Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

The kid seemed a little surprised. He’d hardly broken a sweat.

Then the wrestler from Wisconsin-big guy, two hundred plus-had the heavyweight boxer down and unconscious before anyone had time to understand what had happened, and the boxer might have died if doctors hadn’t come charging into the caged ring.

Neither of the wrestlers used holds that were legal in amateur wrestling, but every experienced amateur wrestler soon learns all the illegal stuff, all the dangerous and dirty little tricks, and they know how to use them.

It went that way all night. One martial arts expert after another was quickly eliminated and unfailingly humiliated-a big letdown for the promoters, but no surprise to me. Out of all the so-called “fighting” disciplines, there are only two groups who actually fight. They fight it out, toe to toe and hand to hand, day after day after day. Those two groups are wrestlers and boxers. The other disciplines pose, they practice and play-act-which is why they are sufficiently naive about actual combat to take themselves too seriously.

Boxers work hard, but no sport requires more discipline, courage, or mental toughness than amateur wrestling (and that’s why it’s a national tragedy that colleges are eliminating wrestling because of a misused but well-intended piece of legislation called Title IX). Only wrestlers and boxers actually fight for a living. The rest are interesting and often stylish pretenders.

Which is why I did not take Amelia’s advice, why I did not move aside.

When Camphill shifted his weight toward me, preparing to jump, spin, and kick, I reached across and grabbed his right wrist and bicep, moving with him. I pulled and ducked under his arm and leg, then came up behind him just as his feet returned to the deck.

My hands on his shoulders, controlling his body, I said into his ear, “You missed,” as I reached around and pried his mouth open, avoiding his teeth by using only the middle fingers of my hands.

Then I hooked a finger into each corner of his lips, applying pressure, pulling his mouth wide, until he arched backward, and I heard him making a hoarse, gasping noise, shocked and in agony, his nails scratching at my wrists as I kneed him hard, twice, on the coccyx at the base of his spine, the very sensitive and easily bruised remnant of our primate tail.

The next morning, I knew, Camphill would have trouble walking. If he could walk, and it would probably be impossible for him to sit.

Had I wanted to rip his face from ear to ear, I could have done it easily. Drunk as I was, mad as I was, that wasn’t my intent. I was giving him a signal-letting him know that, if he continued, the consequences would be serious. There is nothing pretty, heroic, orderly, or theatrical about a real fight. It is brutal, messy, and damn dangerous.

Pointed-face and tennis player were screaming at me. It seemed as if I were in a vacuum, yet a few of their words and phrases pierced through: “Kill him, Gunnar… what are you waiting for!… My God, Gunnar, your face… there’s blood. You’re hurting Gunnar’s face!”

The harder Camphill tried to pry my fingers out of his mouth, the more pressure I exerted, so there was some blood, a slight ripping of tissue, but not much, and, finally, he stopped struggling.

Still speaking into his ear, I said, “I’m going to let you go. If you try to fight back again in any way, I’ll put you down on the deck. Then I’ll put you in the hospital. Count on it.”

I slid my fingers out of his mouth.

I thought he’d heed my warning. He didn’t.

As I released him, wiping my hands on my fishing shorts, he relaxed and shrugged-a decoy posture-then exploded, side-kicking me hard on the left shin, which hurt like hell, and tried to spin his right elbow back into my ribs. I managed to catch the main impact of the blow with my arm. Even so, it put a little wheezing sound into my breathing, caused me to double up momentarily. It also infuriated me.

When he came at me again, I locked my hands on his right wrist, got myself behind him once more, and, without giving him time to react, bear-hugged, lifted, and launched him up over my head, as I arched backward steering his body-a potentially deadly wrestling throw called a “suplay.”

Had I continued arching backward, I would have pile-driven the top of his skull into the floor. Instead, I did a fast quarter-turn so that only the side of his face slammed down onto the wood. Then I pinned him there, using my right elbow to burrow into his neck until I finally heard him wheeze, “ Enough. No more!”

I stood and waited to make certain he wasn’t going to leap to his feet. Then I turned and limped toward the steps, hearing pointed-face say, “You’re going to let him do that to you, Gunnar? He got lucky, for Christ’s sake. Go get him!” as Amelia took my arm, helping me.

The side-kick had been nasty. I’d be feeling a burning sensation in my shin for a week, maybe longer.

I turned to her when she squeezed my arm and saw an intense, appraising expression on her face. A little bit of surprise in there, too, as she said in a low voice, “My God, you’re something. Professor-I figured, yeah, the perfect nickname ’til watching you just now. Like he was a sack of corn or something, that’s the way it looked when you threw him. Un-damn-believable. ”

I used peripheral vision to make certain Camphill wasn’t rethinking his surrender. “He’s a sack of something,” I said. “You want to get another drink?”

And it still wasn’t over. We stopped at the Green Flash because it’s a good place, then walked along the narrow beach road to ’Tween Waters Inn, the Gulf off to our left, a vast lens of starlight and black water without horizon.

Everyplace we stopped, we collected people; old friends and fishing guides and islanders out for a Friday night, more than willing to help us honor Janet. On the islands even a bad reason is good enough for throwing a party, and this was a great reason. So by the time we got to the Crow’s Nest at’Tween Waters, there were more than twenty of us, and the place was already crowded.

One look told me why. The bar has an extended dining area that can be partitioned off from the elevated dining room. The partition was closed except for a door-sized space through which I could see tables of men and women wearing name tags. A sign on an easel read: “Save All Manatees.”

Welcome SAM members!

Damn.

I remembered Camphill saying he was the national spokesman, which meant that he was bound to show up sooner or later. In fact, they probably had him housed in one of the little cottages out back. I took Rhonda and JoAnn aside and told them, “I think we ought to collect our people and get out of here.”

But Rhonda was already locked in animated conversation with Wally, the chef, and Janice behind the bar, so, as she hurried back to them, she said, “Doc, you worry too much. You think Mr. Hollywood is going mess with you again after you put him in orbit? I don’t think so.”

That wasn’t what I was worried about. I didn’t think there was much of a chance that Camphill would give me another try, but the dining room was filled with SAM people, and there was Jeth in his barbecue-a-manatee T-shirt, plus most of the Dinkin’s Bay family.

Something I saw underlined just how irrational and mean the issue had become. The Crow’s Nest is built around a hardwood bar in the shape of a broken L. At three corners of the bar are hand-carved manatees-a classy, ornate touch in a classy sportsman’s bar. Really beautiful pieces of work. On the belly of one of the manatees, though, someone had recently used a black marker to draw a bull’s eye, complete with an arrow. Above the arrow were the words, “Save a Fishing Guide, Kill a Sea Cow.”