Rudy quit on a Tuesday, the second week of December, after practice. He waited until the room had emptied out and the other boys were in the showers, and then he knocked on the door of Coach Kiser's office, and went in, and put his headgear on the desk.

Coach Kiser looked at the headgear for a while. He was a short, thick man who had wrestled in college and taught driver's ed and never raised his voice, which was why everybody was afraid of him.

"Somebody hurt?"

"No, sir."

"Grades?"

"No, sir. I just don't want to anymore."

Coach Kiser nodded slowly, like that was an answer, though Rudy could tell he didn't think it was one. "Your dad know?"

"Not yet."

"Well," said Coach Kiser, and picked up the headgear, and turned it over in his hands. "Door's open if you change your mind. You were coming along."

He couldn't have said why. That was the truth, or close to it. If somebody had held him down and made him try, he might have said it was the room. The wrestling room was in the basement under the old gym, and it was the hottest place in the county in December, with the mats rolled out wall to wall and the windows painted shut and thirty boys breathing hard in it for two hours. You couldn't hide anything in there. Everybody could see everything: who was tired, who was scared, who was soft. There was a word the seniors used for a boy who didn't go after it hard enough, and they used it forty times a practice, laughing, and lately Rudy had started to feel every one of them land on him, as if it had his name written on it.

And there was Daryl.

Daryl Lamphere was a junior at the same weight, and Coach had made them practice partners in November. Daryl was easygoing and freckled and strong in a quiet way, and when Rudy got a good takedown on him, which wasn't often, Daryl would say "Good shot" from flat on his back on the mat, like he meant it. He taught Rudy a single-leg that worked. He let Rudy ride home with him twice when the activity bus was full. There wasn't anything wrong in any of that. There wasn't anything at all. But Rudy had started to lose to him on purpose, to make the drill end sooner, and he didn't know why he was doing it, and he was afraid that somebody in that room, where you couldn't hide anything, was going to see it on his face before he even knew what it was himself.

So he quit. That was as far as he got.

He told them at supper. He'd thought about waiting until after, but his mother had already asked why he was home on the early bus.

"I quit wrestling," he said.

His father stopped with his fork halfway up. His mother looked at her plate.

"Why?" his father said.

"I just don't want to."

His father put the fork down. "That's not a reason."

"Stephen," his mother said.

"I'm asking him, Liz." His father wasn't loud. He was never loud. "Is somebody giving you trouble?"

"No."

"Then why?"

Rudy looked at the salt shaker. "I don't know."

His father sat for a minute. Then he got up and put his plate in the sink, half full, and went out to the hog barn without his coat.

His father's picture was in the trophy case in the high school hallway, third shelf down. Stephen Wainscott, fourth place at the state tournament, 1958. It was a small picture, black and white and curling at one corner, of a skinny boy in a wool singlet with his hands on his hips, and Rudy had walked past it every day since September. Last winter, Rudy's freshman year, his father had come to every one of his meets. He stood at the end of the bleachers by the door with his arms folded and his seed cap on, and he never once yelled. After, in the truck, he'd say one thing, like "You were high on your stance in the second period," or "That was a good escape." And that was all. And it had been plenty.

For three weeks they didn't talk about it. They talked about everything else: the price of hogs, the snow, whether the pickup would start, Christmas at his aunt's. His father didn't come to his room. Rudy did his chores, and some of his father's, and waited.

On New Year's Day his mother found him in the kitchen. "He isn't angry," she said, very low, so it wouldn't carry. "You know that, don't you? He's scared. He thinks somebody did something to you, and you won't say."

"Nobody did anything."

She looked at him for a long moment, the way she did when he was small and said he'd brushed his teeth. "All right," she said. "Then maybe tell him that."

The second week of January it went to twenty below, and the waterers in the finishing barn froze. His father came into the house at nine o'clock at night and said, "I need a hand," and Rudy put on his coveralls.

They worked on their knees in the straw with the trouble light hanging off a nail, his father with the propane torch and Rudy holding the light where he needed it and handing him wrenches. The hogs grunted and shoved around them. Their breath smoked. It took an hour, and neither of them said much, and it was the best hour Rudy had spent with him since December.

When the water was running again his father sat back on his heels and turned off the torch.

"I wanted to quit too," he said. "My sophomore year."

Rudy looked at him.

"Coach we had then was a hard man. Hit you with a rolled-up towel when you were slow. And I just hated it. All of it."

"Why didn't you?"

"My dad would have killed me." His father took off his glove and blew on his fingers. "That's not a good reason either. I've been thinking about that."

The hogs drank. The light swung a little on its nail.

"Your mother says I'm supposed to let you be," his father said. "I don't know how to do that. I never have. But I'm going to try." He was looking at the waterer, not at Rudy. "Is it Kiser?"

"No."

"Is it the boys?"

Rudy thought about it. "Not the way you mean."

His father nodded. He didn't ask the next question, though Rudy could see it go by on his face, and Rudy loved him for not asking it, so much it hurt in his chest like the cold.

"You don't have to tell me," his father said. "Not now. Maybe not for a long time. But whatever it is, someday, I'd like to be the one you tell. Before anybody else, if you can stand it." He put his glove back on. "I'd like that."

"Okay," Rudy said. It came out hoarse.

"Okay," said his father, and stood up, and his knees cracked like two shots in the cold barn, and they both laughed, and went in.

In February his father asked if he wanted to go watch the sectional tournament, just to watch, and Rudy said yes before he thought about it. They sat in the top row of the bleachers in the other town's gym, eating popcorn out of the same bag. Daryl Lamphere wrestled in the semifinal at his weight against a senior from the next county, and it was tied going into the third period. With twenty seconds left Daryl hit the single-leg, the one he had taught Rudy, and took the senior down, and held him there while the clock ran out.

Rudy was on his feet before he knew it, yelling. Everybody around them was sitting down.

His father looked up at him. Then he put the popcorn on the bench and stood up too, and clapped, slow and loud, for a boy he'd never met.

On the way out, going down the bleachers, his father put a hand on Rudy's shoulder. "That Lamphere boy's got a good single-leg," he said.

"Yeah," Rudy said. "He does."

And they went out into the cold together, and his father didn't take his hand off Rudy's shoulder until they got to the truck.

 
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