Read End of the Jews for Free Online Page B

his hand as his knuckles slam into the hard bone of his antagonist’s blubbery cheek.
    Earl staggers. Dolores lets loose with a piercing scream, and Tristan glances over at her—foolishly, since another quick blow might have dropped Earl and now, instead, he’s ratcheted himself into a boxer’s pose, bent at the knees, protecting his face with his forearms, remembering whatever he once knew about scrapping or maybe just doing his best Joe Louis impression as blood pools beneath his nose.
    â€œCome on, boy.” Earl beckons with a fist. “You ain’t no Maxie Baer. I’ll—” But his agenda goes undivulged, interrupted by shouts of “
Dolores
!” and stampeding footsteps on the staircase, and then the room is filling up with men and Charles is pushing through them, striding straight for Tristan, seizing him by the shirt, pinning him against the wall. The back of Tristan’s skull thuds into the plaster, and exploding lights spangle his vision. He blinks himself toward clarity, each blink a stroke against a current that wants to pull him out to sea.
    As he comes within reach of the shore, Dolores’s screams sound in his ears like seagulls’ caws. She is flailing at her father’s rigid arm, his hand now clamped around the base of Tristan’s throat in a near chokehold. The mere anticipation of being strangled robs Tristan of breath. Charles begins to shake him back and forth. Again and again, Tristan’s head hammers the plaster. Flakes fall from the wall like snow, dusting the ground.
    Tristan stares back at his aggressor bug-eyed, wondering what the fuck Charles thinks is going on and whether he is mad enough to kill, snap Tristan’s skinny neck like one of those dangling shtetl-butchered chickens.
    â€œYou just calm the hell down,” Charles growls, giving Tristan a final shake and then shoving him against the wall and letting go. “I don’t know where the hell you come from, but nobody fights in my house, understand?”
    Before Tristan can wheeze a breathless assent, Earl lurches into view behind the host, hand cupped to his nose. “He was tryna put the make on Dee, Charles. If I hadn’t got suspicious and come up, who knows what—”
    Charles’s eyes snap over to Earl, silencing him, then back to Tristan, who opens his mouth to defend himself and finds he cannot muster words. The looped internal protest of his innocence.
I did nothing! I did nothing!
pounds through his head, blending with a deeper, contrary, wholly unexpected rumble of understanding for Charles—sympathy even, because in some strange new crevice of his soul, Tristan understands that he can be guilty of everything and nothing all at once.
    Tristan’s guts, tormented with alcohol and terror, knot and rebel. He stares into Charles’s livid, searing eyes for an instant, and then Tristan buckles and a torrent of vomit gushes out of him and splashes onto Charles and the carpet.
    â€œGoddamn it!” Charles darts back too late, raises his hands to his shoulders, and grimaces down at his ruined trousers. Tristan peers up, doubled over, his hands on his knees, a tendril of drool still connecting him to the reeking puddle. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, waits for a blow to explode against his jaw and drop him to the floor.
    Instead, there’s a commotion, and a commanding male voice says, “Charles. Get ahold of yourself.” Tristan opens his eyes and sees feet, bodies, a man dragging Charles backward by the waist, and then Dolores’s stockings planted between himself and her father. Tristan stumbles; the wall catches him and he straightens against it, stomach clenched with nausea.
    There, sure enough, stands Dolores, her face streaked with tears. Behind her is Charles, wrapped up in a pair of suit-jacketed arms, violence glowing in his eyes.
    â€œTake it easy,” counsels the man behind him, working to lock his hands