I was more interested in being like Cab Calloway, who I’d first heard on the radio, stretching his voice like taffy and yelling ‘hi de, hi de, ho’.  And that got my attention a lot more than all the hollering

Johnny Weissmuller did to shake up the jungle in, “Tarzan, the Ape Man.”  When I finally got a good look at him in a movie about a Chinaman who invented a little picture box called television, Calloway had slick black hair and tiger teeth.  He wore a lemon yellow tuxedo and tails with matching shoes that were lightning fast, as he led his band into battle with a stick that he jabbed and waved like a sword.  Cab’s band played just about every night at the Cotton Club but no colored people were allowed in unless they were in the show.  My older brother, Roscoe, who was a numbers runner, saw Calloway at a lot of after hour joints in Harlem. He told me Cab was always looking to have a good time but wouldn’t stand for no one giving him a hard time.  Somehow, I knew I had to meet this man whose mouth was on the go, full of words I’d never heard of–  like Zazz Zu Zazz.

The manager of the store said no one could leave until the police got there.  The Spanish kid was lifting his shoulders and letting them drop like Jimmy Cagney.  But he wasn’t fooling me none.  I knew he was shittin’ bricks.  I wasn’t that far off from shittin’ a few myself, cause the last thing I needed was to have my father find out I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He would blame me for being anywhere near trouble.

When the police arrived, it took them a while to figure out what happened.  Come to find out, the kid hadn’t stolen anything.  But when the man watching for shoplifters asked him what he wanted, the kid tried to run.  The police called an ambulance for the guy who got bitten.  They told the kid never to run if he didn’t do anything and promised to put a flat foot up his ass the next time he was caught run- ning anywhere.  I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

“You think this is funny,” one of the cops said, grabbing me by the arm.

“No!” I said, feeling his grip tighten.

“What’s your name?”

“War-dell!” I said, trying to show them I wasn’t no punk.

“Well, let me tell you something, War-dell. Another sound out of you and we’ll take you to the station house and see how funny you think it is when your folks have to come and get their smart mouth son!”

I started to say something to show them just how smart my mouth could get but changed my mind.

The cops booted us out of the store together.  They were watching us, so all we did was stare at each other before going our separate ways.  By the time I got to my block, everybody was already beatin their gums about what happened at the drug store.  But the story was all different.  The word on the street was that somebody working at the store called  the cops on a colored kid who took something without paying.  When the cops got there, they beat up on the him real bad and arrested a woman who told them to stop.  The kid was taken to the hospital and someone working there said he overheard a doctor say the boy was dead when the ambulance got there.

Men were standing outside a barbershop, like they did every afternoon when I got home from school.

“I got no problem believing that’s what happened,” one said.

“I thought seeing was believing,” another said..

“A colored kid getting beat to death by a cop is something I don’t need to see to believe it.”

“This is just more of the same old same old!”

The voice came from behind me.  I turned and saw a man in a long robe that hung from his neck to   his feet like a curtain. Some kind of cloth was wrapped tight around his head just above his eyes, which made them look scary.

“Well, if it ain’t Brother Abdul,” said a barbershop regular.  “We ain’t seen you since you up and married that numbers policy queen and moved on up with the folks who live on the hill.  The grapevine has it that you frontin’ a vegetable stand for the white folks you told us not to buy from unless they  gave some jobs to the colored.”

Brother Abdul moved his arms underneath his robe before he said anything.

“I’d hoped you curbside prophets would a figured out how to stay ahead of the game for a change, instead of standing on the sidelines watching the game go by.  But you lames are still out here, signify-

ing, with nothing in your pockets but your hands!”

Brother Abdul definitely knew his way around words.  The younger guys laughed and slapped palms with him.  The older heads chuckled or kept quiet.

“Don’t be too hard on us, Abdul,” one of the older crew said.  “We just wanted see if your mouth had become a stumble bum since you been gone.  What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“So if we take our hands out of our pockets, where should we put them?”

“Wherever you put them, you need to decide whether you want them open or closed.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing out here, son?”

As usual, Papa was wearing his chauffeur’s get-up: black suit, white shirt, slim jim black tie and shiny brimmed hat like the cops wear.

“I’m listening to what they saying about what happened on a hundred twenty-fifth street.”

“You’d be better off paying attention to what your teachers are trying to get into your head.”

“But Papa, they’re saying something real bad might happen.”

“How would they know?  They never move from this spot all day.”

I jerked my head back to the men who’d stopped talking and were looking in our direction.

“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Cecil Fortune,” an old timer said, “Always glad to see there’s one colored man in the driver’s seat while the rest of us standing still.”

“Ain’t nobody holding you so you can’t move.”

The ones who were not much older than me and the others who were around my father’s age got stiff in the neck and put a lock on both of us with their eyes.  I don’t know why he always had to keep rubbing his words in until they burned. Papa might as well have taken a strap to Roscoe when he told him that if he kept breaking the law, running numbers and chiseling colored folks out of what little money they had, this would turn our dead  mother’s peaceful rest in heaven into sleepless nights full of weeping.  Papa must’ve thought his words would get my brother to think about giving up the street life.

But Roscoe packed his clothes and left the apartment without saying a word.  After that, Papa lightened up a bit when he chastised me.  But even though it wasn’t me doing the talking in front of the barbershop.  I knew the next time I passed any of  these guys on the street, I’d get all the heat from what

Papa said that got underneath their skin.

“You got a point, Cecil,” the old timer said.  “You better off than the rest of us.  Cause at least you get to see where the white folks is headed, which is more than the rest of us can say.”

The laughter came out in sneezing shouts that got a hold of everyone except Papa and Brother Abdul who stared at each other.  I thought what the guy said was funny too.  But no way was I gonna laugh at what somebody said about my father that he didn’t think was funny.

“Come on, Wardell,” Papa said, pushing me toward the corner.  “I think you’ve heard enough of these loudmouths for one day.”

We walked down the block to our building.  In all the excitement I’d forgotten I was in that drug- store and saw what happened.  And all the talk about a colored kid getting killed by the cops wasn’t true.  Papa seeing me laugh would’ve been bad enough.  But telling him how I knew what really happened would’ve been worse.  I’d learned how talking about things that happened could make things worse when Mama died.  I was ten when she came down with something called rheumatic fever.  I remember her in bed, talking to us.  And then she stopped breathing.  Sometimes I wonder why it wasn’t me instead of her.  I was sick all the time when I was a baby.  I had pneumonia and just when it seemed like I was getting better, I got it again. Mama washed me, fed me and never left me alone until I was well.  Roscoe, Papa and me did the same for her but it didn’t do no good.  Once Mama was gone, there was no one to pull us tightly together, like she did when she taught me how to lace up my shoes.

Without her, we didn’t fit snug anymore. We walked around, tripping over each other like our shoes were untied.

Later, when we ate dinner, I asked Papa if he knew Brother Abdul.

“I know who he is.”

“You ever talked to him?”

“We’ve had words.”

“What about?”

“About something he did.”

“Like what?”

“Like up and leaving after getting colored folks to see if they stuck together, they could better themselves.”

“Maybe he couldn’t help it.”

“The only thing he couldn’t help was helping himself to the hard earned pennies of folks who got their hopes up and were let down.”

My mind kind of left me for a minute. And when it came back, I was angry with Mama for leaving me.  I’d felt like this before.  But this was the first time I had the feeling that Mama knew, the way she found out just about everything I tried to keep from her.  She’d push the flesh above her top lip under her nostrils, breathe in and say: ”When’s the last time you had a bath?”  I’d lie and she’d say it was time for another one.  It didn’t feel so bad because she never said it around Papa or Roscoe.  But she was letting me know there was nothing I did that she couldn’t smell. And even though Mama was dead, I had the feeling she could smell my anger.

“What you thinking about?” Papa asked.

I wasn’t about to tell him the truth.

“You ever listen to the Cab Calloway Band?”

“I can’t believe you fill your head with the nonsense from that clown.”

“I been hearing a lot of his music lately.”

“I know your brother likes that trash. But why would you waste your time listening to some fool sing about hop heads and people who ain’t interested in nothing but having a good time? You better get your mind right, boy!”

After Papa left for work, I looked out of the fourth floor window of our sixth floor walk-up.  It was just getting dark and streets were bubbling up with talk, getting hotter all the time.  The itch to hear what they had to say got to be too much.  So I dashed down the stairs and hit the sidewalk running.

The voice I was hearing from our apartment window turned out to be a guy I’d heard speaking a lot on the corner.  He always wore a dark suit; the jacket rode up his wrists every time he raised his arms and his hiked up pants showed white socks coming out of shoes run down on one side. When he talked, his eyes dug into everyone like fish hooks.

The word ‘class’ came out of his mouth more than any other. He put it together with other words like ’struggle’ and ‘working’ that reminded me of the words Papa used when he said I struggled so much with my school work cause I didn’t pay enough attention in class. Maybe this guy was saying that people struggled with another kind of class work after they stopped going to school.

When I got to the corner, he was standing on a platform. He’d worked himself into a sweat and his jacket sleeves were almost to the elbows.  As usual, his white sidekick was moving through the crowd, passing out leaflets.

“The killing of a colored boy after he was accused of stealing from a five and dime store tells us all we need to know about the value of property over a human life. The owners of these stores snatch the nickels and dimes out of your hands and then cry thief when you reach for a share of the money that was taken from you in the first place. But taking from those who took even more from you, is not the answer. The answer is– jobs!  Not just for Negroes, as some have demanded, who would replace whites in stores on 125^th Street.  That plays into the hands of the merchants who would have you believe that jobs cannot be had except by giving them to one class of workers and taking them away from another.  The Young Communist League is the party for only one race of people: the working class.   We refuse to be tricked by the tight-fisted shopkeepers into fighting each other along racial lines.  And we’re calling for the arrest of the police officers involved in the fatal beating and the release of the Negro and white workers who were arrested while protesting the actions of the police.”

Some people started clapping, but they didn’t look too happy doing it.

“Hey, little brother! What you doing out here?”

Roscoe had on his stingy brim hat, broke down in the front and on the right side.  He flashed a gold front tooth I hadn’t seen before. And thick black suspenders made tracks up his eggnog colored shirt.

“Listening, same as you.”

“Papa must be at work. Otherwise you wouldn’t be out here.”

“I don’t have to sneak and do stuff I wanna do!”

“If you say so… How’re things at home?”

“All right I guess. Papa’s never at home. He’s always working.”

“Don’t he ever hang out with any of his old friends?”

“He did for a while after Mama died. But when you left…”

“Yeah, well anyway… What did you think of what that guy had to say?”

“I don’t know. I guess he’s right about having a job being better than stealing.”

“Well there’s one thing some of these communists don’t understand. They think a party is only something you belong to.  But until they know how- to- party, nobody’s gonna be interested in anything else they can do. They could learn a lot from Cab Calloway.”

I wondered if Roscoe believed that Papa was a lot like the communists.  I was about to ask him    when someone else got up on the platform to speak.  I t was Brother Abdul.  He still had on that long robe and his arms jumped around in the sleeves like Cab Calloway’s did in front of his band.

“The human race began in Africa,” he said, pointing down Lenox Avenue, which I figured was the direction Africa was in. “And by rights, the so called Negro should be the most favored of races.

But what happened earlier today is just another example of how the black man receives the least favored treatment in America.  That’s why we of the ‘Brotherhood of the Blood’ are determined to thicken our race pride with doing for ourselves and ridding our ranks of all the deadbeats who don’t do but tell you what they can’t do.  So I’m gonna tell you what you ‘can’ do.  You can let the merchants on a hundred twenty-fifth know that we can do to them what we did to Dutch Schultz a few years back, when he tried to take over the numbers business. We told him he’d get no traction in Harlem unless we got some of the action.”

The crowd liked that and started chanting.

“You’ll get no traction, unless we get some action!”

Brother Abdul smiled, stepped off the platform and joined in.  Then someone in the crowd yelled.

“Fuck all this!  Let’s show these whiteys some other kind of action!”

Something jerked all of us forward, like being on the subway car and having the motorman slam on the brakes. I was stuck in the crowd and couldn’t get out as it chugged down Lenox Avenue.  But a hand grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me out.

“You all right?” Roscoe said.

“I think so.”

“Looks like the crowd’s gotten out of Brother Abdul’s hands.”

“Where’s everybody going?”

“A hundred twenty-fifth, where it all started.”

“But it didn’t happen like everybody’s saying it did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was there.”

“So what did you see?”

“The kid was Spanish. The police didn’t kill him  He wasn’t even beaten. The ambulance was called for the man the kid bit.”

“You wanna try telling that to those folks hellbent on their way to 1-2-5?”

I looked at the crowd, moving down Lenox Avenue, not paying attention to nothing except what was ahead of them and all bodied up at the shoulders and hips.

“They wouldn’t listen to me.  It’d have to be somebody who wasn’t a kid.”

“You got anybody in mind?”

“Cab Calloway,” was out of my mouth before I knew it.

Roscoe looked at me like I’d just grown another head.

“You think that’s dumb?”

“Don’t get all bent out a shape, little brother. If anybody could turn that crowd around, it’d be the

Hi De Ho man. But it’s too late. They only got one thing on their mind now.”

The crowd got lost in the night sky, but I could hear what they had on their mind: balloon popping sounds, smashing glass and screaming a long way off like I heard during baseball games when I stood on Edgecombe Avenue above the Polo Grounds.

“What they doing don’t make sense,” I said.

“Why not? So what if it didn’t happen like they think. Nine out a ten times it would a been.”

“That don’t make it right!” I said.

“Right ain’t got nothing to do with it. But you hung up on what’s right. Just like Papa.”

“What about you?”

“Hey! I’m the same way. When me and Papa had our falling out, we both thought we was right.

That’s why I left and why there’s still no understanding between us.”

The horns from fire engines and the sirens from police cars was making me rubber-legged.

“What’s wrong, little brother?  You look a little out of it.”

“I’m all right.”

“Why don’t you hang with me for a while. There’s something I want to show you.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll tell you when we get there.”

We walked up Lenox Avenue and turned into the block around the corner from the Cotton Club.

I followed Roscoe to a door.  He knocked and it opened with a man, as wide as the doorway, standing in front of us.

“Hey Kong,” Roscoe said.

“Hey yourself.”

“We’re here to see ‘the man’.”

Kong’s eyes stood still in a face the color of cooked liver.

“Wait here,” he said and closed the door.

“Who’re we supposed to be seeing?” I asked.

“Who do you think?”

“You gotta be kidding!”

“Is pig pork?”

The door opened again.

“Follow me,” Kong said.

As soon as we got through the door, I was hit by blasting horns and the click clacking of tapping feet on stage.  Kong put up his slab-sized hand for us to stop.  He walked a little further down a hallway and stuck his head in an open doorway.

“Is ‘Kong’ supposed to be short for King Kong?” I whispered to Roscoe.

“The last cat asked him that– Kong put a hurting on him so bad, he couldn’t remember his own name.”

Kong waved for us to come on. I followed Roscoe into the room and Kong closed the door behind us.

“How’s it going, Cab?”

“Everything’s on the upside, Roscoe. ”

The room was tight and narrow. And with Roscoe in front of me, he was blocking me from getting a good look at Cab Calloway.

“I want you to meet my little brother, Wardell.”

Roscoe stepped to the side and there he was in the flesh.

“What’s up, young squire? Gimme some splah!”

He held out his hand.  I slapped his palm and he did the same to mine. I couldn’t speak right away cause he looked nothing like I thought he would. He moved a toothpick around in his mouth; and his hair was poked straight up like the porcupines I’d seen in picture books.  He looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep cause there were swollen pouches under his eyes. And all he had on was a tee shirt, boxer shorts and knee-high socks held up by garters.

“It’s great to meet you, Mr. Calloway,” I said.

“You can nix that mister stuff with me, Wardell. A straight shot to ‘Cab’ suits me fine.”

“Okay, Cab,” I said, still not feeling all that comfortable, having his first name come out of my mouth.

“Roscoe tells me you’re wigged out on my band’s ‘hi de ho’ groove.”

“I listen to you whenever you’re on the radio.”

“Cab. Did you get the lowdown on what happened today on 1-2-5 ?” Roscoe asked.

“Yeah. Everybody’s been running off at the jibs about it all day.”

“Right before we came here, a crowd was headed for 1-2-5.  It looked like they was aiming to put a serious dent in the game the store owners been running.  And Wardell got it into his head that you could a stopped ‘em.”

“What made you think that?” Cab asked me.

I swallowed and hoped I wouldn’t lose the words before I could say them.

“You know the ins and out of words so good, I figured you could get them to do something where nobody’d get hurt.”

Cab’s head snapped back and a howl shot out of his mouth that sent the tooth pick flying.

“Well now, Wardell, that’s some righteous spiel you just laid on me. As a member of the black and tan, I ain’t above cutting a fool of any persuasion who gets on the wrong side of me.  And I’m down with the fraughty issue in Harlem of ofays wearing dark glasses like they don’t see us while picking our pockets.  It’s the changing same, whether it’s on 1-2-5 or here at the Cotton Club.  But the clam bake them splibs having on 1-2-5 ain’t on my tab.  If I frisk my whiskers, it’s to keep this joint jumping no matter what’s shaking anywhere else.”

Listening to him do all those tricks with words seemed like just another way for him to put on a show even without his band.  I’d a been lying if I said I understood everything he was saying but I didn’t want him to stop neither.

The door opened.

“It’s about that time,” Kong growled.

“Well, gents, it’d be a gasser to jib jab with you some more, but it’s time for me go on and break my conk for the paying customers.”

“Thanks Cab, for taking the time to beat the gums a taste with my brother,” Roscoe said.

“It was solidly murderous to riff with you a skosh bit.”

Cab stood up.

“Knock me some skin before you raise up,” he said, and slapped palms with Roscoe and me.

When Roscoe and me were back on the street, we walked without talking.  And I was glad cause there was a lotta banging in my head.  I didn’t know how I felt anymore about what’d happened.  If I believed Papa, Brother Abdul talked out of both sides of his mouth and Roscoe was a no account son who broke the laws of God every time he hit the streets to run the numbers or listened to one of the devil’s main disciples, Cab Calloway.  But if I believed Roscoe, it didn’t matter if nobody but me and the other people in the drug store had the story right cause what was right didn’t always help you under- stand why things went wrong. And then there was Cab Calloway.  Could I believe somebody whose words tap danced so fast when he talked that I couldn’t see what he was saying?

I started hearing a low humming sound coming from down the avenue toward 125^th Street.  Then out of the dark, the sidewalk and street got swollen up with people.   And I could hear the drag and shuffle of their feet getting closer.  Whatever they’d done on 1-2-5, it sounded like a lot more was taken from them than anything they was bringing back.  The humming turned into words I couldn’t make out at first.  But they got clearer in my ears the more I heard them.

“Hi de, hi de, hi de ho, Cab Calloway’s got to show!”

“Hi de. hi de, hi de ho, Cab Calloway’s got to show!”

“You hear that?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What you think’s gonna happen?”

“I don’t know, little brother.  But I ain’t going nowhere till I find out.”

The crowd jammed into the street on Lenox Avenue.  And police had search lights all over the front of the Cotton Club. Patrol cars blocked off 132^nd & 133^rd Street, so no more people could get in.  Cops on foot talked into bullhorns for  the crowd to break it up and go home.  But nobody moved.  Then a voice started shouting:

“We ain’t gonna go, till Cab Calloway show!”

Some cops that had all kinds of medals on their coats stood away from the others and talked.  One

of them went inside the Cotton Club. And the shouting got louder:

“We ain’t gonna go, till Cab Calloway show!”

“You think he’s coming out?” I asked.

“Maybe. The cops don’t wanna have no fracas out here with all them big spenders inside.”

People started coming out of the Cotton Club, dressed in their best threads.  Folks in the crowd screamed when they spotted some movie stars.  The cops pushed them back, so nobody got too close.

The music from inside the Cotton Club was a blast of hot air that blew the doors open.  The band strutted out.  Some were playing and others started singing:

It was at the Cotton Club the other night

there was really quite a sight

Tables were filled with gaudy frails

chewing on their fingernails

Drinks were served six bits a throw

things were moving kind of slow

All at once the room would fill

Men forgot all about their bills

Who should enter but the man from Harlem.

A lemon yellow pant leg and shoe swung out the door.  The rest of Cab followed in matching tuxedo and tails.  His shoes cut loose with quick heel and toe tap chatter that took him to the front of the band.

He jerked his head from side to side and his slick hair snapped like a whip. The crowd whooped  and hollered when two of the movie stars got footloose along with Cab.  They twisted in and out at the   knees and swung their heels out after every step.  It they hadn’t held onto each other around the waist, their legs would’ve run out from under them.

Cab flapped his elbows and squawked like a rooster.  The horns in the band quieted down and he opened his mouth like he was yawning.

“Listen up folks while I give you a wake-up call and all the lowdown. This is a great night I never thought I’d see.  But our friends who pound a beat…”

Boos lit up the night air.

“I know they ain’t exactly been your ace boon coons. But they’ve agreed to let me and my band make a little frolic pad out here, so you can see what you’ve never been allowed to see inside…”

Shouts jabbed back at him.

“Make it plain, Cab!”

“That’s right! Give em the gospel according to US!”

Cab raised his arms for quiet.

“Now I wanna get one thing straight. I’m not out here to rile you up or simmer you down. That

ain’t my calling. You got enough people telling you whether you is or you ain’t, whether you can or you can’t or whether you will or you won’t.  I mix up the do’s and the don’ts and come up with something that nobody can quite figure out…called Zazz Zu Zazz!”

The trumpets played first, sounding like they wanted to take their time before Cab told the story of these strange words I’d only heard about from Roscoe.  The trombones jumped in and got loud, pushing the trumpets to hurry up so Cab could get started– which he did.

Now here’s a very entrancing phrase.

It will put you in a daze.

To me it don’t mean a thing.

But it’s got a very peculiar swing—

Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zay!

The words weren’t even out of his mouth good before the crowd was giving them right back to him.

Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zay!

This loosened everybody up with Cab changing the words up to see if we could follow.

Zu Zay, Zu Zu Zay!

I felt myself start to sway back and forth at the neck, shoulders and hips. Roscoe and everybody around us was doing the same.  Even the cops were taking it easy, lightening up on the tight grip they had on their faces and billy clubs.  I wondered how folks felt who’d gone down to a hundred twenty fifth street.  And was it anything like this?  The bass player took over from Cab and pulled at the strings. He strummed the sound of  Zazz Zu Zazz like Cab did.  And we zazzed right along with him until Cab sang his way back in.

It makes no difference where you go.

There’s one thing that they sure do know.

There’s no need for them to be blue.

Cause Zazz Zu Zazz will see them through.

Cab gave us Zazz Zu Zazz one last time, gargled it in his throat and spit it out in stutters and dribbles until it was all gone.  Nobody clapped or hollered but there was heat in the air that revved people up a lot more than when they listened to Brother Abdul and the communists.

“That’s the all of it, y’all,” Cab said. “You just got the last show.  They’ll be no more shows at the

Cotton Club tonight!”

The crowds packed into the block started breaking up.  There were folks trying to get autographs from the movies stars but most people were moving away from the front of the Cotton Club. Cab and the band were nowhere in sight.

“So!  What do you think?” Roscoe asked.

His voice surprised me. I’d forgotten he’d been standing next to me all that time.

“I can’t think of nothing to say.”

“That’s saying a lot right there.”

“I should go on home before Papa gets off work,” I said

“Yeah, I guess you better.”

“Roscoe?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever wish things was the way they used to be before Mama died?”

“What for?  It’s never gonna be that way again.”

“Why not?”

“Cause it ain’t.”

“What about Zazz Zu Zazz?”

“What about it?”

“Didn’t you feel it?  What happened to everybody when Cab did that song. Nothing nobody did today made people feel like that.”

“It probably won’t happen again.”

“Then why’d you want me to meet him?”

“Cause I wanted you to see that there’s men that ain’t like Papa .”

“But you talk like you don’t really believe in him.”

“Cab don’t need me or you to believe in him. He’s doing that pretty well by himself.  That’s the difference between him and a lot of these shysters up here in Harlem.  They want you to believe in them but not in yourself.  The sooner you stop looking for yourself in other people, the better off you gonna be.”

“That’s not what I’m doing!  I want us to be a family again.”

“I can’t help you there. You gonna have to work that out for yourself.”

“But what about you and Papa?”

“That’s between us. Not you.”

“You don’t understand me no better than Papa.”

“Well, the branch don’t fall that far from the tree.”

“Mama was also part a that tree.”

“She’s gone, Wardell. It’s time you accepted it. I know you think she was a saint cause she nursed you back from death’s door.  But that’s what she was good at.  Running other people’s lives. When she got sick, she didn’t know how to let us help her get well. She needed to be in charge of that too.”

“You jealous cause I was her favorite!” I yelled.

Roscoe smiled at me. It surprised me cause it was soft like a feather.

“That’s right, little brother. But I got over it. You haven’t.”

I turned and walked away.

“That’s part of Zazz Zu Zazz too, Wardell. It ain’t just about having things the way you want ‘em.”

When I got home, I was even more turned around than I was when I found out people believed something that never happened at the drug store.  And just when I met Cab and found out about Zazz Zu Zazz, here was Roscoe telling me I couldn’t even count on that to make anything better.  The only thing I wanted to do was sleep.  I got in bed and tried to talk myself to sleep by saying the words to Zazz Zu Zazz in my head.  I heard the door to the apartment open.  I hoped Papa wouldn’t come into my room to look in on me like he always did after driving all night.  I heard him walk past my room and into the kitchen as the words to Zazz Zu Zazz got louder.

Now here’s a very entrancing phrase.

It will put you in a daze.

To me it don’t mean a thing.

But it’s got a very peculiar swing—

Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zay!

I couldn’t believe it when the voice I was hearing wasn’t in my head.  I got out of bed and went into the kitchen. Papa was sitting at the table, staring at the wall.

“What you doing up, Wardell?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, go on back to bed, son.”

“Papa. What was you saying when you came in?”

I saw something in his face. But he dropped his head like he didn’t want me to see.

“You must a been dreaming.”

“But I heard you!”

“Go to bed. It’s late.”

I went back to my room, wondering if I’d been dreaming.  If I was, I wanted to keep doing it.

“Dude, the better you are the more they cry. If you don’t make the widow cry when you present the flag to them you suck. Staff Sergeant told me one time, and I didn’t believe him at first, but I tried it, and it worked, he told me that if when you’re presenting the flag you have to look them dead in the eye, then you salute cuz that’s what you’re supposed to do…” He took a break in his story to spit Mint Grizzly through the tiny hole of a Styrofoam coffee cup. “Then when you get your hand all the way up, you look them dead in the fucking eye and you say…” He turned to Justin and demonstrated the thousand yard stare. “Semper Fi.”

“What?”

“Yeah, dude. Works every time. My record’s flawless. Ever since then I’ve been able to make everyone cry. I know that sounds fucked up but it’s not. I’m fucking good at this shit.” They both had a shameless laugh until a knocking on the window broke up their fun. Sergeant McMahon was standing there, in the rain unflinching. Justin grabbed his bugle and stepped nervously out of the van.

They took their positions, Rosa and McMahon near the canopy enough to be considered part of the funeral even though they were still outside of the family’s social circle enough to be left out in the rain. The other Marines that had served with the fallen back in the fifties saw the three young Marines, their brothers, and some of them decided to stand outside of the tent as well. From the far corner Justin saw this and took it in. He admired these men and hoped that one day he could still muster enough pride in his beloved Marine Corps to suffer the cold wet winds as they did now. He did the math in his head, their ages. One said he was on the rifle range at Camp Lejeune in 1950. Once Justin pressed the, “equals” button in his mind he decided that he had no right to feel the way he did about the cold rain soaking up into his dress blue uniform. He had no right to think of himself, only to think of the man whose death he was here to honor and the pride he should take in being able to be here. Plus it was an easy fifty bucks.

The priest must have felt bad for the Marines, the speech was short. Before Justin knew it the two others were unfolding the flag to be refolded. Once it had been “table toped” as McMahon had described, Justin about faced with more ease than he had expected in the mud, turned the bugle on and hit the button. He put the machine to his lips and pretended to blow. He actually pictured himself playing it. The honor of it caught his interest. He considered taking lessons and then quickly dismissed it. Yet another semi-good idea that he would never follow up on.

The flag was then folded and delivered. McMahon was a poor presenter, by Rosa’s definition. Justin asked more than once if he had cued the bugle properly.  A round of compliments came from both Marines either to calm him or to shut him up.

The funerals piled up. Many old Marines waited through the winter for the spring thaw to meet Justin who volunteered himself for everyone. Everyday was a funeral after that. More often than not there were two, sometimes even three. By the end of the month he had paid off his credit card, his phone and other bills, and on the first Friday of May he had finally broken free of all his debt. He decided to celebrate by eating dinner. He had come to the point where he was snacking sandwiches between services but could never muster an appetite by the time he got home. He only wanted to sleep away the day’s events as unconsciousness sped up the time in between paychecks.

By the time he had arrived at the Hannaford grocery store parking lot he no longer cared. He considered leaving his car without his cover and his top button unsnapped but caught himself. The ghosts of those he buried that day would scowl at him and he knew it.

He dragged the heels of his shoes, the same heels he so proudly drove into the ground with forceful drill at each service, as if they were attached to weights unbearable to lift. The front of the blouse was no longer filled with the bulging muscle of a proud chest but folded over as he slumped forward as he had on the last mile of so many forced  marches. He didn’t care if his cover was as perfect as he needed it this morning and he failed to wrap his keychain around his hand. The lanyard dragged beside him, like the dead arm of an unwrapped casualty hanging off of a seven ton truck. Only this time he pictured the lanyard as his own arm rather than that of some Iraqi in the truck in front of him. He drove on.

Not even fully in Hannaford’s door, he was greeted by a cheery teenage boy with a welcoming smile and a, “Hi. How are you doing?” Justin wanted ever so badly to tell him exactly how he was doing. He wanted to go off on a tangent about how he had been watching widows cry all day and evaluating the abilities of various Marines in his unit as they presented the flag. He wanted to tell the story about the woman who refused to accept the flag from a Marine, after he had driven six hours north (and then six hours back) to pay his respects, because he was black. He wanted to tell him how upset that made him feel or even that he thought he was going to crumble inside when the mother of a Vietnam veteran, who had just finally drank himself to death, clung to him. The twenty-five-year old Sergeant was a replica of what she had before he went over there, she would say. As her arms pulled him tighter, his mind debated between escape tactics and tried to create a way to comfort her while letting her know that he was not, in fact, her son.

Justin looked up at the clerk, who he judged had yet to see the horror of “real” life, and said with a certain coolness, “I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse.” What he really meant was, “My life is fucked and yours should be too, you six-fifty an hour mother fucker.” The young man seemed to look in awe at what he saw as a hero walking into his store, fifteen minutes before closing. Thoughts of world destruction played with sexual fantasies for the bag girl and an inner inquisition to decide whether cinnamon rolls and Jameson would make an appropriate celebration dinner. The problem, as Justin saw it, with living alone was that he could live without parameters. He had no conception on what normal was and what was acceptable behavior in one’s own home. He often ate his cereal on the shitter in order to save time in the morning. Not having seen this on TV he assumed that he may have been doing something wrong yet had not the courage to ever ask a civilian. Marines had twisted concepts and thus could not be the basis for any research on socially acceptable behavior. He remembered watching a Marine, in Kuwait, guzzle twenty plus point-whatever NA beers to try to catch a buzz. He threw up and got something resembling a hangover but didn’t seem to catch his ride. The next day the same thing was tried only with more fake beer. Finally after the forth day his Corporal had told him enough and that it no longer amused the leadership in his command enough to allow his foolish behavior.

Justin, though having no control group to base his judgment on, decided that this behavior was not “normal” or “socially accepted” though some twenty plus Marines took part in it.

There was no one in this Hannaford to tell him to stop. No one to tell him that too much is too much and since he didn’t know what that was, he decided that he should protect these innocent civilians by reducing their exposure to him. He quickly marched to the frozen food section, grabbed the first thing that looked good and expensive and marched to the one open register.

“Now the Marines aren’t having their ball today.”

‘Some dumbass knew a little history.’ Justin thought. “Funeral detail.” Justin’s reply wiped clean the smirk on the man’s face.

“Oh, sorry to hear that.”

“Grounds thawed, time to burry our winter’s dead.” He felt so Viking, so Roman, so Ancient Greek. There was no real reply from the man in line, just some courtesies that were easily drowned out when the cashier rang up the bottle of Jameson. Justin showed ID and in the same movement grabbed the bottle.

Its touch was comfort, a known exit from his distress. It was delicious and soothing. It was a loving mother’s arms. It was, “$46.75.” The total for the bacon wrapped scallops, miscellaneous junk food and one bottle of mother.

Justin reminded himself that the money in his hand felt good. The lack of it felt horrible, yet his pessimism allowed no superficial joys.

The Hannaford stands there to this day. His thoughts of burning it down that night did not manifest and he went home to drink. It was Friday and he had an entire day off. He would try to drink enough to lose Saturday. He seemed to be counting down the days again. Before, it was until he could leave the Marine Corps. Now he was just counting down the days.

Justin sat in that same van with Corporal Rosa, as he had that first day. He wasn’t nervous, he was a seasoned vet. He wasn’t talkative and jittery. He wasn’t.

“You ever get like… this shit kinda sucks, you know?”

“Yeah,” Rosa said.

“Yeah?”

“Well yeah. It’s a fucking funeral. Specially when you’re doing as many as you’re doing. That’s kinda fucking nuts, Sergeant, you know that, right?”

“What is?”

“Usually they break it down so that everyone only does like one a week maybe two. You’re doing them everyday. You must be making megabucks.”

“Oh fuck yeah. Dude, it’s fifty a whack. I nearly made a G in one week that second or third week of April. Even after taxes it was still good cash.”

“That’s so fucked up, though.”

“What is?”

“This is kinda a weird way to make cash.”

“Better than dealing drugs, though. Right?”

The Corporal hesitated to answer. “Yeah, I guess.”

A knocking on the window ended what was becoming an uncomfortable situation, and with a nod they were off to pay another weeping widow their part of the trade, one husband for one folded flag.

He had loved it and, after a time, wanted nothing more than to leave it and see how the rest of the world compared.  He went away for the army and the war, returned for college, then left again, for good, to make his money and his mark, and to marry a woman who had never once thought of this place as The City by the Sea.  His wife was gone now, passed on to a better world he hoped, and their son and daughter had ended up thousands of miles away—Los Angeles, Seattle, other worlds.

He was sixty-two, smart, successful, surrounded by friends, and still, on overcast winter afternoons he would sometimes leave the immaculate suburb he called home and drive an hour just to walk the beach, to feel that sting and sweetness in his mouth.  Hands in his pockets, he’d wrap the raincoat around his hips and stride along the sand in the wind, letting the cold air slap his cheeks red, burying himself in memories:  the amusement rides, the food stands, a high-school love affair, baseball games, street fights, holiday dinners, a tight pod of neighborhood friends that had broken open and scattered on the wind.

During the second half of December these memories always came to him in shouts.  Some weeks he’d go back to the beach every afternoon just to feel his shoes on the hard gray sand, to buy a slice of oily pizza and sit on the hurricane wall with the gulls screaming at him for having what they did not.  His family had celebrated both holidays–his father letting him hold the shammas and bring the menorah to life; his mother setting up a crèche beneath the tree.  What a couple they had been!  Shouting at each other in three languages over latkes and lasagna, making a Howard Johnson’s milkshake-and-hamburger outing into an exotic adventure decorated with Milton Berle routines and Tony Bennett music.  Burying him in gifts from the first of the eight nights until New Year’s.  He had not deserved parents like that, had not been able to live up to their example except in brief stretches of grace, flickers of light in a life ruled by business, eaten up by business, consumed by the making and spending of money.

His parents had not been one-tenth as well off as he was, but, even so, generosity had been the first commandment in their third-floor flat on the humble street everyone referred to as “The Avenue.”  Generosity, warmth, ungoverned emotions that ricocheted off the wallpaper in bursts of anger and fun.  What a house it had been!  A cranky grandmother with numbers tattooed on her arm and such flashes of pain on the skin of her face that he sometimes could not bear to look at her.  Fat-legged aunts in kitchen chairs, telling ribald jokes; uncles puffing cigars, talking football and money and politics.  Friends leaning stickball bats in the corner and sitting down to lunches of chicken cacciatore and pizza dolce.  And always, always, this rule:  if you had good fortune, any good fortune at all, you spread it around.

That commandment stayed with him, even as others faded and disappeared and a mad ambition flowered.  After the war, after college, on the recommendation of an uncle, he’d gone to work for a company in Boston that made industrial cutting tools–drills and planers and saws with diamond blades.  From the first month he’d made a good paycheck, and every December gave away more money than he probably should have.  The United Way.  The Salvation Army.  One health charity or another–he hated to think of children suffering, of people being tortured and killed.

He married a generous, warm-hearted woman, fathered a boy and a girl, worked hard, moved up the corporate ladder.  He was thirty-eight when the owner died, and he took his wife’s small inheritance, mortgaged their home to the last dollar, and bought the company.  Three years later they were selling diamond-tipped drills and saw blades to the General Electric plant in Lynn.  Then to all the GE plants on the east coast.  Then to Ford, Chrysler, Boeing.  He had a knack for it, that’s all.  A knack, and the discipline to work seventy-hour weeks.

By the age of forty-four he’d reached the million-dollar mark, at a time when that number meant something.  By fifty he owned a waterfront building in the North End, then two buildings.  His children didn’t see very much of him, but they grew up with things he could not have dreamed about:  their own cars in high school, junior year in France, a horse for the girl, a golf club membership for the boy.  They’d had a good family life, it seemed to him now, but no amount of luxury had kept the kids near home.  The money hadn’t kept his wife alive.

Now, his rich widower friends found young blondes for second wives, but he could not do that.  His children–not a menorah between them, not one baptized grandchild–invited him for the holidays every year, and usually he went, a fat Jewish-Catholic Santa stepping out of the airport with suitcases full of toys.

This year he had decided to stay home–he didn’t know why–mailed the toys off in cardboard boxes so heavy he couldn’t lift them onto the counter at the post office without help.  December was mild and rainy.  He worked and worked, and when he wasn’t working he drove to the beach, or The Avenue, or Broadway, and shuffled along the sand and sidewalks there, a ghost with a Rolex on his wrist.  Once Hanukkah began, he had an urge–this sometimes happened–to make an outrageous gift.  In his late wife’s name he’d already made five-figure contributions to the library addition, the mayor’s after-school program, the cancer center.  But that wasn’t the kind of gift he was thinking of now.  This would be personal, anonymous, eccentric, meshugana, the act of a pazzo, a nut.  He took some cash out of one of his accounts.  One Saturday he walked the length of Beach Street in a cold rain, dreaming about going into the bars there and handing out hundred-dollar bills; or climbing up to the door of the third-floor apartment where he’d been raised–a Cambodian family lived there now, he’d spied on them, seen the woman leaning her dark head out the kitchen window to look for her children in the street–and buying bikes for the kids, or a chinchilla coat for the mother.

On another of these solitary walkabouts–it was the Monday before Christmas, cold and clear, with mounds of new snow on the sidewalks– he happened to pass the elementary school where he’d gone as a boy.  Not the school exactly, that building had long ago been replaced with brick condominiums.   A girl of ten or twelve sat on the cold top step of one of the buildings, sobbing.  The symphony of her grief wafted up into the winter air and wrapped itself around him.  He was on the verge of walking over and comforting her when he remembered where he was–America, twenty-first century.  You did not talk to young people you didn’t know, never mind touch them.  A few morons, a few perverts, a few murderers had ruined things for everyone.  He paused, pretending to admire the building’s architecture, trying to send kind thoughts to the girl.  She went on and on, wailing, soaking her hands with tears.

At last he walked away, drawn to the solace of the beach as always, but when he saw the water this time a memory spilled over him like an avalanche.  A thousand tons of cold.   In fourth, fifth, and sixth grades there had been a girl who looked something like the girl on the condominium steps:  on the pudgy side, muddy brown hair, some little spark of prettiness around the eyes and mouth.  Denise, her name had been.  For some reason he and the other boys and girls had been unbelievably cruel to Denise.  It wasn’t anything she had done.  What personality she showed in school was mild and inoffensive; she bathed regularly, hurt no one; she was neither very smart nor very stupid; she dressed like everyone else.

But they had tormented her.  On the playground they walked in circles around her, chanting:  Can’t touch you!  Can’t touch you! In the hallways they swerved in exaggerated detours when she approached.  Once, Denise’s mother had made the mistake of sending out birthday invitations to her classmates, and no one, not one of them, had accepted.  A friend of his had even sent the invitation back with CTD on the envelope.  Can’t Touch Denise.  When the friend told him about that, he’d laughed.

He sat on one of the wooden benches tossing French fries to the seagulls and listening to the faint cold surf.  Easy enough to say it was long ago, and that they were too young to realize what they were doing.  Easy enough to hope Denise had gotten over it and made herself a decent life.  For all these winters–what was it, fifty?–he’d buried the memory, but now it pressed against him like a scalpel blade.  He’d grown up in a good family.  Most of them had.  How had they been capable of that?  Why hadn’t someone, a teacher, a principal, a courageous sixth-grader, stepped forward and said something?  They were little Nazis, is what they were.  Miniature Roman soldiers pounding spikes through flesh.  Klansmen with a torch.  Half-sized Khmer Rouge going into hospital rooms with sharpened bayonets.

That night Denise shuffled and sulked through his dreams.  In the morning—because he was lonely, perhaps a bit touched, probably guilty at his good fortune (How many multi -millionaires came from a third-floor flat on The Avenue?)–he went back to the city and paid a social call on his friend the mayor, and the mayor let him examine the voting rolls.  A hundred Denises, but none with that last name.  Nothing in the phone book.  She’d moved away, of course.  Moved away and married, had children of her own, carried the smoldering humiliation of it through all her life in a secret place inside herself.

He went to his Boston office and before the lunch hour passed he’d gotten a recommendation and hired a private investigator.  He remembered Denise’s last name, her mother’s name; he could take a good guess at her place and date of birth.  That ought to be enough.  “Find her in two days and I’ll double the fee,” he told the investigator.

On Wednesday there was no news.  On Thursday the investigator called.  He’d found one Denise of that name, and that place and time of birth, and her mother had the right name, too.  Only one.  That Denise, it turned out, was buried in a cemetery in southern New Hampshire.  Cause of death unknown, but the investigator could try to track it down if it mattered.

At the company party that afternoon everyone was jolly.  Not the best year they’d ever had, but a good year all the same.  Healthy bonuses, a lot of smiling all around.  He shook hands and slapped backs and received kisses and drank much more than he was accustomed to, so that he rode home in the back seat of the company limo with the western suburbs spinning and tilting, a crazy festival of lights.

In the dark living room he sat in the chair where his wife had liked to sit, glass of water in one hand and a bottle of aspirin beside him on the upholstered arm.  At the party, for a blessed hour, he’d forgotten Denise.  Now she came swirling back, a spinning, magnetized spirit around which fifty years of sin seemed to have coagulated.  He opened the aspirin bottle, swallowed three, and left the cap off.

Hours later it must have been, a ringing sound woke him out of a drunken doze.  His head swirled in oily circles.  He managed to reach the phone before the machine clicked on.  Holding it to his ear he heard the high, reedy innocence of his granddaughter, a one-quarter Jewish girl named Mary, after his mother.  But how could she be awake at this hour?  “Gampa, Gampa,” Mary was saying.  She’d received the packages and her mother had let her open one ahead of time, and the doll was her “favit” now, her best.  She had a name for it, but she wanted to ask him first if the name was alright.

“What name, honey?”

“Da-neese,” she said.

He wasn’t sure he was hearing correctly.  He wasn’t sure he was awake, or sane.  He looked around his unlit house, the elegant sofa, the dark framed pictures on the wall.  A shadowy library of memories.

The next day he woke up later than usual, feeling like he’d been dragged all the way home tied to the axle of a leaking garbage truck.  Alcohol.  Across the space of a few hours the drug went from nectar of the gods to  poison.  He showered, shaved, took his coffee and juice and three more aspirin with two pieces of pumpernickel toast.

He drove to the City by the Sea.  He parked his Mercedes at the very end of The Avenue, two hundred steps from the house they’d lived in.  It was December twenty-fourth.  Some of the people walking past him in the swirling snow did not celebrate Christmas and did not celebrate Hanukkah, he understood that.  Did not know a confirmation from a bas mitzvah, a scapular from a tallis.

He left his keys dangling in the door of the Mercedes, on purpose, walked down onto the platform of the subway station and stood there with the toes of his two-hundred-dollar loafers pushing out over the edge of the concrete.   After a short wait–he thought only of his wife.  How could you replace a spirit like that with a bejeweled young blond?– he could hear the blue-sided train rumbling toward him like the past, the cold rails gleaming, every species of litter there on the gravel between the ties.  “Forgive me!” he called out, so loudly that the person next to him moved away.  “Forgive me!  Forgive us!”

As the first car drew close he leaned forward so far that the conductor blew the shrill horn.  The car passed a couple of inches in front of his nose, the wall of air lifted the lapels on his raincoat.  The doors opened.  He backed away one step.  When the train rattled out of the station he stood there for two or three minutes, running his mind back across the smell of the jungle at night, the stink of fear and the immensity of the feeling of death.  Then he climbed back up to the street where cold flakes tapped his forehead and cheeks.  Some woman, a passing face, wished him Happy Holidays. The Mercedes sat where he had left it, dusted with a thin coat of white, and he took the keys, put them in his pocket, and walked the length of The Avenue to a donut shop that hadn’t been there when he was a boy.  Jaunty holiday muzak warbled in the speakers, and the girls behind the counter wore plastic sprigs of holly on their chest.  He looked at the nameplates there, half-expecting one of them to be Denise, but, no, these were exotic names, young women from other orbits, new to this country as his grandparents had been in their day.  Cambodia, Guatemala, Bosnia, Somalia, Russia–who knew what sort of viciousness had chased these girls away from home, what mad ambition had pulled their families halfway across the world to the promise and hope and frenzy of America?  Who knew where the seed of evil came from?

He waited in line, a stranger there now, forgivable he supposed, blood-stained and forgivable like all the rest.  He ordered coffee and a cruller, put eight one hundred-dollar bills in the tip cup when the girl turned her back, then went out to The Avenue and, carrying his small burden, walked at an old man’s pace past the boarded-up synagogue, and the Cambodian restaurant, and the Bosnian grocery, and on and on, down to a green-slatted bench where he knew he would have an unobstructed view of the sea.

Every time Bird left, it went about the same.  It was always temporary.  And it was always permanent.  And the last time is the only one I can ever remember.  It’s like a stranger’s memory, except this one feels like I’m wrapped in cotton.  The last time //

I had been on the couch all morning, a few bills and junk-mail spread out in front of me, when she came on stage –– a sharp, practiced entrance from stage right, toting a bag on her shoulder, another in her hand.

“I’m going out for a while,” she said as she passed.

“With half of your shit packed?” I asked.

“I’ve got to go for a little while,” she said, back turned on me.

“Look, if this is about your mom––”

“I told you, it isn’t. I just can’t do this now,” she said.  I stood and shuffled to the kitchen to drop bad credit card offers and first notices in the trash.  The trash wasn’t full, but I tied the bag shut anyway and hoisted it out.

“As long as you’re going,” I said, “would you mind taking the trash out for once.”  I tossed the bag at her feet.  “Maybe if you wait with it at the curb, someone will pick you up, too.”

I might as well have baited a hook with a brick.  It didn’t even phase her.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“Don’t bother.”

She looked at me for a moment, feigning comprehension, and put her hand softly to her lips.  She shut the door without a bang or a soft click, just normal, trying to tell me she didn’t walk on eggshells for anyone.  But I heard them cracking.  She couldn’t hide it from me.  Everything beneath her feet was white and thin and just barely keeping together.  She left the bag of trash behind, and I thought of bringing it out, of following her outside.  But I didn’t.

I guess you could say I always had the same problems whether Bird was there or not.  But she was always there and not.  So I don’t know if you could say things got worse.  But they changed for once.  The scenery was different.  I tried to change, rebuild it myself, I remember.  But something else took over  // It came from outside //

I don’t know what day it was.  And I didn’t hear her coming up the stairs, approaching my apartment, lifting her hand slowly.  In confidence, Bird makes sure her resonance precedes her.  But I heard nothing.  Nothing, that is, except for her light tapping.  It was the most timid knock in the world––like three kamikaze ladybugs at my front door.

I had been sitting by the window when she came.  The TV was on, muted, and I hadn’t shaved in days, couldn’t have if I wanted to.  My chest hair had crumbs in it because shirts were too much of a hassle, and there were stains all over my sweatpants.  I knew it was Bird instantly. At her knock, I moved faster than I had all week, nearly jumping straight up, but I stopped halfway to the door.  Quietly, I stepped up to the peephole.  She looked good, even with her body contorted in a bubble.  She shuffled her feet, looked around, jiggled her leg.  And her bottom lip kept popping out from between her teeth.

It had barely been a week since the fire.  I looked at my apartment // overflowing sink with orbital flies / coffee table legs with no discernible top /  unspeakable living room floor / burned bedroom // myself –– aching arms wrapped in gauze from fingertips to shoulders.

Bird knocked again.  I fumbled with the bolts and rolled the side of my arm along the doorknob to get it open.  Bird’s shy smile vanished.

“What happened?” she said coming in, three months already forgotten and closing the door behind her. “Oh my god –– why didn’t you call me?”

“Call you where, genius?”

“I’ve just been at my dad’s place.  You could have tried.  I would have come.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.  She started throwing things away, tidying the place.  “Are you going to be staying at his place for a while?  I could use some help moving a few things out.”

“Moving?” she said, turning on me.

“Not me.  Just some broken furniture.  So you’re gonna be there or what?” I asked, unable to keep from looking at her, watching the bend of her waist.

“No,” she said, “I’ll be here.”  And for some reason –– I want to say it was the drugs –– I said, “Okay.”

And she said, “So what happened to your arms?”

What happened //

My neighbors were in love with home electronics, appliances, and alarm clocks.  The long and short of it?  Old building, bad wiring, too many plugs.  Oldest one in the book, the fire chief said.  The spark ignited on the far wall of their bedroom, curiously close to three curling irons and a stereo.  That wall was also my wall, my headboard.  Their bed didn’t burn, but mine did, taking Bird’s smell with it.

I had just come inside the building when sirens began whispering in the distance.  Halfway up the stairs I smelled smoke.  Ten flights passed in a blink, and there was our floor, toxic and blinding.  Somehow the door opened, and I ran through the apartment to the bedroom.  It was Hell –– wailing and gnashing of teeth as promised.  I dove to the floor, suffocating, and groped under the bed for the fireproof box Bird thought was so stupid.

What they don’t tell you about fireproof boxes is that a certain kind, say, a lower grade model, is not necessarily heat proof.  Third degree burns covered me from fingers, up my forearms, to my biceps.  Like a cow, I got branded, complete with the box’s serial number on my right forearm, sticking out in white like an infection.  Now I’m the property of Econosafe Inc.

In the box //

Documents / certificates / the things that prove I’m alive.

What else //

Pictures of Bird / all of them blurry //  She’s always moving out of frame.

So she stayed, back in swing within an hour.  Her clothes were just outside the door in an old, brown suitcase.  Right away, she asked about the pills.

“So what did they give you?”

“Petroleum dyosophate.”

“Oh man, can I try some?”

And on it went.  We made love –– carefully.  We drank and took pills.  She put her clothes back in the drawers.  Time passed slowly as the petroleum sunk deeper into my spine.

“So how’s your dad getting along?” I asked.  She had been back maybe a week.

“He’s doing okay,” she said.  “He said it was time to get along by himself for a while.”

I had to make up with her in a different way each day, and that was how I apologized –– by showing interest in what lay outside of us.  I usually didn’t.  I usually couldn’t.  Before Bird, my own mother was all I had, and she died when I was three.  There was nothing, no one else, and no real feeling for anyone before Bird.  If she was here, I was happy.  The only time we had talked while she was gone was the night I picked up the phone by accident, drunk and hoping for a wrong number and someone to talk to, not bothering to screen it.  Bird whispered through tears on the other end.  Her mother was gone.  She didn’t want to bother me, but she had no one else to call.  She just wanted to hear a familiar voice.  On some level, I believed that was all she wanted.

All I could say was, “I’m sorry,” but I remember saying it like I’d drank the last of the milk.  I wished nothing ill on Bird’s mother.  The old woman’s vibrancy amazed me.  Bird made more sense in light of her.  And I was sorry she was gone.  But I was not sorry in the least for Bird.

I guess you could say I know how to hold a grudge.

Bird came home one evening from work –– a little beer and wine shop –– and found me in the chair by the window, the TV cocked towards me, muted.  I guess I didn’t hear her talking, because the next moment she was at my right ear.

“Hey! Earth to stoned-guy.”  She circled around me and bent down, her eyes inches from mine.  “Anybody in there?”

“Hey you,” I said, finally able to make out her face.

“Jesus, when do you stop taking those pills?”  She went to the kitchen and brought back a corkscrew and a bottle of wine.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “A few more weeks.”

“They turn you to stone,” she said, filling her glass to the rim.  “I don’t like it.”

Later, she fixed dinner and set a plate next to me, but I forgot to eat.  We watched television until it was dark.  Bird’s plate sat crusted on the floor next to a quarter-full bottle, and she was nodding off.

“Bird?” I mumbled.  She stirred and yawned.  “Do you remember when we were on the frozen lake?”  She squinted, like a bad dream had just finished and she was afraid to open her eyes.

“I remember,” she said.

“Remember how it was so warm at home?  You wore sandals and we just went.  But the lake was still frozen solid, in April.  It was like winter forgot to go away and the lake was safe enough to walk on.  Remember?”

“What about it?”  She changed the channel to Leno.

“Nothing,” I said.  “I was just thinking about the sun shining and the snow on the ground and how you had to hop around on patches of grass.  Then we walked on the lake.  Remember how we wondered what it would take to make cracks, to send us through the ice?  And then I jumped and you screamed, but it didn’t break.  What would it have taken, Bird?”

“All I remember is cold feet,” she laughed.

“Sure,” I said.  Bird shook her head and turned towards the television.  I thought about that lake for the rest of the night.  When Bird fell asleep on the couch, I took another petroleum, and I swam in the lake, plowing through the ice, turning over and over from breaststroke to back.  Then I climbed out onto an icy shore and lay in the sun.  The ice cooled my smoldering arms as the sun warmed my face, wet with cold water.

Once a painkiller as effective as petroleum dyosophate is introduced to a body like mine, it becomes the pain.  Instead of my arms burning, a new sensation filled me and told me when I needed relief  //  a pulse at the base of my spine / neural epicenters opening up slowly / icy electric signals surging to the top of my shoulders, careening down my arms to fingertips //  Pure voltage filled my stomach.

When I took the pills, my body rejoiced.  It scratched all those static itches and chased the chill back to a little spot in my spine.  The epicenters shut down.  All the neurons rested themselves.  And in our silence and stillness, each one of us was rejoicing.  Every last nerve in me was free from stimulus –– floating, detached, isolated.  And every day –– for how long, I’m not sure –– I watched the street through the window.  I saw people walking back and forth, coming then going.

Bird had fixed up my spot by the window one morning.  Usually, I just kicked a chair in the general direction until it was next to the window, but Bird had put cushions on my chair and a tray of food beside it.  She even made a footrest –– two cinderblocks that had been carelessly left in the bedroom, out of place.  I stopped when I saw them, having not been in my room for weeks.  She hadn’t asked where they came from.

About a week before the fire, I took the cinderblocks from a construction site.  Whiskey was involved.  I carried two of them, one in each hand, up to the apartment with the notion of going back for more.  I wanted to block off Bird’s side of the room, even her side of the bed. I wondered what it would be like to roll over and find those cold, gray stones.

Bird was already gone when I got to the chair that morning.  A little note on the seat said she’d be back with groceries and a refill of my pills.  I had none left except for a few days worth of extras stashed around the place.  Trying to open pill bottles with my arms wrapped up like leg-of-lamb had gotten old quick, so Bird took over.  But I always had some ready to access, just so I didn’t have to ask.  I took one from a plastic bag hidden in the potted plant soil.  It lasted until Bird came back.  It was only midmorning.  I knew by the shadows on the street.

“I got bacon!” Bird laughed as she charged through the door.  “I haven’t had it in years. You want some? We can fry it up.”

“Did you get the pills?” I asked.

“No –– I couldn’t.”

“What?” I turned from the window.

“They said you were out of refills, honey.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?  I had one more.”  Twisted in the chair, half-turned to her, I yelled over my shoulder.  “Why did you let them do that?”

“You used the last one two weeks ago.  Besides, it’s time to get off those things.  Maybe it’s better if –– ”

“Shut the fuck up, you don’t know.  They’re just trying to fuck me over.  God damn it, why didn’t you tell them the doctor would call in more or something?”

“They don’t just hand it out on trust,” Bird said, trying to laugh.  She had stopped putting things away and was close to the chair, talking to me from behind.  We hadn’t looked at each other much in the weeks before.  “The pills are done. Get over it.”

“But I still feel pain,” I said.

“That’s a good thing,” Bird said. “Don’t you know?”

As the sun set that evening, Bird came near the chair and stood over me.  Her eyes darted; her lip could not escape her teeth.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said.  Her right leg bounced.  “But I’m going to my dad’s for the night.  He needs some help.”  She looked out the window as she spoke.  “Okay?”

Her image blurred in my vision.  “Alright,” I said.  “But come back early.  I’ll need you.”

She left me there, promising to return the next morning.  I slept in the chair that night and woke to silence and a piercing sun.  A few hours passed as I rode a wave of petroleum dyosophate, crest to trough –– sinking, then rising.  The day got brighter, and it was hard to even look out to the street.  Through water, I saw small figures skating along the sidewalk, short shadows trailing behind.  I knew they’d be standing on their shadows soon, and Bird had still not come home.  So I decided against the sandwich she had left in the fridge and ate three more pills.

I slumped back in the chair for a while, feet propped up, watching as the noon sun brought starkness to the sky and buildings.  Everything was just right, flat and colorful, only light.  But the window began to hurt my eyes, less and less could I see color.  Like a blizzard, white blotted everything out except shapes, outlines.  I leaned forward, rubbed my eyes, and looked down at the street again.  But the street was not there.  It was just a band of white.  People seemed to dance on it, though they were only dots on sticks.  They could have been anyone.

I opened the window.  Even in the warmth of the sunlight, the air was cold.  No sounds came from the street, no shapes either.  It was all white and cold and bright.  I wanted Bird there to close the window. It had hurt to put it up, so I called her name a few times, but no answer.  I yelled out the window, but no one seemed to notice.  They just continued skating along the cold white expanse where the street and sidewalk used to be.

Down at my feet, the two cinderblocks snuggled next to each other.  I took the right one and slid it away, fit my forearms through its two large holes, lifted, and set it on the window ledge. The street –– white –– showed no weak spots, no pressure points, and I wondered if even this would not be heavy enough.  The block moved itself across the ledge to the open side, did not even hesitate to dive from my hand.  It got lost in the glare for a moment, but I saw its shadow come into focus before disappearing –– before the strike.

I thought I saw a crack, a fracture, start beneath the block, and like a shadow it crept up the street and went and went and I wondered if it would split the earth, and I thought of the street breaking jaggedly and folding in on itself like a worn piece of paper –– all the people and things sliding in after.

But then there were only a number of bright, squinting faces looking up at me, gathered around the cinderblock like it was a corpse.  There were no cracks –– only questions.

The police were pacified easily enough.  One look at my arms, my helpless expression –– I was trying to bring it inside, sir, to prop up the window –– and they closed their pads.

I could have killed someone, they said. I should have someone helping me out.

“She’s out right now,” I said, “but she’ll be back.”

They said she better make it soon.  Then they were gone.

Bird’s father greeted me on the telephone that night.  His voice was trapped in another year, happier than it should have been, because his wife’s voice was there beside his, speaking as one.  I left a single message explaining how somebody had almost died outside the building that day and how strange that was.  I said I felt shook up from the whole thing.  I was sure, I said, that Bird had forgotten to call me and was staying one more night.  And would it please only be one more night. The close call had really got me thinking –– You know Bird, I could go tomorrow.  Then I hung up.  I took five more pills and called again at three in the morning.

“I cracked the lake, Bird.  I did it.  It only took a little bit of pressure.  The ice split open and everyone slid in, Bird, but I didn’t see you there.  I didn’t see you there.  Where are you?  I’m on the lake and jumping.  It won’t let me in.  You’re underneath it, but  I never saw you go down.  You’re in the water, Bird.  And I’m on the ice.”

I started to sob, and somewhere along the way, a loud beep cut me off.  I dropped the receiver to the floor and went roaming in the house for more pills.  I pulled the potted plant out, but couldn’t dig through the dirt with gauze on my hands.  Biting off bits of tape with my teeth, I began unraveling my bandages.  Yards and yards of gauze curled up in little piles on the floor.  My forearm looked like pot roast left in the sun –– rotten and leathery.  The other arm was free in under a minute.  I lifted the couch on its end and looked for the stash in the underside.  I pushed the TV from its stand, though I’d never hidden any pills there.  I went everywhere but the bedroom.  I hadn’t stepped foot in it once since the fire.  But it caught my eye as I went to the bathroom to look in the toilet tank.  The black marks on the wall were beginning to fade, along with the smell of ashes.  I don’t know how long I stayed right there, staring at our bed, at Bird’s half.

// And from here everything remains the same, or goes the same I should say / repeating in small cycles easy enough to catch on to if only the windows are open just enough.  It doesn’t matter where I am now or where I was before Bird left and came and left again.  I’ve forgotten which time was which and the birthdays of my family.  I’ve forgotten which month she disappeared and the year I met her.  But it doesn’t really matter.  I told you every time was the same.  I always had burned arms / I was always addicted to detachment / I always loved Bird.  I’m always standing in my room smelling ashes.  The parallel universes of my apartment / where in one Bird is there and another not / gave me something to move through or live in / I don’t know the difference anymore / They all happened at once, in an instant, the same as // sleeping / waking // We’re always doing both at once.  Where I am now is the same as where I was / all my lives like tiny bubbles / amassed into one.

In one life / I’m always in the apartment // In another / I sleep in the street.

In one life I am always myself  / And in another I am always Bird.

In one life I am always on fire / and in another // extinguished.

The walls were a sickly shade of yellow and the cracks in the red linoleum were filled with something I didn’t want to look at hard. The water cooler tucked in the corner burped like a dozing drunk.

The hefty woman sitting beside me muttered that this would be the last damn time she’d bail out her fool of a husband, emphasizing each word with a fist to an open palm. The man next to her nodded and tapped his foot to a tune nobody else could hear.

I’d had to use the home my parents left as collateral, and that house, in all its dilapidation, was the only thing of monetary value I had in this world. I didn’t want to think about what would happen to me and my son Jamal, if I lost it. Truth was, the house was mine by default. My brother Johnny was dead and it belonged to Pet  as much to as it did to me, and she knew it.  Technically, a case might be made that because I’d paid the taxes and maintained it I should call the shots. But “technically” didn’t mean squat when it came to blood.

I hadn’t seen my sister since I was eight and didn’t know who she had become or if I could trust any word out her mouth. All I knew was that when she’d left nearly thirty years ago, whispering her last sad words, my world had changed forever.  Only my grandmother was left after that, and for a kid like me in a family like mine, more was needed than a loving old woman who grew weaker the more I needed her strength.

“I’m gone, Angel,” Pet had whispered. “Don’t tell nobody,  not even Grandma. I got to get out of here now.” “Angel” was what she called me, and when she murmured it that night, me half-sleep and scared, I knew she’d been crying. Why? was what I should have asked but didn’t.

I was a tough little kid who’d just poke out her lip when blows from her mama came raining down, never crying even when Pet jumped in the way, taking those whacks on her tiny little self.  But I cried that night.

When my parents asked the next morning if I knew where she’d gone, I sullenly shook my head. She’ll be back ‘fore night, my father muttered with a drunk’s dumb assurance. She got it good here, she ain’t going nowhere, piped in my mother, and I, lips locked tight, looked straight through them. Johnny was gone as usual, escaping into worlds we knew nothing about.

The day passed, then that night, and first thing next morning my grandma called the police but Pet had just turned 18, and they said it was too early to start a search. An 18-year-old black girl on the run from a block like ours didn’t warrant much effort.

So when Pet had called my office last night, just as I was contemplating a hot, fried fish sandwich and wondering how my son was doing in South Jersey with his dad, the sound of her whispering “Angel” ripped that old scab right off.

“Pet? Pet, is that you? …” I collapsed in my chair, hardly able to get the words out, gripping the phone so hard my fingers hurt.

“Ain’t no fucking Pet, no more.  I’ve claimed the name they gave me, Angel. Petula. Petula Hayle!” She interrupted me like she used to  when I was a kid, with a burst of laughter that made me giggle. There was a harshness to her laugh I didn’t remember, but decades had passed since I’d heard it and old memories, the tender ones, were tumbling back: The smell of the Jergens lotion she wore for perfume. The softness of her palms  when she covered my ears so I couldn’t hear my parents shriek.

“Before you get all carried away about hearing from me and shit, let me tell you why I’m calling, better hear that first.”

Pet had always talked “proper,” not even an “ain’t,” and the way she was cursing now gave me pause for a moment. My sister was deep inside that voice.

“Where you been Pet?”

“Angel, I’m damn near fifty, ain’t been nobody’s pet in years.”

“How long you been in town?”

“Long enough for them to haul me into jail for something I ain’t done.”

“Jail?”  The word came out like it I’d never heard it before.

She coughed hard. “You remember Coleman Hawthorne? Well, somebody shot him dead three nights ago. That’s what Truman told me.”

“Truman Hawthorne, his son? How did he get in touch with you? Why do they think you had anything to do with it?”

“Never mind that now. I need you to bail me out this shit. You still got that house our parents left us?”

Stunned, I didn’t answer.

“You got to put it up. Angel, I ain’t never been so desperate in my life. You’ve got to get me out of this. Please. I ain’t got nobody else I can call.”  She hung up then, and I knew she was probably right.

I called my friend Jake then, who is a lawyer, to help me post a property bond with the court.  I could tell Jake was skeptical but had the good sense not to offer unrequested advice, and when I heard back from him this morning, I went straight to the courthouse.

Thirty years had changed everything I remembered. As a girl Pet had been slight but built, her breasts and hips budding bigger than anybody else’s. She was bony now, the folds of her soiled gray pant suit hung loosely on her body, and her hair was lank. The locks I played with as a child had been soft and thick, the sweet fragrance of  Dixie Peach lingering on my fingers after I brushed them.

I stood up, rushed toward her and she hugged me tight, thinner even than she looked.

“I was looking for a kid with braids and ribbons,” she said, pushing me away to get a better look. “And here you are a grown woman, Angel. Pretty enough to make me cry for all I missed, and I did miss you.”

She hugged me again, and I let her pull me into her like she used to when  I was  girl,  my big sister’s arms around me making me safe.

“Oh, Lord, what have I missed,” she said, whispering it this time. As I hugged her back, all the anger and doubt I’d felt earlier disappeared.  What was left of my family was home.

“Oh, Pet…”

“Petula! Pet brings back too much pain.”

“I’ll try to remember,” I said, the obedient girl listening to her elder sister. Anything was possible.

“I know I got some explaining to do?”

“Yeah, you do,” I said.

“Go on and say what you gotta say.”

“Why didn’t you come back?”  I asked.

She shook her head and gave a smile that wasn’t one.

“You left me all alone,” I said, my voice breaking like that eight year old kid’s. “I had to put them all away.  Mama, daddy, grandma, Johnny. You didn’t even fucking show up when Johnny died!”

She stared at the window for a while, squinting from the sun then turned back to me. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry!” I stared at her in disbelief.

“By the time I heard about them, they were gone and it was too late to face anyone, especially you,” she said, with no expression.

“You didn’t even come for Johnny. Not even for him,” I said. “You broke Grandma’s heart, you know that?”

“Grandma’s heart was broke long before I left,” she said. “You know what it was like in our house with those poor crazy kids we had for parents. Hell, mama was fifteen when she had me. I didn’t hear about Johnny till years later when someone thought to mention it in passing. Let the past lay where it belong, Angel. Just let it lay. I’m back now.  And why did he do that to himself anyway? Shoot himself dead like that?”

“Too many people left without telling him why,” I said even though I knew damn well it wasn’t true. I don’t know why my brother killed himself and probably never will.

Silence again. Maybe she was thinking about it what I’d said or simply didn’t give a damn.

“So who mentioned Johnny’s death in passing?” I said, the anger still in my voice.

“Truman Hawthorne.  Me and Truman been talking for years. Ever since I left.” The way she said “talking,” drawling it out in a lurid slur, suggested they’d been doing more than flapping lips, and a burst of  rage shot through me. But I was scared like a kid gets scared, that she might walk out and disappear again, so I held it back.

Coleman Hawthorne, his wife Althea and their two kids,  Darlitta and Truman, had lived two floors below us in the Hayes Homes where we all grew up.  Coleman had been a friend of my father and had bought his first bar, Cole’s Hole, with money my father and two other men in the building loaned him.  If he paid them back, it had probably been in trade—free drinks, no cash, just bourbon.  Hawthorne owned four bars now, three in Newark and one in Orange.

He was one of those old-time businessmen who had kept the city alive in its dying throes then hung around long enough to celebrate its rebirth. A recent article in the Star-Ledger had played his loyalty up with a page-long feature and picture of him standing proudly over his wife, who was disabled, and  two of his three children, which included  Cole James, the product of  a long-term affair polite folks  never mentioned. Truman, his oldest son, was nowhere to be seen.

When we were kids, my father used to say he hoped  Truman and Pet would end up married—probably to insure him frequent access to Cole’s Hole rather than  his daughter’s happiness.  No father in his right mind would wish Truman Hawthorne on his daughter these days. He was a shifty drunk who looked disheveled whenever I saw him on the street. He always avoided my eyes.

“You said on the phone that Truman was the one who told you his father had been murdered.”

“Told me somebody shot him three times night before last.”

“Three times?”  I asked. If you’re going to shot somebody, you usually do it once then forget it or fill them with lead until the gun runs dry.

Her eyes were closed, her hands folded demurely in her lap like she was praying.

“How come they think you did it?”

“I ain’t seen that man in damn near thirty years.”

Even as a kid, I knew my sister wasn’t as innocent as she liked to play.   “Fast” was what my grandma called her which to my kid’s ear sounded good because I loved to run.  My mother called her something else: slut.  All I knew was that it wasn’t me and it hadn’t been my sister.

I was quiet on the walk to the car as my new commitment settled in. Jamal was with his father for most of the summer, so I wouldn’t have to hear his mouth about our new roommate. But my son had a generous spirit, with well-timed wisecracks and hugs. Hopefully, by the time he got home, I would have found her a job and another place to stay.  My friend Annie had recently bought a small building  and owed me a favor. Wyvetta Green, who owned the beauty salon  below my office, might be able to find her a job. Maybe it was like Pet said, my grandmother was looking out for both of us.

But it would be up to me to make things happen. First would come Jake. I’d beg him to represent her, and I knew if I pleaded hard enough he would. After Jake, I’d call some old contacts in the department and get the real story behind why they picked her up.  There had to be other suspects.

I had made good money with my last job and DeWayne had been on-time with his child support payments. I had a few small jobs running that didn’t require much effort or leg work and would bring in enough change to survive on.

But right now Cole James, Coleman Hawthorne’s  middle-age love-child, was heading toward us fast. He was dressed in his uniform and brawnier than he looked in the photograph in the Ledger, more like his father than I remembered. He walked like him, too, and I wondered how long it took him to master that strut. He hadn’t lived with his father as a kid, but maybe he’d picked it up later.  He was known to be his father’s  favorite, despite being born “outside.”  Coleman Hawthorne soundly rejected Truman, his natural son, but stood proudly behind Cole James, probably because he had made something of himself.

He was a detective in the Newark police department who had inherited his father’s charming, seductive eyes, which gave him a mellow demeanor despite his reputation as a take no-shit cop with an evil-ass temper.

Despite that, people loved him. Although the murder rate in Newark had plunged, it wasn’t low enough to suit most folks who felt the only good thug was a stone-dead one.

When he got to us, he grabbed my sister’s thin shoulders so savagely she fell backwards.

“I didn’t do nothing to him,” Pet said, her eyes darting away then back to his face, too scared to lie.

“I know you did it, and I know why,” Cole James said, a dreadful light glistening in those long-lashed, pretty eyes.  I gently removed his hands from my sister’s shoulder, and he dropped them to his sides.

“I’m very sorry  about what happened to your father, Mr. James.  We used to live under…him.. in the old Hayes Homes.”  I hesitated about the family bit, not sure how he felt about his siblings.

“I know who you are, Ms. Hayle.  I remember your brother from the old days. Respected  him.”

“Then you must know that nobody in my family would be capable of shooting your father like that.”

“Ask her what why she came back here. Ask her about what she thinks is payback.”

“I will,” I said, my voice controlled and reasonable.

“I been coming back,” Pet said, stepping from behind my back, taunting him. I hid my surprise, not taking my eyes off him. “And what happened all them years back happened. I seen worst than that shit last week.”

“Look at yourself, you foul-mouthed old  tramp! A filthy, dried-up old tramp who my father never even looked at good.” The disgust in his voice hit their mark hard. Pet cringed, her gaze dropping to the ground. I followed it down, noting for the first time her torn, dirty sneakers.

Then she picked her head back up. “Why don’t you ask your tramp of a mama about killing him,” she said in a low, hard voice.  “Ask Dorothea James. She had more reason to kill him than I could ever have in this lifetime or the next.”

As he balled his hand into a fist and drew his body tight, I caught my breath.  Then he relaxed, glancing back at the building we’d just left,remembering maybe just where we were standing.

“Let’s go,” I said guiding my sister away from him.

“I’ll get you for this,” he said, grabbing for Pet again, but she dodged him this time, pulling herself up straight to confront him.

“You ain’t getting me for shit cause I ain’t done shit,” she said.

But she was trembling by the time we got to the car. She climbed into the front seat and closed her eyes, clutching herself tightly.

I told her not to worry about Cole James because  he was just one cop in a whole department and they wouldn’t let him anywhere near the case  because the victim was his father. That seemed to make her feel better, and she  nodded as if she understood. I asked her if she was hungry and what she wanted to eat and she said McDonalds so we stopped at the big one on Central Avenue on the way back to the house.

I hadn’t eaten at McDonalds since Jamal was a child, but the smell of  those salty fries and  greasy hamburgers made my stomach growl with hunger. I ordered  drinks,  fries and Big Macs  for both of us and sat down across from her at a table.  She gobbled down her hamburger so fast I gave her half of mine. I sipped  my coffee as she polished off my fries and when she finished, she leaned back in the chair, closing her eyes like she had  in the car.

“So how long you been living here and there?”

“Couple of years. Made money where I could. You name it Angel I been it.” She looked around the restaurant and chuckled. “I worked at a Mickey Ds outside Philly for a minute. Always had me in the back though, put the young ones in front. Think I’d be sick of the smell, but sometimes it’s all I want to eat.

“Cleaned old ladies’ butts in  Boston, bussed tables in New Haven.  That’s just the legal ones,” she added with a wink. “I ain’t never tricked, though. Could have made big money if I had. I was pretty back in the day. Worked bars in Providence till I lost my side tooth, couldn’t smile wide no more then. Got as far west as Chi-town. Married for a minute then got tired of him going upside my head. Had enough of that with Mama, so I wasn’t there long. You was married, too, weren’t you, Angel?”

“Briefly,” I said, frowning at the thought. “Who told you about that?”

“Truman.”

“So you talk to him a lot, huh? Not to nobody else?”  I said and she shrugged lazily. Not sure what to say to that, I went to the front counter to buy her an apple pie and me some more coffee. She was pulling  hard on a cigarette when I sat back down.

“You got to go outside and smoke,” I said, and she stuffed it out on the foil on her plate, tucking the dead butt back into the carton.

“So you never came back to Newark?”

“Nope. One place I stayed away from. Too much shit.”

Was she lying to me or Cole James?

“What kind of shit?”

“Shit that’s none of your business,” she said, finishing off her apple pie and wiping her mouth with her hand.

Stung by her tone, I leaned back in my chair studying her face.  That nagging ache that came before the hugs and all the talk about grandma was back along with a string of “shouldn’t’aves” : shouldn’t’ave paid that damn bail, shouldn’t’ave  opened my damn house, shouldn’t’ave picked up that damn phone in the first place.

“What you thinking about, Angel,” she said, as sweet as could be, which really pissed me off.

How hard would it be, I wondered, to duck out the back door and leave her sorry butt sitting here?

But after she finished her coke she followed me out of McDonald’s, ragged sneakers slapping loudly on the floor  as we headed out the door.  When we were inside the car, I turned on the air-conditioner but didn’t start it.  She pulled out the left-over cigarette butt stuffing tobacco back into the torn paper with her thumb.

“We got to get some things straight before we leave,”  I said. She lit the cigarette, and I snatched it out of her mouth, nearly burning my fingers in the process.  I stuffed it out in the ashtray, and her eyes grew big with hurt.

“Like what?” she said, indignant.

“Like, you never smoke in my car or my house. Got it?”

She chuckled. “You one of them health nuts? Who would have thought it, Angel, the way you used to wolf down them Snickers bars I used to bring you.”

“Second, don’t call me Angel. I’m not your angel. Third I want to know what Cole James meant when he said you had reason to kill his father.”

“Ain’t nothing to it.”

“Then get out my damn car, Petula Hayes. Get your skinny ass out my car.”  I reached across her and popped open the lock.

“Why you need to know?” she said in a small voice.

“Because I need to know everything we’re dealing with,” I said, more gently.

She stared straight ahead. “I can’t tell it without a cigarette. That much I know.”

I rolled down the windows and she lit her cigarette, drawing the smoke in deep.

“You don’t remember what happened the day I left, do you? About that fight me and mama had?” I shook my head. That night had stayed with me but not the day.

“I ran out the house swearing I was grown and it would be the last time she’d ever see me not knowing it would be. ”

“Where did you go?”

“It was my birthday. Eighteen-years old. Don’t you remember that caramel cake grandma baked the night before? Smell of caramel still bring  tears to my eyes.   Didn’t know shit that day, though, thought I knew every damn thing in the world. So he told me to come with him.”

“Who told you to go where?”

“Who we talking about? Coleman Hawthorne. Told me when I turned 18 to come over there to that bar and get myself a drink . Said it the night before. He’d brought Daddy home stinking drunk.  I was sitting at the table,  grandma had just brought the cake.  So that was just what I did after that fight with mama.”

“What did you fight about?”

She shrugged off-handedly. “What time I had to be home. What I owed them for raising me.  But I was eighteen and wasn’t about to put up with her shit.  I’d  gotten myself an application to Upsala College over there in East Orange, figured it was time to make something of myself. I was feeling grown so I figured that was just what I was going to do, go over there and get myself a drink.

“You remember him back in the day? Good-looking something. Gave those beautiful eyes to both  his sons. Used to wear shades all the time, black and skinny.  Them eyes were like cat’s eyes and when he took them shades off, they followed you around like a cat’s do, tracking down a mouse. He was strong like a wrestler, too. Women stood at attention,  skirts  hiked above their drawers, when he strolled into a room.  I don’t know what he saw in a kid like me.”

“All I remember about  Coleman Hawthorne was that he always brought stuff home from the bar. Nuts for me. Pretzels. Port wine for Mama. I thought he was nice.”

“There wasn’t nothing nice about him,” Pet said.  “So I went over there, cute as I wanna be, sat down big and bad at the bar, and he gave me everything I wanted to drink. Singapore slings, mostly. Kids’ drinks. Shit, I must have been there close to three hours, bar was closing and he said, all casual-like. It’s your 18^th birthday, Pet, want to go somewhere special after I close up here. He  said it so sweet and pretty and I remember that to this day how pretty he said it, and I was too drunk to talk but I must have told him yeah, because everything my mama had told me not to do I doing, and so I must have told him yes.

“ I figured he was going to take me to a show or something like that.  We went out to his car, after all these years, Angel, I remember that damn car. Tan, big like a hearse. But the car smelled bad, like somebody had puked in it then covered it up.  To this day,  I get sick when I smell them damn pine cardboard things folks hang in their cars.

“Ended up at some broke-down shit hole on route 3, took me into a room,  laid me down on the bed. This here is your birthday gift from me, he said, and he took off my skirt and pulled down my panties.

“I’d only done it twice before. Just twice, but I used to talk like I had done it lots,  walked like I had but I  sure didn’t want to do it with him, not like that, and I told him so but he just kept on at it, and I started crying because I was scared like the kid I was and then I said think about Althea, Coleman, think about my daddy don’t this to me and he slapped me twice so hard across the mouth I thought he broke my nose then stuffed my own panties in my mouth.

“Then he raped me, Angel. He did it so long and rough I couldn’t get up and walk. I just lay there bleeding.  He  tore me up so bad  I peed right there on the bed, laying  right there under him, under all that dead weight. Then  he sat up  and smoked a cigarette. You ready to go now, he said. You ready to go home?

“I couldn’t do nothing but cry, so he put some money on the night table, tucked it neat and proper right under the ashtray then  told me to call myself a cab when I got ready then he kissed me on the cheek and left.”

Pet pulled out another cigarette and tried to light a cigarette but her hand was shaking so hard she could’t keep the match steady, so I reached over and helped her hold it, and she glanced at me with a small, sad smile.

“I rolled the washcloth up tight and stuffed it high in me when I got in the shower, trying to wash him out, but I could still smell him, feel him, then I  took the money and went home.

“The elevator stopped on his floor; I don’t know why.  Maybe somebody had pushed it and changed their minds. Maybe it was just one of  Satan’s  little tricks. Something made me get out and walk to his apartment. Don’t ask me what I was going to say to him, maybe it was her I  wanted to see.  Show her what he’d done to me.  My eye had swelled big and purple by then and my hair was standing all over my head.  Somebody come toward the door when I rang but didn’t open it.  I must have stood there and rung that damn bell ten times, but whoever it was didn’t give a shit.

“When I went home, Daddy was drunk. She was asleep, sick and tired of him. Johnny was running the streets. I just said good bye to you and left.”

“Where did you go?”

“Truman had moved in with friends and I went over there to see him because I knew he would believe what his father had done to me because he used to beat him and his mama every now and then. Didn’t know that about him, did you?” She added the last with a bitter chuckle, and I shook my head.

“Couldn’t the two of you…”

“I didn’t want to go to the cops. I was 18 and they’d probably think I’d brought it on myself.  Truman? He was always in trouble, which was why they threw him out in the first place. Truman had some money saved so  I took the first  bus I could catch. Providence, Rhode Island. ”

As I took her story into me, my hatred toward this man who had done this to sister overwhelmed me. Yet still there was the question she hadn’t answered, and I had to know.

“Why now, Pet? Why did you finally come home?”

She gave me a strange, crooked smile. “I saw a picture of him in the paper, grinning with his old crippled wife and something  came over me. When a man takes you ugly like that, he rips the soul right out your flesh. I needed to say something to him, make him face what he’d done to me. Didn’t get a chance, did I?”

She lazily blew cigarette smoke out the window then touched my cheek like she used to do when I was a kid.

“The one thing I thought about during all these years, the one sweet thing, was you, Angel.  I had some bad times, but you were in the good ones just the way you looked back then, so pretty and sweet, with them braids grandma used to plait and them red ribbons I used to buy you at Two Guys.  My own little angel tucked deep inside me in a place he didn’t touch.”

I held my sister tight then. For all the years I’d missed her and all the ones I hoped we’d have, and with everything I had in me, I promised I’d get her out of this mess.

“Danny died Tuesday,” Parker’s tight voice announces.

“I’m not having a good day,” I tell the answering machine, refusing to pick up. “I’m not having a good day at all. Why don’t you call back with a better message?”

“Brian, are you there?” Parker says. “Pick up the fucking phone. Are you there?” I can hear him gnashing his teeth. “The memorial service is Saturday morning at…”

“Hello.”

“I knew you were there. Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I’m not going.”

“Yes you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’ll feel like shit forever if you don’t go.”

“I’ll feel like shit forever anyway. Feeling like shit is my natural state.”

“I booked you a flight,” Parker says. “Delta 202 at 3:30 tomorrow out of San Jose. I’ll pick you up at Logan baggage claim.”

“Parker, I’m not…”

He hangs up.

Danny, always full of surprises, is now distinguished by being the only straight male graduate of an Ivy League school —in my acquaintance— to die from AIDS.

In San Jose, I park the car in long term, after some hectic business with the ticket machine.

The ticket comes out, the gate goes up, you drive through. I know this. I pushed the button, removed the ticket, and took my foot off the clutch: 1, 2, 3 — and my car hopped forward, rammed into the yellow wooden arm, causing the parking guy to gallop out of his booth, waving both hands like someone at a crash scene.

“I’m sorry, man,” I said. “It’s not my car. I didn’t know it was gonna do that.”

“Whose car is it?” the guy asked, like it was any of his business.

“A friend’s,” I said, pushing down on the clutch and shifting into first.

“Nice,” the guy said.

“Look, I’m sorry about your gate, but I have to get to a funeral,” I said, easing forward.

“Sure,” the guy said.

I can smell the lilies already. Danny’s mom will be there, looking taut, like she always does, and his father…

The skin around my eyes feels strained, and my hand wobbles on the stick. I put the ticket on the dashboard, where it sticks conveniently in a mysterious furry substance.

Why don’t I ever have anybody to drop me off at times like this?

When I met Danny he’d just come from a wake. He was standing in the hallway outside Parker’s dorm room, wearing a sharp-creased black suit. We waited for Parker to return with our meds, and struck up a conversation. Danny cracked jokes about the deceased, his aunt Violet —he described her as a fat, domineering and dry-skinned woman who flaked in stressful situations— which seemed irreverent, even to me. I sensed possibilities.

Tall, with thick sandy hair, freckles and blue eyes, he came from one of those big Irish Catholic families in which somebody died or got married every weekend. He carried the noise of the crowd with him. I was struck for the first time by the fact that I was really a very average-looking guy.

It was a sunny, late September day, and the light turned the brick buildings on the quad rose. Parker showed up acting twitchy and irritable, handed each of us a Chinese take-out container rattling with pills, and sent us on our way. (Dispensing medication has always come naturally to Parker, which may have accounted for his decision to become a doctor.)

Danny and I got a bottle and rode around town in my cast-off Mercury, yelling out the windows at women, exaggerating about past misdeeds and feeding ourselves pills at intervals until we wound up slumped over the hood of the car, laughing hysterically about what I can’t remember. My bad intentions fused with his disregard for consequence, and we formed a friendship that seemed like the stuff of legend.

That was over ten years ago, long before Karin, detox, that damn dirty needle.

I grab my backpack. In it are a pair of Spider Man pajamas and a box of No-Doz. For old time’s sake.

“Inappropriate funeral attire, Brian,” Parker will say.

Reflexively, I’ll defend myself: “Peter Pan packed my bag.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” he’ll reply. “Peter Pan is dead. Here. Wear this white shirt.”

Since Parker stopped self-prescribing he’s become downright ornery. He lost patience with me several years back anyhow, when I borrowed his new red Volkswagen and mashed it against a tree. Blood-alcohol level: High. Recollection of event: None. There were a few seconds of stunning clarity after I began to feel the pavement digging into my face, but Parker is not interested in hearing about that. He’s not one for war stories, especially if they involve the destruction of his property.

Well, he shouldn’t have loaned me the car, anyway. I’ve always had difficulty managing my personal effects — let alone anybody else’s. There’s a dream I have every so often that I’m walking through a strange city and everywhere I look there is something that belongs to me, deposited randomly on the sidewalk or in a bush. Underwear. Gloves. Framed photographs of the people who used to love me.

Writing my name on the baggage claim stub, I get stuck on the address. How can I not know my own address? The clerk looks at me with measured patience.

“New place,” I lie.

When Karin left I was asleep. I woke up to the cold, literally. It was two degrees outside according to the thermometer and she’d opened every window. I yanked the storms down, pinching my fingers in the metal tracks.God FUCKING DAMN IT!

“Just put your phone number, sir,” the clerk suggests.

Phone number. My handwriting looks foreign to me.

There I was, standing in the middle of the living room, blood on my fingers, cats cowering next to the couch, my dick the size of an acorn. And who did I call?

“Has anyone you don’t know approached you and asked you to carry something?” the clerk asks.

My best friend Danny.

“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

“Have your bags been under your control since you packed them?”

“Sort of.”

And where was my girlfriend?

“Sort of?”

“Yes.”

Sniffling in his bed.

“Airport security is a serious matter, sir. Have your bags been under your control since you packed them?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“Thank you. You can board at gate C16, through the double doors on the right.”

I didn’t find out until much, much later. I’d like to say that when I found out, enough time had passed that it wasn’t a big deal. No problem. Hey, all’s well that ends well. That’s what Danny would have said. He would’ve meant it, too. And why not? Women fell all over him like he emitted some kind of nerve gas.

My pack gets jumbled up with somebody’s laptop and a large, fake leather purse, and I think the thing I always think: I want what they have. I want to take up the objects and duties of somebody else’s life and install myself there, with the lipstick and menthol cigarettes, the business reports and car insurance payments.

II.

AA has made me into a nervous classifier of people — I can spot a habit from ten blocks away. Coke. Pills. Pot. Crack. But me? I just drank myself into a grotesque stupor every night, with the occasional prescription binge for variety.

Danny was, of course, more adventurous. He truly believed he could do anything he wanted to with absolutely no repercussions. Somehow his voracious appetites made him endearing.

Here’s a tip. If your girlfriend ever describes a friend of yours as endearing, you’re done for. Their eyes are already meeting across the crowded room. Endearing. Obviously she’d never witnessed him projectile vomiting out the window of a speeding car. My car. Took the paint right off it.

I explained to Danny once that I started drinking to make myself more permeable, more able to experience things. More like him, I guess. But getting loaded never broke my surface; it just curdled my character. We were sitting on the wave-splashed rocks edging his family’s summer place in Maine, where we would later host a large and incredibly destructive party.

“You think too much,” he replied, one hand flapping around until it lit on something to do. Like comb quickly through his shiny hair, or pinch at his eternally itchy nose.

“Somebody’s got to,” I said. He laughed and slapped me on the back. Things were too easy for him: good-looking, funny, smart. Money falling like fat fruit from the American Dream tree.

If I ever have children, I’ve got one piece of advice for them: Don’t hang out with rich kids. You’ll finish college on your hard-won scholarship and they’ll go off to Kenya to save some rare fucking species of wild cat until they sort themselves out. Meanwhile, you’ll be eating ramen noodles and tuna fish and dreading the arrival of yet another breezy postcard with a foreign stamp.

Danny could sail a boat to Cuba and shoot up with a lower-tier rock star in the space of a five-minute conversation, his body gulping the very air as if he just couldn’t get enough of it. He drank for the same reason he did everything else — to propel himself from one exhilarating moment of being Danny to the next.

At gate C16 I buy a package of Lifesavers and a Harper’s from the newsstand, and sit down in a row of empty chairs. The molded plastic seats are grubby, the carpet a jarring shade of blue with brown triangles on it.

Everything seems ugly and old — am I still in California? I flip through the Harper’s, wondering at how people can care enough about something other than themselves to write impassioned letters to the editor.

I don’t have to go to this funeral. No one will miss me. Mr. and Mrs. O’Hara certainly won’t. The last time I saw Mrs. O’Hara was when she caught me in her master bathroom, sniffing her towel, with a cap of prescription tranquilizers and a nice cold glass of tap water. They’ll greet me with a glazed look indicating they wish I hadn’t come and direct me to the back corner of the church where the acquaintances go.

His fraternity friends from school will be there, all those hale and hearty boys who could do more blow than Scarface and not even dent their trust funds. They’ll be placed front and center, a row or two behind the aunts, uncles and cousins.

If Danny showed up for my funeral, my mother would forget I was dead and take him out to lunch.

If he were sitting here in the airport, he’d probably be reading Esquire, a magazine he could peruse without noting any ironic disparities between his lifestyle and the one advertised. He went out with the kind of girls you see on the periphery in celebrity magazines, the bony, shiny-haired types who pose for photos with their equally bony, shiny-haired friends. Not famous, but attentive to the lifestyles and fashions equated with fame. Decorative girls. Danny decorated himself with a lot of them — their kiwi-colored handbags and little beaded dresses were always draped over chairs in his apartment.

So why Karin? Karin is not beautiful. If it weren’t for her red hair and her long-fingered hands, she’d be downright plain. This fact always gave me comfort. She was mine. Men never looked at her for more than a moment, unless she was walking away from them.

At wedding number eight last summer — Joe and Allison from school, sweethearts all this time — Parker wanted to know why I never came to visit Danny in the hospital. I stood staring at the green hump of land outside our hotel window while Parker fastened his tie in the mirror.

“Because he’s sick,” I said.

“He’s sick,” Parker said.

“He’s sick he’s sick he’s sick. He’s sunken and yellow and bruised and covered in sores.”

“How do you know that? You haven’t been to see him.”

“I’ve read about it.”

“You’ve read about it,” Parker said, his voice dropping an octave. He’s going to hit me, I thought. He is definitely going to hit me. “You know you can’t catch anything by showing a little fucking compassion and going to see him, right? He’s not gonna be around for much longer.”

“I’m not a doctor,” I said.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Parker demanded, turning to face me.

“I’m not a fucking doctor. I’m not prepared to deal with that shit.”

“Everybody dies,” Parker said, like he was talking to a kid that had lost a pet turtle.

“Not like that,” I said.

“Get out,” Parker said quietly.

“No,” I said. “There’s something you’re forgetting.”

“What am I fucking forgetting?” Parker asked.

“You hooked him.”

Parker’s fist spun through the air like a star, landing on my right cheekbone, and I fell against the trimly made bed.

“You did it, man, you hooked him. He put you through school,” I said and closed my eyes, waiting for round two.

Parker stood over me, his manicured hands open, his face fixed like something under glass. Then he reached down and helped me up. One of these times we won’t forgive each other, and then I’ll be free of everything except the memories of my past.

I seem to be working toward that goal more quickly than I intended.

All the bored faces in first class scroll over us lesser passengers as we trundle our baggage to the back of the plane, stalled behind a kid in a striped shirt whining for a soda, and an old, old lady in a lavender suit whose handbag clips people sitting on the aisle every couple of seats.

I watch a sated-looking man with a large platinum ring twingle his icecubes in bourbon and wad the Times around himself like a tarp, and I have to fight the urge to turn around, to shove back out into the terminal as though I’ve just arrived.

I read a story in the paper once about three drunk businessmen who got off an international flight and stole a baggage trolley. They careened around the runway until airport security caught up with them, guns drawn.

Then, the giddy businessmen leapt off the cart and ran toward the terminal. One of them, seeing a large hole in the ground, jumped to safety. Or so he thought. The hole was an automatic trash compactor, and as his blue-suited body fell past the sensor, the machine activated, its metal sides pressing forward, crushing him into a businessman-shaped cube. His two buddies stopped running at the brief and terrible sound of his scream.

Moral of the story is…?

Danny, who, when I told him this story, had just celebrated six months of sobriety, said, “Booze, man. See where it takes ya?”

This from the same man who did a naked barrel roll on a keg at our five-year college reunion, rising to scattered applause with confetti in his hair.

I couldn’t agree.

“I think it’s unfair,” I said. “The poor son-of-a-bitch.” What a moment that must have been, that exhilarating second in the air before darkness closed over him.

III.

The trouble with recovery as I see it is the emphasis on God.

“Why don’t we just can all this higher power crap?” I said at last night’s meeting. “I’ll just pick up my lifetime supply of cigarettes and Diet Coke and we can leave it at that.”

I could see in the carefully neutral expressions of my peers that they thought I was failing to process my issues.

“I don’t have issues,” I told them, and stood up. “I’m missing a piece. I feel nothing. I’m a sociopath.”

“Brian,” somebody whispered. “We can help you work through this. You’re obviously experiencing a lot of pain over your friend’s death.”

I remained standing. I’d made the mistake of telling the group about the phone calls. Three in the last month. What did he want? To get right with me before he died? Apologize? Not Danny. Rationalize, joke, disregard. At least that’s what I assumed he wanted, because I never actually picked up.

Legs crossed and recrossed, everybody leaned forward and looked at me. The whiff of guilt in the air was like blood in the water. These were people, like me, who had repeatedly let down the ones they loved — I was about to tell their favorite kind of story. Their eyes were focussed, their tongues tasted good in their mouths.

“Fuck YOU,” I said, and walked out the door, with a fleeting sense of victory that evaporated before I made it onto the street.

While the plane is taking off, I concentrate on a feeling of lightness, disconnection from the ground. I look out the window, and think, UP, UP, UP! After we reach cruising altitude I let out my breath and watch the clouds. The stewardess minces by, her bleached courtesy devoid of sex appeal. How did I end up on an airline where they still wear navy blue bows? She asks me what I would like.

I’d like a blow job, I think. She wrinkles her nose as though a distasteful image has come to her, and shimmies the cart impatiently.

“Orange juice,” I say. “On the rocks.”

She smiles with her mouth only, a barely perceptible lip exercise that does not affect the rest of her face. She leaves me with a cup of orange juice that tastes like a can. Aluminum juice. No doubt it’s toxic. Everything is toxic, even spring water. All the innocent pleasures of the past — Coca-Cola, Mountain Springs, Sex with Stewardesses — contain lethal possibilities.

The woman next to me smells like a casserole. She wears a small gold heart dangling over the top of her turtleneck, which is a disconcerting shade of peach. She looks as though she’s lost something. Her mouth forms a sad “O” and her eyes are fixed on the seatback in front of her. The tufty brown-gray hair of the man seated there pokes hopefully up. He’s got a happy head. Some people you can just tell, looking at their hands or the backs of their heads, that they are happy.

“Why?” I want to ask them.

About a year after Karin left I decided to get sober. I’d woken up on a cold concrete stoop, half-a-block from my apartment, urine making a map on my pant leg. Danny’d gone into detox a couple of months ahead of me, after passing out in the champagne fountain at his sister Elizabeth’s wedding.

Of course, he cleaned right up like a copper penny. He made friends with the staff at The Clinic, and the women in particular were all deeply concerned for his welfare. An endless network of entertaining new alcoholic pals appeared: Bud, Leonard, Marianne, Louise. He made detox sound like such a good time, I thought I’d go.

All the sitcom types checked out before I arrived, however. My liver was sounding an organ-failure alert that made my whole body feel sick and weak. Everybody seemed ugly, smelly, and liable to steal the few possessions I’d brought along. The staff had clean, cracked hands and supercilious smiles. And I took up smoking, which doesn’t suit me.

When Parker and Danny came to cheer me up in the stir, the first thing Parker said was “Christ, Brian, you look like shit.” I’d been playing cards with my roommate, Hank, a grouchy third-timer who didn’t give me much hope for the future. I’d beaten him at round after round of gin — what a game! — until finally I started losing deliberately on Hank’s behalf.

“Thanks a million, Parker,” I said, and we all slapped hands and went down the hall to the lounge, where a couple of candy stripers came to check up on Danny.

The way he leaned back in the overstuffed chair, one foot on the coffee table, so at ease, made me want to slug him. Parker just fidgeted with the inspirational literature and looked vaguely disdainful, or dismayed, I wasn’t sure which. Hard to tell with him — his drying-out process had been far more dignified than either mine or Danny’s. He just stopped, one day. Mr. Willpower and the Stud, not the two guys you want seeing you all unshaven and fat beneath the fluorescent lights.

“Hang in there, man,” Danny said on his way out. “I’m here for ya.”

The woman next to me has allowed her two small packages of peanuts to slip down into the V-shaped wedge between her stretchpant-clad thighs. I try not to think about that, or about putting my hand in for a peanut rescue attempt.

I want to say something to her, but she stares resolutely ahead at Happy Hair and her fingers do little convulsive prong/grip, prong/grip motions on the metal ends of the armrests.

I realize then that she is afraid. She hasn’t been thinking thoughts of up, but of down. She’ll jeopardize us all.

“Lifesaver?” I ask her, and she looks at me as though I have threatened to open the escape hatch and flush her out of the plane. I reach into my pocket, which is trapped beneath the seatbelt, and my fingers struggle around in the tweediness for a minute before I come up with the half-gone package of Lifesavers, a glob of lint clinging to the top.

One thing I don’t miss about the good old days is attempting to reconstruct the details of the night before: where did my keys go, what happened to my shoes, who was the recipient of my midnight phone call?

Numerous women have had the pleasure of being on The List, but mostly Karin, until we moved in together, and I bought her a ring that I hid in my sock drawer because the right opportunity just never arose. I was usually too busy apologizing to propose. Now that I live sober and alone in a two-room carpeted shithole the telephone tempts me anew:

Call her, she’ll come keep you warm. Call her, she’ll understand. She needs you. You need her. Give her a ring. She’ll think it’s touching you mix up the beginnings and endings of your sentences, so nervous, so dazed with love.

Or maybe she’ll just think you’re drunk.

Tell her it’s just the phone jitters — it’s been so long. She misses you. You miss her. She wants you back. Of course she does.

But I know from experience that this same telephone will pretend not to know me in the morning. I thought that after a while without her the middle of the night would be different. It’s not. I get up, around four or five a.m., and walk down the hall to the bathroom, sensing through the black panes of the curtainless windows that the night is empty, the sky endless and blank.

“What’s your name?” I ask the woman next to me, in as affable and harmless a manner as I can muster. It comes out sounding like “It’s a nice day.” Perfect. It’s a nice day, what’s your name?

“Susan,” she answers, and adds in a whisper, “I hate flying.” I think this is kind of her. Nothing worse than loud proclamations of fear on board ship. Brings down morale.

“I’m not crazy about it either,” I say. “What I do is, I pretend I’m flying the plane. That way, I’m busy while we’re taking off — pulling the throttle, pushing all those buttons…”

Susan looks ill.

“But I’m not actually doing anything,” I say, holding my hands out so she can see I haven’t been messing with any controls. “It’s just a distraction.” We’re bumping along between thin sheets of clouds, cotton candy pulled to pieces and laid across the sky. I don’t tell her that I always try to get a seat near the wing, upon which I imagine strippers doing a complicated, nasty number just for me.

“You know what I do?” Susan says.

“No,” I answer, unexpectedly turned on.

“I take two Valiums and drink a shot of Absolut before I get on the plane.” I look at her face, a round, soft-featured face with hazel-brown eyes and the kind of perky, good-natured nose that starts to look out of place on a woman as she ages.

“Oh,” I say.

She smiles and blinks slowly as if to accentuate her artificial relaxation. Her throat is tanned and a little wrinkly — she’s probably in her early forties. Is she flying towards or away from her husband? How attached is she to the idea of being married?

“You have any more of those?” I ask her, and a small, smooth rock slides down my throat, rests cold against my ribs. Please say no, I think. Please say no.

On the last legendary night of our drinking careers, Danny and I got loaded on the way to see the Rolling Stones at Foxboro. We were arguing about which song was the single greatest Stones song ever.

“Emotional Rescue,” I said, steering Parker’s new red VW into the passing lane.

“Bullshit,” Danny said, swishing some pricey bogwater around his mouth. “Beast of Burden is their best song, no competition.”

“Overplayed,” I said.

“Here,” he said, passing me the bottle. “Go up that entrance ramp.”

“Are you fucking crazy?” I said, single-malt cooling my tongue.

“Do it do it do it GO!”

I swung the VW across two lanes and hurtled around the corner up the ramp, both of us yelling and whooping and the car rattling from the speed, the terrified face of a woman driving a Yugo swerving to avoid us and then we popped over the curb and onto the Northbound, hearts pumping inside our heads.

“Woohoo,” Danny said, laughing, leaning back against the seat. “Atta boy. Don’t think so much.”

It was on the way home that the tree leaned out to embrace the car, and we woke up with blood all over our faces, me with one shoe missing, and Danny’s collar bone cracked.

“Get Offa My Cloud,” Danny said, as the paramedics loaded him into the back of the ambulance, and I shook my head. A decidedly minor song.

He’d spent some time in the parking lot with a long-haired rocker who claimed to have opened for the Stones in New York City in ‘78. The needle slid in, slid out, just another story to tell. I was hunched over a bonfire in a can, listening to a bunch of Harley riders talk about how they were going to kill me.

IV.

“Yes,” Susan says. “You want some?”

This is the kind of situation I always find myself in. I ask for things, I make bad decisions. I want. Danny never really wanted anything. Because it never occurred to him that he wouldn’t get whatever he desired.

Susan looks at me expectantly.

I taste the chalky aftertaste in the back of my mouth, feel my body sink into the seat. The heaviness around my eyes, and later, the feeling of being separated from something, when the pills wear off. The feeling of being left behind.

“Yeah,” I say. I feel like something is trying to escape my chest, the air slowly compressed out of me.

Up, up, up.

“Nurse,” I say, as the stewardess passes by, handing out headphones. “Could I have some vodka for this orange juice?”

She gives me a suspicious look, reaches into the metal recesses of her cart, and extracts a tiny bottle.

Bitch, I think at her. Bitch bitch bitch.

“Do you want these?” Susan asks, pulling the packets of peanuts from their warm resting place. “Salt makes me feel bloated, especially on a plane. You lose half a gallon of water as soon as the thing takes off. Sucks the moisture right out of you.”

To demonstrate my faith in her pronouncement, I hydrate myself with my newly improved drink.

The very last time I saw Danny, we were standing outside the YMCA in the cold, swapping tales with the rest of the Tuesday regulars. All I can see in my mind’s eye are chapped, red hands knuckling cigarettes and breath vaporizing the air. Storytime. After the meeting is when the real details get leaked.

Then I hit my wife in the face with a wrench.

Danny was telling our Rolling Stones adventure, in nitty-gritty detail, and I was busy digesting the fact that he and Karin had been doing the dirty the whole while I was suffering the worst bender of my life.

“I thought you knew,” Parker had said at the end of my long pause during what I thought was just a routine phone call. “Son-of-a-bitch. How could you not know?”

My thoughts swarmed around like bees, as I watched the regulars respond to Danny’s exaggerations, laughing in all the right places. I watched his jaw shaping words until my mind was blackened and stinging, and when he got to the part about the blow-up dolls inflating during “Honky Tonk Women,” I threw him down in a snow bank and punched him in the face as hard as I could, until the other guys pulled me off him.

I don’t remember this, but apparently I was sobbing like a baby, and saying embarrassing things, like: “I thought you were my friend,” and “How was it, fucking your best friend’s girl?” A bad movie.

In one of my imagined versions of this moment, a plow goes by, scraping along with a gunnel of snow pouring out one side and whiting over the salt and exhaust-covered banks. Danny and I are caught up, and we roll along underneath it, tossed in the air and scraped back over and over again, the yellow lights illuminating the praying faces of our audience. Deus Ex. Killed by a snow plow.

In another, he says, “I’m sorry man, I’m sorry,” and we bear hug and walk away from the scene, our noses bleeding, the remaining onlookers baffled and moved by the strength of our bond.

We certainly don’t get into separate cars and drive away, never to speak again.

Susan refuses the headset, and so do I. The better to hear one of the engines falling out, or the stud-bolting rip of the wing disattaching itself from the plane. I can’t watch any more movies, anyway, especially not the happy-ending pap they show on public transportation. In the end, Danny and I were made of movies — our first year of sobriety was one big double feature. We’d watch anything: bloated Hollywood melodramas, goofy romantic comedies, horror flicks, animated films, long-winded French movies — so long as it took up the hours between seven and eleven p.m. The worst hours of the day, any alcoholic will tell you. Seamed with temptation. The people inside the misted pub windows look like they’re having such a good time, it seems entirely possible to drink like a normal person.

And thank God for those romantic sub-plots, right?

“Are you visiting friends in Boston?” Susan asks.

“Uhh…”

“Just a business trip?” she offers, surveying my tatty tweed jacket, wrinkled shirt and splotched jeans. Maybe I’m one of those freelance types who never has to leave his living room?

“No,” I say, pleased to have a definite answer.

She waits a moment.

“Girlfriend?”

“Oh-haha-no.” I’m beginning to enjoy this game.

“Family.”

“No, thank God.”

She laughs at this. “I know what you mean.”

“I’m going to a funeral,” I say, with a relaxed smile to let her know that I’ve been to a lot of funerals, I like the free food, it’s no big deal, don’t sweat it. Just a dead guy.

“Oh God. I’m sorry. Was it someone you were close to?”

“No,” I say.

Silence hums in the pressurized cabin for a long moment.

“Would you mind putting your shade down just a little bit?” I say. “The sun’s getting in my eyes.”

“Are you okay?” Susan asks.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

I order some more improvement from the stewardess. It slides cool and familiar down my throat, filling out all the empty pockets in my gut where my feelings used to reside. I watch the shadow of the plane move along the ground.

It grows small, smaller, then larger, moving closer and closer across the pressed-in houses and tiny parking lots, until it looks like a whiskered shark, and the flaps on the wings groan open, exposing the fragile-looking mechanics that keep us aloft.

the whole planet woven back and forth with invisible bonds of electricity,

the Big Top of everything-there-is staked down in the wind.

But haven’t we always been connected, one way or another—

by goat track, torch-wave, smoke signal, arrow-flight?

Hasn’t the air been filled with pigeons hauling messages on their legs,

the ocean a blue-maned pony express galloping between

unreachable coasts to deliver its bottle-stoppered notes?

And what about the Pony Express, the real one, intrepid cowboys

streaking deserts, clattering mountains, fording rivers

so rapidly those ponies soon transmogrified into speeding trucks?

And while we’re at it, what of rivers? Weren’t they a kind of wire,

connecting Red Wing with New Orleans, Rybinsk and Astrakhan,

watery cables shunting messages across tracts of land

so vast it must have seemed “world-wide” to men with poles

in open boats bearing dispatches from the throne.

Driving the interstate highway system, one thinks of how it weaves

the whole country together in a kind of asphalt net—

the cracked pavement in front of my door in New York

directly linked to the sun-baked tar in front of yours in L. A.

On one of those highways my friend said: “we have the greatest

technologies now to communicate with each other, but almost nothing

to say!” It’s like that sign I saw on a building once: “So little to say,

and so much time.” But now we have the “World Wide Web,”

sizzling shroud of ohms bearing messages at warp speed

between continents and coasts. Words without substance,

a language, at last, of pure light spoken by machines that think

in streams of digits and pixels, that Pointillism of hyperspace

painting a picture of universal communication and understanding.

Yet what is that to the brain, one hundred billion neurons

firing wildly at once, more plentiful than stars, this burning bush

of a human brain from which voices emanate as from a sacred cave?

And what is that to a strand of DNA—microcosmic braid of species,

boundless helix of generations, myriad-skein of eternal life?

Network, system, web, mesh, maze, tapestry, reticulum and grid.

What rage for connection! What urge to unite! To be less

than single, more than one, unconcerned finally

with what is communicated, but communion itself.

This world-wide desire to be contacted and found.

I worked in an orchard. Young, good

with a ladder, I pruned apple trees,

lopped crossed limbs, nipped spurs,

and comforted myself with the notion
my brother was busy underground
carefully disentangling the long roots,
season after season, tree by tree;

but now I know there are people
who tread the earth like water
because below them their dead
are trying to grasp their ankles

and pull them under, so I know

how lucky I am and how grateful

I ought to be: sick for long years

my brother begrudged me nothing.

for R.J.H. 1950-1972

charged with holding up the sky.

Neither of them are aware of it;

they just do it. It’s who they are.

Others who know them are aware

that something’s different about them

and respond to them with either

adulation or hatred. At times both,

which amounts to envy. Usually

the two never meet. However,

sometimes, after many eons,

the simple law of averages requires

they come to know each other,

even intimately and inextricably.

Those two were your parents.

But you knew that, didn’t you?