Episode 166 · Round Two

— You’re watching the lamp, she said, climbing up behind him with the water.

— She’s using the lamp.

— Then don’t look at it. She’s looking at you.

Across the ring, Maxim held the towel for Tesa with the solemnity of a waiter.

— That was lovely, he told her. Do that three more times and we can all catch the last bus.

Tesa was flexing the taped hand slowly, checking it was still the right one.

— Her rhythm isn’t hers, Soles said quietly. When I read her feet, I’m reading the wrong person.

— Then read the right person.

— I can’t. He’s been dead a long time.

Krista wiped his eyebrow and waited. She would wait until you said the true thing, and then make you say it again more clearly.

Fine. She’s brought hers. I’ve got mine.

All week he had kept Phenom on a short lead, the eyes and nothing else. But Phenom had not been a boxer. He had been a hunter, and a hunter does not trade punches with a man in threes. He waits for the hitch, and he puts something in it.

— What are you going to do? Krista asked.

— Lie.

— To Tesa?

— To her hands.

He let Phenom in.

It was not like a voice. It was like the moment before a door opens, when the air in a room changes. The buzzing of the lamps went far away. His breathing slowed without being told. The ring resolved into corners, exits, and an opponent who kept coming.

Krista hit the bell.

Tesa came out in threes. Soles gave her ground, a step at a time, on purpose, along the ropes toward his own corner, where they sagged. He could feel exactly how much they would give, the way he knew a loaded spring before he touched it.

She went to the body and he let one through. It went into the same ribs, and something there made a small sound he would think about later. He let his elbow drop. His back went into the ropes and stayed there.

Tesa stepped in as his guard dropped. The bait had worked. Soles knew the short punch from below, on the hitch; he had already taken it from her once. He felt the floor tell him it was coming.

One, two, three.

His legs went. He let them. He sagged on the ropes, gloves sliding, chin coming up, and he heard Maxim say "Oh" in the far corner, as if something had been dropped.

Tesa stepped in on the hitch.

Tesa was close enough now. Soles let the ropes drive him forward out of the sag, planted his front foot and turned through the short punch before she could finish stepping in. Phenom’s impulse came with it: everything, enough to make sure there would be no next attack.

His right glove struck the side of her jaw.

Pain shot through his right elbow as the force left him. Not his force; the bigger one, the one that had thrown him through a ceiling and had sat quiet under his ribs all week. It went through the glove as if the glove were not there. The sweat came off her face in a sheet, and she went.

She flew backward across the ring. The far ropes caught her weight, pulled tight and threw her down onto her side; the corner post groaned, and the impact traveled through the boards into Soles’s feet.

Maxim’s stool went over. He was standing, which he was not supposed to do.

— One, Krista said.

Soles was walking.

He had not decided to. His feet took him across the ring, quiet and unhurried, the way you cross a yard in the snow toward a man who has stepped into your wire. The lamps had gone. The gym had gone. There was only the floor, and on it someone who had been hit hard and was already moving.

She was getting up. Of course she was. One knee. A glove flat on the canvas. Her head hanging, her guard nowhere.

— Two, Krista said, far away. Three.

Up— It rose through his legs, so calm that it sounded like him. Don’t let her.

He was standing over her. He did not remember the last two steps.

Phenom knew this part. He had done it in a stable yard, under an apple tree, in snow so new it squeaked. You did not leave anything behind that could come after you. You finished it while it was easy.

His right hand was already drawn back.

Tesa lifted her head and looked at him from under her hair, her eyes not quite focused.

— Four, Krista said, and her voice had changed.

The bell had not rung. Her guard was down. And the hand drawn back above her head was not entirely his.

The punch came down.

Everything in him that was Phenom had already sent it. All Soles had left was where it landed. In the last inch he turned his wrist, the way you turn a wrench off a nut about to round, and drove the glove into the canvas a hand’s width from her ear.

The canvas split, and the board under it cracked like a branch in frost.

Tesa did not flinch. She looked at the glove beside her head, then up at him.

— Five, Krista said.

He walked backward to his corner. He did not want to turn his back on whatever had just stood over her, and that was absurd, because it had been him.

Tesa got up at seven. Krista hit the bell.

— There are six seconds left, she said. I’m taking them.

He sat down. His hands were shaking. He put them on his knees so he could watch them do it.

Krista came up behind him. She spoke in the polite voice, the one she kept for officials and for people who had frightened her.

— Would you like to tell me what that was?

— Phenom. He doesn’t stop at one. He doesn’t stop.

— Then he doesn’t come back into this ring.

— No.

— I’m not asking.

— I know.

Across the ring, Maxim was talking to Tesa in a voice meant to stay low. An empty gym is a bad place to keep anything low.

— You want to stop?

— No.

— Because he’d have—

— I know what he’d have. He didn’t.

Tesa came to the middle of the ring and looked at Soles over the hole in the canvas.

— That was yours. Fair.

— It wasn’t fair at the end.

— The end didn’t happen. And Soles. If you hold back on me now, I’ll know.

On the way back to her corner she shook out both wrists, hard, the way you shake water off your hands. When she sat down, her shoulders had come back to where they usually lived.

— He was taller anyway, she told Maxim, and Maxim, who could not possibly know what she meant, nodded as though he did.

One each. Both of us cheated. Both of us got caught.