The Boxer and the Spy (9 page)

“Mr. Bullard drove by a minute ago while I was waiting for the bus.... I assume he’s going to school like the rest of us poor convicts.... Why doesn’t the cheap creep get a real car.... He looks so funny all squeezed into that little sardine can he drives....”

“Hi, Abby, it’s Otis, I forgot my number ... anyway I saw Bullard at that place, near me, where the tech arts kids are building a house.... Kip Carter was there too.”

“It’s number eleven,” a boy’s voice said.

Abby checked her list. Number eleven was Jason’s friend Perry Fisher.

“I don’t even know if it matters, but you said to report everything.... I saw Kip Carter riding in Mr. Bullard’s car with Mr. Bullard.... I don’t know where they were going.”

Abby made her notes.

“Number seven reporting ...” It was Bev. “Mr. Bullard’s car was gone from the school parking lot from two in the afternoon.... It was still gone when I went home after school.”

Abby wrote it down.

“Hey, babe.” It was a boy’s voice. “It’s number three.... I don’t like being number three ... you know I’m number one ... Ha, ha! ... Anyway it’s seven o‘clock at night. Bullard just went into the Trents’ house.”

Number three was Carly Clark. He was black and had gone to school in Cabot as a Metco student since first grade. He was a really good basketball player, good enough for a scholarship, and his parents had rented a house in Cabot, right across from the Trents, so they could keep him in school here, and let him practice, and not waste half his day coming back and forth from Boston. When they moved in, there were some people that didn’t like it. But there was no real trouble.

“Hey, Abby ... you know who this is.... I seen Mr. Bullard talking with Mr. Malcolm, the construction teacher, for, like, half an hour outside Bullard’s office this morning.”

Abby did know who it was. Tank’s voice was still boyish and sort of high for a kid so big.

Abby put the information down. She used a Sharpie with lavender ink that matched the lines on her notepaper. Alone at night in her bedroom with an earpiece plugged into her cell phone, she wrote carefully, in a nice hand, the trivial information about Bullard and other people. It was engrossing. And she felt a little edge of excitement as she wrote and watched the shape of Bullard’s behavior begin to form. If you knew enough about a person, every day, if enough people watched him, you could figure out a lot of stuff.

But for now she wasn’t doing any figuring. She was merely recording. Later, with Terry, maybe all that she’d written down would form a pattern that mattered. She could sort of feel it starting to. Who he saw the most, where he went the most, what he did the most. It was all going to mean something sooner or later.

The phone rang. It was late. She looked at her clock—after eleven.

“Number three again, babe. I’m going to hit the sack, but I just wanted to tell you that Bullard’s still over at Trents’ house.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure. I can see his car. He parked it around the corner, up the street, but I can see it from my bedroom window.”

“I wonder why he parked it up the street?”

“Hey, I just the spotter here, babe. You and your boyfriend s‘pposed to do the thinking.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Abby said.

“Uh-huh,” Carly said.

“Was there space to park closer?”

“Sure,” Carly said. “Park in the driveway like most people do who’re visiting.”

“So what do you think?”

Carly laughed.

“Well, maybe they got some hanky-panky going on,” he said.

“You think he’s visiting Mrs. Trent?”

“Can’t tell,” Carly said.

“Well, keep an eye on them,” Abby said.

“Sho‘,” Carly said, and hung up.

Hanky-panky,
she thought.

Abby sat looking at the darkness outside her bedroom window.

We’ll find out,
she thought.

T
oday we going to do some fists of fury,” George told Terry. ”We going to move round the heavy bag to the left and we going to keep hitting it as fast as we can.... Left-right combo, bang, bang.”

George hit the bag left-right. The second punch was almost synonymous with the first.

“Like that,” George said. “Bang, bang.”

Terry started.

“Punch quicker,” George said. “The right should land a half second after the left.”

Terry punched left-right, left-right.

“Better,” George said.

Terry kept punching.

“Feel it?” George said. “There’s a rhythm to it.”

“Bang, bang,” Terry said.

“Keep your feet under you,” George said. “Keep them spaced, push off the floor.”

Terry moved left as he pounded the bag. He could feel the sweat begin to gather along his arms and shoulders. George was right, once he began to feel the stuttered rhythm of the punches, they came faster. It wasn’t so much bang, bang as ba-bang, ba-bang.

“Okay, now move round the bag to the right, same deal. Bang, bang.”

Terry was breathing hard.

“Easy for you,” he gasped.

The change in direction had messed up his rhythm, and it took him a couple of circuits of the bag to get it back. Then he made one full circle of the bag in good ba-bang.

“Okay,” George said. “Round one, take a seat.”

Terry sat on the folding chair in the corner, his chest heaving, his arms and shoulders glistening with sweat. The sweat beaded on his face. George toweled him off and squirted a little water into Terry’s mouth.

“Don’t want to dehydrate,” George said. “You get dehydrated and it take the zip right out of you.”

Terry nodded.

“Funny, just changing directions got me screwed up on the fists of fury thing,” he said.

“Why you have to do it so much,” George said. “Get your muscles grooved into it.”

“And nobody’s even trying to hit me,” Terry said.

“Time for that will come,” George said. “Now we just getting grooved in.”

“But ... I mean in a real fight some guy comes at you throwing them as fast as he can.... Don’t you kind of feel like wait a minute, wait a minute?”

“Couple answers to that,” George said. “One, that happen whether you know how to box or not, so you may as well know. Second thing is you get enough training you can maybe weather that first couple minutes until the guy runs out of steam.”

Terry nodded.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know. Backpedal. Keep him off with your jab. Cover up.”

“And maybe move around him a little, try not to get cornered,” George said. “He gonna be pretty tired after a minute or two. ‘Less you fighting Smokin’ Joe Frazier, your man can’t keep throwing them like you talkin’ about for very long.”

“You ever just wanted to run?”

George shrugged.

“Boxing be mostly about training,” he said. “Remember what I tol’ you about the three thousand punches. Time you get in the ring, you might be scared, but you trained so much, you sort of can’t think ‘bout running.”

“But what if you do run?”

“Then you need to do another business,” George said. “Nothing wrong with that. Boxing ain’t exactly normal anyway. You know, it ain’t normal to get into a thing where you and somebody else try to beat each other unconscious. Don’t mean you a coward or anything if you can’t do it.”

George paused and framed his words and smiled.

“Probably just mean you too normal for boxing.”

“Aren’t some fighters scared?”

“Sure,” George said. “And you can be a pretty good fighter even if you scared. Technique take you a long way. But it don’t take you all the way.”

“What does that?” Terry said.

“Heart,” George said.

“Heart?”

“Heart make you get up when it be much easier to stay down,” George said. “Make you go out for the next round when you can’t hardly see and you not sure where you are. We don’t know yet, you got heart. But I’m thinking you might.”

Neither of them spoke. George seemed to have gone someplace out of the little gym across from the Coffee Café in the fancy town. Someplace Terry had never been. Then he came back and smiled at Terry.

“Maybe just another word for not normal,” he said.

I
t was a warm Saturday morning and they were sitting on the rocks near the ocean, looking at what Abby called her spy chart.

“These are all the people we’ve seen him with in a month,” Abby said. “And the places he saw them.”

“That whole list?” Terry said.

“Yes,” Abby said. “But they’re in order of frequency. That’s what the numbers in parentheses mean. See, he’s seen Kip Carter All-American twelve times. He’s seen Mr. Malcolm the construction teacher ten times, and so on.”

“So the end of the list doesn’t probably mean much.”

“Probably not,” Abby said. “But I put them in. Just in case.”

“Damn,” Terry said. “You’ve been putting in a lot of work.”

Abby nodded.

“And these are the places we’ve seen him go,” she said, “where he just went there and we didn’t really see him with anybody.”

“Like the supermarket,” Terry said.

“Exactly.”

“Or the Trent house. You don’t know who he sees there?”

“Carly never knows,” Abby said.

“But he’s been there, what, eight times?”

“That Carly has seen.”

“And Carly can’t tell if it’s Mr. or Mrs. or both?”

“No. Carly thinks it might be hanky-panky, but he doesn’t know.”

“Carly thinks everything is hanky-panky,” Terry said. “It’s kind of hard to imagine.”

“I could imagine her,” Abby said. “You even said once she was kind of hot.”

“With him?” Terry said. “That’s what I can’t imagine.”

“God no,” Abby said. “I can’t imagine him doing it with anybody.”

“And don’t want to,” Terry said.

“Grown-ups do have affairs, though,” Abby said.

“But Bullard is married.”

“Married grown-ups do have affairs, though,” Abby said.

Terry nodded, looking at the way the light glanced off the moving ocean.

“I guess we need to find out,” he said.

“You think it’s important?”

“I think we don’t know, so we need to find out.”

“Yes,” Abby said. “That’s the right way to think.”

Terry looked at the list again.

“Wow,” he said. “You been doing this, like, full time.”

“Pretty much,” Abby said.

“How you gonna stay on the honor roll?” he said.

“Oh, phoo,” she said. “You don’t have to do much to make honor roll.”

Terry laughed.

“You got that right,” he said. “Tank made it this term.”

“I rest my case,” Abby said.

Terry was still studying the list.

“Okay,” Terry said. “He’s seen Kip Carter the most and Mr. Malcolm the next most.”

“That we know about,” Abby said. “We don’t see him all the time.”

“I know,” Terry said. “I just don’t want to keep saying ‘as far as we know’ every time.”

“Just so you remember,” Abby said.

“I remember,” Terry said. “I remember.”

“Well,” Abby said. “Aren’t we grouchy.”

“I’m sorry. I just feel some stress, I suppose. I mean Mr. Bullard’s always looking at me, and Kip Carter is always looking at me. And, you know. I mean what are we doing?”

“We’re trying to find out what happened to Jason,” Abby said.

Terry nodded.

“Maybe what they say happened, happened,” he said.

Abby was quiet for a moment. Several seabirds lingered in the area, in search of food. Sitting close so they could both look at the charts, Terry could feel the slight pressure of Abby’s thigh against his own. After a time, Abby shook her head slowly.

“No,” she said. “We already know whatever happened wasn’t. what they say.”

“Like Mr. Bullard telling me not to ask about it ...”

“And Kip Carter All-American telling you to back off,” Abby said.

“I’m not crazy,” Terry said. “There’s something going on, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Abby said. “There is.”

“And we’re the only ones who know it?”

“We’re the only ones that know it and are willing to do something about it,” Abby said.

“And we’re kids,” Terry said.

“I guess,” Abby said. “Sort of.”

They were quiet again. The sun was warm. The ocean smelled fresh. One of the gulls hopped close and cocked its head and stared at them with its blank black eyes.

“If we’re together when we’re grown,” Terry said, “I will never have an affair.”

“Except with me,” Abby said.

“That wouldn’t be an affair,” Terry said.

“You never know,” Abby said.

T
erry stood in the dark with Abby among some evergreen shrubs in back of the Trent house.

“Carly says Bullard arrived here at seven,” Abby said. “That was his car around the corner, right?”

“Yep,” Terry said.

“Why would he park there if he wasn’t trying to sneak?”

“Don’t know,” Terry said.

“Are you scared?” Abby said.

“No.”

“Nervous?”

“No,” Terry said. “I’m trying to think.”

“Oh,” Abby said. “So maybe I should shut up.”

“Uh-huh,” Terry said.

They stood in the dark looking at the house.

“I feel like a peeping Tom,” Terry said.

“I know,” Abby said. “It’s kind of exciting, though.”

“No lights on upstairs,” Terry said.

“If they’re having an affair,” Abby said, “they wouldn’t go right upstairs, for heaven’s sake.”

“What would they do?”

“Have cocktails or something, in the living room.”

“You think?” Terry said.

“That’s where the lights are on,” Abby said.