“Which do you think?” he answered, the edges of his eyes creasing.
She squinted and held the picture closer to her face, then half-smiled as if figuring out some small puzzle.
“You were very beautiful,” she said.
There was a squeal of tires and a roar of gears shifting too quickly. Everyone looked in the direction of the incoming din.
“You should go,” Moonface said, standing up and grabbing his clothes.
Nicole didn’t say anything, only put the photo down. Headlights raised into view.
“No,” she finally said.
“Stay inside. They will see you,” Moonface said slowly, briefly eyeing the window.
“I don’t care. That’s all they do. They just see me,” she told him offhand, walking toward the pile of her uniform.
I motioned back toward the woods to John, but he shook his head.
“Are you crazy?” he whispered, still trained on Nicole’s body.
A pair of beat-up, jangling cars rushed toward the house, their doors opening before they fully parked. Four men leaped out of the vehicles, a couple of them clutching bats. A roughed-up man near the front cocked a pistol.
“Cohen, you kike, get your ugly ass out here!” he shouted.
A couple lights turned on in neighboring houses. Moonface looked at Nicole one more time, his eyes crinkling again as she slipped on her skirt, and he walked outside. I tugged at John’s shoulder and dragged him into the woods, and we huddled behind a tree trunk.
“Shalom,” Moonface said, exiting his home.
“Where is she?” Richmond demanded.
“Inside,” Moonface said.
A small breeze passed through the trees, around us, through the village. Richmond swayed slightly, as if he were only a pine sapling.
“What’s she doing in there?” Richmond said.
“Celebrating our win,” Moonface said. “Go team.”
“Fuck you,” Richmond spat, advancing toward him. The group followed, and I saw John’s stepfather was among the posse. I couldn’t bring myself to look to John next to me.
I realized I still held the near-empty mason jar. Years later I am unsure of my logic, I hope that it was for the right reason, although a part of my mind croaks otherwise, but I threw the glass through the woods at the window. It crashed through the pane, knocking over the two candles nearby, and rolled out of sight. John patted me on the shoulder like I accomplished something heroic, but there was something distant in his gaze, as if he had seen into me, farther into myself than I could see on my own, and it worried him.
The men out front jumped at the noise. Nicole peered through the window into the woods, directly toward us, but we were in the forest, and the sky didn’t shine on us, so we were hidden. Moonface took the distraction to swing at Richmond, connecting with his jaw and causing him to drop his pistol while, behind them, a trace of smoke twirled out the window near the curtains. Nicole glanced to her side and withdrew from the window, and I never saw her again.
A couple of the men went at Moonface with their bats, and he was able to dodge the first few swings. The fire inside his house fanned across the room, up the drapes, accelerated by the liquor-soaked carpets. Moonface heard the roar and whipped around. John’s stepdad saw it as an opportunity to bring his bat across his back. It made a sound like striking a mattress, and Moonface groaned as he fell to one knee.
“Nicole!” her father shouted.
Moonface managed to roll over, and kicked John’s stepfather in the shins. He let out a yelp and fell backward as Moonface scrambled up toward the flames that seeped out the front door. Richmond felt around in the dirt like he’d lost a pair of glasses while the other men stepped backward slowly.
Two things happened near simultaneously; John and I still disagree on the exact order. He remembers Richmond finding his pistol and shooting Moonface in the back, causing him to spin around and tumble into the burning trailer. But I know what I saw — you don’t misremember when a moment burrows into your memory, they’re always there to recall as they were preserved:
Richmond shot and missed, the bullet hitting the doorframe. Moonface did spin around, but only to look at Richmond one final time. The sides of his eyes furrowed as in his photograph, and he leaped inside.
I heard the distant cry of sirens while the neighboring families started racing toward the giant fire, although it was clear there was nothing else to be done. Richmond steadied himself on the hood of his car, repeating his daughter’s name to no one. I remembered the remaining jars of moonshine in the kitchen, and was about to grab John when he beat me to it.
“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” he said.
I nodded, and we raced through the trees back toward our homes. A few seconds later, I heard a great roar from the fire and, for a moment, our path shone brightly ahead of us before darkening again to a dull glow.
The next morning, I hid the menorah under the cinder-block risers of my house and feigned ignorance of the previous night’s tragedy.
“That poor girl,” my mother said after getting off the phone with her gossiping friends. “She was so pretty. It must have been terrible trapped in there with that monster of a man.”
The story warped even more within the week, in part due to John’s near-constant retelling of his account to our classmates, and soon, Richmond was fleshed out for the story. Richmond the brave, doting father, who tried to save his rebellious daughter from the leering, deformed cafeteria worker from foreign lands. He defended her honor at the homecoming football game, and Moonface — the name caught on — then kidnapped her at gunpoint, forcing her to drive them to his lair in a final, desperate attempt to have her. The two foes grappled outside the house, Richmond wrestling the gun from Moonface’s hands and mortally wounding him before the creature fled into the house. He then torched the place from the inside. If he couldn’t have her, then no one could. We were nowhere to be found in the story.
To solidify the legend, it was rumored that the emergency crews couldn’t find any trace of bodies in the smoldering wreckage, as if Moonface and Nicole burnt away in the heat completely. Years later, when I finally could bring myself to investigate this bit of the story, I found information scarce, records lost, graves forgotten, and I couldn’t confirm or deny this addition to Moonface’s legacy.
I’m much older now, I’ve more or less kicked drinking, and I love a woman who loves me in kind, despite this story, the true one, which I have also told her. She is not as beautiful as Nicole, she quit school the same year I did, never cheered for a game in her life, but she is full of wonder, and that’s almost the same. On many days, that’s even better.
I am nothing like Moonface, but I wish I was. There is very little light from the night sky where we live now, it’s all washed away in the muddy glow of the nearby city. Sometimes, while we make love to each other in the dark, I look down at my body to find it lit in patches from streetlamps through our window blinds. I imagine these illuminations are scars from my youth, from the things I am powerless to understand. I look at the menorah resting on my bookshelf while I imagine myself Moonface, and my hurt is not hidden like those around me. I never have to explain the past to anyone ever again. Everyone will see it etched into my skin, but they won’t realize what it’s doing to them until it’s done.
God’s Gonna Trouble the Water
by Dominiqua Dickey
Grenada
I