Act of God

ride,” including “Those with back ailments,” “Pregnant women,” and “Those under influence of narcotics.” A yellow-on-black computer board advertised fireworks sponsored by a cola company. Near it, someone had assembled a “Portable Sport Climbing Wall,” a series of clay-colored slabs stacked vertically with small concavities and convexities for a guy in baggy trunks to scale, tethered to the top by a safety cable. A number of stalls sold saltwater taffy, frozen custard, and fried dough. Even more stalls had games of chance with betting wheels and ringtoss and water pistols as your path to a mountain bike or, more likely, an off-colored stuffed animal.
    The clientele was mostly young, the children squealing in genuine ecstasy, the early teens in baseball caps worn backward using the attractions as an excuse to touch each other here and there, the late teens goofing on the whole scene. Sophistication is a very relative concept.
    However, if you paid attention, you saw some other things, too. An African-American couple in their thirties, joking and walking on either side of a son who might have been twelve but smallish, sunglasses over his eyes despite the darkness and one hand in each of his parents’, his smile if not his sight alternating between them. A Latino kid, muscular but with a blank expression on his face, rap-dancing alone, not bumping into anybody, a Mets cap on his head, the bill turned up like Huntz Hall used to do on the Dead End Kids, moving to the beat of his own internal music. An elderly couple, Italian from the few words I caught, strolling ann-in-arm instead of hand-in-hand, at about the pace they might have gone down the aisle after a ceremony fifty years before.
    Feeling pretty mellow, I sat on a bench with white concrete stanchions and cross planks the same color as the boardwalk. Half the benches looked toward the ocean, but mine faced a bar that seemed to have live music inside and a double line of twenty-two-year-olds outside. They wore mostly shorts and T-shirts, the latter showing their colleges. Rutgers , Drew, Monmouth, Douglass. More than a smatter-mg of New York schools. There was a lot of loud talk and foul words and good-natured jostling. I was about to get up to find a quieter spot when some bad-natured jostling broke I out the door and through the line.
    A blond guy, hair short on top, locks tumbling down his I neck, was pulling a young woman by her brunette hair behind him, another couple about the same age trailing in a hesitating way. The blond guy was the size a major college looks for at tight end, a sleeveless New York Giants blue and red sweatshirt showing arms pumped more for blocking than receiving. The brunette was twisting and yowling a little, saying “Greg... please!... Jesus... you’re... hurt- ing me!”
    The blond guy said, “Fine. Little pain’s fucking good for you.”
    I looked around, hoping for a cop but not seeing any. Given the kid’s size, everybody else, including the couple apparently with him, was backing off before forming a circle in that unconscious, herd-mentality way we instinctively seem to have by fourth grade. That’s when the blond guy stopped and turned. Letting go of her hair, he clouted the brunette on the side of her face with the back of his other hand.
    She cried out, then began just to cry. “Greg... I wasn’t... doing... any -thing.”
    “The fuck do you call smiling at that bartender?”
    There was a little blood dribbling down from the nostril on the side he’d hit her. By the time he’d recocked his hand, I’d joined him and the brunette in the center of the circle.
    He looked at me. Small, meanish eyes. “The fuck do you want?”
    “I want you to knock it off.”
    A smile. Crooked, gapped teeth. “Her head or yours, douchebag?”
    The girl edged toward the other couple. In ascending order, her boyfriend had me by about two inches, twenty years, and forty pounds.
    I said, “Around the time you were learning how to throw up, the Army spent a lot of tax dollars training me to hurt people. Touch her again, and we’ll see if Uncle Sam got his money’s worth.”
    Greg seemed to process that. “So what? That make you some kind of hero?”
    I liked that he didn’t step toward me as he said it. “Doesn’t take a hero to handle you, Greg.”
    He didn’t like my using his first name, but he’d lost the momentum, and as a football player, he could sense it. “Get the fuck out of my face,