“Only a word or two. Let me see your husband and I will quit your neighbourhood as soon as we settle between us a certain important matter.”
“What matter?”
Whereupon, quite like an immaterial phantom, Ligonier Hoey disclosed himself and pulled both Linda Jane and young Daniel from the door. Barefooted, he stood before me, his chin outthrust-how must I put this?-gladitorially.
“Do for you, Clerval? Pretty late to drop by on a social call. I’m not much in the mood.”
“I scarcely wonder,” I said. “In trying to thwart our final double play, you acted with undue aggression. I fear you meant fo inflict injury.”
“Didn’t!” young Daniel said loudly. “Didn’t either!”
Hoey commanded his wife to withdraw along with young Daniel. When she had obeyed, be said, “Screw you, Jumbo. My motto’s play full out and don’t cry in your beer if you draw to a busted flush.”
“To date, playing full out hasn’t resulted in your utter incapacitation,” I observed.
“Look, what do you want? Crocodile tears? A written apology?”
“Buck, your dinner’s getting cold!” Mrs Hoey called. “Can’t you discuss your problem later?” The brunt of this plaintive inquiry was meant, I felt, for me.
“I have no later here in Highbridge,” I told him. “On Tuesday I leave for Philadelphia.”
“Congratulations,” Hoey said churlishly. “Rub it in.”
“What I want includes not only an acknowledgement to your hapless victim-”
“Hey, Dumbo was hopeless-I mean, hapless-long before I got to him.”
“-of your crime against him, but, yes, a written apology for the Herald, and monetary reparations for his blasted career.”
“Buck! Buck, come onnn!”
The miscreant shouted over his shoulder: “For God’s sake, woman, let us talk! We’re going for a walk to hash it out!” He stepped onto the porch with me and pulled the door to with an emphatic bang. I could not determine if be harboured more asperity for me or for his wife.
We walked side by side into Alligator Park. The dogs that had beset me earlier shunned us now, barking only tentatively. Hoey and I ended in the playground where the shadows of teeter-totters still laid an incongruous calm upon me. For an instant I believed that Hoey and I would discover not only an accord about his guilt but also a cure, Daniel, for your disability. We stood beside a metal slide-recreational equipment that had escaped scrapmetal requisitioning-weighing our provisional arguments,
“In any championship game, a real competitor goes for broke,” Hoey said. “He brawls for every advantage. I won’t apologise for that, Jumbo. You’ve got no right to ask me to.”
“Limits exist,” I said. “Today, however, to salve your lacerated pride, you robbed Daniel Boles of any chance of realising the most important goal of his life.”
“Jesus, I didn’t notice you dogging it. You powdered one off Sundog Billy. You stretched like fucking Plastic Man to take Dumbo’s last throw.”
“In neither case did I cripple a rival. Or strive to inflict any wound more distressing than defeat.”
“Horseshit.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I said, Horseshit.”
“Your dogged refusal to admit culpability pisses me off. Continue thus and I may well have cause to thrash you an inch shy of extinction.”
“You’d like to beat the shit out of me?”
“You’ve proved yourself conscienceless.”
“Listen at you. Hank Clerval, the pacifist, wants to whip my brains into a meringue.”
“I do. I do indeed.”
Hoey regaled me with a contemptuous fleer. “Well, try it, you highfalutin tower of Jell-O. You hypocrite. You’re no better than me, Jumbo-not deep down anyways, where the stinking rats of envy screw.”
“I ache for Daniel, for all the acne-ridden soldiers. I despair of their futures.”
“Worry about your own. Them guys in the bigs’ll eat a lummox like you alive. And you’re so ugly, even success up there won’t guarantee you any nookie. Zat why you’re upset I put my spikes in Dumbo’s jewels? Fraid you’re gonna have to get you a new little gal-boy?”
“Have a care.”
“Or is it the other way round? You’re a real pirate’s chest of secrets. The crap we don’t know about you, why, it’d fill an encyclopedia.”
Hoey anticipated neither the fury of my outrage nor my lunge. My left hand encircled his neck, compressed his topmost vertebrae towards his Adam’s apple, and dragged him over to a pair of shaggy sycamores on afar margin of the playground. Hoey fought, but I had effected a one-handed cloture of his windpipe, which muffled his protests and vitiated his exertions. A leopard caching a springbok-so imagine me as I clambered into the larger of the sycamores and wedged Hoey between two of its branches. My conscience had left me, nor did it soon return.
“You sonuva b-b-bitch.” Hoey’s hiccoughing speech prompted first a remembrance of your stammer, Daniel, and then a brilliant inner movie of Hoey’s hateful slide. So much the better for the indemnification I meant to extract, so much the more agonising for your petty tormentor.
Bracing Hoey in place, I removed his belt and secured his bands behind him. Because he strove to curse and bite me. I wedged his own soiled handkerchief into his mouth. We swayed together, sixteen feet above the indurate swell of earth from which the tree columned and spread. I hooked one leg about a stout upper branch, seized Hoey by the shoulders, and hurled him downwards with the same authority and force that Jehovah God launched Lucifer and his minions from Heaven.
The bones in Hoey’s legs splintered with a firelike crackling. He writhed on the ground like a broken-backed squirrel. With a great eructation of wind and blood, Hoey expelled the gag I had fashioned for him and began both to curse me and to cry for help.
Not to have killed him pleased me. I brachiated from one bough to a lower one, released it, and struck the ground astraddle the man who had hectored you all season, the jerk who, just that afternoon, had gratuitously ended your career. “You s-sonuva,” he continued to curse. “You s-s-sonuva…” His lips were foam-flecked; his eyes, like glowing dimes. My fury had not yet expended itself, nor, listening to Hoey’s unrepentant curses, did I feel that I had yet satisfactorily avenged you. I took Hoey’s tongue between two fingers and wrenched it bleeding from his mouth. His eyeballs started from his head, his back arched, and an uncouth groan broke from his larynx. I retrieved the handkerchief that he had spit from his mouth and pushed it back into that unlovely cavity-to stanch the flows of blood and wordless bawling vituperation.