Paul Silverman Stories

Today, Alfred wore his blue and gold Thunderhead Properties fleece vest over his golf shirt, and every time he saw his breath steam over the table and make ghost shapes on the window he wished he had brought the full-sleeved jacket too. It was as cold at the table as it was out there, out in the black center of the lake.

When Alfred wasn’t looking at Chap and Joshua he was casting dire glances at the thermostat. And at the data-crammed dial of his fat-faced watch. And when he wasn’t pondering these instruments he was nervously touching the unopened Barolo, which he had neatly basketed with a set of Austrian crystal glasses, a small genoa salami, a wedge of hand-cut Asiago and the blue and gold Thunderhead Properties Welcome To The Valley brochure.

Then Chap opened his mouth. “They say this Joe Buczko has a short fuse. Do you know that, Alfred? Your agent Greg knows it, I’ll tell you that. He says he’s lucky he  still got a complete set of kneecaps.”

When Chap spoke he tugged at the blue Yogo sapphire in his right earlobe, as though it were a wart that hurt him.

The way he kept digging at it annoyed Alfred, who said, “if you don’t like the stone what do you wear it for? Just pull the thing out and put some Vaseline or something on the hole.”

Alfred turned to Joshua, who said nothing. But Joshua’s eyes glowed orange and he smiled as though the orange glow were from a halo. He looked like a Joshua, and he was called the Preaching Plumber. He didn’t need to open his mouth and preach for you to know why,

“You guys are all finished here,” Alfred said. “You’re sitting pretty.” He nodded to the right - at Joshua. “You did your pipes, perfect.” Then he nodded to the left - at Chap. “You did your walkways and fireplaces and garden walls, perfect. Soon as the coffee’s gone, so are the both of you. You take your trowels and torches and you’re out of here. Then the ball is in my court.”

“Or is the court in your balls?” Again Chap tugged at his Yogo-studded lobe, but this time it seemed to act like an on-switch, setting the corners of Chap’s mouth in motion until they formed the gloating grin of an animation-movie shark. Once more, Alfred turned morosely to Joshua, but Joshua was now off somewhere else, eyes glowing like embers – on the path he had never quite left since he installed the stove, the big Magma Six, with its special feature, a gizmo called The Sabbath Switch.

In his early life in The City, Alfred had heard of Orthodox Jews employing someone they called a Shabbas Goy – to turn stoves and lights on and off on the Sabbath.  “Same thing, right?” he had asked Joshua. While Joshua just stood there, silent as the black lake.

When Joshua spoke he dropped his voice, the low decibels his way of conveying reverence and awe. “This was the first year our little band had The Passover. For the feast we made lamb. Then we finished it on Easter.” He paused for several beats. “Have either of you ever had The Passover?”

            The comment shot Alfred way back to Queens. Why was he calling it THE Passover? Alfred thought he had at last become a westerner, having wandered up and down the old stump towns of the Great Divide since the real estate crash of 1987, sniffing boom in the air. But this Joshua, something about just listening to him made Alfred want to smell garlic meatballs and tomato gravy in his old grandmother’s kitchen. What he recalled even more, though, was a viciously different smell: how the pavement smelled on the day Joey Butch kneed him in the teeth and pistol-whipped him, ear to ear, right under the monster shadow of a Pan Am coming down onto the LaGuardia runway. The engine noise was so loud nobody ever heard Alfred scream, not even the ants swarming out of the cracked concrete to feast on Alfred’s bleeding, unconscious face.

            “You don’t rob the robbers,” Joey had said in the car. “It’s uncouth.”

            Alfred summarily gave up running numbers in favor of just running. He ran three thousand miles before he stopped - at a fence where he saw his first bison, the first one that wasn’t etched on a nickel. Then he busted hump to become the top agent at Thunderhead Properties. In time they made him the regional manager. When one of his agents sold the old Osprey Lodge on the lake, the hulk to end all hulks, the listing broker proudly shuffled into Alfred’s office to show him the Buy Sell. On a thin line at the bottom was a typed-out name and a madman signature. As manager, Alfred saw hundreds of Buy Sells, but the way this one grabbed his eyeballs it could have been an arrest warrant. His mind flew right back to the raging shadow of the plane. To the stink of blood and engine grease. And it dawned on him that this signature was the work of the same hand that had crunched into his belly, surgically dropping his jaw down just right to meet the rising knee.

The men drank up and dropped their Java Lava paper cups into the last of the black-plastic bags. Joshua visually scoured the room. He retrieved a Stanley tape measure from the floor, then lifted his eyes and locked them on the head of a Bighorn sheep hung high above a run of red birch cabinetry. It was a ram’s head, brow plated with a long, curvaceous sweep of horns. Every so often Joshua’s lips moved inaudibly, as though he were murmuring something only the ram could hear.

Like a dog shut in alone, Alfred started cocking his ear, paying extra attention to any sound in the vicinity of the front door. There was the slimmest of chances one final electrician from Valley Vulcan, the heating sub, would show up before Joe Buczko and his wife got in. The new owners were flying in for a late afternoon walk-through of the monster renovation – and then, of course, their very first night on the lake - in a bed whose hand-hewn posts towered over many of the old cabins strung around the former logging sites.

All Chap and Joshua were there for was the mop-up stuff. A little soldering here, some grout-work there. But their business was over and done with, and this was Alfred’s deal, a Thunderhead Properties exclusive. Big sale, manager level, no worming out of being there for the welcome.

“You speak for the company, Alfred. In this deal you ARE the company.” So said the email from the CEO, oblivious to the fact that, the last time Alfred met Joey Buczko regarding a business deal, he was clubbed with so much gun-steel his face cracked like the shell of an egg. Alfred was no beauty contestant, not ever. But since that day his only shot would have been a dog show, because his face was pushed in like an English Bulldog’s – and he even breathed in that labored, bulldog way.

Alfred considered, then dismissed making a desperate phone call to Roland Shelby, who had been the general contractor. Roland was a regular king shit out here - his Bozeman office had done the Ted Turner place in the Gallatin - but there was no point to making such a call, nothing to be gained.

The turntable way back in Alfred’s mind kept replaying Roland’s last phone speech:

 Electrical nightmare? That’s an understatement. We’d have had a shot if they’d gutted the place, but their architect wouldn’t. That old tinder box has so much crazy wiring it’s like a giant spaghetti bowl back of the walls. It’s worst down in the boiler room. Every time they put in a relay it blows – and there goes the boiler. There was an old-timer who knew those wires like the veins in his hand, but he’s dead. None of the young guys can figure it out.

 Chap stalked Alfred, mercilessly wagging finger and tongue. “You should look at yourself in the mirror, Alfred. You should see yourself the way I see you.”

He ticked off all the warning signals. Skin pouching and sagging everywhere. Purple under the eyes. The wattle. The Michelin Man rings of flesh. “Do you even walk on the golf course, Alfred? Or are you a cart man? If you don’t move, your bowels won’t either.”

Alfred turned and snapped, “You want to see me look young and pretty? Make the heat come on. My cheeks will get rosy real fast.”

This time Chap gave his earlobe a long tug and an upward twist, as though he were aiming the ear canal to receive transmissions from the ether. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, his eyes suddenly sharp as darts. “I want to tell you what I did, because I believe it saved my life. For fourteen days I lived on maple syrup and lime juice. I took it three times a day, no other food, and every morning I drank a quart of salt water. The fat melted off me, my blood pressure dropped, I mean really dropped. And best of all, Alfred, nothing bothers me any more. I’m clean, really clean. Twenty five miles of intestines and a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels, clean as a baby’s.”

As he listened, Alfred made a rough calculation of how fast two Hummers - the original dune monsters, not the new ones shrunken and gussied up for the American road – could make it in from the Valley airport. The word was that, on land, the Buczkos only traveled in Hummers. A His Hummer and a Hers Hummer. Then he rose from the table and said, “The two of you, why don’t you just take off.” He waved a hand at the gift basket. “There’s not enough wine and cheese.”

As Chap loaded the last of his tools on his truck he seemed determined to say something that Alfred would remember, once Alfred was left sitting there alone. Chap started talking about a friend of his, a Wyoming outfitter named Iver. According to Chap, this Iver once said, “if Joe Buczko likes you he can’t stop giving you things. One day he gave me snakeskin boots, the next day ostrich boots. Christ’s sake, he gave me more boots than I have feet for. He even tried to give me a Harley, just for showing him how to bow-hunt. But if Joe Buczko doesn’t like you…”

Back in the immense kitchen, Alfred wadded up a towel and went around obliterating the last motes of plaster dust on the various gleaming surfaces. It made no difference whether the material was stone or wood – whatever his bare hand touched had a glacial quality, not just cold but immutably cold. The afternoon’s drift towards evening was written in the continued fall of the thermostat, whose only heat stimulus was the shrinking threads of light still visible in the cloud-bound sky.

Alfred plunked himself down at the table again, listening for road sounds. His ice-white fingertips fiddled with the thatched weave of his Thunderhead Properties gift basket. All around him, the hall-sized room was armed to the teeth with shining appliances, but only one of these objects captivated Alfred – the big Magma stove with its six gas burners, each of which he saw as the approximate size of a Hummer hubcap. If the huge boilers were on the fritz, the gas that fed the stove certainly wasn’t. As always, Joshua’s gas pipes were infallible.

Alfred gingerly extracted one of the Austrian wine glasses and raised it, empty, to the ram on the far wall. He held the glass up and stared at the ram for a long while - until he felt the ram was possibly staring back at him. Then, for the longest stretch, he did nothing but sit and listen. He listened so hard for the Hummers he could even hear the ice forming, far out on the lake. 

As the sky turned dark as the black waters, Alfred became obsessed with how fast the jets on the Magma Six, fed by Joshua’s flawless gas pipes, could push out molecules of gas. It would have to be enough of them, millions and billions, to push aside all those millions and billions of oxygen molecules already in the room.

There was only one way to know for sure: kill the pilot light, then twist all six burners to the ultra-high position. On a convenient shelf was the Magma Six operating manual. Alfred scooped it up, nosed through it and saw that, with a little jiggering, he could get the Sabbath Switch to do it for him.

But that was too big a decision to make all alone. So Alfred, his voice hushed like Joshua’s, stood before the wall and began to ask the ram.

In the frock shop that employs her, Justina is considered a treasure, someone who’s good for the soul. They call her Brady, after the Brady Bunch, because the stories she tells are so warmly colored. Even if on occasion the subject is sad – an uncle or a pet dying – it’s sad in an honorable way; never hopeless or dirty or unspeakably vile. In tone and feeling, this chit-chat of Justina’s is like the dresses that come in every summer, the ones she sells wealthy beach-going ladies and wears so beautifully on her lithe Brady Bunch body.

It so happens that tonight, late tonight, Justina has a date with the most important person in her life. It’s her Mom, Alana, who’s doing something that’s SO Alana, going to a kind of Tupperware Party. But anyway, because the party might run late, Alana suggested that Justina come the next night, it would be easier on everyone.

 But Justina would hear none of it.

“Isn’t this where all the women at the party bake things?” Justina asked.

Alana hemmed and hawed but finally agreed.

“And what’s it called, Mom?”

Alana took a full beat to answer. “The Pampered Chef…Isn’t that what I said before?”

Justina chuckled. “You think I’d miss something you’d baked, Mom?” I’ll be out a little before midnight. I want it fresh from the oven. Yum.”

Justina’s mind is like a humungous photo album. Infinite space between the covers. The pictures in it are all scenes of happy times in Chadwick, Mass., where Alana still lives, a town just south of Boston, on the way to the Cape. Justina grew up there with her mother, father and brother Theo. Rough-housing in the yard, picknicking in the woods, diving into the pool. Getting the freshest, most wonderful eggs from Winsor’s, the farm that’s been in continuous operation since Henry David Thoreau trekked the full Cape seashore. In Justina’s mind-album, Dad comes home every night. On weekends he plays Frisbee with Heidi, the Bernese Mountain dog. Just the snapshots of Heidi running, jumping and twisting would fill a computer even bigger than the mind-album, if such a thing existed, not to mention the shots of Theo, once a track star, doing many of the same leaps and twirls. In sequence after sequence, Justina’s dad Bruno builds masterly treehouses and swing sets and real log jungle gyms. Alana, the baking mom, turns out these amazing grape pies. With grapes she orders from a special place, some farm in upstate New York. If Justina’s mind had real pages in it, these subjects would fill volumes, libraries, and that’s only scratching the surface. But there are no pictures whatsoever of Bruno or his present whereabouts, which some of the townie riffraff, the ponytailed Chadwick hippies, claim is somewhere along the Alaska pipeline. Of Bruno it’s further said by these same nobodies, or alleged, that he works custodially in a far-north hospital. Bagging medical waste, scouring bedpans, pocketing the occasional loose sleeping pill. A miracle hospital, if you believe in such things, where rising radiator steam once alighted on window glass in the shape of the Virgin Mary, drawing crowds from as far as Honolulu. And Theo…he’s doing okay, for someone who sells carnations at busy intersections on weekends and holidays and can stare for hours without blinking.

Mind you, Justina gets dates other than her mom Alana. Of course! - she’s gorgeous, she models. She gets introduced to boys all the time by the wealthy beach-going ladies who love her frocks. They bring around their sons, all blond and yachty and geeky clean. The sons take Justina to their clubs and luxury condos, where Brady Bunch plays just fine until midnight or so, when the geeky clean stops and the Jaegermeister starts to boil in the toilet bowls and noses bleed and get snow-numb and the floor is all yachty bodies rolling in the Jaeger stench. Justina has fled across iced-over fire escapes and learned to make a fist around the blade of her apartment key, just to get running space.

In the mind-album of Justina, Alana is considered a treasure, someone who’s good for the soul.

No one knows this more than Alana.

Alana, the Mom. Who’s only human.

As night falls, Alana opens the hall closet and takes out a case. It’s long and slim, the kind of case a sportsman might carry. Built like it holds a fishing rod. Off she goes in her vehicle, and soon she joins a small herd of SUVs and minivans rumbling up the driveway of a pleasant colonial home, the lawn illuminated by welcoming lanterns.

Justina is the topic on all the ladies’ lips. When will we see her on the cover of a magazine? When will she open her own shop? Who does she date? Who does her hair? How popular is she? Will she marry a billionaire?

Alana listens and laughs. With the corners of the mouth, not the eyes. She says nothing in particular, but winks and nods, acknowledging possibilities. The ladies are book club ladies, more or less, as is Alana. But instead of bringing books, they’ve brought their long, thin cases. And they open the cases and inside are metal poles.

Brenda, owner of the colonial, is hostessing the party. The ladies gather in the kitchen for a little chardonnay, and Brenda slides a long, sugar-smelling tray into the oven. She mops her brow, removes her apron and declares, “I’m sending you home tonight with banana muffins…and with moves you won’t believe.”

Brenda leads the guffawing group out of the kitchen, down a berber-covered staircase to an ample rec room which has stray gym equipment on the sidelines and a big open space in the middle, all in shiny tan tile. She turns down the dimmer and turns up a stereo knob. She gets a black light going in front of the fireplace and strips out of the loose fleece she’s wearing to reveal a tight pink t-shirt with bold black letters that say, “Got Pole.” One instant later the group, including Alana, does its version of the same outer-top removal, but a little clunkier in its execution. Suddenly there are fourteen women in “Got Pole” t-shirts and black hugger pants who have elongated their spring-action poles to nine feet, and they’re standing next to them like troops at attention.

At previous sessions, each has paid Brenda $450 for the pole and another hundred for the case. Tupperware never cost this. As a single mom, Alana’s road is no easy one, even with the kids out. No Bruno, nobody but herself, and a Chadwick home in the Winsor’s Farm area can’t be seen with peeling paint and sagging shingles. If Justina has that lanky Vogue look, Alana, in a certain light – flash blue and red in particular – can still get a Maxim thing going, and she’s thinking career path here. Just up in Quincy there’s the big shipyard and the Commodore’s Club for Gentlemen. There’s Posh Pole too, under Escort Outcall in the Verizon Yellow Pages. What Justina doesn’t know can’t hurt her.

“Let me show you one called The Fireman,” says Brenda, wrapping a leg around the pole so sinuously one of the bigger ladies clucks, “she’s positively boneless.” And a chorus of groans follows as the collective limbs stretch and bend. But not a sound from Alana, who’s grimly determined, in her black Nikes, to just do it.

Three hours pass and Alana towels off, aching. She throws on the retro Brady dress she brought along, a Justina thrift shop find, and flees to the driveway, afraid that Justina will get home before she does. A mile down the road she realizes the only thing she’s baked all night is herself, and she panics at the thought of faking it with supermarket dough-blobs from the still-open Chadwick Stop n’Shop. Then she remembers Brenda’s muffin promise and screeches back just in time to get not one, but two oven-fresh handouts in pink crinkly bags.

“You’ve earned it,” says Brenda, with a sisterly smile. “And I know an earner when I see one.”

Alana gets the kitchen lights up and the warmer going not a moment too soon. She throws on an apron, Betty Crocker and Donna Reed all rolled into one, her daughter’s gift last Mother’s Day.

A blue Miata, borrowed from the frock shop owner, purrs at the breezeway. The blue door opens and Justina emerges, unwinding and extending, like a colt being born.

 Arm and arm, nuzzling, from the breezeway to the kitchen.

“It’s my Mom. I’m so happy. What’s that smell?”

The warmer does its job, filling the air with bursts of butter and cinnamon. Alana stands there in the kitchen, letting Justina hug her. She looks up at the ceiling and notices two blown-out indoor floods. But then Justina stands back, beams her eyes into Alana’s and the eyes make up for the bulbs a hundred-fold. Two amazing gems, green as Caribbean sea. Even after all these years, Alana is awestruck. She watches Justina move around, all limbs, touching this and that. So willowy and weightless, yet merry-cheeked  and not at all gaunt. Alana can’t believe how her own poochy self could have produced such perfection.

She sets out the warm muffins and pours Justina milk.

One bite. “Mom, you outdid yourself. These are incredible.”

Alana nods and smiles wordlessly as Justina nibbles and sips. She looks into the green eyes and knows the mind-album is open. Wide open.

“What’s your secret, Mom?” Justina taps the muffin’s golden helmet reverently, as if the muffin itself might speak. “Whatever you say, I know the real secret. Love. No one loves to bake like my Mom.”

Alana pauses to consider the possibles, but speaks the answer she feels will fit best in the mind-album. “Eggs, they make all the difference. No one does it like Winsor’s, not these days.”

“No factory eggs for my Mom. That’s the law.” Dainty bite, eyes closed, Justina  dream-scrolling back to Easter days at Winsor’s. The greenest grass, the bluest skies, the reddest barn. Mom and Dad tall as Lady and Lord. She and Theo deep in a trove of rolling treasure-eggs, each a color explosion, ovals as intricate and different as snowflakes or rainbows. From a wagon-wheeled podium preside Mr. and Mrs. Winsor, the farm couple. At their side, sacks of goodie bags, handmade chocolate bunnies for the children bounding in their meadow.

Alana, from another angle, muses over Winsor’s as well. She pictures the Chadwick dump and the rusty truck she saw one raw morning, the truck the townie geezers have chittered about for years. She had missed Trash Day a couple of weeks and her trunk was bursting with thirty-gallon Hefty bags. As she was lifting it open the truck came thumping over the hard-packed ruts and through the twisted chain link gateway, the Winsor’s name on the doors nearly rusted off. Neither Ma nor Pa Winsor stepping out of the cab but two of the lesser barn hands, the haulers and sweepers. What they dumped was an odd cargo – not garbage but eggs, the prize product, barrels of them strewn rolling down the humps of landfill into the hollows.

Alana asked and they explained, with a touch of smirk, that these were the eggs that had somehow gotten fertilized, the kind with the little surprise inside, not what the customer wants to see when she takes two from the cardboard carton for the morning’s fresh-scrambled with juice and toast.

On Alana’s next dump run the air had warmed, the earth with it, but the sky was white and sour as bad milk, ooze from a rotten wound, and she could smell this miasma seeping into the landfill. She threw open the trunk and grabbed the neck of the first bag, but something stopped her. She gaped as a litter-flaked mound of dump dirt seemed to twitch, flutter, then pop a whole new color, a fleck of yellow. It happened again and again, until she could see what was breaking through, emerging, the shell bits, the puny, squirming feather-ball, the hint of beak, and eyes.

An Easter scene. At the dump. A newborn. Alana felt her heart open. And then the searing screech and the strike – the toxic white of the sky forming predator wings and claws - the big seagull bombing down and plucking the chick like a dandelion button. Alana, frozen-eyed, stood and watched the attacker flap and rise into the chalky gulf overhead, until the dead milk-sky erased everything, swallowed it up, a devil’s lake taking back one of its own.

For a moment, there in the muffin-warm kitchen, Alana wants to tell Justina this story, just blurt it out. Somehow it seems important, even urgent.

But Justina has just finished her milk. She licks her lips like a happy cat, yawns, and says she wants her Mom to tuck her in.

He did it with Ainsley just to get rid of his headache. Why Ainsley did it with him was anyone’s guess. Then he got dressed again, took off and headed West in the Saab she let him borrow, in that disdainfully agreeable way of hers – pressing the keys in his palm yet angling her face so he was sure to take remorseful note of the yellow-purple thing still welling up from her cheekbone.

As hangovers go – and Flip Cullen knew them expertly - this was no pushover. It still throbbed from his eyeballs to the back of his neck a long while after West Side Drive. It kept aching into Erie, and even into Ashtabula County, Ohio. It didn’t give up until he rolled past the clock tower in Rockford, Illinois.

Flip had been hemming and hawing about how to make the trip, and then they came out with that headline in the New York Post – “Forest Fires Raging. Testicle Festival Still A Go” – and a couple of things jelled in his mind.

One, he had to drive instead of fly. Just to see how much of everything had changed. Or not changed. And how much of a clenched-ass Easterner he had really become.

            Two, he would use the headline to open his Best Man remarks about Binji –  the little brother who could. Talking about the fire in the belly and all that shit. The line would wake up the pews – have the sons of bitches laughing or shaking their fists at him.

For the better part of a decade, he had kept three thousand miles between himself and everything Cullen. All of them, his little brother included. But the closer he and the Saab got to Pit City the old shit-flow started up. He considered himself lucky at the Super Eight in Tomah, Wisconsin, when his internet hookup wouldn’t work.

“Room number, sir?”

He told the clerk it was 118, and got ready for the usual. Go call Mumbai on some 800 number. Instead she offered to take fifteen bucks off because the room number began with a one. “Building got hit by lightning two weeks ago, sir. I’m afraid the whole first floor system got fried. Sorry about that.”

He wound up postponing feeding himself till midnight, which was when the clerk said her shift ended. She took him to a booth in a barn that reeked like a dead hen. The waitress hunted up and down for a bottle of Kendall Jackson, assuring them, “Don’t worry, we’ve got it.” When she finally brought it over she announced further complications. “What I don’t have at the moment are clean wine glasses.”

Kendall and Jackson was followed by some local bottom-shelf vodka, which loosened the gates of memory. With each pour the clerk took on more of a resemblance to Flip’s first cousin Birgit, whom he and Binji used to always call Beergut, for obvious reasons. Beergut began with a fairly trim body, actually, and used to love floating around the home pool on her bimbo-pink inflatable raft, toting some vodka concoction in the cup-hole. After a while Binji noticed she’d stopped wearing bikini bottoms and wore only regular shorts. Then Flip noticed the bulge, the pot belly pushing out the shorts. Then came the yellow skin and the tanning booth trips to cover it up, and the radiologist’s report that Birgit’s liver was so puffed out it went all the way into her pelvis.

He made a polite escape from the clerk before she gave him the chance to view her pelvis. An act of chivalry, he felt, given what he began to feel deep down.

The last time Flip returned to Pit City he flew on a bereavement rate. It was the year three hundred ducks landed on the lake seeping from the old copper works, the biggest acid bath in the world, and quacked their last quack. This was the big news at the union and brotherhood halls, where the ancient diggers and riggers shuffled around dragging their nostril-tubed canisters, spiking their O2 with jolts of Old Crow – forever bemoaning Big Copper’s rude departure, how they cut and ran without so much as a thank you ma’am after ripping the town the hugest, smelliest hole in the Western Hemisphere.

On Birgit’s Wake night her daughter’s boyfriend found the daughter curled up asleep in the bathtub, a quart of vodka and a pint of Gatorade standing like sentries on the shut toilet. The boyfriend was a miner’s great grandson with arms like bull’s legs. When he lifted the daughter from the tub she bit his Adam’s apple like it was a cocktail walnut.

Not her fault, Binji said. Merely the Cullen DNA on autopilot.  

Once he had hit the homeland, it turned out Flip had plenty of material for his fraternal remarks. The stuff started percolating as he sat in Binji’s office, marveling at the stationery that said Benjamin Cullen, Managing Partner, even as he creased a paper airplane out of it. “Righto, Binjamin,” he said, picking his teeth with the nose of the plane, “ye made it to the top o’ the heap, ye did. Even if it is a slag heap.” They repaired for a full eighteen at the celebrated golf course, the one with the black sand traps, cornerstone of Binji’s plan to transform wasteland into theme park. Flip got his first up-front look at Erin, who strolled around the clubhouse with them, pre-tee time. Like all of Binji’s girls she was a couple of inches taller, and she had that glowing hair Binji liked, straight out of a Breck ad. Binji’s own hair had lost the trademark cowlick – to the patient hand of Erin, no doubt. Stalking the fairway, Binji looked nearly as taut and fit as in the days he set records on the one all-dirt, no-grass football field in the whole state. No mean feat, considering the likely blood alcohol level at any given hour.

As they straggled into the church, the wind changed for the worst, turning the sky to a yellow cauldron. No fault of the pit poisons whatsoever, just the annual conflagration in the tall pines, often caused by some match-toting volunteer fireman, itchy for something to do. On the other side of town, the tents were up and they were standing in line for free plates of prairie oysters, deep-fried. Flip joined Binji and Erin at the altar and began, “Did you choose this date on purpose?”

Even the priest chimed in with a lusty laugh, blowing some dark dust off the stained glass. As it happened, the robed and grizzled dude wasn’t a genuine priest but a married deacon with six kids, twenty nine grandchildren and fifty two great grandchildren. “So I don’t just make the rules, I play the game,” he said, when his turn came to bestow pastoral guidance upon the couple.

Flip went on, reeling it out like a road movie. He told them of pulling the Saab up to a rest stop and coming upon a sign that said, in deadpan government type, “Rattlesnakes have been observed. Please stay on the sidewalks.”

He shared other tidbits from his re-entry, describing his encounter with the outskirts and their great black mass of cattle grazing in a field so golden, but smack at the foot of the last of the belching smelter stacks. And how he then ran into the pawn shop lady who waved at the great bald spot on the mountain, then pointed an accusing finger at the smelter. She swore on her mother’s soul to have witnessed “mutant animals” skittering around up there. Hence her name for the peak: Mutant Mountain.

“So not that much has changed,” he told the congregants, “including my little brother. Who else would get married on the day of the Testicle Festival?”

Having hit the funny bone – and sensing he had hit it enough - Flip duly switched into Hallmark mode. He gave morsels of Binji lore, the old and the new, each depicting how the runt of the litter always ran circles around the bigger, older ones. “He was faster, sneakier, harder to hit. And now this,” he said, with a courtly nod at Erin, “the last straw. I mean how could such a beauty be won by such a beast, and a midget beast at that? It just isn’t fair. You should see his toes…”   

Arm around the runty, wiry back, Flip looked down at Binji’s pinkly grinning face, in profile, marveling at how it managed to give off that little boy sweetness at all times and still radiate utter bulldog ferocity. He was the kind of dwarf no Snow White was ever made to handle, unless he allowed her to – and then came the exchanging of the rings. The patient hand of Erin reached out – floated out, really – but Binji snagged it like he was one-handing a ball or sealing a business deal. In the blur, the ring bounced this way and that, and the two of them went for it, Binji like it was a face-off at center ice and he could kill to get the golden puck. But it was Erin who retrieved it, with her longer arm - and, glowing patience, she tipped it to him. This is when Flip saw the eyes of his brother narrow like double ice picks and glare at her, for the merest flash, in a way that even knocked the deacon back a step. The Cullen DNA, on automatic pilot - a look Flip knew. Knew it as far more than a look - but as stuff bubbling up on nights his own clothes stank like a brewery, stuff to kill a shitload of ducks and then some.

Icepick-eyes, the same eyes he had shown Ainsley that morning on the puke-sopped floor. She had come over to help him up – with a hand in soft float like Erin’s - and he had given her the Cullen thank you … grabbed the side of her face and slammed it into the side of a door.

            

The embolism that strikes the sinner Muzzy Farber gives him a holy roll, and sets him off on a religious pilgrimage of sorts. But that hardly means he can’t pause and have the loafers buffed when the plane drops him at Logan. Re-entering Boston’s Fertile Crescent, he figures, you ought to have a little spit on your Sawbuck Quad Eddies. In layman’s terms, Size 10, 4EEEE – what you wear when your foot, roughly speaking, resembles a pizza slice.

Such feet can be heaven’s gift to a catcher. Width and mass to distribute the weight when you’re nine innings into a fistula-popping crouch. Muzzy hasn’t caught a ball in decades, but the old horsehide hum seizes him the instant he enters the little shoeshine enclave and finds the papers splattered all over the three chairs. Boston has gone deep in the post-season and the rags are all open to the double page sports spreads with their fat, bellowing headlines.

Then MoMo steps into the batter’s box. Yes, that MoMo. Or does he?

On the surface, it’s not so extraordinary. Nothing more than this:

Up climbs this thinhead out of the blue, uncoiling from behind a John Hancock ad kiosk like a giant brown shoelace. He has arms like whips and bony hands that could palm a basketball or span an octave, and his skin looks like the saddle part of those Gatsby saddle shoes, but true vintage, the whole surface so weathered it’s practically worn through. The sooty apron and rag-box announces that he, indeed, is the shoeshine man.

But what was he doing behind the kiosk?

With a neat swipe of the spider-fingers he scoops the papers off the center chair. A second swipe ushers Muzzy down. A wooden box opens, and operations commence. In a flash Muzzy sees that fate has swept him into the hands of an artiste. That first touch, when the fellow cradles his benchmade mahogany calfskins, it’s how Stradivarius must have cradled a newborn violin. Not what most of them do, the cretins and gorillas, seize your meta-tarsals in a WWF footlock. Like a board-certified surgeon, this guy looks before he works, studying the upper and lower, perusing the grain and welt. Then there’s that pad-and-dab he does, almost dainty, spreading the Kiwi so gossamer the eye can just about see through it. It’s like he’s French-polishing a Versailles table. Muzzy shifts the fat Porsche wallet he’s sitting on into a front pocket. The gratuity has already reached double and rising.

But fifty two seconds after the brush and rag come out, Muzzy gets smacked with a head-to-toe something, and it’s more than jet lag. The two of them have plunged deep into Sox talk, dissecting a Game Two wall-ball, slammed so hard it nearly knocked a letter off the scoreboard. All of a sudden the shoeshine man makes this little drawling speech, snapping the rag so the pop-pop-pops hang like exclamation points in the air.

“Remember Gil McDougal, the way he’d stand? Legs so far apart you’d think his pants’d split right up his old buttcrack. How did he even swing a bat? But that old stance, it don’t matter. Open legs, closed legs, bat down your shoulder blades, bat behind your head, bat up your ass. It’s bullshit, just more batter bullshit, because it’s all down here.”

And he pop-pop-pops the rag even quicker to grab Muzzy real good by the eyeballs. “Here, down here. Down in the roll of the hands, that last six inches before wham-bam, thank you ma’am. It’s the speed you give it, got to be 500 miles per hour, either you got it in the wrists or you don’t. True sluggers, they don’t just hit the ball, they push it. Stance don’t mean nothing, not one motherf…”

Muzzy pays attention and nods, but his inner eye fixes on something else. The speed of the rag as the words spill out, blurring like the fan belt of a high-revving engine. And those hands of his, the brown bones and bumps of the fingers, the knuckle-knots. The little stars twinkling off Muzzy’s loafer toes makes him think the shine’s over, but for stringbean it turns out to be only the mid-point. He drops the rag, grabs the pad, the Kiwi tin, and commences operations all over again, pausing for one deep exhale that shoots a double blast of fumes into Muzzy’s face, right up both tunnels of his nose. The waft is one part shoe polish and about six parts muscatel, the sweet-as-puke kind that rises from every derelict sidewalk in America. Pure wino antifreeze.

Now Muzzy knows what was going on behind the kiosk, and the flash of yellow-shot eye confirms it. But he also knows something else, knows it for sure, and he fights a minor war with his tongue and lips to keep from blurting it out. “Hey, I caught you in the Eastie game, you son-of-a-bitch. You old flame-thrower. You’re MoMo. I know you from your hands…”

Final proof comes when the fingers curl around the brush. Muzzy sees the grip – sees it as it was that day. He forgets the brush and remembers the white sphere, the red seams. His palm stings all over again, reliving the glove-slap, the smack of victory. That MoMo forkball pounding into his mitt, and the slider – the same smoke he saw in the Eastie game, which came one dribble-hit shy of a no-hitter.

These days, Muzzy drinks nothing less than Macallan 21, twenty bucks a pop at Four Seasons, Santa Barbara, so it must be the muscatel gas that does it. From somewhere he hears the crack of the bat. But it’s not the triumphant clout that won the Eastie game and set him and MoMo to hugging and kissing. It comes from some junkyard months later, dark and pouring winter night, just off the war-zone road the Afro boys used to call Jew Hill Avenue, and the beaked boys used to call Boo Hill Avenue. Muzzy’s cleats have just stomped a rib, raked a flank in the mud. The bat is whooshing through the rain. Too fast to escape it. The crack he hears is hardwood calling on his right cheekbone…

As the memory rattles his skull, Muzzy gets seized with new and darker questions, and he doesn’t blurt these out either. “Hey fucker, which side were you on that night? And was it you whose bat broke my face and made my parrot nose into a turnip? That’s what they said.  And why did you turn out a wino fuckhead so braindead you don’t even know who I…”

Stuck on the unasked questions, Muzzy clams up, takes his shine and dukes MoMo a mere buck, the standard. He just drops the bill in the saddle-leather hands like it’s a used Kleenex, soggy with snot, turns tail and heads for the baggage carousel and the limo-driver waving the name-sign at him.

He proceeds with the pilgrimage as planned, but in a dour, sour mood. The driver is an old Pole who claims kinship to the great wrestler, Kowalski, from the Arena days. The back of his yellow-patched head is a study in botched peroxide, and all it does is remind Muzzy of the wild yellow in the shoeshine man’s eyes, the seep of liver-poison, when he looked up at him and blew the muscatel cloud. Waste of an arm. Waste of a life. And his given name is Moses, prophet of prophets. Why? How?

Sensing the gloom in the back seat, the bleach-blond driver burbles some story about why the car-service company calls itself Satisfaction Limo. “The boss and Mick Jagger are like this,” he says, holding up two fingers intertwined. “Every time Mick’s in town we’re his wheels. I drove him myself on the Bigger Bang Tour. He can’t get no satisfaction - except with us. That’s what the boss was thinking when he named the company.”

“They told me that already,” Muzzy snorts. “Take a left on Warren.”

Maybe it’s the dark, maybe it’s the Boston fog. Same old neighborhood, but the buzz and the beat say different hemisphere. A brownstone painted garish blue seems possessed by drums, throbbing like a four-story concert woofer. Cars half on the sidewalk, doors ripped off, bumpers bent like hairpins. Yiddish signs on the old store windows are now Arabic. The deli, Klopnick’s, is still kosher but now it’s Muslim kosher, and the name is Shabazz. Everywhere the havoc of rust, broken bottles, cops at curbstones rousting bombed people: all skin colors, all makes and models.

Muzzy sees head scarves and feels he’s in Sadr City or Marrakesh, and wonders if the limo will explode.  They pass a block where solid plywood covers every inch of storefront. The same plywood – he’s sure of it – that went up with the burnings, the race riots of old, and now they’re rolling past the junkyard…

Muzzy peers into the lightless rubble where the bat brained him and knows he’s had it for the night. He orders Satisfaction man to retreat to the Back Bay and the Ritz. In the lobby he calls the office park in Santa Barbara, just to hear his own voice mail greeting.  Stirring a Macallan 21 he mind-fucks himself over the old tribal enigma: how two high-schoolers could be teammates by day and enemies by night. We were battery mates, he tells the ice cubes, struck glum by the phrase’s irony.

Next day he shaves poorly and half-eats an egg white omelette. He has the black limo bring him straight to the stone steps and pillars of the great temple, Ohabei Shalom, which he attended from age four to fourteen without ever knowing the name means lovers of peace. His spit-shined left loafer barely hits a step when it occurs to him that the name is no more, the carved letters are somehow eradicated from the pediment – by sandblasting or a lightning streak, who knows? In their place is a kind of billboard, a long strip of signwork that says Muslim Mosque #7. It flashes into his head that MoMo, post-high school and pre-muscatel, could well have called himself Moses X. It was what they did then. So why didn’t you ask him? Now Muzzy chews at himself for being chickenshit, for not breaking the ice. Then again, MoMo didn’t say squat either. He just bent the knee and popped the rag. Muzzy feels cheated. Soul-fucked and short-changed. He’s even mad at the temple, where he’d expected to revisit the hard benches of yesteryear. To put a hand to the wood and reach back, catching something – a wisp, a whiff. Of the long mornings he’d stood captive in the sea of old men, swaying and praying, the stench of their breath sharpening with every chant, even as they pressed their lips ever so softly to the fringes of their unfurled prayer shawls and whispered to the silk.

It’s a mosque. What’s the point of climbing another step?

As Muzzy turns a heel to head for the limo he feels a claw on his cuff. Then he looks down and sees the eye, sulfur yellow, and smells the hideous piss smell that seems to be oozing from the eye. It’s a derelict woman, white, but caked like an unswept gutter. “Look at them shoes,” she says. “Ain’t you something.” He yanks his leg away from her, but she grabs it again. “Look at them shoes. They shine like a nigger’s ass.”

He half-kicks her to get away.

Back at Logan Muzzy hounds the gates, stalks the moving walkways. But the shoeshine man is nowhere to be found. The chairs are empty, piled with yesterday’s strewn newspapers. What can you say to a chair? Even the kiosk is different. It’s an ad for Fidelity now, John Hancock is gone. 

Charles Mulcahy folded the pieces of paper into a neat square and inserted it in his lapel pocket. At the coat closet, he spent more than a moment with his car keys, holding the biggest one between his knuckles and brandishing it like a street-weapon, a blade that could be hidden in a fist aimed straight for the eye. Then he headed out of his elaborately woodworked doorway into the clean morning sun, but this time Cass took note of him. She even left her bead-strings and ornaments, zipped up a winter vest and saw him to the garage, where she took his arm and held onto it until he pulled away.

“So where are you going?”

“So why do you ask?” His finger hit the button and the garage moaned and gaped.  Charles and his wife stepped into the dark opening together, the first of four yawning bays, each containing a different style of chariot, all of them European and subject to quite the luxury tax. He went to the silver one, the one whose long, strong hood reminded him of the nose of an airplane. She stood close as he climbed in.

“It’s the weekend, it’s the season, your grandchild will be here. You have that faraway look.”

“Well I’m not going to Timbuktu,” he said to her. “I don’t have the fuel.”

“If it’s Boston you can pick up something. We could use a really strong cheese.”

“I’m not going in for a cheese,” he said. “I’m going to the old neighborhood.” His voice dropped into shameless self-pity. “Since no one else around here wants to.”

“You could still pick up a cheese.” It was the last thing he heard her say as he swept up the driveway past the now nearly yachtless cove, and it was either the words or the tone of her voice or something else in the air that put him in a zombie zone, the shadow-land of delirium just before exhaustion or fever or intravenous anesthesia takes you under. He came alive again at Logan Airport, vaguely recalling the dopplerized drone of Cass’s call for cheese but nothing else at all, not one instant of the fifty minute trip in through the crawling, bleating traffic, even though he had been at the wheel the whole time and the car was unscathed. He parked in one of the lots and boarded with a straggle of other passengers. But what he entered and took a window seat on was not a plane headed away from Boston; it was a subway car headed into its depths. The old train squealed and clattered like an old man with false teeth. It tilted its nose downward and bore into a hole black as a mineshaft, tunneling under the harbor and the wharves, burrowing beneath the decades.

Charles could have gone in by car, and if Cass or any of his now-grown children had shown interest he would have. But they were happiest out with the Saturday Home Depots and Sunday Frostbite Regattas. And since he was doing a solo he would do it the way that seemed the original way, by train, trolley and foot. HHHTThTHe eventually came out of the ground squinting, not a half mile from where he had walked to school in the days when they taught him the right way to spell a word. The instant his foot hit the top step of the stairs at sidewalk level he became part of the noisy, fast-moving crowd that stretched from one end of the square to the other.

 But his was the only white face in it, and he felt for the pointed end of the key in his pants pocket, making sure it was ready if needed, although the only assault that came his way was a slap of wind announcing the season’s first shower of snow. As he ventured forth from the subway entrance he turned his head this way and that, seeking landmarks. The Cathedral stood gray as ever, but now it was shuttered by a Vatican cost-cutting purge. Over sporadic storefronts there were still signs in unreadable foreign letters, as there had been decades before, but instead of the heathen but familiar Jewish the characters had become either inscrutable Asian or menacing Arabic. Lurking and shirking in doorways or alleys were clusters of the kinds of young men Charles could easily picture shooting hoops in a jailyard or each other in a schoolyard, perhaps the same schoolyard he had looked out on while some spinster teacher droned on about their continent, their dark continent. His right hand stayed on alert in his right pocket, clutching the key with greater or lesser pressure depending on how close these gang-boys got to him. After he had walked a couple of blocks and not a hulking one of them had paid him much more than a shrug, he felt a wave of something come over his deeper self. The feeling couldn’t be called relief, nor was it disappointment either. It was worse, a kind of mourning for a lost whatever – now that he was evidently too old to be worth even a fusillade of verbal race rage, if not a real true mugging.

Charles pulled his overcoat tight against the thin drilling of snow and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He crossed a side street and moved onto a new block where the bars and liquor stores and steel-grated pawn shops were more abundant. So were the loiterers, but they were older and shakier. The mouths showed more gum than teeth; the eyes more yellow and spidery red than white. The men, and some women too, seemed to have glue or molasses in their legs. They struggled with the sidewalk like flies who have just landed on a strip of flypaper.

He crossed to yet another block and came to a neon sign, The Shamrock, which dated from the days he used a fake driver’s license to quaff at the bar. But the fluorescent letters flickered and trembled, as though hungry for electricity.  Passing close to the steamed-up front door he took a good whiff, expecting the ancient tang of spilled ale and overcooked corned beef. Instead he got a nose full of muscatel and piss and a mule-kick of nausea from his offended guts, and Charles Mulcahy jumped to avoid tripping over two feet in torn sneakers. The legs they were attached to were bare from the ankles to the calves, and one of them was swollen blue-purple. What remained of the man’s pants was ripped and sodden and unapproachable. What cloth there was on his chest could have once been a green team jacket; could have been on him for decades too, old as the grates imbedded in the sidewalk. The body itself, the skin - where it wasn’t bruised or pestilent - was the color of dark walnut furniture. But the stranger was alive. The lips and nose labored under thickets of dried blood, sucking and gulping air and water from the steady white drizzle.

Repelled as he was, Charles took heart at having found what he came for, and he wasted no time unbuttoning the collar of his overcoat. He thrust his hand into his lapel pocket and took out the neat square of folded bills, a thousand dollars in all. He fell to one knee and there, from the length of a well-stretched arm, he studied the man’s stained rag of an athletic jacket, planning his move on the one exposed pocket. Then he reached forward and inserted the bills swiftly and cleanly, all without actually touching the fabric.

Charles stayed a little longer with his knee on the cold sidewalk, watching and listening for any sign– an eye flutter, a deeper gasp – anything to acknowledge what had just taken place, but there was only the same sleep, the same dried blood, the same misting snow. He stood up abruptly and crossed himself. After re-buttoning the top of his overcoat he marched double-time back to the dark, welcoming hole of the subway, wondering for a moment what might happen to him in this cab-forsaken territory if the hole suddenly sealed up, or just disappeared. The thought returned to pester him as he rode the old train under the storm-whipped harbor and its sunken world of moorings and anchors and pilings. He stared at the blackness outside the window and thought of the groaning buoys high above and the weight of so much water pressing against the barnacled skin of the tunnel. At one point the train came to a sudden halt and he looked around, a little too wildly, alarmed that there were no other passengers he could see, not even a conductor. For an eerie instant everything inside and outside the train went black, except his racing mind, and in the first flash of returning light Charles saw the forward door between cars slap shut behind something shiny and green that flitted away, leaving the hint of satin or a disappearing arm.

At last there was a snap, a clank and the slow, shuddering climb that returned him to Logan, where Charles wasted no time finding his car and at last using the key, the key he had kept at the ready like a miniature bayonet, from the moment he entered the old neighborhood to the moment the subway turnstile swung shut behind him. By now the threads of snow had begun to gather on sheet metal, and he was glad – brimming with prowess - to feel the spasm of the ignition and hear the big engine rumble at his command.

The feeling only got better as he negotiated the ramps of the airport exit system and made his way onto the highway going back up north - his north, his side of the train tunnel. The very air pooling out of the climate system of the car gave him a sense of welcome and comfort, like a familiar coat slipping around his shoulders, and he grew excited and restless – impatient to return to his Cass and his holiday and a sip of rarest malt, such a malt that could never, ever be found on the shelves of The Shamrock.

His visibility was fine despite the snow. The road ahead seemed exceptionally clear – nothing in sight to slow him down. It was the holiday, of course. Its onset had swept the highway clean of the usual commuting traffic, and the last of the afternoon light was rapidly going home too. To his left were the Park ‘n Fly lots, silent as cemeteries; to his right, a sooty hill capped by a tall Madonna statue and shrine, standing exactly as they had when he was a schoolboy. As the billboard lamps and neon signs came on, the snow glistened like tinsel, and the traffic signal turning from green to red struck Charles as almost playful, because there were no other cars surging behind or beside him. No police either, he reckoned, and he saw it would be a cakewalk to simply keep on going and run the light. For an instant he leaned on the pedal but in the next instant he came to a resolute stop, applying his brakes in a voluntary act of gratitude and civic decency, even reverence. He found himself giving prayerful thanks to the law - to the heavens as well - for bringing him to where he now sat, both hands on the wheel, both eyes enjoying the merry red circle of light and the silvery ice-threads pelting and melting on the windshield.

Charles bit his lip, readying himself for the blink of an eye when the red would turn green and the car would burst forward like a race horse. But the thrust that came and shocked his body was different and opposite in every possible way – a  crumpling slam from the rear, not caused by the action of his own engine and gears but some large foreign object ramming against his trunk. It flung him towards the windshield like a crash dummy and instantly stiffened the seat belt, which slapped him back into his place. Before he could think to unbuckle, before he could get used to the fact that the previously empty rearview mirror was now filled with blaring light and a hideous metallic mass, a hand shot towards the left side of his head and knuckles rapped against the driver’s window.

Next came a voice, loud and pleading. “Are you okay?” The fist pushed its index finger at him. “You, you…okay?”

Charles fingered the button on the door, dropping the window half-way. He caught a blast of breath as rank as a brewery. Now the voice was even louder, an urgent bellow, repeating its plea – okay? And behind the jabbing finger was a brawling, boozy face, thirty or forty years his junior – a white face, Irish as his own -  head shaved clean as the snow. It was the anonymous lout’s head Charles saw all over his warehouse, attached to scores of neckless beef-bodies running his forklifts, pumping his crates, shimmying up and down  ladders like a colony of young apes.

If Charles Mulcahy knew anything, he knew how to be the CEO of men in the trenches. “What the hell happened, son?” He made the front part sound threatening and the last word fatherly. It left no doubt as to who was in command.

“I hit an ice patch, man. Jesus, I’m sorry, I wrecked your beautiful car. Are you okay?”

The images ran through his head like a river of poison. He would be late for the home crowd, his triumphant mood gone sour, his car ugly and maimed. Everything had turned upside down, all because of some gorilla in a shitbox and his gorilla friends. In the rearview mirror he could now make out the shapes of two other neo-Neanderthals. He imagined the reek of the interior and its occupants, every inch of skin, clothing and upholstery steeped in pot fumes and cheap beer, their adolescent ideal of holiday ambrosia. He knew it because he had lived it himself, back in the days when he was a warehouse monkey too. Chugging longnecks up on the hill behind the outstretched arms of the towering bronze Madonna.

“Do you have insurance, son?” Charles contained himself. There was no point in making it worse.           

“Hey, I’ll call 911 if you want me to. Shit, I can’t believe this. My fault, definitely mine. Hey. But the ice, I’m telling you…”

“I don’t need any 911. I’m not that far gone. Let’s pull over to the shoulder. Do you have your papers?”

“Thanks, man. I’m sorry. Damn, I wasn’t tailgating you, I swear it. What a holiday, what a freaking holiday. ”

Charles watched him turn and jog back, like a private who’d been caught on a bender by the MP or drill sergeant. As they crossed the road to the shoulder, Charles in the lead, he noticed what a true crap-heap the assaulting car was. An ancient Lumina, dented, rusted, sagging and groaning. It was his luck, tough luck. But it could have been anything. A falling meteorite, a piece of shrapnel crashing down from a million miles away.

He could still smell the driver’s beer breath as he inched the car into position, as far off the road as he could get it. The stench was in his lungs and head and worse, it was circulating in the cabin. He saw it as causing yet more damage – not the kind a body shop could fix - oozing into the hand-tooled leather of the seats and dash; infecting the shiny burl of the wooden driver’s wheel. With a flick he sent the window down all the way, and the passenger window too, to create a cross-draft. He kept the motor running and turned the fan dial to its highest position  – the idea was to be quick about it, perform his due diligence with the paperwork and just get the hell out of there; no dressing the boys down, no threatening to press charges – he would keep his mouth shut and decide all that later.

From the glove compartment Charles extracted the black calfskin folio that contained his ownership papers. Glancing at the mirror he saw the driver and one of the two companions, milling oafishly between the two cars, pointing to their bumper and to his trunk, shaking their heads. He climbed out and joined them, very relieved at what damage he found. Incredible, his rear bumper was intact, more scraped than mangled or bruised. The Lumina was less lucky. You get what you pay for, Charles said to himself.

“Do you have a pen?”

The driver shuffled and shrugged. He looked haplessly at his friend.

“It’s okay. I’ve got an extra one – take it. Let me see your license and registration.” The way Charles said this made him feel like a policeman, a feeling he didn’t at all mind. He slid his own papers out of a pocket in the calfskin. And then the meteorite did fall from outer space, fell and struck – but in two pieces – slamming him from more than one direction.

The first slam he saw. It was the same fist that had rapped on his window – only this time it smashed into his mouth and teeth. The next blow was from behind, the crunch of stone or hard steel cracking the back of his skull. The pain cut all the way through to his eyeballs and filled them with fiery colors and hellish shapes. He thought he had been thrown from a building when a third wallop came. It seemed to be from the earth itself, as the cold rubble of the roadside rose and drove the full force of the planet into his face.

Through the swirl of agony and visual chaos a tiny part of Charles stayed alive and battling. It was a beam of something no wider than a single cell, but it kept sending him information. The calfskin being snatched from his hands. His haughty silver car throwing back a roar and a screech as it pulled away and took off without him. The ragged Lumina screaming and racing to join it. The two vehicles barrel-assing down the highway, exhaust pipes firing like guns in celebration.

Hot as the pain was, it grew even more searing as he lay there, begging his hands to find the cell phone he had left on the seat. He tasted the gossamer snow as it danced onto his lips and melted away, erased by the stronger substance, the bubbling blood.