It made him feel smart. “Everyone has business,” she said. She began putting her shoes back in her bolsa. “Why would you stay here otherwise? It’s so boring. Nothing ever happens. I’m sorry I ever came. But I’m here now.” She smiled again.

“I’ll try to keep you busy,” he said.

“That’ll be great,” she said as she stood up.

The arena de boxeo was a small unventilated warehouse on the American Highway past the last streetlights at the edge of the barrio popular. The Italian girl drank mescalitos at dinner, and complained a lot about the Mexican men whom she didn’t care for and how her father had a lot of money in Milano except she couldn’t stand him, and had come to live with her mother in New York and had taken up with the wrong people in Mexico. It seemed to make her sad. The hot air inside the arena had the high pomade and liniment smell of little boxing-club halls in East L.A., from the time he’d first known Rae two years ago, air with risk in it, palpable and utterly in the present, and going right into it made him feel lucky, which was how he wanted to feel.

In the ring two Zapotec boys were feeling each other out, circling uncomfortably beneath a bluish light that seemed to make the middle of the warehouse fall below a dense black cloud. Neither boy was a boxer, and neither one wanted to get hurt. Their long, stiff jabs made their gloves dip and seem heavy, like big red balloons, and they moved without discipline and too slowly to want to fight. They were friends, Quinn thought, and that made everything too hard. It was hard to want to kill your friend. The Mexicans in the arena didn’t approve. They were drinking mescal and yelling, though the boys were oblivious. He wanted this fight to be over and better fighters to come in, and so did the Mexicans. The Italian girl had quit talking and stared up at the ring as if someone she knew was inside and something maybe funny would happen to him. She was drunk and having dreams already, and he wanted her to keep together.

The noise in the arena began to grow loud, and both boys’ handlers thumped their elbows on the apron and started yelling at them in Zapotec. The blue light made both fighters seem slow and inconclusive, and everyone realized all at once that the fight wasn’t going to work out.

A large man stood up suddenly in the back rows and threw a pop bottle that hit the ropes and bounced on the canvas, hitting the taller of the two boys in the foot. The boy stopped circling and put down his hands to look at where the bottle had stopped spinning beside his foot. He seemed concerned, and turned to the referee as if he wanted to have the bottle removed before going on. The referee glared into the crowd, wanting to find who had thrown the bottle. He was a short man in a white sweat-stained shirt and a toothbrush mustache, and he seemed to be annoyed. The taller boy began pointing with his glove, and the handler of the second fighter began screaming and beating the apron with his fists, and the boy suddenly threw a straight-in, leaning right with his thumb extended, and hit the taller boxer in the temple just below his hairline, knocking him backward off his feet into the ropes. He came down hard on the seat of his trunks, heels off the floor, and Quinn could see that the boy’s eye had been sprung out of its socket by the other boy’s thumb, and that it was hung out of his face by filaments.

“Oh please,” the Italian girl gasped. “Just please now, I don’t like this, just please.” She put her hands up to her face and rocked backward so that he got afraid she would fall off the bench. It was just a pug’s trick, he had seen it worked before. It looked plenty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked. A good corner could put the eye back, and two stitches would hold it in.