But before I could, a strange thing happened: Derek pulled up short. The muscles along his handsome face were twitching. “No hitting in the face,” he said, with an uncertain voice. It was a rule peculiarly his own, as if our klutzy ballet were a knightly joust and there were niceties of violence to be observed. But this was warfare to the death and I had him, I knew I had him. My next offering, a roundhouse right, caught him solidly, sickeningly, on an astonished eye, and suddenly everything became tension-clear. For me, at least; for poor old self-infatuated Derek, all became confusion. I hit him again. I think I even connected with his goddamned liver. He clawed at me, all talons, as he fell backward on legs which had suddenly sprung a leak. He slammed into the table and went down with it, flapping his arms like the useless wings of a prehistoric bird. He came up—his rage had overcome his narcissism—swinging the hibachi’s poker. I snared a redwood board from the wreckage. He swung at my head. I parried the blow with the two-by-six as if it were Excalibur. The old wood splintered with a sound of an ape biting into a bamboo stalk. It broke jaggedly in half, but the concussion knocked the poker from his hand. He backpedaled, his jaw hanging slack. A glaze coated his eyes, and then that idiot clown-smile took over again. I was all over him like a second shirt, a swarmer glowing with that rarest of possibilities: a victory for the oppressed. I battered him, grunting as each punch landed, while he in duet uttered a strange strangulated rasp, the song of pain. Still my fists continued to pump. I was elated; never had scholarship afforded such rapture. I couldn’t have stopped hitting him had I wanted to; wiping that awful smile from his bloody face had become an obsession.

He bounced off the fridge and into me. I pushed him away, calibrating the shortest distance to his nose. But before I could unload the cannon I became aware of Valerie’s screaming among the trees. I froze, his legs collapsed, and slowly, still smiling, the boy fell dead.

Not quite. She knelt beside him, her hands fussing. A suddenly activated Abdul helped him to his feet. He wobbled there, heavy-footed, a dreamy kindle in his eyes, as if what he managed to see with his backward stare was no more than a freakish illusion, not to be believed and hardly worth his interest.

She crooned to him softly, unintelligibly, but the meaning was clear enough. He leaned on her, ever so still, his arms like waterlogged sponges hanging over her shoulders, and she clung to him.