Читать книгу Philadelphia Fire - John Edgar Wideman - Страница 10

On a day like this the big toe of Zivanias had failed him. Zivanias named for the moonshine his grandfather cooked, best white lightning on the island. Cudjoe had listened to the story of the name many times. Was slightly envious. He would like to be named for something his father or grandfather had done well. A name celebrating a deed. A name to stamp him, guide him. They’d shared a meal once. Zivanias crunching fried fish like Rice Krispies. Laughing at Cudjoe. Pointing to Cudjoe’s heap of cast-off crust and bones, his own clean platter. Zivanias had lived up to his name. Deserted a flock of goats, a wife and three sons up in the hills, scavenged work on the waterfront till he talked himself onto one of the launches jitneying tourists around the island. A captain soon. Then captain of captains. Best pilot, lover, drinker, dancer, storyteller of them all. He said so. No one said different. On a day like this when nobody else dared leave port, he drove a boatload of bootleg whiskey to the bottom of the ocean. Never a trace. Not a bottle or bone.

Cudjoe watches the sea cut up, refusing to stay still in its bowl. Sloshing like the overfilled cup of coffee he’d transported this unsteady morning from marble-topped counter to a table outdoors on the cobblestone esplanade. Coffee cooled in a minute by the chill wind buffeting the island. Rushes of wind and light play with rows of houses like they are skirts. Lift the whitewashed walls from their moorings, billow them as strobe bursts of sunshine bounce and shudder, daisy chains of houses whipping and snapping as wind reaches into the folds of narrow streets, twisting tunnels and funnels of stucco walls, a labyrinth of shaky alleyways with no roof but the Day-Glo blue-and-gray crisscrossed Greek sky hanging over like heavy, heavy what hangs over in the game they’d played back home in the streets of West Philly.

Zivanias would hold his boat on course with his foot. Leaning on a rail, prehensile toes snagged in the steering wheel, his goatskin vest unbuttoned to display hairy chest, eyes half shut, humming an island ballad, he was sailor-king of the sea, a photo opportunity his passengers could not resist. Solitary females on holiday from northern peninsulas of ice and snow, secretaries, nurses, schoolteachers, clerks, students, the druggies who’d sold dope and sold themselves to get this far, this last fling at island sun and sea and fun, old Zivanias would hook them on his horny big toe and reel them in. Plying his sea taxi from bare-ass to barer-ass to barest-ass beach, his stations, his ports of call along the coast.

But not today. No putt-putting around the edges of Mykonos, no island hopping. Suicide on a day like this to attempt a crossing to Delos, the island sacred to Apollo where once no one was allowed to die or be born. No sailing today even with both hands on the wheel and all ten toes gripping the briny deck. Chop, chop sea would eat you up. Swallow your little boat. Spew it up far from home. Zivanias should have known better. Maybe he did. Maybe he couldn’t resist the power in his name summoning him, Zivanias, Zivanias. Moonshine. Doomshine. Scattered on the water.

Cudjoe winces. A column of feathers and stinging grit rises from the cobblestones and sluices past him. Wind is steady moan and groan, a constant weight in his face, but it also bucks and roils and sucks and swirls madly, sudden stop and start, gust and dust devil and dervishes ripping the world apart. Clouds scoot as if they’re being chased. Behind him the café window rattles in its frame. Yesterday at this same dockside table he’d watched the sunset. Baskets of live chickens unloaded. Colors spilled on the sea last evening were chicken broth and chicken blood and the yellow, wrinkled skin of plucked chickens. Leftover feathers geyser, incongruous snowflakes above stacks of empty baskets. The island exiled today. Jailed by its necklace of churning sea. No one could reach Mykonos. No one could leave. Dead sailorman Zivanias out there sea-changed, feeding the fish. Cudjoe’s flight home disappearing like the patches of blue sky. Sea pitches and shivers and bellows in its chains. Green and dying. Green and dying. Who wrote that poem. Cudjoe says the words again, green and dying, can’t remember the rest, the rest is these words repeating themselves, all the rest contained in them, swollen to bursting, but they won’t give up the rest. Somebody keeps switching a light on and off. Gray clouds thicken. White clouds pull apart, bleed into the green sea. A seamless curtain of water and sky draws tighter and tighter. The island is sinking. Sea and wind wash over its shadow, close the wound.

Take that morning or one like it and set it down here in this city of brotherly love, seven thousand miles away, in a crystal ball, so it hums and gyrates under its glass dome. When you turn it upside-down, a thousand weightless flakes of something hover in the magic jar. It plays a tune if you wind it, better watch out, better not cry. Cudjoe cups his hands, fondles the toy, transfixed by the simplicity of illusion, how snow falls and music tinkles again and again if you choose to play a trick on yourself. You could stare forever and the past goes on doing its thing. He dreams his last morning on Mykonos once more. If you shake the ball the flakes shiver over the scene. Tiny white chicken feathers. Nothing outside the sealed ball touches what’s inside. Hermetic. Unreachable. Locked in and the key thrown away. Once again he’ll meet a dark-haired woman in the café that morning. Wind will calm itself, sky clear. The last plane shuttles him to the mainland. Before that wobbly flight he’ll spend part of his last day with her on the beach. There will be a flash of fear when she rises naked from the sea and runs toward him, crowned by a bonnet of black snakes, arms and legs splashing showers of spray, sun spots and sun darts tearing away great chunks of her so he doesn’t know what she is. They’ll lie together on the sand. She will teach him the Greek for her body parts. Hair is . . . eyes are . . . nose is . . . the Greek words escaping him even as he hears them. But he learns the heat of her shoulders, curve of bone beneath the skin. No language she speaks is his. She doubles his confusion. He forgets how to talk. When she tests him, pointing to his eyes, he traces with a fingertip the pit of bone containing hers. He closes his eyes. He is blind. Words are empty sounds. Saying them does not bring her back. He’d tasted salt when he’d matched his word for lips with hers.

Cudjoe is remembering the toy from his grandmother’s cupboard. A winter scene under glass. Lift it by its black plastic base, turn it upside-down, shake it a little, shake it, don’t break it, and set the globe down again watch the street fill up with snow the little horse laugh to see such a sight and the dish run away with the spoon. He wonders what happened to his grandmother’s souvenir from Niagara Falls. When did she buy it? Why did he always want to pry it open and find the music and snow wherever they were hiding when the glass ball sat still and silent? He wanted to know but understood how precious the trinket was to his grandmother. She would die if he broke it. She lay in bed, thinner every day the summer after the winter his grandfather died. She was melting away. Turning to water which he mopped from her brow, from her body parts when he lifted the sheets. Could he have saved her if he’d known the Greek for arms and legs? His grandmother’s sweaty smell will meet him when he returns to the house on Finance and walks up the front-hall stairs and enters the tiny space where he cared for her that summer she melted in the heat of grief. Her husband of forty years dead, her flesh turning to water. Sweat is what gives you life. He figured that out as life drained from her. Her dry bones never rose from the bed. You could lift her and arrange her in the rocking chair but life was gone. He’d wiped it from her brow, her neck. Dried the shiny rivers in her scalp. Leg is . . . arm is . . . He learned the parts of a woman’s body caring for her, the language of sweat and smell they spoke. He had been frightened. He knew everything and nothing. Why was he supposed to look away from her nakedness when his aunts bathed her? He loved her. Shared her secrets. If he sat in the rocker keeping watch while she slept, she would not die.

The crystal ball long gone. He can’t recall the first time he missed it. Nothing rests in the empty cup of his hands. Not the illusion of a chilly winter day, not snowfall or a dark-haired woman’s face, her skin brown and warm as bread just out the oven. Ladybug, Ladybug. Fly away home. Your house is on fire. Your children burning. He is turning pages. Perhaps asleep with a book spread-eagled on his lap, the book he wishes he was writing, the story he crossed an ocean to find. Story of a fire and a lost boy that brought him home.

He had taped what she said. She is Margaret Jones now, Margaret Jones again. Her other names are smoke curling from smashed windowpanes of the house on Osage. A rainbow swirl of head kerchief hides her hair, emphasizes the formal arrangement of eyes, nose, lips embedded in blemishless yellow-brown skin. No frills, no distractions, you see the face for what it is, severe, symmetrical, eyes distant but ready to pounce, flared bulk of nose, lips thick and strong enough to keep the eyes in check.

She thinks she knows people who might know where the lost child could be. And she is as close to the boy as he’s come after weeks of questions, hanging around, false leads and no leads, his growing awareness of getting what he deserved as he was frowned at and turned away time after time. The boy who is the only survivor of the holocaust on Osage Avenue, the child who is brother, son, a lost limb haunting him since he read about the fire in a magazine. He must find the child to be whole again. Cudjoe can’t account for the force drawing him to the story nor why he indulges a fantasy of identification with the boy who escaped the massacre. He knows he must find him. He knows the ache of absence, the phantom presence of pain that tricks him into reaching down again and again to stroke the emptiness. He’s stopped asking why. His identification with the boy persists like a discredited rumor. Like Hitler’s escape from the bunker. Like the Second Coming.

What Cudjoe has discovered is that the boy was last seen naked skin melting, melting, they go do-do-do-do-do-do-do like that, skin melting stop kids coming out stop stop kids coming out skin melting do-do-do-do-do-do like going off—like bullets were going after each other do-do-do-do fleeing down an alley between burning rows of houses. Only one witness. A sharpshooter on a roof who caught the boy’s body in his telescopic sight just long enough to know he’d be doomed if he pulled the trigger, doomed if he didn’t. In that terrible light pulsing from the inferno of fire-gutted houses the boy flutters, a dark moth shape for an instant, wheeling, then fixed forever in the cross hairs of the infrared sniperscoped night-visioned weapon trained on the alley. At the same instant an avalanche of bullets hammers what could be other figures, other children back into boiling clouds of smoke and flame. The last sighting reports the boy alone, stumbling, then upright. Then gone again as quickly as he appeared.

Cudjoe hears screaming stop stop kids coming out kids coming out as the cop sights down the blazing alley. Who’s screaming? Who’s adding that detail? Could a cop on a roof two hundred feet away from a ghost hear what’s coming from its mouth? Over crackling flames? Over volleys of automatic-weapons fire thudding into the front of the house, over the drum thump of heart, roar of his pulse when something alive dances like a spot of grease on a hot griddle there in the molten path between burning row houses? The SWAT-team rifleman can’t hear, barely sees what is quivering in the cross hairs. Is it one of his stinging eyelashes? He squints and the vision disappears. Did he pull the trigger? Only later as he’s interrogated and must account for rounds fired and unfired does it become clear to him that what he saw was a naked boy, a forked stick with a dick. No. No, I didn’t shoot then. Others shot. Lots of shooting when the suspects tried to break out of the house. But I didn’t shoot. Not then. Because what I seen was just a kid, with no clothes on screaming. I let him go.

Cudjoe reminds himself he was not there and has no right to add details. No sound effects. Attribute no motives nor lack of motive. He’s not the cop, not the boy.

Tape is rewinding on his new machine. The woman with the bright African cloth tied round her head had not liked him. Yet she was willing to talk, to be taped. She’d agreed to meet him again, this time in the park instead of the apartment of the mutual friend who’d introduced them. You know. Clark Park, Forty-third and Baltimore. He’d nodded, smiled, ready after an hour of listening and recording to say something about the park, about himself, but she’d turned away, out of her chair already, already out the door of Rasheed’s apartment, though her body lagged behind a little saying good-bye to him, hollering good-bye over her shoulder to Rasheed. She’d watched the tape wind from spool to spool as she’d talked. Rasheed had waited in another room for them to finish. Cudjoe might as well have been in there, too. He spoke only once or twice while she talked. Margaret Jones didn’t need him, care for him. She was permitting him to overhear what she told the machine. Polite, accommodating to a degree, she also maintained her distance. Five thousand miles of it, plus or minus an inch. The precise space between Cudjoe’s island and West Philly. Somehow she knew he’d been away, exactly how long, exactly how far, and that distance bothered her, she held it against him, served it back to him in her cool reserve, seemed unable ever to forgive it.

How did she know so much about him, not only her but all her sisters, how, after the briefest of conversations, did they know his history, that he’d married a white woman and fathered half-white kids? How did they know he’d failed his wife and failed those kids, that his betrayal was double, about blackness and about being a man? How could they express so clearly, with nothing more than their eyes, that they knew his secret, that he was someone, a half-black someone, a half man who couldn’t be depended upon?

He peels a spotty banana down to the end he holds. Bites off a hunk. Rewraps the fruit in its floppy skin and rests it on a paper towel beside the tape recorder. Spoons a lump of coffee-flavored Dannon yogurt into his mouth. The tastes clash. One too sweet. One too tart. The cloying overripe odor of unzipped banana takes over. In an hour he should be in the park. Will Ms. Jones show up? If he admits to her he doesn’t know why he’s driven to do whatever it is he’s trying to do, would she like him better? Should he tell her his dream of a good life, a happy life on a happy island? Would she believe him? Fine lines everywhere to negotiate. He knows it won’t be easy. Does she think he’s stealing from the dead? Is he sure he isn’t? Tape’s ready. He pushes the button.

. . . Because he was so sure of hisself, bossy, you know. The big boss knowing everything and in charge of everything and could preach like an angel, they called him Reverend King behind his back. Had to call him something to get his attention, you know. James didn’t sound right. He wasn’t a Jimmy or Jim. Mr. Brown wouldn’t cut it. Mr. Anything no good. Reverend King slipped out a couple times and then it got to be just King. King a name he answered to. Us new ones in the family had to call him something so we called him King because that’s what we heard from the others. Didn’t realize it kind of started as a joke. Didn’t realize by calling him something we was making him something. He was different. You acted different around him so he’d know you knew he was different. Then we was different.

He taught us about the holy Tree of Life. How we all born part of it. How we all one family. Showed us how the rotten system of this society is about chopping down the Tree. Society hates health. Society don’t want strong people. It wants people weak and sick so it can use them up. No room for the Life Tree. Society’s about stealing your life juices and making you sick so the Tree dies.

He taught us to love and respect ourselves. Respect Life in ourselves. Life is good, so we’re good. He said that every day. We must protect Life and pass it on so the Tree never dies. Society’s system killing everything. Babies. Air. Water. Earth. People’s bodies and minds. He taught us we are the seeds. We got to carry forward the Life in us. When society dies from the poison in its guts, we’ll be there and the Tree will grow bigger and bigger till the whole wide earth a peaceful garden under its branches. He taught us to praise Life and be Life.

We loved him because he was the voice of Life. And our love made him greater than he was. Made him believe he could do anything. All the pains we took. The way we were so careful around him, let him do whatever he wanted, let him order us around like we was slaves. Now when I look back I guess that’s what we was. His slaves. And he was king because we was slaves and we made him our master.

He was the dirtiest man I ever seen. Smell him a mile off. First time I really seen him I was on my way home from work and he was just sitting there on the stone wall in front of their house. Wasn’t really stone. Cinder blocks to hold in yard dirt. Sucked four or five high and a rusty kind of broken-down pipe fence running across the top of the blocks. Well, that’s where he was sitting, dangling his bare legs and bare toes, sprawled back like he ain’t got a care in the world. Smelled him long before I seen him. Matter of fact when I stepped down off the bus something nasty in the air. My nose curls and I wonder what stinks, what’s dead and where’s it hiding, but I don’t like the smell so I push it to the back of my mind cause nothing I can do about it. No more than I can stop the stink rolling in when the wind blows cross from Jersey. Got too much else to worry about at 5:30 in the evening. I’m hoping Billy and Karen where they supposed to be. Mrs. Johnson keep them till 5:00, then they supposed to come straight home. Weather turning warm. Stuffy inside the house already so I say OK youall can sit out on the stoop but don’t you go a step further till I’m home. Catch you gallivanting over the neighborhood it’s inside the house, don’t care if it’s a oven in there. Billy and Karen mind most the time, good kids, you know what I mean, but all it takes is one time not minding. You know the kinda trouble kids can get into around here. Deep trouble. Bad, bad trouble. One these fools hang around here give them pills. One these jitterbugs put his hands on Karen. I’m worried about that sort of mess and got dinner to fix and beat from work, too beat for any of it. My feet ache and that’s strange because I work at a desk and I’m remembering my mama keeping house for white folks. Her feet always killing her and here I am with my little piece of degree, sitting on my behind all day and my feet sore like hers. Maybe what it is is working for them damned peckerwoods any kind of way. Taking their shit. Bitterness got to settle somewhere don’t it? Naturally it run down to your feet. Anyway, I’m tired and hassled. Ain’t ready for no more nonsense. Can’t wait till Billy and Karen fed and quiet for the night, safe for the night, the kitchen clean, my office clothes hung up, me in my robe and slippers. Glass of wine maybe. One my programs on TV. Nothing but my own self to worry about.

When I step off the bus stink hits me square between the eyeballs. No sense wrinkling up my nose. Body got to breathe and thinking about what you breathing just make it worse so I starts towards home which is three and a half blocks from where I get off the Number 62. Almost home when I see a trifling dreadlocked man draped back wriggling his bare toes. Little closer to him and I know what’s dead, what’s walking the air like it ain’t had a bath since Skippy was a pup. Like I can see this oily kind of smoke seeping up between the man’s toes. He’s smiling behind all that hair, all that beard. Proud of his high self working toejam. I know it ain’t just him stinking up the whole neighborhood. It’s the house behind him, the tribe of crazy people in it and crazy dogs and loudspeakers and dirty naked kids and the backyard where they dump their business, but sitting the way he is on the cinder blocks, cocked back and pleased with hisself, smiling through that orangutan hair like a jungle all over his face, it’s like he’s telling anybody care to listen, this funk is mine. I’m the funk king sitting here on my throne and you can run but you can’t hide.

See, it’s personal then. Me and him. To get home I have to pass by him. His wall, his house, his yard. Either pass by or go way round out my way. Got my route home I’ve been walking twelve years. Bet you find my footprints in the pavement I been walking home from work that way so long. So I ain’t about to change just cause some nasty man sitting there like he’s God Almighty. Huh. Uh. This street mine much as it’s anybody’s. I ain’t detouring one inch out my way for nothing that wears britches and breathes. He ain’t nothing to me no matter how bad he smell, no matter if he blow up in a puff of black smoke cause he can’t stand his own self. Tired as my feet be at the end of the day I ain’t subjecting them to one extra step around this nasty man or his nasty house.

So I just trots on by like he ain’t there, like ain’t none of it there. Wall. Pipe he’s got his greasy arms draped over. House behind him and the nuts in it. You know. Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. What I do do is stop breathing. Hold my breath till I’m past him, hold it in so long when I let it out on the next comer, I’m dizzy. But I’m past him and don’t give him the satisfaction. Tell the truth, I almost fainted before I made it up on the curb. And wouldn’t that have been a sight. Me keeling over in the street. He woulda had him a good laugh at that. Woulda told all them savages live with him. They could all have a good laugh together. The hounds. But what I care? Didn’t happen, did it? Strutted right past him like he wasn’t there. Didn’t even cross to the other side of Osage like I knew he was sitting there betting I would. Hoping I would so he could tell his tribe and they could all grin and hee-haw and put me on their loudspeakers.

No. No. Walked home the way I always walk home. Didn’t draw one breath for a whole block. Almost knocked myself out, but be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction.

Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Because the day I’m telling you about, the first time I seen him eyeball to eyeball, wasn’t much more than a year ago. Three months from that day I was part of his family. One his slaves that quick. Still am in a way. Even though his head’s tore off his body and his body burned to ash. See because even though he did it wrong, he was right. What I mean is his ideas were right, the thoughts behind the actions righteous as rain. He be rapping and he’d stop all the sudden, look over to one the sisters been a real strong church woman her whole life and say: Bet your sweet paddy boy Jesus amen that, wouldn’t he now? Teasing sort of, but serious too. He be preaching what Jesus preached except it’s King saying the words. Bible words only they issuing from King’s big lips. And you know he means them and you understand them better cause he says them black, black like him, black like you, so how the sister gon deny King? Tell that white fella Jesus stop pestering you. Tell him go on back to the desert and them caves where he belong.

Got to her Christian mind. Got to my tired feet. Who I been all the days of my life? A poor fool climb on a bus in the morning, climb down at night. What I got to show for it but sore feet, feet bad as my mama’s when, God bless her weary soul, we laid her to rest after fifty years cleaning up white folks’ mess. My life wasn’t much different from my mama’s or hers from her mama’s on back far as you want to carry it back. Out in the field at dawn, pick cotton the whole damned day, shuffle back to the cabin to eat and sleep so’s you ready when the conch horn blows next morning. Sheeet. Things spozed to get better, ain’t they? Somewhere down the line, it ought to get better or what’s the point scuffling like we do? Don’t have to squat in the weeds and wipe my behind with a leaf. Running water inside my house and in the supermarket I can buy thirty kinds of soda pop, twelve different colors of toilet paper. But that ain’t what I call progress. Do you? King knew it wasn’t. King just told the truth.

My Billy and Karen in school. Getting what they call an education. But what those children learn. Ask them where they come from, they give you the address of a house on Osage Avenue. Ask them what’s on their minds, they mumble something they heard on the TV. Ask them what color they are, they don’t even know that. Look them in the eye you know what they really thinking. Only thing they ever expect to be is you. Working like you for some white man or black man don’t make no difference cause all they pay you is nigger wages, enough to keep you guessing, keep you hungry, keep you scared, keep you coming back. Piece a job so you don’t never learn nothing, just keep you busy and too tired to think. But your feet think. They tell you every day God sends, stop this foolishness. Stop wearing me down to the nubs.

Wasn’t like King told me something new. Wasn’t like I had a lot to learn. Looked round myself plenty times and said, Got to be more to it than this. Got to be. King said out loud what I been knowing all along. Newspapers said King brainwashing and mind control and drugs and kidnapping people turn them to zombies. Bullshit. Because I been standing on the bank for years. Decided one day to cross over and there he was, the King take my hand and say, Welcome, come right in, we been waiting. Held my breath walking past him and wasn’t more than a couple months later I’m holding my breath and praying I can get past the stink when he’s raising the covers off his mattress and telling me lie down with him. By then stink wasn’t really stink no more. Just confusion. A confused idea. An idea from outside the family, outside the teachings causing me to turn my nose up at my own natural self. Felt real ashamed when I realized all of me wasn’t inside the family yet. I damned the outside part. Left it standing in the dark and crawled up under the covers with King cause he’s right even if he did things wrong sometimes, he’s still right cause ain’t nothing, nowhere any better.

Cudjoe stops the tape. Was Margaret Jones still in love with her King, in love with the better self she believed she could become? He’d winced when she described King lifting the blanket off his bed. Then Cudjoe had leaned closer, tried to sneak a whiff of her. Scent of the sacred residue. Was a portion of her body unwashed since the holy coupling? She had looked upon the King’s face and survived. Cudjoe sees a rat-gnawed, bug-infested mattress spotted with the blood of insects, of humans. Her master’s face a mask of masks. No matter how many you peel, another rises, like the skins of water. Loving him is like trying to solve a riddle whose answer is yes and no. No or yes. You will always be right and wrong.

Not nice to nose under someone’s clothes. Cudjoe knows better. He had cheated, sniffing this witness like some kind of evil bloodhound.

The spools spin:

My lads wouldn’t have nothing to do with King. When I moved into his house they ran away. I think Karen might have moved with me but Billy, thank goodness, wouldn’t let her. Went to my sister’s in Detroit. Then Detroit drove to Philly to rescue me. A real circus. I’m grateful to God nobody was hurt. King said, You nebby, bleached negroes come round here hassling us again I’ll bust you up. He was just woofing. But he sounds like he means every word and I’m standing in the doorway behind him amening what he’s saying. My own sister and brother-in-law, mind you. Carl worked at Ford. My sister Anita a schoolteacher. Doing real good in Detroit and they drove all the way here to help me but I didn’t want no help. Thought all I needed was King. They came out of love but I hated them for mixing in my business. Hated them for taking care of Karen and Billy. See, I believed they were part of the system, part of the lie standing in the way of King’s truth. The enemy. The ones trying to kill us. Up there in their dicty Detroit suburb living the so-called good life.

Cudjoe fast-forwards her story. Would she tell more about the boy this time? Or would the tape keep saying what it had said last time he listened.

. . . Had the good sense not to sell my house when I moved out. Rented it. Gave the rent money to King. If I’d sold it, would’ve give all the money to him. Wouldn’t have nothing now. No place for Billy and Karen to come back to, if they coming back. Don’t want them here yet. City spozed to clean up and rebuild but you see the condition things in. My place still standing. Smoke and water tore it up inside but at least it’s still standing. Next block after mine looks like pictures I seen of war. Look like the atom bomb hit. Don’t want Karen and Billy have to deal with what the bombs and fire and water did. They see the neighborhood burned down like this, they just might blame me. Because like I said, I was one of them. King’s family. Rented my house and moved in with them. Yes. But for the grace of God coulda been me and my kids trapped in the basement, bar-b-qued to ash.

I still can’t believe it. Eleven people murdered. Babies, women, didn’t make no nevermind to the cops. Eleven human beings dead for what? Tell me for what. Why did they have to kill my brothers and sisters? Burn them up like you burn garbage? What King and them be doing that give anybody the right to kill them? Wasn’t any trouble till people started coming at us. Then King start to woofing to keep folks off our case. Just woofing. Just talk. You ask anybody around here, the ones still here or the ones burnt out, if you can find them. Ask them if King or his people ever laid a hand on anybody. You find one soul say he been hurt by one of us he’s a lying sack of shit.

King had his ways. We all had our ways. If you didn’t like it, you could pass on by. That’s all anybody had to do, pass us by. Hold your nose, your breath if you got to, but pass on by and leave us alone, then we leave you alone and everybody happy as they spozed to be.

The boy?

Cudjoe is startled by his voice on the tape, asking the question he’s thinking now. Echo of his thought before he speaks it.

The boy?

Little Simmie. Simmie’s what we called him. Short for Simba Muntu. Lion man. That’s what Clara named him when she joined King’s people. Called herself Nkisa. She was like a sister to me. We talked many a night when I first went there to live. Little Simmie her son. So afterwhile I was kind of his aunt. All of us family, really. Simmie’s an orphan now. His mama some of those cinders they scraped out the basement of the house on Osage and stuffed in rubber bags. I was behind the barricade the whole time. Watched it all happening. Almost lost my mind. Just couldn’t believe it. I saw it happening and couldn’t believe my eyes.

Those dogs carried out my brothers and sisters in bags. And got the nerve to strap those bags on stretchers. Woman next to me screamed and fainted when the cops start parading out with them bags strapped on stretchers. Almost fell out my ownself watching them stack the stretchers in ambulances. Then I got mad. Lights on top the ambulances spinning like they in a hurry. Hurry for what? Those pitiful ashes ain’t going nowhere. Nkisa and Rhoberto and Sunshine and Teetsie. They all gone now, so what’s the hurry? Why they treating ash like people now? Carrying it on stretchers. Cops wearing gloves and long faces like they respect my brothers and sisters now. Where was respect when they was shooting and burning and flooding water on the house? Why’d they have to kill them two times, three times, four times? Bullets, bombs, water, fire. Shot, blowed up, burnt, drowned. Nothing in those sacks but ash and guilty conscience.

What they carried out was board ash and wall ash and roof ash and hallway-step ash and mattress ash and the ash of blankets and pillows, ashes of the little precious things you sneaked in with you when you went to live with King because he said, Give it up, give up that other life and come unto me naked as the day you were born. He meant it too. Never forget being buck naked and walking down the rows of my brothers and sisters each one touch me on my forehead. Shivering. Goose bumps where I forgot you could get goose bumps. Thinking how big and soft I was in the behind and how my titties must look tired hanging down bare. But happy. Oh so happy. Happy it finally come down to this. Nothing to hide no more. Come unto me and leave the world behind. Like a new-born child.

My brothers and sisters and the babies long gone and wasn’t much else in the house to make ash, so it’s walls and floors in those bags, the pitiful house itself they carting away in ambulances.

His mother died in the fire.

All dead. All of them dead.

But he escaped.

She pushed him and two the other kids out the basement window. Simmie said he was scared, didn’t want to go. Nkisa had to shove him out the window. He said she threw him and then he doesn’t remember a thing till he wakes up in the alley behind the house. Must of hit his head on something. He said he was dreaming he was on fire and took off running and now he doesn’t know when he woke up or when he was dreaming or if the nightmare’s ever gon stop. Poor Simmie an orphan now. Like my Karen and Billy till I got myself thinking straight again. Till I knew I couldn’t put nobody, not even King, before my kids. They brought me back to the world. And it’s as sorry-assed today as it was when I walked away. Except it’s worse now. Look round you at the neighborhood. Where’s the houses, the old people on their stoops, the children playing in the street? Nobody cares. The whole city seen the flames, smelled the smoke, counted the body bags. Whole world knows children murdered here. But it’s quiet as a grave, ain’t it? Not a mumbling word. People gone back to making a living. Making some rich man richer. Losing the only thing they got worth a good goddamn, the children the Lord gives them for free, and they ain’t got the good sense to keep.

You’ve talked to Simmie?

Talked to people talked to him.

Do you know where he is?

I know where to find somebody who might know where he is. Why do you want to know?

I need to hear his story. I’m writing a book.

A book?

About the fire. What caused it. Who was responsible. What it means.

Don’t need a book. Anybody wants to know what it means, bring them through here. Tell them these bombed streets used to be full of people’s homes. Tell them babies’ bones mixed up in this ash they smell.

I want to do something about the silence.

A book, huh. A book people have to buy. You want Simmie’s story so you can sell it. You going to pay him if he talks to you?

It’s not about money.

Then why you doing it?

The truth is, I’m not really sure.

You mean you’ll do your thing and forget Simmie. Write your book and gone. Just like the social workers and those busybodies from the University. They been studying us for years. Reports on top of reports. A whole basement full of files in the building where I work. We’re famous.

Why don’t you leave poor Simmie alone, mister? He’s suffered enough. And still suffering. Nightmares. Wetting the bed. Poor child’s trying to learn what it’s like to live with people ain’t King’s people.

Will you help me find him?

I don’t think so.

Can we meet again at least? Talk some more?

Saturday maybe. That will give me time to ask around. Not here. In Clark Park. I don’t like being in here with that machine sucking up all the air.

I’ll meet you anywhere. Anytime. Tape or no tape.

Saturday morning. Clark Park.

What time, Saturday?

Early.

I’ll be there.

I bet you will. Tell you a secret, though, my feelings won’t be hurt if you ain’t.

Clark Park. Forty-third and Osage. Saturday early. I’ll be there.

One more thing . . . is that damned machine still running?

Yes . . . no.

Click.

If the city is a man, a giant sprawled for miles on his back, rough contours of his body smothering the rolling landscape, the rivers and woods, hills and valleys, bumps and gullies, crushing with his weight, his shadow, all the life beneath him, a derelict in a terminal stupor, too exhausted, too wasted to move, rotting in the sun, then Cudjoe is deep within the giant’s stomach, in a subway-surface car shuddering through stinking loops of gut, tunnels carved out of decaying flesh, a prisoner of rumbling innards that scream when trolleys pass over rails embedded in flesh. Cudjoe remembers a drawing of Gulliver strapped down in Lilliput just so. Ropes staked over his limbs like hundreds of tiny tents, pyramids pinning the giant to the earth. If the city is a man sprawled unconscious drunk in an alley, kids might find him, drench him with lighter fluid and drop a match on his chest. He’d flame up like a heap of all the unhappy monks in Asia. Puff the magic dragon. A little bald man topples over, spins as flames spiral up his saffron robe. In the streets of Hue and Saigon it had happened daily. You watched priests on TV burst into fireballs, roll as they combusted, a shadow flapping inside the flaming pyre. You thought of a bird in there trying to get out. You wondered if the bird was a part of the monk refusing to go along with the program. A protest within the monk’s protest. Hey. I don’t want nothing to do with this crazy shit. Wings get me out of here. Screeching and writhing as hot gets hotter, a scarecrow in the flame’s eye.

Same filthy-windowed PTC trolley car carries you above and below ground, in and out of flesh, like a needle suturing a wound. You hear an echo of wind and sea, smell it. As you ride beneath city streets there are distant explosions, muffled artillery roar and crackle of automatic weapons, sounds of war you don’t notice in the daylight world above. Down here no doubt the invisible warfare is real. You are rattling closer to it. It sets the windows of the trolley vibrating. Around the next blind curve the firefight waits to engulf you.

Above the beach at Torremolinos was another city of tunnels and burrows. Like a termite mound. Once, instead of following the shore path, he’d taken the vertical shortcut from beach to town. Haphazard steps hacked from rock, worn smooth by a million bare feet. You couldn’t see very far ahead or behind as you climbed up the cliff. Quickly the tourists baking like logs on the beach disappeared as you picked your way through a warren of dugout houses, the front stoops of some being the stations that formed a pathway from beach back up to hotels, shops and restaurants. Children sat at the mouths of caves and you planted your bare feet over, under and around their bare bodies, afraid of contamination, embarrassed by proximity, trespass. Bony gypsy children. Eyes dark as mirrors draped with black cloth. Eyes that should flash and play, be full of curiosity or mischief, but stare past you, through you. Riding these trains sunken in the earth, the sound of the sea waits in ambush. Near and far. Turn a corner and there sits one of these world hunger poster children silently begging to be something other than an image of disaster. Fingers of rib bone grasp the swollen belly like it’s a spoiled toy.

He recalls the sound of waves lapping the pilings, breaking and shimmying slow motion against a golden slice of beach three hundred yards below the outcropping of stone where he had paused. He’s naked except for bikini briefs, a gaudy towel slung like a bandolier over his shoulder. He’s ashamed of his skin, its sleekness, its color, the push of his balls against the flimsy pouch of black nylon. No pockets to empty, no language to confess his shame. He couldn’t make things right for the hollow-eyed, big-bellied children even if he had a thousand pockets and dumped silver from every one and the coins sparked and scintillated like the flat sea when a breath of wind passes over it, sequins, a suit of lights rippling to the horizon. From where he’d stood on the steep cliffside, eyes stinging from shame at having everything and nothing to give, the sea reached him as whisper, the same insinuating murmur that can seep from under his bed at night in this city thousands of miles away, that can squeeze from behind a picture frame on a wall, that hums in this subway tunnel miles beneath the earth.

He’ll tell Margaret Jones we’re all in this together. That he was lost but now he’s found.

I could smell the smoke five thousand miles away. Hear kids screaming. We are all trapped in the terrible jaws of something shaking the life out of us. Is that what he’d tell her? Is that why he’s back? Runagate, runagate, fly away home / Your house’s on fire and your children’s burning.

Should he admit to her he’d looked into the eyes of those gypsy children and shrugged, turned his hands inside out? The pale emptiness of his palms flashed like a minstrel’s white gloves, a silent-movie charade so he could pick his way in peace past stick legs and stick arms, the long feet that looked outsize because they sprouted first then nothing else grew. Big heads, big feet. Everything in between wasted away, siphoned into the brutal swell of their bellies. Skin the color of his, the color those tourists down on the beach dreamed of turning.

The subway takes you under ground, under the sea. When the train slows down for a station you can see greenish mold, sponge-like algae, yellow and red speckling the dark stones. Sometimes you hear the rush of water behind you flooding the tunnel, chasing your lighted bubble, rushing closer and closer each time the train halts. Damp, slimy walls the evidence of other floods, other cleansings, guts of the giant flushed clear of debris. He groans, troubled in his sleep as his bowels contract and shudder from the sudden passage of icy water.

When Cudjoe’s aboveground, heading toward Clark Park, the sidewalk’s unsteady under his feet. Should he be swimming or flying or crawling.

He will explain to Margaret Jones that he must always write about many places at once. No choice. The splitting apart is inevitable. First step is always out of time, away from responsibility, toward the word or sound or image that is everywhere at once, that connects and destroys.

Many places at once. Tramping along the sidewalk. In the air. Underground. Astride a spark coughed up by the fire. Waterborne. Climbing stone steps. To reach the woman in the turban, the boy, he must travel through those other places. Always moving. He must, at the risk of turning to stone, look back at his own lost children, their mother standing on a train platform, wreathed in steam, in smoke. An old-fashioned locomotive wheezes and lurches into motion. His wife waves a handkerchief wet with tears. One boy grasps the backs of her legs. The other sucks his thumb with a fold of her skirt that shows off her body’s sweet curves. His sons began in that smooth emptiness between her legs. They hide and sniffle, clutch handfuls of her silky clothes. It hurts him to look, hurts him to look away. Antique station he’s only seen in movies. A new career for his wife and sons. Wherever they are, he keeps them coming back to star in this scene. Waving. Clinging. But it’s the wrong movie. He’s not the one leaving. All aboard, all aboard. Faces pressed to the cold glass. Caroline had never owned a silk handkerchief, let alone a long silky skirt.

A trolley begins its ascent of Woodland Avenue, the steep curve along the cemetery where rails are bedded in cobblestones older than anything around them. A fence of black spears seven feet tall guards the neat, green city of the dead. When you choose to live in a city, you also are choosing a city to die in. A huge rat sidles over the cobbles, scoots across steel tracks, messenger from one domain to the other, the dead and living consorting in slouched rat belly.

Teresa, the barmaid once upon a time in Torremolinos, would listen to anything you had to say, as long as you bought drinks while you said it. Beautiful and untouchable, she liked to shoot rats at night after work, in the wee hours neither light nor dark over on the wrong side of town, in garbage dumps, the pits dug for foundations of luxury hotels, aborted high rises never rising any higher than stacks of debris rimming the edges of black holes. She’d hide in the shadows and wait for them to slink into exposed areas. Furry, moonlit bodies, sitting up like squirrels, a hunk of something in their forepaws, gnawing, quivering, profiled just long enough for her to draw a bead between their beady eyes. She never missed.

She was English. Or had lived in England long enough to acquire a British accent, a taste for reggae. Teresa never took Cudjoe seriously. He could amuse her, tease out her smile, but she never encouraged him to go further. She knew his habits— endless shots of Felipe II, determined assaults on each new batch of female tourists—and he knew she shot rats in the old quarter gypsies had inhabited before they were urban-removed.

He’d daydream of leaving the bar with Teresa, her alabaster skin luminous in the fading moonlight. They were survivors. No one else in the streets, the only sound their footfalls over wooden sidewalks, then padding through dusty alleys as they entered the ghetto. He’d watch her do her Annie Oakley thing. Her unerring aim. Her face pinched into a mask of concentration as she sights down the barrel. When she tires of killing, when she leans her rifle against a broken wall and huddles in her own skinny, pale arms, he’ll create himself out of the shadows, wrap her in his warmth, the heat of his body he’s been hoarding while she shot. He loves this moment when she’s weak and exhausted, the pallor of her skin, the cold in her bones, the starry distance of all those nights at the bar when he made her smile but could trick nothing more from those sad eyes. Yes. Take her in the stillborn shell of a building that is also the grave of a gypsy hovel, abandoned when the urban gypsies fled to join their brethren in caves above the sea. Make love to her in the ruins that had never been a city, ruins that were once a wish for a city, a mile-high oasis of steel and glass and rich visitors. Surprise her and take her there, loving her to pieces while rats scuttle from the darkness to eat their dead.

Yes. Clark Park. He knew the location of Clark Park. He’d nodded at Margaret Jones. Yes, I know Clark Park. He’d beaten up his body many a day on the basketball court there. Drank wine and smoked reefer with the hoop junkies many a night after playing himself into a stupor. Clear now what he’d been trying to do. Purge himself. Force the aching need for Caroline and his sons out of his body. Running till his body was gone, his mind whipped. Till he forgot his life was coming apart. Keep score of the game, let the rest go. The park a place to come early and stay late, punish the humpty-dumpty pieces of himself till they’d never want to be whole again.

Clark Park where he’d see a face like Teresa’s. A woman sat in the grass, on a slope below the asphalt path circling the park, in a bright patch of early-morning sunshine. She was staring at the hollow’s floor, a field tamped hard and brown by countless ball games. This woman who could be Teresa, who would be Teresa until Cudjoe satisfied himself otherwise, rested her chin on her drawn-up knees. No kids playing in the hollow, no dog walkers strolling on the path, just the two of us, Cudjoe had thought as he stopped and ambled down the green slope, lower than she was, so he could check out her face. He’ll smile, one early bird greeting another. Pass on if she’s a stranger.

Under her skimpy paisley dress, the woman was naked. She hugged her legs to her chest. Goose bumps prickled her bare loins. At the center of her a dark crease, a spray of curly hairs, soft pinch of buttocks. Cudjoe expected her to raise her chin off her knees, snap her legs straight, but she remained motionless, staring at the hollow. It could be Teresa’s face perched on the woman’s bare knees, a perfect match even though the body bearing it no way Teresa’s. But still it could be Teresa’s face. Right head, wrong body, like a sphinx. The eyes are dreamy, express a vulnerability Teresa never exposed. Teresa’s eyes were mirrors. You saw yourself, your unhappy secrets in them. Nothing in Teresa’s gaze suggested you could change her or change yourself. This woman, girl in Clark Park whose face was Teresa’s, whose body was compact, generously fleshed where Teresa was lithe and taut, this woman who let him see under her dress, had finally smiled down at him over her knees, a smile saying no more or less than this gift of sun feels good and I’m content to share it.

Then she had leaned backward catching her weight on her arms, knees steepled, eyes closing as she tilted her forehead into the light filtering through the trees. Cudjoe’s throat had tightened; he was afraid to swallow, to move an inch. He stared at the dark hinge between her legs. Though she seemed unconcerned by his presence, she wasn’t ignoring him. She was stretching, yawning, welcoming, returning to him after centuries of sleep. She’d chosen her spot and he was part of it, so nothing was foreign, nothing could disturb this moment of communion when what she was was boundless, new, Eve to his Adam, Cudjoe had told himself, half-believing, as he peered into the crack between her legs, the delicate pinks, soft fleece. Born again.

Her green-and-white minidress clearly an afterthought. Didn’t matter to her if it was off or on. She rolled slowly onto her side. From where Cudjoe stood the dress disappeared except for a green edging along the top of one bare flank. Neat roundness of her buttocks, graceful drape of thighs glowed in soft morning light. He couldn’t see a face now. Teresa disintegrates in the smoky shafts of sunlight painting the bank. Above him the remnant of a statue, a woman perfectly formed from marble.

He’d been stuck. Like a fly in honey. He couldn’t look away. Couldn’t go on about his business. What was he looking for then, now as he remembers her, remembers her wisp of dress and the sun, his throat dry, loins filling up, growing so heavy he believed he was sinking into the ground, remembering how she was Teresa, then she wasn’t, then she was, and the loud clanking of trolleys up Woodland, down Baltimore, cables popping, laughing at himself, believing none of it was real? At some point she’d risen, awkward, stiff from sitting too long. A flash of red-dimpled white cheek before she smooths down the flowered hem of her dress. How long had he stood there like a dummy, gazing into the empty stripe of sunlight?

On Mykonos scuffing his way through hot sand he’d seen naked bodies every size, shape and color stretched for acres between green sea and rocks spilled at the base of cliffs, bodies so casual, blasé, he ignored them, preferred them at night, clothed, in the restaurants and discos. Funny how quickly he’d gotten used to nakedness. Hair, skin, bones. What was different, what was the same about all the bodies. Blond, dark, lean, stubby, every nation represented, all shapes of male and female displayed in any angle he could imagine. What was he looking for in women’s bodies? Surely he’d have tripped over it trudging up and back those golden beaches on Mykonos. But no. The mystery persisted. His woman in the park. A daydream till she brushes bits of straw from the seat of her paisley dress. Runs away.

Rules posted in the park, but the signs, blasted by spray paint, unreadable. No rules, no signs when he’d lived here a decade ago. He’d remembered a green oasis. Forgotten those seasons, months when the park was the color of the neighborhood surrounding it. No color. Grays and browns of dead leaves. July now. Trees should be full, the grass green. He’d been hoping for green. Hoping the park sat green and waiting between Woodland and Baltimore avenues, that it had not been an invention, one more lie he’d told himself about this land to which he was returning.

A statue of Charles Dickens. Only one in the world at last count. Little Nell at his knee stares imploringly up at the great man’s distant face. They are separated and locked together by her gaze. Both figures larger than life, greener than the brittle grass. Both blind. In a notebook somewhere Cudjoe had recorded the inscription carved into the pedestal. For his story about people who frequent the park. A black boy who climbs on Dickens’s knee and daydreams. A crazy red-haired guy muttering and singing nonsense songs to himself. A blind man who shoots baskets at night. A boy-girl vignette about a baby the girl’s carrying, how the couple strolls round and round the path, kids on a carousel, teaching themselves the news of another, unexpected life.

Twenty blocks west the fire had burned. If the wind right, smoke would have drifted here, settled on leaves, grass, bushes. Things that eat leaves and buds must have tasted smoke. Dark clouds drifting this way carried the ashy taste of incinerated children’s flesh. Could you still smell it? Was the taste still part of what grew in the park? Would it ever go away?

Cudjoe watches a runty little boy terrorize other children in a play area off to his right. The kid’s a devil. He screams and stomps his feet, laying claim to a domain invisible to the other kids till they encroach. Then he goes wild, patrolling his turf ferociously with shoves, screeches, the threat of his tiny fist wagged in somebody’s face. He’s everywhere at once, defending, shooing, hollering. Tough little bastard, Cudjoe thinks. All the other kids are buffaloed. Till one boy goes after the tyrant with a gun from outer space that squeals like a lost soul. The bully loses it. Screams and trucks away as fast as his stubby legs and miniature Adidas will carry him to a group of women sitting on a wall. Little guy’s so shook up, he crashes into the wrong lap, hiding his face till another woman, who must be his mother, snatches him up, fusses at him and plops him down beside her.

The moral, Cudjoe says to himself, is everybody’s afraid of something. Or everybody, sooner or later, meets their match. Or any port in a storm. Or if he hadn’t been thinking of pussy a few minutes before, he wouldn’t have glanced over at the young women perched on the wall around the play area and he’d have missed the whole show. And the moral of that was . . .

Circling the park, he passes benches set in concrete just off the main path. Built to last forever, they weren’t going to make it. Somebody had expended enormous energy attacking them. Not casual violence but premeditated murder. You’d need heavy-duty weapons to inflict this damage. Sledgehammers. Crowbars. Why kill these benches whose sole purpose was offering people a place to rest their asses and enjoy the park? Why would anybody need to go declare war on a bench? Whose life was that fucked up? One or two benches survived, hacked, splintered. When would they get theirs? At night or in broad daylight? When all the benches were gone, what part of the park would be wasted next? Cudjoe hears the hobnailed boot tramp of soldier ants, the metallic grinding of their jaws as the column chews its way through a sleeping city.

He checks his watch. No guarantee she’d show up. Why should she trust him? He’d been surprised when she agreed to talk into the tape machine. Surprised when she said she’d meet him in the park. Clark Park between Baltimore and Woodland, around Forty-third. Yes, he knew the place. Yes, he’d be there. Would she?

Three blocks away the basketball court, the hollow. Nothing shaking as far as he can tell. A few people that from this distance, at this hour of the morning are silhouettes, dull shadows until they step beyond the border of trees and then their edges catch fire, bristle in the shimmer of sunshine bathing the far end of the park. One of those figures, wiggling in its nimbus of light, could be hers. Difficult from where he stands to be sure. No chance he’ll miss her if she wants him to find her.

He crosses Chester Avenue, takes the lower dip of the path toward the court. Benches here, above the hollow, spray-painted and carved but intact. Cyclone fencing encloses three sides of the basketball court. All those new courts erected in the sixties had four high metal sides. People said they were part of the final solution. Lots more had sprung up in the ghetto since he’d been away. It ain’t over yet, Cudjoe reminds himself.

This rusty fence seems higher, the court smaller. He can’t remember the asphalt rectangle ever looking as forlorn, abandoned. In the old days when he’d arrive early to shoot around, the court might be deserted, but he’d never felt alone. Only a matter of time before other players would bop in. He wishes he’d brought a ball today so he could pat it, make it boom in the stillness. Glory hanging on every shot. He surveys the backboards, the crooked, netless rims. No clue anybody will play here today, tomorrow, ever. Was the court dead or just sleeping?

Best action migrated all over the city. Years ago Cudjoe knew where they’d be playing any night of the week, they being the bad dudes, the cookers, superstars. If your stuff wasn’t ready better not bring it out there. They’d put a hurt on you. Send you home with your feelings hurt. Don’t care what college you play for. On the neighborhood courts no coaches, no referees, no scholarships, nothing but you and what you can do and a whole lot of bad brothers who could play some ball. Some Sunday afternoons the action came to Clark. Court up at Sixty-ninth and Haverford packed and people cruise by Clark, get it on here instead of lining up for winners at Sixty-ninth. Knuckleheads tore down one rim at Forty-seventh and Kingsessing, couldn’t run full court there, so Clark be it. The Big Time. Joint rocking. They all be out here.

Nothing like it. Cudjoe can’t help smiling as he thinks of himself in the thick of the action. Pushing past the point of breaking but you don’t break, a sweet second wind gets you over and it’s easy then, past breaking or not breaking. Doing your thing and nothing can touch you. Past turning back. You’re out there. Doing it. Legs and heart and mind and breath working hard together. You forget everything you know and play. The wall you can’t move, that stops you and makes you cry when you beat your head against it, is suddenly full of holes. A velvet-stepped ladder tames the air. You can rise over the wall or glide through it. Do both at once. Unveil moves you didn’t know you owned. You don’t remember the wall till you’re past it, over on the other side and a guy runs up to you and sticks out his palm and you slap skin low, high, higher, and the winos, junkies, bullshitters and signifiers jamming the sidelines holler amen like they just seen Black Jesus.

Cudjoe watches bodies flash past. A sound track explodes with crowd noise. The court’s full, then just as abruptly empty again. Seconds pass quietly as the camera pans splitting wooden backboards. Droopy rims. Asphalt cracked with dry riverbeds and tributaries. A view of the empty court shot through interlocking squares of chain-link fencing to suggest how things might look from the steel-meshed window of a prison cell. Inside looking out or outside looking in. Then the court’s full again. Music blasting. Players grunting, panting, squeak of sneakers, cheers from the sidelines, thud of strong bodies every shade of black and brown and ivory colliding, tangling, flying. Cudjoe inserts himself into his film, a solitary figure, narrow shoulders framed by the emptiness of the court that is quiet again. A man caught up in reverie, shuttling at warp speed between times and places, a then and a now. Cudjoe is an actor embarrassed by the cliché shot, a director who can’t resist filming it this way. Camera whirs behind his back, inside his skull. Court full, then empty. Sooty clouds, right on time, roll in from the west.

He senses Margaret Jones behind him, moving closer. Coming the long way round, under the canopy of trees, then into a band of light where her body blurs, disintegrates, her steps slower as warmth drops on her shoulders. Her eyes are fixed on his back, sure now it’s him. Measuring, assessing the pose he’s held too long now, but won’t alter because he wants her to find him this way, wants her to shorten the distance between them, do some of the work to bring them together. He hopes she’s wondering what he’s thinking, that she’ll realize she doesn’t know everything about him. She reaches the trail worn through the grass alongside the far wing of the three-sided fence. He must not turn around too soon. He’ll break the spell, she’ll disappear. She’s wearing an intricately wrapped turban, a robe with swirls of bold color. A few more paces will free her image from the disciplined strands of wire. He pivots abruptly and finds no one there. His timing’s off. He’s scared her away. Would she have been there if he’d held out just an instant longer? Too late now, charm’s broken. Back across Chester Avenue a woman sitting apart from the others smokes a cigarette on the stone wall enclosing monkey bars and slides.

Nkisa used to bring Simba here. I brought my kids, Billy and Karen, when they were little ones. Wasn’t nothing so great about the park. This dinky playground stuff been here forever and half of it been busted forever but I liked the walk down from Fifty-ninth and liked getting out the house. Somebody different to talk to. Other women stuck at home like me with little babies. So once in a while I’d truck all the way down here to Clark with one in the stroller and one holding my hand.

Ten years or so ago.

About that.

Well, I might have seen you then. I lived on Osage. Spent half my life in the park. Played a lot of ball here.

They still play. Or call themselves playing. More drinking and snorting and smoking reefer than ball playing. A rowdy bunch now.

Used to be good hoop.

I wouldn’t know anything about that, but I’d skin Billy or Karen alive if I caught them hanging around here. Pimpmobiles and dopemobiles. Sell you anything you big enough to ask for. And if I know what they’re doing, the cops got to know. You think the police do anything about it? Hell no. Not till one these little white chicks slinking around here ODs and turns up dead, then they’ll come down on that corner like gangbusters.

So the park’s not what it used to be.

What is? Tell me if you know what is.

You might have run into my wife and boys here.

You have children?

Yes. Two boys. Probably about the age of your lads. They live with their mother now.

She stares at him as if none of this is news.

Thanks for meeting me this morning.

We been through all that once, ain’t we? Started off with that polite, nicey-nice do. Don’t need to go back to that again. I’m here. You’re here. Got my reasons. I’m sure you have yours. You might want to take back some of that thank-you when you hear what I have to say. The boy’s gone.

Gone? Gone where?

Nobody knows. Just disappeared.

Are you sure?

Sure as I’m sitting here.

Gone.

Like a turkey through the corn. My friends haven’t seen him for a week. Finally got him to where he’d play with other kids. Had him a few little buddies come by every day and seemed like he was getting better. Simba even talked some with the kids. Grown-ups thought he’d forgot how. Said they saw him smile for the first time too, when he was around other kids. My friends who were keeping him said they’d let Simba go off and play with his gang because he was improving. Being around other kids doing him a world of good. He learned to ride a bike. Buddies taught him and one day he rode off nobody ain’t seen him since.

Have they tried to find him?

What do you think, mister? They was taking care of the child. They nursed him, put up with his craziness. A little wild animal for weeks after the fire. They loved him back from craziness and now they scared to death somebody’s done something else to hurt him. Trying every way they know how to find him. But nobody knows nothing. Had a lawyer who lives in the neighborhood check downtown. If the cops know something, they’re not talking. Seems like that poor boy rode his bike right off the end of the earth.

Jesus.

That’s what I say. This whole ugly business keeps getting worse. People murdered and burnt up is bad enough, but it won’t stop there. Can’t stop it seems. Worked so hard to make Simba better and now he disappears. Don’t make sense. Something going on that’s deep-down bad. Something nasty and ugly that’s bound to get worse.

Will your friends talk to me?

Best for you to stay away from my friends. I sic you on them they won’t be my friends anymore. They’re upset. And got a right to be. Ain’t hardly a time for strangers to come around asking questions. Too many questions already. People want answers.

If somebody doesn’t keep asking questions, how will the boy be found?

Don’t you worry about that. Folks don’t need any interference right now in what they’re trying to do. What I’m saying is leave it be. Butt out. Whatever’s going on, people around here can handle it. They got to. No choice. This where they live. We’re not looking for help from you or nobody else. Help is what started this mess. Somebody called himself helping is the one lit the fire.

* * *

What starts the action, two young bloods shooting around. Gradually six or seven others saunter onto the court. If you’re listening for it, drumming of the ball on asphalt carries for blocks. The game’s one on one on one. Every man for himself. You keep the pill as long as you can score. Make a shot from the field with somebody guarding you then make three free ones from behind the key then you try and score from the field again, with somebody checking you and so on till you miss. Whoever rebounds the miss is next up. Anybody can guard the one with the ball, but the last one who missed has to check him. Keep track of your own points. Call out your score each time you hit a shot. When you close in on twenty-one the whole mob comes chasing you. No out of bounds, no fouls. Point is you got to get the ball. Show what you can do with it when you got it.

A way of loosening up. A way of seeing who can play. No passing, no teamwork, no slowdown or fast break. Everybody up against it. One on one on one.

Even after enough bodies to run full court, no game starts because older players begin to straggle in. Some sit on the sidelines. One or two join in the one-on-one game, wolfing, joshing, schooling the young guys. Clearly stronger, more experienced, able to dominate and talk trash and have it their way.

A box is set up and begins blasting. Players synchronize their dribbling, head fakes, spins and stutter steps with the tunes. Music’s inside the game. If you can’t hear it, you can see it. Somebody always getting off, doing his step in the middle of the action. On time. Younger players drift off to a single basket behind the fence where they mess around during the whole court run. People shoot for teams. Everybody takes a turn on the foul line till ten make it or the first two choose squads. Somebody calls winners. Somebody shouts. Got next after you. First out’s decided by another shot from the top of the key, make-it-take-it, and the run’s on.

That’s how it was supposed to start. And it did. They got that part right.

Been awhile, Cudjoe is thinking, and that’s why he missed. On line but not enough arch. He’d returned to the park to find a game and now he was trying to guide the ball rather than shoot it. Shooting’s all in the mind. You must believe the ball’s going in. Confidence and the amen wrist flick of follow-through. You reach for the sky, launch the ball so it rotates off your fingertips and let it drop through the rim. When you hold on too long, when you don’t relax and extend your arm and let nature take its course, you shoot short. Because you don’t believe. Because you’re trying too hard to maintain control, you choke the ball and it comes up short.

First go-round only six made it so a second chance for everybody who blew. This time Cudjoe’s too strong. Ball boomerangs off the back of the iron. He sits out the first run. Takes winners with two other guys who missed their free throws.

Game was rag ass. Too much like one on one. A neighborhood run. No surprises. Too much assumed and conceded. A few good players who weren’t half as good as they thought they were, sloppily doing more or less what they felt like doing. A few possessed one outstanding skill or talent and slipped it into the game when they could, often when they shouldn’t. Defense nonexistent. Everybody going for steals or blocks instead of hanging tight with their man. Chump city. More action cooking around the court than on it. Block long Eldorado drop top docked at the curb. Deals going down. Basketball game like a TV set playing in a crowded room and nobody watching.

Who’s next?

There’s a spot for you, O.T.

My man wants to run, too.

He’s five then. You, your man, that dude over there talking to Peewee, this brother and me.

Solid.

My name’s Cudjoe.

This Mike. They call me O.T. What’s the score?

Just started, man.

Ain’t much out there.

Early. This the first run.

Cudjoe. My oldest brother used to play with a dude name Cudjoe.

What’s your brother’s name?

Darnell.

Darnell Thompson?

Yeah.

And you’re Skeets?

When I was little I was Skeets.

How’s Darnell?

He’s in the slam, man. Five years now.

Damn.

Dope, man. Into the dope shit, you know.

Darnell?

Yeah. Surprised everybody. My big brother always a together dude. Never in no trouble. He looked out for me. More like a daddy to me, you know. Then dope, man. He just couldn’t handle. Stealing and shit.

Damn. I’m sorry. Ran with Darnell many a day. Right here. Darnell could bust the jumper.

He was tough. Used to watch his every move and wanna be like him some day. I remember you now. Cudjoe. Kind of a different name, you know. Remember the name. Now I’m remembering seeing you play with my brother. You had a nice game. You still busting?

Up next with you.

Can you still do it?

I’m in shape. I can run. But it’s been awhile since I’ve played. Not much ball where I was.

Ain’t nothing out there on the court. We’ll win a few and you be cooking like the old days.

Skeets grown up.

Been a long time since they call me Skeets.

You in school?

Was, man. I’m working now, you know, so I can go back.

Did you play ball?

First semester. Then the books. I fucked up. Lost my free ride. Had to drop out. I’m going back, though. Working now so I can pay my way. Coach say, you know, if I make the team, he’ll go to bat for me. See if he can, you know, get me some money.

Good luck with it.

Yeah. I’ma get myself together. Make something of myself, man. It’s been nice talking to you.

Sorry about your brother.

That’s the way it goes.

Cudjoe watches O.T. move off. Darnell Thompson all over again. Big, black, graceful. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, short, bouncy, almost delicate steps. Darnell’s soft, easy manner. Eagerness in his voice as he leans into a conversation. Enjoying what he’s saying, what you have to say. Taller by inches than his brother. O.T. had grown a body to fit Darnell’s enormous hands. Ten years. Did anything get better instead of worse? Why couldn’t he believe Darnell’s brother? Why did he hear ice cracking as O.T. spoke of his plans? Why did he see Darnell’s rusty hard hand wrapped around his brother’s dragging him down?

One guy on their squad a leaper. About Cudjoe’s height, six one or six two, only leaner, younger. Not much of a shot, but he’d go after everything that missed. Quick as a frog off his feet, a hustler, battler who loved running the court, banging underneath. Then a short dude, runty and arrogant, who pushed the pill downcourt helter-skelter, advantage or no, constantly jamming himself up. Favored behind-the-back, through-the-legs, over-the-backboard passes. Disappeared when the ball not in his hands. When it was in his hands, he forgot about the other four people playing with him, dribbled himself into trouble so he could dribble out again, feeling taller and slicker each time he escaped a trap he’d created for himself. O.T.’s friend Mike was solid, skilled, understood the game; he was dependable, fun to play with. O.T. a monster, operating a foot or so above everybody else. Took what he wanted. Changed gears when he wanted to. Let the other team stay close enough to believe they had a chance. Then blew them away—steals, slams, blocked shots.

Cudjoe did his bit. Hit a lay-up and a couple jumpers from the wing. Fed the free man. Dealt the ball away from the dribble-happy dude. His legs gave out in game three. Downhill from there. A question of holding his own then, not being a liability, not making dumb mistakes, playing tough D.

No wheels. Knew what I wanted to do but my wheels just wouldn’t turn.

His team retired undefeated. Only one serious challenge all evening. A squad had loaded up for them. The best of the rest and Dribble King had decided it was show time, doing his roadrunner act, and they were down three hoops, 6–9, in the twelve-basket game. Finally O.T. glared at Mr. Pat-Pat and brought him back to reality. The little guy sulked but stayed out the way long enough for the others to get it done. Pulling that game out was the best moment. Many high fives and a good, deep-down sense of pushing to the limit and bringing something back. After the winning basket they gathered under the hoop still shuddering from Sky’s humongous dunk. Their eyes met, their fists met for a second in the core of a circle, then just as quickly broke apart, each going his own way.

If you keep playing, the failing light is no problem. Your eyes adjust and the streetlamps come on and they help some. People pass by think you’re crazy playing basketball in the dark, but if you stay in the game you can see enough. Ball springs at you quicker from the shadows. Pill surprises you and zips by you unless you know it’s coming. Part of being in the game is anticipating, knowing who’s on the court with you and what they’re likely to do. It’s darker. Not everything works now that works in daylight. Trick is knowing what does. And staying within that range. You could be blind and play if the game’s being played right so you stay out past the point people really seeing. You just know what’s supposed to be happening. Dark changes things but you can manage much better than anyone not in the game would believe. Still there comes a point you’ll get hurt if you don’t give it up. Not the other team you’re fighting then, but the dark, and it always wins, you know it’s going to win so what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, it’s silly and you persist in the silliness a minute or two, a pass pops you in your chest, a ball rises and comes down in the middle of three players and nobody even close to catching it. You laugh and go with the silliness. Can’t see a damn thing anymore. Whether a shot’s in or out. Hey, O.T., man. Show some teeth so I can see you, motherfucker. Somebody trudges off the court. Youall can have it. I can’t see shit. The rest laugh and give it up, too. You fade to the sidelines. It’s been dark a long time at the court’s edges. People’s faces gloomed in deep shadow. A cigarette glows. Night sure enough now. Cross a line and on the other side it’s been dark for days.

Mellow reggae thumps from the open door of a car. A light crowd of hangers-on in groups by the curb, against the chain-link fence, around a bench on the court, huddled at another bench farther away where the hollow drops off from the path. Riffs of reefer, wine, beer. You smell yourself if you’ve been playing. Cudjoe’s in the cluster of men lounging around the bench in the middle of the court’s open side. Night dries his skin. He feels darker, the color of a deep, purple bruise. He won’t be able to walk tomorrow. Mostly players around the bench, men who’ve just finished the last game of the evening, each one relaxing in his own funk, cooling out, talking the game, beginning to turn it into stories. Cudjoe knows the action will flash back later, game films on an invisible screen above his bed. All those years of playing and it still happens. While his stiff muscles unknot, too tired to sleep, the game movie will play in his head whether he wants to watch or not.

If he told his story to the other men, if he wasn’t a newcomer content to listen to the others, if he wasn’t too tired and beat to say his own name three times in a row, his story would be about night dropping on the city, how deep and how quietly it settles over the park. Nothing the same now. Trick about night is it changes things but you can’t see exactly how. You know the park is different, you feel it in your bones. Night air cools your skin, contours of the ground rise and fall in unfamiliar rhythms, spaces open which haven’t been there before, the hollow loses its bottom, a black lap you’d sink into forever. Night can shrink things. The players beside him are smaller, parts of them lost, stolen by shadow, their voices husky, pitched to the night’s quiet, movements slowed as if night’s a medium like water and they must conspire with its flow. When night’s closing down it shuts things in on themselves and that’s why you are on a ship with these other men thousands of miles from everywhere else, floating through darkness, and you can’t help sensing the isolation, the smallness because night cuts you off drastically as a knife. But since you can’t see clearly, you can’t really tell. Night expands some things. Trees explode silently, giant black puffs hovering like clouds against the sky. You know night’s different and you guess at why. Can’t help guessing, wondering, even though you understand you’ll never understand because night is about hiding things. About things changing. And Cudjoe knows it would make a good story. They’d all be in it. Would the players testify, help him tell his story as they cool out after the game?

The other fact about night—it doesn’t last. Night’s temporary. But you can’t really be sure about that, either.

My poor, aching wheels.

I can dig it, bro.

My mind’s right there. Tells me just what to do. But my legs ain’t with it. In their own world. I send the message and by the time they move, it’s too late.

Like the mayor.

That cat missing more than wheels.

You can say that again.

He’s not stepping down, is he? You watch. He’ll run again. Probably win again if the party’s behind him.

Why you think they wouldn’t be behind him? All he did was torch a few crazy niggers. That’s why he’s up in office in the first place. Keep youall ghetto bunnies in line. Sure, he goofed. But things so fucked in this city whoever’s in the mayor’s chair bound to fuck up. Mayor don’t run the city, city runs him. Them slick dudes own the mayor are grinning from ear to ear cause if it had been a white boy dropped the bomb, bloods would have took to the street and the whole city nothing but a cinder now.

Tell the truth.

Leave the mayor alone, youall. Cat’s doing his best. Hate to hear people bad-mouthing him. Specially black people. Finally voted in a black man, and now nothing he does good enough for you.

Ain’t about black.

Bull-shit. You think they’d let him burn down white people’s houses? Sheeit. He be hanging by his balls from some lamppost. Mayor’s not in office to whip on white folks. Nigger control. That’s what he’s about.

New houses they building up on Osage spozed to be pretty nice.

No stoops, man. How you spozed to have a neighborhood with no stoops?

Check it out. What’s up there mostly holes in the ground.

Where the people living lost their homes?

Not in City Hall. Not in the mayor’s neighborhood.

At least they’re living.

Don’t care what nobody says. It was murder, man. Murder one and some of those lying suckers ought to pay.

They appointed a commission.

Hey, bro. Commissioners all members of the same club. Thick as thieves. Downtown chumps all eating out the same bowl. They come in where I work. Smiling and grinning and falling over each other to pay when I bring the check. You think they going to hang one their own? Watch. Commission will claim some poor blood lit the match.

Papers been spreading that lie already. Like the brothers poured gasoline on the roof and locked theyselves in the basement and set fire to the house. Who’s spozed to believe that shit?

Have they found the little boy?

The one survived?

They say he survived. If he did, hope he’s a million miles away from here. They’ll fuck with him if they find him.

Blame him.

If he ain’t dead already. Papers say eleven dead. Means at least eleven. Lie about the numbers like they lie about everything else. If they admit eleven it means that’s how many bodies they caught red-handed with. Don’t know how many dead in those ashes in the basement. Papers say a boy escaped. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.

Anything left in that bottle, man?

Here, dude. You got the rest.

Cudjoe decides not to ask about the boy again. Cheating in a way when he asked the first time. This mood, this time belongs to nobody. Each man free as long as they relax here letting night close over them. If a city lurks beyond the borders of the park, it’s no more real than the ball games they play again as they talk. They are together in this. No agendas, interviews or interviewees. Are the streetlamps dimmer or has the city slipped into a deeper fold of night? Faces around him are masks. Would he recognize any of these guys if he saw them in clothes on the street tomorrow? Music doo-wops in thick pure phrases from the car on Forty-third behind the chain-link fence. Music reigns supreme and there is nothing not listening. Cudjoe holds his breath. Doesn’t need breath as a high sweet tenor and voices trilling behind it shine like silver, shine like gold.

Could you bring down a city with trumpets? Could a song lay waste skyscrapers? Scour the hills, cleanse the rivers, wipe the sky? Everything in creation had been listening to the music. Now sirens and jets and horns and trolleys, dogs howling, babies screaming had started up again. Thump of Cudjoe’s heart again. That shield of filth the city flings up at the sky in place again. Stars spatter against it like rain on a tin roof trying to get in. Hushed for a moment but now a river of noise again and the tune from a tape deck is a twig drifting along with everything else caught in the current. Waters above and waters below the firmament, and earth a wafer in those wet lips that are light-years thick. He tastes earth as he drains a can of beer. O.T. smoking a cigarette. Darnell sucking on a joint. Or was it the other way round? Too dark to tell. If the lips opened to sing, to kiss, to tell a story. If they opened, and the earth wafer slipped out. Wouldn’t there be a long time when nobody’d know what was happening? Centuries out of kilter, askew, but no one understanding the problem. Just this queasiness, this uneasiness. This tilt and slow falling. You are in a city. You look up and can’t see the stars and that doesn’t bother you as much as it should. You don’t know what’s wrong but maybe more’s wrong than you want to know.

* * *

Cudjoe doesn’t know why he piled into the car going to Papa Joe’s. Why he drank six more drafts with the fellas when the first one cooled him out. Doesn’t know why he’s decided to walk back to West Philly when his legs already wobbly and stupid. He’s at the top of many broad steps, near the entrance of the art museum, whose stones on a good day are golden in the sun. A neat ingot enthroned on a hill. He is sighting down a line of lighted fountains that guide his eye to City Hall. This is how the city was meant to be viewed. Broad avenues bright spokes of a wheel radiating from a glowing center. No buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall. Scale and pattern fixed forever. Clarity, balance, a perfect understanding between the parts. Night air thick and bad but he’s standing where he should and the city hums this dream of itself into his ear and he doesn’t believe it for an instant but wonders how he managed to stay away so long.

I belong to you, the city says. This is what I was meant to be. You can grasp the pattern. Make sense of me. Connect the dots. I was constructed for you. like a field of stars I need you to bring me to life. My names, my gods poised on the tip of your tongue. All you have to do is speak and you reveal me, complete me.

The city could fool you easy. And he wonders if that’s why he is back. To be caught up in the old trick bag again. Love you. Love you not. Who’s zooming who? Is someone in charge? From this vantage point in the museum’s deep shadow in the greater darkness of night it seems an iron will has imposed itself on the shape of the city. If you could climb high enough, higher than the hill on which the museum perches, would you believe in the magic pinwheel of lights, straight lines, exact proportions, symmetry of spheres within spheres, gears meshing, turning, spinning to the perpetual music of their motion? Cudjoe fine-tunes for a moment the possibility that someone, somehow, had conceived the city that way. A miraculous design. A prodigy that was comprehensible. He can see a hand drawing the city. An architect’s tilted drafting board, instruments for measuring, for inscribing right angles, arcs, circles. The city is a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a newborn’s skull. No one has used the city yet. No one has pushed a button to start the heart pumping.

He can tell thought had gone into the design. And a person must have stood here, on this hill, imagining this perspective. Dreaming the vast emptiness into the shape of a city. In the beginning it hadn’t just happened, pell-mell. People had planned to live and prosper here. Wear the city like robe and crown.

The founders were dead now. Buried in their wigs, waistcoats, swallowtail coats, silk hose clinging to their plump calves. A foolish old man flying a kite in a storm.

Cudjoe decides he will think of himself as a reporter covering a story in a foreign country. Stay on his toes, take nothing for granted. Not the customs nor the language. What he sees is not what the natives see. The movie has been running for years, long before he was born, and will sputter on about its business long after he is dead and gone. At best he can write the story of someone in his shoes passing through.

He is not alone. At this late hour museum busy as an anthill. Steady traffic of cars up and down driveways curving around its flanks. If you swept the night visitors together they’d form a crowd, but the museum’s spacious grounds—terraced, grottoed, thickly planted with trees and shrubs—offer privacy to anyone who wishes it. Most of the young people wish it, play hide-and-seek in couples or small groups. Here comes some fool bounding up the hundred stairs from Logan Circle. Rocky Balboa, arms raised in triumph, claiming the city.

Patrol cars take leisurely passes up and down the circular drive. No one pays attention. The mood is mellow, cops and kids ignoring each other. As long as everybody follows the rules, there wouldn’t seem to be any rules. Music and dope in moderation. Little tidbits of sound, of hashish smoke reach Cudjoe. These white kids had been granted a zone. Everybody had zones. Addicts, prostitutes, porn merchants, derelicts. Even people who were black and poor had a zone. Everybody granted the right to lie in the bed they’d made for themselves. As long as they didn’t contaminate good citizens who disapproved. As long as the beds available to good citizens who wished to profit or climb in occasionally. As long as everybody knew they had to give up their zone, scurry down off this hill, no questions asked, when the cops blow the whistle.

Maybe this is a detective story, Cudjoe says to himself. Out there the fabled city of hard knocks and exciting possibilities. You could get wasted out there and lots did. His job sleaze control. Bright lights, beautiful people, intrigue, romance. The city couldn’t offer those rushes without toilets, sewers, head busters and garbage dumps. Needed folks on the other side of the fast track and needed a tough cookie to keep them scared and keep them where they belong. The fast movers would pay well for that service. Let you sample the goodies once in a while. Just enough to spoil you. Not enough to dull the edge you required to do their spadework, to get down where it was down and dirty.

Limousines out there. And sleek women in dresses slit up to their assholes. Everything bought and sold. You could buy day or buy night. This circus of lights enticing him could be turned off or on at someone’s command.

He remembers waterfalls framing the broad museum stairs. At night the pumps rested but during summer days twin stair-stepped cascades of water turned the wells at the end of each landing into swimming holes. City kids in their underwear played in the pools. Colonies of little brown monkeys splashing and squealing and sliding down green sheets of water. Beating the heat. Shirts and shorts discarded where they were peeled off sweaty bodies. Shoes were what got to him. Piles of sneakers all colors, shapes, low-rent versions of adult styles, beat to shit the way kids’ shoes always are, but these, scattered around on the wet steps, these were worse, gaping holes in the bottoms, shredded uppers, laces missing, shoes taped, patched, lined with cardboard. Cheapest concoctions of glue and foam and canvas that money could buy.