Sex & Violence (19 page)

Can you run fast, Evan?”

I nodded.

“Good,” Tim said. “Hit him and get the fuck out of there.”

“The nose is a good target, right in the center, hurts like a bitch,” Layne said, and the ridged bump on my own nose tingled at the thought. “A lot softer than the jaw too. Though most people can’t take a hit in the jaw, either. But start with the nose.

You remember how much that shit hurt, and you think about wanting to deliver that to someone else.”

Of all of it, I could remember the moment my nose broke most. But very little else after that. Which was probably a good thing, overall, because thinking about being destroyed while naked in a shower did zero for my confidence, especially since I was applying for my man card while wearing flip-flops and a cupcake T-shirt.

We started out with me hitting Tim’s open palms, Layne coaching behind me, which made me feel like a little kid learning to piss in the potty. Especially when they would say stuff like,
good, good, that’s nice, that right hand’s good, huh?

Then we did the heavy bag, which was horrible and hard.

Layne said I needed gloves, but Tim said I wasn’t training for a welterweight matchup and needed to get a sense of my hands. I felt ridiculous while they argued, and then Layne’s phone rang, so he ducked out to talk while Tim lectured me on the importance of stance. He reminded me of Dr. Penny, except with totally different catchphrases: “
The power comes from your body,
not your fist”
and
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size
of the fight in the dog.”

“Use everything you got from your feet up, and you’ll lay the other guy out flat,” Tim said. “Keep hitting, beyond the point of impact. Don’t stop once you make contact. Push all the way through to the other side. You do that and it’s over before it starts. Guaranteed.”

I nodded, feeling less stupid, because Tim was smiling-yet-serious and I could tell he didn’t think I was completely hopeless.

“Let’s get some water and see where the fuck Layne is,”

Tim said.

I gulped water like I’d been in the desert. My arms were burning.

“I gotta pick up some Tylenol,” Layne said. “Harry’s got a fever. You’re doing good, Evan.”

“Yeah, he’s picking it up quick,” Tim added.

“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked Tim.

“Not until nine,” Tim said, with a grin that made me instantly jealous of the fact that he had a chick waiting for him.

***

We kept on with the heavy bag. Tim’s phone rang again, but I didn’t eavesdrop this time. I just imagined Tate Kerrigan’s square face and Patrick Ramsey’s hammy one and thought,
One
lucky punch.

“Pull back fast,” Tim said. “Out and back. Assume the first punch didn’t work and you have to do another one. That’s how boxers work, at least. But your right’s pretty strong. That’s your advantage.”

I hit a few more to the bag, and Tim said, “You better stop, or you’ll be sore tomorrow. You can unwrap them wraps by yourself?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Tim pulled out a wad of keys and started fiddling one off the ring.

“Here,” he said. “For if you want to come and hit if I’m not around. I’ll pull down the garage door, but this one locks up the side one when you go.”

He was grinning as he walked out, and I didn’t know why until I got to my car and standing there, swinging her purse on her shoulder, was Lana.

Dear Collette,

It turns out fighting is about thoughtless efficiency and speed. I
know this now because Layne and his brother Tim are teaching me to
box, which is very embarrassing to be taught, Collette—even though
I’m told one of my hands is “good.”

I shouldn’t be surprised that being ready to throw-down without getting tangled in questions and decisions—in thinking—is a key
skill in fighting. If there’s one thing I used to know, it’s how to be ready
without a second thought. I used to be a fucking expert in not thinking.

A good fight, so I’m told, has just one punch. I think the same’s
true of getting down. The more I learn about fighting from Tim and
Layne, the more I realize I already knew.

I am an expert in being a slutty fucker. I should have my own
advice column. Who needs college?

Later, Evan

After I started boxing regularly out at the tow shop, I slept like a fucking rock. So I went as often as I could. The morning after a particularly long session with the heavy bag (and Lana showing up as I finished), my father and I were both crunching through cereal in silence. Typical morning. But then he went and said something completely atypical.

“You need some new clothes.”

“What?”

“Every time I see you, you’ve got an old crappy T-shirt on,”

he said. “I make decent money. Just because you don’t have a mother to tend to this kind of thing doesn’t mean you have to go around looking like a hobo all the time.”

“Like a
hobo
?”

“It’s not just you. Brenda’s been on me about how I wear the same thing every day. She thinks a little color wouldn’t hurt.”

“Dad?”

“I’m saying let’s go buy some new clothes, Evan.”

“Brenda’s gay boyfriend coming with us?”

My father laughed. I shivered with a kind of happiness, hearing him laugh. He did it more and more lately. Though usually never with me. I usually heard it coming through the window of my room as he sat out on our deck with Brenda drinking whiskey sours and playing Tripoli or cribbage.

So he drove us in his Mercedes—an odd car for two badly dressed guys, no doubt—to what amounted to the main shopping center in Marchant Falls: a Sears surrounded by a strip mall. It made me feel sad for Marchant Falls, compared to other places we’d lived. But also a little protective. So what if Marchant Falls was tiny and unhip? I’d rather go fishing with Tom or eat chili dogs at the Dairy Queen with Jesse or knock around Story Island with Baker, and if it meant there was no Macy’s or Cheesecake Factory, then so be it.

“Are you almost out of gas?” I asked, as we pulled into the parking lot.

“No, the gauge is broken.”

That was weird. My father tended to be anal about things being broken.

“Aren’t you going to fix it?”

“Probably not. The nearest Mercedes dealership is sixty miles away. I should get rid of this car. I think it makes me look like a prick.”

I had never considered this, but Marchant Falls was the first place we’d lived where the car stood out.

Despite becoming a man of the people as far as his car was concerned, my father didn’t seem wild about shopping at Sears, so we started with the strip mall. Right away he found a pair of blue flip-flops in a giant bin sitting outside of a dollar store.

While he went to buy them, I went to the nearest men’s clothing store. I was staring at dress shirts when he came into the store, wearing the blue flip-flops.

“Where are your other shoes?”

“In the trunk.”

“What the hell is on your toenails?”

My father smiled down at his feet.

“Nice, huh? You really missed out last night over at Brenda’s.”

“Whiskey sours aren’t my thing, Dad.”

“Last night was sangria,” he corrected. “Also, Bailey’s milk shakes. It was a kind of girls’ night. Quite a sociological experience. Your mother wasn’t so rigidly feminine, of course, so my background knowledge isn’t extensive. But Baker was having a crisis so there were certain female rituals to be observed.”

“What happened to Baker?” I tried not to sound as alarmed as I felt.

“She was looking for you, to start with,” my father said, sorting through a rack of shirts.

“What did you tell her?”

“I said you were out. Probably with some girl, knowing you.”

“You didn’t really say that, did you?”

“I did,” my father said, and I could tell he was smiling, even though his back was to me. “I think I’ll try this red one.”

I didn’t get why he didn’t just try on the damn thing over his current shirt; that was how I always did it. Of course, since the uniforms at Remington Chase, it had been a long time since I’d deliberately gone out to buy any kind of clothing at all.

“Baker asked me if you had a girlfriend,” he called from the dressing room. “I told her it was usually plural, but I currently didn’t know. She didn’t believe it when I said most of the numbers in your phone are girls. I told her that you didn’t tend to keep those numbers long, though.”

This was a little surprising. Given that he seemed to know nothing about me except that I was fucked-up. But like his calls with Dr. Penny, he was showing a definite sneaky side. Like he could only be interested in me when I wasn’t looking.

I was hovering between wanting to punch him and loving that he knew anything about me when he opened the dressing room door.

“What do you think? Is red a good color for me?”

“I don’t know. How can you tell?”

“No idea.” He stared at himself in the mirror, the stubble on his head golden in the harsh dressing room light.

“Well, it matches your toenails.” The saleslady behind us snickered.

“I look like my father,” he said, sighing. “But he had all his hair. And never wore red.”

My dad took his red shirt to the counter, and I added a couple of T-shirts in boring colors—grey, black, white—and he shook his head.

“No color? No style, Evan? Really?”

“What the hell did those women do to you last night?” I asked. “Cut your balls off after they painted your toenails?”

He laughed again, and I couldn’t help smiling too.

“You have to understand,” he said, as he handed the cashier his credit card. “It was a female crisis of tremendous proportions. Baker’s boyfriend came over, and there was a big throw-down of some sort.”

“‘Throw-down’?” I asked. “Like, he was violent?” My hand curled up into a fist reflexively. Thumb out. I was a little surprised at how quickly I’d absorbed the Beauchant brothers’

lessons.

“Oh, no,” he said. “They just had a loud argument in the yard.”

“So, what did Brenda do?”

“Hell if I know,” he said. “From what I could make of it, it sounded like they shouted at each other and finally the guy just left. Something about her best friend cheating? That part was sort of unclear to me.”

“I think it’s unclear to Baker too.”

“By the time I went over there, it was over,” he said, as we exited the store. “Peggy was blending up Bailey’s milk shakes.

I hadn’t had Baileys in years. Your mother used to like it with coffee. They were good, though Peggy thought they clashed with sangria.”

“Who’s Peggy?”

“How long have we been living here, Evan? You know Peggy! Tom’s mother?”

I kind of wanted to punch him again. Like he was in the habit of knowing people’s names! I couldn’t help it if I was bad with names. I never had good reason to remember them.

Which was mostly his fault, to be technical.

“Then Baker took out this device used to sand off calluses from your feet,” he continued. “For some reason women en-deavor to make their feet as defenseless as a newborn’s. Brenda wanted to use it on me, but the damn thing looked like a vibra-tor. The polish is where I drew the line.”

“Dad!” I looked to see if anyone was behind us.

The next store was all perfume, and strangely, my father wanted to go in.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Do you have somewhere else to be, Evan?”

“No.”

“Then relax already.”

The perfume store was staffed by two cute girls who I might have thought appealing, had I not been with my toenail-polished father at the time. But he had no embarrassment what-soever, accepting the samples one girl gave him and listening patiently while the other told him about the deals of the day, then thanking them both politely like they’d just handed him the Nobel Prize instead of samples and a coupon. It kind of cracked me up, but the place gave me a headache, so I dragged him out the door.

“What the hell made you want to go in there?”

“Those girls were cute, didn’t you think?”

“Dad!”

“It’s not like I’ve got work to occupy my mind, Evan. Why not get your thrills where you can find them?”

Because that’s how you lose a spleen, Dad. If you recall.
Again, I wanted to punch him.

“Those girls were my age. And perfume shops aren’t exactly thrilling.”

“Brenda would never wear any of that crap,” he said. “She prefers essential oils. She says they integrate better than syn-thetics with the skin’s chemistry.”

“How would you know
that
, Dad?” I asked, a little shocked.

“You paying attention to Brenda’s
skin
these days?”

He reddened all the way up to his shaved skull. I was happy to have popped him in a sore spot for once.

“What’s going on with you and Brenda?”

“Nothing, Evan,” he said, in a voice that was familiar. Economical. Inviting no more discussion.

The last stop in the strip was a sporting goods store and my nonathletic father acted like the whole thing was another sociological experiment so he enthusiastically followed me in.

“So what happened with Baker and her boyfriend?” I asked.

“You mean the unfortunately named Jim Sweet? Good god. His mother must have hated him.”

“Jim’s not all that bad. Though his name sucks.”

My father laughed and continued. “Mostly it sounded like they both regretted their behavior. I don’t know. Much time was spent explaining to Baker how she was going to college and things would change anyway. That if she valued loyalty, she should insist on it in the future. Then we ate a bunch of ice cream.”

I doubted loyalty was important when you were non-monogramous. But it didn’t seem like Baker understood that concept any better than Jim Sweet could pronounce it.

“Then what happened?”

“More beautification activities. And a debate about whether Baker should just ask you out. Of course, I said that would probably make your summer.”

I spun around from the wall of running shoes I was looking at.