“Why would I call you anything?”
“God, you’re stupid. Are you making a play? You want to mix it up? You want to shoot off your mouth? Tell me what it is.”
“I want you to kill me. Then you’ll be on your way to Old Sparky, and my animals and my family will be safe.”
“You’re a nutcase, man.”
“I guess we’ll never be buds. So in that spirit, see how you like this.”
I hooked my fist just below his eye and felt the skin split against the bone. I’m not proud of the rage and violence of which I now knew myself capable. I know he had no expectation of what was happening to him. I know he got up once and tried to run for the bathroom. I know he knocked the phone off a hall table. I remember his taking the shower curtain with him when he went down in the tub. I also remember the horsetails of blood on the wall. He was mewing on his knees and holding both hands to his nose when I left.
I took the stairs down to the first floor and went out the back exit. A black woman was picking stuff out of a garbage can. A rag was tied on her head to keep her hair out of her eyes. “You hurt, suh?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, suh. There ain’t nothing wrong wit’ me.”
“Don’t you have food at home?”
“My welfare got cut off.”
I gave her two dollars from my wallet. Her palm and the underside of her fingers were the gold-brown color of saddle leather. She closed her little hand on the bills and put them into the pocket of her dress. “There’s a police car out yonder. Don’t be going near them with what you got on you.”
“No, ma’am, I won’t. Thank you.”
I got into my heap and drove away. I thought I heard a fire engine screaming, but I could see no emergency vehicles in the vicinity. At the red light, the sound was so loud that I was sure my heap was about to be cut in half. Then the light changed and the world went silent and I drove home like a man who had been struck deaf.
AFTER I BATHED, I rinsed my clothes clean under the faucet and wrung them dry before I hid them at the bottom of the clothes hamper. Then I scrubbed the tub with Ajax. When my father came home, I told him everything.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said.
“I didn’t see any other way out of it, Daddy.”
“That’s an interesting perspective. Can the rest of us do the same thing? ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like that. So I’ll just punch someone in the face.’ Sound reasonable to you?”
“Not when you put it in that context.”
We were in the kitchen. The backyard was in shadow. The cats were sitting on top of the redwood table, and Major was jumping in the air at a mockingbird that kept dive-bombing him from the telephone wire.
“How bad was the Atlas boy hurt?” my father said.
“I didn’t ask. He’s not a boy, either.”
“It doesn’t matter what he is. You shouldn’t have attacked him.”
I gestured out the window. “How about Major and Skippy and Snuggs and Bugs? Who speaks for them?”
He cut his head. “You make a point.” He opened the icebox and looked inside as though a bottle of beer or wine waited on a shelf. As I said, my mother didn’t allow alcohol in the house. If that was what he was looking for, he was out of luck.
“Want to walk over to the icehouse?” I said.
“No, not really.” He sat down at the breakfast table.
“What are we going to do, Daddy?”
His collar was unbuttoned, and there was a V of bright red sunburn on his chest. His fingernails were clipped and pared and clean, every hair on his head in place. “It’s time to make some people do their job.”
“Which people is that?”