Free The Dream of the Broken Horses by William Bayer Page A

till the second rest period when I looked with shock at the red towel in Jerry's hand.
    "You're a mess, but you're doing great," Jerry assured me.
    Mr. Jessup came over.
    "You okay?"
    I nodded.
    "Good! Terrific fight," he said, then moved away.
    If I had managed to hold my own in the first two rounds, things fell apart for me in the third. Perhaps it was exhaustion, also Mark's superior athletic ability. Whatever the cause, I realized I was getting beaten. Then suddenly, I remember, I felt my legs give out from under me as I was rocked by a terrific blow to the chin. I fell to the mat. I remember Mr. Jessup   giving me a ten count as I struggled to stand up, then shaking my gloves and staring deeply into my eyes while motioning Mark back. I remember standing there stunned, barely able to raise my gloves, as Mark attacked, hitting me in the stomach, then letting loose with a vicious blow to my lower belly that sent me down again.
    I remember writhing on the mat in pain and blood, feeling I was going to throw up. It was so obviously an illegal low blow, Mr. Jessup should have stopped the bout right there. Instead he methodically counted me out, yanked me up, then raised Mark's arm in victory. Then amidst cheers from the crowd, he instructed us to shake hands . . . which we did.
    Later in the locker room, Jerry beside me while I bent over a sink trying to stanch a cut on my lip, several kids came up to say I'd gotten a rotten deal, that after the low blow Jessup should have stopped the fight and called a draw. Better still, Mark Fulraine came over to apologize.
    "The low blow was an accident. I don't fight dirty," he said solemnly. "I still don't like that picture you drew," he added before going off with his friends.
    Still later, showered and dressed, crossing the empty gym, I remember watching as a school janitor mopped our blood off the white rubber cover they used to protect the mats.
    Contrary to schoolboy mythology, Mark Fulraine and I did not become friends. But after our fight he showed me decent respect, his way, I guess, of saying he was sorry for what he'd said. Suddenly more kids seemed to like me, too. On Graduation Day, there was an exhibition of my sketches in one of the hallways of Lower School. Several boys made a point of introducing me as "class artist" to their parents.
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    I' ve been drawing here in the gym for nearly an hour. Now, hearing the sounds of kids returning from soccer practice, I put down my pencil and examine my work. I've got the fight down pretty well, I think. Rather than depicting myself as victim, a role I dislike, I've drawn Mark and me as equally fierce competitors. I also have Mr. Jessup as he appeared to me that day, aloof and out of touch; Jerry, my friend, rooting for me in my corner; and Tim, my betrayer, half turned away, treason in his eyes. But it's my depiction of the audience I like best, their faces filled with those particular pleasureful expressions boys assume while watching other boys fight—identification with aggression, intense interest in the outcome, enjoying too the suffering and debasement of the loser.
    As for Mr. Jessup, though he never acknowledged that he'd refereed unfairly, in class he continued to praise my work. Still I soured on him. I assumed he'd favored Mark because of the Fulraine family connection to the school. It was only later that I found out that Mrs. Fulraine had hired him that spring to give private tennis and boxing lessons to Mark and Robin, and that, in the early days of their romance, those coaching sessions served as the pretext for Tom to visit the Fulraine estate, where, afterwards, while the boys frolicked in the family pool, he and Barbara Fulraine retreated to her bedroom to make frantic, illicit love.
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    T om Jessup had a secret.   I was convinced of it. There was something different about him that spring, the way he spoke and moved, which, perhaps because of my hurt over his betrayal, I was eager to understand. The