Chapter 9: Five Seconds

The radio kept playing.

It was some slow song with the bass turned up until the window glass buzzed, and nobody in the gym said one word underneath it, and the man with the old gray tape on his fingers stood there and looked at Ethan without any expression that could be read.

“You got a name,” the man said. Not a question.

“Ethan Hale.”

“Hale.” The eyes went over him once more, unhurried, and came to rest somewhere around his shoes.

Then Wren stepped in front of him, which put her shoulder almost against her father’s chest. “He’s in my class,” she said.

Her father looked down at her.

“He doesn’t talk to anybody. Not to me, not to anyone. His entire personality is a chair against a wall.” She said it lightly, and she said it to the room as much as to him. “I brought him here because I thought you could do something about that.”

That was not what had happened. Ethan stood there with the handles of her shopping bag cutting into his fingers and let it be what had happened, because it was a story this room would take without asking a single question, and he would have taken it too.

Coach looked past her at Marc Boyd, who had not moved and had not put his hand down.

“You got an opinion.”

Marc’s jaw worked once. “He’s quiet,” he said. “Keeps to himself. Doesn’t have friends.” A pause exactly the length of an insult. “He’s my classmate.”

“Huh,” Coach said, and that was the whole verdict.

“You ever been hit in the face, Hale?”

“. . . Not by anybody who meant it.”

“All right.” Coach turned to the duffel on the bench behind him, took out a roll of hand wraps, red, and began winding one around his left hand — wrist, back of the hand, between the fingers — pulling each turn tight. Under the gray tape the knuckles were flat and wide as nickels. “Then this’ll be new.”

Ethan set the guitar case down against the counter, out of the traffic. Wren watched him do it and said nothing, which was a comment of its own.

“Three nights a week,” Coach said. “Two hours a night. Today you’re a tryout.” He caught the end of the wrap in his teeth and tore it. “I was a buck-thirty at seventeen. Nobody did me any favors. My kid’s brought people in here before and they pay for a class and they get their wind up and I never see them again, and I don’t need your money that bad.”

The woman on the bench said, without looking up from her phone, “He means that as a kindness.”

“It’s not one,” Coach said.

Free was worse than not free. Free meant that if he quit in three weeks it wouldn’t be a transaction; it would be a conversation, and he would have to sit in it.

There was a version of this where he said no thanks, and the man said all right, and he walked out with the guitar and the shopping bag and nothing else happened to him all year.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Yes. Sir.”

“Coach.”

“Coach.”

Wren came and took her bag off him, hooked the handles over two fingers, and while the room was watching Coach start the second wrap she said, quietly, out of the side of her mouth, “’Sir.’”

He had no answer for that.

“Line up,” Coach said. “Twenty minutes.”

Ethan had always assumed he was in average shape. Twenty minutes corrected the assumption on a sliding scale.

Jumping jacks were fine. Jumping jacks were a thing a person did in a middle-school gym with a substitute asleep at the desk. Then burpees, then back to jacks, then something with the knees that the guy on his left did the way characters idle in a game — weight shifting, going nowhere, perfectly content. By the fourth minute Ethan’s arms had stopped being tools and become cargo. By the fifth he was doing a different and much slower workout six feet off the line and drifting.

The front wall was mirrors. He could watch himself quit from four angles, and did, for a while, before he switched to watching the floor. The mat smelled like rubber and old feet. Down at the far end, one of the little kids from the window class had his face pressed to the glass until an instructor’s hand came down on the back of his head and turned it around.

At ten minutes he lay down. He didn’t decide to. He went down for the last burpee and found he had no further interest in coming up, and he lay with his cheek on the rubber and his own blood loud in his ears and the room’s feet going around him and not stopping.

“Jesus,” somebody said. “Is he dead?”

“He’s marinating,” said the oldest one in the room, the one with the shaved head and the gray coming in at the temples.

Then a cold ring against his cheek, and Wren was crouched in front of him with a bottle of water.

“Sit up. Not all at once.” She twisted the cap off. “Hold the first mouthful. Don’t swallow it yet or you’ll be sick.”

He got the bottle away from her and drank it in four long pulls, head back. It hurt his teeth. It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Wren put her chin on her hand and watched him do it, and didn’t stop him, and didn’t laugh at him, which was somehow worse. “Better?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You look like a bag of wet laundry somebody left out in the rain.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Get up.”

He got up in stages and set the empty bottle down at her feet because he had nothing else to do with it.

Nobody in the room said anything. The oldest one was watching him with his tongue pushed into his cheek. The woman on the bench had put her phone down and was running tape through her own fingers, unhurried, minding her own business in a way that made it clear she had decided not to mind his.

Five minutes ago he had been a joke. Now he was something the room was pricing, and the heat crawling up the back of his neck told him exactly why: a girl had knelt down in front of him with a cold bottle, and every man in the building had watched her do it.

“Hale,” Coach said. “Here.”

He handed Ethan a pair of focus mitts, thick and curved, the vinyl split white along the creases.

“You know what this is?”

“A pad.”

“It’s a target. You’re not punching today, you’re holding. He throws, he hits the mitts, he doesn’t hit anything else. Keep them up, keep your chin behind your shoulder, watch his hands.” Coach fitted them on himself, snugged the left one down over Ethan’s knuckles with the flat of his palm. “Nobody in this gym wants to see your throat. Chin down.”

“Chin down.”

“Who wants it?”

Every right hand in the room went up at once.

He had spent most of his life in games with a little bar at the top of the screen that told you how badly the room wanted to kill you. He had never once seen it full. He was seeing it full.

At the standing bag, Marc straightened out of his stance and let the bag rock itself out, and did not put his hand up.

“Coach. He’s my classmate. Let me.”

Classmate. For two years Marc had walked past him in the hallway like he was a fire door.

“Go on, then.”

“Dad—“ Wren had come up beside her father, and she said it quietly, and once. “He’s never held a pad. He doesn’t know how to get hit. You can’t put him in there with Marc his first hour.”

“You want him scared of this room the rest of his life?” Coach said. “Because that’s what happens if I pull him out now. He goes home tonight as the kid who got pulled out.”

She didn’t answer. Ethan watched her breathe in, let it out, close her eyes, and stop being part of the conversation.

Coach’s hand landed between his shoulder blades and pushed. Ethan stumbled forward, caught himself on the apron, and climbed up into the ring.

Marc came through the ropes after him without hurrying. He rolled his neck, once left, once right. His hands were bigger than Ethan remembered them from across a classroom, and he was not smiling, and the not-smiling was worse than anything he had done with his face all week.

“Hands up,” Coach said. “Go.”

Marc touched the mitts, tap, tap, polite, like knocking on a door.

The third one came off the left mitt and hit Ethan in the jaw.

The room tilted. His ears filled with a high clean ringing, and he was looking at the ceiling light, and then at Marc, who was pulling his right hand back and shaking it out.

“Oh, my bad.” Marc leaned in, cheerful. “I looked at your face and got mad. For a second I thought you were the pad.”

“Eyes, head, shoulders.” Coach’s voice came across the ring like something thrown. “You watch the man. You don’t watch the target, you don’t watch your own hands, and you don’t look down. Somebody tell me why.”

“Because you get hit,” the woman on the bench said.

“And then you get hit again,” Coach said, “because you’re looking at the floor like it owes you money.”

Ethan put the mitts back up. His jaw was hot on one side, his hands were slick inside the pads, and he could not get them to close right.

Marc threw a few more, proper ones, weight behind them, each landing hard enough to push Ethan’s arms into his own chest.

“Watching me now, huh.” Marc’s lips barely moved. “Next one’s your eye.”

The right hand came off the mitt and Ethan shut his eyes, because that was what his body offered, and something went past his face close enough to move the hair on his forehead. His head had already gone sideways without asking him.

“Open your eyes!”

He opened them. Marc was two feet away with his guard a little high and his mouth flat.

“Lucky,” Marc said. “You think that happens twice?”

He came in again, and Ethan went back, and back, and the ring post hit him between the shoulder blades, and there was nowhere left to go.

What he did after that he could not have described afterward with any confidence. A straight right came at his nose and he leaned out of the road of it. A hook came at his ear and his chin dropped under it. An uppercut came up the middle and he was already elsewhere — feet planted, hands up and useless, his head going around in a small slow circle while the rest of him did not move at all, like a man trying to remember where he had parked.

Marc hit nothing.

He hit nothing again. Then nothing. Then nothing.

Somebody at the ropes said, “What the hell,” not loud.

“Five seconds,” the oldest one said, as if he were scoring it. Nobody had been counting out loud. Everybody had been counting.

Speed was the wrong word for it. His head kept arriving where the punch was going to be a fraction of a second before the punch got around to being there, and there was maybe one man in the building who could have said what that was.

Ethan wouldn’t have called it a talent. It was parrying, was all — there was a beat you caught, the same beat every time, and he had finished whole games without taking a single point of damage, and nobody had ever needed to hear about it.

Marc’s arm came down. His chest was going. The punches lost their spite and turned into work, and then the work started to come apart.

And Ethan, who had been given exactly one thing all day that he was good at, lifted his head and dropped the mitts.

The kick caught him just under the ribs.

His whole body folded around it. The canvas came up and hit him in the hip and the elbow, and he sat there with his arms wrapped around himself while the gym went up.

“Hey!” The oldest one was on the apron with both hands on the rope. “It’s boxing, you animal. Wrong sport!”

“Marc,” the woman on the bench said, flat.

“Sorry. Sorry.” Marc had his hands up, palms out. “Got a little heated. You okay, Hale?”

Ethan was busy not throwing up.

Marc came off the ropes, dropped to the floor, went straight to Coach, and bowed — quick, complete, a small theatrical bow with his hands at his sides. “Sorry, Coach. Lost my head.”

Coach looked at him long enough that Marc found something else to look at.

“On your feet,” Coach said to Ethan. “Come on. Up. Breathe in through your nose.”

Ethan got his knees under himself. Coach took him by the arm and pulled, and the room came up with him, all of it, the mirrors and the bags and the faces hanging over the ropes, nobody saying anything now.

Coach put a hand flat on his stomach and pressed. “Hurt here?”

“Whole thing hurts.”

“Yeah. That’s the muscle, not the bone. Breathe through your nose.” He pulled Ethan’s arm over his shoulder. “Back room. Let’s look at you.”

Walking was strange. The floor was where it should be but it kept arriving slightly early.

The ringing had moved into the right side of his head and settled in, one long note, and the gym had gone soft and far away behind it; the voices came through at half volume with the middles missing.

The guitar case was still by the counter where he had left it. Nobody had touched it.

He went past her.

She was standing at the edge of the mat where the ropes came down, and Marc was in front of her, out of his gear now, hands moving while he talked — and Ethan’s ears were full of that one note and he could not get a single word of it, and her face was turned three-quarters away from him and he could not make it out. Whether she was angry. Whether she was listening.

Coach’s hand kept him moving.

The corridor at the back of the gym was narrow and didn’t smell like a corridor, and there was a door at the end of it with a light on over the frame.

At the door he turned his head.

Marc was standing where she had been standing.

She wasn’t.

Coach pushed the door open with the flat of his hand.