Роберт Паркер - The Boxer and the Spy

“Just move the punch away. Not far. Just make him miss... and now, with your left you come up in a half circle and block him hard and get a nice shot at his head with your right. On the street you might use your elbow. It’s right there handy.”

They practiced a few times. Terry kept forgetting to drop his left when he checked with his right. His arms would tangle.

“Damn,” Terry said.

“How many times you got to throw a punch,” George said, “‘fore it’s part of the muscle memory?”

“Three, four thousand,” Terry said.

“You done it seven times now,” George said.

“Looks easier,” Terry said, “when you do it.”

“It is easier when I do it,” George said. “I done it a million times.”

Terry nodded. They worked some more on check-block. And at the end of the session, Terry sat on the chair and George took off the gloves for him. Terry unwrapped his hands and caught his breath.

“How long we been doing this, George?” Terry said.

“Five months,” George said.

“I’m nowhere near a boxer yet,” Terry said.

George shrugged.

“And I don’t want to get into a fight with anybody in the school yard or something,” Terry said.

George nodded.

“But if I did, you know,” Terry said, “I’d have a plan. I might win or I might not, but I would sort of know what I wanted to do.”

“Good to have a plan,” George said.

They were quiet as Terry unwrapped the self-sticking tape from his hands and wrists.

“It makes you feel, like, calm,” Terry said.

“Calm is good,” George said.

Terry balled the tape and dropped it into the wastebasket in the corner.

“You ever scared, George,” Terry said, “when you were fighting?”

“Every fight,” George said.

“The whole fight?”

“No,” George said. “Once you get into the first round, you sort of lose the fear thing. First round you figure out if you got a legitimate chance to beat this dude or if you pretty much gonna concentrate on surviving.”

“You didn’t always think you’d win?”

George smiled.

“I could always hit,” George said. “So I always had a chance, but you know pretty quick whether you as good as he is.”

“How about a street fight? Not when you were a bouncer, but just, you know, some guy gives you grief, and you pop him?”

“You a professional fighter, Terry, you ain’t supposed to be popping people on the street. Law give you trouble on that,” George said. “Besides, most street fights be about proving something. You a fighter, you know what you can do. Ain’t no need to prove it.”

Terry nodded. His hands were unwrapped. His breath was back to normal. The sweat had dried. Still he stayed in the chair.

“You’d think it would be the other way,” Terry said. “But it’s like, the more you know about fighting, the less you fight.”

“Maybe the less you be fighting about nothing,” George said.

He put the big sixteen-ounce gloves onto the shelf and turned and looked at Terry for a moment. Terry thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He just looked at Terry silently and nodded as if to himself.

“Don’t be worrying ’bout the check-block thing,” George said after a while. “You gonna get it.”

Gloria Trent stood on the front steps of the Cabot town hall. Her husband was beside her, and several others. A small group of reporters, including one television crew, was gathered in front of her.

“I have devoted my life to simple things,” Gloria Trent said. “To my family, my husband, who is here with me today, and my daughter, who is now completing her freshman year at my own school, Taft University. I have also devoted myself, as my family responsibilities permitted, to public service, first as school committee chairperson of this lovely town, and then as the chair of the Cabot Board of Selectmen. Today, with my daughter away at school, I have more time available for my second love, and with the enthusiastic support of my husband and daughter, I’m announcing my candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor of this great commonwealth.”

The people on the stairs with her applauded. Her husband raised both hands in the air as if he’d just won something. The news people took pictures.

“I will be in the primaries. I will be at the convention. I will preach the values I have lived by. Values all of us understand. The importance of family. The values of small town America. The importance of each individual to the community. We all matter. We all make a difference. I belong to no political machine. I will represent no special interest groups... except one. I will represent you, the people of this great commowealth. My credentials are simple ones. I will govern honestly, with a sense of fairness and fundamental human decency, without which no governance can succeed in a democracy. It is a long road to walk. As we proceed, I will spell out the specifics of my position on every issue confronting us. For now let me say only that I will walk that long road with my husband and my daughter, and I devoutly hope, with all of you... Let us now begin.”

Again the applause. Again the triumphant raising of hands by her husband.

When the applause had quieted, she located the television camera and gazed into it and said, “Questions?”

The hero of William Dawes Regional High School left his cluster of assistant heroes and walked over to Terry in the high school weight room, where Terry was doing some light curls with fifteen-pound dumbbells.

“Novak,” he said, “I wanna talk to you.”

Terry continued to do his curls.

“Okay,” Terry said.

The hero’s name was Kip Carter. Thanks to him, William Dawes Regional had won the state championship in football three years in a row. He was a senior, two hundred pounds, blond hair, an all-state running back his junior and senior year. He was wearing a white tank top and black shorts over gray compression shorts. The tank top had ILLINI written on it in orange letters. It was a way of reminding everyone, Terry thought, that Kip Carter had a football scholarship to the University of Illinois.

“You are starting to get yourself in trouble, Novak,” Kip Carter said.

Terry felt the little ripple in his stomach that he always felt when there was trouble. It wasn’t fear, exactly. He didn’t quite know what it was. But he didn’t like it.

“Like what?” Terry said.

His face showed nothing. He kept curling the dumbbell.

“Like sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong,” Kip Carter said.

He was three years older than Terry and fifty pounds heavier. He was very muscular. The veins showed across his biceps. Terry finished the curls and put the dumbbell down and sat on the bench with his forearms popping.

“Which is where?” Terry said.

He could feel the electric ripple again in his stomach.

“Snooping around asking about steroids,” Kip Carter said. “Claiming, like, some people are taking them.”

“I never claimed anybody was taking steroids,” Terry said.

“You calling me a liar?”

Terry stood up.

“I never said anybody was taking steroids,” Terry said.

“How come you’re snooping around?”

“I’m trying to figure out what happened to Jason Green,” Terry said.

“He killed himself,” Kip Carter said. “Lotta fags commit suicide.”

Terry put his hands up near his head in a kind of loose boxer’s stance.

“What are you going to do, Novak? You gonna box me? You little creep,” Kip Carter said.

Terry thought about what George said. Fighting about nothing. Kip Carter was nothing. What difference did it make what he said about Jason? What did Terry need to prove to Kip Carter? He’d keep doing what he was going to do. Wasn’t that enough proof? It was. He dropped his hands, but he kept his feet under him.