Slide - Kyle Beachy [113]
I had wronged this man terribly. One minute my face pressed to the wife's chest, her fingers tearing into my back. Then she was above me and I was reaching up to her face. I remembered the bat and looked down at my hands, pale skin flapping over raw patches of blood. The mistake was approaching Ian without any of society's established blessings. The boy and his alien world I couldn't hope to understand; sympathy versus empathy. I lifted off my helmet and leaned the bat against the fence. Anything I'd done to Ian I had also done to his father. But I was not a pervert, as far as I knew. I wanted to say something, tell him about purity of intention, innocence, and a desire to help. I lifted the latch and stepped out of the cage.
“I never touched your son. Or hurt him on purpose. And there's something else I should say, regarding your wife. I shouldn't have slept with her. It's just. It's all very.”
The first blow was a sweeping right haymaker that caught me just below my eye. I stumbled, then hovered for a moment while the jolty echo knocked around my skull. Lost balance and fell forward to my hands and knees. Then the sidewalk, which I was relying on for support in this dire moment of need, shot a slab of concrete up into my chest, spinning me onto my back. Like nothing I'd felt. Kick. It was a kick. Then he was standing over me, rocking back and forth as he leveled more kicks into my ribs and abdomen.
My left eye closed of its own accord. Halfway there. T Worpley stood over me like an actual giant, fairy-tale notion, the boy's mythical father. And perhaps this was all the proof I needed. He stopped kicking and I saw his boots move a few steps away. He stopped. I thought to stand up, but this was impossible. I heard a long series of heavy breaths. When I saw him step back toward me I thought to try harder, then thought to play dead, then thought of the time Audrey and I went to the zoo, how she hated the zoo but I dragged her along because, I tried desperately to explain, it was while watching monkeys cavort that I best understood mankind.
He knelt over me and pummeled downward, so now gravity was in on the act as well. Each punch gathered steam in those terrific, round shoulders, then spread in compact, economic motions to his arms and fists. He punched my chest and stomach and I tried to roll and lift and he punched my face and now I was all the way on the ground now, for good.
He ran a jackhammer, this man, and not one of those pussy forty-five-pounders. City would be in trouble without him, as my father had said to Ian. He was talking through clenched lips, and if I concentrated very hard I could almost make out his words, the passwords and whatever he could have taught me.
Each impact made for a cluster of floating candles out on the borders of the world. This was probably for the best. Get me off the streets. I smiled into his fist. Dancing candles floated out there but not as far anymore. I heard a terrific crack, and the candles got too close.
labor day
when our progress slowed enough to see and understand the faces around us, we knew we had become part of the thing. A winding line like a pilgrimage of deep conviction, our procession to the New West County Mall. The traffic was everything the media had predicted, but also good-natured, in a sense; a self-selecting club of we who had been duly warned and had come anyway. Eventually we made it off the highway and found police in white gloves playing conductors, the new traffic lights not yet fully operational. They pointed and waved and chirped whistles. I felt pain in my cheeks, the bruises, which meant I was smiling. I turned to see Audrey in the passenger seat next to me, smiling back.
“I feel like you always kind of wanted a broken nose,” she said.
“I kind of did. You're right.”
She was wearing jeans I recognized and a shirt with tiny sleeves that left her arms bare. She was tanned a deep olive, her face freckled astronomically. Pretty Audrey come to visit her college boyfriend.
Nine days since waking, I still felt some residual, lingering