Chapter 11
Before Jarrod could even say to himself, not again, he'd been hit in the gut three times and was going down. Whoever this was clubbed him on the back of the head, and Jarrod went down flat in the dark alley dirt again. But this time, when the man said, "You chose wrong," and started to move away, Jarrod scrambled up on all fours and threw himself after the man.
He tackled him down and despite the pain in his stomach and the dizziness from the blow to the head, he had at the man with every bit of fight he could muster. The man kicked him away, climbed up again and tried to run, but Jarrod grabbed at the man's ankles and pulled him down again. The man tried to get away one more time, and one more time Jarrod caught him, dragged him down, and began to give back what he had gotten.
"Who?!" Jarrod yelled into the man's face as they lay on the ground and Jarrod pounded. "Who sent you?!"
The man choked and wriggled and tried to get away, but Jarrod was a bigger man and held him down. There was a streetlight at the entrance to the alley. Jarrod crawled to his feet and dragged the man by his shirt toward the light. He wanted to see who had attacked him.
"Who?!" Jarrod yelled again. "Who sent you? Who wanted that land this bad?!"
And then they were in the light. The man was still coughing and trying to get up and away but he was hurt. His nose was bleeding and probably broken and his blood was all over the front of both of them, but Jarrod could see his face, and he went cold.
Jarrod's brain wouldn't even register who this was, even though he knew who this was, but it finally hit him, right between the eyes. This man wasn't sent by someone who wanted the land. This wasn't about who he should have sold the land to. It was about who he should NOT have sold the land to, and that was Ben Gordon.
Because the man who had beaten Jarrod up was Don Gordon.
"What- ?" Jarrod said in disbelief.
Don Gordon was choking on the blood from his broken nose. Jarrod hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the nearest wall.
"Why?! Don, for the love of God, why?!"
Don Gordon said nothing. He just choked and coughed and Jarrod finally just hauled him down the street to the office of the doctor who had tended to Libby. The both did their share of stumbling, making people on the street move out of the way and stare hard, but Jarrod got Gordon to the doctor's office and shoved him up against the door as he pounded on it.
Like many doctors, this one lived above his office and was down in a hurry, used to pounding coming at all hours. Jarrod held Gordon by the shirt when the door came open so he wouldn't fall down inside, but he dragged him right in.
The doctor moaned and closed the door behind them.
In a few moments, the doctor had Don Gordon up on a table in an examination room and Jarrod in a chair nearby. Gordon was bleeding far worse than Jarrod was, so he was tended to first. The doctor said, "That nose is broken."
Jarrod had been trying to think this out. Why in God's name would Don Gordon come after him, telling him he was selling the land to the wrong man when that man was his brother? As the doctor tended the injured man Jarrod had considered a friend, Jarrod remembered what Don had told him a few days ago, and it occurred to him that this was all about one brother's hatred for another. Don Gordon didn't want Jarrod to sell land to Ben Gordon because it would help solidify commercial success for a brother he hated, because that brother had bedded and taken Don's wife.
"Let me look at you," the doctor was suddenly saying and looking at Jarrod. "Can you stand up?"
While thinking about what this was all about, Jarrod had lost track of time, and he hadn't noticed someone else standing in the door – a policeman. Jarrod slowly stood up, unfolding gingerly because his ribs hurt more than ever. He took his jacket off and opened his shirt. His midsection was heavily bruised.
"You didn't get this just now," the doctor said.
"He attacked me last night, too," Jarrod said.
The doctor probed a little. "I'll want to get you on the table and check for broken ribs, as soon as I get this other man off of it."
"What happened here?" the policeman asked.
Jarrod hesitated. "A disagreement," he ended up saying.
"Disagreement my foot," the policeman said. "You two have had an out and out fight, and you just said this man attacked you last night. Did he do it again tonight?"
The doctor was sitting Don Gordon up on the side of the table and easing him to standing. He had shoved cotton up each nostril and then set Gordon's broken bone back into place.
Jarrod said, "It's a personal argument."
"Do you want to press charges?" the policeman asked.
Jarrod said, "No."
"How about you?" the policeman asked Gordon as the doctor put Jarrod's former friend into the chair Jarrod had gotten up out of.
As he sat down, Gordon said, "No."
The policeman sighed, watching Jarrod ease himself onto the table. "All right, but you get into it one more time and I'll run you both in. Good night, Doc."
The policeman left as the doctor said to Jarrod, "Lie down."
Jarrod lay down on the table and endured some probing and then some astringent put to the cuts on his face. He was silent. He had nothing to say.
The doctor said, "There doesn't seem to be anything broken." The doctor then took the astringent to Gordon in the chair and doctored cuts on his face one more time for good measure.
"May I get up?" Jarrod asked.
"Take it easy," the doctor said.
Jarrod sat up and then slid off the side of the table to his feet. He kept his rump sitting partially on the table.
The doctor finished with Gordon, then stood there looking at him, then at Jarrod.
Jarrod asked, "How much do we owe you?" as he fetched his jacket from the chair where he left it. Gordon was leaning back against it. Jarrod pulled his jacket out from behind him, roughly.
"Two dollars will do it," the doctor said.
Jarrod fished out his wallet from his jacket and paid the money.
"I take it you two know each other," the doctor said.
"Yeah," Jarrod said.
"Don't come back here again, because I will call for the police if you beat up on each other anymore."
"Don't worry, Doc," Jarrod said. "This won't be happening again."
Then the doctor said to Gordon, "Go home and don't go attacking anybody for a couple weeks."
Jarrod grabbed Gordon by the arm and pulled him to his feet, but not roughly this time, although not gingerly either. Jarrod took him out of the room and out of the office entirely, out into the dark street, where he stopped. He looked hard at his former friend in the streetlight, and suddenly he understood everything not just in his head, but in his heart. "You hate Ben so much you'd attack me," Jarrod said. "You couldn't bring yourself to beat your brother up, because you're afraid of him, and even if you hate him, he's still your brother. So you did it to me because I helped make his plans come to fruition. Don - ." Jarrod shook his head. He had run out of words.
Gordon glared. He said, "You sold that land to Ben and it'll break that logjam and give him all the land he wants. You just made him a very, very rich man."
"And so you transferred you hate to me," Jarrod said.
"You don't get it, Jarrod. All my life, my brother has humiliated me, degraded me, betrayed me at every turn. And he finally took what meant the most to me – my wife, my daughter. He bedded my wife just to hurt me. He never cared about her. He just wanted to dig at me. You don't know what it's like to have a brother like that."
"No, I don't," Jarrod said. "But I was your friend. I'm not anymore, that's for sure, but I was your friend. And you took your hatred for your brother out on me because you were too afraid and you still love him too much to go after him directly. You're lucky I didn't have you locked up and I'm not gonna go to the court and get them to take your job away from you."
Gordon looked away again.
Jarrod said, "Go home. Go look in a mirror and see what kind of man you've become, because you're gonna have to live with him now."
"You don't know – "
"Yes, I do know!" Jarrod said. He did know what it was to have to face the shame you brought on yourself, but Gordon didn't need to know any details about that. "Go clean yourself up and get out of my life, because if you try coming after me again, I might not be able to keep my temper as well as I have tonight."
Jarrod gave Gordon a shove and walked away in the other direction, toward his hotel. His gut hurt and the blow to the head had given him a headache, but more than anything his heart hurt to know that a man he had considered a friend had done this to him, had beaten him up twice, just because he couldn't deal with his brother.
And he remembered what he had done to his own brothers, two times he had almost killed them, one forgivable because he didn't know who they were, one completely unforgivable because he was just so completely out of control. But he put those memories out of his mind. He had brothers who were forgiving and supportive, despite everything, and he had long ago vowed that he would never let them down again. Don Gordon had Ben Gordon, who at best was scum of the earth, and for that Jarrod was sorry.
