Right after Dalton tears Jimmy’s throat out, killing him, he spin-kicks the man’s still-standing corpse into the water. It feels like an instinctive maneuver in a way: Dalton is used to barfights in which it behooves one to keep fighting until one is the last man standing, ergo if Jimmy is still standing, one more kick is warranted.

But perhaps another instinct is at work: the instinct to distance himself from the carnage he has wrought, the instinct to hide Jimmy’s grisly visage from his sight, the instinct to seek a means to wash away his sins. Dalton has killed tonight, breaking a taboo learned the hard way during the devastating events of his Memphis sojourn. Best to get the body out of here, get it away, dump it where its deadness can do Dalton no further harm.

Jimmy uses his leg to break a tree; Dalton uses that tree to break his leg. How often can you describe the turning point of a fight in terms so symmetrical they could pass for aphorism? That’s the beauty of this extraordinary fight. It uses its environment, and spacial relationships between the combatants within that environment. To see and hear him, Jimmy looks and sounds like he’s closing in for the hill when he delivers the kick that misses Dalton and separates a branch from the tree between them instead. He seems momentarily surprised, and that moment is just long enough for Dalton to grab Jimmy by the ankle and use the tree trunk as a fulcrum to pulp Jimmy’s lower leg. One could make a point about Dalton being in touch with nature here were one so inclined.

After that the fight is all downhill from Jimmy, until he finally abandons the whole Marquess of Queensbury thing and pulls out a gun. At that point, too, the result will be the opposite of what he’d intended. Some people you can’t stop from signing their own death warrant.

JIMMY: Damn, boy—I thought you were good!

DALTON: Go fuck yourself.

Ah, the rapier wit of Mr. James Dalton. Once again, he responds to a fairly specific taunt from his enemy with whatever generic oath he finds lying around in his battered mind, nearly to the point of non sequitur. He doesn’t defend his martial prowess, he doesn’t malign Jimmy’s in turn—he simply picks a more colorful version of “Go jump in a lake.” (Which indeed Jimmy will soon do, sort of, and fatally at that. Be that as it may.)

But the thing is, why would Dalton keep a complement of insults ready to hand? Recall the Giving of the Rules: Insults are just two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response. What’s he gonna do, call Jimmy a cocksucker? Call his mama a whore? A seasoned fighter would know better than to respond to such meaningless verbiage, so there’s no reason to accumulate it. You are such an asshole, go fuck yourself—these are the comebacks of a man whose mind is taken up with more important matters, both physical and philosophical. Because Jimmy is wrong—Dalton is good, as Jimmy is about to learn to his great misfortune.

Midway through their fight on the beach, Jimmy wallops Dalton in the side with a hunk of…I want to say driftwood? It could be a fallen branch from one of the nearby trees, too. Either way I commend his astute use of innate environmental advantages in his fight. That’s the root of all good fight scenes, as I’ve said for many years now—they distinguish themselves from one another by making use of the physical space around them and the objects that inhabit that space. It’s a bit disappointing that at no point does anyone throw sand in the other person’s eyes to momentarily blind them, but be that as it may. It’s also unclear how Jimmy can muster enough force to break an item hard enough to injure Dalton’s ribs a less than one-foot swing, but we’ll ignore that as well. Jimmy’s presence of mind is what’s on display here. And when Jimmy gets his leg tangled up in a tree, Dalton will pay him back in kind, reversing the fortunes of the fight and leading to his overall victory. Watch the wood.