CHAPTER ONE

Barfighters were a minority species in Cheskis’s anger management
class. Rather than fight each other, most violent men find
it safer and more gratifying to assault their wives and children.
Class members tip-toed around the facts. Nothing was as serious
as the cops made it sound or they were framed altogether. Just
now, for example, Muhammad ended his story with another “I
swear to you.” The phrase ended his sentences like a Canadian
“ey.” Muhammad was some kind of Pakistani feather merchant,
a chubby little man with only a few strands of hair around his
head, all of them long and out of place. He’d had a street altercation
with a blood enemy that led to the enemy’s car windows
getting smashed with a club. Muhammad contended the
enemy had followed him, broken his own windows, and called
police. When he told this sad tale he was terribly convincing.
Muhammad could probably borrow money from the most hardened
cynic. But Cheskis and doubtless everyone else in the class
knew he was a lying sack of shit.
Cheskis often wondered whether the patient Lorraine, their
class instructor, had seen the files and knew the precise nature of
the deeds that planted pupils in her class. If so, she never gave it
away. She never challenged them when they interpreted events
like a roomful of verbal cubists. Lorraine was more concerned
with their future than their past. Cheskis suspected she was a
rare individual, someone truly capable of controlling her own
anger. If only she could convey her secret. But few of the class
members cared to know it, even though anger had scarred them
irretrievably.
Lorraine was in her thirties and slender, like a volleyballer.