Episode 165 · A Bag Does Not Hit Back

Two mornings later, Tesa took him to the old bag at the end of the room.

— When you’re this close, you’ve got nothing to wind up with, she said. So you don’t. You turn, and the hand is just the end of the turn.

She set her shoulder almost against the canvas, back foot turning on the ball, hip coming around, and hit it with her good hand at speed.

The bag jumped as if something had kicked it from inside. It lifted on its chain and came down hard, and the chain rang against the bar under the ceiling, and the sound went around the empty gym long after the bag had swung back.

Tesa looked at her glove. Then at the door. Soles had looked there first.

— That’s not how hard I hit it.

She tried twice the ordinary way, drawing the hand back first, and the bag swung like any bag. Then she let her shoulders drop and hit it without thinking, and it jumped, and she pulled her arm in against her side and stood bent over it.

— Wrist? he asked.

— Wrist. And up here.

He had been watching her feet for a week, because she kept telling him to.

— The ones that did that, you didn’t pull back first. And on the one that hurt, your back heel came up before the hand got there.

She put the heel down, checked it before she checked the bag, and turned. The bag jumped, not as high. Her heel stayed flat.

— It still came back up the arm, she said.

— Less?

— Less.

Then it was his turn. He leaned his shoulder into the bag like a man at a bus stop.

— Close, Tesa said. Not romantic.

He turned. The glove went a short way into the canvas, and the bag moved a small honest distance and came back to him.

— That’s a punch.

— It’s very small.

— It’s what it should be.

She sat on the edge of the ring and pulled the glove off with her teeth. Above them, one of the bolts that held the steel bar sat a little crooked in its plate. Soles didn’t think it had been like that before.

— Tonight, Tesa said. Here, after closing. Four rounds. You and me.

He looked at her.

— A bag doesn’t hit back, she said. In five days you walk into something that does. I want to see if you remember your feet when it hurts.

He knew how it would sound, and said it anyway.

— Round two.

Her mouth moved at the corner.

— That’s my line.

— You said it first. I’m only answering.

— Bring Krista. Somebody should count when you’re on the floor.

— And Maxim?

— Maxim’s in my corner. He likes to back a winner.

She went to change. The bag hung straight now. Only the dust beneath it said otherwise, a pale curve swept across the boards much farther out than any punch of his had ever sent it.

Tonight she would be throwing them at him.

The gym closed at eight. At ten past, the old man handed Tesa the keys, looked at them for a long moment, said he lived upstairs and slept lightly, and left them the ring.

Only the three lamps over it were on. They hung low on chains and buzzed, and the one over the far corner flickered now and then as if thinking about something else. Beyond them the gym went dark: the row of bags, the old patched one alone on its chain, the mirror giving back their reflections and a lot of shadow.

Soles had the corner by the mirror. Krista stood on the apron outside it with her phone in one hand and the adjustable wrench from his bag in the other, because the bell was a brass thing screwed to that corner post, older than any of them, and nobody could find what it was supposed to be rung with.

Maxim had the corner by the bags, a stool from the office, a crate for his ankle and a towel over one shoulder, like a man who had paid for good seats.

— For the record, he said, I’m in her corner because she asked first.

— She didn’t ask, Soles said.

— And because I’ve seen you fight.

— Water’s here, Sol, Krista said.

He looked around at her.

— Sol?

— An old word for the sun. I like it.

Maxim looked across from Tesa’s corner.

— The sun? I’ve spent a month helping it put its coat on.

— You can stop worshipping whenever you like, Soles said.

— Tomorrow, then. Find your own damn sleeves, Sol.

Tesa climbed through the ropes. She had taped both hands, and the tape on the one that had spent the winter in a cast went halfway to her elbow.

— Gloves, she said. No headguards, they make people brave. No elbows, no heads. Two minutes, one to breathe. And nothing after the bell.

She looked at Soles when she said the last part.

— I remember, he said.

— I’d hope so. You redecorated my nose.

— You started it before the bell.

— That’s why it’s called the first punch.

— Are you two going to fight, Krista asked, or keep flirting in that terrible way?

— That’s not flirting, Maxim said. That’s how she says hello.

Soles held out his gloves. Tesa did not touch them.

— After, she said. That’s how we do it.

He had known that since the first morning in this gym, with the mud still on his bandage. It had been worth asking.

Krista hit the bell.

Tesa stopped in the middle of the ring and knocked her wrists together, once, twice, and something changed in the way she stood. Her chin went down. Her weight went lower and further forward than it usually lived, and when she moved, she moved in threes: one, two, three, a little hitch, one, two, three. It was not her rhythm. It was a dead man’s, and it fitted her like a coat she had grown into.

Reil. She’s brought him.

She came in on the hitch.

He felt it through the boards, the plank under his front foot easing as her weight came forward, and he moved. Her left went past his ear. Her right went into his ribs, short, from below, from a place he had not been watching, and the breath went out of him in one piece.

He covered his head. Tesa stayed close and drove two short punches under his elbows. He brought them down against his ribs, and her next glove struck above them, sending sweat from his brow into the lamplight.

He tried to escape along the ropes. She cut across his path in two steps and made him turn back into the ring. He could still feel her weight through the boards, but he was moving on the first beat; her punch arrived on the hitch after it.

The far lamp flickered. He blinked.

When he opened his eyes she was inside, and the uppercut came up through his guard so short he barely saw her shoulder move. Reil’s punch. Soles did not know how he knew that, only that it had been thrown a thousand times before it was ever thrown by her.

The canvas hit him in the back.

He lay looking up at three lamps, two steady and one flickering, and listened to Krista counting in her most polite voice.

Ah. So that’s what it’s like from down here. I’d forgotten.

He got up at five. His jaw was still attached. His hip had an opinion. He lasted the rest of the round and even hit her once, a straight left that landed because he stopped reading the floor and simply put his glove where her face was going to be. It was the first time he had ever hit her in a ring. She did not seem to notice.

Krista hit the bell.