---

 

1985

 

One

The avenues are huge black tunnels at night, shaped by hangnoose bursts of orange sodium lamps. For twenty one blocks the four-lane Louisville shrinks to its dim drawbridge conclusion. Traffic lights sputter in random contradiction, Christmas tree-like, nulling all possibility of orderly progress.

Above, the sky is a huge black sun, blotting out the heavens. At the end of this tunnel, beneath the drawbridge, spreads the river which divides the small city into separate and unequal halves.

The early-seventies vintage Mustang idles in the slow lane, on the fringe of a used car lot. The driver leans slightly out of the window, elbow pointed, watching the particular light in front of him as if the color sequence were a matter of specific interest. Green yellow red green. There is the possibility the order might change. Such has been known to occur. To him personally.

He has been driving for three hours, entirely within the limits of the municipality. For a municipality of less than 80,000, this entails a significant margin of repetitiousness. The run so far has been disappointing. A few hours earlier supper was achieved at a pizza buffet; the iced tea waitress was the same as the previous week. She remembered him with a pale smile, but it went no further, as before. Yet as his particular character would have it, he left the same generous and unnecessary tip.

In the habitual driving of his nights patterns have been established. Tonight incorporates alterations; a construction roadblock and general uneventfulness have edged him into a patrol of major thoroughfares; if nothing is happening, he must be missing something at the center. An earlier rain has kept traffic down, but the streets are now dry with wind, like summer drought.

Red, green. Huge openings are present along the avenue for merging. There's nobody out tonight, nobody. Red. The edge of the Holiday Grille. It has been some time, maybe years, since he has eaten there, and like the patient undergoing electro-shock therapy, something fuzzy and dark and unremembered hovers about the location. He knows this: there are patrons here who wear suits.

Then, on past. "Louisville, going past seventh, sixth, fifth, whoops--red light at fifth." He narrates his own progress. The most he makes at a time is three blocks, before the lights-- again.

Red. On the corner of a finance company parking lot. In the left lane beside him a low-rider Monte Carlo pulls up. The window on the passenger side scrolls down. Mac's windows are already down. He watches. White teeth in a dark unlit face. Mac smiles back, the edges of recognition gnawing at him, not quite coming. Someone he knows? Who? What can Mac call him? The face laughs at another face, which belongs to the driver. "Hey," Mac calls, pleased by the interchange, its existence. The answer is a pistol held out rigid halfway between the Monte Carlo and the Mustang. Then a shot. For the immediate Mac cannot hear anything. The white teeth still flashing. Mac knows he felt a breeze, like a fly. The Monte Carlo blasts through the red, down and across the drawbridge.

Green. Mac leaves the car parked, makes it to the parking lot of the Finance company, retches on concrete. For a moment after he sits, hands on knees. Red. Green. No other cars come by, on any of the four lanes. He gets up, clomps back in the driver's seat. There is no sign that anything ever happened. No glass, no hole, no blood. Mac sits. Red again.

Green. Finally go. Enduring the arcane wisdom of signals as far down as Sixth street, he turns right. Windowlamps of residences shy away as he passes, creating a vacuum of darkness. Municipally designated blocks accrete and fade, more numerous than the uninitiated would expect from the appearance of the modest frame-housed neighborhood. "Hudson, Stubbs. Roselawn." His voice a little quivery now, not unlike sports narrators after a ninth inning turnaround.

Sixth street ends. Somewhere in the 3000 numbers. Perpendicular opens Forsythe avenue, with its median of ancient dark trees. Across the avenue, a city park. Once more he crosses Forsythe for a run through the park: cars are weeknight sparse, no mysterious interior goings-on. The swimming pool, lights off; the handball court; swingsets and slides and mini-golf course; the infamous restrooms. The tennis court lights are up, blazing against heavy oak shadow. A pair of women are active, the courts to themselves. He slows to watch through the windshield. Their uniforms are white. Loopy curled hair held in rubber-band-like things, (he's seen them before) only thicker, softer. He estimates them to be just past forty.

He drives on, back down Forsythe, away from the levee. A red late-seventies Corvette is filling up at the convenience station on the corner of North Eighteenth. Circling, he spots Ohio plates and moves on, all interest lost.

Commercial properties along Forsythe exhibit signs of real estate pawnings--an influx of medical clinics and yogurt enterprises. When he turns on Oliver road, heading back toward the nexus of the expanding city, a subtle shock for the uninitiated to encounter fields and woods. Soon enough there is a television broadcasting service and the old shopping mall. At times he has seen local newscast celebrities drive the few blocks along here on break for meals.

Once again he is passing the used car lot, following Louisville. There are more filling stations, then shopping centers and a lumber yard. Houses. The Sho-bar, its dirt-surface parking lot eroded and hollowed out sporadically like the havens small animals make for themselves when it is time to die.

From inside the Holiday Grille they see Mac coming. They recognize him, not from having ever seen him before, but from their own assuredness in knowing at one glance all pertinent facts about him. Though the dress here is in actuality casual, there is something borderline about his bluejean jacket and black dress slacks that somehow manages to imply the worst possible combination. His hair is thick and void of precise color--almost black, uncombable.

The grille is designed to serve the nationally franchised hotel next door and a branch bank across the avenue. As such it is well kept up, not fallen to derelicts as it would be, removed three blocks toward the bridge.

He comes through the double wood doors after some difficulty with their opposite-angled swings. Smiling a hello to a somber business suit he advances past the empty plush booths to the anomalous counter and takes a stool with one space between. The counter waitress halts her conversation with the business man and straightens up, not pleased.

This is the man--Mac--standing in the grocery checkout line you avoid because he will try to talk to you. He is the one who, a week after making a purchase, will return to the store and seek out the very clerk who sold it to him and tell how things are going, explaining the tortured progress with the stereo, the blender, the vacuum cleaner. He holds the door open for the family that could actually manage getting the children outside easier without him there helping. He will wave across a crowd at a civic monument unveiling to the police juror he voted for four years ago and expect to be remembered.

The businessman arches his eyebrow to the waitress: the intruder's proximity. It's the same sense of being uneasy with an empty bathroom while someone takes the urinal next to you and introduces himself. Meet Mac. Or Mack, if you prefer; he's not particular. Mac Arthur--some joke of his mother's that he's never quite grasped.

"Hey. How y'all doing tonight."

The waitress wipes the counter down away from the two men, looking down. "Hi."

"How about some coffee. Bet you got some of that around here, huh?"

The businessman watches Mac being amused by his own joke. The waitress wipes. Picks up a salt shaker. Puts it down. Looks off through the large plate glass windows opposite the counter. The businessman turns his own cup in the saucer, cold. After a while of contemplation, the waitress goes down to the pot, lifts it and looks. Then she pours a cup and brings it to Mac.

The only other occupants of the grille are a retired couple in a booth at the far end by the door, through with eating and now managing to lounge with great reactionary fervor. For having to pay for food they will get their money's worth in seat wear.

The waitress takes a phone call: a female friend. Assertive murmurs. The kind of blond that aggressively seeks other blondes of the same unbelievable acquired-neon-yellow shade. Quickly she surrenders the call. She looks at the businessman and wipes the counter down again. Facing away from him she moves without progressing in any definite manner.

Mac watches them.

The businessman's eyes have become a little frantic, not so much at Mac but the effect Mac has on the waitress, her shying away instinctively. He takes a good look at Mac, and his irritation soon layers into a kind of absent satisfaction.

"Tell you what. I bet they've got some pie in here. Don't you? This is the kind of place they have pie." The joke again. His face engages the businessman, maniacally friendly.

"Pie," the businessman says. "It seems a distinct possibility."

"Yes sir. That it is. How about you ma'am? Don't you agree?"

The waitress is looking through the plate glass windows across from the counter, at the motel. She seems to hear sounds. "Pie." Monosyllabic. As though a question. "It's not no good. I wouldn't advise you. If you know what I mean."

Mac, thrown. Everything is kind of dead now. The businessman quite adeptly avoids Mac's face. "Know what? Some guys took a shot at me. Can you believe that. Just sitting there in my Mustang. Bang. I mean, it was really like Bang bang. Bang." Mac's lips percussive for effect.

"This," the businessman says, "is now that kind of world." Looking into his coffee cup.

"Didn't get me though. I mean, I moved. And I moved fast, let me tell you." Pause for effect: no effect seen. "My windows were open. It's not going to cost me any money."

The businessman whistles--a tune that makes the waitress notice. She laughs. The businessman cocks a finger at her, drops his thumb. Bang. Then he points through the window at the motel. Bang. She laughs.

"And you know what. I don't think they even knew me. They just acted like they did. I bet they had never seen me before in their lives. They were black guys. But I didn't know them."

The businessman's eyes on Mac like lightning, offended at the term. He's black. He gets up and moves down the counter to the waitress.

"Hey. I didn't mean nothing."

The old couple are avidly watching one another watch the other occupants of the grille: white trash, the woman of the pair says. The man, unsure who she's talking about, fiercely agrees nonetheless.

The businessman taps his coffee cup. He goes to the rest room. The waitress finally brings Mac a slice of lemon icebox and becomes inordinately preoccupied with wiping. He's going to ask her something, he's not sure what, when she comes his way again. As the businessman turns the corner of the counter she is in the highly visible act of refilling his cup. The businessman, sitting down, eyes Mac once. Mac finishes the pie in three forkings and pours more sugar into his coffee.

In the far booth the old woman complains clearly about the oily film on the window overlooking Louisville traffic. The old man squints, nods, clearly dismayed. An unseen cook revels in the cacophony of a dropped pan.

The businessman succeeds in directing the glance of the waitress through the window again. In duplicitous exchange he manages to point out a particular room in the motel. "Yeah, sure," she wipes. This goes on.

When Mac pushes his plate back she brings his check. He fumbles with his coffee, finally finishing the last mouthful, spinning quarters to bounce off the saucer. On the walk to the register he tries to peek into the mysterious kitchen.

The trek of the waitress to meet him at the register is her quickest movement of the night. He feigns a search for dollar bills in the crumple wads he pulls from his pockets. In the act of straightening them out he asks, "Hey, what kind of perfume is that you got on? I might get some for my sister---"

Her grasp falters in reaching for the money. Glancing toward the businessman there is a rolling of eyes. She hands over the change and begins to wipe down the counter. "K-Mart," she says, a hoarse laughter. "That's all I know."

Down Louisville, the numbers regress--Fourth street, third, second, but First is not First but Walnut instead and Zero is Riverside Drive, along the levee. There he sits, in the left lane, the drawbridge before him. This is maybe the sixth or seventh time he's been in this spot tonight. On the left, the south side, is a convenience grocery and attached bar. The window of the bar is blackened, but the door is propped open. The Gateway. He pauses for instinct, guidance from somewhere, something.

To Mac's right is a converted service station that is now a used car lot. There is an actual automobile perched on a pole above like a saint upon a stylite. It seems possible to the observer driving this avenue that up to half the city's commerce bears direct or indirect relation to the used car industry. Fine minds of enterprise ponder tiny incalculables in small back rooms powered by window-unit air conditioners. Schoolboys of this small city hold high hopes and ambitions to join such an elite someday.

He looks to the left. The bar is yet too fresh. He was there last night. He'd rather not think about it.

The Mustang remains unaccompanied at the traffic signal before the dark bridge, and as the green descends he looks around--no Monte Carlo, no police either. He makes a nominally illegal turn across the right lane to Riverside, pulling up on the sidewalk beside the car lot.

He steps out and makes a survey. No new arrivals since yesterday. He once bought a car, or rather made a trade here. Despite sometimes tradition no salesman populates the office late night in somber refuge from suburban home and wife. He walks around just in case he's wrong and they've got something worth trading the Mustang for. He walks up to a VW, peers inside. One time he had the shit scared out of him finding a VW open on a Sunday morning, and a guy sleeping in the back seat, smelling like a slaughterhouse. He avoids the VW. Once around the lot again; pickups, Mercurys, an okay Volvo wagon. Which would be good for his job, hauling boxes around the city from one business to another, cheaper than UPS. Mac resumes the drive.

Down the dark tree-branched tunnel of Riverside he cruises. A pickup truck with enormous tires pulls out in front of him at Bres, its undercarriage spotless, pristine, virgin to the mud it was designed to blast through, factory grease exposed, conquering the vicious pavement of urban streets.

Somewhere in the dark along here is a granite marker of some sort perched among Magnolia trees at the foot of the levee. He has never read it, but some nights back he marked it in his head and has been trying to remember it ever since. At the moment he searches.

Suddenly ahead the truck swerves--not away, but rather into something. In the brief chaos of headlights Mac is not immediately able to see what has been struck. Then the Mustang spots it, growling and jerking wildly. Passing by, he sees someone's dog dragging itself in a pitiful circle.

He turns around and parks along the levee, leaving the Mustang running, trying to train the lights on the creature. Without delay he is out of the car, approaching the victim. Both rear legs are crushed, useless. The animal makes dry barking sounds at the incomprehensibility that trails behind him.

With more feeling than rationality Mac reaches down to comfort the dog. The dog immediately forgets his condition and lashes out, one clip of tooth skidding across the back of Mac's hand. The hand flies back automatically. Mac is surprised, feels something rising inside him. Unlike himself, he cannot resist rage, like a chemical transformation, and then he is kicking the dog. After several hits the dog's teeth catch on a shoelace; when the jaw clamps Mac goes forward with his foot, pressing the dog's head against the pavement. Soon he hears a dry crack.

Then he is free. The dog, no longer lunging, is yet alive, but Mac hurriedly leaves the scene, looking over his shoulders everywhere.

At the park, by the tennis courts, he washes his injured hand in the water fountain. The refrigerator motor kicks in. There is a tremendous shame, colored red. He feels deeply as if someone has seen what he's done. His shoe is gone--the one with the dog.

The court lights are off now and the women are no longer playing. Mac runs water over his hand, tries to get it to stop shaking. He hears voices, looks about. The women are sitting on a bench nearby, making him jumpy. They are closer to sixty than forty, an actuality which eludes Mac, even as one complains to the other about her fifteen year old granddaughter's active social life.

He drives to the 7-11 at North Eighteenth and gets a large White Cherry Icee, paying in loose change. The clerk eyes his bare foot. Angling the Mustang back toward Forsythe he pauses, unsure. He returns to the park. There he finds an unlit bench a safe distance from Riverside and watches the occasional headlights go quickly past on Forsythe as his hand throbs. His foot is cold. "Dam it." He has to go see.

He crosses the grass beneath the row of Pecan trees--once a drive through the park, evident only after one has stared at the contours a long time. At Riverside, along the levee, he shies back, ready to take off. A truck comes along. He watches the headlights go past the Bible Center. Nothing. He ventures further. He slows with each step, even looking up to the Magnolia limbs. There's nothing in the road where it happened. Confusion. Then closer. He comes across his shoe, bloody. For a long time he is loathe to pick it up. When he does, he looks back over his shoulder. Where is the dog? He scales the levee, holding the shoe. At the crest he is about to leap straight up, sure the dog is going to come charging up the other side. But he can't stop.

He gets there. No dog. The other side of the levee is a remarkable change from the aging neighborhood along Riverside. Cotton willows are dense along the batture, green even against the blue night sky. Another world entirely, amazing, unpredictable. It is absolutely quiet, scary, the river just beyond, the waves chipping against starlight. Mac listens for the dog, sure it is down in the boggy bottom land.

It isn't a scene he's able to look down on for very long.

Through the hot smell of roads and late night spring blooming he is at the Oliver road/Louisville light again, ready for a left turn toward bed, give it up for the night. It is a two lane turn and he pulls to the right; a red Ford Falcon, late sixties model, is already in the left. The windows are down.

A boy and girl sit in the front, radio off, mouths involved. He judges them to be about sixteen. They have not heard him come up, and in the instant of discovering an observer the girl's face does a crimson flush. The boy is calm, impassively proud.

Mac smiles in what is nothing more than a small celebration. Somehow taking it wrong, the girl's anger is palpable. With savage determination she launches into the boy again, eyes on Mac, tongue flicking about the boy's lips. It is a show. She begins to writhe, slowly grasping the boy's hand and moving upon her breast. The boy's surprise is evident. This is not how he pictured the move coming about. With erratic vertical motions on the seat springs she laughs aloud, watching Mac watch her, moving.

Mac snaps his head back around at the light. The yellow is just now going to red; they have missed several greens completely. He drives through the red anyway, going, barely checking for oncomers.

He has a fundamental aversion to the area where he currently resides. Cooper, whom he works with, has a trailer that he usually moves whenever the second-lease rate increase turns up.(justify high cost of moving trailers) His family of wife and four year old has been scuttled to varying mobile home parks about the parish. The current spot is on the south side of Highway 80 opposite the bayou a mile east of the university campus. Mac inhabits the small room at the opposite end of the trailer from the master bedroom. Cooper is responsible for bringing him into it, making the rent an attractive complement to the note on the Mustang.

It is not even within the city limits.

He can smell disintegrating gar carcasses upon the bank, tossed off yo-yo's in the bayou. The trailer park is dimly lit. The asphalt drive through it culminates in a circle with itself, a solitary post light in the middle.

Cooper's truck is there, as well as the Pinto. Everyone is home. He squeezes the Mustang in beside the truck. The steps sway as Mac reluctantly walks up.

The 701 Club is on. Danuta and a born-again former Jew are getting a kick out of their previous mystic leanings and attempts to achieve the nothingness at their center.

Cooper and Sybil are having an argument, not ceasing upon Mac's appearance, but instead disguising its substance with obscure references. The child sits on the floor absorbed in a coloring book that has long been filled. She is tracing lines into available white space beyond the original boundaries. She has even filled the blank space on the inside of the covers.

Before Mac can get away from the living room Cooper is warning him that Meyer, their dispatcher and employer, was plenty hot when Mac did not return to the warehouse after the last run that day. "I had to make another goddamn run for you at ten til five o clock---"

Mac grins and begins to tell him about two sorority chicks in a white Jeep. Sybil shrieks Cooper back into the argument. The kitchen is small, overflowing with Cool Whip-leftover bowls.

Mac passes through again on his way to the shower, which is beside their bedroom. Sybil quietens momentarily.

When Mac is drying off he notices the plastic door handles on the inside missing. With fingernails he frees himself and goes to the couch to watch TV. Sybil is not in the room; Cooper is about to fill him in on everything when his face shudders with the thought of another grievance and he rushes to the bedroom.

Voices, and the door slams. Mac asks the child if there's anything else on that's good. She answers negatively, citing a scary movie her mother would not let her watch.

Then she looks up squarely at him, her mouth pulling slightly open. She glances around the room. The child has the habit of nervousness whenever she finds herself in a room alone with an adult.

Despite the noise of the argument she disappears down the hall, falling down to sleep upon the carpet before the closed bedroom door.

Mac switches the channel. The scary movie is going off, replaced by a comic whose jokes seem far away and unfinished. Elsewhere there is news and MASH reruns. He finds himself with the folks of the 701 Club again.

At some almost imperceptible point the argument ceases. Sybil crosses the room, sheepish to Mac's gaze. She has changed into a t-shirt, barelegged. With an unopened Coke can on her way back from the kitchen she winks, flashing a bit of panties. He turns the sound up with the remote control.

When the 701 Club manages to let go of its audience for the night, the Donna show comes on. Mac has already seen it once in the day. If it had been a week ago he could have watched it again now. He switches the set off.

Turning all the lights off in the trailer save for the master bedroom he goes to his room-- more accurately described as a flattened berth up a set of brief steps, containing only a shallow mattress, crooked above a larger room Cooper uses for storage. Mac's clothes are stationed in the trunk of his car. The room below was designed as a bedroom, but the child usually sleeps in various places in her parents' room.

Lying still, he hears them at the other end of the trailer. It goes on a long time, slows, then starting again.

At this time of night eighteen-wheelers on the Dixie-Overland Highway outside become scarce. Occasionally there is a plane from the airport, a couple of miles to the south. He hears a motorcycle. He sees the girl in the Falcon, her tongue pushing like an flexed arm muscle.

Somewhere a car radio is on. Mac can clearly hear something like a computer saying the Lord's Prayer. And then this spoken, within music, repeating several times:

"People call me rude
I wish we all were nude
I wish there were no black and white
I wish there were no rules."

Turning on lights and stepping heavily despite himself he goes to the bathroom to run cold water over the swelling groove on his hand. The child is asleep on the floor, still in dayclothes; the bedroom door is open. A reading light over the bedstead has been left on. Mac watches, waiting for one of them to catch him at it. All visual elements here seem to be born of extreme pain and struggle.

Cooper looks asleep. Sybil is erect against the backboard, sheet pulled up, dull eyes forward, unfocussed. At length she makes the discovery of Mac peering through the door and flips him the bird, interrupting herself with a strange arch of the mouth. He thinks he ought to say something to Cooper about driving to work in the morning, but drops it.

Within a few blocks 80 is in the official city again. It shoulders the bayou along a long curve. Black water reflects expensive houses from the opposite bank, racing pinspots of light ceding into the reversed monolithic image of the campus's first-seen and tallest building, an eleven story dormitory. Veering right, he takes the new bridge across the bayou, passing the natatorium and coliseum. He's surprised at the number of doors open and students about at this hour.

He drives on, comes to the dormitory that has just this year been handed over to girls suffering overcrowding. Some windows are lit and open. He parks there, with a view.

The sound of something at his windshield awakens him. An officer of campus security is securing a ticket under the wiper blade. Mac's heart begins to beat uncontrollably. He begins to speak, say something, but the officer is already stalking another illegal parker.

Mac finally understands that he had never been noticed sitting inside. It seems pointless to pursue the officer and say something. He yawns, stretching.

He lies back against the headrest. The girls' dorm has three stories, all doors opening to outdoor balconies. Each door identical with a solitary light beside. There are posters in some windows, unreadable. Eventually there is motion; a young man opens a door, peeking carefully outside. He makes his way quickly to the stairs and runs down, cutting across the road undetected. Mac does not get a glimpse of the girl.

It's back to 80, at this point called DeSiard street, going all the way downtown. The signals are simply flashing yellow. He glides through the five-point intersection, then down Louisville. At Oliver the Falcon is no longer there. The Holiday grille is still open, more populated as day approaches. He slows toward the foot of the bridge: right, left? Mac makes his decision. He proceeds across the river, guided by rows of dim globes to either side, as if providing for travelers in a dark country needing some semblance of boundaries. The river below is a black abyss, blurred by the motion of drawbridge interstices.

Past the bridge to the west side--actually a different municipality--80 hooks sharply right, now called Cypress street. This is the row of forgotten motels, unvisited by Holiday Inn regulars. Wherever the ancient tubes are intact neon abounds. To come across a "No Vacancy" would be an instance in need of some commemoration. The names: Mab's Shady Oaks, the Century, the Canary Court, Green Gables: U-shaped stucco buildings around a central festering swimming pool, highlights garish against the night. Each with an office and black and white television revealing grime on windows.

The Grotto has a new night clerk. Sixty-ish and haired only in scabrous patches above the ears, he answers grudgingly "Vincent" as Mac properly introduces himself and asks the name. Vincent takes the completed registration slip without rising from his stool behind the counter, eyes trained upon his counter-top television. Mac holds his key and watches along with him for a while, waiting for a break. When a commercial arrives Vincent hurriedly switches over to an episode of Hogan's Heroes, keeping time with a wristwatch until the cable health show with leotard aerobic dancing returns.

Mac finds his room. Only the ones in the near section are let, and he thinks he has possibly been in 102 before. The wood slats of the floor give beneath his feet as he undresses.

After a while a play of green from the Grotto-pool sign outside collects and decorates the carpet, lending the room a hesitant luminescence.

Just as the warm red figures begin to move beneath his eyelids he hears the noise. The figures scamper away. He hears the grunting and heaving from some adjacent room and cannot believe his run of poor luck this night and morning. Lying still he tries to cover it, clamp his eyes and ears shut, but the couple's staying power is remarkable.

He sits up and dials Vincent for the time. Having paid already with a crumpled twenty from his front jeans pocket, he gets dressed and drops the key upon the rumpled bed.

Mac will ride around for a while, getting a breakfast biscuit somewhere with the three one dollar bills left in his pocket before heading to the warehouse to begin his day of work.

Morning accomplishes itself, among its sounds the grunting itself, undiminishing. Around ten o clock Vincent comes in, looks around, finding the key. He hears the sound. He walks to the wall, listening to the cavity, picturing the aging water pump and its contingent creaky attachments. He gives the wall a stiff kick, rattling the pipes. Silence.

Two

In some compartments of the city there was an unexpected opportunity for self-congratulation. A survey just released has placed them in a peripherally enviable position on a nationally published list of Places You'd Want to Live, desirable for raising families or a long retirement. The mayor's announcement was made at a hasty press conference. No, he was surprised too, reading it in the paper the same as everybody else, including the very reporters present, whom, it should be noted, made no early tip-off calls to him. Among the lower echelons of city hall staff inquiries were raised as to a cash reward, of which regrettably there was none.

A press conference to announce an article in the newspaper etched a reporter in his school-child's pulp writing tablet, a sandy haired guy in his thirties maybe, a strain beginning to show upon the lower buttons of his shirt.

The mayor minimized any suggestions of undeserved honor. To admit such would imply a certain laxness; instead the citizens reflected upon their own characteristics. Travelers commented on their friendliness and generosity, didn't they? The city was a good comfortable size, allowing intimacy yet populous enough to produce pooling of economic resources. After oil spurted in the 1920s there was a cataract of new three-story columned houses in the plantation style, and an unspoken effort to discourage rampant growth and its attendant disadvantages, such as influx of out-of-staters. Land was bought and left fallow, no inquiries please. However, there was no lack of civic-mindedness. They supported the idea of emphasizing education's advantages. There were stringent littering laws, enforced laws. Recent noises predict a city-wide billboard size regulation, like Dallas suburbs. Maybe.

A healthy diversity of churches for all kinds of folks, described quite well in those info-summary sections of telephone books. Further, the inhabitants do not let their disdain for the populist style of politics endemic to their neighbors in the southern part of the state (horror!) color prudent decision making in the legislature. Some compromises are necessary, and besides, indications of a future reversal in regional fortune seems to favor them. They will be found to have been right all along, and will not gloat.

It is a pretty town, they say, its contours still focused upon the original Spanish land grant along an earlobe bend in the river--a river which has received mention in the National Geographic in the recent past as one of the country's remaining scenic water routes.

A week later, there was another lesser press conference. Not that it had been noticed among the general populace, but watchful eyes among elected officials predicted the beginnings of misgiving concerning the causes of a marginally detectable trend in crime rates in the metropolitan area. On the basis of raw numbers a general caution might be invoked, but outright alarm was unwarranted. In the company of the mayor and a troop of civic-minded businessmen the police chief dutifully produced a chart explaining that a good deal of the increases were actually attributable to skewed interpretations, that total numbers balanced with proportion dissolved the major portion of the threat. A summary of findings was scheduled to be released to press and appearance in the newspaper's local pages.

"What about the bicycles?" Some confusion, but the chief is not thrown: "The bicycles will be dealt with."

Truly, it's just not a bad place to be, the inhabitants say to each other, with slight nudges of friendliness.

This was Mac's method: days he drove a parcel truck for a small local concern which owed its existence to the gross ineptitude of the US Post Office. Nights he drove the streets of the city as well, victim to a merciless curiosity that allowed him no more than a handful of hours for sleep before work again. This naturally led to a crash of sorts every fourth or fifth succeeding day in which he would sleep for eighteen hours straight, leading to regular dismissals from his job. Then came the equally regular and begrudged re-hirings, result of a high driver turnover (low pay) and Mac's own seemingly genius knowledge of locations in the shadow of a city address numbering system that defied all possible variations of human logic.

Of the principal familial relations Mac has one each: mother, father, brother, sister. The degree of contact with each varies.

Concerning his private vehicle, the make and model and year change frequently. This habit is the great depletor of his (low pay) finances, necessitating occasional changes of address, no forwarding location known. In his personal library is the used car blue book, vintage circa two years past. His subscriptions to auto magazines generally last as long as his current address. Newer dealers are usually surprised by his knowledge of arcane facts pertaining to their goods: Monday-built statistics, air-bag suffocation-death rates, option variations on a 1972 Pontiac Catalina.

His date of birth, day and year, are known to him. Certain other facts remain elusive, however, such as the hour of delivery and his weight at the time. (See contact with family.) In this his twenty-third year, he intends to mount a search for the certificate of his live birth.

From the night street outside the singular aspect of the correct (chosen) Coney Island is its coffinlike suggestion of narrow rectangle fading back from the sidewalk. Grease-covered neon lights cast a blue pall down the solitary bar and attendant circular stools. The floor is foot-square checker-tiled, black and white.

Two separate Coney Islands serve downtown Desiard street, one block apart. There is no obvious reason for the duplication. They are not divided along racial lines. In physical appearance they are more than similar, less than identical. The owner-operators know each other, speak for a few moments as they pass along the sidewalk. Yet no one patronizes both establishments. Each has the physical and fiscal capability of absorbing the other's clientele entirely. One closes earlier, at 11:30 PM: its customers pass the other on the trek home and do not stop in to betray. The source of their segregation remains elusive, distantly primal.

Paletello's Coney Island is thus in the early hours the only refuge within walking distance of the newspaper building. Paper rollers and like operators are a common sight. There is no television at this Coney Island; Paletello provides a police scanner in a discreet position behind the counter, more heard than seen, within reach of his cash-register perch. Everyone knows the codes. Any obscure location is referred to Mac; then he has his moment.

Occasionally an actual law officer stops in, usually an inexperienced one. The effect is anticlimactic. The radio news somehow dims in his presence; a sheen is lost.

When things are less slow it is usual for Paletello to make the pronouncement that he makes no profit after the hour of 4:00 PM. Yet he remains open in the dim hours, to some indefinite end. Perhaps the only to have ever seen him actually lock up is Mac himself. His effort is only a public service of some short--Paletello's hazy implication.

Tonight Mac enters early, around 10:30. Paletello surrenders his standard faux-raised-eyebrow greeting. He admits no particular use for any of his customers, ritually demonstrating this upon Mac in the presence of the rest; yet on nights when he talks about his granddaughter, a sentimental favorite among the regulars who have never seen her, Mac is a convenient and absolutely attentive listener.

Ret is a black guy Mac knows. He's down near the end of the counter, with some guy Mac hasn't seen before. Ret's usual attire is green fatigue combat shirt used as a jacket and misshapen matched beret, regular clothing elsewhere. Mac waves, and by some grace of premonition leaves them alone. Ret acknowledges him with a subtle lift of head and carries on a low intense conversation with his companion. The companion is a small man, young. He looks steadily straight down at the counter. Ret has a beer, the visitor a glass of water, no ice. He doesn't look like he might be Ret's brother or anything.

Mac asks Paletello if Martin has been around. "No."

Mac goes with coffee and a chili dog. He listens to the radio dispatcher, a picture firm in his eye. Wonders how she got the job.

Ret denies it routinely the times Mac asks if he was in VietNam. But Martin covertly assures him it is otherwise. If Mac is patient, Martin advises, he will eventually get to hear about the incredible, harrowing maneuvers at Quang Tri. Mac waits, almost patiently.

There is a granite monument in the open grassy plaza in front of the city jail now, listing fatalities of the war from the parish. Mac, of course, was at the unveiling.

Bits of conversation drift down the counter. Mac has not yet heard the voice of the visitor; it is more a set of instructions from Ret, a strange advisory tone. Ret waits untiringly. Mac gathers it is something to do with the visitor's grandmother.

Mac drifts their way to retrieve a stray portion of newspaper. The visitor spies him uneasily; Ret tenses. Mac's usual unerring instinct for fellowship at the worst possible moment.

It is apparently too much. The skittish visitor gets up to leave, shaking Ret's hand quickly and awkwardly, the way a five year old boy does. Ret says "Hey--don't lose what I'm telling you man,--" He's already leaving. "Come on over after work tomorrow or you'll get your ass picked up."

Mac has already slid the newspaper under his armpit, right hand out, prepared for an introduction. All he is able to catch is the crazy angle of the visitor's left eye, its light grey coloring.

He ambles over to occupy the vacant stool. Ret does not turn to face him immediately. "What's happening?" "It ain't." Ret draws on the longneck bottle. "Who was that cat?" A little shiver at the expression, maybe. "That man is my cousin." "What's his name?" Ret twists the bottle. "Called him Glasseye every since he was little." "He's your cousin? He's littler than you a lot." Ret shrugs. "His eye is messed up, huh?" Ret smiles, almost to himself. The radio crackles.

"They would at school try to blow in his ear--this was before he got the new eye and it was just a hole there--they'd blow in his ear and try to see his eyelid puff out. Chase him all over the playground, blowing at him." Ret ran his finger around the mouth of the bottle, a thin high sound. "Kids are rough."

"How'd his eye get put out? or did he come without one to begin with?"

Ret studied a moment before admitting he couldn't remember just how.

When Ret orders another beer Mac has one too, checking the clock and wondering if Martin will come in tonight. Paletello takes the coffee cup away. A black guy glides past the open door on the sidelong, a prolonged look at the oddity of Ret and Mac.

Mac notices, with a strange sensation strongly related to pride. He spreads the paper out on the narrow counter. He scans the front page, as if it were a painting or graphic of some kind, rather than text. Immediately he puts that section aside and lays out the local "Metropolitan" portion. Here he lingers lovingly, recognizing names. "A lot of times Martin is the guy to write this stuff and they don't list him. You know what I mean? It's only on important stuff you see his name, but he does a lot more." Ret nods absently. Paletello adjusts the squelch on the radio.

In the editorial section there is a letter in support of bicycle registration. The city's position is innocence--this particular nuisance is necessary in the fight against theft. Many disadvantaged citizens find their bikes burglarized--the ones who need them most; they need to be protected. Mac, clued in by Martin on the unsubtle subtleties, probes Ret. "I mean, I'm not asking just because you're black, just you might know is all. I mean, we're friends." Ret betrays a look of some irritation. "I know that redneck had to be bugging 'em, asking for it. They wouldn't have jumped him like that for no reason."

In driving at night Mac has seen the loose coordination of gangs on bikes, how quickly they can disperse in all directions after a series of rude slaps on his fenders and trunk, white eye rims in faces invisible against black night. To Ret he refers to the well known recent beating incident along Burg Jones Lane. Then man, up from a rural delta region, had left his pickup to ask directions at the Stop-N-Go #4. "He probably called them niggers or something to their face. Something like that, huh?"

The bottle descending makes a pop on Ret's lips. "Man, I don't know."

"Yeah, who knows." Mac flexes the paper. They sit a little while longer. Mac's hair has grown summer thick in recent days; cars pass down Desiard in low Buick-voiced rumbles, plocking on interstices.

"I've seen them out there--man, those suckers can move on them bikes, can't they?"

Ret draws money out of his pocket for Paletello. "With these streets kept up as shitty as they are, it's a miracle, huh? Especially down yonder. I mean, Burg Jones." Ret stands.

"Check you later," Ret says.

"Yeah, all right. Later." Mac watches him take the sidewalk. He has never seen Ret with a car.

Ret is out the door, to the right. Mac pictures the housing situation down that block: none. Just banks and nonfunctioning movie theatres and the row of decaying buildings along Grand Street, and behind them, heavy cottonwood growth and the river. There's no phone number in the book for him. It is a small source of longing in him, that Ret has never volunteered the location of his home. To Paletello: "You think I pissed him off?"

Martin's principle virtue in the view of his editor is his quickness. This balances the temperament of occasional bottled indiscretions, as occasioned by the recent cancellation of a gang fight story by dim upper regions of out-of-town paper policymakers. The editor, an in-between, stood the brunt of Martin's wrath, yanked the phone cord after turning his back a moment on him, and managed to forestall a substantial dismissal notice for Martin.

Martin could do a front page feature in an hour flat, given the materials. He had the forms, the inner all-purpose filling material that others were just learning. He could be called into the plant from sleep, would go ten hours beyond his regular day if needed.

These are the saving graces he wears upon his sleeve when he leaves the copy room at will, followed by the cool glares of other laborers. He calls upon it also when field work is distasteful, preferring inside cleanups of others' work and frequent walks to the Coney Island.

He has known Mac for six years, since his arrival from the rural southern parish of his birth, of which chameleonlike he is able to drop his cajun accent, an act for convenience's sake more than anything else. It simply takes too long to get anyone up here to stop noticing it in conversation, provoking the usual queries.

His tolerance for Mac is widely noted, to some degree speculated upon, stemming from some outwardly indiscernible source--perhaps the mixed vicinity of chivalrous duty and amusement. There but for the Grace is the usual assumption. And an occasional, typically accidental, source.

He drops his cigarette butt on the sidewalk before entering. Behind, two printroomers follow, close behind all the way from the plant but not "with" the reporter. They sit close to the register. Martin slides in beside Mac.

Mac is immediately conspiratorial. "Ret knows some stuff he isn't telling you, us." "He know about the fight in Forsythe Park last night? Hey Paletello, what did you hear on the P-radio?" "They called out the dog." "I know that. S.O.B. Tom won't say shit about it."

"Does Tom keep the dog at the house?" By various but innocent means Mac has kept up with most of the city police officers.

"As far as I know, in his bed."

Mac misses it. "That must be why they let him keep the patrol car at home--it has to be a reason."

Martin lights another cigarette and turns to the printroomers. "I'm asking--what the shit is there to keep quiet about a gang fight for?"

They all listen to the radio. Paletello delivers Martin's coffee. They hear two DWIs from the usual checkpoints.

"I was trying to get something out of Ret about them bicycle guys for you. He knows something. He ain't saying, though." Mac's tone is authoritative. Martin nods, staring ahead. The radio crackles but the message is garbled. Martin requests the squelch be turned up. "We could ride out there tonight even-- I know where there's some of them hang out." Martin declines paternally. The printroomers are subdued, pursuing bottled drafts. "Later," Martin says.

"I'll ride around--let you know if there's anything."

Martin remembers something. He calls Paletello over and alerts the printroomers. He tells them to watch out for the Parish Fair in two weeks at the civic center. Whether it is warning or prediction is not at first obvious. Leftover information from last night's source indicates that the Junior High gang under observation requires the targeted beating of a white for admission. The scene is to be near the livestock barns behind the auditorium.

"Damn--you might could get to see it."

"Nah," he tells Mac. "I've got a well-known weak stomach. You can do that for me."

Paletello is minimally disturbed. "Martin. You're not chickenshit enough to keep this information from the cops-- " The printroomers grunt: "That's where he heard it."

"Okay," Mac says, seriously making plans. "I'll check it out for you." Martin, amused, is about to take him off the hook when one of the printroomers whistles.

A skirted woman halts at the door, tentative and ludicrous in this place. It is necessary to remove her sunglasses before spotting Martin.

Everybody knows this one, an easily recognizable local TV reporter. Mac greets her effusively; the printroomers call out her name. With a thinlipped stretch of smile she disregards all and walks to the stool beside Martin on the other side of Mac; there she remains standing. Paletello lifts the coffee pot in a kind of salute; she waves him off, not impolite but brisk.

Martin's younger sister Kelly paying a visit to the underworld.

"Gayle is looking for you," she says. "I told her I couldn't imagine where you'd be." The mentioned is an assignments editor at the station where Kelly works, member of an indefinite personal alliance with Martin. "She's been calling." "I just got here. Besides there is an easily traceable phone number to this establishment. I mean, it's in the book." They look at Paletello; he lifts his shoulders and turns to the grille. The phone, a sixties vintage rotary dialer sits primly by the register; only the sharp-eyed will note that there's no tell-tale cord connection from the side. A selling point, as far as the customers of this Coney Island are concerned.

"Sit down," Martin tells her. "I thought you'd be at the movie." Kelly peers at the seat as if it were possible to acquire immune deficiencies from it.

"I didn't want to go by myself. Lanny's over at Tech interviewing some South American nigger they're sucking up to for basketball." "Watch your terminology. We often have negro friends come in here."

"I don't see any," she says, momentarily apprehensive, looking around. She finally sits.

"That's all right--Mac here might have some negro blood in him," Martin says, glancing over. Kelly leans upon the counter to see around Martin. "That true, Mac?"

Mac reddens. "Not that I know of." "That's okay," she says, temporarily friendly now. "You don't look it if you do. Black Irish, maybe." The printroomers chortle. "That's all that matters, right?"

"Sure--we have advanced attitudes here, don't we," Martin applauds, then addresses Kelly. "Gayle told you if you're going to do the Indian Village story or missing kids?"

"Worse, shit. She's letting me decide."

"Autonomy reciprocates longevity," Martin says.

The Indian story is one the station airs anew during roughly alternate years, updating the aging raw footage tapes with a current reporter and the same inconclusive story. The village is a set of mound ruins northeast of the city. Some 2000 years B.C. the first example of extensive communal structure and civic building on the continent took place there, lasting 1200 years, and was abandoned. There was no trace of reason for the villagers' disappearance.

"Missing kids," interjects one of the printroomers.

"See?" Kelly says to Martin.

"Sure. Who's gotten sick of having the weeping mother in their own living room? Interesting, certainly. Personal identification."

"I hate that. I mean, I'll watch it, but I hate to be the one interviewing. I have to cry too."

"Didn't they find one of them off Love road last month?" Martin says.

"Yeah, but it was dead. Not missing anymore."

Martin snorts. "That's the whole point--use that. A ritual sacrifice. Kids are spotted walking home from school, they're snatched into a waiting car. Off to the wildlife refuge that night to honor the devil's much vaunted ice cold dick. Some serious bloodletting for a sideshow." He asks Paletello for a coffee refill.

"Martin--it was a runaway. They think it died of snakebite." One of the printroomers begins to sing a radio song about living the wild life. Martin turns to Mac. "You ever heard about that? Accounts of women who say they've had intercourse with the devil?" Mac shakes his head, listening dutifully if reluctantly.

"They all agree. It's ice cold. The perfect irony. It's just getting your phrasing past the station manager."

Kelly groans and stands up, heading out for her car. Mac looks to see if she still has the red Z.

"Hey--don't tell Gayle you found me." She turns to give him a disappointed look, slips the shades back on. The copyroomers remind Kelly to come see them sometime.

Martin finds Mac sipping his coffee, a little quiet. "Hey man, don't tell her things like that," Mac says. "Besides, those kids--that stuff happens."

"I know," Martin says.

Nobody was home at the trailer to marvel. Mac alone saw a local celebrity on national TV and was flushed by the miracle of the event. The Reverend Sarah, as she was known, was being celebrated on the 701 Club. Her title is something of a homely joke; her primary role is that of Medical Doctor, known at the charity hospital and others for her free clinic and collected hours of community work. She is a never married 64 year old woman. In local church halls Mac has attended two of her encouraging addresses, but neither time was able among the crowd to speak personally or shake her hand. He has spotted her out on his driving rounds; she is given free use of a new Mercedes each year from a local dealer.

Mac feels a peculiar pride when Pat Doberson brings up her home town and her good works there. Mac suffers, that neither Cooper or Sybil are around to hear this. Something like this could get away, vanish, as if it had not ever happened, except for him alone watching.

For the fourth time Pat Doberson says how happy he is to have the Reverend Dr. Sarah sitting right there with him. "Now, tell me how, just how--I don't know--how it is you can find the time to administer all the good works you do? I mean, the free clinic work, the ministry work alone, not just the Sundays...?"

"Well, I don't know how to explain it. I guess sleep is just highly overrated. [laughter] You just get up the morning and do it, and don't stop for anything.

"But three hours a night? I'd thought mightily well of myself for five and half. And I am just a hair younger than yourself." [mild laughter]

"Of course as a young woman, I gave many hours to my medical studies, but that's where I learned to get by on as little sleep as possible; all the while never losing in my sight [she raises her eyes to the studio ceiling] my spiritual mission as well. Life is never complete without fully tending to the body's physical needs, as well as the inner life's, Pat."

"And a gourmet menu for both, for you, Reverend Dr." [laughter]

Mac's tragedy: No VCR.

Running the west length of the park is a street and well-trimmed levee: Riverside--that unmistakable sense of metaphor granted to city planners. Across, on the river batture, is an extensive dock system for the notable possessors of houseboats. Also the public boat launch and nearby Twin City Queen herself, misshapen vision of the civic minded for social and charity excursions; it sits, open double-decker vessel, bloated and gaunt, gay red paint exhibiting rough handstrokes upon close inspection.

Of particular note to the boatless fresh air patrons is a small park along a drive running south of the dock, poised tentatively upon shifting sand dunes between levee and river. The drive lopes along the edge of the current, circles around a public restroom, and comes back to the dock, perhaps a circuit of one mile along the batture. A small number of craftily abused picnic tables and coarse open wood shelters dot the motorcycle-rutted sand. The landscape assumes a lunar desert aspect when not flooded by the river. Beyond the restrooms the dune sinks and is officially off limits; here is a willow-choked maze that extends all the way down to the Louisville bridge when pursued, a sort of nightmarish inversion of the parallel Riverside path. Wandering about in here, sound and vision both completely choked, it is difficult to conceive that some of the city's more desirable homes are just beyond the levee, easy walking distance.

On some definite but unmarked Saturday in spring these ragged spaces acquire an enormous population--jeeps, motorcycles, and frisbee throwers; but mainly there are the cars with highschoolers, packed and squealing, making the drive down to the restrooms, around and back, again and again. A new path under the sun. In the peak hour there is gridlock.

Then on Monday city hall receives the usual calls from the columned houses nearby.

But this example takes place on the near side of the levee. In sullen dispersion garbage trucks patrol the streets of the city, pause, reflect, disappear beyond the blind corner.

Small girls move dropsically down the sidewalk, clothed in carefully purchased rags. They reach out in sudden jabs, critically fingering each other's attire: material girls.

Nearby, along the levee street Riverside, a car screeches. They bundle together nervously. When the car is gone a small spot of squirrel remains on the pavement. They shriek and shiver and move on quickly. By the succeeding block they are singing songs from the radio again.

A nearly shapeless form emerges from the park a few moments later intent upon the spot. The unseen garbage trucks moan atavistically a few blocks away. Occasional eyes through open, then closed curtains. The form, a squat not young woman, looks about warily. Her clothing does not indicate any particular lack of fortune, perhaps even a modest disguise of sorts; who else would walk in this neighborhood who did not own one of these homes? Yet as soon as she believes she is unobserved she bends to the spot, turns it over for better examination, and then lifts it into her purse. She snaps the clasp shut firmly and moves down the sidewalk, swaying in unremitting parody of the tattered girls.

Three

The particular pharmaceutical wholesaler, a marginal enterprise at best, was suffering the breakdown of its Japanese mini-delivery truck.

Mac drove down South Grand along a fungus-and-graffiti-streaked sea wall of dubious purpose--whether for protection of inhabitants or the river unsure. To his left houses large and occasionally sagging marked the intervals between nursing homes and coincident graveyards. The drive is a neglected one, overhung with vegetation, away from the business north side. A burned out two story, long untended spacious yards. The clinic is all the way down at the lower city limits.

The tract of land, which rounded off like the southern tip of Africa where South Grand and Jackson street merged, was actually a compound, fenced. Within it were the Boys' Reformatory, the Intermediate Holding Facility for the yet-to-be-judged criminally insane, and the Charity Hospital. The whole place looked like something from the beginning of the Industrial revolution in some Slavic city.

Mac turned in at the gate. There was a small sentry hut, bordered by hurricane fencing and barbed wire strung across the top. The windows of the hut were dark, opaque. "Rear dock, hospital?" came the voice. "Go on around to the front. Don't come through here." "Huh?" "The sharps?" "I have a package for--" "Forget it. Forget it. Just--"

Then another voice, two people in the hut? "It's medicine," Mac said. A hand waved him through impatiently.

The clinic building was long and flattish in a grass meadow in the middle of the tract, several hundred feet from the other buildings. He pulled within the no-parking strip of the circular drive and looked around. There were no further challenges at this checkpoint. It was like getting to use the handicapped spaces in front of a department store.

In the reception area the presence of the package caused a confusion that can only be found in institutions with extensive procedural flows for all possible occurrences. A man in scrubs folded arms across his chest and said "See? What did I tell you?" A lady and another man in lab jackets averted themselves from Mac's gaze, sort of edging away from the package. "At any rate, we can't take responsibility, and if we have to petition the director himself---" "And he sure won't like that." Ultimately the room was abandoned by all and the responsibility left to the young receptionist who after making two calls for permission signed for the package while loudly chewing gum.

This one's groomed appearance was such that she was well aware of being born with much desired body cavities.

Mac began to tell her about the failure of the wholesaler's truck; she said she was temporary and answered the trill of the phone.

Mac had never been inside the facility before. Perhaps there was adventure here. He stepped into a brief hallway at the end of the reception area. The receptionist spoke heatedly to an acquaintance and no one stopped Mac. There was a door with five numbered buttons--the kind designated to allow only those with a security combination to past. It wasn't quite closed. A shoe horn left a small crack where fingers could pry. It pulled open easily. The floor was slickly tiled, the walls of the corridor a two-toned odorous green.

Some eerie forecast preceded him down the hall, doors slamming harshly in a wave before he can pass or see inside the rooms. Curiosity finally opened into a spacious lounge at the end. Windows were blinded and the air was dim.

There were people in the room, a small contingent turning to behold him. Most seemed unimpressed, as if he were some expected phenomenon, but one was visibly excited, jumping and pointing.

A young pasty faced man in ill-fitting jeans opened his mouth wide and covered it with outspread fingers, emitting a hoarse hooting cry. He darted about, tapping others and pointing at Mac. Although most were conventionally dressed, some wore pajamas and robes. The young man edged along the wall and turned the corner, disappearing to a room down the hall. The door slammed.

One had on a surgeon's mask. A high whispery unexpected young man's voice incommensurate with his bulky shape and dull dandruff-flaked hair said "Smelling somebody else puts their body particles into yours."

A television was on quietly in the carpeted corner, banked off by sofas. The picture was skewed, the vertical hold in disarray. Two men in short pants, approaching obesity, watched without any apparent desire for remedy. A woman in a pantsuit design current perhaps in 1969 approached Mac and asks if her phone call has come in yet. He told her he was making a delivery because the wholesaler's truck broke down.

She seemed disappointed. She began to tell him that she has been touched by the hand of God and that it is a tremendous and awful burden to be touched by the hand of God. Although she was older, maybe forty-five Mac thinks, her face seemed remarkably unstressed. Only her hair was a clue; shoulder length and pleasantly styled, it was a silky white spiked with black shocks rather than the reverse. Her figure would be quite acceptable.

Distressed by her responsibility she began to weep as she spoke. Mac with politeness asked what time does God usually call and she fell upon him, hugging. Mac was pleased--she has a clean, lightly perfumed smell.

They are interrupted by another woman arriving from the hall behind. "Helen," she said. "Helen." Helen allows herself to be removed into a room, still crying.

The woman returned to Mac, appearing somehow official without the benefit of a uniform.

"Uh, I'm--I don't belong here. I'm not--" "Yes, I know. Can I help you?" Her conventioneer's name tag carried only a first name: Vicki. She did not rush or try to push him elsewhere. He told her about the package delivery. It was still in his hand. She took it, not seeming surprised. she read the label. "Good. Yes."

"That lady was telling me about God." "Yes, she has auditory hallucinations. There's a new drug we have hopes for--" She looked at Mac. "She hears voices." "But they're not really there." The look of indulgence that came over her face was one Mac clearly enjoyed. She was cute. "They're there because she hears them."

They were approached by a young black man of winsome face and manner, well dressed in light tans. His speech was informative and clearly enunciated: "When a civilization is discovered it makes a society. Then Columbus came to the new world and invented the big bang, which disintegrates into people of different races from a tiny particle of nothing. On top of the mountain they learned different languages and each word turned into a pea which was handed out and who got the black pea died from pulling his own heart out and eating it."

"Yes, go sit down, Mutuk."

He turned to Mac. "Everything about your face says you got a dirty mind. Whenever in a lonely place say you walk upon the line." His neutral look only now changed, charged with pain. "I don't never get no funk." He joined the couple on the sofa before the skittering television screen.

For a while Mac and the woman stood and watched; in a clean, precise manner she described the internal way of illnesses in the room, and the alleged crimes associated with them. It did not seem at all out of place that Mac was here and being told these things, yet almost imperceptibly she began to lead him down the hall, away.

Her face was horizontally oriented, like Ingrid Bergman's best friend in some movie from the forties, softly round in this age of sleekly technical makeup lines. A good heart resided here.

She refused gently as he asked her out and soon has him back outside, package in her hand, and Mac in the car, leaving behind the room of schizophrenics, godless, desolate and waiting.

When he got back Meyer walked out upon the dock from the office to the warehouse. The warehouse, in past years a meat packing depot, was huge, dark, thickwalled with brick of various makes. It was on North Grand, abutted to the railroad bridge cutting across the river just north of the DeSiard street bridge. It was something of a public storage warehouse where Meyer rented space and ran a courier/delivery service. Part of the rear wall was perilously close to a cave-in from the river bank. Mac had a chalk line drawn on the concrete to remind himself to stay away. It was largely empty, cold, metal sprinklers dangling like overhanging vines in the black forest.

The place, to Mac, was scary.

Meyer waited for Mac to get out of the Mustang. Meyer's office was a white frame enclosure at the end of the dock. Cooper, sliding a few boxes randomly in order to appear something close to busy, noted the rarity of Meyer actually coming outside. "Armageddon, Mac-boy." Comical inverted face.

"You got a call." In exaggerated confusion Mac looked around for whoever Meyer might be talking to. "Said it was your brother, for you to call him at his office." The two stock boys upon the dock cast eyes upon Mac as if surprised by the existence of such a person.

"Can't you come over now?" "I got another run to make. Not until after six, at least." "Shit." "I'll come over to your house." "Hell no. Chandra's---she'll be there. Meet me at a bar. Ledbetter's. Six thirty. No. Six thirty-five."

Mac was dressed wrong. His brother took him to an ill-lit booth.

By thoroughly arcane and baffling routes his brother explained why he wanted to use Mac's name instead for participation in the venture. It was imperative none of this leak out to Chandra. "I'll cut you in for 3 per cent. If it's not dry--of my share I mean. If it is, you won't have to pay out a thing. But it won't be dry. There's no way, son. I know this guy with Schlumberger, and they logged not one hundred yards away. I'm telling you. It's right there on this spot we're just happening to option. Wink, wink."

Mac eventually agreed in a vague way. John was in a hurry. He paid for the draughts immediately. "Hey--have you seen Connie?" John was flat, evasive. "You know where she's living now?" "Mac--she'd shit if she saw you--us. Don't bug her."

He wouldn't look at Mac. Mac stopped short of asking why. John moved to leave the bar.

Mac followed him to the Peugeot. "You know where she lives, don't you."

"You're not going to find out--don't worry." A reprisal of some archaic backyard play. John closed the door. Mac motioned for him to roll the window down.

"Hey--you think you're still going to use my name?"

Mac was pleased with himself.

Wednesday is the day. It is no less than a glorious occasion to drive down the McDonald's on North Eighteenth for breakfast in the morning and seek out the complimentary newspapers scattered about the curvilinear green plastic seats. For therein lie inserted the various merchant's booklet advertisements.

From the primal and unformed recess of having once peered into a Sears catalog for the first time come the sacred and unspeakable shapes. To see only incompletely is to encounter infinity in the form a magic disappearance tucked and spiraling away between model-jutting legs. To this day a cotton white triangle is the deepest of signals.

These are the faces of the angels.

They stand very close to one another in the photographs. Mac believes this is how they move about the rooms, in close contact.

At the Stop-N-Go on North Third he will look at the magazines sometimes. He has even purchased a few. But he believes his masterstroke to be the day he succeeded on the third try in obtaining a Montgomery Ward credit card. After an actual purchase he began to receive not weekly but even more regularly in the mail a booklet not to be found in either the Wednesday or Sunday paper. The crisp newness of each delivery, the unbent pages, the papery smell. New angels. The same angels in new attire. Whenever he changes addresses the department store is sure to receive a notice of his new listing so as not to interrupt service.

Solitude is not Mac's provenance. Yet there are occasional hours upon certain nights when he is not pursued by the hounds of besought companionship.

To the people of his acquaintance this is not a likely thing.

In fact many times he does not go inside, choosing to remain in the parking lot, sitting with windows down or leaning upon front fender, as now. There are three clubs--bars, dance halls--of this size in the city at the moment. These offer more than just the rudimentary requirement of moving body space: the Bleachers, Deja Vu, and Freddies (no apostrophe).

Outside any one Mac can be seen, a lone and obscure figure of uncertain intent.

The sound of bass pushes heavy waves against thick arm-lotioned air. Doors incessantly open and close, people going in and out. The sound, their voices, are fragmentary yet steady, like invisible curtains spreading somewhere around him in ceaseless motion. The eye is a steady rover, momentarily catching things not particularly meant to be seen.

Nights he drives from club to club, a secondary circuit arranged within his regular patrols. In each succeeding season one of them is always the newest, and Mac will out of sentiment drive past some site of past glory, now shuttered and dark-hulking, stray papers cast across the empty lot by winds of some unimpeachable authority.

He likes to check out the vehicles as they come in. He theorizes that these people are never seen in unglamorous daytime. Daytime people aren't out at night. The sheen of streetlights on hair. Mac hates to sleep, hates to miss either one.

Lexuses and Infinitis. Jeeps. Purchased out of town. By people who go out of town. Not that there are not Jaguars. Or Porsches.

Even Freddies, of strictly college freshman patronage, bears host for exotic autos--Range Rovers and Mazda Miatas.

Freddies is where he listens closely to the passing conversations and picks up current phrases--when he can decipher them--that he will later use among people he knows.

The music heard is not that which is picked up on any radio. It is a special music, he thinks, music that is not allowed elsewhere than these oases of the night. Were it for sale it would be the only music of his recollection he would be tempted to purchase. Some nights he is disappointed if he does not hear a favorite, and is late getting to other sites of the city on his rounds. His heart holds dear that low shattering wave through the club's open door he does not recognize as being synthetic, microchip-produced.

His vantage points are the dark corners out of neonsign reach. Tangy scents of female hair. The odor of certain liquors. The inside overhead light when the passenger door opens, suddenly revealing blue fabric seat coverings. New car smells. The laughter of women upon the approach to the club, still buoyant before actual circumstances inside, all promise and possibility still alive.

The bass wave, the drums. It is difficult to conceive of them being a recording. Only going inside, seeing no live players, can he swallow it, the lack of overheated physical contact. How can an inanimate speaker be so loud?

Girls in carefully researched high-tech clothing. Heads back, laughing. The wave. And when through there is still somewhere else to go. He could stare for a thousand years.

In the highspirited entering and leaving the nightcreatures largely do not see him. When they do it is as if a deception has been uncovered. Startled and slackmouthed they encounter a figure they swear was not there a minute ago. At close range all that is possible is a polite hello and moving past. Mac returns the greeting, completely composed, distant, not gregarious at all. Not him. He is just watching.

They would not believe this, the ones who know him.

Sometimes at night when you say nothing at all people will see you and regard you as if you were another traveler and acknowledge you and that will be all. That will be enough.

And sometimes it does not hold. Pretty much largely ninety nine percent of the time it does not hold. Mac's best intentions are skewered. Instinct overrules. Some new element intervenes and leads to ruin.

He'd heard the radio advertisement that afternoon for Freddies. There became something new and official about it and he went there that evening. Some kind of night, maybe semester opening night. The lot was jammed. He was forced to park at McDonald's on Eighteenth, two blocks down.

Freddies had taken the place of a carpet store in a small strip shopping center that dated to the early suburb-expansive 1960s. He stood under a canvas awning for a while, matching the kids. They arrived tightly parked in backseats with loud, hoarse voices. Their clothing harkened to some earlier decade, both outmoded and current, things Mac's sister wore then. He remembered the fat back side of Connie's head, babyish and exposed by pulled up hair.

Pink was an item of popularity among girls.

Two young men came out of the club and eyed him, isolate and out of place before the travel agency display window. They left in a Celica, saying nothing to each other. Their slot was filled almost immediately by a dark blue Challenger, a few years too old to be in synch with the other vehicles, Mac can sense. The girl who got out moved quickly, peering once into the car window for anything essential left behind. She carried a large strapless purse in a single downward handclasp.

She spoke up as if she'd expected him to be standing there. "Is it crowded? Of course. My baby sister calls me up and tells me how bored she is. She's inside this place, she says. Like I can't hear the music myself over the phone. I'm just off work and I'm a little steamed, so I tell her I'm thinking maybe I'd just come over. 'Ooohh,' she goes, 'It's really like for a younger crowd." She faced Mac resolutely and opened her purse. "I'm twenty three. Shit. How old are you?"

Mac stumbled, voiceless, finding himself asking her to guess, as he can't really remember right off. She looked through the purse and produced a glitter coated cigarette lighter, not hearing him.

There's something about this girl. Mac watched her face watching the door, hardly aware that he's staring hard. Her face in the electronic lights was dusty, but round, pretty. Curled hair, feminine blouse, mid-thigh loosish skirt--somehow out of time. The nose. Something about the nose.

Mac perceived her blackness like a doorbell ringing. Not a black girl who is a black girl, but one not aware that she's black. Like the lone non-caucasian in a TV sitcom.

"Listen. Twenty three is not old." She walked away toward the door as abruptly as she'd approached him.

Mac battled it for five minutes, wanting to be outside, watching, satisfied, but it was finally too much, like a phone ringing that no one will answer.

The door checker gave him a single glance and in accepting the cover charge did not prompt for ID. Mac reached back. "It's OK, man. Go on in." Mac fumbled with the wallet, flustered, trying to find the card. "Forget it, man." Mac found himself shoved through.

The floor levels had all been changed since the previous incarnation on an earlier visit. Around the dance section was a rail flanked by miniscule tables, urchins to the crowd inhabiting them. In pursuit of the twenty three year old he did not remark the accusative stares that flocked to him. He made a couple of complete rounds, lingering for a while by the girls' restroom to mark her entrance, but ultimately she was lost.

He made a few stabs at spotting her sister in vain correlation of facial features, but there was no one black in there. At all. Then he found an unoccupied table by the dance floor step-down. A waitress asked his order with advanced celerity. "I don't want anything." "You have to. Its a cover. I know you paid but you have to order two. Too." Mac pointed at a girl with a thin glass in her hand. He noticed the waitress's pregnancy, then the band on her finger.

Looks all around accumulated. He was more than once taken as an errant father come in to wrench a daughter away from certain fate.

One unthin redhead with abundant qualities of plastic jewelry returned his gaze. Ultimately Mac ventured a smile, receiving as reward her outright mirth, taken up by a host of boyfriend companions.

Mac received his drink with flush face and concentrated upon the dancers. His disinterest in supper catalyzed the token alcohol in the Vodka Collins. Things were already not steady when he received the tap on his shoulder.

He had only time to see that she was darkly brownhaired before being pulled to the dance floor. In the crowd his awkwardness was minimized. She was not tall, but such a face to produce mythical remembrances. And well chested.

In proper procedure she looked everywhere but directly at him while they danced; her gaze carried an earnest attachment from her surroundings. She spoke once during the song. A sweet twang, thick even for the rural parishes around, made him ask her to repeat herself. "I thought you looked sad there by yourself."

The song was quite unfamiliar to Mac; by the time he'd collected himself sufficiently in the curious views of those around him it was over.

She was dragging him to her table, also that of a bangled spike-hair. Their party was in the act of rising to leave as his girl sat down, yanking him. The spike-hair was indignant, accusing the belle of being drunk.

Even Mac knew it was with no excess of sobriety that she tried to construct a conversation with him, yet it was genuine and miraculous enough for him. He learned that she was a freshman at the college and had just finished a big test. It didn't last long. Her party was leaving. The attendant boycrew were haggling with the pregnant waitress over payment and the spike-hair was lifting his girl by the armpit but when Mac asked her name she shook hands with him and only said "Thank you. Thank you all so very much."

Under enforced egress she waved goodbye and laughed heartily at the astonished expression of the spike-hair. "Don't give him your name!"

"Beatrice," she called to Mac in about five syllables. "Bee-ahh-ae-tree-chay," he repeated. She broke away from the spike-hair. The boycrew giggled. She crossed half the space from them to him. "No!" she said. "No. Helen." "Hel-uhn." Mac looked around as if for something to write on, then to his open palms. High, shrieking laughter from her. "Jooo-liet!"

"Can I call you?"

"Yes! Yes! By all means, yes! Here it is---" She recited a local phone number. The spike-head clapped her hard on the left ear. "That's my number, bitch!" The sweetgirl swung back ineffectively; one of the boycrew yanked her back, her arms flailing, toplike, comical. Another helped subdue her; grappling whimsically in inappropriate body areas.

Mac, for a moment lost, soon knew he had no choice. He tucked his head, slowly trudged over. Dutiful.

The boycrew soon had Mac splayed on the sidewalk, one rough boot on his neck, two others on his hands. "Get in the car," they told the wrestling girls. As the main boycrewmember departed he dragged the rubbersoled boot over Mac's chest, pulling hair quite uncomfortably.

In the back window driving off, he saw her hysterical face, soundless. Was it meant for him? He couldn't allow himself to believe that.

In later times Mac would pursue the path of a dogged philosopher in reasoning his failure to somehow salvage the situation. It was necessary to prove she hadn't been laughing at him. Yet he had a clue; the college--she was a student. And the retinal image of her. Clues to some universal answer he was almost afraid to uncover.

Long before the mall was built Mac learned of the proposed location. It was a cruel blow. For years the new mega-mall was supposed to have been slated for a vast and incongruous cotton field along Forsythe Avenue. Now it was projected a substantial distance east of the city, in an undeveloped area. Mac heard the report on the radio news in the morning and at lunch was bargaining with Cooper to take for him whatever runs he'd have out there. Cooper hadn't heard; he accepted with no great emotion. When Mac gravely told him the location of the site Cooper was still unimpressed. He pressed Mac for an explanation.

"It's just so damn far out. They're going to have to cut a road to get to it."

"They'll just make an exit off the interstate. Besides, you get paid for time. It's not going to cost you."

Mac was edgy, beyond. "It's in a fucking swamp."

Cooper withstood him, somewhat curious. The expletive was unusual for Mac, indicative of high, uncomfortable anguish. There was more, but not immediately forthcoming. And in recent days now, the grand opening of the mall has been announced.

One of Mac's favorites is Public Television. He picks up facts that can be quoted to people. During the pledge telethons he is usually a sucker, calling up the 800 number. Once he has even gotten through to the sleek lady onscreen with the microphone. He pledged several hundred dollars. He still gets the pledge reminder every so often.

Cooper leaves for bed when Mac and Sybil insist upon a program detailing the horrors of schizophrenia. He urges them to keep the fucking kind of quiet so they won't wake him up. Sybil, used to his spoutings, is expressionless. Mac tells her the show is the kind of stuff he saw when making the delivery to the mental facility.

The program unrolls rapidly in an attempt to cover a great deal of material and they watch without comment, trying to take it all in. The credits are through too soon for Sybil. "They didn't have one of those deals where they give you signs to watch out for, to see if you're getting it too. That's a gyp, boy."

While she washes dishes Mac recites the major points for her, doing the TV voice doing behavioral clues. He wants to particularly impress upon her the possibility of delayed onsets, appearing sometimes in the fourth decade of life. "I mean, you'll be going along, and one day WHAM!"

"I'm just fine, thank you," Sybil releases the water. "I'd know by now, if I was."

Mac shrugs in broad pantomime, sheepishly grinning, the possessor of great secrets.

Of Mac's true stories this is one. The GTO yet existed then. It was during summer when light was long and nights sparsely houred. He would have eaten and gone out and it still would not be dark.

Way out east he ventured upon rural Love Road, scouting the new high school site. The quest was uneventful, not even a sign to mark the location. He came upon the Highway 80 intersection. Along there was a hitcher, trekking the scoured brown pavement itself. He was old, probably fifty or sixty, white clumps in the scraggedly curly hair. His outstanding feature was the large gap in his left nostril that resembled less of a congenital defect than a long-past hooked carving swipe.

Mac talked steadily in his manner, but the stranger was not of loquacious inclination.

They followed 80 in for its better length and hooked at North Eighteenth. The hitcher here announced his destination as south of Desiard near the old railway station, nowhere near, but Mac was entirely insistent upon McDonald's first, his treat. Hitchers were always hungry, Mac said.

The hitcher seemed wary, but finally managed to express small interest in Mac's car, at that time the '72 GTO. They were at the Glenmar stop light. Mac swelled a bit, pointing out the tachometer and custom dash, even though it was an automatic. During the enthusiastic demonstrations the hitcher tacitly slid the floor shift into reverse.

Mac, describing the 427 cubic inches, didn't notice.

"Okay. Show me what all those inches will do." Mac grinned, waited for the light counting down. Gunned it, as they say.

For the long instant that followed great disorientation seized Mac's vision.

The disaster resulted in heavy damage to a hapless blue Cutlass behind, and the ultimate loss of the GTO. The hitcher disappeared in the course of the survey of tangled metal and glass. Mac was at a conspicuous loss to guess what happened when the reporting officer arrived.

The selfsame hitcher subsequently turned up as a semi-regular at the Coney Island and came to be called Jimmy Lee. All was denied upon his first encounter with Mac there. Martin was even dragged over to arbitrate, never having known Mac to lie, later securing the accident report: no witnesses listed other than the Cutlass. It became so that Mac even began to doubt himself, among the patrons there. In time the allegations were disremembered and the two men consorted intermittently thereafter.

Four

The delivery was for 1412 Jackson. No one would ever answer the doorbell, though he heard footfalls, murmurings. He left three notes before taking the package back from the seat into the warehouse. Normally Meyer placed the necessary calls; Mac waited until Meyer wouldn't be in the office and made it himself, curious. The YWCA answered. Mac figured out that was across the street from the given address. The mistake was typical enough.

On the next run he stopped by the YWCA offices. Jackson was a four lane street, in this area populated by funeral homes and insurance offices and convenience groceries of a construction style rampant in the sixties. The Y office building was once a home, ornate. It had columns along the front porch and a brass plaque by the door Mac intended to read at a later time.

Inside the lobby his steps echoed through the foyer open to the second floor. People moved about eyeing him quickly then on with the place-to-place details of their work. No one would stop; as he advanced to explain his mission they would disappear. "Scuse me." "Just a moment please." Finally an official looking black woman with a friendly smile came down the heavily carpeted steps of the curved foyer stairway.

Mac explained himself, holding up the brown-wrapped shoebox-sized package. She seemed concerned when he mentioned the incorrect address; he pointed through the glass windows at the blue two-story house across the street. The woman could not accept responsibility for claiming it. She would have to get a "Miz Gish," indicating a restricted region upstairs. "But she iz on the phone right now. Could you please have a seat?

"Can't you sign it?"--Mac worried about the time and Meyer getting on to him about being too polite.

"I had better get her for you. It'll be a minute, honey." Honey. Mac liked that. She went up the stairs. He wandered around the lobby. A receptionist's desk in a small office to the side was unoccupied. He read the mimeographed comic strips taped to filing cabinets, laughing at the faces, if not quite the punch lines.

There was a coffee can on the desk requesting donations. He bent to read the handwritten notice. Battered Women's Shelter. Ah-hah. Here was something.

Mrs. Gish came down, clearly irritated. She was old and widehipped. "Now why can't--" She snatched the package from Mac and squinted at the label, the address. "Oh." The black woman angled behind her, as if to hide from the package. Mrs. Gish looked once quickly out across the street and then back to Mac. "Oh. I will sign for you, sir."

She reached unsurely. Mac held back, waving the package a little. "That building there," indicating across the street, "that, that must be where the women who get beat up by their husbands go to, isn't it."

The elder woman watched him, dismayed, then glared at the black woman as if all this were somehow her fault. The black woman darted off up the stairs, shaking her head. "Mmm-mmm."

"That information is not public knowledge, sir. It is out of my control, anyway. Can I take the package from you, puh-leaze."

Mac beamed with his intuitive powers. He had seen Kelly's TV report, the building on the screen with those glass-prisms they use to hide the faces of criminals. The location was kept secret to prevent reprisals. Mrs. Gish's eyes skittered. She was supremely agitated, some entire war lost.

Mac thought: Secret knowledge. "It's okay. I'm cool."

But not for long. At supper (Sybil's spoon-stirred peanut butter and apple jelly sandwiches) Mac was surprised and a little gratified at the joy this news seemed to give Cooper. After dark Cooper took Mac out to the Siesta, a college bar on the verge of falling into DeSiard bayou. After an hour of steady drinking Cooper drove to the location.

"It's supposed to be secret," Mac said. He would not want the widehipped woman to come after him.

"Relax. This is just a little fun. Nobody hurt." Cooper sniggered. He sounded like a cartoon groundhog with a rented van full of explosives. He produced a pistol from the glove compartment and ordered Mac to turn the pickup around in the driveway, pointing out to Jackson street. Mac did. Cooper watched him, then ran up to the barred front door and rang the bell and began to scream "Bitch! I know you're in there. Let me in!"

Cooper shook the bars, cackling, grinning back toward Mac. The sound of pandemonium inside on the wooden floors. A child peered backlit through pink curtains and was jerked away. "Daddy! Daddy!" Cooper leaped off the porch and ran to the side and banged on the barred windows. Lights went on and off in the rooms. He yelled more imprecations. "I'm going to shoot your ass! You get out of there right now! We're going home, babe!" He fired the pistol in the air.

Heartrending screams.

Cooper ran to the truck; Mac had the motor running. "Let's get out of here before the cops." Mac was shaking; Cooper laughed hysterically, drunk, oblivious to Mac's silent distress.

Back at the Siesta, Cooper began on the drafts again, laughed out, pensive. "You know, I bet we could get money for that information," he said, quite soberly.

There had been a shooting in one of the columned significant houses north of Park Street, a family of name seen on avenue signs and college dormitories. It was a domestic squabble and not overtly reported, Mac having knowledge of it from Martin, a glossed tale from the Coney Island. He headed up for a drive near where he thought the house may be, the one they were talking about.

Even for Mac the streets in this region are anarchic, nudged into unwieldy curves and nooks by the meanderings of the bayou. It is a sober fact that no signs are life are to be seen, no one outside with hands meshed in a garden, no basketballs thudding with insistent disturbance. The upper rooms are mostly well lit, with curtains drawn and lifeless patches of ceiling revealed, perhaps with grotesque shadows of lamps cast about. But no figures, undressing or otherwise.

Though no mailboxes and no name-displaying signs exist, he has it down by purely conjectural guesswork to three residences of possibility, all with lights out, as would be suitable after the tragedy (a word Mac knows to be on a posterboard at work of words Martin has forbidden to let himself use in an article). Huge trees along the medians and sidewalks hasten the advent of night itself, and seldom does a car pass his own.

He considers it a miracle that people who do not live here are allowed to roam about freely. Certainly there are restrictions: neighborhood watch signs, dead end streets with NO TRESPASSING advised. Yet there is no gate, no card to be shown to a security-uniformed officer. (Mac has been watching TV reports on Secure communities in South Florida.) He breathes deeply. There is a certain waxy odor to the behold here in soft dying daylight.

Which house? It could be any of them. Blood spatters on the stairwell. Ransacked bedroom drawers. No way to tell which. When it came to rich people each house was identical.

After giving it up, he passes on a seldom encountered byway a Junior High campus unsearched in his experience. He has never had any business here. It's a blank, so he parks and investigates public property. The building, though it has the delight of archaic 1920s issue, is not up to noteworthy.

It is routinely rectangular, of dull brown brick and a raised wooden floor. He suspects it has an interior courtyard, like the elementary down on Lee Avenue. The yard, occupying the space of a residential block, is virtually treeless and foottrodden into gray dirt. A hurricane fence outlines the premises and the playground equipment befits rather an elementary school, but disused.

He's sitting on the seesaw axis awaiting some revelation to the city's particular choice of site when a girl surprises him from behind, asking if he's Jimmy. She's around eighteen, dressed in huge flowered baggy clothing.

Mac searches: "Jimmy Lee?"

She's momentarily distracted, then asks if he has the stuff. When he doesn't answer she looks around nervously and begins to walk off. "Wait--" he calls. She turns around.

"I thought you were the new guy."

"Yeah--I was just being careful, you know."

"Oh yeah, I got you. Like, when Lance got caught we freaked." She comes close to him and stands. "You bring it with you?" She takes a paper from her front pocket.

Mac is slow, guessing. "I didn't get the order."

"Piss! I knew the dork would screw it up." She reads the list for him. She's collecting for a handful of friends. "You can remember that?"

Mac can smell perfume of a purple tint and sees that she's made up expertly. "Better give me the list." She hands it over shyly.

"Like--do you know how much it's going to cost?" He shrugs. "You know." "Yeah. Well here's this--Caroline probably won't be able to get the money. I guess you don't have to bring her part." Mac slides the list into his pocket and jokes: "She can work it out, kind of."

The girl catches his drift more quickly than he would have believed. "Oh. Okay. I'll tell her." Then he thinks she has misunderstood the joke. Surely.

Mac asks her to sit down on the axis. "I'm late already. Clint has to take the car back by 9:30." "Where do you live?" She answers that and other questions without hesitation, as if it were required, no longer late. He's surprised to hear that she's fourteen. Her father runs an overhead door company. Whatever that is. Mac says he knows where his warehouse is. She explains about Caroline's allowance. "What I meant was--" Mac begins.

"Hey--like I'd be dead if Clint found out, you know, but could I do that too? Like, instead of money?"

She's serious. Mac knows nothing other than to nod. "Sure." They arrange the pickup for a place other than the schoolyard--the hook in the levee near the intersection of Cherry and McKinley--and she is leaving across the bare playground.

The sensation of lightness Mac feels slowly begins its long descent. Fourteen is a number. The feeling is the same as when he's bought something and promised to pay for it and has to return it when the first payment is called for. He realizes there's no one he knows that he wants to tell all this to.

In opposition to the city direct, the campus boasts at any hour some ongoing occurrence. Approached along 80 from the east, the eleven-story boys dormitory reigns beaconlike, gridded with terrace lights made patchwork soon after semester occupancy by subversive and rampant bulb unscrewers. Upon on chance passings a door will be observed ajar, containing either a lone figure staring the night back or a same-sex social encounter-debate of the type bound only by the severe emotion and strong opinion of late adolescence.

Mac on campus, in search of lost perfume.

An observer would have seen him near the tennis courts, an aimless figure walking along the worn grass trail perimeter beyond the hurricane fencing. There seem to be always a few hitting at any late hour and he would be just a student escaping duty save for his appearance: illfitting plaid shirt, black leather sheen pants of unknown origin, and hair that desperately needed washing--too baggy and unselfconscious for a student.

Where is Juliet? Helen? Beatrice?

Near the perpetually running water fountains at the front gate of the courts rests a lone dull neon tennis ball. When he is upon it he stands for a moment, looking down. Then around to see if he is being watched. The hitters on the court are scarce. He walks away, alert to being seen, but no one seems to notice. The ball does not move. Slowly he walks back, taking care to seem aimless. The toes of his basketball white tennis shoes almost touch it.

He picks it up, turns it over. Looks once more at the hitters. In the motion of throwing it back over the fence his arm is arrested by some invisible force. None of the hitters see him. It is apparent they all have their balls. No one seems to be without one. The possibility of a mistake is present. His arm falls, holding the tennis ball. For the moment the entire world is seized; there is no possibility of action. Each move is fraught with hidden implications. Duty overwhelms the ragged figure and all things become burdensome. There is no sign.

The observer would have seen him hold this stance for a full five minutes.

Then in a steady movement he bends over and replaces the ball in the exact original spot. No one has made a motion toward him. He watches it a moment longer at his foot and moves on the worn grass path.

The door to the trailer won't open. Cooper's truck is gone and Mac has not yet been granted key-keeping status, but he can hear Sylvia walking inside. He knocks. No response. He keeps it up. After a while the child's face appears in the window; she's whisked away and he knocks again.

Shortly thereafter he drives down 80 to PeGe's for ice cream. He stands by one of the outside tables, looking at the overpass toward Rayville. Something bothers him about not being able to see the highway past the overpass--the woods and fields out that way. It's already out of the city limits here and he gets skittish past any one of the municipal boundaries.

Then he goes back and tries the trailer again. This time Sylvia opens the door and asks what the hell he wants. He cannot think to merely say he lives here, and just shrugs. She's cleaning the place. Everything is strewn, rearranged, unkempt, in transit. She walks away from the open door. He makes a quick check on his space and rambles back into the living area.

"In three years, he promised me," Sylvia says. "Three years and we would have a house. A real house." She's wearing a sundress, unusual in the place of cutoffs and one of Cooper's shirts. She has a sunburned aspect, curious. "I ain't staying in this shit-assing trailer."

No response from Mac.

"And if you think I am I'll kick your fucking ass out of this place."

Mac is at a loss. He offers what is left of his ice cream cone. She makes a retching sound. He returns to his bedspace. It will be dark soon and he wonders where Cooper is. When he left the warehouse early in the afternoon Mac thought it had been to go home.

He realizes he'd been asleep when Sylvia calls him from the living room. The hall is dark and he stumbles on a reeking pile of clothes in place to be washed. He can hear the child crying before he sees her.

He's pretty sure Sylvia called him.

Sylvia is sitting on the couch facing Mac's direction, laughing. There is a hard, frantic edge to her lips; they are almost white, like the lipstick women used to wear from somewhere in his remembering. The child is sprawled on the floor in whimpers, face down.

"Look--there's Mac! Pull your dress up for Mac! Pull it up like we do for Daddy!" The child refuses, crying louder. Sylvia laughs harder, soundless, almost teary. "Look--like Mommy--pull it up!" She pulls up her dress.

To Mac the scene is remote and sourceless. Sylvia's underwear, though typical enough and utilitarianly white, seems unrecognizable, as though what it concealed were something impossible, entirely other than what it was. In a brief instant he sees a woman, nothing more or less; someone like himself only different and different only. The two of them in the room are two people with bodies different yet kin to one another, like unremarkable members of a single species.

Sylvia pulls her hem down, then flashes again, watching the child on the floor. She has not looked toward Mac at all. The child wails and Sylvia doubles over in amusement, soundless.

Mac has not moved when she suddenly sees him. The dress is immediately drawn down upon her knees. She seems frightened, caught. "Don't you dare touch me! Don't even think about it."

Mac quickly darts to the door, watching helplessly the prostrate child. This is even scarier than Cooper pulling something at work, or at the Women's shelter.

It's another motel night.

The small man had a host of mannerisms. He sat upon the last seat of the bar, furthest from the front window near the back blank wall as if it were some absolute refuge imperceptible to all but himself. Glancing toward the insecure door to the bathroom and shadowy backroom area as if it held an assassin. Something like a shiver swept over him perhaps two times per minute and one hand remained enclosed and secretive inside the out-of-season flannel checked shirt. A self-conscious avoiding of eyes, though only Martin and Paletello were there besides the subject himself.

They tacitly consorted over Glasseye's presence. Martin sat at the opposite end of bar, nearest the window. Paletello manned the register before him. The radio squawked, not intrusive. A pristine and cooling hamburger rested at Martin's elbow. The door was propped open with a stack of phone books.

Paletello filled him in: Glasseye had asked for Ret three times, a voice soft, country-black-inflected, almost mistakable for the nameless sounds of Desiard street coming through the open door. Neither his good eye roving and alert nor the lifeless one angled in Paletello's direction as he spoke. Paletello repeated thrice Ret hadn't been in today.

The thing Martin noticed were Glasseye's ankles. Below a ragged khaki pantsline they were sockless in crushed penny loafers, a hapless distortion of current college style. Lined in heavy wrinkles along the blue-dark skin above the leather lining was some sort of white caking, like sedimentary deposits of lime.

"Now that you're here--" Paletello said softly. He began to make his way down the bar with slow aimless deportment, not wiping the bar, not disguising anything. Glasseye in evident agitation marked his progress, half rising off the stool as Paletello became still and asked if he was going to buy anything. Wordless, Glasseye left the stool and walked awkwardly halfway to Martin and stopped. He spoke and Paletello asked him to repeat it, he couldn't hear. How much was coffee. Thirty five cents. How much was water. You couldn't buy it. Coffee was thirty five cents.

Glasseye returned to his seat. Paletello placed the cup and saucer before him. Anything with it? Glasseye looked at him briefly, then away. Cream-sugar. A mixture of relief and recognition on Paletello's part. Then: How much? Comes with the purchase. In a little while Glasseye shook his head.

One of the newspaper's van drivers came in for a Chicago coney, settling several stools down from Martin; then a transient asking for Jimmy Lee. No one knew where he was. The transient left and reappeared shortly, asking for a newspaper now. He ain't in the newspaper, not today. Huh? Don't have one. Run on now. Paletello motioned vigorously.

The coffee cup remained untouched for half an hour. Paletello went over again. Something wrong? It taste scorched? Bitter maybe? Glasseye steadily watched the cup. Martin watched tritely for sweat upon Glasseye's brow, but could detect none.

You can pay now. Glasseye quickly had the coins upon the table, ask if already counted and stored in that denomination. Tax makes it thirty eight cents. Again Glasseye did not understand immediately and came entirely off the stool, yet provided three pennies and put them on the counter just shy of Paletello's outstretched palm and settled to the stool again. Paletello removed the saucer and cup.

A bustle from the street, as if someone falling down. Mac appeared with the usual sincere greetings, waving, greeting the driver by name, taking the space beside Martin. He absorbed a chili dog with a not quite fully melted veneer of cheese in three swallows and took in the situation with Glasseye.

"Mac. A word from you. If you will."

Mac, pleased, eager: "Sure. Anything."

"Tell me what you've heard, okay. A van. A carpet van, no less. I'm imagining some paneled thing, not a conversion but one of those eight-foot jobs, right? Carrying carpet. Purportedly."

"Carpet van. Gotcha."

"Word around that people are frightened, avoiding it. Now my request of you is: why. Why are kids on their bikes scrambling like crazy to get away from a carpet van?"

"You've seen this happen?" Paletello interjecting.

"No. It has been reported to me." Casting over toward the driver: a sullen confirmation. "I'm thinking my man Mac here might have a clue, maybe even the solution itself. Man of the streets he is, wizard of the byways."

"Don't know." Mac is pained to be less than helpful. "Was it a Ryder, maybe?"

"Good guess. But no. That's not it. There's something to this, though. Keep an ear out. Let me know." In concert they looked over to Glasseye: No reaction.

Sensing avenues of mischief Martin leaned close and whispered a suggestion. Mac looked down the counter toward Glasseye and sat straight for a moment, as in composing himself for an ordeal requiring martial arts. Paletello soberly shook his head. Martin called for Mac a coffee first. Then Mac stood up and went down past the newsprint driver, taking giant heroic steps toward Glasseye, a friendly hand out in greeting.

Glasseye was immediately off the stool, cornered and pacing. Mac stopped in bewilderment. "Hey, man--it's cool--"

Glasseye's concealed hand appeared with inexpert grip on a blade. The driver was immediately over and behind the counter, all but crouching. Mac retained position while Glasseye skittered in small circles, eyeing a clear lane along the wall to the door.

Mac, with both hands up, palms forward and fingers tight together, like a Policeman halting traffic. "Just a friendly Howdy-do here--" No change in Glasseye's position. Finally Mac moved forward, turning his wrist in a gesture to shake hands, and then the blade was being thrust into the still vast space between them. It became a farce of cartoonish proportions. One would step forward and the other back; then reversing the procedure they would be as before. After several rounds Mac advanced definitively and reached into the general vicinity of the blade; Glasseye eaked by along the wall and ran, bumping his shoulder; the knife flew out and landed on the checked tile, spinning like a compass.

The blade lay between Mac and Glasseye, both looking down as two children playing watch something they've broken. Glasseye was terrified. Mac looked at him, then reached down, picked up the knife, and handed it back to him.

Martin betrayed a soundless, choked laughter. Glasseye halfheartedly thrust the blade toward him once more. "Whoa," Mac smiled. Glasseye escaped through the door and Mac went out after him.

After five minutes he returned, quarryless. "Want us to call out for some portable O-2?" Martin, less than helpful as Mac gets his breath. "That little fella can run." Paletello, shaking his head. "Hey did y'all call the cops?" "What for?" Mac was at a loss. He felt the driver glancing over him, then looking away amused. Were they laughing at him? The more he looked the harder it was to tell. Then he indicated the scanner radio. "Might be interesting to hear, is all."

He dreamed of women, of the physical apparatus. Her (no her her, just Her) lying on a bed on her side, knees tucked, the nothingness revealed, soft tissue with the inconceivable absence there.

With slow trainlike approach it strikes him as a crime beyond belief for a man to come home and not find such waiting for him. It is not even a personal grievance but something larger, a reaching toward somewhere for everyone in the situation. He was certain, almost certain, Glasseye was in it too.

Mac never quite attained a grasp upon the situation.

He was driving around the city, the only unusual aspect of this round being his entire collection of possessions strewn about the car. Cooper had been vehement, rage barely suppressed. He would have advanced to physicality, but Mac was not insubstantially sized. And unpredictable. Sylvia had reported to Cooper attempted intimacies on Mac's part.

Mac was deeply confused to find his own denials hollow. Of course he hadn't been guilty, and Sybil had done some strange things. But just his being there that last time
made him feel the center of a huge stroke of misfortune. For having seen.

In the middle of the ejection a consequence passed over Cooper's face. He told Mac to stay there a minute. He went back inside the trailer. There was shouting. To hell with the money, Mac heard Sylvia. Cooper returned and resumed the eviction.

Mac spent the rest of the night driving, nursing the injustice, showing up to work when the hour came. Cooper didn't show until ten and there they began their practice of never addressing each other forevermore. Until lunch, at least. Cooper gave Mac half a barbeque sandwich from Hendrix's on Trenton in the west city. He began to speak to Mac in the normal manner, joking, focusing on the usual scatological matters. Mac heard a message. "So can I put my stuff back in the trailer?" Cooper acted like he didn't hear Mac. "I didn't do anything."

"Of course you did. She told me. I'm just glad you made sure the baby was out of the room. Appreciate it, man"

"She was acting weird, is all I know."

"I believe that. And if she hadn't been my wife, I would have fucked her too. I don't blame you, man."

Nothing Mac did got through. Then, when Meyer was locking up the door for the day Mac inquired again about lifting the banishment. "No," Cooper said simply, sullenly. "And don't ask again, man."

In Mac's unsophisticated formulation this seemed gross evidence of universal disorder.

In the 1960s commercial enterprises began interrupting residentials in the blocks of North Ninth just above Louisville and have since become interrupted themselves by stagnation. As in a period photograph, the small frame houses once made timid and watchful among Real Estate offices and furniture storages and neglected interior design centers become the solid edifaces as vacancies grow. There is no uniformity to the drive along there at night--some blocks crowded with brick veneer structures, some spare with a modest stucco bungalow, less of the columned porches along here. The sidewalks are mildewed and grainy from years of rain, borders lost and confused as they become domestic animal paths beneath the current city's accumulated detritus. Recent yardlights along carports spray the street with the particular fear incumbent to middle-agers, causing Mac to squint through the windshield as he marks the passage of blocks in his progress.

He finds the two story garage apartment, singular in a large lot as if bereft of its master house by some dim remembered natural catastrophe. There is, of all things, a fairly large garden beside, maintained by persons unknown. The Mustang slowly passes, then makes the block and comes up again with even less haste.

The brown garage doors are closed, the exterior wall light bulbless. The lone upstairs window illumination is strained through a single draped curtain, washworn and abcessly pink. He parks down the curb a respectful distance and moves upon the grass beside the sidewalk quietly, hands tightly into his pockets. Passing the door once, he makes a quick check on neighboring windows for unbidden eyes.

He stops before the door, in it encased a single glass pane from the waist up; past it a stark varnished wooden stairwell and another door at the top, all shadowy from a single naked light bulb dangling from a frayed cloth cord. A place Mac has been before.

After two rounds of knocking he hears movement upon the joisted floor. The top door opens and there is a woman. She looks down the stairs and sees him with nothing on her face and closes the door again.

Ten minutes of steady knocking produces her once more. When she reaches the bottom of the stairs to unlatch the door she does not appear to be angry. "I Ian working tonight," she says, trudging back up the stairs.

Mac follows.

There is a days-old female odor to the squat carpetings of the living room. Two lamps sit upon very low end tables, heavily shaded. The upper regions of the room are dark. Mac eases down onto the couch. The woman goes directly through a curtained doorway.

A small black and white TV is on, sound replaced by a nearby portable radio turned low. An uncurtained window opens to the back, away from the street, a black rectangled sketch of tree leaves and strangled stars.

"I ain't working tonight. You'd better have come to pay off for before." She stands by the TV, smoking. Annie shows the fat of nervous mindless eating, noticed with alarm in the mirror every second or third day and progenitive of healthless fasts. She has a robe on; Mac has already caught glimpses of underwear in flaps as she turns. Helpless, she is, female, to cover everything constantly. Her face is of the kind that merits one brief glance in looking through old highschool yearbooks before turning the page to the next.

"Yeah, I brought it. I mean, thanks a lot for waiting. I had to pay rent. And the car note." Mac strains to stay politely conversational, not reaching for his wallet yet. "Did that guy Jimmy Lee ever come over here to see you? I told him about you."

Annie winces, as if summarily presented with a caricaturist's figure of her life. "What's he look like?" "About my size. Brown-headed. Got a messed up nose." "How old?" "Some older than me." Mac looks at her with puzzlement. "How old are you, Annie?" "Huh. Don't remind me."

She remembers one with a knifed nose, but he'd been at least forty-five. Maybe fifty-five. She asks for the money. Mac stands up. "That's a big tip," she says. "Did I duplicate some services and forget, is what you're trying to tell me?"

His glance toward the curtained doorway has a painful obviousness. "Uh-uh, no way, not tonight. I wasn't even going to answer the door."

They stand off. The DJ's voice cuts into the song. When Mac goes into the pitiful puppy act she makes him quit.

In the back room there is incense burning in service of the various aforenoted odors. "Look, you understand the technical reasons, don't you Mac?" Her voice is almost soft, somewhere in it a schoolteacher's tone. With Mac this seems somehow necessary. "Your mother ever explain to you about girls?"

He looks at her a moment. "Uh, yeah. I got a sister."

She steps past him to cut the overhead bulb and steps into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Mac sits still in a chair, hears the flush. When the phone rings she comes back out.

The conversation takes half an hour. Mac doesn't listen in.

She returns without apology, noticing him there as if he had just appeared. Killing her cigarette she drops her robe on the floor, back turned. "Wait--" "Huh?" "Put it back on a minute, please." She bends, groaning, re-robes. Mac stands. Very slowly he removes the robe himself, then the brassiere. She shifts legs impatiently through the ordeal of his pulling the overtight panties down.

Mac is there a moment, watching, contemplating the primal vortex itself.

Shortly he notices the string hanging down. He reaches. "Uh-uh!" Annie slaps his hand away. "I told you." She walks on her knees across the bed, collapsing at the head. He undresses and moves in.

She reaches down for him, finds her preparatory work there already done. Mac is usually good about it in that way.

They labor for long minutes getting enough lubrication from the almost empty jar. He sees colored streaks on the glass.

Mac ascends. The wind comes up outside, spreading the gauzelike curtain into the room.

Finished, he is lying with eyes closed. "Hey boy--don't go to sleep."

"Just getting my breath."

Annie lies still, too lazy to get dressed again. She listens to the radio, still on in the next room. As the wind shifts she can hear the cars down on Louisville.

Anyone observing would have noticed the impish expression arrive on her face. In one quick swing she straddles Mac, on hands and knees lifting her torso above him. A brief look of exertion, then a burst of flatulence carries Mac's deposit back upon his stomach.

She is off the bed, small embarrassment provoking her own laughter. Mac stares a moment in deflated recognition of the substance, brown-flecked. He wipes himself off with kleenex from the side of the bed, loath to use her sheets. She is by now doubled over, laughing so hard there is no sound and no breathing.

Five

And the litany of horrors continues.

At K-Mart he parks isolated far out upon the lot. To find shopping cart- or key-marks upon his door is a heartache he must avoid at all costs for the moment.

There it is, an uninhabited Mercedes with headlights on. He examines curiously as he approaches, certain there is a time-lapse switch on it. It is a four-door sedan of deep maroon. Mac, ever the peruser of auto magazines, can name the year and list if asked. He pauses, as before a shrine to the high skill of money earning. Making a tour around the perimeter, he satisfies himself upon small details and carefully sculpted insignias. The light continues to not switch itself off. Perhaps there is a malfunction. He waits.

Maybe the driver just forgot to turn them off.

A good deed is in the wind. Mac tries the driver door.

A shrill howl emerges, as if from the undercurrents of the very earth below; it careens and slides, painful to hear. Mac becomes dizzy and time passes before he is fully aware that it is an alarm on the Mercedes itself. The scene attracts distant attention from arriving shoppers. Mac races about the car, seeking some desperate remedy. It does not occur to him to leave the site. The howl continues, changing beats now like an ambulance siren.

He is still fingering crevices and possible hidden entries when two patrol cars discreetly arrive, their approach masked by the pandemonium.

Mac looks up and belatedly smiles. Help is here at last. He is trying to make out the name tags on the officers but they are moving both quickly and cautiously. The faces are not familiar: rookies.

"Okay. Turn around, hands on your head."

Mac's confusion is interpreted as resistance and the request has to be repeated. Finally he turns and is frisked. His explanations go unheeded. While he is contained in the back of the patrol car the owner of the Mercedes appears. Mac observes the consultation. The man is brought for a look at Mac, then some agreement appears to be made. Only then is the alarm deactivated and Mac is begun to be taken away.

They are about to pull out on Louisville when another patrol car pulls up crosswise. Mac grins. It's Pat, an officer of his personal acquaintance. He does not immediately perceive Mac.

After the lowtoned openwindowed exchange he pulls up slightly further and meets Mac's glance. Pat's face, thin and fairskinned Irish as it is, undergoes a deflation. He instructs the Junior officer to Hold on. They pull back into the parking lot. Pat gets out and leans in the window, getting the story from Mac.

Pat asks the Junior officer if the headlights were on when they came up, irrespective of the alarm. The Junior officer is dismayed at his loss of memory. The other officer is consulted: affirmative. Pat locates the owner of the Mercedes. The meeting is brief. Mac is loosed from the back seat of the patrol car. Pat, displaying fatigue, talks a little longer with the rookies before they leave. Then he and Mac are alone; Mac is escorted to the Mustang.

"Thanks, Pat. Owe you one for sure."

"Mac. Don't you know that no good deed goes unpunished."

"I didn't want the battery to go down."

"Yeah, I know, but. . .Mac. Listen. Does it ever occur to you when something like this happens. . .Did you just figure that for any old car?" Mac cites the production run on the model, estimates the range of US purchase price in dollars. Pat does a long pause, suppresses wonder. "Yes, but this guy, this owner, did you take him for some sort of guy you needed to do a favor?"

"Uh, didn't think about it really."

Mac's face eager like a child in a Little Rascals episode. Pat begins to give him further warning, but stops short--Mac's error is of the wrong sort. It is impossible to explain why he should have left the car alone.

Pat endures some small talk about who's going to be the new Mayor, what grades his kids are in. "Mac. Stay out of trouble, okay?" They soon part.

Sitting in his car Mac realizes if he'd missed his chance to see parts of the jail he'd not yet encountered in his visits as a taxpaying citizen visitor.

Responding to the summons Martin ambled laxly and poorly dressed in a pair of houndstooth doubleknit slacks he knew Gayle hated through the cleanlit lobby of the TV station. In a small green smoky staff room the girls are found. When he enters the doorway it is jammed up, some camera jockeys and assorted van drivers around. His sister sits in a spotlight through the smoke like something from Citizen Kane, at her perkiest in a small crowd. Seeing Martin, they all drift off grumpily save for Gayle and Kelly, dubiously eyeing the houndstooth. Martin has consented to a brainstorming session for a Six O' Clock report series to run during sweeps. The station manager, with his astute facility for hot trends, has suggested the subject of local murders. An in-depth series: each night of the week a different focus on the particular death. The all-of-us in the story of the lifeless body.

The ostensible lead-in for Kelly was the recent mutilation of a transient woman, found in a softball dugout in Forsythe Park. Not much was known of the woman. That segment--identity--would be have to be slim, mainly physical details and their attendant slashings.

"That one has no arrests, right?" Gayle says. "It's a statistic," Martin says. "No history, no narrative. Investigation won't waste personnel on her. Anybody like her, either. That's an untold story--the disappearance of the already disappeared."

"Leave it to public TV, in that case," Gayle says.

"Let's get something good," Kelly says. "The Biedenharn woman. Old money."

"She didn't die," Martin says. "Yet."

"So that was just a threat? She was gone to her sister's in New Orleans, right? No body found because the body was still walking and talking."

"That's right, so let's be real." Gayle mentions a recent stabbing instead.

"He was black," Kelly says. "So?" "His sister did it. He ate the bag of Cheetos she bought, her Cheetos. No mystery there." Gayle nods. "Well. Drop the first idea and go with the thread of those with arrests."

Kelly is negative. She wants the unknown killer. Gayle: "Okay. The three girls four years ago, along the old Bastrop road. Commuters, scholarships to the college. All gone within one year. Identical bloody clothes, the whole bit."

"Too long ago. It stopped-- no more college girls dead lately. The guy probably left town and nobody remembers the whole thing anymore anyway."

"I thought that was Love road." "No, it was 139. I remember."

Martin volunteers: "The 7-11 clerks. Five of them." "Uh-uh. Those were holdups. Cashbox money. Decidedly unsexy."

"The fourteen year old only child, white, found behind the cattle pens at the Parish fair, a beating. Massive hemorrhages." Gayle is impressed. "No arrests there." Kelly: "It was a gang of blacks who were meeting requirements for a Junior High club. Trouble is, they can't arrest all of them, so they can't arrest any of them. Nothing on that. Boring." "Go for the grief. Parents whose only child."

Kelly is reticent, finally admitting, "They wouldn't go on camera."

"Okay. The doctor who supposedly killed his wife, only it was his oldest son who did it, and he sacrificed all to cover for him."

"For his son, who he loved. Loved his wife too, but she's gone and what's done is done. Why ruin three lives when ruining two will do."

"Overdone story. Even networks took on that one. Tired. First probation hearing denied. Not news for another two years."

They get coffee and turn on the monitor for the 10 o'clock edition. Martin watches amused as the girls savage the anchor's clothing and new hairstyle.

"Girls. In my favorite phrase, studies show, it has been recognized by scientists that such behavior is directly linked to studied chimpanzee groups in which a barren female will crush the skull of a rival female's offspring, given the chance."

"Are you trying to tell me you like her hair?"

"Forget it."

"Does--at the zoo, you know the one over in the bad part of town--that happen there? With the chimpanzees there?" Kelly. "That could be a related piece maybe."

Gayle looks at Martin. "Yes, we have the same parents," he admits. They return to the subject at hand.

The policeman shot by a Vietnam vet only he wasn't a real vet. A school principal killed by the father of a girl who'd lied, making up an affair with the man. Numerous wives killed by husbands, matricides--eventually the spectre of the commonplace descends.

Gayle suddenly half-stood, surprised they'd forgotten. It was perfect. A young divorcee with a daughter, working full time and attending night classes at the college. Lived in a trailer in the rural southwest part of the parish. Suspect was the boyfriend of a girl she'd worked with: the girl had found a depository of her friend's (the divorcee's) underwear at the boyfriend's house. The body was found rudely handled beneath a highway bridge. No arrest was made. Something about improper handling of evidence at the lab. Kelly could raise the spectre. The killer still out there. Women at risk. Coming out of Victoria's Secret at the mall, who's that watching you? "It would tie in with the college girls, maybe," Martin says.

Kelly is strangely sullen, a cloud of severed communication crossing the small room. The vinyl couch creaks under Martin's weight. "I don't think so."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." "Kelly, come on. Are you sick?"

"It's just I knew her, is all, that girl."

They adjourned with no further conclusions.

There was the sense of a great ordeal needing to be done with. He'd successfully avoided all assignations to the mall but knew Meyer would catch up with him eventually. Essential packages must be placed in the right hands, and Cooper will be elsewhere at times.

In a blackthighed scrape of trees along the interstate the face of menace lies. Alluring, dark, swampy, gray; black doings, soul mongerings, altering substances cheaply begotten yet expensively dispatched, lost time measured in weeks. Sexual conjugations of all specifications occur.

Mac hated that edge of town.

The week of the grand opening was a spectacle that could have only occurred in such a region as this. It had been heralded as the largest mall in the northern half of the state--in fact, north of Baton Rouge. Live radio covered all aspects of the unveiling. TV conducted a series of reports and reviews, the paper headbanded it and there were helicopters about. Once In A Lifetime sales and music from six different kinds of bands. The economic event of the century in the city. Mac listened to the radio in making his delivery rounds; the predicted crowds had indeed materialized.

In the second week after opening he took the step. It was a gray day, drizzly and unfitting of the Spring month. His night driving would be spoiled anyway, so he summoned strength and dressed carefully in his new boarding room without board across the river and set forth down the interstate, eastward.

The rain had stopped and light to the west had begun its last flare-up before final dissolution. Heavy smells of ozone and cut grass and road tar still lingered in the air. The mall was beyond the far end of the city, toward the lowlands that stretched all the way to the Mississippi river, appearing at once melodramatically past a thick swampish cluster of wilderness on the north side of the interstate. It was indeed large, sprawling and misshapen; a great surprise was the proliferation of gothic glass spires at intervals. No linear connection of simple boxes, this.

Mac felt a draining inside his lower torso as he took for the first time the new offramp exit constructed specially for the mall, veering south, then up and over the interstate in a dizzying bend best taken not too hastily. At the apex, carefully holding the curve, he looked back at the downtown skyline, etched with the last of the tangerine descending sun. Downward.

Everything about the site at this point was immaculate and hard-edged. He admitted admiration for the smooth new asphalt parking surface. In the well-occupied lot he pulled in next to one of the new, smaller Cadillacs. He stood outside, gaining his leverage, and would have never thought this town held so many Continentals and Buicks. Across the asphalt came the smell of perfume, women in troops designing their magnificent assaults on the fortress.

It began to drizzle again as he made his approach. The women scurried, producing sheets of clear plastic from nowhere to cover themselves. He walked beneath the outreach of the large canopy of stained glass; it could not have been more like entering a cathedral. Inside, he stood in a short but vast hallway boasting a Mexican restaurant to one side and a cafeteria on the other. He ventured into the main channel, a vista of skylights and gardens and falling water and around them shops gaudily announced by neon and vast plates of glass. He stood still and traffic veered around him. All manner of dress boasted the curves and crevices of shopping women, each with flair for the inherent drama of being female. And this was the locus of the choice accouterments.

There in the mall he saw cheerleaders from hell. Two teen girls skirted a waterfall pool heedless of errant spray, blonde, dressed in cheering uniforms of stark red and black, their faces painted in extreme tribal tones, white and deep scarlet. Further, this: black lipstick. Shopping bags with disturbing designs and characters native to no alphabet in linear history. Their eyes were severe and focused straight ahead, as if their very mission were so deeply ordained it was considered accomplished before even coming into sight. Passing close, they did not notice him at all, Mac staring fullfaced, turning as they brushed past, no attempt at coyness of any kind. They disappeared in apparition-like twists past a jewelry store corner, absolutely soundless in black and white striped Nikes.

Had Mac possessed language twice his capacity, he still would not have been able to describe the precise shade of fear that made his bowels seem about to betray his every last effort to retain control.

It was a fantastic land he wandered, tinged by eerie portents. Everything sparkled and shimmered; light seemed to arise sourceless yet omnipresent. Children darted as though they had never known any other place and consumers studied with great skill the shop window displays. Open space was made angular by spires and skylights, somehow filled with promise of satisfaction--just over there. Unfinished shops bore plywood coverings, some with a worker's door open and there in the darkness the blue sparks of metal working and furtive, rushed men in white uniforms and caps.

Mac was content to stay in the open mall channels, refraining from stores. The floor tiles varied enticingly, clean, sharp-sounding under his boots; some held patterns perhaps indicating directions, possibilities. Presently he came upon an unexpected turn and there before him was a highceilinged hall ringed with fast food shops, smells intermingling and enticing. He made a slow round, surveying each uniquely designed bay, decided ultimately on a chili dog, sat in the raised median for tables and could not finish eating. He watched a movie theatre entrance, somewhat underpopulated, and counted titles to learn that within were ten entirely separate theatres.

He continued his rounds, experiencing a frayed mixture of unease and awe, like the borderline autistic child faced with his first day of society in the guise of mandatory kindergarten. (Martin, later; You? The fabled seeker of companions? The mall sounds like paradise for you, Mackie.)

By the Gyro establishment was another hall, well-lit, yet narrow. Mac watched a while, saw a small drain of patrons veer down that way as though they had special business, specific permission maybe. He furtively followed, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched to appear as though he too had purpose. He came to the bathrooms. The bays were wide, curved. Almost open, disconcertingly. Between male and female were water fountains and pay telephones. And a third bay. This shook him. Family? A sign for changing stations--yet there were teens darting in and out. Of both sexes. Mac fairly leaped into the bay he was secure of, the sign with the guy with pants. There would be time later to deal with this new information.

In the urinal he was alone until the black guy came in, three stalls down. Mac did not specifically look, but could not help seeing something monstrous fall out as the guy unzipped. He could hear the pouring, something like he imagined a hurricane sounded. His own stream dried up. Mac mechanically hit the flush and zipped up in a show of unhurriedness. He felt about as big as a thimble. He turned and walked past, a solitary glance breaking the common and unspoken vow of not staring, and saw the long tongue of a belt dangling. Not what he had pictured at all. But then the guy began to waggle it at him, spinning it around like an overcharged garden hose. Mac picked up speed down the long narrow hallway.

For some hours he investigated this new habitat for the citizens, a skittish eye out for the black guy. Sometimes he rested on flimsy plastic mesh benches and listened over the constancy of running water to the varying comments of the shoppers. None seemed to be on a first visit. All were insistent upon decrying features the others were assumed to have missed.

The tiny cup of gourmet coffee was not to his taste. It was like they added something and forgot something both.

At once he discovered music emanating from somewhere, and knew he'd been hearing it all along, dreamy and inoffensive like the light all around. Along certain walls were vast mural scenes of misty southern pastorality; columned plantation homes, cotton fields, New Orleans jazz funerals.

He found an unfinished wall and remained there, observing.

It was here a field rat ran out among the chromium-light-spattered floor tiles. At first the women regarding it moved along their paths in drugged acknowledgment, as if amused by such an impossibility. Then one screamed it into reality; the others reacted akin to the first. The rat, startled, ran for the waterfall under the tall churchpeaked glass ceiling. The women darted away, horrified and somehow delighted. The situation was brought to the attention of a store manager, and the procedures for alerting mall security were under way.

Mac was curious of the rat's origin. Surely there were no basements or accessible trash heaps in this quintessence of sterility. Wandering, he found an unlatched door within a stretch of gaily painted plywood covering a vacancy. The door came open easily. There it was, the scrambled fleeing of others to the rear, among worker's lunch scraps and a leaking sprinkler main. Hundreds of them, their eyes shining back at his. A hand-prop light had been left on, glistening off the water; a perfect derelict alley amidst consumer paradise.

At last Mac resolved to depart. He'd conquered an alien place and felt no small pride in himself. Only as he walked to the Mustang did misgiving arise. He spotted the car isolate and burnished far out on the lot. It seemed portentous that so many of the Buicks around it had already left. The light from the pole lamp he'd parked beneath had gone out, the only such casualty upon the entire lot.

He was hesitant to move from beneath the canopy. It was misfortune itself that had failed to give him the instinct to park near the movie theater entrance, the most heavily trafficked at this hour near closing time.

Beyond the lot, on the far edge of the stretched municipal limits, lay the Federal wildlife refuge along Love road. Past his car the darkness was complete. He battled remembrances best forgotten and returning now unbidden: the source of his distress upon learning the site of the yet unbuilt mall.

Superstition is the word.

One night he'd met a girl at a tent revival along the Winnsboro road and agreed to take her to see some friends of hers. She was a meek, small girl with granny glasses and full hips and a self-assured smile. They got in Mac's car--no one with her at the revival? he wondered--and she directed him back to Garrett road, north all the way over the interstate. There was a pecan grove by the wildlife refuge, and he turned down a gravel road revealed only by a scant moonlight. Moss hung down creepily from the tree limbs. Mac told the girl was no big fan of nature, especially at night. He could see trucks parked, and the girl told him to pull in behind them. Their feet crunched along the gravel and she walked so close her hips bumped repeatedly, warmly against him. He felt long-awaited promise in the situation, in her. There was a light ahead.

And near the bonfire he'd narrowly escaped a congregation of devil worshippers who held a flame to his left arm attempting to espy a secret tattoo, all the while bringing forth a procession of stolen housepets on leashes from makeshift scrap wood cages.

Mac drove and drove that night, seeking each well-lighted convenience store in the city, drinking a styrofoam cup of coffee at each, counting the minutes until daylight. He would not have minded never sleeping again, had his body allowed it.

This mall was built there, upon that site of Mac's terror, the pecan trees vanquished. He found little pleasure in the fact of its erasure. Under the canopy now he could not escape the feeling of a hovering fiendish aura, buried ill will from the ground itself. Finally a group of consumers joined him past the exit signs and made their way onto the lot. He seized the chance and ran to his car on slick asphalt and departed with heightened pulse.

Tumult at the Coney Island. The regulars in the past week have missed no opportunity to remind Ret of Glasseye's erratic behavior with Mac, and are silent now only in the wake of a new incident. Ret has already been in and out twice and they expect him to return; designs are to calm him down. They stood the information in solemnity; Glasseye had beaten his and Ret's grandmother, and some money was missing. The eighty-year-old's arm was broken at the shoulder. Ret's anger was predictable, yet until now never seen. He stood breathless each visit asking if anyone had seen Glasseye, then disappeared on a bicycle no one had ever seen him on before.

Activity is high otherwise also. Vito, Paletello's son-in-law, is in profile tonight. Jeans and western boots and belt buckle, with thick country-cut black hair--no one would take him for a third-generation Italian-American, but rather a rural boy raised from the gumbo earth itself. He purports to work for a grain-selling concern in one of the delta parishes, commuting each day while Sophia, Paletello's daughter remains at home in the city.

Vito is here with numerous friends of like attire, who pronounce his name to rhyme with "skeeter." A country cousin of one of the printroomers is expected, with interesting cargo to display for everyone. These are largely people about who have never visited before, returning sullen glances with like sentiments. Paletello is fairly hopping, and has pressed Annie, who was only passing through, into service. Mac is less than usually jovial with her, an unnoticed fact as he consorts heavily with Martin over recent developments in the friction between State Police and the local sheriff's department.

The police radio tonight is attended by Veeter, who seems to be the agent of planning for this gathering, glancing significantly toward the others each time they get a location on a patrol car. Paletello, beyond gratitude for the business, looks irritated by the air of things. Traffic on DeSiard even seems substantial. There's a run on Budweiser longnecks. Something approximately a din escapes through the perpetually open front door.

"Hellbuds," Martin says sotto voce to Mac, "all of them." Mac: a puzzled look. "You know, the standard greeting whenever two of them meet up; "Well hell, bud!" Guffaws from Mac. True; this is what they do.

The cousin arrives and there forms a crowd upon the sidewalk. The cousin, a young hellbud from a rural central parish, examines each participant, including Martin and Mac, for signs of plainclothes disguise. Then, hatching the trunk to a sixties-era Toronado, holds forth on the various types of weapons he carries. They lie loose within the trunk, no cartons, no boxes. Hopefully uninitialized. The talk lasts a good ten minutes without questions. More than a sales convention, the affair is a tacit announcement of an organization in the chalk hills for which the AR 15s and assorted supplements are bound. The hellbud in a heavy drawl disperses at details of the necessary drop-in parts to convert the AR 15 to an automatic weapon as well as inflammatory (but carefully non-racial, in deference to Paletello's occasional clientele) implications about the organization. He receives questions from those with interest on both fronts and soon Martin drops out, followed by Mac.

They resume occupancy of their original stools and stand fresh cups from Paletello. "They're getting out of Oklahoma and Arkansas because of the heat," Martin explains to Mac. "It's hotter there than here? This is like, further south. And the humidity," Mac says. Martin's look is patient. He describes with authority but labored interest the white paramilitary Christian groups obtaining land in the less than populated hills to establish a domain of Aryans awaiting the return of Christ and the ultimate destruction of all other groups. No governing authorities are recognized and casualties often occur in surprise confrontations.

Cooper comes up late, asking questions on the sidewalk, apparently having advance word. "Hey, Coop! Coop!" Mac is beside himself waving, always fascinated by unexpected encounters. Cooper looks at Mac as if he has something specific to say, then turns back to the spiel. Martin, thinking out loud to Mac, fathoms hell-buddhism as a discipline. Is Cooper one? "Cooper is the definition," Martin says. Mac finds that hilarious.

When it dies down a little Martin can see Mac think, preparing words. "Hey, uh, Martin." "Yeah." "This might, uh sound a little, I don't know, weird or something." "Shoot." "Do you know, anybody who sells that dope?" "Drugs?" "I guess. I mean, it's not what you might think. I don't want any, or anything." Martin waits a polite time, seeming to give the ludicrosity some weight. "I thought beer and Annie were the extent of your vices." Mac is embarrassed but presses until Martin names a prospect; "I don't know, either really, first hand I mean. But kind of. Donovan. You know him, don't you? Supposed to be a student at the college. Hangs at Habeeb's. Always talking about the movies he's going to make." Mac is surprised. "He's that guy that's Ricky's friend? Ricky plays the guitar?" Mac feels mildly as if there has been a conspiracy to keep him from knowing this, an old recurrent sensation.

The hellbud-slash-weapons-barker closes the trunk. The Toronado has a surprisingly deep, sickish sound. The following disperses, late for duties at the newspaper plant and elsewhere. Veeter strolls around like he has a stake in the business almost; Martin observes him with distaste. The Coney Island is nearly vacant again. Annie hollers for Paletello. "Hey! Pay me! I got to go." "Got that line down, dontcha." "Very funny, Pally-tillywhacker." He opens the register, selects an amount, hands it over. Annie slides a hand on Mac's chin as she leaves, smirking, but not without humor. Mac goes red.

"I saw Kelley talking to some guy."

Martin dumped his cigarette butt into an almost empty coffee cup. "Where?" "Out in that parking lot in front of the Holiday Inn. Louisville." "How'd she look? Intense? Flirty? Was she being held up?"

"Naw!" Mac grins. "She was just asking this guy stuff."

"Oh. An interview."

"Yeah. On TV."

"Probably a visiting speaker on crime the mayor's asked to come in, give a pep talk to the Chamber of Commerce. She's trying to get something going about the murder rate."

They resume their discussion about the territory dispute between authorities about a new dead body found near Swartz School road. "That's out the city for sure," Mac says. Martin's bottom lip pushes in and out, and he stares at the rim of his coffee cup as if it were about to mutate into something else. "Well, which is it." "Huh?" "The man that kills. Who concedes to take the existence of another he had no part in creating. Does he believe there is a world after death? Is he sending the victim to another place for better or worse? Or is it a supreme punishment, total extinction in the black, silent grave. The ultimate deprivation. Stealing life? Well?"

Mac smiles, managing a meager shrug. Martin on a tear again. Outside, someone lingers at the corner of the building; they pause to watch. The figure moves away.

"Or is it something else altogether? It's possible we make all this into something else entirely from what it is. We search, probe; pray for our own destiny among all of it. But is the truth of the killer less than that? Less than zero? Could it be that none of this ever even crosses his mind? That there is simply nothing behind it. No reason. Like a bumper sticker: Death happens." They look up; the figure's back. Jimmy Lee, with his torn nostril, rattles the already open door entering. Nodding slightly, they become quiet and pursue it no further. Jimmy Lee goes to a back stool, his usual.

"I got the month's note on the Mustang paid, I just ain't got the one on the Cougar paid." "You wrecked the Cougar last year." "Yeah, I know." "You dumbass," John said. "You were supposed to get insurance off it. I made you buy insurance. In fact I sold it to you." "I did. I got it." "You did?" "I used it to pay off the GTO Jimmy Lee made me wreck."

Driving by the 7-11 on Forsythe at Eighteenth he spotted his brother, sucking a small Cherry Icee. John's in his business suit; Mac can't quite figure why he's not at his office, mid-afternoon. High school kids roar through the lot in Jeeps. They stand against the front bumper of John's Toyota, facing into the store. Mac sees John stare at a girl--a young teen? "Man, you could see her bra, couldn't you, right up under her armpit," Mac says, genuinely disturbed at the open sight of underwear on a child. John is irritated as well, but differently, replying bitterly: "Their tits are getting bigger. It wasn't like that when we were in high school."

Another girl fairly jumps out of the way at John's stare.

"Was it? You remember, don't you? It's different now. And these young shitheads don't even realize."

To Mac: But it does not add up. The staring. What he's doing here at all. John is married. To Chandra, whom Mac knows, has met. And who is adequate, more than. And in fact, in Mac's sense simply female is adequate.

Later, talking to Martin, an unexpected visit to Martin's apartment, an almost empty tequila bottle on the kitchen table: Yes, (Martin pontificates,) breasts getting larger, rounder, earlier in life. A singularly startling phenomenon, though perhaps not new in the history of the world. And that's where the crux of this matter is. Not chemicals, hormones in the milk and the meat we are raised upon from infancy. Rather that the phenomenon arises not from biologically or physiologically confirmable data but that style, fashion itself has swung around once more with electron-spin speed, dictating such as more desirable, and the breasts themselves have responded, away from the trend of flat blouses and bralessness, a motion totally unperceived by the singular conscious mind, the girl alone deciding how to dress: there is no such thing as a vacuum. You can only dress how someone else has dressed before you.

A dim bedroom lamp is the only light in the place, stretching toward the kitchen where the two of them sit, staring at the worm at the bottom of the bottle. There is something new in this visit, a layered kind of urgency, Martin seeing maybe what he hasn't seen in Mac before. Or just hasn't known that he has seen. On a night like this willing to believe something good about himself, namely that his outwardly indefensible proclivity toward Mac has some rooting in inherent admirability, if not precisely depth.

Mac in despair, not because he doesn't understand, but because he does--the gist of it--despite Martin's way of putting it. The way something turns out to be, and the space between that and the way it could be.

Mac thinks of pleasant things instead, cars he's driven. He'd owned a Firebird after the unfortunate demise of the GTO. A swell of sentiment urges him to take yet another Pontiac. The Mustang's time was winding down, his belly told him. After Martin's the night was humid and dark, the streetlamps enticing how they lit everything in an unreal lower fluorescence the way daylight never could.

He's almost sentimental, heading out to the crossroads at the end of Love road, dimly conscious of having once picked up a hitcher there.

Six

Martin continues to not make an appearance at the Coney Island, and when Ret checks in there during his still-days-later search for Glasseye, Mac, at a loss, follows him outside.

To Mac's delight Ret now owns a car. Ret does not seem displeased by it. Parked before them along the curb is a 1968 convertible Delta 88. With rare volubility Ret explains this is his first car since leaving the service. He's been saving, beyond support of his mother, sister and her crippled husband and another younger sister, and the time was right, having to cover so much ground lately.

Mac had thought Ret simply didn't like cars. He'd never heard of anyone not having a car on a purely financial basis.

Mac asks how much. "Two-hundred and fifty US dollars." "Not bad." Ret lets slip he might not have it long if Glasseye has left town, support of their grandmother falling solely upon him in that instance. "Hey--I'll help you find him--" Ret demurs, noncommittal. "Really--I'll go with you."

After some indecision and much glancing around the sidewalk on Ret's part they get into the car and embark down DeSiard. Mac notices before long they are repeating patterns around Third and Fourth, circling between DeSiard and Louisville. "This is downtown--we ain't going to find him around here. We'd better head down to Burg Jones--don't y'all live right around Winnsboro road?" Ret pulls over by the newspaper plant and seems to be thinking. "Maybe Martin is at the Coney Isle now--you want me to take you there?" "No, that's okay man, I'll just help you out tonight."

Ret insists on putting the top up.

Down Burg Jones Ret is recognized in typical fashion by other vehicles and soft-shoulder pedestrians, the pace down here musical, rolling. Unpainted cinderblock washaterias, fried chicken enterprises, abandoned sno-cone stands. Even the upper limits of the zoo skirt the asphalt down here with mysteriously-bulged hurricane fencing. Mac is seen and regarded with obvious confusion. Perhaps some active dismay. He waves cheerily to all. Soon they are in other neighborhoods, Ret heading north up Jackson and out Louisville. "I keep tellin' ya--he won't be around here, but that's cool, I don't mind riding around."

They are all the way to Thirty-First when Mac gives a brief set of directions; Ret obliges, coming to a halt in the lot of an apartment complex. They sit in the car, looking up. "See that window with the lights out on the second floor, next to the corner? That's where Martin lives. He does a lot of his articles right there. Types them on a computer and mails them to the plant by phone line. We won't go up because whenever you don't see him around he's probably working. He's busy a lot. He only lets people inside on special invitation."

When Mac is through looking Ret drives on, assuming the six-lane, median-separated anonymity of the Highway 165 Bypass.

He grimaces; the needle gauge. He's forced to stop at a convenience store for gas, choosing one that looks like it would have mainly white folks in it. Mac purchases them both machine-dispensed frozen margaritas.

Mac urges Ret to turn on the radio, hoping to see what station Ret prefers. The FM unit is out of operation. "It only gets AM." Ret seems reticent to try even that. "Yeah, all that's for is talking and redneck music anyway."

Ret, more ill at ease as this goes on.

Mac chugs his margarita quickly and recalls something Ret said earlier. "Your little sister--I mean, I didn't know you had one." Ret does not volunteer a word; his intuition gets a little star on the forehead. "She's cute? Got a boyfriend, huh?" Ret manages a shrug.

"Let's cruise on by there." Ret looks at him: What for? "Think she'd go out with me?" "Man-- let's don't get into that."

Mac is silent for a while, sucking the straw. "Is it because I'm white?" Ret's sigh is a small invocation of desperation. "Hey, that's cool--I just wanted to know. She has that right. It's down with me. Like, I've dated black girls," Mac lied, "but that's me--it doesn't matter to me. Any color's as good as another, and I guess I can tell you this, some of my best dates have been with colored gals. Some real cute ones, too."

Mac waits a while. "It's because I'm white, huh?" All Ret's energy is gone. He knows nothing to do but surrender; "Yeah, that's it." "Like I say, that's cool."

Ret turns west at the five point intersection onto DeSiard again. A beating drum in Mac's chest fears they're going back to the Coney Island. He hurries to get another shot at camaraderie in; "Vietnam, huh. I saw Apocalypse Now about fourteen times." Ret glides right through the red at Renwick. "I tell you, I have nothing but respect for you boys going over there."

They coast past the overgrown original black cemetery near Eighteenth; the Olds' engine is smoother and quieter than Mac would have expected. He manages to refrain from pushing Ret any further.

Ret pulls to the curb and leaves the car in drive. Mac cranes to look into the Coney Island for Glasseye, but no one's there other than Paletello, fiddling with the scanner. "Well. Come on in man, let me buy you a chili dog." "No thanks, man. I gotta go." Mac looks back inside at the emptiness, then at Ret again. Ret feels a tug. "Hey. Martin show up soon."

"Yeah. Listen. Sorry about your sister. If I ever met her, man, I wouldn't bug her. That was just me talking." "It's okay, don't worry about it." "You sure?" "Yeah, sure. Thanks for coming along tonight."

"You'll find him. I got my eye out." Mac does a power salute. Ret does not laugh. The Olds rattles off down DeSiard with a sound like distant thunder.

Fourteen was waiting at the base of the levee beneath a partly shot-out streetlight marking the corner of McKinley and Cherry. Beyond the huge swell of earth, invisible to the neighborhood houses, the river veered from its southern course for a quarter mile due west. The houses here were clapboard duplexes and small frame cottages with screened porches, moderately run down, small-town-southern-idyllic to someone now dead's imagination circa 1936. The oaks and magnolia stood tall, huge, starving yards beneath for sunlight, the soil dusty and grassless.

There was someone with Fourteen, a thin look-alike girl in a t-shirt and paisley beret. Mac drove by once, pretending not to notice them. Fourteen waved miserably. The dim streetlight made an ring of illumination around them. Finally he parked several houses down from them at the curb where the grassy slope ended and waited there. They stayed put. He got out, slid a jacket on, made a show of patting the breast pocket and finally ambled over.

Fourteen wanted the delivery immediately but he horsed around, mussing her hair. The other dully watched, bottom lip protruding like a five year old's. He asked who she was. "This is Little Wing," Fourteen said. He stared at the t-shirt. There was a solemn face on it, with hair in an exploded stringy Afro. He tapped Little Wing's bony chest, embarrassed to feel the cross of a bra. Her eyes widened slightly and she swayed forward when he let up. "That's a nigger," he said. "You're wearing a nigger on your tits," he teased. Once said the words sounded foreign to him. The girls looked at each other. "She's a Hendrix freak. That's Jimi Hendrix."

"Oh. Okay. Naw, I'm just testing you." They stood, watching, looking up at him like defiantly expressionless children being admonished on a playground. "What I'm saying is you shouldn't let anybody talk like that, use that word. A lot of my friends are black." The girls stared, lips pushing out. Mac was stumped. This thing wasn't flowing. "You know him, he's a friend of yours? Hendrix?" Fourteen looked at Little Wing.

Little Wing said to Mac, "I know him."

"Can I get the stuff now? This is only like two blocks from my house, and my Mom might see us." Fourteen hugged her elbows in the oversize blue jean jacket. She didn't seem to Mac like the same girl at the playground that day . "Come on."

Mac reached into the pocket, pulled a baggy partly out. Fourteen watched closely, reaching abruptly; the baggy was opaque, colored white. "Let me see." He held her back with an open hand. "That's okay. You'll get to see."

"You said it didn't have to be money," Fourteen reminded Mac.

When Mac stuttered, she headed up the grassy levee, making a path. She stopped halfway up. Mac looked at her and then down the street, half expecting to see her mother watching. Fourteen said to Little Wing: "You can come." Little Wing followed through the knee-high grass. Fourteen was soon over the top of the levee. Little Wing trudged after, saying "Fly on, my sweet angel," and disappeared. Mac followed, now panicky, looking all around. When he reached the top, he could see the river, black, sluggish. Post-lights from the flood-plain wasteland on the other side bounced off unambitious waves. Fourteen was down by the waterline, between two willow trees. Little Wing paused halfway down the levee. Fourteen took her jacket off.

"Whoa," Mac said. "Stop."

Fourteen edged into the shadows beneath willows, unbuttoning. Little Wing advanced closely, glancing between the two of them like there were some kind of plan to all this. Mac called, "Wait, wait." Fourteen, still at it. "No, wait. You don't have to." Mac held the bag out, swinging it from his wrist. "You can have it."

Fourteen finally stopped. Rebuttoned. She and Little Wing darted lightly back up the levee, the black river glistening behind them.

The bag was quickly wrested from Mac's hand. She pulled out something stringy and pink; "Hey, this is bubble gum." Fourteen was incredulous. "You gypped us man! It's a rip!" Mac was getting a little scared. Little Wing interrupted, the voice of reason; "You didn't, like, pay him anything, man." "Hey, my mom knows somebody on the better business bureau." Little Wing: "You really just got some gum for free, didn't you? Isn't it better for everybody to just be peaceful?" "Stop that shit, Little Wing."

"I mean, have you ever been experienced? I have." Mac watched the back of Little Wing's t-shirt, colors changing as a breeze rippled across it, a weird optical effect, like strobe lights. She went on, speaking strangely. Fourteen told her to can the Hendrix.

"I can't believe this! Some guys ought to take you out, man--go around disappointing people! You could get in real trouble! Like hanging out with me--what if I said something to just the right person? Rape! RAPE! SOMEBODY HELP ME! This guy tried to rape me!"

Mac had already turned and was heading for the Mustang. Little Wing still spoke quietly to Fourteen, the voice of reason: "We'll hold hands and then we'll watch the sunrise, from the bottom of the sea. Beautiful." Mac ran.

The engine flooded, Mac's heart pounding, feverishly watching the rear view mirror. Finally he got it going, speeding around the curve that follows the levee, barely missing a pickup truck at the yield sign by the corner of Forsythe Park. He avoided the whole north side for the rest of the night, Little Wing's voice playing back to him: "Maybe now you can't hear them, but you will. Just take hold of my hand."

The building he sought was recipient of some dismal renovation. Redbricked, it curved subtly along the corner it faced. The two other corners of the intersection held vacancies; the fourth spewed tremendous unheard of bargains on used furniture.

He pulled into a parallel slot directly in front of the door. The meter was sealed off by a Chamber of Commerce banner in an attempt to induce consumers with free parking to this sector of downtown. He took the package box to the door, already propped open, half of a double set. He looked inside tentatively. The raised wooden floor was wet. A bar with gold footrail glistened also. A fossil hotel lounge, easily disremembered along this stretch of DeSiard, was undergoing conversion to a bar. It was dark inside. He waited, trying to see if anyone was visible.

Halfway out a side door rests an old upright piano in mid-transport, dusty as a just-unearthed archaeological artifact. Unknowing, Mac trod upon the site of Jerry Lee Lewis's pre-fame shaking. The Killer himself, just up from delta country and before Memphis days, a wild solo piano in the hotel lobby nightly. The ear found it hard to believe that what it heard came from two hands only. Chairs vacated during breaks found damp and rank. These regions hold scenes those haunted, ice-clear eyes once beheld. To face the devil, then tell the tale. Great balls of fire bearing down the alley, up the street, over the river; sights man is not allowed to behold and live still.

"Ahem. Package delivery." Nothing for a while, then feet scuffling, unseen. A voice? "Got a package here. Need somebody to sign."

"Just leave it." "Okay, only I got to have a signature." Nobody appeared. "Can't come out now." "Just take a second, get your Ben Hancock," Mac tried to joke.

"DROP IT! Yer want me to get you fired. That package belongs to me, and you are in unlawful possession, you sonofa." Mac put it down hurriedly, still looking around for the voice, and skedaddled for the car.

In a moment, after the Mustang has pulled away, tentative footsteps down the stairs from dim upper regions. Jimmy Lee, still sleepy from his nap. Invaded first by those damn hammers, and now this. He walked over, picked up the package, headed down the street just as the owner of the building and workers arrive from lunch.

The girl Helen (Juliet?) stands on the balcony outside her dormitory room. There is the light bubbling of an expensive stereo below, broadcasting into the parking lot, and down the walkway goes a boy she has just spoken at length to. Some light is left in the dust-strewn sky, an indistinct purple against a cloudy horizon. This is limbo; the time after supper, yet before full dark and study or other hapless intrigues.

The boy she met last week, turning him down for a date, (with the hazy reasoning well reserved by newly self-sufficient eighteen year old girls) had crossed her path in the cafeteria. He wanted to know if they could maybe just talk; on a leisurely walk around the intermittently scenic campus she hears the tale of his parents' impending divorce, a quick and manufactured but intense intimacy. At one point she is almost embarrassed by his nearness to tears, but is able to overlook the indiscretion, listening closely to all details. She is amazed, pleased at the trust. She feels full and wise, cautioning moderation. Sometimes affection has to die, we become different people. You have to move on. You're eighteen now. It's good they could wait until you're independent. Everything on earth has a mortal course.

She finds an articulation she's never called up before. Uncertain the boy is fully apprehending her wisdom, she is sure it will come to him later. At her room, he asks her out again, and once again her letdown is gentle. He thanks her.

Past the parking lot is a soccer field, and beyond that a few houses, and many trees, a hidden bayou. A moisture rises from the ground along with the twilight to the balcony, and it seems right, natural. Nature is beyond the horizon, and she feels a part of it. Night is coming.

She thinks she has contributed something somewhere, and a rosy feeling leads her to believe she is on a right path. Perhaps she can help people.

It takes a while for Mac to understand that no signature is required for this delivery. This was against prescribed regulations, even when he got threatened, as at the bar. "Just take it to the address, go inside the gate, then the door, and leave it." "Who's going to--" "Nobody will be there. Just leave it and go on, okay?" The box was stamped with the city government insignia; chemicals for the water treatment substation at Roselawn at North Tenth. Direct to the site to save city costs. Mac casts about for a mental picture of the site; he never thought about those streets particularly intersecting. He regarded that area as an undeveloped patch of woods mysterious among older houses.

As he drives up it is pleasant to see a white city pickup parked along the drive off Roselawn leading to a grassy plot and new pump building--citizenly appropriate that the trees have been cleared for the plot.

He walks along the chalky shell utility path through the hurricane fencing gate. The sun is directly above, fragrant against the tall grass. He can hear traffic from over on Eighteenth. The building is very tall and only about twenty feet square. He pulls the steel door open and peers cautiously inside. All that banishes darkness is tangential light from side vents in the wall.

No one inside. He scans the huge machinery again: he has brought in his clipboard and delivery schedule and pen; the pickup truck is outside but no one is there. He places the package on the floor by a lighted flashing switchboard and takes a look around. The pipes are massive and curving, cold to the touch. They plunge into the concrete foundation with great acuity of form, shaped by art instead of constructed by wrenches and torches. He tries to imagine where they go away to.

Then there are voices about his head.

He goes to the door, eager, looks out upon no one. Then he makes a quick tour of the small room of machinery. He looks straight up into the vast space above. Nobody inside. The voice again: a woman's. It is distant, and refracts off the walls, rounding hollow and away. He is only able to decipher one thing recited, an address on Standifer avenue. Before long the voice is gone. But it had been there.

Neglecting his next deliveries, he proceeds to the southerly address, jumpily elated. He finds another building, similar to the one he has just come from, in another undeveloped field. The gate here is locked. He waits, not attempting to proceed further. Traffic sporadically passes him by, blacks of the vicinity eyeing him. At one point a city pickup like the one before comes by, but does not stop. The guy driving doesn't look at Mac.

There, at the recited address, no one arrives, and at five o clock Mac returns to the warehouse to be (not atypically) fired by Meyer when the rest of the packages are found undisturbed in the back seat of the Mustang. That, and the matter of the bar owner not receiving his package.

He returns to his room in the west city and lies there listening until it has grown dark outside. Once he thinks he has something; another voice. It has happened again. Does he know the prime export of Bolivia? He is distressed by his lack of knowledge until he understands it is a quiz show on the television next door just turned on.

He purchases supper at Hendrix's bar-be-que at the foot of the bridge, asking the guy if he's related, receiving a blank stare. He proceeds upon his rounds. After midnight he is driving down South Grand, now cool enough for windows down instead of air conditioning, when he passes the holding facility for the yet-to-be judged criminally insane and slows down, finally pulling over in front of the charity hospital.

Schizophrenia--the word is like a secret prize.

The TV documentary, the people in the facility. Voices.

The inaccessibility of the world now somehow justified. Not an excuse so much--a label-- as a name badge to wear above his left shirt pocket. A sort of "Ohh, okay," he's never had on his side. To explain. Martin drives on, feeling vindicated and privileged both.

In the morning when he wakes late in his motel room and no job to go to he calls the lady at the facility and relays his experience. "Have you experienced any pain in your head? Have you fallen?" "No." She asks a rote list and Mac answers efficiently. He wants to know if he should come on in to the facility. She tells him to return to the location where he heard the voices and see if there is a repetition of symptoms. Mac obliges.

The white city truck is still there as if it hadn't moved since yesterday. Mac parks beside it and goes inside the building again. He stands a while. Everything looks the same. There he assumes unwittingly a lotuslike position on the cool, smooth concrete floor. Attentive. Prayerful, almost. The wait is approximately fifteen minutes. He does not move at all until he hears the voice again, leaping up immediately, then splatters himself on the gravel outside failing to notice that both of his legs have fallen asleep.

After stomping around to get the feeling back in his feet he proceeds toward the car. The sky is blue, the sun high and warming. There is the sound of traffic. Got to find a phone.

And then, in passing the pickup, Mac hears the voice, loud. The pickup? The windows are down. Mac disheartedly notices a radio inside the cab hosting the instructions of the city maintenance dispatcher.

He returns to the motel room with little speed and does not call the lady back.

On his way to the warehouse to appeal his firing Mac conceives a new vista, one that delights him with possibility and glamour. He drives instead to the television studio.

The station has recently moved to a new building and the reception area is cool and dark, fragrant with new carpeting. The receptionist is alone in the huge room behind her minimalist steel and plastic see-through desk.

Mac approaches and asks for Kelly. The secretary expertly recites a statute of station policy. Mac misunderstands and asks again; the secretary repeats herself. "No--she knows me. I just need to ask her a question." The secretary is about to speak again when he tells her he knows Martin too; then comes a blankness. "He works for the newspaper." "This is a television station, sir." They go around like this a few more times. Though patient, she is unbudging and Mac eventually loses.

At a 7-11 he tries to place a call to Martin at the plant and is told they can no longer take phone messages for reporters. Why? New paper policy. Mac tries again, gets the same receptionist, loses another quarter. But within half an hour of driving downtown circuits, wary of the gas gauge, he sees Kelly on the parish courthouse lawn about to shoot a commentary. Must be a big case inside.

He walks up next to the cameraman and greets her. With a minimum of effort she acknowledges him and indicates she's busy at the moment. Mac wonders if the guy she's talking to is another reporter; he's dressed in a suit. They seem to be joking around. He takes something down in a small pocket-held notebook; Kelly, in leaving, touches his arm and cackles at something he's said. Proud of himself, he struts toward the courthouse doors.

The cameraman asks Mac to move away; he's in the view. Mac looks about for the driver of the station van. Kelly is shooting when a passerby pauses beside Mac. Mac with authority explains the situation. "I know her--a friend of mine, she's his sister." The passerby, perhaps a construction worker from the nearby hospital addition, seems impressed and asks if it's true what he hears about Kelly. "Sure," Mac says, then realizes he has no idea what the guy means.

The worker is gone when Kelly wraps and Mac approaches for his original purpose, to ask if the station needs any drivers for their Eye-On-the-Spot vans. Kelly is helping pull the cords inside the door; the cameraman handles the rest. ("No, Mac, don't--look out!!) "Looks like y'all could use help---" "You said that right, but I don't think they're hiring." She then seems to look at Mac for the first time. "We're in kind of a rush, Mac." "Sure." But he does not leave, instead helping her count the loose cables to be put inside. "The operators drive, anyway." A blank look. "The camera guy." She pulls him aside, a light touch on the shoulder; "Besides these bastards are too cheap to pay you decently," she whispers and leaves, managing her public persona to make him feel as though he has heard a privileged message.

Annie is helping out Paletello again. It's almost as if she could get used to regular hours at something. Martin is back from his unexplained respite, complaining about the new assignments editor. Of all things, expecting a crafts fair thirty miles south to be covered, quote unquote. Who hasn't seen one and known them all? A tirade over how he can make a single call, write a piece without even going near the site.

Mac finds them all there. He kids Annie about having to hold down two jobs, winking about the place as if anyone hadn't understood. He attempts to introduce Annie and one the plant drivers and finds it unnecessary, which pulls at him in an unknown way. Explaining Martin's job to Annie, he gets a little carried away; "Hey Martin--when are you going to write something about me." "When you do something worth writing about." "Fair enough."

He is surprised and gratified to learn Martin has a task for him. There is a lecturer from the Middle East on campus tonight. A few of the foreign students, Iranians and Iraqis, are expected to hold sign-bearing protests. "Nothing to it. I already have a copy of what the guy's going to say. Just go over there, see what's happening, come back and tell me. Somebody might even be told to take his seat again, or asked to leave. Write down some slogans if you think of it." "Sure--" Mac is privileged, charged with duty. He almost turns down Martin's offer of a few dollars to cover expenses--but seeing as how the gas gauge hasn't moved off the red the last couple of times.

He throws a triumphant straw at Annie and jauntily asks Martin how much he gets paid, over expenses. "Any one of Paletello's listed meals, on top of what I gave you, okay?" "It's a done deal." Annie tells Mac to settle down, turns to Martin: "Even the $2.95 Chicago Relish special? Or the Incredible Georgia Slaw Dog?" "If the man so desires. No obstacle to deliver what the public clamors for." "Whoa--stand back."

Mac arrives at campus. He finds banners along the side of the basketball coliseum and deduces the location of the speech. There, beneath the freestanding electronic time sign, he takes post on the steps. It's hot, that laziness of late afternoon on campus, the air of studying, everything being put off. A few early arriving protesters are huddled on a small square of grass in front, darkeyed and darkhaired, clothed in accountant casual that manages to look mismatched despite no obvious rule-based clashing. A campus security stands nearby, smoking. His walkie talkie squeaks from his left hip; periodically spectators trickle in to the coliseum. When, at some unspecified but definite moment the insurgents begin to unfold a poster, the security nervously takes the radio into his palm.

They begin to march in a circle; the few straggling members of the audience, notebooks in hand for extra credit duty, are easily able to pass the picketing. There comes a chant, soft at first, building up. For a while Mac believes it to be in some foreign language but discovers they are telling the speaker just to "go home" in bent-syllable English.

He's feeling a little lost by his assignment, not sure what Martin needs from him, watching late arrivals join the protest circle. Very gradually everything grows larger; more cars are beginning to come in, prompting more security to circumvent the inadequate traffic signal in front. Mac sees a few of the city police about. He becomes vigilant for his buddy Pat. Two large delivery vans glide along the restricted circular drive by to the steps. More protesters file outside than Mac could have imagined fitting into the vans, many in surplus US military fatigue jackets. Two of them confer with members of the circle; the rest begin a line to the box office for late ticket purchases. Campus security is burning up the walkie talkie frequencies.

The line for tickets grows into a mass, no one moving at all; American-looking Mac is able to get inside through the confusion without paying and finds a phone. Annie answers at the Coney Island; he demands Martin. "He ain't here." "Quit kidding, I need to talk to him." "Been long gone. What's going on out there anyway? The scanner's going crazy."

"It's weird. Like somebody's going to set themself on fire." He hangs up, noticing the clock, and walks into the circular arena. It's exactly the scheduled time for the speech. A white haired man is already at the podium talking quietly. Mac has to strain; his voice is also heavily accented and indecipherable. Mac knows no more of what the man is saying than he does of overseas voices on short-wave radio.

The speech has attained a length of five minutes when a green jacket leaps up and yells; it seems to be a cue, as in a film reversal of a falling bowling pins, and others join, fists held high. The speaker backs away from the podium until order is returned. Security marches in, citing the protesters with megaphones. The chant grows, moving in a circle, the members strategically placed equidistantly across the coliseum seating. The domestic audience begins to part in small clutches. Chunks of soft drink ice begin to tap the stage like the tentative beginnings of a hail storm; officers are dispatched into the seats and the barrage escalates into a storm. A small cherry smoke bomb such as one encounters on July Fourth lands near the speaker; he is quickly escorted away behind curtains as a crack explosives team takes charge. Protesters descend in one mass toward the stage. The house lights are turned up completely, full amperage.

Mac heads out the front. There are even more of the protest population outside. Along the nearby dormitories students flood the balconies to investigate the sirens. Mac sees a limousine halted in a flood of bodies, panels becoming crushed by fists and shoes. A helicopter appears with hawklike celerity around the upper reaches of the eleven story dormitory, casting a pterodactyl-like shadow below.

Mac is able to make his way to the tall dormitory, after being briefly and mistakenly pursued by a Trooper. The elevators are out of service; he beings a slow trek past idle observers up the stairs. He finds the balcony of the eleventh story unpopulated and sits down there, watching everything omnisciently.

A grey gas emerges from some unseen source and begins to cover the ground, blotting searchlights as far away as Highway 80, across the bayou, and it is deep into the night before Mac can leave the ravaged terrain.

He and Martin are standing along the river overlook in front of the parish courthouse. Martin is astounded more at the national coverage than the event itself. Mac is pleased to have provided some of the info that made it into Martin's article. (Gayle earlier, their analysis of how it became so big in an essentially unpolitical place: "I told you it was something significant that they decided to use the coliseum." "It was a set-up. How else do you explain having it at a place like a rock concert, instead of some back room in the admin building, where all of six people show up." "And how did CBS know to have a national-issue van in this area, four hundred miles from any significant metropolitan area?" "My god, you'd think they'd at least mention the Exxon sponsorship, via the local petrochemical studies department.")

"That's something, Martin, about Kelly going to be on the network tonight." Mac is genuinely awed. "Yeah. Terrific." All along the courthouse yard in front of them are the remnants of the protesters--the minority unable to sneak away, and the others intent upon being caught, going so far as to present themselves to authorities already handcuffed--in a hastily fenced compound with tents and Port-o-lets. The jails full. A squadron of National Guardsmen brought in on relief are patrolling, rifles upright and clutched to chests.

"What was the whole thing about anyway," Mac asks. Martin is terse; the speaker had made favorable comments about the long deposed and deceased Shah some months before in a national magazine. The protesters, college students, arrived at the location from five surrounding states. The local university could claim only a handful as their own.

"This could be a big break for Kelly, huh. Might be like she could get a job there, nationally I mean. Then we'd have to watch the TV at night just to get to see her anymore."

"Let's not think about that."

"You, your stories could go like to a magazine."

"The wires didn't pick it up. They rewrote everything. It's not really my stuff anymore. They just took what happened." What Mac got for him, is what he doesn't say. "Nope. Kelly's the one."

"People sure do like her. I had this guy coming up asking me the other day after I was talking to her, asking stuff. Said he heard she was the friendly type, and I told him yeah."

"What do you mean, friendly? What else did he say?"

"Nothing. Just he'd heard things about her. Nice things."

"Back seat friendly ever since high school."

"Hey cheer up. Maybe she'll interview you on national TV."

"Thanks Mac. You sure know how to brighten the outlook."

"It's all right. Don't mind helping you out anytime." Mac suggests the Coney Island. He's ready for the promised deluxe quarter pound hot dog.

Seven

It came about that after apprehension and processing and release by the authorities, Glasseye was saved by the Reverend Sarah. In the usual venues skepticism arose, but Kelly began to consider a story on the Reverend.

"Are you numbering them? Perhaps some kind of inventive letter/number combination. Can you tell me how many segments you've run on her already? Or don't your archives go back that far." Her brother Martin: a typical reaction. "But I want to emphasize Sarah's work with the black community. It could go right into the Lift your Face & Lift the Race series, plus a leader tie-in at Lanny's intro. If he likes it." "Yeah. And when has he not liked a suggestion of yours." "What are you trying to say?" "Drop it. Excuse my impertinences, little sister."

Kelly delayed a few beats, then picked up again. "Plus, in this case I've got contacts via the Coney Island. Isn't there some veteran guy who went back to VietNam and became like a monk or something, who's Glasseye's cousin? A-and Mac having that knife fight with him? Did they really hold a sheet between them by their teeth?" "Kelly. Who hangs out at that place? and which one of us disinfects the bottom of her shoes every time she's forced to go there? Are you not aware that I your humble servant have gainful employment at a newspaper, and am dependent on a few live contacts in the community for the admittedly meager food which reaches the fundus of my stomach?" "Well yeah but. How many people read--" "DON'T even start on that again." The skin on Martin's neck getting those blotches again, even through the shades. Kelly backs down, considerately, she hopes he notices.

"You know, I don't think we even need to fight any more. The people who watch our show aren't even the same ones who read your paper anyway. It's not like we have to fight for an audience." "Oh. Okay. I feel so much better." "Good. Now, personally, I think if you didn't charge people a quarter to buy it--" "Aargh. Fifty cents. Two bits." "Whatever. I've seen free papers in big cities." "Well. There's a solution." "Good. Now we don't have to do this again. So what do you think about this--"

She especially wanted shots of Glasseye at home with his grandmother, who after personal visitation by Sarah, forgave him for breaking her shoulder.

For days he had been receiving messages demanding amounts of money. These arrived in the form of letters, registered letters, and angry notes taped to his door by his landlady. He did not recognize any of the names of the deprived individuals. Then came a lawyer up the stairway. In this way Mac found out his brother's drilling venture was a dry hole.

With grave demeanor Mac waits in line to present himself to the clinic receptionist. Earlier, having the idea to come here had given him a kind of warm settling feeling, as if he'd found some lost object the moment of ceasing to look for it. Sarah's clinic building was the result of a donation, a former elementary school, and so not cheerily equipped, yet large and supplied well enough.

Past the receptionist's bay, where there were rows and rows of movable, full filing shelves, he sees Sarah passing, speaking in low, pleased tones to several subordinates in lab jackets. She is quickly out of view. After multiple rounds of confusion two aging black people are through with their paperwork at the desk. Mac advances and makes his request. The receptionist, a face he can't recall ever having seen before, takes perfunctory information, makes a few phone calls to verify unemployment, and asks him to be seated.

He waits two and a half hours. Then he is shown to a small room with children's cartoon characters on the wall, where he sits for another half hour. A nurse in an outfit that looks like flowery pajamas to Mac comes in with a folder and spreads it upon a tall counter. The folder has only one sheet of paper in it. Mac sees his named typed upon a label. She remains standing. "So what's your problem today?" He says it is his ears, elaborating little. The nurse leaves without comment.

A short curly haired man with very black eyebrows enters brusquely and introduces himself as the doctor. Mac is confused. He asks about the Reverend Doctor Sarah. He is told that Sarah has already left the building. "Can I come back when she's here, to see her?" It is explained that at this stage whichever Physician is on duty sees the patients on a rotating staff basis. There are no regular correlations, hours. Sarah is often now not in actual practice, preferring the fundraising activities required to keep the clinic going, or in missionary practice.

The doctor examines Mac's ears, finding nothing that would cause sounds. "Probably just loose, hard wax, which I see a lot of here." With a scratchy pen he has to shake a lot he writes upon a pad. "If you aren't able to purchase this, just use a wash of warm saline. Don't put Q-tips down there." When he seems to be waiting Mac says "Uh-huh." The doctor asks if there are any other problems.

Mac, deflated, has to think a moment. "Uh, yeah-- when I piss, it stings." The doctor writes on another slip of paper. "Take this down the hall to your left."

Paletello's teenage granddaughter was in the Coney Island, waiting to drive him home, as his vehicle was undergoing emergency repairs to the transmission. Black was an apparently fashionable shade in her age group. Black clothing, eyeshadow, lipstick. A black dot on one temple: on the opposite temple a red circle with carefully applied (3D) drops of blood running down. The bullet was tied to a lanyard around her neck. They sat her at the counter in a celebration of attention. She was seemingly flattered by a circle of men around her, however castoff in the world they were. One of the regulars hawed, "Bet you got one a' them pierced belly buttons!"

Her easy, pleased smile became thoughtful. She turned her head around the group, giving each one of them a specific and individual look. "Do you really want to see?" No reply. Her voice was girlish, higher-pitched than anyone would have suspected from her outer demeanor. Finally a brave one said "Sure."

Abruptly she stood up, lifting her (black) t-shirt. Indeed there was a navel ring, two in fact. And more. Randomly placed around her belly above and below the navel and along the rib cage, and ostensibly higher and lower, were a total of maybe twenty rings piercing white cadaver-like skin.

"Oowwww. . ." "Girl, you hurting my eyes just seeing you like that." "Stop, please, no more." A satisfied grin from the impaled one; down came the shirt. Apparently Paletello was somewhere on the floor behind the counter.

"Ahem Umm. Seeing that, wonder what else there is to know about you." She sat down again at the center of the circle "Well, let's see. I have a black boyfriend."

Reaction: none. Or minimal shifting at the most. "Y'all are disgusted, aren't you." "Hmmm. Couldn't say that." "Oh, come on. Doesn't it make you sick?" "Well, not exactly sick . . ."

There was a disgusted sound from the guest of honor. "I am so disappointed in all of you. Do you call yourselves white men?" Then she was telling them about a reputed KKK march at an upcoming high school ball game. The klan had not been heard of since the fiasco of the Fair death of the boy. A great chain of unoccurring events. "I mean, I know some things got crossed up there. But it's a long way from being over. You'll be hearing from them soon, believe me." Silence in the Coney Island. She was confused. "But you're white. You're Baptist. You don't have to worry." "Oh, yeah." "Uh, are we not unmindful that. . your grandpa's clientele. ." "Listen at you. Think about who you're talking about. Do you, a legal, respected white citizen pay taxes?"

Martin away, at the end of the counter. It dawned upon him the logic behind the nonexistent three year old Paletello was always going on about.

Glasseye stood on the corner. Not a corner, the corner, and not because this corner was anything special. It was just the corner he was on. The corner he always started from.

Two streets crossed here. It was night. He knew where she lived. To get there, he knew the way. Once again, not a way. He began to walk. There were a number of right-hand turns. To get there, where she lived, necessitated a number of compensating left-hand turns. It took a verifiable amount of time to reach his destination.

That there were other ways to get there was not immaterial or inadmissible so much as simply unallowable deviation. Profane deviation.

When he arrived, when he was there, there was her house. No lights, no car. A modest house, brick, small, perfectly rectangular--in a decaying neighborhood that was never anywhere significant when it was new.

His neighborhood.

He walked up the precise and unlit path laid by stones in the grass. It went from the driveway to the front door. He pushed the doorbell button. He pushed it again. No motion, nothing. Even hearing the bell, it was as if something were broken. Not home took a while to occur to him.

The church. The church a place she would be. He turned around, facing down the driveway to the street where cars passed by, lowriding, booming, flashing, slowgoing. To get to the church.

To get to the church he had to go back. All the way back. He took a number of right-hand turns. This necessitated a number of left-hand turns.

He stood on the corner. The same corner. He knew where the church was now. He started walking.

Mac was in the Coney Island at lunch, atypical. Night was his usual domain here. Martin found him searching frantically through the paper. Which article could he be so interested in? Martin was about to step in with proprietary guidance when Mac asked Paletello if all the ads were here. He received an annoyed look.

Oh, Martin thought, Wednesday. Advertising supplements. In other words, underwear. He'd seen Mac in awe before--even at the disembodied torsos; maybe them most of all--belly button to mid-femur. Strange. Mac looked up to discover Martin. "Did Penney's put out anything today?" "You got the wrong department, bud." "Some bastids tore the papers up this morning at McDonald's."

Mac finally found the insert wedged beneath the footstool, somebody's attempt to steady the uneven legs. It was a little abused but still serviceable. He unfolded the sheets the way you might pick up a hit-and-run victim out of the street. "This one's moving into jogging suits. She probably runs a lot, like along the levee or something." Mac said, pointing a brunette out. Martin felt a little adrift, like one of them was missing something.

"This one here's kind of new. I figure she must just work morning hours, right when I can't see her get off." Mac smoothed the slick paper, then pulled out an ad he'd received in the mail, as if for some type of comparison.. "I mean, I think they ought to have a new building to be in, but I'm glad they ain't moving out on the Interstate by that swamp." Montgomery Wards was in the old mall along Louisville.

Martin let a little time lapse He supposed at any given moment he could let it slide, but right now he couldn't. It was impossible to tell whether or not he was doing Mac a favor, but the smiling faces themselves in the pictures were making him angry. "They're not around here, Mac. That's a national publication. Everybody from Azusa, California to the bottom end of Florida gets the same sales. Those women are in New York or somewhere."

Mac's face didn't seem to register anything for a while. Then it seemed to drain of color. It was a piteous thing for Martin to behold. Quick enough, Mac was covering. "I, I didn't mean. . . Well. I knew that, Martin. I was actually talking about the girls that do work in there. I. . I know a couple of 'em".

"The plastic kind without their nipples, Mac?" --some itinerant city pothole worker. "Naw, man," Mac said in good humor. "Though you wouldn't kick 'em out of the house for leaving cracker crumbs around, huh?" "Look good and keep their mouths shut." "Though there's that plastic-wrap kind of odor when things heat up, huh?" Martin joined in. Paletello: "Pitiful."

In the meantime Mac was ripping the paper into a rough form around the tiny figure and tucking her into a shirt pocket. "Hey Martin. You going to be at your apartment tonight?" "Ah--probably working tonight." "Yeah. I got you." Mac waved to everyone as he went back to the Mustang along the curb.

Martin looked at the ceiling. The water stains resembled clouds in a sepia print. "Tell you what. Hold the onions on that chili dog." "Are you saying that life isn't worth living?" Paletello. "Just a little acidic reflux lately is all." He looked at the leftovers from the paper along the counter. Somewhere there was a embossed memorandum, a shrine to the concept, this attention grabber. Get the eyes with tits, them move 'em down to the lawnmowers.

Did women enjoy seeing each other so much? Or was it like a white glove test?

"Hey Paletello. Your wife, she clothes herself in the normal ways a woman does. Does she study underwear ads, then head down to Monkey Wards to gain the latest in fashion, albeit unseen fashion?" "No woman looks at those things, Martin." "What I thought, what I already know."

Martin had lunch and thought about a career in motel clerking.

"Glasseye? Yeah, sure. He ate lead paint as a baby. His mother sat him on the steps outside and took donations for favors behind the door. The other kids beat up on him because he was smaller than they were." At Martin's apartment, after fifteen minutes of knocking, despite his best efforts to appear not at home. "His mother slept most of the day but his grandmother took him to church on Sunday. He listened to the music and held the hymn book upside down. They dropped a collection plate on his head and it was so full it gave him a concussion. The emergency room kept him waiting three hours and the nurses played cards and bet on the Governor's conviction and the man next to him who came in first died of a heart attack waiting.

"He never had a room to himself anywhere he lived. One day when he thought he was alone in the living room his father came in and caught him pounding the pud and drove a fork through his eye, pulled it out and headed after his mother in the bedroom. He put his finger over the hole holding blood and viscera in, keeping the ball in the bargain. The kids at school beat up on him because his eye was different from theirs.

"His father disappeared before he was born. Someone stole the welfare check from the mailbox and his mother couldn't take him to the doctor for a staph infection in the eye that really didn't look so bad and feed and other eight children too. His grandmother played bingo and wasn't watching him when a splinter from the bench caught under his eyelid. His mother left the state the day after he was born. His father had to leave him alone in the daytime while he worked, tying Glasseye to a bed. He started school three years late and none of the other children would talk to him because he was bigger than they were (but not by much), and besides, he had a congenital eye defect that made him look funny," Martin said. "Or something like that."

After waiting politely Mac asked Martin a question that had been bothering him.

"What? Hendrix?" He blew out smoke. "He's dead. It's been a long time. Fifteen or sixteen years. Which damaged his career somewhat. His comeback was less than spectacular. Sold more records than ever, though." That wasn't it. "Oh. A musician. Guitarist extraordinaire. Loved white women and died on his on vomit. The likes of not heard since."

Martin took the call on the second ring. "I got hit again. To the tune of ten thou, buddy." He recognized the voice of the jeweler. "Yeah? Anybody you know?" "Of course not. They had, what do you call them, sky masks on their mugs." "Ski masks, yes." "Look, I gotta go. I'm watching out the door to see if they're coming back. I want to keep the line open. You want the story, you come here." Martin put the receiver down.

The store wasn't far from the Coney Island on DeSiard. Martin made his way down after lunch. This was the third time in his memory. The jeweler looked up from the back counter.

Martin went through the usual inquiries. Who what when where how. All ye need know. There were two of them this time, "with those, you know, rapping accents." "You mean raspy ?" "No, what do you say, talking music stuff--" "You mean rapping as in gangstas." "Yeah. What I said." "So I guess this is a way of expressing their racial characteristics." "Well, who else? But I'm not saying nothing like that. Don't print I said that." "No, I bet a lot of your customers. . ." "Exactly."

Martin was about to leave when he decided to take a further guess. "Uh--what was the police report number--I might look at it if I get a chance." The jeweler was predictably pressed, unsure. "Well, who was the officer that stopped by?" "Wilson, I think." The jeweler wanted to get away to the back. "He new? I don't think I recall--" "Meriwether it was." "Oh--okay. Sure." Martin waved and went out.

A notice in the paper, not even a piece, and people would stop by just to see the scene. The drama of firearms, bodily threat, sums of money. Gets them in the store, and you don't even have to go down to the plant and cut a check to the ad department.

Martin knew Meriwether. Meriwether was up on Black Bayou Lake, two weeks vacation fishing with his son who now lived with the ex-wife in Arkansas.

The sun was low down the corridor of DeSiard street, over the old bridge. He didn't have his shades with him.

When the technician came into the waiting room she remained standing. Instead of taking him to one of the rooms she told him in hushed yet considerate tones that he had Herpes. "Okay. Do I get a prescription here?" She looked at him and suggested she sit down for a moment.

The region he intends bears an uncharted aspect, north of the city along 165. The highway, re-rerouted into a straight bypass during the sixties, is raised upon a slight levee, broad shoulders sloping down toward bottom lands that revert to swamps after any particular rain.

The concrete has rough braids and with the windows down the bratting of tires ticks time and distance down to the single sensation of a dull lump in the stomach.. Outside the city limits his mastery of streets fails him. Along a melange of garden nurseries and veterinaries and bottle shops he proceeds, remembering a dim intuition to turn left at a TV repair place, all of this in the backdrop of a shallow-pine forest, and there he finds a residential street humping over a railroad track which is raised like a levee. Descending from the tracks he encounters a sparsity of street lights, and all street names and numbers are murky and indefinite.

He has been here but once, some years past, and calls on weathered instinct now, turning strategically, remembering this neighborhood too had once been a swamp bottom, and bears now a trace of such in the original trees left standing, dripping the scenic moss of paperback-cover reveries.

There are no sidewalks here and the street narrows and deteriorates as if in correlation to the houses becoming smaller and less embroidered by contractor's details the further back and closer to still-plowed fields he goes. Near the end, next to the last streetlight and bordered by a brief drive that terminates abruptly into a thick wood awaiting future development, is a small yellow cottage devoid of any decorative trim whatsoever. More than the house, the peach-colored aging Celica parked outside the carport assures Mac this is the place.

He does not approach deliberately; cutting his lights, he drifts along the easy-sloped curb, parking opposite and two houses up, where he remains and watches a small figure at the play under the streetlight.

He figures out she is tracing her own shadow outline in a patch of dirt where the grass has failed. A small puddle nearby refracts the streetlight, shattering as the child tips her finger into it. The street is quiet, forbidding. When he shuts the car door she notices him for the first time and speaks with an impossible familiarity: "My baby brother is sick." "He is." Mac crosses the street in studied lax gait, hands in pocket. He looks about the house as he approaches, stopping several feet away from the child. "What's wrong with him." "He swallowed a pill." There is only the Celica parked in the drive, no other cars. Lights betray two active places in the house: a rear bedroom and the kitchen. The child talks on, not even gazing up to him now. A smell drifts down from the woods behind the houses, a captive mud odor, rising on a breeze that holds yet a little of the day's heat.

He stands at post, speaking softly in response to the child, when there is an event like an explosion and a woman is coming fast from the springing-open of the kitchen door, wiping her hands: "Don't touch her!" Walking quickly but still walking she throws the drying-cloth on the hood of the Celica, taking the child up in a fury. Her face is quite close to his, blotched as from heat, yet archiacally familiar and drenched in the vacant sensation of memory. She stares at him a moment, speaking between a chant and a yell, almost rote: "Don't you dare come in this house, don't come to the door, don't cross the driveway, don't, don't, don't." Her look, thin and tight, is like a pasted layer of paper on a paper-mache skull. Somewhere in it she calls him by name. She shakes visibly, stepping neither forward nor backward but defensively sideways toward the blared door, sputtering, an antic thin figure harried by one last detail.

She latches the screen door and stands outlined in shadow, watching the drive and Mac until a few minutes he leaves with no further attempts to visit his sister.

Later, he heads toward the opposite end of the city. Every so often he drives at night to the zoo. It is not on the regular rounds. He doesn't want to spoil such a sight by routineness--one of the few treasured places he visits as a special treat, or an attempt to not sink down to a place he won't rise from again. After full dark the experience is something removed from the daytime counterpoint. To begin with, the location smacks of bizarre civic inspiration--the heart of the south side, at the end of Wilson street. Standard explanation would be that the neighborhood went through the usual degradation, white, mixed, then black, but it was never white to begin with. Nor was it exactly rural before suburban invasions--rather a shallow-soiled wasteland in the midst of alluvial prime. Curious. The whole matter is on some reporter's list, a trip to the courthouse and library to peruse records is certainly intended.

Mac has a favorite pattern. Wilson street, newly paved and widened, abrupts onto a curved intersection, treeless with municipal park trappings. Straight is the drive that leads first to the parking lot and visitor's center, then on to other neighborhoods. Right is back toward the Lone Star highway and the charity hospital, the old section. Mac wheels left instead each time, anticipating the old and new delights.

Along the bumpy blacktop is a series of dilapidating two-room houses and groundward-sloping beer lounges, heavily shadowed by variegated trees producing grassless yards. Soon the outbuildings of the zoo appear on the right, no less or more dilapidated than the nearby houses, separated from them by hurricane fences bulged strangely from leaning exotic animals.

On a night with windows down this can be imagined: a man in his living room turns the television off for the night and peers through the curtains across the street to see a pack of lions moving slowly to some destination in moonlight. In an unlit bedroom sexual congregation is punctuated by guttural calls of unknown origin. Possibly blending. A drunk staggers across the street to berate a giraffe's somber visage gazing down through a dangling crown of inescapable Louisiana tree moss. Small well-built houselike structures with high-wattage lamps for warmth in villagelike formation across a manicured prairie. Monkeys chattering back to immodest jukeboxes and car radios. Children being put to bed complain of not being able to hear the elephant tonight. A true evocation of the distant dark continent across the mere border of a city street.

Tonight, Mac sees something he has never seen before. It is as though a specific reward for the predictably sad encounter earlier. Had he not seen it himself he would have not believed it. There is not a single person he knows that he would have believed to have seen it.

While he is paused, parked on a gravel extension off a ninety-degree turn in the blacktop, near the abode of Ralph the Wonder Llama, there is a surreptitious procession crossing the street during a lull in traffic. Before him are a number of men in magnificent tribal regalia, clasping poles--spears?. They step gingerly, knees raised high in wide, loping steps, hips pivoting, moving from the neighborhood onto zoo grounds through a recently cut slit in the hurricane fence.

No bicycle-riders these. Nor are they gold-chained bandanna-wearing drive-by noisemakers clothed in shades of red and blue. Their enclave bears faint resemblance to others distant downriver in New Orleans, wild Mardi Gras troupes, but this is something different. With lights and engine off Mac is apparently not particularly noticed .

Once inside the fence, they march to a grassy savanna-like plain and gather into a circle. There are seven of them. One innovation seems appropriate; upon dark skin the glowing of novelty shop neon fingerpaint. A distant rhinoceros starts, moving away. A drumbeat erupts. The drummer swirls in an erratic dance. A low, almost mumbled communal chant. Beneath municipal streetlight the tall leafy grass sways in an electric green tint.

Mack gets out of the car to see better. The sound of the door is a mistake. There is much shouting and pointing. After a moment, a coordinated communal cry, loud. Mac makes a tentative retreat. Apparently, acquired primitiveness does not preclude modern firearms. After a warning shot Mac scrambles back. He tries to call out; he was just looking, no harm meant. Another shot and then the answering cry of something huge--a tiger? He fires up the Mustang, regretful.

Again, rejected.

Early the next morning he approaches Martin in the parking lot of the newspaper plant where he has been waiting. There follows the tale of mangled carcasses found in daylight over recent months by zoo workers--baboons and Macaws. Mostly..

His mother upon seeing Mac seemed not surprised but minimally victimized by the fulfillment of some inevitable prophecy, and immediately began a listing of her apartment's shortcomings. She began to walk away from the screen door, still talking, and Mac let himself in. Hers was the west end in a row of four apartments tucked below the pavement of Highway 80, perched on unsure pilings along the bayou. It was not far from where he had lived in Cooper's trailer. He hadn't known, then.

In purple knit shorts and hornrimmed glasses she beckoned him into the tiny, wrapper-littered kitchen and complained of a stopped drain. "I ought to just throw everything out the window--that's where all the shit around here goes anyway. Into the bayou." The television was on, loud, and he heard running water somewhere. She went into the bathroom and turned it off; Mac remained standing in the living area. As she moved she gave an almost inaudible running narrative account of the place. The floor was joisted and he could feel footsteps in the other apartments. There was a knee-high brown ring along the papered walls and smell he couldn't place. She came back out. Mac said "How long you been here?" For the first time she paused speaking. She estimated the time as three years, "thereabouts."

He sat down upon a couch convertible into which the bed had not been fully retracted. His mother poured herself a glass of uniced tea in the kitchen and returned with a cigarette. She sat upon a folding chair brought out from the hall closet. He said he'd seen her at work, in the ticket booth of Showplex 6. It was an old double theatre recently chopped into several considerably smaller auditoriums. Dollar admission. She considered this, nodding slightly. "I used to work for the man that owns it, when he was down at Third and DeSiard. That was back before y'all came along." "The building's not there anymore." "Yeah, they tore it down." She asked if he wanted tea; he said he'd take beer. "Don't know that I have any--" She was gone a while, then returned with two, handing hers over for Mac to pull the tab, then his.

"You working now?" "Been thinking about going with UPS. Being a driver for them." "They had a wreck on the interstate the other day, one of them. Stopped everything all up." "Yeah. I had to sit for an hour." "The driver got killed, that girl on the television said." "I could see the ambulances." They drank beer.

"I guess that means they got a vacancy now," his mother said. "You ought to put in for it."

"Guess so."

They watched television and drank; Mac offered to get more beer. The refrigerator was packed with cardboard cases of Old Milwaukee. When he got back from the kitchen his mother had changed clothes; they seemed the same garments, yet the colors were different. Never a small woman, she had gained weight recently. She moved to the couch beside him and talked above the hyperbolic chatter of the evening programs. A lot of the names she mentioned Mac didn't know. She quietened during the news, perhaps feeling the beer. "I know that girl, she's the sister of a real good friend of mine." Mac pointed forcefully at Kelly. "Know her pretty good, huh?" "She's nice."

The news went off. For the first time she turned the sound down, with remote control. "Have you talked to John?" "Yeah, that's how I got where you live." She began to speak nostalgically of the time when John had once sent money for her birthday. "But that was before he married and had kids." Mac was certain that his sister had mailed the money that time.

"I went to Connie's the other night," he said. "She wouldn't say nothing to me."

His mother scowled, rising from the couch. She left the room, and the water was running again. He heard her talking as before. He finished the beer. "I'll send you some money, after I get working again. It's just a little slow right now."

She said something he didn't hear, then called him, louder. He went to the bedroom; she wasn't there. Slowly he backed down the hall toward the living room. Warm, humid air spilled from the bathroom, stifling him. She called him again. He stepped inside, saw briefly that she was already in the tub, and tripped in his haste to step back. "I'm going, Ma. . ." "Wait--" She began to talk, more slowly now. There were Old Milwaukee cans spilling from the curtain beneath the sink. He couldn't tell when she had crossed the line, but she was already somewhere else. Her voice was husky, serious, as in a family discipline lecture; "I couldn't wait to get shut of you kids. This ain't being mean, me talking. I'm just giving you something you can use later."

"Yes ma'am. I've got to go on." There was more; she called him again and as he left he could hear the soft slapping of the washcloth upon the water.

Mac returned to his car outside the convenience store at the foot of the Louisville bridge, across from the used vehicle place with the Honda-on-a-Stick. He had thought about an Icee and went inside to get it, but counting his change saw that there would definitely be no Icee tomorrow if he got one tonight. He wandered around the store aimlessly, the clerk's eyes following him dubiously. Mac had tried to engage him in conversation about the riot at the college, seeing that his accent resembled the protesters. "I go to no college. You wish to buy sometheeng?"

Outside the humidity was like a hot wet towel wrapped around his airways. Dullness etched the night. Then, as Mac leaned against the door of the Mustang, a Firebird blared up into the parking lot from the direction of the levee. The guy's stereo was on loud. He left it on a moment after shutting the engine down, crossing eyes with Mac, no reaction. Then he popped the key out of the ignition and stepped quickly outside. The silence was startling.

"Hi," Mac said, friendly in the way you are in greeting someone you have never seen before. The guy slowed a beat, enough to tell Mac wasn't someone he knew, then flipped him the bird and hurried on.

Mac watched him go in. He felt slapped. His heart began to beat hard.

This wasn't fair. So much of the time he could take things and go on. But.
But.

He was scared to go where this feeling would take him if he let it.

Instead he let himself consider a very un-Mac-like thing. He thought about sabotage. Time was short and plans vague when he walked over and looked in the Firebird through the passenger window. He reached in and turned the volume dial even louder so the guy would be blasted when he started up. Then he saw a cassette engaged in the player. He kicked the button. It leaped into his palm. He left quickly, with a touch of some small ecstasy.

It seemed imperative to go across the river for escape. As if a long, long way away. He shot the red light and sped across the drawbridge, tires grating like some natural disaster gaining ground behind him. His car had a tape player but he had never used it. He had never owned a tape; the radio always worked. He descended into the ominous sleep of the west city, kicking the stolen treasure in. There was an organ like a church organ, but edgy, extreme; then a voice:

Dearly Beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called life

The father in passing the bedroom as always heard the music, the insipid beat. Perhaps it was because the door was cracked open a bit that his attention was arrested by a particular sung fragment. He went a few steps further before completely stopping. Then, shoving the door open with his outstretched palm, he asked his daughter to back the tape up. She was lying upon her stomach on the bed, feet kicking in tandem, dressed for sleep in a long t-shirt.

"What?" A high-pitched going-up at the end of her voice. He told her to back up her cassette player so he could hear that part again. "Why?" "If I am not mistaken I heard some trash you shouldn't be listening to, and not even aware of if you ask me." She protested; they went around, as when she wants shoes or clothing he doesn't think she needs.

She fast forwarded the tape, desperately trying to find another part she wanted him to hear instead. He picked up the tape case; there was a negro male in heavy facial makeup lying on a bed, buttocks half exposed. He could tell it was a male because of the moustache.

"That's not it. Now get to the part you know I mean." Finally she played him the obscene phrase. "But he believes in God . See? He says for us all to forgive each other and pray for salvation. The world is going to end soon." The family was one that did not go to church, but at least tried not to be overly conscious of that fact.

He told her it was filth and she was not going to listen to any more of it.

"Daddy!" He took the portable player and stood for several moments, advancing and reversing, sampling lyrics. He found ammunition. The voice wanted to pretend he was married and fuck all night with the pretend-married partner.

He confiscated the tape. "You don't believe in God," she wailed. He told her God didn't have anything to do with it. She began to cry loudly.

His wife's voice came up the hall. "Honey! What are you doing to her?" It rose and floated away; "Honey--don't. What--" The voice maintained presence but the wife did not appear. He knew she was stationed at the door of their bedroom and would come no further. "Honey-- don't-- "

He looked at his daughter, sobbing face down upon the bed. There was a dark mole on the inside of her left ankle. It was growing wider, diluted on expanding, growing skin.

In the courtyard of the church they pause with a single outside light behind them, splaying her white hair. Sarah stands almost a full head above Glasseye, looking down upon him, hand on his shoulder.

Eight

In the aftermath of the slash-ridden removal of the Reverend Doctor Sarah from this earthly world, due horror came upon the citizens. The first day of her absence was a bright and sunny delight, remarkable for its absence of typical summer haze, but disrupted by the unusual and numerous reports heard on car radios about the city. The discovery of the beloved minister's abduction came from signs in the church courtyard which were not immediately divulged to the public. Her automobile (donated by a local agency ((mentioned by name in the reports)) for her well-reported good deeds) was duly described and the license plate number often repeated. The off-duty force from all the public services were woken from sleep and dispatched. Everyone listening to the radio reports was commandeered to take part in the search; phone calls buzzed between morningchore households, and later, in the evening, after the search alerts had been called off but no news officially released, lawnmowers were shut down for conversations between neighbors on driveways, some for the first time. Friendships were made.

There was something suspicious about the early 5 o clock television broadcasts--little or nothing was revealed other than the bare facts, which had been repeated all day. Some felt the beginnings of a coverup. Then, at the end of the broadcast, on one channel only, there was the sudden appearance of a flushed reporter with a word on the tragedy. Kelly stood clutching the microphone, her hair slightly misplaced as if a prop man had tousled it specifically for drama, and announced a break in the case; the Reverend Sarah had been found, and the word "homicide" now applied to the situation. A moment of visible anguish followed. Now here is Dan Rather with the national news, and she will be back in thirty minutes with an exclusive interview of the man who had amazingly located the Reverend.

Relief, shock and anger rolled across the city and supper was eaten. In upper city governing echelons the groundwork for a committee was being laid. Something would have to be named (or re-named) for the fallen figure.

Martin is grave and wired at the same time. He's been trying hard to find Mac and finally does, of all places, sitting on an iron bench in the park between the parish courthouse and the downtown hospital. Mac will eat this one up.

"Hey--Sarah's been killed. I mean, they think. They found blood on the astroturf at the church. APB's on her body. They're checking all the bayous and dredging the river."

Mac is chewing something, eating. "I know."

Martin is surprised Mac's not more wound up over this. Mac folds the wrapper from whatever he's eating and tucks it into his pocket.

"What. . .were you talking to one of the cops?"

"Maybe."

Mac's eyes are calm, oddly diverted--not that maniacally straightforward gaze Martin knows so well. "Figured you'd be out searching with them, then."

Then, as if coming to realize this is Martin here, Mac becomes his old self, off on a tangent. There's a new used Plymouth Roadrunner on one of the Louisville lots he's got his eyes on. The high, rectangular spoiler that looks like something on an airplane. He asks Martin if he wants to ride along and look at it. "Not now. You making deliveries?" "Nah. I quit." Mac is smiling. Weird.

Martin prods him for what's going on. "You seen Kelly?" Mac offers up in response. "No. Why?" Mac points toward the steps in front of the sheriff's office. "That's where she just interviewed me for the television. It's gonna be on at six."

Times her interest was not sharp in herself, when it was hard to maintain a hold on any thought for amusement with herself in the picture, Kelly drove down 165 or Berg Jones to Richwood road at night. Here the dark eyes saw the sculpted white girl face in the whining foreign coupe and tried their best to mess with her. She cruises, spurting the gas, sometimes enticing looks. Stares from bicycles, then grotesque base gestures. For hours in the night she rides, courting incidents, daring trains at broken-trestled crossings, perhaps a flash or two of perfect teeth at droopy-shorts boys passing happy tokes between themselves until she is finally tired enough to sleep.

The phone is harsh ringing her awake, unnecessary. Foggily, she hears the story of the abduction from Gayle, who is suggesting she try the angle from the recent series on people who have been helped by Sarah. Kelly is dispatched to find Glasseye. She rises, applying makeup in the ultra-fast way she has learned, having once taken a course.

She already has the crew upon on the sagging rough-boarded porch when she learns Glasseye is not at home. But the grandmother is animated and anxious to be interviewed, her shoulder still in the cast. Kelly directs the set, re-arranging photographs in the small living room she would have never predicted finding herself inside again. The first few takes are spoiled by a thread of incoherence on the grandmother's part. Finally with both of them sitting down quartered to each other by a rectangular religious-pamphlet-laden coffee table Kelly receives what amounts to an unsolicited and almost forceful alibi for Glasseye at the time of the murder. Kelly leaves, professing gratitude to the grandmother, but discouraged at missing her real target.

She is in conference with the camera man, trying to recall the name of the wino Sarah found in the Salvation Army trash dumpster and converted when a cruiser pulls up along the street. She waves once at the officer and leaves the porch. At first when Mac gets out of the cruiser and approaches her she does not remark the strangeness of the circumstances, just the typical nuisance of his appearance. "Hi," he says. "Hey, Mac," she leans into the lowered driver window.

Mac says "I got something for you. I told them you're the only one I'd tell it to---" She smiles impatiently at him, intent upon getting any new info from the officer. He shakes his head, chewing gum, and indicates Mac.

It is some time before she realizes they are trying to tell her Mac was the one who located the body.

Mac inside Martin's apartment. They are watching the end of the national news, a humorous tag on the many ways oppressed midwest farmers are coping with foreclosures and hostility toward bankers, sewing and knitting clothes for barnyard animals, such as favorite pigs.

"Want a coke? Or a brew?" Martin says, rising. "A coke please." There are commercials, and the Six o clock intro montage of scenic local shots. A brief rundown of upcoming stories, and then immediately into the feature. There they are, on the courthouse lawn, Kelly and Mac.

Mac is on television. A closeup of Kelly; she gives a brief factual rundown of the story so far, then introduces Mac by his full name. His first hesitation is only momentary, then he is fine, at ease, telling the story as if he were at home with friends. Kelly interrupts, prodding for the exact location. Mac describes Black Bayou Lake, about five miles north of the city, and the surrounding milo fields. He had been going fishing since he was no longer employed and saw something down a plowed row near where he'd parked, shadowed by the nearby maturing milo stalks.

"Fishing? You fishing?" Martin said. Mac motioned for silence, watching the screen.

Kelly asks if Mac had personally known the victim. He pauses uncomfortably, as if it were something he'd already explained to her, but smiles for the camera and audience out there. No, he'd never shaken her hand but indeed knew who she was, what kind of person she was. Kelly asks in what state he found her. "She was nekkid," he nods, and then it is over. The anchor finishes the story and then they cut to a police report on the search for the killer (there are several leads at the time) and finally wrapping up with various tributes to the fallen samaritan from local personalities.

Martin lowers the sound with remote control, finishing his can of beer. Mac's face is flushed; he cannot help but smile. "I guess she had to act like she didn't know me personally or something--you can't do that on television, huh?"

Martin nods absently, stepping to the kitchen. "Mac. Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

"Hey--I could give you an interview, Martin." "I'm not writing the story--somebody else got that one." "Ahh--too bad."

Martin turns and looks at Mac a while. "I'm not asking because of my job. "This is me, asking you."

"I was just driving, listening to the radio like everybody else, and they wanted people to look around. I got lucky."

"I can just see you holding a fish. About like you would a pipe bomb. How did you get to Black Bayou Lake?"

"It's off 165."

"What road did you turn off on?" Mac is a blank "Any street in the city limits and you know its name and what it used to be called and how many houses are on it and what the numbers are. But you can't say Black Bayou Road because it's up in the north end of the parish and you've never been on it before today. Am I right?"

Mac is visibly torn. "I can't say nothing else. That's how it happened."

"Didn't I tell you already this isn't going in the paper? Aren't we friends?"

Mac seems on the verge of tears, hearing Martin say that, as if an echo from many years ago. "I always told people we were."

Martin begins to ask something, then doesn't. Some instinct tells him to leave this alone for the time being. He says he's got to go to the office and work a while, and after Mac leaves (a close call--Martin almost found himself hugged, necessitating some fancy evasive footwork) he opens another beer, dials the phone and hangs up on his sister.

Even when the police stopped questioning him people recognized Mac from the television interview, looking twice as he walked around. If they didn't say anything outright, he still believed they knew who he was. For a fact he got calls from inquiring souls seeking details. There was a community phone in the central second floor hallway of his boarding house across the river. Many of the callers were from the Reverend Sarah's church, female voices, some late at night, and the phone was ultimately forcibly removed by an irate sleeper Mac did not have the acquaintance of.

Many of the boarders did not seem to have employment, as Mac, although he had filled out many application forms the past few days. "You might have seen me on the news Tuesday night. . ." The only likely opening was for a 7-11 clerk. At the store on Louisville and Fourth he filled out the form on the wall and handed it to the businesslike black man inside the small concealed office at the back Mac had never noticed before in his many visits as a consumer.

"Caught any big ones lately?" Paletello made bald inquiries about Mac's finding the corpse. Mac shrugged and Paletello wiped down the counter. It was mid-morning, open early, and no one was in save Mac. Paletello said cops had been in twice a day hunting for Glasseye, who had not been seen since the day before the murder. Mac seemed perplexed, authoritative; "Ah--they've got to be kidding. They know it's no way--not him. Kelly gave an alibi from his grandmother." "The one he beat up."

At that moment Ret entered and they ceased. He seemed angry and almost indisposed to receive Mac's usual handshake. Mac began to tell the fishing story again. "I heard it already, man," Ret said. Paletello turned on the police scanner and Mac waited for the lunch crowd to come in. Ret asked Palletello to turn the radio off and after a moment he did.

"How's your car, man?"

"Ain't no car, man." "But. . . " "End of story, okay?"

Paletello watches them, Mac at a loss. But, he leaves it there. Mac rises, walks out to the sidewalk, heads East. Different, Paletello thinks.

Later, Kelly finds Martin at the Coney Isle, where else, but at least Mac is not there. "You hang up on me just one more time mister and it's your ass." Martin spins a matchbox on the counter. She takes a stool beside him. "If you're pissed at me because I got to this story before you did."

"I'm just fucking tired, that's all." "Gayle's been trying to find you. She's worried. Did the guy from New Orleans call? Your editor friend? Oh, I see, that's it."

"No, that's not it and the pay wouldn't have been good for New Orleans. Higher COL." "You'll get an offer later. Takes time. Might even happen to me." "What?" She drops a slip of paper in front of him, a secretary's message form. There was no name, just a number. "They want me to call back." "So what? It could be anybody." "Look at the area code." He does. "It's D.C." "Shitass." She laughs. "Yeah. I'll be on CBS and you'll be here." They let it sit a while. "But it's probably some catch," she says.

"Hasn't stopped you before, ainh?" He avoids her glare.

The Coney Island is quiet, spooky.

"Okay. Do you me this, then, a favor, brother. Who do you think killed the Reverend. It's been five days." "Find the car first, there you go. First step." "Can you believe that? It's still gone. Nothing," she tells Paletello.

It is not long before two officers enter and nod to Martin and Kelly, addressing Paletello. They are looking this time for Jimmy Lee, and hear that it has been a week or so since he's been in. In open conference the group discusses possible sources of his habitation; most agree probably in one of the dilapidates on North Grand. Martin convinces Tom to sit a minute; he does eagerly, winking at Kelly.

The immediate concern is a series of unsolved interstate murders. Jimmy Lee has been detained in Shreveport and Jackson before, and thus. Martin pushes him more; Tom plays the game. Nothing to do with Sarah, they've got the story on that one, but this one's not ready to get out yet. "You talk to Glasseye?" "Yes, we believe he had nothing to do with her case. Did you know the Reverend had just saved him?" "Yes, I knew that. I watch television." His sister, containing a smirk.

Paletello gives the officers coffee in takeout cups and they are gone. "Liars," Martin calls out.

He knew the rumors about Jimmy Lee and the graves, looting, starting with obscure Indian mounds and then jungle-grown forgotten cemeteries along flooding oxbows of the river. He specialized in skulls. "What for? Like for medical students? Or museums?" Kelly says. "Art treasures, the way the black market underwrites Mayan looters for private collections?" "No--not quite. They're just for conversation pieces, to put on your bookshelf. A guy from Long Beach drives through a couple times a year, collecting from his network. People in California pay big bucks for them," Martin says. Kelly understands now, nodding.

"Just one step from bootleg Amway and Herbalife," Martin continues. "The real desecrations."

Mac takes the big step. The forbidden one, never done before. He goes to the other Coney Island.

It looks the same, very similar, only inverted. When he pauses in the door to this Coney Island, one block toward the river from the other one, the bar stands to the left, not right. Here the patrons sit and face west. Their left arms are nearest the door. It is their left shoulders they look over to espy Mac.

The faces are familiar, yet not. He cannot speak the name of any man here, and how can that be?

The decor is identical, even the same waterstains in the ceiling, almost. It seems obvious the same builder built this establishment, in the same era, with the same materials. A darkhaired man who could be Paletello's first cousin stands the register, a dull, mildly skeptical gaze upon Mac.

When he sits down there is an immediate uneasiness, as if they know by some invisible stigmata that he belongs in the other place.

"Hey. How y'all."

"Can we help you?"

"I, uh. . .just, I'll get a burger. Just stopping in for a bite."

"We're out of buns. Have you ever been in here before?" "Naw, sure haven't." "I didn't think so."

"How about a dog? Hot dog. Any old way would be fine with me. Kind of hungry here." Mac points to a guy a few seats down. They have hot dog buns for sure.

"Well, I'll tell you what," Paletello's double says. "I've had my eye out for the sanitation inspector. We're not supposed to be selling food on account of a little kitchen situation back here."

"He's got a hot dog."

"I never sold him a hot dog. I gave him something to eat because he's a friend of mine."

"Can't you give me one then?"

"How could I? I don't know you."

Mac quickly remedies the situation, announcing his name to all present. "If you're wondering where you've seen me before, it was on the news, last Tuesday." Blank stares all around. "The Reverend Sarah. You know, when everyone was trying to find her body? I was the one who did. They interviewed me on television."

"Who?" "Doctor Sarah. The minister on the southside. . ?"

"Oh. That whitehaired lady? I think I heard about something along those lines.. You found her?"

"Yep. On my way fishing." "Was they looking for her or her body? At first? I was under the impression she was thought missing to begin with."

"Yeah. Me too. It was really an accident. Finding her, I mean."

"But you just said you were hunting her like everybody else?"

Before long Mac is out of there, escaping that alternate universe like an uncomfortable dream he's somehow able to wake from. It is as if he has just finished talking to a disturbing machine. But he can't go back to the ur-Coney Island

He's afraid to run into Martin. He doesn't want to be asked anything, and he doesn't want to feel like he's given something away that rightfully belonged to Martin--the story. It's strange, not wanting to see his buddy, and realizing it--the first time that's happened to him. The shame seemed obliquely providential.

After that he decides to check into a new corner bar down DeSiard that he has not yet managed to patronize, just make a delivery. On the way he passes the old Coney Island, taking care to cross to the opposite sidewalk. There's Paletello and Martin and some of the regulars. No Ret, no Kelly. That may be Gayle beside Martin, and Mac feels the urge to cross over, but he does not visit, and no one notices him passing by.

Turning straight, he brushes into someone, startled more at his own imperceptiveness than the body itself, which reeks of beer and urine. The figure moves away hastily. Mac pauses, hands in pocket. "Hey Jimmy Lee." There is no return greeting, just one eye steady on him and the other eye slightly askew. And the gaping nostril. No feature alone explains the almost smirking look.

Mac says nothing more, still paused. Jimmy Lee has a toothpick drooping from his lip. It defies gravity, unhinged by anything save the natural adhesive of dried lips. Jimmy Lee is staring at him, as if he knows exactly what Mac is up to. Of which Mac himself is clueless. Mac steps on, heels tapping on the concrete in eerie isolation along the untrafficked street.

Two blocks down he is at the bar. He turns; Jimmy Lee gazes still. From inside the doorway he waits until Jimmy Lee finally crosses DeSiard to the Coney Isle. Mac turns into the dark bar away from the unnerving inarticulation of the encounter.

The bar is decorated with replica antiques representing no common decade or era. Around the edges of the natural stained board floor are ill-scraped plaster patches, overlooked nagging reminders from the fifties or sixties. Two of the tables are occupied, some four or five others negotiate bar stools. Mac has seen uniforms from nearby St Francis step in here from the sidewalk in the day, giggling, but no nurses seem to be here tonight.

Before he sits down at the bar he checks his billfold. He orders the cheapest draft and drinks very slowly.

He sits one down from two men talking. Before long he's brought up the Reverend Sarah. It doesn't get much comment until he reveals his role. There are handshakes, a few congratulations. He tells some of it, each detail lapsing into silence. Not a lot of curiosity here. He finishes his draft, doesn't order another. At one table near the door three college-ageds receive a series of pitchers, finding much humor in their rate of consumption. A knock on the door: pizza delivery. After some arguing over the loss of a quarter, one of the college boys writes a check and they dig in. The barkeep looks unamused.

He comes out from behind the bar and goes to the table. Mac waits for the showdown. The barkeep returns, laughing, with a slice of his own.

The pizza smells good.

Mac leaves. He wanders a few alleyways, ones not easily driven. (Besides, there's no gas in the car.) Down the unlit passages he finds nothing remarkable, opting for a half-dark moon looming over the highest floor of the hospital. The back wall reminds him of a dispatch switchboard, different lights on and off.

In the block of Grammont near St John an unsuspected voice at his feet startles him, knocking him off-balance, as if his muscles had leaped ahead of their attached bones. Scary moments pass before he recovers, making out an old black man on knees at the base of a building, surrounded by a small fortress of garbage cans. In the dim alley-light Mac sees that the trunk of the man's body rests upon a dolly, the kind once used in a service garage.

The man owns no legs. He will not look precisely at Mac's face, and Mac begins to wonder if he is blind.

He is asking for money. Mac, unlike himself, even to himself, says "Why should I give you money?" There comes no story, no excuse. "Cause I need. You got it, whitefolks." Mac sees a tattered brown suit, dangling pants legs baggy and soiled from being carelessly trodden by dolly wheels.

Mac looks around. No one in sight. "The Reverend Sarah ever help you out?" "Ain't no woman, preacher or not, ever hep me, not even a blowjob. Got any spare change?" Mac considers, then takes the meager change from the draft and drops it in the alley. The old man is forced to wheel several feet to retrieve it. He propels himself by wooden blocks strapped with loose leather to his hands. "Thanks, motherfucker." He looks the change over, slides it into his coat pocket. "What you waiting for?" Mac is looking around the alley. He sees the brief flash of a taxi cab crossing the alley mouth down St John, nothing else.

He begins to kick the man. At first silence, just the dull impacts, then a piteous howling. Mac kicks a few times more. The old man has fallen off the dolly and is unable to move on the concrete. Mac stands, watching, incredulous, as if the two of them were in another world altogether from the one he has known. Among howls the old man is pleading for Mac to kick him some more. "Come on, motherfucker---Ahhh---kick the shit out of me. Ain't have far to go."

Mac does not kick. He looks both ways down the alley, runs the shorter distance as screams echo off the brick walls, running, and at the open sidewalk he doubles over, breathing, the overwhelming insistent drum of his heart in chest.

The girl Helen/Beatrice/Juliet is in line at the university cafeteria. Self-contained, she moves late in the evening, among the last few diners before closing. Somewhere in the kitchen a pan is dropped, followed by more annoying clatter.

This girl's college catalog has been well thumbed lately in search of a major. She has strong feelings about her worth; she is good at counseling, she knows this. It is amazing how people will just open up to her. She often wonders what it is about herself that encourages such intimacy.

Her tray has only a few items, not precisely chosen for nutrition value. Maybe she will study psychology, impress some professors.

She is forced to wait a moment at the checkout register; soon a clean-looking black boy comes to punch her meal ticket. She astutely sees that he has been crying. She inquires sensitively what the trouble is; some altercation in the back has been unjustly blamed upon him. "Mary always does me like that--I've just been having a real bad day."

"Well don't we all," H/B/J says. She pats his hand to cheer him up. The next student in line is pondering choices of jello, so in the few moments left she hears how difficult the first semester has been for him. His girlfriend has left him, his mother is sick, and there is more.

A great moment of impulse comes to her, and as the jello is ready to be checked out she steps behind the register and gives him a sweet hug. Looks from all around them. The black boy is beaming. "Now don't you let me catch you like this again," she says. He thanks her. In a movie there would have been applause from the diners. She crosses to the fountain for coke.

Mac has been observing this. He is not a regular, but has long planned a visit here. The food does not look bad, and is kind of cheap.

With his chopped steak and rice and gravy and jello he moves to the coke fountain. Placing his tray down he catches the glance of the girl, the one of Freddies some weeks ago.

He is certain she recognizes him. It is as if Mac has reached the source of some ancient image, and his priapasmic desire for her makes him want to do something. They've found each other at last, and at a moment when he wasn't particularly trying to. Suddenly there is another spontaneous hug like the one he has just observed, this one from him to her.

The girl drops her tray and screams, glass and ceramic shattering. He stands back; she is still screaming, immobile and shaking. Two late dining football players advance, uncertain. One squats into a playing position, waiting for a count.

A kitchen matron calls for someone to get campus security, but Mac is outside, running along the bayou, followed a short distance by the football players, the screaming finally muffled as the automatic dining-hall door eases to.

The phone reinstated in the boarding house, the calls ceased. Mac cornered Kelly at the courthouse beat and asked if in the case someone got caught and charged with the murder would they re-run the videotape of him talking about Sarah's body's discovery.

He decided to go with the 7-11 job, and drove over with the gas gauge on less than empty and found they had given it to someone else. Maybe soon another would come open. "We tried to call you. Said you were disconnected."

Martin got the initial report in, woman dousing herself and younger child with gasoline, setting a fire in the bathtub, older child gets away. Who in the hell could have stood to take leave of the world in such a manner? Paroxysms of sheer hurt. Manning the phone lines, one source told him a recent malady with her liver had been revealed, although doctors expressed hope. Martin noticed something funny about her maiden name. He dialed Mac's number.

At his sister's funeral Mack is like no one has ever seen him before: calm, assured, dignified. He meets strangers and does not hesitate to pull them close with a few well chosen words and grief in control. He is the one consulted about the many small decisions such affairs entail. He looks beyond himself in the rented suit, fee donated by Martin, whose presence is requested in the family's small reserved section.

Martin, who does not quite know how to get out of this, watches Mac closely. They sit together in the second row; in front is John and family. The husband of the dead sister remains isolated and aloof at the end of the first bench with his mother, a small shrewish woman with audibly negative comments about each aspect of the funeral. She constantly pats him, arm around his shoulder. He seems composed, or tranquilized. His oldest child is not present.

The service is closed casket, in both the larger and smaller instances, and the preacher's microphone is faulty, so little is heard. Everyone watches his mouth and nods.

Midway through, the door to the sanctuary opens. A bulging woman in a loud floral print pantsuit stands, holding it open, flooding the hall with rude bright sunlight. The preacher pauses. A monstrous sigh comes from the woman, huge and inexhaustibly wistful, and then she is gone again, door closing slowly. Dimness resumes.

"Momma," Mac whispers to Martin. "I didn't think she would be able to take this."

Martin considers this. In front, John glances at his beeper as if convinced it's not working properly. His wife shushes a petulant child.

The P.A. system begins to work intermittently. The preacher enunciates the word God like a single-tone chime.

It is a curious matter for Martin. Who could be so angry at something--or someone--that she would set herself and her child on fire?

In the moment the preacher ceases and before anyone rises, Martin is confronted with Mac's sudden and ill-flowing tears.

Nine

Humidity is high and Mac cannot find the right combination; defrost cold then defrost hot, windows down windows up, then the vent. In all circumstances condensation builds up over the dash, scum on the windshield, impossible to see. He even tries steering with his head out the window.

Tonight the streets are wrong. Scanning the low numbers above Louisville he turns right and comes to an immediate halt. A stop sign is missing. While he ponders this curiosity he's abruptly forced to gun the engine, banking the curb hard: a Continental with brights on is barreling down his lane, directly toward him. After it has passed, unrepentant, he looks about, finds a new glittering sign strapped to the telephone pole.

They have changed this to a one-way street.

A deep wrong has been committed upon Mac. Why didn't anyone tell him about this? Nothing could make him feel so left out in the city, nothing as personal as a change in the order of the streets, the flow of traffic.

Whoever they are. It was not that Mac had never wondered about the actual human beings who decided where stop signs went and what turn signals went before or after the green; it was just that he never fully gave them a corporeal existence. There, pulling switches and using two-way radios in some hidden bowel of the city, but not really there--sort of like Oz in the movie he and John and Connie used to watch with fanatical devotion every time it came on--those far between Sunday nights.

Annie's place is down there, on Ninth. Now they want him to drive all the way down Eighth or Tenth to Roselawn just to cut back to the right block. It is a violation of all order, all that is human about driving somewhere in a car. He takes a deep breath, glances around for cruisers, sorry there's not one to see this and arrest him. Defiantly, he drives the wrong way down ninth, forcing the occasional oncomer to the left lane.

Annie doesn't say anything about his not having come around for a long time, which slightly disappoints him. She lets him into the place quite matter-of-factly, chewing something. Clothing sits seeping in the kitchen sink. With her right arm cast out in front and head twisted back, she jiggles the formless mass, making his stomach a little queasy.

"I went to the blood donation place today." "Which one?" "All of them. I'm not dizzy anymore." He shows her the money, unfolding his wallet near the trunk of his body. Annie peers, as if over a precipice

Annie says she has got to get a VCR. She receives many requests to replay the scenery of specific tapes. "You can rent players just like you can tapes, right? Even 7-11's have them, don't they? But I think they're pretty cheap anyway. And you can make copies of tapes." A good businesswoman.

The bed is unmade, brown tide-marks along the wrinkles. Annie turns the bedside portable radio down as she strips and falls back. Mac ventures over shyly, sitting on the edge of the bed at first, then stretches out. "You better get to moving," she says. "I ain't got all night."

"I'm going to pay you."

"You said that right."

A motorcycle goes by outside, loud, scaling its doppler drone. "Everything sounds backward now they turned this street around," Annie remarks. Mac seems to visibly grow sadder.

"What exactly are you intending to pay for?"

"I--uh. I was just thinking about laying here a while. How much will that cost?"

"Just to lay here? Like for an hour?"

"Yeah. I guess."

Annie seems to be considering. "The normal."

Mac assents. They lie, side by side, watching the waterstained ceiling, not particularly touching, other than mild contact along the thighs. After a while Annie covers herself with the sheet.

"Hey," she says. "That doctor woman--the one they said you found, I meant to ask you--had she been fiddled with? You know, molested?" Mac waits a little while: "I couldn't tell." A commercial on the radio for furniture, no payment the first three months.

"I think that tells you a lot, toward finding who did it. Whether it happened before or after she was dead. I mean, that would really be disgusting--an old lady, like that. But you're saying you don't even know if it did happen."

Mac doesn't respond. It's not clear if he's listening.

"They ever find that guy, your little friend with the funny eyeball?" Mac seems disinterested. "I don't really know him."

"Because there are some people around here, who are totally sick, I am here to say."

"A lot of the guys who come to see you, they ask you to do things? Special for them, I mean?"

"What are you getting at? You about to ask for something weird?"

Mac waits a long time, obviously pained. Like drawing an embarrassed request from a third-grader. "Could you put your arm around my head?"

Annie has the grace, beyond initial surprise, to not crush him. Looks around, as if certify no one could possibly observe this. Time passes; slow movements. One tentative grasp around occipito-parietal region, the other arm somewhat down his side, distantly proprietary.

Mac's body does a gradual release, like the uncoiling of a band-spring in some archaic piece of machinery. Cars pass on the street; a child calls out plaintively for another somewhere nearby. Muscles relax in little quivery outbursts along Mac's limbs.

Annie watches the clock--almost a contest of her strength--or implicit need for remuneration.

Mac sighs, maybe asleep? Annie's little finger starts to twitch. Should she resist?

She can't. She leans over the edge of the bed, fumbling through a noisy set of objects along the floor, reaching down and into her mouth, as if she's drinking or eating something but Mac lies undisturbed.

She has to wait a long time. When Mac finally rouses, opening his eyes, she mumbles "Hey, look" and the bulge in her jaw is manifest as a glass eyeball poised in the circle of her open lips.

Mac focuses, and his arm flies off her. The toy falls out upon the bed and Annie's laughing. Mac slips uncontrollably from the mattress, shuddering the apartment.

He's up, moving crouched toward the bathroom door but doesn't quite make it before the early retches ravel upon the carpet, a thin increasing line toward the toilet.

"Shit!" Annie yells, not laughing anymore. "You're going to wipe every bit of that off my floor!"

With the last of his blood money Mac made some of the old rounds, and they were slightly strange, as if he had been somewhere and come back. The garish yellow Mercedes Inn near the zoo had three dead cars parked in the mud lot and a sign in front put it up for sale. Nearby, the llama regarded Mac with great equanimity. He passed slowly with window down and elbow out and said softly, "Ralph."

He has never known inactivity in the south city at any barren hour of night, unlike the vast unpopulated stretches of the northside after midnight, and on a Saturday things were always moreso, colored more brightly. Down Burg Jones there is much walking between the bar and the stop-n-go and the laundrymat, bicycles weaving interbout; some waving at Mac, some beginning to wave then retreating at the white face. Some just look. Voices, his response; sounds often indecipherable, like the sudden reappearance of some lost and unrecorded language.

Down here are no sidewalks, just the crumbly footpaths through the soft earth on both sides of the soft tar street surface. Frame churches and frame houses interspersed, indistinguishable, among yards and vegetation trim not from manual care so much as undernourishment.

Deepset in trees off the ragged streets hidden eyes follow Mac's progress.

In the stop-n-go he buys his Icee from a white girl laughing at the attention she's getting from a group of sub-teen black boys; closer he sees the dark roots of her blonde hair and careless poundage beneath a checked regulation clerk blouse. "C'mon, got horses in my pocket, I swear. None of 'em used." Mac stands around, looking at the unbought newspapers. A video basketball is being played noisily nearby.

A tap on the shoulders points out a sign above the door: No Consumption On Premises. The man is seriously big, seriously black. No official uniform, yet the proprietorship is undeniably his. Mac sucks the straw, grins, indicates other customers and their obviously open bottled soft drinks. He finds his shoulder pushed, his Icee disturbed, and he is outside getting in the car, not entirely under his own locomotion. There, bicycles surround him, hands slapping the trunk, doors, hood.

This was a first timer, never happened to him before.

He's able to drive away easily, but the bicycles follow him. He speeds up, cutting down Standifer down by the deep foliage around the sewerage plant, the calling voices heard no more. Having lost them, he's reluctant to show himself for a while. No street lights down here. He parks the car on a gravel access road, sits on the hood, searches for the absent moon. A guy and girl, a date, stroll past. He nods; they are civil enough, then he perceives a moustache on the one supposed to be a girl.

So he drives on, coming across the tracks at South Jackson, cruising near the reformatory and charity hospital.

Bikes, different ones. Cautious, he makes the first sharp right. To get bearings, he looks for a street sign, but none appears. There's the lone pole, the perpendicular green name plates removed. A strict shortness comes up his throat. He does not recognize this street at all.

When he was at the warehouse and on terms with Cooper, Cooper would get a bunch of them around Mac in a circle and hand out a map and take bets, daring one of them to pick an obscure name off the index and see if Mac couldn't name the region and progress and order of each intersection.

But he does not know this street at all. There is a Dead End sign, one corner somehow ripped away and paint-faded. A barbed-wire fence and rural field and black woods beyond. It is as if finding himself transported to another place in the world entirely, beyond his realm, grossly unfair. He is backing up when he sees the bicycles, coming.

They are around him, slapping, kicking fenders with bare feet. Circling, yelling, calling him out. Voices chant, ancient deep leering sounds that strike at his heart. He can't drive past, they are so thick. Later he would consider at length why he had actually gotten out of the car.

One appears to be a kind of leader. Mac makes several attempts to chat, but gets no coherent reply. A nearby porch light comes on, but the screen door remains closed. He is sucking the Icee when they dismount and close in while the bikes fall over heedlessly and his last recognizable utterance is Ret's name shouted, and then blows to the stomach, head, chest. The breathy, arid sound of ribs in distress. Within moments Mac is fetal, wheezing. The bicycles leave, chains clanking. and the porch light goes off. No sirens, no two-way radios. No Ret around to hear.

His landlord stands in the hall explaining for the third time why he has changed the lock and Mac can get his clothes when he finally pays but he cannot live there anymore

Mac, largely mobile but slow and sore, lies on the hall floor in protest. The landlord goes over it one more time, then leaves, giving Mac five minutes before he calls the police.

Mac waits fifteen, then goes to his car. There is nothing to do but drive around while there is gas in the tank. It is high, bright midday.

He watches the screen. There are words on it. With his eyes watching the screen no one passing the cubicle can tell he's not reading the words, not writing them.

The movable cubicle walls are an odd height; sitting, you can't see over them; standing, you can see anybody else who happens to be standing, but that's all, and them only above the belt line. What do you say to someone across a room, yawning, stretching, too far to hear?

The ceiling looks the same from everywhere you are. It's the only thing there is if, sitting, you want to look at anything else but your cubicle. Panels, celotex, held in place by a metal waffle framing. Fluorescent rectangles of sourceless light. He could be looking at this from any populated place on the earth.

Three times he has called the boarding house and he has been told three different scenarios. Mac doesn't live there. Mac does live there, but can't use the phone until he pays rent. Mac is sick in his room and needs to pay rent so he can go be sick somewhere else.

When Martin arrives on the premises, he is allowed to see inside the locked room after remitting a check for the needed balance. The room is on the top floor, narrow, with a sharp angle to the ceiling, being a partition of a once larger room, maybe an attic storage space.

"You can just take his stuff to him. I got to let that room out."

"Where can I find him?"

A long dull stare. "He drove off. I have not yet received official change of address notification." Ha.

Martin finds himself driving. Looking.

Certain proximities bother him. Mac finding the body, the timing. Paradoxically, Martin is beginning to feel guilty himself, as if through inattention to Mac he has missed some key admission that could have averted all this.

All what? Not an admission to having done something. Mac was not capable of that.

He simply wasn't.

But some clue. One he didn't have his hand out for.

By nightfall he is still driving. The same circuits, over and over. This is how he imagines Mac driving.

He watches this side, the companion lanes. Waits for Mac to pull alongside.

At the unemployment office Mac finds it hard to believe (once he's gotten to the woman's desk and met all preparatory form-filling requirements) how long it will take. "But I told you when it was the last time I worked." "Yes but these have to be examined, verified and approved." Final.

He looks around at the offices as he leaves, arm balanced against a bruised hip. He remembers having bowled here, now it is a department store of governmental offices.

Mac sleeps in his back seat in the same clothes he has worn for four days now, behind the abandoned old Safeway on Oliver road. The niche is securely hidden, immune for a while. It is an old neighborhood, deeply shaded by sycamores.

When he awakes dark night is all around. A pleasant feeling of ease and freedom from pain resides in his chest. Something grand has come to him and he cannot say if it was dreamed or not. The excitement of it makes him sit up straight and he cannot even go back to sleep.

It is three and a half hours after sunrise when he is able to enter the TG&Y (going out of business but it still opens before KMart) where he shoplifts a small steno-sized notepad of yellow paper and Pilot Precise Rolling Ball pen.

Taking the materials is easier than he would have ever imagined, a thing he amazingly has never attempted before. If he found himself caught, arrested, that would merely fall within his plan. But it doesn't.

In Forsythe Park he leans back in the front seat until deep afternoon, writing, composing, drinking a canned coke purchased with the proceeds from a search of telephone-return pockets by the tennis courts.

There, in the park, he observes each cruiser passing through. Bob, Tom, then Pat. Each recognizes him, waves. Pat pulls up, takes an appraising look at the new foot-size dents all around the car.

"Some bad luck, huh?"

"Yeah. Would have called you but there was nothing you could do, you know. Thanks, anyway." Pat nods, is soon gone. Old Mac.

habitual politeness shows through, and tries to practice on Mac, showing deep annoyance as Mac hands over the folded papers. He asks Tim to read it later in the night when he stops somewhere for coffee.

"You'll find me," Mac says. "You don't know what I mean now, but you will. I won't be any trouble."

Whatever.

To drive up 165 past dark, and know where he was going, was to take a huge, overwhelming breath.

Rain had fallen earlier, droplets from the windshield still whipping in through the open windows of the battered Mustang, stinging his left forearm. The land is flat, soggy, lined with swamps. For a stretch beyond the city limits the four lane is unlit, then the remnants of a small town along the bayou appear; offices, daycares, veterinarians, machine shops and finally an anomalous brand new hospital in ghostly relief from blue ground lights.

Right up there, past that, a small two-lane branches off. This is the old highway, overgrown and tagged for use mainly by oil exploration companies and highschoolers on the way to Moon Lake.

Mac is going slow, his temerity of such regions pulsing like a slow heart rate beneath his shallow breathing. The dim headlights are inadequate for long periods amidst the drooping vines and limbs above the shoulderless asphalt; here, civilization's broken white centerline is a necessity. At the Moon Lake turnoff he loses some traction, sliding crosswise to a halt at the base of the silty dirt road leading over the levee and into the trees. He waits a while, just watching, the intensity of the headlights dependent upon the rate of the engine he's coaxing up to idle.

He drives on, ascending the levee slowly and descending even more slowly into the unilluminated river bottom. Whether it's good or bad to have seen no other travelers at all out here Mac isn't certain.

At some unseen point, the day's showery heat ceases and actual coolness crests each corner the car turns, borne on river breezes above intermittent grassy pastures. Headlights cross sagging barbed wire and a visibly disintegrating barn; everything here is going backwards. This two-lane, dating prior to the old highway, leads eventually north to Arkansas, beginning to curve steeply, dangerous for the inattentive or uninitiated. Mac drives slowly enough.

All along Mac's left side--the west--are slivers of moon. He passes one dim turnoff, and silently begins a count. On down to the third possible turnoff, where the branch dirt road is completely identical to the others but is verifiably the third. He turns, gravely

Across a second deeper levee and all remnant light is formally extinguished. Vegetation grows denser, laden with earthsmells; before him the landscape provides only this dim road and again the patched barbed wire fence.

At last there is a break, a shallow field lined on both sides by Oaks from a once upon a time plan. Utterly lightless against the far black backdrop of the river is the long desiccated main house. What remains mostly is two brick columns, no signs or warnings of any kind against trespassers. That this is private land is known to Mac, and he treads lightly.

Once before he has been here, with his brother John. They parked John's first car here just beyond the gate and walked the impossibly rutted logging road for a prescribed distance into the woods, smelled the river, and turned left. After an argument over interpretation of directions they became lost and arrived at their destination three hours late. It was nearly dark when they reached the car again. Mac has not been here since but the way is not something he could forget.

He sits a while, inside the car. The ticking of everything is enormous, the engine, the trees, whatever animal footsteps. In a vision seldom given to metaphor there comes the likeness, neither warm nor chilling but vaguely astonishing, to the one movie he has revisited whenever given chance, such as reruns on Cooper's cable, of a Vietnam story where the captain was sent miles and miles into a dense jungle to retrieve a guy left up in there years before.

The music: Boo-boom. Boo-boom.

Mac leaves the car parked. Being outside that shell is like shedding every piece of clothing he's ever worn, at once. Jumping off a skyscraper seems momentarily more palatable. He sets about the long-remembered trail, every sound overloud and betraying.

After a while it becomes easier for his eyes to perceive the larger objects, and the smaller ones, such as snakes, are probably better left unremarked and undisturbed. He can smell the river. Each successful step, each forward unit without mishap, leads him to feel more capable, if forever foreign to the primal landscape.

This is the last thing to be done.

He makes the turn, the right one that John had not made when they were teenagers. A trail lies there, more a tunnel through vines than a trodden path.

A fluttering of wings and he retains the presence to freeze, trembling, glad not to be able to see himself in a mirror. Perfectly still, it is as if his eyes keep moving forward. In motion again, he passes a long disused cemetery, the toppling stones a little whiter than the actual available light should seemingly allow.

Finally he is descending along the edge of a slight bluff, a dropoff into an old river channel. The overall terrain is surrendering, down toward the new path of the river. The earth falls beneath, the trees rise above.

Ultimately comes a small opening, then a clearing, a shack on a knoll, and a small boat tethered to a drifting wooden dock on the river.

In his adolescence Mac's father was both never there and never actually gone. The three of them, the children, came to regard him as a fact, a curious visitor more or less, no ogre as the mother would have it and no baseball diamond pal. At most there would be fresh fish, surplus from his river catch to be sold to the market on the west bank. For a while he lived on a houseboat and later they learned he had moved to the shack on old plantation land where heirs now owned a computer company and allowed him to keep a watch over for rights to squat. It may have been Connie who disliked his absence most; she would say once or twice to her brothers "At least he never lies. Have you ever heard him to lie?" While their mother kept odd hours for a movie-ticket seller.

And now Mac is there, undetected, observing the dim interior light through the grimy-paned window in the paintless wall.

He walks around, pets the friendly hound, goes down to the boat, looks at the scrub garden. He is capable, reverent, yet has no kinship with any of this. There is one thing to do before he leaves.

At the window he does not knock, he looks in. A television set is on. The contents of the room are sparse, worn and necessary. The television is the source of the light. A dim outline of legs comes out from the wall to the left of the window, perhaps a couch there.

Mac has seen, and is about to step back, when he perceives a dark box to the side of the television. Mac recognizes a VCR. He waits, looking for the first time at the images upon the screen. He sees the proceedings of pornographic videotapes, lingers only a moment, then the hound is re-trailing him across the yard. But he has forgotten one thing, and because she had once spoken less than abusively of her father, he returns to leave a clipped copy of his sister's obituary in the handle of the screen door.

On the main highway again, near the hospital, Mac eyes the pessimistic message of the gas gauge, but within moments that is no longer a concern; abruptly behind him a cherry top has erupted, howling insistently, and as if not enough, another cruiser coming the opposite way careens across the median, blocking Mac. Stopped, by lights.

Mac is soon checking the rear view mirror for his appearance.

As the bullhorn instructs him to remain seated, hands up, he plays a little game, predicting which officers will approach him, pistols lifted.

Ten

The first time it happened the technicians called the police. All incoming lines were temporarily blocked, the system shut down. The sewerage backup caused a few complaints, but the police asked the technicians to keep the system down a few hours longer while they investigated.

The phone had to be taken off the hook. Three days passed before everything cleared again. Then, everyone forgot the whole incident. Toilets across the city performing their magic, unnoticeable functions perfectly.

The second time (eight months later) they also called the police. The same sequence of events occurred. They didn't block the system as long this time, yet the board head noted the increase in the service debit ratio associated with nonfunctional time. (It cost money.)

The plant was off Standifer, in the south city, a tall anomalous levee running several hundred along a neighborhood block, and past that, out of sight from the streets below, a roiling reservoir, populated by hundreds of small geysers. With disturbing colorations. The technicians looked out over it daily like voyagers upon a limitless ocean.

In neither instance were the police able to pinpoint any tangible source of the infant corpses, flushed somewhere in the city. Given the entry port nearest the first appearance of the chemically-bleached skull coverings, the smallest area of origin was a sixty or seventy block region. Maybe. Logistically, narrowing it down further was impossible.

After that the technicians did not shut the plant down again. The normal breakdown processes ultimately proved sufficient for complete dissolution. Sometimes it happened so quickly nothing was even noticed, they told themselves.

Martin is lying fully clothed on his bathroom floor near traces of retching when the dreamlike jangling refuses to cease.

It's Gayle. "Where have you been?"

"Right here. What is it?" He coughs deeply, holding the receiver out, asks to repeat herself. "Confession? What confession?"

"He says he did it. Do you think he really did?"

"No. Where's Kelly?"

"I don't know."

"Who told you?"

"Kelly."

"How'd she find out? No. Wait. How many badges with dicks are there in this city, that's a better question."

It is dark. His window flashes: outside, the parking lot is raging, aflame, exploding. For a moment he entertains the irony of the predicted day of the prophets arriving, then remembers this is the night of Independence Day.

At last in this time toward the end of things Mac is able to see the restricted inner workings of the Police Station. He is gratified at the general alert which has brought many faces into the deep interior office quarters of the Police Chief, most he doesn't know because they are suits, but he does recognize from television an associate pastor of the Reverend Sarah's chosen church.

"Hi," he says, in the center of a glaring circle.

He has seen Pat briefly in the corridor, nodded to him, but Pat is not in the room now. Mac is asked a few general questions, particulars of his identity.

"How y'all doing?" One of the unknown faces explodes, lunging for Mac, is forcibly restrained by lieutenants. Mac is totally surprised, shaky. What did he do? The interview is cut short and Mac is in another smaller room. They are friendlier there, uniformed men, including Tim, and ask if Mac minds being tape recorded while they ask him questions.

The city meanwhile renamed for the Reverend Sarah the civic center expressway, the Louisville-Trenton drawbridge, a new addition to the church, a wing of the catholic hospital, then finally the church itself.

Mac is led handcuffed through lime green corridors that are lit the same all hours of the day and night. He notices a distinct line along the walls at the waist level, beneath which is a queasy change in coloration. Most of the cells are open, unlocked, bound by gates at the ends of halls where he must stop, wait, and pass through. He nods, intently friendly, but is little remarked. One man lies not in his bunk but in the middle of the corridor, hands over eyes, and they are forced to step around him.

Mac is amazed at the uncanny low twisting of the corridors that allow no overall schematic for the mind's eye. The first thing he will do here is try to construct a map of his environs from where he has walked, been led--what hall turns where. He will give them each a name.

In the lot behind the station Pat finds Tim-the-primary-accepting-officer in a circle of compatriots. When they are dispatched he holds Tim alone and asks for the entire story.

Tim leaves. Pat goes back upstairs to speak with the chief. The chief is impatient but listens distractedly to what Pat knows of Mac, his nature, character. Certain embarrassing incidents with waitresses. When Pat is through the chief maintains there have been no irregularities in the apprehension of the suspect. He pointedly, grievously asks Pat to refrain from any untoward suspicions. Does Pat remember how long people have been hounding this office for the latest on the Reverend's killer when there has been nothing at all since the day after her body was found? The TV newscast leading off every damn evening with Tonight, the nth day since the slaying of the Reverend Dr. Sarah? "This is all about to be over Patrick, thank the Lord."

Martin has found a lawyer for Mac and received all clearances and permission to visit the cell.

Mac seems pleased. They shake hands through the bars; Mac is interested for news of everyone at the Coney Island. He doesn't ask how they reacted to his arrest but remembers Paletello's scheduled doctor's appointment and inquires to the results. Negative--good news from Paletello's colon.

"Man, I sure could use a chili-cheese about now. How's Kelly?"

"I haven't seen her. Listen, Mac, I've got to ask you something. Does she have anything to do with this?"

"Huh?"

"Did you ever talk to her, tell her what you said in that note? Before you gave it to Tim?"

Mac has to think a while. "No," he says pleasantly.

"I know she's my sister and all, but did she think all this up? Tell you what to do, what to say, the note, promise you another TV interview?"

"Hey buddy. It's okay. I told them I did it."

"Did you?"

"Yeah." Mac meets him full-gazed, affable, uncomplicated. Then his tone is grave: "They'll probably execute me, huh, Martin?"

"They probably won't."

Mac seems puzzled. Martin tells Mac how many prisoners are on death row in the State of Louisiana at the moment, watching him obliquely as if for some unguarded reaction. "One guy has been there twenty six years. Waiting. Just waiting. The court stays him every time."

Mac nods, eyes glassy, stifling a yawn; then in a sweep he becomes optimistic again; "Hey--I still feel bad about that TV thing, before, remember? I promise: Anything, you know, any stories, I'll give 'em to you--just you."

"Aw, man. That's not important now. I'm here now to see about getting you out of this thing, this place."

Mac's look of puzzlement pains Martin, makes him impatient. "I mean I'll do a story if you want me to, they can't make me, but. If it's best for you, I'm saying, to do it. I will" Mac nodding unsurely.

"I'll be back. I promise." "Martin--" "Yeah, sure?" "Nothing." "C'mon. What?" "It's just--I was going to ask you if that gold GTO was still on the lot at the corner of Louisville and North Sixth. But it doesn't matter anymore."

"No. I'll find out for you. Next time I come. Even if---"

"Martin, it doesn't matter. And you know, I'm glad. I really am."

Martin is afraid to look at Mac. Afraid that if he does, he will start to believe him.

For two days Martin stays in his apartment. He considers how little one is able to know of another's nature. He repeats this to himself, going over all things he has ever believed to be true and false once again. He opens the shades, closes them, changes bulbs, different switch combinations. He stands in places he believes he has never stood before. He sits beneath the dining room table, looking up toward the walls.

His first venture outside is around ten o clock of a Wednesday evening, and he scours the downtown streets working out from the plant in a studious walking pattern; and at last, near the Coney Isle, he passes once, circles the block then turns and goes in. "Ret," he says, taking his usual place. "What's going on."

A new billboard in the south sector of the city : 51% is all it takes. Vote.

Mac tells Martin they have confiscated his car. Tim informed him. "They took another car to pay for the wrecked one before. I don't what they'll take to pay for that one." Martin tells him not to worry about it, one-fourth of all used auto loans are defaulted. They actually need one occasionally, or it screws the system up.

"Well, could you take care of my stuff for me?"

"Sure."

"Or give it to John."

"I'll keep it for you. Until whenever." Martin tells Mac about the series they will do for the paper, since Mac had kind of suggested it himself. Mac is not as excited as before, but is cooperative. Martin has even been in touch with a representative in New York. Why not a book?

Kelly on DeSiard at north Fifth, directing the video crew at a boom-box street dance, young black adolescents spinning. Arms flapping, jerky movements, huh huh huh, eyes rolled up and bodies falling back. The ballet of being strafed. The Uzi dance, they call it.

Martin, leaving the cell, sees Pat briefly in the hall. They recognize each other from a past scene on the west end of town, a homicide/mutilation at first believed to have been tied with drug trade but later related to the interstate drifter series.

Martin has someone here to complain to about the on-again off-again status of the front desk's permission for his sister's interviewing Mac for television; "He has completely and unequivocally stated that he does not want to appear onscreen, and has made a sworn statement to his lawyer to that effect." Pat listens dutifully, then asks about Kelly and Glasseye, how that series turned out.

Martin skips this, eager to point out a slip-up in the department. "I'm not going to print this but, when your plainsclothes interviewed Glasseye right after Sarah disappeared, that wasn't him." Martin gives a stifled laugh. "His cousin, they went up to him, Ret. They have the same last name, see? That's all the detectives ever asked him, his last name. Was that him, they ask. Ret just says yes and doesn't know anything about Sarah, and they let him go. He's not about to tell them because he's figuring, here's two rednecks that think all spades look alike, right?" Martin pops Pat's arm playfully.

Pat goes to file. He knows the girl there who will let him see it even though he is not actually on the case.

He finds the notes, reads the physical description. Flips to Glasseye's dossier, vital stats.

On his way to the chief's office he does not even run.

"I don't care. I'm gone whup her. She make me mad. Going on like that, saying shit to people about me and she don't even know me. She don't know me."

"What she say."

"Some shit. I don't care. I'm going to cut her. I don't stand bitches to do me like that. I don't care they got me on probation and I get kicked out of school. Cause I gone cut her. I gone do it."

"How come you got kicked out?"

"For cuttin' somebody."

Why? Why does a man kill?

These are the questions being plummeted.

This is the third session; Martin is finally getting to something now. He has the wealth of his relationship with Mac at hand, all the knowledge, and here is more. They are up to Mac's sister, and there is about to come a detail.

"Me and John used to, uh. . ." Mac is deeply uncomfortable. Martin goes for water, practices tact, then tries again.

Mac tells him. "She was about eight, ten. We used to chase her and knock her down, she wore these dresses. We'd pull it up over her head. The guys would come along and we'd show them her panties. She'd cry, more when she was wearing old ones with holes in them."

Martin waits.. Mac is truly emotional, repentant.

"Mac, that stuff by itself, it couldn't have. . ." It couldn't have caused her to kill herself. Martin was sure there was more. There was something good at the bottom of this.

He was trying to get there slowly when Pat and the chief and Tim come in. The chief is flustered. Martin is removed to the end of the hall.

Mac is told the situation briefly, and then the lawyer is called. He will be free shortly.

"What?" Martin shouts, advancing. Tim takes him out of the jail.

As she goes up the sidewalk northerly she sees another female opposite, coming down southerly. Skirt, heels. Who in the hell besides herself would be down here looking like that?

They meet at the open door of the Coney Island, standing facing each other on the sidewalk. Gayle: "Have you. . ?" Kelly: "No. Haven't you. . ?" They peer together into the narrow corridor of the restaurant. A couple of grinning faces in cartoonish invitation. No Martin, no Mac, no Ret, not even Paletello. Just the sullen whore behind the counter.

The move away a few steps out of the door-light to a short stretch of blank brick wall. "I've been to the apartment a hundred times. You've got a key too?" "The answering machine just beeps and cuts off." "It does that after about fifty messages." "Well. I don't know then."

"So how did they find out?" "Here it is: Pat found Ret, then went to the grandmother. Glasseye has been gone since the Reverend's disappearance; the grandmother mentions relatives in Little Rock. Pat sends the police department there the Reverend Sarah's license number, and soon enough they have him."

"Think they got the right one, did he do it?"

"Why not? Somebody did it."

"Why? What happened? Why did he do it?"

"They found marks on her arm, where she'd struggled to keep her purse. He wanted something in it."

"Her purse? What?"

"Her gun. He wanted it. Dr. Sarah carried a pistol. For protection." They consider this, standing on he sidewalk.

"Didn't do her much good, did it."

Pat goes to Ret, thanks him. "Sorry you had to do this," remarking silently to himself that all you have to do with the black fellows is show a little respect, and they will respond in kind.

That early man was now thought a scavenger rather than bold hunter and slayer of giant mastodons, a figure perhaps a little ridiculous, was totally in keeping with Martin's dim forebodings. He stepped from the stale office air to the stale evening air and stood upon the corner. A familiar car passed. He watched as he own girlfriend drove by without seeing him.

He did not walk to the Coney Island. He went back toward the river. Down DeSiard he longs for something nameless among the blocks of abandoned office buildings and the gaps from demolished ones. Is it possible that there's nothing new at all, anywhere, any time?

He glances for any previously overlooked establishment down the lower numbers of DeSiard, only halfway hoping. And then there is one. A bar. In the traditional narrow-building fashion, neon-windowed, the murmur of voices, talk, from within. The street is absolutely deserted. How in the world had he ever missed this place before?

He pulls the door open.

Gayle and Kelly banging on the apartment's locked bathroom door; "Martin? Martin! What are you doing in there?" The only sound is that waiting, the expectation of sound when none comes.

Afterwards can be seen about the streets of the city at night a bicycle about. Mac rides it, an investigator of the night, on his rounds. He has a leased room now, in a motel converted to apartments. He can be seen on his paper route, or tromping in the grass along the levee, searching out discarded aluminum cans. And then about the streets at night he is going to a place in mind to see what's going on there. A girl and guy on a bus bench, engrossed in themselves; he waves as he passes, unremarked on well lubricated wheels.

I go out to Forsythe to hit some volleys on the three-wall racquetball court, only no one plays racquetball anymore. I'm hitting when this geek of the classic modes comes up. He's wearing, get this, this: running shoes, with brown socks. Flowered knee length shorts that should embarrass even the eight year olds that wear them. A white dress shirt, long-sleeved, and a brown suit-type vest. It's only eighty-five degrees out.

He starts talking. "You come out here a lot?"

"I guess."

"You practicing to be a tennis pro?"

I'm already hating the situation. "No--just hitting."

"How long do you usually stay when you hit?"

"About an hour." Here, he looks at his watch and then at my car. It's the only one parked in the lot.

"How come you like tennis."

My face is getting red--something is getting out of hand. There are unspoken rules being broken everywhere. My volleys are getting loose because my forearm is beginning to shake a little. Like when you're a kid on the playground and you know there's going to be some fighting, probably with you in it. It feels strange to remember that.

"Couldn't say. Just come out here to get things together."

"You feel like you need to put things together?"

"My game I mean--tennis." A pause. He's standing, lingering along the cinderblock wall, looking into the court. Then comes all this information, like I was actually asking him for it. He's twenty-four and goes to the Mountain of Faith Church south of town, he was saved last year. He asks if I'm saved.

There's nobody else around for miles and I'm wishing I wouldn't answer him, but I do. "No."

"Do you want to be?"

"No."

"Fair enough. What do you do?"

"I go to college."

"Yeah, I'm thinking about going to college. If I can get the money There's the big problem right there." He waits, getting no comment from me, then he goes on--he's from a little town in Arkansas, has a sister there, et cetera. This goes on and I keep on hitting, missing mostly because I'm trying to keep him in view to the side.

Finally he looks at his watch and says "I'll be back" and leaves around the court off to the restromms where I can't see him.

That's where my mistake occurred, not leaving then. He comes back in about ten minutes. "Hey," he waves.

"Hey." He's not talking so much this time, more like he's just waiting. He stands at the same spot, occasionally wandering into my range to kick a sprout of grass in the concrete or chase a ball down for me. One time he's a little close going to pick up a candy wrapper and one of my returns hits him square on the left hip.

"Ah," I'm thinking, here it is at last, an eight-inch blade from under the vest. But all he does is jump back, a little nervous like I meant to hit him at first, then smiles and says "Whoa!" and cheerily tosses the ball back to me.

He's mostly quiet now, occasionally popping off some primitive opinion on world hunger or nuclear stockpiling. How he got those subjects I have no earthly idea.

He looks at his watch. "How long did you say you usually hit?"

"About an hour."

"It's been an hour and ten minutes already."

Now I get goosebumps. I try to hit, hoping my face isn't so hot it shows red. He's not talking at all now and he's standing in direct line between me and the car. He wants a ride, or something worse.

I hit and wait.

Appears then an act of great natural benevolence: the wind blowing something, a piece of note paper, over the grass in the direction of the rest rooms. He wanders over toward it, walking with both hands under opposite arm pits. I remember him walking that way.

I begin to run to the car, carrying only my racket, leaving the balls and canister there. Inside the car I can't tell if the engine's started or not because of the blood beating on my eardrums, so I put it in reverse and the car moves. I look back once.

He watches, all but slack-mouthed, as if it were the scene of some horrendous betrayal, and then I don't see him anymore, avoiding the rearview mirror all the way to the college. Another place I can't go back to.

 

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