ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

The man stood there with the gun. His swollen lips were working but he did not say anything.

“You’re mean enough to shoot a man in the back but you haven’t got the guts,” Roger spoke over his shoulder very quietly, “Go put the gun away and go to bed.”

Roger still sat there with his back toward the man. Then he took what Thomas Hudson thought was an awful chance.

“Doesn’t he remind you just a little bit of Lady Macbeth coming out there in his nightclothes?” he asked the three others in the stern.

Thomas Hudson waited for it then. But nothing happened and after a while the man turned and went down into the cabin taking the shotgun with him.

“I feel very, very much better,” Roger said. “I could feel that sweat run clean down from my armpit and onto my leg. Let’s go home, Tom. Man’s OK.”

“Not too awfully OK,” Johnny said.

“OK enough,” Roger said. “What a human being that is.”

“Come on, Roger,” Thomas Hudson said. “Come on up to my place for a while.”

“All right.”

They said good night to John and walked up the King’s Highway toward the house. There was still plenty of celebrating going on.

“Do you want to go into the Ponce?” Thomas Hudson asked.

“Hell no,” Roger said.

“I thought I’d tell Freddy the man’s OK.”

“You tell him. I’ll go on to your house.”

When Thomas Hudson got home Roger was lying face down on a bed in the far up-island end of the screen porch. It was dark and you could just barely hear the noise of the celebrating.

“Sleeping?” Thomas Hudson asked him.

“No.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“I don’t think so. Thanks.”

“How’s the hand?”

“Just swelled and sore. It’s nothing.”

“You feeling low again?”

“Yes. I’ve got it bad.”

“The kids will be here in the morning.”

“That will be fine.”

“You’re sure you wouldn’t like a drink?”

“No, kid. But you have one.”

“I’ll have a whisky and soda to go to sleep on.”

Thomas Hudson went to the icebox, mixed the drink, and came back out to the screened porch and sat there in the dark with Roger lying on the bed.

“You know, there’s an awful lot of real bastards loose,” Roger said. “That guy was no good, Tom.”

“You taught him something.”

“No. I don’t think so. I humiliated him and I ruined him a little. But he’ll take it out on someone else.”

“He brought it on.”

“Sure. But I didn’t finish it.”

“You did everything but kill him.”

“That’s what I mean. He’ll just be worse now.”

“I think maybe you taught him a hell of a lesson.”

“No. I don’t think so. It was the same thing out on the coast.”

“What really happened? You haven’t told me anything since you got back.”

“It was a fight, sort of like this one.”

“Who with?”

He named a man who was very high up in what is known as the industry.

“I didn’t want any part of it,” Roger said. “It was out at the house where I was having some woman trouble and I suppose, technically, I shouldn’t have been there. But that night I took it and took it and took it from this character. Much worse than tonight. Finally I just couldn’t take it any more and I gave it to him, really gave it to him without thinking about anything, and his head hit wrong on the marble steps going down to the pool. This was all by the pool. He came out of it at the Cedars of Lebanon finally about the third day and so I missed manslaughter. But they had it all set. With the witnesses they had I’d have been lucky to get that.”

“So then what?”

“So then, after he’s back on the job, I get the real frameroo. The full-sized one. Complete with handles.”

“What was it?”

“Everything. In series.”

“Want to tell me?”

“No. It wouldn’t be useful to you. Just take my word for it that it was a frame. It’s so awful nobody mentions it. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Sort of.”

“So I wasn’t feeling so good about tonight. There’s a lot of wickeds at large. Really bads. And hitting them is no solution. I think that’s one reason why they provoke you.” He turned over on the bed and lay face up. “You know evil is a hell of a thing, Tommy. And it’s smart as a pig. You know they had something in the old days about good and evil.”

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