"You're silly," Stern said.
The man's house lay at a point equidistant between Stern's and the estate. Since Stern did not want to pass the man's house on foot anymore, he took to driving his car back and forth to the estate each day, leaving it at the estate edge each morning and picking it up at night. Once he was in his car at night, he had a choice of either driving directly past the man's house or taking a more roundabout route that avoided the man's house altogether. Each night, as he boarded the train, he would begin a struggle within himself as to which road to take. The roundabout road presented the more attractive view and Stern told himself there was no earthly reason why he should have to pass up the nicer scenery along this road. The houses were much handsomer and made Stern feel he lived in a more expensive neighborhood. Stern would start off along the finer road, but when he had gone fifty yards, he would throw his car into reverse, back up, and go down the road that led past the man's house. It was much shorter this way, of course, and Stern told himself now that distance should be the only consideration, that if he took the roundabout road, he was only doing it to avoid having to look at the man's house and was being a coward, afraid that the man would pull him out of the car and break his stomach. On the few occasions when he did follow the roundabout road all the way home, he would walk past his wife and son and lie in bed, sinking his teeth into his top lip. On most occasions, however, he drove right past the man's house, going very slowly to show he knew no fear. His license said, "Driver must wear glasses," and Stern could not drive well without them, but when he went past the man's house he slipped them off to present a picture of strength, squinting for sight so he could stay on the road. Past the house, he would duck down and slip them on again, shoulders hunched in such a way that if the man was looking after Stern, he would not see the glasses.
One night Stern drove by and saw the man's son, who would have been his own son's friend, digging in the dirt beside the curb. From that night on, Stern drove very close to the curb, imagining that he would suddenly speed up, catch the boy on his bumpers, and then go the remaining mile in seconds, disappearing undetected into his garage. And then he pictured a car fight in which the man would get Stern's boy, following him onto the lawn and pinning him against the drainpipe, while Stern, waiting upstairs, held his hands over his ears, blocking out the noise. The man would then, somehow, pick off Stern's wife in her kitchen and then drive upstairs and finish off Stern himself, cringing in his bedroom. Another night, Stern forced himself to examine the name on the man's mailbox. De Luccio. He looked it up in the telephone book that night and saw that there were eighteen others in the town. Even if he were to defeat the man, an army of relatives stood by to take his place. He wondered who he could pit against them and came up only with his married sister who lived in narrow circumstances above a store in San Diego. Once she had helped him in a snowball fight, and back to back they had done well together, until the action speeded up and ice balls began to get her in the breasts. "Stop it; she's a girl," Stern hollered, but a heavy ball split her brow and down she went, making a yowling, nasal sound. But she'd been game, standing firmly in the snow, puffing, blowing the hair out of her face, panting like a puppy. He imagined her now, back to back with him against the eighteen heavy-armed De Luccios, standing game as a puppy, until they all began to beat her breasts and easily knock her to the ground. Who else might have stood off the De Luccios? When alive, perhaps his Uncle Henny, the shoulder pad tycoon, a man of iron grip who'd been gassed in WW I. Once he had disarmed an aged knife wielder on a moving city bus. Uncle Henny would know how to handle the man. Stern could not see a picture of it in his mind, but he was sure that Uncle Henny would have been able to use his gassed lungs and steel grip to fend off the De Luccios.
His own father? There had been another De Luccio long years past, an orphan boy of supple athlete's body and golden hair who had kept Stern in terror for several years. The orphan would appear suddenly in an alley with a great laugh, fling Stern against a wall, lift him high, and drop him down, steal his jacket in the cold, and run away with it, come back, and punch Stern's eyes to slits. Stern never told his parents, afraid the orphan boy would come up to his three rooms, force his way in, and kill Stern's small father. One day, Stern stood talking to his father on the street when the orphan boy appeared, running a comb through his great piles of hair. "Who's that?" asked Stern's small father. "You know him, don't you?"
"Sort of," said Stern, his heart freezing.
"I think it's Rudy Vallee," said his father.
Others against the De Luccio army? How about his mother-in-law, the Hungarian woman? Stern's wife told him that once, as a little girl, she had been abused by a teacher and her Hungarian mother had gone to school and spat upon the antique teacher's face. Once, in an argument with his great-eyed wife, they both had sunk low and Stern had said, "Your mother didn't spit on the teacher. She peed on her." He saw her now against the De Luccios, slowly moving forward, peeing and spitting them backward until they turned on her and pummeled her old woman's stomach.
Stern took note of every detail of the man's house, a new one registering each night as he drove by. A television aerial. This was good. It meant the communications industry was getting through to the man, subtly driving home messages of Brotherhood. But he imagined the man watching only Westerns, contemptuously flicking off all shows that spoke of tolerance. Stern saw himself writing and producing a show about fair play, getting it shown one night on every channel, and forcing the man to watch it since the networks would be bare of Westerns.