Girl in the Arena (30 page)

I watched him open the basket again to nestle the soft drinks around the sandwiches without looking up at me.

Only then did I say, —Well, maybe next week if I can find a sitter for Thad.

You know how it is when you get something you want and then you have no idea what to do with it? It’s kind of that way with Joe Byers. He agreed to come all the way from Akron, Ohio, despite his hip and knee problems. He rarely travels now that he’s in his seventies, but he actually wrote to me after he heard about what had happened to Thad.

I sent him a plane ticket and got him a room at the Charles. He agreed to an interview as long as I guaranteed his anonymity while he’s in town—which meant a serious coordinated effort with Mark to outwit the paparazzi.

So now I’m crouched here in a hallway of the Charles, thinking about what I really need to ask Byers when he opens the door because this might be my only shot at him. Maybe I need to say: just tell me the facts as you recall them, Mr. Byers, the plain truth about how Glad sport started. I’ll put things down exactly as you dictate them so people in the future can dissect and misinterpret, and psychologize and generally mangle your words until no one knows what you said anymore, but at least I’ll know what I heard from you.

I know you can’t push the plant back into the seed, but if I’m going to sit around dreaming, I’d like to imagine there’s a way to put an end to Glad sport someday. They ended it in Rome, and the war in Vietnam ground to a halt, and the Berlin Wall came down—that kind of thing.

And then maybe I could go on a tour, because I’d know I gave 
A History of the Gladiator Sports Association 
a decent ending, and I could talk with young people, young women in particular, about how we once lived in a time of blood. Blood and money and lots of publicity.