The Leash Wound Around His Fist

Craig sees Jacob in the doorway and does what he has done hundreds of times: straightens up, lets go of the collar, looks for his eyes — “waits to be told where.” “After that, Jacob didn’t decide anything.” A throw into the wall, and Craig — heavier, healthier, a man who “had broken bigger men than himself in the scrum” — does not go into the fight. Palms out, at chest height: “Jake. Jake, stop. It’s me.” Jacob hits him. The second — through the palms. The third. On the fifth blow Craig “lowered his hands to the level of his stomach and simply took it,” and in his one open eye “there was no fight. There was what was there in the locker room every morning: where to?” “The leash lay in his hand. When Jacob understood that, he didn’t let go of it. He wound it around his fist.”

This is not self-defense and not a rescue — Simon has already slid down the wall, Craig has already let go. This is what a person does with lateness and guilt when he has no other language for them: “He’d made it here — and he’d been too late, and here it was, his lateness, standing in front of him in a white tank top, not raising its hands, saying ‘Jake,’ and he was doing the only thing he knew how to do with it.” The most terrible thing in the scene is not the blows but that Craig stays on the leash to the end: he waits for a command, takes the punishment the way a dog takes it from its master — and Jacob understands this, and goes on. For three years the book showed that Craig hits “on a nod” (see “Trained Both Ways”); now we see that the nod works in the other direction too: the one who was trained not to fall does not know how to defend himself from the trainer either. The responsibility here lies entirely with the one holding the leash.