"Stop—" The word is barely recognizable. The mouth is cracked. The nose is broken. The face is a map of damage and every landmark on it is a message I put there.
"Stop?" I hit the orbital socket. The left one. The bone that protects the eye, and I feel it fracture under the brass and the eye immediately begins to swell shut. "You want me to stop? Like when I begged you to stop so many times? Like when I said please? Like when I said I don't want to and you did it anyway?"
"Oh, that eye isdone," Tex announces. "That eye has left the building."
Ron isn't talking anymore. The shit-talking is over. The threats are over. The voice that has controlled and commanded and degraded for four years has been reduced to wet gasps and weak sounds that aren't language. The mask is gone. The charm is gone. The smile is gone. What's left is meat and blood and a man who is learning what it feels like to be helpless.
I step back. My right hand is throbbing inside the brass knuckles. My chest is heaving. The rage is draining out of me like water from a cracked vessel, not all at once but in a steady flow, and what's left behind the rage isn't more rage.
It's stillness.
I'm not finished.
I pull the brass knuckles off my right hand. I flex the fingers. They still work. Sheila knew my hands would break without them.
I reach into my left pocket. The pocketknife is there. The old one. The dull one. The one I've carried since I was a kid. The blade that couldn't cut warm butter. The blade I held under the blankets in Alabama and never used because I was too scared, too broken, too convinced that this was all my life would ever be.
I carried it tonight without knowing why. Both knives. The good switchblade in the right pocket, the old dull pocketknife in the left. The switchblade was the weapon. The pocketknife was the memory. I didn't know why I brought it.
Now I know.
I open it. The blade is short, dull, pathetic. It catches the neon light from the beer signs and doesn't even gleam properly. It's the most unimpressive weapon in the historyof weapons. And Ron—through one swelling eye, through the blood, through the ruin of his face—sees it.
He recognizes it.
I can tell. The one eye that still opens widens. He's seen this knife before. He saw it on my nightstand. He saw it in my pocket. He probably laughed at it, the way you laugh at a dog that growls but has no teeth. What's that going to do? What damage could that little thing cause?
Now he finds out.
I kneel down. Tex holds Ron's head still with one massive hand, tilting his face toward the light. Toward me. Ron's eyes—one swollen shut, one wild with terror—find mine.
"This is the knife I kept under my pillow every night in your house. This is the knife I was too scared to use. Every night for four years I held this knife under the blanket and told myself tonight, tonight I'll use it, tonight I'll fight back. And every night I didn't. Because you made me believe I wasn't worth fighting for."
I put the blade against his cheek. The right cheek. The one that isn't split from the brass knuckles. The one clear piece of real estate left on the mask.
"I was wrong," I say. "I was always worth fighting for."
I drag the blade.
Slow. Not a slash—a drag. The dull edge doesn't cut clean. It can't. It was never sharp enough to cut clean. It catches on the skin and tears, pulling rather than slicing, and the wound that opens is ragged and ugly and deep enough to scar. It will never heal smooth. A sharp knife leaves a line that fades. A dull knife leaves a mess that stays.
Ron screams. The sound is muffled by Tex's hold but it fills the bar anyway, bouncing off the bar and the neon signsand the new walls. It is the most satisfying sound I have ever heard in my life.
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.
