Chapter 38 Stormy #3
The scar will run from his cheekbone to his jaw.
Three inches of torn, ragged skin. Every morning for the rest of Ron Jackson's life, he will look in the mirror, and he will see it.
Every person who looks at him will see it.
The smile will never work the same way again because the smile will always have a scar running through it and the scar will always raise questions that Ron doesn't want to answer.
I stand up, close the pocketknife and put it back in my left pocket.
"I'm done," I say.
Tex looks at me. The grin softens. Not gone—transformed. From the wild, righteous grin into pride. The look of a man who has just watched the person he loves stop being a victim.
"You sure?" he asks. "There's still time on the clock, baby."
"I'm sure."
"Okay, then." Tex adjusts his grip on Ron. "Now it's my turn."
He drops Ron face-first onto the hardwood floor. Ron hits with a wet sound and doesn't get up because getting up isn't possible when your bones are broken and your face is ruined.
But Tex picks him up. He grabs the back of Ron's shirt and hauls him upright like a man lifting a sack of grain, effortless, and he spins Ron around and drives a fist into his stomach that folds him in half.
Ron drops to his knees. Tex grabs his collar and pulls him up again and hits him once, twice, three times in the face—professional, controlled, the measured violence of a man who has been in enough bar fights to know exactly how much force to apply and exactly where to apply it.
"That's for the ribs," Tex says. He hits Ron again.
Ron's head rocks back. "That's for the feet.
" Another hit. "That's for four years." Another.
"That's for making him think he was worthless.
"And this—" One more, a sharp uppercut that snaps Ron's head back and sends a spray of blood across the bar.
Tex looks at the blood on the bar top. His father's bar top.
He doesn't flinch. "That's for making me stand at my grill and listen to you describe what you did to the man I love while you smiled about it.
You smiled, Ron. Let's see you smile now. "
Ron collapses. Tex lets him fall. Ron hits the floor and doesn't move except for the wet, gurgling breathing of a man whose nose is destroyed and whose mouth is full of blood and whose body has absorbed more damage in five minutes than he's delivered in a lifetime.
Tex stands over him. The grin is gone now. What's left is the face from the parking lot, the face from the night he told me about Ron's visit, the face of a man who has done what needed to be done and would do it again without hesitation.
"You don't come back here, Ron," Tex says.
"You don't call. You don't write. You don't drive through this town.
You don't say his name. You don't think about him.
If I hear your name anywhere near Bay County, anywhere near this bar, anywhere near him for the rest of your life—I won't stop next time.
There won't be a next time. You'll just stop existing. Nod if you understand."
Ron nods. A tiny movement of a shattered head.
Sheila is already moving. She picks up the brass knuckles from the bar top where I left them, wraps them in a cocktail napkin, and drops the bundle into the leather purse she keeps behind the bar.
The clasp clicks shut. Her face is calm and steady.
Not a single thing that just went into that purse has ever existed.
"I can hear the sirens getting closer," she says.
She's right. Faint but growing. Coming from the west on the beach road. Mickey. The twelve minutes are almost up.
I look down at Ron Jackson on the floor of my bar.
The blood on the hardwood. The broken teeth.
The ruined face. The scar on his cheek that will never heal clean.
The gun still tucked in the back of his pants that Mickey is going to find and document.
It'll be added to the report of an armed man who entered a bar and attacked an employee.
One last thing.
I step forward and kick Ron Jackson in the ribs as hard as I can.
The sound he makes is barely human. His body curls around the impact, fetal, and the gurgling breath hitches and stops and restarts in a wet, shattered rhythm. I feel the impact travel up through my foot and into my leg and it feels like punctuation. A period at the end of a very long sentence.
I step back.
Now I'm done.
The sirens are louder. Getting closer. The bikers at the entrance are already dispersing, casual, unhurried, men drifting back to their tables and their beers, the wall dissolving into a crowd that was never a wall.
The music drops back to normal volume. Someone laughs outside.
The night resumes its shape around the hole that the last ten minutes tore in it.
The hot pink shirt is spattered with blood.
PROPERTY OF BIG TEX'S, partially obscured by red.
The sweatpants are stained at the knees where I knelt with the knife.
My hands are shaking. My chest is heaving.
My eyes are burning with tears that haven't fallen yet because there's still work to do, there's still a story to tell when Mickey walks through that door, and the tears can wait.
Tex is covered in Ron's blood—his forearms, his shirt, his hands.
He glances at Ron on the floor and at me.
His gaze hits the broken plates, scattered rib bones, the blood on the hardwood, and Sheila behind the bar, wiping down glasses and humming to herself as if the last ten minutes never happened.
The grin comes back. Slow. The real one. The Big Tex one that grabbed my heart and never let go.
"Well," he says. "That escalated quickly."
I start laughing and it feels fucking fantastic.