There were scattered lights around the little settlement, but the only place besides the school where anything seemed to be going on was one of the old frame buildings, fifty yards or so up a hill. I could see movement through the windows and I thought I heard a faint sound like singing. I hesitated to intrude, but something about it drew me, so I started over there.
Then I stopped. An eerie sensation was rippling over my skin, like the wind was blowing right through me.
Abruptly, I realized I felt alone in a way I never had before.
I walked on to the building. Three Indian guys about my age were sitting on the steps drinking beer. They stopped talking as I approached. I nodded to them and they nodded back, but none of them looked right at me.
The sound I'd heard was clear now-not singing, but chanting. I went up the steps and along a hall to the room at the end where it was coming from. I stopped at the doorway. Several older people were sitting in a circle on the floor playing a game, casting handfuls of small sticks like dice, while more stood around and watched. Everybody joined in the singsong chanting that would die into laughter or exclamations of disgust as the sticks hit the floor. I was sure they were aware of my presence, but again, nobody really looked at me.
I'd had no idea what I was going to see here, but maybe I'd sensed it somehow and that was what had pulled me-not the game itself, but an extraordinary and powerful force that pervaded the place, the people, the gathering. It was a kind of heart, a center. I'd looked for it in my own world but never found a way to tap in.
But I had no business being there, and I turned to go. Just then, an old man with a headband and a long gray braid raised his face to me-the first direct gaze I'd gotten.
I had noticed him moving his fingers gently over his sticks after he cast them, as if he was reading them. Now I saw that his eyes were clouded with cataracts.
The lighter-weight bouts lasted even longer than I'd expected, and mine didn't start until almost midnight. The wait seemed interminable. I tried to spend it concentrating on what I was there for, but a lot of other things were going on in my head.
I figured out who Harold Good Gun was and watched him warm up, trying not to be obvious about it. He probably did the same with me. He was about my size, six feet one or two and a hundred seventy-plus pounds. It looked like I had a little reach on him but he was thicker through the upper body. I had talked to a couple of people who'd seen him fight, and the consensus was that he tended to come out with a hard flurry, but didn't have much in the way of either stamina or style. My own strongest points were a long fast left jab and a hard straight right. I needed to box him-keep him away at first, then go after him as he tired.
Instead, I let myself get drawn into mixing it up, and just under a minute into the fight, he threw a wild roundhouse right that caught me square in the socket of my left eye. I should have slipped or blocked it easily, and worse, he wasn't even looking at me, just windmilling furiously with his head down. In the upper weight divisions we wore ten-ounce gloves, not much more than ski mitts, and neither of us had on headgear. The impact was something like getting hit by a major league fastball. By the time I came to, sprawled on the canvas, the count was over.
Late the next gray afternoon, while I nursed my world-class shiner and my crushed pride, I felt something pop inside my face. The upper left side filled with fluid so fast it was like it got pumped from a hose. By the time I could get to a mirror, the eye had swelled completely shut. When I pried open the lid and saw just a little crescent of white, I started to realize what had happened. The tissue that supported my eyeball had broken, and it had dropped down into my skull.
Two days later, I got home from St. Peter's Hospital with the eyeball cinched back up in place on a piece of plastic and the bones under it wired together.
Of course Sarah Lynn felt terrible, and I tried to reassure her. I knew she'd been possessive because she was threatened, and seducing me was a naughty way of making me choose her over her rival. The last thing in the world she'd ever have wanted was to see me hurt. That had happened because I'd fought like a rank amateur, and putting any other kind of spin on it was absurd.
Still, she was no doubt right that I harbored subconscious resentment. It was also transparent that she was pleased about my boxing days being over, and that added to the mix. The next summer, we broke up.
By then I was feeling like that punch had smashed right through my face into my brain, jarring me into a new state of clarity. It wasn't especially pleasant. I started seeing a more honest and less pretty picture of myself than the one I had painted in my mind-the kind you might see after you'd been on a three-day runner and ended up alone and wide-awake drunk.
But I also started getting glimpses into my restlessness. It was a longing, an ache that everybody experienced at some point. Boxing, like the religious piety I'd felt as a boy, was a means I'd used to try to cope with it. Its source lay deeper. I realized that the reason I'd been so drawn to the Indians playing the stick game up at Rocky Boy that night was my sense of how close to it they were.
Still, I couldn't identify that hunger, let alone figure out how to satisfy it in a real and long-term fashion. The only thing I could think to do was to keep my options open. I held to the naive conviction that some event of critical importance to my life was out there on the horizon, and if I settled into practicality and security, I might miss it. That was the real reason I'd broken up with Sarah Lynn, who would have given me everything most men would ask.
I got out of Stanford with a degree in history, not good for much except more school, and no particular focus. I decided to try journalism, with a vague notion that wide exposure to new things might help me find the direction I was looking for. I was able to get into a graduate program at USC.
But by then I was seriously involved with one of my former classmates, who had started law school at UC Davis, near Sacramento. The long-distance relationship was a strain, and so was Los Angeles, especially with trying to live there poor. After a year at USC, I left and took a job at the Sacramento Guardian. The position and salary were both well below what I'd have made if I'd gotten my master's degree, but I was ready for a change and a steady paycheck. I figured I'd give it a year or two, then go back and finish school.
I never did. Emilie and I got married-Stanford blessed the union between two of its own in traditional fashion, by bold-printing our names in alumni newsletters-and new factors entered the equation. Her father was a wealthy business executive, her mother a socialite. For a wedding gift, they put the down payment on a house, which, privately, made me very uncomfortable. It was no secret that they considered my profession undignified and my earning potential a joke, and they wished I'd grow up and go to law or business school myself. The pressure mounted as time passed, with Emilie joining the chorus.
I didn't have any interest in law or business or anything of the kind, but that wasn't why I dragged my heels. It wasn't out of love for my work, either-I'd lost my illusions early on. Mostly, I covered local-interest topics like Rotary conventions, bureaucratic incompetence, and couples who preserved historic street signs. Occasionally juicier things happened along-an unusual crime, political scandals-but even those always came down to the same sordid underpinnings.