Bridge of Sighs

beat, in case he was mistaken and Three intended to speak, before punching him again. This time it was his tailbone that hit the pavement first, then, with a sickening sound, the back of his head, after which he lay perfectly still. But for the blood, he might have been taking a nap.
    Now, at last, other boys from the Hill found the courage to come over, the white kids stepping aside to let them into the circle. “Three,” I heard one of them say. “Wake up, Three.” But Gabriel Mock the Third didn’t stir, and one of the Negro girls began screaming, “He’s dead! Y’all killed him!”
    And for a long moment, I think everyone believed her, including Perry, who looked stricken, as if he were about to curl up on the pavement himself. But then Three’s foot twitched, and we saw him blow a blood bubble. “That,” somebody remarked, “is one dumb jig.”
    If anyone had a different benediction to offer, it remained unspoken, and I felt ill when I realized that this was the story that would be told in the corridors of the junior high come Monday morning. Perry Kozlowski’s terrible beating of a boy who’d offered no resistance would not feature in the narrative, whose thrust would be about the stubborn stupidity of a Negro who didn’t know enough to stay seated on the pavement, who’d been given every opportunity to avoid the beating he took, who’d brought the whole thing on himself. The dumbest white boy in the school wouldn’t have been
that
dumb.
    By now a couple of policemen had come out of the station and were trotting over, ordering the crowd to disperse. Jerzy, I noticed, was squatting in the midst of the Negro kids and saying something to Three who still wasn’t stirring. Perry had disappeared. I didn’t notice Karen standing next to the fire escape until she spoke. “Cheer up, Lou,” she said, sounding bored even now. “Could’ve been you, right?”
             
     
    T HE NEXT MORNING, Sunday, I awoke with the vague notion that Uncle Dec had been in the house, that his voice, along with my parents’, had come up through the heat register while I was asleep. Whether he’d been there last night after I fell asleep, or this morning just before I woke up, I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I’d dreamed this. After all, he liked to close the bars on Saturday nights, and it would’ve been out of character for him to be up and about on a Sunday before noon, and more unlikely still for him to pay us a visit when all he had to do was wait for us to show up at Ikey’s.
    Downstairs, there was a note from my mother telling me she’d be back later in the morning. My father was already at the store, getting ready to open. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, wondering sleepily if something had happened but still too groggy to imagine what that something might’ve been. I was staring into the shallow pool of milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl when I heard my mother return, making so much noise I could tell she was angry. In the kitchen she paused at the sight of me, as if I might be the cause.
    “You’re just getting up?” she said, glancing at the clock above the fridge.
    I nodded, not realizing until that moment how late it was.
    “You slept twelve hours,” she said, examining me more closely now. “Did you have a spell?”
    “No,” I told her.
    She nudged my empty cereal bowl. “Are you finished, or do you want to stare at this some more?”
    “I’m finished,” I told her. “What are you mad about?”
    “I’m mad at this stupid town we live in.”
    I was glad it was the town and not me, though as a resident I still felt implicated.
    “I should’ve listened to your grandfather. Stupidity, ignorance and violence. The Thomaston Trifecta, he called it.” And with this she dropped my bowl into the sink where it shattered. “There,” she said, almost pleased, it seemed to me. “Perfect.” She commenced picking the larger shards out of the sink and dropping them into the trash. “That movie you went to yesterday,” she said when she’d finished. “There was a fight afterward. Did you know about that?”
    I was awake now. I acknowledged, warily, that I did.
    “Were you there?” she wanted to know. “Did you see it?”
    I nodded again, confused.
    “That boy’s in a coma,” she said. “He may die.”
    I tried to swallow but couldn’t. Again I saw Three lying on his back, still except for his twitching foot, a blood bubble pulsing at his lips.
    “My
God,
Lou. Didn’t