“What are you doing? What are you doing?”
“Uh . . . smashing the hell out of this place, why do you ask?” This from Trent, exercising his wit. He tapped the baseball bat against the palm of his free hand. He made no effort to run although Pete looked much less confident.
“Come on, man, let’s get out of here,” Pete said. He grabbed Trent’s arm, but Trent shook him off.
“What are you going to do, old man?” Trent demanded.
“I am calling the police!”
The man pulled out a phone. Trent swung the bat and knocked the phone from his hand. As the man bent to retrieve it, Trent smashed the end of the bat down on the phone, shattering it.
“What are you doing, you crazy boy?” The man had an accent, not one I could identify, but it grew more apparent as he grew more agitated and afraid. “Go away! Go away from here!”
Trent grinned, a dangerous look for him. “Who do you think you’re talking to, rag-head? Huh? I’m an American. I live here. I’m from here. I was born here, where the hell are you even from? Iraq? Gabbagabbafreakistan?”
“I am from Afghanistan, I live here five years since—”
“So shut up! You’re probably a terrorist. You going to blow yourself up? You got a bomb in your pocket, old man?”
When the man refused to answer Trent shoved the end of the bat in his chest. The man stumbled back. Trent hit him again and this time the man turned to run.
“Get him!” Trent yelled to Pete. But Pete was backing away, holding up his hands and saying, “No man, no man, we need to get out of here, dude.”
So Trent went racing after the fleeing man. They disappeared from view in the dark, then, a yell, and a solid, sickening thunk!
The man screamed. “Stop! Stop! You’re hurting me!”
Trent was yelling obscenities, grunting as he swung the bat again and again. The sounds of blunt force on flesh and bone were mixed with the hollow metal sound of misses where Trent hit pavement.
The man cried out for help but no lights snapped on in the windows of the neighborhood.
Finally the man fell silent.
Pete, obviously shaken, advanced into the darkness and we followed. Trent stood panting and cursing over the prostrate body. He noticed Pete and gave him a sickly, teeth-baring grin.
“Showed him,” Trent said. “That’s one camel-jockey who won’t be talking back to a white man again. Yeah.” He kicked the downed man.
“Oh, man, you have messed up bad,” Pete said. “Oh, man, oh, man.” He was hugging himself with anxiety, glancing all around, jumpy as a squirrel.
Far off a siren wailed.
Finally Pete took Trent by the arm and drew him away, leaving Messenger and me to stare down at the form of the battered man. He was
still breathing, a fact for which I was grateful. Breathing but bleeding. His face was covered with blood. His hair was matted with blood. His breathing was choked by blood.
“His name is Abdullah Sohal,” Messenger said. Then, in an aside to me, “Have you seen enough of this?”
“I guess we cannot help him,” I said.
“He will survive. As you will see.”
And just like that we were gone from that place and that time and were suddenly in a hospital room, looking at the same man we’d just seen being beaten. The sun was shining through the hospital window. Abdullah Sohal was having his bandages replaced by a male nurse who was attempting to make stilted, awkward conversation.
“If you have any pain, you have to tell me or one of the other nurses, you understand that, right?”
Abdullah Sohal was swaddled in bandages. There was an IV line in his arm and a thing on his finger to measure oxygen passing through his blood. His left arm was in a webbing cast. The fingers extending from that cast were clean but bruised. As the nurse peeled old gauze away from his face I saw a single mass of bruising. His face was swollen, his lip split open, teeth missing.
“Yes, I will tell you if the pain is greater.”