Raylan finds the bar and posts up in the parking lot. The memory hits him, sudden and clear, how he used to wait like this for Arlo, who drank away his afternoons at the Harlan VFW. His palm itches for a ball as he stares at the brickwork, that same old restlessness taking hold. Won’t be long now, and it’ll have somewhere to go.
It’s less than an hour before the man comes out, weaving with drink. When Raylan puts him on the ground, his hat rolls off across the pavement until it hits his truck tire. There, thinks Raylan savagely, almost nonsensically. Raylan takes the butt of his gun to the man’s face. He feels like he did when Boyd lit that match in the mine all those years ago. Like he’s burning up. He loses minutes to it.
When it’s over, the man is wheezing through a broken nose and a busted jaw, blood running down his temple and into his hair. Raylan opens his mouth to check that his airway’s clear, and the man whimpers against his fingers.
“Hurts, huh?” he asks, getting to his feet. He looks down upon the man, who stares up at him through one good eye. “Do you understand, now?” Raylan wonders if he looks older, in the dark. He puts his boot on the man’s neck. “If you ever hurt one of us again, I’ll come back. And I can’t promise our next meeting will be quite this pleasant.”
I’m really proud of this particular scene, so I’m really glad you chose to send this bit! I think there are obvious reasons as to why Raylan is thinking of Arlo in this moment. He’s outside of an establishment serving alcohol, waiting for a violent man: one who specifically targets people he believes to be weaker than himself for reasons they have no control over. Back then, though, the only way Raylan had to get the restlessness out of his hands (and, as it were, attempt to purge and channel his emotions) was by bouncing a baseball futilely off the wall of the building, perhaps imagining it flying straight through the wall and into Arlo’s head, but unable to actually realize that fantasy. Here, he has more recourse, and he takes it.
I think as soon as Tim mentioned the guy’s hat never coming off during the initial assault, Raylan’s complicated emotional reaction coalesced into the following thought: “I’ll make him lose his fucking hat.” This is why the majority of the description in this paragraph is afforded to the fate of the hat rather than the fate of the man. Once the man’s lost his hat, he’s not worth worrying about. The hat, in a sense, basically represents the power imbalance between them; Raylan taking the hat for himself is a symbolic gesture. And, of course, Raylan keeping the hat has broader symbolism outside this single encounter. Because the parallel was drawn between this man and Arlo, Raylan also symbolically wrested this power from his father. In a way, the violence itself is also impersonal. I purposefully refrained from describing any of the effects of Raylan’s actions in this paragraph, instead focusing on the way he felt. He remembers Boyd with the match after the mine collapse because, as touched on in the first chapter, Boyd lit that match in order to take control, in any small way he could, of a situation which they ultimately had no control over: being trapped in the mine. So once again this memory is intended to hint that this moment represents, for Raylan, taking control of a situation that, at least when it played out in his childhood with his father, he had no control over. “He loses minutes to it;” a literal regression of time.
Then, of course, reality reasserts itself, and he comes back to the present, where he’s confronted with the consequences of his actions. He makes sure the man isn’t dead, but not out of any real care for his life; if he’s not alive, he can’t carry this lesson on past this encounter, and ultimately this idea of “being taught a lesson,” so often used as a justification for abuse, is instead being used in retribution for abuse. It’s necessary for this guy to survive in order for Raylan to properly play out the situation (the one he grew up having no control over) in reverse. So, as much as all of this was for Tim, it’s also very much about Raylan and his own demons.
