Chapter 38 Stormy #2
The brass knuckles connect with Ron's mouth and I feel things shift under the impact.
Teeth. Lips. The architecture of the smile rearranging itself around my fist. Blood.
Immediate and warm, spraying from split lips, and a sound from Ron that isn't a word.
It's the sound a man makes when the thing he's always used to get what he wants stops working.
"That's my goddamn boy!" Tex's voice, bright and excited, the voice of a man watching fireworks explode. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are LIVE at Big Tex's Roadhouse! What a NIGHT! Hit him again, Stormy!"
Ron spits blood. A tooth—or a piece of one—hits the hardwood floor. There's blood on my floor now. Ron's blood. On my floor.
I smile at him.
"You're dead," Ron hisses through the broken mouth.
Blood between his teeth, blood on his chin.
The voice is different now—stripped of charm, stripped of performance, the raw voice, the real one, the voice from the room above the salvage yard.
"Both of you. You're fucking dead. You think this changes anything?
I'll find you. I'll always find you. You can't hide from—"
I hit the ribs.
Left side. Low, under the arm that Tex has pinned.
I know exactly where to hit because I know exactly where ribs break.
I know because Ron broke mine. Not once.
Four times across four years. The boot to the ribs was his favorite correction, quick, invisible under clothing, the kind of pain that makes you breathe shallow for weeks.
Every deep breath a reminder. Every cough an event.
I know the sound a rib makes when it cracks because I've heard it from the inside, felt the pop in my own chest, and now I hear it from the outside.
Sounds like justice.
Ron screams. The sound is strangled against Tex's arm but it comes through, high and animal.
"Oh, he felt that one," Tex says, still smiling, adjusting his grip to hold Ron tighter.
"That was beautiful, Stormy. Give him another.
You know what I love about this, Ron? Can I call you Ron?
I'm going to call you Ron. What I love about this is that you drove four hours for this.
You got in your truck in Alabama and you drove four fucking hours to get your ass beat by the person you thought couldn't fight back.
That's commitment, Ron. You could've stayed home.
But no. You drove to Florida to find out what happens when the scared kid isn't scared anymore.
Well, fuck you. Now you know. Keep going, baby! "
Right side. Same spot. Mirror image. The brass knuckles find the ribs and I drive through the impact the way you drive through a punch, not stopping at the surface but pushing through it.
I feel the give, the crack, and Ron's body jerks against Tex's hold and the scream comes again, shorter this time, more air than sound.
"How's that feel?" My voice is calm. I don't recognize it.
It's coming from somewhere deeper than I've ever spoken from, a basement of myself that I didn't know existed.
"That's what it feels like, Ron. Every time.
That's what it felt like when you kicked me on the kitchen floor and I couldn't breathe for three weeks.
Remember that? I remember it. I remember every single time. "
"You worthless—" Ron starts.
Tex shifts his grip, wrenches Ron's right arm forward, and slams the hand flat on the bar top, pinning the wrist. His right hand first. The one that held me down.
The one that grabbed the back of my neck in the dark and pushed my face into the pillow.
The one that signed charity checks on Sunday morning with the same fingers that left bruises on my throat on Saturday night.
The hand is splayed on the wood, fingers spread, and I bring the brass knuckles down on the knuckles and the small bones—metacarpals, phalanges, the delicate architecture of a human hand that can grip and squeeze and hold and hurt—and I feel them break.
Ron's scream is a different pitch now. Higher. Thinner. The sound of a man whose body is sending signals his brain can't override.
"Left hand too, baby," Tex says. His voice is encouraging, warm, the voice of a man coaching someone through the biggest fight of their life. "Don't leave that one out."
The left hand. The one that held the belt.
The one that braced against the headboard above me.
The one that cupped my face sometimes, after, in the quiet, the gentle hand, the tender hand, the hand that made me believe for brief terrible moments that maybe this was love because what else could it be.
That hand was the worst one. The cruel hand hurt my body. The gentle hand broke my mind.
Tex pins the left hand on the bar the same way — wrist flat, fingers spread on the wood.
I break it. I hit it and hit it and the bones give way like kindling. Ron is making sounds that aren't words anymore, wet choking sounds, and the blood from his mouth is running down Tex's forearm. Tex doesn't care, Tex is holding him like a man holding a punching bag, steady and solid.
"That's enough of the hands," Tex says. Not telling me to stop. Redirecting. "Now the face. Take the mask off him. Show the world what's underneath."
I hit the left cheekbone. The brass knuckles crack against it and the skin splits. Ron's head snaps to the right and Tex absorbs the impact and holds him straight. I hit the right cheekbone. Symmetry. Balance. The same damage on both sides because the mask has to come off evenly.
"You think you own me?" I hit the nose. I feel the cartilage flatten under the brass, the bridge collapsing. Blood pours. "You don't own me. You never owned me. You owned a scared kid who didn't know he could say no and you used that against him every single day for four years."
"Stop—" The word is barely recognizable. The mouth is cracked. The nose is broken. The face is a map of damage and every landmark on it is a message I put there.
"Stop?" I hit the orbital socket. The left one.
The bone that protects the eye, and I feel it fracture under the brass and the eye immediately begins to swell shut.
"You want me to stop? Like when I begged you to stop so many times?
Like when I said please? Like when I said I don't want to and you did it anyway? "
"Oh, that eye is done," Tex announces. "That eye has left the building."
Ron isn't talking anymore. The shit-talking is over.
The threats are over. The voice that has controlled and commanded and degraded for four years has been reduced to wet gasps and weak sounds that aren't language.
The mask is gone. The charm is gone. The smile is gone.
What's left is meat and blood and a man who is learning what it feels like to be helpless.
I step back. My right hand is throbbing inside the brass knuckles. My chest is heaving. The rage is draining out of me like water from a cracked vessel, not all at once but in a steady flow, and what's left behind the rage isn't more rage.
It's stillness.
I'm not finished.
I pull the brass knuckles off my right hand. I flex the fingers. They still work. Sheila knew my hands would break without them.
I reach into my left pocket. The pocketknife is there.
The old one. The dull one. The one I've carried since I was a kid.
The blade that couldn't cut warm butter.
The blade I held under the blankets in Alabama and never used because I was too scared, too broken, too convinced that this was all my life would ever be.
I carried it tonight without knowing why. Both knives. The good switchblade in the right pocket, the old dull pocketknife in the left. The switchblade was the weapon. The pocketknife was the memory. I didn't know why I brought it.
Now I know.
I open it. The blade is short, dull, pathetic. It catches the neon light from the beer signs and doesn't even gleam properly. It's the most unimpressive weapon in the history of weapons. And Ron—through one swelling eye, through the blood, through the ruin of his face—sees it.
He recognizes it.
I can tell. The one eye that still opens widens. He's seen this knife before. He saw it on my nightstand. He saw it in my pocket. He probably laughed at it, the way you laugh at a dog that growls but has no teeth. What's that going to do? What damage could that little thing cause?
Now he finds out.
I kneel down. Tex holds Ron's head still with one massive hand, tilting his face toward the light. Toward me. Ron's eyes—one swollen shut, one wild with terror—find mine.
"This is the knife I kept under my pillow every night in your house.
This is the knife I was too scared to use.
Every night for four years I held this knife under the blanket and told myself tonight, tonight I'll use it, tonight I'll fight back.
And every night I didn't. Because you made me believe I wasn't worth fighting for. "
I put the blade against his cheek. The right cheek. The one that isn't split from the brass knuckles. The one clear piece of real estate left on the mask.
"I was wrong," I say. "I was always worth fighting for."
I drag the blade.
Slow. Not a slash—a drag. The dull edge doesn't cut clean.
It can't. It was never sharp enough to cut clean.
It catches on the skin and tears, pulling rather than slicing, and the wound that opens is ragged and ugly and deep enough to scar.
It will never heal smooth. A sharp knife leaves a line that fades. A dull knife leaves a mess that stays.
Ron screams. The sound is muffled by Tex's hold but it fills the bar anyway, bouncing off the bar and the neon signs and the new walls. It is the most satisfying sound I have ever heard in my life.