That Night Read online

  “She’ll probably call the police,” my mother said, a splinter of annoyance in her voice.

  But the cars passed again: we calculated that they’d just driven around the block; and again, they must have gone to the boulevard and back; and once more: around two blocks, or maybe as far as the grammar school and back. We waited.

  Now night was beginning to show itself, along the hedges, in the bushy center of trees. As we waited for them to return, the interval growing longer and longer, becoming the longest yet, we saw Mr. Rossi turn from his door and go back into his living room. We saw Mr. Carpenter crumple the beer can in his hand, stand and, bringing the can to the garbage, look up and down the street one last time. He too went inside, and Mrs. Sayles turned on a light and drew her curtains. We were beginning to spot lightning bugs. Down the block, the Sunshines (who were sportsminded, it was assumed, because they were childless) practiced a few golf swings with an imaginary club, he standing behind her, her arms inside his, and their cheeks together. The Meyer twins began tossing their small pink ball with a vengeance, aiming at each other’s thighs. One or two cars passed. The streetlights snapped on. My parents began to discuss something else entirely.

  I suppose we all believed that the boys had given up the game; that with the beginning of darkness they had gone on to the highway or to the broader, less peopled territory of the schoolyard or the parking lot outside the bowling alley; that they 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, mufflerless 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, 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 yardbound. 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 schoolbus, 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 t
he 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.”r />
  “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, funhouse 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.