Seeing red, Carlo decided enough was enough. He set his feet, avoided Brian’s next wild swing, and stopped the kid in his tracks with an overhand right straight to the forehead. Brian went down on his ass like he’d been hammered into the dirt, face a study in confusion, and looked up at Carlo.
“Well, is that enough, then, Brian?” Carlo asked. “Nobody touch him; let him up. Has Clay been awakened?”
“I don’t think there’s any chance of him moving until noon tomorrow,” someone said.
“That’s good, then. Maybe we can get this one back to bed befo-AGH!”
Brian had lurched to his feet, thrown wildly, missed, and stumbled into the gathering beyond. Reza caught him by the shoulders and then grimaced.
“My God, he smells like he was raped by a liquor store!”
He shoved Brian away into the center of the gathering. Carlo caught him, held him a moment to steady his footing, and began, “Please, Brian…”
And that was when Brian drove his knee into Carlo’s balls.
It is a common misconception that the male of the species is a simple animal; that the female, in all of her labyrinthine turnings of emotional nuance, has him fairly beat for complexity and awareness of self. This mythology is only partially true. It is not that man is simple, strictly speaking; he’s just complex in different ways. It is bald fallacy to claim that all men are prone to certain behavior, be it desirable or undesirable, because they are simple, easily-anticipated creatures. There is a kind of emotional depth within, made all the more vibrant for its subtlety; a complexity of feeling eclipsed only by a self-imposed reserve reinforced through generations of social imperative.
However, it must also be said that it is the rare red-blooded male who, given the appropriate (and in most cases average) infusion of testosterone, does not feel the instinctive call to murder at the assault of his regenerative organs, especially when such attack is salted with the demoralizing laughter of his peers. In such cases, even the storied philosophers out of antiquity might be reduced to knuckle-dragging idiots, replete with sloping brow and spiked club.
And Carlo was certainly no goddamned philosopher.
He bent double as soon as impact with Brian’s knee was achieved, nearly crumpling to the floor as he posted his palms on his thighs and began to cough. Brian continued to swat at him, mostly with little effect, and two of their audience reached out to take his arms in hand. He struggled loudly and cursed but the ones who held him were much stronger, and they kept him in place patiently while Carlo recovered.
“Carlo? Hey, Carlo, did he kill you?” Reza laughed. The others joined in the laughter as well, even those who restrained Brian, while Carlo coughed and panted and spat. Such was his posture for at least a few more minutes while the rest waited politely. Brian, who’d soon discovered he wasn’t going anywhere, settled down and watched his adversary. They held him with his back directed toward Amanda’s cabin, for which he was intensely grateful, but it was also a punishing compulsion to look back in that direction. He had to take it on faith that things proceeded as he hoped.
Before long Carlo had straightened back to a more or less upright posture. When he turned to regard the restrained Brian, the look on his face was poisonous.
“Hold him,” he said, and Brian felt the hands tighten over his wrists.
Carlo advanced on him slowly, a single index finger extended in studious pronouncement, and said, “Now you’ll have a lesson, eh? Note, young man, how as I repay you I do so through more honorable means.”
Carlo took his sweet time winding up as if making ready to send a fastball over the plate, even kicking out a leg, before firing a right directly at Brian’s head. Being restrained as he was, there was little Brian could do apart from yanking his head aside at the last instant. The evasion helped to minimize the impact (Carlo scored only a glancing blow because of it), but his head still exploded on impact. It was the first time Brian had ever been hit in the face by a fully grown man, and he marveled at the urgency of the experience. He was shocked to learn how little pain there was, at the loudness of the blow as the thud pulsed through his grey matter like a low-frequency soundwave, and how all visual data transmitted from his eyes to his brain was interrupted by a total saturation of white noise. He’d heard such things described in his lifetime but learned at that moment how incorrectly he’d imagined the experience—he did not see a flash of white light with his eyes; he experienced it within his head, within the core of his person echoing off the bone walls holding him inside himself. He realized soon after that he could no longer hear the men around him and then, a few moments later, the sounds of their voices came back slowly beneath a layer of dull ringing.
Before Brian had a chance to fully recover his senses, Carlo shot out with a punter’s kick, digging the toe of his shoe up under the sternum, and then Brian knew a pain more debilitating and insistent than anything else he’d experienced in his life. An instant wave of nausea assailed him as the air exploded from his lungs; he doubled over in a bow involuntarily, unable to resist the convulsions of his muscles. Immediately his body began to scream for fresh oxygen, but the muscles of his trunk refused to unclench. He struggled desperately to unlock his jaw and move air but, to his horror, the only direction it would go was out of him; the muscles would only contract further, inciting panicked groans issuing from his throat in an alien voice, and tears began to course down his cheeks as he struggled to gasp. His body yet refused him.
He thought he heard words somewhere, maybe laughter, then Carlo saying more things. Fingers took him by the jaw, not unkindly, and lifted so that he must look up. Carlo looked down into his eyes, smiling warmly like a grandfather, and shook his head.
“Can you breathe yet?”
Brian found he could… barely. He pulled the air into his body in miserable, icy sips, and the fight to get air became a struggle between the minuscule breath he could manage and the constant need of his diaphragm to drive that air back out, but he felt now that his diaphragm was loosening. Things were beginning to unclench torturously slow, and he soon found himself pulling ragged, gasping, relieved breaths.
“Ugh… ye… yes…” he sighed.
“Excellent!” Carlo grinned. He swung again with his right, this time catching Brian full-force in the side of his face. His left cheek shattered like glass, and he had a split second to experience a thought-nullifying, sudden pressure within the entire vicinity of his face and head like an instantaneous hydraulic explosion before all went black.
“The fuck’re you idiots up to?” Pap shouted from the opening of his tent. He’d been drawn finally by the racket of the men.
“It’s nothing, Pap! A brief lesson in manners!” Carlo called, shaking out his aching hand.
Pap strode from his tent and cut through the small crowd like a giant arctic icebreaker vessel. The men fell back a step at his passage, and as he came to stand before the collapsed Brian, he stuffed a thumb through his belt loop and groaned, “What in hell?”
“As I said… manners.”
Pap looked at Carlo in distaste and demanded, “Details, boy. Why’d you have-ta whup ’im so bad?”
Reza cleared his throat and explained the circumstances of the attack. Pap looked again at Brian, this time with a scandalized expression, and said, “Damn, boy. Can’t be shootin’ fer a feller’s yams like that. Lucky he ain’t kilt yah.”
He leaned toward Carlo and asked, “Yain’t kilt him, right?”
“No, sir. That face’ll want a bit of tenderness, but he’ll live.”