He felt his own lip peel back from his teeth as he grabbed the long bony upper arm that had so crazily clutched that weird leather case to that dirty English breast. Mickey grabbed that bony elbow even as Blackie Boy Clay jumped up and down pleading for him, "Mickey, please, don't hurt no one no more!"
Mickey then heard a voice he had never heard before, his own adult voice, his youth’s voice now altered into that of a cruel man, “A good boy you are, Clay—stand clear!”
Mickey grabbed the Englishman’s elbow with his left hand even as Clay cried by his side, “Mickey, the man is like to die—en he white! A white man, Mickey! We can’t kill no white man or we pirates!”
Mickey got a sinking feeling in his belly, knowing as he did that the man would surely die with broken back and mashed kidneys. The spirit of defiance had grown in him to such a point that it must strike another blow against the world before he allowed good sense or greater forces to snuff it out.
Mickey pulled back that left elbow of the arm that so frantically clutched the case, even as the man pissed blood until he died. He felt then an ominous thing, a weight on that arm, which gave him the thrill of doom and lit the fire of defiance in his heart all at once, compelling him to action. He then heard that deep man’s voice again, “Blackie Boy, this is the way of the world—the way of White Men! Step away, ' he said with a snarl that pained his heart.
Blackie Boy, who had had something special and cozy about his soul despite the narrowness of his body, stepped away as if some unseen hands had lain on his shoulders and pulled him gently back.
There you are, Damned Durst, in your first moment of freedom laying cruel words on the most kindly soul you ever knew.
Never mind that womanly boy—what is tucked in the crook of this lunatic arm?
He then slammed a right hammer hand down into the back of that elbow as he pulled back the forearm with his left, and thrilled to the cracking snap of the limb. He then grabbed ahold of the lower arm with both hands and twisted it free of the case.
He heard Clay groan like a hurt old man, and it struck him as quite sad.
As the case hit the deck like a cannon ball—a damned 12-pounder—the lifeless head of the crazed Englishman, whose name they would never know, bounced from the planks that Mickey had scrubbed just yesterday, under the cruel impositions of Jonah Heel, the now dead tyrant of the deck that Mickey now felt was his own, he being the only white an to stand upon it, and by right of conquest at that.
Again the cruel man’s voice came, reminiscent of The Captain when he was in his dark widower’s moods, “Wash this deck of toil in blood!”
Mickey felt like the King of something terrible, as he stood snarling and panting above the broken body of the fool that had brought death to them all less than an hour ago, and now went off to savor it himself. He looked down past the ruined bone rack of a body to see Blackie Boy Clay and his brother Fat Sam—face a bloody mess—looking up at him like he remembered his sisters looking up at that terrible land-renter who had sent them all three to hell in the belly of a ship.
He looked into their eyes and they looked away.
He looked up into the sky, to the first stars of night that had just begun twinkling there. They did not look away, and that gave him scarce comfort as the substance of his actions began to dawn on him—and dawn was a long way off.
