“Got anything to say to me?” Roger said to the man and hooked him hard on the mouth. The man was bleeding badly from the mouth and the whole right side of his face was coming up and his right eye was almost closed.
The man grabbed Roger and Roger held him inside and steadied him. The man was breathing hard and he hadn’t said anything. Roger had a thumb on the inside of the man’s two elbows and Tom could see him rubbing the thumbs back and forth over the tendons between the biceps and the forearms.
“Don’t you bleed on me, you son of a bitch,” Roger said, and brought his left hand up fast and loose and knocked the man’s head back and then backhanded him across the face again.
“You can get a new nose now,” he said.
“Cool him, Roger. Cool him,” Frank pled with him.
“Can’t you see what he’s doing, you dope?” Fred Wilson said. “He’s ruining him.”
The man grabbed Roger and Roger held him and pushed him away.
“Hit me,” he said. “Come on. Hit me.”
The man swung at him and Roger ducked it and grabbed him.
“What’s your name?” he said to the man.
The man didn’t answer. All he did was breathe as though he were dying with asthma.
Roger was holding the man again with his thumbs pressing in on the inside of his elbows. “You’re a strong son of a bitch,” he said to the man. “Who the hell ever told you you could fight?”
The man swung at him weakly and Roger grabbed him, pulled him forward, spun him a little, and clubbed him twice on the ear with the base of his right fist.
“You think you’ve learned not to talk to people?” he asked the man.
“Look at his ear,” Rupert said. “Like a bunch of grapes.”
Roger was holding the man again with his thumbs pushing in against the tendons at the base of the biceps. Thomas Hudson was watching the man’s face. It had not been frightened at the start; just mean as a pig’s is; a really mean boar. But it was really completely frightened now. He had probably never heard of fights that no one stopped. Probably he thought in some part of his mind about the stories he had read where men were kicked to death if they went down. He still tried to fight. Each time Roger told him to hit him or pushed him away he tried to throw a punch. He hadn’t quit.
Roger pushed him away. The man stood there and looked at him. When Roger wasn’t holding him in that way that made him feel absolutely helpless the fear drained away a little and the meanness came back. He stood there frightened, badly hurt, his face destroyed, his mouth bleeding, and that ear looking like an overripe fig as the small individual hemorrhages united into one great swelling inside the skin. As he stood there, Roger’s hands off him now, the fear drained and the indestructible meanness welled up.
“Anything to say?” Roger asked him.
“Slob,” the man said. As he said it, he pulled his chin in and put his hands up and turned half away in a gesture an incorrigible child might make.
“Now it comes,” Rupert shouted. “Now it’s going to roll.”
But it was nothing dramatic nor scientific. Roger stepped quickly over to where the man stood and raised his left shoulder and dropped his right fist down and swung it up so it smashed against the side of the man’s head. He went down on his hands and knees, his forehead resting on the dock. He knelt there a little while with his forehead against the planking and then he went gently over on his side. Roger looked at him and then came over to the edge of the dock and swung down into the cockpit.
The crew of the man’s yacht were carrying him on board. They had not intervened in what had happened on the dock and they had picked him up from where he lay on his side on the dock and carried him sagging heavily. Some of the Negroes had helped them lower him down to the stern and take him below. They shut the door after they took him in.