Bronx Noir

Home sweet home by Sandra Kitt

City Island

It had been years since I was last on City Island. That’s the official name of the community that’s a little spit of land connected to the Bronx by a bridge, one lane in each direction, not far from Pelham Bay Park. The bridge is the only way on or off the island.

I came back for only one reason, and it wasn’t to order a plate of fried clams or shrimp bisque. I wanted to find out what really happened to Brody Miller. The two people in the entire world who would know still lived there on City Island.

I remember it was an adventure to go to City Island with my family and have dinner. Seafood and pizza predominated the businesses that ran the full length of the main street, City Island Avenue, from the bridge at one end down to Belden Street and the pier with its unobstructed view of Long Island Sound at the other. There were two other smaller islands as well, accessible by ferry. As far as I knew no one lived on either. (I now know, however, that short-term jail inmates from Rikers Island are transported there almost daily, for the grisly job of digging holes.) My family had its favorite places to eat, but since then most of those restaurants have been taken over by new owners and new names. Same food.

I never used to believe that anyone actually lived on City Island, as if the stores and restaurants along the main street were a back-lot façade. The restaurants located on the water were the real reason to go. Because of the view of the marina, and the bay beyond the small harbor, and to watch the occasional slow-moving pleasure boats on a nice day. There was something maybe a little exotic about this other world, because it was just barely connected to the rest of the city.

It was only after I met and started hanging out with Jenna Harding in high school, and she met and fell in love with Brody Miller, that I found some of the real charm of the place. Brody had fallen hard, granting City Island the status of Eden. Yeah, Jenna was our official safe passage into the tightknit community of people who’d lived there for generations. But it was Brody who embraced the island with fervor and devotion as if it was also his own. I could never see City Island through either of their eyes, but I went along because Jenna and Brody somehow brought both worlds together, his and hers. But in the end the island showed them both that, either oil and water don’t mix, or never the twain shall meet.

When I heard that Jenna still lived on City Island I knew I had to return. But it wasn’t about her. She was always going to be welcome there; she was one of the island’s own. I always felt more protective of Brody because, as everyone else and everything proved, he had no one but himself. I thought he was still there somewhere. I imagined I even knew where.

When I met Jenna in high school it was the first time she’d been off the island without her family or friends. But she had no choice. City Island schools only went through ninth grade and then all students had to go somewhere else to graduate high school. She said her parents wanted to send her to private school but couldn’t afford it. They were afraid that urban life, and all those ethnic types, would open its great jaws and swallow their redhaired, green-eyed baby whole. I was one of “those people,” but I’d add a little spice to my family by mentioning my American Indian background, effectively demon-strating that, in one way, I was here way before anyone else, like the Indians who originally inhabited City Island.

I started going over there to see Jenna and that’s when my tunnel vision began to broaden peripherally. There were real homes and families. The side streets were small, the blocks short, the homes very close together, barely a human width apart. The island was Old World, like parts of Queens and Brooklyn, with a touch of New England coastal towns before redevelopment. It was sweet. It looked kind of rundown, but interesting. I hardly ever saw other people who looked like me.

When I met Jenna’s parents they seemed, at first, suspicious. Years later I realized that their reception was probably no different from what my parents might have shown had Jenna ever met them and visited where I lived in Washington Heights. My mother worked. Hers didn’t. My father owned a business that had him traveling through three nearby states several times a month. Jenna’s father managed a business on City Island that his family used to own. My mother was the strong family matriarch. Jenna’s father ruled because he was a chauvinist.

Tommy Harding liked to boast that his father was once the unofficial mayor of City Island. The Harding family had been there almost five generations. Tommy took over the title by default after his father died, and was inordinately proud of it. He wasn’t a very big man; slender, a chain smoker, and a big storyteller. Not a lot of formal education, but by no means a stupid man. Mrs. Harding was almost invisible the few times I visited. She kept a clean if unimaginative house. There was a lot of crochet and quilted accents. One was a framed Home Sweet Home sign that greeted visitors just inside the front door.

As much as I was a little bit afraid of Tommy Harding and his big ego, I was more fascinated by his stories of life on the island, what it used to be like. Jenna once confessed, embarrassed but honest, that she thought her father was probably prejudiced. He’d told me that his best friend in the navy was black. But I wondered what he said about me behind my back after leaving his house.

I came to believe that Jenna’s father treated me with the generosity of someone who felt perfectly safe in his universe, and was assured he was far better than I was. Jenna had two brothers. One who’d left right after high school to join the marines. The other had simply moved to a different boating town in Maryland. I wondered if in either case it was to get out of the shadow of their father. Jenna was the baby of the family, a distinction that held pros and cons, and that would ultimately decide her future.

And then Brody entered the picture.

Jenna and I met him at the start of our junior year when he’d transferred in to finish his senior year. He was tall, athletic, good-looking in a bad-boy, smartass way, even though he was neither. He was also an unknown. Neither white nor black, nor Latino, Brody was classic Heinz variety. That meant, whatever racial mixture went into his makeup, the end result was a guy who stood out, drew attention, seemed bigger than life. He had the open personality and charm of someone who went by his own rules but tried hard to get along.

Brody became my friend, the kind of male friend that is only possible when you’re sixteen, and when you have something in common. In our case it was ambiguous background and heritage. Like me he had a curiosity about people, places, and things that made us fearless. But Jenna fell for Brody in the way of a young girl whose heart can be captured, true and fast, just once in her life.

Their romance became public domain, and everyone in school followed its development with personal interest. The other boys wanted to know how long it would take Brody to score. The other girls upped the ante and did what they could to get Brody’s attention for themselves. I was witness to all of it, awed and deeply jealous that no one ever looked at me or sought me out the way Brody and Jenna did for each other.

Yet he wasn’t a player. There was, however, something a bit dangerous and tense about him, like a predatory animal who had very tightly drawn parameters around his space and himself. Even Jenna hadn’t picked that up about Brody, her eyes glazed over with infatuation, and defiance.

Once, Brody and I got to talking outside of school. We’d been let out early because of teacher meetings. Jenna hadn’t bothered coming at all. I felt aimless and not ready to head back home to take up my role as babysitter to my younger siblings.

“So, Jenna didn’t come in today,” he said. He rolled the one spiral bound notebook he ever used, and forced it into the back pocket of his jeans.

“She said it was a waste of time just for a few hours. Anyway, it’s a long bus ride from City Island,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. If I’d known I would have skipped to be with her.”

I looked at his profile. “You’ve been over there? To City Island?”

“Sure. Lots of times.”

“With Jenna?” I thought of her father and the boundaries he’d laid down.

He laughed. “Before I ever met her. I use to fish off the pier near the bridge. I once tried to get a summer job at the marina. Jen and me, we get together and walk around Orchard Beach Park. I have to do the right thing. I want to meet her folks, see where she lives. Let them know straight out Jen and me are together. I love City Island. I could live there.”

“How come?”

“’Cause it’s small. It’s surrounded by water. It feels like home. Kind of cozy and safe and cut off, know what I mean?”

“Like your home?”

“Not where I live now. Where I’d like to live one day.”

“But there’s nothing there. There’s nothing to do but eat. Jenna even says so and she liked growing up there. It’s so different from the rest of New York.”

“Maybe that’s why I like it.”

“Maybe your family could move there.”

“I don’t have a family. I live in a group home. My last foster parents moved before the school year started. I didn’t want to go with them to Norfolk. I was old enough. I could decide to stay on my own.”

I looked at Brody more closely. I was afraid to be too nosy and ask the questions that would give him a history and fill in the blanks.

“Aren’t you afraid to be by yourself?”

“I’ve always been by myself. It could have been worse, I guess. I always knew I was really on my own. I don’t know why my real mother gave me up. I don’t know who my father is. Bottom line, I have to take care of myself.”

“Doesn’t that make you mad?”

“I used to be, but now all I want is my own life, my own place, and to do what I want. I’ve been working part-time near boats and water since I was fifteen. South Street Seaport promised me something full-time when I graduate, but I’m thinking how cool it would be to find a job on City Island. Then I could really stay.”

Brody had always struck me as a guy who said what he meant, and knew what he wanted and pretty much how to get it. But what I wasn’t hearing was where did Jenna fit in? Was she just a stepping-stone to his need to belong somewhere?

His self-confidence was amazing, and it made me wonder if there was some great advantage to having to build your own life, create your own family from the ground up. To not be afraid of the world, not be afraid of being told no. City Island must have seemed like a cosseted haven to him, the safe harbor at the end of the crazy world he came from, where kids were discarded like garbage.

Brody was already eighteen by the time we started our senior year. He looked and behaved older than most of us, which was part of his attraction. We still didn’t know yet how combustible those kinds of traits could be. Awesome to us, threatening to others.

We all had to plot and plan how to get together on Friday nights and weekends for parties and occasional trips into the city to a club. Elaborate lies were created that tested the boundaries of our lives, our families, our communities. Brody had no such concerns and became our de facto leader. I know for me it changed the idea of how big and complicated the world was beyond my own neighborhood. For Jenna I think it was more confusing. How far was she willing to go before she had to turn back home?

“My father is going to kill me,” she inevitably moaned on each new adventure. Like the one that took us to Staten Island, another remote outcast of a place.

In the spring before graduation, Jenna’s parents insisted on hosting a birthday party for their daughter in the tiny backyard of their home. The idea both embarrassed and frightened Jenna, but everyone looked forward to the evening, hoping that the Hardings were cool enough to just disappear so that the real party could go down.

I got there too early, and sat on Jenna’s bed and watched as she finished dressing and did makeup and decided on a pair of cute but treacherous high heels. Her friends started arriving in earnest around 8:30, quickly spilling into the front yard, and the street to the side of the house. Some boy who’d once dated Jenna, before she’d left the island and met Brody, actually showed up, his presence blessed by her father. Goodlooking but, to my way of thinking, too much like a Tommy-in-the-making.

By 10 the party was on, but Jenna was nervous and excited waiting for Brody to appear. Me too. It was such a mixed party that everyone thought Jenna’s folks surely knew about Brody by now. Her father especially was jovial and in good spirits, joking with the boys and drawing lots of raucous laughter. Gracious and flirtatious with the girls, drawing whispered comments like, “He’s kind of cool.” Music and voices and laughter floated like a breeze and wafted over the neighborhood.

Brody arrived a little before midnight, making an entrance that was not soon forgotten because of its simplicity and class. Those are my words. There are some who might give a slightly different spin. In any case, some kind of energy shifted in the yard. With it came anticipation.

Jenna, who had been giggly all evening, ran to greet Brody n a way that left no doubt they were an item. Before greeting anyone else, Brody presented Jenna’s mother with flowers. She was so startled that she barely managed a thank you before escaping into the house with the bouquet. For Tommy Harding, Brody had a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Brody shook Tommy Harding’s hand and thanked him for inviting him to the party, and into his home.

The ice had been broken.

The critical initiation had been passed. Brody was in. All of us closed around him and Jenna like the good buds, comrades, classmates that we were. It totally excluded her parents.

From his pocket Brody took out a delicate chain necklace with a sparkling gem pendant dangling from the center. Jenna turned so that he could fasten it around her neck. We woowooed like a team cheer while Jenna kissed Brody her thanks, and her love.

Given a real choice, I’m not sure that Jenna’s father would have included Brody Miller, and it seemed to me Brody was an unwelcome surprise. Brody wasn’t just another high school friend, he was a young man. He was not just another guest, he was seeing Tommy’s daughter.

The music and laughter continued, and so did the drinking. At one point I noticed that the cake had been brought out and placed on a sawed-down tree stump that served perfectly as a small table. On previous visits to Jenna’s house her father had always complained about the stump, promising to dig it out and get rid of it one of these days, while admitting that it had its uses, like now. The appearance of the cake was a good sign. By 1:30, 2 at the latest, the party would be over and we’d all leave. I wouldn’t have to bare witness to whatever humiliation Jenna’s father was making a case for, as he watched his little girl enjoying herself.

Jenna and Brody held hands, or put their arms around each other. Sometimes they danced, swaying together, hip to hip. Facing each other, the intimacy in their gaze naked and exposed. They looked great together. Years later I’d recognize that Jenna and Brody were setting an example and a standard for our own possibilities in love.

Tommy Harding drank too much. Mrs. Harding tried to draw him aside, away from the party that was not meant for him. Too late, Tommy’s insecurities surfaced and he set out on a course aimed directly at Brody Miller. He suddenly stumbled across the yard, grabbed Brody’s arm, and jerked him around, squaring off.

“I don’t appreciate you comin’ in here and taking over my daughter’s party. Who the fuck are you anyway? Don’t touch her.”

“Daddy!” Jenna gasped in genuine shock.

The crowded yard grew silent so quickly it was as if we were all holding our breath, waiting for this moment.

Jenna’s father and Brody were chest to chest. Brody had the advantage by about three inches. Standing with yet another beer and a cigarette in one hand, Tommy used the other to jab a finger in Brody’s face. Brody took a step back. Jenna was holding his arm. That only infuriated her father more.

I closed my eyes before the first punch could be thrown. All around me people were on the move; standing way back, or pushing through the side gate onto the street. I heard a lawn chair scrape against the flagstone ground and then fall over, as did a bottle that broke. I heard Jenna screaming at her father to stop, her mother wailing like a Greek chorus. I heard Brody quietly telling Tommy Harding to calm down, but I was waiting breathlessly for the tipping point. Brody’s next suggestion that maybe he should leave was overridden by Jenna’s declaration that she was going with him. That sealed it. Both were cut off by a sudden crunch and a thud, a grunt. A highpitched scream rose over the music.

Jenna got between her father and Brody. Her red hair was like a flag, and the only color to be distinguished in the yard lit by lanterns. She was not trying to stop her father but trying to protect Brody. Her choice spurred Tommy Harding into a fury. And it was as if some silent call had gone out. Suddenly, nearly half a dozen men, including Jenna’s former boyfriend, were rushing Brody. They surrounded him, tackling him to the ground.

I heard them calling Brody every dirty word and name they could utter.

“Call the cops. Call the cops!”

It was my own voice I heard, disembodied and shrill. I wanted to make them stop, but I was terrified of the men turning on me as well. No one went to Brody’s aid, and Jenna was wrenched from his side. Once again, he was on his own. He didn’t belong on City Island, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get a chance to be with Jenna Harding.

I don’t remember hearing police sirens. But the fight had lost its momentum and the men were weary. I couldn’t see Brody, but I knew I had to get out of there. Fear took over. I stepped over the debris that was now the backyard. The birthday cake had been smashed and destroyed, the colorful frosting a globby mess on the ground.

Jenna was crying hysterically and being comforted by her mother, but she kept calling out Brody’s name. Her father was slouched on a step at the back of the house. Another man sat bent over on the tree stump that minutes ago held the birthday cake. Brody was on his knees, silently hunched over and motionless. Two men stood over him, as if daring him to get up. Finally, I took a hesitant step toward Brody, but someone stood in my way to prevent my passage.

“It’s all over. Go home. There’s nothing to see. Just go home.”

“Brody? Come on. Get up. Let’s get out of here,” I heard my own trembling voice.

“Don’t worry about him. We’ll see that he gets home. It was a fight and now it’s over.”

“But he didn’t start it,” I said.

The man got right in my face. “Go… home.”

I hung around outside, shivering not from the night air but from having watched Brody outnumbered by five or six able-bodied men. There were still a couple dozen partygoers hanging around. I waited for Brody to come out so we could head back into the city together.

Maybe twenty minutes later a police car ambled its way up the street. The two officers got out and approached the house as if they were just stopping by for a friendly cup of coffee. No rush to see if a teen named Brody Miller was hurt and maybe needed an ambulance.

I decided that Brody would probably be okay.

I went home.

Jenna was not in school the entire next week. Neither was Brody. The talk was not about the ruined birthday party but about the fight, and Brody getting his ass kicked. There was also talk that Brody and Jenna had run off together. I preferred that story to the one that kept playing in my mind.

Jen returned, sullen and standoffish, for the last three weeks of school, and finally graduation. She had nothing to say about anything, except that she and Brody had broken up.

Okay, I could see that happening. She wasn’t going to defy her own father. She wasn’t going to take a risk, or stand up for what she believed or what she wanted. I can’t say if that was a mistake, but it was certainly her loss.

I, for one, never saw Brody again.

It was years before I thought I’d figured out what happened to Brody Miller. I couldn’t tell Jenna. Anyway, I kind of lost touch with her a few years after we graduated. Once I did ask her, flat out, if she ever heard from Brody. She said, simply, no. End of conversation. I heard that someone contacted his group home supervisor only to be told that Brody was no longer there. He was past being a minor, a ward of the state, and if he chose to take off without telling anyone, he had the right.

Jenna and I drifted further apart. What used to hold us together no longer existed. I guess that was as much by choice as it was by circumstance. I know now that you have to work at the things you want, like friendship or love. She landed a job at a law firm in New York. I finished college and returned home. Then one day I realized that I had never returned to the island since the night of Jenna’s birthday party. But that was also the start of some not-so-far-fetched thoughts that wouldn’t go away.

Like believing that Tommy Harding and his friends had killed Brody Miller that night and buried him in the Harding’s backyard.

After a while it didn’t even seem so crazy an idea. I’d already witnessed some of the terrible things people were capable of doing to each other, all to protect themselves, their families, their homes… or in the name of God.

Then, one day, I took a bus back to City Island, getting off the first stop outside a restaurant called the Sea Shore. That was as far as I got. I made myself sick wondering, What if I’m right? What if Jenna’s father goes to jail? What if her family is forced to sell their home, and they leave the island in disgrace? What if Jenna hates me? If Brody was really dead, could I be forgiven for catching and turning in his killer, the father of a friend?

But I wasn’t prepared for a full-fledged flashback of the night of the fight, chilling me to the bone on an eighty-degree day. I turned around and caught the next bus off the island. I was shaking like crazy.

It was a year later when I came up with a real plan. I first went to the police precinct that covered City Island and asked about an incident one spring night nearly seven years earlier at the home of one of the residents. The cops made a show of checking old ledgers and computer databases, and said they could find nothing out of the ordinary. The only thing recorded for that Saturday night was an incident involving a small boat that had been stolen by teens and later run aground.

I did a search of newspapers articles and reports for that entire week. Nothing. I kept thinking, Cover-up. Or, had the police arrived to drive Brody off the island, maybe all the way home? But that was part of the problem again. Brody had no home. He’d wanted City Island to be his home. Maybe he’d gotten his wish.

I Googled his name and the date and still got nowhere. But it was more likely that without anyone to champion him, Brody could have met with foul play. Another thing… people vanish all the time. Sometimes, right under our noses.

There was no help for it. I knew I was going to have to go back and see Tommy Harding.

I don’t think I was prepared to learn that Jenna was back, although I’d heard rumors over the years. She was no longer with her parents but in her own place. I couldn’t find her listed in the local directory, so I called the City Island Historical Society, located in a converted school. An elderly voice answered. Of course he knew the Hardings. He also knew nothing of the night that stayed in my memory.

It was a weather perfect day when I next returned. I got off the bus several blocks from the corner where I’d turn to approach the Harding house. I used the walk to look around and found, eerily, that everything seemed pretty much the same as the last time I’d been this far. There was a craft fair in full swing, and the sidewalks were crowded with tables and makeshift booths of local folks selling their stuff. I bypassed it all.

I turned the corner and approached the Harding house. I was caught off guard when I realized that someone was sitting on the tiny porch. It was Tommy Harding in the flesh, alive and well. I stood on the curb and silently stared at him, too struck by warp time to be able to say anything. He leaned forward in his decaying wicker chair.

“Can I help you? You lost or something?”

“Mr. Harding?”

“Yeah. Who’s asking?”

“I went to school with Jenna. Maybe you remember me?”

He silently regarded me, so still and so coldly that I expected him to yell, Get the hell out of here!

“Sure. I remember you now. How’ve you been? Jenna hasn’t mentioned you in years. Well, come on in.”

I walked through the open gate and up to the steps.

“I know you weren’t expecting me. I’m meeting some friends for lunch in a while,” I improvised smoothly. “I thought that since I was here…”

“You want to know how Jenna’s doing?”

“How are you and Mrs. Harding?” I stalled, minding my manners.

“Fine, fine. Grandparents now, thanks to my son living in San Diego. Wife’s out at that street fair. Come on up and have a seat.”

“Thanks, but I can’t stay long,” I said. “I did want to ask about Jenna. How’s she doing, and everything. I lost touch with her a few years ago.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. I wondered if he was putting together Jenna leaving City Island to go to high school and meeting me. And Brody.

“Well… you know Jenna. She became Miss Independent after she finished high school. Moved into the city, got a job…”

“Did she ever get married?”

“Two years ago. A young guy she grew up with from around here. He’s a cop in the city. Ran into Jenna when he gave her a speeding ticket, and boom. Before you could say City Island they’re planning a wedding.” He cackled gleefully at his own joke. “Sorry you weren’t invited.”

He wasn’t sorry at all, and neither was I. Things change. “I hope she’s happy.”

“She sure did make a beautiful bride. Come inside. I have an album with all the pictures.”

He got up and headed into the house. I hadn’t expected Tommy Harding to make it so easy for me. The inside of the house had not changed either. The first thing I still saw was that Home Sweet Home sign on the wall. It suddenly bothered me a lot to see it. While he was trying to find the right album, I walked toward the window that faced out on the backyard.

“Here it is. Let me turn on the light. See, wasn’t she something? Her husband is a great guy. Known him all his life. They live on the other side of the avenue.”

“So, it’s true. She moved back to City Island?”

His smile was knowing and amused. “She never really left. City Island is a great place to raise a family. The fruit don’t fall all that far from the tree, you know.”

I knew. But I’d hoped that the story would have turned out differently. I bent over the album opened to Jenna’s wedding ceremony. She made a stunning bride, the smiling man standing just behind her a handsome groom. I stared at the images wondering if there’d ever been a chance that Jenna’s future husband might have been Brody? I leafed through the pages but quickly lost interest.

“Why don’t you stop over and say hello? I’m sure Jenna would like that.”

I wonder.

The phone rang and Tommy Harding excused himself to take the call.

That was the moment I needed. I hurried to the window, my heart racing, knowing that this was the moment of truth. Out the window the yard had changed, but not in the way I expected. A small deck had been built, squeezed into one corner. But I also saw that the tree stump was still there. It had not been dug up to provide a convenient hole. The only thing likely to be found beneath it were very dead roots.

“How do you like the deck?”

I grabbed at the opening. “The last time I was here was for Jenna’s birthday our senior year. It ended in a fight with one of our friends, Brody. I don’t know what happened to him after that night. Do you?”

“Well, I sure don’t. Don’t remember the guy very well. Lot of drinkin’ went on that night. Wife told me the next day I made a fool of myself, embarrassed Jen. Too much beer,” he chuckled, unrepentant.

He walked back to the door. I knew that was my invitation to leave. He’d been gracious and let me in. But I wasn’t going away till I got what I wanted. Information. The truth. The whereabouts of Brody.

Halfway across the small living room I happened to spot a bottle of Johnny Walker Red on a bookcase. It was still sealed. It could have been a different bottle than the one given to Jenna’s father that night. It could have been the same. It was something else I’d never know for sure.

I said goodbye to Mr. Harding and walked off his property. Behind me I heard him whistling, comfortable and safe in his kingdom on the bay. He’d given me Jenna’s address, but in that moment I don’t know how much I really wanted to see her again. Too much distance had formed between us, and I was really pissed off with her. She got to come home again, get married to someone else, and settle down like Brody never existed. How could she forget what they’d been like together?

Nevertheless… I crossed City Island Avenue to the quiet streets on the other side, looking for her address. When I found it and saw the life she was living I knew for sure the past was over. Dead and buried.

I was startled when a door slammed on the side of the house and a tall man walked around the car parked in the narrow driveway and prepared to get into the driver’s seat. He stood poised with one foot on the doorframe.

“Come on, Jen. Move it. We’re late.”

A second later the door opened again and the former Jenna Harding rushed out. She hadn’t changed either.

Her flaming hair was still the same length and style as in high school, as in her wedding photos. And she was still answering the call of men like her father who had never ventured very far from this place. Brody might have made a difference. But I forget. He wanted to live here too.

I was going to leave without making my presence known, but Jenna saw me and stopped dead in her tracks. Over the top of her white picket fence, and about seven years, we stared at each other. In her eyes, for a split second, I saw someone I used to know.

“Hey,” she smiled brightly. “What are you doing here?”

Over the fence we air-kissed. The man in the car gently tapped the horn.

“Wait a minute!” she yelled, irritated, turning once more to me. The smile reappeared. “Wow. It’s been so many years.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“So you heard I got married,” she shrugged.

Just then something sharp and bright sparkled at her throat. It was the pendant that Brody had given her on her birthday years before. I couldn’t believe it.

“Let me introduce you to…”

“You’re in a hurry. I just saw your father. I… stopped by to say hello.”

“You did?”

“Well, I actually came for the street fair,” I fabricated again. “He told me you live here.”

“You should have let me know you were coming. I would have invited you to visit, but we’re heading out to his folks for dinner.”

“Go ahead. I won’t hold you up,” I said, stepping back.

She suddenly reached out to me. “Wait. Did you ever hear from Brody?”

Her question was so unexpected that I looked at her hopefully. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

She silently shook her head. “I don’t know anything. Daddy kept telling me everything was going to be all right.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jen, come on, already!”

“Stop yelling. I’m coming,” she pouted.

We stared once more at each other.

“I never saw him again after that night,” she said.

“Maybe he never left the island, Jenna.”

“He did talk about signing up for military duty, and then coming back here.”

She didn’t get it.

The car sounded again.

“I really gotta go. Call me sometime, okay? We’ll get together.” She hurried to the car and got in.

I knew I never would. I stood and watched as the car backed out of the driveway and the former Jenna Harding proceeded with her life as a newly minted matron of City Island, having given up all opportunities to become someone else.

I was overwhelmed with disappointment. I’d held out hope of solving the mystery, positive that something terrible had been done to Brody after the party and he’d never left the island. The body buried in the backyard turned out not to be true. Worse, Jenna appeared as much in the dark as I was.

So, what had happened to Brody Miller?

Had he crept away alone to lick his wounds? Been threatened to stay away from Jenna and City Island? Had he given up on his dream and moved somewhere to create a new one? Was he hiding in the military, always looking for a few good men, and the only place that would give him a home, no questions asked?

The fair was still in high gear, the beautiful weather bringing out more people than the sidewalk space could actually support. Many had given up and drifted into nearby cafés and restaurants to get out of the heat. I stopped in my tracks and was grabbed by another thought.

What if, as I’d believed for so long, Brody was still here. Just not here.

I turned around and began walking again. This time I was looking for a sign that would point the way to one of the other small islands just off the north shore of City Island.

It was called Hart Island. Well-known, but not often discussed. There was a ferry that went over, but no one ever went there just to visit.

I found Fordham Street, which cut through the middle of City Island at its widest point and extended to the ferry stand. I walked there and then stood on the dock staring out at Hart Island. I really don’t understand why I continued to believe, deep in my soul, that Brody’s final resting place was over there. In any case, this is where it ends.

With no family or real address, with only a name known in a very small circle, it would be so easy for him to disappear. With no record of his existence, there would certainly be none of his passing. Like so many others who never fit in anywhere, a final home may have been made for someone once known as Brody Miller in Potter’s Field.

A visit to St. Nick’s by Robert J. Hughes

Fordham Road

I could have found it in my sleep, I could have made my way by touch, or even sense, through the turnstiles, to the trains, to the seat, my seat, the one at the middle, the one that let me out closest to the Fordham Road exit, the one I’d considered my stop, my station, my neighborhood, for too long. But I kept my eyes open. I wanted to see how it had changed, I guess, I wanted to see how it had not, and how twenty years had wasted away — twenty years of my life, my half-life.

It was all so new to me. Again. This life, this freedom, this air. Even the fetid smell of the sweating subway station, even the feral rats that nibbled on the black and glistening garbage bags, even the putrefying corpse of a drunk wheezing on the end of the oily platform, they all meant freedom to me. In the car, they all meant the world had gone on. The big-busted Latinas in their halters with their hoop earrings and stilettos, perched on the benches giggling, half women, all girl. The attitudinous black boys, boastful and wary, manful and scared, sitting with hooded eyes in the corners. The plaid school kids in clutches, the Laotians, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, whose features I couldn’t figure, whose Asian geographies had populated the place when some more of the Irish had seeped out in the recent past. But not all of them had gone. Not my mom. Not my sister. Me, yes. My brother, of course, gone. This had been mine once, this neighborhood where all I saw was squalor, all I savored was stench, and all I felt was opportunity slipping away. This was now mine again, at least in time, for an hour, for two, for today. For more, though. For more. Always, for more.

My neighborhood. My home, once. My home never again. My home was far away, had been, for too long, for too needlessly long. And all because I’d been afflicted with stupidity, and never thought about repercussions. I’d never figured that a victimless crime would eventually have one. We are all victims, somehow, sometime, somewhere. No matter. But though I would never live here again, I had to come back just for now.

The train pulled out into the air and became an el, and the light made me feel, as always, as if I had just discovered grace. The sun blossomed over the rooftops. A few people on the car took out cell phones, and began to shout over the din, din themselves. At Fordham Road, I stepped down again onto the street. I cupped my hand over my brow and got my bearings. Not that I needed to. But I wanted to survey the shifting landscape. The stores were different, but the sidewalk held the same hubbub, now less Irish, now more other, less pink, more beige. The views I had thought vivid faded as my memories met new banks, aging bodegas. There was that White Castle, still going, still open twenty-four hours. Mike’s Papaya, too, dusty and yellow. There the 99-cent store. And there the Mega 99. There the pawnbroker, now with debt solutions in seven languages. And new nail and hair palaces. China Nail. Beauty J. Fordham Nails Ltd., tatty and limited indeed. And the restaurants: Centenario V, Comidas Latinas y Mariscos, Excellents II. English must have been new for them once, but twice? I’d taught ESL upstate, part of my good works there, my rehabilitation. If good had meant anything. It got me here, then, partly, it helped my release. But here, I still didn’t know. I gazed again. There, on the corner, the little bakery, and across from Devoe Park a white van, El Rancho, selling frituras and chimichurri. There, tucked away just off Father Zeiser Place, Patsy’s Bar, the old reliable, and, oh, up ahead, my undoing.

Across University Avenue at the Fordham Road intersection stood those stately gray twin bell towers. Positioned between them above a stained-glass window, a cross, small and unnecessary, punctuated the hot blue sky, as if anyone needed reminding that this was a church. St. Nicholas of Tolentine. Unwelcoming below were the same wooden doors still blistering paint a shade of iron-rich dried blood. My church. My parish. My grammar school. My baptism, my communion, my confirmation. My bête noir. My childhood in a granite sanctuary. Here was my soul anointed in the baptismal, my brow moistened by the holy-water font, my fingers sulfured by matches snuffed at the foot of the saint, my conscience soothed by muttered pleadings at the altar rail, cosseted by lies in the confessional. Shadowed by scuffling in the sanctuary. Haunted by the shouting. Sickened by the blood. Hounded in the darkness. I shouldn’t be here.

I noticed on the sign outside that mass was beginning in ten minutes. I looked over to my right at Devoe Park, where a listless player was shooting hoops, his ball hitting the court in lazy thuds. I ascended the seven heavy marble steps. A Latino man was more sure than I and, coming up behind me quickly, held open the creaking door. I nodded gracias and followed him in, staying a moment in the dank narthex. The stone fonts were empty. Had they been filled, would I have dipped my finger in and touched the water to my blasphemous temple? Attempted my own atavistic ritual of ungranted forgiveness? I would have. I would have relished the blessed water fizzling to steam on my iniquitous fingers as I dared dishonor God. But I was spared that visible damnation for now. I ignored the dusty fonts and went in, standing at the back under the choir loft, letting my eyes adjust.

It was sticky here in the muffled light. A fan at the back whirred, faint against the humid afternoon. Two stained-glass windows on the right side near the choir loft were cracked open at the bottom, under a scene of Jesus speaking to the elders. His early years. When he was filled with promise. Millennia until they’d discovered speed and crack and all of that delightful nastiness.

About twenty-five people were here in church, dropped like random seeds along the hard furrows of the pews. Most of them were at the front, sprouting near the apse. A few knelt to the right side, under the white figure of St. Nicholas floating on a high shelf by the transverse door, a rare papal touch of statue in a church austere enough to have been Episcopalian. But no, here was more sign of a particular denominational kitsch, a chapel at the left transverse, a shrine to the Virgin, Nuestra Señora de Providencia, for the defiantly devout and luckless. I walked that way, barely genuflecting in front of the altar, just another worshiper. The church was empty on the far side but for one man wearing in this heat a camouflage jacket, perhaps from the Army-Navy store on Davis around the corner. Perhaps a veteran. Perhaps a murderer. Perhaps a brother in carnage. And still touched by his religion. Or his disgrace. Or his memories. He could have been Puerto Rican. He could have been Irish. His white hair glowed as if dappled by some interior star, and he held his head down, in sleepy prayer, a cane propped against the pew before him. I walked past him into that side chapel. The front of the church had begun to rustle with the movement of the priest; he checked the sound system, a few taps on a mike, followed by a rumple of fabric as his surplice sleeve scraped across it. Testing.

The chapel was dark too, with but a few candles glowing electric in their enclosed ruby glass biers. I put in a quarter, and another light sprang to feeble life. Before, in my distant youth, this place had been a vague chapel for the Virgin of the Whatever. She wasn’t particularly providential for me, whoever she’d been. I couldn’t recall her mission, or mine, for that matter — beyond offering her candles, real ones then with flickering flames unlike the repellant little flashlights now. The battered kneeler, imprinted with the depression of countless others, was still there, askew, pushed away from the array of fake votives; someone had risen awkwardly and shifted it. Perhaps the camouflaged veteran Garcia-Gerrigan out there finding way to his unsteady feet and lamentable cane. On the wall was a plaque in Spanish and several overemotional icons of the Virgin’s face. A painted statue of that fortunate Mary guarded one corner, and a small onyx one kept sentry at another. Here was a shrine of true belief, simpleminded, strong, primal.

I left and moved softly back to the rear, to another corner, where a statue of St. Nicholas, this one brown instead of white, more earthbound, rested at the wall. This was one I had hoped to find; I hadn’t seen it at first, its own beige camouflage hiding it from my greedy eyes. Its feet were polished from countless eager peasant fingers. I ran my hand along its pedestal myself, feeling as obvious as if I were a surplice brushing an open mike. I looked around me, a furtive supplicant. I felt around the back of St. Nicholas, searching for an indentation underneath. I stepped back, to bow in specious prayer, to scrape my mind for where it might have been placed. It had to be there. They never moved these plinths, they were bolted to the floor and their false idols to them, secured against the marauding horde, the petty us, the larcenous me. I felt again, pious and plaintive, my fingers touching the worn marble feet. There. Yes. A nib of something metal by the back right side, wedged tightly in. Just as Jimmy had said there’d be. I would return.

I dropped another quarter into a candle slot, saw that it lighted, picked up the parish bulletin from a wall holder, and found an empty pew. The bulletin was in Vietnamese. I didn’t try to read it, but turned it over, as I had always done in church, to examine the advertisements on the back, for funeral homes and auto repair shops, for abortion counseling and broker-free apartments, all in English. The list of priests was there on the second page. One Irish. Two Latino. One Vietnamese. The church hours. In English. Evening vigils. What was today? Yes. Tonight.

I looked up along the long, high-ceilinged nave from where I sat. I had remembered clerestory windows above the aisle roofs and the vaulting, but that must have been in a dream, or I’d imagined someplace grander than this. A conflation of conscience and hope, perhaps. The light softened toward the altar, where the apse lay in a wooden shadow.

The priest, russet-faced, bearded, sixtyish, Irish, walked out again. He wasn’t wearing a chasuble, a nod to the warmth that permeated even the usual coolness of a stone church. Just an alb, and his surplice, the barest vestments of office, the merest priestliness. He had an open, kind face. He began the service, hands apart in a limp crucifix, saying, “We open up to a God who loves us.” I bowed my head as if in prayer. But no. No. No love here. I wondered how much he believed himself, and how much was a scam. I’d wondered that aloud to the prison chaplain, and toyed with the idea of vicardom or something like it myself — it could beat the library. But that was then.

I looked back at the statue. A leaning parishioner with a boozy paunch and droopy neck met my eye from the row behind me. I tilted my head down a fraction. Just another believer biding time.

A church can breed its own defiance and devotion, personal and fierce. I looked up and considered what the window to my left might mean to me, in my own dim trepidation, had I considered a metaphor of suffering for myself. In Memory of the Schmitt Family, with its scene of the Sermon on the Mount, maybe? They died too long ago for me to care, for either the paltriness of their demise or the hubris of their son remembering them in glass. What about the Doyle Family, by their brother? The incorrigible Prodigal Son. No. He would never return, at least not repentant. Or, on the right side, the window depicting Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross? No remembrance from a guilty son or battered brother marked it. Just a generalized suffering. Mary’s face here cowed by grief, her followers propping her up, others holding Jesus’ body limp with temporary death. The words Mary Sodality were painted at the bottom. Mom’s group of rosary-wielding hysterics. She now, I thought, would be waiting sullen at the Oxford apartments just there in screaming distance on Webb Avenue. Not waiting for me. But maybe waiting for news of me. And perhaps, too, like Mary, for release. Mine, perhaps. Hers, maybe. And she too had her own ministry. Of shame. I’d be there later to serve under it. It was important. Not the service. The being there.

One of the parishioners announced a reading from the book of Hosea. I heard just a few sentences, as my thoughts wandered outside, into the glare oozing through the windows.“I will lead her into the desert, and speak to her heart… the days of her youth… The Lord is gracious and merciful… I will espouse you the right of justice.”

The gospel just after that went by quickly. It must have been a paragraph, a weekday snippet of good news. I’d missed it, turning around again, as if to look at the choir loft, as if to fool my friendly parishioner there behind me. The priest spoke. I turned to face him, settled myself, head slightly bent. His sermon. He said, “How do you see God?” He paused; not too oratorical. He meant it. “Do you remember your youth?” Do I. It’s all I ever had and squandered. “Can you awaken in yourself the love you had?” No. Because I didn’t. So many questions. Like the thoughtful believer he obviously was, the priest tried to connect the readings, to make quotidian sense of them for us in our tawdry lives, here amid the perspiration and second thoughts of Christ’s distant followers.

My mind meandered through the consecration. The key. The sanctuary. I’m sure the stash hadn’t been found. It must still be there. Had to be. We stood. The Lord’s Prayer. We all murmured it, even me, finding the words again easily enough. The people at the front were holding hands. When had this touching begun? I hadn’t been in a church since that night, ten years ago. I hadn’t attended mass for ten years before that. When had we all become so, I don’t know, Pentecostal? They’d be speaking in tongues next.

“Let us offer each other the sign of God’s peace,” the priest suggested, and the hand-holders held on and looked at each other with shy disbelief in actual forgiveness, while those of us until then blessedly free of contact turned and made nice to strangers. I reached back and grasped the fleshy hand of the man behind me, who gave me a weird little smile. No, you don’t, I thought, widening my gaze. You don’t know.

I shuffled out of the aisle, and slowly went up to take communion, along with the redeemed brethren beside me. It meant nothing to me, I convinced myself, this ritual, but still my heart began to thump with the inchoate tremor of the damned. I did not believe in this tasteless wafer, but I feared somehow the wrath. I had always believed I’d be found out further, even after being discovered back then, limp and bloody, curled fetal in the chancel where I’d collapsed after the beating, after hiding, hoping to remain hidden. Then, it was fear of my punishment. Now, it was dread of another crime. Now. But then. Not back then. Not when I had not killed my brother. It hadn’t been me. Despite what my mother believed. Now, I wanted to see the sanctuary door again. To remind myself of where I’d been, or broken in. I thought it looked the same, but couldn’t be sure. Even the church changes — witness the newfangled grasping. I took the host in my hands, muttered my false thanks, and gave a little glance to the right of the altar. Later.

I shuffled back in holy ignominy to my pew, and leaned forward against the row before me, aping prayer, as we all do no matter what we think we believe. I prayed to Our Lady of Providence. I prayed to the sad spirit of my brother, wherever he ended up. Wherever my mother’s useless prayers might have positioned him in the afterlife.

The priest sat after the communion rite, to read announcements and utter remembrances. “Let us pray for those who are isolated in institutions, prisons, nursing homes, hungering for the warmth of home.” How many of this sparse little congregation knew prisons? How many of them knew what the warmth of home was, or did they just pretend to carry with them a phony memory of affection to get themselves through their leaden days? I had cut off my family. I had turned back all letters. I knew they would be filled with the screeches of my mother’s despair, my sister’s keening anger. I kept aside only that one of Bella’s, thicker than most, the guard signaling it contained cash for when I got out. But I could barely read even that except to take her offering and deny her the satisfaction of forcing me to hear of her generosity and deluded, misguided, untoward hope. Her stultifying superiority in matters moral.

“Let us pray for Father Tran, who is visiting family in Vietnam,” the priest said. “For Father Guzman, in Argentina, working with the missions there. And Father Terranova, in Costa Rica this July.” No one was at home. These roaming Augustinian mendicants spent their summers proselytizing among the heathens of the world. And tonight — I looked over the pastoral staff list on the bulletin — only white-haired Father Farrell would likely be on hand. “Let us go in peace. The mass is ended,” he told us. I waited as the church emptied, to walk about. But a clutch of Latinas were nattering on with the reverend Farrell there by the altar rail, his own trio of “excellent women,” Excellents III, perhaps. I left, after having walked once more toward the apse, to glimpse the chancel door.

Before heading to what my ma considered home, I decided to stop at Patsy’s again. Temptation, no. Just, I don’t know — people, places, things, all of which I’d been warned against. As if it mattered, when there were fewer people I knew. The places I’d remembered were few too, and the thing I wanted, well, it was the only reason to be here. But it wouldn’t be at Patsy’s. Where I shouldn’t be either. I was supposedly clean. At least I was no longer using, had broken that habit fairly early on, managed to get through the years unimpeded, but for one lapse. I could handle the bar now, I thought. Just not yet my mother.

It was just after 1, and the westerly sun had begun to shaft along the bar just as it had back in the day, turning the sudsy beer golden, the shots of rye amber, swathing the nursing codger briefly in light before a sepulchral pallor reclaimed him. Danny — God, it was he, still here, lanky as a Joad — leaned against the till, a towel draped over his shoulder, his attention taken upward by a blaring documentary. A standard-issue sot leaned over the bar, his elbow nestling his grizzly chin, his face turned downward but biased in the direction of the television. In a booth among those that lined the back a couple cooed inebriated nothings at each other; on their table were a tallneck Miller and a highball, half finished, plus a few empties. The lovebirds’ heads turned briefly toward the door as I came in, and Danny glanced my way, but only to sigh slightly. This was his afternoon quiet, so to speak, and a trio of tipplers was enough for him. Reluctantly, he turned away from the television.

“Can I get ya something?”

He didn’t recognize me, haloed as I was by the sun.

“Coffee.”

“There’s a bakery round the corner.” Not unfriendly, not inviting. His voice carried a trace still of his mother’s Ireland. He had spent summers there, I recalled, his ma’s folks’ Donegal place. This bar was his now, I took it, had been his father’s, but he must be dead, ancient as he’d been back then. They all must be gone.

“I see a pot there.”

“That’s tar.”

“Ah. Club soda, then. With cranberry.”

He gave me a wary nod, assessing me for hipsterdom or worse, sobriety. But my clothes, though clean, were downmarket and decades-old, my demeanor humble. Please, warden. He scooped some ice into a glass, squirted soda onto it, and added a pink splash from a plastic jug. He tossed a cardboard coaster before me, nestled the glass on the word Patsy’s swashed across its center, plunked a swizzle stick between the cubes, and tapped the bar with his knuckles. On him.

“Thanks.” I gently lay a couple of surviving bucks down. I had nothing, really. My sister’s regretful wad, folded into that recrimination I didn’t read when I’d reclaimed my belongings, had disappeared quickly. Train fare, subway fare, fare. I was down to tips. And maybe that key.

He turned again to the TV. “The church?” He spoke over his shoulder, but shifted his position so his back wasn’t to me. I remembered. People did come to see it, St. Nick’s. The local landmark. Basilica of the Bronx, sans basilica, sans historical interest, really, but passing tragic for me.

“My mother.”

“The Oxford, then?” Where most of the remaining Irish lived, the well-tended, tired apartments in the shadow of the church, in the clutches of it, off Devoe Park.

“I’ve been away.”

“You do look sorta familiar.” My hair was thinner, my sallow face held penitential hollows. I had the bearing of forbearance, which is to say I looked beaten down. He eyed me, his brow furrowing. “What’s her name? Your ma?”

“Doyle. Agnes Doyle. My sister Bella lives with her.”

“And you’re Davey. You must be. I remember Bella. I still see her at church every now and again.” Danny had folded his arms across his chest, the bar rag draping over his left shoulder. I couldn’t read his expression. It was, if anything, neutral. “You must be out.”

“Must be. Yesterday.”

“So. A new life then.”

“I hope so.”

“At mass, were you?”

“Yeah. Don’t believe much, now, but it couldn’t hurt.”

“No. But.”

He meant the memories. Even in a changing neighborhood, some things are remembered. The scene of the crime. It had actually been part of a long scene, that had begun at the check-cashing place where my sister once worked.

The lump of a drunk down the bar turned from his drink and looked over at me, sensing something. I assumed my prison face, and he shifted his glassy eyes down again. I’d spent several unremembered years here, in various stages of blackout and fury, seething over something petty, something my brother said, something my mother did, something my sister wanted.

“So you’re off the sauce.”

“Yeah. Best thing for me. Ruined my life.”

“It can.”

“You must see a lot of that.”

“Sometimes. But it’s an old crowd here.”

“So… how’s business?”

“We manage.”

“And your ma?”

“Back over. For a while now, with her sister, near Ards. Rural ass of backwards. It’d drive me batty. We manage here.”

“We.”

“My wife’s a lawyer now. You remember Sheila. Sheila Corrigan, from seventh grade?”

“Of course.” Bouncy and becurled and just a little shiftyeyed. I was surprised she’d made it through the LSATs, let alone passed the bar. “That’s great. Good for you.”

“We live over in Riverdale, near her mom now, but we own this building, so it’s an investment. I’m a landlord now too.”

“And it’s all starting to come back.”

“We were lucky.”

“Location.”

“It’s coming back. Near the church is good. And the church isn’t going anywhere. So then. So.”

His unasked question: my plans. Practice for me for Ma, perhaps, and for Danny something to tell later to wee Sheila, as we used to call her, the cute curly-haired little minx. Jimmy had a thing for her back then. Before we were old enough to fail, which wasn’t too old at all.

“Weighing options. Such as they are. Open to suggestions.”

Danny nodded.

“I taught a bit up there, English to some of the cons, reading too, and the library. I worked there. Maybe, I don’t know. Something. I don’t know.” They don’t hire cons in the school system. And I’d never seriously considered it anyway. “Social work, maybe.” A lot of us end up there, facing what we laughingly called our demons. “I see White Castle is hiring.”

“You’ll find something. You always were the smart one,” Danny said. “Good you’re on track again.” Such forgiveness. Well, we hadn’t hurt him. At least, not that time, not directly. God knows I’d been thrown out of Patsy’s enough before that night.

The tough little man from the back booth came up for a refill. He looked at me. I looked at him, the rough-hewn snake tattoo on his wiry forearm. We knew where we’d been. We were marked, tattooed or not. We nodded barely, and he turned back to his girlfriend, or moll. Nah. That would be me. Top o’ the world, Ma.

“Say hi to Sheila for me. Thanks.” I headed out, and over to the Oxford.

I ambled along University Avenue, and turned left at Webb. They didn’t know I was out, let alone in the neighborhood. I was taking a chance here — they could be away themselves. But Ma never went anywhere, or at least she hadn’t when I’d roamed the neighborhood spreading unhappiness, and Bella wouldn’t be far from her. Apart from a Catskills hiking trip or some such with one of her other chubby spinster girlfriends, she didn’t do much except judge harshly. I had no idea how she spent her time. I did know she was a nurse, and probably had become one so she could talk back to our mother with the impunity of the health care industry and treat her patients with the contempt she always showed me, seeing as I had been unavailable for quite some time.

The building looked the same, a little older, but cared for. Pachysandra thrived on the ground behind the iron fence, and window boxes flourished above. I pushed open the fingerprinted glass door to our old lobby and saw her name there on the buzzer in the vestibule. I hesitated a second, then put my finger on the button and buzzed. There was a crackle on the other end. I buzzed again.

“Who is it?” Creaky and old.

“Davey.”

Crackle again.

“It’s Davey, Ma. I’m home.” I hated using that term, but I had to. The door didn’t click. Was she considering? I pressed the buzzer. “It’s Davey, Ma!” I shouted into the crackling once more. The door clicked, reluctantly it seemed, and I scooted in before she changed her mind.

I pulled open the elevator door and stepped in. This old elevator, from the 1950s, struggling under the weight of years, musty with the aromas of pot roast and futility. I hadn’t been in an elevator since I could remember, since that night, perhaps. I got out on the fourth floor, made the right to our old apartment, and rang the bell there. I heard a fumbling with locks following a long pause, as she probably checked me out in the security peephole. She opened the door.

“Ma. It’s me,” I said, bending to embrace her.

“Oh, Davey, you’re killing me.” She pushed me away. “Why didn’t you let us know?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“Well, you have. I never knew what to expect. You didn’t write.”

“I couldn’t, Ma. I was too ashamed.” I was lying immediately, back to myself of old. I’d be high as a kite next.

“Come in, come in, let me look at you then.” She took my hand in a Pentecostal grasp of her own and drew me toward our living room. She had withered a bit, and her hair, like mine, had thinned, though hers nestled in soft cirrus clouds above her head. What was left of mine was shaved close.

“Ma, I’m so sorry,” I lied again.

“I can’t get over it,” she said, sitting down in a recliner that still had the same crocheted throw I’d last seen who knows when. She stared at me, as if I were an apparition of the sort she prayed against. “What are you doing here?” Her tone had shifted quickly, as if she realized it was me, and not my brother come back from the dead.

“I’m from here.”

“Not for ages. Not since you left. The only time you came back, there was trouble.”

“I’ve been through a lot. I’ve changed.”

“So have we all.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“What is it you need?” Sharper now, again. I could never fool her. “Is it money? What are you doing? When did you get out?”

“Ma, it’s not money.” Though it was, it always was, in the end. And at the beginning. I noticed on the little table next to her recliner a photograph of Jimmy and me, from our reckless teens — when weren’t we reckless though? — taken at our cousin Patty’s wedding. I had hair, Jimmy life. My mother saw me eyeing it. Tears had begun to shine in her eyes. “Last night. I came right here.”

“We never knew anything about you.”

“I was safe there. As safe as you can be. In there.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She paused. “You were never safe.”

“I was though, on my own.”

“I’d already lost one son.”

“There’s no excuse. I know.”

“And after that night, after you come back for one day, you and Jimmy—”

The phone rang. Mom stopped sniveling and picked up the receiver. “Of course I’m crying. Yes. Yes. No. Not that. Davey’s here. Yes. No, don’t come. I don’t know if he wants to — no. He didn’t. I’m fine. Yes. No. Alone. I will. But… no. I’ll try.” She put the receiver down and kept her eye on it for a second, as if expecting it to spring to life again.

“How’s Bella?”

“Oh, she’s angry she isn’t here.” She turned her face to me.

“That’s nothing new.”

“Don’t start.”

“I haven’t. I just came to see you.” Bella was a necessary by-product of the visit, like gas.

“Do you expect to stay here?” Not unkindly. Not motherly.

“No. Don’t worry. I thought I’d spend a little time with you—”

“Before moving off again.”

“You don’t want me here.”

“You don’t want to be here. You never did. Ever since your father died.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“And what have you found on your travels, your wandering? What great insights have you uncovered? We’ve been in the dark for, what, twenty years? You’ve been here and there and shut up without a word. Except for that one time, that one night, that one day when everyone knew. But since. It’s like we’ve been dead.”

“You could’ve considered me in some friary somewhere if that would’ve helped put your mind at rest. You always wanted me to be a priest. And I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Bother? Bother us? That’s like a suicide thinking he’s helping others by shooting his face off. That’s a lie. You know it. It’s cowardice. And it’s wrong. It’s wrong. Oh, Davey.” And she began to weep, her head falling onto her arms, her bony back contorted with her sobbing.

I watched her cry. I couldn’t ask her to stop. I couldn’t comfort her, certainly. I couldn’t demand anything of her. I just needed to wait there until dark, so I could leave, retrieve the stash from the church, and be on my way wherever. I looked around at the room, different from what I’d remembered, but when you remember only in decades, some things lose focus. The sofa was new. To me. And the big television. But the picture of Jesus, that famous painting that graced every Irish household in the Bronx and Queens and every damn borough, the Lord looking nothing so much as a film star, like a schoolmarm’s dream of the savior, that was there, in laminated eternity on its own little easel on the buffet table. There were palm fronds from Easter, dry behind the painting of a thatched house in County Cork, a generalized scene of whimsical poverty. Those hadn’t changed. The furniture was new, from what I remembered, but then, that was not to be relied upon.

My mother calmed down after a few minutes, and we sat there in relative silence for fifteen minutes or so. I was reluctant to speak further, and I thought Ma was too rundown by her outburst. But I was wrong. She’d been waiting.

The latch turned in the door. My mother and I looked toward it. Bella bustled in, older, wider, white-clad, wrathful.

“What have you done to her?”

“Bella.” I stood. She pushed past me, in her best busynurse mode.

“Ma, is everything okay?”

“We were just sitting here.”

“Has he done anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Bella.”

“Never the courtesy of a reply in ten years and you show up unannounced. You. You never changed.” She glowered at me. “Sit, Ma. And you — sit where I can see you. And don’t move. I hope you hid your purse, Ma.” She went into the kitchen, returning with a glass of water and a pill, giving them both to our mother. “Drink.” She sat on the sofa facing me.

“So. You must have used up all the money I sent you.”

“Thank you. I never thanked you.”

“You didn’t. But I didn’t expect you to. When did you get out?”

“Yesterday,” Ma said.

“And you’re here now. For how long?”

“Not long. Just a visit.”

“So you must have something planned.”

I didn’t answer that, but assumed an expression of surprise.

“You might fool Ma, but you can’t fool me. You may think we’re dummies here in the old neighborhood, those of us who never left, too stupid to get out, but then, you thought everyone was stupid except you, didn’t you?”

“All I’m here for is a visit, Bella,” I said. “I know I was wrong.”

“You have never been right. Ever. And you and Jimmy together, I don’t know which one was worse.”

“Bella,” said Ma.

“Oh, Ma, cut it out. He was no saint. He’s dead and buried, and it’s been ten long years, but for heaven’s sake—”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“I have never believed that.”

“What? That I didn’t kill him, or don’t you believe me?”

“I have never believed you.”

“Bella, I’m not here to explain myself—”

“Then why are you here, Davey?”

“—but to try to make things right. I even went to mass, for God’s sake.”

“They’ll never be right while you’re roaming the streets. And you’ve never believed anything long enough to make a go of it. Mass. Hah.”

“It was all Jimmy’s idea.”

“So you said. So we heard.”

“That was the truth!”

“So you say.”

“I didn’t kill him. He told me to get away. He didn’t expect we’d run up against anyone else.”

“You left him there, bleeding.”

“It was an accident.”

That was the thing: It had simply happened. We had not counted on evening services, the sodality of tiresome bleating women leaving just as we’d arrived, the priest closing up, finding us at the statue, panicking at the sight of us at a time when the neighborhood had transitioned downward and dangerous, shouting, hitting me with the bronze candlestick he’d grabbed from the nave. Jimmy had hit him in turn after grabbing the candlestick from him, and being stronger, had brained him. I could see the screaming, leaching gash on the priest’s bald skull, and Jimmy, not realizing I was dazed, had thrown me the gun, which slipped and revenged the priest right there, the shot resounding like a chorus through the church. “Run,” he had said, always my protector and often my temptation, pushing it amid his shock and gasping, hot and smoking to me, and I did run, hoping to hide it, and myself, and had stumbled back bruised and bloody up the aisle toward the chancel where we’d just broken in and hidden the stolen cash. I’d tripped at the altar rail, like Cagney stumbling through the bleeding snow in The Roaring Twenties, and fallen finally in the sanctuary, victim at last to the ferocious bashing the priest had inflicted upon me. The adrenaline had kept me aloft until then, but at last I had collapsed, unconscious, while Jimmy lay dying and the priest lay dead. I was supposed to have kept watch while Jimmy hid the key under the statue for us to find later, I was supposed to have prevented the priest from finding him, I was supposed to have made sure the church had been quiet. No one was supposed to die.

“You two together were an accident.”

“You were always led astray,” Ma said.

“As if Davey needed coaxing. Always the easy way, always too smart to work.”

“I told you. I’ve changed.”

“If you’d changed, you’d have stayed away. You want something.”

“I had to make amends to you.”

“Don’t, Davey. Just don’t. Spare us having to believe you and regretting it later. I’ll fix you something and you can be on your way. I’ll give you some money to tide you over, how’s that? I’m sure you’ve got some chippie stashed away somewhere, or some prison pal’s pad you can crash at, right?”

“I don’t want your money, Bella. You’ve been too generous already.”

“I know. I shouldn’t have sent you a thing. You might have never come back. How stupid I was to soften even for a moment.”

“I’ve never had a chance to tell you how sorry I truly am. About Jimmy. About what happened.”

“Apology accepted.” Which meant it wasn’t.

“It’s been a long time,” Ma said.

“We’ve gotten used to the peace, Ma and me, haven’t we, Ma? We’ve gotten used to knowing where you were, and not being a danger to us.”

“So then. I see. Look, I never hurt you, or never meant to. And you’ve never left.”

“You don’t just leave, Davey. Oh, you do, but I like it here, all of the mix.”

“It was getting rough.”

“We lasted though, didn’t we, Ma, didn’t we? The Bronx is in our blood, just as it’s in yours, along with something else.”

“Jimmy hated it.”

“Jimmy was a fool. A criminal like his father.”

“Bella!”

“Ma, enough. A criminal like you. I expected more from you, after the scholarship to Prep. But a little learning is a dangerous thing. It gives you ideas.”

“I always had ideas, Bell.”

“You had a fool for a counselor, Davey, and that was your brother, and when it wasn’t him it was yourself. Things came too easily. You never had to work for them.”

“You think prison was easy.”

“Maybe you learned a little about yourself.”

I had. That didn’t mean I’d actually changed.

“You can sit there proud, Bella, and look down on me from your moral mountain, but I don’t hear you. I served my time. I did my obligation to society. I regret what happened, but we all make mistakes, some of them larger than others. You’re no one to talk about Jimmy. He can’t defend himself against your slander. He had more life than you’ll ever have, dead though he’s been these ten years. So we took a few easy steps. It wasn’t as if you hadn’t left hints about all the security problems at that cheesy job of yours. Jimmy told me you were going on so about the idiotic systems there — you were practically begging us to rob it, you might as well have given us the key to the front door and the combination to the safe, which both were easy enough to find, and you think you’d be more trusting, wouldn’t you? But you’ve got more there going on underneath your stuffed shirt than you let on, don’t you? You’re your father’s daughter too, you know. So don’t act all high and mighty with me.”

“Unlike you, I worked for every penny I’ve ever got.”

“And resented every minute of it too. So I’m a dreamer.”

She snorted.

“So sue me. I’m sure Jimmy did his magic on you too. Don’t say he didn’t. You look for someone to blame, and never look inside.”

“Oh, please, you with your holier-than-thou act — you’re a con, and you always will be.”

“Ex. And at least I owned up to my part in things.”

“Don’t fight, Davey,” Ma said. “Don’t. Don’t come home after all this time and start fighting. But stay for dinner. Bella, let him be. For me, now. It’s been too long.” She hauled herself up and headed to the kitchen.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Bella leaned toward me. “I don’t trust you, Davey. I don’t believe you’re here to make amends, as you call it. In twenty years, you’ve shown up exactly twice, and the second time was a total disaster. So forgive me if I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance of things not working out so great now that you’re back.”

“I can’t control what you think, Bella. I’m not here to hurt you, or Ma, or take anything from you or expect anything of you. I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, but it won’t be here. I’ve always hated here. I don’t want a home. I don’t want a home here.”

“And yet, you are here.”

“Not for long. Listen — I know I hurt Ma, but it was killing me here. It was better that I disappeared. It was better. Jimmy stayed, and look what happened to him. He went job to job, hating every single minute. Only he told me he had a way out.”

“He did. Thanks to you.”

“And so I was the sucker. I showed up for him. He asked me to. He said he needed me. He was my brother. He said he was breaking out of here. He wanted my help. He needed money. He knew where to get it. So I came.”

“And saw, and conquered. I got it. Davey, I’m not going to argue with you. I want you out of here, because you’ll drive Ma crazy like Jimmy did, with his drinking and drugs and thievery and scheming. You’re the same, with your lying and acting as if you know everything that’s going on, acting like because you read a few books you know more than anyone. What did you think would happen after you helped Jimmy? That he would reform? That you would become upstanding? You always spoke like someone who knew something about the world, but you never got beyond the sound of your own words, you never really made sense. I don’t think you believed yourself even, what you said. And like I said, I can’t argue anymore. I want to make sure Ma is all right — and let her have a memory of you where you’re not getting someone killed.”

“And what did you think you’d do, once they found out we’d used your key?”

“I knew nothing about that, and that was proved in court. The money was never found.”

“Sometimes the dice falls the right way.”

“And don’t start with your accusations. I was never in on your scheme, and I won’t have you saying that.” Her voice had been rising. She turned toward the kitchen and back to me. “And I don’t want you hanging around anymore. Giving Ma ideas that you’re going to change. It’s been hard enough, goddamnit, getting her stabilized all these years without you giving her false hope again about whatever. I don’t know what you’re planning, but you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t after something.”

“I promise. I’ll be out of here tonight.”

“And going to mass. As if you believe in anything. Stay away from church.”

That wasn’t going to happen. But the rest of the afternoon and early evening passed without too much palpable rancor on Bella’s part or too much uncertain regret on Ma’s. I told them in so many words about prison life, about tutoring cons, about escaping the drudgery by reading, about keeping my head low. I didn’t tell them about the money, or the plan, or why Jimmy and I had thought that we’d escape the police by running into the church after we’d tripped the alarm like the rank amateurs we really were. Churches don’t offer sanctuary to petty thieves. But we’d managed to stay ahead, and since both Jimmy and I had been altar boys, we knew the layout of St. Nick’s, the stashing places in the chancel, and one particular cabinet behind the vestment closet that had a trick bottom, which one of the older boys had told us about in secret years before. It had been a hiding place during Prohibition, where a generation of miscreant boozy clerics concealed their illicit hooch and extra altar wine. We’d stored comics there and, in our gormless Catholic way, porn of the lamest kind, succulent pouts and ballooning breasts, along with the odd pint of Night Train to glaze the eyes and heighten the erotic possibilities of marginally naked half-beauties. But the priests had long since cottoned on to our feeble depravities, and had nailed the compartment shut so that it could no longer be a repository of half-baked filth and vice. Yet both Jimmy and I had remembered the drawer down the years, and he’d told me to come back and retrieve our stuff when things had cooled down, in case he couldn’t get to it first. I’d opened that false bottom that night, and then replaced the nails carefully, so it would remain closed and not tempt a new breed of clerics, altar boys, or minor thieves. We’d planned to break through at a later date, weeks perhaps. That date had dawned ten years on.

I left my mother and Bella’s apartment with no promise of anything other than an effort to let them know where I might be, how I might be reached, what I might do. In the end, I almost regretted — almost — my leaving, as Bella had lost some of her hostility and Ma had become less alternately weepy and accusatory and more resigned and benign, like the flock of women in the window captioned Mary Sodality.

Dusk had crept in and settled over Devoe Park when I left the Oxford. The white El Rancho van had moved on for the evening, and the ball courts were quiet. The church shadowed the trees below it there, and I walked around the building in shadows myself. Someone was exiting the side door. Good. It was still open. I dashed up just as the door swung closed behind her.

“It’s over,” she said to me. “The service just ended. You missed it.”

“Just a quick candle,” I said. “My Ma’s sick.”

She nodded, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for a far-too-skinny middle-aged bald man wearing shabby clothes to pop into church and say a prayer for his mother. The baleful predator’s ex post facto atonement. But the door had shut behind her, and it locked with a thunk. I pulled on the handle, but it stayed. No way in here. But no mighty fortress was our Lord: I’d remembered that the windows of the vestibule were sometimes kept ajar on hot nights, like this one, and the priest might not yet have gotten around to locking them. I hurried around toward the front in the growing gloom and spied a window cracked open to let in the city air. This side of the church was quiet, abutting the rectory. The tined fence was designed to keep thieves from getting over, but nothing prevented me from leaning against it to get my balance. I managed to shimmy myself up a bit, gripping the granite ridges with my fingers as my feet perched on a small crossbar between the rails. Leaning over with one hand on the outside wall of the church, I pushed the window further open with the other, but it stuck just six inches above the sill. I took a breath and, more forceful — and desperate — I pushed again. This time it unstuck and shot up with a rumbling clack. I heard it echo inside, but I pulled myself over the sill, and squeezed in before I was noticed. I stood in the vestibule, calming myself, wiping a trace of sweat from my forehead, and pushed open the door to the main part of the church, as quietly as possible, its hushed creak sounding like a screech to my ears. But I was in.

The priest had his back to me. The services were indeed over. He was near the altar, actually toward that providential chapel, and didn’t see the new arrival trying to make his own luck. I slipped down the far aisle, and snuck over to the statue of St. Nicholas at the back. That key to the sanctuary, to the vestment drawers, was my chance. That drawer was hiding close to $25,000.

In the dark at the rear of the church, I was invisible. I felt quickly around the statue’s base, and located the nib of the key. It barely protruded; Jimmy had done a good quick job of shoving it under there. I needed to tilt the statue to get to it, but it was a little too highly placed for me to do it with ease from where I stood. But I had little time, and couldn’t draw attention to myself by searching for a bench. Ah, but there, by the vestibule door, a little table with the parish bulletins. I was able to lift it, and position it near St. Nicholas. I didn’t see the priest, that Father Farrell, who must still be getting ready to close for the night. I managed to get myself atop the table, though I scattered a couple of bulletins, which floated down to the aisle. They sounded like a rush of leaves to me, but they were, I hoped, still too faint to be heard up by that chapel.

Standing on the table top, I pushed the head of the statue toward the wall. It was heavy, heavier than I had thought. I didn’t know how I’d get that key from the bottom without making noise. Jimmy and I hadn’t thought of that back then on that fatal night. We hadn’t fully thought things through, as usual with the two of us, especially when we were in our cups, as we had been since I’d returned the day before to see him. But now I was sober. Or at least not drinking or using. And I needed that key. And that money. And to leave.

I tested the statue’s angle of repose, and it stayed leaning against the wall. I hopped off the table, exhaling an unfortunate oomph as I hit the hard floor. I was no longer young. But I heard no sounds of alarm. The light was almost nothing here, though my eyes had adjusted. I reached under the tilt of the statue’s base and found the key, scooping it back and pocketing it. I wanted to leave the statue where it was and get out fast, but that would be foolhardy in the extreme, as I’d forgotten gloves and my prints were all over the patron saint of this benighted parish. I crept back up onto the table, repositioned the statue, and rubbed it over with my shirt sleeve, hoping I’d erased everything I touched. I was careful descending from the table this time, managed to move it back to its place by the door and retrieve the fallen bulletins. I placed them back on top, in no particular order of language, the Babel of parish news.

I still saw no one, and apparently no one had seen me. I’d been planning this moment for so long — pictured myself à la Shawshank on a Mexican beach whiling away my twilight years.

I crept toward the chancel. I hadn’t heard the door shut, but the priest must have gone home, perhaps through the sanctuary door that connected to the rectory. I hoped the lock hadn’t been changed — another point we’d never considered — and then that purloined key fit easily in the slot. As I turned it, the door swung open and the lights went on ablaze.

I squinted. Before me was Father Farrell. And Bella, a look of menacing satisfaction on her face.

In my shock, all I could utter was a stupefled, “What are you doing here?”

“We could ask the same of you,” Bella said. “Father Farrell, this is my brother Davey, long lost and now returned. Father Farrell’s fairly new here, Davey, and probably would have noticed you at mass earlier. Luckily, I gave him a call as to what you were probably up to, and my hunch proved, as you can see, correct.”

I started to turn.

“And don’t try leaving. The police are on the way.”

“My money.”

“Oh, I know why you’re here. But even if you’d managed to get in, you wouldn’t have found it. Do you think you were the only one who knew about that trick drawer, you and Jimmy? You think you were the only altar boys, and only altar boys knew about that hiding spot that the priests had nailed shut? You think altar boys are sworn to a vow of silence? You think we schoolgirls knew nothing about your filthy ways? Hah. You didn’t live in a vacuum, Davey, though for all you noticed about what was going on around you, you could have. Just because you didn’t talk to anyone didn’t mean people didn’t talk about you, or about the church, or about anything that went on there. Your secrets. Brother. You thought you’d had it over everyone, didn’t you?”

“You said the money hadn’t been found.”

“So I did. So I lied. So, in your words, ‘sue me.’ We found it soon after you were sent away. I told the cops where they might look, and your little stash was history.”

“So you planned it. All afternoon. Pretending to be nice to me.”

“You never did see the obvious, Davey. Always too smart for everyone. You think Danny wouldn’t talk? You think Ma was feebleminded by your Prodigal Son returns act? You think no one but you knew the score? Too many books and not enough sense. You thought you kept things close to you, but you were like a bad movie. You always wanted the easy way out.”

“That was my money.”

“Never. Father, do you hear this?” The priest was silent, uncomfortable, a bit ashamed, I felt, to be witness to a sister selling out her brother, her only surviving brother just returned from years away, unseen, unloved. Father Farrell’s head tilted; the sound of sirens grew closer.

“In my own home. You betrayed me.”

“It was never your home, Davey. You said that yourself. You couldn’t wait to leave. Your home is far away now, and has been for a long while. You took us for fools. Now you can go and stew on it once again, and figure out where you went wrong.”

I shook my head at her. I would not let her win. The police arrived and I submitted to the handcuffs as if I were a Pentecostal penitent in the arms of rebirth. I looked away from Bella, and at the priest. Maybe I’d seen the light, or at least I could make do with what I had. “I will espouse you the right of justice,” I told him, keeping my eyes on his horrifled face as the cops led me out to the car. “I open myself to a God who loves me.”

Numbers up by Miles Marshall Lewis

Baychester

Kingston believed he wasn’t a regular at Golden Lady, seated at the bar sipping a plastic cup of whiskey. Silky served his Scotch and amaretto without asking only because she had a great memory like most bartenders, he thought. Kingston considered the cup in his hand and reminisced over the club serving bottles of beer and glasses of mixed drinks years back, before some brawls with smashed Coronas forced a policy change. He also recalled gonzo tricks Silky used to perform with Heinekens in her dancing days, way before her transition to barkeep. Kingston raised his Godfather to Lacey, onstage sliding down a silver pole at the center of her baby-oiled, spread-eagle legs, eyeing him from upside down. Lacey was just the thing to take Kingston’s mind off the hundreds he’d lost earlier at Yonkers Raceway, the robbery of his house days ago, and other recent troubles.

Disorienting strobes bathed Lacey and two other bodacious young women pacing the stage, gyrating hips and stripping under the synthesized pulse of Ciara’s “Oh.” Kingston didn’t consider himself a regular but Lacey’s partners knew from experience not to bother trying to entice money out of the black guy in the stingy-brim fedora. Lacey sauntered over to the head of the crowded bar, bent down, and flashed her fleshy ass just for Kingston, flexing the muscles of each cheek to the beat. Kingston shifted her garish yellow lace garter belt with a finger to place one, two, three paper-cut-crisp twenty-dollar bills between her thigh and the elastic band. Lacey undulated her thick behind in ecstatic waves of motion.

Come 2 o’clock, Golden Lady’s neon sign — a naked blonde lounging in a martini glass — quickly faded into the distance. Kingston and Lacey sat in his onyx Buick zooming up the Bruckner Expressway and out of Hunts Point. Full-blast cool air circulated new-car smell throughout the ride. Kingston’s radio, per usual, tuned in to CD101.9: “I’m in the Mood for Love,” King Pleasure. Plastic jewel cases of smooth jazz CDs cluttered the floor and butter-leather backseats. En route to Baychester Diner, Lacey peered into the illuminated sun visor applying foundation, lipstick, and eyeliner, bitching about the shady tactics Butterfly and Sunflower used to dominate lap dances all summer long. Kingston’s characteristic silence was so typical that Lacey never considered that her sugar daddy might be disturbed.

The all-night Baychester Diner harbored the same two wisecracking women in kempt hairweaves found at the counter every weekend past midnight. Each sported something slightly outré signaling her street profession. One wore a bright Wonder Woman bodice with deep cleavage on display, the other scarlet fishnets with a spiked leather dominatrix collar. Both brandished five-inch stilettos. At the far corner banquette a young couple argued in Creole patois.

“Si ou pa vlé bébé-an, ale vous an,” hissed the pregnant teen in the pink Von Dutch cap.

Kingston and Lacey found an isolated booth and ordered breakfast from a homely waitress. Rain broke the August humidity, slicking the asphalt of Boston Road, while Kingston explained all about the Hernández brothers pushing their numbers turf further down Washington Heights into Harlem, their violent efforts to force him out, and his contingency flight plan to New Orleans.

“King. You gonna up and leave just like that?” Lacey asked. She craved a Newport.

“They ain’t runnin’ me out,” he bluffed. “I done made plenty these past fifteen years. I don’t mind it. Business ain’t like it used to be nohow. Playin’ the numbers is old school, kiddo. More white folks is movin’ into Harlem now and they don’t know nothin’ about me. They play Lotto.”

Lacey laughed.

“You never talked about retiring to New Orleans before.” Not to me, she thought.

“I done told you ’bout the house. We ain’t never been together, but it’s down there. Since 2000. My cousin look after it, she over in Baton Rouge.”

“When are you talking about going?”

“I ain’t right decided yet. Could be two weeks.”

“Two weeks? That’s enough time for you to wrap up everything?”

“We gon’ see.”

Kingston held the door for Lacey and a trucker hand-in-hand with the collared mistress from the counter. Outside all four smelled a faint aroma of barbecue sauce wafting from the local KFC. The illicit couple commiserated on the corner and crossed Baychester Avenue, stilettos clicking on concrete, to a motel with three-hour rates.

Kingston pulled his sedan out of the lot and down Boston Road blaring “This Masquerade.” By the song’s end he’d parked again, less than a mile away at Boston Secor Houses. Lacey grabbed his humidor from the glove compartment.

On the red leather sofa Kingston silently flipped stations searching for baseball scores and fiddled with his cigar while Lacey showered. His sky-blue fedora rested on the adjacent pillow, revealing the receding hairline of his freshly cut Caesar specked with gray. He clicked off her TV and leaned over to untie his Stacy Adams, tightening abdominal muscles buried underneath a stout stomach. His growing belly caused him to chuckle at his own jealousy, wondering what sort of younger man her own age a sexy girl like Lacey would attract once he was gone. Lacey would adapt easily, Kingston imagined. She was all of twenty-two. Life adjustments would come harder to Kingston. Comfortably set in his ways, he never vacationed away from his St. Martin time-share, never ate anything outside of the standard ten dishes he either bought from takeout restaurants or Gussy cooked for him, never deviated from his usual Yankees game, jazz concert, or horse race for recreation. Deciding to uproot his life from 1839 Bruner Avenue to the bayou sprang as much from Kingston’s recent unidentified angst as the threats from Héctor and Eddie Hernández. Kingston finally took a lighter to his cigar.

“One of us has too much clothes on,” Lacey said.

She left her cream silk robe untied at the waist, smoking her own tobacco of choice. Tracey Lott bore only fraternaltwin resemblance to her onstage character, always fragrantly oiled, primped, oversexed. Nearly naked again for the second time tonight — clean, shea-butter-exfoliate scrubbed, and nail-polished in her own apartment now — Tracey looked softer, younger.

Kingston called her Tracey at times, Lacey most often, but it didn’t bother her. The last time they saw one another Lacey had dropped X before his unexpected arrival at Golden Lady and rambled all sorts of private personal information afterwards, about her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, her strict mother (the neighborhood crossing guard), her young cousin’s molestation, her absent dad, and her first fuck at fourteen. Maybe too much for Kingston, she thought.

Lacey flicked cigarette ash into a seashell and sat in Kingston’s lap. The leather sofa farted. As she unbuttoned his shirt both their thoughts clouded with notions of tonight maybe being their last tête-à-tête.

Kingston and Lacey were both more passive than active participants in their own lives, mirrors of each other in that sense. Kingston had inherited the mantle of running numbers from his late father, working under his wing after a brief enlistment in the Gulf War. His life’s work was more due to his own passivity than the passion for the numbers game that his father had held close. Kingston loved Gussy in his way but their union was mainly convenient. She was his Girl Friday on the job. Their relationship saved Kingston the trouble of seeking a woman attracted to his limited social graces who could also be trusted and accepting of his illegal trade. Money only goes so far. Despite over half a million squared away from almost two decades of business, Lacey, an exotic dancer from the projects, was the most ideal mistress he found himself able to draw.

Lacey, too, let her life dictate its own direction, leading from a bust-up with her mother at seventeen to accepting dubious advice from her stalker ex-bf Tré-Sean to sell nude photos to websites and dance at Hunts Point holes like Al’s Mr. Wedge and Golden Lady. The night a zooted pair of homeboys roughly snatched off her thong and dashed out the club with their booty nine months ago, she was comforted by Kingston, a familiar, benevolent customer, and their affair began.

Stripping his shirt, standing and leading him to her bedroom, she felt powerless to trip up the chain of events sweeping Kingston out of her life. Lacey thought sex might solve the problem, her familiar recourse. Their cigarette and cigar sat burning away in an Orchard Beach conch, plumes of smoke dancing an acrobatic tango.

Kingston returned to 1839 Bruner Avenue in the early morning to discover the SUV stolen.

Gussy would find the charred BMW of their steady bettor Wallace parked outside Fordham Hill Apartments on her nighttime jog to the Harlem River, stripped and torched to black cinders save for the pristine license plate: CRM-114.

Like aging hippies cooking organic groceries in a kitchen full of all-Hendrix-all-the-time, Gussy and Kingston were throwback ’70s soul babies. This wasn’t immediately obvious but there were telltale signs: Gussy’s leonine Afro and multitudinous silver bracelets, Kingston’s allegiance to jazz musicians like George Benson and Grover Washington, Jr., who were on the rise when he first started buying vinyl.

The couple met in Kuwait and were instantly simpatico. For Kingston the army was brief, another way to synchronize his life with that of his father, who served in WWII. Buckshot shrapnel lodged near his heart resulted in a quick honorable discharge. For Gussy the army was a career move lasting five years longer than the Persian Gulf strike. With her discharge nine years behind her, former Private Augusta Wilson still hit the shooting range a few times a year and took weekly power runs through Fordham with Parliament on her headphones.

On Monday, Kingston and Gussy put in a normal day at the spot. The sparse bodega Kingston rented on Amsterdam was locally understood as a storefront for his operation. Starting shortly after 12 o’clock, Harlemites stopped by with their three-digit numbers on betting slips, handing them off (with their cash) to Hillside at the front counter. Some old-timers sat for a spell with the Daily News, picking out items to talk shit about: the Maori-inspired tattoo covering Mike Tyson’s face; Michael Jackson’s expatriation to Bahrain. Both Kingston and Gussy fielded calls in the large back office, jotting down more phoned-in numbers. (Lacey played Kingston’s DAV-485 license plate in a box combination: 485, 548, 854, etc.) All day Kingston’s two runners — Pookie and Elliott — returned from the backs of bars, bodegas, barbershops, beauty parlors, billiard halls, and street corners throughout the Bronx and Harlem, dropping off their books of bets. Gussy tallied the incoming cash on an old adding machine till her index finger was sore, at which point she’d use the end of her pencil. From noon to 6 each of the three numbers would post based on the last dollar digits of the total handle from Yonkers Raceway’s daily win, place, and show bets.

By 5 o’clock, Monday’s number was four-two. Hillside left for the Bronx, picking up Chinese takeout from the Orient. Kingston and Gussy, alone, still spoke in code, agreeing to hold off talk of the Hernándezes until after work: City Island, Sammy’s Fish Box. Finally a zero came in. Not one person had hit the number. The three totaled all the final slips, over five hundred dollars gross profit.

Hillside walked to nearby Hamilton Terrace to score from his coke dealer. Kingston and Gussy drove onto the Macombs Dam Bridge out of Manhattan just after 7 o’clock. CD101.9 started a David Sanborn marathon as they sped up the Major Deegan Expressway.

Kingston felt like a ghost, but in a good way. Ever since deciding to give up his patch of Harlem to the Dominicans, Kingston was more conscious of his interactions with the people he’d leave behind, more aware of places he probably wouldn’t see for a long time. He thought of getting skied with Hillside for old times’ sake, or fucking Joie, the former girl-on-the-side stripper over at Sin City who preceded Lacey in his life. Stress was at the root of his recent ulcers and so this new feeling of liberation was welcome. Kingston felt relieved, like knowing the exact date of his approaching death (and rebirth) and appreciating his last moments on earth.

“I know you been scheming. Them motherfuckers got it coming. What’s the plan?”

Kingston was getting distracted by the general lilt of a nearby conversation, two overweight brothers seated behind Gussy eating whole Maine lobsters and linguini. The larger man continually mispronounced Nikes to rhyme with Mikes. They waited on their own platter to arrive.

“Gus…” Kingston laughed. “You sound like Foxy Brown. Ease up, Sheba baby.” He took hold of the thick white napkin underneath his flatware, spreading it in his lap over navy velour sweatpants.

Gussy smiled, holding her head in her hands. Bangles slid to her elbows, jangling. “Héctor and Eddie were safer than they knew till they burnt up Wallace’s Beemer. They gotta pay for that shit if anything.” The BMW was in Kingston’s possession as a marker, till one of his regulars finished paying off a big debt. Now Wallace’s X5 was ashes. “Who the fuck are they threatening?” she asked heatedly. “They think they’re just gonna keep upping the ante until we get the fuck outta Dodge? Is a goddamn car bomb next?” Gussy lowered her voice. “I was thinking, maybe we could pay off somebody over at the racetrack to report what we tell ’em, like a fixed hit. If we had one of our own hit the number with Héctor and Eddie for some gigantic amount, then we could bankrupt the sons of bitches. Or… I don’t know who they pay off at the NYPD but we could find out, make a deal, and get ’em locked up for a while.”

“That’s good thinkin’. But really, kiddo, the way to do this is to leave in peace,” Kingston replied wearily. “We’ll send word back by their baby sister. Elizabeth was the one rollin’ up on Hillside last month from the get. She doin’ her brothers’ biddin’, we’ll let it ride like that. Once they know we fixin’ to leave, that’s the end a that.”

Gussy sighed, just as their bald, husky waiter returned delivering shellfish on a Formica tray. (Kingston, as always, ordered the lobster, king crab legs, and Spanish yellow rice for two.) She tied the plastic bib around her neck thinking back to when she first suggested Kingston invest in property. The Creole cottage he bought five years ago in the French Quarter had become the getaway home he’d never have brainstormed on his own. Though Kingston wasn’t much for vacations, running numbers six days a week, Gussy planned ahead for whatever retirement might come with forethought he consistently lacked. A condo in North Carolina, near an old childhood friend of Kingston’s, was Gussy’s first choice. But Kingston overruled, choosing New Orleans instead, for its jazz history.

Gussy reconnected with Kingston after leaving the service as a tie to the civilian world and to continue what they had started during their twenties in the Middle Eastern desert. She considered love to be an active decision, a conscious choice. She gave her heart to Kingston because, from her viewpoint, he needed the direction it was her nature to provide, and becoming the main woman in his life gave her access to his ample savings. Marriage might never be on the horizon but Gussy always appreciated the cushy situation she long ago stepped into as his assistant and lover.

The attached row house at 1839 Bruner — passed down from Kingston’s parents — must be put on the market, Gussy thought, cracking a lobster leg. She’d be breaching her own lease at Fordham Hill. Their collective furniture would need to be packed and shipped south, sold, or given away. (The cottage was sparsely furnished and completely undecorated.) They’d require two tickets to Louisiana sooner than later. Hillside, Pookie, and Elliott would have to be informed fast — Gussy was sure they wouldn’t have seen this coming — and the Amsterdam lease would also be broken. This was all irreversible stuff. She hoped Kingston had measured everything carefully.

“Is it worth it?” she asked softly.

“It’s time for a change,” Kingston replied, his mouth full. He finished chewing, measuring his words. “Seem like ain’t nobody wanna end up like they parents nowadays, and I gotta count myself in that too. Daddy always promised my mother he’d give all this up and retire down to Florida someplace and never got the chance to do it before she passed. I worked right up beside him till the end and it was clear to me…” He paused. “I just know he’d a done things different if he coulda. Fuck Héctor and Eddie, it ain’t about them. The house been robbed before. I just don’t wanna do this no more.”

Kingston’s initiative took Gussy a bit by surprise. “Well, I’ll handle the details, just let me know what you intend on doing yourself and I can take care of everything else. I can leave enough for Hillside and the fellas to take care of themselves till next year.” She smiled. “I can’t believe we’re really going! I do love it down there.”

“It’s a new day, Gus. I done made ample money off a this, God bless Daddy. There got to be more to life than Baychester and Amsterdam Avenue. Y’know, New Orleans is a big jazz town.”

“Really?” Gussy knew this already.

“Hell yeah, the Marsalis family hails from down there and…”

Kingston Lee never wore an earring. Back when he was a teenager at Evander Childs High, putting a hole through your right ear branded you a fag. But the year his boys all pierced their lefties together at a jewelry store on White Plains Road, Kingston just couldn’t do it. He failed to understand why everybody now seemed to get tattooed at the drop of a hat. He’d always had an aversion to anything that could make him substantially different than he was when his personality gelled as a youngster. Gussy learned this about him early on, deciding it was how Kingston had reached forty-two without any children. Moving from New York City, leaving the only real profession he’d ever known, felt to Kingston like bungee jumping with a sometimey cord.

His father had started the business in the ’60s, from a nearly bare stationery store on 233rd Street. Waiting for Jiffy Lube to service his ride that humid, overcast Sunday — he intended to leave it to Wallace and call things even — Kingston walked from Boston Road and up Baychester to 233rd, taking rolls of mental photographs. Passing Spellman High’s football field he remembered fingering a cheerleader before a game underneath the bleachers; he was a mean running back, she favored actress Jayne Kennedy and knew it. Up the hill he passed the Carvel stand his mother crashed into when he was ten. (“Fasten your seat belt,” she had said dead calmly, realizing the Oldsmobile’s brakes were failing.) Comics & Comics was long gone, another memory now. And the Big Three Barbershop.

Zack Abel, Jr. cut hair at the Big Three Barbershop with his father Big Zack from the time he and Kingston attended Evander together. Big Zack and his wife were staunchly religious; the Big Three of the shop’s namesake were naturally the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, though the secular folks coming in for their fades had no clue. Muhammad Ali had his Afro trimmed there once sometime after the Thrilla in Manila, and a yellowed photo of Ali sitting in Big Zack’s highchair stayed taped to a mirror till the shop closed. Kingston and Zack’s fathers both died in 2000. Big Zack’s death seemed to mature his son. He summarily sold his father’s shop, moved to North Carolina for a Cablevision job, fell in love, and had a son two years ago. Kingston missed Zack, the only friend he felt he really had outside of Gussy. Zack’s move left Kingston a bit ill at ease ever since, as if his life was a jumped-the-shark TV show the network refused to cancel.

Kingston reached the address where his father’s operation first started, now an insurance office. He stood there and removed his Kangol as if out of respect, wiping sweat from his brow with the white cap. He recollected his aunts, uncles, and his own mother dreaming up the number when he was a child, searching through slim stapled pamphlets by Madame Zora and Rajah Rabo listing corresponding numbers for different dream themes: love, sex, death. He got spanked for losing his great-grandmother’s tattered Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book once. His parents let him play occasionally; he recalled hitting for the first time at nine: a whole twenty dollars, all spent at the Good Humor ice cream truck that crept down Bruner playing Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “The Candy Man.” His neighbor Miss Lois once scored a combination hit on the very day she needed to pay her back rent to avoid eviction; she threw a lavish block party and bought herself Jordache jeans for every day of the week. And how many misadventures had young Kingston heard about Chink Low, one of his dad’s first runners, the brother with folded eyelids who never wrote down a number that police could confiscate, memorizing them all without fault? Or Chink’s running partner Clarence, who ended up as a regular on The Mod Squad?

The memories were cathartic. Just one month away, September 2005, Kingston would turn forty-three — with not much more to show for his life than what was left him by his father. He tried to pinpoint the source of his recent melancholy attitude; he knew it had started before the Hernándezes. Was it the birthday of little Zack the third, Gussy pressuring him for a baby? Kingston refused to believe his near depression had anything to do with a midlife crisis; he had a curvaceous kept woman on the side and hundreds of thousands of out-of-circulation Ben Franklins hidden in a safe at the spot on Amsterdam. He tried to envision what he wanted that he didn’t yet have, and it came down to this: He wanted to be his own man.

All his life, Kingston had been following his father’s path to uphold a perceived legacy, yet he couldn’t feel the same obligation on his shoulders anymore. Time and circumstance had moved on, and now, so would Kingston. His father had migrated from Georgia to lay his own path to personal freedom on the streets of the Bronx. Now Kingston would reversemigrate back, attempting to find his very own life purpose in Louisiana. This one-sided turf war was the perfect excuse. Let ’em play Lotto, he thought, liberated.

The phone in his pants vibrated.

It was a message. His battery must have been low, he imagined, having missed the call. Lacey’s voice. They hadn’t spoken since she rang in her number a week ago. She’d reconciled things with Tré-Sean. She wished him well in New Orleans. She asked him to not drop by Golden Lady or the Secor projects before leaving. She hung up the phone.

How intriguing, Lacey thought, that she found herself magnetized by two of the older black community’s archetypes, the numbers man and the pimp.

Tré-Sean Niles ostensibly sold crack from his apartment on Webster Avenue, but persuasive game was his true métier, and Lacey knew it. Never mind how he convinced her to try their relationship again after scary antics like sitting in his beat-up Benz near Boston Secor obsessively monitoring her subsequent men and one-night stands or surreptitiously checking her answering machine until getting caught. Forget how he convinced Lacey to work out her exhibitionist tendencies by posing naked and selling the images to the likes of PlumpRumps.com (splitting the profits) or sharing her shakedancing take. Days ago, Lacey dog-eared Confessions of a Video Vixen on a night of weakness brought on by Kingston’s leaving, called Tré-Sean, and navigated the following conversation.

Isn’t it fascinating how certain women create whole careers from men wanting to have sex with them? Tré-Sean asked. As a kid he had questioned his horny older brother on why he was so transfixed by Elvira’s Movie Macabre when he knew the pasty, buxom Goth girl would never actually show her breasts. For Tré-Sean this was the same disappointing tease performed at stripclubs with all the incredible-looking naked women (like Lacey) who one could never really fuck. Madonna in Penthouse made an impression on his young mind, but when he saw Pamela Anderson blowing her husband on a homemade tape, his philosophy all came together.

Tré-Sean told Lacey that Paris Hilton giving head, having sex for all the world to see on the web, and then becoming even more popular, made perfect sense. The only reason Paris and Pam Anderson had celebrity in the first place was because men fantasized about how they’d be sexually. Tré-Sean recently met a friend of a friend of a friend in the adult film industry who rationalized that the relation between seductive music videos and hardcore pornography was identical to the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what’s funny about the joke. Lacey thought she understood.

Tré-Sean finally laid out his scheme. He was given tickets to the Adult Video News Film Awards from this same new acquaintance. He proposed they go to Las Vegas for the ceremony and network. So much more money could be made in porn for so much less work than dancing, Tré-Sean reasoned, and they’d already made some private sex tapes of their own. Celebrity in this field might lead to celebrity in another, he said. (And if not, it’s the same thing underneath it all anyway, he thought privately). His contact guaranteed him a meeting with a producer, Max Hardcore.

Lacey held the line silently. Kingston’s decision bothered Lacey up until the point she accepted that she didn’t mean enough to him for an extended invitation to the bayou. That Monday Lacey lost the number, but the numbers man lost Lacey; she had called her ex the same night.

“So whassup?” Tré-Sean asked.

In the service, another grunt who’d been a bartender in New Orleans taught Kingston and Gussy how to mix a Tom Collins: gin, tonic, lemon juice, sugar, and a maraschino cherry. In his friend’s honor, Kingston entered their spacious backyard carrying glasses of the poison from the cottage’s indoor bar. Sweltering Southern sunrays beamed through his loose T-shirt and bright Bermuda shorts. Gussy reclined on the powder-blue deck chair by their concrete pool dressed in a gold one-piece swimsuit and Onassis-style shades, rubbing sunblock over her toned legs. Kingston seated himself and passed her the drink; he sipped his own and fired up a cigar.

The two celebrated the impulse purchase of a quicksilver Cadillac that morning, Gussy’s choice. Kingston drove it straight out of the dealership. Like the sensation of a phantom limb, they both considered playing the new GNU-556 license plate for that Friday and had to stop themselves from phoning it in to Hillside. BellSouth had just connected their phone service the day before. Cousin Dot left a message from Baton Rouge about an issued hurricane watch for a nearby tropical storm, Katrina. The tempest had just touched Florida, with a seventeen-percent possibility of hitting New Orleans. Kingston, puffing a Havana, couldn’t imagine it being worse than the storm he’d just weathered.

The big five by Joseph Wallace

Bronx Zoo

It was like the punch line to a stupid joke.

Q: How cold is it?

A: So cold that the dogs are sticking to the fire hydrants.

Only, in this case:

Q: How cold is it?

A: So cold that even the polar bears are shivering.

And it was that cold, eight degrees above zero and headed down. So frigid that clots of ice bobbed and clattered down the stripped-bare Bronx River, that the bison he’d passed on the way in, their shaggy humps edged with frost, breathed out huge gouts of steam like irritable snow-capped volcanoes.

But Akeley didn’t mind. In fact, the plummeting temperatures made what he’d come here to do easier.

Though not too easy. No point if it was too easy.

He stood beside the ice-skimmed pool, between the concrete wall and the jumble of manmade rocks that were supposed to remind visitors of the Arctic. If there was anyone there to be reminded on this gray, deep-winter day, when the zoo was open but no one came, when this patch of the Bronx was the least populated two hundred-plus acres in the city.

The only place, the only time of year, when you didn’t feel like an ant, one among eight million scurrying along predetermined pathways, carrying food back to the giant rectangular mound you called home.

And the zoo was even emptier than usual today. Akeley had known it would be. Known that even the keepers would be hidden safely inside, except when the feeding or cleaning schedule forced them to venture out into the deep freeze.

Almost as empty as the Arctic itself, where great white bears might live out their entire lives without seeing a human being. Carnivores so wild, so untamed, that they didn’t recognize the danger in a rifle, didn’t understand what a large-bore cartridge could do, didn’t realize they were supposed to go down, and so instead kept on coming at you, as if they were above death.

But you had nothing to fear from these zoo bears. They had lost their freedom, their wildness, their purpose. You could see it in the way they got fat, the way they smelled, rank, like something inside them was rotting away. You could see it by the toys the zookeepers had given them. A pink ball, a split plastic barrel, a metal garbage can.

Akeley had often seen them tossing their toys into the pond, then belly-flopping after them, making enormous splashes as the spectators laughed and cheered. It was like watching a kitten cuffing a catnip-stuffed toy mouse, safe and easy and cute, and these defiled bears seemed to respond to human approval just the way kittens did.

Only… not today.

The big one, the sow, lay at his feet. She had sunk down onto her belly and laid her head on her paws. Her eyes were on his, eyes normally sharp as obsidian, but growing rapidly duller, more distant, as the seconds passed. Akeley watched until the last glimmer of light drained out of them.

A small trickle of blood ran from the hole where the bullet had entered, but most was trapped beneath her layers of blubber. To anyone outside the fence looking in, she would seem merely asleep.

The cub stood just a few feet away. Perhaps three years old, but already weighing six hundred pounds or more. Big enough to fight, to attack, to kill, but in its defiled state able only to stare down at its mother, then up at Akeley. Its body was shaking so hard that he could hear its teeth chattering.

So cold that even the polar bears are shivering.

But this one, of course, was shivering in fear.

The hunter hoisted his heavy duffel bag over his shoulder and turned away.

It was a good-sized show at the Holiday Inn Aurora, one of many hotels carved out of wrecked farmland on the outskirts of Denver International Airport. Something like two thousand tables spread across the floor of the convention center, holding endless rows of double-action safari rifles, police revolvers, shotguns, military hardware. Cartridges lined up like rows of gravestones. Knives and nunchaku and pepper spray. Signs saying things like, Laser scopes must be operated only by exhibitors.

Antiques too. A twenty-one-inch-barrel Volcanic rifle in .41 caliber, a circa-1650 Spanish epee, bear traps from the Colonial days, even a 1940s Jeep that had crossed the Sahara which the kids could climb on.

In other words, the usual. The same stuff you’d find at a hundred other gun shows on a hundred other exhibit floors in a hundred other cities.

One thing was different this time, though.

Up on the eighth floor, in the Executive Suite.

It had been a poor shot.

He could see the animal near the rear of the enclosure, leaping again and again off the floor, landing sometimes on its belly, sometimes on its back. Then getting onto its feet and flipping upwards once more, like a marionette dancing from the ends of a callous puppeteer’s strings.

A golden lion tamarin, one of the world’s smallest, rarest, and most beautiful monkeys, its spun-gold fur stained with black blood.

Akeley studied the hole in the glass front of the enclosure and saw what had happened. The glass had deflected the .22 round, just a little, but enough to prevent a clean kill.

He shifted his gaze to the wounded monkey. The others clustered above it on the vines strung across the enclosure, wide dark eyes showing the human emotions of fear and pity, the twittering of their birdlike voices coming through the glass to his ears.

The hunter sighed. He couldn’t leave it like this. Someone might notice, figure out what had happened, and stop him before he was done.

A door leading behind the scenes was located just inside the Monkey House’s entrance. Before he tested the handle, he looked around, seeing only a small group of teenagers over near the Zoo Center and a pair of nannies wheeling strollers toward the tropical warmth of the World of Birds.

No one paid him any attention. If they had, they’d likely have mistaken him for a keeper anyway. He’d dressed in khaki for this day.

He had his tools ready, but the door was unlocked, the passageway inside deserted. It smelled of rotten fruit and old urine, and the calls of captive animals came to him through the small hatches that led into each enclosure.

He found the entrance to the tamarin exhibit without trouble — he knew the layout of every building — and ducked inside. The little golden monkeys flowed away from him in alarm. They knew he was no zookeeper.

The wounded one, still leaping and falling, fully occupied with trying to escape its agony, didn’t notice him. Droplets of blood from its gut wound lay scattered across the floor.

The hunter reached for his duffel, then paused. Decided there was a better way to end this.

He squatted down and lifted the tiny monkey, insubstantial as a flake of ash in his hands. As he brought it close to his face, it stopped struggling and lay there looking at him, its gaze full of unwarranted trust. So used to humans, so tame, that it expected him to take away its pain.

So he did.

He laid the corpse behind a thick growth of plastic ferns, then straightened and looked into the eyes of the little blondhaired girl who was watching him with rapt attention through the glass.

There were five of them in the hotel room, sipping single malt and telling stories. Taking their time before getting to the matter at hand.

The Big Five, they called themselves. A joke, kind of, but also a boast. The Big Five: The most dangerous mammals in Africa. Lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo. The ones you stalked if you were a real hunter.

Among the Masai, you weren’t a man until you’d killed a lion. For European and American hunters a century and more ago, just a lion wasn’t enough. You needed all five.

And you knew where to get them. The Serengeti. The Mara and the Selous. Amboseli, under the shadow of Kilimanjaro. You could shoot till the barrels of your bolt-action repeater melted, or till a rhino got his horn into your gut. Either way, no one cared.

Today, though? Today, all those places were preserves, and you were supposed to head to game ranches in South Africa or Zimbabwe instead. Places where all you had to do was hand over your plastic and choose from a price list of what you wanted to shoot. As if you were sitting in a restaurant and ordering off a menu.

A baboon, your basic appetizer, cost seventy-five dollars. Two hundred for a warthog, two-fifty for an impala, nine hundred for a wildebeest, all the way up to two thousand for a waterbuck and twenty-five hundred for a giraffe. Most of them so slow and stupid that you might as well have been some Texas bigwig blasting away at farm-raised quail.

The original Big Five were on the menu too, though their prices were never listed. You had to ask. But if your pockets were deep enough, you could still follow a guide out and knock down a semitame lion or sluggish buffalo on a groomed veldt that looked like something you’d see on a golf course. And then go home and brag on it to your friends.

The state of big-game hunting in the twenty-first century.

Unless you wanted more, and knew how to get it.

Standing close to the glass, the girl peered up at him. She looked to be about seven, with fair skin, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, curly blond hair emerging from a green knit hat, and eyes so large and pale blue that he thought he might be able to see through to her brain if he looked right into them.

How much had she seen? She was old enough to understand, to tell her mother, to scream. She could ruin everything.

He leaned forward, looked past her, seeing only a young woman in a black parka glancing at the squirrel monkeys across the way. No one else was in the Monkey House.

He had choices, then. There were a couple of different ways this could go.

He tried the easiest first, and smiled at her.

She smiled back.

Okay. Good. Tilting his head, he gestured at the golden lion tamarins on the branches around him. Alarmed, they leaped away toward the farthest corners of the enclosure. But the girl saw only adorable little monkeys doing tricks, and laughed. Then she pointed to her mouth and made chewing motions. Feeding time?

He gave an apologetic shake of the head and showed her his watch. Later.

Her lips turned downward in disappointment, and she shrugged. Then she glanced over her shoulder. He heard her voice dimly through the glass: “Hey, Mom — there’s a man in there!”

But by the time the woman turned to look, he was gone.

Wilson and Crede, the lawyers, had bagged a bull elephant whose crossed tusks, as pitted and yellow as mammoth ivory, weighed a combined 407 pounds. Smithfield, the bluff and hearty CEO of a company with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and New York, had shot a black-maned lion in Namibia that measured eleven feet from head to tail. Clark, the lobbyist, tall and skinny, had faced down a charging three-thousand-pound black rhino, standing his ground and firing his Brno ZKK-602 until the great beast came crashing to the ground not five feet from where he stood. And Kushner, the tanned, nasal-voiced neurosurgeon, had discovered that the leopard he’d shot was still alive, and had finished the job by jamming his fist down its throat until it died of asphyxiation.

Or so the stories went. Who knew what the truth was? And who cared? They were good yarns, and to the Big Five the telling was almost as important as the feat itself.

Taking their time, they opened a new bottle. Soon the room was filled with a familiar camaraderie.

The only thing slightly off was the presence of the sixth man in the room, the one sitting a little back from the circle. A decade older than the others, tall and rangy, he had sun-creased skin, a mustache that had once been blond but was now white, and deep-set eyes the faded blue of sea glass. He sat slouched comfortably in one of the teak-and-gold chairs, his long, tapering fingers occasionally drumming an odd rhythm on his thighs. His piercing gaze moved from one to another, and though he smiled at their loud jokes, he spoke only rarely himself. His drink sat untouched on the table beside his chair.

The others would have liked it if he’d joined in, maybe shared some of his own stories. But no one even considered asking.

They all knew his reputation. He was the one who sometimes disappeared for months at a time, going where no satellite could find him, living off the game instead of just bringing it home to show off. The one who people said could read a landscape with cheetah’s skill, follow the herds as relentlessly as a hunting dog, stalk his prey as silently as a leopard. The one whose obsession for the kill had once made his guns seem like extensions of his body. The one who had seen everything, shot everything, lived a life the rest of them could only dream of.

He was the one they all wanted to be.

Which was why they’d come to the Executive Suite.

A red-tailed hawk was circling over the thatched roofs of the zoo’s fake African village, peering down from the steel-gray sky at the shaggy baboons milling about on their pitiful, barren hillside.

Akeley had seen ospreys here, peregrines, once even an eagle that had wandered over from the Hudson. Predators all, their brains always processing the information their eyes transmitted. He wondered what they thought when they looked down on the apes, tigers, and wolves below.

Probably something like: Man, if I could kill that, I wouldn’t have to hunt again for weeks.

“Sir?”

Shit. He’d been drifting, something he did a lot more frequently these days than he once had.

Drifting could get you killed.

“Sir, I need to talk to you.”

A deep voice, Spanish accent. Slowly the hunter swung his gaze down from the sky and focused on the man dressed in white shirt and blue slacks, an inadequate navy-blue jacket zipped up in a hopeless attempt to block out the icy wind. A walkie-talkie swinging from his belt. The name on his white laminated badge read, F. Cabrera.

A zoo security guard, with chapped cheeks and watering eyes. Unhappy to be outside in this weather, but staying polite for now, probably because of Akeley’s age.

Still, the hunter could see that F. Cabrera was young and self-confident. A smile and a few conciliatory words wouldn’t stop him. And his politeness wouldn’t last long if he didn’t get the answers he was looking for.

Too bad.

“Sir, I had a report of a man fitting your description exiting an authorized-personnel door of the Monkey House.”

Akeley didn’t reply, just turned away and started walking, heading south and east, his strides eating up ground.

“Hey!” Cabrera sounded shocked by this display of insubordination. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

Akeley kept going.

The guard got in front of him again. Now his face was stony, and he showed some teeth when he talked. His hand hovered over the walkie-talkie.

“Papi, you really think it’s a good idea to make trouble?” he said.

Akeley took stock. Down the path toward the African Plains he saw a family — Mom, Dad, ten-year-old, toddler, swaddled baby in a stroller. They were out of earshot, and even if they hadn’t been, they would merely have seen two zoo employees talking. Nothing worth giving a second thought to.

Cabrera cut a glance at Akeley’s duffel. “What you got in there?”

“Books.”

“Huh.” Imbuing the single word with scornful disbelief. “Why don’t you open it and show me?”

The hunter shook his head and started off again, moving faster this time. He felt a hand on his arm, shrugged it off, then felt it grab him again, hard, and half-spin him around.

“You come with me.” Cabrera spat out each word. “Now.”

“Okay,” Akeley said, “I won’t fight you.”

“Good.” But Akeley thought that the guard looked a little disappointed.

They walked together, Cabrera still holding his arm. Up ahead loomed the dark, squat stone walls of the World of Darkness. Akeley waited until they’d gone ten more steps, fifteen, and then broke free and headed up the path toward the building’s front doors.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Cabrera said, and came after him.

They went through the turnstile, the door slamming open once, and then again, and into the permanent near-blackness designed to encourage nocturnal animals — bats, skunks, snakes, wildcats — to put on a better show. The hunter could see perfectly in the darkness, an ability he’d possessed for as long as he could remember. But the people inside, hearing the sound of the slamming door, turned dim, clouded eyes in his direction.

Behind him Cabrera, blind, fumbling, tried to put him in a bearhug. Akeley turned and hit him three times, hard, twice in the gut and once in the jaw.

The guard made a small, despairing sound in his throat and slid to the floor. The hunter spoke into his ear, a whisper that no one else could hear over the squeaking of bats and the rustle of porcupine quills.

“You don’t stop me,” he said, “before I’m done.”

One corner of the exhibit was roped off for construction. Quickly Akeley carried the unconscious man past the barricade and dropped him against the wall. No one would see him there, and he would stay quiet for a while. For long enough.

Akeley headed back toward the door, past a pair of teenagers staring at the fruit bats and a small figure bent over the glass scorpion case: the little blond girl from the Monkey House, turning to look at him as he went by. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and she recognized him as well.

“It’s you,” she said in a half-whisper.

“Yes.”

“Look at this.” She pressed a button, and instantly a black light came on. Under the glass, a pair of large scorpions fluoresced, a brilliant glowing blue. “Aren’t they cool?”

“They sure are.”

As he went out the door he heard her say, “Hey, Mom, look—”

He stood for a moment outside, the north wind in his face. The sun, heading for the horizon, had at last pulled free of the low clouds, and cast weak shadows behind the spindly trees and litter-snagged bushes.

The hunter drew the cold air deep into his lungs and started heading west, toward the setting sun.

Wondering if he’d already lost too much time.

Was “Akeley” even his real name?

No one asked. Even where he came from, where he’d been born, was a mystery. Some said Germany, others England, still others swore he was the son of a ranching family that had lived in Rhodesia for generations. His quiet voice, with its gruff edge, seemed to carry a slight accent, but gave no firm clue to its origins. Nor did anyone know how he had gotten the scar that began beneath his jawline and ran along the side of his neck before disappearing under the collar of the long-sleeved safari shirts he always wore.

A man out of time, people said. Stories told at gun shows, in gentlemen’s club lounges, and in the field, creating only this blurry portrait, all the more compelling for being so incomplete. If he chose to call himself Akeley, that had to be good enough for them.

Even Smithfield, the CEO, had seemed awed when they first met. “Were you the one—” he had started to say, before something in Akeley’s expression made it clear that he shouldn’t finish. Smithfield didn’t usually care what other people wanted — why bother when you could fire anyone who disagreed with you? — but he’d stopped short, cleared his throat, and finished, lamely, by saying, “Glad to know you,” in an unexpectedly hoarse voice.

But he’d recovered by the time they got down to business. “Fifty thousand each?” he said. “Why not make it a hundred?”

Getting some pleasure watching the others wriggle a bit. Then seeing Kushner, the guy who drilled into your skull and fucked with your brain, frowning as he put an end to that. “Fifty,” he said. “As we discussed.”

Everyone else nodding.

But Kushner’s eyes were on Akeley. “And you’ll match it.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Make it five hundred thousand?”

“What it adds up to,” Akeley agreed.

That had been the deal from the start, but still, there was something about hearing it out loud. Smithfield laughed, a sound like a zebra’s bray.

But Kushner wasn’t smiling. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you raising the stakes?”

The hunter stretched like a cat in his chair. “Added incentive,” he said.

Though, really, this group hardly needed any.

The zoo would be closing soon.

Not that it mattered much, not usually. In preparation, the hunter had spent a week living here, on the grounds, and no one had ever gotten a hint of his presence. You couldn’t “close” something so big and sprawling and overgrown, you could just tell people it was time to leave and assume they’d listen.

And because people were sheep, they usually did.

Cawing flocks of crows flew overhead, blown by the wind like flakes of soot as they headed toward their nighttime roosts. Below the heedless black birds, the last few zoo visitors, scattered groups of two or three, hurried toward the parking lots near the Bronx River Parkway and Fordham Road.

But the hunter had someplace else he needed to be.

Moving faster, staying in the lengthening shadows, he kept to his course.

West.

Toward the African Plains.

“We all decide who wins,” Smithfield said.

Everyone nodded. It was the only fair way.

Wilson said, “We get together afterwards and vote.”

More nods.

“And fill each other in.” Smithfield’s lips turned upward. “Every last detail.”

Their favorite part from the beginning.

“We decide where yet?” Kushner asked.

“Great Western Gun Show,” Akeley said.

“Salt Lake City, that is?” Kushner asked.

Akeley nodded.

“Listen, though,” Wilson said. “If we can’t, like, agree, who gets the tie-breaking vote?”

Everyone looked at him, but no one spoke. They all knew the answer to that one.

There.

The prey. As unaware, as self-deluding as the monkey had been, and the bear. Another degraded animal that had convinced itself it was wild, free, unfettered.

The hunter felt himself relax. He was in time.

Just.

It was standing half-hidden behind a screen of bare forsythia. Leaning forward, head hunched low, fierce dark eyes focused on something the hunter couldn’t see. Then, almost imperceptibly, it shifted its weight, muscles tensing as it assumed a predator’s classic pre-attack posture.

Time to put an end to this.

Moving as fast and silently as a shadow, the hunter came up behind it. “Don’t do that,” he said.

His prey jumped, swung its head around, and stared at him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” it asked.

They drew lots. Each got a different zoo, a different part of the country. Minnesota, Miami, San Diego, Washington, the Bronx. The targets: the zoos’ biggest and fiercest animals, or their rarest, or their most difficult to approach.

“I think they’ve got the whole Big Five at my zoo,” said Crede, who’d drawn San Diego.

“Yeah, but I’ve got pandas,” said Smithfield, who was headed to Washington.

Only Wilson seemed to have some reservations, now that their plan was becoming a reality. “Yeah, but—” he said. “I mean, aren’t all these things going to be, like, too easy to kill?”

His words drawing scornful looks from the rest, as if they’d all long since considered that possibility, and discarded it.

Akeley said, “Sure. But who said it was about the kill?”

“Well—” Wilson fumbled for words. “Then… then what is it about?”

Akeley stared at him. “It’s about the hunt,” he said. “The plan. The approach. The wait. The moment — the one moment. And the aftermath.”

Just like it used to be.

He looked into Kushner’s sickly yellow eyes.

The neurosurgeon. Back in the Executive Suite he’d worn some fancy cologne, but now he smelled like powder and heated steel and sweat.

And something more. Something… undone. Unfulfilled.

The hunter let his gaze follow the direction that Kushner had been pointing his Browning autoloader. There, walking along the path that bordered the gray and barren African Plains — nothing like the golden expanse of the real thing — were the surgeon’s final targets.

The little blond girl and her mother. Heading obliviously toward the Asia Gate, walking fast in the gathering darkness, but not faster than a .338 cartridge could fly.

Kushner looked down at the girl, then back at Akeley. The lust for the kill was still strong in him.

“Please,” he said. “Please… let me finish.”

Kushner hesitated in the hallway outside the suite as the others took the elevator down to the exhibition floor. Then he stepped back inside the room. His deeply tanned face was underlain by a reddish flush.

“I have a question,” he said. Akeley waited.

“The kills—” The words were cautious, but the surgeon’s eyes gleamed.

Akeley guessed what was coming next. “What about them?”

“Do they have to be—” A deep breath. The gleam brighter. “To be — animals?”

Yes: what he’d expected.

The word had gotten around about Kushner over the years. How he’d accidentally shot and killed a porter on safari in Namibia, and then another in northern Kenya. Garbled rumors of yet another death, maybe in the Peruvian Amazon, maybe in Thailand.

Or maybe both. The world was full of potential victims, places where a rich American could get away with murder.

“Well,” Akeley said, “aren’t we all animals?”

Kushner blinked, then grinned. His lips were wet. “And will it — will it help me win?”

The hunter merely shrugged.

Knowing that the surgeon would take that as a yes.

“What else did you kill?”

The girl and her mother had moved out of sight.

“What?”

The hunter thought about the time he’d lost in the World of Darkness. “I saw the bear and the tamarin. What else?”

“Snow leopard. Bengal tiger.” Kushner squared his shoulders. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You aren’t supposed to be here. You aren’t supposed to be anywhere. This is my zoo. You’re just the money man.”

“Oh?” The hunter unzipped his bag. “And who do you think I am?”

“Akeley—” the neurosurgeon said, then stopped.

The hunter reached into his duffel for the first time all day. “Do you even know who Carl Akeley was?” he asked.

Kushner, looking at the bag, gave a little shake of his head.

“A hundred years ago, a little less, Carl Akeley was one of the world’s great sportsmen. He loved to shoot.”

Out of the duffel came his Winchester. His elephant gun. There was already a .458 Magnum in its chamber.

“And then he saw that the hunt was becoming a farce, a slaughter. And so he gave it up.”

The hunter hefted the rifle in his hands. It was a good old gun. Like him, it was almost ready to retire, but he thought they both had one more shot in them.

“Akeley saw the day coming when the great herds would be nearly all gone, and the honorable hunters of past years would be replaced by amateurs, men who cared only for the kill, not for the contest. So he decided to fight to save what was left.”

The surgeon, his tan turned the yellow of rotting cheese, was staring at the gun. He didn’t appear to be listening.

The hunter sighed. It was useless trying to explain. He raised the gun to his shoulder.

The surgeon followed the movement with red-rimmed eyes. “What about the others?”

The hunter permitted himself a little smile. “The others,” he said, “are behind bars.”

The surgeon put his hand to his mouth. His gun bag lay forgotten at his feet. “And me?” he asked.

“You I wanted for myself.”

The hunter wrapped his finger around the cold steel of the trigger. With a sudden, smooth movement, he swiveled so the rifle was aimed directly at the surgeon’s head.

“Know what?” he said. “I think you should run.”

They’d all gone at last, taking their Scotch, their memories, and their anticipation with them.

The hunter sighed. His legs ached as he walked over to the refrigerator and took out a Tusker. Not a great lager, he had to admit, but still. It reminded him of the smell of the savanna, the safari of white clouds marching across the enormous Kenyan sky, the nasal bleats of the migrating wildebeest herds, and, further off, the grunting cough of a lion proclaiming its territory.

All a vanished world in a bottle of beer.

He sat down, unsnapped his cell phone from its clip on his belt, and did what he’d always done at the end of a long day’s hunt, just before he pulled the trigger.

He checked to make sure his escape route was rock-solid.

Kushner was shivering uncontrollably.

How cold is it?

“Run where?” he said.

“Wherever you like.” The hunter leaned forward, touching the barrel of the Winchester gently against the surgeon’s quivering temple. “But start now.”

With a sick, despairing look, Kushner turned and stumbled away. He nearly tripped, then regained his footing and ran, legs pumping, arms flailing, northward up the path. The hunter could hear him gasping out the word “Help” again and again as he ran, but he had no air in his lungs to shout, and anyway, there was no one around to hear him. The zoo was closed.

Fifty yards away he got, a hundred, before he came to a break in the wall of bushes. There he hesitated, looking back over his shoulder, as if he might spot Akeley in the gloom. As if there was any chance of ever seeing the hunter, if the hunter didn’t want to be seen.

For a moment more Kushner jittered on his feet. Then he reached a decision and turned, intending to go cross-country toward the road that bordered the zoo.

Akeley, having known he’d do that, waited.

For three seconds, four, the surgeon was out of sight. Then he reappeared in a clearing, a tiny gap where a vine-ridden maple tree had come down in a storm. He paused, looking around, listening for any signs of pursuit. But it was nearly dark now, and his pulse was pounding, so his eyes and ears told him nothing.

That’s how it usually went. The wildebeest about to be swatted to the ground by the lion, the Thomson’s gazelle the moment before it faces the cheetah’s rush. Victims so rarely recognize mortal danger until they feel its jaws around their throats.

Kushner straightened and took the first of four steps — just four — that would have carried him to the road and safety. At that moment, when escape suddenly seemed so close, so possible, the hunter’s index finger tightened.

The Winchester kicked hard against his shoulder. But he was used to it, and knew how to keep his head still, his eyes focused.

So he got to watch the .458 perform its own brand of surgery on the neurosurgeon’s brain.

The doors of the 5 train rattled open before him. He stepped into the nearly empty car, beginning the first leg of a journey that would land him in Panama late that night. There he would collect the money the Big Five had planned to dole out to the “winner” of the zoo slaughter.

And after Panama, where?

Africa, of course. Poor, besieged Africa, just a shadow of what it had once been, but still the only real place on earth. Sitting in this capsule of plastic and steel, he gazed at the continent’s limitless skies, tasted the wind-borne dust sweeping across its vast savannas.

The train’s doors half shut, then squealed and opened again. Two people entered.

The little blond girl and her mother.

They sat down opposite him. The woman, looking cold and worn, closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the plastic seat. For a minute or so, the girl played with a stuffed monkey on her lap. Then, as if sensing the hunter’s presence, she lifted her head and looked directly at him.

Her eyes widened and spots of color rose to her cheeks. He saw her lips move. You, she said silently.

He gave a little nod.

The girl stared, as if willing him not to disappear once more. Then she dug her elbow into her mother’s side.

“Honey!” The woman didn’t move. “Let me rest.”

“But Mom,” the girl insisted, “it’s him! The man from the zoo.”

The woman sat up. Now her eyes were open.

“See?”

The woman saw. The corners of her mouth turned down.

Having savored her moment of vindication, the girl went back to her toy. But her mother scowled at the hunter all the way to East 86th Street, as if she knew — just knew — that he’d been stalking them all afternoon, and even now was planning to leap across the aisle and finish the job.