That Night Read Free Page A

had grown bored with teasing us, scaring us, laughing at us, and had finally moved on to their real fun, to adventures that we, even as observers, couldn’t share.
    None of the boys in those cars was more than nineteen or twenty and yet they obviously, maybe instinctively, knew something about courtship.
    When we finally heard the engines again, that constrained roll and tumble of slow-moving, muffler less motors, we merely sighed, not daring to smile. We turned our backs to them, tossing our heads like hurt girls, snubbed tramps. Mr. Rossi did not leave his television; Mrs. Sayles’s curtain didn’t stir.
    They traveled in the same order: the blue one followed by the green, then the white one with its red devil stripe or a black flourish shaped like a striking snake.
    The first was just at Sheryl’s house when all the engines seemed to explode and the cars, as if the road itself had suddenly leaped and tossed them into the air, were over the curb, one on Sheryl’s lawn, one perpendicular to it, up over the sidewalk, the third at an odd, twisted angle in her driveway.
    My mother grabbed my arm at the sound, pulled me even, as if she would have me run, although both of us were still in our chairs. My father had jumped up, his arms raised, a caricature of rough-and-ready. The other men were already out of their homes.
    The car doors—the ones that faced the house—swung open and the boys slid out. They seemed eerily nonchalant; some even stretched, as if they’d simply stopped for gas in the middle of a long trip. Rick was with them, of course, and he strode unhurried across the lawn and up the three steps. He knocked, not violently, more a polite rattle at the screen door, while his friends stood in loose formation by the cars, looking around and behind themselves as if they planned to stay awhile.
    It was their calm and his, especially his as he stood there at the front door, waiting for someone to come, his shoulders hitched back, his fingers slipped into his rear pockets, that must have kept us all at bay. We had seen him standing there in just that way a hundred times before; we had seen Sheryl come to the door, seen Sheryl’s mother, on countless Saturday nights, greet him and let him in, and even those of us who knew Sheryl was gone, even those who knew why, must have considered the possibility that this was some crude and spectacular rite of hood courtship and that to interfere, to call the police, to run, at this moment, to her mother’s aid, would have been foolish, either terribly childish or terribly middle-aged. Except for the sound of the idling motors, the smell of exhaust, the black strip of torn grass, it seemed harmless enough.
    I don’t know when we would have noticed the chains.
    Rick rattled the door again and then cupped his hand to the side of his face to look inside. I thought I saw, but only faintly, Sheryl’s grandmother appear on the stairs. And then her mother was behind the screen.
    There was some exchange of words. Sheryl’s name must have been heard by the boys scattered around the lawn, by the neighbors standing nearby. Rick suddenly glanced up at the house; his movements for the first time somewhat abrupt, nervous. He said something else through the screen and then quickly grabbed at it, pulling it open. He spoke again, as if the opened door would give him more meaning. We saw him lean inside, his foot on the threshold. His voice grew louder, but his words were still unclear. Then, in one swift movement, he pulled Sheryl’s mother through the door. He was holding her forearm. I remember she wore green Bermuda shorts and pale blue bedroom slippers. He swung her around and off the steps. She fell with her arms out, the dry hedge catching her hips and her legs. I don’t know if she screamed, but at almost the same moment she fell, the front door slammed—the real door this time, not the screen—and Rick began to yell.
    Now the men in the neighborhood were running to their garages,