How you want to wake up is drowsy, in clean, comfortable sheets, with stripes of sunlight on your face from the slats of the blinds on a bedroom window. Not to the punched-in-the-brain jolt of ammonium carbonate crystals mixed with water.
Yeah. Smelling salts. In boxing, that jolt is a powerful clue that in the previous sixty seconds or so, you made an error of such proportions that someone rang your bell like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Some athletes—like hockey players—use the salts specifically to get that whoosh of clarity at exhaustion points in a game. It’s a sensation slightly less violent than a slap in the face and gives an adrenaline rush of clarity and focus.
Me? I’d prefer the slap in the face. The sting of ammonia gas up the nostrils is about as pleasant as vomiting. It triggers an inhalation reflex that snaps you back into the present world and makes your entire nervous system surge with activity.
It also brings your eyes back into focus. Which meant that following an indeterminate period of unconsciousness after taking a hard downward punch across the top of my right cheekbone, I had the questionable pleasure of seeing Billy’s face right above mine as he leaned over my body in concern.
“Hey, stupid,” he said. “Welcome back.”
Billy’s face would never get lost in a crowd. He was bald and fifty. Or maybe bald and seventy. It was a prematurely old face with the clichéd pug nose of a boxer who had cycled a half dozen times through broken, healed and rebroken.
“Hello, beautiful,” I said. “Give me a kiss.”
“Aack.” He pushed away from me, giving me space to sit.
I could replay it now. Ducking and weaving, effortlessly slipping beneath and around the heavy punches of my sparring partner, someone six inches taller, forty pounds heavier and a jar of molasses slower than me.
What had happened was I’d noticed a guy outside the ring, at the speed bag, wearing white Converse leather shoes. A guy in a shiny blue tracksuit, maybe mid-twenties, reddish hair. I’d realized—too late—that my sparring partner was throwing in a big slow bomb of a punch that even a granny in a walker could avoid. And I’d gone down hard.
Hence the smelling salts and Billy’s concern.
Brutus, my sparring partner, was grinning at me with the blackened teeth of someone still wearing his mouthguard. Mine was gone. Billy, of course, would have reached in and popped it out as he checked to make sure my tongue hadn’t fallen back into my throat.
Some trainers wore rubber surgeon’s gloves before touching saliva. Not old-school Billy.
“Next time, dude,” I told Brutus.
He laughed and punched his hands together in anticipation, the smack of his massive boxing gloves echoing in the ring.
I waved him away, signaling that I was done. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back into the ring and continue sparring with Brutus, but that I wanted to track down the red-haired Converse-shoe guy. What were the odds that two pairs of white leather shoes like that had the same scratch across the toe?
Billy followed me to a quiet corner of the gym.
“Never thought in a million years that guy could tag you,” Billy said. It wasn’t meant to bolster my spirits. Billy wasn’t that type of fake motivator. He called it as he saw it. “You sure you’re ready for Saturday’s fight?”
“I’m ready,” I said. “Trust me—it was a freak thing.”
He nodded. “Okay then. Why not? It’s been a freak week.”
“You mean the break-in,” I said. “And you’re sure nothing was taken?”
I was glad my hands were taped up to hide the barely healing blisters. I’d lied to Billy about the night with the curling irons. I’d told him I’d locked up and was gone before the cops showed up. If I hadn’t lied, there would have been the obvious questions, like, Why would someone want to torture you with curling irons duct-taped to your hands?
Just as dangerous, however, would have been questions about my identity. To Billy, I was Jace Sanders, a kid from an inner-city high school, trying to rise above a bad family life. To the cops, however, it would have taken about three minutes to figure out that Jace Sanders didn’t exist and that my driver’s license said Jace Wyatt. Then Billy would have found out that I lived behind the high stone walls of the exclusively rich, pretending that every punch I threw was a punch directly into my father’s face.
So yes, I felt bad about the ongoing lie. I wouldn’t pretend it was justified, because a lie is a lie. But I wouldn’t apologize for it either. That was part of living a double life.
“Nothing stolen,” he confirmed. “That’s part of what makes it freaky. And if it wasn’t weird enough already, why would they vandalize the locker room and break a water pipe? To add to the freakiness, out of nowhere, the plumbers tell me that somebody covered the bill. Go figure.”
“Go figure,” I said. The repairs had cost nearly a grand. I knew that kind of money would hurt Billy. And, sadly, it was mere pocket change from my other life.
“Hey,” I said. “Looked like someone new in the gym. Red-haired guy, blue tracksuit. He any good?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Billy said. “He’s looking for a sparring partner. Tell me when you’re ready to step into the ring with him.”
Billy snorted again. “And that’s another weird thing. He’s the same guy who complained his shoes were gone when he came in the morning after the break-in. Said maybe he’d have to put a lock on his locker if this was the kind of place I ran. But lo and behold, I walk once around the gym and find the shoes tossed into a corner by the heavy bag. Explain that.”
So Tracksuit Guy was just another gym rat. Whoever had tortured me had borrowed Tracksuit Guy’s shoes. Which meant I was no closer to knowing who had been on the other side of the door, dropping notes by fishing line.
When I looked at Billy, I spoke the truth.
“Explain it, Billy?” I said. “I wish I could.”