Tampa Bay Noir

It’s Not Locked Because It Don’t Lock by Ladee Hubbard

Lake Maggiore

Cedric and Gerard hadn’t seen each other in five years, not since Gerard’s mom got remarried and Gerard went to live with his father in Tallahassee. Then, out of the blue, just as Cedric was coming home from work one evening, the phone rang: it was Gerard calling to say he was back in town and wanted to know if they could get together. Cedric borrowed his sister-in-law’s car and drove out to Gerard’s mom’s house to pick him up. When he got there a tall, heavy-set man was standing in the driveway. He didn’t even recognize the man as Gerard until he started walking toward the car, pulled open the passenger-side door, plopped down next to him, and smiled.

“Look at you,” Cedric said.

“Been a minute, huh?”

“What happened? You’re like a foot taller than the last time I saw you.”

“I grew up, man. That’s all.” Gerard smiled. “Thanks for giving me a ride.”

“No problem. It’s good to see you. Wish it was different circumstances.”

Gerard reached around and fastened his seat belt and Cedric put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. They cruised at parade speed down 28th Avenue, rolling past hacienda-style houses with tile roofs and sprinklers shooting jets of water above well-manicured lawns.

“How’s your aunt doing?” Cedric asked.

“Not good. She’s in there with my mom now.” Gerard nodded back toward the house. “Taking it pretty hard, you know. I think she feels like it’s her fault.”

“Well, you have my condolences. Really. I mean, I knew your cousin had problems. But still.”

They wound alongside Lake Maggiore, views of the lake flashing behind the houses that lined the shore.

“She’s not his real mom, did you know that? My mom had another sister but she died when he was a baby. He stayed with his daddy for a while but his daddy’s crazy. They had a falling out. Aunt Darla’s been keeping him since he was nine. She’s the one who really raised him... She almost had a heart attack when she heard what happened to him.”

“Damn. That’s rough.”

“Now she keeps saying how she thought he was getting better. You know, getting his life together. I think she feels bad she didn’t do something, but I don’t know what she could have done. It’s like she thinks she should have seen it coming.”

“Well, I imagine sometimes it’s hard to see.”

Cedric turned onto 27th and the car moved past New Beginnings Community Church.

“Wasn’t that hard,” Gerard said.

“What?”

“To see. Like you said, even you knew he had problems. My cousin always was a lot to deal with. Never made anything easy for himself or anybody else. Always been like that. Ever since we were kids. But he was still my cousin.”

They reached 26th Avenue and Cedric put on his turn signal. He looked at Gerard, trying to find the boy he used to know. Gerard was only seventeen when he left. They’d played football together, been real good friends in high school, but this was the first time they’d actually talked to each other in years.

He switched gears. “Hey, you know what? It’s good you called. Good you’re coming out tonight. Sounds like you need a break. For real though. I know you have a lot going on with your family right now, but you should try to put it out of your mind for a little while.” Cedric smiled. “Tony and Paulie are going to be there. I know they’re really looking forward to seeing you.”

“That’s nice,” Gerard said.

“A lot of people want to see you. Paulie said he would put the word out. Might be we could even get the whole team back together.”

“What about Shaun?” Gerard asked. “He gonna be there?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Yeah, probably. Honestly, Gerard? Shaun and I... we’re not as close as we used to be. Not like before. Don’t really associate much anymore.”

“No? Why’s that?”

“Because he’s crazy. Why do you think? You remember Shaun. Hasn’t changed at all. Still acts like we’re in high school. But I’m a grown man now. I got responsibilities, bills to pay. I don’t have time for foolishness anymore. Everybody has to grow up sometime. One day he’ll realize that too.”

The light changed and they turned onto 9th Street. The car drove past a group of five children playing in a gravel-strewn driveway next to an old Ford truck. Across the street from them, a man in a robe stood behind his fence watering the grass in his yard as he smoked a cigarette, his robe fluttering around his shorts like a flag at half-mast.

“Last night she started talking about that robbery,” Gerard said.

“What?”

“My aunt. You remember? Right before we graduated? That time my cousin got mugged? At least that’s what he told my aunt. Someone beat the shit out of him, that’s for sure. He wouldn’t talk to the police and never properly explained what actually happened that night, so she just figured he must have been someplace he shouldn’t have been, doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. In her mind it was some crazy drug addict that did that, somebody high out of his mind. I mean, it had to be someone crazy, right? Doesn’t make any sense beating someone up like that when he and his friend didn’t have but forty dollars between them.”

The car rumbled onto 22nd Avenue where the houses evaporated altogether, along with most of the trees. They were replaced by a gas station, a liquor store, and Atwater’s Soul Food restaurant.

“Now she says she feels like he was never the same after that. She told me that for like a year after he wouldn’t talk to nobody, and never even wanted to go outside after dark. He’d just go to work and then come home, eat dinner with her, and watch TV. Acting like he was scared all the time.” Gerard shook his head. “Which is hard for me to picture. We didn’t keep in touch after I left, but I remember my cousin. And he may have been a lot of things. But not scared.”

The car turned onto 16th Street and they rolled past a man in beige pants and army boots sitting on a bus stop bench. He nodded as the car passed, then lifted a small bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag.

“She says it wasn’t until a few months ago that he started acting like his old self again. Got his own place, a new job. Started going out with his friends again. And then this happens. Kind of makes you wonder if he didn’t have a reason to be scared.”

“You got to be careful out there, that’s for sure,” Cedric said. “Careful where you go, careful what you do. Make sure you know who you’re talking to. Sometimes you got to watch what you say. Lot of knuckleheads out there, people looking for trouble. I mean in general. I don’t really know what your cousin was into, so I can’t speak on his specific situation.”

“Someone strangled him,” Gerard said. “In an alley, behind a dance hall. That was his specific situation.”

They hit a red light and stopped next to the Blue Nile restaurant. Behind it was a brick building that had lost most of its front wall and stood carved open like an excavation site.

“Look, Gerard. What’s up? You have something you want to say to me? Because I thought I was coming to see an old friend. Why are you bringing up something that happened five years ago? I mean, I’m sorry about your cousin. But I don’t see what the two things have to do with each other.”

A woman in a long red dress clutched a Bible to her chest as she strode past the black and charred remains of some of the buildings set ablaze during the riots. Gerard watched the woman make her way to the bus stop on the corner.

“You were there that night,” Gerard said. “The night he got beat up like that.”

“Yes, I was there. A lot of people were. Who told you? Cheryl?”

“My cousin did, right after it happened. I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time. Didn’t make sense to me, thinking about my friends doing something like that to my cousin. Thought it was like my mom said, that he didn’t want people to know what he’d really been doing that night. I knew he hated Shaun and figured he was just trying to stir up some mess.”

“It was five years ago, Gerard. We were kids. It was stupid and I’m sorry it happened. But, like I said, I don’t really see what it has to do with anything now.”

“How come you never told me?”

“I don’t know. It had already happened. I guess I didn’t really see what good talking about it would do. We were about to graduate and then you were moving to Tallahassee. I felt stupid, just for having let myself get involved in something like that. And honestly? I think a part of me just assumed you knew.”

Cedric shook his head and looked out at the restaurant across the street, where three teenage boys pounded their fists on the window of the kitchen. It slid open and another boy, plastic hairnet festooned to his skull, stuck his head out and passed them a large doggie bag full of leftovers.

“What did your cousin tell you?”

“He said y’all were having some kind of party at Tony’s house. He said he wasn’t doing nothing but walking down the street with a couple of his friends. And you and Shaun just started hassling them. Said it seemed like you just went berserk. Kicked the shit out of him while everybody else just stood around and watched.”

“Yeah? That what he said? Because that’s not exactly true.” Cedric sighed. “Your cousin was provoking us. You know how your cousin was, know he used to provoke people all the time. He and his friends always strutting around in those crazy outfits, laughing all loud and talking shit. And we were all at Tony’s celebrating because the school year was almost over and here he comes, walking down the street. Shaun made some joke about the way his ass swished when he walked, and he came back asking something like why Shaun spent so much time looking at it. People started laughing. Looked to me like your cousin enjoyed the attention because he just kept going. Shaun warned him to stop but he wouldn’t shut the fuck up. And now everybody was laughing at us. We had to do something, it was like he was giving us no choice.”

Cedric looked out the window. “It was stupid. And I’m sorry about it, if that makes you feel better. I was sorry as soon as I woke up the next morning, soon as I realized what I had done. Over what? Some weirdo calling me a name? Saying something about me everybody already knew wasn’t true? And here I am, about to graduate. Got my whole life ahead of me and I’m gonna risk blowing it like that?”

He shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth, Gerard. It’s part of why I don’t hang out with Shaun anymore. Because I learned from it. Realized I couldn’t just be flying off the handle like that. Realized I had to know how to keep my cool, that I needed to be around people who kept cool too. Because if you think about it, the one who might have really gotten fucked up over it is me. My future. My chances in life. I mean I’m serious. I could have wound up in jail. Just for beating up some little freak.”

Gerard stared out the window. A clean-looking kid in a white Camaro pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. He watched the boy walk around and open the door for a pretty girl in a yellow tank top sulking in the passenger seat.

Cedric put the car back in drive. “I’m sorry it happened. But that was five years ago and, if nothing else, I learned from it. And, I don’t know, when your cousin didn’t press charges, I thought maybe he had learned from it too. Because it wasn’t just me and Shaun acting foolish that night. Your cousin was not some innocent party. He provoked us. Was asking for it. And maybe you don’t want to hear this right now but... truth? If you’d had been there that night, you would have been right there with me and Shaun. Because I know you. I mean, I remember how you were in high school. Know how mad you would have been if someone ever disrespected you like that. Just like I know that deep down you realize: a lot of the trouble your cousin had back then? He brought it on himself.”

Gerard stayed quiet. The car continued down 16th Street where two elderly women in matching green dresses, gold lamé shoes, and leaf-shaped hats walked down the concrete steps of a small house, the thin breeze puffing their skirts into bell shapes, hems raised just enough so Gerard could see that their dark stockings were only knee-highs.

Gerard nodded. “My cousin always was hard. And like you said, he did have problems. You know how he came to live with my Aunt Darla? His daddy caught him trying on his mama’s lipstick when he was nine. Come home from work and there’s my cousin standing in front of the mirror in his bedroom with bright-red lipstick smeared all across his mouth. His daddy beat the shit out of him and kicked him out of the house. My cousin and I were real close back then, if you can believe it. Used to do everything together. I didn’t even realize there was anything strange about him at the time. Because he didn’t seem strange to me.

“When I asked him why he’d done that, he said he’d found it in the drawer and just wanted to know what her kisses felt like. Isn’t that funny? I realize now he was probably lying about that, but you know what? At the time? I believed him. Somehow it made sense to me. I understood it and I didn’t see why it was such a big deal. But then my aunt told some people at her church about it and somehow it got around at school. People started teasing him, calling him names, and laughing at him. And because we were always together, people started calling me names too. Got so bad I stopped wanting to do anything with him.

“Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Got tired of defending him, got tired of having to hear it. Told him I was embarrassed to be in public with him because he acted so weird all the time, when really he acted the same when we were alone at my house, and the stuff he used to do never really bothered me then. Truth is, I was scared. Scared of the way people made fun of him, scared people would start confusing him for me. And mostly I was scared because when he told me about kissing that mirror, I hadn’t realized it was a big deal. Started wondering if maybe there was something wrong with me too, just for feeling like I understood it, for the fact that it didn’t bother me the way it seemed to bother everybody else. It was like I got suspicious of my own understanding, the fact that, deep down, I never thought he was all that strange. I mean, not in a way that really mattered. And now when looking back on us in high school, I feel like I spent most of my time trying more than anything not to understand things. Didn’t want to feel nothing because I was so worried what I felt might be wrong. I think that’s really why I was so mad all the time. When people tried to explain to me why I needed to calm down, why I shouldn’t be so upset or something wasn’t a big deal, I would just look at them, suspicious. It’s almost like I thought feeling something for other people was some kind of trick, because I believed there was something wrong with me and I didn’t want other people to know.”

In the rearview mirror, Cedric could still see the two old women passing slowly beneath a streetlight’s glow.

“My cousin used to say he figured I stunted my own growth that way. One time he told me that, as much shit as he got from people just for walking down the street, the one he really felt sorry for was me, because at least he was being who he was. Said he thought it was pathetic how hard I tried to fit in with people like you and Shaun, that there was a beautiful person somewhere inside me but I had smothered it by being a coward. Used to say stuff like that to me all the time, and of course I didn’t like it. Was provoking, just like you said. But now, when I look back at myself in high school, I figure he might have been telling the truth. That’s how I know you’re right. If someone had ever tried to disrespect me the way he did to you that night, I would have been right there with you. Except for one thing.” Gerard reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun. “He was my cousin.”

“What are you doing?”

“That was my cousin. What the hell were you thinking disrespecting my family like that?”

“Wait a minute, Gerard—”

“You didn’t have anything to do with what happened at that dance hall, did you? Someone jumped him that night — how do I know it wasn’t you?”

“Me? No! Of course not. I don’t go to places like that. I would never—”

“What about Shaun?”

“Shaun? I don’t know about Shaun. I told you I don’t have anything to do with him anymore.”

“Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Somebody did it. Somebody got to pay for it. Might as well be you.”

“But it wasn’t me. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him. And that thing at that party, that was five years ago. Doesn’t have anything to do with now. Look at me, Gerard. I’m telling you I’ve changed.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. I haven’t.” Gerard shook his head. “Why do you think I just told you all of that, about what my cousin used to say to me? I think he was right, I think I may have stunted my own growth somehow. Because I’m sitting here, listening to you talk about how you’ve changed, and how long ago that party was, and how I have no business being upset about it now. And I got to tell you: I don’t understand a word of it.”

“Don’t do this, Gerard. Please—”

“I know. Pitiful, huh?”

They didn’t even realize they had run a red light until the car braked suddenly and they lurched forward in unison. A station wagon roared through the intersection, the man in the driver’s seat mouthing curses while two girls stared with their mouths curved into startled Ohs! and their palms pressed against the glass of the rear window. Cedric swerved to avoid hitting them and ran into a telephone pole. There was a loud crash and a hubcap popped off and rolled into the street. For a moment, the car sat stranded on the sidewalk, blanketed by a cloud of smoke kicked up by screeching brakes.

Cedric struggled to lift his head. He could feel blood gushing from his nose, spilling into his open mouth. When he opened his eyes, Gerard was still sitting next to him, a nasty gash on his forehead. There was blood running down the side of his face, spilling onto the front of his shirt. He looked like someone had just beaten the shit out of him. But he was still holding the gun.

“Now let’s go see Shaun,” Gerard said.

Marked by Gale Massey

Pinellas Park

Callie stood at home plate in the first inning of the game, hoping for the right pitch, when she heard the crash. A breeze rustled the palm trees out past the left field fence. Overhead the sunset had turned the sky purple. The crowd in the bleachers fell silent waiting for the metal-against-metal screech to stop, but it went on so long that everyone knew it had been deadly. The dugout emptied onto the field, the players and coaches stood facing south where the train crossed Park Boulevard, even though that intersection was a quarter mile away and blocked from view by city hall and none of them could see a thing. Pinellas Park had been built after the railroad, and the tracks ran through the small town at a foolish angle. Callie rested the bat on her shoulder and scrunched up her face, but that thing people talk about, how you know in your gut someone close to you has died? That part never happened. After the game resumed the lights on the field came on, she swung at a fast ball, and was out. By the last inning her granddad had arrived to tell her the news.

It never dawned on her that her parents might’ve been in that car. They had said they wanted a few minutes alone and dropped her off at the field promising to be right back. It seemed they were always trying to get a few minutes alone, a thing she doesn’t understand even now, two years later. The three of them were always happy enough, riding in the pickup with Callie squeezed between them, her father’s arm stretched behind her back, playing with a lock of her mother’s hair.

Burial expenses wiped out the equity on their small cinder-block house, so it went back to the bank. Her granddad, the town’s widowed preacher, insisted on a four-foot-tall family headstone, had it installed beneath the ancient moss-draped oak at the grave of his long-dead wife, and bought two silk-lined mahogany caskets. Nothing less, he claimed, would serve the memory of his son. Callie saw the reasoning there, but when Granddad paid for three plots, one for each of her parents and one for himself, it bothered her. The old man explained that when she grew up she’d have a husband, and when she died she’d have to be buried next to him, but it was a man and a situation Callie already knew would never exist.

On the day of the funeral the crowded church was sweltering beneath the Florida sun. Halfway through delivering his son’s eulogy, her granddad had a stroke that nearly killed him. He never walked again and soon his ability to speak vanished. He went into the retirement home two blocks from the high school, and Callie went into a foster care group home. But in a town that was Little League crazy, the half-grown girl never got noticed by families looking to adopt.

The sudden upheaval in her life was a shock, though a well-meaning counselor at family services stepped in to teach her how to manage the anxiety that consumed her. The better help came from a large bottle of small blue pills that the house manager gave her at intervals throughout the day and whenever she asked for another. The pills helped her breathe on bad days. On other days they kept her from biting her nails to the quick. The first year after the train wreck passed without lodging itself in her memory. She went through the motions of brushing her teeth and eating, but her mind was always at home plate, the bat resting on her shoulder, listening to the screeching metal.

With help from the pills two years crept by so slowly that her memory seemed like a movie about some other girl and some other family. After another year Callie couldn’t trace herself back to a moment when she wasn’t sliding toward panic. Approaching a window caused a small jolt of adrenaline to burst in her stomach. A door could leave her paralyzed. The house manager kept an eye on her, took her shopping sometimes at the Dollar Store at the strip mall in town just for the distraction of stocking up on household goods. Callie hated shopping. The store added dimension to the world when what she craved was something that would make it smaller. Shelf after shelf of canned and boxed food. Where did it all come from? Who had touched it? Had they washed their hands? Everyone knew about tampering, how it happened all the time.

Opening jars was the worst. Wondering what some stranger might have put in the applesauce or toothpaste. Anything could be tainted, especially products from the Dollar Store where the poor people shopped, yet the house manager refused to waste money across town at the more expensive Winn-Dixie. Callie stayed awake at night worrying that the food from supper had been contaminated by a disgruntled worker on a production line, amused at the thought of killing a stranger on the other side of the country. Callie took to slitting the tube to get the toothpaste out of the bottom. She’d use it a few times and throw it out, count herself lucky each time she survived. Eventually she stopped using it altogether because the counselor told her it was good to trust her intuition, and her intuition made her suspicious of Dollar Store toothpaste.

On the really bad days, when even four pills didn’t help, she used matches. She kept a pack with her because some days just holding the matchbook was enough, on other days the smell of sulfur was enough. On really, really bad days she had to feel the burn. The burn turned her mind white. It told her she was strong and had nothing to hide from because in the middle of a burn the only choice was to endure.

A girl at school had asked if she wanted to see a match burn twice and Callie had been intrigued. The girl struck the match, blew it out, and touched it to Callie’s arm. She screamed as white light exploded behind her eyes.

The girl laughed and said, “Make your mark or the world will make it on you.”

Callie saw her point. Right then she decided to make her own marks — a strip of burn scars down the inside of her arm.

The burn hit the back of her head first and wiped her mind clean. Nothing else existed while her head was lit up like that. The counselor noticed the scars. She made a note on Callie’s chart and suggested she trade softball for basketball. The next day a new prescription showed up and was added to her morning medication. Callie studied the new pill. It was solid and harder to swallow and sometimes got lodged sideways in her throat and hurt until it dissolved.

Basketball was no more fun than softball. She couldn’t run and dribble at the same time, she always got turned around on the floor and ran to the wrong net, but she was taller than the other girls and able to snag rebounds over their heads. The coach told her to plant herself under the net and stay there. It was a losing season and the coach cut her after the last game. The counselor told her sports weren’t for everyone and signed her up for the Junior ROTC in the hope that she might develop responsibility and leadership skills, maybe start to see a future for herself beyond graduation.

Officer Sloan ran the Junior ROTC program at the high school. There was a rumor that he wrestled for money at the armory on Saturday nights, and she felt safer when he was around because no one was fool enough to start a fight in his presence. Halfway through the second semester he started taking the class to the shooting range to teach gun safety and get them some target practice.

The first time she held a gun she was surprised at its weight. The heft of it sent a charge up her arm all the way to the center of her stomach. The feeling didn’t have a name, but as she stood there turning the gun over in her hand, she felt a shift inside.

Sloan came up behind her. “It feels good, right?”

It did feel good.

“The rules are simple. Keep the barrel aimed at the floor and never point it at anything you don’t mean to destroy,” he said.

He showed her how to open the cylinder and load the bullets. One by one she slid them into place, then flipped the cylinder closed. He took the gun and handed her earmuffs, pointed the pistol toward the target, and fired off a round.

She watched him, the twitch in his shoulder, the bullets shredding the paper target at the end of their lane.

“Now you,” he said, and she reloaded.

He stepped behind her, adjusted her grip, and put his hand on the back of her right shoulder blade. She shuddered. It was the most human contact she’d had since sitting on her father’s lap in church.

Sloan didn’t notice. “You’re going to feel the kick right here. Brace for it and pull the trigger.”

When she fired, his hand caught the kick in her shoulder. The bullet tore a hole near the center of the target.

“I knew it,” he said. “You’re a natural.”

He stepped back and she emptied the cylinder. It was like a wind sweeping through her bones. The gun was hot in her hand, her breath steady and even. Her spine straightened as though tempered by the strength of metal. Guns cracked all around her, up and down the firing lanes, and left an intoxicating smell in the air.

She got a part-time job at the range just to be near that noise, smell that smell. For the first time in her life she didn’t mind waking early. One hour before school to empty the bins of shredded paper targets and sweep the lanes of used casings, saving the last ten minutes for practice. The rush from shredding a paper human was the medicine she needed most. Her first paycheck surprised her. She would have done it for free. She bought a necklace at the strip mall, a bullet on a chain that once she put on, she never took off again. Her enthusiasm pleased Sloan and earned her the honor of packing up the pistols and carrying them to the backseat of his apple-red truck each Friday after class ended.

Scared. She’d felt scared for as long as she could remember, but pulling that trigger made everything different. Holding a gun calmed her more than the pills, more than the breathing techniques the counselor had taught her, more than a match head on her skin. She didn’t need to burn anymore and the counselor took that as a sign of progress. The weight of the gun, the smell, and the blast annihilated fear, squashed and contained it to a size she imagined small enough to fit inside the bullet she wore around her neck.

The bullet was a touchstone that she reached for each morning. A totem, a solid thing to hold onto when so much else seemed vague. She held it in her hand whenever she heard the train pass through town, remembering the terrible noise from the wreck, knowing it had been a curse for her parents to die with that noise all around them. She drew strength from the bullet on her way to school, as she walked down Park Boulevard past the Feed & Seed, the small white church with its high steeple, and the motel where the drunks sat on the curb so close she could smell the whiskey on their breath. The bullet gave her the strength to jog until the air smelled clean again. She touched it when she walked through the lunch room trying to find an empty table where she could eat her bag lunch alone, when she left the school grounds in the afternoon, and at night when she crawled in bed. Her fingers were wrapped around the bullet when she closed her eyes and the last pill entered her bloodstream, traveled to her brain, and allowed her mind to go dark for a few hours.

She was dreaming of her granddad when she woke on Friday morning. She knew he’d been in the army years ago, that he would be proud of her aim and the skill she had in handling a pistol. After class she loaded Sloan’s truck with the gun cases. He’d parked behind a stand of palmetto bushes, which made it easy to hide while she slipped the smallest revolver from its case and stuffed it in her backpack.

Alone behind the gun range, she loaded the bullets she’d stolen from Sloan’s truck. She spun the cylinder a few times, feeling the metal’s satisfying clicks, snapped it closed. The weight of cold steel resting in her hands, the power she felt stirring in her gut. It made no sense how much she loved having this thing all to herself. She touched the bullet hanging around her neck, remembering her father’s wedding band and how she would play with it on Sundays while listening to her granddad preach. The church was hot on those mornings. Air-conditioning wasn’t in the budget and the windows were too high up for a decent cross breeze, but it wasn’t considered Christianly to complain. Before the heat pulled her into a stupefying sleep she would sit on her father’s lap and play with his ring. His hands were big, the ring too small to slip over his knuckles, but she would try until her eyelids grew heavy.

She thought about waking up in church with her father’s arm draped over her shoulder as she walked to the retirement home. The old man had aged fast and seemed to be caving in on himself more each week. After his stroke they kept him strapped in a wheelchair, his head bobbing, drool spilling on the pajamas he wore all the time. He never talked but moaned often and loudly. He was on the front porch when she arrived, watching an egret over by the oleanders stalk its supper. It stabbed a lizard and ran to the edge of the grass.

The pill she was supposed to have taken at lunch was still in her pocket. She popped it in her mouth and chewed it to make the calm come faster.

She showed him the bullet on its chain. He nodded and it seemed he understood. She wiped the drool off his chin with the blanket draped across his lap. She told him she’d brought a gun to show him, that it was inside her backpack.

He grabbed her hand and she was surprised at his strength. He knocked her hand against his sternum, mouthed the word Here.

“Yes,” she said, “I have it here.”

She told him how anytime she touched the bullet she felt better.

His hand dropped to his knee and waved like a dying fish, perturbed, uneasy. A squirrel came onto the porch, sniffing around for the peanuts the staff set out every afternoon. Callie hated squirrels, thought of them as rodents with fluffy tails. She kicked at it and it jumped into the grass.

“Me,” he said.

“What?”

He grabbed her hand and placed it over his heart. “Right here.”

A red truck pulled into the parking lot and she thought briefly of how almost everyone in town had a relative in this place.

It was the first time her granddad had touched her in years, but now she understood. She’d taken the gun for one reason, loaded it for one reason.

She slung her backpack over her shoulder and wheeled him back inside, through the dining hall where the staff was putting out fresh bibs and juice boxes, down a corridor of rooms with noisy televisions, past the aide at the medicine cart and the janitor mopping the tiled floor.

She got her granddad inside his room and locked the door.

The gun was wrapped in a hand towel inside her backpack. When she unwrapped it and showed it to him, his eyes turned bright. He mumbled some words that might’ve been a prayer. She took it as a sign. He was rocking back and forth. He was excited and so was she.

Someone tried to open the door and her granddad hushed. The handle jerked a few more times then stopped.

He tapped his chest and mumbled more things she couldn’t understand.

Red lights hit the windowpane. Another ambulance, another resident, another old-timer with a stopped heart. He stared out the window briefly then looked back at her. She brought the pistol close to him. He reached for it and knocked it out of her hand.

It was disgusting having to put her hands on the floor under his bed, guessing at the kind of germs that were sticking to her palms. The pistol had slid next to some half-eaten toast and a ball of used tissue. She grabbed the gun and crawled out from under the bed.

She understood this was scary for him, yet she knew what was right. She had aim. She had this one skill. She was a natural. Then she had a moment of doubt. Maybe he didn’t understand. Maybe waving his hand like that meant something else entirely. Maybe she had it all wrong.

A voice shouted from the hallway. Someone banged on the door.

There was always doubt before she swung at the ball, before she lit the match, doubt before swallowing a pill. She knew not to give in to doubt. She had intuition. When it came down to it, she had follow-through.

She put the pistol to her granddad’s chest, took a deep breath.

The blast knocked her against the wall. She slid to the floor wondering how there’d been so much kick. Maybe she hadn’t planted her feet. Maybe the gun had misfired.

The window was blown out. Her granddad still sat upright in his wheelchair, the floor and his lap covered in shattered glass.

Sloan stood outside the window, so close he could have stepped into the room, his mouth set in a hard line. He kept her gaze, kept the rifle pointed at her as the janitor swung open the door. Sloan lowered the gun and said, “The rules were easy, Callie.”

The bullet, lodged somewhere in her lungs, spread a dull ache down each arm, up into her head, through her torso. The cold dead weight of the pistol sat in her hand and she tried to close her fingers around it. It was impossible to move, to reach for the bullet hanging around her neck. She heard the train approach, saw a mound of shredded paper targets in its path, endured the searing pain. Then, as the air of her final breath escaped through the hole in her chest, Callie saw herself standing at home plate, the bat resting on her shoulder, hoping for the right pitch.

Pablo Escobar by Yuly Restrepo Garcés

Largo

On the Tuesday of my second week of eleventh grade in America, Nicole found me eating on the stairs by the soda machine and introduced herself. Several weeks later, I’d be clinging to the back of her sweater as we said goodbye for the last time before she got on a plane to somewhere in Oklahoma, but that Tuesday I was just scared to talk to her. The school floor plan dictated that at lunch students had to gather in a big rectangular space in the middle of the building, and there were few places where I could eat without being out for everyone to see me. The previous week, my cousin and her friends, who were in the tenth grade, had made fun of my ratty, faded Chuck Taylors and middle part and the fact that I was wearing jeans instead of a skirt and my general FOB-ness. After that, I stopped sitting with them at lunch. I wanted to talk to no one, especially some girl who couldn’t speak Spanish.

Nicole put a lot of coins in the soda machine and pushed some buttons and took out two plastic bottles with what looked like blue liquid in them. She walked over to the stairs, where I was failing to take delicate bites out of what the cafeteria sign said was a sloppy joe sandwich. Nicole handed me one of the bottles.

The liquid inside was, indeed, electric blue, and the label said Fruitopia.

“You’re in my French class,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve seen me because I sit in the back. You’re always in the front.”

Nicole was short and chubby, with brown hair that she had styled in stiff curls, and small, incandescent blue eyes. Even as my heart raced with the responsibility of answering, I thought of my mom, who would have loved the color of Nicole’s eyes as she had been loving the blue eyes of people we encountered in the overly air-conditioned grocery stores of Largo since we’d come to America a few weeks earlier. Nicole was wearing cargo pants, a tight navy T-shirt, and crisp white sneakers that she later told me were K-Swiss, as if that was supposed to mean something to me. She’d soon be my first real American friend, and I’d lose her just as quickly.

“Thank you,” I said. “We’re in French together?”

“Yeah, I sit in the back. Might as well because I never know the answers to the questions. You know all the answers, but I can never hear you when you say them.”

“I know a little French,” I said. Before leaving Colombia, I had been in college for a semester, studying foreign languages. My French was good, but English was what I liked to study the most. Now it made me feel dumb when Americans spoke to me and I couldn’t keep up, or I pronounced a word I knew well in a way they couldn’t understand, so silence became my refuge.

Nicole opened her soda and drank three big gulps, pointing with her eyes at my bottle, asking me to do the same. The soda tasted like cotton candy. I thanked her again.

“Where are you from?” she asked. When I told her, she said she didn’t know where Colombia was, but that some cousins on her mom’s side were from the Virgin Islands.

“South America,” I said. She nodded.

Outside, a blindingly bright and hot late-August day raged, but any natural light that entered the building did so through a row of small windows high on the walls above student lockers. The spotless white floor, the blue lockers, the cafeteria tables — all had the sheen of fluorescent lighting.

“Did you know there was a shooting at this school a long time ago?”

“Someone shot in here?”

“Yeah, my dad told me two kids brought guns to school and started shooting people at lunch. I think the principal died or something. But it was a long time ago. Anyway, they were fucking crazy.”

I kept trying in vain to eat daintily while Nicole told me tales of the place where I had come to live. She told me about the rainbow stain in the shape of the Virgin Mary that had surfaced on an office-building window in Clearwater, about a town full of psychics and mediums, about alligators in people’s swimming pools and ghosts in an old hotel that was now a university building in Tampa. She said her dad was a huge nerd and liked to collect all kinds of things, including these bizarre Florida happenings. She said we could eat together from now on, and that I could go over to her house whenever I wanted.

That night, my mom and I dragged a beige leatherette sofa we had found on the curb of our street into our duplex. It was the only piece of furniture we now had, aside from a TV-dinner table my mom’s boss had given her. The previous night, the aunt we had come to stay with had yelled at my mom for not doing anything around the house, and we’d had to leave and move into the apartment we had found only a few days earlier. We had planned to move into it after we got some furniture. My aunt didn’t work and spent all day watching tennis matches on TV and sipping vodka out of an iced tea can and crying while showing me clothes she had worn when she was younger and thinner. I didn’t know what to do with all that, so I pretended I had something else I needed to do. I didn’t even have the guts to tell her she was being unfair to my mom, who worked two jobs. Eventually, I understood this was what made being friends with Nicole so easy. She expected nothing of me but what I could give her. She didn’t even expect me to talk.

The morning I met Nicole, before I’d left for school, my mom had given me a piece of paper with the address of the apartment we were moving into. It was one street over from my aunt’s place, a street full of duplexes just like ours, whitewashed, with overgrown front yards and chain-link fences and old cars parked outside. Ours was a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba a coworker had sold to my dad for five hundred dollars. It had no air-conditioning.

I told my mom about the Virgin on the window, and she said we could go see her when my dad felt better. I also told her about Nicole. She said she felt happy I had made a friend, and that it was good that she spoke English, and not Spanish, because my English would improve.

We dragged the sofa into the living room. Then I laid a sheet over it and claimed it as my bed for the night. My mom had already put some thick blankets and bed covers on the carpet of the master bedroom for my father, and that’s where she’d sleep too. The three of us drank iced tea and ate a pizza my mom had bought at the grocery store and heated up in the oven. The pizza was topped with tiny, spicy meatballs, which I hated, but the iced tea was sweet and cold.

After dinner, I finished what was left of my homework and lay on the couch, ready to sleep. The neighborhood felt wholly quiet in a way I wasn’t used to. At night, my neighborhood in Medellín was full of the sounds of passing cars and neighbors’ conversations and music and, even after people had gone to sleep, the steady whistle of the night watchman. Now all I heard was the hum of the air conditioner and the fridge, which made the apartment feel emptier.

In the middle of the night, I went back to the bedroom to ask my parents if I could spend the night on the floor with them instead. The couch, it turned out, was riddled with ants.

My dad’s accident happened three days before my aunt kicked us out and four days before I met Nicole. Only a couple of days after arriving in the States, he got a job at a recycling plant. He hadn’t even had time to visit the beautiful Clearwater Beach my aunt kept telling us about before he went to work. The day of the accident, one of the plant’s conveyer belts stopped working, and my dad, who had been a mechanic back home, offered to take a look at it. He climbed onto the belt, which was about two stories high, and removed stuff that had gotten it stuck, at which point, one of his coworkers, who didn’t realize my dad was up there, turned on the belt, and my dad fell into the machine at the end of it. His whole body went through the grinder before anyone could help him. He broke no bones, but he bruised some ribs, and when my aunt brought him home from the ER, he looked like someone in one of the many stories I’d heard back home of people being given scopolamine and taken to various ATMs around the city until their bank accounts were empty and they didn’t know who or where they were. His dark hair was gray with debris and his eyes were bloodshot and his shredded work pants barely covered his scraped-up legs. Upon seeing him, a flood of heat and tears rose in me, and he said, “Don’t worry. Things can only get better now.”

I’d never seen him so frail. Even on the day his brother was murdered on a street corner for helping as a messenger for one of Medellín’s branches of the liberal party, at a time when being open about any kind of politics made you someone’s deathly enemy, my dad had been sturdy as he grieved.

Now the sight of him told me the opposite of what his mouth said, and that’s what I should have listened to. If I had, I could have protected myself at least, but now it was me, in high school after having attended college; my mom, working two housekeeping jobs that kept her away from home from six in the morning until ten at night; and my dad, trying to heal his bruised bones even as he slept on the floor. We shared an empty duplex, and we had no one but each other.

Or at least I thought so. My parents wanted me to think otherwise.

“How do you think we got this car?” my mom said. “And who helped us get this apartment?”

We were sitting on the carpet, sharing another pizza. This one had only vegetables on it, and I liked it much more than the one before.

“Well, it wasn’t our family,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” my dad chimed in. “If it weren’t for your aunt, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, but that’s money you still owe,” I said. “And how are you going to pay her now?”

A few days after we moved into the new place, Nicole asked if I wanted to go to her house after school, and when I said I couldn’t because I had to go take care of my dad, she asked what was wrong. As best I could, I told her about my dad’s accident and our empty apartment, about how we didn’t have pots and pans for our kitchen and how all our money had gone into paying a deposit and first month’s rent on the duplex.

“I’ll come visit. I promise I won’t stay long. I’ll get out of your way if your dad isn’t feeling well.”

That afternoon she showed up at the duplex with two men. One was overweight, dark-haired, and pink-skinned, the other tall, lean, and blond. They both wore baggy jean shorts and black shirts, though the big man’s shirt had bright-yellow and orange flames all around the bottom. Nicole’s hair was in a high ponytail, and she wore olive-green shorts, a red crop top with spaghetti straps, and huge gold-hoop earrings.

“This is my dad,” she said, pointing at neither of them. “I told him about you guys, and he wanted to help. God knows we have enough fucking stuff.”

“Hi, I’m Jake,” the tall, thin one said, shaking my hand. “This is my friend Cory. We brought you a mattress and some other things. The mattress is good, I promise.”

“Okay, thank you,” I said.

We all walked to the driveway, where a small silver trailer was hitched to a giant black pickup truck. Nicole’s dad opened the trailer to reveal a mattress on which my parents would surely be able to sleep, and an array of chairs, tables, kitchen things, and even a twenty-inch TV.

“All that is for us?” I asked.

“We have an air mattress in there too,” Nicole’s dad said. “Nicole’s going to inflate it for you. Listen, you have to tell your dad about worker’s comp. He should have some money coming. Do you understand?”

My cheeks, already warm from the summer heat, grew warmer with tears. I nodded and thanked him. I could hardly speak from sobbing.

“Now girl,” Nicole’s dad said, “let’s not turn this into some sappy moment. I know that whenever Nicole needs you, you’re going to be there for her. This is purely selfish, okay?”

“Like everything else he does,” Nicole said, and gave him a taunting grimace.

He didn’t react, instead stepping into the trailer to push the mattress out. I thought that was so strange. I could count on one hand the number of times my parents had hit me, but saying something like that to them would have surely added to the count. And here was such a nice man doing kind things for us at her behest, and this was how she treated him. I stopped crying, mostly from feeling like I should behave extra obediently to make up for Nicole’s brattiness. I decided to please Jake, to be as invisible as I could while they brought stuff inside. I let myself feel his kindness and the warmth of hopefulness.

In less than an hour, Jake and Cory had taken everything inside and dumped the ant-riddled sofa back on the curb. I went to get some iced tea, only to find them sitting on it when I got back. The thick August air made my hair stick to the back of my neck and my clothes feel heavy, as if I’d been swimming in them. The men’s faces dripped with sweat, and they drank in big gulps and talked about other people they knew. Even though they looked so different, they seemed like the same person. They modeled each other the way children do their schoolmates. They both seemed good humored. They wore the same clothes and moved in the same jumpy, birdlike way. Both had patchy beards and wore chains that linked their wallets to their belt loops, but neither wore a belt. After they drank the tea, Jake took out a pack of Newports, gave one to Cory, and put one in his mouth. I could tell it was the same for everything else — they liked the same music, the same food and drink, the same women.

Nicole stood by the chain-link fence that separated our duplex from the one next to us, kicking the grass with her pristine sneakers and sending the gray sand that had been resting among the brown blades up in the air. This was how all the yards on our block looked — spotty, brown, equal parts grass and sand from the soft Florida soil.

“Why are you here and not there?” I asked Nicole.

“They don’t want me there. They keep whispering shit to each other, so I might as well not fucking interrupt them. They’re probably talking about my mom anyway. God, he’s such an asshole.”

“Your mom?”

“All they do is fight, and then they do shit like this — throw parties, volunteer at school, give away stuff. She hasn’t even slept in their bedroom for months. She calls him an idiot for all the nerdy, creepy shit he’s always been into that she knew about from the beginning. So then he brings Cory over and they stay up all night listening to music and watching their weird-ass movies at top volume and smoking weed. He yells at her for not letting him enjoy his life. They’re both assholes.”

“Don’t they care? When you call them that?”

She shrugged. “My mom’s threatening to move back to Oklahoma where my grandma lives. Anyway, if you ever want some weed, I can steal some of his.”

Nicole’s dad got up and crushed his cigarette stub, while Cory threw the iced tea cans in the garbage and shook off the ants that had managed to crawl up his legs. They both laughed softly at something one of them had said. I couldn’t imagine Jake yelling at anyone, much less his wife.

“Does your mom work on Saturday?” Nicole’s dad asked.

“No sir,” I said.

“If she’s going to take care of your dad, I’ll take you and Nicole to the beach.”

“If you let me drive, you wouldn’t have to take us anywhere,” Nicole said.

“You’re not going to drive this huge-ass truck, honey,” he said.

“Can you even reach the pedals?” Cody said, and laughed until he was out of breath. I didn’t know whether his face was flushed from the heat or the laughing.

“God, you two are such fucking dicks,” Nicole said, then climbed into the truck and slammed the door.

Indian Rocks Beach was one of the hottest places I’d ever been. There was nowhere to hide from the light here. Even in the late afternoon, the air smelled of sulfuric heat, just as it had on the day we landed in Miami after our flight from home. On that day, as we drove up that lonely four-hour stretch of highway to Largo, to the apartment we’d be kicked out of a month later, I could see waves of heat rising up from the pavement. Before Jake brought me and Nicole to this beach, I had only been to Clearwater Beach once, when my aunt had brought me and my mom to eat ice cream by the pier. Mine was promptly stolen away by a seagull. That had been when my mom didn’t have any job at all, and we all still pretended my aunt didn’t have a drinking problem. We played the game of getting along, while I slept until noon every day and told myself repeatedly I liked this quietude, hoping the day would come when I’d believe it.

Now, Nicole, her dad, and I sat on towels on top of sand coarsened by millions upon millions of shells, and I wondered why the only people in the water were parents with their young children. Otherwise, we were surrounded by a few older people, often sitting in pairs on beach chairs and reading magazines or thick paperback novels. Nicole’s dad said all of them lived in the condos that lined the shore behind us, their pastel facades a rainbow.

“Most of them only come in the colder months, so a lot of those apartments are empty now,” he said. “It gets pretty cold up north. But some of them move down here for good. I’d like to own one of these myself when I get older.”

I wondered how anyone could afford these beachfront properties in the first place, let alone as second, winter homes. I couldn’t understand how I was here now, surrounded by luxuries I’d seen in movies, when only a few months ago our neighbors had pooled money so we could pay our power bill, so my mother could cook dinner and I didn’t have to do my homework by candlelight. It was hard to understand how these places were within reach now, but I still had to wonder whether we’d make rent next month.

“I don’t think I’ll ever live in one of them,” I said, pointing behind me.

“Sure you will,” Jake said. “Anyone that comes to this country gets the same chance.”

The air smelled like the older people who moved here wanted to be burned alive. Nicole had slathered on an oily lotion that smelled of coconut. She lay on her back with a towel covering her face, not saying much. Jake asked me a few questions about my family, like where in Colombia we were from and why we’d come to the States and how we’d ended up in Largo. There was so much I could have told him about those candlelit nights that came after the men who’d killed my uncle started directing their threats my dad’s way, so his usual clients wouldn’t do business with him anymore for fear of ending up like my uncle. I could have talked about the block parties the neighbors threw at Christmastime, about getting up at four in the morning to take the bus to the metro so I could be on campus in time for my six o’clock English class, and how sometimes I didn’t have money for the fare and couldn’t go. There was so much I wanted to tell him, so much that got stuck somewhere between my brain and my tongue, so I just said the things I knew how to say.

“Oh, Medellín!” Jake said. “Pablo Escobar, right?”

I smiled and nodded, holding in a sigh. He took a sip of his light beer and readjusted his black baseball hat. His brown eyes glinted in the inescapable sunlight. His face was covered in wheat-colored scraggly hairs that didn’t do much to protect him from the sun. I hadn’t seen him put on any sunscreen.

“I’ve read all about that guy,” he said.

“He was a bad guy,” I said.

“Oh, no doubt, but I’ve read all these articles online about all the money he stashed in all these places that people still haven’t found. I mean, it’s been like six years since he died, and no one has found it. That’s awesome! But that shoot-out where he died was crazy, right?” He slapped his thigh. “The photo of all the soldiers posing with his corpse on that rooftop — that’s hard core. I’m pretty sure I have it somewhere at home if you want to take a look at it.”

I’d seen the picture, of course, and I didn’t feel I ever needed to again, but I nodded. I knew he meant well. He was just trying to connect with me in a way his daughter didn’t feel the need to. I remembered my mom’s tearful gratitude upon coming home and finding the apartment full of things that made it look like a place where real people lived, and the note she had me write for Nicole’s dad in my best English. He’d been kind to me, and it felt easy to be nice to him.

That’s how I found myself at Nicole’s house that evening, standing in the room where her dad kept all his memorabilia. As Jake went through drawers and piles of paper, Nicole plopped down on a reclining chair in front of the TV. Her skin still glistened with the stuff she’d put on at the beach, and her cheeks and the bridge of her round nose had turned pink as cotton candy. She was still wearing sunglasses, even though no natural light entered the room through the black curtains over the window. The walls were covered in posters for what he explained were cult horror movies — movies with titles like Blood and Lace and Brain Damage and Kill, Baby, Kill! There were also posters for movies I did know, like Fight Club and Pulp Fiction, and framed newspaper clippings of bizarre stories of living dolls and people being swallowed by sinkholes. Enormous speakers accompanied the enormous TV, and in a corner stood a small desk strewn with papers and action figures and guitar picks and DVD cases. The word that came to me while standing in the middle of the room as Jake frantically looked for the Pablo photograph was reblujo, which is what my mom called the small room where we used to keep junk back in Medellín. Here, even the carpet served as a resting place for guitars and exercise weights and junk food packages and soda cans.

“Can you hurry the fuck up?” Nicole said. “I want to get this gunk off of me before dinner.”

“I swear I have that photo in here somewhere. Your mom must have hid it.”

“Why would she do that? She doesn’t set foot in this pigsty. You see how clean the rest of the house is, don’t you, Vicky? That’s because Mom cleans it.”

I said nothing, but it was true. The rest of the house was spotless. It was all beige walls and pictures of palm trees and ocean sunsets and shiny glass surfaces and spotless white tile. The living room had a beige sofa, but I could tell it was real leather, and not an ant in sight.

“You know what? Fuck it,” Jake said, throwing papers on the carpet and pointing a slender finger at me. “You stay for dinner. Call your mom. Change into some of Nicole’s clothes. I’ll drive you home later. I’ll look for the photo in the meantime.”

We left him rummaging through the junk in his room, huffing and throwing things on the carpet.

Nicole’s mom found me and her daughter on the beige sofa, going through the family album. It contained picture after picture of a small, chubby Nicole holding kittens and blowing out the candles of her birthday cakes and standing next to Mickey Mouse. My parents had only brought a handful of family photos with them, of my grandparents and uncles and aunts, as well as one picture of their wedding and one of my first communion.

Nicole’s mom, who introduced herself as Carmen, appeared in a few pictures in their album, wearing shoulder pads and hairspray, her lips fuchsia, just like my mom looked when I was a child. Now, as she sat across from us, she wore green scrubs and black chunky shoes, and her dark hair was up in a high, curly bun. Nicole was her spitting image, down to the only dimple that formed on the right side of her face when she smiled. As Carmen examined me, her shoulders slackened and a wide grin filled her cheeks. Nicole had lent me a pair of denim shorts that didn’t quite hug my hips, and a large white T-shirt with the word NASCAR in big block letters.

“You girls having a sleepover?” Carmen asked. Her voice sounded salty to me, like the roar of the waves on the sea.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, just dinner.”

“We ordered pizza,” Nicole said. “Jake’s on one of his rants about a stupid photo. He just really needs her to see it.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said.

“I know,” Nicole said.

“We know,” Carmen said. “Don’t worry, honey. We’ll eat dinner, and I’ll drive you straight home. Sorry he’s holding you hostage. Did you call your parents?”

I nodded. I didn’t understand the word hostage, but I memorized the sound of it so I could look it up in my dictionary at home.

Carmen got up slowly and sighed while undoing her hair tie. The curls flopped down in one clump. She dug around in her purse and left a bill on the coffee table.

“I’m going to get changed before dinner,” she said. “You be on the lookout for the pizza.”

What followed was an hour-long screaming match behind the closed door of Jake’s memorabilia room, during which the sausage pizza Nicole had ordered got colder and colder. I couldn’t hear most of what they said after Nicole turned on the TV to a music video channel that people called to request their favorite video. I could hear pointed accusations like, “What is wrong with you?” but most of it was muffled or drowned out by the volume of the television and Nicole calling the number that scrolled at the bottom of the screen to request “You Make Me Sick” by P!nk over and over, using what she proudly announced was her dad’s credit card number. Even though I couldn’t hear most of the row, it reminded me of the last few months at home, when my parents argued over money they didn’t have for bills they couldn’t pay.

When Nicole’s parents came out, Carmen was still wearing the scrubs and her hair was still tangled, but now her cheeks were flushed and her blue eyes glinted with a giddiness I hadn’t seen before. Jake looked as collected as ever and, during our cold-pizza-and-orange-soda dinner, didn’t mention a single word about the Pablo photograph. When he apologized for making me come over, I stopped bracing myself for another fight. Both were now in full couple mode, asking questions about my dad’s health and my mom’s two jobs, and because I didn’t know the word housekeeping yet, I mentioned the things my mom cleaned instead: floors, windows, toilets.

My mom didn’t work her second job on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so one late-October Saturday we went to see the Virgin on the window. My mom’s boss had written directions on a piece of paper, and I read them to her from the passenger seat of the Cordoba, while my dad’s long legs cramped in the back. My parents wanted to go pay a promise they’d made to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá on behalf of our safe passage and transition to a new country. They still hoped to make it back to Medellín to pay the promise for real, but now that my dad could move around more or less normally again, this would do.

I would never tell my parents this, because their response would have been that God manifests in many forms, but I found the shrine unimpressive. The building where the Virgin had appeared was by the side of a highway, unceremoniously next to a Toyota dealership. The image of the Virgin itself looked like an oil slick that had spread over a couple of large mirrored windowpanes of what we were told used to be an office building. It was an outline of what could be the Virgin but also almost anything else, or nothing at all. In front of the window, someone had installed a life-size wooden crucifixion, in front of which was a church kneeler. Before the statue were countless votive candles and rosaries. People stood around or sat in white plastic chairs and prayed in the choking heat of fall.

A man who introduced himself as Guadalupe told us the image had appeared four years earlier, just before Christmas, and that was why so many people believed it was a miracle. He was short and wore brown slacks and a navy button-up, and he said he came to pray every Saturday. On seeing the slickness of his forehead, which he wiped with a white handkerchief, I wondered if he dressed the same way every time he came to spend a scorching afternoon with the Virgin. He offered my dad a chair close to the Jesus statue after my dad told him the story of his work accident.

“I should be dead,” my dad said. “When that machine was grinding me, I felt like my organs were just going to burst out of my body. All I could think was that I’d brought my family all the way here just to abandon them.”

“But here you are, standing after all of that,” Guadalupe said.

“Yes, and I can walk and move. It hurts, but I can do it.”

“That’s a miracle,” my mom said.

They sat together and prayed a rosary while I stayed silent, wondering what would have happened to my mom and me if my dad had died. Would we have stayed, alone in a new country where we were afraid to answer the phone for fear the caller would speak only English? Would we have gone back home and begged one of our relatives to take us in while we figured out what the rest of our lives would become without him? And what would our lives become now?

When we opened the door of our apartment, it was evening and the phone was ringing, but we didn’t answer it. It rang and rang, until I got a look from my mom that had started to become familiar in this new life, which begged me to speak on their behalf to whomever they couldn’t understand and couldn’t understand them.

I recognized Nicole’s voice through the receiver, but not what she said. She was yelling rapidly, and the words sounded like they were reaching me from the other side of an ocean.

“What happened?” I asked a couple of times, but it was useless.

She yelled and cried, and the only word I understood was “Help!”

We drove to her house. The car still smelled of the remnants of our McDonald’s dinner, which we had shared with Guadalupe. My parents didn’t like the food, but it was cheap, and the air-conditioning inside offered relief from the heat. I loved it and had gleefully eaten my oily apple pie on the ride home. Now the smell made my stomach turn when I thought of Nicole’s ragged voice. I wasn’t even sure I could point my mom to her house without getting lost.

When we arrived at her street, the car got flooded with waves of blue and red light. We parked by the corner, where police cruisers and vans didn’t obstruct the way, but as I ran toward her house, my parents yelling after me, cops standing around chatting to each other and looking at their watches and lazily shooing away the small crowd that was starting to gather behind the yellow tape that cordoned off Nicole’s house, I felt as if I were the only one with any sense of urgency. That was until I saw Nicole, and she saw me and started running to me, her face a mask made of garish red and blue light, yelling, “He killed her! He killed her! He killed her!” and in that moment I remembered that earlier at McDonald’s we’d seen a very old man making his slow way to the counter with the aid of a walker, and that having picked up his food, he couldn’t maneuver his way to a table, and that my dad had said to me to go give him a hand, and having felt shy, I’d said no, so he’d gotten up himself and helped the old man in his own slow way. I thought of this as Nicole extended her arms to me, and I understood she had no one else, and that was why she’d called me, and she didn’t have to tell me the whole story for me to now understand what she had said on the phone, which was that her dad had killed her mom and now she was all alone. I understood that when Jake had said that I’d be there for Nicole someday, that his help to us had been purely selfish; he’d meant it not in the way of self-deprecation, but in the way of a payback he expected me to give someday. Well, that day had come, and as the steam of Nicole’s breath gathered on the skin of my neck when I took her in my embrace, I knew it was time to pay back the things America had given us.

Wings Beating by Eliot Schrefer

Safety Harbor

I guess I should have figured a Florida vacation would have lots of cars in it. This trip has been red arrows, four-way stops, ogling the rare pedestrian, hailing a car on this app or that, or waiting for a crusty cab with a crustier driver. How much of a life around here is spent wallowing in seats, hands at ten and two or a pinkie at six, waiting for a light to tell you when it’s time to act?

I’m driving around all the time in Maryland too, don’t get me wrong. On Darren weeks I’m chauffeuring him plenty. Violin lessons or swim practice or trips to the mall food court with his girlfriends. Darren’s a busy kid — the only thirteen-year-old I know who uses his calendar app — but driving with him back home means not having to talk. Now we’re on vacation so we’re pressed in the back of these hired cars, not me in front and him on his phone, but right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, like we’re sweethearts on a date. Like we’re me and his mom, back before the split.

We’re done with the sightseeing part of the vacation and onto the spa stay, the whole point of this trip. I’m no spa guy, but I was the third-place-out-of-three winner of an episode of Guess It Now, and this spa trip was my prize. I thought Darren and I could bond a little. Maybe we can laugh about it.

That’s why we’re in the back of a car whose upholstery smells like nightclub cologne, driving down the main street of this town called Safety Harbor, even though there’s no ships here. Pretty safe though!

“Nearly there, kid,” I say. “The glamorous resort and spa.”

Darren puts his phone away — he’s pretty good about that stuff, not an addict like most of them — and casts his liquid staring attention toward the spa. I guess it’s the same place as the cutaway graphic on the game show: curved brick drive, blue rectangle of a pool behind the front windows, a restaurant that looks like the conservatory from Clue. There’s something a little seedy about all of it too, which I definitely didn’t expect. Hard to put my finger on. There’s probably microscopic grime between all the tiles.

Valet boys in polo shirts lounge in front. One says, “Good afternoon, sir,” when I pass. It’s in this put-out way, though, like his mom just made him say it.

The other boys look at Darren, with his skinny jeans and gay or at least rainbow-spectrum-y designer eyeglasses, and I can feel the smirks they’re all hiding, each and every one.

I don’t know, maybe I thought the game show would have called ahead, said, Hey, a prize winner’s coming in to stay for a while, give him a congrats when he gets there, and Darren could have had a moment of being proud of his dad, but I guess we’re just like any other guests, because the lady behind the counter says, Enjoy your two nights with us, as she gestures me and Darren toward our room.

The hallway’s covered in aggressively ugly carpet, a blue-green run through by ship’s wheels and nautical rope. It saps the sound from our feet and our luggage wheels.

The room is perfectly clean. It’s also perfectly stale, like a mock-up that was never meant to be lived in. While we slot our clothes into drawers the window air-conditioning unit rattles and chugs, goes quiet, rattles and chugs, goes quiet. I open the blinds, see the license plates of the cars parked right in front, the gas station on the far side, and close the blinds again.

It’s a third-place-winner sort of joint, I guess.

Darren’s messaging on his phone for a while. When the air conditioner’s off, I can actually hear the sound of his thumbs on glass. I wonder, not for the first time, if he’s cruising nearby guys. A little young, sure, but I’d have taken up any chance to have sex at his age, though willing girls are harder to find and I didn’t have apps or anything.

It’s not like he’s come out to me, but I’m operating on the assumption that my son is gay until proven otherwise. I work with three gay dudes — maybe four, actually — and I find it hard to keep up with their fast and mocking conversations, but they’re good guys. My son has their same armoring wit, the same tendency to check his hair, the same examined life.

Darren looks up from his phone and asks if I want to go for a walk. My son has made a request that involves spending time with me. I try to play it cool — but yes, I would like to go for a walk!

We haven’t said much during our days working on our sunburns on Clearwater Beach. We don’t ever talk much, to be honest, but I think that’s what we both want. At least I know it’s what I want, or at least it’s the only way I know how to be. Darren, though — when he’s with his mother he can’t shut up. The number of TV shows they manage to watch and then discuss, it makes me wonder if he’s ever sleeping when he’s in his bedroom with the door closed.

There’s an old pier right near the spa, and we walk along its curving and pitched wood. The constant sea air’s made the surface waxy. Our sneakers tilt and squeak. At the end of the pier is a fisherman, a young guy with a University of Florida T-shirt who I figure is plucking fish out of their water for kicks and not for food. He doesn’t catch anything in front of us, thank God, Darren would not be into that, but I can feel my kid getting withdrawn as he smells the blood and scales.

Darren dutifully plucks up any scraps of loose fishing filament we come across, balls them into his pockets. He doesn’t want them flying into the sea and garroting mermaids or whatever he’s worried about. He doesn’t want to see things that aren’t even human get hurt. He’s an absurdly sweet kid, my son.

Amelia called me a week ago, saying Darren had been moody until he’d finally explained to her that I’d said it didn’t matter if he was gay, or if he was green-skinned or ate babies or was a terrorist. Did that seem like the right way to talk to him about that? she wondered. I told her that I was sure I didn’t put it that way, and if I did it was a joke because I was nervous because I love the kid so much. Of course I don’t think being gay is the same thing as being a terrorist, but how am I supposed to find the words to tell Darren that? And now it’s like we’re never allowed to discuss the topic ever again.

I stop to talk to this nice woman in a tight top about where she’s from and whether she knows good places to eat near here, and when I look up Darren’s gotten away from me and he’s almost back at the spa. He’s a fast kid, his skinny legs made twitchy by all the swimming. I say goodbye to the lady, she was probably too young for me to be flirting with anyway, and catch up to my kid.

He’s at the entrance, where there’s this two-lane road clogged with glossy cars pumping out exhaust while they wait for the four-way stop to clear. Something’s caught Darren’s attention, but I can’t tell what. On the other side of the road is nothing special, just a six-story apartment complex that’s under construction. The earth around it is ripped and raw, and the apartments aren’t finished or anything. It seems like a nice enough place to live, though. I’d take it.

Darren looks upset, and I get worried that all the dried fish guts we saw on the pier are going to make this spa stay go blammo. I’m sure he’d be telling his mom just what was the matter, but I don’t know how to get him talking. I like everything he says to me, I just don’t have a lot to say back, that’s all. I scratch at the sweaty small of my back. “Something wrong?” I finally try.

“Nothing, Dad,” he says. But I know there’s something. It would be a bummer if your view got blocked by that new building, but I can’t see why he’d get upset about that.

He’s looking toward the spa, like he’s ready to go back and chill in the room, but I focus on where he was looking before, and see there’s an egret, a white spindly thing, pretty and harmless unless you’re a fish. It’s fluttering beside a stopped tractor, beating its wings uselessly against the side of the machine. It’s only going to hurt itself. That tractor’s not going anywhere until the crew returns on Monday.

What does a bird have against a tractor?

We have nothing to do with ourselves anyway — I’m at a getaway spa with my kid, and the awkwardness is hitting me more and more hard core — so we wander into the construction site. We poke around the boundary of the scalloped orange tape, check out the derelict backhoes and the homes without doors as we make our way to the bird. If you don’t count the line of stopped cars or the egret or the ladies in white jeans going to the Starbucks on the corner, we’re on our own. Eventually Darren and I make it to where we both know we’re heading: as close as we can get to the tractor and the egret.

The bird goes all still when we get near, like it’s trying to camouflage itself into the tractor. It seems to me that something spindly like an egret should fly away if a couple of humans approach. But it doesn’t, and the wrongness of that leaves me fluttery. Darren, too, he gets this posture like, Let’s leave, Dad, but he doesn’t say any words, he just folds his arms over his slight chest and stares at the bird.

Look, I’m not a knucklehead, I had enough smarts to get onto that trivia show in the first place. I put it all together quick enough: new construction, maybe getting ready to show a model apartment to prospective clients, first-time landscaping around the building, someone knocked down the bird’s tree or whatever, and its nest and its eggs or — God, little birds? — are gone now, but it’s still fighting the tractor, like it can get the babies back. Maybe the dead birds are still under?

“All right, Darren, let’s not bother the bird anymore.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know, but we’ve upset it, look.”

“I don’t think we upset it,” Darren says quietly. “It was already upset when we were back across the street.”

“Okay, but it’s not going to calm down with us around. Come on, let’s check out the pool.”

I walk away, but Darren doesn’t move. He’s like a kid in a horror movie sometimes, his attention gets so focused that all other things fall away.

“Can we help it?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “Whatever it’s upset about is over now.”

“Poor egret,” he says in a whining way that makes me worry about how guys treat him at school. But he’s always tight with the girls in his violin section, chatting away, and I bet they’d all be making friendship bracelets for this egret right now. I decide my kid’s life is fine. In general, at least. For the next two days, I’m not as sure.

“You hungry?” I ask.

He shakes his head. I don’t need to look to know that his eyes are wet. “Okay, we can just stand here and look at the bird, if that’s what you want.”

That’s what we do. Cars are going by, sweat is dripping down my back, more ladies in white jeans are going into the Starbucks, and the egret is still freaked out, but not about us, and I wonder how long it’s been there, fighting this metal thing, and it’s making me sad too, even though my emotions are cinder blocks, so I go and try to investigate, like maybe if it can show me the broken eggshells the bird will feel better, but it flutters its wings at me, with its beak open, and that’s when Darren says, “We can go check out the pool, Dad,” so we head back to the spa.

While we walk I ruffle the hair at the back of his neck. It’s limp and wet. I know he’s gotten sad. He and his mother have always had plenty of melancholy in them, and I’ve never been able to do much about it for either one. They’re just not sturdy, but my own dad made me be sturdy above all else and I’ve come to realize that sturdy isn’t an especially healthy thing for a person to be.

“Maybe there’s chicken fingers at the spa restaurant,” I say.

No reaction to that one. He’s always loved chicken fingers. But thirteen is different from twelve.

The valet kid welcomes us back in that same go-tell-Aunt-Bertha-thank-you tone. By the time we’re at the indoor pool and steam room, my sweat has chilled.

The pool was probably something to behold back in 1980. It’s hidden away from any natural light, occasional tiles darkened like age spots. An old lady in a bathing cap is doing slow laps, and two more are sitting on chaise longues around one of the little tables with pebbled-glass tops. The ceiling is dentist-office low.

“Nice, huh?” I say.

The kid’s staring at a landscape with ceramic vases painted on it, which makes it look like we’re in a low-res Greece or maybe Rome or something. He taps the fakey-jake sky and looks back at me smiling, like he’s finally figured out the answer to some frustrating question.

We lie on our striped towels in the chill AC around the warm pool, and take turns diving in. He keeps his T-shirt on, like I’d have done at thirteen. I display my padded hairy belly to the world, then we go back to the room and put the TV on and drop into our phones. Someone can’t figure out the software licenses in accounting, but otherwise everything at work seems to be going along fine without me. Amelia asks how Darren’s getting along and I text her back a pic of him staring at his phone on his drooping hotel bed, and it all feels nice, like we’re still married. I compose and delete a few texts to her, then finally put the phone down to stop myself from sending any of them.

I say it’s time for dinner, and Darren doesn’t change out of his T-shirt, so I tell him it’s a special occasion. I’m grateful I don’t have to explain that I want the game-show prize to be something special. He puts on a button-down shirt, pleated khakis, and a clip-on tie — it’s a bit much but also pretty damn sweet.

We go tripping along the nautical hallway, my kid’s loafers — loafers! — squeaking on the plush plastic-y fibers. When we get to the restaurant there’s a printout taped to the window, seventy-two-point Calibri telling us it’s closed for a private event.

Kid and I peer in anyway. He’s on his tiptoes to see what’s going on, bringing his white athletic-socked heels right out of the backs of his loafers. At first I think it might be a wedding, but then I see that it’s probably a work event. There’s an easel with some poster board I can’t make out through the foggy glass.

I’m not the kind to go places I’m not wanted, so I bring Darren to the host desk and ask where the spa’s other restaurants are. The lady explains that there’s just the one, and sorry it’s closed for a party, someone should have told me. I ask what else is within walking distance and she explains that there’s nothing unless we want to get a sandwich from the Starbucks. That’s when I start getting really mad, but Darren’s there so I swallow it all down. He heard enough of my yelling back when I was married to his mom.

We stand in the hallway and I pull out my phone, but just looking at the car apps, imagining sitting in the back of a Camry in traffic, pits my stomach. I don’t want to get back on the highway, don’t want to wait at lights and pass three Applebee’s on the way to what other chain restaurant we’ve chosen. I put the phone away. “Come on, we’re going in,” I say to Darren, and before he can protest I’ve pushed through the doors and gone into the private event.

“Whoa, Dad,” he says under his breath as we step to one side, into the shadows. I crashed enough weddings back in my crazier days to know that you stay as still as possible until you’ve picked your strategy.

Looks like the event has been underway for a while already — maybe it’s technically a lunch? — and the conversation is drunken, the buffet mostly picked over. There’s plenty of waxy little cheese cubes, though, and some raw broccoli, and, no way, what looks like chicken fingers! The placard is in French, but I know a chicken finger when I see one. Darren can eat around the creamy blue cheese center.

I tell him to wait at the quiet end of the buffet while I grab some plates, since that’ll bring me close to the nearest clot of drunk office-party guys — this office does seem to be all guys, at least the ones who’ve stayed this late. I nod to four hair-wave polo-shirt bros with their napkin-wrapped beers, like to say, Hey, office stuff, that work we all do, crazy, amiright?

I get four nods back, then return to my kid with the two plates, their porcelain scuffed gray from innumerable meals. Feeling the office bros’ eyes on the back of my head, I hand Darren one and ask him if he doesn’t want to make up his own dinner and has he seen the chicken fingers yet? I’m hyper aware of these guys’ focus, am sure they’re passing around theories about us, because they’re in that late-party zone where no one has anything to talk about but they’re intimate and cheerful and a topic you’ve discovered together is proof of how amazingly everyone gets along, them against the world. Them against me and my kid. Potentially. I dunno where this is all going to go.

We get our food and then find an empty table where I can move enough smudgy wineglasses and napkins to one side so that we can eat together. Darren’s laying into his chicken fingers and I’m eyeing the bucket with the open wine bottles and we’re just being peaceful and companionable until I sense those guys nearby.

“Hey, are you two with—” Here they say the name of their company, which I honestly can’t remember, but it was one of those full-name-of-a-hometown-guy kind of small-fry investment joints.

“Nope,” I say, keeping my eyes on my plate.

Darren keeps his eyes furiously on his food too, but in a maybe overdramatic way, like we’re in a black-and-white movie avoiding Nazis.

“We were thinking this little guy could be a new junior analyst or something.” It’s the same bro speaking, and he’s probably the one drunk or naturally aggressive enough to make this confrontation happen. Not that I think they’re going to start an actual fight — they just want to make us feel shitty for a while so they can feel un-shitty together. I get it. I’ve done it before.

I look right into them. “Look, guys, we’re just trying to have dinner here. We’re not causing any trouble.”

They make side-eye at one another, and that’s how I know I’ve taken the wrong tack. Now I’ve turned from a foreign adventurer to a freeloader taking handouts. I could have explained that the spa rented out its restaurant without thinking about its guests, and that’s why I’m here eating food they don’t want anymore anyway, but I don’t feel like I owe these bros any explanations.

“Guess you didn’t see the sign,” lead bro says. “This is a private party.”

“We’re not doing any harm,” Darren mumbles.

I raise an eyebrow at him. He just said that? My kid?

“What did you say?” lead bro huffs.

“We’re minding our own business,” Darren says. “You should try it.” He takes a preposterously large bite of chicken finger and starts chewing.

Maybe it’s called cordon bleu, this chicken?

“We’re just thinding our own thisness,” lead bro says, with an extravagant lisp. “Well, this is a private party, and you’re not on the list, so you being here is our business, faggot.”

My world clanks and drops. Blood buzzes through my ears.

“They’re not causing any trouble, man, just let it go,” says one of the other bros. They suddenly come into focus, a trio of pastels — pink, green, and blue — behind lead bro’s orange. One of their hands is on lead bro’s shoulder.

“They’re not done ramming themselves down our throat on every TV show, now they’re coming to our parties and eating our fucking food.”

For the sake of Darren, I will myself motionless despite the rage pushing my limbs to move and fight. Do these douchebags think we’re together? Me and my thirteen-year-old kid? Whatever version of the truth lead bro is thinking, it’s not working for me. I push back hard from the table, enough to send my chair clattering to the floor. A couple of other guys in blazers look over, and go back to their conversation.

Pastel-blue bro picks up the chair. Maybe this is going to work out fine.

Lead bro puts down his beer and rubs his knuckles. Maybe this is not going to work out fine.

I’ve been in my share of fights before, and the whipsmack of this lifetime-achievement prize trip being so sucky has definitely given me the urge to connect my fist with something that’ll scream back, but as I start to do my chest-forward-bumping-the-air toward lead bro, I catch a glimpse of Darren and he’s got this look on his face — not scared, exactly, but more tired, like he’d give anything to be surprised by what’s about to happen.

If I’m a good dad, my priority should be getting us out of here.

For the sake of my kid, I put my hands up and turn away from the bros. They start chuckling and victory-snarking, and it makes my shoulders square off and the hair on my forearms rise, but I still walk away. Darren stands up, looking all meek and lanky, but he takes one last chicken finger from his plate and waves it like a Potter wand. “Faggot out!” he says, before sauntering after me and out of the restaurant.

The fight fury fades. It’s replaced by a queasy middle zone, where the pastel voices join together behind me and I’m waiting to feel a beer bottle or a hock of spit hit the back of my neck, things men have done to me and will do to my son for decades to come, but also my mind is skimming along the new reality that my meek sensitive kid stands up for himself, has developed a whole gay arsenal of zingers. Who taught him how to do that?

We’re out of the room, and I’ve got my arm around him, rubbing his birdlike shoulder, and then I’m laughing. “Faggot out,” I say. “Amazing.”

“I dunno, that just came out of me,” Darren says.

“I should use it,” I chuckle. “Faggot out. Awesome line.”

“You don’t need to use it, Dad.”

That can mean ten different things, and I try to ask him to tell me more, but the words stop before they get to my mouth.

Darren looks back where we came, to the closed doors. “I’m glad those guys aren’t following us. They were total assholes.”

“Yep,” I say.

Without quite meaning to, we’ve wandered back into the pool area. I lean down and slap the warm, slightly cloudy water. “Want to take a swim again?”

Darren shakes his head. “I think I want to go back to the room.”

I knew that would be his answer. We don’t even have our trunks and towels with us or anything, and after nearly getting gay-bashed, neither of us is exactly inclined to any father-son skinny-dipping.

We walk past the steam room, and since it’s still barely sunset and we have a whole night of sitting on our hotel beds on our phones ahead of us, I drag my feet by looking inside. Narrow tiled box, dingy without officially being dirty anywhere. It’s like sitting under a giant hand dryer that blows wet. I’ve never gotten the appeal of those rooms.

Darren’s waiting for me, worrying his fingers and tapping his knees, so I close the steam room up and walk with him down the corridor of nautical carpet. We get to our room, and he’s immediately absorbed in his phone, unclipping it from the charger and hurling himself onto the bedspread. I take a piss, then waffle in the doorway. “Did you get enough to eat?”

He nods and pats his belly.

“I’m not sure I did,” I say. The hair on my forearms has risen again. “I might go back out there and see what I can scrounge up.”

He nods again.

“Sure you don’t want anything?”

Headshakes.

“Okay, see you soon.”

I step out, and press the door closed behind me. My palms are sweaty, my mouth full of a metallic taste. All I hear beyond my racing heartbeat is the feeble roar of air conditioners behind closed doors. Where are all the other hotel guests? In their cars somewhere, out to dinner, I guess. But not here.

My feet bring me to the restaurant. I could do with another beer, a cracker, a leaf of lettuce, anything, whatever I can steal from those assholes. I want them to see it, and I want to see the consequences. I listen to the door, then crack it open. There’s just a server left there, cleaning the tables and putting chairs up. She gives me a Hey, stranger smile and I give one back. There’s still some food left, so I could get some, but since the party bros aren’t there it wouldn’t count as stealing, and stealing is what I want to do. I do grab a beer, though, and start it going down quick. That gets a genuine smile from the server. She might like me.

She’s way too young, though, so I leave the restaurant and lean against the door, drinking my beer and listening to the nothing happening all around me. Male murmurs in the distance, the sigh of the steam ticking on and ticking off, the constant hum of the pool pump. An old lady in a bathrobe shuffles down the hallway. I nod and smile at her, she nods and smiles at me. Think she’s the same one who was doing laps in the pool.

I wish I had a cigarette. But I don’t smoke anymore unless it’s at a party. This is not a party.

The question that got me was geography. I wasn’t stuck in the moment; I wouldn’t have gotten it even from the comfort of my living room. I wasn’t meant to be more than a third-place contestant on Guess It Now.

The Amazon River passes through Peru before entering Brazil.

How hard is life going to be for my son?

A roaring janitor passes me, his industrial vac advancing and retreating, advancing and retreating. He dips into the pool room, keys jangling. He comes out a few minutes later, closes the door, and flips a sign on a chain.

The vac roars back to life, then fades as the janitor passes around a corner and out of view.

My fingers flick over my phantom cigarette. Alone again.

Until I’m not. Voices approach from down the hall, voices I recognize.

I don’t hide, but I do go still.

The bros, only two of them now, orange bro and pink bro, lurch along the hallway, coming from the same direction where the janitor disappeared. Pink has his arm around orange’s shoulders, and the pressure of his heavy limb makes orange trip as much as he walks. They’re staying upright, but only just.

My fingers drop the phantom cigarette and make a fist instead.

The bros go right up to the glass door to the pool area, peer in. They totally ignore the Closed sign and push through.

Their voices fall away beneath the hum of the pool pump. I’m alone in the hall. It’s as if the bros were never here, as if they dropped into the water and were sucked away.

I stand there for a moment, resisting the urge to check my phone, just wondering about people being here, people being gone.

I step toward the pool entrance.

I’m totally silent, not from any special source of elegance, but because the carpet is so plush and so thick. I reach the door and peer in.

In soft focus through the blurring glass, the bros are doing midnight laps, laughing and splashing as they kick against either side. Their polo shirts stick to their torsos, and as they pull themselves out of the pool their shorts cling. Would my son enjoy the sight of this? The bros probably wouldn’t want to be seen by my son, and tonight that matters.

The lights are out, but the streetlight silhouettes the bros as they jostle and push, as they scamper along the edge of the pool, frantic and agile, like little boys at a sleepover.

They head toward the door, toward me. I tense, ready for a confrontation. My fist on a jaw might just be the answer I need, the thing that will clear this murky unease.

The bros turn before they’re at the exit, though, and head into the steam room. I hear the crank of the knob, the clink of the heater, the whoosh of the steam.

I walk toward the entrance to the pool area and lay my hand on the doorknob. I push it, and head into the chill, chlorine-tanged air.

The bros are mere smudges of pink and orange behind the small fogged window of the steam room. If they looked toward the window, I think they might see me, but I’m also sure that they won’t. I can hear the barks of their drunken laughter.

Darren’s waiting for me back at the room. I can almost imagine him here next to me, the stew of desire and self-consciousness he would be feeling.

I place my hand on the looping handles of the steam room’s double doors, consider opening them, enjoying the shock of the bros as I confront them, as I lay into them with my fists until they turn the tide on me.

How would I explain the blood and black eyes to Darren?

Instead I look to the pool, to its painted scenes of meadows and vases, and finally to the bug net lying along the tiled wall. I pick up the net, test its metal pole between my hands. Hollow, but strong.

The pole passes right through the handle loops, holds there at an angle, one end pitched into the wall.

Unaware that they’re trapped, the pink and orange smudges continue their jostling and laughter. Drunk as they are, the bros will probably stay too long before they try to leave. Before they find that they can’t leave.

I want to see it happen, want to see their shock at their sudden powerlessness. But I also want to get out of there, get back to Darren, watch whatever horrible show he’s found on the room’s greasy TV, lie there in quiet in our shared space.

I give the steam room door a kick.

The bros go silent, and the smudges near, resolve into shirts below red faces. Voices shout, but I can’t make out the words. I back up, in a horrible kind of awe at what I’ve done, what I’m doing.

I head to the exit, give one last look at the steam room door, at the narrow rectangle of the window. Pale arms beat at it, like wings.

The Bite by Colette Bancroft

Rattlesnake

These days it has some sunny upscale name focus-grouped by developers, but when I was a kid there the neighborhood was called Rattlesnake.

Back in the 1930s, some guy opened a rattlesnake canning plant in Tampa, off Westshore Boulevard near the Gandy Bridge. The suburbs hadn’t sprouted there yet; the land stretching south toward Port Tampa was a couple of miles of pine and palmetto scrub with a hem of mangroves along Tampa Bay, perfect habitat for the plant’s product. Locals caught the snakes by the bagful, pygmy rattlers and big diamondbacks, and sold them to the plant to be skinned and cooked. Around the South roadside gift shops sold the cans, labeled with an illustration of a coiled snake with its fangs bared over the slogan Tastes like chicken! It doesn’t.

By the 1960s, when my family moved to Rattlesnake, the east side of Westshore was lined with streets of neat, new little two- and three-bedroom houses with carports. We were civilians, but lots of our neighbors were military families. MacDill Air Force Base was so close that the howl of fighter jets taking off for training runs was as ordinary as birdsong.

Our next-door neighbors were the Mendozas. He was a staff sergeant in the military police on base, and she was a nurse at the base hospital. They had two little girls, Julieta and Luisa, and sometimes in the afternoon when their shifts overlapped I’d babysit the kids.

Sergeant Mendoza would come home in the evening, unstrap his holster, and set it on the kitchen counter, gun and all. He’d point at his two little daughters and whatever other kids might be around and say, “Don’t touch that,” then make a little clicking noise.

The summer I was twelve, a new family moved into the house across the street. The tenants were a woman and three girls, the oldest about my age, the youngest a toddler. The woman seemed older than my stylish mother, who went off to her job at a downtown bank every day in a smart suit, every hair in her blond chignon in place. The new lady was so skinny and pale she looked like her own ghost, and she never wore anything but faded housedresses (a wardrobe item my mother disdained).

The carport across the street was usually empty, but once or twice a week I’d see a gorgeous 1955 Thunderbird parked there, with gleaming deep burgundy paint and a white convertible hardtop with porthole windows. My dad ran an auto paint and body business, so I knew cars, and I knew a ten-year-old car that looked that cherry was pampered like a princess.

I also knew it was a two-seater, which seemed odd for a family’s only car.

I met the oldest girl when I walked out of the Mendozas’ house one afternoon. She was standing across the street on the sidewalk in front of her house, hands on her narrow hips.

“The colonel would have a fit if he saw us near those greasers,” she said to me.

I wondered what that meant, but she went right on: “I’m Brenda Howard. That’s my sister Nancy.” She tipped her head toward the carport, where the middle sister stood. Brenda had her mother’s sandy hair and angular face, but her brash attitude was her own. Nancy was softer, rounder, blonder, and gazed off to the side of me like she couldn’t quite look at me directly.

As soon as I introduced myself, Brenda invited me in to watch TV. My parents wouldn’t be home for a bit, so I followed the sisters through their front door.

The neighborhood was made up of typical Florida suburban houses, concrete block with terrazzo floors and a picture window in the living room. Ours was cozy, with my mom’s pride-and-joy Scandinavian modern furniture in the living room and, in my bedroom, a pink-and-white chenille bedspread with the figure of a ballerina (although I was the least balletic of girls).

The Howards’ house looked like they were camping. In the living room were one big corduroy recliner, an old black-and-white TV, and three folding chairs that did double duty at the scuffed dining table. Mrs. Howard was sitting there in one of them, playing solitaire. Her eyes widened when she saw me, but she said hello warmly in a twangy voice, not quite Southern.

“That’s our mama, Mrs. Howard,” Brenda said, and led me off on a tour of the house, which didn’t take but a minute. Mrs. Howard’s room had a double bed; in the other bedroom, Brenda and Nancy and the third sister, Susie, slept on a mattress on the floor, where the toddler was currently immersed in a sweaty nap. Old sheets were tacked over the windows.

Mrs. Howard went out to hang laundry on the clothesline as we sprawled in front of the TV. Talking over the dialogue of some old Western, Brenda said she and her sister had been born near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, where their father was posted. “Me and Nancy’s dad died and Mama got a job keeping house for the colonel.”

“Our daddy was in a car crash,” Nancy said, her eyes filling with tears.

Brenda’s eyes rolled. “He was a drunk,” she said, closing that subject. “At Tinker the colonel had a nice big house and we all moved in. So him and Mama got married.”

For just a second, I thought Nancy looked surprised. “Then Susie was born,” Brenda continued, “and then a couple months ago the colonel got posted here. He’s in temporary base housing until they have a big enough house for all of us.”

“How come he doesn’t just live here?”

“He has to be available for duty at all times,” Brenda said. “Military officers have very demanding schedules.”

That wasn’t what I’d heard eavesdropping on enlisted men while they were drinking beer at block parties, but I let it go. “Where’s your car?”

“The colonel drives the car. Mama doesn’t drive. If she has to go somewhere, he drives her. But she never goes nowhere.”

That night at dinner, I gave my parents a reconnaissance report. “She says the colonel—”

“He’s a lieutenant colonel,” my dad cut in. In our neighborhood everyone knew everyone’s rank. I wasn’t sure my dad had even laid eyes on him yet, but that didn’t matter.

“Well, she calls him the colonel.”

“Well, he’s not. But what does she say about him?”

“She says he lives on base and they’re just staying here until they get bigger base housing. He’s their stepfather. Except the baby, he’s her father.”

“Mm-hm,” my father said. “He’s got a sweet car, but how does he get all those kids in there?”

“It’s ridiculous,” my mother said crisply. I couldn’t imagine her giving up her new pearly white Mustang and waiting around for my dad to drive her places, although she did drive his Plymouth station wagon to the grocery store. “Now hush up and eat your pork chop.”

A couple of days later, Brenda came over to invite me to dinner at her house the next night. “The colonel will be here,” she said, kind of like he was the Beatles or something. She told me to come over at six sharp.

At about five, I heard the T-bird’s engine. The colonel climbed out as all three girls swarmed him on the carport, then they carried a bunch of grocery bags into the kitchen. It was the first glimpse I’d had of him. He was tall and rangy, with a tight brush cut that could have been blond or gray, and a khaki uniform so well starched it could have stood up on its own.

I reported at six. Brenda introduced me with a stream of chatter, which he interrupted. “Good to meet you,” he said. He smiled, a handsome smile, but his eyes made me feel like I was on inspection.

I could smell steak grilling deliciously in a cast-iron pan, but it turned out to be the colonel’s dinner. Mrs. Howard served her daughters and me beanie weenies on paper plates.

Susie was perched in a high chair, while the colonel, Brenda, and I occupied the three chairs at the table. Nancy sat cross-legged on the floor by the TV, and Mrs. Howard, her hands empty, started to sit in the recliner.

“Aren’t you going to have dinner, Mama?” the colonel said sharply. “Brenda can sit on the floor.”

Mrs. Howard jumped up halfway through her sit. “Oh, no, sir. I’m not hungry.”

He chewed vigorously for a moment, then smiled. “Well then, Mama, you can sing for us.”

“Oh, no,” she murmured.

“Sing for us,” he said. It sounded like an order.

She clasped her hands behind her back and closed her eyes.

She had a thrillingly beautiful voice, so lovely it seemed unlikely coming from someone so washed out.

It’s a sad song anyway, though she sang it sadder than anyone. The colonel was happily sawing off big bites of his steak, but I couldn’t swallow, felt like I might never swallow again. Just as I began to fear I’d burst into tears, the baby did.

Mrs. Howard didn’t finish the song. She scooped up Susie and carried her off to wash the tears and bean juice off her.

“May we be excused?” Brenda asked the colonel a few minutes later.

“Yes,” he said, “for cleanup duty.”

As we stepped into the kitchen, I started to flick my paper plate at the trash can. Brenda snatched my wrist. “We don’t waste,” she said sternly. “You can use them more than once.” I watched as she carefully scrubbed the paper plates and Nancy gingerly dried them, and the colonel worked his way through the rest of that big steak.

When I left a little while later he smiled at me, warmly this time, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Thank you for coming. I hope we see you again.”

I reported the paper-plate business to my parents, of course. They just rolled their eyes in unison. “We can’t even get this one to wash a real plate,” my dad said.

The Thunderbird was gone by morning, and I didn’t see it for a few days. One afternoon Brenda and Nancy and I walked to the nearby playground, but the sweltering Florida heat soon sent us back.

At the Howards’ house, Brenda said, “Mama, can we take a nap in your bed? You have a fan.” Almost no one had AC then, so a fan was heaven. We stretched out under its cool stream of air. I fell instantly asleep but sometime later was pulled partway from dreams by the sound of the Thunderbird’s engine.

I had started to sink back into sleep when I felt a hand. I lay on my side, my back to the door of the room, and the hand slipped between my legs from behind.

The hand slid inside my shorts and underwear like it knew where it was going. It curved where I curved. A fingertip moved as if searching for something, a side-to-side tremor like a snake scenting prey.

I rolled and jerked up against the headboard to a sitting position. No one else was in the bed. The colonel kneeled next to it, looking at me calmly, his left hand resting where my hip had been.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were Brenda.” He smiled, rose, and walked out.

I felt frozen. I don’t know how long it took me to stand up and walk out of the room, but when I did there was no one in the house.

I didn’t see the Howard girls for a few days. I could tell they were home, but they didn’t come looking for me, and I didn’t feel like knocking on their door, even though I had just about convinced myself I’d dreamed the whole episode.

The rattlesnake canning plant that gave the neighborhood its name was long gone, but the snakes were still around. They had adapted to suburban life, staying mostly invisible but occasionally slithering through a yard or being discovered under a pile of boxes on someone’s carport.

My mother had a reputation as the neighborhood snake killer, having learned her technique from her father, who grew up on a farm in Slovakia where he sometimes dispatched adders. Armed with a shovel, my mother had coolly chopped the heads off more rattlers — and copperheads and water moccasins — than I could count.

One long summer afternoon, my mother had been home from work just long enough to change into her pedal pushers and Keds when we heard screaming from next door. Julieta came barreling into our carport shrieking, “Snake! Snake!” and Mom was out the kitchen door and into the utility room off the carport to grab her shovel.

Next door, Mrs. Mendoza was standing at the backyard gate. “Luis has a gun but he’s not home yet. Please help her!”

Luisa was in the corner of the backyard, in a little slot between the fence and the shed. Blocking her path was a pygmy rattler, a coiled ball of fury, its tail vibrating with that unmistakable warning. I couldn’t breathe.

“Stand real still, honey,” my mother said to Luisa in her kindest voice. “Don’t move.”

The snake was focused on Luisa, but when my mother took a step forward and stomped one foot, it swung its head around. She struck, the shovel blade flashing through its extended neck. The coils convulsed, the jaws snapped, the tail fell silent.

She swept the beheaded snake aside with the shovel, then grabbed Luisa, who was still standing frozen as a little statue. “Did it bite you, baby?”

Luisa shook her head and began to cry as her mother swooped in, kissing her all over and inspecting her for bites at the same time.

Julieta craned toward the snake.

“Don’t touch it,” my mother said quickly. “They can bite even after you cut their heads off.” By way of demonstration, she touched the severed head with the tip of the shovel blade, and the snake’s jaws jerked wide, then snapped.

Mrs. Howard was standing wide-eyed on the sidewalk, hugging herself. I wouldn’t have thought she could look any paler, but she did. I realized I’d never seen her cross the street. She motioned me over.

“Has your mama done that before?”

“Yes ma’am. She’s the Rattlesnake snake killer. She’s not afraid of anything,” I boasted, reflecting a little of my mom’s badass glory.

Mrs. Howard seemed as frozen as Luisa had been a few minutes ago. Then she took a shuddering breath and said, “Could you tell her I’d like to speak to her, please?”

I did. Mrs. Howard stood on her carport waiting until my mom had stashed the shovel and swaggered across the street. I went inside to watch TV, and when my dad got home I realized Mom was still at the Howards’.

They were on the carport, huddled in a corner. Mom was was talking intently, her voice low. Mrs. Howard was nodding but looking utterly miserable, tears standing in her eyes.

I got close enough to hear my mother say, “You have to. You have to go now. My God, the little one is his own child.”

Mrs. Howard closed her eyes, and my mother took hold of her shoulders and shook her a little bit, so that the tears ran down her face.

Then they heard my feet crunch on the dry grass. Mom turned and said, “Go tell your father to get a pizza from Maria’s. And you go with him.”

When we got back she was home. My dad raised his eyebrows; she cut her eyes at me and shook her head. At least I got pizza. They talked long after I went to bed, though they shut my door so I couldn’t hear what they said.

The next day I took a bus to swimming lessons at the Davis Islands pool, as I did a couple of days a week in the summer. The lessons consisted of a couple of teenage lifeguards throwing us all in the deep end and laughing, but the pool cooled us off.

The bus dropped me near home just in time for a classic Florida summer thunderstorm. I was drenched in a minute. I didn’t mind that — I was still damp from swimming — but I was terrified of lightning, so I started sprinting the four blocks home.

A car pulled up beside me and slowed. It was the Thunderbird. The colonel cranked down the passenger window. “Jump in.”

I felt frozen again. He swung the door open just as a thunderbolt crashed so close I could smell the ozone. I jumped.

He pulled into the empty driveway of my house, then turned to me and smiled. “This storm will pass in a minute. I can tell you don’t like that thunder. Let’s wait.”

Rain hammered the roof. He reached over the back of the seat and fished out a towel. He rubbed my hair with it briskly, then slid it over my shoulders.

In the tiny car, his face was close to mine. “So pretty,” he whispered. His hand moved over my wet shirt. I was as flat-chested as a boy, but his fingers found my nipple and pinched it, hard. His arm tightened around me and his mouth was at my ear.

“You remind me of the little girls I used to know in Saigon.” He sighed deeply. “All those sweet little girls.”

I swung the door open, twisted sideways from under his arm, and bolted into the dark house. The Thunderbird sat in the driveway for a minute or two, then slowly drove away. It didn’t stop across the street.

This time I knew I hadn’t dreamed anything, but I didn’t know what to do. That night my parents seemed distracted, sending me to watch TV and murmuring in the kitchen. When my mother came into the living room, she said, “You look tired,” and I realized I was exhausted. I went to bed without argument, figuring if I slept on it I’d know what to say tomorrow.

Voices woke me deep in the night. My parents talking in low tones, but someone else too. From the hall I could see Mrs. Howard and her girls in the kitchen. Susie was asleep on my father’s shoulder. Nancy was backed up against the counter, weeping silently and sucking a lock of her hair. Out on the carport, I could see the back end of our station wagon, piled with loose clothes and my mother’s tan suitcase.

Standing so close to her mother their noses almost touched, Brenda was shaking with anger. “I’m not going anywhere, you old bag,” she said. “I’m staying here with him.”

She turned toward the door, and fast as a cat my mother blocked her. She seized Brenda’s arm and hissed in her face, “You get in that car now, or I’ll hogtie you and throw you in the back.”

Brenda wrenched her arm loose, and I thought she would strike my mother. Instead she whirled and slapped Nancy so hard she staggered. “Come on, you fucking moron,” Brenda said.

I crept back to bed before anyone saw me. In the morning my father told me that my mom got a phone call in the middle of the night and had to go visit her aunt up the coast in Masaryktown because she was in the hospital; she’d be home soon, he added. I didn’t ask him why I hadn’t heard the phone ring.

A day later, walking home after swimming lessons, I spotted the T-bird on the carport across the street and saw the colonel standing at our front door. I cut off through the alley before he could see me and went into our house as quietly as I could through the back.

“Where are they?” the colonel was saying, not shouting but in that voice that sounded like he was giving an order. “I know you know. I know that damn wife of yours has something to do with this.”

“My damn wife is my business,” my father said, “and I’d appreciate you not talking about her that way.”

The colonel snorted. “They’re mine. You have no right. She has no right.”

“All I can tell you is they’re not here.”

From where I stood in the kitchen, the colonel couldn’t spot me, but I could see a gun in his hand. He held it loosely, pointed toward the ground, but he twitched it back and forth in a nervous way I didn’t like.

My father must have heard me. Behind his back, he flicked his hand toward me in a get-back gesture, then pointed toward the Mendoza house. I went out the back door, holding it so it wouldn’t slam, and jumped the fence into the backyard next door.

“The colonel is yelling at my dad,” I said quietly through the Mendozas’ kitchen screen door. “He has a gun.”

“The colonel has a gun?” Sergeant Mendoza was already moving, his hand swinging the holster toward him. “Call the base,” he said to Mrs. Mendoza. To me he said, “You stay here.”

As soon as she was on the phone, I snuck out and slid behind the hedge along the side of our house so I could see the front yard.

Mendoza moved even more quietly than I did, stopping a few feet behind the colonel. “Drop the gun, sir.”

The colonel grew still. He didn’t drop the gun, but he stopped twitching it. “I’m your superior officer,” he said without turning.

“Drop the gun, sir,” Mendoza said again. “Then put your hands up.”

For an instant my father’s eyes met Mendoza’s, and my father took one step back from the doorway, pivoted, and flattened himself against the wall. The colonel’s hand twitched once. Mendoza moved one foot a little forward. Once again I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.

Then we heard the siren.

The colonel never looked at Mendoza, but he put his gun down on the driveway, very slowly. Mendoza kept his weapon trained on the colonel until the MPs handcuffed him and drove him away.

After Mendoza holstered the gun, my father shook his hand. They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then my father said to me, “Come out of those damn bushes.”

For about a week, Mendoza came over while Johnny Carson was on TV and slept on a lawn chaise on our carport, his holster on.

My mother pulled into the driveway two days after the colonel was taken away, just her and her suitcase, and she never said a word to me about where she’d been. I never saw the T-bird again. By the time school started, the Howards’ house had new tenants.

A few weeks after she returned, my mom had to go to some kind of hearing on base. She came home looking tired and poured a double Scotch.

“Did you tell them where you took her and the kids?” Dad asked.

“They didn’t even ask,” she said. “But I told them what he did.”

I was babysitting Julieta and Luisa late one afternoon not long after that. Mendoza and my dad got home at the same time, and I walked out to see them talking in our driveway.

“You know how the brass are,” Mendoza said. “They cover each other’s asses, sweep everything under the rug. All they did was transfer him. But they did send him someplace that might make him regret what he did. Things are getting real hot there.”

My dad’s eyebrows went up. “Where?”

Mendoza smiled. “They sent him back to Saigon.”