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Chapter 7

The first year passes in bits and pieces, fragments with sharp edges. It is defined by voices. Conversations. Like this one:

‘How about a street? C’mon, help us out here. You must remember a street sign, something.’

And him pointing to the letter X on an alphabet puzzle. ‘Like that.’

‘Hey, Joe, you know any street names start with the letter X?’

‘How ’bout Fuckin’ Xanadu?’

‘I think that starts with a F.’

And this one:

‘My dad’s coming back.’

‘Sure, shithead. My momz, too. All our parents is coming back. We gonna have a big fat Thanksgiving turkey dinner and fall asleep ’round the fireplace.’

There are flashes, too – light and movement, photographs that can be strung together to form herky-jerky story lines. There is the Trip to the Hospital, him trembling in the sterile white hall, terrified that he’d been brought here to be put down like the neighbor’s Doberman who’d bitten a Sears repairman. (Which neighbor? Why remember a Sears repairman but not his own mother’s name?) The doctor comes for him, towering and imperious and breathing Listerine, and leads him to a tiny room. He goes passively to his death. They count his teeth, assess his fine motors skills, X-ray his left hand and wrist to check bone development. Then they give him a birthday.

A week later he gets a last name.

Doe.

A random assignment by a faceless clerk in an unseen office. The fact that a brand like that, a goddamn name could be yoked to him forever seems the punctuation mark on a lifelong sentence he will have to serve for a crime he didn’t commit. Michael Doe. Reborn and renamed and left to build from scratch.

Over the months he has added to the memories here, amended them there, losing pieces to the shock that preceded and followed. He had rubbed the narrative curve to a high polish, like river rock, wearing in contours, revealing new seams in the excavated quarry, until what remained, what he beheld, may not even have been the same shape anymore, until he’d freed a different sculpture from the same marble block. But this – this bastardized fusion of past and later – is all he has. This is his imperfect history. This is how it lives in his bones.

Then there is nothing but a snowstorm.

When it clears, he is six.

A run-down house at the end of a tree-shaded lane. He is kneeling at a bay window, nose to the glass, elbows on the sill, fists chubbing up his cheeks. Waiting. The yellow plaid cushion beneath his knees reeks of cat piss. Waiting. A car pulls up, and his spirits fly to the stars, but the car keeps on driving, driving away. Waiting.

A girl’s voice from behind him, ‘Shithead still thinks Daddy’s comin’ back.’

He has told no one about his mother. That he suspects her dead. His mind flits like a butterfly over poisonous flowers. Did his father kill her? Did he use a knife? What is his bloody inheritance?

He doesn’t turn from the window, but his thoughts have moved to the kids gathering behind him, sneakers shuffling on worn carpet. One voice rises above the others, boy-cruel and high with prepubescence: ‘Get over it, Doe Boy. Daddy didn’t want you.’

Mike tries to slow time. He makes a conscious decision to form a fist, the steps of curling, tightening, where to put the thumb. He will use this, his hand, to smash. But then anger bleeds in, overtakes him. A frozen expression of surprise on Charlie Dubronski’s face as Mike charges. A fist, fatter than his, blotting out the bright morning. A whirl of rust-colored carpet and a dull ache in his jaw. And then Dubronski leaning over him, hands on dimpled knees, leering red face. ‘How’s the weather down there, Doe Boy?’

Mike thinks, Calmer next time.

And then, weeks later, he is in the bathroom at three in the morning, the one time it is unoccupied. He needs a stool so he can lean forward over the sink, to see his face in the dim nightlight glow. Looking in the mirror, he sees a missing person. He examines his features. He does not have his mother’s high cheekbones. He does not have her beautiful black-brown hair. His skin does not smell like cinnamon, and his clothes do not carry the faintest whiff of patchouli as did hers. With the exception of the final imprint, his memories of his father are all good ones, gentle ones. But memories are weighted by quality, not quantity. He pictures his father’s hands gripping the steering wheel. That splotch of red on his shirt cuff.

He cannot help fearing just how much like his father he might be.

He does not know his last name. He does not know in which state he was born. He does not know what his room looked like or what toys he had or if his momma ever kissed him on the forehead like the mothers in children’s books. But he does know, now, that he is sixish years old and being raised in an overcrowded foster home in the smog-draped Valley of 1982.

Daylight. The Couch Mother lays in her hermit-crab shell of corduroy sofa, bleating instructions, giving off great wafts of baby powder and something worse, something like decay. An ashtray surfs of its own accord between formless breast and thigh, adrift on a sea of gingham. Ginger hair done in a sixties flip, easy smile, that Virginia Slims voice rattling after them down the hall: Charlie dear, pick up the bath mat. Tony dear, wash the dishes. Michael dear, empty my ashtray.

The communal dresser. He hates the communal dresser. Hates when he’s the last one to get dressed for school and winds up with the salmon-colored shirt that is cruelly mistaken – the day long – for pink. He hoards shirts at night, sleeps with them. But this night, when he gets back from brushing his teeth, his pillow is turned aside; the blue-striped shirt is gone. Dubronski, cross-legged on his bed, is smiling. And of course Tony Moreno, skinny sidekick, is laughing with implausible vigor.

Mike says, ‘Give it back.’

Dubronski holds out his fat bully hands as if catching rain. ‘Give what back?’

This, to Tony M, is high comedy.

‘You can’t even fit it,’ Mike says.

‘Then why don’t you take it?’ Dubronski says. ‘Oh – that’s right. Because I’ll give you a beat-down.’

Something hard and gemlike flares in Mike’s chest. It is blue-hot, but this time as controlled as a pilot light. He leans forward, says, ‘Yeah, but you have to sleep sometime. And my bed is right next to yours.’

Dubronski’s face changes. Tony M stops laughing. Dubronski recovers, quickly, with tough words. He cannot give up the shirt, not now, not with six sets of eyes watching from the surrounding cots. But the stench of his fear lingers in the room after dark. The spell has been broken.

The next day Dubronski limps to school. Mike is the Wearer of the Blue-Striped Shirt.

He is in the bay window as usual. Waiting. Michael dear, go outside and play – you practically live in that window. There is a new kid, skin and bones, with huge feet like a puppy’s paws. When he arrived, his hair was curly and long, but now it is close-cropped like everyone else’s. Head lice make their rounds with such frequency that the Couch Mother has ruled for crew cuts; she wields a pair of clippers with the impersonal proficiency of a bureaucrat denying a request. Function over form, always.

The new kid has a dog name to go with the puppy paws – Shep. Right now Dubronski and Tony M are pummeling him. From his perch on the cushion, Mike watches him get back up, lips bleeding. Another punch. Dubronski’s mouth moving: Stay down, ya little faggot. The neighbor’s kids are at their windows; they are used to the Roman theater that is 1788 Shady Lane. Shep struggles, finds his feet. Dubronski draws back his fist for the fifth or fifteenth time. The Couch Mother’s voice sails from the living room – ‘Diii-ner’ – terminating the day’s festivities.

The new kid’s voice is funny, too loud – Hey, Retard Voice, why you sound like such a ree-tard – so he doesn’t talk much. He eats at the long kitchen table, head down, shoveling, his rail-thin body burning off the calories before he finishes chewing. The Couch Mother arises to refill her jug of Crystal Light, and Dubronski leans across the table and swats Shep’s fork as it goes into his mouth. Shep emits a faint bark. The Couch Mother whirls. ‘What’s wrong, Shepherd dear?’ He winces, shakes his head. When Couch Mother disappears again behind the refrigerator door, he dips his mouth into a napkin, drools blood.

A dream. Beneath flickering eyelids Mike’s mind dances with fantasies of domesticity, of waffle irons and cream-white linens. He wakes up cramped on the too-small cot, staring at a ceiling blotched seaweed brown from water damage.

Back on the yellow plaid cushion. Waiting. Shep out front. Couch Mother engrossed in a talk show and a cantaloupe in the TV room. Outside, Dubronski hammers Shep into the dirt. Shep gets up, jeans torn, knees bloodied. Even Tony M can horn in on the action, can knock the small kid down. Mike can hear Dubronski shouting, exasperated, ‘Stay down, douchebag! Stay down.’ Shep rises again. Mike turns his eyes to the end of the road. There is no station wagon there.

Now it is sloppy-joe night. Zucchini was on sale yesterday, so it substitutes for onions. Zucchini bits are not meant to appear in sloppy joes, with good reason. But the foster children are hungry; they eat with relish. The Police da-da-da from the crackly radio by the toaster. Dubronski has just taken his insulin – Remember, Charlie darling: Cold and clammy, you need some candy. Dry and hot, you need a shot – so he must wait fifteen minutes to eat. When the time is up, he scrambles to the kitchen. On his way back, he pauses behind Shep, extends his overladen tray above Shep’s head, lets it clap to the table in front of him. The sound is like a gunshot in a bank vault, but Shep doesn’t so much as blink. A spray of runny meat spatters his face. Unfazed, he scoops a fingerful off his cheek and pops it into his mouth. The Couch Mother looks at him sidewise, her chins ajiggle, and the next day Shep arrives late to school wearing hearing aids from the Shriners Hospital. On the playground at recess, Dubronski heat-seeks his target. ‘Hey, look at the old man! Shep needs hearing aids like a old man!’ A crowd has gathered. Shep pulls the flesh-colored units from both ears, drops them to the asphalt, crushes them under a sneaker. His stare is level, Zen-like, and for once his voice is even. ‘I don’t need anything.’

A rumor makes its rounds, something involving Shep’s drunk of a dad and a gun with blanks. Like a stubborn shellfish, Shep will not let himself be pried open, will not let his treasure spill. Whereas Mike has strength, Shep has will, and Mike is sharp enough to know which is the rarer commodity.

Time scribbles forward a few months and there Mike is, still on the piss-smelling yellow cushion, nose pigged against the bay window. An unearthly light pervades 1788 Shady Lane, turning it slate gray; it is a black-and-white movie. The street is empty. A station wagon makes the turn, and Mike feels his heart soar. It nears and – yes – pulls to the curb and – yes – that is a man, a solitary man who climbs out – yes – and makes his way up the walk, and a fall of light breaks through the trees and the slate gray pall, lighting his face in full color and – yes – it is his father. Mike runs to the door and is swept up in strong arms, he and his father spinning like a shampoo-commercial couple in a field of foxtail yellow, and he hugs him, feels the cheek warm against his own, the grit of stubble beneath the clean shave, the crinkle of the starched collar. His father sets him down and says, I am so sorry. I came back for you at the playground, and you were gone. I’ve been looking for you all these months, every waking hour, for-going food and sleep, and look – he holds out his shirt cuff with the bloodred blotch – this is just a splash of cranberry juice, and look – he points to the car, and there, waving from the passenger seat, his mother, her smile sending out a light all its own and -

Mike is shaken awake. He tugs away, buries his face in the pillow, rooting out remnants of the dream. But the wide hand is persistent. He rolls onto his back, stares up at the perfumed face, lax with gravity. ‘Michael dear, come with me.’ Instantly he is drenched in panic sweat – another move, another abandonment – but he is walking, in underwear, on ice-numb bare feet, following Couch Mother to doom or desertion. She moves on hushed footsteps; the house creaks under the weight of her. Into the kitchen, into a slant of yellow thrown by the outdoor security lamp, and Mike squints and sees on the table: a cake. His name frilled in frosting. He looks at Couch Mother, but she is watching the cake, her eyes alight. This is their little secret. His mind sputters. ‘It’s not my birthday.’ ‘No,’ Couch Mother says, ‘it’s our birthday. A year to the day I got you.’ His breath leaves him in a huff. He lunges to her, hugs, burying his face in the soft folds of her nightgown. He says, ‘I love you,’ and she says, ‘Let’s not get carried away.’

The next day he finds himself again on the cushion. Waiting. The bay window, smudged with a thousand marks from his nose and forehead. A thousand and one. Waiting. He thinks back on the time he has passed on this cat-piss cushion and wonders if this is all life is, one year after the last, nothing memorable, a sun baked torment. Outside, Shep is receiving his daily beating. He lies on his back in the fall-gorgeous leaves, Dubronski brandishing a fist over his face. ‘Stay the fuck down, runt. Stay down.’ Shep finds his feet. Mike’s eyes move through the arcade of yellow-orange leaves and their geometric patterns to the end of the street, to the station wagon that has still not appeared. Waiting. He tries to stop time, to freeze the image like a photograph, this unextraordinary moment, just to have it, just to have something he can hold on to, something he can keep. He waits for his father.

And then, at once, he hates him.

Shep is standing again – no, not anymore. Tony M, inexplicably wearing an Angels batting helmet, is cackling that idiotic laugh, thumping Dubronski’s shoulders, leaping with joy. Shep manages to get to all fours, but he has halted there. For the first time, he has lost momentum. Dubronski jeering, ‘I told you, you fuckin’ deaf runt. I told you I’d make you stay down.’ Shep looks up at him, the looming fist, unable to rise to it. Mike knows now that if Shep doesn’t rise, something beautiful will die out there on the browning front lawn of 1788 Shady Lane.

Mike walks outside. Dubronski stands over Shep, victorious. Tony M and three others have formed a half circle around Dubronski, crowing victoriously. They turn when the screen door bangs. Mike crosses to them, Dubronski’s unease registering on his broad features. Mike walks in front of the half circle, stands facing Dubronski, two feet away, the distance of an upper-cut. Shep is behind Mike, still on all fours; Mike can feel the heat of him against the backs of his calves.

Mike says, loudly, ‘Get up.’

He hears Shep breathing hard. He hears Shep grunt with exertion. And then Mike reads the shadow.

Shep is standing.

Dubronski’s face flushes. ‘You queers deserve each other,’ he says, but he is backpedaling, knocking through the others, dispersing them. They go inside. All is quiet at 1788 Shady Lane. Dusk is coming, and there will be dinner soon.

Shep brushes himself off, as composed as a businessman lint-rolling a suit. Mike heads up the walk.

Shep follows.

‘Where did you get these?’ The Couch Mother stands over them, legs trembling from the exertion, the mini liquor bottles dwarfed in her flushed, pillowy palm.

Mike and Shep are ten. They are now the same height, but Mike is wider still, more solid, whereas Shep’s body, pulled thin like taffy, can’t seem to catch up to him.

Shep says, ‘What?’

He has learned to speak softly to control his voice, to over-compensate for his bad hearing, for the guttural bursts and blurred consonants. People lean toward him to distinguish his words. They take a step or two in his direction. He draws the world to him, if it is interested. Generally it isn’t. So he has learned something else. He has learned to use his semideafness to his advantage.

That is never clearer than at this moment.

The Couch Mother’s gaze shifts from Shep, zeroing in on Mike. He stares at her ash-speckled crocheted sweater, grimaces, and says, ‘Valley Liquor.’

The Couch Mother frowns, her face folding in and in around her lips. ‘We are going back there to return these, and you are both going to apologize and take whatever punishment you are due. Do you understand me?’

Mike watches the fifty-milliliter nips of Jack Daniel’s disappear into her elephantine purse. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says.

Shep says, ‘What?’

The Couch Mother is not fooling, because she marches them outside and lowers herself into her long-suffering Pontiac. Mike has seen her drive only a few times before, and only to the hospital when someone needs stitches or a fever won’t break. The passenger seat is stripped to the coils, and her seat is shoved back so far that Shep has to sit on Mike’s lap in the back. With dread they watch the scenery roll by while the Couch Mother navigates streets, grunting against the non-power steering, her stomach adding friction to the wheel.

In no time they are behind the counter at the liquor store, standing at attention before Mr Sandoval, who never lets them handle the comic books, who grimaces when he counts their change for Dr Pepper bottles, who hates them. Mike mumbles out an apology, and Mr Sandoval, who has set aside his cursing, hateful self before the Couch Mother, makes a big show of patronizing magnanimity.

It is time for Shep to apologize, but Mike knows that he will not. Shep is not like him or anyone else; he is made of steel and concrete; he cannot be broken.

‘Shepherd dear, your turn.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not going to play this game with me. Now, apologize to Mr Sandoval this instant.’

‘What?’

It escalates until Mike is uncomfortable, until he backs away so his shoulder brushes the real-size liquor bottles on the shelves behind them. He notices a picture Mr Sandoval keeps taped to the cash register – his daughter. It is school-picture day, and she beams proudly, but her little skirt is stained and tattered at the edges. It reminds Mike of the communal shirts in the dresser, and he is flooded with guilt, his assumptions cracking apart one after another, like dropped eggs. But his remorse is temporary, because the Couch Mother’s voice has risen so as to drown out all thought.

Just when it seems Shep will triumph, that he has worn them down into defeat, he mutters, ‘Sorry.’

Mike is shocked. He has never seen Shep cave in, and he fears the act will diminish him irrevocably. On the ride home, Mike pouts. Shep turns on Mike’s lap, studies his face, his own expression unreadable. And then his lips twist in his version of a smile. Tugging up his shirt furtively, Shep flashes the pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s he has shoved down his pants.

A blurred half decade, and they are fourteen. Shep has taken to wearing a pendant of St. Jerome Emiliani – patron saint of orphans – that he stole from a pawnshop. While Mike awaits his growth spurt, Shep has, at last, grown into his feet. He towers, husky with premature muscle. Despite some acne, he now buys Jack Daniel’s without getting carded. At the home, Charlie Dubronski lives and breathes in constant fear, but Shep has never laid a hand on him. He just looks at him now and then, and that is enough.

Mike and Shep have ridden the bus over to Van Nuys Park, where the ice-cream man forgets to lock the back of his truck, so Bomb Pops can be stolen while he’s distracted with paying customers. They have made their way over to the far baseball diamond, where a father, son, and grandfather play ball. The boys lean against the chain-link by the backstop and watch cynically. The grandfather pitches, the son bats, and the father plays somewhere between shortstop and left field, retrieving the ball and tossing it back. They have a pretty good system down. The boy, who is about their age, dribbles a grounder to his father.

Mike says, ‘He can only hit the pull,’ and Shep remarks, ‘’Cuz he’s not good enough to go the other way.’

The father’s car, a straight-off-the-lot forest green Saab, is pulled up onto a patch of dirt behind the fence, and the boy’s bike, an expensive-looking ten-speed, leans against the bumper.

Mike says, ‘Nice set o’ wheels,’ and Shep says, ‘The 900’s a piece of shit.’ Mike agrees out loud but secretly loves the Saab, its sleek lines, its odd angles, how it’s not afraid to be ugly and beautiful at the same time. The car reeks of affluence and power, of accomplishment and control. In its unblemished paint, he sees his own wavery reflection, his idealized self, a future he cannot yet discern. The dealer’s plate stares out at him – WINGATE DEALERSHIP: WE HAVE WHAT YOU WANT! – and he thinks the name, like the car, boasts of success. Wingate. Win-gate. It has a ring.

A voice from the baseball field shatters Mike’s reverie, the father calling out, ‘Ready for a Fudgsicle?’ For an instant, in his disorientation, Mike mistakes the man as speaking to him. But then the son smiles and tosses aside his bat and three generations set out across the park for the ice-cream truck Mike and Shep just looted.

Mike watches them walking away. The boy’s longish blond hair curls out from beneath his cap and makes Mike ashamed of his and Shep’s buzz cuts. He hates that his whole stupid appearance is a concession to head lice.

Shep walks around the fence and picks up the bat. He comes back. Kicks over the kid’s bike. ‘Wanna piss on it?’

This is something they have done before.

Mike shakes his head.

Shep says, ‘Car first?’ He never uses extra words.

Mike stares at the beautiful Saab, and it seems a shame, but there is something burning deep in his chest that wants a way out. He’s not sure what it is, but it has to do with the white gleam of the father’s teeth when he called to his son about getting a Fudgsicle. Mike says, ‘I don’t know.’

Shep says, ‘Why?’

He is embarrassed, but it is Shep, and he can tell Shep anything. ‘I mean, if my mom is alive, I owe it to her not to wind up in-’

Shep says, ‘There is no past.’

Mike coughs out a laugh. ‘No past?’

Shep’s lips part, showing off the slight overlap of his front teeth. ‘There are only two things in life: loyalty and stamina. Everything else is just a distraction.’

‘What about responsibility?’ He is channeling the Couch Mother and hates himself for it.

Shep speaks quietly, as always. ‘You’re not a son. You’re not a brother. No one wants you. So. Make it your own. You can be whatever you want to be. And right now? You’re a man with a task.’

Mike takes the bat. One headlight goes with a satisfying pop. The moon-crescent ding distorts the shine of the hood, the next even more so. He is lost in a haze, in something sticky sweet and unslakable.

Mike’s forearms ache. He stops, pants. Across the park, on someone’s boom box, Bon Jovi is going down in a blaze of glory.

Shep takes the bat. He beats down on the bicycle, wheels denting, spokes flying, metal clanging.

A voice from behind them. ‘Hey, loser. Hey. That’s my bike.’

The boy has run ahead of his father and grandfather.

Shep says, ‘What?’ The boy steps forward, repeats himself. Shep says, ‘What?’ The boy leans in for a third try. Shep head-butts him, and the boy goes down screaming and the father is running at them, and Mike is frozen; he has fought plenty, but an old-fashioned respect for adults has locked him up. The father grabs Mike around the neck, hard, with both hands, and Shep blurs over, closing the space in no time, and then the father is bent backward, choking, Shep’s hand clamped over his throat.

Shep says, in his trademark hush, ‘I’m gonna let go of you. But don’t touch him again. Understand?’

The father nods. Shep releases him. Offers the boy his hand, helps him up. Says, ‘Don’t call me a loser.’

There are sirens. Shep’s mouth is Bomb Pop red, and Mike is quite certain his is, too.

At the station the desk cop says, ‘The Shady Lane boys, what a surprise.’

Mike and Shep are sent to different interrogation rooms. Alone, Mike stares at the wall, memories of similar rooms flooding back. You remember your mom’s name? Hello? What’s your mom’s name? A detective comes in, sits down, reads the report, sighs, and throws it on the wooden table. ‘You’re not worth the chair you’re sitting in, you foster-home piece of shit.’

Mike thinks, Make it your own.

‘You did about fifteen thousand dollars of damage.’

His stomach clutches at the figure. It might as well be a million. Mike knows at that moment: his life is over.

He looks down at his wrists, cinched in flexible plastic handcuffs – kid handcuffs – because the steel ones kept slipping off at the park.

‘Before we ship your ass to sentencing,’ the detective continues, ‘your victims want to confront you.’

Panic overtakes dread. ‘I don’t want to see them.’

‘Well, guess what? When you’re a lawbreaking degenerate, you don’t get to choose your options.’

Mike closes his eyes. When he opens them, the kid is there, freckled cheeks tight with disdain, the detective and the father at his elbows. The grandfather stands in the back, arms crossed. ‘You gonna apologize?’ the kid asks.

Mike knows it is in his self-interest to do so, but he looks at the kid’s ironed shirt, the smudge of chocolate in the corner of his mouth, and can think only, Never.

The kids points at Mike. ‘You’re a nothing. You wreck my stuff because you don’t have anything and you’ll never be anything. Well, guess what? It’s not my fault your life sucks.’

Mike closes his eyes again, for a very long time. He hears footsteps, the door creak open and click shut. When he opens his eyes, the grandfather is sitting across from him. Alone. The man says, ‘That was my car.’

Mike says, ‘I thought it was your son’s.’

The grandfather laughs. He has a white mustache, impeccably maintained. ‘That would have made it okay?’

Mike stares down at the wooden table. Someone has etched into it, POINT OF NO RETURN, MOTHAFUCKA.

‘I grew up in the Depression. You know what that means?’ The man waits for a response but, getting none, continues, ‘If we spotted roadkill on the side of the road, my pop used to pull over so we could cook it for dinner. For a time we slept in the car. We went two long years without a roof over our heads.’

Mike says, ‘You can’t have everything.’

The grandfather spreads his hands. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. People like us, we don’t get to.’

‘People like us?’

‘Like me and Shep.’

‘How about me?’

‘You have a Saab.’

‘I see.’ The grandfather folds his hands across his old-man’s paunch and nods. ‘How do you think I got that car?’

‘How would I know? That’s the first time I’ve been within ten feet of a car that nice.’

‘You’re the predator here, not a victim. Let’s be clear about that.’ His eyes are hard now, and Mike is awed by the force of his conviction.

Mike looks down at his hands. His thumb has a sticky blue streak from the Bomb Pop. He pictures that beautiful, spotless Saab (WINGATE DEALERSHIP: WE HAVE WHAT YOU WANT!), and for a moment the car and the man before him become of a piece; they become two elegant, polished parts of the same whole. Shep’s words come back to him: You can be whatever you want to be. Mike rethinks the question posed to him a moment ago – How do you think I got that car? – and he is speaking, softly, before his brain can catch up: ‘When I get out of juvie, I will work to pay you back for wrecking your car.’

The grandfather closes his eyes, his face beatific and soft, and Mike doesn’t understand his reaction at all. Then the man says, ‘No. You won’t. I’m not pressing charges. And you won’t be held responsible for the damages.’

Mike is certain he is being mocked.

‘I will pay to fix my car,’ the man says. ‘But I’m buying something for that money. Would you like to know what it is?’

Transfixed, Mike nods.

‘I am buying your not getting to feel sorry for yourself about this.’

Incredulous, Mike asks, ‘What’s that accomplish?’

The man says, ‘Wait and see.’

Mike and Shep walk out free men, and from that day forward Mike sees things a little differently. He and Shep remain thick as thieves, closer than brothers because they are all parts of a family to one another, though this remains unspoken. Because Shep did not bend and repent in that interrogation room, he has to work off the price of the boy’s bicycle by bagging groceries; he does this in double time by peddling cigarette packs he boosts from behind the counter.

As they grow older, they run liquor stores with fake IDs, get bulletproof drunk, and raise hell, but Mike is spending more time with his nose in textbooks – Michael dear, you’ll be my first to go to college – then studying for the SATs, taking practice tests, scoring somewhere between retarded and stupid. But slowly, over his junior year of high school, he has brought his scores up to average, and when the acceptance letter arrives from Cal State L.A., he doesn’t even tell Shep right away; he goes out to the backyard when everyone is sleeping and sits with it beneath the golden glow of the security light, reading and rereading it, cherishing it like hidden treasure.

For a few blissful months, the path ahead seems illuminated. The Couch Mother is proud; his plans for college reflect well on them both. Dubronski and Tony M, never deep on originality, start in with the nickname – Hey, College, you gonna grow a mustache like Alex Trebek? - and Mike recognizes their mocking as a form of flattery.

Every year more kids have come, young and damaged, but for the first time Mike realizes that he has become, oddly, a role model. And Shep has, too – a role model of another kind. As an almost-adult, Mike gains a different understanding of the workings of the foster home. How the Couch Mother gets money from the state for every kid under her roof. How on occasion she gets a birth certificate fudged with a little help from well-placed women of like minds and body type to ensure that her children are protected from abusive mothers or molester uncles. It strikes him how fortunate he is to be a cog in the wheels of this particular system.

For a high-school senior, he is young at seventeen. Shep has taken advantage of his first four months as an eighteen-year-old to rack up two strikes under the California penal code. A third felony will land him in jail for twenty-five to life, which seems a bit much for a stolen VCR and beating up some snot-nosed private-school kid who welshed on an arm-wrestling bet. But Shep, as ever, is not worried – Two strikes is nothing. You’ve seen me play ball.

One day Shep walks into the shared bedroom carrying what appears to be a wall safe, his substantial biceps bulging under the weight of it. Mike is rereading his worn SAT practice book, because he is convinced that he will arrive at college next fall and not know how to communicate with kids actually smart enough to be there. He hopes against logic that knowing words like ‘bedight’ and ‘acetate’ might help close that gap.

Incredulous, he looks up from the vocab section at Shep. ‘Where’d you get that?’

Shep says, ‘A wall.’

Mike conveys another bite of SpaghettiOs from can to mouth, using the flat edge of a butter knife since all the forks and spoons are dirty. ‘Shep,’ he mumbles around the mush, ‘you can’t do that shit.’

‘You get half of whatever’s in it.’

‘I don’t want half.’ Mike rolls up the workbook and smacks it against his forehead. ‘I want to know what “flagitious” means.’

‘Of or like a flag.’ Shep sits Indian style on the floor, knocks on the safe at various points, then removes from his back pocket folded graph paper and an actual stethoscope. Mike watches with fascination. Shep ducks into the earbuds and twists the dial, listening with medical interest. Given his hearing, he seems to be having trouble perceiving the clicks. The EKG line of his graph doesn’t progress beyond a few peaks and valleys. He sets the stethoscope aside, goes out, and returns a moment later with a hammer and chisel.

Mike’s mouth comes slightly ajar. ‘Really?’

Round Two. Shep starts beating the hell out of the safe. The ringing of course does not bother him. The others are all ostensibly at a Dodgers game, so Shep and Mike enjoy relative privacy.

Until the Couch Mother, who has been groaning through a bout of colitis in the mephitic fog of her bedroom, calls down the hall, ‘Michael dear, what’s that noise?’ She has learned not to shout to Shep.

Shep says quietly, ‘I’m fixing a carburetor.’

Mike shouts, ‘He’s fixing a carburetor!’

Shep does not have a car.

‘Don’t make a mess!’ Couch Mother bellows.

‘He won’t!’ Mike has set aside his workbook. ‘What are you gonna do with your share?’ he mocks.

‘Vegas,’ Shep says. ‘Hookers. You?’

‘A house. Thirty-year mortgage, fixed. A yard. I want a garage workshop with tools.’

‘How old are you again?’ Shep sits back on his heels, arms sweat off his brow. ‘Look,’ he mutters, not really talking to Mike. ‘Look at that. Hammering off the hinges doesn’t do shit. I need to find where the lock-in lugs slide into the sides of the frame.’ He leans over, tongue poking from the side of his mouth, and jots something onto the back of the failed graph.

A few hours later, the safe looks exhausted, and Shep has sketched what amounts to an engineering diagram. He has been hammering at the seams, meticulously marking the lug locations and projecting new ones. Mike has watched this venture evolve from whimsy to science.

Sometime later Shep has created a hole in the back wall of the safe and peeled up the sheet metal. Beneath is a layer of concrete, which crumbles under the hammer, then sheet metal again. This is Round Eleven, and maybe Round Twelve as well.

From down the hall, the Couch Mother’s voice sounds exasperated and dehydrated. ‘Aren’t you done fixing that carburetor yet?’

Shep says softly, ‘Just about.’

After another flurry of force and leverage, the back wall finally gives way. Shep tosses the loot, a bunch of old coins, aside. He is not interested in them; he is interested in the safe. He mumbles to himself, checks the lugs he hadn’t guessed at, writes down the brand and make of the safe. ‘The concrete’s for weight,’ he mutters.

Mike asks, ‘Don’t you want your priceless coins?’

Shep chews his lip, marveling at the reinforced door. He says, ‘What?’

The next day they are walking past a pawnshop and Shep pulls one of the coins from his pocket and hands it to Mike.

Mike says, ‘Why don’t you?’ and Shep says, ‘They got my picture behind the register.’

Mike hesitates a moment. He thinks of that grandfather’s admonishment years ago and recalls his own wavery reflection in the unblemished forest green paint of the Wingate Dealership Saab, but it’s one old coin and it’s Shep, so he takes it and goes inside. The security camera behind the bulletproof glass makes him antsy, but he writes a fake name and address on the invoice ticket and tells himself again, It’s one old coin and it’s Shep. Mike comes out with twenty bucks, which he stuffs into Shep’s large hand. ‘That was worth it,’ he smirks.

Shep hands him ten back.

That night the cops roll up on 1788 Shady Lane. The senior officer brings a still shot from the pawnshop security camera, and this time the set of handcuffs he wields are adult-size.