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even as he turned to flee, heard Blackwood grunt, shouted—
“Mom, get your gun!”
—crossed the porch, plunged the stairs, spun around, threw at a window, which shattered as he raced to the maple and snatched up two more smooth stones. He had lost his baseball cap somewhere, but he scored a hit on another window and rearmed himself as on the second floor lights bloomed bright and as Blackwood rushed down the porch steps, the throwing knife in his hand.
    Howie expected Blackwood to come at him as fast as a bullet, snatch him up, slice him open, and spill his steaming guts on the lawn. But the big man’s nose was bleeding, his blood black in moonlight, and at any moment some neighbor might appear. He couldn’t kill the whole neighborhood, though he looked like he wanted to, so he hung back, pointing at Howie to emphasize his threat. “You tell them
anything
about me, I’ll return some night, tear off your mama’s face. I’ll spend a month cutting Corrine up alive. Keep your mouth shut, and I’m gone forever. There’s a world of bitches like them. I don’t need them unless you rat on me and make me
have
to come back.”
    Blackwood turned and seemed to fly across the lawn, through the night, faster than any man could run, magic-fast toward St. Anthony’s and the graveyard, and Howie ducked as a large bird—a raven?—flew so low over his head that he felt its talons comb through his hair and graze his scalp.
    He almost wet his pants then, it was a close thing, but instead he ran toward the house, throwing one stone, then another, shattering two more windows. He reached the top of the porch steps as his mother appeared in the open doorway in her pajamas, holding a pistol that she pointed at the floor.
    “Howie, what’re you doing, what’s happening?”
    Although Howell Dugley was only one week short of his eleventh birthday, he’d known more pain than most grown men ever would, more loss than was right for any child to suffer, more humiliation more humbly endured than might be sufficient to ensure the beatification of a saint, and although he had still been naive until this terrible night, he was naive no more. He realized things that other boys his age would not, including that life was hard but sweet, that life was a long series of losses and that you had to hold on tight to what you loved as long as you had any strength left. He knew that evil dwelt behind kind and familiar faces but that not all evil was hidden, that sometimes evil was brazen because it knew you didn’t want to believe it existed, and it mocked you by its brazenness. He realized that no one could save the world because the world didn’t want to be saved, that all he could hope to rescue from the fires of this world were those who were most precious to him, his family and—if he ever had any—his friends, and that it was prideful in the extreme to think he could do more, just as it might be damning not to try.
    Those things understood, he made his choice there on the porch with his mother. If he couldn’t at that moment clearly see the full consequences of his decision, he had a sense of what they might be, and he perceived that remorse might be a weight he would have to carry in years to come. Believing Blackwood’s threat and the big man’s ability to fulfill it, still feeling the talons that had grazed his scalp, Howie decided to leave the world to its self-destruction and save those he might be able to save.
    To his mother, as sirens rose in the distance, he said, “It was just stupid kids, those kids that always rag me and knock me around. I was still awake, reading in my room, when I heard them and came down. I didn’t see faces, I can’t name names, but it was them, all right, throwing rocks at the house, and I chased them off.”
    When the police arrived moments later, Howie told them the same story. He told it well and sincerely. Howie’s history of being an object of torment for the cruel of heart lent credibility to his