and I saw how scared he had been - how scared he still was. Always an out, he knew there was something about him, God knew what, that made a certain type of guy want to pound the living shit out of him. He must have been pretty well convinced it was going to happen again - but this time he wasn't backing down.
The man's eyes shifted to me. 'Another one,' he said, as if marvelling that there could be so many assholes in the world. 'You want me to take you both on? Is that what you want? Believe me, I can do it.'
Yes, I knew the type. Ten years younger and he would have been one of the guys at school who thought it was terribly amusing to slam Arnie's books out of his arms when he was on his way to class or to throw him into the shower with all his clothes on after phys ed. They never change, those guys. They just get older and develop lung cancer from smoking too many Luckies or step out with a brain embolism at fifty-three or so,
'We don't want to take you on,' I said. 'He had a flat tyre, for God's sake! Didn't you ever have a flat?'
'Ralph, I want them out of here!' The porky wife was standing on the porch. Her voice was high and excited. This was better than the Phil Donahue Show. Other neighbours had come out to watch developments, and I thought 'again with great weariness that if someone had not called the cops already, someone soon would,
'I never had a flat and left some old piece of junk sitting in front of someone's house for three hours,' Ralph said loudly. His lips were pulled back and I could see spit shining on his teeth in the light of the setting sun.
'It's been an hour,' I said quietly, 'if that.'
'Don't give me any of your smartmouth, kid,' Ralph said. 'I ain't interested. I ain't like you guys. I work for a living. I come home tired, I ain't got time to argue. I want it out and I want it out now.'
'I've got a spare right in my boot,' I said. 'if we could just put it on - '
'And if you had any common decency - ' Arnie began hotly.
That almost did it. If there was one thing our buddy Ralph wasn't going to have impugned in front of his kids, it was his common decency. He swung on Arnie. I don't know how it would have ended - with Arnie in jail, maybe, his precious car impounded - but somehow I was able to get my own hand up and catch Ralph's hand by the wrist. The two of them coming together made a flat smacking sound in the dusk.
The porky little girl burst into whiny tears.
The porky little boy sat astride his Big Wheel with his lower jaw hanging almost to his chest.
Arnie, who had always scuttered past the smoking area at school like a hunted thing, never even flinched. He actually seemed to want it to happen.
Ralph whirled on me, his eyes bulging with fury.
'All right, you little shit,' he said. 'You first.'
I held onto his hand, straining. 'Come on, man,' I said in a low voice. 'The tyre's in my boot. Give us five minutes to change it and get out of your face. Please.'
Little by little the pressure of holding his hand back slacked off. He glanced at his kids, the little girl snivelling, the little boy wide-eyed, and that seemed to decide him.
'Five minutes,' he agreed. He looked at Arnie. 'You're just goddam lucky I ain't calling the police on you. That thing's uninspected and it ain't got no tags, either.'
I waited for Arnie to say something else inflammatory and send the game into extra innings, but maybe he hadn't forgotten everything he knew about discretion.
'Thank you,' he said. 'I'm sorry if I got hot under the collar.'
Ralph grunted and tucked his shirt back into his pants with savage little jabs. He looked over at his kids again. 'Get in the house!' he roared. 'What you doing out here? You want me to put a bang-shang-a-lang on you?'
Oh God, what an onomatopoeic family, I thought. For Christ's sake don't put a bang-shang-a-lang on them, Pops - they might make poopy-kaka in their pants.
The kids fled to their mother, leaving their Big Wheels behind.
'Five minutes,' he repeated, looking at us balefully. And later tonight, when he