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By Root 653 0

cried softly in the passenger seat. I sat in the back next to her record player thinking about Kench, how he’d looked so sunken-chested and pathetic in that hallway, his nurse beside him in her robe. I meant what I said; if he came around again, I was going to pound him for doing what he did to my sister. Still, it felt wrong to have just walked into his girlfriend’s trailer like that, to have seen her naked. It also felt familiar, though I’d never done something like that before. Sam’s car rolled in and out of a rut, then he was on asphalt, accelerating, and I knew what it was. It was like punching Steve Lynch in the face, how you have to move through two barriers to do something like that, one inside you and one around him, as if everyone’s body is surrounded by an invisible membrane you have to puncture to get to them. This was different from sex, where if you both want it, the membranes fall away, but with violence you had to break that membrane yourself, and once you learned how to do that, it was easier to keep doing it.

LATER, TWO or three in the morning on a Saturday night, a black SS Chevelle pulled up to our house, its eight-track blaring Blue Oyster Cult and waking up the neighborhood. Up on the third floor, I turned over in my bed, assumed they’d move on. But they didn’t. The driver revved the engine, and I thought, The Murphy brothers. The Lynches. The word now was that they were going to get me when I didn’t see it coming, maybe in days, maybe in months. My heart began to zip through my brain, and at the window I could see their interior light on, a woman in a leather jacket passing a joint to the driver I couldn’t see. I opened my window to yell at them to quiet down, to move on, but they’d never hear over their stereo and anyway this was a street full of homeowners who called the cops all the time, had called them on us: for the afternoon parties, for the motorcycles sometimes parked out front, and one afternoon Mom was home and she came out to greet the cop and the two or three housewives who’d gathered at his car to tell him all about us, this bad element on their street. My mother calmly talked to them, explained these were just teenagers listening to music too loud, that’s all, that she’d make them be more considerate about the volume in the future. After the cruiser was gone and the neighbors were walking away, one of the women—sharp-faced with the short, practical haircut of a woman who spent her days running a household—said to another, “She sounds educated. I’m really surprised. Aren’t you?”

Now the neighbors would think these two in the Chevelle were with us, and I lay in bed waiting for the cops to pull up. But they never came, and the car got quieter anyway, the stereo off while the engine ran and ran, a sound I fell asleep to.

The next morning it was still there, a black muscle car in front of our house like an indictment. It was empty, the driver’s door unlocked, and I opened it and peered inside for the keys. The interior smelled like dope. On the floor of the passenger side were three empty Haffenreffer bottles, and I slammed the door and called Sam and twenty minutes later I was behind the wheel of the Chevelle, Sam backing his Duster up to the rear bumper till the Chevelle nudged forward. I gave Sam the thumbs-up and he gave his Duster the gas. I had jerked the transmission stick down into neutral but the wheel was hard to steer and I could smell the rubber we were burning all the way up Columbia Park on a weekday morning, the sun shining bright on the trees in the median. The plan was just to get the car away from my house, but at the top of Columbia Park we waited for a van to pass by on Lawrence Street, and I could see past the chain-link fence around the reservoir, the sun flashing off Round Pond, and I eyed the rearview mirror and looked at Sam in his Duster, then raised my arm and pointed straight ahead, my neck pulling back as Sam accelerated, the tires of the Chevelle smoking, the air smelling like industry as we crossed Lawrence and headed up the lane beside the water. We passed