Dennis hit him.
It was not a movie punch. In the movies there is a swing and a sound like somebody slapping a side of beef, and the guy flies backward over a table, and then the music comes in. What happened in the back lot of Saint Casimir's was faster and uglier and much quieter than that. Dennis's right hand came up from his hip in a short straight line, the way his father had shown him once in their garage, and it caught Win on the left side of the face, on the cheekbone just under the eye, and there was a sound like a dropped bag of marbles. Win's head turned. His knees went. He fell sideways against the Corvette, and his elbow hit the driver's door at the top, just under the window, and the door made a sound I had never heard a car make before, a dry little crack like a tree branch in winter.
Then Win was sitting on the gravel with his back against the front tire and his hand over his eye, and the hose was still running, and the five-dollar bill had drifted all the way into the drain grate and stuck there.
Nobody said anything. Simple Minds was still playing on Mrs. Prochazka's radio. Don't you forget about me. I will remember that for the rest of my life, because it was so stupid, and because nobody thought to turn it off.
Dennis was standing over him holding his right hand in his left. He was looking at the hand as if it belonged to somebody else. Later I would learn that he had broken the fifth metacarpal, the long bone behind the little finger, the injury doctors call a boxer's fracture because people who punch for a living break it all the time. Dennis did not punch for a living. Dennis had never hit another person in his life, except his brother Stash when they were nine and seven, and that had been with a pillow.
"Oh," Dennis said. Just that. "Oh."
Win took his hand away from his face. There was no blood, which surprised me. But the skin under his eye was already swelling, puffing up shiny and pink, and there was a thin split at the top of his cheekbone where Dennis's knuckle had caught it. He blinked at us. Then he twisted around, still on the ground, and looked at the door of the Corvette.