Wheezing for breath, Pasquale looked back over his left shoulder. Old Lugo was walking down the narrow trail toward them, still in his fish-cleaning slicks, pushing the bolt to send another cartridge into his rifle, a green branch hanging from the dirty barrel of his weapon, which he must have pulled from his wife’s garden. The rifle was raised to Gualfredo.
“I’d shoot your tiny pecker, Gualfredo, but my aim is not what it once was,” Lugo said. “But a blind man could hit that gut of yours.”
“The old man has shot me in my foot, Gualfredo,” said the giant Pelle matter-of-factly, formally.
In the next minute there was a fair bit of groaning and shuffling, and then someone let the air back in for Pasquale to breathe. Like children cleaning up a mess, the men seemed to fall back into a simple and rational order, of the sort that emerges when one person in a group is pointing a gun at some number of the others. Alvis Bender sat up, a large knot above his eye; Pasquale’s ear was still ringing; and Gualfredo was rubbing his sore head; but Pelle had gotten the worst of it, the bullet tearing through his foot.
Lugo looked at Pelle’s wound with some disappointment. “I shot at your feet to stop you,” he said. “I did not intend to hit you.”
“It was a difficult shot,” the giant said with some admiration.
The sun was just a smear on the horizon now and Valeria had come down from the hotel with a lantern. She told Pasquale that the American girl had slept through everything, that she must be exhausted. Then, as Lugo stood by with the rifle, Valeria cleaned Pelle’s wound and bandaged his foot tightly with a torn pillowcase and fishing twine, the big man wincing as she tied the wound off.
Alvis Bender seemed especially interested in Pelle’s injured foot, and he kept asking questions. Did it hurt? Did he think he could walk? What had it felt like?
“I saw many wounds in the war,” Valeria said, with strange tenderness for the giant who had come to muscle her nephew. “This one passed right through.” She readjusted the lantern and wiped the sweat from Pelle’s beer keg of a head. “You’ll be fine.”
“Thank you,” said Pelle.
Pasquale went to check on Dee Moray. As his aunt had said, she was still asleep, oblivious even to the gunshot that had ended the little skirmish.
When Pasquale came back down, Gualfredo was leaning against the piazza wall. He spoke softly to Pasquale, his eyes still on Lugo’s gun. “This is a big mistake you’ve made, Tursi. You understand this, no? A very big mistake.”
Pasquale said nothing.
“You understand I will come back. And my guns will not be fired by old fishermen.”
Pasquale could do nothing but give the bastard Gualfredo his coolest stare until, finally, Gualfredo looked away.
A few minutes later, Gualfredo and the limping Pelle started back down the hill for their boat, Lugo accompanying them as if they were old friends, holding the rifle in his arms like a long, skinny baby. At the water, old Lugo turned to Gualfredo, spoke a few sentences, pointed to the village, gestured with the rifle, and then walked back up the trail to the piazza, to where Pasquale and Alvis Bender sat recuperating. The boat fired up and Gualfredo and Pelle disappeared into the darkness.
On the hotel balcony, Pasquale poured the old man a glass of wine.
Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero drank the wine in one long gulp and then looked over at Alvis Bender, whose contribution to the fight had been so minimal. “Liberatore,” he said with a whiff of sarcasm—Liberator. Alvis Bender simply nodded. It had never before occurred to Pasquale, but an entire generation of men had been defined by the war, his father, too, and yet they rarely talked about it with one another. Pasquale had always thought of the war as one big thing, but he’d heard Alvis talk about his war as if everyone served in a separate war, a million different wars for a million people.
“What did you say to Gualfredo?” Pasquale asked Lugo.
Lugo looked back from Alvis Bender over his shoulder, toward the shore. “I told Gualfredo that I knew he had a reputation as a hard man, but the next time he came to Porto Vergogna I would shoot out his legs and while he lay squirming on the beach I would pull down his pants, shove my garden stick up his fat asshole, and pull the trigger. I told him the last second of his miserable life would be spent feeling his own shit come out the top of his head.”
Neither Pasquale nor Alvis Bender could think of a thing to say. They watched old Lugo finish his wine, set the glass on the table, and walk back to his wife. She gently took the rifle from him and he disappeared into his little house.