There were several mysteries on the day that Doug Feldman fought Hobie Eisenman in front of Beth Ami Synagogue while a gaggle of astonished boys and girls looked on. There were the usual enigmas: why the sun so reliably warmed the noisy crowd of children along Palm Avenue, why the breeze so democratically swept along the broad stretch of pavement whereon the kids waited for their parents to drive them home from Hebrew school, why the ground was so solid not only in Tampa, but in cities everywhere around a sphere with a core of fire. But beyond these daily curiosities, the battle of Doug and Hobie offered several new puzzles, some of which give up their secrets grudgingly. What moved Doug to defend his sister Cherise when Hobie harassed her? What departed from Doug’s consciousness during the thirty seconds of the fight? And why, years later, when Doug thought back to his Hebrew school days from the air-conditioned perch of a public defender’s office above busy Kennedy Boulevard, was it this combat that he remembered and almost nothing else? Imagine him now, looking out his window as the cars hurry over the Hillsborough River Bridge and past the silver minarets of the University of Tampa. Doug’s thinking – again – of that bright Florida day when he was nine years old and Cherise, eleven, was trying to fend off insolent Hobie….
They were out in the open air, waiting for their father to drive up in his Ford...
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