THERE WAS THE CAT, the one we called Lady Luck because we’d first found her, six weeks old, running through four lanes of traffic, now jumping and prancing on the back lawn, tossing something into the air and leaping after it, back arched, tail stiff, claws bared. I caught sight of her from an upstairs window when I should have been getting dressed for work and stayed where I was, towel around my waist, underwear in hand. It was a mouse she’d tossed, I could see that now, and it was alive. Or rather, what I really saw was its movement as the cat let it wriggle away, the grass quivering in a curving line toward a flower bed, though it didn’t get more than a few feet before she pounced, batting it down with both paws and holding it firm. Then she picked it up again, by its skinny tail, bucked her head so that it flung over her back, and twirled so she could trap it as soon as it landed. I knew the mouse was suffering, terribly, but I couldn’t help admiring Lady Luck’s hunting skill and taking pleasure in her success. She’d always been a skittish cat, cowering whenever strangers came near, often getting attacked by one of the neighborhood strays, and even though I knew it was ridiculous to project human emotions onto her, I assumed that catching the mouse would provide a necessary boost to her self-confidence. I probably didn’t think about it in quite those terms, but I did recall then, or maybe it was later, a fight I’d gotten into as a ten-year-old, the only one I’d ever instigated, though I’d been reluctantly drawn into plenty of others, usually by a sadistic neighbor who liked to beat me over the head with a rubber snake. This was a fight I’d asked for, challenging a kid who’d said something mildly insulting to me on the bus home from school. The kid was undersized like me, maybe a little smaller, a babyfaced redhead with big pink freckles everywhere, even on his lips and knuckles, and whatever insulting thing he’d said had sparked a cool rage I’d never felt before, an indignation that made me abandon the shy, shrinking self I’d always known and call out for everyone on the bus to hear, Zeek Field, four o’clock. Be there. It was one thing for the sadistic neighbor to beat me with a rubber snake or throw dog shit at me—I’d take that as a consequence of being small and badly dressed, an easy target—but I wouldn’t let a word pass from the babyfaced redhead, who should have tried to make himself invisible to avoid being harassed, as I did, though it never seemed to do any good. After I told him to meet me at Zeek Field, he should have hidden himself away for a few days and hoped everyone forgot my challenge, but there he was when I arrived, in fresh shorts and T-shirt, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he must have seen boxers do on TV. Half the other kids from the bus had shown up, too, standing around the baseball diamond, already cheering us on as I laid my bike beside the backstop. It hadn’t occurred to me to change clothes before coming. I’d just spent the last hour pacing from kitchen to living room, scarfing half a bag of Oreos, and now my mouth was dry, my school clothes stiff. I was probably wearing corduroys and a plaid shirt, or else jeans my mother had ironed like slacks so a white line showed down the middle of each leg. No wonder I got picked on daily. The redhead kept bouncing as I approached, smiling to himself or laughing at something I hadn’t heard, and the rest of the kids closed around us, calling out predictable things you’d always hear at a fight like this—kick his ass, show him who’s a pussy now—and rooting halfheartedly for one or the other of us, since all they really wanted was blood and pain. Who it belonged to didn’t matter. I’m guessing my sadistic neighbor was there, though I can’t remember for sure, giddily pounding a fist into a palm. I knew nothing about fighting, how to throw a punch or block one, and at first all I could do was heave a few big roundhouses that nudged the redhead’s shoulder and chest. The blows he landed weren’t any firmer, and the crowd grew restless, their taunts menacing. If we didn’t beat each other, I knew, they’d beat both of us worse. But then the redhead caught my nose with his forearm, hard, and I froze. There was a little trickle of blood onto my lips, and as I wiped it away, that cold rage growing colder, crystallizing, I could see in his face that he realized he’d made a mistake. All at once I knew exactly the right way to throw a punch, straight out from my chest to his jaw. He turned his face away, but I kept punching, the back of his head, his neck, until he went down on his knees. He was crying, I knew he was, but I jumped on him anyway, aware now that he was indeed smaller than I, quite a bit so, but that didn’t stop me from shoving his face into the pitcher’s mound, grinding cheek and nose into coarse dirt until other kids pulled me away. They carried me on their shoulders, howling in triumph, as if they’d been rooting for me all along. I’d given them more violence than they’d expected, they loved me for it, and if the sadistic neighbor was there, I want to believe I tossed him a look before getting on my bike and pedaling away, one that said, You’re next. But my rage had already thawed, or maybe evaporated, it was gone with the first punch, and on my way home I started sobbing. I wished I’d let the redhead’s insult pass, wished I’d kept to my shy, shrinking ways, not because I regretted what I’d done, but because I knew news of the fight would soon reach my parents, which it did, a day later. My mother called me aside after dinner to let me know what she’d heard from another boy’s mother and ask if it was true that I’d started the fight. I probably relayed whatever insulting thing the redhead had said, blubbering, expecting her to scold me, which she did, but far more gently than I’d anticipated. She said predictable things about ignoring hurtful words, about defending myself only when absolutely necessary. But in her voice I could hear something other than chastisement and disapproval, and I could see it in the edges of her frown, too. There was a burgeoning pride in her undersized son who was so often getting beaten over the head with a rubber snake, whose school clothes were sometimes dotted with dog shit, yes, this little guy had finally found a way to stand up for himself, and not only had he challenged another kid to a fight over a trivial insult, but he’d beaten that babyfaced redhead nose down in the dirt until he was a weeping bundle of freckles begging for mercy. This was what she’d always wanted for her child, a confidence born of independence, of standing strong in a world that tried to knock him down, and if others had to fall for him to feel good about himself, so be it. Wasn’t it what I wanted for my own daughter, now three, bossed around by older kids in her preschool class? When I dropped her off or picked her up, I could see already how she assumed the retreating manner of the smallest kid in the room, drifting to the edge of the story circle, the biggest and most aggressive of the others crowding forward and clamoring for the teacher’s attention. And all I could do was hope that next year, when she was no longer the smallest, she’d find some new peanut of a child to boss around in turn, and though that other child’s self-esteem might suffer, she’d just have to take it out on some kid who followed. As I watched my daughter through the window of her classroom, standing out of the way as bigger kids claimed the best toys and left her with nothing but an armless doll and a handful of faded letter blocks, I told myself that that other child was no concern of mine. And neither was the mouse, though it, of course, would have no such opportunity to take out its suffering on something else. Lady Luck carried it in her jaws now, gently, not wanting to crush it, not yet. She moved to the patio, a place she usually avoided because it was so open and exposed—evidence, I thought, that this game, however cruel, was good for her—and though I was too far away to see, I imagined the mouse’s tiny frame trembling against her teeth. What power she must have felt, what fierce giddy unstoppable joy. How could I not want her to feel this way always? How could I not want to feel it myself? She dropped the mouse on the patio’s concrete pad, and it scurried away, underneath a fern at its edge. For a moment it seemed that Lady Luck had lost sight of it, and I was already tugging on my underwear, ready to head out and pull aside the fern leaves to show her where it had gone. But her confusion was only a feint: soon enough, her paw shot out and dragged the mouse back into the open. And that was when I remembered, or maybe it was later—damn this associative mind, damn its love of patterns—an article I’d read in the previous Sunday’s Times, about one of the recent gang rapes in India, a portrait of the perpetrators and the culture that had spawned them. The authors described the vast hopeless slums of Mumbai, the poverty and boredom and feelings of worthlessness that characterized the lives of men who did nothing but play cards and drink all day in concrete shacks with tin roofs, who dubbed young women “prey” and hunted them because they felt they deserved more than what they had and because they had nothing better to do. After the rape, one of the men had gone straight home and told his mother what he’d done, boastfully, as if he knew she’d want to hear it. The article quoted her at length, saying first that what he’d done was wrong, of course it was, but why was that girl here to begin with, everyone knew this part of the city was dangerous after dark, and wasn’t she a harlot anyway, didn’t she already have her knickers down for some other man, and what was her boy supposed to do when her legs were spread for all the world to see? Her defensiveness hardly masked pride in the son who’d wrestled with the cruel world that kept him on his knees, who’d found a way to make it his own. Why should she care about a girl in skimpy clothes? Remembering her words then or later, I had no doubt that if she’d been with her son in the abandoned factory where he and three other men repeatedly raped the woman, a photojournalist, while her co-worker, tied up with her belt, listened from behind a partially crumbled wall, she would have held those legs apart so her son could squat between them, just as I would have pushed aside fern leaves to help Lady Luck find the mouse. But she didn’t need my help now, because there in the middle of the patio, exposed to anyone who wanted to watch, she happily chewed the mouse’s head loose from its body.