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pocket and handed them to the driver. It was the first time all day I’d seen money change hands.
    The truck went north on Bathurst Street. Bathurst is long and narrow, and as you get farther north, apartment buildings line the street. Out of polite earshot, some Torontonians call it the Gaza Strip. It’s a middle-class Jewish neighbourhood peopled by families who have moved up the immigrant corridor of Bathurst Street from the earlier ghettos downtown.
    North of Steeles Avenue, about the time I began to ponder the question of our destination, the high-rises peter out. Rural Ontario breathes a few defiant last gasps, maple trees, oaks, and elms. Housing developments would take care of them in another half-generation. The truck caught the orange light at Highway 7. I pressed the accelerator and hung on its tail.
    Past Royal Downs Golf Club, the truck turned left on to a dirt road. The driver hadn’t signalled for the turn. My tires squealed when I followed him in. I didn’t follow him far. He stopped twenty yards down the dirt road. By the time I braked, the driver was jumping down from his cab.
    He waddled in my direction. His hands were hitching up his pants and he was speaking to me.
    â€œHey, you, shit-face,” he said.
    It wasn’t going to be an invitation for drinks at the Park Plaza.
    The dirt road was too narrow to turn the Volks around, and accelerating backwards on to Bathurst seemed more chancy than a confrontation with fatso. I got out of the car and watched the driver come the rest of the way toward me. The waddle had been upgraded to a swagger.
    â€œAll day I look in the rearview, I see you, turd,” the driver said. He was near enough that I could smell Jerry’s beer.
    â€œTenacious son of a gun, aren’t I,” I said.
    â€œYou and that fag car.”
    â€œSteady,” I said, “let’s leave the vehicle out of it.”
    Up close, with all the gut and beard and black T-shirt, the driver had a tendency to loom. He weighed about two-fifty, but he looked as fit as Oliver Hardy. That might help my cause if it came to fisticuffs. I didn’t want it to come to fisticuffs. One of us would get hurt. Probably me.
    â€œYou got a smart mouth, asshole,” the driver said.
    His punch began below his belt line, somewhere behind the ring of keys. He might as well have winged it in by way of Pearson International Airport, I had so much time to move my head and left shoulder inside the swing of the punch. His forearm landed on the back of my neck. It made a loud, slapping noise and rocked me forward. The slap was worse than the rock.
    He’d already launched another arcing shot with his left fist. Didn’t this guy watch the Saturday-afternoon fights on ABC-TV? Didn’t he know rainbows like he was throwing were what Marvelous Marvin Hagler had for lunch? I kept my arms high, and his punches thudded onto my elbows and shoulders. The punches didn’t have much steam, but they kept me swaying back and forth on my feet. Professional boxers call it rolling with the punches. I called it making the best of a bad situation.
    Every time the driver swung his arms, his black T-shirt pulled up over his belt and showed a strip of hairy gut. I opted for a display of offence. I dropped my right shoulder and aimed a fist at his bare belly button. It seemed an efficient punch, straight, hard, and not more than a foot. It made no impression on his stomach. Either I was power-deficient or the gut was all muscle.
    While my right hand was down and going about its useless manoeuvre, he landed one of his roundhouses. It hit hard on my ear. The inside of my head turned red. I staggered a couple of feet to my left and bumped up against the Volks. It didn’t have as much give as bouncing off the ropes in a ring.
    I squared around and faced my worthy opponent. He had a small, mean grin on his face, and his right hand was cocked over his shoulder. He was measuring me.
    The