“We waited for you all day on Sunday,” Kim said.
“About that,” Wallace said.
“I’m guessing there’s a story here that also explains the state of your face,” she said.
Wallace told her he had a fight in Florida. He left it at that.
Kim had been around enough fighters to know that if he’d won, he’d have mentioned it already. That was a rule you could count on. Some guy went out to Vegas for a fight and if he won he’d be back in the gym on Monday, not even training, just giving everyone a chance to ask him about it, hear the story of his triumph. If he lost, you wouldn’t see him for a week. When you did see him, he wouldn’t mention the fight. If you asked him how it went, he’d say it went shitty and leave it at that.
“We’ve got to figure something out here,” Kim said. “You can’t just stand her up like that and then show up when you feel like it.”
“I know,” Wallace said.
“You think she doesn’t really notice but she does,” Kim said.
“I know,” Wallace said again.
“This age, you never know what will end up sticking with them for the rest of their lives,” Kim said. “I mean, come on, look at me and my dad.”
By all means, Wallace told her. Let’s go ahead and make this about that now.
Kim looked at him like she was trying to decide whether it was worth summoning the energy to get angry. Over by the hedges Molly clamped the Tupperware down over some invisible prisoner, then looked back to see if she was being watched.
I made this possible for you, Wallace thought. It’s because of me that you can marry a rich lawyer and stay home all day in a big house. You lived with a fighter once and had his baby and followed him into all sorts of bad decisions, so now no one can say you were always boring and domestic.
But that was a shitty way of making himself feel better. Because even if you’re right, he told himself, so what?
“You could take her for a little while today,” Kim said. “Make up for the weekend you missed, maybe even let her stay the night at your place. She likes that.”
Wallace pictured his condo, pictured flinging open the door for Molly, her crinkling her nose at the cloistered stink of three days’ worth of grown man wallowing. Or better yet, what if the cops came by? A nice man in a crisp blue uniform knocking on his door to talk about the morning Wallace had spent smoking weed in public and throwing people in the mud. That’d make a great story for Mol to tell in therapy some day. The kind of story that starts, “The last time I saw my dad . . .”
“Why don’t you just say you don’t want to do it?” Kim said when she saw his face. “At least then I can pretend to respect your honesty.”
“It’s not the best time,” he said.
“It never is,” Kim said.
“Fuck it,” Wallace said.
He told her about the thing in the estuary. He told it just how it happened, exaggerating his own patience and the other man’s obnoxiousness only slightly. When he got to the part about foot-sweeping the man into the mud, Kim looked away from him and shook her head twice in a tight, mean pivot. Wallace said it wasn’t that big a deal. It’s not like he hit him. It’s not like the man was actually physically hurt.
“Right,” Kim said. “It’s so unimportant you’re afraid you’re going to get arrested when you go home.”
It didn’t sound to Wallace like a question, so he didn’t answer.
“And you were stoned too? Walking around with a joint like some teenager? Then you drove here, presumably still stoned? And to see your daughter? I mean, what the hell.”
“I didn’t have a chance to get stoned,” Wallace said. “It might have been a lot better for that guy if I did.”
“That’s why you drove up here rather than just calling, isn’t it?” Kim said. “Because you think you might be in trouble and you’d rather not be there for it.”
There wasn’t anything good he could say.
“God, do you know how boring this kind of thing is now?” she said. “Do you know how stupid?”
Wallace said he did. He was surprised at how much he meant it.
Molly came running around the corner, holding the Tupperware over her head and keeping it very still as she ran. When she got to where they were standing, she extended it up to show them. It was filled with tiny pebbles, and in the center was a snail with a partially crushed shell that oozed air bubbles. Molly’s grin beamed out at them. When she saw Wallace looking at her she stopped grinning, then motioned for her mother to lean down so she could whisper to her. Kim did it. Molly watched him as she spoke into her mother’s ear.
“Yeah, no,” Kim answered her. “That’s not going to happen.”
Molly made a face like she might cry, then turned and raced off with the Tupperware over her head again. Something felt like it was draining out of him as he watched her.
“She wants the snail to sleep in her bed with her,” Kim said once she’d gone. “She doesn’t want me to tell you about it.”
“And yet here we are,” Wallace said.
It was quiet then and Wallace could hear the sound of the ocean drifting across the street at them. The water even sounded cleaner up here. He couldn’t understand it. Kim asked him what he was going to do now. Wallace said he’d probably take the rest of the week off, then get back in the gym on Monday and start thinking about the next one.
“That wasn’t at all what I meant,” Kim said. “But I guess you answered my question anyway.”
That’s how you know these visits are over, Wallace told himself. When you’ve both reminded each other why you don’t do this more often.
He was two blocks from home when he spotted the cop car out front.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought.
There was just one of them, pulled up to the curb with nobody in it, near as he could tell. He drove right on past and tried to look like he wasn’t looking. There was no sign of any actual cop. No sign of a commotion in the courtyard. Just the car.
Haven’t there been cop cars parked out front every now and then? he asked himself. Wasn’t that something that happened sometimes? Maybe it had nothing at all to do with him.
He kept driving. The afternoon was heating up. Ahead of him the freeway shimmered. He drove past it, on into Chula Vista. He didn’t even know he was driving to the gym until he pulled into the parking lot.
Coach Vee was leaning up against the back wall of the gym, watching two lazy heavyweights pretend to spar. Wallace went over and leaned next to him without a word. The heavyweights moved like two men miming a fight in the shallow end of a pool. The act of keeping their hands up seemed to exhaust them both.
“Somebody please hit someone,” Coach Vee said to the heavyweights. “Pretty fucking please.”
One of the heavyweights pumped a few jabs, then stepped back and took a deep breath.
“You two are literally killing me,” Coach Vee said. “It’s a goddamn travesty what you’re doing to me right now.”
The heavyweights both hooked at the same time. Neither of them hit anything.
Coach looked at Wallace and shook his head. “For my sins,” he said.
The round timer dinged. Coach Vee threw his head back and thanked Christ in heaven. Wallace followed him over the wrestling mats and into his cramped little office without being asked. The heavyweights both leaned over at the waist with their gloved hands on their knees.
“So you’re alive,” Coach Vee said, and plopped down in his cheap leather office chair. He had his laptop open on his desk. The word Commitment bounced around the empty black screen, running into the edges and then spinning back out toward the center. Coach Vee’s office always made Wallace feel a little claustrophobic. All four walls were plastered with fight photos and magazine covers. The faces pressed in on you. You got more than two people in there at once and everybody had to flatten against the wall just to let someone out.
“I was this close to sending out the search party,” Coach said.
Wallace told him he’d listened to his voicemails but didn’t feel like they demanded immediate action.
“Even the one where I said ‘Call me back’ like three or four times at the end?” Coach Vee said.
Wallace grinned. He could be sixty years old and Coach Vee would still have the ability to make him feel like he was Dennis the Menace, running around with a slingshot in his back pocket.
“I’m just saying,” Coach said. “Guy suffers a concussion and then falls off the map, least he could do is call his coach and let him know he’s not facedown in the bathtub waiting for the neighbors to notice the stink.”
“Well. At least you’re not being overly dramatic or anything,” Wallace said.
“Sure,” Coach Vee said. “No big deal. Just a knockout, right? It happens.”
Wallace knew what was coming next.
“Of course,” Coach Vee said, and leaned back in his chair, letting his eyes drift up the wall past the framed photos of Coach with past champs, Coach in his own glory days, all the way up to the one of Wallace getting the sweat knocked off his head by a straight right from Vladimir Zinoviev.
“It didn’t used to,” Coach said.
The photo was close to a decade old by now, torn out of a magazine and shoved into a Wal-Mart frame. Zinoviev was a hard-ass ex-Soviet special-forces guy who broke Wallace’s orbital in the first minute of the first round out in Atlantic City. Within seconds the swelling nixed his vision in that eye. His depth perception was shit after that. By the start of the second round he felt like he had a water balloon growing out of his face. Coach Vee had told him to make it a ground fight, take it where he could feel rather than see, and he did. He choked Zinoviev out with a rear naked in the third, then spent the next week in New Jersey because they wouldn’t let him get on an airplane with his eye like that.
All he had to do now was think about that punch and a glowing warmth would spread out across his face, beginning right on that very spot. It was like his body had its own memory of these things that he couldn’t quite access. After that fight Coach Vee told a reporter that it wouldn’t have mattered if Zinoviev had hit Wallace with a shovel, he was too stubborn to get knocked out. Wallace understood right away that it was the highest compliment Coach Vee was capable of giving. It was still the only picture on Coach’s little Wall of Fame where his fighter wasn’t demolishing the other guy or grinning after a victory. The only photo where Coach’s guy seems to be the one getting his ass handed to him.
“I should have called you back,” Wallace said. “You’re right about that.”
“I know I am,” Coach Vee said. “But you were too busy feeling sorry for yourself. Like you’re the first fighter who ever got knocked out in a fight he never should have taken.”
Wallace laughed to himself. How many times had he heard Coach telling guys to step up and fight? How many times had he heard that spiel about how you didn’t make any money sitting on your couch? But that was before a fight. It wasn’t until after that things became so very crystal clear to everyone else.
“Be straight with me, how many more of these are we going to do?” Coach asked him.
Wallace shook his head.
“Bet you’ve wondered the same thing though, right?” Coach said. “I know you have. Tell me something: when you walked into the gym today, how’d it smell?”
“Like dreams and sunshine,” Wallace said. “As always.”
“It smelled awful, didn’t it?” Coach Vee said. “It made you sick, right? Like you wanted to run out of here and get a shower?”
Wallace didn’t say anything. The truth is, that’s exactly how it felt, like the stench of old, mildewed leather was sticking to his skin. That smell of stale sweat, other people’s feet. That same fight gym smell, but worse. Coach leaned forward and stretched his long arms out on the desk between them. He smiled that sad, conspiratorial smile of his.
“When the smell of the gym makes you sick,” Coach said very slowly, emphasizing each syllable, “it’s time to quit. I think Marciano said that. I don’t know, maybe not Marciano. But whoever said it was right. When you start to hate that smell, it’s time. And when it’s time, brother.” Coach held up his hands and let them drop. Wallace opened his mouth to say something, then didn’t. Start talking now, he thought, and you might not be able to stop.
All he needed was a little while to collect himself. He needed a day or two with no Coach Vee, no Kim and no Molly, no asshole neighbor. He needed a second to breathe. He needed some time to figure some things out, and he knew he wasn’t going to get it.
Coach Vee leaned back in his chair again and looked up at the photo of Wallace and Zinoviev.
“Wonder what ever happened to that guy,” Coach Vee said.
In the photo Zinoviev wore a blank expression and a flat-top that was severe and well out of fashion even then. The halo of sweat around Wallace’s head glimmered in the arena lights. There was that warm glow on his cheek again.
“I heard he’s a small-time gangster in Brooklyn now,” Wallace said, his voice thick and all in his throat.
“Seriously?” Coach Vee said.
“That’s what I heard,” Wallace said. He said the rumor was that Zinoviev had gone back to work as hired muscle for the same guys he used to serve under in the Soviet army. Or maybe he’d never really stopped working for them, even when he was fighting. Anyway, that was his life now, or so people said.
“Isn’t that something,” Coach Vee said. “Guy changes continents and still ends up with the same friends.”
On his way out Wallace passed the two heavyweights sitting on the floor with their backs leaning against the wall, slowly unspooling their hand wraps as the sweat puddled up around them. Wallace nodded at them and one of them asked how his fight in Florida went.
“Shitty,” Wallace said.
They’d given him a watch once, the Big Show had. He hadn’t thought about it in years, but now, driving around by himself, he remembered it.
It was a nice one too. Cartier, with diamonds in more places than Wallace had thought possible. He’d never asked for it. No one explained what it was for.
This was back when he was first fighting in the Big Show, after he’d won three straight and people were starting to talk about a title shot. Then, out of nowhere, they had this watch delivered to him. Like, here. It wasn’t his birthday, wasn’t Christmas. His last fight had been two months earlier. The box the thing came in seemed nicer than any luggage Wallace had ever owned. He was scared to take it out. He didn’t even wear watches.
He asked his manager to find out who he could thank for it, and maybe see if he could sniff out a reason for it. His manager called back later that day to say it was all taken care of. It didn’t seem right, but fine. His manager told him he’d have to get used to stuff like this, that when you’re a winner people give you things. They want to. You don’t owe them anything for it.
Wallace believed this at the time. That’s how dumb he’d been.
Probably about a year later he saw where a lightweight who’d just been cut from the Big Show was trying to sell the exact same watch on eBay. He told the story about how the promoters had given it to him for being their top lightweight prospect, how it was one of a kind, custom-made especially for him. The bidding got up there, then it got ridiculous. In the end the bids were all bullshit, just mean, smart kids fucking with him on the Internet. He never got a dime for it.
Wallace still had his, still in the box in the back of his sock drawer. He couldn’t say why. He had the vague feeling that he might need it someday. Maybe he just wanted to know it was there, this watch, a piece of secret evidence. It proved that he’d done something, at least. He hadn’t made it all up.
The big yellow house had a huge wooden door and a front yard made of volcanic rocks. Wallace stood on the sidewalk looking at it, trying to imagine what kind of world existed inside. He’d just had enough, was what it was. There was no breeze coming off the ocean and the heat had flatt
ened the afternoon out, leaving it limp and heavy. Whatever was going to happen, Wallace wanted to get it over with.
You’ll apologize if you have to, he told himself. Then he said it out loud, just so he’d believe it.
Wallace went up and rang the doorbell. Behind it a little dog barked, clipping its nails across a tile floor as it got closer. A woman told it to hush and it did. Wallace realized he hadn’t even considered what he was going to say if someone other than the man in the green jacket answered. He really should have thought about that.
An old woman in a floral print robe pulled the door open just enough to see him. She held the little dog back with her foot. She had thin, bleached hair and the rough, thick skin of a person who’d been willfully abused by the sun for decades. Her eyes were hidden somewhere deep inside her face where Wallace couldn’t quite see. She stood there as if waiting for a sales pitch of some kind. Wallace realized he didn’t know the man’s name, didn’t know how to ask for him.
“Is there a man who lives here?” he asked.
“What’s happened?” the woman snapped.
Wallace didn’t know how to answer that.
“What’s he done?” the woman said.
Wallace told her that it wasn’t exactly like that. He needed to talk to him, he said.
“We had a misunderstanding earlier,” Wallace said. “It was my fault. I wanted to apologize.”
The old woman looked down at her dog, as if checking to make sure he’d heard the same thing she had.
“Is this a trick?” she said.
Wallace told her no, it wasn’t a trick. She looked at him for what felt like a long time, then she looked down at the little dog.
“We’re going to trust this man and let him in to talk to us,” she said to the dog. “We’re going to trust him and hope he is worthy of that.”
The Best American Short Stories 2015 Page 13