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" The Patriots had just missed an easy third down conversion when one of the front windows of the bar exploded. Raja, a gaudy young black man who liked to remind people he&amp;#039;d played on a state champion team in high school, had just tilted his head back and yelled, &amp;quot;Tom Brady is fucking up!&amp;quot; but the appearance of the brick ruined his chance for a satisfying response. It came through the window and bounced once off the bar and caught Janine, the bartender, square in the breastbone. She sighed, &amp;quot;Aahhh,&amp;quot; and sat down on the floor. The regulars, black and white men of all ages, boiled out to the parking lot. Four or five were bleeding. They knew who had thrown the brick: Marvin, the bum, whom they&amp;#039;d twice expelled from the bar that morning for panhandling the college kids who found their way down here to watch the games. In the parking lot their rage intensified. Several of their cars appeared to have been pissed on. Back inside, Janine was tended to and pitchers of beer were poured and drunk and filled again. The football games were mostly, although not completely, ignored. The waitresses began breaking down cardboard boxes to tape into the window. Strategies and citywide searches were debated. It was not the vandalism that enraged them, so much as the destruction of their illusions of sanctuary. Ted March, a white man who had worked as a mechanic for so long that when he closed his eyes at night he saw nothing but endless worlds of bearings and oil pans and re-bored cylinders, felt this loss particularly strongly. His hands and memory weren&amp;#039;t what they once had been, and he&amp;#039;d recently begun to be plagued by horrifying daydreams in which he was replacing the entirely wrong part, or even working on the entirely wrong car. The bar was the only place where these images receded, and he spent as much time here as he could. His son, on his third stint in rehab, suggested a vacation. But Ted suspected darkly that it was something worse than overwork, some sad quiet thing that would eventually engulf him. He finished his beer and staggered up from his stool and made his way out the front door. He felt around under the seat of his pickup until he found the pistol. It lay heavy and menacing in his hand. He thought of the endless darkness of the garage, the pools of oil and coolant, and then of his son sitting in a small bright room in New Mexico, holding his knees and rocking back and forth, staring out the window at some desolate mountain in the distance. Ted could not remember if the gun was loaded although, in fact, he had never purchased any bullets for it. He pointed it at the tire of the truck just like he would point it at the bum Marvin. The hammer fell with a small, magnificently powerful click. He put the gun in the pocket of his sweatshirt, leaving part of the grip exposed so that the others might see it.  Raja saw him come back inside from the parking lot, and he saw the gun. He wanted to ask someone what the fuck was the world coming to, but he had a child too, a daughter, four years old, beautiful and spoiled. He drove a limousine and for ten months he had been making extra runs for cash on the side, against company rules. Often there was sex or drugs involved and it paid well. He spent most of the money on his daughter, whom he suspected was beginning to love her mother more than him, and used the rest to take business management classes at a community college. It didn&amp;#039;t matter that he hated the cases and they confused the hell out of him. He had bigger dreams than this, and everyone knew it. So instead of saying something about the gun, he licked his lips and yelled, &amp;quot;Marvin the bum is fucking up!&amp;quot; The laughter ricocheted through the room. Ted March looked up with blurry eyes. &amp;quot;That fucking bum comes in here again, I&amp;#039;m going to fuck him up,&amp;quot; he said. And Raja, for his part, met that gaze with his own wild grin.  He thought about his textbooks. He thought about the sterile blankness of his apartment, deadly empty until his ex-girlfriend dropped off their daughter in the morning.  Then he raised his voice, unaware of the quaver, and announced he was buying a round for the bar. The two men stared at each other for a long time before they looked down to their beers again, each hoping with a faint desperation that the other had learned something about respect. And Marvin lay against the cool brick of the back of the bar, behind the dumpster, filled with the smells of grease and rotting iceberg lettuce.  He cradled another brick in his hands. Those assholes, he thought. Not even one of those niggers will help a black man. One dollar is all I wanted.  Maybe a couple of dollars. Why do they get to have that and I don&amp;#039;t? The sky in the narrow gap between the dumpster and the wall was a perfect, untouchable blue, and it reminded him of Arkansas and his sister and mother sitting on the front porch in their sun dresses. He cried a little then and clutched his brick and waited for the light to start to fade so he could go out front and break the other window. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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