an old baseball mitt. I can’t be trapped here; I don’t want to hurt him. Please don’t let me hurt anyone again.
“I’m leaving,” I say. “Just get out of my way.”
“What’s the big hurry, Dee-tective?” Tuba Man sneers. “Afraid? Ha! It’s a hell of a lot different when you’re facing a grown man, huh?”
“I’m leaving,” I say. Did that come out as whiny as I think it did?
Tuba Man widens his stance, his face turning from red to purple. Who is this guy? A relative? A cop hater? He tilts his head a little and narrows his eyes to mere slits.
“Look, pal,” I say, my voice shaky. “Don’t write a check your ass can’t cash.”
The big man smiles. “Now that’s some serious false bravado, twitchy boy. Scared ‘cause you ain’t got your gun?” He juts his jaw, giving me a slow up-and-down.
I move to step around him but again he blocks my way. The guy on the laptop grabs his computer and scurries away.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Dee-tective,” Tuba Guy says. “Time to man up.”
If he isn’t going to let me by, then I’m going through him. I’ll—
A giant fist…
The world wobbles, tilts; Tuba Man drops below my field of vision, replaced by the underside of a green table umbrella and a roof overhang. My shoulders strike something, and that thing gives way and I’m falling again, but only for an instant before my back hits cement. A thought zips through my brain that if this were two days ago, I would tuck my chin to save my skull. Of course, two days ago, I wouldn’t have been punched.
My head hits. A flash of white, a flood of red. Blackness…
Struggling through the black, through the silence… trying to move, trying to see.
A moment passes, a second, a minute. I don’t know. I can hear something now. Sounds filtered through thick soup. What the sounds are I don’t know, I can’t…
Clarity now, and in surround sound. Chairs scraping on concrete. Voices. Shouting. A woman’s scream.
“He’s the son-of-a-bitch who killed the little boy.” I think that was the woman with the paperback. Not flirting anymore, I guess.
“That cop who…”
“Fucking cops!”
The darkness turns to gray then to fog. I can see shapes… now clarity, in living HD. Gray concrete under me, table legs next to my head, and over there, several pairs of feet. Anyone want to lend me a hand? Above me a table umbrella. Noise to my left. I turn toward it and see, just inches away from me, heavy legs in blue jeans, brown boots. Doc Martens, I think. One of them rockets toward me. A hair-of-a-second later, I feel a jarring pain in my hip.
I’m still open to getting a helping hand here, folks.
From overhead, Tuba Man’s voice shouts a barrage of curses, sprinkled with “Jimmy.” I see the flash of brown boot and feel another shot of pain in my hip. Better there than in the ribs, I always say. Actually, it’s better not to be kicked at all. Maybe he’s trying for my ribs but he’s a bad shot.
I have to get up… have to get up, have to…
A brown boot stomps my chest.
All goes red, but then a moment later, at least I think it’s a moment, I can see again. That hurt. Hard to breathe.
The impact twisted me around a little, because now I see a different table, this one lying on its side; five or six people stand behind it, one of them the guy with the open laptop. He looks mad. Must have been his table.
Gosh, people, I hope my little boot party isn’t disrupting your latte and biscotti.
The big legs in blue jeans come toward me again. I try to move, try to shield my head, but the command from my brain isn’t getting to my muscles.
I flash to a kickboxing match about fifteen years ago, another time when I lost my brain/body connection for a moment. It wasn’t a good thing then—it was one of my two losses—and it’s not a good thing now. I close my eyes and try to roll into a ball, but again my muscles ignore me.
A woman screams. Chairs slide on cement again. I open my eyes, though wary of catching a boot toe in a socket. The big legs in blue jeans are still there but the boots are pointing away from me.
I move my head a little to see another set of feet in front of the boots, these wearing red converse. Tuba Man is saying something, but my ears are ringing too loudly for me to hear. I get just a hint of another voice, a gentle one, accented.
Ignoring the mad taiko drummer going ape bananas in my skull, I look up, squinting my eyes for clarity. I can see the bottom half of the fat man in blue jeans, his legs spread, arms at his sides, hands fisted. I can’t see the other person, other than the motionless, red converse shoes between the big boots. If it were not for the dark pant legs, I’d swear the red shoes had been neatly arranged there, serenely side-by-side, as if no one were inside them. In contrast, the large, brown Doc martens are scooting, twisting and shuffling.
I want to warn Red Converse Man to look out for Tuba Man’s sucker punch, but my neck muscles give out and the side of my head drops back onto the sidewalk. All I can see now are the motionless red shoes and the restless boots. Then they stop moving. The right boot rolls up on the toe. Is Tuba Man launching another sucker punch?
The red shoes disappear and an instant later, they reappear a couple of feet over. What the hell? One of the shoes disappears and at the same time, I hear a loud grunt, then another and another, like three short, single notes through a tuba. A second later, a fat face thumps onto the cement just inches from mine, its eyes closed.
For a fleeting weird instant, I have a disconnected thought that the white cat that nose-poked my ear last night when I was lying on my garage floor might stop by to nudge the fat man awake. I have to get out of here before it does.
Gotta get out of here… gotta get…
*
Hear birds. Feel warmth. Smell grass.
It’s a peaceful place, wherever I am, and I want to stay here, to bask in the darkness and to avoid the light. Oh man! Gigantic pain in my forehead. Then like the voiceover in an infomercial, “But wait! There’s more. You also get a humongous throb at the back of your head and, if you call right now, we’ll throw in a crushing pain to your chest, ab-so-lutely free.”
The three-for-one price deal opens my eyes, but a searing brightness slams them shut. I examine the red behind my eyelids and mentally check out the pain in my body. It hurts like hell, but it’s manageable. I’ve received worse when I fought full contact… well, not quite worse, but I can handle this. I turn my throbbing head to the side and open my eyes again, just a slit this time. Green. I open them a little more—more green—and then all the way open. Lots of green.
Grass all around, trees, a light-cool breeze, a dog sniffing a bush a few yards away. I look down and see wooden slats. A park bench? I’m lying on a park bench?
“How
