Sam Whitaker stood between them with one hand raised, looked once at Blake Rennert and once at Dolores Marenco, and waited until the last of the noise had drained out of the Copperline Athletic Club. "You know the rules," he said, not loudly, because the room had gone quiet enough that he did not need to be loud. "A tap ends it. A word ends it. My hand ends it. The second it ends, everything lets go. Both of you." Blake nodded once, sharp and impatient. Dee nodded the way she nodded at everything, as if she were agreeing to something ordinary, like a delivery time or a shift change. Sam brought his hand down and stepped back, and the main exhibition bout began.
Everyone in the hall expected it to be over in seven seconds, because seven seconds was the number the whole town had been saying for weeks. Seven seconds at the open mat, seven seconds on the video that half of San Tomas had watched on their phones at kitchen tables and in truck cabs and on break-room benches, seven seconds printed nowhere and repeated everywhere. Dee moved the way she had moved that morning, without hurry, taking the first grip that offered itself and settling her weight as if she had all night, and Blake Rennert was not there. He had spent three weeks preparing for exactly that reach, and he slipped it by a hand's breadth, turned his shoulder out of her line, and was gone around her side before her fingers had closed on anything worth holding. The crowd made the sound a crowd makes when it understands, all at once, that the thing it came to see again is not going to happen the same way twice.
Blake did not celebrate. That was the first sign that this was a different young man from the one who had laughed with a mop bucket at his feet. He circled at his distance, which was longer than hers, and used every inch of it, snapping his lead hand out to measure her, touching her forehead guard, touching her sleeve, never staying. He was twenty-seven and built for this, long and quick and loose, and he had a champion's memory for anything that had ever embarrassed him. Twice in the first minute he feinted low and came high. Once he caught her sleeve and dragged her a half step off her line and scored with a clean entry that put her on one hip on the mat before she recovered her base to the sound of the hall rising. Sam signalled the points with two fingers, unhurried and exact, and the noise doubled, because now there was a story the crowd knew how to tell: the champion had done his homework, the champion was a champion for a reason, and seven seconds had been what seven seconds usually turned out to be, which was luck wearing a good dress.
Dee got up slowly. She was not hurt. She was not even, particularly, surprised. In the front row Yusuf Adeyemi sat with his hands folded over the head of his cane and watched her face the way he had watched it across thirty years of mats, and what he saw there was not dismay. It was attention, the plain workmanlike attention of a woman reading something she intended to finish. She rolled her right shoulder once, carefully, the shoulder she had favoured since before Carla was born, and she set her feet again and walked back into the middle of the mat as if the score were a rumour she had heard about somebody else.
Blake scored again before the end of the second minute, and this time it was better than the first. He drew her reach with a little showman's dip of his shoulders, one of the entries he used in highlight clips, the ones with music under them, and when she committed her weight to answer it he was already underneath the attempt, quick as water, and he turned her and put her down cleanly on her side and rode the scramble out with his chest high and his breathing easy. Sam's fingers went up. The hall was very loud. Somewhere behind the barriers someone said the word fluke out loud, not unkindly, the way people say things they believe they are being realistic about, and Carla, standing at the edge of the mat area with her hands twisted together in the hem of her jacket, heard it and said nothing, because her mother had taught her a long time ago that a bout is not over when the shouting starts. It is over when it is over.