The bouncer had broken Jimmy D’Amato’s nose and left him face down in the parking lot. Maria got to him first, and her expression when she rolled him over made my heart sink: she was in ecstasy. Blood rose in her cheeks, her eyes seemed to glow. She held Jimmy in her arms as if he’d just been taken down off the cross, and I knew that whatever chances I might have had with her were gone.

Steve and I carried Jimmy to the car. On the way to the hospital Maria cradled his head in her lap and told him his nose didn’t look so bad, although really the cartilage appeared ready to burst through the skin, the left nostril had disappeared, and the whole center of his face was turning marbly green-black and swelling like a balloon filling with water. The fight had not lasted long enough to be called a fight; it had been more like Jimmy throwing himself in front of a truck. The bouncer, Robert Fenton, stood a half foot taller than Jimmy and outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

“I’m a kill’m,” Jimmy said, his voice slurred and thick.

Steve rolled his eyes. Steve was my older brother, and for years he’d told me stories about Jimmy; now I was seeing for myself.

“I’m a kill’m.” Jimmy said again.

“That’s right, we’ll get him,” Maria said. “We’ll get him back.”

“We?” Steve said. “Who’s we?”

She scowled. Her silk blouse was soaked with blood, and the fabric stuck to the curve of her breasts in a way that I found strangely erotic; I was seventeen years-old and everything in those days seemed strangely erotic. There was blood on her hands and on her neck and a small smudge on the left side of her face. It was August, during a heat wave; she was sweating, and her sweat was mixing with the blood, and I found that erotic, too.

We waited three hours for the doctors to fix Jimmy’s nose. Steve slept. Maria smoked. I watched her smoke and tried to think of things to say to her; but all my ideas were stupid, so finally I shut up and pretended to read an old magazine. Near dawn Jimmy emerged with two black eyes and a strip of tape across the bridge of his nose. We drove downtown to Morin’s Diner, where we ordered home fries and pancakes and coffee, and began to plan our revenge.

Maria Mendez was a Catholic boy’s dream: good and bad, virgin and whore. On one hand, she went to St. Mary’s and wore a white veil to Mass and kept a set of black rosary beads in her bedroom. On the other hand, she worked in a leather factory, wore red lipstick, and liked very much to show off her body when she danced.

She was a tease, and if she needed a ride home she would not think twice about pretending to like the boy with the car. She never said please or thank you, and she never gave more than a kiss good-night. “You can do those things with other girls but not with me," she told Steve one night as she hopped out of his car, leaving behind a scent of flowery perfume which lingered on the seat for days.

She left Steve for Jimmy; but would not sleep with Jimmy either. What kept Jimmy going was that Maria always acted as if she were on the verge of changing her mind. Every time they went out, just as things got going she would find some ridiculous thing to get upset about—the way he combed his hair, the shirt he was wearing—and would refuse to go through with it. I wondered how long Jimmy would keep chasing her. Steve said Jimmy wouldn’t ever give up. “Sooner or later he’s going to get fed up,” he said. “And when that day comes”—he smacked his hands together—“watch out.”

Maria lived with her parents on Park Street, in the heart of the Puerto Rican ghetto, but she told me that she wouldn’t be living there forever. She was saving money to go to community college; she was going to study business.

“What about you?” she asked me.

“What are you going to study?”

“Classics,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Latin,” I explained. “Latin and Greek.”

She made a face. “The hell you going to do with that?”

I said I didn’t know.

Maria was my age—seventeen—but unlike the other girls I knew, who stumbled on their high heels, smeared their makeup, and acted as if they’d just discovered their breasts and hips and still didn’t know what to make of them, at seventeen Maria had been in a woman’s body long enough to know how to move in it. One day she asked me to take her to the driving range in Edmunds and show her how to hit a golf ball. She made me stand with my arms curled around under her breasts and my hips nestled up against her. Soon I felt myself reacting the way you might expect a boy to react, and I stepped away.

She looked over her shoulder and said, “What’s the matter? You’re not having fun?”

“No, I am,” I said.

She smiled and said, “Yeah, maybe a little too much, right? Come on.”

I hesitated.

“Come on” she said.

I got behind her again and this time she pressed herself against me and rolled her hips in a way that could only have been on purpose. I realized what she was doing.

“She’s evil,” Steve said later, when I told him.

“She’s a tease, that’s all,” I said.

“No,” he said. “She’s evil.”

Maybe he was right. Maria was, in fact, the reason that Jimmy got into the fight with the bouncer; she told Jimmy that the bouncer was calling her names and grabbing her. Steve said she wanted to see how far she could push Jimmy; she wanted to see someone fight over her. “You saw how she looked,” he said. “She loved it. She’s sick.”

Jimmy was no better. He’d spent two years in the Marines and still wore his hair in a razor cut and said that the Corps, as he called it, was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was always telling me that I should enlist, and when I’d remind him that I was going to college, he’d frown and say, “Well, Frank, suit yourself.”

We worked at Pahigian’s Garage on South Union Street, which for Steve and Jimmy was a real job but for me was a way to make spending money for what my father called “these days of wine and roses.” The gas station was a small place near the Essex Street housing projects, with two gas islands and a pair of abandoned repair bays. The owner had given up on the place; he came by every evening to collect the cash drawer and receipts, but otherwise we were on our own.

And it was there, a week after the fight at the Admiral, that Jimmy told us that he and Maria had come up with a way to get Fenton back.

“We wait for him to come out of the bar,” he said. “We follow him home, we grab him, we put him in the trunk of the car, and take him out to the woods some-place.”

“And then what?” I said.

He looked at me. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

He grinned at Steve and Maria, then looked back at me. “We all sit down and have a little talk,” he said.

For days, then, the Fenton plan became our obsession. We spent hours going over details, looking for problems, things that could go wrong. To me this was no more serious than a math problem: Given that X represents the task of hunting someone down and hurting him, and that A, B, and C are the obstacles, solve for X.

There were two flaws, as I saw it. First was the initial encounter—getting him into the trunk—and second was being able to do everything without getting caught.

“Do we wear ski masks?” I said.

“Panty hose?”

“I vote for panty hose,” Steve said.

“You would,” Jimmy said.

Jimmy said we wouldn’t have to worry about being identified, since Fenton wouldn’t remember anything when we were done. And as for getting Fenton into the car, he said, kicking a man in the groin, no matter how big he was, had a tendency to double him over. He demonstrated with a shot to the metal desk, which boomed and shuddered and made my skin go cold. Once, fooling around, Jimmy had cornered me out in the bays and started circling me like a boxer, flashing his fists at my arms and face. “I’m a Green Beret,” he said, “and I’m going to kill you. We’re alone in the woods. What do you do?” I covered my face; he punched my arms until they went numb. Steve stood at the edge of the bay saying, “Come on, Jimmy, cut it out.

Sometimes to amuse himself Jimmy would slap Steve, and Steve would sit there, his hands at his side, afraid to hit back, saying, “Come on, Jimmy. Come on, Jimmy,” and trying to laugh as his cheeks reddened from being hit. I did not like to watch this, but I knew Steve would feel even more embarrassed if I stepped in and tried to stop it.

I was disappointed to see Steve this way but not surprised. There was a weakness about him, a missing piece, that had drawn him to Jimmy in the first place. What he wanted, secretly, was to be Jimmy.

Jimmy never flinched, never backed down, never didn’t get what he wanted. Or so it seemed. He claimed he’d had thirty women, and this seemed possible: he had black hair and green eyes set deep in an angular, dangerous face. Still, it was hard to tell how much of Jimmy was talk and how much was real. He claimed, for example, that he’d killed a man in a bar fight in the Philippines, and that the Marines had covered it up. Steve did not believe this, but I did. and the reason I did was that Jimmy claimed he had enjoyed it. If he’d said how awful it was I’d have known he was lying. But when he told that story, when he described the look on the Filipino’s face, he smiled and his pupils grew so wide that the green irises almost vanished. “Frank, you feel it,” he said. “You feel the life go out of him. It’s amazing.”

He was bad and crazy, and he seemed to know more about life than I ever would. I had never slept with a girl, had never been in a fight. I knew Latin and Greek, had read Virgil, Catullus and Livy, and yet I envied people like Jimmy and Maria, who pumped gas and worked in leather factories.

My father was the son of a millwright, and he had worked summers in the Osgood Mill when he was younger, and he scoffed at the folk singers and poets who came to Linden for the Labor Day Festival. The only people who thought that mill life was romantic, he said, were people who’d never done any. “You can’t imagine,” he said. “And thank God you can’t. Go away. Forget this place.”

Fenton came out of the Admiral at one-thirty. He was alone. We followed him along the river road into the city, staying close behind him. Steve worried that we might lose him; Jimmy said not to worry, there was nobody else around. “Stay back a little bit,” he said. He was smoking a cigarette, looking both ways at the cross streets and checking for police. Maria sat in back with me. She had not spoken much all night, and now that the plan had become real—now that we were actually “in pursuit,” as Jimmy said—she seemed to have lost her nerve.

The street lights downtown shone harsh and yellow and in the glare the storefronts and brick office buildings stood out sharp against the shadows in the alleys. We followed Fenton down Essex Street and across the Broadway bridge into South Linden, turned onto Amesbury Street, and then began to speed up, so that when Fenton turned into his driveway we pulled in right behind him.

Steve cut the headlights. He reached over the seat and took the Louisville Slugger that lay at my feet. Jimmy turned and looked over the seat at me and Maria and told us to be ready in case something went wrong. Then he reached under his seat and took out a revolver.

“Wait a minute,” Steve said. “What the hell is this?”

But Jimmy had already opened his door.

“Jesus Christ,” Maria said. “He’s out of his mind.”

From inside the car it was like watching a silent movie. Fenton smiled at first, and then he saw who it was and became angry. Then he saw the gun, and his eyes went soft. They walked him around to the back of the car.

Maria and I sat tensed up in the back seat, waiting to hear the gun blast.

“Knock him out,” Jimmy said.

Steve said something about the light in the trunk, and about the neighbors.

“Hit the goddamn guy,” Jimmy said.

There was a crack, and then a thud. The car sagged on its springs as they placed Fenton into the trunk. Maria squeezed my arm and said, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” under her breath.

Steve and Jimmy got into the front seat. Steve started the engine, but didn’t put the car in gear. We sat in the driveway.

“We can go now,” Jimmy said.

Steve’s face was red; he looked ready to cry. “What the hell is the gun?” he said. “What the hell is that? Have you got the goddamn thing loaded?”

Jimmy slid the gun under the seat and said, without looking at Steve, “I said we can go now.”

We drove out Route 125 and headed north toward the missile base. Maria sat close to me, so close that I could smell her perfume, and when she shifted in the seat her bare thighs made a peeling sound against the car seat, and I felt myself getting hard. She had shown up that afternoon wearing frayed denim shorts and a halter top that barely contained her. Now, in the moonlight, her dark skin seemed even darker, and her curly black hair shone, and her eyes were wide and dilated with excitement; they glistened like drops of motor oil. Soon the buildings grew farther apart, the woods became thicker, and as we moved beyond the limits of the city a salty taste began to thicken on my tongue. There was a thump from the trunk, and then another one.

I tapped Jimmy on the shoulder. “He’s awake,” I said.

He turned down the stereo. Fenton was pounding on the trunk lid.

Maria said, “Let’s just drive him around for a while. You know, just scare him. We can leave him out at the quarry, like without his clothes or something.”

Jimmy turned and stared at her. His face was black and swollen around his eyes, as if he were wearing a mask.

“You got us into this,” he said.

Then he turned around and raised the volume on the stereo and looked straight ahead at the road.

The quarry was at the far southern edge of North Edmunds, past the subdivisions and the farms and the town forest. The site was a ten-acre dirt clearing with a hole in the middle which years before had filled with water. The water was deep and dark, and around it was a flat dirt clearing, as dry as the surface of some empty planet. Around the periphery were thick woods.

The main access road was blocked by a fence, but we left the paved road and took a rutted access road that led onto the quarry from the side; we drove out onto the clearing under a bright moon which lay like a white stripe across the black water. Coming out of the woods it seemed as if we had crossed some threshold and had entered a new world where there was no one watching and where anything might happen. The tires of the car coughed up a cloud of dust that hung in the air behind us.

We stopped at the edge of the woods.

Jimmy reached under the seat and took out the revolver. The gun was real: a short blue-black barrel, brown wooden grips, fluted chambers, and a tiny sight, like half a penny, at the end of the barrel.

He started to open the door, but Maria reached over the seat and grabbed his neck and said. “Jimmy, come on. Put it away.”

Jimmy freed himself and reached for his door, but she grabbed him again.

“Jimmy,” she said. “We didn’t come out here to kill anyone.”

Jimmy looked out the side of his eyes at her hand on his neck.

“And what if it goes off or something?” she said. “You never know.”

Jimmy smiled. “Yeah, you never know,” he said. “OK.” He leaned forward and put the gun back under the seat. Then he turned to me and said, “Give me the bat.”

Jimmy stood beside the car, like a batter standing at the plate waiting for a pitch, while Steve put the key into the trunk lock and got ready to open the lid. Maria and I stood a few feet away. Fenton had been silent for a long time now and I had a feeling that he had suffocated. I imagined him curled up beside the spare tire, his face gone blue. But when the lid opened he sprang out of the trunk like a bull coming out of a rodeo stall.

Jimmy swung the bat into his stomach and doubled him over. He staggered, but then he grabbed Steve around the waist and drove him backward into the car. Steve hit the fender with a thud, and went limp. I grabbed Fenton’s hair and got a couple of shots into his face—there was blood, my hand came back wet, and adrenaline rushed through me like a drug—but he drove his knee up into my stomach and I fell to my knees, feeling as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the air around me.

Then Jimmy cracked him across the back of the head, and it was over. He fell like a bag of sand. “There,” Jimmy said. “Good night.”

I got back to my feet, feeling dizzy, wanting to retch. Fenton lay stretched out like a corpse. Even on his back he was huge. Jimmy reached under Fenton’s shoulders and managed to lift him a few inches off the ground. Fenton’s giant head lolled to the side.

“Let’s go,” Maria said.

“We’re not done yet,” Jimmy said.

“This is sick,” she said. “I’m not watching this.”

She got back into the car.

We dragged Fenton into the woods and took turns kicking him. We started on his chest and back, then moved down to his legs. At first Fenton would groan each time we kicked him, and his little sounds, as awful as they were, made me angrier. But then he stopped making noise, and I could not go on. I told them that my foot had begun to hurt.

“You shouldn’t have worn sneakers,” Jimmy said.

He and Steve wore steel-toed work boots. Steve kicked with the side of his foot, like a soccer player, but Jimmy used the toepiece. He kicked and cursed and jumped at Fenton like a man possessed. He’d gone over the edge, and the more he kicked the angrier he became. His eyes burned with a rage so fierce and so deep that it could not have been meant only for Fenton; no single person could merit so much hatred. It was as if a well of madness and violence had been swelling in him all his life, and now at last it had been released.

Finally he stopped and stood there, his chest heaving, his face and neck coated with sweat. Steve stopped, too. Jimmy caught his breath and seemed to become calm. He spat on Fenton’s face, and watched the spit trickle down across his cheek. So there, I thought. That’s it.

But then Jimmy drove the toe of his boot into the spot where his spit landed. There was a wet sound, like an egg cracking. I looked away, but too late: my stomach tightened, and I went into the woods and got sick.

When I came out they were gone. Fenton was alone. His hair and shirt were thick with blood. They had gone after his face, and now he didn’t seem to have a face anymore. He looked dead; but I could hear his breath rising in shallow spurts.

From the clearing I heard Maria shriek. Then I heard Jimmy shout, “Give me back the gun.”

When I stepped out of the woods Jimmy was standing by the front of the car, facing Maria. She stood a few feet away from him, holding the gun. Steve stood behind Jimmy. Both of them were soaked to the knees in blood: their shoes, their jeans.

Jimmy apparently had returned to the car for the gun and somehow Maria had got it away from him. She held the gun away from her body, as if she were afraid to touch it.

“I’m going to get rid of it,” she said. She began to back away from Jimmy. “We’re not killing anybody.”

But, in fact, we were going to kill Fenton, at least if Jimmy had his way. I remembered his story about the Filipino, and suddenly I understood the awful truth of what he’d brought us here to do.

“Look—” I said.

But before I could finish, Maria turned and ran toward the water. The edge of the hole was no more than fifty yards away. Jimmy set off after her, and just as he got his arms around her waist she cocked her arm and threw the pistol out toward the water.

She fell to the ground with Jimmy on top of her. The gun flew clumsily, tumbling sideways, and plopped into the pond and disappeared. That sound, that plop, rang across the clearing and seemed to hang in the air, and when Maria replays this night in her memory I am sure that she hears that sound and remembers it as the sound of her luck turning bad; she must go over and over that decision and know that she could have saved herself by simply handing over the gun and letting Fenton die. Because that was the moment when things changed in a way that none of us could have expected.

Jimmy picked her up and dragged her back to the car, where Steve and I were standing. She pulled herself free and said to Jimmy, “I just kept you from spending your life in jail. You should thank me.”

He looked at her; the corners of his mouth began to curl up into a smile.

“You know,” he said, “you’re right.”

He struck her in that face so hard that she fell to the ground. When she stood up a stream of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. She looked down at her feet.

“You take me home now,” she said, in a quiet voice. “And then I don’t ever want to see you again.”

She walked to the car and got into the back seat. There was a long moment when none of us spoke, and everything became still, and I felt a terrible energy gathering in the air around us.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

They stared at the car, as if they hadn’t heard me, as if I didn’t exist. Then they walked to the car. Jimmy got in back with Maria. Steve and I got in front. Maria sat with her legs pressed together, biting her lip, staring down at the floor; Jimmy sat beside her, seething. Steve put the keys into the ignition, then leaned over the wheel.

“Steve,” I said, “start the car.”

But again it was as if I weren’t there. We sat for a long time, in silence. Steve smoked a cigarette. When he was done he snapped the butt out his window and looked into the rearview mirror at Jimmy. As if on cue, Jimmy grabbed Maria’s hair and snapped her head against the seat and said, “You know, I’ve had it with you.”

She said, “It’s over, Jimmy. Forget it.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not over.”

Steve climbed into the back and the two of them began to take off her clothes. She did not struggle; she seemed to know there was no use. She was not wearing much clothing, and in a few seconds she was naked, her face blank and tilted up, her eyes fixed on the roof of the car; she looked as if she were praying. Jimmy knelt behind her and held her arms. Steve knelt between her legs and as he began to open his pants he turned and looked at me. His eyes were heavy-lidded and serious, as if he were about to do some boring piece of work. He seemed to be about to say something; but he didn’t.

Maria followed his gaze and turned her head to face me. In a voice that was nearly a whisper, she said, “So what about you?”

I knew what I should do. I knew that what was happening was wrong. And the only reason I can give for my failure is this: in some part of myself—at some low, deep level that I had not known existed—I knew why they were doing this to Maria, because I wanted to do it, too.

I did not hate her. I was not angry at her for being a tease. But I wanted to get into the back seat; I wanted to touch her. I feared her, and perhaps I loved her—maybe those two are not so different— and the sight of her scared and naked, the muscles in her neck tensing, her face tight, her arms and legs coiled and beginning to struggle: these things excited me.

I said, “I’m getting out of the car.”

Jimmy said something about me being a virgin for the rest of my life, and Steve laughed. Maria’s face began to shake so badly that I couldn’t look at her anymore.

I got out and walked into the woods and stood in the dark among the trees. The moon was behind the clouds and the car was a dark shape, heaving on its springs. The springs made a rusty, creaky sound. I could not see Steve and Jimmy; only their shadows. Twice Maria cried out.

When it was over Steve and Jimmy stepped out of the car, and there was a thin line of blood on the side of Steve’s neck. The air smelled sweet. I felt sick again. The sky was thick and heavy with stars which appeared to be right on top of us. The trees seemed to tilt and huddle.

On the way home I sat in the back with Maria. She sat silent, looking straight ahead. They had torn her shirt and now she held the pieces over her breasts and smoked one of Jimmy’s cigarettes.

Steve and Jimmy talked about the Red Sox. Jimmy said, “You watch the Red Sox, Maria?”

She shook her head.

Fenton was back at the missile base. I wondered what would happen to him; I thought that maybe I should call the police. But these ideas rushed away as quickly as they came, and what I fixed on finally—what I held onto—was that in two weeks I would leave for college and never return; and in a few hours I would be at Mass, and I could go to confession and have this wiped away.

But as we drove back into the empty city, where the street lights were blinking yellow, and the stores stood dark behind their metal grids, I knew that although we had come back across the threshold we had not returned to a world of order, but instead had brought the emptiness of that other world back with us. I had a sense that even if I were to pray my prayers would not be heard. And then a worse and further knowledge came to me: that my prayers had never been heard. My sins were my sins: mine. I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the tires as we passed over the Canal Street bridge.

I looked at Steve in the mirror. He wouldn’t look back. The blood on his neck had dried into a thin red-brown line. His face had changed; his life had swung down, and maybe for good, like the arc of a thrown ball when it stops climbing and begins its descent.

Maria did not seem to care at all. I took her hand, but she slid it away and crossed her arms and sat there, looking out the window. When we stopped outside her house it was almost dawn. Music from a radio drifted out a window into the street: trumpets, guitars, a man’s voice singing in Spanish.

I wished she would cry, of yell, or try to hit us. But she just got out of the car and closed the door. Jimmy said, “Good night, Maria.”

We watched her go up the inside stairs. I imagined her inside, naked, holding a cloth to her swollen face, taking a bath to wash us from her body, hoping that as long as she didn’t get upset she might be able to believe that the whole thing had never happened.

Jimmy said we should drive to the beach to see the sunrise. Steve drove fast on the curves of the river road, and outside, on the river, mist steamed up and hovered in wisps over the water. The dark cottages, with their sad, small lives now sleeping, gained form in the gray light. In one house the lights were on, and a man sat at a table; I imagined him woken by some bad news, then making coffee and sitting in the bare light, not wanting to take the news alone, but knowing he would have to. Behind the cottages the river scraped at its banks, dislodging bottles and bags of trash which by that afternoon would snag in the canals and dams of the city.

“Steve,” I said. “Stop the car.”

He pulled over, and we got out and walked to the back of the car.

“I’m going home,” I said.

He glanced into the car at Jimmy, as if he were afraid of what Jimmy might hear. But Jimmy sat in the front seat, smoking, looking out at the river.

I said what I believed: that he had not wanted to do what he had done; that he had just been too afraid of Jimmy. Any reasonable person would understand that, I said.

“They’ll believe us,” I said. “We can go together.”

He looked in at Jimmy again. Then he looked at me and shook his head. He seemed small and frightened, like a little boy lost in the rain.

“I can’t,” he said.

He shuffled his boot in the dirt, his bottom lip curled and trembled: he looked doomed.

I said, “I’m your brother.”

“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

He was right. We were headed in different directions; we had been all along.

He got back into his car and drove away. And then there was nothing—only the hot sweet empty air, the shivering trees, and the long low rush of the river. I turned and walked back toward the city, wondering what I would say.