which the man would get Stern's boy, following him onto the lawn and pinning him against the drainpipe, while Stern, waiting upstairs, held his hands over his ears, blocking out the noise. The man would then, somehow, pick off Stern's wife in her kitchen and then drive upstairs and finish off Stern himself, cringing in his bedroom. Another night, Stern forced himself to examine the name on the man's mailbox. De Luccio. He looked it up in the telephone book that night and saw that there were eighteen others in the town. Even if he were to defeat the man, an army of relatives stood by to take his place. He wondered who he could pit against them and came up only with his married sister who lived in narrow circumstances above a store in San Diego. Once she had helped him in a snowball fight, and back to back they had done well together, until the action speeded up and ice balls began to get her in the breasts. "Stop it; she's a girl," Stern hollered, but a heavy ball split her brow and down she went, making a yowling, nasal sound. But she'd been game, standing firmly in the snow, puffing, blowing the hair out of her face, panting like a puppy. He imagined her now, back to back with him against the eighteen heavy-armed De Luccios, standing game as a puppy, until they all began to beat her breasts and easily knock her to the ground. Who else might have stood off the De Luccios? When alive, perhaps his Uncle Henny, the shoulder pad tycoon, a man of iron grip who'd been gassed in WW I. Once he had disarmed an aged knife wielder on a moving city bus. Uncle Henny would know how to handle the man. Stern could not see a picture of it in his mind, but he was sure that Uncle Henny would have been able to use his gassed lungs and steel grip to fend off the De Luccios. [Pg 50] [Pg 51] [Pg 51] His own father? There had been another De Luccio long years past, an orphan boy of supple athlete's body and golden hair who had kept Stern in terror for several years. The orphan would appear suddenly in an alley with a great laugh, fling Stern against a wall, lift him high, and drop him down, steal his jacket in the cold, and run away with it, come back, and punch Stern's eyes to slits. Stern never told his parents, afraid the orphan boy would come up to his three rooms, force his way in, and kill Stern's small father. One day, Stern stood talking to his father on the street when the orphan boy appeared, running a comb through his great piles of hair. "Who's that?" asked Stern's small father. "You know him, don't you?" "Sort of," said Stern,
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