The Best Revenge

His smile gave him away. I couldn’t forget that smile if I tried.

It was in a place named Trudy’s, in a dead-end town across the river. I was over that way on business. My meeting got over later than expected. I didn’t want to miss the championship fight going on that night, so when I saw Trudy’s neon sign, I pulled over.

A dim, jaundiced light cast shadows at weird angles over the couple dozen or so people slumped over stools inside the bar. Their heads lifted momentarily to look at me, flat eyes swimming in the bad light, and then sagged back down again.

The place stank of decades-worth of stale cigarette smoke. They only served beer and rotgut wine. Multicolored bottles of the latter were lined along the wall like exotic brands of antifreeze.

A guy at the end of the bar eyeballed me as I walked in. I ignored him, ordered a steak and a beer from the wrinkled redhead behind the bar, and asked if they were showing the fights.

“Yep,” she said, sliding over an unopened can of beer.

The guy at the end of the bar kept studying me. I watched him in my periphery.

He was your typical ex-jock. Big, meaty shoulders, habitual forward lean from too many bench presses and not enough back work. Flab that had once been muscle hung off his bones like rubber sheets on a clothesline.

I guessed he didn’t like the way I was dressed. I look like someone who has money, because I do. guys like him hate guys that have money. It reminds them of the imaginary forces that ruined their lives.

I felt him watching me, and I knew he had bad intentions. I cracked my beer, took a drank, and watched the television.

The common misconception among guys like him is that anybody who has money is a pussy. You can’t tell them otherwise. Even after you kick the shit out of them, they won’t accept it.

It’s a matter of divine justice in their minds. They need to believe there’s some kind of balancing factor in the universe. The idea that a guy can be better employed AND kick their asses is too much to bear.

“Who do you like the fight?” he called over.

“Evans,” I said.

“Evans?” he snorted in disgust. “You must not know shit about fighting. Evans is the top pound-for-pounder in the world.”

“Yeah, but Evans is the toughest.”

“Evans is a bum. It won’t last the first round.”

“Maybe not, but if it does, I guarantee Evans wins.”

“I guess we’ll see.” He smiled, and that was the smile I could never forget.

Holy shit, I thought. It’s Edgar Beavers.

He was heavier, and his hairline started further back, but the smile hadn’t changed a bit in twenty years. That smile had haunted me for more than half my natural born life.

Edgar terrorized me from kindergarten to junior year. He’d been blessed with a mutant thyroid and was always twice the size of everyone else his age. He hit puberty somewhere around the second grade. It happened overnight, too. One morning he just walked in and was six feet tall and had hair on his balls.

He’d strut around the locker room naked waving his hairy nuts in our faces. He was the meanest bastard I’ve ever known.

He went on to become a high school football star. His pictures were in local sports pages every weekend. Girls squealed when he walked by. Boys cowered.

Edgar had everything going for him — popularity, athleticism, a rich family, but none of those things ever really fulfilled him. No, Edgar’s true passion was the torment of his others.

I was an easy target. My father was a drunk, my mother was dead, and my coat sleeves came up two inches short of my wrists. Plus, I was poor, so no one gave a shit what happened to me. “White trash” was a term I heard a lot. So, that was how I became Edgar’s favorite object of torment.

To his credit, Edgar was no dumb brute. He had an aptitude for cruelty that bordered on genius, with the subtlety of a true artist. He once had a cheerleader pretend she liked me, record our phone conversations, and play the tapes at parties. That gag alone ruined any hopes for a normal life.

By tenth grade I accepted that I’d never have friends. I resigned myself to simply survive until the end of high school. That wasn’t enough for Edgar, though. It wouldn’t be enough for him until he snuffed out every last remaining shred of my dignity.

For weeks, I offered no resistance. Still, Edgar probed deeper. He wanted to find the last live nerve left in my heart. Near the end of sophomore year, he found it.

I was walking to class when he shouted across the hall that the reason my mother killed herself was because she’d given birth to a retarded son. Without a thought I charged him, backpack still slung over my shoulders.

I swung wildly, only vaguely aware in my blind rage that he was hitting me, too. I didn’t even notice the security guard pulling me off Edgar until he put me in a wrist-lock.

Slowly I regained my awareness. First thing that came to mind was that nobody was wrist-locking Edgar. The whole school had gathered around us. The guard said something about me being on drugs.

Edgar stood there with that goddamn smile. He was rich, and he was a sports star. He could do no wrong.

Me? I was just some loser with bad teeth and short coat sleeves.

All at once, the cold realization hit me that this was how life was going to be, forever. It wouldn’t end in high school. It wouldn’t end after. It would just keep on going. The world was rigged for me to lose. The other team had home field advantage, the best equipment, and all the referees on their side.

I started to cry. It started with a little sob, but then degenerated into all-out bawling. I couldn’t stop it. I just stood there blubbering like a little baby.

Edgar burst out laughing. The other kids followed suit. Even the security guard snickered.

I ran. When I got outside, I kept running. I ran until I got sick, then I ran some more. I didn’t stop running until I was miles away from that place, and I never went back again.

In one or another, I kept running for a long time afterwards. It took years for me to stop. I gave up feeling sorry for myself, and I learned how to fight, literally and metaphorically. I got some education and I got into real estate. Things worked out very well for me from there.

I made something of myself, but I never forgot Edgar or that day. Nobody ever really forgets things like that. Not really. We just find deeper places to hide them.

Now, by some incredible coincidence, there he was: Edgar Beavers, bane of my youth, sitting at the far end of the bar smiling that goddamn smile. It was like the gods were rewarding me.

Now, I’ve heard it said that success if the best revenge, and I won’t argue that that may be true for some. But for me, personally, kicking the shit out of someone has always been far more gratifying.

I sipped my beer, contemplated the television, and thought about how to proceed. I couldn’t just call him outside. Only low-lives go around picking fights. If you want to do it right, you have to get the other guy to pick it. It’s a delicate art.

I never did anything but smile.

As soon as the fight started, I had the bartender bring Edgar a beer. He looked at me kind of funny, nodded his head awkwardly, and turned back to the fight.

At the end of every round I bought him another beer, gave him another smile. After every smile, I took another bite of steak.

Evans was winning, just like I said he would. He got beat badly in the first, did a little better in the second, and then started taking over. The longer the fight went, the angrier Edgar got, and the more beers I sent him. By the end of the seventh, Edgar had five beers in front of him, plus the one in his hand.

At the start of the eight, I bought one more. This time I raised my own beer in a toast and winked.

Edgar was out of his seat and halfway around the bar before he realized it was a bad idea. He read my body language, my eyes, and knew he’d been set up. He saw I wasn’t afraid. More importantly, he saw I wasn’t afraid because I had good reason to not be afraid.

A man can sense the difference between real and fake confidence in a situation like that, just like silverback gorillas fighting for dominance. Somehow, when the adrenaline starts to flow, we just know.

Edgar slowed his stride a bit, but it was too late for him to turn around. His friends were watching, and if he turned back he’d look like a coward. Guys like that have nothing but their barroom reputation to stand on. They’ll risk death to maintain it.

He said some stupid, threatening thing. I got up and walked outside.

Every person in the bar followed Edgar outside and formed a little ring around us. Edgar puffed up, gestured profanely, shouted and pounded his chest to try and mask his terror. He was doing all he could to drag the affair out until somebody stepped in.

One look at the inebriated apes surrounding us, and I knew no one was breaking this up. Edgar finally accepted the inevitable and came after me.

I let him swing some haymakers, slipped them, stepped away from his sloppy attempts to take me down. I watched him quickly tire. It wasn’t long before he slowed and then stopped completely, standing there gasping for air with his hands barely higher than his waist.

I didn’t need him tired to take him out. I could have done it anytime. I just wanted him to know, and everyone else, too, that this was all Edgar Beavers ever was — a one-round knockout fighter late in the tenth, no guts, no grit, no balls, a guy that didn’t have what it takes to go the distance.

I let him feel that for a bit, let his friends see it, and then moved in for the hook.

Most guys in a fight will swing for the head, but if you really want to give somebody a hurt that stays around for a long time, you go for the body. Body shots linger, they make a guy piss blood, they make him toss and turn at night trying to find a halfway comfortable position to sleep in.

You get a guy with a good body shot, and he’ll remember you for days.

I thought about telling him who I was, but decided against it. It didn’t really matter if he knew. It only mattered that I did.

I uncorked the left hook and felt the solid, satisfying crunch of it hitting home.

Edgar let out a gargled shriek and fell to the gravel clutching his side, eyes wide in shock at the pain. I watched him squirm there for a few seconds.

The crowd watched in embarrassment as Edgar whimpered. They looked around at each other wondering if they should do something.

I walked to my car and drove away. Out on the road I turned on my radio. A sports commentator said Evans had knocked Garcia out late in the tenth.

“Garcia just didn’t have what it took in the later rounds,” the commentator said. “Even in this day and age, there just isn’t an answer for a hard-nosed fighter with a good work ethic and unwavering determination.”

“Damn right,” I said, turned off the radio, and kept driving.

Copyright 2018 Jeff Suwak