Eddie carried the ladder back to the garage and Karen, moving beside him in the dark, showed him where to stow it away. They came outside again and found Skip. He stood without moving, utterly silent, and Eddie had a sudden sense of warning. The next moment Skip had turned on Karen. He grabbed her and slammed her into the wall and then jerked his hand back and hit her with the edge of his fist. Her head snapped and Eddie heard the bump it gave against the garage wall. “You goddamn bitch!”

Eddie said, “Skip, cut it out. We can’t have a racket here.”

Skip paid no attention. “I’ll show you!” He snatched at her hair, got his fingers into it, jerked her forward almost off balance. She tried to catch his knees to keep from falling; he slapped her hands away. She’d begun to whimper. She stumbled around Skip, off balance, and then he yanked her head up again and she gave a small shrill cry.

Eddie moved then. His action was involuntary, without plan. He put out a foot and then with a quick tentative step he was closer and pushing Skip in the face with his open hand. Skip tried to hang onto the girl and handle Eddie, but he couldn’t do it. Eddie got a good leverage under his chin and jabbed hard and Skip fell over backward. He was on his feet again in an instant, like a dropped cat. He moved in with a flurry of blows.

Eddie wasn’t Skip’s kind of fighter. Skip danced and flicked his fists and tormented an opponent, while Eddie just stood and took punishment and waited; but pretty soon Eddie found what he was looking for and he let loose a solid heavy blow that snapped Skip’s head back and flung him off his feet. He sat there under the starshine, not hopping up as before, but stunned, groggy. “You leave her alone,” Eddie said. “From now on.”

There seemed an eternity of quiet out there in the dim dark beside the old garage. Eddie stood over Skip. He was tensed, a hot fiddle-string tautness filling him, his fists hard as hammers. He was ready for Skip to move. Skip sat bent, his head hanging. His light-colored hair shone a little in the gloom, but his face was in shadow, and Eddie couldn’t even guess what sort of expression was on it. One thing he knew, Skip didn’t accept defeat. His reaction was always simply to be meaner and tougher and cleverer than ever.

Oddly enough, Skip didn’t say much. He got to his feet, grunted, brushed at his clothes, and then looked around as if for Karen.