The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

“Then knowing and having that makes you lucky.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” he said.

She said nothing. Blew out the bed lantern and lay down on her floor.

The next morning he ran clear and cool in his head, heard the horse trot to keep up behind him. He went three hills farther than he’d ever gone before and ran back without stopping. Took only one jar of water from Billie. He used heavier weights, did more sit-ups, made the jump rope sing and swirl. Slipped on training gloves. The heavy bag hung in the sunlit barn. Gene glided to it on feet that didn’t stick to the earth. He felt the rhythm of a breeze. Feinted once, twice—

Hit the heavy bag with a right jab that shook dust off the barn beam, a great slamming thwack that made the horse jump in his stall.

Gene turned and grinned at Billie. Saw her want to smile back, and that was something, almost enough. The heavy bag cried in pain for half an hour of his punches. He worked the speed bag like a machine gun. Doyle came out of the house, the leer gone from his face. Harry pranced around the barnyard like a chicken chirping: What’d I tell you! What’d I tell you!

And Gene breathed as a boxer.

That night Billie blew out the lantern on the bedside table, but instead of lying down on her floor, she stood there looking at him on the bed as moonlight streamed through the open window. The breeze stirred her hair and her long white nightshirt.

“You lied to me,” she said.

“That’s one thing I’d never do.”

“You said you were only truly good at one thing, at boxing. But you’re the best in the world there ever could be at this. At risking everything to save me. No one could do that better and there’s sure no one who would ever want to.”

The bed floated in front of the light of her eyes in that shadowed room.

“Do you think we’re going to get out of this alive?” she whispered.

“Or die trying.”

But she didn’t laugh. Said: “Either way, just once, for one thing, I want to choose.”

“That’s what I want for you, too.”

She lifted the nightshirt off over her head like a white cloud floating away to let her bare skin glisten with the lunar silver glow. The bed squeaked as she knelt on it, as she lay beside him. He’d never been so afraid of doing the wrong thing. She took his right hand and pressed it on her breast, filled it with her round, warm, stiffening flesh, and he felt her heart slamming as hard as his as she said: “Everything I can, I give to you.”

“But do you want to?” he whispered.

Her breath came quicker, shallower, like she was running. Her long legs stirred against his. He pulled back, her face held away from his, her lips parted but unable to reach him, and he held her away until he heard her whisper Yes! she whispered Yes! she told him Yes! and as her bare leg slid up his thighs he moved into their kiss.

In the morning Gene found the edge. That knife line border where strength and hunger meet. That fury place when you sink into your eyes and your spine steels. You no longer walk, no longer run: you are a tight wind with legs like thunderclouds and lightning bolt arms. The smile on your skull is death and your mouth’s coffee-metal-salty taste for blood doesn’t care whose. He devoured ten miles of road with the scent of her on him, her hips bouncing up and down on the black horse. He shadowboxed in the barn with her watching everywhere and not there at all. Bare-fisted, slew the heavy bag with his favorite three-punch staccato rhythm and whirled without losing cadence to make the speed bag sing, then spun to snatch a horsefly out of the air with his right jab. He was totally in the moment of that hay-stinking, dusty, oven horse barn even as he was absolutely in eternity’s every four-cornered canvas ring. Pain simply didn’t matter. He was a boxer.

“Clean up,” said Doyle. “We’re all going to town, show the yokels we’re for real.”

Doyle drove and made Gene sit up front with him. Harry was a wire in the back seat beside Billie. She wore that blue dress.

Shelby’d been full before the fight announcement. Now Gene felt like he was in a beehive swelling with hot air from the beating of a million wings. The town had six dance halls for workers who’d flooded in to hammer up the eight-sided, 40,000-seat wooden arena rising like a toothpick skeleton on the edge of town. On the prairie across the tracks from the fight site stood an encampment of Indian tepees. Cars jammed Main Street. People stared and pointed. Men took it upon themselves to clear a slot for them in front of the movie house, holding up traffic, beckoning Doyle into the parking spot. When they got out of the car, hands appeared from everywhere to shake Gene’s, to touch him on the back, the shoulders. The crowd stared at the Larsons, who followed in the wake of the fighter and his trainer, knew these merely local half-breeds were now somehow sacred, too. Fans smiled a dark hunger. An oilman’s blond daughter whose eyes Gene had never marked now pulled at the gladiator with her sapphire gaze.