guy I had been fighting was on me again.
I flicked my fingers against his eyes and he groaned and got out of my way.
Leonard was down and the guy with the knife was stabbing him again. I got there just in time to slide behind the guy, reach around, and rake both hands across his face, gouging one eye deeply.
The guy shrieked like a rat with a boot heel on its back. He turned, lunged. I went sideways and he went past. I hit him with everything I had, right behind the head with a hammer fist. He went down and didn’t move. The guy who had been holding Leonard had him down now and was punching. Leonard brought a leg up and over the guy’s head, swept him off, got up holding his stomach. He said, “Watch out!”
When I turned, the machete man had recovered his weapon. He was coming toward me. The other guy came at Leonard. Leonard scooped sand, threw it in his eyes, sidestepped, and shot out a sideways kick that took the guy’s knee out. It cracked as loud as a bullwhip. He yelled even louder as he went down.
The machete man charged me.
He was so wild, all I had to do was move and he went stumbling past me. When I turned, Leonard had gone down from his wounds, was lying in the sand, bleeding, unconscious. Maybe worse.
I had done all right the first couple of times, but a machete is a machete, and all it took was for him to make one correct move and for me to make one mistake.
Somehow I was aware of the sun turning red, dying somewhere behind the city. A gull shrieked loudly overhead, cheering us on. Then the guy with the machete began to stalk me, slow and steady, the machete cocked at his side.
I glimpsed something in my peripheral vision. Another man. He wore a blue baseball cap and also carried a machete.
I was about to reach for my wallet, throw it to the guy, hope for the best, when the second machete bearer ran past me. I ducked, but he didn’t swing. He just kept going, right to the other man with the machete.
Machetes clanged together. The man who had joined the fray on our side was good. He was not swinging wildly like the other guy. He was warding off the man’s strikes with the flat of the blade, using his free hand to slap and grab. Pretty soon he had the other man by the arm and was pulling him down. Using the flat of the blade, he knocked our attacker unconscious.
Our rescuer promptly marched over to the two downed men. One of them was out, the other was clasping his knee with one hand, holding the other hand up as if to push our savior away.
Our fella said something in Spanish and the man on the ground began to crawl away, leaving his unconscious buddies.
The man turned toward me, the machete held by his side. I wondered if I were his next victim. He might have merely been eliminating competition. I eyed the machete lying on the ground, judged if I could reach it quickly.
Nope. Too far away.
The man grinned at me. He had a gold tooth and the sun caught the tooth and made it sparkle. He had on a thick white cotton shirt and pants, and sandals. Although he had moved well and looked younger while in motion, I could see now that he was seventy if he was a day. The hair under his baseball cap was gray, nearly white, and he had gray stubble on his face.
He turned to Leonard, knelt beside him.
I rushed over. Leonard was bleeding. He opened his eyes.
“Have they gone home?” he asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
The man said something in Spanish, and neither Leonard nor I responded. He came back in English.
“Policia. Not good.”
“They’re police?” I said.
He nodded. “Off duty.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s good, Leonard. They’re off duty.”
“Oh good,” Leonard said. “You know, this hurts. Bad.”
“They are corrupt,” said the man.
“No shit,” Leonard said.
“They are from Cozumel. They come here to make extra money.”
“Nice,” Leonard said. “A part-time job… Look, I’m gettin’ kind of queasy here.”
“Come,” the man said. “We must go. My boat.”
We got on either side of Leonard, helped him up, carried him toward a fishing boat tied at the dock.
“What about my hat?” Leonard asked.
“Well,” I said, “if you want it with a hole in the crown. One of those fuckers’ feet went through it. If you had ears like a mule, you might want it.”
“Typical,” Leonard said.
We climbed on board the boat with some difficulty, stretched Leonard out on the deck and opened his shirt.
“Not so bad,” the man said. “Had worse.”
“Yeah, but it’s me that’s got this one,” Leonard said.
“I will fix it. Beatrice!”
A very attractive, slightly heavy, thirtyish woman with shoulder-length hair dark as a miner’s dream came onto the deck. She looked miffed. She wore a black short-sleeve sweatshirt, earrings with silver dangles, blue jeans, and black canvas shoes. She smelled like fresh soap and had a look on her face made me think she could have beaten puppies to death and enjoyed it. I noticed that the tip of her right pinkie was missing and the skin was puckered there and visible was the faint shine of yellow bone.
The man said something in Spanish. The woman looked at us, sighed, went back inside the cabin, reappeared with first-aid gear in a plastic box. She squatted beside Leonard, opened the kit.
The man took out some alcohol, some other disinfectants, and went to work. As he worked, he said something to the woman. She went away. A moment later the anchor was up and the motor was humming. We were moving out into the ocean.
The man turned to me suddenly, smiled, said, “Ferdinand.” He stuck out his hand. I shook it.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Oh, he is good. Got good skin.”
“Haven’t I always said I have good skin, Hap?”
“Always,” I said.
“One wound pretty good in the stomach,” said Ferdinand. “But it is not so deep.” He pulled a large needle and thick thread from the box.
“Oh shit,” Leonard said.
“Hold his head,” Ferdinand said.
“You don’t have to do that,” Leonard said. “Just sew.”
Ferdinand started right in. After the first pass, Leonard said, “Hold my goddamn head, Hap. Hold my legs. Sit on me. Do something.”
I held him as best I could, and Ferdinand made eight stitches.
12
Time flies when you’re having a big time.
I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep, but I awoke lying on the cabin floor by the bunk where Leonard lay. The woman was asleep on the bunk across the way. I barely remembered us going inside the cabin. Nothing like a good fight and a knifing of your best friend before dinner.
’Course, we might not get any dinner.
I got up, went out of the cabin, onto the deck. It was dark and the moon was up. The sea was a giant basin filled with ink. The boat lifted up and down like a carnival ride. I had never been so sick of water in all my life.
