USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

AFTER THIRTY by Don Winslow

1945

Charlie Decker is a hard case.

Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.

Charlie’s no good.

He’s trouble and always has been. Drunkenness, absent-without-official-leave, brawling, gambling, insubordination—three stretches in the navy and Charlie’s been in and out of the brig and up and down the ranks. The navy probably would have thrown him out if there wasn’t a war on and they didn’t need a man who knew how to make an engine run. Give Charlie Decker thirty minutes and a wrench and he can fix anything, but you also know that he can wreck anything too, and just as easily.

People tried to tell Millie this, but she wouldn’t listen. Her roommates saw it clear as day. One good look in Charlie’s eyes, that cocky smirk of his, and you knew. They told her but it went through one ear and out the other. Now she opens her eyes, looks at the clock on her bed table, and slaps him on the butt. “Charlie, get up.”

“What?” he mumbles, happy in his sweet, warm sleep. They sat up and drank when she came home from her night shift at Consolidated, and then they did it and then drank some more, so he don’t want to get up.

She shakes his shoulders. “It’s thirty days.”

Millie knows the navy—up to thirty days it’s AWOL, after thirty it’s desertion. He’s been shacked up with her for almost a month now. Almost a month in the little bungalow that was already crowded with four other girls, and he said he was going back before the thirty days were up.

But now he mumbles, “To hell with that.” And closes his eyes.

“You’re going to get in big trouble,” Millie says. AWOL, he would get a captain’s mast, but probably no time in the brig because he’s set to ship out soon anyway. But for desertion he’s going to get a court-martial, maybe years in the brig, and then a DD.

“Charlie, get up.”

He rolls over, kisses her, and then shows her what trouble is. That’s the thing—she knows he’s bad news but he’s just so damn handsome and so good in the sack. She knew from the moment they met at Eddie’s Bar that she couldn’t keep her legs shut with Charlie.

Charlie makes her see fireworks.

Charlie rolls off her, reaches for the green pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, finds his Zippo, and lights one up.

“Go fix us some breakfast,” he says.

“What do you want?”

“Eggs?”

“Try buying eggs, Charlie.”

“We got any coffee left?”

“A little.”

Like everything else, it’s rationed. Coffee, sugar, meat, cigarettes, chocolate, gasoline of course. The girls swap ration coupons but there’s only so much and she doesn’t like it when Charlie deals in the black market. She tells him it’s unpatriotic.

Charlie doesn’t give a damn. He figures he’s done his patriotic duty all over the Pacific, most recently on a tin can in the cordon line off Okinawa, and he deserves a little coffee and sugar.

The first cigarette of the day is always the best.

Charlie sucks the smoke into his lungs and holds it before letting it out his nose. It makes him feel good, relaxed, at ease with the decision he has to make.

“Then after breakfast you’ll go back,” Millie is saying.

“I thought you loved me,” Charlie says, flashing his smile. He’s proud of the smile—his teeth are white and even.

“I do.” She does love him, despite everything. That’s why she doesn’t want to see him get into a really bad jam. He’s always going to get in a little trouble, Millie knows, that’s part of what she loves about him.

“Then why do you want me to go?” Charlie teases. “You know we’re shipping out.”

“I know.”

“Will you wait for me?” he asks.

“Of course I will.”

He knows she won’t. Millie needs it, like most women. The story is that men need it and women just put up with it, but Charlie knows better. Maybe not virgins, maybe they don’t, but once a woman’s had it, she wants it again. And Millie wants it. Takes a couple of drinks to loosen her up enough to admit it, but after that, hell, look out.

If he ships out she’ll be with another guy by the time he gets back. He knows this for a fact because she was cheating on some poor jerk when she went to bed with him. Anyway, Charlie knows she won’t wait and tells himself that’s why he’s not going back. She’ll find another guy to sleep with, another guy’s back to scratch with her nails, another guy to tell that he makes her helpless to stop him.

That’s what he tells himself most of the time, and when that story doesn’t sell—usually in those cold gray hours of the early morning when he’s so drunk he’s almost sober—he tells himself a different story—that he doesn’t want to go back to the brig.

Charlie has felt an SP’s baton in the kidneys, along with the metallic taste of his own blood when they decided it was more fun to bust up his face, and he don’t want any more of it. They do whatever they want to do to you in the brig, and then hose it down like that washes it all away. Thirty days AWOL, the captain might send him to the brig and it’s not a chance he wants to take.

That’s what Charlie tells himself, anyway.

Now he watches Millie walk into the kitchen and likes the way she looks in the little white silk robe he bought her.

Millie’s a looker, all right.

That Saturday night he had liberty and headed down to Eddie’s because he heard that’s where the factory girls go. The ship had just limped back for repairs so they had a lot of free time, and after what they’d been through they were all ready to for it too. The scuttlebutt was that Eddie’s was the place to go, so he skipped the usual dives in the Gaslamp and headed to Pacific Beach. The joint was crowded with sailors and Marines all after the same thing, but he saw her and gave her that smile and she smiled back.

Charlie went up to her and talked and then she let him buy her a drink and then another and they talked and he asked her a lot of questions about herself and found out she came out from a little town in North Dakota because she’d always wanted to see the ocean and she wanted an adventure.

“I heard there were jobs for women in San Diego,” she said. “So I got on a train and here I am.”

“Here you are,” Charlie smiled.

“In Pacific Beach, California,” she said.

“Do you like it?”

She nodded. “I like the money and it’s fun living with the other girls most of the time.”

They talked some more and then he asked if they could get out of there and she said okay but where did he want to go?

“Can’t we just go to your place?” he asked. “You said you have a place.”

“I do,” she said, “but I don’t want to go right away. A girl likes a little romance, you know.”

Oh, hell, he knew. He was just hoping this one girl didn’t. But if she didn’t, she’d be the first ever. At least of the ones you didn’t pay. The whores, they didn’t want romance, they just wanted you to get your business over with as soon as possible so they could get on with theirs. It was like eating on a ship—hurry up and finish because there’s a sailor waiting for your chair.

But Millie, she looked at him with those dark blue eyes and he decided that a walk along the beach would be just the thing. You expected blue eyes with a blond girl, but Millie’s hair was jet black, and cut short, and she had these cute lips that made you think of Betty Boop. When he walked close to her she smelled like vanilla, because, she told him, perfume was hard to get.

But the vanilla smelled good behind her ear, in her hair. She was small, what did she call it—petite—and fit nice under his arm as they walked on the sand under the pier. A radio was playing somewhere and they stood and danced under the pier and he held her tight.

“You feel nice,” he said, because it was all he could think of to say and because it was true too.

“So do you,” she responded.

Now he remembers how nice she smelled and how good she felt under his arm and how life was the way he always hoped it would be. There were no flames that night, no acrid smoke that burned his nose, no screams that seared his brain, and the waves touched the beach like kisses, and if he told the truth he would have stayed there forever with her on Pacific Beach and not even taken her back to her place and her bed.

But he did and they made love and he slept through his liberty. He meant to go back that day, he really did, while it was still no big deal, but it was just too good with her in the little bungalow.

Millie shared the bedroom with another girl from the factory, a girl named Audrey from Ohio, and they’d run a rope across the room and draped a blanket over it for a little privacy. Sometimes Millie didn’t want to make love if Audrey was home because she felt shy with the other girl just across from the blanket. But Audrey worked the day shift and was gone a lot of nights with an airman, and sometimes Millie did it anyway with Audrey there and Charlie suspected she liked it because it made her feel dirty.

The bungalow was crowded, but so was all of Pacific Beach since they built the factories and all the people came for work. There was hardly any place to lie down—some people lived in tents in backyards—so Millie felt lucky to stay there even though it was hard to get into the bathroom sometimes and there were two girls sleeping in the living room.

Charlie liked it there too, that was the problem, even though it often felt as crowded as a ship. But it was quiet in the morning with the girls gone on their shifts, and he and Millie got up late and had the kitchen to themselves and they’d take their coffee and cigarettes out into the tiny yard and enjoy the sun.

Audrey had a car and sometimes they’d drive down to Oscar’s for hamburgers, or go to Belmont Park and ride the roller coaster, and Millie would scream and hold on tight to his arm and he liked that. One time when Millie got paid they went to the Hollywood Theater downtown to see the burlesque and she dug her elbow into his ribs when he gawked at Zena Ray, and they both laughed at Bozo Lord even though his jokes were corny. And afterward he got her to admit she thought the girls were pretty, and she was a pistol in bed that night.

On the nights she worked, he’d stay home or hit the bars on Garnet or Mission Boulevard, keeping a sharp eye out for the SPs even though there were a lot of guys walking around in civvies—the 4Fs, sure, but mostly men who had served their bit, or been wounded, or were on leave. So the SPs didn’t look at him too hard and anyway they were busy keeping an eye on the sailors and marines who flooded the sidewalks and had fistfights that spilled into the street.

Charlie would make sure he arrived back to the bungalow before she got home, tired from work but too jazzed up to go to sleep, and he thought it was funny that this tiny girl was building PBYs and B-24s.

“You’ve probably killed more Japs than I have,” he said to her one morning.

“I don’t like to think about that,” she said.

The nights were fun but the days were the best. Most days they’d sleep in late, then have breakfast and walk down to Pacific Beach and swim, or just sit or lie down on the sand and take naps, or walk along the boardwalk and maybe stop someplace to have a beer, and the days just went by and now July has become August, and he has a tough decision to make.

Charlie comes into the kitchen in his skivvies and a T-shirt and sits down at the table.

“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?” she asks.

“The other girls are all at work, aren’t they?” he asks.

She pours him a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of him. Then she puts a little margarine in a pan, waits for it to bubble, and throws in two slices of bread and fries them.

He can feel her impatience and aggravation. He hasn’t done a damn thing but hang around for a month, and even though she says it’s all right with her, he knows it isn’t. Women can’t stand a man not working. Just a fact of life—it was that way with his mother and his old man and it’s the same way with Millie and him now. She knows he can’t get a job, knows he can’t ever get a job with a DD on his record, so she’s wondering how long he plans on living off her and he knows that’s what’s on her mind.

Has been for the past couple of weeks, if you want to know the truth. Since that night he woke up with Millie shaking his shoulder, telling him he was having a bad dream.

“It’s okay, baby,” she was saying. “It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare.”

He didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t a nightmare but real life, and she asked him, “Where were you?”

“None of your damn business,” was all he said, and he felt that his cheeks were wet with tears and then he remembered that he’d been crying and moaning, over and over again, “I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to go back…”

She asked him, “Where? Where don’t you want to go back to, Charlie?”

“I told you it was none of your damn business,” he said, and slapped her across her pretty little Betty Boop mouth. When she came back in from the kitchen she had ice in a towel pressed against her lower lip and there was a little streak of blood on her chin and she said, “You ever hit me again, I’ll call the SPs and turn you in.”

But she didn’t throw him out.

She knew he had no place to go, no money, and would probably get picked up by Shore Patrol. So she pressed the ice to her lips and let him stay, but nothing was ever as good between them after that and he knows that he broke something between them that he can’t fix.

Now she sets the plate down just a little hard.

“What?” he asks, even though he knows.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Eat my breakfast,” he answers.

“And then what?”

He almost says, Slap that look off your puss if it’s still there. Instead he shoves a piece of fried bread into his mouth and chews it deliberately. A woman should let a man have his coffee and breakfast before she starts in on him. The day is going to be hot—the summer sun is already pounding the concrete outside—and she should just let things slide so they can go down to the beach and enjoy the breeze and the water, maybe walk down to the end of the pier.

But she won’t let it go. She sits down, folds her forearms on the table, and says, “You have to go, Charlie.”

He gets up from the table, goes back into the bedroom, and finds last night’s bottle. Then he returns to the kitchen, pours some of the cheap whiskey into his coffee, sits down, and starts to drink.

“Oh, that will help,” she says. “You showing up drunk.”

Charlie doesn’t want to listen to her yapping. He wants to get drunk even though he knows that no amount of booze can wash away the truth that no man can stand to know about himself.

That he’s afraid to go back.

Since that moment the Jap planes came crashing onto the deck, spewing fuel and flame, and he saw his buddies become running torches and smelled them burning and he can’t never get that smell out of his nose. Can’t get it out of his head, either, because it comes in his sleep and he wakes up shaking and crying and moaning that he doesn’t want to go back, please don’t make him go back.

Charlie knows what they say about him, that he’s no good, that he’s a hard case, but he knows he ain’t hard. Maybe he used to be, though now he knows he’s as broken as the spine of the ship.

But the ship is repaired now and will be steaming out across the Pacific, this time to the Japanese home islands, and if they think Okinawa was bad, that was nothing compared to what it’s going to be.

It ain’t the thought of the brig and it ain’t even the thought of losing her, because the truth is he’s already lost her. He can take the brig and he can take losing her, but he can’t take going back.

Something in him is broken and he can’t fix it.

Now what he wants to do is get drunk, stay drunk, and lay on the beach, but she won’t shut up.

“You have to go back, Charlie,” she says.

He stares into his cup and takes another drink.

“If you go back today it will be all right.”

He shakes his head.

Then she says it. “It’s okay to be afraid.”

Charlie throws the cup at her. He doesn’t really know if he meant to hit her or not, but he does. The cup cuts her eye and splashes coffee all over her face and she screams and stands up. She wipes the coffee out of her eyes and feels the blood and then stares at him for a second and says, “You son of a bitch.”

Charlie doesn’t answer.

“Get out,” Millie says. “Get out.”

He doesn’t move except to grab the bottle, take a drink directly from it, and lean back into the chair.

Millie watches this and says, “Fine. I’ll get you out.”

She heads for the door.

That gets him out of the chair because now he remembers what she said she’d do if he hit her again, and he did hit her again, and Millie is the kind of girl who does what she says she’ll do, and he can’t let her go and call Shore Patrol.

Charlie grabs her by the neck, pulls her into his chest, and then wraps his arms around and lifts her up, and she wriggles and kicks as he carries her toward the bedroom because he thinks maybe it can end that way. But when drops her on the bed she spits in his face and claws at his eyes and says, “You’re real brave with a woman, huh, Charlie? Aren’t ya?”

He hauls off and pops her in the jaw just to shut her up, but she won’t shut up and he hits her again and again until she finally lays still.

“Now will you behave?” he asks her, but there’s blood all over the pillow and even on the wall and her neck is bent like the broken spine of a ship and he knows he can’t fix her.

She’s so small, what do they call it—petite.

Charlie staggers into the bathroom, pushes past the stockings that hang from cords, and washes his bloody hands under the tap. Then he goes back into the bedroom, where Millie is lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He puts on the loud Hawaiian shirt he bought at Pearl, the one Millie liked, and a pair of khaki pants, and then sits down next to her to put on his shoes.

He thinks he should say something to her but he doesn’t know what to say, so he just gets up, goes back into the kitchen, finds the bottle, and drains it in one long swallow. His hands shake as he lights a cigarette, but he does get it lit, takes a long drag, and heads out the door.

The sun is blinding, the concrete hot on his feet.

Charlie doesn’t really know where to go, so he just keeps walking until he finds himself at the beach. He walks along the boardwalk, which is crowded with people, mostly sailors and their girls out for a stroll. He pushes his way through and then goes down the steps to the sand and under the pier where him and her held each other and danced to the radio.

Maybe it’s the same radio playing now as he stands there listening to the music and looks out at the ocean and tries to figure out what to do next. They’ll be looking for him soon, they’ll know it was him, and if they catch him he’ll spend the rest of his life in the brig, if they don’t hang him.

Now he wishes he had just gone back like she told him to.

But it’s too late.

He stares at the water, tells himself he should run, but there’s nowhere to run to, anyway, and the music is nice and he thinks about that night and knows he should never have left the beach.

Then the music stops and a voice comes on and the voice is talking like he’s real excited, like the radio did that day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

Charlie turns around to look up at the boardwalk and all the people are just standing there, standing stock-still like they’re photographs or statues. Then suddenly they all start to move, and whoop and yell, and hug each other and kiss and dance and laugh.

Charlie walks to the edge of the boardwalk.

“What’s going on?” he asks this sailor who has his arm around a girl. “What’s going on?”

“Didn’t you hear?” the sailor answered, swinging the girl on his hip. “We dropped some kind of big bomb on Japan. They say it’s the end of the war. They say the war is over!” Then he forgets about Charlie and bends the girl back and kisses her again.

And all along Pacific Beach people are hugging and kissing, laughing and crying, because the war is over.

Charlie Decker, the hard case, goes and sits in the sand.

He peers across the ocean toward a city that has burst into flame and people burn like torches and he knows he will never get the smell out of his nose or the pictures out of his brain. Knows that he will wake up crying that he can never go back.

Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.

Charlie’s no good.

Now, broken, he sinks back onto Pacific Beach.

MISSING GENE by J. Malcolm Garcia

Evening

Fran’s at night school studying for her associate’s degree. I don’t feel like watching TV so I get out the knife one of the interpreters gave me in Kandahar and start throwing it at the wall. He said he got it off the body of a bad guy who blew himself up laying an IED in the road, but I think he stole it off one of our guys, because it’s a Gerber and it doesn’t look like it was in any explosion. The terp could throw it and stick it every time. I’m not that good, but I throw it at the wall anyway. I can do it for hours.

I was a contractor over in Kandahar. Electrician. Worked there for twelve months. When my year was up, I flew home to Kansas City and took up with Fran and a couple of months later moved in with her. Mr. Fix It, the soldiers called me. Did some plumbing too. A little out of my league, but at two hundred tax-free grand a year I was more than willing to say I could do anything. I got used to the noise: mortars, sniper fire, return fire, .50 calibers, AKs, generators grinding all night, guys living on top of each other telling dead baby and fag jokes. Awful quiet now that I’m back. Behind Fran’s house, I hear buses turn off Prospect and onto 39th Street, drone past and slice into the night until I don’t hear anything again. The knife helps. I like the steady repetition of tossing it. The precision of it. Like fly fishing. Gene understood. He fought in Korea.

The trick with the knife, I told Gene, is you got to establish a rhythm. You do that and the silence becomes part of the flow and the plink the knife makes when it enters the wall interrupts the silence, and the small suck sound it makes when you pull it out, and then the silence again until you throw it, again and again.

Right, Gene said.

Next day

This is the third week I haven’t seen Gene at Mike’s Place. Out of all the regulars, he’s the only one missing.

Melissa isn’t here but we all know where she is. A public defender, Melissa has a court case this afternoon. I overheard her tell Lyle yesterday she would be working late. And Lyle? He may have a job painting or installing a countertop or a new floor or fixing someone’s shitter. What I’m saying is, Lyle’s around. He’s a handyman. He’ll be in later, as will his buddy Tim.

Bill’s here. He’s retired from working construction and basically sits at the bar all day drinking up his disability. And Mike, of course. It’s his bar. The floor dips and the stools wobble, all of them, and the top of the pool table’s got a big slash in it and someone walked off with the cue ball, but it’s a good place—cheap, and it’s only a couple of blocks from Fran’s.

Then there’s Gene. Or was. He drove off is how I look at it. Flew the coop, as they say. Well, that’s it. I’m leaving too. Montana is what I’m thinking. I’ve been considering a move for a while. I mentioned Montana to Gene. He thought it was a good idea.

Wide open, no people, he said.

Absolutely, I said.

I’ll tell Fran tonight.

Evening

What’s on at seven?

Golden Girls reruns.

Oh.

You’ve had beer.

I was at Mike’s.

Well, you missed my mother.

Oh… yeah?

Yeah. It’s all right. I wasn’t expecting her.

Fran’s mother does that; drops by without calling. She’s divorced and bored. Good thing Fran was here instead of me. Her mother nags me when Fran’s not around. She knows I’m not going out on many jobs. I’ve told her we’re okay. I earned a bundle in Afghanistan. She thinks I should have stayed another year and made even more.

I’m going to Montana.

Montana?

Yeah.

When?

I don’t know.

Oh.

I play solitaire, spreading the cards across the blanket of our bed. I tell Fran not to move her legs beneath the blankets and disturb the cards but she does anyway.

Why Montana?

It’s wide open.

Fran doesn’t look up from her book, The General and the Spy. A man on the cover wears an open red tunic and some tight-ass white pants a real guy’d never wear. His skin’s the color of a dirty penny and he has no hair on his chest. A woman’s got her hands on his stomach, ready to rip into those pants I bet.

Fran folds the corner of a page, closes the book, and wipes tears from her eyes.

Nobody cries over those kinds of books, I tell her.

Montana?

I’m thinking about it. Gene’s missing.

Who?

A guy I know.

Fran goes, Let’s change the channel. Then let’s talk.

Go ahead. Change it.

I changed it last time.

What do you want to watch? I ask.

I don’t know.

She picks up her book and puts it down again. We stare at the TV, the remote between us.

Next day

Bill sits beside me at Mike’s, buys me a beer. Crass old fucker Bill. Bald as a post and bug-eyed. He’s always hunched over and rocks back and forth and makes these sick jokes about his neck being so long he can lick his balls like a dog. Deaf as Stevie Wonder is blind.

Hey, Bill, Tim says.

What you say? Bill asks.

Fuck you, Bill, Tim says.

What you say?

Tim laughs. Laughs loud and talks loud like we’re all deaf as Bill. He sits at the end of the bar where Gene always stood, wipes his hands on his sweatshirt and jeans. Tim works in a warehouse in the West Bottoms. Refrigeration parts. Something like that. Comes in grimed in grease and oil. Starts at five in the morning and works all the time, weekends too. With jobs the way they are, is he going to say no when his boss offers him extra hours? I don’t think so. Not with paying out child support to his ex.

His money being so tight is why he killed his dog’s puppies. At least that’s how he explains it. The dog, a brown and white mix between this and that, had a litter of seven. He put six of them in a pillow case and dropped them in Troost Lake. Then he shot the dog. Easier than getting her fixed. I stopped sitting next to Tim when I heard about the puppies.

Every time I think of them, I’m reminded of these Afghan laborers in Kandahar. One afternoon they found some puppies when they were collecting trash. A trash fire was burning and they threw the puppies into the fire. You want to hear some screaming, listen to puppies being barbecued. I hear them now. I ball up my fist and right hook my temple once, twice, three times, waiting for what I call relief pain to wrap my skull and take their shrieks out of my head. Tim and Bill look at me. I open my fist.

Fucking mosquito, I say and smack the side of my face again.

Big-ass mosquito, Tim says, still looking at me.

It’s strange seeing him in Gene’s spot at the end of the bar. Gene never sat, just stood. No matter how cold, he always wore shorts, a T-shirt, and a windbreaker. Brown shoes and white socks. Legs skinny and pale as a featherless chicken. Wore a cap that had the dates of the Korean War sewn in it. He told me that Kansas City winters didn’t compare to a winter in Korea.

I saw frozen bodies stacked like cord wood covered with ice, Gene said. Some of them I put there.

It got cold in Afghanistan too, I said.

I remember one time when this truck driver got to Kandahar in December. Brand new. Just off the bus. He was so wet behind the ears I had to tell him where the chow hall was. He kept rubbing his hands together and I pointed out the PX where he could buy some gloves. He went on his first convoy an hour later. This guy, he got in his rig, took off, but realized he was in the wrong convoy. He turned back to the base and approached the gate fast because he was out in no man’s land by himself. You didn’t approach the gate fast. You didn’t do that. But he was scared. Some Australians shot him five times with a .50 cal. I mean, he was obliterated. They had to check his DNA to figure out who he was. Less than two hours after I showed him the chow hall, I saw them put his body pieces in bags.

Evening

Fran tells me what I’m planning is called a geographic. Moving to get a new start somewhere else in the mistaken belief you’ll leave your bad habits behind is how she puts it. She studied psychology last fall and thinks she can pick apart my mind now.

I mean it. I’m gone, I say.

She goes, When you decide to do it, just go. Don’t bother telling me because I’m not going with you. Men have left me before. I survived. I’ll survive you. Leave before I come home. Make it easy on us both.

I will, I say. I can do that.

Okay, she goes, okay.

Next day

Just me in here this afternoon.

What’s the latest on Gene? I ask Mike.

Haven’t heard a thing, he says.

Mike has owned Mike’s for ten years. He was in a band, got married, and had a kid. In other words, time to get a real job. So he bought the bar and named it after himself. He’s divorced now, sees the kid every two weeks, plays gigs occasionally, and runs this place. Says if he ever sells it, the buyer will have to keep the name. Years from now nobody will know who the hell Mike was but his name will be here. A piece of himself nobody will know and can’t shake off. That’s one way to make an impression.

I first came to Mike’s by chance. I used to drink at another bar on the Paseo but one night it was packed. After Kandahar, I couldn’t handle crowds, so I left. On my way home, I stopped at Mike’s. Some lights on but barely anyone in it. I had a few beers and came back the next night. Two nights in a row and Mike figured he had himself a new regular. He bought me a beer and said his name was Mike. We shook hands. Sealed the deal, as they say.

I met Fran here. She was shooting pool by herself. Bent over the table, her ass jutted high and round against her jeans, and any man with a nut sack would have known that if she looked that nice from behind she’d be more than tolerable face-to-face. And, if she wasn’t, so what with an ass like that. But she was fine all the way around.

She had light brown hair and a determined look. My glance moved down past her chin and rested on a set of perky tits that pressed just hard enough against her T-shirt that my imagination did not have to strain too hard to know what would be revealed when she undressed. I asked to shoot pool with her and we got to chitchatting. One thing led to another is what I’m saying.

I’m not sure when I noticed Gene. I just did. I remember seeing this old man at the end of the bar and thinking how solitary he looked, how he was off in his own world. He had one of those faces that sort of collapsed when he didn’t talk, mouth and chin merging into a flat, frowning pond. When he took off his hat, the light shined on his bald, freckled head. He’d still be standing in his spot when I left a couple of hours later, the same bottle of Bud he had when I first came in half-empty and parked in front of him. He barely said a word to me in those days. Just nodded if we looked each other’s way. But then as I began showing up every night, he started saying hello and I’d say hello back.

Evening

Fran and I drop our plates onto the crumb-graveled carpet for our beagle to lick. Partly chewed pizza crust, orange grease. Slobbered up in seconds. I reshuffle the cards.

I’m going to sleep, Fran says.

Say what?

Turn the TV off.

I’m still up.

Turn it down then.

It’s not loud.

Please.

But it’s not.

Shhh.

I shut off the TV, go out to the living room. I sit in the dark fingering my knife. The way Gene has vanished, an eighty-year-old man. I can’t help but notice the empty space at the bar. Like a radiator turned off. All that dead air, dead space.

Funny what you learn about a guy after he’s gone. For instance, Tim and Lyle said that Gene would come to Mike’s at eleven in the morning. He would stay all day and apparently be pretty toasted by the time he left at closing. Really, he never seemed messed up to me. Maybe he kicked in and drank like a horse after I left.

One night, Gene told me he had taken his landlord to court. It wasn’t clear to me why. I believed him, and whatever the reason, he made it seem like he’d won the case. After he disappeared, Bill told me Gene lived in his car. There never had been a court case or a landlord. Bill had put him up in his place but not for long. Said Gene wandered around the house with nothing on but his skivvies. I couldn’t have that, Bill said. Not with my wife in the house and the grandkids coming over. I don’t care if he is a vet.

Next day

Hey, Lyle, Mike says.

Mike, Lyle says, and takes a seat near Tim. He has his hair roped back in a ponytail and wears an army fatigue jacket that hangs well past his hands. His feet dangle off the bar stool and tap the air. He reeks of pot.

I was just getting ready to leave, Tim says.

No you’re not, Lyle says.

He turns to me.

What’s going on? Working?

Absolutely, I tell him. Staying busy.

You were in Afghanistan, weren’t you? How was that?

Good. It was good.

That’s good.

Actually, it was kind of crazy.

Crazy can be good, Lyle says, and he and Tim laugh.

Mike, I’ll have another, Tim says.

I notice Melissa come in the back door.

Hi, Melissa, Mike says.

Hey, Melissa, Lyle says.

Melissa, what’s up, Tim says.

Hey, Melissa says.

She sits next to Lyle and orders a Bud Light and a shot of Jack. She has on heels, gray slacks, gray jacket, and a white blouse.

Won my case, she says. Got him off.

Since none of us know who she’s talking to, we all nod at the same time. Melissa smiles. She starts talking about the first time she came in here as she always does. I don’t know why it bears repeating. I mean, I’ve got the story memorized. But she likes telling it. Maybe it gives her a sense of seniority. After Lyle she has been coming here longer than the rest of us. Like it makes her feel she belongs is what I’m saying.

It was just before closing, Melissa says. Mike and Lyle were shooting pool. Gene was in his usual spot. She remembers Mike saying he was about to close. Then he let her stay and the four of them had beers and got stoned after Mike locked up.

Gene got stoned? I say.

Yeah, Melissa says.

I hadn’t heard that part before.

Evening

Fran tells me that instead of doing a geographic, I should go with her to visit her sister in St. Louis. It would be cheap, she says. No hotel or eating-out expenses.

Sounds okay, I say.

Did you order a pizza?

Not yet, I say. I’m tired of pizza.

What do you want?

I don’t know. Shit, what’s up with all the questions?

Fran goes into the kitchen. I hear her making herself a drink. I try calling Gene. I gave Gene my cell number one night. He called me a few times before he disappeared but I could never make out what he was saying. He had a sandpaper voice that came at you like radio static. What’s that? What’s that, Gene? I’d say, and then he’d hang up. I’d call him right back but he’d never pick up. He doesn’t pick up now. I get one of those female computer-generated voices telling me to leave a message. I’d like to talk to Gene, I say, and hang up.

Next day

Anybody hear anything about Gene? I ask.

Lyle shakes his head. Melissa and Tim look at Lyle and shrug.

Getting to be awhile, Lyle says.

Yeah, awhile, Mike says.

I shout in Bill’s ear and ask him what he knows. Well, he says, speaking like he’s got a mouth full of cotton, I spoke to one of his sons in San Antone. Yes, San Antone it was. Gene gave me his number when he stayed with me. An emergency contact, he had said. Well, let’s hope this isn’t an emergency because Gene’s son wants nothing to do with him. One of those kind of deals, if you know what I mean. Still a lot of water under that bridge, I guess. Anyway, I told his son, I just want you to know your father is missing. We haven’t seen him for the longest. Maybe he’s headed your way. But his boy said again he wanted nothing to do with him. What can you do?

He doesn’t expect an answer and I don’t give him one because, well, what can you do? Melissa, Tim, and Lyle go out back to smoke. Mike steps into the kitchen. Bill stares at his glass. I tell him that today for no good reason I was reminded of this private, a young gal. We got mortared and she got all messed up. She lay on the ground, her right arm ripped to shit like confetti. Some medics put her on a stretcher and got an IV in her, and her shirt rose up exposing her flat stomach and full tits and despite all her screaming I thought she was beautiful. I went over to see if I could help and she looked at me wide-eyed and said, Am I going to die? No, I said. You’re fine. You’re going to make it.

Do I know if she did? No, I don’t. That bothers me.

What you say? Bill says.

Evening

I call Fran from the union hall on Admiral Boulevard, shouting above the traffic noise of cars backed up overhead in the tangled mess that is I-70 and I-29 looping around one another. I only worked a few hours this afternoon, I tell her. I stuck around for something else to come up but nothing did. Can you pick me up?

Okay, she says.

By the time she gets me, I’m pissed off. Pissed I had only four hours of work today, pissed I couldn’t get a ride home, pissed I had to wait around until Fran got off her job at Walgreens to get me. I was 360 degrees pissed off is what I’m saying.

I get in the car, ball my hand into a fist, and press my knuckles against Fran’s right temple. She tilts her head away and I keep pushing with my fist until her head is against the window and I feel the vein in her temple pulse against my knuckles.

Stop it, you’re hurting me, she says.

Next day

Mike, I’ll have another one, Melissa says.

She’s dating this gal, Rhonda, a school teacher. I don’t know how old. Younger, I’d say by the look of her in a photo Melissa passed around. I don’t care that she’s gay. I mean lesbian. She corrected me one time. Men are gay, women are lesbian. Okay. What do I do with that bit of knowledge? Keep my mouth shut is what I’m saying.

Melissa talks about how nice it is to be involved with a woman who doesn’t trip when Melissa has to work late. Doesn’t ask a thousand questions to make sure that nothing is wrong. It’s nice to be with someone who’s an adult, Melissa says. She says that a lot. Nice to be involved with an adult. Like she’s trying to convince herself that it’s nice. Like maybe the confidence of her lover makes Melissa wonder what she’s doing.

I’m going home, Tim says. Make some dinner.

What’re you going to have? Lyle says.

I don’t know.

What you say? Bill says.

Fuck you, Bill, Tim says, and he and Lyle laugh. It’s not as funny as the first time he said it. It’s starting to get old but I can’t help smiling a little.

Gene and I had dinner together one night. I met him in the parking lot behind the Sun Fresh Market off Southwest Trafficway. I didn’t know then that he was sleeping in his car. Just ran into him there and he asked me if I was hungry. Come to think of it, I said.

A bunch of clothes were heaped in the backseat of his station wagon. An old rusty job with wood paneling peeling off the doors. He had rigged a towel to take the place of a window that would no longer roll up. Laundry day, he said, explaining away the clothes.

We drove out of the parking lot to Mill Street and followed the curve into Westport to a little joint called The Corner. Some bums who might have been hippies years ago stood on Broadway wiping down car windows at a red light while the drivers waved them off. Gene and I sat down and a waitress cleared our table. I ordered a burger. Gene had the meatloaf special.

The Corner closed not long after that. A big For Rent sign hangs above the front door along with the name of some real estate company. I went by it the other day and noticed the table where Gene and I had sat surrounded by other empty tables made all the more empty by the emptiness of the place.

Evening

Fran’s mother sits with me in the kitchen. Her perfume gives me a headache. I stare at her hair all puffy and piled up on her head and bleached so blond it’s almost white. She twirls the lazy Susan with a finger, touches the corner of her mouth, and then goes back to spinning the lazy Susan, her finger skating along on a film of lipstick she rubbed off.

What’s it taste like, your lipstick?

Why would you want to know? What kind of question is that for a man to ask?

I don’t know, it just came to me, I want to say, but don’t. One night, I was walking to the shitter and mortars started coming in. We were always being mortared. This is the real deal, baby! someone yelled. And then, the blasts lifted an eighteen-year-old private into the air, tossing him backward like a rag into all this dirt and noise and smoke; his blood sprayed over my face. I can still taste it.

Where’s Fran? her mother says.

School, I say.

Have you thought of going back to school?

No.

Is it your plan for Fran to do all the work while you sit around? Fran’s mother says. Have you thought about being more than an electrician?

No, Mrs. Lee, I haven’t.

Well, it shows.

I apply a piece of Scotch tape to a corner above the cabinets where the wallpaper is peeling.

Fran’s mother gets up and walks to the sink. I listen to the linoleum creak beneath her shoes.

When do you plan to clean these? she says of the dishes. Or are you waiting for them to pile up to the ceiling?

I throw the tape down and face her. She steps back, a little aren’t-I-clever smirk on her face, and I turn the hot water on in the sink and pour in some soap. I find a sponge beneath the sink and start wiping down a plate. My fingertips turn white from squeezing the plate so hard. A littler harder and it would break. I want to feel it break but I ease up; put the plate on the rack. I start cleaning another one.

You two should get married, Fran’s mother goes.

I keep washing the plate.

You’re living together, she says. Not having a job hasn’t stopped you from doing that. Married, you’d at least be official. It would show responsibility. Now wouldn’t that be something?

I rinse the plate, set it on the rack. I lean on the sink, arms stiff.

I’m leaving, I say.

You’re leaving. Where you going?

Montana.

Montana. What are you going to do in Montana?

Work.

Work. Work here for a change. You think some cowgirl is going to put up with you?

I raise my hand before she says anything more. There’s this nasal termite sound to her voice that chisels into my head. I press my fingers against my eyes. My neck feels hard as a tree trunk.

Fran’s mother stands beside me. I ignore her, work on another plate. She runs a finger over the dishes in the rack and shows me a spongy speck of pizza crust glued to her fingertip.

You can’t do any better than that? she says.

I smash the plate on the edge of the sink and throw the jagged piece still in my hand against the wall. Fran’s mother steps back, her eyes betraying panic, her finger still poised accusingly, and I grab her finger with a fury that fills me with a terrible heat and force it back until she kneels, screaming. A pasty white color washes through her face when the bone breaks, and I feel something break in me and I keep pressing back on her ruined finger, until the bone tears through the skin and into my palm. Her eyes swell like something wide and deep rising out of the ground, bubbling tears, and her screams take on a new level.

I let go of her hand and jam my knee into her solar plexus and put all my weight on her chest. She gags and spits up whatever she ate this morning. I rise up and then drop my knee into her chest, and her neck and face go all purple, and I do it again until I feel ribs crack under my knee. I sink into her chest and down to her spine like falling through ice. Blood geysers out of her mouth and then her eyes roll back. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth like a slug and I smell her bowels. I push myself off her and sit at the table. The silence is almost as loud as her screams. I focus on the hum of the refrigerator. White noise. I take up my knife. My hands shake and at first my throws are way off. Then my breathing steadies and I get my rhythm back and throw it once, twice, three times into the baseboards, the refrigerator humming behind me.

Next day

Rhonda’s not answering, Melissa says, looking at her iPhone. Why isn’t she answering?

The front door swings open.

Hey, Heidi, Mike says.

Hi, Mike, Heidi says.

She plops down beside Lyle, her mop of curly red hair flouncing on her shoulders. The two of them started dating not too far back. She tends bar here on the weekends. Has two kids. Their daddy dealt drugs and got busted. Lyle sells drugs, but hasn’t been busted. I think she can do better. I bought books for her five-year-old daughter. I figured she’d appreciate that. Little picture books. But she started seeing Lyle and I quit the book thing. Maybe books weren’t what I should have been giving her in the first place. But I was with Fran so books seemed appropriate. Neutral. Not too over-the-top is what I’m saying.

I force a smile at Heidi but I don’t strike up a conversation. I’m not really here. Yesterday seems far away and today doesn’t feel like today. I hear Heidi and Lyle talking but it’s all background noise to Fran’s mother dying. That’s how I look at it. She died. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something snapped inside me and she died. It was not me who killed her but something working through me I can’t define. That something left me afterward as suddenly as it had come on and I almost fell asleep in the kitchen throwing my knife. But then the old me came back and I knew I had to clean up the mess left by that something else.

I carried Fran’s mother into the garage and put her in the trunk of my car and covered her with a blanket. Finding a mop, I returned to the kitchen and washed the floor. Back in the garage, I looked for a box of five-, ten-, and twenty-pound weights Fran had bought at a yard sale when she got it into her head she was going to exercise. Dust and cobwebs covered the weights and clung to the hair on my arms, and I felt each hair released when I wiped the cobwebs off.

I put some rope and the weights in the trunk and drove to Troost Lake. Clouds sealed the sky so that no stars shone. I followed Troost Avenue to the turnoff into the lake, and the road narrowed and wound around the lake and my car lights skimmed over the oil blackness of the water and the wet stone walk where old men fished during the day. I parked the car under some trees, opened the trunk, and trussed Fran’s mother up with the rope. She wasn’t too heavy even with the weights I’d wedged beneath the rope. I held her and listened to what I thought was an owl. Shadows rose and dipped above me and then darted away and I could only assume they were bats. I waited for the owl to stop calling. In the vacancy left by its silence, I rolled Fran’s mother down a hill and she splashed into the water and was absorbed into its darkness leaving only ripples that spread into nothingness.

Evening

When I’m with Fran, I think of her mother. I don’t need that. I sit alone in the kitchen while Fran sleeps and punch my temples until my head feels like it will explode and thoughts of Mrs. Lee shatter into bits. I think of Gene and what he would say.

The last time I saw him, he was standing in front of a Church’s Chicken near Gillham Plaza and 31st Street. It was hot and the wind blew trash and some napkins were pinned against Gene’s knobby white knees. We said hello and he offered me a ride but I told him I had my car. I’m getting some coffee, I said.

When I went back outside, he was still there. I looked at him and he gave me a knowing wink like we were both in on something no one else would understand. I don’t know what that might have been. But I’m thinking now he might have done some awful things in Korea besides killing gooks and letting their bodies freeze, and I think he saw in me the ability to do some awful things too, and then Fran’s mother died and he was proved right. I’m just saying. I don’t know. Gene didn’t say and I never saw him again.

Next day

Okay, Mike, I’m outta here, Tim says. After one more.

I’ll do one more too, Mike, Lyle says.

What you say?

Fuck you, Bill.

Lyle and Tim stand and walk outside to smoke. Melissa follows them tapping a number into her iPhone. Heidi looks at me and smiles. She asks Mike for a cigarette. Watch my purse, she says. Then she goes outside too. Mike puts two bottles of beer on the bar for Tim and Lyle. I wave him off when he looks at me. I feel all hemmed in. The beer congests me. It’s difficult to breathe.

I’ll pay up, Mike, I say.

Evening

In bed Fran rolls over with her back to me, her head on my right arm. I grit my teeth. Her touch sends shock waves through me and I get all jittery. I edge away from her. She says she has called her mother a few times but no one answers. It’s not like her, she says. Her mother doesn’t have an answering machine so Fran is going to go by the house in the morning.

That settles it. I’m out of here. When Fran leaves for work I’ll be right behind her but headed in another direction. It will still be dark. I’ll take 39th to Broadway and hang a right by the Walgreens and drive into downtown. A few blocks east, I’ll see the glow from the Power & Light District keeping the sky open like an illumination mortar, and I’ll cross the Broadway Bridge and get on I-29 north until I reach I-90 and then it’s a direct shot west to Montana and wherever.

I feel my arm falling asleep beneath the weight of Fran’s head. I curl it to get some circulation and realize I could choke her no problem. I drop my arm and slide it out from beneath her head and punch my temples with both fists until the pain overwhelms my thoughts.

I kick off my blankets; get my legs out from under the sheets. I long for a breeze. I imagine Fran’s mother at the bottom of Troost Lake. I think of Tim’s puppies and then I think of Kandahar and of other things I’ve seen. My head throbs. I shut my eyes against the room closing in on me, get up, and go sit in the kitchen. I find my knife, hands shaking. I start tossing it but can’t establish a rhythm.

I drop the knife, think of Gene and of dead Koreans calling to him. I imagine he is sitting in his car miles away parked beneath a streetlight unable to sleep. Moths bounce against the windows. Flies strike the windshield. Beetles scuttle across the hood. I tell him that when I was a boy, my friends and I would drop grasshoppers into empty trash barrels and then we’d scream into the barrels and listen to our voices ping-pong against the sides like shrapnel, crumbling antennae, wings, legs. We’d pluck the grasshoppers out barely alive and bury them. I see them now, their jaws working furiously, filling with dirt. Hear the crunch-scrape of seeking mouths sucking air.

LOOT by Julie Smith

(Originally published in New Orleans Noir)

Mathilde’s in North Carolina with her husband when she hears about the hurricane—the one that’s finally going to fulfill the prophecy about filling the bowl New Orleans is built in. Uh-huh, sure. She’s been there a thousand times. She all but yawns.

Aren’t they all? goes through her mind.

“A storm like no one’s ever seen,” the weather guy says, “a storm that will leave the city devastated… a storm that…”

Blah blah and blah.

But finally, after ten more minutes of media hysteria, she catches on that this time it might be for real. Her first thought is for her home in the Garden District, the one that’s been in Tony’s family for three generations. Yet she knows there’s nothing she can do about that—if the storm takes it, so be it.

Her second thought is for her maid, Cherice Wardell, and Cherice’s husband, Charles.

Mathilde and Cherice have been together for twenty-two years. They’re like an old married couple. They’ve spent more time with each other than they have with their hus­bands. They’ve taken care of each other when one of them was ill. They’ve cooked for each other (though Cherice has cooked a good deal more for Mathilde). They’ve shopped together, they’ve argued, they’ve shared more secrets than either of them would be comfortable with if they thought about it. They simply chat, the way women do, and things come out, some things that probably shouldn’t. Cherice knows intimate facts about Mathilde’s sex life, for instance, things she likes to do with Tony, that Mathilde would never tell her white friends.

So Mathilde knows the Wardells plenty well enough to know they aren’t about to obey the evacuation order. They never leave when a storm’s on the way. They have two big dogs and nowhere to take them. Except for their two chil­dren, one of whom is in school in Alabama, and the other in California, the rest of their family lives in New Orleans. So there are no nearby relatives to shelter them. They either can’t afford hotels or think they can’t (though twice in the past Mathilde has offered to pay for their lodging if they’d only go). Only twice because only twice have Mathilde and Tony heeded the warnings themselves. In past years, before everyone worried so much about the disappearing wetlands and the weakened infrastructure, it was a point of honor for people in New Orleans to ride out hurricanes.

But Mathilde is well aware that this is not the case with the Wardells. This is no challenge to them. They simply don’t see the point of leaving. They prefer to play what Mathilde thinks of as Louisiana roulette. Having played it a few times herself, she knows all about it. The Wardells think the traf­fic will be terrible, that they’ll be in the car for seventeen, eighteen hours and still not find a hotel because everything from here to kingdom come’s going to be taken, even if they could afford it.

“That storm’s not gon’ come,” Cherice always says. “You know it never does. Why I’m gon’ pack up these dogs and Charles and go God knows where? You know Mississippi gives me a headache. And I ain’t even gon’ mention Texas.”

To which Mathilde replied gravely one time, “This is your life you’re gambling with, Cherice.”

And Cherice said, “I think I’m just gon’ pray.”

But Mathilde will have to try harder this time, especially since she’s not there.

Cherice is not surprised to see Mathilde’s North Carolina number on her caller ID. “Hey, Mathilde,” she says. “How’s the weather in Highlands?”

“Cherice, listen. This is the Big One. This time, I mean it, I swear to God, you could be—”

“Uh-huh. Gamblin’ with my life and Charles’s. Listen, if it’s the Big One, I want to be here to see it. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Cherice, listen to me. I know I’m not going to convince you—you’re the pig-headedest woman I’ve ever seen. Just promise me something. Go to my house. Take the dogs. Ride it out at my house.”

“Take the dogs?” Cherice can’t believe what she’s hearing. Mathilde never lets her bring the dogs over, won’t let them inside her house. Hates dogs, has allergies, thinks they’ll pee on her furniture. She loves Mathilde, but Mathilde is a pain in the butt, and Cherice mentions this every chance she gets to anyone who’ll listen. Mathilde is picky and spoiled and needy. She’s good-hearted, sure, but she hates her precious routine disturbed.

Yet this same Mathilde Berteau has just told her to promise to take the dogs to her immaculate house. This is so sobering Cherice can hardly think what to say. “Well, I know you’re worried now.”

“Cherice. Promise me.”

Cherice hears panic in Mathilde’s voice. What can it hurt? she thinks. The bed in Mathilde’s guest room is a lot more comfortable than hers. Also, if the power goes out—and Cherice has no doubt that it will—she’ll have to go to Mathilde’s the day after the storm anyhow, to clean out the refrigerator.

Mathilde is ahead of her. “Listen, Cherice, I need you to go. I need you to clean out the refrigerator when the power goes. Also, we have a gas stove and you don’t. You can cook at my house. We still have those fish Tony caught a couple of weeks ago—they’re going to go to waste if you’re not there.”

Cherice is humbled. Not about the fish offer—that’s just like Mathilde, to offer something little when she wants something bigger. That’s small potatoes. What gets to her is the refrigerator thing—if Mathilde tells her she needs her for something, she’s bringing out the big guns. Mathilde’s a mas­ter manipulator, and Cherice has seen her pull this one a mil­lion times—but not usually on her. Mathilde does it when all else fails, and her instincts are damn good—it’s a lot easier to turn down a favor than to refuse to grant one. Cherice knows her employer like she knows Charles—better, maybe—but she still feels the pull of Mathilde’s flimsy ruse.

“I’ll clean your refrigerator, baby,” Cherice says carefully. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“Cherice, goddamnit, I’m worried about you!”

And Cherice gives in. “I know you are, baby. And Charles and I appreciate it, we really do. Tell you what—we gon’ do it. We gon’ go over there. I promise.” But she doesn’t know if she can actually talk Charles into it.

He surprises her by agreeing readily as soon as she men­tions the part about the dogs. “Why not?” he says. “We can sleep in Mathilde and Tony’s big ol’ bed and watch television till the power goes out. Drink a beer and have the dogs with us. Ain’t like we have to drive to Mississippi or somethin’. And if the roof blows off, maybe we can save some of their stuff. That refrigerator ain’t all she’s got to worry about.”

“We’re not sleepin’ in their bed, Charles. The damn guest room’s like a palace, anyway—who you think you is?”

He laughs at her. “I know it, baby. Jus’ tryin’ to see how far I can push ya.”

So that Sunday they pack two changes of clothes, plenty for two days, and put the mutts in their crates. The only other things they take are dog food and beer. They don’t grab food for themselves because there’s plenty over at Mathilde’s, which they have to eat or it’ll go bad.

The first bands of the storm come late that night, and Charles does what he said he was going to—goes to bed with a beer and his dogs. But after he’s asleep, Cherice watches the storm from the window of the second-floor living room. The power doesn’t go off until early morning, and when the rain swirls, the lights glint on it. The wind howls like a hound. Big as it is, the house shakes. Looking out, Cherice sees a building collapse, a little coffee shop across the street, and realizes how well built the Berteaus’ house is. Her own is not. She prays that it will make it. But she knows she will be all right, and so will Charles and the dogs. She is not afraid because she is a Christian woman and she trusts that she will not be harmed.

But she does see the power of God in this. For the first time, she understands why people talk about being God-fearing instead of God-loving, something that’s always puzzled her. You better have God on your side, she thinks. You just better.

She watches the transformers blow one by one, up and down the street, and goes to bed when the power goes out, finding her way by flashlight, wondering what she’s going to wake up to.

The storm is still raging when she stirs, awakened by the smell of bacon. Charles has cooked breakfast, but he’s nowhere to be found. She prowls the house looking for him, and the dogs bark to tell her: third floor.

“Cherice,” he calls down. “Bring pots.”

She knows what’s happened: leaks. The Berteaus must have lost some shingles.

So she and Charles work for the next few hours, putting pots out, pushing furniture from the path of inrushing water, gathering up wet linens, trying to salvage and dry out papers and books, emptying the pots, replacing them. All morning the wind is dying, though. The thing is blowing through.

By two o’clock it’s a beautiful day. “Still a lot of work to do,” Charles says, sighing. “But I better go home first, see how our house is. I’ll come back and help you. We should sleep here again tonight.”

Cherice knows that their house has probably lost its roof, that they might have much worse damage than the Berteaus, maybe even flooding. He’s trying to spare her by offering to go alone.

“Let’s make some phone calls first,” she says.

They try to reach neighbors who rode out the storm at home, but no one answers, probably having not remembered, like Cherice and Charles, to buy car chargers. Indeed, they have only a little power left on their own cell phone, which Cherice uses to call Mathilde. The two women have the dodged-the-bul­let talk that everyone in the dry neighborhoods has that day, the day before they find out the levees have breached.

Though they don’t yet know about the levees, Cherice nonetheless feels a terrible foreboding about her house, acutely needs to see how badly it’s damaged. She doesn’t have much hope that the streets will be clear enough to drive, but she and Charles go out in the yard anyhow to remove broken limbs from the driveway.

“Let’s listen to the car radio, see if we can get a report,” Cherice says, realizing they’ve been so preoccupied with sav­ing the Berteaus’ possessions, they’ve forgotten to do this.

She opens the car door, is about to enter, when she feels Charles tense beside her. “Cherice,” he says.

She turns and sees what he sees: a gang of young men in hooded sweatshirts walking down the street, hands in their pockets. Looking for trouble.

Charles says, “You go on back in the house.”

Cherice doesn’t need to be told twice. She knows where Tony keeps his gun. She means to get it, but she’s so worried about Charles she turns back to look, and sees that he’s just standing by the car, hands in pockets, looking menacing. The young men pass by, but she goes for the gun anyway.

By the time she gets back, Charles is back inside, locking the door. “Damn looters,” he says. “Goddamn looters.” And his face is so sad Cherice wants to hug him, but it’s also so angry she knows better. “Why they gotta go and be this way?” he says.

They listen to the Berteaus’ little battery-powered radio and learn that there’s looting all over the city, crime is out of control. “Ain’t safe to go out,” Charles says grimly. “Can’t even get home to see about our property.”

She knows he’s sorry they came, that they didn’t stay home where they belonged. “I’m gon’ fix some lunch.”

So they eat and then go out in the backyard and clean it up the best they can, even try to get some of the debris out of the swimming pool, but this is a losing battle. After a while they abandon the project, realizing that it’s a beautiful day and they have their dogs and they’re together. Even if their house is destroyed.

So they live in the moment. They try to forget the loot­ing, though the sound of sirens is commonplace now. Instead of Tony’s fish, they barbecue some steaks that are quickly defrosting, and Cherice fixes some potato salad while the mayonnaise is still good. Because they got so little sleep the night before, and because there’s no electricity, they go to bed early.

Sometime in the night they awaken to a relentless thudding—no, a pounding on the Berteaus’ door. “I’m goin’,” Charles says grimly, and Cherice notices he tucks Tony’s gun into the jeans he pulls on.

She can’t just stay here and wait to see what happens. She creeps down the stairs behind him.

“Yeah?” Charles says through the door.

“I’m the next-door neighbor,” a man says. “I’ve got Tony on the phone.”

Charles opens the door and takes the man’s cell phone. He listens for a while, every now and then saying, “Oh shit.” Or, “Oh God. No.” Cherice pulls on his elbow, mouthing What? to him, terrified. But he turns away, ignoring her, still listening, taking in whatever it is. Finally, he says, “Okay. We’ll leave first thing.”

Still ignoring Cherice, he gives the phone back to the neighbor. “You know about all this?” he says. The man only nods, and Cherice sees that he’s crying. Grown man, looks like an Uptown banker, white hair and everything, with tears running down his cheeks, biting his lip like a little kid.

She’s frantic. She’s grabbing at Charles, all but pinching him, desperately trying to get him to just finish up and tell her what’s going on. Finally, he turns around, and she’s never seen him look like this, like maybe one of their kids has died or something.

He says only, “Oh, baby,” and puts his arms around her. She feels his body buck, and realizes that he’s crying too, that he can’t hold it in anymore, whatever it is. Has one of their kids died?

Finally, he pulls himself together enough to tell her what’s happened—that the city is flooded, their neighbor­hood is destroyed, some of their neighbors are probably dead. Their own children thought they were dead until they finally got Tony and Mathilde.

Cherice cannot take this in. She tries, but she just can’t. “Eighty percent of the city is underwater?” she repeats over and over. “How can that be?”

They live in a little brick house in New Orleans East, a house they worked hard to buy, that’s a stretch to maintain, but it’s worth it. They have a home, a little piece of some­thing to call their own.

But now we don’t, Cherice thinks. It’s probably gone. We don’t have nothin’.

In the end, she can’t go that way. She reasons that an entire neighborhood can’t be destroyed, something’s got to be left, and maybe her house is. She wants to go see for herself.

“Cherice, you gotta pay attention,” Charles says. “Only way to go see it’s to swim. Or get a boat maybe. There’s people all over town on rooftops right now, waitin’ to be res­cued. There’s still crazy lootin’ out there. The mayor wants everybody out of town.”

“That’s what he said before the storm.”

“He’s sayin’ it again. We goin’ to Highlands tomorrow.”

“Highlands?”

“Well, where else we gon’ go? Mathilde and Tony got room for us, they say come, get our bearings, then we’ll see. Besides, Mathilde wants us to bring her some things.”

There it is again—Mathilde asking a favor to get them to leave. So that’s how serious it is. Well, Cherice knew that, sort of. But it keeps surprising her, every time she thinks about it.

“How we gon’ get out with all that lootin’ goin’ on?” she says. “Might even be snipers.”

“Tony says the best way’s the bridge. We can just go on over to the West Bank—we leavin’ first thing in the morn­ing. And I mean first thing—before anybody’s up and lootin’. Let’s try to get a few more hours sleep.”

Cherice knows this is impossible, but she agrees because she wants to be close to Charles, to hold him, even if neither of them sleeps.

De La Russe is in the parking lot at the Tchoupitoulas Wal-Mart, thinking this whole thing is a clusterfuck of undreamed-of proportions, really wanting to break some heads (and not all of them belonging to looters), when Jack Stevens arrives in a district car. Sergeant Stevens is a big ol’ redhead, always spewing the smart remarks, never taking a damn thing seriously, and today is no different.

“Hey, Del—think it’s the end of the world or what?”

De La Russe is not in the mood for this kind of crap. “There’s no goddamn chain of command here, Jack. Couple of officers came in, said they got orders to just let the looters have at it, but who am I s’posed to believe? Can’t get nobody on the radio, the phones, the goddamn cell phones—” He pauses, throws his own cell across the concrete parking lot. It lands with something more like a mousy skitter than a good solid thud.

He has quite a bit more to say on the subject, but Stevens interrupts. “What the hell you do that for?”

“Why I need the goddamn thing? Nobody’s gonna answer, nobody fuckin’ cares where I am, nobody’s where they’re supposed to be, and I can’t get nothin’ but a fuckin’ busy anyhow. Nothing around here… fuckin’… works! Don’t you… fuckin’… get it?”

“Del, my man, you seem a little stressed.”

De La Russe actually raises his nightstick.

“Hey. Take it easy; put that down, okay. Ya friend Jack’s here. We gon’ get through this thing together. All right, man?”

For a moment, De La Russe feels better, as if he isn’t alone in a world gone savage—looters busting into all the stores, proclaiming them “open for business”; whole fami­lies going in and coming out loaded down with televisions and blasters and power tools (as if there’s gonna be power anytime soon), right in front of half the police in the parish. Sure, De La Russe could follow procedure, order them out of there, holler, Freeze, asshole! like a normal day, but which one of ’em’s gonna listen? In the end, what’s he gonna do, shoot the place up? It’s not like he’s getting any backup from his brother officers and, as he’s just told Stevens, it’s not like he can get anybody on the goddamn phone anyway. Or the radio. Or anyhow at all.

“Now, first thing we’re gon’ do is go in there and get you another phone,” Stevens says.

De La Russe knows what he means, and he’s not even shocked. What’s going on here is nothing short of the breakdown of society, and he thinks he’s going to have to roll with it. Something about having Stevens with him is kind of reassuring; he is a sergeant—not Del’s sergeant, but still, if he heard right, a sergeant in the New Orleans Police Department has just told him to go into Wal-Mart and loot himself a phone.

Just to be sure, he tries something out: “Loot one, you mean.”

“Hell no! We’re gonna commandeer you one.” And Stevens about kills himself laughing.

They hitch their trousers and push past several boiling little seas of people, seemingly working in groups, helping themselves to everything from baby food to fishing poles. Nobody even glances at their uniforms.

“Why are we bothering with the goddamn phone?” De La Russe asks. “Damn things don’t work anyhow.”

“Yeah, you right,” Stevens says. “But just in case.” He turns to the busy knot of looters on the small appliances aisle and grabs himself one at random—a woman. Just shoves an arm around her, gets up under her chin, and pulls her against his body. De La Russe sees her pupils dilate, her eyeballs about pop out of her head with fear. Stevens whispers some­thing in her ear and she nods.

When he lets her go, she reaches in the pocket of her jeans and comes out with a cell phone, which she hands over, meek as you please. Stevens passes it to De La Russe. “Now ya back in business.” He swings his arms wide. “Anything else ya need?”

De La Russe feels sweat break out on his forehead. His scalp starts to prickle, and so do his toes. His heart speeds up a little. Weirdest part of all, he’s actually having a sexual reaction; he’s getting hard. Not all the way hard, just a little excited, like when he sees a woman he likes, maybe lights a cigarette for her, brushes her thigh, but that’s all, no kiss or anything. A woman who isn’t his wife but someone who’s not supposed to get him excited. This is how he feels now, except with sweat and prickles. Because he’s pretty sure this is not an idle question Stevens is asking. Thing about Stevens, there’s rumors about him. About how he makes stuff disap­pear from the property room, shakes suspects down for drugs, little stuff that tells you a lot.

Thing about De La Russe, he’s not above the same kind of thing. And he doesn’t need rumors, he’s been disciplined and everybody knows it. Yeah, he’s been clean since then, but he’s starting to feel this is something else again, this thing he’s looking at. This thing that’s nothing less than the breakdown of the social contract. It’s just occurring to him that people are going to profit from this, and they’re not just gonna be the Pampers-and-toothpaste thieves. He decides to get right down to it.

“What are you saying, sergeant?”

“Hell, Del, it’s the end of the world and you’re callin’ me sergeant—what’s up with that shit?” But he knows perfectly well.

De La Russe smiles. “I was just wondering if I heard you right.” He waits for an answer, not allowing the smile to fade. Keeping his teeth bared.

“Remember that little eBay bi’ness you told me you and ya wife was runnin’? How she goes to garage sales and finds things she can sell to collectors? And then you photograph ’em and get ’em on up online? Y’all still doin’ that?”

“Yeah. We still doin’ that. Why?”

Stevens looks at him like he’s nuts. “Why? Think about it, Del. You can sell just about anything on eBay.” He pauses, does the wide-open this-could-all-be-yours thing again. “And we got access to just about anything.”

De La Russe is getting his drift. His mind’s racing, going instantly to the problems and working on solutions. He shrugs. “Yeah? Where would we store it?”

“Glad you axed, bro. Just happens I already hooked up with a lieutenant who’s got a room at the Hyatt.” The Hyatt has become the department’s temporary headquarters. “He’s got access to a couple other rooms we could use. And I don’t mean hotel rooms. Storage rooms. Pretty big ones. We keep it there for now and when things get back to normal, somebody’s garage, maybe.”

De La Russe narrows his eyes. “What lieutenant?”

“Joe Dougald.”

The patrolman almost does a double take. “Joe Dougald? You’re dreaming. Guy’s a boy scout.”

Stevens hoots. “Yeah? Ya think so? I been doin’ deals with Joe for fifteen years. Trust me. We can trust him.”

De La Russe isn’t sure if he even trusts Stevens, much less Dougald, but what the hell, the regular rules just don’t seem to apply now that the apocalypse, or whatever this is, has come crashing in on them. And he’s got two kids in Catholic school, with college looming. That’s not going away.

He assesses the place. “Let’s start with little stuff that’s easy to carry. iPods, video games, stuff like that. Electronics, small appliances. Hey, do they have jewelry here?” He gives a little snort. Wal-Mart jewelry isn’t going to make them rich, even if it exists. “Watches, maybe?”

Stevens smiles as if he likes the way De La Russe is get­ting into this. “This ain’t the only store in town, ya know. And stores ain’t the only sources we got. You’re from the Second District, right? People there got real nice taste.”

De La Russe decides he’s just fallen into a real deal. Here they are, right this minute, he and Stevens, policing Wal-Mart and helping themselves while they’re at it. He sees how he can patrol his own district, get credit for coming to work, arrest a few of the real looters—the street guys—and help himself to whatever he wants while everybody’s still out of town. How come he hadn’t thought of it first?

It’s early the next day when De La Russe sees the black cou­ple—oh, excuse him, the two African-Americans—packing up their car in front of the biggest-ass goddamn house in the Garden District, or so near it doesn’t matter. What the hell are they thinking? There aren’t any cops around here? He decides he’s really going to enjoy this.

He parks his car and strolls up all casual, like he’s just gonna talk to ’em. “How y’all?” Dicking with them.

They go rigid though. They know from the get-go he’s trouble, and it has to be because of their guilty little con­sciences. “What y’all doing?”

“Leavin’,” the man says. “Gettin’ out of town quick as we can. You want to see some ID? My wife works here and the owners are in North Carolina. So we rode out the storm here.” He starts to put his hand in his pocket, maybe to get the ID, and that gives De La Russe an excuse to slam him up against the car, like he thinks the guy’s going to go for a weapon.

He pats the man down, and sure enough, there is one. Doesn’t that just sweeten this whole deal. Worth a lot to a couple guys he knows. “You got a permit for this?”

The guy doesn’t answer, but his wife pipes up: “It’s not ours. It belongs to Tony. My employer. When the looters came…”

De La Russe smiles. “… ya thought it might be okay to steal ya boss’s gun, huh? You know how pathetic that story sounds? Know who I think the looters are? Yeah. Yeah, I guess ya do. Let’s see what else ya got here.”

The woman says, “My boss, Mathilde… she asked me to bring—”

“Mrs. Berteau,” the man says. “My wife works for Mathilde Berteau.”

“Right,” says De La Russe. “Y’all get in the backseat for a while.”

“What about… ?” The woman’s already crying, know­ing exactly what’s in store for her. He grabs her by the elbow and rassles her into the car, shoving her good, just for the fun of it.

“What about what?”

“Nothin’, I just…”

The husband is yelling now. “Listen, call the Berteaus. All you have to do is call ’em, goddammit! Just call ’em and let ’em tell you.”

“Like there was the least chance of that,” Cherice says ten months later. The encounter had led to the misery and indig­nity of incarceration for three days and two nights, plus the humiliation of being accused of looting—almost the hardest part to bear. But she has survived, she and Charles, to tell the story at a Fourth of July barbecue.

“Know why I was wastin’ my breath?” Charles chimes in. “’Cause that peckerwood was enjoyin’ himself. Wasn’t about to ruin his own good time.”

She and Charles are living in Harvey now, in a rental, not a FEMA trailer, thank God, until they decide what to do about their gutted house. Their families have all heard the story many times over, but they’ve made new friends here on the West Bank, people they haven’t yet swapped Katrina yarns with. Right now they have the rapt attention of Wyvette Johnson and her boyfriend Brandin. Cherice didn’t catch his last name.

Wyvette gets tears in her eyes. “Mmmm. Mmmm. What about those poor dogs?”

This annoys Cherice, because it’s getting ahead of the way she usually tells it. But she says, “I nearly blurted out that they were there at the last minute… before he took us away. But I thought they’d have a better chance if he didn’t know about ’em. Last thing I wanted was to get my dogs stole by some redneck cop.” Here she lets a sly smile play across her face. “Anyhow, I knew once Mathilde knew they was still in the house, that was gon’ give her a extra reason to come get us out.”

“Not that she needed it,” Charles adds. “She was happy as a pig in shit to hear we’d been dragged off to jail. I mean, not jail, more like a chain-link cage, and then the actual Big House. I ended up at Angola, you believe that? The jail flooded, remember that? And then they turned the train sta­tion into a jail. Oh man, that was some third world shit! Couldn’t get a phone call for nothin’, and like I say, they put you in a cage. But one thing—it was the only damn thing in the city that whole week that worked halfway right. Kept you there a couple days, shipped you right out to Angola. But they got the women out of there just about right away. So Cherice was up at St. Gabriel—you know, where the women’s prison is—in just about twenty-four hours flat. And after that, it wasn’t no problem. ’Cause they actually had working phones there.”

Wyvette is shaking her silky dreads. “I think I’m missin’ somethin’ here—did you say Mathilde was happy y’all were in jail?”

“Well, not exactly,” Cherice says. “She was outraged— ’specially since I’d been there for two days when they finally let me make the call. It’s just that outrage is her favorite state of mind. See, who Mathilde is—I gotta give you her number; every black person in Louisiana oughta have it on speed dial—who Mathilde is, she’s the toughest civil rights lawyer in the state. That’s why Charles made sure to say her name. But that white boy just said, ‘Right,’ like he didn’t believe us. Course, we knew for sure she was gon’ hunt him down and fry his ass. Or die tryin’. But that didn’t make it no better at the time. In the end, Mathilde made us famous though. Knew she would.”

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t’ve got on CNN if it hadn’t been for you,” Charles says, smiling at her. “Or in the New York Times neither.”

Wyvette and Brandin are about bug-eyed.

“See what happened,” Charles continues, “Cherice went on eBay and found Mathilde’s mama’s engagement ring, the main thing she wanted us to bring to Highlands. Those cops were so arrogant they just put it right up there. In front of God and everybody.”

“But how did you know to do that?” Wyvette asks, and Cherice thinks it’s a good question.

“I didn’t,” she says. “I just felt so bad for Mathilde I was tryin’ anything and everywhere. Anyhow, once we found the jewelry, the cops set up a sting, busted the whole crime ring—there was three of ’em. Found a whole garage full of stuff they hadn’t sold yet.”

Brandin shakes his head and waves his beer. “Lawless times. Lawless times we live in.”

And Cherice laughs. “Well, guess what? We got to do a little lootin’ of our own. You ever hear of Priscilla Smith-Fredericks? She’s some big Hollywood producer. Came out and asked if she could buy our story for fifteen thousand dollars, you believe that? Gonna do a TV movie about what happened to us. I should feel bad about it, but those people got way more money than sense.”

Right after the holiday, Marty Carrera of Mojo Mart Productions finds himself in a meeting with a young producer who has what sounds to him like a good idea. Priscilla Smith-Fredericks lays a hand on his wrist, which he doesn’t much care for, but he tries not to cringe.

“Marty,” she says. “I believe in this story. This is an important story to tell—a story about corruption, about courage, about one woman’s struggle for justice in an unjust world. But most of all, it’s the story of two women, two women who’ve been together for twenty-two years—one the maid, the other the boss—about the love they have for each other, the way their lives are inextricably meshed. In a good way.

“I want to do this picture for them and… well… for the whole state of Louisiana. You know what? That poor state’s been screwed enough different ways it could write a sequel to the Kama Sutra. It’s been screwed by FEMA, it’s been screwed by the Corps of Engineers, it’s been screwed by the administration, it’s been screwed by its own crooked officials… Everybody’s picking carrion off its bones. And those poor Wardells! I want to do this for the Wardells. Those people have a house to rebuild. They need the money and they need the… well, the lift. The vindication.”

Marty Carrera looks at the paperwork she’s given him. She proposes to pay the Wardells a $15,000 flat fee, which seems low to him. Standard would be about $75,000, plus a percentage of the gross and maybe a $10,000 “technical consultant” fee. He shuffles pages, wondering if she’s done what he suspects.

And yes, of course she has. She’s inflated her own fee at the expense of the Wardells. She thinks she should get $100,000 as an associate producer, about twice what the job is worth. And not only that, she wants to award the technical consultant’s fee to herself.

Marty is genuinely angry about this. She’s roused his sympathy for the wrongfully accused couple, and even for the beleaguered state, and he too believes the Wardells’ story—or more properly, Mathilde and Cherice’s story—would make a great movie for television.

However, he thinks Ms. Smith-Fredericks is a species of vermin. “After looking at the figures,” he says, “I think I can honestly say that you seem uniquely qualified to do a piece on looting.”

But she doesn’t catch his meaning. She’s so full of herself all she hears is what she wants to hear. She sticks out her hand to shake.

Well, so be it, Marty thinks. I tried to warn her.

His production company doesn’t need her. So what if she found the story and brought it to him? He’s not obligated to… Well, he is, but…

“Marty,” she says, “we’re going to be great together.”

He shakes her hand absentmindedly, already thinking of ways to cut her out of the deal.

THE PRISON by Domenic Stansberry

It was 1946, and Alcatraz was burning. I had just got back into town and stood in the crowd along the seawall, looking out toward the island. The riot at the prison had been going on for several days, and now a fire had broken out and smoke plumed out over the bay. There were all kinds of rumors running through the crowd. The prisoners had taken over. Warden Johnston was dead. Capone’s gang had seized a patrol boat and a group of escapees had landed down at Baker Beach. The radio contradicted these reports, but from the seawall you could see that a marine flotilla had sur­rounded Alcatraz Island and helicopters were pouring tracer fire into the prison. The police had the wharf cordoned off but it didn’t prevent the crowds from gathering. The off-duty sailors and Presidio boys mixing with the peace-time john­nies. The office girls and Chinese skirts. The Sicilians with their noses like giant fish.

In the crowd were people I knew from the old days. Some of them met my eyes, some didn’t. My old friend Johnny Maglie stood in a group maybe ten yards away. He gave me a nod, but it wasn’t him I was looking at. There was a woman, maybe twenty-five years old, black hair, wearing a red cardi­gan. Her name was Anne but I didn’t know this yet. Her eyes met mine and I felt something fall apart inside me.

My father had given me a gun before I left Reno. He had been a figure in North Beach before the war—an editor, a man with opinions, and he used to carry a little German revolver in his vest pocket. The gun had been confiscated after Pearl Harbor, but he’d gotten himself another some­where along the way and pressed it into my hand in the train station. A gallant, meaningless gesture.

“Take this,” he said.

“I don’t need a gun.”

“You may be a war hero,” he said, “but there are people in North Beach who hate me. Who have always hated me. They will go after you.”

I humored the old man and took the gun. Truth was, he was ill. He and Sal Fusco had sent me to borrow some money from a crab fisherman by the name of Giovanni Pellicano. More than that, though, my father wanted me to talk with my mother. He wanted me to bring her on the train back to Reno.

Johnny Maglie broke away from his little group—the ex-soldiers with their chests out and the office janes up on their tiptoes, trying to get a glimpse of the prison. Maglie was a civilian now, looking good in his hat, his white shirt, his creases. My old friend extended his hand and I thought about my father’s gun in my pocket.

I have impulses sometimes, ugly thoughts.

Maybe it was the three years I’d spent in the Pacific. Or maybe it was just something inside me. Still inside me.

Either way, I imagined myself sticking the gun in my old friend’s stomach and pulling the trigger.

“So you’re back in town,” said Maglie.

“Yeah, I’m back.”

Maglie put his arm around me. He and I had grown up together, just down the street. We had both served in the Pacific theater, though in different divisions. He had served out the campaign, but I’d come back in ’44—after I was wounded the second time around, taking some shrapnel in my chest. This was my first time back to The Beach. Johnny knew the reason I had stayed away, I figured, but it wasn’t something we were going to talk about.

“We fought the Japs, we win the goddamn war—but it looks like the criminals are going to come back and storm the city.”

I had liked Maglie once, but I didn’t know how I felt about him anymore.

“You going to stick around town for a while?”

“Haven’t decided,” I said.

“How’s your mom?”

“Good.”

He didn’t mention my father. No one mentioned my father.

“You know,” he stuttered, and I saw in his face the mix of shame and awkwardness that I’d seen more than once in the faces of the people who’d known my family—who’d moved in the same circles. And that included just about everybody in The Beach. Some of them, of course, played it the other way now. They held their noses up, they smirked. “You know,” he said, “I was getting some papers drawn up yesterday—down at Uncle’s place—and your name came up…”

He stopped then. Maybe it was because he saw my expression at the mention of his uncle, the judge. Or maybe it was because the cops were herding us away, or because a blonde in Maglie’s group gave a glance in his direction.

“Join us,” he said. “We’re going to Fontana’s.”

I was going to say no. And probably I should have. But the girl in the red cardigan was a member of their group.

For twenty years, my father had run the Italian-language paper, Il Carnevale. He had offices down at Columbus, and all the Italian culturatti used to stop by when they came through the city. Enrico Caruso. The great Marconi. Even Vittorio Mussolini, the aviator.

My father had been a public man. Fridays, to the opera. Saturdays, to Cavelli’s Books—to stand on the sidewalk and listen to Il Duce’s radio address. On Tuesdays, he visited the Salesian school. The young boys dressed in the uniforms of the Faciso Giovanile, and my father gave them lectures on the beauty of the Italian language.

I signed up in December, ’41.

A few weeks later my father’s office was raided. His paper was shut down. Hearings were held. My father and a dozen others were sent to a detention camp in Montana. My mother did not put this news in her letters. Sometime in ’43 the case was reviewed and my father was released, provided he did not take up residence in a state contiguous to the Pacific Ocean. When I came home, with my wounds and my letters of com­mendation, my stateside commander suggested it might a good idea, all things considered, if I too stayed away from the waterfront.

But none of this is worth mentioning. Anyway, I am an old man now and there are times I don’t know what day it is, what year. Or maybe I just don’t care. I look up at the televi­sion, and that man in the nice suit, he could be Mussolini. He could be Stalin. He could be Missouri Harry, with his show-me smile and his atomic bomb. This hospital, there are a million old men like me, a million stories. They wave their hands. They tell how they hit it big, played their cards, made all the right decisions. If they made a mistake, it wasn’t their fault; it was that asshole down the block. Myself, I say nothing. I smell their shit. Some people get punished. Some of us, we get away with murder.

“You on leave?”

Anne had black hair and gray eyes and one of those big smiles that drew you in. There was something a bit off about her face, a skewed symmetry—a nose flat at the bridge, thin lips, a smile that was wide and crooked. The way she looked at you, she was brash and demure at the same time. A sales­man’s daughter, maybe. She regarded me with her head tilted, looking up. Amused, wry. Something irrepressible in her eyes. Or almost irrepressible.

“No, no,” I said. “I’ve been out of the service for a while now.”

She glanced at my hand, checking for the ring. I wasn’t wearing one—but she was. It was on the engagement finger, which she tucked away when she saw me looking. What this meant, exactly, I didn’t know. Some of the girls wore engage­ment rings the whole time their fiancés were overseas, then dumped the guy the instant he strolled off the boat. Anne didn’t look like that type, but you never knew.

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t wearing any kind of ring—in spite of Julia Fusco, back in Reno. We weren’t married, but…

“I grew up here.”

“In The Beach?”

“Yes.”

She smiled at that—like she had known the answer, just looking.

“And you?”

“I’ve been out East for a while,” she said. “But I grew up here, too.”

“But not in The Beach?” I asked, though I knew the answer, the same way she had known about me.

“No, no. Dolores Heights.”

The area out there in the Mission was mostly Irish those days, though there were still some German families up in the Heights. Entrepreneurs. Jews. Here before the Italians, before the Irish. Back when the ships still came around the horn.

“Where did you serve?”

I averted my eyes, and she didn’t pursue it. Maybe because I had that melancholy look that says don’t ask any more. I glanced at a guy dancing in front of the juke with his girlfriend, and I thought of my gun and had another one of my ugly moments. I took a drink because that helped some­times. It helped me push the thoughts away. The place was loud and raucous. Maglie and his blonde were sitting across from me, chatting it up, but I couldn’t hear a word. One of the other girls said something, and Anne laughed. I laughed too, just for the hell of it.

I took another drink.

Fontana’s had changed. It had used to be only Italians came here, and you didn’t see a woman without her family. But that wasn’t true anymore. Or at least it wasn’t true this night. The place had a fevered air, like there was something people were trying to catch on to. Or maybe it was just the jailbreak.

Maglie came over to my side and put his arm around my shoulders once again. He had always been like this. One drink and he was all sentimental.

“People don’t know it,” he said. “Even round the neigh­borhood, they don’t know it. But Jojo here, he did more than his share. Out there in the Pacific.”

“People don’t want to hear about this,” I said. There was an edge in my voice, maybe a little more than there should have been.

“No,” said Maglie. “But they should know.”

I knew what Maglie was doing. Trying to make it up to me in some way. Letting me know that whatever happened to my father, in that hearing, it wasn’t his idea. And to prove it, I could play the hero in front of this girl from The Heights with her cardigan and her pearls and that ring on her finger.

I turned to Anne.

“You?” I asked. “Where were you during the war?”

She gave me a little bit of her story then. About how she had been studying back East when the war broke out. Halfway through the war, she’d graduated and gotten a job with the VA, in a hospital, on the administrative side. But now that job was done—they’d given it to a returning soldier— and she was back home.

The jukebox was still playing.

“You want to dance?”

She was a little bit taller than me, but I didn’t mind this. Sinatra was crooning on the juke. I wanted to hold her closer, but I feared she’d feel the gun in my pocket. Then I decided I didn’t care.

I glanced at the ring on her finger, and she saw me looking.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Berlin.”

I didn’t say anything. Frank went on crooning. Some of my father’s friends, I remembered them talking about the Berlin of the old days. About the cabarets and the big­mouthed blondes with husky voices who made the bulge in their pants grow like Pinocchio’s nose.

“He, my fiancé—he’s a lieutenant,” she said. “And there’s the reconstruction. He thought it was important, not just to win the war. Not just to defeat them. But to build it back.”

“He’s an idealist.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how come she had fallen for him. I wondered if she had known him long. Or if it had been one of those things where you meet somebody and you can’t escape. You fall in a whirlwind.

At that moment, inside Alcatraz, Bernie Coy and five other convicts were pinned down in the cellblock. None of us in the bar knew that yet, or even knew their names. If you wanted to know what was going on inside Alcatraz, the best you could do was climb up a rooftop and listen to the radio—but it was too far to see, and the radio was filtered by the mil­itary. Anyway, prison officials weren’t talking. They were too busy to talk. Later, though, it came out how Bernie Coy was the brains. He knew the guards’ routines. He’d managed to crow apart the bars and lead a handful of prisoners into the gun room. He and his buddies had clubbed the guards, taken their keys, and headed down the hall to the main yard; but the last door in the long line of doors would not open. The keys were not on the ring. They had all the ammunition in the world, but they could not get past that door. Now they were pinned down, cornered by the fire on one side and the guards on the other. So they fought, the way men in a foxhole fight. Our boys in Normandy. The Japanese in those bloody caves. The floodlights swept the shore and the tracer bullets lit the sky, and they fought the way desperate men fight, creeping forward on their bellies.

Sinatra was winding it up now, and I pulled Anne a little closer. Then I noticed a man watching us. He was sitting at the same table as Maglie and the rest. He was still watching when Anne and I walked back.

He put his arm around Anne, and they seemed to know each other better than I would like.

“This is Davey,” Anne said.

“Mike’s best friend,” he said.

I didn’t get it at first, and then I did. Mike was Anne’s fiancé, and Davey was keeping his eye out.

Davey had blue eyes and yellow hair. When he spoke, first thing, I thought he was a Brit, but I was wrong.

“London?” I asked.

“No, California,” he smiled. “Palo Alto. Educated abroad.”

He had served with Anne’s fiancé over in Germany. But unlike Mike, he had not re-enlisted. Apparently he was not quite so idealistic.

“Part of my duties, far as my best friend,” he said, “are to make sure nothing happens to Anne.”

The Brit laughed then. Or he was still the Brit to me. A big man, with a big laugh, hard to dislike, but I can’t say I cared for him. He joined our group anyway. We ate then and we drank. We had antipasti. We had crabs and shrimp. We had mussels and linguini. Every once in a while someone would come in from the street with news. At the Yacht Harbor now… three men in a rowboat… the marines are inside, cell-­to-cell, shooting them in their cots. At some point, Ellen Pagione, Fontana’s sister-in-law, came out of the kitchen to make a fuss over me.

“I had no idea you were back in town.” She pressed her cheek against mine. “This boy is my favorite,” she said. “My goddamn favorite.”

Part of me liked the attention, I admit, but another part, I knew better. Ellen Pagione had never liked my father. Maybe she didn’t approve of what had happened to him, though, and felt bad. Or maybe she had pointed a finger her­self. Either way, she loved me now. Everyone in North Beach, we loved one another now.

Anne smiled. Girl that she was, she believed the whole thing.

A little while later, she leaned toward me. She was a lit­tle in her cups maybe. Her cheeks were flush.

“I want to take you home.”

Then she looked away. I wondered if I’d heard correctly. The table was noisy. Then the Brit raised his glass, and every­one was laughing.

After dinner, Johnny Maglie grabbed me at the bar. I was shaking inside, I’m not sure why. Johnny wanted to buy me a beer, and I went along, though I knew I’d had enough. There comes a time, whatever the drink is holding under, it comes back up all of a sudden and there’s nothing you can do. At the moment, I didn’t care. I caught a glimpse of Anne. Some of the others had left, but she was still at the table. So was the Brit.

“How’s your mom?” It was the same question Johnny had asked before, out on the street, but maybe he’d forgotten.

“She’s got her dignity,” I said.

“That’s right. Your mama. She’s always got her head up.” He was a little drunk and a smirk showed on his face.

I knew what people said about my mother. Or I could guess, anyway. She was a Northern Italian, like my father, from Genoa. Refinement was important to her. We were not wealthy, but this wasn’t the point. My father had only been a newspaperman, but it had been a newspaper of ideas, and the prominenti had respected him. Or so we had thought. My mother had tried for a little while to live in Montana, outside the camp where he was imprisoned, but it had been too remote, too brutal. So she had gone back to North Beach and lived with her sister. Now the war was over, and the restric­tions had been lifted, but my father would not return. He had been disgraced, after all. And the people who could have helped him then—the people to whom he had catered, peo­ple like Judge Molinari, Johnny Maglie’s uncle—they had done nothing for him. Worse than nothing.

“Are you going to stay in The Beach?” Johnny asked.

I didn’t answer. My father worked in one of the casinos in Reno now, dealing cards. He lived in a clapboard house with Sal Fusco and Sal’s daughter, Julia. Julia took care of them both.

About two months ago something had happened between Julia and me. It was the kind of thing that happens sometimes. To be honest, I didn’t feel much toward her other than loyalty.

“So what are you going to do?”

I glanced toward Anne. The Brit had slid closer and was going on in that big-chested way of his.

“I don’t know.”

But I did know. There was a little roadhouse on the edge of Reno with some slots and card tables. Sal Fusco wanted my father and I to go into business with him. To get the loan, all I had to do was shake hands with Pellicano, the crab fisher­man. But my father, I knew, did not really care about the roadhouse. All he wanted was for my mother to come to Reno.

I had spoken to my mother just hours before.

“If this is what you want, I will do it,” she said.

“It’s not for me. It’s for him.”

“Your father can come back here. The war is over.”

“He has his pride.”

“We all have our shame. You get used to it. At least here, I can wear my mink to the opera.”

“There is no opera anymore.”

“There will be again soon,” she said. “But if this is what you want, I will go to Reno. If this is what my son wants…”

I understood something then. She blamed my father. Someone needed to take blame, and he was the one. And part of me, I understood. Part of me didn’t want to go back to Reno either.

“It’s what I want,” I said.

Johnny Maglie looked at me with those big eyes of his. He wanted something from me. Like Ellen Pagione wanted. Like my father wanted. Like Julia Fusco. For a minute, I hated them all.

“I know how you used to talk about going into law,” Johnny said. “Before all this business.”

“Before all what business?”

“Before the war…” he stammered. “That’s all I meant. I know you wanted to be an attorney.”

“Everything’s changed.”

“My uncle—he said he would write a letter for you. Not just any school. Stanford. Columbia. His recommendation, it carries weight.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a rush of excitement—that I didn’t sense a door opening and a chance to walk into another life.

“Is it because he feels guilty?” I asked. “Because of what happened to my father? He was at the hearing, wasn’t he?”

Johnny looked at me blankly, as if he didn’t understand.

“I saw Jake yesterday.”

Jake was Judge Molinari’s boy. He was a sweet-faced kid. His father’s pride and joy. He’d done his tour in Sicily and distinguished himself, from what I heard.

“How’s he doing?”

“Getting married.”

“Good for him.”

Back at the table, the Brit raised another glass. Beside him, Anne was beautiful. The way the Brit was looking at her, I didn’t guess he was thinking about his buddy overseas.

I was born circa 1921. The records aren’t exact. It doesn’t matter. Like I said, there are times, these days, when I can’t place the current date either. It is 1998, maybe. Or 2008. The nurse who takes care of me—who scoots me up off my ass and empties my bedpan—she was born in Saigon, just before the fall. 1971, I think. French Vietnamese, but the French part doesn’t matter here in the States. Either way, she doesn’t give a fuck about me. Outside the sunlight is white, and I glimpse the airplanes descending. We have a new airport, a new convention center. Every place, these days, has a new convention center. Every place you go, there are airplanes descending and signs advertising a casino on the edge of town.

I close my eyes. The Brit gets up all of a sudden, goes out into the night. I see Anne alone at the table. I see my father dealing cards in Reno. I see Julia Fusco in my father’s kitchen, fingers on her swollen belly.

My kid. My son.

A few days ago, for recreation, they wheeled us to the convention center. We could have been anywhere. Chicago. Toronto. I spotted a couple in the hotel bar, and it didn’t take a genius to see what was going on.

You can try to fuck your way out. You can work the slot. You can run down the long hall but in the end the door is locked and you are on your belly, crawling through smoke.

No one escapes.

The nurse comes, rolls me over.

Go to sleep, she says. Go to fucking sleep.

“I was on Guam.” Anne and I were outside now, just the two of us. The evening was all but over. “The Japanese were on top of the hill. A machine-gun nest.”

One of the marine choppers was overhead now, working in a widening gyre. The wind had shifted and you could smell the smoke from the prison.

“Is it hard?”

“What?”

“The memories?”

“Of the war, you mean.”

“Yes, the war.”

I didn’t know what to say. “A lot of people on both sides,” I made a vague gesture. “Us or them. Sometimes, the differ­ence, I don’t know.” I felt the confusion inside of me. I saw the dead Japs in their nest. “I don’t know what pulls people through.”

She looked at me then. She smiled. “Love.”

“What?”

She was a little shier now. “Something greater than themselves. A dedication to that. To someone they love. Or to something.”

“To an idea?”

“Yes,” she said. “An idea.”

What she said, it didn’t explain anything, not really, but it was the kind of thing people were saying those days—in the aftermath of all the killing. I felt myself falling for it, just like you fall for the girl in the movie. For a moment, she wasn’t Anne anymore, the girl from The Heights. She was something else, her face sculpted out of light.

She smiled.

“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “Why don’t you get me a taxi?”

Then I had an idea. I didn’t have to go to Reno. I could just walk up Columbus with Anne. We could catch a taxi. And we could keep going. Not out to Dolores Heights, or Liberty Heights, or wherever it was she lived. But beyond the neighborhoods… beyond the city… out through the dark­ened fields… carried along on a river of light.

Then from behind came a loud voice. It belonged to the Brit and it boomed right through me.

“Anne,” he said. “I have gotten us a taxi.”

I felt her studying me, reading my face. I felt her hand on my back. The Brit opened the taxi door.

My legs were shaking as I headed down the alley. I could hear the copters still, and the sirens along the waterfront. As I walked deeper into the neighborhood, I heard the old sounds too. An aria from an open window. Old men neighing. Goats on a hillside. I was drunk. At some point I had taken my father’s gun out of my pocket. It was a beautiful little gun. I could have gotten into the taxi, I supposed. Or I could find Anne tomorrow. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had other responsibilities. I hadn’t been in The Beach for a while, and I was disoriented. The alley was familiar and not familiar. Rome, maybe. Calabria. An alley of tradesmen, maybe an accountant or two, in the offices over the street. I saw a figure ahead, coming out of a door, and I recognized the corner. Judge Molinari had his office upstairs. Had for years. But this was a younger man. He turned to lock the door. Go the other way, I thought. Don’t come toward me. But on he came. Jake Molinari, the judge’s son. With the war behind him and a bride waiting. I hadn’t planned to be here, but here I was. There are things you don’t escape. In the dark, he was smiling to himself. Or I thought he was. He raised his eyes. He saw me. He saw the gun in my hand and his mouth opened. I thought of my father and Julia Fusco, and I shot him. He fell against the alley wall. Then all I could see was Anne. Her face was a blinding light. A flash in the desert. The man lay at my feet now. I shot him again.

At the top of the hill, I paused to look back. I knew how it was but I looked anyway. The sky over the bay was red. Alcatraz was still burning.

HELPER by Joseph Bruchac

The one with the missing front teeth. He’s the one who shot me. Before his teeth were missing.

Getting shot was, in a way, my fault. I heard them coming when they were still a mile away. I could’ve run. But running never suited me, even before I got this piece of German steel in my hip. My Helper. Plus I’d been heating the stones for my sweat lodge since the sun was a hand high above the hill. I run off, the fire would burn down and they’d cool off. Wouldn’t be respectful to those stones.

See what they want, I figured. Probably just deer hunters who’d heard about my reputation. You want to get a trophy, hire Indian Charley.

Yup, that was what it had to be. A couple of flatlanders out to hire me to guide them for the weekend. Boys who’d seen the piece about me in the paper, posing with two good old boys from Brooklyn and the twelve-pointer they bagged. Good picture of me, actually. Too good, I realized later. But that wasn’t what I was thinking then. Just about potential customers. Not that I needed the money. But a man has to keep busy. And it was better in general if folks just saw me as a typical Indian. Scraping by, not too well educated, a threat to no one. Good old Indian Charley.

Make me a sawbuck or two, get them a buck or two. Good trade.

I was ready to say that to them. Rehearsing it in my head. For a sawbuck or two, I’ll get you boys a buck or two. Good trade. Indian humor. Funny enough to get me killed.

I really should have made myself scarce when I heard their voices clear enough to make out what the fat one was saying. It was also when I felt the first twinge in my hip. They were struggling up the last two hundred yards of the trail. That’s when I should have done it. Not ran, maybe. But faded back into the hemlocks.

Son of a bidgin’ Indin, the heavy-footed one said. And kept on saying it in between labored breaths and the sound of his heavy feet, slipping and dislodging stones. The other one, who wasn’t so clumsy but was still making more noise than a lame moose, didn’t say anything.

I imagined Heavy Foot was just ticked off at me for making my camp two miles from the road and the last of it straight up. It may have discouraged some who might’ve hired me. But it weeded out the weaker clientele. And the view was worth it, hills rolling away down to the river that glistened with the rising sun like a silver bracelet, the town on the other side that turned into a constellation of lights mirroring the stars in the sky above it at night.

The arrowhead-shaped piece of metal in my flesh sent another little shiver down the outside of my thigh. I ignored it again. Not a smart thing to do, but I was curious about my visitors.

Curiosity killed the Chippewa, as my grampa, who had also been to Carlisle, used to joke.

For some reason the picture of the superintendent’s long face the last day I saw him came to mind. Twenty years ago. He was sitting behind his desk, his pale face getting red as one of those beets I’d spent two summers digging on the farm where they sent me to work for slave labor wages—like every other Indian kid at the school. The superintendent got his cut, of course. How many farmhands and housemaids do you need? We got hundreds of them here at Carlisle. Nice, civilized, docile little Indian boys and girls. Do whatever you want with them.

That was before I got my growth and Pop Warner saw me and made me one of his athletic boys. Special quarters, good food and lots of it, an expense account at Blumenthal’s department store, a share of the gate. Plus a chance to get as many concussions as any young warrior could ever dream of, butting heads against the linemen of Harvard and Syracuse and Army. I also found some of the best friends I ever had on that football squad.

It was because of one of them that I’d been able to end up here on this hilltop—which, according to my name on a piece of paper filed in the county seat, belonged to me. As well as the other two hundred acres all the way down to the river. I’d worked hard for the money that made it possible for me to get my name on that deed. But that’s another story to tell another time.

As Heavy Foot and his quieter companion labored up the last narrow stretch of trail, where it passed through a hemlock thicket and then came out on an open face of bedrock, I was still replaying that scene in the superintendent’s office.

You can’t come in here like this.

I just did.

I’ll have you expelled.

I almost laughed at that one. Throw an Indian out of Carlisle? Where some children were brought in chains? Where they cut our hair, stole the fine jewelry that our parents arrayed us in, took our clothes, changed our names, dressed us in military uniforms, and turned us into little soldiers? Where more kids ran away than ever graduated?

You won’t get the chance. I held up my hand and made a fist.

The super cringed back when I did that. I suppose when you have bear paw hands like mine, they could be a little scary to someone with a guilty conscience.

I lifted my little finger. First, I said, I’m not here alone. I looked back over my shoulder where the boys of the Carlisle football team were waiting in the hall.

I held up my ring finger. Second, I talk; you listen.

Middle finger. Third, he goes. Out of here. Today.

The super knew who I meant. The head disciplinarian of the school. Mr. Morissey. Who was already packing his bags with the help of our two tackles. Help Morissey needed because of his dislocated right shoulder and broken jaw.

The super started to say something. But the sound of my other hand coming down hard on his desk stopped his words as effectively as a cork in a bottle. His nervous eyes focused for a second on the skinned knuckles of my hand.

Fourth, I said, extending my index finger. No one will ever be sent to that farm again. No, don’t talk. You know the one I mean. Just nod if you understand. Good.

Last, my thumb extended, leaning forward so that it touched his nose. You never mention my name again. You do not contact the agent on my reservation or anyone else. You just take me out of the records. I am a violent Indian. Maybe I have killed people. You do not ever want to see me again. Just nod.

The super nodded.

Good, I said. Now, my hand patting the air as if I was giving a command to a dog, stay!

He stayed. I walked out into the hall where every man on the football squad except for our two tackles was waiting, including our Indian coach. The super stayed in his office as they all shook my hand, patted me on the back. No one said goodbye. There’s no word for goodbye. Travel good. Maybe we see you further down the road.

The super didn’t even come out as they moved with me to the school gate, past the mansion built with the big bucks from football ticket sales where Pop Warner had lived. As I walked away, down to the train station, never looking back, the super remained in his seat. His legs too weak with fear for him to stand. According to what I heard later in France—from Gus Welch, who was my company commander and had been our quarterback at Carlisle—the superintendent sat there for the rest of the day without moving. The football boys finally took pity on him and sent one of the girls from the sewing class in to tell him that Charles, the big dangerous Indian, was gone and he could come out now.

Gus laughed. You know what he said when she told him that? Don’t mention his name. That’s what he said.

I might have been smiling at the memory when the two men came into view, but that wasn’t where my recollections had stopped. They’d kept walking me past the Carlisle gate, down the road to the trolley tracks. They’d taken me on the journey I made back then, by rail, by wagon, and on foot, until I reached the dark hills that surrounded that farm. The one more Carlisle kids had run away from than any other. Or at least it was reported that they had run away—too many of them were never seen again.

That had been the first time I acted on the voice that spoke within me. An old voice with clear purpose. I’d sat down on the slope under an old apple tree and watched, feeling the wrongness of the place. I waited until it was late, the face of the Night Traveler looking sadly down from the sky. Then I made my way downhill to the place that Thomas Goodwaters, age eleven, had come to me about because he knew I’d help after he told me what happened there. Told me after he’d been beaten by the school disciplinarian for running away from his Outing assignment at the Bullweather Farm. But the older, half-healed marks on his back had not come from the disciplinarian’s cane.

Just the start, he’d told me, his voice calm despite it all, speaking Chippewa. They were going to do worse. I heard what they said they’d done before.

I knew his people back home. Cousins of mine. Good people, canoe makers. A family peaceful at heart, that shared with everyone and that hoped their son who’d been forced away to that school would at least be taught things he could use to help the people. Like how to scrub someone else’s kitchen floor.

He’d broken out the small window of the building where they kept him locked up every night. It was a tiny window, but he was so skinny by then from malnourishment that he’d been able to worm his way free. Plus his family were Eel People and known to be able to slip through almost any narrow place.

Two dogs, he said. Bad ones. Don’t bark. Just come at you.

But he’d planned his escape well. The bag he’d filled with black pepper from the kitchen and hidden in his pants was out and in his hand as soon as he hit the ground. He’d left the two bad dogs coughing and sneezing as he ran and kept running.

As his closest relative, I was the one he had been running to before Morissey caught him.

You’ll do something, Tommy Goodwaters said. It was not a question. You will help.

I was halfway down the hill and had just climbed over the barbed wire fence when the dogs got to me. I’d heard them coming, their feet thudding the ground, their eager panting. Nowhere near as quiet as wolves—not that wolves will ever attack a man. So I was ready when the first one leaped and latched its long jaws around my right forearm. Its long canines didn’t get through the football pads and tape I’d wrapped around both arms. The second one, snarling like a wolverine, was having just as hard a time with my equally well-protected left leg that it attacked from the back. They were big dogs, probably about eighty pounds each. But I was two hundred pounds bigger. I lifted up the first one as it held on to my arm like grim death and brought my other forearm down hard across the back of its neck. That broke its neck. The second one let go when I kicked it in the belly hard enough to make a fifty-yard field goal. Its heart stopped when I brought my knee and the full weight of my body down on its chest.

Yeah, they were just dogs. But I showed no mercy. If they’d been eating what Tommy told me—and I had no reason to doubt him—there was no place for such animals to be walking this Earth with humans.

Then I went to the place out behind the cow barn. I found a shovel leaned against the building. Convenient. Looked well-used. It didn’t take much searching. It wasn’t just the softer ground, but what I felt in my mind. The call of a person’s murdered spirit when their body has been hidden in such a place as this. A place they don’t belong.

It was more than one spirit calling for help. By the time the night was half over I’d found all of them. All that was left of five Carlisle boys and girls who’d never be seen alive again by grieving relatives. Mostly just bones. Clean enough to have had the flesh boiled off them. Some gnawed. Would have been no way to tell them apart if it hadn’t been for what I found in each of those unmarked graves with them. I don’t know why, but there was a large thick canvas bag for each of them. Each bag had a wooden tag tied to it with the name and, God love me, even the tribe of the child. Those people—if I can call them that—knew who they were dealing with. Five bags of clothing, meager possessions and bones. None of them were Chippewas, but they were all my little brothers and sisters. If I still drew breath after that night was over, their bones and possessions, at least, would go home. When I looked up at the moon, her face seemed red. I felt as if I was in an old, painful story.

I won’t say what I did after that. Just that when the dawn rose I was long gone and all that remained of the house and the buildings were charred timbers. I didn’t think anyone saw me as I left that valley, carrying those five bags. But I was wrong. If I’d seen the newspapers from the nearby town the next day—and not been on my way west, to the Sac & Fox and Osage Agencies in Oklahoma, the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, the lands of the Crows and the Cheyennes in Montana, the Cahuilla of California—I would have read about the tragic death by fire of almost an entire family. Almost.

I blinked away that memory and focused on the two men who paused only briefly at the top of the trail and then headed straight toward me where I was squatting down by the fire pit. As soon as I saw them clearly I didn’t have to question the signal my Helper was giving me. I knew they were trouble.

Funny how much you can think of in the space of an eyeblink. Back in the hospital after getting hit by the shrapnel. The tall, skinny masked doctor bending over me with a scalpel in one hand and some kind of shiny bent metal instrument in the other.

My left hand grabbing the surgeon’s wrist before the scapel touched my skin.

It stays.

The ether. A French accent. You are supposed to be out.

I’m not.

Oui. I see this. My wrist, you are hurting it.

Pardon. But I didn’t let go.

Why?

It says it’s going to be my Helper. It’s talking to me.

They might have just given me more ether, but by then Gus Welch had pushed his way in the tent. He’d heard it all.

He began talking French to the doctor, faster than I could follow. Whatever it was he said, it worked.

The doctor turned back to me, no scalpel this time.

You are Red Indian.

Mais oui.

A smile visible even under the mask. Head nodding. Bien. We just sew you up then.

Another blink of an eye and I was back watching the two armed men come closer. The tall, lanky one was built a little like that doctor I’d last seen in 1918. No mask, though. I could see that he had one of those Abraham Lincoln faces, all angles and jutting jaw—but with none of that long-gone president’s compassion. He was carrying a Remington .303. The fat one with the thick lips and small eyes, Heavy Foot for sure, had a lever-action Winchester 30-06. I’d heard him jack a shell into the chamber just before they came into view.

Good guns, but not in the hands of good guys.

Both of them were in full uniform. High-crowned hats, black boots, and all. Not the brown doughboy togs in which I had once looked so dapper. Their khaki duds had the words Game Warden sewed over their breast pockets.

They stopped thirty feet away from me.

Charley Bear, the Lincoln impersonator, said in a flat voice: We have a warrant for your arrest for trespassing. Stand up.

I stayed crouching. It was clear to me they didn’t know I owned the land I was on. Not that most people in the area knew. After all, it was registered under my official white name of Charles B. Island. If they were really serving a warrant from a judge, they’d know that. Plus, there was one other thing wrong.

Game wardens don’t serve warrants, I said.

They said he was a smart one, Luth, Heavy Foot growled.

Too smart for his own good.

My Helper sent a wave of fire through my whole leg and I rolled sideways just as Luth raised his gun and pulled the trigger. It was pretty good for a snap shot. The hot lead whizzed past most of my face with the exception of the flesh it tore off along my left cheekbone, leaving a two-inch wound like a claw mark from an eagle’s talon.

As I rolled, I hurled sidearm the first of the baseball-sized rocks I’d palmed from the outside of the firepit. Not as fast as when I struck out Jim Thorpe twice back at Indian school. But high and hard enough to hit the strike zone in the center of Luth’s face. Bye-bye front teeth.

Heavy Foot had hesitated before bringing his gun up to his shoulder. By then I’d shifted the second stone to my throwing hand. I came up to one knee and let it fly. It struck square in the soft spot just above the fat man’s belly.

Ooof!

His gun went flying off to the side and he fell back clutching his gut.

Luth had lost his .303 when the first rock struck him. He was curled up, his hands clasped over his face.

I picked up both guns before I did anything else. Shucked out the shells and then, despite the fact that I hated to do it seeing as how guns themselves are innocent of evil intent, I tossed both weapons spinning over the edge of the cliff. By the time they hit the rocks below, I had already rolled Heavy Foot over and yanked his belt out of his pants. I wrapped it around his elbows, which I’d pulled behind his back, cinched it tight enough for him to groan in protest.

I pried Luth’s hands from his bloody face, levered them behind his back, and did the same for him that I’d done for his fat buddy. Then I grabbed the two restraining belts, one in each hand, and dragged them over to the place where the cliff dropped off.

By then Luth had recovered enough, despite the blood and the broken teeth, to glare at me. But Heavy Foot began weeping like a baby when I propped them both upright at the edge where it wouldn’t take more than a push to send them over.

Shut up, Braddie, Luth said through his bleeding lips, his voice still flat as stone. Then he stared at me. I’ve killed people worse than you.

But not better, I replied.

A sense of humor is wasted on some people. Luth merely intensified his stare.

A hard case. But not Braddie.

Miss your gun? I asked. You can join it.

I lifted my foot.

No, Braddie blubbered. Whaddaya want? Anything.

A name.

Braddie gave it to me.

I left them on the cliff edge, each one fastened to his own big rock that I’d rolled over to them. The additional rope I’d gotten from my shack insured they wouldn’t be freeing themselves.

Stay still, boys. Wish me luck.

Go to hell, Luth snarled. Tough as ever.

But he looked a little less tough after I explained that he’d better hope I had good luck. Otherwise I wouldn’t be likely to come back and set them loose. I also pointed out that if they struggled too much there was a good chance those delicately balanced big stones I’d lashed them to would roll over the edge. Them too.

I took my time going down the mountain—and I didn’t use the main trail. There was always the chance that Luth and Braddie had not been alone. But their truck, a new ’34 Ford, was empty. An hour’s quiet watch of it from the shelter of the pines made me fairly certain no one else was around. They’d thoughtfully left the keys in the ignition. It made me feel better about them that they were so trusting and willing to share.

As I drove into town I had even more time to think. Not about what to do. But how to do it. And whether or not my hunch was right.

I parked the car in a grove of maples half a mile this side of the edge of town. Indian Charley behind the wheel of a new truck would not have fit my image in the eyes of the good citizens of Corinth. Matter of fact, aside from Will, most of them would have been surprised to see I knew how to drive. Then I walked in to Will’s office.

Wyllis Dunham, Attorney at Law, read the sign on the modest door, which opened off the main street. I walked in without knocking and nodded to the petite, stylishly dressed young woman who sat behind the desk with a magazine in her nicely manicured fingers.

Maud, I said, touching my knuckles to my forehead in salute.

Charles, she drawled, somehow making my name into a sardonic remark the way she said it. What kind of trouble you plan on getting us into today?

Nothing we can’t handle.

Why does that not make me feel reassured?

Then we both laughed and I thought again how if she wasn’t Will’s wife I’d probably be thinking of asking her to marry me.

What happened to your cheek? Maud stood up, took a cloth from her purse, wetted it with her lips, and brushed at the place where the bullet had grazed me and the blood had dried. I stood patiently until she was done.

Thanks, nurse.

You’ll get my bill.

He in?

For you. She gestured me past her and went back to reading Ladies’ Home Journal.

I walked into the back room where Will sat with his extremely long legs propped up on his desk, his head back against a couch pillow, his eyes closed.

Before you ask, I am not asleep on the job. I am thinking. Being the town lawyer of a bustling metropolis such as this tends to wear a man out.

Don’t let Maud see you with your feet up on that desk.

His eyes opened at that and as he quickly lowered his feet to the floor he looked toward the door, a little furtively, before recovering his composure. Though Will had the degree and was twice her size, it was Maud who laid down the law in their household.

He placed his elbows on the desk and made a pyramid with his fingers. The univeral lawyer’s sign of superior intellect and position, but done with a little conscious irony in Will’s case. Ever since I had helped him and Maud with a little problem two years back, we’d had a special relationship that included Thursday night card games of cutthroat canasta.

Wellll? he asked.

Two questions.

Do I plead the Fifth Amendment now?

I held up my little finger. First question. Did George Good retire as game warden, has the Department of Conservation started using new brown uniforms that look like they came from a costume shop, and were two new men from downstate sent up here as his replacement?

Technically, Charles, that’s three questions. But they all have one answer.

No?

Bingo. He snapped his fingers.

Which was what I had suspected. My two well-trussed friends on the mountaintop with their city accents were as phony as their warrant.

Two. I held up my ring finger. Anybody been in town asking about me since that article in the Albany paper with my picture came out?

Will couldn’t keep the smile off his face. If there was such a thing as an information magnet for this town, Will Dunham was it. He prided himself on quietly knowing everything that was going on—public and private—before anyone else even knew he knew it. With another loud snap of his long fingers he plucked a business card from his breast pocket and handed it to me with a magician’s flourish.

Voilà!

The address was in the State Office Building. The name was not exactly the one I expected, but it still sent a shiver down my spine and the metal spearpoint in my hip muscle twinged. Unfinished business.

I noticed that Will had been talking. I picked up his words in mid-sentence.

… so Avery figured that he should give the card to me, seeing as how he knew you were our regular helper, what with you taking on odd jobs for us now and then. Repair work, cutting wood… and so on. Of course, by the time he thought to pass it on to me Avery’d been holding on to it since two weeks ago which was when the man came into his filling station asking about you and wanting you to give him a call. So, did he get tired of waiting and decide to look you up himself?

In a manner of speaking.

Say again?

See you later, Will.

The beauty of America’s trolley system is that a man could go all the way from New York City to Boston just by changing cars once you got to the end of town and one line ended where another picked up. So the time it took me to run the ten miles to where the line started in Middle Grove was longer than it took to travel the remaining forty miles to Albany and cost me no more than half the coins in my pocket.

I hadn’t bothered to go back home to change into the slightly better clothes I had. My nondescript well-worn apparel was just fine for what I had in mind. No one ever notices laborers. The white painter’s cap, the brush, and the can of Putnam’s bone-white that I borrowed from the hand truck in front of the building were all I needed to amble in unimpeded and take the elevator to the sixteenth floor.

The name on the door matched the moniker on the card—just as fancy and in big gold letters, even bigger than the word INVESTMENTS below it. I turned the knob and pushed the door open with my shoulder, backed in diffidently, holding my paint can and brush as proof of identity and motive. Nobody said anything, and when I turned to look I saw that the receptionist’s desk was empty, as I’d hoped. Five o’clock. Quitting time. But the door was unlocked, the light still on in the boss’s office.

I took off the cap, put down the paint can and brush, and stepped through the door.

He was standing by the window, looking down toward the street below.

Put it on my desk, he said.

Whatever it is, I don’t have it, I replied.

He turned around faster than I had expected. But whatever he had in mind left him when I pulled my right hand out of my shirt and showed him the bone-handled skinning knife I’d just pulled from the sheath under my left arm. He froze.

You? he said.

Only one word, but it was as good as an entire book. No doubt about it now. My Helper felt like a burning coal.

Me, I agreed.

Where? he asked. I had to hand it to him. He was really good at one-word questions that spoke volumes.

You mean Mutt and Jeff? They’re not coming. They got tied up elsewhere.

You should be dead.

Disappointing. Now that he was speaking in longer sentences he was telling me things I already knew, though he was still talking about himself when I gave his words a second thought.

You’d think with the current state of the market, I observed, that you would have left the Bull at the start of your name, Mr. Weathers. Then you might have given your investors some confidence.

My second attempt at humorous banter fell as flat as the first. No response other than opening his mouth a little wider. Time to get serious.

I’m not going to kill you here, I said. Even though you deserve it for what you and your family did back then. How old were you? Eighteen, right? But you took part just as much as they did. A coward too. You just watched without trying to save them from me? Where were you?

Up on the hill, he said. His lips tight. There was sweat on his forehead now.

So, aside from investments, what have you been doing since then? Keeping up the family hobbies?

I looked over at the safe against the wall. You have a souvenir or two in there? No, don’t open it to show me. People keep guns in safes. Sit. Not at the desk. Right there on the windowsill.

What are you going to do?

Deliver you to the police. Along with a confession. I took a pad and a pen off the desk. Write it now, starting with what you and your family did at your farm and including anyone else you’ve hurt since then.

There was an almost eager look on his weaselly face as he took the paper and pen from my hands. That look grew calmer and more superior as he wrote. Clearly, he knew he was a being of a different order than common humans. As far above us as those self-centered scientists say modern men are above the chimpanzees. Like the politicians who sent in the federal troops against the army of veterans who’d camped in Washington, DC this past summer asking that the bonuses they’d been promised for their service be paid to them. Men I knew who’d survived the trenches of Belgium and France, dying on American soil at the hands of General MacArthur’s troops.

The light outside faded as the sun went down while he wrote. By the time he was done he’d filled twenty pages, each one numbered at the bottom, several of them with intricate explicatory drawings.

I took his confession and the pen. I placed the pad on the desk, kept one eye on him as I flipped the pages with the tip of the pen. He’d been busy. Though he’d moved on beyond Indian kids, his tastes were still for the young, the weak, those powerless enough to not be missed or mourned by the powers that be. Not like the Lindbergh baby, whose abduction and death had made world news this past spring. No children of the famous or even the moderately well-off. Just those no one writes about. Indians, migrant workers, Negro children, immigrants…

He tried not to smirk as I looked up from the words that made me sick to my stomach.

Ready to take me in now?

I knew what he was thinking. A confession like this, forced at the point of a knife by a… person… who was nothing more than an insane, ignorant Indian. Him a man of money and standing, afraid for his life, ready to write anything no matter how ridiculous. When we went to any police station, all he had to do was shout for help and I’d be the one who’d end up in custody.

One more thing, I said.

You have the knife. His voice rational, agreeable.

I handed him back the pad and pen.

On the last page, print I’m sorry in big letters and then sign it.

Of course he wasn’t and of course he did.

Thank you, I said, taking the pad. I glanced over his shoulder out the window at the empty sidewalk far below.

There, I said, pointing into the darkness.

He turned his head to look. Then I pushed him.

I didn’t lie, I said, even though I doubt he could hear me with the wind whistling past his face as he hurtled down past floor after floor. I didn’t kill you. The ground did.

And I’d delivered him to the police, who would be scraping him up off the sidewalk.

Cap back on my head, brush and paint can in hand, I descended all the way to the basement, then walked up the back stairs to leave the building from the side away from where the first police cars would soon arrive.

I slept that night in the park and caught the first trolley north in the morning. It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the top of the trail.

Only one rock and its human companion stood at the edge of the cliff. Luth had stayed hard, I guessed. Too hard to have the common sense to sit still. But not as hard as those rocks he’d gotten acquainted with two hundred feet below. I’d decide in the morning whether to climb down there, so far off any trail, and bury him. Or just leave the remains for the crows.

I rested my hand on the rock to which the fat man’s inert body was still fastened. I let my gaze wander out over the forested slope below, the open fields, the meandering S of the river, the town where the few streetlights would soon be coming on. There was a cloud floating in the western sky, almost the shape of an arrowhead. The setting sun was turning its lower edge crimson. I took a deep breath.

Then I untied Braddie. Even though he was limp and smelled bad, he was still breathing. Spilled some water on his cracked lips. Then let him drink a little.

Don’t kill me, he croaked. Please. I didn’t want to. I never hurt no one. Never. Luth made me help him. I hated him.

I saw how young he was then.

Okay, I said. We’re going back downhill. Your truck is there. You get in it. Far as I know it’s yours to keep. You just drive south and don’t look back.

I will. I won’t never look back. I swear to God.

I took him at his word. There’s a time for that, just as there’s a time when words end.

EASY AS A-B-C by Laura Lippman

Another house collpased today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef. It’s not enough to carve master bath suites from the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, sending a river of mud into the alley, then putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate by even an inch—boom. You destroy the foundation of the house. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.

It’s odd, going into these houses I knew as a kid, learning what people have paid for sound structures that they consider mere shells, all because they might get a sliver of a water view from a top-floor window or the ubiquitous rooftop deck. Yeah, I know words like ubiquitous. Don’t act so surprised. The stuff in books—anyone can learn that. All you need is time and curiosity and a library card, and you can fake your way through a conversation with anyone. The work I do, the crews I supervise, that’s what you can’t fake because it could kill people, literally kill them. I feel bad for the men who hire me, soft types who apologize for their feebleness, whining: I wish I had the time. Give those guys a thousand years and they couldn’t rewire a single fixture or install a gas dryer. You know the first thing I recommend when I see a place where the “man of the house” has done some work? A carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t close my eyes in my brother-in-law’s place until I installed one, especially when my sister kept bragging about how handy he was.

The boom in South Baltimore started in Federal Hill twenty-five years ago, before my time, flattened out for a while in the ’90s, but now it’s roaring again, spreading through south Federal Hill and into Riverside Park and all the way up Fort Avenue into Locust Point, where my family lived until I was ten and my grandparents stayed until the day they died, the two of them, side by side. My grandmother had been ailing for years and my grandfather, as it turned out, had been squirreling away various painkillers she had been given along the way, preparing himself. She died in her sleep and, technically, he did, too. A self-induced, pharmaceutical sleep, but sleep nonetheless. We found them on their narrow double bed, and the pronounced rigor made it almost impossible to separate their entwined hands. He literally couldn’t live without her. Hard on my mom, losing them that way, but I couldn’t help feeling it was pure and honest. Pop-pop didn’t want to live alone and he didn’t want to come stay with us in the house out in Linthicum. He didn’t really have friends. Mee-maw was his whole life and he had been content to care for her through all her pain and illness. He would have done that forever. But once that job was done, he was done, too.

My mother sold the house for $75,000. That was a dozen years ago and boy did we think we had put one over on the buyers. Seventy-five thousand! For a house on Decatur Street in Locust Point. And all cash for my mom, because it had been paid off forever. We went to Hausner’s the night of the closing, toasted our good fortune. The old German restaurant was still open then, crammed with all that art and junk. We had veal and strawberry pie and top-shelf liquor and toasted grandfather for leaving us such a windfall.

So imagine how I felt when I got a referral for a complete redo at my grandparents’ old address and the real estate guy tells me: “She got it for only $225,000, so she’s willing to put another hundred thousand in it and I bet she won’t bat an eyelash if the work goes up to $150,000.”

“Huh,” was all I managed. Money-wise, the job wasn’t in my top tier, but then, my grandparents’ house was small even by the neighborhood’s standards, just two stories. It had a nice-size backyard, though, for a rowhouse. My grandmother had grown tomatoes and herbs and summer squash on that little patch of land.

“The first thing I want to do is get a parking pad back here,” my client said, sweeping a hand over what was now an overgrown patch of weeds, the chain-link fence sagging around it. “I’ve been told that will increase the value of the property ten, twenty thousand.”

“You a flipper?” I asked. More and more amateurs were getting into real estate, feeling that the stock market wasn’t for them. They were the worst of all possible worlds, panicking at every penny over the original estimate, riding my ass. You want to flip property for profit, you need to be able to do the work yourself. Or buy and hold. This woman didn’t look like the patient type. She was young, dressed to the nines, picking her way through the weeds in the most impractical boots I’d ever seen.

“No, I plan to live here. In fact, I hope to move in as quickly as possible, so time is more important to me than money. I was told you’re fast.”

“I don’t waste time, but I don’t cut corners,” I said. “Mainly, I just try to make my customers happy.”

She tilted her head, gazing at me through naturally thick, black eyelashes. It was the practiced look of a woman who had been looking at men from under her eyelashes for much of her life, sure they would be charmed. And, okay, I was. Dark hair, cut in one of those casual, disarrayed styles, darker eyes that made me think of kalamata olives, which isn’t particularly romantic, I guess. But I really like kalamata olives. With her fair skin, it was a terrific contrast.

“I’m sure you’ll make me very happy,” was all she said.

I guess here is where I should mention that I’m married, going on eighteen years and pretty happily, too. I realize it’s a hard concept to grasp, especially for a lot of women, that you can be perfectly happy, still in love with your wife, maybe more in love with your wife than you’ve ever been, but it’s been eighteen years and a young, firm-fleshed woman looks up at you through her eyelashes and it’s not a crime to think: I like that. Not: I’d like to hit that, which I hear the young guys on my crews say. Just: I like that, that’s nice, if life were different I’d make time for that. But I had two kids and a sweet wife, Angeline, who’d only put on a few pounds and still kept her hair blond and long, and was pretty appreciative of the life my work had built for the two of us. So I had no agenda, no scheme going in. I was just weak.

But part of Deirdre’s allure was how much she professed to love the very things whose destruction she was presiding over, even before I told her that the house had belonged to my grandparents. She exclaimed over the wallpaper in their bedroom, a pattern of tiny yellow roses, even as it was steamed off the walls. She ran a hand lovingly over the banister, worn smooth by my younger hands, not to mention my butt a time or two. The next day it was gone, yanked from its moorings by my workers. She all but composed an ode to the black-and-white tile in the single full bath, but that didn’t stop her from meeting with Charles Tile Co. and choosing a Tuscany-themed medley for what was to become the master bath suite. (Medley was their word, not mine. I just put the stuff in.)

She had said she wanted the job fast, which made me ache a little, because the faster it went, the sooner I would be out of her world. But it turned out she didn’t care about speed so much once we got the house to the point where she could live among the ongoing work—and once her end-of-the-day inspections culminated with the two of us in her raw, unfinished bedroom. She was wilder than I had expected, pushing to do things that Angeline would never have tolerated, much less asked for. In some part of my mind, I knew her abandon came from the fact that she never lost sight of the endpoint. The work would be concluded and this would conclude, too. Which was what I wanted as well, I guess. I had no desire to leave Angeline or cause my kids any grief. Deirdre and I were scrupulous about keeping our secret, and not even my longtime guys, the ones who knew me best, guessed anything was up. To them, I bitched about her as much as I did any client, maybe a little more.

“Moldings?” my carpenter would ask. “Now she wants moldings?” And I would roll my eyes and shrug, say: “Women.”

“Moldings?” she asked when I proposed them.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “No charge. But I saw you look at them.”

And so it was with the appliances, the countertops, the triple-pane windows. I bought what she wanted, billed for what she could afford. Somehow, in my mind, it was as if I had sold the house for $225,000, as if all that profit had gone to me instead of the speculator who had bought the house from my mother and then just left it alone to ripen. Over time, I probably put ten thousand of my own money into those improvements, even accounting for my discounts on material and my time, which was free. Some men give women roses and jewelry. I gave Deirdre a marble bathroom and a beautiful old mantle for the living room fireplace, which I restored to the wood-burning hearth it had never been. My grandparents had one of those old gas-fired logs, but Deirdre said they were tacky, and I suppose she was right.

Go figure—I’ve never had a job with fewer complications. The weather held, there were no surprises buried within the old house, which was sound as a dollar. “A deck,” I said. “You’ll want a rooftop deck to watch the fireworks.” And not just any deck, of course. I built it myself, using teak and copper accents, helped her shop for the proper furniture, outdoor hardy but still feminine, with curvy lines and that verdi gris patina she loved so much. I showed her how to cultivate herbs and perennials in pots, but not the usual wooden casks. No, these were iron, to match the décor. If I had to put a name to her style, I guess I’d say Nouvelle New Orleans—flowery, but not overly so, with genuine nineteenth-century pieces balanced by contemporary ones. I guess her taste was good. She certainly thought so and told me often enough.

“If only I had the pocketbook to keep up with my taste,” she would say with a sigh and another one of those sidelong glances, and the next thing I knew I’d be installing some wall sconce she simply had to have.

One twilight—we almost always met at last light, the earliest she could leave work, the latest I could stay away from home—she brought a bottle of wine to bed after we had finished. She was taking a wine-tasting course over at this restaurant in the old foundry. A brick foundry, a place where men like my dad had once earned decent wages, and now it housed this chichi restaurant, a gallery, a health club, and a spa. It’s happening all over Locust Point. The old P&G plant is now something called Tide Point, which was supposed to be some high-tech mecca, and they’re building condos on the old grain piers. The only real jobs left in Locust Point are at Domino and Phillips, where the red neon crab still clambers up and down the smokestack.

“Nice,” I said, although in truth I don’t care much for white wine and this was too sweet for my taste.

“Vigonier,” she said. “Twenty-six dollars a bottle.”

“You can buy top-shelf bourbon for that and it lasts a lot longer.”

“You can’t drink bourbon with dinner,” she said with a laugh, as if I had told a joke. “Besides, wine can be an investment. And it’s cheaper by the case. I’d like to get into that, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it right, have a special kind of refrigerator, keep it climate controlled.”

“Your basement would work.”

And that’s how I came to build her a wine cellar, at cost. It didn’t require excavating the basement, luckily, although I was forever bumping my head on the ceiling when I straightened up to my full height. But I’m 6'3” and she was just a little thing, no more than 5'2", barely one hundred pounds. I used to carry her to bed and, well, show her other ways I could manipulate her weight. She liked me to sit her on the marble counter in her master bath, far forward on the edge, so I was supporting most of her weight. Because of the way the mirrors were positioned, we could both watch, and it was a dizzying infinity, our eyes locked into our own eyes and into each other’s. I know guys who call a sink fuck the old American Standard, but I never thought of it that way. For one thing, there wasn’t a single American Standard piece in the bathroom. And the toilet was a Canadian model, smuggled in so she could have the bigger tank that had been outlawed in interest of water conservation. Her shower was powerful, too, a stinging force that I came to know well, scrubbing up afterwards so Angeline couldn’t smell where I had been.

The wine cellar gave me another month—putting down a floor, smoothing and painting the old plaster walls. My grandparents had used the basement for storage and us cousins had played hide-and-seek in the dark, a made-up version that was particularly thrilling, one where you moved silently, trying to get close enough to grab the others in hiding, then rushing back to the stairs, which were the home-free base. As it sometimes happens, the basement seemed larger when it was full of my grandparents’ junk. Painted and pared down, it was so small. But it was big enough to hold the requisite refrigeration unit and the custom-made shelves, a beautiful burled walnut, for the wines she bought on the advice of the guy teaching the course.

I was done. There­ was not another improvement I could make to the house, so changed now it was as if my family and its history had been erased. Deirdre and I had been hurtling toward this day for months and now it was here. I had to move on to other projects, ones where I would make money. Besides, people were beginning to wonder. I wasn’t around the other jobs as much, and I also wasn’t pulling in the kind of money that would help placate Angeline over the crazy hours I was working. Time to end it.

Our last night, I stopped at the foundry, spent almost forty bucks on a bottle of wine that the young girl in the store swore by. Cakebread, the guy’s real name. White, too, because I knew Deirdre loved white wines.

“Chardonnay,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“I noticed you liked whites.”

“But not Chardonnay so much. I’m an ABC girl—Anything But Chardonnay. Dennis says Chardonnay is banal.”

“Dennis?”

She didn’t answer. And she was supposed to answer, supposed to say: Oh, you know, that faggot from my wine-tasting class, the one who smells like he wears strawberry perfume. Or: That irritating guy in my office. Or even: A neighbor, a creep. He scares me. Would you still come around, from time to time, just to check up on me? She didn’t say any of those things.

She said: “We were never going to be a regular thing, my love.”

Right. I knew that. I was the one with the wife and the house and the two kids. I was the one who had everything to lose. I was the one who was glad to be getting out, before it could all catch up with me. I was the one who was careful not to use the word love, not even in the lighthearted way she had just used it. Sarcastic, almost. It made me think that it wasn’t my marital status so much that had closed off that possibility for us, but something even more entrenched. I was no different from the wallpaper, the banister, the garden. I had to be removed for the house to be truly hers.

My grandmother’s parents had thought she was too good for my grandfather. They were Irish, shipworkers who had gotten the hell out of Locust Point and moved uptown, to Charles Village, where the houses were much bigger. They looked down on my grandfather just because he was where they once were. It killed them, the idea that their precious youngest daughter might move back to the neighborhood and live with an Italian, to boot. Everybody’s got to look down on somebody. If there’s not somebody below you, how do you know you’ve traveled any distance at all in your life? For my dad’s generation, it was all about the blacks. I’m not saying it was right, just that it was, and it hung on because it was such a stark, visible difference. And now the rules have changed again, and it’s the young people with money and ambition who are buying the houses in Locust Point, and the people in places like Linthicum and Catonsville and Arbutus are the ones to be pitied and condescended to. It’s hard to keep up.

My hand curled tight around the neck of the wine bottle. But I placed it in its berth in the special refrigerator, gently, as if I were putting a newborn back in its bed.

“One last time?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said.

She clearly was thinking it would be the bed, romantic and final, but I opted for the bathroom, wanting to see her from all angles. Wanting her to see me, to witness, to remember how broad my shoulders are, how white and small she looked when I was holding her against my chest.

When I moved my hands from her hips to her head, she thought I was trying to position her mouth on mine. It took her a second to realize that my hands were on her throat, not her head, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. She fought back, if you could call it that, but all her hands could find was marble, smooth and immutable. Yeah, that’s another word I know. Immutable. She may have landed a few scratches, but a man in my work gets banged up all the time. No one would notice a beaded scab on the back of my hand, or even on my cheek.

I put her body in a trash bag, covering it with lime leftover from a landscaping job. Luckily, she hadn’t been so crazed that she wanted a fireplace in the basement, so all I had to do was pull down the fake front I had placed over the old hearth, then brick her in, replace the fake front. It wasn’t planned, not a moment of it, but when it happened, I knew what to do, as surely as I know what to do when a floor isn’t level or a soffit needs to be closed up so birds can’t get in.

Her computer was on, as always, her e-mail account open because she used cable for her Internet, a system I had installed. I read a few of her sent messages, just to make sure I aped her style, then typed one to an office address, explaining the family emergency that would take me out of town for a few days. Then I sent one to “Dennis,” angry and hate-filled, accusing him of all kinds of things, telling him not to call or write. Finally, I cleaned the house best I could, especially the bathroom, although I didn’t feel I had to be too conscientious. I was the contractor. Of course my fingerprints would be around. The last thing I did was grab that bottle of Chardonnay, took it home to Angeline, who liked it just fine, although she would have fainted if she knew what it cost.

Weeks later, when Deirdre was officially missing and increasingly presumed dead according to the articles I read in the Sunpapers, I sent a bill for the projects that I had done at cost, marked it “Third and Final Notice” in large red letters, as if I didn’t know what was going on. She was just an address to me, one of a half-dozen open accounts. Her parents paid it, even apologized for their daughter being so irresponsible, buying all this stuff she couldn’t afford. I told them I understood, having kids of my own, Joseph Jr. getting ready for college next year. I said I was so sorry for what had happened and that I hoped they found her soon. I do feel sorry for them. They can’t begin to cover the monthly payments on the place, so it’s headed toward foreclosure. The bank will make a nice profit, as long as the agents gloss over the reason for the sale; people don’t like a house with even the hint of a sordid history.

And I’m glad now that I put in the wine cellar. Makes it less likely that the new owner will want to dig out the basement. Which means there’s less chance of a collapse, and less likelihood that they’ll ever find that little bag of bones in the hearth.

THE ROSE RED VIAL by Pir Rothenberg

When I got inside I called her name. My house was dark and quiet, and although nothing appeared altered I felt that something had happened since I’d left for the museum’s summer gala. There was a note on the kitchen table. I scanned it and it made no sense. I stuffed it into my pocket, took back a shot of whiskey, and walked the narrow hallway into the living room. I thought of the note; the words were going to make sense in a moment. I was sure of it, and felt so much like a balloon steadily expanding that I held my breath and winced at the inevitable explosion.

One month prior, in a storage room below the Virginia Historical Society, I sat before an empty glass cabinet preparing the lamps I would mount on the shelves. There were to be six items of Edgar Allan Poe memorabilia here, among them a lock of dark hair taken off the poet’s head after his death; the key to the trunk that accompanied Poe to Baltimore, where he spent the final few days of his life; and a walking stick, which Poe left here in Richmond ten days before his death. The items were on loan from the Poe Museum across town for the city’s celebration of the poet’s bicentennial, as yet seven months away.

I took a pull from the small metal flask I kept in my utility belt. When I noticed I wasn’t alone, it was too late to hide it. It was the new intern, a dark-haired girl with a small scar across her lower lip.

“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t,” I said, and took another swig before recapping the flask.

She’d started at the museum on Monday, but I’d seen her the weekend before in my neighbors’ backyard. The Hamlins had installed a six-foot privacy fence years ago, but by the unobstructed view from an upstairs window I’d watched the young woman standing like the very portrait of boredom, hand on the flare of her hip, as Barb Hamlin pointed out the trained wisteria and the touch-me-nots in her garden. She’d had one leg stretched into a band of sunlight when she glanced up and noticed me.

I went back to work on the lamps. “They give you something to do in here?”

“Rebecca,” she said, strolling through the makeshift aisles of cases and boxes. Her dark hair fell in angles around her face and she wore a white summer dress unsuitable for an intern’s duties. “And I wish they would. This room is why I’m here.”

“Poe fan, huh?”

“You too,” she said. “Or so Uncle Lou tells me.”

I chuckled softly but did not look up. I was well acquainted with “Uncle Lou,” former captain of the 3rd Precinct, famous for his supposed paternal brand of policing. Really, he’d never been more than a squat old tyrant. We’d been neighbors for a decade and the only thing that kept our peace was that six-foot fence. Now I was humbled to learn that “Uncle” was not a total misnomer; Lou, who’d sired no offspring, had a pretty young niece from Cincinnati.

“Maybe you could ask them to give me an assignment back here,” Rebecca said.

I told her I was just a lighting technician, contracted, not even staff.

“But you know John,” she said. John was the head curator. “You two are friends.”

I thought she ought to ask Lou, a patron of the museum whose connections had likely procured her the internship in the first place. But I agreed to put in a word, if only to end the conversation: nothing good could come from associating with Hamlin kin—much less from upsetting one with a refusal. Yet it excited me too, the thought of Lou’s scowling displeasure were he to discover Rebecca and I chumming around at the museum. Displeasure was a euphemism; he’d put his wife’s garden shears through my skull.

Still, when she asked for a drink, I handed her the flask.

At sunset she was at my front door. I glanced toward Lou and Barb’s house. Rebecca told me not to worry, they’d gone to play bridge with friends.

“So,” she said, wandering into my living room, “do you have any first editions?”

“What?”

“Of Poe,” she said.

“Did your uncle tell you that too?”

Glancing into corners, trailing her fingers along windowsills, she smiled. “I was hoping that a Poe aficionado—who works in a museum, no less—would have an artifact lying around.”

“What,” I said, “just lying around like junk mail?”

“Don’t be nasty,” she said, then picked up a green glass ashtray. “Like this,” she said, holding it to the light. “It’d be great if you could say, ‘And this is Poe’s ashtray, recovered from his writing desk at his last residence at Fordham.’”

“That was my grandfather’s.”

She set it down. “Lou would like that. History buff.”

Yeah, I thought. He had a hard time letting go of it.

“All sorts of Civil War memorabilia everywhere. Ever been inside?”

This was beginning to feel like a game. “What do you think?”

“How should I know where you’ve been?”

I told her she’d better not let Lou see us together.

“Together?” she said, hiding a smile.

“You know what I mean.”

“Why, doesn’t he like you?”

Now I just sat back and looked at her.

“Oh, I know,” she said, grinning. “He told me to stay away from you.”

Then she asked for a drink, even though, by the way she’d cringed earlier, I could tell she’d hated it. I was disappointed. She was only there with me for a little rebellion against the stuffy uncle and aunt.

So be it. I went to get the whiskey.

I spoke with John. I owed my job at the VHS—my very livelihood in this city—solely to him. By the end of the week Rebecca was putting in shifts assisting me in preparing the illumination of over 1,500 objects for the bicentennial exhibits. John and the staff unpacked items every day and created layout plans. It was my job to determine how best to light those books, paintings, and curios they wanted in cases, mounted upon walls, or perched on podiums. Rebecca was happy the hour or two a day she worked with me—rather, with the objects, to which her full attention was devoted. She was ecstatic watching the items emerge from their boxes, or gazing into the cases once the lighting was complete, all the pieces illuminated perfectly before they went back into their boxes for safekeeping. The lights from the displays would strike her face full on, or under her chin like a flashlight beam, or sidelong as in a Rembrandt painting. I wanted to pose her and arrange the light so as to expose every molecule of her simple beauty.

On my back, my head inside a case, I heard Rebecca gasp.

“Wow,” she called, “have you seen this?”

When I stood up Rebecca was crouched by a case that John and I’d worked on that morning and had yet to finalize. She moved aside and looked at me, leaving one finger pressed to the glass.

“The perfume?” I said.

It was a small red vial, chipped along the lip—like Rebecca, with that nick running the width of her own. The original cork stopper, disintegrated long ago, had been replaced by a plastic facsimile.

Rebecca read from the placard: “The essence of rose, believed given by Poe to Virginia the year of their marriage, 1836.” She looked to me again, this time with a lusty sort of gaze. “Can you open the case?”

Although I was technically disallowed, as I was not a member of staff, I did have a key. John gave it to me for the sake of convenience—and because he trusted me. But I couldn’t shake her eyes and thought, What the hell, the museum had better let her touch anything she wanted if they liked her uncle’s money. I opened the case, then cradled the vial in my palms.

“If this breaks,” I told her solemnly, “that’s it. The end of us both.”

I felt her warm fingers coax the vial free from my hold, and noted the light that shone from the case upon her thin nose and lean cheeks, a cool, sterile light that was all wrong. Then, with a move of her thumb, off came the stopper and my heart kicked like a horse.

“Rose,” she said ecstatically, the vial beneath her nose.

I took a whiff. “Yup—now be care—”

She flipped the vial over upon her finger, then dragged the scent across her neck desperately, back and forth. I paled, took the bottle as forcefully as I dared, replaced the stopper, and put it away. She was grinning, her fingers down her dress top.

“Jesus, Rebecca!”

“Emery,” she said softly, almost pityingly, “you knew I was going to do that.”

I heard her call me in the parking lot behind the Historical Society. I didn’t stop, but slowed. We walked together into a long, thin park of magnolia trees that bordered Sheppard Street. The humidity was palpable and a damp wind was gathering strength. I turned into an alley and Rebecca followed, eyeing the flask when I took it from my belt.

“You don’t even like it,” I snapped.

The evening light on her face reminded me of the light that shines upon generals or angels in classic paintings: the exultant yellows and oranges bleeding through churning clouds. I reminded her how quickly I’d be fired if anyone discovered what had happened, then plopped the flask into her hand.

To avoid being seen together, we stuck to the alleys, hopping over streets—Stuart, Patterson, Park—and cutting through the neighborhood diagonally. Below our feet the cobblestones were mashed together like crooked teeth, and on either side crowded slim garages, wooden fences, bushes and woody shrubs, and walls of ancient brick. Green plumes of foliage, heavy with flowers and fruit, alive with the frenetic song of mockingbirds, spilled over everything like lush curtains; and the ivy-draped limbs of mammoth tulip trees wound intricately overhead like the soft arms of giants. It awed me how wild and vivacious the wilderness could be on these nameless roads. It was hard to imagine that a city existed beyond the houses we walked behind.

“Here once, through an alley Titanic,” intoned Rebecca, “Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.”

She watched me for a reaction.

“That’s Poe,” she said, as if to a very slow child.

The trees were loud in the wind and I caught the distinct scent of rose.

“You’ve got to wash it off as soon as you get home.”

“No one’s going to know, Emery.”

I glowered at her. A large, bulbous rain began to fall and rattle the magnolia leaves.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I’ll wash it off tonight.” Then she threw her arm around my neck and pulled me down to her. “But just smell. Isn’t it nice?”

I tensed, restrained for a moment, then drew in the scents—the deep rose, the sticky warm skin of her neck, the rain—and shivered. She leapt away and screamed with delight at the storm, and ran the length of the alley for her house. I didn’t hurry. When I reached my back gate, I saw the blurry shape of Lou in his kitchen window, looking out.

That night I dreamed Rebecca was breaking into my house through a loose window. It was dark but there was a spotlight on her and she was naked. I spent the following morning distracted, preparing for work and wanting to see Rebecca. Wanting to see her in a particular light.

On my way to the museum, I found Lou in the alley breaking fallen tree branches for the trash. He was a stout, wiry man, white-haired and mustachioed, with a thick, soggy cigar between his teeth and sweet blue smoke clinging to his face. He cracked a limb under his knee and I imagined my bones making a similar sound. I felt sure that he’d seen me in the alley the previous night, that he already suspected something. But he said nothing, and did nothing more than nod curtly.

At the museum Rebecca and another intern were sanding walls in an empty exhibit room. When our paths crossed—Rebecca sweaty, covered in white dust, looking unhappy—I smelled the rose perfume. I eyed her, but said nothing. Lou’s lack of reaction had me on guard, probably more so than if he’d clocked me. That, at least, would’ve been in character.

Once alone, I asked if she’d showered, and caught the image of her slick body in steam.

She played indignant, then laughed. “Maybe it’s my natural scent.”

I smelled rose the next day too. It lingered in the replica wood cabin where she’d worked. I followed it through the Story of Virginia exhibit, down thousands of years of history, from the Early Hunters of 14,000 BC to the Powhatan Indians to the Belmont Street Car. Was it a game? Had she bought some cheap spray from the drugstore to irk me? But the odor of an imitation would be like a candy apple compared to the earthy fruit I’d smelled upon her in the rain. I went into the storage room. I found the box where the perfume had been repacked, but it wasn’t inside. Even its placard had vanished. I took a swig from my flask and found that I wasn’t much surprised.

On Saturday evening Rebecca knocked on my door. She’d told her uncle she would be at Trina’s, an intern she ate lunch with sometimes.

“What will you and Trina do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Paint our nails. Talk about boys.”

“Try on perfume?”

She spun around, swore the stuff simply hadn’t washed off, that she had on a different perfume, that I was imagining things. I hadn’t alerted John about the theft because I needed to get the perfume back myself. As much as I wanted to know how she’d done it, I’d already decided confronting her would get me nowhere. But now she was blinking. Big-eyed, disarming blinks. It infuriated me, this show of innocence while the scent of rose was so potent my eyes were practically watering.

“Perfumed from an unseen censer,” she said, raising a brow.

“Poe,” I said. “I know.” Then I took her arm and pulled her up the stairs. She played nonchalant but I could feel her legs resisting. I moved her into the bathroom and sat her on the edge of the bathtub.

“What the hell are you doing?” she said.

I turned on the hot water in the sink and lathered a washcloth with soap. If she was having so much trouble ridding her neck of the scent, I told her, I was going to help. Rebecca’s angry eyes grew challenging, playful. I kneeled, brought the cloth to her skin, and started scrubbing.

“That’s hot,” she said, but she acquiesced, tilting her head.

I wrung the washcloth, soaped it again, and resumed on the other side, taking hold of the back of her neck to steady her. This was a task, this was work—or so I told myself as I watched the soapy rivulets streak her skin. I felt her gaze on me, cool and calm now, and I didn’t look up before kissing her. I tasted rose and chalky soap, and saw red behind my eyelids, pulsing in time with my chest.

Rebecca was curled on one end of the couch and asleep. The whiskey had knocked her out. I put a blanket over her and sat on the opposite end, staring into shadows. A breeze moved my hair and disturbed Rebecca’s purse. I saw her keys in the purse. I took them, went barefoot into the Hamlins’ yard, and let myself in.

I did this all as though in one unthinking movement, and only when I heard snoring did I note my own thrashing heart. For Lou, shooting intruders was dinner conversation. I found Rebecca’s bedroom. Clothing was scattered in piles, and the tangled covers upon her bed made a fossilized impression of her body. On a dresser I fingered through a few trinkets, some cash and letters, then opened the top drawer. Here I found the girl’s undergarments, which, perhaps for posterity, were the only items she’d stowed out of sight. I ran my hands through the silky contents, inhaled the scent of fabric soap and rose. Feeling into the corners I came upon a small, smooth object: the red vial with the chipped lip. I crept out of the house, flooded with excitement and pleasure.

That was Saturday; I didn’t see Rebecca again until Monday afternoon, when I came in for a half-day shift. She was reading a magazine in the break room, a mug of tea below her chin.

“Rose hips?” I said, a sparkle in my voice.

“Chamomile.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t smell like rose.”

She gave a small smile but didn’t look up. I left and headed toward the storage room. The glass vial bulged in my pocket. When I arrived, the door was already open and John was inside with several other staff members. They were unpacking boxes. The room was a disaster.

“Ah,” John said. “Just the fellow I was waiting for.”

My stomach dropped. John explained: he’d been working in storage with Rebecca that morning when she noticed a loose placard; when they tried to return it to the item it described—a red perfume bottle, of course—they discovered it missing. Did I remember it? Did I know anything about it? I made a series of noncommittal noises, difficult as it was to think straight, much less be clever. Rebecca’s little smile danced vividly to mind.

“We’re ass-deep in here the rest of the day making sure it’s really missing, not just misplaced.” I offered to help; I could produce the vial from the first box I unpacked and voila! Case closed. But John refused. Staff only for now. “You know,” he said, “to avoid any confusion.”

“Why would you do that?” I said, nearly shouting.

“Why would you creep into my room and steal it?”

I scoffed. “You’re accusing me of stealing!”

We stood facing each other under the magnolias. Rebecca stared off petulantly.

I took a few long breaths. “Do you want to know why ‘Uncle Lou’ doesn’t like me?”

Rebecca’s lips parted as if to speak, but she said nothing. She wanted to see what I’d say first, the crafty girl. I didn’t care at that point, so I told her.

“He thinks I stole a painting.” I laughed. “From a museum, no less.”

“Francis Keeling Valentine Allan,” Rebecca replied. “The portrait by Thomas Sully. Stolen in 2000 from the Valentine Museum. I know.”

I watched her fixedly. By the end of this revelation, her eyes had drifted down the row of magnolias, her gaze light and airy.

She continued: “Poe said she loved him like her own child. It’s a beautiful painting too, not that I’ve seen it in person.”

“Did Lou also happen to tell you he and a squadron of police burst through my door and tore apart my house eight years ago? That if it wasn’t for John choosing to trust me I’d have been blacklisted from working in any museum in this city again?”

Rebecca returned my stare; she looked ready to play rough. “He told me he saw you with a painting—covered by a sheet. He saw it in your hands the night of the burglary. You were trying to get it from your car to your back door. He saw you, Emery.”

I shook my head and laughed. “So, you’re Lou’s little spy? Looking for lost treasure?”

“Lou is a horse’s ass,” she said. “Anyway, would I find it?”

“It was a storm window, for Christ’s sake. Kid put a baseball through the old one a few days before. Once the cops were done demolishing my house, they were kind enough to look into it. Your uncle hates me because he made a fool of himself at the end of his career. He went out a laughingstock.”

Rebecca shrugged. “He thinks you have it. Still.”

“Do you think I have it?”

“You have my perfume,” she said. “And I want it back.”

Rebecca avoided me the next few days, which was fine, as the restrictions placed upon the non-staff made my job difficult enough. Gone was my key to the storage rooms and cases; gone the days I could work without staff watching over my shoulder. Rebecca had sealed her own fate too; she was back sanding walls all day. John hadn’t ruled it theft, but neither did he believe the missing perfume an inventory list blunder. He simply called it “Missing.” I could feel the growing weight in his eyes when he looked at me.

Lou found out about the perfume through his museum connections. That’s what Rebecca told me a week later, when she appeared at my door again. She’d heard Lou speaking of it on the phone, invoking my name more than once to John and others she didn’t know. I listened to her, weighing the veracity of what she said. I doubted Rebecca would tell Lou or John about my having the perfume; she wanted it for herself, and ratting me out wouldn’t accomplish that. No, given the opportunity, she would steal back the perfume. Probably it was the only reason she was here now. I told her as much.

“I won’t have to resort to that,” she said, stepping close. “I think you’ll give it back.”

“Why, because John and your uncle are hot on my heels?” I said, cockily.

She considered it. “Maybe because you like me?”

I watched her eyes for sarcasm, but she closed them and burrowed her face into my neck, running me through with chills.

“And because I like you,” she added.

One thing nagged me: if Lou had spoken with John and learned of the perfume, wasn’t it likely he’d also heard of Rebecca working with me in the storage room? Uncle Lou knew plenty of the staff—hadn’t anyone put his niece with me? We were careful, but there’s only so much one can do. It’s a small city. By Rebecca’s account, though, Lou was clueless about us.

In bed we made love. She pressed herself close and said, “Smell. Not as nice, is it?”

I smelled rose, but it was sugary and cheap. She wanted the real stuff, just a drop—a molecule.

When I took the perfume from my dresser drawer, she said, “Not much of a hiding spot.”

“That’s what I thought of yours.”

Then she grabbed for it. I held tight and we crashed back onto the bed. She was giving me a good fight, biting my ribs, pulling my hair. When exhaustion wore us down, I tipped the vial onto my finger and applied it to her neck. We lay in bed deep into the night, the perfume high upon the dresser. She was in my arms, and I knew I had to hide the vial before I fell asleep. Then I heard her voice, low and hypnotic.

“I’m going to turn you in.”

I roused, tightened my embrace as though it was lovers’ talk.

“You can’t. I didn’t steal it.”

“But you have it.”

“Darling,” I said, “if you turn me in, I’ll tell them the real story. Then John knows you’re a thief, and your kindly uncle knows you’ve been cavorting with the likes of me. You lose both ways—and you don’t get the perfume.”

“If I turn you in, your life becomes a living hell.”

I pinned her, gripped her neck with my hands. “I could kill you now,” I said. “And that would be the end of this nonsense.”

There was a flash of real fear in her eyes, but only a flash—something had come to her. “I’m at Trina’s tonight,” she said. “When I don’t come home, Lou calls Trina.”

“And?”

“And then Trina tells him about you.”

I was suddenly so pleased with her, with her cunning and forethought, her tenacity. I lowered my head to kiss her, all the while feeling that I was losing myself to her, about to give her something she hadn’t even asked for. I snatched the perfume and took her to the basement, where I pulled boxes away from the wall. When I removed a section of the fake wood paneling with a screwdriver, she laughed and said, “So, you’re going to brick me up back there. I should have figured.”

Then she saw the vault. She stood wide-eyed, the sheets in which she’d wrapped herself slinking down her shoulders. The dial spun swiftly under my fingers, right-left, left-right, and then there was the clean, cold click of the lock giving way. The massive door opened noiselessly. I reached into the darkness and drew out what was inside.

“I knew it!” she screamed. “You sneaky bastard!” She hurled a string of delightful profanity at me, then reached out to touch the painting. She held it while I flicked on a series of mounted spotlights that came together on the opposite wall. I hung the portrait in that pool of radiance—it was alive now, the woman who raised Edgar Allan Poe. She was depicted young, and had a small nose and mouth, large dark eyes and roseate cheeks; her black hair was pulled up, and long strands of it curled past the edges of her eyes down to her jaw. There was a ghostly light about her long neck and her gauzy white dress.

I lost track of how long we stared into it.

Eventually, Rebecca asked, “What’s the point? I mean, it just sits in there. In the dark.”

“What should I do,” I said, “put it up in the living room? Rebecca, having this painting in the vault is dangerous enough. But it’s worth it. It does something to me. Every morning I wake up and remember what’s here, in my house. I’m sitting upon a great secret, and it makes everything… vibrate. But it’s a crime.” I brought my fingers to her neck. “And you don’t wear your crime.”

I put the painting back and the perfume in with it—now she couldn’t rat me out without exposing herself as an accomplice who knew where the secret vault was. I swung the door shut and met Rebecca’s contemptuous gaze. She apparently got the point.

“I want to trust you, Rebecca. And you to trust me. This assures that trust.”

“That’s not trust,” she said. “That’s mutually assured destruction.”

The longer the perfume stayed missing, the more my hours diminished. The museum’s auxiliary technicians were increasingly around, assigned to projects that ordinarily would have gone to me. I was not outright expelled, but more like a child faced into the corner. The cloud of suspicion that had loomed over me eight years before was above me again, and it was dark.

When I confronted John, he said, “Emery, there’s just a lot of talk.”

“Since when do you believe talk?”

“Let’s give it some time,” he said, “let it blow over.”

“Is it Hamlin? Are you listening to Lou Hamlin now?”

“Emery,” he said sharply, “you were the last one with the… People are suspicious.”

Christ, I thought, he defends me when I’m guilty, and condemns me when I’m not—not completely, anyway.

The only bright thing in my life was the source of my troubles. I found it strange that Rebecca’s uncle didn’t try leashing her. Was he duped so easily, believing she spent all her nights at Trina’s? In the basement I’d retrieve the perfume from the safe and trace the oil along her curves. We’d sleep upon the daybed with rose and sweat in the air. Rebecca was surprisingly agreeable to the situation, washing off the perfume dutifully before she left my house each morning, not arguing when I put it back in the safe. If we didn’t make love, or study the painting, Rebecca would pose and I’d manipulate the lights so that I’d swear she floated in them, my treasure.

Rebecca’s internship was nearly complete; she’d be leaving for Cincinnati in a matter of days. It struck me hard, and maybe her too, but neither of us spoke about it. Following my first day of work in four days, Rebecca, walking home beside me in the alleys, presented me with an idea.

“Would things be better for you if they found the perfume?”

I supposed they would, but the small red vial had been so long in our possession, and become so important to us, that I couldn’t imagine being without it.

“I want you to give me the perfume,” she said evenly. “I’ll plant it in a box in one of the storage rooms.”

Her face was confident and serene, and I wanted to kiss the little notch upon her lip for her offer. But it was too dangerous—besides, neither of us had access to the rooms. Then she handed me an envelope. Inside was a key she’d stolen, copied, and returned the day before.

I held onto the key. “It’s too dangerous, Rebecca. If they catch you…”

“Then what? They send me home?”

“Or prison.”

There was the Summer Celebration gala the next night, a fund-raising party for members, staff, and interns. I could do it then, slip in and out amidst the crowd.

“Why do you suddenly want to get rid of it?”

“For you.”

I looked all around at the alley we were in, one of a thousand veins through which coursed the blood of our city to its heart, where a great and mysterious history seemed preserved for us.

“Poe should have died here,” I said, “in these alleys. Not on some bench in Baltimore.”

That night was our last with the perfume.

We took my car. At the museum, Memorial Hall was bustling with ritzy summer gowns and tuxedoed bartenders, colorful spreads of hors d’oeuvres, live jazz. Rebecca and I spent only a few minutes together—the Hamlins were expected shortly—and gulped down our wine in a corner. She was especially striking, having spent so long with her compact mirror as we dressed in the basement, painting on her dark eyes, making her face radiant.

“Rebecca…”

“You have to,” she said. “You can’t lose everything because of me.”

“No, I mean, will you still…”

I was conflicted, afraid that returning the perfume was tossing away the only card I had, tossing away Rebecca herself. I couldn’t finish, but she seemed to know what I meant, because she pulled me to her by my waist and gave me a slow, full-hearted kiss.

“Do it soon,” she said. “I’ll meet you later. Goodbye.” And she disappeared into the crowd.

I waited, put crackers into my dry mouth, said quick hellos, then made my move. I was fueled with wine, sliding through back hallways, full of love for Rebecca. It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t keep it—I hadn’t been fair, keeping it from her. Wouldn’t it all blow over sooner or later? The old case of the missing perfume, just like the painting, which was by now a tired page on an FBI website. In the storage room I stood still, feeling the weight of the vial in my jacket pocket, and Rebecca’s hands still around my waist. I had my treasure—not the painting anymore, but Rebecca. And she, such the devoted student of Poe, deserved to have the perfume. If it was time to return anything, it was the painting. With a wild surge of clarity and elation I rejoined the throngs of people, who had begun dancing as if to emulate my joy. I couldn’t wait to tell Rebecca, to see her face; I’d have liked to see her uncle’s too, just to show him my pleasure and confidence. But I found neither. Someone tugged at my elbow. It was Trina.

“You looking for Rebecca, Mr. Vance? She left a little while ago.”

I stared at her, baffled, then said, “No, Trina. I’m not looking for Rebecca.”

The row of magnolias was empty so I circled back to the parking ramp. She’d be waiting for me, my getaway driver. At my parking spot I discovered three things almost simultaneously: Rebecca wasn’t there, my car was gone, and my keys were no longer in my jacket pocket. I ran home through the alleys trying to keep my mind blank, trying not to remember that last embrace with Rebecca, her hands snaking around my waist. Lou’s house was dark, as was mine. My door was unlocked. Inside I called her name.

Then I read the note:

Please forgive me. But you must see the bright side. The cloud of suspicion above you is lifted—evermore.

R.

I had my shot of whiskey, felt my body shudder, and then it came, the mean bang of fists against my door and the wave of blue uniforms through the halls. I heard my name from the lips of one officer, a young sergeant, who explained his warrant for search and seizure. I saw John in his suit, straight from the gala, and Lou Hamlin dressed in black like some prowler.

The young sergeant said solemnly, “Mr. Vance, is there a safe in your basement?”

I managed to ask if that was illegal.

“What you’ve got in it is,” said Lou, sneering.

They ushered me into my basement and Lou coughed with laughter when he saw the safe in plain view. The sergeant tried the handle.

“Open it up, shitbird,” said Lou.

The sergeant raised a finger to quiet Lou—this pleased me—and said, “You’ll have to open the safe, Mr. Vance. That, or it’ll be opened in the lab.”

I felt my cold body rise and fall with my breath; I waited, but nothing came to me: no idea, no plan of escape. I was done.

“No need for that,” I said, and went to open it.

“No,” said the sergeant, blocking me. “Just recite the combination.”

It was an unoriginal set of numbers, the poet’s birthday: 01-19-18-09. As I recited them I remembered spinning the dial earlier in the evening to retrieve the perfume, Rebecca behind me on the bed doing her makeup, mirror in hand. The click of the lock woke me. The flashlights came out like swords and the beams ferreted through the dark, but where the light should have by now found the black hair, the thin nose, the quiet eyes, there was nothing but more dark, and more light chasing in until the beams struck the rear wall of the safe.

All eyes—and the beams of flashlights—turned upon me.

“Where is the painting, Mr. Vance?” asked the sergeant.

I looked at Lou’s face, white and fishy, and kept my eyes on him when I said, “What painting?” It came out weak, unconvincing, but what did it matter? The empty safe was proof—the empty safe would hide my crime. Only John was touching the brackets on the opposite wall, and looking at the spotlights.

Lou erupted, snatching me by the collar and heaving me into the wall for some of his paternal policing. He got in one blow to my face before he was restrained by the officers. He fought at them too, and when he was finally subdued and handcuffed on the floor he was nearly foaming at his white mustache.

“She said!” Lou spat. “She said the painting was here! She saw it!”

Rebecca. His spy all along. I let this sit on my thoughts for a moment, as if seeing how long I could hold an ember.

The sergeant looked beat. He shook his head at Lou. Then his face brightened. “Mr. Hamlin, where is your niece?”

“She doesn’t have it,” he said. “She made this happen!”

Oh, treacherous Rebecca! But her note was coming into focus. She’d duped me good, but she’d gone to great lengths to dupe her uncle too, and leave me protected.

The sergeant peered at me. “Where is Rebecca? Does she have the painting?”

I said nothing.

That’s when I heard John: “Rose. I smell rose.”

Suddenly, I could smell it too, as if it had exploded in my pocket; it was all over me, all over the bed and the walls and the safe. I looked away from John.

“Mr. Vance,” the sergeant continued, “if you can help us, it’ll be good for you.”

John leveled his gaze at me. “The perfume is here. I smell it. I smell the rose perfume!”

The sergeant patted me down and found the vial. He took a disinterested sniff, handed it to John, and turned back to me.

“Now there’s this,” he said, like a tired parent. “We could forget this altogether if you cooperate.”

I looked at the sergeant and at Lou and I savored it, my chance to turn the tables on her, to beat her at her own game. And then I let it go. “Sergeant,” I said, “Mr. Hamlin. Respectfully, I don’t know where Rebecca is and I have no idea what painting you’re talking about.”

“Arrest him,” Lou barked, sandwiched between officers. “Arrest him for the perfume!”

And they might have. But there was John again, the vial in his hand. “This isn’t it.”

“What?” I shouted, unable to stop myself.

John held up the vial and pointed to an unblemished lip. “No chip,” he said. “Anyway, smell it. Putrid!” He placed the vial on a cabinet and made sure I saw the great disappointment in his eyes.

I was berated for another hour by the officers. What kind of game are you playing with us? Do you think you’ve gotten away with it? Don’t you know it’s just a matter of time? Do you really think this is going to end here, tonight? I just stared into a corner, hardly listening. I was thinking of Rebecca on westbound 64, driving fast with my car into the night. The questions weren’t for me; they were for her. And when I found her, I would make sure she heard them.

When I was at last alone, I found the forged bottle where John had set it. Rebecca must’ve made the switch during our final night together. The vial rolled around on my palm. I was so disappointed that she’d forgotten to add the chip, I didn’t have the heart to remove the cork and smell the candy spray she’d put inside.