"To the dance he came,

To tryst by moonlight,

Forlorn with shame—

With his eternal lover, Night.”

-In the Land of Ham

“Ping,” sounded the steely pimp cane, as the tip came down in the concrete gutter.

The woman lay to his front left.

The three Latinos stood in a triangle, the leader, in the blue slacks and button shirt, instinctively going for his gun, strapped under the dark blue vest that so suavely accentuated his shirt and slacks. He then looked at the drone nests covering the intersection, one shot to pieces, but the other three blinking a stifling blue.

Tom Jones liked feeling bullet proof, liked the jaunt in his step that came of walking with a pimp cane. And so he smiled, magnanimously, as if he owned the corner, and pointed down the road to Endsor way, letting them know that they were free to leave if they so chose.

The leader smirked and stepped off the sidewalk, with a deliberate, leopard-like step of a testing nature, his eyes as narrowed as his mustache, as tightly squinted as the crease of his curling mouth. Once his snakeskin shoes scrapped resoundingly on the asphalt he took a long lazy pivot out and around, effectively placing Tom in a vice.

Simultaneously, the thin greaser in the hoody stepped forward, drawing a telescopic baton from the slot pocket and deploying it with a raspy click.

At the same time, the stocky greaser in the overalls stepped nearly on the woman as he flanked Tom and fitted a set of brass knuckles on one meaty fist, the woman scurrying on her hips and hands back into the weeds at the edge of the sidewalk where the wall of something old—Tom forgot what—crumbled into red brick flakes, stone and powdered concrete.

Tom permitted himself a sigh as the dapper leader drew a wicked long knife in an ice pick grip, then pressed a gravity lever with his thumb and with a clack and steely ring he now held a slender bayonet of a knife—a mean tool of the night.

Tom knew he was dead, but his confidence was merely bolstered by this affirmed realization.

The leader was closest. Tom hefted the pimp can overhead, holding it by the middle and swung it down at the leader’s head. He meant to strike the head and then realized he was too far off. He took an awkward lurch forward, feeling his hip catch, and knew anew, that his slow stroke would still fall short. He cursed himself for failing to strike a blow at his own killing, even as the supplely muscled body of the leader rippled under his thin, form-fit clothes, and the thin-lipped greaser smirked his lethal smile.

Then, as if of a mind of its own, the cane slipped forward in his grasp, snaking through his hand in an undulating—or was it his imagination and his sweaty palm had failed to hold the thing tight, the thing he had staked his slim hopes of heroism upon—effectively extending his reach.

Did he recover his grip—as he would have told it afterward—or did the tip of that pointy, steel cane snake about the base of his hand and hold on as the heavy mahogany globe at its end smashed resoundingly into the lightly shoed foot of the smirking knife-wielder, his face cracking into a thousand-pained mask of agony even as his foot shattered under the weight of oiled mahogany and stainless steel?

“Ahhhhgggr!” went up the low moan of the fallen man as he fell backward onto the cracked asphalt, steel killing knife still held in his hand, the other hand clutching for the ruin of a foot that flopped as awkwardly as Tom’s hip had a moment ago, and oozed blood from blue socks from which protruded sharp white bones.

The still, after-rain night suddenly crackled and he could smell the ionization, as one does before a storm.

There was not time, however for Tom to savor his last defiant stroke, for the thin man was upon him, bringing that black stack of steel mini-pipes down upon his old, thin-skinned and bare, head. The stroke came cleanly down upon his head, but there was only a vague pressure, for a derby hat of uncommonly resilient cloth absorbed the blow, causing the skinny greaser to hop backward as his swinging arm recoiled from the blow that bounced back from the apparently rubberized hat.

Amazed worry flooded the previously narrowed eyes of the thin man, who deployed a razor in his left hand from the pocket of his pants, as the stocky bruiser shuffled down off the curb to give battle—and a strange thing came to pass!

Behind the stocky man, heard over the low moans of the leader dragging himself back to a sitting position, rose a savage ululation, the singing of some such song as might have, long ago, been chanted in a jungle grove. All eyes turned to the crazed figure from which the erotically brutal song issued.

The medical worker was bounding about in the weeds, doing ungainly pirouettes as she tore off her clothes, thrashed her puff-ball head of hair about under the street light and wagged her breasts at the moon, which had just peeked from behind the shifting banks of cloud.

“Ululululueeee!” she chanted.

The song caused a sensation of youthful pride in Tom’s weary limbs. For he felt the woman was cheering him on in his battle with these savage greasers.

No sooner had this thought formed in his mind, was Tom Jones leaping through the intervening distance—a full six feet and beyond, he would have reckoned if he had any conscious thought that he could cover it before the Rotund One was upon him. Tom fairly leaped past the bony greaser as the head of the clubbed pimp cane swung about in a glittering black arc and sent that narrow head flying from the chicken neck which attached it—inadequately it would seem—to those gaunt shoulders.

“Ulululululululuay!” screeched the furiously twirling woman idiot, eyes glaring insanely up at the moon.

Then it came, the shearing of his flesh, the letting loose of his blood, the dastardly slashing of his left shin with that big knife—whose wielder he had lost track of—cut his leg from a seated position. Tom’s instinct was to bound up and away to protect his long unused family jewels, but as he leaped high, the cane grew too heavy for him to leap over the half prone man, and he simply jumped up, jumped higher than he ever had, jumped higher than he ever would have imagined, clearing his own height before he came down, heels first onto the chest of that dapper killer—the chest that splintered like a wicker basket under the tires of a car.

A fountain of blood sprouted from the mouth of the mortally surprised and wide-eyed trampoline as he bounded off of the crunching springboard—forever ruining its remaining elasticity—avoiding the bullish rush of the wide fool in overalls, who was swinging his brass knuckles like Thor’s hammer.

Tom landed with a twenty year swing in his hips, a childish spring in his ankles, and a mighty-feeling roundness of bicep and soundness of shoulder that washed the years away.

“Ulululululueee!” screeched the crazed woman, now dancing naked out into the street, circling the stocky brute who had felled her with that cruel slap. The man looked at her, flinched, looked at Tom, and then rolled his shoulders forward and came on with his fists up, one with knuckles of brass.

Tom thought how easily it would be to stick this fool to the body with a jab—if only he were a young middleweight—and drop him. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind, then with a glimmer of steel flashing silvery in the moonlight, Tom lunged forward with the cane, held right below the pummel, like a sword, and the cold length of mahogany-inlaid steel “squished” through that wide torso, taking the brute under the heart, in the neighborhood of the spleen and passing out his back with the sound of a broken rib.

Looking into the dying eyes of the dumfounded thug, Tom drew the cane slowly out of the falling body as the man fell first to one knee and then lay back in repose.

A street sign clapped in the wind.

The streetlights whined in the background.

The traffic lights seemed to sing like sirens as they squeaked back and forth over the intersection, in the wind that scours the rainy mist from the rain-soaked world in the wake of the cleansing deluge.

Tom Jones stood strong, vital, confident—alive for the first night in thirty years as a sultry voice by his side sang beautifully of things he could not have fathomed were he able to comprehend the meaning of those words.

And Night kissed his lips with her wet breeze.