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Henry’s yard. Robert didn’t punch until they were on the ground, and then he kneed and punched maniacally, his eyes and mouth and whole face squeezed shut as if he were underwater, boxing a shark. Henry wriggled into a ball. For a moment the combatants were both viewed distantly, through a haze of watery interference. Then the silence broke with a rush, the fight bobbed up from its oceanic depths and the kids pushed in close to watch. How else would they have heard the strange whining sounds, the almost animal keening which came out of both of the bodies in Henry’s yard? You were learning something. That kids fought was understood but your chances to see it were still rare. The same sound might come out of your own body one of these days. It was worth a look, worth holding back a moment from breaking it up no matter what your sympathies, which anyway weren’t so clear. Then you broke it up, shouting “Breakitup! Breakitup!”—words that emerged by fluent instinct though you’d never spoken them before. In this case, Alberto dashed into Henry’s yard and pulled Robert off by his shoulders.
    “See, see, see,” said Robert Woolfolk, breathing like a bellows, pointing his finger. Captured by Alberto, arms wrapped, he still raged toward Henry, and his and Alberto’s legs trembled like those of an animal bucking and cringing in its stall. He’d scraped the top of his hand to bleeding on the pavement or perhaps on Henry’s teeth. “See, that’s what you get, see, that’s what you get.” Robert Woolfolk elbowed out of Alberto’s embrace and stalked back to the corner of Nevins. He turned just once at the corner to scream, “See!” Almost as if it was someone’s name he was calling. Then he vanished.
    Nevins Street was a river of unhappiness running through the land of Dean Street.
    Who cleaned Robert Woolfolk’s clothes, for instance?
    He probably wouldn’t come back for a while. He’d probably come back after a while.
    Maybe he had a brother or a sister.
    Nobody could say.
    There wasn’t any way to think about it. No one was accountable. The traffic of cars and the bus rolled past under the shade of Dean Street’s trees, whirring through blobs of light and shadow. The drivers were blinded by the flicker. The men in the doorway of the rooming house advertised disregard in the way they wore their little felt hats even in this weather. They drank discreetly from a sack. Anything they thought to say they said in Spanish or kept to themselves. Probably everybody’s mother was in the kitchen making dinner now—assuming they had a mother. Nobody looked at the kids in Henry’s yard. The old white lady didn’t even look out her window so much these days.
    Sometimes the kids didn’t even look at each other. You could argue for hours about who said what or who was really there when something important happened. Pretty often it turned out that someone hadn’t been there in the first place. The girls never confirmed anything for anyone, though you’d supposed they were right there, watching. Marilla might know a given kid’s sister and you’d never hear a word about it. Days were full of gaps, probably because they were too alike. And when something big happened it was impossible to hold it clear. The gaps rushed in even there.
    Henry, for his part, revived instantly and disdained any injury, though he had a shiny stripe of blood under his nose. He sucked it back and wiped it away, swallowed. He ran his tongue around his teeth and straightened his limbs, which were on the whole a lot straighter than Robert Woolfolk’s. The fat lip was more an attitude than anything else, an earned sneer.
    “Stupid motherfucking shitty bastard.”
    “Huh.”
    “Bet you he won’t come back.”
    “Huh.”
    It was suddenly conceivable Henry had been pummeling Robert Woolfolk and not the other way around—from the way he shrugged the fight off and threw several arching stoopball home runs right afterward you had to