“What’s in Maine?”
He felt like a boy resisting bullies.
The man stepped toward him. “I said what’s in Maine?”
The man came close enough for Tony to smell the onions with something sweet and liquory, his face level with Tony’s, and though he was thin, Tony knew the man could destroy him. He took a step backward but the man closed the gap. It’s the age difference, Tony said to himself, not adding that he had not been in a fight since he was a boy and never won one then. I live in a different world, he almost said to himself.
He didn’t want to say he had a summer place in Maine.
The man leaned forward, forcing Tony to lean back. He’d better not touch me, he said to himself. The man took hold of Tony’s sweater and pushed a little. “What did you say was in Maine?” he said.
Let go of me, Tony ought to have said. “Let go of me,” he said. He heard his voice frail like a small kid being tortured.
Her voice rang out loud in the night: “Let my Daddy alone!”
“Fuck you baby,” the man said. He let go of Tony’s sweater, laughed, and strolled over to the women. Terrified, trembling, trying to heat his cowardly blood to the required temperature, Tony followed. “What’s in Maine? Your Daddy won’t tell me, so you tell me, okay? What you going to in Maine?”
“What’s it to you?” she said.
“Come on baby, we’re nice guys. We’re fixin your tire. You can tell me, what’s in Maine?”
“Our summer place,” she said. “Okay? Satisfied?”
“Your Daddy thinks he’s better than me. What do you think of that?”
“Well he is,” she said.
“Your Daddy is scared of me. He’s scared I can beat the shit out of him.”
“You’re a lousy little no good,” she said. “You’re a punk, you scum.” Her voice was high and frantic, like a scream.
The man took an angry step toward her. When Laura stepped between he pushed her aside. He put his hands on the girl’s shoulders up against the car and instantly Laura was on him again, hitting him, clawing, pulling at him from behind, until he flung about and pushed so she fell. “Bitch!” he murmured. Somehow Tony must have gotten in there too, with a leap of strength before the man’s arm swung around like a crowbar and knocked him back. His nose felt hit like a crowbar, it stung. The man faced the three of them and snarled: “Watch it, you sons a bitches, you got no call to talk to me like that.”
The men by the tire had stopped their work to watch.
When Tony Hastings saw his wife Laura fall, when he heard her little cry of shock and pain in the private voice he knew so well and saw her in her traveling slacks and dark sweater sitting on the ground and watched her laboriously turn to pull herself to her feet, he thought, bad, a bad thing is happening, like news of the breakout of war. As if in his whole lucky life he had never before known a really bad thing. He remembered thinking, when his cowardly blood exploded in his head, jumping on the man and being flung back by the man’s arm like a crowbar: this is no childhood bully. Real people are being knocked down.
The man looked a grievance at him. “Christ sake, we’re fixin your fuckin tire,” he said. He walked over to the others. They were almost finished, tightening the bolts. “And when we’re done we see the cops about this here accident you caused.”
“We’ll have to find a telephone,” Tony said.
“Yeah? You see any telephones around here?”
“What’s the nearest town ahead?”
The others put on the hubcap. They rolled the bad tire back to the trunk of Tony’s car and stowed it in with the jack.
“What do you want a town for?”
“To report to the police.”
“Right,” the man said. “So how you gonna do that?”
“We’ll drive to the police station.”
“Leave the scene of the accident?”
“What do you want to do, wait until another police car comes by?” He remembered, you already sent one away.
“Daddy,” Helen said, “there’s phones along the road. Emergency phones, I saw them.”
Yes, he remembered.
“They’s out of order,” the man said.
“All they good for is breakdowns and repairs,” the man with the glasses said. The man with the beard was grinning.
“We have to go to Bailey, it’s the only way,” Ray said. “You can’t get cops on them road phones anyway.”
“All right,” Tony said, decisively. “We’ll go to Bailey and report it there.”
“So how do you propose to get there?” the man said.
“In our cars.”
“Yeah? Which car?”
“Both cars.”
“Naw, mister. Don’t try no fuckin business with me.”
“What’s the matter?”
“How do I know you ain’t going to scoot outa here, leave me holding the bucket?”
“You think we would not go to the police?”
“How do I know you wouldn’t?”
“Don’t worry. I mean to report this.”
“You don’t even know where Bailey is.”
“You lead the way, we’ll follow.”
“Hah!” The man laughed. Then he seemed to think a while, looking out into the night woods as if something had occurred to him. He thought some more and seemed for a moment to have forgotten them all, dreaming away about something of his own. He’s crazy, Tony thought, the words sounding like news. Then the man returned. “What’s to keep you from fading away and taking one of them crossways to the other side?”
“You seem pretty good at keeping close to other cars,” Tony said. The man laughed again. “Okay, we’ll go first and you follow. We couldn’t get away from you very well that way.” They were all grinning now as if these were jokes, and even Tony grinned a little.
“Fuck you,” the man said. “You go in my car.”
“What?”
“You go with us.”
“No way.”
“Lou can drive your car. He’s a law abiding citizen. He’ll take good care of it.”
Helen groaned. “No.”
“We can’t do that,” Tony said.
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to leave my car in your hands, for one thing.”
The man pretended to be surprised. “You’re not? What, you think we’re gonna steal it?” Then he said, “Okay. You go in your car, the girl comes with us.”
A cry of alarm from Helen. She went to the car, but the man blocked her way.
“No you don’t,” Tony said.
“Sure you will,” the man said. “You’ll come with us, won’t you honey?” He put his hand on her plaid shirt over her breast, and they struggled a little.
“Tony,” Laura said. She was looking at him, and the man was looking at them both. Then she shouted: “Leave her alone!”
“Stop it,” Tony said, fighting the quaver in his voice.
“She likes it,” the man said.
“I do not!” she said.
“Sure you do honey, you just don’t know.”
“Tony,” Laura said again, quietly. He tightened his muscles, clenched fists, and stepped toward the man, but the man with the beard held him by the arm. He tried to pull loose. The man named Ray noticed and turned to Tony, releasing the girl. She broke away and ran down the road.
“Helen!” Tony called.
“Who’s boss in your family?” Ray said.
None of your business was in his head but he said nothing. He was looking at his daughter running along the shoulder of the highway. “Helen, Helen.” The man named Ray was grinning at him with his oversized teeth in his undersized mouth. About fifty yards away she sat down on a rock just off the edge of the shoulder. He could see she was crying. There was a moment of silence.
With a nod of his head Ray signaled to the others and they went over to his car and had a conference. Tony was aware of the night, of the coolness and the mountain clarity of the stars. Behind him the ground descended into black woods, he could not see into them at all. The opposite lanes were out of sight up the slope on the other side, concealed by trees. When cars went by there they cast a white light in the trees like a ghost in the branches. The men in their conference were gesturing, excited, laughing, and Helen down the road was sitting on the rock with her head in her hands.