Meyerson sounded his horn and then growled the siren. Oblivious to anything but the single enemy, they stood and fought. There was no art to their fighting. They simply punched one another as hard as they were able. There was no telling how long the fight had been in progress. The white boy’s left eye was closed. The black boy was bleeding from the nose and he was sobbing nervously.

Meyerson sighed. “We’ll have to break the stupid bastards up or move the car,” he said. The three of them got out of the ambulance.

“Don’t get clobbered,” Meyerson warned.

“Let’s take them now,” Adam said as the boys went into a clinch and grappled.

It was surprisingly easy. They put up only ego-soothing resistance, each undoubtedly relieved the ordeal was over. Spurgeon had grabbed the white boy’s arms from behind. “Is that your car?” he asked.

The boy shook his head. “His,” he said, indicating the other combatant. For the first time Spurgeon noticed that Adam was holding the colored boy’s arms while Meyerson’s large pale hands, clenched in kinky black hair like Dorothy’s, forced his head back.

“That isn’t necessary,” he said sharply. The white boy whimpered. Glancing down, he saw his own familiar black fingers digging into freckled flesh. Amazed, he opened them and the boy walked away like a freed animal, stiff with false nonchalance.

The black boy gunned his twin carburetors in defiance as they got back into the ambulance.

He felt again like the old man weeping on the bench.

“We chose sides,” he said to Adam.

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t leap fast enough to handle the white punk and both of you brave ofays roughed the colored kid.”

“Don’t be a paranoid asshole,” Adam snapped.

On the way back to the hospital the wounded man occasionally groaned, but none of the occupants of the ambulance spoke to one another.

In Emergency there were three cops who had been struck by thrown rocks, but otherwise still no sign of the predicted onslaught. Their ambulance was sent back to Roxbury to pick up a carpenter who had sliced his hand on an automatic saw while cutting boards to nail over store windows. Then they were dispatched to bring in a man who had suffered a coronary outside North Station. At 9:20 they went out again, to get somebody who reportedly had injured his back in a fall from a ladder while painting his apartment ceiling.

The next call was at a city housing project in the South End. Waiting for them near the large, splashing pool was a boy, about the same age as the street-fighters but very skinny and wearing a dirty white Nehru jacket.

“Right this way, gen’men,” he said, moving into the darkness. “I’ll take you up to him. Look like he’s really hurt.”

“Shall we take the litter?” Spurgeon asked.