That Night (3 page)

But in those days that followed the fight, all that changed. In the days that followed the fight, our fathers stepped out of their houses and over their property lines. They drew together as only our mothers had done before, meeting each other as if by chance at the curb, the mailbox, the edges of lawns. Some of them still wore squares of gauze taped over their foreheads or pink Band-Aids wrapped tightly around every knuckle of one hand, and when they met they would lift their shirts or raise a pant leg, bending like farmers to examine each other’s wounds. They would reenact in slow, stylized motion the blows they’d given, the blows they had received, adding now the grace that had been missing from the original performance, the witty dialogue, the triumph. They would talk together until nightfall and the mosquitoes drove us all inside.

Now the children stepped back from what until then had been their own territory, stepped back and grew silent as children will do whenever grown-ups join and claim their games.

On the first of these evenings, the men gathered at the foot of our own driveway. My mother and father had been sitting out on the porch.

Diane Rossi and I were on the steps below them, talking listlessly of what we would like to do with the evening, wishing, as we were always wishing, that there were an amusement park with a roller coaster and a funhouse somewhere nearby. When my father went down to the driveway to help Jake turn around, Mr. Carpenter stopped polishing his car and crossed the street to greet him. I heard him ask for my father’s opinion: What did he think would happen to Rick now that the police had him?

My father shook his head. He was still guiding Jake, holding with one hand the curved silver handlebars of his four-wheeler, and he seemed to say something about getting what he deserved. The two men watched the boy list badly as he headed down the sidewalk. Then Mr. Evers crossed his own driveway to join them. He had his hands in his pockets, his pants loose and low on his slim hips. His face was delicately tanned. “A couple of years in the cooler,” he said. He held out his hand and one by one drew in his fingers. “Trespassing,” he said. “Assault. Attempted kidnapping. Maybe breaking and entering.” His good looks added authority to his words, as if he were reading them from a script. The other two men nodded, their eyes on him.

Diane and I had also grown silent. Behind us, my mother had placed her magazine on her lap and turned her head away from the men as if she were contemplating some article she’d read, not eavesdropping.

“He hasn’t got a record,” I heard my father say.

“He does now,” Mr. Carpenter told them.

Jake Sr. approached. He had Daisy, their beagle, pulling furiously on the end of a leash. He smiled when they questioned him. He was a tall, thin man and he reminded me of a cowboy on a restless horse the way he moved back and forth, trying to counterbalance Daisy’s desperate forward motion. “How about five years on a chain gang?” he said. Their laughter was like a shout.

On the night of the fight, while my father and most of the other men were at the hospital or the police station, I had asked my mother what would happen to Sheryl’s boyfriend. Her sigh had surprised me. Just an hour or so before, she had been as shrill with outrage as all the other women, spitting out words like hoodlums and punks. “I don’t know what will happen to him,” she’d said, sadly, perhaps even somewhat wistfully.

Later, I heard my father in the kitchen, telling her, “Just a slap on the wrist.” I may have grinned with relief. I imagined them releasing him. I imagined him searching the country, trying to find her. I imagined him growing closer and closer, zeroing in. I imagined him taking her in his arms.

But early the next morning, when my father in his short summer pajamas limped across the hallway to the bathroom, I saw that his pale legs were covered with red welts and bruises the color of tea stains and I was suddenly ashamed of my disloyalty.

That evening over dinner, he explained to my brother and me that the men in the neighborhood would get a slap on the wrist from the judge because they had taken the law into their own hands, but the hoods would end up in jail.

Jake broke through the men and once more pumped his bicycle up our driveway. This time, Diane and I helped him turn around. Then we followed him down to the sidewalk and the men. Mr. Rossi had joined them, and so after we petted Daisy (who, unaccustomed to being walked, was now lying exhausted on the grass), we each went to our own father’s side.

“To tell the truth,” mine was saying, “I don’t really care what happens to him as long as they stay away from here.”

“They’d better,” Jake Sr. said. He had a piece of masking tape on his thick tortoise-shell glasses and I wondered if they’d been broken in the fight. “They’d just better.”

Mr. Rossi smiled. “Oh, I think they’ll stay away. I think they learned their lesson.”

The men all agreed, stirring a little. I feared the subject would be closed—it was closed, I suppose, but the men seemed reluctant to break up. It was a humid night and they were all in T-shirts or shirt sleeves. They stood with their arms folded across their chests, their hands pressed flat under their arms, or, as Rick had stood, with their fingers tucked into the back pockets of their pants. Their skin gave off a warm metallic odor that I associated then with their belt buckles, with the dog tags or Saint Christopher medals they wore around their necks.

“Well, I don’t know how we didn’t see it coming,” Mr. Carpenter said suddenly. He glanced at the others. “With that crowd she ran with.”

Again the men stirred with a kind of agreement.

“Saw what coming?” Mr. Rossi said.

I felt my father glance at me. “Her getting herself into that situation,” he said softly. He looked at Mr. Carpenter. “Right?”

Mr. Carpenter nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That and the fact that a crowd like that isn’t going to let one of their girls just go away.”

The men moved again. I had the feeling they were nodding with their whole bodies.

Mr. Carpenter ran a hand over his short red hair. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we should have seen it coming. We should have said something to her mother.”

“If she had her father,” Jake Sr. said, and Mr. Rossi interrupted him.

“If she had her father,” he told them, “none of this would have happened. You think those punks would have come to the house if there’d been a man there?” He laughed, as if at the foolishness of anyone who would believe such a thing. He was a short, dark man with a flat head, bound for the death of his only son and a middle age spent in sideburns and bell bottoms. “She had her father,” he said, “he would have stopped it long before it started.”

The men moved again to show they agreed. I tried to remember Sheryl’s father. A thin blond man with high color. Balding. He, too, had been somewhat housebound. I remembered him getting out of his car and getting into it. He had had a heart attack one morning as he drove his car to work.

Mr. Evers said, “I don’t know.” He might have been speaking to himself, but the other men leaned forward to listen. “She always seemed like a nice kid.” He turned to Mr. Rossi. “Your daughter starts dating a punk, what are you going to do? Lock her in her room?”

We all looked at Diane, who seemed a little frightened and yet pleased by the question, as if it were proof that Mr. Evers had designs on her. I tried to imagine her pigtails gone, her short bangs grown down into her eyes, her hair teased into a lump at the back of her head. I pictured her with some teenager’s leather arm hung heavily over her shoulder.

Mr. Rossi put his arm around her. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. If I have to.”

“She was pretty,” Jake Sr. said suddenly, indicating Sheryl’s house with a nod. “Wasn’t she?”

The men seemed to consider this. They might have been recalling someone already long gone. And then, one by one, they began to agree. “Oh yeah,” they said. “She was a pretty girl.” “Sure.” They looked toward Sheryl’s house, where her mother and grandmother were already packing. Packing their clothes and consoling themselves with the news that the girl had been found in time and so would live: a miracle, of sorts.

“Cute,” Mr. Evers said.

I suddenly felt Mr. Carpenter’s great hand on my head. He gripped my skull, palming it like a basketball. “Cute as these two gals?” he asked. All the men smiled. There was something proprietary about their looks, as there was about Mr. Carpenter’s touch. As if having claimed the sidewalks and the streets, they were now ready to claim the children who used them.

“Just as cute,” Mr. Evers said. Jake Sr. smiled. “Sure.”

“Well, then.” Mr. Carpenter moved my head back and forth. “We’d better get sharp.” He slid his hand down the back of my hair and lightly held my neck between his thumb and forefinger. He had a small daughter of his own who even in adulthood would be known as Little Alice, as if she were a gnome. “We’re going to be throwing boys off our lawns for years to come.”

“Spare me!” my father cried, grinning.

Mr. Rossi laughed. “We’d better start studying jujitsu.”

“Or get a shotgun,” Jake Sr. shouted.

As if sensing their enthusiasm, Daisy suddenly stood.

Diane and I looked at one another, both frightened and pleased. What were roller coasters and colored lights, fun house mirrors and barrels, compared to the nights we would soon experience, suspended over the furious battles of our fathers and our boys?

“I’d kill them,” Mr. Rossi was saying. “I’m not kidding.”

He stepped forward to jab a finger into the center of the circle. “And it would be justifiable homicide, too!”

Mr. Carpenter raised his hand from my neck to say, “I’d make them a present of their balls.”

“That’s what they deserve,” my father said.

Jake Sr. added, “Punks.”

My mother called to me and Diane from the porch. Reluctantly, we went to her. “Why don’t you stay here and let the men talk?” she whispered. We whined a little, but she insisted and we sat again on the steps. My mother’s call had reminded the men to lower their voices and they were speaking softly now, but not so softly that we couldn’t hear our names being mentioned, and the names of the other daughters on the block; not so softly that we couldn’t hear what they would do to them, those hoodlum boys, how they would protect us.

Our fathers. They were still dark-haired then, and handsome. Their bruised arms were still strong under their rolled shirt sleeves, their chests still broad under their T-shirts. They had fought wars and come home to love their wives and sire their children; they had laid out fifteen thousand dollars to shelter them. They had grown housebound and too cautious, as shy as infants, but now, heady with the taste of their own blood, with the new expansion of their territory, the recalled camaraderie of men joined in battle, they were ready to take up this new challenge, were ready to save us, their daughters, from the part of love that was painful and tragic and violent, from all that we had already, even then, set our hearts on.

They were wrong about Sheryl, of course. She had not been very pretty. And as time passed, they became even more wrong about her. They said she had been beautiful.

They said, when trying to praise another girl’s looks, “She is as pretty as that Sheryl was,” her name giving the praise an edge of sadness and ill fate, so the listener would often reply, “Let’s hope she turns out better,” so we all could come to recognize the fine, dangerous line that only pretty girls must walk. Even just recently, while watching the Miss America pageant in the white- and coral-colored living room of her Florida condo, my mother had said of her favorite contestant, “You know who she reminds me of? She reminds me of Sheryl.” It wasn’t true, but I long ago had stopped trying to push back the tide of her praise.

She was skinny, not very tall, with thin taffy-colored hair and light brown eyes. Her front teeth overlapped each other like dealt cards and protruded just enough to change her lip when she held her mouth closed. Her mouth was small and seemed to hang a little too low in her round flat face. She wore pancake makeup and black eyeliner that itself was sometimes lined with white. She dressed as all the girls who went with hoods had dressed. To school, she wore tight skirts and thin, usually sleeveless sweaters made of some material like Banlon or rayon and meant to show off both her bra straps and her small breasts. She wore bangle bracelets and, later, Rick’s silver ID bracelet and a delicate gold “slave chain” on her ankle, under her stocking. She favored thin, transparent Woolworth scarves in bright red or pale blue and black pocketbooks shaped like small shopping bags. After school and on weekends, she traded her skirt for beige or black Wranglers that she had tapered along the inseams so she would have to lie down on her bed in order to zip the fly. She kept a teasing comb in her back pocket, the two turquoise spikes of its handle pointing toward her shoulder blade.

I remember my mother and some of the other women saying how she had trembled as if she would convulse throughout her father’s funeral. How on the morning he died she’d been driven home from school by the principal himself. Most of the women were out on the sidewalk by then, drawn first by the sight of the police car at the curb and then by the news of what had happened. They saw her paw wildly at the car door before the principal had even managed to come to a complete stop and heard her call to her father, who was by then a good couple of hours dead, as she ran across the lawn and into the house.

She was the first female child on our block to enter adolescence, but until the night of the fight, I don’t remember anyone taking notice of the fact. During the summer before, her fifteenth summer, when the sight of her might ordinarily have startled and touched the men, made the mothers wary and filled us young girls with envy and awe, Sheryl was marked by a different distinction. I would see her carrying her books and her pale blue looseleaf binder home from school, see her boarding the bus for the shopping mall, coming to the door when Rick picked her up for a date and kissing him good night when he dropped her off, and think not that these were freedoms and pleasures soon to be my own, but only that these were all things she did despite the knowledge that she would never see her father again.