Pittsburgh Noir

Atom Smasher by Lila Shaara

Forest Hills

You grew up next to a what?” the sweaty girl said. Hot was supposed to be synonymous with sexy, he thought, all that imagery of damp flesh and body heat. She looked damp all right, but on her it just looked like she’d smell bad if you got too close. Her hair was big and her accent jarring; he’d been living in Atlanta for seven years, ever since college. He’d grown used to soft Southern consonants and slippery vowels. The sharp angles of Pittsburghese grated on him now, along with her sweat-darkened tank top and spiky, lacquer-hardened hair. The air inside the bar was so steamy he thought he might faint. He imagined he looked as though he’d just come out of a hot tub himself.

“An atom smasher,” he said. “It was built even before the atom bomb. They were smashing atoms together before they even knew that they could blow up the world that way.”

“Huh,” she replied, and he could tell that she didn’t believe him; people seldom did when he told them this bit about his past, but he expected more from a local.

He said, “You can see it from Ardmore Boulevard. It looks like an upside-down teardrop.”

She looked interested. “You mean the big metal ice-cream cone?”

“Exactly.”

“Wow,” she said. “I’ve seen it my whole life, and didn’t know that that was what an atom smasher looks like. Growing up next to that, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Ronnie hadn’t expected her to want to have sex with him, and he was sad to find that it was in a way a relief. He had just moved back home, and amid the shame of it all was the practical problem of having nowhere to bring women. But he’d only been back a month, and though he’d gone several times to a bar that had been good to him in the past, he hadn’t had to solve this particular problem as yet. He was not quite drunk when he returned to the house that was now partly his again. It was quiet; his parents were asleep. Thank God, he thought, and got a beer from the refrigerator.

He went upstairs to what used to be his bedroom; his parents had turned it into an upstairs den, with a large TV, a couch, and a small refrigerator. His father called it his “man cave,” and he hadn’t wanted to return it to his son. Now Ronnie was sleeping in a semifinished room in the attic, which was hot despite the window air conditioner, but he couldn’t bear the thought of living in the guest room, which had wallpaper covered in ducks. The best thing about the conversion was a deck built off the second-floor room that hung high above the backyard. Ronnie went out the sliding glass door, and eased himself into one of his mother’s old patio chairs, the kind with fat, if slightly mildewed, cushions. After a minute he got up again and brought some matches from the kitchen, and then lit two giant citronella candles that sat on the wide wooden railing. The mosquitoes here weren’t as big as the ones in Atlanta, no matter what the locals wanted to believe, but they were bad enough when they were hungry.

He could see the silhouette of the atom smasher in the low horizon, unmistakable even in the gentle red light given off from the city center, eight miles away. He’d never heard it called the more modern term: particle accelerator. Compared to the ones they built now, it was minuscule. But he’d always been told that it was the first one ever made, and so it had an excuse for being a nuclear pipsqueak. Even so, the metal icecream cone was six stories high; it sat on top of a large, ugly bunker of a building constructed out of concrete and corrugated steel. The whole structure covered over an acre of land, the cracked and weedy parking lot surrounding it covering at least two more. The orange paint flaked off in handfuls, and there were few windows; it looked like the setting for a bad postapocalyptic film. Yet Westinghouse had tucked it away in this residential enclave, presumably so that many of its employees could live nearby and walk to work. Fortunately, the topography of his home town meant that he couldn’t see the ugly bunker from the deck, only the metal dome itself.

Forest Hills was aptly named; virtually every backyard was a slope in one direction or another. His parents’ house poked out of the hillside like a shelf fungus on a locust tree. The ancient Westinghouse complex lay off to his left, only four lots away. The old-fashioned Westinghouse tinker toy W painted on its side was eye level. He’d actually thought about taking the sweaty girl from the bar there after all this time. He’d already forgotten her name, and he’d never been attracted to her, other than in the basest, most pragmatic way, an opportunity, even if it wasn’t particularly appealing. Man, he thought, it’s been a long time since I’ve done it there. Remembering that none of the girls had been over seventeen, he thought, it was statutory rape, and I was too stupid to even know it. Maybe some of the girls’ luck did rub off on me, since I never got caught.

In high school he’d been well-liked and thought handsome by enough girls that it had become accepted as fact by everyone else. But he hadn’t been a star in sports or in anything else, and so his professional success had made coming home to his tenth reunion a pleasure. He still looked good, had a pretty wife and a career that many of his former classmates envied. He’d loved saying, “I’m a sports writer,” over and over between sips of warm beer. “For the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Had to move to the Sun Belt, but I’m still a Steelers fan.” It had gone over so well that his dreams had rung with the social success of it for weeks.

But four years later, the wife was gone, as was the job — the price of being in a junior position in a downsizing industry. He still had a friend or two, though fewer than he thought. Print journalism is dead anyway, they all said. Do online stuff, they said. As though it were that simple; as though that was the way to get rich. But his boss had said, “Sorry, Ronnie, but you’re not that good. My advice? Find a different line of work.”

He’d received a mailing about the fifteenth reunion. The irony of not having to travel this time did not make him smile. Now he stared at the atom smasher and thought, this time maybe I can get it to work for me.

His mother said, “What a blessing that the sun’s out,” for the fifth time, as she pulled a five-pound package of hamburger meat from the refrigerator. It had rained for the last three days. Now the sky was empty of everything but a hot, white sun, the blue around it hard, like thick glass. It made Ronnie’s head hurt to look at it; he’d been at the bar again the night before, and he had a hangover. It hadn’t even been worth it; the available women had been either unattractive or uninterested. Now he followed his mother’s orders, and spent the morning setting up chairs in the backyard and helping her shape the loose, wet meat into patties. At noon, she released him, saying, “Just don’t make a mess anywhere.”

He pulled a can of soda from the refrigerator and went upstairs to the second-floor deck. He sat, popped the can, and looked at the atom smasher, hanging above the trees beyond the yard. It looked like a huge, fat metal teardrop that was going the wrong way. Like a giant cried while standing on his head, he thought. Maybe I can get a job as a poet. Then he almost smiled, thinking, there’s one of the few jobs that probably pays less than a newspaperman. He took a drink; it was too sweet. Root beer. He hadn’t noticed what he’d taken from the kitchen. His mother always had a large stockpile of soda in case they had company, and today they were expecting a lot of it. She bought the stuff by the case, store brands that came in all the basic flavors: cola, ginger ale, root beer, grape, and orange. He wondered how they got away with using words that designated actual fruits. Orange was a color too, of course. But, he thought, the words are always followed by the microscopic amendment, flavored drink. Root beer used to be the boiled and carbonated syrup of the sassafras root. He knew because his Uncle Lou had made some when he was a kid. It tasted alcoholic to him then. Knowing his Uncle Lou, it probably had been fermented. The stuff in the can was mostly corn syrup and some unknowable chemicals that tap-danced on your taste buds and some sort of dye the color of shit. He drained the rest of the can. He thought, maybe I could get a job as a taste tester for crappy cola.

From the deck he could peek through the slats in the railing and watch the festivities without being seen. The basement door two stories below opened out to a brick patio some twenty feet square; it was dotted with a disreputable but solid collection of lawn chairs culled from sixty years of family gatherings. A gas grill the size of a player piano sat on a far corner of the patio, and his father was replacing the propane tank underneath it, something his mother had wanted him to do the day before, and had loudly wanted Ronnie to help him. Ronnie was relieved that his father had ignored her on both counts. His mother didn’t seem to know he was up on the deck, and his seated position allowed him to be invisible from below unless he chose to poke his head up above the wooden railing.

Behind him, he heard the brushing sound of the screen door into the upstairs den, and turned to see his cousin Gary standing on the threshold. He hadn’t seen Gary in several years, and his looks hadn’t improved. Gary was a few inches shorter than Ronnie, and was usually heavier. Ronnie had always thought that Gary had a head the shape of a potato, though of course much larger; he thought about this now, since the resemblance had grown more pronounced with the years. Gary came onto the deck, a soda can in his hand as well, and sat down on a chair identical to the one on which Ronnie sat, white-painted rattan with cushions in a loud floral print. “So, Ronnie,” he said, “how’s it hangin’?”

Ronnie gave the automatic answer, rehearsed and perfected and enjoyed many times in their shared youth: “High and long, Gary, high and long.”

Gary tipped his can toward Ronnie, who raised his, and they met with a satisfying tink. Ronnie remembered that Gary had had to stop drinking a few years ago. Two years? Three? He couldn’t recall, nor could he recall any of the details his mother had told him, although he was pretty sure that Gary had ended up in rehab. Gary no longer had a wife, and the divorce was complicated by the fact that he had two kids, or maybe it was three; Ronnie couldn’t recall the details of that either. Ronnie hadn’t seen any young kids running around the backyard below, so he supposed Gary’s ex had custody. Here at last, he thought, was someone who would also understand the meaning of bad luck.

Ronnie pointed to the atom smasher. “Any new plans to tear it down?”

Gary said, “No, and no one wants to buy it. They tried to get the Smithsonian to take it, but the damn thing’s too big. Too expensive to trash it too.”

“Is it still radioactive?”

“Supposed to be. If that wasn’t all just scare talk to keep teenagers away.”

Ronnie smiled. “Does it work? It didn’t used to.”

Gary laughed, and Ronnie could see that he was missing a couple of teeth. His mother had died of some kind of cancer when they were kids; now with his wife gone, there seemed to be no one monitoring his oral hygiene.

Gary sipped his can. Cola was written in blue letters on a red background. He said, “Sorry to hear about your troubles. But your mom’s glad you’re back.”

“Thanks.”

Gary nodded at the great inverted teardrop on the horizon. The summer light caught it so that it gleamed like the dull side of a sheet of aluminum foil. “You been back there?”

“What?”

“You know. You take any girls there?” He wasn’t looking at Ronnie, but at the big teardrop.

“It’s been a long time, Gary. I don’t know any girls that are available. And worth it, if you know what I mean.”

“You got your eye out, though, right?” Gary turned to face him, and he was still smiling. His face was sweaty. Ronnie wondered if he’d spiked the cola with something; Gary almost looked a little drunk.

“Sure,” answered Ronnie.

“Sucks about your job. Sales sucks now too. Fuckin’ economy.” He said ecawnomy, and Ronnie tried not to find it annoying while Gary repeated, “Fuckin’ economy.” Then he got up abruptly, crunching the empty soda can with fat fingers, causing the rattan chair to twitch and rustle in unpleasant ways. “I’ll be back,” he said in a weak Austrian accent, and then disappeared through the sliding doors.

Ronnie heard voices from the front of the house, where his mother was greeting whatever neighbor or relative had just arrived. The number of people on the patio below was gently increasing, as was the volume of the voices. No one was looking up; most eyes were turned toward the grill where his father presided over a dozen or so fat sausages. Ronnie caught the smell, and it made him hungry.

His mother appeared from beneath the deck, leading an old woman by the arm. He recognized her: Mrs. Asch from three doors down. Skinny and saggy and gray, oh my, he thought. But then he watched his mother reach a welcoming hand out to someone behind old Mrs. Asch, another woman, but not an old one, and from what he could see of her, she was far from saggy or gray. She was tall and slender with a beautiful ass in tight white shorts, nice tan legs, bare between cuff and sandal, and a yellow tank top that fit snugly across round breasts. Her hair was brown and very curly and full, caught up in an attractively messy ponytail. He thought, she’s got to have the face of a moose, with a body like that.

Gary came through the door again with a clatter as he accidentally nudged the vertical blinds that were pressed together in a skinny wad at the side of the door. He was carrying a compact blue cooler, which he plopped down beside Ronnie as though it was heavy. Gary opened it and the inside glowed gold, like pirate treasure. Gary pulled out two sweating cans of Michelob and handed one to Ronnie. The cool feel of it in his hand was delightful in the day’s heat. Gary sat down again in the whispering chair, and together they popped the tops of the cans, tilted them at each other, and each took a sip. Both cans were empty within a few minutes. Ten minutes later, Ronnie was on his third, and Gary his fourth. Ronnie wondered how many the cooler could hold; every time Gary opened it, it glowed from within.

Ronnie was about to ask Gary to lean forward and identify the woman with the beautiful body when his cousin said, “You remember Josette?”

It took a few moments for Ronnie’s neurons to reorient, and then the information clicked together — a face, a body, a smell, a voice. He said, “Josette Foyle.”

“Yeah. Oh man. She came home for her mom’s funeral last year, and she looked exactly the same, man. Exactly the same. Tits like basketballs.” He waited for Ronnie to answer, but when he didn’t get a response, he went on: “I ’member when you took her up there.” He nodded at the great W that hung above them. “She was so fuckin’ sexy. No pun intended.” He grinned his gappy grin.

Ronnie grinned back, only slightly uncomfortable. The beer helped. “Yeah,” he said. “She was something.”

“How many times did you take her up there?” He said it up air.

“Only twice.” That’s all it took, he thought.

“Right, cause then her dad got that job where they moved away, somewhere overseas.”

“Paris.”

“Goddamn France,” said Gary. “Couldn’t pay me.”

“If someone paid you, you’d go to fuckin’ Shitsville,” Ronnie said without giving it much thought. Old rhythms, like call and response. He thought, she was so happy it was all she could talk about. Paris, Paris, Paris.

“I already live in Shitsburgh,” Gary said. Another old joke. Gary lived in Forest Hills, two blocks from his parents; the borough had its own mayor and so it technically wasn’t the city. But everyone said they lived in Pittsburgh when it was easier, or when they were talking about sports. “Didn’t she marry someone there and sort of become a Frog herself?”

“Yes,” Ronnie said. “I thought you spoke to her when you saw her last summer.”

“No.” Gary shook his head. “She’d never remember me, bro.”

Ronnie was starting to feel drunk. “She married a Michelin.”

“A tire?”

“No. A person who’s part of a family who owns a tire company.”

“Shit yeah. That’s right.”

Ronnie drank more, sitting up straighter so that he could see over the railing. The girl in the tank top and shorts was talking to his Uncle Lou. She laughed at something Lou said. Ronnie still couldn’t see her face, could only tell by the tilt of her head and a faint sound that seemed to come from her, that seemed to be laughter. And Lou was all smiles himself. Ronnie thought, she must be pretty.

Gary said, “Who else was there? Mary Galetti?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“And Brenda Bergamo. Nia Petrandis.”

Ronnie said, “Stacey Trelski.”

“Yeah. Blond. Cute. Small.”

“Yes,” Ronnie said. “She’s an actress now.”

“Really? I never heard.”

“She changed her name, and she’s mostly been in horror movies. But she’s done pretty well. She changed her name to Stephanie Thomas.”

“That’s her? Jesus, I didn’t know.” I dinno.

Ronnie added, “Nia got into Penn on a full scholarship and then went to vet school there. She’s written a few books. I even saw her on C-SPAN once, talking about one of them. Something to do with mad cow disease.”

“No shit.”

The unknown girl was still talking to Lou, but Mr. Kray from next door had joined them. All Ronnie could see was the back of her head, but he could tell by the grins on the faces of both old men that she had to be pretty. He said, “Brenda Bergamo is a news anchor now in New York. I think it’s an ABC affiliate.” He could feel his control slipping, along with his coordination and his ability to speak clearly. He was revealing more than he would have if sober.

Gary popped a can. “I never asked before, but what did you do? I mean, did you scare ’em shitless with the story of Boneless Bernie?”

“Shit no, Gary. Jesus.”

“I never heard of his ghost being seen around the place, but if I’d been you, I’d’ve used it. You’d think he’d haunt the place... You know what’s weird? I’ve always thought of the guy as a lot older than me. But he was only seventeen when he died, so he never got older. Weird.”

Ronnie nodded. He’d felt much the same, although he thought it would lower his dignity to agree with Gary too strongly.

Gary said, “Imagine falling so far that you turned every bone in your body to oatmeal.”

“I’d rather not, thanks.”

“No one ever figured out what he was doing up there.”

Ronnie said, “Being a dumbass. Wasn’t he drunk?”

“Yeah.” Gary crushed the can in his meaty hand, and stared at the crumpled, sharpened edges of it as though there were coins somewhere inside. “I heard his brains were coming out his ears.”

Dwelling on this image against his will, Ronnie said, “I don’t know. I was, like, four years old. If that.” He was doing his best to keep his squeamishness to himself. He couldn’t tell how convincing he was being. He knew that Gary would run with it till they were both steeped in ghoulish stories and gross-out jokes, and Ronnie’s stomach was feeling just delicate enough from the excess of beer that he knew this might ruin his afternoon.

He was on the verge of asking Gary about his kids just to change the subject, even though he was less interested in them than he was in Boneless Bernie, but then Gary asked, “So where the hell is Mary Galetti?”

Ronnie felt his surprise as anger, and said, “Shit, Gary, do you pay attention to anything but football?” Gary looked surprised, but Ronnie was committed to being irritated for the moment. “She was on the goddamn space shuttle. Three years ago. It was all over the goddamn news: Pittsburgh’s own Mary Galetti. You know the way they do. She’s some kind of scientist.”

“Oh. No shit. You’re right. I don’t pay as much attention as I should to stuff like that.” Like at. “But I’m not a hot-shit sports writer. I don’t have an in with the papers and shit.” Ronnie waited, knowing that Gary would take care of it for him, would take the blame, even though Ronnie had been the one out of line. Sure enough, Gary went on: “My dad gets my news for me. He watches all the news shit. The local channels anyway. The Channel 4 folks.” He had a smile on his face now, a sickly one, drunk and ingratiating, and it made Ronnie feel lousy, so he took another drink. Gary added, “Those girls were behind me in school, so I never knew any of ’em, really. Except for Nia. But she never had anything to say to me, and that’s not the kind of thing my dad knows about. C-SPAN and such.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t follow it so much myself except...” He stopped himself, and covered by taking a drink. As he’d hoped, Gary took over for him again, still not grasping the important thing about these women.

“Except that you nailed all of ’em,” Gary said, vicarious glee returning. “You nailed ’em by the light of the silvery atom smasher.”

He was good and drunk by the time he could sever himself from Gary and join the rest of the party in the backyard. There were almost no children, which was refreshing, but which also made the gathering oddly sedate; in his youth, Memorial Day cookouts had teemed with them. Many of the same people were present, just grown up, and most of them were childless, one way or another. He saw Lou’s daughter, his cousin Melissa, younger than him by four or five years, and waved her over. She’d always had a crush on him, or at least that was what Gary had told him a few summers ago. Ronnie had found the idea creepy, not only because of their blood tie, but because she had a jutting jaw, bad skin, and no breasts to speak of. She’d bred since then, so her breasts had more oomph to them now, but she was still homely. She greeted him with too much happiness, telling him that her three-year-old daughter was inside with the kid’s father, a man from the city who Ronnie knew he’d met, but couldn’t remember anything about. Ronnie made a slurred promise to say hello to them later, but managed to achieve his principle aim, which was to get information on the hot but faceless woman. Melissa said, “You mean Dana Asch? She just moved back in with her mom. Bad divorce. No kids.” It didn’t seem to occur to Melissa that she’d just described Ronnie’s own situation. To his delight, Melissa hollered, “Dana! You met my cousin Ronnie? He’s back now too.”

She was older than he’d thought, maybe even over forty, but she looked great, the way a lot of movie stars manage to look perfect at forty, or even fifty, sometimes even hotter than they’d been at twenty. He didn’t know what it was, maybe good bones or lucky genes. Probably just money, he thought. She looked like money too. Skin just tanned enough to look golden, hair just blond enough to look real, skin just taut enough to look like it was due to virtuous exercise, not plastic surgery. She smiled at him and his soberest thought was Come to Papa.

At first they chatted glibly by the grill, under the elated stare of Uncle Lou. They exchanged facts, some of which they already knew about each other. He learned that she’d gone to Pitt, then moved to San Francisco, gotten a job as a hospital administrator, married a doctor, and had lived in a large house with an ocean view. Neither mentioned divorce. She was enough older than he was that they didn’t share many acquaintances, despite growing up in the same neighborhood. Then Mrs. Asch yelled, “Dana!” in an old-woman voice, and Dana gave a quick smile to Ronnie, then Lou, and moved away toward where her mother sat surrounded by three or four other elderly people in loud golf clothes. Yet he felt that some subtle consent had passed between them; he kept her in his peripheral vision, and when she walked into the house alone thirty minutes later, he followed her without anyone noticing.

She was in the kitchen, looking at a picture held by a strawberry-shaped magnet on the refrigerator door.

“My mother’s black lab,” Ronnie said. “Pepper. The dog’s been dead for six years.”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

She still looked good, even when he was quasi-sober. His head was finally clearing after all the beer he’d had with Gary, and he couldn’t believe his luck. She turned to peer at him, and then her eyes broke away, darting around the room. His eyes followed hers, and he could see they were truly alone, if only for a moment. He turned back to her and then she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth, quickly but hard, a serious kiss. She pulled back and stared at him with shining hazel eyes. She said, “No one can know. I’m ‘going out with girlfriends’ tonight. I just moved back. I don’t want my mother to know anything.”

He nodded, then asked, “Do you know the path to the atom smasher? Where it comes out by the ballfield?”

She smiled wide, almost laughing. “Oh my God. Yes.” She dropped her voice. “Two hours from now. Bring wine. I’ll bring cups. And watch out for poison ivy.”

It was like a military maneuver through a jungle. It was only spring, so the milkweed and Virginia creeper weren’t as thick as they would be in July or August. Still, the path was dark and a little muddy; if there hadn’t been a tacit ban on speaking, he would have joked that they could use a machete. Here and there they passed wild raspberry bushes; he remembered that Mary Galetti had liked to eat the ripened berries on the way up the hill.

The hurricane fence was at the top of a rise, steep like all hillsides in the neighborhood. The fence was the same, which was a shock. Even the spot he’d most often used in the past hadn’t been mended, where the green-painted metal knots only kissed the ground instead of digging deep into it. The fencing was even still bent in the same places. All it took was a hard jerk and the hole was big enough to scoot through. Nothing has changed, he thought. How weird is that? He’d brought pliers in his backpack, hoping they’d be enough to bend the wire fence to get in; he’d been praying that he wouldn’t need his father’s bolt cutters. There was simply no way he could have snuck them out of the house. Now it turned out that even the pliers were unnecessary.

She was behind him, no backpack of her own, just a plastic bag that she said held some Dixie cups and snacks. He didn’t know if she’d brought condoms or not, but he had a pocketful. He’d never gotten anyone pregnant in his life that he knew of, and that was a good thing. At her age, he wasn’t sure if she could even get pregnant. But since he didn’t really know her, there was always the tiny possibility that she was worried about her biological clock, and saw him as a possible sperm donor. I just want my seed spilled where it won’t do anything but lie there, he thought, realizing that the metaphor was a strange one, full of double entendres, and he almost laughed. The thought of disease didn’t worry him at all.

Behind him, she said, “You’re about to put your hand in a bunch of poison ivy.” She was right; the three-pointed leaves quivered in the slight wind from his breath as he drew his hand back from the weak part of the fence. Her voice was quiet, but not a whisper; there didn’t appear to be anyone else around. Careful to avoid the poison ivy, he pulled up on the fence, which bent obligingly up, till they could walk through if they stooped. He led the way, and then held the flap of wire fencing back for her. Once she was through he carefully put the fencing back in place, the way he always had. They stayed silent as they made their way across the parking lot, across asphalt so cracked and uneven it looked like an earthquake had stirred up the dirt underneath.

The night was fine and clear, with sharp, bright stars overhead and the red glow of the city just visible above the trees to the west. The entire vast parking lot could be seen with one turn of the head, and it was clear that they were alone. The only sounds were distant ones: the buzz of an air-conditioning unit outside the closest house; a motorcycle bursting loudly up to speed on Ardmore Boulevard, only two blocks away but remote over a tree-covered rise; firecrackers popping on a concrete driveway. All distant sounds, all benign.

He took her hand then, and looked her in the eye. Now was a critical time; he needed to make sure she continued to think this was fun, a romantic adventure they were sharing, not a sordid episode, which it could easily morph into if it wasn’t handled with careful, experienced hands. He smiled, she smiled back, and he felt himself relax.

“Let’s go up on the platform,” he said in a soft voice. He pointed to the rusty metal steps that began in shadows at the base of the atom smasher, perched on the unlovely rectangle of corrugated steel and concrete.

“It’s really big when you’re right next to it,” she whispered.

“Are you afraid of heights?” he asked.

“Not really. But I’m not a kid anymore, you know? I’m in pretty good shape, but still, all those stairs.”

“They used to be pretty sturdy. Even if they’ve rusted more since I was here last, the metal was really thick. They should still be okay.”

They made their way to the base of the stairs, and he put out a hand to find where the railing started. It was rough with rust, and he waited until his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he could get a better look to see if the metal staircase had deteriorated in the decade since he’d last climbed it. It was too dark to see well, and although he had a flashlight, he didn’t want to use it unless he had to; there was a good chance that it would be seen by neighbors if anyone was near a window. He shook the railing, but it didn’t budge, so he put his foot on the first step. It too felt firm, and now his eyes were darkadapted enough that he could see the sturdy gray outline of the staircase reaching up to the bulge of the dome. He went up two more steps, and then turned and reached his hand down to her. She took it.

There were two platforms: one at the widest part of the inverted pear shape of the atom smasher dome, and a smaller one at the very top, like a widow’s walk. The steps ended halfway to the lower platform, replaced by a ladder; this too seemed in good shape, still firmly attached, and so the rest of the climb to the first platform was no harder than he remembered. After stepping off the ladder, he reached down for her hand and helped her the rest of the way onto the metal floor. Fortunately, it was a solid steel sheet and not grillwork, or he would never have had the success he’d had up here; no sleeping bag would have been thick enough to make it comfortable. The sinking of the sun had cooled the hills, and so they’d each changed clothes since the afternoon; both had on jeans and running shoes and long-sleeved shirts. Hers was black and plain, his was a Steelers jersey.

He pulled a blanket out of his backpack; it was the spare one kept in a box under his bed, so his mother wasn’t likely to miss it, even if she went snooping. He spread the blanket over the metal floor of the platform and then reached into his pack again for the magnum of wine that he’d managed to cadge from the cookout. Dana pulled a handful of cloth handkerchiefs from her plastic grocery bag, whispering an apology that she was a “clean freak” and liked to be able to wipe off her hands. She put the handkerchiefs in her jeans pockets, and then produced two Dixie cups circled with little purple flowers from her plastic bag, separated them, and handed both to Ronnie. He unscrewed the bottle, joking about the fact that there was no cork. He filled a cup and handed it to her. When he had his own, they toasted silently, the cups making no sound as they touched.

“I think we’re safe now,” he said.

She laughed softly. “So what made you think of this place? Do you bring all the women you meet up here?”

He shook his head, taking another sip of the paper-flavored wine. “Only the special ones.” He laughed too, feeling the air brush him, seeing the stars on the carpet of trees in the valley below them that were really the lights of the eastern suburbs, North Versailles and Turtle Creek. The exotic names of the not-very-exotic places that had created him. “The truth is, I haven’t been up here in almost fifteen years. Not since my senior year in high school.”

“Really? I guess I really am special.”

He laughed again, not telling her that he hadn’t been home enough since then for it to become an issue anyway. “Didn’t you ever sneak in here? Maybe climb up to the top on a dare?”

“I don’t take dares,” she said. “Of course I’ve been here. Everyone comes here sooner or later. But not in a long, long time. And even when I was a kid, I believed all the stories about radiation.”

He was about to mention the ghost of Boneless Bernie, but thought better of it. Her hair was still up in that cute bunchy ponytail, and he said, “I’d like to kiss you.”

“I’d like to kiss you too,” she replied. “But not yet.”

He nodded and leaned back, resting against the curved metal behind him.

“Are you sure it’s not still radioactive?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “But I’m not interested in having kids, so I don’t think it matters much.”

“Still, you don’t want to die young for a dumb reason like that — because you leaned against a building that happened to poison you.”

“I think it’s shielded,” he said, although he didn’t really know. “I can’t believe they’d leave it just sitting here if it was spraying radiation all over the place.”

“Well, they don’t expect people to be up here rolling around in it.” There was a smile in her voice, and he could tell she wasn’t really worried, so he decided to change the subject.

“I’ll tell you about my train wreck if you tell me about yours.”

“What train wreck?”

He poured them each more wine, saying, “Both of us have just moved back in with our parents. I didn’t do it because it made my life more worth living. I did it because I have to. I don’t want to assume the same for you, but the odds are, you’re not back home because it’s your life’s ambition either.”

She laughed again, a lovely soft sound that revealed perfect teeth gleaming in the soft glow from the light on the street on the far side of the building behind them. It radiated around the huge metal structure like a shadow in reverse.

“He lost his medical license,” she said. “Too many kickbacks from a couple of drug companies. A little Medicare fraud. He’s in Tacoma now. I wasn’t interested in following him.”

“Man, that’s cold,” he said, smiling.

“Not as cold as living in a slum in San Francisco. What about you?”

“A similar story. But morally I didn’t do anything wrong. No offense to your ex.”

“You have my permission to offend him all you want.”

“Thanks. I just lost my job. Downsizing. Fucking economy.” He thought of Gary, then tried not to.

“To the fucking economy,” she said, saying the latter word properly, and they toasted again. A warm breeze made a brown curl dance by her left ear as she added, “So how many girls have you brought up here, exactly?”

He paused, then thought, she’ll laugh, but that’s okay. “Eleven.” He took a deep breath. The air was tinged with sulphur from the one remaining steel mill in Braddock, a few short miles away. He didn’t remember when the mills had filled the landscape and clotted the sky with fire and smoke. But she might, he thought. The notion was startling. He said, “There’s a thing about that. An interesting thing.”

“What’s that?” He again heard the smile in her voice. I’m going to do it with her, he thought. Right here, like old times. It won’t be right away, but that’s okay. One of the perks of being a grown-up is understanding the joys of delayed gratification.

“The interesting thing is about the girls. Every one of them had things happen to them after they were up here with me.”

“What?” Her voice had a little sharpness to it, maybe of fear, and he realized how badly he’d said it; she didn’t really know him and might think he meant something bad, so he hurried on. “No, no. I mean good things.” He drained the cup and reached for the bottle. “Really good things. Like, they got rich suddenly, or their parents did. Or they got scholarships. Or they got into their first choice college, even if they didn’t expect to.” He looked at her, and she was looking back, but it was difficult to read her face even though his eyes could see pretty well now that they’d spent so much time in the dark. “It was every single time. They each got what they really wanted. One girl really wanted to be a cheerleader, and she got picked two weeks later, against some pretty big odds. Some of them, the good stuff happened a bit later on, but all of them, every single one, has had a great life ever since. So far, anyway. Every single one.”

She was quiet for a moment, and he could feel his heart beating a little fast, and he waited with no idea what her reaction would be. Then she said, “You’re helping me out, is that what you’re saying?” And then she was laughing, and at first he was a little annoyed, even hurt, but then laughed with her as she added, “You’re a good luck charm. That’s so wonderful.”

He put his arm around her shoulders, and she let him. He expected her to lay her head upon his, but instead, she took another drink, draining the Dixie cup, and then held it in front of him. He moved his arm away to give her another refill. The air cooled and began to move more around them, and there were gray clouds appearing here and there in the sky, small ones with rose bellies from the city far below. The ambient light caught her straight white teeth as she grinned at him; then she said, “That’s amazing. Really amazing.”

“I know,” he said, relief clutching him, and he realized how tightly he’d held onto this truth about himself, a truth he’d never shared with anyone, even his wife. Of course, he’d never brought his wife up here. Now that she’d left him the moment the chips were down, he was glad. “I’m relieved that you don’t think I’m nuts. You don’t, do you?” He was feeling the wine now, feeling drunk for the second time that day, and he thought, I’d better slow down if I want everything to work later. He added, “It’s occurred to me that it was lucky for me too, at least it was until recently, and I thought, well, if I’m going to be superstitious, might as well go all the way. Maybe it brought me luck too, by setting me on the right path, or something. And I sure could use being set on the right path again. So maybe we can both get something out of it.” He thought, you’re drunk, stop talking.

She shifted suddenly, startling him. She placed her hand on his shoulder and used it to support herself as she stood up. She rocked a little, and he realized that she was drunk as well. Her hand moved from his shoulder to the side of the atom smasher as she steadied herself. Then she pulled her hand away, looking at the spot where her hand had pressed against the metal as though expecting to see a print in the dim light.

“It’s not radioactive,” he said, although in truth he didn’t know if there was any danger in touching the bare metal. He’d done it so many times in the past he couldn’t imagine there being something poisonous about the place, but he knew nothing about radiation; he knew about sports, for Christ’s sake, about batting averages and hat tricks and careers made by extraordinary feats of strength and coordination, and lost by torn sinews and addiction. Only not anymore. You’re just not that good.

He stood up, steadying himself the same way she had, his hand on the warm curved metal. It’s warm because it’s been sitting in the sun all day, he thought. Not because its atoms are burning up.

“I want to go up,” she said. “All the self-help books I’ve ever read say you have to take risks to get anywhere. You make your own luck. We’ll be lucky for each other. Let’s take a risk. Let’s go up.”

Two horizontal bars led from the platform to the bottom of the upper ladder; she grabbed the uppermost of these while stepping onto the lower one, and then she began to work her way left before Ronnie was fully on his feet. “Dana,” he said, using her name for the first time, an image of her tumbling forty or so feet down onto broken asphalt in his unwilling mind, maybe her brains coming out of her ears. She ignored him and moved onto the ladder without losing her grip while Ronnie looked on with growing dismay. Then she started climbing, slowly at first, then more quickly when the ladder turned into steps as it curved toward the top. There were handrails on either side which she touched only lightly, as though she didn’t want to get her hands any dirtier than she had to. When she was partially out of sight, she paused and turned slightly to look down at him, her body only a black silhouette against the pink and gray sky. The wind was blowing harder now, and her hair began to wave at him from the confines of its wild ponytail. “Come on, Ronnie,” she called softly, the wind carrying her voice away from him. “Be my good luck charm.”

And so he grabbed the horizontal rails, grateful that he didn’t have a fear of heights even when sober, although he knew that if he looked down or thought too much about what he was doing, that might change. He crab walked until he reached the ladder, only maybe fifteen feet away, then shifted his weight onto the ladder itself, deeply relieved that it seemed to be solid. It only creaked a little when it took on the weight of his whole body, and so he started to believe that neither of them was going to follow the flight path of Boneless Bernie. Ronnie moved up and up, beyond the point where the ladder curved into steps as it leveled off; the change was disorienting, making it tricky to find his center of balance, but he kept going until at last he was at the top.

The platform at the summit was little more than a crow’s nest with just enough room for two people to stand comfortably. It was protected by a waist-high metal railing, and she was gripping it with both hands, her back to the edge, facing him, so when he was able to stand free of the steps, slightly winded, he was only inches from her. He knew the view was spectacular; when he was young he tended to stay below when he brought company because of the lack of room up here, and even at night the cops could easily see you at the top if they were looking. But he had loved it, he remembered now, had loved creeping up here by himself on the occasional night when he was alone, or with a girl who was particularly daring. He never stayed long, and the climb had always been scary, but it had been worth it.

Dana let go of the railing, put her arms around his waist, and kissed him deeply on the mouth, her tongue caressing his teeth. Then she pulled her tongue out, sucking his into her with a wine-soaked fierceness that aroused him in a way he hadn’t known since adolescence.

She pulled back and laughed so softly that the wind carried it away altogether; he couldn’t hear it but could feel it radiating off her; it only made her more magnetic, more hot, more sexually necessary to him.

She said, “This place was my good luck charm too.” He could just make her voice out in the wind that blew the stars around over their heads. “Maybe it wasn’t you, Ronnie. Maybe it was the place itself.” She turned around, pushing her hips against the railing, and he pressed himself into her back, pressed himself in her ass, into the backs of her thighs. “Ronnie, I never thought about it before,” she was saying, “but you were right. Everything good for me started here.” Her body rubbed against his as she turned around, facing him again, and she had a handkerchief in her hand, and all he could think of was a handjob where she needed something to keep herself from getting all sticky. He could smell her warm, Merlotinfused breath as she said into his mouth, “I thought it was just an accident. Bad luck. But it was like a sacrifice or something. It’s been twenty-one years. Is that a significant number?” She laughed and Ronnie tried to understand what she was saying. “Maybe twenty years is the limit,” she continued. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen, but maybe that’s why everything went so well after that. I got everything I wanted.”

And then Ronnie realized that she was talking about Boneless Bernie, and he felt her hands, like pistons on his chest, two blows so hard they hurt, and who would expect a woman to be so strong she could hurt you like that? And then he felt like he was swimming, only it was through air instead of water. He hit something that felt sharp like a gunshot, and then he was free again, falling, and it was like a carnival ride that you know is a terrible mistake as soon as it starts moving, but you can’t get off no matter what, and even through the dark he could see her, so far up, blowing him a kiss, and already wiping down the railing at the top of the giant inverted teardrop, before he met the broken asphalt.

Still Air by Terrance Hayes

East Liberty

The morning after Amp got killed our neighborhood was lit up with rumors. My mother and me, we barely even made the block before someone passing said, almost with a whistle, “You hear that nigga Amp got popped by some gangbangers?” Someone else said, carrying the news like a bag of bricks, “Sad what happened to that boy who got robbed last night.” People who didn’t know Amp or his kin said, “I know his mother.” “I knew his pops.” Rumors idled in the slow drag of the traffic, the rich Fox Chapellers and Aspinwallers who drove across the Allegheny River into what was our little moat of trouble: Penn Circle, the road looping East Liberty like a noose.

Lies, gossip, bullshit, half-truths spread out, carried in the school and city buses. Pompano heard it was two white guys, probably plainclothes cops, that took Amp out. Walking by with her girlfriends, Shelia said she heard gunshots and shouts. “Amp went out shooting shit up like a true thug,” she cackled, pointing her finger at me like the barrel of a gun. Her girlfriends laughed like she wasn’t talking about someone who’d actually been killed. I mean, Amp was dead and people was already kicking his name around like it never had any air inside it.

This is why I never wanted anybody to give me a nickname. Well, that ain’t exactly true. Most people call me Demario, but I used to let Star call me Fish sometimes. My grandmother used to call me Fish. Her “little fish,” even though I was taller than her by the time I was fourteen. I didn’t even know Amp’s real name. Maybe I heard a teacher say it when we was in preschool at Dilworth. Anthony Tucker. Andrew Trotter. By first grade the teachers, even Principal Paul with her thick-assed eyeglasses and that belt squeezed too tight around her gray pantsuit, called Amp “Amp.” It was the only name he answered to.

I can’t really say he was my friend, though, to tell you the truth. He was never really in class that much, and then he dropped out of high school junior year. Star said it was because he wanted to get a job as soon as he heard she was pregnant, but I think he’d have dropped out anyway. He spent his days on the corner behind Stanton Pharmacy. He was always there in jeans so new it looked like he hadn’t even washed them yet. New sneakers, pro jerseys — people said he had a Steelers jersey for damn near every player. You’d think he’d be there waving his shit in my face or calling me a clown, but I don’t think he ever even noticed me. He’d look right through me, call me youngblood even though we were the same age.

And once he sold me a hammer, I shit you not. It was in the book bag on my shoulders that morning. Even crazier, he sold my mother a big twenty-four-inch level. How he got her to buy it, I’ll never know. But that’s what he did — or what he’d been doing for the last couple of months. Word was out and people, mostly old dudes trying to make ends doing handy work or whatever in Highland Park, would buy shit from him. He’d take you around the corner to a grocery cart full of stuff. I saw he had a cordless drill and a circular saw one day. An empty paint bucket and a couple of utility knives the next. I bought the hammer for two dollars. It was big too. Practically a mallet. I doubt Amp kept what he didn’t sell. He just wanted to get paid. Rumor was, he was stealing things from Home Depot, but I saw the shit. Most of it was used. None of it was useless but most of it was used.

You’d find him near Stanton Pharmacy with that dog that always followed him around, some scrawny watered-down pit bull he called Strayhorn. The dog always barked at me. It’d go to barking like it wanted to bite me in my kneecaps when I passed and wouldn’t stop until I was down the street. For a long time I thought Amp was whispering sickems in the dog’s dull gray ears, but now I think he was just talking all kinds of mysterious shit to it. That’s why Star liked him. Why she dumped me for him, I guess. She said he had poetry in him.

“I heard they killed the boy’s dog too!” my mother said to her friend Miss Jean as we stood waiting for the 71A. This is what I tried to do every morning: walk my mother to her bus. It was the only time we got to talk since I was usually knocked out by the time she came home from work in the hospital kitchen. I know it sounds like I’m some kind of momma’s boy or that I’m soft-hearted, but it was something my grandmother made me promise to do. In fact, I only started calling my mother “Mother,” instead of “Marie” like I used to, after my grandmother died. I used to call my grandmother “Mother” and my mother “Marie,” because when we all lived together in the East Mall projects, that’s what I heard them call each other. You remember the East Mall? The damn building used to straddle Penn Avenue, cars drove right beneath it. Now that that shit’s been demolished, I almost can’t believe we lived there. I mean, who puts a building right on top of the street? If Penn Circle was the moat, well, the East Mall was like one of its bankrupt castles. No, better yet, it was like an old drawbridge that couldn’t be lowered. Anyway, we were on the fifth floor so I never heard any actual traffic, but when I looked out of my window, I could see the cars going and coming 24/7. I could see the houses in four neighborhoods at once: Shadyside, Friendship, East Liberty, I could see where Penn Avenue curved up the hill to Garfield.

If I had a better sense of Pittsburgh history, I could tell you all the stuff my grandmother used to tell me. I mean in detail. When the civic arena was built in the ’50s, I think it was the ’50s, a lot of blacks were driven from their homes in the Hill District. Some ended up in Homewood or on the North Side, some moved out this way. My grandmother could also tell you, gladly, about all the famous Pittsburgh Negroes from back in the day. Mary Lou Williams. George Benson. And Billy Eckstine, who grew up just a few blocks away in Highland Park. She would sing “Skylark,” which is a song I think he must have made. If she had the record she would have played it all the time, no doubt. Skylark, have you anything to say to me? Won’t you tell me where my love can be? Is there a meadow in the mist, where someone’s waiting to be kissed? It went something like that.

“Yep. They killed the boy and his dog, I can’t believe it,” my mother said this time, bothering a white man with his dress shirt cuffs rolled up to his hairy forearms. He didn’t have a single tattoo.

East Liberty had been plush once, that’s what my grandmother always said. Decorated with big unvandalized houses. But then they dropped a lasso on the neighborhood in the late ’60s. Homeowners moved across town and contracted their shabby cousins and uncles to convert their old places into shabby rental units. The living rooms were the size of bedrooms, the bedrooms the size of closets. Businesses left, the projects came. You know that little strip of Highland Park Avenue between Centre and East Liberty Boulevard that cuts through Penn Circle like the white line on a DO NOT ENTER sign? My grandmother hated it, but that’s where everybody hung out. The blackest block for blocks. After they demolished all the projects and got a Whole Foods and Home Depot and a fancy bookstore, white people started calling it the East End. Fucking changed the name of the part of the neighborhood they wanted back. We still call it Sliberty, though.

My grandmother said the neighborhood was on white people’s minds again. White people young enough to be the grown children of the people who’d left decades ago. Contractors were called to make the apartments houses again. They’d be corralling us like a bunch of Indians, my grandmother said. She said “Native Americans” but I knew what she was talking about. Reservations and Indian-giving and shit. I rarely heard her call people their real names. I once heard her ask this Mexican lady if she preferred “Latino” or “Hispanic.” And sometimes, when she was being sarcastic, she might say “Negro,” but I never heard her used the word “nigga.” She said things like: “Look at these Negroes.” The way she said it sounded worse than “nigga” to me. She was dead with cancer before she had a chance to see me and Marie living on our own for the first time.

“They ain’t kill his dog, it wasn’t that kind of thing,” someone said behind me. It was Benny giving me the wuzzup nod and then flipping open his cell phone.

“People saying it was some plainclothes white cops, but I know it wasn’t cops,” I said to him.

“No, I heard it wasn’t cops too, yo,” he replied, assuming I’d heard it from the same place he had.

“Pranda said they was some old country-looking motherfuckers. Some old long-hair-and-plaid-vests shit. She was ’bout to call the cops about it, but I was like, Them motherfuckers ain’t even been caught yet! They find out you been talking to the PoPo, they coming for you.” He shook his head while holding the cell phone to his ear. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or the person on the other line. “I think they were drug dealers from down south,” he said. “Some old meth heads or some shit. Naw, man, fuck no. I ain’t going back over that bitch house until them motherfuckers get caught!” He laughed into the phone.

Marie. My mom, her bus showed up either just ahead of schedule or just behind it, depending on your perspective. It was never on time. She never said anything like, “Home right after school.” She knew I’d be there. Homework done. Learning more from television than I ever did at school. She kissed me on my face the same way her mother used to kiss me and her. Then she’d whisper, “My little fish.” I pretended I didn’t hear it. Told her, “Goodbye. Be good.”

I was supposed to walk to school, get there five or ten minutes before the first bell. But I was going to see Amp’s people. His uncle Shag would want to know what I knew. Or I should say, if Shag heard I knew anything, I should see him before he sent someone to find me. Everybody said he was kind of crazy. He didn’t sell drugs or anything, but he’d been in jail a few years for something. Nobody fucked with him.

I wanted to tell Shag what I knew, but first I went back to the alley where, the night before, I’d seen Amp running with the white men right behind him. There was a big old dumpster there. I let my hand rest for a moment on its lid before I opened it and looked inside. The smell crawled over my face. Black garbage bags, white garbage bags, little tiny plastic bags, muddy liquid rot, an old sneaker, a lawn chair — it was all sour. But there was no corpse. No dog, no tatt-covered body. Amp had tattoos all along his neck and arms. On the back of each of his hands was his dad’s name and R.I.P in block letters. As if the man had died twice. Or as if Amp might forget him in the time it took him to look from one hand to the other. I heard he got Star’s name tattooed over his heart as soon as she got pregnant, but I don’t think that shit was true.

When I got to Amp’s house nobody was there. I guess they could have been at the morgue. People said they’d seen the ambulance, the body bag. Everybody noticed when an ambulance or police cars blazed through the neighborhood. I pulled out my phone and looked down the block. New houses were being built along the streets I had passed walking to Amp’s. They stood out like new cars in a junkyard next to the dumps around them. They were big odd-colored places. Light green, light blue, light red wood siding. They looked like empty dollhouses, even the one or two that actually had white people living inside. The FOR SALE signs called them Historic District houses and had prices with six digits. Like whoever was selling them wanted us to know we could never afford them. More old houses were being leveled and more new “historic” houses were being built on top of them. Construction workers, real estate agents, young families, white people were coming and going through the neighborhood’s side streets. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody was scary or threatening or anything. Sometimes we’d wave when they passed us on the street.

And anyway, most of the guys I knew were truly minor criminals. Burglarizing the cars and backyards of Highland Park for chump change. No one who was really hardcore lasted long. Not because they got killed in a drive-by or something you see in a movie, though that happened occasionally, but because they usually got snatched by the police before they could do anything that was truly gangster. Everyone was happy when Chuck Ferry was off the streets, for example. He was just too dangerous for anybody’s good. The streets were left more often than not to a mix of loiterers, dudes like Amp, and tired old men and boys who did little more than strut along the corners and back alleys. But when I passed them the morning after Amp was killed, everybody seemed nervous. I could feel it. Everybody was anxious to have the villains off the street so the neighborhood could be returned to itself.

“Heard ya boy got got,” a dude said when he saw me sitting on Amp’s steps. He was a few years older than me. I knew he was looking for some little bit of gossip he could take with him on down the road.

“Wasn’t my boy,” I said without looking him in the eye.

“Damn. That’s some cold shit to say, youngblood.” The dude stared until I looked at him. Then walked off with something like mild disgust flickering across on his face.

I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve never even broke up a fight. I’m the quiet dude that’s always watching from the edge of the clash. Dude like me, always the first one people ask what happened. “You saw that shit, Demario? Who threw the first punch?” Usually I know, but I don’t say. The conversations go faster that way. I got no problem with bystanding. One time Star sort of hinted that was my problem. I didn’t think it was a put down at first.

Star. She is without a doubt the blackest person I know. Which is funny because she is also yellow as a brown banana. She didn’t wear dashikis and all that Back-to-Africa shit, but she wore these white shells in her braids. And she knew everything there was to know about Malcolm X, M.L.K., W.E.B. Them famous Negroes whose names were initials. She still had an OBAMA 08 sign propped up in her bedroom window. I could see it whenever I stood across the street looking at her house. I never got, you know, to run my hands over her body and all that, but I know she had a little tattoo shaped like Africa somewhere under her clothes. She never showed it to me.

“What you doing?” I said with a flatness I meant to sound cool when I phoned her. I knew she wouldn’t be at school. She was like eight months pregnant. She’d have the baby in a couple of weeks and be back to finish the last two months of our junior year at Peabody.

“I can’t talk to you right now, Mario.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard what happened to Amp.”

She was quiet. Like she was holding her breath. I knew she’d been crying. After a long minute, she said, “I just don’t know why this is happening.” Damn. Then we were quiet a little while longer.

“I saw the dudes.”

“Who? You saw the dudes that did it?”

“Don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of it for you.”

“Who’d you see?”

Amp wasn’t dead yet when I saw him, I almost told her. I thought of how they had him pinned to a dumpster in an alley off Black Street. Two wiry, scruffy men. The dog, Strayhorn, was snapping at the pant leg of one of them. The guy gave the dog a frantic kick and then kicked at Amp in the same frantic way. They sort of snatched and poked at him. Amp’s shirt had been ripped. He was bleeding. I could hear him saying, “I ain’t got your shit. I ain’t got your shit.” Declaring it, really. Like he wasn’t afraid. Like he was in charge even if they were the ones grabbing and shoving and delivering awkward blows. They could barely handle him. I knew they weren’t gangsters. But I still did nothing.

“I’m gonna take care of this shit,” I said to Star, half talking up my nerve. I didn’t really know what I was saying.

“Don’t go trying to be a hero, Mario.”

“No, it ain’t like that.”

“Just go to the police.”

“Police?”

“Or go by his house— Wait a minute,” she said, putting me on hold.

I rubbed my brow. I thought for the first time that calling the police wasn’t such a bad idea. I won’t say I had plans to take care of Star, exactly. All the money I made working at the Eagle went to Marie. We lived in this little-ass apartment. My mother had been strange since her mother died. She was working long, lonely hours. She was my priority. And then Amp’s death last night, well, I told you she kissed me like her mother used to: a peck on each cheek then on my nose. Shit was embarrassing. I jerked back just a bit, but then I relaxed. I knew she was sad.

The phone clicked back on: “Demario?”

“Yeah? Why you put me on hold?”

“Listen: go over to Amp’s house and tell his uncle what you saw.”

“I’m there now. Ain’t nobody here.”

“You there now? At Amp’s house?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Fuck is wrong with you, Star?”

“Don’t cuss at me,” she said.

“I want to see you.”

She sighed. “No. You can’t see me.”

“I’m coming by.”

“Just stay there. Wait for Shag... Come by after you speak to him.”

So that’s what I did. I sat on the steps with my hands in my pockets. Had there been no baby, maybe Star would have gotten back with me. Had there been no baby and no Amp, maybe she could have let herself fall for me. I ain’t bad looking. Amp was just a little taller. But he had these long dreadlocks, where I just have this little nappy afro. Not even enough to braid into cornrows. Once when we were hanging out at Highland Park, Star said she liked my Asiatic Black Man eyes. She grabbed my jaw and looked right into them like she was reading something. Fuck, I hadn’t ever heard the word Asiatic before.

People thought my grandmother had some Asian in her. She had a pudgy face — before the cancer got at her — she had a pudgy face and these slanted eyes that made her look like she was just waking up. If you were on her bad side her face looked full of NotToBeFuckedWithness. I know dudes who just moved and nodded when they saw her walking their way. But if you were on her good side, the same face, the same expression, just seemed real mellow. She’d nod back to those brothers almost without moving her head. She really wasn’t to be fucked with, though, that’s for sure. She kept a fat switchblade in her bra. I got it now.

After thirty, forty minutes, Shag pulled up in an old gray sedan. He was a long skinny man. Going bald. He almost didn’t have to lean over to roll down the passenger-side window.

“Who are you, boy? What you want?” He didn’t seem all that fucked up over anything. Just suspicious as anyone who finds somebody on his porch in the middle of the day.

“I’m Demario. I used to go to school with your nephew Amp.”

Shag didn’t exit the car. I started thinking he wasn’t as calm as I first thought. Seemed like he was figuring something out. Maybe he thought I had a gun or something. All I had was a few books and a hammer in my backpack. And my grandmother’s blade. I had that in my back pocket.

“I saw what happened to him last night,” I told Shag.

People were saying the dudes who’d killed Amp hadn’t been caught, that was true for the moment. People were saying some sort of drug shit was involved, it didn’t seem like that to me. I’d seen them but the stupid dog was the only one to notice me. He barked with the gray hair up on his neck. But it wasn’t his usual wild, territorial bark. There was urgency in it. Fear. I probably imagined it. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two.

I cleared my throat. “I think it was a couple of dudes who been renovating those houses on Euclid.”

That was my theory. It should have felt good to tell him, but it didn’t.

“Come here,” he said, waving me to the car window. He glanced up and down the street in a way that made me nervous. But what else could I do? Couldn’t run with him right there looking at me. I walked over to him with my hand stuffed in my pockets.

“What they do with him? You tell the cops?”

“I don’t know what they did. That’s why I came over. See how he doing.” That was mostly true. I’d come hoping Amp was alive, hoping the rumors were lies. But really, I just didn’t want Shag to ask why I hadn’t helped his nephew survive. I’d seen Amp fighting back. The dog was barking at me. Like it was saying, They’re gonna kill him, they’re gonna kill him, do something! Amp broke free, running off into the darkness of the alley with the men behind him. Maybe his dog barked at me just a beat longer before it realized I wasn’t going to do anything. It turned, running after them. I didn’t follow.

“Well, he ain’t here...” Shag said, getting out of the car.

“Okay.” I could see it in his face, he was lying to see if I’d know he was lying.

“You should come in with me and wait for him, he’ll be back soon probably,” Shag said.

“No, I got some errands to run. I might come back by later.”

Shag chuckled slightly and said, half to himself, “Nigga talking about errands.” He was jingling his keys.

“I’ll come back later.”

“Man, come on in the house,” he said. Then, a little bit softer: “I got something I want you to do.”

“Amp ain’t alive is he?” I said. Blurted.

“No, he ain’t,” he sighed. “He ain’t.”

He opened the door and I followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor where he and Amp and Amp’s mother lived. I don’t know where she was. Bawling at the East Liberty precinct. Picking out caskets. I thought the air smelled funny. Damp, salty with grief maybe. She might have been locked in her bedroom dreaming her son was still alive. We moved down a tiny hallway to a tiny den. I recognized Amp in the woodcolored face of a boy on an end table. His first or second grade school portrait. His grin was so wide it showed every one of his teeth. He had a small gold stud in his ear. I remembered he’d been the first of the boys our age to get pierced. Instead of the white-collared shirts we were supposed to wear for our school uniforms at Dilworth, he wore a loose white T-shirt.

“Amp did that shit,” Shag told me, pointing to where the thick blue carpet was yanked back revealing a perfect hardwood floor beneath it. “Told his momma he was going to fix this place up with his tools.” Shag sat down on a plaid sofa that took up nearly all the space in the room. I saw the edge of a bedsheet spilling beneath it and figured it was where he slept.

“You want to smoke,” he asked, pulling out a sandwich bag full of weed. He was settling in, I hadn’t sat down yet.

“No,” I said. Though I wanted to get high, really. What I really wanted was something to lift me from the ground. Up through the roof, up on above Penn Circle sitting like a bull’seye in the middle of our neighborhood. Up on out of Pittsburgh. But I told him no and watched him roll a blunt.

“I told that nigga he was gone get jacked up for stealing them boys’ shit,” Shag said. He told me to sit down, but he didn’t seem to care when I didn’t. “I told his momma too. His room’s full of their shit. Some dusty safety goggles, screwdrivers, dirty work gloves, dirty work boots, a fucking sliding T-bevel. You know what a T-bevel is? Amp didn’t know either, but he got one in there.”

Shag’s phone buzzed on his hip but he didn’t answer it.

“So I need you to do me a favor, youngblood. We need to ride over to where them motherfuckers are working and I need you to point them out to me.”

“I didn’t get a good look at them.”

“That’s all right. I want you to try. Just point in the right direction, know what I mean?”

He reached between the cushions of the sofa. I saw the butt of the gun just as his phone started buzzing again. This time he answered it. He smiled at me, then stood and walked from the room.

I sat down on the couch and touched the gun handle where it stuck out like the horn of an animal. I thought for a second about taking it and the bag of weed. Instead I got up, tipped to the hall, and listened. I could see into Amp’s room. There were a pair of sneakers and a dog leash on his bed.

“No, I’ll probably head to Newark. Atlanta. Somewhere with more black people than there are here.” I could hear Shag taking a piss in the bathroom while he talked. “You ain’t good for shit, you know that, right? No. No, nigga, just stay there. I got somebody here gonna ride over there with me.”

I thought again of the gun. Shag would want me to drive while he shot from the window. Or worse, he’d drive while he made me shoot. Either way, what I’d seen meant I’d have to be a part of what was going to happen.

I tried to be quiet running out of the house. I kept thinking I could hear a dog barking behind me. Amp’s dog. The ghost of his dog. I didn’t look back until I was panting around the corner. I was a few blocks from Star’s house. But I turned toward Euclid where the new houses were being built.

There was a young white woman working in her yard. Planting flowers or something. Trimming the hedges. She glanced at me, then stared as I walked up the steps of the big empty house standing next to hers. There was no one there. I rattled the doorknob looking through its window into the wide bare rooms. I glanced back at the white woman who was pulling off her gardening gloves and still watching me. I pulled the hammer Amp sold me from my book bag and used it to smash the window on the door. The woman rushed inside her house. I reached through and tried to grab the door latch, but couldn’t. I walked across the porch and hammered at the pane of the living room window until it broke open like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. It was loud as hell. I didn’t fucking care. I guess I got cut. My blood dripping on the shiny hardwood floors almost looked like a trail of pennies.

I wanted to carve Amp’s name somewhere no one would find it. Not for another fifty years or so. Not until the house had been lived in by rich white people, then rented out to poor black people, then renovated for white people again. I wanted someone in the future to strip back the sheetrock and find Amp’s named carved into a beam. There was nowhere to carve it, though. Nowhere discreet. The kitchen didn’t have cabinets yet. The bathroom on the first floor had no toilet. Wires hung from the ceilings and walls. Just an empty house. My grandmother said — she used to say this all the time — that people, black or white, would always fight over dirt but nobody could ever really own it. She said the land could only belong to the land. The rivers belonged to the rivers. The air was still air no matter who claimed to own it.

On the second floor I stood at a window in the master bedroom. Brick and sky, metal and wood, concrete and dirt, you already know what I saw out there: all the shit that gives air something to lean on. I knew the cops were on their way. And I’d have to do something. Say something. I thought I could already hear the sirens. I thought I could hear dogs trying to match the sound. I sat in the middle of the floor with the hammer in my lap. I had blood on my shirt and pants. I wasn’t crying. I was barely breathing.

When I dialed Star’s number, the dial tones echoed around me. We’d talked on the phone, but I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Wasn’t that I was afraid of Amp or his fucking dog. I just kept thinking she’d ask me over eventually. Soon as Amp fucked up, I figured she’d want to see me. And really, when I heard he was dead, I thought it was a reason to see her. Pregnant or not. I was going to be there for her. I was going to be with her.

Star didn’t speak a word when she answered. “Hey,” I said after a few seconds. I said it just as I’d said it to my mother when we came home from my grandmother’s funeral. Sort of like it was a question. Softly. Slowly. It embarrassed me the same way when I said it then. “Hey.”

Duplex by Stewart O’Nan

Bloomfield

She thought when Evelyn died she might finally get the second floor. She was not a selfish woman — a mother, a grandmother, used to doing for others — but in this one instance, after more than forty years of dealing with the soot and the street noise and people creeping through the alley and peeping in her windows, Anna Lucia felt she’d earned her reward.

She expected Eddie would leave and find his own place rather than live surrounded by his mother’s old furniture. He was a dwarf and a drinker. He’d retired on full disability from the public works, and Evelyn had left him everything. Anna Lucia figured he’d take the money and buy one of those new condos over by Highland, since he spent most of his time in the bars along Penn anyway. Instead, a couple of months later he brought home a girlfriend twice his size and half his age.

She was last-call trash, a tall blonde, but ugly, a big-nosed Russian, right off the boat, like a mail-order bride who’d bailed at her first chance. Eddie had ruined his back in the sewers. He was paunchy and bald, hardly a catch. As far as Anna Lucia could tell, the girl didn’t work.

Didn’t cook either. Every night while Anna Lucia was fixing dinner for herself, they came clumping down, banging the outside door shut. She watched from her front window, frowning as he waddled to the car and held the passenger door for the girl, as if she was a lady. As if he was in love.

If so, that was even sadder. In the hospital, Evelyn had asked Anna Lucia to watch over him. She’d done her best, but Eddie was a grown man, and after all his problems, he deserved some happiness, even the fleeting kind.

Suddenly acquiring a new neighbor after having lived there alone for most of her adult life confused Anna Lucia. Out of shame, maybe, Eddie didn’t introduce her. It was only by surprising them one evening on their way out that she learned the girl’s name: Svetlana.

“Pliz to mit you,” the girl said, shaking hands like a man.

She was taller than Dominic, with pitted cheeks and too much blush and her things falling out of her top. Not in a million years would Anna Lucia have let Roseanne leave the house like that, but Eddie seemed happy, dressed up like they were going somewhere fancy, and Anna Lucia was left to wonder exactly where as she picked at her leftovers.

They came back after the bars closed, laughing and making a racket on the stairs. Under the covers, she heard them moving from room to room, listened awhile, then settled back to sleep.

Some nights that was the end of it, but some nights they fought — no surprise, given their condition — and deep into the morning she woke to shouting and something heavy being knocked over, something being broken. Like most of the old row houses on the block, this one was brick, with plaster walls and high ceilings, so she couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, only bursts of words that shocked her heart. She clamped her extra pillow to her ear, picturing the two of them squared off in Evelyn’s living room, trading threats and accusations, destroying her precious snow globes and commemorative plates to make a point.

When their fights went on longer than Anna Lucia thought she could bear — when they sounded as if they were scuffling directly above her — she debated whether or not to call the police. She kept the phone Roseanne had given her on her nightstand. It would take so little. All she had to do was punch three numbers, yet every night, no matter how bad it sounded, she held off, not only because she suspected nothing would happen, but because they’d know it was her.

The mornings after these battles, she staked out the staircase, hoping to witness the damage — a puffy eye, a split lip — as if to prove she hadn’t imagined the night before. Rarely was anything visible. Once, Eddie came down with a large gauze square taped to the side of his neck, maybe covering a scratch or a bite mark. The girl appeared untouched, though it was hard to say, with her long sleeves and all that makeup. They acted like everything was hunky-dory.

“Good mornink, Mizziz Nardinny.”

“Good morning, Svetlana,” Anna Lucia enunciated. “How are you liking Pittsburgh?”

“I like Pizzburr very much.”

“Well, you couldn’t ask for a better person to show you the city. He knows it inside out — literally.”

“Ha, nice one, Mrs. N.,” Eddie said, herding the girl toward the door.

“Have fun,” Anna Lucia called after them, then stood there at the bottom of the stairs, biting the inside of her cheek, listening for his car to start.

She’d been waiting for this chance, but still wasn’t sure. Her plan was to take the spare key Evelyn had given her and go up and see what condition the place was in. Right after Evelyn died, Anna Lucia had been a frequent visitor, carrying up a pan of lasagne or some tomatoes from the Tomassos’ garden, but since the girl moved in, Eddie always stopped Anna Lucia at the door as if he was hiding something.

The key was in her little china teapot in the kitchen cupboard, along with her bingo money. All she needed was five minutes. She put the chain on the outside door for insurance and hurried up the stairs.

The place stank of cigarettes and old bacon grease. They’d rearranged everything. In the living room, on the antique sideboard where Evelyn had kept her family pictures, was a flat-screen TV. It faced her green velvet couch, covered with a flowered sheet spotted with burn marks. On the coffee table, beside a chipped glass ashtray piled with butts, as if waiting for their return, stood a half-full bottle of whiskey. Though her first instinct was to pour it down the sink, she made a point of not touching anything, kept silent as if someone might be listening.

The rug hadn’t been vacuumed in ages. The kitchen floor was sticky, the counter crowded with glasses. Her plants were dry and dying. At least Eddie had left Evelyn’s room alone — here were her snow globes and plates, exiled but safe — though he obviously never dusted. The bed in his room was mussed, a pair of pink sweatpants with JUICY written across the bottom draped over the headboard.

As she turned to leave, she noticed some money on his dresser — a wad of twenties folded in half, as if waiting to go into a wallet. She wondered if he was really that trusting or if he’d left it sitting out as a test. Whichever, it seemed wrong — like the girl’s sweatpants, a taunt to all that was decent — and with her lips pinched in concentration, she stepped to the dresser, peeled two twenties from the wad, and slipped them into her pocket.

It was only after she added the bills to her teapot that she remembered to take the chain off.

She didn’t say anything to Roseanne over the phone about her little visit, just let her know their fighting was getting worse.

“You want to hear fighting, you should hear Frankie and me going at it over the stupid insurance. People fight. Whatever it is, it’s their business, not yours.”

“They drink and they fight. It’s different.”

“Ma, listen to what you’re telling me. Drunk people fight. That’s not news.”

“You’re telling me I should have to listen to it every night?”

“I’m telling you it’s what people do. It doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, black or white, Russian or whatever.”

“I worry about Eddie.”

“That’s good of you, Ma, but it sounds like Eddie’s doing what he wants to do.”

“It’s not right.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things in the world that aren’t right, like the insurance companies, but we’re not going to change them either.”

“I’m just telling you, I’m not happy about it.”

“Oh my God, will you stop?” Roseanne said. “Your complaint is registered.”

That night they came home late, stumbling up the stairs. In bed she waited for them to begin. She tried to justify taking the money, telling herself it was for his own good, that Evelyn would want the girl out of her house. Anna Lucia had resolved to call the police once they got started, but after what seemed an endless silence — had they passed out? — instead of shouting and banging, she heard their footsteps cross the ceiling to his bedroom, and then that other, even more unwelcome noise she didn’t want to picture.

The next night while they were out, she chained the door again and took three twenties, leaving six, and then, seeing an opportunity, tore off the last of the toilet paper so there was just a thin square hanging from the roll.

It was a Friday, and they were later and louder than usual. They were already fighting out in the street. They continued the argument in the hall and then above her, the normal back-and-forth. There was no point calling the police until things got physical, and she lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if they might come falling through, until, after a long lull, finally there was a rumble of someone — maybe both of them — running, then yelling, and glass breaking, bottles possibly, china, and a thunderous crash that sounded like a dresser going over. Yes, that was what she’d been waiting for. Another crash, and then something smashing, maybe a plate. Someone or something big fell. She sat up and turned on her light, reached for her glasses and then the phone. The girl was screaming — keening, not making words at all — as Anna Lucia punched the buttons and calmly gave the dispatcher her address.

Waiting for the police, she heard someone coming down the stairs, and rushed to the front window in time to see the girl hustle between the parked cars and across the street with a duffel bag. Anna Lucia couldn’t be sure it was her plan that had worked, but in any case she was grateful. She thought Evelyn would be too.

Upstairs there was no sound. She considered going up, but it was three in the morning and Eddie might not want to see her. She sat by her front window, watching from behind the blinds as the police arrived with their lights going.

They rang the bell, then banged on the door. After a time, Anna Lucia went out with one hand holding her robe closed at her neck and let them in.

“You the complainant?” the big one asked.

“They’re fighting again.” She pointed and stood there as they climbed the stairs.

A couple minutes later the short one came down. His forehead was sweating. “You said ‘they’re fighting.’ Who’s ‘they’?”

She told him about Eddie. No, she didn’t know the girl’s last name.

“Any idea where she might be?”

“She ran off toward Liberty right after I called you.”

He asked if Anna Lucia knew what the woman was wearing. She didn’t exactly, but let him know about the duffel bag and her complexion.

“It’s a good thing you called,” the policeman said. “He’s pretty bad off. We’ve got West Penn en route. In the meantime I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

“Of course,” she said. “Please, come in.”

There was no need to tell him everything. He’d seen it too many times. They were drunk and fighting and the girl stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife.

Anna Lucia cried, both then and after he’d left. She prayed. God knew that had never been her intent. Maybe it was inevitable, with the two of them. Still, it seemed awful, and needless. The girl would sink back into the underworld of the undocumented. Eddie would live, but would need round-the-clock care; he’d be moved into an assisted-living place in Wilkinsburg, where Anna Lucia would visit him once a month, bringing her famous lasagne.

Once he was gone, she had the rugs torn up and the walls painted a sunny custard yellow. She hired a crew of teenagers from St. Joe’s to help her move. She had a lot of stuff, and some of it was heavy: the loveseat with the brocade slipcover, her mother’s hutch, the marble-top table. Miraculously, it all fit. She stood in the middle of her new living room, directing the boys — a little more this way, a little more — until she had everything just the way she wanted it.