by Neil Mcmahon
I just hoped that Madbird's bluff would prove out, and the risk of exposure would spook Balcomb enough, in turn, to get off my case.
I didn't know if Sarah Lynn would still be awake, but I was carrying the wad of cash I'd brought from my place and I wanted to pay her back. She lived not far away, in the hills east of the capital, so I figured I'd drive by and see. I could have waited for Monday-Bill LaTray would refund her twenty-five hundred after Balcomb paid him. But my sense of honor had taken a serious pounding, and I was going to feel a little better if I made a point of settling the debt right away.
I stopped at an ATM to clean out the seven hundred bucks in my bank account, and learned something I'd never known-I had a daily limit of two hundred, and that was all the son of a bitch would give me. I decided it was the thought that counted, and drove on to Sarah Lynn's.
Her house was modern and expensive, two-level, with a rock facade on the lower one. I knew that she and her ex had owned it together until they'd split the sheets. She'd married the kind of guy she wanted-the son of the local John Deere dealer, who had a cosmetic job working for his father. They had plenty of money and they lived well. But he was a small-town playboy, content to collect his easy checks and spend them on golf, skiing, and other women. Sarah Lynn put up with all that for a long time and probably would have kept on, except that she'd wanted children and they didn't come. Her doctors assured her that she was fine, biologically. She'd pushed her ex to get tested, but after a lot of hedging, he finally flat refused, unwilling to allow the possibility that there might be any trouble with his manhood.
"There were half a dozen problems all the time-like cats in a sack, fighting to get out," she'd told me once. "It took all I had to handle them, but I could. Then that one more came along, and everything blew up."
Now she'd been single for several years-had gone through the shock of divorce, the first acute loneliness, the period of getting used to it, and then the realization that this was how things were likely to stay. There weren't many eligible men around, and she was choosy.
The front picture window was dimly lit. Behind the curtains I could see the flicker of a TV screen. I rang the bell. A few seconds later, she turned on the porch light and opened the door cautiously, just the few inches that the chain allowed.
"Candygram," I said, and held up the sheaf of bills.
She smiled and closed the door to release the chain.
When she opened it again, I could see that she hadn't been kidding about her plans for a big Saturday night. She was wearing a white terry-cloth robe. The TV was showing an old movie, the couch was a nest of pillows and comforters, and a half-full glass of wine was sitting on the coffee table.
"It's a little short of two thousand," I said, handing her the money. "I'll get you the rest Monday."
"I told you not to worry about it."
"I want to keep my credit good, in case I have to hit you up again."
Her gaze sharpened. "I hope that's a joke."
"Me, too."
"You still owe me that story."
"Any time," I said.
There was an awkward little pause.
"I'd ask you in, Huey, but it wouldn't be a good idea," she said.
"I know."
She smiled again, a trace sadly this time, and touched a fingertip to the scar under my eye.
"You ever going to forgive me for this?" she said.
"I never blamed you."
"You did in a way-you just wouldn't admit it. And in a way, it was my fault."
"You didn't have anything to do with it, Slo. I dodged left when I should have dodged right. That's all there is to it."
"I was being a selfish little girl."
"That's the best kind of selfish I've ever run across," I said.
For a second, I thought she might change her mind and invite me to stay. Instead, her smile turned wry.
"You've still got the blarney, Davoren," she said, and closed the door, politely but definitely.
The reason I'd come here was to give her the money, and that was the truth. But I admitted that there'd been a fantasy in the depths of my mind that we'd end up in bed. I'd been subsisting for the past years on occasional one-nighters and even rarer connections that lasted a while longer, but never held. That had worn thin to the point where it was almost more trouble than it was worth. Something in me understood that no longer caring about getting laid was a bad sign.
Tonight, with her, it would have been natural and easy-and I knew that was why she hadn't gone for it. It wasn't just that I looked like a goat and smelled worse. She was in the same situation as me, only more vulnerable, and this would have been a dangerous step toward another heartache.
I walked back to my truck, filled with morose admiration for her good sense.
19
As I started the pickup's engine, I couldn't help glancing across the seat at a dent in the passenger door panel. It had come into being the same night as my scar, and Sarah Lynn was right-irrational though it was, I couldn't help connecting the two things.
Toward the end of Christmas break my junior year in college, she and I had driven this truck to the town of Rocky Boy, on the Chippewa-Cree reservation up near the Canadian border. They were hosting an AAU boxing tournament and I was on my way to face another light heavyweight, Harold Good Gun.
It was a Saturday afternoon in early January. A chinook had sprung up two days earlier, a freak warm wind that stripped snow from the fields, leaving streaks of dark earth through the cover of winter. The sky was the color of frost, with no visible horizon. From Wolf Creek to Fort Benton, the highway followed the Missouri northeast. We could see it most of the way, winding through the bleak landscape, thawing in stretches that shone metallic gray in the flat afternoon light. Small white crosses marked the roadsides where people had died in car wrecks. Sometimes there'd be several of them in a cluster.
Sarah Lynn was quiet for most of the drive. She'd come along only because we had such a short time together before I went back to Palo Alto, and we wouldn't see each other again until June. This wasn't a part of my life she liked. On the surface, that was because of the brutality, but there was a deeper aspect.
After Pete Pettyjohn had thumped me, I'd stuck with my vow to learn to take care of myself. I took tae kwon do lessons for a while, then segued into boxing because of my admiration for a coach named Jimmy Egan-a tough, salt-of-the-earth mick from the smelter town of Anaconda who taught English at the local Catholic college and shepherded young men into becoming respected and respectful fighters. His view of the sport was parallel to his steadfast religious faith. Dedicated training and clean ring work were along the paths of righteousness. Any kind of moral transgression was punching below the belt.
I trained with Jimmy my last three years in high school, then went on to Stanford. It had long since disbanded its politically incorrect boxing club, but I hooked up with an informal group who worked out and sparred together and sometimes got bouts at a gym in San Jose. I kept on with Jimmy during the summers and took every local bout I could get.
I had no illusions about achieving any major status. There were plenty of amateur light heavies out there who were faster, more experienced, and a lot hungrier. What kept me at it was a passion that had developed over the years. I was still always jumpy when I got into a ring, but fear had become outweighed by the electric charge of the experience. At its best, it thrilled me with a sense of power that nothing else I'd ever done could touch. I had also gotten plenty familiar with the downside-a soundless explosion in my head, then opening my eyes to the sight of another man's ankles, with my face on the canvas and the ref yelling numbers in my ear. But even that had a raw, real edge.
That passion was what troubled Sarah Lynn. She saw it as a threat, almost like another woman. It stood for a side of me that wasn't at all in line with what she wanted, which was to get married and start a family. She'd gone to college the previous year at Montana State, but left after two semesters to work for her
father. Now she was just waiting for me to graduate.
I was having my own troubles, but I couldn't grasp why. I only knew that I was more and more restless. That must have been clear to her, and it didn't help any.
We'd brought along a six-pack of beer for the drive home. But as we got close to Rocky Boy, Sarah Lynn surprised me by opening one. She surprised me again by finishing it fast and starting a second. She wasn't much of a drinker. She pulled off her boots and leaned against the far door with her knees drawn up and her feet tucked under my thigh, sipping and watching me. It made me slightly uneasy.
The town of Rocky Boy was several miles east of the highway, a pretty drive along Box Elder Creek. The site was steeply hilly, with a small settlement of houses and a number of reservation agency buildings. The bouts were being held in the school gym, and the parking lot was crowded with pickup trucks and station wagons.
I felt the first real tingle of what was coming, and opened the pickup's door.
"Let's not go in yet," Sarah Lynn said. "Let's drive around."
"Drive? Where?" Havre, the nearest town big enough to have more than a gas station, lay halfway between here and Saskatchewan. There wasn't much else but snowbound prairie for a good fifty miles in every direction.
"We could go to Bear Paw," she said. "Daddy took us skiing there when I was little. I want to see if it looks the same."
Evening had settled in by now. It was around six, the scheduled starting time. But tournaments worked from the lightest weights up, and judging from the number of vehicles, there were going to be a lot of kids tonight. Most weren't big enough to knock each other down, so they usually went the full three rounds. For sure, I wouldn't be coming up for a few hours.
A swirl of the damp chinook breeze slipped across my face and high into my nostrils. I closed the door and started the truck.
I drove a couple of miles along the dead-end road toward the little Bear Paw ski area. The landscape was deserted. Sarah Lynn had gotten animated and was looking intently out the windows, like she was watching for something. Abruptly, she grabbed my arm and pointed at a dirt track leading into the woods.
"Turn in there," she said.
I obeyed, thinking maybe she needed to pee, although I'd have expected her to go into the school. I took it slowly, feeling my way, nervous about getting stuck. But the ground surface was firm and we only had to go a hundred feet before we were shielded by trees. I coasted to a stop and cut the headlights.
But instead of getting out, Sarah Lynn got all over me, her tongue hot and wet in my ear and her fingers tugging at my belt. Startled, I half embraced her and half tried to hold her squirming body still.
"Sarah, baby, we can't," I said. Sex before a contest was an old athlete's taboo, another thing I knew was superstition and yet still had a powerful hold. I caught at her hands, but she was determined, and maybe I didn't fight her all that hard. Then her mouth was on my cock, and I could no more have stopped than I could have walked home with the truck on my back. I pushed down her jeans and panties, with her hips wriggling to help. She straddled me, heaving and then yelping while I heard myself growl, and I came so hard my slamming boot heel pounded that dent into the opposite door.
***
The noise level in the gym was almost painful, compounded of shouting from spectators, loud conversations of others trying to be heard, and the thudding of blows. I guessed the crowd at about a hundred and fifty, standing around the ring or sitting in the bleachers. Young men and boys were getting their hands wrapped, shadowboxing, snapping punches at coaches who held gloves shoulder-high. Some, their ordeals already over, carried trophies.
Sarah Lynn spotted a couple of other women from Helena in the bleachers, mothers of young contestants, and went to say hi. I stood there a minute longer, watching the eleven-or twelve-year-olds in the ring flail at each other with melon-size gloves strapped to the ends of their skinny arms. It was a little pathetic and really dull. A lot of the parents wore boosters' jackets, made of shiny nylon of various bright colors and emblazoned with the name of their club. The fluorescent overhead lights cast a sheen on those and on human flesh that I'd never seen anywhere but at boxing matches. The yelling faces and the colors seemed magnified in a way that suggested a disturbing dream. Maybe it was because of all the aggression floating around. When I glanced up at Sarah Lynn, I saw that she and the other two women were talking with their heads bowed together. The gym was overheated and stuffy with the smell of sweaty bodies. I decided to take a walk.
As I passed the ticket table inside the door, the hearty black-haired woman in charge gave me a big smile.
"You running away?" she said.
"Damn straight. I'm getting out while I can."
She shook her forefinger at me playfully. "That's what you think."
The outside world was deliciously cool and quiet except for the gentle gusting wind. I scanned the license plates in the parking lot. A few were from other states or Canada, but most were from Montana, and most of those from the heartland. You could tell because the plate's first number, one through fifty-six, identified the county. The local boxing club would meet in the back of an Elks lodge or VFW hall in some tiny town like Geraldine that you'd drive through and barely notice. But there'd be a few kids out on those ranches who thirsted for something more, to prove themselves or just to break the monotony, and grabbed at this small glory as a means.
There were scattered lights around the little settlement, but the only place besides the school where anything seemed to be going on was one of the old frame buildings, fifty yards or so up a hill. I could see movement through the windows and I thought I heard a faint sound like singing. I hesitated to intrude, but something about it drew me, so I started over there.
Then I stopped. An eerie sensation was rippling over my skin, like the wind was blowing right through me.
Abruptly, I realized I felt alone in a way I never had before.
I walked on to the building. Three Indian guys about my age were sitting on the steps drinking beer. They stopped talking as I approached. I nodded to them and they nodded back, but none of them looked right at me.
The sound I'd heard was clear now-not singing, but chanting. I went up the steps and along a hall to the room at the end where it was coming from. I stopped at the doorway. Several older people were sitting in a circle on the floor playing a game, casting handfuls of small sticks like dice, while more stood around and watched. Everybody joined in the singsong chanting that would die into laughter or exclamations of disgust as the sticks hit the floor. I was sure they were aware of my presence, but again, nobody really looked at me.
I'd had no idea what I was going to see here, but maybe I'd sensed it somehow and that was what had pulled me-not the game itself, but an extraordinary and powerful force that pervaded the place, the people, the gathering. It was a kind of heart, a center. I'd looked for it in my own world but never found a way to tap in.
But I had no business being there, and I turned to go. Just then, an old man with a headband and a long gray braid raised his face to me-the first direct gaze I'd gotten.
I had noticed him moving his fingers gently over his sticks after he cast them, as if he was reading them. Now I saw that his eyes were clouded with cataracts.
***
The lighter-weight bouts lasted even longer than I'd expected, and mine didn't start until almost midnight. The wait seemed interminable. I tried to spend it concentrating on what I was there for, but a lot of other things were going on in my head.
I figured out who Harold Good Gun was and watched him warm up, trying not to be obvious about it. He probably did the same with me. He was about my size, six feet one or two and a hundred seventy-plus pounds. It looked like I had a little reach on him but he was thicker through the upper body. I had talked to a couple of people who'd seen him fight, and the consensus was that he tended to come out with a hard flurry, but didn't have much in the way of either stamina or style. My own strongest points were a long
fast left jab and a hard straight right. I needed to box him-keep him away at first, then go after him as he tired.
Instead, I let myself get drawn into mixing it up, and just under a minute into the fight, he threw a wild roundhouse right that caught me square in the socket of my left eye. I should have slipped or blocked it easily, and worse, he wasn't even looking at me, just windmilling furiously with his head down. In the upper weight divisions we wore ten-ounce gloves, not much more than ski mitts, and neither of us had on headgear. The impact was something like getting hit by a major league fastball. By the time I came to, sprawled on the canvas, the count was over.
Late the next gray afternoon, while I nursed my world-class shiner and my crushed pride, I felt something pop inside my face. The upper left side filled with fluid so fast it was like it got pumped from a hose. By the time I could get to a mirror, the eye had swelled completely shut. When I pried open the lid and saw just a little crescent of white, I started to realize what had happened. The tissue that supported my eyeball had broken, and it had dropped down into my skull.
Two days later, I got home from St. Peter's Hospital with the eyeball cinched back up in place on a piece of plastic and the bones under it wired together.
***
Of course Sarah Lynn felt terrible, and I tried to reassure her. I knew she'd been possessive because she was threatened, and seducing me was a naughty way of making me choose her over her rival. The last thing in the world she'd ever have wanted was to see me hurt. That had happened because I'd fought like a rank amateur, and putting any other kind of spin on it was absurd.
Still, she was no doubt right that I harbored subconscious resentment. It was also transparent that she was pleased about my boxing days being over, and that added to the mix. The next summer, we broke up.
By then I was feeling like that punch had smashed right through my face into my brain, jarring me into a new state of clarity. It wasn't especially pleasant. I started seeing a more honest and less pretty picture of myself than the one I had painted in my mind-the kind you might see after you'd been on a three-day runner and ended up alone and wide-awake drunk.
