Underworld

1

Bronzini thought that walking was an art. He was out nearly every day after school, letting the route produce a medley of sounds and forms and movements, letting the voices fall and the aromas deploy in ways that varied, but not too much, from day to day. He stopped to talk to card-players in a social club and watched a woman buy a flounder in the market. He peeled a tangerine and wondered how a flatfish lying glassy on flaked ice, a thing scraped with a net from the dim sea, could seem so eloquent a fellow creature. Its deadness was a force in those bulging eyes. Such intense emptiness. He thought of the old device of double take, how it comically embodies the lapsed moment where a life used to be.

He watched an aproned boy wrap the fish in a major headline.

Even in this compact neighborhood there were streets to revisit and men doing interesting jobs, day labor, painters in drip coveralls or men with sledgehammers he might pass the time with, Sicilians busting up a sidewalk, faces grained with stone dust. The less a job pays, Bronzini thought, the harder the work, the more impressive the spectacle. Or a waiter having a smoke during a lull, one of those fast-aging men who are tired all the time. The waiters had tired lives, three jobs, backaches and bad feet. They were more tired than the men in red neckerchiefs who swung the heavy hammers. They smoked and coughed and told him how tired they were and looked for a place on the sidewalk where they might situate the phlegm they were always spitting up.

He ate the last wedge of tangerine and left the market holding the spiral rind in his hand. He walked slowly north glancing in shop windows. There were silver points of hair in his brush mustache, still so few they were countable, and he wore rimless spectacles with wire temples because at thirty-eight, or so said his wife, he wanted to convince himself he was older, settled in his contentments, all the roil-some things finally buttoned and done.

He heard voices and looked down a side street filled with children playing. A traffic stanchion carried a sign marking the area a play street and blocking the way to cars and delivery trucks. With cars, more cars, with the status hunger, the hot horsepower, the silver smash of chrome, Bronzini saw that the pressure to free the streets of children would make even these designated areas extinct.

He imagined a fragment of chalked pavement cut clean and lifted out and elaborately packed-shipped to some museum in California where it would share the hushed sunlight with marble carvings from antiquity. Street drawing, hopscotch, chalk on paved asphalt, Bronx, 1951. But they don't call it hopscotch, do they? It's patsy or potsy here. It's buck-buck, not johnny-on-the-pony. It's hango seek-you count to a hundred by fives and set out into alleyways, shinnying up laundry poles and over back fences, sticking your head into coal bins to find the hiding players.

Bronzini stood and watched.

Girls playing jacks and jumping double dutch. Boys at boxball, marbles and ringolievio. Five boys each with a foot in a segmented circle that had names of countries marked in the wedges. China, Russia, Africa, France and Mexico. The kid who is it stands at the center of the circle with a ball in his hand and slowly chants the warning words: I de-clare a-war u-pon.

Bronzini didn't own a car, didn't drive a car, didn't want one, didn't need one, wouldn't take one if somebody gave it to him. Stop walking, he thought, and you die.

George the Waiter stood smoking near the service entrance of the restaurant where he worked. He was a face on a pole, a man not yet out of his thirties who carried something stale and unspontaneous, an inward tension that kept him apart. Over the spare body a white shirt with black vest and black trousers and above the uniform his jut features looking a little bloodsucked.

Bronzini walked over and took up a position next to George and they stood without speaking for a long moment in the odd solidarity two strangers might share watching a house burn down.

Three boys and a girl played down-the-river against the side of a building, each kid occupying a box formed by separations in the sidewalk. One of them slap-bounced a ball diagonally off the pavement so that it hit up against the wall and veered off into another player's box.

He was George the Waiter in a second sense, that his life seemed suspended in some dire expectation. What is George waiting for? Bronzini couldn't help seeing a challenge here. He liked to educe comment from the untalkative man, draw him forth, make him understand that his wish to be friendless was not readily respected here.

Then the second player bounced the ball into someone else's box, hitting it hard or lightly, slicing at the lower half of the ball to give it english, and so on up and down the river.

"The thing about these games," Bronzini said. "They mean so much while you're playing. All your inventive skills. All your energies. But when you get a little older and stop playing, the games escape the mind completely."

In fact he'd played only sporadically as a child, being bedridden at times, that awful word, and treated for asthma, for recurring colds and sore throats and whooping cough.

"How we used to scavenge. We turned junk into games. Gouging cork out of bottle caps. I don't even remember what we used it for. Cork, rubber bands, tin cans, half a skate, old linoleum that we cut up and used in carpet guns. Carpet guns were dangerous."

He checked his watch as he spoke.

"You talk about the cork," George said.

"What was the cork for?"

"We used the cork to make cages for flies. Two flat pieces of cork. Then we got straight pins from the dressmaker which were all over the floor of the shop."

"My god you're right," Bronzini said.

"We stuck the pins between the cork discs. One disc is the floor, one is the ceiling. The pins are the bars."

"Then we waited for a fly to land somewhere."

"A horsefly on a wall. You cup your hand and move it slowly along the wall and come up behind the fly."

"Then we put the fly in the cage."

"We put the fly in the cage. Then we put in extra pins," George said, "sealing the fly."

"Then what? I don't remember."

"We watched it buzz."

"We watched it buzz. Very educational."

"It buzzed until it died. If it took too long to die, somebody lit a match. Then we put the match in the cage."

"My god what terror," Bronzini said.

But he was delighted. He was getting George to talk. How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

Directly across the street George the Barber was sweeping the floor of his shop. Voices from Italian radio drifting faintly out the open door. Bronzini watched a man walk in, a custodian from the high school, and George put away the broom and took a fresh linen sheet out of a drawer and had it unfolded and sail-billowing, timed just right, as the man settled into the chair.

"Maybe you heard, Albert. The hunchback died, that used to carve things out of soap."

"We're going back a few years."

"He carved naked women out of soap. Like anatomical. The hunchback that used to sit outside the grocery."

"Attilio. You'd give him a bar of soap, he'd carve something."

"What's-his-name died, the softball player, the pitcher that threw windmill. He had shrapnel from the war. He had shrapnel actually in his heart from in the war. That only now killed him."

"Jackie somebody. You and he."

"We used to work together at the beach. But I barely knew him."

George used to sell ice cream at the beach. Bronzini saw him many times deep-stepping through the sand with a heavy metal cooler slung over his shoulder and a pith helmet rocking on his head. And white shirt and white ducks and the day somebody got a cramp while George sold popsicles in section 10.

"Remember the drowned man?" Bronzini said.

They were playing salugi in the street. Two boys snatched a school-book belonging to one of the girls, a Catholic school girl in a blue pinafore and white blouse. They tossed the book back and forth and she ran from one boy to the other and they threw the book over her head and behind her back. The book had a thick brown kraft cover that Bronzini was sure the girl had made herself, folding and tucking the grainy paper, printing her name in blue ink on the front-name and grade and subject. Salugi, they cried, that strange word, maybe some corruption of the Italian saluto, maybe a mock salutation- hello, we've got your hat, now try and get it back. Another boy joined the game and the girl ran from one to the other, scatterhanded, after the flying book.

Or Hindi or Persian or some Northumbrian nonce word sifting down the centuries. There was so much to know that he would die not knowing.

"What about the kid?" George said. "I'm hearing things that I don't know if it's good or what."

"He's coming along. I'm pleased one day, exasperated the next."

"I have respect for people that can play that game. When I think to myself this kid is how old."

"I try not to lose sight of that very thing, George."

"I hear he beats experienced players. This could be good or bad. Not that I'm the expert here. But I'm thinking maybe he should be in the street with these other kids."

"The Street is not ready for Matty."

"You should impress into him there's other things."

"He does other things besides playing chess. He cries and screams."

George didn't smile. He was standing off, faded into old brooding, and he sucked the last bland fumes from his cigarette. One drag too many. Then he dropped the butt and stepped on it with the tap toe of his way-weary shoe, the border of uniformed George, rutted and cut across the instep.

"Time I showed my face inside. Be good, Albert."

"We'll talk again," Bronzini said.

He walked across the street so he could wave to George the Barber. How children adapt, using brick walls and lampposts and fire hydrants. He watched a girl tying one end of her jump rope to a window grille and getting her little brother to turn the other end. Then she stood in the middle and jumped. No history, no future. He watched a boy playing handball against himself, hitting Chinese killers. The hi-bounce rubber ball, the pink spaldeen, rapping back from the brick facade. And the fullness of a moment in the play street. Unable to imagine you will ever advance past the pencil line on the kitchen wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.

The barber waving back. Bronzini went to the corner past a man unloading jerry cans of Bulgarian sheep cheese from the trunk of a beat-up car. He walked north again, the savor of sweet peel in his hand. He realized he was still holding the fruit rind. It made him think of Morocco. He'd never been there or much of anywhere and wondered why the frailest breath of tangerine might bring to mind a reddish sandscape flashing to infinity.

Buck buck how many horns are up?

The clear cry reached him as he tossed the skin toward some cartons stacked at a cellar entrance. They are jumping on the backs of their playpals. It is usually the fattest boy who serves as cushion, standing against a wall or pole while the boys on one team stoop head to end and their rivals run and jump one by one and come yowing down. With the stooped boys swaying under the weight, the leader of the mounted team holds fingers aloft and calls out the question. How many horns are up? Bronzini tried to recall whether the padded boy, the slapped and prodded roly-poly, the one who dribbles egg cream down his chin-is he officially called the pillow or the pillar? Bronx boys don't know from pillars, he decided. Make him the mothery casing stuffed with down.

Twenty past four. The appointment was ten minutes hence and he knew that even if he arrived after the specified time he would not be late because Father Paulus was certain to be later. Bronzini envied the blithe arrivals of life's late people. How do they manage the courage to be late, enact the rude dare repeatedly in our waiting faces? A goat and four rabbits were hung upside down in a window, trussed at the hind legs, less affectingly dead than the flounder in the market- dumb scuzzy fur with nothing to impart. Envy and admiration both. He took it that these people refuse to be mastered by the pettier claims of time and conscience.

The butcher appeared at the door of his shop, flushed and hoarse, loud, foul, happy in his unwashed apron, a man who lived urgently, something inside him pushing outward, surging against his chest wall.

"Albert, I don't see you no more."

"You're seeing me now. You see me all the time. I bought a roast last week."

"Don't tell me last week. What's last week?"

The butcher called to people walking by. He called across the street to insult a man or engage a particular woman with knowing references. The rasping spitty sandblast voice. Other women twisted their mouths, amused and disgusted.

"What are you feeding that genius of yours?"

"He's not mine," Bronzini said.

"Be thankful. That was my kid I drive him out to the country and leave him on a hillside. But I wait for the dead of winter."

"We let him chew on a crayon once a week."

"Feed the little jerk some capozella. It makes him ballsy."

The butcher gestured at the whole lamb hanging in the window. Bronzini imagined the broiled head hot from the oven and sitting on a plate in front of Matty. Two cooked heads regarding each other. And Albert is telling the boy he has to eat the brain and eyes and principal ganglia. Or no more chess.

"It puts some lead in his pencil."

The butcher stood at the corner of the window looking well-placed among the dangled animals, his arms crossed and feet spread. Bronzini saw an aptness and balance here. The butcher's burly grace, watch him trim a chop, see how he belongs to the cutting block, to the wallow of trembling muscle and mess-his aptitude and ease, the sense that he was born to the task restored a certain meaning to these eviscerated beasts.

Bronzini thought the butcher's own heart and lungs ought to hang outside his body, stationed like a saint's, to demonstrate his intimate link to the suffering world.

"Be good, Albert."

"I'll be in tomorrow."

"Give my best to the woman," the butcher said.

Bronzini checked his watch again, then stopped at a candy store to buy a newspaper. He was trying to be late but knew he could not manage it. Some force compelled him to walk into the pastry shop not only on time but about two and a half minutes early, which translated to a wait of roughly twenty minutes for the priest. He took a table in the dim interior and unfolded the Times across the scarred enamel.

A girl brought coffee and a glass of water.

The front page astonished him, a pair of three-column headlines dominating. To his left the Giants capture the pennant, beating the Dodgers on a dramatic home run in the ninth inning. And to the right, symmetrically mated, same typeface, same-size type, same number of lines, the USSR explodes an atomic bomb-kaboom- details kept secret.

He didn't understand why the Times would take a ball game off the sports page and juxtapose it with news of such ominous consequence. He began to read the account of the Soviet test. He could not keep the image from entering his mind, the cloud that was not a cloud, the mushroom that was not a mushroom-the sense of reaching feebly for a language that might correspond to the visible mass in the air. Suddenly there the priest was, coming in a flurry, Andrew Paulus S.J., built low and cozy, his head poked forward and that glisten of spittle in his smile.

He had books and folders slipping down his hip but managed to extend a cluster of scrubbed fingers, which Albert gripped in both hands, pressing and shaking, half rising from his chair. It took a moment of clumsy ceremony with overlapping salutations and unheeded questions and a dropped book and a race to retrieve it before the two men were settled at the table and all the objects put away. The priest heaved, as they say, a sigh. He wore a roman collar fitted to a biblike cloth called a rabat and over this a dark jacket with pocket square and he could have been George the Waiter's tailored master in black and white.

"How late am I?"

"You're not late at all."

"I'm doing a seminar on knowledge. Wonderful fun but I lose track."

"No, you're early," Bronzini said.

"How we know what we know."

You had to look hard at Andrew Paulus to find a trace of aging. Unfurrowed and oddly aglow, with a faint baked glaze keeping his skin pink and fresh. Hair pale brown and fringed unevenly across the forehead in boyish bangs. Bronzini wondered if this is what happens to men who forswear a woman's tangling touch and love. They stay a child, preserved in clean and chilly light. But there were parish priests everywhere about, leaky-eyed and halting, their old monotones falling whispery from the pulpit. He decided this man was not youthful so much as ageless. He must be thirty years senior to Albert and not an eyelid ever trembles or a bristly whit of gray shows at the jawline.

"Did you see the paper, Father?"

"Please, we know each other too well. You're required to call me Andy now. Yes, I stole a long look at someone's Daily News. They're calling it the Shot Heard Round the World."

"How did we detect evidence of the blast, I wonder. We must have aircraft flying near their borders with instruments that measure radiation. Or well-placed agents perhaps."

"No no no no. We're speaking about the home run. Bobby Thomson's heroic shot. The tabloids have dubbed it for posterity."

Bronzini had to pause to take this in.

"The Shot Heard Round the World? Is the rest of the world all that interested? This is baseball. I was barely aware. I myself barely knew that something was going on. Heard round the world? I almost missed it completely."

"We may take it that the term applies to the suddenness of the struck blow and the corresponding speed at which news is transmitted these days. Our servicemen in Greenland and Japan surely heard the home-run call as it was made on Armed Forces Radio. You're right, of course. They're not talking about this in the coffeehouses of Budapest. Although in fact poor Ralph Branca happens to be half Hungarian. Sons of immigrants. Branca and Thomson both. Bobby himself born in Scotland, I believe. You see why our wins and losses tend to have impact well beyond our borders."

"You follow baseball then."

"Only in distant memory. But I did devour today's reports. It's all over the radio. Something propelled this event full force into the public imagination. All day a steady sort of ripple in the air."

"I don't follow the game at all," Bronzini said.

He fell into remorseful thought. The girl appeared again, sullen in a limp blouse and shuffling loafers. Only four tables, theirs the only one occupied. The plain decor, the time-locked thickness in the air, the trace of family smell, even the daughter discontented-all argued a theme, a nonpicturesqueness that Albert thought the priest might note and approve.

"But baseball isn't the game we're here to discuss," Paulus said.

In other shops the priest had made an appreciative show of selecting a pastry from the display case, with moans and exclamations, but was subdued today, gesturing toward the almond biscotti and asking the girl to bring some coffee. Then he squared in his chair and set his elbows firmly on the table, a little visual joke, and framed his head with cupped hands-the player taut above his board.

"I've been taking him to chess clubs," Bronzini said, "as we discussed last time. He needs this to develop properly. Stronger opponents in an organized setting. But he hasn't done as well as I'd expected. He's been stung a number of times."

"And when he's not playing?"

"We spend time studying, practicing."

"How much time?"

"Three days a week usually. A couple of hours each visit."

"This is completely ridiculous. Go on."

"I don't want to force-feed the boy."

"Go on," Paulus said.

"I'm just a neighbor after all. I can push only so hard. There's no deep tradition here. He just appeared one day. Shazam. A boy from another planet, you know?"

"He wasn't born knowing the moves, was he?"

"His father taught him the game. A bookmaker. Evidently kept all the figures in his head. The bets, the odds, the teams, the horses. He could memorize a scratch sheet. This is the story people told. He could look at a racing form with the day's entries, the morning line, the jockeys and so on. And he could memorize the data of numerous races in a matter of minutes."

"And he disappeared."

"Disappeared. About five years ago."

"And the boy is eleven, which means daddy barely got him started."

"Adequate or not, on and off, I have been the mentor ever since."

The priest made a gesture of appeasement, a raised hand that precluded any need for further explanation. The girl brought strong black coffee and a glass of water and some biscuits on a plate.

"The mother is Irish Catholic. And there's another son. One of my former students. One semester only. Bright, I think, but lazy and unmotivated. He's sixteen and can quit school any time he likes. And I'm speaking on behalf of the mother now. She wondered if you'd be willing to spend an hour with him. Tell him about Fordham. What college might offer such a boy. What the Jesuits offer. Our two schools, Andy, directly across the road from each other and completely remote. My students, some of them don't know, they remain completely unaware of the fact that there's a university lurking in the trees."

"Some of my students have the same problem."

Bronzini remembered to laugh.

"But what a waste if a youngster like this were to end up in a stockroom or garage."

"You've made your plea, Consider your duty effectively discharged, Albert."

"Dip your biscotto. Don't be bashful. Dip, dip, dip. These biscuits are direct descendants of honey and almond cakes that were baked in leaves and eaten at Roman fertility rites."

"I think the task of reproducing the species will have to devolve upon others. Not that I would mind the incidental contact."

Bronzini leaning in.

"In all seriousness. Have you ever regretted?"

"What, not marrying?"

Bronzini nodding, eyes intent behind the lenses.

"I don't want to marry." And now it was the priest's turn to lean forward, shouldering down, sliding his chin near the tabletop. "I just want to screw," he whispered electrically.

Bronzini shocked and charmed.

"The verb to screw is so amazingly, subversively apt. But conjugating the word is not sufficient pastime. I would like to screw a movie star, Albert. The greatest, blondest, biggest-titted goddess Hollywood is able to produce. I want to screw her in the worst way possible and I mean that in every sense."

The small toothy head hovered above the table in defiant self-delight. Bronzini felt rewarded. On a couple of past occasions he'd taken the priest into shops and watched him taste the autumnal pink Parma ham, sliced transparently thin, and he'd offered commentaries on pig's blood pastry and sheets of salt cod. The visitor showed pleasure in the European texture of the street, things done the old slow faithful way, things carried over, suffused with rules of usage. This is the only art I've mastered, Father-walking these streets and letting the senses collect what is routinely here. And he walked the priest into the acid stink of the chicken market and pushed him toward the old scale hung from the ceiling with a lashed bird in the weighing pan, explaining how the poultryman gets twenty cents extra to kill and dress the bird-say something in Latin, Father-and he felt the priest's own shudder when the deadpan Neapolitan snapped the chicken's neck-a wiry man with feathers in his shirt.

"If I were not so dull a husband we might sit here and tell stories into the night."

"Yours real, mine phantasmal."

The priest's confession was funny and sad and assured Albert that he was a privileged companion if not yet a trusted friend. He enjoyed being a guide to the complex deposits around them, the little histories hidden in a gesture or word, but he was beginning to fear that Andy's response would never exceed the level of appreciative interest.

"And when you were young."

"Was I ever in love? Smitten at seven or eight, piercingly. The purest stuff, Albert. Before the heavy hormones. There was a girl named something or other."

"I know a walk we ought to take. There's a play street very near. I think you'd enjoy a moment among the children. It's a dying practice, kids playing in city streets. We'll finish here and go. Another half cup."

He signaled the girl.

"Do you know the famous old painting, Albert? Children playing games. Scores of children filling a market square. A painting that's about four hundred years old and what a shock it is to recognize many games we played ourselves. Games still played today."

"I'm pessimistic, you think."

"Children find a way. They sidestep time, as it were, and the ravages of progress. I think they operate in another time scheme altogether. Imagine standing in a wooded area and throwing stones at the top of a horse chestnut tree to dislodge the sturdiest nuts. Said to be in the higher elevations. Throwing stones all day if necessary and taking the best chestnut home and soaking it in salt water."

"We used vinegar."

"Vinegar then."

"We Italians," Albert said.

"Soak it to make it hard and battle-worthy. And poke a hole through the nut with a skewer and slip a tough bootlace through the hole, a lace long enough to wind around the hand two or three times. It's completely vivid in my mind. Tie a knot, of course, to keep the chestnut secured to the lace. A rawhide lace if possible."

"Then the game begins."

"Yes, you dangle your chestnut and I bash it by launching my own with a sort of dervishy twirl. But it's finding the thing, soaking the thing, taking the time. Time as we know it now had not yet come into being."

"I tramped through the zoo every year at this time to gather fallen chestnuts," Bronzini said.

"Buckeyes."

"Buckeyes."

"Time," the priest said.

Across the room the girl filled the cups from a machine. Father Paulus waited for her to slide his cup across the table so he could let the aromatic smoke drift near his face.

Then he said, "Time, Albert. Both of you must be willing, actually, to pay a much higher price. Hours and days. Whole days at chess. Days and weeks."

Bronzini had his opening, finally.

"And if I'm not willing? Are you? Or not able. If I'm not able to do it. Not equal to the job. Are you, Andy?"

The priest looked at the knot in Albert's tie.

"I thought you wanted advice."

"I do."

"Please. Do you think I'd even consider tutoring the boy? Albert, please. I have a life, such as it is."

"You're far more advanced than I, Father. You're a tournament player. You understand the psychology of the game."

Paulus sat upright in his chair, formally withdrawing, it seemed, to a more objective level of discourse.

"Theories about the psychology of the game, frankly, leave me cold. The game is location, situation and memory. And a need to win. The psychology is in the player, not the game. He must enjoy the company of danger. He must have a killer instinct. He must be prideful, arrogant, aggressive, contemptuous and dominating. Willful in the extreme. All the sins, Albert, of the noncarnal type."

Chastened and deflated. But Albert felt he had it coming. The man's remarks were directed at his own genial drift, of course, not the boy's. His complacent and easy pace.

"He shows master strength, potentially."

"Look, I'm willing to attend a match or two. Give you some guidance if I can. But I don't want to be his teacher. No no no no."

Now the grandmother appeared with an opened bottle of anisette crusted at the rim. When Bronzini asked how she was feeling she let her head rock back and forth. The liqueur was a gesture reserved for select customers and took earning over time. She poured an ashy dram into each demitasse and the priest colored slightly as he seemed to do in the close company of people who were markedly different. Their unknown lives disconcerted him, making his smile go stiff and bringing to his cheeks a formal flush of deference.

She left without a word. They watched her glide moon-slow into the dimmed inner room.

"I don't know what to tell you about the older brother," Paulus said.

"Never mind. I asked only because the mother asked. It will all straighten itself out."

"We have an idea, some of us, that's taking shape. A new sort of collegium. Closer contact, minimal structure. We may teach Latin as a spoken language. We may teach mathematics as an art form like poetry or music. We will teach subjects that people don't realize they need to know. All of this will happen somewhere in the hinterland. We'll want a special kind of boy. Special circumstances," Paulus said. "Something he is. Something he's done. But something."

When they stood to leave and the priest was gathering his books, Bronzini took his cup, the priest's, and drained it of sediment, tipping his head quickly-espresso dregs steeped in anisette.

They shook hands and made vague plans to stay in touch and Father Paulus started on the short walk back to the Fordham campus and Albert realized he'd forgotten his own suggestion about visiting the play street nearby. Too bad. They might have ended on a mellower note.

But when he walked past the street it was nearly emptied out. A few boys still playing ringolievio, haphazard and half speed, the clumsy fatboy trapped in the den, always caught, always it, the slightly epicene butterfat bulk, the boy who's always reaching down to lift a droopy sock and getting swift-kicked by the witlings and sadists.

Is that what being it means? Neutered, sexless, impersonalized.

Dark now. Another day of games all ended, or nearly all-he could hear the boys' following voices as he made his way down the avenue. And when it ends completely we find ourselves abandoned to our sodden teens. What a wound to overcome, this passage out of childhood, but a beautiful injury too, he thought, pure and unrepeatable. Only the scab remains, barely seen, the exuded substance.

Ringolievio coca-cola one two three.

A faint whiff of knishes and hot dogs from the luncheonette under the bowling alley. Then Albert crossed the street to Mussolini park, as the kids called it, where a few old men still sat on benches with their folded copies of II Progresso, the fresh-air inspectors, retired, indifferent or otherwise idle, and they smoked and talked and blew their noses in the street, leaning over the curbstone with thumb and index finger clamped to old shnozzola, discharging the stringy stuff.

Albert wanted to linger a while but didn't see anyone he knew and so he joined the small army of returning workers coming around the bend from Third Avenue, from the buses and elevated train.

Time, finally, to go home.

She sat there, Rosemary Shay, doing her beadwork. She had the frame set on two small sawhorses. She had the four bolts screwed in that held the frame together, those bolts with wing nuts at one end. She had the material pinned to the edges of the frame. She had the wood-handled needle that she used to string the beads onto the material, following the printed design-greenish beads arrayed on a flossy thread.

She heard Nick doing something at the kitchen table.

She said, "You should go get the meat."

She did her beadwork and listened to him doing whatever he was doing. Writing something, it sounded like, but not for school, she didn't think.

She said, "It's paid for. And they close soon. So you should think about going."

She did her beadwork, her piecework. Sweaters, dresses and blouses. She did whole trousseaus sometimes, working off the books just as Jimmy had.

She did her work and listened to Nick, finally, go out the door. Then she went and looked at the piece of paper he'd left on the table. Made no sense to her at all. Arrows, scrawls, numbers, circled numbers, a phone number in the Merian exchange, letters with numbers next to them, some simple additions and divisions-all scribbled frantically on the page.

She listened to the radio and did her work. She made an official salary, the money she reported, answering the phone for a local lawyer and typing wills and deeds and leases, mostly, and immigration forms, and listening to the lawyer's funny stories. He told all the new jokes and had a backlog of a thousand old ones and he liked to sing "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" in Italian, a thing he did more or less automatically, like breathing or chewing gum.

The job was good for her because it put her in contact with other people and because it had the virtue of fairly flexible hours. And the money, of course, was life and death.

Bronzini walked toward Tremont, past apartment buildings with front stoops and fire escapes, past a number of private homes, some with a rosebush or a shade tree, little frame houses beginning to show another kind of growth, spindly winged antennas.

He was wondering about being it. This was one of those questions that he tortured himself deliciously with. Another player tags you and you're it. What exactly does this mean? Beyond being neutered. You are nameless and bedeviled. It. The evil one whose name is too potent to be spoken. Or is the term just a cockney pronunciation of hit? When you tag someone, you hit her. You're it, missy. Cockney or Scots or something.

A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in to dinner.

A fearsome power in the term because it makes you separate from the others. You flee the tag, the telling touch. But once you're it, name-shorn, neither boy nor girl, you're the one who must be feared. You're the dark power in the street. And you feel a kind of demonry, chasing the players, trying to put your skelly-bone hand on them, to spread your taint, your curse. Speak the syllable slowly if you can. A whisper of death perhaps.

Half a block from his building, on a street where the Italians thinned out and the Jews began to appear. And approaching now to see his mother in the first-floor window, cranked up in her special bed, white hair shining in the soft light.

Baseball's oh so simple. You tag a man, he's out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

The young man struck the match with one hand. He'd learned this when he first started smoking, about a year ago, although it seemed to him that he'd been smoking forever, Old Golds, isolating the match by closing the cover behind it and then bending the match back against the striking surface below and driving the head with his thumb. Then he brought the flared match up to his cigarette, his hand cupping the whole book with the match still secured. He lit up, shook out the flame and conceded use of the other hand to pluck the spent match from the book and send it to match hell.

You need these useless skills to make an impression on the street.

The science teacher fading into the evening, southbound, and his former student Shay, a mopey C-plus in introductory chemistry, walking the other way on the same street, into the shopping district, taking deep drags on his cigarette, with numbers running in his head.

Ever since the game yesterday, Nick's been seeing the number thirteen. The game, the mass hurrah, the way he crouched over his radio, ready to puke his guts all over the roof. All day today, thirteens coming out of the woodwork. He had to get a pencil to list them all.

Branca wears number thirteen.

Branca won thirteen games this year.

The Giants started their pennant drive thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers.

The month and day of yesterday's game. Ten three. Add the digits, you get thirteen.

The Giants won ninety-eight games this year and lost fifty-nine, including the play-offs. Nine eight five nine. Add the digits, reverse the result, see what you get, shitface.

The time of the home run. Three fifty-eight. Add the digits of the minutes. Thirteen.

The phone number people called for inning-by-inning scores. ME 7- 1212. M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Add the five digits, old thirteen.

Take the name Branca-this is where he started going crazy. Take the name Branca and assign a number to each letter based on its position in the alphabet. This is where he started thinking he was as crazy as his brother doing chess positions or probabilities or whatever the kid does. Take the name Branca. The B is two. The r is eighteen. And so on and so on. You end up with thirty-nine. What is thirty-nine? It is the number which, when you divide it by the day of the month of the game, gives you thirteen.

Thomson wears number twenty-three. Subtract the month of the year, you know what you get.

Two guys were pushing a car to get it started. Nick nearly went over to help but then didn't. He was done with baseball now, he thought, the last thin thread connecting him to another life. He saw the old man who dressed as a priest, more or less, wearing a cassock sometimes with house slippers, or one of those ridged black hats a priest wears, blessing the fucking multitudes, and ordinary shabby street clothes.

He walked into the butcher shop. The bell over the door rattled and the butcher stood above the block, Cousin Joe, hacking at a pork loin.

The other butcher said, "Hey. Look who's here."

He said it the way you say something in passing, to no one in particular.

Cousin Joe looked up.

"Look who's here," he said. "Nicky, what's the word?"

The other butcher said, "Hey. He wants to be called Nick. You don't know this?"

"Hey. I know this guy since he's four years old. A little skinny malink. How long you been coming in here, Nicky?"

Nick smiled. He knew he was only a stationary object, a surface for their carom shots.

"I seen him with that girl he goes with. Loretta," the second butcher said.

"You think he's getting some?"

"I know he is. Because I look at his face when they walk by."

"Nicky, tell me about it. Make me feel good," the butcher said. "Because I'm reaching the point I have to hear other people's, you know, whatever it is they're doing that I'm not doing no more."

"I think he's a cuntman. Up and coming."

"This is true, Nicky?"

Nick's mood was improving.

"I think he's getting so much there's not enough left over for the rest of us," the second butcher said, Antone, barely visible behind the display case.

"Make me feel good, Nicky. I stand here all day, I look at them go by. Big women, short women, girls from Roosevelt, girls from Aquinas. You know what I say to myself. Where's mine?"

"Nicky's got yours. He's got mines too."

"Him, I could believe it."

"And you know why, Joe?"

"He's doing something he shouldn't be doing."

"He's got that pussy smile when he walks by. Which could only mean one thing. The kid is eating box lunch at the Y."

"Sboccato," the butcher said happily, berating Antone, rasping the word from deep in his throat. Foulmouth.

Nick went to the door and opened it and waited for a woman to walk past and then flicked his cigarette toward the curbstone.

"Who's better than him?" Antone said.

"You going to school, Nicky?"

"He goes when he goes. Hey. Who's better than him?" Antone said. "I would give my right arm."

Antone took the bag out of the case. It held chops, chicken breasts and fresh bacon. He passed it over the top to Nick.

"Who's better than you?" he said.

"Be good," Cousin Joe said.

"My right arm I would give. Look at this kid."

A taste of blood and sawdust hung in the air.

"Regards to your mother, okay?"

"Be good, okay?"

"Be good," the butcher said.

Bronzini lay beaming in the massive bath, a cast-iron relic raised on ball-and-claw feet, only his head unsubmerged.

Salt crystals fizzed all around him.

His wife leaning against the door frame, Klara, with their two-year-old affixed to her leg, the child repeating words that daddy issued from the deeps.

"Tangerine," Albert said.

This was happiness as it was meant to evolve when first conceived in caves, in mud huts on the grassy plain. Mamelah and our beautiful bambina. And his own mother, ghastly ill but here at last, murmurous, a strong and mortal presence in the house. And Albert himself in the hot bath, back from the hunt, returned to the fundamental cluster.

He summarized the meeting with Father Paulus. A slouching Klara seemed about to speak several times, the way her body begins to drag along a surface, going restless and skeptical.

"An impressive man. I want you to come along next time. Or I'll invite him here."

"He doesn't want to come here."

"Doctorate in philosophy at Yale. Graduated magna cum laude in sacred theology from some Jesuit center in Europe. Louvain, I believe," and he formed the word as a privileged utterance. "Holds a chair in the humanities at Fordham."

"But he's not inclined to help you with the boy."

"He'll help. He'll come to a match. Tangerine," he said to the child and raised his arms out of the water.

Klara lifted the girl up over the roll-rim of the tub and Albert sat up and took her under the arms, holding her upright, feet in white socks barely touching the water so she could step along the surface, laughing, making little kick-waves. And he felt like a mother seal, yes, a mother, not some raucous coughing bull or whatever the male is called-he would have to look it up.

"Do you know the old painting," he said, "that shows dozens of children playing games in some town square?"

"Hundreds actually. Two hundred anyway. Bruegel. I find it unwholesome. Why?"

"It came up in conversation."

"I don't know what art history says about this painting. But I say it's not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me. It's some kind of menace, some folly. Kinderspielen. They look like dwarves doing something awful."

He held the girl kicking, raising her just above the surface, then dropping her a notch so she could splash lightly, laughing when the spray hit him in the face.

"Fat and backward. Did you hear that, little girl? As a matter of fact she's getting pretty heavy, isn't she? Whoa. Aren't you, sweetheart?"

Sooner or later the daily litany of delicate questions and curt replies.

"And my mother?"

"Resting."

"And the doctor came?"

"No."

"The doctor did not come?"

"No."

"When is he coming?"

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow. And Mrs. Ketchel looked in?"

"Looked in, exactly."

The child stepped along the surface and he lifted her high so Klara could take her. She swung her past the end of the tub and managed to have her wet socks off about a second after she touched down. One of those thousand-a-day death struggles of mother and child. Wails and bent limbs and a certain physical insistence on the woman's part. All done in a compact blur that dazzled Albert and made him lean over the edge to espy the two dinky socks lying soggy on the tile, as confirmation.

His mother suffered from a neuromuscular condition, myasthenia gravis, and she lay helpless much of the time, eyelids sagged, arms too weak to move except in ever slower syllables of gesture, reduced to units now, and her vision evidently doubled.

He recited the word for the child one last time as she was hustled out.

He'd brought his mother here, prevailing over her own fatalism and his wife's practical misgivings. You are the son, you take care of the parents. And the illness, the drama of a failing body, the way impending death made her seem saintly, with an icon's fixedness, a stern and staring and enameled beauty. Albert, who shunned any form of organized worship and thought God was a mass delusion, sat and watched her for hours, combed her hair, soaked up her diarrhea with bunched Kleenex, talked to her in his boyhood Italian, and he felt that the house, the flat, was suffused with a reverence, old, sad, heavy and impressive-an otherworldliness, now that she was here.

The salts had stopped fizzing and he lay in silence a while. He felt the contentment begin to slip away. There was something about evening perhaps that caused a transient sadness. He heard Klara in the kitchen preparing the meal. Things there he must keep at a distance. Her moods, her doubts. He thought about his own situation. Things he must confront. His complacency, his distractedness, his position at school, his sneaky-pete drinking.

It came to him suddenly when it finally came. Tangerine. How he'd stood in the market this afternoon peeling the loose-skinned fruit and eating the sweet sections, slightly stinging as the juice washed through his mouth, and how the scent seemed to breathe some essence, but why, of Morocco. And now he knew, incontrovertibly. Tangerine, Tanger, Tangier. The port from which the fruit was first shipped to Europe.

He felt better now, thank you.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blaze brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living.

Nothing fits the body so well as water.

Later they would go get the car but first they hung around a while, letting the night close in, sitting on the stoop in front of 611.

Juju did not sit down until he spread his hanky on the steps. He was talking about the new model cars, just out, this one's got the horsepower, that one's got the handling, and he was earnest and fervent.

"You talk like you're ready to whip out your wallet," Nick said. "When you know and I know."

Scarfo stood on the corner about ten yards away eating a jelly apple, a grown man, holding it away from his body and leaning in to bite.

"There's nothing in there but a rubber."

They watched people come home from work. Nick sat haunched on the iron rail just above Juju. It was cold and they came plugging home, clerks, bus drivers, garment workers, elevator operators.

Nick watched them and smoked.

"That's you," he said.

"What are you talking?"

"Two years tops. That's you," he said. "Could happen sooner."

"It's a job. They have jobs. What do you want them to do?"

"I'll tell you what I think."

"Save me a drag on that cigarette."

They watched Scarfo talking to the shoemaker, holding the jelly apple at arm's length now.

"Anything's better than what they're doing. That's what I think."

"They're working. Let them work."

Nick watched and smoked, secretaries, maintenance men, bank tellers, messengers, typists in the typing pool, stenographers in the steno pool.

"It's not the work. It's the regular hours," Nick said. "Going in the same time every day. Clocking in, taking the train. It's the train. Going in together. Coming home together."

"You're better than that."

"I'm better, I'm worse, what's the difference."

When Nick took the last drag on the cigarette he held the butt with his thumb and middle finger, the middle finger poised to flick so that he took the drag and flicked in one prolonged motion, sending the butt toward the curbstone.

"Thanks," Juju said.

"For what?"

"You rather collect twenty weeks a year than have a steady job that pays decent?"

"I tell you what I rather do. I rather get my dick sucked by the one in the green coat."

"Where?"

"The one in the green coat."

"Where?"

"Across the street," Nick said.

"You like that?"

"Hey. I didn't say I want to marry her."

"You couldn't save me a drag?"

"What? Did you ask?"

"She's awful short," Juju said.

"Good. She can blow me standing up."

"Save wear and tear on her knees."

"God makes short people for a reason."

Scarfo wore neat creased pants and good shoes and he ate with his body contorted to keep the jelly from dripping on his clothes. He was talking to the shoemaker about something and the shoemaker stood there squat-bodied and blank.

"You got gas money?" Juju said.

"We don't need gas. For where we're going?"

"Where are we going?"

"To the poolroom," Nick said.

They watched the shoemaker think. Like watching a bulldog take a crap.

The people came home from work, thinning out over time, the merest scatter now. It was the night before Thanksgiving and there was a thing you were supposed to feel about a holiday and a day off and getting ready for the big feast with the relatives coming over but Nicky's days off had started a couple of weeks earlier when he stopped going to school and there weren't any relatives nearby which was something, in fact, to be thankful for.

He tapped Juju on the shoulder. They walked over to Quarry Road, a stretch of weedy landscape traveled mainly by dog walkers. This was where the '46 Chevy waited at the base of the high stone wall that surrounded the hospital for the incurable.

They were too young to have drivers' licenses but it didn't matter because the car was stolen anyway.

They'd seen it parked near the zoo about three weeks ago, key in the ignition, near nightfall, and Nick had gotten in, an impulse, a thing you don't even have time to dare yourself to do, and he started up the engine. Juju watched for a second and got in. Vito was with them, Bats, and he got in. They drove around for much of the night and it was still a joke, an escapade, and they chipped in for gas and drove around some more and then left the car parked next to an empty lot, with Nick taking the keys, and it was still there the next day They got a set of plates from Vito's uncle's car that was in traction, more or less, for the winter, and they exchanged these for the original plates and drove mainly at night because the brashness had given way to a responsible sense of ownership and they went only limited distances because it seemed safer and they didn't have money to spend on gas and there was nowhere to go anyway.

Juju started the car up and they sat there listening to it throb.

"You see what you're doing to this mat," Nick said. "Only three weeks it's been. You're wearing it out. You're wearing down the ridges with your feet. You and her. Use the backseat, animal."

"The backseat's cramped."

"Animate."

"It's roomier up here."

Juju and his girlfriend shared the front seat for hours at a time, Gloria, french-kissing into the night, the young man's hands exploratory, but it was the action of their feet that caused the trouble, it was the grinding of their feet in unavailing passion that was destroying the traction on the mat.

"Explain to her that if she puts put, Gloria, in a polite way, tell her, the damage to the car will be reduced in the long run. You won't have all this frustration that the both of you take out on the furniture."

"The furniture."

"Put out or stay out. Tell her nice-nice. Because we can't afford this girl destroying our property."

Juju put the car in gear and drove the two blocks to the poolroom, parking away from the streetlight. They got out, examined the car and then crossed the street and went up the long flight of steel-tipped stairs and through the tall metal door into the sparse smoke of the big room, where a single dim figure was hunched over a table, cue ball spinning in the gloom.

A woman rapped a penny on the window and Klara looked up. The woman waved, missus somebody, and Klara smiled and hurried on. She had company coming and she was late.

She stopped for some things at the grocer's and then went up the front steps and there was Albert's mother in the window, cranked-up, wearing a white hospital gown and facing straight out, with a religious medal dangling, and she looked a little like a vision or someone waiting for a vision.

Klara did not want to give this striking scene a title out of some Renaissance gallery because that would be unkind. But the fact, after all, was that the woman was on display.

Mrs. Ketchel sat with Albert's mother this afternoon. The child was being minded by a girl in the building who was capable and trustworthy.

Klara tidied the place a little, not much, and then stood in the spare room looking at the sketch on the easel, a study of the room itself. She'd been sketching the room for some time now. She did studies of the door frame, the molding on the walls, she did the luggage stacked in a corner.

When Rochelle rang the bell she was standing in the kitchen smoking.

"So, Klara. Here you are."

"Don't look too closely. I didn't clean."

"You don't clean for old friends."

They sat in the living room with coffee and snacks.

"So here you are."

"Exactly, what, six blocks from where we grew up?"

"It feels strange coming back. Everybody's so ugly. I swear I never noticed."

The real Rochelle. This is what Mara wanted but wasn't sure she'd get.

"You have a new place," she said.

"Riverside Drive. How did I get so lucky I don't know."

"You're looking very Parisian or something. The hair, maybe, or the clothes. What is it?"

"Once you start, you can't stop. It's like a disease," Rochelle said. "You still have your willowy look, which is the envy of my life."

Rochelle's husband was a developer. She called him Harry the Land Man. They went to Florida and Bermuda and shopped for lingerie together on Fifth Avenue.

"So you're here, Klara. Teaching art."

"There's a community center. The children come to me, some of them kicking, some of them screaming. Others are very willing, they love to draw."

"So it's satisfying."

"At times, yes, I enjoy it."

"So you enjoy it. So it's good. And Albert. He's a teacher too. Everybody's a teacher. Half the world is teaching the other half."

"Albert's a real teacher. A professional."

"That's his mother in there?"

"A forceful woman actually, even in this condition. I admire her in a number of ways. Takes no crap from anybody."

"She's dying in there?"

"Yes."

"You'll let her die in the house?"

"Yes."

"You were always open-minded that way. You have a lover, Klara?"

"Ten minutes you're in my house. The answer is no."

"You want to ask me if I fool around?"

"I know what I'm supposed to say. Youd be crazy to fool around. Risk all that? Harry, the apartment, the underwear? But in fact."

"Once or twice only. I need something in the afternoon or I feel useless."

Rochelle wanted to see her work. There were several small canvases stacked against the wall in the spare room and they stood there a while, looking. The pressure Rochelle felt to say the right thing mashed her head into her torso.

"Harry wants to buy art."

"Tell him to get an advisor."

"I'll quote you that you said that."

Klara showed some pastels.

"So Albert's a dear sweet man, right? He likes it that you paint?"

"He thinks it relaxes me."

"So you enjoy it. You come in here and paint. I can picture you, Klara. Standing here thinking, measuring with the brush. Itbu're trying this, you're trying that. Once I let an elevator man rub against my thigh, in Florida."

They had another cup of coffee and then went upstairs to see Klara's child. She was on the floor playing with jigsaw pieces and they stayed half an hour talking to the baby-sitter and watching the child make a world independent of the puzzle.

"Klara, say it. I should have a baby."

"You're the last person I would say it to."

"Thank you. We're friends to the end. Give me a hug, I'll go home happy."

They went down and stood on the stoop talking. Three men were pushing a car to get it started. A light snow was falling.

"So she takes no crap, Albert's mother. Take me to her deathbed before it's too late. Maybe she can tell me something I should know."

When she was gone Klara went into the spare room and restacked all the canvases and stood looking at the sketches she'd done. The door, the doorknob, the walls, the window frame.

She sent Mrs. Ketchel home and sat with Albert's mother until it got dark. Then she went into the kitchen to do something about dinner. But first she turned on the lamp near the bed so Albert would see his mother when he came up the steps.

The poolshooter was George Manza, George the Waiter, and he was playing alone at the back of the room. He was not a man who mixed with the regulars and he was a master shooter besides. It was rare that anyone came in who could play at this level.

Nick stood near a table where a gin rummy game was going but he was watching George shoot pool. Bank the six, play beautiful position for the ace, make a masse shot that Nick could barely visualize even after he saw it.

Once, nearly a year ago, George came up to Nick, unexpectedly, and asked him to go to the unemployment office with him. He needed to fill out some forms so he could collect for the next twenty weeks and he didn't say it outright but Nick understood that he required help reading the forms and filling in the information. Nick also understood that an older man might not want to ask someone his own age for this kind of help. They went to the office and filled out the forms and George didn't feel embarrassed and ever since that day he always had a word for Nick, some advice to give, regards to your mother, stay in school.

Somebody says, "What's this, fuck-your-buddy week?"

Mike the Book stood behind the counter, under the TV set, a short square-jawed man who was always about a day late shaving. The poolroom was a sideline to Mike's bookmaking operation. Sometimes he let Nick and his buddies shoot pool with the light off over the table, which meant they didn't have to pay.

He caught Nick's eye and tilted his head and when Nick walked over he said something.

"What?"

"It's called grand theft. You know this phrase?"

"What do you mean?"

Mike leaned across the counter, speaking quietly.

"You think word don't get around? What's the matter with you? I thought you were smart. That chooch over there, Juju, I don't expect better. You, I'm surprised."

"Mike, the car is a throwaway. I honestly don't think the guy ever meant to drive it anymore. He left the keys in the car so somebody could take it. It's the kind of car you take it out in the woods and shoot it. So we saved him the aggravation."

"You're gonna think it's funny when you're booked at the precinct. I picture your mother, Nicky."

The dog came over and sniffed at Nick's shoes, a mutt, a stray that Mike the Book took in one day. Somebody named it Mike the Dog.

"All right. I'll see what we're gonna do."

"Get rid of it. That's what you're gonna do."

"I won't need it anymore. I'm getting a job. I can take taxis whenever I want."

"Wise guy. You're like your father."

Nick wasn't sure he wanted to hear this.

"Your father liked to put himself in a corner and then edge himself out. He was always at the edge. Not that I knew him that well. We were in the same business but he was downtown and I was over here and he always kept a distance, anyway, your old man. Like he's somewhere else even when he's standing next to you."

"I'll do something."

"See what you're gonna do."

"I'm this close to getting a job. My life of crime is over, Mike."

They were shooting pool at two other tables now and when Juju started racking balls at a third table Nick went over to shoot a game.

He said, "Mike knows."

"What? He knows?"

"I think everybody knows. How could they not know? The fucking dog knows."

"Then we're shit out of luck," Juju said. "We put the key back in the ignition and just walk away."

"Good idea. Give me the key I'll do it," Nick said.

In the middle of the game he went to the phone on the far wall and called Loretta. George the Waiter saw him and raised his stick and Nick tipped an imaginary hat.

"Loretta. What are you doing?"

"Trying on those shoes I bought."

"Those shoes."

"I bought. You were with me."

"That was three days ago."

"So I'm still trying them on. So what?"

"You're alone?"

"My mother's here."

"You're not alone?"

"My mother's here."

"She's there now?"

"She lives here. It's her house. She has a right."

"I just thought if you were alone."

"My mother's here."

"I could come over."

"She's still here. She was here when you first asked and she's still here."

"So meet me at the car. I'm parked across from Mike's."

"Meet you at the car? Now you want me to meet you?"

"We'll drive somewhere."

"What am I supposed to say? Ma, I'm going out for a bottle of milk."

"Tomorrow's off. You don't have to get up for school."

"I have to get up for the turkey. We have twenty-two people. I'm up at six-thirty Maybe when they all leave. Tomorrow night."

"Wear your shoes," he said.

He went over and watched George run the table. George had a floury face and hollow eyes and he talked to Nick with his nose compassed on the cue ball.

"What's this about you're not going to school no more?"

"No more, no more. Waste of time, don't you think?"

"Stay in school."

"Stay in school. Okay, George."

"Ifbu're working?"

"I got something I'll be doing part-time."

"What?"

"In an ice-cream freezer. Packing and unpacking."

"This is union?"

"What union? The union wants ice-cream packers to do twenty minutes in the freezer, twenty minutes out. So they don't freeze their peckers off. So the company's hiring fools like me."

George slammed in the four ball with a flourish, nearly driving the stick up into the ceiling. It was interesting to see a clammed-up guy like George become a showman at the table.

"You want some money in your pocket."

"That's right."

"And you're not thinking about the right or wrong of the situation or your own danger to your health."

"That's right."

"But they're gonna pay you shit-ass wages. What are they paying you?"

"Shit-ass wages."

"And they're gonna keep you in the freezer for unsafe periods. Let me talk to a guy I know. Maybe I can get you something better. You'll work like a beast of burden but at least you don't wear no mittens."

Vito Bats had taken Nick's place at the other table. Nick went over and watched, smoking, pointing out errors in their game.

"Everybody knows," he said.

"We just have to leave it," Vito said. "We don't go near it anymore. I'll take my uncle's plates off, late tonight. They'll see a car with no plates, they'll tow it away. Goodbye, good riddance."

"You'll never get laid, Vito. Both of you guys. That car is your only hope."

"I rather die a saint in my coffin than go to jail with ten thousand tizzoons."

"Give me the keys. I told Juju. Give me the keys, I take care of everything."

"Give me my uncle Tommy's plates, maybe I'll give you the keys."

"Take the fucking plates. I'm taking the keys."

"Ifou're taking ugazz. That's what you're taking."

"Hard-on. Give me the keys."

"U'gazz. All right?"

"See that stick? The stick you're holding. The stick you're holding."

"Alls I'm saying, Nicky."

"Cuntlap. Give me the keys."

He was talking to Vito even though he knew Juju had the keys. He didn't want to put Juju in a position where he would lose pride or standing. But Vito with those thick glasses and big lips, fish lips-he had those wet lips he was always licking.

"I don't get the keys, you know what happens to that stick? The stick you're holding. I give you one guess where it goes."

George the Waiter paid and left and soon the cardplayers came in, blinking in the smoke, the high-stakes poker players, they played till four, five in the morning, chips massed in the pot and a guy named Walls sitting by the door.

Walls carried a.38, this was the story, somewhere on his hip.

Four of the players were here and they stood at the counter talking to Mike and after a while two more players arrived and the lights over the pool tables began to go off and the poolshooters drifted out.

Somebody croons in a clear tenor, "Bluer than velvet was the night."

Walls was sitting by the door, different from the others, a narrow face and long jaw, hair cut short, and Nick watched him from the counter and Walls caught the look and raised his eyebrows slightly. In other words there's something you want to say to me?

Nick smiled and shrugged, taking his change.

"Be good," Mike said.

Vito borrowed a small folding knife off Mike's key chain and the three thieves went down to effectuate removal of the plates.

Mike the Dog went with them.

Nick watched them work and pointed out flaws in their method. He pissed against the hospital wall, drawing the dog's attention, and then went back to the car, where they were still disengaging the plates, and he commented freely.

Vito said, "Hey. Don't be such a scucciament'. All right?"

"Give me the keys," Nick said.

"We're not finished."

"You'll never be finished. Because you're a scumbag in the shape of a human. You're a scumbag that's gonna marry a dooshbag when you're twenty-one, Vito. God bless you. I'm serious. You and your lovely children."

When they got the plates off, Juju handed the keys to Nicky. It was his car now, a green heap, naked of documentation, gas tank close to empty.

Nick said he'd take the dog back up to Mike's and the two guys went their separate ways and Nick crossed the street with the dog alongside.

He started up the stairs talking to the dog and when he was three-quarters of the way up the tall door creaked open and the man named Walls stood there with his hand in his jacket.

Nick smiled at him.

"Walking the dog," he said.

Walls stepped back so the dog could get in. Then he stood in the opening again.

"I thought that was a thing you do with a yo-yo."

"That's right," Nick said. "Walking the dog. But I think my yo-yo days are over."

Walls showed a slight smile. Nick approached and looked through the opening, hoping that Mike might see him and invite him in to watch the game a while.

Walls shook his head, still smiling, and Nick nodded once and went back down the stairs. He got in the car, started it up and drove it to the original parking spot, two blocks away. Then he got out, walked around the car, inspecting it for this and that, and went back to the stoop in front of his building, where he sat haunched on the iron rail smoking one last cigarette before he went upstairs.

3

The knife grinder came and went. Matty was supposed to listen for the knife grinder's bell and then go downstairs with the knives that she'd set out on the kitchen table-knives to be sharpened and money to pay, all set out.

On her way home she saw the fresh-air inspectors standing on the corner, elderly men mostly, they were out even in cold weather provided the sun was shining and they stood there breathing steam, changing their position inchingly with the arc of the sun, and when she went upstairs the knives were on the table, dull-edged, and there was the money in bills and coins, thirty-five cents a blade, untouched and unspent, and Matt was at his board in the parlor, waiting for Mr. Bronzini.

Rosemary took off her hat and coat and said nothing. She went into the bedroom, where the frame was set between the sawhorses, and she turned on the radio and began to do her beadwork.

What she knew about the knife grinder was that he came from the same region as Jimmy's people, near a town called Campobasso, in the mountains, where boys were raised to sharpen knives.

It took two hours to bead a sweater. She listened to the radio but not really, you know, letting the voice drift in and out. She guided the needle through the fabric and thought of Jimmy's stories. She used to fight to keep him out of her thoughts but it wasn't possible, was it? He replaced the radio in her mind.

She said, "What happened to the knives?"

There was a long pause in the next room.

He said, "He never came. I never heard the bell."

She said, "He always comes on Tuesday. He never misses a Tuesday. Since we've been here, except if it's Christmas Day, he will be here on a Tuesday."

She waited for a response. She could sense the boy's surrender and resentment, the small crouched shape squeezed in utter stillness.

"Am I wrong or is this a Tuesday?" she said in a final little dig.

She saw the pigeons erupt from the roof across the street, bursting like fireworks, fifty or sixty birds, and then the long pole swaying above the ledge-so long and reedy it bent of its own dimensions.

Mr. Bronzini knocked on the door and Matty let him in.

The Italian women in the building, which almost all of them were, called her Rose. They thought this was her name, or one of them did and the others picked it up, and she never corrected them because- she just didn't.

Never mind hello. They started right in talking about a move, a maneuver from a couple of days before. Mr. Bronzini sometimes forgot to take off his coat before he sat down at the board.

Jimmy used to say carte blank.

The boy who kept the pigeons stood invisible behind the ledge, waving the pole to guide the birds in their flight.

They lapsed into a long pondering silence at the board, then started talking at once, yackety-yak together.

She strung the beads onto the fabric.

She didn't want to be a sob story where people feel sorry for you and you go through life dragging a burden the size of a house.

Jimmy used to say, Here's some money. You have carte blank how you spend it. I don't even want to know, he'd say.

She heard a woman in the hall yelling down to her kid. Her head out the door yelling to the kid who's galloping down the steps.

"I'm making gravy," the woman yelled.

How is it we did so much laughing? How is it people came over with their empty pockets and bad backs and not so good marriages and twenty minutes later we're all laughing?

They started a legend that he memorized every bet. But he didn't. They still tell stories about his memory, how he moved through the loft buildings taking bets from cutters, sweepers and salesmen and recording every figure mentally. But he didn't. He had pieces of paper all over his clothes with bets scribbled down.

She heard the women talk about making gravy, speaking to a husband or child, and Rosemary understood the significance of this. It meant, Don't you dare come home late. It meant, This is serious so pay attention. It was a special summons, a call to family duty The pleasure, yes, of familiar food, the whole history of food, the history of eating, the garlicky smack and tang. But there was also a duty, a requirement. The family requires the presence of every member tonight. Because the family was an art to these people and the dinner table was the place it found expression.

They said, I'm making gravy.

They said, Who's better than me?

It did not happen violent. This was a thing she would never believe, that they took him away in a car. The man went out for cigarettes and just kept walking.

She didn't want her children to see her dragging, slumping, thinking too much, brooding, angry, empty.

Conceal, conceal. But it was hard.

They told her to change her hair. The women in the building. They told her she had a Mother Hubbard hairdo.

No, she wasn't empty. Just tense much of the time, hearing a voice inside that she'd never heard before, her own voice, only edgy and angry and one-track.

She listened to Mr. Bronzini in the living room. He spoke about the truth of a position. The radio was doing a serial drama called "Bright Horizons" or "Bright Tomorrows" or "Brighter Days" and every position has a truth, he told Matty. A deep truth is what you want, not a shallow truth. You want a position worth defending to the death.

This food, this family meal, this meat sauce simmering in a big pot with sausage and spareribs and onions and garlic, this was their loyalty and bond and well-being, and the aroma was in the halls for Rosemary to smell when she climbed the flights, rolled beef, meatballs, basil, and the savor had an irony that was painful.

He used to come home and get undressed, Jimmy, and pieces of paper would fall out of his clothes, scraps of paper, bets in code, his own scrawled cipher of people's names, horses' names, teams and odds and sums of money.

They said, See what you're gonna do.

How is it she could laugh all night at his stories about a day in the garment district, or a day when he went to Toots Shor's famous restaurant, out of the district, the famous Toots Shor, out of his jurisdiction completely, but Toots Shor met him and liked him and wanted to give him some action and he was a heavy bettor, very, and Jimmy made occasional trips to West 51st Street to take limited bets from Toots Shor, a big lumbering man with a face like a traffic accident, and he told her stories about the well-heeled bums around the big bar drinking until four in the morning.

I'm making gravy, they said.

The wife of Mr. Imperato, the lawyer she worked for in her regular job, called a couple of times a week and said, Tell him I'm making gravy.

She did her beadwork off the books. The pigeons climbed and wheeled and the long pole swayed above-the ledge.

Some women have one man in their life and he was the one, that bastard, in hers.

Mr. Imperato liked to joke about our famous forefathers. Abraham Linguin' and George Washingmachine.

In warmer weather Matty sat at the board in his beeveedees, how little he looked, so thin and pale, but his eyes were fixed on the pieces so hard and hot she could easily think there was someone else in there, sent to possess the boy.

The trick was, the thing was he was not the center of the family when he was here. She was the center, the still center, the strength. Now that he was gone, she could no longer make herself feel still, or especially central. Jimmy was central now. That was the trick, the strange thing. Jimmy was the heartbeat, the missing heartbeat.

It was a promise that was also a call to duty. Tell him I'm making gravy.

They said, See what you're gonna do.

This was a threat to a son or daughter who was not behaving. Straighten out. Change your attitude. See what you're gonna do.

They said, Who's better than me?

This was a statement of the importance of small pleasures. A meal, a coat with a fake-fur collar, a chair in front of a fan on a hot day.

It did not happen violent. It was the small thing of a weak man walking out the door. It was not big. It was not men with guns who tie paving stones to someone's ankles and put a bullet in his head. It was small and weak.

If you could feel the soul of an experience, then you earned the right to say, Who's better than me?

Jimmy knew some dialect. Abruzzese. He used to take the knives down and talk to the knife grinder and he found it satisfying to use the dialect. They talked while the man sharpened the knives and it was something Jimmy did not do with men he saw more often who came from the same region, or their people did. He talked to the knife grinder because he saw him only rarely and this was an arrangement he preferred.

They called her Rose. They had assurance and force, most of them, they had nerve and personality and loud voices, not all but most.

She did her beadwork, her piecework, working off the books just like Jimmy.

He slept continuous. Never got up in the night. Drank coffee and slept right through. Didn't seem to feel the cold. Walked barefoot on the cold floors, slept in his shorts on those winter nights when she'd finally hear the heat whistling in the pipes, her signal to get up for mass.

Somebody put serious money on a horse called Terra Firma and he began to worry when it finished first.

She listened to Matty analyze a position. They stopped the game occasionally and talked out the moves.

He was not a braggadocio. He told sly quiet stories late at night.

Conceal, conceal. But it was hard.

The baseball man Charlie Dressen was a horseplayer. Jimmy took his bets. He took bets from Toots Shor. He left seven hundred dollars in a coat that she took to the dry cleaner. The coat was his private bank, only he never told her, and she took it to the dry cleaner and went back when she found out about the money and they said, What money, lady? There was an inside pocket she didn't know was there. What money, lady?

She applied the beads with a wood-handled needle, following the design printed on the fabric.

But how is it we did so much laughing? How is it we went dancing the night of the seven hundred dollars and we laughed and drank?

He was not a harum-scarum guy who took crazy chances but the long shot came in and he began to feel the pressure to pay off.

Who's better than me, they said.

This was a statement she couldn't make, partly out of personality but also because she could not feel the ordinary contentment of things the way she used to. She could not feel favored or charmed.

He'd replaced her life with his leaving. The voice running through her head was not the voice she used to hear before he left.

But how is it we ate a German meal on 86th Street and went dancing at the Corso down the block, seven hundred dollars poorer?

There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people. Maybe that's why they called her Rose.

Nick was walking the halls at school. This close to Christmas the Catholic school kids were already off, Matty was off, the shopping area was decorated with lights and wreaths, the merchants were putting out trees at five in the morning, which you could smell from a distance, and there were eels on sale for Christmas Eve and spruce and balsam fir stacked against the walls, from upstate, and kids unloading crates of grapes from California for customers who made their own wine.

Nick wandered the halls smoking and Remo came out of a classroom wearing tight pegged pants and the Eisenhower jacket he never took off.

"What are you doing here?"

"Taking a walk," Nick said.

"You take walks indoors?"

"You been out? Fucking freezing. What are you doing here?"

"Hey. I go to school here. What are you doing here?"

"Talking a walk," Nick said.

"I got a pass to see the doctor."

"The nurse. That's who you want to see."

"Save me a drag," Remo said.

"Where's home economics?"

"I don't know. The end of that hall maybe. I hear you're working."

"Ice-cream plant."

"Pays decent?"

"Forget about it."

"It's steady then?"

"You have to shape up. Like the docks," Nick said, and he felt like a man, saying this. "A guy says, You, you, you, you. Everybody else goes home."

Remo seemed impressed.

"You get to eat the merchandise?"

"Actually, you want to know the truth."

"What?"

"We steal it and sell it. But we have to work fast."

Remo didn't know whether to believe this. He reached for the butt-end of Nick's cigarette and Nick gave it to him and he took two hungry drags and then dropped it, stomped it, exhaled and went into the doctor's office.

After the bell rang and the classrooms emptied out Nick spotted Loretta and Gloria and they walked out onto Fordham Road together.

"Allie's father hit a number," Gloria said.

"I know. I heard."

"He had five dollars on it if you can believe that."

"It's true. I know it for a fact," Nick said.

An older guy named Jasper, a noted cuntman, sat in a Ford convertible, with the top down yet, in this weather, motor running, listening to the radio. The two girls were quiet walking by, quiet together, by mutual consent, exchanging unspoken thoughts about Jasper.

"Who puts five dollars?" Loretta said. "They put fifty cents. They put a dollar if they're feeling very, very lucky."

"He had a dream," Nick said.

"He had a dream. What kind of dream?"

"What kind of dream. He dreamed the number. What else would he dream?"

"For five dollars," she said, "it must have been very convincing."

"It was in technicolor," Gloria said.

"If I dream a number I think I'm gonna die on that date," Loretta said. "This man gives five dollars to a gangster."

"Gangster. What kind of gangster? He gave the money to Annette Esposito."

"Who's that?"

"She's a Catholic school girl. She goes to my brother's school," Nick said. "She runs numbers for her father. Every day she makes the rounds."

"In her school uniform," Gloria said.

"The customers like a runner they can trust."

They walked past White Castle, where kids were eating sawdust hamburgers, and then Gloria crossed the street and went into her building.

"Where's your radio? You used to carry your radio all the time," Loretta said.

"I had a radio in my car. That's the only radio I needed."

"It's for the best," she said.

"You think it's for the best."

"I'm relieved," she said. "That car, my god. What wasn't wrong with it? Not to mention it was stolen property."

"We didn't have nice times in that car?"

"The drive-in was nice. Not the parking on dark streets. Like criminals."

"That's what we were," he said.

She laughed. She had two teeth that didn't exactly match, on either side of the incisors, and he thought it gave her a sexy smile.

They turned east and he saw a garbage truck and saw Juju's father, who was a garbageman, jump down off the truck and stride across the sidewalk and flip the lid off a can and muscle the can over to the truck and then upend it into the grinder.

"See that guy? That's Juju's father," he said with an edge of pride in his voice.

He admired the graceful action, the long continuous body motion from the cellar entrance to the truck, the way the man wrestled the can across the sidewalk, all forearm action, and the freedom to make noise, skidding the can and running the grinder, and then the hoist and dump, a shoulder motion mainly, and the original pitch of the lid, a gesture of half contempt but also graceful, which he earned by the nature of the work he did.

And flinging the can back toward the wrought iron fence that guarded the basement steps. Also a privilege of the job, Nicky thought.

They reached her building and went inside.

Loretta stood in the hallway and turned to be kissed and he kissed her, moving her up against the mailboxes with her books between their bodies sliding back and forth.

"Who's home?" he said.

"They're all home."

He pressed her into the mailboxes and could hear the friction of her skirt when she moved against the slits in the metal where you could see if you had mail.

"You still think it's for the best I don't have my car?"

"It's broad daylight, car or no car."

"We could park in the parking lot at Orchard Beach. Just the seagulls and us."

She kissed him.

"So steal another car," she said slurringly.

He opened his eyes while he was kissing her and she was looking at him with wide brown eyes that seemed to be thinking seven things at once. She knew he'd had sex with other girls, handjobs, blowjobs, whatever else, putting it in taking it out, putting it in keeping it in, bareback, rubber, whatnot, and she knew who the girls were, from Washington Avenue, from Valentine Avenue, one from Kingsbridge Road, because somebody told somebody who made sure it got back to her, and he knew that she knew, from Gloria passing a remark to Juju, like one of the radio serials his mother listened to, doing her beadwork.

"You'll meet me tomorrow?" she said.

"I work tomorrow."

"They're all home. What can I say?"

"I have to work. What can I say?"

" When's the last time you washed your hair?" she said.

He walked a while and ended up going into the zoo, on an impulse, entering by the big bronze gate, and he went up past the sea lions in a cold stiff wind with the place just about empty of visible humans. He missed his shit-heap Chevy, no plates, no insurance, no license to drive it, transmission shot to hell, the door on the passenger side opening up unannounced every time he made a left turn, driving only at night in a skulking and shadowy manner, mostly alone, smoking, the radio frequently fading out.

He was angry about something but it was something else, not the car or the girlfriend-the thing that ran through his mind even in his sleep.

He walked for half an hour and then stood by the wildfowl pond. When he was in grade school he'd come to the zoo with a kid named Martin Mannion, and Martin Mannion had climbed a fence, it was a day like this, wintry and empty, and Martin Mannion climbed into the buffalo enclosure and stood there waving his jacket at the buffalo, the bison, and the huge nappy animal from off a five-cent piece just looked at him indifferent and Martin Mannion got so mad he took out his dick and peed.

It was beginning to get dark now. He stood at the edge of the pond and lit another cigarette, turning his back to the wind.

"Call me Alan," he says. "Call me Alan."

"I says, What's Alan? He says to me, That's my name." "That's my name."

"I look at him. I says to him, How could that be your name? You already got a name."

"What happened to Alfonse?"

"I says, What happened to Alfonse? You were Alfonse for sixteen years, lour grandfather was Alfonse."

"The both of them."

"Two grandfathers Alfonse. What happened? He says, I'm not them."

"Miserable little cross-eyed."

"I'm not them, he says."

"He's king shit, that's who he is."

"Call me Alan, he says."

"I'm not them."

"I could break his back."

"I'm not them."

"I says, Who are you?"

"He's king shit, that's who he is."

"I says, Who are you, stunat', if you're not them?"

Giulio Belisario, Juju, had never seen a dead body, including at a wake, and he was interested in the experience.

"Who's gonna die," Nicky said, "just so you can satisfy your curiosity?"

"I missed my grandmother when I had the measles."

"I'm looking around. I don't see any volunteers. You hear about Allie's father?"

"What?"

"You don't know this?"

"What? He died?"

"He hit a number."

"I was gonna say."

"He's buying a Buick. One day he's a fishmonger. The next day."

"I was gonna say. I just saw him yesterday in the market. How could he be dead?"

"How long does it take?" Nicky said.

"I'm only saying."

"One day he's selling scungilli. The next day, hey, kiss my ass."

"Who's better than him?" Juju said.

"I'm driving a big-ass Buick. Stand clear, you peasants."

They were in the grocery that occupied a storefront in Nicky's building at 611. The grocer's wife, Donato's wife, the only name they knew her by, tolerated their presence because she liked Nicky's mother. Outside five older guys were gathered and one of them, Scarfo, was doing broad jumps at the instigation of the other four. Scarfo wanted to take the sanitation test and they'd convinced him he needed to broad-jump six feet from a standing start and he was out there in his good coat and creased pants jumping cracks in the sidewalk, to see if he could do it.

The two young men stood inside the store smoking and watching.

"I saw your father," Nicky said.

"He's picking up in the neighborhood, temporary."

"He ever find anything in the garbage?"

"What could he find? That he brings home? Forget about it."

"He could find something valuable."

"My mother would have a conniption fit. Forget about it."

Donato's wife gave them each a piece of sliced salami and they watched Scarfo work on his jump.

Matty bit his shirt cuff, a slink of a kid with lively eyes, and he looked across the board at Mr. Bronzini, who was smiling twistedly.

"You killed me," Albert said.

"I saw everything."

"You came, you saw and so on. And you killed me."

He knew that Matty loved hearing this. He loved winning at chess and he loved hearing the loser declare himself dead. Because that's what he was, kaput, and it was Matty who'd crushed him.

The boy's mother stood in the doorway watching.

"How many moves did it take? No, don't tell me," Albert said. "I want to preserve some self-respect."

Matty and his mother were delighted.

"He's beginning to think in systems," Albert said to her. "I think this is a sign that good things will begin happening again."

The adults had a cup of tea and Matt stayed at the board, a small floating godhead above the pawns and rooks. The boy had taken some more losses lately, including a rout at the Manhattan Chess Club, and this was deeply disappointing all around because Father Paulus had appeared.

Came, saw, said little and left.

After a while Albert went over to Arthur Avenue, where he saw the chestnut man pushing his oven on wheels, a cartoon contraption, smoke coming out of the bent metal chimney. There was a peach basket appended to one end of the oven to hold the unroasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes.

He bought some chestnuts, which he more or less juggled in a piece of wrapping paper because they were damn hot, and he carried them down the side street into the barbershop.

George the Barber led him into the back room, where they sat at a small table eating the chestnuts and washing them down with wincing sips of Old Mr. Boston, a rye whiskey unknown to the Cabots and the Lodges.

Albert knew that George had a wife in a little house somewhere, and a married daughter somewhere else, but the man was otherwise unimaginable outside his barbership. Stout, bald, unblessed with excess personality, he belonged completely to the massive porcelain chairs, two of them, to the hot-towel steamer, the stamped tin ceiling, the marble shelf beneath the mirror, the tinted glass cabinets, the bone-handled razor and leather strop, the horn combs, the scissors and clippers, the cup, the brush, the shaving soap, the fragrance of witch hazels and brilliantines and talcums.

George the Barber knew who he was.

"Biaggio hit a number," he said.

"Who, Biaggio?"

"He hit a number. Six hundred to one."

"From the fish market Biaggio?"

"He hit a number," George said.

When the chestnuts were gone he refilled their glasses and they sat there sipping quietly, thinking about someone hitting a number.

"And how is the woman?" he said to Albert.

"The woman,"

"Yes, how is the marriage?" he said.

The radio was tuned to the Italian station and an announcer was signing off with repeated cries of bad a tutti, which was fine with Albert, absolutely, the way he felt in the bracing wake of the whiskey.

"This is a subject so immense."

"Of course. What else?"

"Big, big, big, big."

"Too much, too much," the barber said.

"I can only say one thing."

"There's only one thing to say."

"Every marriage, every marriage. Not just mine or yours."

"Exactly."

"How can I put it, George? Un po complicate."

"Of course. What else can we say?"

"What else is new?"

"What else is new?" the barber said.

Albert licked at a dusting of chestnut on his fingers. A woman and child came in and George moved into the front of the shop and Albert drained his glass and followed because he did not want to presume on the man's hospitality.

He spoke to the woman while George arranged the boy's special seat. Then he put on his hat and coat and left. He stopped in Mussolini park and spent a few minutes talking with the old men. The fake priest went past, Benedetti, wearing a lumber jacket and a black biretta and carrying a breviary. He moved his lips as if in prayer but held the book unopened to his chest.

Albert had to sit. He realized he was slightly woozy, Umbriago the mayor of New York or of Chicago, and he sat on a bench and waited for the feeling to pass.

The other men drifted off. The sun was edging behind the extended mass of the hospital for the incurable and it was colder now, with flurries in the air, and the men drifted off to a storefront social club, or a candy store, or home.

A tow truck went by at a crazy speed, rushing to get to the wreck before the competition.

Albert sat on the bench and waited for his head to clear. The important thing is to sit and wait, to be patient. The other important thing is not to vomit. You see a man every so often standing over a curbstone vomiting. He did not want to think of himself as that kind of man.

He sat there feeling all right, feeling slightly less dizzy now and generally all right. Bad a tutti, he thought. To everyone on the street, yes, kisses, and the faces went muddling through his mind, the bread makers, grandmothers, street sweepers, to the priests who are and those who aren't.

The kids called it heave. I think I'm gonna heave, Johnny.

A car pulled up and he heard the hoarse voice of the butcher calling across to him.

"Albert, che succese?"

"Hello, Joe. Merry Christmas."

"It's snowing. Go home."

"I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine."

"Irbu want a ride?"

"Go, go, go, go. Merry Christmas, I'm fine, goodbye."

He heard the train pull into the station about a block away. He heard it shriek around the bend and rumble into the station and he sat in the wind's high howl waiting for his head to clear completely.

4

There were a thousand sameshit nights when he played knock rummy with a guy named Fontana in Fontana's father's plumbing supply store, a nominal nickel a point, or shot a game of pool and had a slice of pizza at Half Moon with Juju and Patsy, nights that always ended down, disappointed someway, and once he phoned Loretta from the candy store and told her he had his dick in his hand and studied the pause at the other end, knowing she was in a room with her mother, her brothers, her grandfather and who knows who else, and he went downstairs sometimes and stood smoking alone, late, in the doorway of Donato's grocery, spitting occasional grains of tobacco into the wind. He had a little money now. He gave most of what he earned to his mother but at least he had something in his pocket, approaching age seventeen, and he went to the show and sat in the balcony with Allie and Ray, two guys who talked back to the screen, but after a while what could you say to a movie that wasn't the sameshit thing you'd said a thousand times before?

Klara was in the room, the spare room, the room she was painting inch by inch, and she stood at the easel working.

Yes, Albert thought painting relaxed her. It was a break, he thought, from the other things she did.

She stopped when it was time to pick up the child. For a moment she forgot where she'd parked the child. Upstairs with the regular girl or across the street with the woman whose husband made coats for rabbis.

Painters are supposed to have a line. Klara thought she had a scribble.

She went upstairs and got the child and came down saying something like, Naptime for little girls. But Teresa wasn't ready for her nap. Sleepy creepy time. But Teresa let her mother know this was not going to happen right now She did not soften her yeses and noes. She was an open wound of need and want and powerful refusal.

Klara sat by the bed talking to her. After a while she went into the spare room and stood by the easel and looked at what she'd done. What had she done? She decided she didn't want to know.

She looked in on the child, who was sleeping now. Then she looked in on Albert's mother. Mrs. Ketchel, the woman who sat with her, was putting on her coat. Mrs. Ketchel seemed to be putting on her coat a little earlier every day. The days were getting longer now, technically, so maybe Mrs. Ketchel had so many other things to do, to fill the longer days, that she couldn't sit with Albert's mother for extended periods anymore.

Klara thought the child resembled her grandmother. A mournful-ness about the eyes, she thought. But that can't be true, can it, in a child so young? A darkness, a brooding sense of misfortune. But she was making it up, wasn't she, looking for signs and omens.

She sat in the room with Albert's mother. The woman was awake and turned her head to look at Klara, an incomplete movement that brought her to the point of exhaustion, but then exhaustion was all that remained, although that's not true either. Her gestures had force, still. They were halting but strong. They showed a willful woman who could dismiss entire populations with a singsong waggle of the hand.

The gestures did not refer to practical things. They had a range that extended to another level. The hand that sweeps under the chin. The pushed-out mouth. The way the eyes close and the head tilts up.

To Albert. When it's time to die, I'll die.

To friends who sat with her. God doesn't know everything. Only the things he has to know.

To Albert. Why do you want to talk about your father when all I see when I hear his name is lost opportunity?

To Albert. Be careful. That's all I'm saying.

To Klara. Go live your life. I'm not worth your time or attention.

This last is a gesture of hand and eye that both women know to be insincere.

Klara did not tell Albert that she found it an odd comfort, at times, to sit with his mother. They had one parent left between them, dying. She played Perry Como records for the woman. She brought the child in so the grandmother could touch her hands and face. The woman did not see well, or saw two things where one occurred, and her hand on the child's face seemed to work a marvel of retrospection.

Her skin was getting browner, her hair whiter, hands spotted and blotched, but there was still something strong about her, something Albert seemed to fear, a judgment, a withering conviction of some kind.

She had a gesture that seemed to mark a state of hopelessness too deep to be approached with words.

Klara sat there and talked to her a little. She kept the window open slightly to let the mustiness escape, the slow waste. She heard fire engines some distance off and watched the light fade.

Albert's sister came to visit sometimes, Laura, unable to accept the impending death, scared, dependent, betrayed, and Klara could imagine she'd try to climb into the gravehole when the time came.

How strange it was to find herself here, listening to Perry Como with a woman she didn't know, who was dying, and with everything else as well, this chair, that lamp, this house and street, and to wonder how it happened.

When Albert came home she was in the kitchen.

"How is she?" "Sleeping."

"Did she eat anything?"

"I made a little soup."

"Did she eat it?"

"Ate some, spilled some. Your daughter caught a cold from the baby-sitter."

"I'll make it go away," he said.

She heard him telling stories to Teresa, nonsense tales he'd been told as a boy, characters with funny rhyming names, and he overpro-nounced certain words for effect, his voice rounded and melodic, but she shut the kitchen door because she didn't want to hear it anymore.

The story voice, the play voice was all too Albertlike, rippling with incidental music and fanciful plot. She put the dinner on the table and spoke his name.

They talked through dinner, inconsequentially. She smoked her last cigarette of the day in the spare room, looking at the wall. She put out the cigarette by grinding it into the bathroom mirror and then she flushed it down the toilet and went to bed.

The first one ran into the playground, the one with the dark cap. Nick was punching the other one, both of them skidding on the icy surface.

He'd never seen the guy before and this is why he was punching him. He punched the guy to his knees, or the guy skidded to his knees, and then Nick looked into the playground. Juju was chasing the first one but skidded and fell, a leg flying up. Juju sat there a moment watching the guy run toward the steps that went down to the lower level. The playground was white and still, swings hanging empty, an inch of snow on the seats.

The other one was on his knees, looking embarrassed to be there. Nick crouched and set himself and threw a punch. He knew it was not necessary to throw this punch but he'd hit the guy only glancing blows to the face and he wanted to hit him solid. It was a chance to hit someone solid that he didn't want to miss. He punched him under the eye, a short-stroke blow, and the guy rocked back on his haunches, hands to his face, and Nick felt better now.

Juju came out of the playground and took some frozen dog shit out of the snow. He wasn't wearing gloves. He picked it up and mashed it into the guy's head, into his hair and ears.

He said, "Here, stroonz, this is for you."

Then he washed his hands in the snow and they walked over to Mike's to shoot a game.

Matty knotted the blue tie. The Catholic school boys wore white shirts and blue ties. For a long time his mother had to knot his tie for him. And he couldn't figure out how to put his jacket on, how to hold it so that a certain arm goes in a certain sleeve hole, and sometimes he had to place the jacket flat on the ground, sit down in front of it and then match an arm to a hole, sort of lying down backwards into the jacket.

Imagine what Nicky said, watching this spectacle.

But he was over that now. He was over the tantrums, pretty much, and the silent treatment he used to give his mother when he was mad at her, and the times he locked the bathroom door and tried to suffocate himself with the shower curtain.

He was over the tantrums because he wasn't playing chess. Mr. Bronzini called it a sabbatical. One of those words of his, to be spelled, explained and acted out. Matty had his own word. Sick.

He could not take the losing. It was too awful. It made him physically weak and massively angry. It sent him reeling through the flat, arms windmilling. His brother bopped him on the head and that made him madder. He did not have enough height and weight to contain all his rage. He was past the point of crying. Losing made his limbs shake. He gasped for air. He did not understand why someone so small, young and unprepared should have to squat in the path of this juggernaut called losing.

He put on his tie and went to school. First he slipped the new dog tag over his neck, for atomic attack, with his name and school inscribed on the disk, and then he put on his blue tie and walked the five blocks to school.

Matty sat in the row next to the cloakroom and was one of three pupils who opened and closed the sliding doors of the cloakroom at designated times. They worked in unison, with a whoosh and bang. This was their assignment.

It was Catherine Conway's assignment to clap the erasers every Friday, out the back door above the schoolyard, her eyes smarting in the chalk dust.

Richard Stasiak was assigned to open and close the windows. He took the window pole with the hook at one end and he fitted the hook into the loop at the top of the window and then pushed or pulled. Richard Stasiak was big and tall and this was the logical job for him.

They sat at their desks, forty boys and girls, sixth-graders, this drab gray day backs erect, feet together, watching Sister Edgar.

Sister prowled the space between her desk and the blackboard, moving in a rustle of monochrome cotton, scrubbed hands flashing. She recited questions from the Baltimore Catechism and her students responded in a single crystal voice.

Matty believed in the Baltimore Catechism. It had all the questions and all the answers and it had love, hate, damnation and washing other people's feet, it had whips, thorns and resurrections, it had angels, shepherds, thieves and Jews, it had hosanna in the highest.

He didn't know what that meant, hosanna in the highest, and was afraid to ask. They were all afraid. They'd been afraid for a week, ever since Sister had banged Michael Kalenka's head against the blackboard when he gave a snippy answer to an easy question. They were studying the Creation and the Fall of Man, lesson five in the Baltimore Catechism, and Sister pointed to a picture in the book of a man and woman standing more or less undressed beneath an apple tree with a serpent coiled on a limb and she called on Michael Kalenka and asked him to identify the man and woman, the easiest question she'd ever asked, and Michael Kalenka stood up and looked at the picture, and he thought and looked and thought, and Sister said, "The original parents of us all," and Michael Kalenka thought and grinned and said, "Tarzan and Jane."

Sister flew at Michael Kalenka and collected the boy in the wing-folds of her habit. He was practically out of sight until she suddenly propelled him toward the blackboard headfirst. The impact was strong and true. There was a sound so real, a thud and a subsequent hum, the whole panel vibrating, that the boys and girls went slack in their seats, wide-eyed and semiliquid. Blown out of their rigid posture. And Michael Kalenka stood stunned and rag-dollish, sheepish, guilty, grinning but mostly just stunned and rag-armed and sagging.

Sister asked questions from the catechism and they responded in unison. Matty liked doing this. To hear the assigned questions and to recite the right answers was the best part of the school day.

Sister knew the catechism by heart and Matty knew each day's lesson by heart, with more time for homework now and with a secret respect for Sister Edgar, who was known throughout the school as Sister Skelly Bone for the acute contours of her face and the whiteness of her complexion and the way her lean hands seemed ever ready to administer some grave touch, a cold and bony tag that makes you it forever.

He liked the way the response to each question repeated the question before delivering the answer.

Sister said, "What do we mean when we say that Christ will come from thence to judge the living and the dead?"

The class replied in unison, "When we say that Christ will come from thence to judge the living and the dead, we mean that on the last day Our Lord will come to judge everyone who has ever lived in this world."

Then Sister told them to place their dog tags out above their shirts and blouses so she could see them. She wanted to make sure they were wearing their tags. The tags were designed to help rescue workers identify children who were lost, missing, injured, maimed, mutilated, unconscious or dead in the hours following the onset of atomic war.

Sister went up and down the aisles, bending to read each tag. At approach distance she smelled laundered and starched, steam-ironed, and her nails were buffed to a glassy lava finish, and the rosary beads that hung from her belt like a zoot-suiter's key chain were blinky bright, and when she rustled low and near she smelled more intimately of tooth powder and cleansing agents and the penance of scoured skin.

She said, "Woe betide the child who is not wearing a tag or who is wearing someone else's tag."

It had been known to happen, in other classes, that a boy and girl switched tags to signify a kind of atomic fondling.

When Sister was finished with her inspection she said nothing, which surprised the class. They were expecting a drill, the duck-and-cover drill, which they'd rehearsed before the tags arrived. Now that they had the tags, their names inscribed on wispy tin, the drill was not a remote exercise but was all about them, and so was atomic war.

Instead she went back to the catechism, to questions and answers, until Annette Esposito, an eighth-grader, came in with a note from the principal. Sister read the note and looked at Annette Esposito and said, "What are these?"

At first nobody knew what she meant. Then the class realized she was looking at Annette Esposito's chest, her breasts, which caused bulges under her blue jumper.

"What's all this? Get rid of this. I don't want to see this next time you come in here."

The boys and girls went low in their seats, tingling a little at the exposure of Annette Esposito as a freak of nature. Their eyes went shifty and bright. They bit their knuckles and made small damp throat noises. When Annette Esposito walked out the door, not unproud, flouncing slightly, shoulders thrown back, every eyeball in the room clicked in her direction, fastened on her breasts of course, not a common object of contemplation in the life of the sixth grade.

Sister did not call the drill. She did penmanship instead, demonstrating on the blackboard the cursive flair of her own hand. She showed the slant, the loop, she stressed the need to stay between the ruled lines, she told them to take their fountain pens and follow the motions she made in the air, and they did, working the wrists, looping in unison, and they shaped a tempestuous capital T that resembled a rowboat in a rainstorm.

Matty sat there nearly spellbound, writing in the air with his brother's old Parker vacumatic, a streaked green model with an arrow clip, but his mood went flat when the bell rang for lunch and Sister crook'd a forefinger in his direction.

"Matthew Shay."

His own name stunned him, coming from her lips.

"See me before you leave the room."

With his two assigned mates he slid open the cloakroom doors and got his coat and waited for the room to empty and then presented himself at Sister's desk.

She had tight blue eyes and thin lips and a nose that was slightly bumpy up near the bridge.

"In the schoolyard yesterday. You were huddled with several others. Looking at a magazine."

The terror of being alone with Sister Edgar.

"I would like to know. Firstly. The name of the magazine."

She leaned on a corner of the desk lightly twirling her beads, the big crucifix moving in a wobbly spin with Christ's body bowed out from the cross.

"Secondly. A summary of the contents."

The answers passed through his mind.

1. Movieland magazine.

2. Full-page faces of Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. Also, Mario Lanza's Heart Stood Still. There were articles about stars he'd never heard of. There were ads for French nighties and dance panties.

What if she asked him about these things?

Sister peered closely, waiting. He kept his hands behind his back to conceal his gnawed fingernails and the shreds of dead skin at the edges.

Would he have to explain that a dance panty is when they embroider a fox-trotting couple on the leg of a lady's underwear?

And what if the magazine was banned by the Legion of Decency and she asked him who it belonged to? Although she would never end a sentence with a preposition.

"Matthew. Yes?"

If he had a choice between lying to Sister Edgar and snitching on a classmate, he'd have to snitch, instantly and remorselessly. And what about the ads all over the back of the magazine for bust creams and better bust contours?

Matthew-yes was not a question. It was a summons to urgency and truth. And he told her the name of the magazine and who was on the cover and what was inside, sticking to the romances and heartbreaks of the stars, and Sister seemed interested and pleased.

He was surprised and encouraged and became less tentative, describing the Hollywood homes of certain stars, and Sister asked little leading questions, trying to obscure her interest by looking out the window, and he grew confident and expansive, speaking rapidly and more or less uncontrollably, making things up when he couldn't recall the details of a story or a photograph, feeling a sense of desperate elation, and Sister was eating it up.

She knew a lot about the stars. Their favorite flavors and worst insect bites and their wallflower nights in high school. Their basic everydayness inside the cosmetic surgeries and tragic marriages. She looked out the window and asked him sly testing questions and dropped little comments here and there.

He was able to stand outside the scene, hearing his own voice, watching the babbling boy at ease in the company of the hooded nun. But he wasn't completely unwary. It was her after all, habit and hood. The cloth was daunting. She was all cloth. She was a wall of laundered cloth. A woman of the cloth.

In the schoolyard after lunch Richard Stasiak did an amazing thing. Matty saw it without knowing for a moment quite what he'd seen. Richard Stasiak wore underwear so shabby and itchy and threadbare that he unbuttoned his fly and stuck his hand in there and pulled the underwear right off his body, yanking the ratty thing out of his fly and throwing it at Mary Feeley, who skipped away backwards, hands to her mouth as if she'd seen something it was best to keep unspoken.

Then they all went into class again.

Nick grabbed a ride every morning with another packer in the plant, waiting on a cold corner in the dark and then driving down to the ass-end of the Bronx where one river does a curl into the other and the icecream plant sits in the weeds like a pygmy prison on the Zambezi and this was better than taking the train in the lockstep drudge of the rush.

After work he got dropped near the zoo and walked west past his brother's school, where he saw a guy in one car giving a push to six guys in another. He came to the building where they lived and turned at Donato's grocery and went thirty yards down the narrow street and swung into an opening that led down a set of concrete steps into the network of alleyways that ran between five or six buildings clustered here.

Down the yards, this was called.

Close-set buildings, laundry lines, slant light, patches of weeds, a few would-be gardens and bare ailanthus trees and the fire escapes that fixed fretwork patterns of light and shade on the walls and paved surfaces.

Nick ducked under overhangs and passed through narrow openings. There were padlocked doors and doors ajar. There were basement passages connecting utility rooms and alcoves for trash cans and the old coal bins that housed furnaces now and the storage rooms where merchants on the street kept their inventory-a smell that was part garbage and part dank stone, a mildew creep and a thick chill, a sense that everything that ever happened here was retained in the air, soaked and cross-scented with fungus and wetness and coffee grounds and mops in big sinks.

He'd spent his childhood half in the streets and half down the yards with a little extra squeezed in for the rooftops and fire escapes.

He went past a furnace room and opened a door at the end of the passage. George the Waiter was sitting in a small storage room he used as a home, he said, away from home. He saw Nick in the doorway and nodded him in. George had an arrangement with the super. The room had a cot, a table, a rat trap, a couple of chairs, a couple of dangling lightbulbs and an array of paint cans and plumbing equipment, and Nick was pretty sure the arrangement involved a woman who came here to visit George, a woman he paid for sex, and the super let him use the room in exchange for some of the same, periodically, the woman taking care of the super and getting paid by George.

"I figured you'd be here."

"I'm here," George said.

"I have a sixth sense about these things." see through walls."

George pushed a deck of cards to the middle of the table and Nick sat down.

"Just a sixth sense. I'm still working on walls."

"Did it tell you, this sense of yours, what happened in the poolroom in the middle of the night?"

He was a bachelor for life, George, and he had two jobs and lived with his eighty-year-old grandmother and shot pool for whole days sometimes when he wasn't working. And when he wasn't doing any of these things Nick would find him here and they'd play a card game called briscola, pronounced breeshk in dialect, a game the old men played, and they played just to pass the time, which there were worse ways of doing because there was something about George the Waiter that Nick found interesting.

"When, last night?"

"Last night. The place got robbed."

"The poolroom got robbed?"

"Three men with pistols," George said and he made a sound like movie music.

"Three men with pistols. You were there?"

"I went to work in the restaurant six o'clock, went back at eleven and shot a game and then went home. Happened much later. They robbed the poker game."

"They robbed the poker game?"

"You gonna repeat everything I say?"

"I'm amazed by what I'm hearing."

"And stocking masks."

"And stocking masks. What's that?"

"A woman's stocking, a nylon stocking."

"On their face?" Nick said.

"No, on their legs. Madonn', I thought this kid was smart."

"I'm amazed by what I'm hearing. On their face."

"On their face. So their features don't show."

"Stocking masks. Three men. Where was what's-his-name? The guy at the door who's supposed to be armed and dangerous. Where was this Walls?"

"He didn't show."

"Walls didn't show. That's interesting."

"They cleaned out the table nice-nice. Then they cleaned out the players one by one, turning out their pockets. Then they cleaned out Mike the Book, who's holding whatever he's holding that's a full day's take. Pool receipts and bets."

"How much?"

"Total. Over twelve thousand I hear. This is I hear. Who knows how much?"

"Twelve thousand."

"Three men with pistols. Pistolas."

And George made twirling moves with his hands at belt level like a Mexican bandit showing off his guns and it was rare for him to be so breezy.

Nick shuffled and dealt.

"I meant to get some beer," he said.

"Who sells beer to a minor?"

"I told Donato's wife I'm nineteen. She says, What do you think I'm stunat'?"

"But she sells you the beer."

"She sells me the beer."

"She does it out of spite."

"For who?"

"The world," George said.

"Stocking masks. I'm amazed by this."

They played cards a while and then George leaned over and opened the drawer at the end of the table and felt around for cigarettes without taking his eyes off his cards.

"You keep your rubbers in there?"

"Never mind what I keep in there."

"Who is she? Trust me. Who'm I gonna tell? Is she the one I saw you rowing a boat in the park one day?"

"If you saw me with a woman in public, then she's not the woman who comes here. And you didn't see me in no boat, wise guy."

"George, I'm being serious."

"What?"

fix up your friends?"

George gave him a level look from out of those deep emptyish eyes.

"This is not a girl. This is a woman. And it's not for you. I'm pushing forty, Nicky. You can get what you need without paying for it."

Maybe this is what interested Nick. The fact that George was the loneliest man he'd ever known. George was lonely in his walk, his voice, his posture and in the way a whole room, the poolroom with its clash of noises and flung insults and ragged laughs-the way George's corner of the room was different even if he was shooting a game with someone else. George carried the condition everywhere he went and it seemed to be okay with him. That was the interesting thing. Maybe it was his choice to live this way and maybe it wasn't but either way he made it seem all right.

"Talk about buying beer."

"Yeah, what?" Nick said.

"This shit-ass job of yours, which you should of stayed in school in my opinion."

"This shit-ass job, what?"

"I been talking to somebody You can make more money on a truck. Not beer but soda. Delivering to stores and supermarkets. 7-Up."

"It makes me wince when I drink it."

"You'll wince all right. You unload the crates of full bottles and then you load up on empties. Make you a man."

"Make me a man how?"

"Brute labor, that's how. In summer you just about die. I did it one summer. I cun't fucking believe it. Lost twenty pounds my first two days."

Nick didn't think it was necessary to have one job for life and start a family and live in a house with dinner on the table at six every night and he thought about George, an older guy who'd survived the loss of these things-not the loss but the never-having. Played cards, played pool, got laid, a few dollars in his pocket, not a whole lot of time to think. Fuck you, I'll die alone.That's what George was saying in his heart.

"Pays decent?"

"Better than you're making. Steadier. Safer except you'll get four hernias your first week. And a stroke come summer. Make you a man, Nicky."

"I appreciate."

"You don't have to say nothing. Maybe they'll hire you, maybe they won't."

"I want you to know. I appreciate."

"They'll take one look at you. This is a guy all he thinks about is getting laid. We better find a polack somewhere."

Nick liked that. They played cards a while longer and he realized George was giving him an odd look, measuring him somehow.

"You think I keep rubbers in this drawer here?"

"I don't know."

"You want to see what I keep in here?"

"I don't know, George. Sure, why not?"

"No. I don't think you want to see what I keep in here."

"Sure, why not?"

"No. Big mistake. You'll talk."

"I won't talk. Who'm I gonna tell?"

All right. George was having a little fun with him, not that he changed expression. Raw, drawn, tired, with receding hair and long fingers stained with cigarette tar.

"Because I trust you, Nicky."

He reached into the drawer and came out with a box of kitchen matches and a spoon.

"We used to call these lucifers, these wood matches."

The utensil was an ordinary spoon clouded on the bottom of the bowl, stained like George's fingers, only darker and marbled.

"I'm watching," Nick said.

"You interested?"

"I'm interested," he said.

George reached into the drawer and came out with a length of elastic, medical-looking, a strapping device of some kind. He tossed it next to the matches and looked at Nick.

"I'm still watching."

"You watching?"

"I'm watching."

George reached in and came out with a hypodermic needle, a needle and dusty syringe, and he held it in front of Nicky's face.

"You watching? Watch."

It took Nick a minute to understand all this. This was new to him. Drugs. Who used drugs around here? He felt dumb and confused and very young suddenly

"You use this stuff?"

George lifted a fold-over pouch out of his breast pocket. He wagged it several times and dropped it back in.

"Eroina," he said.

Nick felt dumb all right. He felt like someone had just sandbagged him in an alley. Wham. He almost put a hand to the back of his neck.

"Let me see it," he said.

George took out the pouch and handed it to him. Nick lifted the flap and tried to sniff the powder.

"What are you smelling? It don't smell."

He handed it back.

"How come?"

"How come what?"

"You use this stuff."

George rolled up the sleeve on his left arm. There were stippled marks and scars and in the crook of the elbow a dark mass, a fester of busted blood vessels and general wreckage.

Then he brandished the needle, enjoying himself.

"You asked me do I fix up my friends? What kind of fix?"

"Hey. Get away."

"We'll start you slow. Skin-pop. You don't hit a vein."

"I skeeve needles, George. Get that thing away from me."

"You hit the plunger, see."

"This I don't need."

"Come on. We'll tie you off."

George brandished the elastic belt and Nick felt he had to get up and stand across the room. The older man enjoyed that.

"How come?" he said.

"How come how come. You want to get laid. How come," George said.

For years kids played hango seek down the yards and there were nickel-and-dirne dice games and older guys who might tap a keg on a hot day and drink a few brews standing up in the shade and women who hung out the windows to get some air and complain about the cursing.

"You could put that needle in your arm? Man, I skeeve that like death."

George smiled. He was happy. He swept his works back in the drawer and lit up a cigarette and sat there with his face in the smoke.

They talked about the robbery and after a while the tone went back to normal.

"Gotta go," Nick said.

"Be good."

"See you at Mike's."

"Be good," George said.

Nick made a turn in the dim passage and went out into a small courtyard where trash cans stood against the wall and he walked up the back stairs and through the heavy metal door into his building.

George had cut him down to size all right. George had taught him a lesson in serious things.

It happened near the end of the day when no one expected it. This was her intention of course. It happened fast and hard and unexpected.

Sister turned from the blackboard where she'd been diagramming a compound sentence, the chalked structure so complex and self-appending it began to resemble the fire-escaped facade of the kind of building most of the boys and girls lived in.

She paused just long enough to let them know that something was coming but not so long that they might guess what it was.

Then she said, "Duck and cover! Duck and cover! Duck and cover!"

For a long moment they were too shocked to think straight. Slow, shocked, klutzy and dumb. They began to tumble out of their seats, knocking over books and bumping each other, all scuttling to the three designated walls as they'd been trained to do, squat-hopping like people in potato sacks.

The fourth wall was the window wall, which they'd been told to avoid.

Matty saw Francis X. Cavanaugh blunder nuts-first into a desk edge. He felt a sympathetic quiver in his loins.

And Sister's voice keening across the room, drop and duck, duck and cover, and the kids jostling for position and then going into deep genuflections, heads to the floor, eyes shut, hands guarding the face from bomb-flash.

It was a long time before they were positioned and settled and still.

Matty had his head at the base of the cloakroom door nearest his desk. He liked to duck and cover. There was a sense of acting in unison that he found satisfying. It was not so different really from opening and shutting the cloakroom doors with two of his classmates or reciting mass answers to Sister's questions from the catechism. He felt the comfort of numbers. He felt snug and safe here on the floor, positioned more or less identically with the others. After the first moments of surprise and confusion, they were all calm now. This was the first rule of atomic attack. Keep calm. Do not get excited or excite others. Another rule, Do not touch things.

He felt an odd belonging in the duck-and-cover. It was a community of look-alikes and do-alikes, heads down, elbows tucked, fannies in the air. The overbrained boy of the thirty-two pieces and the million trillion combinations liked to nestle in his designated slot, listening to Sister's voice repeat all the cautions and commands like a siren lifting and dipping in the dopplered haze of another nondescript day.

Keep calm.

Do not touch things.

Do not answer a ringing phone.

Unplug your toaster.

Do not drive a motor vehicle.

Carry a handkerchief to place over your mouth.

In their prayer posture they could have been anyone from anywhere. The faithful of old Samarkand bending to their hojatollah. The only thing that mattered was the abject entreaty, the adoration of the cloud of all-power-forty softly throbbing bodies arrayed along the walls.

She ordered them back to their normal places. They got up, retrieved their fallen books and slid a little hangdog into their seats, watching Sister Edgar so they might ascertain how totally foolish they ought to feel.

Never end a sentence with a preposition and never begin a sentence with an And.

Sister was not pleased with their performance. She leaned over her desk, hands so tensed on the wood surface they could see the blood drain from her knuckles.

They waited for her to tell them to do it again.

"Hey Bobby."

"I'm busy over here."

"Hey Bobby."

"I'm busy over here."

"Hey Bobby. There's something we want to tell you.

"I told you, okay, I'm busy."

"Juju wants to tell you. Hey Bobby. Listen."

"Go way, all right?"

"Hey Bobby."

"Fuck out of here."

"Hey Bobby."

"Irbu see I'm working over here?"

"Hey Bobby. Juju wants to tell you this one thing."

"What."

"Hey Bobby."

"All right. What."

"This one thing."

"All right. What."

"Shit in your fist and squeeze it," Nick said.

She didn't know what to call it, a lightness, a waft, something with change in it, treebloom or fragrant rain, and she stood on the stoop and watched a man across the street chip rust from his fire escape, up on the fourth floor.

A truck pulled up in front of the grocery two doors down. The grocer's son came out and unlocked the metal hatch in the sidewalk and lifted the two swing-back sections. The men unloaded crates of soda and took them on a handcart into the store, the older man, or carried them by the hand grips, the younger, down the hatchway into the storage cellar.

Klara lit a cigarette and thought about going across the street to get the child, who was being minded by the tailor's wife today, this was a Wednesday, because it was nearly time.

The younger man wandered over to the stoop on the way to his third or fourth trip into the cellar.

"You wouldn't think of saving me a drag, would you, on that cigarette?"

She looked at him, taking in the question.

"Hate to ask," he said.

She looked at him, taking in the damp shirt and scuffed dungarees, the way he held the crate at belly level, forearms veined beneath the rolled sleeves.

"One drag could mean the difference," he said, "between life and death."

She said, "In which direction?"

He smiled and looked away. Then he looked at her and said, "When you need a smoke, does it matter?"

She reached out and offered the cigarette but he didn't put down the soda crate and take it. Instead he climbed two steps in her direction and looked right at her and this meant she had to place the cigarette between his lips or withdraw the offer.

At first she didn't do either. She took a drag herself and said, 'Aren't you afraid it'll stunt your growth?"

Six days later, or seven, she came out of the flat and locked the door. There was someone on the stoop looking in through the vestibule. She knew exactly who it was and what he was here for and she made a gesture that was either a shrug or a come-on. Then she put the key back in the door she'd just locked, unlocking it.

He followed her into the spare room and when she turned he was right there. He was pretty big and lifted her into the wall. She kicked out of her shoes and grabbed his hair, a fistful, and jerked his face away from hers so she could look at him.

When they were nearly naked they stood watching each other. There was no bed or sofa and they barely touched, his hand on her upper arm, which she pushed away. She kept waiting to feel crazy but didn't. He put his hand on her upper arm and she knocked it off. He shrugged and laughed, like what's going on. She put her hand to his chest. She could make him stop laughing by touching him.

She said, 'Are you a boy I ought to know? Who are you? Not that I give a damn."

He was darkish and well-built and he moved her into the wall again. She pushed her hair out of her face. She thought as long as she kept him in this one room, no one could say there was something crazy going on. This was the spare room, the paint room. She wasn't supposed to be naked here but aside from that, her feet cold on the bare floor, there was nothing awfully strange happening here.

He had his hands all over her. He smelled of cigarettes and something else, some odd body must mixed with sweat. They kissed for a time that seemed to be hours. It seemed to be taking hours, long sluicy kisses that she disappeared into, distant, empty, feeling his hand brusque on her tit, but also practical all of a sudden, yes, pushing him off and going into the closet down the hall and getting the spare mattress for the child's bed, a Jewish heirloom of the generations.

She went back to the room and gave him the mattress, rolled up and tied in a length of twine. He stood it on end and pretended to hump it, his tongue hanging out.

She noticed the room. He unknotted the twine and flopped the small mattress down and lowered himself to his knees, waiting. The room was beautiful in this light, shadow-banded, all lines and gaps, claire-obscure, and she walked over to him, untrusting of course, and motioned for him to sit back on his haunches.

She didn't know what would come next, second to second, and kept resisting even as she moved into him, biting and stroking, the word stroke, the word cock, half resisting everything he did, smelling work and basement on his body, sour rooms webbed in dust.

They were everywhere on each other, noisy and damp, taking in air the way you drink down water, deep and sort of smacking, in drawn portions. He was here to be explored a little. She liked stopping and watching, or looking away actually, or guiding his hand, or going into the kitchen for a glass of water and coming back and pouring it partly on his chest, a body disproportionate to the bedding, and then handing him the glass and watching him drink and thinking there was nothing crazy going on that she could clearly locate except that she was naked in her workroom.

Then they were everywhere at once again, looped about each other, everything new for the second time, and she closed her eyes to see them together, which she could almost do, which she could do for the sheerest time, bodies turned and edged and sidled, one way and the other, this and that concurrent, here but also there, like back-fronted Picasso lovers.

When he went to find the toilet she thought she'd feel strange and crazy and out of her mind, finally, but she just sat on the mattress smoking.

"Thirteen inch we got."

"Thirteen inch."

"What-do-you-call. Admiral."

"Admiral. This is, what, better than Captain?"

"Clear. No snow."

"Thirteen inch. What kind of thirteen inch? You want thirteen inch? Bend over,"

"Hey. You and what army?"

"Bend over. I'll show you no snow." "You and what army?"

"You got an Admiral. I give you a Motorola." "Your whole family couldn't come up with thirteen inches. Including your grandfather and his monkey."

Bronzini stood before his class, forty-four stoical souls in general science. Most sixteen years old, a few older, even eighteen, the dopier ones, the discombobulates, left back at some point in the long alpine march to knowledge.

He stood behind his platformed desk and spoke to the walls and the ceiling, to the windows at the far end of the room. He spoke to the bus-fumed air of Fordham Road and the university in the trees beyond, where seniors at the college wore bachelor robes and where the names of the alumni dead of World War I were engraved on capitals atop the stone posts that marked the south boundary of the campus.

Universitas Fordhamensis.

"We can't see the world clearly until we understand how nature is organized. We need to count, measure and test. This is the scientific method. Science. The observation and description of phenomena. Phenomena. Things perceptible to the senses. The seasons make sense. At a certain time the cold diminishes, the days grow longer. It happens at the same time every year. We spoke last class about the difference between equinox and solstice and you remember this, I trust, Miss Innocenti. The planets move in an orderly manner. We can predict their passage across the skies. And we can admire the mathematics involved. The ellipsoid passage of the planets around the sun. Ellipse. A slightly flattened circle. Here we detect form and order, we see the laws of nature in their splendid harmony. Think of the rhythm of waves. The birth of babies. When a woman is due to give birth, Applebaum, eyes front, we say she is coming to term. The precision of nature becomes evident in the birth-giving process. The woman follows stages. The fetus grows and develops. We can predict, we can say roughly this week or next week is the time when the child will be born. Coming to term, Miss Innocenti, as you chew your gum a mile a minute. Carrying the fetus to term. Nine months. Seven pounds two ounces. We need numbers to make sense of the world. We think in numbers. We think in decades. Because we need organizing principles, Alfonse Catanzaro, yes, to make us less muddled."

A voice piped up at the back of the class.

"Call him Alan."

A rush of amusement moved through the room like wind over dune grass. Bronzini did not have major problems of discipline. The students sensed his unwillingness to engage in confrontation and they read his museful mild delivery, sometimes far-wandering, as a kind of private escape, not unlike their own, from the assignment of the day.

A second voice near the window, a girl's, sissy-mimicking.

"Don't call me Alfonse. Call me Alan. I want to be an actor in the movies."

A deeper ripple of mirth this time and Bronzini was sad for the boy, skinny Alfonse, but did not rebuke them, kept talking, talked over the momentary rollick-skinny sorry Alfonse, grape-stained with tragic acne.

"We need numbers, letters, maps, graphs. We need scientific formulas to understand the structure of matter. E equals MC squared."

He wrote the equation on the blackboard.

"How is it that a few marks chalked on a blackboard, a few little squiggly signs can change the shape of human history? Energy, mass, speed of light. Protons, neutrons, electrons. How small is the atom? I will tell you. If people were the size of atoms-think about it, Gagliardi-the population of the earth would fit on the head of a pin. Never mind the vast amounts of energy stored in matter. Matter. Something that has mass-a solid, a liquid, a gas. Never mind what happens when we split the atom and release this energy. Energy. The capacity of a physical system to do work. I want to know how it is that a few marks on a slate or a piece of paper, a little black on white, or white on black, can carry so much information and contain such shattering implications. Never mind the energy packed in the atom. What about the energy contained in this equation? This is the real power. How the mind operates. How the mind identifies, analyzes and represents. What beauty and power. What marvels of imagination does it require to reduce the complex forces of nature, all those unseeable magical actions inside the atom-to express all this with a bing and a bang on a blackboard. The atom. The unit of matter regarded as the source of nuclear energy. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. proposed the idea of the atom. B.C., Miss Innocenti. Before Chewing Gum. Small, small, small. Something inside something else inside something else. Down, down, down. Under, under, under. Next time, chapter seven. Be prepared for an oral quiz."

Barely an audible groan.

"Maximum public embarrassment," Bronzini said.

They bundled out of the room and into the long halls, where four thousand others were beginning to mass in the vast hormonal clamor that marked the condition of release.

It was still winter but there was something soft in the air today, that rhythmic fiction of early spring, so sweet to be deceived by, and Albert took his usual route into the shopping streets, poking into stores and social clubs.

Here he ate a pignoli cookie and asked after the woman's son, an artilleryman in Korea. There he thumbed his mustache and stood amused in the company of an eager complainant, a man loud with the measliest grievance, pink-eyed and spitting.

In the pork store he talked to a couple of newcomers, Calabrian, a woman and her trail-along daughter, and it made him think of his mother and sister, down that memory tunnel, and how the girl fairly clung to her mother.

Now the mother lay in a plot in Queens, in a great wide meadow of stones and crosses, thousands of souls outside the ordinary sprawl, a sovereign people uncomplaining.

He bought meat here, fish there, and headed home. He thought about the saint's day every summer when members of the church band walked through the streets playing heart-heavy pieces that brought women's faces to the open windows of the tenements. It was the custom of the musicians to slow-step along a certain residential street and stop at a particular private house, a frame structure with a front porch and rose trellis, the home of the olive oil importer. When they stopped playing the family invited them in and they entered in their band uniforms of black pants and white shirt, carrying their instruments. Such an old and dignified custom, the elderly men, the obese trombonist, the young man hollowed out by the bass drum strapped to his torso, each shuffling into the shady house for a glass of red wine.

Juju didn't want to follow him in but he had to. Once Nick went in, Juju had to go in too.

He'd wanted to see a person dead and Nick was going to show him. They stood in the anteroom of the funeral home near Third Avenue, where twenty or thirty men were smoking and talking.

"Maybe this is not a good idea," Juju said.

"Just be sure you don't laugh."

"What am I gonna laugh?"

"Show some respect," Nick said. "We want them to think we're family."

Nick shoved him and they went into the viewing room. Women sat in folding chairs saying their beads and there were sofas against the walls, younger women looking strange in black, sealed away from knowing, with several small girls placed among them, grave and pale.

They went up to the casket and looked in. It was an old man with nostrils gaped wide and the hands of a carpenter or mason, copper fingers rough and notched.

"Here's your body. Soak it up."

They knelt at the casket.

"He doesn't look that bad," Juju said.

"I think they plucked his eyebrows."

"I thought it would be different," Juju said.

"Different how?"

"I don't know. White," Juju said. "The whole face chalk white."

"They put makeup and grooming."

"White and stiff, I thought."

"He's not stiff, this man?"

"He could almost be asleep. If he slept in a suit."

"So you're disappointed then."

"I'm a little, yeah, disappointed."

"Why don't you say it louder," Nick said, "so they can drag us out to the street and beat us to death."

"This was a bad idea of yours."

"We're supposed to have an envelope," Nick said.

"This was a bad idea. What kind of envelope?"

"If we're family," Nick said. "A mass card or money."

"I thought an envelope is when you get married. Not when you die."

"An envelope is when you do anything. They're always doing envelopes."

"This was a bad idea. I'm ready to leave."

"Too soon. Say a prayer. Show them you're praying. Show them respect," Nick said. "Women in black dresses. We don't show respect, they tear us apart."

In a corner of the poolroom a guy named Stevie hawked up a wad of pearly phlegm, called an oyster, and spat it down the neck of his Coke bottle.

Juju said, "I ask you for a slug of soda, you do this?"

"Hey I didn't say no."

"But you do this? You spit in it?"

"You asked for a slug. I'm saying. Take two slugs."

Stevie cleared another oyster out of his throat and spat it into the bottle and handed the bottle to Juju.

"But you do this? You hack up this big thing, which you think nobody in his right mind's gonna drink from a bottle that has this big thing floating in there."

"You want a slug. Hey. Take a slug. Take whatever."

"So you're giving me your whole soda, you're saying. Take whatever. If I'm crazy enough to drink it."

"What's mines is yours," Stevie said.

Juju smiled falsely, a look with a mocking quality. Then he drank the whole thing down in one long slug. He followed with a small gassy belch and tossed the bottle back to Stevie.

Nick watched in admiration.

Later that night he took Mike the Dog out for a walk. He walked along the hospital wall and then went east through the empty streets. He stood across the street from the building where the woman lived. There was a bed in the front room, stripped of sheets, an empty bed cranked up, easy enough to see just to the right of the stoop, the curtains half drawn, a lamp lit nearby, and he stood there a while smoking.

When he got back with the dog, two men were coming down the poolroom steps. He thought he recognized one of them from the poker game and they came down the steps in a kind of rumble, making the dog back off.

Mike was alone, at the counter, doing his tally.

"Where'd you take him, to the men's room at Grand Central?"

Nick wagged a thumb at the men who'd just left.

"I know those guys?"

"I don't know. You know those guys?"

"Serious business, right?"

"I might as well tell you," Mike said. "You'll hear about it anyway."

"What?"

"You remember the guy who sat by the door when we ran the games?"

"Sure. Walls."

"Walls was not here the night of the holdup."

"I thought that was interesting."

"A number of people did. And a number of people who were here that night thought that one of the three holdup men."

"Wait. They wore masks, right?"

"Could have been Walls. Mask or no mask. And of course Walls has not been seen since. So you can imagine the interest being shown in his whereabouts. Not to mention two of the players are very close," Mike said, "to the organization."

"The organization. And now?"

"Walls has been seen."

"Walls has been seen. They found him."

"And he's shit out of luck. In a Puerto Rican grocery about a mile from here."

"What's he doing in a Puerto Rican grocery?"

"Buying a green banana. Hey. How the hell do I know?"

Nick laughed. The news excited him. He found it satisfying even though he liked Walls, he admired Walls, based on the few words they'd exchanged that one time. They'd found him and killed him. He told himself to remember to get a paper first thing in the morning. It was bound to be in the papers, this kind of thing.

"He took your money too," Nick said. "Not just the cash on the table."

Mike stood on a chair to turn off the TV, which was running without the sound.

"I'm not looking to celebrate," he said. "This is a thing it brings the wrong kind of attention. I have the precinct I have to keep greased so they don't close me down. The robbery was bad enough. This thing brings homicide detectives and reporters coming around."

"How'd they do it?"

"How'd they do it. They shot him. Bang bang."

"I know. But how? How many guys? What kind of weapons?"

Photograph of blood-streaked body with towel covering head for decency sake.

"They shoot anyone else? They get away in one car, two cars?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask."

"He was armed, this Walls, when they shot him?"

"I don't know," Mike said.

"They shot him in the head or what?"

"Nicky. I say all right. Go home and get some sleep."

They went to the show downtown and walked around Times Square looking at people, all kinds, and they felt superior and dumb at the same time.

They took the el back home late at night with Juju and Ray sitting next to each other and Nick stretched out on the long wicker seat across the aisle.

"You know, I'm thinking," Juju said. "We never should of gone in there. It's not right. Fool around, fool around, fool around. I say all right. But this is not a thing we should of done."

"You're guilty," Nick said.

"The man's laid out. Leave him alone. If he was some jerk sat on his ass all his life, be different maybe. This is a working man. The man's laid out."

Nick assumed the position of a prepared body.

"You're guilty. Go to church and confess. You'll feel better," he said.

Ray Lofaro had no idea what they were talking about. Juju wouldn't tell him as a matter of principle and Nick wouldn't tell him because he didn't want to be bothered.

The train was a local and took forever.

They rode past the dark tenements of the lower Bronx, past the sleeping thousands in their beds, and Nick got up and tried to rip the wicker apart, first with his hands, which was hard to do, and then by kicking it in and using his hands again to pick apart the weaved strands.

A man at the other end of the car got up and went into the next car and Nick watched him, deciding whether this was an insult or not.

Then he kicked some more, standing back and using the heel edge of his shoe to stave in the back of the seat. He poked with both hands, peeling off strips of wicker in a series of long dry snapping sounds.

His buddies had nothing to say.

He got off one stop before their regular stop and they watched him go out the door. He walked over to the building where she lived. He stood across the street smoking, watching the building. The lamp was lit in the front room but the bed was gone now

He knew that Mr. Bronzini's mother had died recently. His own mother telling him. And over a day or two he began to make the connection that the bed was the old woman's bed, that the apartment was Mr. Bronzini's apartment, that the woman he'd fucked in the apartment was Mr. Bronzini's wife.

He found it didn't matter much. He'd walked past the building a number of times, in daylight, and never saw her. He'd stood on the stoop once or twice, smoking, and she hadn't come out. Lately he'd been standing in the dark and watching the building, after midnight mostly, those sameshit nights, passing the time before he was ready to go to bed.

He was seventeen years and some months. He'd get drafted soon and that was probably not a bad thing to happen. His friend Allie was in uniform now, finished basic, and he was headed to Korea, where he'd fuck the best-looking women, he said, and leave sloppy seconds for Nick and the others.

He stood there smoking. He watched her building and he thought about a thousand things, sane, crazy, dumb, and he thought about the woman.

The empty lot was less than a block from the school entrance, a rambling waste with a higher and lower level, boulders, weeds and ruined walls, signs of old exploded garbage here and there, brown bags tossed from adjacent buildings, and this is where young kids had rock fights and older kids roasted sweet mickeys in the evening chill and where a kid named Skeezer ate a grasshopper live, which was a legend of many a neighborhood, the kid with grasshopper juices running down his chin, but in this case there were reliable older men who'd witnessed, and where other and darker stories were set, a man who slept in a ditch every night and the guys from the other poolroom, Major's, taking a girl into the ruins, late, a summer night, and lining up for sex, and who was the girl, and was she willing, and other stories of the lots.

It was a single expanse of land that was called the lots the way a back alley was called the yards and this is where Matty got his hand busted up in a card game called shots on knucks.

He walked in the apartment and went into his mother's bedroom, where she was doing her beadwork, and he stuck the hand in her face.

"What's this?"

"What does it look like?" he said.

"Blood."

"Then that's what it is."

"Then you should go and clean it."

"Don't you want to know what happened?"

"What happened?"

"Never mind," he said.

He sat in the living room and examined the marks and scrapes, the mudlet streaks of dried blood. He felt a self-pitying pleasure, doing this, even a fascination, an animal attachment just short of licking, but then his brother walked in the door, earlier than usual, and he tried to conceal the hand.

"What's that?"

"Nothing."

"Show me, jerk."

"I just need to clean it."

"You need to put iodine on that. Let me see."

"I don't need iodine," he said with a soft insistence.

He extended the hand and looked away at the same time, sort of tactfully.

"He needs iodine," Nick said to their mother.

"Is that the 7-Up man?"

"Eye-oh-dine, eye-oh-dine."

Matty went small in his chair as his brother looked at the hand. Nick's own hands were dirty and bruised and so much bigger, five, six years bigger-a man's hands, almost, blistered on the palms and cut by broken glass.

"How'd it happen? You punched a little girl in the mouth?"

"Card game in the lots."

"You go in the lots?"

"Just at the edge."

"Does she know you go in the lots?"

"I don't go way in."

"You think it's a good idea, going in there?"

"What do you think?"

"I think go in. But watch yourself. There's kids in there from all over. They don't know you're my brother."

Nick held his hand and looked at it.

"It doesn't hurt the way it did."

"You played shots on knucks."

"That's right."

"And you ended up holding some cards and the winner whacked you how many times."

"I had a choice."

"I remember this choice."

"Either he gives me nine scraping shots with the edge of the deck or he gives me four scraping shots and then one killer shot with the deck held up and down."

"Blunt end. Where he hits you square on your knuckles, full force."

"That's right," Matty said.

"Let me ask. How could you lose a kid's card game, a brain like you, supposedly, playing with a bunch of little pisspots?"

"They weren't so little," Matty said.

Nick held his hand. Many times through the years Nick had bopped him on the head, a flick of the middle finger that carried slingshot force. Many times Nick had lifted him off a chair and sat himself down. Nick had held him out the window once for rubbing snot on a door edge. Many times Nick had booted him in the ass for no reason except he was passing through a room that had Matty in it.

"I think we're talking about iodine here."

"I don't need iodine," he whispered.

He looked at his hand in Nick's. His brother had an odor of work and heat and sharp salami, the spicy bright salami he ate on the job.

Their mother came in and looked at the hand.

She said, "Mercurochrome."

Nick took the hand away from her.

"Iodine," he said.

"First he washes the hand with soap and cool water, Matthew, are you listening? Then he dries the hand."

"Then he puts iodine on it."

"I don't want the iodine," Matty said. "I want the mercurochrome."

"Iodine. It's stronger, it's better, it's hotter, it burns."

"Mercurochrome," Matty said. "It eats right into the wound, cleaning and burning." "Mercurochrome," Matty said.

But he didn't want his brother to drop the hand, to let go of the hand just yet.

Klara stood on the roof watching stormclouds build bluish and hard-edged, like weather on some remote coast, a sky that seemed too lush and wild to pass this way.

The child played with a neighbor's child on a blanket nearby.

She'd taken down the laundry and put it in the basket but wasn't ready to go inside just yet. The wind was gaining force and she could see women on rooftops all up and down the block unpinning clothes from swaying lines, ducking under bedsheets walloped up, and she could hear other women pulling on the lines that crisscrossed alleyways between windows and laundry poles, the screech-song of old ropes passing through the grooved rims of all those rusty wheels.

She missed Albert's mother. It was strange to walk into the front room now, an awkward empty place, first the empty bed and now not even the bed, just floor space that needed filling.

It was also strange how they hadn't wanted to get rid of the bed, either one of them. They'd kept it around for weeks, cranked to her daylight angle, the hours when she liked to close her eyes and feel the sun on her face.

The white of her nightgown and hair and the white sheets and the sheets billowing on the rooftops and the women fisting them down to gatherable size.

The first drops hit thick and splatting.

She'd been up here once, not long ago, more or less hiding from her life, and she saw the young man standing across the street, standing smoking by a lamppost.

Most of the time when she thought of him at all she thought of him in motion, she thought of notched hands moving on her body and dirt grained deep in his fingers, she thought of the turn of his shoulder and the way he looked at her over his clenched fist.

She'd liked it when she saw him by the lamppost looking at the building. Then she thought about it and didn't like it so much. But that was the only time she saw him there.

The two children did not want to go inside but the rain was getting close.

He'd been easy in a way, natural in a way, not distant or totally unknown. At first she thought it might be nice to think of him as the Young Man, like a character in a coming-of-age novel, but she only thought of him in motion, and nameless, and nonfictional, a sort of rotary blur that hovered just off her right shoulder somewhere, the thing her brain condensed from all that pleasure and wet.

She looked over the ledge and saw three girls playing jacks on a stoop across the street, seated on different steps, the girl with the ball still-bodied and hunched, only her hand working among the strewn jacks, frantically, and Klara could hear them calling threesies and kissies and interference, an argument breaking out, steely and clear.

She didn't want more, she wanted less. This was the thing her husband could not understand. Solitude, distance, time, work. Something out there she needed to breathe.

She took the laundry basket to the door and left it just inside. The surrounding rooftops were just about empty now and the yowl of the alley lines had stopped. Even from this height she could hear the rapping sound. A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in from play.

Then the rain came hard. Klara picked up her daughter and scooped the blanket under her arm and took the other child by the hand and they ran laughing across the roof under racing skies.

At dinner she told him she'd been selfish.

"I don't think that's true," he said.

He tore a length of crusty bread in two, a thing he did ritually and with such depth of dependable habit that she could not imagine him getting through a full meal, all the switches and intervals and hand movements, without this crucial flourish.

"The painting's a waste. I'm not getting anywhere. Well put Teresa in that room."

"Give it time," he said. "And anyway where do you expect to get with it? Do it for the day-to-day satisfaction. For the way it fills out the day."

She had a small print of a Whistler, the famous Mother, and she hung it in a corner of the spare room because she thought it was generally unlocked at and because she liked the formal balances and truthful muted colors and because the picture was so dashingly modern, the seated woman in mobcap and commodious dark dress, a figure lifted out of her time into the abstract arrangements of the twentieth century, long before she was ready, it seemed, but Klara also liked looking right through the tonal components, the high theory of color, the theory of paint itself, perhaps-looking into the depths of the picture, at the mother, the woman, the mother herself, the anecdotal aspect of a woman in a chair, thinking, and immensely interesting she was, so Quaker-prim and still, faraway-seeming but only because she was lost, Klara thought, in memory, caught in the midst of a memory trance, a strong and elegiac presence despite the painter's, the son's, doctrinal priorities.

"No, we'll do something with the room. That's what I ought to be doing. Getting this place in some kind of livable shape."

"We have the front room to do," he said.

"We have the front room, which is still a kind of no-man's-land. I'll do the front room. Then I'll do the spare room."

"And I'll step up my own efforts. Head of the science department. I'll make this my goal. And we'll travel this summer. To Spain or Italy. Wherever you like," he said.

She liked to watch him eat because he did it so deeply, handling and savoring things, handling utensils, chewing food thoroughly, the way he paused unpretentiously with the wineglass an inch from his lips, waiting, savoring, a sense of earth and our connection to it, that was Albert over a dish of inky squid-earth and sea and the way he looked at food in the plate, breathing it all in before he even touched a fork.

"To Spain," she said. " Madrid. The Prado." And she laughed a little coldly, with the hollow tone she used when she was punishing herself. "I want to look at pictures till I drop."

Then she saw him on the street with a friend, veering toward an army-navy store, and she stopped and stood right there, stationed in his path, and he nearly walked into her before he saw who it was, and he stopped and showed only the thinnest surprise, and his friend stopped, and then she went around them and crossed the street.

The next day he was standing by the lamppost when she looked out the window. She was putting up new curtains in the front room and he was standing there smoking. A Railway Express truck passed between them. Then he looked up and saw her. He flicked the cigarette and walked across the street.

She threw down the mattress. Nick watched her and pulled his shirt over his head. Then he watched her again. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember something, and then she undid a button at the side of her skirt.

She didn't finish her kisses. This was interesting and a little puzzling, unlike last time when they kissed nearly into old age. The way she broke off now and looked away just when he thought a kiss was getting her warm and soft, and the way she looked when she did this, ripping away hurt, almost, and he was surprised at how different she looked, not what he remembered from last time but paler maybe, hands weightless and drained, these white things floating past, and eyes that bugged out a little and seemed to see things he didn't know were there.

But the eyes also looked away and that was the same and the twisty smile, the little turn at the end of the mouth. Some things the same. The tits the same, the ass and tits and bush, and the slub of folded tongue when he kissed her.

Looks that he couldn't figure out what they were supposed to mean.

And the other smile, where she smiled privately at the two of them together, or whatever she was smiling at, smiling to herself like it was three days later, after the fact, and she was walking down an aisle at the A amp;P thinking what they'd done, but it wasn't three days after the fact, it was still the fact, and she had his balls in her hand, squeezing slightly.

A naked woman was amazing.

He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked across the room, all these ways and walking toward him too and different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn't bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she'd been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn't have curves and swerves but was good-looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth.

He took her stocking off the floor and fitted it over his head. She smiled and looked away and seemed to want to say something and then changed her mind. He jammed it down so he was looking out at her more or less through the heel of the stocking. He pantomimed pulling a gun out of a shoulder holster and pointed it at her.

"Everything you own. Mine or die."

"It's hard to be serious about this, considering what you look like."

"Hey. Lady. This is what they do."

"Holdups, you mean?"

"That's right. But I have to say. They must need money pretty bad to wear this on their face."

"Well, it's used. They don't wear used stockings, do they?"

"I don't think these guys are finicky. They wear whatever's lying around."

"I have to admit you're a changed man."

"You think you'd recognize me if you came in the house and I was standing here in this mask?"

"No. But I wouldn't recognize you without the mask either."

He pulled off the mask and sat on the mattress. She went to get some water and he watched her walk out of the room, the way her ass barely jounced, and he held the stocking around his dick and then tossed it away.

The warm fusty sort of slightly tired smell, the nylon cling of the odor still in his face, sad, tired, day-old, hers, and close to him, and something he knew about her that made her less strange.

But she was still strange. She was something you didn't want to tell your friends about and that was strange. And she was something you didn't have to tell yourself was really happening. It just happened. It happened bang and that was it, with Whistler's fucking Mother hanging on the wall.

He watched her come into the room.

He said, "You know, my brother when he was a little kid, he was somewhere watching a girl taking a pee, a small girl that was a neighbor's kid probably, and she dropped her drawers and wiggled up onto the seat and had herself a pee, and my brother's watching this and then he goes out to a room full of grown-ups, as I later heard the story, and he waits for them to stop talking and then they finally stop talking and they look at him and he says, Mary Feeley has no birdy."

She handed him the glass. It was one of the longest speeches he'd ever made, Nick, not counting jokes he sometimes told. Then she reached for his bunched pants on the floor and felt in the pockets for a pack of cigarettes.

They sat on the mattress, knees touching, smoking and sharing the water.

"You know why I smoke Old Golds? I wouldn't tell this to just anybody."

"Bullshit. Why?" she said.

"That's the cigarette that used to sponsor the Dodgers on the radio. Old Gold. We're tobacco men, not medicine men. The Dodgers were my team. Were. Not anymore."

"This is a big privileged secret you're telling me."

"That's right. Now you have to tell me one of your secrets. Could be big, could be small."

"What's your name?"

"Nick."

"Nick, you can't come here anymore. It's too completely crazy. No more, okay? We did it and now we have to stop doing it."

"We can do it somewhere else," he said.

"Nowhere else. No. I don't think so."

Never mind the body. He's never looked at a woman's face so closely. How he thinks he knows who she is from her face, what she eats and how she sleeps, from the lookaway smile and the uncombed hair, the hair over the right eye, how her face becomes everything she is that he can't put into words.

"Nick Shay," he said with a little stab in it, a touch of vengeful intent, because she knew about the chess lessons of course, and would recognize Matty's last name, and would know Nick was the older brother, and would feel the close-knit danger of the thing.

But she didn't seem to give a damn. The way he didn't give a damn that she was someone he knew's wife, she didn't care that he was someone's brother.

"Then I might as well," he said.

"Yes, I think it's time."

He picked up the pants and got dressed and left her naked on the mattress, seated sort of leaning to one side, legs together and bent, blowing smoke away from her face with the hand that held the cigarette, and he didn't even think of looking back.

7

Rosemary sat in the law office over the bakery, filing documents in an old cabinet, and her boss came in, Mr. Imperato, returned from a rare morning at the criminal courts. He was a shambling man who told jokes expertly, who rose to the occasion of a joke. He was bald, flat-footed and carelessly dressed and he was forgetful in his work, sometimes, but when there was a joke to tell he heard the music of the spheres. He never botched a punch line or missed a pause. He did voices and accents, men, women, talking birds, unfalteringly, a quickness rising to his eyes.

"Smell the bread," he said.

"That's the trouble with being over a bakery. I keep buying bread. My boys can't keep up."

"What'd you buy?"

"It's for dinner."

"Show me. Is it round or long?"

"Last time, remember what you did to my bread. It's dinner bread. Getaway."

Four or five years ago Mr. Imperato hired a private investigator on her behalf to try to locate Jimmy. The biggest secret of her life, a thing no one knew but the lawyer and the investigator. When nothing came of the effort Mr. Imperato paid the man himself and told her she could do some clerical work to settle her fee. She'd been working here ever since and he never deducted the fee from her salary because he needed someone, he said, to listen to his jokes.

"I'm buying us a bigger fan."

"I think we need it," she said.

"I got one for home. The kids sit in front of it sometimes. The TV is on the blink. I tell Anna. They're watching the fan."

"I don't want TV in my house."

"You have to have it," he said.

"I don't want it."

"The kids want it."

"Matty wants it. He goes upstairs to a neighbor and watches wrestling."

"I never miss the wrestling if I can help it. You have to have it. The kids have to have it. It's the one thing you have to have."

When she went home with her bread she climbed past her floor, going up the worn steps, seeing laundry hang outside the smutty stairway windows, because there was a thing she wanted to talk about with Mrs. Graziani, up on the top floor.

Carmela put out a coffee ring and made coffee and they sat in the kitchen.

"How you climb these steps every day."

"Three, four times," Carmela said. "I know every step by name. I have names for the steps."

"And Mickey's feeling better since the operation."

"If you could call it feeling better. He's the same as he always was. I don't know if that's better. Because these men, all they want to do is sit in a room playing cards for seventeen hours they can play. Cards till they drop."

"But he had a real scare. If he can play cards, more power to him. You nearly lost him."

"I don't think I could lose him if I went to China," the woman said.

Rosemary usually felt better after a visit with Carmela. The woman had a running argument with men, not just the husband and the sad son, Cosmo, but men everywhere, and even if Rosemary agreed with her only two percent of the time she still felt cleaner somehow, purged like confession, having a cup of coffee with Carmela.

"I wanted to ask. Did you hear about the woman at 607? The grandmother?"

"There's nothing to hear," Carmela said.

And she made a gesture, the hand that sweeps under the chin, a sign that meant this is not a story we're obliged to take seriously. The nothing sign. A very dismissive gesture as Rosemary understood these things.

"So you don't think."

"If I thought there was anything to it, I'd be the first to go over there and wait for him to appear and get down on my hands and knees to thank God for this miracle."

The woman at 607, saying her rosary in the basement room of the narrow shingled house occupied by two families and two grandparents, looked up from her beads and saw a saint standing in the doorway, Saint Anthony, and Rosemary needed guidance in this matter, a sense of how much acceptance she should be willing to risk.

Carmela put four spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee.

"You know what I say, Rose? Domani mattin. In other words, sure, tomorrow morning, here he comes again, this time with an angel blowing a trumpet."

This reaction was a letdown. For all her endless skepticism, Carmela was a frequent figure at early morning mass and Rosemary wanted her to take the story more seriously, or to concede the grandmother's credentials at least, long periods of prayer with a number of other old women, all in graveclothes, reciting the mysteries.

Carmela told her for the dozenth time to get out and see people.

"You're still young, Rose."

"I'm not so young."

"Don't argue with me. You need to spend less time at home and more time making friends. You give your whole life to those two boys. This Nicky, I hate to say it."

"Then don't say it."

"I hate to say it, Rose."

"Don't say it."

"This boy has got I-don't-know-what written all over him. You know exactly what I mean."

"He works hard. He hands over his money without a complaint."

"The other one. I don't know."

"If you don't know, Carmela."

"I don't know, Rose. The other one. But it's Nicky I'm watching. I watch this boy."

"That's funny because you know what? I don't watch him. He gets up at the crack of dawn. He goes to work. He gives me his money. He gives me his pay envelope. Plus I don't hear a word of complaint."

"The mother's always the last to know."

"He grew up fast, Nicky. He's a man now. He's more responsible than someone ten years older. He grew up like lightning, this boy."

"I'm sorry, Rose. But him I would watch."

Carmela's son had spent a year in the basket-weaving class and another year in remedial reading and a third year falling down a flight of stairs and recovering in bed, three meals a day in bed, and he lived with his grandparents now, upstate.

And she tells me she's worried about mine.

No, it was not the average satisfying visit with the woman on the top floor and in the days that followed, warm days and cool evenings, the water truck spraying the streets and dirt and grit running in the gutters-there were many days when Rosemary walked past the narrow house, 607, and thought about the old woman, Bettina, saying the rosary in the basement room with her friends, the five joyful mysteries, Mondays and Thursdays, the five sorrowful mysteries, Tuesdays and Fridays, the five glorious mysteries, and so on, but then again they probably didn't follow a set routine, no, they wouldn't, these women, because there were women like that who wore monks' robes on the feast of Saint Anthony, women and children both, brown robes and bare feet, the statue bobbing above them, and it was amazing and strange and impressive, Rosemary thought, and women like that would say their prayers without regard for schedules.

She was too shy to knock on the door but she liked to think of the women sitting around the table, big beads the Our Father, little beads the Hail Mary.

She didn't have time, herself, to do this every day. She had her own form of beadwork. She had the frame and the material pinned to the edges of the frame and the needle with the wood handle that she used to string the beads onto the material, iridescent beads to decorate a dress, and she never really wondered who would wear it.

She was too shy to talk to the grandmother, who spoke no English anyway. Thirty-five years in this country and not three words of En glish. But this was a mark of her faith in a way, an indication of what truly mattered. What mattered were the mysteries, not the language in which you said them.

The fresh-air inspectors stood on the corner nearly every day, three or four or five men, and Rosemary walked past the narrow house and thought about the thing that supposedly happened there.

Sometimes faith needs a sign. There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

"Maybe, like, for an eighth of a second, she thought I smacked my lips. Or I clicked my tongue at her."

"Then what?"

"Then she understood I had food in my teeth and I was wedging it out. The way you wedge it out with the tongue. But she looked at me and she saw who it was and she decided she rather be insulted."

"I can understand this."

"You can understand this."

"I can understand this because even if you didn't insult her, you could have."

"I didn't. But I could have. This is what you're saying."

"I known you twenty years. And you could have."

"Just so I understand. I didn't. But I could have."

"That's right. Because you, I could believe it."

"But I didn't."

"But you could have."

"Regardless I was wedging food."

"Regardless Jesus walked on water. Because you could have." "So this is where you're taking us." "Where am I taking us?"

"To where I have to say something. And you know what I have to say? And I say it to you and your sister. The both of youse." "Be careful."

"You're gonna hear this very good. To you but mostly to your sister." "Be careful, Anthony." "I'll fuck you in your heart, you fucker." 'Anthony. But what a mistake you're making." "You and your sister. I'll fuck you in your heart." "Who I know twenty years." 'And your mother for good measure."

"Who he thinks I'm gonna listen to this from a hard-on like him." 'And your mother," he said.

A kid went by with a baseball glove hooked to his belt, eating a melorol.

The longshoreman stood across the street with that massive mustachioed head of his, a whal-yo off the boat about a year ago, works the Jersey docks, strong as a Mack truck.

Two guys pushed a car that had no one in it.

Nick stood in front of the grocery eating a hero sandwich and holding a beer that Donato's wife had sold him, concealed in a paper bag.

The fresh-air inspectors.

Sammy Bones who ran on the field during a game at the Polo Grounds so he could be seen on TV, except nobody he knew was watching and he's been arrabbiato ever since, like mad-dog angry.

A girl in her confirmation outfit, a white dress and stockings and white shoes, and wearing red ribbons in her hair, and carrying white flowers in crinkly red cellophane.

Juju came by and took the sandwich out of Nick's hand and looked inside.

The old man on the stoop across the street who spreads his handkerchief dainty on the top step and then sits and fills his pipe with cigarette tobacco and the shreddings of a crumbled DeNobili cigar, the perennial guinea stinker, and whatever else he can find that doesn't belong in a pipe.

"You're serious about these weights."

"I'm doing bench presses where my mother grabs the bar when I yell. Supine presses," Juju said in a slightly snobbish tone.

"How many bites you're gonna take out of my sandwich?"

"I'm doing a whole program. You should come over."

"Hey. I work, remember. I got 7-Up I lift all day long."

"That's not a program," Juju said.

"I rather die than lift weights."

"See, now that's an attitude where you're only showing your ignorance of the subject."

"I rather die the death of a thousand cuts."

"Show your ignorance."

"I rather be ignorant. Look over there. The one in the yellow blouse. That's a 36D."

"What, you measured?"

"What kind of measured? I have a trained eye."

"You can tell a D cup from a C cup from this distance."

"I rather eat sheep stomach than lift weights," Nick told him.

The super's wife looking peacefully out the window at 610, called Sister Katy. So when she got screaming raging drunk, about once a month, the kids chanted up to her, Sing it Sister Katy.

"She sells you beer on Sunday? Before one o'clock?"

"What kind of beer? This is root beer."

A boy in a white suit with a red tie and a red armband and his hair plastered down trying to wriggle out of the grip of his mother, who's swinging her handbag at his head.

"What's your confirmation name?"

"Never you fucking mind," Juju said.

First the close air of the long stairway and the metallic taste of the air and the thick distant stir of men's voices on a busy night, the roil of muddy voices, and the smoke of the big room and a ball game on TV and a player softly chalking his stick, looking like a soldier in some old eccentric war, and the beautiful numbered balls and green baize and dreamy prowl of a shooter on a run, and the endless caroming clack of the balls hitting, the touch sounds of the cue, the balls, the cushions, the slap of the pocket drop.

That night Nick shot a game with George the Waiter. George parked cars at the racetrack on his nights off from the restaurant and he told stories about the cars he parked, about flooring the pedal and slamming the brake, that sounded like dirty jokes, the chrome and upholstery and handling, all tits and ass.

Nick felt a little wary of George since the episode of the needle. He felt cut off in a way, less free and easy, but George never referred to the thing and didn't even seem to remember.

Still, he felt he'd lost some standing with George, showing shock and confusion that way.

Nick looked up from the shot he was lining up. There was something in George's face that made him follow the man's line of sight to the other end of the room.

"Who's that?"

"You don't know him?"

Mike stood talking to a man near the counter, heavyset, in a too-tight jacket, two-toned, over an open-collar shirt.

"Take your shot," George said.

He called seven in the side.

"That's Mario Badalato," George said.

He made the shot.

"Not bad," George said. "You know this name?"

He wasn't sure but shook his head.

"It's a name, over the years, that's been connected to that particular life."

Nick moved crouched to the far end of the table, studying his next shot.

"Understand what I'm saying? Father, uncles, cousins, brothers."

"That particular life."

"You're never gonna bank the four. You should be looking anywhere but the four," George said. "People in that life."

"That life," Nick said.

"Malavita. Who, once they're in, they're in for good."

Nick glanced at the man in question, forty years old, maybe, thick and packed, a thickness of body that had no rolling or sagging but was hard, packed, built on other men's lesser luck, on the way an unfortunate occurrence across town makes you stronger.

"You should be looking at the two ball meanwhile. The four is not your shot, Nicky."

"The two ball."

"Madonn', what do I have to do, send an engraved invitation?"

"That life," Nick said.

"That particular life. Under the surface of ordinary things. And organized so that it makes more sense in a way, if you understand what I mean. It makes more sense than the horseshit life the rest of us live."

Nick studied the table some more.

"So is this the man who had Walls, you know, put on ice?"

"What do I know? I don't know, I don't want to know, I don't even want to talk about it no more."

"No more, no more."

"Take your shot," George said.

Mario Badalato. Maybe he knew this name from somewhere. They shot a couple of games and George gave him hints and tips and a guy at the next table was singing to the tune of a popular song.

"Don't know why. I've got lipstick on my fly. Slop-py blow-job."

"It's almost beach weather, George."

"This makes you happy? I hate the beach. I used to work at the beach."

"Don't tell me lifeguard. I pity the drowning child."

"Wise guy. I used to sell ice cream. This was years ago. Ninety degrees with a cooler on my back that felt like a thousand pounds."

"They still have those guys."

"We had to wear sun helmets. Like Africa."

"They still wear them."

"I never want to see another beach. You want the nine ball here. Look. It's set up beautiful."

It was time for George to get back to the restaurant. There was a gin rummy game going and Nick stood and looked and got bored and called the dog and took it for a walk.

He stood in Mussolini park while the dog went scratching at patches of dirt. He watched a tow truck go by, doing sixty easy, the driver taking the traffic circle like a rodeo rider, slanted to jump. A guy named Grasso came up to him, they were in the same shop class once, and he pointed at two guys diagonally across the street, at the luncheonette, at the outside counter, standing eating something, black guys both of them with team jackets.

"They come out of the bowling alley. Then they go over to the window and order whatever they order."

"Ever seen them before?"

"Here? They never been here."

The two guys put their paper cups back on the counter and walked toward Third Avenue and Nick and Grasso followed, with the dog trailing. The guys knew there was someone behind them. Not that they turned. But Nick saw the way they stopped talking and the way their stride seemed, maybe, to tighten a little.

"What's it say on the jackets?"

"Hawks, I think."

"Ever hear of them?" Nick said.

"Never. Hawks? What fucking Hawks? Plus I don't think it's a team. I think it's a gang."

They went past the funeral home and walked a block and a half along Third Avenue through the slatted shadows of the el and then the two guys stopped and turned around.

Nick and Grasso walked up to them.

"Hawks? What's Hawks?" Grasso said.

They didn't answer. One guy ready, the other still thinking about it.

"You live here, the Hawks? Because I don't think I seen any Hawks before."

They didn't answer.

The dog caught up to them and began to go nose-twitching around the feet of one of the guys.

"It's better, you know, at night especially, if you stay where you belong. In the day too," Grasso said. "But at night especially because otherwise people get the wrong idea."

The train passed over with a great staccato clatter and they all waited until it was past. But then the two guys didn't say anything.

"I still don't know what's Hawks. I aksed nice. But I don't hear no explanation."

Cars creeping around the el pillars when they made a turn. And Mike the Dog sniffing at the guy's shoe and the guy sort of flicking the shoe, doing a little foot-jerk that made the dog back off, and Nick stepped up and punched him.

A car stopped in the middle of a turn.

Nick stepped up and hit the guy once, a fair to good shot that caught him on the temple when he tried to duck under, and this car came to a sudden stop and four guys got out and left the doors hanging open of this car just stopped in the middle of the street.

They were guys from the other poolroom, Turk and his fuckface friends, and one of the black guys started running but the other one stood there and glared, six white guys and a brown dog more or less surrounding him.

Nick half smiled at Turk.

"He kicked my dog," he said.

The one still here was the one he'd hit and he was looking at Nick, glaring, and Nick shrugged and smiled and the guy turned and walked away slowly and the four other guys took a breath and hitched their pants and got back in the car. The doors closed bangedy bang and the car drove off.

Grasso said, "Fucking Turk."

"I know."

"Thinks he's king shit walking the earth."

"I know," Nick said.

"Where'd you get that animal?"

"Lives at Mike's."

"I never seen an animal so ugly."

Nick faked a punch to the guy's head and they walked back to the lighted streets with the roar of the el behind them.

About a month later the man was back in the poolroom, standing at the counter late one night, with Mike, they're eating baked ziti out of tin plates.

Mike flashed the light over the table where Nick was playing.

When Nick looked up he said, "Come over here."

Nick walked over with a self-conscious saunter like he was about to meet his future father-in-law.

"Mario here, he wants to say something you should listen to. Mario knew your father just after the war. During the war and after the war."

Badalato was standing with his back to the room and Nick went around the counter, where Mike was standing, behind the counter, so he could face the man.

They had glasses of wine, which Nick had never seen in here, and they had a canister of red pepper they passed back and forth, eating standing up, every forkful of ziti trailing long strands of mozzareir.

"I knew your father. Jimmy. I liked Jimmy."

Nick could not fail to understand the consequence of the moment, a man of this particular life who is going to talk to him about his father.

"Mike told me. He said, Jimmy's son he comes in here. Jimmy Costanza. I said, I haven't heard this name in a while. I liked Jimmy, I said."

And the consequence of the man himself, the thick hands and dark brows and thick hair and the slightly flattened nose, like a boxer's.

"I said. What did I say? Jimmy had a talent, this guy, he's mister invisible."

Nick could not fail to understand the weight of the occasion. But he was also wary of it, he was hesitant, he wanted to say something unsolemn because anything about his father made him apprehensive.

"The way I understand it from Mike, you think your father had no choice in the matter. How he left. How he disappeared. Somebody put him in a car. This is what you think, as his son, is what happened to the man. And they drove him somewheres. But I have to tell you one thing."

Badalato took a sip of wine from the low squarish glass.

"Nothing could of been done to your father without me knowing about it. I have to tell you this. I would of known. And even if I don't know beforehand, which isn't about to happen, but even if it did, then I find out later. I would of heard. You understand what I'm saying? It's not possible this could happen without me knowing about it sooner or later."

The warm smell of the food was making Nick hungry and he couldn't help wondering how the food could be carried here from a restaurant still steaming hot.

"I liked your father. I don't think Jimmy had serious enemies. He owed money, so what? If somebody owes you money, you work out an arrangement. There are ways to do these things where you use simple business methods, the way Mike runs a business, the way a haberdasher runs a business. You buy a suit, you pay so much down, so much a month. You buy a car and so forth."

The man looked at Nick while he spoke. He didn't sound superior or offhand. He wanted to make an honest connection and get his point across.

"Jimmy was not in a position where he could offend somebody so bad that they would go out of their way to do something. No disrespect but he was penny-ante. He had a very small operation he was running. Made the rounds of the small bettors. Mostly very small these bets. This is what he did. Factory sweepers and so forth. You have to understand. Jimmy was not in a position to be threatened by serious people."

Nick watched him take a bite of food. He could not help feeling grateful. The man stood there and talked to him. The man took time to tell him something he thought would settle the matter in Nick's own mind.

"I appreciate," he said.

"I liked your father. And I know what it's like, myself, to lose a father at an early age. From cancer this was."

"Your taking the time. I appreciate."

"Forget about it. Go finish your game," the man said.

Nick shll had the pool stick in his hand. He gestured toward the light over the table.

"Mike, tell me you're not gonna charge me for the time you guys spent eating ziti."

The men enjoyed that. He went back to the table and finished the game with Stevie and Ray. They wanted to know what he'd been talking about with the guys at the counter.

He thought of a half-ass joke but then said nothing.

He was grateful for the time, genuinely, but he didn't think he had to accept the logic of the argument. The logic, he decided, did not impress him.

They played cards down there, pinochle, and drank homemade wine, in the room under the shoemaker's shop, off the dim passageway that led out to the yards.

Bronzini looked on, sitting in when someone left but otherwise a kibitzer, unmeddlesome, content to savor the company and try the wine, sometimes good, sometimes overfermented, better used to spike a salad.

He was in a hurry to be an old man, Klara told him. Why else sit here with these elders of the streets, some of them nearly twice his age, spending whole afternoons in argument and aimless talk.

Outside in the deep slow swelter, cats were asleep in the shade and people keeping to the sides of buildings if they were out at all, moving dazed in the unexpected heat.

Down here in the basement room it was dry and quiet and stone-cool, quiet except for the voices of course, and he liked the voices, loud, crude, funny, often powerfully opinionated, all speechmakers these men, actors, declaimers, masters of insult, reaching for some moment of transcendence.

John the Super loosed a bullfrog fart.

He told them about the garbage he used to handle when he worked as a janitor downtown, temporary, in a large apartment building, elevators, doormen, dry cleaning delivered, taxis left and right.

Mannaggia VAmerica.

This goddamn country has garbage you can eat, garbage that's better to eat than the food on the table in other countries. They have garbage here you can furnish your house and feed your kids.

They played and bid and made sissing noises to acknowledge the bountiful folly of clothes in the garbage that are good enough to wear.

Albert told them about the ancient Mayans. These people did not bury their dead with gleaming jewelry and other valuable objects. They used old broken things. They put cracked vases in with the dead, or chipped cups and tarnished bracelets. They used the dead as a convenient means of garbage disposal.

This story satisfied the cardplayers. It was very satisfactory. Disrespect for the dead was a nice cruel satisfying joke, especially to men of a certain age. A joke on the dead was a beautiful joke. A joke with balls.

Albert felt isolated here in the safest of ways, the slap of the cards, the men making theatrical bids, the wine seeping into his system, and he knew finally why there was something familiar about these lost afternoons under the shoemaker's.

Like childhood, he thought. Those bedridden days when he was islanded in sheets and pillows, surrounded by books, by chess pieces, deliciously sick at times, a fever that sent him inward, sea-sweats and dreams with runny colors, lonely but not unhappy, the room a world, the safe place of imagination.

Liguori didn't take wine anymore, the printer, because he had a liver condition. He talked about the strolling musicians who used to come around, a fiddler and a trumpet player, and how people wrapped coins in paper and threw them from the windows.

Quantasold'?

His wife used to say, How much is it gonna cost me to listen to this cafone play his fiddle? But they didn't come around anymore. They had liver conditions, or half a stomach between them, or the noise of traffic, Albert said, made music futile.

The men spoke mostly English but used the dialect when an idea needed a push or shove into a more familiar place. And odd how Albert, barely nearing forty, could feel his old-manness within him, here in particular, as the voices took him back to earliest memory, the same slurred words, the dropped vowels, the vulgate, so that English was the sound of the present and Italian took him backwards, the merest intonation, a language marked inexhaustibly by the past.

Someone was evicted, put out on the street, chairs, tables, bed, right around the corner-the bed, John said, the super. Frame, spring, mattress, pillows, out on the sidewalk.

Porca miseria.

What a wretchedness it was, what a complete humiliation of the spirit. You're like a museum of poverty People walk by and look. The bed, the plates and glasses, the suitcase with your clothes, a pair of old shoes in a paper bag. Imagine shoes. And they walk by and look. Who says this, who says that, who sits in a chair, who points from a car. They should be ashamed to look. A man's shoes on the sidewalk.

There was always the neighborhood and who was leaving and who was moving in, showing up on the fringes. Tizzoons. A word Albert wished they wouldn't use. A southern dialect word, a corruption, a slur, an invective, from tizzo, he assumed, a firebrand or smoldering coal, and broadened to human dimensions in tizzone d'inferno, scoundrel, villain. But the word they used suggested a hellishness, a fiendishness that made it more unspeakable, in a way, than nigger. But they spoke it, of course, these men, these immigrants or sons of immigrants, the hordes who threaten society's peaceful sleep, who are always showing up and moving in. Tizzoon. They masked the word. They narrowed their eyes and barely moved their lips. But they spoke it, they half hissed the word in a way that made Albert wish he hadn't heard.

Spadafora told them about the washing machine that was automatic, where the woman sets a control and walks out the door and the machine washes, rinses, spins, dries, shuts off-everything automatic.

They shook their heads and made sissing noises and muttered casual curses, baffled at their luck in being here, amazed and confused, searching a way to train their skepticism on the wonders that unfolded daily.

The wine was not so drinkable this time. It was the shoemaker's own wine, Guido, and this was not wine weather anyway, and Albert wanted to be more responsible. He wanted to be a dry wise soul (Her-aclitus), less slipshod and indecisive, more willing to see into the core of a complicated matter.

He needed to take a leak and the super told him there was a utility sink he could use and gave him directions through the maze of passages.

He went past storage rooms and empty garbage cans. Then he came out into a courtyard and saw the door the super had described and went into the next building.

For a long time he wanted to believe that she had ambitions on his behalf. But now he wasn't sure of this. He thought she wanted him to campaign for department head, for assistant principal, make the moves, play the game, buy a car, buy a house. And he thought these ambitions were going unfulfilled, which made her angry and distant at times. But now he wasn't sure.

He walked through the cellarways under rows of copper piping. He found the utility closet and peed in the sink. His childhood was back there, in the voices of his mother and father, guarded, suspicious, scared at times, and in the sissing noises they made to mark distrust of the unknown world around them.

He heard a radio playing round the next bend and decided to follow the sound, music, sweetness, strings, his head clear and his bladder empty, the ever gregarious Albert, curious to see what sort of company he might encounter here.

He turned the corner and stopped next to a discarded table with a missing leg.

George Manza, George the Waiter, sat in a chair in a shabby room. There was something about him. He was not dozing or deep-thinking but there was something. He was awake but unresponsive. And there was something that kept Albert from speaking.

He stood in the doorway watching.

The room had a certain anonymous squalor. It was a room you could probably spend some time in without registering clearly what was in there. A strew of lost and found and miscellaneous things, and anonymous faded colors, and things that were stored here not for future use but because they had to go somewhere.

George sat in profile, hunched a little and breathing through his nose, slow-breathing, drawing in and letting out at long intervals, a small life in every breath.

The door was ajar and Albert watched. There was only a three-inch space between the door and the jamb, three, four inches only, but this was enough to see whatever there was to see. He didn't know exactly what this was.

The man directed a dead stare at the facing wall. There was something so stark about him that Albert thought he had no right to look. He hadn't seen George in several months, or longer even, and George looked different, thinner, smaller, severe, sitting under a radio on a shelf, the music so foreign to the figure of the man that Albert felt a need to turn it off.

But he stayed where he was in the dim passage. He was seeing something completely concealed, an unwhisperable thing under the standoff man, the taciturn man hard to befriend. He felt guilty looking into the room and guilty again moving away, backing away, but he backed away quietly and turned toward the light of a dangling bulb.

He went down the wrong passage and into a narrower place, pipes running horizontally along the walls and a cloacal stink beginning to emerge. He walked over a grated drain where the smell was profound, a sorrowful human sewage, and it took him a while to find a door that led outside.

Mike the Book had a flourish he did with his hand. It was broad and Roman, a flat hand moving parallel to the earth as a gesture of burial or a way of writing finis to something significant.

That night Albert and Klara made love in the moonlight. It was sweet and easy and seemingly endless, a love so lost to time he felt they'd found a spirit-life that would protect them from human flaw, with a small fan buzzing in the corner and an aria drifting from a radio on a fire escape somewhere.

He wasn't sure who she was, lying next to him in the dark, but this was something they could overcome together.

8

Up on the roofs, the tar beaches, they put suntan oil on their arms and legs and sat on blankets wearing shorts, the girls did, or jeans rolled to the knees, and they oiled their faces and sat listening to a portable radio until the heat was too intense to bear and then they sat a little longer.

They sang the week's top songs along with the radio, down the list from forty, and they got the words, the pauses, the dips and swerves, every intonation point-blank perfect, but only the songs they liked of course.

The tar softened and fumed and the heat beat down and the green gnats stuck to their bodies and across the way the pigeon kid sent his birds into spiral flight with a bamboo pole, and waved a towel at times, and whistled like a traffic cop, and his flock mixed in midair with a rival flock from a roof three blocks away, a hundred-birded tumult and blur, and younger birds flew with the wrong flock and were captured and sometimes killed, dispatched within the rules by the rival flyer of the other roof, and after a while the girls had to leave because the sun was just too smoking hot, singing lyrics as they rolled their blankets up.

They took the bus out to the beach and people kept crowding on and Nick got jammed in the back with Gloria instead of Loretta. They stood hanging from the straps and every time the bus turned or stopped there was a certain amount of body contact that was unavoidable, except they could have avoided it, and Nick reacted deadpan and Gloria smiled and this was a ride that took approximately forever.

Section 13 was the pickup section at the beach but they put their blanket down at the first available space because they were here with each other and the beach was just as crowded as the bus.

Guys rode the shoulders of other guys and hand-fought, the riders, in shallow water.

Blankets with radios, food, rented umbrellas, sand bodies crammed together, cardplayers, sailor hats, suntan oil.

Loretta came out of the water and he threw her a towel, the only towel they'd brought, four people, and he watched her stand above the blanket, in a vast sand nation of blankets, the horseshoe beach stretching to a rock jetty in either direction, and he watched Loretta shake the water off her hair and finger-stick the towel in her ears.

A guy stood on his hands before toppling into a blanket he didn't belong to and there were looks and words and people brushing sand.

Juju stood up to put oil on his body.

"Let them see you/'Gloria said.

"The weight lifter," Loretta said.

"Show them your forearms, Juju."

"It's funny what you can do on a beach," Loretta said, "which if you did it on a street corner, they'd throw stones."

"Flex for them, they're watching," Gloria said.

An ice-cream vendor made his way among the blankets, wearing all white, his face gone pink in the high sun, and if you bought a two-stick pop you'd never get to the second half before it melted in your hand.

Nick hit the water and went deep and felt the shatter-shock when he emerged, lungs tight and eyes salt-burned, the bracing change of worlds.

Women removed the wet bathing suits of their children with the kids wrapped in towels and then dressed the kids, underwear and all, still in towels, like writhing magic acts in the desert.

Loretta was facedown on the blanket, asleep, sand sticking to her back, and he rested on an elbow next to her, blowing softly on her shoulder.

They had the rear seat of the bus to themselves on the ride back, the motor right below them, heat beating up, and they dozed on each other's shoulders, faces sun-tight and eyes stinging slightly, tired, hungry, happy, the bus belching heat beneath them.

He stood in the dark hallway and watched her.

"Gloria, you're so bad."

"I'm not bad. You're bad."

"Ibu're so bad."

"If I'm bad, what are you?"

"Gloria, come here, Gloria."

"What do you want?"

"Come here a minute."

"What for come here? Come here for what?"

"You're a cunt, Gloria."

"What do you want?"

"You're a cunt, Gloria."

"Say something nice, Nicky."

She was smiling, he wasn't.

"You're so bad. You're really bad."

"I'm bad? Who's bad?"

She was rolling her hips under his hands and smiling.

"Ibu're a cunt in and out and up and down. You're an all-over cunt through and through."

"Try and say something nice for a change," she told him.

Nick carried the last crate of empties up through the hatchway and slid it into the side of the truck. Then he sat in the truck with Muzz the driver, who had sweat running through his shirt and eating up the colors, turning the whole shirt gray.

"I say all right."

"Let's move."

"I say all right. But this is ridiculous," Muzz said.

"Let's go, let's go."

"I got up this morning. I cun't believe it. I said to myself."

"Drive, drive, I'm dying."

"You take your salt pills? Take your salt pills."

When they were stopped for a light a car nudged them from behind.

Muzz looked into the side mirror.

"You hit my bumpah you fuck."

The guy in the car said something.

"You hit my bumpah you fuck."

The guy said something.

"You trying to do?" Muzz said.

The guy spoke into his windshield.

"Tell him," Nick said. "Where'd you get your license?"

Muzz put his head out the window but did not turn toward the car behind them.

"Where'd you get your license to drive that piece of shit?"

The guy said something into the windshield.

"Tell him Sears Roebuck or what?" Nick said.

Muzz looked into the mirror, his face an inch from the glass.

"Sears Roebuck you fuck?"

The light changed and people began to blow their horns,

"Get mad," Nick told him. "Tell him you'll ram your tire iron up his ass."

Muzz had his face an inch from the mirror, enunciating slowly into the glass. Sweat was running along the crease in his lower back, down into his pants. They were blowing their horns back there.

The school was empty now and Sister walked the halls sometimes, looking into classrooms. Others were gone, they were spending the summer at the motherhouse or visiting relatives somewhere or doing doctoral studies on some campus, sharing pathways under the shade trees with atheists and pinks.

Sometimes it was hard, with the silent classrooms and the halls so lifeless, for Sister Edgar to know who she was. There were a couple of other nuns, they came and went, and there was the Filipino janitor, Miguel, who scrubbed the hall floors even when they were untrod upon for days, a practice Sister admired of course, because you could never clean a thing so infinitesimally that it didn't need to be cleaned again the instant you were done.

Alone in her room she wore a plain shift and read "The Raven." She read it many times, memorizing the lines. She wanted to recite the poem to her class when school reopened. Her namesake poet, yes, and the dark croaking poem that made her feel Edgarish again, contoured, shaped, bevoiced, in the absence of her boys and girls.

Her fan mags were stacked in the closet. There was a picture of Jesus propped on the candlestand. A small mirror used to hang above the washbasin but she took it down because it disconcerted Sister to see herself unveiled. Hair, neck, shoulders, full face-these were things she'd left behind to enter sisterhood. The shock of the body, revealed. The subsistence individual, with cropped hair and bony shoulders. This was a sight to guard against, starker, even, than the empty classrooms of summer.

She memorized the lines and worked the rhythms and repetitions. She paced the floor, organizing a system of gesture and inflection. The sixth grade was hers and she wanted to scare the kids a little. She was their nun for the year, drilling them in eight subjects. A drawing teacher came every two weeks and a music teacher likewise, with a pitch pipe and a fruity perfume. All the rest was Sister.

She even gave them marks in Health, based on days absent and late, and times requesting trips to the lavatory, and amount of dirt and grime stuck under their fingernails and squeezed into the creases of their palms.

And she wanted to teach them fear. This was the secret heart of her curriculum and it would begin with the poem, with omen, loneliness and death, and she would make them shake in their back-to-school shoes.

She paced the floor and walked the empty halls and memorized the lines. Soon they'd come back, uniforms blue and white, notebooks crisp, fountain pens filled, schoolbags swinging from their soft fists, and she would arrange them along the walls in size places and she would seat them in alphabetical order and she would inspect their hands and nails and crack their palms with a ruler when it was called for.

They would know who she was and so would she.

And she would recite the poem to them, crooking her finger at their hearts. She would become the poem and the raven both, the roman-nosed bird, gliding out of the timeless sky and diving down upon them.

These summer nights the women on the upper floors could not wash the dishes because the johnny pump was on, kids dancing under the fanned spray, and there wasn't enough pressure to move water through the building.

All movement toward the air, the night, heads sticking out windows, women eating peaches in darkened windows, laughing in the dark up there, women waiting to feel a breeze and men in undershirts down on the stoops with radios going, a ball game from breezy Cleveland.

Kids running, sweating, shirtless, a kid with a boxful of bared ribs down the front of his body. Other kids on line at the rear of the Bungalow Bar truck, fudgsicles and orange pops, and there is the kid with ink on his tongue, there is always a kid with an inky tongue. Waterman's blue-black. What does he do, drink the stuff?

Women on the porch of a private house, sitting in the dark talking.

Older kids on rented bikes, ten cents an hour, and girls riding with some of the boys, sitting sidewise on the crossbar, and the boys riding into the gushing water, making everybody happy, the stoop sitters, the window heads, the shrieking girls on the bikes and the smaller kids who separate to let the bikes pass, all happy together, and finally the kid in his brother's bathing suit who holds a coffee can at the nozzle to flare the stream of water, geyser it high and wide.

Later the young men will stand on corners smoking as the lights go out, bullshitting the night away, and people will sleep on fire escapes, here and there, because there's a breath of air outside. Finalmente. A little bitty breeze that changes everything.

Nick sat reading a magazine with the hollow knocks volleying back from the far wall, across eight lanes.

"Nicky, what's the word?"

"Hey Jack. You're a married man, I hear."

"Went and did it. No regrets."

"She lets you out to bowl?"

"Only to bowl," Jack said.

Lonzo was crouched down there at the end of the alley, about the only black person you could see, regular, in a radius of five or six blocks. He was an ageless man, hard to tell if he was twenty-five or forty-five, and he worked setting up pins, just about every night, soft-footed, fine-featured and slightly out of tune. A little stunat', Lonzo, and they were careful not to treat him badly, the regulars at the alley, because he wore the same clothes for many days and nights and seemed to have no regular place to sleep and carried a whiskey-stink sometimes, soft-footing past the counter on his way to the lanes.

Juju came in and sat next to Nick.

"What's the word?"

"Your turn's coming," Nick said. "I see you married with three kids. Getting paunchy and going bald."

"Come on, we bowl a few lines."

"Forget about it. Not my sport. She'll let you out to bowl once a week."

"People get married and have kids. This is not normal?"

"Bowling, to me, it's like lifting weights."

"Do me a favor."

"It's something I rather be bad at it than good at it."

"But do me this one little favor."

"Because being good at it means there's something wrong with you."

"Forget I mentioned it, all right?"

"I rather die the death of a thousand cuts."

"Everytime you see a Charlie Chan movie. Which, come to think of it, don't you owe me five bucks from the last time we bowled?"

"It's a brouch," Nick told him.

"How come?"

"Because I'm not trying to win. Because winning insults my dignity. Beat me in pool I'll pay you the five dollars. Otherwise ugazz. I'm pulling a brouch."

The regulars taunted each other constantly and said things to the girls who showed up now and then and they always looked a little narrow at strangers walking in. But they were careful to be patient with ageless Lonzo even when he was slow or clumsy setting up the pins, a birdlike figure hunched aloft down there at the end of the lanes, white-eyed in the spatter of flying wood.

Juju found someone to bowl with and after a while Nick put down the magazine and left.

"Hey. Be good okay?"

"Be good, Jack."

"Be good."

"Be good," Nick said.

It was dark and quiet now and he went up the narrow street toward his building but then swung into a gateway on an impulse and went down the steps and into the yards.

There was no light in the outer passage and he felt along the walls for the door that led inside. He smelled wet stone where the super had hosed the floors. He went inside and walked past the furnace room to the door at the end of the passage.

He still felt uneasy about the basement room, about the needle and strap and spoon, but it was passing little by little into faded time, half lost in the weave of a thousand things.

George was in the room all right, playing solitaire.

"I thought you might be here."

"Cool down here."

"That's what I thought," Nick said.

George gathered and stacked the cards and shuffled them. Nick sat across the table and George dealt out three to a man and turned over a club trump and they started playing a game.

"The trouble with cards, when you play for money," George said, "and you concentrate on all those numbers and colors for hours and hours, a poker game into the morning, you can't fucking sleep when you go home."

"Your mind's too active."

"Ibu can't fucking no-way sleep."

"Your brain is racing."

"But we play a little friendly game of briscola. Maybe I can sleep in an hour or two."

"You have trouble, normally, sleeping?"

"I have trouble sleeping. I also have trouble staying awake."

They laughed and played. They played for an hour and talked about nothing much and smoked a couple of cigarettes each and dropped the butts in an old beer bottle.

"This thing I want to show you. Found it a couple of days ago," George said, "in a car I was parking at the track. Slid out from under the seat when I made a quick turn."

"The turns you make."

"I'm cautious. Hey. Compared to most guys."

"You respect the automobiles you park."

"Not so much the owners. The cars, definitely."

They laughed. George reached behind him and came up with an object from the bottom shelf, down behind paint cans and rolled linoleum.

It was a shotgun, sawed-off, the barrel extending only a couple of inches from the forearm part and the stock cut down to a pistol grip arrangement.

"What? You found it?"

"I didn't want to leave it in the car where somebody who's not responsible."

"Let me see," Nick said.

He reached across the table for the weapon. He sort of bounced it in his hands and then stood up to hold it more naturally.

"I know one thing about shotguns," George said. "You shoot with both eyes open."

"Sawed-off is illegal, right?"

"That's the other thing I know. Once you cut the thing down it's a concealed weapon."

"Looks old tome."

"It's old, rusty wore out," George said. "Piece of, basically, junk."

He posed with it, Nick did, a pirate's pistol or an old Kentucky flintlock if that's the word. It was more natural two hands than one, the left hand under the forepart to steady and point.

He hefted it and pointed it. He saw an interested smile fall across George's face. He had the weapon pointed at George. He was standing a couple of yards from George and George was in the chair and he held the weapon midbody, slightly above the hip, which meant it was pointed at George's head.

A little brightness entered George's eye. Rare in George. This brightness in the eye. And an interested look moved across his mouth. It was the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

"Is it loaded?"

"No," George said.

This made him smile a little wider. They were having a good time. And he had a look on his face that was more alive and bright than George had ever looked. Because he was interested in what they were doing.

Nick pulled the trigger,

In the extended interval of the trigger pull, the long quarter second, with the action of the trigger sluggish and rough, Nick saw into the smile on the other man's face.

Then the thing went off and the noise busted through the room and even with the chair and body flying he had the thumbmark of George's face furrowed in his mind.

The way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

He asked if the gun was loaded and the man said no and the smile was all about the risk, of course, the spirit of the dare of what they were doing.

He felt the trigger pull and then the gun went off and he was left there thinking weakly he didn't do it.

But first he pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.

Then he felt the trigger pull and heard the gun go off and the man and chair went different ways.

And the way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

He asked if the thing was loaded and the man said no and now he has a weapon in his hands that has just apparently been fired.

He force-squeezed the trigger and looked into the smile on the other man's face.

But first he posed with the gun and pointed it at the man and asked if it was loaded.

Then the noise busted through the room and he stood there thinking weakly he didn't do it.

But first he force-squeezed the trigger and saw into the smile and it seemed to have the spirit of a dare.

Why would the man say no if it was loaded?

But first why would he point the gun at the man's head?

He pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.

Then he felt the action of the trigger and saw into the slyness of the smile.

He stood above the spraddled body in the blood muck of the room, not that he clearly saw the room, and he thought he heard a sucking sound come out of the man's face, the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head.

But first he went through the sequence and it played out the same.

When they took him out to the cop car there were people on the stoops, in robes, some of them, and heads in many windows, hanging pale and hushed, and a number of young men stood near the car, some he knew well and some in passing, and they watched him closely and gravely, thinking this was a kind of history taking place, here in their own remote and common streets.