The morning after Ed Hooley saw a coyote in the supply closet, Bob Alexander declared something smelled rotten inside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.
This was at six a.m. on a Tuesday, midway through abs and stretching. Inside the ring, the eleven members of the First Thing crew sprawled out on foam mats as Terry Tucker, fifty-four, led them through an arduous medley of scissor kicks and side-to-sides, knees-to-your-ears and upside-down bicycle. It was August in Austin, the average age inside the ring was forty-nine, and though it would be hours before a single speck of perspiration would appear on Terry’s left temple, his charges were sopping.
Sopping except for Bob Alexander. Bob was lanky and spry, a semi-affable curmudgeon. At sixty-eight, he was the oldest of the First Thingers and among the fittest, too, though on this morning he was only going through the motions. Preoccupying Bob was the anonymous note that had been placed under the windshield wiper of his Audi sometime the night before.
It had been a decade since his nephew had disappeared, and things like this still happened on occasion. A lead to nowhere, a tip to nothing. A psychic in New Braunfels who’d experienced a vision. “Sounds promising,” Bob had told the detective who’d called with that gem. A few days before, a short article on the tenth anniversary of the disappearance had run in the Statesman, so of course the kooks and grifters were coming out of the woodwork now.
No one had ever shown up at his house before, though, and it was this, combined with the note’s puzzling content, which meant that as soon as Bob left the gym, he would take the folded paper, stowed in his glove compartment, to Austin Police headquarters, a time-suck in building form, where, if he had to guess, he’d rehash the story of his missing nephew, Nathaniel Rothstein, without coming any closer to finding him.
Bob had never figured out how to talk about it all. It was strange to lose a nephew. Lose a son, well, that’s awful. A tragedy. But a nephew? Who even liked their nephew? Nephews were always conspiring against patriarchs, trying to kill the king. And why shouldn’t they? Uncles were worse. Bob liked to joke it was amazing he was never a suspect given the reputation of that breed. “You want to end pedophilia?” Bob had told the Statesman reporter. “Ban uncles.”
“That is off the record and he’s kidding,” Bob’s wife, Marlene, had been quick to add. “He’s a professor,” she’d said, by way of explanation. “That’s why he’s so… voluble.”
“I’m more voluble than a professor,” said Bob, recently retired. “Professor emeritus.”
Even with his friends here, at the gym, Bob rarely brought it up. Most of them had known Nathaniel, too. The kid had spent hours hitting the heavy bag that weird summer of 1998. But there were parts of the story the First Thingers didn’t know, parts Bob didn’t want them to know. Besides, with them it was easy to ignore the subject. People “disappeared” from this place all the time. It was the nature of the business, the nature of a gym.
That was where Bob’s mind was on this seemingly typical Tuesday morning at Terry Tucker’s, when, halfway through two-minute planks, he let out a sigh signaling he could no longer remain balanced on his forearms and slumped facedown onto his mat. There, his nose an inch above the canvas, Bob smelled The Smell for the first time and, surveying the rest of his cohort—flush and grimacing but all, much to his annoyance, still in position—said, “Who laid an egg in here? It smells like a colostomy bag.”
It should be noted that except for Bob Alexander, none of the First Thingers smelled anything unusual. No matter. This was exactly the sort of scandal they lived for, the reason they showed up each morning before scooting off to garages downtown or office parks along 360, the only evidence of their pre-dawn lives stashed in gym bags or tossed into hampers. Among the regulars were a money manager, multiple realtors, a district court judge. Turned out hitting inanimate objects for an hour before work made office life more tolerable. Turned out no one was making poop jokes with the guy one elliptical over at Planet Fitness.
And so, despite the fact that the only foreign odor emanating from their surroundings was the breakfast sausage that Ed Hooley—the gym’s “squatter-in-residence”—had been heating on a hot plate in his small room at the back, still scrawny Judge Ulbrecht said, “How you know it’s a solid?” and Bob replied, “Is that an admission of guilt, Your Honor?” to which Jocelyn Carter, self-described as the biggest butch in this band of weenies, countered, “Doesn’t shit usually come out of an asshole, Bob?” The others yowled in approval. “Not bad,” said Bob, his mood improving. “Not bad.”
Were Ed Hooley present for this exchange, he would have known for certain that the coyote he thought he saw at 12:54 that morning was not a figment of his imagination, nor was the stool sample he found inside the ring at 3:01, two sheepish grins curled one atop the other. For almost twenty minutes, he’d scrubbed the stain with Oxi-Clean wipes, then covered it with three strips of duct tape, as he’d seen Terry do with rips in the canvas. After, he’d sprayed citrus-scented Febreze over the offending area and laid a foam mat on top, which, three hours later, Bob Alexander would appropriate for abs and stretching. But Ed was in his room finishing breakfast, and by the time he came out to sweep, the First Thingers had descended the boxing ring’s shaky metal steps, passed through the garage doors that faced the gravel lot, and begun their morning run.
Please let her be real. This was what Ed told himself as he gathered the dust bunnies that had somehow collected in the eight hours since he’d last swept. It had looked like a coyote. Mangy and matted, like someone had taken a dog and beaten out the cuteness.
Ed ran his broom along the wall, pausing in front of the supply closet. He’d never liked that musty sliver of a storeroom, shelves of cobwebbed fight trophies and mismatched gloves. But Terry always told him his main responsibility was to “keep an eye on the place,” which was why, when Ed heard that rustling just before one a.m., he’d risen from his cot, walked through the darkened weight room, past the cluster of sleeping heavy bags, and to the closet door across from the ring. There the noise intensified: claws on cardboard, a low growl. It’s only in your head, his identical twin, Larry, always told him. For fifty-two years, this had accounted for most of Ed’s problems. He took a deep breath.
The coyote had been pawing through a box of unspooled hand wraps. She craned her neck to observe the figure in the doorway, squat and ruddy-faced. Her chary yellow eyes locked with Ed’s, wide and watery, and in that moment, Ed did what anyone might do whose fate relied on knowing the real from the imaginary and whose track record in this knowing was not good: he shut the door and, left eye twitching, returned to his room, where he lay awake, tapping his socked foot against the floor.
And now, at 6:13 a.m., five hours after the sighting, three hours after he’d worked up the courage to return, only to discover those devilish droppings but no beast, he was ready to try again.
Ed ran a finger over the scar along his neck, a crude rendering of the number two, carved into him many years before. He touched the doorknob gingerly.
Please let her be real.
Ed’s residency at the gym, he knew, was predicated not only on his “keeping an eye on the place,” but also on his ability to “stay sane-ish,” and as peculiar as it would be for a coyote to be hiding in the supply closet, it was significantly less peculiar than the alternative: that the only place that hungry coyote existed was in Ed Hooley’s mind.
Ed didn’t find her in the supply closet. Nor was the coyote hiding against the deceased pommel horse underneath the ring; behind the cracked toilet in the bathroom; nor below any of the torn barber’s chairs from which, starting at two p.m. daily, old-timers debated who would win fights that never happened, the sound of leather on flesh and the smell of sweat and Vaseline doing as much to keep them alive as any diet or doctor, or so understood their wives, whose own mental health depended on those afternoons alone.
The coyote wasn’t in the gravel lot, either, which was where Ed was searching when the First Thingers began to trickle back from their run. “Hey, Ed,” they called, slapping his shoulder as they made their way into the gym. “Hey,” twanged Ed, nodding to the passing herd. He prayed they hadn’t seen him moments earlier, crawling around their cars.
Ed felt a special loyalty to the First Thingers. It was they who’d outfitted his room when he’d shown up three years before. Jocelyn Carter had spearheaded the campaign, securing a spare cot from the nurse’s office at Burnet Middle School, where she taught biology. Soon, others followed. Ed inherited a ten-speed bicycle, the hot plate. Items destined for Goodwill ended up with him instead: a deck of well-used Uno cards, a lava lamp. One day, Bob Alexander showed up with an entire garbage bag of supplies.
This was in the winter of 2005, seven years after his nephew Nathaniel’s disappearance. By then, enough time had passed that the missing boy rarely came up in gym conversation; only those who’d been around at the time knew the details. Nathaniel had come by way of Newton, Mass., the troubled, taciturn son of Bob’s harried sister, no dad in sight. In Austin, he’d loosened up, started coming to the gym. Then one day, poof, gone. Never to be seen again.
In the days after the vanishing, Bob had batted away any attempted condolences with a confident “He’ll be back.” As the months passed and the kid stayed gone, Bob found other ways to say, Let’s not go there: “Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m not missing.” Or: “Everyone’s got something, right?” To Bob’s gym friends, it seemed like he couldn’t acknowledge the weight of what happened, or just wanted to forget it. So it was a bit of a surprise when Bob appeared with a garbage bag of the kid’s stuff, which his friends assumed he’d long ago sent back to Boston, or thrown away. Bob had made this move without consulting his wife or benefiting from her curational abilities. Inside were the sloppy seconds of a nineties-era high school boy: a bottle of Acqua di Gio cologne, the liquid turned a sickly yellow; a leather Dopp kit, complete with dried-out Clearasil pads and half a tube of Colgate; the baggy novelty tees of a pudgy kid desperate for his peers to focus on shirts silkscreened with Bart or Beavis and not on the body beneath them. “Thanks for taking this stuff off my hands,” he’d told Ed.
Ever since, Ed had kept the small cash allowance Terry paid him in an electric-blue Velcro wallet, which still housed an age-softened reminder card from Newton Centre Orthodontics for an appointment scheduled a decade before. Ed’s boxing gloves were the missing boy’s, as was the gym bag he kept them in. On cold days, it wasn’t atypical to find Ed Hooley in an oversized Patriots hoodie and matching beanie. Practically a sin in Texas.
Bob had never told Ed the story of his nephew; Ed had picked that up from the others. But like a transplant recipient in the presence of his dead donor’s kin, Ed felt a quiet reverence for Bob Alexander.
Now, at 6:41 a.m. in the gravel lot outside the gym, Ed watched the old professor trot toward him, the last of the First Thingers to return from their run.
“Heya, Bob,” said Ed hopefully.
Bob raised his bushy eyebrows in acknowledgment, continued into the gym.
Ed wanted to tell him about the coyote, but he knew that level of honesty wouldn’t lead anywhere good. Instead, he followed Bob inside, screwing up his mouth like his twin brother had once taught him, to keep the words from tumbling out into the world.
For the next three hours, Ed completed his chores as usual. He deposited a case of plastic water bottles into the refrigerator near the gym’s entrance, leaving the crinkled dollar bills in the Tupperware on the top shelf untouched. In the weight room, he Windexed the mirror-covered walls, hoping the coyote might appear in the spritz and smears. By ten, Ed was changing the dimming bulb in the bathroom, so tired from his restless sleep that he resolved to take a short nap.
That resolve weakened when he emerged from the bathroom. There he saw Terry Tucker kneeling in the ring, cutting duct tape with his teeth and laying it over the spot Ed swore he’d already covered. “What you doing?” Ed asked, frozen next to a double-end bag.
“Fixing a tear in the canvas,” said Terry, smoothing out a strip. “Nothing to see here.”
To another man in another profession, what Terry Tucker saw that Tuesday morning might’ve elicited a wince or a grimace, some evidence that his facial muscles remained intact. But for thirty-five years, Terry had walked the narrow isthmus between the seas of sport and criminality, and on that crooked strip of land called Boxing, this sort of aggravation seemed, if not typical, plausible enough.
Terry had spent the morning on the phone, trying to lock down an inaugural opponent for twenty-one-year-old Alexis Cepeda, his latest fighter to turn pro. Cepeda had been runner-up at regional Golden Gloves in San Antonio, but recently he’d seemed unsure of himself in the ring. Much to Terry’s irritation, he’d also begun showing up late, as was the case this morning.
Terry’s own career as a trainer had never taken off as he’d imagined. Fights had yielded modest paydays, but most of his income came from the gym. He’d opened the place in ’84, in what had been Ming’s Automotive, the building’s past life evident in the garage doors and in a rusty old gas pump that still stood near the entrance to the gravel lot. Terry had once believed success would mean finding a fighter to go all the way with. Over the years, he’d learned that the one he’d be going all the way with was Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.
People came and went, the gym remained. It didn’t stay the same, exactly. Year after year it became ever more itself. Inside, the walls were covered in tattered fight posters over which Terry was forever stapling fresh ones, fights at the Alamodome, fights at Austin Coliseum, so many fights it seemed one could drain the walls of cement and insulation and the building would stand on the strength of those posters alone. Many listed days and months but no years, Alvarez–Barrowman from the previous December already sun-bleached, edges fraying, its age indistinguishable from Hopkins–De La Hoya, from Hagler–Hearns.
Expect nothing from no one, Terry had learned, but be open to everyone, because you never knew. Who would stick with it, who would burn out. For years he’d tried to force his patrons to enter the gym through his cramped front office rather than via the garage doors; he liked to have eyes on all who passed, every newcomer a potential investment. As his dreams of discovering the next x, y, or z dimmed (and this was boxing almost a decade into the twenty-first century: most people didn’t know who x, y, or z was in the first place), he loosened up on that particular rule. Still: you never knew.
Would Alexis Cepeda make it? All Terry knew for sure was that if the kid could gain some confidence back, maybe he had an outside chance.
This chance was why, at 9:55 a.m., Terry Tucker, stacking the foam mats still laid out from that morning’s class, cradled his portable phone on his shoulder and listened to the nasal whir of Lemuel Pugh, on a scratchy line from across town, try to sell him on “a fellow with a very mild palsy,” for Lemuel, ninety-one, made a living promoting surefire losers for up-and-comers to KO.
“You gonna deny a boy his dream on account of a little shaky-shake?” Lemuel was saying when Terry noticed it: a greenish brown crust around the rims of three new strips of duct tape, just above the spot where Bob Alexander’s nose had hovered four hours prior.
“Seems like it,” said Terry, squatting down to get a closer look. He pulled the tape back, the crust expanding into a damp mass of putridity.
“OK, try this on your noggin, then: I got an old boy, one win, thirty-nine losses…”
The smell wafted up, through Terry’s nostrils and to his brain, where an image formed of a grapefruit in sunglasses reading the newspaper on the toilet.
It wasn’t the stain itself that caused Terry to itch at his thick salt-and-pepper goatee (consolation, he called it, for all he’d lost on top), to stop listening to Lemuel’s interminable nattering. It wasn’t even that someone had indeed laid an egg in his ring, a serious crime for which he could already name several suspects.
What bothered Terry was that he could envision, with startling accuracy, what happened after Ed Hooley discovered the specimen at 3:01 that morning. He knew Ed wasn’t the perpetrator. He knew, too, that this was the sort of incident that could lead to a Hooley meltdown: Ed’s left eye spasming as he stammered and wept and begged to stay.
Terry had learned a few things since Ed walked through the garage doors three years before, a stocky man in a stinking sleeveless shirt, his limp brown hair combed inexplicably forward. Between bouts of soft conversation with himself, Ed had claimed his twin brother would be back for him in an hour.
“One night only,” Terry had told the vagrant at closing time, the alleged twin nowhere to be found. The next day Terry showed up to find Ed had stayed awake cleaning, not a bang-up job but more than the gym owner usually mustered. “Two nights only,” said Terry.
Now, peering down at the canvas, Terry told Lemuel he’d call him back. Ed had been right to cover the stain, but he’d only used three strips of duct tape when no less than double that would do. Terry jumped down from the ring, grabbed the roll off his desk.
He tried to move quickly, lest Ed catch him in the act. But just as he was laying down a sixth and final strip, Ed came out of the bathroom.
“What you doing?” Ed asked, and Terry could see the panic in his eyes.
If only he’d known what was going through that Hooley mind. Someone shit in the ring, he would’ve said, it happened, let’s continue with our lives! But everything in Terry’s experience suggested candor wasn’t the best policy here, which was why he said, “Fixing a tear in the canvas. Nothing to see here,” and smoothed an already perfectly laid strip of duct tape, and stared at it until he thought Ed was gone.
Ed was still there, however, holding on to the tether of a double-end bag, his left eye twitching, so Terry resorted to his only option left. “Wrap up,” he called. Sometimes the only way to get Ed out of his head was to make him move his feet.
Eleven minutes later, at 10:13, Ed Hooley, hands carefully wrapped, clambered up the metal steps and met Terry Tucker in the center of the ring.
At the very moment Ed’s right glove hit Terry’s left focus mitt, the coyote, curled inside a truck tire lying flat on the weight room floor, awoke to the whoosh of a jump rope swinging so fast that the cable never once smacked against the rubber flooring. Had Miriam Lopez, twenty-two, been paying attention to her skipping reflection in the mirrored wall, she might’ve noticed two pointed ears poking out from the truck tire six feet behind her. But Miriam—the gym’s only patron at that dead late-morning hour—wasn’t watching Miriam. She was watching Ed, through the doorway separating weight room from ring room, lumber around the canvas.
It was hard to look away. There was slight and nimble Terry calling out, “Jab jab jab,” and there was Ed, red and wheezing, smashing his gloved fist again and again into Terry’s covered hand. He was a hesitant fighter, Ed Hooley, eyeing the mitts suspiciously, as if at any moment they might grow little leather arms and hit back. When he got tired, he’d bite his lower lip, snap his head against his shoulder.
“One two!” Terry called, and Ed threw his left, then his right. “One two hook two!” Jab cross hook cross.
Miriam swung the rope twice before allowing her feet to touch the ground, then three times, causing it to whistle. She’d found the boxing gym at the start of field training. “You’re about to embark on eleven weeks working overnights with me,” her field training officer had told her on day one, pleasantly suppressing a belch. “So you may want to find a way to blow off steam.” This morning, before Miriam arrived at the gym, they’d dropped off a robbery suspect at APD headquarters, her final act as an apprentice. Tomorrow, Probationary Police Officer Miriam Lopez would set out on her own.
She knew she wasn’t ready. The rap on PPO Lopez was that she lacked, in the words of her training officer, a certain “Jew no say qua,” that ineffable Do not even think about fucking with me quality that cops exuded. Their first night together, Miriam had watched the officer break up a college party inside a packed apartment on Riverside Drive. “PSA if you’d like to avoid a repeat visit from yours truly,” he’d told the crowd: “you can either smoke this much pot or play your music this loud, but you cannot do both.” Before he’d finished, it seemed to Miriam as if the apartment had emptied, the fog of smoke lifted.
Whatever that was, Miriam didn’t have it. “Perps don’t respond to passivity,” he’d told her another time, after she’d allowed a drunk to back-talk her.
“I guess I’m more of a doer,” Miriam said to her shoes.
“Do with your mouth,” he’d instructed.
Why was she like this? Miriam couldn’t even bring herself to tell Ed Hooley to quit staring at her, a habit of his if he wasn’t otherwise occupied.
In the ring, Terry stabbed a mitt into Ed’s belly, his sign for done good, then extended his arms, mitts facing the canvas. “Five six five!” Terry called. Ed squatted low, uppercutting the pads.
The coyote yawned from her tire, buried her face in her paws.
The guy was weird around women, Miriam knew. He’d sing their names to tunes he’d invented, offer strange gifts, like swans he’d made from old candy wrappers that never quite turned out. Miriam had watched others refuse Ed’s bad origami, tell him to buzz off with ease. She could never access that part of herself.
It wasn’t that she was scared of Ed physically. Miriam had scored well on the APD fitness test, still held the Lanier High record in the 1500 meters. Hell, she could shoot him in the head if she had to. It was never the doing that paralyzed Miriam Lopez, only the forever in between.
“You got one more round in you?” Terry asked Ed as Miriam moved into the ring room, taking a spot under one of the speed bags. “Lopez,” barked Terry. She turned, raised her wrapped hand to say hello. From the ring, Terry nodded to her, asked Ed for a one-two. Miriam started in on the speed bag. Maybe her real problem with Ed Hooley was that he reminded her a little too much of being on the clock. She ran into a lot of Eds in a night, Eds at their lowest. This Ed, safe inside the gym, was probably the best version on offer. Being a cop was kind of like being a social worker, Miriam had come to realize. Problem was, she wasn’t social.
That’s what she’d told Bob Alexander, at least, when she’d run into him seventy minutes prior, in front of APD headquarters. Miriam had been headed out the revolving door, still trying to get the burglar’s rank odor out of her nostrils, just as Bob had stepped in it. He spotted her mid-revolution, kept on revolving until it spat him out next to her, at the top of the steps to the building. “You,” Bob had said, pointing a long finger at her. “I know you.”
He was still in the sweat-splotched ensemble she assumed he’d worn to the gym: a pocket T-shirt and high white socks. Miriam had seen Bob there only a couple of times, him leaving late or her coming early. She liked those old, yapping morning people, with whom she couldn’t get a word in even if she’d wanted.
Outside police headquarters, Bob had insisted on buying Miriam a coffee from the vendor across the street. “Anything to not go into that building.”
Until then, she’d never heard about Bob’s nephew’s disappearance, didn’t know what to make of the folded note Bob pulled from the pocket of his tennis shorts. On it, someone had written his nephew’s birthdate in a childlike scrawl. 10/27/81.
“That’s all they wrote?” Miriam had asked him.
“Pretty weird,” said Bob. “But people are weird. I have to say: I would not have suspected you were a police officer.” He’d dealt with many a cop since his nephew disappeared. “I know they’re trying to help, but I’ve never been down for the big swinging dick stuff. Have you?”
“You talk a lot on this job,” said Miriam. “A lot more than I thought when I signed up.” That’s when she’d confessed to Bob that she wasn’t social.
“Better than some of your colleagues,” said Bob. “They’re antisocial.”
It had occurred to Miriam then that it might be wise to change the subject from the big swinging dicks of her antisocial colleagues, many of whom were in the building right across from them. “So, you have any idea what happened to him, your nephew?”
“I had my theories back in the day,” said Bob. “When something terrible happens, it’s easy to let the mind go wild. You get to be my age, you realize the answers are never that interesting. Some BS note on my car?” A theatrical shrug. “Just another Tuesday.”
Miriam thanked him for the coffee.
“Nathaniel Rothstein,” he said, by way of signing off. The name of his nephew. “You ever hear anything about his case, maybe you’ll let me know.”
“Hey, Bob, if you don’t mind my asking…” said Miriam, as the old man turned to go. “If I don’t seem like a cop, what do I seem like?”
Bob considered this a moment, then raised his coffee cup in a toast. “A normal person,” he said, and continued across the street.
At Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, Miriam attacked the speed bag with alternating fists, embarrassed at the memory. Bob had told her about what must’ve been the worst thing that ever happened to him, and that’s how she’d responded? She glanced back at Ed Hooley.
In only eleven weeks, Miriam had learned that her city contained a limitless supply of limited people, enough undesirables loitering on the margins that, were they to choose a single spot to congregate, they could form a city of their own. The cops Miriam worked with were so at ease patrolling those sordid fringes. Not PPO Lopez. She was too unsure of herself to meld with the rest of that mordant lot, whose personalities, on the job, seemed to become one personality: Police. She didn’t even think like a cop. Why hadn’t she asked Bob more questions about that creepy note? Miriam was too preoccupied searching for clues to a more pressing mystery: the mystery of herself.
Had Miriam been less inside her head, she might’ve sensed a nearby rustling, might’ve glanced not at Ed Hooley but through the doorway to the weight room, where she would’ve seen the coyote standing tentatively on quivering legs, head bobbing slightly.
If Miriam had then walked closer, she would’ve understood that the animal wasn’t drifting off, but rather was staring at the mirrored wall, mesmerized by the sight of the saddest creature the coyote had ever seen.
The coyote took a wobbly step forward. The mirror creature did the same. This is not good, thought the coyote, and, unnerved, headed toward Miriam. But there was too much noise coming from over there, so the coyote circled the other way, past her tire, under benches, between dumbbells, and toward the only door in sight, nudging it open with her snout. In the far corner of this new room, an unmade bedsheet hung over the side of a cot. She struggled under the narrow bed, relieved to find a secure hiding space.
The round ended at 10:43. Terry returned to his office, determined to track down Alexis Cepeda, his (potentially) promising young fighter whose tardy had stretched into an unexcused absence. In the ring, Ed pulled off his gloves, then started toward his room as a new round began. Miriam Lopez didn’t turn when he passed but knew once he was no longer there. She thwacked at the speed bag harder than before. He’d want to say hello (he liked that girl, liked how her short ponytail poked out the back of her ball cap), but the day had been too much for Ed Hooley. Exhausted, from the mitts and the all-nighter, exhausted of himself, he kicked off his sneakers and lay down without bothering to unwrap his hands.
In the years before his brother dropped him here, Ed sometimes used to bathe in nearby Shoal Creek. He knew coyotes lived in the woods surrounding those murky waters, had listened to them howl late at night. The way Ed saw it, back then, he’d invaded their home. He wondered if one was now returning the favor.
Ed could hear his other half scoffing at the notion. No coyote’s comin’ for you, brother. Ed and Larry hadn’t lived together since childhood, their reunions always brief before Larry was off again on his next adventure. Yet no matter how long they were apart, Larry’s low voice was always with his twin. He offered Ed firm if abstruse advice, the proud architect of a language of which he was the only fluent speaker. Now imbibe some air and shut them peepers. “You’re right, Larry,” said Ed, trying to get comfortable. “You’re right.”
Thirty-three minutes later, calmed by the thrum of Ed Hooley’s snores, the coyote excused herself from underneath the cot. There was food in this room, she knew, not any of her favorites (oh, blessed rat!) but something, and she sensed it was trapped underneath two coils atop the hot plate on the floor. The coyote licked at the coils, stuck her tongue low between them.
No rat, but it would do.
At 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday, August 12, 2008, as the napping Ed Hooley approached his fourth hour of unconsciousness, a different scene was playing out on a mattress five miles south of Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.
In a messy condominium on South Congress Avenue, twenty-one-year-old Alexis Cepeda, only three minutes awake, was pulling owl-print bedsheets this way and that in hopes of finding his boxer shorts when he noticed a note scrawled in Sharpie across his left leg: PROPERTY OF B.S.!!! Door locks itself!!
For her part, B.S., a.k.a. Bethanny Simons, a first-year associate at the law firm of Elkins and Meriwether LLP, was already in the fifth hour of a continuing legal education course deep inside the Sheraton Downtown, in the most frigid of their conference spaces, the cavernous Ballroom C. This particular seminar, A Guide to the Texas Franchise Tax, was sponsored by the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants, and if one was curious as to why B.S. had decided, the previous night, to bed a twenty-one-year-old (!) boxer (!!) from Mexico (!!!), one needn’t look further than either side of the poor girl now. To her left: a sallow wretch, a dribble of chicken salad from the complimentary boxed lunch hanging precariously from the edge of his mouth. To her right: a woman who looked alarmingly like Bethanny might twenty years from now if she wasn’t careful—hips swollen, thighs thickened, those wild apricot curls tamed into a sullen flop. Your life is so fun now, isn’t it? this beaten-down version of Bethanny seemed to be signaling to Actual Bethanny through heavy eyes. Just wait two decades, bitch.
At lunch, against her better judgment, Bethanny had called Alexis’s phone (“Just wanted to make sure you made it out OK!” she planned) but no one answered. She phoned again at the 2:30 break, curious if Alexis’s recollection of their night together was the same as hers. By then, Alexis’s phone was dead, and all Bethanny got was an automated message telling her the voicemail was full.
As it turned out, Alexis’s memory of the evening was hideously intact, which was why, when B.S. called that second time, at 2:30, her young one-night stand, due at the gym five hours earlier, was instead bent naked before the sink top in the pastel blast of empty lotion bottles that constituted Bethanny’s bathroom, madly scrubbing at his Sharpied leg with a worn lime loofah.
“Best way to get your big head straight is to get your little head straight,” Carlos Ortega had told him the afternoon before. Carlos, forty-one, was an ex-fighter known for working everyone at the gym to their last nerve. Six hours prior to Alexis meeting Bethanny, Carlos had watched the lightweight shuffle sluggishly around the heavy bag. “You get worse every day,” grumbled Carlos, who didn’t speak so much as cough up words. “You ask me,” he added, raising a finger, “too much pussy.”
Carlos Ortega said this hopefully, because too much pussy was his way of saying not enough pussy, tell me about pussy. Later, on the hood of Carlos’s 1982 Cimarron, Alexis explained his problem: Three weeks before, he’d told his girlfriend that he was going pro and she’d burst into tears. “You in six-inch heels, me coming out to Akon… are you seriously not smiling right now?” he’d said, holding her close. The way Izzy Escobedo looked at him then, he knew there was someone else.
To Alexis’s family, it was shocking he’d lasted this long. Sure, he was cute (tight fade, Who me? grin, even the fist-flattened nose had its charms). Izzy Escobedo, though? She was serious. National Honor Society; a Scholastic Art Award; Marian the Librarian in the Travis High production of The Music Man.
“Hold on to that one,” Alexis’s tía Lola had been saying for years, never quite believing that her goofball nephew might actually pull this off.
He would have, too, if Izzy hadn’t enrolled at Texas State, if her T.A. in organic chemistry hadn’t been Augustine Benavides.
“Prince Augustine,” Alexis sneered from the hood of Carlos’s car.
“I was you, I’d fuck him up,” offered Carlos.
Problem was, Alexis needed to fuck up guys much tougher than Augustine. Carlos was right: he was getting worse. No focus, sloppy footwork. Since the summer he’d met Izzy when he was thirteen, Alexis’s entire life had revolved around her and boxing, and without one, the other suffered, and without both, well…
“Best way to get over pussy is more pussy,” Carlos advised/imagined, which was how Alexis ended up downing shots at Wild Bill’s on Dirty Sixth, why he’d sidled up to that boozy redhead alone at the bar.
She was a chatty girl whose exuberance didn’t quite mask her general ungainliness, twenty-five and dressed like she’d raided an older woman’s closet for executive wear that didn’t settle on her like it should.
Bethanny had come post-work, just one drink after a long day, but then one drink became two drinks and two drinks became Alexis Cepeda.
Their flirtation was concise. He told her she had the most freckles of anyone he’d ever seen. She said he was almost short enough to be a jockey.
“What’s with the bling?” he asked, touching her thumbnail, which was painted azalea pink. She’d bejeweled it with a sparkly heart the week before, after a thirteen-hour day poring over regulation commentary resulted in a Yellowtail-fueled shopping binge, including forty impulsive minutes scouring nail art on the web.
“My boss told me it’s inappropriate,” she told Alexis, four shots in.
“Fuck your boss,” he said smoothly, motioned for another round.
“I kind of want to put you in my pocket,” she confided.
“I’m gonna be the champion of the world,” he slurred.
The sex lasted thirty-nine minutes. This was about twenty-nine minutes longer than either of them wanted, but every time Alexis got close to finishing, the detached head of Prince Augustine Benavides, pulled from MySpace, would float across the bed and multiply, settling on the girl’s face, her nipples, the owls on her bedspread, until there were five bobbling Augustine heads, ten of them, taunting him to finish. “Almost there,” he kept saying, as if repeating it enough might will it to be so.
“Like twenty minutes in I grab his butt,” Bethanny told her best friend, Justine, over the phone the next day from the Sheraton, after Alexis didn’t answer during the 2:30 break. She could feel the eyes of Beaten-Down Bethanny upon her as about a dozen of them made unnecessary phone calls in the hotel driveway, anything to escape the conference room air-conditioning, and each other.
“Jesus,” said Justine. “Your vagina must be a hellscape right now.” Justine sold muffins part-time out of a trailer called the New Cupcake on Barton Springs Road and at twenty-seven seemed primed for a career as the receptionist to a hard-drinking detective in a pulp novel. “Pistol wouldn’t shoot?”
“Pistol?” said Bethanny. “Try submachine gun.”
“A regular John Dillinger.”
“Is a submachine gun actually long?” asked Bethanny. “My point is I’m rubbing that little butt and you can tell he likes it. And I like it. Obviously. I mean, a boxer? And as I’m doing it he’s thrusting harder, all”—here she lowered her voice—“‘Yeah baby,’ and he’s moaning in Spanish, and I’m thinking, yes!, I’ve figured out the code to getting this dude off.” Bethanny made sure to say this last part loud enough for her beaten-down double to hear. “Except he’s still going and going, and I can, like, feel the UTI developing inside of me…” She turned back toward the hotel, satisfied to see her fat future-self galumphing through the Sheraton’s automatic door. “So finally I just stuck my thumb up his ass.”
Ding ding ding. It was as if Bethanny had pushed straight through Alexis Cepeda: his insides the roads of colonial Mexico, her thumb Miguel Hidalgo leading the revolution. He finished with a shudder, rolled off her in a daze. By the time Bethanny had peed and brushed her teeth, Alexis was fast asleep.
“Do you want to see him again?” asked Justine.
Bethanny scrunched her face, perplexed. “I really do.”
In the bathroom, Alexis set the loofah on the sink top, his leg no less markered than when he’d started scrubbing twelve minutes before. It wasn’t so much that it happened that bothered him, only that it felt so good.
Alexis turned away from the mirror and twisted his head around, straining to get a decent view of his backside. Looks right, he thought, hoping for some sign that everything was as it should be. Alexis massaged his neck. But how would I even know it looks right if I never seen my own ass before? Have I seen my own ass before? He spread himself open. Interesting…
If he’d explored more deeply, he might’ve seen something else of interest, but one look was enough for Alexis Cepeda, and it wasn’t until a few minutes later, when Bethanny returned to Ballroom C, that she thought to glance down at her thumb, painted azalea pink except for a patch of unpolished nail in the shape of a clumsy heart.
At 4:58 p.m. outside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, the gravel lot had begun to fill.
For much of its life, the gym had been sandwiched between a Burger King and a U-Haul rental on this practical stretch of North Lamar Boulevard. At the start of summer, word spread that a developer had bought the U-Haul lot. A high fence now surrounded that property, the stubby building where renters would check in leveled, the fleet of trucks vanquished. On the other side, cars snaked around the Burger King drive-thru.
In the gravel lot, patrons pulled workout bags from trunks or backseats, then started toward the garage doors. Pros and amateurs and none-of-the-aboves. A stumpy State Farm agent; a bone-thin muralist. Fifty-six-year-old Barbara-Ann Jaffee, a gabby market researcher in a tunic-like Jazzercise tee, her good-natured golden retriever, Frisco, as always at her side.
This was Ed Hooley’s favorite time of day. He trundled about the weight room, bumping fists and saying hey, still in the hand wraps he’d put on seven hours before. Ed had slept longer than he’d intended, hopeful that the four-legged shadow of uncertainty that had trailed him that morning would canter off as he made his late-afternoon rounds.
If that had been his fate, then Ed’s story, our story, would’ve ended now, at 4:58 on this outwardly ordinary Tuesday at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, except that, just as Ed entered the main room, Frisco, the golden retriever, charged through the garage doors, straight at him.
The creature, barking wildly, lifted himself high on hind legs, gave Ed’s chest a rough high five with his front paws, then turned and sprinted toward the ring, darting from one corner to the next without ever venturing under the cloth siding.
“Frisco Jaffee, absolutely not,” yelled Barbara-Ann, rushing in after her unleashed pup. She caught the dog by his collar, squatted in front of him. “Is this who you are, Frisco?” she said as Ed watched, dumbfounded.
Barbara-Ann had to use both hands to drag Frisco toward the weight room. “This is not how I raised him,” she told onlookers as Frisco barked in the direction of the ring. Barbara-Ann grabbed a jump rope and used it to leash the dog to the leg of a weight bench. “What can I say? He’s nuts,” she told the crowd. “You’re nuts,” she told Frisco.
But Frisco, Ed suspected, wasn’t nuts. There was only one reason that normally agreeable animal would be losing it like that. There was something underneath the ring. A living thing. If Ed were to get over this whole messy day, he’d need to see it for himself.
He knew that crawling underneath the ring in view of fifty-some people would lead to too many questions. Ed could wait until eight thirty, closing time, but he could already feel his left eye pulsing.
A solution emerged in the unlikely form of Alexis Cepeda, who arrived at the gym at 6:02, a remarkable eight hours and seventeen minutes after he told Terry he’d be there.
Since he’d left the apartment of Bethanny Simons, Alexis had gone for a run around Town Lake and, over the course of three listless miles, determined it was time for a change.
Of course his girlfriend had left him. He was a loser, a shrimpy kid who’d barely eked out a high school diploma. He couldn’t even screw right anymore, not without a stranger’s thumb up his butt. A professional boxer?
Why hadn’t Alexis kept his ambitions more manageable? Terry had warned him that turning pro would present challenges outside the physical. In his early teens, Alexis had crossed the border on foot from Reynosa, his only documentation someone else’s now long-expired ID. At twenty-one, he couldn’t get on an airplane, and if he ever left the country, he’d have no way to return. What kind of boxer fought only within driving distance of where he lived? Alexis worked a few nights a week under the table as a busser at a Brazilian steakhouse. He could probably double his hours if he asked. It was time, he knew, to get his shit together.
“What’s with the leg?” asked Carlos Ortega, skulking outside the gym when Alexis appeared in the gravel lot. Alexis was still Sharpied, Bethanny’s message melted into an illegible smear.
Alexis shrugged. “This is it, man. Last day,” he said. “Fuck this, y’know?”
“Yeah, man,” said Carlos. “Fuck this.”
Inside, Alexis wrapped his hands on the bench across from the ring, nodding at the fighters who passed him, otherwise keeping his head down. Next to him sat Ed Hooley. To Alexis he looked vaguely crazed: knees bouncing, eyes watering. Alexis had always been a little skeptical of the guy, though he couldn’t say why. Just a feeling.
“You OK, Hooley?” Alexis asked.
“Just having a sit-down,” Ed said uncertainly.
Alexis reached under the bench for his gym bag, pulled out his gloves. “You mind lacing me up?” He wanted to hurry into bag work before Terry could read him the riot act for no-showing.
Grateful for the distraction, Ed took the left glove and pulled it over Alexis’s hand, did the same on the right, then tied them both forcefully.
Alexis tapped him in the gut—a thank-you—and went off to work the bags.
In the coming weeks and months, Alexis would claim he’d never fight, never spar even, without first soft-punching Ed Hooley in the belly, a tradition that began that Tuesday in August 2008. “He’s my lucky charm,” he’d tell a local news reporter for a segment on the up-and-comer six months later. KXAN would feature B-roll of Alexis working out, along with a somewhat self-conscious shot of the two men engaging in their pre-fight ritual.
It was true that Alexis did tap Ed Hooley’s stomach before every fight at the start of his professional career. But it wasn’t for good luck.
This was only a cover, a feel-good way to explain how he’d broken out of his slump. The real reason was not one he would share with KXAN or anyone else until a few years after retiring from boxing, when, polishing off a nightcap at the Adolphus in Dallas, he’d look across the bar to find a forty-something Bethanny Simons sipping a martini.
Alexis would be in town for the opening of a new Toyota dealership, the sort of quick-buck promotional event available to former professional athletes of regional renown. Bethanny had transitioned to litigation, was trying a case at the courthouse down the street. “Are you who I think you are?” he would ask.
“Wow,” she’d say, startled. “Wow. Yikes. Wow.”
“Uh-oh. Yikes?”
“Not yikes you. Yikes me. Yikes twenties.”
On that day many years after Ed Hooley saw the coyote in the supply closet, Bethanny Simons would invite Alexis Cepeda to join her for a drink. They would offer each other glosses on their professional trajectories, their respective divorces. At last call, unsure why he was revealing this information but revealing it nonetheless, Alexis would explain that the evening after their encounter, he’d stood in front of the heavy bag at Terry Tucker’s, sure it would be his last workout before Real Life began.
He tapped his gloves together, threw a jab. Then another. He threw a cross, and as the bag began to swing, he started to work around it, still thinking about the events of the previous night. He replayed the sex in his mind, and for every “Almost there” he’d moaned, he hit harder.
The thumb appeared with forty seconds left on the clock. “Jesus, I did that?” Bethanny would ask, unspearing a martini olive with her teeth. “And it was a real thumb? I mean, the one you saw?”
“I’m telling you: I see it, like, out the corner of my eye as I’m working the bag. A lady’s thumb. Pink nail polish. Your thumb. But huge. Person-sized.”
“Did it have feet?”
“Do thumbs have feet? Like wobbling over or whatever. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“You have to tell me this!”
Alexis kept going: one two one! Harder and harder. “And as I’m punching, I see the thumb coming closer and closer, faster and faster, and I start to move around the bag away from it. One two! And then, just as the clock’s winding down, it catches up to me. Stops right behind me. Bends at the joint.”
“Were you like, What’s going on?”
“I’m terrified. And then the thumb, it’s like…”—and here Alexis would look around to make sure no one was listening—“The thumb, it’s like, inside of me.”
Alexis moved around the bag like he’d never moved before, throwing shots at a clip he’d never imagined. When the fight clock beeped, signaling the end of the round, he ignored it, kept throwing. “There’s this guy a few feet away at the double-end bag,” he would tell Bethanny. “You ever hit a double-end bag? It’s a bitch, pardon my language. And it’s his first day. He’s sick of hitting this thing, and I’m going all out at this point, so he comes over to watch.”
Soon other spectators followed. People turned from speed bags, stopped skipping rope. Another three-minute round ended, and the boxer was nowhere close to slowing down. None of the assembled realized that a giant thumb was two feet up Alexis, propelling him around the bag.
Terry Tucker was watching, too. He’d been in his office when he heard a commotion, came out to find twenty people gathered around his newest fighter to turn pro. Terry always said it was impossible to know a boxer’s worth until you watched him in the ring. Still, even he had to admit he was seeing a different Alexis Cepeda.
Another three-minute round, another minute in between, another three minutes: Alexis never stopped. And suddenly, though Terry tried not to admit it, he could envision, in the future, a different Terry Tucker, too. By the fifth round, Terry was back on the phone with Lemuel Pugh, trying to find the kid a suitable opponent. By the sixth, he’d scheduled Alexis Cepeda’s professional debut for Waco in the fall.
“If this story isn’t true,” Bethanny would tell Alexis all those years later, “it’s the weirdest way to pick a girl up.”
“Am I picking you up?” Alexis would ask, feigning uncertainty.
“Are you?” Bethanny would disingenuously counter.
By the eighth round, folks were streaming in from the weight room, standing on top of benches.
By the ninth, all fifty-four people inside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym had crowded around Alexis Cepeda, focused on nothing but the most exhilarating workout they would ever witness in their lives.
All fifty-four people except for Ed Hooley, who’d scrambled underneath the vacant boxing ring unnoticed, now face-to-face with the coyote he thought he’d seen eighteen hours before.
She was grislier than Ed remembered.
He found the coyote between the legs of the overturned pommel horse, curled into herself and trembling. A smattering of bald patches along her back revealed fingerprint-sized islands of pink-white flesh. Her legs were hairless and scabby; a yellow crust had formed around the rims of her eyes. Most agitating to Ed was her size. She was minuscule, pathetic.
Ed poked at her belly. When she didn’t wake, he poked again, harder. The second time, she opened her eyes and let out a soft whimper, chin resting against her paws. “What are you, anyway?” Ed could feel eighteen hours’ worth of anxiety coursing through him.
“What are you, huh?” said Ed. The coyote looked away. “Look at me,” he said, swatting his hand just in front of the animal’s face. “Look at me.” He swatted again. “What you gonna do about it?” Ed’s left eye twitched. The coyote burrowed her snout under her paws. “What you gonna do?”
He swatted once more, and this time he made contact. It was more graze than slap, his longish fingernails just catching her ear, but it was enough to awaken the coyote.
She scrambled up on those skeletal legs, shaken and delirious, bared her fangs, and, using whatever bit of muscle was left in her, lunged at Ed, sinking her teeth through the wrap on his right hand.
He yelped when she did it, a yelp he hoped no one in the gym would hear, and then scampered backward, eyes fixed on the coyote, who’d retreated to the pommel horse, scared of what Ed might do.
Ed unwrapped his hand and examined the bite mark, two bloody holes the size of nail heads in the soft tissue between his thumb and index finger. In the coming weeks, as the wound healed, he would keep his hand wrapped in front of other people, but that wouldn’t stop him from retreating to his room every few hours to examine the damage and shake with relief. This, finally, was his proof.
From nearby, the sound of cheers and, soon after, feet on metal steps, the creak of floorboards as fighters re-entered the ring.
Ed and the coyote rested on their backs, his hand on her stomach, moving with her shallow breath. They stayed that way until he could make out the last of the cars pulling out of the gravel lot, and the clang of dumbbells being set back on their racks in the weight room.
“Where you been?” asked Terry when Ed appeared in the weight room doorway looking dusty.
“Been around.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Terry. “You finish closing up?”
Later, after he’d locked the garage doors, Ed scoured his room for a dollar, depositing loose change in the Tupperware in the fridge and taking a plastic water bottle in exchange. Back under the ring, he held the bottle above the coyote’s mouth and, when she wouldn’t drink that way, he cupped one hand and poured water into it. When she finished, he brought her a link of breakfast sausage and, after she held that down, another. Ed tried to wipe a damp washcloth on the coyote’s front legs, but she whimpered and hid her paws under herself, so he opted for the Febreze instead, then wrapped the nakedest parts with used hand wraps from the supply closet.
By eleven, the coyote was asleep again. Ed would watch her for many hours, knowing when she woke what he would need to do.
At 5:41 on Wednesday morning, some twenty-three and a half hours after he smelled something rotten inside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, Bob Alexander was cruising along North Lamar Boulevard, headed to his workout as usual. He’d just turned up the radio, Jethro Tull at full crank, when he passed Ed Hooley swiveling down the road on the ten-speed bicycle he’d been given three years before. Around his neck, Ed wore an animal like a stole.
“What the—” said Bob, Ed and his bicycle already fading in the rearview mirror.
So peculiar was the sight that Bob didn’t mention it during abs and stretching, sure the other First Thingers would think the old man had finally lost it. Bob might’ve thought he had lost it if, coming back from his morning run, he hadn’t found Ed in the gravel lot, same as the day before. On Ed’s sleeveless shirt: a smudge of dried mud. In that Rorschach-like print, Bob Alexander saw a paw.
He wasn’t about to ask Ed for details. The man’s relationship with reality was too fragile, the circumstances too bizarre. Instead, Bob raised his bushy eyebrows, his usual hello, and jogged back into the gym.
Whatever happened, he was unexpectedly relieved to see Ed back. Bob would never say it, but he was proud of the fact Ed had found a safe place in this world. Proud of the small part he’d played in making it happen. Ten years before, Bob had failed at that task. It felt good to get this minor do-over.
Sometimes, Bob still imagined his nephew Nathaniel out there. Maybe there were some folks keeping half an eye out for him, like the First Thingers did for Ed. Maybe he’d found a boxing gym of his own. It was a nice thought.
Bob had learned the hard way that nice thoughts brought limited returns. Imagining, he knew, didn’t get you far.
He was reminded of this fact that Wednesday afternoon, when he received an automated message from the Austin Police Department that the evidence he’d submitted the day before—the anonymous note left on his windshield—had been processed. Should there be developments, someone would get in touch. If past were prologue, Bob knew no one ever would.
In the months to come, the memory of Ed Hooley and the coyote, like that anonymous note, would fade from the retired professor’s mind. Life went on, full of its small joys and disappointments.
Still, every so often, at moments he didn’t expect—at the end of two-minute planks, say, his nose an inch above the canvas—Bob would remember what he saw that Wednesday morning. It would come to him all at once and disappear as quickly, as it had in real time.
At 5:41, after Ed Hooley passed on his bicycle, Bob turned back, only for a second. When he did, the coyote craned her neck to reveal herself to him. She looked at him and he at her, and then she howled: a wild bay that, even with the music and the motor, Bob was certain he could hear.
Copyright © 2025 by Lucas Schaefer. From the forthcoming book THE SLIP: A Novel by Lucas Schaefer to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
Lucas Schaefer lives with his family in Austin. The Slip, out June 2025 from Simon & Schuster, is his first novel.
