Savage by Nathaniel G. Moore Page B

were huddled in their best late-morning wear.
    I dropped out of sense, out of sync from it all, and began shouting with ribbons of tears streaming from my hot face.
    "Call the police; he’s insane! He’s going to kill her!"
    I watched my house from down the street. Dad came outside and was standing in front of the car. "What’s he doing now?!" I shouted. Even more neighbours were gathering beside me.
    The show-stealing antics were rewarded in kind: two police cruisers showed up, just as Dad was fidgeting with the car’s engine.
    "What’s he doing now?" I asked hysterically, looking at my father playing with the car’s guts.
    The police moved up the driveway, one officer taking Mom to a police car, the other, as far as I could see, talking with Dad beside the car. Dad closed the hood.
    I disembarked from the group of local spectators and crossed the street towards Mom.
    "What’s going on?" I said, sidling up to Mom as she lit a cigarette. She dabbed it out after three tiny puffs.
    "They need a statement from me," Mom said. "This is so embarrassing."
    I looked at our house now, feeling as if a sinkhole had risen up and formed. In it we would now— all of us —slide towards a new-fangled dent in the property schematics, a dismal abyss in wait.
    The officer had finished speaking to Dad. He nodded and walked towards Mom and the other officer, passing a few neighbours who had frozen along the way.
    "What?" Mom said, her voice rising as she continued, "They’re letting him go!?" She was marvelling at the police officer standing next to her, face in a twist of creases and astonishment.
    "He’s putting the spark plug back in," Mom said, sobbing. "He took it out so we couldn’t leave!" she cried, snot dripping from her nose.
    I stepped back from the police car and watched as Dad finished operating on the car’s engine.
    Fucking asshole , I thought, watching Dad drive away. "He’s going to cool off at his folks’ place," the officer told Mom. "He said in Kingston, right?"
    Mom was dripping with wet and mucus. She nodded shamefully, not making any eye contact. "We just need to take your statement, Mrs. Moore."
    Slowly the gaggle of neighbours and onlookers thinned out, and we returned to our domestic shell.
    "You want to call one of your friends?" Mom asked, blowing her nose with Herculean pomp. She tossed her cigarettes in the trash.
    Later in the afternoon, Andrew came over with a baseball bat. Mom served us lemonade on the front porch; her eyes were now dry and open, awaiting another soft deluge. Telling Andrew what had happened both excited and shamed me, as if sharing the malicious porch gossip would provide fodder for the future judgment and ridicule I knew my best friend was capable of propagating. We rented two movies and ordered a pizza. Mom, Holly and I engaged in a silence with occasional facial recognitions in key comedy points. Otherwise, we were hypnotized for several hours wearing flatline expressions.
    Dad returned the next day, said nothing to anyone about the incident, quietly milled about the house, avoiding chaos, carpet shocks, raised tones or eye contact.
    "Hello, Nate," he said as if nothing had transpired. It was the absolute most terrified I’d ever been.
    Within the high noon showdown, we both flinched, and my fantasy uncoiled, spoiling a reel of seamless smiles. Each toothy grin killed forever.

    *

    At school, I submitted to the boys and their phys-ed steak arms, glistening in dark hairs, and new deodorant, their skin scabbing in places, from battles from sex, from falling down new and drunk. These growing and grizzly fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys would pick me up vertically, my head under their pits, my feet way up above their own heads, then they fell back on a gym mat. It was called a suplex. I stood five-and-a-half feet, weighed 118 pounds. When I had a bad headache from anxiety or illness, Mom suggested an Aspirin intervention while I