Yok

by Tim Davys

  I looked down at my plate. Why hadn’t I heard the sorrow in his voice before?

  During all of ninth grade I got up an hour earlier than I had to and did strength training. Stomach, back, and shoulders. I still hoped I could live up to his expectations. I would have done anything to avoid seeing the sorrow in his eyes when again and again I ran too slow, hit too slackly, or didn’t move as fast as he hoped. I also started concealing my other interests from him, because I realized he would worry that they would encroach on training. I hid books under the bed, because even if he had nothing against me reading, he would have preferred seeing me improve my acceleration or explosiveness. He never said that, of course. He was extremely careful not to make demands on me. He repeated, in various ways and with many examples, that intent, not performance, was the important thing. And the better Dad concealed his disappointment, the more painful it became to see.

  About the time I resumed training after Adam stopped boxing, there were four parallel fifth-grade classes at South Sors General Grammar School where my father taught, and during gym classes they were put together, two and two. But the males were not separated from the females. Now and then a parent protested the mixed classes, but the school resisted making any changes.

  In Harry S. Bulldog’s class almost fifty ten- and eleven-year-old stuffed animals ran into the gym and lined up in their places. Dad believed in discipline at school.

  “Good morning, pupils!” Dad shouted.

  “Good morning, Schoolmaster,” the cubs responded.

  With energy and enthusiasm Harry S. Bulldog then divided the pupils into four teams, and they made their way out to the schoolyard.

  South Sors General Grammar School was the largest building along the street, the largest building in the area, and on the schoolyard there was a small patch of woods for the cubs to play in at recess. Across from the school some craftsmen had opened shops in recent years, and shoemakers, seamstresses, bakers, and cabinetmakers ensured that animals came and went on the sidewalks.

  Dad’s ambition was to divide his time evenly among the four teams, but when Rector Bergdorff showed up at the sprinting track, class was almost half over and Dad had only helped with the long-jump group.

  The rector waved discreetly, and Dad excused himself and left the jumping group. The two adults placed themselves under an oak by the side of the cricket field, out of earshot but within view of everything going on in the yard.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you like this, Harry, but I have promised to answer . . . a certain animal . . . before lunch. This is about the selection for the City Athletic Championship.”

  “Yes?”

  Harry S. Bulldog knew exactly what this was about. He understood it as he turned in the lists of who would compete for South Sors General Grammar School last week. He had made his selections. This year he wanted to win.

  “If I understand this correctly,” the rector continued cautiously, “we are sending no more than ten cubs this year?”

  “May be right,” Bulldog said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “And last year there were eighteen from our school?”

  “May be right.”

  “And Leonard Louse is not one of the ten we’re sending?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “While Fox Antonio Ortega is registered in all events?”

  Harry S. Bulldog again shrugged his shoulders.

  “You realize, Harry,” said Rector Bergdorff, “I’ve been on the phone all morning with Louse’s father. He maintains that it’s not just him, there are a number of parents who think this is outrageous. Fox Antonio Ortega is not . . . one of the school’s stronger pupils. And his family is . . . well, I’ll make no judgments on the cub’s family, but many are upset that we are giving someone special treatment who . . . that is, why don’t we give more cubs the chance to distinguish themselves during the championships?”

  “Excuse me,” said Harry S. Bulldog, “but you said ‘distinguish themselves’?”

  “Please, Bulldog, this is about eleven-year-olds,” said Bergdorff. “They’re in the fifth grade. There is time for them to win and lose many times before they leave school. Shouldn’t we—”

  “Look,” Dad interrupted, pointing. “Look at him.”

  At the long-jump pit Fox Antonio Ortega had just started his run-up, and now he quickly picked up speed. Harry S. Bulldog could not keep from smiling. Never in his professional life, neither as a boxer nor as a gym teacher, had he seen anything like it. Fox Antonio Ortega was a physical miracle. It was not only the promise of great deeds in the way he moved, there was something so powerfully well-balanced about the fox’s whole appearance that whatever sport he chose, he was meant to write sports history.

  Fox Antonio Ortega was my absolute opposite.

  Dad pointed, and Rector Bergdorff could see for himself. Fox’s running gait was magnificent, aggressive but butterfly light at the same time. Even at the age of eleven he was a polished diamond. His sense of timing was complete; raw strength in combination with a focused desire to train would force every obstacle out of the way to medals and millions.

  Harry S. Bulldog felt no envy on his own behalf; it was impossible to envy perfection, because it was unachievable. But unconsciously he must have compared the fox with me; it was unavoidable because I had been running around the same schoolyard a few years earlier. The gym teacher’s son, who trained and trained but still wasn’t able to achieve any results. Every time I stumbled, every time my energy gave out at the finish, every time the bar quivered and fell, it must have been like a knife that cut a little piece out of Dad’s heart. He could not have helped feeling that way, nor could I.

  Fox Antonio Ortega reached the plank and took off. He traveled through the air, and even from their spot under the oak they could see that the jump was a long one. Very long.

  “If he were only twice as good as the others in any event,” Dad explained, “I could make an exception. Then I would have set him to the side. But he is much better than that.”

  Bergdorff watched Fox get up in the long-jump pit and brush off the sand. The rector was obviously moved by what he saw.

  “I see,” he said. “Do as you wish. But make sure that Leonard Louse is one of the ten.”

  And with these words he left the gym teacher to his class.

  Fox Antonio Ortega knew the jump was good, but also that he had jumped better. For that reason he didn’t turn around to see where he had landed. No one else bothered either.

  When he started school it had been different. Then his classmates were fascinated by what he could do. They begged and pleaded to see him hit a ball over the school roof; they kept time when he ran around the block and dragged him over to the ignorant cubs at Noah Whale Elementary to let him challenge them. Fox Antonio Ortega was their trophy.

  But the grade school pupils became middle school pupils, and their interest flagged. When his classmates returned after summer vacation to the fourth grade, they were in search of new sensations. After the severe disappointment Fox experienced during the first few weeks, a deep satisfaction followed. In reality he was happier when he didn’t have to be at the center, and he gladly assumed his more anonymous role in the social structure of the school class. Which did not mean, however, that his physical achievements were less astounding.

  Now Fox Antonio Ortega walked back along the run-up and placed himself last in line to attempt another jump. The cubs who stood
waiting were too little to notice how their classmate moved; how he walked, with his long, springy steps, his back straight and arms pleasingly swinging along his body. They did not see how the fox’s sharp red fur glistened in the sun, as if it were gilded, and they did not see that his ears proudly stood up from his head, as if the wind were filling a pair of sails. For the coming years, and until Antonio Ortega finished high school, he continued to surprise Harry S. Bulldog, and remained a phenomenon.

  The day Dad introduced me to Nick Rhinoceros, Charlie put up the posters in the reception area. He papered the whole wall toward the dressing rooms, and even put a few up outside the entry. The district boxing championship in Sors was only held every three years, for financial reasons, which made the competition even more prestigious. All the clubs in the district shared in hosting, and Fresco’s logo was on the poster, too. That made us proud.

  I had boxed a couple of matches “for real,” but lost both, and Dad and I had jointly decided not to compete again for the time being, not until I was ready. When I saw the poster for the district championship and noticed the date, I realized it had to be then or never. There were fourteen months until the competition, and by then I would turn eighteen. All excuses that I wasn’t fully developed so far were based on my being too young. After my eighteenth birthday it was no longer an argument.

  “Nick, this is my son, Gary,” Dad introduced me.

  “Gary. Nice to meet you. I think I can help you,” said Rhinoceros.

  “That would be fantaththtic,” I answered.

  “Fantaththtic?” Rhinoceros wondered.

  “He lisps a little,” said Dad. “After a while you won’t notice it.”

  “We’re here to boxth, after all,” I said.

  “Boxth?” Rhinoceros wondered.

  Nick Rhinoceros had been city welterweight champion in Mollisan Town. Dad had worked with Rhinoceros, and now the successful champion decided to repay the help.

  Nick Rhinoceros was as stylistically pure as a boxer as he was miserable as an instructor. It took a few months for both of us to accept this. But when the rhinoceros finally stopped talking, and instead of listening I could concentrate on seeing what he did, how he moved, positioned himself, and hit, the training sessions went much better. Nick had a lot to teach, and he taught it to me in the ring.

  Dad was fired up. He stood alongside, taking notes. Every movement, feint, and hit was noted, and then we went through the notes together in the evening. To say I regained my former self-confidence is not true, but our sessions went so well that I once again found delight in training.

  I was done with school—no one I knew continued studying past high school. So Dad and I went to Fresco in the mornings. Charlie was at the reception desk with a greeting so disinterested you knew you had come home. Changing in the worn-out dressing room, locking the locker even though it wasn’t necessary because everyone knew everyone at the club, and stepping out into the big workout room where the light flooded in through the broad windows in the day and where all kinds of animals and weight classes were training at the same time, in different corners and at different stations, conveyed a sense of security that is impossible to explain to anyone who has not experienced it himself. Slowly I again became one in the crowd, even if I was the only one training with a real champion. At first Nick had to sign autographs and tell stories from his glory days, but as the months passed, everyone got used to him and incorporated him into the community.

  The reality that Dad primarily was training me for the district championship was not something we talked about, it was understood. When Nick showed up there was more than a year before the first match, and it would have been ridiculous to start talking tactics or speculate about opponents so soon. But time passed quickly, and however relaxed Dad tried to appear, I saw the expectations growing in his gestures and comments. In tempo with his restrained excitement, the pressure on me increased. I will not pretend that his enthusiasm was not contagious. I still carried the insight about my own mediocrity, but I was training with a master and I had a father who had always been able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and Dad said I was getting good. That did not leave me unaffected.

  One evening when only a month or so remained until the match drawing and I had done a late training session, I remained sitting in the drying cabinet in the dressing room long after the cabinet had turned off. I sat in the darkness absorbed in my own thoughts. It was warm and pleasant and I don’t think I was brooding about anything in particular when I was startled by a pair of familiar voices. It was Dad and Nick Rhinoceros who had entered the dressing room; they were talking loudly and I was just about to stand up and get out when something held me back. It was the sort of thing you can speculate about for a long time afterward, but presumably it was just their raised voices that made me hesitate.

  “Frankly speaking, Harry, I don’t give a damn,” I heard Rhinoceros say through the closed drying cabinet door.

  He sounded grumpy. He was no sunbeam normally; his tone was most often curt and neutral, but now he sounded irritated.

  “You know you can trust me,” Dad answered.

  “I don’t trust anyone,” said Rhinoceros.

  “I haven’t been late a single time.”

  Rhinoceros did not comment on this, which is why I assumed that he agreed but didn’t bother to acknowledge the point. I could hear how he sat down heavily on a wooden bench along the wall, and I assumed that Dad placed himself in front of him and started untying his gloves.

  “I’ve had a little problem with the bank,” said Dad.

  Rhinoceros did not answer. I froze inside the drying cabinet. Not a single time during my growing up had I heard Dad talk about a bank. There had always been money at home, because Dad always had a steady job and no major expenses.

  “I mortgaged the apartment, did I tell you that?” Dad continued. “And I sold Mama’s rings. It was harder to get rid of the painting. I thought it was worth lots. But what do I know about art?”

  Rhinoceros grunted. I knew exactly what painting Dad was talking about. It was a painting he’d inherited from Grandfather, which had hung over his bed all these years. I was seldom in Dad’s bedroom, and so I had assumed it was still hanging there. It was our most valuable possession, Dad always said.

  “Listen,” said Rhinoceros when with a moan he pulled off his right glove. “I don’t give a damn what you’re up to. I’m not your mother. You give me the cash tomorrow, and I’ll come back and train with the cub next week. No cash, no sparring. At least not with me.”

  “You’ll get the money. That’s not what I meant. It’s just that . . . it’s been a little tough . . .”

  I remained sitting in the drying cabinet until I was certain they both had left Fresco, and I almost scared the life out of Charlie when I passed him at the desk; by then it was late in the evening, and he had been certain the gym was empty.

  To say that I was shocked is an understatement. I was beside myself. I ought to have realized that Nick Rhinoceros was getting paid to train me, and in that case I blamed my own inexperience. But that Dad had pawned everything he owned was completely contrary to his whole character and all he stood for. I could only sense the moral sacrifice that was behind this. Even worse was that he had kept it secret. It gave me no peace, even if it took a week or two before I added this insight to the growing performance anxiety I felt prior to the district championship.

  I was seeded against Conny Rooster in th
e first match. I didn’t see the lists myself; it was Charlie who phoned and told me because he had posted them. I remember I was standing at home in the hall, staring at the wall.

  It was over.

  Until that moment I had tried to cheer myself up. I told myself that my combinations were instinctive at this point, and you couldn’t complain about my footwork. What I lacked in weight and distinctiveness, maybe I could offset with my relative quickness? Winning one or two matches was not impossible. That’s how I had been thinking, and the least I owed Dad after his sacrifices was a positive attitude. But Conny Rooster? I could have pretended but I wasn’t an idiot. My championship ended even before it began.

  I hung up and went back to my room and lay down on the bed. That was where Dad found me later that afternoon. He instantly understood why I was lying there. He sat on the edge of the bed and placed his paw on my back.

  “You got a tough draw, Gary,” he said. “But it happens to everyone sometime.”

  “It’th over now.”

  “It’s not at all.”

  “Roothter ith too good for me. He made it to the top five in the last championthhip. And he’th better now.”

  “No match is decided in advance,” said Dad.

  “Yeth,” I said. “This one.”

  There were three weeks left, and even if the draw meant that I could give up on this championship, I continued training. I went out and ran every morning as the fog drew in over the city, and was at Fresco before the Morning Rain. I worked with the punching bag and the sandbag in the morning and sparred with Rhinoceros a few hours after lunch. I ended with strength training before I went home and made dinner with Dad.

  “It’th not going to work,” I said. “I’ll be happy if I’m thtill thtanding after the third round.”

  “What counts is trying,” Dad answered.

  “Bullthit,” I said. “What counth is winning.”

  “Not if you ask me,” he answered.