The Awkward Black Man

1

Albert Roundhouse came from a good working-class family in Los Angeles. He did well in public high school and made it through three years of state college before things started falling apart.

There was a young woman named Alyce who came into Albert’s life like a typhoon — at least that’s what Albert’s sister Luellen said.

“Alyce blew in like a storm,” Luellen Roundhouse reported to anyone who cared to listen. “She told him that she wasn’t the kind of girl that belonged to anyone or who wanted to settle down. And as much as Al tried to understand what she was telling him, he just sank under all that loving like a leaky rowboat in a summer storm.”

And it was true, what Luellen said. Sometimes when Albert gazed on Alyce’s brown body in his bed at night, he would howl and pounce on her like an animal from some deep forgotten part of the forest. And Alyce loved his hunger for her. She rolled and growled, clawed and bit with him.

And then one day she was gone — out of his bed, out of his apartment, out of the city, with Roald Hopkins, a sailor on furlough.

“He could have been called Jimmy or Johnny,” Luellen Roundhouse said. “He could have been a she for all that Alyce cared. Because she was just hungry for passion from as many lovers as possible. She told Albert that. She warned him.”

At about that time, September 1979, Albert and Luellen’s father, Thyme Roundhouse, met Betty Pann. He fell for Betty just as his son had fallen for Alyce. But Betty didn’t run away — not at all. It was Thyme who ran out. He left Georgia, his wife, the kids’ mother, and moved with Miss Pann to Seattle, where they lived in a house that looked over the Puget Sound. Thyme became a fisherman and Betty a nurse. “Blood and Fishes,” they had printed on their own personal stationery.

Georgia Roundhouse changed her surname back to Gordon but still refused to give Thyme a divorce. She didn’t quit her job as senior office manager for the city of Los Angeles, but after seventeen weeks of absence she was fired.

By then Albert was failing his classes, pining for Alyce. She had sent the lovesick student a postcard telling him that she’d left Roald for another lover, name of Christian Lovell. Her words and tone were so friendly that Albert cried for three days. Luellen convinced her brother to drop out of school and move in with their mother, each to serve as a life preserver for the other.

For a while it went as well as heartbreak would allow. Albert got a job for Logan Construction and came up with the small monthly mortgage payment. The rest of their money came from Georgia’s private savings and what little Luellen could provide from her various part-time jobs.

Albert had never done hard labor before. He manned a wheelbarrow most days, moving rock from one pile to another. He lifted and strained and grew callouses. Al was grateful for the exhaustion because it meant he would sleep rather than brood about Alyce at night in his childhood bed.

Georgia cooked dinner every day and ate with her moping son.

The mother loved Albert, but for most of his life they’d had little in common and less to say. But with Thyme gone, Georgia would find herself telling Albert about her family history. She told these stories because Albert rarely had anything to say except that he loved Alyce more and more each day.

Georgia talked about her mother and father and Great-Grandfather Henry, who had been born a slave but became a spice trader, getting his own ship and working from the port of Havana. Henry’s wife, Lorraine, had been a woman of the streets.

“Great-Granddaddy Henry married a prostitute?”

“He had got himself stabbed by a Spaniard that wanted to take over his business, but Lorraine found him bleeding in an alley and took him in. She nursed him back to health, and Henry went out and killed that Spaniard. When he came back he told Lorraine that he would marry her and build her a big house in America, where she would never have to work unless that was what she wanted.”

“He must have been the most colorful ancestor we got,” Albert said, forgetting for the moment his sorrow.

“Oh, no,” Georgia said. “Big Jim Gordon, your great-uncle on my father’s side, was the wildest, most exciting relative. Big Jim declared war on the town of Hickton, Mississippi, and fought that war for twelve long years.”

“War?”

“Oh, yes,” Georgia said with surety. “Full-fledged war, with guns and traps, dead men and blood. He lived in the woods around that town and took retribution on those that had harmed him and others of our people.”

“When was this?”

“Just after World War One and up to the Great Depression.”

“But the Gordons aren’t from Mississippi.”

Georgia smiled. It was a look of mild cheer, but Albert thought he could see how deep the pain ran.

“You only get so much a night, Al,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you how the white men in that town of Hickton hurt Jim and then paid the price.”

With these words Georgia Gordon got up and went to her bedroom, leaving Albert to wonder about his great-grandfather the spice merchant and his great-uncle Big Jim, the one-man army.

So taken was the young man with his unknown heritage that he didn’t brood over Alyce that evening.

In the morning he got up early, before his mother, and went out to work in Oxnard, where he spent the morning rolling chunks of concrete and granite to a pit that had been excavated by the company bulldozer. He swung a sledgehammer for three hours in the early afternoon and then used an oversize shovel in the gravel pit until his shift was through. He worked harder than usual, imagining a one-man black army declaring war on a white southern town. In this reverie he didn’t feel the weight of his labors or the gravity of loss.

When he got home, the house was quiet and dark. Albert couldn’t remember the last time he’d entered the house when the television wasn’t on.

“Mama,” the twenty-one-year-old called.

He expected the “Here” to come from one of the back rooms. But there was no welcome.

Georgia Gordon was dead in her bed, her left hand gripping the edge of the blanket near her chin. Her foot, clad in a gaudy, pink cashmere sock, poked out from the sheets. There was an odor hovering in the room, a smell that Albert couldn’t get out of his nose for many weeks.

“Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?” Detective Todd Green asked Albert, for the fourth or fifth time.

“I, I could tell she was dead,” he said. “Her skin was cold, and she hadn’t been out of bed since I left this morning.”

“Why didn’t you call the ambulance this morning?”

“I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

“You knew that she hadn’t gotten out of bed.”

“I left the house at five in the morning. When I got home, all the lights were off and the paper was at the front door. I could tell that Mama had never gotten up. I went in her room after she didn’t answer, and there she was.”

“Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?” the detective asked again.

“I called my sister.”

“Your sister? Why?”

“She’s her mother too. And Mama was cold, and the room smelled bad. Lu said to call the police, and so that’s what I did.”

Thyme Roundhouse came down for the funeral with Betty Pann on his arm.

“I’m selling the house, Al,” he said at the reception after the service.

“But this is Mama’s house.”

“Your mother’s dead, and I’m still her husband.”

The full impact of the death hadn’t hit the young man until his father uttered those words. From then on, and through the next few decades, Albert was confused about the sequence of events.

There were some things he was sure of. He began crying upon hearing his father’s callous pronouncement. Not loud bawling; it was just that the tears wouldn’t stop flowing from his eyes. Luellen and Thyme argued. Men touched him on the shoulder and head. Women kissed him and held him like he was their child.

At some point everyone was gone from the house, and Albert was alone with a fifth of Jack Daniel’s that someone had brought for the repast...

The first bender lasted for eight or nine weeks. It carried him from the house his father was selling up to Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue. He crashed in the laundry room of a house on Derby Street.

One night he had sex with a woman in the back of a van while her husband watched from the driver’s seat.

He moved out of the house and into an empty lot, using a sleeping bag that a man named Hartwynn had given him. He did day labor when the hangovers were tolerable.

The Petals of the Sun commune was located in southern Oregon where a redwood forest met the ocean. There he dried out for some months, though he wasn’t sure how many. There was a woman with big hands named Rilette, who had built a one-room cottage and took him in. Rilette had a brother, Marquis. Marquis and Albert went into town one night and bought a bottle of red wine and then another.

When Albert woke up the next morning, Marquis was gone, and Rilette was blaming Albert for stealing her money to buy wine.

He hadn’t taken her money, but she sent him away. Albert marked this event as the beginning of his roustabout years.

Finally, after three months incarceration for vagrancy in northern California, he built up enough strength and sobriety to hitchhike across country with a woman named Bergit. She was half Native American and half Swedish and tall and blue-eyed and completely in love with the world she inhabited. She was leaving her boyfriend in Oregon to visit her husband in Vermont. This husband lived on a commune that raised silkworms and practiced Tibetan Buddhism.

For a year the master of that sect worked with Albert, trying to get him to “get outside of the inebriation.”

“You mean you want me to stop drinking, right?” Albert once asked. “I been tryin’ to put the bottle down, but every time I turn around I find it there in my hand.”

The master had a huge, round, burnt-orange-colored face. He smiled at Albert and shook his great head.

“It is not what I want that matters,” the master said. “You must seek your own equilibrium. If drinking brings balance then by all means drink. But if it is only a mask, a beard to cover the real face of your desire, then you must find another way.”

Albert would sit in his straw hut at night, wrapped in a down comforter that Bergit’s husband gave him. Outside it was below zero, but the round hut stayed warm, and Albert wondered what it meant to achieve balance.

In the spring the master died, and the man who ran the raw-silk production line asked Albert to leave.

“You’re just a drunk,” Terry Pin said to Albert three days after the cremation rite.

Theodore Bidwell, Bergit’s husband, apologized for Terry’s rough words.

“Bergit has relatives that work construction in New York,” Theodore told Albert. He bought the displaced Californian a ticket for the Peter Pan bus in Saint Albans and gave him forty dollars to hold him over till he contacted the Swedish Indian’s cousins.

Bergit had left some months before to return to her boyfriend and his son in the forests of Oregon. Albert thought it was nice of her husband to buy his ticket and give him a recommendation.

On the bus Albert sat by the window concentrating on the idea of balance. He thought about Alyce and his father, his mother, and Luellen. He touched the center of his chest with the middle finger of his left hand. At just that place there was a gap, a space that Alyce had stretched out and then vacated. There was something about this emptiness that kept him from the proper equilibrium. It was like trying to stand up straight atop a gas-filled balloon that always seemed to be shifting away.

Albert rubbed the area that felt hollow, wondering if somehow he could move the emptiness around.

In the window of the bus he peered into his own dark image, thinking about Alyce and Great-Uncle Big Jim. These unknowable quantities, he felt, were what made him stagger through life. Or maybe it was his mother’s unexpected death or his father’s betrayal.

“My life hasn’t really been all that bad,” he said to the image of himself.

“What did you say?” asked the woman in the aisle seat next to him.

“Nuthin’.”

“It was something,” the youngish, round white woman said. “I heard it. I just didn’t understand the words.”

Her smile was gentle and reminded Al of a time when he wasn’t sad.

“I was sayin’ that my life hasn’t really been all that bad. I mean, I’ve had some hard times, but every trouble I’ve had has been at least partly my fault.”

“We all make our own beds,” she agreed, “but it’s God that gives us bedbugs.”

Albert laughed deeply. While laughing he tried to remember the last time he felt mirth when sober.

Mary Denise Fulmer was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. She taught middle school there and lived by herself in a small red house near the train tracks. She was unmarried and had never lived anywhere but Springfield.

“Where are you coming from now?” Albert asked.

“My grandmother lived in Montreal,” Mary Denise said. “She died last week, and I took a few days off to wrap up her affairs.”

Albert told Mary Denise about his mother’s death and his on-again, off-again ten-year bender.

“I just can’t seem to get straight,” he said more than once.

Somewhere outside of Amherst she asked, “Would you like to come stay with me for a while? You could sleep on the couch... or in my bed if you want.”

Albert hadn’t had a drink in thirty-four hours. He felt queasy but clearheaded.

“I really, really want to, Mary D,” he said, surprising himself with the clarity. “But I’m on a tight schedule here. I got to get to a place that’s mine. Mine.”

The plump schoolteacher smiled sadly and put a hand on his forearm. She leaned over and kissed his bristly cheek.

2

The next twenty-two years passed like overlapping spirals drawn by a tired child on a rainy afternoon. Albert would work for weeks, sometimes for months at a time, and then he’d fall off the wagon.

But even when on a bender, Albert would always find time to beg. This practice he’d learned from his Tibetan master.

“A man with a tin cup allows the more prosperous to pay penance. Without this opportunity, their souls would surely be lost.”

Albert could imbibe prodigiously in his younger years, but after he crossed the half-century border his capacity diminished. Where at one time he could drink a fifth and a half of sour-mash whiskey, now half a bottle of cheap red wine was all he could manage before the gut rot set in.

He’d been hospitalized twice by the city and had done three stints in jail, for public lewdness, resisting arrest, and simple assault. The Eagle Heart Construction Company of Queens always took Albert back if he was sober. He’d been working for them as long as most could remember.

Between work and inebriation, jail and hospitalization, Albert lived in a cavity under an abandoned subway tunnel on the Upper East Side. This space was an underground chamber he inherited from a German survivalist named Dieter Krownen, who had returned to Munich when his mother got sick.

Chained together under metal netting in the abandoned tunnel above his subterranean lair, Albert had a collection of shopping carts in which he kept those belongings that didn’t fit in his 137-square-foot underground bunker.

Albert hadn’t realized he’d passed the half-century mark until he was fifty-three. One day he’d come across his birth certificate in an old alligator wallet in the bottom of one of the carts. The date of his birth was January 12, 1958, the time 4:56 a.m. His race was Negro, sex male, and he came into the world weighing six and three-quarter pounds.

After calculating his age, Albert stopped working for Eagle Heart Construction. Fifty, he thought, should be the mandatory retirement age in order to make space for younger workers. One of his professors at state college had told him that.

So for six months he’d been strolling around Manhattan with his travel cart. He pushed the rickety shopping cart all over the city, whispering words about his father and mother, Luellen, and always, always Alyce. He begged for a few hours each day, thinking about his deceased master and believing that he was doing penance by begging and saving souls.

One sunny afternoon he found himself on Sixth Avenue, two blocks south of Houston Street. There he stood on the corner next to a restaurant with half of its tables out on the sidewalk. He leaned against a lamppost remembering the half-told story about his great-uncle Big Jim who, Albert imagined, had killed a dozen white men in a just war.

Over the years, Albert had fleshed out the tale that his mother had tantalized him with before she died. Albert’s Jim was six foot six, with fists like hams, and very proficient with every kind of weapon. He’d fought beside Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and had been wounded more than once...

While reconstituting the story he’d contrived over the years, Albert became aware of a woman crossing the street.

It was Alyce or, at least, almost Alyce. The woman walking toward him was the same age Alyce had been when Albert knew her; she was taller, with different-color eyes, blond not brunette, white not black. But in spite of all that she had the same style and poise and grace. She had the same wildness in her blue, not brown, eyes. Her gait was brash like Alyce’s, and her expression was one of mirth in the face of disaster.

This woman, who every man and woman around was looking at, walked right up to Albert and said, “Hi, I’m Frankie. What’s your name?”

“Albert.”

“You want to make some money, Albert?”

“OK.”

“Well, then,” she said, with a wry grin, “let’s go.”

Stillman’s Gourmet Grocer was a chain that had a store in SoHo. Frankie had Albert leave his cart down the block from the entrance and told him to go into the fancy supermarket before she did.

“First, go back to the meat section,” she told him, “and then to the fruits and vegetables. Whenever you see me, count to twelve and then go to the next section. Don’t act like you know me. Just count to twelve and move on.”

She laid out the plan for him to go to five different sections. He committed these destinations to memory, thinking that maybe the Tibetan notion of reincarnation was true and that Alyce had died and been reborn as Frankie.

He went into the store and was shocked by the air-conditioning. The cold made him shiver now and then, even under his coat and sweater. He made his way to the meats and looked into the cold bins with rows of steaks and pork chops, whole chickens and slabs of bacon — all set on rectangular Styrofoam plates wrapped in clear plastic. The food distracted him. He cooked in his subterranean lair but only rice and beans, chicken necks and grits.

After a while Alyce, no, Frankie, yes, Frankie, wandered into the aisle. One, two... She wore tight-fitting, faded blue jeans and a linen shirt. There was a necklace of blue stones around her neck. Her hair was tied back, and she was so beautiful...

...eleven, twelve.

Albert moved on, looking for the fruits and vegetables.

Store employees followed him openly. There was a guard in a uniform not three steps away.

Albert wasn’t worried. He was no thief. His mother hated thieves. At one time his sister wanted to be a cop. Looking at a bin filled with huge pomegranates, Albert wondered whether Luellen still had the same phone number. They hadn’t been in touch in nineteen years, maybe twenty.

“Excuse me,” the copper-skinned guard, wearing a blue and gray uniform, said.

At just that moment Alyce, no, Frankie, came into the far end of the aisle.

One, two, three...

“Excuse me,” the guard insisted.

“Yes?”...four, five...

“Can I help you?”

“No, no, I’m just looking.” ...seven, eight...

“If you’re not going to buy anything, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

The guard was young and pudgy, with a silly, drooping mustache. His eyes were both insecure and resentful.

When Albert got to twelve he turned and walked away.

The guard followed him.

“Excuse me.”

Albert passed the pasta aisle and one with cookies and cakes. Finally there was a row with coffee and teas, chocolates, and wildflower-flavored honeys.

Albert stopped in front of a row of golden jars and stared.

“Excuse me,” the guard said.

There were store employees standing at the far end of the aisle.

“Yes?” Albert asked, grateful not to be distracted by having to count.

“I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“But I haven’t finished looking.”

“You have to buy something.”

Albert reached into his pocket and took out a five-dollar bill. He showed this to the guard.

“See?” Albert said loudly. “I have money to buy with.”

Looking at the guard, he noticed that customers had stopped to watch the argument.

The guard slapped Albert’s hand.

“I don’t want to see that,” the man with the drooping mustache said.

“I got a right just like anybody else to be here, to shop here,” Albert said, loud enough that the spectators could hear.

More people were coming into the sweets aisle. Albert glanced around to make sure that Alyce wasn’t one of them. No, no — Frankie.

The guard grabbed Albert’s left biceps, but when Albert flexed his muscle he let go.

“I’m just lookin’ for a candy bar, man. Why you wanna kick me outta here?”

“Chico,” a man in a dark blue suit said.

Albert was looking around for Frankie, yes, Frankie, but she was nowhere to be seen. Had he made her up?

“Yes, Mr. Greenwood?” the security guard said.

“What’s going on here?”

“Um,” Chico the guard said.

“I come in here wanting to buy me a piece a’ fancy candy,” Albert averred, brandishing his five-dollar bill. “First I looked at the meats and vegetables just to see what you got, and then this man here said that I’m not welcome to shop in your store. I got my money right here in my hand.”

Mr. Greenwood was about Albert’s age. He was pale-skinned and had amber eyes behind metal-rimmed glasses. He’d made something of himself, that’s what Albert thought. He was a man who ran a grocery store, while Albert was just a guy who lived in a hole.

“Excuse me, sir,” Greenwood said, forcing a smile. “You are certainly welcome to shop here, just like anybody else.”

There were people all around them, but Alyce — no, Frankie — was nowhere to be seen. Albert was becoming light-headed.

“Would you accept a gift of one of our boxes of chocolates?” Greenwood was asking.

“No,” Albert said. “I don’t want anything from this store if you won’t even let me walk around and look. I mean, that’s what people do in the store, right? They shop and look and buy if they see somethin’ they like. No, I don’t want your candy now.”

When Albert saw Frankie waiting at his shopping cart, he was overjoyed. He thought that maybe he had actually seen her on that corner but imagined their conversation. Maybe his make-believe had brought him to the store, thinking that she was following him, and he was perpetually moving away.

“You were just perfect, Al,” she said, beaming.

She pulled his shoulders and kissed his cheek.

“Let’s go to my house,” she said. “And I’ll make you a Stillman’s steak.”

There was an office building on Broome Street that had changed hands and was under reconstruction.

“The man who owns it is being indicted for fraud or something,” Frankie told Albert. “The trial’ll take years. A guy named Childress gets the keys from the construction boss and makes a few spaces available for apartments. I got the one on the sixth floor, and I only pay three hundred a month.”

The halls were dusty and dark, but the makeshift apartment was bright and airy, with good furniture, electricity, and a camping stove in the office-supply room that she used as a kitchen. There was even a bathroom with running water at the end of the hall.

“You’re not all that dirty,” Frankie said, “but you could still wash up while I make us dinner. There’s some clothes in a box in the hall that might fit you.”

The bathroom had a fiberglass businessman’s shower installed in the corner. Albert felt vulnerable being naked in that illegal space, washing with cold water. But he was excited too. Frankie was almost Alyce in his eyes, and for the first time in decades the mantra of love-lost had stopped nagging at him.

With a smile on his face he plunged under the ice-cold spray and experienced exhilaration that spanned his entire life. His father might have been dead by now. Luellen never became a cop. The moon was rounding the curve of the Earth, soon to be aloft in the New York sky. Albert was standing naked in that hidden space, and there was a woman down the hall who wanted to have a meal with him.

Out of the clothes box he took a pair of gray sweatpants and a green T-shirt that was only a little too small.

“You’re in pretty good shape for a homeless,” Frankie said, as she served him a fried rib-eye steak with white rice and shredded brussels sprouts sautéed in butter with garlic and soy sauce.

“I live in a hole in the ground,” he said, savoring the meal. “But I’m not homeless. No more than you are.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“How come you picked me off the street like that?”

“I needed a partner, and the last guy I worked with punked out on me.”

“You needed a black man to distract security?”

“Uh-huh. You want some red wine?”

“I don’t think so. No, no, I don’t.”

“You need a job, Albert?”

“I’d like to work for you, Frankie.”

“I’m not getting up off of any pussy. My last partner, Joby, didn’t understand that.”

“These his clothes?” Albert asked. He was thinking about his deceased Tibetan master and the ideal of balance, of the moon arcing through the sky and all the many tons of rock he’d piled over the years.

“Yeah,” Frankie said, “but they belonged to a guy named Teddy before that.”

“You know a lotta men.”

“My father had Huntington’s disease,” she said, as if in answer. “He’d go into these wild rages, and my mother had me and my sister padlocked in our rooms at night. She gave me a pistol. I still have it.”

“Did he ever try to hurt you, your father?”

“Only all the time.”

“What’s that got to do with all the men you know?” Albert was wondering about the reasoning behind his own question.

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” she said.

“I won’t steal,” Albert said, as if in answer, “but I don’t mind walkin’ around in a store.”

3

Albert “walked around” while Frankie shoplifted from drugstores mainly, but they also hit hardware stores, art-supply stores, little knickknack places down in SoHo, and some Midtown department stores. Frankie knew the most valuable items to boost (and where to sell them), and all Albert had to do was look at things that interested him.

He was especially interested in portable electronics and colored pens.

He was arrested twice but then released for lack of evidence. He made sure to have twenty dollars in his pocket so that he could always claim to be shopping.

Frankie set up a room for him down the hall from her suite. She padlocked her doors and told him that if he broke in on her, she still had the pistol her mother had given her.

“I’ve shot men before,” she warned.

Early one Thursday morning, Frankie knocked on Albert’s door. He was already awake, lying on the futon she’d had the man Childress deliver. She paid an extra hundred dollars a month for Albert. He stayed on Broome Street, even though he had another illegal home uptown.

He heard the knock but didn’t answer immediately. He was lying there thinking that he hadn’t had a drink since the day he met Frankie.

“Yeah?” he said at the second knock.

“You wanna get breakfast and do some shopping?”

“I have something to do today.”

“What’s that?” She pushed the door open and walked into the small office.

“I’m going up to Central Park to beg.”

“You don’t need that. We make more than enough.”

“I don’t do it for the money,” he said.

“Why else would somebody beg on the street?”

“To save souls and redeem karma.”

They left the building together and walked up Broadway toward Houston Street. Just before crossing Prince, Frankie stopped and turned around, pretending to be looking in the window of a little perfume boutique.

“Stand in front of me, Al,” she whispered forcefully. “Stand in front of me. Not there. On the other side.”

Albert did as she said and looked around.

Coming toward them were two burly white guys in jeans and white T-shirts. They had crew cuts and tattoos. They were the kind of men that Albert had learned to avoid on streets and back alleys.

One of the men looked at Albert as he passed.

Albert smiled, and the white man sneered.

“Are they gone?” Frankie asked.

“Yeah.”

They stopped outside the entrance to the F train near Broadway and Houston.

“Who were those guys?”

“Toad Boy and Westerling,” she said.

“They got a problem with you?”

“When the police asked me where they were, I told ’em — because they killed my friend Bobby. I guess the case fell through.”

“What’ll happen if they see you?”

“You might have to start begging full time.”

Nine days later Albert and Frankie were sitting in her makeshift apartment eating a dish she called Yankee stew. It had potatoes and beef and a good amount of beer in it.

“I like you, Al,” Frankie said as they ate.

“Me too. I mean, I like you too.”

“Is there anything you want from me?”

“You already gimme a job and a place to stay.”

“I’ve played this game with a lotta guys. All of them have tried to get in my pants at least once. I never let ’em. You’re the first one didn’t want it. Are you gay?”

“No.”

“Don’t like white girls?”

“I would like one thing from you, Frankie.”

“What’s that?”

“Could you... would you let me... let me call you Alyce?”

“Alyce?”

“Yeah. I used to know a girl by that name when I was in college...”

“You went to college?”

“I loved her so hard, and when she left my heart broke, and it never got better until I met you.”

“You fell in love with me?”

“You took her place, kind of,” he said. “You don’t look like her, but you have the same spirit. If I could call you Alyce that would mean a whole lot to me.”

“You’d rather that than lay up in my bed?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, bewilderment in her tone. “OK. I guess it could be like our little nickname.”

That night Albert reclined on his futon feeling like he’d passed into a new land, a new place. There was a woman like Alyce who didn’t mind being called by that name.

He was smiling and sober and hopeful for something he could not quite imagine.

Through his window he could see the crescent moon. Then a loud banging from the hall brought him to his feet.

The footsteps passed his door and continued down toward Alyce’s room.

He came out into the hall and saw the backs of two men. They had crew cuts, T-shirts, and tattoos.

“What do you want?” Albert demanded.

The white men turned.

“This ain’t your business,” either Toad Boy or Westerling said. “We just want the bitch.”

Albert surged forward throwing his fists, getting hit twice for every blow he delivered. He pushed and fought and struggled in the narrow passage. The men hit him, and he felt pain, but it was like a far-off experience, like the memory held in an untouched bruise.

He felt something hard strike the side of his head and fell, happy to give in to the pull of gravity. Someone kicked him in the chest, then in the head. They kept up like that for thirty seconds or so.

Albert expected even more punishment, but there was a shot and then another shot.

“Let’s get outta here!” one of the men shouted.

After the third shot the same man squealed in pain.

By then Albert was on his back looking up at the ceiling. Alyce ran by and was gone for a minute, maybe two.

Albert closed his eyes for a moment.

“Are you all right?” Frankie, no, Alyce, asked.

Albert opened his eyes, caught a glimpse of his friend, and then passed out.

He woke up in a hospital bed feeling surprisingly healthy. His jaw hurt, as did his side. He turned his head and saw a middle-aged black woman sitting in a chair. She was heavy but not fat, wearing a gray dress and holding a dark blue purse.

“Al?” she said.

“Lu?”

“Baby, I was worried that you were gonna die lyin’ right here next to me.”

“What happened?”

“Somebody called the police and told them that you was all beat up in this buildin’. They came and found you. You had my name and address in an old alligator wallet. The cops said there was the smell of gunpowder in the air. But you didn’t have no gunshot wound.”

“It was only me?” Albert Roundhouse asked.

Nodding, Luellen said, “The police wanna question you.”

The interrogation lasted an hour or so. The men who broke into Albert’s illegal squat were named Toad Boy and Westerling. They kicked the shit out of him, and then there were shots. He didn’t know if anyone else lived on that floor. He’d only happened upon the place that day.

The hospital discharged Albert when he told them that he didn’t have insurance.

His sister offered to fly him back to Los Angeles.

“I’d like to go back to school, Lu,” he said. “I’d like to study history and find out what really happened with Great-Uncle Big Jim and the town of Hickton, Mississippi.

“You can come live with me,” she said. “Daddy got sick after Betty Pann died. He bought a house in LA, and I took care of him till he passed.”

“I have eighty-three thousand two hundred ninety-seven dollars and forty-two cents,” Albert said.

“You do? Where you get that?”

“The money I collected while saving souls. I can give it to you, and then I won’t be a charity case.”