He went around, on the grass side, and gave Pete the full respectful berth of a man passing a stranger's dog, and he had very nearly cleared them — he could smell the beer and the river and somebody's cheap cologne, and the evening was, for four full seconds, going to let him go — when the shaved-head one, Ricky Solano, thirty years old and too old for this and knowing it somewhere underneath the beer, said to nobody and therefore to everybody, "Man's got his lunch with him," and the broad bearded one, Josh Parnell, said, "That's not lunch, that's a strategy. Eat the sandwich, gain the strength," and the fifth of them, Deacon Miles, twenty-five, who had been sitting silent on the low wall by the restrooms with his phone face-down on his knee and the air of a man waiting for his real life to start, laughed once, unwillingly, like a man whose laugh had been borrowed. And Kyle Rennick stepped off the gravel onto the path ahead of Tomas and turned and stood in the lamplight with his hands loose and his weight easy, and smiled the smile he had practiced on referees, and it did not reach anywhere near his eyes.
"Hold on, hold on," Kyle said, in the reasonable voice of a man hosting a segment. "Don't rush off. We're settling something. Northside debate club." He gestured at Tomas with two fingers, taking in the jeans, the clean shirt already losing its creases, the hands. "My friends say mechanic. I say mechanic is the cover story. Look at the hands on him. Those are working hands, boys. Respect the working man. My uncle's a working man. He fixes trucks and he could not fight off a cold, but we respect him." He let the group laugh and rode it like a man who knew exactly how long a laugh lasted. "Where you headed in such a hurry, working man? Night shift? They got you on nights with a lunch bag like a school kid?"
"Headed home," Tomas said. "You fellas have a good night. Take the ranger's advice on the cans, the fine isn't worth it."
It was the second time he tried to leave. He wants it noted, later, that he tried twice: once around the man in the path, and once through the conversation, offering them an exit dressed as advice, because a fine for the cans was a real thing and a small humiliation they could all share and walk away from as a story about a ranger and a mechanic, instead of the other kind of story. He stepped to go around Kyle Rennick on the river side, unhurried, lunch bag swinging, already composing the version he would tell Ben, in which the whole thing was Pete's elbows and a difference of opinion about sandwiches.
Kyle moved with him. It was not a drunk's drift. It was a step a trained man takes, quick and balanced, cutting the angle, and in that one step the last of Tomas's evening went out like a lamp. He had time, in the half-second it occupied, to register everything Hector would have wanted registered: that the man was sober enough where it counted, that the other four were arranging themselves now along the path behind and beside him in the unchoreographed choreography of men who had done this in schoolyards and intended to do it here, that the bandstand was empty, that the lamps made their islands and this was the dark water between them. And that he was not afraid, which he examined quickly and found to be true and not useful. Fear was not the problem. The problem was arithmetic. There were five of them and the path was narrow and he was thirty-nine years old with a daughter asleep at her grandmother's and a picture day on Friday.
"Kyle," said Ricky Solano, from behind him, in a voice that had a warning in it, or the beginning of one, and Kyle did not turn around.
"You walked past us like we're furniture," Kyle said, almost gently, stepping close enough that Tomas could see the fine scar through one eyebrow and smell the beer under the mint. "That's the thing about this town. Everybody in this town walks past. Ranger walks past. Jogger runs past." He looked Tomas up and down, slowly, for the audience, the overalls swapped now for jeans but still, in those eyes, a uniform: the tired stoop Tomas had carried out of the depot after a ten-hour shift, the slouch of a man saving himself for tomorrow, read by a twenty-six-year-old prospect with a mediocre record as the plain signature of weakness. "I don't think you could stop a bus if it rolled at you, mechanic. I think the buses stop themselves out of pity." The group made its sounds. Kyle put out one hand, flat, almost companionable, the way a man steadies a friend in a photograph, and laid it in the center of Tomas Herrera's chest. "Let's see how you stand," he said, and shoved.