“I can see goose pimples,” the passenger said.

I moved two steps to my right, and my feet felt like they were sinking into wet sponge.

The passenger clown glanced quickly down the avenue and back toward me.

The driver looked in the rearview and his hand disappeared from the wheel.

“Patrick?” Phil said. “Let’s go.”

“Patrick,” the passenger clown said slowly, as if he were licking the word. “That’s a nice name. What’s your last name, Patrick?”

Even now, I have no idea why I answered. Total fear, perhaps, a desire to buy time, but even then, I should have known to give a false name, but I didn’t. I had some desperate feeling, I guess, that if they knew my last name, they’d see me as a person, not a victim, and I’d receive mercy.

“Kenzie,” I said.

And the clown gave me a seductive smile, and I heard the door latch unlock like a round ratcheting into a shotgun.

That’s when I threw the baseball.

I don’t recall planning it. I merely took two steps to my right—thick, slow steps as if I were in a dream—and I think initially I was aiming for the clown himself as he started to open his door.

Instead, the ball sailed out of my hand and someone said, “Shit!” and there was a loud popping noise as the ball buried itself in the center of the windshield and the glass fractured and webbed.

Phil screamed, “Help! Help!”

The passenger door swung open and I could see fury in the clown’s face.

I stumbled as I leaped forward and gravity pushed me down Savin Hill Avenue.

“Help!” Phil screamed and then he ran and I was right behind him, my arms still pinwheeling as I tried to keep my balance and the pavement kept jerking toward my face.

A beefy man with a mustache as thick as a brush head stepped out of Bulldog’s bar at the corner of Sydney, and we could hear tires squealing behind us. The beefy man looked angry; he had a sawed-off bat in his hand, and at first I thought he was going to use it on us.

His apron, I remember, bore swaths of meaty red and brown.

“Fuck’s going on?” the man said, and his eyes narrowed at something over my shoulder, and I knew the van was coming for all of us. It was going to jump the curb and mangle us.

I turned my head in order to see my own death, and instead I saw a flash of grimy orange tail lights as the van spun the corner onto Grampian Way and disappeared.

The bar owner knew my father and ten minutes later my old man came into Bulldog’s as Phil and I sat at the bar with our ginger ales and pretended they were whiskeys.

My father wasn’t always mean. He had his good days. And for whatever reason, that day was one of his best. He wasn’t angry we’d stayed out past dinner time, though I’d been beaten for the same offense only a week before. Usually indifferent to my friends, he ruffled Phil’s hair and bought us several more ginger ales and two heaping corned beef sandwiches, and we sat in the bar with him until night had risen up the doorway on our left and the bar had filled.