Then he watched Clayton moving toward the same mat.
The farmer was older than the boys in the front row, and he moved with the stiffness Pete recognized from long shifts on concrete. He didn’t joke about the money or appear to enjoy the attention. Pete saw him glance toward the television weather report and then look down at his heavy work boots.
Something about that bothered him. A man who looked as if he were calculating the price of his own work boots was not there to have fun.
“Don’t go up,” Pete called before he realized he was speaking.
Clayton looked over.
“You don’t have to give these people another laugh,” Pete said.
For a moment their eyes met. The farmer nodded once, neither annoyed nor grateful. He seemed to understand why Pete was warning him. Then Clayton turned back to the ring.
Pete took out his phone and wrote Melissa a message.
I did something stupid tonight. I’m okay, but I’m going to be late. I’ll explain when I get home. I’m sorry.
He sent it before he could change his mind.
When he looked up, the farmer was waiting at the edge of the rope. Pete stood, ice pack still in his hand, and moved close enough to tell Rusty he would help if somebody needed to be carried out. The only useful thing Pete could do now, he decided, was make sure his own foolishness didn’t prevent him from helping the next man.
CHAPTER FIVE
A MAN WHO DIDN’T LOOK DANGEROUS
Clayton crossed the tavern slowly enough that several people assumed he was heading for the restroom.
He didn’t have the posture of a challenger. He kept his shoulders rolled forward, eyes down, boots heavy with dried field dirt. The gray shirt he wore had a long oil stain across the stomach. Where a younger man might have tried to look larger, Clayton seemed determined to take up as little space as possible.
Shane Mercer saw him first. He swung his camera toward the approaching farmer and smiled with sudden professional interest.
“Hold on,” Shane said into his phone. “We might have a late entry. This is what I love about small towns. You never know who’ll step up.”
Trent stopped shadowboxing.
The spectators followed his eyes. A low ripple of amusement traveled through the room. The man walking toward the ring looked as though he had just crawled out from beneath a tractor and forgotten to go home.
“You looking for someone, sir?” Trent called.
Clayton stopped at the rope. “Heard there’s five hundred dollars.”
“There is. For anybody who can last three minutes with me.”
“Cash?”
Trent laughed. “You think I’m going to pay you in coupons?”
Shane moved closer. “What’s your name, friend?”
“Clayton.”
“Full name?”
“No need.”
Shane looked disappointed. “How old are you?”
“Old enough.”
“I like this guy,” Shane told the camera. “No excuses, no fear.”
Clayton wasn’t listening. He was studying the uneven mat. The tape at the northeast seam had curled upward, exposing a strip of black flooring. There was too little padding at the edge. The rope was loose. One spectator rested his chair leg half on the fighting area. It wasn’t a place he would have allowed a teenager to wrestle, never mind two grown men throwing strikes.
“Someone should fix that tape,” he said.
A burst of laughter erupted. Trent spread his arms.
“You hear that? He wants housekeeping before I knock him out.”
Clayton looked at Rusty. “Will it count if he quits?”
“Yes,” Rusty said from the edge of the crowd. “Three minutes, or a submission. You understand that?”
“I understand.”
“You can back out any time.”
“I understand that too.”
Trent leaned against the rope. “Look, man. I respect the courage, but you’re not ready for this. Maybe if you had come to the gym first, we’d talk. As it stands, you’re about to get hurt.”
There was a time Clayton might have liked that warning. It sounded almost decent. But Trent delivered it for the phone, then glanced sideways to be sure Shane had captured his magnanimous expression.
“Could be,” Clayton said.
His answer bothered Trent more than a threat would have. Most challengers cursed, swaggered, or promised to surprise him. The farmer seemed to regard the possibility of injury the way he regarded rain: unpleasant, ordinary, and not worth arguing with.
Clayton sat on the floor outside the rope and removed his boots. The laces were damp. He folded each sock inside its boot before stepping onto the mat barefoot. His feet were scarred and deeply callused, with a broad heel and toes slightly bent from years of work. He tested the surface with one foot, then the other, taking care not to disturb the loose tape.
Somebody near the front whispered, “That man even walks like his back hurts.”
It did. His back always hurt.
Rusty approached and lowered his voice. “Last chance. I’ll come up with the rest of your cooler money. I swear I will.”
“You don’t have it tonight.”
“No.”
“Then I need to be done with this before my truck quits too.”
Rusty held his gaze. “You know how to do this?”
Clayton looked past him, at the lights reflecting off the beer bottles.
He could say yes. He could say that he had spent years being taught to read bodies before they moved, that he had trained in rooms designed to imitate stairwells and doorways and places where mistakes were irreversible. He could explain that he had been responsible for men younger than Trent and that being responsible had left marks no camera could see.
Instead he said, “Enough to know I shouldn’t be here.”
Rusty waited for a smile that never came.
Across the mat, Trent bounced on the balls of his feet. He had noticed Clayton’s lack of warm-up, lack of guard, and reluctance to meet his eyes. It looked like fear. Trent was comfortable with fear. He understood what to do with it.
He did not recognize restraint.
“You got a family?” Trent asked, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“A sister.”
“Better call her now. You might need a ride home.”
A few people laughed. Others looked uncomfortable. Clayton thought of Nora sitting in her kitchen after a twelve-hour shift, phone on the table, worried about something he hadn’t told her.
“Just ring the bell,” he said.
A tall man near the back stood up. Clayton recognized him as Pete Malloy, who had taken the first loss. Pete had an ice pack against one cheek.
“You don’t owe that kid anything,” Pete called.
Clayton nodded. “I know.”
The words were important. He did know. He wasn’t stepping onto the mat for honor, or revenge, or to teach anyone a lesson. He was there because a remanufactured part cost more than he had and the weather was coming faster than the harvest.
Trent raised his hands and rolled his neck.
“Three minutes,” he announced. “Don’t blink.”
Shane framed the shot with Clayton in the foreground and Trent looming behind him. It would make an excellent thumbnail. The old farmer’s greasy shirt. The young champion’s perfect posture. The sort of contrast that persuaded people to keep watching.
No one noticed Deputy Pike put down his drink and step closer to the ring.
No one noticed the way Clayton had settled his weight evenly through his hips.
The room counted down from five.
And in the instant before Rusty dropped his hand, Trent decided to end the fight with the first punch.
CHAPTER SIX
THE FIRST MINUTE
The punch came fast.
Trent crossed the distance in two steps, his right shoulder rising as he threw a heavy overhand toward Clayton’s jaw. He expected the farmer to recoil. Most men did when they saw a fist coming at full speed. Some lifted their hands too late. Some turned their faces away. Nearly all of them gave him exactly the reaction he needed.
Clayton moved, but not enough.
He hunched his shoulders and tucked his chin. The blow glanced high against the front of his head, sending a sharp white burst through his vision. The sound was wet and blunt, louder inside his skull than it was in the room. Trent’s knuckles struck hard bone at a bad angle.
For a split second, neither man moved.
Then Trent stepped back, shaking his taped hand.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Clayton tasted blood. He had bitten his cheek. A sickening heat spread behind his eyes. A part of him wanted to sit down before the nausea reached his knees.
He did not feel clever. He felt thirty-eight years old and already injured.
The crowd roared because it had seen a punch land. Shane’s phone tracked Trent as he circled. From the back, the strike had looked devastating. He could almost hear the caption forming in Shane’s head: FARMER TAKES MONSTER SHOT AND WON’T FALL.
Trent shook out his wrist and attacked again.
A jab caught Clayton on the cheekbone. A low kick slammed into the outside of his left thigh. The pain rolled down to the knee that had been damaged years before. Clayton stumbled sideways and caught himself just inside the rope.
“There you go!” Shane shouted. “Turn him around!”
Clayton’s breath shortened. He could feel every face in the room looking for the moment he would fall. He had been watched by crowds before, although never like this. In the service, the people watching him depended on what he did next. Here, most of them simply hoped the next moment would be exciting.
Trent bounced forward, sensing weakness. “Come on, farmer. Fight back.”
Clayton kept his hands open. He watched the younger man’s hips rather than his shoulders. Trent’s eyes were locked on Clayton’s face, searching for flinches. It was a habit from the gym, where people often told you what they were about to do with their expressions.
Trent threw another jab, followed by a fast kick rising toward Clayton’s head.
Clayton stepped inward instead of away. He was not graceful. He looked like a man stumbling toward a falling door. But by moving closer, he spoiled the kick’s reach. Trent’s leg slid past his side without the power it would have carried at full extension.
For one instant, the younger fighter’s weight remained on a single foot.
Clayton put both hands against him and drove forward.
Trent fell backward onto the foam.
The impact produced a hollow thump. His breath escaped in an involuntary grunt.
There was no roar this time. The silence came so quickly that the mechanical hum of the overhead fans suddenly seemed loud.
Rusty looked from the fallen fighter to Clayton. He had expected a disaster, then a stoppage, then maybe a trip to the emergency department. He had not expected the champion to be on his back before the first minute was over.
Trent’s face changed.
The humiliation arrived before the pain. He felt every person in the room see him in a place he was not supposed to be. His first instinct was to scramble up so fast that nobody would remember he’d fallen. His second was to make Clayton suffer for it.
He sprang to his feet.
“Lucky shove,” he said.
Clayton took a breath. It scraped inside his chest.
“Maybe.”
The answer infuriated Trent. He had expected boasting or a challenge. He needed Clayton to behave like an opponent in a story he already understood. The man in front of him was not cooperating.
From the sideline, Shane made a slicing motion with his hand.
Finish him.
Trent nodded without thinking.
He changed his stance. His hands came higher. His steps grew shorter and more deliberate. For the first time all evening, he began to treat the person across from him as someone with a plan.
That made him more dangerous.
Clayton felt the low kick settling into his thigh, a spreading ache that threatened to turn into weakness at any moment. He rolled his left shoulder. Something inside it clicked. He had an old injury there, the kind that never truly healed because it never got a long enough rest.
He glanced at the wall clock. It was useless. The second hand had stopped at twenty past eight months ago.
“How long?” he asked Rusty.
Rusty checked the phone running the timer. “Two minutes and twelve.”
Clayton nodded.
He had survived forty-eight seconds. That was not enough. The alternator on Gary’s shelf was still four hundred eighty-two dollars away.
Trent stalked toward him again, no longer smiling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PLACE WHERE FEAR WENT
The second attack was quieter.
Trent didn’t shout this time. He came forward behind a compact guard, chopping at Clayton’s legs and testing his reactions. The first low kick landed against muscle already tender from the previous blow. Clayton’s foot skidded an inch across the mat. He regained balance, but he could feel the damage accumulating.
Trent noticed.
He aimed there again.
Clayton raised the leg in time to turn the next impact away. Bone and muscle collided with a hard crack. Both men felt it. Trent’s expression tightened. Clayton’s knee protested with a hot, sickening warning that he might not be able to trust it after another exchange.
The ring suddenly felt much smaller than it had from the bar.
Trent drove forward with a quick combination. One strike grazed Clayton’s cheek. Another caught the top of his shoulder. Clayton shifted enough to avoid the worst of it, but each movement cost him. He was good at keeping his feet. He was no longer young enough to pretend that skill made pain disappear.
Then Trent caught the back of his neck.
The younger man had strong hands and knew how to use them. He pulled Clayton into a tight clinch and drove a knee into his ribs.
For an instant Clayton heard nothing.
The noise returned as a distant, distorted roar. Pain flashed across his side, bright enough to make his vision swim. He tried to breathe and found only a shallow gasp. Whether the rib was cracked or badly bruised, he couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. Each breath felt like it struck a rough edge.
A memory came with the pain.
A narrow street. The smell of dust baked into brick. Somebody shouting his name through a radio. A young man named Jonah Hale kneeling beside a ruined vehicle, trying to drag a wounded friend out of the way.
Clayton had spent years telling himself that those images were in the past. That had never stopped them from arriving without permission.
He blinked. He was in a tavern. The smell was beer and sweat. The sound was a crowd trying to decide whether the farmer was about to collapse. There were no radios. No convoy. No reason for the cold calculations pushing toward the surface of his mind.
Stay here, he told himself. This room. This floor. This minute.
Trent tried to pull him into another knee.
Clayton shifted his weight, framed against the younger man’s shoulders, and turned out of the clinch. They collided hard enough to drive both men toward the center of the mat. The move was rough. It hurt Clayton’s ribs. It startled Trent, who had expected the older man to continue folding under pressure.
The two men separated.
Trent stared at him with sudden uncertainty. His own breathing had changed. It was louder now, less controlled. He’d entered the bout expecting a brief performance and discovered that he had spent the first half of his energy without solving the problem.
