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“GO HOME!”
“Go home!”
“Go home!”
I blinked in the late afternoon sun, processing what I was looking at across the parking lot. Two men shouting at a woman, one of them with something in his hand. The woman shouting back, struggling to retrieve what the man was grasping. Behind her several children, a couple of them wailing. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t even the second cousin twice removed of a fair fight. I let go my shopping cart and started to run.
“Go home!”
“Go home!”
“Go home!”
She was black—I was guessing Somali—wearing a flowing yellow dress and orange head scarf. The older of the two guys was chanting while a younger and skinnier man tugged at the scarf like an old-fashioned vagrant trying to steal laundry off the line. Both of them white. She was no pushover; she was yelling at them as she tried with one hand to keep the garment from being pulled off while shielding her kids with the other. As I ran I looked out at Broad, hoping for a cop, but saw only a steady stream of cars speeding in each direction past a jumble of west-side fast-food restaurants, car lots, and payday loan joints.
“Go home!”
“Go home!”
“Go home!”
“Stop it,” the woman said over the crying of her children. “Stop it!”
“Hey!” I said as I reached them a few moments later. I took a second to catch my breath. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Go home . . .” The older guy said, the chant dying on his lips as he stared at me. He was a hard-living fifty or so, dumpy and balding with patchy grizzle coating his face and chin. He wore loose-fitting tan cargo shorts and a blue checkered button-down short-sleeve shirt with the bottom two buttons undone, exposing a flash of belly as white as butcher-shop lard. The kid with the scarf in his hand was scrawny, midtwenties maybe, in jeans shorts and a white ribbed wifebeater, with a shaved head and a thin face I might have paid more
