Buckey scrambled to his feet. He limped slightly on the knee I'd kicked and he moved more slowly. The blood from his nose was reddening his T-shirt, mixing with the sweat that had already soaked it. Where he'd fallen some of the parking lot gravel stuck to the moisture. He was breathing hard. He lunged at me again and threw a handful of gravel at my face. It didn't have much effect. But it distracted me for half a second and Vern hit me on the left side of the jaw and knocked me two staggering steps and down flat on my back. My head echoed with hollow distance and my vision blurred. He jumped through the blur, kicking at my head, and, mostly on instinct, I half rolled and got my hands up and the kick hit my upper arm. I kept rolling and crab-scrambled away from the next kick and got my feet under me and was up. I felt dizzy. Vern hit me again on the upper left arm, and then on the right forearm as I covered up and deflected the punches. The ringing in my head was clearing. I could hear Vern's breath rasping in and out. He tried to get his arms around me in a bear hug and when he did I kneed him in the groin and butted him under the chin and broke away. He was gasping and shaking his head, half doubled over in pain. But his eyes were fixed on me with the same red intensity they had when he stepped out of the bowling alley. He was drooling a little and bleeding and soaked with sweat and filthy with dust and gravel. He was breathing like a bellows, oxygen heaving into his chest. But he had stopped coming at me. He stood still, swaying slightly, his head shaking slightly.
"Vern," I said, "you're just not in shape." I shook my head. "Shame to see a man let himself go like this."
He came at me again, but more slowly. Not cautiously, but in a slower-motion version of the way he had come at me before. There was no change in expression. I made a little feint with my left hand and hooked it over his shoulder and got him on the jaw. I moved away from his punch and hit him a combination, left, left, overhand right. And moved away. Vern turned slowly toward me. His arms were starting to drop. It was what I used to look for when I was fighting. Your opponent got arm-weary and he let them drop and you went for his head. I hit Vern another combination. My head was clear now and the oxygen was flowing in and out easily and the legs were good and the muscles were loose and I could see very clearly. I could see the openings where the punches could go and I was moving in the clean, precise automatic sequences I had learned a long time ago when I thought I was going to be heavyweight champ. Vern was pushing his punches at me now. It was almost done. I knew there were people watching and I knew the sun was out but none of that had any reality, only the swaying massive shape in front of me and the punching lanes and the sequenced movements. It was like dancing to music only I could hear. Even Vern barely mattered in the intensity of my concentration and the rhythms of the fight. There was no pain. Later there would be, but not now. Just the patterns and the movements and the solid jolt as the punches landed.
And then he was through.
He didn't go down. But his arms dropped; he stopped coming, even slowly, and stood motionless, his arms down, gasping for air. I stepped back away from him. The intensity was gone. The meanness was gone. In his eyes there was nothing. As if all he was was mean and if he lost it he ceased to exist. Around us most of the people north of Bangor stood in a ragged semicircle in absolute silence. I could hear my breathing deep and steady easing in and out, and I could hear Buckey rasping desperately. Somewhere in the scrub forests along the highway some kind of bird was making a persistent sound like chips being sliced from a hardwood slab.
Behind me a man's voice said, "Put him away, mister."
And another voice, male also: "Put him down, man… Put the sonova bitch down."
I said to Buckey, "You ready to talk about Ginger?"
A woman's voice said, "Knock him down, mister." And a man said, "Don't stop until it's done."
A lot of voices chimed in. Vern wasn't only disliked. He was disliked widely.
A woman said, "Kill the bastard."
Buckey still stood motionless, still swaying slightly, his head down, gasping. Then he slowly bent forward and his knees buckled and he fell like a weed wilting, crumpling to the ground and lying still with his face in the gravel. Again there was silence and then someone began to clap and then the odd rural crowd began to applaud steadily.
Now I was the toughest guy in Lindell, Maine.
14
Buckey's pulse was strong and I propped him in the shade against the east wall of the bowling alley. The bartender with the tattoos brought me a bucket of water and some ice and a rag and I sponged Buckey off and soaked my hands and waited. I was sitting on my heels with both hands in the ice-water bucket when Buckey opened his eyes.
I didn't move. His eyes slowly focused on me. I put the ice bucket aside and rested my forearms on my thighs and folded my hands. His eyes moved past me. There was no one else. The big fight was over. The audience had gone away. He looked back at me.
"I'm going to kill you," he said. I nodded.
"When you're sleeping or getting laid or walking along not thinking about it, I'm going to be there and blow the back of your fucking head away."
I nodded again. I had my gun back on my belt and sitting still on my heels I reached around with my right hand and took it out and pointed it at the tip of Buckey's nose and said, "Maybe."
Buckey looked at the muzzle of the gun two inches from his face. He didn't say anything.
I said, "Now I want you to tell me about your daughter, Ginger."
"I ain't telling you fucking shit," he said. But it was weak.
"You've been doing that," I said. "And look what it got you. I want to know about the whorehouse you sold your kid to."
"She's dead," he said.
"Yeah, she was a street hooker in New York City and somebody shot her."
"So what's the fucking difference?" Buckey said.
"Fatherhood rests but lightly on you, Vern," I said. And I thumbed the hammer back on my gun. It made the cylinder turn one notch and Vern could see the copper-jacketed slug go under the hammer. "What whorehouse?"
Buckey shrugged. "Place called Magic Massage in Portland. I didn't sell her. It was a finder's fee."
"Place still there?" I said.
"Was last time I was down to Portland, on Congress Street, around the corner from Franklin."
I smiled, and turned the gun away from his face and let the hammer down gently. Then I flipped the cylinder out, turned it so there was an empty chamber under the hammer, closed the gun and put it back on my hip. Vern watched me.
"You had a fucking gun why didn't you use it," he said. "How come you come on to me without it, if you had one?"
"Wanted to see if you really were the toughest guy in Lindell," I said. I stood up. "See you around, Vern."
"That's all?" Buckey said. "You come up here all this way to fight me and find out about a whorehouse in Portland?"
"Un huh."
"You're fucking crazy, man. What do you care about a whorehouse in Portland? What the fuck you care about some dead whore in New York?"
"Vern," I said, "it was a pleasure to punch your lights out. It was such a pleasure that I may come up sometime and do it again."
I turned and left him sitting slumped against the wall and headed for my car and drove away, back south. Toward Portland.
15
The sky over Portland is like the sky above San Francisco, unusually blue and high, suggestive of the ocean that surrounds the city on most sides. The buildings were low and that emphasized the high of the sky and the silent presence of the ocean.