Page 32 of Takedown

The economy ran on beef jerky and contraband gummy worms, exchange rate set by weight class — guys still cutting paid double. The judiciary was Sam, who settled all disputes with a chemist's neutrality and whose rulings were final. Aleks sat alone with headphones on, watching film on his phone of the guy he'd wrestle in Sunday's finals, because Aleks had already decided he'd be in Sunday's finals, and honestly nobody was betting against him. Reyes slept the whole way with the practiced totality of a man who learned to sleep on buses before this one. And Miles ran the government — three card games, one playlist war, and a rolling debate about whether a hot dog is a sandwich that at one point required Halloran, without turning around, to declare a national emergency.

"It's a taco," said Kirby, from the driver's seat, and the bus went dead silent with the horror of it, and that was the end of the debate and arguably of the republic.

The seat lottery — Miles ran that too, allegedly random, absolutely rigged — put me and Grayson across the aisle from each other. Not together. Across. Which turned out to be its own specific station of the cross: three hours of him in my peripheral vision, reading an actual book like a Victorian, one knee up against the seatback, while the gold afternoon went by behind him and did that thing to his hair.

Somewhere around Hartford, my phone buzzed.

Whitfield: Stop looking at me.

Me: im looking at the window

Whitfield: You're looking at the window the way you look at the pie carousel.

Me: the pie was from this week

Whitfield: Read your book, Kovac.

Me: dont have a book. never needed one. some of us have inner lives

Whitfield: You're watching Miles lose his own card game and mouthing along to the arguments.

Me: RICH inner lives

Across the aisle, Grayson Whitfield made a sound he converted into a cough, and the nation-state rolled south with all its idiot citizens, and I put my head against the window and grinned at New England going past like a guy with a secret in his pocket, which I was, which I would like it noted I was extremely good at except for all the texting.

* * *

The Garden State Invitational is held in a field house the size of a lie, eight mats running at once, sixteen teams, a wall of sound that never fully stops — whistles, coaches, the flat slap of bodies, some kid's mother screaming SQUEEZE with her whole soul — and I love it. I need that said plainly. Tournament days are the days the sport gives back everything it takes: you and a bracket and nowhere to be but forward.

I went 3–0 on day one. I'll keep the wrestling short, because the wrestling was short: a pin, a major, and a 7–2 decision over a Rutgers senior who spent the whole seven minutes learning what everybody in Pennsylvania already knew, which is that I do not stop coming forward, and you can know it's coming, and it comes anyway.

What I want on the record from day one is two other things.

One: Grayson at the edge of the mat, every match. Backups run towels and water at tournaments — it's the job, it's convention, nobody looks twice — and so nobody looked twice at Whitfield standing at my corner for three straight matches with his arms crossed and his jaw set, radiating an intensity that read to the entire field house as drilling partner with a wrestle-off coming, and read to exactly one person as what it was. Between periods of the Rutgers match, catching my breath, mouth guard in my fist: his voice cutting flat through the wall of noise, "He's dropping his left after the tie, he's done it nine times, take the shot." Nine times. He'd counted. The most romantic sentence spoken in New Jersey that day, and I took the shot, and it scored.

Two: the semifinal draw came up on the screens at the end of the day, and my quarter of the bracket resolved into a name with a #6 next to it, a returning All-American out of Lehigh, and the team gathered around the board doing its noise — and I felt it land on me not like fear. Like the letter. Like rent. Beat a ranked guy Sunday and the wrestle-off stops being a question anyone at Ashworth asks out loud. Lose ugly, and it's a conversation.

"Tomorrow's problem," Grayson said, at my shoulder, reading the board, reading me — voice pitched team-loud, teammate-flat, and then, one register down, for the space of one step as we turned away: "Eat. You're not cutting tonight. Both problems can wait."

Before dinner, the tournament ran exhibition rounds on the back mats — extra matches for the guys who don't start, the sport's way of making sure nobody rides a bus six hours to hold towels. Grayson drew a Bloomsburg junior with forearms like dock rope, and for the first time all season, our positions inverted: him in the green singlet under the lights, me at the edge of the mat with the water and the towel and the job.

I'd wrestled him every day for two months. I had never once watched him.

There's a difference, it turns out. At the wrists he was a problem I was solving; from the corner he was — Christ. He was beautiful, and I don't mean the way the singlet meant it. I mean the wrestling. Ten years of private coaches had built the frame, but the thing living in it now was appetite — my word, the one I'd loaned him without knowing, weight forward, no announcements — and he took that dock-rope junior apart with a patience that had violence folded inside it like a letter, and between periods he came to the corner and took the water from my hand and looked at me over the bottle, breathing hard, eyes asking without asking.

"He's carrying his head too high in the tie," I said. Flat. Corner-voice. "Snap him down twice and he'll stop trusting his own base. Then he's yours."

Nine snaps later — I counted; we count now, apparently, it's the house style — the kid's base was a rumor, and Grayson shot the no-knock single and put him flat, and while the ref slapped the mat my whole chest did something enormous and stupid that I had to stand still through, holding a towel, wearing my teammate face, while the man I'd taught that shot got his hand raised in it.

He came off the mat and I handed him the towel and our fingers overlapped on the terry cloth for exactly one second longer than the transaction required.

"Good call on the head," he said. Team-loud.

"Good shot," I said. Teammate-flat.

Filthy, the both of us. Absolutely shameless. Nobody saw a thing.

Team dinner was a pasta apocalypse at a place called Vito's that has been feeding this tournament for forty years and has the photos to prove it. Miles gave a toast to "the republic." Kirby ate a hot dog, dared us all with his eyes to say something. Aleks, three seats down, watched his finals opponent's film propped against the parmesan and ate exactly what Sam put in front of him, and I clocked Sam doing it — plating for him, casual as breathing, no words — and filed it, and looked away.