The band began to play a song that ticked upward on the upbeat, prompting Mexican couples to step onto the wooden dance floor. Arm in arm, they danced and marched in time to the upbeat, circling the floor like roller skaters. “It’s a cumbia,” John told him.

Cumbias were new to Jason, who had joined his friends John and Mark at El Prado, a Mexican dance club in Fresno. The two guys were brothers, and their parents owned the Pioneer Chicken fast food restaurant, where the three of them worked together. Jason crossed the section of the bar where people sat at tables, entering the 21 and above section of the club. He wasn’t 21 years old yet, but those 18-20 could still get into the club, even though they were not allowed to enter the bar area—at least in theory. Jason tried to look calm as he ordered a Kahlua and milk, then returned to the section beside the dance floor, where he spotted a short, dark-skinned Mexican beauty with large eyes.

“Would you like to dance?” Jason asked.

“Okay,” she agreed, and the two of them danced to a top-40 R & B dance hit. Afterwards, Jason struck up a conversation with her, learned that she was Lydia, and got her phone number. He called her up the next day, and the two of them went out to a movie after he picked her up at her sister’s apartment. Because he picked up Lydia at her sister’s apartment, her parents had no idea she was dating a white guy. The two of them went out to a movie, and then made out in his car.

Jason continued dating Lydia, and their make out sessions grew more intense, reaching the point that they were in his car in Rotary Park after dark, and she was giving him a handjob while he fondled her bare breast with its dark brown nipple.

Things were going pretty well, and Jason was happy, until one day she revealed that she could never let her parents know that she was dating a white guy, and that she had no plans of ever introducing Jason to her family. Jason got angry, for reasons he still didn’t understand, and he broke off the relationship.

Less than a year later, Jason was in the downtown Fresno library, where Lydia worked, and he’d heard that she was already married. Jason was shocked at her appearance. While she was beautiful when they dated several months ago, she had put on a lot of weight, and her cute face was now round, fat, and bloated, as was her formerly petite body. Even worse, she was nearly bald, with a few strands of thin black hair on her scalp, which made her fat face look even larger. She wasn’t very friendly to Jason, acting as though they’d never dated, but given her frightful appearance, Jason was okay with her aloofness, and had no interest in trying to restart anything.

Jason broke out of his reverie and asked his grandfather, “How can a guy tell that the woman he marries isn’t going to fall apart on him, just totally let herself go? I was thinking of one girl I used to date, who in a couple of months after we broke up, went from petite, to fat and bald. It was scary how drastically she changed, and in such a short time.”

Grandpa was showing Jason how to make beef stew and was browning the beef in olive oil. “You can’t know, which is why marriage is such a crap shoot, a huge spin of the wheel, or a roll of loaded dice, which most of the time are going to come up snake eyes. They say women get married hoping their husbands will change, while men get married hoping their wives won’t change.”

“How is it that women hope their husbands will change?” Jason asked.

“Remember, most women who marry are settling for the man they can get, a man who is desperate enough to commit to them. The kind of man that women want to marry doesn’t want to get married, because he’s got a constant stream of women in his bed. These men are driven and successful.” Gramps removed the browned beef with a slotted spoon and set it onto paper towels. “The woman wants the man she’s settled for to be more ambitious, more driven, more dominant, but the guy’s clueless.”

“Can’t she just tell him what she wants?” Jason made drinks for them, mixing a rum and tonic for himself, then a rum and soda, which he handed to his grandfather.

“Thanks. It’s like me asking you to be more spontaneous. How can you plan to be more spontaneous? Usually, the guy’s clueless, thinking she married him because she loves him, and doesn’t get his wife’s hints.” Gramps poured some olive oil into the warm pot and sautéed some onions, garlic, and peppers. “Once I saw a group of women in their 50s, all of them stocky, unattractive, with short hair, only I could tell they all had money, in part because they were standing by their new SUV’s. And I thought, ‘Why do these women have a comfortable lifestyle; because they were good-looking thirty years ago?’ Then I asked myself, ‘What guy in his twenties would marry one of these fifty-year-old women and provide her a lavish lifestyle?’ No one, of course.”

Gramps put the beef, the browned potatoes with the skin on, plus a large can of chicken broth into the pot to let everything simmer. He put the lid over the top of the pot, then waved to Jason to join him in the living room. “It might be okay to spend a lot of money for a woman who’s young and gorgeous, but a heavy, unattractive woman in her fifties? Why would you do that? Most guys can’t see that far into the future, and most aren’t even trying to. But every woman eventually hits the wall.”

Jason dropped into the padded chair, while his grandfather sank into his recliner. “Hits the wall?”

“It’s a term from stock-car racing,” his grandfather explained. “That’s when a car loses control and slams into the wall, at which point the car is ruined and the race is over. Sooner or later, every woman reaches a steep drop-off in her attractiveness. A lot of women who are used to getting by on their looks discover that it’s not working for them anymore.”

“Yeah, I was thinking of the Verdugo sisters, students who were the stereotypical Hispanic bombshells, like J-Lo, only with big breasts,” Jason recounted. “Then a few months after they graduated, I saw them at a Burger King, and they were fat and ugly. I was shocked to see it and could hardly believe that they used to be dynamite. It was like someone triggered a self-destruct sequence.”

“It happens,” his grandfather shrugged. “It’s just a matter of time.”

“The weirdest case was a plain-looking stocky girl I had in class. Then one day I saw her on campus and I thought, ‘Am I going crazy, or did she just get better looking?’ Sure enough, I saw her again and was surprised by how much more attractive she looked.” Jason took a sip of his drink. “But the weird part is that just a week later I saw her and she was unattractive again. She suddenly turned attractive for a week, and then it abruptly ended. Weird.”

Gramps laughed. “Any plan you make that counts on a woman remaining attractive for any length of time, and certainly for decades, is doomed to fail.”

Jason took another drink. ‘But does that make us shallow? I mean, if marriage is based on love, then looks shouldn’t matter, right?”

“That’s the line of bullshit they feed you so you’ll get married and keep your nose to the grindstone. Women are less concerned with men’s looks, in part because they find so few men attractive—15% or less. But women are looking for men who make lots of money, and no one ever tells women not to be shallow and want wealthy men. Genetically, we’re drawn to young, beautiful women. That doesn’t make us good or bad, that’s just the way men are.”

“But shouldn’t we try to rise above our nature?” Jason wondered.

“Suppose I tell you your problem is that you breathe too much, and you need to start breathing less. How successful is that going to be?” Grandpa shot him a look.

“Not very.”

Gramps smiled. “Right. You can try fighting your nature, but it’s a struggle, and even if you manage to bulldoze your way through it, fighting it with everything you’ve got, you’re going to be miserable.”

“Changing gears again,” Jason began, “I’m at the Father Milligan stage in the game, and I’ve decided to box to earn money for the shelter. The only problem is, I don’t know how to box.”

Gramps stood up and set his drink down, then motioned for Jason to stand up with him. “Lucky for you, I studied boxing in the Philippines.”

“Really?” Jason stood and started to loosen up his arms.

Gramps moved to an open space in the living room near the door. “Yeah. I had an Australian friend, Ray, who got me into boxing. There’s a gym not far from Colon, where we stayed, and we used to walk down there to train. Ray was an old guy on a disability, but he loved to work out by boxing, and he got me hooked on it.”

“Was?” Jason stood next to his grandfather, just behind him, so he could watch and learn.

“After one great trip we made to the Philippines he e-mailed me, said he had a tumor in his head.” Gramps looked sad and let out a long breath. “He was going through a nasty divorce, and I think that contributed to his health problems. The e-mails became less and less frequent, and I finally heard from a mutual friend that he’d died. He was a great guy, and I’ll always be thankful to him for turning me on to boxing. Go to the Philippines while you’re young, Jason.”

Jason had never really thought about going to the Philippines, which seemed like a strange place to him.

“Okay, most important,” Gramps announced, changing the subject, “Your feet are shoulder-width apart, knees bent. You’re light in your feet.”

The old man began hopping lightly on the balls of his feet, and Jason imitated him.

“The most important thing is that your hands are up.” His grandfather raised up both hands to his temples. “There’s an old saying in boxing: Get hit in the body and you get hurt, get hit in the head and you die. That means if you get hit in the stomach, ribs, or chest, you may be hurt, but you’re still conscious and in the fight. Get hit in the head, and get knocked out, and the fight is over. Keep your hands up!”

Jason followed his grandfather as the two of them hopped back and forth on the balls of their feet with their hands up at their temples.

“Keep your chin down,” his grandfather instructed him. “The blow to the chin is a knockout blow, so keep your chin tucked in.”

“Shouldn’t we be standing the other way around?” Jason asked, and he noticed that his grandfather was already winded.

Gramps did a quick side shuffle, moving off to his right, before returning to his former spot. “No, we’re doing Pacquiao style, and Bruce Lee style, which I call Strategic Southpaw. They’re both right-handers who decided to fight southpaw, or right side forward, to gain an advantage.”

Next, as they hopped forward, gramps threw out his lead right fist, and repeated the punch every time he hopped forward. “That’s the jab. Keep it light and quick. Shoot it out, but don’t leave it hanging—whip it right back.”

Next, Gramps showed him the jab-straight, or 1-2, only he stood and rested while Jason kept hopping. He had Jason keep practicing while he went to a closet and returned with a set of long, ribbon-like cloths.

“These are hand wraps, to protect your hands,’ Gramps explained as he began winding them around his grandson’s hands, starting with the thumbs. “Now we’re going to hit the focus mitts.”

With his grandfather’s help, Jason felt like he just might be able to win his first match, or at least not get humiliated.

* * *

Maureen’s freckled face lay in Jason’s lap as he drove away from the tenements on Fairlead. He had probably just killed a man, the gang leader he shot in the gut, but what really alarmed Jason was the realization that he was becoming aroused by the young redhead rubbing her face over his crotch. He struggled to drive with one hand, weaving around cars, and to pull her up off of his lap with the other hand. “You’ve got to get off of me, or you’re going to make me have an accident.”

“In your pants?” she asked with a weary smile, and he was finally able to push her up so that she swayed in the passenger seat.

Jason scolded her. “That wasn’t a very lady-like thing to say.”

“I’m not a child,” she said angrily, but had difficulty focusing her eyes.

“You’re not a child,’ Jason agreed, “but you’re not a lady, either, and you should be.”

He drove on, looking at her from the corner of his eye. She hiccupped, which caused her fat breasts to bounce.

“I just wanna have fun,” she mumbled. “Are we having fun?”

“When your Aunt Mildred wakes me up in the middle of the night because you’re gone and she’s worried out of her mind, then I have to wade through the Rowdy Murphys to get you out of there before they all take turns with you, that’s definitely not fun.”

She hiccupped again and rested her head against the cool glass of the passenger window. Jason was aware that anything he told her right now would most likely get lost in an alcoholic fog of memory.

He pulled the car up to the garage, then got out and heaved up the pivoting door. He wanted to get the car out of sight in case it got reported, and the police were looking for it. He pulled the car into the garage, then helped Maureen out of the car. He propped her up for a moment while he reached up to swing the garage door back down, and Maureen nearly fell, but he caught her.

Maureen wrinkled her nose. “What stinks?”

“You threw up on the back of my pants.” Jason steered her in the direction of the rectory.

“Ya know, Father Jason, I want to do things with you,” she confessed as she hung onto his shoulder, then her breath hitched. “Fun, dirty things.”

Jason tried not to react, but the thought of “fun, dirty things” with this beautiful redhead excited him, and he was disgusted with himself for thinking like that.

She swayed as she hung onto him and stepped a little too heavily. “I’d really like for us to do that, but you’re a priest, and I know that’s wrong.”

“But I’m not a priest,” Jason thought, “which means…”