She had taken Marcus Webb to coffee on the second Tuesday of the month, at the place across the bayou with the good empanadas, and she had talked to him the way promoters talk to fighters they believe in, which is to say she had talked about the future as if it were a room she could let him into. The regional circuit was watching Houston. The gala was the biggest room the club had ever sold. A featured slot at a gala was not a headline she handed out β it was a headline a man took, in the circle, in front of the right eyes. "I'm not promising anything," Dana had said, in the precise tone of a woman promising something. "But I'll tell you where it's leaning. It's leaning your way, Marcus. It has been leaning your way since February. You just have to give me a reason not to talk myself out of it." And Marcus, who was twenty-nine and had a daughter whose photograph was the lock screen of his phone and a regional ranking that had stalled one place below the money for two years, had heard what he was meant to hear: that the evening was his audition, that the club's future had a face and it was his, and that Tyler Brooks β Tyler, his training partner, his friend, the man who had driven him to Galveston at midnight in March when the baby was in the hospital with a fever that turned out to be nothing β Tyler was, in the order of things, the supporting act.
She had taken Tyler to lunch on the Thursday, at the same place, in the same booth. Tyler Brooks was twenty-seven and fought the way water finds a crack, patiently and from below, and he had a quality the coaches valued and the crowd had not yet learned to price: he did not need the last word. Dana had watched him for a year and reached the promoter's conclusion that such a man could be made hungry by being told, carefully, that he was underestimated. "Between us?" she had said. "The featured slot. Everybody assumes it's Marcus. Marcus assumes it's Marcus, which tells you something. But the people whose opinion is going to matter in this city β they are leaning your way, Tyler. They think the circle is a thinking format. They think it's yours to take. All you have to do is not be the second man in the room on Saturday night."
Neither conversation was a lie in the way a cheque bounces. The featured slot did not exist as Dana described it; there was no slot. The gala programme listed the survival circle as a demonstration main event with three participants, proceeds to charity, no title, no ranking, no winner in the contractual sense β Vic had been immovable on that for a decade, and Carla had written it into the same agreement as the poster clause. The featured slot was a story Dana was telling two men separately so that each would walk into the circle with something private at stake, because Dana believed, the way she believed conflict sold tickets, that men with something private at stake gave better theatre. She was not even wrong about the theatre. She was wrong about whose theatre it was.
The discovery happened by accident, which is how most true things happen in locker rooms. On the Monday of gala week, Marcus came in early to work the bag before the evening session and found Tyler already there, taping his wrists with the methodical slowness of a man wrapping a parcel. The room smelled of leather and liniment. Marcus's daughter had drawn him a picture that morning β a circle, and in it a stick figure she had labelled DAD in letters that leaned β and he had it in his gym bag to tape inside his locker, and he was in the softened mood that such pictures produce, and so, instead of working the bag, he sat down on the bench and said the thing he had been carrying since the empanada place, because carrying it alone had started to feel like doing something to Tyler rather than for himself.
"I should tell you something," Marcus said. "Dana had coffee with me. About Saturday. About where things are leaning."
Tyler did not look up from the tape. "Empanadas?"
"How do you know about the empanadas?"
"Because I had lunch there Thursday. Same booth, I think. There's a wobble in the table." Tyler tore the tape with his teeth. "She leaned you, too, huh."
There was a silence in which the heavy bag in the next room swung and settled, swung and settled.
"She told me it was leaning my way," Marcus said. "Since February."
"She told me everybody assumes it's you, and that's exactly why it's leaning mine."
Marcus laughed first β one short, startled bark that he tried to catch and couldn't β and then Tyler laughed, and then they were both laughing in the way men laugh when the joke has cost them something and they have decided, together, that the cost is going to be charged to the correct account. It was not Dana's account, in the end. That was the interesting thing, and Vic Anselmo, hearing about it on Wednesday from Carla, who heard everything, said it was the most grown-up thing he had ever heard of happening in that locker room, and he had owned the building for twenty-two years.