“Don’t looook,” Dad’s voice smears. But I am through our kitchen and clear into the shadowed living room. I’ve run five paces past already seeing them, joined. My elbows out, I slide to a car-brake-screeching halt.

•  •  •

My mother, so pale and beautiful, is so beneath him. The couch’s many printed roses look cactus-sized, thirstier, as smothered as my Mom. The man’s back is tanned and stretches longer than three of me. His bare bottom is vanilla, rocking like Mom’s foot-treadle Singer. But somehow into Mom, a derrick over/into over/into her. Her fists hold hair behind his ears, hair gold as coins of my play money. White summer pants bunch around his ankle planted on our rug.

Though he twists and sees this woman’s eight-year-old standing right beside the couch, the man’s lower back sneaks continually on, letting Momma have it, blam, there, blam, there. Letting her have what? I’d like to know.

I cannot figure how I understand what I am partly seeing. I simply know he’s giving Mom a major one of those. Pinned under such thudding, her knees have risen not that far from Mom’s own ears. She now turns slow, notices me whole here, screams, “Can’t beee!”

“What say, pal?” Doc’s tone comes casual. Bugs Bunny. He talks right over at me. He’s naked so happily. Dead level with my frown, he crunches one dry wink my way. “Wha’s up?”

My chest quaking, I point to him, “Bad bad baaad man!”

Then, for reasons past anything merely sayable, I jump onto a fellow facedown in Mom.

I have mounted him like that bucking dime-horse downtown. I am riding the long spine of the veterinarian, who seems someway out of, then too IN my mom. Out of, in. Out in. In in. Innie.

“Baby,” she speaks through him to me, “your weight’s too much, it’s hurting me.”

“My weight? MY dern weight?!”

These fists of mine are really slamming hard the back of a man so accustomed to being caught, that he is finishing. He is going to. I feel a tally mounting in him and now sledding quite unstoppable downhill.

I understand this payoff without knowing what it means or where it goes or how it feels to them. I’ll just keep trying stopping him. I cling around his tree-ringed neck. I yank his yellow hair way back, I scratch under one braced arm. A dark sliding voice says, “Bite that ear, you’re dead, you little mongrel bastard….” I am kicking his bare butt so. “Go away from off my Mom, Mister. Go on off from us, get … off of her, you … HURT-ER!”