So as the shopkeepers stood at the curb and yelled at us with increasingly-offended self-righteousness, my wife finished pulling into the spot, turned off the engine, got out, slammed the car door shut, and started walking away.
“Uh oh,” I thought, “this is not going to go well.” My wife was hell-bent on seeing through this particular course of action, and I knew from experience that there was no stopping her. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out too, shutting the passenger door behind me and hustling off to catch up with her before she got too far away.
We weren’t half a block from the car when I heard footsteps rushing up behind us. Within seconds a furious, hulking lunatic of a man brushed me aside and went straight for my wife. He was in crazed animal mode, and he grabbed my wife’s hair and started kicking at her.
In my mind at least, the scenes that follow play back in slow motion with a muffled soundtrack, because as soon as I saw that bald-headed thug grab my wife’s hair with his thick stubby hands, I was aware of only one thing in the whole world, and that was a man attacking my wife. I too went into crazed animal mode. I launched myself between them and tried to separate them, furiously prying the thug’s hands from my wife’s hair as he redirected his kicks at me.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a small crowd running towards us from the direction of the market, and I was relieved to realize the crowd included this thug’s father, an elderly man with a long beard who I thought would surely put a stop to this insanity. What father, after all, would allow his son to beat up on a woman? If I saw a son of mine beating up on a woman, I would kill him myself right there on the spot.
But this old man didn’t come running towards us to stop his son. He actually began egging his son on, and his other sons, not to be shown up in front of dear old dad, joined the melee.
Within moments my wife and I were surrounded by the brothers and their buddies from the street in a scuffling, confused mass of humanity. At one point someone threw a punch at me, but there were too many bodies knocking each other to and fro, and the fist merely glanced off my cheek.
Thug #1 continued to kick and scratch at my wife while his brothers and their buddies pulled me away from her, threw me into the street, and surrounded me like a pack of wolves. I quickly realized what was about to happen and I thought, “Oh man, this is not going to go well.”
As the wolf pack closed around me, my wife began screaming at the top of her lungs. It was a piercing, desperate, terrified and terrifying scream no human being should ever have to hear. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, not even when that woman upstairs was getting thrown around by her husband, and I hope to god I never hear a scream like that again.
…
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Don’t call the cops” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]