That Night Read Free Page B

calling to one another with what I remember only as sounds, sounds with lots of go’s and ca’s. “C’mon,” I suppose they said. “Let’s go.” My father answered in kind, barking one syllable from our porch and then rushing past us. My mother, who still had a death grip on my arm, said, “Go call the police.”
    Rick had kicked the door and then run down the steps, yelling for Sheryl. He sidestepped across the lawn, looking up to the bedroom windows, to the one spinning fan. Her mother cried, “She’s not here,” and he looked down at her, made as if to kick her, and then, spinning around, called again. He was bouncing now, almost jiggling. He moved backward across the lawn, looking up at her house, yelling for her. You could hear the men running in the street. You could hear the boys gathering up their chains.
    Rick bent as if he might fall, danced a little and then drove his fists into his thighs. His cry rose above the idling engines, the footsteps, the hum of backyard filters and window fans, the hard sounds that passed between the running men. For just one second before the fighting began, it was the only sound to be heard.
    While we, the children, roamed through our neighborhood like confident landlords, while we strolled easily over any lawn, hopped into any yard, crossed driveways and straddled fences as if all we surveyed were our own (looking shocked and indignant when someone suggested otherwise, or simply smiling ruefully, dismissing some adult’s demand to stay off the grass as we would any bad idea), while our mothers knew the kitchens and dining rooms and side doors of any number of our neighbors and could chat as casually on a street corner as in a breakfast nook, our fathers, until that night, were housebound and yard bound Once their cars had delivered them home each evening, they might be seen puttering on the lawn or taking the garbage to the curb or sitting on their porches, but until that night, the night of the fight, the sidewalks for them might have been like those two closet-sized bedrooms in each of our homes, might have been meant for children only, meant only as a place to line up for the school bus to push a doll carriage, to ride a bike until you had grown coordinated enough to ride in the road. Seen out upon them, usually late at night and usually with a dog, our fathers seemed huge and foolish, like fullbacks on tricycles. They smoked cigarettes, hunched their shoulders, hugged the curb. They walked quickly and quickly returned to touch home.
    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