Tanya Burgee was the name on her worker identity card. It peeked out of the mock-o-dile purse she snapped open to pay the sub man. “Tuna, twelve inches,” she said, pressing into the glass counter and slapping both arms on the top, the better to peer into the stainless steel tuna trough and follow every move of the scoop. The sub man, a zit-pocked boy with pale eyebrows, flicked his eyes up and down – from the array of breads and toppings to the arms that sat like whole thighs fogging the glass.

“Don’t look at me,” Tawny said. “Look at what you’re doing. I want everything, and extra black olives. But I don’t want any less tuna. You open that roll and spread it wide.”

Even with her eyes glued on the sub man’s blond-fuzzed hands she was aware of the darker man behind her, all elbows and metallic flash, seated in the tight corner where the self-serve soft drink case met the once-white wall, now yellow as cooking oil. He had a coffee within reach and papers in his hand; but his eyes, at this moment, were straining to zoom in on the same place her eyes were.

The zit-scarred face flared pink. “Banana peppers, green peppers and hot peppers too?”

“I said everything. And you got to put on more mayonnaise. I like mayonnaise with my tuna. That means mayonnaise on both sides of every scoop. You can’t put in more, you’re gonna have to start again.”

The sub man began to lift the swollen, finished sandwich onto the plate. “Not so fast. One more scoop for a regular customer,” Tawny said. “Don’t you know you got to take care of the regulars.”

She received no argument whatsoever, paid for her bomb and looked around for a seat. There was a whole floor-full of them empty except for one – over in the corner by the soft drink case. She took a booth in that general vicinity, close enough to look him over. For all the baldness on top there was a forest of black on his praying mantis forearms and significant fingers, which seemed to have extra knuckles. There was a scab on the bald head and another under his spear-point of a nose; and now the eyes, black as the olives on her tuna, had suddenly gone into hiding behind yellow reflector sunglasses. But Tawny was still sure she had seen this man somewhere else.

Two hours later she pushed her bed-changing cart down the ninth floor carpet of the Highline Hotel, the only stretch of runner that hadn’t been torn up when the place was still called the Remington and condemned. “Squalid as a spittoon,” the Combination Gazette had said. Tawny knocked twice on Room 927 – and he opened the door.

*******

Tawny didn’t get the chance to put on 927’s new bed sheets until they had sweated up the old ones. The introductions were over in a matter of seconds. “I like the way you controlled that guy making your tuna sandwich,” the man said, without a trace of slyness. Then he stepped back with a slight bow so she could roll her paraphernalia into the room. “Might you do the same for me.”

“Take off those shades and I’ll let you know.”

The eyes told her he was one of those unique men who enjoyed spotting a woman a hundred pounds, and maybe even more than that. She saw promise, too, in the long-knuckled digits and their opulence of midnight-black hair running right up to the cuticles. Tawny grabbed the longest of the fingers and led him onto the mattress and straight under her, her swaggering chest-work, just where she knew he wanted his face to go. There he stayed for the duration, sprawling and moaning, like the spidery train jungle that writhed under the arched bridge, its stonework suddenly the pedestal for an erupting thundercloud.

It had been that long a time for her.

His name was Al – Alton Fred Huston – and he told her he was checked in for Wigwag Week, arriving a few days early so he could “prepare.” Now that his cologne was all over her, the memory burst out of the thick air, clear as a noon sun ball: she had seen him skulking around the Highline two days in a row: waiting for elevators, flashing those yellow lenses and various baubles in places like the Hopper Car Café and the Iron Horse Lounge. Al climbed out of the sheets and stood before the contents of his pockets on the oak dresser. He fixed his string tie and clicked open his chained watch, a conductor’s collectible. Forty six hours and thirty eight minutes, he said, till the official kickoff of Wigwag Week, so named for a once-popular signal arm at rail crossings, one of the sturdiest ever made. Everyone who was anyone in traindom would be there, including the strongest EVP of the Great Pacific Northern & Central, a coal and grain monolith. And that was the point of everything, Al said, his black eyeballs blackening even more, till they seemed hard as buckshot. But at the bloodshot corners Tawny saw something else: a seepage of yellow into the white ovals; sickly and sour as pus. Although she didn’t read books she could read eyes. What she found written there in the jaundice dulled the glitter of his black pupils, his pearl buttons, his hammered-silver cufflinks. The spots that shone instead, in a hellish way, were the two that scabbed his head and upper lip. Jagged and rusty, more like flakes of rotting metal than preludes to budding skin.

“Gotta get rolling,” she said. “I’m two rooms behind.”

He put two fingers on a drawer knob and seemed to waver about pulling it. “What are maid’s hours these days?” he said. “And let me add I don’t find you exactly the maid type.”

“Split shifts. That’s the good part of this work. Driving a semi from Bend to Bangor don’t generally include split shifts.”

“Trucker huh? Well, I can see that one. When does the split shift split? There’s a place I have to go. I’d like to ask you to accompany me if…”

As he ventured forth with the invitation he completed the slow drawer pullout. Inside the open drawer was the last and crowning item for adorning his person. The way the pearl handle slid into the pocket told her it practically lived there.

“Some sleek piece,” she said. “In like Flynn. Not even a bump in the cloth.”

“My Baby Browning,” he said. “Not for sale, not ever. Just about everything else you see here is.”

“You want me to accompany you someplace, you tell me something. I need to know more about that pearl baby of yours.”

Al said he was a gun dealer, thirdly. And secondarily, he was a dealer in knives. “I go around to shows, these hook and bullet shows. They’re here, there, everywhere. Problem with this market today, tell you the truth, is too many shows. It kills off the mystique. Too many greedy promoters in this world.”

“You sell Baby Brownings at shows?”

“Not this Baby Browning. I told you. And I don’t do much at shows anyway. Occasionally I find items from other dealers. But I find more at pawn shops.”

“So where do you sell?”

“We’re in the age of eBay, why fight it? Long live eBay. Before eBay I had a little notebook with numbers in it. That was my store, that was all there was.”

They left it that more would be imparted to her when the split came in the shift. Upon her return, he said, he would have refreshments as well. And Tawny found he meant what he said. When she reappeared, now crossing the threshold of 927 on her own time, he had three items out on the service table: a decanter two-thirds filled, and two whiskey tumblers. All had that vintage heavy-glass feel, with the Great Pacific Northern & Central logo - and not those dull straight-up letters of today but the original marque, the shield glaring like the grille of a locomotive about to run you over.

“I like Coke with my Jack,” she said, frowning. “That could take hours in this place. New help comes in tomorrow.”

“I know you better than you think.” He swung open a door under the TV and cracked open the red can. It was warm-ish, but she decided to let it pour. Sipping, she said, “Now you tell me what a big cheese from the GPN&C wants with hooks and blades and bullets.”

He had a small fistful of pills to wash down with the first slug from the tumbler. They all had to do with blood. Blood thinners, blood pressure. He did it with a smooth roll of the Adam’s apple, as though chasing pills with corn whiskey was his normal way of medicating. “As I was saying, there’s one focus of mine that’s second and another that’s third. The primary is something else, and that’s not even a business - not yet. It’s still a passion, strictly. I need to find a barn out by Reunion, it would be best within the hour.”

“You won’t do that by the Interstate. No GPS either. That’s a back-roads special. Cow paths and Forest Service. Shame, I do like these glasses.”

In the car, Al told her how he fancied trains and always did. “Not model trains, though. Those little midget cars, the way they scamper around the rug, they’re all mice to me.”

He stepped on the pedal. “I like big and real.”

“Don’t I know you do. Now let me show you some short cuts.”

Ten minutes later he was cursing the ruts and rocks on the swerve she had taken him on, saying he should have rented a dune buggy.

“You can always let a professional take over.”

“Watch yourself, trucker. You’ll be answering to the Alamo people. That’s a ten four.”

Eventually, the ruts gave way to dirt that was smoother but bone-dry. Dust-clouds invaded the AC. Tawny had never seen a man spit into a real silk handkerchief.

“Before I give you the real short cut you need to tell me this.”

“This what?”

“You ever offed anyone?”

“Not one. Two. Their names were Briggs and Stratton. I shot a lawnmower once, and you would have shot it too. When do we get there?”

*******

The barn was where Tawny began to sniff what Al was up to, and not because the walls were lined with Western art, mostly paintings, but because his spine seemed to leave his body the moment in he walked in. Off came the yellow lenses and in their place, a sense of yellowness from deep inside him, the coward’s kind, starting even deeper than the liver. But Tawny had nothing against cowards: most of them, in her view, were only dogs that had been kicked until something burst.

She held his hand and the sweat of his palm seemed so yellow it was as though he were peeing through his skin. It seemed to make no sense since all they were doing was viewing pictures in a curious locale – this was a barn that hadn’t seen hay for ages, and it had a wood floor bent as planks in a funhouse. Orange bugs crept over the tilting floorboards and over their footwear, too, whenever they stood still.

“So what do you think?”

Tawny wanted to take him out of this rattletrap, dry him off, spray Deet on each of them and barrel-ass back to 927 and the whiskey glasses.

“Where’s the farmer and the farm?” she replied. “It’s spooky. That’s all I think.”

“We’re here a little early. What about the pictures? You like Western art?”

A family of orange bugs were colonizing Al’s well-shined calfskins. He was oblivious. She looked up at the frame-filled walls and down at the crazy floor and its scatterings of rodent turds. “All cowboys and Indians to me. That’s all I see.”

“Ever hear of Wilhelm Ferry? Excuse me, stupid question. Why would you.”

When a section of wall suddenly swung into motion, revealing itself as a doorway, Tawny expected the Baby Browning to go off, and perhaps a few machine gun rounds along with it. Al mopped his sallow brow, excused himself and slipped into the crease, which swung shut, leaving her alone with the orange bugs and the cowboys and Indians.

*******

She assumed the two brown-wrapped rectangles were paintings, given their size and heft. But no information was forthcoming from Al, only a request that she help him load them into the vehicle. More details would be announced, he said, soon as Wigwag Week was in full tilt, the Highline a hundred percent occupied, and the Presidential Suite filled. “With Mr. you-know-who. He stays there every year, without fail. The titan of trains.”

A few miles from the barn and his color seemed better. His mood too. “If we get back before your shift I got something to show you. Ever go down to the station?”

“The Combination Depot? Only when I go to see my aunt in Two Forks. Last time I did that was twelve years ago.”

He snorted and snapped open that train watch of his. “You people in Combination slay me. You’re a railroad centerpiece, a switchpoint for the biggest piggybacks in the country. Even a major passenger feeder. Yet you hear that whistle hoot off the mountains and it’s no more to you than ass-gas whining in the wind.”

The speeches ceased for eighteen miles. He drove relentlessly, nearly smacking into a Charolais, a jumper that had strayed from the herd and defied the barbed wire. For a moment he got that look again, awash in dread, and she wondered if he was having an attack of some kind.

But then they hit the outskirts and the downtown, the sketchy railroad district with the rusted rolling stock and the smashed bottles of bum-strength muscatel. But out of this morass rose a proud station building that still had its vital mass and momentum. And the two of them cut quite the figures strutting through the human buzz of the church-high interior: he with his elegant droop of watch chain, Atchison Topeka pocket scarf and double-scabbed head; she with her blue-uniformed, mighty caboose and yellow flower pin in front, worn in sympathy with the pain she saw ever lurking at the edges of her Alton’s eyes.

“We’re in time for the 5:36,” he said. “Let’s go out on the platform.”

The platform, vaulted in flawless, open azure, was Al’s stage. His voice boomed above the wind sweeping across the endless scramble of tracks, and he seemed to have grown taller.

“Look at all those people. Look at how far down they stretch. You think a plane could bring a crowd like that? There’s nothing like a train.”

His outstretched arm led Tawny’s eyes down the full length of concrete, which disappeared around the bend just like the train tracks. It grew more crowded by the second, as the young and old swarmed out of the terminal building. Underfoot was a slight but bottomless rumble, the kind that registers in the gullet, if not the Richter scale.

It wasn’t 5:36, but it was close enough. In slid the Silver Bullet, up from Alma on the Canadian border, smooth as mercury filling up a thermometer stem. The mass of silver steel instantly dwarfed the human flood, transforming even the tallest humans into insects clamoring on the sidelines. The disgorged passengers seemed propelled by magnetic energy, slamming into the arms of loved ones. For some reason, Tawny’s eyes locked on a little girl, a Shirley Temple type, who was hit by a great stuffed bear, so bloated a toy she couldn’t get her arms around it or notice the older man who foisted it on her.

Al returned to the soap box, but Tawny didn’t mind – she could feel the heart he was putting into it, the blood pressure. He excoriated Amtrak – for doing away with the classic amenities: the domed observation car, the lounge car with the fabled cocktails.

“For a spell in the late forties, there was even a jazz car – Fat Man Kincaid playing this bebop.”

The new passengers climbed into the tall cars and the Silver Bullet exerted itself into a moving state, unstoppable as a glacier, its direction the waiting mountains. The sheer size of the procession pulled at Tawny’s arm, made her want to wave, although she didn’t know a single soul on board.

“The cars are taller here,” Al said, “but the Indian trains are wider, because of the animals. I went all the way to Baltistan to see one of them – the last run of the Karakoram Star. Amoebic dysentery loves me – I can look at an ice cube and catch it - so I didn’t eat the whole time I was there, not a rice ball. But my blood pressure pills are supposed to be swallowed with food. When I got back here I felt like the train’d run me over. The hospital said it was close. Pressure 65 over 39 and falling.”

“I can help you with that,” Tawny said, aiming her eyes below the belt. “Tonight.”

On the way back to the Highline he asked her if she’d ever been way up there, up in the Presidential Suite.

“Too many times,” she said. “It’s a hell-hall to clean. One pubic hair in that tub, they fire your ass. I used to do that whole floor, the sixteenth.”

“The bigwig, what will he be able to see from there?”

“Oh everything there is. The windows wrap around. He’s paying for it.”

“The train yard, end to end?”

“Of course. And beyond and beyond. The lake, even the saddle way back where the trains duck into the tunnel. See where I’m pointing?”

Tawny thought of the two ladies in matching kayaks, both skinny as rails. She pictured them nibbling jicama salads on the verandas of their lakefront McRanches, sipping shimmering concoctions with their rich, bull-armed husbands.

“The big bastard checks in tomorrow,” Al said, “he and his flunkies. I have an appointment up there after dinner. I’m gonna be his dessert, sweet when I go in, rich when I come out.”

The talk was boastful, the eye corners mucky as the Yellow River – Al’s Pinocchio feature. Tawny took somber note. “Uh huh,” was all she said.

*******

There were two maids on the ninth and one good vacuum, able to snarf cigar butts like they were dust motes, and Tawny was prepared to do battle to get her hands on it. Geraldine, half her size, saw her steaming down the corridor like a Peterbilt and backed off. The power vac knocked a good twenty off her night-time split, and she was slipping her house key into 927’s slot just as the last thread of purple sank out of a sky that was now black as a tux. The beefed-up room service staff deployed itself on all floors, airlifting liquid supplies to the newly arrived Wigwag revelers. Al sensed the change in the air like a penned-up animal. She walked in on him pacing from one wall to the other, his neck swiveling erratically and his nose up, as though he were seeking a scent from somewhere above the ceiling.

“Making plans,” he said, pointing to the two paintings that stood tall against the foot of the bed, both of them still shrouded in brown paper.

“Can I see?”

“Now? Why now? Why rush the night?” To keep her at bay he grabbed the throat of the decanter, bourbon-brown and full to the very top. He popped a fresh can of Coke and poured her the Coke and Jack in just about equal proportions. She felt the rush before it even touched her lips.

After a while he took her arm, pressing his sharp thumb dead-on the tattoo, and led her to the foot of the bed. But not to unveil the pictures. Instead he switched the lights off, and commenced a whoop-dee-doo with a glow-in-the-dark condom. As before, she straddled, strong as a buttress, and let him nibble the low-hanging fruit. But the glow rose so high and no higher, and in the end the only shots that squirted out were from the decanter. This time she poured him one, and another, and so on. “Let it go to your head,” she said. “Your head can use it.”

Tawny looked out the window and found a kind of clock: a sidewalk wino struggling from one end of a wide BAIL BONDS sign to the other, crawling slow as a hermit crab. In between sips she checked it, and guesstimated a two-hour span for him to cross from the B to the S.

Eventually, they ordered up roast beef sandwiches, gushing mayonnaise at Tawny’s request. She ate three of the four halves and both orders of chips. Al had no appetite, he was already filled up, he said – with his strategies for tomorrow. When he spoke he blinked rapidly, as though the lids were clicking off points he would make in his art pitch to the EVP.

At midnight, they clinked glasses and sucked the last of the Jack dry. But Al didn’t reach for the phone: he wasn’t about to buy his bottles at room service prices. He wobbled over to the closet, unbuckled a valise, extracted a new black-labeled quart and re-fueled the decanter. “High-test, full tank - is that right, Madame?” She nodded, half her attention on the gathering shuffle and stomp of feet overhead – all those empty rooms now hopping with the cream and the crap of the railway world. Honchos and hoggers, as Al put it, hoggers being the engineers who ride up in the locomotive.

“Tomorrow will set a record for Janitor-in-a-Drum,” Tawny said. “And Drano. Those heavy-footed guys sound like toilet pluggers. Look, I can’t stand the suspense. Give me a lousy peek.”

“Okay, Cinderella,” he announced, “it’s time.” Al whipped out an ivory pen knife and surgically slit the brown paper. Small, deft cuts to keep the wrapping intact so it could be re-used for his trip to the Presidential Suite. He swept it away with an abracadabra flourish. “Behold.”

When in doubt say nothing. In lieu of moving her lips, she squeezed his hand.

“Well, what do you see? Tell me.”

What she saw were paintings with the same unexciting features as the ones in the barn. Same colors, same sky, mountains, etcetera. But instead of cowboys and Indians providing the foreground action there were trains. One was long and winding. The other was up close and barreling.

And that’s what she told him she saw. Trying to keep her emotions neutral, trying to keep his balls intact. “I’m a trucker, not a painter. What do I know?”

He wasn’t happy with that. “You don’t know Wilhelm Ferry, you really don’t. That’s for sure.”

He proceeded to give her a jaundiced-eyed art lecture, the point being Wilhelm Ferry was a just-deceased artist whose sales were posthumously rocketing. Of his hundreds of paintings, only two were known to have featured trains. “These here, you’re lookin’ at them” said Al, beating his concave chest as though he were already inside the railroad’s vault and filling a forklift with bricks of gold. “Same as Winslow Homer, ever hear of him? Painted all boats, all in the ocean, and only two or three canoes in a lake. Those canoe pictures, now, that’s what you want to own. It’s all about scarcity…”

*******

When she again keyed herself into 927, it still felt like the pitch-black morning hours before, her whole being still stuck in the quicksand of the dream she’d had, the nightmare that was impossible to shake off. In it she was walking by the city beach, staring at the two ladies in matching kayaks. One moment they were skimming across the lake as usual, but the next moment one of them was gone, vanished, the empty kayak now trailing and forlorn, falling ever farther behind. As she woke in a fever, the dream had posed a question but couldn’t answer it. Was the empty kayak waiting for Tawny? Or had she already tried to board it, and, with her boulder of a body, fallen into the lake and plunged to the bottom?

Al had convinced her to leave him to his own machinations all day long; to not even make her normal cleaning rounds – and now she wished she had told him to screw off and not mess with her job. The place stank like a Jack Daniel’s factory after a gang fight. Al huddled in a far corner, yellow as a canary, his whole bony body scrunched like it had gone under a steamroller. She saw the two spots leaking red and hurried over to him. No longer scabs, the sores had popped open and were bleeding freely. The word stigmata came back to her, from a time in her childhood.

“Were you picking at them. What did you do?”

“I wasn’t picking shit. It’s the blood thinners. Sometimes they just break through.”

The booze was everywhere, soaking into the carpet, the mattress. She yanked tissues out of the bathroom dispenser and dabbed at the two red puddles, first the head then the upper lip. The bleeding sores pushed Al’s physical weirdness over the edge. He now looked leprous as well as jaundiced. He squinted and scowled like a man in acute physical pain.

“Stop it,” he yelled, and slapped her hand away.

In the opposite corner stood the two paintings, no longer upright in straight, symmetrical positions, and no longer wrapped. They leaned against the wallpaper at helter-skelter angles, trains shooting into space in ways that made no sense to a sane eye.

Tawny grabbed his chin and made him look right at her.“Did you go up there? What did he say?”

Al slapped at Tawny’s hand again, but she held on, demanding answers. “Did you even get in? Did he see you?”

“Fuck, yes, I saw him and he saw me. Now I’m down deeper in the shit than you are. I can’t even buy a tuna sub for breakfast.”

“What did he say to you? Did you get a chance to…”

“He had a freak-ass little bastard with him, about two feet tall. With a magnifying glass. He said they weren’t even Wilhelm Ferrys.”

“Weren’t even…”

“Weren’t even shit. Weren’t worth the canvas they were painted on. Hahaha. Here, want my watch? Got cash? Nice watch. Elgin, circa 1904, twenty one jewels, the real deal.”

“Well, bring the pictures back, goddamn it. Bring ‘em back to that barn.”

Al slapped his thighs and shook his head like a rag mop, shook it so wildly he spattered blood on her skin and blue uniform.

“What the fuck you think that barn is, baby, WalMart? Thirty days and your money back? You know what? You deserve to be a maid.”

She drew back her arm and smacked him. Hard. His head shuddered like a bobblehead. More blood spattered. But all he did was cackle crazily, a Halloween movie sound that smacked of dancing skeletons and scarecrows come to life. “Do you know how much I paid that barn fucker? Do you know where he is now? Do you know what country?”

She was about to rush back to the bathroom to pull more tissues. She scanned the room and thought of how much hard labor it would take to clean it, the arsenal of chemicals, the superhuman rubbing and scrubbing…

But suddenly Al was on his feet, and the pearl-handled pistol, the Baby Browning, was out of his pocket. He aimed it at one of the paintings and squeezed: crack-crack-crack. The smell of gun oil mixed with the bourbon reek made her food come up her throat.

He just stood there, grinning like a fiend, and shot at the picture as though it were a shooting gallery target. He blistered the wall behind it too, the faded and stained Victorian wallpaper. She screamed at him, sure that in a half-second the cops and the manager would break the door down, even though music from the convention-packed bars had turned the elevator shaft into a giant, throbbing speaker. She screamed some more and out came another gunburst as he let loose and strafed the second painting. Ripped holes right across the serpentine train. Tawny was about to run at him, slam him with all her weight, as though she were a train herself. But he moved like a jackrabbit – spun around and turned the Baby Browning on the decanter and the two glasses. He shot and they shattered, and the Jack spurted all over the table, flooding yet more whiskey onto the already polluted carpet.

When the gun finally stopped shooting, Tawny thought of stupid, everyday things to do at once, maid things: wadding up bath towels and flinging open the window. Shooting floral air-spray over the bullet fumes.

But Al slapped a new clip into the pearl handle and pointed the barrel at a new place: the side of his own head. He spoke to her in an eerie flattened tone, cold and low. “If you don’t want this to go off, you’ll go home. You’ll get out of here now.”

It was as though she didn’t matter at all. As though the only things that did matter to Al were the paintings, and how they had betrayed him, played him for a fool. Tawny staggered out of 927 and pushed open the staircase exit door, not even waiting for the elevator. She wished she could be the paintings, the pair of bullet-ridden train scenes. She was jealous of both of them, they were her rivals – and never in her life had she felt quite as awful as she did now: a circus of a fat lady, so fat she wasn’t even visible as a human being.

*******

Next day, she squeezed herself into a uniform and made the pimply sub man regret he had even come to work. She rode up the Highline Hotel employee elevator and walked into a cop’s nest of yellow crime scene tapes, gawking, hung-over guests and a yawning reporter. The rooms adjacent and across from 927 had been emptied, and 928 had been turned into a police interview room. Tawny was instantly directed to a long line of other maids and waiters and maintenance men. There she stood, for a seeming eternity, making up evasions and denials in her head. As it turned out, she needed none of them – all the authorities asked her were the same routine questions they put to the other employees. To them she was just another cleaning appliance, a round machine that did rugs. And in the end, no one had been hurt or died, Alton Fred Huston was long gone, and the idea that a room had been trashed on the kickoff night of Wigwag Week was a fairly unspectacular one.

The yellow tapes came down, the repair people hammered and sawed for a few days, and then, one afternoon, Tawny knocked on the door and opened it, pushing her cart with its customary array of powders and liquids, brushes and rags. As she crossed the threshold into the future, the greater part of her soul ached for the past: Al waiting there in his debonair threads and trademark shades, waving her in and escorting her to the decanter, the shielded tumblers, and, with his railroader’s dream-spinning, to points of call she had never even imagined. Instead, what she found was a run-of-the-mill briefcase, the kind they sell on special at Staples, and the sour wake of a tractor salesman in need of a stronger foot powder. The following day was a new odor: medicinal mouthwash and belly gas and potpourri sachet – and open on the bed the purple plastic garment bag of a couple who’d spent their whole lives shopping at Sears and Penney’s, and reading the bible to each other. And the next afternoon she found 927 simply unoccupied, sheets and toilet paper untouched, a freshly baited trap waiting for the stumbling entrance of a new captive.

Each time the lock yielded to her key she endured an immeasurable half second, a black hole of a moment when 927’s door was open no more than a spider-crack, when she was powerless to keep her eyes from searching for him, dumbly expecting to succeed. The moment was like a mountain, and on the other side of it lay miles to cross, a plain of gloom.

On her thirty fourth birthday,Tanya Burgee ate a whole cake, tipped the scales at 293, and realized that Alton Fred Huston had, in all likelihood, been her life’s love story. The fog of time had rolled in a little more each and every day, clouding out the mad, bad stuff and artfully curling its wisps around the raucous, joyous episodes, immortalizing them. She daydreamed of the night a Willie Nelson song had floated up from the bar, and how she had hushed her voice and said, as though she were speaking a poem, just those two words, Willie Nelson. And then how Alton, his connoisseur side all in a ruffle, how he had turned and away and declaimed, “any guy in a bar can sing better than Willie Nelson.”

But what possessed her more than anything, swarmed over her like a low, persistent fever, was her penchant for sinking into the day he had brought her to the train platform. How he had stood there in the cacophony of meeters and greeters as the Silver Bullet came to town, whistle blaring, somehow making himself the impresario of all the hooplah and hullabaloo.

Then came a day she had off, raw and gray, a thunder-sky so low invading her room that no action she took could affect it, not even flipping on every last light switch and pounding a six pack while the morning TV babbled Regis and Kelly.

So she took off for the depot, for a pre-noon train that never had been a barn-burner, never had drawn the crowds like the 5:36, but she could stand there nonetheless and feel the arrival of a rip-snorting, steel-shouldered visitor, the train itself. And as the ten-car bruiser rolled in and stopped just short of her feet, she felt the steamy exhale from the engine vents and flirted with the odds, no worse than the lottery, of paying this depot visit daily and, maybe once in the who-knows-when, maybe one time she’d see him alighting like a Daddy Longlegs, hair slicked and shades and shoe-tops bouncing the sunbeams, all hopped up for another shot at Wigwag Week.

The straggle of de-training passengers hooked up, for the most part, with a complimentary straggle of welcomers. Once coupled, they all drifted into the building, leaving the long, wide platform barren except for Tawny and the prairie gusts that blew gray drizzly air over the cars as though washing them for the journey ahead. Tawny walked a long way back, from the locomotive past the dining car and several passenger cars, determined to see the train off since the train, the mechanical mountain itself, was all there was to see off. As she walked, the handful of new passengers climbed aboard and disappeared into the blocks of steel and slits of dark-tinted window.

She was quite a ways down, in sight of the back end, when the train roused itself and groaned into solemn movement. And out of what seemed to be nothing but the empty air, a woman appeared on the platform, running alongside the moving cars and waving a slip of paper. She was slim and pretty in that golden way and Tawny thought of the Shirley Temple girl trying to wrap her arms around the giant, stuffed bear. Only this time the girl was grown up and trying to catch something even bigger, a whole departing train.

Tawny turned and watched as the woman cranked and pumped, actually gaining on the locomotive, and then she saw where she was heading – a car far forward where a uniformed man, a train worker, hung half his body out, stretching his arm in her direction. Moments later the woman caught up and found an instant where she was running even – just enough time to slap the paper at the man’s grasping hand. He pawed at it, snatched it, then dropped it, and the now-crumpled slip jittered on a blast of wind like a wounded kite trying to stay up. Then it plunged into nowhere, sucked under the titanic belly, and the paper only re-surfaced when all of the cars had rolled over it, just another wisp of track trash, now no different than the candy wrappers and wadded Kleenex bobbing and skittering from empty rail to empty rail. The woman bent over, fighting for air, and Tawny watched her as she finally got her breath and limped towards the building and succumbed to the door. As for Tawny herself, she turned and became so hypnotized by the bouncing piece of paper, so aching to touch it and read it, she was unable to budge an inch, not even after it had blown far across the tracks and completely out of sight.

*******

One day he tried to get out. Denver - just a three day break. He put so much pedal on the metal he nearly missed the airport road. He squealed around the hairpin turn, burned rubber, turned heads and finally parked. He left his brother’s flatbed zigzagging the neat yellow lines of the lot. Unlocked. Did they tow out here? He went under the sign that said Thunderhead Valley Airport and charged at the automatic doors, and they whooshed open. To anyone watching it would have seemed like the door-moving force wasn’t a sensor in the terminal walls, no way, it was the bullish zeal spilling from the man entering. He was way early, because he was too hepped up to stay away. To read or sleep or anything. Breakfast had been a handful of Cheerios. Twelve or thirteen tiny little O’s.

He blamed the smoke for keeping him inside. Away from the kayaks and canoes and glacial crags and precipices. All of the Western paradise stuff that was going to sweat him clean again. Boil it out of him.

He’d paced the floors of the trailer and tried to read his brother Steve’s stupefying treatises on the mountain bluebird. That’s all there was – and zoology textbooks. And caffeine pills. The professorial bastard didn’t even drink real coffee. Matt followed his brother around the meadows when he checked on his bird boxes, maniacally penciling mating data on his clipboard. The smoke drove them back. Back to the trailer filled with Steve’s stuffed ducks and mad professor monographs. Matt’s skin felt like it was buffalo jerky.

And then he’d sit down and start dicking and clicking. Again.

*******

A plane buzzed. One of the private turbo-props that sound like pissed-off horseflies. Some rancher hotdogging above, galloping the polluted heavens in his Cessna. Matt rushed past the raging glass-encased grizzly bear and bellied up to the Sky West counter to check on the flight.

What flight?

He passed through the lone gift shop, running a knicky-knacky gauntlet of every possible manifestation of moose and bear in dolls and dishware, stuff worse than Hummel, worse than the Franklin Mint. And then he entered the Grizzly Grill, whose motif was ferocious bear rugs and vintage bear kill photos affixed to knotty pine walls. At this hour there were empty seats all over the place. At his back was a liquor shelf and taps, but the formica tables, diner sugar shakers and stale bacon smell said breakfast place, so he ordered a huckleberry stack just to buy an hour, and unless there were big tailwinds it would be that and even then some.

He didn’t take a bite – it wasn’t his stomach that wanted attention. All he did with the flapjacks was fork a few berries and push them this way and that in the sauce, watching it cool and dull and thicken into a purple paste.

But Matt wasn’t the only one with his eye on the sky. And now there was a new smell in the room, startling and toxic, not the kind given off by a puddle of sugared berry glop or old bacon grease. And then a voice, a man’s, from a corner he’d thought unoccupied. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the restaurant and the airport property. You can take your food with you, but only if you go now. Right now. In a minute they’ll announce the evacuation on the P.A.”

Matt didn’t need to ask why. The smoke rolled in like tumbleweeds. His first thought was some skillet flare-up in the kitchen. But by the time he reached the main entrance the plumes were dark and big and stampeding over the ticket counters. In the open air, if you could call it that, he felt his throat seize as the smoke poured into his lungs. He spun around in the murk, not sure where he’d left the flatbed. If this was all the visibility he had, what was it like for the pilots coming in?

He got himself out to the lots and behind the wheel and hightailed it down the interstate, in shitless awe that the sky-blocking incineration in his rearview mirror was something that would live in history, along the lines of a Mount St. Helens blowing its top. He saw an expanse of flame and blackness tall and wide as a tidal wave. It had swept down a mountain, burned all the timber in its way and was churning towards a cluster of tract homes that bordered on one of the runways.

Matt switched on the radio, normally a wall-to-wall band of top forty country, and got the official word about the forest fires shutting down the airport, with no word whatsoever about when operations would resume.

As it turned out, the sky became such a boiling cauldron even the tanker planes were grounded, so nothing much remained in the firefighting arsenal beyond the prayers issued daily by the governor. Matt and Steve burrowed into the trailer like moles running from an exterminator’s fumes. Each day became a gift from the prevailing winds.

*******

The idea had been to go out west and help Steve build a road. Not two days after he arrived, Lion Creek lit up like a bonfire. Soon it was a blaze the size of Rhode Island, and the inside talk all over the valley was no amount of tanking and hosing, no amount of cutting and digging, nothing but nothing in the realm of human endeavor could do squat. In the end it would be the winds and the cold and the snow – a long time coming. As for Steve’s road… it was all they could do to check his bird boxes so he could keep the feds from pulling the grant money. By the time they got to operating the rented backhoe, around mid-morning, every breath they took was like something from the exhaust pipe of an ancient Mack truck. The rent on heavy equipment was expensive. Steve sent the backhoe back.

Big Steve with a PHD was no different than little Steve had been in the sandbox. Unbearable. Losing a backhoe no different than losing a toy train. He popped serial tantrums and academic shit fits, whining about the blown summer and badgering Matt at every turn with his theorems and profundities and pontifications, as if Matt were a captive freshman in BIO 101.

Did Matt know there were turtles whose shells could withstand the impact of hundreds of galloping wildebeests? Steve did, and rattled on about it, shrieking like a human aviary. Did Matt know that 63% of the diet of Chinese mantises is male mantises? Was he aware of the 200-year-old whale still swimming around with a harpoon in his flanks?

“Now answer me this. Who do you think is the better Western artist – Russell or Remington?”

“To me they’re all the same, Steve. Pictures of cowboys and Indians and buffaloes.”

“That’s because you don’t see as well as you used to. Did you know your vision peaks at eleven years of age?”

*******

The weekend came, and Matt and Steve rose early to attend a memorial service for fallen firefighters. The fires raged so wildly the authorities held off picking a church location until the evening before, when it was known which communities the winds would spare for twenty four hours. It had been eighteen days now since they’d received that weird call from the sheriff’s office, a recorded advisory recommending that everyone in their district temporarily evacuate homes and ranches. When they pushed the prompts to say no, an official envelope appeared in the mailbox the very next day. It asked for copies of dental records so their remains could be identified if charred beyond recognition.

Even before that, Matt and Steve had been squalling over everything – what to eat, who should drive – their bickering so ceaseless it took on a permanence, the new normality of how they talked to each other. Matt was at his wit’s end with the academic one-upping. Nothing Steve did rankled his ass more, and Matt said so – repeatedly – but what he said had no effect whatsoever. On the way to the church a flash breakout in a pasture stopped the highway traffic dead. The two of them sat there, watching the golden fields give way to scorched earth, and the hapless volunteer teams running and driving this way and that, caught in such a struggle with their equipment they couldn’t catch up to the sprinting blaze. In the frenzy, some of the locals began acting as citizen cops, straddling the yellow line, waving their arms and whistling, frantically trying to detour vehicles over an old wagon path.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen to us,” Steve proclaimed, as though he were the great Darwin predicting the next phase of travails for the species. “It’s going to be like the jellyfish and the salmon all over again.”

Matt rolled his eyes and had a murderous urge to just lean on the horn, hard as he could, as much to blank out his blowhard brother as to attack the snarled traffic. Only Steve could turn a flatbed passenger seat into a lectern with a gilded Latin seal.

“More from the man who talks out of his colon,” Matt said. “Blast away.” But Steve’s beak was high in the air and his lips were pursed – hard and tight as little bird bones - and he cawed the story of how this Irish salmon farm was set upon by billions of jellyfish, a vast mass of red in the Irish Sea, ten square miles and thirty five feet deep. “Pelagia nocticula,” Steve announced, “popularly known as the mauve stinger. They wiped out every last pen of salmon in three hours. Hundreds of thousands of fish – just like that.”

Mercifully, the traffic began to inch ahead as Steve broke into his trademark shit-eating grin, the telltale sign he’d got to the crowning moment of his analogy. He swept his hand across the dashboard, indicating the choked highway and the rest of the length and breadth of the valley. “I’d say that this time we’re the salmon and the fires are the jellyfish. And we all know who wins. As far as the planet is concerned, our main value will be as nutrients in the timber cycle.”

Matt watched the needle strain towards 10 mph. “If you’re finished,” he told his brother, “why don’t you change your underwear.”

What shut Steve up at last – although only for two hours – was all the hymning and praising that burst forth from the overflow church crowd. The pastor began and ended his remarks with gratitude to Heaven on high – for keeping the fires of Hell at bay so the congregants, at least on this morning, could fill their lungs with the succulence of sweet air, and “shake the rafters with sorrow and song.”

Afterwards, they all gathered in a field, just across from the church, for a white dove ceremony to honor the dead firefighters. The pastor called the grieving families to the front of the crowd, and when they had all formed a circle, he stepped back and a dark truck pulled into the field, slow as a hearse. The truck stopped and an old barrel of a man came around from the driver’s seat. He lowered the gate of the truck and, using a furniture blanket, eased off a crate that had three solid sides and one wire mesh side. The passenger door of the truck opened and out stepped a woman, decades younger than the man and sturdy as a barn beam. Her hair was the color of oak furniture and it was set in tight waves, the standard perm Matt had seen in every aisle of every store he had entered since coming out here. The dress she wore, blue with white dots, seemed cut to flatter the fullness of her shoulders even more than the curves in front, and there was something about the shoulders that drew Matt’s eyes and held them as she stood quietly in the field, the crate at her side. Far behind the woman, forested hills jutted out of the flat plain, spewing curls of smoke. But the smoke seemed oddly inconsequential, as if the shoulders had pushed it so far in the background there was no smell, not even a wisp of haze muting the sky.

At a signal from the pastor, the woman knelt beside the crate, grasped a handle on the mesh front and thrust it open. A dove fluttered out, beat its wings in place and then burst upwards. Matt had assumed there would be a single dove for each firefighter, three in all, and when the third flew out he looked away from the crate, expecting the pastor to take over with an obligatory torrent of closing remarks.

The torrent, however, came from the crate. Dove upon dove emerged, such a blizzard of them the crate itself began to seem as magical – for its sheer capacity - as the copious white-bird fountain shooting into the blue sky. As the doves exulted in their escape, they moved more like dancers or skaters than rockets. They wheeled and swooped and traced elliptical figures, flying low as well as high, before they finally massed and soared up and out of sight. Through it all, the crowd and the wind stayed hushed, and the beating wings were so audible there was something powerfully musical about them. It affected Matt more, much more, than the written music he had heard in the church. For an instant he even shut his eyes - an instant that didn’t escape Steve, who nailed him about it on the way home.

“They weren’t doves, you know. Not real doves. Do you think white doves let out of a crate would survive in nature? What you saw were albino homing pigeons. They’ll be back for supper.”

*******

Late that night a cold front invaded the valley and, next morning, the temperatures being recorded were record lows for the August-September cusp. The chilled air molecules put a clamp on new fire activity – the entire radio band chortled about it, suddenly swamped with new ads for back to school gear. There were even a few doorbusters for snow blowers and battery minders.

Matt found himself itching to get the road project going again, and then when everything froze to feel the high mountain snow crunching underfoot. He started making plans to go deep in the back country, well after the bears had dug in for the long snooze. It was a bracing day, such an excellent one he even felt civil towards his brother, whom he decided to treat to an evening meal that would be special and well prepared.

Besides the improved cuisine – of all things a fat chunk of salmon clawed from the crust of the freezer – it was dinner as usual with Steve. Enamelware by Coleman for service, paper towels for linen. He clammed up and filled his face while Steve railed about giant climactic dislocations causing a stampede of walruses on some remote polar island. Matt pictured thousands of them trampled, their endless tusks bleaching in the cold sun like tombstones.

The next day the neighbor’s big dog appeared, the half-wolf whatever, dragging a bloody deer-head. He deposited it right on the trailer doorstep. Steve had a conniption and called the neighbor, who said some sloppy hunters had bagged the deer in the nether regions of his property, chopped it up and left deer parts all around, the killer probably some newbie Nimrod making his bow-and-arrow debut.

Steve dragged the head to the canyon and tossed it over. Next day back came the dog, right back to the doorstep, delivering the head anew. “Just like FedEx,” Matt said. “When it absolutely, positively…”

After the canyon went bust, Steve lugged it onto the neighbor’s, far beyond the barbed wire. But the dog got to the neighbor’s doorstep before the neighbor, and the outcome on Steve’s doorstep was precisely as before.

“A doe, probably a mother,” Steve said, kneeling to inspect the head. “It survived all that fire – to die like this.”

Matt was hearing a new note, easier on the ears. Steve surrendering decibels. For once, only speculating, not lecturing.

They got a big plastic garbage bag and drove the head two towns over and way up a mountain, beyond the burned-up tree line.

Flower headquarters! In fact, this venue of horticulture was a surprisingly sleek and cool office building called Ikebana International, the focal point of the worldwide society of women (mostly) who do Japanese flower arranging and buy endless paraphernalia to assist them in their snipping and bunching: a vast array of precision tools and artful containers, all purchased from the association along with the lessons, etc.

Angie and the hula girl, whose real name was Christine, were members and official enrollees, occupying themselves dawn to dusk with classes taught by Japanese flower masters, and attending jam-packed exhibitions in a hall surrounded by a moat of swans. Me and the old soldier, real name Patrick, were the drag-along spouses, optional companions who were only there to partake of the discounted air fare and hotel rates and the legendary palate-challenging cuisine, which featured dishes such as boiled guts of slug.

But before they even got their certificates, before the four of us even climbed on the first bullet train, Christine gave us a taste of what culinary life was like back home with the old soldier. “He walks into the kitchen one day,” she told us, “holding this fat rattlesnake, and he expects me to cook it. So I ask him: ‘Where’d you get that?’ And he says: ‘In the backyard, where do you think?’

He tells me he killed it, and now it wouldn’t be right to waste it, and that I should go look at my chicken recipes. Well, I did and I cooked it. I looked the other way and dredged it in flower. But I made him skin the thing. What a mess! And I can tell you, it was loaded with bones.”

The old soldier got his way with the rattlesnake, bossing Christine around the kitchen, and he was the same way with us, bossing us around Japan. The first place we would go see was Hiroshima. There was no Plan B. He’d get this General Patton scowl on his face if we even mentioned anything else. So off we went.

The night before we left, Christine gave the Angie the lowdown on the old soldier, and she blabbed it right to me. He wasn’t even a soldier at all, he just had that look: John Wayne, Douglas MacArthur, the granite jaw, the 45-caliber eyeballs, that thing from the old newsreels and war movies. He was a military man in a way, but it was a crazy way. In his real job he was some kind of marketing man, he worked for a communications agency or something. But he was a nut for war collectibles, World War Two stuff always, although he wasn’t even born then. He sold them on eBay, but what he liked to do best was bring them to work. He filled up his office with them, floor to ceiling. Nazi helmets. Bayonets. Huge wall banners with swastikas and rising suns. He had old reveille bugles, sword straps and scabbards, minefield marking flags, gasmasks and artillery rucksacks – all of it carefully hooked and draped and tacked over much of the available space. He even had an old olive-drab metal desk. I can imagine it all gave the office a ferocity that baffled anyone who walked in, especially if their purpose was to discuss some label or coupon on a juice can or milk container. But that was Patrick, the hula girl said. “He liked to own the element of surprise.” The old soldier was quite the risk taker too, according to his wife. One of his possessions was this old pineapple-style hand grenade, scary-looking but totally harmless. He took it with him whenever he traveled – and once, right after 9/11, he was detained trying to board a plane at the San Diego airport and nearly charged with a federal crime. I still wonder if it ever occurred to Patrick that “pineapple grenade” was another one of those mixed-up terms, soft and hard at the same time – and when you thought about it, an even more bizarre example than flower headquarters.

But his most prized item of all, the one that he said inspired him every day, was a large print of a portrait of President Harry Truman. A civilian, yes. But perhaps the greatest commander in chief ever, he said. A true soldier’s grit and the ability to give an order in the face of the greatest adversity - that was Truman. To the core.

We arrived in Hiroshima at night, hungry as wolves. If Angie and I had been by ourselves we would have probably stayed put and dined on hotel fare, where there was enough English on the menus for us to point to something and know what they were cooking us. But Christine asked a few questions, we strolled a few blocks and soon found ourselves climbing a rickety staircase in a building that was dark on the first two floors.

On the third floor we found bright paper lanterns, noise and bustle, and lots of griddle-sizzle and mouth-watering aromas. The place was filled with locals swigging draft beer and chowing down. Nothing fancy, just long tables and cheap chairs. One of the waiters squeezed us in, Christine did the ordering, and soon we were digging into plate-sized pancakes layered with noodles, eggs, pork, cabbage, and I don’t know what - a kind of Asian pizza. Huge and filling, and impossible not to finish.

That was the beauty of being with Christine: she talked the talk. Angie and I called her the hula girl because she had grown up around Honolulu – in a land where they grew pineapples, not grenades - and that very first night back in flower headquarters she had given us a little demo of how she could still swing those hips. “If I had a fighter plane,” Patrick had bragged, “I’d paint her on the nose.”

Christine spoke the Hawaiian style of Japanese, maybe not the King’s English in Tokyo, but good enough to get us into doors vacationers from clam-land normally don’t even see. Angie and I were new at Japan: Angie had been doing the Ikebana arrangements for years, but this was our first trip there. What we learned that night, to our surprise, was that this was Patrick’s first time too.

“He knows nothing about Japan,” Christine said. “He thinks he does, but he doesn’t. Now that he’s met me, he can see the real deal.”

I took a long swallow from the iced mug of Kirin. “You mean the two of you aren’t an old married couple? You act it.”

It turned out they had only met two years ago, and they were still finding things out about each other. Patrick was pure white-bread Missouri, just like Harry Truman. Christine was all Japanese and her story started in California, near Sacramento.

“Go on, tell them about the cockroaches,” Patrick said. “They’re finished eating.”

His remark wiped the smile from her face as abruptly as if he had slapped her. What replaced it was a poker face, so polite and implacable it could have been on one of those dolls we’d seen all over the Kyoto souvenir shops. You could tell that, behind the frozen face, she was embarrassed – even enraged – at the mere mention of the word cockroaches. But Patrick had that drill sergeant look of his, and the hula girl went on.

“So, we were poor,” she said, “that’s a fact. My grandparents and future parents left everything in Sacramento. What we had in the islands were those island cockroaches, so big you could hear them before you saw them. We had this tomcat too. He’d catch the cockroaches at night and bite off one of their legs, just one, so all they could do was this spinning thing. In the morning we’d wake up and find six huge cockroaches, all spinning like tops. My husband thinks that’s funny…”

Patrick patted the hula girl’s shoulder. “At ease, private, you’ve done your duty. Now I’ll do mine.” He waved over a waiter and ordered us another round.

By the time Angie and I left the restaurant we understood why Christine was so frosted about the cockroaches. They symbolized her family’s exile.

“I mean, my grandfather wasn’t exactly small potatoes in Sacramento,” she said. “He had a dry goods store. Clientele mostly Japanese, sure, but the place was a goldmine. There were no cockroaches in that house, I can assure you. But maybe I can’t – I wasn’t even born yet.”

Patrick piped up, his voice slightly boozy. “Her family spent time in the original Hotel California. Guests of FDR.”

Christine froze her eyes on Angie, as though the men were not to be trusted with what she was about to say. “From hearing my mother tell it, the concentration camp wasn’t the worst part. That was later, after the damage had been done. I mean the home, the fine home that was destroyed, the reputations and connections …”

At that moment Patrick could have been Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, standing on the beach with the shells crashing around him, somehow immune and untouchable, as though war just couldn’t hurt him – and certainly not any conversation having to do with war.

“The worst thing,” Christine went on, “was the inspectors that came to the house before there was even talk of sending my family away. My mother said they combed through all of my grandmother’s possessions. Anything that was too Japanese they told her to throw out, and fast. She had recordings, Japanese recordings of popular musicians. They were especially menacing about those. They told her she’d better destroy every last one of them.”

After their release, the family never recovered. The store was gone. They fled to a place that was neither America’s mainland nor Japan’s, and years later Christine was born. “I was the Hawaiian Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” she said, eyes boring into Angie’s. “How the mighty hath fallen. From castles to cockroaches.”

Long, tall strips of neon marked the many towers muscling skyward in Hiroshima, and our hotel was one of them. The view from our panoramic window was all dazzle and flash, a thriving, rebuilt city showing its muscle. But in the morning we looked out on utter greyness: the sky, the buildings, the mournful geometry of structures and walkways and monuments created for a purpose so enormous it could never be attained on this earth: the atonement for the nuclear catastrophe, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima’s civilian population. We breakfasted quickly and left the hotel on foot for the memorial grounds, Patrick setting a rapid pace and moving stiffly, as though he were marching as much as walking. The contrast between the old soldier and the hula girl was extreme to the point of seeming insane. Her face was consumed by grief. His looked as though he might be parading into battle. They walked apart, in single file, each on a separate and evidently opposite mission. And although not a word was said, it was clear to Angie and I that we should let the two of them do whatever it was they had come to do. We hung back and let the crowd visiting the hallowed bomb site fold around us and sweep us from their view.

We re-connected with them that night at the hotel bar, but soon it began to seem that the old soldier and the hula girl might not survive another night as a couple, married or otherwise. Patrick drank hard and spoke violently, railing at something he had read on a diorama at the Hiroshima bomb museum. Angie and I had seen it too. It was a caption to a horrifying photo of burned, tortured human beings. The caption took a point of view on his hero, Truman, a perspective that Patrick found reprehensible. It said the U.S. had been ready to drop the atomic bomb on Germany as early as 1943, when the German armed forces were still strong and the outcome was still in doubt. Instead, the Americans held off. Only under Truman, when the Japanese had virtually surrendered in secret talks with the Russians, was the decision made to A-bomb civilians, and then only Japanese civilians. Far and away the biggest reason for the attack, according to the diorama caption, was that Truman and his power circle wanted to justify the billions of dollars the government had spent developing the monster weapon.

“How can they print lies like that?” Patrick raged. “Truman acted to save lives, American lives. Every schoolchild knows that…”

He drank hard and bellowed his case, turning heads up and down the bar. “I had two uncles who died in the Pacific. Brothers. They were blown to pieces. It left my grandfather staring at doors…”

As it happened, the purpose of Christine’s visit was to find a large tomb on the memorial grounds. In it were the unidentified bones of thousands of bombing victims. She was certain that some of them belonged to old family members, relatives from her grandparents’ generation, and she knelt at the great block of stone and prayed for their ancestral souls.

Although the old soldier stormed out of Japan the next day – booked a flight and stormed out forever, he vowed – the hula girl said she wanted to stay, and stay with us as well. She wanted to take us to the mountain country, she said, to view one of Japan’s many active volcanoes. We reached it by tram, on a day that was bright, but chilly and gusty because of the elevation. A metal fence separated the sightseers from the slope plunging thousands of feet into the caldera, and scattered all over the site were small, hard-roofed shelters – there just in case the mountain blew – and signs warning asthma sufferers to beware of the poisons drifting up from the vast simmering mouth. A guard assured us, though, that on a day this clear there was no danger at all, so the three of us stayed a long time, leaning over the metal fence and peering into the liquid chaos below – white-green, steaming and infernal, like a sea of lethal acid from a Hollywood terror movie.

When the tram bell rang for the return trip, Angie and I turned to join the crowd straggling back from the caldera edge. But Christine stopped us, and we turned back and lingered where we were, the three of us pretty much all by ourselves. Then the hula girl reached into the tote bag she was carrying and pulled out an oval object, that olive drab icon from a thousand war movies. It was Patrick’s old army surplus collectible, the pineapple grenade. “I snatched it from his suitcase,” she said, her voice fighting the brisk mountain wind. “By now he probably wants to wring my neck.” And with that she drew her arm back and pitched the thing over the fence. Her intention, of course, was to hurl the grenade into the boiling liquid below, but her lob only managed to lift it into a brief arc followed by a short spasm of bouncing down the lava rocks of the slope. Then the bomb that was shaped like a fruit came to rest where we could still see it, wedged there for as long as it would take for the volcano to cause its obliteration – either by slow, seeping fumes or a moment’s burst of overwhelming fire.

The towel boy kept on folding, kept on setting out the bottles of Cane Palace water and the little paper cups of complimentary sunscreen. Ray thought he looked odd performing these fey activities because he was cut like a linebacker. He read the boy’s behavior as sullen, like he didn’t consider the question worth answering. “Your sign,” Ray said, pointing. “What does it mean? Is it correct?”

“The sign is correct,” the towel boy said, his native island face blank as the sand.

“Right now,” Ray said. “Are there jellyfish out there or not?”

The towel boy’s shrug was unreadable, and so was his answer: “I don’t know.”

Ray marched back to the beach after lunch and what he saw made him boil. So many guests dunking, dipping, dogpaddling, standing waist-high and chatting—the cove could have been a public bath in Tokyo. By now the towel boy had been joined by his buds, four fellow islanders. All of them were smartly turned out in crisp khaki shorts and cucumber green polos with the Cane Island logo, the ubiquitous stalks of sugarcane. Together they seemed like a clique of junior bodybuilders, or bodyguards for some Asian film star. Two of them had Tarzan manes. Their tattoos were cryptic in that South Pacific way, endlessly winding and tangling, like tentacles sent from the bottom of the sea to guard warrior muscles.

The next morning Ray marched up to the lobby desk, eager to find a hike with enough ups and downs to maybe keep the waistline from swelling into yet another belt-hole. Behind the desk the girl was attired in the female version of what the buff beach attendants wore: the crisp khaki and cucumber green, the same sugar cane graphic on everything from cocktail napkins to cabana umbrellas. She was an island girl who registered indifference, or diffidence, or whatever it was that hit Ray like dry ice, in the very act of smiling for him.

While she fished in her desk for a trail map Ray looked around at the murals all over the big room, centuries-old depictions of the early South Pacific war parties who’d fought their way onto Cane Island and populated it to this day. The murals showed how they’d paddled their outriggers an astounding distance, some twenty five hundred miles of ocean, coming from God knows where. Yet at journey’s end they still had the strength to spill onto the shore and hack the existing inhabitants to pieces. Fierce as these originals were, they fell like swatted flies at the onset of the Nineteenth Century, when the Western sugar tycoons rolled in. The natives were crushed and chained, and their machete skills turned—under the lash—to the usual Caucasian-glorifying pursuits, foremost of which was building the plantation manor house known as Cane Palace. Back then it was the domain of hard white-faced masters, now it was the domain of soft white-faced guests. Tippers extraordinaire. The present Cane Palace, touted in high roller magazines like The Robb Report, was a five-star resort owned by Swiss luxury hoteliers, but largely staffed with island folk. “Swiss-trained and efficient as a Swiss clock,” The Robb Report crooned.

The desk girl unfolded a piece of glossy paper and spread it on the counter, which was an enormous plank of hand-hewn jungle-wood, black as the lava that lined the seacoast. Before she said even a word Ray saw there were only three trails mapped out, each highlighted in cucumber green. One was hardly more than a walk beside the beach past the towel boy and the Man of War sign. Another followed the cart paths on and off the pristine golf course. A third snaked along the ocean on the side of the property that seemed to have no Cane Palace beaches, pools, bungalows or facilities of any kind.

“What about that one?” Ray said, emphatically pressing his finger on the map.

Either the girl didn’t hear his question or she ignored it, responding in a kind of teleprompter voice that seemed flat and faraway, the kind of apathy heard from the other end of some vast fiber-optic sprawl. The only difference was that her inscrutable face was right here, two feet in front of his. In her tech-support voice she droned on, like some robot-concierge, trying to get him to choose the beach or golf course trails because they had shade trees and were prettier walks. “That’s the problem,” he snapped back. “They’re walks, and I don’t want a walk. I’m fat. I want a hike.”

“The trail is all overgrown,” she said. “No one goes there much.”

“Sounds perfect,” Ray said.

A half hour later that was the trail he was on, scaling the wave-battered lava chunks in his new hiking sandals, a bottle of Cane Palace water stuffed in the cargo pocket of his baggy shorts. The more the desk girl had discouraged it, the more he hankered to spite her and go. Based on the beach experience, the first thing he had expected to find was a herd of other hikers, but as Ray approached the top of the first rise he felt a rush of solitude, the sense that he was as alone as a man on the moon – and the crazy shapes of the lava made him feel like he was on some moon.

Decidely un-lunar, however, was the gathering heat. The morning sun was on the move along with him, and it rose faster than his fat hiker’s feet. But it was good, he told himself. Double action on the blubber roll: If the trail couldn’t walk it off, the sky would broil it off. Ray sucked from his water bottle and was in the middle of a foot-hand rock scramble when he found a monster root humped across the trail. He palmed the spur jutting out of a black crag and hoisted himself. But the spur bit his palm like pins and needles – a far cry from familiar New Hampshire granite, this spiky lava – and he let go fast and swung his thigh over the root instead.

The effort was worth it. He stood on a promontory that gave him a jeweler’s view of the rocky inlet below, shimmering pure turquoise. According to the map, this was one of several such formations on the lava trail: steep ascent followed by steep descent, each sequence ending in a bauble of surf and shore. Now that he was at the top he picked his way towards the bottom, the heat travelling right along with him. Half-way down he stopped and mopped his face, taking a long look at the crescent of rock-beach below. All the stones were white or off-white, all except one that was bigger than the rest, and greenish. He looked up at the lava cliffsides next, and saw some of those same beach stones, the whitest ones, arrayed in a spooky design, like a Halloween thing. It was a giant stick figure with the jitters, arms and legs flying every whichway. How they ever got the white stones to stick there against the sheer black walls baffled him, but there they were, bright against the dark rock and gravity-defying – a bunch of crazy bones in a dance for the sea.

Ray slugged more water and resumed his descent. He kept going until he was off the cinders of the path and onto the glinting beach, wondering whether his toes would fry if the sandals slipped off.  He recalled a story he’d heard in the Arizona desert about vultures, how they vomit on their feet to cool themselves off. He got a good look at the large greenish stone and saw it was no stone at all.

It was something out of the pages of National Geographic, a honker of a sea turtle, green and horned and still as a boulder. And for a sea turtle it was quite some ways from the sea, well above the ragged edge of dried gunk that Ray reckoned was the high tide mark. The last time he had been so close to a turtle this size was in the Boston Aquarium, ages ago, when he pressed his face to the glass and stared at it floating his way, beak to beak. By Ray’s estimation these were rare creatures, ancient and endangered, and to him the lunker at his feet was either dead or dying in the sun, by now as hopeless as a roast in an oven. He gave it a wake-up shove with his foot, then a rap with the plastic water bottle. No response, not a flicker, and suddenly he had a new plan for the morning. He seriously wondered where his surge of resolve came from—maybe from the heat broiling his brain, soaking through all the sarcastic crud to strike some buried lobe that governed empathy and pity. He turned on his heels and took off with newfound zeal. He clambered up the side of the lava, re-entered the resort grounds and stormed into the lobby.

*******

“What are you going to do about it?” he demanded of the desk girl, the same one he had locked horns with over the map. “Maybe the thing isn’t dead. But it sure can’t get back to the water by itself, not from where it’s stuck now.”

For a response, she gave him even colder treatment than the turtle had. The voice as flat as a scripted courtesy speech on loop. “That location is off property. I’ll report it to the maintenance people, but they aren’t allowed to interfere off resort grounds.”

Ray set his two rotund forearms on the thick black plank and pushed his face at her, bull-like. “That thing is probably a hundred and fifty years old,” he said, “and you’re going to let it just cook there?”

Finally she allowed him a burst of eye contact, but hardly the happy kind. “If the sea turtle is as old as you say, it didn’t get there by being stupid. It’s probably napping.”

Ray could hear his voice swelling, and he could see other heads start to turn. “I kicked it,” he said. “If you were napping and I kicked you what would you…”

She broke eye contact and lowered her head, so he was aiming his words at nothing but the jet black crown of her head. When her island face came up it was different, flashing something he had never seen from a concierge type. There was a warning in it, and a silence so venomous he considered backing off. But by then the big door had opened and the man with the look that said European-in-charge pushed himself into the fray.

He had one of those walrus mustaches reminiscent of Von Bismarck  and a cracker suit to boot, linen white as coconut meat. He seemed twice as large as the girl he loomed over, as though he were capable of biting off half her head. Instead he crisply sent her to the office he had emerged from, his raised arm sharp as a Rolex hour-hand striking nine o’clock.

He addressed Ray in the manner of a general in the Swiss civilian army. “We are all servants here, including me. She should not have talked to you that way.”

“How could you hear how she talked to me? Your door was shut.”

The look he gave Ray said don’t ask and don’t think. And don’t try to do my job for me. It was a look so dictatorial Ray actually felt, of all things, a flutter of concern for the girl. In it was an unpleasant image called up from days gone by: the shod foot of the planter crunching the native’s neck.

“I hope she still has a job here,” he said. “People do have disagreements.”

But when all was said and done this was a polite lie, and Ray knew it. The truth was, having the girl fired was appealing—he couldn’t lie to himself—and, in the best of all possible worlds, maybe towel boy could get the gate right along with her.

But his comment about the girl’s job evoked no more than a cool managerial nod, neutral as Switzerland. “Nobody on their vacation should be fretting about the life and death of giant turtles. Why don’t you leave that to us, Mr. Ryan. And meanwhile…”

He reached into the white suit jacket, pulled out a gold pen and scribbled a note on stationery embossed with the sugar plant logo. He slid it into an envelope and pushed it across the black plank to Ray. “Drinks all day are with our compliments. Enjoy.”

*******

Ray carried the envelope to lunch, where he devoured a shrimp salad, washed it down with two Long Island Teas, canceled a 3:18 tee time and marched back for another bout with the lava trail. Ray was too curious not to—the cynic in him said the beached turtle would be no better off than before and he figured the beast was likely fouling the air like any dead fish left out in the sun.

The high afternoon sun was on fire, and the dancing bone-stones looked even more bleached against the dark cliff-side. Down below the beach rocks were wall-to-wall as before but the turtle was missing. Ray searched up and down, scouring both the beach and the shallows of the surf, but nothing resembling a greenish hump remained. He felt a rush of self-importance. Based on the evidence, he had gotten Cane Palace off its ass—they had either pushed the turtle back in the ocean if it was alive, or carted it off if it was dead. At any rate, one thing was clear: he could resume his fat-melting regimen. Which he did, huffing in the sun as he soon reached the top of the next black and jagged rise.

He looked down to the new cove below, expecting to find another crescent of white beach rocks. Instead he saw green, green, green—humps everywhere—fifteen, twenty of them. Out of the water, burning in the sun. He double-timed it down the thin, spiky trail, nearly stumbling twice, furious at himself for making yahoo assumptions, for being such a tourist. Turtles! For all he knew they could fly or disappear into the earth, they could squirt on SPF50 every day and waddle onto the shore to sunbathe, just like any other Cane Palace guest.

Ray approached the closest behemoth and, just like before, was about to knock on its shell with his plastic water bottle. But a human voice interrupted him, female and spear-sharp, yelling something so primal it seemed beyond language. He turned and saw mid-way up the cliffs, the desk girl, descending fast, as if the lava offered her all kinds of footholds he hadn’t even noticed. Gone was the decorous khaki and green career apparel she wore in the lobby, gone was the polite arrangement of her long black hair. She had on one of those sequined surf tops and frayed jean shorts and everywhere, even in her flyaway hair, she flashed pieces of shiny stuff that could have been razor blades or bone shards. From her tone and the way she moved his way, Ray concluded two things: yes, she had been fired. And two, she had it out for him.

He took the measure of her—a girl, for Christ’s sake—and resolved to confront her with the best stuff he had, words from the heart, or at least from the heart he felt now in his throat. He was on the workers’ side always, all his life, no doubt about it; he came up working in the underbelly of old factories, peeling asbestos from the pipes. Never in his life would he try to get an island girl canned, and he had specifically asked the Swiss boss…

The words bubbled up, his apology and defense, and Ray lurched over the rocks and around the boulder-backs of the turtles to get within earshot. He shoved a hand in his shorts to check for the wad of bills—he would peel off half of them it that’s what it took, to show her that she mattered, that he gave a shit about her life and her future.

Then he saw from another part of the cliff what he hoped he wouldn’t but knew he would—two of the beach attendants, the Polynesian Tarzans with the towels and the jellyfish, scrambling down too. What they both looked like, the raging hair, the tattooed chests that seemed war-painted—to Ray they leaped straight out of the warrior art he had seen in the lobby. Both of them loping towards him, making that same unearthly whoop as the girl, made him change course and swivel into reverse, only he lost his footing and fell hard on the hot white stones.

The way Ray landed his face came up inches from the head of one of the turtles, so close to the side of its beak he could smell the salt on it. As he tried to get to his feet he saw a big wrinkled eyelid move, saw it open and shut just once. It was like the world’s oldest man winking at him, giving him the one-eyed chuckle, thinking about the wild old days when the beaches were red with blood.

And newspaper is what the old man stuffed under the pigskin. But only for a while, until Frank built up some callous. The dad, once an ump in the boonies, had done the same thing coming up. He’d also used a broomstick for a bat.

So Frank went through all of Little League toting a starter glove. Hey, that’s just what Little League is, the old man said, a starter league. But the coaches still wrote things down, the parents still yapped, and Frank had a rep, just like any player at any level. He was known for fast hands when they were curled around the neck of a bat, and slow ones when he was hounding balls in the outfield, and the old man didn’t go for that, not for one second.

The old RawHide did get tossed when the Pony League came up. But the old man said this was only because Frank’s fingers were thicker and longer. Not because he’d earned it.

Frank pleaded his case, even wrote the old man a note quoting Jackie Robinson. His friends had Mizunas and Nokomas. He wanted to go to a genuine sports store, not some bargain barn where the ladies department was nine times bigger than the sports section. But it was back to Gibson’s Discount City, and back to RawHide. Back to the pigskin that might as well have made a nice prom glove for Libby, Frank’s girlfriend, but was a palm-burner when a screaming liner struck the pocket. The price was five bucks higher than the old pigskin, and Frank knew this was no upgrade, no reward. It was just because his new hand size needed more pigskin.

You’re in the Ponys now, the old man said, you work on scooping those liners before they fall in for singles, you work on moving your tail when you hear the crack of the bat, not when you see the pill in the sky. You work and you work and let me worry about the gear.

Frank became a notable in the Ponys. Someone to watch, a kid with a future. He was known for spraying hits all over the field, from one foul pole to the other, very rare in a young player. He was known for hustle in the outfield. Not circus catches – he was no acrobat – but he kept his ears perked and usually got the jump on the hitter.

High school was next. But before that, the South Shore League. July and August. It drew influentials. The school coaches went to every game. Occasionally, scouts had been seen jotting on clipboards.

Tryouts were six weeks away, and, during a weekend breakfast Frank would never forget, the old man said they were going glove shopping. At Hanson’s, the premier sporting goods store. The Hanson’s baseball department was wide and deep, the salespeople were players, and a special group did big wholesale orders for school teams.

Heart of the hide? Frank asked.

Heart of the hide, the old man answered. And they were off in the car.

The Hanson’s salesman explained what Frank pretty much knew already. That the best baseball gloves come from the hide along the cow’s backbone. Cows do most of their growing in the belly region. This stretches and compromises the belly hide. Not so up by the backbone. It’s the best of the beast.

By definition, a heart of the hide glove, cut from backbone skins, is top of the line. And the old man bought Frank one, a Rawlings. You may have this for the rest of your life, he said, it’s your gamer. Cal Ripken locked his gamer up and wouldn’t let anyone near it. Yogi Berra rubbed his with shaving cream and swore by spinning it in the dryer for a day or two.

Frank did what Yogi did and more. He rubbed it with Vaseline, saddle soap and neatsfoot oil. He greased it and baked it in the oven for four minutes. He went to a batting machine and caught fastballs to form a pocket. At night he used old shoelaces to tie a ball inside the glove to keep the pocket intact.
At about the same time Frank got his glove, Libby got a new video camera, a Sony with all the bells and whistles. She was a movie nut. She looked gorgeous holding a camera, the way she swayed with it for those shaky-cam shots. She had a knack with a whip-pan and a zoom, and she loved tracking Frank loping after a long fly.

Every spare moment of daylight the old man had, he hit fungoes at Frank. Frank leapt high in the air to rob taters and dove to make shoestring catches, even a few with his belly sliding on the grass. The weeks before tryouts were good weeks. Frank felt he learned and he grew.

It wasn’t that way at first, though, especially not for Frank’s glove hand, his left. A hand doesn’t think like a brain does. In a way it has a brain of its own. There were those flies that Frank muffed or nearly muffed, the kind he and the old pigskin snagged with ease. Everything was different about the new glove. Bigger web, bigger pocket and, especially, bigger leather. The pigskin had worn so thin Frank had sometimes felt he was playing barehanded.

But then Frank hit his groove with the new glove, and he was more of a threat than ever in left field, because the glove stretched his reach, and the reach stretched his range.

The day came. He made the team. He had serious competition, it wasn’t cut and dried, but that was good. It made him focus. He hit sharply and made left field smaller with his stride and range.
And his glovemanship.

Opening game was a picture-perfect day, the kind of day when beaches are swarmed and carnivals ring up records at the till. Frank had a family that could fill a small grandstand, and they were all there. Libby was outstanding in her sundress. She’d brought every lens she had. She blew him kisses all through batting practice.

The old man chewed the fat with the head umpire.

From the moment he stepped into the batter’s box, Frank was locked in. Single to left, single to right, moonshot of an out to left, should have been a double but, even so, it drove in the tying run.
He made catches too, one a neat running scoop along the foul line, a shot that would have been trouble if they’d called it fair.

Then came one of those baseball moments the writers rhapsodize about. Light breeze in the outfield. Sun chasing the last puffs of clouds. Azure above, green below. Clocks running, but time seems to stop.

Frank was playing deep. Their big guy crushed one, but foul. Frank moved himself two feet deeper.

The bat cracked, and Frank could tell from the sound. Might have been a fungo stroked by his dad, lazy and high. He rambled in and stood under it. He raised his glove and prepared to squeeze. From the corner of his eye he saw Libby swaying. Everything seemed to take forever, the ball pausing, pure white against pure blue. The crowd quiet as the summer air.

At last, the ball fell from the sky and landed, with a smack like a fastball on the hard heel of the leather. It took a violent bounce, and another, and another, before Frank caught up to it.

His throw was a gunshot, a strike to the catcher, and one step behind the tying run.

The crowd now loud as thunder.

Five hours later, the cousins were still all over Frank’s backyard, scarfing down barbecue and saying what cousins always say.

One said the sun got in his eyes. Another said it was the baseball gods.

The dad of philosophers quoted Ted Turner, who said losing is just learning how to win.

New Mom Roberta, the shining star of the lobby and its fawning pack of blue-hairs, has lost at least half her luster and wears a new face that frowns with the pang of neglect. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Kayla, Mama? Look at how big she’s gotten. Kayla, say hello to Grandma.”

Al’s mother peers at the infant through her owlish, sparkly tortoise-shells. “I don’t know, she still looks like a peanut to me. Have you got enough in there?” And her liver-spotted hand shoots out like a talon and grabs Roberta’s left breast. Roberta jerks backwards, startling Kayla, who begins to howl.

Mark, the father, gets up from the discount sofa with a pleading look in his eye and stands beside his wife. Al’s mother turns her scowl on me.

“Mama, this is Jake. The guy from work. I asked him to come here so he could see the Feldstein House.”

She seems supremely unimpressed as she eyes me up and down. “What’s he going to do, buy the Feldstein House? If he does he’ll probably throw me out. He’d better not try.”

Mark, Roberta and the howling Kayla have moved into a corner for a family conference. Roberta turns her back to me, hunches her shoulders and fiddles with the front of her dress. When she turns around, Kayla is breastfeeding quietly and Mark is attempting to stand between mother and child and me, not without reason. He knows I’m looking.

“I hope there’s enough in there,” says Al’s mother. “That kid looks like a peanut.”

Al has already told me things about Eddie, his older brother. Eddie briefly worked for a printer, but that was years ago. He became disabled; or, to put it more accurately, his disability emerged. Eddie couldn’t focus on anything, not on anything with as many parts to it as even the simplest job. So Eddie collected disability checks, and the checks helped pay for his mother’s unit in the Feldstein House, whose charter specifically read that its occupants were to be elderly people in need of assisted living. Not even fifty two years of age, he is the youngest resident of the Feldstein House ever.

While Kayla breastfeeds, Al’s mother passes around a tray of Ritz crackers spread with a gray, briny mixture. “They had extra in the dining hall,” she says, “from the Oneg Shabbat on Friday night. Frank the cook gave it to me. He knows Eddie loves chopped herring.”

I try one and it’s better than I thought it would be, but one is enough.

“Don’t you want another one?” asks Al’s mother.

I tell her I’m saving my appetite for lunch.

“This might just be lunch,” she says, “so be careful. When Eddie wakes up he’ll be hungry.”

I excuse myself and walk the few feet from the sitting area to the bathroom, passing the shut bedroom door on the way. The bedroom door has a simple flush surface, painted the standard institutional beige that’s all over the Feldstein House. In the split second it takes to pass it I think I hear rustling or groaning, or just a fan, or nothing at all. Just outside the door, in a little corner, is a small brass urn with an umbrella and three or four wooden backscratchers.

I go into the bathroom and find myself in a space no bigger than a closet, a closet in which urine is the dominant smell, overpowering the floral spray Al’s mother uses. To the left of the toilet, on the wall, is a palm-sized grey disk with red letters that say push for help. On the right is a tall Detecto medical scale whose grey balance indicator sits near the numerical peak, on the notch that reads 300 pounds. Just above the scale is a shelf with numerous squeeze bottles lined up like rockets: Fleet enemas and Debrox earwax removal kits, together with cotton balls and Q-tips.

Something about the smell and the closeness of the windowless room makes it feel as though a big cat has been in here. I lift up the seat and stare down at a white porcelain rim spattered with thick, yellow-grey blotches of congealed uric acid, concentrated piss.

When I rejoin the group, Mark is talking about what a good sleeper Kayla is and how much more of a person she’s become in a few short weeks.

“It’s amazing what a couple of pounds will do,” Mark says. “At birth she weighed only six pounds, seven ounces.”

“Eddie weighed seven pounds, six ounces when he was born,” Al’s mother says.

“Mama, Kayla’s ten weeks,” says Roberta. “Eddie’s over fifty years old.”

In my mind’s eye, the combination of the 300-pound notch on the scale and the urine blotches touches off a flight of fancy, and I begin to picture Eddie, this creature yet to emerge from behind the door in the bedroom, as a version of all the bizarre fat people who have ever come across my radar. I picture him as Steinbeck’s Lennie, and as one of those enormous, bedridden men the authorities have to free by chopping down walls, because they’ve eaten so much they can no longer fit through doors. When two full hours have gone by with no Eddie I get a flash picture of him as an obese Borscht Belt comic, making his entrance with a grunt and a fart, grabbing a backscratcher out of the urn and hoisting his huge ass onto the soiled pillow on the largest chair in the room. With the chair as his stage, he commences a routine of stinkers and clinkers. Two peanuts went into the woods. One was assaulted… Then a chicken went in. He was so cold he was walking with a capon…Hey, how do I know Jesus was Jewish? He lived at home till he was thirty three and his mother thought he was God.

I picture Eddie as one of those men who waddle on planes and can’t fit in the seats in coach. I picture him as a human hippo testifying in a Weight Watchers infomercial that he’s finally found the regimen that will turn his life around.

My pictures are shaped by snatches of conversation, by what I saw in the bathroom and overheard from the kitchenette, and by stories Al has told me. I see Eddie as an eccentric food addict, madly creating repulsive versions of ordinary dishes: stuffing the microwave with a dozen hot dogs and radiating them for an hour; then gulping down the residue, the pink, powdery cylinders of nitrate; pure deli dust, as parched as styrofoam.

And then I visualize him languishing in bed, obsessed with the orifices of his swollen body. Squeezing Fleet enemas into his ass; squeezing Debrox earwax removal liquid into his ears; plugging his ears with cotton to block out the sounds of the external world so that all he hears is the popping, rushing babble of the hydrogen peroxide mixture as it melts the wax and etches its way through the canals that twist into his skull; and when the rushing subsides plucking a Q-tip from the bedstand to probe and extract the thick inner ooze. I picture him doing this round the clock, not noticing date, time, day, night. Oblivious to his sheets, his bathrobe, his mother talking to him. Waiting and listening for each new crescendo of bursting peroxide bubbles; waking up to it and falling asleep to it. Focusing on nothing else.

But in all the time I spend at the Feldstein House that afternoon I never do get a good, close look at Eddie – I don’t get any look at all. As I remember it, I’m sitting there still figuring out what to do with the stained mug of coffee the mother gave me, still troubling myself about the wasted day when I see Al’s mother bolting out of the bedroom like a banshee and slamming the palm of her hand onto the push for help button on the bathroom wall. Next comes a crowded blur of paramedics, cops, firefighters, oxygen tanks, I.V. hookups and stretchers. In what seems like only seconds, so many uniformed people surge into the tiny apartment I never do see them transport Eddie out.

And then I am with them all again a few days later, still following Al the way a fingernail follows a swarm of blisters breaking out all over you, head to toe. They’re all there: Al, Al’s mother, Roberta and Mark, listening to the rabbi eulogize Eddie as a good son, a loyal son, a larger-than-life son who honored the Jewish way by staying faithful to hearth and home. As she hears this, the mother’s face twists with disapproval, as though she wants the rabbi not to talk but to act: To get back that which wasn’t just taken from her, but stolen. And I’m shocked to find that, even though I’m a total outsider, I’m feeling that way too. Only because of the moment of Eddie I never got: that glance, that whiff, that word or two – it didn’t happen and I’m suddenly a mourner. I feel he was stolen from me too, and here I am on my own, protesting and appealing, even as the rabbi calls him by his Hebrew name, Ephraim. Ephraim Ben Yakov.

Their very first conversation was about sumo wrestling, which he said was his favorite sport – even though he was thin as a rail.

“Why do you like that?” Leonora asked. “Around here everyone loves yacht racing.”

They were at intermission during a small, private concert at a home known as The Ledges. Waitresses in black glided here and there with the crusted irresistables Leonora had designed – and champagne in heirloom crystal flutes.

“Sumo is older than yacht racing,” he said. “A lot older. It goes back to the Eighth Century, at least. These yachties think they’re so traditional. They’re just newcomers, really.”

Just as the intermission ended she asked him what it takes to build a normal male into a sumo wrestler. It was a subject she had thought about many times before – palpitating and salivating as she did.

Maurice drained his champagne and gave her a playful stare. He even did two big leg extensions ending in a mock sumo stomp, which turned a few heads.  “Training,” he said. “Years of it. And, of course, food.”

“I imagine lots of food.”

Maurice winked and returned to his seat. Leonora watched him. She remembered the softness of his mouth, the absence of any edge to his chin. She had seen the whites of the eyes, and she could tell he was no spy. She was ecstatic that his last word had been food.

*******

Leonora was a cook who didn’t mind how hot the kitchen got. For all of her renowned expertise, she blithely gave away her prized recipes to other women. She did it with moist eyes and warm smiles and earthy hugs. She wrote the recipes out on her finest stationery with a careful hand, as though she were inscribing an intricate cake. But, with the same careful hand, she omitted minor yet critical ingredients. A sprig of this, a pinch of that.

The women never blamed their inevitable failures on her – they remembered the smiles and hugs, the heartfelt words of encouragement. They were convinced it was they themselves who had failed Leonora. In the kitchen they simply weren’t what Leonora was.

In short, Leonora cooked to win, and she ate the way she cooked: for strength and pride. To her, an underfed woman was no better than a half-starved lioness at the edge of the pride: ribs showing, eyes glazed with fear, death stalking her on the grassy plain because she was too slow and weak to break the zebra’s neck. Leonora’s physical presence suggested she fed jubilantly on the marrow from large bones. She was broader than Maurice, and she had a couple of inches on him in the height department too.

*******

Leonora returned to her seat and watched the tall, wild-haired piano soloist perform a demanding piece, described in the program as Brahms Variations and Fugue in B-Flat on a Theme by Handel. The soloist had fingers so long they could palm a basketball, and he threw his whole body into the playing with such zeal his chin dripped sweat on the keys. But Leonora hardly took notice of him; or took notice of him as an accessory only. From where she sat - in the front orchestra, stage left - her view was the soloist’s heaving back, his crashing hands, the keys and the open book of sheet music just above the keys. And one other shape, the one that grabbed her eyeballs and held them like a vice. This was a small, slight Filipino youth standing straight as a board at the soloist’s side - in a state of rapt concentration. He was the page-turner: so child-sized he was no taller on his feet than the soloist was sitting down. Leonora’s eyes bore into the Filipino boy with the same burning intensity as the boy’s eyes bore into the sheet music. The ramrod stillness of his Lilliputian body accentuated the power of his stare. He never moved a flicker, except when the score thundered to the last written note in the bottom line, and then his right arm shot out like a striking snake, pincered the page at the corner and flipped it. The execution so efficient it was as though the page had turned itself.

*******

It was an eternity before Maurice was back in town long enough to have a meal at Leonora’s place. This visit was when she first heard about the Sharapova girl.

“What exactly is it you sell – to the Russians?” Leonora watched him mop up the last swirls of chasseur sauce and she immediately refilled his plate, with no objections from him at all. Just the thought of serving him chasseur excited her. The word meant hunter, and Leonora, as she watched Maurice bite and chew and swallow – watched him crave her sauce like a vampire craves blood - felt so much like a huntress her ladle could as well have been a crossbow.

“Drugs,” Maurice replied. “But it’s not exactly like it sounds.” He said he had flown Aeroflot so much he felt like one of those well-traveled goats he used to share space with in the airline’s earlier days, when the engines were so frail and the cargo so heavy the planes would stagger to get off the ground, then hover interminably until, finally, some gust or hand of heaven thrust them sputtering up to the clouds.

He said he worked for a pharma company whose business plan was based on the fact that Russian doctors are paid next to nothing, and that most of the Russian population would kill to get free drugs, any drugs. Maurice’s task was to round up the doctors and the human guinea pigs and form panels for testing new wonder meds. “It’s easier than doing it in America,” he said. “Here everyone’s afraid even to drink water.”

*******

Over the course of the next several dinners, Leonora moved Maurice to extreme lard-based preparations, even venturing to serve long slices of pure pig fat as an appetizer. This she called a rare white prosciutto, cochon de la neige, and he was thrilled to take seconds and even thirds. The more he ate, the more he talked. Both vodka and women in Russia, he said, are not unlike the Aeroflot planes – meaning that the old and the new are pretty much everywhere. “On any street you can buy vodka for two dollars or two hundred dollars,” he said. “In any city you can find old crones in babushkas or the leggy, gorgeous ones in La Perla thongs, the Sharapova type.”

Leonora sliced him another wedge of her mile-high Pavlova au crème Gargantua. “Really,” she said, “and what do you think of the Sharapova type?”

In short order, she learned that Maurice spent as much time in the bulkheads of America West as on Aeroflot. “Good as the Sharapovas are,” he said, “the most stunning ones of all you don’t find on the tennis courts in sneakers. You find them on the ice, on skates. They’re magnificent, and they’re even taller than your dessert.”

He accepted a third cream-drenched pyramid and slid a picture out of his wallet. In front of a purple and gold velvet curtain stood Maurice, a sheepish grin on his face, one arm at his side and the other wrapped around the waist of a girl who epitomized what he’d just been describing. “She skates in Vegas at the Riviera,” he said. “They have an ice show there, all Russians, all exquisite. The best seats are around this horseshoe of ice and they come skating right by you and your vodka, so close you can smell them. No one skates with more feeling than Russians. You want to lick their skates. There’s nothing, nothing like…”

Leonora moved like a big cat for the Chateau Y’qem and poured Maurice a double. She tapped a long nail on the photograph. “And what about her? Do they let her out to pose with the tourists? Did you have to pay?”

Maurice sipped, then sipped again. “Pay? Why pay anything? That’s Alyona, my girlfriend. All I pay for is a plane ticket and a room at Mandalay Bay.”

“A skinny old shit like you? I don’t believe it.” This is what Leonora wanted to say but didn’t let herself say, even though it took so much tongue-biting she could taste blood. Years of stalking the grassy plains had taught her that actions speak louder than words, and her plan of action, swiftly galvanized by the rage and hurt, was now solid as a rolling pin: Stuff the Russian salesman like a foie gras goose. Create so many rolls on his belly the Michelin Man looks starved by comparison; fatten his scrawny pecs into breasts so pendulous Alyona becomes repulsed by his every jelly-like shudder.

Leonora kept quiet, kept strategizing and kept cooking. While serving Maurice shovels of her five-cheese kugel one day, it occurred to her that if the Russian salesman didn’t pan out there was a most superlative Plan B.  Of course! - the Filipino page-turner. She became fixated on her remembered image: the pianist and the page-turner locked together before the great black block of a piano. She saw it as a Nineteenth Century tableau, a kind of sculptural group depicting the essence of colonialism. The tall Caucasian dominating the huge instrument and the torrent of sound and the entire audience, which sat mesmerized below. And at his side, dwarfed, anonymous and unnoticed, the subjugated Pacific boy: while he was flipping pages today, tomorrow perhaps he’d be fanning the air around the white oppressor with palm fronds or reeds of bamboo.

To take this jockey-sized serf and feed him and feed him and see him swell – until he was a boulder that might roll atop the high and mighty soloist and flatten him – the thought so stoked Leonora she began to see the Russian salesman as unimportant, as empty and pallid a vessel as a vodka bottle after the vodka has been guzzled.

While her tantalizing concoctions simmered and shirred, she warmed to the idea of the Filipino – in particular to a new image of him she couldn’t get out of her head. It was the concert piano onstage all over again, except this time the great black block was a stove, and she, Leonora, was in the role of soloist, fingers flying over all six burners.

And beside her, his head no higher than her apron-top, stood the page-turner - fat as he was tall and expanding exponentially - every ounce of him burning to bring her that one grain of salt or even sit and sizzle on the white-hot skillet, if that’s what Leonora commanded him to do.

She summarily dumped the Russian salesman and schemed her way into getting an introduction to the tall soloist, just to acquire the page-turner’s contact information.

But on the day they were to meet she had all her digits done at the newly opened Star of Paris Nails. The person assigned to her fingers and toes was a total surprise: a big-bellied, twenty-year-old Vietnamese boy. She became aroused, of course, when he bowed to her feet, but that wasn’t the reason she found him alluring. All the boy wanted, he confessed with a loud belly laugh, were objects made of steel or wires: hot cars and digital gadgets. His cravings struck Leonora as pure macho. And his tattoos said so even more: they were bad: jailhouse bad, cage-fighting bad. And yet he was a mani-pedi boy. What made him exquisitely delicious was he saw no contradiction in this whatsoever, no reason to feel guilty or sissified over his job. He did nails because his parents owned the store and the money was good. It was that simple.

Leonora had read, in the Guinness Book of Records, that not long ago  a fourteen hundred pound man had married a one hundred forty pound woman, setting the world mark for the greatest weight disparity of any married couple ever. She looked at the belly of the Vietnamese boy and saw possibilities. She made a new mani-pedi appointment and started planning the greatest, richest, most captivating menus of her career.

It was roomy and ostentatious and it didn’t take long to find. The counter and back bar dripped more twisted wood than a Banyan tree, and was emblazoned with brass elephants and apes. Boston-born Ray, who had learned to smoke in a sewer worker tunnel just off the schoolyard – a popular venue for warfare with tire irons - had a quick, crazed impression straight out of his earliest history books. Redcoats drank here, fat-assed lordly colonials who had been told the sun never sets on their empire – and they believed it. And swarming around the bar, little dark men with fast hands grinned and kissed their asses and mixed the bully-boy redcoats their gin and whatevers.

But as he entered there were no such lackeys in sight, and the barman who came over to take Ray’s call for vodka on the rocks could have been a cop or a wharf gorilla from lower Washington Street, the old Combat Zone. He had a proper shirt with epaulets and the cane logo, even on the cufflinks. But he also had construction worker hands and the florid sly face you see at Bruins’ games. He was good slinging the booze, though – every pour, every spritz, eyeballed precisely. Ray watched him concoct pink and green frozen things, garnished with half an orchard, for a couple two seats away who were picking at little mounds of edamame and wasabi peas. It was mid-afternoon but they were still in their golf clothes, colors bold as a mandrill’s ass and matching from head to toe. Listening to them one-up each other on golf brands made Ray wish he had left his clubs at home, but then he remembered the mayor’s priest telling him one night in a prime Fenway field box, “you go to Cane Palace you play golf. It’s Christian charity to animals. The whales swimming right off the twelfth tee box have gotten used to a steady diet of golf balls. They’d starve without shankers like you…”

Ray ordered another vodka just as the woman whipped off her Guccis – with drama – letting the premises know her eyes were still worth a gander, like vintage beads. “Let’s talk about tonight, our first night,” she declared to her companion, “and champagne.”

He popped an answer quick as a ping-pong slap. “White Star. I like that the best.”

She frowned and wrinkled her nose. “But it’s so sweet…”

“Well, I don’t think so. Do you like champagne with orange juice?”

She was miffed, for sure. “Certainly not good champagne. Why would you spoil it?”

The woman paused, and there was a seriousness to it – as though she were deciding whether to spend the rest of her life with this man who killed fine bubbly by turning it into orange punch. “Do you like…Cristal?” she finally asked.

“Not really. What about Dom Perignon?” He had a mastiff brow, too big for the rest of his face, and it was already sun-fried. But now it reddened all the more. He seemed shamed by his own question.

“Dom, not Dom,” she snapped, whipping the air with the Gucci shades. “I really don’t like Dom. It tastes like aspirin. You know that taste – that Tylenol taste?”

The man seemed crestfallen, and said nothing.

“Cristal,” the woman said. “It’s perfect! The bubbles are perfect.”

The crestfallen man signaled for the tab, bringing over the barman, who, for the first time, gave Ray a look that wasn’t just official politeness. When the two of them finished making their exit Ray returned the look and moved his lips, voicelessly, so they formed a single word: “assholes.” The bartender gave a little smirk and said, “they better watch out or they might step on a snake.”

******

It so happened the bartender wasn’t from Southie, or Fields Corner, or any of the places Ray wanted him to be from. But he was from Newark and then Rahway, where, like half the town, he’d worked at the prison, and that was good enough for Ray.

“So here’s the first question,” Ray said, “is that where you learned to mix drinks, in the joint? And the second one: how did you get all the fuck out here?”

The bartender brought over a stainless steel bowl of limes and a small cutting board. He sliced one and said, “maybe the question shouldn’t be how – but why? When I landed here it was the rainy season, which you and your wife will never see, since you’re on the high-season rate plan. I always keep my shirts on those wire hangers, you know, and after two weeks I start noticing these big rust marks inside all my shirts. The weather is eating the hangers, the hangers are eating the shirts…”

“So why do you stay? Free shirts?”

“Hey, there are worse places. Ever been to Lucknow? This is my career, you know. I’ve shaken and stirred all over the known world. Besides, this place lets me play my music. They give me gigs, you know, minor gigs, the Tuesday Pig Roast…”

Ray, who had made his stash distributing liquor to half the Bay State, asked the question he always asked bartenders. “Move much Goldschlager?”

The bartender scooped a new round of limes out of the stainless steel bowl. “You mean the schnapps with the little gold flecks?”

“Eighteen-karat. That’s what they say.”

The smirk again, and much wider. “Not a Cane Palace favorite. They don’t do beer and shooters here. You heard the lady, they drink Cristal. But I like the gold shooters now and then. It’s always been my dream to shit gold. I’m still waiting.”

Cane Palace, as it turned out, was everything the brochure said it was, from the pearl beach to the emerald golf course. It was a place so perfect Bill Gates had gotten married on the greens atop the seaside cliffs, while the dolphins below leapt with glee.

All that remained of the old sugar plantation, and the days of the machete versus the lash, was the great manor house. It was now a five-star resort – for those who had five-star wallets: Maximum occupancy was forty eight people a week.

*******

On the return ferry ride, the Cristal couple toasted each other with champagne from a cooler: the woman’s favorite brand, of course. Every time she raised her glass she flashed an enormous emerald cut diamond. It looked like the prow-browed suitor had passed muster, despite his tacky fondness for polluting top-shelf bubbly with Minute Maid. Ray couldn’t stand to look at them, which made him look all the more.

Maddie tugged his sleeve.” Hey, you could buy them and sell them. Don’t you know that?”

“I don’t want to buy them and sell them. I want to throw them off the boat and let the sharks buy them and sell them.”

Ray fell silent, fixated on his second-day visit to the Cane Island bar – when the real reason he went back was to ask the bartender what he’d meant by that snake remark. The bartender told him about an incident that was rumored to have occurred several years ago, when Cane Palace was a more sketchy operation. There was a kind of fashion show in one of the gardens, which at the time was overgrown and badly tended. The concept of the show was female guests as models, wearing sarongs made by island women.

“In this business,” the bartender had said. “There’s only one thing worse than a guest that trashes the room. It’s a guest that trashes the help. You know what I mean…”

As the rumor had it, one of the “models” was a woman, a lot like the Cristal lady, whose help-trashing was the talk of the back rooms and the villages. “She came down the garden staircase dressed like a bird of paradise,” the bartender said. “But she stepped right on a viper, a little tiny guy, who gave her an unfortunate nip on the toe. Nobody put it there or anything. It was an accident, of course.”

“Of course,” Ray had replied, in that knowing voice. But what did he know about the Cristal lady, or the Cristal man, for that matter – whether they treated the help like shit or like sugar. All he really knew was they were rich and liked to show it.

But so did other people.

“Hey Ray,” Maddie announced. “Maybe you need shock therapy. Maybe you should buy me a rock like that. You could land a plane on that stone of hers.”

“Maybe I need to get drunk,” he said, “till I can’t think about this shit any more. I don’t know who I am…”

Back in Boston at last, Ray had his pilot take him to Teterboro, where his New York driver picked him up and motored him down to Rahway.

Ray had the driver drop him at one of the dive bars where the prison workers go after their shifts. For the first time in twenty years, Ray sucked down Goldschlager until it was coming out of all apertures, until he had to change his seat from the bar to the men’s room. “Fuck,” he said to the occupant of the adjacent stall, whom he could see through a drilled hole you could drive a truck through. “All my life I made gold. Tonight I shit some.”

“Good luck,” the occupant said. “And if you don’t?”

“Then I puke some. This is my lucky night.”

Ray looked away for a minute. When he looked back he saw the dick push through the hole in the stall wall. It made him think of the Cristal lady and the viper. But by now his gullet was a geyser, and he retched until he felt his stomach would shoot right out of his mouth. When it stopped, he was on his knees before the reeking can, and the dick was nowhere to be seen. Vanished, along with its owner, as though offended by the gushing and the stench.

Another eruption followed, but this time it was wild laughter – from an even deeper part of Ray’s gut. And he turned to the more important business of the evening, beaming his eyes into the porcelain bowl of upchuck, mining it for that little fleck of gold.

They unpacked and she was off for a seaweed wrap – and, by default, Ray was off too, walking for no other reason than to walk. He told himself he was headed for the bar, any bar. Resorts like this had them inside and outside, anywhere and everywhere. But where he found himself, once he’d turned a corner or two, was nothing like a bar. He was at a place that lacked congeniality of any kind. It was one of those border points where the manicured resort property - the mowed grass and the procession of specimen plants – came to a dead stop and changed into something not for the eyes of guests: a parched patch of limbo that looked hacked and burned and abandoned. Judging by its size, it could have been a field for croquet or badminton at one time, but now it contained four Cane Palace dumpsters, big as army tanks, and their unpleasant overflow. At the sight of them Ray automatically turned away, but a flash of turquoise water to the right of the farthest dumpster gave him a different option – a path that ran to the side of the dumpsters rather than towards them and beyond - and when he had taken it he found himself looking out on a little empty cove, shimmering like a sapphire. It was bordered by a wall of forest so thick the bunched green shapes were almost black - as though pressure from the jammed trees had squeezed the shadows in the forest until they poured out, the way ink might seep from a monster squid.

Ray stopped, looked and listened, and was about to head towards the cove, but a disturbance in the mass of branches and vines stopped him in his tracks - and out of the forest burst an island man riding a horse with no saddle. Both the man and the horse had a feral, starved look, ribs as prominent as sticks, the man nearly as naked as the horse. Ray crouched and watched as the man dismounted, led the horse into the waves and carefully splashed sea water all over the animal. He spent a long time at it, the water up to his waist, as though he were dousing a fever. Then the man re-mounted, and he and the horse rose out of the water like a ravenous centaur. They vanished at full gallop into the forest, and Ray, nerves pounding, made his way back to the barren field. The moment he reached the paved pathways – there were several of them joined in a circle - he was startled by an engine sound. It was a luggage cart about to cross in front of him, driven by a resort worker, an island man in crisp white shirt and shorts. The man stopped the cart abruptly. “Ride, sir?” Ray hesitated but finally climbed in, simply because it felt easier to say yes than no. “Where are you headed, sir?” the driver asked, speaking politely, but staring in a way that was too cold for what the voice was offering. Ray stammered his request: the beach-side bar, and the island man gunned the cart. But the path he swerved into wasn’t the path Ray expected. In fact, it appeared to go in the exact opposite direction, back towards the cove, and for a brief time they plunged into forest so dense Ray saw nothing but jungle, yellow-green walls, and he found himself thinking of locked places: bunkers and vaults.

Just as Ray was one blink away from jumping out of the cart, they emerged from the jungle and re-entered the streaming light. And it was as though a dungeon had crumbled and disappeared. The walls of wilderness gave way to Asian gardens and statuary. They went over a rise and the beach-side bar appeared. As they sped toward it, Ray fumbled in his pocket for bills…

That night he and Maddie shared an exquisite dinner, food so carefully raised and prepared even the mince of chicken could be eaten raw. They were in the brochure again, the storied and much photographed dining room, with its paddle fans and fantastically carved ceilings from the old plantation days. But in his mind, Ray stayed in replay mode, his thoughts a running spool in which he was forever pulling out bills and handing them to the luggage cart driver. When he tried to break this loop all he could do was switch tracks and go back to the cove and the wild-looking man and the horse. As he sipped the wine – they’d ordered so pricey a Burgundy it was decanted by a candle-holding sommelier - he obsessed over the forest rimming the cove: whether it was home to other desperate men and their fevered, starving horses, and even whether the man on the horse and the man on the cart were connected in some way. It worried him that he could not, for the life of him, think of the bills he’d handed the driver as just a tip.

Instead he saw it as ransom, and this thought alone robbed him of sleep, even though he kept drinking on the bedroom balcony long after Maddie had nodded off. Even though he threw down a double Ambien.

Just as the night sky faded from black to grey, Ray finally fell into a brief swirl of half-sleep, a delirious place where he was back staring up at the dumpsters and then pushing himself to go right past them, straight into the forest. He stepped over a swarm of roots and found himself face to face with a huge snake, hooded like a cobra, except the cobra face was gone. In its place was the head of a starving dog, fur withering and raw bone showing through the patches; fangs bared and foaming, eyes that were blood red yet bluish cold.

In the morning, croissants were brought by a man who could have been the same man who had driven the luggage cart. He set out the linen and silver with a flourish. Yet there was something Ray saw in the eyes: a chilled look that seared, somehow defying and denying every act of hospitality the man performed. He had seen this in the eyes of the cart man, a knife-cold flash, and now Ray knew it had been in the eyes of the cobra-dog and the man with the horse as well.

He choked his way through the croissants and busied himself until Maddie took off - for a morning of yoga. Then he turned to the only task that seemed to matter: finding peace on Cane Island, peace for which he was prepared to pay a bigger price than the fat sum he had handed the travel agent. What that entailed was still uncertain, yet one aspect of it was ridiculously clear. He would have to forget golf and dining and basking and everything else the brochure had touted as the essence of a Cane Island experience. In the brochure these things had been trumpeted in bold type, even heralded with a title splashed across the cover: The Great Cane Island Escape.

But now Ray had his own idea of escape, and there were no options, no other possibilities. Escape meant he would have to go off to the dumpsters again, go to them and go beyond them. He dressed quickly, without brushing his teeth or shaving. Before he closed the door behind him he seized the brochure and tore it to pieces. There were no dumpsters in the brochure.

Cookie Murphy Milbach in the Cadillac, surging into barn country, somehow moving backwards. Strains of that one Novena still rippling around her brain. Seeping like cave water, old pools of it trapped in the hollows behind her eyes. The echo of it unstoppable, even when she pushes up the volume button on the dashboard, even when the cell phone jangles and Ernest asks if she’s eating eggs these days.

“Okay on the eggs,” she says. “This is a christening, isn’t it?”

“Kind of, Mom. You take your Lipitor today?”

Cookie gives a guilty look at the last crumbs of frosted cinnamon bun dotting the mahogany burl of the console. Fuel for the long drive.

“Your Dad took me off that stuff. I was getting these sharp pains in my arms and legs. He could have told me. I’m not just another one of his patients…”

Ernest’s voice turns sweet and low. He’s so soothing Cookie almost crashes into a Silverado heaped with hay, and thanks heaven she’s in a real doctor’s car, STS with a hood that’s long and strong. Leo Milbach’s slightly less regal Caddy, the spouse car. Queenly not kingly. It’s his twenty eighth since “grand opening day,” his very first surgical invasion of someone’s chest. He buys these cars like socks, two at a time, and trades them still smelling new.

“Limb pain is a Lipitor side effect experienced by a tiny fraction of patients,” Ernest says. “Dad probably didn’t want to worry you. Bet he’ll come up with something even better.”

She listens and goes uh-huh, uh-huh, but still wishes Leo had got off his high horse and told her. Almighty Leo. His stated three-word mission, I save lives. Once described otherwise by Sylvia, the OR nurse, in between licking the glass lip of her third Manhattan. “Sanctioned murder, what else is it? All the skin and ribs know is a knife is plunging in.”

At the time, a thought crossed Cookie’s mind: Here is a woman who could chill that Manhattan with her lips.

The Silverado swerve slams the seat belt tight to Cookie’s belly. Reminds her what a belly it is. Every now and then Cookie sees herself as a whale among barracudas. Blubber for the Milbachs to feed on. Or, as Cookie, the Irish non-drinker, confidentially asked Sylvia, after ordering a wine-spritzer and wishing it were a bowl of fudge ripple:

“Sylvia, they all drink so much and stay so skinny. It’s a Milbach gene, I swear it, they’re all that way. Leo’s always looked like a wire. When we flew to Paris he had eleven scotches and skipped off the plane. If I drank like that I’d outweigh the plane.”

They were in Le Club Cheroot then, and even in the lounge shadows, Cookie watched Sylvia’s eyes turn feline, in a way that made her feel like a mouse that had better run from the claws.

“On the plane to Paris, yes,” Sylvia replied. “But before surgery, nothing doing. His rule is zero alcohol thirty six hours prior. Ironclad.”

It was in the days when every lounge in the Thunderhead Valley was a smoke-filled lounge, and Cookie remembers how she gasped and wished for a window to throw open. How come Sylvia knew the rule? How come she, the spouse with the Leo-approved Caddy, didn’t know the rule?

Shithead in the Silverado. She stares daggers at him in her rearview mirror. Some farmers should stick to driving tractors.

                                                            *****

Cookie nearing the truckstop, the halfway point, her mind-tendrils swimming evermore in reverse as the Caddy thrusts ahead. Foot slips over to the brake, automatically. Up ahead the diner floats like a lone silver boat on a fat green lake of pasture. Ernest on the far shore of it, she can picture him gathering eggs.

A bump in the asphalt coiling up to the diner jars her inner gears yet again, shifts them. In her temples Cookie feels the hardness grind, engage. She looks at herself in the rearview mirror, but finds her mind’s eye zooming across the years and down gleaming tiled corridors, squinting into the medicinal glare, the smarting mists of disinfectant. Summoned at Leo’s orders, mother and son have duly arrived at the OR observation suite. Time for Ernest the anointed to enter the holy realm and glimpse the ordained calling, his Hippocratic destiny. “Milbachs may start out as Cub Scouts,” the father had proclaimed, over last night’s brutally delayed family dinner, “but we grow up to be doctors.”  

Installed in their box seats at the Leo show, Cookie wasn’t even touching Ernest’s hand. But seconds into the operation she knew his fingers had turned as cold as his face. Forehead to chin, it was missing all blood and color, every pore frozen in sympathy with the slashed patient on the table below. Ernest stood gamely at the glass, knowing he’d been summoned to a performance, determined to be awed. But the sound of the sternum being cracked and yanked open like a butcher-shop carcass threw him back into his seat. He watched the rest as best he could, through a nauseous haze, and Cookie forced him to keep his eyes open for the pinnacle act, Sylvia stemming the gore pooling around the lung while Leo butchered away an alien mass the size of a monkey head.

Hours later – down in the hospital coffee shop – she was still trying to get a spoonful of tea into Ernest when Leo strode in, brisk as Napoleon entering his command tent. “That young man wasn’t much older than you, son,” he said. “Got short of breath just running out of the huddle. Now he’ll be back breaking the rushing record. You’ll see.”

By late in the day Ernest was better and Cookie went ahead with her plan for a celebratory dinner. And once again, Leo wobbled in late beyond reason – the usual “making rounds at the hospital” business - causing the demise of Cookie’s prize huckleberry cobbler.

As she shoveled out the globs of expired and graying crust, she mentally wrote her own ending to his little speech of the previous night - “We also grow up to be mean drunks” – but she spoke not a word of it, just stood there with the spatula and watched him blow his scotch-breath on the untouched dessert plate.

                                                   *****

Cookie shutting the Caddy door behind her, deciding to keep her sunglasses on. The early beams bleach the weedy gravel and bejewel the silvery diner, bouncing colors off the windows that strike her as churchlike, deep and shimmering as purple wine in crystal goblets. Stained glass arching skyward is where her mind’s at: re-entering the thrall of the long-ago cathedral morning, her shriveled mother on her arm, nodding to nuns, officiants, the Bishop himself. In three days, Ernest the college senior will go up for the Test of Tests, his med school entrance exam.

Cookie lets the cool of the diner soak in. She tends to her makeup, squeezes in and out of the unisex john and vows to have coffee only. She slides into a torn faux leather booth, accepts a glass of water and stares so hard at the opposite booth it’s as though someone else is there. Her lips move mutely, repeating the words she said to her old friend, Father Kroll, when she was telling him she thought she still had faith, yes, but not necessarily in religion. “The Novena was my mother’s idea. She prayed so long and so hard her bones ached, every ounce of her begging the Lord to send Ernest to medical school. Praying like that, in such pain – it didn’t occur to me that it could do anything but work. Then Ernest took the test. And he flunked.”

                                                *****

If only the diner waitress had zipped her lip. But no, she pours more coffee and pushes those lemon squares, the ones lurking like a golden ambush in the pastry case. “Scrumptious, home-made, just out from the back.” Cookie gives in and hates it all the more because of the waitress’s lankiness, the bare pipestem arms and icicle fingers, so deft setting out the cutlery – she’s an absolute ringer for Sylvia arraying those scalpels and clamps, just so, knowing where Leo’s gifted fingers need to go.

In the funk of Le Club Cheroot her head had been as murky as the room, not a clue in it about why she was even out with Sylvia, let alone spilling all this, the Ernest secrets, the in-law trivia. It dawned on her as Sylvia sashayed back from the cigarette machine, firing up a Pall Mall. She was backlit, silhouetted by the blue neon floor tubes, and at that moment Sylvia had that look, so Milbach, an absolute ringer for one of Leo’s sisters.

“What do you eat, Sylvia, to stay thin as a rail?”
Sylvia sipped then pulled smoke then pulled again.

“Fish sticks,” she said. The words uncoiling in a poison cloud.

“Fish sticks. You’re kidding.”

She puffed until a white-orange ash broke off, like lava.

“Well, I’m not kidding. Have you ever fixed them for Leo?”

“What’s there to fix? You just heat them up.”

Sylvia’s eyes narrowed to slits, razor blades.

“Maybe you ought to.”

Out of the diner and back in the Caddy, Cookie feels four feet tall and four feet wide. She guns it past the barn where Leo keeps his two new horses, a farmer’s gift in lieu of cash, his barter for chest repairs. The hated image flares up and pesters her like a swarm of gnats: Leo and Sylvia off on a long canter. In perfect sync, loping the butte. She hasn’t seen it. But she’s heard.

She consoles herself with another image, savoring the spite. Leo’s father, the Doc Emeritus, finally paying his bar tab to Mother Nature. “Your hands, Dad,” Cookie remembers saying. “How do they feel?”

But the old appendages were more claws than hands, permanently bent in a gnarled cupping position. Sideshow hands.  Diagnosis: tendons shrunk by advanced alcoholism. He, of course, with the optimism of an old cowboy surgeon, had his own way of describing the hook-mitts.

“At least they can hold a drink,” he sneered.

                                                      *****

Cookie on the winding rutted road, cut for chuckwagons not Caddies. Bleating chorus all around. Windows down a crack so she can hear. It’s her ninth visit to Ernest’s spread since the vows were exchanged, a rampant violation of Leo’s boycott. She knows how to go around back of the house, how to sidestep the hay clumps and animal pellets. Zephyrs of oven-sent cinnamon beckon her, speeding her every step.

Smoochy hugs inside the ranch kitchen from Ernest, then a single stiff embrace from Patrick, the priestly looking boy, his hair cresting in dramatic waves, silver-white since veterinary school. Ernest clearly in his element, aproned and clucking, less polished and more effusive than on the phone. At thirty one he’s a pudgy Leo, larded jowls pooching the inherited cock-of-the-walk jaw. No doubt his instrument of prowess is the spoon and not the paternal knife. Blare of a timer going off bends him to the oven and the bubbling pan within.

Patrick, with the flair of a diplomat, slides a chair out for her while Ernest fetches a glass and presents a jumbo Bloody Mary pitcher. “It’s an occasion,” he urges his Mom.“You can bend the rules.” But Cookie notes, with alarm, that the pitcher appears to be half-gone at too early an hour. “Just a cocoa for me,” she says, and Ernest shrugs cheerily and reaches up for the Ghiradelli tin – “same thing, it’s all sugar, Dad would tell you that.”

“There’s sugar and there’s sugar,” Cookie says, and adds, with a shudder, “Do you want hands like your grandfather had?”

Patrick drops extra ice in his Bloody Mary then sits with his lean legs crossed and his right hand pressing the tall chilled glass against the side of his face, which is flushed that priestly pink. She’s struck by how he angles his chin and cheekbone to meet the ice-red cylinder. To Cookie such preening seems so other-worldly, so Parisian or something, a kind of facial ballet no male she’s ever known would even be able to dream up. She remembers Ernest’s forays into girl-dating, the tepid and the dismal, the obligatory and the mandatory, and finally the night he summed it all up for her:

“Women who hate their fathers take their revenge on me.”

After that, the closet creaked and creaked, and then pinched open. Ever wider. No tirade in Leo strong enough to slam it shut. Out strutted the various pre-Patricks and, at graduation time, Patrick himself - the two of them in the gowns of academe, side by side for the procession, and touching - all the way down the stately lawn. Leo on campus for precisely two hours and twelve minutes, about the length of the ceremony.

Cookie sips her cocoa and idly picks at the scatter of magazines and catalogs, expecting something with a cake or a roast on the cover. But most of it is dry do-gooder and conservationist stuff, principally from the Yellowstone Coalition, to which Ernest and Patrick mail money faithfully. Of all the sheep ranchers she’s known in her day these two are unique – and to Leo they are insane. Pro-wolf. Pro-bear. More copper pans on the walls than firearms. Ernest stood there and declaimed his position two visits ago:

“We can’t eliminate the predators. It’s not right. We have to live with them. We have to be creative.”

“Creative?” she challenged him. His answer was a doozer, and Cookie still doesn’t know if he was only pulling her leg.

“They say a guard donkey works well against coyotes. But it has to be a female. A male gets too crazy.”

“Will you be getting a guard donkey then?”
Gentle shrug, gentle smirk, no answer.

                                                              *****

At long last, the presentation of the Blessed Arrival. Ernest gives a nod, Patrick cradles it in from the barn. Pick of the litter, a black furball.

“Hold him while you can,” says Ernest. “He may outweigh all of us soon.”

“But why a Newfie?” Cookie asks.

“We considered a Great Pyrenees first. White as snow. Same dog, but it’s not us – we’re the black sheep people.”

“Newfies and sheep?”

It’s a silly question, she can see. This furball will do no work outside – it’s obvious from the way Ernest and Patrick hold her, passing her back and forth like a human newborn. She’s family – Cookie envisions the toys, the trips, the snapshots. Is this to be the grandchild she can bake and knit for?

She examines the Newfie’s face, the features – expressive and facile, not unlike a baby gorilla.

“And her name is?”

Ernest chokes up. He clinks his Bloody Mary against Patrick’s Bloody Mary, then against Cookie’s cocoa mug.

“It’s Novena, Mom. I hope you like that name.”

She goes blank, then stammers that she does. But at this moment, Cookie is dry-eyed and has no idea of what she likes. The tears do come, though, soon after the Eggs Benedict, when Ernest opens the oven and sets before her something he calls a very, very special surprise. Deep and golden and purple – she wonders if a blackbird will fly out. 

“Huckleberry cobbler,” he says. “Your recipe.”

But the tears that drop aren’t sadness and aren’t joy. She tastes them, in the first bite of the cobbler.

Salt. And too much of it.

An animal? Harsh I’d say, although Zev did break a face or two, but never for money. Not the sort of person Didi wanted at her parties. She even wanted to keep him away from our wedding, maybe for fear of crushing the canapés.

What did Didi know about animals? She wasn’t born in the Tsar’s manure piles. She never wrestled a horse to get its shoes off. She was born with a silver filling in her mouth, right here. A dentist’s daughter who married down. Me – down – that’s who she married. A son of Zev, Zev who hardly ever spoke, certainly not in English. His tongue was tied even in Yiddish. He earned his keep breaking sidewalks with a steel pick. For Italian padrones, who called him their Jew cavallo, their Jew horse.

Zev used to make a fist and the kid would hang on it with both his hands, as though it were some kind of carnival ride. By then Zev’s beard was ash-gray, his skin candle-yellow, but the fist was still like a horse’s hoof. The kid could do this for hours, hanging on Zev’s fist and spinning through the air, making this crazy screeching sound. But not like any human. You could swear it was the screeching of a bird.

*******

The burial place was in a sea of tenements, but the look of it was straight out of the Tsar’s potato fields. The old beards knew only one way to get buried. Didi had never seen such a thing. Not a coffin as she knew it, carved and shiny-thick. But pine boards, raw and white and thin, loosely nailed together, slipping this way and that as Zev was carried to the hole and the tall mound of city dirt. You could see snatches of ash-beard or eye-pouch as the top board rattled around. The dirt was piled high and the hole was deep. It smelled of smoke and sewer steam, and there was only a single tall shovel. It stuck up from the dirt pile, waiting for us. We were supposed to go up, each of the men, one by one. I’d seen it before, one shoveler at a time, men working slow as a dirge, until the mound was gone and the hole was filled and nothing showed, only the beaten-down dirt. But on that day the first shovel-full brought a sound from the crowd that was like nothing I’d ever heard. A moan, I suppose, or a cry – there just is no word for it. So dreadful and deep it felt like it was coming from Zev too. Something in the hole had shifted – it must have been the earth below, moving - and the pine top-board was shaken way out of position. There was a crack a mile wide and the dirt fell right on the face and the beard, and all down the yellowed white shirt. The kid saw it and squirmed and tore at my eyes. But I held on, even when Didi tried to pull him away from me. I wouldn’t let go, I even missed my turn shoveling. I missed my turn and I was the son. The kid screamed as I carried him away, following the others past the stones, through the iron gate to the smashed sidewalk.

All those times I went back to the grave I went alone. Didi wouldn’t go. She begged me never to let the kid set foot in the place. She said he wasn’t the same kid, not after that day, and it was all my doing.

Now when I go to visit the burial place I can see them both, my two closest, now, then and forever. Zev I can see just by staring hard at the granite stone, at the Hebrew letters. The granite is no more than a fog to me. I can squint and see all I need to see.

The kid is there too. Alive, I guess you could say, and above ground. He won’t get the meds himself, so I bring them to him. Not to him directly, I give them to the two old keepers who sit in the shed of an office, with their prayer-books, shawls and skullcaps. They make him tea and a little soup. The kid has his own beard now, too, black as Zev’s once was. He stays on the smashed sidewalk, for the most part. They can’t budge him, not even the cops, who are kind of amused. The crate he’s found keeps out some of the wind and none of the cold. At least it’s wood, not cardboard. Thin slats of wood, whitish. It makes me think of the day with the pine and the dirt. After dark the two old beards close the gate. They tell me that’s when the kid pushes his face through the iron rails and makes this sound, a bird sound that lasts long into the night. It’s a soft sound, somewhere between a shriek and a whimper. No complaints from the neighbors – they don’t even hear it. Maybe Zev does.

Blodgett couldn’t resist those clams. He was a pig for them. On any given night he’d go by the kitchen raw bar ninety, a hundred times. At least three of those times he’d grab a juicy, just-opened cherrystone and suck it down before Gus the Shucker even noticed. Waiters were no more allowed to eat clams, oysters or shrimp from the kitchen than they were allowed to help themselves to Stoli or Wild Turkey from the bar.

Blodgett acquired his own black suit, his waiter’s tux, at Keezer’s used clothing store in Cambridge. The head waiter, Bobby, gave him no choice in the matter of career apparel. “Fredo’s is a class place,” he said. “We all wear tuxes. You put your little ass in a tux if you want to work at Fredo’s.”

Blodgett considered himself an actor at the time, which meant he took a class or two at B.U. or Emerson extension, paid to have head shots taken and showed up now and then at auditions for local commercials and industrials. He had a couple of screen credits but had yet to be cast as a principal player; he was still waiting, and longing, for the camera to look on his handsome face for at least a full second - while he spoke a real line.

He told his acting friend Erica - the one who made him pose for her, oiled all over and stroking his penis - that he looked forward to wearing a tux each night because it made him think of English plays and films with butlers in them. “I’ll be the butler of Fredo’s,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Erica frowned with those pouty, princess lips of hers. “Phil the butler. It doesn’t sound right.”

“Then I’ll be Blodgett,” he said. “Blodgett the butler.”

So it began. Just Blodgett. And he joined the black suit brigade. French-serving the vegetables. Boning a whole sole calabrese. Swiveling around the tables like a matador with his little towel. He had the waiter’s gene. Working when the rest of the world was partying. Groveling suavely for tips on nights like New Year’s Eve, those American ceremonial nights when all wait-people are left out and very alone. De-shelling the lobster for New Year’s couples and lovers. Fussing foppishly over the bananas flambé while the girl gropes the boy under the table. “I wait,” said Blodgett, assuming a Shakespearian pose in front of Aldo, the half-wit dishwasher. “I wait, therefore I am.”

“Fuck you,” said Aldo, plunging both bony arms into the gray, greasy water.

Every time Blodgett put on his well-worn tux he could smell the armpits of the last three men who had owned it, and no amount of dry cleaning could erase the stink. It was the penalty for buying Keezer’s absolutely cheapest, most-used model. But Bobby had told him not to go overboard. “You’re only going to get it stained with lasagna anyway, honey,” he had advised, and sashayed away with his armful of menus.

After just one month on the waitstaff Blodgett left his roach-ridden Chelsea rooming house. He was a convert to Little Italy and the waiter’s life. He moved to the North End and to the domain of a new landlord, some Baciagalupi who lived off the rents squeezed from three tomato-stained tenements. Blodgett’s place was right across from an Italian butcher shop, where the window was crammed with skinned lambs and rabbits strung up for Easter. It made sense to be there, just around the corner from Fredo’s and a stone’s throw from the other Italian restaurants too, just in case things didn’t work out. The apartment Blodgett found was a pre-urban renewal classic; so small the toilet, sink and stove were all in the same room. He could piss and fry an egg at the same time.

The waiters were fed at five sharp, giving them ample time to finish and set up for the dinner rush. Lino, or one of the other fat-armed cooks, would do up a trough of baked ziti, always overcooking it because he had better things to think about. The waiters would line up with plates and the cook would shovel and dump, distributing the burned ziti more in the manner of a zookeeper than a chef.

Carrying his ziti plate, Blodgett would always do a sly detour by the raw bar, but there were times Gus would catch him in the act.

“You like a fucking seagull, stealing clams from the boat.”

“What’s a clam to you, Gus? One lousy clam.”

“If I had a cleaver I chop your fucking hand.”

But Gus would always relent. “Take your fucking clam. Fucking seagull.”

Among the black-suits was one genuine black-shirt, an old Neapolitan they called Dutchy, after the Italian Duce, because he was a major fan of Mussolini and his causes. This meant Dutchy after all these years was still fighting the Ethiopians, whom he saw as all the African people walking the face of the earth, including every last black living in Boston. “Mussolini, he clean ‘em up,” Dutchy said to Blodgett. “He come here, make ‘em all into soap.”

“Mussolini’s dead, Dutchy.”

“You think he’s dead? Not dead around here.”

That very night, Bobby steered a party of Harvard professors to Dutchy’s station. The academics all loved Dutchy for his age and his humbled English; he was their peasant Methuselah, straight out of Fellini. It made them feel they were more in the grottoes of Italy than a plastic booth nine hundred feet from Boston Garden, and they always went with his recommendations, dishes he claimed weren’t on the menu.

Blodgett heard Dutchy say to the eldest prof, “hey, tonight you get Steak Africane. Lino make it for you special.”

The whole party ordered it – tenderloin in a black butter sauce, deep and dark.

“See, I serve them niggermeat, a la Africane,” Dutchy said to Blodgett, stacking his tray and pushing through the kitchen doors. “Make Mussolini proud.”

In front of the professors he did a little bow, sized up the generous tip possibilities, and ordered Blodgett to run back for sides of linguine vongole, on the house.

“Make it al dente,” he hissed. “Not the fucking steamed shit in the steamtable.”

Blodgett did as he was told and even helped Dutchy clear the plates, dumping the uneaten Steak Africane in a doggie bag. At two in the morning he closed up and left the North End for the South End and the Fenway. He followed a small rat into a Symphony Road apartment house and shared the contents of the doggie bag with Ollie, his new friend from the Beth Israel Hospital film. The B.I. was doing a twenty-minute industrial for staff training. A down and dirty production; no union amenities, not even a box of free doughnuts for the cast. Blodgett and Ollie were playing orderlies, chosen at callbacks under the usual Oreo strategy: one white youth and one black, both equally handsome, both equally stuck in jobs spilling piss and shit out of bedpans.

“You’re eating niggermeat, you know,” Blodgett said, swigging a fat hit of jug wine. “That’s what he calls it. I mean it.”

“Tastes good,” Ollie said, his mouth full of the tenderloin. “Tastes like me. Can I visit you at your job some day?”

“You can go anywhere you want. They’re not all racists like Dutchy, you know.”

“Yes they are,” said Ollie. He grabbed the jug and thrust the neck in his mouth, like a gas pump into a tank. “But I want to see the motherfuckers for myself.”

They wound up back in the North End, both sleeping in Blodgett’s dwarf apartment. At noon the next day they trudged across to the Café della Sport - to pry open their eyelids with double espressos. And if all the other customers’eyeballs had been bullets, they’d have been shot dead a thousand times.

“It’s 1986,” said Ollie. “But in Little Italy it’s 1886.”

Blodgett couldn’t believe it. “You can stay with me all you want,” he said. “You got a rat in your place.”

“It’s not a rat. It’s a large mouse. And if I stay with you I might wind up cooked in a Calzone.”

“Calzone a la Africane.”

After espressos and biscotti they made their way to the hellish Auto Mile in Norwood, where Blodgett handed some huckster on a windswept lot all the tips and wages he had to his name. In return he and Ollie chugged back to town in the lemon of lemons, a kicked-around, rusting MG roadster.

“I wanted an actor’s car,” Blodgett said. “It’s the best I could do.”

“You’re not an actor,” Ollie said. “You’re a waiter.”

Blodgett had one good reason, one only, to justify the midget car. It was like his apartment. Sized to fit cramped Little Italy, the fruit-strewn alleys and backstreets that were skinny as capellini.

As it turned out, the initials MG were significant. A portent. He spied them that very night, embossed on a cigarette case of phony gold. Mando, the head of the back room, stole into the storeroom where Blodgett was sneaking a break among the onion sacks, trying to cop a few minutes of peace away from Dutchy, his dictator. Mando slid out the gold-toned case with his spindly, tobacco-yellow fingers and lit up.

“Clam boy,” Mando said, and muttered something rank about pink, juicy cherrystone clams and the female sex organ. With a shrug, Blodgett suggested the raw, open clam could also be compared to the male baboon’s ass.

Then he asked, “You slow tonight too, Mando?”

“Slow, fuck yes. I can’t live on this shit.”

Blodgett asked him what the G on the cigarette case stood for.

“My last name. Fuck, what you think?”

Mando was the waiter who ran the back room the same way Dutchy ran the front room. They were the two field generals, and the other waiters were the troops. As for Bobby, he talked a big game up front, the day Blodgett was hired, but in reality he was head waiter in name only. He bossed no one, because he dished and swished too much for Nicky, the big boss, to take him seriously. Bobby was more like the male hostess than the head of anyone, lisping and hugging the menus to his chest as he wiggled down the aisle, leading the parties to their tables.

“Hey, clam boy,” Mando said to Blodgett, “you suck one tonight yet?”

“Had three tonight. Gus was in the walk-in freezer digging out shrimp. I could have had six.”

Although Mando looked like a pimp he was actually a family man, a career waiter with four kids. He worked every split shift, sometimes seven days a week, and every holiday. Mando was a pro; he could carry six zabaglione up his long arm. So Blodgett was flattered when Mando asked him to leave Dutchy and come work the back room with him.

“I got the okay from Nicky,” he said, “don’t you worry. Tonight I fire two guys, they suck cock anyway. Then it be just you and me. We work the room, maybe we can make a buck.”

Mando wasted no time showing him how to pork up the tips. There were the legal ways, such as passing out thin chocolate mints at the end, making sure you placed an individual mint in front of each diner. Always good for a few extra bucks. There were times when eye contact worked, or kneeling, or simply touching a shoulder. There was knowing which people to keep out of your station, if possible: two old ladies splitting a check, for sure; and all parties of sailors, and any and all people from Maine.

As for those who tipped the best … without question guys who were dating each other were very good. And guys who were dating each other who were priests were so good they could duke you a hundred percent - and more than that if there was something about you.

Mando waited till the dead part of the evening to instruct Blodgett in the less than legal way to pork up a tip. He took him outside and showed him Rico, the man in the cap who parked cars. Rico was a cross between a jockey and an ape; tiny-assed with wide shoulders and hands like gorilla paws.

“Ever hear of Willy Pep?” asked Mando. “He could have been the next Willy Pep. Fast as a plane, punch like a train. Instead he parks cars for Nicky. And other things.”

Mando let the comment sink in. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, lit another and went on, explaining that all over Boston the restaurants were switching to computerized registers. Machines that automatically priced the items and spit out the checks. But the North End guys like Nicky were so goddam cheap they still had their waiters scribbling out the bills by hand. Every man, even the ancient Dutchy, carried a pencil and a bill-pad in the breast pocket of his tux.

Fredo’s also didn’t take plastic, none of it. Nicky always said he would rather break sidewalks with sledgehammers than hand over four percent to American Express.

Mando fixed his pimp eyes on Blodgett and spoke gravely. “When the fucking computers come in I go looking for a new job. Open a grocery store or something. Get my own computer.”

But until that day, Mando continued, he would go on applying both ends of his pencil. Using the lead point to tack on an extra ten percent or so to the bill. Then using the eraser to remove the ten percent once the customer had handed over the cash.

Blodgett found he had no moral objections whatsoever to being double-tipped. He kept his eraser clean, pocketed the bonus cash, and made sure his addition was exactly right when he finally handed in the checks to the cashier. Even on shit nights he came out with a decent wad in his pocket. Two tips for every one.

Three weeks into the scam Blodgett asked Mando what would happen if Nicky found out what they were up to.

“Then you see Rico,” he said, “and Rico see you.” Blodgett could feel the bolt go up Mando’s spine and leap into his own. He had the sensation they had both been hanging out for the subway and suddenly they’d been shoved, from behind, onto the third rail.

From that moment on, Blodgett was seized with a touch of that third-rail feeling again and again. It hit him every time he stood before Ralphie the cashier, who was a kissass first cousin of Nicky, waiting to turn in a fucked-over check.

“Hey, clam boy, you got to take a chance to make a chance,” Mando said, attempting to settle Blodgett down.

On St. Anthony’s Feast Day, Fredo’s was a zoo. Outside, the trumpets blew somberly and the holy procession marched through the angel-hair streets, one street skinnier than the next, holding the saint high in the air above the sweating crowd. The tenements emptied as crones in shawls and men in Bicycle Thief undershirts clawed into the sea of people, begging for room to pin their dollar bills over every exposed inch of the sacred figure.

The image of the saint covered with money was still in Blodgett’s head, shortly after the huge dinner rush died down, when two tall priests came in and were seated deep in the back room, in the darkest table. Even in the shadows Blodgett could tell they were flush-faced Irishmen. They wore civilian jackets over their black shirts and white collars; they smoked Gauloises and French-inhaled languidly, and they sent Blodgett to the bar for two Negrones, the pungent, ruby-hued martinis of Italy.

“Make them with Tanqueray and Cinzano, real Cinzano,” said one of the priests as Blodgett pivoted and headed off. He felt the fatherly eyeballs lasered on his back. Feeling so coveted brought out the actor in him, and he gave his hips a little bounce, a la Bobby, even though it made him feel sluttish.

Suddenly Mando swept alongside, whispering stage directions. “Those two spend,” he said. “Do the antipasto yourself, in front of them.”

“I think I am the antipasto,” said Blodgett.

It was Blodgett’s luck, not good luck, that Nicky himself was tending bar tonight. Nicky was so much the owner, his every action seemed motivated by divine right. The way he patrolled the long stretch of mahogany made it all look smaller, more a podium for an iron-fisted tyrant than a long counter staffed by a human in an apron.

“Two Negrones,” Blodgett said. “Straight up. With Tanqueray and Cinzano.”

Nicky nodded, but ignored the bottles of Tanqueray and Cinzano displayed on the mirrored shelf behind him. Instead, he reached under the bar and came up with two no-names, Mount Vernon Gin and Rossini red vermouth. Blodgett knew Nicky was boosting the margins by slipping in rotgut, but the murderous way Nicky squeezed the necks of the bottles as he worked told him something. Told him to keep his mouth shut.

Following protocol, Blodgett took a small round cocktail tray off the stack. He held it, in respectful obedience, as Nicky loaded on the pair of Negrones, but he became embarrassed when a sudden case of the shakes seized his tray-hand. The liquid, which should have been still as the glass itself, shivered visibly. Blodgett turned away to hide the panic - too quickly, and Nicky caught him.

“Hey, kid, no cocktail napkins? Where’s your manners?”

Blodgett grabbed two napkins and fled back to Mando and the priests.

By the time he reached tableside he was calm and suave again, so much so that one of the priests, the most fatherly of the two, stopped in mid-sentence and followed Blodgett’s every move in serving the drinks, the way a camera shooting slow-motion follows the twists and turns of an athlete or a muscular horse.

“You have a classic North Italian face,” the priest said. “Classic. Does that make you blush?”

Blodgett said nothing and smiled modestly. To his knowledge he hadn’t a touch of Italian in his veins, North or otherwise, and if he had a church at all it was Congregationalist.

He set down the cocktail napkins and backed off a good ten feet. The Irish priests said “Salut” to each other and lifted the Negrones to their lips. Suddenly the one who had oozed over Blodgett’s facial features turned dark as a demon.

“Waiter,” he snapped, “what’s in these drinks?”

Blodgett rushed back, putting on the best poker face he could. He mumbled and fumbled with his order pad.

“This isn’t Cinzano,” the priest declared. “It’s not Tanqueray either.”

Without a word of protest Blodgett swept up the drinks and trotted back to Nicky’s bar.

“These are priests,” he said, holding out the tray. “They say it’s not Cinzano and it’s not Tanqueray.”

Nicky was dead-silent for a moment, still as stone. Then a smile crept on his face and he spread his palms over the two drinks, as though he were a priest himself, the bar was his altar, and he was blessing a pair of sacramental goblets.

“Now it’s Cinzano,” he intoned. “Now it’s Tanqueray.”

And with a wave of his hand he sent Blodgett off to complete his mission.

The mood, back at the priestly table, was no better than when he had left. Blodgett put down the drinks gingerly, the way one would serve raw meat to snarling wolves. And he put down new cocktail napkins as well.

The fatherly priest sipped first and closed his eyes, de-constructing his long, slow swallow.

Finally he looked up and spoke.

“Grazia,” he said. “This is what we ordered.”

And Blodgett bowed.

“Let me bring you bread and olio,” he said. “And I’ll toast it for you too.”

The priests dined and drank like cardinals, running up the largest tab Blodgett had ever seen from a deuce, a party of two. In the lulls between courses and wine changes they called Blodgett over, just to look at him, contraposto, as though he were a marble statue in a ducal garden, and not just an acting student in a tux that smelled like it once belonged to an old man with a goat.

“Jim would like to photograph you,” said the less boisterous priest, speaking of his companion, the fatherly one who had sent back the Negrones. “Would you like that? Jim has a big Hasselblad.”

Blodgett had noticed that the less he spoke the more he intrigued them. So he said nothing, nothing at all, and went away to add up the bill. He tried to walk the way the statue of David might walk if it came to life.

“These are your padres,” he said to Mando. “Do you still want to add the spiff?”

You’d be stealing from your church.”

Mando reminded Blodgett of the saint being paraded in the streets, money pinned on him everywhere.

“Tonight I be his partner,” Mando said. “So what’s wrong with that?”

Thanks to the priests, when Nicky finally locked the doors Blodgett had so many bills in his pocket he couldn’t stand it. He shot home, raced up the four wooden flights to the dwarf apartment and turned the key, eager to grab Ollie and slam down to the after-hours joints deep in the old Roxbury, the dusky, jive-dive Ollie places. There he would slug Jack and Coke, suck up some more cherrystones, oysters too, and duke a few other waiters as royally as the priests had duked him.

In no time flat his plans went down the shitter, big time. There sat Ollie, cowering on the can in the kitchen, his eyebrow torn open, balling up his socks and throwing toothbrush, razor et al.into his gym bag.

“Who kicked your ass?” Blodgett demanded.

“Nobody in particular. A hundred flying beer bottles.”

“Let me fix you.” Blodgett reached for the torn eyebrow, the gash in the butterscotch skin, but Ollie pushed him away. At this phase of Blodgett’s life it was the skin that got him going more than anything else, the sheen and polish of it. It wasn’t a gender thing – at least he told himself it wasn’t. It would have been no different if Ollie were a girl named Mollie, as long as she had the tone, the buff. Skin to skin; mirror to mirror, I am you and you are me – it was easy, so easy why even think about it?

“I’ve been waiting for you all night,” Ollie said. “I want you to drive me out of here. I’ll never sleep in this hellhouse again.”

He trembled as he spoke, sweated and shook blood on the floor, and when he explained how they had come at him Blodgett couldn’t deny Ollie had every right in the world to shake, to shit, to run like the wind itself.

They had been crouching behind crates and garbage cans and cars on the narrow side street, all hopped up with fervor from the Feast Day, the berserk posse of Little Italy kids who had seen Blodgett and Ollie come and go, come and go, night after night. The moment Ollie popped out on the stoop they let the bottles fly like burning arrows, doing the whole nigger go home thing, the vigilante rant from another century. Nothing you would ever see in Cambridge, in Brookline, not even in fucking Charlestown, not in this day and age. Only here, in the North End; and only there, in the other end, South Boston, probable home of the Negrone-loving priests.

While Ollie stuffed his gym bag and steeled his nerves, Blodgett went back down and brought the MG right alongside the stoop, like a police boat at a dock. The shitbox sounded its standard death rattle, but it moved. Blodgett scanned the streets like a getaway man, beeped the horn and Ollie sprinted down. He jumped in and Blodgett floored the pedal, nearly crushing a mangy cat. As the North End receded from view, Ollie went from panic to funk. He flat-out refused to party. Blodgett left him on a street corner, skulked back to his empty bed and slept horribly, nothing in his stained black pants but cash.

He awoke to a sky that filled his postage stamp of a window with the color of pent-up pus. The bulges of yellowish gray threatened a furious downpour. But the storm hadn’t broken yet; it was all in a state of suspension and foreboding; and not a drop had been shed on the filthy panes.

This was his day off, and “off” was the operative word. He wanted to dump his tux in the drycleaner, and scoot away in his roadster to points unknown. He pictured a part of the Cape, beyond the storm clouds, that corresponded to his images of the Riviera. Endless asses bronzing in an infinite tanning booth.

He swigged and spat mouthwash, threw something on, grabbed the musty tux and the car keys and hit the stairs, bounding as though he were breaking jail.

In the street Blodgett’s shoes turned to stone; and he could no more move than a fly whose legs were stuck to flypaper.

But it was his eyes that were freezing him in place, not his feet.

He was staring straight at the MG. It was there, right where he left it. Same car, same color: rust-pocked racing green. But its position had changed; it was on its back, like an insect that had been flipped over by a shoe or a shock of wind.

The first wave of nausea slammed Blodgett then and there. He felt nausea as though it were a human hand, long fingers in a sleek black glove, reaching right through the skin of his abdomen and grabbing the organs, clamping them so tight the blood stopped and the nerves howled.

He almost doubled over, but the imagined hand loosened and withdrew as swiftly as it had come. Blodgett walked to his car, walked all around it and finally knelt beside it, at the point where he could best read the letters scrawled on the windshield.

Niggerlover, the letters said, although the scrawler had messed up the spelling, leaving out one of the g’s. For a fleeting moment Blodgett’s optimism gene kicked in, telling him he was only being accused of loving some place called Niger, a river in Africa, or an old name for Nigeria. The next moment he was back realizing that Niger, in this neighborhood, could only mean Nigger, and that Nigger could only mean Ollie.

A jab of something purely animal told Blodgett to make tracks at once, to run with all his might; but a counter-jab of something very human told him no way, not without my car. So he scurried for the cover of his building and his apartment, where he hoped he could phone a tow truck.

Just before turning heel he ran his finger over the white scrawl, wondering if it was paint or just chalk. The waxy feel and the smell showed him it was neither. It was soap.

Mussolini, he clean ‘em up. He come here, turn ‘em all into soap.

As Blodgett hightailed it up the steps, he kept whipping his head around, looking for the ghost-gang he knew was after him, the hundred teenage Mussolinis of whom Dutchy would be proud.

Back upstairs he slammed the dead-bolt, and the very phrase scared him, signifying he might be bolted in dead. Then he began calling around, telephoning garages in neutral neighborhoods. Finally, someone sent four apes who picked up the puny MG as easily as a side of beef and dumped it upright. The vehicle bounced on its tires and shook off a side mirror and a shard of rear bumper, brown as a rotted tooth. But every other appendage, including the windshield wipers, seemed to stay attached. Blodgett watched the operation from his high narrow window, and as soon as the tires hit the ground he was down the stairs like a gazelle pursued by cheetahs. He took a wet rag to rub out the soap-scrawl and his pantload of cash to placate the apes; and to get them to stay right where they were, guarding his escape, at least until he was around the corner and in high gear.

Twenty minutes beyond the North End, where the Southeast Expressway opened up, a welcome wave leaned into Blodgett, and he in turn leaned into the accelerator. It was the sheer force of the moment itself, the moment in which he saw the facts for what they really were. He was out of harm’s way, he could still be a waiter and a young actor anywhere on this earth, he was heading south and the bloated yellow-grey clouds were heading north. Blodgett could even see streamers of blue at the horizon, and the streamers to him meant the festive fuck-all party that was Provincetown. The scent of it was already in his nostrils, that beach in the dunes of Truro; the sunbathers topless, bottomless, limitless.

Blodgett had forgotten the black-gloved hand; but it hadn’t forgotten him. It let him get as far as Hyannis, just about half way down the peninsula. There the clenching fingers reached right through Blodgett’s wall of skin and stomach muscle, found the raw, coiling intestine and began to squeeze. Here, there and everywhere, sometimes lightly and other times so hard it wrung perspiration out of every pore on Blodgett’s body, and strength from his muscles. He pulled into a Mobil station and parked on the side, where the rest rooms had handwritten signs that said customers only. Inside the station he purchased a candy bar just to get his hands on the key to the toilet, one of those keys they affix to a crude chunk of wood so big you can’t pocket it. Walking around to the rest room door he had the sense Hyannis was in a different galaxy, one with a system of gravity that made putting one foot after the next a stunningly exhausting exercise. He also had an urge to get the candy bar out of his sight – just drop it on the ground, anything – because even the feel of the wrapper in his hand was nauseating.

Inside the cool, solitary cell of the men’s room he discovered just how topsy turvy this new world was. Blodgett took a shit and it was white, white as limestone. He pissed and it was brown as cola.

The men’s room mirror showed him the new Blodgett. A person with skin befitting a wax museum, steeped in a yellowness he associated with infection, the yellow that oozes out of a dirty wound. The taint was deepest in the corners of his eyes.

For the first time in his life Blodgett felt so bad he wanted to go to the doctor, and he was fearing bad things. The A-word. He bought a little gas from the Mobil attendant for no other purpose than to insure he got accurate directions to the Hyannis Hospital. The oily-faced attendant, as he stuffed the fat nozzle into the rickety MG, made a point of rolling his eyes and generally acting insulted, as though he were being called upon by some diseased dandy to jam good U.S. gas into a thing that wasn’t even a car, a contraption no better than a shitpiece roller skate.

But the roller skate rattled away and found the hospital.

To Blodgett, the doctor they gave him might just as well have been an undertaker in a white coat.

“You’re a sick man,” he said, but the pitiless look on his face - a melodrama face with a villain’s mustache - seemed to say, “you’re a sickening man.”

Shivering in the johnny they had made him wear, Blodgett heard the doctor’s voice swerve in mid-sentence and turn as metallic as the steel examining table, which made him shiver all the more. He paced back and forth in his medical white coat and began to speak gravely of the blood tests. They had been positive. Blodgett slumped, doubled up by a new wave of cramping.

But the morbid doctor never proclaimed that Blodgett had the A-word. It wasn’t on his clipboard that day.

The disease he had come to discuss was from another part of the medical dictionary.

The H-word.

“Hepatitis is serious,” said the doctor, in his chilliest undertaker voice. “If you don’t take care of it, it can take your life.”

Given the diagnosis Blodgett had expected, this grim pronouncement seemed like a reprieve from the gallows, a mere slap on the wrist. The H-word may have been Hepatitis, but for him it was Hallelujah.

Yellow skin, white shit, brown piss. Now Blodgett wanted answers. Who did all this to him?

Not Ollie, it turned out. Not Erica. Not Jim the priest. Not the Navy captain or the Navy captain’s wife. Not the stylist who smeared her powder over the hot spot on his forehead for his bedpan-emptying part in the B.I. movie. Not the three-chinned state rep who stalked him, begging to suck him off, in a long black official car all the way from the Golden Dome down the slope of Beacon Hill to the Haymarket pushcarts.

It was Gus the Shucker who did it.

“Tell me your favorite food,” asked the doctor.

This was the last thing Blodgett wanted to discuss. His appetite was obliterated. The very thought of food made him want to hurl.

“Tell me.”

Blodgett told him but the doctor already knew. Bootleg clams from contaminated beds. Sewer food. They’d been dropping people like flies all month. Greater Boston was a hepatitis hot zone.

All those smart, suave moves. Hovering at the edge of the raw bar like a seagull, waiting for Gus to duck into the refrigerator for a new bushel of oysters. Then swooping in on the cherrystones.

Perhaps it was Gus himself. His fingers. Maybe Gus never used toilet paper.

“I’m admitting you for a few days,” the doctor said. “We need to check your bilirubin.”

Blodgett thought he was talking about a Jewish kid. He had never been with any Billy Rubin, far as he could remember. But after two days in an isolated room – they installed him in a special wing for communicable diseases – he began to get a handle on hospital talk, on the neat little shorthand hospital people have for the most calamitous events. Room 356 stroked out. Kill that monitor, will you?

Not drinking alcohol for a solid year – the doctor’s orders – didn’t seem hard to bear, not at the time, because the very thought of a Jack and Coke sliding down his throat brought the bile sliding up. As for work, the doctor said nothing about that, but Blodgett felt no more capable of carrying a food-laden waiter’s tray than lifting the iron-framed bed they had him in.

For all he knew they had already canned him. Unlike cooks, waiters were seen as being a dime a dozen; and he had been AWOL two days. With his yellow left hand Blodgett picked up the phone on his bed table. With his yellow right index finger he dialed Fredo’s. He wasn’t sure who picked up, so he asked for Mando.

There was a long silence, followed by rustling and muffled voices. Then Bobby came on and asked him where he was.

“I’m in the hospital,” Blodgett said. “Sick as puke.”

“Isn’t that interesting. That’s where Mando is too. The one next to Campagno’s funeral parlor.”

“You’re kidding? I never saw Mando eat any clams.”

Bobby laughed a bitter laugh. “Clams? Mando didn’t eat clams. He ate knuckles, honey. Served by Rico.”

Just the way Bobby said that gave Blodgett the whole picture. Ralphie the kissass cashier, starting to punch in a check, spotting something that makes him tilt his bifocals, wrinkle his nose and squint. Split-second later he’s zooming in like a high-powered lens on a faint gray blotch, the telltale erasure mark. Next comes Rico, the axe-fisted little ape, the bantam who could have been Willie Pep, taking Mando apart on the asphalt of the parking lot.

And Nicky licking his chops. Pouring Rico a Strega.

“If Mando wakes up at all he’ll be lucky. Or unlucky. If he wakes up, he won’t be Mando.”

The words carried such a bolt of terror Blodgett almost dropped the phone, as though it had suddenly turned live and hot with deadly electricity. He thought of the subway and the third rail, of big hands pushing him off the platform.

“You don’t fuck with our checks. You don’t steal our money.” Bobby’s voice became thin, cool and sharp, a stiletto voice, stabbing at his ear.

“And if I were you, honey,” Bobby said, “I’d get my little ass to another planet.”

Which Blodgett tried to do. Tried to do in spite of the black-gloved fingers laying strangle-holds on his sensitive stomach parts. In spite of his bloated liver making his feet so heavy he could hardly drag them out of the hospital door. Drag them he did, but this time he found the scabbed-up MG was as comatose as Mando. Dead-silent, not even a whirr or a whine. And Blodgett crept back to bed to hide behind the whitecoats and consider his options.

Everything was extra work, even the telephone. It had the leaden heft of a small barbell.

Ollie was not an option. He clicked off in two seconds flat.

Erica, the pouty princess, was so amused at Blodgett’s description of himself, yellow inside and out, she said she’d drive down from Boston just to see it. She called him dahhling, doing the theater-school Tallulah thing, and said she’d bring him daffodils, a big yellow bunch.

If he felt like it, she said, her voice shrieking into his ear, they could do the scene from Menagerie, the one about Amanda and her jonquils.

Although the woman with three breasts didn’t purchase the card, she lingered over it, because the card said so much to her. She was killing time in a shop in a big urban mall, one that was near a major museum. Imaginary men were of the utmost importance to the woman with three breasts. Since her early teens she had run into them or conjured them up wherever she went, and by now she was quite the connoisseur. Very early on, her few experiences with non-imaginary men – cruel to say the least - had convinced her that the imaginary route was the way to go. The only way, if she wanted a life free from the torture of ridicule and rejection.

Once the woman with three breasts had crossed the line, had utterly and totally put the possibility of non-imaginary men behind her, the rest of what the modern world has to offer opened up to her, on a more or less equal playing field. She was bright, well-educated and attractive – some would even say beautiful. Her face had certain features that could rival those of the housewife in the greeting card, especially its bone structure. From chin to scalp she possessed precisely what models and actresses covet, the skeletal prominence that keeps skin youthful and glowing well into maturity.

After musing over the card, the woman went deeper into the mall to do an errand. There was enough time; she still had a good half hour before the museum opened. She entered a fabric store and carefully inspected the new goods that had arrived. She picked out a bolt of this and a bolt of that, added in some sundries, arranged for delivery and paid by card. The woman with three breasts was a virtuoso with a sewing machine. Soon after puberty she learned to sew for survival, to avoid the mortification of entering a clothing store. She created her own patterns and developed crude designs for tops and dresses that would mask and even flatter her upper physique. But her natural talent and intelligence led her even further - into the realm of fabric artistry. She bought books and taught herself how to cut, with proficiency and a bold flair. She was so adept she became a top seamstress, doing complex repairs and alterations for the most demanding clientele. She was sought after by bridal shops and fine boutiques. They wanted her to work on premises but she refused, insisting that the garments be sent to her apartment, where her at-home workshop had grown from an alcove to two large rooms.

For quite a while, the woman with three breasts flirted with becoming a bona fide fashion designer. Now she was pursuing this goal in earnest. She had found a rep who would handle all the client and supplier contact, allowing her to keep working inside the walls of her home. She had come upon an ancient floral pattern based on the Narcissus, and she began adapting it to various accessories, such as fabric belts and handbags cut out of rare hand-dyed goods she’d located in the south of France. She called her brand just that, Narcissus, and designed her own logo. The name gave her a chuckle. To her female customers it would mean a flower. But to her it would mean the ideal imaginary male. The legendary male so taken with his own beauty he can’t help staring at its reflection.

The act of naming her brand caused the woman with three breasts to take a new look at her own name - Sandra. Her decision, in the end, was to re-style it, and she began calling herself Alessandra. In her view, the name was still the one she’d been born with. All she was doing was using its superlative form.

From the fabric store, Alessandra hurried towards the mall walkway that opened onto the museum gardens. She had to pass right in front of a splashy lingerie store, an experience that made her physically and emotionally ill. Her legs shook and the sweat poured out of her. Every tart of a window mannequin was a reminder of the cross she had to bear – her lifelong dread of ever stepping over the threshold of such a store, of ever going near any retail counter anywhere to acquire a bra. All of hers were home-made, and it goes without saying that the quality and workmanship of these pieces exceeded anything sold in stores. But the real coup was the innovative construction she had devised, a system of rigging and cupping and cinching that, so long as she stayed fully dressed, made her unique abundance seem to be nothing more than normally opulent curves.

After the terror of the lingerie windows came the joy of the walkway, the relief of escaping her monsters and the thrill of entering a domain of soothing pleasures, a true oasis. First came the canopy of open sky, then the fountains and topiary and colonnades, and then the museum itself, timeless and palatial. She walked the huge halls resolutely, buoyed by the sharp echo of her footsteps. She hurried by the queue forming at the café, without so much as a thought about stopping for lunch. This was the first day of a new exhibit, a major showing of classical sculpture, not a day to let a croissant and salad steal time from what really mattered.

The woman with three breasts climbed the temple-like steps to the highest floor of the museum. She bought her ticket for the exhibit, titled “The Time of Heroes,” showed it to a seated guard and entered the exhibit hall. For a moment she stood perfectly still, just to let the cells of her body adjust to the sudden change. Only her eyes moved, and everywhere they darted they found the same thing. Men of stone. Perfect men. Men whose god-like limbs and torsos were unchanged after thousands of years.

Slowly, Alessandra began to move from figure to figure, circling each one like a cat. She paid no attention to the little plaques that explained whether the sculptor was Phidias or Polykleitos or Myron, or whether the sculpted male was a Herakles who had just killed a lion, a Dionysos on a bash, a Hermes about to take flight, or some unknown athlete scraping oil from his ribs. What she was after was a shoulder, a hip, a wrist that struck her as especially agile and powerful. Her mind and her eye worked together, feverishly, as photographer and camera, snapping prizes she could take home with her and keep, summoning them at will for her own physical pleasure. And just as soon as she had made her way through the ranks, she turned from the exit door and retraced her steps the entire length of the hall, once again letting her gaze spill ecstatically over every inch of stone skin. On her third and final trip, when she had reached her saturation point, she let out a small laugh, just audible enough to turn a guard’s head. She was recalling that line from the greeting card, and thinking how very right the line was.

The guard frowned and coughed sternly, and Alessandra rushed away from him and out of the hall. She was finally ready for a little food and drink. At this hour – well past lunch – they seated her promptly in the café, where she ordered a nicoise salad and tea. She slipped her toes out of the tight part of her shoes and attacked the food lustily, feeling her energy ramp up for everything that was to come, the rest of her museum day.

Over the years, she had become so taken with sculpture she had finally joined a basic sculpting class. It was taught in the basement of the museum, by a credible artist, a man who was good enough to place work in the better second-tier galleries. Today’s class was themed directly to the exhibit, “The Time of Heroes.” The students were to work from a live male model posing as an ancient Greek athlete. Ten minutes before class-time, the woman was outside the locked door, so eager to get her fingers into the wet clay she felt shock-waves running through them. And when the teacher ambled up the corridor and unlocked the door, she charged to the front and center, setting herself up as close as she could to the modeling stand.

The teacher made a few introductory remarks and brought him in, the human centerpiece - a young man with a discus thrower’s body but a back-alley swagger. He also had a strip-club smirk, which a glare from the teacher wiped away. The ripped young man knew how to stand like a statue, though, in perfect contraposto, torso twisted just so far to suggest explosive tension restrained by an even more muscular spirit. Alessandra worked feverishly, this time capturing her images in earthy handfuls of clay as well as camera flashes of her own mind. The cup supporter the model wore beneath his thong, the kind of jock used by modern athletes, left something to the imagination. But to the woman with three breasts this was not a problem. Anything male that was imaginary would not be squandered by her; her mind, bursting with pictures from “The Time of Heroes,” could fill in all gaps.

What the live model fed into her imagination, however, were properties that no piece of marble possessed. The glow of living skin, the sheen of sweat, and a scent so compelling the word that shot into her mind was something from the Greek myths: ambrosia, the liquid of the gods. The longer he posed the more it poured out of him, a reek that was half him and half the spray he had doused himself with. Alessandra found herself breathing faster just to get more of it into herself. At one point she even felt her nostrils had turned into a new form of eyes. Without realizing it, she was getting all her impressions from the air around her, applying the clay with the lids of her real eyes shut tight.

*******

Seven months after the class, the woman with three breasts stood up from her sewing machine and sat down at her computer. The smell of the model was as alive for her as it was on the day of the class, and it haunted her. Her business had begun to stumble from the effects. That powerful tool of hers – imagination – was so absorbed in the model it was running wild, with precious little left over for stitching and designing. Something had to be done, and finally she had acted. Unable to sleep or work, she had phoned the teacher of the sculpture class. She spoke in the coolest, most objective business voice she could muster, asking for the model’s name and contact information. It was all about opportunity, she said, opportunity for him. As a fashion designer, she said, she had thoughts now and then about a men’s line – a few choice pieces that fit the name Narcissus: a pocket scarf, a neckband, something bold on the wrist, whatever. For some reason, encountering the model had sharpened her focus on these musings. There was something about him, a je ne sais qua, that made her begin to see the finished pieces, their rhythm and flow. At any rate, she needed to see him again and have a personal session – for which she would pay well.

The teacher gave up the goods, and Alessandra began an email exchange with the model at once. His first name was Tom, which she assumed explained the first part of his email address – TMWFT – which was followed by the usual @ sign and internet provider name.

Today she had stitched next to nothing, but it was as much sewing as she could take. All the magic and promise was radiating from the computer, and she opened it like a banshee. She sat on tenterhooks while the screen filled, suffering the drone of the log-on process as though it were the grinding of centuries. The instant the buzzing stopped she opened her email, and there it was in the inbox, TMWFT re:today. He would stop by her place mid-afternoon, he accepted her financial offer, he would pose or be fitted, be sketched or photographed. He concluded, with an e-smile, that he was ready, willing and able to become the poster boy for Narcissus. Reading it, Alessandra’s head swam, as though the scent of the model was seeping through the emoticon and enveloping her.

And then it was there, really there, a dense cloud of it, as she opened her apartment door and let him in. The aura of him deepened and sharpened as he stripped down in the scant clearing of floor between the dress forms, fabric bolts and the racks of half-sewn garments. Once again he wore a cup and a thong, nothing else. Once again, the thong was blue. Alessandra wondered if it was the same thong as before, and the thought that it probably was – a live link to the day in the museum - hit her like a shot of absinthe, the banned lethal kind, dripping desire. She had to stand guard over every word that came out of her lips, to keep her real feelings from blowing the business façade to smithereens.

She showed him swatches and color samples and scribbled a few impressions on a sketch pad, just to give him a sense that there was a palette and a concept or two behind what they were doing. Today would be brainstorming, she said, just trying things. And then she asked him to stand with both arms raised and bent at the elbows, hands pressing the sides of his hair, as though he had just come up from the ocean or the bottom of a pool, soaking wet. He laughed and asked if that meant he was Narcissus, in which case he would be staring back at the pool, or a mer-man, in which case he would look wonder-struck finding himself in a world without water.

Alessandra seized the opportunity and said if he were a mer-man, and maybe even Narcissus too, he wouldn’t be wearing a mass-produced thong with a piece of athletic equipment stuck inside it. To say what she said was such a leap it made her sweat all over - but to hear her say it made Tom sweat even more. The windows of the room were shut tight and the thermostat was high, set that way on purpose by Alessandra, and now she had the exact moment she had wanted, the sense of being locked in a terrarium with some tropical man-plant, so pungent he had her in near delirium, and in the very next moment she would watch him step out of the thong…

He started to lower it - but suddenly he balked and hitched it back up. What she had caught at the museum, that strip-club bravado, it seemed to drain out of his face and even his limbs, just like that, dulling the skin tone.

This isn’t a class full of students, she said. It’s just me, it’s just us. What’s wrong?

But all he did was stand there, muscles and sinews frozen, haunches stalled like a horse spooked by a wolf howl. She felt the air change, become drier and cooler. Whatever it was that seized him was like a frost creeping onto his skin, killing the spicy sheen, and the ambrosia with it.

Alessandra offered to undress him herself, but this spooked him even more. He shied and stammered and finally came up with a way to defend himself. He turned the game of cat and mouse into a new sport: if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.

He challenged her to drop the sketch pad – and more. From the waist up, he said, she was covered – there was blouse fabric from both wrists all the way to her neck. If she wanted him to show bottom the least she could do was show top.

Never, she said, because I’m paying you. And I can pay you more too. Is that what you want, Tom? Is that it?

His response was an icy stab cloaked in laughter, a verbal shiver. He told her she had no idea what she was asking for. And when she asked yet again he said, in a dark whisper, consider yourself warned.

With that he thumbed the cloth at both hips, yanked it down and stepped out. She saw it all, the man and the manhood. But there was something about the pouch and its contents. It was swollen with balls, it was abundant, but it was so much more abundant than Alessandra had ever expected.

TMWFT, he said, bitterly. The man with four testicles. Now you know why I’m the loneliest man in the world.

In the moments before she spoke, Alessandra considered the possibilities. Her brain spun with them. She could, and should, reveal herself. At last there was a man with whom she had common ground. He would understand her, they could be lovers. Their difference from the rest of humanity would be their bond. But the more she stared at him the more she wanted to turn away – and, in the end, the woman with three breasts scorned the man with four testicles. Everything that attracted her to the figures in “The Time of Heroes” – the utter physical perfection - made her repulsed by the figure that stood before her, this aberration in flesh and blood.

She dismissed him and shut the door in his face. She never, ever ventured again from the world of imaginary men.

And yet it had been almost wondrous while he had been out there. Mysterious and even sacred, as though mammoth beasts were buried in the drifts. The snow was totally white and the sky was too, not a touch of blue in it, and no bright shining sun whatsoever. Nevertheless, the day had felt perfect. It was just the colors that were different. Or missing – totally out of the picture for that day even though the air tasted fine and even refreshing, with a misting shower of snow that fell the entire time he traipsed through the woods. And the forecast was it would continue to fall. Tonight, tomorrow, perhaps all week.

He was an Easterner new to the Rocky Mountains, so he was struck with the stark verticality of everything. The forested peaks on either side of the trail were taller and steeper than anything he was used to, and the trees themselves, the conifers, towered over their Appalachian cousins. Although technically evergreens, the trees were affected by the same color omission as everything else. No green whatsoever, not that he could remember. Just the extremely white snow and blackness: black trunks, branches, twigs and needles – an entire world of black pine trees, thick with the whitest, purest snow, so much of it the limbs of the trees drooped, even though their trunks and spines stood straight as the pikes of giant warriors. Karl thought of billions of towering arrows ready to rise up and strike another planet. The surrounding mountains also had none of the hues he normally associated with mountains. Browns and reddish beiges and bluish grays and greens. The mountains bristled with the black trees. They stood like enormous, humped animals in their winter coats, looming darkly, their blackness accentuated by the snow draping the trees and the snow-white ocean of sky.

The massage woman was tall and thin and alluring in a way that managed to seem both ethereal and shrewd: a languid free spirit who seemed more than ready to lend you her hands for a Visa card. Her getup was pipe-stem jeans and a flowing top that, in one swoop, said the farmhouses of the prairie and the ashrams of India. Not much makeup but just enough, long half-wild hair caught in some kind of bandanna, and fingers that were pale and long as religious candles. The fingers waved in a loose, watery motion, like reeds or tendrils, as she and the man negotiated just what the massage would consist of. Once they agreed, the fingers became purposeful, guiding the man’s head into the donut-hole pillow which was the main feature of her sit-down massage station. The man had the back and shoulders of an athletic winter sportsman and the back of his neck seemed especially powerful. But the woman’s fingers were up to the challenge. They dug into the neck and stayed there, kneading and pressuring. The sheer physical power she seemed to put into the operation was impressive. Karl imagined that the man, like any man, saw the intensity of her hands as erotic, a sign that he was in her eyes a special being. Yet the massage lady’s glazed, distant look said the opposite: that, in his case, it wasn’t her pulse that was running, it was merely the meter. And Karl wondered how she managed to summon such energy to her hands, customer after customer, day after day.

He wished he hadn’t asked them for a new map because all it did was make him guilty and jumpy about the old map. He didn’t understand how such a thing could slip out of the pockets of his ski pants, all of which had been zippered. Everything else he had taken with him was still in place. Wallet and Kleenex in the left pocket, car keys, matches and a small box of raisins in the right. He considered himself meticulous about such things. While he was off in the forest he had removed his right glove and reached into his pocket two or three times at most, for the raisins and nothing else. Each time he had put the raisin box back and zipped the pocket. The map, he was certain, had been in the other pocket, the one with the wallet and Kleenex, which meant he had never unzipped it, not once – he had just assumed he was on an official trail, left the map alone and therefore hadn’t removed his left glove.

Then it occurred to him he was not telling himself the truth, which made him even jumpier. Something – he saw it as the blind swirl of his own brain cells - had obliterated a simple, inconsequential memory - just as swirling snow obliterates tracks. Of course he had removed the left glove – it was when he had needed to urinate in the woods. To find privacy he had pivoted, made a right angle, stepped off the trail and plunged into the unbroken snow. This occurred about two hours into his trek, and now that the memory was emerging he pictured more and more pieces of it. He had planted his poles in the snow, removed both gloves and tucked them under his right arm while he unzipped and aimed. He even remembered some of his thoughts at the time, his concerns. Had he gone far enough off the trail? – the vaguely marked outside loop he then believed was the official snowshoeing trail – so as to not be seen and embarrassed by other snowshoers or cross country skiers? Were there sufficient barriers around him? – thickets and standing or fallen trees and hollows walled by drifts? He bashfully rejected a number of possible places and moved on, deeper into the woods, until he found a spot where, finally, he had felt secure and unwatched. All of these priggish worries were absurd, of course. He hadn’t come upon a single human being since the first five hundred feet of his journey, and that person had been a lodge worker repairing a small storage shelter for wood and road salt.

Karl remembered the sound of his urine hitting the snow. It was not the normal splash or splatter but a persistent drilling. It even gave off an echo in the extreme silence, and it pierced the snow cleanly and sharply, as though the urine wasn’t even liquid but a solid wand. Once, a stone worker had told him about the modern technique used for cutting counter tops out of large granite slabs. It didn’t involve metal of any kind. It was a water saw, streams of it driven at massively high pressure, and this made the smoothest, most efficient cuts. Nature, the friend said, had invented the technology, employing rivers to slice and shape mountains.

The guitar-playing cowboy wasn’t making it easy to stitch together all the moments, as Karl wanted to – desperately. More skiers had drifted down from the slopes as the afternoon moved towards evening, and there was a shrill, aggressive bustle around the fireplace. This excited the cowboy and made him sing more – and louder. He had just launched into a howling song about breaking up, making up, then making wild love to celebrate the making up. Instead of giving more attention to the cowboy – or to the masseuse standing over the bent back of her customer, one eye on the customer’s neck and one on her watch - Karl turned to the great wide lodge window and stared at the white and black vastness. This made him more anxious, considerably so, because it reminded him of the serious stain he had left out there. What bothered him wasn’t the urine, which was as natural as the trees, but the map, which more than bothered him. He saw it as contamination incarnate: a thick and heavy square of coated, folded, glossy paper, a hunk of industrial crud no better than a thoughtlessly tossed beer can. Even if he had missed the proper trails, he was now a snowshoer who had a responsibility to snowshoeing – and to the snow. Skiers go for the packed lifts and the loud crowds, but snowshoers are people who seek solitude in the pristine woods. The presence of a brightly colored, glossy clump of paper in the snow was an insult to the very concept of solitude.

Because it had been his first time snowshoeing, Karl had spent considerable mental capital bothering about the straps and snaps and buckles. In addition to the snowshoes themselves, there were special boots that had to be laced correctly, and poles to be dealt with as well. All of this had confused and distracted him, but key details were coming back: rising out of the snow, in a way – that was how it felt. He now understood that the only time he had had both gloves off was when he was relieving himself and zipping back up. With a glove off his left hand as well as the right, the one he used for the raisin box, it was clear he could have reached into the other pocket with the wallet, Kleenex and map. At least that had been the most likely time. He bore down on this line of thinking. Did he in fact reach for the map? If he did, the map could have fallen, just slipped out of the pocket as he put it back, or while he assumed he was putting it back. And if he’d been preoccupied with getting the gloves back on, and getting the foot paraphernalia in motion again, with shaking the snow off the snowshoe webbing and turning himself around to get away from the place where he had urinated, well, all of that could have muddled his actions even further, and fogged his recall as well.

It was good, he felt, that he had turned his eyes from the cowboy, the masseuse and the fireplace, and aimed them through the glass at the endless expanse of snow, forest and mountains. Small, important facts were resurfacing, minutia of consequence. The clarity of the view helped. But he wanted an even better view, if possible, to help him remember more. Amid the jumble of ski lodge furniture he spotted an empty chair that was closer to the great square of glass, and dead-center as well. He sprang to his feet and made a move for it. As he rushed to the chair, however, a flutter of activity caught his eye. It was the massage customer standing up and stretching – the end of the session. Karl couldn’t keep himself from watching the two of them again, the way they parted company. At first, the athletic man did most of the talking, working his head and shoulders in a roguish way. The massage lady processed his credit card with a slightly religious air, as though she were preparing flour for ceremonial bread. Their eyes met and, in a flash, the customer was a different man. His posture sagged. He took the receipt as if she were handing him his walking papers, and seconds later he was out of the room.

Back in the years when Karl was a different man himself – a mental health patient as now, but pursuing much milder therapies – there was a morning he lay flat, stomach side down, on a contraption not unlike the massage lady’s, his chin and brow resting on a cushioned hole. He was at the office of an acupuncturist. The acupuncturist, a small, lean Asian man, opened the session with subtle hand pressure on the skin between Karl’s shoulder blades. Staring down through the hole, Karl watched the acupuncturist’s shoes. They were charcoal gray, small and pointy, the shoes of a delicate man, and they hardly moved. Karl saw them as generic Asian shoes, not exactly leather, not exactly plastic, perhaps a combination of both. For several moments, the acupuncturist worked in silence. Then the shoes became slightly agitated, and the acupuncturist made a single comment, his voice just above a whisper. “You walk around with a war inside you,” he said.

As Karl settled himself into his new window-view seat, his left hand brushed against his left pants pocket. It hit an object that startled him, because it was not a wallet, Kleenex or a folded map. It was a pencil, and he now realized the pencil had been there in the pocket all along. At first he tried to reason with himself, telling himself the pencil was only a short stub of a thing. It had just gotten buried, that was all, behind the other items, and he had forgotten it – in the same way one forgets loose change. But his anxious side could not be convinced or placated. Like a policeman, his anxious side took an accusatory position. It insisted, in a menacing way, that he had brought the pencil along for a specific purpose: To jot down observations, anything from insights that crossed his mind to animals that crossed his path. He had taken it for safety’s sake as well – to write messages in case he became injured or stranded in the snow. But the most troubling and accusing thought of all, the one that raised his heartbeat to a drumbeat, was the suspicion that far more than the pencil had slipped his mind. Perhaps he had, in fact, put the pencil to use. It could not be ruled out. Perhaps he had actually written something on the map. If so, that made losing the map all the worse. Not only was it a blight on the snow; it was a document that carried his handwriting on it.

Now that Karl’s anxious side was raging over the pencil, other wisps of possibility came into sharp, sudden relief. There was a certain shape he had come upon just after zipping up and getting under way again. At the time, he had noted it simply as a cloud in the snow. Those were the words that occurred to him, and at the time he hadn’t thought much of it. But his anxious side would not relent – and what his eyes had actually seen out there, out in the whiteness and blackness of the middle of nowhere, now took on a new and dire significance. To his anxious side it was the most crucial – and possibly incriminating – evidence of all.

As Karl dimly remembered it, a section of the snow had been disturbed, as though something had landed on it and moved around. The disturbed area had been at least as wide as Karl was tall, probably wider. The shape was rounded but uneven, in the way some clouds appear to be shaped. He had glanced at it but paid it little mind, concentrating all of his energy on stomping away from the place where he had stood under the black trees and urinated. But with his anxious side ranting in his ear, Karl tried hard as he could to retrace every step and re-consider every inch. First he considered whether it was one of those snow angels people make by lying on their backs and waving their arms like wings. But that motion would have created an orderly shape, and this one was unruly – so churned up it could have been caused by an animal flailing about or even two animals locked in combat. It was indeed a violent shape, Karl’s anxious side proclaimed, speaking with the loud certainty of a gavel falling. And animals in combat were one thing, but what if the disturbed snow had been caused by humans in combat - perhaps combat to the death? The question grabbed at Karl like hands around his throat and shook out the most damning question of all. What if the map were to be found, no more than a few feet from the combat scene - possibly the murder scene - and found with his handwriting on it?

Karl gripped the arms of the chair like a prisoner under interrogation. He pounded his brain for facts. He folded, unfolded and re-folded the new map, hoping it would yield clues. Most of all he concentrated on the scene in front of him, the window and the woods beyond it. He scanned it like a GPS system looking for a pinpoint. The entire puzzle lay right in front of him, every foot of snow and every single tree in the huge ocean of back country rolling out from the lodge. Various trails spider-webbed across it, and on the outer perimeter was a vague border trail called the outside loop. At least that’s what the map said. But where had he seen the cloud shape? At which point on the outside loop? Or, more accurately, at which point just off the outside loop? His anxious side didn’t just demand an answer, but an exact answer. The exact patch of snow. The exact stand of trees. The exact drift or hollow where the old map had fallen. The map that had his incriminating handwriting scrawled on it.

Karl stared at the huge square of black and white until the white became tinged with gray, the onset of evening. He kept at it until his temples began to buzz. Blood pressure, stoked by panic, that’s what he thought it was at first – until he was startled by what appeared to be a large, angry insect in the upper right quadrant of the glass. Next came the rotor action, the whirring of blades, and he realized that the panorama was no longer a simple, tranquil composition of snow, forest and mountain. A helicopter had entered the picture, and the buzzing had nothing to do with his temples or his blood pressure. The chopper buzzed restlessly over the entire terrain, swooping here and plunging there – operated by a pilot who was clearly looking for something, and who had a far sharper view of everything than Karl had, parked in his chair.

After several passes, the helicopter changed its pattern of attack, narrowing the field of investigation. It still swooped and plunged, but the overall line it followed, often pausing to hover, dead-still, was roughly the same one that the maps depicted as a faint gray line.

The outside loop.

When Karl rose to his feet he was hardly able to stand on them, the trembling was so intense. He tumbled back in the chair and tried to come up with options. His first thought was to swallow a fistful of powerful pills. But he hadn’t brought pills. No pills, his doctor had said. That was the whole point of the trip. No pills this time, just the snow, just let the cleansing snow do its work. It will do you a world of good, his doctor had said.

He could, of course, go straight to the bar. He could drink until he was blind drunk. Passed out and numb to the panic. Or else he could try a session with the massage lady, who at this moment didn’t have a customer at her station. Anything that might bring him peace. He looked at her standing by her donut-hole contraption, her candle-fingers wiping the cushioned material with a peach-colored liquid, eyes glowing with piety as she worked the cloth. Then Karl’s anxious side spoke up, in a voice so loud it drowned out every option but one. It demanded that he strap on his snowshoes at once. That he find the lost map before the helicopter did. It demanded that he do this even though night was imminent, even if the night snow should come down in torrents.

Karl unfolded the new map one more time. He glared at it with profound bitterness. Being a map, and a good map, it could show him many things. But not the only thing that mattered – the place where the old map was located.

Karl tore the glossy paper to pieces and crumpled the pieces in a ball. He fought his shaky legs and made himself stand. He stumbled past the massage lady and the guitar-playing cowboy and down the stairs. They led to the rented locker and the snowshoes and the fast-fading light.

Janet, in that way she had of looking smitten, said, “We’re schoolteachers, just schoolteachers, Molly. Just like you and Damon. Nobody ever told us about dog pre-nups.”

The Pinot Grigio session, beginning around 4pm., was Molly’s idea - designed to get Janet battle-ready for her 5:30pm with Justin. Molly loved Pinot Grigio as an action lubricant. “Just enough alcohol,” she said.
“And no taste at all,” Janet said, in a tone that was less than grateful. She picked a fleck of cork off her tongue, and continued picking flecks while Molly conducted the little ceremony she had cooked up. Molly pulled out a bronze badge, an exact replica of a band-aid, and endeavored to pin it on Janet’s top, left side. She said it was a “bandage for the heart,” a kind of medal of honor created by some cool designer she’d found online. “It’s purpose is to honor those who are getting killed or wounded in the love wars,” Molly said. “I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more.”

As Molly said this she actually choked up – and just watching this, Janet wanted to throw up. She also felt she didn’t have the strength to resist, and she stood passively while Janet clicked the little pin in place.

Justin was coming to haul Parker the Lab, dog toys and all, away for the night. Their trio of little kids was at Janet’s mom’s. The kids had seen – and heard - enough for a lifetime. “I’m here so he won’t walk over you,” Molly said with a swig.

“He’s already walked over me but I’m still functioning. A sidewalk does it all the time.” She put the glass to her lips, but sniffed instead of swigged. “Dog pre-nups, Jeez. Who do you think we are - were?”

*******

At 5:40 a hulking pair of shoulders darkened the doorway, but they weren’t Justin’s. It was Damon who stood there, with that looming Frankenstein way of his, and his ever-present computer bag, which told the world he was the IT teacher – not chained to a classroom like Molly and Janet. Molly greeted him and Parker commenced soft-mouthing Damon’s free hand, which was meaty as a roast. It took a three-slice bologna bribe to get him to cease.

At about 5:50, from Pinot Grigio headquarters back in the kitchen, the three of them, Janet, Molly and Damon, rose as they heard the front door swing open. Not a knock, not a doorbell buzz, just a swing. “You haven’t changed the locks yet?” Molly cried. “Are you insane?”

Justin didn’t just cross the threshold. He had this way of bouncing over it – and there they were, just like old times. A familiar thought occurred to Janet, popping right through the fear and rage: Were she to be casting a medieval movie, she’d make Justin the freckle-faced prince, ever young, ever cocky, and – for certain - thick as a post. Even though he’d tossed her like a stale beer she’d do this. But Damon, she’d make him the black-masked executioner. A man whose body was born for the part. The way he looked now, fat arms folded and glowering – looming and fuming over Justin - he could easily have a black hood on his big bald head. And Justin was no midget – he still had his linebacker’s build. The cruel irony was that Damon could never begin to do to Molly what Justin had done to her. He was her Marshmallow Fluff since high school. “My bitch,” she said, when the Pinot Grigio flowed.

As usual, Justin wore jock clothes, his Phys-Ed teacher uniform. Another special “educator” – no classroom drudgery for him. He had that glow, a kind of revved-up, earnest sappiness that told her he had come straight from the weight room.
Damon, the pussy of an executioner, jumped right in with an axe-swipe at Justin’s head. “Look, you fucker. This has to stop. She wants the dog, give her the dog. You’ve already taken away everything she…”

When Damon finished, he passed the axe to Molly, whose happy-hour arms couldn’t lift it all that convincingly. She still managed to get in some nice shots about the horrors and humiliations Justin had wreaked on his wife and family. How his taking up with the Empress of the PTA – now showing - had torn the school to pieces, not to mention two formerly sane spouses and two households filled with very young children.

The problem was, everything Damon and Molly were saying had been said for three weeks, ad nauseam. As Janet listened and watched, all she could feel was that great process of cosmic excretion seizing her once more. She saw it as a sequence in which she started out as a green clump of grass in an open field, sprouting in full view of countless bypassers and bystanders – a happy, random clump suddenly pulled up by her roots, then chewed, swallowed, etched to death by gastric acid, and finally dumped out on the ground as a brown piece of shit.
Characteristically, the more Damon and Molly lambasted Justin, the more that all-American, choir-boy smile of his grew and grew. Just like Pinocchio’s nose, except a lengthening nose will always look evil and deceitful. But Justin’s exploding smile kept shooting out those rays of nuclear-strength decency.
The smile hit its radiant, Eagle Scout peak when Molly accused him point blank of cruelty to children.

“Three of them, lost and abandoned,” she said, slurring the “s” in lost. Actually saying losht.

“Don’t talk to me about kids, “Justin said. “ I love kids, and Janet knows it. Daria and I want to have lots of kids. And we hope in time our two families can be close. Yours, and ours.”

Damon went off like a bomb. “The kid machine,” he yelled, “that’s what they’re calling you, you dumb, miserable fuck. You should move to Saudi Arabia and get three more Darias.” His executioner’s eyes burned like white-hot spikes. But all Justin did was grin like a freckle-faced farmboy, a grown-up version of the Howdy Doody doll Janet’s mom had in her house. With a finger-snap he summoned Parker, who bounded to his side in a flash.

“Notice how he never barks,” Justin said. “Never with me, at any rate. We started out calling him Barker, but then we had to change it to Parker.” Man and dog gazed at each other adoringly – “isn’t that right, boy, isn’t that right?” – each gaze, each wag, each word, was like a cigarette ash dropping on Janet’s skin.

What finally made her crack like an egg was a single sound. The snap of Justin hooking the leash on Parker’s collar.

“He’s not going with you,” she screamed. “He’s not. Not, not, not.”
Both Parker and Justin reacted identically. Heads high. Eyes bright. Two pups ready to chase sticks.

“The dog is MINE.”

“Not for two days a week he isn’t,” Justin said, in the tone of a good-natured Nautilus instructor gently correcting some novice’s machine posture. “You agreed to this. Can you honestly say you didn’t agree? Would you swear it on a bible?”
At this one moment in the great sea of time, Janet and her friend Molly could have been on opposite ends of the universe.

“He’s just a dog,” Molly said, touching Janet’s shoulder. “It’s only for a night. Save your ammunition for the children. It’s the children who count.”
The executioner glowered at the freckle-faced prince. “You’re a hell of a one to talk about bibles, you bastard.”

But glower was all he did. Justin, with Parker heeling flawlessly, turned and headed out. They trotted in perfect synchronicity. Janet sprang across the threshold and followed all the way down the walkway, shouting “I love you, Parker. Parker I love you. You be good now.”

Parker turned his head only once, showing the whites of his eyes. But this time Janet saw something different in them. Something that wasn’t bright, wasn’t happy, wasn’t just goofy to play. All things considered, it was a miraculous flash. And though it had come out of nowhere and lasted only a split second, she knew what she’d just seen would stay in her brain the rest of the night, flashing and flashing. She also knew the best thing Molly and Damon could do for her would be to shut up and get out of the house. Now. Right now.

The “right now” took a good hour, but at last Janet found herself alone. And not thinking of the kids, either, who at this moment were in good enough hands. All her focus was on Parker, only Parker. She walked through the empty house, missing everything about him. The way he curled on his L.L. Bean bed. The way he sat for treats, suddenly so solemn and angelic, exactly as he had sat when he was a tiny furball of a puppy. Molly would be horrified, no doubt. The idea of Justin sharing the children – having visitation rights at least – Janet could almost accept that. But to share Parker seemed like cutting off a limb.
As evening fell, Janet slowly climbed the stairs to the unlit master bedroom, stopping on her way to the medicine cabinet. She lingered beside the bed, in no particular hurry to flip the light switch. The scent of Parker was all over the room, and the shadows seemed to intensify it. Finally, she turned on the light and let her eyes fall on the white comforter. It was covered, absolutely covered with black hairs. The thought that tonight she would not be holding Parker in her arms, hugging him like a great black Teddy bear, this was a situation that seemed beyond cruel and unusual, beyond inhumane. Daria had Justin – why couldn’t Janet have Parker? How much pounding could a sidewalk take?
Back down in the kitchen she confronted the three empties. Empty table, empty wine bottle, empty L.L Bean bed. The latter was all that really counted. As the night wore on, the thing she had seen in Parker’s eyes – a longing was what she was calling it now - became so intense she could almost hear it as well see it. It was a kind of cry, from way down deep. Of regret, that kind of cry. Regret for the shattered family, the pack that once was and never will be. It staggered her that this cry, this regret, was more visible in the eyes of an animal than in Justin’s entire being. The thought, the horror of it, began to stalk her like an apparition every time she randomly glanced over at the dog bed. And, after a while, it was everywhere her eyes darted.

It was even in the kitchen cabinet where Janet went rummaging for a sugar rush at around eleven. All she wanted was a little late something to put off the duty of sleep, the inevitable trek to the comforter. There was also the thing from the medicine cabinet, the stick she could pee on. But why rush the night? All over the house were items Justin left behind. His souvenirs - would they ever stop turning up? Cast-off sneakers hiding in a basement closet. A bar of male-smelling soap started three weeks ago. Pitted-out tee shirts and rusted bike wrenches.

She fished around the cabinet and bumped into a few more of them. Tall jars of male energy junk, expired and never thrown out, his powders and granules and capsules. She opened another door and hauled down the Dunkin’ Donuts box, and then the glass-necked vessel from way back, the Captain Morgan’s. From these she assembled her set of possibles. Two double-chocolate frosteds, three sprinkles, and a glazed. Then she pondered. And poured.

The glazed she chose to eat first, because she liked the way it named the occasion: a glazed night if ever there was one. Each bite she took slowly, letting the Captain Morgan’s swish its rummy island lushness all around her mouth and into every last crumb, transforming the greased cake into drenched bits of Caribbean bliss. After three donuts and half the bottle she had to take a royal pee. Time for the stick. She made her way into the half-bath off the kitchen, already thinking of names. It occurred to her, before she even had a color on the stick, why not just name the offspring Morgan, after the Captain himself, a true swashbuckling buccaneer. There was also Pinot Grigio, of course, but it sounded like a circus clown. Pinot Grigio, what a joke…

As fate would have it, next day they all sat next to each other, close as four bugs in a rug, in the teachers’ meeting room, where the principal went ape for a half hour about the new fire drill regs. Janet thought about when she would drop the news on Justin, and what he would do, but of course she knew what he would do – just smile that Pinocchio smile of his, wider and wider. Then something occurred to her, just a glimmer, a kind of a trade she might make, and trade was a word that gave her a shiver of disgust, but there was just no other word for trade but trade. Besides, simply having something to trade, a bargaining chip, it was such a leap forward – or up – it felt utterly new and huge, like winning a fortune or finding an overhead branch to grab and use to pull yourself up out of a raging river. Morgan for Parker. As simple as that: an even swap. You take one, I take the other. Molly would be horrified, everyone would be horrified. Tomorrow even she, Janet, would be horrified for considering it longer than two seconds. But today, as the principal droned on and Justin sat there with his shit-eating smile, it took the hangover right out of her head.

Alana’s book club friends have suggested that nocturnal pole-dancing – under the shield of a Dolly Parton wig – might be a faster way to fill the cookie jar. Meanwhile, waiting on tables at The Chadwick Grille is still Plan A for hanging onto the house, a 1786 saltbox with a historic plaque.

Working all those split shifts has flattened Alana’s feet. But it’s also stretched her peripheral vision. So when she emerges – on this her night off -  from the dark of the Fenway concession arcade, third base side just back of the visitor’s dugout, she finds she can look straight out at the players doing pre-game sprints and still size up the guy two seats in from the aisle. She observes he’s an overeater who’s in from the sticks and a Red Sox fan - like many of the thousands milling and mooching, curled all the way from the Monster in left around to the Dunkin’ Donuts sign high above the right field grandstand. The way he’s wolfing the sausage and pepper sub tells her it’s not going to be his last of the evening, and dustings of  pulverized  peanut shell already adorn his navy blue shorts.

Within moments she learns he’s from the hills of Worcester, because she hears him say “Wister” in between chomps.

These are no ordinary seats Alana has. They’re Yankee game seats, a pair of them, deep down in the field boxes. The kind Bruno used to get when he pitched for the Triple A PawSox and subbed now and then for injured Red Sox starters.

Unaffordable and unavailable, the seats come compliments of the handlers who are still betting on Alana’s only daughter as maybe, just maybe, becoming the Twenty First Century’s Twiggy: saintly skinny as opposed to cheeky skinny.

For a mother-daughter evening, more perfect you couldn’t buy. Sky of velvet. Zephyrs tickling the flag. But Justina has never, ever joined Alana before Inning Four. With the schedule she has, how could she? The green eyes and golden cheekbones are busy moving the needle. Ditto the hands, the ankles. And starting this morning they were shooting her for a Nine West direct mail drop.             

Alana’s bones hurt from running with trays, so why be cramped? She plunks herself down on the aisle, leaving a one-seat space.

And the overeater leans her way and says, in a surprisingly sweet voice, “I’m not that fat, am I?”

Alana looks at the hamhock elbow pressing on the arm of the empty green chair  and thinks, “yes you are.” But what she says is, “oh no, I’m just saving that seat for my daughter.”           

Actually, the fellow, who wears a flag-red Jason Varitek tee shirt with man-tits, isn’t obese fat so much as big-boy fat. One of those baby-skinned chunks who, even at two hundred forty with stubble and a mustache, still hasn’t outgrown the butterball he used to be in his kindergarten red jersey and navy blue shorts. Using her peripheral vision, Alana pegs this point in time as around 1977.  Nine years or so before Justina was born.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees other things too. The round golden glint on that meaty hand of his holding the beer. Back in the sticks of Wister, there’s a wife.

Right at Alana’s back are a pair of Red Sox haters. It’s not clear whether they’re Yankee fans, or even fans at all. They wear no pinstripes, no caps. They never cheer, only jeer lewdly. One is a shrill, wiry girl. The other is a massive pre-human, a neckless creature whose head rises straight out of a tank-body, cylindrical like a cement mixer.

The crowd roars. A droplet hits the back of Alana’s neck. It falls just as the second pitch of the game hits the mitt, far outside the strike zone. With the sky dry as a sapphire, Alana concludes it was beer spray. She hunches her shoulders and raises the collar of her crisp Italian polo, loot from a Justina shoot months ago. Just putting it on in front of the mirror stirred a reverie of all the years of Justina-building. The glossies, the cattle calls. Dragging Justina from this to that. Joining the long lines of pugnacious stage mommies and fearful, fidgeting children, crowded in some ragged field like chained prisoners, waiting forever to be called into the Winnebago. Before modeling days, the commercials. Some TV, mostly radio. Locked in the glass sound booth pushing the juiced-up cutesy voice, the sound of Disney on speed, the sprinkly sweet strains of child labor. Alana outside with the engineer at his console and the stacked bagels and moldering cantaloupe, schmoozing the clients.

After the session, Alana would don the home apron and bake cupcakes. For Justina. Just the two of them in the sun-striped buttercup kitchen, sheltered by the original 1786 beams. Justina licking the frosting bowl. Pressing her face to the apron and saying, “I love you, Mommie.” Saying it in her true, unamplified voice.

                                                            *******

Justina at work. She knows this cheeseball Nine West drop will run out of pages before they would deign grant space to her face. It’s ankles they’re after, the more per line of glossy stock the better. Yet the photographer, a hawk-faced huntress in a skull-print Japanese tunic and slouchy tie pants, makes head-on Leica assaults for a seeming eternity, chewing up film, grinding out the billable hours. Justina’s eyes sting from staring into the white heat, and all the time there’s this pathetic yelping from somewhere behind the backdrop. When they finally let her break for a swig of Fiji she heads straight towards it, trailed by this eel of a man, shiny as a black satin tie, who calls himself the photographer’s producer and lets it be known he’s the photographer’s brother as well.

As she’s done before, Justina yanks open the door of a storage room the size of an ample pantry. She bumps into the photographer’s pocket dog, a silky-eared King Charles Spaniel, clawing so madly it’s as though Justina’s legs are a tree that must be climbed. One wall of the room is exposed brick, whitewashed a soothing linen. Lining the others are shelves with enough herbals and tree barks and organics to stock a small natural foods store, including books on yogic systems and the wheel of bliss.

But the stench of the place makes Justina palm her nostrils with one hand and clutch her throat with the other. She looks and finds what she knew she’d find. Over in the corner by a smeared, crusted window is a spiral of fresh dogshit in a puddle of dogpiss. And the toy dog’s toenails scrape at her even faster, like a buzzsaw.

“Not your fault, Winnifred,” she says, “not your fault. It’s okay, Winny. Okay.”

As though she were the photographer’s maid and not the model, Justina pulls a fistful of Glad-baggies. Then she grabs a skull-print leash off a peg, hooks it on the dervish of fur and jogs for the elevator.

“A little late for that, wouldn’t you say?” The eel-man’s voice echoes over her shoulder, and eventually the voice stops her. She has to agree, the dog has messed  – what’s the point of going down to the alley now?

He folds his arms and watches, grinning, as she bends over the squish-pile with a roll of paper towels and the Glad-baggies, and sprays disinfectant until the chemical smell overpowers the shit smell.

They’re all criminals here, she thinks. It’s no different than if they crippled the animal. Broke its little legs.

“Since you’re an animal lover,” says the producer, “can I tell you a story?”

Without a doubt the story will be about animals but not about animals. Justina, back on her feet, reads this from the way the tanned and oiled head tilts lewdly at her and the facial jewelry gleams. She knows the dance, knows where it goes. But she takes Winny to her lap, strokes the silky ears and lets him get on with it, his ducks and drakes tale, as he puts it.

Right off the bat he informs her that among all the birds on earth, drakes are among the very few armed with penises. These they use like assault weapons on the ducks. “I’m talking aggressive,” he says. “You have no idea…”

Justina strokes Winny and wishes they would call her back from the break. She’ll take a Leica stuck in her face all day and all night. Anything but eel-man.

“The penises come in all shapes and sizes. They’re elaborate, just like guns. It’s like all the drakes are in an arms race with all the other drakes…”

At last they do call her and he has to stop. Or pause. But he starts again the instant he can, hitting on her with his story even after the shoot ends and she slips out of the building. Late in the cab and traffic, Justina plows through the Fenway turnstiles and heads for the seats and Alana. But the ringtone nails her and what can she do? – he’s a player in the Twiggy plan. From behind their cotton candy towers the concessionaires peer at her, this leggy wonder, at her red-carpet gait and second-skin jeans and butterfly camisole. The platoon of shuffling men waiting for access to the green-doored men’s room pivots en masse. They see the phone glued to Justina’s bangled ear and the heel-spikes flashing past them and they think E! and People Magazine and Hall-Of-Famer girlfriend.

“Ready for the duck part?” the eel-voice natters into her ear, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “For every ingeniously armed penis there’s an ingeniously defended vagina,” he says. “Some have corkscrew turns, some have blind endings. Those duck vaginas make it tough for the drake, baby. Just like you…”

                                                        *******

Absorbed as he is with the Sox’ ace Beckett notching his fifth strikeout, the fan from the sticks nearly drops his beer when he catches Justina wriggling past Alana and sanctifying the space right next to him. In the tight Fenway seats, the two of them are so close that a strand of her flaxen hair falls across his left forearm as she reaches down to adjust a heel strap. She sees the wedding ring on the hefty, hairy hand, then she sees him slip the hand out of sight. This he keeps doing – either sitting on it, tucking it under his right arm, or hiding it under the greasy paper he’s collected from the multiple hot dogs and subs he’s put away.

“Sorry for the mess,” he says, in a tone that has a wink in it, slightly flirtatious, and Justina catches it by the second syllable. But there’s a second tone weaving in there as well, groveling and serf-like, as though he were addressing a Princess of the Realm. All of this is wrapped into a body language of sheepish, playful head nods, gestures that make Justina think of huge plush-toy dogs, those Newfies and St. Bernards when they’ve reached full size but still have their puppy ways. After eel-man, she’s happier to be next to him, in his loutishness, than he could ever realize.

She watches him attempt to smile at her without leering – unsuccessfully. Then he reaches under his seat with the right hand, comes up with a red, white and blue bag and slyly asks, “Peanut?”

Justina does an instant fat-gram calculation and takes one. Just one. As she cracks it she sees his left hand return to full view, like a gopher emerging from a burrow. It comes to rest on his lap. Abracadabra – no ring.

Meanwhile, the game has become five innings old, and for the last two of those innings Alana has endured a cascade of ugliness spewing from the pair of Red Sox haters right behind her. They opened fire after their third or so Budweiser round and pumped up the venom and the decibels with each succeeding brew. Now that Justina has joined her mother right in the battle zone, the outbursts rage around the back of her neck too. And she feels it like the hot breath of stalkers.

Up to the plate comes Julio Lugo, the Red Sox leadoff man.

And from the neckless throat of the tank-sized man, a sneering war cry. He calls out JULIA, JULIA. He keeps shrieking this through a nine-pitch at bat.

When the hitter Manny Ramirez stands in, he screams, MANDY, MANDY.             

And when the catcher Jason Varitek draws a walk he roars at the umpire. HEY, BLUE, WHY DON’T YOU STICK YOUR HEAD UP YOUR ASS? AT LEAST YOU’LL BE ABLE TO SEE SOMETHING.

To Justina, this isn’t heckling. The voice and the person are too big and too close, and the sound is too angry. She wants to be in a fetal position, trembling, huddled in a corner somewhere until the storm blows over. What she hears isn’t a drunken bloke at a ballpark, but her father Bruno when she was seven, just before a court order sent him far away. She hears the sound of the deepest male rage erupting, breaking through the trap door of the brain. She sees Bruno shattering everything he can get his hands on, trashing the house. And she and Alana scampering out of any door they can reach. Grabbing barrettes and bobby pins. Fleeing to motels, bus stations, airports, anywhere to get away.

Alana knows what’s happening to Justina. The fiery ball in the stomach, the panic attack. She would know it with her eyes closed. What surprises her, though, is that the fan from the sticks seems to know it too. Alana catches the new look in his sidelong glances: alarm, concern. No trace any more of the ogling, the clumsy banter.

The inning is a long one, with the Red Sox doing so well they bat all the way around, and Julio Lugo steps up to the plate again.

From behind Justina, the bull voice reaches its most ear-splitting level yet. To her, it comes out of the earth, or the loudspeaker. It drowns out the entire crowd:

JULIA, JULIA. YOU PUSSY. YOU CUNT.

She hears it with reverb. Thunder bouncing off the mountains. CU-U-UNT.

And she cringes, shrinks into the green seat. If she were a turtle the green seat-back would be her shell, and her whole being would disappear into it.

At the very moment Justina slides down in her seat the fan from the sticks half-rises in his. He twists his girth around and locks eyes with the shouter.

“Hey, clean it up, will you.”

The response is a snarl, then the loudest roar yet:

JULIA, JULIA. YOU PUSSY. YOU CUNT. CU-U-UNT.

“Watch your mouth, you watch it.”

YOU WATCH YOURS, PUSSY-MAN.

And on the last word he launches a fist like a piledriver, straight and short – a direct hit on the mouth. Justina hears the gruesome mashing sound, the sound of skin ripping and teeth cracking. She smells something that cuts through the beery atmosphere. The rancid stench of two brutes in a death-lock. Relative to her, they could be bears, rhinos. They don’t just hit, they collide. She sees the blood spray and gush as the bigger man seizes the head of the merely big man, pins it on the seat-back and hammers it without letup, hammers it long after it ceases to squirm out of the way. He keeps at it while the crowd retreats. He keeps hammering until the last, even when there’s a security force of a half dozen swarming over him from the back.

They wrestle him away, the massive Red Sox hater, and somebody yells something about making room for paramedics. Justina is alone, the only remaining onlooker in the circle of cleared seats. Even Alana joined the stampede and cries to her from the sidelines, where the victim’s comrades have retreated too. Splayed next to Justina, for all intents and purposes, is a butchered carcass in human clothing. A being that no longer moves and no longer has a face, only bloody, bubbly face-meat. With smashed shapes on it that once had been distinguishing features: nose, lips, eyes, cheekbones. Her butterfly cami is splattered red. She cradles the head and dabs at it with the hem, soaking up the gore. Alana stares at the scene, numb with too much feeling. She sees a small girl, the toddler of yesteryear, hovering over a pet that’s been crushed by a speeding train.

                                                     *******

The paramedics and their beefy cargo, strapped and swaddled like an enormous papoose, slowly disappear into the cave-mouth ramping down to the concession mall. Justina bolts to her feet and tries to trail along, but she bumps into a cop belly, blue as an umpire’s chest protector. The policeman sits her down, produces paraphernalia and attempts an interview. But only Alana can speak. She acts as interpreter, translating her daughter’s simpers and whimpers into police-log English. Tonight there will be no going their separate ways, no staying for the rest of the game and then Justina breezily taxiing off to her Back Bay one-bedroom with what has become her little signature, a self-mocking Twiggy air-kiss launched just before the yellow door shuts. The two of them stagger, arm in arm, to the parking lot, and, for the whole ride back to Chadwick, Alana sits like a sentry at the wheel while Justina keeps the passenger seat in full recline. The sound of her daughter’s fitful breathing fiddles with Alana’s time sense. At least twice on the highway she gets lost in a warp, really believing it’s one of those nights when she’s driving, just driving, to let the rocking road lull her stricken newborn asleep.

Once inside the salt-box she draws Justina a tub, peels off the blood-splotched cami and finds her fleeciest robe. She excuses herself as soon as she can to get the stove going. In double-time she re-climbs the steps, scrubs Justina’s back and lanky limbs, then towels her head to toe and wraps the robe around her. Justina maintains a dazed look, stone-silent, even when Alana stands on tiptoes to peer at some dot of linty fuzz on her scalp. Arm in arm, they descend to the buttercup kitchen, where the warm cakey smell rising from the oven registers a flash in Justina’s eyes, restoring the emerald shimmer, if only for an instant. Alana feels as though a train, stopped dead on a broken track, has started up again. She warps out for the third time tonight, confusing this moment, this sense of a train back on track, with the very moment Bruno finally took a suitcase and stormed out for good.

Justina’s hands are folded in her lap as Alana sets a cupcake in front of her, the chocolate glistening from the heat within.

Another flash of green in the eyes and then another.

“They’re shooting again tomorrow,” Justina says, radiant at last. “I can only have half. But I love you, Mommie.”

When Justina wakes up the next day and turns again to her cell phone, she finds four messages blinking. Three are from eel-man and one is a voice she knows yet doesn’t know, but the rumble of it makes her skin explode in violent blotches that even the stylist can’t hide. The voice claims to be Bruno. He says he saw her in some mailer from Nordstroms. Page fourteen, tank tops.

In her Greek English, Melina told the psychiatrists the attacks were like vertigo, but not the kind you feel standing on the edge of a roof. The first one came on the plane from Venizelos to Logan, where she sat on her hands because she felt the hands would assault her. She was traveling from the wharves of Athens to the wharves of Boston, flying to her aunt and uncle who had arranged transport and would give her work in the uncle’s fish restaurant. In her fourteenth night in the kitchen on the pier she refused to walk out of the walk-in refrigerator, and shrieked so loudly the tables began to empty. Melina went straight to Applewood, in an ambulance. It was her first trip inland, anywhere, ever, and when morning came she was afraid to take long looks at the open fields between the cottages, they seemed so vast.

The day Taylor saw her sitting in the brief patch of sun was a milestone, her first venture outdoors in weeks. The cottage they put her in, North Brannock, had two floors and thirty four patients. On her floor, the first, was a Canadian nurse, Janet, who was a good twice her size, and this huge human being was the one she came to trust above all others. “You’ll keep me from falling,” Melina said. “Falling from what?” Janet asked, looking down at her, “you’re already sitting on the floor.” From her cross-legged position on the tile the girl threw her arms around Janet’s thick calves and replied, “falling out of my self.”

On break with the other nurses and attendants one day, Janet nicknamed the girl Helen of Troy, and it stuck. “Helen of Troy wants a Rice Krispies bar.” “Well, of course she does. It’s rice, and she’s Greek.” “Bring her some tea with it. Helen of Troy demands tea. It’s for her hair, it’s her beauty secret.”

Taylor would sit in some mangy vehicle from the Applewood fleet, half-camouflaged by the ragged trees. He would think so ravenously about Melina’s hair he would smoke three cigarettes and barely realize he had lit a single one.

Before the anti-psychotic drugs began to settle Melina down, her learning there were locked doors at every turn was actually a source of relief. It meant there was less unbounded space into which she could “fall.” It also meant ever-present staff, men and women who would emerge out of nowhere with their heavy, glinting keyrings and somehow find the right key for every keyhole. And if she balked at the newly opened space they would take her by the arm and escort her across the threshold, walking with her until she felt safe. After several days, Janet found the most effective therapy wasn’t to engage her patient in probing chatter about the past and her feelings, but to simply let her sit in silence on the floor of her room encircled by large, solid masses – her dresser, her bed, and, most imposing of all, Janet herself. From that fortified position Melina would endlessly knot and re-knot her hair, her fingers dancing and twisting this way and that. As a palliative, this worked even better than sitting on her hands, she said, because it gave the hands gainful employment and kept them from wreaking destruction on herself and others. On sunny days, Janet brought in dandelions and daisies plucked from the forgotten orchards and weed-ridden fields. Melina said she could feel the ghost of her mother, who on festive occasions had adorned certain rooms with leafy vines, making the house smell like magic. With her own hands, so meaty and crude compared to the thin, regal fingers of “Helen of Troy,” Janet used the torn-up flowers to fashion rough garlands for the braided mane. “A crown for Helen,” she announced at the nurse’s station. “Can Paris be far behind?”

                                                *******

Taylor yearned for his own set of keys as deeply as Melina wanted none of it, wanted no access whatsoever to any part of the cottage. On her first night she’d begged for a straitjacket, but Janet crushed her with the news that they were no longer used. Melina described her entire angle on life, how she saw things since plunging through the cracked floor of her mind, as a long telescope turned completely around. No matter where she pointed her gaze, everything she longed for was smaller and more confining. Life in miniature. If it were possible she would sleep in a dresser drawer, and even more secure than that – in a boxed compartment within the drawer.

Taylor, on the other hand, envied Hank, because he had the precious power of access, and he bought Hank beers at the Winfield Barn – did everything he could to pry the keyring loose from his neck. The situation was a familiar one: even in grade school it was always Taylor, stuck on a lower rung of the ladder, whining for some privilege or possession of Hank’s, and Hank reaching down and swatting him away. “Don’t go too far,” Hank warned him at the Winfield. “Next step is the shelter, the human dumpster. Even your mother won’t take you – you  need this job.” What he meant was that Taylor had already bounced around the valley, far more than was wise. He’d been let go from the only places where employment existed at all - state and county institutions – prisons, reform schools, homes for the orphaned and disabled, and mental hospitals like Applewood. The valley was filled with such official receptacles, all of them occupying great tracts of the cheapest land in the state, all of them founded and built ages ago to catch the rain of falling bodies, the deluge of people driven mad or maimed by the mills.

Not being allowed keys was Taylor’s cross to bear – not just once, but several times a day. He would stand outside the front door with his empty hand-truck, pressing his nose against the rectangle of shatterproof glass, banging for a nurse or an aide to notice him and open up. Then he would repeat the process when the cart was cargo-laden. He would stand inside the door like a mule in a stall, shifting his feet, itching for the stable keeper to let him out. Keys were for psychiatric personnel only: They wouldn’t ease the rule, not ever. Not even on the day of the big change in North Brannock, the day Taylor executed the Facilities Director’s rearrangement of the rec room.

That move was slated for the lunch hour. Precisely. Until that time Taylor was allowed to do nothing but occupy himself with the daily mandatories. First and foremost, this meant locating every basket or barrel on site and emptying all refuse, which included medical waste. Naturally, the job could never be as simple as in most businesses, where all that was required was extracting a garbage-stuffed plastic liner from the trash container, cinching it, stacking it on the hand-truck and hauling it away. At Applewood the very words “plastic bag” raised alarm. Plastic bags of any style or size were banned, and banned with such fervor you’d think they were as much of a suicide threat as handguns and loose pills.  Nurses and aides confiscated them on sight, plucking them from the hands of visiting relatives innocently bringing in candy or magazines.

But making trash rounds gave Taylor much to sniff for and look forward to. Trash rounds were his passport into each and every patient room, and in the mornings the occupants were typically elsewhere – a third of them off receiving ECT in the clinic, the rest at group therapy sessions in the common rooms of North Brannock. He made a beeline for Melina’s room and knelt to pick up the wastebasket. As he moved past the whitewashed iron headboard, the scent of her erupted from the bed clothes and possessed him. He fell on the bed and sank his face into the sheets. He opened an eye, saw a wisp of dark hair on the pillow and wildly imagined the full braided pelt grazing the skin of his chest, then unknotting and falling like a bower around his face, eclipsing everything else.

                                      ******

Exactly at noon, Janet and the subordinate on-duty nurse, Christine, led the first-floor patients of North Brannock into the dining area, a cavernous space adorned with homey touches here and there – someone’s futile attempts to suggest an eat-in kitchen. As soon as the chairs at the long table were occupied and all the names checked off, Janet locked the dining area door for a solid hour, twice as long as usual. This was in accordance with her instructions from the Nursing Director, to whom the Facilities Director had gone for final approval of the new rec room plan. Although the plan had many elements, such as new shelving and wall cabinetry, what the Nursing Director honed in on were the big space-takers. “The elephants in the room,” was how she put it when she briefed Janet, who in turn briefed Christine.

By far, the largest object in North Brannock was the piano that was never played.

Janet referred to it that way because, in the dozen years she had worked in the cottage, she hadn’t heard the keyboard give up a single sound. In her view, the patients were so sunk in depression that notes couldn’t be heard, or else could be heard so faintly they weren’t worth playing. Christine had a very different theory – that depressed patients dreaded the piano being played because their disease exaggerated all stimuli. To them, the sweetest music would sound as shattering as the loudest thunder.

Taylor had no such hypotheses. He only knew he was supposed to move the piano to where the blue couch stood, and the blue couch to where the piano stood. In effect, he was altering the rec room so that east and west exchanged places.

“Big guy, can you give me a lift with this?” Taylor put a pleading glare in his eye but he already knew Hank’s answer. Hank had struggled up the ladder and bypassed Taylor to become a psychiatric aide; he would do nothing in front of the nurses that smacked of janitorial, and no exceptions. To make matters worse, the head maintenance man had refused to assign Taylor a helper, not even for fifteen minutes, citing the endless budget cuts that had thinned the ranks to a skeleton crew. “Even the exterminator is hardly around here anymore,” he said, and issued Taylor some paltry extra equipment – two flat dollies with wobbling casters – as the very best he could do.

What they called the blue couch was, in reality, two pieces – a long blue sofa and matching love seat, pushed against each other to provide a single wall of seating for six or seven patients. Moving it entailed moving countless satellite objects as well – side tables and floor lamps, Scrabble and Monopoly sets, stacks of ancient, unread magazines dotted with rodent droppings, jigsaw puzzles, Chinese checkers and dominoes. The couch was a heavy, cumbersome piece, but once the two flat dollies were in play, Taylor made decent progress.

The piano, on the other hand, might have been a mountain for the way it resisted him. The Nursing Director was right – the job took up the whole hour. When Taylor finally finished, he wiped as much sweat off his face as he could and rapped the dining area door for Janet, but she was occupied with one of the older patients, taking vitals. Through the thick glass rectangle, Taylor watched Melina at the long table, sipping her tea. Suddenly Melina put down the cup and stared up at him. The look told him she knew he had been doing something more momentous than collecting trash. A message was written on both their faces. The same words - he could feel them in his skin.  

                                                      *******

“Maybe it’s Feng Shui,” said Janet, the morning they heard it. “Maybe we finally got it right.” The chords rising from the piano were stiff and hoarse, as though the sharps and flats were wheezing dust from their undersides every time they were struck. But they formed a melody nonetheless, a song that wasn’t American and wasn’t classical either. “It sounds Mediterranean,” Christine said, and the two nurses dubbed it “The Ballad of Helen of Troy.” There was Melina on the piano stool, nothing around her body but space and high ceilings, her posture confident and her fingers traipsing over the keyboard as nimbly as when she fixed her hair in the tight shelter of her room. She had gone and sat there abruptly, without announcing her intention or asking permission, three days after the instrument had been moved. As for other patients, the impact of the rearrangement on them was alarming, even devastating, and some of them never adjusted. When they had filed out from lunch, several of them stepped into the rec room and became openly hostile or frozen with gloom. “How could they do this?” an older, professorial man said, addressing the piano itself. His moan was cosmic and hapless, the cry of a philosopher whose world had been seized by a totalitarian state and turned upside down.           

At the afternoon staff meeting, Janet, Christine and the psychiatrist in charge of North Brannock reviewed Melina’s sudden behavior change. The psychiatrist, a Pakistani whose M.O was endlessly tinkering with patients’ meds, believed it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We’ve just hit the right receptors,” he said, “a matter of chemistry, plain and simple. Two days ago I changed her cocktail. Please don’t tell me this all occurred because a maintenance man moved a couch.”

“Not the couch,” said Janet, “ the piano…” She could have continued the debate, but chose not to. More important was getting the psychiatrist’s approval of advancing Melina to Level 4, meaning she could be let out to walk the grounds without staff accompaniment. Just helping her with her hair, Janet could tell the girl was ready – and eager too. Instead of huddling on the floor Melina now sat at the window, gazing out at the valley, impatient with Janet if her hands made a clumsy move and blocked the view.

Christine was playing politics too. She got the psychiatrist to okay Melina’s participation, as a performer, at the annual Applewood Picnic. This event was strictly for certain patients, the ones staff felt might benefit from social interaction on a grander scale than daily life in the cottages. All the North Brannock residents qualified. It was held each summer under the trees that fronted the old psychopharmacological research facility, a building that once held high hopes for inventing breakthroughs but now held undisturbed spiders and mouse-chewed texts.

On this same afternoon, Taylor completed his trash rounds with another visit to Melina’s unoccupied room. He had saved it for last, and it paid off. On top of the wadded Kleenex, used teabags and other bits and pieces of flotsam was a perfectly folded sheet of paper. It had one word scrawled on it – Talyor.

He stared at the letters for several moments, blood pounding. Then he unfolded the paper and found a childish pencil sketch of leafy vines.

                                                *******

Then came the bright, searing day they would talk about for years, the source of endless memos and recriminations about standards; as well as the loss of accreditation and precious state funding.

Among the professional staff, blame fell hardest on Christine, for leaving her keys in a place where Taylor could steal them. And worse, for not reporting it immediately. When the Nursing Director ordered Christine’s dismissal, Janet not only accepted the verdict but heartily approved. She had always considered Christine a lightweight, literally and figuratively. Too many years in amateur ballet, too given to flighty theories, too susceptible to distractions like the Applewood Picnic, a therapeutic non-essential if ever there was one. “Event-planning isn’t in her job description,” Janet said. “She’s a clinician – can’t she get it? That picnic was all she thought about for days, and the Greek girl playing the piano…”

                                                            *******

“She was doing so well as a Level 4,” Janet told Hank. “Long walks in the fields, all by herself. I watched her march right to the edge of Greeley Pasture that day, the day of the picnic, again and again…”

“You weren’t the only one watching. Didn’t you ever see the black truck? Well, you couldn’t. Not from your angle.”

Exactly how many trips Melina made with the raincoat might never be pinned down, but it was clear she made several. Each with a wave of permission from Christine, Melina’s reward for dazzling the picnic guests with her music. Each time she started out with the raincoat folded and flat. Each time she went to the same place at the edge of Greeley’s Pasture, where it meets the scrubby woods. Each time she was seen kneeling down for a time, then standing up with the raincoat swollen like a sack, clutching it with both arms. Then she reversed course and returned as swiftly as she could to North Brannock, sometimes breaking into a run.

And only Taylor knew why. Only he knew the feeling from the inside out, from the heart of the one true witness, because that witness was himself. He never revealed this to a soul, not as the officials were banishing him, not as Hank was drumming his face to a pulp. The story was his alone – to tell when he saw fit, or to never tell at all. The fervor of Melina’s fantasy, how she planned every detail, even the time to enter her room on the day of the Applewood picnic. How eagerly she begged him to steal the nurse’s keys. The glint in her eyes as she spoke of the bower she would create - the wondrous colors of the vines she had found and how she would drape them everywhere. Iridescent vines, bursting with glossy green and deep burgundy. In her Greek English it all became something mythical, a time beyond time. And for days she drew and re-drew those things, the child’s sketches of leaves. She pressed them to her lips and planted the snips of paper under the collar of Taylor’s shirts and in the openings between the shirtfront buttons, so they touched his chest.

On the day of the picnic he made his entrance as unobtrusive as possible, parking the black truck a good distance from North Brannock, in the lot behind the administration building. It took several tries with Christine’s ring of keys until his shaking hands found the right one. As he pushed his way through the doorway he expected to hear an alarm go off, or hear a nurse or an aide bellowing his name. But, miraculously, there was only silence and emptiness, except for the jangling of his keys, and it stayed that way as he passed the unoccupied nurses’ station and turned down the hallway that led to Melina’s room.

In the short time Taylor spent standing at the threshold, he glimpsed the meticulous hanging garden she had created. It ran from floor to ceiling, shiny leaves strung over lamps, cabinets, sills and the window tops. But at that point the vines struck him mainly as a background scheme – tangles of decoration. His eyes skimmed them in a blur and narrowed on Melina. She sat on the bed in a white gown, ghostly quiet, her back to him. The perfect braid between her shoulders seemed longer than ever, tumbling so far it rested on the sheets, the last strands of it pointing right at him.

As he rushed to touch it, she turned her head. And in place of the wondrous hair she gave him lips, eyes and cheeks - a swollen, screaming mass of features that only a monster would call a face. He jumped back, and only then, recoiling from the slitted eyes and blistered skin, did he look all around the room and see that the gleaming leaves she had strung everywhere, the Grecian arbor she had promised him - it was all poison ivy.            

                                                    *******

Next morning, a kangaroo court of accusers from every level of the hierarchy descended on Taylor. He held his hand over an imaginary stack of bibles and swore he never harmed a hair on Melina’s head – a claim that was technically true, since all he’d done the entire time he’d spent in her room was caress and kiss her mane, the only part of her that wasn’t raging with toxin.

As for Melina, the moment he left her bed she turned from the window to the wall and became mute as stone. Nothing they did could spark a response, not even when they told her Taylor faced prison for the way he’d violated her. With a heavy black marker they changed her status on the chart at the nurses’ station, sending her all the way back to Level 1. Locked down and supervised. For months she didn’t venture a glance at anything outside the windows of North Brannock, not even a patch of sky or a blade of grass. But Janet was her sun and moon.  On the worst day of the rash, Janet stayed overtime and tended to every last inch of tortured skin, squeezing stripes of jellied anesthetic over the sores and rubbing gentle circles with her thick, latex-smooth fingers. She smiled beatifically and told the others she was anointing Helen of Troy. 

Charlie is a skittish, skinny man, so full of the wind that drives him coast to coast his pants bag out. This ticks off Stella, who says it clashes with the green of his steeply climbing paychecks. “No more hip-hop look,” she announces, and they drive in for a clothing adjustment. “You don’t have enough hair,” she adds.

The salesman at Ari – the only men’s store in the Hub – goes beyond ebullient. The Milano wool Stella picks for Charlie is luscious. Its fine-combed pattern is set in either dark bluish gray or dark grayish blue, depending on whether you hail from above or below the Mason-Dixon line.

To Charlie, who calls on the Coca Cola folks in Atlanta, this is no trifling matter. You don’t walk in to see a cracker at Coke wearing navy, as though you were William Tecumseh Sherman. Not even if all you’re there for is to peddle eyeballs in the blogosphere.

“Nino will be right up,” the salesman chirps. “All you do is stand on the little stool, and he’ll make this fit like your skin.” He palpates a piece of subtle lapel cloth as though it were a sex organ. “Beautiful hand to it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Now something I don’t like is pressure,” Charlie declares, beholding his long tallness in the mirror. “There are two places. One is…”

Nino sweeps in, a small man with a Naples face and a tape measure.

“…there. Where you’ve got your hand.”

Nino has Charlie by the crotch-fabric, which droops off his bony haunches like the sail of a boat at anchor.

Stella speaks right up. This is what they had driven in for.

“Come on, Nino. Do your thing.”

Nino reaches between Charlie’s cheeks and yanks the material higher. 

“That’s a wedgie you’ve got going there,” Charlie whines. “I feel like a popsicle on a stick.”

“Pin it,” declares Stella. “No more clown pants.”

*******

A week later the suit is ready, and Stella proposes making a day of it. She tells Bronwyn to mind the shop. Coke wants Charlie down first thing Monday, and he’s wild. Wild in a way Stella’s never seen. His eyes don’t just bulge, they burn.

“We’ll go to Ari,” she says, “then we’ll do lunch at Yudofu. You can even wear the suit to lunch, how’s that?”

Charlie raves about Coke’s biggest buy yet. Monday will cinch the deal. He wants to wear the suit. She tells him there’s spittle on his chin.

They get a good spot at a meter near Ari’s, but it’s one of those high Boston curbs. Even with his beanpole legs, Charlie has a near plumber’s-butt moment stepping onto the sidewalk.

Inside the store, Stella watches Charlie do his cock-of-the-walk thing, parading up and down the carpet. 

“He’s like that Zegna boy,” Nino says, “only longer.”

“Adrian Brody? If you say so.”

She whips out her purse and plunges into the last signing at the cash register. Charlie, meanwhile, continues aping a male runway model - but on crack, legs pumping triple-time, sashaying haywire towards the front door. 

The very instant she snaps her purse shut, Stella sees something happen to the trouser bottoms of the new suit. Implosion. They sag and bunch at the heels of Charlie’s shoes. Same as they did in the old suits.

“Stop,” she cries, just as his fingers curl around the door handle. 

Charlie bounces back like a yo-yo on jet fuel. She directs him to a couch on one side of the room, and pulls Nino over to the other.

“Unacceptable,” Stella declares. “They’re swimming on him. They’re always swimming on him.”

Nino stares beyond Stella’s shoulder at Charlie on the couch, not uttering a word, his face a timeless study in failure – the eyes so pained Stella fears he’ll garrot himself with the tape measure. 

But there’s a limit to what she can endure too – on this day of all days, when the purse that holds the just-paid suit invoice also contains other documents – a small blizzard of them, bad news in every line - all of which popped into Stella’s mailbox over the last forty eight hours.

One comes from the state institution where her former husband resides, informing her of his imminent release. Just watching Nino’s twisted face revives the night her own was spouse-slammed into the refrigerator door. Stella remembers thrusting her forehead out like a bumper to try and save her nose. She feels a wrecking ball in her chest, swinging like a pendulum, crashing left and right.

But Charlie’s revving himself up for the Coke pitch, his voice keening and careening like a bird’s screech as they peel out from Ari’s. That voice of his bounces off the walls in the cavernous parking garage, where they find the express elevator that soars to the penthouse, and Stella swallows her thoughts, bites her tongue and carves a smile on her face. They emerge and see their reflections in a black pool of serenity, then a hand slips out of a curtain, and they follow it into the smooth-rocked realm of Yudofu, hippest of the hip in this city.

In Japan, Yudofu is an entire cuisine based on tofu. Appetizers, soup, salad, entrée, dessert. Tofu fried, boiled, broiled, braised, steamed. Tofu spiced, soured, sauced, sweetened.  All of it the rarest and most pristine tofu imaginable, sometimes so fanatically procured only the curd that’s been caressed by water spilling across a certain reef in the Sea of Japan is acceptable. 

In Boston, Yudofu is the foodie temple, the restaurant beyond restaurants, and the menu’s holy of holies is the purest of slabs bathed before you – while you sit in a lotus position – in a boiling cauldron just inches from your unshod feet.

But jumpy Charlie is too Coked up on his spiel, too wild grooving on the pitch he will make to ever sit still and cross-legged, and he jerks to his feet. As he does the pants of his new suit desert him, and he trips on the cuffs, twisting like a top. All over the restaurant eyes turn coldly, and Charlie turns too, turns so fast and gyroscopic he stops only when centrifugal force and gravity bring him crashing to the ground, one cheek of his ass wedged in the scalding pot. 

The place rocks with laughter, the help runs over, the half-trousered victim is escorted behind the curtain. Lengthy backroom ministrations ensue. At last Charlie returns to the lotus mat, swathed in a kimono. He raises his chopsticks and even manages a smirk.

He takes one bite of the ethereal spongy whiteness, gives Stella a smirking stare, points the chopsticks at her face and says,” you’ve got a bat in your cave.”

She’s genuinely puzzled. “A what in a what?”

“There’s a booger in your nose. Want me to pull it out with these?”

Something in his face, something in the way he says it takes her by surprise. In that instant - and an instant is all it lasts - the carved smile softens and becomes real. For the first time in all her life, Stella feels overcome by Zen. She realizes why she’s sitting where she’s sitting, and why all is as right as a being could ever ask it to be. She sees she can enter tomorrow in just twenty four hours. But yesterday? Not in twenty four million years.

The bus pushed off under whipping Boston rain, so much of it the windows smelled like wet fish until they hit the cornfields, where everything dried and smoothed out. Denver was the longest stopover, and from there to the state line the only sound around them was passenger snoring and engine hum, so Corinne could stroke Johnny’s dome and talk softly about the future.

There were things she had to say about the past too, things she was still ticked or ripped about. Even now, she considered Johnny a beer-bellied fuck who couldn’t see his toenails, much less the end of the Mass Pike. “Until me, me the Steam City girl, you were like that big old sign in South Station,” she said, “the one right before the tracks that had just four words on it, Albany and the West, like Albany was the end of the known world. Without me you wouldn’t have even got to Albany, would you? Albany! You would have sat there in Eastie, two feet from Runway Three at Logan Airport, and you never would have even stepped on a plane. You would have stayed up in the catwalk with your stinking olive barrels, up there at the top of the goombah line with the forklifts, cracking the staves and pouring the olives down the chute, coming home to me stinking like an antipasto. Jesus, Johnny, you could have had a doctor’s degree in olives. Who else east of the tunnel could tell a Cannon Ball from a Colossal? But until me you didn’t know Arizona from Alabama, for shit’s sake. A gorilla like you, a weekend bouncer at the Marco Vittori Post, nearly wetting his pants over that bullshit cactus story. It’s a myth, that’s all, there’s no such thing as a jumping cactus, a cactus that shoots its spines at you if you come within six feet of it. They were slinging it to you, those cowboys, and you fell for it, cause you were such a Boston-ass dude, such a greenhorn, you and your faht and pahk the cah mouth, Charlie and the MTA… ”

Corinne didn’t bring up the other incident – it was so dumbass and shameful, but she remembered how Johnny’s baggy eyes had bulged, like an elephant having a shit fit over a mouse. The guy in skinny-assed Wranglers who showed them around the mesa in a jeep - the memory was so sharp she caught whiffs of that very guy in the bus fumes…how he’d screeched to a halt at this big rock and scooted off just as she and Johnny climbed out onto the red dust road. Like a freaking mountain goat the guy was – scrambling right up the side of the rock. “Know why I’m up here?” he yelled down at them. And then, after a great, fat silence: “Cause the spot you’re standing on has the greatest concentration of rattlesnakes in the world.”

But in the end, after all the times she dragged him, kicking and screaming, away from the three-deckers and out to the West, it was Johnny who forked over the wad for the trailer, every EE bond they had in the East Boston Five, and the trailer was waiting for them now, just two trailers back from a dead-on view of the craggy Presidio Range. These were the sunset shapes Johnny had slowly come to love more than anything he’d ever known. More, even, than the old giant Madonna statue looking down on the Chelsea oil docks, the hopped-up nags of Suffolk Downs and the garbage barges toting the seagulls up and down the great artery of mercury called the Mystic River.

The bus made its final stop at Steam City, and what was left of the night and the conversation took place at a super-economy motel, the kind Johnny was fond of calling A Nap n’ a Crap. Next day, Corinne hit the local Auto Mile and acquired a Chevrolet Suburban. As the salesman had said, it was a style of Suburban you don’t find any more, the battleship style, built back when they were making the bodies out of steel not plastic. They reached the trailer at nightfall, and there was more talk about the past and the future, a night and a whole day of it, a day of the foghorn-free air Corinne was born in. And then, in a swoop of light and color, it was the future: sunset pulling its blanket of blue and rust over the chilled crags of the Presidios.

Corinne walked until she found nothing in sight with pitted chrome or worn treads, just a straight-on view of the peaks. Then she waited for a breeze, lifted the dome and let Johnny go wherever the air wanted to take him. She was still amazed that a three-hundred-pound barrelhead, a greaser who could eat nails and spit nickels, who inhaled two-pound T-bones like they were communion wafers, could fit so easily in a brass jar. 

We were just out of Williams driving to Flagstaff in the dead of winter in the dead of night when one of us, the driver, shouted the rest of us awake and said he just saw one honker of an elk in the thick snow by the highway come this close to jumping in front of the car, and the whole rest of the way he shat bricks and had the rest of us peering bug-eyed out the windows, scanning the roadside drifts for more elk. “An elk isn’t like a deer,” he said, in this crazed voice. “It’s much bigger, much heavier. It’s like a moose. And if you hit an elk it’s curtains for both sides. You should see cars that have hit elks. They’re totaled, I mean totaled. The cars are so bent and twisted they need the jaws of life to get you out.” Finally, at last, we got beyond the elk danger zone and into outer Flagstaff and we hit the hotel where we were staying, en route to Phoenix, and over fireplace drinks the rest of us, those who had something to say, shared their views or facts or whatever about the subject. “If you see you’re going to hit an elk or a moose,” said another of us, a teacher, “don’t swerve, just go on and hit it head on. If you swerve that’s when the car will flip and you’ll die.” And then one more of us, a dentist, said the deadly thing about elk or moose is that they’re so tall. “You hit an animal that tall and they don’t just smash the bumper and the hood, they come right through the glass and kill you.” And then the last of us, a market researcher, said she had to give us the bad news that even a deer can be lethal. “I know someone who hit a deer, just a deer, and went into a coma for weeks and was never the same again,” she said, “not even now.” It went on and on, this gloom and doom over antlered creatures, and finally we drifted into the restaurant, which surprised us all because it was a tepanyaki bar, one of those Benihana deals where a Japanese chef does this show right in front of your face with knives and a sizzling grill. In walks the chef who turns out to be a hefty American in a tall red chef’s hat who says he was trained by a Japanese expert. We make our choices, all of which had shrimp in them, and the chef whales away on the grill, slashing and slicing, pouring this incendiary oil that makes this eyebrow-singeing ball of flame, and after all the talk about killer elk and deer the swirling flame makes two of us jump back in terror. Finally, at last, the mood changes and swings upbeat when the chef does this circus move with all the shrimps, slashing off their tails on the fiery grill and flipping them way up in the air with the flat of his knife and catching each little tail, amazing, in the top of his chef’s hat. He does this again and again and doesn’t miss a single tail, which leads the dentist to exclaim to the chef he should take his knives and hat up the highway and work in Vegas, where his shrimptail-flipping act will be a sensation. All is pleasant until the teacher goes and asks the driver a technical specific about the law and murder. “Although the outcome is the same,” the teacher goes and says, “is there a difference between the way you guys treat someone who kills a person with one shot, a clean bullet to the head, as opposed to the way you treat someone who kills a person then dismembers him?” The driver, who is a prosecutor, doesn’t even think about it. He immediately replies that there is a vast, huge difference. “The one who kills and dismembers would be treated far more harshly, no question about it, because what he’s doing beyond the act of murder is heinous. He is depriving the victim’s family of any opportunity to pay the victim his last respects in anything remotely resembling a normal way - to even look in peace at the dead body in the casket.” The swerve of the conversation into more gloom and doom throws us all back into such a state of depression we gulp our drinks and get the hell out of there and fly up to our rooms.

Next day, we all scour the breakfast menu, which is a long list, but every one of us chooses the fitness breakfast. We check out of the hotel and open the glass doors and step into a cold slap of air. We look around and sniff the air and see it’s a gorgeous day – ice sparkling everywhere in the sharp sun. We’re all so dazzlingly happy we decide to make a side trip and go stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, free of tourists this time of year and all filled up with sun, nothing but sun, a mile deep.

On the way, we pass the carcass of an elk, covered with feasting crows. Soon the elk is a dot in the rear view mirror and then the flaming sun eats the dot.

When Philly was ten he had only heard about the Nepco man, never even seen him, except in bad dreams in the dead of night. Mornings there was something of him in the kitchen as well. It hovered over the battlefield, the table where Herschel and Bertha bombarded each other like opposing armies.

“What kind of a father are you? The kid and you never play catch, never have dinner. You wake up at three in the afternoon and you’re gone by four.”

“He has breakfast with me, for Christ’s sake. “When I come home he’s getting ready for school.”

“He has orange juice and you have a quart of Miller High Life. You stink of brown mustard. Besides, he doesn’t go to school in the summer. Did you forget?”“I work like a dog, for Christ’s sake. I work twelve hours a night, every night.”

“With slimeballs and shitbags you work. What an example you set.”

“You take the money pretty good. You take it and you run with it to Filene’s Basement. You got a closet as big as my walk-in refrigerator. Who’s the whore here?”

“I didn’t ask for this. You used to work days and come home. You’re the owner. Then all of sudden you … you just went into the night.”

The old man drained the Miller High Life, looked at Philly and rolled his eyes. This was a sign that he wanted to shut things up – so he could drag his legs out of his mustard-stained whites and throw his sore feet into some boiling Epsom Salts. So he could slam a door, grab a little sleep and get ready to go behind the counter again from late afternoon until dawn.

 But the bombardment wasn’t over.

“You know why I work all night every night, rain or shine?”

“Here we go. Want a shovel?”“If I’m not there at four thirty every morning you can kiss the whole place goodbye. That’s when he comes in.”“He?”

“He.”

“He my ass.”

                                     *******

Other fights were wordier, harder to understand, although the subject was always the same.

“Nobody but me talks to the Nepco man, because if they did, you wouldn’t even have a hanger, let alone a closet.”

 Herschel would then launch into a raving treatise on deli economics. He would hammer the table with the empty beer quart and declaim that the core profit item was cured and pickled meats. Not just corned beef and pastrami, but tricky specialty items like rolled beef and spiced beef. The key to making money was to avoid overstocks of these perishables by calibrating deliveries with the distributor, Nepco, The New England Provision Company, and haggling price with their rep, who showed up in a truck every day, pre-dawn.

Their rep. What was a rep? Philly had once heard the old man talk about a cousin who was a state rep. He had an office under the golden dome of the State House. He was the one you called to fix tickets. But this rep, the Nepco man, had a four-wheeled office. It rolled along in the dark carrying barrels of soaking briskets and an arsenal of smoked meats shaped like fat and thin bombs.

Who was he?

“I have a partner, Sherman,” Herschel screamed at Bertha. “He can stuff a cabbage with newspapers and it will taste good, but he can’t even read the English on a can of beans. That’s why he does breakfast and lunch only. You think I can let Sherman the dunce talk to the Nepco man? You think I can let him sign invoices?”

Bertha picked up the empty quart and threw it, shattering, into the other brown beer bottles clumped in the trash. Then she let out a sound, one primal vowel, her voice rising in pitch so it slashed the air much like the exploding bottle. Afterwards, she let the stillness sink in, and she turned and left the kitchen with a hiss:

“He my ass.”

                                    *******

Herschel, Bertha and Philly lived in an apartment so close to the Franklin Park zoo Philly had heard lions roar every day of his life. He knew lions like a Masai warrior. He could tell how the roaring changed tone and ferocity in response to when and how the captives were being fed. Usually their breakfast was huge hunks of horsemeat the keepers would bring around on jitneys. At age fourteen Philly still had this recurring dream, in which the keeper throwing horsemeat into the cage of a huge male lion was really the Nepco man. In the dream the skin of this man was the greenish grey-pink of bad bologna and he wore the uniform of a jail guard. The lion jaws would open and clamp shut on the arm that fed them - except at that point in the dream the limb being mauled wasn’t the Nepco man’s – it was Philly’s, and he would wake up thinking he was covered with blood and crushed bone. He touched his arm and it was wet with blood – until he realized the wet was only sweat.

He had just been through another bout with the dream the day the old man told Philly it was time he earned the price of the orange juice he was drinking. It was seven a.m., the building hot as a jungle, and Bertha had spread newspapers on the kitchen table so it wouldn’t reek like a brewery from Miller High Life spills.

“You really want me to work?”

“With me – tonight. You might as well learn from the best.”

“How late do I have to stay?”

“I’m your ride,” the old man said. “You stay until I go.”

                           *******

A drive in the old man’s fat Nash took them down the pretzel of roads twisting through the park and the zoo. They burst past the hulking lion house, whose granite blocks sweated such an acrid piss-steam into the sweltering haze it outstank the fumes from the old man’s half-chewed cigar. Right next door came the chain-linked sandlots of wildebeests and antelopes. The denizens stumbled here and there in an endless terror-funk, the old man explained, because every quiver of their snouts brought warning of imminent lion attack.

No lover of animal smells, Herschel floored it past the leering giraffes and sneering camels. The Kohns’ apartment sat on one side of Franklin Park, the deli on the other, and Herschel railed it took a trip through half of Africa to travel between the two.            

They parked the Nash out in the back alley, careful not to block a rancid bin of grease barrels. The barrels were hauled off every few days, Herschel explained, by a pig farmer who claimed there was nothing like a few shovels of pastrami lard to make his porkers salivate and gobble up their feed.

Herschel wrestled a rusty latch and a thick metal door swung open, changing the air from humid, hazy and open to torrid, smoky and dense. A great dark stove filled one wall, above it a hanging forest of black, grunge-crusted pans and tentacles of yellow-brown flypaper. Roughly in the center of the sooty floor was a square boulder of butcher block, its top surface worn into a bowl shape like a dugout canoe. This was the meeting table where Herschel and Sherman snarled at each other over a trough of unsold bread pudding. After several moments Sherman shrugged, stubbed out a cigarette, fired up another, and walked out without a word, officially ending the day shift.

“Bread pudding he leaves me,” Herschel said, shaking his head. “After dark, even Santa Claus couldn’t give it away.” He handed off the trough to a red-eyed minion toiling over a sinkful of dirty water and led Philly through a swinging door, out to the counter and a cafeteria setup of fissured formica tables. “This is your battle station.”

*******           

For the next two hours, Philly was affixed to a manual slicing machine, rocking back and forth as the circular blade spat mountains of slippery pink and white pastrami slices. “More?” Philly kept asking the old man, as he filled bucket after bucket. “More,” said Herschel. “This is Friday night. Every boozehound and hophead in the city will be staggering in here with the midnight pastrami fits. You’ll see. You think these animals will want bread pudding?”

Herschel took his pastrami and dumped several bucket-loads into a vat sunk into the steamtable. He prepared a brew – it was brown mustard and hot water from the boiler-sized coffee urn – and poured it over the mass of meat.  “Wait till that gets going,” Herschel said, pushing the submerged pastrami around with tongs. “With the front door open they’ll be salivating in the streets. Even the goddamn lions will wake up.”

Then he sentenced Philly to donkey work in the cellar.

His assignment was to drag beverage cases and sacks of onions, cabbages and potatoes up the steep, dank, wooden cellar stairs. Haul up a couple of crates of sweet pickle chips, giant mayo jars and cherry peppers too. Then swab at the geologic layers of stair gunk with a mop and pail that smelled like two parts vinegar, one part sewer gas. Turning a corner in the cellar, Philly bumped into a large item that seemed out of character with everything else. It was a couch, and a rose-colored couch at that. Its pillows were frayed, grayed and sagging with flour sacks. But because it was rose-colored and a couch, it stuck out like a birthday balloon in a coal bin.

As the evening pushed toward midnight, Philly leaned on his mop, cocked his ears and followed the swelling influx of customers through the sounds of feet and the trembling of rafters. The gathering turmoil grew from sporadic scrapes and shuffles to a thunderous pounding that shook the bare bulbs dangling around his head.

Then the door at the top of the steps squealed open and Herschel appeared in the rectangle of light, hollering down. “Get up here and clean off some tables, for Christ’s sake. They’re starting to take their trays into the crapper.”

                                     *******

Philly was still clearing and lugging when the round Nehi clock over the coffee urns swung its hands past three a.m. He began to fixate on the clock. Every tick was like a step: the Nepco man leaving some dark warehouse and marching closer.

But the old man was off his feet, reveling in a record-breaking night at the cash register. While the lesser countermen toweled the glass showcases with ammonia, Herschel had set up camp in a distant corner table, off alone in an alcove that housed the cigarette machine. He had a heel of black bread, a heel of hard salami, a freshly lit cigar simmering in an ashtray, a couple of glasses and a fifth of Canadian Club. The old man blew a cigar cloud as Philly plodded towards the kitchen with yet another trayful of dirty plates. At the counter he passed a puffy-eyed cabdriver, the only customer left. The cabdriver ordered prune juice and wanted to know if the men’s room had been cleaned yet from the night before.

After the cabbie had come and gone, the place went into a dead zone. A good ten minutes without a single walk-in. Tables mostly empty, one or two drunk or dismal faces scattered here and there, staring into empty coffee mugs.

Philly emerged from the sink area scouting for more dishes. But on this round the old man stuck his head out from the alcove, extended his arm past the corner and waved the cigar. “Take a load off,” he said. “Get over here.”

Philly set the tray down on an empty table and approached the corner of the alcove. Two steps before he saw them, he smelled them. Herschel had been joined by two women, one nearly as old as Philly’s mother and the other not twenty. From one of them, or both, came a fog of perfume and sweat. It was dense and delicious and nauseating, and it mingled with the old man’s cigar smoke and the gagging reek of Canadian Club. Philly felt he was entering not just an alcove but a separate atmosphere, a tiny tropical island rotting in the sun.

Both women had plump, nun-like faces that reminded him of his fourth grade teacher, Miss McCluskey. But Miss McCluskey had worn no makeup and dressed in dark outfits as concealing as a habit, while these women – Sheila the older and Shannon the younger – were as gaudy as huge, fat parrots.

After they had been seated a while, Sheila stood up and tottered towards “the little girl’s room.” When she returned she bent and clasped her heavy, red-freckled arms around Philly’s head, burying his face, nose and mouth in too-fragrant skin and top-heavy green satin. “I’ll just have to take you under my wing,” she said, in a bubbly voice that made him see she was winking at the old man - even though her pillow-arms and breasts had squeezed his eyes totally shut.

“I think she needs some coffee,” the old man said to Philly, but his look said something else – get out of my face. As Philly stood up and headed for the counter, he heard the old man again, booming around the corner from the alcove. “The coffee’s stale. Dump it and make a fresh urn. It’s good practice for you.”

The stainless steel urn was big as a torpedo, and Philly had worked it only once before, with the old man watching his every move. This time he was on his own with the valves and spigots and the steam, sweating over every step. But finally he saw it – the dark liquid filling up the glass indicator tube. As he turned around to grab a mug and saucer, he had the sense that something about the dining area had shifted radically. It was as though the floor had tilted to a different angle. And, somehow, the clock had tilted too – whole minutes dropping out of the circle and marching on without him. His eyes were nowhere near the round face. Yet he felt the hand kick forward and click sharply, hitting its next mark on the dial. He looked up and saw it was four thirty five. He stared idiotically at the face of the clock, as if it were an oracle that might speak.

But Philly had the answer himself, he had it the instant he emerged from behind the counter with the mug of fresh coffee. He had it because he could smell it - a mass of perfume and cigar smoke that swirled outside the cellar door, huge as a swamp. It left no doubt about where they all had gone.

The very thought of the three of them on the rose-colored couch made the cellar doorknob seem untouchable, as though it had turned to molten metal. Philly backed away from it, fled into the kitchen, and threw the mug into the swill.  He shuffled towards a row of crates in the darkest corner of the room, kicked away a mousetrap and sat down – so heavily it was as through he had been thrown down by a wind he couldn’t feel, a force he couldn’t see.

Now he knew everything about the Nepco man. He even knew his name – except it was two names, Sheila and Shannon.

He, Philly thought. The word burst into his mind with a hissing sound. Part of it steam from the dishwashing machine, part of it his mother’s voice.

He my ass.

Irene Lesserman was a nurse, a live-alone widow who ministered to ancient men and women. But she was heavy-hipped, which excited the skinny ten-year-old, Jack Kopinsky, and she wore the white nurse’s uniform, anchored in a hem wide and round as a tent, and she would stand on the grates of her fire escape in the very center of her white, spreading tent, on pillars of white nyloned legs - always gartered, always girdled. This was the view Jack had, the view straight up from underneath, because his family lived one story beneath the nurse. All summer long he took advantage of Mrs. Lesserman this way, violating her with his eyes through the spaces in the grates, cringing tight to the bricks of the building and the green door of the stairwell like a leering troll.

Occasionally Peltz, the spidery landlord who came knocking each month, door by door, for his two dozen rent envelopes, would appear upstairs on the fire escape alongside Mrs. Lesserman. Or he would appear, disappear behind her screen door and his spider arm would appear again, pulling at the white sleeve of the nurse’s uniform until Mrs. Lesserman’s legs would pivot and move towards him, and the screen door would open wider to take all of her inside.

                                                             *******

Jack found a rope, an old piece of clothes line. He fashioned it into a lariat after his mother took him to the Great Rodeo at Boston Garden. He watched the palomino horse, Trigger, and Gene Autry in rhinestones, then he rode the subway and a succession of streetcars home. With his lasso he roped tree limbs and bicycle handlebars and the arms and legs of playmates, when they would let him. Each morning he coiled it, as the cowboys did, and hitched it to the butt of the silver cap pistol, and went down the fire escape to look for friends and enemies. He avoided the inner back stairs of the stairwell. They had a ratty smell that rose from the cellar, where Peltz kept his rent records under a bare bulb and Fishkin, the janitor, shoveled coal into the yawning furnace so the apartments would have hot water. As the heat of the day subsided so did the high cowboy spirits. He went back up the fire escape and hunkered into his spot, the stairwell door to his back and his mother, behind her screen door, sucking in coffee and cigarettes at the kitchen table, as obsessed with her crossword puzzles as he was with the anticipated underview of Irene Lesserman. Further into the apartment, beneath another cloud of smoke, Harold Kopinsky roused himself from his final burst of sleep and fished around in the closet for his deli pants and shirt. Like Mrs. Lesserman he also worked in whites, but nocturnally, feeding fat meat to the sun-starved.

                                                     *******

Silent as an insect, Jack backed himself tight against the bricks. He crouched and drank with his eyes, thirsting to be a chameleon, his body colored and patterned exactly like the bricks. He was so struck by Irene Lesserman’s looming entrance onto the fire escape above, his senses were shut to everything else: the squalling and bickering from other apartments, the mewing of pigeons on the hot asphalt roof, the squeal of a doorknob turning behind him and venomous eyes drilling the back of his neck.

The bite of sharp fingers sinking into Jack’s collar flesh turned his insides from pleasure to pain. He screamed, and the fingers dug in deeper, and he screamed like an animal fighting for its life. The screams drove Mrs. Lesserman back indoors, batting and clenching the bottom of her dress. In the Kopinsky kitchen, the screams ripped Sylvia away from the crossword and the ashtray. She burst through the screen door – so murderously Peltz actually loosened his grip.

 “Little vahntz,” hissed Peltz. “See what he was doing?”

“Give him here. Give him. How could I see what he was doing?” She pulled Jack away from Peltz, her plump paws digging into his sun-browned, scrawny arms.

Peltz aimed a bony finger like a pistol. His whole hand, bristling with knuckles, was streaked black from coal and ridges of hair.“Tell mama what you were doing. Little momser.”

Now that she had a grip on him – and Peltz had none – Sylvia aimed all of her rage at Jack. “What’s he saying about you? What were you doing? You better tell… ”

Peltz pointed a finger that stabbed the air with righteous wrath.“What were you doing with your hands? Where were your hands?”

By this time Irene Lesserman had returned to the fire escape. She glared down through the grate, holding her dress tight against her.

“He knows what he was doing with his hands. Don’t you? And Mrs. Kopinsky, you know when your lease runs out,” snarled Peltz, aiming his words so Mrs. Lesserman could hear him lording it over Mrs. Kopinsky.

Peltz wheeled, pushed through the green door and slammed it behind him. A few moments later he surfaced on the grates above, his spider arms pawing the nurse, his tongue dripping promises of protection and revenge. But by then, Sylvia had dragged Jack into the kitchen, had grabbed the rope from the loop on the cowboy belt and had it bunched and raised in her right hand. She was joined by her husband, who had heard everything. He held Jack for her; held him so hard Jack could barely kick his legs.

                                                  *******

Sylvia gave him his rope back – threw it into the room where he was whimpering on the bed and slammed the door on him. Just touching it brought back the fire of rope-strokes cutting his legs, and the ice-wave of hate that came over him was like camphor, chilling the burn of welted skin. He clutched the rope and ran to the street, sick of hearing himself weep, sick of hearing the two of them yelling at each other in the kitchen, bemoaning the shame, and the odds of whether or not they’d be evicted, cast out by Peltz. He stood in the dust under an elm tree, tying it this way and that, trying to figure out the hangman’s knot they fashioned so neatly in the cowboy pictures. Nearly an hour passed and the knot eluded him, but it dawned on him at last – how could Peltz see my hands? He was behind my back, behind the door.                                                                                                                                                *******

“Peltz knows everyone who works for the city,” his mother said, not even looking up from the stove burners she raked with steel wool. “He knows the Chief of Police. He could put you in reform school. You’ll live in a cage.”

Cells, walls, towers, guards with clubs and guns. Jack began to picture these things and buckle under, a prisoner of fear. Sylvia went back to her crossword puzzle and her stub-filled ashtray. He sat on the floor simpering, cemented in a circumference two yards from her at its widest, tied to her like a chain to a ball. There he stayed as it grew dark, waiting for a knock on the door, deep in a cage of his own making.

Sylvia spread out the newspaper with the half-finished crossword puzzle and set two plates on it. She found a can of salmon, listlessly cut the tin off, forked the pink and gray mass into a bowl and mashed it with mayonnaise. The odor of the fish rose up, bonded with the cigarette haze and hung over the table. She foraged in the bread box for a heel of pumpernickel, then opened the refrigerator and found random, wilting vegetables and a single hardboiled egg.

“It’s all I’m making tonight,” she said, dropping a piece of paper towel and sparse dinnerware beside each salmon plate. “Get up here and eat.”

He sat beside her at the table, picking at the greasy mound, his palate dead and his ears alive. The night had no breeze, not a flutter, and the heat seemed to have risen and grown bloated with the heavy press of darkness. The air was wet as ooze from an infected sore, and the thickness of it gave the summer sounds an echo, so they reverberated, screeched and boomed through the thin walls and the screen door and wide-open windows. The bleat of the crickets had an urgent edge, as though they were warning of something, or ticking off moments on an alarm clock. The radios – and the few televisions - of twenty four apartments were a howling chorus of the damned. Jokes fighting jokes; songs fighting songs. And right overhead were the footsteps, the footsteps of Mrs. Lesserman, ceaselessly criss-crossing the ceiling, faster and faster, as though she were trapped in her own apartment and combing the floor and walls for a crack to crawl though. 

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.            

Nothing counts but this moment, and in this moment there is nothing.

My wife Cathy says the sentence was uttered long ago by some Zen master, and then it echoed around Japan for ages and eventually came to Maine inside the head of Sedge Hanto, the bomb-burned duffer who worked the pumps and such with her down in Beasley’s Q-Hut and Mobil Mart. She says the words sustain her in a moment that’s like no other - the moment in which she has to sign her name to the infamous sheet in the rest rooms, especially the men’s, which is always viler than the ladies.’

Now I’m not saying anyone in the Mobil company, national, would ever instigate such a policy. It’s always some down-the-line dog-ass  trying to win points for himself by squeezing every last ounce, and I happen to know Mobil breaks up its empire regionally into franchises to keep the local flavor over such things as hot dog toppings. Not long after Cathy found her job, some boss of the Beasley franchise, which covers about one third of Maine on the left and a patch of New Hampshire, sent down this clean restroom decree. Ragging the Lysol, plunging and swabbing, the usual stuff, all well and good, but then he went over the top and instituted this public cleanup sheet. He had it printed up and ordained that it be pinned right on the wall of both toilets. In big type it says Restrooms will be personally cleaned and inspected hourly. And then it lists every hour, from 5am on, in a long column with the heading Signature (full name) of person who personally performed cleaning and inspection.

Cathy does eight-hour shifts, sometimes longer, so every day you have these trucker guys with their loads of particle board and flaked fish rolling in to do their business - and reading eight or more times that Cathy P. Tuffley is the one hand-wiping their piss splotches and Hershey stripes off the porcelain rims. In her own handwriting. All that’s missing is Cathy including her phone number, our phone number, and now I’ve finally unlisted us, but that still doesn’t stop the ringing and the breathing in the dead of night. Or the snide abuse Cathy takes when she’s pulling a donut off the rack for one of these drooling dudes and he tells her be sure and use wax paper to touch the donut since it’s going in his mouth.

Nothing counts but this moment, and in this moment there is nothing. I stand behind the bar slicing fruit for Death Dives and fantasize about the moment the big franchise exec comes to town to inspect his inspector. It makes me slice faster and meaner. But it never happens, he never comes, life is never so neat.

When you’ve got to cut as much fruit as I do your mind wanders. The other day I was lopping off limes and wondering how many people’s photographs I’m in. I don’t mean the photographs shot by people I know or Cathy knows. I mean those pictures snapped with no thought whatsoever about me being there as a subject - when someone in Ray-Bans fresh off the slopes just wanders into the Naked Antler with their Canon or Nikon in their ski parka. And then after a beer or three they go clicking off a few shots of the stuffed moose and just happen to grab me in the background, and there I am at the edge of the frame mopping a table or hoisting a tray or capping a ketchup bottle. Back turned, collar twisted, eyes darting or shut tight. Me anonymously, a piece of human wallpaper. It’s the moose’s face they want, not mine; for all they care I could be a dirty tray station sitting there or a row of beer pulls along the bar. But I’m there with all my crooked teeth and nose hairs – in their wallets, their albums, their hard drives.  

They’re all camera crazy, the skiers in winter, the climbers in summer. They’re hooked on one promontory, The Eagle’s Head. Spectacular, they say, and they’re not wrong. Let’s just say our local bird looks a lot more like an eagle than the Old Man of the Mountain looks like an old man. And it gets even spookier in the winter. The way the snow always lies on the smooth upper rock, it turns the eagle into a bald eagle, bald as a Sno-Cone, just like on a postage stamp.

Coming from a land where photography is the national sport, Sedge (orig. Seiji) was a clicking maniac when he came here. His age and the scars didn’t stop him either. He’d hike up and out on some ledge just to get a special angle on the beak. He even strapped on snowshoes and plodded up Eagle’s Ravine, a trail that appears on the maps in a line dotted with jagged arrows, the symbol for most difficult. One bitter day Sedge came off the mountain and I drew him a Harpoon, which he said he preferred to Sapporo or even Asahi. He said he was astounded by the mountain and felt it pulling at him, the way a magnet pulls at a snip of wire. Right then and there he stood up – in that way certain little guys have of standing up and looking so big you feel dwarfed, even though you’re peering down at them.

Sedge stood there and announced that he never wanted to leave this mountain, that he would live right here with us North Country hillbillies until his dying day – even though he had free health insurance for life from the Japanese government. He said there was something about our mountain – something inside, like the magma but not as hot – that did more than just remind him of the mountain that stood at the place where he was born. It radiated something that felt like it was protecting him, he said, like some giant warrior’s shield. For a while he did custodial stuff in the Delmore Inn (pets and smoking allowed – and encouraged), warming the boots of the hunters and such. Then he started buying his Old Golds and tea at the Q-Hut just when they were adding toasted grinders and a third register, and he saw the Help Wanted sign. After he and Cathy got close – because of those sayings of his, all Zen stuff I assume - he said he wanted to die as he had lived. “Like the cold, harsh ice of winter; but also like the green buds that are right underneath, eager to push up and take over.” That’s how Cathy remembers it. That’s what she put in her notebook.

Yesterday, he was burned and urned. More people than you’d expect showed up – Sedge had a following of sorts, but far under the radar. Then a few of us took the long walk and threw the ashes off The Eagle’s Head.

They make a real good machine for slicing French fries. Why can’t they make one for slicing limes? Not that many people know, much less care, how much fruit it takes to get this place through a Saturday night. The hot item is the sixty-ounce bowl drink – we have a whole menu of them – each one a swimming pool of assorted rums. Lolling all over the liquid, like Caribbean hotel guests in green trunks, are these lime wedges, one for every six ounces of liquid. The bowl drinks have these menacing names, all themed after the huge gorge that yawns right under the eagle’s beak and stretches very far below it. Death’s Dive I’ve mentioned. But there’s also Poison Plunge, Tumble of Doom, and a half dozen more. The gorge is my personal choice if Mr. Q-Hut-Exec ever shows up here looking for fun on the slopes. I know the twists and turns, the true paths and the false ones. I can draw him a map that will take him up very slow and down very fast. At the speed of gravity.

Although Sedge had a bit of the Samurai about him, he fought his last battle in the spirit of one of King Arthur’s knights. Ready at the drop of a glove to die for a lady’s honor. The Antler and the Q-Hut were both closed. It was long past the midnight hour and the three of us were at our place – in the living room, if that’s what you want to call it – sipping and smoking. These Jaegermeister goons, big as B-52s, came stomping off the rutted road. They kicked our door, they stuck their tongues out and lapped at our windows. One of them held up a sheet he had torn from the men’s room wall. He kept pointing at Cathy’s signature and roaring to be let in, like the sheet in his paw was his personal written invitation granting immediate access to any and all of her apertures. When things got hand to hand I didn’t have my lime knife but I had a home version that was just as good. A tire iron too. As for Sedge, he did what he could with his 1940’s judo. In the end it wasn’t a blow from outside that killed him, but an explosion from within – a cardiac event, as they say.

At the modest but well-attended cremation ceremony they told the story of Sedge’s earliest home. He was a little boy who happened to be living on the other side of the mountain – not the city side - when the Nagasaki bomb dropped. You’ve seen the story in pictures a thousand times; no need to re-hash it here. He didn’t die in that moment, the moment of the flash and the mushroom cloud and so on. He only suffered leg burns and some radiation sickness, not enough to stop his life.

Elizabeth clearly thinks of Goldberg as some kind of fop, an advertising fruit, and Goldberg knows it, but still he presses on. He fastens the silver tongs to the little cucumber sandwich and lifts it to his plate, just as she has done.

Goldberg knows about tea, too, in his own way. Though he would not presume to challenge her to a tea shootout. He’s on her territory today. This is apparent to both of them.

He’s not about to give this day up for anything. Not for all the tea in China, as he said back at the agency. Ad guys usually get asked to tour hotdog processing plants or cookie factories, period. Ad guys don’t get personal walkarounds in places like the Commonwealth Bibliotheum, whose windows look out on the graves of many a Mayflower Pilgrim and more than a few Founding Fathers.

Goldberg even put on a handknotted bowtie for the occasion. He left the black turtleneck and Prada patent leathers at home. The fopwear.

The last time Goldberg met a lady of Elizabeth’s Brahmin pedigree - granted, she was a different generation, and octogenarian, and less coy, and less stylish, but still – she had this amazing comment to make about Goldberg’s personality, which she saw as devil-may-care and charming.

“It’s because you’re utterly unencumbered by background,” the octogenarian said, her teeth so clenched that the words whistled,

As if all those deserts and all those shtetls didn’t count, thought Goldberg. Not as background.

Elizabeth fits easily into Goldberg’s Ralph Lauren imagery. She is prim, slim, mousy in a sexy way. She wears fitted things of dark blue and white, and tortoise-shell glasses you want to tear off. She has million-dollar ankles and she appears to be divorced, like Goldberg.

As Development Director, Elizabeth presided over the raising of funds for the Bibliotheum’s top-to-bottom restoration and renovation project, a $50 million effort of premier historical, architectural and literary importance. Now that the project, at long last, had been completed and the facility reopened, those special people who selflessly lent their talents to the cause are being thanked in the time-honored Bibliotheum tradition - at an afternoon tea so gracious and grand it is even exceeding Goldberg’s Ralph Lauren imagery.

The ad agency Goldberg slaves for, owned by an ancient trustee of the Bibliotheum, was very willing to lend its talents selflessly to the cause. The owner cracked the whip and not a bill was sent for even one minute of Goldberg’s time. His creative labors on the fundraising brochure and ads, which had appeared weekly in all the Symphony Playbills, didn’t cost Elizabeth and her cadre a nickel. He was indeed entitled to as many scones as he could fit on his plate and stuff in his mouth, not to mention an afternoon in close sniffing range of her Shalimar pulse points.

“You just do what you do, Elizabeth,” says Goldberg, giving his hostess a wave of permission to move beyond the cucumber sandwiches. “I’ll do exactly the same. My strategy is just go with the flow.”

Elizabeth looks up at Goldberg and likes what she sees – at least more than she liked before. He’s past the fop stage, and into the pimp stage, a big step up. She enjoys his joshing over the ridiculous cucumber sandwich, a teeny wimp compared to the gigantic, steaming pastrami sandwiches she associates with Goldberg. No one told her about his days in the deli; she just has a sense of these things. She especially likes his Russian shoulders, and his height. Goldberg’s first name is Jon, but she keeps wanting to call him Jeff, as in Goldblum. They could be cousins, in her view, Goldberg and Goldblum, and maybe they are. An afternoon nibbling scones with Jeff Goldblum or his cousin would not be an afternoon wasted. Not at all.

But the scones, with their piece de resistance accompaniments of lemon curd and clotted cream, are still several stations away, and the tea procession is moving slowly. Elizabeth deftly slides the silver implement under an array of the thinnest slivers of yellow cake. She takes one sliver only, hands the implement to Goldberg, and he apes her exactly. “Go with the flow,” he says again. As he speaks, the corners of his mouth form a sly Jeff Goldblum smile, and Elizabeth reddens, just a smidge, but she never flinches or drops her gaze.

At last they arrive at the lady in the gray dress who officially pours the tea. She sits flanked by two silver sentries, their spouts wafting wisps of aromatic vapor into the erudite Bibliotheum air. “What do you have?” asks Goldberg, jumping the gun a bit - out of sheer hunger, having found it takes forty gridlocked minutes just to inch around the guest-besieged pastry table. His phrasing has cafeteria overtones. Elizabeth does not have to ask such a question. She informs him it’s English Breakfast and Lapsang Souchong.

He pauses, like a traveler at a fork in the road.

“I take the Lapsang,” she says, whispering very close to his ear. “It’s a wonderful afternoon tea. Smoky.”

“Lapsang it is,” says Goldberg, his mind savoring the word smoky, which he connects far more with Elizabeth’s whisper than any snort of tea.

Goodies in hand, Goldberg and Elizabeth wend their way through the merry chaos of the Bibliotheum’s first-floor hall, where tea has been served weekly since the War of 1812. She is a nimble guide, able to swivel through the narrowest passages of abutting tables with the bravado of a first-string tailback. The china and silver dessert-ware seem to be natural extensions of her demure, polished hands. No amount of clattering and tinkling, even at high speeds, comes close to causing an embarrassing fumble. But with Goldberg the tea novice it’s a most different picture. His rangy Russki physique tense and shaking, he grips his little Lapsang cup as though it’s a fifty-pound anvil, for fear of spilling the hot stuff down some dowager’s pearl-draped neck.

“Whew, we made it,” Goldberg says, as they finally enter the small book-lined room Elizabeth has reserved for her little coterie of guests and minions. It’s a choice spot, secluded yet accessible, one she has used often; whenever she’s wanted to have her own private fete within the bosom of the larger, official whoop-de-doo. There are eight empty spaces at the round table. She motions Goldberg into the spot directly to her left, and they brush jacket sleeves repeatedly as they get seated. He wonders if it will just be the two of them, and happily catches a fresh whiff of Shalimar as she turns in her creaky Windsor to point out the Perrier-Jouet chilling on the sideboard.

“First, tea,” she says. “Then our tour. Then the crowd will drift away, and we can have a toast.”

“Or two,” says Goldberg.

“Or three,” says Elizabeth.

Before long they are joined by three members of Elizabeth’s staff, young, single women either too ditzy or too dowdy, and one invited notable, a stern, executrix type whom Elizabeth introduces as Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke, Special Projects Director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

“Louise knows her P’s and Q’s about Washington,” says Elizabeth.

Can I call her Double O? Goldberg wants to say this, but bites his tongue, and then shuts himself up with a forkful of peach tart. He tells himself to maintain decorum. Yet he’s starting to feel like the fox in the hen-house, and can’t wait for the champagne.

As the clinking and clucking fills the air Goldberg gains confidence. He becomes more comfortable, even sentimental, about his pleb roots and commoner education. He’s thinking of noble-savage anecdotes with a Yiddish tilt. Tales from Goldberg as a deli youth. His eye roves from Elizabeth’s tea-moistened lips to the commanding chandelier to the columns of leather-bound books, and it dawns on him he doesn’t even know, really know, what a private library is. The phrase seems an oxymoron. The libraries of his days in the Boston school system all made a big deal about their public-ness, proclaiming it a triumph of democracy. He remembers such places as the dominions of ferocious spinsters – in temperament not unlike Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke – to whom he was always apologizing or paying fines. He remembers being accosted in the stacks and the bathroom stalls by the ever-present homeless denizens of the huge, fortress-like Boston Public Library. Wine-soaked tramps offering blowjobs for spare change.

Years of adroit hostessing have honed Elizabeth’s conversational GPS. She knows where the prattle wants to go before it goes there. Her antennae pick up little blips of Goldberg’s nostalgia. But since she can only be who she is, her mind’s eye renders it as something dreamy and Chagall, which is hardly what’s on Goldberg’s mental movie screen.

“Where did you grow up?” she asks him.

And he tells her. He tells her too much. Shock talk about the deli night crowd. Pimps beating up whores. Drunks pissing in the phone booth. Ugly four-letter words creep into Goldberg’s narrative. He never gets around to the sweet stuff, the daytime stuff, his regular shift after school. The old Russian rag-man stopping by every afternoon for a glass of tea, a glass mind you, and a heel of hard black bread and a raw onion. This is the Chagall part, and Goldberg has it in him, but it’s down too deep, stuck under the Howard Stern stuff.

So she cuts him off nicely, spooning a puddle of marmalade onto his plate, and entices him to hear her “naughty” story of summer midnights at Squam.

“Can I get a refill of the Lapsang first?” Goldberg asks. “So smoky. That smokiness …like a single malt.” He tosses back the dregs of his cup, swishes it through his teeth and ponders. “Laphroiag,” he concludes.

Elizabeth views this alcoholic name-dropping as a little overmuch. And she’s still peeved when he finally returns from the tea station. So much so it colors her story, the whole picture she paints behind the picture. She can’t resist telling it as though she’s wearing white cotillion gloves, and he’s toting a rake and a hoe. There’s this tone in her voice - she knows what it is - and everything comes out more clannish, much more, than originally intended. The subject itself is common enough. Skinnydipping at the lake. But Elizabeth frames it to sound multi-generational, as though she were talking legacy with her trust officer at Bessemer.

She speaks of this wondrous hulk of a boathouse that’s been part of girlhoods and boyhoods in her family “forever and ever.” She purposely spins it into a domain Goldberg feels he might not be allowed to enter, not without a weekend pass from the purebred elders - a clubby mausoleum where the embalming fluid is boat varnish, the spicy reek of it oozing from the spruce ribs and mahogany gunwales of ancestral canoes, rows and rows of them. Elizabeth finds herself concocting both a snub and a tease, just to see what he’ll do with it. And she likes what she sees him do. Instead of faltering, Goldberg gives her the rakish Goldblum closeup, and he seems quite more aroused than put off.

“Can you imagine?” she says. “Midnight strikes and fifteen of us race into the boathouse. Aunts and nieces, mothers and daughters. The youngest is eleven, the oldest is sixty two. And we peel off everything.”

Goldberg-Goldblum raises an eyebrow. Arch and lustful. Elizabeth sees it as an eyebrow erect, and warms to her tale. She depicts the tittering bare-assed run from the boathouse to the lake, the dash and splash, as a spiky blend of Marquand and Boccaccio, and Goldberg gulps the bait. What snags him is the sheer volume of nudity, the flesh-rich tonnage of it all. So many matriarchs and debs and great-aunts and maiden-aunts heaving and jiggling as they prance into the moonlit waters. He imagines them as seven Harriet Beecher Stowes and Louisa May Alcotts. And eight Gwyneth Paltrows, Cate Blanchetts and Kate Winslets. Thirty breasts and thirty cheeks. Elizabeth grooves on his erect eyebrow, and layers detail into the scene - the dames and damsels sporting and squealing, wet and shiny as dolphins.

For the raciest part she moves her lips even closer to his ear, drops her voice and double-checks the other side of the table, because Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke has begun to stir and stare. She’s tall and casts a shadow of discipline, the capitalist Mother Superior, straight out of Southie. The ever-ready minions pick up a vibe from Elizabeth and hit O’Boyle O’Rourke with an ambush of distracting sound. They’re all over her, chirping torrents of flatter-chatter.

A zap of amplified static yanks Elizabeth and Goldberg back to real time. It’s the P.A. system, booming with awards and announcements. When it subsides Elizabeth cheerily pipes up that it’s walkaround time. Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke snaps to attention and rushes to be first in line.

Goldberg, still in his boathouse reverie, dawdles at the table and leaves his Lapsang slowly.

And instead of walking with him, Elizabeth makes a beeline for O’Boyle O’Rourke. They set out together, heels clicking on the new Italian marble.

Next in the little parade come the minions, falling in like ducklings.

Goldberg is mildly surprised, but sees it as something neither here nor there. Guarding the rear is a male thing to do. As they proceed from statue to statue and stack to stack, he has a chance to study Elizabeth from a new angle, and he finds her as comely as ever.

For her part, Elizabeth is solidly in her element, playing her best role. The ultimate tour guide, fluent and assured. To her audience she seems to know the story behind every plinth and page.

She calls attention to a particularly ancient European book, a volume the size of a small tabletop, which she dates at 1483.

“The heat and moisture around this book are under very sophisticated climate control,” she observes. “You’ll note the floor, in this section, doesn’t even have tile. The chemicals in tile are too harsh.You’re standing on a specially-engineered linoleum.”

“Lino,” says Goldberg, showing off that he’s been to London.

“Without regulation of the air and surrounding materials, the book would keep trying to revert to its natural shape. Every part of it is animal skin.”

O’Boyle O’Rourke looms over the book in hushed reverence. The minions, who must know this tour by heart, provide the requisite ooohs and ahhhs. Just loud enough to add excitement without distracting.

Goldberg offers comedy-club irony. “Does that mean if you turn off the air conditioner it will start to look like a sheep?”

When they reach the round peach-walled room that houses George Washington’s papers, Goldberg notices a visual quirk, a coincidence. In her facial bone structure, in her imposing height as well, Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke bears no small resemblance to General Washington – at the time when he was still being painted with brown hair.

Like a hyena, Goldberg skulks on the perimeter of the group as Elizabeth directs O’Boyle O’Rourke’s attention to three empty pedestals.

“Such faces. By Houdon, the French Huguenot sculptor. All three of them busts of children, and charming. They’ve been out for ages, wouldn’t you know it? For a cleaning. They left us months ago.”

Murmurs of disappointment from the minions. O’Boyle O’Rourke lightly touches Elizabeth’s jacketed elbow to show sympathy. Her fingers are long as candles. Goldberg stares blankly at the pedestals.

The tour takes even longer, considerably so, than the trip around the jam-packed pastry table. They dutifully climb every staircase, snoop in every alcove, pry open casements and marvel over the views from every balcony. As evening falls they wend their way back to their little V.I.P. tea room, and Elizabeth, deft as a cruise ship steward, uncorks the first Perrier-Jouet.

Everyone is still standing, milling around in the new nocturnal atmosphere, their own little cocktail party, tres private. Outside in the greater hall it’s a vast emptiness. The tea sippers have gone home. Only a few janitorials are left; methodically clearing and sweeping.

Elizabeth raises her slender glass and opens her lips to speak, but Goldberg blitzes in with a pre-emptive toast.

“To the literary event of the year,” he says, in his brashest Goldblum. Years of headline brainstorming at the agency have taught him that he who speaks fastest and first usually wins the battle of ideas.

Elizabeth nods graciously and takes a dutiful sip. For the whole length of the swallow she averts her eyes from him. A moment later she sips again. And then she throws down another and another, in rapid fire. The minions follow suit. By the end of the second glass the chatter is at the feverish pitch of an aviary.

But now that the revelers are standing and moving instead of fixed in their seats, the positions have shifted. Elizabeth hones in on O’Boyle O’Rourke the way a gull tracks a returning codfish boat. And, inexorably, the two of them float into a semi-secluded corner behind a torchier. Out of nowhere, the minions flutter around Goldberg like magpies, beseeching him for his views on the “commercial” world of branding and guerrilla marketing. Their three-on-one attack steadily pushes him into the opposite corner, his back brushing a gargantuan vase from the China Trade.

Cock his ear as he might, through the din Goldberg can hear next to nothing from the corner that unites Elizabeth and Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke. He does pick up two or three words, though, because it’s what they keep calling each other. “Lou,”says Elizabeth. “Why, Betsy,” says O’Boyle O’Rourke, her once-icy voice now strong and musical, like the left hand notes of a grand piano.

What Goldberg can’t hear, or see, is his own hard fall from grace, the grace of Goldblum, as Elizabeth mentally dumps him like a trash can. She leans close and invites O’Boyle O’Rourke to a private viewing of the Jefferson Davis papers, Boston’s most outrageous heist ever from the trounced and helpless Confederates.

They exchange knowing looks and off they go to the stacks.

Goldberg, by now high as a kite himself, watches their arm-in-arm departure, staring gaunt-eyed from the depths of his Russian despair. Physically he can do nothing to intercede and reverse the jilting, jammed as he is between the Chinese vase at his back and the forward wall of clamoring minions. But with the champagne and the kiss-off he has finally found his Chagall, his muse of tea… and he turns and feigns interest in the pattern of the vase, just to get a little dreaming room…

…He is back years and years ago, back behind the counter with his well-used cloth. Wiping the counter surface at the point where the rising aroma from the tray of just-cooked pastrami creates plumes of greasy steam that cloud the glass and shroud the entire food display. The heat from the long silver steamtable has a hearthlike effect on the frozen, bustling world on the sidewalk outside the glass door. Stung by the record cold, people tromp in, kick snow off their boots and barge up to the counter. They seem to derive nourishment just standing near the simmering trays and breathing. They breathe hungrily; the air is so filled with food.

To follow his scent-memory, Goldberg needs peace and quiet. He makes a restroom plea to the minions and they let him stagger away. And why not; Elizabeth and O’Boyle O’Rourke have safely vanished, eloped into the labyrinth of books and nooks. With all the ducts, cubbies and passages, it could take a search party all night to find even a wisp of Elizabeth’s Shalimar.

Alone at last, Goldberg plunges into a vortex of silence. He reaches the center of the great hall of tea and talk, now a mute sea of oak and marble. The tables have been broken down, the last cup put away. Like a skiff in a squall, the ad man lurches towards the far end, and pushes through the same dark doors the help used when they were clearing the saucers and crumbs. In the shadows he makes out the familiar shapes of a commercial kitchen. Even though his eyes are fuddled, his hands see precisely. They take him to an island of butcher block, and quickly locate the spot where years of slicing and dicing have worn a trough. This is where he rests his elbows and shuts his eyes completely.

And the instant the eyes shut, the steamed-up deli door opens; letting in a swift howl of arctic cold, a whip-snap of tundra air that may have come all the way from Siberia. With the swoop of wind comes a person, the old rag-man’s wife, huddling into her black coat, moving slow as a dirge.

The wife was not a regular like the rag-man himself, who was in the deli every day for his peasant’s meal. Goldberg saw him as the only man in America whose snack of choice was a whole uncut onion, an axe-hard heel of black bread and tea in a glass. Tea, not in a dainty cup pinched by two fingertips. But in a glass, a big, scalding glass; around which you wrap both hands, to warm them from the bitter cold, the Tolstoy winters of the rag-man’s youth.

When the rag-man came in for his usual snack – and he had not been in for a good two weeks – it was always the slow part of the day. “Sit,” he would say, and Goldberg would take a load off, light up and join the old bastard. “How do you eat those fucking onions, Mr. Karpovich?” Goldberg would say, blowing Lucky Strike smoke all around the words.

“Good,” is all Mr. Karpovich would answer, grunting the word and smacking his lips. And he would pick up the onion like an apple, chomp it, tear off some bread and wash it down with scalding tea.

To actually watch this onion eater do his rag-gathering work, Goldberg had to resort to imagination. Use it as a pictorial tool, a mental paintbrush. There were no huge, snorting draft horses anymore, no more grizzled men in wagons rolling through the cobbled street calling out, “Rags, rags.” The cobblestones had been paved over. The rag-man was a retiree. Karpovich rode to the deli each day in the street car. It was the only place he ever went, his wife tells Goldberg - on that frozen day she plods in alone, ushered by the wind, and wraps her thick work-hands around the steaming glass of tea Goldberg pours for her. A bag of orange pekoe. A twist of the handle on the stainless steel urn, tall as a boiler. Tea in a glass, which holds twice as much as a cup.

They sit a table in the deli slow hour, the twilight before the dinner rush, and she blurts out whatever comes to her mind about the rag-man’s burial, how the diggers had to break the hard snow to find a little dirt; a handful of it for her to throw on the pine box. She speaks a Yiddish English, a language in itself, and undoes her tight kerchief – perhaps to let the words come more freely, perhaps to simply wipe the steam from her glasses.Watching her swollen fingers fold around the tea glass and clutch it, Goldberg remembers marveling at the sheer size of the rag-man’s hands. How they seemed to be from another time and place, big as anvils and hard as hooves. Hands of a monument; but not carved or cast, nothing so elaborate. Merely born.

As Goldberg sits with the widow, mourning the rag-man, thinking of the big hands on the reins, he feels a cloudy connection with other reins and other hands, all the rag-men who preceded Mr. Karpovich. He sees a vast wagon train of rag-men and huge horses, stretching back into measureless time.

This is the image Goldberg takes with him as he finds his way out of the Bibliotheum and heads home to his high-rise condo. It is what he knows about tea.

As Jacob Kopens emerged from the soup of foam and sea-spinach a large man came over a sandy rise and headed straight for him. To Jacob he was a complete stranger, a man he had never seen on the club beach before, never seen anywhere. But there was nothing about him that remotely fit the word trespasser. The man moved with such aggression he seemed to possess every inch he walked on, no matter what any club deed said. He was in a plain white t-shirt and battleship gray swim trunks, and his legs were menacingly overbuilt, a human being with the underpinnings of a draft horse. The man towered over Jacob, and he had a facial feature even more outsized than his legs. His forehead was more prow than brow. A white brush-cut shock of hair accentuated it, like an ax blade.  He bore down on Jacob, a ram-headed cruiserweight looming over an eagle-nosed welterweight.

“How’s the water?”

“Fine, but a little scuzzy.”

“Scuzzy. How so?””Oh, temperature’s fine. But because of the storm, lots of seaweed. So it feels scuzzy on your skin.”

“Scuzzy. Really?”

“Well, yes. Really.”

The large man’s brow pushed out at Jacob like the bow of a surfacing submarine. The mass of bone and skin formed a dark, inquisitorial hood over his eyes.

“That’s what makes a beach a beach,” he announced. “You must be new to this area.”

New was a word Jacob didn’t like to hear. Not after having fought as hard as he had fought to be taken into the club.

“No, not really,” he said.  “I moved here in 1984, and I’m from Boston, born and brought up there. I’m a native New Englander.”

What Jacob didn’t say is, are you a member of this club? I am.

“Really. Well, seaweed is what makes a beach a beach. I hunt up in Maine and come back down the coast. There’s always seaweed. That’s the charm of it.”

“Charm. Is that what you call it?…”

The man shook his head gravely, as though he were in deep disagreement with Jacob over a point of politics. Or morality.

“Well then, you should jump right in,” Jacob said. “You’re really going to love it today.”

He extended the sentence by four words - you son of a bitch –  spoken only to himself - as he shook the man off and paraded away over the dunes.  He chugged up the planked pathway to the old shabby-chic asphalt circle, cratered like the moon, and began the leg home over the old town road.

Normally, the bracing sea water worked like a mood-changer on him, a natural shock treatment. But today he stayed on edge, fretting over minutia, all courtesy of the six feet of feces in the plain gray trunks. A beach fascist. He had never met the species before, and having met him he couldn’t forget him. Not him in particular. But everything he stood for. It lingered like Hurricane Isabel’s last dirty gust. Not the mood he wanted to be in with the son and the new flame driving up.

So the goal of the day was to get happy or else by dinnertime. Joyce expected no less. The son blew in from his wandering once in four seasons or so, maybe, and he was even overdue on that. As Jacob speed-walked he repeatedly looked up into the clear, strong blueness, seeking solar assist. But each time his eyes came back down they bumped into a piece of Isabel’s debris.

Where the road turned away from the church steeple and plunged into the Burnham Woods – where what was left of the old townie population still lived, in their shacky houses with tar-paper peaks and wood-burning stoves  - he had to climb over the trunk of an oak whose fall had squashed two roofs in one blow, totaling a worm-eaten single-car garage and the old Dodge pickup sticking out of it. The faded gray Dodge was a dead-on color match with the gray swimming trunks of the seaweed chauvinist, not a good coincidence. It made him obsess more darkly over where the lout had come from, how he could walk the club beach as though he owned it, all without Jacob ever having seen him at the club. It disturbed him, too, how this frenzy called Isabel had reshaped the tall old-growth trees, snapping and ripping up so many of them there was a canopy of tangled branches overhead, blackening everything and giving the whole place the look of a medieval forest. Not New England but some schwarzwald. On this stretch of road – well below the hill that Jacob’s home and lawns dominated - the human structures were humble and few and far between. Rickety houses and camps that, in the witchy shadows of the crippled trees, knocked the lenses of his mind off kilter – and gave him an alien’s sense of entering a foreign domain, some third-world Appalachia or Transylvania in a new continent or hemisphere, for the very first time.

So the old boyish spine-shivers were already there when Jacob’s left sneaker hit something both pliant and stiff. Before he actually saw the big dead crow his feet were in the air, twisting and jumping to avoid further contact. When he hit ground again he had cleared the bird corpse, but stumbled so violently his bare shin hit the feathers and felt the toughness of the muscle and bone below, the presence of a true chest and shoulders – things he had never associated with any creature light enough to fly. Reflexively he slapped his leg, batting at the invisible demon presence of rabies and cadaver germs. Then he saw more – a garter snake cutting graceful S-curves, not ten inches from his right heel. He and the snake froze at the exact same moment, and the creature did something he had never thought was even in a garter snake’s repertoire. It coiled and confronted him, head aimed like a pistol and tongue flicking defiance, a bizarre skinny imitation of a rattler on red alert.

Even breaking through the Burnham Woods and returning to his property, the greatest home of his life, even getting inside the gloriously arching mahogany door gave Jacob Kopens no sense of sanctuary. Not today; not after the bastard on the beach. He escaped upstairs to the shower and turned the sleek controls until the downpour was scalding, vaguely hoping the torrent of heat would burn away the dark thoughts, the way the ocean sun burns off the morning fog. As he toweled and dressed he could hear Joyce addling the cook over menu and table settings for the evening. They had plans for a quick lunch together but even that was impossible. He had hardly popped an olive in his mouth when the bell and the big dogs went off at once, the big dogs whimpering like spaniels, reminding him that today was the day the disaster afflicting the great room would be diagnosed at last.

Dan Gannett, the architect who had designed Jacob’s grand door, and every last inch of the massive rehab, had pronounced the sickness in the beams to be outside his competency. Over malt with Jacob at the club bar he had said, “we can’t solve this alone – you and me and The Balvenie. You need a structural engineer, the best in the business. You need Stanley Orne.”

“I want to warn you,” Gannett had said as the club valets brought around their cars – and Jacob would remember and replay the warning as if he had it burned into a disc - “Stanley Orne isn’t a Balvenie man. He’s more old school, straight rye and a beer chaser, a boilermaker kind of guy, and he looks it. But he knows his shit.”

Like a man possessed, Jacob ran from Joyce and the lunch table and gripped the hand-cast brass pull of his proud door. The wide mass of mahogany swung open, and now he stood face to face with an all-too-familiar man –  that man; the sub-human who had roiled him on the beach about swimming and seaweed. This time, the draft horse legs were hidden under canvas pants, but the forehead that loomed like armament was as battle-ready as before.

In their shared moment of recognition, Jacob watched the visitor’s brow stiffen and jowls redden, just as he felt his own skin pull tight and white with the frost of contempt.

“You don’t know my name, do you? It’s Orne.”

“I know the name,” Jacob said. “I didn’t know it was yours.”

He held out a hand for Jacob to consider shaking, but it seemed as much a challenge as an offer – as in touch me, if you dare to.

Jacob considered a joke about orne, ornery to lessen the tension, or perhaps intensify it, but dropped it for no other reason but contempt. He brushed the extended paw and inched back from the threshold. This Orne had ruined his morning; why should he make Orne’s entrance to his home even one hair easier?

He threw Joyce a dark look. She caught it and nimbly brought her usual greeting flurry down several registers, turning it to an exercise in mere diplomatic politeness. With a flip of her cornsilk hair, Joyce could turn from hostess to helmsman to hellion. Her people came from the sea, just as Jacob’s had once come from the desert. Joyce’s father had been the club commodore. But even so, Jacob had had to claw his way in, winning votes one by one, always doing this or that to smooth his rough edges. His given name, after all, had been Jack Kopinsky … a name from the days of phylacteries and stuffed cow’s gut and chicken neck. The deli days from the old pushcart part of Boston, the part these North Shore clubbers hardly knew existed. Jacob’s ladder … that’s what he called Joyce. His shore wife, who’d smashed his old city-sidewalk wife like a thundering wave. And now he had a home and lands he called Burnham, trumping the very woods of the townies.

Orne acknowledged Joyce courteously, but did it all without managing to hint at a smile. Then he became businesslike, fixed his hands on his hips and aimed his brow down the hallway like a surveyor’s instrument. Although the entire reason for Orne’s visit was the great room, they moved towards it at the glacial, hateful pace set by Jacob. When minutes had passed and they were still within sight of the mahogany door, Orne made a digging comment, and bluntly turned his head Jacob’s way to show his words were meant for him. “If we stand here too long,” he said, “it all might fall down.”

“Mount Rushmore will fall down first. My architect made me that promise.”

 Old school, boilermaker kind of guy. Who was Gannett kidding?  Orne was a savage, a bully. Right under Jacob’s Galicia slate roof, Orne pulled out that word - McMansion - to describe the space he was standing in.

“Snazzy door you put on. What were you thinking? – new knobs on an old actress?”

It was as if the morning on the beach had never ended. The bile surged in the pit of Jacob’s stomach, sending waves of fire up his gullet.

“We’ve got a job here,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

They entered the great room, the capstone of Gannett’s magnificent revision of a hulking townie wreck, the biggest Burnham Woods relic ever condemned by the building inspector. Orne cast his eyes up and down and around, finally fixing them on the tortured beams. “Did you retain anything from the old house?”

“You’re looking at them,” Jacob said, waving his hand at the beams. 

The engineer moved from the center to the periphery. He took measurements, made a few cuts in the wall to look behind the blueboard, and scribbled his calculations on a wadded bar napkin produced from his back pocket. As he went through the numbers he thought out loud, muttering. “You have a wall, you have a roof, you have pressure per square inch. If it were blood pressure, you might be dead.”

Orne took delight in proclaiming his diagnosis. The beams were twisting, ripping and heaving from stress he described as dangerous in the extreme. The PSI was unacceptable. The word he used was shear.

“Like the blades of a scissors,” he said, “One force from one direction, the other from the opposite direction. Together they shear the beams, like pieces of paper. This happens quickly, the beams can go just like that, no warning whatsoever. Your McMansion has overloaded them…”

Jacob wanted to say,“you’re overloading me - with this bullshit.” Instead he sucked in his hate and hissed, “And what if I don’t believe you?”

Orne narrowed his eyes. “Shear gives no warning. But you’re a lucky man. You have your warning. From me. I’ll send a full report to you and your architect.”

Orne made his exit like a storm trooper, thumping down the hall so loudly the paintings shook. On the way he noticed the kitchen wall, slashed by the fury of Isabel. The storm had thrown a maple limb against the house, slamming the wall so hard the phone had flown across the room like a catapult had hurled it. The receiver struck and shattered one of Joyce’s favorite pieces, a China Trade bowl originally brought over from Canton by one of her sea captain ancestors. The wall’s paint and plaster bore a long fissure, jagged as a lightning bolt.

“That wall …” The engineer stopped dead in his tracks, like a lion considering prey. “That wall was where my father kept his guns.”

And without further word Orne loped for the arching mahogany door. He reached it before either Jacob or Joyce caught up to him, and he didn’t wait on ceremony. He twisted the knob in his big right hand as though he were opening the main valve of a steamship’s boiler, and he barged over the threshold. The engineer walked away without once looking back, and whether he planned it or not, he slammed the door in Jacob’s face. The slamming wood actually grazed Jacob’s nose; for a moment the intricately finished mahogany could have been blunt steel, could have been the door of a prison or a vault.

“These townie men, they have their gripes,” Joyce said, “but don’t let it rattle you. Why is it your fault his parents couldn’t afford the taxes on their own house? Three centuries in America and what did they do? They dug clams.”

“He’s not a clamdigger. He’s a structural engineer. And he still sees his father’s guns hanging on our wall.”

“He’s a clamdigger to me. I can smell the pitchfork and the muck.” Joyce flipped her flaxen hair. “Now go be the old Jacob and call Gannett, and let’s get a plan for those beams.”

Jacob did indeed want to call Gannett, but only because he wanted to verbally kick his ass like a soccer ball. Blowing the mathematics of beam stress was bad enough. But on top of that he’d given Jacob a problem beyond architecture. A problem worse than buried hazardous waste or termites. He’d given him Stanley Orne.

“We’re in a club. Our club. Why couldn’t he send us someone who’s in the damn club?”

As he spoke he watched the blue in Joyce’s eyes turn from the color of sky to the color of steel. Whenever this happened he understood, from a place deep in his gut, what the term blueblood really meant. It meant that every drop in Joyce’s veins could turn blue as cold steel when the circumstances required it; when that which she considered hers was being threatened. As long as Jacob was in the category of that which was hers, this show of blood was a good thing, a thing he could welcome.

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “The club, the club, the club. Twenty years ago you weren’t talking like that. Were you? You, Jack Kopinsky?”

“Why would I? I was an outsider looking in. Through the glass of my father’s pastrami counter. But you fixed that. You and the Commodore.”

“Nobody wanted to be in the club more than you, Jack. You worked it like a man running for President. You changed your name for it. Your name. And I didn’t even ask you. I never would.”

“I didn’t change it. You’re dead wrong. I adjusted it, I gave it a new shape.” He gave a bitter little laugh and brushed his hand over his nostrils.  “It was like a nose job.”

He stared into her face, searching for a hint of détente, a faint mirror of his grin. But the blue steel didn’t bend.

“It’s still my nose,” he said. “It’s still me. I’ll always be me. And I mean it.”

He had wanted the mahogany door. He had wanted mastiffs, and still did, even though now he recognized his choice had been driven by perception and not reality. The beasts proved to be fey, fussy eaters; they whined and were disease-prone; they crippled young at the hips. He had also wanted an early Mulliner Park Ward Corniche, the Rolls of Rolls, and Joyce had indulged him, even though she knew this was the car of heavyweight boxing champions and gutter entrepreneurs.

Jacob Kopens sat thinking of these things, the stupid minutia rich people obsess about, as Joyce and her cook snipped the watercress and chose the candlesticks. He sat in the gathering dusk opposite the wall that had disgorged the phone, staring at the jagged scar left by Isabel, the long lightning-bolt of a crack that glared back at him like a gaping fault line. He had combed through the town phone books, but he had found no Orne listing at all, not a trace. When the huge house made a sound in its bones, any sound in any room at all, Jacob heard it as a growl or a groan, a bestial utterance he connected with the storm-mangled woods and the tribal rage of Stanley Orne.

Tribal was his word for the nausea that gripped him, the sense of vertigo he felt even though he was up no further than a kitchen stool’s height from the French-polished teak and ebony floor, Macassar ebony. In America you could change tribes; that was what America was all about. You could keep your right foot in one tribe and plant your left in another. Do that in the Congo and they’ll nail your head to a tree. In the Congo, they’d hunt you down. But never here. Or so he’d thought. But he had never accounted for the Orne tribe, the evicted ones; and now he saw Stanley Orne more as structural avenger than structural engineer. He saw him as the raging townie exile stalking the dunes and the woods torn up by Isabel, finally getting his chance to crash inside the hated mahogany door and call his chits. This, the call, was what Jacob felt in his skinny legs. The bony thighs were crossed tight as blades of a scissors, shivering.

Night fell and the son came to dinner. So did the flame, who turned out to be a brown boy with sharp, painted nails. Joyce was cordial and her eyes stayed steel blue, inscrutable as the edge of a dirk. Jacob’s vertigo worsened. The sense of staring down from a fearfully nauseating height afflicted him, even though he was only seated in his customary Chippendale at the table’s head. He looked at the brown boy as if he had emerged from somewhere under the earth, blasted out through the crack in the wall by a demonic force. The plan was for dinner at home and late nightcaps at the club. He thought of brown-boy fingers and painted nails passing under a gauntlet of hating eyes: the Commodore’s comrades, with their blazers and Nantucket reds. As he sat and sipped he could feel the foreshock of tribal catastrophe vibrating the rails of his Chippendale. It was even making its way across the teak and ebony to the panels of the mahogany door.

Now he had a name for it too. Shear.

Blodgett couldn’t resist those clams. He was a pig for them. On any given night he’d go by the kitchen raw bar ninety, a hundred times. At least three of those times he’d grab a juicy, just-opened cherrystone and suck it down before Gus the Shucker even noticed. Waiters were no more allowed to eat clams, oysters or shrimp from the kitchen than they were allowed to help themselves to Stoli or Wild Turkey from the bar.

Blodgett acquired his own black suit, his waiter’s tux, at Keezer’s used clothing store in Cambridge. The head waiter, Bobby, gave him no choice in the matter of career apparel. “Fredo’s is a class place,” he said. “We all wear tuxes. You put your little ass in a tux if you want to work at Fredo’s.”

Blodgett considered himself an actor at the time, which meant he took a class or two at B.U. or Emerson extension, paid to have head shots taken and showed up now and then at auditions for local commercials and industrials. He had a couple of screen credits but had yet to be cast as a principal player; he was still waiting, and longing, for the camera to look on his handsome face for at least a full second - while he spoke a real line.

He told his acting friend Erica - the one who made him pose for her, oiled all over and stroking his penis - that he looked forward to wearing a tux each night because it made him think of English plays and films with butlers in them. “I’ll be the butler of Fredo’s,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Erica frowned with those pouty, princess lips of hers. “Phil the butler. It doesn’t sound right.”

“Then I’ll be Blodgett,” he said. “Blodgett the butler.”

So it began. Just Blodgett. And he joined the black suit brigade. French-serving the vegetables. Boning a whole sole calabrese. Swiveling around the tables like a matador with his little towel. He had the waiter’s gene. Working when the rest of the world was partying. Groveling suavely for tips on nights like New Year’s Eve, those American ceremonial nights when all wait-people are left out and very alone. De-shelling the lobster for New Year’s couples and lovers. Fussing foppishly over the bananas flambé while the girl gropes the boy under the table. “I wait,” said Blodgett, assuming a Shakespearian pose in front of Aldo, the half-wit dishwasher. “I wait, therefore I am.”

“Fuck you,” said Aldo, plunging both bony arms into the gray, greasy water.

Every time Blodgett put on his well-worn tux he could smell the armpits of the last three men who had owned it, and no amount of dry cleaning could erase the stink. It was the penalty for buying Keezer’s absolutely cheapest, most-used model. But Bobby had told him not to go overboard. “You’re only going to get it stained with lasagna anyway, honey,” he had advised, and sashayed away with his armful of menus.

After just one month on the waitstaff Blodgett left his roach-ridden Chelsea rooming house. He was a convert to Little Italy and the waiter’s life. He moved to the North End and to the domain of a new landlord, some Baciagalupi who lived off the rents squeezed from three tomato-stained tenements. Blodgett’s place was right across from an Italian butcher shop, where the window was crammed with skinned lambs and rabbits strung up for Easter. It made sense to be there, just around the corner from Fredo’s and a stone’s throw from the other Italian restaurants too, just in case things didn’t work out. The apartment Blodgett found was a pre-urban renewal classic; so small the toilet, sink and stove were all in the same room. He could piss and fry an egg at the same time.

The waiters were fed at five sharp, giving them ample time to finish and set up for the dinner rush. Lino, or one of the other fat-armed cooks, would do up a trough of baked ziti, always overcooking it because he had better things to think about. The waiters would line up with plates and the cook would shovel and dump, distributing the burned ziti more in the manner of a zookeeper than a chef.

Carrying his ziti plate, Blodgett would always do a sly detour by the raw bar, but there were times Gus would catch him in the act.

“You like a fucking seagull, stealing clams from the boat.”

“What’s a clam to you, Gus? One lousy clam.”

“If I had a cleaver I chop your fucking hand.”

But Gus would always relent. “Take your fucking clam. Fucking seagull.”

Among the black-suits was one genuine black-shirt, an old Neapolitan they called Dutchy, after the Italian Duce, because he was a major fan of Mussolini and his causes. This meant Dutchy after all these years was still fighting the Ethiopians, whom he saw as all the African people walking the face of the earth, including every last black living in Boston. “Mussolini, he clean ‘em up,” Dutchy said to Blodgett. “He come here, make ‘em all into soap.”

“Mussolini’s dead, Dutchy.”

“You think he’s dead? Not dead around here.”

That very night, Bobby steered a party of Harvard professors to Dutchy’s station. The academics all loved Dutchy for his age and his humbled English; he was their peasant Methuselah, straight out of Fellini. It made them feel they were more in the grottoes of Italy than a plastic booth nine hundred feet from Boston Garden, and they always went with his recommendations, dishes he claimed weren’t on the menu.

Blodgett heard Dutchy say to the eldest prof, “hey, tonight you get Steak Africane. Lino make it for you special.”

The whole party ordered it – tenderloin in a black butter sauce, deep and dark.

“See, I serve them niggermeat, a la Africane,” Dutchy said to Blodgett, stacking his tray and pushing through the kitchen doors. “Make Mussolini proud.”

In front of the professors he did a little bow, sized up the generous tip possibilities, and ordered Blodgett to run back for sides of linguine vongole, on the house.

“Make it al dente,” he hissed. “Not the fucking steamed shit in the steamtable.”

Blodgett did as he was told and even helped Dutchy clear the plates, dumping the uneaten Steak Africane in a doggie bag. At two in the morning he closed up and left the North End for the South End and the Fenway. He followed a small rat into a Symphony Road apartment house and shared the contents of the doggie bag with Ollie, his new friend from the Beth Israel Hospital film. The B.I. was doing a twenty-minute industrial for staff training. A down and dirty production; no union amenities, not even a box of free doughnuts for the cast. Blodgett and Ollie were playing orderlies, chosen at callbacks under the usual Oreo strategy: one white youth and one black, both equally handsome, both equally stuck in jobs spilling piss and shit out of bedpans.

“You’re eating niggermeat, you know,” Blodgett said, swigging a fat hit of jug wine. “That’s what he calls it. I mean it.”

“Tastes good,” Ollie said, his mouth full of the tenderloin. “Tastes like me. Can I visit you at your job some day?”

“You can go anywhere you want. They’re not all racists like Dutchy, you know.”

“Yes they are,” said Ollie. He grabbed the jug and thrust the neck in his mouth, like a gas pump into a tank. “But I want to see the motherfuckers for myself.”

They wound up back in the North End, both sleeping in Blodgett’s dwarf apartment. At noon the next day they trudged across to the Café della Sport - to pry open their eyelids with double espressos. And if all the other customers’ eyeballs had been bullets, they’d have been shot dead a thousand times.

“It’s 1986,” said Ollie. “But in Little Italy it’s 1886.”

Blodgett couldn’t believe it. “You can stay with me all you want,” he said. “You got a rat in your place.”

“It’s not a rat. It’s a large mouse. And if I stay with you I might wind up cooked in a Calzone.”

“Calzone a la Africane.”

After espressos and biscotti they made their way to the hellish Auto Mile in Norwood, where Blodgett handed some huckster on a windswept lot all the tips and wages he had to his name. In return he and Ollie chugged back to town in the lemon of lemons, a kicked-around, rusting MG roadster.

“I wanted an actor’s car,” Blodgett said. “It’s the best I could do.”

“You’re not an actor,” Ollie said. “You’re a waiter.”

Blodgett had one good reason, one only, to justify the midget car. It was like his apartment. Sized to fit cramped Little Italy, the fruit-strewn alleys and backstreets that were skinny as capellini.

As it turned out, the initials MG were significant. A portent. He spied them that very night, embossed on a cigarette case of phony gold. Mando, the head of the back room, stole into the storeroom where Blodgett was sneaking a break among the onion sacks, trying to cop a few minutes of peace away from Dutchy, his dictator. Mando slid out the gold-toned case with his spindly, tobacco-yellow fingers and lit up.

“Clam boy,” Mando said, and muttered something rank about pink, juicy cherrystone clams and the female sex organ. With a shrug, Blodgett suggested the raw, open clam could also be compared to the male baboon’s ass.

Then he asked, “You slow tonight too, Mando?”

“Slow, fuck yes. I can’t live on this shit.”

Blodgett asked him what the G on the cigarette case stood for.

��My last name. Fuck, what you think?�

Mando was the waiter who ran the back room the same way Dutchy ran the front room. They were the two field generals, and the other waiters were the troops. As for Bobby, he talked a big game up front, the day Blodgett was hired, but in reality he was head waiter in name only. He bossed no one, because he dished and swished too much for Nicky, the big boss, to take him seriously. Bobby was more like the male hostess than the head of anyone, lisping and hugging the menus to his chest as he wiggled down the aisle, leading the parties to their tables.

“Hey, clam boy,” Mando said to Blodgett, “you suck one tonight yet?”

“Had three tonight. Gus was in the walk-in freezer digging out shrimp. I could have had six.”

Although Mando looked like a pimp he was actually a family man, a career waiter with four kids. He worked every split shift, sometimes seven days a week, and every holiday. Mando was a pro; he could carry six zabaglione up his long arm. So Blodgett was flattered when Mando asked him to leave Dutchy and come work the back room with him.

“I got the okay from Nicky,” he said, “don’t you worry. Tonight I fire two guys, they suck cock anyway. Then it be just you and me. We work the room, maybe we can make a buck.”

Mando wasted no time showing him how to pork up the tips. There were the legal ways, such as passing out thin chocolate mints at the end, making sure you placed an individual mint in front of each diner. Always good for a few extra bucks. There were times when eye contact worked, or kneeling, or simply touching a shoulder. There was knowing which people to keep out of your station, if possible: two old ladies splitting a check, for sure; and all parties of sailors, and any and all people from Maine.

As for those who tipped the best – without question guys who were dating each other were very good. And guys who were dating each other who were priests were so good they could duke you a hundred percent - and more than that if there was something about you.

Mando waited till the dead part of the evening to instruct Blodgett in the less than legal way to pork up a tip. He took him outside and showed him Rico, the man in the cap who parked cars. Rico was a cross between a jockey and an ape; tiny-assed with wide shoulders and hands like gorilla paws.

“Ever hear of Willy Pep?” asked Mando. “He could have been the next Willy Pep. Fast as a plane, punch like a train. Instead he parks cars for Nicky. And other things.”

Mando let the comment sink in. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, lit another and went on, explaining that all over Boston the restaurants were switching to computerized registers. Machines that automatically priced the items and spit out the checks. But the North End guys like Nicky were so goddam cheap they still had their waiters scribbling out the bills by hand. Every man, even the ancient Dutchy, carried a pencil and a bill-pad in the breast pocket of his tux.

Fredo’s also didn’t take plastic, none of it. Nicky always said he would rather break sidewalks with sledgehammers than hand over four percent to American Express.

Mando fixed his pimp eyes on Blodgett and spoke gravely. “When the fucking computers come in I go looking for a new job. Open a grocery store or something. Get my own computer.”

But until that day, Mando continued, he would go on applying both ends of his pencil. Using the lead point to tack on an extra ten percent or so to the bill. Then using the eraser to remove the ten percent once the customer had handed over the cash.

Blodgett found he had no moral objections whatsoever to being double-tipped. He kept his eraser clean, pocketed the bonus cash, and made sure his addition was exactly right when he finally handed in the checks to the cashier. Even on shit nights he came out with a decent wad in his pocket. Two tips for every one.

Three weeks into the scam Blodgett asked Mando what would happen if Nicky found out what they were up to.

“Then you see Rico,” he said, “and Rico see you.” Blodgett could feel the bolt go up Mando’s spine and leap into his own. He had the sensation they had both been hanging out for the subway and suddenly they’d been shoved, from behind, onto the third rail.

From that moment on, Blodgett was seized with a touch of that third-rail feeling again and again. It hit him every time he stood before Ralphie the cashier, who was a kissass first cousin of Nicky, waiting to turn in a fucked-over check.

“Hey, clam boy, you got to take a chance to make a chance,” Mando said, attempting to settle Blodgett down.

On St. Anthony’s Feast Day, Fredo’s was a zoo. Outside, the trumpets blew somberly and the holy procession marched through the angel-hair streets, one street skinnier than the next, holding the saint high in the air above the sweating crowd. The tenements emptied as crones in shawls and men in Bicycle Thief undershirts clawed into the sea of people, begging for room to pin their dollar bills over every exposed inch of the sacred figure.

The image of the saint covered with money was still in Blodgett’s head, shortly after the huge dinner rush died down, when two tall priests came in and were seated deep in the back room, in the darkest table. Even in the shadows Blodgett could tell they were flush-faced Irishmen. They wore civilian jackets over their black shirts and white collars; they smoked Gauloises and French-inhaled languidly, and they sent Blodgett to the bar for two Negrones, the pungent, ruby-hued martinis of Italy.

“Make them with Tanqueray and Cinzano, real Cinzano,” said one of the priests as Blodgett pivoted and headed off. He felt the fatherly eyeballs lasered on his back. Feeling so coveted brought out the actor in him, and he gave his hips a little bounce, a la Bobby, even though it made him feel sluttish.

Suddenly Mando swept alongside, whispering stage directions. “Those two spend,” he said. “Do the antipasto yourself, in front of them.”

“I think I am the antipasto,” said Blodgett.

It was Blodgett’s luck, not good luck, that Nicky himself was tending bar tonight. Nicky was so much the owner, his every action seemed motivated by divine right. The way he patrolled the long stretch of mahogany made it all look smaller, more a podium for an iron-fisted tyrant than a long counter staffed by a human in an apron.

“Two Negrones,” Blodgett said. “Straight up. With Tanqueray and Cinzano.”

Nicky nodded, but ignored the bottles of Tanqueray and Cinzano displayed on the mirrored shelf behind him. Instead, he reached under the bar and came up with two no-names, Mount Vernon Gin and Rossini red vermouth. Blodgett knew Nicky was boosting the margins by slipping in rotgut, but the murderous way Nicky squeezed the necks of the bottles as he worked told him something. Told him to keep his mouth shut.

Following protocol, Blodgett took a small round cocktail tray off the stack. He held it, in respectful obedience, as Nicky loaded on the pair of Negrones, but he became embarrassed when a sudden case of the shakes seized his tray-hand. The liquid, which should have been still as the glass itself, shivered visibly. Blodgett turned away to hide the panic - too quickly, and Nicky caught him.

“Hey, kid, no cocktail napkins? Where’s your manners?”

Blodgett grabbed two napkins and fled back to Mando and the priests.

By the time he reached tableside he was calm and suave again, so much so that one of the priests, the most fatherly of the two, stopped in mid-sentence and followed Blodgett’s every move in serving the drinks, the way a camera shooting slow-motion follows the twists and turns of an athlete or a muscular horse.

“You have a classic North Italian face,” the priest said. “Classic. Does that make you blush?”

Blodgett said nothing and smiled modestly. To his knowledge he hadn’t a touch of Italian in his veins, North or otherwise, and if he had a church at all it was Congregationalist.

He set down the cocktail napkins and backed off a good ten feet. The Irish priests said “Salut” to each other and lifted the Negrones to their lips. Suddenly the one who had oozed over Blodgett’s facial features turned dark as a demon.

“Waiter,” he snapped, “what’s in these drinks?”

Blodgett rushed back, putting on the best poker face he could. He mumbled and fumbled with his order pad.

“This isn’t Cinzano,” the priest declared. “It’s not Tanqueray either.”

Without a word of protest Blodgett swept up the drinks and trotted back to Nicky’s bar.

“These are priests,” he said, holding out the tray. “They say it’s not Cinzano and it’s not Tanqueray.”

Nicky was dead-silent for a moment, still as stone. Then a smile crept on his face and he spread his palms over the two drinks, as though he were a priest himself, the bar was his altar, and he was blessing a pair of sacramental goblets.

“Now it’s Cinzano,” he intoned. “Now it’s Tanqueray.”

And with a wave of his hand he sent Blodgett off to complete his mission.

The mood, back at the priestly table, was no better than when he had left. Blodgett put down the drinks gingerly, the way one would serve raw meat to snarling wolves. And he put down new cocktail napkins as well.

The fatherly priest sipped first and closed his eyes, de-constructing his long, slow swallow.

Finally he looked up and spoke.

“Grazia,” he said. “This is what we ordered.”

And Blodgett bowed.

“Let me bring you bread and olio,” he said. “And I’ll toast it for you too.”

The priests dined and drank like cardinals, running up the largest tab Blodgett had ever seen from a deuce, a party of two. In the lulls between courses and wine changes they called Blodgett over, just to look at him, contraposto, as though he were a marble statue in a ducal garden, and not just an acting student in a tux that smelled like it once belonged to an old man with a goat.

“Jim would like to photograph you,” said the less boisterous priest, speaking of his companion, the fatherly one who had sent back the Negrones. “Would you like that? Jim has a big Hasselblad.”

Blodgett had noticed that the less he spoke the more he intrigued them. So he said nothing, nothing at all, and went away to add up the bill. He tried to walk the way the statue of David might walk if it came to life.

“These are your padres,” he said to Mando. “Do you still want to add the spiff?”

You’d be stealing from your church.”

Mando reminded Blodgett of the saint being paraded in the streets, money pinned on him everywhere.

“Tonight I be his partner,” Mando said. “So what’s wrong with that?”

Thanks to the priests, when Nicky finally locked the doors Blodgett had so many bills in his pocket he couldn’t stand it. He shot home, raced up the four wooden flights to the dwarf apartment and turned the key, eager to grab Ollie and slam down to the after-hours joints deep in the old Roxbury, the dusky, jive-dive Ollie places. There he would slug Jack and Coke, suck up some more cherrystones, oysters too, and duke a few other waiters as royally as the priests had duked him.

In no time flat his plans went down the shitter, big time. There sat Ollie, cowering on the can in the kitchen, his eyebrow torn open, balling up his socks and throwing toothbrush, razor et al.into his gym bag.

“Who kicked your ass?” Blodgett demanded.

“Nobody in particular. A hundred flying beer bottles.”

“Let me fix you.” Blodgett reached for the torn eyebrow, the gash in the butterscotch skin, but Ollie pushed him away. At this phase of Blodgett’s life it was the skin that got him going more than anything else, the sheen and polish of it. It wasn’t a gender