Beautiful Ruins (92)

“The Brit skipped out on his bar bill,” Gualfredo said, now twenty meters away. “You might as well pay me for that, too.”

“No,” Pasquale said simply.

“No?” Gualfredo asked.

Behind him, he heard Alvis Bender come out onto the patio. “Everything okay down there, Pasquale?”

Gualfredo looked up at the hotel. “And you have another American guest? What are you running here, Tursi? I’m going to have to double the tax.”

Pasquale reached them just at the point where the trailhead met the edge of the piazza, where the dirt of the shore blended into the first cobblestone strada. Gualfredo was opening his mouth to say something else, but before he could, Pasquale swung the cane. It cracked against the bull neck of the brute Pelle, who apparently wasn’t expecting this, perhaps because of Pasquale’s sheepish demeanor the last time. The big man lurched to the side and fell in the dirt like a cut tree, Pasquale lifting the cane to swing it again . . . but finding it broken off against the big man’s neck. He threw the handle aside and went after Gualfredo with his fists.

But Gualfredo was an experienced fighter. Ducking Pasquale’s haymaker, he landed two straight, compact blows—one to Pasquale’s cheek, which burned, and the next to his ear, which caused a dull ringing and sent him reeling backward into the fallen Pelle. Realizing that his own furious adrenaline was a limited resource, Pasquale leaped back at Gualfredo’s sausage-packed frame, until he was inside those direct punches, swinging wildly himself, his own blows landing on Gualfredo’s head with deep melon thunks and light slaps: wrists, fists, elbows—everything he had.

But then the big lamb-shank hand of Pelle landed on his hair and a second meaty hand fell on his back and he was dragged away, and for the first time it occurred to Pasquale that this might not go his way, that he’d likely need more than adrenaline and a broken cane to pull this off. Then even the adrenaline was gone, and Pasquale made a soft, whimpering noise like a crying child who has exhausted himself. And, like a steam shovel out of nowhere, Pelle slammed a fist into Pasquale’s gut, lifting him and dropping him flat to the ground, slumped over, not a molecule of air left anywhere in the world to breathe.

Big Pelle stood over him, a deep frown on his face, framed with the specks of Pasquale’s vision as he gasped and waited for the steam shovel to finish him off. Pasquale bent forward and scratched at the dirt below him, wondering why he couldn’t smell the sea air but knowing there would be no smelling as long as there was no air. Pelle made the slightest move toward him and then a shadow flashed across the sun and Pasquale looked up to see Alvis Bender fly from the rock wall onto the massive back of Pelle, who hesitated for a moment (he looked like a student with a guitar case strung over his shoulder) before reaching behind himself and tossing off the tall, thin American like a wet rag, sending him skittering across the rocky shore.

Pasquale tried to get to his feet now, but there was still no breath. Then Pelle took a step toward him, and three fantastic things occurred at once: there was an intimate THUP in front of him, and a big crack behind, and the big left foot of the giant Pelle burst forth in a red spout, the big man crying out and doubling over to grab his foot.

Wheezing for breath, Pasquale looked back over his left shoulder. Old Lugo was walking down the narrow trail toward them, still in his fish-cleaning slicks, pushing the bolt to send another cartridge into his rifle, a green branch hanging from the dirty barrel of his weapon, which he must have pulled from his wife’s garden. The rifle was raised to Gualfredo.

“I’d shoot your tiny pecker, Gualfredo, but my aim is not what it once was,” Lugo said. “But a blind man could hit that gut of yours.”

“The old man has shot me in my foot, Gualfredo,” said the giant Pelle matter-of-factly, formally.

In the next minute there was a fair bit of groaning and shuffling, and then someone let the air back in for Pasquale to breathe. Like children cleaning up a mess, the men seemed to fall back into a simple and rational order, of the sort that emerges when one person in a group is pointing a gun at some number of the others. Alvis Bender sat up, a large knot above his eye; Pasquale’s ear was still ringing; and Gualfredo was rubbing his sore head; but Pelle had gotten the worst of it, the bullet tearing through his foot.

Lugo looked at Pelle’s wound with some disappointment. “I shot at your feet to stop you,” he said. “I did not intend to hit you.”

“It was a difficult shot,” the giant said with some admiration.

The sun was just a smear on the horizon now and Valeria had come down from the hotel with a lantern. She told Pasquale that the American girl had slept through everything, that she must be exhausted. Then, as Lugo stood by with the rifle, Valeria cleaned Pelle’s wound and bandaged his foot tightly with a torn pillowcase and fishing twine, the big man wincing as she tied the wound off.

Alvis Bender seemed especially interested in Pelle’s injured foot, and he kept asking questions. Did it hurt? Did he think he could walk? What had it felt like?

“I saw many wounds in the war,” Valeria said, with strange tenderness for the giant who had come to muscle her nephew. “This one passed right through.” She readjusted the lantern and wiped the sweat from Pelle’s beer keg of a head. “You’ll be fine.”

“Thank you,” said Pelle.

Pasquale went to check on Dee Moray. As his aunt had said, she was still asleep, oblivious even to the gunshot that had ended the little skirmish.