The Power of One Chapter 24 Summary

  • Peekay keeps up his cocky pace as a grizzly man, staying on the job for nine months with only the one week off he'd taken after his third month. He believes that because he's so smart he is safe from accidents.
  • The insurance man at the mine refuses to cover Peekay, asking him to quit because he's pushing his luck, but Peekay really needs the money to pay his way through Oxford, plus he thinks he's too awesome to fail.
  • However, fail he does. The night before his accident, Peekay dreams of the black mamba. He dreams that he is lighting a fuse and that it turns into the snake, and blows him into pieces.
  • The grizzly men always said that once you start getting the dreams it's time to quit, so Peekay turns in his week's notice the next morning.
  • That night, during his shift, Peekay comes across something so rare that he had only seen it as a side note in his textbook once: a running fuse. This is a fuse that doesn't look like it's lit, but actually is, so it is very dangerous for the person who stands there still trying to light it.
  • As he tries to light the fuse, he has a vision of the black mamba and suddenly knows. He pushes his number one crewman, Elijah, into the safety hole, and narrowly escapes being blown to pieces.
  • Thinking he'd cheated death, Peekay decides to withdraw his notice and tries to break the eleven-month record for grizzly men (a record which ended in death, by the way).
  • He's so happy that he gets right back to work, and when some rocks start to fall down he misjudges the way they bounce and takes one in the stomach. It knocks him down a sixty-foot shaft, where he is then covered in gigantic rocks that come tumbling down after him.
  • Elijah sounds the alarm, and Rasputin is the first one on the scene. He won't let anyone else help him uncover the rocks, sure that they will upset the balance and possibly crush Peekay.
  • Seven hours after the accident Rasputin uncovers Peekay. He has spent the past hours hauling tons of rock with his own bare hands, and dies of exhaustion just as he sees that Peekay is alive.
  • Peekay spends a week in the hospital, recovering from where his skin had been ripped off of him. Miraculously, he hadn't broken a bone.
  • He decides to build a beautiful gravesite for Rasputin using the wooden balls stacked in a pyramid, and gets some of the kids in town, for whom Rasputin used to always buy ice cream at the movie theater, to take care of the grave.
  • The insurance agent announces that Peekay is covered after all, and his payout, along with his bonuses and the insurance benefit from Rasputin, who had named Peekay his beneficiary, are enough to pay for Oxford as well as training session with the famous English coach Dutch Holland.
  • Peekay keeps training so that he can pass his check-out physical and get out of the mining town, and decides to raffle off the last of the bottles of brandy at the bar and use the proceeds to get ice cream for the kids in Rasputin's memory.
  • At the bar he's busy in the backroom making raffle tickets, when the bar tender runs in and tells him that Botha has a powder headache, which makes him crazy. He's after Peekay and wants to kill him because of his temporary insanity.
  • Peekay is sure there must be some mistake, since Botha liked him so much even though they'd never met. But Botha, a gigantic Boer, comes barreling into the room and goes after Peekay.
  • Peekay recognizes the swastika tattoo high up on Botha's arm, and realizes he's dealing with the Judge again after all these years. The fight of his life is happening now.
  • He fights the Judge hard in the barroom for about a half an hour, leaving him in terrible shape. He uses an eight-punch combo to finish him off, and the Judge falls to the floor.
  • All of Peekay's rage over Granpa Chook comes out, and the Judge recognizes him and calls him "Pisskop" again.
  • This time it's a thirteen-punch combo, and the Judge passes out.
  • Peekay loses his head, and grabs Doc's knife. He carves a Union Jack, the English flag, over the swastika and then carves "PK" into the middle of the tattoo. He muddies it up with snot and blood so that it will be sure and get infected to leave a nice scar. Yuck!
  • With that Peekay feels clean, free of hate. He walks out of the bar, and instead of feeling lonely inside feels refreshed. All's well that ends well, we guess.