Two days later Allie came up with a passable excuse to go to Alan Vorstad's office. She had well-developed skills at subtly guiding a conversation the direction she wanted it to go—her all-smiles demeanor only made it easier, especially with men—and she didn't have to do much by way of passing herself off as mildly interested in boxing to get him talking wistfully about his favorite pastime. Along the way, she mentioned in passing that she heard one of the sports writers fought down at the Sixth Street Gym on occasion, which naturally led Vorstad to say no, that was actually Olin Pond, and he was as yet undefeated and really becoming something of a local sensation. It was only a while after she left that it occurred to Vorstad to wonder why she was so interested in hearing about Pond.
As soon as she got off work that evening, Wednesday, Allie went to the Sixth Street Gym. A beautiful woman with a charming smile is able to get just about anywhere and talk to just about anyone, and it was only a matter of minutes until she was shown into the office of the gym’s owner, Trent Gutshall. Gutshall was a surprisingly young man for a business owner. He looked to be in his late twenties, certainly no older than thirty. (In fact, he was thirty-four at that point.) He was big, thick, solidly built, but he had something of a disarming baby face, and he wore glasses. He looked more like a fit accountant than a bodybuilder or gym rat.
“Good evening,” said Gutshall, extending his hand to her as she entered. “You’re lucky; you caught me working late. I’m Trent Gutshall. What can I do for you?”
“I’m Allie Caldwell,” Allie said with a smile, shaking his hand and then sitting down across from his desk, her eyes quickly passing over the various posters, trophies, and randomly strewn papers in the office, which was surprisingly small for an owner of what was reputably a successful business. “I might not look it, but I happen to be fond of boxing. I’m from a ways out of town, but someone told me you have a little boxing league here?”
“Not a league,” said Gutshall. “But we train fighters and sponsor matches on a regular basis. It’s our calling card, and I daresay we’re the best boxing gym for quite some radius around here.” Allie knew all of that, but a little feigned ignorance went a long way.
“When do the fights usually happen?” Allie asked, although she already knew the answer to that too.
“Every other Friday, most of the time, we have Fight Night,” said Gutshall. “Typically admission is ten bucks, and there are between three and five fights on the card, from various weight classes. We also have a few small refreshment stands. We have a couple of bigger-ticket fighters, really good fighters, and when they fight admission can be a little bit more, twenty or twenty-five depending on the fight. We put ads in the local paper advertising our cards a week in advance.” He was giving a little sales pitch at this point. Something about this conversation seemed odd to him; something was strange about a knockout of a young woman coming to his very modest gym and asking about the Fight Nights.
“Speaking of which, is this the gym where a guy named Olin Pond fights?” said Allie, finally getting to her point.
“Yeah,” said Gutshall. He paused and frowned. “You a reporter?”
Allie smiled. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, at risk of sounding rude when I don’t mean to be,” said Gutshall, “I got a feeling, just call it a gut feeling, you’re here working for somebody. Is there anything you want? A tour, free tickets?”
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Gutshall,” said Allie, “I can only assure you I’m not here on behalf of anyone but myself. I shouldn’t take much more of your time, but do you know when Pond is fighting next?”
Gutshall pushed his glasses up his nose, as he often did when perplexed. “He hasn’t fought much lately,” he said. “But I’m about seventy percent sure he’s going to fight next Friday. I have to finish the arrangements, but I think I have somebody to fight him.”
“Thank you very much for your help,” said Allie with another one of her cheerful smiles. “Do you put ads in the Record & Courier?”
“Yeah, I do,” said Gutshall. “If you get that paper, look for an ad on Monday or Tuesday about it. I publish the cards in the ads.”
Allie thanked Gutshall again and drove home, humming happily to herself.
What Allie had heard from Val and Alan Vorstad was very close to the truth as well as anyone knew it. Olin Pond’s story was short and utterly devoid of any information of substance. His past was completely unknown to everyone, and no one knew whether he had any relatives. He was never seen in the company of any particular friend, and in reference to the question Val never directly answered for Allie, no one ever saw him on a date with anyone, not even once. As is usually the case when someone who is unpopular is not married or frequently dating, speculation about his sexual orientation fluttered around from ear to ear.
Pond had appeared, as though out of the ether, in Broxton in 2008, at twenty-six years of age, and took over as John Parrella's personal secretary not long after. Everyone simply arrived at work one Monday morning to see a new desk in place and completely set up, directly in front of Parrella’s office, and Olin Pond sitting there as though he were born there.
Olin Pond also appeared at the Sixth Street Gym at the same time he arrived at the Record & Courier. Not a soul on earth knew this, but the reason Pond moved to Broxton was because he had known Trent Gutshall since childhood, and Gutshall had agreed to rent him a small room in the gym’s basement. Pond went to the gym almost nightly – four or five times a week on the average, it was estimated – dressed himself in shorts, an old T-shirt, and boxing gloves, and went downstairs to his little room. He had lined the walls with thick wrestling mats, propped up a dummy in the corner, and hanged three punching bags from the low ceiling. A while later he added to the punching bags five or six medicine balls, also hanged from the ceiling, a few high, a few low. Down there, in the dark, his muffled shouts, grunts, and furious screams could be heard in the adjacent rooms despite the padding in the room as he hit the bags, the dummy, the walls, furiously, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for three hours. Those few who heard it and the fewer who had seen it called it the most intense workouts they’d ever seen. And every morning, Pond returned to his desk, where every day he was utterly calm and cold as he went about his business. John Parrella told his few private friends Pond was the best secretary he’d ever heard of.
When Pond showed up at the Sixth Street Gym the next day after work, Gutshall was waiting for him at the dressing room, as he sometimes did. “Hey Olin,” he said at Pond passed by with a storm quietly raging in his eyes. “Talk to you a sec before you try to knock down my building?”
“Go for it,” said Pond quietly.
Gutshall talked while Pond changed from his business suit into his shorts and T-shirt. “A very odd thing happened yesterday. Someone came in here asking about when you fight.”
Pond stopped and turned to Gutshall. “A fighter?”
Gutshall shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. I suspect it was an out-of-town reporter. I think word about you is getting around.”
“You ‘suspect’?” Pond growled.
“Well, the thing is,” Gutshall said, “This was a girl couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and she was smoking hot. She might have been one of the five best-looking women I’ve ever personally laid eyes on. The only thing about her was…”
Pond had already ceased what he was doing and sat straight up on the bench, his body tensing. “Let me guess,” he interrupted. Gutshall stopped. “The only thing about her was, she was missing her left hand.”
Gutshall was flabbergasted. “How in the world did you know that?”
Pond sat still and rigid as a rock. “Call me psychic,” he said.
“Am I to believe you know this girl?”
Pond didn’t say anything for a moment or two, and all that could be heard was the sound of his thick breathing. “Allie Caldwell. She started working at the paper about a month ago.”
“So she is a reporter, then.”
“She wasn’t here for a story,” said Pond, suddenly rising.
“So what was she here for?”
Pond didn’t answer. He rose, leaving Gutshall sitting on the bench, and walked out of the room with a heavy step. A few seconds later, everyone downstairs could hear – some said they could feel – the force as he whaled on the walls and dummies in his closet-room.
No comments:
Post a Comment