John Lash moved quickly. He got, up and said, “Wait! Hold it! Croy, wait...” Dusty tried to grab Croy but he moved quickly. The spear tip gashed John Lash’s arm as he tried to fend it off, and as Croy drew back to thrust again, John Lash hit him flush in the face with one of those big brown fists. Croy bounced back and hit the engine hatch and rebounded to fall heavily and awkwardly, unconscious.
Betty reached him and turned him and sat, his head in her lap, arm curled protectively around his head, murmuring to him. Lew wet the end of a towel and gave it to her. She wiped the blood from his mouth and looked at John Lash and then the rest of us with cold hate. “Why didn’t you stop him? Why are you letting him do this to Croy?”
“I had to hit him!” John Lash said, his voice a half-octave higher than usual. “You saw what he was trying to do. Why didn’t you guys stop him?”
Croy’s mouth puffed rapidly. He mumbled something. Dusty started the engine. “We better get back. You want to get the anchor up, Dobey?”
I broke it free and hauled it in, coiling the line. When I moved back I saw that Croy was sitting up. Betty was holding onto his arm. She was saying, with a gradually increasing edge in her voice, “No, darling. No. No please, darling.”
But Croy was looking beyond her, looking at John Lash. Lash was trying to grin. It wasn’t a grin as much as it was just a sort of twist he was wearing on his mouth. He’d look at Croy and then look away. Croy got up then with Betty holding onto him. He lurched over toward the rail and grabbed one of the gaffs. Lash came back up onto his feet quickly and said, “Grab him!”
Croy shook Betty loose. Lew and I grabbed Croy. It was like grabbing hard rubber. He lowered his head and butted Lew over the rail. Dusty swung the boat to keep the prop clear of Lew. It made me lose my balance. As I staggered Croy rapped me across my shins with the handle end of the gaff and hot stars went off behind my eyes from the sudden pain of it. When I could see again I saw him going for Lash with the gaff. They were poised for a moment, muscles like they were cut out of stone, both holding onto the long gaff. Then John Lash, with his greater strength, hurled Croy back toward the stern again. Croy fell, harder than before, but he hadn’t been hit.
“Keep him off me!” Lash yelled. “Keep him off me!”
Croy got slowly and clumsily back to his feet and started back toward Lash. I was set to take another grab at Croy. Lew was climbing aboard. The other two guys were having no part of it. They were plain scared. Just as I was about to grab Croy he put his weight on his left foot and went down. I could see the ankle puffing visibly. He never took his eyes off John Lash. He had fallen near his gear. He fumbled and came out with a fish knife with a cork handle. Holding it in his hand he began to crawl toward the bow, toward John Lash again, the handle thumping against the cockpit boards every time he put his right hand down. I fell on his arm. I could hear Lash yelling. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I got Croy’s wrist and managed to twist the knife out of his hand. Lew had him around the middle. We hauled him over and tried to sit on him. He kept struggling with stubborn, single-minded strength. Once he broke free and started crawling again toward Lash, puffed lips pulled back from bloody teeth, but we got him again.
Dusty helped that time and one of the other guys and we held him and tried to talk sense into him, but he kept on struggling. We finally got heavy nylon line around his wrists and tied his arms behind him. We thought that was going to be enough, but even with his hands like that he managed to get on his feet and, limping badly, try to get at Lash. Dusty put a length of the anchor line around the engine hatch and we tied him there around his chest, sitting on the litter of gear and water and smashed sandwiches and cans of beer, staring at John Lash and fighting the heavy line constantly.
5.
Once he was tied up, Betty kneeling beside him, trying to soothe him, John Lash lighted a cigarette. His hands shook. He grinned. “He get like that often?” he asked “Look at him. He still wants to get at me.”
Croy’s shoulders bulged as he fought the rope. Lash kept glancing at him. We were all breathing hard. Dusty examined skinned knuckles. “I never see him like that, not that bad. Old Croy he gets an idea in his head, you can’t get it out. No sir.”
“He’ll get over this, won’t he? When he cools off.”
“He’s not going to cool off at all,” Dusty said. “Not one little bit. Tomorrow, the next day, it’ll be just the same.”
“What am I supposed to do then?” Lash asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know,” Dusty said. “You got to either kill him or he’s got it in his mind he’s going to kill you. Known him twenty years and he’s never gone back on his word one time. Or his daddy before him.”
Lash licked his lips. I watched him. I saw him sitting there, nervous. It was something he’d never run into. It was something I guess few men ever run into in their lifetime. I could see him wishing he’d never made any sort of a pass at Betty.
Croy fought the rope, doggedly, constantly, sweat running down his face.
John Lash lighted another cigarette. “He’ll get over it,” he said unconvincingly.
“I wouldn’t want to bet much on that,” I said.
There was that big John Lash sitting there in the sun, a whole head and forty-fifty pounds bigger than little Croy Danton. And without the faintest idea in the world as to what to do about it. Either way, there didn’t seem to be any kind of an out for John Lash.
“He’s nuts. You people are all nuts down here.” Lash said.
I sensed what was forming in his mind. I said, “When we dock we’ll see if we can hold him right here for about an hour. You ought to pack up and take off.”
“Run from a character like him?” Lash said.
Croy’s arms came free suddenly and he tried to shove the line up off his chest. His wrists were bloody where the nylon had punished them. Three of us jumped him and got his wrists tied again. He didn’t make a sound. But he fought hard. Betty kept trying to quiet him down, talking gentle, her lips close to his ear. But you could see that for Croy there were two people left in the world. Him and John Lash.
It took about forty minutes to get back in. Nobody talked. I didn’t like to watch Croy. It was a sort of thing I have seen in Havana at the cock fights. I hear it is like that, too, at the bull fights. A distillation, I guess you would call it, of violence. The will to kill. Something that comes from a sort of crazy pride, a primitive pride, and once you have started it, you can’t turn it off.
It was easy to see that John Lash didn’t want to look at him either. But he had to keep glancing at him to make sure he wasn’t getting loose. During that forty minutes John Lash slowly unraveled. He came apart way down in the middle of himself where it counted. I don’t think any of us would say he was a coward. He wasn’t yellow. But this was something he couldn’t understand. He’d never faced it before and few men ever face it in their lifetime. To Lash I guess Croy wasn’t a man any more. He was a thing that wanted to kill him. A thing that lusted to kill him so badly that even defenseless it would still keep coming at him.
By the time we got in, John Lash wasn’t even able to edge by Croy to pick up his gear. We had to get it and pass it up to him where he stood on the dock. John Lash looked down and he looked older in the face. Maybe it was the first time he had seriously thought about his own death. It shrunk him a little.
“Hold him for an hour. I’ll go away,” he said. He didn’t say goodbye. There wasn’t any room in him to think of things like that. He walked away quickly and a bit unsteadily. He went around the corner of the fish house. We’ve never seen him since.