I tried to gain my feet, but I had very little strength left, I was hurt all right, I was confused and the fear was there to feed the rage, and that wild anger was all I had left- that and self-preservation and some instinctive things you never forget if you’ve ever been trained by the military. He slashed at me again, turning my face into the gravel, and more pain flared and I tasted my own blood, hot and thick and salt-sweet. I was half crazy with all of it.
I kicked at him blindly, missed, kicked again, felt the side of my shoe scrape along his rib cage. He shouted in agony, maybe I broke some of his ribs, and then his weight was gone and I was able to roll over and come up. I saw him and threw myself at the dark panting shape and hit him in the same ribs again with my shoulder while he was trying to recover. He screamed a second time, twisting his body, and I went after him on my knees, flailing at him with wild, ineffectual blows at first, until I got to him, and then connecting, hitting him now, hurting him now.
I stopped swinging at him after a time, and he knelt there on all fours with his head hanging down, bull-like again, a fighting bull after the picadors and banderilleros and matadors have finished wounding him and sapping his strength and preparing him for the kill. I raised over him, matador readying the final thrust with the muleta, this crazily disjointed thought there in my mind amid the agony and the heat, and I caught my hands together again and brought them down on the back of Holly’s neck. He grunted, not falling, and I brought the hands down again, and again, beating him to the ground, beating him flat, kept on hitting him until I could not raise my arms any longer and he was lying there very still. All of it drained out of me at once, and I thought: I killed him-but I had no reaction to that. I fell away from him, stretching out on my belly on the hard, rough gravel, leaking blood, trying to breathe, trying to regain control.
A long time passed, and no one came, and I thought: We made enough noise to raise half the town, why isn’t someone here? But even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t true; the accelerated speed at which things had happened, the heightening of all my senses, the pain and the fury, had magnified things out of proportion. We had not made as much noise as all that, the office was too far away, the fight had not lasted nearly as long as it seemed. We were alone back there in the darkness.
I felt my thoughts clearing finally, in spite of a raging inferno of agony in my head, and I got my weak arms under me and pushed myself up, struggling to a sitting position. I was still gasping. I looked over at Holly, and he had not moved. Droplets of blood fell from somewhere on my face to spatter on the gravel between my knees as I sat there. Get up, I thought. I made it onto my feet, shakily, and stood there hurting until I was sure I could walk all right without falling down. Then I went to Holly and leaned over him, and I could hear the stertorous wheezing of his breath into the gravel. I got a grip on the collar of his torn poplin jacket and dragged him to the cabin porch.
It took some doing to get him up the five steps and across the porch and into the cabin, but I managed it. I left him lying on the floor just inside, and closed the door and locked it and put the key in my pocket. I walked across to the bathroom and flicked on the light, leaving the door open so I could watch him out there, and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink.
Sweet Christ!
I caught onto the sides of the basin with shaking hands, fighting down nausea. I was drenched in blood. The left side of my face was like raw ground beef, pebbled with bits of gravel, dirt commingled with the fluid there. A three-cornered flap of loose skin hung open high on my right cheek, and the eye above it was swollen half shut; bruises on both temples, my upper lip split in two places. There was pain all across the back of my skull where he had rolled it in the gravel, and inside my head a near-unbearable pressure had gathered, like volatile gases coming to an explosion point.
He had done a job on me, all right.
I stripped off my shirt and jacket and ran warm water into the basin, glancing into the other room with my good eye from time to time; Holly had not moved. I washed my face, gently, trying not to cry out. I used a soft towel, and looked in the mirror again, and it was not quite so bad now; but I had to do something about that flap of skin hanging loose under my eye. It was still bleeding, trailing crimson down my cheek in a hellish tear stream.
I went into the other room, moving on enervated legs, and unlocked the front door and stumbled down to my car. There was a first-aid kit in the glove compartment, and I took that back inside, relocking the door. I poured Mercurochrome onto a gauze square and tore off two strips of adhesive tape and stuck them across the top of the pad; then I set my teeth and shut my eyes and placed the bandage gently over the cut, pressing the loose skin back into place.
I could feel the pain down through my groin, and a kind of whimper came out of my throat. After a moment the pain went away and I could breathe again. I poured more Mercurochrome onto some cotton swabbing and worked that over the left side of my face, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed and ate four aspirin dry from the kit.
In my open suitcase I located a package of cigarettes. I tore it open and lit one, drawing in the smoke, coughing, inhaling again. My hands were still trembling; I had not been in a slugging fight in ten years, and never one like this. I was too goddamn old for anything as physical as this, and the reaction was setting in. I thought: He’s like a bull, all right, just like a bull. How the hell did I take him?
I sat on the bed and smoked and trembled, and finally I began to feel a little better. The throbbing gentled in my head, and some of the terrible weakness in my legs and arms went away. I walked into the bathroom again and drank a glass of water and came out and looked down at Holly. He was stirring now, moaning deep in his throat.
He rolled over onto his back, and I saw that he looked as bad as I did-blood all over him, cuts, torn clothing, his nose twisted to one side and still flowing, a tooth missing in the front. I backed off a couple of steps, thinking: I hope he doesn’t try to start it up again, I don’t think I can handle any more. There was a writing desk in one corner of the room, and I went there and took the heavy redwood chair and stood it between Holly and me. If he made another play, I was going to use the chair on him and the hell with it.
Holly lay with his eyes shut, his belly heaving like a giant bellows as he sucked in breath through his broken nose and ruined mouth. Then he moaned and rolled over again and crawled up onto all fours; he shook his head, shook it again, prying his eyes open. He raised one hand, rubbed the back of it across his face, and then he saw me and my hands tensed on the back of the chair.
But he just knelt there, looking at me with his vacuous eyes. After an interval he let the lower half of his body relax, rolling his left hip onto the floor and resting his weight on that and on his left arm. He forced words through his thick lips, ‘You beat me. Nobody ever beat me before, and you beat me.’
‘You son of a bitch.’
‘You’re tough,’ Holly said. ‘You’re a tough guy.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Oh yeah, I’m a tough guy.’
‘Nobody ever beat me before.’
There was a certain respect in his voice, as if he held no more anger or animosity toward me, as if I was now a kind of hero for having beaten him. The bloody mask of his face was expressionless, but I had that feeling of grudging worship and it made me uneasy. I wanted to hate him, and yet I could not do it with him the way he was-a sort of huge child, a worshiping Brahma child. I stood there, trembling, watching him.