The Boxer and the Spy

“Just move the punch away. Not far. Just make him miss... and now, with your left you come up in a half circle and block him hard and get a nice shot at his head with your right. On the street you might use your elbow. It’s right there handy.”

They practiced a few times. Terry kept forgetting to drop his left when he checked with his right. His arms would tangle.

“Damn,” Terry said.

“How many times you got to throw a punch,” George said, “‘fore it’s part of the muscle memory?”

“Three, four thousand,” Terry said.

“You done it seven times now,” George said.

“Looks easier,” Terry said, “when you do it.”

“It is easier when I do it,” George said. “I done it a million times.”

Terry nodded. They worked some more on check-block. And at the end of the session, Terry sat on the chair and George took off the gloves for him. Terry unwrapped his hands and caught his breath.

“How long we been doing this, George?” Terry said.

“Five months,” George said.

“I’m nowhere near a boxer yet,” Terry said.

George shrugged.

“And I don’t want to get into a fight with anybody in the school yard or something,” Terry said.

George nodded.

“But if I did, you know,” Terry said, “I’d have a plan. I might win or I might not, but I would sort of know what I wanted to do.”

“Good to have a plan,” George said.

They were quiet as Terry unwrapped the self-sticking tape from his hands and wrists.

“It makes you feel, like, calm,” Terry said.

“Calm is good,” George said.

Terry balled the tape and dropped it into the wastebasket in the corner.

“You ever scared, George,” Terry said, “when you were fighting?”

“Every fight,” George said.

“The whole fight?”

“No,” George said. “Once you get into the first round, you sort of lose the fear thing. First round you figure out if you got a legitimate chance to beat this dude or if you pretty much gonna concentrate on surviving.”

“You didn’t always think you’d win?”

George smiled.

“I could always hit,” George said. “So I always had a chance, but you know pretty quick whether you as good as he is.”

“How about a street fight? Not when you were a bouncer, but just, you know, some guy gives you grief, and you pop him?”

“You a professional fighter, Terry, you ain’t supposed to be popping people on the street. Law give you trouble on that,” George said. “Besides, most street fights be about proving something. You a fighter, you know what you can do. Ain’t no need to prove it.”

Terry nodded. His hands were unwrapped. His breath was back to normal. The sweat had dried. Still he stayed in the chair.

“You’d think it would be the other way,” Terry said. “But it’s like, the more you know about fighting, the less you fight.”

“Maybe the less you be fighting about nothing,” George said.

He put the big sixteen-ounce gloves onto the shelf and turned and looked at Terry for a moment. Terry thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He just looked at Terry silently and nodded as if to himself.

“Don’t be worrying ’bout the check-block thing,” George said after a while. “You gonna get it.”