“I give up. I give up,” the man said.

Sam felt obligated to give the man a chance, though he knew that the guy’s temptation to throw another punch would relapse like a disease. He dropped the pinkie and waited for the left hook. It came. Sam threw his head back, let it slide by, and then did a short strike, driving the points of three fingers right into the solar plexus. The strike hadn’t even approached full power, but the man dropped and flopped like a fish.

Sam stepped back, disgusted with the whole matter. Nothing like this ordinarily happened in these islands. People were civilized and thoughtful. The old stench of unadorned aggression hung heavy over the scene. Sam reached over and tried to help the man up, but he was too badly incapacitated. Sam took off his coat and put it under the man’s head. Men like this did not come to this island in winter, and Sam wondered at his wardrobe. Then another thought came to him: Already today Sam had seen others like this guy, and it didn’t leave him with an easy feeling.

“Who is he? he asked Sherry.

“Just came a day or so ago. Calls himself Rafe something. Thinks I sold him my body just because he bought my stereo. I told him I didn’t want to sell it. Told him it wasn’t worth five hundred but he insisted. And then after he took the stereo he got real ugly when I wouldn’t have dinner with him.”

“That other one,” she said, meaning the smaller man, who’d already disappeared, “I guess is trying to take up pimping.”

“So he’s not with the heavyweight champ here.”

“Not regular I don’t think.”

The insanity was starting to make a little more sense.

“What’s this guy doing on the island?”

“I don’t know, but he’s got friends.”

Sam nodded.

Rafe what’s-his-name was coming around. When he got up he kept his eyes pointedly away from Sam, brushed himself off, and walked straight away.

Sam went back and resumed his reading until he felt the weight of someone else’s gaze. Without looking he knew that it was Haley, her brunette curls and eyes like blue green silk, that were perceptive and inquisitive and that once might have had just the proper mirth. Sam hadn’t seen that light in her eyes in a long time, not since the fourth of July 1994.

She had missed the Mud Head and Rafe show and that was just as well. She would have insisted on fighting.

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