Ancient history for the day

Rico says he's happy to share Near-death in the Afternoon or The Temperature Also Rises, a true story:

It’s funny, but somehow death never looks like you expected it to when you stare it in the face. I never thought it would look like a twelve-year-old black kid. I never thought it would show itself to me on a hot and muggy July afternoon, a block and a half from Hemingway’s house in Key West. But death was all those things, this time, and real as shit.
My father, a dark-horse candidate for the Look Alike Contest, and I were doing the rounds of the island on our second day in the Keys. I’d come to Key West for the first time only two months before, the mid-point of a 12,000 mile excursion around the country, and I was taking him down hard-won byways I’d discovered on that earlier trip. We were strolling, as it was too hot and humid for anything rapid, down Whitehead Street, heading for the Truman Annex and the entrance to the road to the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor, when we passed two young men, hell, two children. We were on the sidewalk, and they were in the street, struggling with a bicycle. The machine was tipped on its side, the chain fouled with the restraining line of a long spearfishing gun.
Both of us, I’m sure, were having the same reaction to their plight: ‘Poor kids, wonder if they’d mind if I offered to help’. It’s how our minds work, you see. So I’m sure it was with the same shock that we heard the older kid’s response to our mute observation: “What are you lookin’ at?”
Here’s where environment distorts character. My father, a product of the Thirties, lives in La Jolla, while I, a product of the Sixties, lived, until recently, in Oakland; two more different places in California would be hard to find. He heard only a blustering child, while I heard the warning sounds of a young man with an attitude problem. I kept moving. He responded, flippantly, that he’d only been looking at the young man’s string caught in his chain. His comment, while literally true, and thus innocent in his eyes, was translated by the kid into a challenge. A street beef like that, in the innocent Thirties in which my father grew up, would be won by either superior wit, or superior lung power.
In the Nineties, however, a challenge to your manhood, even the short skinny manhood of a twelve-year-old, is settled by death. Which is how I came to be staring death in the face, that hot afternoon. Because the kid picked up his other fishing spear, the one with the nasty three-tined tip on it, and shoved it in the general direction of my gut. Hell, truth be told, in the general direction of my balls.
It’s odd, trying to focus on a wavering spear tip and on his hate-distorted face at the same time. I know, I know, all my teachers told me to watch the face, not the weapon, but there’s something so compelling about those shiny steel tips, the little barbs catching the light just so ahead of the bright yellow shaft…
The next problem is, I’m trapped between my father, who’s half not going to let some punk kid push us around and half disbelieving the kid’s serious anyway, and this angry young man, who’s totally not going to let some honkie tourists make him back down in front of what turned out to be his house and his family. So I’ve got one hand out to the side, trying to get my father to, in the vernacular, back da fuck up, and the other hand extended to both attempt to placate the kid and be in position to ward off those fucking tines, when and if they come within reach.
But the real problem, after turning forty and living in Oakland for a decade, is that I don’t dance anymore. In the game of life and death, I’ve learned that cowardice is not an issue for me. You want to put up a billboard claiming I’m chicken, hell, I’ll sign the damn thing. Survival, on the other hand, definitely is. So I know, in my gut, that when the kid decides that he really doesn’t like the look of these two looming white guys who are, in his mind, ‘dissing’ him, he’s going to try and stick me with that spear. And, way down in my gut, I know that when he does I’m going to defend myself, and my sweet idiot of a father, and if the stupid little kid in front of me dies in the process, that’s just how it’s going to be.
But then one of his relatives came out of the house, saying ‘Don’t pay him no mind’, to which I could only respond ‘You don’t pay him no mind, he’s not pointing that thing at you’. In the end, I guess, the kid just tired of the game, and wasn’t willing to pursue us down the street. So he turned away to fix his bicycle, setting the speargun down, and we continued our retreat. Though we were blocks away, looking for a policeman, before I stopped imagining the sound of a bicycle coming up behind us, a speargun laid over the handlebars.
But we never did find a policeman, not that whole afternoon, until it was well past being worth it to turn the little fuck in. My father, bless him, seemed to be worried that my urge to do my civic duty shit was going to land me in the middle of some race war in Key West. I, on the other hand, spent several hours in the dark that night, wrestling with each step of the disaster, and each of the ever-more-deadly legs the story could have taken. If we’d been more belligerent. If the kid had been stupider. Or faster. If the cops had come by at the right time. If things had gone bad… There were many other endings to the story. I didn’t like most of them at all.
We spent the next day wandering town, seeing the sights, finding new places. On one of my swings down Duval Street, I passed one of the many construction sites where they were repairing the ancient sewerage system under the streets. There I chanced upon Officer Madeiro of the KWPD, a slightly-graying middle-aged cop who’d seen it all. Just the kind of guy who might want to hear my story. Which he did, being the kind of cop I’d thought he would be. And he’d heard it all, as well; he knew exactly who the kid was, ‘always on that bicycle’, and how many times the kid had been in trouble before. We agreed that, if I’d made a timely report the day before and the district attorney was willing to take on a charge with an out-of-state witness and it went to Juvenile Court and the judge was willing to sentence the kid to twenty one days in the juvenile correctional facility in Miami, the kid would probably come back meaner and tougher than before. But he did say that he’d enjoy going around to the house later and ‘pinning his ears back’, so some justice might prevail out of the situation.
The next day my father had to go to Tampa on business. But I never stopped listening for those bike tires, not until the plane took off for Miami, not for a minute.