Xel Kazma

Xel and Max Masters met in foster care when they were young. They’ve been brothers and best friends ever since.

Xel Kazma fights in the underground: no gloves, no rounds, four hundred people screaming at two men in a chain-link ring. The announcer calls him the Harbor Line Heartbreaker. He is forty-one and oh.

He isn’t like other people, and he has known it since he was a kid. He has never had a cold. Cuts that should need stitches are gone by the morning. At the warehouse the forklift barely moves all week, and somehow the pallets still get shifted.

Ringside, people ask whether his eyes are contacts. In the ring he lets punches come close and lets a jab land on purpose. The scariest thing, one spectator says, is that he isn’t even trying.

When a gambler twice Max’s size grabbed him by the collar after the fight, Xel only needed four words: drop him. Now. Walking home in the rain, he told Max he wouldn’t always be around to bail him out. Max had it under control. Uh-huh.

Back at the apartment at 1:12 a.m., he stood by the window icing his hands with a bag of frozen peas. Hands that had already healed. Habit, he said.