December Park(134)

Anger gripped me. I felt a boiling heat rise through the core of my body. I was done running from these *s.

“You want to end this,” I said, “then let’s do it now. Just you and me. Fair fight. With just our fists.”

“I’ll rip you apart,” Keener sneered. Fire still danced in his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “You probably will. But I’ll hurt you, too. You won’t walk away from this without hurting. I promise.”

“We all promise,” Adrian added, touching the tip of his nose.

“Then that’ll be the end of it,” I said.

“Kill him, Nate,” Sallis shouted. His face was stricken, pale, trembling with anger. “Bust his f*cking face in half.”

I pointed at Sallis. “But it’s just me and him. You try to jump in on it, and my friends will cut you up.” I looked at Falconette. “Goes for you, too.”

Falconette’s grin was as hideous a sight as anything I had ever seen. But he didn’t challenge me, and I had gone too far to back down now.

“And what about your friends?” Keener said. “They gonna shiv me in the back while I’m whooping your ass, f*cker?”

“No.” I looked at each of my friends. “No one steps in. No one gets involved.” I held my gaze longest on Scott, who looked ready to rush over to Keener and fillet him with his butterfly knife. “It’s just him and me.”

Their faces were a maelstrom of varying emotions. Yet they all nodded.

“There we go,” I said, turning to Keener.

The rest happened quickly but also in slow motion.

Keener dropped the busted bottle and launched himself at me. He tackled me around the waist, knocking the wind out of my lungs. When I hit the ground, my teeth shook like ball bearings in my skull, and my vision dispersed in patterns of fiery light like the fireworks at Market Square. Straddling me, the son of a bitch struck me repeatedly in the small of my back. Out of instinct I pulled myself into a fetal position, but that only exposed more of my back and spine to Keener’s punches. I bucked my hips and knocked him off me.

I rolled away, my ribs and back aching, my heart thumping fervently in my throat. Just as I scrambled to my feet, Keener charged me again, swinging. I jerked backward and watched a fist roughly the size of a wrecking ball whiz past my face. As his arm then shoulder blurred by, I fired a right hook at the exposed white flesh of Keener’s right cheek. The punch connected, and it felt as though my wrist collapsed like a telescope under the force.

Keener grunted. The momentum of his poorly calculated punch kept him moving forward. I threw a second punch that connected with his right shoulder blade. He whirled around, and in that instant I saw nothing but burning yellow eyes and the gnashing teeth of a bloodthirsty predator. He collided with me, all his furious weight knocking me to the ground again.

In my mind’s eye, I saw my father teaching Charles and me how to defend ourselves in our backyard, the borrowed sparring gear from the police station scattered about the lawn. I saw Charles throw punch after punch, his dark hair glistening with sweat, the smooth muscles of his arms moving with each jab. There was a controlled fluidity to his movements. Then I thought of him blown apart in a foreign country, the bloody tatters of his military uniform and the pieces of his body strewn about like refuse after a storm, and the empty coffin buried next to my mother’s grave on Cemetery Hill . . .

When I returned to real life, I was on top of Keener, thrashing his face in a furious barrage of punches and slaps. At one point I grabbed him by the cheekbones and drove his head down into the mud. Repeatedly. I smashed the front of his face with a fist and heard the sound of his nose breaking. A spume of blood, impossibly red, spurted up into the air and spattered in an arc across his left cheek and my knuckles. Then, in the blink of an eye, all I saw were monochromatic shades of gray—bands of gray blurring into one another and filing by like the image on a television set whose vertical hold needs adjusting.

Someone’s arms looped around my waist. I howled, my eyes blurry with tears, and thrashed back and forth, clawing at the person’s arms that had slid up and were now secured across my heaving chest. As I was dragged off Keener, kicking and shouting, the color gradually seeped back into the world: beneath the sodium lights, I saw the bright red blood on my hands, my shirt, and on Keener’s face as he lifted his head drunkenly off the ground.

“Stop,” someone whispered very close to my ear. The command came over and over and over again, although never changing pitch. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”

I ripped the person’s arms off me and spun around to find Peter standing there. He held up both hands, as if offering proof that he had finally let me go.

Behind him, the rest of my friends remained standing with their knives out, expressions of utter disbelief on their faces. Even Denny Sallis looked upon the scene with incredulity. I turned and saw Eric Falconette leaning against the underpass with his hands in his pockets. There was a black streak of blood on his left cheek, and I had to wipe tears from my eyes to make sure I was actually seeing it.

Keener rolled over onto his side. Blood purled from his nose, soaking his shirt and pants. He took his time coughing and spitting onto the ground. His face was so red it looked as though it had been heated in a kiln. With great care, he propped himself up on his hands and knees and remained in that position while he caught his breath.