Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,246

Mark says. Everyone believes in the supremacy of money.

The first fight is almost over. To prepare myself, I think back to all the times I’ve seen Rourke on display—a field, a gymnasium, a theater, a classroom. I remind myself that nothing I have seen so far has been random. I’ve been made ready.

There is a way they tell you to draw trees. A tree should not be a blot on the landscape, stripped of obliquity. A tree should express contour, core, crevasse. A tree should lift off the paper. To render contour, you have to draw back and forward and down. To render core, you must envision center. Center is not the dead point between two edges, or the geographic median of some object you happen to see, but the soul of the O, the heart of vastness, the umbilicus, the basic order of the nature of a thing, the fixed innerness from which unfixed outerness originates. To render its scars, seek the tree’s fortune. Conceive of the tree wholly. Every tree grows up and down and out with an equivalency of energy. If you look you will find a carnival of direction—perpendicularity and pendancy, lift and transverseness, convexity and indentation. A tree rises with grandeur when it meets with no obstacle; it skews sharply to prevail against adversity; it thickens incrementally, gaining girth with years; it bears down into the bed of the earth with its talons. Like a child, it bruises back in response to cruelty and obstruction. Like a saint, it drives to the light.

In every tree there is a system of softness beneath the armature, a velvet refuge, an underside, a whisper-sweet sanctuary where potential is stored. Underside, because there is truth and beauty in what is rejected by sight. Underside, because in every king there is a boy.

Antonio Vargas has gypsy skin and black hair tied back. He looks like the kind of guy who is good to kids and aging relatives and to the girls who love him. As it turned out, Tommy Lydell backed out at the last minute. When Mark got the call, he kicked the coffee table and broke it. After Mark heard Vargas’s stats—twenty-two years old, one hundred ninety pounds, six-foot-one, 25–3 with 20 KO’s, and a lefty—he felt good enough to kneel down and check the damage. The leg had split, so he had Manny take it to the basement.

“You want me to glue it?” Manny asked, leaning at the door with the table. It looked like he was holding a dead Labrador against his chest, legs out. “I have the clamp!”

“Throw it out,” Mark said. “I’ll buy a new one.”

Rourke is double-jabbing, steering Vargas backward around the ring with ambling, edgy grace, his feet hardly touching the canvas. He fights easily, like it’s nothing. I don’t get the feeling I often get from seeing him in public, when he’s there but not there, and transcendent somehow to his own performance. From the first bell, when he walked out to center, he looked at Vargas, lifted his hands, and began to fight. Vargas seemed caught by surprise, by the lack of formality. I know how he felt. I know what it is to be completely unprepared for a being so instinctive. I know what it is to face him that way, when it is just you he sees.

In the fourth round, Rourke gives Vargas a sickening combination—a right to the jaw, followed by a smooth uppercut left, also to the jaw, then a clean right to the face in the indent between nose and cheekbone, and there is shouting, in a roar, like a train popping from a tunnel. And a bell. And a retreat, to the corners. I keep my eyes on Vargas, watching in spite of the blood. His nose sheds an amber stream from one nostril. His mouth guard gets slipped out, and water goes down his face and chest from the corner man squeezing a sponge. Ice goes on the cheek, and the cut man checks the eyes. His head tilts back and people talk at him, giving coarse encouragement.

Rob appears opposite from where we stand, on Vargas’s side, about ten feet from the corner, talking to Vargas’s brother. I think it is the brother, by the resemblance. Rob’s face floats mat level. It surprises me to see him there, though I suppose it doesn’t matter where Rob stands. The men in the ring and out of it are the same: there is an equivalency