Page 5 of Takedown

Formal hall on a Wednesday: candlelight, gowns over blazers, a Latin grace nobody's believed in since the war, and me at the long table under six portraits of men with my jaw. The boys around me were the boys who are always around me — Pemberton, crew, enormous and kind and roughly as observant as furniture; Ridley, whose father runs a bank the way other men run a bath; a rotating cast of guys who call me Whit and have never once asked me a question they didn't already know my answer to. That's what that world is. A conversation with itself, conducted through its children.

"Whit. Heard your weight class got interesting." Ridley, over the soup. "Some scholarship project from coal country. They're saying Halloran's making you babysit."

"Drill with him," I said. "Kovac. State champion."

"State champion of Pennsylvania," Ridley said, the way you'd say state champion of the moon, and the table did its little laugh, and I felt my own mouth do the thing it's trained to do — the tolerant smile, the heir's smile, above it but not unkind about it — while somewhere under my sternum a brand-new thing turned over once, like an engine trying itself in cold weather.

He'd looked at my basement like he'd crossed state lines for it.

"Careful, though," Pemberton offered, helpful as a landslide. "Those wrestle-off things. Be embarrassing, wouldn't it. Name on the library and some mill kid takes your spot."

"That's not how the sport works," I said, pleasantly, which was a lie — that is exactly how the sport works, it's the only sport that works that way, it's the entire point of the sport — and I turned the conversation with one hand the way I'd been turning conversations since I was twelve, and the table moved on to Ridley's boat, because everything at that table is eventually a boat.

"He'll fold at the wrestle-off," Ridley said, later, over the lamb, meaning it kindly, meaning it as reassurance. "The hungry ones always do. They spike early and there's no bottom to the tank, because nobody ever taught them there's supposed to be one. Give it till March, Whit. Blood tells."

"Blood tells," Pemberton agreed, the way you'd agree the sun was due up, and reached across and took the last of the bread off my plate without asking, because at that table nothing belongs to anyone, which is a species of poverty none of them has ever once noticed they live inside.

Here is a thing about my world that takes outsiders years to see, and some of them never do: nobody in it touches you without a reason, and the reason is always, underneath, the same reason. A hand on the shoulder that is an introduction to a man who runs a fund. An arm around you in a photograph that is really a caption. My mother kisses my cheek on the station platform in a way that has been, my whole life, a form of correspondence — arrived safely, behaving well, the holdings intact. I did not possess, anywhere in the whole ledger of nineteen years, a single instance of being touched for nothing. I didn't know to miss it. You can't miss a country you've never crossed into. You just live vaguely cold your whole life and call the weather normal.

I let blood tells stand, because turning it would have cost more than it was worth, and I sat under my grandfather's oil-painted jaw and thought about a duffel bag hitting the mat like a lease being signed. I hope it does, I thought, in a register I wouldn't recognize as my own until much later. I hope blood tells everything. I'd give a good deal to hear what mine has to say for itself, some day, instead of only what it's been instructed to.

I sat through the cheese course under my grandfather's portrait thinking about a duffel bag hitting the mat like a man moving in. My back straight. My tie correct. Performing, flawlessly, a young man thinking about nothing at all.

I'm good at it. I'm the best in any room.

It was the last easy performance I ever gave.

Chapter 3 — DANNY

Coach Halloran was sixty-one years old and built like something you'd use to stop a runaway truck. The first thing I ever heard him say was a man's name. The man dropped and did twenty. Nobody laughed.

Okay, I thought. This translates.

That had been my one fear, honestly. Not the money, not the blazers. That the wrestling would turn out to be Ashworth too — that I'd come down these stairs and find my sport wearing a scarf. Instead: forty guys in a hot basement run by a human retaining wall who didn't appear to know the university existed.

The relief nearly took my knees out. Thank Christ. Thank actual Christ.

The locker room before that first practice sounded like every locker room in America, which was its own kind of relief. Somebody's speaker playing something with too much bass. A senior yelling about a missing shoe. A sophomore getting roasted for his haircut with the specific cruelty you only get from people who'd take a punch for you.

"Kovac, right?" The equipment cage guy — sixty-something, glasses, forearms like he'd been born in there — slid a lock and a stack of gear across the counter like a pawnbroker who'd seen it all. "Kirby. You lose it, you owe me. You break it, you owe me. You graduate, somehow you still owe me."

"What if it breaks on its own?"

Kirby looked at me over his glasses for a long second. "I like this one," he announced to nobody, and that was apparently that. Six weeks later he'd fight a man for me over a headgear dispute, but that's Kirby: the love arrives before the evidence.

A senior two benches down — Turner, though I didn't have the name yet; the room mints names inside a week, like a press — leaned around and grinned like Christmas had come early. "You the new guy at seventy-four?" When I said yeah he grinned wider. "Oh, you're gonna have a time." He didn't explain. Nobody in that room ever explained anything; you were expected to find out by getting hit, which is the most honest curriculum I've ever been enrolled in.

"Ignore him," said a voice coming around the lockers ahead of the body it belonged to — a laugh with a person attached, arriving late. "Turner's been undefeated at ominous since October and it's never once meant a thing." Boat shoes. In a locker room. I filed him under problem on sight and I'd never been more wrong about a filing in my life. "Good hook or bad hook, Kovac? Bad ones are by the drain, they smell like a decision somebody regretted."

"I'll take a bad one," I said. "Not planning on getting attached to the gear."

Kirby, without lifting his eyes from the cage, logged it for the record like a man filing a prophecy he fully intended to disprove: "Not planning on getting attached to the gear. Sure. That's how I know he'll graduate still owing me for a headgear he'll swear on his mother's grave he returned in April." He slid a numbered hook across the counter. "Drain wall's yours. Welcome to the one honest room in the building, kid. Don't tell the university it's down here. They'd only try to fix it."

* * *

The practice room read like two rooms.

One wall: the inheritance. You could tell by the gear — new, but deliberately not too new — and by the warm-up talk, loose and easy, guys who had never once wondered whether they belonged somewhere. The other wall: mine. I knew them the way you know your own accent. A wiry kid at 133, hollow-eyed, tape on both thumbs, drilling before drilling started, alone, like stopping was the dangerous part. A big calm sophomore stretching with an actual chemistry textbook open on the mat, reading formulas between hamstrings. A dark-haired transfer sitting with his back to the wall, the way you sit when every gym you've ever walked into had to be scouted first. Junior-college posture. I'd worn it on the bus for eleven hours.