The peace broke with the harsh metallic screech of a dirt bike engine revving entirely too close. Agrippa didn’t flinch. His eyes simply flicked toward the sound. A predatory reflex he had spent years trying to suppress. Five young men crested the small hill leading down to the playground. They weren’t riding the bike. One was pushing it. The exhaust smoking while the others flanked him like a ragged obnoxious honor guard. They looked to be in their early 20s. Old enough to know better, young enough to believe they were invincible.
They wore the uniform of suburban boredom. Muscle shirts, backward caps, expensive sneakers scuffed with intentional neglect. The one in the center, the one pushing the bike, seemed to be the gravitational pull of the group. He was tall, thick around the middle, but broad-shouldered with a loud braying laugh that immediately grated on Agrippa’s nerves. He carried a half-empty tallboy of beer, swinging it loosely in his right hand. Agrippa watched them objectively. He didn’t judge their clothes or their noise. He judged their mechanics.
The leader walked heavy on his heels. Poor balance. The two on his left were jittery, talking fast, compensating for insecurity with excess motion. The remaining two were quiet, lagging slightly behind. Followers. None of them looked like they had ever taken a punch. They dumped the dirt bike near the edge of the playground, right over a bed of marigolds the city had planted in the spring. The leader, Trent, as Agrippa would soon hear the others call him, crushed his empty beer can and tossed it into the bushes.
“Place is dead,” Trent announced, his voice carrying effortlessly across the playground. He looked around, his eyes sweeping over the mothers at the swings, the empty basketball court, and finally settling on Agrippa and Larry. Agrippa didn’t look away. He didn’t glare, either. He just offered a blank, unreadable stare. It was the same stare he used to give across the referee’s outstretched arm before the bell rang. A total absence of emotion.
Trent smirked, taking the lack of visible reaction as a sign of submissiveness. He nudged the guy next to him, a scrawny kid with a neck tattoo that looked like it was done in a basement. “Watch this,” Trent muttered. Agrippa sighed, a long, slow exhalation that ruffled his mustache. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. He didn’t want this. He was bone-tired. He had a half-eaten sleeve of saltines in his truck and a kid who needed to eat a real dinner and go to bed. He just wanted the world to leave him alone for one goddamn hour.
He looked over at Larry. The boy hadn’t noticed the intrusion. He was still meticulously backing his yellow truck up to a small mound of sand. Just keep walking, Agrippa thought, his eyes tracking Trent and his crew as they swaggered closer. Just keep walking and let us be. But the world, as Agrippa had learned long ago, rarely listened to what a tired man wanted. They didn’t walk past, they drifted into the playground like trash blowing across an empty lot, settling exactly where they were most in the way.