The Cabin at the End of the World(18)
He tightens his grip on the poker and swings wildly in the direction of the woman in the white shirt. She creeps along the floor closer to Eric and Wen.
The woman holds her weapon out in Andrew’s direction, but defensively. Her hands and arms shake as though the thing weighs two hundred pounds. She says, “Let me help him. I’m a nurse. He’s hurt.”
“Get the fuck away from them! Don’t touch them!”
He lunges at her and strikes the blade of her weapon with the poker. Metal on metal clangs like a blacksmith’s strike and vibrations run up through his hand and numb his forearm. He keeps swinging and she scoots away, backward toward the bedroom.
Andrew drops to a knee next to Eric’s head. Eric’s eyelids flutter and he drunkenly moves his arms and attempts to sit up, rolling and rocking like a turtle flipped onto his shell.
Wen has both arms wrapped around Eric’s right arm, and she pulls him, saying, “Get up! We have to go, Daddy!”
Everything speeds up and collapses in on Andrew.
The kitchen table and love seat bubble up from the suddenly volcanic basement stairwell and spill out into the common room. Leonard follows, an ash cloud billowing into the cabin. He’s enormous, bigger than a god. Unlike the others, he carries no weapon.
The sun shines mercilessly through the shattered glass slider doors. Redmond is a squat, silhouetted goblin, holding his bulky staff like a picket sign. He grunts and giggles his way past kitchen chairs and the end table, knocking over the little yellow lamp, snuffing out its weak light. He says, “Sorry about the mess. We’ll clean it up. Promise. Now let’s take it easy there, Zorro, yeah? Stop waving that thing around before someone gets—”
Andrew launches at Redmond. He swings the poker high, aiming for the man’s head. Redmond is slow to react but he manages to duck behind the mass-of-shovel-and-trowel-blades end of the weapon. The poker gets caught in the spaces between the irregularly arranged hand tools. Redmond drops that end of the weapon, holding the wooden handle parallel to the floor, levering the poker out of Andrew’s grasp. It clangs to the hardwood and skitters out of reach.
With Redmond’s hands down by his waist, Andrew doesn’t hesitate. He throws two quick punches. The first, a right hand, connects with Redmond’s fleshy nose and draws a squirt of blood. The second jab, a sharp left, slams into his jaw, and Andrew cuts open the skin of his knuckles on teeth. Staggered, Redmond drops his weapon, checks his nose for blood, and his eyelids flutter like moth wings. Andrew doesn’t let Redmond create space or opportunity to get his hands back up. Andrew goes in tight and works the body, punching Redmond in the ribs with two rights, and a left to the stomach, which goes soft like a sail with no wind, and an uppercut to the bottom of his chin that clicks his jaw shut. A hard punch to the solar plexus whooshes the rest of the air out.
Redmond is roughly the same height as Andrew, but he’s a thick, beefy guy, probably outweighing him by more than fifty pounds. As many shots as Andrew is expertly landing, he knows it’ll take a lot more to get Redmond to go down and to keep him down. So Andrew keeps hitting him.
Redmond has his arms up trying to protect himself, but he’s either too slow or has been knocked into being too slow to fend off the blur of blows. Blood gouts from his nose and leaks from his split lip but he doesn’t go down. He absorbs the punishment as though in atonement.
“Daddy, stop hitting the man! Stop it! Stop it!”
Andrew stops and he backs away on sea legs, exhausted and gasping for breath. His knuckles are swollen and bloodied.
Redmond takes a shaky backward step and sits heavily on the couch he pushed away from the slider doors. The springs inside the couch reprise their dissonant chord.
Leonard stands in the middle of the common room, holding Wen in the crook of one arm. She looks so small, she could be a ribbon on his chest. Wen has her hands balled up in fists that way she does (with the thumbs inside) and she holds those fists against her mouth. She isn’t wearing Andrew’s hat anymore.
The woman in the black button-down shirt stands next to Leonard and Wen. She reaches across Leonard and pats Wen’s leg and says, “Shh, you’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” Andrew doesn’t know where she came from or how she got inside the cabin.
Eric is on the floor, sitting up. His eyes are wide in what would be a hammy pantomime of surprise if there were any life or light in his blank stare.
The woman in the white shirt kneels before Eric. She peers into one eye and then the other, examining him. She has a hand resting on his shoulder and she talks in a low voice. He responds with slight nods and confused, pained looks.
Leonard says, “Wen is right, Andrew. That’s enough. That’s enough.”
Let’s Make a Deal
Three
Eric
Eric was a striker for his high school soccer team. He wasn’t the most skilled player but his coach always made it a point to praise him for being fearless when going after headers, particularly off corners and direct kicks. Most of the team’s set pieces were designed to get Eric a free run at volleys into the box. In mid-September of his senior season he knocked heads with a burly defensive back as they both went for a ball bending toward the far post. He doesn’t remember the forty minutes of game play preceding the collision. The collision itself he remembers as a snapshot, a still photo of the green grass and chalk lines and other players frozen in athletic poses staged by some secret hand and the blue sky decorated with bright, cartoonish, white stars. Eric missed two weeks of practice and games after the concussion. He forced his way back onto the field before he was ready with the hope that he could help the team earn a trip to the state tournament. They didn’t make it. For the rest of that season, after each header, Eric had a high-pitched ringing in his ears that would fade over time like the volume was slowly turned down but not all the way off.