I was ready, I thought, but not for the knife in David's hand, a balisong, a blade with a split handle which folded over the two cutting edges, a sort of primitive switchblade. David opened his slowly as if it were an old friend in his hand, laid it edge-up on the table, and motioned to his two buddies sitting behind him who no one had noticed coming in. They looked like something out of an L.A. rat pack, and one was slipping another balisong from his pocket.
"To make losing more fun, man," David said with a sly grin on his face.
"Not me, man," I said. "I only play for marbles and match sticks."
"Sure, man," he said, closing his blade and waving his troops away. I noticed that my troops had gathered, and wondered at all this fuss for a fuck. "Just putting you on, man." Like hell.
The knife had chilled me, had scared me in a way I didn't like to admit, but it made me madder than hell, too. It was back in his pocket, but the challenge still gleamed in his arrogant smile, and his shadow lay flat and stark against the tabletop like an echoing slap. He reared his forearm on the table, strong and supple and slightly weaving in a hypnotic dance. I matched him to the murmur of a muffled "Get 'em, Slag-baby," to Haddad's voice wailing like a street vendor as he took bets. I placed the brown of my arm, white against the brown of his, in the circle.
"Let's put a little bread on it, man," he said, snapping his fingers. I shook my head, knowing as he knew: whoever lost, left.
Our hands clasped, separate fingers carefully placed, molding a primeval bond. Morning held the hands as David and I eased into the clasp, then stepped back and shouted "Go!" No fancy stuff, no waiting, no more playing around, I leaned into his arm as if trying to shove him out of the universe.
I should have known. What match was primitive cunning and arrogance against the enlightened rage of a civilized man? I should have known. White, paunchy middle-class American that I was, I was also the boy who had dug ten-thousand post holes before I was eighteen, milked twice that many cows, and lifted how many countless pounds in how many curious ways for the past ten years to retain that initial strength. Fed on eggs, fattened on steaks, nourished in the land of milk and oatmeal, was it any wonder I slammed a skinny Filipino's hand to the table, ending with the same motion I began?
Before the echoes of David's hand on the wood stopped, I already felt silly, even guilty in the sudden quiet. He slowly flexed his hand, staring at the sliver of blood which split the middle knuckle. He grinned wildly and said, his bop-talk gone, his accent heavy, "We play your game, motherfucker, now we play mine."
He stood up, kicked his chair away, flipped the table from between us, and opened his balisong in a nickering, sickening twirl. The instance charged into my mind, clear and stark as if time tripped again. I saw everything with an incredible vision: the writhing crowd making room; Novotny's aghast face; Teresita waving frantically at the bartender; an old whore already crying; Morning's perplexity. All the figures as clear and distinct as if I had sculptured them, molded and cast the panorama of the stricken crowd. A crystal drop of sweat paused in its race down the side of David's face. If I could have held that cleft in time, God knows what flaming stars, what nights of space I might have seen – but for fear. But I couldn't have seen those things at all, for even as David moved, I stood as swiftly as he, and as his blade held the light, my chair already flew toward him.
Ah, poor David. He might have sliced me into slivers, but he had no luck. The chair leg, four pieces of wrapped bamboo, slipped past his raised arm and slammed into his mouth. He staggered back with a surprised pinch around his eyes, as if he remembered all the movie chairs broken on virtuous backs, then he stumbled to the side as if the world were spinning too fast for his legs. He fell, then propped on his elbow, lay on his side still amazed. When he moved his hand from his face, he exposed a bloody gap where several teeth had been broken off at the gum line. The stubby root of one still gleamed optimistically in the cavity.
This too was a clear picture out of the corner of my eye as I ran away, but I didn't realize what it meant until I bumped into Morning standing like stone next to me. I turned back, no more thinking now than when I had run, and leapt toward David as he tried to get up. His blade scraped in his struggles like a rattler on the cement floor. I kicked him in the ribs, then stomped his hand, and scooted the knife away. Behind me I heard a crash as Morning and Novotny tore the legs off the table and cornered David's rats without a fight. David was up now, and I caught his staggering rush, blocked his right, then grabbed his arm and spun him toward the bar. A clot of spectators kept him from hitting the bar, and he was quickly up. But in the short spin I had heard the singing and knew where my blood beat. When he came, I was ready.
Did I cry? shout? suffer? I triumphed.
I panted over David and had an unbidden impulse from my boyhood to mount my foot on the bowed neck and wake the jungle with my call, and as the thought came and went unacted upon, I laughed away.
Back I came at the touch of Teresita's hand and the whisper of her voice, and found, on the far side of violence, desire coiled tight and hard about me. It's violent we leave that place, I thought, grabbing her arm and pushing through the crowd, and fitting and proper violent go back. She did not struggle under my hand, then valiant hand.
Once she slipped from my grasp in the scrambling people, but before I could reach back, she thrust up to me and I felt her swelling breast nibble at my arm. Across the floor and up the steps into the shadowed helter-skelter of rooms, our breaths breaking the air before us, we ran. At the first door I slapped the bamboo curtains aside and crashed into the room only to find the bed already occupied. Cagle rode like a monkey on an elephant's back among the acres of his bloated lover, humping away as if mere friction might consume the indifferent tons. Gripped in his saddle meant for no earthly horse, he rode, his hairy arms each wrapping a huge flabby breast, his tiny white ass flickering in the slitted light like that casual muscle it drove, while the unprotesting hulk calmly flipped the limp pages of a comic book above his burrowed head.
Teresita and I laughed and laughed, but hurried to the room at the end of the slanting hall, our impatient hands flying at each other's flesh like mad birds. She was naked and blood from a clumsy kiss ran sweet in our mouths before I could get my pants off; so I took her, damp and quivering, hobbled by my britches. She arched, bucked and achingly arched against me, reared like a mare in the chute, and the curve of her back embraced a void I must fill. And again she came from the bed, lunging up as if it were afire, and again she fell to earth, to earth and into the void beyond where our frail members hesitate to go; but I went with the proven strength of my back, swinging myself like a club, and I went like a child lost in a dark echoless cavern, and I went.
And then we were easy and slow and rolling but not over, and her breasts quivered hot as tears on my face as we began the effortless lope through the foothills toward the snow on the mountains, blistering white snow in our sun. And as we ran, time fled past us like a startled bird, a beating, hurrying flutter, and the beard grew on my face and the drying mud of the jungle stiffened my clothes and the stench of the battle mingled with the steady slow suck of boots in muck. A web belt encircled my waist and a canteen thumped at my back and I knew my weapon lay under the bed, my rifle in frightened reach as I paused this moment from the fighting, this moment so precious between the fear, so perfect and beautiful because it might never be again, for I too must someday play the vanquished… But I had the smoothness of now, and clutched it as I felt the first bite of the snow as the cold, cold heat gathered to burst pure white re-creation, white and hot as the snows we trampled.