Wildcat
"Your guard's too pretty," Grant said, and hit him in the mouth.
The barn was hot. August in central Illinois, flat land in every direction, the corn high enough that the property looked like an island in a green ocean. The barn had a regulation ring, a heavy bag, a speed bag, a jump rope hanging from a nail, and six chickens that wandered in and out through a gap in the back wall and had opinions about everything.
Ted Grant was sixty-three and built like a fire hydrant and poured his first bourbon at eleven in the morning and his second at eleven-fifteen and trained in between like the alcohol was fuel. Five-eight and wide. His hands were scarred across every knuckle and when he hit the heavy bag the chickens scattered and when he stopped they came back. He'd named all six of them after boxers he'd knocked out.
"Pretty guards come from schools," Grant said. He circled. The ring creaked under his feet. "The mountain, the dojo, the temple. They teach you to hold your hands like you're posing for a painting. A painting won't stop a headbutt."
He demonstrated.
The headbutt was educational.
Six weeks with Ted Grant undid about a year of composure.
Every mentor he'd had worked in some version of quiet. Dragon asked questions. Shiva gave corrections that could take your head off. Kirigi taught through pain and silence. Grant talked constantly, in full sentences, about things that had nothing to do with fighting while also fighting.
"Tell your mountain people their kicks are bad," Grant said in the second week, rolling under a roundhouse that would have taken his head off if it had connected, which it didn't, because Grant was sixty-three and also faster than a sixty-three-year-old had any right to be. "Pretty. Useless. A kick above the waist is an invitation to get thrown. You know what never gets countered? A liver shot at belt level while the other guy's trying to look like a movie."
He laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, in the middle of a round. Grant caught him with a jab while his mouth was open.
"Don't laugh with your chin up."
He laughed more in six weeks than he had in a year. Grant was funny constantly and about everything and without any indication that a joke had been told. The humor lived in the delivery, which was flat, and the content, which was wrong. Grant told him about the time a bank robber in a gorilla suit tried to hold up a credit union in Keystone City while Jay Garrick was making a deposit and Jay had been so offended by the man's technique that he'd disarmed him at normal speed just to make a point.
"Could've had him in a quarter-second," Grant said. "Instead he walked up to the counter, took the gun out of the guy's hand, and said 'son, I'm trying to refinance.' The gorilla just stood there."
Dirty fighting. Headbutts, elbows in the clinch, the knee to the inner thigh that dropped bigger men. The equalizer. "Everything else is what you do when you have time," Grant said. "This is what you do when you don't."
He learned to read Grant, but Grant's tells were different. Shiva telegraphed through micro-tension, the body preparing fractions of a second before the strike. Grant telegraphed through conversation. He'd start a sentence and the punch would come in the middle of the sentence, timed to the word the listener's brain was processing. He'd been doing it for forty years and it still worked because people couldn't stop listening to someone who was talking to them.
"The thing about a lead hook is- "
The lead hook arrived between is and nothing. Clean.
"-you never see it."
Grant's days had a rhythm. Up at six. Eggs, burned. Coffee, too strong. Training from seven to ten. Bourbon at eleven. Training from eleven to one. Lunch that was usually leftovers from a dinner that had been leftovers from something else. Afternoon on the heavy bag or the pads. Bourbon again. Porch. Stories. Sleep.
The chickens came and went. The one Grant called Frazier liked to sit on the ring apron during the afternoon rounds and watch with one eye. He'd asked Grant about the naming convention once. Grant had looked at him like the question was beneath the conversation.
"I don't name them after people I lost to."
Eleven AM on a Wednesday. Fourth week.
Grant threw the liver shot with his right hand. Clean, fast, from an angle below his eye line that he didn't read in time. It landed below his ribs on the left side and the pain was instant and total and Grant had done this to hundreds of people and knew exactly where to put it.
He went down. One knee on the canvas, hand on the rope. Everything below his ribs said stay down.
He stood up.
Grant checked the clock on the wall.
"Thirty seconds."
"What?"
"You were down thirty seconds. A liver shot like that should keep a man on the floor for ten minutes. I've seen heavyweights go fifteen." He leaned on the ropes. "What are you made of?"
"Good genetics."
"Uh huh."
He unwrapped his hands and went to get water. Grant watched him walk to the bucket. Grant poured bourbon. It was eleven in the morning. The chickens were back.
The stories came at night.
Grant's porch faced west and the sunset went on forever because there was nothing between the house and the horizon except corn and a two-lane road nobody used. Grant drank bourbon and he drank water and the stories came out slow.
"Alan used to light up," Grant said. "Middle of a fight. The ring, the green, the whole deal. First time I saw it we were in a warehouse on the waterfront. Forty-three, forty-four, Nazis or something, there was a lot of that going around. He raised his fist and the whole ceiling turned green. The structural beams, the metal, everything. I was standing fifteen feet away and I could feel the heat of it on my face and the guys we were fighting just stopped. Just stopped and looked up."
He took a drink.
"Jay was faster than anything. Faster than anything anybody's seen, probably. He could've solved every problem in the world if he ran fast enough. He chose to live in Keystone City and refinance his mortgage and eat dinner with Joan every night at six and the speed just lived inside him like a second person." Grant swirled the bourbon. "Joan knew. She always knew. She married him anyway and set a place for him at six and some nights he was late because he was running through a building on fire in Central City and she'd reheat the plate and not ask."
A truck passed on the two-lane road. Headlights swept the corn. Gone.
"Did any of them wonder what they were?"
Grant looked at him. "All of them."
The bourbon was amber in the porch light and Grant held the glass with both hands on his stomach and they sat with the corn and the dark.
"I stood next to gods for ten years," Grant said. "A man who runs through walls. A woman who's existed for a thousand years. A kid who turns into lightning. You stop asking what's normal after the first year. You just ask if the person's good." He looked over. "You're good. The rest is details."
Thursday of the fifth week. Sparring. Grant's jab caught him on the eyebrow and opened a cut. Small, quarter inch. The kind that bled freely because the skin over the brow was thin.
Grant put butterfly strips on it in the kitchen. The blood was already slowing.
"Hold still."
"It's fine."
"It's a cut on your face. Hold still."
The kitchen smelled like the eggs Grant had burned that morning and the coffee that was always too strong and the bourbon that lived on the counter like a pet.
Next morning he was up before Grant. He checked the mirror in the bathroom. The cut was gone. The butterfly strips were still there, bridging clean skin. He peeled the strips off. Pressed the spot. No tenderness. Nothing.
Grant was in the kitchen. Making eggs. Burning eggs.
"Let me see."
He turned his head. Grant looked at his eyebrow. Touched the spot where the cut had been with his thumb.
"That ain't normal."
"It healed fast."
"Bullshit."
Grant went back to the eggs. The eggs burned. He poured bourbon into a coffee mug and it was seven-thirty in the morning and the chickens were in the yard and a mockingbird was doing something complicated on the fence post and Grant didn't bring it up again.
Zatanna's letter arrived on a Tuesday.
Three pages. Fat envelope, tea stain on the corner, a rabbit wearing a scarf drawn in the margin of the first page. The handwriting leaned forward and chased every thought before it finished arriving.
She was in London. Her father was teaching at a private academy for practitioners and she was sitting in on lectures and performing at a pub in Camden on weekends.
The pub has a stage the size of a kitchen table and the ceiling leaks and the owner's name is Clive and he pays me in fish and chips and lets me use the back room to practice. I made it snow indoors last night. Real snow, not illusion, actual crystallized water vapor from controlled temperature manipulation of ambient moisture which is what Dad calls it and what I call INDOOR SNOW. It came down from the ceiling and melted on the tables and the people at the bar were just sitting there with snowflakes in their beer and this kid, maybe five, she was standing in the middle of the room with her mouth open catching them on her tongue and her mum was laughing and the chestnut seller outside stopped selling chestnuts and came in and stood in the doorway and watched.
The second page was the academy. The lectures, the other students, a woman from Prague who could fold space in her palm and a man from Accra who spoke to rivers. Zee's handwriting got smaller when she was excited and the bottom quarter of the second page was nearly unreadable.
The third page had one line. Halfway down, white space above and below.
I wish you'd been there.
He read the letter on the porch where Grant drank bourbon. The corn was dark and the sky was bigger than any sky had a right to be. He read it four times.
The first three times were the snow and the kid and the chestnut seller and the pub and Zee being Zee.
The fourth time was the last line.
He folded the letter and put it back in the envelope and the rabbit with the scarf looked up at him from the margin and he sat on the porch and listened to the corn and didn't think about anything for a while, which was a lie, because he was thinking about a girl in a pub in London making it snow.