"Ain't you done enough?" Arnie asked.
"Enough? Good Christ. I dropped a pass, I didn't back over your legs with a cement mixer!"
"You might as well have. I could have been with the Dolphins."
"Arnie, scouts from Miami don't come to iceberg towns like ours without a reason, and even Lowell wasn't good enough. It was just a rumor. You've been stewing in your juices for ten years over nothing."
"I could've been with the Dolphins."
"You couldn't have been water boy for the Dolphins, Arnie. You were a scrub, we all know it. I wasn't much better, but it's time to-"
Not like I didn't know it was coming. You call an unstable, hypersensitive, borderline psychopathic wretch a "scrub" when his days are built into a shrine for his glory years-which consisted of three seasons spent mostly on the bench and a couple of flounders and fumbles in the mud-and you can pretty much count on him lunging.
His footwork was about the same. He came at me with his shoulders low, throwing a bad block, looking for a tackle by keeping his eyes on my face instead of my hips. I wondered if he'd raise his fist, knee me, or do anything you might do in a real fight, but he wasn't interested in punching me out anymore. In his head he wanted to knock the ball out of my hand, recover it, run it down to score in the last ten seconds, invite the scout from Miami home for some of his mother's beef stew, talk about the color of the car he wanted, five-speed, fuel-injected, cherry red.
I set myself, wondering if he really thought he'd find salvation in knocking me down in the dirt and crabgrass of his yard. For a second I felt a great sympathy for him, watching his lumbering charge, his mother's eyes wide with anticipation and pride, hoping he'd find himself again over something as small as dropping me on my ass, letting all the venom pour out of him in some cathartic moment when he might finally jump-start his thoroughly wasted life.
Then I thought, fuck that.
We hit the way we had in a hundred practices on the high school field, grunting shoulder-to-shoulder. He'd gone to pot but he had a lot more weight behind him, and the ground was still wet and slippery in spots. He slammed into me like a charging … sea lion, maybe … and his forearms came together hard on my collarbone. It hurt and a red blaze filled my head as we clung together and grappled. I drove hard into his barrel-chest, digging my feet in and working him back one step at a time.
A sharp stab of pain pierced my back and a loud crack like snapping bone twisted me around. I wondered if the old lady had actually stabbed or shot me. I turned and saw Kristin holding half a broom handle, the other splintered piece lying at my feet. She screamed, "Leave my brother alone!”
“Kristin…"
There was a lot more in her face than anger and worry. She spoke under her breath out the side of her mouth. "Sorry, Jonny, she was gonna bash you with a wrench."
"Oh," I said. "Okay, thanks."
"You should go now."
"Your brother hasn't quite seen the error of his ways.”
“Have you seen yours?"
Arnie lumbered to his feet, set himself and started to grunt and growl. His hands were bleeding and tiny shards of brown glass stuck to his palms. The yard was in worse shape than I'd thought, a couple years' worth of broken beer bottles scattered in with the rest of the refuse.
I told him, "If you ever cared this much when we were in high school and didn't always quit after half-time, Arnie, we would've won more games too."
It drove him berserk and he howled in rage, lunging for me again as if the quarterback had just shouted "Hike!" He kept his head too low, the way he'd always done, so that he couldn't properly judge speed and position. He caught me low but not low enough to actually shove me back, and his ham-hock fists worked ineffectually against my thighs as he tried to find my kidneys. Mrs. Devington shrieked some more, urging him on. This was not exactly the t`ete-`a-t`ete I was hoping for.
I rolled out from between his meaty arms and wove aside a few paces. "Don't look at the ground, Arnie, I'm up here. You always used to do that, go for a guy's knees, that's why they could always dodge you."
He worked his lips as if he wanted to chew them off and spit them out at me. His cheeks inflated and deflated like a blowfish until he managed to yell, "You screwed me!"
"I did not screw you."
"You did!" his mother chimed in.
"I dropped the ball. In one game. Ten years ago. You people need a serious reality check, you're both a couple of quarts low."
Kristin groaned loudly and rolled her eyes at me. I shrugged.
Arnie was catching his breath, and starting to feel good again, his mouth working into a pretty ugly parody of a smile. "I should've taken care of you a long time ago."
"How many articles did you ever clip out of the Gazette's sports section, Arnie, huh? How many times were you singled out for ever winning a game? For Christ's sake, get over it. Have you really been like this for ten years? Or did you need me to be the scapegoat again when your marriage fell through?"
"You son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"
He swung wildly and caught me on the temple. The red haze returned and I flopped over onto my knees and scrambled. His laughter could hardly fit through that weird smile of his now, coming up hollow and like a gurgle. He sprang, grabbed the back of my head and hauled me to my feet. He pulled his arm back and drove a fist into my stomach twice in quick succession, and I yelped and nearly vomited. He tried it again and I seized two handfuls of his sweatshirt, yanking him around and around, then let him go. Arnie slipped in the mud but tried to stay on his feet, did a couple of fairly graceful spins before he fell on his face. Mrs. Devington held a wrench and Kristin wrestled with her shouting, "No, Ma, no!"
No matter what our respective intentions had been, we were all beginning to border the farcical. Arnie took a crawling lunge at me and I put my palm down on his bald head and held him at bay.
I said, "Couple of things here, Arnie. First, I shouldn't have made that crack about your wife, that was low. I'm sorry." It brought up another snarling cough. "Next, get over that damn game and get on with your life." He'd bitten the inside of his cheek and blood dappled his lips. "Last, and listen good, this is the important part, you can forget the rest but not this… if you have any intention of bothering my girl again, don't do it. You hear me? Don't do it."
He said nothing, as his mother continued to screech. Kristin looked at me as if she knew this wasn't over, and might never be.
I had the same feeling, got in the van, and went to buy more batteries.
The old photo albums had a primitive type of plastic covering the pages, now yellowed and split in places. They made a distinctive crackling snap when you touched them, like freshly cut pine popping in the fireplace. Anna sat with two of the albums on her lap and another few piled atop the precarious tower of hard-boiled Gold Medal paperbacks on the coffee table. I tried to keep things in perspective and not let my usual anal nature take too firm a hold of me, but it wasn't easy. My stomach clenched at the thought of those rare novels from the 'forties and'fifties being crushed beneath the weight of Christmas and birthday pictures from those same decades.
Semi-conscious and lying flat on the floor, Anubis caught the scent of blood and nervous sweat and reared to his feet in one sinuous wheeling motion. He opened his mouth, mumbled like the priest at Teddy's service, and stalked closer to me. He sniffed my bruised knuckles and stared into my face impassively, but somehow managed to convey the impression that he was rolling his eyes.
"You've been walloped," my grandmother said.
"Repeatedly.”
“That much is apparent. Was it the Asian woman? Jocelyn?”