Randy White: Everglades

Men who are big and quick and hard exude a kind of physical assurance. He had it.

Something else: The guy had been a competitive wrestler-and a good one.

I knew the instant he put his hands on me. It was unmistakable. I knew because, in high school, I’d spent each and every post-football season enduring the brutal practices which that great, great sport demands. Hand control, the variations of classic takedowns and reversals, had all been pounded into my skull by a brilliant wrestling coach named Gary Freis. The moment you hook up with another man in any kind of physical conflict, a wrestler instantly recognizes another wrestler.

This guy had had a pretty good coach himself-unsettling news.

As he pushed me into the water, I used his own momentum to duck under his right armpit, and come up behind him. When I grabbed his throat to take control, he slapped his huge hand on mine. Then, instead of trying to pull away as expected, he pushed his body back into mine, prying my hand loose as he moved.

Suddenly, he was behind me, his left arm levered under mine, using the back of my head as a fulcrum, his right leg trying to grapevine between my legs.

As I grunted in pain, he said into my ear, breathing heavily, “You want to get nasty, asshole? I’ll show you nasty.”

What I’d learned in those few first seconds was disturbing.

The guy was stronger than I-no question-plus he had to be thirty, maybe forty, pounds heavier. He had those raccoon kind of fingers, steel within hard rubber, that move like tiny, independent little animals, and are nearly impossible to escape.

Something deep inside was telling me to stop, give it up, surrender-but not just because he was capable of beating me; even killing me.

No.

My inner voice and its reasoning were all too familiar: I no longer trust myself in a fight. Simple as that. I can no longer rely on the control I once pretended to have over my own cold temper.

Yet I couldn’t quit. Old habit.

Instead, I tried to relax my body, hoping to give him the impression I was quitting. When I felt his grip ease ever so slightly, I swung my hips to the right, then somersaulted forward into the knee-deep water as hard as I could throw my body.

It was enough to break me free. But not for long. He was instantly on me as I tried to get to my feet, pulling me, then turning me with a very effective arm drag.

Then he was behind me again, his left arm wrapped around my throat, the hard edge of his forearm digging into my Adam’s apple, severing the flow of oxygen between mouth and lungs.

It is the most basic-and the most effective-of submission holds, and if I didn’t find a way to break it, he could hold me there until I was unconscious. Or brain-damaged. Or dead.

“You want to keep dancing, asshole? Or you ready to quit?”

I hammered my head backward. Felt it glance off his nose; heard a woof of pain. It loosened his grip enough for me to drive my elbow into his stomach, but he managed to keep his forearm locked on my throat.

That was the end. All I could do. All I could stand without replenishing the oxygen supply, and I knew it. The world was getting fuzzy, and not just because my glasses were now hanging uselessly, tied around my neck with fishing line.

My head was tilted skyward and I watched the April sunset clouds turn gray, then rainbow-streaked as I began to slip into unconsciousness…

Then I heard: “Oh… shit. Oh-h-h-h-h shit-t-t-t! ”

Was I imagining the distress in his voice?

No… because suddenly, I was free. For no reason whatsoever, he released his grip, allowing me to collapse into the shallow water.

I got shakily to my feet, touching fingers to my bruised Adam’s apple, pulse roaring in my ears, as I put on my glasses.

Skinhead had already waded to shore where, inexplicably, he was now on his knees at the base of the buttonwood tree that had once been his hiding place.

He seemed to be coughing, making a weird barking sound. It took me a confusing few seconds to understand what he was doing.

He was vomiting, using the tree to steady himself, heaving violently. We’ve all experienced it: When you’re that nauseated, you are absolutely focused on the intensity of stomach spasms, and therefore helpless.

What had I done to cause him to vomit? There was a touch of blood beneath his nose. Otherwise, he was unmarked. Had I somehow caught him in the solar plexus, or the testicles? It made no sense.

As I walked toward him, he held his hand up like a flag, palm out and waving: a universal signal of surrender. He was done; too sick to fight anymore.

Breathing heavily, feeling sick myself, I turned my back to him and waited. I could see Sally crossing the scrim of kitchen window, still busy doing something, almost frenetic in her body movement.

The way she moved seemed out of character-just as some of the things she’d said, her speech patterns, were different.

More indications that my friend had changed.

Why the hell’d you hit me, Mac? There wasn’t no reason for you to coldcock me like that.”

The man was still on his knees, pale-faced and leaning against the tree, taking long, slow breaths.

I said, “Are you kidding? You jump on me from a tree and don’t expect me to fight back?”

“Jump you? I didn’t jump, dumbass, I fell. Slipped off that wet limb ’cause I was so surprised to see you down there. Next thing I know, you’re taking a swing at me. Just my luck, too-about a billion acres of swamp in this shit-hole of a state, and I gotta land on a fucking wrestler.”

Was he serious? Yeah, he seemed to be sincere, talking in his big-city accent: New York with a touch of New Jersey. Some kind of hybrid combination; almost a parody, it seemed, of a 1940s tough-guy movie. I didden jump dumm azzz… The mobster talking to Bogart about a Maltese falcon.

He had a big, wide, citified face, too: Mediterranean skin-Italian blood showing-with birdlike, golden eyes set deep beneath a heavy brow, darker with his head shaved bare. I also noted that his fingernails were thick, pitted like opaque oysters, a condition known as onchomycosis, which is a fungal disease, often associated with people who have their hands in water a lot, or who use steroids. The fungus spores attach themselves beneath the nail, and begin to feed on the nail’s cells. Tough to get rid of.

The guy definitely did not fish for a living so, judging from his size, he’d gotten into bodybuilding, juicing himself with shots or pills to get bigger. Maybe.

I listened to him ask, “Where’d you wrestle college, Mac?”

I said, “High school. That was it.”

“No way. You had to go further. Or you were a blue-chipper. Nothing national?” He seemed to be marking time, speaking but focusing inward, testing all the internal sensors, unsure if he was going to be sick again. He punctuated every few words by spitting weakly, then sniffing.

“My junior and senior years, I did the AAU tournament in Iowa.”

He said, “That explains it. I did that tournament three times, which means you had to be a state champ or you wouldn’t’a been invited. You make the finals? Maybe we wrestled before.”

I took a few steps and leaned against a nearby black mangrove, relaxing a little. “Nope. Lost in the quarters. I was way out of my league.”

He made a baritone gurgling sound, his stomach momentarily spasming, but then he slowly smiled. “Most guys, they have excuses. Tore up their knee or popped a shoulder. But you say it right out loud: just not good enough. I’ll tell you something though, Mac. If you made it to the quarterfinals in that tournament, you were good enough. Plenty good enough.”

I waited a few moments, looking at him, before I said. “You didn’t have much trouble beating me.”