All of which was in his hands that Monday morning under the Number 14, in the stiffness of his shoulder, in the way the town had suddenly decided to retell him to himself. He finished the alternator. He signed the sheet. At lunch he sat alone on purpose in the cab of a decommissioned bus the men used as a break room, and finally, because there was no putting it off, he called the number the police had given him.
The officer, a woman named Sergeant Amy Lindqvist, spoke with the clipped kindness of someone reading from a list she had already memorised for his benefit. The five young men had been charged, she said. Disorderly conduct for all of them, assault and attempted assault in varying degrees, Kyle Rennick and Ricky Solano carrying the heaviest weight because one had started it and the other had thrown the bottle that, mercifully, had missed everyone and died in the hedge. There would be court dates. There would, she warned him, be lawyers, and one of the lawyers had already used the phrase professional fighter in a tone that suggested Tomas's past might be presented as if he had been lying in wait in a public park with a sandwich and a children's entertainer, waiting to ambush five innocents.
"Was I supposed to fall down?" Tomas asked, before he could stop himself, and heard, in the small silence that followed, how tired he sounded.
"No, Mr. Herrera," Sergeant Lindqvist said. "You were supposed to do exactly what the video shows you doing, which, between us and for the record, is why you are the witness and not the accused. You controlled. You did not strike. You stopped when it was finished. Three separate bystanders have used the word gentle, which is not a word I get often in these reports."
Tomas looked out through the decommissioned bus's windscreen at the yard, at the rows of honest green buses steaming faintly in the morning cool. "I'm sorry for his trouble," he said, and meant it, which surprised him.
"He will want to say his own sorry," the sergeant said. "That is his business and I will not arrange it. I am telling you so it does not arrive as an ambush. You have had enough of those this week."
That afternoon he collected Sofia from school himself, because Rosa's arthritis had flared and because, if he was honest, he wanted the ordinariness of the gate, the backpacks, the shrieking, the crossing guard with her whistle and her absolute monarchy. He got the gate. He did not get ordinariness. He felt the whispers arrive before he heard any single word, the way weather arrives in an old injury. Two fathers he knew by sight, decent men, men who had helped him jump-start the car in February, performed the small, terrible pantomime of noticing him and deciding in real time whether a champion was a celebrity or a danger. A mother he did not know pulled her son, not roughly, not cruelly, just unmistakably, a half step closer as Tomas passed, and the boy, looking up, said something Tomas did not catch, and the mother said, "Hush," too quickly.
Sofia came out at a run with her lunchbox banging her knee and a painting of a bus stuck to a piece of card with heroic quantities of glue. She stopped in front of him and studied his face with Marisol's diagnostic calm. "You look like the depot," she announced. "All thinking." Then she took his hand for the crossing, because that was the rule and had always been the rule, video or no video, champion or no champion, and Tomas felt the small, sweating fingers close around his and thought, with a clarity that steadied him more than any breathing Hector had ever taught, that this was the record that mattered and the only title he had ever successfully defended.
"Papá," Sofia said, as they walked, swinging their joined hands in the approved manner, one swing per lamp post, "did you really used to have a belt? Like a championship belt? Not for trousers?"
"Who told you that?"
"Everybody," Sofia said, with vast tolerance for his innocence. "It is on the internet. Mrs. Daley showed us how to not believe everything on the internet using you as the example. She said it was a teachable moment." She considered. "She said you were very calm in the video, which is true, and that we should not ask you to demonstrate anything, which is also true, because demonstrating is for school and this is walking home."