Tunnels

The avenues at night become long straight tunnels, shaped by hangnoose bursts of orange sodium lights. Mac’s ‘74 Plymouth idles on the corner of a used car lot where an actual automobile pole-squats thirty feet in the air like a saint upon a stylite: Honda on a stick.

Mac narrates his progress aloud: “Louisville, going on seventh . . . sixth . . . whoops, red light at fifth.” It’s maybe the tenth time he’s been through here tonight. Ahead, all four lanes shrink to a dim drawbridge conclusion.

There’s nobody out tonight. Nobody. Past the empty sidewalks shadows blend into shadows of deeper distinction.

The Fury’s door handle rattles: sudden low frequencies surround. In the left lane a low-rider Monte Carlo slides up. Mac looks over earnestly at the face looking back. The passenger window glides down evenly.

White teeth in a dark unlit face. Mac smiles back—someone he knows? The face laughs at another face, belonging to the driver, who’s wearing dark glasses and a necklace of drilled dice. “Hey,” Mac calls, pleased by the exchange, its very existence.

“Ah . . . yeah. Right.”

“How’s it going there?”

Laughter.

“Aint much happening tonight, is it. Seen some cars at Lazarre’s point earlier, but they headed out. Probly going to Moon Lake."

The answer is a grey pistol held out rigid. Then a shot. For the moment Mac goes deaf. White teeth still flashing. He knows he felt a breeze, like a fly.

The Monte Carlo blasts through the red, down and across the drawbridge.

Mac leaps from the Fury, makes it to a car lot, retches on concrete, spattering the tires of a blue Cutlass with wide whitewalls. Even at this hour of night spotlights blaze transcendently upon the inventory. He coughs and spits and finally rises to a squat. They’ve moved the glitter-coated Eldorado to the back of the lot.

He rises and clomps back to the still-idling Fury.

The steering wheel shudders with the impatient engine, still running. He adjusts the rear view. There’s no evidence anything ever happened to him. The avenue exhibits the utter emptiness of some post-solar world.

Holiday Grille

From inside the diner they see Mac coming. Recognizably borderline something. The bluejean jacket and striped dress slacks imply a world of miscalculation.

He sidesteps through the inner half-doors after some difficulty with the opposite-angle hinges.

Smiling hello to a somber business suit he takes a stool, leaving precisely one space between them. The not-pleased counter waitress halts conversation.

The businessman arches a brow toward the intruder's proximity, as though in a public restroom when someone starts small talk from the next urinal.

"Hey. How y'all doing tonight."

The waitress wipes the counter, 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. There's a motel there. The businessman turns his cup in the saucer. After a space of contemplation, the waitress goes down to the coffee pot and lifts it. Then she pours a cup and brings it to Mac.

There's no one else in the place.

She looks at the businessman and wipes the counter down again. Facing away, she moves without progressing in any definite manner.

Mac watches them, back and forth.

The businessman fidgets with the distance the waitress is keeping. His face registers beleaguered dissatisfaction as Mac begins to speak.

"Tell you what. I bet they've got some pie in here. Don't you? This is the kind of place they have pie."

"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, over the motel parking lot. She seems to hear sounds. "Pie." Monosyllabic. As if a question. "It's not no good. I wouldn't advise you. If you know what I mean."

Everything is kind of dead now.

"Know what? Some guys took a shot at me. Can you believe that. Just sitting there in my Fury at a red light. Just a little while ago, about ten blocks up. You probly even heard it. 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." Swirling his coffee.

"Didn't get me though. I mean, I moved. And I moved fast, let me tell you." Pause for effect. "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 colored guys. But I didn't know them."

The businessman's eyes are on Mac like lightning. He's black. He stands up and moves down the counter where the waitress has drifted.

"Hey. I didn't mean nothing." Mac looks to the waitress, who's visibly even icier.

The businessman taps his coffee cup. He stands up and walks to the restroom. The waitress finally slides Mac a slice of lemon icebox and hits the salt shakers again.

He's going to ask her something, he's not sure what, whenever she comes his way again. As the businessman turns the corner of the counter she's in the highly visible act of refilling his cup. The businessman, sitting down again, eyes Mac once. Still here. Mac finishes the pie in three jabs of the fork and pours more sugar into his coffee.

"Usually I eat at the Coney Isle on DeSiard, but I like to try different places," Mac says. "I mean, the one at 526, not the one over by Third. Don't nobody go there, huh?"

The businessman succeeds in directing the glance of the waitress through the window again. He indicates a particular room in the motel. "Yeah, sure," she wipes friskily. This goes on.

When Mac absently edges the saucer back the waitress has his check pronto. He fumbles with the coffee, finally finishing his last mouthful, spinning dimes for the tip that bounce off the saucer.

Mac digs for nonexistent bills in his pockets. Turning up more loose change he asks, "Hey, what kind of perfume is that you got on? I might buy some for my sister—"

She manages to roll her eyes without moving her face at all. With a glance toward the businessman she begins to wipe down the counter. "K-Mart," she says, a hoarse laughter. "Lord. That's all I know."

Trailer

Night darkened, as if light diminished inexorably with each hour.

Idling beside an early-sixties orange Ford Falcon, Mac watched a boy and girl, mouths deeply involved. He waved. Seeing him see them, the girl blushed, then mimed Pervert sweetly and placed the boy's hand upon her chest, bouncing and flicking her tongue.

Face stinging, he gunned it through the red light and out Highway 80 to where he rents a room. Cooper, the guy he works with, relocates a trailer when arrears get to the point of certified letters. The family of wife and four year old are used to still-in-bed midnight hauls behind a tractor cab. Their current base sits opposite the bayou two miles east of the university—sort of on the edge of the edge of town. It's not even within the city limits.

Cooper and Sybil appear to be having an argument. Their sole concession to Mac's arrival is to disguise points of contention with obscure proper nouns. The child sits on the floor absorbed in a coloring book that has long been finished, tracing lines into the available space.

Meyer was plenty hot, Cooper warns, when Mac didn't return to the warehouse after the last delivery trip that day. "I had to make another g dot d dot run for you at ten till five—"

Mac begins a story about two women in a white Jeep; Sybil shrieks Cooper back into the argument. Mac decides to hit the shower.

After drying off he ventures to watch TV. Sybil is no longer in the room. From the sofa Cooper balefully stares at the wall above Mac's head. Abruptly his face shudders with the thought of another grievance and he rushes back to the bedroom.

Loud voices, and the door slamming. Mac asks the child if there's anything else on that's good. She says this is a scary movie, as if that were evidence enough.

"You don't want to watch that, do you?"

"Uh-huh."

"It'll give you bad dreams."

"Do scary movies give you bad dreams?"

"No! Not, I mean, no. They don't at all."

"That's good."

"I'm just talking about, for a kid, for you."

She looks up squarely at him, mouth pulling slightly open, then glances around, evidencing unease whenever alone in a room with an adult.

Despite the clamor of the argument she trudges down the hall, settling upon the carpet before the closed bedroom door, soon asleep.

Mac switches the channel to a comic whose jokes seem far away and unfinished. You can't have everything. Where would you put it. At some imperceptible point the noise in the bedroom ceases. Sybil comes out very quietly and crosses the room, sheepish to his gaze. She's changed into a t-shirt, barelegged. Visiting the kitchen for a coke can, she winks at Mac, flashing a bit of undies.

He switches the set off.

To his room at the opposite end of the trailer from the master bedroom—actually a flattened berth up a set of brief steps, containing only a shallow mattress crooked above a larger room Cooper uses for storage, mainly hunting supplies, including ammo. His clothes remain situated in the trunk of the Fury. He searches for what's left of his last paycheck beneath the mattress, stuffing crumpled bills into his pockets.

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

At this time of night solitary eighteen-wheelers on the Dixie-Overland rattle through. Occasionally a plane drones from the airport, a couple of miles south. Somewhere a car radio is on. Mac can clearly hear something like a computer saying the Lord's Prayer.

Stepping lightly he goes toward the bathroom. The bedroom door is open. Mac peers hesitantly inside, above the inert child. He shouldn't look. He knows that. But here he is, drawn, as the wounded examine a cut to see if bone shows.

The room is totally trashed with clothes and spilled food and empty shoe boxes. Cooper looks asleep. Sounds resembling active strangulation issue from his gaping mouth. Sybil sits erect against the backboard, sheet pulled up, dull eyes forward, unfocused. Mac sees her hand beneath the sheet, working at something like a persistent itch.

At length she makes the discovery of Mac and interrupts herself with a bizarre arch of the mouth, a shape like Go.

Mac went.

Highway 80, where motor courts along the bayou resolve in time to their elemental state. The nation's first all weather coast-to-coast route. They weren't replacing the signs on it any more.

Underworld

Blocklong stretches of shuttered ex-storefronts and offices and there's the Coney Island, like all oases an attraction in the dark for the parade of emotional self-flagellants off the cratered streets. Grease-coated fluorescent lights cast a bluish-green tint over the bar and checkered floor tiles, the effect from the sidewalk simultaneously comforting and coffinlike.

The other Coney Isle, the one two blocks down no one ever goes to, closes at two am, leaving Paletello's during hollow hours the only refuge within walking distance of the newspaper building. Paper rollers and distrib staff wander down, endemic. There's no television stationed at this Coney Island; Paletello provides a police scanner in a discreet position beside the register, more heard than seen. Everyone knows the enigmatic, crackly codes. Obscure locations are referred to Mac-the-human-map; he then has his moment.

Martin drops his cigarette into an unoccupied shoe propping open the door. Behind, two printroomers follow, not "with" the reporter. They settle in jammed to the register. Martin slides beside Mac, who is immediately conspiratorial.

"Ret left already. He knows some stuff he isn't telling you, us."

"He know about the fight in Forsythe Park last night? Hey Paletello, what'd you hear on the scanner?"

"They called out the dog."

"I knew that much. Broun won't say squat about it."

"M-martin, you know if Broun lets the dog stay at his house?" Mac keeps up with the city police officers.

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

A printroomer snorts. Mac, a little slow. "That must be why they let him keep the patrol car at home—it has to be a reason."

"Okay everybody. Heads up. Tell me what you hear about this. The dad who forgot and left the four month old in the car and went in to work. One hundred degree heat. Walked out for lunch, realized, brought the baby into his locked office and screamed for three hours straight until they could break inside and inject him and claim the body. Everybody figured suicide, at least divorce. Remember that one? We can't fathom, right? But listen, it's months later, the wife stayed with him, he's seen around with the five year old in tow. Plain view of everyone. Even more unfathomable. Now here's the tip: he obviously didn't suffer enough. Or it wouldn't be life as usual, right? So a group of concerned citizens is going to duct-tape him solid and leave him in a cotton field in the back of a junker, windows tight. An aid to his imagination, so to speak."

Paletello: "You're not scum enough to keep this from the cops, Martin."

"Hah. That's where he got it from," a printroomer rejoins.

Piercing clicks audible on the sidewalk outside. One of the printroomers abruptly whinges—a sound like a beaten, happy dog.

A skirted woman stands halted at the door, tentative and ludicrous in this place. It proves necessary for sunglasses to come off before Martin, crouching, can be spotted.

Everybody knows this one, a highly recognizable local TV reporter. Mac greets her effusively; the printroomers recite the name in leering audacity. With a thinlipped stretch of smile she dismisses all and walks to the stool beside Martin; there she remains standing. Paletello's lifted coffee pot amounts to a salute; she acknowledges him, not impolite but brisk.

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

"Gayle's been looking for you." She cocks her head: "I told her I couldn't imagine where you'd be."

"I just got here. Besides there is an easily traceable phone number to this establishment. What I mean is, 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 prominently by the register; only the sharp-eyed will note no distal cord connection.

"I thought you were supposed to be at some remote lakefront dinner party," Martin says. "Have a seat." Kelly peers below as if it were possible to acquire immune deficiencies from the stool.

"I didn't want to go by myself. Lanny's over at Tech angling for an interview with some seven foot South American moon cricket they're sucking up to for a basketball recruit."

"Excuse me? Maybe you should refresh your word choice? We often have black friends join us in here."

"I don't see any," she says, apprehensive, glancing around.

"At any rate, even withstanding our lack of moral sophistication, the coarsest of us last heard that denominative used in the what—1960s?"

Finally she sits. "Must have been mistaken—thought this was some sort of skinhead hangout."

"If bald means skinhead, well . . . but I guess from your perspective. That's all right—Mac here might have some brother-blood in him," Martin says.

Kelly leans upon the counter to peer around Martin. "That true, Mac?"

Mac reddens. "Not that I know of."

"It's okay," she says, "You don't look it if you do."

"Black Irish, maybe."

"Irish Setter, rather?"

"Is anybody talking to you?" The printroomers wither from Kelly's hurled glance. For effect, she reaches past her brother and squeezes Mac's shoulder in a condescendingly sensuous way. Which flatters, shames, horrifies and arouses him simultaneously.

"Gayle told you if you're going to do the Indian Village story or missing kids?"

"Worse. She's letting me decide."

"Prerogative of a boss."

"Apparently her being the girlfriend of my brother carries no weight whatsoever."

"Missing kids," interjects one of the printroomers. "Pulls in an audience of half the world."

"See?" Kelly says to Martin.

"Sure. Who's ever gotten sick of the weeping mother in their own living room? Personal identification, but someone else's pain. Which is actually a definition of pornography, look it up."

"I hate when they do that. I mean, I'll watch, but I hate to be the one interviewing. I always have to cry too."

"Didn't they find one off Love Road last month?" Martin says.

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

"That's the whole point—use it. A ritual sacrifice. Latest trends in Satan worship. Kids spotted walking home from school, they're snatched into a waiting car. Off to the wildlife refuge to honor the devil's much vaunted ice-cold member." He signals Paletello for a coffee refill.

"Martin—it was a runaway. They think it died of snakebite."

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. Beyond freezing. The perfect irony. Trouble is getting your phrasing past the boss."

Kelly groans and stands up, heading out for her car. Mac cranes for a glimpse of the red Datsun Z.

"Hey, listen—don't tell Gayle you found me."

She gives him a look containing a detailed history of exasperation, slips the shades back on. "Disappointed a few people. Well. Isn't that what friends are for?" Quote marks falling off her lips. The copyroomers call for Kelly to come see them sometime, just any old time, and are answered by the high whine of the Z.

Martin finds Mac sipping his coffee, subdued. "Well?"

"Hey man, don't tell her things like that, that aint the kind of subject you mention around your sister," Mac says.

"What—the devil's genitals? You want me to let drop a few of the things I've heard her say?"

Mac shivers his body no. His voice lowers: "Besides, those kids, dying—that stuff happens."

"I know," Martin says. "That's what news is."

Sarah on TV

Nobody was home at the trailer to marvel. Mac alone sees a local celebrity on national TV. His face flushes uncontrollably. The Reverend Sarah, as she's known, is being celebrated by the evangelical God on Earth Club.

Something like this could get away, vanish, as if it had never happened, except for him watching.

The moniker is slightly misleading—although fully vested as a congregational pastor, her alternate role is that of Medical Physician, known for her free clinic, charity hospital shifts, and collected hours of community work. She is a never-married seventy four year old. Mac has attended two of her inspirational addresses at local church halls, but remains unable to say he's ever spoken personally or shook her hand. He spots her often during his driving rounds; each year she's given free use of a new Volvo from a local dealer.

Mac feels a tingle along the back of his neck when the chummy Pat Robinson names her home town and her good works there.

"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 all-volunteer clinic, the ministry service alone, not just the Sundays . . .?"

"Well, I don't know any way to explain it. I guess sleep is simply highly overrated.  [audience laughter] You just get up early and do it, and don't stop for anything."

"But three hours a night? I'd thought mightily well of myself for getting five and a 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 shut-eye 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 requirements, as well as the inner life's, Pat."

"And a gourmet regimen with both, for you, Reverend Doctor."  [quickly dying laughter and long pause]

"But in all seriousness, Pat.  Where has anyone ever gone wrong in serving God?  What harm has anyone ever done in praising the Lord and helping her fellow people?"

The program ends and he turns the set off before anything else can come on and ruin the thrill.

The trailer is totally, eerily silent. He doesn't know where Cooper and Sybil and the baby might be and he feels jittery, full of aimless energy. There's so much inside, no words, no sound, only a wild sorrow at the lack of any way to go from me to you and for you to know exactly what's in me. To reach the same place between us.

The most he could do when he felt like this was get out and drive. Nothing helped but motion.

Coney Isle

Around 10:30 pm Mac enters, long after delivery hours. Paletello surrenders his standard faux-raised-eyebrow greeting.

Ret is a black guy Mac knows, down near the end of the counter with somebody never seen here before. Mac waves broadly. A subtle lift of face, and Ret carries on a low intense conversation. The companion proves a small man, young, who peers straight down at the counter. Ret clasps a longneck beer, the visitor a glass of water, no ice.

Mac asks Paletello if Martin's been around. "No." Not nope, but no.  Final.

Mac goes with coffee and a chili dog. He listens to the radio dispatcher, a female voice advising coded scenarios and locales with no seeming confidence in the outcomes. A picture of a face comes to Mac, natural, kind—in blatant disconnect with the whiny, selfsmitten tone.

Ret's typical attire consists of a fatigue combat shirt as jacket over a white-tee, with khakis and a stained beret. The times Mac asks, Ret denies adamantly that he was in Viet Nam. More adamantly as occasions escalate. But Martin covertly assures him the truth is otherwise. If Mac picks just the right moment, he will eventually get to hear about the harrowing maneuvers at Quang Tri bridge. Mac waits, watching Ret for signs of affability, weakening. He is almost patient.

Bits of the conversation drift down the counter—Ret's usual cautionary tones. Mac is unable to decipher the high, cat-like moans coming from the visitor. Ret works tirelessly, reciting a short list of instructions over and over, like incantations. Mac gathers the matter has something to do with the visitor's grandmother.

There's no phone number in the book for Ret. It remains a small source of disquiet in Mac, Ret never volunteering the location of his home.

Despite Paletello's discouraging expression, Mac rises and drifts tentatively down their way, aiming for a stray newspaper on the counter.

The visitor spies him uneasily; Ret tenses.

Mac halts and reaches for the paper. He takes a long, deep look at the cover photo, a school bus leaning in a ditch, then turns ever so slightly toward Ret.

The proximity proves too much. Their visitor jumps up, shaking Ret's hand quickly and awkwardly, the way a five year old boy does. Ret tosses an irritated glance at Mac and reaches to grasp a sleeve in vain. He calls "Hey—don't lose what I'm telling you man—"

Mac stands, newspaper under his armpit, right hand out for an introduction. The visitor cringes, still moving, fists balled in his pockets. Mac is able to catch the crazy angle of the left eye, its iridescent grey coloring. Hugging the stained wall behind the stools, whizzing through.

"Come on over after work tomorrow or you'll get your butt picked up."—Ret.

Out the door, shoes soundless on the sidewalk. Mac, tucking his hand back in pocket, totally obvious.

He ambles over and freely occupies the vacant stool. Ret does not turn to face him.

"What's happening?"

"It ain't." Ret draws on the longneck bottle.

"Who was that cat?" A little shiver from Ret. The phrasing, 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.

Mac's fingers drum the counter.  "Got a messed up eye, 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 runs his finger around the mouth of the bottle. "Kids are rough."

"How'd his eye get put out? or did he not come with one to begin with?"

Ret studies a moment before admitting he can't remember just how.

Mac spreads the paper on the narrow counter, scanning the pages as if they held enigmas behind the printed words. Soon he lays out the local Metro section. Here he lingers, reading out 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 than that." Ret nods absently. Paletello adjusts the squelch on the radio.

In the editorial section there are letters regarding the recent mandatory bicycle registration. Many disadvantaged citizens find their possessions burglarized—the ones who need bikes most have to be protected. That the fines for those without registration papers borders on steep is an unfortunate side effect, though a necessary adjunct to the formation of an electronic database of registrants.

Driving at night Mac has seen the snaky coordination of gangs on bikes, how quickly they disperse after a round of rude slaps on his trunk, white eye rims in faces invisible against black night.

Having been clued in by Martin on the unsubtle subtleties of the official position, he probes Ret. And not for the first time. "I mean, I'm not asking just because you're black, just you might know is all. I mean, we're friends."

Ret's look betrays some irritation.

"Hey, that guy, last week?"

"Hmm?"

"He musta been some kind of hick, huh. Coming from out in the parish with that pickup. He wadn't asking for no directions, I bet. Probably called those guys on bikes the n-word or something to their face. No wonder they beat the crap out of him. Think that's what happened?"

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

Mac looks down at the paper quickly, flexing it.

"Yeah, who knows." Cars pass down Desiard in low Buick-voiced rumbles, plocking on pavement interstices. A certain uncomfortable thickness holds.

Then: "I've seen them out there—man, those suckers can move on them two-wheelers, can't they?"

Ret immediately draws money out of his wallet for Paletello.

"With these streets kept up as crappy as they are, it's a miracle, huh? Especially down yonder. I mean, Burg Jones."

Ret stands. "Check you later."

He drops two bills on the counter and doesn't wait for change.

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

Out the door, going west. Mac pictures the housing situation down there: none. Just banks and nonfunctional movie theatres and the row of decaying buildings along Grand Street. Behind them, heavy cottonwood growth and the river.

"You think I ticked him off?"

Riverboat Queen

"And this too has been one of the dark places of the world," intoned Martin.

"That's only because it's night," Gayle shot back. "Remind me again why we're not doing this in the day when we can actually see some of the sights we've paid to see?"

"Because you're always saying we need something on our evenings off to keep from going into work. Am I right? And also this: it's too hot in the day."

"But it's a riverboat excursion. Blue sky, green river, white summer clouds. We're going to miss all of that."

"What I wish we'd miss are all the stragglers just now getting on board. Should have pulled out three minutes ago, which would have been exactly on time."

"This steamboat is a long way from being full, Martin."

"And it's not really a steamboat, is it."

"You are totally determined not to have a good time, aren't you. That's okay, I spy someone you're dying to see down there on the dock."

"You have got to be kidding me."

Gayle cupped her hands: "Mac! Up here! Come on!"

"Would you hush? He doesn't see us."

"Oh yes he does. What's he saying?"

"He's pointing at his pockets. No money. Too bad."

"It's okay, Mac! Martin's got you covered."

"Whoa! I do not. Come on Gayle, I thought you wanted to have a good time."

"He's coming down there, Mac!" She shoved Martin toward the gangwalk.

Mac accepted the ticket. "You didn't have to pay that guy, I told him I was going to get right back off . . ."

Gayle bestowed a swift clasp-hug; "Join us, Mac. We are officially tourists. It'll be fun."

"Words from the oracle. Disregard at your own peril."

"All this time here, the river going smack through the middle of everything, and I've never even been on it before!" said the bubbly oracle.

"So, Mac. Did you just happen to be planning a boat ride tonight and coincidentally run into us?" Martin, aside to Gayle.

"Huh? Aw, no. I saw your car parked and figured what else could it be and scooted over here and there you were."

"You still at work?"

"Yeah, I got another run to make."

"Oops, boat's pulling out. Everybody get ready for the inner station."

"I probly ought to get off when it stops."

"No, never get off the boat, remember?"

"Mac, it's already dark," Gayle said. "You're still delivering? What on earth?"

"Some pharmacy, I think. But it looks all boarded up, this guy comes out on the sidewalk and hands me a bag. The address is always written right on the bag."

"Hmm. Sounds like Meyer's facing market pressure."

"Black market pressure."

"Keep an eye out for cherry tops, Mac."

"Yeah, I do, all the time. Can't stay under the limit a hunnerd percent of the time, right?"

"Actually, I meant . . ."

"The lights. The colored lights on the black water, that's the benefit of doing this at night, right? I see that."

"You know, when this area was in the hands of the French, way back, they called it the River Noire . . ."

"Whoa, we're really moving," Mac said.

"Don't have your sea legs yet, Mac?"

"It just feels funny."

"There's your warehouse, Mac. Meyer's."

"Look! I told you it was about to fall in the river."

"Perilous would seem to be the word."

"Are they going to raise the drawbridge on Louisville for this thing or not?"

"See those boxes up under there?" Mac pointed at a plateau of bare dirt on the bank beneath the metal supports. "That's Jimmy Lee's place."

"Who?"

"Mac refers to our local poster child for transients everywhere."

"He's been talking about renting out some space, make a little extra money."

"Got hold of some extra cardboard, huh?"

Gayle elbowed him; "Look at all the houseboats on the west side. Is this just like a parking lot, so to speak, or do people actually live on them?"

"Both. See that one there, with the shiny roof? I helped some guys put that aluminum on one hot Saturday. Inside is this incredible antique Bavarian keg, carvings like you wouldn't believe."

"I'm sure you were just in the state to notice." Gayle turned. "Are you okay, Mac?"

"I'm fine, I probably need to get off. Where's the next stop?"

"Likely at Forsythe Park."

Martin slapped a mosquito on his neck. "The way they're letting these kids here run everywhere on deck you'd think they want them to trip and fall into the river."

"I thought so too, until I heard how it sounds when you say it."

"Didn't take much to get you in a bad mood."

"Usually doesn't, does it."

"Don't tell me. Now you're going to stop talking."

(silence)

"Okay. Mac, You keep turning your face from the water. Point of this cruise is to get out in it. Celebrate the nature we find in the middle of our everydayness."

"I'm fine. How long does it take to get to the park? Are you sure it stops there?"

"Tell you what. Got a noncommunicative female here. Why don't we— sometime—do a double? Nothing like having a second set of painted lips to get the noise going. Got a girl somewhere you can pull out?"

"Look. You can see the dock now. I'll just take a jog along the levee back to my wheels."

"Aw, come on, Mac, you gotta be holding out on us."

"Yeah, I got some ladies I could ask, you know . . ."

"Maybe one with intact frontals?"

"Huh?"

"Not just any old dog, is what I mean."

"Oh yeah, yeah. I mean no. You know, I've really got to make that delivery—"

"Don't jump in the water, I haven't noticed any flotation devices. Looks like she's about to aim for the dock."

"I'm going to go on down, you know . . ."

"To the lower deck. Okay, catch you later, Mac."

Mac waves half-heartedly at Gayle.

"Leave it to you to make Mac glad to be leaving."

"I'm just not in the mood, okay?"

"And since when are you ever? He's sensitive, Martin. And you're not. You could tell that hit him where it hurt most. I'm surprised at you."

"Well that makes a good lesson doesn't it."

"What?"

"Don't ever be. Surprised. You'll be better off that way."

Knife Fight

The small man hosts an assortment of mannerisms, sitting upon the last stool of the bar near a blank wall of absolute refuge. Something like a whole-body shiver sweeps him twice every minute as he flips a napkin over and over. A self-conscious avoiding of eyes, though only Paletello and, recently, Martin are there other than the object of curiosity.

The door to the Coney Isle sits propped open by a stack of phone books, sounds of DeSiard traffic drifting through. Paletello fills the reporter in: Glasseye had asked for Ret three times, a voice soft, country-black-inflected. Paletello had found it necessary to repeat thrice Ret hadn't been in today. Neither his good eye nor the lifeless one fell in Paletello's direction as he spoke.

What Martin notices are Glasseye's ankles below ragged khakis, sockless in crushed penny loafers. Heavy wrinkles in the blue-dark skin displaying some sort of white caking, like sedimentary deposits of lime.

"Now that you're here—" "Hmm?" "My backup," Paletello whispers. He begins to make his way down the bar with a slow, aimless maneuver.

Glasseye half-rises off the stool. Paletello draws still and asks if he intends to buy anything. Quickly Glasseye leaves the stool and walks halfway to Martin and just as quickly stops. He turns back, stops, turns again, then speaks. Paletello asks him to repeat it.

How much was coffee.

"Thirty five cents."

How much was water.

"You can't buy it. Coffee is thirty five cents."

Glasseye returns to his seat. Paletello places the cup and saucer before him. "Anything with that?"

Glasseye looks at him briefly, then away. "How much cream-sugar is?" "Comes with the purchase." After hesitation Glasseye shakes his head No.

One of the newspaper's van delivery drivers arrives for a modified Chicago Coney, settling several stools down from Martin. Then a transient asking for Jimmy Lee. No one knows his whereabouts. The transient leaves and reappears shortly, asking for a newspaper now.

"He ain't in the newspaper, not today anyhow."

"Huh?"

"Forget it. Don't have a paper here. Run on now." Paletello shoos him.

For half an hour the coffee remains untouched. Paletello ambles over again. "Something wrong? It taste scorched? Bitter maybe?" Glasseye steadily watches the cup.

"You can pay now." Glasseye immediately has the coins upon the table, as if already counted and stored. "Tax makes it thirty eight cents." Again Glasseye does not understand immediately and comes entirely off the stool, yet extracts three pennies for the counter just shy of Paletello's outstretched palm. Paletello removes the saucer and cup. Glasseye settles to the stool again.

A bustle from the street, as if someone falling down. Mac appears with the usual sincere greetings, waving, calling the transport driver by name, assuming the space beside Martin. He absorbs a chili dog with its not-quite-fully-melted veneer of cheese in three swallows.

His eyes light repeatedly on Glasseye.

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

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

"Something for you to do out there driving. Keep an eye open, let me know. Forsythe Park, people are getting shaken down at night."

"Gangs, huh?"

"Couples. Guy and girl couples. Necking on a bench. Walking by, your guard is down, then wham. The thing is, they wear masks. Not Halloween, not celebrities. Just masks of people. On people. I could use some descriptions."

"Sounds like he's volunteering your wallet for you." The van driver.

"Sure thing, Martin. I'll get a notebook, write stuff down," Mac says eagerly, then gazes back toward Glasseye.

Martin leans close and whispers. Mac looks down the counter and sits upright for a moment, barely contained.

Paletello soberly shakes his head: "Martin. What are you doing."

"A good deed. Reaching out to touch another human in need. Now get Mac here a coffee to fortify his resolve." Paletello complies only with forced effort.

Mac drinks it with one hoist of the cup, then stands up and goes down past the driver, taking giant heroic steps toward Glasseye, positioned for a handshake.

Glasseye is immediately off the stool, cornered and pacing. Mac halts in bewilderment. "Hey, man—it's cool—"

Glasseye's left hand appears with inexpert grip on a blade.

The driver is immediately over and behind the counter, crouching. Martin whispers evenly: "Mac. Come back here. Leave him alone, just step back slow, slow now . . . " Mac retains position while Glasseye skitters in circles, eyeing a clear lane along the wall.

Mac, both arms up, palms forward and fingers tight together, like a policeman halting traffic. "Just a friendly Howdy-do here—"

Glasseye remains in place antically. Slowly Mac moves forward.

Glasseye jabs the blade into the space between them.

"Mac! Come here!" Martin sits unable to move; Paletello inches toward the phone, aiming to jack it in.

"Whoa boy," comes Mac's pleasant voice. "Lets just shake here." Mac edges gently forward; closed-mouth, abbreviated shrieks issue from Glasseye as he waves the knife in an elliptical pattern, then Mac eases back.

"Mac—I'm telling you—get over here now!"

Then, the moment appearing more random than premeditated, Mac advances definitively and shoves his hand into the general vicinity of the blade. Glasseye makes a kamikaze dash. The knife is close, very close. Mac sucks air to retract his belly. A button flies off his shirt and pings the counter. The assailant ekes past and runs, still jabbing.

As his shoulder grazes the wall the knife flies onto the checkered floor tile, spinning like a compass needle.

Glasseye stops.

The blade lies between Mac and Glasseye. Both gaze downward the way kids watch something they've broken. Glasseye seems terrified, as if a thought he'd barely been able to suppress was suddenly upon him. Mac looks at him, then reaches down, picks up the knife, and hands it back.

Martin stifles laughter. Glasseye halfheartedly begins to thrust the blade toward Mac once more.

"Whoa, bud," Mac yells, betrayed, a little angry now.

Glasseye escapes through the propped door. A pickup rattles past nonchalantly. Mac dashes out after him.

After five minutes he returns, empty-handed.

"Want us to call out for some portable O-2?"— Martin, less than helpful as Mac catches his breath.

"That little fella can run."

Paletello, shaking his head. "Mac. Are you okay? Seriously."

"Shoot yeah. Just found out I can't run fast as I used to. My side hurts."

"Now what would you have done if that knife had gotten you?"

"Aw. He wasn't gonna do that. He was just scared."

Paletello interjects: "Oh. You mean he wasn't really trying to stick you when he was trying to stick you. That was some kind of symbolic act."

Martin hands the button back to Mac. "Don't guess you have a sewing kit on you."

"Naw. I'll just head on over to Goodwill. Get another whole shirt. Got a bunch of them there already anyway. At least five or six."

"We've noticed," Paletello says.

"A lot of times, now listen to this, they just throw those shirts out—in the dumpster. Don't even take them inside. They say people give 'em so many they don't have enough room."

"That right?"

"It's a real clean dumpster. I mean, not like garbage or nothing."

"A good thing to know."

"Hey did y'all call the cops?"

"What for?"

Mac indicates the scanner radio. "Might be interesting to hear, is all."

Then he notes the clock and heads off to resume deliveries.

"Martin," Paletello says.

"Don't say it. Don't even. I had no idea."

"I wouldn't want to say, but you might just try a little better care with your suggestions."

"You wouldn't want to, but you do anyway. Just for me. Well thanks. Thanks a whole bunch. Reform is my middle name. Just ask anyone in my entire family."

Drifter

The warehouse, in past years a meat packing depot, was huge, dark, thickwalled with brick of various blood shades—where Meyer runs his courier/delivery service. Mac's drawn a chalk line on the concrete floor to remind himself to stay away from the area where the rear wall sits perilously close to a river-bank cave-in. The space inside stands largely empty, cold, with metal sprinklers dangling like overhanging vines in the black forest.

The place, to him, was scary.

Meyer, behind a cigar, his patience never any too generous, waits for Mac to get out of the Fury after the latest outing. Cooper, the other delivery driver, slides a few boxes randomly in order to appear something close to busy.

"You got a message." In exaggerated confusion Mac looks around for whoever Meyer might be talking to. "Claimed it was your brother, for you to call him at his office. Hah."

"Can't you come over now?"

"I got another run to make. Not until after six, at least."

"I got to close the office at five sharp."

"I'll go over to your house then."

"No!—no. Chandra's—she'll be there. Meet me at a bar. Ledbetter's. Six thirty. No. Six thirty-five."

Mac's dressed wrong for the place. John wears his suit from work, insurance-agent charcoal shade. Mac finds himself escorted to a dim-lit booth.

"Hey," John summons the bartender, who hardly looks old enough to be in the building. "Could you cut that muzak and put the dial on 940?" A puzzled look. "You know, AM? Ever heard of that?"

John resumes following local talk radio. Discussion includes the discovery a of sixteen year old girl, raped and left in a dumpster beneath a pile of cinderblocks, currently still alive.

"Been on all day. Nothing else. But she was like, black, you know. Go figure. Your buddy, the reporter guy, what does he say about it?"

"I aint seen him. But I know that dumpster they mean."

"So what are you trying to say?"

"I just know where it is. Out there by these mini storage warehouses on 80—"

"What about that drifter guy who got his nose eaten off, do they know where he was at the time?"

"Huh? Jimmy Lee? It's only half his nose, and he stays out under the interstate bridge."

"I'm still waiting for you to pay that note."

Mac, fidgety, wipes the sweat from the beer mug. "I paid the one on the Fury two weeks early, just like you said. Plus the one on the GTO, and I don't even have it anymore, cash in an envelope under your door—are you sure I still have to give money to the insurance company?"

"I just sell it, Mac, they make the rules. Look, I have to be quick here. Listen to this." By thoroughly arcane and baffling routes his brother explains why he wants to use Mac's name instead of his own. It was imperative none of this leak out to Chandra. "I'll even cut you in for three per cent. I'm telling you. Two of your paychecks at the most. All we got to do is find five people, and they each find five people. Tell me—who can't do that?"

Mac agrees in a vague but enthusiastic way. John's in a hurry and suggests Mac get the tab for the drafts.

"Hey, wait—have you seen Connie?"

John expression is flat, evasive.

"You know where she's living now?"

"Mac—she'd crap if she saw you—either of us. Don't go bugging her."

He slides out of the booth, refraining to meet Mac's gaze.

Mac follows him to the Volvo. "You know where she lives, don't you. She probably didn't even move."

"You're not going to find out—don't worry." An archaic reprisal of backyard play. John slams the door. He finally gives Mac a glance: sorry, ol' bud.

Mac stands for several moments, then motions for him to roll the window down.

"Hey—you think you're really going to use my name? Somebody'll call, ask me stuff?"

Of Mac's true stories this is one.

Drifters liked warm meals, he was sure of that. Especially a face that had its history written in the form of a missing nostril.

The GTO came from the dizzy fast years of the sixties when you could name a model year from fifty yards away. A totally different body every fall. He liked to think of it now as a kind of organ donor.

Mac found the drifter out on Love road.  He was old, probably fifty. There was nothing out that way but weeds, the interstate nowhere near. He wasn't going in any direction. He was just going.

The drifter didn't like the meal.  He sat there with it in front of him and looked at Mac.

"Man, a double quarter pounder is just about my favorite thing in the world. I would get one myself, but I just ate here about thirty minutes ago."

The drifter lifted his head as if another angle might reveal an answer to the presence of the food.

"Guys like you aint got much money, I know that. I'm happy to help out. You'd be surprised how hard it is to do something for someone you know, might as well help somebody you never seen. Like, I'm with you on how you might not want to eat that. It's okay."

The drifter would not admit to a name when asked. Mac decided to simply guess, like a game. To his great surprise the drifter nodded at Jimmy Lee. "Man! Can't believe I got it right off the bat."

When they left Mac decided to show him where everything was in town. Just the basics, soup kitchen, bus station, the mission.

"This car took everything I ever saved up. The block's an original 427." Mac pointed out the interior appointments, all original except the floor-mounted shift knob. It was chrome, in the shape of a brain, bright, mirrorlike.

The drifter's hand slowly went forward, then stopped.

"You can touch it. Go ahead."

The light was about to change.

"All right." It was the first time the hitcher had actually spoken. His hand caressed the chrome brain almost sensuously. "Show me what all those inches will do."

The green dropped. Mac floored it.

He not only lost the GTO, the eighty year old man in the Pontiac behind them suffered a minor stroke which could not be definitively ruled out from an existing heart condition.

Mac was never able to fathom how the shift had gone into reverse so soundlessly. Even an automatic. The drifter fled in the chaos, emergency lights and sirens everywhere.

The question everybody had for him was what in the world was he doing out there where nobody was in the first place.

Ret Drives

For the latest countless time Ret's face appears in the plate glass, and yet again Paletello shakes his head grimly. Word around is Glasseye assaulted his (and Ret's) grandmother, and some money has gone missing. The eighty-year-old's right arm suffers a compound fracture at the shoulder. The answer everywhere for Ret: no sign of the small man.

As he turns back, Mac sprints outside. To his immense satisfaction Ret now owns an automobile. Ret, however distracted, does not seem displeased by it himself.

Parked along the curb is a 1968 convertible Delta 88. With rare volubility Ret explains this is his first vehicle since leaving the service. He's been saving up, beyond support of his mother, sister and her crippled husband and another younger sister, plus the time was right, having to cover so much ground lately. Mac avidly absorbs the info.

He'd thought Ret simply didn't like cars, rarely encountering anybody without one on a purely financial basis. That's why you took out loans. How much? "Two-hundred and fifty US dollars." "Not bad."

Ret allows he might not have it long if Glasseye has left town, having to add the grandmother to his financial roster. "Hey—I'll help you find him—" Ret demurs, noncommittal. "Really—I'll go with you."

"So, uh, what precipitated my cousin pulling a knife on you? Did he somehow feel threatened?"

"No way, man, I was just reaching out to shake his hand, make him welcome."

"Oh, so you mean he thought you were gonna touch him."

"Aw, he didn't know what, he didn't mean to. But, come on, we'll track him down."

A misaligned eyebrow. "Naw, man I know you got things to do."

"Believe it or not, I don't."

"Maybe some other . . ." But Mac's face seems on the verge of begging please—a nakedness to be avoided at any cost. After much glancing around the sidewalk they get into the car and embark down DeSiard.

Before long Mac observes repeating patterns around Third and Fourth, circles between DeSiard and Louisville. "Hey Ret, this here's downtown—we ain't going to find him around nowhere close. 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 at the Coney Isle by now—you want me to take you back there?"

"No, that's okay man, I'll just help you out tonight."

Ret insists on putting the top up. Holes in the fabric and all.

Down Burg Jones Ret is recognized and saluted in typical fashion by other vehicles and pedestrians, nods of the head, a soft raised palm, the pace down here musical, rolling. Unpainted cinderblock washaterias, fried chicken enterprises, abandoned sno-cone stands. The upper limits of the municipal zoo runs along the asphalt, evidenced by mysteriously-bulged hurricane fencing.

Mac is noted with obvious confusion. Sometimes muted hostility. He waves cheerily to all.

"I know this ain't no pretty thing to say, but maybe you ought not come out down here so much. I know you drive around a lot. I mean, it's my own folks, it's not you."

"Never had no problem down here. Only time I ever got shot at, was up in my part of town."

Soon Ret has them in other neighborhoods, 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're all the way to Thirty-First when Mac enthusiastically calls out a set of directions; Ret obliges, coming to a halt in the lot of an apartment complex near the university. 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 probly working. He's busy a lot. He only lets people inside on special invitation."

When Mac seems to be through observing the dark window Ret drives on, seeking the anonymity of the Highway 165 bypass. Once there, a grimace; the gas needle. Forced to stop at a convenience store, he chooses one that looks like it would have a mainly white base. Mac purchases two machine-dispensed frozen margaritas, handing one over to the reluctant driver. "A Icee is just about my favorite thing to drink, and I been wanting to try one of these. You know, riding 'round with a bud, I mean." Ret views the cup in his hand askance before precisely placing it in a holder beneath the dash.

Mac urges Ret to turn on the radio. "It only gets AM." Mac looks dismayed. "Aint no good, man," Ret mutters.

"Yeah, all that's for is talking and redneck music anyway." Ret, more ill at ease as this goes on. His drink begins its melting process.

Mac chugs his margarita and squints, involuntarily. "Your little sister—I mean, I didn't know you had one." Ret doesn't volunteer a word. She's cute? Got a boyfriend, huh?" Ret manages an oblique shrug

"Let's cruise on by there."

Ret twists his neck at him: Where? And what for?

"Think she'd go out with me?"

"Man—let's don't get into that."

Mac's silent for a while, sucking the straw. "Is it because I'm white?"

Ret's sigh, a small invocation of despair.

"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 stammered, "but, 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. Nothing to do but surrender; "Yeah, that's it."

"Like I say, that's cool." Mac seems cheered.

Ret turns west at the five point intersection onto DeSiard again. Smells of asphalt, overgrown grassy lots, open-barrel barbeque.

"Viet Nam, huh. I watched about fourteen movies of it. I know all about Viet Nam."

No revelations forthcoming here. Ret's face is a granite marker. He glides right through the red at Renwick.

"I tell you, I got nothing but respect for you boys going over there." They coast past the overgrown original black cemetery near Eighteenth; the Olds rolls smooth, pneumatic, big.

Ret pulls to the curb and leaves the car in drive. Mac cranes to look into the Coney Island, but it's empty other than Paletello, fiddling with the scanner. No Glasseye, nobody.

"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. Mac's fingers drum on the passenger door, his head twitchy like a sparrow's.

Ret's voice is soft. "Hey. Martin show up soon."

"Yeah. Listen," he says quickly, "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 from the sidewalk. Ret rolls his fingers from the wheel. The Olds rattles off down DeSiard with a sound like receding thunder.

Dream

He dreamed of women, of the physical subterrain. Her (no her her, just Her) lying on a bed on her side, knees tucked, 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 this waiting for him. A whole half-the-world was women. His is not even a personal grievance but something larger, a reaching toward everywhere for everyone in the situation.

He was certain, almost certain, Glasseye was in it too.

Motel Again

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

Shortly after, he drives down 80 to PeGe's for an ice cream cone. He stands by one of the outside tables, looking at the overpass toward Richland. Something bothers him about not being able to see the highway past the overpass—the woods and fields and swamps out that way. It's already out of the city limits.

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 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 eases 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 simple print housedress, instead of the usual cutoffs and shirt of Cooper's. Her skin has an orangeish sunburned aspect, curious.

"I aint staying in this trashy trailer."

No response from Mac.

"And if you think I am I'll kick you out of this place. I swear."

Mac remains at a loss. He offers what's 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.

Mac realizes he's been asleep when Sylvia calls his name from the living room. The hall is dark and he stumbles on a reeking pile of soiled clothes. He can hear the child crying before he spots her.

He's pretty sure Sylvia called him.

Sylvia is sitting on the couch, laughing. There's a hard definition to her lips, almost white, like the lipstick women used to wear from somewhere in his remembering. The child is sprawled on the floor whimpering, 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 soundlessly, almost in tears of hilarity. "Look—like Mommy—pull it up! Together now!" She lifts the generously flowing hem over her face.

To Mac the scene is remote and sourceless. Sylvia's underwear is utilitarian-white and typical enough. In the first instant he sees a woman, nothing more or less; someone like himself only different. Yet the glimpse contains the shock of the impossible.

Sylvia pulls her dress down, then flashes Mac again, with a manic flushed look on her face, watching the child on the floor. The child wails and Sylvia doubles over in amusement, struggling for breath.

Mac has not moved when she suddenly stops laughing and sees him—as if for the first time. "You sick creep!" The hem is immediately yanked down to her knees. Her eyes are frightened, caught. "Don't you dare touch me! Don't even think about it."

"Uh, I wasn’t, I . . ."

"You sorry perverted weenie!  I’ll tell him, and he will cut your jewels out of the sack before you can call home!"

"But I . . ."

"I mean it. I want you so far out of this place you'll be talking Chinese!"

Mac quickly makes for the door. The fetal-crouched child lies still on the carpet. Sylvia's threats give way into ascending howls.

It's another motel night.

Beloved

As the Fury covers the eternal matrix of night streets, blackened figures track alongside, separating like fish from the school into shadows and narrow spaces, always heading elsewhere, forever moving forward.

At St John and DeSiard Mac pumps the brakes. A shadow stops, looks back, then walks very quickly down an alley. Mac feels a spark of recognition, heart leaping. He guns the Fury up and around on Grand, crossing back at the parish courthouse. He stops in the middle of the street.

Glasseye emerges from the mouth of the alley, eyes fixed straight ahead, and slams into the rear door. He recovers, considers the roadblock as if inadmissable evidence, and skirts quickly across the street to the park in front of the Catholic hospital. "Hey," Mac calls repeatedly.

The Fury takes off again. On the other side of the park Mac glides into place once again, cocking the passenger door open between a light post and fire hydrant where Glasseye's path comes to an end.

He's fixed between the post, hydrant, and door handle, reverse as some physical impossibility.

"Hey, little Buddy. I ain't worried about you cutting me. I swear."

Gaze fixed on the roof of the car, hands in pockets, emitting a hum approximating music between the normal intervals. The massive Catholic hospital looms past the east end of the park.

"Get on in. I'll give you a ride. And, I promise, I won't say nothing to Ret because I know that was some kind of mixup about your grandmother's shoulder getting busted. Had to have been."

Glasseye shifts his half-vision as far as he can in all directions without moving his face.

Mac lets the engine idle with the patience of a dynastic palace guard.

"Shoot. I aint doing nothing. Looks like the same deal for you tonight. Might as well check some things out together."

Somewhere off a siren increases; with an airy moan Glasseye morphs inside the car without seeming to bend at the waist, perching inflexibly on the bench seat. "All right," Mac chimes victoriously. He jogs around to close the door, and back. "Now, let's just take it easy and cruise around."

Mac wheels behind the hospital, past the blown-clouds of steam and the mysterious furnace device, cuts across at the police station and through the civic center parking lot and on to the abandoned railroad station. Here begins territories of roam and building debris and inexplicable grass fields and the friend of a friend and the search for a pill that was effective and effective again and always effective.

After a long period with no attempt to communicate, Mac begins to tell a story from a week earlier.

"I was at the Fill-A-Bill across from the Honda-On-A-Stick, you know where I mean?That place where the Icee machine breaks down a lot. I was thinking about an Icee and whether it was going to be good or not, or if the mixer was broke again, or mainly that if I spent my money on a Icee I definitely wouldn't get one the next day. I was just sitting in my Fury. In the parking lot. And this Firebird comes up next to me. There's this guy driving, and I'm just sitting there looking over and he looks over and cuts the engine and he looks right at me. He sees me. And I go like, Hey. And what happens next is what I'm telling you about.

"He looks right at me and sees me and I say Hey and he looks at me. Just looks. And he turns his head. And he gets out and goes in the store. He doesn't even say hey or anything. It's real apparent, too.

"And I never done anything to him. Not a thing. You know what I'm saying? You know how it feels when somebody don't even say hey back to you. I don't know, maybe it never happened to you, but it does to me. A lot, it seems like."

God, is what Mac thinks Glasseye says.

"Yeah. Just like that. I know. Gets you right there. It can happen and you go on and it happens again."

They glance at the other Coney Isle and away again in unison, as though somehow guilty, then glide down St John again under the overpass and come to a stop at Texas, where the street is foreshortened by a waist-high hedge and beyond that a closely cropped yard and gardens, a plot that fills an entire block. "That's the Castle," Mac says, indicating the ediface with red brick towers and turret bays. "I aint never been there. Have you? I didn't think so. People live in it. Just regular people. They rent, but I don't know how you get in." Glasseye visibly writhes, like something liquid inside a cured skin. "I would take you cruising through there, but I saw a cop parked last week at night, and didn't stop. I think they watch the place."

Mac turns north and drives until he comes to Jackson, on to the curve and Winnsboro road. "You probly know this area pretty good. I come through a lot, nobody ever gives me trouble."

A high whine, the way a nervous puppy sounds on the first car ride.

"You got anyplace I can take you? I'd just drop you off, you know, you need me to."

Glasseye's head cocks over—at Sixth street? Is that where he wants to go?

"I can show you that Church where the Reverend Sarah preaches, you want me to turn here?" Mac wheels around, and before he can slow down the door flies open and Glasseye is out of the seat. Mac watches him roll log-style off the tar and gravel street across a grassy shoulder and into a ditch.

He's terrified Glasseye has been killed. And that Ret will have to grieve. Because of him.

By the time Mac throws it into park and jumps out he can barely see Glasseye up and running through a sideyard past a darkened house.

Mac leaps back in the car. The sign today at the Reverend's Church says "God Has A Big Eraser." He shoots down the block and around, coming up the opposite way on South Seventh, but no Glasseye.

He continues driving the cross-hatched numbered streets for an hour or so.

Then he swings by the charity hospital ER; "A guy fell outta my car." They can't tell him anything. It's a violation of patient rights to release information to anyone not specified. "That's OK, I don't even know his real name. Does that make it all right?" The clerk, studying some pressed-open textbook, shakes his head, but tells Mac no story like that's come through lately.

The smell of the ER. It takes him back. To what, he can't say.

In the Fury a cassette tape sits on the floorboard of the passenger side—how? Did Glasseye drop it? Mac can't figure out any way to give it back to him. Having Glasseye, and losing him, grows into a sheet pulled over everything: absolute failure.

He has to get out, away. Across the river.

Taking Jackson and Eighth all the way down to Louisville, he turns west and shoots the red light, speeding across the drawbridge, over the metal mesh.

He's never used the tape player in the car, never owned a tape; the radio always worked fine. The Fury descends into the ominous somnolence of the west city, Glasseye's music sliding in. There sounds an organ like a church instrument, but edgy, extreme; then a voice:

Dearly Beloved

We are gathered here today

And a pandemonium of bass drums and fuzz-bent guitars. Let's go crazy.

The tires on the drawbridge grating drone with the immensity of some natural disaster gaining ground from behind.

Eviction

Mac was never able to grasp the root of his exile.

He drives the city in typical looping patterns, the entirety of his possessions strewn about the Fury. Cooper was vehement, his rage barely suppressed, and would have advanced to physical means but for Mac's inadvertently larger stature.

Sybil had reported to Cooper attempted intimacies on Mac's part. Mac felt deeply confused to find his own denials hollow. Of course he wasn't guilty, and Sybil had done some strange things. But just his being there in the living room made him feel the center of a huge stroke of misfortune. For having seen.

In the middle of the ejection process Mac raised a consideration. Cooper instructed him to stand there a minute. He went back inside the trailer. Mac heard shouting. Screw the money: Sybil's sentiment.

Cooper returned and resumed the eviction.

Mac starts to head out 165 north, but pulls over. Out here the trees block the stars, even with the pavement raised some twenty feet over the flood plain. Why they called it a highway.

Mac crosses the median and goes back. He spends the rest of the night driving the numbered streets, nursing the long train of injustice, showing up for work when the hour came. Cooper doesn't appear until after ten and they begin their practice of not addressing each other forevermore. Until lunch.

Cooper gives Mac half a barbeque sandwich from Hendrix's on Trenton in the west city. Then he starts to kid around in the normal manner, bawdy jokes for the fourth time, with the same "Mitsubishi!! Mitsubishi!!" punch line. Mac thinks he detects a message.

"So I can put my stuff back in the trailer?"

Cooper acts like he doesn't hear.

"Hey Coop. 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 done her too, plus worse. I don't blame you."

Nothing Mac said gets through. Then, when Meyer is locking up for the day, he makes one last attempt. "No," Cooper says simply, sullenly. "And don't ask again, man."

That the situation could be taken as a sign of universal injustice was something Mac, in ignominy, could admit to passing consideration.

First Church

Between a Coke machine that talks to you and one that doesn't, why not. 

Thing was, this machine was out in front of just about the last filling station in the city where a guy came out and pumped for you and cleaned your windshield—an old guy in coveralls—and the station wasn't always open. Like now. But it had the newest coke machine anywhere he drove.

The first time Mac approached, the voice startled him. He said hello back. Only he didn't know who to. “Make your selection, please, and press the button.” After taking the usual change, the machine asked him for more; kind of a tax for the company provided, he figured.

Beside the station was a massive church with the municipal golf course on the other side. A fencelike row of tall pines stood over a flower garden at the edge of the fairway. He took place on a bench there and felt the pipe organ vibrating inside the sanctuary.

Doors opened behind him and people started coming out, but he'd sat here before and they let him. "Mac?" He smelled perfume, a lot of it, the way older women wore it, only she wasn't, exactly. "Hey, could—how are you—I sit down?" Mac nodded, unable to immediately speak. Gayle slid a large satchel off her shoulder, spilling primary grade Sunday School materials.

"You know Mac one of the things I like about you is that you are always so upbeat! And I'm sorry it didn't really work out with that man at the assisted living—you know the guy with the antique what was it a Pinto—"

Helpless goosebumps at sudden female proximity besieged him. "It was a '66 Mustang, Cherry red, restored to factory."

"Yes, and I just don't understand what I heard, it really didn't sound like you—"

"He got pretty mad at me."

"And I'm the one who set you up over there, I just figured it was a great opportunity, I mean you've got all this zest for people, and that place there, children just dump their folks and never come back I mean, what exactly, uh, what did you say to him, that—"

"Aw we were just talking and he was asking me some stuff and I said No, he probably wouldn't live past a hundred and I guess he thought I would say something else or wanted him to die off so I could get his car and he said he'd drive it off the bridge before I ever got a hand on it and—"

"And they're so used to people going along and joking and saying Oh no, you'll outlive me! I see—"

"I was just trying to be honest, and he might, you know, but if you look at the numbers—"

"Yeah, usually you just kind of play along—"

"But I'm always thinking it's kinda important to tell the truth, even if you can be wrong about it. Martin, he agreed with me, he went to the library and looked up some numbers."

"Martin! Did he tell you to say that to the guy?"

"No! No, this was after, when we were trying to figure out what happened."

"Are you sure he didn't? Because it sounds exactly like—"

"This is where you go to church, Gayle?"

"What? Oh, yeah, here. I like the, uh—music and all, mostly classical. But you know what people call it, the First Methodist Country Club. I've liked some better in other places I lived, but I feel for me it's—"

"Are the people pretty friendly?"

"Yes, I would say yes—"

"I thought about visiting once, I didn't know you went here." Underneath her hose were tiny dots where leg hair had been shaved—curious, unsightly and stirring all at once.

"Well, wow, yeah, sure—it's just—people here are I don't know kind of stuffy, sometimes it feels kind of all big smiles and the same ones introducing themselves week after week like they've never met you before. I don't mind it, just feels necessary for me to just show up somewhere, know what I mean? You go to Church Mac someplace?"

"Yeah sometimes, this one place I thought I was going to like they told me I looked at one of the lady members the wrong way and I don't even remember it and so I don't go there any more."

"Well. One thing you can say for sure about this region is there's lots of different places to try out, huh. I don't think I've ever quite been anywhere with so many—listen the Reverend Sarah's church, I bet that's a place, do you know where it is? And that guy who's at the Coney Isle with y'all, he got saved by her just day before yesterday, who, Ret's cousin I think? Did you know that?"

"He did?"

"Isn't that great?"

Mac pauses seriously. "I didn't know that."

"You okay, Mac?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Mac there's a place that's right for you. Hang in there, okay? Look, gotta go, get over to the station, Kelly's waiting for me, I'll give it some thought, take care Mac. Oh, if you see Martin before me, tell him a stranger that rides into town can ride right back out again if he never opens his eyes, okay?"

Gayle hurried for the parking lot; Mac heard the solid ping of tightly-closing doors and smooth engines humming and before long the church seemed completely deserted.

The eyeball, that had to be what it was. He remained with his coke on the wooden bench and between the curling azalea spaces he could see them golfing.

Annie

The two story garage apartment sits in its oversized residential lot as though bereft of a master house from some dim unremembered catastrophe. Garden plots featuring cabbage and tomatoes and field peas surround the frame structure. The Fury slowly passes, then makes the block and comes up again to rest.

A single drape, washworn and abscess-pink, adorns the upstairs window. He parks down the curb a respectful distance and steps carefully upon the grass beside the sidewalk, hands tight in his pockets. Passing by once, he makes a quick check on neighboring windows.

He returns and stops before the door. A glass pane reveals a varnished wood stairwell and another door at the top, light bulb dangling from a frayed cord. A place Mac has seen before.

But only in passing by. He would not be able to recall the number of times he has strolled along this sidewalk and paused to peer in. And dutifully moved on.

However. Tonight is the night.

After prolonged rounds of knocking he hears movement upon the floor. The top door opens. A woman looks down the stairs with a total lack of expression, her face one that might catch the eye in a not so recent yearbook, now weighty, round, edematous. She closes the door again.

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

Mac follows.

He eases down onto the couch, everything old the way objects two generations past are old. The woman goes directly through a curtained doorway. A small black and white TV is on, the sound replaced by a nearby portable radio turned low. An uncurtained window opens to the back, away from the street, a black sketch of branches, leaves and strangled stars.

"I told you I aint working tonight. I don't know what you're doing here." She stands by the TV, smoking. Annie shows the fat of nervous mindless eating, ill-covered by a peach terrycloth bathrobe.

"Yeah, well you know. Just thought I'd stop by. I didn't know exactly which days you . . . uh, worked." Mac taps his back pocket, evoking the wallet. "Been to the Coney Isle lately? Aint seen you there lately."

"Oh, yeah, I have partaken of their fine cuisine lately. Particularly the slip au gratin dog."

She asks for the money. Mac stands up pronto. "That's a big tip," she says. "Did I imply more than I meant to?"

His glance toward the curtained doorway has a timid obviousness.

Annie sighs "I wasn't even going to answer the door."

They stand off. The DJ's voice cuts into the song. When Mac moves into a semblance of supplication she tells him to quit and leads the way.

In the back room incense burns in service of various odors. "Look, there's some technical difficulties. You understand that, don't you Mac?" Her voice is almost soft, something of a schoolteacher's tone. "Your mother ever explain to you about girls?"

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

"Specifically?"

"Uh. Different equipment?"

"In a way."

"That's sort of the point why I'm here."

She watches him. "I warn you, too much chatting and I close shop early, understand?"

She steps past him to cut the lamps and then into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Mac sits still in a chair, hears the flush. When the phone rings she reappears.

The conversation takes half an hour. Mac manages not to listen by humming softly to himself.

She finally hangs up 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 edgily he advances to removes the robe himself, then the brassiere. There's a painful, scripted sense to the procedure. She shifts legs impatiently through the ordeal of his pulling the overtight briefs down.

Mac remains still a moment, watching, as though contemplating an ancient abyss.

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 beside her. She reaches down for him, finds work to be done. "Look. There's going to have to be some arrangements. What do you think you paid for?"

"Uh, the usual."

"Well as I have showed you, there is a temporary problem. That may not be a problem for you, and believe you me, there's enough of them who only want it on a day of the red flag, but that aint me. And it costs extra. More than that tip."

"I had to pay my car note."

"Now is that my problem? And plus," looking down at him, "Something not moving you?"

"Could you uh, put 'em back on?"

"What?"

"You know . . . your . . . under—"

"You can't say what ladies wear to cover their crack?" Mac's face reddens, deeply. She hovers on the edge of the bed, but manages not to laugh. "Okay, then." She stands up and dons the apparel unceremoniously. "But it's a rule. You have to do yourself if you can't say that word."

Mac for all the world like a child being punished by having his lunch withheld. Tightlipped, he moves to comply; Annie covers a smile with her hand.

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

Annie stands and smokes another cigarette while Mac dutifully does as told. She holds a neutral but definite pose. Finished, he lies with eyes closed. "Hey boy—don't you dare go to sleep."

"Just getting my breath."

Annie squats on the edge of the bed, no move to dress again. She listens to the radio, still on in the next room. As the wind shifts she can hear the traffic down on Louisville.

An impish expression arrives on her face. In one quick swing she straddles Mac, hands and knees lifting her torso above him. Her face drops to his, cheek to cheek, lips to ear. Whispering loudly, "Panties! Panties!!"

Mac leaps up, hurriedly wiping himself off with a dirty sock, the closest thing, Annie falling to the floor. His face burns helplessly, enormously, as though verging on permanence. He grapples with his belt, finding it difficult to turn the doorknob. Annie is by now doubled over, laughing so hard there is no sound and no breathing.

Connie

The region is uncharted territory, north of the city along 165. Off the map as far as Mac is concerned. The highway, re-rerouted into a straight bypass in the sixties, sits raised upon a broad levee sloping down toward bottom lands which revert to swamps after any particular rain.

He wouldn’t be doing this, if he didn’t have to. And what makes him have to, he isn’t sure.

The concrete shoulders hold rough braids that send otherworldly machine-gun warnings if the car drifts even a little. He drives slowly, traffic whizzing around the Fury.

Amidst garden nurseries and veterinarians and bottle shops he searches, with a dim intuition to turn left at a TV repair place—all of this against a gloomy wooded backdrop. Vaguely disappointed, he arrives at the correct street. A residential area squats beyond a raised railroad track. For a few moments he deliberates, then lets the high idle of the Fury pull him on.

This neighborhood too, draped with scenic moss, had once been a swamp bottom.

There are no sidewalks; the pavement narrows and deteriorates as if in direct relation to houses becoming smaller and simpler, regressing toward still-plowed fields. When he finally reaches the end of the street a small yellow cottage squats devoid of any decorative trim whatsoever.

The peach-colored aging Celica parked outside the carport assures Mac this is the place. John lied. She never moved. There's another car now, a newer Toyota with a dent in the back fender.

Cutting his lights, he drifts along the shallow-angled curb, parking opposite and two houses up. Night comes sooner here among the thick trees and he watches the light fade from the sky as if it were being dimmed by an invisible hand upon a switch.

Beside the driveway to the house sits a single streetlamp. He remains and watches a small figure at play under the light.

He decides what she is tracing is her own shadow outline in a patch of dirt where the grass has failed. A nearby small puddle refracts the streetlight, the image shattering as the child tips her finger into it. The street is quiet.

The thick treetrunks and mossy limbs behind the house are hard to see through. Within the wall of gray are black spaces, entirely impenetrable. He cannot imagine what it would be like to wake up and look out a window upon such terror.

Time.

When he shuts the car door the child notices him and speaks with an impossible familiarity: "My baby brother is sick." "He is." Mac crosses the street with studied laxness, hands in pockets. He looks about the house as he approaches, stopping several feet away from her. "What's wrong with him." "He swallowed a pill."

Ceiling lights betray two active areas in the house: a rear bedroom and the kitchen, visible at the end of the carport. The child talks on, not even gazing up to him now. A captive mud odor drifts from the woods behind, rising on a breeze that holds yet a little of the day's heat.

He is standing 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 sprung-open kitchen screen door, wiping her hands:

"Don't touch her!" Walking very quickly she throws the drying-cloth on the hood of the Celica, flesh seeming to vibrate over brittle bones. In one motion she advances and snatches the child up. Her face stops quite close to his, blotched as from heat, archaically familiar.

She glares at him intensely, her speech between a chant and a yell: "Don't you dare come in this house, don't come to the door, don't cross the driveway, don’t ever, don't, don't, don't." Her face, thin and tight, is like a pasted layer of paper on a plastic skull.

The sound of what she’s yelling fills the air with the pressure of a climatic occurrence. Mac somehow manages to feel calm, peripheral, an observer rather than the object of this rage. Longsuffering moments pass. Somewhere in the frantic monologue she calls him by name. Mac would begin to speak but he gets no chance.

And then she stops suddenly. As if timed.

She's skinnier than he's ever seen her.

Her body shakes visibly, stepping neither forward nor backward but defensively sideways toward the blasted-open door, sputtering, an antic figure harried by one last detail.

Mac stands where he has been since encountering the child, gazing at the house. The trees around him loom huge, dominant.

She latches the screen door and remains outlined in shadow, watching Mac until he drives off with no further attempt to visit his sister.

Late Call

The Fury navigates the potholes in Meyer's lot. Mac slumps out, eyes still blinking, pillow and blanket in the back seat.

"Noon is not nine," Meyer says.

"I was up kinda late."

"And it never was. Especially when you're out driving the streets until dawn."

"What's up first? Legal offices, huh?"

"I got to let you go, Mac."

Mac winces. His billfold is almost not even there anymore.

"Business is bad. Am I'm losing what little I used to get off time guarantees."

"Can it be Coop's turn?"

"Mac. Open your eyes. Have you seen Mr. Cooper in the last week? He's gone. Done been."

"How long for me this time? I can probly tough it out."

"This one's for good. This is it Mac."

"Well, all right."

The phone rings inside. Mac stops still. Meyer goes to answer it. When he returns he says to go to Theus, Grisham and deliver a deposition to Kidd, Culpepper, ASAP. "And then come right back here."

"Sure thing, Meyer." And Mac does just that.

Then Meyer fires him again.

Mac counts his pay. "What's this extra dollar?"

"Severance," Meyer replies. "Make it last."

What are you calling me here for?

Hey. I got an idea. I could be like a night guard at your office, only I'd work for free.

I told you not to call me at home.

I could come over.

No. Calling's better, if you have to.

So can I? Stay at your place, nobody else is there. I'll be outta there way before eight.

You been sleeping in your car?

Not much. I saw in the paper there's been some break-ins.

Yeah, I heard about some missing paper clips.

So can I?

No. The insurance company won't let me.

I thought it was your office. Huh.

It is. But it's the company's too. Got to play by their rules, not make them.

You're missing a good deal.

Mac. You drive all night and crash when it's light. Now how is that going to work?

Not some of the time.

You got a job.

Not anymore. But he always hires me back.

Just get you a place. Have you looked?

Yeah this one place, I can pay by the day, but it's kinda steep.

What, a motel? The Grotto again?

Naw, it's like this place, I don't know, a house. People have long meetings in the kitchen.

Mac. That's a halfway house.

No, I think it's the whole place.

You're an idiot. Excuse me.

Each of the last three days he'd seen the kid downtown, oversize boxes bungee-strapped to his back, smoke curdling from the moped's tailpipe. One hand steering and the other struggling to secure cargo. Mac to himself: uh-oh.

He finds himself following the kid, watching. A schoolbus forces the scooter into the curb on Breard and Mac stops to help rearrange the load. Then the one-cylinder won't fire up again. The stream of curses from the kid's mouth stuns Mac.

He couldn't have been more than sixteen but you could already see he needed a dentist bad and wouldn't get one.

Mac jiggles the spark plug wire and gets the blue smoke puffing again. No expression of thanks from the kid. Mac isn't even sure he returned looks.

After the kid keeps waving him around he drops three or four cars back. Boxes dispatched on DeSiard, St John, Short Washington, and all the way out to Lamy Lane. Mac tails him back downtown. To North Grand.

Don't, Mac whispers, don't turn. Not at Meyer's.

But the kid turns.

Mother

His mother upon seeing Mac seems not startled but victimized by the fulfillment of some inevitable prophecy.

"For a minute I thought I was in that old rotten house of ours on Sherrouse."

"I think it got tore down."

"Oh. Well. You wasn't in it were you?" Mac doesn't understand. "When they tore it down, I mean. It's a joke."

"Aw, nuh-uh. You doing okay?"

She wanders back from the screen door; Mac allows himself in. Despite the presence of two recliners, she pulls a lawn chair from a tiny hall closet and sits. Mac takes place on a sofa to which the pull-out bed won't fully retract.

"I guess I am. I hadn't thought about it. I don't complain. I'm not one to complain."

She asks if he wants tea; he says he'll take beer. "Don't know that I have any—" She's gone a while, then returns with two cans, handing hers over for Mac to pull the tab, then his. "You working now?"

"Been thinking about going with Fedex. Being a driver for them."

"UPS 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 and the stretcher. His leg was about clean off him. Had a wife and two boys." Mac sips his beer.

"I guess that means they got a opening now," his mother says. He hears water running somewhere, he thinks. "You ought to put in for it."

"Guess so." They watch television and drink; Mac offers to retrieve more beer. The refrigerator's packed with cardboard cases of Old Milwaukee and little else. When he gets back from the kitchen his mother moves to the couch beside him and speaks below the bubbly chatter of the evening news. A lot of the names she mentions Mac doesn't recognize.

"I know that girl, she's the sister of a real good friend of mine." Mac points at Kelly.

"Know her pretty good, huh?"

"She's nice."

"I always thought she looked like she could find herself a good time on a regular basis."

"She's pretty happy, yeah."

"MacArthur. I swear it wasn't me who dropped you on your head, but somebody sure did."

"You always made that up, Ma."

She lights a cigarette and leans forward. Her legs are splotchy, rippled with what seem like liquid pockets of gel. Thin stringlike purple veins trace paths between hundreds of freckles, now fading.

"So. Whatcha here for MacArthur? I can tell you straightforward I don't have any supply of money to peel off for you."

"Ma. No I'm just stopping by—thanks anyway, I'm doing okay, got a little saved up to make a payment on the Fury, you know . . . thanks, though. I don't need none."

"Good."

The newscast ends. For the first time she turns the sound down, pulling the remote control from beneath a cushion. He's pretty sure it's running water somewhere. "Have you talked to Johnny?"

"Yeah, that's how I got where you live."

She begins to speak of the time when John had once sent fifty dollars for her birthday. "But that was before he got married and had kids." Mac's 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. "You got a girlfriend? Besides that TV girl?"

"Aw, she ain't. Yeah, I date some ladies now and then."

"Not a strong suit of yours, as I recall."

"I do all right."

"Now that wadn't the case with Johnny. They was knocking on the window all night. I wouldn't never get no sleep if I hadn't run them all off. Shoulda steered some of them your way, huh."

"Ma."

"At least you wasn't born no girl. I believe most mothers would tell you one girl is exactly one girl too many."

Her expression sours, as if encountering an unspeakable odor.

"Fancy pants swaying. Letting 'em have a tiny little peek ever time you turn around. Just a little tease never hurt nobody. Don't you know everbody in the room just wants to look at you, only you, and every other split leg human ought to just go ahead and die right then and there for all the good's it going to do them as long as you're in the world and there's a man, any man, to look at you. Nope. You were born a boy, MacArthur. And I was glad of it."

She began to read the Old Milwaukee can slowly, all the fine print, as though the letters would change at any moment and reveal a message of entirely different import.

"Connie wadn't like that, Ma," Mac says softly.

He finally gets up to check out the sound, heading for the bathroom. The water's about to crest the tub, prevented only by a small drain near the faucet. When he reaches down, she shrieks and advances, slapping his hand. Hard. "Leave that alone, do you hear me? Who told you to come in here and mess with anything?"

Mac steps back to the hall, shaken.

"I'm going now, Ma. . ."

"Wait, listen to me now—" She begins to talk, very slowly, as if to be absolutely clear. Emptied beer cans spill from the curtain beneath the bathroom sink. The toilet at the opposite end smells unflushed.

"I need that sound, do you understand me?"

"Yes ma'am. I've got to go on."

She begins to stack the empty beer cans against the wall, deliberately, methodically, and continues a recitation: "A whole lot nobody ought to never have to endure, I mean to say, and then she goes and tells him what I said and I never done it and I dare anyone to come up with any messing thread of evidence that I did, and to get convicted and hung without a trial and then her staying out to 3 AM with that boy and he goes Ma'am, my family dates back to Don Juan Miro in the Eighteenth century right here on the river. And what does she do but fall over in a faint. And this cheap-dye-platinum telling him I said what I never did any such. Now that one can go to Miami Beach and lay down for labrador retrievers at seventy-five dollars a party, as far as I'm concerned. . ."

She calls him again. As he pulls the screen door going out he hears the clatter of cans crashing to the floor

Congo

Congo street, so-named, north off DeSiard where the Trans-Southern railroad crosses. On either side of the tracks bumpy dirt right-of-ways follow the gentle curve out of sight; sad houses of 1920s union laborer vintage side by side, red-curtained, slack-porched, dimly seen as if still within that era's remnant light. Facing the tracks the way they might a highway or a river.

At night the mysterious pull in his gut as Mac pauses on the crossing. How far does it go? He's never quite actually driven the length—something forbidden or shameful about a dirt street in the heart of town, belonging to another population entirely, an unfathomable group offended by his appearance, his transgression. Congo. Mac wonders.

Only a short stretch is navigable to automobiles—yet the tracks on paper run unbroken all the way until the river. And further up on Washington he can gaze down from the opposite perspective. It looks the same, yet different. Unallowable. Some space between here and there, untouched by official geography.

Mac knew all the streets. He had maps, hundreds of them, mostly repetitious copies, some even collectibles—though the concept struck him as foreign. He's driven them all, known them all.

But Congo bothers him. His unease following it. The way overhanging limbs make it some kind of tunnel.

Every street he drove connected with another street and all roads came together one way or the other, and he could drive circles on them forever. A railroad goes on, straight on, and eventually ends. Must end.

Somewhere else.

Disappearance

The day of the Reverend Doctor Sarah's disappearance was bright and breezeless, remarkable for its absence of typical summer haze, disrupted only by unusual and numerous reports on car radios about the city. The discovery of the beloved minister's abduction arose from signs in the church courtyard not divulged to the public. Her automobile (donated by a local dealer for her well-documented good deeds) was described and the license number repeated often. The off-duty contingent of all public enforcement was wakened and dispatched. Everyone listening to the broadcasts was commandeered to take part in the search; phone calls buzzed between morningchore households, and later, in the evening, after the alerts had faltered but no news officially released, lawnmowers were silenced for conversations between neighbors on driveways, some for the first time. Friendships were made.

Mac, seeing nowhere a cashier might even want to sit, stared at the new pumps beneath the recently erected canopy, CREDIT CARD ONLY, dollar bills in his loose grasp.

The five o' clock television newscasts carried suspect undertones in that nothing was revealed other than the same skeletal facts repeated all day—but now the authorities were no longer appealing for help. Some projected a coverup. Then, at the end of the broadcasts, on one channel only, a flushed reporter appeared with a word on the tragedy.

Kelly stood clutching the microphone, her hair slightly askew but stiff as if tousled and then sprayed that way, and announced a development in the case; the Reverend Sarah was no longer missing, and the word "homicide" now applied. A moment of visible anguish followed.

Now here is Dan Rather with the national news, and our reporter will be back in thirty minutes for an exclusive interview with the man who fortuitously located the Reverend's remains.

Relief, shock and anger rolled across the city and supper was eaten. In upper city hall rooms the groundwork for a committee was being laid. An impassioned late editorial argued some public ediface would have to be named (or re-named) for the fallen figure.

  Grandmother

The phone is harsh ringing her awake. Such an unnecessary occurrence. Even if she is on duty at her desk.

"The latest in a long line of. Our national saga."

She finds herself listening to various theories of the abduction from Gayle, who suggests an angle from the recent series on those citizens who have found themselves helped by Sarah. Kelly is being dispatched to find Glasseye.

She already has the camera guy upon the sagging rough-boarded porch when she learns (no surprise) Glasseye is not at home. But the grandmother is animated and anxious to be interviewed, her arm still in the sling.

Kelly directs the stage, re-arranging photographs on the television set in the small living room. 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 beside a religious-pamphlet-anchored coffee table, Kelly inadvertently obtains what amounts to a forceful alibi for Glasseye at the time of the murder.

"Uh, were you surprised, or pleased, to learn of his baptism at the hand of the Minister . . .?"

Kelly manages a few further mundane queries before rising, professing gratitude to the grandmother, but remains discouraged about her subject's unavailability. She stands in conference with the camera guy, 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 sidewalk. She waves to the officer and hurries down from the porch.

When Mac gets out of the squad car and approaches she does not remark the strangeness of the circumstances so much as the typical nuisance of his appearance.

"Hi," he says. "Listen, I—"

"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 whatever new info is available from the officer.

The officer shakes his head, chews 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.

On At 6

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

"Hey—Sarah's been killed. I mean, that's what they think. They found blood on the astroturf at the church. APB's on her body. They've checked all the bayous and dredged the river."

Mac is chewing something. "I know."

"Oh, okay?"

He's curious that Mac's not more wound up over this. Mac folds the wrapper from whichever Jack-In-the-Box product he's consuming 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, in that case."

No response. Then, as if only belatedly recognizing Martin, Mac slides into his old self, off on a typical 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. Not anymore." Mac is smiling. Weird. Martin prods him for what's going on.

"Well," Mac offers, "You seen Kelly?"

"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."

Mac On TV 

Mac inside Martin's apartment. They're watching the end of the national news, a humorous tag on the ways oppressed midwest farmers are coping with foreclosures and hostility toward bankers by sewing and knitting clothes for barnyard animals. "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, upon the courthouse lawn, Kelly and Mac.

Mac is on television.

First, the closeup of Kelly; she gives a brief factual rundown so far, then introduces Mac by his full name. His hesitation proves awkward at first, then he's fine, at ease, telling the story as if he were sitting at the Coney Isle with friends. Kelly interrupts, prodding for the exact location. Mac describes Black Bayou Lake, about five miles north of the city, and the surrounding crop fields.

"I was just driving out to the lake to toss a pole, listening to the radio like everybody else, and they wanted people to keep an eye out.  Since I got let go and don't have a job, I got plenty a' time now, for sure.  If anybody out there's looking, just let me know (waves.)  She was uh, laying there, kinda near where they put the boats in the lake.  Under the cotton stalks."

"Fishing? You fishing?" Martin said.

Mac motioned for silence, eyes on 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 inquires delicately of the state in which he found her.

"She was nekkid," he nods, and then the interview is over. The anchor finishes the segment and then they cut to a police report on the search for the killer (several leads exist) and finally wrap 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 grin. "I guess she had to act like she didn't know me personally or something—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 for the paper, Martin."

"I'm not writing the story—somebody else is on that one." Evasive.

"Ahh—too bad."

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

"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. "Uh, right offhand . . ."

"Any street in the city limits and you know the name and what it used to be called and how many houses are on it and what their numbers are. But you can't say Dufresne Road because it's up in the north end of the parish and you hate anything rural 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 more, then doesn't. Some instinct 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 (Martin almost finds himself hugged, necessitating some fancy footwork) he opens another beer, dials the phone and hangs up on his sister.

Celebrity

Even when the police stop coming to question him people recognize Mac from television, double-takes as he goes places and waves to all. If they don't say anything outright, he still believes they know who he is. At the Coney Isle he repeats his narrative every time asked, and then some. For a fact he gets calls from inquiring souls seeking details of the body.

There is a community phone in the second floor hallway of his boarding house across the river—a room let with the help of a small loan from Martin. Many of the callers are from the Reverend Sarah's church, some female voices, some late at night. The phone ends up forcibly removed by an irate sleeper of whom Mac does not have the acquaintance.

In the mirror he watches long past any sense of recognition, as if someone else were the one doing the watching, until it makes him want to ask himself questions. Questions he doesn't know the answers to. As though the mirror itself could solve the blank spaces, make a place out of somewhere that was nowhere at all.

Most of the boarders do not seem to have employment, like Mac, although he has filled out many application forms the past few days. "You might have seen me on the news last Tuesday night . . ." But the only likely opening is for a 7-11 clerk. At the store on Louisville and Fourth he presses a clipboard against the wall to write and hands it to the businesslike black man inside the small concealed office at the back he's never noticed before in his many visits as a consumer.

Bikes

With the last of his aluminum can money Mac drives some of the old rounds, and it feels strange, as if he's been somewhere else a long time and just come back. Down Burg Jones there is much walking between the bar and the Stop-N-Go and the laundromat, bicycles weaving interbout, some visibly resentful of the white face. Others just stare, heads turning with the slow-rolling Fury.

Here are no sidewalks, just crumbly footpaths through soft earth on both sides of the tar-surface street. Frame churches and frame houses hardly distinguishable among stunted yards and undernourished vegetation. Hidden eyes, deepset in trees off the ragged streets, trace Mac's progress.

In the Stop-N-Go he buys his Icee from a white girl much amused at the attention from a group of sub-teen black boys: "C'mon, got horses in my pocket, I swear. None of 'em used."

Mac stands around, glancing at the stacks of unbought newspapers. Video basketball plays noisily nearby. A tap on the shoulder indicates a sign above the door: No Consumption On Premises. The man is seriously big, seriously black.

Mac sucks the straw, grins as if a joke. This isn't beer or anything. He finds his shoulder pushed, his Icee disturbed, and himself getting in the Fury, not entirely under his own locomotion.

There, in the parking lot, bicycles surround him, hands slapping the trunk, doors, hood. It gets a little scary, so many, jeering. This is a first timer, never happened to him before. He's able to pull away, but the bicycles follow him.

He speeds up, cutting down Standifer into the deep foliage around the sewerage plant. Past the water chemical station, the Lone Star Baptist Church, and Ray's Bottle Tree, until it seems that he's lost them. No street lights down here.

His belly feels jittery.

Across the tracks at South Jackson, cruising near the reformatory and charity hospital, then suddenly, bikes. Different ones? His accelerator leg jerks crazily, startled. He makes the first sharp right, looking for a street sign, but none exists. There stands the pole, green plates gone.

A strict shortness comes up his throat. Mac does not recognize this turn at all. When he was at the warehouse and on terms with Cooper, a bunch of them would get around Mac in a circle and hand out a map and take bets, Cooper daring any 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 this street Mac does not know.

A Dead End sign announces itself, one corner ripped away, the paint faded. Barbed-wire fence and rural field and black woods beyond. It is as if finding himself transported to another place in the world entirely. He's trying to reverse 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. The interlopers are so thick he can't drive past.

One appears to be a kind of leader. Mac rolls the window down and makes an attempt at chatting, to no decipherable reply. He steps outside. A nearby porch light comes on. He is sucking the Icee when they dismount and close in as the bikes fall over heedlessly. His last recognizable utterance is Ret's name shouted, and then a multitude of rough grasps seize him. He feels himself airborne, literally flying back inside the car. The door gets kicked shut. The porch light goes out.

Inside, the sound is like the worst imaginable hailstorm. Huge, sharp cracks, dull thunks, chassis-groans. A shower of glass layers the back seat. The Fury rocks, a ship in some relentless tempest.

Mac fires up, throws it in reverse, and backs deliberately, heedlessly, eyes closed. Further blows track alongside, loud, forceful. When he reaches the highway a horn blares and the tractor-trailer swerves. He jams it into drive and melts tread toward town.

Parking at the Mill Street grocery, he holds the keys loosely and jogs off through the leafy back alleys of the dark west city. Aiming for the empty shell of his room. He can't even begin to look at the Fury right now.

Camouflage

At the edge of the lot behind the station, Mac peers on tip-toes over the squad cars. Finally the dispatch door slides open.

"Hey Pat!"

Longsuffering lines fill Pat's thin fairskinned face.

"Mac. Staying out of trouble, I hope."

"Sure am, and I appreciate all the times you've helped me out too, and I was just thinking, you know, y'all could ask me stuff any time at all, you know, about the Reverend—"

"I think we're through with you, Mac."

"You said you talked to Jimmy Lee already, right, and then it was some other guy's name you mentioned I don't know?"

"We've got a handle on it. You don't need to worry."

"If it's Glasseye you're hunting, I can tell you it probably wasn't him—"

"Mac. Remember the fourteen year old girl who thought you were a dealer and turned you in for it but really she was mad you didn't have anything to sell her? Implying possible sexual assault as well? I believe I was the one who finally stepped in. And you could return the favor this time by simply not sticking your neck out?"

"But one of the other guys, he said, I won't name him or nothing, he said y'all were trying to find Glasseye."

"We'd like to talk to him. Yes."

"One time before, I found him, I could ride around, keep my eye out—"

"You do, and I'll run you in, Mac. I mean it."

"Whoa. Good enough for me, Pat." Mac, palms up.

Pat's eyes scanned the street. "You on foot these days?"

"Huh, naw, uh yeah guess I am. Never hurt nobody to walk a little, huh?"

Once Pat's off in his cruiser, Mac trots over to the battered Fury, parked amidst others on an adjacent auto body lot. Camouflaged, as it were.

Job Hunting

Phone reinstated in the boarding house, Mac ceased to receive calls related to his celebrity status. He cornered Kelly on the courthouse lawn and asked in the event someone got caught and charged with the murder would they re-run the videotape of him talking about Sarah's body's discovery.

"Out of my hands Mac."

"Naw, I just mean would they?"

"Sure, Mac. Probably so. But look, I gotta run."

"You ever need to interview me again, just call right up!" he yelled.

He decided to go with the 7-11 job, and drove over with the gas gauge on less than empty and found it had been given to someone else. "We tried to call you. Line was always busy."

"Huh. Musta been the guy in 4. He's always on it."

"Yeah, that's what it was. Sorry."

"Caught any big ones lately?" Paletello baldly referred to Mac's locating the corpse.

Mac shrugged and Paletello wiped down the counter. It was mid-morning, open early, and no one else was in.

Paletello said cops were coming in twice a day hunting for Glasseye. Mac crouched over the bar sedately; "Kelly talked to his grandmother and he was at her house."

"The one he beat up."

"Well . . ." Just then Ret entered and they ceased to talk. He was indisposed to receive Mac's handshake. Mac began to tell the fishing story.

"I heard it already, man," Ret said. Paletello turned on the police scanner and they waited for the lunch crowd to come in. Ret asked Paletello to switch 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. Ret sips uniced water.

Mac rises, walks out to the sidewalk, heads east. Different, Paletello notes.

Eyeball

Humidity suffuses rampant and Mac cannot find the right combination: defrost-cold then defrost-hot, windows down windows up, then the vent. No matter what, condensation builds over the dash. He even tries steering with his head out the window.

Louisville, right at Ninth, then he's forced to bank the curb hard: a Continental with brights on barrels down his lane, directly toward him. It passes, barely missing his side view mirror.

Mac, at a halt, loosens his grip on the wheel. The stop sign that's always there is missing. In its place a new yellow-glittery warning strapped to the telephone pole.

They have changed this to a one-way street.

Unfair didn’t even begin to describe it.

Why hadn't anyone told him? Nothing could make him feel so left out, nothing as personal as a change in the order of the streets, the flow of traffic. It seemed like some dark message specifically for him.

Mac knew there had to be actual human beings who decided where stop signs went and whether turn signals go before or after the green, but was convinced you couldn't talk to them. He had a picture of geeky wizards hidden away, calculating the red, yellow and green with walls of computers. Pulling switches in some hidden bowel of the city—sort of like Oz in the movie he and John and Connie used to watch with fanatical devotion those far-between Sunday nights.

Mac sits in the driver's seat, totally displaced.

Annie's apartment is down there, on Ninth. Now they want him to go Eighth or Tenth to Roselawn just to get back over.

It makes him feel cut off, free to do what everything about him tells him not to do.

He takes a deep breath, glances around for cruisers, sorry there's not one to try to stop him. Jamming the gas, he drives the wrong way down Ninth, forcing the occasional oncomer to the grass.

Annie doesn't say anything about his not having been back, which slightly disappoints him. She opens the door quite matter-of-factly, chewing something. Clothing seeps in the kitchen sink.

"I went to the blood donation place today," Mac says.

"Which one?"

"All of them. I'm not dizzy anymore now, though." He shows her the money, unfolding his wallet close to his right hip. Annie peers, as if over a precipice.

The bed lies unmade, brown tide-like 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 stretching 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, its doppler drone scaling downward. Annie makes no move to turn the portable radio off.

"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 a whore's half-hour?"

"Yeah. I guess."

Annie seems to be considering. "The normal."

Mac assents. If she’s surprised, she doesn’t let on. They lie, side by side, watching the waterstained ceiling, 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 for furniture, no payment the first three months.

"I think that would tell you a lot, toward finding who did it. Whether it happened before or after she was dead. I mean, which 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 replies disinterestedly, "I don't really know him."

"Because there are some people around 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. "Could you put your arm around my head?"

Annie grins. But: he’s serious.

She looks around, as if to certify no one observing. One tentative grasp, an elbow pocketing the occipito-parietal region, the other arm somewhat down his side, distantly proprietary.

Mac's body does a gradual release, like the uncoiling of a bandspring in some archaic piece of machinery. His arm shyly eases across her soft belly. Cars pass on the street; a child calls out plaintively for another somewhere nearby. Muscles relax in little quivery outbursts.

Annie's gaze falls vacantly upon the melting red numbers of the radio clock.

Mac sighs, maybe asleep? There’s a lot to do tomorrow, but she can’t remember what.

Her little finger starts to twitch. An idea occurs. She's marginally abashed, but can't stop the impulse.

She leans over to fumble through a noisy set of objects under the bed—props for various customer scenarios—then brings a hand to her mouth, as if she's drinking or eating something. Mac lies very still, unbothered.

She has to wait a long time. When Mac finally rouses, opening his eyes, she mumbles "Hey, look" and the bulge in her jaw manifests a very human-looking glass eyeball in the circle of open lips.

Mac focuses, and his arm flies off her. The toy spews out upon the bed and then to the floor and rolls halfway across the room. Annie's laughing uncontrollably. Mac falls from the mattress; the floor shudders.

He's up, moving slumped toward the bathroom door, but doesn't make it before early retches splatter upon the carpet, a stringy, sticky line toward the toilet.

"Hey!" Annie yells. "You sorry—. You're going to get every bit of that off my floor! Even if you have to lick it!"

Evicted Again

His landlord stands in the hall explaining for the third time why the lock has been changed and Mac can get his clothes when he finally pays but he cannot live there anymore. Mac lies on the hall floor in last-ditch protest. The landlord goes over it one more time, then returns to his office, allowing Mac five minutes before he calls the police. Mac waits fifteen, then goes to his car.

There is nothing to do but drive while there is gas in the tank. It is high, bright midday.

Other Coneyisle

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, two blocks toward the river from his Coney Island, the bar stands to the left, not right. Here the patrons sit and face west. The faces are familiar, yet not. He's unable to speak the name of any man here, and how can that be?

The decor is identical, even the waterstains in the ceiling, almost. A man with dark thinning swept-back hair who could be Paletello's first cousin stands the register, a dull, mildly skeptical gaze upon Mac.

When he sits, there is immediate uneasiness as though some sign stuck on his back.

"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. Know it's kind of funny, drive down this street a hundred times a day, but I've never been inside here."

"I didn't think so."

"How about a dog? Hot dog. Fixed up any old way would be fine with me. Kind of hungry here." Mac points to a guy's plate 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?"

"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, Tuesday before last." 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?"

"Well, yeah, I uh . . ." The eyes. Every set of eyes in the place is upon him. "You got coffee?"

A long sigh from the proprietor. "Cawf-fee. Hmm. Naw. Aint got none." And right there, in front of Mac and all the eyes, the guy with the unfinished hot dog raises a stained coffee cup. Mac watches. The proprietor slowly turns behind the counter and lifts a glass pot from a burner. Very deliberately he walks to the same emptied cup and pours.

"Joe," the proprietor says. Mac is puzzled. "What this is, is Joe. That's what we call it."

"Well, okay. I'll have some, um . . . Joe."

What follows is not laughter, but raucous sound with elements of distant hilarity. "Joe! Joe!" Repeated up and down the counter, echoes bouncing off the tile. Contorted faces, laden with moisture and redness and dry tears. "He called it Joe!"

Before long Mac is scrambling over himself to get out of that alternate universe. It is as if he has just escaped some uncomfortable dream, or finished talking to a disturbing machine. But, outside in the night air, on the same sidewalk he's always walked, shame lingers.

The old Coney Island is on the way back to the Fury so he shuffles to the opposite side of the street. From a safe distance, there's Paletello and Martin and some of the regulars. No Ret, no Kelly. That may be Gayle beside Martin, and Mac fights the urge to cross back over. No one notices him passing by.

A body startles him, brushing past. Smells of beer and urine. Mac pauses, hands in pocket. "Hey Jimmy Lee." There is no return greeting, just one eye steady upon Mac and the other eye slightly askew. And the gaping nostril.

Jimmy Lee has a toothpick in his mouth, unhinged by anything save the natural adhesive of dry lips. He stares at Mac, an almost smirking look, as if he knows exactly what Mac is up to. Of which Mac himself is clueless. Mac decides to move on, heels tapping on the concrete in eerie isolation along the untrafficked street.

The night is cooler than recently, and traffic scarce. He wanders a few alleyways, keeping to the middle, opting for a moment to watch the half-dark moon looming over the highest floor of the hospital. The windows there remind him of a dispatch switchboard, different lights on and off.

In the block of Grammont near St John an unexpected voice at his feet rattles him, knocking him off-balance, as if his muscles had leaped ahead of him. Scary moments pass before he recovers, making out an old black man at the base of a wall, 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 wooden kind used in older service garages.

The man owns no legs. Upper or lower.

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, asks "Why should I give you money?" There comes no story, no excuse. "Cause I need. You got it, whitefolks." Mac observes a coarse-threaded brown suit, dangling pants legs baggy and soiled from being caught 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 handjob. Got any spare coins?" Mac considers, then takes what meager change he has 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 straps to his hands.

"Thanks, mother—." The man counts the change, slides it into his coat pocket. "What you waiting for, whitefolks?" Mac is looking around the alley. He sees the brief flash of a taxi cab crossing the alley mouth down St John, nobody else anywhere.

He begins to kick the man. At first there comes nothing, just the dull impact of his shoes, then a piteous howling. Mac kicks a few times more. The old man falls 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 cries the old man is pleading for Mac to strike him some more. "Come on, whitefolks—Ahhh—kick it out of me. Ain't have far to go."

Mac looks both ways down the alley, runs the shorter distance toward light as screams echo off the brick walls, running, and at the open street he doubles over, breathing, the overwhelming insistent drum of his heart against ribs.

Surrender

He got money as a kid by scouring the hospital hallways for coke machines and newspaper carrels, checking coin return slots. A lot of people in the hospital forgot their change. Pay phones were the best. That was how he got cokes and candy bars.

He was surprised to find it still worked.

After visiting the Black and Lovely Grocery on Adams he drives back a couple of blocks to the south. Selecting the peanuts from the package one by one, he counts to fifty between.

He would share with Connie, but they always had to hide from Johnny so he wouldn't take the peanuts and shoot them through a straw. Connie was too short to reach the phones.

The only place he's seen to park where nobody will say something is the playground of the old schoolyard, a shady niche at the back of the lot where a couple of junkers already rest. The city's historic cemetery sits next to the main building. Against the evening sky stands a civil war guy on a horse and several crosses.

Mac gets out to look down the main long hall. The doors are locked and the lights on. Nobody in there. It was all black kids went here now.

Johnny told everybody the graveyard was there on purpose to say Look here, kids, this is what it all comes to. So the grades don't really matter, do they.

The hallway is spookily unpopulated, with hundreds of identical lockers to either side.

Mac stands there with his hands over his eyes.

It isn't any better that way.

When Mac awakes dark night is all around. A pleasant feeling of ease and freedom 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, keeps him from falling back to sleep.

He has been in the same clothes four days now.

Two and a half hours go by after sunrise before he is able to enter the TG&Y where he shoplifts a small steno-sized notepad of yellow paper and Pentel Superball black ink pen.

Taking the materials is easier than he would have imagined, a thing never attempted before. If he found himself caught, arrested, that would merely fall within his plan. But it doesn't happen.

In Forsythe Park he leans back behind the steering wheel until deep afternoon, writing, correcting. There, in the park, he observes each cruiser passing through. Broun, Tom, then Pat. Each recognizes him, waves. Pat slows down, pulls over, makes an appraisal of the foot-size dents all around the Fury. And the missing window glass.

"A little bad luck, huh?"

"Yeah. Would have hollered at you but there was nothing you could do, you know. Thanks, anyway." Pat nods, is soon driving away on rounds. Old Mac.

An hour or so later, the rookie cop Tim pulls up beside him. "You ain't got nowhere to go? You been here about five hours. Sitting." Mac nods, habitual politeness showing through. Tim takes his shades off, slowly recognizes the guy Pat knows. "Oh."

Deep annoyance as Mac hands over the folded papers. He asks Tim to read it later 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.

Badlands

Southbound on the North highway again near the outlying hospital, leaving the dismal riverbottom forever, Mac eyes the pessimistic message of the gas gauge, but in moments finds it no longer a concern; behind him a cherry top erupts, howling insistently. And as if not enough, another cruiser coming the opposite way careens across the median, blocking the Fury. Stopped, by lights.

Mac checks the rear view mirror for his appearance.

Incarceration

At last in this time toward the end of things Mac is able to view the restricted inner workings of the Police Station. He receives gratification from the general alert which has brought many faces into the deep interior office quarters of the Chief, most he doesn't know because they are suits, but he does recognize from television an associate pastor of the Reverend Sarah's church.

"Hi," he says, centered in a circle of glaring eyes.

Pat had watched from behind a desk as they brought him in and nodded as if it were the old days, but he is not in the room now. Mac is asked a few general questions, particulars of his identity. One of the suits is his lawyer he thinks, but they all look kind of the same.

"I'm fine, thanks. How y'all doing?" One of the unknown faces explodes, lunging for Mac, and has to be forcibly restrained. Chairs are picked up and the table straightened. Mac is totally surprised, shaky. What did he do?

The interview is halted and Mac finds himself in another, smaller room. They are friendlier there, fewer in number, uniformed men, including Tim, and they ask if Mac minds being tape recorded. Of course he can refuse to answer questions, if he really wants to. But he doesn't, does he?

The city meanwhile has renamed for the Reverend Sarah the Civic Center expressway, the Louisville-Trenton drawbridge, and a wing of the public hospital. A statue, to face southerly, has been commissioned for the riverwalk. The Reverend's church itself will bear her rubric as well.

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 waist level, beneath which lies 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, intensely malleable, "Hey, how y'all," 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 construct a map of his environs from where he has walked, been led—what hall turns where. He will give them each a name. Like streets.

Interview

Martin has contacted the public assistance lawyer who'd not been overwilling to listen to a quasi-sophisticated and heavily pro-defense take on Mac's life and character and received all clearances and permission to visit the cell.

Mac seems pleased yet sedate. They shake hands through the bars; he's interested for news of everyone at the Coney Island, with no apparent curiosity about the reaction to his arrest, and remembers Paletello's scheduled doctor's appointment. Uh-oh—suspicious news from the proprietor's colon.

"Man, I sure could use a chili-cheese dog 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, and it's none of my business, 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."

"But you didn't. Did you?"

"Yeah." Mac meets him full-gazed, affable, uncomplicated. Then his tone becomes grave: "They'll probably execute me, huh, Martin?"

"They probably can't."

Mac seems puzzled. Martin explains to Mac how many prisoners are on death row in the State of Louisiana at the moment. "One guy has been there twenty six years. Waiting. Just waiting. The court stays him every time. Because of a literacy issue."

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."

"That's not important now. I'm here now to see about getting you out of this thing, this place."

The look of confusion he encounters throws Martin: "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 Camaro was still on the lot at the corner of Louisville and Sixth. But then I remembered it doesn't matter anymore."

"No. I'll find out for you. Next time I come. Even if—"

"Martin, it won't work. And you know, I'm glad. I really am."

Martin appears hesitant to look directly at Mac. As though if he does, he will start to believe him.

Pat

In the lot behind the station Pat finds Tim-the-primary-accepting-officer among a circle of peers. As they are dispatched he holds Tim alone and asks for the entire story.

Tim reels it off simply, with a cocky grin, and drives off casually in his cruiser. Pat goes back upstairs to speak with the chief.

The chief receives him but listens distractedly to what Pat knows of Mac, his character. Certain embarrassing incidents with waitresses which demonstrate an essentially harmless nature.

When Pat finishes, the chief maintains there have been no irregularities in the apprehension of the suspect. They have a solid, unforced confession. He pointedly, grievously asks Pat to refrain from any untoward notions. 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?

"And think about this, Patrick," lowering to a whisper. "What if all this was wrong, what if we had a huge terrific screwup, some circus of mistaken identity? So what? Look at his history. Look who he is. Think of any possible value he adds to the community. If we send the wrong guy to Angola, well, he gets room and board for life.

"This is all about to be over Patrick, thank the Lord."

Book Deal

"So there's somebody you want to protect."

He looks directly at Mac as though every physical feature of  the cell existed in a different, transparent dimension.

"What do you mean, Pat?"

"Some person who could actually commit a crime like this. One of any number with the capacity. Right here in our city."

"I told them I did it. I said it."

"Saying it is just talk. Anybody can confess to an unsolved case, and believe you me, there's always a welcome mat waiting."

"That guy in the dark suit said they, they had stuff on me."

"They're calling it evidence, yes. But . . . here's the thing." Pat took a swallow.

"I have never seen you be unkind, Mac. Not once, not even close. Not even to rich owners of Mercedes. Or someone pulling a knife on you. I just never thought it would go so far as this. To jeopardize your life for someone else's."

Mac watches Pat, almost curiously.

"Now you're the kind of guy who's friendly to half the city. Which is not to say you can fill one hand with the names of close friends. Just like anybody else. Can you name them, Mac?"

"You're one, Pat."

Pat groans. "I'll be back. Count on it."

Martin passes him in the corridor.

Mac informs Martin they have confiscated his car, such as it is. Tim told him. "They took the Mustang to pay for the wrecked Impala before. I don't know what they'll take to pay for the Fury."

Martin advises him not to worry, one-fourth of all used auto loans are defaulted. They actually need predictable losses, or the system gets screwed up.

"Well, could you take care of my stuff for me? Do something with it, I mean."

"Sure, I . . ."

"Or give it to John."

"I'll keep it for you. Until whenever."

Martin informs Mac about the upcoming recap-series on the disappearance and discovery of the Reverend for the paper, since Mac had kind of suggested it himself. A while back.

"Uh, sure. That sounds great, Martin." Whatever you say.

"Now, I might as well tell you, there's been some calls. Book agents. For people acquainted with the accused killer. But, no matter what someone else might tell you, nothing's a sure thing. Deals fall through all the time."

"Okay."

"This is not, I'm not saying you did it. Even though you are. Saying that."

"Okay."

"So. Your rights, you don't have to talk to anybody else if you don't want to. Nobody can make you. Not even me. Not even the court."

"I can talk. I don't mind. Like, that book you were talking about writing, before, the worst things that happen to people?"

"Arrgh, I was drunk, forget that—I'm just saying, we do a thing for the paper, and just see? You and me, huh?"

"A book might be a break for you."

Martin reddens. "It's not about me. Really." He pauses, as if choosing a specific aspect for his face to display. "I was going to say . . . but if things go a certain way it won't help you one damn bit, will it."

Mac sits on the cot, perfectly calm.

"Okay, then.  Feel like talking?" As long as nothing involved Kelly. Her incessant trilling about going to the network farm leagues. Atlanta, no less.

The Truth

Martin, leaving the cell, detains Pat briefly in the hall. They recognize each other from a past scene on Dixie Overland east, a storage unit bloodbath at first believed to have been tied with drug trade, then for a short while connected to the interstate drifter case before final linkage to a jealous boyfriend-once-removed who owned up more or less but neglected to leave the smallest hint of physical evidence and took the option of walking free.

Martin seizes an audience here for his now-familiar complaint about the on-again off-again status of the front desk's permission regarding 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 the question, eager to point out a slip-up in the department. "I'm not going to print this but, when your plainclothes interviewed Glasseye right after Sarah disappeared, that wasn't him." Martin gives a stifled laugh. "His cousin, the detectives went up to him, Ret. They have the same last name, see? Ret just tells them his verifiable whereabouts the night of, and he doesn't know anything about Sarah. He's not about to straighten them out because he's figuring, here's two hellbuds who think all spades look alike, right?" Martin pops Pat's arm with a rolled-up notebook.

Pat does not respond. "Excuse me okay, Martin?"

"Sure. Catch you later."

Pat goes to the file desk. He knows the girl there who will let him see it 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 walk fast.

More Truth

Why? Why does a man kill?

Given a choice not to, why does he commit what can be seen (outside of, say, a larger view) as the ultimate robbery?

The latest session is under way and Martin seems finally about to get something now. He has the wealth of his relationship with Mac at hand, the narrative fact-matrix, and here comes commentary from the very source. They are up to the part about Mac's sister.

"Me and John used to, uh . . ." Mac seems deeply uncomfortable. Martin goes out for water, exhibiting tact, then tries again.

Mac tells him. "She was about five, six maybe. We used to chase her and knock her down, we'd pull her dress up over her head. The guys would come along and we'd show them her . . . drawers. She'd cry. More when Ma made her wear old ones with holes in them."

Martin waits. Mac is emotional, confoundingly repentant.

This can't be it.

"Mac, that stuff by itself, couldn't have . . ." Made anyone actually suicidal. Martin was sure there was more. Something big waited at the bottom of this.

He tries to get there slowly, asking about her education as a nurse, hoping to ease into her illness, when Pat and the chief and Tim arrive at the cell. The chief is flustered and decidedly impatient. They ask Martin to step out.

"Whoa! Wait just one minute here—" Martin finds himself escorted to the end of the hall.

Mac is told the situation briefly, and then the lawyer called. He will be free a little later on. Paperwork.

"What?" Martin shouts, advancing. Tim physically removes him from the jail.

Keys

Automatic sliding doors open to the police station parking lot. Mac's wallet feels strange in his pocket again.

That's Martin waving from across the boulevard. Mac ambles over to the porch steps of an abandoned house. Next door, Bail Bond lights blink insistently.

"Yo, free man."

"Guess I oughta get used to walking, now."

Martin smiles broadly, cheeks flushed.

"You been sipping, Martin?" Though no tangible evidence, such as a bottle.

"Let's just say a certain clarity has come to me."

The air has a metallic taste, as when it has rained. But, looking around, there's no sign of a shower anywhere. The sun sits low behind the Catholic hospital tower; traffic is very light, like Sunday. Maybe it is Sunday. It was kind of hard to tell.

"Mac. I have something of importance to express to you. I owe you a tremendous apology. For thinking something about you, albeit briefly, that I ought to, by all rights, have known wasn't true." Martin pops his left palm with a rolled-up newspaper. "Before I move on, I'm obliged to at least say that much to you."

"Martin. I was the one who didn't tell the truth." Mac is blushing deeply. "Not all of it."

"No. Don't you understand? What that says about me? That I believed what you said?"

"Do you think God will forgive me?"

Martin hikes his knee and looks up fully to Mac's face.

"Well, I'm the last to be considered an expert, but my guess for you would be, yeah."

Mac grins broadly.

"Cause you see, the whole thing was my fault because I gave him a ride one time and we were driving around and I was the one who showed him where her church was at."

"Where he got saved."

"Yeah, that happened right after! Lucky for him, huh?  A-and the night she—when it happened, I saw her gold-colored Volvo on 165, and I thought she was just going to some little country place to help somebody out.

"I had no idea he was the one driving it, and the next day, hearing everything on the radio, I went back there to the lake turnoff.  And let me tell you, I 'bout stepped on three snakes."

"You didn't actually see him?"

"It was at night."

"That's the story, huh?"

Mac's shoulders approximate a shrug.

"So some folks got a little ahead of themselves. Including yours truly. And looks like, even you Mac." A cruiser tested lights and siren in the lot before pulling out, ready for the world. "Inquiring minds as it were, abhor a vacuum. Nature's not the only one."

Martin holds his keys out.

"Naw, man—I can't take your car."

"Hard to imagine you without wheels. Without the green bomb."

"You know. I'll be rollin' soon. And you'll be needing yours."

"Here's something. With what you told me, they could probably charge you as an accessory. If they care. Obstruction of justice and all that."

Mac brightens. "You think so? It's a possibility?"

Martin heaves himself up. "Well. Time to go." He begins down the sidewalk in the direction of the river.

"Hey. Want me to walk with you?"

"Can't. Know for a fact you wouldn't care for the company I find."

"Okey dokey." Mac goofily tips an imaginary hat. "See you later Martin."

He sits on the steps and watches patrol cars pull in and out of the station lot. Nobody seems to be in a hurry, no lights, no sirens. The sky above the hospital is deep blue, with high thin clouds seemingly about to touch the stars that are coming out.

Martin's keys sit on the buckle-boarded porch near the top step. Mac grabs them and runs down the sidewalk, calling. He stops at each corner to look all ways, but Martin is nowhere.

Sarah's gun

As she goes up the sidewalk she sees another female opposite, coming down. Skirt, heels. Hard to make out at night. Who in the world besides herself would be in this part of town looking like that?

They meet at the open door of the Coney Island, facing each other. Gayle: "Have you . . ?" Kelly: "No. Haven't you . . ?" They peer together into the narrow corridor of stools and bar. A couple of grinning faces in cartoonish supplication. No Martin, no Mac, no Ret, not even Paletello. Just the sullen whore behind the counter.

They move a few steps out of the doorlight to a short stretch of blank brick wall.

"The answering machine just beeps and cuts off."

"It does that after about fifty messages."

"I've been by the apartment a hundred times since four-thirty. You've got a key?"

"Just empty cans on the table."

"Well. I don't know then."

"I answered the phone. His editor wanted to know where quote the f-bomb unquote Martin is with the story about Mac's release—in theory it's Martin's territory and he's got thirty to respond before another reporter who will actually get in touch has the assignment."

"Such a nice person."

"So how did they find out?"

"Here it is: Pat found Ret, then went to the grandmother. Turns out, Glasseye has been gone since the Reverend's disappearance. Nobody's seen him. The grandmother mentions relatives in Arkansas. Eldorado, to be exact. Pat sends the police department there the Volvo's license number, and soon enough they find the car with a flat tire. Abandoned."

"Uh-oh."

"What?"

"Thought I saw Mac couple of blocks down. If he comes, you go that way and I'll go the other."

"What about Glasseye?"

"Oh. He was back living at the Church of the Dirt Floor. Picked him up at the Sunday Service. That place, it's an abandoned store on Grand? The river behind?"

"So they got the right one, did he do it?"

"Why not? Somebody did it."

"Why? What happened? Why did he?"

"They found marks on her arm, where she'd struggled to keep her purse. He wanted something inside."

"Her purse? What?"

"Her gun. He wanted it. Dr. Sarah carried a pistol."

"Oh. The reverend had a gun?"

"For protection." They consider this, watching up and down the darkened sidewalk.

 Afterward

Afterwards can be seen about the streets of the city an errant bicycle. Mac rides, investigator of the night on his rounds, cutting curbs to avoid the close ones. He can be seen pedalling on his early morning paper route, or tromping in the grass along the levee in search of discarded aluminum cans. And then, coasting along the streets at night, he heads to some place in mind to see what's going on there.

Things were different now. He had made some promises to Pat, and didn't want to let him down again. Ever.

The geometry of the streets constantly evolves the one-to-one map you're moving through. The world unfolds at every turn anew, a talking coke machine here, a shed knocked down there. Leaves falling, leaves burning. An old guy shuffling along, cradling a paper bag, fresh off the interstate circuit, face lifted as though investigating odors heretofore unsampled in the known world.

And there, beneath the Oak in the park, a girl and guy sitting on the bus bench; Mac waves as he passes, front wheel squeaky and misbalanced.

Down the drive, he stops. He wants to go back.

A car-with-the-boom passes, window down, palm lifted.

He knows he probably shouldn't.

He promised.

Bad end

It was already night in the park. Of late the greenery had declined to a dryer, less vivid shade—what went for the beginning of fall in Louisiana. Though there was no hint of coolness the boy was snug inside his letter jacket. The girl wore a short jean skirt. They sat on the bench hours after the last bus because it was there.

"I need to be asleep. I got practice."

"It's only nine o' clock."

"I get up at four on practice days."

"You don't ever go to sleep before midnight."

The park was quiet, everything dark save for the street lights and the tennis court lights and the lights on the other side of the levee, where the river was.

"My mom keeps looking for my pads, checking the garbage."

"Put ketchup on 'em."

"It doesn't look right when it dries. It's not the same color when they dry out."

"Red koolaid. Brown koolaid."

"But I think she gets them out and smells them too. I think I caught her."

"I told you. I can get the money. It's going to take a month. That's all."

"But that's a month. It'll grow."

"I'm horny."

"Where my problem started."

"It's not like it matters now anyway. The worst thing has already happened."

"Not in the car, okay."

The boy leans in to her, orchestrating her hands. The bench sits twenty feet off the street in the grassy area between the soccer fields. They hear a whirring noise. After looking up, the bicycle has already passed.

"That's freaky. It looked like the guy who raped and killed the old lady minister."

"He's in jail. I hope they cut his balls off and make him eat them in the electric chair. That was my preacher."

"You go to church?"

"You know that. You went with me one time."

"Uh-uh. That must have been some other slut."

"Whatever."

"Can we move?"

They get up and walk across the grass to a baseball field, a lean-to over the visitor's bench. The girl prepares matter-of-factly, semi-hidden from the street. Grunts of known caliber issue.

"Ooopsy—" and the sudden sensation of mild clomping having ceased. "Oh, I'm really sorry, I thought you lost something, y'all were looking for it, I was just going to help, I'll just scoot on out of here, I'm sorry."

"What do you think you want?" The boy is up, wet and unclothed from the waist down, jacket still on, like some bizarre manifestation of a mythological creature, half this, that. The girl crouched on hands and knees.

"I was, I just thought you lost something—"

"More like you thought you lost your fricking brain. You so desperate to see a little nookie you got to watch somebody else doing it?"

By now the girl is standing also, wet, as if a bucket of water had been thrown on both of them. "It is him. My god. Get him out of here!"

The boy rushes Mac in a tackle; Mac falls beneath, helpless. "Why the hell did they let him out of jail—aint one poor old woman enough?"

"He probly busted out."

"Get up! Get up!"

Mac waits, shakily rises, only to be tackled again. The boy keeps driving him into the ground. The sound of dry snapping, though Mac is generally quiet, unprotesting.

"Crap. Crap." The boy rises, kicks Mac harshly and repeatedly. The girl comes over, intensely curious, hands covering herself.

The boy places his foot on Mac's neck. Mac looks up, almost curious.

"It's a good thing you got him before he did something to me."

Mac is not getting much breath now.

"You could kick the crap out of him by yourself."

Cued, she steps lightly on Mac's abdomen. "He feels gooey."

"What do you think would happen if I just let him up?"

"He'd do it to somebody else. That's all."

The boy presses harder upon Mac's neck. Mac seems to be attempting to subdue his own arms.

"Look at him. He makes me sick."

The girl gazes down upon Mac the way a child watches a maimed frog.

The boy lifts all his weight upon the one leg. There was another, drier snap, and a shudder seemed to go through Mac.

"Good. I'm glad that's over."

"Aint you going to thank me?"

"Put your pants on. You look ridiculous standing out here like that."

"You're welcome."

They catch their breath, then begin to dress.

Mac lies perfectly still on the grass, eyes cast toward the stars.

"Okay. Here it is. We were out here. I walked over to the tennis court bathroom. When I came out the retard was raping you. I ran back and saved you."

"Simple."

"Yeah, but there's more."

"Okay."

"Nobody's going to care when they scrape his baby out of you. It's the perfect excuse."

"How convenient."

"Take it or leave it."

"Drive me home. I feel all sticky."

"I think you ought to be the one to make the call."

Further

At first it was thought the victims had all killed each other. The man, the boy, and the girl.

The bodies still held warmth when discovered by the young man taken by the arriving officer for a vagrant, who later proved to be on unauthorized self-furlough from a nearby group home on the search for loose change near the tennis courts.

Pat's was the third squad car to arrive. Tim and Broun made a token effort to steer him away from the one body but he pushed aside to confirm his hunch.

In the initial moment, every time, the mangled body in its hapless arrangement called the spectre of distant levity: the emergence of surprise in the world. Surprise and a vanishing.

He turned to look for the reporter. Where? He could have sworn he'd seen him.

Elementary forensics showed the boy and girl expiring subsequent to the first killing, as the first body's temperature was lower. The couple had clean holes in their foreheads and expressions like thoughts interrupted. And no firearm, no residue on Mac.

The group home fugitive wore a necklace of dice wrapped twice around his forehead. Found at the scene, he maintained, yet was reluctant to hand it over as evidence into a sterile plastic bag. He seemed disconcerted to entertain the idea that the ambulance wasn't going to be able to revive the three.

Knowing him, he was asking for it. —Tim.

You didn't know him. —Pat.

Huh. Be scared for myself if I did.

Here was another one to have to sketch out. Drive-by, holdup, retaliation, self-defense, experiment in curiosity.

What? Pat said.

Solid quarters for a coke?

May I ask why you're asking me?

Cause I don't have mine anymore. I used the one I found calling you.

Oh.

And I'm been thirsty. That man there gave me one.

Mac? You mean to say you took it out of his pocket?

Naw. I'm talking bout last week.

Pat studied him and dug down, leather pistol holder groaning.

Now, you say what, that particular event aint never happening again. Is it.

coda

After hours of driving the neighborhoods he slept and dreamed of driving.

The sky at night remains a huge black sun, blotting out the heavens. Down the empty avenue traffic lights trip in random contradiction; used cars wait upon their lots like illuminated units of currency, and the traveler with nowhere particular to go gets there eventually.

In the dream he saw second story windows belonging to the extinguished hours of early morning, long darkened blocks of bolted doors and no trespassing signs.

A lone window, lit up, curtainless—who lived in these rooms? Who paced, long awake, wracked by thoughts of unknown divination?

Someone alone in a room did not exist until another came along and there were two.

If he knew them, if he walked in the rooms, he would be the one seen instead.

The world would be other than what it was.

All that you can no longer remember is still there. Each street you've been on, every kindness shown you.

In the dead hours of the night the avenue runs straight and deserted for blocks upon blocks to an unseen black river and there, at the end, rises its dim drawbridge conclusion where angels spar and time isn't.

#