The Feud by Thomas Berger Page A

fat he still had solid stomach muscles, dating from his early days of strenuous labor.
    His own next blow hit Huff’s nose: blood gushed from it like water from an open tap. Huff tried to continue, but he was bleeding too much. He put both hands to his face and walked rapidly away in the direction of the toilet.
    While Dolf was watching Huff’s retreat he was struck in the chest by the sledgehammer of a heart attack, and he fell writhing to the concrete floor.
    It took a while for Walt to stanch the flow of blood from his nose: he was a notorious bleeder. He snuffed a lot of water from the cup of his hand, and from time to time he threw his head back as far as it would go.
    He had been wrong to start at Beeler’s belly, which had not proved that weak; he too should have gone for the face. Luckily no one else had seen the fight. Being ten years younger, he would have been humiliated the way it turned out. However, that brief encounter was only Round One so far as he was concerned. The blow he took could be considered as pretty much a sucker punch. It had been gentlemanly of him to strike at the body, whereas Beeler had obviously been out to disfigure his own opponent: he was a dirty fighter, a yellowbelly, and a bum.
    Walt gingerly fingered his face while looking into the discolored mirror over the washbowl in the toilet. His swollen nose definitely changed the upper part of his face; even his eyes were affected. The guys had a softball team that sometimes practiced at the nearby Legion field after work, and for safekeeping stashed their equipment in the stockroom, which was either always manned or stoutly locked. Walt was thinking he would go get one of the baseball bats and settle the score with Beeler, who had really, if you thought about it, jumped him from behind without warning, the shit-heel. He himself had been in the right and had suffered for it. If Beeler dared to come into the toilet at the moment, Walt would have shoved his face in a pisspot.
    When finally someone did appear, it was a guy with whom he had had no dealings and whose face was only vaguely familiar. This man went to the urinals and assumed the standard spread-legged stance. After a moment he looked over at Walt.
    “Know a foreman named Beeler? They just took him away in an ambulance.”
    “Huh?”
    “There’s blood all over. They don’t know what happened.”
    Walt ran out to the scene of the recent fight. The old colored janitor, wearing a suit coat on top of overalls, was mopping the floor, but nobody else was there.
    “What happened here?”
    “Don’t know if he was daid or not,” said the janitor.
    “Who was it?” It could have been somebody else. Dolf was perfectly O.K. when last seen. The guy in the toilet could have been wrong about the identification.
    “That heavy guy,” said the colored man, “you know? What they call Ralph?”
    It was tempting to take him at face value, but having had experience with our dusky friends, Walt was aware they were none too reliable with the names of white men. “You don’t mean Dolf?”
    “Yes indeed, that is it,” said the janitor, grinning affirmatively. “They was hauling him out when I come, and I says, ‘Who’s that?’ and they says, ‘Ralph.’ “
    As Walt hastened out toward the parking lot he met a group of men who were returning.
    He asked, “Was that Dolf Beeler?”
    Somebody said, “That’s right. He just keeled over.”
    Someone else said, “He had a hemorrhage. There was blood all over the floor.”
    Walt tried to oppose panic with reason. He had been the one who bled. His only blow had sunk into five or six inches of fat: a man didn’t die from that or even lose a drop of blood. Yet who could say what might happen to a man of Beeler’s age if he took a punch? It wasn’t as if he had just collapsed in the normal course of his day. He might well have a legal case against a younger guy like Walt. Walt knew a man on whose property a door-to-door magazine salesman had