Step Right up a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University in Partial Fulfillm

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Step Right Up

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

James M. Miranda

May 2015

This dissertation titled

Step Right Up

JAMES M. MIRANDA

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Patrick O'Keeffe

Assistant Professor of English

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

MIRANDA, JAMES M., Ph.D., May 2015, English

Step Right Up

Director of Dissertation: Patrick O'Keeffe

The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “The Genuine Fake:

A Look at the Long Con of American Fiction” and a book manuscript titled, Step Right

Up.

“The Genuine Fake: A Look at the Long Con of American Fiction” presents a historiographical survey of the phenomenon of the “confidence man” in American culture and fiction. The essay positions the confidence man as a central figure in an ongoing national identity discourse. It looks to American fiction, beginning in the antebellum period and continuing up through the modern and postmodern age, as a means of deciphering certain cultural shifts in attitude with regard to authenticity and imitation.

Step Right Up is composed of short stories that attempt to participate in, subvert, and distort certain elements of this discourse. The stories regularly dissect the prevailing mythos of the “self-made man” in America. Through their experimentation with voice, form, point-of-view, and language, they are fraught with cultural and individual notions of what constitutes the genuine and the artificial in the contemporary American landscape.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………3

The Genuine Fake: A Look at the Long Con of American Fiction……………………….5

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….5

The History of the Confidence Man and 19th Century American Fiction………...7

Truth, Artifice, and the Con Man in Mid- to Late-19th Century Fiction…………10

The Evolution of the Confidence Man in 20th Century American Literature……24

Step Right Up and Appealing to the Confidence of the Reader….………………53

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...69

Step Right Up…………………..………………………………………………………...71

Sobreático………………………………………………………………………..71

We Knew Horses………………………………………………………………...91

Losing Weather…………………………………………………………………107

The Shot………………………………………………………………………...126

Barium…………………………………………………………………………..146

The Healing Properties of This Place…………………………………………..157

By Sea or Breeze or Bird……………………………………………………….177

All In……………………………………………………………………………202

Razing Rice Terrace…………………………………………………………….220

Step Right Up…………………………………………………………………...245

THE GENUINE FAKE: A LOOK AT THE LONG CON OF AMERICAN FICTION

It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

-J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

Introduction

In Saul Bellow’s afterword to J. R. “Yellow Kid” Weil’s biography Con Man: A

Master Swindler’s Own Story, he quotes Weil as saying, “I was of a very fragile constitution, unfit for the heavier sort of manual labor. I knew I could not toil like other men. How was I to live? My power lay in words. In words I became a commander”

(332). Weil managed to bamboozle his “marks”—mainly those of America’s upper-crust business class—out of eight million dollars over the course of his long career. Through some combination of his own unique acumen for the trade, his intuition when it came to human psychology, and sheer longevity, Weil achieved that rare paradox status of

American idol: that of the “reputable criminal” or the “genuine fake.” The confidence games that he orchestrated were incredibly intricate and layered, often strung out over a long period of time, and relied heavily upon the nature of the mark’s own dubious moral character—on the notion that the victim was implicated in his/her own brand of baroque fleecing. The old maxim, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” encompasses the basis by which the confidence game operates, and in this complicated and symbiotic relationship 6

(between the con man and his mark, and the implied contract that they enter into), in

America’s simultaneous fear and fascination with the phenomenon of the con man, lies a fruitful paradigm for dissecting and understanding some of the ways that American fiction has evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

For the purposes of this introduction I’d first like to examine the historical rise of the confidence man phenomenon in antebellum America and the ways in which this phenomenon developed alongside class tensions and anxieties that arose in the new industrial landscape. I’ll then explore the way these anxieties may have manifested themselves, both diegetic and extra-diegetic, in some examples from mid- and late- nineteenth century fiction. Then I’d like to look at the evolution of the confidence man in the early twentieth century—specifically at how the confidence man, at one time reviled and feared, became an adaptable model for a generation (and beyond) of “self-made” men and women, and how the legacy of this model impacted the writing of fiction prior to the modern and postmodern age. The rise of and national intrigue surrounding the

American confidence man—an ongoing intrigue—had a profound impact on not just the content of the literature that flourished in its wake, but also on the way that fiction writers changed previously inherited approaches to their craft, on the breadth of narrative tools at their disposal, and on writers’ attitudes toward the their own shifting culture. Finally, I’d like to place my own writing within the context of this tradition and speak briefly about how the stories in Step Right Up utilize inherited and improvised narrative approaches to gain the confidence of a reader.

I. The History of the Confidence Man and 19th Century American Fiction

The rise of the confidence man in the United States betrayed the logical underbelly of a new economic culture on the make. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, at the height of industrialization, men and women (though mostly young men) were, for the first time, leaving their homes in rural towns and hamlets, leaving behind the families and communities that had so rooted them and their forefathers, to seek new lives and fortunes in the cities.

Karen Halttunen has done extensive research on this mass migration and its impact on popular culture in her study, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of

Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870. She notes the preponderance of so-called

“advice literature” that pops up around this same time: manuals penned by moral- reformers, clergy, and educators in an effort to guide these young men who would be lacking the moral and social guidance of their native communities. These included such titles as William A. Alcott’s Young Man’s Guide (1833), which went through some twenty-one editions by 1858, and Daniel Eddy’s Young Man’s Friend: containing admonitions for the erring; counsel for the tempted; encouragement for the desponding; hope for the fallen (1854)—books that sold thousands of copies. As Halttunen notes,

“Although the term confidence man does not appear in the advice manuals, it accurately identifies the villain of the piece. The seducer—whether rake or pimp, gambler or thief— begins his assault on the innocent youth by winning his confidence through an offer of friendship and entertainment” (2). What the guides offer are first an introduction to the various brands of duplicitousness that might challenge these young men upon their 8 entering the city, a description of the telltale signs by which they might earmark bearers of such guile, and specific methods/practices by which these young men might build characters resistant to ruinous temptation. Alcott, in his Young Man’s Guide, in a section entitled “On Books and Study,” even takes up the place of the novel in such a regimen:

As to NOVELS it is difficult to say what advice ought to be given. At first view they seem unnecessary, wholly so; and from this single consideration. They interest and improve just in proportion as the fiction they contain is made to resemble reality; and hence it might be inferred, and naturally enough, too, that reality would in all cases be preferable to that which imitates it. But to this it may be replied, that we have few books of narrative and biography, which are written with so much spirit as some works of fiction; and that until those departments are better filled, fiction, properly selected, should be admissible. But if fiction be allowable at all, it is only under the guidance of age and experience;—and here there is even a more pressing need of a friend than in the cases already mentioned (68).

This passage is indicative of the generic fear of social artifice and imitation that runs through these advice manuals. It’s also an early marker (from an unlikely popular source) of a larger cultural shift in aesthetic attitude that encompasses not just the advent of literary realism, but also the ways in which technology and migration and shifting modes of capital came to inform such aesthetic movements. Simmering just below the surface of this innocuous “advice” about reading material and self-education, one sees the simultaneous draw and repulsion of the Janus-faced confidence man—the “spirit” that

Alcott speaks of belies the ephemeral line dividing the counterfeit from the original. This aesthetic preference denotes a shift in what Miles Orvell calls “a culture of types, of stylizations, of rounded generalities” (19th Century) to a “culture of authenticity” (20th

Century) (xv). 9

Here is not just the arrival of a new breed of criminal, believed to be stalking the city streets and taverns, but more so the widespread and fever-pitched response to such a threat. Implicit in the advice literature of the time is a pressing and rankling anxiety.

There is a sense, underneath all of the practical advice with regard to character and money and industry and charity, that the integrity of a system is at stake, and that a potential toppling of time-tested social curation is in the offing. The fear here is not directed toward any particular individual or group, but rather at the idea of a prevailing generation of “self-made men,” men who do not heed the customs and codes of good manners or social contract that were bestowed upon them by the older generation or by a cultural tradition imported from Europe (and more specifically from Britain). What the confidence man comes to encompass, as the shadowy figure lurking through the pages of these manuals, is the embodied fate of the already fallen—the natural entropic product of men living without proper guidance. As Halttunen notes:

The powerful symbol of the confidence man expressed antebellum concerns about the replacement of a traditional hierarchical social structure with a modern system in which no man occupied a fixed social position. In the open society, it was feared, because all men were on the make [italics mine], all men were in danger of becoming confidence men, whose claims to a new and higher social status were a dangerous form of hypocrisy (192).

The popular culture of the time was rife with implicit and explicit responses to these dangers. In addition to the advice literature, the lecturers on the moral-reform circuit, and the various clubs whose métier was a kind of ethic-crusading, there was also a marked amateur fascination with the newly developing fields of phrenology and physiognomy— two new “sciences” that offered their practitioners and adherents a way of reading the

(false) exterior of human subjects, so that they might decipher the (true) interior. Miles 10

Orvell, in his book The Real Thing (1989), makes some convincing connections between

Walt Whitman’s fascination with and practice of phrenology and the radical new poetic forms that showed up in the early editions of Leaves of Grass. In short, American society was engaged, on a number of popular and intellectual fronts, in a soul-searching debate regarding authenticity and imitation, truth and artifice. Orvell posits, “One might imagine that the concept of authenticity begins in any society when the possibility of fraud arises, and that fraud is at least possible whenever transactions—whether social, political, commercial, or aesthetic—routinely occur, especially when the society becomes so large that one usually deals with strangers, not neighbors” (xvii). And nowhere was this anxiety regarding authenticity more evident, in both form and content, than in the fiction of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

II. Truth, Artifice, and the Con Man in Mid- to Late-19th Century Fiction

As an example of mid-19th Century fiction steeped in the discourse of artifice and authenticity, you could do no better than Herman Melville’s vexing final novel, the allegorical satire, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, published in 1857. The novel seems to serve as a strange lacuna in the popular pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap novels that would come to dominate the popular literature after the war (i.e. Horatio

Alger’s prolific and formulaic series [Ragged Dick [1868], Luck and Pluck [1869], Ben the Luggage Boy [1870], etc.]). The Confidence Man, read now, seems prescient to the ways that America’s new avenues for economic, political, and social betterment might breed a growing sub-culture of corruption and fraud. Though the book’s biting tone (part scoff/part snarl) feels partly rooted in Melville’s own bitterness concerning the reception 11 of his fiction, the target of this bitterness (along with religion, certain writers and political figures of the time [Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, etc.], racist governmental policies, etc.) becomes the embodied deceit of American consumer capitalism and its expansionist and revisionist agenda.

Structurally, The Confidence Man is something like an allegorical ouroboros. It takes as its subject the episodic encounters between passengers on a Mississippi steamship—the Fidéle (from the French meaning “faithful,” “loyal,” or “true”)—that sets sail on April Fools Day for a long journey south to New Orleans. The novel’s model owes something to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccacchio’s The Decameron. The passengers, for the most part strangers to each other—all hucksters, thieves, and confidence men of one sort or another—interact and tell each other tales; they swindle each other, their episodes intertwining. The reader is left deciphering the various

“disguises” that each character wears in a given scene. Who is conning who? And for what purpose? We are told early in the first chapter that “in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase” (2). This metaphor speaks as much to the literal western expansionist project underway, as it does to the new country that has cast off one pall of history and structural power for another. Part of the puzzle of The Confidence Man is figuring out who is a wolf and who is a fox, and this identification process becomes nearly impossible, as layered and tempestuous as each character’s identity seems to be.

Melville takes great pains to establish The Fidéle, and, by extension the

Mississippi, in allegorical terms. In an early description of the boat we get the following:

Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends from apple to orange, from clime to clime, yet, like any small ferry-boat, to right and to left, at every landing, 12

the huge Fidéle still receives additional passengers in exchange for those that disembark; so that, though always full of strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange (Melville, 5).

The emphasis on “strangers” and strangeness, generally, echoes the fear of strangers so pertinent in the advice literature of the cities, the transient (read dangerous) quality of the Fidéle and its inhabitants. Later in the same chapter the Mississippi River itself is described as “one cosmopolitan and confident tide” pulling the Fidéle and its passengers toward its destination (New Orleans), which, as the novel progresses, portends to be even more rife with frauds and thieves than the boat itself (6). “Cosmopolitan” and

“confident” are two carefully chosen adjectives in this context. The extended metaphor equates the inevitable gathering of the northern tributaries into the great waters of the

Mississippi with the gathering of disparate populations in modern urban centers. That the tide of the Mississippi is “confident” echoes (etymologically) both the appeal for

“confidence” enacted again and again in the novel by the various con artists toward their marks, and the primal and unstoppable draw of the modern current of “self- improvement” and “self-establishment”—a tide that carries the nation’s young forward with little use for history or a healthy dose of cynicism.

But a simple one-to-one allegorical correlation would do injustice to the layering at work in The Confidence Man. Like much of Melville’s later work, the text is peppered with so many extra-textual references (allusions to popular periodical pieces of the time, biblical scripture, popular culture, history, satiric portraits of contemporary rivals, etc.) that it feels, at times, almost impenetrable. This coded way of writing fiction seems purposeful—a dense simulacrum that approximates the unknowability of the human soul. 13

Exteriors are not to be trusted in this brave new world. What Melville finds useful in the modern figure of the confidence man, in the public’s infatuation with it, is the shadow that it casts on everyone: the clergy, the banker, the beggar, and the thief. And he emphasizes this by enacting the con man’s appeal for confidence again and again, in every guise possible. In this way, each chapter, each new con, is structured very nearly like a joke, and he relishes in set-up and punch line. By way of example, here is a scene between “the man with the weed” (one of the confidence man’s many guises) and a young scholar that he finds reading at night by the rail of the ship:

“For, comparatively inexperienced as you are, my dear young friend, did you never observe how little, very little, confidence, there is? I mean between man and man—more particularly between stranger and stranger. In a sad world it is the saddest fact. Confidence! I have sometimes almost thought that confidence is fled; that confidence is the New Astrea—emigrated—vanished—gone.” Then softly sliding nearer, with the softest air, quivering down and looking up, “Could you now, my dear young sir, under such circumstances, by way of experiment, simply have confidence in me?” (23)

Melville seems to relish in this persuasive slow boil, in the sibilant and slinking way that the con man establishes his case. Prior to this particular little interaction, the man with the weed has been trying to convince the young scholar to toss his copy of

Tacitus into the river. The persuasion is comical, almost cartoonish, and ends up falling short. Tacitus—a historian—the man with the weed condemns as being too cynical.

“Much cause to pity man, little to distrust him,” he insists (21). He even appeals to the young man using one of the sciences of exteriors discussed earlier. “Phrenelogically, my young friend, you would seem to have a well-developed head, and large; but cribbed within the ugly view, the Tacitus view, your large brain, like your large ox in the contracted field, will but starve the more” (22). Here the aim of Melville’s satire is not 14 just the figure of confidence man himself, but also the moral-crusading writer of the advice manual—the would-be arbiter of taste when matters of character and integrity come to bear. Melville flips the script, adopts the language of the advice literature, in order to simultaneously expose the comical villainy of the confidence man and the deep- seeded hypocrisy of the moral reformers.

In both content and form, The Confidence Man is a novel that uses the phenomenon of the con man to explore something that Melville found deeply psychologically and sociologically troubling about the new American landscape. But it would be misleading, at best, to insinuate that Melville, as late as 1857, was setting the vanguard for American fiction. After the publication of Pierre (1852), Melville had already fallen out of favor with both American and British mainstream reviewers and publishers. He had become something of a sardonic fringe voice whose cutting vision of

America’s dark under-soul (distinct from the satire of, say, Twain or Bierce) would be better picked up by writers of the mid- to late-20th century, nearly one-hundred years after the publication of The Confidence Man. But other, more popular writers of the time, chose to take on the fear of fraud and deceit sweeping the country by shifting their gaze to a new subject, namely the amorphous source from which the American confidence man supposedly arose: the rural and urban poor. Two of these writers, Jacob Riis and

Stephen Crane, would set some of the groundwork for the coming age of Naturalism and for the gritty Realism that would come to dominate American popular and literary fiction heading into the twentieth century. Their aesthetic handling of the confidence man, and, more significantly, of the underclass from which he/she rose (in the American mythos), 15 were distinctly journalistic—an important shift in perspective that would serve as a profoundly influential model for a large strain of twentieth century fiction.

Though one could easily sift through the bulk of Mark Twain’s oeuvre for instantiations of the confidence man as literary convention, I am offering up Twain as an introduction to two other writers—Jacob Riis and Stephen Crane—whose careers crucially blur the line between the popular journalism of the 19th century “penny press” and the concurrent fictional literature that would be produced and embraced at the turn of the century. The ways in which both the penny press and popular fiction of the time worked in tandem is complicated and worth looking into, both as a means of understanding the way the figure of the confidence man started to evolve at the turn of the century, and as a means of understanding the course that fiction would take

(stylistically, in terms of subject, and in terms of its contribution to the American mythos).

In Twain’s 1884 sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a scene in which Huck arrives at the farm of Tom’s Aunt

Sally and Uncle Silas with the intention of finding and freeing Jim. Huck is pretending to be Tom, who Sally and Silas are expecting for a visit. When Tom finally does show up,

Huck intersects him first on the road and gets him to agree to play along with the scheme for the sake of freeing Jim. Tom tells elaborate stories to concretize his identity as a stranger from out of town (“Hicksville, Ohio”), an identity that actually belongs to his own younger half-brother, Sid, though he introduces himself as one “William 16

Thompson.” I’m relying on Matt Seybold’s reading of the scene in his article “Tom

Sawyer Impersonates ‘The Original Confidence Man.’” Seybold notes:

Even in 1885, few readers would have recognized this allusion to a figure of somewhat fleeting notoriety, whose infamy preceded the Civil War. During the 1850s, William Thompson came to be known as the ‘Original Confidence Man’…Thompson’s exploits were first described in the New York Herald in July 1849. He would become a fixture in the Herald over the next decade, as would the epithet derived from his first publicized arrest. It is unlikely the con would have survived to become a staple of American literature and cinema were it not that the Herald’s authoritarian editor, James Gordon Bennett, found confidence man to be an effective term of derision. He applied it liberally, not only to conventional criminals, but to prominent financiers, politicians, rival publishers, and other public figures of whom he disapproved (137-138).

Of note here is not just the way that the etymology of the term confidence man found literal circulation into the culture, but also the way in which it found its way into Twain’s fiction and what the implications of such an appropriation might be. Bennett’s eagerness to latch onto the notion of the confidence man metaphorically speaks to its fertility vis-à- vis the new political and economic landscape that his newspaper was attempting to navigate. As Seybold notes, “Bennett immediately recognized Thompson’s swindle as a synecdoche of a grander scheme, with which he, like Twain, was peculiarly obsessed: stock speculation. In no place was confidence more frequently evoked than on Wall

Street” (138). This “grander scheme,” it was implied, created an entire population of dupes and marks—a population that also became an obsessive subject within the dailies and for the journalist/writers working their beats.

Prior to 1890 and the publication of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives—a combination ethnography and journalistic/photographic expose of New York City tenement life at the turn of the century—“slum writing,” a new-found and then fledgling 17 tradition in American letters, had either taken the form of a kind of charitable call-to- action, a condemnation of the (by implication) inherent moral corruption attending the poverty-stricken immigrant populations occupying the tenement buildings, back alleys, taverns, and city squares of lower Manhattan; or as scandalous grist for dime novels and

19th century pulp fiction. Writing with an unabashed sense of Protestant moral rectitude, reformer/writers such as Charles Loring Brace (The Dangerous Classes of New York and

Twenty Years Work Among Them [1872]) and the reverend E.H. Chapin (Humanity in the

City [1854]), amongst others, catalogued, as Keith Gandal notes in the The Virtues of the

Vicious, “the Protestant virtues and vices (especially intemperance, disorder, uncleanliness, idleness, beggary, vagabondage), disease, the miserable conditions of dwellings…the loss of modesty, the dissolution of families, the forms of employment and their moral and physical ills and dangers, the institutions devoted to their uplift, and the reform that still needed to be done” (29). Seeing the slums and its inhabitants as an industrial age battleground for Victorian morals, these writers undertook the task of documenting daily life in the slums as a means of charitable action—a rallying cry to the city’s (and nation’s) would-be reformers who believed that the squalor of the tenements might be overcome through a programmatic application of, and adherence to, Victorian principals, and through a direct appeal to individual moral character.

Though Riis, a reformer and philanthropist in his own right, implements the language of charitable writing and reform in How the Other Half Lives, he does not limit his project to the condemnation of perceived moral decrepitude brought on by slum conditions or solely to a posture of moral outrage. There are other artistic and aesthetic 18 aims and preoccupations in How the Other Half Lives that set the stage, in some ways, for some of the later fictional and nonfictional literature that will take as its subject the poor, dispossessed, oppressed, and marginalized. In Riis’s anthropological and ethnographical acumen, in his ability to parse the social and structural ethics that dictate behavior and power struggles in the slums, in his keen observance of the social politics at play in the lower echelon of New York society, and in the often poetic language used to portray the various immigrant factions comprising the slums (their culture and customs), he presents a portion of the population without wholly resorting to sensationalizing or offering up the slums as targets for charitable action. He tries to resist, in other words—unlike the majority of the latter-day Gilded-Age writers (whether purposely or not)—presenting the slums and its inhabitants as just a morally bankrupt other, but, instead, takes some pains to point out the large-scale systemic corruption and injustice that attends capitalism run amok. As Gandal notes, Riis is not just interested in “how the other half sins and suffers, keeps house and works, but also how it speaks and flirts and passes time: to use his

(Riis’s) word, more fully how the other half lives” (32).

In his introduction to the original edition of How the Other Half Lives, Riis writes:

Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance (1).

From the outset Riis presents the ills of 19th century urban life (the rapid growth of tenement housing and the quality of life therein) as an issue of top-down neglect and willing ignorance. “The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth,” Riis writes in his opening chapter on the genesis of the tenements, “though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered” (5). There are larger structural forces at play in creating and perpetuating the conditions of the slums, and these forces

(economic, political, psycho-social, etc.), biblical in scope, have very little to do with an individual will-to-power or a “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” paradigm. Riis understood this early on in his journalistic career, working as a police reporter with the

New York Tribune, and used his emphatic and detail-oriented style (similar to the style used in How the Other Half Lives) to poke and prod at the urban development committees, housing departments, and political machines responsible for cordoning off a good growing portion of the city’s population. But perhaps what made How the Other

Half Lives so impactful—for a generation of journalists, artists, writers, and social activists—was Riis’s accompanying photographs, a series of intimate and compelling portraits of the lives of the urban poor. Pioneering newfound German innovations in flash photography, Riis was able to literally shed light on the dark back alleys and nighttime tavern scenes that previously could not be photographed south of Mulberry Street. These photographs, pared with Riis’s muckraking style of ethnographic writing, had a profound impact on the readership of the time, who included not only social reformers and those already enlisted in fighting the blight of the urban poor (Theodore Roosevelt, then the

Police Commissioner in New York, famously took nighttime forays with Riis to witness, 20 firsthand, some of the scenes that were made famous in How the Other Half Lives), but also a growing middle-class readership whose consumption of these images and stories piqued middle- and upper-class curiosity (and anxiety) regarding a turbulent and multiplying population of urban poor.

Three years later, when Stephen Crane published his short novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), it appeared that Maggie (a beautiful tenement girl who strays from her family in search of her own life) might have been one of the tenement occupants so carefully portrayed in Riis’s chronicle of the Bend or Gotham Court or any of the other

Fourth and Fifth Ward neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. Crane, like Riis, was profoundly influenced by his work as a journalist covering the slums of New York, but his writing never quite took on the moral crusading tone that appears time and again in

Riis’s journalism and in How the Other Half Lives. If we see a shift from some of the previous reformist slum writing and Riis’s How the Other Half Lives—a distinctly ethical shift when it comes to portraying the urban poor—then we see an even more marked shift between Riis’s writing and Crane’s. Whereas Riis’s purpose in writing How the Other

Half Lives still seems firmly rooted in an agenda for social justice and moral reform,

Crane’s posture toward his subject matter appears, not indifferent, but decidedly unwilling to make any grand moral or political claims. Oftentimes throughout Maggie

Crane seems to go so far as to even indict the kind of moralizing that factors so heavily in charitable writing about the slums, usually by putting the language of Puritan moral value into the mouths of his underclass characters. This is particularly clear at the end of

Maggie, following her murder, when one of the neighbor women, attempting to comfort 21

Maggie’s mother Mary, says, “Yer poor misguided chil’ is gone now, Mary, an’ let us hope it’s fer deh bes’. Yeh’ll fergive her now, Mary, won’t yehs, dear, all her disobed’ence? All her tankless behavior to her mudder an’ all her badness? She’s gone where her ter’ble sins will be judged” (85). As readers who have witnessed Maggie’s coming-of-age in the tenements, we can’t help but read hypocrisy in the neighbor’s seeming concern for Maggie’s salvation (a belief in salvation and moral righteousness that seems handed down and repeated by rote), and also hypocrisy in her parent’s dwelling on Maggie’s perceived “innocence” as a little baby (illustrated when Mary brings out Maggie’s baby shoes to cry over). We’ve seen the social, familial, economic, and political forces that have contributed to Maggie’s demise, and we’ve seen the responses from her family and neighbors to Maggie’s behavior throughout; there is no hiding these facts in the wake of Maggie’s death, nor is their a need for Crane, as narrator, to moralize or offer us redemption in the end. Unlike other fiction writers who have taken the slum as subject prior to Crane (Harding Davis, Townsend, Friedman,

Fawcett, Howells, etc.), Crane seems less interested in and less willing to do some of the moral waffling typical of the prevailing tales of slum redemption or ruination.

Though Keith Gandal sees manifest in both works (Maggie and How the Other

Half Lives) “the decline of the nineteenth-century mental philosophy of ‘moral character’ and the rise of a modern psychology of ‘self-esteem,’ the decline of the nineteenth- century styles of sentimentalism and moralism and the rise of a modern aesthetic of excitement or spectacle,” I would argue that this shift is not so clear in Riis’s posture and world view (at least not in his writing—the paired photography may strengthen Gandal’s 22 argument), though How the Other Half Lives does seem to serve as a kind of ethical bridge paving the way for a novel like Maggie (Virtues of the Vicious, 10). However,

Gandal’s view that “Riis’s study and Crane’s novel represent some of the first volleys fired in what Warren Susman calls ‘one of the fundamental conflicts of twentieth-century

America’: a ‘profound clash between different moral orders,’ ‘between two cultures—an older culture, often loosely labeled Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture, and a newly emerging culture of abundance’ or consumption,” seems an important and viable claim (10). Both works offer up the slums and the underclass of New York as spectacle, as a now knowable quantity available for middle- and upper-class consumption and understanding. The shift from Riis’s nonfictional ethnography of the urban poor to

Crane’s fictionalized account of one girl’s life growing up in the tenements, also signals the marked impact that journalism would have on coming trends in American

Literature—an impact that would blur the lines between high/low art/culture and that would shape the way future writers would model, not only the trajectory of their careers, but also the style of their writing and their treatment of class within that writing.

Crane, as Michael Robertson notes in his study Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, was not one to make clear delineations between his journalistic and artistic writing. Often the subjects and beats that he covered for the dailies and magazines of the time blended with his fictional work. Pieces like “An

Experiment In Misery” and “The Open Boat,” often anthologized alongside fiction of the time, were either direct products of Crane’s journalistic endeavors (in the case of the former) or transcribed narratives taken from his own journalistic accounts (as in the 23 latter). In both instances the pieces take the spectacle of that which would be exotic to a middle-class readership (often this involved the day-to-day lives of the growing underclass) and presents the material in a literary package that brings the subject into sharp relief without moralizing or lapsing into sermon or satire. This conflation of journalistic and literary writing, though it’s become nearly archetypical in the formation of canonical modern American writers and writing, was also a source of anxiety and artistic debate at the time—a response that would solidify its future place in the literary canon. Michael Robertson, in his look at writers preceding Crane (particularly Gilded

Age writers like William Dean Howells and Henry James), notes:

Howells’s and James’s disdain for journalism reveals as much about the changing status of literature and the attendant anxieties of Gilded Age authors as about the new journalism of the era. Faced with a need to earn a living in the mass marketplace, authors such as Howells and James saw their role as uncomfortably close to that of the hired reporter…it is possible to see their works as an attempt to defend literature’s privileged status and the author’s prestige in an era when both were threatened by mass-circulation journalism’s commodification of writing” (13).

Both Riis and Crane (not to mention earlier writers like Ambrose Bierce and

Mark Twain), who benefitted from the formation of the penny press and mass-circulation journalism’s audience, created a kind of template for future writers to follow (particularly writers like Dreiser, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner). Riis and Crane redefined, ethically and stylistically, what American literary prose (and a career in it) might look like, particularly when the subject that these writers pursued was the nation’s poor and disenfranchised.

In Maggie and How the Other Half Lives, the confidence man shows up from time to time in the guise of the petty criminal and thief, preying more often on his/her 24 neighbors in the fourth and fifth wards of Manhattan than on the middle and upper class readership whose anxieties bred such a fascination with the figure. Maggie is ultimately undone by a concatenation of less-than-genuine acquaintances (namely Pete and Nellie, but implicitly by the structural hypocrisy of her neighbors and of the city). But significant in Riis and Crane is not just the literal portrayal of the confidence man in their work, but the sense that some larger structural forces were at work in potentially conning an entire generation, an entire nation, of people. Maggie and How the Other Half Lives are replete with a growing population of victims. But victims of what? Of whom?

III. The Evolution of the Confidence Man in 20th Century American Literature

Heading into the 20th century, the discourse embodied in the figure of the confidence man—a discourse of fraud, disguises, social politicking, conspicuous consumption/capital, sentimentality, and authenticity—becomes both diffuse and omnipresent. The concept of the “confidence man” and of the “confidence game” gets coopted by writers from all avenues of American experience. The notion of the American

Con—its layered complexity, its duplicitous possibilities—offers a platform upon which performativity in issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and power might be explored. Texts and authors that take on the cultural inheritance of the confidence man, that explore the foundational integrity of the American Counterfeit, are numerous and varied in this period. Indeed, once one starts to look, they become nearly inexhaustible.

The following is an examination of three works spread out over the course of the first half of the 20th century—emblematic works that complicate and repurpose the notion of the confidence man and of “confidence” in very different aesthetic, political, and ontological 25 ways. These works are Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The

Great Gatsby (1925), and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha (1953). Aside from being texts that participate so centrally in the discourse of authenticity versus imitation, I’ve also chosen these texts because of their general influence (in terms of craft and themes) on generations of fiction writers to follow. Therefore, in addition to continuing the survey of diegetic and extra-diegetic confidence man phenomena in the 20th century, I’ll also be exploring the kind of influence that these writers—and their participation in this particular tradition—has had on the stories in Step Right Up.

It should not be taken-for-granted at this point that literature at any given time is anything but a monolith. While writers like Twain, Riis, Crane, and a cadre of other

“regional writers” championed by Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells were embracing Main Street vernacular, other popular literary writers of the time—among them, Edith Wharton—were still deeply committed to the stylistic hallmarks of the

Victorian and Gilded Age. Even as late as 1920, when Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence, the baroque novel steeped in the etiquette and customs of the elite still held a good deal of cultural cache.

For Wharton, understanding the way structural power was apportioned in any society meant understanding the nuanced “degrees of culture and conduct” that dictated a given echelon in that society, and her opposition to the so-called “Main Street Novels” of the early 20th Century (embodied in the work of Sinclair Lewis and his imitators)—the

“just folks” novels, as she disparagingly called them—was on the grounds that “at the heart of Main Street’s literary popularity…was an act of nationalist cultural and class 26 synopsis” (17). In other words, her charge was that the Main Street novels averaged out

(specifically middle class) American experience into a blanched and meaningless approximation of what Wharton found, in fact, to be multivalent and even contradictory.

Whereas the Naturalist and Socialist-Realist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century so often took the proletariat or urban/rural poor as its subject— supposedly valorizing a growing underclass in the United States—an equally compelling argument could be made, given the general readership class constitution of the time, that these works served merely voyeuristic (if not outright exploitative) purposes. The rich and the middle class wanted to understand this underclass that were in such close proximity, and this desire seemed to be born more of anxiety than of solidarity. So while

Wharton may have been “deeply conservative, opposed to socialism, unions, and women’s suffrage, intellectually attracted to the relentless worldview of Darwinism, hostile to the rawness and noise and vulgarity of America” (27), there also seemed to be a charge of hypocrisy that she leveled at the “Just Folks” literature coming to dominate the market.

So in 1905, when Wharton published her novel The House of Mirth—a novel steeped in the social mores and faux pas of New York’s upper crust at the turn of the century—it seemed, in terms of both style and content, to go directly against the current of the then en vogue fiction. And yet…her subtle satire and scathing irony perform an equal (if not more pernicious) take down of the power systems dictating certain fates— particularly those of women and the disinherited—from within the social elite. This is particularly true when read against The Age of Innocence published some fifteen years 27 later, by which time she seemed to soften to (even look back with nostalgia at) the social customs and rigid hierarchies that dictated the times. The House of Mirth is a novel of manners informed, however begrudgingly, by the structural critique so implicit in literary naturalism.

Like Henry James (a close family friend and confidant) before her, Wharton had a keen ear for the falsities that seem to vibrate underneath the surface of day-to-day social interactions, particularly where matters of money or love or power are concerned. The

House of Mirth is a novel that revels in these falsities—in the tête-à-tête ironies and hypocrisies that tend to characterize polite society. We see this in the very opening of the novel, where we encounter the novel’s heroine, Lily Bart, through the eyes of Lawrence

Selden. The two characters, who know each other vaguely, bump into each other by chance in Grand Central Station and get to talking. But before any of this, we are introduced to Lily only through Selden’s appraisal of her from afar, an appraisal that seems at once aesthetic and commercial. Selden, even as one of the more “liberated” characters in their circle, can’t quite see past Lily’s capital in the New York set. Here is his first impression of her in the station:

Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her? (4)

The initial impression is one of compliment. He finds Lily “radiant,” “vivid,” nearly glowing against the masses of the station. But we don’t have to wait long (in fact, it comes in the very next clause) for that compliment to be qualified and turned on its head. 28

Her beauty becomes “conspicuous,” and the beauty that he first perceived in visceral terms, gets downgraded to a girlish “purity of tint” that she is, on second thought,

“beginning to lose after eleven years,” etc. This descriptive passage, meant to give us

Selden’s impression of Lily, but also serving to betray the routine assessments made in the blink-of-an-eye in this society, has the affect of a low-talker who shouts accolades but trails off into disparaging whispers. The impression ends with a question: can she be as old as her “rivals” seem to claim? “Rivals” being of some significance here. “How nice of you to come to my rescue!” Lily exclaims, and yet we know, from Selden’s quick inner calculation, that he is doing (and will do) nothing of the sort.

Structurally, this innocuous passage of description serves nicely as a synecdoche for how New York’s elite will deal with the likes of Lily Bart. Underneath the social and materialist veneer of politesse that defines the upper class, is a complex, cut-throat sub- language of signs and signifiers meant to keep outliers from gaining access, and the

“genuine” aristocracy from falling prey those who might attempt to mimic their customs.

What makes Lily so unique, so fitting as Wharton’s protagonist, is her conflicted attitude toward participating in and living by the codes of such a society. Lily’s impulse to accompany Mr. Selden back to his rooms for tea in the opening chapter, disastrous as it turns out to be for her reputation, is just one of many impulses that define Lily as a liminal figure in a world that does not do so well with ambiguity. After running into Mr.

Rosedale coming out of Selden’s rooms, effectively caught out in her own breach of social etiquette, we get a break between chapters, a caesura, of sorts, before entering into the free indirect discourse of Lily’s consciousness—our first sense of the oppression and 29 constant self-policing (against the kind of appraisals that we’ve already seen from

Selden) that plagues Lily’s existence:

In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh. Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden’s rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could afford (15).

This turns out to be true. But what interests me here is the “structure of artifice” that Lily so clearly perceives—one that is alluded to throughout the novel—a kind of civilized matrix of behavioral ticks that congest the text to the pitch of suffocation at points. To give into impulse is deadly in this society (unless you’re someone like Selden, or someone rich enough to do whatever you please), but it’s also one of the only things that humanizes Lily enough to forge a sympathetic connection with the reader. Lily makes terrible mistakes, at crucial points in the novel, and they wind up costing her the easy ticket that would solidify her station and simplify her life. In practice, Lily Bart is not quite capable of securing the confidence of a suitor, and this seems to be because, as

Mrs. Fisher will so succinctly put it later in the novel, “at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for” (189). If courtship, arranged matches, and the intricate equations of wealth and title amount to a certain kind of “confidence game” (which Wharton’s depiction attests to), then Lily Bart seems to have little mastery over it. “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in his essay “Experience,” (1844) and Lily, so it appears, is not a very adroit skater. 30

Lily’s chief asset (and burden) in the novel is her beauty. Remarked upon by many, frequently presented in terms of capital or market value, Lily Bart’s beauty serves as something like a counterweight to her various indulgences—it allows her to commit certain infractions without penalty. But, combined with her unwillingness to marry, it also makes her a target for scandal at the hands of the Trenors and the Dorsets. As

Jonathan Franzen notes in his New Yorker profile on Wharton, “A Rooting Interest: Edith

Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” “Beauty in novels usually cuts two ways. On the one hand, we’re aware of how often it deforms the moral character of people who possess it; on the other hand, it represents a kind of natural capital, like a tree’s perfect fruit, that we’re instinctively averse to seeing wasted” (27). The degree of Lily’s beauty is established in many places in The House of Mirth, but most significantly when held in

Selden’s gaze—first in the opening chapter and then again in the tableaux vivant held at the Wellington Bry’s. Mary Balkun, in her book The American Counterfeit, explores the many ways that collecting and connoisseurship inform the discourse of imitation and authenticity that comes to dominate the cultural zeitgeist at the turn of the century. In the activity of the tableaux vivant—a party game in which guests will serve as actors in recreations of famous paintings, Lily sees an opportunity to display “her own beauty under a new aspect: of showing that her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace” (139). Lily is both successful and not successful. As Balkun notes, “While others have merely enacted scenes, Lily has literally turned herself into a work of art, a living portrait available only to the most discriminating connoisseurs” (82). “Discriminating” here implies both a would-be 31 suitor’s discretion with regard to appreciating her physical beauty (equated here with authenticity), but also his discretion with regard to accepting her flaws (the ways in which she might be perceived, societally, as counterfeit).

Later in the novel, after Lily has already exhausted or bungled a number of opportunities to concretize her station within the New York set, she receives an unexpected, plainspoken proposal from Mr. Rosedale. Rosedale is a crucial figure in the

1890s landscape of The House of Mirth, emblematic of the “new wealth” that is starting to close in on the hereditary titles of Old New York. In other words, he is an outsider attempting to gain entrée to a level of societal distinction that would have been previously inconceivable for someone of his background—Jewish, working-class, self-made. A

“genuine fake.” His dialogue is peppered with the “ain’ts” and other such turns of speech that betray his lack of fluency in the language of tradition and convention, in which Lily was raised. “You’re not very fond of me,” Rosedale says to Lily, “—yet—but you’re fond of luxury, and style, and amusement, and of not having to worry about cash. You like to have a good time, and not to have to settle for it; and what I propose to do is to provide for the good time and do the settling” (177). That use of the word “cash” is meant to strike the reader as vulgar—we recognize Rosedale’s directness as uncouth—even if

Rosedale is, in essence, speaking directly to the heart of Lily’s predicament. Rosedale is guilty of the same crude appraisals as Selden (or any other man in the novel), but his background in business—a career that has placed him conspicuously in such company— shines through here; he’s confused the realms of social grace and commerce. But he’s also smart enough, self-aware enough, to be conscious of his frequent breaches in 32 etiquette, in his lack of fluency, which is part of the reason he’s proposing to Lily in the first place; if Lily accepted, he’d be gaining a wife, a connection to title, but also a teacher of sorts—an upper echelon cicerone.

Lily’s response is thus:

Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him: she had to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try to decide coolly which turn to take. “You are quite right, Mr. Rosedale. I have had bothers; and I am grateful to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always easy to be quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor and lives among rich people; I have been careless about money, and have worried about my bills. But I should be selfish and ungrateful if I made that a reason for accepting all you offer, with no better return to make than the desire to be free of my anxieties. You must give me time—time to think of your kindness—and of what I could give you in return for it—” (177-78).

Between Lily’s interiority and the ensuing dialogue there is a discrepancy and a kind of dance. Lily thinking of herself as a “fugitive” in this context insinuates the performativity that her response requires, but it also betrays this sense of imposter syndrome that rests in the heart of Lily’s character. She’s been called out, however bluntly, on what she seems throughout the novel to “be going for,” and yet faced with it so directly she feels both indignant and exposed as a fraud. In Lily’s verbal response to

Rosedale one can hear the echo of Melville’s confidence man standing by the rail of the

Fidéle. There is a posturing going on here (“independent,” self-respecting,” “poor”), an appeal to pathos that doubles as a reproach. She wants to gain Rosedale’s confidence in case this is, indeed, the best she can do for herself. But if on one level she is thanking

Rosedale for his proposal and asking him for time to consider, on another, she is admonishing him for pointing out her “bothers” so blatantly, for verifying her slip in 33 station by insinuating that their match might be a possibility. We see, simultaneously, the disdain for the societal traditions and conventions that she finds so oppressive throughout the novel, and her clinging to them in the face of potential embarrassment.

In the end Lily’s indecision, her ambiguity in the face of upholding the New York elite’s gendered power structure, proves to be fatal. Once fallen from grace, she is as inept at manual labor and at being a secretary as she was at charming her way into a

“successful match.” She becomes a victim, it is implied, of forces much larger than herself, much larger, even, than any of the individuals who might contribute in their own way to her demise. This nebulous force of socio-economic machination is as palpably present in Wharton’s fiction as any of her characters; it serves as something like poetic form transposed onto the social sphere—a distinct set of ruled conventions within which players might improvise and entertain subtle variation, but only by slight degree.

In terms of its influence on my own writing, what I find most striking in Wharton, and particularly in The House of Mirth, is how she is able to evoke the discrepancy between the interior nature of individual desires and the systemic social politics that shun, embrace, or transmute those desires. Wharton is a master of filling the pregnant pauses of tense social interaction with nuanced and strategic interiority. There is the world of exteriors (what is heard, scene, read, spoken, etc.) and the world of interiors (which often arrives in the form of free-indirect-discourse, implied access to consciousness, dreams, filtered observation, etc.), and the thrust and drama of her fiction exists somewhere in the push and pull between these two worlds. In dialogue, her characters are almost always acting out a role—particularly those characters most likely to find themselves on the 34 losing end of a transaction (whether social, political, economic, or aesthetic). What characters say to each other in The House of Mirth is almost always a pale reflection of what they actually mean. They speak past each other or around each other, vaguely and through a learned cultural matrix of politesse, and this almost always results in a kind of crisis of confidence. Characters who do speak directly and with purpose are almost always committing an act of social blunder. Therefore, taking on a confidant in Lily

Bart’s particular set of friends, family, and acquaintances is a dangerous proposition. In the new American landscape, where bloodlines and titles and inherited ancestral codes no longer serve as firewalls to certain forms of capital, what does the discourse of trust look like? Wharton’s fiction is invested in the anxiety underlying such a question—an anxiety that can be traced in a continuing tradition of American literature to follow.

In the epilogue to Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women, she notes, “By the late nineteenth century, the confidence man no longer stalked the pages of advice literature as the symbol of the dangers of placelessness in a society of self-made men. In fact, the confidence man was actually becoming a kind of model for ambitious young Americans to emulate” (Halttunen, 198). This is where Halttunen’s study leaves off, but it seems as if the potential for confidence-man-as-template in American business lay implicit even as early as the advice literature of the mid-nineteenth century. It was certainly implicit in James Gordon Bennett’s adoption of the term to expose all manner of financial and political corruption in the pages of the Herald.

By the time that Dale Carnegie published his best-selling instructional guide How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, the skill set of the confidence man (so 35 painstakingly laid out in the advice manuals of the 19th century) and the skill set of the adroit businessman (whether in sales, stock speculation, politics, real estate—or in gambling, racketeering, bootlegging, prostitution) were already looking remarkably similar. Carnegie’s guide, dictated by an editor who sat in on one of the 14-week seminars that Carnegie facilitated, has chapters with headings like “How To Make People

Instantly Like You,” “Do This And You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere,” and “What

Everybody Wants.” What strikes one when thumbing through the guide is Carnegie’s insistence on sincerity, authenticity, and the genuine sentiment that should back up the various strategies for cultivating charisma. An apt example for the purposes of this introduction:

I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. “If the author doesn’t like people,” he said, “people won’t like his or her stories.” This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching a sermon. “I am telling you,” he said, “the same things your preacher would tell you, but remember, you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories (66-67).

This is one of a series of refrains in How to Win Friends and Influence People that serves to undercut what would otherwise read as concrete exercises in social manipulation. Like the passage from Alcott’s advice manual cited earlier, the consideration of fiction does not seem accidental. Both men, in offering guidance to succeeding generations, turn to fiction and the writing of fiction as a means of exploring individual character. I’m not sure what it means to be a “successful writer of stories” in

Dale Carnegie’s vision of the world, but it at least implies a contractual arrangement with 36 the reader (not dissimilar from Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”)—one that hinges simultaneously on execution of craft and on that intangible matter of “the writer’s character.” It involves an appeal (and reciprocation) of the reader’s sympathies, their wants and needs. And at the heart of Carnegie’s sense of the human character—at the heart of a budding enterprise that would come to comprise the “Self-Help” movement—is the notion that the human character is malleable—that it can be molded, coaxed into being, self-made.

A decade prior to the cultural moment that would birth a phenomenon like How to

Win Friends and Influence People, it seems that F. Scott Fitzgerald had already seen the writing on the wall. Nowhere is the malleable nature of the human character explored more vividly (or bizarrely) than in the novelistic post-mortem of Jay Gatsby. I say “post- mortem” because the significance of The Great Gatsby (1925), for the purposes of this introduction, rests centrally in Nick Carraway’s curatorial/investigative role in the novel, in the impact that Gatsby has had on Nick’s life—both while Gatsby is living and, later, when Nick is back in the Midwest and piecing the narrative of their acquaintance back together. Nick can be read not just in the light of William Booth’s oft-cited concept of the

“unreliable narrator,” but also as a kind of victim in a game of confidence—a willing mark in Gatsby’s larger scheming. Nick’s story, as presented to us through his recollections, seems to mimic the exact series of events that the advice literature of the previous century warned against.

Early in the first chapter of the novel we are told, in passing, of Nick’s early loneliness upon arriving in New York. He describes this brief period thus: 37

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides…I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all (4).

This is the tone and cadence of prose that we come to expect from Nick

Carraway: posturing, sentimental, slightly poetic and self-important, infused with all the embarrassing foresight of a high school yearbook inscription. But the naiveté is purposeful here. Nick, even with his Yale education and his familial ties to the upper crust, is recognizable as the targeted unguided young man of the previous century’s advice literature. He is intent on fashioning for himself and by himself a persona conducive to luring success—here embodied in the knowledge of finance (that convoluted world of speculation that will come crashing down in just a few short years), but also in the knowledge of the classics (which might have come from William Alcott’s own suggested reading list). By placing J. P. Morgan between Midas and Maecenas in this passage, Fitzgerald is conflating myths, both contemporary and classic, and he’s placing Gatsby’s story somewhere in that continuum.

Soon, if the advice manuals are to be believed, Nick should be baited into confidence with promises of friendship and entertainment, and this turns out to be almost exactly what happens. Fitzgerald sets the stage for Nick’s first meeting with Gatsby at a party during which Gatsby appears only in fleeting peripheral glances—as a myth and a rumor. When Nick asks Jordan Baker about Gatsby’s pedigree—namely if he is, in fact, 38

“an Oxford man”—Jordan deflects the question with perhaps her most famous line:

“‘Anyhow, he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy’” (49). The quote is oft-cited for its urbane wit, for the delicious kind of spontaneous paradox that will come to epitomize “good” dialogue in contemporary American fiction; but it also speaks to one of the recurring tropes of the novel: the geographic staging of the Midwest versus the East Coast. This proves to be a core internal tension throughout Nick’s narrative. Fitzgerald’s use of the word “urban” in describing the tone of Jordan’s dialogue at this moment draws attention to the fact that

Nick is decidedly not urban—that he comes from a place of “small parties,” where everyone knows who you are, and where anonymity (required for scams of confidence to succeed) doesn’t exist.

It’s at this point in the novel when Nick’s recollection of Gatsby becomes suspect.

This is not to say that Nick’s narrative is “untrue,” but rather that the acute observations that typify his descriptions of Gatsby appear to be the observations of one trained

(through experience) not to trust the surface of things. Here is Nick describing Gatsby in their first significant interaction of the novel:

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand (64).

Richard Godden, in his study Fictions of Capital (1990), looks closely at

Carraway’s use of language and the ways in which Nick participates in a willing act of his own deceit. He notes, “Individual words in Carraway’s narrative are alienated from their setting, so that sentences tend to achieve unhappy montage rather than linear growth” (80-81). In this particular passage, “nervous, sporadic games” seems to achieve the dissonant quality that Godden refers to—an ambiguous and auspicious phrase, especially when preceded with the plural possessive. And “American” strikes one as strange as well—the sudden bird’s eye view of Gatsby, ethnographic, a generality that either betrays Nick’s retrospective attempt to mythologize Gatsby, or Fitzgerald’s attempt to do so through Nick.

All of this layered narrativity—diegetic and extra-diegetic—speaks to the complexity of Fitzgerald’s use of the first-person voice in The Great Gatsby. It’s not just a question of whether Nick is “reliable” or “unreliable;” rather, in a novel that concerns itself with cultural myths concerning identity, forgery, sincerity, and nostalgia—the first- person voice allows for performativity that isn’t available in the third-person. Often what makes a first-person voice so useful a narrative tool is the gap that exists between what the narrator understands and what the reader is left to imply given the information presented. In other words, the reader is often meant to understand something that the narrator, at the time of the telling, does not. This is accomplished, most often, through a hyper-detailing of the surface bric-a-brac of the narrator’s fictional world, which, in turn, as Charles Baxter notes in his craft study The Art of Subtext, creates something of a

“congested subtext.” It’s the implied congested subtext that makes a work complicated 40 enough to take on the amorphous concerns of an age and culture. The surface clutter in

The Great Gatsby is two-fold: it comes to us in the conspicuous hyper-observations of

Nick Carraway (particularly where Gatsby’s gestures and physical persona are concerned), and also through the hyper-materiality of Gatsby’s life—in the accumulation of objects that come to define him. This materiality is never more pronounced than when

Daisy and Gatsby occupy the same space. In the chapter that encompasses Daisy’s first visit to Gatsby’s mansion, we’re made privy to a catalogue of Gatsby’s possessions:

“bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk,” “dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms, with sunken baths,” “an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of

Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall,” a “dresser with a toilet set of pure dull gold,” “shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel,” “shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” (91-92). The catalogue has a giddy deliriousness to it, a champagne bubbliness that’s meant to reflect not just Nick’s hyper-observation, but the sense that Gatsby is finally able to recreate himself, through his possessions, in the presence of Daisy. Gatsby is selling himself here and he’s nearly boiling over with the high anxiety of the transaction. This is what Mary Balkun means when she speaks of the

“American counterfeit,” which is “the commoditization of the self through the process of self-creation.” According to Balkun, “The construction of a new self (or the refusal to accept the self imposed by society) is akin to the creation of an object, with all that term implies (the self can now be sold, traded, owned, copied, and even collected)” (Balkun,

12). This commoditization of the self applies to nearly everyone in The Great Gatsby, but 41 particularly to Gatsby and Daisy. Daisy becomes for Gatsby the ultimate collectible object—the possession of which will signal the pinnacle of Gatsby’s self-creation. This identity-through-collection is not merely materialism run amok in a culture of conspicuous capital; there is, as Balkun notes, “a sacramental quality” about this collection, “first because it often involves sacrifice of some kind (time, money), and second because the collectible, once obtained, is expected to transfer some of its uniqueness to its possessor” (81). The lewdness of Gatsby’s collecting—the fact that his tastes and arrangements come just short of appearing “genuine” or “authentic”—doubles as being either maniacally charming or borderline psychotic in light of the fact that all of this is being curated for an audience of one (Daisy). In terms of Nick’s narration, the sheer accumulation of visceral descriptions surrounding Gatsby’s physical world signifies the compulsion of Gatsby’s self-creation. It implies that his “collecting is about creating order, about fashioning a self for public consumption, and about the possible reification of that self” (Balkun, 132). And it’s this reification—this desire to make identity real, concrete—that resonates.

As the mark often sees him/herself reflected back at them in the flattering appeal of the confidence man, in his careful arrangement of identity, so to do we see our own individual and cultural myths underlying the surface clutter of a narrative like Nick

Carraway’s in the aftermath of Jay Gatsby’s death. As Baxter notes:

Nick Carraway leaves the geographical scene of the crime, though he is slower to leave its spiritual locale, and he still can’t fully explain Gatsby’s obsession. Part of him admires it. But Gatsby’s obsession bleeds out into the whole American landscape, and after a while, he seems to be not just Jay Gatsby but a true red- white-and-blue American who has suffered, in a phrase from a Weldon Kees poem, a “ruinous nostalgia” (43). 42

It’s this “ruinous nostalgia” (Gatsby’s unwillingness to let his memory of Daisy go) that may cost Gatsby his life at the end of the novel, but it’s also a “ruinous nostalgia” that can’t allow Nick Carraway the luxury of moving beyond a full account of

Gatsby’s life—an account that he can’t possibly give. If Nick begins the narrative in the guise of the innocent youth prepared to have his character molded by the big city, then he ends it with a confidence man’s particular narrative skill set. There is a wound that Nick has suffered, it is implied, and this wound is both central and peripheral; it’s fresh and it’s old. For all of the suspicions that Nick may or may not have had over the course of his brief friendship with Gatsby while he was alive, these suspicions (and their romantic counterweights) seem amplified forty-fold in the retelling and resettling of Gatsby’s narrative after his death.

This is one of the most influential contributions that The Great Gatsby brings to

American letters—the simultaneous corrosion and focus that memory lends to narrative, particularly when filtered through a single consciousness. It’s something that I had in mind in writing a number of the first-person/past-tense stories in Step Right Up (“We

Knew Horses,” “All In,” and “The Shot” in particular), but also something that I was writing against in the first-person/present-tense voice of “The Healing Properties of This

Place”—where the perpetual “now” of the narrator’s voice is meant to reflect his jacked- up consciousness while on drugs and also the strange surreal “now” of celebrity culture.

What’s unique in Fitzgerald (in The Great Gatsby, but also in Tender is the Night and

This Side of Paradise), is his vivid sense of the mythic qualities surrounding America’s love affair with easy wealth and advertising. His fiction was interested in the great siren- 43 song allure of these shared social narratives—in their shiny surfaces and in the negative space carved out around them—and in the power that these narratives hold over the individual.

By the mid-twentieth century the notion of the confidence man and the specter of the confidence game had become so widespread, so diffuse in the culture, that its paradigmatic and metaphoric appeal with regard to American art was panacea-like. As

Richard Wright noted in his 1953 novel The Outsider, “modern life is a kind of confidence game” (336). It became a particularly fruitful trope in exploring black subjectivity post-WWII and beyond. Phyllis Klotman sums this up nicely in her exploration of the “black confidence man” in mid- and late-twentieth century fiction:

The con man plied his trade in the old West, yet he also fared well as a Yankee peddler in the East. He sold patent medicine and cure-alls from a covered wagon at the roadside, paddled gadgets in his Yankee “get-ups,” and did his slight-of- hand tricks on a Mississippi gambling boat. He was the secular Tetzel of the nineteenth century (goods hawker and moral trapsetter for the guilty-hearted) and he is probably “cousin-german” to the traveling salesman, so much a part of the American scene and the American joke in our not too distant past. Today he sells “guaranteed” used cars, permanent youth and healthful filter tips. He is the political panderer of offshore oil, the drug pusher, the hustler, the numbers runner. His mask and product may change from time to time, but his salient characteristics are permanent: he is smooth-tongued, quick-witted and fleet of foot, a master of guile (597).

For the purposes of exploring the confidence man’s (and his cousin, the double- agent or spy’s) import in African-American fiction, Klotman finds direct ancestry in the

“trickster” figure of African-American, African, and Native-American tradition. The kinship here resides in a kind of culturally sanctioned duplicity—a recognized performativity that is both peripheral and central to the way that a culture simultaneously subverts and reinforces its own hegemonic values (particularly with regard to sex, money, 44 power, religiosity, and ceremony). This figure is an important one in the so-called protest novels of the mid- and late-twentieth century, and culminates, in many ways, with the figure of B. P. Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). As Klotman notes,

“Ellison’s B. P. Rinehart…has almost as many masks as Melville’s confidence man—he is ‘Rine the runner Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend’” (597-98). Klotman’s study of two 1967 novels—John A. Williams’s The

Man Who Cried I Am and William Melvin Kelley’s Black Arts classic dem—traces the way that this figure was coopted, reified, and complicated in the wake of writers like

Wright and Ellison. Though I’m interesting in the way these figures manifest themselves again and again in both popular and literary fiction, I’m more interested in the way that the notion of “modern life as a kind of confidence game” pervaded even less direct explorations of authenticity and imitation with regard to identity politics and systems of power. I’m interested in writers outside of the male mainstream who catalogued the more nuanced traces of the confidence game in the pregnant pauses and social silences of everyday life.

Gwendolyn Brooks published her first and only novel Maud Martha in 1953. The book, which is really a kind of novel-in-vignettes, is a radical departure from the collections of poetry that had garnered her so much praise in the 1940s, and, in many ways, her formal experimentation and shift in creative form echoes some of the changes

(physical, economic, racial, political) that Chicago had undergone in the past decade, and that it would continue to undergo heading into the 1960s. 45

Maud Martha, unconcerned with linear plot or a traditional novelistic form, follows the eponymous heroine Maud through a series of, often quiet, heightened moments as she comes of age in the city of Chicago. What’s interesting about the book is its complete lack of didacticism when it comes to heightened tensions regarding race, class, and gender. Maud, as a young working-class black woman living in mid-century

Chicago, embodies in the book some of the same paradoxes that made the narrator of

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (published one year earlier) so compelling and complicated. Though Maud exhibits some of the profound impacts (psychological, familial, political) of being “unseen” in society, the book seems particularly interested in the degrees by which Maud is becoming “visible” in the city—both to herself and to the people she interacts with (particularly those people that reside across race/class lines).

In the opening vignette, “description of Maud Martha,” the novel begins: “What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions”

(1). From this subdued opening ensues a collection of odd facts, preferences, dislikes, and dreams—all part of the complicated mosaic that is Maud Martha as the book progresses.

The accumulation of objects/vignettes recalls the process of collecting-as-self-creation that figured so significantly in The Great Gatsby; and yet Maud Martha’s collecting goes largely unseen and unheard; it’s a self-creation made not necessarily (or not always) for public consumption, but for the sake of artistic and subjective integrity. What’s significant (as is often the case in the novel) is not necessarily Maud’s blackness or her femaleness or her poorness, but, first and foremost, her powers of observation, which 46 enable her to place her subjectivity, at crucial moments, in context (and specifically in the context of a city in flux). These powers of observation come into play significantly when issues of race/class/gender do arise in the book and often imbue social interactions with a weighted quality that forces the reader to contend with the complicated tensions often roiling beneath the surface of Brooks’s artful silences.

For the purposes of this introduction, I’d like to focus specifically on the many instances in the book that focus on performativity with regard to identity and how that relates to art. Maud Martha, in many ways, seems interested in that dividing line between the confidence man and the artist. It places Maud Martha, time and again, as a spectator watching and judging certain kinds of performances. Maud’s silent estimations of these performances comprise something like an aesthetic vision or accounting, but they also underscore the kinds of performances required of her in daily life.

In one of the earliest sections of the novel, “at the Regal,” we witness a sixteen- year-old Maud Martha going to a performance of the singer Howie Joe Jones. What strikes Maud about the performance was not Jones’s voice—billed as “rugged honey”— but rather that “The applause was quick. And the silence—final” (19). There’s something that bothers Maud about the custom and artifice of this performance and its dutiful reception. Much attention is given over to the surface of Jones’s stage identity: “that tall oily brown thing with hair set in thickly pomaded waves, with cocky teeth, eyes like thin glass” (19). The description is not flattering; there’s something false about Howie Joe’s exterior, something slightly predatory in those “cocky teeth” that insinuate he’s pulling one over on the audience—that he’s getting away with something. The performance is 47 equated with something like a cheap, quick high. “For a hot half hour it had put that light gauze across its (the audience’s) little miseries and monotonies, but now here they were again, ungauzed, self-assertive, cancerous as ever” (20). Howie Jones’s performance is dispatched in medical terms. It’s an ineffective palliative. Maud decides that he merely sings for the money, “Money that was raced to the track, to the De Lisa, to women, to the sellers of cars” (21). In the end, we get a little dip into Maud’s consciousness (something we come to expect, structurally, as these vignettes accumulate), and a variation on a theme—this notion of life-as-art, of lived experience and living well as a kind of art object:

She had never understood how people could parade themselves on a stage like that, exhibit their precious private identities; shake themselves about; be very foolish for a thousand eyes. She was going to keep herself to herself. She did not want fame. She did not want to be a “star.” To create—a role, a poem, picture, music, a rapture in stone: great. But not for her. What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that (21-22).

Brooks relishes in these silences, in these quiet spaces of subjective interiority.

Compared to the sprawling, epic-in-scope novels of her contemporaries (Maud Martha follows inconspicuously in the wake of Richard Wright’s Native Son [1940], and directly on the heels of Ellison’s Invisible Man), Brooks’s novel-in-vignettes feels like an anomaly; and yet the penetrating insight into Maud Martha (her emotional landscape, her struggles and razor-sharp perception) feels no less relevant to national narratives and discourses having to do with systems of power and oppression. What we get in Maud

Martha is the full weight of marginalization on a singular consciousness—not through 48 that consciousness’s outward participation in large-scale political action, but, rather, through the way that consciousness perceives the physical world that surrounds it.

Another such moment occurs in the vignette “we’re the only colored people here” in which Maud and her date decide, on a whim, to go see a movie downtown at the World

Playhouse as opposed to the old Studebaker Theater, which they normally frequent.

Maud’s plea to her date, significantly, is “They have a good picture. I’d feel rich in there”

(73). The World Playhouse, a theater with a predominantly white audience, is conflated with notions about the upper class that come to play in the scene that follow. Maud’s date finds himself involuntarily whispering in the lobby of the theater, as if to avoid drawing attention to themselves amidst the other white patrons, and is unsure and afraid when it comes to approaching the “blonde and cold-eyed” girl working the concession stand.

Maud despises her date as a coward in the moment, begrudges his timidity and inability to fit in, but carries on undaunted. Once inside the actual theater, Maud is completely carried away, lost in the “technicolor” and “classical music.” She thinks, “you felt good sitting there, yes, good, and as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet- smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables; and wonderful silver on night- blue velvet” (77). Though this scene is happing some years after the opening vignette, when Maud is just a little girl playing in the back yard, Brooks is careful to repeat the image of “deep blue, or delicate silver” that show up in that opening chapter—images associated with Maud’s rich dream life. The final moment of the scene—after the exhilaration of blending into the dark theater audience, annihilating the self in favor of the collective will to illusion—captures a profound moment of deflation: 49

When the picture was over, and the lights revealed them for what they were, the Negroes stood up among the furs and good cloth and faint perfume, looked about them eagerly. They hoped they would meet no cruel eyes. They hoped no one would look intruded upon. They had enjoyed the picture so, they were so happy, they wanted to laugh, to say warmly to the other outgoers, ‘Good huh? Wasn’t it swell?” This, of course, they could not do. But if only no one look intruded upon… (78)

The moment captured here is complicated and profound, and Brooks uses subtle technique to carry off the heightened tensions undercutting the surface of the action. Her impersonal use of “the Negroes,” for instance, after we’ve been intimately acquainted with Maud and her date throughout the narrative is a distancing and a labeling technique meant to alienate and objectify. All of the attendant race/class fears and anxieties pop to the forefront of the narrative in the use of that distancing mechanism, which purposely serves to bring the subtext of the scene directly to the attention of the readers. Brooks pulls off a devastating moment of deflation—a return to the self and to black subjectivity that had been magically subsumed in the course of watching the movie. There is something “false” about that forgetting (it’s similar to, though perhaps more visceral than, the audience’s earlier response to Howie Joe’s performance), that speaks to

Hollywood’s role as an industry-machine of confidence—but the breakdown in social barriers is real enough to be almost dizzying to Maud and her date, an illusion that has all the palpable sense of reality.

As evident in “we’re the only colored people here,” Brooks is constantly testing the boundaries of cross-class (and cross-race) encounter by testing the physical geographic boundaries of Chicago. Maud’s desire to head “downtown” in “we’re the only colored people here” is fraught with social significance for the novels time/place, but it is 50 also a kind of pioneering that Brooks mines again and again in an effort to remap the city

(or at least call into question its arbitrary dividing lines).

Carlo Rotella, in his comprehensive study of contemporary urban literature,

October Cities (1998), argues that the mid-century shift in American cities from industrial to post-industrial economies, had a profound impact on urban writers of the time. Particularly on Chicago writers (most noticeably Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow),

Rotella sees in the writers’ depictions of the city a kind of “literary palimpsest” of place, where the old industrial order of the city (and all its attendant political, social, economic power structures) is constantly poking through the new specter of a changing (and often unrecognizable) place. These writers often participate in what Rotella calls a “narrative of urban decline” (63). Brooks, however, Rotella notes, does not necessarily participate in this narrative of decline in writing about mid-century Chicago. He says, "one is hard pressed to find arguments at mid-century for black Chicago's decline from a past glory to a reduced present” (98). Though writers like Algren and Bellows, often chronicling the white immigrant communities impacted by the post-industrial shift, lament the deterioration and dispersion of an imagined golden age, no such golden age existed in the

African-American collective memory in Chicago. Therefore the changing city “enabled and demanded revised formal strategies, new stories, (and) a modified set of meanings"

(94). Formal strategies, new stories, and modified sets of meaning that Brooks seemed compelled to invent as a black female artist who found herself writing in Chicago at this time. Maud Martha’s unique form—a novel-in-vignettes—seems significant in terms of its subject and location. The subtle moments of contact and laden pauses seem to embody 51 a kind of withholding, a personal propriety, often associated with the Midwest and with

Midwest literature, but also a developing black subjectivity that finds dire consequences and loaded subtext in all manner of manufactured silence. These are similar to the silences between performances that Brooks instantiates again and again throughout the novel. Brooks is almost always interested in these spaces that exist between people and between narratives. She’s interested in the borderlands between converging fronts of miscommunication and misperception.

In “millinery”—one of the few sections of the novel where we actually gain access to someone’s consciousness other than Maud Martha—I’m reminded of the move from interiority to contradictory outward expression so common in the novel-of-manners explored through Wharton. Here the scene begins in the mind of the millinery manager who is watching Maud Martha try on a hat:

“Looks lovely on you,” said the manager. “Makes you look—” What? Beautiful? Charming? Glamorous? Oh no, oh no, she could not stoop to the usual lies; not today; her coffee had been too strong, had not set right; and there had been another fight at home, for her daughter continued to insist on gallivanting about with that Greek—a Greek!—not even a Jew, which, though revolting enough, was at least becoming fashionable, was “timely.” Oh, not today would she cater to these nigger women who tried on every hat in her shop, who used no telling what concoctions of smelly grease on the heads that integrity, straightforwardness, courage, would certainly have kept kinky (154-155).

In the leap from interrupted dialogue to free-indirect-discourse Brooks offers an instance of performance gone awry. The millinery manager has a role to play—we recognize that role and the surface flattery/influence it requires—and yet the particularities of her day, the struggles hinted at in her own personal life (rooted in a variety of bigotries with regard to the shifting market of ethnic capital in the Chicago of 52 the moment), make this role nearly impossible to inhabit fully. She’s not having much success in gaining Maud’s confidence. They haggle over the price of the hat and Maud, two times, makes to leave the store. “‘Wait, wait,’ shrieked the hat woman. Good- naturedly, the escaping customer hesitated again. ‘Just a moment,’ ordered the hat woman coldly. ‘I’ll speak to the—to the owner” (156). We’ve already learned to decode the meaning of the dash in this woman’s dialogue. She is lying. There is no owner in the store. But she must make a pretense of going out of her way for Maud. She’s beginning to come around to the old tricks in her repertoire, to making Maud feel that she’s receiving attention beyond the conventions that normally dictate transactions of this sort.

“‘He might be willing to make some slight reduction, since you’re an old customer,’” she says, “I remember you. You’ve been in here several times, haven’t you?’” The feigned familiarity serves a number of purposes in the hat lady’s performance: for one, it recalls the “nigger women” of her earlier interior monologue, the sense that all black women are interchangeable to her; for another, it is meant to appeal to a sense of imagined kinship that would warrant bestowing Maud with a gift of some kind—a common ploy in any game of confidence. Maud doesn’t bite. “‘I’ve never been in the store before,’” she says.

Simple. Flat. Declarative. But the woman heads off to the back of the store to have her imagined conversation with the owner anyway. When she returns, predictably offering

Maud a further reduced price, Maud says, “I’ve decided against the hat,” and quickly exits the store. She refuses to play along with the role that the hat lady is assigning her, even if it means some kind of material gain in the end for her. Maud, it is implied, is an honest woman; but it’s an honesty made much more complicated by the palpable air of 53 the hat lady’s racially motivated, barely concealed, disdain. In the end, the hat lady is left muttering “‘Black—oh, black—’” to her display of hats, “which, on the slender stands, shone pink, and blue and white and lavender, showed off their tassels, their sleek satin ribbons, their veils, their flower coquettes” (157). The final image—a catalogue of merchandise—recalls, again, the catalogue of luxury objects meant to reify Gatsby’s false identity; except Maud knows a costume consisting of luxury goods will do her no good; the hat lady has made that perfectly clear in what remains unsaid between them.

I marvel at the intricately structured silences that Gwendolyn Brooks is able to create between her characters. I return to them again and again when thinking about the negative space created within the bounds of my own fiction. These silences intensify and take on great weight particularly when characters are being forced into roles or when they are witnessing others “perform.” A strong silence following in the wake of artifice allows for a moment to land, and it allows that which is false to ring tinny in the reader’s ear, or, conversely, for that which is true to reverberate before being swallowed up again by the momentum of narrative.

IV. Step Right Up and Appealing to the Confidence of the Reader

In James Surowiecki’s January 13, 2014 New Yorker financial tidbit, “Do The

Hustle,” he briefly traces America’s love affair with the “con artist”—a term that I’ve purposely avoided up until this point in the introduction. Surowiecki uses a particular trend in films that attests to this uniquely American obsession (the release of both Martin

Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and David O’ Russell’s American Hustle in 2013, but also a slew of examples from the history of cinema: the movies of W.C. Fields and the 54

Marx Brothers, The Sting [1973], Dirty Rotten Scoundrels [1988], Glengarry Glen Ross

[1992], Six Degrees of Separation [1993], to name just a few). Sorowiecki notes:

It seems con artists, for all their vices, represent many of the virtues that Americans aspire to. Con artists are independent and typically self-made. They don’t have to kowtow to a boss—no small thing in a country in which people have always longed to strike out on their own. They succeed or fail based on their wits. They exemplify, in short, the complicated nature of American capitalism, which, as McDougall argues, has depended on people being hustlers in both the positive and negative sense. The American economy wasn’t built just on good ideas and hard work. It was also built on hope and hype (43-44).

It’s not clear when the term “confidence man” and “con artist” became interchangeable, but the shift in terminology seems significant in that it says something about the evolution of the figure in the American psyche, about the way we aesthetically consider fiction (in all its various forms), performativity, sincerity, and their roles in our lives. In some ways, “Con Artist” implies a notion of the confidence man that has risen above its own materiality. If gaining confidence has become an Art, then what does that say about American culture? What does it say about Art heading into the 21st century? A return to sentimentality? A continued stratifying of the irony that came to define the postmodern and post-post-modern age?

When I set out to write the stories in Step Right Up I had no real intention of

“exploring the figure of the confidence man” or “taking up the mantle of authenticity vs. imitation in a commodity culture,” but I noticed certain patterns emerging as the collection came together. Many of the stories feature characters who make their living on the fringes of the cultural/economic machine: Gio in “Step Right Up,” Tom in “All In,”

Sport in “We Knew Horses,” Simone and Blane in “Sobreático,” Ray and Ofer in “The

Shot,” etc. These are figures that seem to have a rankling suspicion with regard to the 55

American enterprise—a dry sense of irony when it comes to goals and dreams and aspirations. They are striving for the same things that many of the characters explored in this essay desired: wealth and comfort and love and security. But they also struggle with issues of integrity and loyalty and what it means to be sincere. They navigate the world in a series of pregnant pauses (like Maud Martha), or they have bizarrely focused manias

(like Gatsby), or they fail to function within the customs and codes set forth by their communities (like Lily Bart).

In this final section of the introduction, instead of merely tracing how some of the characters and narratives in Step Right Up participate in the confidence man discourse,

I’d like to unpack the notion of the “con artist” with regard to the writer of fiction vis-à- vis the implied reader/writer contract. In other words, I’d like to think about the various strategies writers of fiction employ in gaining a reader’s confidence. I’ll look to some examples of contemporary short fiction that have greatly influenced my own work and

I’ll draw from the stories in Step Right Up to talk about three particular elements of craft: voice, form vs. content, and setting as character.

“My Old Man” by Ernest Hemingway (included in both Three Stories and One

Poem [1923] and In Our Time [1925]) is seldom taught and rarely anthologized. It stands as one of the early stories, before Hemingway had found his trademark chop, his pared- down style, and perhaps this explains why it is so infrequently discussed. The voice of the story—narrated in the first-person by, Joe, the son of an American jockey riding and living in Italy and France—is airy and colloquial, with long run-on sentences and a chatty 56 rhythm not really seen anywhere else in Hemingway’s work. Consider the opening paragraph:

I guess looking at it, now, my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he’d pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He’d have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo’s skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o’clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I’d help him pull off his boots and he’d get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we’d start out (167-68).

What always strikes me about this story is the fine line that Hemingway is able to ride between giving the reader enough context and information to understand what is happening in the narrative, while also using a specialized language (an argot idiosyncratic to the place and time and subculture) that keeps the reader, to some degree, on the outside looking in. In this opening paragraph it’s the use of “jumps” and the “rubber shirt” and

“Razzo’s skins” and “Torino”—all known to the narrator and perhaps to those familiar with the European circuit of horseracing, but probably not to your general reader.

Hemingway is able to evoke confidence in his reader by deploying this language strategically—the confidence that the author has mastery of the material. He’s also able to create an extra-textual tension by exploiting the reader’s lack of specialized knowledge. The reader is compelled to read on because of his/her uncertainty, because of the way that Hemingway is making ordinary language unfamiliar. And so even if we don’t understand every little reference or slang term or piece of equipment, we start to 57 understand the rules of the story’s milieu, the internal logic of the world and how characters might interact or react based on these very specific rules.

As the story moves along, we start to understand that Joe’s father is a bit of a crook; he loses races for money; he’s capable of being bought. Joe idolizes his father— after all, it’s just the two of them—and part of the way that Hemingway is able to portray this reverence is through the language of the jockey’s profession, which Joe uses with relish: a language that Joe has obviously inherited from his father and that he throws out to prove himself a loyal member of what he perceives to be an exclusive cadre (we know this even if he never says it explicitly because of the way he looks at his father and his friends, by the meticulous way he observes them). In the end, we get the sense that Joe is in for a big fall; the heroic vision he has of his father will have to be reconciled with the curses of the two gamblers Joe overhears while watching his father ride his last race

(during which he suffers a fatal accident).

Placing the reader in the position of an outsider—a voyeur who needs to decode specialized language in order to understand the nuanced structure of the fictional world— can be an affecting narrative tool. I think specifically of those writers whose milieu is criminal factions or detective procedurals, but also of the literary writers who take on the parallel linguistic realms of organized crime or the antiquated lexicon of historical epochs

(William Kennedy, E. L. Doctorow, John Edgar Wideman, and Jaimy Gordon, to name a few). I found myself employing certain variations on this first-person idiosyncratic voice in a number of the stories in Step Right Up. These voices are steeped in the procedural world of their narrator’s occupations, for the most part—constructed from a unique bank 58 of terms that allows for play in terms of rhythm and sound and dialogue, but also (I hope) grounded in a way that keeps the reader from drowning.

In “All In” this takes the form of Tom’s poker language—the terminology of the casinos and the specific games that Tom plays to make his living. Tom uses this language to establishing a pecking order within his own claustrophobic world, where he always has to be wary of the other players around him. But he also attempts to use that same language to navigate his personal life with Anne, which is part of the central conflict of the story. The language rests at the heart of the conflict itself and at the heart of the way

Tom communicates with people in his life (particularly with those people who mean the most to him).

“The Shot” has a similar occupation-specific lexicon: the argot of the paparazzi photographer. Some of this language is pulled directly from research, but some of it stems from what interests me about the nature of the job with regard to Ray’s individual story. Hence the predatory language, the war similes and metaphors, the hyper-sexualized and hyper-fetishized objectification that constitutes a given day “on the hunt.” What interested me in constructing Ray’s voice was the push and pull between his reliance on the language of his work (a language steeped in violence and alienation) and his ability to switch modes in his personal life (with Avery and Val).

In both “The Healing Properties of This Place” and “We Knew Horses” I’m relying on some of the language of horseracing to speak to some of the more significant conflicts in the lives of the narrators. For Anthony in “We Knew Horses,” the emphasis is on the lineage in thoroughbred stock—the names of mares and sires, the piecing together 59 of family trees—because Anthony’s own current family has conspicuous gaps in the lineage (the absence of his mother and father). This was a fun game that I could put in the mouths of Sport and Anthony because it made sense: Sport is an avid gambler and appreciator of the game and Anthony idolizes Sport and takes an interest in his obsessions. It was also an opportunity to look into the language of the blood stock charts in order to find names that would sound good in the context of the rest of the story, names that would allow me a deft and simple layering of linguistic allusion (e.g. “Risk,”

“Exclusive,” “Virtuous,” “Foolish,” and “Pleasure”). These are actual horses, but they also just work, in terms of language, within the context of the larger familial story.

Similarly, in “The Healing Properties of This Place,” the narrator (who I see as an older version of Anthony) uses the language of the track to mark his belonging in the setting— this is like the claiming of a heritage—but his use of the language also hints at some of the story’s underlying subtexts with regard to class and pedigree and attraction and strange social politics. This roiling subtext is also coaxed to the surface through the language of the service industry, the hierarchical terracing of the setting where Anthony works, and the peripheral language of Hollywood that intrudes halfway through the story.

My hope is that the confluence of all these worlds, mediated through Anthony’s voice, imply an inner struggle that can’t quite be put into words explicitly—that his present- tense narration speaks to the immediacy of the culture that Anthony is immersed in, even if at the expense of some of the more important things alluded to in the background of his life. 60

In good fiction form, to some degree, should echo its content. I don’t mean that this needs to happen in any obviously gimmicky way, but a writer of fiction should ultimately have to account for their choices with regard to form—whether this be the structural integrity of the narrative (i.e. the balance of exposition to scene, flashback to current frame, rhythm of prose corresponding to what it describes, etc.) or the literal appearance of the prose on the page. Form appeals to the reader’s confidence in the same way that the patterns of myth appeal to a collective unconscious—we invest in story, conflict, character development, and setting in direct proportion to the degree by which form reflects and contains these elements.

In Tony Earley’s short story, “The Prophet From Jupiter” (Here We Are In

Paradise [1994]), the narrator is a damkeeper whose marriage is on the rocks, we learn, because of his inability to communicate with or impregnate his wife. The correlation and ensuing extended metaphor sounds labored and trite, but Earley somehow gets away with it—namely, I would argue, because of the unique form and structure that the story employs. Aside from the narrator’s conflict involving his wife, the story is strategically

(over)populated with an almost untenable number of characters and an operator’s switchboard of interweaving plotlines. In other words, the narrative takes on all of the surface bric-a-brac that it can possibly handle, and the result is a roiling subtext that feels very much like a river damned or a floodgates being opened. This is most commonly affected by the narrator’s consistent use of the non-sequitur. All of the various plotlines run together and often the narration can jump from current frame to a swath of the town’s 61 history in 1916 within the same paragraph (or even the same line). Consider the following passage:

The most important part of my job is to maintain a constant pond level. But the lake rises all night, every night; the river never stops. This will worry you after a while. When I drive below town, coming back toward home, I’m afraid I’ll meet the lake coming down through the gorge. When Lake Glen was built, it covered the old town of Uree with eighty-five feet of water. As the dam was raised higher and higher across the river, workmen cut the steeple off the Uree Baptist Church so it would not stick up through the water, but they did not tear down the houses. Fish swim in and out of the doors. Old Man Bill Burdette, who lived beside the church, left his 1916 chain-drive Reo truck parked beside his house when he moved away (4-5).

This is indicative of the way the narrator will often conflate the present with the past throughout the story. Thus the story of the damkeeper’s wife and her new lover, the deserted town of Uree, the mayor, the damkeeper’s assistant, the real estate agents, the bootleggers of the 1920s, the Prophet from Jupiter and his family—all of these figures mingle and carry equal weight in the narrator’s telling, and because of this, the narration starts to feel compulsory, sent forth as if having a great pressure geysering it up from the earth. If the narrator was unable to speak to his wife before she left, he is unable to do anything but speak now. The last section of the story (worth quoting in its entirety) is composed of one long line strung together with semi-colons.

I walked back and forth and back and forth across the dam until all the ghosts of Lake Glen buzzed in my ears like electricity: I saw the Prophet from Jupiter riding with Old Man Bill Burdette, down the streets of Uree in a 1916 Reo truck, toward the light in Aunt Plutina Williams’s window; I saw catfish as big as men, with whiskers like bullwhips, lie down at the feet of the Prophet and speak in a thousand strange tongues; I saw dancers moving against each other in the air to music I had never heard; I saw Lavonia, naked and beautiful, bathing and healing Junie in a moonlit cove; I saw Elisabeth standing in the edge of the lake in the spring, nursing a child who smelled like the sun; I saw the new police chief in a boat watching over his family; I saw the mayor on his knees praying in Gullah with Charleston whores; I saw Jim Skipper and Rudy Thomas and Big Julie 62

Cooper driving a bleeding pilot beside the river in a wagon pulled by twenty-four mules; I saw the Prophet from Jupiter and his five young sons shoot out of the lake like Fourth of July rockets and shout with incredible light and tongues of fire, Rise, Children of the Water, Rise, and Be Whole in the Kingdom of God (31-32).

This coda is rhythmically and syntactically mellifluous, steeped in the language of gospel; but it is also, fittingly, ejaculatory. The damkeeper’s wife has finally found solace with the new police chief and is pregnant with his child, and the damkeeper paces back and forth on the night that she is meant to give birth. Whereas, in another story, the shift in the prose at the end might feel forced or suspicious, Earley has paved the way for this ending both in terms of character and structure. We know eventually that the narrator is going to have to let go of everything he’s been bottling up from the beginning, and this letting go takes two forms: the narrative as a whole, which is told in retrospect and scattered but purposely intermeshed; and in the final coda, which serves as a microcosm of the larger narrative it caps off. The story is nearly perfectly structured and paced.

In terms of form and structure, the stories in Step Right Up don’t break any new experimental ground. They’re “conventional” in that they make ample use of the standard narrative conventions for moving a story forward while signaling clearly to the reader when transitions in place/time might be taking place. What is carefully considered in the form and structure of these stories is the way the past is integrated into the present or frame of the stories. In “Barium,” for instance, the protagonist, Scott, literally cannot recall the specifics of his brief affair with Susan. This is what causes such tension in the current frame of the narrative. He is in an enclosed space with this woman; he’s vulnerable and compromised; and yet he can’t remember, for the life of him, how he might have wronged this woman who seems to hold something against him. Therefore, 63 the story takes place almost entirely within the bounds of the doctor’s office and in a very circumscribed period of time (the time it takes for Scott to get his procedure). The flashbacks that we do get are fleeting and fragmentary. He has a notion that he’s done something wrong with regard to Susan, but it’s unclear whether the circumstances of the invasive and uncomfortable barium swallow is responsible for this dread, or if Scott has truly done something to atone for. The mirroring of the night-vision explosions on the television in the waiting room and the impersonal and meaningless flashes that Scott sees in his own x-ray during the barium swallow, signal some kind of remove—a lack of responsibility on Scott’s part, even for his own body. Ending with a line of Susan’s dialogue is significant structurally, as it signals a kind of power shift that’s occurred.

In “Razing Rice Terrace” the numbered sections signal the alternating third- person limited shifts between Carla’s story and her daughter’s (until they converge), but they are also meant to mimic the compartmentalization of both the elderly housing where

Carla works, and the dorms where Sydney lives. The story is a kind of love story between mother and daughter and the isolated sections are meant to feel that way—where the absence of one character within the narrative of the other becomes palpable in the alternating form. Both mother and daughter are immersed in this institutional, communal kind of living (Carla by occupation, Sydney as a student), and yet they both feel very much alone. In the end, when the narratives converge and the “family” is all under the same roof, the convergence is meant to feel inevitable and structurally balanced.

Similarly, “By Sea or Breeze or Bird,” also has two characters who, from the beginning of the story seem like they are bound to come together. The introduction of Georgina 64

Ostrovsky at the beginning of the story—the accumulation of her mystique via hearsay and communal gossip—sets her up as a kind of ticking clock in the story. We know that when she enters the story, when her and Vincent cross paths, the story’s climax can’t be too far behind. Hopefully, though, the reader is adequately distracted by the particularities of Vincent’s other problems (financial, health-related, filial, existential, romantic, etc.), so that Georgina’s entrance into the narrative is both surprising and organic.

I’d like to close out this introduction by considering, briefly, the role of place in gaining the confidence of the reader. In each of the stories that comprise Step Right Up, I think of place, of setting, as central. Place—the way it is observed by the characters, how it defines who they are, how it defines the relationships that they forge and the troubles that they must contend with—is character and story. Often when I’m writing a story, place is where I start and it’s usually where I finish. I can’t envision a story without first envisioning where and when that story is enacted. In the fiction that I tend to gravitate toward, place is paramount. This is because it tends to be tied so integrally to the writer’s notion of his or her identity, even if that place (Anderson’s Winesburg, Gatsby’s West

Egg, Bascomb’s Haddam, NJ) doesn’t exist on any map. As Eudora Welty has said,

“Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else…Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?” It’s this “crossroads of circumstance” that gives fiction its power—not just in terms of what the writer puts together on the page, the diegetic circumstance of the fiction 65 itself; but also in terms of the circumstances that brings a reader to a certain piece of writing and then keeps that reader engaged and reading.

In Charles D’Amrbosio’s short story, “Up North” (The Dead Fish Museum

[2007]), place is transformed through the shifting consciousness of a narrator who possesses certain clandestine knowledge concerning its history. Daly, who is accompanying his wife to her family’s cabin in northern Michigan for Thanksgiving, is privy to the knowledge that one of the men at the cabin that weekend (a close friend of his wife’s father), sexually abused his wife in the very same cabin when she was a young girl. The story is complicated by the fact that the narrator is pretty certain his wife is having an affair, and that their relationship might be coming to an end. These events, both past and present, imbue the setting—foreign to the narrator but familiar to everyone else—with an ominous kind of foreboding. What Daly observes, while hunting with the his father-in-law and his friends, while interacting with the women in the cabin, casts suspicions on everyone and often the physical world comes to mirror this suspicion.

Here is one of the first descriptions of setting that we get in the story: “The flight from New York had been rough, and my ears were still blocked, but somewhere in the distance, beyond the immediate silence of the falling snow and the thick woods, I heard the muffled echo of rifle shots.” There is a lot going on here in such a seemingly benign line of description. We understand that the narrator and his wife are coming from the city and that they are now isolated and surrounded silence—they’re forced to confront each other without any urban distraction. Then there is also the menacing foreshadow of the

“muffled echo of the rifle shots,” which forecast both the hunting trip that Daly will be 66 forced to take with the men and the menace of his wife’s trauma as they return to the scene of the crime.

When they finally arrive at the cabin, Daly notes: “We ate tuna sandwiches and potato chips on paper plates that had been gnawed by mice. Lucy set out a plastic tray of carrots and celery sticks and black olives. We drank mulled wine in Dixie cups, from which I nervously nibbled the wax coating.” The “paper plates gnawed by mice” is a nice touch with regard to setting—one can imagine the rough-cut pine cabinets where such plates might have been kept through the off-season, the droppings and sawdust littering the shelves. But the echo of the image in Daly’s action nibbling the wax coating from the

Dixie cup capitalizes on such a detail and enriches the reader’s sense of character as well.

Here is a physical manifestation of Daly’s psychology: he is mouse-like, meek; not like the other men who will enter the scene momentarily. Then we get our first extended look at the cabin through Daly’s eyes:

The cabin was open and cozy, a single large room with a high ceiling, and although I’d never been there before, it struck me as familiar. It was rustic and unpretentious, with that haphazardly curatorial décor that accumulates in old family haunts. At one end was a large fireplace constructed of smooth stones hauled up from the lakeshore, and at the other end were the log bunks where we’d all sleep. Everything that had ever happened here was, in a way, still happening (96).

Though Caroline’s rape hasn’t been revealed yet to us, Daly has full access to this knowledge as he first assesses the cabin and that final line, “Everything that had ever happened here was, in a way, still happening,” calls this fact up ominously. It speaks directly to Caroline’s relived trauma and to Daly’s distinct position as an outsider. Once certain facts are revealed in the course of the narrative (Daly practices a kind of 67 withholding and disclosure that feels purposeful and measured), the story invites almost an immediate rereading, because all of the clues as to the tension and conflict in the story are right there in the details of the physical world from the very beginning. Everything that comes prior to the disclosure of Caroline’s rape is suddenly retroactively infused with the energy of the trauma—a trauma that Caroline chooses to keep hidden for fear that it will “destroy” her father. That the setting here is so infused with the conflict at the heart of the narrative (and vice versa) speaks to a complex layering, a careful attentiveness to language, that nearly demands the reader’s confidence. Even if the other characters in the story are not privy to Caroline’s (and Daly’s) secret, the atmosphere is supercharged with it. It’s contagious. Slowly, incident by incident, the polite barriers of civility begin to come down.

D’Ambrosio’s fiction was very much influential in some of the approaches to place that went into the stories of Step Right Up. In the title story—one of the more layered, in terms of setting, in the collection—Gio inhabits a number of worlds that both reflect his personality and the various tensions that underlie the narrative. There is a kind of natural dichotomy established between Gravesend and Scarsdale. The places reflect the central conflict between his mother and father, but also some of the class issues that characterize his parents’ split. Gio’s journey from one to the other is a significant one, and his observations while in Scarsdale are heightened, made noticeably acute, but the guilt he feels for having left his father (even if just for a weekend). This is further complicated by the appearance of Nava. As desire pile upon desire, certain fetishized objects associated with his mother’s new home (the pool, the air-conditioning, the 68 immaculate porcelain bathroom, etc.) take on a double layer of guilt and pleasure in the narrative. Nothing that Gio uses or touches or consumes (even as his mother tells him that this is his home now too) escapes the charge of his own guilt. Meanwhile, back in

Gravesend, the apartment that he inhabits with his father is just as supercharged with his mother’s absence. Coney Island, therefore, becomes something that is Gio’s and Gio’s alone, and yet this setting is surreal and exploitative and borderline grotesque. All of the surface-level detail that characterizes Gio’s job at the range, this all angles downward into a subtext loaded with fears about loyalty and betrayal and what it means to create an identity outside of the family unit.

The stories in Step Right Up purposely take on a wide range of settings (LA,

NYC, Connecticut, Ohio, Barcelona, upstate NY). Though I wasn’t interested in limiting the book to exploring and staking out a single geographic area, I was very conscious of the way that place was serving each of the stories in the collection. I attempted to evoke these settings on the page with a certain degree of confidence in their physicality, but also in their moods and tones. Most of all, I attempted to use place as a means of revealing and reflecting character, in all its complex psychology and unfolding contradiction. My intent was to instill in the reader an organic sense of confidence in the “crossroads of circumstance” that brought these stories together. I hope they’ve come close to their mark.

WORKS CITED

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Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Cornerstone Publishing. 2005.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie and Other Tales of New York. New York: Penguin. 2000.

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Seybold, Matt. “Tom Sawyer Impersonates ‘The Original Confidence Man.’” Mark Twain Journal. Vol. 52, No. 2. Fall 2014. 136-142.

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Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Harper. 1920.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Penguin. 1993.

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Wright, Richard. The Outsider. New York: Harper Perennial. 2008.

STEP RIGHT UP

Sobreático

Directly across from the apartment she’d rented was a bell tower that tolled the quarter hour. Simone knew about the bell tower prior to renting the apartment; the owner made a point of mentioning it in the property description—wake each morning to the music of church bells drifting over El Raval. But, after a few days, despite the view that unfolded something in her each morning when she lifted the blinds, a toll every fifteen minutes started to seem a bit excessive to Simone—a blunt reminder of time ticked off like some ancient brand of scolding.

They’d flown direct from LAX to JFK. Caught a red-eye that brought them into

Barcelona just as the sun was beginning to rise. By the time they’d collected their bags at the claim, changed money, used the bathroom, and located the shuttle that would take them to the city center, the day was already starting to feel like one of those time-lapse videos you always saw in nature documentaries: seed, sprout, plant, rain, sun, wither, die.

Blane was a terrible traveling companion. Simone realized this not two hours into the flight when he’d asked her to switch seats with him before takeoff, leaving her with the window seat instead of the aisle she’d purposely booked a month in advance. He shook a little Xanax football out of an aspirin bottle, split it neatly with his thumbnail, and took half of the pill without even thinking to offer her the other half. Then he’d conked out for the entirety of the flight while Simone sat through two romantic comedies 72 and a sitcom fragment. The static from the rented airline headphones were loose wires whipping away inside of her skull.

“Painless,” he’d had the nerve to say, seven hours later, jarred to consciousness only by the pilot announcing their descent.

Their property manager, Keith—a miniature gay man from Montreal with a neatly sculpted beard—met them outside of the apartment on Ronda Sant Pau. Keith took an immediate liking to Blane. He stood pigeon-toed in greeting, lingering on the introductory handshake just a beat too long, smiling up into Blane’s stupid, chiseled face.

“You’ve got the best of everything,” he said. He spoke directly to Blane. “The market is being renovated at the moment but there’s a temporary one right there on the corner where you’ll have all the necessities.” He gestured like a college tour guide, back- peddling, speaking out and over them. “Then the bazaar will close up the block Sunday morning—comic books, music, antiques, some primo nineteenth-century erotica for the big guy.”

They reached the corner of San Pau and San Antoni, where a fat man sat under a half-moon aluminum yurt roasting yams on a grated barrel fire. The man smiled at

Simone and she was conscious, suddenly, of her lethal stiletto boots, her acid-wash leggings—the two items she’d considered European in the dim light of her San Fernando studio the previous afternoon. The fat man poked and prodded with a set of blackened tongs and flames sprang up from the coals to lick the skin of the yams.

“Do we have a normal toilet up there?” Blane said. 73

Keith smiled and placed a hand on Blane’s tricep, where it peeked out from the sleeve of his fitted crew.

“You’ll be taking care of business just like you do at home,” he said. “Cross my heart.”

He led them around the corner onto San Antoni where the neighborhood lost its light. If it weren’t for the Vespas zipping by on the cobbled street, the shops selling mobile phones and calling cards, Simone would have thought they’d slipped back in time—the entire neighborhood carved from one medieval block of sooted stone.

“This is us,” Keith said, gesturing vaguely.

They stood on a corner of Cendra and San Antoni, right in front of a halal rotisserie. Golden chickens turned on stacked spits behind a large display window. They dripped beads of fat that collected in a deep metal trough down below. Blane took out his cell phone and snapped a picture of the chickens and of the ancient Carrer de la Cendra etched into the cornerstone of the building.

“I’m sending this back to Kendra,” he said. “She’ll flip.”

Simone wasn’t sure which Kendra Blane was talking about. They knew a few back in the valley. It was becoming a popular name for the girls who showed up spun and reeling to the studios as if by conveyor. The year before it had been any variation on

Jewel. Seven years prior the Simone had had a nice little run. Just make sure the name says sex, she remembered Scott Ho, her first agent, saying to her back when she’d first arrived. After that first casting-couch debacle, when she’d been so sore after the shoot that she thought she might have done herself some irreversible damage. They’ll 74 remember the name longer than they’ll ever remember you. She recalled the strange mumbling of a doctor who roamed the sets those first years—a short, obese man with a hairy neck who everyone knew to be desperately hooked on pain pills: Dr. G. can cure what ails you. Abrasions contusions infections and tears. This incantation that was supposed to get the talent through to the other side. Abrasions contusions infections and tears, oh my.

Standing there, watching the chickens spin, Simone had the strange realization that she didn’t know Blane’s real name. That Blane didn’t know her real name. Which didn’t seem like a big deal back in the valley, where the concept of a real name was just a kind of footnote to who you were, a toe-tag tied to the life you’d left behind. But here in

Barcelona, where they knew no one, where Blane and Simone would be spending too much time together, relying on each other even in securing a cup of coffee, here it seemed dangerous not knowing Blane’s real name.

“Spooky,” Blane said, tracing a hand over some of the faded graffiti that covered the storefronts up and down Cendra.

Keith led them halfway down the dark street to a small white door. It stood out amongst the dingy aluminum grates that shuttered up the business fronts. He produced a large set of keys and let them into the building, where the lobby was dark and silent and smelled of ammonia.

“There’s a power order on so we try to keep the lights off down here,” he said.

“Just let your eyes adjust.” And they did, standing in the dank hollow of the lobby 75 without a word between them, until the edges of walls and stairs and post-boxes took on heft and substance and the darkness became a designed thing they could navigate.

At the back of the lobby was a brass-caged lift and Keith ushered them into it.

He pushed the button marked SA.

“That’s you,” Keith said, “Sobreático. The penthouse.”

There was a round mirror in one corner of the lift’s ceiling, like the side mirror on a vintage car, and Simone watched all of their reflections on the way up: her face tight, dried out from the long flight; Blane’s domed skull, the mirror catching that spot on his crown where the frosted hair was starting to thin and where the scalp beneath was the boiled pink of a baby rodent.

When the lift stopped, Keith rolled back the grated door and led them onto a landing. The stairs spiraled below them in a geometric plunge. There was only one other door on the landing, and when Keith keyed into it, there was a great rush of air. It was bright and cool. They’d risen, in that short amount of time, through the bowels of the city and had come to perch on a terracotta-tiled rooftop terrace.

Simone felt like a pull-tab had punctured some pressurized compartment in her skull.

Uh, she said, involuntarily, and Blane let out a similar little groan.

She felt as if her body was dissipating in the open air, breaking up into its constituent cells and buzzing off into the cityscape. Expansive. She’d heard people say this before. Maybe she’d read it in a novel or in one of those self-help books that her mother sent her from time to time along with the clandestine family updates and the odd 76 photograph. But when they came out to that rooftop patio, with the potted succulents circling the deck, the flowering bougainvillea twining the side of the lift’s maintenance shed, all around them similar terraces spanning the city’s rooftops like another raised city, laundry hanging unapologetically, television antennae like rusting sculptures, neighbors sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes and watching their children kick soccer balls across the walled-in courts, far off the mountains and castles and funicular cables that cut neat lines across the harbor—when they came out to all of this—Simone felt unquestionably expansive.

“The sobreático,” Keith said, half-twirling on the slick tile. “Welcome home.”

* * *

Those first few days, Simone had to admit, Blane was magic on the set. He was professional but amicable with the rest of the crew. Even with the language barrier between him and the talent that Amores Zorras was providing—a parade of young, lithe brunettes, girls who didn’t carry quite the same shell-shocked look as the talent back in the valley, not the scars or physical incongruities that cut-rate surgeries made the norm— he knew how to work a room. Everyone smiled and laughed politely at his incessant stream of set-breaking chatter. The girls looked bored more than anything else. The glances they gave each other between scenes betrayed the same tired scripts. The clockwork sequences and routines. They whispered to each other in quick little hisses— 77 conspiratorially, it seemed to Simone—and even with everything that Simone had seen or done in her career, they made her feel prudish and extraneous.

“I think these girls bathe in blood in their free time,” Blane said one afternoon on break, while a coven of them modeled Manolo spikes for each other behind the sound stage. He sat on a canvas folding-chair that had Simone’s name stenciled across the back.

He wore only a pair of white linen pants, airy as medical gauze, and massaged himself mechanically beneath the stretched waistband. He looked strung out and beaten away from the lights.

“Whatever keeps that skin looking young and fresh,” Simone said.

Blane flung his head back martyr-style. He seemed to absorb the whole hum of the moving machinery that surrounded them—the electric buzz of the lights and camera equipment, the spastic music that came from the Amores Zorras production offices behind the set, where Simone’s new international partners drank calvados from paper cups and smoked thin cigars and occasionally called for one or two of the girls to come in and close the door behind them. These men had been cordial but distant with Simone from the beginning. It was business, after all. They wanted the use of the talent in her stable, the American grit of her brand, but she was not invited into the back room to smoke and drink and play the boss.

“Only human beings could make fucking this complicated,” Blane said.

Simone placed her hands on his shoulders and squeezed. She could smell the manufactured strawberry tang of the lubricant they were using out there. Blane’s 78 rejuvenating tea-tree shampoo and dried sweat. From somewhere on set came the hydraulic whirrs of a tap gun, breaking down or setting up lighting rigs.

“This is going to be good for the company. Good for you, baby. I’ve got no choice except to branch out here,” she said. She’d been trying to prune back that compulsive, sugary vine that still crept into her voice from time to time, but old habits, etc. “I can’t do the hustle night and day, every inch, just to keep from getting squeezed out by those psychopaths back in the valley. Those guys…if it were legal for them to just cut to the chase and start making snuff films they’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Blane reached up and put his hands over hers. Patted them lightly.

“And you think these guys will be any better?”

She dug into his shoulders. Kneaded at the tight little knots that spurred his bones.

She could feel his muscles tense up. A series of involuntary twitches. And it brought back the nerve-memory of those same twitches flickering against her own bare skin—a shoot they’d done together maybe six years back. When Simone was still working the other side of the camera. A nightmare shoot, literally—BDSM to the max—Blane periodically angling his head away from the camera and whispering behind her: You okay? You good?

Tell me when it’s too much. Under the heat of the lights, the restraint of the straps that chafed at her wrists and thighs and ankles and hips, it was hard to tell exactly where that voice was coming from.

“I think I need a bigger cut of whatever it is you’re getting here, Sim.” Blane sat up straighter, still massaging himself below the waist of his linen pants. “This is what they’re paying for. Truth be told.” 79

Simone had been prepared for this. Blane putting the bite on her. But she thought it would come afterwards. Once the shoot was done and they were back stateside sucking back top-shelf tequila in Vivid or Sardos and Blane had blown half his pay in a single night of partying. Blane was no genius, but he understood that he was her fledgling production outfit. Simone’s girls were all so predictably green—drug addicts, most of them, hardcore boozers with no name recognition or flare for branding. About as dependable as they were old. But veteran Blane had taken a chance signing with her, and with only passing mention of future EP credits and slightly higher-than-average shoot fees as collateral.

“We’ll work it out,” said Simone. She patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s just get through this and then I’m open to anything.”

Through the thick block that insulated the Amores studio, right in the aortic pulse of El Raval, they were beginning to hear the start of the Three Kings procession outside.

They’d seen signs of the parade walking to the studio that morning: grated steel barricades lining all of the sidewalks on San Antoni, the fruit-jeweled King cakes piled high in every shop window, and even right there outside of the studio building, on a flatbed truck with wood-slatted sides, the three deflated husks of the processional puppets—something vaguely fetal about their paper-mâché faces. The parade was why

Simone and Blane were sleeping under the same roof during the shoot. There’d been nothing else remotely close to the studio until after the holiday ran its course.

One of the Amores PAs approached them with a weary smile. He was young and brittle-looking, a wedge of flesh missing from one of his earlobes. 80

“Mr. Blane?” the kid said, waving an arm toward the set. Three Amores girls, clad in various strips of leather, were mock-paddling each other and letting out quick reptilian squeals. “They’re ready for you now.”

“Uno momento,” Blane said.

He took a few measured breaths, then stood abruptly and stepped out of his pants.

He walked away from Simone and toward the glare of the set. There was a hitch where everyone seemed to be listening—to the muted horns and kettledrums striking up out on the avenue as the parade was filing past. And then came the call and echo of the production crew: Rodando! Rodando! Rodando, gente!

* * *

Late in the afternoons, when shooting wrapped, Simone took to wandering the narrow winding alleyways of the Gothic Quarter. There was something that she found comforting about being lost there. She’d make her way from the avenue to one of the larger tributaries, never bothering to remember the names on the street signs, and then to the tighter alleys and plazas and cobbled arches, always circling back to something familiar—a store that sold dull felt hats; a bronze louvered tavern behind wrought-iron gates; a familiar piece of jewelry winking at her from one of a million displays.

Their last day in the city Blane tagged along. They sat for two hours in a small enclosed plaza, where a man in a gray fedora played the same wandering notes over and over again on an electronic piano. The high wall of a heavy stone church loomed across 81 the plaza. Children were dropping coins into the piano player’s galvanized bucket and then running back to hide behind the legs of their parents.

“I feel like I’m in a movie,” Blane said.

“You’re in a lot of movies,” Simone said.

He linked his arm with hers. They both wore thin wool coats bought from the same cheap clothier on Ferran where they’d been hustled by the same salesman. Simone felt good sitting on the cold cement ledge there in the plaza, the patterned phrases from the piano being helped along by the acoustics of surrounding stone. She thought that to anyone passing by, her and Blane must look like a married couple, settling into a vacationed middle age, enjoying music in the open air, huddling against each other as the night fell in.

“What now?” Blane said, already losing patience.

He was like a shark. He had to keep the world flowing through his gills at all costs.

“Just sit with me for a little while,” said Simone. “Pretend.”

A fluorescent yellow scrap of paper skittered over the stones of the plaza, kicked one high leap, and plastered itself to the front of Simone’s coat. She pulled it off and smoothed it out. It was one of the many pocket-sized fliers and cards that local kids handed to tourists on Las Ramblas—usually advertising food or music or drink or sex.

But this one just said the word thalassotherapy in wavy script. A smudged address in

Barceloneta printed underneath.

“Thalassotherapy?” Blane said. 82

He reached for the scrap of paper but Simone pulled it away.

“It’s a sign,” she said. “If this was a movie then we’d have no choice.”

Blane reached across and snatched the paper from her hand. He mangled the name of the street with his ham-and-cheese accent.

“Shane lives out there,” he said, and when Simone gave him a needling look, “one of the Amores girls. I think, anyways. It’s out by the beach.”

Simone dissected him a little with her eyes. The piano player had stopped playing and she watched the man start to pack up his gear. He looked cold and tired and he didn’t even bother to count the money in his bucket. Blane rubbed his hands, cupped them together, and filled them with hot air from his lips.

“I vote we keep moving,” he said.

Simone held out her hand and Blane pressed the yellow scrap of paper into her palm. She folded it up and tucked it away.

* * *

The thalassotherapy place was not difficult to find. Right across from the beach and boardwalk, where people jogged and cycled in the darkening water-chilled breeze that whipped in across the harbor, it didn’t look like much of anything from the outside: a building made of black glass, like a stack of obsidian cubes, with the clean boxy angles and handle-less doors of a gymnasium or health-supplement outlet. 83

The reception area smelled faintly of chlorine and something sweet. There was a single black waist-high counter that stretched almost the length of the lobby. Behind the counter was a young man, clean-looking, very fit, who was dressed entirely in white: white pants, a form-fitting white polo shirt, and, Simone was sure, though she couldn’t see behind the counter, those white sneakers that only the very old or the very infirmed or those who cared for them tended to wear. The sodium lights from outside, which had just begun to flicker and flare, came through the black glass of the reception area and bathed the whole place in an orange glow.

“Ciao,” said the young man. “Cómo está?”

Simone produced the yellow paper from her pocket and smoothed it out on the countertop. The young man’s smile disappeared. He looked at his watch and let out a small puff of air.

“Not much time,” he said. “Closing in forty-five minute.”

“What is it, though?” Blane said. “Thalassotherapy?”

“Thelassotherapy?” said the young man. He looked perplexed. He pointed out toward the boardwalk and the harbor and traced a circle in the air with his outspread fingers. “How do you say? The water? Ocean water. But here in the baths. Good for the muscles and for inside. Kidneys? Liver? Insides. And skin too. Good for that. ”

Blane looked to Simone and raised his thin brows. He was nervous and it made her happy.

“Do you have bathing suits here?” she asked. 84

The young man disappeared behind the counter and came up with a rubber bin filled with plastic-wrapped packages: speedos, one-pieces, cheap paper sandals ready-to- assemble, bathing caps with the address of the building scrawled across the sides.

“Forty euro each for everything,” he said. “Must have caps and these.”

He took out one of the packages containing the paper sandals.

“For you,” he said.

Blane cleared his throat and put his hand up as if to ward off the paper sandals, but Simone already had the cash in her hand. She was already handing the man a hundred-euro note.

Once they’d gone to their separate locker rooms—once she’d changed into the cheap scratchy one-piece bathing suit, stowed away her clothing and valuables, stretched the bathing cap over her fried hair, rinsed in the cold push-button shower, and inspected herself in the full-body mirror hanging by the toilets—Simone emerged from a swinging door marked Baños and into a tiled tropical glade.

The air became immediately thick and vaporous. The pool deck felt dangerously slick underneath her paper sandals. There was the smell of salt and chlorine and eucalyptus. And something distinctly human too—an intimate cheesy smell that Simone associated with nursing homes and with the women’s shelter in LA where she’d had to spend a stray night or two early on, before she’d gotten set up in the business. The smell raised the hair on her arms—disoriented her—and she had trouble locating Blane amongst the other bodies that populated the deck and the large pool and the mechanical waterfalls that materialized in front of her, people swimming and floating and angling 85 their heads up into streams that rushed down from giant mushroom-capped shower heads, or who lounged under gentle terraced cascades, or who lay atop submerged body-shaped shelves where bubbles rose up from jets and made the water look like it was boiling.

“Sim,” she heard. It was coming from down below. And suddenly there he was, treading water at the edge of the large pool, grinning up at her, his eyes slightly squinted where the bathing cap tugged his at his flesh. “You’re not going to believe how good this feels,” he said.

She wasted no time. She crouched down and slipped over the edge into the pool.

The water was warm and she knew it was salt because of the way her armpits burned where she’d shaved that morning. They were the youngest people there as far as Simone could tell. The more desirable nooks and massaging jets and chiropractic cascades all seemed occupied by one person more ancient than the next.

“We’re the kids,” Blane said, angling his back into a series of jets designed to fit the curve of his spine.

“I can feel my organs sheefting,” Simone said. “Keedney. Leever. And skeen. Eez good for that too.”

The complex turned out to be much larger than it appeared. Simone and Blane went from station to station, following what seemed like a natural migration pattern.

They forced themselves into the ice pool. They lolled in the scalding Jacuzzi. They poured eucalyptus water over themselves in the steam room. Sucked in the mentholated air. Heat-blasted their lungs in the sauna, where Simone sat on the top tier and Blane 86 leaned back between her legs on the bottom, the back of his head resting gently on the slight swell of her stomach.

“We should open up one of these places back in the valley,” he said, tilting his head to meet her eyes. “Industry-only,” he said. “People would die.”

Simone peeled off Blane’s bathing cap. She ran her fingers through his thinning hair.

Later, they fell asleep on the hot marble slabs that were sunk into tiled nooks outside of the attendant’s office. A pair of wrinkled women woke them up, scoffed and shooed them away with a wave of their paper-thin towels. There were rows of identical paper sandals at each station and Simone was never sure whether she was taking her own sandals or someone else’s each time she moved on, though she worried less and less about it with each treatment.

They’d made one entire circuit of the stations, when a toll came over the loudspeaker—two chimes that dropped in octave from one to the next. All of the elderly people started the process of pulling themselves silently from the pools. They removed their bathing caps and stepped under the open-air showers that circled the deck. They rinsed the salt and chlorine from their hair. They began to file toward the locker rooms. It was as if they were all moved by some gravitational kind of force, and Simone and Blane couldn’t help but fall into the same simple rhythm.

Just before they reached the split doors leading into the gendered locker rooms—

Simone ready to go her way, Blane his—one of the women fell. Simone had been admiring this woman from afar as they made their way through the stations. She was in 87 her late sixties. Maybe early seventies. Slim with muscular arms and beautifully rounded shoulders. She wore a metallic-purple bikini and was stunning in that earthy and sophisticated way that Simone knew could only be passed down from one generation to the next. Simone was surprised when the woman snapped off her bathing cap to reveal a head of silver-white hair shaved nearly to the scalp. And then she’d fallen. Right in front of the drinking fountains. Went down hard, and with nothing to break the fall except the back of her elegantly shaved head, which hit the tiled deck with a sickening crack.

Blane, who was right behind the woman in the silent procession, was the first to come to her aid. He knelt on the deck beside her and placed a hand on one of her beautiful round shoulders.

“Don’t move,” he said, and it looked like he was holding her there, though it was clear that the woman wasn’t going anywhere. She’d cracked her head too hard to bounce back. Her eyelids fluttered and her pupils scanned reflexively from side to side behind them. There was a tiny bit of blood smeared on the deck by her head and it mixed with the water from everyone’s feet. She was having some kind of fit.

“Sim, make sure she doesn’t choke,” Blane said. “Her tongue.”

But Simone couldn’t take her eyes from the involuntary movement of the woman’s eyes. The woman’s body started to shake and pulse in synaptic waves, her fingers dancing on the wet surface of the deck. And Simone just stood over her and watched. Watched until the young man from the reception desk arrived, gleaming in all his white glory, opened the woman’s mouth, and wedged the corner of a plastic swim- 88 paddle between her teeth. He shouted something in the direction of the attendant’s office, but Simone had no idea what it meant.

* * *

They didn’t speak to each other on the walk back from the Metro station that night. Once in the apartment Simone locked herself in the tiny bathroom and sat on their miniature toilet. Blane was flipping through the channels on the television outside. There was a large window in the bathroom, frosted, but open a crack, and she could feel the air from out on the terrace, where they’d been spending the mornings and early evenings drinking coffee brewed in an ancient percolator. She couldn’t bleed the old woman from her mind. The sound of her going down on the tile. Her thin ankles and paper sandals.

Her pupils flicking back and forth. The bell tower struck the quarter hour and Simone sat with her head in her hands, studying the tile on the bathroom floor.

“Everything okay in there?” Blane called from the other side.

Simone straightened up and flushed the toilet behind her. She felt the vibration of the water trickling down the pipes.

“Everything is fine,” she called back, the words like webbing in her throat.

She stood and opened the medicine cabinet over the sink and there she found

Blane’s passport tucked up against a slim travel carton of Band-Aids. The passport was issued eight years earlier, and in the picture his hair was nearly jet-black, parted to one 89 side like an ad-man; he wore a white collar and a black tie. The name, printed to the right, rang thin and scraped out, despite the official block lettering.

When she came out of the bathroom she found him splayed out on the futon in front of her, his hands clasped behind his head, long and lean, bigger than he actually was.

“We may be coming up on something of a dry patch here,” she said. “I just want you to be prepared—workwise.”

She might have been addressing the IKEA furniture.

“We?” he said.

He looked at her as if amused, a tight smile carved into his face.

She heard that disembodied voice whispering to her in the heat of the set lights.

You okay? You good? Tell me when it’s too much. That boiled pink on the back of his skull. The jokes. The flimsy contract that bound them.

Blane sat up on the futon and rubbed at the stiffness in his knees.

“Actually,” he said, as if the thought was just then occurring to him, “I think I may stick around here for a while yet.”

Simone realized she was clenching her teeth.

“Yeah,” Blane said, reaching out slowly and pulling an orange from the Amores gift basket that had been awaiting them on arrival, filled now with empty wrappers and drained cans and bottles. “The Amores guys, they offered me some work. A solid opportunity I think. Something worth thinking about anyway.”

She couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. 90

“Besides,” he started peeling the orange, the kitchenette blooming with the scent, tangy and sweet and a little bitter, “I think I’m digging on the scene out here. The whole vibe of this place. There’s more to it than what’s right in front of you. You know?”

He split the orange in half and tore off a wedge, offering it up to Simone, but she refused it.

“I even talked to Keith,” he said, chewing now on a wedge of orange. An audience applauded on the television. “I booked this place for another week. I guess I’m getting a little attached. You might think it’s stupid or whatever,” there was no bitterness in his voice, just something like smudged irony, embarrassment maybe, “but a guy has to make some moves in life. Look out for himself. What’s the old saying…”

When Simone didn’t fill the silence, Blane walked over to the counter and started preparing the percolator for a pot of coffee. He used water from the tap. Ground the beans. Set the percolator on the glowing red coils of the stove. And when it was ready, they drank the coffee out on the terrace, without speaking, listening to the settling sounds of the city below them.

Later that night, long after Simone thought he was asleep, Blane came into the bedroom and laid himself out beside her on the bed, never touching, just prone there, listening, as the bells across the avenue chimed off each quarter hour until Simone would have to go and catch her flight home.

We Knew Horses

On the way out to the river I played with the loose fabric that hung down from the ceiling of the Grand Marquis. The glue had stopped holding. Sport had it thumb-tacked places to keep the felt off our heads. I could smell the squash sandwiches that my grandmother had foil-wrapped in a plastic bag at her feet, the rotting chicken wings and necks in the five-gallon plastic pail next to me. From up front came the tick…tick…tick of the rosary beads that swung from the rearview.

"Native Dancer," Sport said, adjusting the mirror to meet my eyes.

An easy one.

"Polynesian," I said. "Out of Geisha."

"Good," he said. "Genuine Risk."

He lifted the brim on his spitfire cap. Thumbed the rose-tinted glasses that always rode low on the bridge of his nose.

I had to think about that one. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the bloodstock chart that hung over my pullout at home, a gift from Sport for my eleventh birthday. At night I would fall asleep reading the names—branch after branch of them, an endless interconnected web that spun out to the chart's edges, curbed only by the nickel-sized portraits of racing sires that ran along the border.

"By Exclusive Native," I said, "out of—"

My grandmother shifted in her seat, the plastic bag at her feet rustling and letting out a waft of olive oil, crushed tomatoes, sautéed onion, and garlic. She caught my eye in her side mirror and lifted two fingers in the sign of victory. 92

"Out of Virtuous," I said.

Sport slapped the steering wheel with his palm and laughed.

This was our game.

We knew horses.

We were headed to the stretch of marsh behind the high school, to the river that ran behind the football field there, along a bank of salt grass and mud the color of baking chocolate. When the team was out practicing, we'd toss our crab-lines to quarterbacks calling their plays. Occasionally, static from the announcing booth's public address system would ring out across the marsh like a rifle shot, spooking the egrets, herons, and gulls that mulled along the banks grubbing for fiddler crabs.

That afternoon Sport parked the Grand Marquis at the edge of the grass practice field, where it sloped off toward the river and funneled down into a concrete culvert—a kind of cracked slab that people would use as a boat launch and make shift fishing pier.

Usually we’d have to share the place with other families: unshaven fathers in cut-off jean shorts and guinea tees, overweight mothers who nagged their kids about losing Aqua

Socks to the mud. But that afternoon we had it all to ourselves.

"We gonna eat tonight, An-tony?" Sport asked.

I shrugged. Sport never pronounced the h in my name and that suited me fine.

It took at least a dozen blue crabs to make a decent sauce. Keepers were supposed to be five inches from point to point, but Sport kept everything. 93

"We're gonna eat," Gram said, untangling one of the lines and pushing the sharpened end of a coat-hanger clip through a chicken neck. "Not sure if you're gonna eat. That is, unless you plan on catching something with that paper."

He sat on the front fender of the Grand Marquis, his pant legs riding up in a way that showed his shins—hairless from years of wearing too-tight argyles. The Daily

Racing Form snapped in the breeze and Sport made notes with a ballpoint while Gram and I set up the lines. We used plastic kite reels as anchors, the ones with the smooth handles on either end of the spool. That way we could stick one end into the mud like a stake and watch the line unwind when the crabs started to make off with the bait.

"Two hundred and sixty-seven thousand dollar carry-over in the Pick Six at

Saratoga tomorrow," Sport said.

He sucked air through his teeth and circled something in the paper. Meanwhile, I hopped barefoot from flat rock to flat rock—crab scoop in one hand, baited line in the other—trying to find a perch that would get my line out to the middle of the river. It was a slack tide and shiners leapt the loose stalks of cordgrass left in the stranded tidewater pools. An invisible plane buzzed somewhere high overhead.

"What time's this guy coming down?" Gram asked.

Sport didn't look up from the paper.

"He's a busy man," he said. "He'll get here when he gets here. We should be grateful that Jimmy even set this up for us. If we went through the normal avenues we’d both be dead before anything got straightened out." 94

Gram let loose a from the belly unh and tried to work out a tangle deep in her spool. Her fingers were slick and greasy from baiting our rigs; I refused to touch the chicken necks, just the wings, which we used only when the necks were gone. She tried to adjust the wine-red hive of her hair with a clean knuckle.

Dooby-dooby-doo, Sport sang. Da da da da da.

He laid the Racing Form gently on the hood of the Grand Marquis and ducked into the back seat of the car for his transistor, which he propped on the roof of the car. It crackled when he spun the dial. He settled on an oldies station, the music bright and melancholy at the same time.

* * *

Back at home—where I switched nights sleeping on the pullout or the beat-up

Lazy-Boy out in the den—Sport had shoeboxes full of his charts and forms spilling from every shelf and closet in the apartment. His homework, he called it: stacks of ten-cent notebooks stuffed with past-performance entries and articles from the racing forms; circled, underlined, starred, and double-starred; glued sections of newspaper left to swim in a blue-black pool of his own illegible chicken-scratch. Every morning he got up before the sun, went through the click-clack of cleaning and grooming himself, lifted the car keys from the hook by the front door, and headed off for his papers and lotto tickets at the

Book-and-Card downtown. 95

I pretended to be asleep when he got back twenty minutes later and settled into the kitchenette, which was separated from the den only by a waist-high wall littered with

Catholic knickknacks and fake flowers. Then there'd come the scrape of glass on

Formica, the trickle of watered-down cranberry juice cocktail, the shuffling of newspaper, the whispering of scissors. In the bedroom Gram gurgled softly in her sleep.

Those first few weeks living with them, I'd sometimes lie for an hour or so like this, still as stone, listening to Sport at work.

At the time, I didn't mind much living with them. I was the only person under sixty that lived in the whole building (technically I don't think I was even allowed to be there, but Sport had some kind of arrangement with Scott Sobelesky, the guy who managed both our complex and the one down the street that looked just like ours), and everyone liked having a younger person around. I was like a community secret that walked around in plain sight. Two or three times a month—when there was a fire inspection or someone from the government came to drop off or pick up paperwork—

Scott would give Sport the heads up and I'd have to make myself invisible. Something I never had much trouble doing.

Rice Terrace wasn't an old folks home in the traditional sense. The residents came and went as they pleased. Like Gram and Sport, a lot of them drove and cooked; some even still had jobs as greeters at local department stores or as grocery cashiers. It was just a cheap place, government subsidized, where you could manage to stretch out your Social

Security check a little longer through the month. There was a waiting list a mile long to get into one of the units, but Gram had an in because of her old job working the front 96 desk at the police station downtown—a job that used to help bail Sport out whenever he got busted running his basement craps games back in the days before there were Indian casinos and online gambling and scratch-off tickets in every gas station. Sport never had a real job in his life, but he always worked really hard at not having one.

Since Sport didn't like to be bothered mornings, I would usually go with Gram to

Karen's Corner across the street for groceries, or check in with Frank across the hall, who had me sign his checks for him because of his gnarled fingers. Frank was the oldest person in the building by far, but he still dressed up in a three-piece suit every morning— a watch fob glinting from the pocket of his sport coat—even if all he had to dress up for was sitting out in front of the building on Rice Terrace to watch the guys over at Karen's

Corner flatten cardboard boxes by the loading dock.

"You stop dressing up, you start going down," he'd say, straightening his tie, the cataract in his left eye gleaming like a pearl.

I liked Frank. I liked most of the people who lived in the building. Even the miserable ones whose families never showed up to take them out to eat or see a movie at the Cineplex down the street. Everyone was nice to me. They all knew my situation, that

I was kind of like an orphan, even if I had Gram and Sport taking care of me, and my mother and father were somewhere down in Florida or Georgia or one of the Carolinas drying out for the umpteenth time.

My favorite thing about living in Rice Terrace, though, was the rec room that took up most of the first floor of the building. It was just a big open hall, windows lining one whole side of the room so that the sunlight rushed through late in the day and made the 97 whole place feel like a memory. Mainly it was filled with cheap foldout tables and padded metal-framed chairs. But it also had a small kitchen and a black-laquered grand piano and a closet full of games that I'd never heard of before: Tiddly Winks, and Uncle

Wiggily, and half a dozen versions of Po-Ke-No.

That first afternoon that I came to live with them, after Sport came back from watching races at the Teletrack all day, we sat at one of the empty fold-outs and played round after round of Criss-Cross Poker and Steal-the-Old-Man's-Pack. Sport cheated, but he made it real obvious because he knew I got a kick out of catching him.

"Life's too short to play it straight," he said, shuffling and dealing one-handed.

My mother and father had dropped me off early that morning with a black trash bag full of my clothes, the taillights on their car reflected in the small glass vestibule of

Rice Terrace, where Gram waited in a flower-printed housedress. I watched him deal, heard the snap when he threw from the bottom of the deck, and the sound was like an elastic band bringing me back into myself.

"We just gotta find you an angle," Sport said.

I was used to the way that Sport talked to me, like we were both in on some kind of scheme that was years in the making. He had a funny habit of rubbing the smooth pad of his thumb with the tip of his ring finger—a nervous tic maybe—and it was something that I found myself doing unconsciously in class sometimes while Mrs. Florentine scraped away at the chalkboard and all around me sat brain-dead kids who knew nothing about parlaying if/then bets at three different tracks around the country at the same time 98 or going up three units instead of one on inside numbers once you took some money off of the table and the dice got hot.

Every once in a while Gram would try to counteract whatever kind of influence

Sport cast over me by taking me to the mechanical dinosaur exhibit at the history museum, or by signing me up for a baseball or soccer team (which I always quit after only a few practices), but secretly, I think that she liked the way Sport and I took to each other. He never had a particularly close relationship with my father—an only child—so I think that I was something like a do-over for him. A chance to get something right for once, even if he was still rectifying on his own terms.

* * *

The eels were bad that day. Every few minutes one would hit the chicken so hard on the end of the line that it would nearly yank the spool right from my hands. I had to hold on tight and wait out the heavy strikes, trying to feel, with my fingertips resting gently on the open line, the more subtle tugs and pinches that might be the crabs pulling and tearing at the skin and flesh of the chicken. When I was younger, I would imagine that the eel strikes were actually blue crabs as big as dinner plates, monsters that I could never tempt up from the middle of the riverbed. But after a few summers of crabbing with Gram and Sport, the eels became more nuisance than thrill—slimy slit-eyed scavengers that tore our bait to shreds and left us skunked and defeated at the end of the afternoon. 99

"An-tony," Sport called out from the bank.

I'd found a narrow strip of concrete some ways down-river that jutted out into the current. It wasn't quite above the surface of the water, but I had managed to get some solid footing by wedging a thin piece of rebar that stuck up from the concrete between my toes. The other foot I had back on dry land, but I had to be in a near split to make it work. The sun beat down on my shoulders and baked the concrete dry and hot.

"What do you want, Sport?" I shouted, wobbling as I reeled my line inch by inch.

He was still sitting on the hood of the Grand Marquis, the racing form draped over his lap, and he was eating one of Gram's squash sandwiches. The foil-wrapped bottom of the sandwich glinted in the sun. Gram was sitting in the passenger seat with the door open, taking one of her catnaps.

"Foolish Pleasure," Sport shouted in between bites.

He didn't even look up from the paper, and I had one of those moments that I had every so often, when I tried to picture the inside of Sport's mind—the bits of data and statistics and odd factoids whirling around in there, the decades of racing lineage that hung like scaffolding over the folds of his brain.

"By What A Pleasure," I yelled. "Out of Fool-Me—"

And then I went down.

One second I was bringing in the line—the pale outline of the chicken wing inching up the bank toward me, the darker outline of the crab feeding on it below the surface—and the next there was that quick pang of panic that shot up from my gut when I reached back to grab the net and lost my footing. 100

At first it felt more like a return than a shock. The water was too warm to shock, the same temperature as the air, and I took in a brackish mouthful. The green spool of my line bobbed down-river, spinning and unreeling as it went. There was the soft suck of mud between my toes and fingers as I tried to lift myself up, then the tug of the current, the steady inevitable draw pulling me along. Rocks and bottles and tree limbs raked at the underside of my thighs. The sun broke the surface of the water in quick flashes. I reached for it. And just as I felt myself starting to suck away, my fingers scraping into the shell- studded muck, something yanked at the back of my T-shirt—the neckline tearing and cutting into the soft flesh of my throat—and I was being dragged back up onto the bank.

Sport stood over me heaving.

Mud spilled from the insides of his patent-leather loafers. His woolen pants were soaked up to the knee. His hat was gone—something that he rarely went without, even when indoors—and when I looked downstream I saw it floating behind the spent kite spool that once held my crab line.

"You okay?" he said. He was having trouble catching his breath.

He looked me over and then untucked his button-down to wipe at his glasses with the tails of his shirt. A gull cried somewhere overhead. From far out in the middle of the marsh another one answered. Then they seemed to be calling from everywhere at once, a shrieking hard-knock language that turned back on itself and stirred up something ugly inside of me.

"I slipped," I said, standing now on dry land.

Sport put his glasses back on and looked up to the gulls circling overhead. 101

"Can it!" he yelled.

He looked down at his loafers and at his pant legs. I'd never seen him so out of sorts before. He was always the picture of composure—cool, calm, and collected, perpetually flying under the radar—and so to see him like that, with his shirt tails hanging loose, his comb-over unmoored by the breeze, muddy and wet up to the knee, caught me completely off guard, and I couldn't help but laugh.

"I'm glad this amuses you," Sport said, trying to wring out the cuffs of his pants.

"I'm a mess here. I shoulda just let you go."

Up above the lip of the culvert a car door closed and then Gram was stutter- stepping her way down the concrete bank, trying not to slide on the hard-packed mud.

"What is it?" she said. "What happened?"

She was winded and panicky, the soft pooch of flesh under her chin shaking.

Unlike Sport, this wasn't an unusual state for her; she had a way of making people nervous because of this simmering anxiety, but it could be endearing too.

"He slipped," Sport said. "He's fine, Caroline."

"I'm fine," I said.

Then another car door closed, and when we looked back up the culvert there was a man standing on the ridge looking down at the three of us. He was dressed in some kind of uniform: a drab olive shirt with a patch on the breast and with miniature black epaulets on the shoulders, but tucked into blue jeans and steel-toed work boots—and he wore big dark aviator sunglasses. He was a redhead and didn't seem to have much of a jaw, this 102 guy, but he tried to make up for it with a short-cropped red beard that he grew longer on the chin.

"Afternoon, folks," he said.

Gram made a noise that sounded like some small animal dying under the cover of acred marsh, and Sport touched her gently on the shoulder, a gesture I'd never seen him make before. He attempted to tuck in the loose tails of his shirt.

"Afternoon," Sport said, running a hand through his thin hair. He started to make his way up the embankment toward the man, but the man was already angling his way down—not toward us, but to where we had our other lines and traps and an aluminum beach chair that Gram had been sitting in before her nap in the car.

"Thanks for taking the time to come down here like this. We really appreciate it,"

Sport said. "We know you've got a ton of this stuff on your plate down there, and…well…Jimmy Delvecchio couldn't say enough good things about what it is you do down there at the DHS."

The man didn't seem to be paying much attention to what Sport was saying. He bent over the five-gallon pail that we'd draped with a towel to keep the crabs out of the sun, and pulled the towel from the top, letting it drop to the mud. He took what looked like a mini-ruler out of his breast pocket and poked around inside the pail for a minute or two. The water sloshed around the bottom, hard shell scraping against plastic.

"You ever have blue crabs in marinara?" Sport said. "Out of this world. Really.

You haven't lived until you've had Caroline's." 103

The man stood up and sighed. He wiped the mini-ruler on the thigh of his jeans and slipped it back into his breast pocket. Sport cleared his throat.

"Look, I'm sure we can straighten out whatever needs to be straightened out no problem. We're willing to do whatever it takes, you know. He's a good kid. He's just been through a rough patch lately and it's like one of those cycles. They can be brutal when they want to be. Kids. I tortured my parents. The thing is, we just, we don't want to lose the kid over something so stupid. It don't make no sense. He should be with family is the way I see it."

Sport stopped and took a breath. It was as if he'd been rehearsing these lines for weeks, which was strange, seeing as how before the red-bearded man showed up, I had no clue that Sport was nervous about anything. But I could see the sweat on his upper lip and brow. He had Transition lenses on his glasses and they were discolored here and there from where the water had splashed them, the sunlight darkening the glass in some places but leaving the glass clear in others.

"You folks aware that these hard-shells are supposed to be five inches across the back," the man said.

Sport looked at Gram and then at me. From out over the marsh the gulls picked up their conversation again. It sounded like they were trying to warn us about something.

"Excuse me?" Sport said.

The man reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a flip pad.

"You not familiar with EnCon, sir?" the man asked.

"EnCon?" Sport said. 104

"The Department of Environmental Conservation."

"The Department of Environmental Conservation?" Sport said. He turned to us.

"What the fuck is he talking about?" Then back to the man. "You Jimmy's guy? The guy from the state supposed help us out with Anthony?”

"Officer Ridley," the guy said. "There are forty-six officers working EnCon this year. We're just trying to make sure that people are adhering to the rules and limits set forth by the state in order to sustain healthy populations. We don't have healthy populations then no one gets Caroline's marinara."

The man paused and took off his sunglasses. He slipped them into the same pocket as the mini-ruler and then fished around in his jean pockets for something, but couldn't seem to find whatever it was that he was looking for.

"Would you happen to have a pen, sir?" he said.

Sport stared blankly at the man. Then he reached into his pocket, as if dazed, and pulled out the ballpoint he'd been using on his racing forms. He handed it to the man.

"Thank you," the man said. "Now, I'm gonna have to write you up a citation here.

You've got over a dozen hard-shells in there and at least ten of them don't make the limit.

Normally the fine is fifty dollars for each violation, but I'm gonna cut you a break here and only fine you for half a dozen."

He started filling out the citation. I was trying to do the math in my head. Next to me, Gram shook her head, and while the man filled out the citation sheet, she made her way silently up the bank toward the car. Mud speckled the seat of her beige pants and it seemed to take more strength than she had to get back up the steep slope of the culvert. 105

She was a big woman, my grandmother, and something about the way she had to lumber up that embankment, her thin wrists straining every time she used her own knees as leverage brought back my father's hand on my mother's knee in the car that morning when they'd dropped me off at Rice Terrace, as if to tell her, everything was going to be all right, they were doing the right thing here, anyone could see that, while I gathered up my trash bag and they each placed a dry-lipped kiss on my forehead. "Don't fall too hard for Sport's shit," my father had said, and I told him I wouldn't.

The red-bearded man seemed to have trouble with Sport's ballpoint. He shook it and placed his tongue to the tip. I edged up beside him and snatched the citation pad right from out of his hands.

"Don't mess around, kid," he said, a look of shocked resignation on his face.

"Give it back."

I could tell, by the way he said it, that he was used to having things snatched away from him.

"Don't mess around, kid," I mimicked. "Give it back."

I could feel Sport's hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off.

"Don't," Sport said. But it was too late.

I reached back and threw the pad as hard as I could. It got about halfway out over the river before the wind caught the pages and it flapped bird-like down into the current, bobbing for a hitch before being sucked under. Once I got started it seemed pointless to stop. So I kicked over the five-gallon pail, the crabs sliding out in a rush of mud-colored water. They side-scuttled down the bank and toward the water, a few taking refuge under 106 the canvas cover of Gram's aluminum beach chair, and so I threw the chair too. Watched it turn and tumble in the rising current.

"Enough," Sport said, but he wasn't yelling.

He was just stating it like a fact. What I’d done was enough.

From up on the football field I could hear the football team counting out their pre- practice calisthenics. Farther off a cheerleading squad spelled something out in high- pitched harmony, like a chant that was supposed to draw me up and over the bank, out toward my future life. Then there was a crackle from the announcing booth's PA system, and we couldn't help—all three of us—but flinch.

107

Losing Weather

At the ramshackle bottom of Julius Pendergrast's soul, he'd always believed there was some essential and inextinguishable ember, like one of those rare-element power sources found in comic books, or like the dim pulse of a star, which, though stamped with some vague notion of an expiration date, would still surpass the half-life of this sad little hunk-of-dust planet. It was this thought that comforted Julius when things got bad. It allowed him to believe that some core piece of his identity, the purest piece (whatever that might mean), was left untouched during those frequent bouts of blowing-it-all-to- hell-and-gone—a phrase championed by Julius's grandfather, Ives Pendergrast, and a favorite pastime of all the Pendergrast men, Julius notwithstanding.

Julius felt for that ember on a Wednesday night, as he stood poised over the five- dollar-minimum craps table at the Soaring Eagle Casino. He reached tentatively with two fingers, right below his navel, where he'd always imagined the ember resided, tucked like a red-hot musket ball behind the pinch of his belt buckle, but he felt nothing there. Just a slight pang in his bladder, a pressure that told him he should cash out and hit the men's room before trekking back the dark silent miles of I-94.

"Press it," Julius said to the dealer, and watched the dealer's tiny Filipino fingers work themselves over the stacks of red, white, and green chips.

"Going up," the little man said.

To the right of the dealer a pit boss in an ill-fitting Armani knockoff leaned in behind the stick-man and nodded. 108

"Fifty dollar five and nine," Julius said, tossing four green chips out in front of the dealer.

The shooter at the other end of the table, a tiny woman with a fake tan and a disturbingly freckled chest, had already made four passes and Julius could feel that familiar stir of excitement take hold of the table, a tentative updraft that straightened spines all around.

"Here they come," the stick-man shouted.

The freckled woman took a deep breath, and then threw three consecutive fives and two nines before hitting her point, the hard way, all to raucous applause. She shrugged back a shock of copper hair and leaned out over the table. Don't get cocky now,

Julius thought. Just keep this roll alive. He took some money off of the table and tried to flag down a cocktail waitress. Over the public address system someone was told to meet his or her lost party at the Winter Rotunda entrance. Muzak waffled over the dull register of slot payouts.

"Coming out," the stick-man sang. He pushed the herd of die up toward the freckled woman and she selected the two fours facing up. The woman shook the dice and flung them out over the table in a smooth arc so that they hit the wall in front of Julius and split screaming out toward each side wall—one running behind the bank, the other riding the rail in front of the players.

"Seven, winner, seven," said the stick-man, to a light smattering of applause.

Julius shifted his weight from foot to foot while the freckled woman threw and threw and threw. Three more sevens, four elevens, bringing Julius back seventy-five 109 bucks with each toss. There were only two people at the table who weren't making money on the roll: one, an old man in a windbreaker and Bermuda shorts who brooded over his paper cup of coffee; the other, a tired-looking Korean kid whose posture attested to a marathon run of Pai Gow or Caribbean Stud. Gone was that internal swing-of-fate barometer, they could barely lift their eyes to track the progress of the moving dice. But there had to be close to twenty-three hundred sitting in Julius's rack, even as the pain in his bladder was intensifying, a fiery ache that might have been the ember expanding, smoldering, stoked by the bellows of the roll.

Finally the freckled woman made a point—a hard-ways ten.

All around the table the players coddled and reassured her.

Easy ten.

Come on with that ten.

Right back with that ten.

The freckled woman tossed her hair back once more, readying herself for another magic flick of the wrist, and it was at that moment, in the split second before she chose her two die and cradled them in the palm of her hand, that Julius saw it all fade away, as if the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped by three degrees. Losing weather, he thought.

"Seven, craps, seven," came the automaton drawl of the stick-man. But already

Julius had scooped up the chips from his rack. Already he was walking away from the table and toward the cool fluorescent glow of the restroom. 110

* * *

The following afternoon, with the sun coming down cool and accusing, Julius prepared for another sit-down with the old man. Idle times with Ives, as he'd come to call them—pitiful affairs that ended with one or both of them drunk, a flurry of memories and light-hearted recriminations, all capped with a half-assed meal of whatever Ives had managed to defrost from the game freezer that morning.

It wasn't much, but it was what passed for family in Julius's life. He didn't quite remember his mother, who'd split when he was just three and a half. As a kid, he'd be dumped off on Ives for weeks or months at a time while his father held court at the Green

Top or The Duck Inn, Waddle Out, eyes glued to the keno screen up over the bar or to the little paper windows in his losing pull-tab lottery tickets.

Julius found Ives in good spirits. He was outside tending an anemic-looking garden when Julius pulled up the gravel drive. A cherry tomato plant hung from the awning of his double-wide and Ives struggled to get the spout of an aluminum watering can up over the lip of the pot. He’d shrunk some in the last couple of years and had a tendency to compensate for this by sky-rising the register of his voice.

"Julie-boy," he boomed as Julius stepped down from the cab of his pick-up. "Let me use your legs."

Julius took the can from his Ives, raising it a few inches and tilting the spout until the water began to pour. On the stoop, at his feet, were a few dead or dying herbs in terra cotta vessels, cigarette butts stubbed into the soil surrounding the roots. 111

The old man watched him carefully as he poured.

"This is the only one I’ve been able keep alive," he said. "They gotta be hanging in the air around here." He made a strange sucking noise with his lips and tongue. “You buy the things and then you try and keep them from dying for as long as possible,” he said, “or you just forget about them and they go on living in spite of you. There’s no sense to it.” He took the can back from Julius and dropped it behind one of the patchy hedgerows that spanned either side of the trailer’s front stoop.

“It helps if you stop putting your cigarettes out in them,” Julius said.

Inside, the double-wide smelled of bacon and mentholated cigarettes. The television in the den was tuned to one of those home-shopping networks and a woman with shiny hair was holding some kind of delicate-looking porcelain doll. She turned it deftly, creepily for the camera.

"The hands on these women," Ives said.

He'd followed Julius into the den, somehow losing his shirt along the way, and

Julius was taken aback by his Ives’s collapsing frame: the coarse, white hairs that sprouted sporadically around his nipples; the single tattoo on the upper left portion of his chest, reduced over the years to an indecipherable blue-black smear, like a giant blood blister puffed up over the old man's heart.

"I've got some venison steaks I can fry up if you're hungry," Ives said.

He shuffled through the den and into the kitchen where the Allegan county sunlight fought its way through the dirty double-hung windows over the sink. There was unopened mail spread out on the kitchen table. Dirty plates and bowls stacked on every 112 available surface. In the basin of the enamel sink Julius could make out a brown paper- wrapped package, heavy and sure of itself, string-tied like an unassuming black-and- white-movie time bomb.

"I’m good, Ives," he said, sinking into the La-Z-Boy in the den.

Ives pulled the package from the sink and it trailed a thin drizzle of blood between the basin and the hefty chopping block on the counter. He unwrapped the package and slapped the steaks down on the block—an old slab of hard maple, pocked and blood- blackened over the years.

"So how goes it for our county's poor, huddled masses?" Ives asked. He'd lit a cigarette and the mentholated smoke spiraled over his head. Julius watched him work some kind of seasoning into the grain of the steaks, his knuckles as thick and bloated as ginger root.

"Still poor," Julius said. “Less huddled.”

He was going on year four as a social worker at the Department of Human

Services, an outreach worker for CPS. He never shared specifics with Ives, but the old man knew well what kind of sadness and anger and dysfunction rotted on the vine all around them. He didn’t need Julius and his file drawer full of cases to tell him that.

"You're not doing those animals any favors. I can tell you that much. Some people just got no self-respect or dignity or nothing. There's just not much to be done with folks that far gone."

A flake of cigarette ash drifted down onto one of the steaks and Ives rubbed it in with the seasoning. 113

"You don't say," Julius said.

"I do say,” Ives said, “I just said it."

The old man disappeared behind the counter. Julius could hear the clanging of pots and pans. From Julius's vantage, with the cigarette smoke still drifting above the chopping block, it looked like the old man had just spontaneously combusted, leaving nothing behind but a trail of smoke and a few tenderized hunks of meat. But the old man popped back up with a broiling pan. He arranged the steaks carefully on the pan, spun the dial for the broiler, and slid the pan into the oven.

"Me and you," Ives said, scrubbing his hands in the sink, "we got business needs our attention."

He stubbed his cigarette out on the drain guard of the sink.

On the television a different woman, one with even shinier hair, was modeling something called a "trust blanket"—a cross-stitched masterpiece of bright signs and symbols being pushed as the perfect wedding present. The woman wrapped herself in the blanket to demonstrate its universal coziness. She smiled lovingly at the camera. Prices and toll-free numbers scrolled in an endless loop beneath her.

"Have you talked to that dope-of-a-father of yours recently?"

Julius sunk down into the La-Z-Boy.

"Not recently—no," he said, though this wasn't exactly true. He'd run into his father down at Harvey’s three nights earlier, too blind drunk to even form a coherent sentence, but just sober enough to hit Julius up for a hundred bucks from the ATM. 114

Ives plopped down on the loveseat and crossed his legs. He began massaging one of his feet with quick, violent squeezes, as if resuscitating it.

"Kid is a walking black hole. Eyes to god."

Julius was used to hearing Ives talk about his father this way, as if Julius's father was the kid in this equation, him and Julius having switched places in the lineage long ago.

"We’re going to need to make a run out to the land," Ives said.

Julius was still watching the woman on the television. He could almost feel the intricate stitching that she was worrying with the soft tips of her fingers. Her nails gleamed like the inside of a clamshell.

"Sure, Ives,” Julius said. “We could head out this weekend.”

Ives shook his head.

"Now Jules,” he said. “I got a notice in the mail the other day. They’re extending water and sewer lines after the thaw this spring and I wanna see what the surveyors have marked off. I just know they’re gonna screw me on this.”

Ives stopped rubbing his foot. He was suddenly edgy—irritable.

If the old man had an obsession—besides wreaking general havoc for those closest to him—then that obsession was two negligible plots of land that he owned between South Haven and Saugatuck on the coast of Lake Michigan—joke parcels thrown in as promotion with two 1932 subscriptions to the Chicago Tribune. Never developed (he could never afford to build on them), and never sold; just visited and whispered to from time to time like a sick shut-in relative. Even Julius had no clue how 115 the old man kept up with the taxes, subsisting as he did on an old army pension, his

Social Security, some buy-out package from GM that no one seemed to understand the terms of; but it seemed that he did—year in and year out—reserving the same tone of reverence for the plots that Julius imagined prospectors in the old west used when they got to talking up their unlikely claims.

Ives straightened up in the loveseat and gave Julius a hard look, and Julius, as he did every so often, recognized the dim reflection of his own features in the old man's face—the same sunken cheeks, the same tight lines of worry around the mouth, the same hooded eyes that made the man impossible to read. It was like looking into one of those funhouse mirrors.

“Those property lines aren’t going anywhere, Ives. We pitched new rebar with non-fray flags last year. Christ. Everyone knows where Ives Pendergrast’s property begins and ends.”

"All right then," Ives said, as if Julius had agreed with him. He popped up from the love seat and clapped his hands together. "I’ll get dressed," he said.

The old man still managed to surprise Julius with his agility from time to time, as if the whole elderly-sad-sack-in-a-trailer routine was just so much grift he'd picked up along the way. Another tool in Ives’s big bag of cons.

"I'll wrap up those steaks for the road," he said.

* * *

116

What started out as a once or twice a month run up to Soaring Eagle had become a three or four nights a week habit. Julius was on a first name basis with the dealers that ran the table games. He even knew some of the pit bosses and cashiers: where they were from, how many kids they had, what they liked to eat from the Sky Vault buffet on their breaks. He'd schedule his home visits to get him as close to the casino as possible at the end of the day. That way, he could duck out of whatever den of dysfunction DHS had pushed across his desk that morning, and head straight to the tables—all of the pain and misery and unbelievable turmoil witnessed during the day dissipating as soon as he set foot into the oxygen-and-muzak-pumped lobby of the Soaring Eagle.

On the afternoon before he'd beat the craps tables for a little under three grand (a great run, but nowhere close to bailing him out of what he'd dumped into the house till in the past few months), Julius had sat in on a string of monitored visitations at the office.

He hated office visits more than he hated the home visits, where, even when he found kids living on the brink of calamity, in dirt and grime and infestation, at least they weren't being forced into some staged and tested approximation of normalcy that could only end poorly for everyone involved—the kids, the parents, the fosters, the social workers— everyone.

His last office visit that afternoon had set him over the edge. The caregiver—in this case the kid's grandmother—had opted to watch the scheduled visit along with Julius in the observation room. They sat in plastic chairs behind a flimsy plastic folding table and watched the child—a crooked little boy with deep-set eyes—completely ignore his mother—a gaunt girl of nineteen who'd just gone through another stint at a methadone 117 clinic. The girl would just stare listlessly back at them through the one-way mirror from time to time, as if asking them, with her eyes, what it was they expected her to do.

Julius could smell talcum powder and something sweet and peppery, a perfume that the grandmother must have been wearing. Through the intercom they could hear the little boy humming to himself as he moved a set of colorful plastic beads along an elaborate track of twisted, wood-mounted wire. Finally the grandmother, a large woman in matching brown sweatpants and sweatshirt, shook her head and sighed.

"She doesn't even know where she is," she said. "It’s not natural."

She picked up her heavy purse from the floor and walked out of the observation room and into the adjoining waiting room for fosters and caregivers, where she’d be reunited with her grandson after the visit time had elapsed.

Julius remembered a woman with gray-black hair showing him drawings in a picture book many years ago, how she smelled almost sickeningly sweet, and how she spoke to him in a small half-whisper that made Julius's spine tingle as if he had to pee. He liked the smell of the woman. The way she whispered to him. He remembered hoping that his father wouldn’t show, that the woman would go on whispering, flipping pages, and emitting that sweet-peppery smell for the rest of the day, after which Ives would come take him back home.

But his father did show up—smelling of cigarettes and chewing gum—wearing a three-day beard. He mussed Julius's hair in a way that hurt, and hurried the whispering woman out of the room. Then he spent most of their time together staring smugly into the two-way mirror and mouthing soundless things that Julius couldn’t decipher. 118

They’d put together a puzzle together that couldn't have had more than a ten pieces. It was a red barn with chickens and an old mule out front—a weathervane in the shape of a rooster gleaming from the peak of the roof. He remembered the look of satisfaction on his father's face when they'd finished it, how he'd clapped Julius on the back and said, "You get that puzzle-solving shit from me."

Watching the doped-up teen in the next room, Julius had such an urge to duck out and get himself to a card table that he thought he could hear the blood buzzing in his veins. He wasn’t one of those people who went around feeling sorry for themselves, or making excuses, but it was turning into a day when the whole human experiment seemed like a kind of terrible mistake.

In the observation room, the girl never made a move toward her son; she just sat examining her hands, messing with the zipper on her lightweight jacket, which she'd never bothered taking off. She would turn to look back at the two-way mirror from time to time, pleading with someone or something, but her gaze was fixed to the right of

Julius, off by just a degree.

* * *

It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon for a drive.

Warm for the end of September.

They parked Julius's pickup on a dirt road off the Blue Star Highway. The trees— pines, birch, and pin oak—were thick all around them, but they could still feel the light 119 breeze that came up from the lake and over the dunes. Ives led the way down the beaten dirt drive until they came to the bluff overlooking the water. This road intersected another at the edge of the bluff, one that followed the contours of grassed dune up a quarter mile before dead-ending in a great wooded cul-de-sac. They stood some hundred and fifty feet above the beach and looked out at the water—slate-gray in the late afternoon light and spread thick along the horizon line.

"There we are," Ives said, and Julius didn't know if he meant the parcels of land, or the lake itself, or the air that rushed up the dunes to meet them there. But he felt the old man unlock—a loosening of his posture as Ives ran a hand through his hair and took a deep draught of the cool lake air.

“Taste the electricity in the air, ” Ives said. “Storm’ll wash over tonight.”

Julius could taste something in the air but he couldn’t say what it was.

Ives reached into the front pocket of the flimsy windbreaker he was wearing and pulled out a folded piece of paper: nicotine- and water-stained. Julius had been out there enough with Ives to know that the old man didn’t need a printed sheet to tell him where his property lines ran. There’d been enough easement requests and buy-out offers over the years, particularly when the big building boom took off in the nineties, to keep him informed. But it was like a ritual that the old man liked to perform every time he came out here: the taking in of the cold lake air, the unfolding of the paper, the physical walking off of the circumscribed lines—as if, in the actual walking of the property’s perimeter, Ives was bringing the plots into existence again and again and again— reminding himself, through the soles of his feet, what he could rightly claim as his. 120

“Someone’s been busy,” Ives said, pointing out the neon blue and orange paint lines that marked the surveyors’ work. The day-glow markings—circles and boxes and straight-cut lines—peppered the two adjacent lots like some kind of extraterrestrial message. If Julius didn’t know any better, he’d swear the place had been graffitied up by a bunch of local teenagers, or artsified by some of the local hippies that liked to slip down from Saugatuck sometimes and swim the secluded stretch of lake au naturel. In the last few years, these two plots had become some of the only undeveloped land on this stretch of coast. And with the not-so-subtle “cottages” going up on either side, his land was starting to take on the look of an abandoned inner-city lot: food wrappers and construction flotsam snagged in the trees and brush, gouges of earth left by the giant excavators used to develop the other lots, pin oak and pine bent low by the wind that made its way, unimpeded now, up over the dunes.

Ives went around snatching at the loose papers and plastic wrappers littering the lot, stuffing them into the pocket of his windbreaker and clucking his tongue in disgust.

They were standing there, checking the property lines on Ives’s diagram against the swirl of surveyors’ marks, when they heard a call coming from down toward the cul-de-sac at the end of the dirt road. Julius turned and noticed, for the first time, tucked back into the tree-line, one of the most beautiful houses he'd ever seen: a brand new, three-story, cedar- shake behemoth; wrap-around porches jutting from the upper two levels; a slate, verdigris roof; a wrought-iron weathervane that turned slowly in the half-breeze coming up from the lake. 121

A tall man in khaki shorts and a light green polo shirt was jogging toward them through the wooded lot and down along the dirt road.

"What can I do for you gentlemen?" he said.

He was well-tanned, with a block jaw, and he wore his cropped hair styled with product in a way that looked purposely not styled. He came up panting and smiling like a retriever.

"Not a thing," Ives said. "Just having ourselves a look."

He turned his back to the man and continued tracing a particularly staggered neon-green line that arced back away from the road like an artillery tracer.

"A look around?" the man repeated.

Behind him one of the curtains on the second-floor balcony of his house drew back. A dark-haired woman, blurry through the wavy sheen of the glass, looked down on them for a brief moment. Then she was gone.

"This is all private back here, gentlemen." He swung an arm out in a way that seemed to insinuate—not just his property—but the whole of Lake Michigan. "There's a public beach not five miles back down the Blue Star,” the man was saying. “Just keep an eye out for—"

"We’re not looking for any public beach," Ives said. He actually spat on the hard- packed dirt of the road. "We came out to check my holdings," he said.

"Holdings?" the blond man said.

"My land," Ives said, nearly choking on the word. "This all is my land here." 122

Ives swept his arm out in an even wider gesture than the one the blond man had used, a sweep that took in the lake, the land, the sky, and anything else around them that a man might like to own.

The blond man gave them a puzzled look. He opened his mouth to speak but then seemed to think better of it.

“You know the umbrella posts down on the beach?” Julius said. “We poured the concrete bases for those. For the fire pit too.”

“That so,” the man said.

Julius felt foolish for even opening his mouth. But there was something about the man’s bright shirt. About his purposely mussed hair. It was as if he’d been dropped down in front of them from the pages of some catalogue. Julius recalled that summer—six or seven years back—filling five-gallon pails with quick-dry concrete and lake water.

Mixing them up with long pieces of driftwood. His father insisted the posts were necessary if they were going to have a regulation volleyball net, though Julius didn’t think he’d ever played a game of volleyball in his life. It was just one of those strange fixations. No rhyme or reason to it. The Pedergrast men would have two plots of lakeshore property and a regulation volleyball net. When the net never materialized, the posts became umbrella stands.

“Pendergrast?” the man said, rolling the name over his teeth, “Ives Pendergrast?”

Ives prodded at a Snickers wrapper that stuck out from the pocket of his windbreaker. There was still some chocolate left in the wrapper and he’d smeared some on the zipper. 123

“Yeah,” he said.

“Ives,” the man said, extending his beefy hand, “Scott Merriman. I’ve been trying to nail you down for the last eight months.” Scott Merriman looked back to his massive house. The same curtain that had drawn back earlier, where the distant dark-haired woman had been, seemed to shimmy a little, as if shifted by the breeze, or by someone walking on the other side. Merriman smiled and ran a hand over the invisible stubble that lined his jaw. He seemed pleased—relieved even—that this was the Ives Pendergrast he’d been trying to nail down.

“No disrespect, Mr. Pendergrast,” he said, “I just assumed that with the city water and sewer lines coming in and the kick in property taxes, that maybe you’d be interested in getting out from underneath it all.” He looked back toward his own house again and shook his head. “It’s really my wife’s idea to be honest. If I can cut the bullshit here.”

There was something false about the way he used the word bullshit, like it was something he’d considered and pulled out of a display case. “She was hoping we could build something like an in-law cottage in the adjacent lots, maybe a bigger yard for the kids.

Believe me,” he said, “another building project is not something I need to take on right now, but...”

Julius had the feeling that he was somehow, personally, getting finagled out of something. He’d known for years that the land had to be worth good money. As a kid, he remembered coming down with Ives, his father when they could wrangle him in, and lugging towels and beach chairs and a coolers full of ice-cold beer down the three hundred and fifty-six steps that led from the road to the hot sand of the beach. He 124 remembered when that first cottage went up on the coast three lots over—the way the feel of the place shifted suddenly, as if from one moment to the next, so that it was no longer theirs anymore—a place where his father could doze off under a striped towel, where

Julius could cling to the old man’s neck while they swam in the lake, and where, afterwards, they’d spear hotdogs and marshmallows and scorch them over a driftwood fire. That afternoon, on the drive out to the lake, as Ives droned on and on about county easement codes and tax rates, and as Julius watched a moon-sized roulette wheel spin and stop and spin and stop in some non-smoking casino corner of the mind, hadn’t he been thinking about the fact that Ives would undoubtedly have to give this place up some day?

If not this year then next? Or the year after that?

Ives took another step back from Merriman. He reached into the front pocket of his windbreaker again, filled now with candy wrappers and cigarette cellophanes and the wadded carbon copies of construction change-orders, and pulled out the ancient-looking paper that contained the property lines. In the brief stints when Julius’s father might stay on the wagon long enough for Ives to start making some plans, he’d once or twice let conversation run to building something on the land out here—something small— something reasonable. But it had never happened.

“If you’ll excuse us, Scott,” Ives said, looking from the paper to one of the neon blue circles that shone like a bulls-eye in the back corner of his lot, “it’s been a long drive and we’re losing the light here.”

Scott Merriman looked from Ives to Julius and smiled. He looked up at the sun, as if tracing its arc across the sky, telling time by the shadows it cast over his property. 125

“Well it was a pleasure to finally meet you gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll let you get back to your work.”

He gave Julius one last appraising look and nodded. But for Ives, it was as if the man wasn’t even there. He was already toeing an imaginary line in the dirt, following it along the edge of the road until turning a right angle back across the lot—away from

Julius and the distant scrape of the surf.

126

The Shot

I didn’t like twinning up. It cramped my style. But for whatever reason Taj, the new bright suit over at the agency, teamed me up with Ofer that day—a Lebanese bowling ball of a guy with a rep as a killer out in the trenches. We’d crossed paths once or twice before. Had the same valet in our pocket over at The Standard, which had been a problem on more than one occasion back when we were both running mercenary. Rumor was he’d slept three nights under a pool filter in Long Beach two years back to catch that industry-standard spread of Pino Alvarez and the pool boy soul-kissing in a Jacuzzi—a shot that cleared half the mortgage on a condo in Torrance and put a gleaming lime-green

Vespa out front—but in my car that afternoon, he was just some patch-bearded shlub who smelled like onions and Axe body spray and whose equipment took up more room than mine.

We spent the morning door-stepping the pop princess’s compound out in the hills of Encino. It was a shit lead. She’d already passed through open-season-train-wreck territory and into a kind of lulled obscurity. I had the feeling that Taj was punishing me for not producing of late, for not making good on the nearly 3K they were paying me as a weekly staffer. He’d said there were hacks out there with flip-phones that could do my job.

“Why do I feel like we’ve been exiled?” Ofer said, reaching into one of his gig bags for a pack of powdered mini-donuts, which he ate mechanically and rapid-fire. He sat with his phone pinned between his shoulder and his ear, a Carlton 100 dangling from his lips, scrolling through video he’d taken on his bulky DVX earlier that week: clip after 127 clip of tight-skirted women stepping out of sports cars; well-groomed men holding newspapers or magazines or paper coffee cups between their faces and the camera; two scarved women whispering over drinks at a café, their sunglasses swallowing up their eyes.

Up ahead, beyond the far curve of the asphalt, a beaten-looking dog slipped out from behind a stand of scrub-brush and yucca, scanning the hood before hot-footing it across the street. Three scraggled pups followed on its heels. Coyotes, I realized—with their narrow snouts and slitted eyes—cat-killers.

“I have to ask,” I said. “That Alavarez score—the pool filter—any truth to that?”

He smiled and smudged at some of the powdered sugar that clung to the wiry little hairs around his mouth with a knuckle. “All right. We doing fun-size or king?” He drew a slow breath like he was tuning an instrument. He sat up in the passenger seat and measured the princess’s gate with his narrowed eyes.

“This kid I had in my stable cleaned pools all over South Bay. Good-looking kid.

I mean, really good looking. Half black, half Salvadorian. Did partial-nude shoots up in the valley every once in a while when he was struggling. So he says, though I wouldn’t have put it past the kid to turn a trick when things got tight.” He lit one of his Carltons and side-streamed the smoke toward where the window was cracked. “I’m good to my people is the thing. I know how to draw gives without making anyone feel icky. That way we’re all on the same team. And this kid…shit, I think I might have paid a cell phone bill for him one month or something and it wasn’t long after that he perks me to a new contract with the Pino Alvarez. Low-key Long Beach hideaway—two or three cleans a 128 week—lap pool, grotto, hot tub, whole nine. This is right after The Tourist comes out, so

Pino’s got this crazy heat on him. He’s trying to escape it all. So we’re talking wet-dream exclusive give. You got it?”

I had to fight not to get pulled into the swell, which was exactly what he wanted.

The cadence of the whole thing, the way it flowed like he owed it to you. I had the quiet urge to crack his teeth with the Mark ii sitting there in my lap.

“So he gets me onto the property. Slides me the punch code to a maintenance gate and tells me I’m on my own. Fair enough. I set up shop in the filter room. I’ve got food.

A gallon of water. A Stadium Pal if worse comes to worse. Course, the only thing I don’t think about is the chemicals. My god, the fucking chemicals.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Buckets of chlorine stacked ceiling-high, hydrochloric, algaecides, disinfectants. For two nights I’m breathing in the fumes, feeling like my lungs are bleeding, I shit you not. I actually start seeing things. Hallucinations. These little squiggly worms in my vision that float down across my eyes.”

He wiggles his fingers in front of his face.

“But nineteen hours later it all finally lines up. The cramps in my legs, the sack of piss, the pool chemical mind-trips probably rewiring my chromosomes—all worth it in the end—because I know as soon as I see the kid stroll out by the hot tub, too late to be working, that I had it. I had to disavow the connection in all the depositions and hearings afterward—entrapment, yadda yadda yadda—but I fucking knew it. They start off like they’re just two buddies, drinking a couple of Heinekens by the pool. I’ve got the shed door open just a crack, a towel wrapped around the DVX to muffle any noise even 129 though the filter is taking care of most of that for me, and I just know man—what we don’t even bother to dream about in all our exclusive jerkoff fantasies while we’re out there chasing away like lunatics.”

He paused at this point and held out his hands, palms-up, Christ-like. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say—I’d seen the shots, everyone had seen them, I knew how this story ended—so I spun a finger in the air.

“They. Start. To. Kiss,” he says.

“Pino Alvarez is kissing this kid and this kid is kissing him back, and, the thing was, I mean, they were really kissing. This wasn’t some two-a.m.-drunk-out-of-your- mind-regret-it-all-in-the-morning kiss. This was the real deal. A roll-credits kind of kiss.

Came right through in the—well—you’ve seen the shots. You tell me. What’d it look like?”

I try to conjure up the spread in my mind. The blown-up covers on all the rags that ripped their way through the country like shockwaves, electronic and print, tearing up primetime for a week or so before slipping back into the ether. I remember thinking, at the time, how natural they’d looked together—Pino Alvarez with his eyes closed and his hand light on the kid’s hip, like nothing you’d ever seen him do in the live-action thrillers or high-octane espionage flicks. They looked alike, those two—one of those couples that are together for so long that they actually become blood. Don’t ask me how, but this was what came through in the shot, this was what people wanted.

“Guard down,” I said, though this wasn’t really what I meant. “No bullshit,” I said. “Like he needed it.” 130

“Exactly,” Ofer said, his body going slack and spent. “Exactly.”

The neighborhood was quiet all that morning and we caught some flak from the jogging neighbors; a patrol car that stopped and parked behind us for fifteen minutes— running my plates—before gliding by like he was doing us a favor. Nothing we weren’t used to. But it was the mailman in tight navy shorts that finally got to Ofer.

He crossed the street in front of our car, rustling through a large pouch slung over his shoulder, and when he looked up and saw the two of us sitting in the car, Ofer’s cigarette casualties scattered all over the sidewalk—he iced us and shook his head.

“Help you with something, guy?” Ofer shouted, craning his neck out the window.

But the mailman just readjusted his bag slightly, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and started walking away from us, up the slight rise of Calneva.

“We’re working here,” Ofer barked. “You don’t see me shaking my head every time you drop a Pottery Barn catalogue on my doorstep.”

A breeze swung in carrying with it the smell of smoke—a reminder of the wildfires still eating up a two-thousand-acre tract between Santa Clarita and San

Fernando. There were tons of them all up and down the coast that spring. Suspect in source. If you believed the people on the news, it was one guy out there, slowly setting fire to the state of California.

Ofer reached into his shirt pocket and fished out another Carlton. He had just cupped a light when something caught our attention up by the gate: a shifting pattern of light that moved up the palmetto trunks towering above the stucco walls, like light refracting across the bottom of a pool. 131

I popped the lens cap on my Mark ii and threw the strap over my head. But Ofer didn’t budge. His eyes just drifted until they reached the point where the windshield met the upholstery before he finally flipped the screen on his DVX and leaned out the window to catch the movement of the light. I climbed out of the car and, with the Mark propped against the roof, waited for the mechanical click and whine of the gate. But it never came. Instead, a bright cluster of silver-foiled balloons appeared from behind the wall, lifting slowly but steadily, trailing a tanged tail of blue ribbon. The sun caught the balloons in a flash of light and it was hard to look at directly. They snagged in the fronds of the palmettos for one brief moment before the breeze freed them up and lifted the whole bright mass higher and higher where they caught an air current and sailed off—a winking, nickel-sized glint in the atmosphere.

“Spooky,” was all Ofer said when we got back to our posts in the car.

He sat watching the video he’d just taken of the balloons, rewinding and playing it, over and over. There was something strangely soothing about it. Framed off like that in the tiny screen. Neat and digestible. It had the same affect as popping half a Xanax.

“Maybe she’s having a party,” I said, and I tried to picture her on the other side of that wall, standing on an open stretch of million-dollar patio, surrounded by her serving staff or whoever, making them watch as she inflated balloon after balloon to the synchronized hiss of a helium tank.

From somewhere down in the canyon came the yip and small-pup cries of the coyotes—otherworldly—and we settled back to wait the princess out.

132

* * *

I hadn’t really followed the princess’s crash and slow burn the way the rest of the country had. I remember getting a couple shots of her back when she was first coming up—there was a song on the radio that ran incessantly then, something sweet but with a serrated edge that worked its way into the collective mind loop like a scar—but to get anywhere near her was complete chaos once she started to nosedive, and so I stuck with middling glam to make my life tolerable. I only knew her story from the spreads that showed up nearly hourly in the rags. After that first album had dropped in the charts and the second was a flop. A Las Vegas marriage. Some fiasco involving soul-searching in southeast Asia (Laos? Cambodia?). A divorce. A fire. Another marriage. An involuntary up at Las Encinas.

Then nothing.

Months passed. A year. The agencies eventually lost interest and started sending their teams elsewhere. The independents couldn’t spare the time. So it went from a long line of SUVs tail-gating each other up and down her block every day to three or four desperate paps a week.

I do remember, though, a conversation with Avery around the time the princess was all there was. We were driving back from the supermarket and there’d been a cover spread on one of the rags at the checkout: the princess with a shaved head looking like some kind of wild-eyed monk. Avery said she felt bad for her and I’d let out a quick little hiss of air. Avery looked amazing in the moment—her profile all punched up in neon— 133 and I thought how lucky I was to have a woman like that sitting there in my car. One of those rare times when the dream of this place and its guttered reality felt in sync.

“I do,” she’d said, staring out at the strip of cash advance joints and chain restaurants on Sepulveda. “She reminds me of one of those little dolls. You know, the ones that fit up inside each other?”

“Matryoshka,” I said, dredging up the little blue and gold one that I remembered my grandmother keeping on her fireplace mantel back in Connecticut. The smallest doll, the innermost one, was about the size of a large vitamin pill and I would sometimes put it in my mouth and test it gently with my teeth.

“Matryoshka,” Avery repeated.

She reached out and turned on the Sony HDR that I had mounted to the dash for street work. She hit the record button and we both watched the taillights on the car in front of us, glowing in the tiny digital screen.

“There’s something sad and scary there,” Avery said. “It’s like she thinks the crowd is going to keep her from hitting the ground or something. Like those little inner dolls are all sealed inside and swaddled up in fan mail.”

There was an edge to Avery’s voice that sounded like some kind of test. We’d only been living together for a few weeks at that point and I was still getting used to finding her things in my apartment: the tubes and vials of sweet-smelling lotions and creams that showed up in my medicine cabinet over the sink, the Eckhart Tolle books and pewter amethyst-encrusted dragons that took up residence on my book shelves, dragons 134 that, I admit, I never once noticed on the nights when we lived separately and I would crash at her place two or three times a week.

Avery was different from the other women that I’d dated since moving to the west coast. She spoke to our houseplants, for one—the big wandering Jew that hung from a white iron hook in the breakfast nook, the knobby little cacti and succulents that staked out sills and end tables throughout the condo. Tiny whispers of encouragement that would have been endearing if not for the pleading in them, like she expected some kind of response eventually.

There was also the way that she went about explaining my job to people, which was embarrassing. You’d have thought I was Annie Liebowitz or Diane Arbus.

Ray really has a way of bringing out the true character in his subjects.

Ray knows how to draw someone out of themselves in a single true moment.

I sometimes felt, when we sat around with her younger friends in Hermosa or out in Echo Park and Silver Lake, drinking cheap wine and smoking dope, that they all thought I was living my life ironically. Like my job was a performance piece that they were all silently applauding in their thick-framed glasses.

Sundays, we’d head out to her sister’s place in Manhattan Beach for backyard barbecues. Real family stuff. Debbie, Avery’s older sister, would kidnap Avery to some quiet corner of their remodeled bungalow where they would take stock of Avery’s life by pitting it up against Debbie’s. I would sit outside with Mark, Debbie’s husband, a decent enough guy who was transferred out to LA by his construction management company almost ten years prior and who only planned on being here for a few months—until 135

Debbie showed up. Their little girl was Val: this blonde blur on the periphery who would pop up every now and then to grill me with the kind of questions that only a seven-year- old could get away with. Who invited your face? or Does your camera ever suck you inside of it? or, one afternoon, just when I thought I could see us Debbie-and-Marking in a not-so-far future with the yard and the fence and the compost guy who came every two weeks to cart away the family pile of eggshells and coffee grounds and vegetable peelings: When are you marrying Aunt Avery?

* * *

Ofer spent the rest of that morning dozing doggishly in the passenger seat, but noon rolled around, and the sun seemed to crack him open like a steamed mussel. There was no shutting him up.

“Take Spain, por ejemplo. I could buy a place right now for under forty thousand.

Forty thousand! It’s nuts. And yet we stick around here and spend all of our hard-earned cash on gluten-free trail mix and raw hunks of exotic fish. Chase after the same deranged lunatics every day just hoping to catch a crotch-shot when they step out of their quarter- million-dollar spaceships. We’re masochists is the thing. We get off on being the fountain scum that feeds the birds. We dig the insults and cheap shots. The drinks flung in our faces. We eat that stuff up.”

He paused and rifled through one of the gig bags down at his feet. He was huffing like he’d just jogged a couple of miles. 136

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

“I am speaking for myself,” he said. “Who the hell else would I be speaking for?”

“I just wouldn’t describe myself as ‘fountain scum.’ That’s all.”

“Yeah?” He deadpanned me with his slitted eyes. “What kind of scum would you describe yourself as?”

My phone rang and I snatched it up quick from the cup-holder before Ofer could get a look at the screen. We had a half-keeled source inside the princess’s place, but we weren’t sure who exactly was giving it up: a gardener, the maid, some pissed-off personal trainer. It could have been her own publicist for all we knew—razing ground for a comeback—staging something spin-worthy.

“You’re going to hate me for this.”

It was Avery. I knew it before I even heard her voice because of the muzak floating in the background and because of that groan and burble from the glass-washer spinning in the sink behind the bar. She was still managing Critters down in Hermosa, which was where we’d first met, where I liked to knock off after a long day and night of chasing, or after we’d spent a whole day on the beach in Redondo and then showered together, her metallic-painted toenails chipped from the sand, and I’d have the urge to explain to her about the blood rush that could keep you awake for days when someone didn’t want to be found, but there you were, staked out in your car, clinging to a tree, crouched behind a bussing station in a restaurant, and finding them all the same. Finding them and finding them and finding them. There were times when the chase would make me so giddy that I thought I might seize up and froth over. 137

“What’s up?” I said.

“I know you’re working and I totally respect that. I do—”

“Avery, what is it?”

I could feel Ofer’s little rat eyes on me.

“It’s Val,” she said, “Someone needs to get her at school. Mark had some kind of accident at his job site and Debbie is stuck in the waiting room at Good Samaritan. He’s okay, just some stitches and a check for concussion, but they don’t think they’re going to get out of there in time and I’m stuck here with just a trainee.”

She cupped her palm over the receiver and I could hear her spitting muffled orders.

“I’m not alone here,” I said.

A beat.

“Oh.”

“I mean…the agency has me teamed up today.”

The glass-washer started moaning in the background again. Ofer was still staring me down, a smirk cut into the edge of his fat face. He’d unwrapped a cereal bar of some kind and it made the whole car smell like chemical apples and cinnamon.

“She gets out at two-thirty,” Avery said. “And Ray, this is one of those things.

Okay? A real relationship thing.”

Another beat.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there. Two-thirty. No worries.” 138

When I placed the phone back into the cup-holder Ofer clucked his tongue. He wadded the cereal bar wrapper and tossed it to the floor at his feet.

“Blood in the water,” he said. “Good stuff.”

He started to pack up his gear. He capped the DVX propped up on the dash and slung it over his shoulder, brushed the powdered sugar that covered his lap to the floor.

“What?” I said, “you don’t have a life?”

He opened the door and started hauling his gig bags out to the sidewalk. Then he closed the door and stooped down to eye me through the open window. He patted the outside sill a couple of times like it was the flank of a horse.

“You’re looking at it,” he said.

* * *

There were no kids milling around when I got there. No school buses lined up outside. The freeway overpass was only a block away and every once in a while a semi truck would grind its gears and downshift. From somewhere came the haunted ping of a basketball and for the second time that day I caught the far off smell of wildfire.

Then two figures stood under the pagoda-like front entrance—Val and an older woman in a gray pantsuit. They both looked across the courtyard to where I sat in my car.

I rolled down my window and waved but they didn’t wave back. The older woman just urged Val down the steps, through the zen-like rock garden that fronted the school, and toward my car. I got out to meet them. 139

“Val’s uncle?” the woman asked. Her dyed-red hair was bobbed in a way that made her look busy and put-upon.

“Not exactly,” I said. “Avery—Val’s aunt…we live together. For a while now. I mean, I guess I’m kind of an uncle. Not legally though.”

The woman gave me a bleached smile and looked down at Val. Even with her standing there right in front of me I wasn’t sure that I recognized her. She was smaller somehow. Impossibly blonde. Mark’s chin and cheekbones maybe. Debbie’s nonexistent eyebrows.

“Hey Val,” I managed.

“Hey,” a small, hesitant chirp.

She was wearing a t-shirt that said No one puts baby in a corner in black stenciled letters—Debbie’s handiwork, no doubt—and was strapped into a pink vinyl backpack that looked like a giant piece of saltwater taffy.

“You need an ID or anything?” I asked the woman.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said.

She placed an official hand on Val’s shoulder.

“See you tomorrow, Sweetie,” she said.

Val, taking the cue, slipped right out of her backpack and handed it to me. Then, without a word, she opened up my passenger door and slipped into the seat—testing, I think, knowing she wasn’t supposed to be up front. But she closed the door, and the woman and I watched her fasten her seatbelt. Watched her flip down the visor and look at herself in the tiny mirror embedded there. Her tiny round face perfectly framed. 140

“Are we looking for famous people?” Val asked, once we’d slipped into traffic on the 10 and downtown started to slip away.

She was fiddling with some of the junk in my center console—the broken chargers and adaptors, a golf ball or two, the stuffed hedgehog that Avery won from the claw machine outside of the AMC South Bay on Hawthorne. She toed the powdered sugar that Ofer spilled on my carpet.

“I don’t want you to be worried about your dad, Val,” I said, something I’d been practicing on the way to pick her up, the right tone, the right cadence. “He’s a big strong guy and he’ll be back at home and building all those big important things in no time.”

“I know,” she said, smiling like she’d just won something.

She reached up and started adjusting the camera mounted to the dash, the swivel- joint in the plastic mount grinding and letting out little screams.

“Why do you want pictures of other cars?” she asked. “That’s weird.”

I reached out and straightened the HDR. Patted her hand gently away from the camera.

“It’s not really the cars that matter so much as the people in the cars. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you catch someone in the right place at the right time. Everything has to line up perfect. And then it makes everybody money, which makes everybody happy. But you’ve got to be ready for it. So I’m always ready.”

She nodded and there was a long beat where she watched the car parts and fast- food wrappers and neon traffic cones that littered the side of the highway. I could see her 141 head jerk every time she tried to keep her eyes on something stationary out there, the little muscles in her neck twitching and relaxing and twitching and relaxing.

“What if they don’t want it?” she said, her little hands up on the HDR again.

It took everything in me not to reach out and stop her.

“Want what?” I asked.

“To have their picture?”

She turned the power on and then off. Swiveled the camera around back toward me.

“Everyone wants their picture taken,” I said.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I reached out and patted at her hands again. But she wanted to hold the camera, to feel like she was controlling it. She started making little noises to mimic the mechanical clicks of the shots. Then she took up Avery’s stuffed hedgehog again. She rubbed it up against her nose and made a puckered face. She sneezed.

“Bless you,” I said. “You can keep that if you like it. I’m sure your aunt Avery wouldn’t mind. You could take it back to your mom and dad’s later.”

She seemed to consider it. She sat the hedgehog on her knee so that it looked up at me with its sad little plastic eyes.

“My mom calls you ‘the leech’ sometimes.”

“The leech?”

“Mmhmm. Because you leech the famous people.”

“They explained that to you?” 142

She nodded.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Well, how about this? You know back in the day doctors used leeches to make people better. I bet your mom didn’t tell you about that. The leeches would suck out all the bad blood. So maybe I’m one of those good leeches. Sucking out all the nasty shit so that people don’t die.”

“Gross,” she said.

By the time we rolled up to the princess’s compound on Mulholland the shadows cast onto the road by the gate had shifted ninety degrees. They striped Ofer—who crouched there on the sidewalk, propped up against a fire hydrant and his gig bags—in dark shadowy bars. He popped up when he noticed the car.

“One big happy family,” he said, once I’d parked and Val and I stepped out onto the sidewalk to meet him.

“Please,” I said. “She’s going to hang with us for a little while. Help us out. Right,

Val?”

She looked down at the plastic daisies that bloomed from the thongs of her flip- flops. Ofer’s physical presence turned her into a hermit crab and she toed invisible nothings into the concrete.

“And what’s your story?” Ofer said.

But Val wasn’t taking the bait. She just seized up there on the sidewalk, furled up into herself like a fiddlehead. It made me think of Avery when I’d seriously fucked up.

When I’d wounded past the point of speech. 143

A plane droned by dragging an advertisement through the sky but it was too high to read. The same sad animal yipped down in the canyon. And then we heard the mechanical unlocking of the gate—that Pavlovian buzz that sent us both scrabbling for our gear.

The princess came out walking a ten-speed bicycle. Her hair was shoulder-length and blonde, the way she wore it back when she was still touring, though it looked less chemically fried, more natural. A chunky pair of Chanel sunglasses covered most of her face and she wore a Tulane sweatshirt over ripped-to-style jeans.

Ofer crept along the sidewalk, closing in on her, the DVX already up and rolling.

We were all bunched up to one side of the gate like a little welcoming party. Terrible positioning. So I moved out into the street, trying to head her off as she rolled out. She looked a little slumped and pale, more like a writer than an actor, but you could still see what she’d been at one time. That bone structure that made her skin shine at angles. That impossibly narrow waist. She moved out into the street, following the movement of the opening gate, and stopped without having looked to her left, without quite catching sight of us.

And it was when she stopped that I noticed the kid. She had one of those little plastic seats mounted to the back of the bike and strapped into it was a fat, pink baby. The princess swung her leg over the seat, steadied herself before pushing down the slope of the driveway entrance and onto the road. Then she saw me. Firing away. Bearing down.

Thirty frames per second. She saw me, and she flinched. One of her feet got caught between the pedal and the asphalt. I knew she was going to go down. I tried to get to her. 144

To catch her. But it was too late. She came down hard on her hip and elbow. Sunglasses skittering across the road. Baby seat rough-rubbing against the asphalt.

We all froze. Froze until the baby, still strapped into the plastic seat, started wailing away on its side. The princess scrambled on her hands and knees to get to it. She unstrapped the kid and scooped it up under the arms, turning it like a piece of produce to look for bumps and bruises. The baby’s cries amplified—tinny and hollow like a laugh- track. It coughed and wheezed and the princess just kept turning it awkwardly.

“I was practicing,” she said, softly, as if to herself, “just a little practice,” she said.

And I noticed, then, the baby’s eyes—too white and too open—not really eyes at all, just the painted equivalent of eyes. And the skin of the baby’s arms and face—it was the same soft, forgiving plastic that pacifiers were made from. “It was a test run,” she said.

I went to help her up but realized that she wasn’t even talking to me. She was speaking right through me, past me, and when I turned to follow her eyes—there was

Val, standing there on the open drive.

“I can’t get her to stop,” the princess said. “Once she starts, there’s a trick to it.

You have to have her in the perfect position. But I don’t know it and if you don’t know it there’s no other way to get her to stop and she just keeps crying and crying.”

Val stepped forward. With the princess there on her knees, holding the baby out in front of her at arms-length, her and Val were almost the same height.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Val said, chiding her, like she was talking to one of her friends at recess. 145

The princess looked to Val, and then to me. She didn’t seem to notice Ofer sweeping toward her with the DVX. Val held out her arms and the princess only hesitated for a beat before handing the doll over. Val cradled it gently, supported the weight of its neck, the back of its soft skull in the palm of her hand.

“Like this,” she said, angling her body so that the princess could see what she was doing.

Then Val cooed to the doll, made soft clucking noises, until the mechanical cry softened to a whimper and eventually stopped altogether.

The princess smiled. She cupped her hands in a little gesture of thanks.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’ll have to remember.”

All the while Ofer closed in, one hungry smile behind the screen of his DVX, the microphone reaching out from the side of his camera like a tiny helping hand.

“This is great,” he was saying, closing in and bending low. “You’re fine now.

You’re beautiful. You look absolutely amazing.”

“Give her a little space,” I said.

I stepped between them.

“You’re in my shot, Ray,” he said, looking away from his screen and straight at me. “Get the fuck out of my shot, Ray.”

I felt a tug on my sleeve and there was Val, offering me the baby, proud as proud can be.

146

Barium

At first it was something that happened just once in a while, that he’d attribute to carelessness on his part, to the fact that he tended to eat like an animal when very hungry.

He’d hidden the discomfort from his wife, enjoyed long stretches of completely normal dining with friends and family. But then, without much warning, the problem became impossible to shrug off. He found himself unable to eat anything without a drink to wash down each and every bite. And then there was the last straw—his sixty-fifth birthday dinner with his in-laws two weeks ago, when he’d gotten a particularly tough piece of

New York strip stuck in his throat and had to spend the remainder of the evening pacing the bright-tiled bathroom of the Mediterranean restaurant his wife had chosen for the occasion, drinking sips of tap water only to have them come right back up, Beth speaking softly into the door every few minutes, worried that he’d lost consciousness, and him having to assure her, in choked whispers, that everything was fine. He just needed time.

He needed the facilities. He could breathe. He was still among the living. Everything was going to be just fine.

Now he sits in the waiting room of the radiology lab at the clinic outside of town.

Across from him, a woman in a camouflage jacket sleeps soundly, an empty barium cocktail sitting on the table next to her. The bent straw sticking out of the top is ringed with brown lipstick and a prescription label hangs, half-peeled, from the side of the container. A flat-screen television is mounted to the far wall of the waiting room and a news loop shows rockets exploding in night vision somewhere: great green bursts followed by staccato tracers that zip out into the ever-expanding dark. Scott alternates his 147 gaze between the television—noting the stock quotes that scroll the bottom of the screen

(Allergan down 2.12…shit…GM up .17…okay)—and the full wall of windows behind the triage station and receptionist’s desk. The windows are clear except for a single stained-glass pane, split down the middle by a metallic lightening bolt. The sunlight pushes through the stained glass and laps bright blue and lavender pools across the waiting room carpet—amoebic patterns that make Scott slightly nauseous.

“Mr. Hillis?”

A woman in dark maroon scrubs stands in the entrance to the lab. She holds a clipboard and scratches at the back of her head with a cheap Bic pen.

“Scott Hillis?” she says.

Scott lifts himself from his seat and approaches the woman.

“Morning,” she says.

“Good morning,” he says.

“I’ve got your breakfast ready for you,” she says.

For a moment Scott is confused, thinks perhaps that she’s called the wrong patient, but then he remembers the barium container next to the sleeping woman in the camouflage jacket. She’s making a joke. This is a joke, he thinks, processing like a clunky machine.

“Breakfast,” he says, “of course.”

The woman musters a laugh, forced, percussive, and leads him down a corridor and into a dim room cluttered with large beige machinery. On the wall is a rack where lead-padded vests hang like riot gear. He notices a two-tiered rolling cart next to one of 148 the larger machines and on the upper tray of the cart, three Styrofoam cups filled to the brim with a thick white liquid. There is also a small cup containing a single swallow of water, a silver-foiled packet glimmering and resting against the cup like a prize.

“Have a seat,” the woman says.

Scott sits in one of the two plastic chairs under the rack of vests. In an adjoining room filled with computers and shelved chemicals, a young goateed kid whistles while stirring up some more Styrofoam concoctions. There’s a high-pitched bleating from down the hall that comes in five- or six-second intervals. It’s followed by the muted rumble of someone speaking over an intercom.

“I’m going to be drinking that?” Scott says, trying to iron the edge out of his voice.

The woman is putting on one of the lighter-looking vests from the rack. She busies herself with a series of straps and buckles.

“Oh, it’s not all that bad,” she says, in a tone that seems to accuse him of being nothing but a big baby. “Just gulp it down without even thinking about it and you’ll be fine.” She’s brisk in her speech, clipping her words as if she doesn’t have enough time in the day to finish them.

She finishes putting on the vest and then looks at him directly.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she says.

Scott tilts his head. Scans his cerebral Rolodex. He’d had little tricks to help him avoid exactly this kind of situation when he was still a partner at Wilcox & Sheridan— little mnemonic ditties that he’d use to remember the names of clients. But this woman 149 conjures up nothing. She’s his age. Maybe a little bit younger. She fills out her maroon scrubs completely but not in an unpleasant way. In the barren light of the lab there’s something shadowy and drawn about her face—a dusty quality to her straight yellowish hair. She looks like the nurse. Nothing more. But she’s still frowning at him, shifting impatiently in her scrubs, when he notices a small scar, like an asterisk, on her forehead, then the veined rings of greenish-gold that circle the pupils of her eyes, and the clefted notch in her chin, how had he missed that chin!

“Susan?” he says.

For some reason he stands up. There’s an awkward hitch before they half-hug each other. He smells honeycomb and jasmine—a lotion or soap or one of those tinctured scents in tiny brown bottles that they sell at the farmers market Beth drags him to on

Saturdays—a smell that makes him inexplicably hungry.

“Scott Hillis,” she says, tut-tut-tutting him with the tip of her tongue. “Should I even ask?”

He does some panicked calculations. Tries to place Susan. A line seems to arc out in front of him now like one of those artillery tracers zipping across the TV screen in the waiting room, fizzling out at start and finish.

“Thirty years?” he says, finally, “maybe thirty-two?”

Susan nods soberly. There’s a line of fine white hairs around the edges of her mouth, not quite downy. She’s gained a good deal of weight. But a flash: twenty- something-year-old Susan, naked and stretching the long arch of her back in a doorway somewhere (his place? hers? a hotel?), her thigh muscle dimpling above her knee, her 150 breasts pale and large and sloping outward, her dusty yellowish hair draped in front of her face. The image arrives like a puncture wound and Scott has to collect himself before he can even look at her again.

“How have you been?” he manages.

Susan maneuvers around the large machine in the middle of the room, putting it between them. She adjusts knobs and dials with assurance. In her lead-padded vest and maroon scrubs she looks implausible to Scott—a version of someone he once knew intimately, conjured up now by his subconscious, set down out of context by the strange rules of dream logic.

“You know,” Susan says, not bothering to meet his eyes, “just getting by like everyone else I suppose.”

She flutters the fingers of her left hand over the machine and what little light there is in the room catches the glint of her wedding band.

“Married,” she says, “twice. No kids with the first one, which was a relief, believe me. Three kids with Rick—the current one. Two boys and a girl. I’ve been here since last fall when they shut down my clinic upstate. It’s fine I guess.”

She rests her hands on the bed of the machine and leans out toward Scott.

“You?” she says.

He straightens in his chair.

“Good,” he says. “Yeah, great. Also married.”

He lifts his hand to catch the light, but there’s no ring there. His ring is at home, in one of Beth’s jewelry boxes—too small now for his finger, something she likes to 151 tease him about when she comes across it looking for something to wear out at night, or when she’s loaning jewelry to one of their girls—and so he’s stuck waving strangely at

Susan.

“Just retired actually,” he continues. “Buyout package. Lucky, I know, but not sure what I’m supposed to be doing with all the time.”

He laughs but it lands in the silent hum of the lab with something like a thud.

“How nice for you,” she says. “Congratulations.”

He can feel Susan weighing him with her eyes. Cold. Clinical. Setting the broken bone of their acquaintance.

She wipes some invisible thing from the bed of the machine. Seems to contemplate the solid plastic immensity of it. She drifts for a moment and it’s pleasant to watch her lost in herself. But then she’s looking up at him again, something a little unkind in the way her eyes pin him down.

“You make it up to Fox Lake much these days?” she says.

She seems to regret it almost as soon as it’s comes out of her mouth. She blushes a little. Just a quick tinge of color that rises and, just as quickly, disappears. What had he done to this woman? He recalls an overexposed sun, maybe. Gulls crying. Susan splayed comfortably on a bright-striped beach towel. Between them a plastic bag of black cherries—picked up at a roadside farm stand on the way out to the lake—nestled into the sand. He remembers the woman selling the cherries was so old she could barely speak.

She’d smiled at the two of them as if they were an abstract idea. On the beach, Scott plucked them one-by-one from the bag—the stems sticky, barbed at the ends—and 152 dangled them over Susan’s lips. Her her eyes gone behind her too-large sunglasses. Her skin red and sand-scraped. Susan naked. Susan crying. Susan gone.

They’re caught for a moment. Suspended in something strange—in this dim plastic room, of all places—surrounded by all of the x-ray equipment. There’s the smell of something sweet and medicinal in the closed air of the lab. Scott feels that there’s a question he should be asking here. He’s attempting to put this question into words, feels the force of it at the back of his throat, when the door to the lab opens and a bearded man in a short white coat enters.

“Mr. Hillis,” the man says, smiling briskly, first at Scott, then at Susan, “I hear you’re having trouble keeping things down.”

The man offers his hand and Scott takes it. He wants to give the man his name but it’s as if some essential part of his brain has been cauterized.

“Doctor Green,” the man says. “I’ll be monitoring along with Susan this morning.”

He gestures vaguely toward Susan while eyeing the carefully aligned cups on the rolling tray. He leafs through some pages fastened to his chart. Scott tries to will Susan to look at him but she’s cordoned herself to the other side of the lab, into a little den carved out by all of the machinery. She busies herself with electronic settings on the biggest machine, adjusts the slope and position of the platform at its center—a kind of bed that

Scott assumes is reserved for his own body.

“You’re in good hands,” the doctor says, though it seems directed toward no one in particular. He straps himself into one of the most substantial lead-padded vests. “It 153 may take a few minutes to get the right positions between views, but if you just swallow when we tell you to swallow and move how we tell you to move everything should go pretty quickly. Try to keep as still as you can and just leave the rest up to us.”

The doctor ducks his head into the adjoining room and says something unintelligible to the kid with the goatee still mixing concoction under bluish light.

“Is this something I should be worried about?” Scott asks Susan.

He’s talking about the procedure, of course, his symptoms. But as soon as the words are out of his mouth they seem to be about something else.

Susan places the doctor’s chart next to the cups of barium on the rolling tray and starts to fiddle with the angle of another flat screen monitor—this one hung on an adjustable stand next to the Scott’s plastic bed. Black cords and wires trail from the screen and snake deep into the circuitry at the heart of the machine.

“I guess that’s what we’ll find out,” she says.

The doctor comes back in and sits in a much more comfortable-looking seat in front of the monitor. He settles into the seat as if setting out on a long drive.

“Looks like we’re just about ready to get going here,” he says. “It’s pretty simple.

We’re going to put you in a number of positions in front of the x-ray so that we can get a good solid look at your upper GI. As you swallow the barium we should be able to see any signs of strictures or other abnormalities worth worrying about in the esophageal tract. The barium will taste a little nasty at first, but you’ll get used to it. Also, don’t be alarmed tomorrow when you’re stool is bright white. Totally normal. Sound good?”

“Sure,” Scott says. “Sounds good.” 154

“Any questions for us?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All righty, well, hop on up whenever you’re ready,” the doctor says, patting the platform.

Scott mounts the machine awkwardly. The plastic is unforgiving, even colder than it looks, and he tries to make himself comfortable by sprawling flat on his back. His flesh sticks to the plastic and pinches when he tries to adjust.

“RL and RAO,” Susan says from somewhere in the periphery.

“Yes,” the doctor says, “why don’t we try and get the not-so-pleasant positions out of the way first. On your right side, if you wouldn’t mind. With one arm along your side or behind your back and the other over your head like this.”

The doctor contorts his own body in an approximation of the pose he wants Scott to try. He looks inflexible and put-upon, like he’s being handcuffed. Scott tries to mimic the pose on the hard plastic but he has trouble with his right arm, can’t quite get it high enough, angled enough, and suddenly he smells it again—the honeycomb and lavender, the clean talc of Susan’s scrubs—and she’s behind him, one hand clenching his left shoulder, one guiding his right arm beneath his body and behind his back. Scott feels a burning twinge in his shoulder. His right ear is crushed painfully into the ridged platform.

“I know this is uncomfortable,” the doctor says, “but the positions get better after this. I promise you.” 155

Susan circles around the machine and takes one of the Styrofoam cups from the tray. Then she’s back behind him, lowering the dangerously full cup in front of his face, just inches from his lips.

The doctor pushes a button on the monitor and Scott can see the insubstantial traces of his own anatomy, white-lining their way from out of the darkness. There’s something familiar and intimate about seeing it there on the screen in front of him.

“All right,” the doctor says, “take that first good swallow now.”

Susan brings the rim of the cup to his mouth, tilts it back—too quickly it seems— and the barium is there against his lips, some of it missing the mark and running down the side of his face in a slow drip. It’s milky and glue-like and he has to force himself to swallow it.

On the screen, Scott watches the white mass mercury-slide down the ghosted lines of his insides. It happens so fast that he can’t imagine the doctor being able to see anything of importance—normal or abnormal—in the way it traces its way from the top of the screen to the bottom.

“Nice,” the doctor says. “Again.”

Again Susan upends the cup and the liquid is there too fast. The taste is slightly familiar now. The taste of zero nourishment. Staid air. Liquid chalk. That white mass sliding across the screen into nothing.

“Again,” the doctor says.

But this time, when Susan brings the cup to his lips, he balks.

“Hold on,” he says. “Just wait a minute.” 156

He tries to shift his weight on the platform, to ease the burning in his shoulder.

He’d dislocated it once as a kid and every now and then the old injury liked to reassert itself. But he feels Susan taking hold of his hand, which is splayed out uncomfortably beneath and behind him, numbed by the weight of his own body. She gives the hand a quick squeeze. Deft. Insistent.

“Come on now,” the doctor says. “We can move on after this one.”

Scott tries to squeeze back in retaliation, but his hand is nearly asleep now, a faulty satellite cut off from the dense pull of who he is. What was it? Why can’t he remember? It was a fling. The beach. Cherries. A motel with lots of vacancy. The sneaking away and the coming back. But he honestly can’t recall how it had all come undone in the end. How had they ended it? He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember.

“Go ahead, Mr. Hillis,” Susan says, leaning over him to assert her presence, blocking out the overhead light. His hand is so numb now that he’s not even sure she’s still squeezing it, though he thinks maybe, possibly, he can feel her nails digging into the soft flesh of his palm, these dull bites urging him on.

She tilts the cup once again and the liquid comes even faster this time, though he’s ready for it. He’ll get it all down.

“Swallow,” she says, and he does, and there’s that flash across the screen once more, that indecipherable blip, and he waits for them to tell him what they think is wrong.

157

The Healing Properties of This Place

This morning, setting my tables in the upper terrace of the racetrack, I watch a scrawny chicken flip-flop on the inner turf like an air-drowned fish. No one knows how it got on the track. It could have wandered in from one of the neighboring farms, or bolted from a backside shed where the grooms stacked them in milk crates to make a few extra bucks selling the runty eggs. I watch while it spins and shakes its sad wings at one of the outriders—a young, brown girl who tries to coax the thing into her padded riding helmet.

Down at the end of the terrace, Ziggy, in his wife-beater and black silk-striped pants, perches on a stool behind the bussing station. His suit jacket and tuxedo shirt hang behind him on the linen rack, his unknotted bow tie slung over his neck like something dead. He pulls from an unfiltered Pall Mall and shakes his silver head down at the track where the chicken and the outrider seem to be chasing each other in closing circles.

"Eighty-six the chicken," Ziggy calls.

It's eight o'clock. The gates haven't opened yet, but there are a couple of day- tripping families standing down by the rail. They watch the last horses cool down from their morning works. The PA crackles across the grandstand and clubhouse, reminding employees to punch in.

Ziggy pulls himself up from his stool with an involuntary grunt and comes down to where I'm polishing my silver. Some of the forks have clots of yellow gunk stuck between the tines, steam-hardened from the giant industrial washers down in the kitchen, so I do what I can with a linen napkin and some red-wine vinegar. 158

"I don’t know why they bother," I say, holding up one of the forks for Ziggy's inspection.

He sits across from me at the four-top and twists the gold and onyx ring that he wears on his pinkie finger. Ziggy isn't quite the double-barreled asshole most of the captains working the terrace are, but that doesn't mean I don't triple-check my slips at the end of each day. Money moves this place, and everyone in Saratoga is on the make come

August, when the meet starts to wind down, and the money dries up. We feel it like the suck of sand through a sinkhole.

"If we’re making any dough today," he says, still twisting his ring, "I need you sharp on VIP."

"Sure," I say. "No worries."

He takes off his ring and taps it on the tabletop. Slips it back on.

"Have an iced bucket of spring on seven before they start seating,” Ziggy says.

He sighs and looks down to the track where the outrider has managed the chicken into her helmet and is jogging with the whole mess toward the bridle path. A single white feather skates the dirt. “Some lemon and lime too, but not the way that mope Stubbs does them.

Dig up a paring knife from the kitchen and we'll thin-slice here at the station."

“I know the drill, Zig,” I say.

Ziggy’s one of those that gets to reinvent themselves for a couple months out of the year with this gig. The rest of the time he’s a should-be-retired shop teacher out toward Mechanicville. A high school security guard for part of the week. But during the six weeks or so of the meet, in his penguin suit and hair oil and guinea jewelry, Ziggy 159 gets to be a make-believe tough guy. He watches me working the linen over the silverware for a few minutes, then reaches across the table and lifts my chin so that he can see my eyes.

"You fucked up, kid?"

I catch a quick whiff of Old Spice and tobacco, something hard and metallic, like the dirty loose change at the bottom of the cup-holders in my car.

"I got you," I say, pulling my chin away. “Worry about your own weak game.”

My brain feels doused in kerosene and Ziggy looks like he’s counting the burst blood vessels in my eyes. He does this. Tries to crack me open with one of his third- period-shop-room stares. Up on the next level the other captains are shining their shoes and running black plastic combs through their thinning hair. They whisper like priests way up there.

"You look like you shaved with a rock this morning."

"Please," I run a hand along my jaw. “This shit is tight.”

I go back to working my silver. Ziggy twists his ring. After a while he gets up, another quick grunt, grabs his shirt and jacket from the linen rack, and climbs the stairs to join the other captains by the betting cages. “It’s gonna get harder,” he says to me on the way past, and I can tell he has to hold himself back from putting a hand on my shoulder.

“That bounce back,” he says.

All things being equal, I should have called in sick this morning. Three hours ago

I was driving hot laps around the lake outside of town, stuffed into Gianna's rust-rotted

Geo Metro with two other girls from the track—concession workers both—a head full of 160 bad coke and a box of white zinfandel. I thought I'd land in bed with all three girls, even though Gianna was my real girl, and one of the concession workers smelled like grease from the burger and cheese-steak flat-grill she worked by the paddock. But somewhere around five in the morning, with me driving the girls around the lake, all chirping like birds and watching the sun come up, everything started to feel like one of those old reel- to-reel projectors when the tape spends itself and starts slapping back at the machine. We ended up, all four of us, fishing by the boat ramp with chunks of Slim Jim and a little kid's push-button rod and reel—a mystery prop left in our apartment months ago on a similar night—catching and releasing fat bluegills and smallmouth bass until the coke and wine were gone and we were all sick of looking at each other.

“You need to start thinking about this like real life, Anthony,” Gianna said, catching my arm before I could open the car door that morning, before we could ditch the two flat-grill girls at their motel off of Route 9. “Everything’s coming attractions with you.” She was grinding her teeth. Her pupils barely there at all. “It’s no way to live.”

Gianna’s workflow: observation, summary, attack. Ideal for the Thai kickboxing that she teaches to middle-aged women down at the convo center. This is one of Gianna’s things now—zero tolerance when it comes to helplessness.

Up at the servers' bar Stubbs already has a cold ginger and bitters sweating on a cocktail napkin that reads: Ziggy was here. He shoots me a wink and slides a couple ibuprofens across the bar. In the corner by the ice machine a bevy of can-tan college girls, the ones who make a killing working the suites in their tight black pants and men's extra- 161 small button-downs, laugh and double-check their bankrolls. I cup the pills into my mouth and take a drink.

"Whiiiiiskey's only good in bottles," Stubbs croons in a motherly kind of singsong.

Hawaiian-shirted Stubbs is fifty-three, which is sixty-five in Canadian Club years.

In the off-season he slices deli meat at the Price Chopper and they make him wear one of those little paper hats. I’ve seen him there. I can't look at him without thinking about my old man down in Naples—not the actual Naples, but the Florida one—sucking back

Goslings and Mr. Pibb, watching the races in simulcast while mom tries to get him to eat something. My mother would be right at home in Gianna's kickboxing class.

"Zinfandel’s only good in boxes," I say, shaking my empty glass at him.

He tops it off from the soda gun, adds a few drops of angostura and a wedge of lime. We've been having lime problems all summer—a tough growing season down south

I guess—so when I squeeze the wedge into the drink it produces only a few drops of what

I need.

I take my drink up into the men's room and lock myself in one of the stalls, pull out my car keys and what's left of one of the baggies from last night and fix myself a couple of bumps to clear my head. In the stall next to me someone turns the pages of a newspaper and makes soft whimpering noises like they’re crying.

When I come back down to our station, everything looks a little crisper. I can see the line of patrons forming at the maitre d's stand: the men in seersucker suits and porkpie hats, the women pasteled up like Easter eggs. The upper terrace. It's where the real money 162 is. Back a few summers, when I first started on, they moved me around to wherever they needed warm bodies. There were the private parties in the Paddock Club tent, the casual dining down on the deck, the joke tables by the Carousel and Diamond Jim's. You could have a decent day at any of these stations, depending on the relative ups and downs of your players—but the terrace was where you wanted to be. Up here you didn't have to worry about getting stiffed at the end of the day if some slob went and lost his entire bankroll. Owners, trainers, gangsters, politicians. The corporations with tables booked for every day of the meet. You kept your eyes peeled for that black no-limit AmEx and you ran it up to that point just before someone might check an itemized tab.

"Edgy today," Ziggy says, spooking me from his low-down stool tucked into the busser's station. He does this sometimes—materializes from nowhere, pulls me back into myself just when I’m starting to flake.

"Too much coffee yesterday or something," he says, massaging his left forearm.

"Last night, you know what I did? I stared at the ceiling for about six hours. There's mold up there I think. I never noticed it before. Like the plague up there hanging over my bed and I just notice this. Six hours of staring up and then I get dressed and come back here.”

He points to the rubber mat under his feet. The shiny toes of his wingtips.

“The end of the meet makes me nuts," he says.

Manny—who they fire every year for taking bribes, then rehire at the start of each meet—saunters down the steps with a young couple in tow. He seats them at table four, a six-top right over the finish line, and the guy palms him some cash before taking his seat and staring out over the track to the gull-covered infield. The guy is maybe in his mid to 163 late thirties and wears a white-on-white seersucker suit and a white fitted baseball cap.

He sports gold-framed Ray Bans. The woman is Asian—Japanese maybe—and much younger. Twenty-two or twenty-three. My age. She wears a short silver dress that looks like it's made of chain mail, and sandals with leather straps that cut into the flesh of her calves. Her hair looks painted onto her scalp.

"And it begins," Ziggy says.

He grabs a couple of menus from the drawer in the bussing station and bends to check his reflection in the mirror propped behind the water glasses. He missed a small patch of iron stubble under his chin shaving this morning but I don't tell him. Bowties are adjusted once then twice. Spines straightened. I follow on Ziggy's heels.

"Afternoon, folks," Ziggy says.

They look up at Ziggy like maybe they're lost and Ziggy’s got a map. There's something unreal about them up close. Something stagy. It makes me want to check the periphery for a camera crew. Which is when I recognize the guy—this bit actor with a regular supporting role on one of the pay networks about West Coast gangsters. I don't remember his name but I remember his character's name: Smalls or Smally or Small

Time. As in, Don’t be fooled by the name…Smalls will fuck your shit up.

Ziggy launches into his terrace-as-the-lap-of-luxury routine, and I don't notice when he introduces me as their server because I can't take my eyes off of the guy's date.

She looks up at Ziggy with bright black eyes ringed in green liner, flits a set of long, fake lashes. Her cheekbones jut out beneath her eyes like ledges you could fall from. 164

"Anthony’s going to take real good care of you," Ziggy says, and she's blinking up at me with those long lashes while Smalls scrolls through the messages on his phone.

"Out at Hollywood Park" she says, leaning her head out toward the track, “last month. We saw them put one down that got itself tangled up in the gate. I don’t want to see that today.”

I nod and look to Ziggy who nods and looks to Smalls.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say, but I don’t laugh because she’s not joking.

“O and C in a tall glass, please,” she says, rummaging now through a sleek silver purse.

"She means mimosas," says Smalls, still not looking up from his phone. "How many times I have to say it, Sym. Mi-mo-sas."

"Sure," I say, “two of those.” My voice wound tight.

Smalls clicks off his phone and slips it into the breast pocket of his jacket. He takes off the Ray Bans and looks up at me. His left eye is slightly swollen. The lid and cheek are the yellowish purple of a shiner three or four days healed. He smiles like he wants me to notice it then slips the glasses back on.

"Tell you what," he says, "bring Symphony her juice and bring me a cold bottle of

Grey Goose and a chilled cognac glass."

"Sure," I say, willing myself not to look at the guy's date. "Anything else?"

He puts a hand on her chain-metal thigh and strokes at it like a pet python.

"Ice," he says. "Keep that ice coming."

Word spreads quick. 165

The college girls sneak from their private suites and peer down from the upper terraces to get a peek of Smalls and his date. Other diners aim the tiny black eyes on their cell phones and snap pictures on the sly. To their credit, Smalls and his date don't seem to pay much attention. They sit and sip their ice-cold drinks. They watch the horses when they break on the far side of the turf, moving in unison like cardboard cutouts slotted into a greased track, and Symphony produces a tiny pair of golden opera glasses to track the horses on the backstretch.

Around the fifth race she orders an ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce and a cup of maraschino cherries on the side. Smalls wants more ice for his vodka.

"I like your dress," I say, before heading off for the kitchen, and I know it's stupid as soon as it comes out of my mouth, but I can't seem to help myself.

Smalls takes a sip of his iced vodka and smiles up at me. He reminds me of a pug or a bulldog—one tightly coiled muscle bred to pounce.

"You like her dress?" he says, cracking ice between his molars.

Symphony doesn’t seem to be paying us any attention. She picks up her opera glasses by the long golden stem and swivels them into viewing position. She peers through them and out across the track to where the green backside sheds all sit in a row.

It's too far to know what she sees out there, but I know the grooms are hot-walking their entries on the old rusted carousels, some of their little brown kids playing in a cloud of backside dust.

"Do people live there?" she asks, still looking through the glasses. “In those tiny houses?” 166

"They're not supposed to," I say, "but they do."

Smalls shakes his glass in my direction and I know I'm overstaying my welcome by a long shot now. I catch Ziggy giving me the eye from down at the bussing station. He slashes at the air under his chin. There’s something I can say here, something easy and scripted that would remind us all of our roles and set things right, but I just can’t bring myself to do this.

"You know,” I say, something fizzing and snapping at the back of my skull, “I waited on the governor here once.”

I lift my chin up toward a higher level of the terrace.

“Right up there. And the thing is…” I’m reeling a little, backsliding, toe- stretching toward a hold. “When you wait on a governor—any highly ranked public official really—the thing is…they do these background checks on you. Family. Records.

Political affiliations. That kind of thing. One of the secret service guys—earpiece, buzz cut, gun wedged up under his pit—this dude corners me at the bussing station right over there, three hours before the big guy arrives. Asks me about family connections, if you know what I mean,” I try my best insider’s smile, “asks me about a party I’d been to a year-and-a-half ago down in Albany. Asks me if I’m still hanging around with any of the people down there. Their names. How I know them. Whether I’d ever traveled to such and such before. If I know this guys or that guy,” I’m losing it now, this plate spinning mile-high up on a pole, and so I change tack. “But I guess they can’t be too careful? After all,” I say, “he’s an important person. Who knows who I am. Where I been.” 167

I feel a puff of hot air at my neck and Ziggy is leaning into me. Take a powder, he spits, under his breath. Then to Smalls and Symphony: “Everything golden here, folks?”

Smalls sizes me up. Gives a little nod. But I can feel Symphony’s eyes too—like

I’m an old dress she found tucked into the back of her closet, one she used to wear all the time back in the day, but that she’d completely forgotten about.

Two before the feature race—some half-million dollar purse named after a rich dead lady—I put in orders on cashier's row and then duck out to Hialeah. This is what we call the glorified fire escape off the server's bar. Stubbs is smudging a cigar into the bottom of a cocktail glass when I get out there. His shirt is untucked in the back and he's got some yellowish stains under his pits. I prop the milk crate in the door to keep it from locking on us. He lights up when he sees it's me.

"Heard you’re on Hollywood today," he says. "Some score."

He rubs at the fat slope of his shoulder.

"Should be a money-maker, no? With that bottle service?"

I give him a half shrug.

"Wouldn't be the first time I got stiffed by a movie star here," I say. Which is one of the ground rules here: never let on to what your card looks like on a given day. Too many people to tip out—the bussers if you want your tables cleared quick, the bartenders if you want them to pay you any kind of attention in the swarm, the cashiers, the line- cooks down on the grilling station—and people can’t take from you what they don't know about. 168

From the perch on Hialeah you can see the bridle path snaking back toward the paddock and the jockey's quarters. There are picnic tables set up around the grounds and clusters of televisions mounted to canopied posts where people gather to watch the same races that are happening just around the corner. A line of mounted horses come down the path. They're heading out to where the lead horses will meet them at the track entrance and guide them out to the post. Their hooves beat up small puffs of dust. The jockeys' silks remind me of the spent pregnancy tests at the bottom of the plastic garbage pail in our bathroom back home—the whites and pinks and blues—some chemical inside

Gianna that causes one color to pop up over another. We’ve been making a conscious effort when it comes to our health. We're trying to tap into the healing properties of this place—a place where, back in the day, people would send their relatives when they started coughing up blood or lost control of their muscles. Something to do with the air.

The water. You can't go into a bar or restaurant downtown that doesn't nod in some way to the old hoods and hustlers that have been coming up here for a hundred years; men who—when they weren't gambling or whoring or finding an angle—sat in the lime-lined spring baths to ease their gout, or drank the sulfur-smelling water that bubbles up from the ground all around town to settle their stomachs. Gianna says that if we can balance ourselves on a molecular level, so that our insides come closer to matching the world we have to deal with on the outside, then we've got a fighting chance of being happy. This is her theory. Molecular happiness. She sends me down to the mineral springs three times a week with plastic gallon jugs, even though I can't bring myself to drink more than a 169 couple sips at a time. It's not the taste so much as the look of the spring once I get down there—like a giant sore growing up out of the earth, all weepy and mineral-stained.

"Maiden special weight?" I ask Stubbs.

He picks up a program from the floor and turns the pages.

"New York breds," he says. "Mile and a sixteenth on the turf, non-winners of two since January."

I nod like I know it just from looking at the horses, which would be impossible.

Out on the path one of the entries rears up and unseats the rider, who rolls on the path before scrambling to his feet. His white silks are smudged with dirt and he looks pissed about it. A groom grabs the horse by the bit and cups a hand over its muzzle, strokes the side of its neck. Stubbs circles something in the program.

"I'm thinking about following the circuit down to Gulfstream in the fall," Stubbs says. "Don't you got family down there?"

"My folks," I say. "Two hours west in Naples. So I've been to Gulfstream. It's a nice track. You’d fit right in." I lean back on the rail. We're four flights up in Hialeah and

I feel like a string is attached to the lining of my stomach and that someone is tugging at it. "I’ve thought about it before," I say, though I haven’t, not really. But I do now. Palm trees. That coconut smell of Banana Boat. The buzz of the boats cruising the inter- coastal. It’s strange, I think, people following horses from place to place to place. The same but a little different all over—this money trail dog-legging its way across the country. 170

Stubbs runs a hand over his mouth and I can see the sweat on his upper lip, beaded up like drops on a cocktail glass. His skin looks poached in the sun.

"It would be a nice change of scene anyway,” he says. “I don't know if I can live through another upstate winter."

He makes an attempt at tucking his shirt back in, but the waist of his pants are too tight and it ends up just looking bunched and wrinkled around his thick middle. I can see the lip of his pale stomach where the shirt separates under his belly button.

“Back to it," he says, and he’s gone.

I check my phone and there's a text from Gianna that says she's teaching an intermediate double tonight down at the convo center—Thai kickboxing—which means she won't be home when I get done. Talk later lets get on the same pg. it says. I wonder if she feels as terrible as I do, if she's able to even use her head without feeling the machinery grinding away up there. I consider telling her about my Hollywood. I have it in my mind that she likes the show Smalls is in. But then I think about the guy’s date again, the way those leather straps cut into her calves, the way that metal dress outlines her body.

Back at table four, Hollywood is getting quietly and hopelessly loaded. Smalls has managed to work his way through three-quarters of a bottle of Grey Goose, and even though he asked for two full bowls of ice, he only plops a single cube in each drink.

Symphony barely touches her ice cream sundae. It just melts in the sun while she plucks maraschino cherries out of the bowl. She's gone from champagne giddy and helium- buzzed to bored in a matter of hours, and Smalls seems to want to whack her for it. 171

When I clear her sundae cup and three of her empty champagne flutes she reaches out and touches my forearm. She looks up at me like she’s boring down on my soul.

“Where’s a girl get a recharge around here?” she asks, softly. She touches a finger to the side of her nose.

Smalls has a significant nest of ripped betting slips sitting in front of him and he sifts through the pile like he's looking for something underneath it all. He doesn’t seem to register that I’m even standing here.

I scan the deck.

"Yeah," I say, blood pounding away at my temples, “I might be able to hook you up.”

Down in the bussing station Ziggy is sneaking a Pall Mall; I can just make out his wingtips sticking out behind the condiment rack, a cloud of smoke rising up above the station. I jerk my head up toward the betting cages where there's a low-key handicapped bathroom that no one really uses.

"Gimme five," I say and her smile wrecks me.

I check on a couple of other tables, but it's getting toward the end of the day and most of them just want their checks or some free water to wind down the afternoon. I tell one of the bussers to handle the water requests and drop checks at my two-tops. On the way to the upper terrace my heart is like a speed bag in my chest. I thumb the baggie in my pocket, reassuring myself that it's still there, and when I look back I can see, two terraces down, Symphony following me with her eyes. 172

No one is in the handicapped bathroom and so I slip in and bolt the door behind me. I throw some water on my face and then pat myself dry with the brown paper towels stacked by the sink. The pulpy smell of the paper towels reminds me of fooling around with Gianna in the C-hallway faculty bathroom at Kennedy Central. We'd sometimes skip out on second period and meet each other there. Even these days, all I have to do is think about waiting for Gianna in that bathroom; imagine her sneaking out of class and moving through those empty hallways—everyone else sitting through something bunk and endless—and it's enough to make me crazy.

I take the baggie out and hold it up to the light. There's probably enough for a few decent bumps each, but nothing that's going to get either of us rocked. I fix myself a tiny key bump, wet my fingertips, and pinch between my nostrils, rubbing the moisture up into the walls of my nose. I'm gumming the residue when I hear a faint knock on the other side of the door.

"Occupied," I say, a slight hitch to my voice.

"It's me," I hear, and the way she says me, like I'm supposed to know something about that me.

I open the door and there she is—chain metal dress and all—tapping her fingernails on the wooden door frame and blinking those long, fake lashes. I realize that she's at least half a head taller than me—all skinny legs and elongated torso.

"We doing this or what?" she says.

I step back into the bathroom and she follows me in. She closes and locks the door behind her. Words are failing me big time and so I just pull the baggie from my 173 pocket, offering it up in the palm of my hand. She looks a little disappointed when she holds the baggie up to the light. She flicks at it with her middle finger.

"Key?" she says, and I hand her my car keys.

She chooses the key to the apartment that I share with Gianna and scoops up half of the baggie in one go. She places the little mound under her left nostril and takes it up in one quick blast, pinching her nose and throwing back her head like she'd just taken an uppercut. Her eyes are still fixed on the fluorescent tubes x-ray flickering in the ceiling mounts when she hands back the baggie.

"What’s your name again?" she asks, lowering her chin.

It's like she's seeing me for the first time all day.

I cover up my nametag with my hand.

"Guess," I say.

She smiles and there’s a waxy sheen to her face now. Here skin is pore-less. I’ve never seen someone so unreal in my life.

"Wait—don't tell me. I can do this," she says.

She places the tips of two fingers at each temple. She closes her eyes and the fake lashes come to rest gently on the upper reaches of her cheeks. They look like little living things resting there. I have to fight the urge to pluck one off.

"Quinn," she whispers, sucking in a breath.

"That's it exactly," I say. "Unreal."

She smiles and I notice how thin and straight her lips are. 174

"I don’t know," she says, "not really. Any name I said would have been right. I just needed to name you and now I did. Welcome to the world."

She tilts her head toward the mirror and checks her nostrils for traces of powder.

"You're looking at me like you want to pick your teeth with my bones," she says.

"Sorry,” I say. “You're just kind of an amazing looking person."

The way this comes out sounds more like a diagnosis than a compliment.

"Is that your real name—Symphony?"

She takes a step toward me and tugs at the chain-mail hem of her skirt.

"What do you think?" she says.

I take the moment to dig another bump from the baggie—a small one, barely a grain or two on the end of the key—and then hand the baggie back to her. It’s this ritual I know and that I’m thankful for it. I figure as long as there's still something in the bottom of the bag, some small trace of dust, we can stay in here, doing this forever.

"Does Quinn have a girlfriend?" she says.

"Quinn does," I say.

"Does Quinn love his girlfriend?"

"Does Symphony love her actor boyfriend?"

She laughs and hugs herself tight around her flat chest. I look at the sharp lines of her collarbones, the way they slope down to the thin blades of her shoulders. She looks easily breakable.

"Joshua's has intimacy issues," she says. “He doesn’t sleep at night.” 175

The name, when she says it, is like a release valve. She might have said abracadabra. There's an actual physical change in the room. She can feel it too and she hugs herself tighter. It’s cramped and warm in here and smells like wet dirt.

"What's girlfriend's name?" she says, the play going from her voice.

"Gianna," I say.

The baggie is empty and now we're just two people stuck in a bathroom together, which I knew would happen, but it seemed to happen too fast.

Then someone knocks on the door.

"Occupied," Symphony says in a shrill falsetto.

But whoever is out there knocks again. There’s a pause and we both stop breathing. Then knocks riddle the other side of the door, a bass-beat pounding that rattles the hinges and echoes off the tiles and porcelain sink. A muted voice comes through the wood. Sym. Symphony. Open the door, Sym. Symphony looks at me wide-eyed. But it's like this is all setup for a scene in a movie, like we’ve gotten our cue, cameras rolling, and we’re ad-libbing our way through to the other side. I know you're in there, Sym. Open the door you little cokehead trick. Symphony lets out a series of quick choked laughs.

She backs into my body and I feel how cold she actually is. I swear to god, Sym— There's a thud of a body hitting the door. The slight creak of wood. I'm not dealing with this shit anymore. I swear to god.

"Okay," I say, putting my hands on her hips. The chain metal dress nips at my fingertips, but I can feel the vibration of her body beneath it. I can smell the medicine of her body lotion, something sweet and cool that seems fear-released, because I swear I can 176 see traces of it in the air—these free-floating, half-invisible nothings that her body sends up. There's another thud against the door. A separation in the frame. I'm coming in there,

Sym. You know that. The molecules multiply. They buzz all around us. Open up, the voice says, cause either way I'm coming in.

177

By Sea or Breeze or Bird

Three years ago, when Georgina Ostrovsky bought Rogers Island—one of the bigger in the archipelago chain, the one that marked the inland channel—Vincent didn’t think much of it. After all, it was a free country. If she had the twenty-two million to spare then good for her. Sure it was inconvenient to have to work around the crews of

Salvadorian landscapers that carted backhoes and potted palms out to Rogers on small flat decks and pontoon skiffs. Sure Vincent thought it ridiculous when, making a run around the south side of the island one morning, he noticed a private nine-hole miniature golf course tucked into the pink granite shelf of bedrock. The Tuscan fountain on the west side of the island that glowed blue and purple and neon green like a Las Vegas pit- stop may not have been to his taste, and the swan- and dragon-shaped paddleboats that floated creepily in her mini marina may have looked like relics from a dying carnival ride, but, like his father was prone to say in his failing old age: money wins, money wins.

Even his father—god rest—would surely have seen the writing on the wall two years ago when she purchased Phelps, Jensen, and Cut-In-Two East. Last year it was

Reel and Cut-In-Two West. This fall, Belden's and East Crib. You knew when she closed on another property because within days a galvanized flagpole would go up, a white flag bearing some kind of family emblem—a single green tree in a circle of white, like the logo for some new-age, green-energy, tech company—whipped by the breeze that blew in off of Long Island Sound.

"There has to be something illegal about it, no? Some kind of monopoly law?" 178

This to his ex-wife Filomena, who he'd run into unexpectedly at the Thimble

Creek Market one Saturday morning in early June. He’d been building his way up to a small reprieve in alimony payments, but got stuck in the same old piteous rut describing what he'd come to call the “old widow's real estate boondoggle.”

Mena wasn't much interested in anything Vincent had to say these days. She rolled her purple press-ons across the slab-marble tabletop, stared absently through the window to where the islands broke up the open sound like bumpers on a horizon-sized billiard table.

"Choppy out there today," she said, not bothering to meet his eyes.

Vincent felt a premonitory pang of nausea. Unbelievable really, that after forty- six years on the sound he'd just begun to experience the particular hell that was sea- sickness—a roiling, swelling plague that came out of nowhere that spring and showed no signs of flagging, even with the healthy doses of Dramamine he chewed and swallowed each morning with his black gas station coffee.

"I'm losing all of my steady fares," Vincent said.

"Since when have your fares ever been steady?"

"You know what I mean," he said.

"It's a free country, Vincent. What can you do? She wants to buy islands then she buys islands. No use whining about it. And definitely no use trying to put the bite on me,"

Mena said.

She drove Vincent nuts. Saw right through him. Even now, three and a half years after their divorce, he felt like a child pleading his case. 179

"I'm talking to a lawyer about it," he said. "A specialist."

"Sure you are."

One of the pony-tailed Market girls brought over a cup of coffee and a toasted bagel and set it down in front of Mena. The girl wore nonexistent denim cutoffs, her tan more like some kind of spiritual inner glow. She lingered there over the table, as if waiting for something.

"I’m sorry," the girl said, "but I just have to say—you have the most beautiful hair."

Mena gave her a curt smile.

"I know," she said. "Thank you."

The girl stood looking down at the two of them. Then, when Mena repositioned the bagel on her paper plate, the she turned and hightailed it back to the kitchen.

"Your hair does look very nice today," Vincent said.

"Vincent, please—do us both a favor and cut the bullshit. I let you have alimony instead of child support because I knew you weren't the type that needed chasing down. I knew you could use the tax break. Don't prove me wrong. You're better than that."

She looked out toward the islands again. White caps were breaking even in the channel and Vincent knew that it was going to be a long day. He hoped the breeze would slack before noon.

"I need to get to work," said Mena.

He hadn't even noticed that she was wearing her salon clothes: the utilitarian black clogs, the black server's pants, the zebra-print blouse cut just low enough to show 180 off her paid-for tan—tip incentive for the business types from the office park who frequented her salon on their lunch breaks or after work. She wore the delicate gold chain that their son, Donny, had given her for her birthday last year—a chain Vincent had helped him pick out and had paid for down at Island Treasures uptown. It looked cheap.

Easy to break in the morning light.

“You’re loveable, Vincent, but you should know it’s a love in short doses. I don’t mean that as an insult. Just something you should know about yourself if you don’t already. Don’t press your luck.”

Mena began gathering herself as if to leave, though she’d barely touched her breakfast. She unslung the leather strap of her purse from the back of her chair. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin, leaving little cinnamon blooms on the cheap paper. She stood up, and, as if on cue, the wind gusted outside, rattling the assortment of wood and metal chimes that hung from the Market’s tattered awning.

“You better go find those fares,” she said.

She pushed through the screen door, the hinges groaning, the door snapping closed behind her.

* * *

Vincent walked down past the small town beach, St. Paul's Episcopal across the street, past dog-shit park where two kids sat smoking a joint on the sea wall, past the post office and the pink granite water fountain and the Evinrude engine shop, and finally 181 down to the dock, where he hoped Donny would already be prepping the boats for the first morning runs. On the slatted floor of the gazebo that marked the entrance to the docks, two seagulls fought over a cracked channel whelk, stabbing their beaks into the soft flesh of the whelk and letting out harsh throaty cries to ward each other off.

These days Vincent, Donny, and a revolving third crew member worked a two- boat fleet. The boats were twenty-foot Whalers that Vincent got for a song up at the police auction in Old Lyme. They piloted runs on the hour, carted out groceries and cold beer, delivered foil-lined heat bags full of oven-fresh pizza and stuffed breads. A small operation, granted, but a necessary one for all of the folks who spent their summers in the cottages—cedar shake and piling-perched—built into the granite outcroppings of pitch pine and blackberry brambles and other hang-tough plants whose seeds had to be carried in by sea or breeze or bird from the mainland.

Occasionally a party might rent out one of the boats for an evening and ask to be ferried along the coast up to Indian Neck where they'd get fall-down drunk at Lenny's or at the Owenego Club. Vincent or one of his two boys would be there when the party came stumbling out of the club around midnight, stutter stepping the narrow concrete pier that jutted from the club's terraced lawn like a stiff finger. Vincent made it clear that he had no qualms about leaving without customers come midnight, but he always stuck around the extra fifteen or twenty minutes, the time it took for folks to realize they'd be stranded on the mainland, a two-mile swim between them and their summer beds.

"You're late," Donny said, popping up from behind the tilted head of the Merc engine. He had lines of sweat running down his forehead and Vincent knew the kid must 182 be hung over. He was going away in the fall to a good college that Vincent would never be able to afford, and the summer was turning into something like one long extended goodbye party between him and his friends.

"The boss is allowed to be late.”

Vincent rubbed a thumb over the aluminum time-table posted at the ramp entrance to their slip. Someone had spray-painted the phrase eat me raw with a wooden spoon over the launch times and prices. Vincent would have to use a wire brush and some thinner on it later.

“You’re looking a little parched,” Vincent said.

Donny let out a half-laugh. He was re-coiling the anchor line at the bow. Little pieces of dried seaweed flaked off the line and drifted to the deck. Out in the channel a small barge puttered by with a Bobcat mini and a wheelbarrow full of shovels and rakes chained to the deck. Vincent and Donny watched it chug along as if following the slow crawl of a funeral procession.

"I’ll be fine once we get going," Donny said.

Vincent clopped down the aluminum ramp, his footsteps ringing hollow over the lapping water. He watched the long, stringy muscles in Donny's arms tighten and relax as he coiled the anchor line. Vincent placed a foot on the side of the boat and pushed so that the boat moved away from the slip, stopping only when the slack in the lines was spent.

He checked the bumpers hanging over the sides. The front had been loosening up on him in the night so that some mornings, when he came to start his runs, it was just floating there in the water, nothing protecting the hull of the boat from the harsh scrape of the 183 slip. He was sure that Donny was taking the boat out at night without asking his permission, that he was too drunk by the end of his little joyrides to tie the lines properly.

"You know you’re going to have to buckle down up there this fall," Vincent said.

“Don’t think I’m shelling out money so you can drink and get your dick wet for four years.”

Donny plopped down on the cushioned cooler mounted to the front of the center console. He lifted a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee from the deck and took a long drink.

He was nearly a foot taller than Vincent and most of it had come in his last year of high school. He was a bright kid and Vincent loved him, but sometimes he wanted to pinch him until he cried out. He was just so damned sure of himself, this kid. It made Vincent worry.

"I will do little but buckle," Donny said. He shook the dregs at the bottom of his coffee. "Flag’s up over on East Crib. Saw it last night," he said.

"The Franciscos sold out?" Vincent said.

Donny nodded. He popped the plastic lid on his coffee cup and dumped the dregs over the side of the boat. Vincent felt a familiar wash of panic, like the onset of a drug.

The Franciscos were one of Vincent's lifelines: a big, rich, Catholic family with so many kids and grandkids that there were bound to be one or two on any given shuttle run May through September. They'd held the cottage at East Crib for nearly four decades.

"Probably made a killing," Donny said. 184

He dipped the Dunkin' Donuts cup into the water and rinsed it out, then filled it about halfway and dumped the sea water over his head, running a hand through his hair and blowing air through his lips.

"I think we'll just use the one boat today. Doesn't seem like it'll be worth putting gas in the other tanks," Vincent said.

Donny smiled but wouldn’t meet Vincent’s eyes. He opened up the cooler and rustled around inside of it, came up with two cans of Coors and threw one to his father. It was barely nine o'clock in the morning, but Vincent popped the top and took a long drink before setting foot in the boat.

* * *

The day was one of those slow, languorous Saturdays that sapped Vincent even of his will to earn. They made a few runs to Money and Outer Island—groceries and a few lagging family members who hadn't been able to make the Friday ferries. Each trip

Vincent could feel the swell and roll of the tide beneath the boat like a kind of terrible fever dream. He popped Dramamine tablets out of their foil shells and chewed them like dinner mints, washing down the chalky bitterness with Coors. To keep himself from getting sick, Vincent took to focusing on the steady wake fan out behind them when

Donny punched the throttle. When they pulled into the slip at the end of the runs, Donny would have to throw the bumpers and fasten the towline, while Vincent grabbed himself 185 another beer from the cooler and lunged for dry land where the nausea left his body like cloudy water through a bilge pump.

Late afternoon found Vincent half in the tank and sitting on the end of the slip, his feet dangling in the cool water. Donny was sprawled over the bow seat, one arm slung over his eyes, the other covering his bare stomach. Vincent watched his son sleep. He’d stopped expecting fares a few hours ago. He relished in the syrupy warmth of the sun and the way the Coors (and some of the ice-cold blackberry brandy that he had squirreled away at the bottom of the cooler) allowed him to curl up into himself and feel whole.

Around 5:30, just as he was thinking about packing it in for the day, just as he was about to hoist himself up to start rinsing the decks and taking down the console canopy, there came the hollow ping of footsteps down the aluminum ramp. Then a voice that sing-songed over the groan of the aluminum and the water lapping at the pilings:

"Well that’s what I’d been saying from the beginning. If you’d just listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Thrown to the mercy of strangers and I won’t be forgetting it any time soon. You can believe that.”

It was a woman dressed head to toe in pastels. She wore a green and pink paisley jacket over a white silk blouse, pink capri pants that would probably have shown the blue-green veins in her ankles had she not also been wearing sheer hose underneath, and a broad-brimmed teal sunhat that seemed to hang heavy in the heat, obscuring the upper portion of her face. She had on white high heels and was having a hell of a time negotiating the ramp.

"You're fine. You're fine," Vincent said. "Just watch yourself on that ramp." 186

Following on her heels was a handsome Asian man, ready to scoop her up should she falter on the ridged grating. They both carried expensive-looking totes.

"Oh Good," she said. "Something's finally gone right today."

She had to negotiate the slats of the wooden slip with her mid-heel pumps.

"You can take this one," the woman said, handing Vincent the leather straps of her designer tote. "Kwan, be a dear and grab the other bags from the car."

The Asian man plopped the tote he was carrying onto the slatted planks of the slip, turned, and trotted back up the ramp without a word. At the top of the ramp he pulled a set of keys from one of his cargo pockets and hit a button on the key fob. A green Jaguar, parked by the gazebo, let out two shrill chirps, its sleek yellow hazards flashing as if in code.

Vincent cocked his head and tried to get a peak under the brim of the woman’s ridiculous hat.

"As I live and breathe," Vincent said.

“Hmmm,” the woman said, rustling through a sleek purse slung over her shoulder.

“Georgina Ostrovsky?” Vincent said.

The woman lifted a frail arm to tilt the sunhat back on her head. She eyed the beer can in Vincent's hand for the first time. They stood very close to each other—there was only room for three or four customers on the narrow slip—and Vincent, who was not a very tall man, felt suddenly conscious of the space he was taking up. Georgina Ostrovsky must have been in her late seventies or early eighties, but the skin on her face had the smooth pink glow of a recently healed wound. 187

"We met at the council meeting back in April," Vincent said.

He cringed inwardly at the thought of that flimsy town hall meeting—a last-ditch, half-assed attempt to organize some members of the community in solidarity against

Ostrovsky, who now owned more of the town than anyone in its three hundred year history. But when Georgina Ostrovsky herself made an appearance that night, donning a black-onyx sequin dress, the town’s resolve seemed as flimsy as the particleboard podium they’d propped at the front of the room.

“Did we?” Ostrovsky mused, giving Vincent a glazed look.

"Vincent Cianciola," he said.

"Yes, of course,” said Ostrovsky. “The ferryman. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, then, Vincent—Roger’s Island? The south dock? We’re running a little bit late.

Or do we have to wait for the other fares to show up?" She scanned the empty dock, the barren parking lot by the gazebo. “I’m not really sure how this all works. Usually, Kwan and I, we have our own means of conveyance—but today…well…today has been trying.”

Vincent rubbed at the back of his burnt-up neck. He felt something like venom roil up beneath his skin—a surge that coursed through his blood and seemed to clear his system of the last traces of nausea and drunkenness.

"I have half a mind to deny you passage," he said, his voice a little shakier than he would have liked, “if we’re being honest here,” he added.

"Because you’re drunk?" she asked. She placed a dry delicate hand on his forearm. “Perhaps the boy can drive?” She gestured toward Donny who was still sleeping in the boat. 188

Vincent took a measured pull of his beer, crumpled the can, and then threw it in the bow of the boat, which woke Donny up. The boy jumped into stride, as if he'd already started stowing bags and preparing lines for departure in a dream, and when he saw

Georgina Ostrovsky standing on the slip next to his father he looked utterly confused.

"Not terribly drunk, no," Vincent said. “It’s just that we don’t serve monopolists on these particular vessels. This is a monopolist-free zone.”

He waved Georgina Ostrovsky’s bag—why was he still holding her bag?!— toward the boat and nearly knocked her back into the rail of the aluminum ramp.

Ostrovsky let out an indignant puff of air. She looked out to where the whitecaps still broke in the channel like a school of bunker sent airborne by some bigger fish below.

"Stop it now," said Georgina Ostrovsky. "It won't take you more than a few minutes." She eased up the platform steps by the stern and offered her hand up to Donny who, unsure of what to do, took it. He helped her into the boat. "This is a ferry isn't it?" she said, plopping down on the cushioned cooler seat in front of the steering console. "I'd like to be ferried. I’ll pay my way just like anyone else.”

Kwan reappeared on the ramp carrying another tote, a wooden case of wine, and a plastic valise balanced on top of the case. When he misjudged the gap between the ramp and the slip, Vincent lunged reflexively to keep him from stumbling headlong over the side of the boat and onto the deck. But the plastic valise slid from on top of the case of wine and sailed into the foredeck, cracking open on impact and spilling its contents: what looked like stones and crystals of varying cuts and sizes, tiny cellophane packets containing herbal concoctions, and something that Vincent thought resembled a Ouija 189 board—though the signs and symbols were not in English and the board was not made of cardboard but of a pliable kind of rubber—like the custom mouse pad Donnie had given him this past Christmas with the picture of the two of them fishing silk-screened into the smooth surface.

"Kwan," she said, watching Donny pick up a polished gold stone that had come to rest by the anchor line. "You'll have to excuse him. He's a brilliant boy when it comes to certain matters. But his coordination leaves something to be desired."

Kwan handed the tote and case of wine off to Vincent and then scuttled up to the foredeck to help Donny with the stones and herbs. The two of them crawled around at

Ostrovsky's feet. It reminded Vincent of the reproduced oil paintings that hung in the

“common room” of his condo complex. All of this happened so quickly, with such frantic charge, that it somehow short-circuited Vincent's rage. Standing there, with the case of wine in his arms, with the tote mysteriously slung over one shoulder, he was having trouble focusing his anger, as if, like a beam of light, his anger had somehow been redirected by one of the crystals that littered the foredeck.

Ostrovsky looked wistfully to the horizon where the sky glowed pink behind all of her islands.

"There's a touch of rain to the air," she said. "We should really be on our way."

* * *

190

The short ride out to Roger’s along the main channel was a silent one. Vincent's nausea returned in slow waves that kept him feeling fused to the captain's chair. Donny reached a leg over the side of the boat testing the channel water with his outstretched toes. Kwan rode the bow seat, looking out toward Long Island as if something might be written there in the haze above the land. And Ostrovsky sat with her back to Vincent.

From his perch in the captain's chair, watching the relaxed dip of her shoulders, the slight nod of her head, he thought she might be dozing as they made their way out past the second channel marker and into the sheltered cove of Rogers proper.

They tied up on the south dock and Donny put out the portable step. Ostrovsky was the first to disembark. Vincent looked up the dock to where her mansion spread over the granite coast like the world’s largest tombstone. There was very little tree cover on the island and so the mansion, which would have been imposing set anywhere else—with it's Georgian columns, crenellated spires, and cut-slate roof—looked somehow naked and vulnerable out here.

Vincent, Donny, and Kwan were able to carry the luggage in one trip between the three of them. They followed Ostrovsky up the dock and along the redbrick path that circled the boathouse and landscaper's shed and then led up to the main entrance. Tools that the landscapers used for pruning and digging and irrigating were left scattered all along the terraced plots leading up to the front steps.

“Terrible,” said Ostrovsky, clucking her tongue at the disarray.

The click of the latch echoed away from them into the vestibule when Mrs.

Ostrovsky opened the large double door and entering the mansion was like entering a 191 mausoleum. The marble floors were waxed to an icy sheen and a pink granite table sat eerily naked in the center of the vestibule like an altar of some kind. It smelled of the sea, but not the sea that Vincent knew. There was something cold and musty about this sea smell, as if the sea had been bottled up in an urn and kept away from light and air and sun. From somewhere came the steady ticking of a clock and the low moan of the wind off the sound—a moan that modulated in pitch and timbre so that the house itself seemed to be speaking to them.

"You all can get as upset as you want, but people forget, Vincent, that we've been here all along," Mrs. Ostrovsky said, her voice resonant and quavering against the vaulted ceilings of the vestibule. "Bernard and I have had the cottage on West Crib since 1976.

We had an astounding bicentennial celebration there. It was written up in the Register and the Times. There were ice sculptures. But people forget these things. It's remarkable really—the memory on your average person."

She led them around the curve of the vestibule and then through a dark hallway to a remarkably small kitchen. It was barely larger than the kitchen in Vincent's condominium in Brushy Hill—the same narrow counters and flimsy-looking cabinets.

"We can just drop everything here in the service kitchen," Ostrovsky said.

She reached into one of the cupboards by the stove and came up with a bottle of

Macallan scotch. Holding the bottle up to the light, she lifted the brim of her sunhat and eyed the level.

"Someone's been sneaking," she said. "It’s terrible, you know, to be unable to keep an eye on things, everyone welcome to what’s yours because, well, you’re only one 192 person after all and you just can’t be everywhere at one. It’s just not possible, Vincent. It isn’t. It’s enough to drive you insane just thinking about it really."

Behind Vincent, Donny and Kwan stood in silent anticipation as if awaiting commands from Ostrovsky that would unlock the muscles of their bodies. Vincent, to shake himself from whatever had happened the moment that plastic valise cracked open back at the slip, dropped the two totes he was carrying to the floor with a thud.

"All due respect. But there's a difference between having a cottage out on West

Crib and building up your own private little empire. It just seems a little—"

"Excessive?"

"Mean-spirited, actually. Plain un-American, some might say."

Ostrovsky let out another puff of breath.

"Come and have a drink," she said. "Bring the boy. I can see that you’re upset and

I don’t want you to be upset. I don’t see any reason why we can’t be friends here. This is such a small community and I just want to be a part of it. What’s so hard to understand?"

There was something plaintive but also unnervingly calculated about the way

Ostrovsky asked questions. Vincent wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer them or not. Whether he was even in a position to speak for “the community.” He’d lived in this place his entire life, and there were days when he thought that he didn’t recognize a single face. Days when he felt like community was a lot to ask of a bunch of monkeys clinging desperately to a hurtling ball of dirt.

“We have to get going,” Vincent said. “We have a few more runs to make today.” 193

Ostrovsky fixed him with a hard stare, the smooth skin of her face flashing in the light of the service kitchen.

“Please, Vincent,” she said. “I’m asking you now.”

There was a rolling cocktail tray at the entrance to the kitchen and Ostrovsky grabbed two cut-crystal glasses from the bottom tier. She brushed by Donny in the process and Vincent thought that the old woman whispered something into his son's ear, though he couldn’t be sure.

“Go ahead and get started, Kwan,” she said. “We won’t be too long.”

Kwan deposited his case of wine on the counter and then made his way back toward the vestibule, the plastic valise tucked neatly under one arm.

Donny looked from Ostrovsky to Vincent. The boy, usually so unflappable, looked terrified in some small social way. It was like he was six or seven again, when

Vincent would watch him and Mena doing something simple and intimate (coloring, cooking, folding laundry onto a freshly made bed), and be a little bit awed at the direction of his life.

“One drink,” Vincent said. “Then we have to get back to the slip.”

Ostrovsky led them through a series of dark hallways that seemed designed solely to keep people out of sight. There were no pictures or artwork hanging on the walls. The house smelled musty and rich, like an old cedar chest left out in the rain. It was cool and inviting in there, but it didn’t feel like a place where someone might actually live, just a place where you might pass away an afternoon—like a museum or an aquarium—rapt in the sights and sounds precisely because they were so unlike anything resembling a home. 194

“I’m not as bad as what you all might think,” Ostrovsky said, leading the way deeper and deeper into the bowels of the house. Beckoning them forward. The lighting glade-like. A dampness to the air. “It was charming at first—being this monster that you could all rail against—flattering—but it gets boring and lonely after a while. Incredibly lonely. I can barely move sometimes for the loneliness of the whole thing. And it’s not what you think, Vincent. I’m not playing the sympathy card here. I’d give almost anything to not be bored with this whole situation, to actually feel the immediacy of it all, to not feel so removed, I suppose…but…I don’t know…I’m just finding it hard to muster up the heart for all of that at my age.”

She sighed heavily and tucked the bottle of scotch under her armpit, the two crystal glasses grinding together in her hand. Then they were back in the sunlight. They'd gone from the south to the north side of the island through a series of connected corridors and now they’d come out through an impossibly large glass-sliding door to a large stone terrace. It was a no-frills kind of rebirth, one that involved lots of cut flagstone and parapets capped in oxidized copper. It took Vincent a moment to get his bearings, but then he recognized the Country Club directly across the inland channel, the red and green markers leading the way into the harbormaster's raised perch there.

"Sit," said Ostrovsky, motioning towards a row of high-backed rocking chairs with the bottle of scotch. “Please.”

The three of them sat side-by-side in the rocking chairs, the ancient runners letting out gentle groans with each back and forth. She poured scotch into one of the glasses and reached across the arm of her rocker to hand it to Vincent. 195

“Does the boy drink?” she asked.

Donny looked to Vincent. Pure hope.

“We’ll share a glass,” Vincent said.

Ostrovsky placed the bottle on the stone floor of the terrace and settled back into her rocker. For the first time that afternoon Georgina Ostrovsky took off her sunhat, and underneath her hair leapt in patchy twists from her scalp like sporadic wisps of flame.

Her smooth scalp looked as if it had been powdered. Vincent shifted uncomfortably in his rocking chair. He looked out across the channel to where the lights in the harbor master's perch blinked on and off in the late afternoon haze. Ostrovsky, seeing Vincent's discomfort, sighed with impatience.

"I'm going bald, Vincent," she said. "For Christ's sake. I'm not sick. If that's what you're thinking. The women in my family go bald. It's a great part of our inheritance."

She ran a hand through what remained of her hair. Without the sunhat she reminded Vincent of an actress who'd made some great physical sacrifice for a role—a pretty girl playing ugly. Though there was nothing obviously pretty about Georgina

Ostrovsky.

"Do you know how my husband made his money, Vincent?"

With his free hand, Vincent cupped the knob of his left shoulder and squeezed it rhythmically. The tote bag he’d carried into the house had been surprisingly heavy.

"I've heard things. Some kind of bond trading or hedge partnership that—"

"That was all much later, Vincent. There’s a point at which money just breeds money. That’s what you’re speaking to. But originally it was very very simple. Rosemary 196 extracts. Bernard made money in rosemary extracts. He was a smart man. A bit of an amateur botanist. He figured out that you could keep fresh meat looking red longer when you packaged it using rosemary extracts. These days they use carbon monoxide or some such thing. It's shameful, I think, as far as those things go, but well…"

Vincent handed the glass of scotch to his son. Donny accepted the glass but tried not to make a show of sucking it down. He sipped and looked out over the water, out to where House Chimney Island split Pleasant Point in two. A small skiff puttered around the south side of the island, as inconsequential as a tern or gull, and Vincent remembered clamming with his mother and father off the same south shore when he was small. His father would shuck the cherrystones right in the boat and eat them bay raw with peels of horseradish, the gnarled root of which he kept in a mason jar behind the gas tank of their dory. He remembered, distinctly, the moment when this habit of his father’s became suddenly something to be ashamed of: his mother curled in the bow of the skiff with her straw sunhat covering her face and shoulders, reading a romance novel or the Register, his father's fish-belly feet kicking up from the water as he plunged his hands into the bay floor, coming up each time with two or three muddy clams, and then the harbormaster's boat passing by on its way back to the slip at the country club marina, and the harbormaster, with his admiral's cap and gold tasseled epaulets, shaking his head, ever so slightly, in the passing.

Vincent lived all of his life in this one place. He knew every island and rock in a nearly supernatural way. But it looked strange to him sitting on Georgina Ostrovsky's 197 terrace. Like an old postcard that someone might send to a relative they don't especially like.

"He was a small man, my husband," she said, her voice coming to him diffused and far off. "Bernard. Physically, but spiritually too. Dead fourteen years. Astoundingly small…really."

She took a drink of her scotch and slipped one foot out of its pump. The sheer legging was bunched up at her toes. She leaned out from her rocker to see past Vincent to where Donny sat still sipping the scotch.

"And what about you, boy?"

"His name’s Donny," Vincent said, finally finding his voice.

"Donald," she said, looking at Vincent conspiratorially. “Lovely. What plans do you have for the future, Donald?”

Donny shifted in his rocker. Vincent had an almost unbearable sense of love for the boy in the moment. It nearly choked him. From somewhere inside the mansion a few soft notes of music drifted out through one of windows on the upper floors. Over the channel, terns swooped and dove to its steady rhythm.

“I’m going to school in the fall,” Donny said. “To a college in Maine.”

“That’s wonderful, Donald,” said Ostrovsky. “One must be educated these days.

It’s one of those required things. The world no longer suffers fools the way it used to.

Isn’t that right, Vincent?” 198

Vincent felt as if he were losing the rhythm and pattern of the conversation. It was being muddled by the music spilling softly from the mansion behind them and by the soft groans coming from Donny’s rocker.

“What is that?” Vincent said.

“The music?” Ostrovsky said. “That will be Kwan getting started. I’ll have to be going in soon.”

There was a sprinkling of chimes. The shrill cry of a gull.

“What are we doing here? What is this?” Vincent said.

Ostrovsky took a swallow of her scotch and smiled pleasantly.

"We’re having a drink, Vincent. Like two civilized adults. We're having a drink and staring out at the water. It’s what people do,” she said. “Some of the people that I invite out here in the summers—old friends of Bernard’s or of the kids. I wonder sometimes what it is they see. It's a beautiful place—I know that—but I'm not sure I've ever really seen it. I‘m partial to the city myself. But I try. Every summer I come out here and I try. Believe me, I do."

Vincent eyed the scotch in his glass and swallowed the last mouthful. He felt buoyant, like he could float right up off the terrace and levitate back to his slip at the town dock. From far away came the sound of the steam-whistle from the Tilcon gravel company—the afternoon shift coming to a shrill close.

"You know,” Vincent said, “they used to take the rocks from these islands—the granite—to build great things.” He swept his empty glass out toward Andrews Island and 199

Burr and Cedar and Mermaid. "Today it's counter tops and floors, but it used to be for bigger things. My grandfather—"

His mind felt cloudy from the scotch, and maybe he was just postponing the dizzying ride back to the slip, and back to his life, but he felt like he would be remiss if he didn’t impart something before he left, that he was missing an opportunity, that he should do something, say something, anything…

"Hmm?" said Ostrovsky dreamily.

"My grandfather," he said, a catch in his throat. "He used to ferry men out here years and years ago. Miners. For the pink granite that runs through this whole place.

They’d come out to Bear island and blast off big chunks of the granite and then they’d float it back to shore. It’s all over the country. The Brooklyn Bridge. Grant’s tomb. All over.” The music from upstairs was getting a little bit louder now. Picking up instruments and harmonic complexity along the way. “And here,” Vincent said. “It’s right here beneath us. Your house is built on top of it.”

“That’s lovely, dear,” Ostrovsky said, nearly dozing in the warm sun that filtered through the surrounding islands. “Just lovely. Please, keep talking. Tell me more.”

A honeyed warmth crept into Ostrovsky’s voice and it brought to mind Vincent’s mother, humming while his father dug clams from the bay floor, or Mena’s quiet self- conscious singing in the shower—an intimate, cadenced breathiness that rose and fell in swells.

“And now I ship people out here,” Vincent continued. “I bring them out with my son and we do the same thing. All these years later—” 200

“Tradition is important,” said Ostrovsky.

“What would you know about that?” Vincent said. “You just buy things. Collect them. Islands and houses and boats and all the lives wrapped up in them. You just buy them.”

“Well that can be a tradition too, can’t it?” Ostrovsky said.

“But the families, they’ll all be gone. I won’t be able to do this anymore. Don’t you understand? You’re choking me out of this place. This is my home.”

“Yes, times are hard, dear. I understand.”

Vincent heard a great creaking groan then, and suddenly Donny was standing up.

He was walking across the patio and toward the wide terraced stairs that led down to the coast. His abandoned chair rocked violently to and fro. The cut-crystal glass sat empty on the patio floor.

“Donny?” Vincent said, but the boy was moving with purpose now. He trotted down the terraced steps of the patio and then along the winding flagstone path that led to a concrete pier that jutted from the sheer rock face walling off the north shore of the island. Then he was up on the pier. He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it to the ground. He hesitated for only a short beat before diving—head first—into the choppy water of the channel.

Ostrovsky let out a little shriek of delight.

“So impulsive!” she cried.

She watched eagerly as Donny broke into a cool-cadenced freestyle. Cutting his way through the water. Vincent wasn’t sure if someone piloting a boat just then would be 201 able to see his son through the thickening rollers and the froth of the caps. He looked like nothing out there. A piece of floating debris.

“Donny!” he called, but his son couldn’t hear him. He was heading straight for the channel markers. He was a very strong swimmer.

“It’s okay, Vincent,” Ostrovsky said. “Let the boy swim if he wants to swim.”

Vincent watched and tried to focus his fear, to channel it into something that made sense, but there was that strange music again, drifting from the upper stories of the house behind them, and there was Donny propelling himself out toward the beacon lights of the country club, and the Tilcon trains pulling out for the last shipments from the pit across the bay, and this little bald woman, singing chastisements to him as she fell asleep in her ancient creaking rocker.

202

All In

I knew as soon as the kid sat down to the table that he’d crack me out with some donkey-ass hand. A suited Dolly Parton or Jackson Five, maybe even a ten-two off if he was bad enough. He just had that fresh-fucked look that all the babies brought to the felt nowadays: a wiry little spade hugging his bottom lip, the cheap wrap-around sunglasses, the fitted cap with the brim swung off to one side, and more than anything, that new hungry look, a look that had nothing to do with the money as far as I could tell.

It was this look that had been getting to me the past couple of years, eating away at me from across the table, ten, twelve hours a day, putting me on tilt hard. It was a look

I just didn’t understand at all, that I hadn’t seen coming up around the backroom stud all- nighters, the nickel and dime grinders. Us stool-top fixtures, left to dangle from the short rope we’d cut ourselves called that look The Pit. Getting busted by one of these infants was to be sucked into The Pit, to be left hanging over the open mouth while the dealer played the absent agent of evolution. Because, let’s not fool ourselves here, we were seeing a sea change in the gene pool weren’t we? Soon the old order would be extinct.

And good riddance. All the same, I had a sinking feeling that these kids would miss the old relics tucked off in the nine or ten seat, sucking on our comped mint lozenges, steady as stone pillars with our reasonable play and our surefire celebration of the odds.

For these kids it was all an electronic orgasm. They were in it for high scores and shiny bracelets, two minutes of cable fame, while the rest of us played for groceries and whatever our unemployment didn’t pick up; if the house would let us cash our social security checks at the cage we would. 203

I wasn’t thinking about any of this when the kid sat down that day though.

Evolution and extinction, these were the thoughts I had alone at night, once I’d left the poker room and run the gauntlet of jangling slots; when I watched the late night sitcom reruns fade to infomercials. No, what I had been thinking about, when I should have been watching this fetus while he got ready to make a move, was Anne, my ex-wife of five years now. We still talked from time to time on account of her being a pit boss at the

Oasis. She’d remarried shortly after we’d gotten divorced, which stung more than I’d ever admit. Not because of the quick rebound, but because as far as I could see, neither of us had changed all that much in the interim, and if we weren’t planning on growing as people then I didn’t see why we couldn’t keep not growing together. So it was already a shit start to the day when she was running the seating desk for the tables that morning and had to take down my name, her old name, for a three to six no-limit seat.

“Morning, Tom,” she said, when I walked up to the check-in and leaned against the fake marble counter.

“Morning, Annie," I said. "How are we today?”

She hated when I called her Annie.

“Same old. Frank and Red are back there on the two-four. You want me to get you in there?”

“How they making out?” I asked.

"Grinding it out," Anne said, as if I was an idiot for even asking.

“In that case put me somewhere else.” I rapped the countertop with my knuckles.

“Give me something to work with today. Huh. Would you please.” 204

I had to sit there for ten minutes before she could get me in at a table. It was crowded for a Sunday; all the degenerates come to pray to the pot. I watched Anne as she talked to some of the players that strolled in after me and I had to admit that she looked good for a fifty-six year old pit boss. Vegas good, I mean, which is dolled up just enough for a decent tip but not really looking. I wished she’d go a little easier with the eye-liner, maybe buy a bra that lifted a bit more, but she kept herself in shape. She’d started dying her hair a darker shade of red and the new color clashed against her house uniform and made her look like angry. I remembered back when we were still together I used to make her wear that uniform at night. I got a kick out of it. She’d shimmy the stiff black skirt down around her hips just enough so I could see the tops of her black tights, a little bit of skin showing between the waist of the stockings and the maroon blazer, and I would just put my face to that little strip of warm flesh and feel what went on beneath the house getup. I told her it was better than sex.

I was dredging up all of this shit while I sat there watching Anne and didn’t even realize that I was smiling at her all the while, I mean seriously grinning it up, though I knew I wasn’t really smiling at her; I was smiling at some dumbed-down memory of her that probably never even existed in the first place, but before I could catch myself, Anne had locked eyes with me from across the seating lounge and was giving me one of her more disgusted looks. I was relieved when one of the younger Chinese runners called my name (Mr. Rangry, they called me, not able to pronounce their l’s for shit) and escorted me out of the lounge, past where Anne was half-listening to some cocktail waitress by the desk, but really watching me go from the corner of her eye. 205

I didn’t know anyone at the table that night when I sat down except the dealer,

Sol, a cute little brown girl with big hoop earrings. I sat down with my rack and stacked my five hundred in red chips on the wood outside the felt. Sol noticed me joining the table in mid-deal and she smiled.

“What’s the temperature here tonight, Sol?” I said, “You got my deck?”

Sol smiled. She had big apple cheeks that glowed when you made her laugh and those fake painted lashes, the kind that shimmy a little with every blink.

I picked up a fistful of chips and shuffled them with my right hand and then with my left. I liked to do this when I was at a table with wild cards, unknowns. Put it right out in the open that I knew my way around a table, muck up some respect in case I’d need it making a play later on. I knew most guys trying to hustle would never give that away right off, but I thought that was all bullshit; if you were the better player then you were going to end up with the pot nine times out of ten anyway.

I could feel the other players’ eyes as I restacked my chips, sizing me up. Next to me a whale in a floral patterned button-down was eating fried chicken right out of the

Styrofoam to-go box. He hadn’t even bothered to request one of the wheeled drink carts.

He tore off a chunk of drumstick, popped a couple fries in his mouth, and washed it all down with a gulp of beer. I couldn’t stand players who ate at the table. I’m sure he was getting grease on the cards; I could feel his slicked prints on some of my hands.

The kid didn’t sit down until two hours in, around noon. I pegged him for what he was right off the bat—namely an online hustler, trying his luck in the real world. This was the new wave, the kids trying to mouse-click the chips into the pot. They win a few 206 online tournaments and move to Vegas. It was a shame to think of them spending the better part of their youth inside a stale casino for nineteen hours out of each day, but they wouldn’t see that until much later, if they ever did at all. This was the thing about the poker circuit; it became an isolated world within the world. There were only two reasons you had to acknowledge that larger outside shell: when you ran out of money or when you fell in love. Even these two things you could find in-house if you knew where to look.

He was nervous. I could see that immediately. His hands shook slightly when he was fumbling with his checks. He knocked his stack over three times in a half hour. But he was playing conservatively, nothing outside of wired pairs and ace paint, and so he was making a little bit of money. I actually watched his confidence pick up after the first hour. He went from tipping Sol a buck from each pot that he took down to two or three chips, which he’d flip out onto the automatic shuffler. I could tell it was bothering Sol, who had been rotated in and out as our dealer twice already. She knew the hands she was dealing weren’t worth more than the buck.

“Kid, keep your tips off the shuffler,” I finally said, after he’d taken down his fourth or fifth pot.

I don’t know why I said anything. I rarely spoke at the table unless I found myself with a bunch of the regulars, but there was something about this kid that was bothering me on this particular day. His pale, bony face. The way he flipped on his sunglasses every time he decided to play a hand, like he was going into battle. 207

“What’s that?” he said, without looking up. He was still stacking the chips he’d raked in.

“When you tip her,” I said, taking a chip off one of my stacks, “just slide it out in front of her. You’re sitting right next to her. She gets it.” I slid the chip over the play line toward Sol and she dropped it into the little slot by her elbow. It hit the other chips at the bottom of the box with a shallow clink. She smiled at me and shook her head.

“Oh, okay,” the kid said. His face flushed up. “Sorry,” he added.

“Not a problem,” I said. “Just letting you know.”

Two hands later I took away half his stack by slow-playing a straight that I’d hit on the flop against his aces up. This shook him. His cell phone rang while I was stacking the chips and Sol yelled at him when he answered it at the table. I thought that he might just up and leave at this point, but instead he reached into his pocket and pulled out two crisp hundred dollar bills and laid them out on the table in front of him.

“Cashing two hundred,” Sol shouted, over her shoulder. She pushed the cash down into the slot by her other elbow and counted out two hundred in red fives. I figured it was a good time for a break and asked Sol for a marker to hold my seat.

In front of the deli window by the Sports Book a young couple argued over money. I didn’t hear their exact words as I waited in line for my BLT but I knew it had to be about money. The woman, a girl really, was pretty and dark haired. She wore a cashmere cardigan over what could have been a prom dress and cheap-looking pumps.

She looked like a Zapatista bride. She wore a tight line of worry across her forehead as she nodded and shook her head at whatever the man was saying. 208

“Bastante. Bastante,” she muttered. “Bastante!” and she stormed off toward the restaurants and shops at the far end of the casino lobby. The man watched her as she left and then took his fistful of checks over to the cage. I sat alone and watched the cocktail waitresses sling their free drinks while I ate my sandwich at the bar.

* * *

Anne and I had never even talked about kids. They just weren’t a part of the picture as far as I was concerned. She was working her twelve to fifteen hour shifts in the pit while I put in at least as much time at the tables each day. We had been married four comfortable years on our own terms before someone had to come along and rattle our padded cage. It was a good four years too. We had both been married before and so there were no delusions in the wedded bliss department. Though we’d never said so explicitly we’d enjoyed our independence as divorcees and planned to continue along those parallel paths together, growing old without the hassle of a complicated family life.

We would often leave the casino together late at night or in the early hours of the morning and Anne would smoke her Nat Sherman while we waited for the valet to bring my car around. This was my favorite part of the day back then, after spending hours scrutinizing even the smallest facial movements of strangers, most of whom I would never see again, I loved to watch Anne smoke without wondering what was going on inside her head, without having to worry about the ways she might take whatever I put out in front of me. I loved draping my arm across the back of her seat while we drove 209 north on the 15, the windows cracked and the cool desert air lifting shocks of her hair as we came closer and closer to home. These were silent drives, even before things turned on us, and I thought of that quiet as something like my real life.

Then Anne started getting sick in the mornings.

“If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were poisoning me,” she said, one morning coming out the bathroom. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist.

She had a greenish tinge to her skin, especially around her eyes and mouth, and it made her nose and cheeks sharper looking than they actually were. I told her we’d drop by the clinic on the way out to the strip. I had a buddy whose wife worked reception there three days a week, and I was sure she could lose our paperwork after the check-up so we wouldn't have to pay on our deductable.

When we got there I remember thinking how strange it was that almost everyone in the waiting room was wearing a uniform similar to Anne’s. It felt like an army barracks. Tiny women in their dealer’s jackets wheezed and coughed. An old man wore a stained undershirt and a crucifix around his neck but was dressed like a bellhop from the waist down. He wheeled two green cylinders back and forth behind him in a cart as he paced the lounge, the plastic tubes dangling from his nostrils. Anne leaned on me over the armrest of our conjoined seats.

“You’re gonna miss the tail-enders,” she said, looking at her watch.

“The tables aren’t going anywhere," I said, but quietly I was pissed to miss a morning shift, when some of the kids and tourists were riding out all-night benders and making terrible decisions in the early morning light. 210

She rested her cheek on my shoulder and sighed. We watched the old bellhop pace the room.

“What do you think about going to visit my sister in Hawaii over Christmas?” she said.

"Sound like something we'll talk about and then forget,” I said.

She ran a finger up and down my arm, tracing a pattern along my sleeve. I could feel the clamminess of her forehead, even through my shirt.

“I don’t see why that seems like such a big thing,” she said. “People go and visit their family all the time, Tom. It’s what people do.”

I watched a heavy-set woman in a cocktailing getup fill out some insurance forms across from us.

“It’s just a piss poor time to do it, Anne. You know that. Idiots out here spending their tax refunds.”

She shook her head.

“Would it kill you to not be earning for a day?”

“It just doesn’t—“

“Go to work,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

I tried to put my hand on the back of her neck and she squirmed out from under it.

“Seriously, Tom, just go. I’ll take a cab in.”

I thought about arguing with her, telling her I would stay until she at least saw the doctor, but we’d had this argument before and I knew where it was going so I walked.

211

* * *

Sol had been rotated out to one of the stud tables and a younger blonde with too many rings and bracelets had taken her place. I’d never seen her before. Her hair came down over her shoulder and covered the nametag above her left breast and it bothered me that I didn’t know her name. I sat down and she asked whether I wanted to be dealt in the next hand or wait until the blinds came around and I told her I’d wait.

“Hey, we were worried about you,” the kid said, from across the table. He grinned and couldn’t even help himself from looking down to his stack and then back up to me.

“Well,” I said, “you should have been worried about me coming back.”

The other guys at the table looked steamed and I knew he must have caught a nice run while I was gone.

Over by the seating desk I could just see the back of Anne’s head nodding as she talked to one of her dealers. I used to have to hear these sob stories late at night while we lay in bed. This one’s husband took a second mortgage out on the condo and blew it all playing Pai Gow in a weekend. This one popped pills. This one cut herself in the bathroom on her breaks and poisoned her sister's pet iguana. There was something about

Anne that always had these girls confiding in her. Anne, the Las Vegas pit shrink. Anne, the surrogate mother.

When the blinds came around, the dealer swung me pocket kings right out of the gate. The kid, playing three seats outside the action, put on his sunglasses, raised to 212 fifteen, and got two callers before the play even came around to the blinds. I re-raised to thirty-five. He called. The other two mucked.

“Good luck,” he said, just as the dealer was placing the flop out in front of her face down. The balls on this kid.

Flop came ten of diamonds, four of spades, king of clubs and he checked. I led out with fifteen instead of checking the set and got a quick call.

“Don’t chase,” I said, stretching chase out into a singsong kind of warning.

He smiled.

Turn came two of spades and he checked again. I came out with forty-five and he thought about it for a couple minutes before raising it to ninety.

“Look who decided to make a play,” I said. He smiled again, and for the first time that I night I could see how young he really was. I doubted he was even old enough to be in the casino. He had a nervous high pitch to his voice that said he was doing something wrong and getting away with it. There was nothing he could be holding that would beat the three kings. I knew he had to be playing a gut-shot draw or maybe even a smaller set but I waited a good stretch before I re-upped another one-eighty to bring the pot ten shy of a nickel. He couldn’t have had more than one-twenty or one-thirty left in his stack but

I put out the one-eighty just the same to force him all in. I watched him when I reached for the re-raise; I saw the color draining from his face. He looked like he was going to be sick and when I saw that, when I saw any shred of confidence that he may have amassed over the last few hours dwindle down to a tight little knot at the pit of his stomach, I felt a kind of sickness myself. 213

To the kid’s credit he regained his composure pretty quickly, but not before I realized that he was most definitely on a draw and hoping to put me off of a top pair with the initial raise. Now he would have to put everything he had into the pot on a nine to one gut-shot and though part of me didn’t want to see him call it, I knew that he was more than priced in. After a few minutes the dealer wrapped her knuckles on the felt, her bracelets clacking together like a baby’s rattle, and announced thirty seconds.

When I think about it now, I still don’t fully understand why I did what I did next.

When the kid had about fifteen seconds left before forfeiting the hand, I pulled two one dollar chips off of my stack and flipped them up in front of the dealer, where they landed right on top of the automatic shuffler with a ta-tick.

“Thanks,” I said to the dealer.

I didn’t even look at the kid when he finally got the point and folded the hand.

* * *

When I pulled up Anne was waiting outside the clinic smoking one of her blue

Nat Sherman’s. A plastic bag dangled from her wrist and when she saw me swing into the lot she put the cigarette out on the heel of her shoe and flicked the butt into the shrubs.

It was the look on her face when she got into the car that kills me now. She slipped into the passenger seat absolutely beaming. The olive tinge had left her cheeks 214 and they glowed a healthy pink. There was something strange about her whole demeanor, like she'd been raptured or something.

“You're not gonna believe this, Tommy” she said, and started rummaging through the plastic bag on her lap. She was pulling out pamphlets and brochures, free samples. It was the only time I ever remember her calling me that.

“What,” I said. "What's it a bug?"

She looked at me and smiled.

“I'm pregnant. The nurse made me take a piss test after I described my symptoms," she said, sifting through all of the stuff in the bag. "A little blue cross. I almost dropped right there in the exam room.”

At first I thought she was bullshitting me. Anne was fifty-one at the time and I was closing in on sixty; the idea of starting a family at this stage in our lives was about as likely a thing as me running for public office. We were quiet in the car that afternoon for a good long stretch. I watched the frayed palms out in front of the building waffle in the desert breeze.

“Pregnant?” I said.

She pulled a plastic tube like an electronic thermometer from the plastic bag and motioned for me to hold out my hand. When I did, she placed the tube in my palm and I saw the little faded blue cross winking up at me like a tiny eye.

“Jesus, Anne,” I said, dropping the thing in between the center console and my seat. “Why would you hand me that?” 215

For a couple weeks after this I hardly recognized her. There was a constant stream of baby that Anne spoke whenever we were alone. She was hoping for a boy; all of the counseling she’d done for her girls at the Oasis had turned her off to the idea of raising a girl in Vegas. The doctor told her that there was an increased risk of complications, possibly autism or Down’s Syndrome due to her age but she waved these cautions off. It was as if all of this talk had been building up in her for fifty-one years. You would have thought that we had been trying to have a kid from the beginning. In fact, the pregnancy was such a blessing in Anne’s eyes that my thoughts about the whole matter were apparently irrelevant. Even now when I think back on it I’m not quite sure what I was thinking. We had something dangled out in front of us for the briefest of an instant and it was like a glimpse at another life.

At night while we lay in bed, the television casting a blue light over Anne, she would pull herself into me and cling.

“You're gonna be good,” she’d said one night, drifting off to sleep.

The day that we finally went in for a check-up and ultrasound, Anne glowed in the waiting room. She rubbed my knee and smiled at every dealer, cocktail waitress, pit boss and sad sack that walked into the place. She squealed when the ultrasound technician, a chubby little Mexican woman, smeared the jelly onto her stomach and pressed the wand into gel. The woman moved the wand slightly and something like a night-vision display of pulsating grapes throbbed on the screen to the left of Anne’s head.

The tech moved the wand around some more and cocked her head at the screen.

“What is it?” Anne asked. 216

The chubby little woman removed the wand from Anne’s stomach and placed it on the instrument tray by the bed. She snapped off her latex gloves, stepped on the pedal to the wastebasket in the corner of the room, and threw them inside.

“The doctor will explain,” she said.

“How’s it look?” I asked. It seemed to me that we could have been watching some

CNN air-strike coverage with the sound off.

“The doctor will be in soon,” she said, and left the room.

When the doctor finally did come in, Anne had taken to drawing intricate designs into the transmission gel on her stomach with her fingernails. The doctor smiled and snapped on a pair of gloves.

“How are we today, folks?” he asked, smiling brightly.

He squirted some more gel on Anne’s stomach and pressed the wand down gently. Again, the cluster of grapes flared and shifted on the screen.

“We’re just a little concerned about what we’re seeing here,” he said.

“What are we seeing?” Anne asked.

He moved the wand around some more and inched his face closer and closer to the screen. Nothing changed as far as I could see. He sighed and put the wand back down on the tray. The screen went black.

"Looks like a mole," the doctor said, as if to himself.

He snapped off the gloves and tossed them into the wastebasket. I pictured a tiny rodent squirming around in Anne’s stomach. Some blind little thing burrowing down inside of her. 217

“A molar pregnancy,” he said. “It happens at fertilization. The sperm fertilizes an essentially empty egg, which develops into a kind of placenta, but there is no fetus. No baby inside. It’s really nobody’s fault.”

Anne sat up on the bed and pulled the gown down around her.

“But I feel different," Anne said, looking like she might rise up from the table and float of down the hallway. "I'm pregnant. I feel pregnant."

I put a hand on Anne’s shoulder. The way I thought I should.

“Your body thinks it’s pregnant but there is no fetus. I’m positive about that. We can induce labor to eject the placenta. It will be relatively painless.”

But Anne forced him to run the ultrasound again. Each time she would point to something in the display, a brief flicker, a small flitting of tissue, wordlessly asking the doctor the same question. After the third pass I couldn’t look at the screen anymore. Even when she called my name, when she asked me if that tiny little quiver didn’t look something like a heartbeat.

* * *

After I cleaned the kid out that night, I wished everyone at the table good luck and asked motioned to one of the runners for an extra rack.

“Sorry,” I said, as I was turning to leave.

“What’s there to be sorry about?” he said. “That’s the game right? Nice hand.” 218

He stopped counting his remaining chips and waved a finger at me, squinting his eyes.

“I like that move you put on me earlier. That was classy,” he said. “Old school.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” I said.

“I’ll be seeing you around the tables.”

“Maybe,” I said.

The dealer was already doling out the next hand when I walked out toward the casino lobby. Up above, on a giant LCD screen, an electronic sky burned bright blue but I knew that it was nearly three o’clock in the morning and that the real sky was dark out there, that the moisture was already starting to come down from off the mountains.

I waited for my car by the valet stand. I didn’t even notice Anne leaning up against one of the pillars by the limo island. She was smoking a dark gold cigarette with pink bands down around the filter and tapping her foot against the concrete. I think she was hoping I wouldn’t see her but I walked over anyway.

“Tough night?” I said.

She nodded and exhaled a drag into the night.

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “You okay with a ride?”

She looked at me strangely. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking exactly but I knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t what I wanted her to be thinking.

“John should be here any minute,” she said. She tried to smile but it came off hard and sad. 219

Just then the valet swung around in my Buick and hopped out of the driver’s seat.

I handed him a couple of bucks and turned back toward Anne. She was grinding the butt of her cigarette into her heel.

“Alright, Anne, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Probably.”

I waved to her as I pulled away and she lifted her chin only slightly in my direction. I turned the radio off driving north on the 15 and listened to the whine of the wheels against the asphalt. I opened the windows and let the desert air lift dust and sand into the car and wondered how long it would take for the wind to actually bury someone out here.

220

Razing Rice Terrace

Slowly but surely, the pancakes became her thing. It started with Mrs. Gargiulo— the widow in 3G who drank too much Rossi-from-the-jug, and who Carla knew to be hung over some mornings when she came to help the old woman shower and clean up around the efficiency. Blueberry with praline and granola. Then word spread around the building. Her other clients at Rice Terrace—the state-subsidized housing complex that had become her bread and butter in the last three years—started making requests. Mr.

Giordano in 7C liked chocolate chip with real Vermont syrup. Strychnine for an eighty- six-year-old with Type-1 diabetes, but she indulged him once a week. Mrs. Althusser in

5L wanted hers plain, but sprinkled with a mixture of confectioner’s sugar and nutmeg, sliced cantaloupe and cottage cheese on the side. She complained if the sugar-to-nutmeg ratio tasted “unbalanced.” Overripe banana and Brer Rabbit Molasses. Sour cream and ramps. Blackberries sunk deep in batter.

Carla started bringing an old plug-in hotplate with her to work, along with the soaps and medications, the glossy checkout rags that she brought for her favorite clients—the ones who still stayed hip to celebrity gossip, who talked about the bikini-clad pop-singers or tuxedoed heart-throbs like they were long-lost relatives who’d somehow gone deliciously astray. The hotplate made cleanup easier. Plus there was the ritual of the whole thing. A simple enough diversion from the crushing boredom and tunnel vision that seemed to consume some of her ailing clients. 221

Carla’s daughter, Sydney—a freshman now at Stratton—complained that Carla was too giving with her finite time and resources. After all, no one was reimbursing her for the ingredients (the pancake requests had become increasingly elaborate for some of her clients, particularly those requesting fresh fruits hopelessly out of season), and wasn’t it just like her mother to drop a good chunk of her paycheck providing perks for people who should have been looked after by their own flesh-and-blood? Providing perks…Sydney’s words. A callousness there that Carla chose to interpret as misplaced protective instinct—not an unnatural quality in a bright young girl raised by a single mother (a single mother who was little more than a bright young girl when she’d had

Sydney)—but still. There was something cold in Sydney’s logic, something keen-edged and distilled that bothered Carla. She’d had an urge to confess to her daughter that she’d virtually moved into Sydney’s abandoned bedroom over the last couple of months, that she slept nights in her empty single bed, read the notations in her stranded YA novels, breathed deep the buttery scent in the closet that held only the clothes she’d left behind.

“I’ll have them put blueberry pancake claims in with their Medicare,” was Carla’s actual response. “There might be a seven or eight pancake deductible on their policy, but as long as my ass is covered…”

Sydney just smiled that lawyerly smile she’d developed in the last couple of years. Those fine cheekbones that came from God knows where. Those nonexistent eyebrows.

“I just don’t like seeing people take advantage of you,” she’d said. “That’s all.” 222

But Carla was an Aid. People taking advantage of her was practically her job description. And besides, if she wanted to be in something solely for the money, she would have stuck with Coldwell Banker—living month to month on her commissions, at the whim of a housing market that decided to take a nosedive right around the time she’d secured her real estate license. This was something different. She actually liked her job now. She liked her clients and the way they made room for her in their lives, as if they’d been expecting someone like her to come along sooner or later, and, thank god, she’d made it just in time. What a lifesaver, they’d say to her as she ran a soft sponge across their backs in the shower, or as she filled their dishwashers and brought them their groceries. As she did the myriad things they could no longer do for themselves. What a lifesaver you are, Carla.

Of course, like any job, there were drawbacks.

In Carla’s case this drawback happened to come in the form of Scott Sobolesky— the creep of a building manager, the man with the smudgy moustache and too-tight

Dockers who Carla always saw doing inventory on the vending machines in the first- level corridor or scraping blackened gum from the sidewalk out front with a putty knife.

Scott Sobolesky who was always grooming himself in front of the clouded mirror that hung in the lobby (for whom, Carla couldn’t imagine), and who decided that the ancient hotplate Carla had inherited from her mother wasn’t safe to use with the electrical outlets in his building—something about the wattage and the way the new units had been rewired in the latest renovation. 223

“You blew fuses in Mr. Giordano’s and in the Shockley’s place last week,” he’d said; catching her one morning before she could dip into the elevator of the cramped, stale lobby. “Either get a better plate or knock off the Betty Crocker routine. It’s gonna cost me overtime in maintenance.”

And she’d responded: “Grief is a contest that we all win in the end, Mr.

Sobolesky.”

She had no idea where this came from, but it felt like the pearl of all perfect things to say at the time. Something one of the heroines in the Victorian novels she loved to read in junior college would have said, and she was almost giddy with the way it had come out of her, with the way Scott Sobolesky had cocked his greasy head at her, taking her in askance, as if maybe she was dangerous in some subtle silent way that he hadn’t quite calculated before. She said this strange, cryptic thing, slipped through the closing doors of the elevator, and watched as Scott Sobolesky disappeared in the narrowing gap.

When she told Mrs. Gargiulo about the run-in, the old woman seemed to cough up some small, loose piece of herself.

“That wiry little Polack,” she said, depositing phlegm into a flowered paper napkin, drawing a shallow breath. “Serves him right.”

Mrs. Gargiulo was one of Carla’s A-Squad: those residents who hadn’t yet slipped over the edge into paralyzing anger or waking catatonia, who could still spin out their pasts for Carla with a sense of having actually lived them. A tough old broad, was how Carla always described her—a phrase she’d never knowingly used prior to meeting 224

Mrs. Gargiulo, but it was immediately what jumped to mind the first time she’d walked into the old woman’s apartment.

Mrs. Gargiulo wore flower-print housedresses that came three to a pack and snapped up in the back—dresses that looked like the protective coverings you might wrap around your ironing board. She had her hair dyed once a week at a salon in town, coifed in an old-fashioned bouffant hive, and though her hastily painted eyebrows could make her look severe, there was a softness there too—one centered around a loss, or, more likely, a series of losses—and Carla found herself confiding in the old woman more often than she probably should.

“You can’t trust men with moustaches,” Mrs. Gargiulo said. “They’re covering something up with all that hair.”

This seemed accurate to Carla. Her ex-husband, Lyle, had gone through a moustache phase—a costly one that coincided with his poker playing at the Indian casinos upstate. One of the last straws in a marriage that she recalled as mainly a series of last straws.

“It’s boiling in here,” Carla said, taking out the plastic carton of fresh blueberries she’d just purchased on credit at Karen’s Corner. “You want me to turn down the thermostat?”

Mrs. Gargiulo scoffed.

“Please, don’t touch it,” she said.

Carla peaked around the kitchenette’s wall to read the little dial. 225

“You’ve got this set to eighty-six right now, Annie. We could grow hothouse tomatoes in here.

The old woman stretched her legs across the foldout ottoman on her La-Z-Boy.

There was a slight funk to the air of the efficiency. Carla was used to the smell—a private human mustiness that came from these closed-up apartments—spaces too thoroughly lived in—but the leaving and returning always brought the smell back embarrassingly anew.

“I’m going to crack a window then,” she said, padding her way into the dark bedroom down the hall.

“You’ll do what you’re gonna do,” mused Mrs. Gargiulo,

In the bedroom, Carla took a moment to take in Mrs. Gargiulo’s rosary collection.

Staggering, really. Draped over both posts on her headboard, she had close to a hundred sets: the plastic ones that came gratis in the mail from one diocese or another, the oversized wooden ones that Carla remembered the nuns carrying around back at Sacred

Heart, beads that would clack softly as the sisters made their way through the halls between periods or when they filled their treys in the cafeteria at lunch. Carla ran her fingers over them. Tested the weight of their crosses in her palm, before twisting the crank on the window next to the nightstand to let the fresh air in.

Outside, across the street, two kids in green aprons were sword fighting with long strips of cardboard between the Karen’s Corner dumpsters. The cardboard swords would crease on contact and Carla found something significant in the way these swords leaned 226 to the right or left—as if the grocery clerks, the same boys who bagged Mrs. Gargiulo’s blueberries not fifteen minutes earlier, were trying to warn her about something.

“Something’s burning,” sang Mrs. Gargiulo from beyond the bedroom door.

Carla sighed. She knew this drill. The senses playing tricks on her clients. Their anxieties made manifest in imaginary sights and sounds and smells.

But once in the hallway, she could smell it: an acrid chemical stench wafting out from the kitchenette.

A plastic shopping bag—the one that previously held the blueberries—sat draped over the hotplate on the counter, a corner of it bubbling black on the edge of the burner.

Carla had forgotten to check the dial position when she plugged in the plate.

The smoke alarm began to chirp.

“Oh for chrissake, Carla,” Mrs. Gargiulo cried. She’d risen from the La-Z-Boy and was now leaning heavily on her walker at the entrance to the kitchenette—the efficiency so small that Carla had trouble navigating around her to get at the plastic bag.

“Sorry sorry sorry,” Carla said, finally swatting at the bag and then flinging it into the kitchen sink. She flicked the tap, allowing cold water to flow over the smoldering plastic. Then she maneuvered around Mrs. Gargiulo once again, who stood squeezing the pump break on her wheeled walker. Carla slapped at the smoke detector mounted to the hall ceiling with a dishtowel. It took only three slaps for the chirps to quit, but she could already hear doors opening and closing up and down the corridor outside, an up-swell of murmuring that she knew she’d have to defuse as well (smoke detectors being no trivial thing in a place where people started fires as a matter of course), then Scott Sobolesky’s 227 voice rising above the din, making his way down the hallway, making sure everyone knew who was in charge.

II.

Sydney was three weeks late. One of those simple biological facts that she found herself admitting aloud in the shared dorm bathroom of Howe Hall one Friday night while the other two shower stalls hissed and gurgled and the smell of chemical fruits and flowers hung like a sharp tonic in the air. Three weeks late. Her voice sucked into the swirling of the drain.

“What, Syd?” Sasha called from the next stall over.

Sydney cleared her throat.

“Nothing,” she called. “Just talking to myself.”

Through the thin-tiled walls she could hear a bass beat coming from one of the rooms down the hall. A high-pitched shriek and giggle from out in the common area.

There was something familiar about dorm life that Sydney recognized almost immediately upon entering Howe Hall. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but, whatever the reason, she needed no real period of adjustment. Not like some of the other girls on her floor—the quiet ones who only emerged to sprint off to class or use the bathroom or heat up some water in the shared kitchenette before slipping stealthily back into their own rooms. Sydney thrived in this place. From the moment she set foot on the pretty sycamore-lined campus upstate, she knew that she belonged here, that this place was going to change her entire life in some essential way. 228

And now it had.

“You think you could get Caleb to pick us up a couple bottles of white?” she heard Sasha say, as if from the bottom of a cistern. “I’m not drinking vodka ever again. I promised myself that after last weekend. I lost two days that I’ll never get back and— shit.” Sydney could hear a plastic razor skittering across the tile floor in Sasha’s stall.

Then, there it was, on the floor of her own stall: a white and aquamarine oval with an innocent line of little pink bumps running down the middle.

“Help me out, Syd?” Sasha called, her hand emerging from beneath the partition, her slender fingers fluttering in anticipation, nails painted a chipped bright blue. Sasha reached down and handed her friend the razor.

“If I don’t trim, then I won’t hook up, so I’m not doing it. Right?” Sasha said.

“I’m being good this weekend. I need a little bit of discipline in my life.”

“Whatever works,” Sydney said.

The shower two stalls over cut out. There came the heavy plops of water when the mystery bather in there started wringing out her hair. Whoever it was, she’d been in there long before Sasha and Sydney started getting ready for the night. Probably Aubrey from two doors down: the silent girl from Martinique who Sydney knew was transferring at the end of the semester. Aubrey had unbelievable stick-straight hair that came down below her waist. She never did anything but let it hang where it wanted to hang, and there was something about this that made her seem older and smarter than most of the freshman girls—like she’d done all of this before and was, quite honestly, not all that impressed. 229

Sydney sat up late with her one night in the kitchenette, talking over cups of chamomile tea, which was when Aubrey had let slip her plans to transfer.

“Everyone here just seems like…I don’t know…like they’re owed all of this in some weird way,” she’d said, something that had stuck with Sydney. She knew what

Aubrey meant. They’d had a great conversation about it, actually—one filled with lines like this, that cut through the swaddled nicety of everyday life at Stratton—but it was clear that Aubrey had already turned off her receptors, that she was preparing to move on, and so the brief connection was like the epilogue to a story that hadn’t been and never would be written.

The pipes screeched in the next stall. Sasha was done. Sydney realized she’d just been standing there under the steaming water for twenty solid minutes. Her back felt numb from the heat and pressure—the best of all the dorms on campus, which was like winning a kind of secret lottery—and so she turned off her shower too, even though she hadn’t washed a thing.

Outside the stalls the air was cool enough to raise bumps on her skin. Sasha stood by the sinks and mirrors with an optimistically striped beach towel wrapped around her, wringing her dark hair over the sink basin. She worked one of the paper-thin dorm towels around her head and squinted at herself in the mirror—that strange, sly appraisal that

Sydney noticed whenever Sasha happened to catch her own reflection at a party, or in the produce mirror at the supermarket in town, or in the black reflective glass that lined the outside of the cafeteria on the quad. Sasha was beautiful, but she didn’t seem quite convinced and Sydney loved this about her. 230

“That crew kid tried to get me to go down on him last night,” Sasha said, unzipping her makeup bag and resting it on the ledge of the sink.

“Brian?” Sydney asked.

“No, the other one. With the jeep?”

“Oh, right. And?”

“Ugh…he smelled like beef jerky.”

Sydney cringed. She watched Sasha scrutinize her pores in the mirror, holding her face so close that her nose almost touched the glass. She felt a sudden surge of gratitude for Sasha. The way she moved through the world. The way she refused to suffer any form of fool. She reminded Sydney, for some reason, of her mother. A feeling she didn’t know how to reveal to Sasha without offending her, and so she tried to show her gratitude in a running series of small nods: with notes, and knowing glances, and cigarettes shared in the quickly gathering cold outside of their dorm. The truth was, Sasha was rich—like everyone else at Stratton—but she didn’t do some of the things that the other rich girls in their small group of friends did to Sydney. Like leave her, more often than not, with a bar tab. Or forget to give her cash when she went to pick them up salads at the natural food place downtown. Sasha never put Sydney in a position where she had to reveal herself as petty in any way, and for this, more than anything else, Sydney was eternally grateful.

Sasha caught Sydney’s gaze in the mirror.

“What?” she said, running a finger between her thin brows, “do I need to pluck?” 231

Sydney shook her head. She was afraid if she spoke she might start crying, and so she tried to level off the helium buzz of her blood by taking a deep, slow breath. Then another. Slower still.

“No,” she said, finally. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

This eased Sasha’s features, as Sydney knew it would, but it also brought back, in some fiber-optic, hard-wired flash, that night with Caleb a few weeks earlier. Sitting on the pitched roof of his apartment building off-campus. Drinking tequila and pineapple juice out of chunky ceramic mugs. Watching the traffic move lazily down Stratton’s small main drag. Perfect, Caleb had said, staring off toward the pinpoints of light that refracted from windshields and car fenders and the gilded shop windows downtown. Am I right? Sasha could feel the sun beating down on her bare shoulders. The pleasant pinch of the sand-papery shingles beneath her thighs. It was perfect. One of those rare molecular moments when everything seems to balance out for some short shrift in time. Then they’d climbed back through Caleb’s bedroom window to have some terrible sex, after which

Caleb fell asleep, curled up like an overgrown fetus, while Sydney sat thumbing through a slim volume of nonsense poems—trying to reconstitute, not the sex, but whatever the hell had happened out there on the roof that precipitated it.

“There’s something I think you should know, Syd,” Sasha said, lining her eyes with gentle touches from a greasy white pencil. “It’s kind of awkward though.”

They stood side by side at the sink, sharing the mirror, each speaking to the other’s reflection. Sydney watched a bloom of blood flush the skin of Sasha’s throat. 232

“It’s about Caleb,” Sasha said, averting her eyes in the mirror, but smiling a guilty little smile. “He kind of hit on me the other night at Dogwood. I mean…nothing happened, obviously, but still…he was definitely trying to make some moves. And when he saw that shit wasn’t going to fly, I think he kind of freaked out? Definitely left the party. I actually almost felt bad for him at the time.”

Sasha met Sydney’s eyes in the mirror for a brief instant and then went at smoothing the liner around her eyes with the edge of her finger. It looked like she was wiping away invisible tears.

Sydney stared down into the gleam of the sink basin. She felt a twinge in her shoulder—a muscle twitch that she got from time to time when she wasn’t sleeping well.

“Right,” she said. “Well…not exactly the biggest shocker in the world. But…”

She trailed off. But what? What else was there to say?

Sasha snapped her makeup bag shut and readjusted the towel under her arms.

With the white towel wrapped around her head, and the lemon-and-crimson-striped towel wrapped around her body, her facial features strategically sharpened with paint, she looked like a spokesperson for some kind of rare tropical fruit. “All right,” she said, “I just thought you’d want to know. I know I would.” She pursed her lips in sympathy. It looked like she was trying out faces in the mirror. The way an actor might. She met

Sydney’s eyes in the mirror again. Cocked her head playfully to the side.

“Enough of this nonsense, though, right?” she said, transforming before Sydney’s very eyes. “Let’s bring on the night.”

233

III.

At home, the little reinsulated beach bungalow that Carla still prided herself in after all these years, she put a kettle on to boil and stared blankly into the pink glow of her ancient refrigerator. Nothing much to see. A couple of soiled cartons of leftover

Chinese. Two carrots wilting in the crisper. A brown pool of some undetermined sauce that seemed to always be gathering on the bottom shelf, though Carla couldn’t bring herself to mop it up of late. Her own shopping had fallen off sharply since Sydney started school. Unbelievable, really, what that kid was capable of packing away.

It wasn’t until Carla was settled into the loveseat in the living room, letting the light of some television cop drama wash over her, sipping her tea, that she heard the sounds coming from out back. First a muffled clatter—like brass wind chimes clacking in the breeze (though Carla owned no such chimes); then a low-grade, throaty mewling that seemed to come from just beyond the sliding glass door leading out to the back patio.

She knew, even before she flicked on the sodium-vapor flood out there, that it was

Lyle. Three times in the last two months they’d gone through this routine: Lyle showing up drunk and full of sentimental steam, stumbling his way around Carla’s patio furniture until he found himself a seat, then snoring away a couple of hours until he was sober enough to climb back into his dented Grand Marquis and drive the lonely highway miles to his condo complex up in Brushy Plains.

Carla wasn’t sure what the proper course of action was in this situation. Lyle never came to the back door. He never yelled out or pleaded for Carla to let him in. There were no arguments or altercations or demands. Occasionally he’d leave behind a few 234 empty cans of Rolling Rock or the dregs of some blackberry brandy in an otherwise spent plastic pint—but, more often than not, when Carla went out to fill the birdfeeders and water the gladiolas in the morning, there were no signs that he’d been there at all. It made her wonder if she wasn’t dreaming his little visits, which, in turn, made her wonder if her dreams had really sunk so low.

They were married right out of high school. When Carla was already five months pregnant. A mistake so obvious that Carla questioned whether or not she’d been conscious at the time. It lasted barely a year. Now they’d been divorced for fourteen years. Separated for two before that. But it was only once Sydney left for Stratton—the intervening months crushing Carla with their bungalowed silence—that Lyle started in with these nocturnal visits.

Did he know how bone-crushingly empty she’d felt with Sydney gone? Is that what brought him crashing through her unused patio furniture in the night? Mumbling and snoring in his sleep (what Carla had come to think of as the “autumnal vocalizations of the Northern Lyle”)? She didn’t know. But she’d be lying if she said that there wasn’t something bizarrely comforting about having Lyle out there in the back yard while she sat watching television and drinking her tea. Of course, this was only because he didn’t try to talk to her, to bridge that gap between the patio and the glass sliding door. If he did,

Carla was sure that she’d throw something at that fat, muddled head of his, that she might even call the cops or, worse, one of Lyle’s brothers (always willing to physically straighten out their money-borrowing younger sib from time to time). But because he didn’t do any of these things, because he just sat out there like a garden gnome gathering 235 moss, Carla tolerated his presence out back the way she imagined farmer’s tolerated certain vermin—a toleration so ancient and elemental that it almost bordered on reverence.

That is…until this particular night. Because on this night, when Carla hit the switch for the light out back, when it x-ray flickered to life, there was Lyle standing at the glass sliding door, peering into the house with his hand cupped over his brows, his lower lip cracked and bleeding, his palm-treed Tommy Bahama polo shirt torn across the collar.

They both flinched at the sight of each other. Carla spilled some of her tea, scalding her toes through her socks. Lyle staggered across the patio. He limped his way back to the door. He tapped gently on the glass with his knuckles, mouthing the words O-pen

Pleeeaze, so that Carla could see the blood staining those perfectly capped teeth she’d paid for years ago.

She flipped the lock and slid the door open.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now, Lyle?”

He ran a hand up and over the right side of his head, through his thinning, mousy hair. He winced. He could barely muster up a conciliatory smile.

“The flagstone’s starting to chip back here,” he said, gesturing back toward the patio. “Someone’s going to catch a toe and kill themselves.”

He put the back of his hand to his torn lip and looked at the smudge of blood it left there. He shook his head.

“Mind if I come in for a sec?” he said. 236

Carla eyed him slowly and deliberately. When she’d opened the door she’d been shocked—almost physically paralyzed—by the greeting of Lyle’s smell—by the memory of that smell and the actual one colliding over the threshold of the slider: a lemony, boozy odor cut with something a little bit spicy, like nutmeg or All Spice or those candy-coated seeds that they sometimes gave you with your check at Indian restaurants. Fucking Lyle.

Amazing, she thought, that someone so useless could be responsible for one of the most important things in your life.

She backed away from the door and he followed her inside.

“Strange thing about getting into fights as an adult,” he said, as if Carla were waiting for the monologue. “Nobody wants to follow through with it. You both know that. That’s the secret at the heart of the thing. And so it’s like slow motion the whole time. Like you’re already apologizing to each other even as you’re trying to tear the other guy’s eyes out.” He sighed and slumped down into the love seat—into the same spot where Carla had, just moments before, been contentedly drinking her tea. “Christ,” he said. “Exhausting.”

Carla stood over Lyle, arms crossed. She’d abandoned her mug of tea to the kitchen counter. Lyle had yet to meet her eyes. He just kept looking around the house, as if he’d left something important here, years ago, and expected to find it sitting in the very same spot, untouched, gathering dust.

“Place looks nice,” he said.

“What are you doing here, Lyle?” 237

He collapsed even deeper into the loveseat, fusing with the cushions. He closed his eyes. Despite the torn lip and the thinning hair, Carla had to admit that Lyle had aged well. Particularly for someone who punished the body daily the way Lyle did. One of those little injustices that needled like a practical joke. The stubble at the tip of his chin and the hair at his temples had started to silver. No wrinkles or age lines to speak of. He was still relatively lean. And there was something about the way gravity courted Lyle— like they were old friends or business associates—that lent him a false front of dignity or depth. This was how Lyle got women. This was always how Lyle had gotten women.

Even in high school, when he was drunk or high six days a week, it was easy to see in

Lyle something tortured, maybe brilliant. But Carla knew the truth. The same truth that

Lyle had always known about himself: that he was cursed with only the markings of depth; and so, more often than not, condemned to let people down.

“Lyle?” Carla said, uncrossing her arms and leaning toward him.

His breathing had become shallow. She could hear the air catching and releasing at the back of his throat. She leaned closer. She could smell it again—that foreign spice cut with the booze. A nighttime vapor. She reached out. She poked him in the shoulder and his chin dropped to his chest. She knew it was a mistake, but she didn’t have the heart to wake him up.

IV.

The night started slow. 238

First, glasses of wine back in Sasha’s dorm room with some of the other girls

(though Sydney only sipped water from a blue plastic cup, hoping that no one would notice). Then, grilled-cheese sandwiches and vegetables dipped liberally in ranch dressing at Catalyst—the late-night snack bar on the bottom floor of the student union. A pit stop at another dorm room in Tower. More drinks at The Alley—the tiny dive on the east side of Stratton where the bouncer didn’t even pretend to card anyone at the door, and where Sydney and Sasha were hit on by two middle-aged men in leather motorcycle vests and ripped blue jeans. And, finally, arriving ensemble at Stables—the off-campus ranch house that sat in the middle of a fallow corn field one mile north of Stratton proper—out where the equestrian girls (like another sheer-cheeked species) practiced in their hip-hugging flesh-colored pants and thigh-high boots.

The house at Stables had been in student hands for years, Caleb’s most recently, along with three other patch-bearded friends. The place reeked of mildew and stale beer.

Out back, the yard was hard-packed dirt and patches of crabgrass—soldered sculptures left to rust here and there like the ghosts of art students past. When Sydney arrived that night a bonfire was blazing out back, roaring dangerously high, the tips of its flames lashing at the tree branches that leaned overhead in the night sky. There were over a hundred Stratton kids circling the fire. Dark shapes that herded and merged and lost their individual outlines farther away from the light. They drank from plastic cups. Their cigarette tips floated like fireflies out over the field. Watching those orange pinpoints dim and flare out there in the dark, Sydney was struck with a sudden sense of loss so 239 immediate and palpable that she thought she might drop to her knees right there in the crushed-stone driveway.

“Okay, Syd?” Sasha asked.

Sasha was drunk. Sydney knew this because of her tendency to drop pronouns past a certain point in the night. She looked stunning though, even in the floodlight that angled off the side of the house and sheeted the driveway: her dark hair tied in a loose chignon at the nape of her neck, the sharp features of her face washed out in the sodium light, a loose-knit sweater—the color of old bone—clinging to her enviably flat stomach.

Sydney wore beat jeans and a Stratton sweatshirt, a ragged v cut out of the neck for breathing room. She felt blurry. Nondescript.

“Fine,” Sydney said, steadying herself, “just a little drunk, I guess.”

Sasha laughed and draped an arm over Sydney’s shoulders. She smelled like cucumber and melon. Clean. Fresh.

“Come on,” Sasha said. “Let’s find that shithead boyfriend of yours.”

She pulled Sydney toward the steps leading up into the house.

Inside it was surprisingly quiet. The house was small but wide open, cabin-style, with fake wood paneling on the walls and ceilings, stained carpets on the floors. Soft music—horns and piano and something mildly electric—drifted down the stairwell from one of the bedrooms. A shirtless kid in gym shorts was passed out on the couch in the living room, dark hair on his chest and stomach, a smear of shaving cream on his face.

“And we have our first casualty,” said Sasha, leading Sydney gently past the couch by her forearm, toward the stairwell. Sydney could smell the syrupy tang of weed 240 coming from somewhere—a familiar, sweet scent that tried to mask the mildew and booze-baked carpets. A couple of kids were playing quarters in the kitchen. A girl sat wide-eyed at the kitchen table, her pupils like camera lenses, plucking discordant notes from an acoustic guitar that was missing half its strings.

Sasha tugged Sydney up the stairs. She felt as if she were being led to some kind of initiation or ceremony. Sasha the high priestess, sifting through the rote passage of rites. Tending to the acolyte. Up and up they went. When they reached the landing,

Sydney heard a distinct thud and crackling from outside the house—wood settling in the bonfire—the crowd of Strattonites letting out a pagan cheer. Then they were standing at the door to Caleb’s bedroom. And Sasha was knocking. And the door opened. And on the other side was a miniature blonde girl with eyes like great glass paperweights. Blinking into the dim light of the hall. She was naked from the waist down—one of Caleb’s high school lacrosse t-shirts hanging to just below her slender hips.

The girl smiled dreamily at Sasha and Sydney.

“We must have fallen asleep,” she said, yawning and stretching out her arms,

Caleb’s shirt lifting and revealing a manicured patch of translucent pubic hair for just a fraction of a second. “Is everyone still here?” she asked; sleep misting her giant eyes, “or did we miss it all?”

Sasha squeezes Sydney’s arm. The blonde girl is still smiling. She has light freckles all across the bridge of her nose, across her soft cheeks. From inside the darkened bedroom there comes the unmistakable groan of a mattress. “Who is that?”

Caleb’s voice—squeezed through the teeth of a pepper grinder. 241

Then back through the hall, down the narrow stairs, past the shirtless kid who’d turned on the couch, his back to Sydney now, past the girl with the broken guitar, quarters slapping the kitchen counter, the stains in the carpet molding a path, another volley of cheer from the bonfire crowd, and just before sliding back outside—that glint from the pegboard hung by the door: Caleb’s keys with the dancing-bear chain, slipped from the peg and she’s gone.

Carla sat for some time at the kitchen table while Lyle slept fitfully on her loveseat. Every now and then he’d let out a strange whimper—unintelligible but pleading in pitch and timbre. She’d thrown an afghan over his lap. Dabbed at his torn lip with a

Kleenex. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d physically touched each other.

While she sat there, listening to the whimpers of her ex-husband, staring to the lacquered bottom of her tea mug, she replayed the events of earlier that afternoon, the intensity of the memory rushing in like a sudden illness.

Scott Sobolesky was the first face she saw when she’d emerged from Mrs.

Gargiulo’s apartment, as if he had been waiting out there all along, hoping that Carla would slip up. He stood with his hands on his hips, a slight shake to his head, his shoes scuffed with dried mud from god-knew-where.

“Don’t even tell me,” he’d said, the self-righteousness like fuel igniting in his voice. Up and down the corridor were a handful of residents, peeking their heads out of their apartments or shuffling along the carpet, their eyebrows raised in concern. 242

“It’s fine,” Carla had said, “everything’s under control.”

But before she could even finish the sentence Sobolesky was past her and inside

Mrs. Gargiulo’s apartment. Carla smiled helplessly at the residents in the hall, some her clients, some just dimly familiar Rice Terrace faces, men and women at the end of their lives, tucked away quietly and inauspiciously, stacked in identical flimsy cubes. From inside Mrs. Gargiulo’s she could hear the old woman’s voice, shrill in protest, and then

Sobolesky was back in the hall—a flowered oven mitt on one hand, clutching the rim of the ancient seasoned hotplate. He ghosted Carla, made his way heavy-footed down the corridor, and she followed on his heels.

“What the hell are you doing?” she half-whispered into his back. “Please,” she said, “you’re embarrassing me.”

But he didn’t acknowledge her at all. Just kept marching down the hall, swinging her mother’s hotplate with each stride, Mrs. Gargiulo’s ridiculous oven mitt inching down his stick-thin wrist. At the end of the corridor he came to the small steel door of the garbage chute and placed his free hand on the knob.

“Don’t you dare,” Carla managed to hiss, her voice compressed by that same anger and embarrassment. But Sobolesky hesitated for only a slight hitch before opening the door to the chute and tossing the plate into its dark mouth.

There was a rumble as the plate spun and scraped the aluminum sides of the shaft.

A distant, muffled crash when it finally struck bottom.

Sobolesky turned. 243

His confidence eroded right before Carla’s eyes. It was plain, written across his face—panic narrowing his eyes.

“Look,” he said, hedging, “I…I told you. I told you that—”

And that was all he managed to get out before Carla struck him hard—open- palmed—across his face.

Down the hall, one of the tenants gasped.

The last thing she remembered was the glassiness of Scott Sobolesky’s eyes. The slight twitch in his upper lip. Visible even under cover of that wiry little mustache.

VI.

The sun is just burning night from the eastern sky when Sydney pulls up to her mother’s house. She rolls down the car’s windows. Kills the engine. Listens to it ticking as it cools under the hood.

Caleb’s books and clothing and old empty cd cases are strewn everywhere. A skateboard and lacrosse stick sit on the back seat. She takes a measured breath. She can taste the salt in the air, rolling up from the trash-strewn beach four blocks away. In the bluish light, bats are swooping and diving for their food high up over the rooftops. She can hear the hum of the transistors where they perch up on the poles.

To her surprise, her father’s Grand Marquis is parked across the street—one front tire sunk into a neighbor’s lawn, a large dent in the passenger side door, a parking ticket pinned underneath one of the wiper blades—and even though Sydney has no idea what to 244 make of this, it seems logical in the moment, as if she’d expected him to be here, a lifetime of evidence to the contrary.

Sydney has trouble getting up the nerve to leave the car. She sits and tries to conjure up what happens next—what her options might be—but her mind feels squeezed and emptied. From somewhere in the distance comes the tolling of a garbage truck in reverse. The sound of trash cans being lifted and dumped. Men calling to each other.

Once she’s finally worked up the nerve to go in, she finds her father first: asleep upright on the loveseat in the living room, a blanket draped over his lap. There’s a small wedge of flesh missing from his bottom lip. Sydney notices it even in the dim milky light that drifts through the glass slider. His shirt is torn at the collar. His breathing comes in fits and starts. There’s a half-full mug of tea on the kitchen table.

She makes her way quietly up the stairs. To her old bedroom. The familiar smell of home hanging over everything. And when she opens the door Sydney’s not surprised to find her mother asleep in the small single bed of her old room, curled up there like a little girl, as if keeping it warm for the daughter who might show up, any minute now.

245

Step Right Up

At work, while Gio straps on the gear, the fat man sits on double-stacked milk crates by the boardwalk and barks at strangers in his thick Brooklyn accent. This is his job. What Emil pays him to do.

Shoot the freak! Come on and step right up! For three bucks you can shoot this freak right in his freakin’ throat! Have some fun and shoot the freak! Shoot the freakin’ freak!

All day in the dead-dog heat of August, soft-serve glistening in the sun, the fat man yells. Gio doesn’t mind the fat man. Gio doesn’t even mind Emil Carasso, who stuffs his meager pay-envelope at the end of each week—Emil rubbing on those jade beads like some fake-ass gangster, with his metallic three-piece suits, and his baseball- thick wad of singles. What Gio minds is the heat. All day, every day, running through this abandoned lot in the pads and the helmet. This morning he gets so sun dizzy he thinks he might black out. He has to stop the game right in the middle of a green-light-go and tell the fat man he needs some water, and the fat man plays it like the freak is waving the white flag, like the suckers are lighting him up too good. Let’s give the freak a breather, the fat man shouts, cigar ash smudged into his guinea tee. But under his breath to Gio:

Look, kid. The freak don’t get paid to drink no water. The freak gets paid to run.

And so Gio runs.

Shuck shuck. Jive jive. Shake rattle and go. This is Gio disappearing. A black blur in the heat of a fresh run. He sprints the chute and can feel the old paintball shells crushing underfoot like dead leaves. The briny smell of exploded rounds a thin mist in the 246 air. When he comes to the end of the chute he squares up against the firing line and raises his riot shield. Thwmp. Thwmp. Thwmp. Three shots like hoofbeats hit the broad plate of his plexi-glass shield. A volley of other shots kick up dust at his feet.

At the line are three kids—two boys and a girl in pigtails—all dressed in catholic prep uniforms. The boys giggle in between the rounds they squeeze off; they high-five each other and squeal when Gio lowers the shield to just below his chin and hops from foot to foot, taunting. The little girl is silent. She squints through the sites and lets loose a shot that hits Gio square in the right eye of his mask, the purple paint splattering across the plastic window and rendering him half-blind.

We gotta shooter here, ladies and gentleman! Dead-eye Jane!

When Gio tilts his head toward the sunlight, the fresh paint on his eye-guard flares in bright bursts of purple that make him nauseous. But even with one eye, Gio can see the trajectory of the shot as it comes in. He can anticipate what part of his body he needs to protect by the look of the shooter. Frat boys and red-headed kids always go for the crotch-shots. Asians love the head and neck. Gang-bangers try to hold the gun sideways and this results in a series of hollow clicks before they realize that the hoppers operate on gravity.

When the kids’ hoppers are empty, a chaperone quickly shoos them away from the firing line, despite their pleas for more ammo. Gio heads over to the cleaning station at the back corner of the lot—a pump and bucket hidden behind a tall stand of plastic cattails. In the distance he can hear the tick tick tick tick of the Cyclone as it readies for another plummet. 247

Gio does all he can to stretch the break before the next go. He pulls off his mask and runs it underneath the hose, uses the car sponge to work the gunk from between the lens and the frame. Scott, the part-time weekend freak from Park Slope, the wannabe actor, waits too long between cleans and already the viewing plate in the mask is cloudy with paint dust. Gio squeezes out the sponge, wets it again and wipes down the shield and shin guards. He turns the spigot on the hose and readies himself for another run.

* * *

The first time Gio saw the patent attorney’s daughter it felt like a punch line of some kind. He'd agreed to spend the night at the patent attorney's house for his mother's fortieth back in May. This was mostly at his father's urging, who insisted that six months was too long to hold a grudge at fifteen.

"Will you come?" Gio had asked.

"I'd rather chew rock salt off the FDR," his father said.

So Gio found himself for the first time on the Harlem Line Metro-North, a train nothing like the subways that he was used to riding; it had air-conditioning and electric outlets and cushioned seats that he could imagine himself falling asleep in, if the ride up to Scarsdale was longer, and if he wasn't so wound up. He bought a package of Starburst from the newsstand in Grand Central and chewed them nervously through the Bronx and then through Fleetwood and Tuckahoe and Crestwood—places with names like movie butlers. He thought up elaborate ways to embarrass the patent attorney, but by the time 248 the train pulled into the Scarsdale station, he was too nervous and disoriented to remember any of these ideas, and, besides, his mother showed up at the station to pick him up alone.

She hugged him on the open platform and he noticed that she smelled different, like a combination of honeysuckle and the pink soap that came out of the dispenser at the

Y. Her clothes, too, were looser, airier than anything she used to wear when she lived with them: a silky gold blouse, crinkled like pastry, draped over a beige tank top; a pair of impossibly white capri pants and delicate suede sandals. With her dark kinked hair and gold-rimmed sunglasses, she looked like an unaffordable version of his mother.

"Gi-gi, honey," she said, holding Gio at arms-length as if to check him for damage. Her Staten Island accent still worked its familiar nasal magic despite the new digs, and it nearly melted something inside him. She was the only one who called him Gi- gi. His father thought it was a girl’s name.

"I'm glad you came," she said. "It's a nice gift."

"Thank Dad," Gio said.

He wasn't sure what he was hoping to accomplish by opening with this, but it seemed to have the desired effect; she gave his shoulder a tight squeeze and motioned for him to follow her down the platform and out toward the commuter lot, where, in front of the station, fireflies pulsed over a trash-strewn island of shrubs. He didn't even balk when she led the way to a brand new gray Mercedes in the back corner of the lot, though he played silently with the electronic seat adjustments all the way back to the patent attorney's tree-lined and flagstoned street. 249

The house itself was all dormers and cedar-shake, older looking than anything else on the street. They entered through a side-door in the three-car garage, walking past two sheet-draped cars, like bodies in a morgue, and through another door into the main house.

"Frank is excited you're here," his mother said, seemingly at ease in her new surroundings. "Nava too," she said.

They passed through an anteroom strewn with shoes and rain galoshes and umbrellas. Some of the scattered shoes he recognized as his mothers. Then down a long hallway lined with framed photographs of people Gio didn't recognize. Then all at once they were in the kitchen and there was the patent attorney sitting on a stool at an immaculate center island, drink in hand, reading a newspaper.

"Gio," his mother said, "you remember Frank."

The patent attorney looked up and smiled. He was shorter than Gio remembered from the few times they'd met in the city, when he was still just his mother's boss. He had a clean-shaven face, a slight sag to his cheeks, and you could tell that he was the kind of guy that needed to shave twice or three times in a day—like his father. He wore an unbuttoned yellow shirt and a tuft of gray hair sprouted from the collar of his white undershirt. Gio could smell wine and something buttery in the air.

"Great to see you again, Gio," he said. It was as if he'd been rehearsing the line.

"It's Giacamo," Gio said.

The patent attorney looked at him with a wary kindness. It was his lawyering face,

Gio thought. Like he was billing his time in four-minute increments even sitting in his 250 own kitchen, drinking his own drink, which he took a measured sip of—the ice settling and cracking softly at the bottom of his glass.

"Right. Giacomo," he said. "As in Casanova."

The patent attorney smiled and the little touches of gray at each temple shifted slightly.

“What’s he talkin’ about?” Gio said, though he didn’t look to his mother.

“Giacomo Girolamo,” the patent attorney continued, “the Italian lady’s man. You don’t know Casanova?”

“Why don’t I show you your room,” his mother said.

She brushed some imaginary crumbs off of the marbled center island. From somewhere in the house came the chime of a grandfather clock, which mapped the immensity of the place in hollow sound. The patent attorney nodded, as if to its rhythm.

The night passed this way, everyone tiptoeing around each other. Clipped pleasantries followed by silence. The three of them had dinner outside by the pool on a wrought-iron table, the quiet punctuated every now and then by the zap of a bug light.

The quiet felt strange and slightly dangerous to Gio, though he couldn’t say why. From time to time his mother would ask him questions and he tried to answer with as few words as possible. It started to feel like a kind of game.

Then, just as they were finishing up dinner, Gio heard a light volley of laughter from beyond the screened slider that led back to the kitchen. There came the screech of the slider and two girls, both about Gio's age, slipped out onto the patio, both glowing in tennis whites and neon polo shirts. One of the girls, the taller one with the dark hair, wore 251 a pink cast that covered her wrist and lower forearm. Junior could see the freckles on her cheeks and nose, even in the dim glow of the patio flood.

"Bout time," the patent attorney said. He stood up and the taller girl pecked him lightly on the cheek. Then she came around the table and gave Gio's mother the same perfunctory peck.

"Gio," his mother said, still holding the girl lightly by the wrist, "this is Nava,

Frank's daughter. Nava this is Gio, my son."

Nava smiled at Gio. She had a slight gap between her top front teeth, but you could tell she wasn’t self-conscious about it. She seemed like someone who wasn’t embarrassed by much of anything.

"Giacomo Girolamo," she said.

"Hey," Gio said.

The other girl, the redhead with eyebrows like two wisps of flame, stood silently behind Nava looking like she might faint if anyone made a loud noise.

"Dad, Sonja's going to spend the night," Nava said.

"That’s fine," said the patent attorney, sitting back down. "How are you, Sonja?"

Sonja toed the flagstone with her tennis sneaker.

"We lost both doubles matches in straight sets, but Nava won her singles, even with the cast ruining her backhand, so I guess we know who’s not carrying their weight," she said.

“How’s the wrist?” the patent attorney said. 252

“Solid,” said Nava, and she knocked it twice against the wrought-iron table to demonstrate.

“Honey,” his mother said, “please. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Gio tried not to look directly at Nava. He'd somehow forgotten about the patent attorney's daughter, though his mother made a point to mention her from time to time during their phone calls—something the girl had said or done that was supposed to exemplify the ways kids acted in these situations. Instead he assembled her in glances.

She was tall for her age. Taller than Gio even. Mostly legs and arms. She had the same distinct peppering of freckles on her knees—the kind that looked like they might disappear if she stayed out of the sun for a few days. Her mother died when she was very young. Gio knew this. He also knew that the patent attorney had remarried twice. That neither of the marriages lasted very long. Months of one-sided conversations with his mother seeped suddenly to the surface. He thought he’d made a conscious effort to block it all out, to ignore it, but here it was staring down at him in tennis whites and a gap- toothed smile and a hair that hung down like spun coal.

That night they played an endless game of Pictionary in the leather-clad den— kids versus adults—and Gio was genuinely disappointed when Nava told him, jokingly, that he drew like a five-year-old. Whenever he tried to catch a quick glimpse of her, a peripheral snapshot that would verify the thrumming in his ears, he seemed to make eye- contact with Sonja—who was creeped Gio with her thin, bloodless lips and razor-cut bangs. 253

Soon the adults were going to bed and Gio's mother was showing him his room again, as if he’d forget and wander somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. Here were his towels. Here was the toothpaste. Here were the extra blankets—an entire closet-full. She kissed him gently on the forehead.

"You know, you can come up here whenever you want," she said, her voice tired and husky—a little edgeless from the wine.

Gio nodded.

"Yeah," he said.

She kissed him again and ran a hand over his head. He’d had the urge to collapse into her like an accordion, but down the hallway he could hear the patent attorney gargling in their master bathroom.

When he came back out to the den Nava and Sonja were both dressed in pajamas—mesh gym shorts and old t-shirts—watching television, their legs intertwined on the couch. Gio sat in the overstuffed leather recliner and pretended to watch the television too. Sonja had a laptop out and every now and then she would turn the screen and show something to Nava and they would laugh or talk shit about someone Gio didn’t know. But then, all at once, they were looking at him, staring unabashed.

"What?" he said.

Nava untangled her legs and lifted the computer from Sonja's lap. She came over and sat on the arm of Gio's recliner. He could smell the lotion that she used, some kind of fruit or flower that he could never name. He thought about these things growing somewhere far away. About someone picking them. Crushing them. Making them into a 254 paste for Nava’s body. He noticed the subtle tan line from the tennis skirt she’d been wearing that day. She held the laptop out in front of him, leaning forward so he could see the screen.

It was a YouTube video. It took him a moment to recognize what he was seeing.

The lot looked smaller on camera and the fat man's baritone sounded tinnier. The video was labeled Shoot the Freak – Coney Island and was uploaded less than a week ago. Gio watched the padded figure zigzag across the lot, toying with the shooters, shaking the riot shield after every rush and sidestep. He'd never seen himself like this before. He looked up at Nava expecting her to break out in laughter, to see something cruel in her eyes, but she watched the video with genuine interest, her face taut with something like muscle memory. She followed his every move on the screen.

"Doesn’t it hurt?" she asked.

"Sometimes," he said.

He showed her a small bruise on his inner arm—just the ghosts of a bruise really—and she traced a finger around it lightly.

"Your mom says she can get your dad locked up for letting you do this," she said.

Gio felt an acidic twisting in his stomach.

"I'd like to see her try it,” he said. "I got working papers from my school. It’s legit as far as New York City is concerned. Not sure how you do shit up here in the boonies, but I gotta get paid.”

“I babysit,” Nava said.

“Mmhmm.” 255

“And I help out at dad’s office in the summers.”

“Right.”

Nava closed the laptop.

"Why are you being mean to me?" she said.

Sonja made a show of yawning and stretching her arms high over her head.

"I'm going to bed," she said, shooting Nava a look. "You ready?"

Nava lifted herself from the arm of the recliner and her skin stuck to the leather.

That night he lay in his guest bed in his guest room and watched the light reflected off the pool outside throw shifting patterns across his guest ceiling. He listened to the night noises of Scarsdale. He listened to the house settling. The trill of insects. A giggle or two from Nava's bedroom next door, until the girls laughed themselves to sleep and he thought he was the only conscious person in the house. Soon all he heard was the dry hum of the central air-conditioning and the crickets out by the pool.

He was just nodding off when he thought he heard a tap at the guest room door.

He propped himself up a bit, but didn't move or respond. After a while there was another tap. He could see two small shadows in the wedge of light that came in under the door.

Then the handle was turning and the door was opening and there was Nava standing in the open doorway.

"Gio?" she said. He could barely hear her.

He decided not to answer. He could see her and she couldn’t see him. Her eyes hadn't adjusted yet.

"Gio?" she said again, louder this time. 256

"Yeah," he said.

She stood for a moment, as if trying to visualize the layout of the room. Then she walked over to the bed and kneeled down so that they were almost face-to-face.

"I just…" she said. "I just…wanted you to know that I didn't mean to upset you before. It’s not really any of my business."

Gio turned on his side to face her. He could smell the mint on her breath. Her eyes were two shining things in the dark of the room.

"You didn't hurt my feelings," he said.

In the refracted light of the pool he could just make out the sharp line of her nose, the vague outline of her lips.

"Good," she said. "I know this must suck for you, I just—"

And then before he knew what he was doing he'd leaned in and he'd kissed her, a sad kiss, just to the left of her mouth, a clumsy and misjudged kiss, more two faces colliding and recoiling, but the idea of the kiss was there. Nava pulled back and tripped over herself, sprawling across the hardwood, and then she was up on her feet and heading for the door. He didn't even have time to say anything before she’d slipped out and disappeared back into the light of the hall.

* * *

Another afternoon of shake and shuffle on the boardwalk. At the end of the day, walking north on Stillwell toward the F Stop, Gio peels flecks of dried paint from the hair 257 on his forearm. During the last run some skinny hipster, trying to impress his band-mates no doubt, had managed to sneak a shot past the riot shield and under Gio’s left arm- guard, the paintball working its way up to the crook of his elbow. There was already a yellowed bruise coming up beneath the skin.

On the train platform an ancient Chinese man sits on a stool and works a bow across what looks like a stringed sledgehammer but sounds to Gio like a dying dolphin.

There is no money in his upturned case. A boy and girl, younger than Gio by a few years, are connected by a single set of headphones; they lean into each other against the MTA machine and exchange quick kisses. Gio stands at the edge of the platform and straddles the stenciled warning to watch the gap. He cranes his neck to look up the tracks.

This summer there has been a series of what the papers are calling “subway heroes”—selfless citizens who put themselves in harm’s way to rescue fainters and fallers just moments before they get crushed by oncoming trains. In Queens, a Gulf War-veteran and grandfather, on his way to claim an unemployment check, rescued an epileptic mother of three by dragging her from the tracks and shielding her shaking body beneath the lip of the platform. In Battery Park, a bicycle courier, on his way home after delivering legal documents all day, saved an attorney who tripped over his own briefcase and found himself, bloodied and bruised, staring down a fast-moving 6 local. These stories had worked themselves into the collective consciousness of the city so thoroughly that it became impossible not to imagine yourself as the kind of person who would do such a thing—as a potential hero—and so Gio found himself playing out elaborate 258 scenarios in which he might rescue the patent attorney's daughter from the city’s public transportation system.

On the train Gio chooses the one car that everyone else at the station seemed to know to avoid. There’s a bum covered in thin, soup-cellar blankets who stretches across three seats, his feet duct-taped but with the toes, hard-knobbed and ashy, sticking out.

The entire car smells of deep humid funk, but Gio sticks it out until Avenue U, the collar of his shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth. Three minutes away from the boardwalk, from the salted breeze off the bay, and already Gio can feel the inland city air pressing down on him.

The sun is powering down behind their four-floor walk-up on Van Sicklen when he gets home. Outside on the front stoop are the two new tenants from downstairs: Slip and Slide is what his father calls them. They’re six or seven years older than Gio, in their early twenties: patchwork beards, tight jeans, one tall and dark, one short and blonde.

They’re drinking 22 oz. beers wrapped in paper bags, the tall one rolling a cigarette on top of a phonebook still sealed in the plastic. Their arrival last month coincided with a two hundred dollar hike in rent for the rest of the building—a reworked lease agreement slipped under their doors in the middle of the night.

“Boss man,” says the short one, Slip, nodding in Gio’s direction. “Celebrations abounding up in here.” He lifts his bagged beer as if to toast.

“Abounding who?” Gio says.

The tall one licks the length of his cigarette and then places it in his mouth. He’s the quieter of the two—the one that Gio has seen walking with these spooky girls through 259 the cemetery across the street sometimes. Girls who smear dark makeup around their eyes and who always look like someone just woke them up and dragged them out of bed by their hair.

“Me and my man here,” Slip says, “we got signed by Wicked Imp this afternoon.

We go into the studio in three weeks to cut tracks. No joke.”

“Wicked imp?”

Slip looks momentarily stung, but then shifts his voice like he just remembered he’s talking to a foreigner.

“Indie label, brother. They’re killing it right now,” he says. “This shit is happening.”

At night, when Gio is trying to sleep, he hears the strange sounds that bubble up from their apartment on the ground floor. Electronic whirrs and ticks. Deep dark church- bell tolls. Something like the sounds a frightened computer might make if you went at its insides with a soldering gun.

A slight breeze twists up and rattles the leaves on the trees across the street, the ones that shade the Gravesend Cemetery.

“Some day you can say you lived above us,” says Slip, dopey grin side-winding.

“I can say that now,” says Gio.

Slip laughs and takes a drink from his bag.

Slide lights his cigarette and draws at it like it’s an asthma inhaler.

Gio squeezes between them to get into the foyer. In the mail: two cheap calendars from the Diocese of Brooklyn and something from a place called Alive in Hope. His 260 father is a regular contributor to the Diocese. He gets junk from them every other day and refuses to throw any of it away, as if the calendars and flowery return labels and cheap plastic rosaries are mailed out from the desk of Jesus Christ himself. Their drawers are cluttered with them now.

Upstairs, dust bunnies look alive in the late afternoon light. This time of day the sun comes through the three small windows of their apartment like SWAT. His father isn’t home yet from his morning shift taking fares out to JFK and LaGuardia, so Gio decides that he’ll make them something cold and healthy to eat: bagged arugula, grilled chicken, sliced pickled beets from the can. The AC unit is acting up again and his father refuses to buy another one; he just punches up the still-working “fan” setting, which pushes hot air around the room and drowns out some of Slip and Slide’s computer music.

On the answering machine there’s another message from his mother. She wants to know when they can expect him again. It’s been a few weeks since his last visit and he’s been avoiding her calls. She mentions the temperature of the pool. Something about fireworks on the Hudson. In the background Gio can hear the television—a laugh track swelling up between the tired lines of some sitcom. Maybe Nava and the patent attorney laughing too. She mentions the Mermaid Parade this coming Saturday in Coney Island.

Nava and her friends thinking about coming down. Gio listens to the message twice and then deletes it.

By the time his father walks through the door he’s already got the chicken breasts grilled (a little brucciato—the way his father like all his meat) and sliced. He’s chopping the beets for the salad. 261

“The Freak,” his father says, kicking off his shoes. “And he cooks.”

“This is almost done,” Gio says.

His father pulls at the stretched neckline of his sweatshirt and takes a whiff of what’s going on underneath. “Oof,” he says. A large coffee stain is spread out above the

Mets logo. Stubble grays the underside of his chin. He has these intense razor burns on the sides of his neck, which Gio knows he shaves to monkey-down—to make it look like the black hair that grows on his head and face and back and throat aren’t all connected in that sick guinea pelt.

“I gotta head out in a minute actually,” he says. “Amir called in sick and I’m on cover.”

Gio chops quick and steady.

“They should ring up NSA on that dude,” he says, soothing himself with the groove of the knife. “He might be sleeper cell.”

His father disappears into the back bedroom.

“You watch too much television,” he calls. “The man is from Schenectady.”

After a beat, the pipes begin to groan under the floor of the apartment. The shower hisses through the walls. Gio fixes a bowl of salad for his father and a bowl for himself. He pours some olive oil and balsamic vinegar over the top and brings both bowls out to the coffee table in the living room. The plastic-covered sofa is pure torture in the heat and so Gio covers it with the sheet from his bed. Half of Manhattan below 39th Street is browned out, says the Asian lady on television. A red-faced spokesman for Con Ed in suit, tie, and yellow hardhat comes on to say that his crews are working overtime. The 262 grid is over-exerted. Please limit the use of your air conditioners if at all possible.

Sacrifice for the greater good.

When his father comes out of the bedroom he’s wearing a new light blue, short- sleeved button-down, stiff as wrapping paper. Cheap, pleated khakis. He falls in next to

Gio on the couch and the plastic under the sheet lets out a groan. He begins stuffing the salad into his mouth mechanically.

“This is good,” he says. “How’s work?”

Gio switches the channel on the television.

“They’re starting to find the chinks in the armor,” he says.

He shows his father a bruise on his upper thigh, purple-brown in the center and a sickly yellow around the edges. His father winces.

“Emil isn’t paying you enough,” he says. He shakes his head. “That makes two of us.”

“No,” Gio says, poking at his bruise like it belongs to someone else, “but I’m not the only shithead in this city willing to get shot for money.” Which is true. Gio knows that Emil has taken fifteen applications in the last six days, interest in the range booming after the local news did a what’s-happening-in-your-neck-of-the-woods segment featuring it. NPR followed up with a radio piece that Gio found and listened to online. He thought the fat man’s barking sounded different over the radio. Sadder. Faker.

“Oh,” his father says, “language.”

The volume on the television cuts out and from the other side of the cemetery comes the nursery-rhyme loop of an ice cream truck. A garbage truck shushes the 263 neighborhood with its air-brakes. His father scrapes up the last shreds of his salad and then runs a finger through the oil and vinegar pooled at the bottom of the bowl. He brings the empty bowl into the kitchenette and drops it with a clank into the sink. He opens the fridge and takes out a carton of milk. Takes a few gulps. Puts it back. The nursery-rhyme loop of the ice cream truck begins to fade.

“You deleted the message,” he says.

On the television now is one of those court shows. Knockoff Judge Judy this judge: bloated, with a spade-shaped goatee, miniature statuettes lines along his mahogany bench.

“I forgot the EZ-pass this morning,” he says. “I know she was on there. G,” he adds, scratching at his jawline, the razor burns flaring now, “go up again if you want.

Spend a night or two. I don’t care.”

“I know,” Gio says. Though what he really knows is this little two-step. The tests that his father likes to float out there, wallowing a little, looking for a pick-me-up. But

Gio’s too tired to play along. Too hot.

His father lifts an arm and fans at his armpit. Gio sees the pale lip of his stomach where his shirt lifts up over his belt. He sifts through the mail on the kitchen table. He opens the letter from the Brooklyn Diocese and pulls out a white, plastic rosary. He runs his finger over the beads and then pins the collection envelope to the freezer door with a magnet.

“You should go see your mother. I mean, legally. By law. You’re going to have to see the cunt eventually.” 264

He regrets it as soon as it comes out of his mouth. He’s doing his silent ten-count and reforming his anger with mental pressure: coal into cool clear diamond. Something one of the counselors told him to try and see when they were all still doing the counseling thing. Gio knows to keep quiet during the conversion process. In his own head he pictures the glowing red dollars ticking away on his father’s car service meter, something that used to help him sleep when he was little.

“Look,” his father says, sighing, “enough time goes by and mistakes aren’t even mistakes anymore. You’ll see. It’s just the way things happen.”

It’s like he’s reading from one of those teleprompters that politicians are always using on TV. His eyes are pinned to the collection envelope on the freezer door and he’s still going at the beads on the rosary.

“People find angles, G. Your mother…”

And then it starts again from downstairs—the electronic toll of a synthesizer, a looped hook that breaks off in snowy static every other bar. A bass beat joins in. The pistol pop of a snare. The apartment seems to settle in its joists. The knockoff judge on television turns some documents over in his fat hands.

His father’s wrapping-paper shirt is already dark under the arms, but he draws a hot breath and forces a smile. He places the beads in the junk drawer with all of the others.

Conversion complete.

“Thanks,” he says, nodding toward the empty bowl in the sink. “I needed that.

265

Unable to sleep that night, Gio slips out of the apartment and walks. He crosses Avenue

U where the clapboarded bungalows with conversion vans parked out front give way to the redbrick monstrosities further north. Wrought-iron fences line the sidewalks in front of these homes and vintage gas lamps burn dimly in the dark. Gio can hear the fountains of the Armenian Mile (his father’s term) trickling away the night.

Emil is sitting inside the dispatch office when Gio arrives. He sees him framed in the dispatch window, washed out in fluorescent light. Gio crosses the street before Emil can spot him. He watches Emil poke half-heartedly at the contents of a Styrofoam container. He has on sweatpants and a white t-shirt; his bulky Air Jordans are unlaced, the tongues sticking out as if bloated with the heat.

Across the street is a bank of payphones. Gio goes to the only one that doesn't have the phone ripped from the receiver and drops in some change. He pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket—he'd stolen the number from his mother's cell phone that next morning, when he’d woken up too shame-sick to even sit up in bed. But Nava was already gone for the day and he told his mother to take him to the train station even though he was supposed to spend the rest of the weekend with them. The ringing comes through the earpiece false and pre-recorded. Then it stops and there is a muffled shuffling on the other end.

“Hello?”

Her voice is salted with sleep. She rearranges herself in her bed.

“Hello?” she says again. 266

And Gio hangs up the phone.

* * *

Saturday morning, the morning of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, people come from all five boroughs to dress like sea creatures and drink. They ride the rides and stick their toes in the sand, while the Lubavitchers hand out their pamphlets and protesters bewail the high-rise condos perpetually slated for construction.

In the morning they have an employee meeting outside the range: Gio, Emil, and the fat man—who shows up twenty minutes late reeking of booze and stale cigars. Emil is dressed in a white linen suit and lime-green shirt and looks as though he belongs on a billboard for Miami real estate. While Emil and Gio check the CO2 lines running to the guns and the levels on all the hoppers, the fat man sits on his milk-crates, head between his knees.

There's not much action in the morning. A couple of ragged drunks, probably still reeling from an all-nighter, unload forty shots in less than a minute while Gio runs the gauntlet. They laugh until they realize they're out of ammo and money. A big blonde couple from Sweden or Germany or Luxembourg spring for two rounds but seem to lose interest once they've captured it all on their small digital camera. The crowds start to thicken with the sun.

Gio sits atop one of the oil drums, his helmet and shield down at his feet. He can hear the parade starting up on Surf Avenue. There is the bark of a megaphone and then 267 mechanical voices ringing out over the 12th Street Amusement canopies. In the distance, the rush of the Cyclone as it makes its first drop of the day. Music is playing through a

PA somewhere: “Rock Me Like a Hurricane,” “Under the Sea,” “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

It’s not long before Gio can hear the parade coming down to the water on West

10th. The procession spills out onto the boardwalk in a flurry of color and sound. They move parallel to the shore: a steady stream of mermaids in shiny turquoise sequins, naked from the waist up, seashells and starfish pasted to their bare breasts; bearded sea gods in tattered loin-clothes and thick leather belts; pirates, with their tri-cornered hats and long fake locks, puttied scars glinting in the harbor light; Uncle Sam loping down the boardwalk on six foot stilts. At the end, perched in his wheeled, wicker chariot, trident held high, aluminum crown angled on his head, is King Neptune himself—this year,

Brooklyn’s own, Harvey Keitel. He's dressed entirely in black and waves to onlookers while his big-breasted Queen blows bubbles from a glittered wand.

Gio watches it all pass in front of the range and can’t help but feel like he’s living in the world’s largest rusting and collapsing joke. Like he’s living someone else’s life out here. Not his own. That nothing is quite as real as it seems. He doesn’t even notice when

Nava and her friends show up, detaching themselves from the swell of the parade and sidling up to the counter of the range. There they are now, laughing and spinning, so that

Emil and the fat man can get a look at their costumes. Nava is dressed in a long aqua skirt that hugs her hips, scales painted in silver up and down the length of it, and a matching blue bikini top. Her hair is pulled up with a tie of plastic kelp, sand dollar and starfish 268 barrettes inserted strategically. Metallic blue lashes, three-quarters of an inch long, flit from her lids. Her pink cast looks like part of the costume.

Gio hops off of his oil drum to head toward the line but already Emil is motioning for him to put on his helmet. Already the fat man is barking at the crowd.

Shoot the freak! Step right up and shoot the freak! Nothin's better than shootin' the freak!

Emil is positioning the girls at the firing line, touching a hip here, the small of a back there. He hands each of the girls a gun. He rattles off some quick instructions. Gio watches Nava ready herself. She props her thin elbows up on the counter and squints down the site of the black lacquered barrel. She smiles. She waves to Gio. The fat man begins counting in his gravely baritone. Five…Four…Three… Gio picks up his shield. He squares up to the line.

There’s a hiccup in time before the paint is flying. Gio’s moves are epic. His spin and stutter-step. His juke and short-sprint. His pivot from the waist and hips. He’s never been so missable. Halfway through the run he actually feels something unlock and release in his blood—like he’s bitten down on one of those suicide capsules that spies hide under their tongues as a last resort. Everything gets syrupy slow.

How to describe it?

The juice of the go?

That invisible line that links the suckers—eyes drilling down the sights of their hollow barrels—to the Freak? 269

You’re gonna have to do better than that folks! Come on now! The Freak is on his game today! Step right up and take him down! Shoot this Freak!

The fat man claps his hands together and challenges the tourists roaming the boardwalk—the gawkers with cameras and floppy sunhats, the young girls in cut-offs and tanks. Some stream right on by. Some stop and watch. From out on the water coms the squelch and moan of an air-horn. The Cyclone’s wheels roar in Gio’s ears. Walled off in his pads and his helmet, he feels like the beating heart of this place.

Nava and her friends pause halfway through their clip. They recalibrate. Refocus.

Gio’s lungs feel salted and raw. His knees are full of give.

One more go now! Who’s got this kid’s number! Shoot this freakin’ Freak!

The fat man is just doing his job. Gio knows this. But this last bark throws him off his stride. He feels the eyes of the tourists—sickled like question marks—and before he can regroup, the next wave of shots is already on its way: a spray across his stomach before he can get the shield up, slugs to his padded chest, shin-guards spackled in green and red, facemask veined with paint. He stumbles the lot. Shots whistle past. Shots hit their mark. He’s swaying like he’s out to sea. There it is ladies and gentlemen! He tries to remember his way to cover. They’ve got him on the rails now! He reaches out for one of the oil drums leaning squat at the edges of his vision. Step right up and have some fun!

Through the haze of paint come the mannequin busts strung up and swinging, the red- white-and-blue targets somewhere in the distance. Nothin’s better than shootin’ the

Freak! He trips and falls to the ground. Props up his shield. Waits it out.

And the shooting stops. 270

Gio stands and flips up his mask.

He sucks in a big breath of garbagy air.

Up at the line, Nava and her friends are searching for the hidden pockets in their costumes. They’re handing Emil whatever they have. Nava gives another friendly wave before crouching back down to the line. Off shore the fishing charters begin to sound their baleful horns in celebration.

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