I GUESSED I WAS MORE or less expecting it. I wasn’t exactly surprised. Just too much time had passed. Even he could figure it out in ten minutes.
“Oh?” I said. “How come?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, man. And I’d rather have it myself,” he said.
“If you do, you’ll wind up throwing it out in the sea like Steve wants you to.”
“There’re plenty of places here I can hide it.”
“You bury it and you’ll ruin it. It’ll rust.”
“Don’t kid me, man.” He made a little half smile that was more a snarl. “I want it. It’s mine.”
“I think you’d be a lot smarter if you let me keep it for you,” I said.
His voice started to get higher. “You think you’re fooling me? You talked me into giving it to you. You even got me to put my fingerprints on it.”
“Come on,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Listen, man. That’s my machete. Just give it to me, man.” He began to snap his fingers, both hands, the way I’d seen him do, the way Steve was constantly watching him for. He started to bounce agitatedly up and down on his toes.
“Well, I guess I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m going to keep it for you, anyway.”
He began to yell a stream of curses at me. “Motherfucker. Cocksucker. Shit-eater.” A string of variations. “That’s cheating. It’s not fair. You’re a sneak. Give me my machete.”
“I’m keeping it,” I said.
“I’ll make you give it to me,” Chuck screamed.
“Okay,” I said. “Make me.”
He was really very fast. One second he was standing in front of me. The next second he had danced in, delivered me a front groin kick in the crotch, and danced back out. All before I finished getting the words out of my mouth. I just didn’t see it. Maybe I’d been expecting to talk a little longer.
Pain engulfed my crotch and shot up in rays through my groin like an aurora. Right after it came the slow, sick nausea in the pit of the stomach that you get. But the kick seemed light. As if he’d pulled it to get back away.
My instinct was to retch and try to vomit. But I was damned if I would. I wasn’t Stevie-boy. I wasn’t one of his punk kid opponents at the Construction, either. I gave him a grin and went after him, and I could see the surprise in his eyes. He’d expected me to keel over.
He came at me again, all set to groin kick, by his body stance. I slid left and leaned in to him and hit him with a hard left jab that went through his guard to his nose and rocked him back. His kick missed and he danced back. I followed him.
I was more than just furious. I was crazy mad. The pain in my crotch and the pain in my side were already enough. But I was thinking about Marie and Girgis, and all the rest of it. There was a kind of crazy joy in it, too, that made my head burn as if seared. I didn’t care if he killed me. If he did, I’d kill him along with me.
He came in again, and I did the same thing: slid left and jabbed. After he missed that kick and I had punched him again, he slammed a right-hand chop into the side of my neck that did me no harm at all. I hit him in the belly with a right that hurt him. When he danced away I followed again.
He was losing ground to me. And his nose was already swollen from my two jabs. I noticed something else. He was fast but he didn’t carry much weight behind his punches and kicks. Curiously, his blows didn’t carry much conviction, or authority, as if his heart wasn’t really in fighting, like mine was. I gave him a mean grin.
He was “Hoo!”-ing and “Hah!”-ing, like they teach you in the suburban karate classes, but I saved my breath. Silence can be as scary as noise. And karate was like with everything else. You had to be good at it, to be effective. That was why I preferred fist fighting. It was natural to me. Chuck wasn’t that good. He was good enough to terrorize some kid at the Construction, was all.
When he came in again, he tried to tag me with a leaping high kick. I reached out my left and swung it up under his ankle and dumped him. He lit on his back. It knocked the wind half out of him, but he rolled free and up to his feet very fast. I gave him another grin.
This time he had desperation on his face when he came in. He was going to give me a front groin kick with his right foot, from the way he moved. I moved to get inside it, taking a chop to the cheekbone that numbed my cheek, and he shifted his weight and kicked out with his left foot again. Just like the first time. I seemed to be a patsy for that one.
Pain exploded in my testicles, but I was where I wanted: inside. I hit him with a left hook in the belly that knocked all the wind out of him, and then sunk my right fist into the side of his head as hard as I could hit him. He went flying, and lit on his back two steps away. I took the two steps, though it hurt me, and grabbed him by his shirt and jerked him to his feet and hit him with everything I had, just above the angle of his jaw, and let go. He went sprawling, and I followed and got his shirt and jerked him up again. I was intending to do the same thing. I was willing to keep on doing it just about forever. But something stopped me.
He was out on his feet. His glasses were long since gone, knocked off somewhere, and his eyes were glazed and rolling around in his head. Fine. All that was fine. But syllables came out of his mouth that didn’t make any words. It sounded like, “Tra ga go ka gye dye.”
I suspected he was still cursing me, or thought he was.
I wanted to break him apart. I hoped Pekouris gave him everything he could give him. I didn’t care if they gave him the firing squad. But I made myself put my hand down.
There was no point in breaking his jaw for fun. Instead, I grabbed a handful of his shirt with my left hand, and softly shook him back and forth. He just sort of dangled. I let go of him and he sat down.
I walked away toward the boat, waddling from the pain in my crotch, wanting to vomit, my side shooting pains every time I breathed. What a way to make a living. I was getting too old for it.
Behind me Chuck began to come out of it. He struggled to get to his feet, and made it as far as his knees. The syllables he had been mouthing turned back into curses, which he now screamed at me like a girl. He didn’t have a lot of grace in defeat.
On the dock his glasses that had been knocked off in the fight were lying there, somehow miraculously undamaged. That seemed grossly unfair to me. Almost automatically, I made as if to grind them under my heel. He’d have one hell of a time replacing them, here. But the same something stopped me.
Instead, I picked them up and looked at them. They were sure thick.
Holding them up for Chuck to see, I whistled. When I was sure he was looking at me, I snapped them in two at the bridge, and tossed them into the seven-foot-deep water and said,
“Dive for them, you son of a bitch.”
Chuck peered at me myopically with his bad eyes, then peered myopically at the water. “I’ll get you for that,” he screamed. “I’ll get you for everything.”
“You do that,” I said. “Bring all your friends.”
I nodded to Sonny. “Let’s get the hell out of here, Sonny, for God’s sake.”
As we rounded the far point of the tiny cove out of sight, Chuck was rummaging in his Kelty pack and pulled out a face mask.