Washington Park

"How about that," the first man said, looking through the chain link fence.

"What's going on?" A second man asked, seated in the nearby home dugout.

"I don't even know. Sam, you should come get a look at this," the first man said.

Sam exited the aging, blue-wooded shelter and stepped up to the fence. He stared across the open field beyond the baseball diamond's grass and saw the small dark mound emitting various shouts.

The barking mound was being pulled in front of the faroff trees toward a brighter mass with thin spikes jutting from the top.

The darker pile orderly bounced left as the second group convected the pointy tops from the center to the front where the crowds were slowly starting to meet.

There was a small uproar as the collections mashed across the park ground. Spiky tops mingled and suddenly fell into the dark wave. The larger, mobile team enveloped the group that had remained stationary as Sam saw a black straight line file out from the distant woods of Washington Park. The growing assembly became louder; Sam heard two consecutive bangs and parts of the three cliques scattered.

One group ran toward the fence and slowly their picket signs reemerged out from the top. Half of the group that had originally moved to the protestors stood recongealed to the right of the disorganized blur of black that consisted of their other half and the squad that had come out of the woods.

Sam left the field and walked into the crowd of people gathered near the fence where he read their peace-promoting mantras scrawled onto scraps attached to broom handles. He gravitated toward an older, bald man standing in the center of the congregation.

"What's going on?" Sam asked.

The squat man explained to Sam how a radical group of segregation seeking militants had secured a permit to parade on the grounds that day and that the people surrounding the two had come to march against them.

He went on to say that as the two camps meshed, a fight broke out; the awaiting police force came out from the alley where they had been and came down the block to disengage the factions. Apparently, one of the racist's Alsatian guard dogs had been unleashed upon the police and was killed.

Sam thanked the man and walked back behind the fence where he was informed that as he stood watching the riots, someone's errant softball had broken his car's windshield.