Read Online You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook - Free Book Online Page B

hungry as an ordinary man,and this was intriguing to other men. My scar always seemed to create a mini-dilemma at whatever primitive soirée I might intrude upon. The man pinched my shoulder and wouldn’t let me go before his friend had a good look at my scar. “Where did you get it?”
    “Born with it?” the other man asked.
    I said, “Sure, that’s right,” because I hadn’t even had a beer yet and the music seemed to be fading. I worried it might be my luck to come in at the end of the set.
    “He’s got his mother’s slit on him,” the first man yelled.
    This was an interesting perception and the whole bar turned away from the tight little stage to locate the target of the strange remark. Even the guitarist, who couldn’t have heard it, looked out into the darkness before him, resting his wrist on the neck of his guitar.
    Not even a second passed and I’d thrown one. The first blow to come my way connected and put me off balance, the next got me square. This had me doubled up, but it was just a momentary thing. The men didn’t follow through and I couldn’t believe it when I saw that Lane had stepped into it. Lane was trying to pull somebody off me, someone who wasn’t even part of it. It was so dark in there. She was like one of those little birds which peck at the shoulder of a rhino, and at first nobody noticed her. Then she got a good one, an elbow or the back of someone’s hand which opened a little cut below her eye. I tried to push her out of the way, before she got roughed up. “Jesus,” somebody said when at last they saw her, “what’s she doing?” I shoved Lane ahead of me and we took our leave. Nobody cared. The men were laughing; I was bashed up enough without their help. I pushed Lane outside and up under a lamp where I looked at her bruised cheek. She seemedsmall to me then, familiar but unreadable, changing before my eyes.
    I’ve lived behind this perfect line since I was thirteen, when I ran through a plate-glass window at a department store. The window was cleaned to a perfect invisible gleam. They had just removed the annual “Price Breaker” signs after a store-wide sale and there were no stencils or decals to inform me of the dangerous sheet. The scar runs down my face and throat and continues through my pectoral muscle, over the small brown plateau of the nipple, down the short ladder of my ribs and it ends below my waist where the hair at my pelvis begins to increase and obscures its path.
    My parents were given five thousand dollars in insurance, which was to be saved for my college education. My father squandered the money before I was out of high school. He used to say, “Life is an education, and you’ve got living expenses to cover.” So the cash went for rent and for a used car which still sits out in back of the house where I grew up. Its windshield sports a crack right down the center where I tried to kick it with the steel toe of my boot. I was standing on the hood to face my father who was behind the wheel, driving away, going ten, then twenty miles an hour until I slid off the hood making sure I landed on my feet. I straddled the white line of Route 138, waiting for my father to turn the car around. When he did, he was screaming at about seventy miles an hour, coming straight for me. It wasn’t a simple test. I lost my nerve and dived out of the way when there was still a little time left, I’d say less than a few seconds, but I was too shook up to take advantageof it. When he passed by, I saw he was way over on the opposite side, nowhere near me. I was ashamed of my cowardice, ashamed of my gratitude.
    I put Lane back in the car. “You could have lost some teeth,” I said. She curled her tongue up over her front teeth at the idea. Her eye was a deep half-moon, but there wasn’t much swelling. The tiny cut was
below
her eye so I knew that her eye wasn’t going to close. I told her, “Never get between two goons going at each other.”
    “But they were