Garrett feels the urge to laugh, he chokes the instinct to do so out loud but he can’t stop the dizzy feeling of laughing uncontrollably inside his head. Underestimate your opponent at your peril. Garrett’s father wasn’t fond of quotes like his sister was but the learning they had as children hadn’t been entirely wasted on him. Garrett’s father preferred his few favored quotes to come from the military and political leaders of old. Garrett first heard that one while he lay bleeding on the floor of the family barn.
Garrett was eleven years old when his father walked into their small shared home, drunk, and announced that it was time for his son to graduate from practicing with wooden weapons to the real thing. His father pulled him out to the barn and tossed a knife on the ground at his feet. The blade was a small, single sided thing, barely larger than something used to cut meat at the dinner table. “Pick that up and come at me now, like we practiced before.”
Garrett was always terrified when he was around his father to one degree or another but that night in the barn had been a highlight. His father cleared his bowie knife from its sheath cleanly in one lightning quick draw and then waved the fingers of his other hand, come here.
When Garrett hesitated to move his father looked at him and lowered his knife to his side. The man seemed suddenly sober. “We’re just sparring, kid, same as with the wooden sticks. I’m not going to gut you with this thing and I’m not going to let you hurt me with that little pig sticker. Now grow a pair and come at me.”
Garrett followed his father’s command and feigned a charge with the blade before he turned and swung the small knife around in a diagonal arc. The blade almost hit its target, dragging across his father’s pants leg, right along the bottom of his knee where it would make a man lame if it was drawn deep. The false charge was clean and the feint was flawless. The last time Garrett pulled that move his father, sober, had stopped the lesson, astonished at his son’s quick wit. This time he figured the drunken lout must have missed the subtlety, not noticing that Garrett moved his wrist at the last moment to avoid cutting cloth or drawing blood. Only after Garrett had finished the attack and pulled back in readied repose did his father swing low, pulling his blade shallow but drawing a cut across the back of Garrett’s hand.
Garrett hissed in pain and drew away from the fight, clutching the back of his wounded hand. His father followed through, kicking the boy’s feet out from underneath him and bringing his big knife into play, pushing it against Garrett’s throat as he landed on the barn floor.
They rested like that for a few moments before Garrett’s father spoke. His words came out slowly as he fought to speak clearly through the drink. ““Underestimate your opponent at your peril.” The whole thing had been a test from start to finish, one that Garrett had failed the moment he used the same technique twice in row.
The initial price of his miscalculation had been the cut along the back of his hand but Garrett heard his father’s words and learned the valuable lesson that a man should never expect the same attack or response twice. After the incident Garrett learned that lesson once again and for the last time.
Garrett, as a child had to bandage the wound himself and was made to agree to meet his father later in the week for a rematch which he also painfully lost. Garrett had youth on his side and he also had the insight of knowing that his father, as sheriff, didn’t give a fig for his wellbeing, any more than the man cared for the wellbeing of the people he was charged with protecting.
Their last sparring match had been a public affair. It was impromptu and Garrett had been the one who was drunk. That match was the end of an argument that had been building for nearly a decade and the fight was just as quick as the one in the barn seven years earlier. The aftermath spoke volumes for how they would both deal with slights, imagined and true, in the future. When Garrett feigned with his knife, he turned it out and down, this time across the back of his father’s knee, he caught cloth and then flesh. He drug the blade and felt tissue and muscle give way as he levied his strike against that of his father. The same cut meant for the back of his son’s hand seven years before caught only air before the bowie slid down and drug across the hardwood of the saloon floor. Garrett’s only words spoken to his father in haughty anger had been the ones tossed at him seven years before. “Underestimate your opponent at your peril.”
Garrett’s father’s last public exhibition was also his last lesson to his son. Unlike his father’s private lessons, Garrett’s first public spectacle had been seen as gaudy and meaningless in the public eye, one meant to cement his being unfitting for temperament as a lawman.
Garrett’s father slowed the pace of his life after that night, all but retiring from the position of sheriff and claiming a permanent seat at the village’s drinking hall.
The last words Garrett ever heard from his father as he set out on a solo hunting trip the next fall were clean and true to form for the old man. “You and your mother, she could have made better babies, and a lot of them, the wrong one died.”