USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

AMAPOLA by Alberto Urrea

Here’s the thing—I never took drugs in my life. Yes, all right, I was the champion of my share of keggers. Me and the Pope. We were like, Bring on the Corona and the Jäger! Who wasn’t? But I never even smoked the chronic, much less used the hard stuff. Until I met Pope’s little sister. And when I met her, she was the drug, and I took her and I took her, and when I took her, I didn’t care about anything. All the blood and all the bullets in the world could not penetrate that high.

The irony of Amapola and me was that I never would have gotten close to her if her family hadn’t believed I was gay. It was easy for them to think a gringo kid with emo hair and eyeliner was un joto. By the time they found out the truth, it was too late to do much about it. All they could do was put me to the test to see if I was a stand-up boy. It was either that or kill me.

You think I’m kidding.

At first, I didn’t even know she existed. I was friends with Popo. We met in my senior year at Camelback High. Alice Cooper’s old school back in prehistory—our big claim to fame, though the freshmen had no idea who Alice Cooper was. VH1 was for grandmothers. Maybe Alice was a president’s wife or something.

You’d think the freak factor would remain high, right? But it was another hot space full of Arizona Republicans and future CEOs and the struggling underworld of auto mechanics and hopeless football jocks not yet aware they were going to be fat and bald and living in a duplex on the far side drinking too much and paying alimony to the cheerleaders they thought could never weigh 298 pounds and smoke like a coal plant.

Not Popo. The Pope. For one thing, he had more money than God. Well, his dad and his Aunt Cuca had all the money, but it drizzled upon him like the first rains of Christmas. He was always buying the beer, paying for gas and movie tickets and midnight runs to Taco Bell. “Good American food,” he called it.

He’d transferred in during my senior year. He called it his exile. I spied him for the first time in English. We were struggling to stay awake during the endless literary conversations about A Separate Peace. He didn’t say much about it. Just sat over there making sly eyes at the girls and laughing at the teacher’s jokes. I’d never seen a Beaner kid with such long hair. He looked like some kind of Apache warrior, to tell you the truth. He had double-loops in his left ear. He got drogy sometimes and wore eyeliner under one eye. Those little Born Again chicks went crazy for him when he was in his devil-boy mode.

And the day we connected, he was wearing a Cradle of Filth T-shirt. He was staring at me. We locked eyes for a second and he nodded once and we both started to laugh. I was wearing a Fields of the Nephilim shirt. We were the Pentagram Brothers that day, for sure. Everybody else must have been thinking we were goth school shooters. I guess it was a good thing Phoenix was too friggin’ hot for black trenchcoats.

Later, I was sitting outside the vice principal’s office. Ray Hulsebus, the nickelback on the football team, had called me “faggot” and we’d duked it out in the lunch court. Popo was sitting on the wooden bench in the hall.

“Good fight,” he said, nodding once.

I sat beside him.

“Wha’d you get busted for?” I asked.

He gestured at his shirt. It was originally black, but it had been laundered so often it was gray. In a circle were the purple letters, VU. Above them, in stark white, one word: HEROIN.

“Cool,” I said. “Velvet Underground.”

“My favorite song.”

We slapped hands.

“The admin’s not into classic rock,” he noted. “Think I’m… advocating substance abuse.”

We laughed.

“You like Berlin?” he asked.

“Berlin? Like, the old VH1 band?”

“Hell no! Lou Reed’s best album, dude!”

They summoned him.

“I’ll play it for ya,” he said, and walked into the office.

And so it began.

Tía Cuca’s house was the bomb. She was hooked up with some kind of Lebanese merchant. Out in Paradise Valley. The whole place was cool floor tiles and suede couches. Their pool looked out on the city lights, and you could watch roadrunners on the deck cruising for rattlers at dusk. Honestly, I didn’t know why Pope wasn’t in some rich private school like Brophy or Phoenix Country Day, but apparently his scholastic history was “spotty,” as they say. I still don’t know how he ended up at poor ol’ Camelback, but I do know it must have taken a lot of maneuvering by his family. By the time we’d graduated, we were inseparable. He went to ASU. I didn’t have that kind of money. I went to community college.

Pope’s room was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Tía Cuca had given him a detached single-car garage at the far end of the house. They’d put in a bathroom and made a bed loft on top of it. Pope had a king-size mattress up there, and a wall of CDs and a Bose iPod port, and everything was Wi-Fi’d to his laptop. There was a huge Bowie poster on the wall beside the door—in full Aladdin Sane glory, complete with the little shiny splash of come on his collarbone. It was so retro. My boy had satellite on a flat screen, and piles of DVDs around the slumpy little couch on the ground floor. I didn’t know why he was so crazy for the criminal stuff—Scarface and The Godfather. I was sick of Tony Montana and Michael Corleone! Elvis clock—you know the one, with the King’s legs dancing back and forth in place of a pendulum.

“Welcome,” Pope said on that first visit, “to Disgraceland.”

He was comical like that when you got to know him.

He turned me on to all that good classic stuff: Iggy, T. Rex, Roxy Music. He wasn’t really fond of new music, except for the darkwave guys. Anyway, there we’d be, blasting that glam as loud as possible, and it would get late and I’d just fall asleep on his big bed with him. No wonder they thought I was gay! Ha. We were drinking Buds and reading Hustler mags we’d stolen from his Uncle Abdullah or whatever his name was. Aunt Cuca once said, “Don’t you ever go home?” not mean like. Friendly banter, I’d say. But I told her, “Nah—since the divorce, my mom’s too busy to worry about it.” And in among all those excellent boys’ days and nights, I was puttering around his desk, looking at the Alien figures and the Godzillas, scoping out the new copy of El Topo he’d gotten by mail, checking his big crystals and his antique dagger, when I saw the picture of Amapola behind his stack of textbooks. Yes, she was a kid. But what a kid.

“Who’s this?” I said.

He took the framed picture out of my hand and put it back.

“Don’t worry about who that is,” he said.

Thanksgiving. Pope had planned a great big fiesta for all his homies and henchmen. Oh, yes. He took the goth-gansta thing seriously, and he had actual “hit men” (he called them that) who did errands for him, carried out security at his concerts. He played guitar for the New Nouveau Nuevos—you might remember them. One of his “soldiers” was a big Irish kid who’d been booted off the football team, Andy the Tank. Andy appeared at our apartment with an invitation to the fiesta—we were to celebrate the Nuevos’ upcoming year, and chart the course of the future. I was writing lyrics for Pope, cribbed from Roxy Music and Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World album. The invite was printed out on rolled parchment and tied with a red ribbon. Pope had style.

I went over to Tía Cuca’s early, and there she was—Amapola. She’d come up from Nogales for the fiesta, since Pope was by now refusing to go home for any reason. He wanted nothing to do with his dad, who had declared that only gay boys wore long hair or makeup or played in a band that wore feather boas and silver pants. Sang in English.

I was turning eighteen, and she was fifteen, almost sixteen. She was more pale than Popo. She had a frosting of freckles on her nose and cheeks, and her eyes were light brown, almost gold. Her hair was thick and straight and shone like some liquid. She was kind of quiet too, blushing when I talked to her, shying away from all us males.

The meal was righteous. They’d fixed a turkey in the Mexican style. It was stuffed not with bread or oysters, but with nuts, dried pineapple, dried papaya and mango slices, and raisins. Cuca and Amapola wore traditional Mexican dresses and, along with Cuca’s cook, served us the courses as we sat like members of the Corleone family around the long dining room table. Pope had seated Andy the Tank beside Fuckin’ Franc, the Nuevos’ drummer. Some guy I didn’t know but who apparently owned a Nine Inch Nails–type synth studio in his garage sat beside Franc. I was granted the seat at the end of the table, across its length from Pope. Down the left side were the rest of the Nuevos—losers all.

I was trying to keep my roving eye hidden from the Pope. I didn’t even have to guess what he’d do if he caught me checking her out. But she was so fine. It wasn’t even my perpetual state of horniness. Yes it was. But it was more. She was like a song. Her small smiles, her graciousness. The way she swung her hair over her shoulder. The way she lowered her eyes and spoke softly… then gave you a wry look that cut sideways and made savage fun of everyone there. You just wanted to be a part of everything she was doing.

“Thank you,” I said every time she refilled my water glass or dropped fresh tortillas by my plate. Not much, it’s true, but compared to the Tank or Fuckin’ Franc, I was as suave as Cary Grant.

“You are so welcome,” she’d say.

It started to feel like a dance. It’s in the way you say it, not what you say. We were saying more to each other than Cuca or Pope could hear.

And then, I was hit by a jolt that made me jump a little in my chair.

She stood behind me, resting her hands on the top of the chair. We were down to the cinnamon coffee and the red grape juice toasts. And Amapola put out one finger, where they couldn’t see it, and ran her fingernail up and down between my shoulder blades.

Suddenly, supper was over, and we were all saying goodnight, and she had disappeared somewhere in the big house and never came back out.

Soon, Christmas came, and Pope again refused to go home. I don’t know how Cuca took it, having the sullen King Nouveau lurking in her converted garage. He had a kitsch aluminum tree in there. Blue ornaments. “Très Warhol,” he sighed.

My mom had given me some cool stuff—a vintage Who T-shirt, things like that. Pope’s dad had sent presents—running shoes, French sunglasses, a .22 target pistol. We snickered. I was way cooler than Poppa Popo. I had been over to Zia Records and bought him some obscure ’70s CDs: Captain Beyond, Curved Air, Amon Duul II, the Groundhogs. Things that looked cool, not that I’d ever heard them. Pope got me a vintage turntable and the first four Frank Zappa LPs; I couldn’t listen to that shit. But still. How cool is that?

Pope wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t blind either. He’d arranged a better gift for me than all that. He’d arranged for Amapola to come visit for a week. I found out later she had begged him.

“Keep it in your pants,” he warned me. “I’m watching you.”

Oh my God. I was flying. We went everywhere for those six days. The three of us, unfortunately. Pope took us to that fancy art deco hotel downtown—the Clarendon. That one with the crazy neon lights on the walls outside and the dark gourmet eatery on the ground-floor front corner. We went to movie matinees, never night movies. It took two movies to wrangle a spot sitting next to her, getting Pope to relinquish the middle seat to keep us apart. But he knew it was a powerful movement between us, like continental drift. She kept leaning over to watch me instead of the movies. She’d laugh at everything I said. She lagged when we walked so I would walk near her. I was trying to keep my cool, not set off the Hermano Grande alarms. And suddenly he let me sit beside her, and I could smell her. She was all clean hair and sweet skin. Our arms brushed on the armrest, and we let them linger, sweat against each other. Our skin forming a thin layer of wet between us, a little of her and a little of me mixing into something made of both of us. I was aching. I could have pole-vaulted right out of the theater.

She turned sixteen that week. At a three o’clock showing of The Dark Knight, she slipped her hand over the edge of the armrest and tangled her fingers in mine.

This time, when she left, Pope allowed us one minute alone in his garage room. I kissed her. It was awkward. Delicious. Her hand went to my face and held it. She got in Cuca’s car and cried as they drove away.

“You fucker,” Popo said.

I couldn’t believe she didn’t Facebook. Amapola didn’t even e-mail. She lived across the border, in Nogales, Mexico. So the phone was out of the question, even though her dad could have afforded it. When I asked Pope about his father’s business, he told me they ran a duty-free import/export company based on each side of the border, in the two Nogaleses. Whatever. I just wanted to talk to Amapola. So I got stamps and envelopes. I was thinking, what is this, like, 1980 or something? But I wrote to her, and she wrote to me. I never even thought about the fact that instant messages or e-mail couldn’t hold perfume, or have lip prints on the paper. You could Skype naked images to each other all night long, but Amapola had me hooked through the lips with each new scent in the envelope. She put her hair in the envelopes. It was more powerful than anything I’d experienced before. Maybe it was voodoo.

At Easter, Cuca and her Lebanese hubby flew to St. Thomas for a holiday. Somehow, Pope managed to get Amapola there at the house for a few days. He was gigging a lot, and he was seeing three or four strippers. I’ll admit, he was hitting the sauce too much—he’d come home wasted and ricochet around the bathroom, banging into the fixtures like a pinball. I thought he’d break his neck on the toilet or the bathtub. The old man had been putting pressure on him—I had no idea how or what he wanted of Pope. He wanted the rock ’n’ roll foolishness to end, that’s for sure.

“You have no idea!” Pope would say, tequila stink on his breath. “If you only knew what they were really like. You can’t begin to guess.” But, you know, all boys who wear eyeliner and pay for full-sleeve tats say the same thing. Don’t nobody understand the troubles they’ve seen. I just thought Pope was caught up in being our Nikki Sixx. We were heading for fame, world tours. I thought.

And there she was, all smiles. Dressed in black. Looking witchy and magical. Pope had a date with a girl named Demitasse. Can you believe that? Because she had small breasts or something. She danced at a high-end club that catered to men who knew words like “demitasse.” She had little silver vials full of “stardust,” that’s all I really knew. It all left Pope staggering and blind, and that was what I needed to find time alone with my beloved.

We watched a couple of DVDs, and we held hands and then kissed. I freed her nipple from the lace—it was pink and swollen, like a little candy. I thought it would be brown. What did I know about Mexican girls? She pushed me away when I got on top of her, and she moved my hand back gently when it slipped up her thigh.

Pope came home walking sideways. I had no idea what time it was. I don’t know how he got home. My pants were wet all down my left leg from hours of writhing with her. When Pope slurred, “My dad’s in town,” I didn’t even pay attention. He went to Cuca’s piano in the living room and tried to play some arrangement he’d cobbled together of Tommy. Then there was a silence that grew long. We looked in there and he was asleep on the floor, under the piano.

“Shh,” Amapola said. And, “Wait here for me.” She kissed my mouth, bit my lip.

When she came back down, she wore a nightgown that drifted around her legs and belly like fog. I knelt at her feet and ran my palms up her legs. She turned aside just as my hands crossed the midpoint of her thighs, and my palms slid up over her hip bones. She had taken off her panties. I put my mouth to her navel. I could smell her through the thin material.

“Do you love me?” she whispered, fingers tangled in my hair.

“Anything. You and me.” I wasn’t even thinking. “Us.”

She yanked my hair.

“Do,” she said. “You. Love me?”

Yank. It hurt.

“Yes!” I said. “Okay! Jesus! Love you!”

We went upstairs.

“Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!” Popo was saying, ripping off the sheets. “Now! Now! Now!”

Amapola covered herself and rolled away with a small cry. Light was blasting through the windows. I thought he was going to beat my ass for sleeping with her. But he was in a panic.

“Get dressed. Dude—get dressed now!”

“What? What?”

“My dad.”

He put his fists to his head.

“Oh shit. My dad!”

She started to cry.

I was in my white boxers in the middle of the room.

“Guys,” I said. “Guys! Is there some trouble here?”

Amapola dragged the sheet off the bed and ran, wrapped, into the bathroom.

“You got no idea,” Pope said. “Get dressed.”

We were in the car in ten minutes. We sped out of the foothills and across town. Phoenix always looks empty to me when it’s hot, like one of those sci-fi movies where all the people are dead and gone and some vampires or zombies are hiding in the vacant condos, waiting for night. The streets are too wide, and they reflect the heat like a Teflon cooking pan. Pigeons might explode into flame just flying across the street to escape the melting city bus.

Pope was saying, “Just don’t say nothing. Just show respect. It’ll be okay. Right, sis?”

She was in the backseat.

“Don’t talk back,” she said. “Just listen. You can take it.”

“Yeah,” Pope said. “You can take it. You better take it. That’s the only way he’ll respect you.”

My head was spinning.

Apparently, the old man had come to town to see Pope and meet me, but Pope, that asshole, had been so wasted he forgot. But it was worse than that. The old man had waited at a fancy restaurant. For both of us. You didn’t keep Big Pop waiting.

You see, he had found my letters. He had rushed north to try to avert the inevitable. And now he was seething, they said, because Pope’s maricón best friend wasn’t queer at all, and was working his mojo on the sweet pea. My scalp still hurt from her savage hair-pulling. I looked back at her. Man, she was as fresh as a sea breeze. I started to smile.

“Ain’t no joke,” Pope announced.

We fretted in silence.

“Look,” he said. “It won’t seem like it at first, but Pops will do anything for my sister. Anything. She controls him, man. So keep cool.”

When we got there, Pope said, “The bistro.” I had never seen it before, not really traveling in circles that ate French food or ate at “bistros.” Pops was standing outside. He was a slender man, balding. Clean-shaven. Only about five-seven. He wore aviator glasses, that kind that turn dark in the sun. They were deep gray over his eyes. He was standing with a Mexican in a uniform. The other guy was over six feet tall and had a good gut on him. What Pope called a “food baby” from that funny movie everybody liked.

The old man and the soldier stared at me. I wanted to laugh. That’s it? I mean, really? A little skinny bald guy? I was invincible with love.

Poppa turned and entered the bistro without a word. Pope and Amapola followed, holding hands. The stout soldier dude just eyeballed me and walked in. I was left alone on the sidewalk. I followed.

They were already sitting. It was ice cold. The way I liked it. I tried not to see Amapola’s nipples. But I noticed her pops looking at them. And then the soldier. Pops told her, “Tápate, cabrona.” She had brought a little sweater with her, and now I knew why. She primly draped herself.

“Dad…” said Pope.

“Shut it,” his father said.

The eyeglasses had only become half-dark. You could almost see his eyes.

A waiter delivered a clear drink.

“Martini, sir,” he said.

It was only about eleven in the morning.

Big Poppa said, “I came to town last night to see you.” He sipped his drink. “I come here, to this restaurant. Is my favorite. Is comida Frances, understand? Quality.” Another sip. He looked at the soldier—the soldier nodded. “I invite you.” He pointed at Pope. Then at her. Then at me. “You, you, and you. Right here. Berry expensive.” He drained the martini and snapped his fingers at the waiter. “An’ I sit here an’ wait.” The waiter hurried over and took the glass and scurried away.

“Me an’ my brother, Arnulfo.”

He put his hand on the soldier’s arm.

“We wait for you.”

Popo said, “Dad…”

“Callate el osico, chingado,” his father breathed. He turned his head to me and smiled. He looked like a moray eel in a tank. Another martini landed before him.

“You,” he said. “Why you dress like a girl?” He sipped. “I wait for you, but you don’t care. No! Don’t say nothing. Listen. I wait, and you no show up here to my fancy dinner. Is okay. I don’t care.” He waved his hand. “I have my li’l drink, and I don’t care.” He toasted me. He seemed like he was coiled, steel springs inside his gut. My skin was crawling and I didn’t even know why.

“I wait for you,” he said. “Captain Arnulfo, he wait. You don’t care, right? Is okay! I’m happy. I got my martinis, I don’t give a shit.”

He smiled.

He pulled a long cigar out of his inner pocket. He bit the end off and spit it on the table. He put the cigar in his mouth. Arnulfo took out a gold lighter and struck a blue flame.

The waiter rushed over and murmured, “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a nonsmoking bistro. You’ll have to take it outside.”

The old man didn’t even look at him—just stared at me through those gray lenses.

“Is hot outside,” he said. “Right, gringo? Too hot?” I nodded—I didn’t know what to do. “You see?” the old man said.

“I must insist,” the waiter said.

“Bring the chef,” the old man said.

“Excuse me?”

“Get the chef out here for me. Now.”

The waiter brought out the chef, who bent down to the old man. Whispers. No drama. But the two men hurried away and the waiter came back with an ashtray. Arnulfo lit Poppa’s cigar.

He blew smoke at me and said, “Why you do this violence to me?”

“I…” I said.

“Shut up.”

He snapped his fingers again, and food and more martinis arrived. I stared at my plate. Snails in garlic butter. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t even sip the water. Smoke drifted to me. I could feel the gray lenses focused on me. Pope, that chickenshit, just ate and never looked up. Amapola sipped iced coffee and stared out the window.

After forty minutes of this nightmare, Poppa pushed his plate away.

“Oye,” he said, “tú.”

I looked up.

“Why you wan’ fock my baby daughter?”

Sure, I trembled for a while after that. I got it, I really did. But did good sense overtake me? What do you think? I was full-on into the Romeo and Juliet thing, and she was even worse. Parents—you want to ensure your daughters marry young? Forbid them from seeing their boyfriends. Just try it.

“Uncle Arnie,” as big dark Captain Arnulfo was called in Cuca’s house, started hanging around. A lot. I wasn’t, like, stupid. I could tell what was what—he was sussing me out (that’s a word Pope taught me). He brought Bass Pale Ale all the time. He sidled up to me and said dumb things like, “You like the sexy?” Pope and I laughed all night after Uncle Arnie made his appearances. “You make the sexy-sexy in cars?” What a dork, we thought.

My beloved showered me with letters. I had no way of knowing if my own letters got to her or not, but she soon found an Internet café in Nogales and sent me cyber-love. Popo was drying up a little, not quite what you’d call sober, but occasionally back on the Earth, and he started calling me “McLovin.” I think it was his way of trying to tone it down. “Bring it down a notch, homeboy,” he’d say when I waxed overly poetic about his sister.

It was a Saturday when it happened. I was IM-ing Amapola. That’s all I did on Saturday afternoons. No TV, no cruising in the car, no movies or pool time. I fixed a huge vat of sun tea and hit my laptop and talked to her. Mom was at work—she was always at work or out doing lame shit like bowling. It was just me, the computer, my distant girlie, and the cat rubbing against my leg. I’ll confess to you—don’t laugh—I cried at night thinking about her.

Does this explain things a little? Pope said I was whipped. I’d be like, that’s no way to talk about your sister. She’s better than all of you people! He’d just look at me out of those squinty Apache eyes. “Maybe,” he’d drawl. “Maybe…” And I was just thinking about all that on Saturday, going crazier and crazier with the desire to see her sweet face every morning, her hair on my skin every night, mad in love with her, and I was IM-ing her that she should just book. Run away. She was almost seventeen already. She could catch a bus and be in Phoenix in a few hours and we’d jump on I-10 and drive to Cali. I didn’t know what I imagined—just us, in love, on a beach. And suddenly the laptop crashed. Just gone—black screen before Amapola could answer me. That was weird, I thought. I cursed and kicked stuff, then I grabbed a shower and rolled.

When I cruised over to Aunt Cuca’s, she was gone. So was Pope. Uncle Arnie was sitting in the living room in his uniform, sipping coffee.

“They all go on vacation,” he said. “Just you and me.”

Vacation? Pope hadn’t said anything about vacations. Not that he was what my English profs would call a reliable narrator.

Arnie gestured for me to sit. I stood there.

“Coffee?” he offered.

“No, thanks.”

“Sit!”

I sat.

I can’t relate the conversation very clearly, since I never knew what the F Arnie was mumbling, to tell you the truth. His accent was all bandido. I often just nodded and smiled, hoping not to offend the dude, lest he freak out and bust caps in me. That’s a joke. Kind of. But then I’d wonder what I’d just agreed to.

“You love Amapola,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He smiled sadly, put his hand on my knee.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He nodded. Sighed. “Love,” he said. “Is good, love.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You not going away, right?”

I shook my head. “No way.”

“So. What this means? You marry the girl?”

Whoa. Marry? I… guess… I was going to marry her. Someday.

Sure, you think about it. But to say it out loud. That was hard. Yet I felt like some kind of breakthrough was happening here. The older generation had sent an emissary.

“I believe,” I said, mustering some balls, “yes. I will marry Amapola. Someday. You know.”

He shrugged, sadly. I thought that was a little odd, frankly. He held up a finger and busted out a cell phone, hit the speed button, and muttered in Spanish. Snapped it shut. Sipped his coffee.

“We have big family reunion tomorrow. You come. Okay? I’ll fix up all with Amapola’s papá. You see. Yes?”

I smiled at him, not believing this turn of events.

“Big Mexican rancho. Horses. Good food. Mariachis.” He laughed. “And love! Two kids in love!”

We slapped hands. We smiled and chuckled. I had some coffee.

“I pick you up here at seven in the morning,” he said. “Don’t be late.”

The morning desert was purple and orange. The air was almost cool. Arnie had a Styrofoam cooler loaded with Dr. Peppers and Cokes. He drove a bitchin’ S-Class Benz. It smelled like leather and aftershave. He kept the satellite tuned to BBC Radio 1. “You like the crazy maricón music, right?” he asked.

“… Ah… right.”

It was more like flying than driving, and when he sped past Arivaca, I wasn’t all that concerned. I figured we were going to Nogales, Arizona. But we slid through that little dry town like a shark and crossed into Mex without slowing down. He just raised a finger off the steering wheel and motored along, saying, “You going to like this.”

And then we were through Nogales, Mexico, too. Black and tan desert. Saguaros and freaky burned-looking cactuses. I don’t know what that stuff was. It was spiky.

We took a long dirt side road. I was craning around, looking at the bad black mountains around us.

“Suspension makes this road feel like butter,” Arnie noted.

We came out in a big valley. There was an airfield of some sort there. Mexican army stuff—trucks, Humvees. Three or four hangars or warehouses. Some shiny Cadillacs and SUVs scattered around.

“You going to like this,” Arnie said. “It’s a surprise.”

There was Big Poppa Popo, the old man himself. He was standing with his hands on his hips. With a tall American. Those dark gray lenses turned toward us. We parked. We got out.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Shut up,” said Arnie.

“Where’s the rancho?” I asked.

The American burst out laughing.

“Jesus, kid!” he shouted. He turned to the old man. “He really is a dumbshit.”

He walked away and got in a white SUV. He slammed the door and drove into the desert, back the way we had come. We stood there watching him go. I’m not going to lie—I was getting scared.

“You marry Amapola?” the old man said.

“One day. Look, I don’t know what you guys are doing here, but—”

“Look at that,” he interrupted, turning from me and gesturing toward a helicopter sitting on the field. “Huey. Old stuff, from your Vietnam. Now the Mexican air force use it to fight las drogas.” He turned to me. “You use las drogas?”

“No! Never.”

They laughed.

“Sure, sure,” the old man said.

“Ask Amapola!” I cried. “She’ll tell you!”

“She already tell me everything,” he said.

Arnie put his arm around my shoulders. “Come,” he said, and started walking toward the helicopter. I resisted for a moment, but the various Mexican soldiers standing around were suddenly really focused and not slouching and were walking along all around us.

“What is this?” I said.

“You know what I do?” the old man asked.

“Business?” I said. My mind was blanking out, I was so scared.

“Business.” He nodded. “Good answer.”

We came under the blades of the big helicopter. I’d never been near one in my life. It scared the crap out of me. The Mexican pilots looked out their side windows at me. The old man patted the machine.

“President Bush!” he said. “DEA!”

I looked at Arnie. He smiled, nodded at me. “Fight the drogas,” he said.

The engines whined and chuffed and the rotor started to turn.

“Is very secret what we do,” said the old man. “But you take a ride and see. Is my special treat. You go with Arnulfo.”

“Come with me,” Arnie said.

“You go up and see, then we talk about love.”

The old man hurried away, and it was just me and Arnie and the soldiers with their black M16s.

“After you,” Arnie said.

He pulled on a helmet. Then we took off. It was rough as hell. I felt like I was being pummeled in the ass and lower back when the engines really kicked in. And when we rose, my guts dropped out through my feet. I closed my eyes and gripped the webbing Arnie had fastened around my waist. “Holy God!” I shouted. It was worse when we banked—the side doors were wide open, and I screamed like a girl, sure I was falling out. The Mexicans laughed and shook their heads, but I didn’t care.

Arnie was standing in the door. He unhooked a big gun from the stanchion where it had been strapped with its barrel pointed up. He dangled it in the door on cords. He leaned toward me and shouted, “Sixty caliber! Hung on double bungees!” He slammed a magazine into the thing and pulled levers and snapped snappers. He leaned down to me again and shouted, “Feel the vibration? You lay on the floor, it makes you come!”

I thought I heard him wrong.

We were beating out of the desert and into low hills. I could see our shadow below us, fluttering like a giant bug on the ground and over the bushes. The seat kicked up and we were rising.

Arnulfo took a pistol from his belt and showed me.

“Amapola,” he said.

I looked around for her, stupidly. But then I saw what was below us, in a watered valley. Orange flowers. Amapola. Poppies.

“This is what we do,” Arnulfo said.

He raised his pistol and shot three rounds out the door and laughed. I put my hands over my ears.

“You’re DEA?” I cried.

He popped off another round.

“Is competition,” he said. “We do business.”

Oh my God.

He fell against me and was shouting in my ear and there was nowhere I could go. “You want Amapola? You want to marry my sobrina? Just like that? Really? Pendejo.” He grabbed my shirt. “Can you fly, gringo? Can you fly?” I was shaking. I was trying to shrink away from him, but I could not. I was trapped in my seat. His breath stank, and his lips were at my ear like hers might have been, and he was screaming, “Can you fly, chingado? Because you got a choice! You fly, or you do what we do.”

I kept shouting, “What? What?” It was like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense. “What?”

“You do what we do, I let you live, cabrón.”

“What?”

“I let you live. Or you fly. Decide.”

“I don’t want to die!” I yelled. I was close to wetting my pants. The Huey was nose-down and sweeping in a circle. I could see people below us, running. A few small huts. Horses or mules. A pickup started to speed out of the big poppy field. Arnulfo talked into his mike and the helicopter heaved after it. Oh no, oh no. He took up the .60 caliber and braced himself. I put my fingers in my ears. And he ripped a long stream of bullets out the door. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. Louder than the loudest thing you can imagine. So loud your insides jump, but it all becomes an endless rip of noise, like thunder cracking inside your bladder and your teeth hurt from gritting against it.

The truck just tattered, if metal can tatter. The roof of the cab blew apart and the smoking ruin of the vehicle spun away below us and vanished in dust and smoke and steam.

I was crying.

“Be a man!” Arnulfo yelled.

We were hovering. The crew members were all turned toward me, staring.

Arnie unsnapped my seat webbing.

“Choose,” he said.

“I want to live.”

“Choose.”

You know how it goes in Die Hard movies. How the hero kicks the bad guy out the door and sprays the Mexican crew with the .60 and survives a crash landing. But that’s not what happened. That didn’t even cross my mind. Not even close. No, I got up on terribly shaky legs, so shaky I might have pitched out the open door all by myself to discover that I could not, in fact, fly. I said, “What do I do?” And the door gunner grabbed me and shoved me up to the hot gun. The ground was wobbling far below us, and I could see the Indian workers down there. Six men and a woman. And they were running. I was praying and begging God to get me out of this somehow and I was thinking of my beautiful lover and I told myself I didn’t know how I got there and the door gunner came up behind me now, he slammed himself against my ass, and he said, “Hold it, lean into it. It’s gonna kick, okay? Finger on the trigger. I got you.” And I braced the .60 and I tried to close my eyes and prayed I’d miss them and I was saying, Amapola, Amapola, over and over in my mind, and the gunner was hard against me, he was erect and pressing it into my buttocks and he shouted, “For love!” and I squeezed the trigger.

THE TIK by John O’Brien

Part of me wished that I had asked the cab to wait. I hadn’t. I stared up at the big double doors, weathered from the desert sun, yes, but still so imposing that you half-expected to see a muscled bodyguard when they opened. The doorbell didn’t work. It never had. I felt the familiar quiver begin in the back of my neck as twice I dropped the ornate knocker, an upside-down black iron cross. I peered over my back to see if the cab was still in sight. The long drive was empty.

Despite the impending nightfall, I noticed the German shepherd asleep on the grass, his white face a beacon in the otherwise black lawn. I knew this dog and wondered if he would remember me. I walked over to nudge him awake.

When I had last left this house over ten years ago, I was certain that I was through with this all-consuming part of my life, but as I bent over to pet the dog, it was clear this place was far from finished with me; rather, like the dog, it was merely lying in wait for some new awakening. The shepherd lifted his head and growled, but whether the snarl was for me or something else, I did not know. I followed his gaze and was startled to find that I was being watched by a tall slim figure, standing where only moments before the closed doors had been.

“Timmers, you’re back,” she said, not at all surprised to see me.

I cringed at her easy, reflexive use of my nickname; at her prosaic manner of observation, as if I’d just returned from a short walk—when in fact I had been gone for a decade. This meeting was nothing less than heart-stopping for me.

“Melinda, I… I didn’t hear the door open. You startled me…” So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t remember anything that I had planned to say. “You sound as if you’ve been expecting me.” She ignored this.

“Come in,” she said.

As I followed her through the foyer and into the heart of the house, I began to feel a sort of resignation; a feeling that, now that I had set things in motion, I could sit back and relax, free from the burden of decision making. It was not an unpleasant outlook.

“Christ,” I said as we walked into the living room, its windowed ceiling a full twenty feet above me. “I’d forgotten how damn big this place is.”

“I doubt that,” she responded. “Still drink bourbon?”

“Finally a question. Apparently there is at least one thing that you’re not sure of.” I was starting to feel cocky. How else could I feel? I’d come this far into the house, into my past. The less I thought about it, the better it felt. I was comfortable here. Melinda understood me in a way that no one else could.

“Not really, Timmers.” She reached into an antique Spanish sideboard and extracted a dusty bottle of Wild Turkey.

“My brand, even. I’m impressed.” I narrowed my eyes and grinned at her. Her presence was making me giddy. I was excited—this was so easy. She knew why I was here. It was like being in a cathouse—no pretense. You ask for sex and they give it to you. But a cathouse would seem like a church compared to this place.

“Your bottle, actually,” she said.

“Fuck it,” I said. “We can drink all we want later.”

Without missing a beat she set down the bottle, picked up my hand, and turned silently toward the staircase. I willingly followed her determined walk and flowing silk robe. This was the beginning of the end of ten years’ anxiety. It seemed as if I’d barely been away. Right now nothing seemed less relevant than my time away from her.

But I did have that time, and I had to remember that. I had to remember the futile years of trying to ignore this hidden life, with Melinda and this extravagant house standing at the center. I had to remember why I was here.

Why was I here?

What if I did like it? Liking it—living it—had been the whole point. I was back now and it was time to unlearn compassion and let Melinda take me again.

We climbed the staircase to her bedroom; ten years since it had been our bedroom and yet it looked exactly the same to me. Perhaps it would always be our bedroom. Melinda dropped my hand and turned to face me. She stepped back and looked into my eyes as she untied her robe and let it fall to the floor. I was amazed at her perfection. Though life had left its many marks on my body, she was just as I remembered—flawless, still possessing all the curves and textures of a nineteen-year-old showgirl.

She unbuttoned my shirt and in a moment I, too, was naked. Melinda wrapped herself around me. I lifted her onto the bed, the raw heat rising inside of me. It was exactly as I remembered. I ran my hands along her thighs, stopping short of the cleft of her. Her nipples were hard and brown. I took one between my teeth, one between thumb and finger, and bit and pinched with exacting pressure. Melinda cried out, but did not move to stop me. She was open beneath me, ready. It was time. I licked and tasted her until her legs quivered on the brink. I stopped short of her orgasm and lay on top of her, breathing in the intermission. Finally, I pushed into her. She climaxed in waves, acute bursts of pleasure. I was close behind, teetering on that exquisite edge.

Melinda sensed this, as I knew she would, and stopped all her motion. At once my imminent climax was completely in her control. She slid from beneath me and sat up on the side of the bed. She opened the nightstand drawer. I waited, trembling, as she extracted a stainless steel tray and with slick efficiency prepared the injection. The glowing black fluid filled the syringe. My hardness raged. I swallowed against it all, my throat dry.

At that moment it was impossible for me to understand how I had stayed away from this drug—we called it “The Tik”—for all those years. I had never heard of it outside this room and had never looked for it elsewhere. Somehow I knew that it existed nowhere but here. This place was as much a part of The Tik as I, moments before, had been a part of Melinda. She lived here in a desert oasis with it, and the whole scene had always been one great, indivisible, seductive, eternal entity to me. I had once believed that I could escape it by running. Now I had run back, and was going to try to escape another way.

Melinda tapped the needle of the syringe with a long red fingernail. The sexual tension and my own anticipation had my heart nearly beating out of my chest. My bloodstream was primed to rush the drug to my brain. Melinda turned, ready with the needle. I closed my eyes and offered my arm.

The beautiful pinch.

As the hot fluid rushed through my veins, Melinda prepared another hypo and injected herself. Then she dropped the syringe onto the tray and kicked it, lunging into me. As the stainless steel and empty vial clattered to the floor, Melinda clutched my waist and took me into her mouth. The heat of The Tik inside of me and the heat of Melinda’s tongue outside of me combined into that perfect euphoria I’d known only within these walls. She held me on the brink for as long as she could. Then I yelled out, pumping into her.

The feeling of being alive poured over me, elemental and singular. We were finally together again.

The Tik.

We blinked in the aftermath, verifying it was real. I lay on my back, Melinda’s head on my stomach. Then she reared up and playfully bit me. I laughed and pushed her off. Full of new energy, I bounded out of the bed and down the stairs, returning with the bottle of bourbon. Melinda already had her panties on and was rolling up her fishnets. I sucked the bottle as I watched her dress. She grabbed it from me and took a big swallow.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said. She shoved the bottle back into my hand and pulled open the door of what had been my closet. I was stunned. Before me hung all my old clothes, just as I had left them.

I laughed. “Unfuckingbelievable. Do you still have the Jag too?”

“In the garage,” she said.

Nothing had changed.

Melinda and the drug were working in perfect harmony. My head spun with satisfaction and lust. I grinned wildly and shook on the leather jacket that had always fit me like a second skin. It still did. My boots, my jeans, everything was in place. I gulped some more bourbon and pounced on Melinda. We fell onto the bed and I ripped off the black lace bra she had just put on. She laughed as the zipper on my jacket scratched her. We fucked again, more perfunctorily this time, then got dressed.

After finishing the bottle of bourbon we went down to the garage. Melinda’s vintage Jag, a black 1967 XKE, was still in perfect shape, just as I, by now, expected everything to be. The car had also fit me. I slid into the driver’s seat and palmed the bulb of the stick shift. Melinda’s perfume blended with the smell of leather and night air. We squealed down the driveway and onto the moneyed side street. The ragtop was down and the wind blew Melinda’s hair all around. I flew through a red light. We vanished into the night.

We headed for the Strip, battling traffic. I didn’t mind. I basked in the stares this beautiful woman and car garnered beneath the streetlights and neon.

“Let’s go to the Barbary Coast,” I said.

“The Barbary Coast? You’ve got to be kidding,” said Melinda. “Why?”

“Dunno,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “The $3.99 prime rib dinner?”

Melinda laughed, throwing her head back. “Oh, Timmers,” she said. “I’d forgotten how you make me laugh.”

We parked off the Strip and started walking hand in hand through the crowd. The Tik pulsed inside me and mixed with the bourbon. Melinda was on my arm. I was ten feet tall.

Overweight Midwesterners stared at the two of us, wishing they could be us. We were the Las Vegas they came to see. A middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts eyed Melinda’s long legs.

“Loosest slots on the Strip,” I said to him with a conspiratorial nod as we passed. Completely stunned, he looked up at me, his mouth agape. Melinda and I folded with laughter, then broke into a run.

After a few minutes, Melinda stopped, breathless, and turned to me. She squeezed my hand. Her nails broke the skin.

“It feels so good to have you back, Tim,” she said.

I pushed her against the cold brick wall and put my mouth on hers while pressing my thigh between her legs.

“I love you,” I whispered. My hand was sticky with blood.

She returned my kiss, our tongues rolling together until Melinda pulled back.

“Why then,” she said, “are you going to make me go in there?” She nodded toward the billowing entrance of the Coast.

“Come on,” I said. “I feel so good. I feel like slumming. And if we don’t find any action in there”—I indicated the space in front of me with a grandiose sweep of my arm—“the entire Strip awaits us.” We stepped through the forced air plenum and into the clanging miasma of the casino.

A semi-attractive blonde with a very large chest caught my attention. She was sitting alone at a blackjack table.

“I’m going to the girls’ room,” Melinda shouted over the cacophony of bells and chimes that rang from the slot carousels. “I’ll catch up to you in a couple of minutes.”

I nodded and watched her meander off, as did most of the people she passed. The fishnet stockings had that effect.

I sat down next to the blonde and threw a hundred dollars on the table. The dealer set a short stack of chips in front of me as a cocktail waitress in a bad pirate costume appeared at my elbow.

“A double bullshot,” I said, placing a chip on her tray.

“What’s that?” said the blonde as she slurped at a frothy blender drink.

“It’s beef bouillon and vodka,” I said, peering at my cards.

She wrinkled her nose into a grimace. “Ewww! Why are you drinking that?” The end of her straw was coated in waxy orange lipstick.

“I’m hungry,” I said. After all, I was. I nodded yes to a hit from the dealer.

“That’s so gross,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I said. Maybe semi-attractive was too generous a description for her, stacked or not. The bad casino lighting wasn’t shoring up her odds either. “Now shut up and finish your snow cone.”

“Okay, I will,” she said. “And then you can.”

“I can what?” I said, rolling my eyes. The waitress set down my drink with exactly the speed a pre-tip buys. I placed another chip on her tray and turned back to the blonde.

“You can fuck me,” she said as the dealer flipped over his jack and ace.

“Who the fuck are you?” With characteristically perfect timing and an equally perfect brunette, led by the hand, Melinda intervened. The blonde sized up the two women and picked up her drink. “I’m more than you could handle anyway,” she said, then collected her remaining chips and walked away, flipping us off.

“Tim, this is Teena,” said Melinda, not even looking after the blonde. “She’s new in town. Just got a job as a waitress over at the Peppermill.”

“After I finish the training course,” said Teena. “Of course,” she added, giggling at her own quip.

“Right,” said Melinda. “After you finish the training course.” She wrapped an arm around Teena’s waist and turned to me. “She’s coming home with us for a nightcap.” One look at Teena and I could see that Melinda had bribed her with the coke she always kept in her purse.

“Hi, Tim. I saw you walk in and thought you were really cute. I’m really glad to meet you,” said Teena. She seemed like a willing little lamb, naïve and very sexy. Exactly what I’d had in mind.

“With that perky attitude,” I said, “my bet is you’ll sail right through that training course.” Teena gave me a prom queen smile. Perfect, just like everything else so far.

“So what do you say, Tim?” asked Melinda, though she already knew the answer. “Nightcaps at our place?”

Our place. “That sounds just fine,” I said. “First let’s have a drink for the road.” I pushed a chip toward the dealer and steered the girls around to the bar. “Will you be riding with us, Teena, or do you have your own car?”

“Teena will follow us out to the house,” said Melinda, lifting an eyebrow down the bar.

I smiled at Teena.

“What can I get for you?” said the bartender, one eye eclipsed by a fake black eye patch.

Melinda looked at me. “Make a wish,” she said.

I motioned Teena to park next to the Jag in the garage. Melinda took Teena inside to show her around while I looked over Teena’s Honda and then locked up the garage. I went in the back door of the house and found Melinda and Teena necking in the kitchen. I didn’t seem to disturb them.

“Save some for me, Mel,” I said. “Anyone want a drink?”

“Tequila,” said Melinda.

“Got any champagne?” asked Teena.

I headed for the sideboard to crack open a new bottle of bourbon.

“Join us upstairs when you’re ready, Timmers,” Melinda shouted down the hall. She was anxious despite her cool veneer. It had been a long time for her too. I was eager to do a number on Teena, but something vague seemed to be holding me back. Fuck that, I thought, and took the longest drink of bourbon in my life.

By the time I got up to the bedroom, Melinda’s face was buried between Teena’s legs. Teena seemed a little dazed but was holding up her end quite well, no doubt aided by the small mountain of coke next to her on the nightstand. Melinda saw me and bolted upright. She was covered with sweat.

“Fuck her, Tim,” she said. “Fuck her proper.”

Teena rolled over and did another line, then she lay back on the bed. “Yeah, fuck me,” she said.

I did. I was rough but she took it. When I got off her, bruises started to form on the insides of her thighs. I reached for the bourbon and watched her and Melinda work on each other. I felt strange. The Tik still moved through me, though now at an even keel. I drank more bourbon.

I drank for a long time.

Melinda screamed and dug her nails into Teena’s skin. Teena threw her head back on the pillow. Melinda rolled over and beckoned me. My head was spinning. I placed my hands on Teena’s knees and opened her as Melinda reached for the nightstand. I centered all my consciousness on Teena. I focused my whole body on my mouth, and my mouth on her. Melinda moved on the bed. I heard a whisper of rushing air. Teena stiffened and bucked under me. A hot spray rained across my back. Something clinked against the wall. I squeezed Teena’s waist with all my strength. Tears came to my eyes. Teena’s body went limp.

I lay hugging her, my breath so fast. The room was quiet. After a time I looked up at Melinda. She smiled and wiped the blood from her eyes. She got off the bed and picked up the straight razor, which she had thrown against the wall. She dropped it in the nightstand drawer.

“You okay, Timmers?” she asked. “I know it’s been awhile.” She paused, then reached back into the drawer. “Maybe it’s time for another shot.”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

I picked up the bourbon and had a sip. Melinda closed the drawer and turned toward the bathroom.

“Suit yourself, but we shouldn’t wait too long,” she said. “I’m going to clean up. Will you take care of that?” She nodded at the blood-soaked bed and the still body, naked and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

“Of course I will,” I said. “Don’t I always?”

I finished the bourbon as Melinda closed the bathroom door behind her. Out the window, dawn announced itself quietly with a barely perceptible change of color in the east. A car started off in the distance and I reflexively glanced at the garage door. It was still locked. I really didn’t worry. Melinda and I had always led a charmed existence. I sighed and put on my pants.

“Wash my back, Tim,” Melinda called from the shower when she heard me enter the bathroom. I opened the curtain and soaped up my hands. I massaged her back as I washed it.

“Ahhh, that feels good,” she said. “Get in here. I’m ready for a good fucking.”

She put her cheek against the wall and closed her eyes. I pulled her razor from my back pocket. With one motion I grabbed her hair and drew the blade across her throat. For an instant she stretched her neck out, exposing it even more, and then she slumped quietly to the bottom of the tub. I turned off the water and went into the bedroom, dropped the razor into her nightstand.

I cleaned up and finished dressing in the clothes that I had arrived in the day before. I kissed Teena’s forehead. I kissed Melinda’s hand and held it to my mouth for a long time.

Downstairs I lit a small fire on the love seat in the living room, then went to the kitchen and turned on all the gas jets. On my way out to the garage I stopped and, as an afterthought, picked up my leather jacket.

I backed the Jag out of the drive and looked for but did not see the German shepherd. It suddenly occurred to me how very old he must have been. As I put the Jag into gear, my eyes paused at the mailbox, an unlikely witness. I pulled away and, driving down the road, watched it disappear in the rearview mirror. I thought about how badly I needed to sleep.

LIGHTHOUSE by S.J. Rozan

It sucked to be him.

Paul huffed and wheezed up Lighthouse Avenue, pumping his bony legs and wiping sweat from his face. His thighs burned and his breath rasped but he knew better than to ask if he could stop. One more uphill block, he figured, then he’d turn and head back down. That would be okay. That would take him past the mark one more time, even though there wasn’t much to see from the street. A wall with a couple of doors, a chain-link fence, raggedy bright flags curling in the autumn breeze. The building itself, the little museum, nestled into the hillside just below. Paul didn’t really have to see it. He didn’t have to do this run at all, truth be told. He’d been there a bunch of times, inside, in that square stone room. He used to go just to stand in the odd cool stillness, just to look at those peculiar statues with all their arms and their fierce eyes. Long time ago, of course, before The Guys came, but the place hadn’t changed and he already knew all he had to know about it. Alarm, yes; dog, no. Most important, people in residence: no.

He kept climbing, closing in on the end of the block. Paul liked it here. Lighthouse Hill was easy pickings.

It always had been, back from when he was a kid. The first B&E he pulled, he boosted a laptop from the pink house on Edinboro. Years ago, but he remembered. The planning, the job, his slamming heart. The swag. Everything.

It was good he did, because The Guys liked to hear about it. While he was planning a job they liked to help, and then when it was done they liked to hear the story over and over. Even though they’d been there. They wanted him to compare each job to other jobs so they could point out dumb things he did, and stuff that went right. That used to piss Paul off, how they made him go over everything a million times. Turned out, though, it was pretty worthwhile to listen to them, even though in the beginning he’d wondered what a bunch of stupid aliens knew about running a B&E. He was right about Roman too. Roman really was stupid. He never knew anything about anything. Paul had to be careful when and where he said that, even just thought it, because if Roman was listening he could do that kick thing and give Paul one of those sonuvabitch headaches. There was a way he’d found where he could sometimes think about stuff, sort of sideways and not using words, and The Guys didn’t notice. But the thing was, even if Roman did catch Paul thinking about how stupid he was, it didn’t matter; it was still true.

Larry and Stoom, though, they were pretty sharp. “You mean, for aliens?” Stoom asked once, with that sneer he always had. Paul thought for sure he was curling his lip, like in a cartoon. That was how he knew they must have lips, because of Stoom’s sneer. Stoom was the only one who still used his alien name, and he was the nastiest (but not as pig-eyed mean as Roman). He was always ragging on Paul, telling him what a loser he was.

“Then why’d you pick me?” Paul yelled back once, a long time ago. “I didn’t invite you. Why don’t you just go the fuck back where you came from?”

Stoom said it was none of his business and then whammo, the headache.

But as far as the sharp-for-aliens thing, Stoom and Larry were actually pretty sharp for anybody. It was Larry who suggested Paul do his preliminary reconnaissance (“Casing the joint!” Roman bawled. “Call it casing the joint!”) in sweats, jogging past a place a couple of times, at different hours. That was good for a whole bunch of reasons. For one thing, Larry was right: no one noticed a jogger, except other joggers, who were only interested in sizing you up, figuring if they were better or you were better. If they could take you. Of course, if it came to it, any of them could take Paul and he knew it. Real runners were all muscle and sinew. Paul looked like them, lanky, with short hair and sunken cheeks, but his skinniness was blasted out of what he used to be, drained by junk. As though the needles in his arm had been day by day drawing something out instead of pumping it in.

But he still laced up his running shoes and made himself circle whatever neighborhood it was, every time he was ready to plan a job. Which was pretty much every time the rent was due or the skag ran out. Even if he had the whole job ready to go in his head and didn’t need to, like now, he still ran the streets around it. For one thing, The Guys liked that he did it this way, and as awful as the wheezing and the fire in his legs were, the headaches when they got mad were always worse.

Another thing: suiting up and going by a couple times over a couple days stretched out the planning part. That was Paul’s favorite. He liked to learn stuff about his marks: who they were, how they lived, what they liked to do.

“Oh, please,” said Stoom, about that. He sounded like he was rolling his eyes, though Paul didn’t know if they had eyes, either. He’d asked once, what they looked like, but that turned out to be another thing that was none of his business. “You’re a crook,” Stoom went on. “You’re a junkie. You’re a loser with aliens in your head. All you need to know about people is what they have and when they won’t be home.”

“Maybe he wants to write a book about them,” Larry suggested, in a bored and mocking voice. “Maybe he’s going to be a big best-selling author.”

That had burned Paul up, because that was exactly what he’d wanted before The Guys showed up. He always had an imagination; he was going to grow up and be a writer.

He never talked about The Guys anymore. He had, at first. It took him awhile to figure out no one else could hear them and everyone thought he was nuts. “There are no aliens, Paul. It’s all in your head. You need to get help.” Stuff like that.

Well, that first point, that was completely wrong. Paul used to argue, say obvious things like, “You can’t see time either, but no one says it isn’t there.” All people did was stare and back away, so he stopped saying anything.

The second point, though, was completely right. That’s where The Guys lived: in Paul’s head. Where they’d beamed when they came to Earth on some kind of scouting mission, Paul didn’t know what for. Or from where. They never did tell him why, but Stoom had told him from where. It’s just, it was some planet he’d never heard of circling some star he’d never heard of in some galaxy really, really far away. Magribke was the closest Paul could come to pronouncing it. The Guys laughed at him when he said it that way, but they didn’t tell him how to really say it. They didn’t talk about their home planet much. Mostly, they just told Paul the Loser what to do.

They first showed up when he was fourteen. He supposed he’d been a peculiar kid—God knows his mom always thought so—but he wasn’t a loser then. (“Oh, of course you were,” Stoom said, but Paul knew he was wrong.) It was them, making him do weird shit, distracting him so he started flunking out, giving him those kick headaches—they were the ones who screwed him all up.

And the third point, get help? He’d tried. What did people think, he liked it like this, these bastards giving him orders, making him hurt really bad when he didn’t do what they said? When he was sixteen and he knew for sure The Guys weren’t leaving, he went looking for someone who could tell him what to do. Somebody at NASA or something. But NASA didn’t answer his e-mails and his mom dragged him to a shrink. The shrink said she believed Paul about The Guys, but she didn’t. She gave him drugs to take but the drugs made the world all suffocating and gray, and they didn’t make The Guys go away, it just made it so Paul couldn’t hear them. They were still there, though, and he knew they were getting madder and madder, and when the drugs stopped working he’d be in bad trouble. So he stopped taking the drugs, and The Guys were so pleased he’d done it on his own that they only gave him a little kick headache, not even a whole day long.

What The Guys liked best was Paul breaking into places and boosting stuff, so that’s what he started to do.

He didn’t live at home anymore, not since he stopped seeing the shrink and taking her drugs. He knew his mom was relieved when he moved out, even though she pretended like she wanted him to stay. He still went home to see her sometimes. She acted all nervous when he was there, which she tried to hide, but he knew. She especially got nervous when he talked to The Guys. He’d asked them to just please shut up while he was with his mom, but of course they didn’t. So he still went, but not so often.

He had a basement apartment in St. George. It had bugs and it smelled moldy but it was cheap and no one bothered him and it was easy to get to whatever neighborhood The Guys wanted him to hit next. It was also easy to get to his dealer, and it was a quiet, dark place to shoot up.

The first year after he moved out was the worst of his life. The Guys wouldn’t shut up, and they were really into the headaches that whole year. It was part of some experiment they were doing for their planet. Even sometimes when Paul did exactly what they told him, they’d just start kicking. Sometimes he thought they wanted to kick his brains out from the inside.

Sometimes he wished they would.

That year it especially sucked to be him—until he discovered heroin.

Damn, damn, damn, what a find! The only bad thing: he hadn’t thought of it years ago. Shooting up wasn’t like taking the shrink’s drugs. The Guys liked it. A needle of black tar, and everyone just relaxed, got all laid-back. Made him laugh the first time, the idea of a bunch of wasted aliens nodding out inside his head. He was a little afraid right after he laughed, but while they were high The Guys didn’t care, didn’t get mad, were so quiet they might as well not have been there at all.

It was the only time anymore that things were that way, the only time Paul could even pretend it was like it used to be before The Guys came, when he could do what he wanted and not what he was being told to do.

He reached the top of the hill and turned around. His long, loping strides down were such a relief after the pain of fighting his way up that he almost cried. He guessed that was another thing Larry was right about, though. If The Guys didn’t make him do it this way, he’d be just another junkie passed out on a stinking mattress with a needle in his arm. He wouldn’t be pulling B&E’s, he’d be mugging old ladies when he got desperate for a few bucks to buy the next fix. The running kept him in some kind of shape, kept his muscles working, and cleared his head for planning his jobs.

“Well, sure. Glad to help. Because I don’t think you really want to go to prison, do you?” Larry asked as Paul passed the bright line of flags again. Paul didn’t answer. Larry’s questions were never supposed to get answers. “There’s no heroin in jail, you know.”

Paul knew, and that was enough to make the idea terrifying. No skag, and for sure The Guys would come with him. How shitty would that be? If he thought they wouldn’t, he’d let his ass get picked up in a New York minute, but no such luck and he knew it.

Though on his bad days—and what day wasn’t bad, really?—he wondered how long he’d be able to stay out anyway. He had an arrest record, had been fingered twice for B&E’s, but he was good (“We’re good,” Stoom said. “Whose idea was the surgical gloves?”) and the cops were way overworked and no one had gotten hurt either time, so they cut him loose. But lately there was a new problem.

Lately, The Guys had started liking for people to get hurt.

The first time he’d hurt someone it was by accident. Well, all three times it was. But that first time, it was a year ago and fucked if Paul wasn’t as scared as she was. He’d just slipped into the garage window of a square brick house in Huguenot, and like he knew it would be, the car was gone; and like he expected, the door to the kitchen had this cheesy old lock. (“Even you can pick that,” Stoom said. Roman whined, “Oh, come on, kick it in,” but Paul hadn’t. He didn’t have to do what Roman said if one of the others said something different.) The lady who lived there never came home before noon on Tuesdays. Paul wondered where she went, to the gym, to a class or something, and if it was a class, what did she like to learn about? The Guys jeered at that but no one kicked him, and he jiggled the credit card down the doorjamb and got in.

The girl at the kitchen counter dropped the coffee pot and screamed.

Paul almost pissed himself. He’d never seen her before. She didn’t live there. Curly brown hair, brown eyes, she looked like the lady, maybe a sister or something, maybe visiting, shit, what did it matter? Good thing he was wearing the ski mask. He backed toward the door, was trying to run but she threw a plate, brained him, and he went down, slipping in all that spilled coffee. He thrashed around trying to get up and she whacked at him with the broom, so he had to grab it and pull at it and she wouldn’t let go. He yanked really hard and she slipped too, went down with a thud, and then gave a loud moan and a lot of, “Ow-ow-ow!” Rolling around on the floor clutching her arm. Paul sped back through the window and ran down the street, ripping the mask and gloves off as he went, shoving them into a dumpster behind the bagel place, where he stopped and threw up.

As he was wiping his mouth he realized with a chill that The Guys were laughing.

Not at him; they did that all the time and he was used to it. But with each other, like he and his buddies used to (when he was a kid and had buddies) when they’d ring old lady Miller’s doorbell and run away, or when they’d boost a couple of chocolate bars from Rifkin’s. It wasn’t the thing, the event itself: it was the rush. That’s why they’d done it, and laughed like hell afterward, from the relief of not getting caught, and the rush. That’s the kind of laughing The Guys were doing now.

“Glad you thought that was funny,” he said, straightening up. “You like it that she clobbered me, huh?”

“Seriously? Who gives a shit?” Roman cracked up again. “Did you hear her screaming? Ow-ow-OW! I bet you broke her arm!”

“I enjoyed that face she made,” Larry said. “When she screamed. I didn’t know people’s mouths could open that wide. That was very interesting.”

Even Stoom was chortling, though he didn’t have anything to say. Paul couldn’t wait to get home, get his works, shoot up.

It was more than six months after that before the next person got hurt because Paul was in their house. Another accident, same kind of thing, a man coming home early, Paul barely getting out, The Guys close to hysterics. The one after that, just last month: the same but not the same. Paul had a bad feeling that time. He liked the house, full of small, fenceable stuff, he liked the layout—lots of trees and shrubs, once you got to the back door you were seriously hidden—but the lady who lived there had this funny schedule, you couldn’t trust her not to come home. He was thinking maybe he should look for somewhere else but then Larry chimed in. The Guys never had an opinion before on where he should hit—at least, they’d never expressed one—but this time Larry said Paul should just go ahead and do it. Paul wanted to explain why not, but Roman started chanting, “Do it! Do it! Do it!” and when Stoom said, “I think it’s a good idea too,” Paul knew he was sunk. He did everything he could to be sure the lady would be away, and she was when he broke in and she was while he emptied her jewelry box into his backpack and shoved a laptop in with it and a nice little picture from the wall that might bring a few bucks, but before he could go back down the hall toward the stairs he heard her car crunch gravel in the driveway. He flashed on different ideas—hide in the closet, go out the window—but they were all stupid and he slammed down the hallway and flew down the stairs hoping he could get out while she was still wide-eyed staring and thinking, What the fuck? He didn’t, though. She was like the girl the first time, this lady, she came right at him, screaming and cursing, smashing at him with her handbag, her fists, she was like a crazy lady. “Just move!” he yelled at her. “Just let me out of here!” But she wouldn’t, so he pushed her. She stumbled backward and fell, banged her head on the floor. She made a long, low, sad/angry sound, tried to get up, couldn’t get up. She pushed at the floor and flopped back, just glaring at Paul with eyes full of hate. When she tried to get up and he thought she’d be able to, he grabbed for something from the coat rack, it was just an umbrella but it was a big heavy one, and he raised it over his head.

Two things happened.

One: the lady’s eyes got wide, her face went white, and she froze like a lying-down statue.

And two: Larry said mildly, “Hit her.”

Paul froze too. Two frozen statues staring at each other. He dropped the umbrella and backed away, stumbled past the lady, yanked open the door, and ran. The Guys started kicking him even before he got the ski mask off. By the time he arrived back at his place his whole head was pounding, even his nose and his cheeks, like they were trying to kick his face off. It was one of the worst headaches ever and it took a long time to go away, partly because it was so bad he could hardly see to light the match and melt his tar.

When the smack wore off The Guys kicked him some more—they were really mad Paul didn’t do what Larry said—so he had to have another fix. After that one, though, they calmed down for a while. By nighttime Paul was able to move his shaky self out of the apartment, get a cup of coffee and a slice.

The next day he felt okay enough to do some business. The lady’s jewelry pawned pretty well, and he sold the laptop for some nice bucks. The picture, it turned out, wasn’t worth shit, but his fence gave him a little for the frame, and for a couple of weeks Paul could spend the days running, eating pizza and Chinese, and shooting up. The Guys stayed pretty mellow, not like they weren’t there, but it was just a lot of bullshit ragging on him, no headaches, no stupid ideas like the time they told him to jump off the ferry and he had to squeeze the rail so hard he thought he’d break his fingers. That time, they finally told him okay, he didn’t have to, and then they laughed and laughed. Nothing like that now, and he relaxed a little and got into a rhythm. He saw his mom, and things were as close to good as they ever were, since The Guys had come.

Eventually, though, it got to be time to plan another job.

Paul had this idea, thinking about it only in that no-words way so The Guys wouldn’t catch on. The little museum on Lighthouse Avenue, the Tibetan Museum, it had a lot of art in it, small statues, some made of gold or silver, some even with jewels on them. He told The Guys about them, how easy they’d be to fence and how much he could get for them, as long as he took them into Manhattan. He knew The Guys would like that, they liked that trip, which sometimes Paul made for skag if his dealer was in jail or something. He told them about the skylight into the square room and the alarm that even if it went off—and he didn’t think the skylight was wired up, but even if it was—no one lived there and the precinct was at least five minutes away. Paul could stuff half a dozen, maybe even more, of those strange statues into his backpack and be out the door and sliding down the overgrown hill out back before the cop car ever pulled up in front. The police would walk around for a while with their flashlights, anyway. They’d try the doors in the wall, and by the time someone came to let them in, Paul would be home stashing the statues under the bed and breaking out his works.

The best part of the plan was the part he wasn’t thinking in words. No one lived at the museum. No one would stop him. There’d be no one for him to hurt.

Long ago some people used to live there. Long, long ago the lady who built the museum lived next door, and the gardens were connected and she’d have come running. But there was a wall there now and the people who lived in her house didn’t even like the museum all that much. He wasn’t worried about them. And in the hillside below there were two little caves, for monks and nuns to meditate in. When Paul was a kid and used to come here, sometimes there’d be one of them in a cave for a few days, just sitting and thinking with their eyes closed. They used to leave their doors open and Paul would tiptoe over and hide behind the bushes and peek at them. Once, one of the nuns opened her eyes and saw him and he thought she’d be mad but she just smiled at him, nodded like she was saying hi, like she knew him already, and closed her eyes again. The nuns didn’t look like the ones he was used to. He’d never seen real monks, only in Robin Hood comics, but they didn’t look like this either. These monks and nuns had shaved heads—all of them, the nuns too—and gray robes and big brown beads, like rosary beads but not. He liked the way they seemed so calm and peaceful, though. That’s why he liked to watch them. Even when he was a kid, even before The Guys came, he’d never been calm and peaceful like that.

But that was a long time ago. No one had used those caves for ten years, maybe more. The museum stopped having monks and nuns come and no one was ever there when the place was closed, and thinking without words Paul knew this was a good idea.

Even though he also knew he didn’t have a good idea for next time.

He wasn’t worrying about that now, as he finished his run and swung onto a bus for St. George. He couldn’t. He needed to go get himself together. He’d have loved to get high but there was no way he could shoot up now and still be able to do this job when it got dark. So he went back to his basement apartment, pushed some pizza boxes and takeout cartons out of the way to find his black shirt and pants. He took a shower, even though the clothes were filthy, and then lay down, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept. He hoped The Guys would give him a break; sometimes they liked to scream and yell and wake him just as he was falling asleep. He was braced for it but they didn’t and he slipped away.

When he woke up it was just after sunset. Excellent. He took his black backpack and stuffed his ski mask and his gloves into it, plus a rope, and a hammer and a pry bar for the skylight. He stuck in a light-blue sweatshirt too, for afterward when they’d be looking for a guy all in black. If anyone saw him to describe him to the cops. But no one would see him; that was the beauty of this plan.

At the bodega he bought two coffees, lots of cream and sugar, and threw them both back before he got to the bus stop. Now he was buzzed; good. He took the bus up to the corner past the museum and walked down. It was dark, with yellow squares of light glowing in people’s windows, the kind of people who had normal lives and no aliens in their heads. Except for one dog walker, no one was out. The dog walker had gone around the corner by the time Paul got to the fence. He climbed it easily, trying to avoid the flags. He didn’t know much about them but they were called prayer flags so he thought it was probably bad to step on them. He slid a little on the wet leaves on the north side of the building but he was completely hidden there from both the street and the next house. Because the building was buried in the hillside he was only maybe ten feet below the roof, and the rope tossed around a vent pipe took care of that. (“Lucky you’re a broken-down skinny-ass runt or that pipe would’ve busted,” Stoom pointed out. Paul didn’t answer.) The skylight, like he figured, was some kind of plastic, and the panels were even easier to pry loose than he’d hoped. He lifted a panel out, laid it aside, and waited. Right about that too: no alarm. He grabbed on to the edge, slipped over, and he was in.

He dropped lightly into the center of the square stone room, almost the same spot on the floor he used to sit on when he was a kid and came in just to stare. The lady who sold the tickets thought it was neat that a little kid kept coming around, and didn’t make him pay anything. Sometimes if he’d boosted some candy bars he’d bring her one, and she always took it with a big smile and a thank you.

He slipped the headlamp on and turned slowly, watching the beam play over the room. The place hadn’t changed much, maybe not at all. On the side built into the hill a couple of stone ledges stepped back. Most of the statues sat on them, lined up in rows. A bunch more were in cases against the other three walls. Two of the cases stood one on either side of the door out to the balcony. The space smelled cool and damp, like it was one of those caves where the nuns and monks used to stay. It was still and silent, but not the heavy silence of the shrink’s drugs or the skag. Those made him feel like everything was still there, he was just shutting it out. This, it was a quiet like everything had stopped to rest.

“What a lovely little trip down Memory Lane,” Larry said acidly. “Can we get to work now?”

Paul swung the backpack off, opened it, and stepped up to the shelves, leaning over each statue. He wanted them all, wanted to take them and put them in his basement room just to stare around at them, but that wasn’t why he was here and no matter how many he took that wasn’t what would happen to them. He reached out. This one, it was gold. He held it, let the headlamp glint off it. Then into the pack. That one was beautiful but it was iron. Leave it. The two there, with jewels and coral, into the pack. The silver one. That little candlestick, it too. That was all the best from the ledges. Now for the cases on the walls. Paul turned his head, sweeping the light around.

There she was.

Just like the first time, the girl in the kitchen, Paul almost pissed himself. A nun, in gray robes, big brown beads around her neck. She smiled softly and Paul’s mouth fell open. It was the same nun, the one from the cave, smiling the same smile.

“You—you—you’re still here?” he managed to stammer.

“I’ve always been here,” she replied. Her eyes twinkled, and she stood with her hands folded in front of her. When she smiled she looked like the lady he used to give candy bars to. He’d never noticed that before, that they looked alike. “Paul,” she said, “you know you can’t take those.”

His voice had rung oddly off the stone walls. Hers didn’t disturb the sense that everything was resting.

“How do you know my name?” This time he whispered so he wouldn’t get the same echo.

“You came here when you were a little boy.”

He nodded. “I used to watch you sitting there. Meditating.”

“I know. I thought perhaps you’d join me sometime.”

“I—”

Larry interrupted him, barking, “Paul! Get back to work.”

He said, “Just give me—”

“No!”

That was Roman. The kick was from him too. Paul’s head almost cracked. The pain was blinding, and he barely heard the nun calmly say, “Roman, stop that.”

The kicking stopped instantly. Paul stared at the nun. “You can hear them?”

She smiled. “You don’t have to do what they say, you know.”

Paul swallowed. “Yes, I do.”

“Yes, he does,” Larry said.

“Yes! He does!” Roman yelled.

“No,” said the nun.

“I can’t get them to leave.” Paul was suddenly ashamed of how forlorn he sounded. Like a real loser. He heard Larry snicker.

“Even so,” she said.

He wasn’t sure how to answer her, but he didn’t get the chance. “Paul?” That was Stoom, sounding dark. When Stoom got mad it was really, really bad. “Do what you came for, and do it now. Remember, Paul: no swag, no skag.” It was one of those times Paul could hear Stoom’s sneer.

Paul looked at the nun, and then slowly around the room. The headlamp picked out fierce faces, jeweled eyes. “There’s lots of places I could hit,” he said to The Guys. “Doesn’t have to be here. This was a dumb idea. You know, like my ideas always are. How about I just—”

“No,” said Stoom.

“No,” said Larry.

And Roman started kicking him, chanting, “No swag, no skag! No swag, no skag!” Then they were all three chanting and kicking, chanting and kicking.

Paul staggered forward, toward a statue of a person sitting cross-legged like the nun did. Pearls and coral studded its flowing gold robes. He reached for it but the nun moved smoothly in front of it. She said nothing, just smiled.

“No,” Paul heard himself croak. “Please. You have to let me.”

She shook her head.

“Paul!” Stoom snapped. “You moron loser. Push her out of the way.”

“No. I’ll get a different one.”

“I want THAT one!” Roman whined.

Paul swung his head around. The headlamp picked out a glittering statue with lots of arms, over in a case by the door. He turned his back on the nun and lurched toward it. By the time he got there she was standing in front of it, hands folded, smiling. He hadn’t seen her move.

“Paul,” she said, “this life has been hard for you. I don’t know why; I think, though, that the next turn of the wheel will be far better.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about. Wheel, what wheel? All three of The Guys were kicking him now, Roman the hardest, trying to pop his right eye out. “Please,” he said. “Get out of the way.”

She said nothing, just smiled the ticket lady’s smile and stood there.

Paul took two steps over to the next cabinet.

There she was.

“Please!” he shouted at her. “Stop it!” His head pounded, the pain so searing he thought he might throw up. He could barely see but he knew she was still standing between him and the statues. “Please!”

“Hit her.” That was Larry. Paul barely heard him through the pain. He tried to pretend he didn’t hear him at all but Larry laughed. “Hit her. With a statue.”

Paul’s hands trembled as he reached into the backpack, took out the gold statue. “Please,” he whispered to the nun–ticket lady. “Please move.”

She just stood and smiled.

Paul lifted the statue way high. As he brought it down on her shaved head he realized he was screaming.

He felt the impact on her skull, felt it all the way up to his shoulders, his back. The nun crumpled to the floor without a sound. Blood flowed from the smashed-in place, started to pool under her face. Paul dropped the statue; it fell with a splash into the puddle of blood. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

“Oh my God is right!” Larry roared a grand, triumphant laugh. “You killed her!”

“Killed her! Killed her!” shrieked Roman.

“You know what happens now, don’t you?” Larry said. “You go to jail. Prison, you loser, you go to prison where there’s no smack and we go too! Oh, will that be fun!”

“No.” Paul could barely get the word out. “I didn’t. She’s not dead.”

“Really?” said Stoom. “Can you wake her up?”

Paul kneeled slowly, put out his hand, shook the nun gently. She still had that little smile, the ticket lady’s smile, but she didn’t respond at all.

“Look at all that blood,” Stoom said. “You’re stupid if you think anyone could be still alive with all their blood on the floor like that. You’re stupid anyway, but she’s dead and you killed her.”

“Prison!” Roman bellowed. “Killed her! Prison!”

“No.” Paul stood slowly, shaking his head. “No.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Larry said. “Oh, yes.”

Paul took one more look at the nun, then staggered toward the exit door. An alarm shrieked as he pushed it open. He ran across the terrace, slipping on the autumn leaves. When he got to the railing he stared down; the headlamp shone on branches and bushes growing out of the wall beneath him but couldn’t reach all the way to the street below.

He grabbed the rail, ready to vault over.

“No,” said Stoom in that very hard voice. “No, you’re staying.”

Paul felt his grip tighten on the rail, like The Guys were controlling his fingers. He heard a siren wail. That would be the cops, because of the door alarm. If he was still here when they came, he’d go to prison for sure.

“That’s right,” Larry said with satisfaction. “Prison for sure.”

Paul took a slow, deep breath. “No,” he whispered. “She told me I don’t have to do what you say.”

The Guys yelled, they bellowed and kicked, but Paul loosened his fingers one by one. He climbed over the railing, stood for a minute on the edge of the wall. Then he dove. His last thought was the hope that The Guys wouldn’t have time to clear out of his head before he smashed it to bits on the pavement.

The impact, the thud of a body landing forty feet below, didn’t penetrate very far into the square stone room. It barely disturbed the resting stillness, didn’t echo at all past the golden Buddha in the middle of the floor. The statue lay on its side on a smooth dry stone tile, beside a backpack full of other statues. Except for the statue and the backpack, and the single panel removed from the skylight, nothing was out of place. The calm silence in the room continued, and would continue once the statues had been replaced in their proper spots by the museum’s new director.

She would be pleased that something had scared off the thief, though greatly saddened that he’d fallen to his death over the railing at the terrace. As advised by the police, she’d add an alarm to the skylight. She had much to do, as she was all the staff the museum had. She guided visitors, and also sold the tickets, the ticket lady having retired years ago. She didn’t mind the work. She was hoping, even, to soon reopen the meditation caves, to perhaps make the museum not just a serene spot, but a useful one, as it once had been: a beacon for poor souls with troubled minds.

SECRET POOL by Asali Solomon

I learned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Roadshow. I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.

“You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.

Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to school in the suburbs with real rich white people, while her French teacher at Central High was a black man from Georgia. Despite the fact that I had no true friends at my school and hated most things about my life, she was in a one-sided social competition with me. As a result, I was subjected to Aja’s peacocking around about things like how her friend Jess, who lived in a massive house down on Cedar Avenue, had invited her to go swimming with her family.

“Come off it, Aja. I just said I didn’t know about it.”

“I just think if you live right here… maybe your mom knows about it?”

“Look, is there a story here?”

“Well, it’s crazy. There’s this wooden gate with a towing sign on it like it’s just a parking lot, but behind it is this massive pool and these brand-new lockers and everything. And it was so crowded!”

“Any black people there?”

“Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”

“Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”

She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”

“Janitor?”

“I think he was the security guard.”

I snorted.

We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.

“Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”

“So ghetto,” said Aja.

“Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.

“He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”

“Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.

“Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”

I laughed and then she did too.

“So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.

“Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.

“You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.

“Not that sewer,” I said.

“Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”

“Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.

Dahani, who used to have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.

“You been there?” I asked.

“Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.

“So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.

“I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.

My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here. But she rallied. “You liked that one, didn’t you, Zingha?”

I looked at Dahani. “Sure, watch Wesley Snipes do it with a white woman and stick me with the dishes.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of the dishes,” my mother snapped, managing to make me feel petty. Turning to Dahani she asked, “How is Jason?”

“Just fine,” Dahani said, in a tight voice. I followed his eyes to the clock above the refrigerator. “Movie starts at seven.”

My brother kissed my mom and left, just like he did every night since he’d come home in disgrace. I went upstairs so I wouldn’t have to listen to the pitiful sound of her cleaning up the kitchen. After that she would doze in front of the TV for a couple of hours, half waiting for Dahani to come home. She always wound up in bed before that.

I went up into my brother’s room. I didn’t find my things, but I helped myself to a couple of cigarettes I knew I’d never smoke, and an unsoiled Hustler magazine.

It happened after I had done the deed with a couple of contorting blondes who must have made their parents proud. I had washed up for bed and was about to put on my new headphones, which would lull me to sleep.

I realized that my Walkman was gone.

Understand this. I did not care about the mother-of-pearl earrings from my aunt that even my mother admitted were cheap. I did not care about the gold charm bracelet that my mother gave me when I turned sixteen—the other girls in my class had been collecting tennis racket and Star of David charms since they were eight. And of course the future value of nonfunctioning Swatches was just a theory. But Dahani, who had once harangued my mother into buying him seventy-five-dollar stereo headphones, understood what my Walkman meant to me.

Every summer since eighth grade, the nonprofit where my mom worked got me an office job with one of their corporate “partners.” I spent July and part of August in freezing cubicles wearing a garish smile, playing the part of Industrious Urban Youth. This summer it had been a downtown bank, where the ignoramus VPs and their ignoramus secretaries crowed over my ability to staple page one to two and guide a fax through the machine. If you think I was lucky I didn’t have to handle french fries or the public, you try staying awake for six hours at a desk with nothing to do except arrange rubber bands into a neat pile. It was death.

Most of the money I made every summer went for new school uniforms and class trips. The only thing I bought that I cared about was the most expensive top-of-the-line Walkman. I had one for each summer I’d worked, and all three were gone. I turned on my lamp, folded my arms, and decided that I could wait up even if my mother couldn’t.

The next day I hovered around the living room window waiting for Aja to appear on my block and also hoping that she wouldn’t. I needed to tell someone about my brother. But on the other hand, Aja had the potential to be not so understanding. She had two parents: a teacher and an accountant who never drank beer from cans. They went to church and had a Standard Poodle called Subwoofer. It was true that sometimes we were so lonely that we told each other things. I had told her that I liked my brother’s dirty magazines and she told me that she didn’t like black guys because once her cousin pushed her in a closet and pulled out his dick. But whenever we made confessions like these, the next time we met up it was like those mouthwash commercials where couples wake up next to each other embarrassed by their breath. Besides, I didn’t want her to pronounce my crack-smoking brother “ghetto,” not even with her eyes.

He lied, he lied, he lied. Dahani, who used to make up raps with me and record them, who comforted me the one time we met our father, who seemed bored and annoyed, and once, back when we were both in public school, beat up a little boy for calling me an African bootyscratcher. That brother, said calmly, “I didn’t take any of your stuff, Nzingha. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking: what the hell is going on? I’m thinking: where are my Walkmans? I’m thinking: where are you all the time?”

“I’m out. You should go there sometimes.” He laughed his high-pitched laugh, the one that said how absurd the world is.

“Okay, so you supposedly went to the movies tonight, right? What happens to Gator at the end of Jungle Fever?” I asked.

“Ossie Davis shoots him.”

“That’s right. The crackhead dies. Remember that,” I said.

“Crackhead?” Dahani sounded his laugh again. I didn’t realize how angry I was until I felt the first hot tear roll down my cheek.

I stomped out, leaving his door open. That was an old maneuver, something we did to piss each other off when we lost a fight. But then I thought of something and went back in there. He wouldn’t admit that he’d taken my things. But he agreed that if I didn’t say anything to our mother, he’d take me to the pool. He could only take me at night after it closed, and only if I kept my mouth shut about going.

That night, a Friday, we made our mother’s day by convincing her we were going to hang out on South Street together. Then, as it was getting dark, Dahani and I walked silently toward 47th Street. A clump of figures looked menacing at the corner until we got close and saw that they couldn’t have been more than fifth graders. We slowed down to let a thin, pungent man rush past us. Even though the night air was thick enough to draw sweat, the empty streets reminded me that summer was ending.

“Is anybody else coming?” I asked finally. “Jason?”

“I haven’t seen that nigger in months. Ever since he pledged, he turned into a world-class faggot.” Jason, my brother’s best friend from Friends Select, the only other black boy in his class, had started at Morehouse the same time my brother had gone to Oberlin.

“So it’s just going to be us and the security guard?” I had worn a bathing suit under my clothes, but felt weird about stripping down in front of the character Aja described.

“Look,” my brother said, “be cool, okay?”

“Cool like you?”

“You know, Nzingha, this is not the best time of my life either.”

“But it could be. You could go back to school,” I said, teetering on the edge of a place we hadn’t been.

“It’s not that fucking easy! Do you understand everything Mom’s done for me already?”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Let’s just go where we’re going.”

We passed under a buzzing streetlight that could die at any moment. I had a feeling I knew from nightmares where I boarded the 42 bus in the daytime and got off in the dark. In the dreams I heard my sneakers hit the ground and I thought I would die of loneliness.

We finally reached the tall wooden gate with its warning about getting towed. In a low voice that was forceful without being loud, Dahani called out to someone named Roger. The gate opened and Dahani nearly pushed me into a tall, skinny man with a tan face and eyes that sparkled even in the near-dark.

“Hey man, hey man,” he kept saying, pulling my brother in for a half-hug.

“What’s up, Roger?” said Dahani. “This is my sister.”

“Hey, sister,” he said and tried to wink, but the one eye took the other with it.

I looked around. It was nicer than the dingy gray tiles and greenish walls at the Y pool, but to tell the truth, it was nothing special. I’d been going to pool parties at Barrett since sixth grade and I’d seen aqua-tiled models, tropical landscaping, one or two retractable ceilings. This was just a standard rectangle bordered by neat cream-colored asphalt on either side. There were a handful of deck chairs on each side and tall fluorescent lamps. This is what they were keeping us out of?

A bunch of white guys with skater hair and white-boy fades drank 40s and nodded to a boombox playing A Tribe Called Quest at the deep end near the diving board. Then nearby enough to hover but not to crowd, were the girls, who wore berry-colored bikinis. I thought of my prudish navy-blue one-piece. There was a single black girl sitting on the edge of the pool in a yellow bathing suit, dangling her feet in the water.

“Aja?” I called.

“Nzingha?” she replied, sounding disappointed.

Then I recognized Jess, who seemed not to see me until I was practically standing on top of her. Actually, this happened nearly every time we met. “Hey,” she said finally. “I thought that was you.” She always said something like that.

“What are you doing here?” Aja asked.

“My brother brought me.”

“That’s your brother?” Jess gestured with her head to Dahani, who stood with his hands in his pockets while Roger pantomimed wildly.

“You know him?” I asked.

“He’s down with my boys,” she said. I tried not to wince. “Speaking of which, hey, Adam! Can you bring Nzingha something to drink?”

We looked toward the end of the pool with the boys and the boombox. One of them, with a sharp-looking nose and a mop of wet blond hair sweeping over his eyes, yelled back: “Get it for her yourself!”

Jess’s face erupted in pink splotches. “He’s an incredible asshole,” she said.

“And this is news?” said one of the other girls. She had huge breasts, a smashed-in face, and a flat voice. Suddenly I remembered the name Adam. Aja had a flaming crush on him for nearly a year, and then Jess had started going out with him on and off. Last I heard they were off, but now Aja liked to pretend she’d never mentioned liking him.

“I don’t want anything to drink anyway,” I said.

Aja asked if I was going to swim and I don’t remember what I said because I was watching my brother walk down to the end of the pool where the boys were, trading pounds with wet hands. He reached into a red cooler and pulled out a 40. Roger stayed at the tall wooden gate.

“They think they’re gangsters,” Jess said, rolling her eyes in their general direction. “They call themselves the Gutter Boys. All they do is come here and smoke weed.”

“That’s not all,” the girl with the smashed-in face said with a smirk.

“Is my brother here a lot?” I asked.

“I’ve only seen him once. But this is only the third time I’ve been here, you know, after hours.”

My brother didn’t seem interested in swimming. I didn’t even know if he was wearing trunks. Instead he walked with a stocky swaggering boy toward the darkness of the locker room. Don’t go back there, I wanted to scream. But all I did was stand there in my street clothes at the water’s edge.

Adam cried out, “Chickenfight!”

“Not again,” said smashed-in face. “I’m way too fucked up.”

Adam swam over to us. “Look, Tanya, you’ll do it again if you wanna get high later.”

Tanya’s friend murmured something to her quietly. Tanya laughed and said, “Hey, Adam, what about this?” Then she and her friend began kissing. At first just their lips seemed to brush lightly, and then the quiet girl pulled her in fiercely. I stepped back, feeling an unpleasant arousal. The boys became a cursing, splashing creature moving toward us. “Day-ummm!” called Roger, who began running over.

“Keep your eye on the gate, dude!” yelled one of the boys.

“Okay, you big lesbians get a pass,” said Adam when they finally broke apart. Then he turned to Jess. “What can you girls do for me?”

“I think we’re going to stick with the chickenfight,” said Aja, giggling. She still liked him. I could not relate.

While they sorted out who would carry whom, my brother emerged from the locker room. I waited until he and the stocky boy had parted ways before I began walking over.

“Dahani,” I called in a sharp voice.

“You ready to go?” he asked. I examined him. He didn’t seem jittery and he wasn’t sweating. This was what I knew of smoking crack from the movies.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

I glanced back at the pool, where Adam, laughing, held Jess under the water. Aja sat forlornly on the shoulders of a round boy with flame-colored hair waiting for the fight to start. “I’m ready to go,” I said.

When Roger closed the gate the pool disappeared, and though “Looking at the Front Door” sounded raucous bouncing off the water, I couldn’t hear anything at all.

“Are you smoking crack?” I blurted.

Dahani came to a full stop and looked at me. “This is the last time I think I’m going to answer that dumb-ass question. No.”

“Are you selling it?”

He sighed in annoyance. “Nzingha. No.”

“But something isn’t right.”

“No, nothing is right,” Dahani said. “But this is where I get off.” We had reached my mother’s house. He kept walking up the dark street.

It wasn’t until a couple of nights later that Dahani didn’t show up for dinner. My mother, who barely touched the pizza I ordered, kept walking to the front window and peering out.

When it began getting dark, I slapped my forehead. “Oh my God!” I said.

My mother looked at me with wild round eyes. “What?”

Without biting the inside of my cheek, I said, “I totally forgot. He said to tell you he wouldn’t be home until really late.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t know.”

My mother folded her arms. “Thanks for almost letting me have a heart attack.”

“Mom, he’s a grown man.”

“Nzingha,” she said, “what is this thing with you and your brother?”

I didn’t answer.

“You don’t seem to realize that he’s having a really hard time. I mean I’m the one stuck with loans from his year at college. I’m the one supporting his grown ass now and I’m the one who’s going to have to take out more loans to send him back. So what’s your issue?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Can I go upstairs?”

“You really need to change your attitude. And not just about this.”

“Can I go upstairs?” I said again.

My mother and I sometimes had strained conversations. It was she and Dahani who had fireworks. But now she looked so angry she almost shook. “Go ahead and get the hell out of my sight!” And I did, hating this.

That night I wasn’t sure if I was sleeping or not. I kept imagining the nightmare-bright scene at the pool, those girls kissing, my brother disappearing into the back. Night logic urged me that I had to go back there. After my mother was in bed with her TV timer on, I climbed out of bed and dressed. Then excruciatingly, silently, I closed the front door. I plunged into darkness and walked the three blocks as fast as I could.

“Roger,” I called at the gate, trying to imitate my brother’s masculine whisper. I tapped the wood. There was a pause and then the tall gate wrenched open.

“Where’s Dahani?” Roger said, waving me inside. His clothes were soaked and he was in stocking feet. “Oh God. You didn’t bring Dahani?”

I felt my legs buckle, and only because Roger’s sweaty hand clamped over my mouth was I able to swallow a scream. I had seen only one dead body in real life, at my great-grandmother’s wake. Though with her papery skin and tiny doll’s limbs, she’d never seemed quite alive. I’d never seen a dead body floating in water, but I knew what I was seeing when I saw Jess’s naked corpse bob up and down peacefully. I ran to the water’s edge near the diving board. There was a wet spot of something on the edge of the pool that looked black in the light.

Roger began pacing a tiny circle, moaning.

“Did you call 911?” I asked him.

“It was an accident. They’re gonna think—”

“What if she’s alive?” I said.

Roger suddenly loomed in front of me with clenched fists. “No cops! And she’s not alive! Why didn’t you bring Dahani?”

In the same way I knew things in dreams, I knew he hadn’t done it. Not even in a Lenny in Of Mice and Men way. But I needed to get away from his panic. I spoke slowly. “It’s okay. I’ll go get him.”

“You’ll bring him here?”

Before I let myself out through the tall gate, I watched Roger slump to the side of the pool and sit Indian-style with his head in his hands. I took one last look at Jess. Later I wished that I hadn’t.

I found myself at Aja’s house. It was after midnight, but I rang the bell, hoping somehow that she might answer the door instead of her parents. I heard the dog barking and clicking his long nails excitedly on the floor.

Aja’s dad, a short yellow man with a mustache and no beard, answered the door. “Zingha? Now you know it’s too late. Does your mom know—”

“Mr. Bell, I really need to see Aja.”

“Are you serious, girl?” Then he started pushing the door shut. The dog was going crazy.

“Aja!” I screamed.

Her mother appeared. She grabbed Subwoofer’s collar with one hand and pulled him up short. He whimpered and I felt bad for him. All I’d ever known him to attack with was his huge floppy tongue.

“Shut up and get in here,” she said.

Aja’s father moved off to the side but he wasn’t happy about it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.

“Quiet, you!” she responded. She was nearly a head taller than he was, with eggplant-colored lips and very arched eyebrows.

“Look, Nzingha,” she said, “Aja’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”

I shook my head frantically. “We have to find her! You don’t know what’s going on. There’s a—”

“Stop talking and listen,” she said, getting louder. “If anyone comes around asking where my daughter is, tell them the truth. That she has disappeared and that we are very worried. Mr. Bell will walk you home.”

Mr. Bell fumed as he escorted me. “I guess there’s no point in any more stupid fucking shit happening,” he muttered. I didn’t answer; he wasn’t talking to me.

I let myself in as quietly as I had left, shocked by the thick silence of the house. I tried not to imagine Jess’s closed eyes, her blood on the asphalt. I had to remind myself that she was dead, so she couldn’t be as cold as she looked. I tried to tell myself that her floating body, Dahani, and Aja were in another world.

But the next morning I learned that my mother hadn’t been home. She’d been down at the precinct with my brother.

By the time the police had arrived at the pool, Roger was nearly dead. He had tried to drown himself. He couldn’t answer questions about Jess from his coma, but the police knew he hadn’t done it.

It seemed to me, from what I managed to read before my mother started hiding the papers, that Jess’s death had been an accident. But her dad was a lawyer and Aja was dragged back from an aunt’s house in Maryland to do eighteen months in the Youth Detention Center. I went to visit her once that winter, in the dim, echoing room that reminded me of the cafeteria at our elementary school. I didn’t tell my mother where I was going. She hadn’t let me go to the trial.

Aja and I made painful small talk about how the food was destroying her stomach and about her first encounter with a bed bug. She said fuck more than usual and her skin looked gray.

Then she blurted, “I didn’t do it.”

“I know,” I said.

“Things just got crazy.” She told me about that night. Everyone had been drinking, including her, and Adam called for another chickenfight.

“First I fought that girl Tanya and I beat her easy. Then it was me and Jess. But I had won the time before, the night you came, you remember?”

I nodded, though I hadn’t seen her victory.

“So she was really getting rough. And then she fucking—”

“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” I said, trying to be the sweet girl my mother remembered.

“She pulled my top down. I kept telling them I wanted to stop. But they were yelling so loud. And Adam was cheering me on. It was so—” Aja’s voice seemed to swell with tears, but her eyes remained empty.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and we were quiet for a moment. The din of the visiting room filled the space between us.

“But Jess was my best friend,” she said. I had come to be good to her, yet I wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her teeth chattered.

My brother was able to convince the police that he hadn’t done it. But he not only needed an alibi, he also had to rat out the Gutter Boys, with whom he’d apparently tried to go into business. Tried, I say, because he was such a crummy drug dealer that he had to steal to make up for what he couldn’t sell. Dahani told the police what he knew about the small operation, and after that, a couple of Jeeps slowed down when he crossed the street, but he didn’t turn up in the Schuylkill or anything. He got his old job at the video store back, but he got fired after a couple of months, and then our VCR disappeared. After two weeks in a row when he didn’t come home, and my mom had called the police about sixteen times, she changed the locks and got an alarm system.

Sometime after that she looked at me over a new tradition—a second nightly beer—and said, “Nzingha, I know we should have talked about this as soon as I knew what was going on with your brother. But I didn’t want to say anything because I know that you love him.”

The scandal didn’t break the pool. They held a floating memorial service for Jess and hired a real security company. The scandal did, however, break the news of the pool to the neighborhood. But at $1,400 a year, none of the black folks we knew could afford to join it anyway.

BUMS by William Kent Krueger

Kid showed up at the river in the shadow of the High Bridge with a grin on his face, a bottle of Cutty in his hand, and a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. Kid was usually in a good mood, but I’d never seen him quite so happy. Or so flush. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a bottle of good scotch.

It was going on dark. I had a pot of watery stew on the fire—rice mostly, with some unidentifiable vegetables I’d pulled from the dumpster behind an Asian grocery store.

I held up the Cutty to the firelight and watched the reflection of the flames lick the glass. “Rob a bank?”

“Better.” Kid bent over the pot and smelled the stew. “Got a job.”

“Work? You?”

“There’s this guy took me up on my offer.”

Most days Kid stood at the top of the off-ramp on Marion Street and I-94 where a stoplight paused traffic for a while. He held up a handmade sign that read, Will Work For Food. He got handouts, but he’d never had anyone actually take him up on his offer.

“What kind of work?”

“Chopping bushes out of his yard, putting new bushes in. This yard, Professor, I tell you, it’s big as a goddamn park. And the house, Jesus.”

He called me Professor because I have a small wire-bound notepad in which I scribble from time to time. Why that translated into Professor, I never knew.

I wanted badly to break the seal on the bottle, but it wasn’t my move.

Kid sat down cross-legged in the sand on the river­bank. He grinned up at me. “Something else, Professor. He’s got a wife. A nice piece of work. The whole time I’m there, she’s watching me from the window.”

“Probably afraid you were going to steal something.”

“No, I mean she’s looking at me like I’m this stud horse and she’s a… you know, a girl horse.”

“Filly.”

“That’s it. Like she’s a filly. A filly in heat.”

I watched the gleam in Kid’s eye, the fire that danced there. “You already have yourself a few shots of something?”

“It’s the truth, swear to God. And get this. The guy wants me back tomorrow.”

“Look, are we just going to admire this bottle?” I finally asked.

“Crack ’er open, Professor. Let’s celebrate.”

Kid and I weren’t exactly friends, but we’d shared a campfire under the High Bridge for a while, and we trusted each other. Trust is important. Even if all you own can fit into an old gym bag, it’s still all you own, and when you close your eyes at night, it’s good to know the man on the other side of the fire isn’t just waiting for you to fall asleep. Kid had his faults. For a bum, he thought a lot of himself. That came mostly from being young and believing that circumstance alone was to blame for his social station. I’d tried to wise him up, pointing out that lots of folks encounter adversity and don’t end up squatting on the bank of a river, eating out of other people’s garbage cans, wearing what other people throw away. He was good-looking, if a little empty in the attic, and had the kind of physique that would probably appeal to a bored rich woman. He was good companionship for me, always eager and smiling, kind of like a having a puppy around. I didn’t know his real name. I just called him Kid.

The next evening when he came back from laboring in the rich man’s yard, he explained to me about his plans for the guy’s wife.

“She’s got this long black hair, all shiny, hangs down to her hips, swishes real gentle over the top of her ass when she walks. Paints her nails red like little spots of blood at the end of her fingers and toes. Talks with this accent, I don’t know what kind, but it’s sexy. And she’s hot for me, Professor. Christ, she’s all over me.”

Dinner that evening was fish, a big channel cat I’d man­aged to pull from the river with a chunk of moldy cheese as bait. I was frying it up in the pan I used for everything.

“If this woman is all you say she is, she could have any man she wants, Kid. What does she want with a bum?”

That offended him.

“I’m not like you, Professor. The booze don’t have me by the throat. One break and I’m outta here.”

“Dallying with a bored rich woman? How’s that going to change your luck?”

Kid peered up from watching the fish fry. “I got inside today, looked the place over. They got all this expensive crap lying around.”

“And you’re what, just going to waltz in and help your­self?”

His looked turned coy. “She let me inside today when her old man took off to get a bunch of bushes from the nursery. Asked if I wanted some cold lemonade. Starts talking kind of general, you know. Where I’m from, do I got family, that kind of thing. Then, get this, she tells me her husband’s not a man for her. No lightning in the rod, you know? I tell her that’s a damn shame, all her good looks going to waste. She says, ‘You think I’m pretty?’ I tell her she’s the prettiest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen. Then you know what, Professor? She invites me back tonight. Her old man’s going out of town and she’s all alone. Doesn’t want to be lonely. Know what I’m saying? When it’s dark, I’m heading over.”

“You’re spending the night?”

“Not the whole night. She don’t want me around in the morning for the neighbors to see sneaking off.”

“You sure you’re not on something?”

“Proof, Professor,” he said with a sly grin. “I got proof.”

From his pants pocket he took a small ball of black fabric. He uncrumpled it and held it toward me with both hands, as if he were holding diamonds. “Her panties.”

Thong panties, barely enough material to cover a canary.

“She gave you those?”

“Reached up under her skirt and slipped ’em off where she stood. Said they’d tide me over until tonight.”

He went to his things and rolled the panties in his blan­ket.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Naw. I’m going to the Y, slip inside and wash up. I want to smell good tonight. Don’t wait up for me, Dad,” he said with a grin, and he walked off whistling.

He didn’t come back that night. I figured he’d got what he wanted from the rich man’s wife and the rich man’s house and I’d seen the last of him. What did I care? People come into your life and they go. You can’t cry over them all.

So why did I feel so low the next day? All I wanted was to get drunk. Finally, I headed to the plasma center on University, let them siphon off a little precious bodily fluid, and I walked out with cash. I headed to the Gopher Bar for an afternoon of scintillating conversation with whoever hap­pened to be around. It was a place where Kid and I had some­times hung out together, and I hoped he might be there.

Laci was tending bar. A hard, unpretty woman with a quick mind. She sized me up as I sat on a stool. “Starting the wake, Professor?”

“You lost me,” I said.

She threw a bar towel over her shoulder and came my way. “I figured you were planning to tip a few to the memory of your buddy. Not that a piece of crap like him deserves it.”

“Kid? Piece of crap? What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

She turned, took a bottle of Old Grand-Dad down from the shelf, and poured me a couple of fingers’ worth. “This one’s on the house.”

Then she told me about Kid. It was all over the news.

The night before, he’d been shot dead in the rich man’s house, but not before he beat the guy’s wife to death with a crowbar.

“Funny.” She shook her head. “I never figured him to be the violent kind. But anybody beats a woman to death deserves what he gets. Sorry, Professor, that’s how I see it.”

I swallowed the whiskey she’d poured, but instead of sticking around to get drunk, I walked back to the river.

That night I didn’t bother putting together a fire, just sat on the riverbank below the High Bridge, listening to the sound of occasional traffic far above, thinking about Kid. At one point I pulled out my notepad, intending to write. I don’t know what. Maybe a eulogy, something to mark his passing. Instead, I picked up a stick and scratched in the sand. A few minutes later a barge chugged past and the wake washed away what I’d written. I ended up crying a little, which almost never happens when I’m sober.

Two years ago I had a wife, a good job as a reporter with the Star Tribune, a house, a car. Then Deborah left me. She said it was the drinking, but it was me. I was never reliable. The drinking only made it worse. Not long after that I lost my job because I was happier sitting at the bar than at my desk try­ing to meet deadline. Everything pretty much went downhill from there. Somebody tells you they drink because they’re a failure, it ain’t so. They’re a failure because they drink. And they drink because it’s so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn’t empty, they never feel far from being happy.

That’s me, anyway.

Near dawn, I stood up from the long night of grieving for Kid. I was hungry. I walked the empty streets of downtown St. Paul to Mickey’s Diner, got there just as the sun was com­ing up, ordered eggs, cakes, coffee. I picked up a morning paper lying on the stool next to me. Kid and what he’d done was still front-page news.

He had a name. Lester Greene. He had a record, spent time in St. Cloud for boosting cars. He had no permanent address. He was a bum. And he’d become a murderer.

The woman he’d killed was Christine Coyer, president and CEO of Coyer Cosmetics. Deborah used to ask for Coyer stuff every Christmas. All I remember about it was that it was expensive. According to the paper, she’d just returned from visiting family in New York City. Her husband had picked her up at the airport, brought her home, and while he parked the car in the garage, she’d gone into the house ahead of him. Apparently, she surprised Kid, who’d broken in with a crowbar, which he proceeded to use to crack her skull. He attacked her husband too, but the guy made it upstairs where he kept a pistol for protection. Kid followed and the rich man put four bullets in him in the bedroom. He was dead when the cops arrived. The husband knew the assailant. A bum on whom he had taken pity. A mistake he now regretted.

The story was continued on page 5A with pictures. I could tell already the whole thing smelled, but when I turned to the photos I nearly fell off my stool. There was the dead woman. She was fiftyish, nicely coiffed, but not with long black hair that brushed the top of her ass. She was a little on the chubby side, matronly even. Not at all the kind of figure a pair of thong panties would enhance.

If the article was correct, she’d been in the Big Apple when Kid had been given that delicate little sexual appetizer. So, if Christine Coyer didn’t give it to him, who did?

During my college days, my clothing came from the Salvation Army. I shopped there in protest against consum­erism and conformity. I shop there now out of necessity. For ten bucks I picked up a passable gray suit, a nearly white shirt, and a tie that didn’t make me puke. I washed up in the men’s room of a Super America on 7th, changed into the suit, and hoofed it to the address on Summit Avenue given in the newspaper story.

Like a big park, Kid had described the place. His perspec­tive was limited. It was the fucking Tuileries Gardens, a huge expanse of tended flower beds and sculpted shrubbery with a château dead center. The cosmetics business had been very good to Ms. Coyer. And to her husband, no doubt. So good, in fact, one had to wonder why a man would do any of the dirty landscape work himself. Or hire someone like Kid to help.

I knocked on the door, a cold call, something I’d often done in my days as a journalist. I had my notepad and pen out, in case I needed to pretend to be a reporter.

A woman answered. “Yes?”

I told her I was looking for Christine Coyer’s husband.

“He’s not here,” she informed me. “Do you have an appointment?”

No, just hoping to get lucky, I told her.

“Would you like to leave a message?”

I didn’t. I thanked her and left.

I headed back to the river thinking the woman’s accent was French, but not heavily so. Quebec, maybe. Her black hair when let down would easily reach her ass. And that body in thong panties would be enough to drive any man to murder.

What to do?

I could go to the police. Would they believe me? If I produced the panties, they might be inclined to look more skeptically on the rich man’s story.

I could go to an old colleague. I still knew plenty of press people who’d take the story and dig.

But the influence of money should never be underesti­mated. Everybody’s integrity is for sale if the price is right. So I knew that turning the information and the panties over to anybody else was risky.

I realized I was probably the only shot Kid had at jus­tice.

I sat by the river, smelling the mud churned up from the bottom, but also smelling the perfume of the black-haired woman as it had come to me on the cool air from inside the big house. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what she wore under her dress. I could understand completely why Kid had been so eager and had disregarded the obvious dangers.

For a long time, I’d been telling myself I was happy with nothing. Give me a bedroll and a place to lay it, a decent meal now and then, and a few bucks for a bottle of booze, and what more did I need?

But the circumstances of Kid’s death suddenly opened the door on a dark, attractive possibility.

I thought about the lovely house and its gardens.

I thought about that fine, beautiful woman inside.

I thought about the deceased Christine Coyer and all the money she’d left behind.

I thought about all that I didn’t have, all that I’d fooled myself into believing I didn’t care about—a set of new clothes, a soft mattress, something as simple as a haircut, for God’s sake, nothing big really, but still out of my reach.

I was a starved man looking at the possibility of a feast. In the end the choice was easy. After all, what good did justice do the dead?

I got the telephone number from a friend still employed in the newspaper business. I kept calling until the rich man answered.

I identified myself—not with my real name—and told him I was a friend of Lester Greene.

He scraped together a showing of indignity. “I can’t imagine what we have to discuss.”

“A gift,” I told him. “One your wife gave to him. Only she wasn’t really your wife. She just pretended in order to lure Lester to your house to be murdered.”

“I’m hanging up,” he said. But he didn’t.

“Ask the woman with the long black hair,” I urged him. “Ask her about the gift she gave to Lester. Here’s a hint. It’s black and silky and small enough to be an eye patch for a pygmy. Ask your beautiful friend about it. I’ll call back in a while.”

I hung up without giving him a chance to respond.

When I called back, we didn’t bother with civilities.

“What do you want?”

Justice for Kid is what I should have said. What came out of my mouth was, “One hundred grand.”

“And for one hundred thousand dollars, what do I get?”

He sounded like a man used to wheeling and dealing. According to the paper, he was a financial advisor. I advised him: “My silence.” I let that hang. “And the panties.”

“You could have got panties anywhere,” he countered.

“She’s beautiful, your mistress. Who is she, by the way? Your secretary?”

“Christine’s personal assistant. Not that it’s important.”

“But it is important that she’s not very bright. She took the panties off her body and gave them to Lester. A DNA analysis of the residual pubic hair would certainly verify that they’re hers. I’m sure the police would be more than willing to look at all the possibilities more closely. Do you want to take that chance?”

“Meet me at my house,” he suggested. “We’ll talk.”

“I don’t think so. Your last meeting there with Lester didn’t end well for him. We’ll meet on the High Bridge,” I said. “I get the money, you get her panties.”

“The panties I can verify. What about your silence?”

“I talk and I’m guilty of extortion. Jail doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does to you. The truth is, though, you have no choice but to trust me.”

“When?”

“Let’s make the exchange this evening just after sunset. Say, nine o’clock.”

I wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the money so quickly, but he didn’t object.

“How will we know each other?” he asked.

We’ll have no trouble, I thought. We’ll be the only cock­roaches on the bridge.

The High Bridge is built at a downward angle, connecting the bluffs of Cherokee Heights with the river flats below Summit Avenue. Although it was after dark, the sodium vapor lamps on the bridge made everything garishly bright. I waited on the high end. Coming from the other side of the river, the rich man would have to walk uphill to meet me. I found that appealing.

The lights of downtown St. Paul spread out below me. At the edge of all that glitter lay the Mississippi, curling like a long black snake into the night. The air coming over the bridge smelled of the river below, of silt and slow water and something else, it seemed to me. Dreams sounds hokey, but that’s what I was thinking. The river smelled of dreams. Dreams of getting back on track. Of putting my life together. Of new clothes, a good job, and, yeah, of putting the booze behind me. I didn’t know exactly how money was going to accomplish that last part, but it didn’t seem impossible.

The evening was warm and humid. Cars came across the bridge at irregular intervals. There wasn’t any foot traffic. I thought for a while that he’d decided I was bluffing and had blown me off. Which was a relief in a way. That meant I had to do the right thing, take the evidence to the cops, let them deal with it. Kid might yet get his justice.

Then I saw someone step onto the bridge at the far end and start toward me. I was a good quarter-mile away and at first I couldn’t tell if it was him. When the figure was nearly halfway across, I realized it wasn’t the rich man. It was the personal assistant. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and waited, looking up at the Heights, then down toward the flats, uncertain which way I would come.

What the hell was this all about? There was only one way to find out. I walked out to meet her.

I wasn’t wearing the gray suit, but she recognized me anyway.

“You were at the house this morning,” she said in that accent I decided was, indeed, French Canadian. Her hair hung to her ass and rippled like a velvet curtain. She wore an airy summer dress. The high hem lifted on the breeze, show­ing off her legs all the way to mid-thigh. Killer legs. Against this, Kid hadn’t stood a chance.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Who cares, as long as I have your money.” Her lips were thick and red around teeth white as sugar. I smelled her deli­cate perfume, the same scent that had washed over me that morning. It seemed to overpower the scent of the river.

“Show me,” I said.

“Where are my panties?”

I reached into my pocket and dangled them in front of her. “Where’s my money?”

From the purse she carried over her shoulder, she pulled a thick manila envelope. “The panties,” she said.

“The envelope first.”

She thought about it a moment, then handed it over. I looked inside. Four bundles of hundreds bound with rubber bands.

“Want to count it?” she said.

All I wanted was for the transaction to be over with and to be rid of this business. “I’ll trust you,” I said.

She took the panties and threw them over the bridge rail­ing. I watched them drop, catch the breeze, and cut toward the middle of the river, swift as a little black bat.

“Gone forever.” She smiled.

“You didn’t even check to make sure they were the ones. For all you know, I could have bought a pair just like them at Marshall Field’s.”

“They would never let a bum like you into Marshall Field’s.” She turned with a swish of her long, scented hair and walked away, her dress lifting on the breeze.

I watched until she’d grown small in the glare, then turned and headed back toward the Heights.

I was ten feet from a new life when he spoke to me out of the shadow of the squat pines at the end of the bridge.

“I’ll take the money.”

He’d probably come across in one of the cars during my meeting with the woman. I couldn’t see his face, but he thrust a gun at me from the shadows and it glowed in the streetlights as if the metal were hot.

“I give it to you, I’m dead,” I said.

His voice spat from the dark. “You were dead from the beginning.”

I sailed the envelope at him like a frisbee. It caught him in the chest. The gun muzzle flashed. I felt a punch in my belly. I spun and stumbled into the street in front of an MTC bus that swerved, its horn blaring. I fled toward the dark, away from the streetlights.

The bus passed, and he came after me on foot, a black figure against the explosion of light from the bridge. I ran, making my way along the streets that topped the Heights. I cut into an alley, across another street, then into another alley.

Suddenly, inexplicably, my legs gave out. They just went limp. I sprawled in the gravel behind an old garage. A streetlamp not far away shed enough light that I could easily be seen. I managed to crawl into the shadow between two garbage cans, where I lay listening. I heard the slap of shoes hard and fast pass the alley entrance and keep going. Then everything got quiet.

My shirt was soaked with blood. My legs were useless. I’d hoped to make it to the river, but that wasn’t going to happen. The end was going to come in a bed of weeds in a nameless alley. Nothing I could do about that.

But about the man and the woman who’d killed Kid, there was still something I could do.

I pulled the pair of panties from my pocket, the pair she’d given Kid and whose twin I’d found that afternoon at Marshall Field’s and bought with money made by selling my own blood. I drew out my pen and notepad and wrote a brief explanation, hoping whoever found me would notify the police.

I was near the river, though I would never sit on its banks again. I closed my eyes. For a while, all I smelled was the garbage in the bins. Then I smelled the river. When I opened my eyes, there was Kid, grinning on the other side. Like he understood. Like he forgave me. I started toward him. The water, cold and black, crept up my legs. The current tugged at my body. In a few moments, it carried me away.