The two cities each straddled a river of the same name. The Wapsipinicon came in from the northwest, flowed through the sandstone bluffs of Palisades State Park, then passed into the town of Wapsipinicon, through the verdant campus of EIU, and into Riverside Park.
The Nishnabotna came in from the north. Just north of town it was dammed up to make Lake Pla-mor. Then it ran along the railyards and industrial flatlands of Nishnabotna and joined up with the Wapsipinicon to form the Iowa River, which then flowed thirty or so miles down to the southeast and joined up with the Father of Waters, which, technically speaking, ran all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana.
“I’ll just—I’ll just be going,” a voice said.
The voice was deep and rough and sounded like truck tires driving on a gravel road. It was coming from a dark corner of the basement, a nook that had been set into the wall as a kind of root cellar/tornado shelter. Clyde heard something moving back there.
A large, hunched, dark form emerged from the little three-sided room. Poised on his hands and knees in the middle of Forks County and looking up squinty-eyed into the dim light, Clyde could see only his silhouette. It was hard to tell whether he was looking at a water heater, an abandoned refrigerator, or a human being. When it moved a little, he decided the latter, but in terms of size and shape it was about halfway between a water heater and a refrigerator.
The shape moved fast considering it was clearly drunk and had just got up. Clyde tried to stand, but he was still on one knee when the man dived into him, wrapping his arms around Clyde’s waist, and slammed him backward into the concrete. There were ways to foil this type of takedown, but Clyde could not really use them because he had to concentrate all his efforts on not getting the back of his head smashed on the floor.
He did a half twist as he was falling backward and flung one arm above his head, so that his armpit, instead of the back of his skull, absorbed the successive impacts of his own weight and Tab Templeton’s 450-some pounds.
Clyde Banks and Tab Templeton had been separated by two years of age and several weight classes when they’d been in school, and consequently had never gone mano a mano until both had graduated to the less scrupulously fair adult world. Since then they had gone at it a total of nine times—mostly in the back room of the Barge On Inn, but most memorably during the climactic third year of the Nishnabotna Meat strike when the strikers had got Tab liquored up, placed an ax handle in his mitts, and sent him forth to wreak some mayhem. The Heavyweight had been too disoriented to know which were scabs and which were strikers, but when Clyde had shown up to arrest him, acting on the orders of Sheriff Mullowney, Tab had suddenly realized who his opponent was and had begun to swing the ax handle terrifyingly. Clyde, for his part, was armed with his nightstick, Excalibur, which had very recently been turned from a block of yellow Osage-orange wood, dense as uranium, by his grandfather Ebenezer. The two had done battle in the center of a vast ring of cheering strikers and scabs. Clyde had—at some length, and after suffering many injuries—brought his man in.
Clyde kept shaking his head back and forth, trying to dislodge Tab’s hand from his jaw and Tab kept putting it back there. Clyde did not recognize this move at all until he finally figured out that it was not really a wrestling move per se; it was an attempt to snap Clyde’s neck.
Some dim light was coming in through a window above them and glancing off the multiple layers of clothing that The Heavyweight was wearing; around his vast conical neck Clyde counted four separate collars nested inside one another and a T-shirt underneath that.
Underneath the T-shirt was something else, some kind of shiny, colorful fabric that had got dull and dirty with the years. Realizing what it was, Clyde worked his one free hand down the back of The Heavyweight’s neck, grabbed it, and yanked it off.
It was a loop of ribbon with something thick and heavy dangling off it. Clyde held it up so that it rotatedand glowed in the light—a yellow metal disk with a design stamped into one side and some words. Clydedidn’t have the leisure to read it, but he already knew what it said:
GAMES OF THE XIX OLYMPIAD
MONTREAL 1976
WRESTLING
The Heavyweight took his hand off Clyde’s chin and grabbed for his gold medal, but Clyde was ready for that; he tossed it away and heard it go plink in the corner of the room.
Just like that, he was gone. The terrible pressure was gone from Clyde’s ribs and legs. He scrambled to his feet, snatched up his boots, and made for the stairway, keeping one eye on Tab Templeton, who was on his hands and knees in the corner of the basement, pawing through debris looking for his medal.