Bridge of Sighs

can
spit
on me? Is that what you think?”
    The boy just stared at Perry darkly, his arms hanging limp at his sides. He was a skinny kid, much taller than his father but no match for Perry, who shoved him again. Though Three Mock tried hard to keep his balance, he went down anyway and for a moment just sat there examining his gravel-scraped hands. Perry stood over him, fists clenched.
    “Fuck it, Perry,” Jerzy Quinn said. He was standing at the inner ring, with Karen at his elbow, looking bored as usual. “Let it alone. What do
you
care?” But if Perry heard this advice, he gave no sign, and Jerzy seemed disinclined to interfere more forcefully. Everybody knew that he was just one fight away from returning to reform school, which is why the rest of his gang had been delegated so many responsibilities.
    “Tell me why this is happening to you,” Perry told Three Mock. “I know you know.” When the boy tried to rise, Perry planted a big foot on his shoulder and sent him sprawling. “Sit there till you tell me what I want to know.”
    Some distance off, maybe a half-dozen Negro kids clustered together. You could tell they didn’t like what was happening, but they kept their distance. Probably they’d warned Gabriel Mock the Third about his foolishness, but he’d persisted, so now he was alone. Even from where I stood on the fire escape, I could see there were tears in his eyes, but determination as well.
    “You’re doing what I just told you not to do,” Perry said when the boy scuttled backward like a crab and got to his feet again, his arms still at his sides. “You gonna tell me why this is happening to you?” When Three shook his head, you could tell he was preparing himself for another shove, but this time Perry hit him right in the face. The blow surprised everybody, not just Three. It wasn’t only that fights out back of the theater in broad daylight seldom went this far. It was also that the boy who’d been struck neither flinched nor tried to avoid the blow, accepting Perry’s fist as if he’d been receiving punches like this one all his life and understood they couldn’t be avoided. His head snapped back, and he sat down hard on the pavement, his nose gushing an astonishing amount of blood down his white shirtfront. Everyone gasped at the horror of it, and a girl—maybe Nan Beverly—said “Make them stop” to no one in particular, as if she held both boys equally responsible. It was clear that even those who’d crowded in so eagerly had now taken a step back, wanting no more of this. You couldn’t really even call it a fight. It was just one boy punching another. Three Mock might as well have had his hands tied behind his back. I’d not been there to witness Bobby Marconi’s legendary battle with Jerzy Quinn, but I knew it couldn’t have been anything like what I was witnessing now. That fight had been drenched in glory, whereas this one offered only blood.
    Three now sat blinking on the pavement, shaking his head, probably trying to clear it, an effort that sprayed blood left and right, causing another gasp to run through the crowd. The other Negroes began to stir now. The boys seemed to know it was their duty to intervene, but they clearly feared what might happen if they did. The girls whispered to them to do
something,
though no one seemed to know exactly what. They weren’t alone in this. Perry himself didn’t seem to know what to do next. He was still standing over the boy with his fists clenched, but when he spoke again, his tone was different.
    “Tell me why this is happening,” he repeated, but this time there was a plea in his question, as if he desperately needed to know how things had come to such a pass. I recalled what he said in the theater about how people who wanted to mind their own business sometimes just couldn’t. And when Three, still wobbly from the blow, began to struggle to his feet again, I saw Perry steal a glance at Jerzy, who said, “Let it go,” his voice barely audible, and I could tell from the slump of Perry’s shoulders that he’d have liked nothing better. Three was now on his feet again, swaying, his eyes glassy. “You did something wrong,” Perry reminded him, coaching him, really, toward the correct answer that would make further punishment unnecessary. “Tell me what it was and I won’t hit you again.”
    The boy blinked, turned his head away and again spat blood, then turned his fixed, glassy stare back on Perry, who waited a