John Henry Days

PART FOUR. THE STEELDRIVING THEORY OF LIFE

They come out of cars. Out of vehicles hot from sunlight and conveying engines. The hoods tick cool. Parking is a hassle. Nose to nose. On weeds, almost in ditches, on crumbling terraces of asphalt unstable because rainwater has swept the dirt from under. Passengers are reminded by other passengers to roll up the windows. The father surveys and orders the son to put the camera under the seat. Locks are locked, are doublechecked, sometimes by remote control with beeps. Somebody forgot something in the car, sunglasses nestle over ears snug on the scalp. Mud flaps. The cars move slowly, there are too many people on the road, little kids not looking where they’re going, and it’s a creeping progress. Those who have found parking spaces view these drivers with a certain superiority. Then they take a few steps and get lost in the fair.

Portable equipment has been hauled to the grounds. One look at the line for the portosans and you reconsider your need. The line for the mens is always shorter, discernible from the line for the womens and inspiration for many identical observations about biological equipment repeated over the course of the day by many different people. Some men sneak off into the woods. By the bandstand, toward the middle of the grounds, a generator rattles. The amps have already been tested. A man was sent to fetch tape to tape down orange industrial cable where a child might trip or an old lady break a hip. Along the sides of the bandstand black sheeting is taped up to keep people from seeing the fragile-looking scaffolding. Some kids will sneak in there when no one is looking and peek through at the people. A quarter mile of steel fencing separates the tracks from the grounds, and several guards patrol the space between all day, per the agreement with the railroad. No one wants a regrettable incident.

The day before, the registered vendors match lot numbers with marked territory and learn the pecking order. Of course some favoritism is to be expected and those who registered late are penalized with less than optimum placement. Those with plum spots feel something that draws itself up to contentment.

Some try to come up with ways to beat the system. It is quite a thing to stand there the day before the fair and see the land sectioned off like that by strings and stakes, in three long rows. They can hardly believe the day is almost here. The people who will come the next day will move from booth to booth. It is important to have a flashy sign to draw them in and the next day some of the vendors will return with paint on the flesh that has resisted turpentine. Many of the vendors have never met before and extend greetings while checking out their neighbor’s wares. No one wants to be next to a booth that will be a turnoff. Put all that effort in and then something like that happens out of your control. One booth will have some kind of trick to draw people over and the neighbors think, why didn’t I think of that. Mostly friendly but then it’s dog eat dog on some level.

There’s almost a fistfight. Cooler heads prevail. A man argues with his wife over who had the keys last, they’re in his back pocket where he never puts them. The baby won’t fall asleep and that little song that always works isn’t today. They take turns throwing dirt bombs. Children have too much sugar and get cranky suddenly. One after the other children run out of money and try to find their parents. Children manipulate tubes of fluorescent colors. The effect is not as striking in the daytime. Children express character traits that will turn out to be lifelong. One eats her candy slowly so it won’t run out and discovers later she still has some to put under her pillow. Another has forgotten that rides employing the principle of centrifugal force make him ill and he leaves the metal steps slick for later thrillseekers. The Tilt-a-Whirl employs a system of red tickets that are exchanged for cash. The operators of the ride are down to one roll and improvise by reusing the tickets. At the end of the day the cardboard is gummy and bent, as if contorting the tickets would force the machine to slow.

The secretary and deputy undersecretary of the women’s auxiliary smile above cookies and biscuits. They mix the more unfortunate batches around with the good ones for cover. A small gang of suspects dally by the kegs. Overflow from cups moistens the dirt. Hijinks by the helium canisters, a chorus of castrati. You watch a balloon slide up serpentine until it disappears. Ends up three states over, exhausted. Big weekend for the local distributor of miniature American flags. Shoddy work, translucent fabric, but the weekend’s take eventually gets kicked up to the manufacturer and there are no repercussions. Fanny packs hoard valuables, identification. The scratching of Velcro vies for attention with distant crickets. Somewhere out of sight many voices cry out in surprise and people hustle to see what they are missing. Or maintain speed, confident the display will continue. He comments to his girlfriend and when she doesn’t answer discovers a stranger beside him. She has exact change, but her hands are too sweaty, her pants too tight to get at it. An insurance salesman wipes his brow over fine print, over his wobbly-legged foldup table. It’s a tough sell but he has a gimmick: monogrammed pens biding time to leakage. Everyone is prey.

Hangnails sun themselves atop flip-flops. First one cup then another cup is dropped on the ground. By the end of the day the rows will be filled with dashed paper cups. Ants find the red punch appealing and spread the word. The trash cans, there are never enough trash cans, spill over. People arrange their trash delicately on overflowing receptacles and hope to make a clean getaway before it tumbles off. The paper cups can be traced back to certain more popular vendors. Undone shoelaces trail in muck. There is no bank nearby and some despair. People are hungry and can’t decide what to eat. They disdain worthy choices, stroll on, cherishing this rare chance to snob, find themselves too hungry to go farther and settle for third rate, something dead on a skewer. The grill of the Italian sausage stand resembles the floor of a garage. Mustard obscures clots of grease. Mustard bedevils the mustachioed. No instructions from a helpful second party, no matter how succinct, can lead the napkin to the spot.

Abstract horror for the fast walkers when they fall behind dawdlers. Invective, calumny. Finally maneuvering around to find the agent of delay is infirm, disabled, acquitted. They split up. They are left waiting at the meeting place and despise their companions. Excuses are tendered up and down the rows. You see that man hold something you want and wonder where he got it, what booth. She wants him to hold her hand and he keeps finding reasons to withdraw it, to look for change, check his watch. Out here all exposed. A mother disciplines her child and bystanders pronounce it abuse, but what can they do. Put that down, come over here, don’t bother the nice lady. The soda is undercarbonated. Stingy, bubble-wise. You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession. Suspicions are raised as to the intentions of next person, do they intend to cut in front? When the vendor inquires who’s next, people lie. Need a penny, take a penny, have a penny, leave a penny. The lonesome fathoms of the tip cup. Someone says, I just want to stop here for a second. By midafternoon certain vendors are sick of people who ask questions, lift objects, frown at the price tag, replace. People say they’ll be back later to purchase, just stand there bold as day lying through their teeth. The vendors form a composite of this type and roll their eyes when one ambles up.

Look at that guy’s T-shirt, it has a witty slogan. Desire coruscates. The woman in the red tank top leaves a wake. One woman thinks, if I could be single for just one day, absently sliding a finger across the scar of her C-section. Hey, wait up. Everybody’s saying, hey, wait up. They skid along. At the information booth separated children are emotionally scarred. Cotton candy mollifies the more practical. Her boyfriend is very tall and easily spotted in the crowd when they get separated. Over time people memorize their companion’s T-shirts so they know what to look for when they get separated. Mosey over there. You see that same guy over and over, you keep ending up at the same booths. At the ice cream stand parents commiserate through glances as their offspring demand below. Underage youths try to get beer, trade schemes. The tallest boy is always the one dispatched plus he has stubble. Teenage boys look at teenage girls. Vice versa too. His parents’ friends walk up whenever he gets the nerve to talk to a girl. Happens every time. Grass stains on knees. One guy sells rocks he painted pastel colors. Temporary tattoos. One boy rolls a pack of candy cigarettes into his T-shirt sleeve and tries to look tough.

The cheap-looking raffle tickets always seem like part of some con job, don’t they. Hot dogs ’n’ hamburgers. The old lady fans herself with the brochure. She wishes he wouldn’t drink so much beer. Older she gets the fatter she gets. People would be surprised how many people have the same unkind thoughts. People cast longer shadows than the angle of the sun can account for. His upper back is already sunburned, like that. Aloe is suggested. Arguments are fertilized for tonight’s harvest. Never knowing whether or not to look at the guy with the facial scarring, which is worse. All agree it’s criminal to pay so much for a bottle of water. He thought he was the only one with this kind of shirt but look around, everybody is wearing it. People encounter bad cover versions of their favorite people. More than one vendor miscalculates the amount of change the day requires and has to go around to competitors saying can you break a twenty. Contemplate the ride home. She’s always buying that crap. She asks him to hold her purse for a minute and his face gets hot, what does he look like standing there with a purse. It’s hot. In the dunking booth he makes remarks. They want to kill him but make do with dunking. They will all sleep a little easier tonight after they have dunked the insolent boy in the tank. He is a scapegoat with swimming goggles. He offers to take a picture of the couple but can’t work the camera. One of those new Japanese jobs. There are too many buttons. The flash won’t go off. He waits for people to clear out of the way but they walk into the frame as if instructed. Fleeting eye contact overanalyzed. Listen to me when I’m talking to you.

She reads palms, heck it’s a living. People compliment her acumen. There’s no place to wash your hands. Pebbles insinuate themselves into shoes like beings with a purpose. They hold no formal meetings but those who walk around with pebbles in their shoes and those who remove pebbles immediately form discrete groups with philosophies. It’s his fault they collide but the other guy says excuse me. You try to pass each other but you both keep darting in the same direction, it happens three times and you chuckle sorry. In the middle of people the man bites his knuckle and mumbles over bone, if I could just beat this fever. Signs say homegrown and homemade. They keep kissing in public, shaming others into contrived gestures of affection. Where has the fire gone in their marriage. Smell of charcoal. The retired citizens organization has a booth where they all sit around with sun visors. Vendors take shifts, one leaves to see the fair and leaves the other behind. They come back with goods from other booths and to dissipate envy offer obscure directions to this or that distraction. There is a strange oompa-oompa and they stand aside for the high school marching band. Take photographs of this authentic local culture. The boy accidentally sprays a grownup with water when the other kid ducks. The time for the raffle nears, you can win a boat. The smoke from the firecracker drifts over when they are done being startled. They made fun of him for selling underwear and socks that people can get any old place but look at the till. The antacid is in the glove compartment. Someone has to go back to the car to get something. He takes a moment to himself and has a smoke. Everyone stays too long. It’s a fair.

Don’t find a lot of white men on the South Side of Chicago at night so when he sees the white man leaning on the bar Moses thinks he’s out sneaking on his wife, head downtown to spend a sweet night with a colored girl. The bartender seems to know the man, or at least likes his tips, so Moses figures the guy is a regular in Rudy’s, every weekend he comes down here for a little pussy and music. Then halfway through the set he notices the guy taking notes. Not even trying to talk to any of the ladies but writing down stuff on a piece a paper. Thin brown hair soaked with sweat and snake eyes squinting through wire-frame glasses. No jacket on, sleeves rolled up, the guy’s not dressed up to talk to women. He’s after something else.

He isn’t that odd a sight, but Moses loses his concentration and forgets to tell the joke about the mule, not a show-killing mistake but he likes the joke and the city audiences love it. He knows half of them, shit most of them are only two soles from bare feet; they remember the country, remember every day why they moved North but they like to be reminded from time to time of where they came from. They can put on their airs, pretend to be city and take the El just like white folks but deep down they’re still country. Rudy’s is the great leveler, could be a Mississippi jook if you didn’t look outside the front door and see the tenement rows across the street. And overlooked the absence of sawdust on the floor — Rudy likes to think this is a class joint. Moses will play the blues and draw these folks back home. That’s what they pay for. He’s sky and unimpeded sky, hilltop brush tickling blue and a sun.

He starts into “Queen of Spades” and sizes up the couples. It’s his first night in Chicago and he falls to custom and looks for the ugliest woman in the room. There’s rarely any difficulty in finding her: the ugliest woman in a room stands out, like the tallest tree or the biggest rock. She makes a stark jagged outline against the rest of her sex, a landmark of homeliness. In small towns he sings and looks around the establishment (a timber concoction rotting on stilts over a swamp, a tin-walled jook joint shivering on lonely road) for flaw until he finds rickety teeth, all-gum smiles, lazy eyes, or hair like a spiderweb. He’ll make eye contact with the woman (her lazy eye makes him cock his head, which the audience takes for some performance tic) and sings the next song, “Sweet-Hearted Woman,” to her, tossing each word to her like roses. Thorns flicked off one by one. Everyone else in the room recedes until she understands — first in mad glee, then incredulously, finally in rapture— that it is just her and him, he’s singing about her sweet heart. No man has ever loved her as he does now (those goddamned honey eyes of his, he knows how to make his eyes goddamned and honey), and when the song ends she fears that it is the dim light in the saloon that has saved her, created a spell over him that will dissolve once the set is over and he sees her close up. She has developed techniques over the years to mask nature’s imperfections: urged by stares and coarse comments she tends to look at the ground when someone addresses her, mumbles to prevent viewing of the teeth knocked out by her mother some years before, and is wholly and keenly aware when eyes flit over defect and then swiftly shift away. But the singer lifts her chin in his rough palm after the set and coos. His songs did not lie. He is a special human being and can see what the rest of the world cannot, that she is good and decent and has much love to give to the one who discovers her treasure.

A survival tactic for a far-roaming and rolling man like himself that suggested itself one night in Mississippi when his eyes sailed out into the audience and immediately wrecked on a reef of monstrous titties, titties of such abundant rightness that the botched face of the woman they were attached to did not perturb him. He couldn’t get past the titties. He imagined her aureoles, counted each immaculate bump, they swirled and orbited around the nipple like faithful retainers. He didn’t see her face at all and later that night when his mouth was pressed between her breasts and he could barely breathe he realized from her wetness and greed for him that she hadn’t been laid in a long time. She was grateful. Conceiving in that moment his plan to find the ugliest woman in the audience. A simple matter of practicality. They were grateful and eager to please. They never had a man who was liable to cut him or send him running out the bedroom window with his drawers around his ankles. They always remembered when he came back to town and sat at a front table in a new red dress, with a new hairstyle, with all their scars and defects powdered into invisibility by an emergent confidence and the promise of a night with Moses. He has safe houses from here to Galveston maintained by ugly but worthy women no other man wants. They are good cooks, excellent cooks all of them, and sometimes when he recollects his time with them it is the food he remembers first. Maybe he does it for the food after all. For pig’s feet like jelly.

This night Moses decides to change his repertoire. He’s in Chicago for a week and he feels full of luck. There are so many beautiful women in the crowd tonight he thinks maybe he can do what he wants. Not play it safe. In the front row a young lady in a blue dress with a collar of white lace fans herself and he can see sweat slide out of the depression in her neck. He’ll lick it dry he thinks, and can’t help grinning and gloating over that future taste. She’s smiling too, back up at him, no man at her table, she’s stepping out tonight with two sweet and wonderfully plump friends. All of them in a big bed together. What their asses will feel like with his guitar hands squeezing them. Knead them like dough. His eyes ramble on as he takes notes: Oh, that woman in the red dress leaning on the bar, the way her leg’s cricked up on the rail, he can see the slope of her calf. It’s a small sexy lump, obscured now by a patron dragging himself up for a drink, but it vibrates in his head and trembles with naughty notes. He’ll talk to her, the ugly woman will have to fend for herself tonight. He’s on the South Side of Chicago and he has one or two songs he’s written that describe the devilment he’ll get into tonight.

Calf or no calf it doesn’t work out that way. He finishes his set, shakes a few hands and struts over to the bar to talk to the woman with the miraculous calf (such a tiny miracle must token other miracles hidden from view by the homemade dress, surely) but before he can get to her the white man intercepts him. Mr. Moses, he says, wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief and squinting, that was a powerful set. I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute about a business proposal. Moses, winded from his songs and his mind on his own business proposals thinks, I don’t need any Bibles. He asks, can it wait? and the man says he’s a scout for American Music and he’d like to make a recording of Moses’s songs.

Down the bar within arm’s reach and yet so far down the bar the woman in the red dress laughs and takes the arm of a sharp-faced man in a crisp pinstripe suit. He smiles back at her out of his blue-black face and notices Moses’s stare, and the itinerant bluesman knows he’s not getting any closer to that calf, in his dreams maybe but certainty not tonight. The white man now presses the handkerchief to his brow. It’s hot in here but not that hot, Moses thinks, this guy’s sweating like he’s in the jungle. Ha Ha. At least he’s not a detective about that other matter. My name is Andrew Goodman, he says, giving Moses his card. Have you ever been recorded before? Moses says no, even though Spier down in Jackson approached him on a street corner a year earlier (a dead afternoon, none of those country Negroes parting with coin for this songman, nuh-uh) with the same proposition. H. C. Spier, the guy that put Tommy Johnson and Ishmon Bracey on Columbia, and who he’s heard just paid Charlie Patton fifty dollars a side. Spier sat him down, gave him some rye and recorded four demo songs. Moses never heard back from him, the songs didn’t make it with the Columbia boys apparently so Moses says, no, never been recorded before. No use letting the guy know his business. He says he’ll come tomorrow to the guy’s shop and he forgets about it for a few hours.

Good old Rudy comes up and thanks Moses for coming, they clasp shared nights and time together with their hands, which leads to one drink and then a couple of drinks and a poker game in Rudy’s back office. His woman thoughts for the night stepped on by the Chicago boy in the pinstripe suit, Moses finds gambling presents itself naturally as pastime for this night. Not that Rudy would let him beg off. He knows he can win back some if not all of Moses’s pay. The other players joke, but not much: regulars in Rudy’s game, they keep their eyes on the cards. Moses helps himself to rye whiskey and one of the guys asks, that’s how you get your voice like that, huh? That and canned heat and antiseptic when he can’t get his hands on anything else. Rudy wins back his money from the talent for the night. The cards are marked. Moses looks up at the stained ceiling; he hadn’t noticed when the noise downstairs stopped. They play poker above an empty saloon. Come four in the morning Rudy’s won half the next night’s pay as well.

As Moses gets up to leave, he asks Rudy is that white guy on the level. Rudy says he’s here whenever there’s a blues act booked. Rudy buys his records at the man’s store over on Forty-third. He’s all right, Rudy says, a little quiet.

When he wakes, sun through slats striping his body, he doesn’t know where he is. There’s nobody next to him and he can see that the room is so small that he must be alone. Unless she’s hiding under the bed. Spending his first night in Chicago by himself. He remembers losing his pay in a poker game and waking up the crotchety old hotel manager at dawn. Did he hit the man or just yell to get him to open the door (his keys glinting on the bureau where he left them before departing for his gig). There’s his guitar along the wall, tilting and sure. He didn’t lose that. He never loses that. It’s like a curse. He drops his feet to the floor and looks at his hideous toes. Does he have anything, even a drop? There’s a brown bottle from two towns ago in his scarred suitcase. It calms him down.

He’s a mug. He has no money. But he feels better now and maybe he’ll see that record man. Fifty dollars a side sounds more real after Rudy’s okay of the man, after a night losing money in Rudy’s back room. Nothing but a train stub in his pocket. He thinks back to how he never heard back from Spier; the lost opportunity made him feel like he does when he’s playing music on a corner and just watching everybody walk on by, no one stops to put a dime in his guitar case. Like he’s not even there. Cracker had a face like a handful of gravel. When he hears about Ish and Skip James selling records and people say, Moses, why don’t you have one of those, he says, shit those crackers know better than to mess with a nigger like me. Tough, like he doesn’t care. At a house party or a dance in a Delta mud town some fool with ashy elbows will ask him to play something he heard on somebody’s record. You don’t do someone else’s stuff. Steal it, yeah, but you don’t just do it like that because some burrheaded fool asks you to. Those guys have got something and it ain’t nothing Moses ain’t got. Sometimes. On a good night. With a good audience, fine women up front to look at and he hasn’t been drinking too much. Spier didn’t call him back so forget about him. Let’s see what this Goodman has to say.

Goodman’s Records is the store on the corner, and its windows are so clean compared to the rest of the establishments down the row that it seems to prop up the whole block, like a piece of wood steadying a wobbly chair. Moses burps, feels a finger of bile in his throat. He looks down at the black handle of the guitar case cut across his palm like a blood brother slash. Time to meet the man, he says and pushes in the door, waking bells.

He figures a lot of these people are in from the country, come into town on a Saturday afternoon to pick up what they need to make the neighbors jealous. Yards of fine new cloth, new pots like what they see only in the Sears catalog and maybe a new Bible. Dust in their cuffs and untamed hems, boots for the fields. No place to buy race records where they live, Goodman’s is a telegraph wire to the rest of the Negro world. He’s a smart little white boy: set up shop on the South Side where other white people are too scared to give the folks what they need. Where there’s a clientele and a need. He sees four listening booths along the right wall and a skinny boy disappears into one, clutching some nasty tune under his arms. Generally he’ll stay out of record stores; the names of his fellow songsmiths up there on the wall, or angled up in crates like a plot of wind-fret weeds, depress him. He sees the names of men he has played with, traded tunes with, shared women with. They have been recorded. A young woman, her face hidden by the drooping flaps of her hat, snatches a James record out of a bin; he recognizes the label: Paramount. Paramount and Decca and Lonely Moon. Lemon Jefferson has been dead for years but they don’t want the public to know. They put out the backlog of recordings one after another so people will think he’s still alive. He reads, Paramount Records are recorded by the latest electrical process. Great volume, amazing clear tone. Always the best music — first on Paramount! There’s a little pip of a boy at the register but Moses doesn’t see Goodman. Sweat pouring out of him. He tightens the fat knot of his tie and sees the instruments at the back of the store. Violins and banjos on little hooks on the wall like family pictures, sheet music in rows, folk ditties and Scott Joplin. He sees the guitars. Brand-new Stellas and Nationals for nine dollars and ninety-five cents. Rues his scratched-up old Stella that’s almost as scratched up as him, and works the best as it can, like him. Have you seen the new Tri-Cone Nationals? Goodman asks, coming out of the back room. He nods up to something beautiful that Moses doesn’t see; Moses sees a hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar price tag and strings popped on his old Stella. I’m glad you came down, Moses, Goodman says. The man nods to the stringy boy at the register and sends a stare that orders, don’t let these people put anything in their coats.

Upstairs at Goodman’s boxes and boxes of records are stacked to the ceiling and hide dusty windows. The air doesn’t move up there. Walking up the steps makes him a little dizzy and red snakes writhe popping on his eyeballs. You can take that stool, Goodman says. Moses falls into the stool like a diver. I got the idea when I started doing vanity records for my customers, the white man says. For five dollars I put their songs down for them. “Happy Birthday, Annie,” whatever they want. Then a man came in from American looking for some race records and we started talking. He was supposed to be in charge of the company’s race music label and didn’t know a thing about who’s out there. Hadn’t heard of anybody.

How much do I get for this?

I can offer you forty dollars a side.

I’ve heard people get sixty, seventy dollars a side for work like this.

Who’s paying sixty?

That’s what I heard.

Look, I don’t even know if American is going to go for your stuff. Do you know how much they have to sell just to break even? Five hundred. I don’t even know if what we get is going to be usable.

Do you have something to get me started?

What do you mean?

A little something.

Ah. That’s right. Goodman considers how much whiskey to put in the tin cup, then pours a taste more in. Seems he was prepared, Moses thinks. He knows how to treat talent. Goodman opens an icebox in the back of the room and pulls out a platter of beeswax an inch thick. He says, The heat can ruin it so I have to keep the masters in there.

I’ve heard about that. (Seen it before.)

From that mike, your music will go from the microphone and through to the amplifying stylus and that will cut it into the wax. It’s pretty straightforward.

Alcohol-sick and sick from the heat, Moses feels better after a little rye. Tin cup quivering in his hands. A minute ago he could have heaved his guts to the floor but now he’s calm. Funny how his hands shake in the morning but never when he feels a string, pulls it to the fret and lets the arrow fly. Goodman wants the songs from Rudy’s. Spier said play what you want to play But Goodman stares at him when Moses leans to the microphone. He gives orders.

Let’s do that one you sang about the old house.

“My Baby’s House.”

Let’s do “My Baby’s House,” but this time don’t do the “uh-huh” when you get to the chorus. Leave that out.

Can’t leave out the “uh-huh.” That’s the whole song.

Just for this take. I’d like to hear how it sounds without it.

Goodman signals Moses to play. Goodman keeps telling the man his business. He’ll nod at different parts in the songs, a quick jab, but he does it at parts that Moses doesn’t think are important. Things Goodman hears in what he’s doing that Moses doesn’t even realize.

You changed the chorus. That’s not how you did it last night. He waves his notes from the show last night at the man whose show it is no longer. Like he’s in charge now.

I like to mix it up. Sometimes do this, and then some other time I’ll do that. (It has a mind of its own.)

They do sixteen songs, two sides engraved into the disk while the hot air sucks sweat out of him and into his suit. Goodman says he wants him to come in tomorrow and Moses is so afraid he’s fucked up his chance again that he says yeah, and doesn’t even ask when he’s getting paid. The man gives no sign as to if he liked it or didn’t. Just — can you come back tomorrow at the same time?

Moses walks halfway to his hotel and stops. On the other side of the street an empty lot allows the sun to splash on him, blast of heat through that notch. He sets down his guitar case and starts playing a few songs. Six, seven songs in and no one drops coins in his guitar case in appreciation of his technique and mastery, his shaping of song. They sweat and walk past him, with their sagging bags or sweating bottles, hurry through that patch of sun and back into the shade. Then he realizes that he hasn’t been playing at all, he’s just been standing there panting, holding his guitar and staring off into sunlight.

He is fret.

He goes back to his hotel room and sweats out a few bad dreams before the gig.

Moses oversleeps and makes it to Rudy’s just in time. The room is more packed than the first night. Word has spread. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday. Rudy gives him a glass of whiskey and Moses sets it down next to his stool. Some nights it’s all he can do to drag his ass from song to song, like tramping through ditches, just make it through the set. Then there are nights like this. The second night in Rudy’s in the first song he accidentally repeats a verse — they don’t notice of course — but it works. It makes the song better. The lines had to be said twice to get them in people’s faces, to say you can’t look away, look at me when I’m talking to you. The rest of the song benefits from the mistake, like it let off weight and now it can sail higher, above Rudy’s and all the South Side. People in Canada look up and see it over the Great Lakes. And from there it only gets better.

An accident that’s lucky. He brings them home.

He watches her all night and he goes to her table after he finishes the set. She sits with a couple, the odd woman out. He asks her, how did you like the show, and the man at the table, this big guy in a brown suit, says those sure were some good songs. Moses knew he liked them; fool jumped out of his seat half a dozen times and waved his hammy arms around. The woman has full red lips and a wide, solicitous mouth. Moses asks, can I join you, always like to ask the people who come what they think about the songs. The man says I’m Al and this is my wife Betty and this is Mabel. He says let me buy you a drink and Mabel says I liked that song about the woman with the sweet heart (the song he sang as he looked into her eyes). He tells her how he wrote it one brokenhearted evening when he was crying over a woman who was not half as pretty as her. Mabel, Mabel, he tells her, he has an aunt named Mabel and he always thought it was the prettiest name.

Al is a doctor. He and Betty have to get up early for church, Al says. Betty and Mabel consult. They’ll see each other tomorrow in church, Mabel assures her friend. Mabel is a waitress at Clement’s Luncheonette and no doubt can cook.

She has a clean room in a clean building a simple stroll away. Moses staggers a little on the stairs but he is behind her (ass for miles) and he doesn’t think she notices. She lets him into her room and goes to use the bathroom down the hall, she’ll be right back. Moses drops his jacket on a bedpost and leans his guitar against the wall. He walks over to the Victrola and sees a Lemon Jefferson record on the turntable. He looks at the silver nipple poking through the heart of the record and closes the lid. She has twenty records stacked between the wall and the Victrola’s little stand; he sees this and retreats back into the center of the room. He’s beat and sits on the bed. Loosens his tie some more.

Those are my nursing books, Mabel says on her return, pointing to the books he rests his hand on. He hadn’t noticed; he thought his hand was on mattress. I’m studying to be a nurse.

Uh-huh.

Waitressing is nice but being a nurse, that’s something. So I got those books out of the library. Al’s a doctor and he said he’d put me in touch with some people who need a capable person.

He hears her erase her accent from time to time, it slips in, a leak into her city bluster before she puts her finger in it. He says, your parents still down South? Where did you say you were from?

They’re down in Pacolet. In South Carolina. They keep thinking, oh, she’ll be back soon enough. They’re still of that same attitude, but I’m not going back except maybe for visits.

What made you leave? He removes his suspenders from his shoulders.

He watches her wince for a second in recollection or something else before she says, I got tired of working for those lintheads.

Lintheads?

They called them lintheads because it was a cotton mill and when they came out they were covered with it. They got seventeen cents an hour, poor as dirt, but they still had more money than us. They wasn’t going to let no Negroes work in that mill. So they paid us to keep their houses and take care of their children. They worked from six in the morning until six in the afternoon so that’s when we had to be there. My sisters, we all worked in the Liberty Street houses, all my cousins on my mother’s side. You could stick your black hands, stick your black hands in their dough for bread, you could lay your black body in their beds to nap with the children, but you couldn’t walk through the front door. I did that for going on almost two years and then I said I’m going to Chicago. They couldn’t stop me. They tried but I was going to Chicago.

Sounds about right.

We had a colored school in my town. I knew how to read so I left.

I’m sure you have a lot of stuff up there in that pretty little head of yours.

She falls asleep after he shows her how people do it back where he comes from (verbatim, that), she snores on his arm and he thinks, what is it, what is it: he felt he had to bounce back from the afternoon’s session. What is it: this could be his one chance. Fifty dollars a side, his name on the records on Goodman’s wall, his name up there for all them to see. This night he nailed it. Like he was in competition with himself and he had to take each song higher. He was reaching for something all night and then he switched “Long Time Blues” with “John Henry” and that was what did it, he changed his mind, didn’t know why, half a second before he chased the first chord out he knew that he had hit it. He starts falling asleep and thinks, he wasn’t competing with himself, he wanted to beat the machine. The box on the second floor of Goodman’s, the diamond needle cutting his fame into beeswax. People could buy him for seventy-five cents, after payday, and he’s in rooms on layaway Victrolas, him and his guitar drifting through screen doors into the night air in Natchez and Meridian, some hot young girl listening to him, swaying in sweat and getting ideas.

When he wakes up she’s gone and he doesn’t know where he is. Then he remembers, remembers she said she had to go to church and would he still be here when she got back. He mumbled in his sleep and she put that mouth on his forehead and kissed him a kiss that stuffed him back down into sleep. He looks around and thinks, no breakfast. She didn’t cook him no breakfast. What kind of women they raising up here? Waking up by himself — might as well have gone to bed by himself if that’s what’s going to happen. His temples pound like hammers when he lifts his head from the pillow. Good God. He rummages around her room and comes up with a small bottle quarter-full of a liquid that a sniff tells him is rum. He takes the bottle, leaves, and thinks she’s lucky that’s all he takes, shit. Next time, he’s sticking with the ugly women. No way he could live up here. These are some people with some new ideas.

The pipsqueak kid at the register tells him to go on up, he’s waiting for him.

Goodman unpacks records from a large box labeled Columbia. That new Patton record is really going fast, he says.

Let’s do this, Moses says.

I’ll be just a second.

Don’t got all day.

Goodman frowns and prepares the equipment. Moses tells his fingers, I’m going to get it right this time.

Goodman says, how about we start with that John Henry thing you did last night?

You like that.

It had a nice mood.

Moses wouldn’t call it nice. He’d call it something else. Most John Henry songs he’s heard from people, they tend to talk about the race and the man’s death. He sang a version like that a few times but it never sounded right to him. The words “nothing but a man” set him thinking on it: Moses felt the natural thing would be to sing about what the man felt waking up in his bed on the day of the race. Knowing what he had to do and knowing that it was his last sunrise. Last breakfast, last everything. Moses could relate to that, he figured most everyone could feel what that was like. Moses certainly understood: that little terror on waking, for half a second, am I going to die today. Am I already dead. When Moses woke every morning he had to think hard about where he was, what town and whose bed. But it was one thing to possess that fright for a moment, he thought, and another thing entire to know it for sure, that today is your last day. So he figured that was as good place as any for his song to start. What a dead man thinks.

He only sings it occasionally. He sings it in cities mostly. The people in the bigger cities respond to it better for some reason. He plays it second-to-last in a show, to make them think about the night that is passing and almost over, what they have shared and is closing, that loss, before going into “Little Snake Man,” which really gets them stomping. Placing those two songs back to back like that he always gets a reaction. Like John Henry gets them thinking about the grave and then the adventures of the Snake Man make them say, fuck it, I’m going to have a good time. They pick up on it. John Henry gets on them slow, creeping up on them like a shadow and their heads begin to nod with the beat Moses keeps with his old shoes and his broken fingernails on the guitar’s body, he beats it like a drum with his hand, and then their palms head for the tabletops, in time, to this slow and mortal beat. It spreads from table to table and that is the best part, when he knows the song has got them and they know that it is them he is singing about. Moses has done this thing. He’s shut up the voices at the back of the room with their talk of wages or women, undone the low hands of lovers and forced them to the beat. His mother always said, James, you should have been a preacher.

He doesn’t do requests but he agrees to Goodman’s request and he does what he does for money: sings.

How do you fit all that in? At the monument finally after all these years, she’s forced to erase the image suggested by her father’s stories, forced to throw out what she draws from her hold of curdled perceptions. No one could possibly agree on what he looked like. He was everyman. Every freed slave, traveling under the most common freed slave name. He was a six-foot-tall bruiser, big as a barn, dark as chocolate, darker. He was a wiry trickster figure who lived by his wits, quite obviously had some white blood, gentle, mean. If the professors who came here to study the legend couldn’t get people to agree on what he looked like, what chance did this sculptor? The artist was forced to rely on what the story worked on his brain. He looked at the footprint left in his psyche by the steeldriver’s great strides and tried to reconstruct what such a man might look like. Everyone here is gathered for the fair, she considers, all those people below, and they all work from a different snapshot. All the people who have heard the song on radio or had the story read to them from a children’s book, they all have their own John Henry. You summon him up from verses and he swings his hammer down with the arms you give him. Think he really lived and he’s more human; deposit a smile on his face and beads of sweat or tears running down his cheek. Think he’s legend and muscles slide under fantastic limbs, the mountain shudders and birds flee branches each time the hammer comes down. His death shudder is a trembling exhalation or an earthquake, take your pick. The artist who made this statue had a big job. She inches toward admiration. Thousands and millions of John Henrys driving steel in folk’s minds, and his is the one that climbs up on this stone pedestal and gets the plaque, the concession stand right there. She looks up at the eyes of the statue and they shelter penumbra too deep to comprehend.

Really, how can you fit all that in? she thinks, shifting on her feet. Pamela studies the statue, slanted in self-conscious posture, as if she were in a museum and the portly guard hovering too near. Is he the same metal as the head of his hammer, the drill bits he struck, the tracks he advanced. The statue of John Henry is black metal, pitted across the chest where bullets have struck. Bunch of guys in a pickup with guns and nothing to do on a Saturday night. Probably a rite of passage, take a few shots at the black man on the rock. He’s much shorter than the image she had in her mind, a little more fireplug than she would have made him. Not that she is an artist. Perhaps there was a question of how much it would cost and they had to save on materials. Put in a bid and the most economical gets the commission. Chamber of Commerce cuts the check. She takes a step back and realizes that the statue is taller than she is, six and a half feet high, but maybe the chest is a little disproportionate to the legs or arms. The hard to define ratios sought by the eye when taking in someone new are off somewhere. She grants this might be an aesthetic choice. She’s no artist. It makes him more brutish, puts a little of the animal in him.

She moves over because the white couple next to her wants to take a picture. The monument area bustles with people, baseball caps bruit esoteric slogans, they trickle in, jostle each other, drain down the road to enter the main part of the fair. Pamela thinks that with so many people around the right thing to do is to come over, pay some quick respects to the monument, mumble a dull observation, and then move off so others can get a proper glimpse. But she’s just standing there. He looks like he’s waiting for the gun to go off. It’s the moment before the race. Or any working day for him, there’s no difference, he’s going to do what he has to do. In the way that happens in such situations she becomes suddenly aware of the noise of the crowd around her. Their exhalations and giddy utterances. They could be witnesses to the competition. Come from all over for the big day. He holds the sledge at a slight angle up from his waist, right hand gripping in a fist near the hammer’s head, left a bit slack at the bottom of the handle. Legs apart, well balanced. His hammer is kind of like a dick, if you want to look at it at a certain way. He’s a boxer, a confident contestant in this affair. But, Pamela wonders, is he about to strike or just finished. Sure of his next blow or pulling back from a swing, sure of the blow just dealt, gauging the disappearance of the drill into the rock. She can’t fix him. He is open to interpretation. Talking out of both sides of his mouth. You hear what you want to hear. The shutter clicks and fixes this moment.

She catches herself. This is an artist’s rendering. She is confusing the statue before her with the man, and the man with her conception of the man. His head is dipped slightly. He’s not wearing a shirt. Too hot for that in the tunnel. His pants are loose, cut of no fine cloth, falling in static waves, and she thinks of slave clothes. She finds herself wondering about this artist’s politics, exactly what agenda he is trying to get across here. A bird has paid its respects on John Henry’s shoulder.

“They say he died with a hammer in his hand.”

Pamela stares, drawn back to the world again. It’s that guy J. in his silly Hawaiian shirt.

“Who’s W.E.H.?” he says, nodding toward the bronze plaque, the inevitable bronze plaque, set resolutely, recently polished, in the body of the pedestal. Impossibly, she hasn’t noticed it. JOHN HENRY

THIS STATUE WAS ERECTED IN 1972, BY A GROUP OF PEOPLE WITH THE SAME DETERMINATION AS THE ONE IT HONORS. THE TALCOTT RURITAN CLUB CHOSE THE MEMORIAL TO MARK A PAGE OF HISTORY, ONE HUNDRED (100) YEARS AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE BIG BEND TUNNEL IN 1872.

JOHN HENRY DIED FROM A RACE WITH THE STEAM DRILL, DURING CONSTRUCTION OF THE TUNNEL FOR THE C. & O RAILWAY CO

MAY GOD GRANT THAT WE ALWAYS RESPECT THE GREAT AND THE STRONG AND BE OF SERVICE TO OTHERS.

BY W.E.H.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs.

“I thought you were the big expert.”

“Are we on the record? This an official conversation?”

“I’m just a humble laborer doing an honest day’s work. No John Henry but I break a sweat now and then.”

“Here’s a tidbit then. They call it the statue that Jim Beam built. Do you have a pen or what?”

“It’s all up here, trust me.”

“The centennial of the race was in 1972—”

“Hypothetical race,” J. interjects.

“The completion of the tunnel then, and the, what’s it say, Ruritan Club gets the idea for the statue, but they don’t have any money. They need about fifteen thousand dollars. So Johnny Cash has this TV show at that point, a variety show, and he sings his John Henry song, which is a pretty good version, you should look around for it, but he misidentifies this place as Beckley, West Virginia, and not here. Most of the songs name Big Bend Tunnel, which is what we’re standing on top of, but then some take the legend and put their own local spin on it. So the Ruritan people call him up and say, hey, you made a mistake and also we’re trying to raise money for this John Henry statue. So he sends a check and that’s some of the money. What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Keep going, please.”

“Then Jim Beam calls up. The Ruritan people have copyrighted their model for the statue and Jim beam is doing a special John Henry bottle and they want to know if they can use it. So they’re like sure, but we’re trying to make this statue, can you kick in a little money. So that’s where the rest of the money came from, and that’s why they call it the statue that Jim Beam built.”

“So you can drink John Henry whiskey.”

“It was just a special thing they put out for a short time. But my dad has, had, a few bottles.”

“These little telling details.”

“And you see those dents on the statue? People come around and use it for target practice. One time they chained the statue to a pickup and dragged it off the pedestal down the road there. Then the statue fell off and they drove off so they found it next day just lying in the road.”

“Probably not much to do here on a Saturday night.”

“Hmm.”

An energetic and determined clan moves in front them, driving them with gentle vulgarity away from the monument. While the matron wrestles her camera off her shoulder Pamela and J. withdraw into the parking lot. She asks him what he thinks.

“I thought it would be a lot bigger,” he says. The monument land is a shelf on Big Bend, the lap of a squatting giant. Chain-link fence keeps the people with two left feet from the cliff edge. On a day like today it earns its keep; there are varied hordes around J. and Pamela in search of justifications for the day’s drive over. Kids’ heads dart between boiled hot dogs and soda cup straws. Galoots lumber about snapping photographs and announcing how many pictures they have left. Some have purchased John Henry T-shirts and put them on over what they drew from the laundry this morning, to fit in with celebration, to pledge fealty to the day in 50–50 cotton and polyester. Bound to be a few of the clumsy type, statistic-wise, and the fences gird and protect. Most of the folks congregate around the food stalls, attempting to connect things they might have eaten, or at least described to them from visitors to foreign lands, with the missing letters on the menu. They mill there or by the red caboose, underneath the sign that reads JOHN HENRY PARK below the virile swirl of the Coca-Cola logo. Not much of an assignment. “I’m not sure if they had to fly me down for this, expense-wise,” J. says.

“This is just the monument,” Pamela counters. “The fair is over there by the tunnel.” She leads him to the fence and a vista of the fair, down there at ground level. The iron seam of the railroad tracks stretches directly below their feet, diving into the famous tunnel. Then there’s a thin strip of bone-white gravel and fencing and the fair itself erupts, eager, full of moving creatures negotiating white tents and each other, amid rippling streamers sad in the heat despite their exuberant colors, pulsating movement in the sun. There’s a nice turnout. The preparations have paid off. Between the three rows of booths and assorted attractions too small to make out from this vantage, where the people are, hundreds, it’s all unruly delight, what kind of cold heart despises the sincerity of a county fair on a summer day. The grounds extend for a quarter mile to the east, a ragged-edged flow. The eye is drawn to the south where the river writhes, seized by its own turbulent movement, and the mind can’t help connecting the two, the river of water and the river of people. Both move to their inevitable conclusions.

“Not bad,” J. says.

“Let’s see the caboose,” Pamela suggests, sounding suddenly more peppy than J. has seen her.

They move three feet and are reintroduced to the rules of moving in crowds. The necks of the more mindful glisten with suntan lotion. They shuffle forward. The line to the food and the line to the caboose get confused at one point (they have evolved too far from ants to remember how to work in such an insect boil) until the problem is sorted out by the more aggressive and J. and Pamela are before the door of the train car. There’s only one entrance, so as one or two exit blinking into the sunlight, they are replaced at the same rate. It doesn’t look as if the caboose ever saw any service on those tracks below. It doesn’t look sturdy at all, the wood planks more suitable for a backyard toolshed’s walls than a train car hustling on grooves at multiple horsepower. Pamela can see why they want to buy her father’s museum. Appropriately exhibited, the Street archive would fill a couple of these cars. A modest train. The John Henry Express. A young white couple from the city exit the caboose carrying a small figure. J. and Pamela enter the caboose.

Even if they were the only people inside, they’d still be climbing each other’s backs. Some of the clutter can probably be blamed on the previous fair-goers, who pick something up, replace, never matching the fastidious arrangement of the proprietor. But it’s still a haphazard assortment of wares. There are a stack of T-shirts in a soft slow topple along the right wall, and then a collection of figurines. The woman next to J. says, “This is cute,” lifting a three-inch-tall John Henry. John Henry ranges in size from toy soldier to lawn jockey, in a range of poses that produce an animated strip of steeldriving. John Henry holds his hammer at present arms, lifts his hammer to dare a lightning strike, brings his hammer down to ruin rock. On shelves above the counter, postcards are for sale. More than a couple are well-framed shots of the monument and the caboose in which they stand, a few more black-and-white shots of demolished C&O structures, the construction of the dam, various bucolic-minded scenes from the length of the New River. Merchandise. The air does not circulate, the wares exhale something not quite breathable, a gas more fit for whatever ceramic planets these objects call home. On the other wall clutter items unrelated to John Henry. Confederate flags in different sizes, T-shirts with said symbol. Available for purchase are miniature license plates that say Talcott and Hinton, suitable only for fairyland vehicles. In a row await diecast metal train cars, some even with wheels that move, if reluctantly. Books published by publishers outside the known New York zip codes describe the history of the region, the Chessie railroad system, West Virginia mining strikes, slim volumes with big type. The busy hands of tourists touch these things to test their solidity. They try to envision where these items might go in their households, mantels are conjured, knickknack nooks reconsidered. Everyone has a limit to how many T-shirts they can own, the figure varies with the individual. And yet the days are fleeting or so mirrors argue and souvenirs provide unimpeachable proof. A sign suggests, WHILE IN HINTON BE SURE TO VISIT HERB S.

Pamela says she’ll meet J. outside. She leaves before he can respond. Outside she can breathe again. Trying to relax all day and almost there until she saw one of the John Henry’s. It is identical to the one her father brought home twenty-five years before. The one that started it. It’s in a box up in New York. If the museum is going to have a gift shop, it will be full of stuff like that in there. She has a smoke and J. returns with a souvenir under his arm. It’s a mid-swing John Henry, of that vintage, two feet tall, and J. holds it like it’s a toddler. “It was only fifteen bucks,” he says.

“It’s nice,” Pamela murmurs. “Gonna carry that all day?”

“Hadn’t thought of that.”

“You want to head down there? I don’t think there’s much else to see here.”

“What time is the taxi coming back?”

“We have to walk.”

“All the way down there?”

“All the way down there with John Henry under your arm. And your fly is open.”

They walk, he adjusts.

When the Sepia Ladies Club convenes in the downstairs parlor of the Sutter household Jennifer is conscripted into serving duty. Her mother fusses over her hair, pronounces it a bird’s nest, then says there’s my princess after taming brush. When the Sepia Ladies take the teacups from the serving platter in their white gloves, they tell Jennifer how pretty she looks. One by one down the crescent of soft chairs as they sip. The ribbons in her pigtails deserve no small portion of blame for these compliments, if their comments on how delightful they look are any indication. Her mother twists them a certain way. The women pinch her cheeks. Jennifer lingers in the doorway, scratching her right ankle with her left foot, as the Sepia Ladies go through the minutes and from time to time her mother tells her to fetch more crackers from the kitchen, where Jennifer sets them in mandallic arrangements on a silver platter. From what she can tell, they don’t talk about anything. Nothing she cares about anyway. Mrs. Jackson (who could not attend this meeting) is acting all uppity because her husband bought that new emerald Cadillac, but it doesn’t matter because Mrs. Greenley saw him outside the grocery store at noon and she swears she smelled liquor on his breath, it runs in the family, but we shouldn’t talk about Mr. Jackson’s father and the turpentine. Mrs. Barden (who has been attempting to join the Sepia Ladies Club for some time now but does not understand she has to earn her place and that bragging about her Creole blood is not going to do the trick) and her husband moved into the corner brownstone on 138th Street and have fixed it up all nice (from what they can see from the outside; Mrs. Barden has not graced these women with an invitation to her abode) with lace curtain ordered from an English catalog, but maybe she should be less worried about their nice lace and spend more time thinking about her young Angelique talking to the no-good shiftless Negroes who work at Hope’s Garage, spend less time bragging about how her grandfather went to Harvard and the award he won for his speech about freedom in Haiti and more time thinking about their daughter’s carrying-on.

The Sutter family lives on Strivers Row.

This afternoon the Sepia Ladies are holding their weekly summit at Mrs. Mason’s house to set the procedures of the upcoming raffle in stone. Jennifer watches the atomizer, that deep purple gem, cajole liquid into essence. Mrs. Sutter checks to see how the sleeve of her yellow dress falls on her shoulder. She tweaks the shoulder pads. The dress is a slick yellow, her hat a satisfied gold that livens her face. Jennifer has always coveted her mother’s pearl earrings, she longs for holes in her earlobes. Once she slept with the earrings under her pillow, her fist around them driving the pins into her flesh. Two days later her mother asked, “Jennifer, have you been in my jewelry box?” and that was the end of that. Except for the twin scars in her palm. Her mother sees her watching and asks, “Jennifer, what are you going to do today while I’m at my meeting?”

“RoseEllen can’t play today,” Jennifer says. She tells her mother the story of RoseEllen’s sick grandmother in Maryland and how her family had to drive down there.

Her mother says, “That’s terrible,” and ponders her behind in the mirror and above that the oval of flesh on her back permitted to eyes by the cut of the dress, the brown pearl and its lone imperfection, a mole that required careful plucking by Dr. Sutter every fortnight. “This is a perfect opportunity to practice for your recital,” Mrs. Sutter says, inspecting.

Jennifer Sutter demurs and after a little back and forth, mostly forth from Mrs. Sutter, who has little time for discussion as her Sepia Ladies Club mission draws near, who has paid good money to acquire the services of the best music tutor in Harlem, who will not be embarrassed by her daughter at the recital in front of the other women of the Sepia Ladies Club, who has gone to great lengths to provide the best for her daughter, Jennifer is left with a brand-new dime in her hand for candy, but then it’s straight to the piano.

Jennifer pulls up her white socks and folds them over. She buckles her shoes.

They walk out into the neat hubbub of Strivers Row that afternoon together. The Strivers Row Property Association does not allow stickball on this street (they leave that to the other streets in the neighborhood, to Negroes who care less about noisy youth and their epithets, their window-smashing errant balls). Instead they dispatch their male sons with Mr. Harding to Morningside Heights for softball. Jennifer’s brother Andrew is there now with Jackie, Garvey and the rest of his friends. While Jennifer has to stay in their stuffy house and feel Mr. Fuller’s stare upon her even though he’s not there (he’s probably playing with that little rat mustache of his), feel his impatience at incorrectly-struck keys even when it’s not her fault, her fingers just slipped. Mr. Fuller always makes it out to be her fault. He has a list memorized of things a proper musician does and does not do, he has a thing about posture and a back like a lamppost. Her mother tells her to make sure to lock the door and they diverge on their clean stoop, the elder Sutter east and the younger Sutter west.

The Candy Store is only a block and a half from her house but she’s forbidden to enter the disreputable radius of the Tip Top Lounge so Jennifer has to cross the street, walk down the opposite side and then cross the street again like a good girl. This circuitousness a condition of her release. She looks over at the open door of the Tip Top but cannot see inside it. She passes four sewer grates on her journey and each time she glances down between their iron teeth but she does not see any musicians. Never has.

The store doesn’t have a name on a sign anywhere. Grown-ups call it The Polish and the kids call it the Candy Store. There was a time when the first thing Jennifer did when she entered the store was pivot left and head for the comics rack. Superman routing Nazis, Sub-Mariner crashing U-boats, occasional mayhem in the Pacific theater. Captain America was a normal GI until the medical experiments and then he became a fighting machine. But the war comics disappeared. First the Nazis, then the Japs, and then the conflict moved to the home shores: her mother realized that the four-color confections belonged to her little girl and not her young man, and that put an end to the comic books. It wouldn’t do for her baby girl to dirty her hands with that messy ink, the violent images. But Mr. Polaski still remembers those days, he has dossiers on his customers beneath the glass counter, and when she enters his establishment he says, “Just got the new Action Comics in.”

Jennifer mumbles quickly, “No thank you.” The avuncular proprietor, with his gray undomesticated thatch of hair and tidy red face, is a relieving sight. His wife, who works occasional shifts in the omnibus store (scissors, candy, newspapers and wrapping paper, round tins of tobacco for those taken with the habit, items every tenant has special drawers for, and dust) doesn’t like Jennifer, or children, or Negroes, and does not have a pleasant manner at all by any measure. Twice she shortchanged Jennifer, but grown-ups are so adamant and sure about being correct in all things that Jennifer never protested. The old lady has a shrunken face like a rat and little rat paw hands that curl around coins as if they were treasured crumbs. But she isn’t in the store today. Jennifer holds up her dime and says, “I’d like ten redhots and ten caramels, please.” Always say please. She likes to alternate the feeling on her tongue. First the rocky redhots burning red into her tongue until she’s able to smash them with her teeth, then the soothing gooey caramel that’s like sweet gum for a few chews before she dissolves it. On hot days like this the red from the redhots and the goo from the caramel sticks on her hands. She remembers that she’ll have to wash them before her mother gets home, but she doesn’t remember that each time she has that much candy she always feels sick afterward. Little wonder, how fast she eats it, but she never remembers that fact about her routine, just the nice contrast of the alternating flavors and textures that she makes in her mouth.

“I’m afraid I’m all out today, friend,” Mr. Polaski apologizes with smile. “Cleaned out by noon and I haven’t got my new shipment in. They don’t work on the Sabbath.”

Sabbath must be how they say Saturday in Polish. She looks up at the empty jars behind the counter. The jars are empty and her heart falls.

“Still have plenty of gum,” Mr. Polaski offers. “We have redhot gum and that’s almost the same thing.” His hand already dipping into the jar. But Jennifer’s not allowed to eat gum even though everyone else is. Her father is a doctor and has explained the situation to her. Eating gum will give her big lips. It is very important for her to keep her mouth shut when not talking or forking food into her mouth, or else she will get big lips like so many of their race. If the mouth is allowed to remain open, the muscles in the face relax, and after a time the lips slowly begin to curl outward, exposing the pink inside, until they remain like that. It is important to learn to always breathe through the nose, the nostrils. That’s why God put them there. When one chews gum, the natural urge is to chew with the mouth open, which in turn promotes lippus maximus. So gum was not allowed in the Sutter household on Strivers Row. Often when they walked in the neighborhood her father would point out those afflicted with lippus maximus and reiterate his professional advice.

No more suckers and only gum. RoseEllen, of course, can eat as much gum as she pleases. Chew it brazenly, blow bubbles, stick it on the undersides of furniture. Which was why Jennifer rued deeply her grandmother’s sudden illness. Mrs. Turner keeps a bowl of rainbow gumballs on the mantel in the living room and Jennifer can help herself to as many as she likes. She crushes them, sucks on the candy shell until its all gum, defenseless against her violence, blows bubbles that she snaps like firecrackers. RoseEllen might say, “You’re eating all my gum!” but only when she’s already mad at something else. Jennifer almost considers buying the redhot gum, which probably mixes the tartness of the redhot with the pliability of the caramel, but just two Saturdays ago she forgot to spit out her gum before she got home and was sent to her room without dinner. The redhot gum jar used to have a picture of a firecracker exploding on it, but after they dropped the bomb on the Japs they renamed it A-Bomb Gum and now a mushroom cloud unfurls itself in redhot taste.

“No thank you,” Jennifer says and nearly runs out. She stops a few stores down, her face hot. She has a dime. She could walk two blocks down to the Five and Dime but it seems so far. Jennifer looks up the street and sees the stained black awning of the Tip Top and immediately turns away to face the music store. Halfway between the Candy Store and the Tip Top, around the corner from her house and yet she’s never seen this store before. Seen it from across the street of course but there’s no name on the outside. From here, her face in the glass, she sees records taped up all across the window, so many that she can’t see in the shop. She doesn’t know any of the names on the records. Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and W. C. Handy. The sun has faded the record covers so that they cling on the glass as blanched barnacles of what they had been. She has a dime. She doesn’t know why, she pushes the door.

Jennifer smells air that at bottom is dusty and musty, and up top sweet and slightly acrid. The light allowed by the record covers in the window, all those sliver cracks, merges into a limp gray that is defeated only at the end of the room, where a naked bulb shines down over the counter. The room is narrow, and the aisles between the boxes of records and stacks of old, amber magazines remind her of the tramped spaces in the park, the beaten-down grass that through wordless agreement of all who pass makes a path. The two men at the counter stare at her interruption. The one behind the counter is a fat man in a striped red sweater whose palms are pressed down resolutely on the cluttered counter, as if it might levitate. His head is shaved and the sweat glistens on the short hairs, like dew impaled on grass. The man leaning against the register slouches with his shoulders forward in a bony landslide, his head ducking beneath a cloud of slow smoke. He’s dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with one tail tucked in. He exhales out of the corner of his mouth, looking at Jennifer, sticks a toothpick between his lips and passes a tiny cigarette to the man behind the counter, who secrets it out of sight.

Jennifer turns her face to the record crate nearest her and starts fingering the heavy 78s, trying to be obscure. W. C. Handy spreads his hands wide on the cover of the first, his band behind him poised at their instruments. She flips quickly through them for a few moments to kill time. What is she going to do with a dime and a Victrola at home she’s not even allowed to touch? The phonograph sits in the parlor, polished to gleam. Not that she could do anything with it anyway, since her parents don’t own any records. It’s like a vase, or the candlesticks in the downstairs hallway, something that roosts in the Sutter brownstone in its designated place. For show. She hears the men on the other side of the room begin to murmur to each other. They’ve gotten over her intrusion here. She smells the strange air in the place and remembers that her mother told her to practice for her recital and thinks she should go home. Her mother won’t like it if she messes up in the middle of Jacques Wolfe’s “Shortnin’ Bread” while Jimmy Mason and Sojourner Gardiner, with their flute and recorder and snotty attitudes, get through their songs fine. Scandalized by her pretty little girl in front of the Sepia Ladies Club. She’s about to leave the store when it occurs to her: she can buy sheet music. Then she has an excuse to be here in this store her mother would obviously not approve of, with its dirt and shiftless-looking clientele, just two doors down from the Tip Top. She glances over at the counter. The two men face her, heads tipped together and saying something she can’t hear. The man with the toothpick pulls it out of his mouth like tugging a weed, looks down at it and replaces it on the other side of his mouth.

She makes her way between the piles of newspapers, steps over a broom currently enjoying an indefinite period of unemployment and deeper into the sweet cigarette smell at the back of the store. She looks up at the owner and waits for him to say, “Can I help you?” be friendly like Mr. Polaski, but he continues talking, obviously seeing her there but not saying anything. He has twin moles on each cheek waxing over his bushy black goatee.

“Do you sell sheet music?” Jennifer asks.

The owner’s head rolls on his neck and he stares down at her. “I got sheet music over there, I got sheet music all over the floor over there, what kind of stuff you looking for?” His tone like she’s been asking him questions all day. His eyes shift over quickly to his friend in message, then return to Jennifer. “I got Hit Parade shit, jazz, I got New Orleans, what do you want?”

“Do you have anything for ten cents, please?”

“Ten cents? Ten cents won’t get you a dime in here. I’m just a man trying to make a living here,” he says, opening the cash drawer with a button and a smart chime, and then slamming it shut again to underscore his point.

“Why don’t you give her a break, man?” asks the man with the toothpick.

The owner squints at his Saturday afternoon companion. “What did you say?”

“Give her a break, man”—clearing his throat with a gush—“she’s a little girl.” He smiles down at Jennifer, parting lips to promenade gums and three loyal teeth.

“You got other places to be, right? I know you got other places to be.” The toothpick man shrugs and looks down at his feet. The owner looks down at Jennifer again, grimacing. “I’ll tell you what,” he says, “I have some old stuff in the back that I can’t get rid of. Why don’t you wait a minute and then you can see what you see.” He condemns his friend with a stare and disappears behind dusty green curtains into the back before Jennifer can say thank you.

The man reaches behind the counter and retrieves the cigarette. “Little crotchety,” he says to Jennifer as he lights the end. He removes the toothpick and holds it straight up in his fist as if there were a balloon at the tip of it. Jennifer watches him inhale with dedication and then he adds, without letting smoke escape, “He’s crazy.” He nods to himself, agreeing anew with what he just said. Jennifer spies an autographed photo on the counter of the owner with his arms around a big woman in a black dress. She can’t make out the signature or the dedication. In the photograph, the owner is much slimmer and wears a smart pinstripe suit and a homburg hat. His slim mustache then is now somewhere in his overgrown goatee. Hearing movement in the back room, the man exhales quickly and returns the slim cigarette behind the counter. Toothpick back in his lips.

“Here we are,” the owner says. As he parts the curtain with the corners of the Coca-Cola crate, he sniffs, nostrils flapping like bellows, and he frowns at his friend. “Pipes burst in the basement and soaked all this through,” he says, setting it down on the floor. “Some of it — you can see for yourself. That’s all I got for ten cents.”

“Thank you,” Jennifer says.

While the owner starts berating his friend in a low voice, Jennifer kneels before the crate. A strong gust of cellar hits her from the water-ruffled paper. There’s grit on her fingers as soon as she touches the first one, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” by Jack Waite. Black clumps of mold bloom in some spots on the wrinkled pages, and each page she touches releases more of the musty smell. She’s going to have to wash her hands as soon as she gets home. She hears a match struck. She doesn’t recognize any of the composers or the songs. Mr.

Fuller doesn’t teach her songs like these. “Abdul Abulbul Amir” by Frank Crumit, “Swingin’ Down the Lane” by Isham James. They’re really old, these songs, over twenty years old, from 1928 and 1920 and 1923. She looks at the dust on her fingers, looks down to make sure her dress isn’t touching the floor. She can’t find anything she wants, and her mother would take one look at whatever came from this box and put in it the fireplace. It’s dirty. But she doesn’t feel she can just walk out without buying something because the crotchety owner went all the way downstairs, so she grabs the next piece of music, “The Ballad of John Henry” by Jake Rose, and rises from the box.

“Let’s see what you got here,” the owner says, trying to touch as little of the sheet music as possible.

“Look at that shit,” the man with the toothpick says, “Why don’t you just let her have it for free, man?”

The owner barks, “Is this your store or is this my store? If someone wanted to kick some lazy, hanging around all day doing nothing but smoking other people’s stuff never has any on himself out of here, would that be you or me?”

The man shrugs and shifts his toothpick from the left corner of his mouth to the right.

“Here’s ten cents,” Jennifer says.

“That is indeed a dime,” he says, opening the register and dropping the coin into a clinkless hollow. “Knock yourself out.”

The sun is twice as bright once she leaves the store, until her eyes adjust again to this average world. She almost walks past the Tip Top, then doubles back, takes her usual long route around the prohibited saloon. At each sewer grate she looks down, below the street, but does not see what she thinks one day she will see.

She feels that the piano has been waiting for her whole life, on its sculpted paws, and before that. Her mother and father do not know how to play, and her brother Andrew prefers his models and sports. Her parents bought the baby grand for Jennifer alone, it seems, for the day she would take her place in the scheme, setting the piano in the corner of the parlor room where the sun attends for whole hours in the late afternoon, the light charging facets of the crystal vase atop it as the star heads west. All for show, for years, until Mrs. Sutter retained Mr. Fuller, the piano instructor, said to be the best in all of Harlem, a bit expensive but well worth it, and Jennifer learned how to play. “It’s never too early for a little girl to get herself cultured,” her mother informed her, and her free time retreated before the advance of lessons and practice, half an hour of practice a day and now an hour. After school, on weekends. The old piano had a use now beyond decoration, and Jennifer attended to her instruction. The first thing Mr. Fuller does each lesson is to remove the vase from above the piano with a tsk-tsk-tsk, and Mrs. Sutter replaces it after every lesson.

Jennifer hears some kids laughing outside and closes the window. Above the music it reads, “Another fine musical composition by Yellen & Company Music under the auspices of Dr. Simon Ramrod’s Patent Medicines.” On the back is an advertisement for Dr. Ramrod’s Essential Tincture of Gridiron, Otherwise Known as Nature’s Grand Restorative, in which a contented gentleman dozes against the bark of a weeping willow, in supreme repose, anodyne lulled. She places the music over the oppressively familiar staffs of “Shortnin’ Bread.” She knows that piece as well as she is ever going to, even though her mother shakes her certitude at every opportunity. There was no way, Mrs. Sutter reminded her daughter, that she would stand to be humiliated at the club’s recital next week, when the Sepia children, or at least the ones blessed with the gift of music, will perform familiar ditties from the Hit Parade while their parents sip tea and clap dainty hands together. She pays Mr. Fuller good money and will not stand to be disappointed.

“The Ballad of John Henry” by Jake Rose hides the music for “Shortnin’ Bread,” which Mr. Fuller has decided will best showcase Jennifer’s facility with the pianoforte. Mean Mr. Fuller, whose skin reeks of a sharp cologne, who breathes loudly through his nostrils as she tries to concentrate on her finger drills, who reminds her to turn the thumb under the hand and not over. There’s a notion forming in Jennifer’s head, not yet articulated but understood: if it’s in another language, it must be culture. Mr. Fuller knows many languages. He says, “Music is a tonal art, but we must always remember the words of Liszt when he first heard Henselt—‘Ah‘, j’aurais pu aussi me donner ces pattes de velours’—‘I, too, could have given myself these velvet paws.’ Tone is the means, not the purpose.” Which means nothing to Jennifer. He says things like, “We must strive to embody Michelangelo’s words, ‘La mano che ubbidisce al intellecto,’ to be the hand which obeys the intellect.” Which means nothing to Jennifer except a few moment’s respite from her next attempt at middle C. Whenever Jennifer tries a new composition, the words of Mr. Fuller and her mother shout: he tries to remind her of what to look for in the piece; she tries to remind Jennifer of the importance of being a lady. The melody of “The Ballad of John Henry” is not complicated. But this time she does not hear any of the usual voices as she starts the piece. As she looks down at the yellow and stained paper, she hears something Mr. Fuller said once, a few months before at the end of a lesson. She can’t recall the German words or the name of the man who said it, but she remembers this: you think you push but you are being pushed. Her first round through the song is remarkably easy. It speeds by, like a walk down a street she has been down a thousand times before, something seen but not seen, gone in a blink but navigated without mishap as she thought of something else. She tries it again, top of the wilted page, and this time is even easier, there’s something sad about the song, but what she feels most is — pushed. The song pushes her. There is something in this song that does not exist in the music that Mr. Fuller brings, it quickens inside her. It doesn’t go to church and cusses, wears what it wants. For a second she thinks, this is what I should play next week at the recital, not that other song. But she knows that won’t happen. The afternoon light glides along the dark wood of the baby grand, reminding her of sunlight on the Hudson River, something here in her vision for a little time before it goes into the ocean, joins a larger thing. The last note withers in the empty brownstone, down the hall and up the stairs into empty rooms, and this time she decides she’ll sing the words. She’s in a heat right now. She sings lyrics that tell a story of a man born with a hammer in his hand and a mountain that will be the death of him: you think you push but you are being pushed. She sings it again and is so pushed that she doesn’t hear her mother come in the front door, only hears her mother yell, “Do you think your father works ten hours a day walking up and down the neighborhood treating sick people so that he can come home and listen to his little girl play gutter music?”

Unexpected accompaniment. Jennifer jumps off the piano bench, fingers recoiling from the keys. “No, ma’am!” she says. Gutter music. Gutter music always conjured in her head the image of an orchestra in a sewer, neatly dressed gentlemen in tuxedos, their tails dragging in the muck beneath the city. She used to always look down into sewer grates to see if she would see them playing, sneaking a peak surreptitiously, but all she ever saw was glinting liquid and she does this less frequently now. Today she did, because she has always wondered: what music do they play?

Her mother drops her shopping bags in the doorway and strides over to the piano. She rips away “The Ballad of John Henry” and shakes it in the air, the cheerful stanzas of “Shortnin’ Bread” restored to vision and dignity. “Where did you get this?” she demands, her hat slanting off her hair.

Jennifer looks down, cracks her foot and grinds her shoe tip into the new carpet, which is a self-satisfied regiment of whorl much admired by the good soldiers of the Sepia Ladies Club, expensive, alluding to the European.

“Where did you get the money for this, Jennifer Sutter? You used that dime I gave you for candy, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jennifer settles into this dressing down by her mother, winded, still trembling a little from being pushed. She hadn’t thought she was doing anything wrong, but apparently the sheet music was part of a larger transgression that she had never considered. When she was older, she thought, she’d know where everything lay.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you, young lady.” Her mother takes her daughter’s chin in her hand. “This afternoon when I left for my club meeting you said you wanted a dime for candy because I always try to do the best for my only daughter. Don’t your father and I always try to do the best for you and your brother?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Often when their parents walked them down the street their clothing was tight and constrictive compared with that of other children their age, whose parents were not as cognizant of the role appearance played in social standing, whose parents did not know that people will talk. These other children invariably looked more comfortable.

“Does this look like candy to you?”

“No, ma’am.” If the sheet music was that much more horrible than candy, it must truly be horrible. Of such low social standing.

“When we walk to church on Sunday morning down Broadway,” her mother said, cheeks red in her light brown skin, “you see the dirty men with their shirts all out their pants, drinking the devil’s liquor and stinking to high heaven when good people are going to church. Do you know what they’ve been doing all night?”

“No, ma’am.” She did know, because now this discipline had wound its way down the hills away from the music and into a familiar body, and Jennifer was well acquainted with its currents and undertow. She knew all about the good-for-nothing niggers who passed bottles back and forth and were an eyesore. But it seemed best to feign ignorance.

“Staying up all night drinking and listening to music like this!” her mother screeched. “Because they are good-for-nothing niggers who don’t care about making a better life for themselves. They want to stay up all night and carry on and pretend that just because they don’t have to pick cotton they have no more duties to attend to. We can’t do anything about good-for-nothing niggers who don’t want to take their place in America, but we can watch ourselves. This is Strivers Row. Do you know what striving means?”

“It means that we will do our best,” Jennifer recites.

“It means that we will survive. Now I want you to promise me that you will never play that music again. Will you promise me that?”

“I promise, Mother.”

“That’s the girl I raised,” her mother says, this tempest now just draining damp. “Now I’m going to put my bags away,” she says, reassuring herself, “and I want to hear that song that Mr. Fuller has been teaching you so you can be ready for your recital.”

It’s always that song. Her mother doesn’t know any of the names of the composers. They’re just nice things to her, more nice things to have in the house. Her mother disappears with the groceries and leaves Jennifer alone in the room. Her eyes fix on the good and pleasant notes of Jacques Wolfe’s “Shortnin’ Bread.” She hears the instructions of Mr. Fuller and her mother’s explanation of why it is important to be a lady. She thinks as she starts to play: no, it wasn’t candy but it sure was sweet.

The citizens practice their aim. Some shoot BBs at tin cutouts of fowl, which are dragged in ellipses by iron chains and tip back ninety degrees when hit. Some shoot water pistols into the mouths of clowns to fill a balloon, and others toss baseballs into cupped targets. This is good old American know-how. It’s all rigged. The prizes for excellent marksmanship hang on hooks, dingy teddy menageries. Alphonse quiets the temptation to engage in a little target practice. It would be a little perverse in light of his plans for the next afternoon, and besides, he’s already put in his time at the range over the last few months. Plus there’s nothing more ridiculous than a man hauling a gigantic miniature green elephant.

Tiny hollows, pits, and chips pock here and there the skin of the tin ducks, and these depredations prove them kin to the John Henry statue on the hill above. The targets take the shots and persist. His fingers fall over his purple fanny pack; through the thin plastic he can trace the barrel. It would be perverse to take a shot at the ducks or the clown, he thinks, but it sure would be a nice piece of color for a journalist. Trace back the steps of Mr. Miggs of Silver Spring, Md. over the days leading up. One of them might ask Eleanor if her husband often attended stamp-related events. Would she remember? He rarely goes to expos or conventions outside the D.C. area. Then they might ask her, why do you think he did what he did in Talcott? What they should ask, Miggs thinks, is why the mountain chose him.

He can’t decide if he should walk faster or slower. There’s more to see that he might miss and so much he cannot savor if he speeds. He allows his legs to take him, sniffing the fair into him, receiving a gutter bouquet of popcorn, beer, children’s vomit. There’s a table full of stuff no one wants in tableaux of disappointment, silk wraps, tin rings, family heirlooms offered up after debate to help out with the mortgage. That woman there selling her bad paintings — he recognizes them as paint by number specials, produced in a factory for people to fill in. She’s chosen some bizarre colors — residence in her mentality for one second would be too long — but at least she’s stayed in the lines. (More than he can say for himself.) He overhears conversations he doesn’t want to overhear and wants to sprint past them but he can’t. This is all so important. He might miss something. Alphonse looks around for something to dissuade him but nothing he sees offers argument or counterpoint, not the couple in romance sharing a public private smile, nothing in all the human connections he magnifies through the lens of his disquiet into infinite love. Of course these people don’t know he is seeking something from them. Of course no matter how hard he tries to avoid looking at the mountain, he knows it is still there with its unavoidable message. The twin tunnels are like eyes.

If he keeps his eyes on ground level maybe he can avoid it for a while. A little redheaded girl in overalls holds a goldfish in a plastic bag. She slides her left hand across the bottom of the bag and raises it and for a few moments the poor fish doesn’t know what to do. It can choose one half of the bag or the other. By a casual gesture its world has been halved into inevitabilities. He watches as the girl disappears to catch up with her mother. Alphonse thinks the fish will be lucky if it makes it back to her home alive. Asphyxiation. Drowning in water, invisible plenty. They never had children. It bugs him only occasionally, generally at times like this when he sees families and families out together. He has small hands but he could take a smaller hand into his own and lead. He has things he could pass on to someone, a message to communicate beyond tomorrow’s dispatch. What would it sound like if he heard it aloud, he wonders, and heard it for once outside his head. He could scream in this crowd and no one would hear him because of all the happy noise.

The announcer says, “Lost child Kevin Graham is at the information booth. Lost child Kevin Graham is at the information booth. His mother’s name is Carol.” Alphonse looks around — no woman runs through the crowd toward the information booth with tears of relief on her face. He spots the man whose life he saved last night, over near the kegs with some of his journalist pals. The man seems none the worse for wear. Alphonse waves — for a second there it looked like the black man was looking in his direction. But he doesn’t see him and there’s no way Alphonse is going to go over there. To say what, I saved your life last night, remember me? If he had done nothing, he would be no less a stranger to that man. Alphonse could be another one of the man’s readers, anyone in this crowd.

He turns around and finds himself in front of soft stacks of John Henry T-shirts. He recognizes the design as a black-and-white copy of the stamp.

The image is a little hard to make out because it has not been well reproduced, the grays aren’t that forceful, and John Henry is very black, like a smudge almost. He can almost make out the mouth and chin, but for the most part the face is just dark. What expression is there is anyone’s guess. Past the right shoulder of John Henry a locomotive speeds into futurity. The business end of his sledge rests on his shoulder. Alphonse thinks the hammer looks in pretty good condition, pristine, as if it’s never been used.

Everybody’s wearing one. They sell like hotcakes. The owner’s young son handles all the transactions while his father chats with a crony and the boy is meticulous with the change, counting aloud.

Alphonse puts the T-shirt on over his red polo shirt, tugging the collar out over the neck of the T-shirt. The black church sells plates piled heavy from heated aluminum trays. Do they still call it soul food, or have they changed that too, Alphonse wonders. In the sensitivity seminar at work the consultant they hired said that any word out of the mouth can be a ticking timebomb. He hears, “Lost child Kevin Graham is at the information booth. Lost child Kevin Graham is at the information booth. His mother’s name is Carol.” Then the siren blows and everyone stops in their tracks. The train is coming.

The fairgrounds are adjacent to the tracks, separated from the fair by steel fencing and frowning rent-a-cops. It might be a special day for the town of Talcott, but the business of CXS Transportation must continue. Alphonse, denizen of middle management, understands this. The crowd charges over to the railward part of the grounds to jockey and jostle by the fence. There’s a slim space between there and the last row of booths, and the people squeeze in. Alphonse finds a place in the second row, behind a father balancing a daughter on his shoulder. The guards tell everyone to take it easy, hold on, don’t lean on the fence. Most of them are teenagers and wish they had a gun to go with the uniform. Instead they have to rely on tough guy stares honed over time in convenience store parking lots. Everyone looks away from the mountain. East toward the coming, crawling train.

Hey.

The general readership magazine that recommended stamp collection as a worthwhile hobby advised that choosing one kind of stamp, a specialty, might add shape and purpose. Before he caught on Alphonse collected only those stamps that arrived on his correspondence. He cut out the corner of the envelope and soaked it in warm water. Once the stamp loosed, he removed it gingerly with the tongs that came in the mail order stamp collecting kit, and dried it overnight in a paper towel. The next day he slid the stamp in the hinge and deliberated, directed by personal symmetry, over its place in the album. After a few months he had many stamps, to be sure, an index of received confidences and dull immediacies, but there was no order to them. It was a collection of randomness he had preserved there, and looking over what he had assembled depressed him. Surely this was not what a hobby was supposed to be. Hobbies made the days easier, what, they knocked down imposing hours into moments that stretch. Then he went to his first stamp fair, at the convention center. He walked up and down the rows. Everyone was so serious and seemed to know what they were doing. Even the little kids knew what they were looking for, going up to dealers to ask if they had NASA space stamps or reptiles. He tried to look busy; everyone knew he didn’t belong there, surely, he felt it on his neck in pore-squeezed sweat. He busied himself in a dealer’s penny box, where they put all the dregs that no one wants, that have no value, where everything goes for a penny no matter what the postage declares. He picked through Thomas Edison, Dutch tulips, a number of South American military dictators. Sweat stained his collar; everyone was looking at him. Then he found his first railroad stamp.

It was a commemorative for the first trip of the Atlanta Zephyr. Was he supposed to recognize the Atlanta Zephyr? Was it famous and he was out of the loop or was the line something lost and his ignorance the common and most appropriate response to the name of the old Georgia train? A nibble off the top left edge was missing, and half the perforations were gone. But — he couldn’t stop his finger from running over its rough skin. He could feel the speed. The image fell into what he would later discover to be the standard portrayal of trains on stamps: a locomotive and a car or two speeding off the right edge with a little puff of steam, foreshortened to suggest departure from an old world and speed across the border into the new. It was not a picture of a vase or a cat. The train, tinted blue, was a notion of possibility. Human beings had made these trains, men like him, and if to outsiders a stamp was no kind of monument to a grand idea, for Alphonse this was true craftsmanship. With a few simple strokes, with a few anonymous cars and one noble locomotive, the artist had composed the definition of dreaming. Anything could be in those cars, anything he wanted. Off the border, nameless destinations that all who boarded knew as Paradise. Inside, special people bound for safety, the saved and the blessed, and what kind of freight in the boxy cars? Gold or the smart man’s invention or penicillin for the epidemic. News of the peace treaty. Once his collection started in earnest, he’d spend hours with a magnifying glass trying to discern human faces in the passenger cars, with such enthusiasm his posture degraded to its present stoop. He placed his face behind those sooted windows and willed himself safe passage.

Now he can log on the internet and trade information through his phone line, but in those early days he haunted catalogs and newsletters, discovering that every specialty had its society, and they communicated through a secret language. He mailed a five-dollar money order and received a F/VF commemorative of the Gold Rush Centennial, sent another for six seventy-five and got General Motors’ Train of Tomorrow, with its optimistic jet age angles. Sometimes when the illustrations were uninteresting, falling into the standard locomotive/car profile, the titles were enough to trigger enthusiasm. The Florida Sunbeam Is Coming Back — he didn’t know the history, what tragedy had befallen the Florida line that made its return such a glorious event, but his blood rushed. The First Winter Run of the Georgia Mercury, M condition. He read the words Alaska Railroad, 25 Years of Progress (F/G) and saw crews hacking ice in the tundra, a few sled dogs dozing by the fire and a new settlement just over the next hill that needed supplies by rail. Progress, progress in limited issues, warmed him and justified his days. The Inaugural Daily Service Chi-LA El Capitan (NM) described to him a nation learning to run; daily service across half the country was civilization. Even the mundane issues — the solemn Helsinki Railway Station (VG), the humble First Diesel (G) in Bangladesh, Bulgaria’s Unloading Mail Car (F), the commemorative for unsung hero Andel Pinto, Railway Builder (NM) of Brazil — were like press releases from the office of the twentieth century, from his basement view, informing the citizens of the world that each new peak bested was mere appetizer to the next novel summit just now in view. He filled albums and albums with stamps from around the world. Every place on the globe was linked by the invention of the railroad, it crossed oceans and cultures.

He didn’t notice when he started collecting the stamps of dead places. The Last Run of the Sante Fe Motor (P), Commemorating the End of Old Erie (G), Old Brighton Terminal (NM). They issued stamps for dead lines, defunct lines, extinct depots. Routes that had become obsolete, replaced by superhighways or snipped short by politics. Towns failed, everybody moved away and the terminal shut its doors in anticipation of vandalism, became a stamp. Small independent lines were bought up and swallowed by larger ones. Tracks uprooted to be melted down into arms for the revolution, or left to weed over. Impractical lines laid out of vanity that never justified the planning of the right of way. Top of the line locomotives made inefficient by technical advances. What remained of the ultimate in human achievement was a stamp. It was all obsolete and preserved in adhesive elegies, limited-issue testament. He collected it all.

The engineer blows the horn and they all cheer. The train departs the Talcott depot and advances on the crowd, sliding coyly across the rails. The locomotive isn’t sexy at all, just a utilitarian snout prodding ahead to shift its freight to safe berth. Nothing like anything in his albums, this is the new machine. It moves slowly, Alphonse notes, to ensure that no one from the fair gets hurt. They can’t cancel the shipment, John Henry Days or no John Henry Days, because there are timetables and money involved. What’s in there? he wonders. CXS hauling aluminum. The fair-goers cheer ore, or a stack of struts. Rolls of fiber-optic cable — that’s where the true lines of communication are these days — fiber-optic cable. That’s the way people get the stuff they need these days. The engineer blows the horn again and waves out the window. People whip American flags or balloons, whatever they have in their hands, in response. Then they can make out the banner draped along the black metal of the first car: CXS TRANSPORTATION SALUTES JOHN HENRY DAYS AND TALCOTT, WEST VIRGINIA. They probably kicked in a little money for today’s celebration, that’s good p.r., Alphonse thinks. People around him applaud the sign; those with items in one hand bring their hands together feebly to make a show of applause. He watches the locomotive pass, and he turns to face the mountain. The train will slither into the tunnel, the new tunnel that replaced the one John Henry dug a few yards over. John Henry’s tunnel didn’t stand the test of time, the roof gave in, and they built the new tunnel adjacent, according to modern specifications. Obsolete.

He can’t help it; he looks up at the mountain and finally gets his confirmation of his fate.

Soon after her father died the temp agency farmed her out to a content-driven interactive information provider. She was a temporary. She went where they sent her. This particular job was for a rapidly expanding company in the rapidly expanding industry called the internet. They needed bodies. They were set to launch in six weeks and needed all the bodies they could get as they ramped up for launch.

At orientation the first day, Pamela sat in a room with the other new hires and the parameters of the job were explained by a teenager dressed in faded jeans and a faded T-shirt. She discovered later he was pretty high up in the company, a bigwig in Implementation. He laid out the scene after they signed nondisclosure agreements; reams of nondisclosure agreements sat in piles along one pockmarked plaster wall, just in case. The company was going to launch a new portal in a few weeks. The internet was growing by leaps and bounds every day and every day people were getting on without knowing where to go. Their portal would be an on-ramp to the information superhighway, although, he added, information superhighway was not a word they liked to use around the office because it was really more of an old media term. This was the new media.

Your job, he told the new hires, is ontology. With millions of websites out there, a newbie will need a reliable source to tip them on where to go. Where they can find things that might interest them, discount diaper retailers or aluminum pliers. The ontologists classify websites into root categories such as Entertainment, News, and Health, categories recognizable to many from the real world, and write descriptions of no more than thirty-five words. The database also allowed them to rate the sites from one to five stars.

Then he explained about the Tool. There was a new data-entry interface on the way called the Tool. Technology Services had been scheduled to deliver it a few weeks before, but there had been some glitches. These things happen. Until the glitches were worked out, the company needed extra hands. The present database was fine for the average business but not for a new media company such as theirs. It was cumbersome. It was obsolete, dodo bird in this new world. Awkward fields, counterintuitive commands. All that would be eradicated by the healing balm of the Tool. The Tool is HTML-based, he said, and will publish their ontology directly on the web, saving the extra step of having to export and convert information from the old database. The Tool is being specifically designed for the needs of ontology. The Tool will possess data-entry fields specifically designed for the ontologists, fields for URLs, fields for site descriptions that automatically cut off if they get too wordy, handy pull-down windows for marking one to five starts. It will cut the ontologists’ workday in half, he said. They will need half as many ontologists once the database is web-friendly. The Tool.

But until Technology delivered the new Tool, he continued, abruptly dispelling this magnificent dream with a strategic conjunction, they would need all the bodies they could get. Have fun with it, he added, and left the room, sneakers squeaking on the new tile. The new hands picked up slim cardboard rectangles from the stack by the door. The writing on them read, Office in a Box. The box contained tape, scissors, scratch paper and pens. Anything a person might possibly need.

Instead of the modular Ls and Ts and Us of cubicle labyrinth she had expected, her workspace was an open room. In an industry that chose its terminology with an astounding lack of irony, the nickname for the room was refreshing. With people, for example, when they talked of visitors who might come to the site instead of human beings they talked about the hits, the eyeballs, the clicks. It sounded like a bill of bad garage bands. But her room was simply called the Box. Ten workstations lined the walls, leaving the center of the room open for hypothetical pacing, which remained hypothetical for they generally remained in their ergonomic chairs. The ten members of the team faced the walls. There was ample space between each workstation and available wall space for items or totems of personal significance one might tape up or tack up, but no one had essayed such a thing.

Once the people on her team got their morning coffee, they sat at their workstations and put on their headphones and started their workday. Everyone had CDs they brought to work. They put them in the CPU’s CD-ROM drives and listened to them through headphones. They all listened to different kinds of music, which seeped out of the cheap earpads of the office-issue headphones and overlapped. She was forced to bring some music from home because if she didn’t all day she felt as if she was lost between stations.

No one talked in the Box. If you wanted to borrow your neighbor’s stapler, you sent them an email and waited. They sent you back an email in the positive or negative. Only then did you reach over to the next workstation for the stapler or whatever. In this system, by design perhaps, there was little eye contact, and the rest of the team was almost as anonymous as the people whose web pages they wrote up. Who knew what those people looked like out there. If it said Herbert’s Pet Rock Shrine, Herbert could be a pseudonym, a nom de web, and the pet rock fanatic is really a Bob or an Orville. It took some getting used to. Occasionally the ergonomic consultants laid hands on her, tilting her limbs, modifying.

Anticipation of stock splits trembled the premises, tremors became tumultuous expansion. The company leased two and half floors, and then leased another two, and then the half floor, which had been shared with a law office, was also leased after a long negotiation. Now they had five floors, and periodically the construction caused problems. This server or that server might go down for a few hours while they rewired, and no one on the team could work for a while. It was a handsome prewar building and everything had to be ripped apart for the new power requirements and the T1 lines. The voice mail system went crazy. Sometimes she would see the red light on her voice mail go on even though the phone had not rung. She would check the message and it would be someone she didn’t know trying to reach someone she didn’t know, a person who was not on the new, frequently updated phone list and there was no record. The messages dated back weeks. Sometimes they were urgent but she had no other recourse but to delete them. I’m at the airport and where are you? Mom’s sick, you should give her a call but don’t say I said anything. The people were gone. The red lights winked out. Maybe they were temporary like her.

While she had never been on the internet before coming to work there, it did not take her long to familiarize herself. For such a big thing, it was actually pretty small once you spent an hour or two on it. The websites they were supposed to write up appeared in her email each morning, delivered by bots. The bots were lines of code that prowled the internet at night searching for keywords of interest to each team’s area of ontology, night owls. Then other specialized lines of code randomly assigned the new websites to each team member. If you ran out of sites to cover halfway through the afternoon, the bot could send you new ones to work on. The bot worked in the daytime, too. Day and night. It did not tire like people. How could one not admire a bot?

Pamela didn’t know why everyone got excited the morning the wipeboards appeared over the desk of each computer, but once she saw how the rest of the team hurried to write in red or green or blue their to-do lists, she realized that a void had been filled. The wipeboards were like a little bubble of hope inside each person that they had been unaware of. They made charts on the wipeboards, some people just lists, and when an item had been achieved, it was crossed out or wiped away. In some ways these to-do lists were the only outward markers of the progress made each day. Everything else was held tight by the database in cells, rows, columns.

For lunch she went to overpriced salad bars in search of the unwilted. No matter how far she walked, everything was overpriced. Because of all the renovations the elevators were slow and filled with the mysterious remains of heavy moved things, bits of plastic or insulation, and the delays cut into her lunch hour. Once she was past the doors of the building, she never ran into anyone she recognized from the office. They all went somewhere else for lunch. The mid-town lunch hour streets were a welter of trundling dry cleaning.

Around the coffee machine people talked about who was going to be laid off once the Tool arrived. Since the office was anonymous, you could offer your own contribution without fear. They could have been standing in line in the bank discussing why aren’t there more tellers on duty or at the departure gate of a delayed flight in communal bitch about the fucking airlines. The kind of honest and fleeting camaraderie you only get with strangers. One guy said half the ontology team would get the pink slip once the Tool arrived— that was how efficient the Tool was. Another said it wouldn’t happen all at once — that was how insidious the Tool was. Some people would be kept on to keep things running smoothly during launch week, to look out for glitches. But most people understood that some people were going to be let go. A lot of this talk didn’t interest her because she knew she would move on, Tool or no. That was the nature of being temporary.

A negative article appeared on one of the internet news sites, dubious as to the viability of their venture. No one liked it when financial analysts were quoted. There was the stock to think about. Most of the staff had enrolled in the stock plan and they checked the stock market throughout the day searching for dips. The goddamned dips. Plus the investors. An email with a link to the article was in her inbox when she booted up that morning. By noon a dozen interoffice counter-emails had joined the negative email, disputing some of the points in the piece. The Project Manager promised a pizza party. This cheered everyone up a bit.

One night, just before she left for home, she got an email saying that due to shifting priorities and the great flood of new hires, her team was going to be relocated to a more strategic location in the building. She put on her coat and left the building for the day. The next morning when she walked into the Box, it was filled with people she had never seen before. This was an entirely new collection of bad posture. Where the skinny skater-type had been, a beer-bellied former athlete hunched. The aerobics addict had been replaced by a teenager with braces, and so on. The email had not informed them that the move was going to happen overnight. She noticed a sign on the door offering directions. When she walked into the new Box, which was just next door to the old Box, all the members of her team were at their workstations. The workstations were in the same configuration, in the same order along the walls, but now there was a window. She turned her computer on and it was the same one she had used for the last few weeks. They’d moved it all overnight, like that. Even the wipeboards. She sat and attacked the next item on her to-do list. The window looked out on corporate slabs.

The worst thing was when the bot sent her to a place that didn’t exist. She would cut and paste the URL from the bot’s list, but when she got there the site would be gone. The browser could not find the page. It had been taken down, or abandoned, who knew what. It happened pretty frequently. Someone said, that’s the information age for you. Here today and gone tomorrow. And indeed one day she came in and was informed that the Tool had arrived. It worked to specifications and that was her last day there. She was only temporary.

The old connections re-form, and Lucien is reminded of how to eat an ice cream cone on a hot day. “Mmm, this is really good,” Lucien says, extending a cold tongue to newly minted double scoop. “This is Rocky Road, right? This is really good,” he says, tilting the cone to catch with his tongue a cascade. The old skills come back. The smell of cotton candy, the cheers swirling out in a tornado of joy and fear from the Tilt-a-Whirl, these particulars remind him of the mechanics of ice cream. It’s the day, he can’t help himself. Everything is unironic, sincere, even. Canned preserves! He read an article about the magical process in a lifestyle magazine recently. The photo-spread for the piece featured color-saturated shots of a runway model with tight pigtails, dressed in a blue pinafore. She made the apples into jelly and rendered them airtight, bent provocatively with dripping fingers. It must have cost twenty, thirty thousand dollars to produce. Drop in the bucket of their art budget. He could have given that preserve lady back there a dollar and gotten change back.

Lucien and the ice cream melt in the heat at deviating rates. He could have gone incognito in jeans and a T-shirt, perhaps a ribbed T-shirt of combed cotton, opted instead for his usual attire. His undershirt sops and he regrets his decision but not out of discomfort. He regrets his suit because he looks at the people around him and feels envy. He has a theory of course. He is accustomed by the necessities of his job to think of civilians as a herd to be shepherded by those of his elite. There is no real way to do his job if he thinks of these people as peers. Peers know what you’re up to, understand if not the specifics then the generalities of your schemes, the clients and press and p.r. men are in on the joke. Even the damned caterers will give you a wink now and then at an event. But every so often an Olympian must gaze down through clouds at mortal pastures and see his face in those faces and envy their simple bliss. They can enjoy. They can wear a T-shirt and a baseball cap and not consider it an ironic gesture. They can mess up their hair without dashing for the spritzer. The little things in life.

Lucien feels dampness between his fingers. He unbandages the bottom of the cone and sucks out the melted ice cream through the hole. Lawrence watches this as if apprenticing to an alchemist: rapt and respectful and calculating the years to the coup. The conjure ends with a flourish as Lucien pops the cone into his mouth and crunches. He instructs Lawrence to ask the ice cream stand who their distributor is, and to make arrangements for a tub to be sent up to the New York office.

Free of his familiar, Lucien relaxes and takes in the beautiful crowd. Normal folks, what they call families, kids and the like. They’re all dressed naturally, like they picked out their favorite clothes and stepped into them, like that. Even the USPS men have relaxed for the occasion, Lucien notices. They wear navy-colored polo shirts of the same manufacture, possess the same Middle American faces as the majority of the fair-goers. In their identical khaki pants with sure pleats, they resemble undercover police in this crowd, but they look comfortable. Lucien spies Parker Smith, their leader, by the dunking booth, weathering the taunts of the insolent drenched lad, and he waves. Parker catches this, volleys a greeting at Lucien and then a baseball at the bull’s-eye. His theatrical windup is justified. The boy falls into the water to applause.

Parker’s underlings clap him on the back and launch hands to high five. Parker has his platoon here, and Lucien has his. Lucien imagines a war room away from the front where they moved colored pins over a satellite map of Summers County but of course all the planning for the operation had been conducted over the phone, Parker’s long distance charges paid for by taxpayers and Lucien’s tucked neatly into the overhead. It had all been Parker’s doing. The start of it. Lucien had been recommended to Parker by a friend in the judicial branch whom Lucien had flattered once. Parker described the unique dimensions of the event with the honesty of a professional, much to Lucien’s appreciation. It was a weird gig, no doubt about it, a new paradigm. Public relations were only a small part of the USPS’s goals. Target Marketing, he explained, had decided that community events such as this, tied into popular innovations like limited, commemorative stamp series, were a small but significant means of getting the people involved with their government again. Tepid, downright embarrassing voter turnout was only one example of a widespread public disaffection with the national apparatus. He had the figures right in front of him; through the speakerphone Lucien heard a tapping noise. Like surly teenagers, the people of the country holed up brooding, bedroom doors shut against the invitations and entreaties of national life.

But ever since they opened the selection process for commemoratives to the public, the number of responses had astounded. Post Office statisticians tabulated and correlated the numbers on government-issue ledgers and hypothesized. It went far beyond the stamp collectors. The Post Office announced the category and the people voted. All types of people. A jumbo crayon box of ethnicity. They voted for flowers. Everyone had a favorite flower, maybe it was a gift once from a true love or something worried over in the back garden that finally blossomed for two days before the slugs got to it, but everyone had a favorite flower and they voted. They voted for the dead in order to see their faces on stamps. As if the particular dead celebrity on the stamp watched over the passage of the letter to its recipient, blessing the correspondence, the top right-hand corner of the letter a perch in heaven. In some ways it was an exploration of the American psyche, and keep it under your hat, Parker whispered, but they’ve been getting calls from the CIA. They think the data can be useful somehow. Parker explained this to Lucien. The kind of power a red convertible had on the people, hands down the favorite in the classic car commemorative. Sometimes the artist responsible for the image received fan letters whose freight had been paid by his particular creation. That was the funny thing: they used stamps to mail in their choices, like it had all been planned in some boiler room pyramid scheme. These commemoratives had a hold on the people. Combine it with local events such as this and you had an important experiment in progress with implications.

Lucien inspected his fingernails while Parker erupted from the speaker-phone.

And Talcott, Parker elaborated on the phone that day, Talcott is the perfect partner. An event like John Henry Days is a slice of Americana. It is a window into true lives that men like Parker and Lucien never get to see. Sure there had been some bellyaching when Talcott contacted them and demanded that they hold the stamp ceremony in their little town. Fact-finding had already occurred in Pittsburgh. The home of steel. Foundries already scouted out for photo ops and overtures made. Nothing signed but an inconvenience nonetheless. Then — a small town! Someone proposed a motion to table irritation for the moment and raise the issue of serendipity. It was seconded and many said aye. Talcott was planning an annual festival whose inaguration would coincide with the release of the John Henry commemorative. The timing was perfect. It was almost a scheme, it might appear as a scheme to the cynical observer, fast food cups tied to the big summer blockbuster, something concocted by men who neither ate fast food or patronized big summer blockbusters. One of the Quality boys pointed out that this kind of event was the type of thing they had set out to accomplish from the beginning of their late public relations push. Synergy. One mind, one people. If no one got excited about presidential candidates anymore, they certainly came out in droves to support their beloved heroes and artifacts. On stamps. If Talcott wanted some funding to help publicize their festival (for how does something exist without decent publicity) how could the Post Office not oblige? There were all sorts of different kinds of disbursement forms at the ready, in reserve, for such eventualities.

Lucien had never done a town before. Worked with the government, sure, Democratic fund-raiser for the education candidate one week and a Republican fund-raiser for the tax-cut candidate the next. Remarkable how many people were at both events. Same band, same caterer, same signatures at the bottom of the checks. He doesn’t think of himself as political. What others see as politics he perceives as momentary breezes. But he’d never done a town before. As Lucien considered the assignment, it occurred to him that maybe the trick about doing a small town is making the thing into the idea. Which raised the question of the chicken and the egg. This question dogged him as he got to work — he couldn’t figure out which came first, the stamp or the festival. Is the stamp a merchandising tie-in for festival, or the festival a press conference for the stamp? Looking around today, he’s still confounded. There are canned preserves and men walking around in old conductor uniforms. Is this really homey or is it constructed in some way. Is their sincerity actually the hapless grasping after something they believed their fathers possessed. There’s a safe deposit box containing their heritage, but they don’t possess the right documentation. Lucien suspects he is falling for a deception that beguiles the con artist and the mark in equal measure.

Lucien laces his fingers behind his back and walks, chest thrust out, dictator among the banana fields. The people moving, the flags ripping, the sound checks, are all interconnected gears set into motion by the idea of John Henry, every thing and person here grinds into another to keep this mad happy machine operating. He is cog, too, set to purpose and function. Lucien passes one table where a furtive young man hawks primitive masks he’s carved of wood, his own private mythology laid out on his table for converts, sixth grade math teachers, proxied bullies, assorted nemeses. Then kids erupt around Lucien’s hips, their faces daubed rainbow colors. Strawberry-flavored blood drips from these bloodsuckers’ mouths, raccoon circles blacken their eyes. Slim black whiskers bow over cheeks. Lucien traces these mini demons to a table where a matron asks the kids what kind of monster they want to be before she administers fright makeup. A long line of children await transmogrification. And what kind of monster would Lucien choose to be?

Another one of these characters in a railroad engineer’s outfit has attracted a ring of boys and girls around him. Lucien inches closer and hears the man say, “From that first day he appeared at the C&O camp, John Henry proved himself to be the strongest, fastest steeldriver they had ever seen. He swung the hammer down and the whole world jumped.” Not all of these kids are local, Lucien figures. Maybe they’re hearing this story for the first time. Truth be told, Lucien had no idea who John Henry was when Parker contacted him; first thing when he got off the phone he dispatched Lawrence to do some research. When he returned with a children’s book, Lucien frowned, squinted and asked Lawrence to do a summary. Later that night, as he read his assistant’s notes, he began to remember the story. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place where he’d first heard it. It was one of those stories that seems like it has always been a part of you. Like the stork story about the pebbles in the water glass, or however that story went. The fox and the grapes. Maybe some of these children squatting on the grass are getting the story for the first time. How many of their parents remembered the story? How many have heard of Talcott before today? He is proud of himself.

“Lucien? It’s Apple Valley Brand Rocky Road. I got their contact number.” This is the dull announcement of Lawrence’s return. He had dispatched his assistant on a mission in order to have a few moments to himself, lose the bottom beneath his feet at each new swell of the fair and here comes Lawrence back too soon. As long as he doesn’t start talking about the animals again. Lawrence whined that when they returned from the airport, there were all these paw prints in his bathtub and since then he can’t stop talking about bears mauling him in his sleep. Just the prints in the tub, nothing else was touched. What did he think, a bunch of cubs let themselves in with a key? Lawrence probably thinks he’s roughing it down here.

In the end they don’t really have to be here, on this flattened grass, hundreds of miles from his new leather chair. (Certainly that is one ill-planned aspect of this expedition; never get a new leather chair delivered just minutes before you have to hop on a plane. There are breaking-in rituals to be performed, imprinting to be executed.) Apart from the novelty of doing a town, the quiet audacity of such an idea, in the end Lucien hasn’t done more than tailor his methods to the needs of the client, as always. His people gave these folks a few tips on how to write a decent press release. He alerted the appropriate travel guides to get the event included in 1997 editions, called upon old New York colleagues who had fled the metropolitan turmoil and put themselves out to pasture in small Southern dailies. Small advance items appeared here and there. He called upon the List.

The List still amazed him. Cell phone signals probably turned to mist in these mountains but the List penetrated. He had put this weekend down out of habit, but never expected this kind of turnout. Five junketeers. In Talcott! The food is terrible, the only celebrities around are high school football greats yakking about that one big game, and the atmosphere is what climate control switches are meant to eradicate. He doesn’t know what surprises him more: the efficiency of the List or the desperation of its subjects.

A convenience that started as an experiment. As Lucien’s private game, not so long ago, a chin tuck ago. He noticed that the same people dragged themselves out for his events, for his competitors’ events, for whatever trough was laid out that night. Glossy writers, daily writers, beat reporters, scrabbling freelancers of mixed pedigree. (Not counting the true hangers-on of course, the blue-haired Park Avenue freaks, bony spouse hunters, and other assorted night fiends they haven’t invented pesticides for.) The writers were like day workers who crowded the farmer’s truck every morning for penny-work. They ate and drank, migrant workers, wiping maw on sleeve, and sometimes they got out the word like they were supposed to. There had to be a better system than this mooching free-for-all, it seemed to him. He took note of the names and faces, linked them to later bylines. A good number of them, it appeared, did the work. Sure they leeched, but a certain kind of creature maintained a more-or-less stable ratio of coverage to freeloading. He decided to add another database to his shifting A-list and B-list invitees, one devoted to this overlooked species of freelancer. He monitored their progress through the nights. How many drinks they poured down their gullets, how long they lingered after the food disappeared into lonesome garnish, how many bylines sprouted in the aftermath.

Soon he had a hand-picked crew who could be depended upon in times of need to fulfill a quota of coverage. Gossip columnists, music writers with Coke-bottle glasses, airline magazine habitués scheming passage to the next cabana, home electronic experts who sold review products to pawnshops, the eager and ambitious and just furloughed from internships. They were dependable, and he watched them. Surveying slime trails from above, patterns emerged, and he discovered a ratio he liked. When he was ready he mailed them anonymously. He didn’t mind including his rivals in his communiqués

— the more experienced these select became with the rules of the contract, the more healthy the entire industry would become. He added names, scouted out rookies and journeymen, subtracted slackers. There were few complaints; there was no one to complain to. They were fed, through them the public fed, and they filed pieces that paid the rent and subsidized their habits. Everybody won and the List flourished.

“Lucien?” Lawrence intrudes.

“Yes, Lawrence.”

“I saw the boys, sir. Dave and Tiny and the rest. They’re over by the beer garden. Do you think it’s time we glad-handed?”

“Lawrence, I think it’s a perfect time for glad-handing.” Who came down? He remembers he hooked Dave Brown up with Milt Chamber from West Virginia Life—Milt, formerly a Condé Nast regular, had fled back home after rehab to start a new life. Tiny is probably here for the food, Frenchie, he can’t remember at the moment, but there might be a travel magazine involved, knowing his predilections. Is One Eye doing anything? One Eye has been giving Lucien evil looks lately, but he is used to One Eye’s periodic fits of pique. And J. is here, from all accounts continuing his attempt at the record, poor guy. That way lies madness. Might have to have a talk with the boy at some point if he keeps it up. At least J. followed up on that website lead and is doing some coverage. Two out of five of them down here working. That makes forty percent. Well within the acceptable range.

Lucien takes one last look at the children. The storyteller’s face is a stone engraving and the children lean forward, drawn by suspense. He’s not doing too bad a job, probably trying to remember how his father or grandfather told him the story decades ago. At the booth adjacent they’re taking donations for the museum. The parents of the kids dig out a few bills while they wait for John Henry to win his race. Yes, it is a nice day. They’re taking donations for the construction of John Henry Museum. Throw in the museum thing and this is almost an artsy-type gig. He always feels good after an artsy-type gig.

“Let’s go, Lawrence,” he says, “and review the troops.”

At the all-night bodega of souls the crackheads promenade, jigger and shimmy, trade palsies in fitful games of one-upmanship, count coins beneath the corrugated tin of the yellow canopy. The bodega never closes. At midnight the night man removes the brick from the front door and transactions proceed through bulletproof plastic. He takes requests. He strains to hear the crackheads. When he withdraws into the recesses of his mercantile domain to retrieve malt liquor and potato chips of anonymous manufacture, protein shakes if that’s all the customer can keep down, the crackheads etch nonsense slogans and their names into the plastic with keys or dimes, halfhearted dispatches from underground. They look over their shoulders for 5–0; if they pooled their resources they could come up with two dozen warrants and summonses among them, surely. They taunt the night man for no reason, reason enough. They deprecate his sensory apparatus. Yo, you deaf? I wanted one St. Ides and two O.E.s, motherfucker, not two St. Ides, shit. I wanted those Lays chips you got right there, not that plantain shit, shit, you blind? They talk through the bulletproof plastic about the state of the economy. What you want another ten cent? Day before yesterday it was a dollar ninety-five, now you trying to tell me it’s another ten cent? My boy was down here two hours ago, nigger, he got the same shit and it wasn’t no ten cent more. You Dominican niggers try to rip a nigger off. If the night man is too tired to grant this impromptu haggling session the attention it deserves, he’ll let the guy off the hook and hear his name cursed by the man to the other crackheads down the line. If he feels like standing his ground, he’ll turn the revolving bulletproof box around so that the man sees his insufficient coin there on the yellowed plastic, a museum exhibit on ghetto commerce. He can come up with that dime or he can leave. Cigarettes and condoms may be purchased singly. The new demand for Phillies cigars is accounted for. The night man runs back and forth. Even a request for simple orange juice from this crowd, at this time of night, gathers licentious aspect. These people take ordinary items from his uncle’s shelves and convert them into criminal accessories.

The same faces night after night. Crackheads and drug dealers and here’s that guy for three Coronas.

J. Sutter on deadline queues up with crackheads in the sinister A.M. His fingers hurt from late employment at the tiny buttons of J.’s microcassette recorder, where they teased shrill idiocy from metallic spools. On the tape the actor and pinup expounded on Tantric sex and the Dalai Lama, from a white table poolside at a hotel in Los Angeles. That day, a year ago, J. sipped a margarita and squinted at his notes in the bleaching sunlight. He felt himself getting soft and overripe in the sunlight just like everything else in the state, his brain splitting and spilling juices. Brody Mills had just finished a stint at a court-appointed substance abuse rehabilitation facility. “Four weeks of seriously getting my head together,” as he described it that day, and a year later in J.’s apartment through diminutive technology. He tapped ash on the coarse tile of the hotel Sun Deck Lounge, eschewing for reasons of his own the elegant ashtray proximate his hand. “I’m clean for the first time in years and it feels so great,” he said, while eyeing and coveting J.’s frothy blue margarita like a Bedlam fiend.

Brody Mills dispensed rehearsed penance as the viscount of the studio publicity mechanism nodded and smiled and tapped Brody’s tanned forearm when he wandered too close to the demilitarized zone between their agreed-upon orchestrations and the facts themselves. His implosion had announced itself for months, first as nameless ectoplasm in blind items of gossip pages, then as bold-faced and named instigator in a brawl at a Manhattan after-hours club, finally no longer omen but event itself, as Brody Mills was cast against type in a hooded sweatshirt and detectives led him into the precinct at the top of the nightly news. On every channel. He was Wednesday’s scandal, he took a wrong turn after an afternoon spent with his surgeon-sculpted proboscis deep in cocaine anthill, slapped his longtime model girlfriend around, and bit the arresting officer on the ass when he came to investigate the noise complaint delivered to 911 by fellow residents of the upscale downtown co-op. The judge gave the actor and heartthrob probation and ordered a mandatory stay in rehab. J. was one of ten journalists scheduled for poolside chats that day, one of pop’s own parole review board. Brody certainly looked better than in his now infamous mugshot: the goatee shreds in a Beverly Hills sink; the black halos around his eyes trod away by step after step (numbering twelve in total) of self-awakening. J. was there to force the man to his mark, the X of tape where the public wanted him to stand, centered beneath the cleansing spotlight of contrition. Brody moved obediently. “Fame came so quickly,” he conceded, “I never had a chance to grow up.”

When J. got to that part of the tape, a few days later, when he was back in the civilized regions of Brooklyn, that quotation insisted on itself as an obvious and natural segue for a recap of Brody’s early career. He grew up before the public’s eyes but the child remained inside him. It was obvious, blunt, and ready for copy.

The magazine called him up, asked J. if he wanted to fly to L.A. to interview the actor and idol on his release from rehabilitation. J. flew out, interviewed this nipple-pierced Lazarus and filed the piece on time. But Fellini died. The great director Federico Fellini was dead in Italy and the managing editor wanted to run a package on the man’s demise: capsule reviews of his key movies rated by one to four stars for video store convenience; brief statements by leading American directors (no one too art housey) who were influenced by his work; and an essay on his impact on the world of film, the peculiar economy of postwar Italian life and how it produced idiosyncratic and beautiful art, this essay prepared months before when the man first checked into the hospital, just in case. There’s a protocol for such things. J.’s piece on the Confessions of Brody Mills, Actor and Superstar, was pushed back a week to make room for the package, and then another week, and then no one cared and a kill fee (full) arrived in the mail. That was a year ago.

Then this morning J. got a call rousing him from a dream, one of the agitated type that he gets only when the noon light gushes full and accusatory on his face through the bedroom window. Brody was in trouble again, falling naturally to mischief just as he did in the show that made him famous, the Fox television program Quaker’s Dozen, a situation comedy concerning twelve orphans of different ethnic backgrounds and the hip preacher who is their guardian. (When one of the child actors wanted to leave the show, or was eliminated by the producers’ caprices, they were “adopted” at the end of the season, a truly successful adaptation in the Darwinian jungle hell of modern entertainment, rarely a dry eye in the house when this stunt was performed, and seismic, Neilsen-wise.) Brody arrested yet again, and on the eve of the premiere of his new action film, yet. Will neighbors ever refrain from calling the police over loud noises that disturb the early morning metropolitan calm? When the constables arrived at the Paramount Hotel this morning and knocked down the door, Brody Mills was as naked as a babe (or the famous bare-ass scene in Ten Miles, the first film he made after he was adopted from the hip priest’s orphanage) and arguing with invisible critics and studio executives (for the unseen goblins he harangued must have surely been critics and studio executives) while the paraphernalia of narcotics abuse lay in plain sight and the hotel reservoir of pay-per-view pornography inundated the well-appointed suite at high volume. “It took half a dozen of New York’s Finest to restrain him,” the magazine editor related to J. from the AP wire, and would J. mind fixing up his piece from last year, two thousand words if possible, buck a word and by tomorrow noon?

J. put down the phone and went back to sleep. Paid twice for basically the same thing: he slept unperturbed by hectoring afternoon light, tranquilized by the thought of taking money off the troubled celeb. He woke and mulled over, guzzling coffee, the talk show disaster on his TV screen. At five he strolled to Fort Greene Park for what he reckoned might be a pleasant hour of meditation but he bored quickly with the pavement and pitbulls and wilted condoms and beat it home after five minutes. His thoughts did not touch on the assignment for more than a few moments through the evening. Pop a few details into the original fifteen-hundred-word piece, no sweat, snatching lollipops from a baby, the tikes have no grip yet, he could get up early and do that easy. He ordered Chinese food and watched television until eleven o’clock, when the faint angel of professionalism perched on his shoulder, implored in a whisper, and he went to check the file. Place the X rays up to the light and see exactly where the fractures were, what needed mending tomorrow so to speak. When he called up the file he found gibberish, a glyphic conspiracy of pixelated symbols he didn’t even know how to muster from his keys, it was a language from a cranky sect deep within the motherboard. He couldn’t explain it. He had fifteen hundred words of shit when he called up the file B. Mills Repentance Spiel.

But he still had the interview tape in his income tax receipt drawer, and he had coffee beans. J. knocked back a pot of coffee and transcribed once again the actor and teen scream’s confessional peregrinations. J. fastfor-warded past his own voice; he loathed the sound of his voice through the tiny speaker, it was amplified and remastered by the machine so that it contained a quality of earnestness and sincerity that he did not truly possess. Since Brody Mills never answered any of his questions, preferring instead a dada discourse, it did not matter that J. did not hear his questions. But two and a half hours into his reconstructions, J.’s fingers were rebellious from rewinding and fastforwarding, and his stomach and heart convulsed with the coffee bean’s harassment. He was so jazzed up that he needed to calm down if he was going to get, what, two hours sleep maybe and be fresh for the morning’s foray to the happy hunting grounds of hackery. And that meant an expedition to the only establishment open at this time of night. He must make his descent.

There was a time that whenever he suited up for a late night bodega run, J. would take the necessary bills and leave his wallet behind. Crackheads begging for change, knuckleheads out on the prowl: best to make a strategic withdrawal. But nothing ever happened and he stopped. More dreadful than becoming a participant in the city’s most popular street theater (the mugging on darkened corner, a spectacle tourists from all over the globe line up to get to see, easier to get than Broadway tickets) are the black windows in all the buildings. Surely, he thinks when he sees them, he cannot be the only one awake at this hour, he is not alone. But in all the buildings and brownstones the neighbors sleep. The decent folk forsake these hours. Blue TV flicker in some windows tells him there are a few like him awake at this time, not many. Always the same windows too, he’s noticed, scattered and well dispersed from block to block so as to adumbrate this nocturnal isolation to best effect. He waves at one blue dancer. No response. It’s a four-block walk to the trading post with only two sketchy parts: the blind turn from Carlton to Lafayette (who knows what kind of scene he’ll stumble into rounding that building’s blade); and that block where streetlights stare blindly, handicapped by vandalism and city neglect, where shadows confab to trade samizdat decrying illumination. But nothing has ever happened on the walk. Two blocks down he sees the huddled messes group outside the bodega. He takes a deep breath and sallies forth.

The freaks come out at night.

He gets in line behind the crackhead who sometime dons a subway worker’s reflective orange vest, a souvenir he picked up somewhere in the tunnels. This character likes to tell passersby he needs a token to get home, the orange vest intended to provide evidence of solid citizenship; why he’d need a token if he worked for the Metropolitan Transit Authority has apparently never occurred to the man. J. sizes up the group before him, they are travelers who have come a long way, certainly troubadours finally come to this neck of the woods: The most popular entertainment troupe in all of ShabbyLand, the Freebase Players. Yayo the Clown, his face rouged by dried blood and nose swollen after a recent third fracture, stands in his gay gray attire — he prefers to play the dignified gentleman raconteur down on his luck, happy to share a comedic tale of woe for some change. Those dynamic men on the flying trapeze, Gordy and Morty, who zoom on leave from gravity through alkaloid extracted from cocoa leaves, death defying, without a net worth, falling to earth only at dawn, when this team is too exhausted to perform any trick except attempting sleep while wired to the limits of human endurance. And of course the elders, Ma and Pa, married for twenty years, half that on the pipe, God bless ’em, keeping vigil over the dirty garbage bags containing the cherished props of their act, deposit bottles and broken toasters. And at the fringes of this group, mingling with the celebrities, are assorted teenagers just ducking around the corner for supplies, some malt liquor and Newports, identifiable by their baggy jeans and beepers and youthful joie de vivre, so refreshing beneath the timer-controlled beam of the streetlight.

The line progresses slowly. Tonight everybody hassles the night man, they denounce the service at this establishment. But there are no questionable characters hanging around who fall outside the usual disrepute of the crowd, so J. starts thinking about the article, he leaves this corner and is conveyed to its double on Grub Street. Then J. sees him.

J. sees him zigzagging down the street, stymieing any snipers of euthanasiac bent who might be roosting on the Brooklyn rooftops, an out-of-control prop plane in for an uneasy landing. Tony darts here to finger the coin slot of a pay phone, diddling around in luckless pursuit of change, scrambles there to see if that glint (bottle top) is a dime or mirabile dictu a quarter. J. sees Tony, the ghoul’s fingers wiggling in the air like crab’s legs over wharf bottom detritus. Tony lopes down the avenue, scanning and panning, and J. knows that with Yayo the Clown’s meticulous and agonized counting of pennies (always that same deficient sum, the limited number of pockets in which to search), there is no way J. will get clear before Tony lands at the bodega.

J. is the only mark in the ragged assembly on the corner; Tony will not approach the malt liquor boys, contusions have taught him better, and the crackheads are his comrade connoisseurs of the pipe and competitors for change, outside the game. During the day the street has enough traffic that J. is not always discovered as the object of Tony’s salvage operation. During the day Tony is a puppy; at night he’s a damned barnacle, strung out on an odyssey for the next piece of rock and there’s no shaking him. J. and Tony have a relationship at this point, going back to when J. first moved to Brooklyn and had a pocket full of change. Tony looked more craving than hungry, but he needed the change more than J., fuck it, J. was in a good mood. Tony smiled and memorized the sucker’s stupid face. The act wed them as mark and con man, till zip code do you part. That first contribution was a binding contract (everyone at the bodega now would attest to its legality) although J. hadn’t bothered to read all those subclauses, the fine print he couldn’t see in the bright and easy light of that aimless afternoon. They have a relationship, with rules. During the day “Sorry, man,” will dispatch Tony to the next mark down the street, that bohemian homesteader of these Brooklyn badlands, the goofy white dude with the goatee. Plenty of marks on the afternoon street, such is the bounty of the neighborhood. Another rule: Tony won’t beg for change if J.’s escorting a lady; he’ll tip a nonexistent hat, but that’s it. At night, though, times are tough, and tonight J.’s the only sap around.

Tony’s evidently having a bad night. All sorts of tectonic mayhem afoot in Tony’s face this eve: his troubled visage bursts with subcutaneous lumps of calcified ooze and porous eruptions trickling a clear fluid. The hair he managed to grow last week and was quite proud of (they talked about it while J. walked briskly for the subway, forbidden turf for the shambling man; the subway cops had beat him up once, or so Tony claimed), has evacuated in patches, exposing old and angry scabby flesh. Tony arrives just after J. asks the man behind the bulletproof glass for three Coronas. He assumes his hovering remora position and says, “Hey, Mickey Mouse man, you having a good night?”

“All right,” J. responds, glancing at Tony and then staring dead into the store. J. was wearing a freebie T-shirt from Disney that first day Tony hit him up for cash. Remembering and filing his clients’ distinguishing characteristics helps the crackhead keep his various pitches in order.

“That’s good, that’s good,” Tony says, nodding to comrades down the line, who pantomime back things seen. “Say, listen, listen, could you spare a few dollars for some food? I haven’t eaten all day, man, and I’m hungry.” Holding his stomach urchinwise.

“We’ll see,” J. says. This is one night he should have left his wallet behind. In a few moments J. will open his wallet and Tony will take a big thirsty peek at the cash. Can’t really say he doesn’t have any cash when there’s a sheaf of twenties in there.

“Sure am hungry,” Tony says, nonchalant.

“Maybe,” J. says. He withdraws a five, holding his wallet close. He thinks of soldiers in trenches cupping their cigarette tips so that the Kaiser’s goons won’t see the flame and draw a bead. The night man returns with three Coronas and rings it up, cue now for J. to slide the money into the bulletproof box and spin it around for approval. The night man slips his agile fingers into the register and drops the change and the bottles into the box, slides it around, transaction complete.

Tony bobs happily next to him. J. stuffs the dollar twenty-five into his jeans and withdraws from the crackhead bazaar. “Hey, brotherman, how about that change?” Tony murmurs.

“Sorry, man,” J. says. Cradles beer to his chest and strides.

Tony’s head rocks back and forth and he pulls up next to J. “But you said so.”

Semantics now. “I said maybe. Can’t help you out tonight.” He just got two checks in yesterday, so giving the man a quarter is no big deal. Tony can have the change and smoke himself to death, no big deal, it’s spare change. But J. has that article due, he’s been transcribing word for word a Hollywood junkie’s incoherent speeches and he’s had enough of junkies tonight. Coffee curdling in him, deadline creeping: he’s in servitude to one druggie tonight and that leaves him with empty pockets for this neighborhood nuisance. “See ya later,” J. says.

They’re the same age, J. found out one day. Tony trotted next to him, like he is now, halfheartedly rapping about needing some Similac for his baby, a ploy Tony used the first few months after their original meeting but eventually dropped when he realized that he didn’t come off as a dutiful daddy (no one glows that maniacally with the joys of paternity). Tony said, “How old do you think I am?” and J. guessed forty-five. Tony grinned broken teeth and giggled, “I’m twenty-nine! Twenty-nine years old! Today’s my birthday!” And with that he cackled away down the block.

Tony is not giving up so easily tonight. He’s hurting for a little something. Tony says, stepping closer than J. would like, “You want some LPs? ’Cause I know a Guy that got some. You like that old funk? I could hook you up.” Switching tactics tonight. He knows a Guy, a Guy who J. has learned is a truly enterprising individual. Over the years this Guy, with Tony as the middle man, has been able to furnish stereos (“Real cheap!”), VCRs of the finest Japanese craftsmanship (“Videos too! You like porno?”), sticky weed (“I saw you walking with that dread last week. Maybe he wants some smoke.”), and women (“The night guy at the old people home pays me five bucks to get a woman for him — I could hook you up!”). The Guy Tony knew was a true entrepreneur. Perhaps one day J. will ask if the Guy has a line on devices that make receipts, but not tonight. Nor is he interested in a bunch of old records that the Guy robbed from someone’s house.

“No thanks,” J. says.

“I haven’t eaten all day, man, please.”

“No.”

“What do you mean no? I see you every day, motherfucker, and now you can’t even help a nigger out with some money to eat. That’s terrible.” A boil splits on Tony’s face and drips. “Can’t even help a nigger out with a sandwich. I saw you got plenty of money on you.”

“No.” They’re on the block of broken streetlights. Tony’s mother lives on this block. Tony’s pointed it out to J. before; it’s a nice old brownstone in the middle of the block. Family discord: Tony lives a few streets away in a vacant lot shack. Or he used to. The habitation burned down a few weeks ago and Tony pointed to a glistening pink burn on his arm for proof. A problem with the wiring no doubt.

“You got money for alcohol but I can’t eat,” Tony says. As if this suppurating shade wanted the money for food, strung out like he was. No one on the street but them and all the windows dark. Tony takes the advantage of his opponent and leans up and whispers, “I’m so hungry I might have to take it then, I’m so hungry,” and the threat sits there in J.’s ear. There was that night when J. was heading for the subway to make it to a book party in Manhattan and he saw Tony prowling around, cussing. His clothes were inside out and blood seeped from a gash above his eye. When he saw J. he asked him if he’d seen these three knuckleheads walking around anywhere. J. replied he hadn’t and Tony said that he got into a beef with them and they beat him up and made him take off his clothes and put them on inside out. Or maybe they made him put his clothes on inside out and then beat him up. At any rate, he was looking for them and he had something: he pulled up his shirt and pointed to the long carving knife tucked into his belt. He was going to cut them when he found them. J. told him to calm down and get himself cleaned up. He wasn’t going to cut anybody. Tony considered this possibility, nodded and agreed. He pulled his shirt down over the knife. Then he asked J. for some change.

J. doesn’t respond to the threat. They walk in silence for a few feet, and they leave the threat on the pavement behind them. They move into the next streetlight’s circle and Tony says, “Hey, you know I wouldn’t do that. I ain’t like those other crazy niggers they got up in here. But I gotta eat. What do you want me to do?”

“Can’t help you, man.” If he gave into the crackhead now, it would look as if he was giving in to the threat, even with Tony’s withdrawal of it. A principle involved: he doesn’t want to be punked out. There’s one more block before he gets to his house and he doesn’t want Tony there when he gets to his front door.

“You want me to sing for my supper?” Tony asks. “You want me to sing for my supper? I’ll sing for my supper.” He spits a gremlin of phlegm to the pavement and scratches his foot across the sidewalk like a pitcher taming his mound for a pitch. Then he jumps up and down and sings from his singed throat, “This old hammer killed John Henry but it won’t kill me! This old hammer killed John Henry but it won’t kill me!” J. looks back at the crack-head. Tony’s eyes bulge out with the strain of producing that gross racket. “This old hammer killed John Henry but it won’t kill me!” And here, J. thinks, this is the essential difference between this neighborhood and those of Brody Mills’s orbit. No one here will call the police about the noise. They hear gunshots and arguments in the middle of the night and they might creep to the window to see what’s going on but they won’t call the police. They’ll pray they don’t hear a rape, something that will force them to get involved, or consider getting involved, but the people behind the black windows will not call the police at this. “This old hammer killed John Henry but it won’t kill me!” It’s up to J. He has no more resistance. He pulls out the change from the five dollars and gives it to the crackhead. Without touching the man’s palm. Who knows what the guy wipes his ass with.

“You like that song?” Tony asks.

“You won,” J. responds. Yards between them now, the distance between the mark and the expert con.

J. hears Tony yell, “Hey, brotherman, brotherman, wait a minute!”

J. turns, knowing from the volume of the man’s voice that there are distances, old distances, between them. Tony jabs his finger at him and says, “You’re a solid brother, Mickey Mouse, you’re a solid citizen.” He bows and scampers away in the direction of a building without a door, a building with secret steps and codes.

At his desk J. sips his first Corona and looks down at his notes. He calculates what he’ll get done before he’s dampened enough to fall asleep. He considers how much sleep he’ll get and through the calculus of doggerel arrives at how many words per hour he has to produce by noon. He presses a button and listens to the lying junkie. Only variety of junkie awake at this hour.

The biggest spud in Summers County is a mean-looking son of a bitch, whole cubic feet of lumpy resentment, a bad-ass tuber from the bowels of Hell. Last year’s winner, enthroned on a table across the aisle and encased in a top of the line plastic sheath to preserve its nefarious glory for generations to come. The proud father, a grizzled farmer garroted by a bolo tie, stands behind junior pointing to the sign at its swollen base that invites the passersby to touch it. Just an exhibit, not for sale. J.’s almost bored enough to walk over and see what kind of tater miracle will be performed on him, but he’s not there yet. It’s comfortable on the beer garden bench, even if he’s not drinking, and the boys are doing well enough by themselves, rapidly exhausting the roll of drink tickets the city fathers, via the taxi driver, gave them when they arrived at the fair. J. can’t keep his eyes off that spud, though. It’s a Paul Bunyan potato, a John Henry snack.

The boys sprawl across the benches, bending elbows and killing time. Flies alight on their faces for brief disappointed moments.

“I think they should give us free T-shirts. I want a free T-shirt.”

“Don’t think they carry your size, my man.”

“For my mother.”

“How old do you think she is?”

“She’s seventy-four. That why I want to get it, for her birthday.”

“Not your toothless ma, that woman there in the red tanktop.”

“Those guys over there keep drinking out these jars, man, been watching them. It’s moonshine.”

“Ever tell you about the time I was interviewing Lynrd Sknyrd and we drank from their still? Drinking a bucket of nails.”

“What time is this steeldriving thing? It’s like some kind of monster truck thing, right?”

“I say we go over there and buy some of that shine.”

“I gotta dig that steeldriving event. Maybe I can squeeze a GQ thing out it. Mano-a-mano is really big right now.”

From time to time, J. sneaks a peak at the next bench over, where some locals have bivouacked for similar purposes. So far J. has cataloged one “get a load of these guys” thumb gesture, three different rounds of chortles at his friends’ expense, and assorted steel-eyed squints of challenge. Only he has noticed. There’s not a fight brewing, but one or two lessons to be taught to the rude outsiders are being debated under their baseball caps, drawn from fisticuff curricula.

“Still pissed?” One Eye taps on his shoulder.

Ever since their embarrassing internment in Lawrence’s bathroom, One Eye has avoided him. J. figured his friend was probably busy with caper preparation: diagrams of heating vents, timing with a stopwatch the length of time it took to get to Lucien’s room from his, counting and recounting paces, calculating lines of sight. At 12:05 on the dot every night the security guard leaves his post for a bathroom break. Now here he is with a white cotton candy cone picked bare except for a few tufts of pink fur, as if he’s been picking meat off a dead cartoon animal.

J. says, “Forget it. Just don’t mention it again.”

“It’s up to you, my friend,” One Eye says, ripping remnants of pink, “But I’m hitting Stage Two tonight, with or without you. Lucien’s having dinner with some of the local muckety-mucks and I’m going to hit him them.”

“Enjoy.”

“I’ll take you off too if you want… Oh, look, here comes Captain Johnson now.”

Lucien and his herald try to make an elegant stride over to the beer garden as gawking tourists and hyperactive children divert them into constant course corrections, pausing here, dodging left or right. Dressed in the only Angelo Marini suits for a hundred miles probably. Lawrence follows behind his master conjugating to irritate with every step (he irritates, has irritated, will irritate). “Hello, friends,” Lucien says as the final obstacle jets across to the giant spud and clears the way. “There is a truly exemplary ice cream stand on the other side a little farther up.”

“Just between you and me,” Lawrence says in a Dow Jones whisper, “the Rocky Road is your best bet.”

As they greet the group, J. looks over their shoulders to see if he can spy Pamela. She ditched him once they made their way down the hill. He had a bit of trouble maneuvering around this lady’s double stroller, asked, “Do you want to go this way or down there?” and she was gone. He stood there with John Henry under his arm and correctly reckoned he’d find Dave Brown, Tiny, Frenchie and One Eye near the most convenient beer station. He doesn’t see her.

“Glad to see you’re all enjoying yourselves,” Lucien smiles. “Not the usual, eh?” J. has to agree. The sun is a pleasant kind of irritation on his back. Out here in the open, under unpillaged blue, it’s a nice rest stop, it breaks things up as he goes for the record. Monday he’s back in cities again, taking his usual train routes to the standard event locales, taking his usual cab routes home after the standard event closings. “Off the beaten track to be sure,” the p.r. man continues, “so you know I appreciate the effort you men have put in.”

“Ours is not to wonder why, Lucien,” One Eye growls.

“Dave,” Lucien turns, “how is old Milt Chamber? You’re covering this for West Virginia Life, correct?”

“Nice guy,” Dave hiccups, “we’ve only talked on the phone, but didn’t he used to be at the Times'? I think I met him a few years ago. Had some kind of breakdown, right?”

“Dehydration, I think, was the explanation I heard. One of those new fad diets. J. — heard you talked to InterTravel. It sounds like it’s going to be one hell of a site when they launch. Apparently you can just click on any city and you’ll be able to get restaurants and hotels. The local attractions. Isn’t this world wide web marvelous? The head of content there is a dear friend.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s really smart. You guys should get together once you get your piece in. I think they’re looking for good writers, and with Time Warner behind them, they should pay quite well.”

“Sounds great.” Lunch, let’s do lunch, let’s meet for drinks, here’s my card, that’s the office number and I’ll put my cell number on the back.

Lawrence points. “What is that?”

“That’s J.’s,” Dave Brown says, tapping the John Henry statue. “His little buddy.”

“He’s really got the spirit.”

“The merchandise isn’t too garish,” Lucien says. “I’m quite surprised. They’ve shown remarkable restraint.”

“I would have gone for an action figure at least,” Lawrence twitters. “Margins on action figures these days are not to be believed. Board games, any number of directions they could have gone in. There’s not even any sweatshirts. Everybody makes sweatshirts these days.”

“Why don’t you write them a memo, Larry?” Frenchie asks, winking to comrades.

“Oh, J.” Lucien interrupts, “I have something that might interest you. Lawrence?”

Lawrence fumbles with his leather briefcase and hands J. a newspaper. “We thought you might get a kick out it,” he says.

“The Hinton Owl,” Tiny says, “All the News That’s Fit to Hoot.”

It is the special John Henry Days edition, a slim four-sheeter. J.’s seen stacks of it lying on tables. But what’s it got to do with him? JOHN HENRY DAYS ARRIVES! with a picture of Mayor Cliff standing beneath the monument on the hill. This is real breaking news.

“Below the fold,” Lawrence offers, smiling thinly.

J. flips the paper. TRAGEDY AVERTED AT OPENING NIGHT GALA — VISITING JOURNALIST SAVED BY HEROIC LOCAL DOCTOR. There's a crime scene photo of J. on the ground, his arms spread out, while onlookers — he recognizes Frenchie’s coif — bend over him. Jesus Christ.

Tiny snatches the paper from his hand, roaring, “ ‘A near fatal accident was averted last night when J. Sutter of New York City almost choked to death during the opening ceremonies of the John Henry Days …’—catchy lede, I’ll say that. Blah blah—‘local talent Bobby Martin sang the famous “Ballad of John Henry” ’—blah blah—‘only inches from death’—yeah yeah— ‘if not for the expertise of respected physician Dr. William Stephenson, Mr. Sutter surely would have expired. A piece of roast beef is the suspected culprit.’ Wow, J., you got your name on the front page!”

“Better put out an APB on that roast beef before he strikes again!”

“It’s written by that guy who was hanging around, Honnicut or whatever. Gotta give that guy credit for having a nose for a story.”

“Guess you never know when you’ll make the news.”

Lucien smiles. “Thought you might want to have that for your clip file. Keep it.”

Tiny says, “It’s a good omen. Could’ve been an obit — misadventure by buffet.”

“Thanks for the paper, Lucien.” J. knows One Eye has some kind remark or squint-related communiqué, so J. refuses to look in his direction. He gives Tiny his drink tickets and tells them he’s going to check out the fair.

He’s a few yards in when Dave Brown says, “Hey, Bobby Figgis — aren’t you forgetting something?”

J. turns around. His John Henry statue rests on the picnic table, presiding over a fief of half-filled beer cups.

He’s in. He walks past pastel menageries of balloon fauna with knot navels, is enticed to linger over rows of pies. This isn’t the Aryan Nation recruitment rally he thought it would be from what he saw last night and this morning. More black people than he expected; he’s doing a lot of the old afro-nod, the hello you give to folks when you get out of the city and into friendlier climes. He notices quite a few teenage couples, dressed in the hip-hop gear he’d see on any Brooklyn ave; there are even one or two hardrocks around, fronting. Cable allows every teenager, no matter how country, to catwalk into the latest styles. And maybe looking at these woods forces them to reach for what they see on TV as ghetto realness, and they cling to it. A life raft in this cracker wilderness. So they know who they are even when mowing the lawn. Hell, the circulation of the people he works for reaches everywhere, so he’s helped it along in his small way. Wrote about the new sneakers the rap crowd decided on this spring, interviewed Down Ready Crew just a month ago to abet the push for their first major label release. Even the white kids have a little flavor. There are older bourgie couples with small kids, the Range Rover crowd out for a weekend excursion. Of course we’re here, he thinks, but his New York prejudices still urge him to surprise.

The next trash can he comes to is full, overfull, topped with the last uneaten nubs of hot dog buns and crenellated paper plates with Rorschach ketchup smears, so he rolls up the Hinton Owl and stuffs it in his back pocket. Christ. He’s seen his name in the paper plenty of times, that’s his trade, migrating to where the work is and getting a byline at the end of the day, but he’s never been in the paper. He felt so good he’d almost forgotten about last night. And with his picture like that, stretched out like a KO’d heavyweight. The closest he’s ever come to being in print was when one of his college friends imagined himself as his generation’s Proust and stuck J. in under a pseudonym as a talented fellow who’d allowed himself to betray his talent. His pal denied the character was based on J. — after all, his name was name Ray, wasn’t it?

Sniveling Lawrence handing him the paper like that, and Dave Brown’s Bobby Figgis crack. In this anonymous fair, surrounded by the motley, he felt out in the open. Out here all exposed.

John Henry is too heavy. He feels like he’s been lugging him around for years. He wasn’t that heavy up in the caboose, but he started to get heavy as J. walked down the hill to the fair, and now he’s heavier than ever. Slighted anonymous muscles in his hand grumble. There’s no place to put him. He thinks, I got John Henry here in fine condition! Get your authentic John Henry here! How much would you like to bid, sir? No one else has one.

They’ve stuck to T-shirts, some kids have green foam sledgehammers, but he’s the only jackass walking around in spy sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt with a John Henry under his arm.

So where would Pamela be?

Not in the moonwalk. The moonwalk is a machine that takes children into its input and has three settings: jump, tumble and headrush. Once they have been output the children have been altered, possessing a new appreciation of solid ground. But the true heart of the lesson, J. thinks as he watches the gamboling and careening kids, is that reality is always waiting. Solid ground will rush up to meet you after your momentary escape. The Enchanted Castle has seen better days in more blessed kingdoms; gray patches cover puncture wounds in the plastic, half the turrets on top wiggle in asphyxiation, they sag, wobble at every pratfall of the children inside. Blue smoke chugs out of the gasoline engine pushing air inside. Perhaps a steam engine would be more eco-friendly

His arm is tired; he readjusts his grip on the statue and John Henry dangles upside down as J.’s fingers curl around his leg. Not a dignified pose for a legend, but… On the bandstand the bluegrass trio who performed during his last pass has been replaced by O’Leary the One-Man Band. Cymbals collide tinnily between his knees, he wheezes into a harmonica that’s hooked onto his face like emergency room apparatus, his banjo writhes, and an extra hand comes out of nowhere periodically to squeeze the tiny black horn at his hip. Is he singing John Henry? This is an instrumental, and the kinetic extravaganza before his eyes distracts his ears, he can’t make out the song. He moves through the bottleneck of O’Leary fans, soldiers past a stall of tie-dyed wall hangings and finds her.

He finds her in a wedged-in booth, an illegal space probably off the official map of vendors, between a tableau of assorted shriveled jerkies and a booth offering photographs of dead celebrities in glamorous poses. Pamela is having her palm read by an old white lady perched on a green-and-white plaid lawn chair. The fortuneteller is skinny as barbed wire, rusted as such, just as bent. She smokes a brand of cigarettes J. has never seen before, discounted tobacco calibrated to the region’s economic profile, an off-brand with on-target carcinogens. The weatherbeaten oracle notices J. and cuts off her prognostications, folds Pamela’s palm into her mottled hands and drinks deep from the seeker’s eyes. A might theatrical, J. thinks, but what can you expect from a lawn chair psychic?

Pamela notices J. as well and turns to ask the woman, “You’re not going to tell me how it turns out?”

She lights a cigarette with another cigarette and says, “What do you expect for two bucks?” leaning back into the soft slats of her throne.

“How’s the future looking these days?” J. asks as they retreat into people.

“She was just reminding me of something.” The muscles in her face un-ratchet. “Where did you go?” she asks.

“I was right behind you,” he says, “I thought you ditched me.” She denies convincingly. They stroll.

Into his hand is thrust a flyer for auto repair, a few seconds later a flyer for soul repair; mechanics and Christians alike work the crowd. He thinks, we are officially hanging out now, but what does that mean. Nothing. They’ve merely been thrown together at an odd occasion and talking and walking together is easier than being alone in a crowd. She doesn’t say anything. He feels like an ass. His eyes follow the barricade that runs along the tracks and he can make out half the arch of the new tunnel. Right now the one John Henry dug is hidden by a tent, but Pamela has steered them in that direction, so he’ll soon see the famous place. What all the hubbub is about. He knows the fair isn’t that big, but all this aimless cutting across the rows makes it seem like it goes on forever. His sneakers scud across crushed paper cups and they stroll through the fair.

“My father would have loved this,” Pamela says.

“Have you decided about the museum?”

“Not all this junk they’re selling, but the idea behind it.” She finally looks at J. “He would have loved it.”

“John Henry!” rolls the voice across the field. “I’m looking for John Henry! Are you out there?” Before J. can suggest they check out this next petty spectacle, Pamela charges ahead toward the shouting, where a small huddle has assembled around a contraption. The worn sign at its base urges, TEST YOUR STRENGTH, and a sheet of paper taped up for this occasion offers as postscript, JOHN HENRY CONTEST. J.’s eyes skitter up the length of the wooden totem, to the bell at the crest. At intervals along the way, obscuring the usual designations, newly taped-up shreds of paper read, WATER BOY, APPRENTICE, SHAKER, STEELDRIVER, and at the top, JOHN HENRY. Looking for John Henry, paging Mr. John Q. Henry,” shouts the barker. In a worn green suit, beneath the rim of a dusty brown bowler hat, he says, “Take a chance, take a chance, every swing might be your last.”

J. slides in next to Pamela. She says, “I’m not sure what I thought this would be.”

Three teenagers in U of WV football shirts perform calculations in their heads, make charts with Risk, Ballsiness and Ridicule Potential headers. While they ponder and cogitate, their date rape stares ease into squints of scholarly contemplation. Two arrive at a figure in unison and shove their slower comrade toward the barker, spilling beer over rims.

“All right, citizens, looks like we have a contestant!” the barker yelps, grabbing the redheaded conscript’s arm before he can squirm back to his friends. “Listen here, Red,” steering him toward the contraption, “this ain’t hauling kegs up the frat house steps. This is serious business.” He shoves a scraped-up wooden mallet into the frat boy’s hand. “You don’t want your friends there telling Lisa Ann that her beau doesn’t have what it takes, do you?”

Red can’t back out now, so he hams it up for his pals and the crowd, hoping to shape this incident into a flattering anecdote his friends will recount for years to come, preferably when he is trying to get laid. He flexes Atlas-style, does two pushups and spits into his palms while his chums hand over the two bucks.

“Just hit the target, Red, and try not to break anything,” the barker advises, less solicitous now that he’s roped one in. He directs Red’s attention to the padded plug at the base of the device. Red takes one last look at his cronies, unleashes a rebel yell and brings the mallet down on the target, whereupon rudimentary kinetic energy transfer systems are initiated and the red ball shoots up the center groove of the totem. It jets up; he’s no WATER BOY or APPRENTICE, but SHAKER, and the red ball, having judged and designated, delivering in quivering apex summary judgment, falls back down. Red does not ring the bell, sound in clear summer air his legend. His friends shout “Shaker! Shaker!” and slap the man on his back.

The barker says, “Too many shakers and not enough men around here, been like this all day.” Back at the crowd now, ushering this last contestant back into the crowd and searching for rubes. “Who’s next? Two dollars an affirmation, who’s next, who’s next? Two dollars to see if you have that steeldriving stuff. Take a swing, every day may be your last.” Spittle off his lips clear in the sun. “Think you got what it takes?” Judging the crowd in advance of his machine. “You, in the sunglasses, come on up and take a swing, son.”

It becomes evident to J. that the man is addressing him. “No, thanks,” he says, taking a step back.

“Why don’t you go ahead?” Pamela asks. Perhaps a mischievous expression roosting there in those oxbow eyebrows, wide pupils.

“No thanks,” J. repeats.

“I understand, my man,” the barker says, drawing disappointment from the well of his face. “Don’t want to look bad in front of your girlfriend, but performance anxiety is nothing to worry about. Happens to a lot of men, I hear.”

“Here’s two dollars,” Pamela says, handing him the cash. She looks back at J., hands on her hips as if he’s been standing there for hours. “Come on, J., take a swing.”

“I’m not sure if your friend has taken his Geritol today,” the barker offers, “perhaps that’s what’s bothering him. You take your Geritol today, son?” He extends the mallet to J.

Can’t escape without pushing past the crowd behind his back. He doesn’t have any choice, really, does he? He steps up to meet his fate.

“You gonna let go of that?” the barker asks.

He has the statue under his arm.

“I’ll hold that for you,” his new enemy Pamela offers, and an exchange is performed whereby he trades the statue for the mallet.

“Where are you from, son?” the barker inquires, mock friendly. Up this close his face is all pores. He’s going to have a little fun with J. before he lets him take a swing.

“Brooklyn,” J. mumbles.

“Big Apple,” nodding, scratching beneath his bowler. “I was in New York once when I was in the navy. Hung out in Times Square with all the lights. Caught a dose so bad it still hurts to — sorry, ma’am. Wouldn’t go back there if you paid me. Let’s see — do you work out? This muscle tone, what are you, a construction worker?”

“Writer. I’m ready to go if you’d just step aside.”

“College boy, huh? Well, we don’t discriminate here. Why don’t you take your shot. Wait a minute, hold it like this. It ain’t a bunch of daisies. Hold it like you want to drive steel, son.”

J. spreads his legs apart, trying to insinuate his slack limbs into a pose of classic athleticism. A statue a museum would be proud to acquire. Wouldn’t mind giving Pamela a little knock on the head, to tell the truth. Ignore everybody; he attempts to do so, but he can feel their eyes on his neck, and sweat torrents from ducts. He feels like he felt at dinner last night, all the crackers around him watching his troubles. The mallet is a little heavier than he thought it would be. He makes a note to himself to give the swing a little oomph when he brings the head over his shoulder. Makes a note to have good aim and hit the mashed plug square. He will not falter and damn Pamela and damn all them behind him.

WATER BOY.

Out of the crowd whitecaps of swelling laughter, which collapse into a splashy foam of chortle and chuckle. A few cheer out of honed politeness. The mad barker at the end of the world nods exaggeratedly in commiseration, hat in his hands over his belly. He takes the mallet from J. and says, “Noble profession, Water Boy. Some of my best friends are Water Boys. No shame in a trade like that,” then he quickly pivots and faces the crowd, hectoring, on to the next victim, “Hit the bell and make it ding ding ding, make it sing that old John Henry song!”

“Come on, Water Boy,” Pamela says, sliding her arm into his.

J. is startled by the heat of her arm, but still too pissed to take in the full implications. “What did you have to do that for?” he sputters, but he doesn’t take his arm away.

She pats his hand with warm fingers. “Don’t worry about it. You were just a little too smug. It’s all in good fun.”

“Those things are rigged,” he halfheartedly fumes. “See how he was leaning on the post? Has a switch back there where he can adjust if he doesn’t like someone. That college boy crack …”

At their backs they hear, “Think you’re John Henry? You ain’t no John Henry, I’ll tell you that.”

“I still haven’t seen the tunnel up close yet,” he says. He can’t think of anything else to say.

“That’s where we’re going.” GENUINE STEEL-DRIVING EXHIBITION—4 P.M.

MATT HENDRICKS OF INTON

VS.

TONY LESLIE OF TALCOTT

The biggest rock in Summers County sits on a wooden stage, bulging eight feet high, one side sheared off into an almost level surface. Red, white and blue streamers dangle from posts, patient for wind that will marshal and inspire them into patriotic ruffle. Two ruddy white men, shirts off, take practice swings with sledgehammers; they stretch muscles and suckle water bottles.

J. and Pamela force themselves into the biggest clot of people yet. It’s almost four o’clock and time for the show.

“The steeldriving exhibition,” Pamela says. “I don’t know how they plan to do it,” pointing up at the flat front of the rock. “See those two holes there? I think they drilled a little ways in to start them off, and then the two of them will hit into the holes and see how far they get into the rock in a set amount of time.”

“Gambling allowed in West Virginia?”

“They need someone to hold the bits straight — they need shakers.”

“Water boys, too, Ah reckon.”

“And the shakers better hold those bits straight or else they’re going to lose a hand.”

He looks up at the two white guys up there warming up. They live for this. They wink at confederates. Nothing life or death here, just a chance to show off for the crowd. Buy each other beers after the match and the loser has to endure jokes until next year’s rematch. What is at stake here? he wonders, looking over the well-scrubbed faces of the crowd, drawn here across miles, to the main event after an afternoon of sugar-rich foreplay. Their steps get smaller as they approach; they press together, dropping individual fancy for group delectation. An unkind part of him says mob but he knows they are not bloodthirsty. What will happen will be entertainment. A few pictures on a roll of twenty-four that will be picked up at the drugstore on Tuesday. And what would it have been like that day in 1872? On that ghost day. Who did they root for before legend and meaning accreted around the competition between the man and the device. Progress or the black man. A wife or girlfriend rubs the latest sunblock into the arms of one of the steeldrivers. This is where they stood, after all, right? On mashed grass like this. Waiting outside the tunnel for news of the competition. Today it is entertainment. Gift from the bounty of pop. They can see for themselves, the way they always do nowadays. Real-time, and they can almost touch it, all participants in this competition, this spectacle.

It will be a fun time, pay per view.

“There’s still time to see the tunnel,” Pamela says, and they squirm through; she leads him with a warm touch, batting back balloons held by tiny sticky hands.

At the edge of the fair, finally, he sees the tunnel for the first time. He thought it would be bigger. This is the John Henry tunnel, not the one over there that has replaced it. The functional tunnel draws in the modern freight, the John Henry tunnel old wives’ tales. Rain and dirt have sullied the dignity of the entrance but the cut and arranged stones announce a tamed mountain. The message out of the black mouth is not that of conquest but shrugged failure. The county has recently repainted the words GREAT BEND TUNNEL in smart white paint, an effort at renovation that merely forces the weather’s violence to stand out in relief. He looks right, over at the new tunnel, past the barricade. An electrical cable glides into its mouth, steel tracks shiver along the ground into it, testifying to utility. What does John Henry’s tunnel have on that? The sun just dips over the mountain and a fantail of shade sets the tunnel into obscurity. Whatever crowd gawked here earlier has decamped to the steeldriving exhibition; in their wake popcorn boxes and cups lay scattered like abandoned tools. A trickle of water from above scratches its way down and into the face of the tunnel. Slow work, but it gets the job done, melting stone and the arrogance of men. Repair the damage, what human beings have done, and the mountain will close its wound.

They move up on vague feet to the wide black mouth. Five haphazard and ineffectual slabs of concrete have been lugged over to block entry, just for show, really, satisfying some city council subordinance on keeping the kids away from the town treasure. Five teeth for this maw. A cool cemetery gust scrubs their faces as they get close. He looks up when he gets directly beneath the tunnel’s mouth, eyes tracing the irregular black stone of the arch and then the burst of dirt and greenery advancing on the tunnel entrance from above, the sky beyond the mountain; it is a vista of scorched land and the renewed, regenerating growth inching up on it. They don’t have to discuss it; he clambers up on the top slab and extends a hand to Pamela’s warm hand and they jump inside.

He feels sleepy and calm. The ground is muddy with pooling water, confused by where to go, why this tunnel is here where familiar rock should be. It hasn’t sunk in. He looks up at the arching of the tunnel above them and can make out only darkness from which crags and broken pieces occasionally emerge, breaking the surface of the ocean darkness like scattered atolls. His eyes need to adjust.

“What do you think it looked like to him,” Pamela’s voice, “before he was an inch in, before he started. He had a big mountain in front of him.”

He hugs the statue closer to him, for comfort, for an anchor in this novel gloom. It smells like every dank basement he has ever been in. He remembers the stories of accidents from the p.r. packet, where the miners were caught by cave-ins, crushed or trapped by rock and left to asphyxiate. He read about a train that got stuck in this tunnel during a cave-in or mechanical failure and people suffocated on the engine smoke. After last night he can imagine suffocating in here, choking on soot. This feeling seeps into him and resounds against his bones, where he can feel the angry tonnage of the mountain pressing down on his body, as if he has the mountain on his shoulders. Or he is in its fist, and it is squeezing. A touch of claustrophobia? No previous indications of this condition so no, more than that.

“Standing in here now, I thought I would never be here because I hated it all. Listening to the same stories out of his mouth every day. John Henry, John Henry. But being here now.”

Toes cold. His shoes are soaked through from the water. The puddles are deeper than he thought or else he’s sinking. Like he has ghouls grasping his ankles to pull him beneath. Puddles, dejected bits of rock that continue to rain from above, but no tracks. They’ve been melted down or relaid in the replacement tunnel. No respect for the obsolete. Air from outside is pulled in here and wrung of all good things by diseased alveolae, converted into pestilential exhalation, pushed out of this mountain’s diseased lungs. But this place is not diseased, or evil, or anything more than rock. Surely. An echo rises from unidentified critter or natural event and in him surges almost an impulse to run, quickly stifled by reason. This is merely a tunnel and a few yards away the real world spins at its normal rate. As his eyes adjust he cannot make out any graffiti. No looping declarations of love or lust, the name of the local football team in fuzzy exclamations, the latest band rules. Kids dare each other to step inside but no one gets very far in or stays too long. How does the song go? Big Bend Tunnel will be the death of me, Lord, Lord, Big Bend Tunnel will be the death of me. Why didn’t they wall it up. They need something from it. Need their ghosts. And what else?

“Of course they say if you listen hard you can hear his hammer and it’s a bad omen. Can you hear it? Why don’t you say anything?”

He has half a mind to set the statue down on the floor of the tunnel, make a puppet show of this scene. Diorama of the big day, the John Henry miniature making literal the scale of his competition. So small beneath this grand arching and the infinite tons crouching above him considering pounce and collapse. That’s how he feels now — small. Step in here and you leave it all behind, the bills, the hustle, the Record, all that is receipts bleaching back there under the sun. What if this were your work? To best the mountain. Come to work every day two, three years of work, into this death and murk, each day your progress measured by the extent to which you extend the darkness. How deep you dig your grave. He wins the contest. He defeats the Record. This place confounds devices, the steam drill and all that follows. This place defeats the frequencies that are the currency of his life. Email and pagers, cell phones, step in here and fall away from the information age, into the mountain, breathe in soot. Unsettling but calming, too. The daily battles that have lost meaning are clearly drawn again, the opponents and objectives named and understood. The true differences between you and them. And it. He presses a hand to the cool blasted wall. There are no rough edges to the stone; they have been smoothed away by falling water, decades of healing and forgetting. How long does it take to forget a hole in your self. He wins the contest but then what?

“If I asked you to help me do something tomorrow, would you do it?”

She has been squeezing his hand for some time now but he hadn’t noticed. Some time ago this became a silent movie. They are in the seats, shifting thighs, as the outside world and those other people from the fair unspool on the parabola screen of the tunnel mouth. The competition is about to begin, all the characters have been set up. The bit players move through the fair, staring past each other, waiting for cues; they have spent their whole lives rehearsing. All that rehearsing is cutting-room floor discard, the outtakes from the perfect American movie no one will ever see. In the middle rows are J. and Pamela. If they did what the audience never does and turned in their seats, they would see the light of the projector, the white flickering projector that is the light at the other end of the tunnel. A dream projecting itself from the west.

He says, sure.

Out of the mouth of the tunnel, on that screen, it is time for the main event. They are all there.

They were all there, from the eminently fuckable to the differently attractive, the not conventionally handsome and the walking airbrushed in complimentary pairs, the critics’ darling and the promising newcomer milled about. Miracles abounded in that room. The recovering nicely thank you and the unknowingly metastatic discussed a summer share. The shy and awkward essayed the latest dance. The junior professors dismissed their dread over the upcoming tenure review and the last to know were informed by the gatekeepers of scandal while teetotalers guzzled and juicers sipped fizzy water. The Wall Street warriors in their surreptitious girdles felt secure. The easily startled possessed a beatific calm later unrecallable. The muscle boys did tricks with their pecs and the feeble were happy in their own bodies. The lipstick lesbians and the baldheaded butches traded stock tips and the rhinoplasty specialist chuckled on meeting a performance artist named the Nose, an individual renowned for spectacular inhalations. The secret diarist took notes. The shortlisted for the position and the recently eliminated shook hands, unaware of their fates. It was the main event. They were all there. And it was only nine o’clock.

J. was there. He alone was not carefree, this night he was a chap of heavy heart, unswayed by ambient and intrusive cheer. He had read about a death in the newspaper just that very afternoon. It weighed on him.

The devout danced with the dissolute and they traded numbers they would never call. The chairman of the board stooped to tie his shoe and the boy from the mail room attending tonight via intercepted invitation later splurged for a taxi home. A faint smell of jasmine filled the room. The coat check girl needed a fix. The bathroom attendant hovered over a stack of white towels.

J. had never met the dead man. He encountered the obit on the jump page of an article describing a Hollywood actress’s new animal rescue charity. The obit ran down the dead man’s greatest hits, his days as a student protester on the steps of Berkeley and his strut over to the Oakland offices of the Black Panthers. The day he changed his name to Toure Nkumreh. The shoot-out with police and his flight to Cuba, where he drove Russian cars under palm trees, and his return to America. The dismissal of the murder charges after his lawyers convinced a jury that the police raid had been in fact a contract hit, his two years in prison for the lesser charge of weapons possession. That was it, until he was found dead in Tallahassee, of unknown causes, an autopsy would reveal all. Dead in his apartment for five days before the neighbors noticed the stench. That was it for the obit except for the cool archival photograph of Nkumreh in his Black Panther gear, black leather jacket, sunglasses, the tilted arrogant beret, automatic rifle pointing up at the photograph above, at the abused puppy who had found a new home thanks to the actress’s good efforts.

The spinach dumplings deposited a green rot on the incisors of all who consumed them and everyone was too polite and malevolent to remark upon it.

They had gathered in a club called Glasnost to partake of the spread, the panoply of bite-sized widgets laid out by the publisher of Godfrey Frank’s A Chiropodist in Pangea, a fifteen-hundred-page grimoire of mysterious content that would debut in a few days on the New York Times best-seller list. There was some question as to whether it would be categorized as fiction or nonfiction. Someone had to finish it first. It might debut sandwiched between the memoir of the man who got lost in the ice and the volume of the Akita’s wisdom as collected by his enterprising owner, or between the novel about the magical patriarch and the one about the CIA cryptographer who gets caught up in a conspiracy. Waitresses dressed in the red uniforms of the Czar’s honor guard distributed victuals and refreshments from platters to open hands. The party was cosponsored by a vodka manufacturer that had rethought its advertising campaign a few months prior. The guests walked and chatted while a large painting of Lenin’s angular visage frowned at them.

They discussed the book.

The lapsed Catholic said, “It’s about the environment.”

The socially liberal but fiscally conservative said, “But it’s not hit you over the head with it, from what I hear. It’s a philosophical treatise in the form of a prose poem.”

J. was a sophomore in college when the lonesome monks of the Afro-Am Department retrieved Toure Nkumreh and hired him as a visiting lecturer for a semester. None of the students had heard of him before, but on the announcement of his arrival all were sure they had heard of him, and they cackled excitedly. One student claimed that his father had marched with the man; another recognized the name from a documentary. The school newspaper conveniently recounted his biography and the excitement trebled now that they had something concrete about the man to discuss. The turnout the first day was so big that they had to move the class to a bigger lecture hall, displacing the Classicists.

The reluctantly sober since waking offered, “It’s a roman à clef about the publishing world. Apparently there’s a lecherous haberdasher who’s really the head of Condé Nast.”

The voted most likely to succeed by her high school class insisted, “But I thought it was a history of the twentieth century as seen through a bunion.”

Gray insurrection beset Nkumreh’s quaint, sculptured afro and gnarled goatee. He no longer wore that black leather jacket and black turtleneck, favoring instead brown corduroy blazer and beige turtleneck, as if his old gear had faded, bleached by circumstance and striding history. He spoke in a deep, bedrock voice and the students took notes. Black Power doodles writhed, marginalia, clenched fists detailed by disposable pens. “I’m the last member of the Black Power Traveling All-Stars,” he joked, and the lecture hall filled with laughter. The students believed they had been embraced as intimates. He recounted trucking through Texas in the middle of the night with a trunk full of pistols and cruising the streets of Oakland on a food drive, and each tale was equally suspenseful.

The smiling politely said, “It’s a postmodern retelling of the Midas story — you know, capitalism.”

The natural storyteller declared, “No, it’s a memoir.”

The morning person asked, “What, is he in A.A.?”

The voice of the disenfranchised responded, “No, but he had a funny uncle. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

Graduate students from the History Department were bused in to teach the weekly sections. There wasn’t an Afro-Am graduate program at the university, but there were always students in other disciplines who needed the extra cash. Lean times as they crawled over dunes toward dissertations. They conducted tours of primary sources that Nkumreh mentioned in passing, to give the students a better picture of the period in question. Nkumreh had written a book of poetry in 1969 called Whitey Counting Missiles While Cities Burn, but it was out of print so they made do with Xerox copies that dangled on their staples in dorm rooms. The teaching assistants placed Nkumreh’s bad poetry in context, declaiming on the oral tradition and revolutionary consciousness.

The spokesman of his generation said with authority, “It’s about two warring groups of chiropodists. One group does it the natural way, looking for fungus and corns, and the other—”

The nymphet interrupted, “What about the bunion?”

The rock promoter said, “Society is the bunion. The bunion is us. That’s what I heard.”

The hooker with a heart of gold added, “The chiropodists are just the prologue. The rest of the book is a social history, according to the New Yorker.”

And the don’t swing that way said, “Oh.”

J. liked the class. While he had to admit that the man didn’t look that good some mornings and tended to repeat anecdotes, often changing the ending depending on what was in the news that week, the class was held at 1 P.M. in a building close to the dining hall, and thus spectacularly convenient. That April J. enlisted in the takeover of the Dean’s Office to protest the lack of funds for the Afro-Am Department. It was an annual event, as much a token of spring as the cadre of fertilizer sprayers who roamed the Quad grass in plastic masks. The students filed a permit to take over the Dean’s Office, and the Dean took a few days off to go fishing until the university sent the customary “let’s open talks” letter to the students inside, who were pretty sick of each other after three days of sundry privation. Three or five days, depending on whether the takeover fell on a weekend. Fired up by Nkumreh’s tales of revolution, the front lines, the failed prison breakouts, that year’s sit-in was well attended and J. was sure he’d get laid. Beneath the Dean’s desk, or behind a filing cabinet filled with musky and aphrodisiac transcripts, surely he’d get laid, perhaps by one of the freshman girls who brought in soggy McDonald’s every couple of hours. All he got were back pains from sleeping in the hallway; the precious square feet of carpet space had already been claimed by the dashiki-clad upperclassmen, who had taken over the Dean’s Office the year before and prioritized. He was glad when he got to sleep in his bunk bed again, and drifted to slumber with the ease of the righteous.

The prodigal son said, “I read how the second person voice hasn’t been used this effectively since the mid-eighties.”

The Jew for Jesus uttered, “I thought it was nonfiction.”

The postfeminist countered, “It’s a nonfiction novel.”

And the twelve-stepper said, “Oh.”

In the first class after the takeover of the Dean’s Office, they expected Nkumreh to praise their protest. To welcome them as comrades in the struggle. But he did not mention it. He talked about his maroon days in Cuba, and the Marxists he broke bread with, he discussed Pan-African consciousness and unity across borders. He began to miss a lecture here and there, and the head of Afro-Am Department, a German who had written books about Nietzsche and the natal alienation of the slave, filled in for him. Technically, Nkumreh had office hours, but when J. tried to go to them the man’s office was always dark, the receptionist no help. After lectures, Nkumreh picked up his satchel and scurried away and after a time the students learned that it was impossible to snag his attention despite their famous parents.

The sex columnist pronounced, “In a weird way it’s a reinterpretation of Hamlet.”

The analyst said, “And Joycean in its use of language.”

The analysand said, “It’s a masterpiece.”

The triskaidekaphobic added five and eight without unease. The substituting big black guy when really meaning to say nigger related a tale about a misunderstanding at an ATM. A man crouched on all fours and barked like a dog when the drugs hit.

The man of the hour, Godfrey Frank, was popular on talk shows, he left his deep tread in popular magazines and sent the junketeers scurrying for cover. It Came from Academia: Frank shambled through the media like a creature from a science fiction film, a monster whose mutant gigantism he could doubtless locate in nuclear-age anxiety, cold war terror. He could write about anything it seemed, from baseball to hip-hop to weapons manufacturers, hold forth on historicized interpretations of ladies underwear while sprinkling in obscure double entendres for the Medievalists in the cheap seats. Articles written by the man (or cooed into microcassette and then later transcribed by a succession of Women’s Studies majors who all shared a prominent body part adored by the cultural studies demiurge) sometimes appeared a few pages distant from articles about the man, profiles that included photographs of Frank perched pensive on Le Corbusier furniture, legs crossed, eyes fixed simultaneously on the high and the low. He quoted French theorists who liked to inflate helpless nouns with rhetorical gases until they burst into italics, and did some inflating of his own. The nouns were never the same after that. A Chiropodist in Pangea was said to be his breakout book, his release from the university press ghetto. That was the word in publishing circles. It was getting raves everywhere.

A cover girl dared to eat a peach and another vomited in the little girls’ room. The groupies and the hangers-on equipped with strategic filofaxes giggled among themselves for a moment before trolling for the famous.

No, the junketeers were not fond of Godfrey Frank. He was an outsider who had connived his way into their world of free events as if he were a celebrity. But he was not: he was an academic. Despite their hatred of him, the junketeers came here tonight because it was the best party going in Schadenfreude City, and they wheeled and dipped, ripping sinew from this carcass lately thrown up on their feeding grounds: top shelf, fat olive, chicken saté. Uptown at the Waldorf, the great-great-granddaughter of a wealthy nineteenth-century industrialist who still had plenty of money after the trust-busters robbed him of his empire announced her new charity, but there was no open bar, according to the word around town, and the junketeers stayed away. Downtown in a gallery, a painter who specialized in the whimsical desecration of corporate logos in order to make a point about consumer society and to extend the brittle dominion of irony held a party for his latest show, but his publicity firm had a reputation for thin white wine and supermarket cheese, and the junketeers stayed away. They came here.

The priapic stroked themselves to swift release under the tables and wiped themselves with cocktail napkins. The trust fund babies invited the rough trade back to the apartment papa bought for them, got more than they reckoned for and bled on catalog sheets before falling asleep with a smile.

A publicist he recognized from stress-born nightmares and events like this grabbed his hand. Short moussed spines erupted from her scalp to repel predators and a ring of metal in her left nostril helped the behaviorists track her movements through glittery habitat. He couldn’t hear what she said for the music and he couldn’t remember her name for the inebriation associated with her every appearance in his life. She smiled, withdrew a promotional CD from her expensive and artificially distressed messenger bag and deposited it in his hand. It was warm and moist. Then she scampered off to spread the rest of her spoor around her territory, until her bag was completely evacuated.

The recently liposucked found their palms falling farther than usual to pat new and improved thighs and at this sensation their eyes widened in astonishment, which was taken for animated interest by the food critic, who continued to describe Chef Jean-Phillipe’s cassoulet. Those who longed for the days of the Algonquin round table could think of nothing witty to say because they were not witty people.

J. made his way through densities. He stepped on the high-heeled hoof of a woman whose face was a fright mask that did not change as he caused her injury. He accidentally and without realizing dislodged a gimlet from a man’s hand, but the man did not protest because he was afraid of black people and in a subfloor of his consciousness thought perhaps he deserved it because he had made a killing that day while others shambled through the metropolis without cappuccino machines, sans arugula, pestoless. J. joined a human tributary that had eroded a course between canyons of the standing still, he trusted that the waif in front of him would not dawdle or stop. He gave himself to the current, the sure freckles on the back of the waif in front of him and the jostling idiot behind him who nibbled at the back of his shoes. J. put his hands in the air and looked at them as they grasped at the cardboard mobiles, the glossy vodka bottles blossoming on invisible wire, he looked as he spread his fingers wide in the air. No one noticed, and he did not expect them to. The diva shrieked through the sound system, addling the neighbors once again, and the waif took him to the altar, fellow traveler, fellow pilgrim, guided by the same instinct now hectoring J. They stood before the open bar.

The hip-hop artist in heavy rotation on the video music channel lost his clip-on gold tooth in the hummus. The man with no name accidentally revealed it after his third martini: Melvin. The rock star who just got clean fell off the wagon, or on the spike as the case may be.

At the bar J. beached on a khaki shoal that turned out to be Dave Brown. Dave Brown had both his elbows bracketed into the bar to keep himself steady. The old-timer’s arm moved in a slim arc, like a robot on a production line; when he wanted to sip his drink, it pivoted on the knob of his elbow. This technique kept the shakes at bay. The junketeers nodded at each other, sopping but safe for a moment from the vengeful tides behind them. Dave Brown introduced J. to a woman on his left, a woman whose eyes shimmered beneath scythe eyebrows. Dave Brown tendered her name and credentials, she was an editor at woman’s magazine, and J. had heard her name damned from this man’s lips at an event two days ago, an event much like this. She smiled as Dave Brown offered J.’s credentials, the slim capillaries in her pink nostrils dilating as if she were taking this information into her very bloodstream, and then she turned around to talk to another darling.

“Can you believe this?” Dave Brown asked. The junketeer’s head panned across the room. “All this for him. Criminy I have to get my act together.” His arm arced over to his drink. “You see anyone else out there?”

J. said, “I think I saw One Eye and Jimmy the Turk on the other side of the room.”

“The rest’ll be here soon,” Dave Brown decided. “Not much else going on tonight.” He looked down at J.’s palm. “What do you think of the song?” he asked.

J. tried to make out the song coming from the speakers, but the ponderous beat effaced it whenever he identified a note or two. “Don’t know, what is it?” he asked.

“Not that song — that,” Dave Brown said, pointing at the CD. J. still had it in his hand and he held it up to the purple light emanating from behind the bottles in the bar. The name of the song was “Awestruck Post-Struct Superstar,” and the performing artist was billed as Godfrey Frank with Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions.

“What’s this?”

“That’s the CD that comes with every copy of the book. He’s singing now.” Dave Brown shook his head. “I really have to get my act together.”

It occurred to J. that Dave Brown had been around, he had forded shifting and treacherous trends, a hobo of pop, and had seen many things. J. asked his comrade if he’d heard about Nkumreh’s death. Dave Brown plucked the lemon twist out of his martini and sucked it, gnawed it. He said he used to party with him in Bob Rafelson’s house in the early seventies. The Panthers, he said, always had the best coke. Then something shifted on the far end of the room eventually but inevitably triggering a local effect: a sudden eddy that whisked Dave Brown to another corner, to a mellow grotto where there were couches and the media mercenary could rest for a few minutes and drink in peace. J. was left alone at the bar holding the CD. He leaned over and tried to get the bartender’s attention.

The social climbers clambered unimpeded. The walking wounded realized that time heals all wounds after spying a new object of obsession. The spoken word artist skipped his inner beat and everything he said came out wrong, lyrical and classically cadenced.

J. had seen them perform once, some time ago at record release party: Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions, a pop group in moribund drag. A few years before, bands from their hometown had made it big by fomenting a new sound that critics and record company executives believed would save rock and roll from the gloomy tyranny of European drone and inner-city armageddon. The bands from that hometown were an angry bunch who had converted their pain into a dread palatable for mainstream radio, a zippy melancholy, and Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions played the game by secreting their sweet pop in thrashing and deadly arrangements. A wah-wah pedal helped exceedingly. A record company signed them on the basis of their place of origin and their willingness to adapt to the new flavor of pop. But things did not go as planned. After two years, the children tired of the new sound. Even the parents were no longer afraid and found themselves humming minor chords while driving to work, signing contracts, closing the deal. The bands of the new sound broke up, or went into rehab, or put out records that were perceived to have betrayed their early promise. Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions, the epigonic poseurs, found themselves in a difficult position when the big record label dropped them after an even newer sound appeared on the scene, antidote to and savior from, according to the arbiters of taste, the last new sound.

The just last week stomach stapled felt something give. The fond of comparing every civic discomfort to the days of Nazi Germany complained about alternate side of the street parking. The hypocritical said they would never do such a thing.

Until the band was saved by Godfrey Frank. In a long and heavily footnoted article in a popular music magazine, Godfrey Frank smeared away the muck to reveal the bubblegum underneath. He situated them in a lineage of the Dionysian going back centuries, he located their Thanatotic flourishes as a necessary guise in the final days of a self-conscious century, he outed them as a canny pop band just in time for the demise of the new sound and rescued them from the bargain bins. Critics, insecure about their lack of academic grounding and ignorance of music history before the dusty advent of the blues, reversed themselves; radio station programmers placed the band’s next single in strategic slots. Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions befriended Frank and hired him as a consultant on their new video. And this was the final miracle. He went after the adults without pretense. The video’s conceit dispatched the formerly shabby rockers into the re-created sets of a television show popular when the older demographic was young, and the sight of Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions attired in the bright and lively gear of the television characters they had loved in their youth tickled them, on repeated viewings warmed them inexplicably, reminding them perhaps of easier times, loosening the intractable fear that seized them every minute of the day. Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions, skinning knees in sitcom mischief to a merry tune, comforted them, more than hedge funds and acupuncture, and made them whole.

J. read on the CD, This song is a special limited edition companion single available only with the purchase of A Chiropodist in Pangea by Godfrey Frank.

The so happy they could bust a gut did so, and the content with their lot in life grew more comfortable with their self-definition. The op-ed columnist had no op on Ed, the rent boy with a line for every occasion, but particularly ones like this, particularly for women like her.

J. had spent the afternoon filing a piece for a consumer electronics magazine. The manufacturer of a digital video playback device had sent him a model of the machine, gratis, and the film companies mailed him free copies of movies formatted for the device. But something was amiss. It was a gloomy occasion. This particular gadget had debuted at the same time as another with identical capabilities, and even though this evil sibling was more expensive and less efficient, the public had chosen, had spoken, had decided that this other device was the one they wanted for digital playback of their favorite classic films and recent box office smashes. The device J. was assigned to write about had already been discontinued, and the film companies were no longer going to produce disks for the machine. But all concerned had a backlog of product they wanted to get rid of, they gave incentives to retail salesmen, the men on the floor, to move the stuff off the shelves and to lie to the hopefully uninformed, who wanted and needed a new digital playback device and might invest in the hapless superannuated boxes. The vested companies advertised heavily in the consumer electronic magazine. J. had an article to write.

The biracial who adopted a superficial militancy to overcompensate for light skin discussed the perfidy of ice people with the gangster rapper ashamed of a placid upbringing in a middle-class suburb. The queasy at the sight of blood and the weak of stomach found new fortitude.

It was a tale of doomed technology and ruined hopes, an old oft-told story. Star-crossed since the implementation of its marketing scheme lo those many months before, the device never had a chance. Years from now white dudes with goatees who had never been loved in high school and so channeled their sexuality into the fringe and obscure would rescue the device from a dusty nook in a hip trash store and revive the machine, deify it in the name of kitsch. Name a zine after it. But the travails of this future pop sect did J. no good. He had a job to do and described resolution, picture quality, packaging. He used the word pixel. It was unrecognized by the spellchecker of his word processing program. His profession usually called for him to justify to the people out there the indispensability of this or that artifact to their lifestyles. Now he was trying to praise an object that would not exist in a few months to those who had already voted with their electronics store credit cards against its usefulness. The device did not increase their self-esteem, it did not percolate joy in their blank hearts, it did not gather and glue the potsherds of their fragile psyches. He wrote the piece about the dead machine, faxed it in to a number that answered shrilly, and then he read about the dead man in the newspaper he purchased at the corner bodega.

A urinal filled with vomit and the antiseptic puck bobbed in that horrible sea. The newspaper’s crusader of truth held his tongue when he spied the party boy’s sweet nipples and this was one less truth he related to his public.

They came here. They came because their empty and periodically disinfected apartments slurred threats at them, malevolent tides seeped from tight carpet moss or between wooden floorboards, and the original wood at that. They came because they had heard good things, there was a good buzz, and it was the worst thing they could imagine to be shut out, to be one of the anonymous shapeless out there banging on the castle walls. They came because it kept the hate away, but most of all they checked out their chipped bodies in mirrors, inspected the bits that had fallen away and came here because they thought tonight might be the night of the transfiguration, that sidereal maneuverings up above might allow that thing in the center of the universe to see them for the first time and it might love them, unclip the bowing velvet rope and accept them into itself. But it wasn’t going to happen.

A social disease would induct novitiates by dawn. The beard of the closeted actress turned out to be that someone in the kitchen with Dinah, the scullery maid who later sold the photos to a national gossip magazine with sure distribution in supermarkets.

In the last class of the semester, Nkumreh talked about some of his former comrades in the struggle. Some were dead by bullets or drugs. One was a congressman on the Republican ticket who appeared on talk shows as the voice of black reason to denounce all he had believed in the fever of youth, talking of quotas and bemoaning the popularity of male-bashing black female writers, and another sold a barbecue sauce whose label featured the infamous curling panther, this one poised to strike tongues with vinegar and hot pepper. The condiment did a healthy business in soul food restaurants across the Midwest. It was the last class. The bell rang to signal the end of class and Nkumreh leaned into the microphone and said, staring up into the institutional rows, “In five years you will have forgotten everything I’ve said.” He stared straight ahead into the dead heart of the room and yet more than one person felt he was staring into their eyes, and these shuddered. He exited the room with his customary speed and that was the last J. ever saw of him. Instead of a final exam, they had to hand in a term paper, which the graduate students in the History Department graded with circumspection.

The actress in the sequined dress lost a sequin and through mysterious repercussion never worked in a film again unless she bared her breasts, which were exuberant and strained against fabric, culpable in the final analysis for the lost sequin.

Sometimes he ran into people he went to college with. At a party, say, in a neighborhood he rarely had cause to visit. All sorts of things happen when you leave your stomping grounds, all sorts of ghosts pop up. They saw each other and looked away, down into the plastic cup cool with cocktail, suddenly interested in the words of the entity they’d been thrown up against at this party, next to the bookcase filled with unread books. They avoided each other until their guards slipped and they found themselves face to face, waiting in line for the bathroom or after making a wrong turn in search of a friend. The other people in Nkumreh’s class, the righteous brothers and sisters who had memorized the Panther’s Ten Point Plan, thought it quaint that he wrote for magazines, scribbling little pieces, and J. thought it obvious that they worked downtown, beetles chittering in the shadows of skyscrapers. They had nothing to say to each other, made plans to hang out, chuckled at the news of some classmate’s misfortune. They made excuses and departed, to look for a friend, to piss, just getting my coat, great seeing you. Each secure about the path they had taken, smug and fondling the keys to the city. Toodle-oo, toodle-oo.

The marginally talented but well connected mentally decapitated their betters and those gifted with second sight were frightened by all the bloody heads on the floor.

He had never talked to the man. He had known people who had died, and what he felt on those occasions was nothing like he felt now. He didn’t even feel like he did when a famous person died, when he suddenly realized what a large role they had played in his pop life, whether the deceased was the expert songsmith unavoidable on the radio or the crag-faced character actor, the bit player who soldiered on through Hollywood decades always double-crossing the hero, reliable that way. This thing in him now was peculiar and he couldn’t figure it out.

The lately upgraded to homo erectus slouched anew, as was their lot. The rock critic pontificated about the latest sound from the latest town, and found few cared.

J.’s body slipped into another current in the room, he fell into a pattern that nature had imposed on this crowd, and after a time his drink was empty and that very moment he found himself deposited at the bar again. This time One Eye was there, dressed in a blue prom tuxedo, with an eye patch of the same blue covering his signature wound. He was trying to get the bartender’s attention. “J., J., my man, do you know what time the open bar closes?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” J. responded.

“Maybe I should get two drinks then, just in case.” He leaned over the bar and whistled. No one could hear him for the sound system.

“What’s that getup for?” J. asked. The texture of One Eye’s tuxedo seemed to the dance under his gaze, an ancient magic living in polyblended fabric.

One Eye, the gentleman junketeer, without a care, hoarding drink tickets, said, “What, this old thing?” He smiled and then noticed J.’s expression. “Why so glum, chum?”

J. related his confused feelings over Nkumreh’s death while behind One Eye’s shoulder, the bartender came to take his order and then departed in response to One Eye’s inattention.

“You’re upset that the dude’s dead,” One Eye said. “That’s natural.”

J. said that wasn’t quite it; he felt something new. He described some of the symptoms as One Eye looked back after the bartender, who had repaired to the other end of the bar to flirt with the underage. J. talked about the class he had taken in college and the fact that the man had died alone in Tallahassee. Tallahassee wasn’t on his map, and if the man died in Tallahassee he died in another world apart from the one J. lived in.

“I know what’s wrong with you,” One Eye appraised, apparently listening despite the evidence to the contrary. He turned, rocking his head back and forth to the DJ’s latest selection, a tawdry thing whose refrain was a looped simulated orgasm. “You’re not upset that the guy’s dead,” he said. “You’re upset that you don’t care that the guy is dead. That you should be feeling something that good people feel when someone dies.”

J. exhaled something and felt lighter.

One Eye clapped his hand on the shoulder of his fellow junketeer. “I envy you your youth, my friend,” he began, hazarding a quick glance after the mercurial bartender, a man of untold transactions. “Hold on to these days. You still care that you don’t care. The time will come when you don’t care that you don’t care, and on that day you will become a man. If you want I can arrange some sort of ceremony to mark the occasion, tasteful but symbolic, you know what I mean. Rent a donkey, something along those lines.”

The music stopped, a giant lifted the roof off the club: a sudden shift in the barometric. The sound system cut out in the middle of a song that had shrieked for so long that it had come to seem the sound of their bodily processes, enzymatic reaction, mitotic doubling, a siren deep within the guests that made them go. Dazed, unable to account for this alien silence, the people in the room looked at each other, blinking, they looked at the sky to confirm that the shelling had stopped. Lights choreographed by computer, tilting on gyroscopes, burst in frenzied illumination, in a welter of patterns. This was a new effect to the night, novel sensory vandalism in an evening of myriad crimes. More than one among them wondered what they were in for next.

Along one innocent wall perpendicular to the bar, nondescript and overlooked all night, a curtain began to rise, a prehistoric red eyelid. Behind the curtain was a stage. The roving lights converged upon it, became one light.

The falling starlet contemplated a stick of celery and realized in its rectitude the fact of her wilted career. The polymorphously perverse and those repressed in that area hit it off like old army buddies until it came to the deed, where they parted ways.

Godfrey Frank took the stage and the four boys from Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions trailed behind him, seizing guitars, a gold bass. One crawled into the drum kit. Godfrey Frank stood on bright green platform shoes. He had squeezed his sausage legs into black leather pants above which damp chest hair weaseled through a red mesh T-shirt. His long brown curly hair, glistening with a relaxing fluid, poured down his shoulders. He grabbed the microphone between his hands as if wrestling a rattler and screamed, “New York — are you ready to ‘rock’?” The deficiently jaded in the crowd assented and he repeated, “I said, New York — are you ready to ‘rock’!” The lights fled from each other again, seeking every inch of the room for a millisecond and roaming farther, and the guitarist pummeled the first chord of “Awestruck Post-Struct Superstar,” the song that would haunt all of them for months, on the radio, on the television, in the listless aisles of supermarkets and gourmet delicatessens while shopping carts skidded on hobbled wheels.

J. couldn’t make out the words. He looked back into the crowd, daring the replacement of his every cell with salt, and saw heads tilted in angles of strict attention, eyes split wide in hunger and mouths tastefully ajar as the ravenous lights licked their faces, savoring and considering who will be the first to go. He turned back to the stage. It was not that they liked the music or didn’t like the man they had come here to celebrate, he thought, but that something was happening they could talk about later, and talk was important, it filled minutes, it flattered the speaker when delivered with the correct wise and knowing intonation. Information the last currency in this town. The act onstage was conversation tomorrow morning, an anecdote at next week’s dinner party. The audience that night thought about the next audience and watched.

The editor of the magazine that published the finest literary fiction found that no one had ever heard of him, the publication, or those he published, and he longed for the days of Fitzgerald. The ne’er-do-well daughter of the famous actor and the tycoon’s son got along swimmingly because they both lived off another’s name.

J. couldn’t hear the words, but when Godfrey Frank got to the chorus a tech man flicked a switch and the words were projected on the face of Lenin, that old Russkie hustler, which had been painted on the far wall of the stage:

Roland Barthes got hit by a truck

That’s a signifier you can’t duck

Life’s an open text

From cradle to death

Some people sang along, some merely pretended to.

The best man and the groom kissed for the first time and the wedding was off. The architect to the fabulously stupendous misplaced all sense of the perpendicular that night, and turned to igloos. The hot, the tarty and the downright slutty traded notes with the well endowed, the flaccid, and those who just liked to watch, and come morning destiny’s inscrutable hand had transformed all of them forever.