Kyle came forward the way a man comes forward who has rehearsed this walk in a mirror. He was light on his feet, his hands up and loose, his chin tucked the way Frank Oduya had drilled into him for six weeks, and there was nothing careless in him now, nothing of the park in him at all except the knowledge of what the man across the mat could do when he chose. Tomas came forward more slowly, because he had always come forward slowly, because at thirty-nine his first step was a measurement and not a declaration. They met in the middle of the blue mat with the taped border Grace Nolan had laid down that morning, and Kyle's first touch was a collar tie that snapped Tomas's head down an inch before Tomas's hand found the wrist, peeled it, and reset them both to nothing.
"Good," Hector Ruiz said from the corner, quietly, as if he were speaking in a church. "Nothing is also a place. Stay there as long as he lets you."
Kyle did not let him stay there. On the second exchange he changed levels with the clean speed of a man in the middle of his twenties and in the middle of his prime, caught Tomas's lead leg, drove through the hips, and put him down near the centre of the mat with a takedown so tidy that two of the younger men in the front row stood up before they remembered where they were. The scorekeeper's hand went up. Two points, if points were what this night was about, and the noise came then, real noise, because the hall had been told a story about an old champion and stories are easier to cheer when they behave themselves, and here the story was behaving exactly as the posters had implied it might not.
Tomas landed the way he had been taught to land when he was seventeen and the way he had taught himself to land again after Sofia was born and falling badly stopped being a private matter. He took it on his side, kept his elbows in, built his frames against Kyle's chest and neck before the younger man's weight had finished settling, and began, unhurriedly, to breathe. Kyle worked to pass the way well-drilled men work, head low, hips heavy, one hand hunting for the far underhook, and Tomas gave him the first small thing he asked for, a half step of guard opened, because Hector had said it a hundred times in the six weeks of mornings: give a strong man a door he wants and he will stop looking for the one you are building.
He almost paid for the philosophy immediately. Kyle slid his knee across, flattened him, and settled into side control with his shoulder driving into the hinge of Tomas's jaw, and the hall went quiet in the particular way of people doing arithmetic they do not like. Grace Nolan, at the officials' table with the first-aid bag at her feet and the donation ledger open beside the score sheet, found she had stopped writing. Frank Oduya stood behind Kyle's corner with his arms folded and said nothing at all, which the five young men sitting in the second row in their matching community-service shirts understood, by now, to be the loudest thing he knew how to say.
"Tomas," Hector called. "Your near hand. You know where it lives."
Tomas did know. He worked the near hand inside, not forcing anything, letting Kyle's pressure spend itself against the frame of his forearm, and when Kyle shifted his weight to hunt the mount Tomas shrimped once, twice, each movement no more than a hand's width, and recovered first a knee and then a whole guard out of a position the scorekeeper had already written off in his head. The applause that met it was out of proportion to how it looked, which was almost like nothing, and Tomas heard it from a long way away, through the cotton of his own breathing, and allowed himself to understand that the people in this hall were not really applauding a knee. They were applauding the refusal of a thing to be over.
Kyle stood out of the guard and reset, bouncing once, annoyed at himself in the open way of athletes who have been coached hard enough to be annoyed usefully. "Again," he said, not to Tomas, to himself, and came in behind a feint at the collar, caught the single leg a second time, and this time Tomas went with the drive a fraction earlier, turned the fall into a scramble, and for three bright seconds they were both moving the way the highlight film of Tomas's youth had moved, hips and hands and changes of direction, until Kyle, younger and quicker at the last joint of every exchange, came out on top near the border and Paul Lindgren's hand hovered and did not fall. "Centre," Paul said. "Work in the centre, gentlemen. You have a whole mat. Use the honest part of it."