10 Guts

When I was in junior high and high school my father had warned me never to let myself be sucked into a street fight. Boxing was fine with gloves in a ring and a referee present.

But street fighting was stupid.

"A big man will always whip a little man," my father told me, "in both the ring and the street, and in the street you may never know until it's too late if a man is carrying a knife as an equalizer and is willing to use it."

Late one Friday night at the tavern one door west of Genuine Parts, my father's auto parts store, a local man, probably drunk, had harassed a party of Mexican seasonal workers employed by the local nurseries until one of them had pulled his pruning knife from its sheath on his belt and in one quick motion opened a gaping eight-inch wound in the abdomen of his persecutor.

I overheard as I swept floors at the store the following Saturday morning.

His intestines had all spilled out onto the filthy barroom floor.

The victim had died.

But my father was typically less interested in the racism and the homicide than in what he could learn from the matter that might possibly be of some practical use one day. Dad trusted the revelations of science much more than he trusted the revelations of God. Doctors could have stuffed the guts back in, Dad told two friends in the store, and just sewn the man back up.

"That kind of wound by itself is not fatal," I heard him explain, "and if he had not gone into shock he would still be alive."

If the victim had just had the sense to have kept his wits about him, my dad suggested, he could even have bent down and picked up his intestines himself. Though my father conceded that for any man it would be a terrible shock to see his own intestines slide out of his gut and onto the floor that way, it seemed quite clear to me as I listened that that was what my father believed he would have done.

I did not doubt it.