For a long while she was nothing more to me than one of those skirted beings whom boys at a certain age disdain to play with. Just how I came to love her, timidly, and with secret blushes, I do not know. Rut that I did was brought home to me one night, the first night that Ned wore his long pants. Us fellers were seated on the curb before an apartment house where she had gone in. The young trees had not outgrown their boxes then. V Street was lined with them. When our legs grew cramped and stiff from the cold of the stone, we’d stand around a box and whittle it. I like to think now that there was a hidden purpose in the way we hacked them with our knives. I like to feel that something deep in me responded to the trees, the young trees that whinnied like colts impatient to be let free… On the particular night I have in mind, we were waiting for the top-floor light to go out. We wanted to see Avey leave the flat. This night she stayed longer than usual and gave us a chance to complete the plans of how we were going to stone and beat that feller on the top floor out of town. Ned especially had it in for him. He was about to throw a brick up at the window when at last the room went dark. Some minutes passed. Then Avey, as unconcerned as if she had been paying an old-maid aunt a visit, came out. I dont remember what she had on, and all that sort of thing. Rut I do know that I turned hot as bare pavements in the summertime at Ned’s boast: “Hell, bet I could get her too if you little niggers weren’t always spying and crabbing everything.” I didnt say a word to him. It wasnt my way then. I just stood there like the others, and something like a fuse burned up inside of me. She never noticed us, hut swung along lazy and easy as anything. We sauntered to the corner and watched her till her door banged to. Ned repeated what he’d said. I didnt seem to care. Sitting around old Musl-Head’s bread box, the discussion began. “Hang if I can see how she gets away with it,” Doc started. Ned knew, of course. There was nothing he didnt know when it came to women. He dilated on the emotional needs of girls. Said they werent much different from men in that respect. And concluded with the solemn avowal: “It does em good.” None of us liked Ned much. We all talked dirt; but it was the way he said it. And then too, a couple of the fellers had sisters and had caught Ned playing with them. Rut there was no disputing the superiority of his smutty wisdom. Bubs Sanborn, whose mother was friendly with Avey’s, had overheard the old ladies talking. “Avey’s mother’s ont her,” overheard the old ladies talking. “Avey’s mother’s ont her,” he said. We thought that only natural and began to guess at what would happen. Some one said she’d marry that feller on the top floor. Ned called that a lie because Avey was going to marry nobody but him. We had our doubts about that, but we did agree that she’d soon leave school and marry some one. The gang broke up, and I went home, picturing myself as married.

At every performance lots of white people wept. And almost every Sunday while they were on tour some white minister invited the Negro actor who played God to address his congregation and thus help improve race relations — because almost everywhere they needed improving. Although the play had been the hit of the decade in New York, its Negro actors and singers were paid much less than white actors and singers would have been paid for performing it. And, although the white producer and his backers made more than half a million dollars, the colored troupers on tour lived in cheap hotels and often slept in beds that were full of bugs. Only the actor who played God would sometimes, by the hardest, achieve accommodations in a white hotel, or be put up by some nice white family, or be invited to the home of the best Negroes in town. Thus God probably thought that everything was lovely in the world. As an actor he really got very good write-ups in the papers.

Then they were booked to play Washington, and that’s where the trouble began. Washington, the capital of the United States, is, as every Negro knows, a town where no black man was allowed inside a downtown theater, not even in the gallery, until very recently. The legitimate playhouses had no accommodations for colored people. Incredible as it may seem, until Ingrid Bergman made her stand, Washington was worse than the Deep South in that respect.

But God wasn’t at all worried about playing Washington. He thought surely his coming would improve race relations. He thought it would he fine for the good white people of the Capital to see him — a colored God — even if Negroes couldn’t. Not even those Negroes who worked for the government. Not even the black congressman.

But several weeks before the Washington appearance of the famous “Negro” play about charming darkies who drank eggnog at a fish fry in heaven, storm clouds began to rise. It seemed that the Negroes of Washington strangely enough had decided that they, too, wanted to see this play. But when they approached the theater management on the question, they got a cold shoulder. The management said they didn’t have any scats to sell Negroes. They couldn’t even allot a corner in the upper gallery — there was such a heavy ticket demand from white folks.

Now this made the Negroes of Washington mad, especially those who worked for the government and constituted the best society. The teachers at Howard got mad, too, and the ministers of the colored churches who wanted to see what a black heaven looked like on the stage.

But nothing doing! The theater management was adamant. They really couldn’t sell seats to Negroes. Although they had no scruples about making a large profit on the week’s work of Negro actors, they couldn’t permit Negroes to occupy seats in the theater.

So the Washington Negroes wrote directly to God, this colored God who had been such a hit on Broadway. They thought surely he would help them. Several organizations, including the Negro Ministerial Alliance, got in touch with him when he was playing Philadelphia. What a shame, they said by letter, that the white folks will not allow us to come to see you perform in Washington. We are getting up a protest. We want you to help us. Will you?

Now God knew that for many years white folks had not allowed Negroes in Washington to see any shows — not even in the churches, let alone in theaters! So how come they suddenly thought they ought to be allowed to see God in a white playhouse?

Besides, God was getting paid pretty well, and was pretty well known. So he answered their letters and said that although his ink was made of tears, and his heart bled, he couldn’t afford to get into trouble with Equity. Also, it wasn’t his place to go around the country spreading dissension and hate, but rather love and beauty. And it would surely do the white folks of the District of Columbia a lot of good to see Him, and it would soften their hearts to hear the beautiful Negro spirituals and witness the lovely black angels in his play.

The black drama lovers of Washington couldn’t get any real satisfaction out of God by mail — their colored God. So when the company played Baltimore, a delegation of the Washington Negroes went over to the neighboring city to interview him. In Baltimore, Negroes, at least, were allowed to sit in the galleries of the theaters.

After the play, God received the delegation in his dressing room and wept about his inability to do anything concerning the situation. He had, of course, spoken to his management about it and they thought it might be possible to arrange a special Sunday night performance for Negroes. God said it hurt him to his soul to think how his people were mistreated, but the play must go on.

The delegation left in a huff — but not before they had spread their indignation to other members of the east of the show. Then among the angels there arose a great discussion as to what they might do about the Washington situation. Although God was the star, the angels, too, were a part of the play.

Now, among the angels there was a young Negro named Johnny Logan who never really liked being an angel, but who, because of his baritone voice and Negro features, had gotten the job during the first rehearsals in New York. Now, since the play had been running three years, he was an old hand at being an angel.

Logan was from the South — but he hadn’t stayed there long after he grew up. The white folks wouldn’t let him. He was the kind of young Negro most Southern white people hate. He believed in fighting prejudice, in bucking against the traces of discrimination and Jim Crow, and in trying to knock down any white man who insulted him. So he was only about eighteen when the whites ran him out of Augusta, Georgia.

He came to New York, married a waitress, got a job as a redcap, and would have settled down forever in a little flat in Harlem, had not some of his friends discovered that he could sing. They persuaded him to join a Red Cap Quartette. Out of that had come this work as a Mack angel in what turned out to be a Broadway success in the midst of the depression.

Just before the show went on the road, his wife had their first kid, so he needed to hold his job as a singing angel, even if it meant going on tour. But the more he thought about their forthcoming appearance in a Washington theater that wasn’t even Jim Crow — but barred Negroes altogether — the madder Logan got. Finally he got so mad that he caused the rest of the cast to organize a strike!

At that distance from Washington, black angels — from tenors to basses, sopranos to blues singers — were up in arms. Everybody in the cast, except God, agreed to strike.

“The idea of a town where colored folks can’t even sit in the gallery to see an all-colored show. I ain’t gonna work there myself.”

“We’ll show them white folks we’ve got spunk for once. We’ll pull off the biggest actors’ strike you ever seen.”

“We sure will.”

That was in Philadelphia. In Baltimore their ardor had cooled down a bit and it was all Logan could do to hold his temper as he felt his fellow angels weakening.

“Man, I got a wife to take care of. I can’t lose no week’s work!”

“I got a wife, too,” said Logan, “and a kid besides, but I’m game.”

“You ain’t a trouper,” said another, as he sat in the dressing room putting on his makeup.

“Naw, it you was you’d be used to playing all-white houses. In the old days...” said the man who played Methuselah, powdering his gray wig.

“I know all about the old days,” said Logan, “when black minstrels blacked up even blacker and made fun of themselves for the benefit of white folks. But who wants to go back to the old days?”

“Anyhow, let’s let well enough alone,” said Methuselah.

“You guys have got no guts — that’s all I can say,” said Logan.

“You’s just one of them radicals, son, that’s what you are,” put in the old tenor who played Saul. “We know when we want to strike or don’t.”

“Listen, then,” said Logan to the angels who were putting on their wings by now, as it was near curtain time, “if we can’t make it a real strike, then let’s make it a general walk-out on the opening night. Strike for one performance anyhow. At least show folks that we won’t take it lying down. Show those Washington Negroes we hack them up — theoretically, anyhow.”

“One day ain’t so bad,” said a skinny black angel. “I’m with you on a one-day strike.”

“Me, too,” several others agreed as they crowded into the corridor at curtain time. The actor who played God was standing in the wings in his frock coat.

“Shss-ss!” he said.

It all began long ago when he was a tiny boy who was already used, in a fearful sort of way, to living with shadows. But what were the shadows that made him afraid? Surely they were not those beautiful silhouettes of objects cast upon the earth by the sun. Shadows of that kind are innocent and he loved trying to catch them as he ran along sunlit paths in summer. But there were subtler shadows which he saw and which others could not see: the shadows of his fears. And this boy had such shadows and he lived to kill one of them.

Saul Saunders was born black in a little Southern town, not many miles from Washington, the nation’s capital, which means that he came into a world that was split in two, a white world and a black one, the white one being separated from the black by a million psychological miles. So, from the very beginning, Saul looking timidly out from his black world, saw the shadowy outlines of a white world that was unreal to him and not his own.

It so happened that even Saul’s mother was but a vague, shadowy thing to him, for she died long before his memory could form an image of her. And the same thing happened to Saul’s father, who died before the boy could retain a clear picture of him in his mind.

People really never became personalities to Saul, for hardly had he ever got to know them before they vanished. So people became for Saul symbols of uneasiness, of a deprivation that evoked in him a sense of the transitory quality of life, which always made him feel that some invisible, unexplainable event was about to descend upon him.

He had live brothers and two sisters who remained strangers to him. There was, of course, no adult in his family with enough money to support them all, and the children were rationed out to various cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

It fell to Saul to live with his grandmother who moved constantly from one small Southern town to another, and even physical landscapes grew to have but little emotional meaning for the boy. Towns were places you lived in for a while, and then you moved on. When he had reached the age of twelve, all reality seemed to him to be akin to his mother and father, like the white world that surrounded the black island of his life, like the parade of dirty little towns that passed forever before his eyes, things that had names but not substance, things that happened and then retreated into an incomprehensible nothingness.

Saul was not dumb or lazy, but it took him seven years to reach the third grade in school. None of the people who came and went in Saul’s life had ever prized learning and Saul did likewise. It was quite normal in his environment to reach the age of fourteen and still be in the third grade, and Saul liked being normal, liked being like other people.

Then the one person — his grandmother — who Saul had thought would endure forever, passed suddenly from his life, and from that moment on Saul did not ever quite know what to do. He went to work for the white people of the South and the shadowlike quality of his world became terribly manifest, continuously present. He understood nothing of this white world into which he had been thrown; it was just there, a faint and fearful shadow cast by some object that stood between him and a hidden and powerful sun.

He quickly learned that the strange white people for whom he worked considered him inferior; he did not feel inferior and he did not think that he was. But when he looked about him he saw other black people accepting this definition of themselves, and who was he to challenge it? Outwardly he grew to accept it as part of that vast shadow-world that came and went, pulled by forces which he nor nobody he knew understood.

Soon all of Saul’s anxieties, fears, and irritations became focused upon this white shadow-world which gave him his daily bread in exchange for his labor. Feeling unhappy and not knowing why, he projected his misery out from himself and upon the one thing that made him most constantly anxious. If this had not happened, if Saul had not found a way of putting his burden upon others, he would have early thought of suicide. He finally did, in the end, think of killing himself, but then it was too late…

At the age of fifteen Saul knew that the life he was then living was to be his lot, that there was no way to rid himself of his plaguing sense of unreality, no way to relax and forget. He was most self-forgetful when he was with black people, and that made things a little easier for him. But as he grew older, he became more afraid, yet none of his friends noticed it. Indeed, many of Saul’s friends liked him very much. Saul was always kind, attentive; but no one suspected that his kindness, his quiet, waiting loyalty came from his being afraid.

Then Saul changed. Maybe it was luck or misfortune; it is hard to tell. When he took a drink of whisky, he found that it helped to banish the shadows, lessened his tensions, made the world more reasonably three-dimensional, and he grew to like drinking. When he was paid off on a Saturday night, he would drink with his friends and he would feel better. He felt that whisky made life complete, that it stimulated him. But, of course, it did not. Whisky really depressed him, numbed him somewhat, reduced the force and number of the shadows that made him tight inside.

When Saul was sober, he almost never laughed in the presence of the white shadow-world, but when he had a drink or two he found that he could. Even when he was told about the hard lives that all Negroes lived, it did not worry him, for he would take a drink and not feel too badly. It did not even bother him when he heard that if you were alone with a white woman and she screamed, it was as good as hearing your death sentence, for, though you had done nothing, you would be killed. Saul got used to hearing the siren of the police car screaming in the Black Belt, got used to seeing white cops dragging Negroes off to jail. Once he grew wildly angry about it, felt that the shadows would some day claim him as he had seen them claim others, but his friends warned him that it was dangerous to feel that way, that always the black man lost, and the best thing to do was to take a drink. He did, and in a little while they were all laughing.

One night when he was mildly drunk — he was thirty years old and living in Washington at the time — he got married. The girl was good for Saul, for she too liked to drink and she was pretty and they got along together. Saul now felt that things were not so bad; as long as he could stifle the feeling of being hemmed in, as long as he could conquer the anxiety about the unexpected happening, life was bearable.

Saul’s jobs had been many and simple. First he had worked on a farm. When he was fourteen he had gone to Washington, after his grandmother had died, where he did all kinds of odd jobs. Finally he was hired by an old white army colonel as chauffeur and butler and he averaged about twenty dollars every two weeks. He lived in and got his meals and uniform and he remained with the colonel for five years. The colonel too liked to drink, and sometimes they would both get drunk. But Saul never forgot that the colonel, though drunk and feeling fine, was still a shadow, unreal, and might suddenly change toward him.

One day, when whisky was making him feel good, Saul asked the colonel for a raise in salary, told him that he did not have enough to live on, and that prices were rising. But the colonel was sober and hard that day and said no. Saul was so stunned that he quit the job that instant. While under the spell of whisky he had for a quick moment felt that the world of shadows was over, but when he had asked for more money and had been refused, he knew that he had been wrong. He should not have asked for money; he should have known that the colonel was a no-good guy, a shadow.

Saul was next hired as an exterminator by a big chemical company and he found that there was something in his nature that made him like going from house to house and putting down poison for rats and mice and roaches. He liked seeing concrete evidence of his work and the dead bodies of rats were no shadows. They were real. He never felt better in his life than when he was killing with the sanction of society. And his boss even increased his salary when he asked for it. And he drank as much as he liked and no one cared.

But one morning, after a hard night of drinking which had made him irritable and high-strung, his boss said something that he did not like and he spoke up, defending himself against what he thought was a slighting remark. There was an argument and Saul left.

Two weeks of job hunting got him the position of janitor in the National Cathedral, a church and religious institution. It was the solitary kind of work he liked; he reported for duty each morning at seven o’clock and at eleven he was through. He first cleaned the Christmas card shop, next he cleaned the library; and his final chore was to clean the choir room.

But cleaning the library, with its rows and rows of books, was what caught Saul’s attention, for there was a strange little shadow woman there who stared at him all the time in a most peculiar way. The library was housed in a separate building and, whenever he came to clean it, he and the white woman would be there alone. She was tiny, blonde, blue-eyed, weighing about 110 pounds, and standing about five feet three inches. Saul’s boss had warned him never to quarrel with the lady in charge of the library. “She’s a crackpot,” he had told Saul. And naturally Saul never wanted any trouble; in fact, he did not even know the woman’s name. Many times, however, he would pause in his work, feeling that his eyes were being drawn to her and he would turn around and find her staring at him. Then she would look away quickly, as though ashamed. “What in hell does she want from me?” he wondered uneasily. The woman never spoke to him except to say good morning and she even said that as though she did not want to say it. Saul thought that maybe she was afraid of him; but how could that be? He could not recall when anybody had ever been afraid of him, and he had never been in any trouble in his life.

One morning while sweeping the floor he felt his eyes being drawn toward her and he paused and turned and saw her staring at him. He did not move, neither did she. They stared at each other for about ten seconds, then she went out of the room, walking with quick steps, as though angry or afraid. He was frightened, hut forgot it quickly. “What the hell’s wrong with that woman?” he asked himself.

Next morning Saul’s boss called him and told him, in a nice, quiet tone — but it made him scared and mad just the same — that the woman in the library had complained about him, had said that he never cleaned under her desk.

“Under her desk?” Saul asked, amazed.

“Yes,” his boss said, amused at Saul’s astonishment.

“But I clean under her desk every morning,” Saul said.

“Well, Saul, remember, I told you she was a crackpot,” his boss said soothingly. “Don’t argue with her. Just do your work.”

“Yes, sir,” Saul said.

He wanted to tell his boss how the woman always stared at him, but he could not find courage enough to do so. It he had been talking with his black friends, he would have done so quite naturally. But why talk to one shadow about another queer shadow?

That day being payday, he got his weekly wages and that night he had a hell of a good time. He drank until he was drunk, until he blotted out almost everything from his consciousness. He was getting regularly drunk now whenever he had the money. He liked it and he bothered nobody and he was happy while doing it. But dawn found him broke, exhausted, and terribly depressed, full of shadows and uneasiness, a way he never liked it. The thought of going to his job made him angry. He longed for deep, heavy sleep. But, no, he had a good job and he had to keep it. Yes, he would go.

After cleaning the Christmas card shop — he was weak and he sweated a lot — he went to the library. No one was there. He swept the floor and was about to dust the books when he heard the footsteps of the woman coming into the room. He was tired, nervous, half asleep; his hands trembled and his reflexes were overquick. “So you’re the bitch who snitched on me, hunh?” he said irritably to himself. He continued dusting and all at once he had the queer feeling that she was staring at him. He fought against the impulse to look at her, but he could not resist it. He turned slowly and saw that she was sitting in her chair at her desk, staring at him with unblinking eyes. He had the impression that she was about to speak. He could not help staring back at her, waiting.

“Why don’t you clean under my desk?” she asked him in a tense hut controlled voice.

“Why, ma’am,” he said slowly, “I just did.”

“Come here and look,” she said, pointing downward.

He replaced the book on the shelf. She had never spoken so many words to him before. He went and stood before her and his mind protested against what his eyes saw, and then his senses leaped in wonder. She was sitting with her knees sprawled apart and her dress was drawn halfway up her legs. He looked from her round blue eyes to her white legs whose thighs thickened as they went to a V clothed in right, sheer, pink panties; then he looked quickly again into her eyes. Her face was a beet red, but she sat very still, rigid, as though she was being impelled into an act which she did not want to perform but was being driven to perform. Saul was so startled that he could not move.

“I just cleaned under your desk this morning,” he mumbled, sensing that he was not talking about what she meant.

“There’s dust there now,” she said sternly, her legs still so wide apart that he felt that she was naked.

He did not know what to do; he was so baffled, humiliated, and frightened that he grew angry. But he was afraid to express his anger openly.

“Look, ma’am,” he said in a tone of suppressed rage and hate, “you’re making trouble for me!”

“Why don’t you do your work?” she blazed at him. “That’s what you’re being paid to do, you black nigger!” Her legs were still spread wide and she was sitting as though about to spring upon him and throw her naked thighs about his body.

For a moment he was still and silent. Never before in his life had he been called a “black nigger.” He had heard that white people used that phrase as their supreme humiliation of black people, but he had never been treated so. As the insult sank in, as he stared at her gaping thighs, he felt overwhelmed by a sense of wild danger.

“I don’t like that,” he said and before he knew it he had slapped her flat across her face.

She sucked in her breath, sprang up, and stepped away from him. Then she screamed sharply, and her voice was like a lash cutting into his chest. She screamed again and he backed away from her. He felt helpless, strange; he knew what he had done, knew its meaning for him; but he knew that he could not have helped it. It seemed that some part of him was there in that room watching him do things that he should not do. He drew in his breath and for a moment he felt that he could not stand upon his legs. His world was now full of all the shadows he had ever feared. He was in the worst trouble that a black man could imagine.

The woman was screaming continuously now and he was running toward the stairs. Just as he put his foot on the bottom step, he paused and looked over his shoulder. She was backing away from him, toward an open window at the far end of the room, still screaming. Oh God! In her scream he heard the sirens of the police cars that hunted down black men in the Black Belts and he heard the shrill whistles of white cops running after black men and he felt again in one rush of emotion all the wild and bitter tales he had heard of how whites always got the black who did a crime and this woman was screaming as though he had raped her.

He ran on up the steps, but her screams were coming so loud that when he neared the top of the steps he slowed. Those screams would not let him run any more, they weakened him, tugged and pulled him. His chest felt as though it would burst. He reached the top landing and looked round aimlessly. He saw a fireplace and before it was a neat pile of wood and while he was looking at that pile of wood the screams tore at him, unnerved him. With a shaking hand he reached down and seized in his left hand — for he was left-handed — a heavy piece of oaken firewood that had jagged, sharp edges where it had been cut with an ax. He turned and ran back down the steps to where the woman stood screaming. He lifted the stick of wood as he confronted her, then paused. He wanted her to stop screaming. If she had stopped, he would have fled, but while she screamed all he could feel was a hotness bubbling in him and urging him to do something. She would fill her lungs quickly and deeply and her breath would come out at full blast. He swung down his left arm and hit her a swinging blow on the side of her head, not to hurt her, not to kill her, hut to stop that awful noise, to stop that shadow from screaming a scream that meant death... He felt her skull crack and give as she sank to the floor, but she still screamed. He trembled from head to feet. Goddamn that woman... Why didn’t she stop that yelling? He lifted his arm and gave her another blow, feeling the oaken stick driving its way into her skull. Rut still she screamed. He was about to hit her again when he became aware that the stick he held was light. He looked at it and found that half of it had broken off, was lying on the floor. But she screamed on, with blood running down her dress, her legs sprawled nakedly out from under her. He dropped the remainder of the stick and grabbed her throat and choked her to stop her screams. That seemed to quiet her; she looked as though she had fainted. He choked her for a long time, not trying to kill her, but just to make sure that she would not scream again and make him wild and hot inside. He was not reacting to the woman, but to the feelings that her screams evoked in him.

The woman was limp and silent now and slowly he took his hands from her throat. She was quiet. He waited. He was not certain. Yes, take her downstairs into the bathroom and if she screamed again no one would hear her… He took her hands in his and started dragging her away from the window. His hands were wet with sweat and her hands were so tiny and soft that time and again her little fingers slipped out of his palms. He tried holding her hands tighter and only succeeded in scratching her. Her ring slid off into his hand while he was dragging her and he stood still for a moment, staring in a daze at the thin band of shimmering gold, then mechanically he put it into his pocket. Finally he dragged her down the steps to the bathroom door.

He was about to take her in when he saw that the floor was spotted with drippings of blood. That was had… He had been trained to keep floors clean, just as he had been trained to fear shadows. He propped her clumsily against a wall and went into the bathroom and took wads of toilet paper and mopped up the red splashes. He even went back upstairs where he had first struck her and found blood spots and wiped them up carefully. He stiffened; she was hollering again. He ran downstairs and this time he recalled that he had a knife in his pocket. He took it out, opened it, and plunged it deep into her throat; he was frantic to stop her from hollering… He pulled the knife from her throat and she was quiet.

He stood, his eyes roving. He noticed a door leading down to a recess in a wall through which steam pipes ran. Yes, it would be better to put her there; then if she started yelling no one would hear her. He was not trying to hide her; he merely wanted to make sure that she would not be heard. He dragged her again and her dress came up over her knees to her chest and again he saw her pink panties. It was too hard dragging her and he lifted her in his arms and while carrying her down the short flight of steps he thought that the pink panties, if he would wet them, would make a good mop to clean up the blood. Once more he sat her against the wall, stripped her of her pink panties — and not once did he so much as glance at her groin — wetted them and swabbed up the spots, then pushed her into the recess under the pipes. She was in full view, easily seen. He tossed the wet ball of panties in after her.

He sighed and looked around. The floor seemed clean. He went hack upstairs. That stick of broken wood… He picked up the two shattered ends of wood and several splinters; he carefully joined the ends together and then fitted the splinters into place. He laid the mended stick hack upon the pile before the fireplace. He stood listening, wondering if she would yell again, but there was no sound. It never occurred to him that he could help her, that she might be in pain; he never wondered even if she were dead. He got his coat and hat and went home.

He was nervously tired. It seemed that he had just finished doing an old and familiar job of dodging the shadows that were forever around him, shadows that he could not understand. He undressed, but paid no attention to the blood on his trousers and shirt; he was alone in the room; his wife was at work. When he pulled out his billfold, he saw the ring. He put it in the drawer of his night table, more to keep his wife from seeing it than to hide it. He climbed wearily into bed and at once fell into a deep, sound sleep from which he did not awaken until late afternoon. He lay blinking blood-shot eyes and he could not remember what he had done. Then the vague, shadowlike picture of it came before his eyes. He was puzzled, and for a moment he wondered if it had happened or had someone told him a story of it. He could not be sure. There was no fear or regret in him.

When at last the conviction of what he had done was real in him, it came only in terms of flat memory, devoid of all emotion, as though he were looking when very tired and sleepy at a scene being flashed upon the screen of a movie house. Not knowing what to do, he remained in bed. He had drifted off to sleep again when his wife came home late that night from her cooking job.

It was one of those bright days when that Washington sun wasn’t taking any stuff off of anybody. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the wind wasn’t a big wind at all, just a little itty-bitty breeze to take the edge off the sun’s heat. It was a good day, man, because there wasn’t any school, the grown folks were at work, and we could do anything that crossed our natural minds. It was a crazy day, man, because that night Joe Louis was going to knock the living stew out of a big German named Max Schmeling.

We could have gone swimming. There was the colored pool on the other side of town and the muddy Eastern Branch of the Potomac was only a few blocks away. We could have swiped pop bottles from old man Farbenstein’s store yard and sold them back to him. Then we would have had enough money to ride across town to the picture show. A Bob Steele movie was playing at the Gem and a Tom Mix one was at the Alamo.

But this wasn’t the kind of day when you went swimming or sat in a movie. You could do stuff like that anytime. But how often did Joe Louis have a chance to get into the same ring with that blabber-mouth Schmeling. That German had been doing a lot of talking about how badly he was going to beat Joe. Naturally he thought he was better than Joe because he was white, but the newspapers were hinting that he thought he was better than everybody because he was a German. Well, you know Joe, he hadn’t said much, but all of us knew what was bound to happen. Joe was nobody’s talker, but he could dispose of a man before you could call his name. Yes, this was going to be a great night and we were prepared to celebrate it.

When I ran through Pennsylvania Station on a cloudy November afternoon, I was wearing a clean blue shirt with a soft unbuttoned collar, a brown knit tie, a brown herringbone suit, well-polished brown Spanish shoes, and an English overcoat — a gray herringbone — that I had worn for three years. I had some old letters stuffed into the inside pocket of my jacket, and after I had taken out my wallet to buy my train ticket I had trouble putting it back. I was afraid I would miss my train, so I slipped the wallet into the inside pocket of my overcoat, thinking I would sort things out when I was aboard. I had a hundred and forty-seven dollars in the wallet, a sum left over from my last pay check, and I was on my way to Washington, D.C., to see my family — my mother and father and an older sister who had recently got married. I had just left my job as a salesman-demonstrator-instructor in the tennis department of a famous New York department store, where I, John Lionel, was known as “Wright & Ditson.” One day, for some reason, while demonstrating the proper service technique to a twelve-year-old boy and his mother, I tossed a tennis ball up in the air and hit a powerful cannonball service; the ball whizzed by the floor manager’s — Mr. Palmerston’s — ear, and smashed a glass case. Palmerston said it was nice knowing me and told me to pick up my check. So long, Wright & Ditson. It was my third job since coming back from Europe, where I had served a tour in the Army, and although in a way I was a little concerned because I didn’t seem to be going anywhere and didn’t know where I wanted to go, I thought, Well, I’m only twenty-three and I’ve got time.

Somewhere near North Philadelphia, I ate a tuna-fish sandwich that I bought from a vender on the train, and about twenty minutes south of the Thirtieth Street Station I began to feel warm and a little strange. I thought I’d get some air, so I left my seat and went out to the platform between the cars. I leaned against the steel wall and smoked and looked out at the countryside. The cool air made me feel a lot better. I stayed out between the cars until the train was about a half hour past Wilmington, and then I returned to my seat in the coach.

I thought I’d get a book out of my suitcase and read for a while. When I looked up at the baggage rack, I saw that my overcoat was gone. I had forgotten to take the wallet out of it. I had placed the coat neatly folded over my suitcase, and there was no doubt that it was gone. I walked up and down the coach, looking at all the overcoats in the baggage racks, and then I returned to my seat and tried to be calm and think things out. Then I went up and down the car again. When I returned to my seat for the second time, feeling demoralized and enraged, a man sitting across the aisle asked me what was the matter, and I told him that my overcoat was gone. The man folded his newspaper and looked out the window for a while, and then he asked me to describe the coat. I told him that it was a gray herringbone, and that it had been on the rack above my seat. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then, seeming embarrassed, he told me that he had seen a man pull my coat from the rack as the train got into Wilmington, and that he had, even then, found it a little strange, because this man was already wearing a camel’s-hair coat.

I slumped down in my seat, feeling sick. I always do when somebody steals from me. For a while, I sat there thinking about my overcoat and how it had been part of the friendly continuity of my life. Then I got to my feet and went through my pockets and came up with fifty cents. I had lost my money, my Social Security card, and even my passport. I began to feel cold and hot alternately, and around Aberdeen I began to feel cramps and nausea. I figured it was the tuna-fish sandwich. Just outside of Baltimore, I became desperately sick and went to the men’s room and threw up. I was sick again between Baltimore and Washington, and when the train finally pulled into Union Station and I stepped out into the cold, rainy afternoon, I felt like hell.

I didn’t have enough money for a cab, and it was no use calling home. My family was out of town, visiting my sister’s husband’s family in Maryland. They would be coming back to Washington in the morning. So I got on a bus, and about twenty minutes later got off, in the rain, and transferred to another bus. While I was on the bus, the nausea and cramps came back and I decided I’d have to get off. I began to look for a bar or restaurant or hotel along the way, and when I saw a gasoline station in a very old, shabby neighborhood — a Negro neighborhood — I pulled the cord and picked up my suitcase and got off.

In the men’s room of the gasoline station, I bathed my face in cold water, and went outside again. I was feeling much better, but weak. The rain was cold, and the wind had grown stronger, and I was shivering. I was about to cross the street and wait by a little yellow bus-stop sign, when I saw that I was in front of a small grocery store with a green awning slanting down over a dimly lighted display window. I decided to stand under the awning and watch for the bus from there.

The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. “Two votes a precinct,” he said for the dozenth time. “Just two lousy votes a precinct.”

“When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,” I said as Karl handed me the phone. The Congressman thought about that for a moment, frowned and shook his head, said something more about two votes a precinct, and set fire to the American Express card. I said hello into the phone.

“McCorkle?” It was a man’s voice.

“Yes.”

“This is Hardman.” It was a soft bass voice with a lot of bulldog gravy and grits in it. Hardman, the way he said it, was two distinct words, an adjective and a noun, and both got equal billing.

“What can I do for you?”

“Make me a reservation for lunch tomorrow? Bout one-fifteen?”

“You don’t need a reservation.”

“Just socializin a little.”

“I’m off the ponies,” I said. “I haven’t made a bet in two days.”

“That’s what they been tellin me. Man, you trying to quit winner?”

“Just trying to quit. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I got me a little business over in Baltimore.” He paused. I waited. I prepared for a long wait. Hardman was from Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia or one of those states where they all talk alike and where it takes a long weekend to get to the point.

“You’ve got business in Baltimore and you want a reservation for one-fifteen tomorrow and you want to know why I haven’t made book with you in two days. What else?”

“Well, we was supposed to pick somethin up off a boat over there in Baltimore and there was a little trouble and this white boy got hurt. So Mush — you know Mush?”

I told him I knew Mush.

“So Mush was bout to get hisself hurt by a couple of mothers when this white boy steps in and sort of helps Mush out — know what I mean?”

“Perfectly.”

“Say wha?”

“Go on.”

“Well, one of these cats had a blade and he cuts the white boy a little, but not fore he’d stepped in and helped out for Mush — know what I mean?”

“Why call me?”

“Well, Mush brings the white boy back to Washington cause he’s hit his head and bleedin and passed out and all.”

“And you need some blood tonight?”

Hardman chuckled and it seemed to rumble over the phone. “Shit, baby, you somethin!”

“Why me?”

“Well, this boy got nothin on him. No money—”

“Mush checked that out, I’d say.”

“No gold, no ID, no billfold, nothin. Just a little old scrap of paper with your address on it.”

“Has he got a description, or do all white folks look alike?”

“Bout five-eleven,” Hardman said, “maybe even six feet. Maybe. Short hair, little grey in it. Dark for an ofay. Looks like he been out in the sun a whole lot. Bout your age, only skinnier, but then, hell, who ain’t?”

I tried to make nothing out of my voice; no tone, no interest. “Where do you have him?”

“Where I’m at, pad over on Fairmont.” He gave me the address. “Figure you know him? He’s out cold.”

“I might,” I said. “I’ll be over. You get a doctor?”

“Done come and gone.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can catch a cab.”

“You won’t forget about that reservation?”

“It’s taken care of.” I hung up.

Karl, the bartender I had imported from Germany, was deep in conversation with the Congressman. I signaled him to come down to the other end of the bar.

“Take care of the Right Honorable,” I said. “Call him a cab — the company that specializes in drunks. If he doesn’t have any money, have him sign a tab and we’ll send him a bill.”

“He’s got a committee hearing tomorrow at nine in the Rayburn Building,” Karl said. “It’s on reforestation. It’s about the redwoods. I was planning on going anyhow so I’ll pick him up in the morning and make sure he gets there.”

Some people hang around police stations. Karl hung around Congress. He had been in the States for less than a year but he could recite the names of the one hundred Senators and the four hundred and thirty-five Representatives in alphabetical order. He knew how they voted on every roll call. He knew when and where committees met and whether their sessions were open or closed. He could tell you the status of any major piece of legislation in either the Senate or the House and make you a ninety to ninety-five per cent accurate prediction on its chance for passage. He read the Congressional Record faithfully and snickered while he did it. He had worked for me before in a saloon I had once owned in Bonn, but the Bundestag had never amused him. He found Congress one long laugh.

“Just so he gets home,” I said, “although he looks as if he’ll fade before closing.” The Congressman was drooping a bit over his glass.

Karl gave him a judicious glance. “He’s good for two more and then I’ll get him some coffee. He’ll make it.”

I told him to close up, nodded good night to a handful of regular customers and a couple of waiters, walked east to Connecticut Avenue and turned right towards the Mayflower Hotel. There was one cab at the hotel stand and I climbed into its back seat and gave the driver the address. He turned to look at me.

“I don’t ever go over there after midnight,” he said.

“Don’t tell me. Tell the hack inspector.”

“My life’s worth more’n eighty cents.”

“We’ll make it an even dollar.”

I got a lecture on why George Wallace should be President on the way to the Fairmont Street address. It was an apartment building, fairly new, flanked by forty- or fifty-year-old row houses. I paid the driver and told him he needn’t wait. He snorted, quickly locked all the doors, and sped off. Inside I found the apartment number and rang the bell. I could hear chimes inside. Hardman answered the door.

“Come in this house,” he said.

I went in. A voice from somewhere, a woman’s voice, yelled: “You tell him to take off his shoes, hear?”

I looked down. I was standing on a deep pile carpet that was pure white.

“She don’t want her white rug messed up,” Hardman said and indicated his own shoeless feet. I knelt down and took off my shoes. When I rose Hardman handed me a drink.

“Scotch-and-water O.K.?”

“Fine.” I looked around the livingroom. It was L-shaped and had an orange couch and some teak and leather chairs, a dining table, also of teak, and a lot of brightly colored pillows that were carefully scattered here and there to make it all look casual. There were some loud prints on the wall. A lot of thought seemed to have gone into the room, and the total effect came off fairly well and just escaped being flashy.

A tall brown girl in red slacks swayed into the room shaking down a thermometer. “You know Betty?” Hardman asked.

I said no. “Hello, Betty.”

“You’re McCorkle.” I nodded “That man’s sick,” she said, “and there ain’t no use trying to talk to him now. He’s out for another hour. That’s what Doctor Lambert say. And he also say he can be moved all right when he wakes up. So if he’s a friend of yours, would you kindly move him when he does wake up? He’s got my bed and I don’t plan sleeping on no couch. That’s where Hard’s going to sleep.”

“Now, honey—”

“Don’t honey me, you no good son-of-a-bitch.” She didn’t raise her voice when she said it. She didn’t have to. “You bring in some cut-up drunk and dump him into my bed. Whyn’t you take him to the hospital? Or to your house, ’cept that fancy wife of yours wouldn’t have stood for it.” Betty turned to me, and waved a hand at Hardman. “Look at him. Six-feet, four-inches tall, dresses just so fine, goes around pronouncing his name ‘Hard-Man,’ and then lets some little five-foot-tall tight twat lead him around by the nose. Get me a drink.” Betty collapsed on the couch and Hardman hastily mixed her a drink.

“How about the man in your bed, Betty?” I said. “May I see him?”

She shrugged and waved her hand at a door. “Right through there. He’s still out cold.”

I nodded and set the glass down on a table that had a coaster on it. I went through the door and looked at the man in the bed. It was a big, fancy bed, oval in shape, and it made the man look smaller than he was. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year and there were some new lines in his face and more grey in his hair than I remembered. His name was Michael Padillo and he spoke six or seven languages without accent, was handy with either a gun or a knife, and could make what has been called the best whiskey sour in Europe.

His other chief distinction was that a lot of people thought he was dead. A lot more hoped that he was.

Two hands resting on bars of steel

Wondering was all this really real

Living from day to day using dope

Death was waiting with a steel rope.

Nora believed that my stories were old-fashioned. She said once, “Friend, why don’t you write something up-to-date, immediate. The romantics are dead. Friend, they’re gone.” She was really very serious about it, and I had to tell her that hers was a liverish idea whose time had not yet come. Not that it made any difference, because in 1965 nobody would buy the stories except an obscure review in the Midwest, whose payment was in prestige. In the first six months of 1965 I had two payments of prestige with a third on the way. For eats, as Nora liked to call them, I worked as a researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest, an expensive private newsletter which purported to give its subscribers advance information on legislation pending before the House and Senate. I was paid a hundred dollars a week for reading the Congressional Record and reporting my findings to the editor, who would rearrange them into breathless verbless sentences.

But that had little to do with Nora Bryant. She was English and had come to Washington as correspondent for one of the popular London dailies. She had good looks, and good brains to go with the good looks, but she was admired for her idiosyncrasies. Nora believed that America was alive and Britain was dead; interesting, amusing in its way, but dead nonetheless. She thought that this country was open to possibilities and in perpetual motion in a way that Britain was not. She had a wide circle of American friends, and spent as little time at the British embassy as she could manage; the ambassador there was an aging peer whom she called the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake stream-lined baron. In a bewitching West Riding accent she spoke American slang, and the effect was hilarious: Somerset Maugham imitating Allen Ginsberg. Her specialty was southern politicians and she told me it was a high point of her life here when she spent an evening with the then-occupant of the White House and came away with enough vocabulary to last her a month or more. She came to my apartment after dinner at the White House, still laughing over all the wonderful words and phrases she’d learned. I tried to pump her about the man himself, what he was like. How much did he drink? What was on his mind? Was his mood hot or cold?

“I didn’t have a thermometer up his bum, friend,” she said.

“Come on, Nora! Give! What did he say about the war? Anything about—”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Nora …”

“That dog won’t hunt,” she said, and that was that.

Martin Luther King was dead.

A gloom descended upon me; and it was as if my body was outside of me like some kind of haunting shadow.

One night during that semester I dreamed I saw my ghost drifting across the campus toward me like a puff of stream. My face drifted above the stream. And although I knew it was my ghost, my face was without definition.

I followed the ghostly twin to a crossroads.

“On one side of this road,” I thought I heard her say, “there is a river of blood. On the other side there is a river of milk. Life could not exist without either. You will have to choose. But there is pain always …”

And now in the cool spring air, I made my way across the campus to the Arts and Humanities building. I liked this time of evening best. Now I would have access to the practice room where I could play what I wanted without the vulgar intrusions and comments of Dr. Reed, who was the chairman of the music department.

I would hang around the library and try to work on my paper on the history of the violin in the development of European music. Needless to say, I found all of that quite boring. Did you know that from 1600 to 175 °Cremona was the center for great violin making? And that Antonio Stradivari was Nicolò Amati’s pupil? Yes, it was boring like Dr. Reed, who must have been teaching this course since the days when this university was five shacks by a dirt road which later came to be called Georgia Avenue. His note cards were frayed and dirty, and he affected a kind of gay British accent.

I was never good at writing papers, but I somehow managed to get by with good grades. In my senior year, I found it harder and harder to work. I was feeling disconnected, a little batty even. And now the death of Dr. King, my hero. It was, nonetheless, my last year. I would have to bear down.

I tried taking notes from Petherick’s book on Antonio Stradivari, but after fifteen minutes into it, I found it hard to stay awake. I would doze off, and then suddenly jerk myself awake like one of these junkies down on U street. This can’t go on.

I played my scales and exercises. Then I worked on the piece by Schumann. I worked hard until I had built up a sweat. But I stumbled through the Hindemith, and finally gave up on the Bartók.

Outside, there was a large crowd of students clustered around the big oak tree just opposite the library. A notoriously controversial student by the name of Jennie Forman was speaking through a white bullhorn. The campus police were there almost in full strength. She wore a high bushy Afro; and she had on an army jacket with red, black, and green epaulets. She must have been quite popular with the male students, because there were a lot of good-looking brothers guarding her.

She shouted through the bullhorn. The sound bounced off of the buildings surrounding the campus green: “You call this education?! Think about it. What are these bourgeois Toms preparing us for? I’ll tell you … Have any of you heard of the Congo, or Vietnam …?” She paused, waiting for an answer. “What about imperialism?”

“Tell it like it is, sister!” a male voice boomed out.

“Brainwash! Make you docile, afraid, and white-minded like them. We have to shake up this university. Find out which members of the board are investing in South Africa. We got to expose the running-dog lackeys in the political science department. The revolution must begin here because this is where we are.”

The crowd cheered her wildly.

“This is nothing but a nigger factory. Look around you. The world is changing. The dark world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is coming into its own. Students all over the world are making the revolution … And what are we doing? Joining fraternities and sororities …” She seemed to look directly at me. I looked around somewhat self-consciously; there was no one there from either a fraternity or sorority. I shuddered a little, and for some reason I thought of the dream with my ghostly twin at the crossroads. The brisk evening air made me shudder again.

The moon seemed to rise over Douglass Hall now, casting a cool blue light over the tall oak tree under which she stood; that oak tree which was the traditional place for radical speeches on the state of everything from the politics of Reconstruction to the quality of the food in the cafeteria.

She wasn’t much bigger than me. Underneath the army jacket, her faded blue jeans were tight around her firm body. She was surely intelligent, but there was something of the tigeress about her. Even standing back on the edge of the crowd, I could feel her force. But I could never wear my hair like that. My mother would kill me. A disgrace to the race, she would say. And not proper by anyone’s standard of beauty.

“Let’s shut this mother down!” someone shouted. Then they started throwing bottles at the campus guards. Then two more campus patrol cars sped into the main gate. On one car there was a loud speaker: “This is an illegal assembly. All students are requested to disperse. Those failing to move on will be reported to the dean’s office.”

The guards began moving in on the students. But she continued to shout over the bullhorn as they dispersed. Who was she anyway? Her name came up all the time in our rap sessions. And I had seen her from a distance. She always looked determined, like she was mad in quest of something that was speeding ahead of her. One day I had seen her working in the reading room of the library. I watched her furiously taking notes as she went through several volumes of books piled high beside her on the long mahogany table. She was a top-notch student, but the men she went around with were always making trouble. They disrupted student council meetings with their crazy ideas. All that talk about blackness and black people. It was black this and black that. They should just be happy, I thought, happy to have the opportunity to get an education in this world. The crowd broke up. I went back to the practice room in the basement of Arts and Humanities.

It was dangerous to be out anyway. Maybe the District police would have to come on campus like they did last week when Stokely was here. They say that during the rioting and looting Stokely tried to get the crowd off the street. “Go home!” he said. “Go home! Get off the street … We’re not ready to fight!”

Ready for what? I thought … Did people like him really believe that we would ever be ready to fight these white people? It all made me feel very sick and strange. But I had cried for Dr. King. Yes, I had cried and that was that. There wasn’t any need to do anything else. I had done all I could; and hadn’t my roomie and I, with several other girls, wept for the man of peace, as we drank cognac and ginger ale the night I had my first puff of marijuana?

The Arts and Humanities building was semi-dark. But on the top floors light shined from the windows of the art studios. Several of the painters would linger working and talking long into the night. I wondered if painters were more gregarious than musicians. What about me? Was I just one of the herd around here? Was Jennie Forman right when she attacked the lifestyles of students like me and my sisters in the sorority? Who the hell does she think she is, and why does she believe that she has to be right?

Wide dust mops shoved the day’s debris along the marbled corridors. Along the corridor walls were pictures of the founders of the university.

These old photographs showed some determined people. You could tell by looking at them intently and studying their faces, and then you would zero in on their eyes; their eyes looking straight ahead to the future at you! At me! I would shout in my head, and smile. But there they were beige faces, brown faces, yellow faces, black faces, red faces, and damn near white faces all looking forward at me, fine brown Linda Frazier who hasn’t even given up any pussy yet. Linda Frazier who fears the dark crossroads. They were looking at me sternly but sincerely. I was standing in the way of one of the janitors, who pushed a mound of trash along the wall beneath the photographs. I stepped out of the way.

I wondered whether these janitors ever picked up any of the trash and read it. Like if, say, a religious lady was cleaning the office of a professor of theology; and suppose she found a pile of notes on say the Eschatogical Vision in the Book of Revelations; or one on the Hermeneutics of Divine Providence. I wondered what that poor woman would think. I wondered how the God she lived by and prayed to would compare with the analytical abstractions of the theologians …

I set up the music and began working on my various scales and exercises. I went through the exercises automatically, remembering the dream of my ghost in the fog hovering above the crossroads near the rivers of blood and milk. Graduation was one month away. What would I do then? Enter the conservatory in New York? Graduate work? Then maybe a job in an all-white symphony orchestra? Maybe no job, just frustration and anger. I could always teach. I went from the exercises to a piece by Hindemith. I worked the first eight bars of the piece and then stopped. How come I wasn’t as dynamic as Jennie Forman? What made her so tough? I played the piece through. I liked the way it moved, especially the rhythm in the middle sections. It was beautiful, but as I played, it was as if I was drifting out of myself and hovering like a bird looking down on myself …

Next, I improvised on a blues song that my grandfather used to sing. I played the piece in A minor. I just played and played from my heart. I wept as I played and thought about my father and mother, both graduates from this university. I thought about how they were so unlike my granddaddy who died last winter, right before Christmas.

Granddaddy always made my mother mad singing and humming this old blues song. She used to say, “Daddy, you still singing those ole-time songs? Folks up north don’t wanna hear that stuff … It reminds them of slavery …”

Grandfather: “I was never a slave for nobody. I worked for myself all of my life, took care of your mother, and sent you to college. I’ll be singing this song until the day I die …” Then he would go back to humming. But neither Mommy or Daddy liked it. And Dr. Reed didn’t like it either.

Dr. Reed: “The department would like to discourage our students from playing such music as jazz and blues in the practice rooms. The time allotted for these facilities should be used constructively. The classical forms require dedication and discipline. You may, however, play that kind of material on your own, preferably off campus …”

Having said this, Dr. Reed posted a notice on the bulletin board outside of the department office that read:

Needless to say, we constantly disobeyed this directive. No one was ever caught. But it was said that Dr. Reed had spies who reported on the activities of the music majors. Someone tapped on the door. I stopped abruptly. A pair of light brown eyes peered through the little window in the door. I opened it slowly; it was the tall ascetic student from the rally. Up close, he was very handsome, much more than I had previously thought. He was inside of the little room now.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “I was passing this room when I heard your playing — beautiful.”

“Thank you. I thought you were one of Reed’s mysterious spies.”

“Yes, Dr. Reed … He’s one of our targets.”

“Targets?”

“Yes, he is a running-dog lackey. And we want him out of this university.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s not black enough.”

“Black?”

“Not physically, but spiritually … He’s one of those super-brainwashed Negroes who believes that we can’t be educated unless we become mentally and culturally whitened.”

“I see,” I said softly. There was a long pause. I glanced at my music stand.

“What is your name, Sister?”

I was taken back not so much by the word “sister,” but there was something special about the way he said it. A warm blue wave passed quickly over me; and in a flash I felt our future closeness.

“Linda.”

“My name is Eugene, but I’m thinking about changing it.”

“Changing it?”

“It lacks power.”

“Power? What does your name have to do with power?”

“I don’t know … That’s what I’m trying to find out … But — Linda what?”

“Frazier,” I said.

“Well, Linda, we must claim this century in our name. Do you understand …?”

And then he sat down at the piano and played a variation of my granddaddy’s blues. I joined in, and we played together until the night watchman came to close the building. Then I knew it was clear, I had to fall in love with him.

Later, we walked across town and surveyed the burned-out stores in the riot corridor. “The people have spoken,” he said quietly, “but it is us and future generations that will make the revolution.”

“How?” I said.

“We must each find a way … I’m going in law … Jennie’s got her plan …”

“Any place for a violinist in the revolution?” I laughed.

We had crossed the street and were looking at the titles in the Drum and Spear bookstore: The Wretched of the Earth, Muntu, Don’t Cry, Scream, Black Fire, Toward the African Revolution, The Collected Works of Marcus Garvey, Song for Mumu, The Dead Lecturer, The Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung …

“We’re going to start by dealing with the administration.”

“What’s gonna happen?”

“Something that should have happened a long time ago.”

I certainly don’t want to be involved in any kind of mess, I thought, not now with only a month to go before I graduate … My mother would kill me.

“You should talk to Jennie.”

“I don’t know her, but she seems so hard.” I tried not to show any jealousy.

“Not hard. Determined. The Sisters will have to make the revolution also. Jennie is a poet and a committed revolutionary.”

From the tone of his voice, I could easily surmise that he really admired her. I had only known him for two hours, and already I was jealous of her.

“We’re having a meeting tomorrow. You should stop by … Stokely and Marion will be there. Plus some people from Philly … a group called R.A.M.”

“Ram?”

“The initials stand for the Revolutionary Action Movement.”

“If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.” I was lying. This was going too far.

It was a clear night. We lingered for a moment in front of the large apartment building that the university had purchased and converted into a dormitory. Then he walked me to the security desk as the armed night guard eyed him suspiciously.

Looking around the foyer, he said: “This place is an armed camp since the rebellion.” The guard wore what I later learned was a .38 caliber police special. Eugene grasped my hand and shook it gently. “Keep on pushin’,” he said and walked out of the door.

My heart was jumping like crazy when I got in the elevator. He was nice, but he was a little strange. I tried picturing him sitting with us back home at dinner. I strained to imagine how my bank executive father would talk to him. Would they clash, and ruin dinner? Or maybe they would just talk about sports and money like most men did. But what would they think of me?

I entered my room. My roommate was sleeping, but the radio was still on. I turned it off, undressed, and then stood before the mirror stark naked. I checked out my hips and thighs. I turned around sideways to check out my behind. I touched myself all over. My hands were very hot and moist. I massaged my face with cold cream. Then I turned off the light and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, thinking …

As I dozed off, my ghostly twin smiled in the fog at the crossroads … Granddaddy’s blues echoed in the distance over the cool murmur of rivers …

Flat on his back at night when the TV and radio whispers and the coughs and sobs faded away, Lucus let his arm float up until his fingers pressed against a concrete sky and told him where he was.

What’s going on, he thought, remembering a song from another Death City son who’d been big back when Lucus had been an outside man. Now …

Grounded, man: Got to maintain. All day. All night.

Night meant the admin killed the cells’ overheads. Dudes with desk lamps had to snap them off. Unblinking walkway bulbs on the tiers cast a pale light into every cell.

Same as ever, cell lights snapped on at 7 a.m. that cold autumn morning.

From the bunk under his, Lucus heard H.L.S. whisper: “Think they’s gonna go for it today?”

Lucus said nothing.

Jackster lay on the cot an arm’s length from H.L.S.’s bunk, waiting to take his cue from the two gray men the admin had sardined him with, waiting before putting his feet on the floor and figuring on whether to take his meal card, make for breakfast. “Maybe it’s all cool,” said Jackster.

“Maybe it’s chilled.”

“They been rocking the cradle,” said H.L.S. “Put a dude to sleep with its-forgots, put steel in him when he’s dreaming. They thinks they got a beef, they got a beef, and it don’t blow away in the wind. Hard luck.”

“I know what you’re saying,” said Jackster, not backing down like a punk but not pushing like a fool. “What you gonna do, Lucus?”

Silence answered those whispers in cell 47, tier 3, Administrative Building 3, Central Facility of the Lorton Correctional Complex, which drew its residents from the streets of Washington, Death City, a half hour drive north on a Virginia highway.

Then from down the tier came the buzz of a cell door as officers called a D-Dude out, the tinkle of chains as they strapped him in full restraints — hands linked to a chain belt in front, ankle hobbles, a lead line and chains to the next guy in line.

D-Designate residents were linked up to be marched to and from the mess hall, the first cons for breakfast and last for dinner. Lunch got carted to them in their cells, a universally unpopular feeding system negotiated between Eighth Amendment court rulings and the administration.

When the jerks moved the D-Dudes to the mess hall, other cons were supposed to stay in their cells. Their gates might be locked, but it was easier for the guards to yell the corridors clear and march the D-Dudes past open cells as fast as the shackled men could shuffle. D-Dudes shuffled fast: In full restraints, you were a soft mark to get tore up.

Two years into his stretch, Lucus became a D-Designate after he and Marcus jumped the hospital bus guards, stole the vehicle, and damn near made it to the freeway before troopers threw up a roadblock. Lucus shot a trooper in the leg with a bus guard’s pistol. After a SWAT sharpshooter cracked Marcus’s head open, Lucus was able to press the guard’s revolver into Marcus’s dead hand, then surrender unharmed. The trooper who got shot couldn’t make a positive ID on which orange-jumpsuited convict had pulled his trigger, so dead Marcus ate that beef. Lucus only got tabbed for an escape.

That adventure added five to his forty, kept him in chains for the next seven years.

Chains tinkled past the cell. Lucus drilled his eyes into the concrete ceiling.

H.L.S. swung off his lower bunk, went to the seatless toilet, urinated.

“Man,” he said, “hard luck, my plumbin’s so creaky, can’t go but half the night without hitting porcelain and I still gots to go first thing in the a.m.!”

“I hear that,” said Lucus.

A rhythm worked its way down the tier, squeaky shoes followed by a loud clunk, moving closer: the fat Guard Rawlins unlocking the manuals on each cell door. Rawlins threw their bolt, squeaked down the line.

Jackster whispered: “What are you going to do, Lucus?”

Respectful. Wary. But pushing.

The warning Klaxon echoed through the five tiers of Building 3, then came the sledgehammer clang of all the cells unlocking electronically.

Lucus sat up.

Cell doors were slid open by their residents. Lucus didn’t need to remind his two cellmates to leave their door shut that day. To sleep warm in the seasonally cold cell, he wore his orange jumpsuit over a white T-shirt — the seven-inch shank hidden along his heart-side forearm, inside the orange sleeve, held in place by a fuzzy red wristband like the iron-pumpers sported. Two winters before, a fish with a machine-shop job thought he could wolf out Lucus with the shiv he’d made right under the jerks’ eyes. Lucus broke both the fish’s arms and one of his knees, kept the blade, and left the fish to gimp around like a billboard.

At their cell sink, H.L.S. splashed water on his face.

“I’m hungry,” said Lucus. He slid to the floor, slipped into his sneakers. Glanced to the man at the sink whose hair was white: “You hungry, Sam?”

H.L.S. — Hard Luck Sam.

“Hell yes,” he answered. “If it’s gonna keep running out, got to put more in.”

“Want to stroll, Darnell?” said Lucus. Darnell, not Jackster: not using the dude’s street name. Not dissing the younger man, but underlining who was who.

“Think I’ll hang here for a while,” answered Darnell.

Jackster, thought Lucus, you keeping safe distance?

“I ain’t that hungry,” added the young man.

Justifying, thought Lucus. Making sure I bought what he sold.

“What’s hunger got to do with it?” Sam put on his shoes.

Could have just been H.L.S. running off at the mouth again.

But Lucus knew better.

And the flicker in Darnell’s eyes said that he wondered.

Central Facility’s dining hall could hold all 2,953 residents, but by the time Lucus and Sam made their way through the checkpoints out of their cellblock and the chain-link fence tunnel to the dining hall, half of the bolted-down picnic-style tables were empty.

Lucus recognized several crews of younger inmates clustered at their usual tables, a politicization of geography that mirrored neighborhoods from which those men drew their identity. Here and there sat old timers like Sam and him, neither apart from nor a part of any group. Tattoos from a biker gang filled the corner table; they were laughing. Spanish babbled from three tables. Two Aryan Brotherhood bloods kept themselves close to the main doors — close to the control station where two guards sat. Two more guards punched inmates’ meal passes as they moved into the food line. Three guards strolled the aisles, their faces as flat as the steel tables.

The dining hall smelled of burnt coffee and grease. Breakfast was yellow and brown and sticky, though the cornbread from the prison bakery was fresh.

Sam carried his tray behind Lucus, sat with him at the table that emptied of other convicts as soon as Lucus arrived. The exodus might have been coincidental, Lucus couldn’t be sure. He was grateful for Sam staying where he didn’t have to be.

“You lookin good this morning,” Lucus told him.

“Hard luck is, I look like myself.”

Five tables away, Lucus spotted Twitch — 6’3” of too-tight piano wire, a guy with kinky hair like the man who thought up the atomic bomb. Lucus had seen a picture of that guy in the prison library encyclopedia when he started the program and learned to read good. Twitch bunked four cells down from Lucus. Twitch lifted a spoonful of yellow toward his grim mouth — the spoon jerked, and yellow glopped down to the tray. Nobody laughed or dissed Twitch: He was a straight-arrow postal worker who’d bought his ticket here when he beat a man to death when the guy complained about slow mail service.

Twitch met Lucus’s eyes.

Hope you’re taking your medication, thought Lucus. Twitch’s lawyers lost the insanity plea, so their client bused it to the prison population instead of a loony bin, but the courts let admin make sure Twitch took pills to keep him functional.

In the chessboard of tables, two men sat surrounded by an invisible bubble. One was thin and coughed; the other looked fine. The Word was they had the Ultimate Virus, and once that was the Word, those men were stuck where they were.

Someone snickered to the right.

Easy, casual, Lucus drifted his eyes to the laughter.

Two tables over, sitting by himself, bald head on 300 pounds of barbell muscle and sweet-tooth fat: Cooley, pig-blue eyes, thick lips. In the world, Cooley cruised for hitchhikers and lone walkers, made page one when Five-O tied him to three corpses.

Why ain’t you a D-Designate? Lucus said to himself, knowing the answer, knowing that Cooley played the model prisoner, except for maybe once or twice a year when he found some unconnected sheep where the admin wasn’t watching. Cooley left ’em alive, which kept the heat off, and always washed his hands.

Twitch heard Cooley snicker, jerked his head toward that mountain of flesh.

Don’t do it, Twitch, thought Lucus. He made his mind a magnet for Twitch’s eyes. Don’t be a fool today. Crazy as you are, Cooley’ll eat you alive and love the memories in his lockdown. Ride your pills. Keep it cool.

Magic worked: Twitch’s eyes found Lucus, blinked. Bused his tray and left.

“Hard luck,” muttered Sam. “Twitch losing a cushy government job like that.”

Lucus smiled.

Sam lowered his voice and talked with tight lips: “Ears?”

Lucus shook his head.

Sam told him his back was empty, too, then said: “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m in the flow of events,” said Lucus.

“Just you?”

“Gotta be who it’s gotta be, and it’s gotta be just me.”

Sam said: “Believe I can—”

“You can’t help me enough,” said Lucus. “That’d just be one more body in the beef. That’d force it up to big-time, but it’s not enough to back it down. I won’t let you stand on that line and get slaughtered since it ain’t gonna do no good no how … But bro,” finished Lucus, “I hear you. And thanks.”

“Hard luck.” The older man sighed. Lucus wasn’t sure if it was with sorrow or relief. “So you’re in the flow.”

“There it is.”

“I be on the river banks.” Sam shrugged. “Never know.”

Then, for all the room to see, he held out his hand and slapped five with Lucus.

“What about Jackster?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” said Lucus. “What about our Darnell?”

Darnell had folded the cot, leaned it next to the toilet. His footlocker was jammed up against the wall. With the small desk, the sink, the rust-stained toilet, and built-in footlockers designed for only two prisoners in this Resident Containment Unit, enough space remained for him to pace eight steps along the front of the cell bars.

“You getting your exercise, Jackster?” asked Lucus when he and Sam got home.

H.L.S. stretched out on his bunk — feet facing the front of the cell. “Why didn’t you take it to the rec? They got three new ping-pong balls and you loves to watch that talk-show lady strut her stuff.”

“Figured I’d just hang here,” said Darnell. “Wait for you.”

“Wait for us to what?” Lucus kept his voice flat, easy. He perched on top of the desk, the open front of the cell and Darnell filling his eyes.

“Shit, man, I don’t know!” said Darnell, pacing, staring out across the walkway, across the yawning fifty-foot canyon between their wall of tiered cells and the identical scene facing it. “We’re partnered here, I figured—”

“Partnered?” said Lucus. “Don’t recall signing on with anybody when they put me in here. You remember anything like that, Sam?”

“I disremember nothing and I don’t remember that.”

“Shit, man,” said Darnell. Not turning around.

“Course, we do have to live together,” said Lucus.

“Yeah,” said Darnell. “That’s what I’m talking ’bout.”

“I mean,” said Lucus, “we all gots the same cell number.”

Darnell humphed.

“Numbers, man,” chimed in Sam from the lower bunk, “they can be hard luck.”

“What you mean?” snapped Darnell.

“Why, nothing, Jackster,” said Sam, flat on his back, hard to see. “Just talking about numbers. Luck. Like when I went to that sporting house outside of Vegas. Man, they trot the women out in a line, I’m gassed, blow and booze and riding a hell of a score, squinting at them long legs, them firm—”

“Stop it, man!” hissed Darnell. “Don’t kill me like that!”

“How do you want us to kill you?” said Lucus, sweet and low.

Jackster didn’t reply.

“Just a story!” came the words from the lower bunk. “It ain’t about women, it’s about numbers. Them ladies all had these number tags on ’em, kind of like our designations, only you couldn’t tell as much from reading theirs, just their number. Some of ’em were dog meat, but I spot number nine and she’s so fine—”

“I heard this shit already,” said Jackster.

“And I choose her, tells the man nine, pay him, go to the room and skin down — and who strolls in but the skaggiest bowser in the line who’s so untogether, she’s number six but her number’s on upside down!”

“Hard luck,” said Lucus, rolling out Sam’s punch line.

“Yeah,” spit out Jackster, “like when old H.L.S. here, him already a two-time fall man, cases his apartment rip so bad that the lady done showed up coming home—”

“She got sick at work.” Sam’s tone was flat. Hard. “She wasn’t supposed to.”

If Jackster knew what he was hearing, he didn’t show it.

“Yeah,” he said, “hard luck that lamp you whomped her upside the head with—”

“She wasn’t supposed to be screaming, getting in the way of me getting gone.”

“And hard luck when you dropped out her window and the alley dumpster lid caved in on you, and hard luck it was empty so’s you hit steel bottom and busted your foot instead of bouncing off a pile of dirty Pampers, and—”

“You talking about my crime.”

Even Darnell heard the sound of gravestone from the man on the bottom bunk.

Can’t let this shit roll down today, thought Lucus; said: “Enough hard luck out there to fill our happy home.” Zero the score so H.L.S. won’t need to. “Kind of like when somebody sells three bags of rock to a roller wearing a beard over his badge, deal going down just in time to catch the new mandatory-sentencing guidelines.”

Darnell’s eyes risked flicking from the lower bunk to Lucus.

Lucus smiled: “Some guys just ain’t cut out for the spy game.”

“I don’t play no games,” said Darnell. But his edge was jagged, backing away.

The air inside the room eased out the open cell door, whirled into the cacophony of shouts and radios and sweat in the cellblock.

“The point of the story,” said Sam, his words round and smooth again, “is numbers. Some people get their number wrong, and look what hard luck that brings.”

“I got my number,” mumbled Darnell, “don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t,” said H.L.S. “I be glad for you.”

“What about you, Lucus?” said Darnell.

“What about me what?”

“You gotta be working on your number,” said Darnell. He met Lucus eye for eye. “Like you said, we live together, no choice. That means your number’s chained to mine.”

“I know about chains,” said Lucus.

“Me too,” said Jackster. “And us being linked, it’s righteous I should get to know what’s what and figure my score around your play.” He shrugged. “Ain’t saying I’ll throw with you, but I gots to do the stand-up thing by the guys I’m bunking with.”

Chaos and chatter from the tier filled their cell.

“Time for me to hit the shower.” Lucus snagged his towel, stepped past Darnell. “You boys play nice while I’m gone.” Then Lucus was on the walkway, strolling down the tier, his towel looped in his left hand. Inside his sleeve rode the shiv.

Split the walkway toward the right, stay closer to the rail than the cells. Not so close it’s an easy bull-charge to push you over, but better than walking next to the bars where you’re an easy pull into a cell for a pile-on of badasses and blades. Ripping it up on the walkway meant that the tussle might get seen by the tier monitor in the tower. He could punch the horn, maybe get nightsticks there while you still had some pieces left. In the cells, you’d fall into a setup so savage it’d be history before anyone got there, even if the monitor saw you snatched.

Usually when Lucus walked the tiers, dudes sang out to him, gave him a nod, or even strolled up to jazz. That morning, the guys hanging outside the open cells and doing their busies inside sent him no words. Guys in his path rolled away.

“Hey, sir,” Lucus said to the guard behind the desk at the cage entrance to the shower rooms, “okay if I catch a shower so’s I won’t stink up the boss’s office today?”

Security plans for the Central Facility called for two corrections officers to be on front desk duty at the cleansing unit’s entrance, and for one officer to be stationed “in visual range” of the showers in each of the five locker rooms. The building’s architect had taken the “custody and care” charge of incarceration laws seriously. Under the latest budget plan, however, there was only enough manpower for one front desk officer.

That pockmarked guard had seven years left to his pension. Whenever he found a dollar bill on a walkway, he failed to smell fermenting homebrew. The guard skimmed the clipboard of demerit denials and didn’t find Lucus’s name or designation. “Number two and four are busted out,” he said.

“Believe I’ll try three,” replied Lucus, signing his name and number on the second line of the log book.

The guard frowned, spun the log book around, and double-checked the scrawl on the line above Lucus’s name.

“I thought you could read, boy.”

Keep it level — hell, slam it straight back at the fat son of a bitch: “Do my numbers too.”

“You know who’s in there?”

“I don’t care.”

Flat out, the power mantra.

The guard shook his head, scrawled his initials in the column. Said: “Never figured you for that scene, Lucus.”

Like all its counterparts, Unit 3’s locker room had no lockers. Wooden benches were bolted to the floor. A set of prison-orange clothes and a DayGlo undershirt were neatly stacked up in the empty dressing room when Lucus walked in. From inside the tiled shower area came the sound of rushing water and billowing steam.

Lucus stripped to his skin, stacked his clothes by the wall opposite the other pile. A scar snaked around his left ribs where he’d been too slow seven years before. He held the shiv along his forearm, his other hand fanned a path through the warm fog.

There, against the far wall, under the last of all twenty spraying shower spigots, shoulder-length permed tresses protected by a flowered shower cap, saying: “And lo, it is the man himself.”

“Who you expecting, Barry?” Lucus walked through the lead-heavy rain.

Barry was six feet three inches of rippling muscles. Long, sinewy legs that let him fly across the stage of the city ballet or lightspeed kick the teeth out of dudes inside who were dumb enough to think his style equaled weakness. The shower steam made the mascara over Barry’s right eye trickle down his cheek like a midnight tear.

“Expecting?” Barry turned his bare shoulder toward Lucus, flashed his floodlight smile, and swung his arms out from his sides, up above his head, hands meeting in a point as he stretched to his tiptoes, eyes closed in ecstasy. He held position for a full count, then fluttered his arms down, cupped his hands shyly above his groin, and lowered his chin, eyes closed: a sleeping angel scarred by the midnight tear.

One heartbeat.

Barry’s eyes popped open and he beat his lashes toward the man with the shiv.

“Why, I’ve been waiting for only you.” Barry cocked poses with each beat as he sang: “Just you, indeed, it’s you, only you, yes it’s true …” Whirling around, dancing, singing: “No-body bu-ah-ut—” Cobra coiled, shrinking back on one cocked leg, both pointing fingers aimed right at Lucus’s heart: “Yooou!”

“Good thing you came,” said Lucus.

“What else is a girl supposed to do?” Barry leered. “My pleasure.”

“No, man,” said Lucus, “my payoff.”

“Oh my, yes,” replied Barry, washing. “Lucus to Mouser to Dancer — why, you’d think we’re playing baseball!”

“We ain’t playing shit.”

“Certainly not, manchild.” Barry smiled. “And right you were. The play’s been called, the sign is on for a hit.”

“When?”

“Well, that nervous Nellie was all denial, you see, as if he hadn’t been cruising around the yard, too scared to make a move, afraid his bros would put him down. Those savages! As if they’ve never grabbed a punk in these very tiled walls and made the poor boy weep! But of course my man wasn’t really doing it, you understand, just accepting my smitten appreciation of him being such a stud.”

“When?”

“Let a girl tell her story or you’ll never get anywhere with her!”

“We’re where we are and where we’re going. You been paid, you come across.”

“Always.” Barry savored the moment. “What did Mouser owe you that he swapped my debt to him for?”

“Enough,” said Lucus. “Now give me what I bought: When?”

“Why, today, dear man.”

Lucus showed nothing.

“Probably in the afternoon exercise.”

Yard time, thought Lucus. Starts at 3:30. About five hours away.

Barry washed his armpits.

“My simple little use-to-be-a-virgin’s crew has traded around and rigged the stage and done the diplomacy and even rehearsed wolf-packing. They have a huge enough chorus to smother any friends of their featured star who try to crimp the show and make it more than a solo death song.”

Water beat down on the two men.

“What else?” said Lucus.

“Nothing you’d want. He cried. I think he actually feels guilty. That’s the only charming thing about him — though he does have nice thighs. Not as nice as yours.”

“Does he suspect that he was set up with you or that he ran his mouth too much?”

“He’s all ego and asshole,” said Barry. “He can’t conceive that he’s been bought and sold and suckered clean.”

“How about his bros? By now, they might know about you two.”

“Not from him. He’s too scared of getting branded to confess, cagey enough to not let it slip out. If they do know, no worry: Like you said, I used to middleman powder for upscale customers from a boy tied to their crew. That makes moi acceptable.”

“We’re square.” Lucus stepped back, his eyes staying on Barry as he moved toward the door.

“How about a little something for the road?” Barry smiled. “It’ll calm your nerves. For free. For you, from me.”

“I got what I need for the road.”

“Oh, if only that were true for all of us! If only we could all believe that!”

Lucus turned, disappeared in the steam. In the locker room, he dressed. Don’t run. Don’t show one bead of sweat.

“You get what you was after?” asked the guard as he signed Lucus out.

“Guess I did.”

“Guess I did — sir.”

“Yeah.” Lucus saw his reflection in the guard’s eyes, saw how it shrank because of what that guard thought happened in there. That’s his problem, thought Lucus. He went back to the cell.

Spent the morning on his cot, like he had nothing to do.

Jackster and H.L.S. puttered about, neither one leaving Lucus.

“Lunchtime,” announced Lucus, swinging off his bunk. “Come on, Jackster. Today you eating with the men.”

“I eat where I want,” snapped Darnell.

“Why wouldn’t you want to eat with us?” asked Lucus.

Darnell mumbled — then obeyed Lucus’s gesture to lead the way.

A table emptied when Lucus and his cellmates sat down.

Lunch was brown and brown and gray, with coffee.

Jackster kept sneaking looks at other tables, locking eyes with bros from his old neighborhood.

H.L.S. ran down “Chumps I have known.”

Like Dozer, a Valium freak who bypassed a pharmacy’s alarm system, then overindulged in bounty and nodded off in the baby-food aisle. The cops woke him.

And Two-Times Shorty, a midget who tried to bully an indy whore into being his bottom lady. She chased him through horn-honking curbside shoppers and lost tourists looking for the White House, pinned him on the hood of a Dodge, and pounded about a hundred dents in him with her red high-heeled shoe. Tossed him buck naked into a dumpster. Climbing out, pizza parts stuck to his naked torso, Shorty grabbed the offered hand of a fine-looking woman. What the hell, he figured, second time’s the charm, and he reeled off his be-mine pimp spiel. She slapped policewoman bracelets on him.

Then there was Paul the Spike, who tested heroin on street dogs. While he was slicing and dicing a batch of Mexican, Paul heard a knock on the door. Because of the ’sclusionary rule, he beat the narco charges but drew ninety days for cruelty to animals.

“Hard luck can bite anybody’s ass,” said Sam, “but it always eats up chumps.”

“I ain’t no chump,” said Jackster.

Sergeant Wendell entered the mess hall, scanned the mostly empty rows of tables.

“Who said you were?” Lucus let his eyes leave the sergeant to study Darnell.

“No fool better!”

Sergeant Wendell started toward them.

“Trouble with young punks today,” said Sam, “they got no finesse. Our day, needed to smoke a guy, you caught him in private, did your business, and everything’s cool. These days, you young punks let fly on street corners and wing some poor girl coming home from kindergarten. No respect for nothing, no style or—”

“Style?” snapped Jackster. “You got no idea, man, no idea what style is!”

“Resident Ellicot!” yelled Sergeant Wendell.

“Yes, sir?” answered Lucus.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I was just—”

“You know your damn schedule as well as I do! Your ass belongs in Administrator Higgins’s office as of ten minutes ago!”

“On my way, sir!” Lucus stood.

H.L.S. pulled Lucus’s tray so Lucus wouldn’t need to bus it.

“Why’d you make me have to come fetch you?” Wendell asked as he marched Lucus along in front of a dozen sets of eyes.

“Just guess I ain’t so smart,” said Lucus.

“Don’t give me that shit,” said Wendell, who was no fool and a good jerk, though no con had ever been able to buy him. “Move!”

Assistant Administrator Higgins kept his office almost regulation. Sunlight streaming through the steel mesh grille over his lone window fell on a government low-bid desk positioned in line with the file cabinets and the official calendar on the wall next to facility authority and shift assignment charts. But Higgins had taken out the regulation steel visitors’ chairs bolted to the floor in front of his desk and had risked replacing them with more inviting, freestanding wooden fold-up chairs that a strong man could use to batter you to death.

Higgins was a bantamweight in chain-store suits and plain ties. He wore metal frame glasses that hooked around his ears. Glasses on or off, his dark eyes locked on who he was talking to. That afternoon, he slowly unhooked his glasses, set them on the typed report in the middle of his otherwise blank desk, and fixed those eyes on Lucus.

“So, do you understand this report?” asked Higgins.

“I can read now, so that ain’t what I gots to talk to you about.”

“That was on your meeting request.” Higgins leaned back in his chair.

“The administration,” started Lucus, “they got to like what I been doing. They been catching hell on the news, in the TV ads from those two citizens running for senator. I heard the warden—”

“Chief administrator,” corrected Higgins.

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Change the name and everything’s okay. Long as there’s no trouble.”

“What do you mean, trouble?”

“There’s some that say the understaffing helps you guys, cause it’ll inspire something to happen, and then you all can say, See? We need more budget. Jobs.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“Maybe some of the guards do.”

“The officers are paid to watch inmates, not make policy. I need to be told about any of them who act differently.”

“I ain’t the telling kind,” said Lucus. “I just sensitive to your problems about image and keeping up the good show so the warden don’t get bad press and take heat from his buddy the governor and every other politician looking to get elected.”

“What’s this got to do with anything?”

“I just glad to help out — with things like that charity program on your desk.”

“You’ve done good work, Lucus.”

“What will it get me?”

Higgins frowned. “You knew that isn’t the way this works.”

Lucus shrugged. “Things change.”

“Don’t go con on me now, resident.”

“Sir, you was the one who showed me about attitude, about getting out from behind it and how nothing would change if I didn’t. So I been workin on my attitude, what’s behind it, what I do. But where’s it getting me? Still right here.”

“You’re down for Murder One, five counts … plus. Where do you expect to be?”

“Oh, I’m a criminal,” said Lucus. “No question about that. I can do the time for what I did, but man, let my crime justify my punishment.”

“Five murders,” said Higgins. “Plus.”

“I already done my plus in chains.” Stay calm. “But I never did no murders.”

“The law—”

“Sir, I know the law. We were sticking up gamblers. The law made them crooks, which made them marks. The law did that — not me. Figure, heist a crook, he can’t holler for cops. Rodney had the gun, had them fools lined up against that wall, told me to check out the basement. We agreed before we went in there: in and out with cash, nobody hurt, nobody can do shit about us. I’m in the basement looking for whatnot, I hears those pop-pop-pops … Man, Rodney done me just as much as he done them dudes!”

“Not quite,” said Higgins.

“Yeah, well, what’s done is done, but I didn’t kill nobody. It’s the law and Rodney that made me guilty.”

“You chose to rob, you chose to run with a trigger-happy partner, you chose your juvie record, your prior theft and assault rec—”

“Yes, sir,” said Lucus, interrupting with polite formality. Got to hurry this up. “I admit I’m guilty, but fitting my crimes with two twenty-year stretches, back to back, no parole — no right man can do that kind of justifying.”

“It’s a done deal, Lucus. I didn’t think you were fighting that anymore.”

“I got a lot of time to mess with it. Nineteen more years.”

“Might just be enough to make yourself a new life.”

“Yeah. Starting when I’m sixty-two.”

“Starting every time you breathe.” Higgins blinked. “You want something.”

“This new attitude you helped me get,” said Lucus. “Working programs — with my program in my head. Not getting in any beefs since I got out of chains—”

“At least none that you got caught for,” said Higgins.

“I been doing good time.”

“The law isn’t about doing good time. That’s what you’re supposed to do as a minimum. No matter what you do in here, every day is on the payback clock, and you gotta get to zero before you can claim you’re owed.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe not always.”

Higgins shrugged. “What do you want?”

“A transfer,” said Lucus.

“What?”

“Out of here. Right now. Not a parole, you couldn’t pull that off. But you could take a paper out of that desk, sign it, and there it is, a transfer out of the Wall to the Minimum-Security Farm. Effective soon as the ink is dry. Call the duty sergeant and—”

“You’re down for hard time. You’re a five-count killer with one escape and one shot-up officer — don’t tell me where that gun was found — plus a jacket full of incidents.”

“All before I changed my attitude.”

“Never happen. I never bullshitted you it would.”

“The transfer ain’t for me. It’s for my son.”

Higgins blinked.

Blinked again, and in the administrator’s dark eyes, Lucus saw mental file cabinet drawers slide open.

“Kevin,” said Higgins. “Kevin Ellicott, down for …”

“Last year, a nickel tour for what they could get him on instead of big dope. He’s done angel time for thirteen months.”

“Your boy runs with the Q Street Rockers,” said Higgins. “They’re no church choir.”

“I didn’t say he was a genius. What he is, sir, is a juicer. Just about to become a full-bore alcoholic, if he stays in here much longer. And what’s that gonna solve? How’s that gonna make life easier for the warden? What justice is—”

“Doesn’t add up,” said Higgins. “He can get pruno as easy at the Farm as here.”

“Maybe if he gets into the Farm’s twelve-step program—”

“It’s his maybes, not yours. Why isn’t he asking? Why are you doing this?”

“He’s my son. I wasn’t there to bring him up. Hell, if I had been around before I got my attitude program, probably wouldn’t have done him much good. Maybe he could have learned better street smarts, but … he stays in here, he dies in here.”

“Of alcoholism?” said Higgins.

“Dead is dead,” said Lucus.

They watched each other for a dozen heartbeats.

“And you think a transfer to the Farm will keep him alive.”

“It’ll give him a chance.”

“What aren’t you telling me?” asked Higgins.

“I’m telling you everything I can,” answered Lucus.

“That you can? You got to learn that we create most our own cans and can’ts.”

“We do?” Lucus paused; said: “You always say that we pay for them too.”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah,” said Lucus. “That’s right. So if somebody’s already paid, then he deserves a can.”

Softly, Higgins said, “Don’t blow it, Lucus. Whatever’s going down, don’t blow everything you’ve accomplished.”

“What’s that, sir? Any way I cut it, I still got nineteen years to go. What could I blow?”

“The way you get to look at yourself in the mirror.”

“I see a man there now. I’ll see a man there tomorrow.”

“If you won’t help me,” said Higgins, “I can’t help you.”

“I’ve been helping you — sir. Look at the report on your desk. Let the warden take credit for it, keep his image shiny. I ain’t asking nothing for me. Who I am, what I’ve done, what I can do — one way or the other, all that should pay for something.”

Higgins shook his head: “You can’t bargain for your son.”

“Then what the hell can I do?”

“Let him do his own life.”

“You telling me, no transfer for him?”

“That’s the way it has to be.”

“Thought we defined our own possibilities.” Lucus stood. “Are you through with me — sir?”

“We’re through, resident.”

Lucus walked to the door, turned back. “Answer me one question, sir?”

“Maybe.”

“Why do what you do? Every day, come in here, locked up just like us, with us. Bucking the admin, the law, and the Word and the attitudes: Why you do it?”

“I got kids too.”

Lucus nodded as he opened the door. “Too bad.”

Clock on the wall facing the sergeant’s desk: 1:52. Hour and a half to go.

Close that door behind you, thought Lucus, then said: “Hey, sergeant, got some book work to do. Can you cut me a library pass? It ain’t my regular day till tomorrow.”

Sergeant Wendell wrote the pass without bothering his boss behind the closed door. Wendell knew about Lucus and his Help the Homeless Project, all the grants and reports.

The library filled the second floor of the recreation complex. Lucus shivered as he hurried through the outside fenced tunnel from admin building to the rec. Couldn’t help himself, he turned his face up to the cold sun as if to kiss the sky like he was a free man with a future. His exhaled clouds floated through the chain-link fence. The blade hugged his arm.

Inside the rec, Lucus glanced at the standing-room-only crowd of orange jumpsuits watching a soap on the prison’s big-screen TV that the Feds had confiscated in a drug bust. Cons laughed and joked, but soaked up the story about a beautiful blonde in slinky dresses. Lucus couldn’t spot that face in the crowd, but he knew it was there.

The guard at the library door blinked at Lucus’s pass with eyes that coveted first-floor duty where he could watch TV too.

The A-Designate con working as librarian stood by the checkout desk, stacking books on a delivery cart to be rolled along the tiers. Another A-Designate replaced books on a shelf. Three residents sat at tables, surrounded by law books and yellow legal pads.

Over in the corner, reading at his Thursday table: James Clawson. The Man.

An orange tent loomed in front of Lucus: Manster, the only creature in the institution bigger than Cooley. Manster stayed out of chains because whatever he wanted from another con, the other con gave up. Outside, Manster had pistol-whipped a cop to death.

“I’m here to see the Man,” Lucus told Manster.

“Maybe.” Manster kept his eyes on Lucus, coughed to get the Man’s attention.

The three other iron men between the Man’s table and the world made a space for their ruler to check out the petitioner. He read to the end of the paragraph, glanced through the orange jumpsuits, and let Lucus fall into his eyes.

“How you doin’, J.C.?” said Lucus.

“Lucus the lone wolf,” replied J.C. “Join me.”

J.C. picked up some chump’s pink commissary pass, used it as a bookmark for the page he was reading, then closed the volume. He turned the book so Lucus could see the cover: a picture of a suit-and-tie dude with a cocked sword in one hand and a briefcase in the other. The book’s title read: Corporate Samurai — Classic Japanese Combat Principles for the 21st Century’s Global Business Economy.

“Are you still reading, Lucus?”

“When I got time.”

“You know what the underlying fallacy of this book is?” asked J.C., who was working on his MBA, correspondence and good-faith-in-your-prison-jacket style.

“Ain’t read it.”

“You don’t need to. Look at the cover.”

The suit with a briefcase and a sword and a going-places face.

“Give a twelve-year-old a dime and a nine,” said J.C., “and he’ll punch a dozen red holes in Mr. Global Business Corporate Samurai before that sword even gets close.”

A national gang once sent a crew from Angel Town to Death City to “negotiate” J.C.’s outfit into their fold. A freezer truck carted the five gangbangers back to L.A., dumped the meat in their hood.

“Business ain’t my thing,” said Lucus.

“It’s the wave of the future,” counseled J.C., who was down on a drug kingpin sentence running longer than any life.

“I’ve got something for you,” said Lucus.

“Ah.”

“But I need something too.”

“Of course you do. Or you wouldn’t be here. Respect and such, you’ve been smart about it. But it’s always been Lone-Wolf Lucus.”

“I’ve had bad luck at partnering.”

“Perhaps prison has taught you something.”

“Oh yeah,” said Lucus. “Deal is, there’s trouble coming down. You run most of what moves inside here.”

J.C. shrugged.

“Trouble comes down,” said Lucus, “all the politics buzzing outside, the admin will tighten the screws, and that’ll crimp business, be bad for you.”

“The innocent always suffer,” said J.C. “What ‘trouble’ has made you its prophet?”

“There’s a hit on, likely for this afternoon. The guarantee is it won’t be quick and clean, and you don’t need any out-of-hand mess tightening the screws on your machine.”

“What’s the ‘guarantee’?”

“I am.” Risk it. Maybe he knows, maybe not. Maybe he gave the nod, maybe he just heard the Word and let it melt in his eyes.

“The hit’s on my boy — Kevin. He got drunk, got in a stupid beef over a basketball game in the yard. Trash flew, couple pushes before some guards walked by and chilled it down. Dude named Jerome’s claimed the beef with my boy, and Jerome and his Orchard Terrace Projects crew gonna make it a pack hit.”

“This is just a beef? Not turf or trade?”

“Nothing ever stays clean, J.C. You know that. The Orchard Terrace crew does my boy, it’ll make them heavy — balance of power shifting don’t do you no good.”

“Unless the teeter-totter dips my way,” said J.C.

“Far as I know, you ain’t in this.”

Gotta be that way! Or …

J.C. sent his eyes to one of his lieutenants.

“Lucus’s punk runs with the Q Street Rockers,” said the man whose job it was to know. “Wild boys. Orchard Terrace crew, they been proper, smart.”

J.C. sat for a moment. Closed his eyes and enjoyed the sunshine streaming through the grilled window. “You’re in a hard place,” he told Lucus.

“Life story.”

“What do you want from me?” asked J.C.

“Squash the hit — you could do it, no cost.”

“Everything costs. What’s in that play for me?”

“Your profits stay cool,” said Lucus.

“Your concern for my profits is touching.”

“We got the same problem here.”

“No,” sighed J.C., “we don’t. If I squash the hit, then I tilt the teeter-totter. Why should I become the cause instead of just one of the bystanders? Your boy picked his crew—”

“It’s a neighborhood thing, he didn’t pick.”

“He didn’t grow up,” said J.C. “Now, if he runs to me out of fear, wants to join up … I’d be signing on a weak link. I’d gain more if I fed him back to the Orchard Terrace boys — then they’d owe me. Better to be owed by lions than to own a rabbit.”

“I figured that already.”

“What else is in your column of calculations?”

Fast, everything’s rushing so fast, too fast.

“You quash the hit,” said Lucus, drawing the bottom line, “I’ll owe you one.”

“Well, well, well. What would you owe me?” asked the man with a wallet full of souls.

“Eye for an eye. One for one.”

“Eye for an eye plus interest.” J.C. smiled. His teeth were white and even. “You really aren’t a businessman, Lucus.”

“I am who I am.”

“Yes. A gray legend when I walked in here. Lone wolf and wicked. You mind your step, never push but never walk away. Smart. Smarter than smart — schooled.”

“I’m worth it.”

“You ever kill anybody, Lucus?”

“I’m down for five murders — plus.”

“My question is,” said the man whose eyes punished lies, “have your hands ever drained blood?”

“Nobody ever quite died,” confessed Lucus.

“Quite is a lot.” J.C.’s smile was soft. “I know you’re stand-up. You’d keep your word, wear my collar. But the fit would be too tight. And down the line, who knows what problems that would mean?”

Lucus felt his stomach fall away. His face never changed.

“So … I can’t help you. Your boy’s beef is none of my business — either way, I promise you that. He makes it clean, I’m not in his shadow. But his future is his future.”

Lucus nodded. Pushed his chair back from the table slowly and felt the meats close in by his sides, ready.

“Whatever happens,” said Lucus, “remember I gave you heads-up, fair warning. Nothing coming your way from me. Or my boy.”

“We’ll see,” J.C. shrugged. “If we’re square on that, we’re square.”

On his way out the library door, Lucus checked the clock: 2:01. Less than ninety minutes until the turnout in the yard.

What was left was the hardest thing.

Lucus found them in the TV room, backs to the wall, street cool — running their mouths and eyeing beautiful people on the tube.

“Well, what’s up here?” said one of them as Lucus neared.

Brush past that fool like December wind.

Look at yesterday’s mirror — a young man against a wall, thick hair with no gray, taller and flatter muscles, no scar across the bridge of the nose, but damn: a mirror.

“We gotta talk,” Lucus told the apparition.

“Say what?” said the young man. Lucus smelled pruno on the boy’s breath. Fear in his sweat.

Fuck your fear! telepathed Lucus. If you can’t kill it, use it and ride it smart! But he said: “Say, now.”

“Old man,” answered his son, “anything you got to say, you say it right here, right now, in front of my bros.”

“I thought you grew up to be enough of a stallion you didn’t need nobody to protect you from facing your old man.”

Catcalls and laughs bounced off Lucus — bounced off him and hit his son. Lucus knew they were all measuring Kevin, seeing how he’d handle this. Wondering if maybe Lucus could wolf their bro down. And if the old man could do it …

Kevin knew all this too, sensed Lucus. Damn yes: My son ain’t all fool.

“Well, shit!” said Kevin. “You been worrying ’bout talking to me for nineteen years, you might as well get it off your back now.”

Kevin swaggered out of his crew, headed toward an empty corner by the moth-eaten pool table whose cues and balls hadn’t been replaced after the last riot. Pressed his back against the wall, made Lucus turn his eyes from the distant crowd.

Good move! thought Lucus. “We haven’t got much time.”

“You never did have the time, did you?”

“I never had much choice. Your grandma didn’t want to be bringing you down to no lockup, get you thinking that was just another part of family life, and your mother—”

“She’d have sold me for a nickel bag.”

“She did what she could by you, got you to her mother. Gave up the only thing she ever loved all-out.”

“I should drop by the cemetery, spray tag Yo, thanks! on her stone.”

“Don’t throw your shit on her grave.”

The chill in Lucus’s voice touched his son.

“Why’d you two go and have me anyway?”

“Wasn’t what we were thinking of,” answered the father.

“Yeah, I know. A little under-the-jackets action sitting in chairs in minimum security’s visitor hall.”

“Least you know who your father is.”

“Hell of a family that gives me.” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know who the hell you are. You’re the big Never There.”

“Nothing kept you from catching a bus out here when you turned eighteen, signing the visitor’s log, calling me out.”

Kevin shrugged: “I figured I’d make it here soon enough.”

There it is, thought Lucus. Got to tend to business! But he said: “Outside … you got a woman?”

Kevin looked away, said: “They’s all bitches and whores.”

“Thinking and talking like that,” said his father, “no wonder you’re in prison. No woman who’s worth it will stick around you when you got that attitude.”

“Yeah, well … no ladies no how was beating down my crib door.” Kevin looked at his father; looked away, said: “That woman Emma, works down at the dry cleaners for them Koreans. She calls herself your wife.”

“We ain’t got no law on it.” Lucus shrugged, prayed for the clock not to tick. “Her old man died in a bust-out, I got to know her through that. Phone calls, letters. We understand each other.”

“You don’t even have minimum-security visiting privileges. The glass stays up when she visits you. What’s she see in it?”

Lucus shrugged. “Safe sex.”

Made him laugh!

“We got no time,” said Lucus. “There’s a hit on you today. Likely in the yard.”

Kevin blinked: “Jerome said—”

“Words are weapons! Ain’t you learned that?”

“You ain’t been my teacher, so you can’t give me grades.”

“If I’d been learnin you, you wouldn’t have got drunk, got in a chump beef over yard basketball! And if you had run up against it, you would have done it right.”

“Yeah? Like how?”

“Like you’d have kept it personal! Man to man. Walked into Jerome’s crew and called him out — put him on the spot. Then you’d have had a chance.”

“What chance did I ever have for anything?” hissed Kevin. “You think I’m chump enough to ask him—”

“You don’t ‘ask’ for anything from anybody!”

“Force a throw-down, strap our arms together, toss the blade on the floor, and—”

“And you got an even chance! You let it buck up to you dissing him and his whole crew, you got a war, not a battle.”

“I got my own crew!”

“Yeah. There’s more of the other dudes, and the guys on your side would never sell anybody out. Or dodge getting cut up. They gonna die for you.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“If that’s the way it is, this wouldn’t be Plea-Bargain City.”

“So what do you want me to do, Mr. Smart-Time Con?”

“You got one chance. Go to the admin. Feed them a pruno still: Robinson, Building 2, Tier 2, in the bus the auto mechanics practice on. Trade that bust for a crash transfer to—”

“You want me to rat? You a fool? That’s evil! And suicide!”

“No, that’s smart. Robinson wants to kick the juice — like you need to. He knows lockdown cold turkey is his only way. I already cut a deal with him. You just gotta make your move — and right now.”

“You’re one treacherous mother,” said Kevin.

“Believe it.”

“But I go to the Farm, the Orchard Terrace guys—”

“They got no crew there.”

“They will.”

“That’s tomorrow. You’re scheduled to die today. With the time you done, keep your jacket clean and when the courts make the admin thin the herd, you’re prime for early release. Could be outta here in a year. Besides, we’ll fix tomorrow when—”

“The Farm boys would know I ratted.”

“Not if Robinson puts out the Word how you two tricked the admin.”

“My crew would cut me loose.”

“No loss.”

“They’re all I got!”

“Not anymore.”

Lucus heard the babble behind him; knew a hundred eyes were checking them out. Knew the clock was ticking.

“You just don’t understand,” said Kevin. “If I run from—”

“You’re not running from, you’re running towards. And don’t tell me I don’t understand.”

“I just gotta do what I gotta do. If what’s gonna happen’s got to happen, that’s just the way it’s gotta be.”

“Kevin?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t hand me bullshit street jive. That’s all hollow words you stack up in front of your face to keep from seeing you’re too lazy or too stupid or too scared to walk smart. What’s gotta be, gotta be — shit: You sit there where the ‘be’ shit is, you ain’t being stand-up strong, you’re making yourself the most powerless chump in the world.”

“You don’t get it, do you, old man?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Just because I done a lot of wrongs don’t mean I can’t do one right.”

“Why this? Why me?”

“You’re what I got,” whispered Lucus.

Kevin pushed off the wall. “See you.”

“I can save your life!”

“No, you can’t,” said his son. Nineteen-year-old Kevin spread his arms out like Jesus. “Besides, what’s it worth?”

And he walked away. Strutted toward his bros.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, Lucus went back to his cell.

Jackster and H.L.S. were there, waiting out the last few minutes before yard time.

Nobody said anything.

Soon as Kevin got sent to the institution, Lucus put the few pictures the boy’s grandmother had grudgingly sent him in a paperback book where, like now, he could flip through them without a ritualized search that might betray his heart. With those childhood snapshots were pictures that Emma had somehow scissored from high school yearbooks for both years Kevin had attended.

Lucus glanced at his cell walls. Pictures of wide outdoors. Pictures of Emma — she sent him a new one every three months. Who says we can’t grow old together? she once told him through the phone and glass in the maximum designates’ visitation room.

Couple minutes to go, Lucus leaned on the bars. Stared nowhere.

“What you doing?” asked Jackster.

“Nothing,” mumbled Lucus.

“What you gonna do?” asked Jackster.

Lucus stood wordless until the Klaxon blared the “All out” for those residents with permission to choose the ninety-minute exterior exercise, general population period.

The blade rode up Lucas’s sleeve when he slipped into his blue-denim prison jacket. As his cellmates grabbed their jackets, Lucus said: “Nice day out there.”

The yard.

Inside the Wall, chop a couple football fields and box them in a square with three mammoth cellblocks, double chain-link fences topped with razor and barbed wire. Build guard towers for snipers. Lay down a running track that circles inside the fence a couple steps from the dead zone trip wire. Pave a dozen basketball half-courts in one corner, stick some rusted barbells and concrete benches beside them. Paint some white lines on a cellblock and call them handball courts. Smack in the center, throw up a water tower surrounded by a chain-link fence. Build chain-link fence funnels from the cellblocks and admin building.

Loose the animals down those funnels.

The D-Designates clink out there with their chains for thirty minutes after breakfast. General population gets ninety minutes in the afternoon. A-Designates have lunch to dinner access.

Institution procedures assign twelve pairs of corrections officers to roaming yard patrol during general population period. The budget that day sent five pairs of jerks out to the yard.

Several hundred inmates funneled through the tunnels.

Go to the core, thought Lucus. Go to the center of the yard, where you can watch and be ready to move any which way.

H.L.S. casually strolled a step behind Lucus’s right side.

No matter how Jackster shuffled, the old dudes hung behind him a half-step and herded him where they wanted.

J.C. and a squad paraded toward the concrete chess tables in the best sun. J.C. showed his empty face to Lucus. Manster sent the lone wolf a sneer.

Lucus thought: The hitters’ll take their time, make sure the play is set.

Kevin and a handful of his crew entered the yard laughing and looking drunk.

Count six, thought Lucus. Q Street Rockers supposed to be a dozen strong.

Barry strolled by with three attentive supplicants under his protection.

The orange-jumpsuited and blue-jacketed sea of inmates parted for Cooley. The hulk’s beady eyes jumped around the yard, seeking a fish.

“Yo, Jackster!” An inmate Darnell’s age popped out of the crowd twenty feet away, a worn brown basketball spinning in his hands. “We shooting hoops or what?”

“Ah …” Darnell looked to his cellmates. “I got a game.”

“Better win,” said Lucus. And he smiled.

Darnell got an empty stare from Hard Luck Sam.

Jackster followed the man with the ball to a half-court.

Twitch stood by the water-tower fence, alone, an invisible wind roaring around him. His gloves were gone, strips of an old blue shirt were wrapped around his hands. Twitch’s eyes bore through Lucus.

Lucus used both hands to rub his temples, like to rub away the pain.

Jerome and a posse of his Orchard Terrace crew, a dozen dudes, strolled into the yard, headed for turf opposite Kevin and his bros. Like nothing was on.

Looking once at Jerome, the world couldn’t tell him apart from Kevin.

There, in the crowd on Kevin’s flank, positioning by the dead zone wire: one, two — no, three Orchard Terrace boys, the O.T.s fanning out and holding. Waiting.

Making the box, thought Lucus. No need to check the other flank, O.T.s would be there too.

The shiv burned along Lucus’s forearm.

Across the yard, a b-ball game filled a court, the ball clinking through the chain hoop, bouncing off the backboard.

Jackster caught a pass, made a fast break to the hoop, and laid the ball up in the air. A teammate tipped it in. Dude on the other team slapped Jackster five and jogged down the court with him, mouths a-working. Time out and the five-slapper waved a sub in for himself. Time in. Standing on the sidelines, a spectator got the word on the game from the five-slapper. Dunk shot. Ball in play. Spectator got bored, strolled away from the courts, through the crowd, cut left, cut right, materialized alongside the O.T. posse. Whispered in the main man’s ear. Got a nod. The main man put his arm around Jerome, leaned in to him.

Standing beside Lucus, H.L.S. said: “Catch that?”

“Oh yeah,” said Lucus. Two tan uniformed jerks picked their way through the orange-jumpsuited crowd: Adkins and Tate, a too-lean and too-short combo who always got stuck with yard duty and always walked the same beat. They headed for their shake-the-water-tower-fence-gate check, after which they would angle toward the barbells.

Lucus saw the O.T. posse adjust their cluster, the flankers anticipating the patrol, not letting anybody use the guards to outmaneuver the game plan.

Adkins, the lean guard, swung the keys retracto-chained to his belt. Shorty Tate kept his eyes on the ground, like he was looking for something. Everybody knew his eyes were in the dust so the cons wouldn’t see his fear. As if they needed to see it. Fear hung like smoke over the small man, who wished yard officers were armed and he didn’t have to rely on the wall snipers.

Adkins swung his keys and complained about the union and the World Series. Tate locked his eyes in the dust, thinking about how after checking the gate to the water tower, they’d only need to—

Twitch threw a punch smack between Tate’s shoulder blades, and the small guard crashed into the dust.

Adkins dropped his keys and the retracto-chain snapped them back to his belt. But before he could whirl around, Twitch was on his back, sliding a thick strip of old shirt around the guard’s neck. One end of the strap was tied to Twitch’s wrist. He looped it around his hand, cinched it tight so the shiv in his fist was locked with the point digging into the guard’s neck.

“Nobody move!” screamed Twitch. “Anybody moves, I cut his head off and let the mice run out! Nobody moves!”

The cons cared zero about Adkins, but Twitch’s play stunned them into stillness.

On the ground, Tate gasped, but managed to push the button on his belt radio.

Twitch backed toward the water tower, hugging Adkins in front of him with the knife pinned at the base of his skull.

Guards ran through the jumpsuited crowd, yelled into their radios.

“Nobody come any closer! Nobody move!” Twitch yelled to the charging guards. “Don’t you clear the yard! You clear the yard, I cut off his head and let the mice run out! Swear to Jesus, you clear the yard, you come at me, he’s dead! Dead! Mice! Ain’t gonna let you clear the yard! No Attica! No clean shots!”

The guard captain reached the inner ring of spectators near Lucus and called out: “Everybody hold your positions! Everybody! No prisoner moves! Officers stay back! … It’s okay!” he shouted to Twitch as the inmate kept backing toward the water-tower fence. The captain’s words flew over Tate, who stayed facedown in the dust and prayed that the snipers’ aim was true. “You’re okay!”

A react squad of guards charged out of the admin building. Shotguns, man, buckshot loads bouncing on SWAT belts. They formed a skirmish line facing the cons to be sure nobody tried to cop a point in this psycho drama.

On the wall, snipers ran to position. Lucus saw sunlight glint off a scope.

Twitch kept yelling, “Nobody move!” He made Adkins unlock the water-tower gate, stayed pressed against the guard. The Klaxon blared.

Higgins, radio in hand, moved next to the captain as Twitch maneuvered himself and his hostage up the spiral steel staircase along the outside of the water tower.

“What the hell is he doing?” asked Higgins.

“We can’t get a clean shot,” said the captain.

“Nobody move down there!” yelled Twitch. “Nobody move or we’ll all die!”

Higgins radioed a report to the warden.

In his mind, Lucus saw the state police cars in the town a mile beyond the wall, cops choking down donuts and slurping coffee as they turned on their red-and-blue spinning party lights and roared toward the prison.

Somewhere, Lucus knew, a TV news camera crew was racing to their helicopter.

Standing on a metal ledge fifty feet above the yard, knife against the guard’s spine, Twitch screamed down: “Don’t move! Kill him if you do! Mice!”

Radios crackled.

The dudes started to buzz, whisper, but stood still cause the admin had turned out the shotguns and snipers.

Higgins’s radio squawked; it was the warden: “What does he want?”

Cool and careful, Lucus stepped forward.

“Administrator Higgins!” yelled Lucus, going for the man in charge. “I can do it!”

“Freeze and stow it!” yelled the captain. A guard swung a shotgun toward Lucus.

“I can do it!” pleaded Lucus.

“Do what?” asked Higgins.

“Get your man down from there alive. Twitch, he thinks I’m, like, one of him. You know I’m the only guy in here who he believes.”

Captain said: “What the—”

“He’s crazy, sir,” said Lucus. “But he ain’t stupid.”

“He’s a dead man!” snapped the captain.

“Drop him, your guy falls too,” said Lucus, adding: “Sir. Hell to pay for that. Hell to pay even if you just kill Twitch. TV cameras coming. Ask the warden what he wants on the 6 o’clock news.”

“Resident,” snapped the captain, “you’re ass—”

“How will you do it?” said Higgins.

“Careful, sir. Real careful. I can do it, I promise you that. But,” added Lucus, “I’m gonna need something from you.”

“We don’t—” started the captain.

“What?” interrupted Higgins, who knew the true priorities.

“I can’t bargain Twitch down off of there with just Be nice bullshit,” said Lucas.

“That man’s crazy!” barked the captain.

“Dead on, sir. And there’s nothing you can threaten him with that he don’t already do to himself in his cell. But you let me tell him he can get transferred to a state hospital—”

“The courts put him in here as sane,” said the captain.

“Wasn’t that a smart move.” Lucus jerked his thumb toward the men on the water tower. “You can administratively transfer him to the state hospital for a ninety-day evaluation. Hell, they get him in there. Unless you or his lawyer squawks, they’ll keep him on an ‘indefinite treatment term.’ No doctor gonna risk his state job turning loose a man with a knife talking about mice.”

“Why would that work?” asked Higgins.

“Cause I’ll sell Twitch the truth. Hospital is co-ed. Nurses. Better drugs, better beds, more sun, people who treat him like he is. He might be crazy, but he ain’t no fool … Course, there is one more problem.”

“What?” chorused the captain and Higgins.

“Why risk my ass doing that? Long climb up that tower. Long fall down.”

“You get my man back,” ordered the captain, “or—”

“Or what — sir? My lockup order don’t make me a hostage negotiator. I get punished for being a no-volunteer, some lawyer will make the admin eat it big-time.”

“What do you want?” asked Higgins.

“Nothing much,” said Lucus. “A righteous deal — admin breaks its word on this, it’ll get brutal in here, then real soon admin will need credibility with us residents to save something or somebody else.”

“What do you want?” repeated Higgins.

“That little matter we talked about earlier will do.”

Captain said: “What?”

Higgins pushed his steel eyes against Lucus. Lucus didn’t fold. Higgins bargained in the radio with the warden.

“That a TV news helicopter I hear chopping close?” said Lucus.

Higgins lowered his radio. Told Lucus: “Go.”

Sam, Kevin, and Darnell, Cooley and J.C. and Manster, Jerome and the O.T. posse, Barry, Higgins, and the admin — everybody watched Lucus. Heard him yell to Twitch that he was coming up. Heard him talking about deals, making it cool. Watched Lucus climb that spiral staircase as his words faded in the October wind. Watched three men on a platform high above the yard. Watched them with cold eyes and sniper-scoped rifles — for maybe ten minutes: Nobody took their eyes off the three men to time it.

A helicopter chopped the air above the institution.

Movement on the ledge — a sliver of glistening steel tumbled down through the sky to the yard.

Guard Adkins scurried down the water-tower steps.

Higgins, into the radio: “No fire! Repeat, no fire!”

Half a dozen guards grabbed Twitch when he reached the bottom of the stairs, handcuffed him, and led him away. Everybody knew the guards would use rubber hoses on him inside, but even the meanest jerk knew the deal had to stand.

Lucus walked toward Higgins and H.L.S.

Higgins said something to the captain, who frowned, but nodded when the message was repeated as a command.

The captain and two of his shotgun boys marched through the crowd of prisoners. Marched up to Kevin.

“You!” yelled the captain. “Let’s go!”

“Me?” said Kevin as the shotguns swung his way. “Hey! What’s this shit? I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!”

And as the guards hustled him away to pack his personal gear, the yard watched.

Higgins nodded to Lucus, went home to his family.

The Klaxon sounded “Return to cells.” Shotguns on the yard watched everybody shuffling back inside.

J.C. was lost in the crowd.

For a heartbeat, Lucus glimpsed Jerome and the O.T. posse.

Roll up on that boy next yard time, thought Lucus. Brace him, but let him back down. His posse won’t be so hot to dance with me, and he’ll know it. The Word will advise him to keep his cool: The chump he wanted ain’t around no more, the beef is over, and a respected, evil dude like me … Word is, don’t mess with Lucus.

Walking beside Lucus, like he was reading the man’s mind, H.L.S. said: “What about our spy boy Darnell?”

“Oh, I’ll think of something for Jackster.”

“Hard luck,” said Sam.

As they strolled to the tunnel, other dudes kept a respectful distance from the two old cons.

Sam said: “I gots to know. Just exactly what did you tell Twitch to make him drop the blade and climb down from there?”

Lucus whispered: “Same thing I said to make him grab the guard in the first place.”

Someday I’m gonna write all this down. But I don’t write so good in English yet, see? So I’m just gonna think it out loud.

Last night I had a dream.

In my dream, I was a kid, back in the village. My friends and family from the chorio, they were there, all of us standing around the square. My father, he had strung a lamb up on a pole. It was making a noise, like a scream, and its eyes were wild and afraid. My father handed me my Italian switch knife, the one he gave me before I came over. I cut into the lamb’s throat and opened it up wide. The lamb’s warm blood spilled onto my hands.

My mother told me once: Every time you dream something, it’s got to be a reason.

I’m not no kid anymore. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s early in June, 1933. The temperature got up to one hundred degrees today. I read in the Tribune, some old people died from the heat.

Let me try to paint a picture, so you can see in your head the way it is for me right now. I got this little one-room place I rent from some old lady. A Murphy bed and a table, an icebox and a stove. I got a radio I bought for a dollar and ninety-nine. I wash my clothes in a tub, and afterwards I hang the roocha on a cord I stretched across the room. There’s a bunch of clothes — pantalonia and one of my work shirts and my vrakia and socks — on there now. I’m sitting here at the table in my union suit. I’m smoking a Fatima and drinking a cold bottle of Abner-Drury beer. I’m looking at my hands. I got blood underneath my fingernails. I washed real good but it was hard to get it all.

It’s 5, 5:30 in the morning. Let me go back some, to show how I got to where I am tonight.

What’s it been, four years since I came over? The boat ride was a boat ride so I’ll skip that part. I’ll start in America.

When I got to Ellis Island I came straight down to Washington to stay with my cousin Toula and her husband Aris. Aris had a fruit cart down on Pennsylvania Avenue, around 17th. Toula’s father owed my father some lefta from back in the village, so it was all set up. She offered me a room until I could get on my feet. Aris wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t give a good goddamn what he was happy about. Toula’s father should have paid his debt.

Toula and Aris had a place in Chinatown. It wasn’t just for Chinese. Italians, Irish, Polacks, and Greeks lived there too. Everyone was poor except the criminals. The Chinamen controlled the gambling, the whores, and the opium. All the business got done in the back of laundries and in the restaurants. The Chinks didn’t bother no one if they didn’t get bothered themselves.

Toula’s apartment was in a house right on H Street. You had to walk up three floors to get to it. I didn’t mind it. The milkman did it every day and the old Jew who collected the rent managed to do it too. I figured, so could I.

My room was small, so small you couldn’t shut the door all the way when the bed was down. There was only one toilet in the place, and they had put a curtain by it, the kind you hang on a shower. You had to close it around you when you wanted to shit. Like I say, it wasn’t a nice place or nothing like it, but it was okay. It was free.

But nothing’s free, my father always said. Toula’s husband Aris made me pay from the first day I moved in. Never had a good word to say to me, never mentioned me to no one for a job. He was a sonofabitch, that one. Dark, with a hook in his nose, looked like he had some Turkish blood in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the gamoto was a Turk. I didn’t like the way he talked to my cousin either, ’specially when he drank. And this malaka drank every night. I’d sit in my room and listen to him raise his voice at her, and then later I could hear him fucking her on their bed. I couldn’t stand it, I’m telling you, and me without a woman myself. I didn’t have no job then so I couldn’t even buy a whore. I thought I was gonna go nuts.

Then one day I was talking to this guy, Dimitri Karras, who lived in the 606 building on H. He told me about a janitor’s job opened up at St. Mary’s, the church where his son Panayoti and most of the neighborhood kids went to Catholic school. I put some Wildroot tonic in my hair, walked over to the church, and talked to the head nun. I don’t know, she musta liked me or something, cause I got the job. I had to lie a little about being a handyman. I wasn’t no engineer, but I figured, what the hell, the furnace goes out you light it again, goddamn.

My deal was simple. I got a room in the basement and a coupla meals a day. Pennies other than that, but I didn’t mind, not then. Hell, it was better than living in some Hoover Hotel. And it got me away from that bastard Aris. Toula cried when I left, so I gave her a hug. I didn’t say nothing to Aris.

I worked at St. Mary’s about two years. The work was never hard. I knew the kids and most of their fathers: Karras, Angelos, Nicodemus, Recevo, Damiano, Carchedi. I watched the boys grow. I didn’t look the nuns in the eyes when I talked to them so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Once or twice I treated myself to one of the whores over at the Eastern House. Mostly, down in the basement, I played with my pootso. I put it out of my mind that I was jerking off in church.

Meanwhile, I tried to make myself better. I took English classes at St. Sophia, the Greek Orthodox church on 8th and L. I bought a blue serge suit at Harry Kaufman’s on 7th Street, on sale for eleven dollars and seventy-five cents. The Jew tailor let me pay for it a little bit at a time. Now, when I went to St. Sophia for the Sunday service, I wouldn’t be ashamed.

I liked to go to church. Not for religion, nothing like that. Sure, I wear a stavro, but everyone wears a cross. That’s just superstition. I don’t love God, but I’m afraid of him. So I went to church just in case, and also to look at the girls. I liked to see ’em all dressed up.

There was this one koritsi, not older than sixteen when I first saw her, who was special. I knew just where she was gonna be, with her mother, on the side of the church where the women sat separate from the men. I made sure I got a good view of her on Sundays. Her name was Irene, I asked around. I could tell she was clean. By that I mean she was a virgin. That’s the kind of girl you’re gonna marry. My plan was to wait till I got some money in my pocket before I talked to her, but not too long so she got snatched up. A girl like that is not gonna stay single forever.

Work and church was for the daytime. At night I went to the coffeehouses down by the Navy Yard in Southeast. One of them was owned by a hardworking guy from the neighborhood, Angelos, who lived at the 703 building on 6th. That’s the cafeneion I went to most. You played cards and dice there if that’s what you wanted to do, but mostly you could be yourself. It was all Greeks.

That’s where I met Nick Stefanos one night, at the Angelos place. Meeting him is what put another change in my life. Stefanos was a Spartan with an easy way, had a scar on his cheek. You knew he was tough but he didn’t have to prove it. I heard he got the scar running protection for a hooch truck in upstate New York. Heard a cheap pistola blew up in his face. It was his business, what happened, none of mine.

We got to talking that night. He was the head busman down at some fancy hotel on 15th and Penn, but he was leaving to open his own place. His friend Costa, another Spartiati, worked there and he was gonna leave with him. Stefanos asked me if I wanted to take Costa’s place. He said he could set it up. The pay was only a little more than what I was making, a dollar-fifty a week with extras, but a little more was a lot. Hell, I wanted to make better like anyone else. I thanked Nick Stefanos and asked him when I could start.

I started the next week, soon as I got my room where I am now. You had to pay management for your bus uniform — black pants and a white shirt and short black vest — so I didn’t make nothing for a while. Some of the waiters tipped the busmen heavy, and some tipped nothing at all. For the ones who tipped nothing you cleared their tables slower, and last. I caught on quick.

The hotel was pretty fancy and its dining room, up on the top floor, was fancy too. The china was real, the crystal sang when you flicked a finger at it, and the silver was heavy. It was hard times, but you’d never know it from the way the tables filled up at night. I figured I’d stay there a coupla years, learn the operation, and go out on my own like Stefanos. That was one smart guy.

The way they had it set up was, Americans had the waiter jobs, and the Greeks and Filipinos bused the tables. The coloreds, they stayed back in the kitchen. Everybody in the restaurant was in the same order that they were out on the street: the whites were up top and the Greeks were in the middle; the mavri were at the bottom. Except if someone was your own kind, you didn’t make much small talk with the other guys unless it had something to do with work. I didn’t have nothing against anyone, not even the coloreds. You didn’t talk to them, that’s all. That’s just the way it was.

The waiters, they thought they were better than the rest of us. But there was this one American, a young guy named John Petersen, who was all right. Petersen had brown eyes and wavy brown hair that he wore kinda long. It was his eyes that you remembered. Smart and serious, but gentle at the same time.

Petersen was different than the other waiters, who wouldn’t lift a finger to help you even when they weren’t busy. John would pitch in and bus my tables for me when I got in a jam. He’d jump in with the dishes too, back in the kitchen, when the dining room was running low on silver, and like I say, those were coloreds back there. I even saw him talking with those guys sometimes like they were pals. It was like he came from someplace where that was okay. John was just one of those people who made friends easy, I guess. I can’t think of no one who didn’t like him. Well, there musta been one person, at least. I’m gonna come to that later on.

Me and John went out for a beer one night after work, to a saloon he knew. I wasn’t comfortable because it was all Americans and I didn’t see no one who looked like me. But John made me feel okay and after two beers I forgot. He talked to me about the job and the pennies me and the colored guys in the kitchen were making, and how it wasn’t right. He talked about some changes that were coming to make it better for us, but he didn’t say what they were.

“I’m happy,” I said, as I drank off the beer in my mug. “I got a job, what the hell.”

“You want to make more money, don’t you?” he said. “You’d like to have a day off once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

“Goddamn right. But I take off a day, I’m not gonna get paid.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that, friend.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Do you know what ‘strength in numbers’ means?”

I looked around for the bartender cause I didn’t know what the hell John was talking about and I didn’t know what to say.

John put his hand around my arm. “I’m putting together a meeting. I’m hoping some of the busmen and the kitchen guys will make it. Do you think you can come?”

“What we gonna meet for, huh?”

“We’re going to talk about those changes I been telling you about. Together, we’re going to make a plan.”

“I don’t want to go to no meeting. I want a day off, I’m just gonna go ask for it, eh?”

“You don’t understand.” John put his face close to mine. “The workers are being exploited.”

“I work and they pay me,” I said with a shrug. “That’s all I know. Other than that? I don’t give a damn about nothing.” I pulled my arm away but I smiled when I did it. I didn’t want to join no group, but I wanted him to know we were still pals. “C’mon, John, let’s drink.”

I needed that job. But I felt bad, turning him down about that meeting. You could see it meant something to him, whatever the hell he was talking about, and I liked him. He was the only American in the restaurant who treated me like we were both the same. You know, man to man.

Well, he wasn’t the only American who made me feel like a man. There was this woman, name of Laura, a hostess who also made change from the bills. She bought her dresses too small and had hair bleached white, like Jean Harlow. She was about two years and ten pounds away from the end of her looks. Laura wasn’t pretty but her ass could bring tears to your eyes. Also, she had huge tits.

I caught her giving me the eye the first night I worked there. By the third night she said something to me about my broad chest as I was walking by her. I nodded and smiled, but I kept walking cause I was carrying a heavy tray. When I looked back she gave me a wink. She was a real whore, that one. I knew right then I was gonna fuck her. At the end of the night I asked her if she would go to the pictures with me sometime. “I’m free tomorrow,” she says. I acted like it was an honor and a big surprise.

I worked every night, so we had to make it a matinee. We took the streetcar down to the Earle, on 13th Street, down below F. I wore my blue serge suit and high button shoes. I looked like I had a little bit of money, but we still got the fisheye, walking down the street. A blonde and a Greek with dark skin and a heavy black moustache. I couldn’t hide that I wasn’t too long off the boat.

The Earle had a stage show before the picture. A guy named William Demarest and some dancers who Laura said were like the Rockettes. What the hell did I know, I was just looking at their legs. After the coming attractions and the short subject the picture came on: Gold Diggers of 1933. The man dancers looked like cocksuckers to me. I liked Westerns better, but it was all right. Fifteen cents for each of us. It was cheaper than taking her to a saloon.

Afterwards, we went to her place, an apartment in a rowhouse off H in Northeast. I used the bathroom and saw a Barnards Shaving Cream and other man things in there, but I didn’t ask her nothing about it when I came back out. I found her in the bedroom. She had poured us a couple of rye whiskies and drawn the curtains so it felt like the night. A radio played something she called “jug band”; it sounded like colored music to me. She asked me, did I want to dance. I shrugged and tossed back all the rye in my glass and pulled her to me rough. We moved slow, even though the music was fast.

“Bill?” she said, looking up at me. She had painted her eyes with something and there was a black mark next to one of them where the paint had come off.

“Uh,” I said.

“What do they call you where you’re from?”

“Vasili.”

I kissed her warm lips. She bit mine and drew a little blood. I pushed myself against her to let her know what I had.

“Why, Va-silly,” she said. “You are like a horse, aren’t you?”

I just kinda nodded and smiled. She stepped back and got out of her dress and her slip, and then undid her brassiere. She did it slow.

“Ella,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Hurry it up,” I said, with a little motion of my hand. Laura laughed.

She pulled the bra off and her tits bounced. They were everything I thought they would be. She came to me and unbuckled my belt, pulling at it clumsy, and her breath was hot on my face. By then, God, I was ready.

I sat her on the edge of the bed, put one of her legs up on my shoulder, and gave it to her. I heard a woman having a baby in the village once, and those were the same kinda sounds that Laura made. There was spit dripping out the side of her mouth as I slammed myself into her over and over again. I’m telling you, her bed took some plaster off the wall that day.

After I blew my load into her I climbed off. I didn’t say nice things to her or nothing like that. She got what she wanted and so did I. Laura smoked a cigarette and watched me get dressed. The whole room smelled like pussy. She didn’t look so good to me no more. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and breathe fresh air.

We didn’t see each other again outside of work. She only stayed at the restaurant a coupla more weeks, and then she disappeared. I guess the man who owned the shaving cream told her it was time to quit.

For a while there nothing happened and I just kept working hard. John didn’t mention no meetings again, though he was just as nice as before. I slept late and bused the tables at night. Life wasn’t fun or bad. It was just ordinary. Then that bastard Wesley Schmidt came to work and everything changed.

Schmidt was a tall young guy with a thin moustache, big in the shoulders, big hands. He kept his hair slicked back. His eyes were real blue, like water under ice. He had a row of big straight teeth. He smiled all the time, but the smile, it didn’t make you feel good.

Schmidt got hired as a waiter, but he wasn’t any good at it. He got tangled up fast when the place got busy. He served food to the wrong tables all the time, and he spilled plenty of drinks. It didn’t seem like he’d ever done that kind of work before.

No one liked him, but he was one of those guys, he didn’t know it, or maybe he knew and didn’t care. He laughed and told jokes and slapped the busmen on the back like we were his friends. He treated the kitchen guys like dogs when he was tangled up, raising his voice at them when the food didn’t come up as fast as he liked it. Then he tried to be nice to them later.

One time he really screamed at Raymond, the head cook on the line, called him a “lazy shine” on this night when the place was packed. When the dining room cleared up, Schmidt walked back into the kitchen and told Raymond in a soft voice that he didn’t mean nothing by it, giving him that smile of his and patting his arm. Raymond just nodded real slow. Schmidt told me later, “That’s all you got to do, is scold ’em and then talk real sweet to ’em later. That’s how they learn. Cause they’re like children. Right, Bill?” He meant coloreds, I guess. By the way he talked to me, real slow the way you would to a kid, I could tell he thought I was a colored guy too.

At the end of the night the waiters always sat in the dining room and ate a stew or something that the kitchen had prepared. The busmen, we served it to the waiters. I was running dinner out to one of them and forgot something back in the kitchen. When I went back to get it, I saw Raymond spitting into a plate of stew. The other colored guys in the kitchen were standing in a circle around Raymond, watching him do it. They all looked over at me when I walked in. It was real quiet and I guess they were waiting to see what I was gonna do.

“Who’s that for?” I said. “Eh?”

“Schmidt,” said Raymond.

I walked over to where they were. I brought up a bunch of stuff from deep down in my throat and spit real good into that plate. Raymond put a spoon in the stew and stirred it up.

“I better take it out to him,” I said, “before it gets cold.”

“Don’t forget the garnish,” said Raymond.

He put a flower of parsley on the plate, turning it a little so it looked nice. I took the stew out and served it to Schmidt. I watched him take the first bite and nod his head like it was good. None of the colored guys said nothing to me about it again.

I got drunk with John Petersen in a saloon a coupla nights after and told him what I’d done. I thought he’d get a good laugh out of it, but instead he got serious. He put his hand on my arm the way he did when he wanted me to listen.

“Stay out of Schmidt’s way,” said John.

“Ah,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “He gives me any trouble, I’m gonna punch him in the kisser.” The beer was making me brave.

“Just stay out of his way.”

“I look afraid to you?”

“I’m telling you, Schmidt is no waiter.”

“I know it. He’s the worst goddamn waiter I ever seen. Maybe you ought to have one of those meetings of yours and see if you can get him thrown out.”

“Don’t ever mention those meetings again, to anyone,” said John, and he squeezed my arm tight. I tried to pull it away from him but he held his grip. “Bill, do you know what a Pinkerton man is?”

“What the hell?”

“Never mind. You just keep to yourself, and don’t talk about those meetings, hear?”

I had to look away from his eyes. “Sure, sure.”

“Okay, friend.” John let go of my arm. “Let’s have another beer.”

A week later John Petersen didn’t show up for work. And a week after that the cops found him floating downriver in the Potomac. I read about it in the Tribune. It was just a short notice, and it didn’t say nothing else.

A cop in a suit came to the restaurant and asked us some questions. A couple of the waiters said that John probably had some bad hooch and fell into the drink. I didn’t know what to think. When it got around to the rest of the crew, everyone kinda got quiet, if you know what I mean. Even that bastard Wesley didn’t make no jokes. I guess we were all thinking about John in our own way. Me, I wanted to throw up. I’m telling you, thinking about John in that river, it made me sick.

John didn’t ever talk about no family and nobody knew nothing about a funeral. After a few days, it seemed like everybody in the restaurant forgot about him. But me, I couldn’t forget.

One night I walked into Chinatown. It wasn’t far from my new place. There was this kid from St. Mary’s, Billy Nicodemus, whose father worked at the city morgue. Nicodemus wasn’t no doctor or nothing, he washed off the slabs and cleaned the place, like that. He was known as a hard drinker, maybe because of what he saw every day, and maybe just because he liked the taste. I knew where he liked to drink.

I found him in a no-name restaurant on the Hip-Sing side of Chinatown. He was in a booth by himself, drinking something from a teacup. I crossed the room, walking through the cigarette smoke, passing the whores and the skinny Chink gangsters in their too-big suits and the cops who were taking money from the Chinks to look the other way. I stood over Nicodemus and told him who I was. I told him I knew his kid, told him his kid was good. Nicodemus motioned for me to have a seat.

A waiter brought me an empty cup. I poured myself some gin from the teapot on the table. We tapped cups and drank. Nicodemus had straight black hair wetted down and a big mole with hair coming out of it on one of his cheeks. He talked better than I did. We said some things that were about nothing and then I asked him some questions about John. The gin had loosened his tongue.

“Yeah, I remember him,” said Nicodemus, after thinking about it for a short while. He gave me the once-over and leaned forward. “This was your friend?”

“Yes.”

“They found a bullet in the back of his head. A twenty-two.”

I nodded and turned the teacup in small circles on the table. “The Tribune didn’t say nothing about that.”

“The papers don’t always say. The police cover it up while they look for who did it. But that boy didn’t drown. He was murdered first, then dropped in the drink.”

“You saw him?” I said.

Nicodemus shrugged. “Sure.”

“What’d he look like?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Yeah.”

“He was all gray and blown up, like a balloon. The gas does that to ’em, when they been in the water.”

“What about his eyes?”

“They were open. Pleading.”

“Huh?”

“His eyes. It was like they were sayin’ please.”

I needed a drink. I had some more gin.

“You ever heard of a Pinkerton man?” I said.

“Sure,” said Nicodemus. “A detective.”

“Like the police?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“They go to work with other guys and pretend they’re one of them. They find out who’s stealing. Or they find out who’s trying to make trouble for the boss. Like the ones who want to make a strike.”

“You mean, like, if a guy wants to get the workers together and make things better?”

“Yeah. Have meetings and all that. The guys who want to start a union. Pinkertons look for those guys.”

We drank the rest of the gin. We talked about his kid. We talked about Schmeling and Baer, and the wrestling match that was coming up between Londos and George Zaharias at Griffith Stadium. I got up from my seat, shook Nicodemus’s hand, and thanked him for the conversation.

“Efcharisto, patrioti.”

“Yasou, Vasili.”

I walked back to my place and had a beer I didn’t need. I was drunk and more confused than I had been before. I kept hearing John’s voice, the way he called me “friend.” I saw his eyes saying please. I kept thinking, I should have gone to his goddamn meeting, if that was gonna make him happy. I kept thinking I had let him down. While I was thinking, I sharpened the blade of my Italian switch knife on a stone.

The next night, last night, I was serving Wesley Schmidt his dinner after we closed. He was sitting by himself like he always did. I dropped the plate down in front of him.

“You got a minute to talk?” I asked.

“Go ahead and talk,” he said, putting the spoon to his stew and stirring it around.

“I wanna be a Pinkerton man,” I said.

Schmidt stopped stirring his stew and looked up my way. He smiled, showing me his white teeth. Still, his eyes were cold.

“That’s nice. But why are you telling me this?”

“I wanna be a Pinkerton, just like you.”

Schmidt pushed his stew plate away from him and looked around the dining room to make sure no one could hear us. He studied my face. I guess I was sweating. Hell, I know I was. I could feel it dripping on my back.

“You look upset,” said Schmidt, his voice real soft, like music. “You look like you could use a friend.”

“I just wanna talk.”

“Okay. You feel like having a beer, something like that?”

“Sure, I could use a beer.”

“I finish eating, I’ll go down and get my car. I’ll meet you in the alley out back. Don’t tell anyone, hear, because then they might want to come along. And we wouldn’t have the chance to talk.”

“I’m not gonna tell no one. We just drive around, eh? I’m too dirty to go to a saloon.”

“That’s swell,” said Schmidt. “We’ll just drive around.”

I went out to the alley where Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into his car. It was a blue ’31 Dodge coupe with wire wheels, a rumble seat, and a trunk rack. A five-hundred-dollar car if it was dime.

“Pretty,” I said, as I got in beside him. There were hand-tailored slipcovers on the seats.

“I like nice things,” said Schmidt.

He was wearing his suit jacket, and it had to be eighty degrees. I could see a lump under the jacket. I figured, the bastard is carrying a gun.

We drove up to Colvin’s, on 14th Street. Schmidt went in and returned with a bag of loose bottles of beer. There must have been a half-dozen Schlitz’s in the bag. Him making waiter’s pay, and the fancy car and the high-priced beer.

He opened a coupla beers and handed me one. The bottle was ice cold. Hot as the night was, the beer tasted good.

We drove around for a while. We went down to Hains Point. Schmidt parked the Dodge facing the Washington Channel. Across the channel, the lights from the fish vendors on Maine Avenue threw color on the water. We drank another beer. He gave me one of his tailor-mades and we had a couple smokes. He talked about the Senators and the Yankees, and how Baer had taken Schmeling out with a right in the tenth. Schmidt didn’t want to talk about nothing serious yet. He was waiting for the beer to work on me, I knew.

“Goddamn heat,” I said. “Let’s drive around some, get some air moving.”

Schmidt started the coupe. “Where to?”

“I’m gonna show you a whorehouse. Best secret in town.”

Schmidt looked me over and laughed. The way you laugh at a clown.

I gave Schmidt some directions. We drove some, away from the park and the monuments to where people lived. We went through a little tunnel and crossed into Southwest. Most of the streetlamps were broke here. The row houses were shabby, and you could see shacks in the alleys and clothes hanging on lines outside of them. It was late, long time past midnight. There weren’t many people out. The ones who were out were coloreds. We were in a place called Bloodfield.

“Pull over there,” I said, pointing to a spot along the curb where there wasn’t no light. “I wanna show you the place I’m talking about.”

Schmidt stopped and cut the engine. Across the street were some houses. All except one of them was dark. From the lighted one came fast music, like the colored music Laura had played in her room.

“There it is right there,” I said, meaning the house with the light. I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t know who lived there and I sure didn’t know if that house had whores. I had never been down here before.

Schmidt turned his head to look at the row house. I slipped my switch knife out of my right pocket and laid it flat against my right leg.

When he turned back to face me he wasn’t smiling no more. He had heard about Bloodfield and he knew he was in it. I think he was scared.

“You bring me down to niggertown for what?” he said. “To show me a whorehouse?”

“I thought you’re gonna like it.”

“Do I look like a man who’d pay to fuck a nigger? Do I? You don’t know anything about me.”

He was showing his true self now. He was nervous as a cat. My nerves were bad too. I was sweating through my shirt. I could smell my own stink in the car.

“I know plenty,” I said.

“Yeah? What do you know?”

“Pretty car, pretty suits … top-shelf beer. How you get all this, huh?”

“I earned it.”

“As a Pinkerton, eh?”

Schmidt blinked real slow and shook his head. He looked out his window, looking at nothing, wasting time while he decided what he was gonna do. I found the raised button on the pearl handle of my knife. I pushed the button. The blade flicked open and barely made a sound. I held the knife against my leg and turned it so the blade was pointing back.

Sweat rolled down my neck as I looked around. There wasn’t nobody out on the street.

Schmidt turned his head. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand and straightened his arm.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I just wanna know what happened to John.”

Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab.

“I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt.

“You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.”

“Pretty hard to swim, you got a bullet in your head.”

Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?”

I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out and while he was kicking at the floorboards I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all of a sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead.

I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped it off with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took it with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street.

I didn’t see no one for a coupla blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking toward Northwest.

Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

Another block or so I came up on a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod.

One of the coloreds started to come toward me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on.

I walked for a coupla hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying cause my father had given me that knife, and now it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again.

When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner-Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table.

This is where I am right now.

Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now.

I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one.

I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

Horace and Loneese Perkins — one child, one grandchild — lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Claridge Towers, a building for senior citizens at 1221 M Street, N.W. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made love for the last time — Loneese kept a diary of sorts, and that fact was noted on one day of a week when she noted nothing else. “He touched me,” she wrote, which had always been her diary euphemism for sex. That was also the year they retired, she as a pool secretary at the Commerce Department, where she had known one lover, and he as a civilian employee at the Pentagon, as the head of veteran records.

He had been an army sergeant for ten years before becoming head of records; the secretary of defense gave him a plaque as big as his chest on the day he retired, and he and the secretary of defense and Loneese had their picture taken, a picture that hung for all those twelve years in the living room of Apartment 230, on the wall just to the right of the heating-and-air-conditioning unit.

A month before they moved in, they drove in their burgundy-and-gold Cadillac from their small house on Chesapeake Street in Southeast to a Union Station restaurant and promised each other that Claridge Towers would be a new beginning for them. Over blackened catfish and a peach cobbler that they both agreed could have been better, they vowed to devote themselves to each other and become even better grandparents. Horace had long known about the Commerce Department lover. Loneese had told him about the man two months after she had ended the relationship, in 1969. “He worked in the mail room,” she told her husband over a spaghetti supper she had cooked in the Chesapeake Street home. “He touched me in the motel room,” she wrote in her diary, “and after it was over he begged me to go away to Florida with him. All I could think about was that Florida was for old people.”

At that spaghetti supper, Horace did not mention the dozens of lovers he had had in his time as her husband. She knew there had been many, knew it because they were written on his face in the early years of their marriage, and because he had never bothered to hide what he was doing in the later years. “I be back in a while. I got some business to do,” he would say. He did not even mention the lover he had slept with just the day before the spaghetti supper, the one he bid good-bye to with a “Be good and be sweet” after telling her he planned to become a new man and respect his marriage vows. The woman, a thin school-bus driver with clanking bracelets up to her elbows on both arms, snorted a laugh, which made Horace want to slap her, because he was used to people taking him seriously. “Forget you, then,” Horace said on the way out the door. “I was just tryin to let you down easy.”

Over another spaghetti supper two weeks before moving, they reiterated what had been said at the blackened-catfish supper and did the dishes together and went to bed as man and wife, and over the next days sold almost all the Chesapeake Street furniture. What they kept belonged primarily to Horace, starting with a collection of six hundred and thirty-nine record albums, many of them his “sweet babies,” the 78s. If a band worth anything had recorded between 1915 and 1950, he bragged, he had the record; after 1950, he said, the bands got sloppy and he had to back away. Horace also kept the Cadillac he had painted to honor a football team, paid to park the car in the underground garage. Claridge Towers had once been intended as a luxury place, but the builders, two friends of the city commissioners, ran out of money in the middle and the commissioners had the city government people buy it off them. The city government people completed Claridge, with its tiny rooms, and then, after one commissioner gave a speech in Southwest about looking out for old people, some city government people in Northeast came up with the idea that old people might like to live in Claridge, in Northwest.

Three weeks after Horace and Loneese moved in, Horace went down to the lobby one Saturday afternoon to get their mail and happened to see Clara Knightley getting her mail. She lived in Apartment 512. “You got this fixed up real nice,” Horace said of Apartment 512 a little less than an hour after meeting her. “But I could see just in the way that you carry yourself that you got good taste. I could tell that about you right off.” “You swellin my head with all that talk, Mr. Perkins,” Clara said, offering him coffee, which he rejected, because such moments always called for something stronger. “Whas a woman’s head for if a man can’t swell it up from time to time. Huh? Answer me that, Clara. You just answer me that.” Clara was fifty-five, a bit younger than most of the residents of Claridge, though she was much older than all Horace’s other lovers. She did not fit the city government people’s definition of a senior citizen, but she had a host of ailments, from high blood pressure to diabetes, and so the city people had let her in.

Despite the promises, the marriage, what little there had been of it, came to an end. “I will make myself happy,” Loneese told the diary a month after he last touched her. Loneese and Horace had fixed up their apartment nicely, and neither of them wanted to give the place up to the other. She wanted to make a final stand with the man who had given her so much heartache, the man who had told her, six months after her confession, what a whore she had been to sleep with the Commerce Department mail-room man. Horace, at sixty, had never thought much of women over fifty, but Clara — and, after her, Willa, of Apartment 1001, and Miriam, of Apartment 109 — had awakened something in him, and he began to think that women over fifty weren’t such a bad deal after all. Claridge Towers had dozens of such women, many of them attractive widows, many of them eager for a kind word from a retired army sergeant who had so many medals and ribbons that his uniform could not carry them. As far as he could see, he was cock of the walk: many of the men in Claridge suffered from diseases that Horace had so far escaped, or they were not as good-looking or as thin, or they were encumbered by wives they loved. In Claridge he was a rich man. So why move and give that whore the satisfaction?

They lived separate lives in a space that was only a fourth as large as the Chesapeake Street house. The building came to know them as the man and wife in 230 who couldn’t stand each other. People talked about the Perkinses more than they did about anyone else, which was particularly upsetting to Loneese, who had been raised to believe family business should stay in the family. “Oh, Lord, what them two been up to now?” “Fight like cats and dogs, they do.” “Who he seein now?” They each bought their own food from the Richfood on 11th Street or from the little store on 13th Street, and they could be vile to each other if what one bought was disturbed or eaten by the other. Loneese stopped speaking to Horace for nine months in 1984 and 1985, when she saw that her pumpkin pie was a bit smaller than when she last cut a slice from it. “I ain’t touch your damn pie, you crazy woman,” he said when she accused him. “How long you been married to me? You know I’ve never been partial to pumpkin pie.” “That’s fine for you to say, Horace, but why is some missing? You might not be partial to it, but I know you. I know you’ll eat anything in a pinch. That’s just your dirty nature.” “My nature ain’t no more dirty than yours.”

After that, she bought a small icebox for the bedroom where she slept, though she continued to keep the larger items in the kitchen refrigerator. He bought a separate telephone, because he complained that she wasn’t giving him his messages from his “associates.” “I have never been a secretary for whores,” she said, watching him set up an answering machine next to the Hide-A-Bed couch where he slept. “Oh, don’t get me started bout whores. I’d say you wrote the damn book.” “It was dictated by you.”

Their one child, Alonzo, lived with his wife and son in Baltimore. He had not been close to his parents for a long time, and he could not put the why of it into words for his wife. Their boy, Alonzo Jr., who was twelve when his grandparents moved into Claridge, loved to visit them. Horace would unplug and put away his telephone when the boy visited. And Loneese and Horace would sleep together in the bedroom. She’d put a pillow between them in the double bed to remind herself not to roll toward him.

Their grandson visited less and less as he moved into his teenage years, and then, after he went away to college, in Ohio, he just called them every few weeks, on the phone they had had installed in the name of Horace and Loneese Perkins.

A long time ago, nearly thirty years now, I had a friend who was waiting to be discovered. His name was David Baldanders; we lived with two other friends in one of the most disgusting places I’ve ever seen, and certainly the worst that involved me signing a lease.

Our apartment was a two-bedroom third-floor walkup in Queenstown, a grim brick enclave just over the District line in Hyattsville, Maryland. Queenstown Apartments were inhabited mostly by drug dealers and bikers who met their two-hundred-dollars-a-month leases by processing speed and bad acid in their basement rooms; the upper floors were given over to wasted welfare mothers from P.G. County and students from the University of Maryland, Howard, and the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine.

The Divine, as students called it, was where I’d come three years earlier to study acting. I wasn’t actually expelled until the end of my junior year, but midway through that term my roommate Marcella and I were kicked out of our campus dormitory, precipitating the move to Queenstown. Even for the mid-1970s our behavior was excessive; I was only surprised the university officials waited so long before getting rid of us. Our parents were assessed for damages to our dorm room, which were extensive; among other things, I’d painted one wall floor-to-ceiling with the image from the cover of Transformer, above which I scrawled, Je suis damne par l’arc-en-ciel, in foot-high letters. Decades later, someone who’d lived in the room after I left told me that, year after year, Rimbaud’s words would bleed through each successive layer of new paint. No one ever understood what they meant.

Our new apartment was at first an improvement on the dorm room, and Queenstown itself was an efficient example of a closed ecosystem. The bikers manufactured Black Beauties, which they sold to the students and welfare mothers upstairs, who would zigzag a few hundred feet across a wasteland of shattered glass and broken concrete to the Queenstown Restaurant, where I worked making pizzas that they would then cart back to their apartments. The pizza boxes piled up in the halls, drawing armies of roaches. My friend Oscar lived in the next building; whenever he visited our flat he’d push open the door, pause, then look over his shoulder dramatically.

“Listen—!” he’d whisper.

He’d stamp his foot, just once, and hold up his hand to command silence. Immediately we heard what sounded like surf washing over a gravel beach. In fact it was the susurrus of hundreds of cockroaches clittering across the warped parquet floors in retreat.

There were better places to await discovery.

David Baldanders was my age, nineteen. He wasn’t much taller than me, with long, thick black hair and a soft-featured face: round cheeks, full red lips between a downy black beard and mustache, slightly crooked teeth much yellowed from nicotine, small well-shaped hands. He wore an earring and a bandana that he tied, pirate-style, over his head; filthy jeans, flannel shirts, filthy black Converse high-tops that flapped when he walked. His eyes were beautiful — indigo, black-lashed, soulful. When he laughed, people stopped in their tracks — he sounded like Herman Munster, that deep, goofy, foghorn voice at odds with his fey appearance.

We met in the Divine’s drama department, and immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Neither attractive nor talented enough to be in the center of the golden circle of aspiring actors that included most of our friends, we made ourselves indispensable by virtue of being flamboyant, unapologetic fuck-ups. People laughed when they saw us coming. They laughed even louder when we left. But David and I always made a point of laughing loudest of all.

“Can you fucking believe that?” A morning, it could have been any morning: I stood in the hall and stared in disbelief at the department’s sitting area. White walls, a few plastic chairs and tables overseen by the glass windows of the secretarial office. This was where the other students chain-smoked and waited, day after day, for news: casting announcements for department plays; cattle calls for commercials, trade shows, summer reps. Above all else, the department prided itself on graduating “working actors” — a really successful student might get called back for a walk-on on Days of Our Lives. My voice rose loud enough that heads turned. “It looks like a fucking dentist’s office.”

“Yeah, well, Roddy just got cast in a Trident commercial,” David said, and we both fell against the wall, howling.

Rejection fed our disdain, but it was more than that. Within weeks of arriving at the the Divine, I felt betrayed. I wanted — hungered for, thirsted for, craved like drink or drugs — High Art. So did David. We’d come to the Divine expecting Paris in the 1920s, Swinging London, Summer of Love in the Haight.

We were misinformed.

What we got was elocution taught by the department head’s wife; tryouts where tone-deaf students warbled numbers from The Magic Show; Advanced Speech classes where, week after week, the beefy department head would declaim Macduff’s speech — All my pretty ones? Did you say all? — never failing to move himself to tears.

And there was that sitting area. Just looking at it made me want to take a sledgehammer to the walls: all those smug faces above issues of Variety and Theater Arts, all those sheets of white paper neatly taped to white cinder block with lists of names beneath: callbacks, cast lists, passing exam results. My name was never there. Nor was David’s.

We never had a chance. We had no choice.

We took the sledgehammer to our heads.

Weekends my suitemate visited her parents, and while she was gone David and I would break into her dorm room. We drank her vodka and listened to her copy of David Live, playing “Diamond Dogs” over and over as we clung to each other, smoking, dancing cheek to cheek. After midnight we’d cadge a ride down to Southwest, where abandoned warehouses had been turned into gay discos — the Lost and Found, Grand Central Station, Washington Square, Half Street. A solitary neon pentacle glowed atop the old Washington Star printing plant; we heard gunshots, sirens, the faint bass throb from funk bands at the Washington Coliseum, the ceaseless boom and echo of trains uncoupling in the railyards that extended from Union Station.

I wasn’t a looker. My scalp was covered with henna-stiffened orange stubble that had been cut over three successive nights by a dozen friends. Marcella had pierced my ear with a cork and a needle and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. David usually favored one long drop earring, and sometimes I’d wear its mate. Other times I’d shove a safety pin through my ear, then run a dog leash from it around my neck. I had two-inch-long black-varnished fingernails that caught fire when I lit my cigarettes. I kohled my eyes and lips, used Marcella’s Chloe perfume, shoved myself into Marcella’s expensive jeans even though they were too small for me.

But mostly I wore a white poet’s blouse or frayed striped boatneck shirt, droopy black wool trousers, red sneakers, a red velvet beret my mother had given me for Christmas when I was seventeen. I chain-smoked Marlboros, three packs a day when I could afford them. For a while I smoked clay pipes and Borkum Riff tobacco. The pipes cost a dollar apiece at the tobacconist’s in Georgetown. They broke easily, and club owners invariably hassled me, thinking I was getting high right under their noses. I was, but not from Borkum Riff. Occasionally I’d forgo makeup and wear army khakis and a boiled-wool navy shirt I’d fished from a dumpster. I used a mascara wand on my upper lip and wore my bashed-up old cowboy boots to make me look taller.

This fooled no one, but that didn’t matter. In Southwest I was invisible, or nearly so. I was a girl, white, not pretty enough to be either desirable or threatening. The burly leather-clad guys who stood guard over the entrances to the L&F were always nice to me, though there was a scary dyke bouncer whom I had to bribe, sometimes with cash, sometimes with rough foreplay behind the door.

Once inside all that fell away. David and I stumbled to the bar and traded our drink tickets for vodka and orange juice. We drank fast, pushing upstairs through the crowd until we reached a vantage point above the dance floor. David would look around for someone he knew, someone he fancied, someone who might discover him. He’d give me a wet kiss, then stagger off; and I would stand, and drink, and watch.

The first time it happened David and I were tripping. We were at the L&F, or maybe Washington Square. He’d gone into the men’s room. I sat slumped just outside the door, trying to bore a hole through my hand with my eyes. A few people stepped on me; no one apologized, but no one swore at me, either. After a while I stumbled to my feet, lurched a few steps down the hallway, and turned.

The door to the men’s room was painted gold. A shining film covered it, glistening with smeared rainbows, like oil-scummed tarmac. The door opened with difficulty because of the number of people crammed inside. I had to keep moving so they could pass in and out. I leaned against the wall and stared at the floor for a few more minutes, then looked up again.

Across from me, the wall was gone. I could see men pissing, talking, kneeling, crowding stalls, humping over urinals, cupping brown glass vials beneath their faces. I could see David in a crowd by the sinks. He stood with his back to me, in front of a long mirror framed with small round light bulbs. His head was bowed. He was scooping water from the faucet and drinking it, so that his beard glittered red and silver. As I watched, he slowly lifted his face, until he was staring into the mirror. His reflected image stared back at me. I could see his pupils expand like drops of black ink in a glass of water, and his mouth fall open in pure panic.

“David,” I murmured.

Beside him a lanky boy with dirty-blond hair turned. He too was staring at me, but not with fear. His mouth split into a grin. He raised his hand and pointed at me, laughing.

“Poseur!”

“Shit — shit …” I looked up and David stood there in the hall. He fumbled for a cigarette, his hand shaking, then sank onto the floor beside me. “Shit, you, you saw — you—”

I started to laugh. In a moment David did too. We fell into each other’s arms, shrieking, our faces slick with tears and dirt. I didn’t even notice that his cigarette scorched a hole in my favorite shirt till later, or feel where it burned into my right palm, a penny-sized wound that got infected and took weeks to heal. I bear the scar even now, the shape of an eye, shiny white tissue with a crimson pupil that seems to wink when I crease my hand.

Sharnella Watkins had never walked into a police station in her life. She’d been tossed in delirious or drunk, carried in kicking and screaming, and marched in on a manacled chorus line. But walk in on her own, never. That would have been like sex. Another thing that if it was up to her, she’d never do.

She checked both ways before she crossed the street, searching for witnesses, not traffic, and clattered over on her nosebleed heels.

She knocked on the bulletproof plastic at the information center.

The desk sergeant looked up from his racing form. “Help you, ma’am?”

“I’d like to talk to that detective, the big one. He’s bald and he gots a beard down in front, ah, you know, ah Van Dyke they calls it, oh yeah, he wears glasses, too.”

“That’s detective Bitterman, ma’am, and why would you like to talk to him?”

“It’s personal.”

“Well, he’s working now. Why don’t you come back when his shift ends?”

“When’s that?”

“Six o’clock.”

“I can’t wait that long. Can you give me his phone number? I’ll call him.”

“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t do that. Unless you’re family. You aren’t family, are you?” The desk man sniggered. Big Bad Bitterman and this itty-bitty black junkie whore.

“No, I guess you’re not. Sorry ’bout that.” The desk man looked down, trying to root out a winner in all those optimistic names.

Sharnella knew the truth would be pointless, but along with a nonexistent gag reflex, the other gift that had kept her alive on the streets all these years was the unerring ability to pick the right lie when she had to.

She leaned forward so that her bright red lips were only inches from the divider and sneered. Then, shaking her head, she said, “You think you’re so smart. Well, lets me tell you something. It ain’t me what needs him. He’s been looking for me. He wants to talk to me. And now, I’m telling you both, to go fuck yo’selves. I ain’t coming back, and I ain’t gonna talk to him and …” She got close enough for the desk man to count her missing molars: “I’m gonna tell him it was your sorry bullshit what pissed me off and he should see you ’bout why he can’t solve no cases no more.”

The desk man had been following her little breadcrumbs of innuendo and found himself ending up face to face with Mount Bitterman. The explosion wouldn’t be that bad. Bitterman had made enough enemies that if he declared you one, you’d as likely be toasted as shunned. Bitterman never forgot and never forgave.

The desk man had endured too much inexplicable disappointment and loss to risk an angry Bitterman.

As Sharnella turned to walk away, the desk man said: “Hold your horses, bitch. This is his number at headquarters.” He wouldn’t write it down for her, hoping her memory would fail. She’d be fucked and Bitterman would have no cause. As she backed away, mouthing the numbers to fix them in her disloyal mind, the desk man said, “You know Bitterman only listens to the dead. I hope you find him soon.”

Across town, Detective Avery Bitterman reached down and pulled on his dick. One of the advantages of a closed front desk. He’d notice himself doing this more since his divorce. A dispassionate review told him that it wasn’t for pleasure but rather to reassure himself that he was still all there, a feeling he had less and less often these days.

The receptionist at headquarters told him that he had a call from a Sharnella Watkins and that she said it was an emergency. “Put it through,” he said.

“Is this Detective Bitterman?”

“Yes, it is. How may I help you?”

“You probably don’t remember me, but I remembers you. You arrested my boy Rondell. You was the only one who didn’t beat up on him. You wouldn’t let nobody hurt him.”

Bitterman shook his head, remembering. That’s right, ma’am. I wouldn’t let them lynch him. I thought it would be more fitting if your son got sent to Lorton, where he could meet the two sons of the woman he raped, sodomized, and tortured to death. Those mother’s sons and some friends tied him down, inserted a hedge shears up Rondell’s ass, opened him up and strung his intestines around him like he was a Christmas tree. When, to their delight, this didn’t kill him, they poured gasoline over him like he was a sundae and set him on fire.

“No, I do remember you, Sharmella.”

“SharNella.” She knew she was right to call this man. He remembered her. He would help her.

“It’s my baby, Dantreya. He’s gone, Mr. Bitterman. I know he’s in some kind of trouble …”

What a fuckin’ surprise. “Ma’am, I’m a homicide detective. You want to go to your local district house and file a missing persons report. I can’t help you with this.”

“Please, Mr. Bitterman. They won’t do anything. They’ll just say, ‘That’s what kids do,’ and with me as a mother why not stay out all night. But he’s not like that. He’s different than my others. He’s a good boy. He goes to school. He’s fifteen and he never been in no trouble. Never, not even little things. He likes to draw. He wants to be an artist. You should come and see what he draws. Please, Mr. Bitterman, he’s all I got left. It’s Christmas tomorrow. I just want my baby home.” Wails gave way to staccato sobbing.

Sharnella’s tears annoyed Bitterman. I’m a homicide detective, that’s what I do, he said to no one. I can’t deal with this shit. It ain’t my job. Come back when he’s dead. Then I’ll listen.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. I understand how you feel. But the beat cops can keep an eye out for him. You tell them where he’s likely to go. That’s your best bet, not me. I’m sorry. I gotta go now.”

Bitterman hung up over her wailing “No’s.” Where was he going to go? He was head of the cold case squad. These days, everything was a cold case. Arrest and conviction rates were lower for homicide than for jaywalking. The killers were younger, bolder and completely without restraint. The law of the jungle, “an eye for an eye,” would have been a welcome relief. The law of the streets was “an eye for a hangnail.” Everything was a killing offense. Motive was nothing, opportunity and means were ubiquitous. Children packed lunchbox, thermos, and sidearm in their knapsacks for school. The police were the biggest provider of handguns. Three thousand had disappeared from the city’s property rooms to create more dead bodies that the medical examiner’s office couldn’t autopsy, release or bury. That for Bitterman was the guiding symbol of his work these days. Handguns on a conveyor belt back to the streets, and the frozen dead serving longer and longer sentences in eternity’s drunk tank.

The phone jerked Bitterman back from his reverie.

“Mr. Bitterman, this is Sharnella Watkins. Don’t hang up on me. I can help you. My boy’s gone, ’cause they want to kill him.”

“Who’s they, Sharnella?”

“The 6th and O Crew.”

“Sharnella, you said your son had never been in trouble. The 6th and O Crew is nothing but. Why am I listening to this?”

“He didn’t do nothing. He was coming home from school with a trophy he got at a art show, and Lufer tried to take it from him, but my baby wouldn’t give it to him and when Lufer tried again he hit him with it and knocked him down and my baby ran off. He said Lufer went to get his gun and was yellin’ that he’d kill him for sure. And he would, that boy’s purely mean. He kill you for no reason.”

“Sharnella, this still doesn’t help me. Get to the help-me part or I’m hangin’ up.”

Sharnella had never given a policeman a straight answer in her life. But her baby was in danger. Sharnella never stopped to think why she felt so differently about this child, her fourth, than any of the others, only that she did and that his death, after all the others, would kill her too.

“This boy, Lufer Timmons. He’s killed a bunch of people. That’s what everybody says. Everybody afraid of him. They say he’s the Crew’s main shooter. But he does it when it ain’t business, just ’cause he likes it. And he said he’ll kill my boy. Doesn’t that help you, Mr. Bitterman?”

The Crew favored death as a solution to all its problems. Giving the delivery man a name was a help. “Tell you what, Sharnella. You go over to the station house like I said and give ’em all the information about your son. Bring a picture, a list of all of his friends and where they live, and where he’s been known to hang out. Tell them to fax me a copy of all that. I’ll look into it.”

Her story was probably 90 percent bullshit and 10 percent horseshit for flavor, but Bitterman knew he’d check it out. You turned over every rock and picked up every squiggling thing. That was his motto: No Corner Too Deep, No Corner Too Dark.

Bitterman tried to remember Sharnella from her second son’s trial. She’d started dropping babies at fourteen and was done before twenty. That’d make her around thirty-five now. She looked fifty. Flatbacking and mainlining aged women with interest. Beginning as a second-generation whore, Sharnella’s childhood had been null and void; her prime had passed unnoticed, one sweaty afternoon in a New York Avenue motel.

Bitterman was more aware of time than ever before. He’d lifted and run and dragged his ugly white man’s game to basketball courts all over the city. Elbow and ass, he rebounded with the best even though he couldn’t jump over a dime. No one ever forgot a pick he set or an outlet pass that went end to end, but he remembered not to shoot too often or try to dribble and run at the same time. His twenties and thirties didn’t seem all that different, but now at forty-five he knew he wasn’t the same man. Bald by choice, rather than balding. Thicker but not yet fat, slower both in reflexes and foot speed. Maybe mellowing was nothing more than realizing that he couldn’t tear the doors off the world anymore. The long afternoon of invincibility had passed.

Sharnella’s second son, Jabari, had killed a rival drug dealer in a rip-off attempt that also killed a nursing student driving by. Her only daughter, Female, with a short “a” and a long “e,” so named by the hospital and then taken by Sharnella, who liked the sound of it, had died of an overdose of extremely good cocaine at the age of sixteen. Everything she delivered died or killed someone else.

Bitterman called down to Identification and Records.

“Get me the file on Lufer Timmons. If there’s a picture make a copy for me and send it up with the file. And see if there’s a file on Dantreya Watkins.”

Bitterman sat at his desk awaiting the files, massaging his eyes.

Bitterman had tried to catch a case of racism for years, a really virulent one, but to no avail. He had mumps when he needed anthrax. It would have made his job so much easier. No sadness for the wasted lives, no respect for the courage of the many, no grief for the victims, no compassion for the survivors.

He’d been a homicide cop in a black city for almost his entire adult life. He’d seen every form of violence one person could do to another. He’d seen black women who’d drowned their own babies, and ones who’d ripped their own flesh at the chalk outlines of a fallen son. Men who’d shot and stabbed an entire family, then eaten the dinner off their plates and men who’d worked three jobs for a lifetime, so their children wouldn’t have to. Bitterman just didn’t get it, how anyone could conclude that they were all of a kind, that they were different and less. He wished he could, it saved on the wear and tear.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw the Lufer Timmons file on the desk and a note saying no file on that Watkins. Maybe he was his mother’s pride and joy.

Lufer Timmons had been raised by strangers, starting with his parents and moving on to a series of foster homes, residential treatment centers, detention centers and jails. Now at seventeen, he was well on his way to evening the score with a number of crimes to his credit starting with the attempted rape of his therapist at the age of eleven.

Bitterman studied the picture of Timmons. Six-one and a hundred sixty-eight pounds. He had a long face with deep crevices in his cheeks, thin lips, a thin nose, prominent cheekbones, and bulging froggy eyes. Bitterman pocketed one photo, Xeroxed the page of known associates and family and put the file in his desk drawer. A call to operations yielded the very pleasant news that one of his known associates was currently in custody at the downtown detention center.

The bullets discharge from the muzzle of Officer Carson Blake’s sixteen-round Beretta with the tinny, explosive popping sound of a toy gun. He will not remember exactly how many shots he fires so wildly. Fires with pure intent. Fires, he is sure, to save his life. In the first seconds after the shattering sound of the bullets subsides, he would say, if asked right then, that he had fired every bullet in his gun. Never before has his gun been so large. Never before has it weighed so much. He’s dizzy and breathless. His heart beats so fast, he can’t believe he is still standing.

When he shoots the man, everything, all of it, unfolds as if in slow motion. He wants to look away. He dares not turn his gaze. The first bullet boring through the man’s thick neck riddled with razor bumps, the force twisting his head to the side, as though he is looking with those astonished, horribly open, not yet dead eyes to see where the bullet comes from. The second bullet piercing the skin of the black leather jacket, lodging in the flesh of his shoulder. The third bullet, fired at his groin, bringing him to his knees and then onto his face, sprawled flat out on the parking lot forty feet from the entrance to the Chinese restaurant The House of Chang.

Carson stands staring at the man on the pavement, his body a bloody heap illuminated by the fluorescence of the mall parking lot lights, and sees the cell phone a few feet from the man’s hand, and he prays for the ground beneath his feet to shift in a cataclysmic rumble and swallow him whole. A cell phone, he thinks, unbelieving. A cell phone. Not a gun. He hurls a howl, deep and guttural, into the night. Sinking to his knees, he touches the man, turns him over onto his back, sees the bulbous, bloody wound in his neck, smells the sharp odor of his sodden groin, desperate now to find, to feel, a pulse. There is none. There is only the cell phone. Looking up in desperation, Carson sees a sky unfamiliar and frightening, in which he can fathom not a single star, a vastness that makes him wish for wings.

Carson tries to stand but cannot, and he crawls a few feet away and vomits. When there is no more sickness to spill from his gut, he wipes his mouth and shouts at the dead man, through trembling lips stained with a blistering splash of tears, “What the fuck were you doing? Why didn’t you just do what I said?”