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A
Headache From Barstow to Salt Lake
by
Clarence
“Box” Templeton was a two weight class Marine boxing champion during an
amateur career that spanned from the start of the Korean War to one year after
when, in 1954, he turned pro and had a more-or less-good five year run that
included a night at the old Felt Forum where, in a loss on points, he rattled
Archie Moore with body shots so hard and strong that “The Mongoose” (“You
feel it when a rib goes,” Box once told Coleman.
“It’s hard and then it’s soft.”) told reporters he couldn’t
sleep right for a month.
“Watch out for that boy,” Moore said back in 1955.
“Learn to spell his name.
He’s here to stay.”
But Box Templeton was not there to stay.
A year after the Moore fight, he’d become nothing more than a side of
beef club boxer, propped up and pieced together enough by Wednesdays to be
beaten on Fridays for $50 a fight.
He married Coleman’s Aunt El in 1958, and ended up at the Long Beach
shipyards. There
may have been a decent piece of him left--Coleman has always thought there must
have been for El to take him in--but by the time Coleman arrived in 1970 after
his parents died in a car wreck, all that was left of Box was hatred and scar
tissue. A
head more full of lumps, stitches and revenge than ideas, El once said.
So when El fell in love with Mavis Clemont--who taught fifth grade math
at Coleman’s school--he knew where his loyalties fell and he never said a word
to Box. When
El and Box moved to the desert, Mavis sent Coleman her letters, and he’d hand
deliver them to El, so Box wouldn’t open her mail and find out.
When El died, Mavis sent letters to Coleman.
“Men ruined our lives,” she wrote in the last one.
“And we let them.”
Billy Pritchard, who Uncle Box says is dumb enough to think that the driver’s
test is hard and mean enough to drink shooters of rattlesnake poison and grow an
inch each time, is at the front door to Box’s bar when Coleman pulls up.
Get the money and get out is what Coleman’s thinking.
The ground crunches, hard and dusty, under Coleman’s feet and he
wonders, as he does every time he comes to visit, how anything or anyone can
live on, in or on top of all this.
The earth, sucked dry, split, puckered and cracked--like El’s bloody
knuckles, flaky as pastries, the year before she died--spits up plants short as
tongue depressors with root structures so stubborn thick and expansive that even
a creature like Billy Pritchard couldn’t yank them up.
“You’re here,” Billy says.
Coleman looks up and squints; heat waves quiver and spasm off the metal roof.
He sees the sign with the type-o above the door—the sign they never
changed that reads Trucker Welcome,
left from the Chinese couple El bought the place from when she and Box packed it
up, called it quits and left the rat race when Box’s lungs started to bleed
and the shipyard gave him the early retirement, wished him well on his way to
healing or death--whichever he might find--out in the desert.
He walks towards and into the bar, brushing by Billy.
“I am,” he says.
“Where’s Box?”
Billy grabs Coleman, turns him around.
“What do you do?” he says.
“For him.
What do you do?”
Coleman lights a cigarette; wishes he was inside with a beer.
Coldest taps in the desert, that’s
what El told him when she bought the place.
Coleman looks at Billy Pritchard, then at Billy’s hand still on
Coleman’s arm--the hand with the gouge from the meat-packing plant--the hand
that’s not really a hand anymore.
“Box?” Coleman says.
Billy releases his grip; shakes his head.
He points inside.
“His business why he thinks you’re worth two shits.”
“He doesn’t,” Coleman says.
“So you know?” Billy says.
“Know what?”
Billy looks surprised--like he’s a kid caught shoplifting.
He looks out at the desert.
“You better talk to Box.” |