"Evening," she said, in the tone of a woman addressing a church meeting, and let the torch travel slowly over the five young men and come to rest, not accusingly, on Tomas. "Somebody want to tell me why my park looks like a hand of cards somebody dropped?"
"He attacked us," Kyle said, from the ground, with feeling, and then, feeling Dana's silence as keenly as everyone else, added, "He did. Tell her, Josh."
Josh, in the grass, considered the loyalty being requested of him and the condition of his tailbone and the empty hand he too had spent some seconds contemplating. "He didn't hit anyone," Josh said, to general astonishment including, visibly, his own. "That's the thing. He just kept putting us down. It was, it was like being folded."
"He put hands on all five of us," Kyle said desperately.
"One at a time, as I recall," said Ricky from his elbow, "as we became available."
Dana's torch did another slow circuit and her radio crackled and she thumbed it and said a few unhurried words into it, a location and a number and the phrase "no injuries reported as yet, stand the ambulance down to the car park," and Tomas felt something in his chest ease by one notch, because professionals arriving and speaking in complete sentences meant the evening was becoming paperwork, and paperwork he could do. Paperwork was a fence, and fences were where his life lived now. "Sir," Dana said to him. "I don't know you, but you're the one standing and you're the one not shouting, so I'll start with you. Name."
"Tomas Herrera."
"And these gentlemen are your friends, Tomas Herrera?"
"No, ma'am."
"Acquaintances?"
"We met by the water fountain," Tomas said. "They had opinions about the space I was taking up on the path. It developed."
"It developed," Dana repeated, and the torch dipped slightly, which among rangers is laughter's nearest available relation. "Anybody need a medic, speak now, and no points are deducted. Wrists, heads, anything." There was a general and sullen shaking of heads, except for Josh, who said his tailbone would like it recorded that it had been present at a historic event, and Kyle, who held up his right wrist and worked it in a circle with an expression of forensic concentration.
"It bends," Kyle announced.
"Then it's better off than your judgement, and we'll write both down," Dana said. "Up you get, all of you, one at a time, slowly, and you'll sit on that bench there like a school photograph while we wait for my colleagues, who are going to have questions so similar to mine that you'll be nostalgic for this conversation. You," she added to Pete, pleasantly, "with the phone. Keep it in your hand, don't put it away, don't touch the screen. Thank you. That's very sensible. I can always tell the sensible ones. They're the ones not sitting in gravel."
They arranged themselves on the bench in the order in which they had fallen, as if some instinct for narrative governed them still, Kyle at the end with his wrist cradled like a small animal, and Tomas stood a little apart with his hands visible and loose, and watched the lamps come fully on along the path and lay their orange circles down in a row toward the car park, and in the new light he could see what the dusk had been kind enough to hide: that his work trousers were filthy at the knees, that there was grass in his hair, that the torn button had taken a triangle of shirt with it, and that all of it together made him look exactly like a man who had been in a fight in a park, which was the one thing he had retired, eight years ago, in a room above a gymnasium in Columbus, promising a woman in the family court, who had since then become only a signature on a calendar of visitation orders and a voice on a phone twice a year, that the man in the cage was the last of him anybody would ever meet.