Paul Levine - False Dawn

There are times when a man’s got to act like a man, and other times like an adolescent.

“ Cagado cabron! ” Hector snarled. I didn’t know what it meant but figured it wasn’t Have a nice day. He picked up a handful of peanuts and dropped them into the beer where they sizzled happily. Then he picked up the pitcher and poured it over my head.

At the next table, I heard someone say, “Shee- it,” and I heard chairs scraping against the planks of the wooden floor, veteran spectators giving us room to arbitrate our grievances. Hector placed the pitcher on the table. Peanuts stuck in my hair. The beer stung my eyes, soaked the front of my shirt, and dripped, icy cold, into my crotch.

“Hector,” I said softly, “I hate Budweiser.”

And then I slipped a hand under the table, grabbed it where the base met the top, planted both feet, and pivoted, swinging the table hard into Hector’s crotch. I dropped the table but continued the movement, swiveling two hundred seventy degrees and getting to my feet, expecting a first punch from his buddy and taking it, a glancing right hand off the side of the skull. I squared up, and snapped a left jab that he ducked. I followed with another that missed, and then feinted yet another jab and came across the top with a right that he tried to avoid by turning his head. He had good quickness, but I still caught him solid on the ear. I felt the jolt all the way to my elbow, and his cerebellum must have been dialing 911, because he folded neatly in half and crumpled into a carpet of peanut shells, unconscious before he hit the floor.

I didn’t have time to give him the mandatory eight-count because Hector took that moment to smash a pool cue across the back of my head. The wood broke with a hellacious cr-ack, but it didn’t hurt my head. Not a bit. Then he ricocheted what was left of the cue stick off my shoulder, and again, same thing. No pain. Those chairs they smash over the cowboys’ heads in B westerns must be made of cue sticks.

I was starting to feel invincible, a celluloid cowboy, snapping long-distance jabs. Since I was taller and stronger, I wanted to maintain what the experts call an outfighting range, keeping Hector from getting inside with quick punches or kicks. But Hector knew what he was doing. He had some hand speed and understood how to retreat, then come back with a flurry. When he counterattacked, I covered up with the double forearm block. It isn’t pretty, something like Floyd Patterson’s peek-a-boo style. It leaves you with bruises on both arms but protects your dimpled chin and semihandsome face.

I had stalked Hector halfway across the bar, around the pool table, and up against a cooler, but he spun away. He kept leaping in and leaping out, a flurry of punches, and then a retreat. He knew something about martial arts, his style similar to the White Crane method of kung fu. A crane can defeat a gorilla, simply by spinning out of its grasp and counterattacking with furious beats of its wings, beak, and claws. But it takes patience, intelligence, and timing. The bird must continuously circle the beast, changing position and attack angles, retreating time and again until it can attack and peck away at the gorilla’s eyes or otherwise discourage it from continuing the fight.

Hector had landed enough rat-a-tat-tats to raise some welts on my forehead, and the back of my skull, where the cue stick had landed without immediate effect, was starting to ache. Pain is like that, sometimes creeping up on you. I’m not exactly immune to pain, but I’ve grown accustomed to its pace. I played ball when a lot of guys got intimate at halftime with the Caine Brothers-Novocain and Xylocaine. It was expected. You played hurt or you didn’t play at all. I resisted the needle until a game against the Bills when I took an elbow through the face mask on a kickoff, and my nose went east and west where it used to be north and south. If we hadn’t been so thin on the special teams, they would have sent me to the locker room, but you don’t tackle with your nose, so you can play-compound fracture notwithstanding-if you control the pain. With the offensive line huddled around me on the bench to block the view of the cameras, the team doc put a shot of Xylocaine right between my eyes, and damned if I didn’t recover a fumble on a kickoff in the fourth quarter. After that, it was Darvocet for a separated shoulder, cortisone for turf toe, and an occasional jolt of my buddies, the Caine Brothers, for assorted twists and sprains.

Now I moved in again, and Hector caught me in the chest with the front snap kick they call Mae keage in karate. Then he spun to his right and tried to connect with the Yoko keage, the side snap kick. His timing was off, and he missed, leaving himself off balance, still spinning toward my left, his body open.

From somewhere in my peripheral vision, I was aware of the faces at the bar, intently watching us. They seemed to be smiling. The jukebox had switched gears, and Paula Abdul was in a rush for a guy who kissed her up and down.

I pivoted from the hips and stepped forward with the left foot. I hit him square in the solar plexus with a left hook that had everything I’ve got behind it. I heard the air wheeze out of him, and as he gasped for breath, I unleashed a right uppercut that started near my shoelaces and ended on the point of his unshaven chin. The punch lifted him off the floor and stretched him out on his back, feet twitching.

Francisco Crespo had gotten up and now stood at the bar, watching without expression. He hadn’t helped them and he hadn’t helped me. He was a good soldier who didn’t want to cross the general. I wondered what he would have done if I’d been in real trouble. But then, I already knew that.

I was aware of some murmuring at the tables, and in a moment, everyone was drinking and talking as if nothing had happened.

I was breathing hard when I paid the tab. I threw in twenty bucks for a broken cue stick and a fifty to cover renting the place as a boxing ring. Another twenty for the waitress, who asked us to come back real soon and bring our friends.

In the parking lot along the canal, an ugly Bufo frog the size of a double cheeseburger burped hello. Or was it good-bye? Some extremely unbalanced druggies are known to lick the Bufo, which secretes a milky hallucinogenic goo. I could never help wondering what bozo discovered this pharmaceutical phenomenon by first putting tongue to toad.

The knuckles of my hands were split and beginning to swell. I sank stiffly into my old convertible and looked at my maniacally macho self in the rearview mirror. Angry knots were already popping out of my forehead. A judge once told me that, based on my trial strategy, I must have played football too long without a helmet. Now I looked the part. Maybe that was good for my buddy Crespo. The trial was two days away, and when the jurors filed into the box, they wouldn’t be able to figure out which guy was the felon.

A tractor-trailer had collided with a bus on Tamiami Trail, snarling traffic on the way back into the city. A light rain was falling, and it was growing dark. An ambulance sat on the soggy berm alongside the canal where the bus was jammed nose-first into the shallow water, its rear wheels angled into the air. Raindrops slithered down my windshield, glowing blood red with each revolution of the ambulance’s flashing light. From the east, I could hear a siren drawing closer. I know a personal injury lawyer who loves the sound. Whenever he hears an ambulance, he turns to his partner and says, “They’re playing our song.” The same lawyer branched out into divorce work and had a new business card printed: “Broken bones and broken hearts.” And my brethren at the bar wonder why they’re considered bottom-feeding gutter rats.