Lost in the City

YOUNG LIONS

He stood naked before the open refrigerator in the darkened kitchen, downing the last of the milk in a half-gallon carton. Carol, once again, had taped a note to the carton. Caesar Matthews did not have to read it to know that it told him she loved him with all her heart, or that she would miss him all that day. She used to pin such notes to her pillow before she went off in the morning, leaving him still asleep. But in the night, when she brushed her hair as she prepared for bed, she would find the notes still pinned to the pillow, undisturbed and so perhaps unread. So now she taped them to milk cartons, for he could not begin his day without drinking milk, or she taped them to his gold key ring, or pinned them to the zippers of the expensive pants she knew he would wear that day. In more than two years, the wording on the notes had not changed very much. Sometimes, when he thought of it, he would fold the paper with the words and place it on the kitchen table between the salt and pepper shakers, to let her know he had come upon it before he ventured out.

This morning, after he had finished the last of the milk, without reading the words, he tossed the carton in a high arc across the room into the trash can. He pulled up the window shade and let in the morning light. He was anxious to be out in the streets; there was nothing like an empty apartment to bring down the soul.

The night before, for the fourth time in a week, he had dreamed about the retarded woman. Sherman would have told him such dreams were a good sign. Caesar was left now with only fragments of the dreams, the splintered memory that he had been roaming about in some foreign land, and the retarded woman had been standing among tall trees in that land. She never seemed to be hiding, as she should have been, but appeared to wave to him. He could not remember anything after she waved. He did remember with certainty that in all the dreams the woman was known to him not as being retarded but as being feeble-minded, which was the phrase his father had always used.

He was still naked when the telephone rang, standing at the bathroom door wondering if he wanted a shower. “These are the times,” Carol would have joked, “when we miss our mothers most.”

Manny, on the telephone, asked if he wanted to tend bar that evening and make some change. “I was about to hop over your place,” Caesar said. He never liked Manny Soto calling his apartment, for Manny always whispered on the phone and made each word he spoke sound obscene. “He talk that way cause he’s a fence and every other bad thing in the world,” Sherman had said once. “He think people are listenin to everything he says, and maybe by whisperin, they’ll hear a little less.”

“Coincidences. Coincidences. Heh, heh,” Manny said. “Good minds think a lot, they say. I was just checking to be sure, heh, heh, to see if you might be available, heh, heh.” The inappropriate laughing was also why he didn’t like Manny calling.

“But listen: You heard what Sherman is doing now, heh, heh, heh?” Manny said. This time he obviously felt the whole thing was funny, and he asked Caesar again.

Caesar told him no, that he had last seen Sherman in Howard Hospital. “Two, three months ago,” he said.

“Well, since you last saw him, he’s gone up in the world. Or gone down, whichever the case may be, heh, heh.” He hung up without another word.

While dressing, Caesar found another note pinned to the collar of his shirt. He read it, crumbled it for effect, and propped it against a picture they had had taken together at a Southeast club. He would remind Carol of all the notes when he told her about the retarded woman. “Dancing with me don’t end that way,” were the first words she had ever spoken to him. “Try me and see.” He had gone to Manny’s place with Sherman Wheeler and Sherman’s old lady, Sandra Wallington, and, after a good bit of coaxing by Sandra, he had asked a woman sitting alone two tables away to dance. He and the woman had slow-dragged through one record, then another, and as the woman ground her body into his, she would bite and tug at his earlobe with her lips. When the second record ended, she unwound herself and went back without a word to her table. There was now a man at her table, and the man stood and pulled the woman’s chair away from the table for her. The man and the woman sat down. The woman’s back was to Caesar, who stood dumbly looking at the back of her neck and at the man. The man stood again, and he looked at Caesar with the patience of someone who had nothing better to do. “No one,” the man said finally, “gets more than two dances free.” He sat again and Caesar, after a few moments, found his way back to Sherman and Sandra.

“Dancing with me don’t end that way.” He had been about to sit when Carol tugged at his shirt sleeve. He allowed her to lead him away to the dance floor. “Try me and see.”

He decided that morning on the desert-brown leather jacket, a present from Carol for his twenty-second birthday two years ago. It was October, and in that month and in November before the days turned colder heading into December, he enjoyed wearing the jacket, enjoyed the opulent sound of leather with each move he made. He checked the jacket’s pockets to make certain he had his address book. There was not much in the book — a few names and telephone numbers of people he knew from Manny’s. But there were also the addresses and phone numbers of the three women — their names coded to read like male friends in case Carol saw them — he would go to when he and Carol argued, or when he simply wanted to spend the night with a woman whose body, whose responses, he could not easily anticipate.

He put the Beretta in one of the jacket’s pockets. The moment he touched it the memory of the times he had used it came back to him. He liked remembering. The last time had been eight months ago when they crossed into Maryland and he shot the 7-Eleven clerk in the face. A few miles from the store, back in D.C., Caesar was still laughing about how the man’s face had drained of blood as the gun came toward his face. A month before that he had placed the pistol beside the head of a man he and Sherman had caught far up New Hampshire Avenue near the Silver Spring line. The man had looked insulted to be robbed, and Caesar, dangling the man’s watch before his eyes, had pulled the trigger to scare him into the proper frame of mind. “I wasn’t gonna take this cheap-ass thing,” Caesar said about the watch, “but you just ain’t got the proper attitude.” The bullet had nicked the man’s ear, and so it didn’t count the way a blast in the face counted. The nice thing about the retarded woman was that he wouldn’t even have to take the pistol out of his pocket.

Sherman Wheeler had rarely carried a gun. “My daddy got his toe shot off tryin to quick-draw one a those things,” he said once. “Sides, my mind is the only gun I need.” Then he had made his hand into a gun, placed it against his temple, and pretended to pull a trigger. He hadn’t liked Caesar carrying a gun, and in their first months together he pulled rank and told him to leave the guns at home when they weren’t needed, but Caesar would sneak them out anyway. From the beginning, with the first cheap piece he had stolen during a burglary at a home in Arlington, Caesar had liked carrying a gun. And now, having to work alone without Sherman, he would not step outside the apartment without one.

II

In the vestibule of Manny’s Haven at Georgia Avenue and Ingraham Street, there was an impressive collection of Polaroid pictures displayed behind a locked glass case. In most of the dozens of photographs, Manny, always wearing a Hawaiian shirt, stood in the center, his arms around Washington politicians, two-bit celebrities, customers for whom he had a special affection, or wild-eyed, out-of-town relatives. At the very bottom of the display, in two and a half rows, there were also photographs of men who had, as Manny put it, “made irredeemable fools of themselves in my house,” as he called his bar. Most of these men, usually too drunk even to remember where they were, had refused to leave the bar when told, and Manny had had the bouncers toss them out. But throwing them out was never enough, and he would also have the bouncers beat them on the sidewalk. “Take his picture! Take his goddamn picture!” became his euphemism to the bouncers for throwing a man out and putting a hurting on him. The majority of the men were photographed leaning against the front of the bar just below the neon sign that blinked Manny’s Haven. They were alone in their pictures with their bloodied faces, except, now and again, for the hand of some unseen bouncer that kept the fellow from falling over.

Manny was reading the Post aloud at a table near the bar when Caesar arrived that morning. Manny was alone, which didn’t make Caesar happy. The whole place was dark, except for the tiny lamp on the table. Manny did not look up at first when Caesar sat down across from him and said, “Mornin.”

Manny finished the page and put the newspaper aside, took off his glasses and rubbed his closed eyes with his knuckles. “Young Blood,” he said, squinting. “Ain’t seen you in a month of Sundays. Thought you mighta gone away on vacation.” Manny dressed the way a very small child would without the help of an adult. “I always expect to look under the table and find him with his shoes on the wrong feet,” Sherman had said once, “with knots and shit in the shoelaces, insteada little bows.” Manny had hundreds of Hawaiian shirts, including some very expensive ones dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. He wore one every day of the year. This morning he had on a particularly loud silk and rayon thing with palm trees that looked not like trees but tiny green explosions. He was quite a thin man, and all his shirts hung loosely on him, the way they would hang on wire hangers.

“I’ll need you for tonight and two three more nights this week,” Manny said. “You got time for that?”

Caesar nodded. Bartending would tide him over until things were finished with the retarded woman. He could hear the rumblings of the men in the basement, sorting and cataloging the stolen stuff Manny had bought from thieves. Manny would send all of it on to an apartment on Florida Avenue where people came shopping to buy it for a little more than what Manny paid for it.

“What’s this about you not hearing about Sherman?” Manny said. “Thought you two was closer than dick and his two nuts.”

“We was once,” Caesar said. Manny blinked, waiting for more. He undoubtedly knew everything already, but Caesar knew that having to tell him was the price of doing business with him. Besides, there was nothing to betray. He told Manny what little Sherman had told him in the hospital the last time he saw him: Sherman had ODed at the home of a woman who catered to a small group of people with “functional habits,” people who could work and carry on their lives without the rest of the world knowing they needed special recreation in their off hours. A person could go to one of Regina’s houses on M Street and relax in one of her small rooms, and after a few hours of traveling, get up and go home.

“I know this woman,” Manny said. “Regina Carstairs. Oh, such a fine house in the Gold Coast. I went to her place for a function once, raising money for the mayor. The house where no junkie is allowed. But I didn’t enjoy myself because she had somebody watch me all the time like I was going to steal something.” Manny indicated with his fingers that he wanted more.

There’s not much more, Caesar said. Sherman had traveled out on a far limb one night with just a one-way ticket. Regina thought he was dead or near-dead and had people dump him in a tree box on a street blocks and blocks from her house. (“Another satisfied customer,” Manny interjected. “One million and counting.”) Caesar did not tell Manny that in the hospital he and Sandra, Sherman’s woman, had argued, with Sandra accusing him of dumping Sherman at death’s door. He had looked to Sherman for support, but in the end Sherman had raised the arm without the IV and begged Caesar to go. “I’ll call you,” Sherman had said.

“I got some pictures here you might be interested in, heh, heh,” Manny said. “Got some nice pictures. Oh, do I got the nice pictures. Bet a million you didn’t know he was on that heroin shit, did you?”

Caesar said no.

“Well, I did. It’s hard to tell with some fools, but I knew.” He was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed. He was thin enough for Caesar to see the edges of the chair on either side of him. “That’s the thing with that heroin shit. You see, with your average crackhead, they’re climbing the walls and everything. You ask them the time and they’re ready to kill you cause you ain’t got your own watch. But with heroin, you ask them the time, and they’re ready to give you the watch. And Sherman was the mellowest man I knew.” He leaned forward. “You wanna see my pictures, heh, heh? The proof from our man Polaroid that our man from Sixteenth Street has come up in the world.”

Caesar was curious, but he did not want to see. It was as if someone had asked if he wanted to see pictures of his naked father. “We can take him,” Caesar had said once about Manny. “We can take him. Come in wearin masks and shit. We can clean his ass out and live like kings.” “And then where we gonna live?” Sherman had said. “Even if we got a million dollars from him, where in the fuckin world would we live? Stop bein such a hothead all the time, man. Manny still payin people back for some small thing they probably did to him when he was five years old.”

“Come on,” Manny said. “Peek on the wild side.” In fall and winter, Manny’s Hawaiian shirts had two pockets, and he took a set of photographs out of the left pocket.

The pictures were of a security guard standing with folded arms between two paintings in what was clearly a museum. The man seemed to stand with an air of importance and authority, but the more Caesar studied the first pictures the more he saw that the man would never be anything more than a guard whose job was simply to stand between two paintings. The man’s expression changed but slightly in the series of photographs, but in the last one, as if he was finally aware that he was the photographer’s real subject, he was turning his head away and the camera caught only a blur. The guard, in a dark blue uniform, wore a dark blue hat with a shiny shield in the front, and though the hat was pulled down low over his forehead, Caesar could see that the mouth and chin were Sherman’s. “My father gave me my eyes and nose, but I got my mouth and chin from my old lady.” Sherman had been on his own since he was ten, but he always spoke of his parents as if he had had a full life with them.

“They were taken in the Smithsonian,” Manny was saying. “Not the one with that big elephant — that’s my favorite — but the art museum, the one with the paintings. When I heard he was working there, I just had to see it. So I had this guy and his whore that owed me a favor: Act like tourists and go down there and pretend they were Bamas in town to see the pictures, heh, heh.” Manny tapped his forehead. “Smart. Real smart.”

Caesar got up. “I gotta be movin. Be back at seven, okay?”

“Seven’s fine,” Manny said, kissing the pictures and putting them back in his pocket. “Any later and you’ll be late.”

III

He felt suddenly exhausted and afraid and considered returning to the apartment, but Carol was not there and an empty place brought down the soul. Then he thought of the retarded woman and things brightened a bit. He took a bus downtown to see the woman for what would be the last time before Friday.

He had been following her for all of two months, since a week or so after he saw Sherman in the hospital. He had first come upon her waiting for the bus with three of her housemates. They were all adults, all at least thirty years old, but they talked as if they were new to the world and excited about being in it. The two men talked very loudly, as if they were not afraid to share whatever they were saying. Caesar figured from the beginning that the larger of the two women was the weakest, would be the easiest to pick off.

He had stood a few feet from them, pretending he too was waiting for the bus. Days later he learned that the retarded woman lived only two blocks from the bus stop in a house with perhaps six other retarded people of various ages and with a woman in her fifties. He figured the older woman was there to look after the seven. Except for the older woman, he learned, all of them worked, or at least did something that took them out of the house each morning. The retarded woman he was interested in worked in a French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue near Lafayette Park.

And so for two months he had secretly placed himself in her life, doing all the scoping out, the drudgery that had once been left up to Sherman. “You’d fuck it up,” Sherman had said once. “I know you.” “Have some faith in me,” Caesar would laugh. “Have a little faith.” “I know you, mothafucka.”

Week after week, Caesar had followed the retarded woman as she made her way to work, sitting in the back of the bus so he could see when she got off. At K Street, she always walked the block and a half to the restaurant. He hung around near the restaurant, sometimes for the entire day, learning her schedule. He often saw her sweeping up the alley in the back where the employees entered and where deliveries were made. About two thirty or so most afternoons, after they had probably eaten lunch, the retarded woman and a much older woman would walk to Lafayette Park and stay for up to thirty minutes. After they went back to work, he would not see the girl again until about five, when she left work and took the bus home.

On Saturdays, she came to work at noon and stayed until eight or nine in the evening. But it was only the Fridays that concerned him now. For on Fridays, each Friday evening, she left work and walked up Connecticut Avenue to Dupont Circle, where she deposited her paycheck at American Security. He would stand beside her on most Fridays over those months as she took forever to fill out the deposit slip, making first one mistake, then another, then dropping the crossed-out slips into the wastebasket beside the table. After she got on line, he would pick up every slip she had dropped. Then he would stand behind her until she had completed things with the teller.

It was a little before two when he got to the restaurant. The retarded woman and her friend soon came out to Connecticut, heading for Lafayette Park. Not quite two thirty, but close enough to the times of other days not to worry. As the women often did, they walked holding hands. They wore green uniforms and though they seemed to polish their white shoes every day, he had noticed that they were scuffed plenty by midday. He knew their first and last names, he knew where the old woman lived, having followed her home one evening, he knew the retarded woman’s favorite candy, he even knew the station the old woman had her radio tuned to.

“I can see me sometime holdin my own little baby,” the retarded woman said after they sat down on a bench facing the White House, “rockin her and feedin her and doin such.” The sun was warm, and Caesar sat on the grass Indian-style a few feet behind the women. He opened a newspaper he had taken from a trash can, but he watched the tourists taking photographs and the government people eating their lunches.

“Thought everything would work with Fred and me,” the retarded woman said. “He like the job they got him. Me and him would sit on the stoop, makin plans bout our future.”

Caesar knew about her Fred, but he had never learned if he was one of those loud talkers he had seen in the first weeks at the bus stop.

“People call us the lovebirds,” the retarded woman said. “‘Look at em. Look at them lovebirds.’”

The old woman was eating orange pieces from a small plastic bag, and now and again, when the breeze shifted, the smell of oranges came to Caesar. He watched a black family come up to a very old white man at the Lafayette statue. The father gave his camera to the white man and then stood in front of the statue beside his wife and behind his three children. The oldest boy closed his eyes and would not open them again until it was all done. The old man took the family’s picture, and when the mother raised one finger, the old man advanced the film and snapped again.

“Then he commence to change. He talk back to Miss Prentiss,” the retarded woman was saying. “His job call Miss Prentiss and said he all the time late. Wouldn’t do what they told him.”

“Anna, he musta told you what was the matter,” the old woman said.

“No, ma’am, Miss Elsie,” the retarded woman said. “He never did. Yesday I got home, a car came with two men and they took him back to Laurel.” Caesar watched as the father read what was on the side of the statue and then the father looked up at the man on the horse, shading his eyes. His little girl did the same.

The black family crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, and the father gave the oldest boy the camera so he could take pictures of the White House. Then they went down to the corner and joined the line going in.

Caesar was only half listening; there was no more that would help on Friday. The problem would be Carol. He put the newspaper aside and lay down, closing his eyes. He would not follow them back to work. On another day not long ago, he had waited for the retarded woman across the street in front of the copier business until she got off from work. He had followed her to the bus stop. She was overweight, and he saw that walking was not easy for her in the heat. For the first time since he had been following her, she was not wearing her uniform. She had on a blue skirt and a pink blouse, which she wore outside the skirt. She had on tiny, gold-plated earrings a person might not notice until he was within a foot or so of her, and that was how close he was when he walked past her. She smelled of garlic and, beneath that, of a soap that reminded him of the halls in the hospital where his mother had died.

It was a crime, Sherman had said, to fall asleep anywhere but in a safe place, and so he was up and off a few minutes after the women left. He felt he wanted to see Sherman and left the park at the corner of Pennsylvania and 16th, heading in the direction where he thought the museum was. In both his lives, he had never come down to the world below Constitution Avenue, except for those times when relatives came from out of town. His mother and father would bring everyone down to see the Washington they put on postcards and in the pages of expensive coffee-table books. He knew that his father worked in one of the government buildings, but he didn’t know which one. His father was the kind of man who, if he looked out his office window and saw his son, would come down the stairs three at a time and hold him until someone called the police. “Call the law! I have a thief who robbed me! Call the law!”

At 15th and Constitution, among the tourists and office workers, he gave up the idea of seeing Sherman. It would be better to start working on Carol. He could see no problems with Anna, the retarded woman, but retarded or not, she was still a woman and there was a danger of her being skittish. He called Carol at work.

He told her that he loved her, then he told her that he missed her. In his mind, he read the words written on her notes.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder. You made my day.”

He promised to fix her dinner before he went to Manny’s and he told her once again that he loved her.

“I wish I could record that,” she said, “and play it back any time I wanted.”

IV

When people found out that Angelo Billings, Caesar’s cousin, had in fact stolen the flowers from an I Street florist and taken them to the funeral home, they said he would never again have good luck. Never mind, they said, that he loved Caesar’s mother as much as he loved anyone and that stealing the flowers was his way of showing that love. There were some things God would not tolerate, and stealing flowers for the dead was one of them.

Caesar, though, was moved, and they grew closer after his mother’s funeral. Angelo introduced him to Sherman. Angelo, before Caesar gave up on school, would wait for him outside Cardozo High, and they would go to Sherman’s two-bedroom apartment on 16th Street, a few blocks up from Malcolm X Park. What fascinated Caesar most about the apartment was the dominance of sound, of noise, as if Sherman were afraid of silence. In every room, there was something playing each second of the day, whether a radio or television or cassette player. In the bathroom, hanging from the shower curtain rod, there was a transistor radio that played around the clock. Sherman lived alone in the apartment, but he had two children by Sandra, who lived elsewhere in the building with the children. Most of the time when Caesar and Angelo visited, they would find Sherman wrapped in his bathrobe sitting on the couch, listening to one of dozens of cassette tapes that Sandra had recorded of the children talking and playing with each other. There were four speakers in the living room that stood three feet high, and he enjoyed playing those cassettes so loud that the noise of the children made it sound like a playground with a hundred children. Now and again, one child would hit the other or say something mean and there would be a fit of crying on the tape. Sherman would jump up and speed the tape past the crying to a place where the talking and playing resumed.

The apartment, despite the noise, became another home for Caesar and he began going there without Angelo after school. Before long, he was leaving home at least two or three days a week and going not to school but straight to Sherman’s place, where he’d drop his books at the door beside the two-foot-high porcelain bulldog and make a place for himself in front of the television. In the beginning, he was able to get back home in the evening before his father arrived from work. But as the months wore away to winter, to spring, he was getting home later and later.

One night in April, Sherman dropped him off about three in the morning, and Caesar stood on the sidewalk for a long while looking up at his house. For the first time, all the lights in the house were off. When he opened the front door, his father was standing before him in the darkened hall.

“I’m just slaving away my life to raise up another Angelo,” his father hissed, turning on the hall light. “A goddamn no-account.” As soon as his hand was off the light switch, he slapped Caesar, knocking him back against the front door. Before Caesar could recover, his father had grabbed him by the shirt with one hand, opened the door with the other, and threw him out on the sidewalk.

“I gave you more chances than you deserved,” his father said and closed the inner and outer doors to the house. Caesar, still sprawled on the ground, saw the hall light go out. Seconds later, he saw the light in the upstairs front bedroom, his father’s room, go on, and a moment later, that light went out.

He got to his feet and looked up and down French Street. The new leaves rattled as if something were shaking the trees, and the sound unnerved him. He brushed off his clothes, not because of dirt or debris, but because right then he did not know what else to do. Under the street lamp, he looked at the watch Sherman had given him the week before, and it occurred to him that he had never before been awake at that hour in the morning. A cool wind sauntered up the street and chilled him, unnerving him even more, and he suppressed the urge to cry.

He considered pounding on the door, calling his father as loudly as he could and then running away. But he stood quiet. For all of his life, he had been Lemuel Matthews’s son, and even now, standing in the dark outside the walls of his father’s house, he was still his son and he knew he could not be a bad boy at such a place at such a time in the morning.

He saw the brighter lights at the half smoke joint at the 9th Street corner and he went toward those lights. The place was closed, but he used the outdoor telephone to call Sherman. Sandra answered, and after he had told her what happened, she told him to stay put, that Sherman would be back down to pick him up. While he waited, he called his father’s house several times, stepping out of the telephone booth with the receiver as he listened to the ringing. He looked up tree-lined French Street, but there was not enough light to distinguish his house from all the others.

It was true what people said about Angelo’s bad luck. He robbed the Riggs Bank on 15th Street in early May, using a gun he had rented for twenty-five dollars a day and a Safeway shopping bag. He was so curious about how much he had gotten away with that as he ran down M Street, he looked in the shopping bag, and at that moment the money, booby-trapped with a red dye packet, exploded in his face. He dropped the bag, cursing the bank teller, but he continued running, trying for the next several blocks to wipe the dye from his face and hands with the shirt he had taken off.

Sherman had thought that Angelo, eager, cocksure, had potential as a partner, but soon after the government people put Angelo away, he began to consider Caesar, who was now staying with him. Caesar knew Sherman didn’t have a real job, but he didn’t learn until he had been with him two months what he did for a living. He was not particularly surprised or disappointed. Caesar was seventeen, and for the first time in his life, he was living his days without the cocoon of family, and beyond that cocoon, he was learning, anything was possible.

“The first thing we do,” Sherman said one day, “is get all your shit from your daddy’s place. You gotta have an identity. Get you out in the world so you can stop all that mopin.”

The next morning they drove down to the house on French Street and waited in the car until Caesar was certain his father had left for work and his brother and sister had gone to school. Caesar opened the front door with his key. He was surprised his father had not changed the lock, but Sherman was not surprised. “What’s there to be afraid of from his own little boy?” Sherman said. Caesar stepped into the hall. Had his father suddenly appeared before him, it would have seemed the most natural thing. Indeed, he expected him, and when he stepped into the living room, he expected his father to be there as well. Sherman, silent, followed as Caesar went through the rooms on the first floor. Caesar touched nearly everything along the way — a lace piece made by his grandmother that was on the back of the easy chair in the living room; a drawing of the house signed and dated by his sister taped to the refrigerator; the kitchen curtains he had helped his mother put up. In a corner of the kitchen counter he found wrapped in a rubber band the letters he had been sending to his father; only the first one had been opened.

“Let’s get your stuff,” Sherman said after a bit. “Enough of this.”

They went upstairs, and in the closet of his father’s bedroom, Sherman found a small metal box, broke its tiny lock with his hand, and leisurely went through the papers in the box, putting aside Caesar’s birth certificate and the Social Security card he had gotten the year before in hopes of finding an after-school job. Caesar watched.

“You want your mom’s death certificate?” Sherman said, reaching the end of the papers in the box.

“No.” He turned away and went to his sister’s room, where he touched the heads of the three stuffed animals sitting on the pillows of her bed. In the room he had shared with his brother, he took as many of his clothes as he could carry, his hands shaking each time he picked up an item.

In the hall, Sherman was waiting at the head of the stairs. He took some of the clothes from Caesar. “He had a little money in the box, some cash and some gold pieces,” Sherman said. “And I found a stack of pictures in a drawer. I got a few of em, mostly some with you in em. Must be your mother, too. I got a lot of em. You might want em later on when you start to forget.”

Caesar nodded. In a few minutes they were on 11th Street, heading back uptown. He knew what his father would look like when he realized he had been robbed: the fist pounding the air, that pulsating vein at the left side of his head. For months and months after that, he could conjure up the image whenever he wanted and replay it. That night, they went to Manny’s and Carol said what she said about dancing with her not ending that way, about trying her and seeing. She took him home that night, and when he woke up the next morning, she was lying on her side watching him. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “It’s all right,” she said, “I already went and brushed my teeth.” Aside from the ones in Sherman’s magazines, she was the first naked woman he had ever seen. She kissed his ear. “There’s a toothbrush in there with your name on it,” she said. “And I bet I spelled your name right.”

Two weeks after Caesar and Sherman went into Caesar’s father’s house, Sherman took him out for the first time, to burglarize a home in Chevy Chase. Sherman peed on the sofa in the recreation room, having taken a quick dislike to a large painting behind the sofa of a man in a tennis outfit whom he took to be the owner. The next night, in a light rain, they followed a light-skinned, well-dressed fellow from a bar on Capitol Hill to his car parked a block away. The man had tottered the whole distance, not bothering to open the umbrella he was carrying. “Not a sound,” Caesar said, placing the pistol at the man’s head just as he stuck his key in the car door. “Not a sound. No words. Not one word.” Sherman went through the man’s pockets, took his wallet and then his watch. “Please, please,” the man kept saying, his arms extended high into the air. The man was balding and the hair he had left was combed perfectly to either side of a bald path that went back to the middle of his head. With the light of the street lamps, the robbers could see the beads of rain on the bald path and on his eyeglasses. “Next time,” Caesar said as they stepped away from the man, “buy your shit in a liquor store and take it home to drink.”

V

On the way home from following Anna that last time, Caesar bought white carnations for Carol and the ingredients for a shrimp creole dinner. He had dinner prepared when she came home, and after they had eaten, with her head swirling just a bit from the wine, he made love to her because he did not know what kind of mood he would be in when he returned from Manny’s that night.

Later, as he told her about the retarded woman, he rested his hand on her bare stomach. He could feel her tensing up with each word. He massaged her stomach, then he took her belly button between two fingers and rubbed it gently.

“Don’t ask me to do any of that,” she said. “Don’t bring me into any of that.” As long as she believed it did not involve another woman, she had never wanted to know what he and Sherman did. But now she felt all of the not-wanting-to-know had come due and she pulled the sheet up to her neck against the cold.

“There’s nothin to it,” Caesar said. “In an out. Before you know it, we’ll be back home, Carol. I promise.”

“Stop. I’m not like you. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“It’s just the money,” he said, getting up. He began to dress.

“Don’t go just yet,” she said. She was naked and she got out of bed and put her arms around him. The cold came in the window and she shivered.

“I don’t ask a whole fuckin lot of you,” he said, “and when I do, you act like this.” He left the room and she called to him as she put on her robe. He was out of the apartment before she got in the living room. He took the stairs two at a time, and she continued calling him as she leaned over the banister.

That was Monday. He did not go back home all that week. Manny told him on Friday that he was tired of Carol calling the bar. “Talk to her,” Manny said. “Do something to shut that pussy up.”

“Come home,” Carol said when he finally called her Saturday afternoon. “Come home.”

“You forgot what I asked you to do?” he said.

“No, I didn’t forget,” she said. “Come home.”

“Then what do you have ta say bout what I asked?”

She said, “Yes. Yes. C, I can’t hurt anybody. I just can’t.”

“Who said anything about somebody gettin hurt? Nobody’ll get hurt. I already told you.”

“Come home,” she said.

The final days of that October were pleasant, but as the sun set, it grew cooler. There had been rain a few evenings, and when there was no rain, a wind came up that chilled as much as the rain. Caesar wore the tan Burberry Carol had bought for him. And as he sat in Dupont Circle Park watching Carol standing before American Security, there was still enough sunlight left for him to see Anna, a block or so away, make her way with the crowd up Connecticut Avenue.

Carol did not look over at him, and as she paced, she would occasionally pull from her purse the picture of a boy about three years old, study it as if trying to memorize the boy’s features, and then return the picture to her purse. Caesar had taken it from Manny’s wall of Polaroids, but no one at the bar, not even Manny, could remember who the child was. Carol, however, believed that Caesar knew the boy, and when Caesar laughed, she had flung the picture at him. It had taken him most of the rest of Thursday evening to calm her, convince her that, as his father would have said, he didn’t know the boy from Adam.

Still, he could tell from the way she looked at the photograph that everything he had said and done that Thursday was wearing off. Carol finally looked over at him. When Anna was but several yards from her, Caesar pointed at Anna and Carol walked to her. She took Anna by the arm and gently pulled her from the flow of the crowd. “Always say nice, soothin things,” he had told Carol. “Talk to her like you were longtime sisters or somethin.”

The lights in the park and along the streets came on. Anna’s back was to him, but he could see Carol’s face. She appeared calm and this surprised him. “The makins of a pro,” Sherman would have said. The boy in the picture, dressed in green swimming trunks with his back to some ocean, could well be a grown man by now, or he could be in his grave, Caesar thought, but today, on that street, his mother was saying he needed five thousand dollars for an operation or he would die as sure as anything. “Always make it seem like the choice is hers — whether he lives or whether he dies.” Anna took the picture and she looked at it, holding it but a few inches from her face.

Just the way Anna was standing told him that of the million things in the world she could do, she would do the one thing he wanted. And knowing this made up for not being with Sherman. It made up for that old woman who had cut his hand two weeks before when he ran by and tried to grab her money from her coat pocket.

Anna gave back the picture. Satisfied, he took his eyes from the women and watched the passersby heading home. Somewhere, Sherman was about to do the same. He could see Sherman closing a giant museum door so people could not see his roomful of paintings. “No more. No more for the day.” It did not hurt as much to think of him now. He looked back at the women in time to see them enter the bank.

When they came out, they crossed the street, and Caesar thought it a nice touch that Carol took Anna by the arm as they crossed. Anna sat on a bench across from Peoples, and for a minute or so more, Carol talked to her. Anna nodded. Everything now should be the closeout, he thought, and he felt she was taking too long. He waited until Carol walked by him and crossed the street, heading down Massachusetts Avenue. When he caught up with her, he took her by the elbow and she pulled away.

“You did good,” he said, putting his arm around her. “You did real good. How much did you get?”

“Can’t you wait?” she said. “Can’t you even wait!” They crossed 18th Street. “Do we have to go into all this out here like this?”

“It’s all right, Carol,” he said. “She back there. Nothin can happen now.” Midway down the block, he reached for her purse, but again she pulled away from him.

“Stop! Jesus!” She quickened her pace.

He stopped momentarily. “What’s wrong with you?”

At Massachusetts and 17th, he managed to lead her into the tiny park. The place was empty except for a bum who was sleeping on a bench several yards away from them. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” He took the purse.

“Don’t!” she said, taking it back. “For God sakes, don’t!”

He slapped her and grabbed for the bag with the other hand. It opened and everything inside fell out. Seeing the money fall to the ground, he slapped her again, and she began to cry. Her nose bled, and her bottom lip was split in two places, and it bled as well. The bum had awakened, and seeing the woman get slapped, he asked, “What is it there with you two peoples?”

Caesar dropped the purse, and Carol knelt down and began putting things back in it. He pulled her to her feet. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.”

She knelt and he pulled her up again. “I said leave me alone.” He slapped her. He could now see the distance between them growing, and seeing that distance and knowing he no longer had the power to close it, he slapped her once more. The blow sent her back a few feet. She said ohh several times, but everything sounded to him like no. She put her hand to her face and trembled.

“Hey there, fella,” the bum said. “We gentlemens don’t—”

“You want me to come over there and kick your ass?”

The bum was silent. He knew these young lions. He eased himself off the bench and rolled under it. Better to face the rats and the filth than face a young lion in his wrath.

“Carol, get the stuff and let’s go home.”

She watched him. Stepping up to her, he took out the Beretta and held it to her cheek. “Did you hear what I said?” There was no surprise in her face, and there was no fear. He realized that if he beat her with the pistol, that, too, would not surprise her. And had he shot her, in the face or through the heart, she would not have been surprised at that either. He pocketed the gun and stepped back.

She walked around him and was crying softly as she gathered up the money and her belongings. It had begun to rain and she shook each thing before putting it in the bag. When she was done, she stood and looked at him. Then, as if there was all the time in the world, she walked slowly out of the park, heading down Massachusetts. He watched her until she disappeared among the lights of Dupont Circle, and then he turned away.

There was something in the air, but he could not make out what it was. He walked out of the park. He kept looking behind him, expecting something or someone, but he was alone on the street and he saw nothing but the swirling of dead leaves. He continued looking behind him as he made his way up 17th Street. He took out the address book, but found he could not read the names or the numbers under the feeble street lights. He hurried, hoping for a telephone booth where the light would be brighter. He began to run, and as he ran, he kept trying to read the names and numbers, but the rain was now turning them to blurs. He did not know what was in the air. He only knew that tonight would not be a night to be without shelter.