a sheepish look at Angus.
Angus shrugged. He didn’t particularly care if Don Pommeroy got beat up. He deserved it, the idiot. A five-foot monkey. For Christ’s sake.
Fred Burden set his teeth into Don’s shin and clamped. Don howled at the injustice, “No biting! No biting!” He was outraged, it seemed, because he’d made that rule perfectly clear with regard to the monkey fight. Angus Addams, standing at the bar, watched the awkward scramble on the floor for a while and then sighed, turned around, and asked the bartender if he could settle the tab. The bartender, a small, slight man with an anxious expression, was holding a baseball bat that was half his height.
“You don’t need that,” Angus said, nodding at the bat.
The bartender looked relieved and slid the bat back under the bar. “Should I call the police?”
“You don’t need to worry. It’s no big deal, buddy. Just let ’em fight it out.”
“What are they fighting about?” the bartender asked.
“Ah, they’re old friends,” Angus said, and the bartender smiled with relief, as if that explained everything. Angus settled his bill and walked past the men (who were wrestling and grunting on the floor) to go upstairs and get some sleep.
“Where you going?” Don Pommeroy, on the floor, shrieked after Angus as he was leaving. “Where the hell you going?”
Angus had walked out on the fight because he thought it was nothing, but it turned out to be something after all.
Fred Burden was a tenacious bastard, and Don was as stubborn as he was stupid, and neither man let up on the other. The fight went on for a good ten minutes after Angus went to bed. The way Carl Cobb described it, Fred and Don were “two dogs in a field,” biting, kicking, punching. Don tried to break a few bottles over Fred’s head, and Fred broke a few of Don’s fingers so fiercely, you could hear them snap. The bartender, a not very bright man who had been told by Angus not to worry about the fight, didn’t.
Even when Fred was sitting on top of Don’s chest, fistfuls of hair in his hands, pounding Don’s head into the floor, the bartender did not intervene. Fred pounded until Don was unconscious, then sat back, heaving. The bartender was polishing an ashtray with his towel when Carl said, “Maybe you should call somebody.” The bartender looked over the bar and saw that Don was not moving and that his face was mashed up. Fred was bloody, too, and one of his arms was hanging in a funny way. The bartender called the police.
Angus Addams didn’t hear about any of this until the next morning, when he got up for breakfast and prepared to head back to Fort Niles. He learned that Don Pommeroy was in the hospital, and that things didn’t look good. He hadn’t woken up, Angus heard. He had some “internal damage,” and the rumor was that a lung was punctured.
“Son of a bitch,” Angus said, deeply impressed.
He’d never thought the fight would turn into something so serious. The police had questions for Angus, but they let him go. They were still holding Fred Burden, but he was so beat up himself that he hadn’t yet been charged with anything. The police weren’t sure what to do, because the bartender—their one sober, reliable witnes—insisted that the two men were old friends who were only kidding around.
Angus arrived at the island late in the afternoon, and went looking for Don’s brother Ira, but Ira had already heard the news. He’d received a telephone call from the Rockland police, informing him that his brother had been beaten into a coma by a Courne Haven fisherman in a bar. Ira went wild. He stormed around, flexing and unflexing his muscles and waving his fists in the air and shouting. His wife, Rhonda, tried to calm him down, but he wouldn’t hear her. He was going to take a shotgun over to Courne Haven and “cause some trouble.” He was going to “show somebody.” He was going to “teach them a thing or two.” He got together with some of his friends and worked them up into a serious froth. Nobody ended up taking any shotguns on board, but the tense peace that existed between the two islands was shattered, and the fourth Courne Haven lobster war was under way.
The daily details of this war are not significant; it was a typical lobster war. There was fighting, cutting, pushing, vandalism, theft, aggression,