‘Hey Wolfe — I can get your dad a paper run if you want. He could use the pocket money, ay.’

Rube smiles.

‘Hey Wolfe, when’s your old man gonna get the dole?’

Rube stares.

‘Hey Wolfe, you might have to leave school and get a job, boy. Y’ family could use the extra money.’

Rube rubs his teeth together.

Then.

It happens.

The one comment that does it:

‘Hey Wolfe, if your family needs the money so bad, your sister should take up whoring. She gets around a bit anyway, I hear …’

Rube.

Rube.

‘Rube!’ I shout, running.

Too late.

Far too late, because Rube has the guy.

His fingers get bloody from the guy’s teeth. His fist hacks through him. Left hand only at first, but it’s over and the guy doesn’t have a chance. Hardly anyone sees it. Hardly anyone knows, but Rube is standing there. Punches fall fast from his shoulder and land on the guy’s face. When they hit him, they pull him apart. They spread him out. His legs buckle. He falls. He hits the concrete.

Rube stands and his eyes tread all over the guy.

I stand next to him.

He speaks.

‘I don’t like this guy very much.’ A sigh. ‘He won’t get back up. Not in a hurry.’ He’s standing in the guy’s eyes, and the last thing he says is, ‘No one calls my sister a prostitute, slut, whore or anything else you please to call it.’ His hair is lifted by the wind, and sun reflects from his face. His tough, scrawny frame is growing good hard flesh by the second, and he smiles. A handful of people have seen what has happened now, and the word is beginning to travel.

More people show up.

‘Who?’ they ask. ‘Ruben Wolfe? But he’s just a —’

A what? I wonder.

‘I didn’t mean to hit him so hard,’ Rube mentions, and he sucks on his knuckles. ‘Or that good.’ I don’t know about him, but I get a flashback of the many fights Rube and I have had in our backyard, with just the one boxing glove each. (You do that when you have only one pair of gloves.)

This time it’s different.

This time it’s real.

‘This time I used both hands,’ Rube smiles, and I know that we’ve been thinking about the same thing. I wonder how it feels to really hit someone — to make that final commitment of putting your bare fist in his face, for real. Not just some brotherly thing you do in the backyard, for fun, with boxing gloves.

At home that night, we ask Sarah what’s been happening.

She says she’s done a few stupid things lately.

We ask her to stop.

She says nothing, but gives us a silent nod.