I rushed upstairs and asked my grandmother what Jack Buffmeir was doing a headstand in the rag bin for? She looked up from doing her bills. “Getting a stroke,” she said.

A few days later I was sitting out on the back porch drinking chocolate milk and reading comic books with the Marzuki brothers when Jack asked us if we would like a boxing lesson. We demurred, but Jack insisted. Soon Butch Marzuki was standing in the gravel parking lot with a pair of sixteen-ounce pillows on his tiny fists. Jack Buffmeir was wearing the other pair. With a suddenness that verged on cheating he said, “Okay, box!” He was dressed in a glen plaid suit and wore a vest with a watch chain and that pair of two-toned brown-and-white shoes. He danced around Marzuki, cuffing his ears until they turned red. Marzuki, who barely came up to his waist, launched a right, and Buffmeir’s left hand cracked over it and bloodied Marzuki’s nose. Tears followed.

“Defend yourself at all times, boy. You had that one coming,” Buffmeir said, dancing about the lot as he tossed his head side to side, keeping his neck loose. He looked very pleased with his victory, adding, “And quit that sniveling, you big sissy.”

Buffmeir looked at me and said, “You’re next.”

“I ain’t fighting,” I said.

“Why not? Are you scared?”

My grandmother came out to the back porch with a pail of dirty water and a mop. I noticed that Jack’s face flushed with color at the sight of her. “Just teaching the boys the manly art of self-defense, Mag.”

“Leave them be,” she said. “They fight enough as it is.”

“They asked me to show them,” he croaked.

“No, you forced us,” David Marzuki exclaimed.

“Did not.”

“Yes, you did!” Marzuki said.

“Ingrate!” Buffmeir said. “Liar.”

“Am not,” Marzuki said.

Shortly after this episode Jack Buffmeir fell into deep black moods. When they came upon him, he couldn’t even bear the companionship of his dog, Oyster. After the dog killed Jack’s rooster, a mean bird, and most likely Oyster could have claimed self-defense, Buffmeir took after him with a horsewhip. Some of the factory workers from the Durabilt were eating sandwiches on my grandmother’s front porch when he set upon the animal. A dark, muscular man with a cut of plug in his cheek set down his sandwich and snatched the whip out of the man’s hand. “No way to treat an animal. Shame on you.”

Furious, Buffmeir walked though the front door, exited to the back, crossed the parking lot, and went into his shack. The dog was still waiting for him on the front porch late the next morning. My grandmother said, “The dog thinks Jack is in the store.”