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But he wasn’t unconscious. He tried once more to get up while May was gibbering and shouting behind an Asian officer near the door.
    Thomas had backed up against the wall. He was more frightened of Elton now than he had ever been. He couldn’t understand how someone could be hit so hard, so many times, in the head and not stay down. He now saw his father like a monster on one of those scary shows that Eric liked to watch—a monster that couldn’t be killed and who came back through bombs and gunfire and killed everyone except the women and children he took to his cave, where later he would eat them.
    Two of the officers had jumped on top of Elton. They were pulling his hands behind his back. Thomas was expecting to see the policemen thrown off like on TV, but instead they bound Elton’s hands and dragged him to his feet. He struggled but didn’t get away. He yelled, but the threats didn’t hurt anyone.
    “You don’t have to hit him like that,” May cried.
    Suddenly the big woman jumped at the Asian officer, knocking him into the men trying to subdue Elton.
    “Leave him the fuck alone!” May cried. “Leave him!”
    “I will kill you when I get outta here,” Elton warned May even though she was trying to help him. “I will kill you when I get out.” And then he turned his head toward Thomas. “An’ you too, you little bastid. You think you cute tellin’ her about that lunch. Lyin’ like I was after her. Lyin’ ’bout what I said. I’ma get you too.”
    Then the policemen dragged Elton off. They handcuffed May and took her along too. Finally there was just Thomas and the Asian policeman left in the house.
    His name was Robert Leung, and his grandparents had come from China.
    “And so Mr. Trueblood is your father?” Officer Leung was asking Thomas. They were sitting on the black couch in the TV room.
    “Uh-huh,” Thomas replied.
    “And Miss Fine is your mother?”
    “No. May’s Daddy’s girlfriend.”
    “Does she live here with you?”
    “I think so.”
    Officer Leung frowned. “Don’t you know?”
    Thomas explained that his mother had died and that he had just come to live with his father.
    “Does your father hit you?” the policeman asked.
    “No.”
    “Are you afraid that he’s going to hit you?”
    Thomas didn’t know the answer and so remained silent.
    The policeman took him in the squad car down to the precinct police station. There they put him into a cell and locked the door.
    “I’m locking the door so nobody else can hurt you,” Officer Leung said. “Child services has to come to get you, but they’re all asleep and so you’ll have to stay here until they get here.”
    “Can’t I go with you?” the boy asked the cop.
    “I have to go home.”
    Thomas couldn’t understand why the policeman didn’t realize that he wanted to go home with him. He thought that if Eric was there he could make the policeman understand.
Eric always makes people understand,
Thomas thought.
    “PSSSST,” THOMAS HEARD, when Officer Leung had left the room full of human cages.
    It was a tall, light-colored man across the way, also locked up in a cell.
    When Thomas looked the man said, “You ever see a man’s big thing?”
    Thomas thought he knew what the man meant, but he wasn’t sure. This uncertainty made him shake his head slightly.
    The man, who was clad all in gray, pulled down the zipper of his pants and fished out his penis. It was very long and slender.
    The man laughed.
    Thomas turned away from him and settled down to the floor on his knees. The man kept talking, but Thomas hummed to himself so that the words the man uttered were unintelligible. After a while the man stopped talking, and all that was left were the sounds of Thomas’s own humming and the hardness of the concrete floor beneath his knees.

5
    B UT WHERE’D he go?” Eric asked his father when he got home from school and was told that Tommy had moved away for good.
    Ahn and Minas were both afraid to have Eric there when