Johnny is rolling them over and over among the rocks and brambles, trying not to let Cal get a solid purchase where his weight will tell, pressing close so Cal can’t get the reach for a decent punch. He smells of shitty fake-fancy aftershave. Cal sees flashes of his bared teeth, the heather, the stars. It streaks across his mind that if they roll too far and land in a bog, the mountain will take them and no one will ever know.
He gets Johnny by his pretty haircut and mashes his face into the dirt, but Johnny finds Cal’s ear, tries to rip it off, and twists away quick as a fox when Cal jerks backwards. Cal lunges after him, on hands and knees, blinded by the crisscross of moonlight and shadow, following Johnny’s scrabbles and the painful whine of his breath. He grabs a limb and drags Johnny back towards him, punching at anything he can reach, taking a vicious heel to the forehead. Neither of them yells out. Cal has never been in a fight this close to silent. If anyone or anything else is out on the mountain, neither of them wants to draw its notice.
He tries to get hold of Johnny’s arms, takes a thumb to the eyeball and sees a bright burst of stars, but the fresh shot of rage lets him force a knee up between their bodies and slam Johnny in the balls. While Johnny is curled up wheezing, Cal straddles him and lands one more punch to his nose, just to put a dent in his good looks, save a girl or two from falling for his wheedles. He forces himself to stop there. He wants to keep hammering the guy’s face till there’s nothing left of it, but he needs Johnny to hear what he has to say.
Johnny gets his breath back and tries to heave himself free, but Cal is a lot bigger than him. When Johnny goes for his eye, Cal catches his wrist and bends it backwards till Johnny yelps.
“If you’re still in town Monday morning,” he says, so close to Johnny’s face that he can smell the blood and booze, “I’m gonna shoot you and dump your carcass in a bog where it belongs. We clear?”
Johnny laughs, which makes him cough blood. Fine droplets of it hit Cal’s cheek. In the moonlight his face, stippled and smeared black and white, barely looks like a face at all; its edges blur into the black and white of the undergrowth, like he’s dissolving away.
“No you won’t, man. If you do that, Rushborough’ll think I took off, and he’ll come looking to get me back by going after my family. You think he’ll stop at Theresa?”
Cal gives his wrist an extra twist, and Johnny catches his breath with a hiss. “You don’t give two shits about your family, fuckhead. He could shove ’em all in a wood chipper, and you wouldn’t budge an inch outa cover. He knows that.”
“Then he’ll do it just to get his money’s worth. You don’t know the man.”
“I’ll worry about Rushborough. All you gotta worry about is packing your shit.”
“Are you planning on putting him in a bog as well? ’Cause I’ll tell you something for nothing, boy: you won’t catch him napping as easy as you caught me. Try anything on him, and you’ll be the one lands in the bog.”
Johnny’s voice is staticky, clogged with blood. “I’ll take my chances,” Cal says. “All you need to know is, your chances are a lot better out of this place than in it. You got the whole world to dodge Rushborough in. You’re not gonna dodge me. Are we clear?”
They are very close together. Johnny’s eyes, made of fractured slashes of light and shadow, hold nothing but refusal, pure as an animal’s. For a moment Cal thinks he’s going to have to break Johnny’s wrist. Then he sees the vivid flash of fear as Johnny reads that thought and realizes that Cal means every word.
“Yeah!” Johnny yells, just in time. He jerks his head, trying to shake blood out of his eyes. “Jesus, man, I get it. Get the fuck off me.”
“Great,” Cal says. “About fucking time.” He picks himself up, starting to feel the throbbing in various parts of him, and hauls Johnny to his feet by his shirt collar.
“Bye, Johnny,” he says. “It’s been something.” The struggle carried them farther off the path than he realized; it takes him a minute to get his bearings, amid the maze of shadows, and aim Johnny in the right direction. He gives Johnny a good hard shove and Johnny stumbles off towards home, blotting his nose on his sleeve, with the autopilot obedience of a guy who’s lost enough fights to know the protocol. Cal resists the urge to speed him on his way with a kick in the pants.
He hasn’t worked out what, if anything, he’s going to do about Rushborough. His instinct is that Johnny was just blowing smoke, and that if Johnny goes, Rushborough will go after him. Cal has encountered plenty of men, and women too, who hurt people for pleasure, but he doesn’t get that scent off Rushborough. Rushborough smells like a different kind of predator, the ice-minded kind that locks on to his prey and doesn’t turn loose unless you shoot him off it. Regardless of what he said, Cal doesn’t rate Johnny’s chances of giving Rushborough the slip, here or anywhere.
