Everything Changes

lurches back sharply, ramming Matt’s head into the brick face of the storefront. Then he grabs behind him for Matt’s head, but comes away grasping only the Elton John wig as Matt falls to the floor. “What the fuck?” Satch says, staring in abject horror at the wig and then at Matt’s bald head. The distraction provides me with a momentary opening for a football kick, which, though poorly executed, nevertheless connects solidly with the underside of Satch’s crotch. Satch spins around to face me, but then sinks to his knees in pain, and a second kick to the chest puts him on the ground. And then I’m on top of him, holding his shirt with one hand and pounding his face with the other. And the thing of it is, I can’t seem to stop, even after I feel his nose break on the third or fourth punch, even as I taste the copper salt of his blood flying into my mouth, which is open in an endless, primitive scream, even as the bones in my hand feel like they’re being shattered against his skull and his arms stop coming up in defense. Because somewhere beneath the pain and horror of it all, it feels good, a golden release, the first, greedy lungful of air after emerging desperately from dark, watery depths, and it doesn’t stop feeling like that, even after Matt and Norm pull me off, even as I’m vomiting onto the sidewalk, even as the police show up, sirens blaring, and lead us all, cuffed and panting, to the backseats of the waiting squad cars.

Chapter 24
    Mom and Pete come to pick us up from the precinct in her Honda Civic, and I don’t know if it’s coincidence or the ghost of an old habit, but Norm gets into the front seat, while Matt and I join Pete in the back. And there we are, the family King, on a typical outing, except that the ice packs aren’t for a picnic of luncheon meats and potato salad, but for my throbbing, swollen fist and the purple lump on the side of Matt’s head. A few hours earlier I watched transfixed as a paramedic excavated a fragment of tooth that was buried in the flesh between two of my bloody knuckles, before closing the wound with three stitches and a Band-Aid. Matt’s having a hell of a time keeping on the Elton John wig while icing a contusion the size of a golf ball under it, but the good news is, all charges have been dropped.
    Norm, in typical fashion, jocularly introduced himself to our arresting officer, Jim Sheehan, from the backseat of the squad car as if they were sharing a cab, and in doing so learned that he used to carpool with the officer’s father years ago when he still lived in Riverdale. It turned out that Mr. Sheehan senior had passed away in the last year, and Norm’s fond memories of the man seemed to move his son. After hearing Norm’s version of the events in question, Sheehan left us in an interrogation room and went to have a word with Satch, who was being treated at a nearby emergency room. Two hours later, Sheehan returned, having successfully brokered a compromise wherein Satch would agree not to press charges if we would agree to keep the Mustang and be done with him. I got the feeling, from the way Officer Sheehan explained it, that he’d leaned a bit on Satch in pressing our case. “Not for nothing,” he said to Norm as we left the station, “but he was a real son of a bitch to sell your son that car. He deserves more of a beating than he got.”
    So there we sit, a fractured family temporarily fused in the confines of Lela’s Honda with no idea how to be mended, what shape it is we’re supposed to take, or whether we even want to try. An awkward silence envelops us, so Lela turns on the radio and Pete sings along to Dave Matthews with reckless abandon. I direct my mother back to Johnson Avenue, where I parked Jed’s car. We all stand around for a moment, unsure of who will go with whom and who belongs to whom. Finally, Norm suggests we all go out to dinner, but that’s more than I can bear right now; my innards are still trembling as my mind replays my earlier violence in a continuous, unedited loop. I say I have to get back to the city, and Matt’s got a gig, so Norm decides he’ll follow Lela and Pete home in the Mustang and have dinner with them. First, though, he thanks Matt and me for “having my back” in the altercation with Satch. “What a team!” he declares, swelling with macho pride. “The Fighting Kings!”
    That’s us. The Fighting Kings. What we lack in brawn we make up for in bizarre diversion, the strategically