That one was twenty-six, perhaps, compact and good-looking in the sharpened way of a man who cuts weight for a living, with a fighter's cauliflower beginning on one ear and a Northside sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to show forearms that had advertising on them. He was sitting on top of the cooler like a man on a porch he owned, and he was the only one not laughing anymore. He was watching the path. He was watching it the way Tomas had once watched the doors of arenas, not for anything in particular, but because watching was what the evening was for, and because a man sitting on a cooler in a public park with four friends and a case of beer and a mediocre professional record needed the evening to provide something, and had already been disappointed by a jogger.
Dana Cole came down the path from the footbridge then, with a flashlight on her belt and a radio on her shoulder and the unhurried walk of a ranger of twenty years' standing who had broken up everything a park could offer at least twice. She was forty-four and knew Tomas by sight from years of mornings, and she took in the cooler and the cans and the five of them with an expression Tomas recognized from his mother's repertoire, the one that meant a tally was being kept. "Gentlemen," she said, in a voice designed to carry exactly as far as it needed to. "You know the rule on the cans, and you know the rule on the hour. You've got the look of men finishing up."
"We're finishing, ma'am," said the one on the cooler, pleasantly, with a smile that had been practiced on referees. "Post-training hydration. We're athletes."
"Then hydrate like athletes and take the empties with you. The bin is six feet from your friend's knee and it has been waiting all evening for a contribution." Dana held the moment one beat longer than comfort allowed, in the manner of a woman whose authority did not depend on volume, and then she walked on toward the bandstand and the greyhound man and the rest of her rounds, and the five watched her go with the exaggerated respect of men performing innocence for an audience that had already left. Tomas, coming down the path toward the bend with his lunch bag in his hand, understood the whole geometry of it instantly and completely, the way you understand a room when you have spent your youth being paid to. The ranger was gone around the bandstand. The lamps made islands. The river made its noise. And the man on the cooler had already stood up, all in one unhurried motion, because the path had finally provided what the jogger had failed to.
"Evening," Tomas said, because his mother had raised him in a country where you greeted a room before you decided what kind of room it was, and he kept walking, not fast and not slow, on the line of the path that gave the group the most room and himself the clearest view of the river side, where the grass fell away and a man could step off the pavement if a conversation went bad. He had taken perhaps four steps into the bend when the tall one, the bouncing one, drifted — not stepped, drifted, with a drunk's plausible deniability — into the middle of the path and stood there scratching his stomach and looking at the sky, and the broad one with the beard laughed, a half-second late, and Tomas stopped, because stopping was free and walking into a man cost something, and he had spent eight years learning to count costs first.
"Pete," said the man who had been sitting on the cooler, in a tone of mild reproach that was not a reproach. "You're blocking the sidewalk, Pete. The gentleman can't get to his evening." Pete Kaminski grinned at Tomas over his shoulder, all elbows and good nature weaponized, and moved exactly one step sideways, which was the joke, and the group appreciated it in the manner it deserved.
"I'm in no hurry," Tomas said. "Path's wide. I'll go around."