It is surprising how quickly time flies when you’re looking ahead to something.
I look ahead to seeing Dee, every damn day.
McNamara and Glass train me individually day after day, the former in the morning, the latter in the evenings. In the afternoons I work on my conditioning with the other boys at the camp. We skip rope, run sprints, and then do calisthenics, the kind most people would find extreme.
We fall down from a standing position into a push up, and then push ourselves up into that standing position. We do handstands with no support, then dip down until our heads touch the floor, before straightening out our arms. Then we do it again balancing weights on our feet.
Even with the blood rushing into my head, my face no doubt a swollen red, and my shoulders and triceps shaking by the time I get to my fiftieth repetition, all I’m thinking about is Dee.
I think about how we went ice skating, how when I looked back as Glass drove me away I saw her in the window, waving. That smile… those eyes.
I think about her lips, our kiss, the feel of her hot breath on my face, being so close to her, so intimate.
Glass thumps me in the gut, and I fall over in a heap. I growl, get to my feet quickly, angry at the unprovoked attack, but he just stares at me.
“Look down.”
I look down, and am a little embarrassed to find I have an erection.
Glass slaps my head, and I strike out instantly, stop my fist at the last moment hovering millimeters from his face. He’s winced, leaned back, recoiled.
I pull back my fist. “Reflex,” I tell him bluntly.
He points a finger at me, tells me to focus. “I know what it’s like to be your age, but focus. Stop thinking about girls. You’re a fighter now, an athlete. Girls will only unravel you. They will only prevent you from becoming all you can be.”
He walks stiffly on, and I become aware of the other boys in the camp gazing at me. I meet their eyes, and we all share a cheeky, childish snicker, and then I get myself into a handstand again, and start dipping.
Girls. Glass wasn’t too far off the mark, but he was wrong enough. I wasn’t thinking about girls in the plural. I was only thinking about one girl.
The days blur together. Glass and McNamara teach me old-school moves, and new-school ones, too. They teach me how to feint, how to feint like I’m going to feint, and then how to feint that I’m going to feint that I’m going to feint.
Fighting’s not just two brutes wailing on each other in a cage. If you’re a moron, you’ll never be good at it.
I learn how to chain moves together. You don’t reset after each punch, kick, or block. Fighting is fluid, flows like water taking bends in a creek. You read and adapt. Read and adapt. You bend like water. Obstacles don’t stop you, you just go around them, over them, under them.
Opponent jabs, I dodge, use my momentum, turn it into a kick. Opponent ducks the head kick, I spin into an elbow. Opponent slaps the elbow away, I duck into fast gut punches. And so on. All moves strung together, no pauses, no stops, no resets. You think on the fly, and you have to think.
People fancy that boxers, that MMA fighters, that kickboxers are stupid, fools, idiots. Just men who get hit in the head too much that they slur their speech.
They don’t understand that fighting is like chess – not that I’ve ever played it – but you know what they say, always be thinking so many moves ahead.
Before I know it, three months have passed, and I know that I’m over the hump, on the downside of the hill now. Now, I see Dee in fewer days than I’ve been away from her.
We’ve not been allowed any contact with the outside world. In here, there is one thing and one thing only: Training. Sure, the other boys and I shoot the shit. A lot of them are like me, just looking to do something with their lives.
It burns me that I can’t contact Dee, can’t even call her. No phones on the camp, no computers, no internet. No kid has a mobile phone. There is only a payphone five miles away – I snuck out there one night, ran the road, to call her. The payphone was busted, looked like it hadn’t been used in years.
So every day I wonder how she is. I wonder if she does well at school… she seems like she would. I don’t get the impression she works her ass off, but I think she’s a good and smart student.
I wonder what she does day to day. How different are our daily schedules? And then I think of her eating dinner alone, every night. Heck, she probably prefers it. She has a laptop, and there’s the huge television, and then there’s the library in the house, and all those books…
Books. I don’t think I’ve ever finished a book… at least not one that I can remember.
The second half of my training involves endurance. Not fitness, not motor, not how long you can go for, but how much you can take.
Fighting’s not about how hard you hit. You don’t have to hit that hard to knock someone out, to force the brain to fire synapses that pull a person into unconsciousness as a protective mechanism.
No, fighting’s about how hard you can get hit. Fighting’s about pain threshold, toughness. These are things that can be trained, and we train them.
I take hits from Glass and McNamara. To the face, to the arms, to the shoulders, to the chest, the trunk, the legs, the calves.
They kick me and punch me, and I come roaring back for more. I swear at them, shout at them, unable to hit back. I bellow curses at them, and when they think I’ve had enough, I taunt them, ask them if that’s all they’ve got.
But then I get used to it. Then I take it silently. Kicks, punches, slaps. Every night I have new bruises, and every day we do it again.
Desensitization, and mental discipline. That’s all it is.
It’s these last few weeks that pass by quicker. For every punch I endure, I think of Dee, and threaten to smile. If I smile, Glass just hits me harder.
Sometimes I smile. I’ll take the hit.
By the end of it, we’re in full-on sparring matches. Glass can’t keep up with me, so I spar with McNamara. He’s got that old-man strength you can never underestimate. It’s not muscle mass at that point, it’s central nervous system.
He’s got that old-man endurance, too. He doesn’t even feel pain.
We spar twenty times in twenty days, pure boxing, no MMA, no take-downs. I win sixteen times, five times by knockout, the rest concession. The four I lost, McNamara surprised me with them old-man tricks.
After our last fight, Glass comes to me, grinning widely, his eyes shining. “God damn it, boy,” he says, throwing an arm around my shoulder and squeezing me into him. “You’re fucking magic, baby.”
I take off my gloves, unwrap my hands, and then go to McNamara, still on the ground, holding onto his eye. Blood streams down the side of his face, but he takes my arm and I help him up.
“Good fight,” I tell him, and we tap fists.
“Wasn’t for me,” he jokes. “It’s been good having you here, Duncan. You did good. I’m sure fucking glad you’re done here, because I don’t think I can take anymore of this.”
“Sure you can,” I say, nodding toward his trophy cabinet. “They once called you champ.”
“You’ll earn that name soon,” he tells me, slapping my shoulder affectionately.
We leave later that afternoon. During the drive back – we take turns – he talks about how much better I look. I’ve put on weight, maybe twenty-five pounds of lean mass in the last six months, without losing any speed or agility.
They fed me five thousand calories a day at McNamara’s fighting camp, and when you’re not eating junk, you really come to appreciate just how much food that is.
Boiled chicken, brown rice, and broccoli six times a day, basically. Full-sized meals. On top of that were the multitude of supplements, and the post-workout protein milkshakes blended with egg whites.
I stayed away from the stimulants, though. Some of the other’s liked it, yohimbine, caffeine, even just green tea extract. But I can’t take it. It fucks with my rhythm.
Glass slaps the steering wheel in excitement, then looks and me and laughs. “We’re going to give all those fuckers a real surprise with you, boy.”
Those fuckers. The other mob families and groups he hopes to swindle by selling me as an underdog so they bet against me.
It won’t last for long, but at the start, he’ll make a killing.
And I’ll get my share.
And yet… all I can think about is what Dee will think about that.
Will she begrudge my taking part in her father’s plan?
I know that I am going to fight, and I know that I am going to make money, and I know that I am going to be the best.
But I haven’t thought past that. I could go pro at some point like Glass will want me to, but dealing with the politics and intricacies on that stage doesn’t particularly interest me.
No, the more appealing idea is to just walk away when I’ve had enough, take my money, and go.
But it’s only more appealing if I have Dee going with me.
I suck on my lower lip for a moment, then engage with Glass who’s chattering animatedly about his plans.
I need to stop looking so far ahead with Dee.
There’s no telling how much she may have changed in these past six months, whether our last night together will mean as much to her as it still does to me.
And beyond that, there’s no telling about our future, about how things will play out.
Shit, everything could go to fucking hell.
I try to imagine the worst situations, the ones I hate the most, and find that in all of them, Dee and I are not together.