It was a mistake to tell Khajee.

The morning after her uncle’s funeral, she invited me to go for a jog, said she needed to clear her head. So with my bearded face shrouded by my hoodie, together we ran the Camp Hill route, over the bridge, me with one eye out for cops. We ran down through Seibert and along the forest path. Standing at the base of the rock wall, I bent with my hands on my knees and sucked in air.

She said, “Let’s see if you’re finally worthy of the Tiger Claw secret.” It was the first time I’d heard a smile in her voice in days.

“Let me catch my breath.”

“No,” she snapped, shifting into a serious tone. “Now, when your body thinks you’re exhausted. You have to learn you have reserves you haven’t tapped.”

I knew what she was trying to do, using her coaching voice, disappearing into that role, because she didn’t want to be a mourning niece. But me, I wasn’t ready to play along with that script. My head was in a different space. “Look,” I said as I straightened, “I’ve got something to say, and you’re not going to like it.”

She listened without speaking, no expression as I told her about my arrangement with Sunday. Flatly, I explained about the fixed fight with Badder. As I went into my end of the bargain, the beatdown I was planning on administering to my father, her eyes — green no more but their true brown, deerlike — grew wide. This part felt like a confession, since I was still waffling between regret for accepting and anticipation of the chance to face him. When I finished talking, Khajee shook her head, took a few steps away from me, and said, “Revenge is all wrong. You aren’t the kind of person who would do this.”

I thought about all the things that sportswriters had written about me. Out of control. Brute Boy. No good. “Maybe I am that kind of person. Maybe I’ve been that kind of person all along.”

“Mac,” she said, facing me again. “The kind of person you are, that’s not just one thing set in stone. It’s not something you discover. It’s something you decide.”

We walked toward each other, and there was a weird vibe in the air, like maybe we were two brawlers squaring off, about to start swinging. I could see her trying to mask her disappointment. Up close now, I said, “Well, this decision’s already been made.”

She nodded and looked at the rock wall behind me. “Every decision has a consequence Mac. You’d do well to think that through. I’m going to jog home and try and get my head back in the game, get back to school. I need to restart my life, figure out a few things.”

Khajee, always with a better plan than me. I could tell by the way she said what she did that she was imagining running home alone. “That sounds good,” I told her. “Go do your thing. I’m going to do what I have to do.”

She winced. “Don’t do that, Mac. Don’t pretend you don’t have a choice when you do. I gotta go.” With that, she started trotting back up the path, and I watched her until she disappeared around a bend.

I wandered the other way, following the trickling water down to the Conodoguinet. On the banks, I bent for a handful of slim rocks, and for a while I skipped stones just like I did when I was a boy, watching the circles radiate across the water and dissipate. A memory of me and my dad together having a good time floated through my mind, the two of us not far from this place, catching crayfish for fun. I needed two red Solo cups, but he just used his hands, snatching them from the water with a pinch. I let go of these images and everything inside me they brought up. And for a time, I tried to think of nothing.

At first it felt a lot like what I’d heard at church, just being still and listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit. But after a while, all I heard was the buzz of traffic on the bridge overheard. Seems I was equally unskilled at meditation and prayer, and all I was really doing was wasting time chucking rocks in the water.

And so that night, in the same way Than’s consciousness had traveled on its way to its next form, I found myself taking a trip, but my destination was much more certain: the Fort Indiantown Gap Correctional Facility. I was seated in the front seat of Grunt’s van, and he had managed to drive the whole way from Camp Hill without uttering a sound. On edge and feeling a little crazy, I began playing a game with him. I’d say, “What’s six hundred and eight minus six hundred and eight?” and when he stayed silent, I’d say, “Right! Nothing!” For kicks, I also asked, “What’s Aquaman worth in a fight?” “What can you hear in space?” and “What’s the meaning of life?”

I couldn’t get a rise out of him, so I retreated to my MP3 player. A little Aerosmith goes a long way.

Finally we rolled into the parking lot where seven years earlier I’d refused to get out of my mom’s dilapidated Subaru. I saw the high cyclone fence my father had gripped with his fingers, staring my way. Then and now, curling barbed wire lined the top. Grunt drove us toward a guardhouse, and two towers cast spotlights roaming the yard. It was easy to imagine the men in those outposts, holding loaded rifles at the ready, trained to shoot on sight.

The uniformed woman at the guardhouse seemed to have been expecting us, and as we idled up to her window she turned to a computer screen. The gate before us rolled clear of the road. While it slid out of our way, she pointed and said, “Deliveries are straight ahead, left at the T. You’ll see the incinerator and beneath it, a big red door. That’s you.”

As we followed her instructions, I found myself trying to imagine my mom in this very place. About a year after his incarceration, not long after he got time added to his sentence for fighting, my father began writing her letters. She had joined a support group, stopped drinking, was volunteering at New Hope. Finally, accompanied by our parish priest, she agreed to visit. A half dozen trips later, she convinced me to go, said it would be good for all of us. “Forgiveness helps you as much as the person who wronged you, Eddie. There’s just no point in staying angry like this.” Once we arrived though, I looked at that barbed wire and remembered my father as he was on the night of the Civil War. I’m not sure what I told her about why I wouldn’t get out of the car, but the real truth is that I was scared, plain and simple.

But I wasn’t scared tonight. Instead, I was resigned. I didn’t want to accept Sunday’s claim, that I was a wolf at heart, but I couldn’t reject this chance to face my father. So I’d decided before Grunt had picked me up to just smack him around, give him just a slim taste of his old medicine, and call it a night.

Grunt parked by a stark brick building, one with a huge chimney climbing skyward. Even in the blackness of the night, I could see the white-gray smoke billowing from its top. I wondered what dynamo was inside that structure, buried but burning still.

We left the van and headed for the red door, and when I pulled it back I was shocked to see Blalock standing there. “Good evening, Edward,” he said. “Always a pleasure.”

Grunt and I followed him along a cramped hallway lined with overhead pipes and drooping wires. We turned right and then left, passed through a shadowed area where I guess the light bulb had died out. I had the odd impression that we were descending into the guts of some vast mechanical organism. At one point, we crossed over a rickety catwalk and down below us, in a huge open chamber, great furnaces roared. Conveyer belts fed material into open mouths alive with flame, and even from high above, I could feel the waves of heat on my cheeks, the palms of my hands. When I inhaled, the air singed my nostrils. There were a couple men down there on the floor — shirtless with hard hats — but I couldn’t understand how they survived. More than workers, they looked to me like sinners condemned to some unendurable penance.

At the other end of the catwalk, we passed through one more hallway and then entered a large room. Inside were two gigantic metal eggs, each twenty feet around and ringed with dials and valves. They rumbled low and angry. I took these to be boilers and decided we were positioned over the fiery machines below.

In the open space between the twin boilers, a group of men stood around a rough circle of fold-out chairs. I recognized Sunday, but not the other three. One wore a suit and tie, two were in prison guard uniforms.

Blalock said, “You should be grateful. Mr. Sunday called in a lot of favors to arrange this. But he’s convinced it’s worth it, giving you this. It represents a significant allocation of resources.”

“That’s fine,” I said, mostly to shut him up.

As we neared Sunday, he broke from the others and extended a hand my way. I shook it, and he said, “Here’s the man himself, the star of our show.” I turned to see if the other men wanted to shake, but they kept their hands at their sides. One of the prison guards, a stocky guy, folded his bulging arms and stared at me hard.

I scanned the room and said, “So where’s he at?”

“Patience,” Sunday advised. “You’ll live longer and won’t seem so rude.”

I couldn’t give a crap how I seemed, but I knew there was no point in saying this.

Sunday slipped a hand over up behind my neck, a power display for the others. “A few rules before we begin. I promised you a chance to reckon with your father and I’m a man of my word. So no one here will intervene unless it’s clear you’re in over your head.”

“Ain’t likely,” the thicker guard said. He’d been searching my face before, looking for a resemblance. I wonder what else he knew to make him say this.

“Be that as it may,” Sunday continued, a little annoyed, “it’s important too that you not inflict any damage requiring medical attention. You can rough up your old man all you want. Bloody his face. Give him a good stomping. Anything the infirmary here can handle we can contain, even a few stitches. But if we need an ambulance, the situation gets more complicated. Understood?”

I nodded. No need for them to know it, but this was all in line with my plan.

Sunday said, “This is important. I need to hear you say it.”

“You betcha,” I said, ticked at being pushed. “I’m not here to kill the guy. This is just going to be a friendly family get-together. I thought there would be cake and ice cream.”

Sunday grinned. “Sarcasm is the language of the ignorant, Kid. Don’t think so little of yourself.”

After the pep talk, we all waited together. Sunday and the guy in the suit sat down and whispered. Grunt took a post by the door. Blalock checked his phone, illuminating his birdish face in the darkness. I paced back and forth by one of the boilers, feeling the radiant heat. That thick guard kept an eye on me and popped his knuckles.

When the door to the catwalk swung open, we all turned as one to the two figures stepping through. The hallway light cast them in silhouette, so they had to come forward before I could see the big one in the back was a uniformed guard, holding a nightstick in both hands. The one in the front wore flip-flops and was dressed in an orange jumpsuit with short sleeves and had his hands chained at the wrist. But there was something wrong.

“That’s not my father,” I announced, before I had a chance to consider my words.

The man stopped walking about ten feet away. Frozen in place, he said, “Eddie?”

Sunday motioned with one hand, and the guard behind the chained man pushed him forward, closer to me. I took a few steps in his direction, and we stood face-to-face. He was silent while I looked him over. This man was forty, fifty pounds lighter than my father, and surely a few inches shorter. His hair thin, his cheeks gaunt, his eyes without fire. This man was wearing wire-rim glasses.

But when he spoke, when he licked his lips and searched my face and actually smiled a bit and said, “Eddie, what are you doing here?” I recognized his voice with absolute certainty. It simply didn’t go with this body, like in a sci-fi movie where two people switch minds or something.

He leaned forward, and I think he would have tried to hug me but for the handcuffs, and I reared back. “You’re thinking of the wrong scene,” I said.

Now my father scanned the other people in the boiler room. His eyes fixed on one and he named him, his tone not hiding his disdain. “Sunday.” But quickly he turned back to me. “I’d heard you were on the run.”

I was surprised he kept tabs on me, that I was even on his radar, but I didn’t want to give that away. “I didn’t run far.”

Sunday stepped forward, put a hand on my father’s shoulder. “Don’t worry Victor. We’ve taken him in and are watching over him. He’s family.”

My father’s face, twisted in anger, suddenly looked quite familiar. “So help me God, Sunday, if you —”

Sunday waved a hand dismissively and stepped away, taking a position in front of Grunt. “Forgive me if I’m not in the mood for a series of empty threats.” He shifted his gaze to the guard. “Lose the cuffs.”

The guard stepped in between me and my father, yanked his hands forward by the chain, and pulled a key ring from his belt. I noticed the chunky guard who had been eyeing me up reach for his holster. With a thumb, he unsnapped the flap.

In turn, my father rubbed each wrist with the opposite hand, and I saw black-green ink covering his forearms. One displayed a huge cross, slightly lopsided, and the other broadcast the message “Christ Alive in Me!!” He saw me looking and I said, “You’re freakin’ kidding me, right? You’re going to tell me you found Jesus in here?”

My father grinned and shook his head. “More like He found me.”

“He who was lost has been found,” I said. “Praise the Lord and pass the cheese whiz.”

“Don’t mock the Lord, boy.” This came from the old man, the one in the suit, still seated. He looked at Sunday and said, “Can we get on with this? I didn’t pay for a conversation.”

My father’s forehead knotted in confusion, and he looked around as if some answer could be found. Blalock saw the same thing I did and said, “Allow me to articulate your dawning epiphany Victor, in parlance you will comprehend: Your boy is here to even the score.”

My father looked at me for confirmation, his eyes tightening, and I nodded. And with this, the whole endeavor returned to my mind. I was over the notion that yes, clearly he was physically not the man he used to be. I’d expected us to be equals, but certainly he was smaller. Still, he was larger now than I was in fourth grade, when he ripped an extension cord from the wall and whipped me with it, just cause the Raiders missed a field goal and I had the nerve to say, “Tough luck.” He was larger than I was the day I dumped his liquor down the drain, an act of rebellion that ended with him smacking me with a damn spatula, chasing me in my socks out into the autumn leaves behind the yellow house. His size advantage had never stopped him then, and it wouldn’t stop me now.

Sunday said, “Let’s begin then, shall we?”

Everyone stepped back, leaving us in the center of a loose circle. I slipped off my hoodie and tossed it into a corner. My father watched this and said, “I don’t understand. Listen Eddie, I’m not sure what this jerk’s got you involved in, but you can’t trust him.”

A laugh rattled from me. “He’s the guy I can’t trust in this room? That’s what you’re going to tell me?”

“Enough talk,” Sunday shouted, his voice agitated now. “Eddie, if you can’t follow through on what we discussed, I’ll have Grunt take your place.”

I turned to the big man, standing with this arms crossed by the catwalk, statue-like. Then I told Sunday, “No. I fight my own battles.”

“Fight?” my father echoed. “No way am I going to fight you, Eddie.”

Hearing him say this, which somehow I’d been expecting since I saw him, tightened my hands into fists, and in the next instant I was streaking forward, plowing a punch sideways across his chin. It snapped his head hard to the right and he took a step back, shook it off, and then wide-eyed said, “That’s one hell of a cross.”

I slid easily into a fighting stance, the familiar blood rising. “I got a lot more than that.”

But my father remained flat-footed. “Look Francis,” he said to Sunday. “I’m not sure what you expected would happen here tonight, but if you think I’m going to fight my son for your sick thrills, you’re out of your mind.”

“I wanted this,” I told him. “This was my idea.”

My father looked at me, mouth open in shock.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “This scene has kept me company on a lot of long nights.” The adrenaline was taking hold of me now, and the thrill of all those violent fantasies settled in me like a fever.

As my father stared my way, something shifted in his eyes. Finally he said, “I understand now.” With that, he knelt on the concrete floor, tucked his hands behind his back, and lifted his face. “I was a drunken man, fallen and wrecked, full of hate and spite. You and your mom deserved way better, and me getting locked up was a blessing for us all. I’ve begged forgiveness for my many sins, prayed a thousand nights for absolution, from your mother and from God. They’ve given me their answers, and I guess now it’s time for you to give me yours.”

The man with Sunday dabbed a handkerchief to his forehead and said, “What kind of maudlin BS is all this?”

I reached down and with both hands took hold of my father’s orange collar. Twisting my fists I lifted him to his feet. “Be a man,” I said. What he used to say to me.

Weakly, he stood before me, his arms still behind his back. “I won’t hit you, son.”

My left hand held him up and I cocked my right, like I was pulling back a nocked arrow. I was thinking of a cool line to say — You picked the wrong night to be a pacifist — I’m not your son — when my fist flew forward, flattening his nose and snapping his head back. Only my grip on his collar kept him from falling, and I’ll confess a certain thrill at seeing his eyes roll. I decided I wanted some evidence of his pain, a trail of blood, a shattered tooth, and I drew back my fist again.

“Eddie,” he got out before I pounded him to silence.

I could feel his weight as his legs went limp, and I released him, letting his body collapse to the concrete in a heap. “Come on!” I shouted. “At least put up a fight.”

Facedown on his knees and elbows, he said, “I won’t.”

As he turned to look at me, I stepped in and swung my right foot into his gut, which made a satisfying crunch. Could be I broke a couple ribs, and I didn’t give a damn about Sunday’s rules. My father doubled over, curled away from me. To my side, the man with Sunday mumbled something about “hardly seems sporting” but I couldn’t have cared less. My plan of a soft beatdown was abandoned, and I fell on my father’s fragile form, kneeling above him. I whaled away with righteous fury, no hint of pity or mercy.

The sounds he made were pathetic, but I found no further satisfaction in the beating. It came to feel more like an obligation than a pleasure. I paused to catch my breath, and in that break I recognized something. The chamber at the center of my heart, which I’d expected to surge with revenge or justice, remained empty. It was hollow.

His face, I thought. I just need to see his face. So I grabbed him by the shoulders and roughly flipped him to his back, with the full intention of mounting him and returning to his punishment. Only when I rolled him over, and the light above us flashed on his face, he wasn’t crying as I’d imagined. He didn’t look hurt or scared, or any of the things I’d hoped for. Instead his eyes were flat, deadened. I saw the stubble of beard covering his gaunt cheeks. My father looked resigned to whatever grim fate his future held.

This was a look I knew all too well. The man in the boxcar. My mom. This was a look I’d surely worn back in that mothball closet. I stood up, stepped away.

Those gathered around us stopped cheering, and only then did I really register that they’d been applauding.

I stepped over my father’s body and walked to where I’d dropped my hoodie, snatched it off the ground. Behind me, I heard whispering, and when I turned the man with Sunday was leaning into him, looking my way. Sunday nodded, then said, “Eddie, you won’t get this chance again. You should finish him off.”

I looked at my father, sitting up now on the floor with his elbows draped over his knees. I shook my head. “There’s nothing left to finish. He’s done.”

I headed toward the catwalk only to find my path blocked by Grunt, who planted his feet and squared his shoulders. My hackles were up and I didn’t stop.

Sunday caught up to me from behind me and took me by the arm. He turned me so I was again facing my father, who had staggered up and was now standing on shaky legs. “You’re going to let him off that easy? This is the guy who beat your own mother, disfigured her for life. He’s at your mercy.”

My father, bent slightly, took a few steps toward us, and Sunday ushered me closer. We faced each other and Sunday egged me on. “He deserves more. Did he ever go easy on you?”

I stared into my father’s emotionless face, like some mask he was wearing. I watched it soften, grow tender, and the thinnest of smiles took shape. “It’s okay, son. Do what you have to do. I’ll understand. He’s right that I deserve it. Later, just know that I’m sorry and that I’ll always love you because —”

My hand flashed out, grabbing his throat and trapping his words. And I was shoving him backward, hard and fast, so quick his feet almost couldn’t keep up. We charged straight past the old man who came with Sunday, straight past the prison guard with the nightstick, and only stopped when we hit a wall, which I smacked his head into. I pinned him against those thick bricks, still gripping his throat. “There’s nothing you have to say I want to hear. There’s nothing you can do to make up for what you did. I don’t forgive you. I don’t pity you. I don’t hate you.”

Here, I released his neck and he took in a deep breath. I said, “You’re nothing to me.”

I turned and walked past the others, zipped up my jacket and slid the hood over my head, then marched up to Grunt, still blocking my path. He eyed me hard, and I felt ready for anything. But Sunday raised a hand. “We’ve got a long drive home,” he said. “The show here is over.”