Pittsburgh Noir

Pray for Rain by Nancy Martin

Highland Park

When the floodwaters rose, I went to the grocery store because that’s what normal people do. They buy milk and bread and toilet paper, and good girls even buy necessities for their neighbors too.

When I got back from the store around ten in the morning, I parked in the marina lot and grabbed the bag of groceries off the passenger seat. I bailed out into a driving rain and ran across the lot, hoping I looked like a regular person — someone with nothing on her mind but getting through the storm. Before I reached the gate to the boat launch, I wondered how much the flood had washed away.

Over the weekend, a monster hurricane had gathered speed over the gulf and tore a path of waste and death across Louisiana before heading up the Mississippi. The storm’s momentum carried heavy weather as far as the Ohio River Valley and finally stalled here in Pittsburgh, where a deluge that smelled like the ocean fell for three days straight. The three rivers rose until the weathermen on television starting yelping about the flood of 1936, sending the whole city’s population crowding into the grocery stores to grab supplies.

My old sneakers skidded at the top of the boat launch, and I grabbed the open gate to regain my balance. My houseboat was still there, riding with her lines pulled tight against the cleats of the dock, but the water had come another foot up the concrete launch during the hour it had taken me to get to the store and back. Now the Allegheny swept masses of junk and debris past the few remaining boats tied up at the marina. An empty doghouse floated by, trailing a length of chain. Half a plastic Santa bobbed by on the turmoil of cold brown water. He rolled with the current until one mittened hand rose in the air as if hailing a rescue boat.

“Oh God.” I stared at the torrent of garbage rushing on the flood.

From upriver, an enormous tree suddenly roiled up from the surge — muddy roots, thick trunk, branches and all — heading straight for the marina. I caught a breath as the tree slammed into The Hines, the old wooden cruiser in the first slip. The shudder reverberated down the whole dock, and unmanned, The Hines tore loose from her mooring. The boat spun out into the channel. A jagged hole had been ripped in her hull, and ugly brown water poured through it, rolling the boat lower.

Her owners had fled with nearly everyone else and weren’t here to see their grand old lady list down into the river. The swift current swept her past the old salvage yard and the closed steel mill toward the dam. As I watched, the boat struck the dam and split apart. Her glorious upper deck washed over the spillway and disappeared, but the rest of her — the ugly inner workings of the old boat — hung there on the lip, surging and groaning with the flood. Eventually, she’d sink down into the dark water to join the industrial waste that lay at the bottom of this stretch of river. Down there was an underwater junkyard full of horrors I didn’t want to think about.

The tree remained by the marina, though, snagged beneath the surface of the floodwaters alongside my boat. The unseen impediment had hooked it like an anchor that shifted only slightly with the rhythm of rising water.

I ran down the concrete steps to the dock. Secured a few slips down from where The Hines had been tied, my family’s boat rode high on the flood. She wasn’t agile on the water or remotely as beautiful as The Hines, but we used her to putter downriver to the stadium to wait for fly balls on warm summer nights, so she was still seaworthy. Tied to this dock, I thought she’d be safe.

I thought we’d both be safe.

I grabbed the rail of the boat and leaped across to the deck. I could feel the surge of the flood beneath my unsteady feet. Carefully, I gripped the wet handrail and scrambled around the stern to peer over the opposite rail. The tree lurched in the current there, just a few yards away.

Next door, Ralph Potter came to the shelter of his cabin doorway. He was barefoot and shirtless despite the cold, wearing jeans that rode low on his hips. He grinned and bellowed across the rain. “It’s Bible time, Laurie. We’re the last ones left! Better pack your stuff and find a hotel room.”

I shouted back. “You leaving, Ralphie?”

He laughed and shook his head. He lifted his coffee cup to me — probably holding his morning hair of the dog. “I’ll go down with my ship!”

Big talk, but that was Ralphie. He’d come home from Baghdad with a crazy look in his eyes. I knew he sold a little dope to keep body and soul together, but otherwise he hung around the marina drinking, fishing, and sometimes howling at the moon.

I shouted, “What about this tree? It could wipe us all out!”

“Pray for more rain,” he called with a cackling laugh. “The only way that tree is leaving is on more water!”

“We’re all going to drown!”

More laughing. “Aw, you know more boaters drown from beer than floods!”

He was right, of course. The bodies of most drowned boaters were found with their flies down.

“Did you sleep last night?”

“Slept like a baby! Never heard the thunder or lightning. You?”

No, I hadn’t slept much.

The rest of our small community of marina dwellers had wisely hauled their boats out of the water before the river officially hit flood stage and the heaviest debris began to boil past. Yesterday, the fire department had come by to deliver their warnings — get out now, they’d said, because we’re not coming back to rescue you later. All of the other regulars obeyed and cleared out before nightfall, except crazy Ralphie. And me.

“If you get scared, you know where you can cuddle up, right?”

I mustered a grin and nodded. “You have groceries?”

“Could use some coffee.”

I tossed him a can. He caught it one-handed and cradled it against his bare chest.

Above us, a black pickup truck pulled into the marina and slid to a stop on the slick asphalt. A man in overalls and a parka climbed out of the truck, a cell phone to his ear. He ended the call, then jogged across the parking lot. He pushed through the gate left unlocked by the last hastily fleeing boater.

He shouted my name and peeled back the hood of his coat. It was Nolan McKillip.

Ralphie gave me a raised eyebrow and disappeared into his own boat.

“Now what?” I muttered to myself. But I raised a hand and waved at Nolan.

He bypassed the concrete boat launch where foam and debris surged up the ramp and made for slippery footing. Instead, he rattled down the steps and strode purposefully up the boardwalk, wind at his back. Then he saw the huge tree, riding the water perilously close to my boat.

“Are you crazy?” he shouted over the roar of river. “You’re going to get swept away!”

“It’s an adventure!” I called, managing a little cheer. “Help me with the lines?”

“What can I do?”

“I’ll toss this one to you. Take it up to those pines and tie me off?”

He nodded and held up his hands to receive the line.

I tossed my grocery bag, minus my coffee, into the cabin, then tied a buoy to a length of nylon rope, coiled it up, and threw it expertly — like riding a bike, a skill never forgotten. Nolan, not a boater, caught it clumsily, then struggled up the muddy bank and wrapped the line around a listing pine. He made a hash of the knot, but it would hold. I repeated the process, and he tied off the second line to a different tree.

He came back down the bank, rubbing the crud off his hands, and there was nothing to do but invite him to stay.

“You want to come aboard?” I called, but I heard my own lack of cordiality.

If he heard it too, he ignored it. Nolan jumped from wet dock to thrusting deck, and I made a grab for his arm, but he didn’t need steadying. He landed lightly and gathered me up in a hug — quite an experience since he’d taken to pounding iron and feeding a forge in his studio. He had muscle now, and shoulders that felt wonderful to cling to. Folded into his warm frame, I felt safe for an instant.

But then he got a closer look at me, and his eyes widened. “Jesus, what happened?”

“It’s nothing. I was trying to start the pump, but the lever kicked back on me.” I started to turn away. “A silly mistake. It looks worse than it feels.”

Nolan cradled my cheek in his warm hand. “Sweetheart.”

I jerked my head to avoid his touch. To take the sting from that little rejection, I smiled up at him and hoped it didn’t look false. “Come inside before you get soaked.”

In the cabin, I kept my slicker on. “It’s not much, but it’s home.”

He unzipped his parka, shook the rain from his hair, and glanced around. I tried not to imagine what he thought. The cabin looked like the studio apartment of a careless grad student. Or maybe a fugitive on the run. Unmade bed in an alcove and a cluttered kitchen with little more than a hot plate, dorm fridge, microwave, and dishes in the sink. The gray morning light did little to warm the cabin.

It was all a far cry from the converted carriage house where I lived before it all started. On my parents’ estate, I’d had the run of the grounds and half the carriage house for a studio. My apartment — furnished with Mother’s priceless castoffs and paintings by friends and family — overlooked the swimming pool. At night, with the tiny white lights glittering in the trees, it had been an elegant setting for parties when I felt like having friends over for drinks and talk.

How far away that seemed now, even though the estate was only a mile or two from the houseboat.

Nolan looked toward my easel and paint boxes that were stashed, unused, in a corner with a tangle of buoys and bumpers. A couple of crushed beer cans in the mess finished the picture.

With a frown on his brow, he turned on me. “Laurie, you can’t be serious about staying here.”

I said, “I know what I’m doing. I’ve boated all my life.”

“But what’s the point of staying? This flood is dangerous.”

“It’s where I live now. It’s my home.”

“But— Look, your mother called me. She’s scared to death.”

“She called you, of all people? Why?”

“She worried, that’s why. I am too. Staying here — it’s nuts.”

“I’m not stupid. I’ll leave if it gets too bad. Coffee?”

“It’s not just the flood,” Nolan said. “She said Dennis called the house.”

I snatched up my grocery bag and pushed aside some dishes to make room for it on the kitchen counter. Then I fumbled with the coffee pot, trying to tamp down panic.

“She said Dennis was drunk on the phone with her. Has he been here?”

“What fool would come down here in weather like this?” I mustered some humor and gave him a shaky smile over my shoulder.

Nolan still frowned. “We’re afraid for your safety.”

“So am I,” I said lightly. “Which is why I went to the police. Do you mind if I zap some coffee instead of making fresh?”

“I don’t care. Laurie—”

“Look, I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’m not helpless. Why does everybody treat me as if I am? The police will take care of Dennis. We have to let the legal system work.”

Nolan caught my arm and pulled me around. “Forget about coffee. Talk to me.”

Looking up into his worried face, I tried to recall how long I’d known Nolan. He’d been in my orbit since before I could remember — the son of family friends in a rarified social circle. When my grandfather died the year I was sixteen, he’d come solemnly to the funeral with his father — both in suits and ties — and we’d eyed each other with covert interest. Months later, he smuggled me a drink from the bar at a cousin’s wedding at a swanky country club. When he gave me the glass, Nolan noticed the paint under my nails, and we’d gone outside to talk about art in the evening air while the music played.

His older brothers went into business and law, but Nolan had grown up artistic and intuitive. With a discerning eye and passion too. Playing rugby evolved into building gigantic steel mobiles — the kind corporations bought to display in their impressive headquarters. He and I had gone our separate ways, but there had been potential between us. For a while.

Nolan watched me, his expression going very still. “Tell me the truth. Did Dennis come here to see you?”

“Heavens, no.”

Whether he believed me or not, I couldn’t be sure. He released my arm and said, “Your mother says there’s a gun on the boat. Is that true?”

“I have no idea. There might have been one years ago, but surely not anymore.”

“I have one, if you need it.”

That surprised me. But I said, “I wouldn’t know how to use a gun.”

Nolan’s gaze didn’t waver. “I made some calls after your mother contacted me. I talked to his brother. Laurie, Dennis phoned from this location last night.”

Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. “How do you know that?”

“He has a fancy app on his cell phone — a GPS. So does his brother. He made the call, Laurie. Did you see him?”

“Of course not.”

“But the call.”

“He might have come around the marina.” Uncertainly, I glanced out the window and tried to remember. How long had I left the curtains open last night? I gathered my wits and said, “Nolan, I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

“In what?”

“Dennis and me.”

“Jesus, are you back together with him?”

“God, no.”

“Then why—?”

“Please, I don’t want you to — Dennis will go away eventually, but until then, you need to keep your distance.”

Nolan seized me by the elbows, his hands insistent. “I can help, Laurie. I’ll break his neck if he hurts you again.”

I smiled. For all his size, I couldn’t see Nolan hurting anyone. He was too sweet. Sometimes so sweet my teeth ached.

But Dennis? He had swept into the city like a pirate from New York and conned a local art dealer into giving him a share in a gallery. Then the hoodwinking started. Nothing could ever be proved, of course, but there were commissions stolen, artists cheated, buyers angry. The gallery owner retired hastily and fled to Florida. Dennis’s life-of-the-party personality and undeniable sex appeal — for both men and women, it turned out — kept him riding high a little longer.

He’d come courting me before his real trouble started. The reputation of my family — painters, all of us, especially Daddy, a portraitist and teacher at the university — made me a kind of blue blood in the city creative class, something Dennis needed to keep going. Respectability, that’s what I’d brought to the match. And he’d brought — well, something I had avoided since a stormy love affair fell apart two years ago. Sex, at first. The kind that made me lose my head. And more excitement too — one temptation after another to lure me deeper into his world.

But Dennis soon ran the gallery into the ground and took my good name with it.

The first time he hit me had been at Thanksgiving. His frustration boiled over. Somehow his financial problems were all my fault. He knocked out my eye tooth — humiliating as much as painful.

“Are you in some kind of trouble, Laurie?” Dr. Feingold had asked, there in his dental office. His gentle eyes were worried behind his round-framed glasses.

I lied to him. Told him I’d fallen off a ladder while setting up the Christmas tree.

During the holidays my family intervened — expressing genteel concern and dismay. A restraining order, they urged. So I went to the police station and blushed the whole time I told impassive officers my dirty story. They asked awful questions. About the sex. Had I liked it at first and then got second thoughts? What else? I told them as much as I could stand, and that he’d begun to hit me. The police took photos of my bruises. I admitted that he’d threatened to do worse.

The restraining order didn’t stop Dennis, though. I’d called 911 and had him arrested twice — the first time during a Twelfth Night party where friends watched aghast — which only made him more furious with me.

My mother started having angina attacks. What could I do but move off the family estate to spare her? So I’d come to the boat and hoped I could resolve things myself.

In a hard voice, Nolan said, “Did you see him last night, Laurie? You can trust me.”

“No.”

“Because...”

I saw a change in Nolan’s face. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

Nolan turned his head away. “He was supposed to meet me last night. To give me something.”

“Give you what?”

After a heartbeat, Nolan said, “He had pictures.”

“From the gallery?”

“No.”

It didn’t take much to figure out what he meant. Photos. Blackmail. The word made my insides twist with pain. I’d brought ugliness into so many lives. First Dennis had gone to my family and now to Nolan, threatening to show my mother what I’d become. All this awfulness because I’d yearned to walk on the wild side.

I said, “He wanted you to pay him for pictures.”

“Yes.”

“Of me.”

“Yes.”

I knew exactly which photographs he meant. A night long ago, when Dennis was still deliciously naughty and fun, he’d snapped a few shots in bed. After I’d had too much wine. When it hadn’t taken a lot of convincing. Dennis brought out something in me that I then realized had been lurking inside all along.

My face burning, I said, “Did he show them to you?”

“Only one.” Nolan’s voice sounded hollow.

“Well, I hope it was a good one.”

I shoved through the door, and slammed it back on its hinges. On the deck, I gulped fresh air to fight down nausea. The water was rougher than before, but the rain had let up a little. I grabbed the railing for support. The tree had rolled away from the boat, I thought. Maybe the thing that snagged it had shifted too. I fought down the nausea that rushed up from inside me Nolan came out of the cabin and said nothing.

He’d never think of me the same way again, that was for sure. I’d never be the pretty girl at the country club, sipping cocktails on the veranda and talking about the Impressionists. Him brushing a ladybug from my yellow dress, thinking I was the kind of girl he could take home to his family.

In a while, I said, “How much were you going to pay him?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“That kind of thing never stops, you know. You pay him once, he’ll come back for more until you’re broke.”

Gently, Nolan put his hand on the small of my back. His touch felt as if he wanted to go dancing. “Let me take you to your mother’s house, just for a couple of nights, okay? When the weather settles down, we can—”

“No,” I said.

“I want to help.”

“I don’t need help!”

“The hell you don’t.”

“Not from you,” I snapped and spun around.

He pulled his hand away and tightened it into a fist. “You’re not the only one who has a dark side, Laurie. Maybe I’m not who you think I am either.”

If only he were, my problems might be over.

Ralphie came back outside of his own houseboat across the dock from mine. He’d put on a shirt and shoes, but that didn’t make him look any more respectable than before. His ball cap was on backwards, with greasy hair sticking out around the back of his neck. He made a big show of stretching his arm over his head and yawning. His jeans rode low, showing a line of pubic hair on his belly.

Then he called, “Everything okay over there, Laurie?”

“Who’s he?” Nolan asked me.

“We’re fine, Ralphie!”

Ralphie squinted at us. “Your friend bothering you?”

“He was just leaving.”

“Laurie—”

“Go, Nolan,” I said, low-voiced. “I didn’t ask you to come. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you mixed up in my problems.”

“Too late,” Nolan replied. But he turned away. He pulled his car keys from a pocket. “Will you call me if you have to get away fast? I can be down here in half an hour. I’ll pick you up, take you home.”

I’m never going home, I almost said aloud. It would be like dragging barrels of poison through the front door.

But I said, “Thank you.”

“Is your cell phone charged?”

“Go, Nolan. I’ll be fine.”

He went. He glanced back over his shoulder once, doubtfully taking in Ralphie again. For all I knew, he wondered if I’d given up Dennis, and rejected him too, for the likes of Ralphie now, a houseboat rat who drank too much. Who dealt drugs, peed in the river when the need arose, who ate Slim Jims for dinner and probably never heard of the Impressionists.

When Nolan had climbed into his truck, started the engine, and backed out of his parking space, Ralphie vaulted over the railing of his own boat and landed on the dock in his sneakers. His sweatshirt read, Steelers, in faded black and yellow letters.

He said, “Old boyfriend?”

“I guess that’s what you could call him.”

“Not anymore, you mean?”

“Not anymore.”

“You have a lot of those, don’t you?”

Ralphie had a whippy kind of strength in his body and a loose, happy smile. He might have been a sexy ladykiller once, before he went to seed. He leaned playfully on my railing, absorbing the surge of the boat with his arms. But his gaze was full of something darker than mischief.

When I didn’t answer, he said, “Water’s still rising.”

“I see that.”

“I expect it’ll come up a few more feet before it’s all over.”

“Yes.”

“If we get more rain, and then it’ll wash everything away. Maybe us too, but everything else, for sure.”

He nodded at the tree, still riding the river’s current alongside the dock. The branches twisted, the few remaining leaves wriggling as if in death throes.

Around the tree, the water ran muddy brown, full of silt from upstream, so it was impossible to see below the surface of the river.

But eventually the water would clear, and the view to the bottom would be unobstructed. Dennis’s car would be clearly visible.

Last night, when the car disappeared into the dark water at the end of the boat launch, I thought it was gone for good. But choking back tears, I had watched the turn signal flash for hours. At some point the light stopped blinking like a heartbeat — short-circuited at last. Or maybe the car had rolled over, burying the light in mud. Whichever it was, I had finally gone to bed.

But this morning I had seen ripples on the surface of the river where the car lay submerged.

When the tree had slammed into the sunken car I thought maybe, just maybe, the tree might push the car out into the channel, deeper into the river where it would never be seen or found. If the river’s current strengthened, if the tree continued to push, perhaps the car would wash into oblivion.

If it didn’t wash away, the car would be discovered when the flood receded and everybody came back to put their boats into the river again.

I was in trouble. Deep.

Ralphie said, “We just need another day of rain. Then it’ll wash his car away. Nobody’ll ever see it.”

He grinned at me, and I felt my heart lurch.

Conversationally, he asked, “Did you shoot him first?”

“Yes.” I swallowed hard.

Ralphie shrugged. “I was drunk last night, and maybe I slept like a rock, but something woke me up. Must have been your gun. I came outside and watched. I saw everything. You dragging him up to his car, shoving him behind the wheel, putting the transmission in neutral. Where’s the gun now?”

“In — in the car.”

Ralphie slipped a wet lock of my hair behind my ear, and his touch lingered there. “Was he dead when you pushed the car down the ramp?”

“I’m not sure.”

If Dennis had lived long enough to make a phone call from the sinking car — perhaps desperately dialing as the cold water enveloped his bleeding body — well, I couldn’t think about that.

The river surged around us with a dull yet rhythmic roar. Listening to it, I decided it sounded like the pulse of God.

Ralphie took off his ball cap and plunked it on my head. He was smiling at me. “Don’t worry, honey. If this rain keeps up, the car will wash down to the dam and get lost in all the crap down there. Nobody’ll ever find it. Or him.”

He put his arm around me, nuzzled my throat, and breathed the fumes of his first beer of the day into my ear. He ignored my shudder.

“Let’s go inside for a while, huh?” Ralphie slid his hand down inside the back of my jeans and cupped my butt. “You’d like that, right? We’ll fool around a little, you and me. Get to know each other better. And all we have to do is pray it keeps raining, right?”

“Right,” I said.

A Minor Extinction by Paul Lee

Carrick

The river that persisted namelessly in his dreams seemed to be all rivers at once, black and collusive and oceanic. It carried him along a swift path beneath a star-spattered firmament, and though he knew the water to be ice cold it seemed to his skin to have been stripped of temperature. He was a silhouette projected on the water, in conveyance to a place that was strange and logical, cruel and intimate. And how the stars teemed so impassively above him as he lay in bed, drowning in sleep... how they burned small and cold and bright in all of that unfathomable blackness, like grains of fossilized fire strewn in pitch, as the river pulled him across the earth in a fugue of stark and limitless dread and longing.

He was working in a room of increasing white when he was told the latest news about the elder Gorski brother. It was noon, and they were painting another empty old house in Carrick whose inhabitant had moved or died. The floors were sheathed in plastic. The interior walls had sallowed to the shade of animal fat, and, hearing the news, Mark continued to work as though he had not heard a thing, rewetting the long-handled roller in the pan and applying to the stale walls lucent strips of dripping, viscous white, a slathered rendering of reversed time. “Couldn’t stop his brain swelling,” the other painter was saying sidelong from his perch on the stepladder. He seemed unslighted by Mark’s silence, even a little deferent to it; he had also gone to Carrick High years ago and was still held by the residual sway of Mark’s single year of seniority and former status as a varsity hockey player — the old teenage hierarchy. “Real sad about that family,” he was saying.

A rumor had been circulating that Zacharias Gorski had been, uncharacteristically, blind drunk while driving home through Mount Oliver three nights ago. Mark had heard only that he had hit a tree and been thrown from his car, but the rest seemed as clear to him as if he had been in the passenger seat: the upstanding surviving brother, college-educated and betrothed, swept down a fast black road almost against volition, headlights swinging wildly around a sharp corner, propelled into the night by drunkenness and the brute laws of random chance. It was as if Mark was witness to the stillconscious Zacharias being launched headlong through exploding glass and flung into the hollow that the headlights had dug out of the darkness, as if he heard Zacharias’s skull striking something hard, a rock or a tree trunk, at the edge of those woods. He heard it as the same sound — not an identical sound but the very same sound repeated — as the one he had heard when the younger brother died, when Mark accidentally killed Levi Gorski eight years ago. It was as though the eight years were a canyon and he was just now hearing the echo of the original impact undiminished from the opposite side. Sad about that family. And from here he could see that irrevocable night occurring across the canyon. Seventeen-year-old Levi shivering skinny and half-naked by the river, his face lit up by the flashlight, downy black mustache soaked in mud and bloodied snot. And underneath those vast stars made tiny by distance, beside the strand of water that was the Monongahela: just the slightest flick of movement. The shear streak of the Maglite, a small figure toppling backward, fragile head meeting the edge of a rock somewhere in the dark. And if that rock had not been there. Or if I had not been here.

If Mark Braun had not been here he would be a twenty-six-year-old Korean living amid a countryful of Koreans, maybe attending electrical school the way he had been planning for years now, and perhaps knowing of Pittsburgh only by way of Hines Ward. Levi Gorski would still be living, probably still a fuck-up, and Zacharias Gorski would not be brain-dead. But instead Mark was adopted by an American couple before he learned to speak and transported from Korea to Pittsburgh, brought here to be the Chinese boy in Carrick with the German last name. And instead he was raised on fish sticks and pierogies, surviving all the bullying and taunting, learning eventually to mock the few other Asian kids he encountered with even greater cruelty. And instead he grew up athletic and crew-cut and thick-necked and played hockey, never a star player but always solid enough to stay off the bench. He guzzled beer and bum wine with the best of them. Yet on some level he still sensed, even in people he had known since childhood, that they continued to perceive in him a touch of the simulated life — that, to them, each perfectly formed American word that came from his mouth remained perennially a small astonishment, the uncanny product of some tortuous craftsmanship that was occurring somewhere behind that face.

And there was something of the weight of this continental displacement behind the blow that killed Levi Gorski — Levi, a mangy kid who was rumored to have once eaten a sporkful of shit for twenty bucks, who had obliquely called Mark’s thengirlfriend Abigail — a white girl — a “gook” after she whirled and called him shiteater for squeezing himself indecently past her in the hall. Mark had betrayed nothing as she recounted the incident to him later that night. Outwardly he had only mirrored her casual disgust. But already he had felt himself being taken up by a fast-moving current, one he mistook for self-determined rage, a current which seemed to carry him to — and then leave him just a few beats after — the moment that found him by the river, flanked by two of his hockey buddies, drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 with the Maglite poised above Levi’s head. They had earlier found Levi smoking by himself in the dark near his house, the three boys crudely flush with purpose and wildness after four-wheeling through Mount Oliver in Nathaniel’s truck. It was still an incipient spring, a night when the wind seemed to be cutting in from the expired winter. They had forced Levi into the backseat like mobsters and sped to Riverfront Park, bloodying his nose along the way, with Isaac nearly singing about how they would beat him unconscious and leave him by the river to freeze. But Mark later understood that he was impelled toward the scene of Levi’s death not by the exuberance of adolescent violence but by the force of that ruthless current, which proved strong enough to sweep up the other three boys along with him, strong enough even to deliver Levi’s older brother to his fate eight years later.

They had parked near the Birmingham Bridge on a bleak vacant street lined with warehouses. In warmer weather they might have seen another parked car or two, signs of teenagers tucked away in the dark to smoke weed or make out, but on this night they were alone. They forced Levi to the riverside, their victim first squirming and yelling, but after being smacked quiet letting his boots drag in what seemed a parody of nonviolent resistance, then finally stumbling along with his head bowed: the consciously bland submission of someone, outnumbered and outpowered, who can at last only hope that his aggressors will soon grow bored of his meekness. The river, opening up wide before them, ran calm and tranquil, its edges lapping up in ragged doglike waves onto the dirt, and with the Maglite switched on they turned and navigated the black thread of scraggly wilderness along the water while shoving Levi shirtless into the jagger bushes, the bugs biting, behind them the civilized world quietly receding, seemingly from existence, the four of them hiking through that wooded darkness until about ten minutes later they stopped randomly at some sufficiently removed spot that afterward seemed predestined, and Mark, before even willing it, swung hard at Levi and knocked him to the hard-packed dirt, maybe even as surprised as he by the connecting impact of that first real uninhibited effort to inflict human damage. There had hung a beat of silence when he hit the ground. Then the three lit upon him, kicking and thrashing at the prostrate shape in the dark. The memory of this remained for Mark only as shredded sensation: the scribble of the flashlight over Levi’s curled backside, the panting of exertion, the guttural grunting when they would wedge a hard kick in the soft of his belly. They forced his head up and shoved a fistful of riversludge into his mouth, calling him shiteater, then batted him around again, all of them reluctant to be the first one to let up. And strangely, Mark could not even remember now whether or not he had felt any rage over Levi’s offense while in the act of assaulting him, any remnant of that burst of raw heat that had originally resolved him to beat this white boy into repentance. It was as though the record of that retributive heat, if there had indeed been any, had been expunged by the running river, leaving for memory only a cold, passionless violence even more savage for its bloodlessness. As though passion in the end had no bearing upon the governing forces of life and death, and at the river the four had unknowingly given themselves up in violent ritual to that greater logic which was inexorable in its progression. And it was on this force that Mark pulled Levi to his feet for the last time — his motility gone sluggish and boozy, his shivering torso thorn-scratched and slick from sweat and mud, the four of them in that instant a tableau of miniature figures seen from across a canyon of eight years — and without thinking brought the butt of the Maglite down on his head. Levi fell — seemed to backfall a distance far deeper than his standing height, with a force far heavier than his falling weight. They heard a blunter, meatier echo of the blow that sent him down, then nothing.

We killed him

Mark you fucking killed him

Instantly the current that had brought him here seemed to desert him, to drain away in a final roar and expose an underlying quiet that he had not known he had not been hearing, the ever-present quiet of the dirt and the stars and their bodies quietly alive. A barge lowed somewhere on the water. They swung the body blindly into the river and left, scared as hell, and no one saw them. Afterward no one suspected them. It was only later that Mark began to gain a crude understanding that the current had not left him at all; it had only merged into a larger course, one in which he was no longer an active mechanism but a thing powerlessly adrift, too small and too integrated to perceive what engulfed him as anything separate from the carriage of existence itself.

He was driving the company truck toward the South Side after work, last week’s snow still shrinking on the edges of the road. The heater was rasping. It was an old pickup of an indeterminate grade of black, a rattling, smoking steel thing with a busted radio and cracked vinyl seats and faded lettering on the sides. The windshield was cold and sunbrushed with the last of the slanting daylight. Normally he took the bus home, but today he had volunteered to close the shop, then taken the truck out when the others had gone, with hardly a thought given to consequence or purpose.

He drove now with the half-formed notion of going to a bar, but was thinking of Levi’s murder and seeing everything around him, the entire world as he knew it, as what the murder had left behind in its wake. One of his science teachers, who had liked to tell Mark that he could go far in life if he only applied himself, had once said that the course of the universe was like a cosmic game of billiards. And Mark was thinking of this now, of pool balls ricocheting again and again in endlessly multiplying accident. Thinking, He’s dead Mark you killed him. Thinking of Abigail, how they had broken up soon after, how she had then ricocheted until she had become engaged to Zacharias, how Mark had thought her ricocheting had stopped then. Thinking how the ricocheting had now killed Zacharias too, and knowing now that its reverberation would never cease — that it would one day become unattributable to the murder, but only because it would exceed the limits of human calculation and memory.

As he neared the East Carson bars, he found himself turning onto the narrow street on which stood UPMC South Side, where Zacharias was lying somewhere, brain-dead. He found a vacant spot by the curb and, from the idling truck, gazed up at the building’s turreted façade without intention, only thinking in a mild stupor that this was where the Gorski family would finally be blotted out. He was recalling the classic illustration of human evolution, the monkey uncrouching by increments toward the apotheosis that was man, and in his mind he pictured the Gorskis’ ancestral line in the same way: the descendents springing up one after another through dark millennia in an unbroken and resolute linear procession, only to be suddenly extinguished by the repercussive force of his own trivial and incredulous hand. Permanently annihilated. There would be whole branches of people who would now never come into being, whom the world would never even know to miss. The idea was almost unfathomable to him in its simple desolation.

When a few minutes had passed, he twisted off the engine and sat in the violently ensuing silence, sensing the tiny clustering of the oncoming dusk, the near-imperceptible way it began its purple bloodying of the air. He continued to stare up at the hospital, as if by staring enough he might see Zacharias. At any moment he expected to restart the engine and drive to the bar, but his expectation was devoid of will, as though the decision to leave would be made by someone other than himself.

When she came out, he did not immediately recognize her. She was just another figure emerging from the building, small in her puff of a white jacket, like something blown out onto the sidewalk. There was an air of relief about her, something he had noticed in others who had exited, some registering of freedom, but in her it somehow seemed intentioned, the exhalation exaggerated for her own witnessing, as if by feigning it, the actual relief, and then the actual freedom, would follow. He tracked her absently as she walked in his direction, but it was only when she stepped in front of the truck to cross the street that he recognized her as Abigail. He watched a few moments longer, unmoving and unthinking, before abruptly quitting the truck and walking after her.

She was proceeding hurriedly, cutting toward the next block through the small sitting area opposite the hospital, and he followed as if pulled by the slipstream, not calling out, not knowing what he would say when he caught up to her. They had not remained close after they broke up those years ago. Their affair, which had lasted maybe seven months, had seemed a thing of real substance by high school standards, the first convincing romance for both, and perhaps would have continued had it not been for the murder. He remembered it as a sustained flash of heat against the cold, beginning in the waning warmth of late late summer and fizzling in the spring, in full bloom only in fall and winter. It had seemed to have its own unspoken logic, by which their fierce rifts were graced with the same intimacy as their tenderest moments. Their arguments in the halls had reached levels of violence that bordered on parody, taking on the air of staged teen dramas in which they were secretly witting actors; on campus they became as famous for their public fights as for their public affection. Their theatricality — the cheek both burning from a slap and imprinted with lipstick — had made itself the trademark of their relationship, seemed crucial to its continuing survival, and this may have set the precedent for Mark’s brutal response to Levi’s offense, because between them there had never been any room for the middle ground.

They had broken up soon after. As he followed her now he was thinking of how they had never spoken over the years, seeming almost to realize it for the first time. She had become a neighborhood fixture to him, someone he saw with inevitable regularity around Carrick and East Carson, and in the process she had entered that strange realm of once-familiar things that have fallen into conspicuous obscurity. He had heard through friends about her father’s brain cancer — a bad headache one morning, buried five months later — and her engagement to Zacharias, but had otherwise rarely thought about her directly, instead remembering Abigail and that segment of his past as a single crude impression of vivid color and heat. He followed her for another short block, muted by the years. There were stretches of the sidewalk still crusted over with ice, but she moved quickly, incautiously. At the corner she crossed the street to the first available bar, a dingy corner dive with a white shingled overhang, and pushed through its palm-smudged door.

He stopped, lingering on the opposite side, but in a minute Abigail reappeared, clutching a weighted paper bag with both hands. She saw him standing across the street then and quickly looked away as if she hadn’t, as had been their custom. But now he held his gaze, unmoving as she crossed back to his side, the beer bottles clinking in her bag, and finally she looked back at him when it could no longer be avoided, her expression hard but unable to fully conceal her incredulousness. “Mark,” she said ironically. He had not looked at her this closely in eight years, but he felt no tug of old emotion, only a defamiliarized recollection of intimacy. While most people he knew, including himself, had gained some heft around the jaw since high school, Abigail had grown bonier, shedding the shapeless skinniness of her youth for a thinness that seemed lighter and frailer and more severe, giving an impression of bones growing hollow. She was not wearing makeup today, and her face had that raw scrubbed appearance of women who are rarely seen without it.

“I heard,” he said. “About Zacharias.”

She studied him for a moment without speaking. He had not been friends with Zacharias, who was two years older and had been away at college at IUP when Levi died. Nor had Mark decided upon an explanation for his sudden appearance on this empty corner, still in his work clothes, his pants and boots splotched with dry paint. But she showed no intention of asking, instead seemed to be trying to deduce it from his face. Her tone was even and empty of sarcasm when she responded: “So you know I’m engaged to a vegetable then.”

He shifted uncertainly. “I was thinking maybe I could see him,” he said then without thinking, unsure whether he asked because he could think of nothing else to say or because this was the reason he had come.

She gave him a strange look. “You wanna see Zach?” But then the look passed from her face, as though she had decided that her wondering was not worth the effort. She looked back at the hospital. “Well I’m having one of these over there first. Then if you still want, I’ll take you up to see him.”

He carried the bag for her as they returned. The outdoor sitting area was empty. She chose one of the maroon benches farthest from the street, then pulled two bottles of Yuengling from the bag and handed one to Mark. They sat and drank from the green bottles as the light began its slow fade, their breaths steaming and cooling in the air. For a while neither spoke, just sat looking at the hospital entrance as Abigail peeled the labels from her bottle and flicked the pieces onto the ground. The silence gathered between them in stealthy accumulation, first incurring a palpable weight, then growing fat with character, until it seemed to ape the chronic silence that had broken their romance years ago, to echo the abrupt silence that had announced Levi’s death by the river, to imagine the unknowable silence that now whirled in Zacharias’s head, until at last the silence grew too heavy to continue, seemed to collapse upon itself, and Mark spoke reflexively as though responding to physical law.

“I remember when I went to his brother’s funeral and Zacharias went up to the coffin.” He was not looking at her, but he continued to speak. “Up till that point he was rock-solid — you know. The big brother back from college, shaking hands with everyone and taking charge. But when it was his turn to go up to the coffin and look at Levi’s picture, it was like the whole thing just crumbled. He was just standing in front of it for a second or two, but then his hands went up to his face, he almost slapped himself, and suddenly he was all hunched over and shaking. And we were all just sitting there watching him. And after a while his dad had to take him away, and we never saw him again.”

She said nothing for a few moments, letting his words grow strange in the air. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t know why you ever went to that funeral anyway.”

Mark hesitated, took a slug of beer.

Then her tone softened. “Let’s not start this, this kind of talk, the dead mourning the dead. Not yet.”

“All right.”

“I mean, you didn’t even know him,” she said, her voice stirring again. “Or Levi, really. God, I haven’t even seen you for years.”

“What do you mean?” He looked at her now. “I see you around all the time.”

“Maybe you saw someone else,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

“You saying you didn’t notice the Chinese guy hanging around Carrick?”

She let out a familiar sigh. “I’m not saying anything, Mark.” She finished her beer and stood up, and in the fading light he recognized some agitated kink in her stance that for an instant seemed to telescope the past eight years into something graspable. “You still want to see him or not?” she asked. He downed the last of his beer and followed her inside, leaving their bottles sitting empty on the bench.

When they reached the room that contained Zacharias, Abigail took the paper bag from Mark and set it down in the hallway by the edge of the open door. Then she motioned him in. He entered to find Zacharias’s parents and grandfather seated in a row of three chairs along the wall by the bed, on which Zacharias lay as if asleep. They looked up at him when he came in, the grandfather’s expression one of foggy incomprehension, something distantly savage in his decrepitude, and the parents reflexively smiling the feeble and exhausted smile that they had been practicing together for days, perhaps mistaking him for one of the hospital staff. They looked small and supplicant in their chairs beside Zacharias, whose substantial figure was stretched across the bed, seeming the size of the three of them combined. Abigail appeared behind Mark but lingered in the doorframe, saying, “This is one of Zach’s friends.” The parents nodded feebly at him, still smiling and saying nothing.

Mark stepped toward the bed. He had been this close to Zacharias only a few times, and only by accident, brushing past him in the halls between classes, or later vying with him for the attention of a bartender at Mario’s. His head was almost comically bandaged, the gauze baring what seemed a niggardly amount of face, from the eyelids to just below the lower lip. But even on this meager stretch of skin the shattered windshield and fatal trauma were fully manifest: his face was like a random side of a bruised pear, finely lacerated and discolored, softly misshapen, his closed eyes swollen and seeming sealed over with wax. A pair of tubes ran from the machine to converge in his mouth, force-feeding vital gases.

“Who is that?” the grandfather roared suddenly to no one, his jaundiced eyes seizing upon Mark in what appeared a kind of vague terror. The mother patted his hand and murmured, “A friend of Zach’s.” The grandfather grunted.

Mark glanced back at Abigail, who was leaning against the doorframe. She was not looking at him or anything else in the room. Instead her gaze was fixed on some faraway point beyond the walls, and her foot was steadily tapping the floor, betraying impatience. But framed within the doorway she appeared almost serene, and would have been a portrait of female serenity had she been painted in this moment, with her tapping foot stilled by the fixed colors. When she met his eyes her face grew rigid, breaking the illusion. She shot him a look demanding they leave.

He looked down again at Zacharias, taking in once more all of that mortal irreparability, seeing him now — a dead lump of living tissue — as the blunt implement of the Gorskis’ final erasure. Then Mark stepped away. The grandfather peered at him as if seeing him for the first time, blurting again, “Who is that?” — the dusty, fading patriarch, registering in perhaps only an intermittent glimmer the totality of his posterity’s irreversible failure. This time no one answered him. The polite feeble smile reappeared on the parents’ faces when they saw that Mark was leaving, and suddenly he felt sickened with some mixture of guilt and pity and scorn and revulsion. It was a shiteating smile, he realized. It was a smile of shiteating surrender, a sick swallowing-and-grinning expression of utter powerlessness, of private, implacable misery. They continued to smile gruesomely, smiling beside their dead son, and Mark retreated after Abigail, muttering some goodbye.

Outside, the night had been consummated. The stars shone cold and clear, almost ringing to Mark with some deep familiarity, some deeply familiar mystery. They went to sit inside the truck to drink the remaining beers, and Mark turned on the ignition to run the heater. The truck stammered intransigently, then fired on with a massive metal roar, then fell into its steady idled shuddering. They sat in the dark, drinking.

Abigail pulled her feet up onto the seat and hugged her knees. “I can’t take it anymore, just sitting there staring at him,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “It’s like we’re trying to stare at him till we stop seeing anything there.”

“Yeah,” said Mark, his mind elsewhere. How impassively the stars had witnessed the murder, those stars that night by the river. And I remember those stars, he was thinking, knowing that they had been clinging to that same black sky for eight years unchanged.

Mark are you fucked in the head you fucking killed him

Throw him in the river we have to

Grab his legs

Hurry

He did not understand the science behind the scrolling map of the sky, but he knew that the stars above the hospital now were not the same ones from that night; he did not recognize them. He was thinking, I remember the stars from that night and they are still there only because I remember them. If I forget them they will cease to exist.

He and Abigail sat in the truck, quieted by uncertainty. He knew that when they finished the six-pack there would be no more reason for them to remain; Abigail would leave the truck to go become a widow, and Mark would drive the truck back to the shop, maybe stop by a bar to get drunk, and to him this seemed incomplete, though he could not have explained what he was waiting for. But he made no move to alter this course, only sitting and thinking quietly, And if I exist in the memory of those stars as they exist in mine, if they can remember me only because I remember them. And if I cease to remember them. Finally thinking, Yes, if I cease to remember them then they will have to cease to remember me. Then it will be as if that night never happened. As if I had not killed him.

And then something was quietly activated in him. Wordlessly he shifted the truck into gear and pulled out into the street in a disembodied decision to simply drive. Abigail did not ask where they were going, consenting with reciprocal wordlessness, and when he turned west onto East Carson she gazed out the window as if she had not seen the strip a thousand times before, as if she were new to town, all of that exclusive tangled neon slung low on the buildings, brazen and eye-catching and aloof. For a while the pink light permeated the truck with something sentimental, a soft electric intimation of lapsed time and lapsed memory. Then it seeped away as they cleared the strip, and the night seemed to reemerge all around them. The road angled northward, and soon they were driving parallel to the Monongahela, and when they drove past the confluence, both gazed out at the Point as they always did here and would continue to do for the rest of their lives: the sight of the whole city, at the will of the rivers, converging in a crush of architecture into a single spew of water. And then it passed behind them, the city darkening like a heap of embers dying, and then they were driving along the Ohio River under black sky, the stars fanning, and soon they were separated from the water by only a bare set of railroad tracks.

Abigail spoke, still looking out at the river which ran long and dark beside them. “We were house shopping,” she said, just audible over the truck. “Every weekend we’d go out and look at houses. Once we even bid on one.”

“Where?” asked Mark when she fell quiet.

“Carrick. Of course Carrick. He was actually more into the whole thing than I was. He didn’t want us to get married and then have to come back to the same apartment.” Then she added, “He would have been a good father.”

Mark nodded, though she was not looking at him to see it. The road continued to grow darker, the stars clearer. He remembered that he had seen her with Zacharias on a weekend afternoon not long ago, conferring in front of a house with some woman in a red pantsuit. He had thought nothing of it then, but felt now as though he had stolen a glimpse into an abrogated future, being for a moment privy to the unstomachable processes of fate permanently altering its course.

“I need to move out of Pittsburgh,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see those houses again, and they’re all over Carrick. I can’t keep living here.”

As they crossed the creek into McKees Rocks, a smaller road opened up, following the bend of the river. Mark swerved onto it, rattling across the train tracks, then pulled off the road onto the first gravel yard that sat off the riverbank, one still patched with snow and littered with beached rundown motorboats. He stopped the truck and climbed out into the night, his face turned up to the sky as the gravel crunched under his boots. The wind was sweeping raw and hard across the water but he did not feel cold. Five miles downstream from where he had once deposited Levi Gorski into the water, he was staring at the stars now to see whether he would recognize them, thinking, If they are not the same, then when I die my memory will die and their memory of me will die with it. They shone clearer here than ever, each a vivid puncture in the night, but as he looked and strained to look, they seemed to grow only increasingly ambiguous in arrangement, until he found he could no longer see anything in them, could not recognize whether they were familiar or strange, until they seemed just meaningless points of light spread flat and trivial across the sky.

He had left the headlights on. For a while Abigail sat in the fading warmth of the truck, watching his shape moving then going distant in the dark. He seemed submerged in it, a dimly rendered figure sluggish and incipient in dark liquid. From within the truck she could hear the wind battering the windows with an animal energy, wild and invisible. “What are you doing?” she finally called out to him, rolling the window down a crack, but her voice seemed to fly away in the wrong direction.

And standing in the untamed grass that lined the river, Mark thought he saw something floating silently on the water.

You killed him, didn’t you? he heard Abigail say out of the darkness, her voice almost inaudible in the wind.

He froze, something terrible expanding in his chest.

Did you kill him? she murmured.

When he turned he saw her climbing out of the truck in the distance and walking toward him against the wind with her hair blowing back, clutching a beer in her hand. For a moment she was lit garishly by the headlights. She stepped from the gravel onto the concrete between them, and then he saw her suddenly going down on a patch of ice, falling messily but somehow retaining an impression of lightness, like a bird knocked to the earth by a gust. When he went back to her she was still sitting on the concrete with her hand held to her stomach. Her mouth was skewed and rigid. “Goddamn ice,” she said. She took a stubborn drink from her beer, which she had somehow managed to save, before allowing him to help her up. Her hand remained on her stomach, and her mouth remained rigid.

“You all right?” he said.

She shook her head.

“I can drive you back.”

She shook her head again and walked stiffly ahead of him toward the river. He joined her where she stood on the grass gazing at the sparse black trees of Brunot Island. “I’m fucking pregnant,” she said finally over the wind. The words seemed to race toward some distant point behind them at a hundred miles an hour. “I hadn’t even told him yet,” she added. “Haven’t told anyone.”

The island jutted like some malignant outgrowth from the middle of the river.

“I’m getting rid of it obviously,” she said, then took another swallow of beer as if to drive the point home. As the bottle fell back to her side he reached to take it from her, attempting in the last instant to mask the effort in casualness as if they had been sharing the bottle. She let him take it. But when he raised it to his own lips he found it mostly empty, the last mouthful of beer warmed by her hand. She looked at him strangely, then moved away from him, wandering upstream beside the black water, just beyond the reach of its ragged waves.

Something began to take shape dimly at the back of his mind. He turned the empty bottle over in his hands, then pulled his arm back and hurled it by the neck. He could not see it fly, but he thought he could hear it ringing for a few seconds, the whispering friction of air on glass, until it was blotted out by the water. When he glanced over, Abigail was the clearest object in the near distance, her white winter jacket catching the scant trickle of light offered by the night sky. And this seemed to be enough; for now, her pale and heatless luster was sufficient to draw him, to allow himself to be drawn, to incite something real or imagined in his blood. “Abby,” he said, moving toward her, feeling some vestigial pull when he spoke the name, the two rudimentary syllables that had once been so common on his lips. She looked at him as he drew near. Veiled by the dark, the hard specificity of the lines etched upon her face by recent days were all but erased.

“Why did you come today?” she said then before he could continue. Finally asking. Her tone was not harsh, not accusatory, but quietly demanding, deliberate.

He faltered. “I don’t know,” he answered, thinking of the terrible slackness on Levi’s muddied face after he had fallen, the empty face looming under the beam of the flashlight like a moon in the dirt. He amended, “I can’t really explain.”

“Try.”

He let out a breath of frustration. “ I wish I could tell you.”

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t. If you knew, you’d understand.”

She was quiet, seeming to respect this response enough not to push again.

Then a softness fell into his voice. “But I did want to see you.” He believed this now, though it might not have seemed true to him earlier. They stood side by side as he struggled to gather the effort to conquer his own resistance. And then, hastily, he put his arm around her in a way that he had not done since high school. He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her toward him, almost roughly, and could feel through her thick jacket the once-familiar shape of her waist as she shivered against the wind. She did not resist, and he pulled her closer.

“You know,” she said distantly, “even though the way he went was terrible, how sudden it was, I still prefer it over the way you went. Just going silent for no reason, like you just checked out without telling me.”

There was something pliant in her voice now, despite its distance. And with Abigail pressed to his side, Mark thought he could detect the current of his fate shifting again, merging now with hers and with the Gorskis’. Without even thinking he began to plot a future, one that seemed to unfurl before him upon the remainder of his life: he would learn to love Abigail again; he would father Zacharias’s baby as his own; he would attend electrical school and buy them a house. He would make himself useful and productive. In his mind this was less a decision than a hard, lifelong indenture that he would accept without resistance, even gratefully.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked vaguely.

And with what seemed both impulse and a summoning of will, he pulled her to him full-on in the dark, then pressed his mouth blindly to hers, kissing her with a fervor that was hard and passionless and bitter, almost bludgeoning. She responded at first in kind, pressing back with empty abandon, but moments later he felt her mouth breaking up under his, suddenly going shapeless with grief. Even as he realized it was useless he clenched the back of her neck and continued to hold her to him, stubbornly, until she tore herself away in tears, grieving at last, her sobs ragged and guttural and bearing no resemblance to her crying during their fights long ago. There was nothing to say and he said nothing as she turned from him, as she retreated into the darkness, her sobbing figure going dim, then disappearing.

In the distance behind him, the door of the truck banged shut. The wind was skating hard over the surface of the water, agitating it into a jagged roil, and the river seemed wide and long and turbulent with life, destined to run and accumulate in endless and unthinking self-perpetuation. And Mark stood on its bank, quietly breathing. He saw nothing floating on the water now, no corpses, no specters. He saw only water drowning in water, minute perturbations collecting on a mass scale.

Overhead the stars looked on. Clustered along a galactic belt they now appeared not static but lazily adrift in everchanging configuration, in a refusal to be schematized. And Mark thought, without believing, how each of those trillion dots had its own set of planets, its own revolving worlds. Without believing he thought of all the obscure forms of life that must be springing from their soil; he imagined shadowy figures standing on alien riverbanks in alien Pittsburghs, each bearing the terrible weight of some tiny murder — crimes and lives and lineages as ephemeral as a dream disintegrating with consciousness. He held to this thought, trying to siphon from it a breath of solace, but the image was too tenuous to sustain. As he stood by in the dark, his imagined counterparts seemed to recede from plausibility, to dwindle into the night, until finally there was only the river and the wind and the weight of Levi Gorski’s murder, close and deafening and undeniable.

When Johnny Came Shuffling Home by K.C. Constantine

McKees Rocks

Johnny Giumba graduated from high school on June 6, 1944, the same day the Allies invaded Normandy. A week later, he enlisted in the army, determined to kill Nips or Nazis — didn’t matter which. All he needed was a gun and bullets. Everybody he knew said we needed to get them before they got us. Johnny agreed, at first. But then he remembered Pearl Harbor and he thought, they already got us, didn’t they?

After basic training, he boarded a troop ship to England with an M1 Garand slung over his shoulder, just like everybody else aboard ship who wasn’t a non-commissioned officer. But after training for a month in England, when he finally landed in France at the end of September, his first sergeant ordered everyone in his platoon to turn in their M-1s. Then they were all issued M1 carbines. Johnny didn’t understand. Carbines were for the NCOs: staff sergeants, technical sergeants, master sergeants. Except for the NCOs in his platoon, nobody else was even a private first class.

His first sergeant told them not to worry about what kind of weapon they were carrying. The only Germans they were going to see would either be captured, wounded, or dead. They wouldn’t have to shoot any of them. Then the first sergeant told them they were being reassigned to Graves Registration.

Johnny had never heard of Graves Registration. Neither had anyone else. He wanted to know what it was.

Don’t worry, his first sergeant said. You’ll find out soon enough.

His squad leader told them they were going to need their full field transport packs. Since all they’d done in France was stand around and wait, all they had to do was pick up their packs and put them on. Johnny wanted to know where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there.

We’ll find out when we get there, his squad leader told him. There’s a truck coming for us, he said. Other than that I don’t know any more than you do.

They climbed into the back of the truck just as it was starting to rain. It rained the whole two hours the truck kept moving, never once getting up to more than twenty miles an hour. Sometimes the mud was up over the axles. Once they had to get out and push. Johnny and two of the others slipped and fell to their knees in the muck, and then got showered with mud as the tires finally got traction.

Just when Johnny thought he couldn’t get wetter, muddier, or more miserable, he heard artillery. For the last few minutes or so, he’d been thinking it was thunder. He should’ve known it wasn’t because he hadn’t seen any lightning. And now the noise was growing sharper. Louder. More distinct. The explosions were coming in bursts of two, three, four, only seconds apart.

Johnny felt rumbling in his stomach. His throat was suddenly dry and felt like it was closing. It was getting harder to breathe. He was okay, he told himself. This stuff I’m feeling, it’s just fear. Everybody’s as scared as I am. They might not let on, but everybody’s looking at where the sound of the explosions is coming from and nobody’s saying anything.

Johnny’d felt the same way the time Billy Pristash talked him into going out on the river in his uncle’s rowboat. He kept telling Johnny he was going to row straight into the wake of the sternwheeler that was heading downstream. At first, Johnny thought he was joking, but the more Johnny said he was crazy the more he laughed. That rooster-tail’s ten feet high, Johnny said. You row into that it’ll toss us around like a coupla corks. This boat will come down on our heads.

Billy said, That’s the point, dummy. It’s better’n Kennywood. Way more fun than the Racer or the Jack Rabbit. Especially cause that captain’s looking right at us and any second now he’s gonna blow the whistle. But that’s all he can do. He knows we’re gonna do it, and it’s pissing him off real bad, but he can’t do nothing but blow his whistle. Listen to him, there he goes, ha-ha! And here we go!

And there they went! Billy stroked fast as he could and rowed right into it, the crazy son of a bitch. And up and over they went, just like Johnny knew they would. Johnny dove left cause he didn’t want to be under the boat when it flopped over to the right. The oars went flying like a coupla popsicle sticks, and Johnny got scared stiff cause he hadn’t thought to take a big breath and didn’t know which way was up and must’ve swallowed a quart of water. God knows what was in it.

Johnny finally popped to the surface, no thanks to himself. Just dumb luck. When they righted the rowboat and climbed in, Billy asked if Johnny had swallowed any Allegheny whitefish.

Never heard of that kind of fish, he replied.

Christ, you don’t know nothing, do you? That’s a rubber, dummy. They’re all over the river. Probably swallowed a nigger fish too.

A what?

A turd, nitwit. Dumb as you are, I don’t even know why I’m friends with you.

I’m not as dumb as you think, Johnny said. I only got two B’s last year.

Two B’s! Well goody for you! But that’s school crap, it don’t make you smart.

That’s not what my dad says. Or my mom. They told me I keep getting grades like that, I could probably go to Carnegie Tech. Be an engineer.

An engineer! You go to Carnegie Tech so you can wind up driving a damn train? Boy, I heard everything now. We get back on the dirt, do me a favor. Pretend you don’t know me.

Okay with me, Johnny said. ’Bout five minutes ago, I thought you were gonna kill us both.

Well are you dead now? Huh? Don’t look dead to me. Hell, you don’t even know when you’re having fun. That was fun, dummy.

No it wasn’t!

Aw, go home to your mommy and daddy. But don’t forget what I said. From now on, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Carnegie Tech. Christ Almighty.

Johnny remembered the conversation as though it had happened that morning, before he’d climbed up into the truck.

Fifteen minutes after they got to where they were going and were told what they were going to do and had started doing it, Johnny had already vomited twice. He was actually glad because retching made his eyes watery, so for a little while at least he couldn’t really see what he was trying to pick up, trying to match up with other pieces and parts he’d already picked up. Then he vomited again. And again. All that came up the last time was saliva.

Every day was the same. Johnny woke up and marched to the chow tent and tried to eat. As soon as he went out to start picking up the pieces, his breakfast came back up. He picked up more pieces. Tried to match them with still other pieces. Then they ate noon chow, and as soon as Johnny started work, the noon chow came back up. The vomiting got so bad, Johnny tried not to eat. But a day or so later, his squad leader caught on and ordered him to eat. Eat or die, his squad leader said. If you don’t eat, eventually you die, everybody knows that. So Johnny tried to eat again. He tried hard. But nothing he put in his mouth would stay down. Or if it didn’t come right back up, in a little while it would come out the other end, watery, until he was raw from wiping. Every time he swallowed he tasted acid. Then he started sniffling. He didn’t know whether he had a cold or the flu or whether he was crying. His whole body ached like he had the flu. He had chills that made him shake. But he didn’t have a fever. His nose wouldn’t stop dripping. His eyes kept filling up with tears.

He wondered whether what was happening to him was happening to anybody else. When he looked around, the only thing he noticed was that nobody was looking anyone else in the eye. Everybody seemed to be slouching around, head down, trying to not see. Worse, it looked like they were trying to not be seen. The only guys who seemed to be talking, saying anything at all, were the NCOs who never left their bivouac area. And those guys didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping their food down.

By the end of the second week, Johnny’s pants were practically falling off him. He had to keep shortening his belt. At the end of three weeks, Johnny looked down at himself when he was trying to wash off the stench and saw that his stomach was sinking back toward his spine. His ribs were protruding. He caught a glimpse of himself in somebody else’s metal mirror and he was so startled by the sight, he ran back to his sleeping bag and pulled it up over his head.

Johnny didn’t know what to do, his life seemed so bleak. He thought and thought if there was anything he’d liked to do. And if there was, where did he like to do it? Back home? He couldn’t remember where home was. He remembered a river he used to swim in. He also remembered he used to like arithmetic. Though when he tried to do simple addition or subtraction, he had to think really hard how to do it. But that turned out to be a good thing because thinking hard about how to add or subtract meant he could stop seeing, smelling, feeling what he did every day.

He soon tired of adding and subtracting. He tried dividing and multiplying. Over and over he multiplied time and then divided it. How many hours were in a month, how many minutes, how many seconds. He did the problems in the dirt with the point of his bayonet. He didn’t have to look at anybody, nobody had to look at him. He didn’t have to think about how skinny he was becoming. But in the middle of the third week he’d started to hallucinate. He saw a leg walking, hands clapping, a hand throwing a ball, a foot kicking a ball, teeth biting the air, lips spitting blood, brains thinking. When his first sergeant asked him what the fuck was going on with him, Johnny said, I’m seeing what thinking looks like.

Is that supposed to be funny? the first sergeant said.

Oh, it’s no joke, Johnny said. It’s hideous.

On his thirtieth day, seven hundred and twenty hours, forty-three thousand two hundred minutes, two million five hundred and ninety-two thousand seconds after he had been assigned to Graves Registration, on their first break of the morning, Johnny picked up his M-1 carbine, extracted the magazine to make sure it was fully loaded, reinserted the magazine, worked the bolt to put a round in the chamber, pushed the safety off, put the barrel in his mouth, and thought, here I am in the war and the only person I’m ever gonna shoot is me.

The next thing he knew, he was on his back and somebody was sitting on him, punching and pummeling him in the face, screaming.

His attacker kept shouting at him, You think you’re gonna blow your fucking brains out and leave the rest of us here to stick your fucking dog tag in your teeth and hang the other one on your fucking carbine! You think you’re gonna get out of this shit that easy? The fuck you are!

He didn’t know who had knocked him down and beat him; he hadn’t seen him coming. All he knew for sure was that he was having trouble breathing. He didn’t know his nose had been smashed nearly flat. Blood was streaming into his eyes from the deep cuts on his eyebrows. Everything looked red. Some of his teeth had been knocked out. He was gagging on the blood pouring from his gums, trying not to swallow his teeth.

By the time he got to Paris, most of the swelling had gone down in his face. By the time he got to England, all the cuts had healed. By the time he got to Fort Dix, New Jersey, he wasn’t wearing the straitjacket anymore, but he was still in handcuffs and leg irons.

A couple of months later, when the commanding officer of the prison ward in the hospital handed him his discharge papers, Johnny barely glanced at the words. Both of them said, Unfit for Military Service. Or maybe they said, Unfit for Military Duty. He wasn’t sure. He was sure that he didn’t care. He also didn’t care that all the brass insignias had been removed from the new uniform he’d been issued. He didn’t care that he had cash in his trouser pocket or that the corporal who’d handed him the cash had subtracted the price of a bus ticket back to Pittsburgh.

The last thing the prison ward CO said to him was, There’s a VA hospital in Pittsburgh. Maybe they’ll be able to help you there, son.

Johnny asked if he was supposed to report to that hospital.

No, the CO said, you’re officially separated from the army, Mr. Giumba. I can’t order you to report anywhere. I am advising you and suggesting strongly that you go there and ask for help because, son, you really need it.

The last thing they did before he got on the bus was remove the handcuffs and leg irons.

Sitting on the bench in the back of his parents’ house on Washington Street in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, head back, eyes closed, the sun warm on his face, he wondered if anything would happen if he didn’t go to that VA hospital, wherever it was. Since he was legally discharged, he was pretty sure they couldn’t say he had deserted. They shot some guy in France for deserting.

He thought he’d keep wearing his uniform, even though he couldn’t remember why he didn’t have any insignias. He believed that if an MP showed up and tried to say he was a deserter, he could tell him the reason he was wearing his uniform was to show he was planning to go back. And if he was planning to go back that would mean he was not a deserter, just Absent Without Leave.

He read the discharge papers again. They said the same thing they said every time he’d read them. And five minutes later he couldn’t remember whether it was Service or Duty he was unfit for.

When his mother and father were in the kitchen, they stopped talking when he passed through to go back to the bench outside. After he closed the door, he could hear them speaking, their voices low. Lately, it seemed every time he passed them, they were whispering. Another thing he noticed was they both were looking guilty. He wondered what they had done to look that way.

One afternoon his mother came to the door and said, How you feeling today, Johnny? You feeling any... different?

He shrugged. Just like he did every time she’d asked him that before.

Next question was as predictable as the last. You sure you don’t want me to wash your clothes?

He shook his head no, closed his eyes, and lifted his face to the sun.

Her next comment had as little impact as the previous two. Johnny, don’t get mad, but you’re starting to smell.

He thought, starting? Jesus, you think I smell now? Should’ve smelled me a couple months ago. He didn’t say it. There wasn’t any point smarting off to his mother. She’d always been good to him. And anyway, none of what had happened since he’d arrived in France was her fault. Nothing was her fault. His father’s either.

He started thinking about something he’d been thinking about for the last week or so. He’d been thinking about not talking anymore. But if he did stop talking, he worried his mother might think it was because she kept asking the same questions every day, and it wasn’t that at all. It was just because he was running out of things to say and he was pretty sure that if he used up all his words talking about how he was or wasn’t feeling or whether he did or didn’t want his clothes washed, he might try to talk one day and find out all his words had been used up and he wouldn’t be able to say anything else ever again because he was also pretty sure he didn’t know where to go to get a supply of new words. Not new new words. Just words new to him. That, he felt sure, would be a real problem.

A big, poofy cloud hid the sun for a couple of minutes. Johnny took off his Ike jacket, hooked it over his shoulder, and started walking toward the river. He hadn’t been down there since yesterday and he wanted to make sure it was still there. There was something about the river that soothed him. Maybe because one time he talked to some guy from the museum who was digging on the Indian Mound and that guy told him the river was real old. It had been there since the last glaciers melted. Thousands of years ago. At home that night Johnny multiplied how many hours, minutes, and seconds there were in a thousand years and he couldn’t even pronounce the number he got. He did like the name of the river, although he’d had to ask his father what it was.

Ohio, his father said. It’s the Ohio River. When you were a kid you used to go swimming in it, remember?

He wasn’t sure if he could remember swimming in it. He did like the sound of the river’s name. He walked around saying it over and over, singing it, sort of. Oh-high-oh.

It was unusually warm for November. Indian summer, his father said. He couldn’t figure out why the summer would be named after the Indians. Maybe it was because of the Indian Mound, which was a little bit closer to Pittsburgh, where he talked to the guy from the museum who told him how old the river was. There were supposed to be a lot of Indians buried in that mound. Johnny believed that was true because he’d found a whole jarful of finger and toe bones. They were still on the shelf in his closet upstairs. Maybe when he went home he’d take them out of the jar and count them again. He wondered why finding those Indian bones had never bothered him, not anywhere near the way finding bones in France had bothered him. The pieces of bodies he collected in France made it impossible for him to eat, to nourish himself. In a month he’d lost nearly thirty pounds. A pound a day. When he was weighed in Fort Dix, he was so weak medics had to steady him on the scale.

A little before he reached the end of the block, he heard a horn and somebody calling his name. He kept walking at the same pace, but he thought he recognized the voice, so he turned and looked. The car was keeping pace with him. The driver was smiling.

Hey, Johnny boy, I heard you was home. Wasn’t over there too long, huh?

Johnny stopped and bent over to get a better look at the driver. I know you?

Do you know me? The hell kinda question’s ’at? I’m Billy. You don’t remember me?

Billy?

Billy Pristash! The hell’s the matter with you? You lose your mind?

No. I know where it is. He tapped his head. It’s right up here.

Billy thought that was funny. You’re jagging me, right?

Jagging you? I’m way over here, how could I be jagging you?

Oh, now I know you’re jagging me. Hey, serious now, I wanna talk to you about something.

You said we were supposed to pretend we didn’t know each other.

Ah, c’mon, man, that was a long time ago. My old lady talked to your old lady in church. Your old lady said you practically don’t talk to nobody anymore. Says you just give everybody real short answers. Or else you don’t say nothing.

Saying nothing, Johnny started walking again.

I guess you probably heard, Billy said. They tried to draft me last year, but I flunked the physical.

I heard something? What?

You didn’t hear about me being 4-F?

Four what?

Four-F. You don’t know what 4-F means?

No.

Well, before you hear some jagoff spreading rumors about me trying to beat the draft, I’m telling ya I flunked the physical. So you’re hearing it right out of the horse’s mouth. Something wrong with my heart. Some kinda murmur or some shit like ’at. So I’m 4-F. Unfit for military service.

That’s what my discharge says. Or maybe it’s duty I ain’t fit for.

Billy threw his head back and laughed hard. He wiped his eyes. That’s rich, he said. That’s really rich. You and me. The same. Unfit.

No. Not the same.

No? How’s come no?

You said I was dumb. You didn’t know why you were friends with anybody dumb as me.

Aw, c’mon, Johnny, forget about that. That was a long time ago.

I remember like it was yesterday.

Aw, hey, man, I’m sorry I ever said anything like ’at, okay? Had it to do over, I would’ve never said it. So we’re straight now, right?

Straight?

You know what I mean. Straight like friends again. Like we used to be. Like in junior high. Ninth grade.

You were in ninth. I was in eighth.

Okay, okay, so you was a year behind me. One year, what’s the difference?

You never talked to me until now.

Ah, hey, you know, the conquering hero comes home, gotta talk to him, you know, that kinda shit.

Ain’t a hero. Didn’t conquer nobody.

Huh? You ain’t? You didn’t? See, right there, that’s what I wanna talk to you about. What’s it feel like, killing somebody? How many Krauts you kill?

None.

None? You didn’t even kill one lousy Kraut? C’mon.

Not one.

C’mon, man, quit jagging me. Fuck were you doing over there?

Collecting garbage.

Collecting garbage?! Git outta here.

That’s what war does. Makes garbage.

And that’s what you were doing, huh? Picking up garbage, emptying cans, crap like ’at?

Johnny nodded.

Aw, quit jagging me, man, come on! This is me here. Billy.

Johnny turned away from the car and continued walking toward the river.

Hey! Where you going? I was just joking around, I didn’t mean nothing.

Johnny kept walking, no faster, no slower.

Billy kept pace with him. Hey! Johnny! Wanna go for a ride?

To where?

Anywhere, nowhere. C’mon, I’ll show you my car. Just got it. Practically brand new. Only got twelve thousand miles on it. Not even that. Eleven nine five oh, to be exact. Bet you’re wondering where I got the money, huh?

No. Ain’t wondering.

You ain’t? I’m gonna tell you anyway. Shit, man, I’m rolling in it. I’m driving a lift truck down the Wheel and Axel. They converted more than half the plant. Half’s still making wheels and axles, the other half’s making artillery shells. One oh five millimeters. Musta seen a lotta them over there, right?

No. I collected garbage.

Uh-huh. If you say so. Well, anyway, I’m getting all the overtime I want. I could work twelve hours every day if I wanted. And you know, everything over forty hours is time and a half. I paid cash for this baby. Only trouble is the gas rationing, you know?

No.

Yeah, well, how would you? They started last year. You’re only allowed to buy so much a week, depending on what kinda job you got. I walk to work, so I’m only allowed, like, five gallons a week. Ain’t much, but I know some guys, know what I mean? For the right price, the right people, whatever you want, you can get it. Hey, where you going? C’mon, get in.

This baby can really go, it’s a V8, you know?

No.

Well where you going anyway?

Oh-high-oh.

Ohio? You mean the river? Fuck you going there for?

To look. Makes me feel...

Makes you feel what?

Quiet.

Quiet?! Billy’s face got pinched and wrinkly, like that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. For a long moment, he inched the car forward, not saying anything.

Hey, Johnny! Ho, Johnny! Hold up, man, I wanna ask you something, you know? I’m serious now.

Johnny stopped and looked over his shoulder at Billy.

What was it like, man, huh? I’m serious now. And don’t bullshit me. You know. The war. Last couple guys I knew was over there, I asked them, but I know they was bullshitting me. I could tell, you know. They were trying really hard not to laugh at me. But I’m serious, man. I really wanna know.

Collected garbage.

Aw, come on, man, stop with that garbage shit. I wanna know what it was like. You can tell me.

I can?

Yeah. Cause we’re straight now. Like before.

Nothing’s like before. I collected—

C’mon, Johnny! Man, stop with the garbage shit.

Only person I ever tried to shoot was me.

Huh? You tried to kill yourself? What’d you wanna do that for?

Didn’t wanna collect garbage no more.

Jesus Christ, you got a one-track mind, I’ll say that for ya.

I like sitting on the tracks. I can watch the river.

One-track mind, I said, not railroad tracks. Thought I was gonna learn something talking to you. Turns out I was right all along. You really are fucking dumb.

Johnny stopped walking toward the river. He stepped out into the street. They were where Ella Street’s bricks ran out, where it turned to dirt. Because it hadn’t rained for more than a week, the dirt was a powdery grayish-tan dust. Johnny bent over from the waist.

He lowered his voice and talked evenly, not emphasizing anything. You wanna know? he said. You really wanna know what the war was like? Okay. I’ll tell you. There was garbage. Everywhere. That’s what the war was. Wasn’t like anything. It was just garbage.

Oh, for Christ sake, stop it, willya?! You collected garbage. Maybe that’s all you’re good for. Don’t know why I thought you was gonna give me the straight poop. From now on, it’s gonna be just like before. Pretend you don’t know me.

Johnny turned away from Billy and, stepping through the powdery dust, made his way across the Rox Boys Club baseball field. He walked past third base and through the grass of left field, hearing the cars and trucks humming above him on the McKees Rocks Bridge. He crossed the railroad tracks and slid down the bank of the Ohio to a small outcropping where he could sit and watch the greenish, grayish, brownish river flowing by. He felt better just thinking about how long this river had been flowing past where he was sitting and how much longer it would flow after he was dead. He thought of a song he’d heard one time.

Ol’ man river, ol’ man river, he don’t know nothin’, he don’t say nothin’, he jus’ keeps rolling along.

Thinking those words made him feel even better.

I almost drowned in you once, he said. You damn near kept me down. But you didn’t. Maybe I’d be better off if you had. I don’t know how to think about that. But you got me for sure now. I’m gonna come here and look at you every day it’s not raining or snowing hard. I’ll do most of the talking. Sometimes I talk too much. A little while ago I almost told Billy Pristash a lotta stuff I said I was never gonna tell anybody. But I caught myself in time.

I didn’t tell him, cause he would’ve blabbed everything I told him. But I can tell you. Cause like the song says, you don’t know nothin’, you don’t say nothin’, you jus’ keep rolling along.

It was a lot like here, Johnny said. Houses, apartment buildings, streets, gardens, trees, the river, factories, animals, cows, pigs, chickens, people. All blown to shit. All turned to garbage. Every day, every stinking day, and I do mean stinking, cause there ain’t no stink like it in the whole world. When people die, when animals die, if nobody buries them, as soon as they die they start to rot. And when they start rotting, they give off all kinds of smells, there ain’t any words for it, at least I don’t have any words for it, all I know is it gets in your clothes, in your hair, in your mouth, in your nose, and no matter what you do, you can’t get rid of it. And you think, the first time you smell it, what could be worse? Nothing could be worse than this. But there is something worse. It’s called Graves Registration, a nice bullshit army term. And if you’re unlucky enough to get put on GR, what you do every day as long as you can stand and bend over and zip and unzip body bags, you walk through wherever they drop you off, and you pick up bodies. And it ain’t a picnic if the poor slob got dropped with one in the head or the heart, because the real hell is when you got to pick up the pieces of a whole lot of slobs that got hit by 88s. Cause that’s when you have to walk around picking up heads, hair, brains, ears, eyeballs, noses, tongues, arms, legs, torsos — and that’s if you can even make out what it is.

There’s only one thing left I have to tell. Dog tags.

Everybody gets two. If you find a guy that died quick and in one piece, more or less, you open his mouth, you wedge one of his tags between his teeth and you take his rifle or carbine or whatever he was carrying and you put his bayonet on it and you stick it into the dirt beside him and you hang the other tag on his weapon someplace, wherever you can put it. Then you move on to the next one. Sometimes you have to use a rake and a shovel. And before you zip the bag, the last thing you do is write on the paper that goes with it, A soldier known only to God.

So now, Oh-high-oh, maybe you can tell why after thirty days of collecting that kinda thing, I wanted to blow the back of my head off. Didn’t do it. Somebody knocked me down, beat the shit outta me. Smashed my nose, cut me all over my eyebrows, my cheeks. First time I saw a mirror, I looked at it and I said, Who is that? I really couldn’t tell it was me. And so here I am, Oh-high-oh, I just dumped it all in you. Cause I can’t carry it no more.

So far you haven’t said anything. I don’t think you’ll blab no matter what I tell you. I’m pretty sure you won’t. Not that I have anything else to say. I already told you the worst part.

A couple of hours later, Johnny stood and dusted off the seat of his trousers.

Then he stretched his arms up and said, See you, Oh-high-oh. Tomorrow, probably. Don’t worry if I don’t show up. Cause my dad and my mom, they’re already worrying about what’s gonna happen to me when they die. They think I don’t hear them whispering about it. Bad as their hearing is, they have to talk loud, so it’s easy to hear them. So, one day not too far down the road, I’m sure they’ll throw their hands up and say they can’t stand me anymore. Then they’ll call the cops. And the cops will do what cops get paid to do. Take me to some nuthouse. Make sure I don’t get loose.

I have to think of some way to make them understand I won’t hold it against them for calling the cops. That won’t be their fault, any more than any of the rest of this was ever their fault. Gonna be tough convincing them, though, cause no doubt they think I lost my mind, and as long as they think that they’re never gonna believe anything I say. And anyway, I haven’t lost my mind. I know right where it is. Same place it’s always been. Under my hair.

Remember what I said, Oh-high-oh. Cause I’ve just decided I’m never gonna repeat it. Not to anybody. In fact, I might never say anything to anybody again.