'Let's not go in yet,' Sarah Lynn said. 'Let's drive around.'
'Drive? Where?' Havre, the nearest town big enough to have more than a gas station, lay halfway between here and Saskatchewan. There wasn't much else but snowbound prairie for a good fifty miles in every direction.
'We could go to Bear Paw,' she said. 'Daddy took us skiing there when I was little. I want to see if it looks the same.'
Evening had settled in by now. It was around six, the scheduled starting time. But tournaments worked from the lightest weights up, and judging from the number of vehicles, there were going to be a lot of kids tonight. Most weren't big enough to knock each other down, so they usually went the full three rounds. For sure, I wouldn't be coming up for a few hours.
A swirl of the damp chinook breeze slipped across my face and high into my nostrils. I closed the door and started the truck.
I drove a couple of miles along the dead-end road toward the little Bear Paw ski area. The landscape was deserted. Sarah Lynn had gotten animated and was looking intently out the windows, like she was watching for something. Abruptly, she grabbed my arm and pointed at a dirt track leading into the woods.
'Turn in there,' she said.
I obeyed, thinking maybe she needed to pee, although I'd have expected her to go into the school. I took it slowly, feeling my way, nervous about getting stuck. But the ground surface was firm and we only had to go a hundred feet before we were shielded by trees. I coasted to a stop and cut the headlights.
But instead of getting out, Sarah Lynn got all over me, her tongue hot and wet in my ear and her fingers tugging at my belt. Startled, I half embraced her and half tried to hold her squirming body still.
'Sarah, baby, we can't,' I said. Sex before a contest was an old athlete's taboo, another thing I knew was superstition and yet still had a powerful hold. I caught at her hands, but she was determined, and maybe I didn't fight her all that hard. Then her mouth was on my cock, and I could no more have stopped than I could have walked home with the truck on my back. I pushed down her jeans and panties, with her hips wriggling to help. She straddled me, heaving and then yelping while I heard myself growl, and I came so hard my slamming boot heel pounded that dent into the opposite door.
The noise level in the gym was almost painful, compounded of shouting from spectators, loud conversations of others trying to be heard, and the thudding of blows. I guessed the crowd at about a hundred and fifty, standing around the ring or sitting in the bleachers. Young men and boys were getting their hands wrapped, shadowboxing, snapping punches at coaches who held gloves shoulder-high. Some, their ordeals already over, carried trophies.
Sarah Lynn spotted a couple of other women from Helena in the bleachers, mothers of young contestants, and went to say hi. I stood there a minute longer, watching the eleven-or twelve-year-olds in the ring flail at each other with melon-size gloves strapped to the ends of their skinny arms. It was a little pathetic and really dull. A lot of the parents wore boosters' jackets, made of shiny nylon of various bright colors and emblazoned with the name of their club. The fluorescent overhead lights cast a sheen on those and on human flesh that I'd never seen anywhere but at boxing matches. The yelling faces and the colors seemed magnified in a way that suggested a disturbing dream. Maybe it was because of all the aggression floating around. When I glanced up at Sarah Lynn, I saw that she and the other two women were talking with their heads bowed together. The gym was overheated and stuffy with the smell of sweaty bodies. I decided to take a walk.
As I passed the ticket table inside the door, the hearty black-haired woman in charge gave me a big smile.
'You running away?' she said.
'Damn straight. I'm getting out while I can.'
She shook her forefinger at me playfully. 'That's what you think.'
The outside world was deliciously cool and quiet except for the gentle gusting wind. I scanned the license plates in the parking lot. A few were from other states or Canada, but most were from Montana, and most of those from the heartland. You could tell because the plate's first number, one through fifty-six, identified the county. The local boxing club would meet in the back of an Elks lodge or VFW hall in some tiny town like Geraldine that you'd drive through and barely notice. But there'd be a few kids out on those ranches who thirsted for something more, to prove themselves or just to break the monotony, and grabbed at this small glory as a means.
There were scattered lights around the little settlement, but the only place besides the school where anything seemed to be going on was one of the old frame buildings, fifty yards or so up a hill. I could see movement through the windows and I thought I heard a faint sound like singing. I hesitated to intrude, but something about it drew me, so I started over there.
Then I stopped. An eerie sensation was rippling over my skin, like the wind was blowing right through me.
Abruptly, I realized I felt alone in a way I never had before.
I walked on to the building. Three Indian guys about my age were sitting on the steps drinking beer. They stopped talking as I approached. I nodded to them and they nodded back, but none of them looked right at me.
The sound I'd heard was clear now-not singing, but chanting. I went up the steps and along a hall to the room at the end where it was coming from. I stopped at the doorway. Several older people were sitting in a circle on the floor playing a game, casting handfuls of small sticks like dice, while more stood around and watched. Everybody joined in the singsong chanting that would die into laughter or exclamations of disgust as the sticks hit the floor. I was sure they were aware of my presence, but again, nobody really looked at me.
I'd had no idea what I was going to see here, but maybe I'd sensed it somehow and that was what had pulled me-not the game itself, but an extraordinary and powerful force that pervaded the place, the people, the gathering. It was a kind of heart, a center. I'd looked for it in my own world but never found a way to tap in.
But I had no business being there, and I turned to go. Just then, an old man with a headband and a long gray braid raised his face to me-the first direct gaze I'd gotten.
I had noticed him moving his fingers gently over his sticks after he cast them, as if he was reading them. Now I saw that his eyes were clouded with cataracts.
The lighter-weight bouts lasted even longer than I'd expected, and mine didn't start until almost midnight. The wait seemed interminable. I tried to spend it concentrating on what I was there for, but a lot of other things were going on in my head.
I figured out who Harold Good Gun was and watched him warm up, trying not to be obvious about it. He probably did the same with me. He was about my size, six feet one or two and a hundred seventy-plus pounds. It looked like I had a little reach on him but he was thicker through the upper body. I had talked to a couple of people who'd seen him fight, and the consensus was that he tended to come out with a hard flurry, but didn't have much in the way of either stamina or style. My own strongest points were a long fast left jab and a hard straight right. I needed to box him-keep him away at first, then go after him as he tired.
Instead, I let myself get drawn into mixing it up, and just under a minute into the fight, he threw a wild roundhouse right that caught me square in the socket of my left eye. I should have slipped or blocked it easily, and worse, he wasn't even looking at me, just windmilling furiously with his head down. In the upper weight divisions we wore ten-ounce gloves, not much more than ski mitts, and neither of us had on headgear. The impact was something like getting hit by a major league fastball. By the time I came to, sprawled on the canvas, the count was over.
Late the next gray afternoon, while I nursed my world-class shiner and my crushed pride, I felt something pop inside my face. The upper left side filled with fluid so fast it was like it got pumped from a hose. By the time I could get to a mirror, the eye had swelled completely shut. When I pried open the lid and saw just a little crescent of white, I started to realize what had happened. The tissue that supported my eyeball had broken, and it had
