There was a crack in the fiberglass. It ran from the top of the door, where his elbow had hit, down at an angle about eight inches long, thin as a pencil line, with a little spider of smaller cracks at the top where the paint had chipped away to show the gray underneath. On a steel car, an elbow would have left nothing. A Corvette's body is fiberglass, and fiberglass, Dennis told me afterward in a voice like a man reading his own obituary, does not dent. It breaks.
Win looked at the crack for a long time. And the look on his face was not the look of a rich kid who has been embarrassed in front of a car wash. I did not understand it then. I only knew that I had expected him to be angry, and he was not angry. He was afraid.
"Oh, no," he said, very softly. "No, no, no."
Mrs. Prochazka was out of her lawn chair by then. She was seventy-one and had raised five boys, and she walked straight across the wet gravel in her orthopedic shoes and stood between Dennis and Win like a crossing guard. "Dennis Okonski," she said, "you go stand by that table. Rollie, turn off that hose. You," to Win, "don't you get up yet. Let me see that eye."
"I'm fine, ma'am," Win said. He was still looking at the door.
"You're not fine, you've been hit by an Okonski. Their grandfather threw a mule once. Hold still."
Somebody in the line had gone into the rectory to call. I don't know who. Maybe the bakery woman. By the time I had turned off the hose and walked back across the lot, Father Lisowski was coming out the back door of the rectory in his shirtsleeves with a dish towel full of ice, and behind him, already turning in off Middle Avenue, was a black-and-white Elyria police cruiser with its lights off.
I want to be fair to everybody in this story, and that includes Officer Vernell Tibbetts, who was about forty and had a mustache and a stomach and the patient, sorry face of a man who has been called to a great many back lots on a great many Saturdays. He got out of the car slowly. He looked at Win sitting against the tire with Father Lisowski's dish towel pressed to his face. He looked at Dennis standing by the folding table holding his own right hand. He looked at the Corvette, and at the crack in the door, and he said, "Well, that's a shame," and I could not tell which part he meant.
"Who wants to tell me," he said.