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Donnie ignores Kim as the Korean walks by. His gaze is fixed on me, his eyes still bugging.
“I’m not done with you, man,” he says.
“Well, you’ve got me at a disadvantage,” I say, raising my hands up to show that they’re empty. “After all, there are two kinds of men in this world: those with loaded guns—”
“Oh shut the fuck up!” he snaps. “Do you have any idea how fucking hard it’s been being your goddamn brother?”
“Hard?” I say, dropping my hands. “Hard?”
Donnie tosses the gun aside and it lands with a muffled thud on the sand.
“The Murdertrain! The champeen! Always getting the big shots! The big pushes! I worked my fucking ass off to be half as popular as you—”
“If you worked half as hard as you say, we wouldn’t be here right now. You never liked wrestling, anyway.”
He starts stepping towards me.
“You’re fucking right. You were born big! I was born…” he’s starting to lose his train of thought. He’s too hopped up on adrenaline and whatever else he’s been filling his body with.
“Handsome. Smart. Winning smile,” I say, running through the list. “So what?”
He lunges at me and lands a fist in my right temple as his knee connects with my gut. I connect with a knife-edge chop across his chest and stumble back from him.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Donnie?!” I belt out.
He charges at me again with his fists together and swings at my head. He connects with my jaw and I fall back onto the sand. I hear the tide slowly creeping up a few feet away.
“Get up! Get the fuck up, Murdertrain!”
He stands over me with his fists clenched and then sits on my chest. He puts one hand around my throat and slaps me with the other hand.
“Come on! I’m winning this match fair and square! No brass knuckles! No foreign objects! No referee interference!” he screams as he slaps me again.
I swing one hand and knock him off my chest and into the damp sand next to me, closer to the rising tide. I take a long breath and feel my chest pound. My knees snap and crackle as slowly I get back on my feet. I feel clumps of sand sticking to all of my wounds. I feel the cleaver in my back pocket, but I can’t use it. Not on him.
“So this is it? This was your big scheme?” I grumble. “You drag my ass out here, put your own wife in danger, kill a crime boss… You pretty much screw everybody on these islands… just so you can fight me?”
“No,” he says between breaths, “this was just icing. The moment I found out the higher-ups were sending you, it all just fell together.”
I turn away from him.
“This is fucking pathetic. Be your own fucking man, Donnie.”
“I only did all this because of you, damn it,” he mutters. He finally sits up and claws his way back onto his knees. The oncoming water just barely reaches him on the beach.
“Are you quitting?” he asks. “Because that’s not allowed. This match has no disqualifications.”
I turn back around to face him. I’ve had enough of this joke.
“If we fight, I will kill you. You know that, right?” I say.
“You don’t have the balls,” he says. Then he pulls out his Magnum, which has been tucked into the back of his trousers. He fires at me. I just watch it hit me right in the arm. The arm that wasn’t shot yet, naturally. Fire shoots up my shoulder and into my neck.
“You’re a fucking lousy shot, Donnie,” I say. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
He screams in what I can only assume is frustration and fires another shot. This one hits me in the chest, near the clavicle. The pain explodes through my body and I stumble a little.
“Bo!” I hear off in the distance. Some part of my brain can still register it as Alison’s voice. I look up and see her hobbling towards us from the boat, the tattooed guy trying to get her to go back with him. She pushes him away.
“Oh, that’s just what I need. The whore,” Donnie says, rolling his eyes. He then points to gun in her direction without looking and shoots his last bullet.
I’m still standing, I think. But the tunnel vision is creeping in. I can’t tell what’s going on and it’s taking all my strength to stay upright. The pounding in my chest is getting worse. I reach for the cleaver and manage to pull it out, but it falls through my fingers and hits the sand below. I can’t feel my arm anymore, and I can’t tell if what’s dripping down my face is blood or sweat or what. I see Donnie’s dark, distorted form stand up and toss the gun aside. I feel his hands grab my head and bring it down on his knee, and I flop over onto the ground in a heap, face down. I feel his fingers grip the back of my head, lift it up, and slam it into the sand.
“You fucked my wife, Bo!” he says before sending my head into the sand again. “You fucked her! What the fuck is wrong with you?!”
As he pulls my head up again, I manage to mutter, “She was hot.”
He slams my face even harder.
“What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that, you piece of shit?”
He lifts my head up again. I’m not sure if my eyes are just swollen shut or if my body is merely giving up at this point, but all I see is darkness.
“I said,” I say more clearly, “your wife is hot. So I fucked her. A lot. And it was amazing.”
He lets go of my head and lets it fall on its own. I hear him stand up and click the hammer back on his gun. Then I hear the click of an empty chamber, followed by the thump of the gun hitting the sand.
I finally manage to get myself up out of the sand and on my knees. My eyes slowly pry themselves open, chunks of crusty sand falling from the lids. Some gets into my eyes, but at this point, I don’t care.
“She’s too good for you, Donnie,” I say. “Hell, she’s too good for me, too.”
I can’t see his face. He’s standing with his head sunken low in the darkness.
“The only thing good enough for you were the whores in Saigon.”
He still doesn’t say anything. And for a moment, even over the crashing of waves, I think I can hear him sob. His body shudders.
“Do you…” he manages out between pathetic sobs, “Do you know what they made me do over there? Do you know the things I did?”
“Save it, Donnie,” I say. “You chose to go. You wanted to be a big war hero, right? Like me. Like Uncle Willy.”
“Have you ever seen children engulfed in flames? Watched their clothes burn and melt onto their skin?”
I say nothing.
“You know what’s worse than seeing that? Being the one doing it to them. I did that, Bo. I gunned down whole villages of people. One of my guys… he wore their ears on a fucking necklace. And we loved it!”
I stand up. The imagery is sobering me up for sure.
“I killed men, women, children, dogs, grandmothers, retards… Some men didn’t want any of it. Those poor guys didn’t have the stomach for it. But me… others like me… we thought that was what it was all about.”
“I’ve heard enough.”
We stand in silence again. Finally, I step towards him and hug him.
“I’m sorry, Donnie. I’m sorry you felt like you had to live up to some idea you had about me.”
The pounding in my chest is just getting worse. The whole side of my body is becoming useless. But I manage to walk Donnie to the boat Eddie brought us here in, and the two of us sit down in it.
“What are you going to do with me?” Donnie asks. He sounds like he’s six years old again and knows he’s in trouble.
“We’re going to take this boat back to Oahu. Then I’ll take you back home. Back to Mama. She’ll take care of you, Donnie.”
“Is Alison okay? I’m worried about her,” he says, and I’m not sure if he remembers shooting at her or not.
“She’ll be fine. I’ll take care of her, make sure she’s happy. She still loves you. I’m sure of it.”
He closes his eyes and breathes in deep.
“Remember the match in Tulsa?”
Somehow I had forgotten that match. It might have been his best match ever. We brought the house down. Probably one of the very few times he didn’t try to screw me.
“Oh man, Tulsa… I remember. I had you tied up in the ropes. I nearly lost a finger doing that trick. Hell of a match.”
“One of the best, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, Donnie, it was. How much of it can you remember?”
He tightens his eyes shut and leans his head back, and I quietly wrap one arm around his neck, place my good hand around his face, and twist. I lay his body down in the boat, grab a can of gas from the deck, and douse the whole thing. Done, I step out of the boat and into the water, and I light the last Lucky Strike in my pack. I smoke in silence for a few minutes and then toss the remaining cigarette into the boat and give the boat a big push out into the water. I watch the boat become a pyre as it slowly floats away.
Then I take several steps back onto the beach and collapse. Everything goes black.
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