in my head and my resolve became a solid force, a pure, clean feeling, totally controlled by my head.
‘Jaapie Botha come! Come, man, come, I’ve been waiting for you for most of my life.’ There was a menacing growl in my voice I had not heard there before.
Fritz Three, back behind the safety of the long bar, screamed at me. ‘He been sniff gelignite, he crazy. Run, Peekay. That Boer kill you!’
The Judge dropped from the bar and with an angry roar charged towards me. A powder headache as severe as his could cause temporary insanity and I knew he was capable of killing. I stepped to the side and hit him with a left uppercut hard on the nose, seating the punch deep, aware that the crude explosion of pain into the swollen sinus tissue would be devastating. A man my size would certainly have passed out from the blow. Bellowing like a wounded animal, the Judge turned to face me again, blood and mucus running from his nose.
I had waited a long time for this moment; I knew exactly what to do. The Judge was the bull and I was the matador, it was I who would shape the fight. I knew suddenly that all of Geel Piet’s footwork had been designed for this moment; it was time for the ‘klein baas’ to dance.
The Judge was a man of around twenty-five but he had already let himself go around the middle and his brandy gut hung over his belt. Years of working on a farm and then in the mines had built up his bulk and he was probably at the height of his physical strength. But, looking at him, I knew his condition was poor. With his sinuses already severely blocked I would try to work on his mouth. If I could make him swallow enough blood as well as lead him into frequent charges, he’d soon be winded. My hands were strong from carving Rasputin’s balls and the skin and knuckles were hardened from the canvas punching bag I had worked with my bare fists. The Judge charged repeatedly and each time he came at me I stepped in with a lightning punch and hit him on the nose or in the mouth. Soon he was spitting a lot of blood, his chest heaving deeply as he tried to regain his breath. The salty blood would be mixing with the brandy in his stomach by now. Later I would put a Geel Piet eight right into the nexus of the solar plexus, where all the nerve ends came together.
He was beginning to move more slowly, trying to get me into a corner where he could crush me. I let him work me until he had my back right into the corner then I lifted my hands up as if I was going to plead for mercy. His punch came from ten miles away, I ducked and weaved out of the corner as his huge fist smashed into the wall. His knuckles split, the bones in his wrist smashing through the skin, splattering blood all over the tiles as his wrist and hand broke.
The cold rage inside me cocooned me into a circle of concentration, centred on the Judge and myself. Like a Goya painting, only the action in the centre mattered; the rest was blurred peripheral belonging to another place and another time. I was unaware that the space behind the bar had filled, a couple of hundred miners were standing three deep along the sixty-foot counter. The Judge turned suddenly and lumbered towards the bar. Men pushed back in fear and collided with shelves and bottles of spirit which rained down on them. The Judge grabbed a half empty bottle of brandy from the counter which no one had thought to remove. He smashed it on the edge of the bar, sending a spray of brandy into his face, some of it going into his eyes and blinding him. The Geel Piet eight went into the blinded man’s gut and I finished it off with an uppercut into his pulped and smashed nose. By the time he swung the broken bottle I was clear again.
The Judge, as though in slow motion, fell to his knees and threw up onto the floor. The fight had been going nearly twenty minutes and I hadn’t said a word, my fury concentrated in both my hands. My knuckles were raw and bleeding from hitting him, but I felt nothing.
As he sat there in his own vomit a small child’s voice cried out from somewhere deep inside my body, ‘You killed Granpa Chook!’
The Judge rose slowly to his feet using the broken bottle to push himself up off the floor. His face was a bloody mess, blood dripped from his broken hand and wrist, the front of his shirt stuck to his chest and stomach, soaked with brandy, blood and vomit. He lifted his head and looked up at me, through his broken lips he whispered the single word, ‘Pisskop.’ Using his remaining strength he hurled the broken bottle at me missing me by several inches. His useless broken hand and wrist hung at his side and he swayed unsteadily on his feet. The Solly Goldman thirteen went in, each punch deep and hard into the Judge’s gut. The hurl of vomit travelled three feet before it splashed to the floor as the Judge collapsed unconscious.
My head exploded. The roar in my head was all white light. It was time for the heart. I was onto his body in a flash, straddling his torso. The snot and blood ran from his nose as his head rested on his right arm just above the broken wrist. His left arm with the swastika tattoo faced me. I was unaware of having gone to my shorts but Doc’s Joseph Rogers pocket knife was open in my hand, the blade small but razor sharp. It struck high up on the arm where the mamba strikes and sliced through the epidermis above the ragged swastika, the blade cutting a square about four inches across and three down, then I crossed the square from corner to corner to make an X in a cross of St Andrew and then again from centre to centre to make the cross of St George, cutting deep almost to the muscle. The blood, before it started to run down his arm, made a perfect Union Jack. Across the jagged blue lines of the swastika I cut P.K. Then, smearing my hand into the mess on his shirtfront, I rubbed it into the Union Jack and into the initials, knowing it would set up a massive infection and cause the keloid to build up on the arm. Nothing would ever remove the wide band of scar tissue which would form to make up the flag and the initials which cancelled the swastika. I wiped my hands and the blade of Doc’s knife on the back of the Judge’s shirt and rose to my feet. Closing the blade of Doc’s Joseph Rogers I returned it to the pocket of my blood-splattered shorts. ‘Rasputin thanks you for the brandy, Botha,’ I said, suddenly calm.
I became aware of the men behind the bar. They hadn’t moved and were silent, their eyes following me, as I walked slowly towards the Western style saloon doors and then out of the crud bar. Outside, high above me, a full moon, pale as skimmed milk, floated in a day sky. I felt clean, all the bone-beaked loneliness birds banished, their rocky nests turned to river stones. Cool, clear water bubbled over them, streams in the desert.
About the author
Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of
Bryce Courtenay lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.
Further information about the author can be found at brycecourtenay.com
BOOKS BY BRYCE COURTENAY
