Darwin's Nightmare by Mike Knowles

listen because bartenders are usually full of hot air and Steve didn’t look like much — he only weighed about one-seventy, and he could barely see through the hair that hung over his eyes. While I was holding the junkie to the wall with my forearm, I missed the sound of the thin bartender moving over the bar. Almost at once he was behind me, tripping me backward over his foot.
    I bumped off the ground ready to fight. The junkie saw that Steve was between us and rushed out the door. Steve tilted his head forward, and with a hard jerk he sent his hair flying back. He used a rubber band from his wrist to tie the hair up into some kind of shabby samurai topknot. I threw a weak jab before he was done with his hair as a setup to something much worse; he surprised me, pulling my arm tight — hyperextending it. Steve twisted and pulled the arm in front of him and began pushing against it like he was at the turnstile to get on a roller coaster. I grabbed the brass rail on the bar and pulled against my arm, interrupting Steve’s momentum. He stumbled into my field of vision, no longer able to put me to the floor. My elbow drove back over my shoulder and connected with his jaw, but it did nothing to loosen his grip. I hit him five more times in the jaw and side of the head until my twisted arm was free. The fight went on for three more minutes. Stevetried repeatedly to take me down while I tried to knock him out. I used fast hard punches and elbows out of fear of getting a limb broken in a painful joint lock.
    After three minutes, we both were slow to get up and Sandra had just come back from the store. She walked up to the fight, unafraid, and pulled Steve away by the arm. At once, his eyes softened, and he followed her behind the bar. The junkie was long gone, and my left knee and right arm were severely stretched. I staggered to the bar and did the only thing I was able to do. I ordered a Coke.
    We weren’t friends after that, not by a long shot, but I did my best to respect the bar, and Steve did his best to turn an eye every now and then when I had to brace someone a little rough. Three years ago that all changed — not because of some touching Hallmark moment, but rather because of something much worse. We both got blood on our hands together. Blood has a way of making two people stick together like nothing else.
    The neighbourhood where Sully’s Tavern was located was rough. No one lived there because they wanted to — they just had nowhere else to go. Every violent offender, addict, and pedophile was like a magnet dragging others like them to the area. Sully’s Tavern was the eye of the hurricane; it was the one peaceful spot in a mass of human depravity. The only real order in the neighbourhood came from Paolo’s men. It was mob turf, and everybody was expected to pay into the local protection fund. The hoods in charge of the collecting left Steve alone for the first little while because his bar didn’t turn a profit, and he didn’t care who came in with who so long as they didn’t start trouble. But when the bar started getting regular customers, the neighbourhood boys became more interested in Sully’s Tavern. The first visit was on a Tuesday, then every other day after Steve refused to pay. The boys justdidn’t understand, being so low on the food chain and used to intimidating everyone, that Steve wasn’t going to be scared into anything.
    I heard rumblings of what was going on and I talked to Steve about it. “Those aren’t punk kids, Steve, they work for a dangerous man. Just give them a piece of the pie and call it the price of doing business.”
    Quietly, under his hair, he said, “It’s my business, my pie, no tastes. You want another Coke?”
    I came in a week later, on a Monday, to find Steve ramming a man’s head into the brass footrest of the bar. Another man was on the floor, his left arm and leg at unnatural angles. On the