PART 2:
The clipboard hit the concrete face-down, and the crack of plastic on asphalt was the last clean sound I heard for a while.
Then it was just diesel and heat and the wet, close smell of another man’s soap.
Julian’s forearm was thick and hairless and it pressed in against the sides of my throat, not the front. He knew what he was doing. He had the angle right, the elbow tucked, the hips driving forward to fold me backward over a stack of shrink-wrapped condenser units.
He wanted me to flail. He wanted the guys to see my boots leave the ground.
I didn’t touch his arm with my hands. I put them on it, but I didn’t pull.
My palms closed over his wrist and his forearm and I locked them against my own sternum, elbows tight to my ribs, and then I stopped holding myself up.
I dropped.
Not a bend. Not a sag. Two hundred and ten pounds straight down through my heels, my weight dropping out of his control like a sack of sand coming off a hook.
His hips came forward into nothing. His balance broke over my shoulder.
Somewhere behind me a pallet jack clanged to a stop.
I stepped my right leg — the bad one, the one with the shrapnel scars and the dead spot above the knee — deep behind his left calf and planted it in the gravel and the oil. The pain went up through my hip like a nail being driven, and I let it. The pain kept me awake. The pain kept me slow and careful and exact.
I turned my hips and pulled his captured arm down and across my chest, and I rolled his shoulder past the point where a shoulder is supposed to roll.
He made a sound I had heard before. Not in a gym.
His knees hit the concrete. One, then the other. The asphalt tore open the skin over both kneecaps and left two red blooms on the gray.
I stayed standing, holding his arm in a grip that had nothing to do with sport, and I pressed the back of his tattooed hand up toward his own spine, one slow inch at a time.
He tapped the ground. Fast, frantic, flat-handed.
In his world, that ends it.
Part of me knew that. Part of me had already heard the tapping and was already letting go.
But that part of me was five years old, and it was standing behind the rest of me with its hands in its pockets, and it did not have the wheel.
“Don’t,” I said. My voice came out flat. There was no rasp in it, no heat. “You don’t get to start it and then call it.”
His free hand slapped again. The sound was wet. He was making a high, thin noise through his nose.
I held the pressure and I counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
I wanted him to have time to think about the fact that nobody in the yard had moved. Not one man. Not even the kid on the forklift who was nineteen and scared of the baler.
Then I opened my hands and stepped back.
Julian went down flat on his side and curled up around his own arm like it was a hurt animal he was trying to protect. He was coughing, spitting, breathing in through his mouth in ugly, ragged pulls. His spray tan had gone the color of old plywood.
I bent down and picked up my clipboard. One corner was chipped.
“Big Mike,” I said, without looking around.
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