Laura ordered me some new underwear from Amazon. Three pairs of lightweight briefs in green, black, and blue, each with a racing stripe. I modeled the black. “Lovely,” Emma said. “Do you wish I’d gotten you red? I know you don’t like boxers.” I was going to protest, but it was true. “You know boxing is just a horrible sport,” I said, deliberately misunderstanding in order to deflect her accusation. “I used to think it was okay. As a kid I even boxed for a while. A friend had some gloves and we’d go at it. Then his older brother got involved, and I was afraid he’d kill me.”

“Did he kill you?” Laura asked.

“No, but I made sure not to hit him, not to make him throw a real punch. I was really scared. But later I wondered what would have happened if I’d let it all out. Maybe I could have taken him.”

Laura smiled and shook her head and went off to do something else. I changed back into my old underwear, disappointed in the way things had gone.

§

The next morning at the Blue Coyote Café we enjoyed our coffee in a quiet corner, and Laura told me her dream.

It was a little auditorium, she said. The stage was small and though the lights weren’t on there was enough light to see a number of ears of corn were scattered around, maybe left over from some Halloween play the kindergarten class had put on.

Both boxers came up the same side steps and then the big man took their robes. When the robes came off I first thought they were naked, but they weren’t naked. The white boxer wore tight red nylon shorts. He had dirty yellow hair and he hadn’t shaved for a while so his beard was dark and grizzled and his eyes were red-rimmed and his teeth were at crazy angles. The black boxer was glossy. His skin. His boxing trunks, too. That’s what they call them, right? Trunks?

Naturally I looked at the black boxer. He seemed very confident, dancing around, flexing his knees, dipping and bobbing. The unshaven white boxer just stared at him, but the black boxer paid no attention to the white boxer.

What I liked best about the black boxer were those leather shorts, trunks, which were very dark, almost the exact same shade as his skin color, and at first they hung loose on his hips, but then he cinched them somehow, and it was as if the leather encased him. I don’t see how he could have cinched the trunks with the boxing gloves he was wearing, but he did it, and with no effort at all.

Neither of these men was really all that big. They were average size, maybe even slightly smaller. The old overweight sheriff with the gray whiskers who stood off to the side next to the drooping flag made these men seem almost like toys, or like pet animals, dogs that were about to try out for behavior school. At the sheriff’s signal the boxing began.

The white boxer had his guard up as he moved cautiously across the stage towards the black boxer. The black boxer didn’t seem too concerned. The white boxer threw a punch. His arm was long and thin, and the punch seemed slow. I thought even I could get out of the way of it. Right then I knew the white boxer was in big trouble. The black boxer bent his body back, and the slow red glove of the white boxer bulled across empty air. The white boxer stumbled forward, as if the glove decided at the last moment to pull the man with it. For a second I thought he would plunge right over the edge of the little stage, but somehow the white boxer was able to stop himself. His back was to us now, and he tried to hitch up his pants, but his gloves wouldn’t let him get a grip. The black boxer looked mildly amused.

The white boxer rushed at the black boxer, and it seemed like he tripped almost before he could throw a punch. The black man stepped aside as if he were a bullfighter, and the white boxer stumbled forward but managed to keep his footing enough to avoid falling all the way to the floor.

Then the stage lights snapped on. The white man blinked. I thought: maybe he’s embarrassed, maybe he’d started fighting too soon, maybe he was supposed to wait for the lights. He was facing us now, and it didn’t seem from his expression that he was embarrassed. He tapped his big boxing gloves together.