LITMIR.BIZ

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       “GO HOME!”

       “Go home!”

       “Go home!”

      I blinked in the late afternoon sun, processing what I was looking at across the parking lot. Two men shouting at a woman, one of them with something in his hand. The woman shouting back, struggling to retrieve what the man was grasping. Behind her several children, a couple of them wailing. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t even the second cousin twice removed of a fair fight. I let go my shopping cart and started to run.

       “Go home!”

       “Go home!”

       “Go home!”

      She was black—I was guessing Somali—wearing a flowing yellow dress and orange head scarf. The older of the two guys was chanting while a younger and skinnier man tugged at the scarf like an old-fashioned vagrant trying to steal laundry off the line. Both of them white. She was no pushover; she was yelling at them as she tried with one hand to keep the garment from being pulled off while shielding her kids with the other. As I ran I looked out at Broad, hoping for a cop, but saw only a steady stream of cars speeding in each direction past a jumble of west-side fast-food restaurants, car lots, and payday loan joints.

       “Go home!”

       “Go home!”

       “Go home!”

      “Stop it,” the woman said over the crying of her children. “Stop it!”

      “Hey!” I said as I reached them a few moments later. I took a second to catch my breath. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

      “Go home . . .” The older guy said, the chant dying on his lips as he stared at me. He was a hard-living fifty or so, dumpy and balding with patchy grizzle coating his face and chin. He wore loose-fitting tan cargo shorts and a blue checkered button-down short-sleeve shirt with the bottom two buttons undone, exposing a flash of belly as white as butcher-shop lard. The kid with the scarf in his hand was scrawny, midtwenties maybe, in jeans shorts and a white ribbed wifebeater, with a shaved head and a thin face I might have paid more attention to had my eyes not been drawn to a prominent tattoo on his neck that seemed to involve rifles, barbed wire, and the sun. I couldn’t tell if it represented a branch of the military or a prison break fantasy.

      “The fuck are you?” Grizzle said. His eyes were glassy and he swayed as he spoke. “Some kind of raghead lover?”

      Up close, I noticed for the first time the gun in a holster on his right side. Ohio’s an open carry state, making it perfectly legal. I took a step back. Legal, but cause for concern with a guy in that condition? That was another matter altogether.

      “I’m someone telling you to leave this lady alone.”

      “We’ll leave her alone when she goes home. Where she belongs.”

      “She is home, you nitwit. That’s probably why she’s buying groceries.”

      “How do we know she don’t have a bomb under that?” said the scrawny guy with the tattoo, tugging on the scarf as he pointed at her dress.

      “Stop it!” she said.

      “How do we know you don’t have shit for brains?” I said. “Do everybody a favor and beat it.”

      “Free country,” Tattoo said. “Except for terrorists.”

      “The only terrorists I see are you two clowns. Why don’t you crawl back under the rock where you came from and we can all go about our business?”

      “Make us,” Tattoo said, grinning.

      “Are you deaf on top of stupid?” I said, reaching out and tearing the end of the scarf from his hand. He looked at me in surprise, as if I were a magician at a kids’ birthday party who’d just pulled a penny from his ear. I turned toward the woman, who rewrapped her scarf without meeting my eyes. I was turning back to face the cowboys when out of the blue Tattoo leaped onto my back. I reached around to try to pull him off, wobbling like a top at the end of its spin, and then gasped as he wrapped his right arm around my throat and cut off my air. What the hell? I thought. This was supposed to be a simple grocery run. I gasped as black specks floated before my eyes like flies hovering over dogshit. I staggered, spun around once more, summed up my available options, settled on one, and fell backwards, hard, into the car behind me. The kid made an “oof” sound like a guy who didn’t realize the medicine ball he was catching was quite that heavy, and dropped off me like a leech doused in sea salt.

      I stepped away from him, inhaling deeply. “I said, beat it.”

      “Let’s

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