Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 10 of 20)

The rain continued.

Miss Rosa’s had shutters, great wooden ones on swinging hinges, and they’d been locked in place hours ago. No one had come in for a while. The power had given, too, but there was a generator in a brick shed added on to the back of the bar. The beer would not skunk on Miss Rosa’s watch, and the lights would stay on if she had to hook them to treadmills and set the orphans to running. Wasn’t like anyone could leave, she figured. Might as well take all their money.

Joint was hopping. Judge Backfat had one of Miss Rosa’s girls on his lap; he was telling her a funny story about how he had sentenced her daddy to the chair. The police chief, Bachelor Smolls, he was at a table with some of his men and just as many girls. (Some of the girls were older than the men, but there’s only one woman at Miss Rosa’s, and that’s Miss Rosa; all the other female staff were girls.) They were celebrating a big bust. Chief had put most of the drugs and some of the cash in the evidence locker, and now it was time for a good time. The Chamber of Commerce had a reserved table in the back; it was full and there was a cash pot in the middle. The dealer had hair dyed a painful black. She was topless, and smiled at the men’s jokes. They had an infinite supply of jokes. An astronaut was at the bar–swear to Deke Slayton, an honest-to-God astronaut–with a girl who liked to be called Bailiwick. A few years after the storm, the astronaut would shoot his wife to be with Bailiwick; his plan did not prove out.

Sometimes the lights would flicker like something dramatic was about to happen, but nothing did.

“How’d you get into it?”

“What?”

“Roadie-ing. Being a roadie. However the fuck you’d say that,” Romeo Rodriguez asked.

“Fell in with a bad crowd,” Precarious Lee answered.

The bar ran all the way along the east side of the room, opposite from the swanky curtains that separated the main bar from the lobby and door. There was a service station in the middle with rails and a tacky placemat to set trays on. Precarious and Romeo were in the far corner, at the end of the bar where they could see the room. Neither was drunk, but neither was sober: they were in that in-between spot, right in the pipe, where thoughts and speech came easily and wit was a companion and everyone was 15% more attractive. Romeo was in his uniform, as he had been since being shot in the face; Precarious was wearing the pair of jeans he owned and a tee-shirt he had been given two decades prior.

“Precarious.”

“Miss Rosa.”

She was short and wide and solid, all of a singular mass, and a blonde wig that might have been too ostentatious for Graceland or the Opry. There was a little curl pasted to her forehead. Red-and-blue western shirt with spangles and buttons and boots made from ostrich and alligator with “ROSA” written in script across each toe. Miss Rosa did not have a pistol; she kept her gun in the hand of the orphan that was leaning over the second-floor railing and watching her every move. His name was Snuffy.

Anything you wanted. All it took was cash. Anything. Girls? Of course, it’s a cathouse, course we got girls. Boys? Well, we all got our weakness, don’t we, Preacher? We can fix you up. Need a little something make the evening go quicker? Maybe you’d like to meet someone in a different line of work from you. Or sell an item you weren’t supposed to have. Could be you got an envelope full of money and an indicted brother. Or you wanted your cock sucked. Miss Rosa’s was your place.

“Why you always bringing ghosts into my place?”

“Fell in with a bad crowd.”

She snorted, nodded at the bartender. Two more shots of Braddock’s whiskey and pints of Arrow beer appeared in front of Precarious and Romeo, and when they turned back to thank her, she was gone and there was no one staring at them from the catwalk. The two men tipped the shots, exhaled forcefully, slapped the glasses back on the bar. Precarious lit another smoke with his silver Zippo. Romeo asked for one.

Outside, the wind screamed like a new widow.

Bum-THAK bum-THAK. The band was back, and the girls were leading the men onto the dance floor. Lester Force and his Texas Millionaires played Western Swing, and they played it well. They said they played it the best, but so did other acts. Show biz isn’t big on empirical proof. The lap steel player barked his slide against the strings, and the drummer smiled like he’d been instructed. The bass payer was named Carolina Cotton, and she also yodeled.

“This is America?”

“Part of it,” Precarious said.

The orphan bartender took their shot glasses. He had on a white tee-shirt like all the other orphans. He said,

“One dead, one alive. Schrodinger’s bar tab.”

And walked back to the astronaut and Bailiwick. Romeo said,

“You sure we’re welcome here?”

“Sure. This is America.”

Incandescent neon flickered and shpritzed above the expensive liquor bottles; the genny hummed in its brick shed and shoved power into the lights, the freezers, the amplifiers. People had come out for a good time and they would get it. People had come out with cash and they could spend it.

A girl who called herself Nursey put a hand on each man’s shoulder.

“You boys like to buy a girl a drink?”

And they did, they did like to buy a girl a drink, especially if the girl was Nursey because Nursey was a good-time girl–you could just tell–and her brown curly hair rested on the spaghetti straps of her lingerie. She had pale eyes like a freshly-calved iceberg and lipstick so red it was a parody of itself, a quotation of itself; it was self-aware lipstick: you know why we’re here, and I know why we’re here, and no harm letting makeup reflect the situation. Shoes that were both slippers and high heels at once. Free-floating sleeves with a tight fishnet weave.

“You a ghost?”

“Me?”

“No, the guy who’s not a ghost,” Nursey said.

“I’m a ghost cop.”

“How’s that going for you?”

“Got its ups and downs.”

“Sounds like my job.”

Precarious laughed.

“Never fucked a ghost before.”

“Me, neither,” Romeo said, and immediately regretted it. Precarious turned back to his beer, shook his head, thought about ordering nachos.

The wind buffeted against the outer walls, but the roof held, and the room roared back against nature with shouts, whoops, insults, lap steel solos. Miss Rosa’s was set apart. Special. That safe place your mother did not tell you about on the outskirts of town open to all who had the cash. Water rose where it shouldn’t. Water flowed where it couldn’t. Electrical fires sparked and sprayed in defiance of the rain and there were live wires like spastic anacondas in the road. The soil saturated and vomited out long-buried caskets that floated down the boulevard in procession. The sky chucked down shit and death and laughed at samaritans.

Nursey laughed and took the drink the orphan bartender had brought her in manicured hand, drank, laughed some more. It was a professional laugh, a practiced one, a perfected laugh, and she said,

“I’m just like you.”

The drinks hit Romeo Rodriguez all at once like a wall and the room was swimming and drowning, and laughing the whole time. The topless dealer had knives hidden in her nipples and sliced the Chamber of Commerce to shred, chopped ears off as souvenirs and trophies, maybe she’d masturbate with ’em later. Snuffy up on the catwalk got to shooting and wouldn’t stop–could be a brain tumor, could be he had enough–and Miss Rosa took the first shots, and the second and third, too. The orphans went feral and grew teeth; the girls all had knives; Carolina Cotton’s yodeling shattered skulls and pelvises. Sand-spiders pattered inside and leapt on Judge Fatback, ate him raw while he screamed for Jesus and his mother.

None of that happened.

Romeo sat at the bar, blinked his eyes, wondered where he was and saw it all again for the first time: the bags under the piano player’s eyes; the barbacks carrying kegs larger than themselves; the scars under the fishnet covering Nursey’s arms.

“You used to be a real nurse,” he said.

“Yeah,” she answered, and curled her hand around his neck, softly, like she had a secret to tell, and she leaned in real close, so close that the words were just breaths with intent. “I told you. I’m just like you.”

A banging at the door. And louder. And louder. A solid WHANP WHANP that shouted out the band and the bar and the genny; no one turned, no one cared. The Chamber of Commerce’s poker game went on. The cops were getting blowjobs, and the judge was, too. Miss Rosa was in her office upstairs with the door closed and locked and Snuffy standing outside.

“You wanna go upstairs?” Nursey whispered to Romeo.

And the door WHANPED some more, and Nursey’s warm hand was in his crotch. Precarious had put a hundred on the bar and slid it towards him; she eyed it, and he eyed it, and then he was immaterial and passing through her and the tables and the dance floor and the orphans and the thick curtains that separated the main room from the lobby. Door was locked, which means dick to a ghost.

They were short and poor. Wet. Baby crying and mother trying not to. Old man. All useless, all broken, and not a dime between them.

“There’s a cover charge,” Miss Rosa said from the catwalk. Snuffy was beside her with his pistol.

“I got it,” Romeo said.

“No. Everyone pays their own way in my place.”

Romeo nodded his head, and said,

“Fuck you. Feed them.”

Miss Rosa smiled and Snuffy pointed his gun, but Romeo Rodriguez was faster. Not an orphan alive that can outdraw a ghost cop. BLAM the revolver flew out of Snuffy’s hand just like in the movies. Precarious picked it up and backed Romeo’s play. You dance with who brought you. Miss Rosa nodded at Romeo and backed into her office. Door shut.

“Cheeseburgers,” Romeo said to the orphan bartender. “And a beer for the old man.”

The old man nodded at Romeo.

The storm passed and the sun came back. It does that. The sky was steel, but lightening and hopeful and huge as the state it lay above. No more fuckery for the time being. Go about your lives, the sky said. I’ve said what I came to say. The crowd thinned.

“About that time?”

“Seems like it,” Romeo said.

Most of the parking lot was a lake. Pickup trucks foundered; motorcycles floated. Off towards the far end was a 1974 Dodge Monaco, black, that had not been affected by the storm. In fact, it was cleaner.

Precarious revved the engine and reached into the glove. Metal box with Tom Mix stamped onto the front. Took out a doobie and arched his back off the driver’s seat to slide the Zippo out of the change pocket of his Levi’s. Lit it PHWOO and held the joint in front of him to see if it was burning properly. It was. Took another drag PHWOO and offered it to Romeo, who looked at it, looked out the windshield, the joint, the windshield, reached for it and hit it PHWOO and sat there with the doobie burning in his hand.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” he said.

“America?”

“Yeah.”

“She can be a bit much,” Precarious said.

And they were on Route 77 with the sun in their eyes, blue skies and puffy clouds that looked like bunnies and puppies and kitties and friendships; the billboards all had compliments on them.

“I think it’s time to go home,” Romeo said.

“Okay.”

“I…I have this weird feeling…like I’m a secondary character in someone else’s story.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Precarious Lee extracted the soft pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes from the breast pocket of his tee-shirt. He hiked a single smoke out of the pack with a flick of his wrist, and lipped it out. Zippo. PHWOO.

“Everybody gets that feeling.”

“Why?”

“We’re all right occasionally.”

The billboards were warring and humping, and the double-yellow line was arguing with itself. Route 77 led to just about every place, but it stopped off in Texas, and also Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“Will you, son of man, judge this bloody city?”

“Shit, I’d judge this place like motherfucking Judge Dredd. They better not give me a gavel. I believe–and I am not kidding, I believe this–that I might injure myself, I’d judge this fucking place so hard. I’d have to stretch first! And even then, even then, I might really tear myself up. I’d get into it. I might blow out my asshole.”

“Not your knees?”

“Fuck my knees. I’m worried about rectal integrity at this point. I get the power to judge some of these slack-nutted fuckwits? I’m laying down sentences like Shakespeare, and I’m putting my back into it. Puts a lotta stress on the body, and you know my theories about the asshole.”

Aiesha Mundi, whom everyone called Aye-Aye, knew his theories on the asshole, and there were many: the proper care thereof, appropriate cleaning techniques, appropriate cleansing techniques–Cordoba Martin differentiated between cleaning one’s asshole and cleansing one’s asshole–and, of course, the secret history of the asshole. The stuff they don’t teach in paramedic class. She also knew Cordoba’s theories on his balls, and his cock, and the Israeli/Palestinian problem, and agronomy, and interstellar telepathy, and the mysterious origins of backgammon, and what was going on with his sister and her jackass husband. He had spent a week last year developing an intricate idea about the future of nipples. If he weren’t funny, Aye-Aye would have stabbed him years ago.

She wasn’t sure what a knife would do to him, though. Possibly nothing, based on observation. Cordoba had been stuck with needles infected with everything from AIDS to zygomycosis; negative tests always. They would bring junkies back to life at the Hotel Synod with Naloxone and get a swinging, flailing, sweaty thank you made of fists and kicks; Aye-Aye saw him take numerous blows to the nose–hard and connecting whacks–and not even sneeze. He’d punch through windows and not get a scratch. Cordoba said there was a trick to it, and Aye-Aye thought that maybe he was telling the truth.

He drove the ambulance, which was a type 2, which means it was built on a van’s chassis instead of a pickup truck’s, so it was not a jutting hood and cab in front of a boxy back section, but a single carton of a vehicle with a sloped front that bore a scarred metal grill. Cordoba had theories about getting out of the way of ambulances, and all of them centered around his belief that you fucking well should. He had bumped Buicks, shoved Chevies, fucked up Fords; he smiled every time. One time, they returned to the garage at St. Agatha’s with the entire rear bumper of a Datsun 280z caught up in the cowcatcher. Cordoba had wanted to leave it there as a warning, but Aye-Aye turned him down on the grounds that it was unprofessional. The grill was black, and the ambulance was white with a two-tone horizontal stripe down either side, emerald and gold.

She did the paperwork. This was the trade-off of first response, of cops and firemen and paramedics: privilege for paperwork. Shatter windows, kick in doors, punch ne’er-do-wells, jam syringes of potent chemicals in strangers’ buttocks; this is all allowed as long as the proper forms are completed properly. In triplicate. In ink. Press hard. At first, they traded off the driving and paperwork, but Cordoba wouldn’t stop talking while he wrote and always ending up writing down the bullshit he was saying.

The cops got called on you. The fire departments was called for you. But Little Aleppo called the paramedics themselves. Heartburn and loneliness and self-amputated toes. Children who recognized the signs of a stroke in their parents. Adult children helping their mothers out of the showers they’d fallen in, trying to look away from their nude flesh. Anonymous renters in the Hotel Synod, and anonymous homeowners all the way on the Upside. Folks who just didn’t feel right. Others who had been physically wronged by their appliances. Sometimes real, real late, the phone would ring and the voice on the line would ask,

“Can you hold onto my gun for me? Just for tonight? It won’t shut up.”

And though the regulations said that they couldn’t, Aye-Aye and Cordoba did. She marked it down as “Shortness of Breath” and left business cards and phone numbers, put the weapon in a quart-sized plastic bag, wrote the owner’s name down with black marker. She put them in an unused locker in the garage. The guns would be claimed, or not.

St. Agatha’s was on the Downside. It was a trauma hospital, a gunshot hospital; it was a hospital you suddenly needed, not one you elected to go to. The dispatcher decides where the 911 call goes to. Crime to the cops, and fire to the firemen, and injury to the ambulance.

“They’ll automate this fucker.”

“The whole thing?”

“Sure. Inevitable,” Cordoba Martin said. “You know those claw machines in the arcade? You got a joystick and you try to pick up fucking teddy bears and whatever?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“That’s the first wave. Those machines? They learn. They’re using our hand-eye coordination against us, and that’s gonna be the end of human labor.”

“You’re an idiot. Those claw machines are fixed.”

“Fixed for death.”

It was noon and the Main Drag was snappish and short-tempered; lunch was necessary. The morning’s coffees had curdled in the neighborhood’s stomachs and pedestrians were peevish, and no one would yield to oncoming traffic even if it was an ambulance with its red-and-blue lights circling and wailing. Drunks were waking up sober and junkies were coming off their wake-up shot. The Poet Laureate was dead asleep in a messy apartment, dreaming of critical success.

And the Morning Tavern. Day for night in the Morning Tavern: some people liked to rock and roll all day and save their partying for the nighttime, and that was alright in the Morning Tavern. First beer served right before dawn, and Last Call rung out in the late afternoon. No credit, ever, and the walls fluttered with the Rejection: dishonorable discharges, and no-thank-you’s from publishing houses, and divorce papers. If you needed to start drinking early, then the Morning Tavern was for you.

There was a fat man on the bar’s floor. He had fallen from his stool. He was clutching his chest with one hand and holding the hand of a short woman in a tight black dress with the other. She had hair the color of Superman’s tights and was telling the man that everything would be okay when Aye-Aye ad Cordoba burst in with the stretcher. There was an oxygen tank laying on the white sheets of the mattress.

Aiesha Mundi, whom everyone called Aye-Aye, knelt next to the man and stuck two latex-covered fingers into the nape of his neck to hear his pulse, and she said,

“Can you hear me, sir? What’s your name?”

And the man wheezed,

“Seamus.”

“Okay, Seamus. Try to breathe. You’re not going to die today.”

Cordoba Martin jammed the oxygen mask on Seamus’ mouth and nose, and wrapped the springy cord attached to it around his skull.

Aye-Aye asked him,

“Your chest hurt?

Seamus nodded, and he looked around desperately for his mother or Jesus, but they were not there; just a short black woman and a tall white man, both in short-sleeves and blue latex gloves. Then he was on the stretcher and then he was in the ambulance with the Morning Tavern a forgotten landmark of the past behind him. Sudden illness concentrates the mind on the present; pain brings the moment into focus. You have ancestors and you have plans, but let your right ventricle skip a few beats in a row and you have nothing but right now.

Human beings live in their heads until their bodies don’t let them.

Cordoba put Seamus on the thin mattress and the gurney extended upwards with wheels under it; they took him outside from the darkness of the bar into the sun of the sidewalk and then into the ambulance head-first. Aye-Aye climbed in with him, and Cordoba closed the back doors and climbed behind the wheel. Flicked the lights and sirens back on and did a u-turn on Widow’s Way so he was driving east, and then he turned south on the Main Drag and nudged a Volvo out of his way at a red light. There was no separation between the front seats and the patient-space in the back and he could see what was happening in the rearview mirror.

“Shabbos–”

“Seamus,” Aye-Aye corrected.

“–you’re in good hands. This woman has never lost a patient. A bunch have died, but she always knew where they were. Hasn’t lost one.”

Seamus flopped his arm up to the oxygen mask and shifted it off his mouth. He asked,

“Does he think he’s helping?”

“He does,” Aye-Aye said, and put the mask back on him.

St. Agatha’s was three minutes away–four if Cordoba Martin had to shove a Chrysler onto the sidewalk–and Aiesha Mundi, whom everyone called Aye-Aye, started a line on the fat man lying on the stretcher. Someone needed help, so they went. Some people need more help than others, and paramedics are all socialists at heart: to each according to their need. You go when you’re called, and do the paperwork on the way, because that’s the job in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

America was hiding in plain sight on Route 77. The promises whizzed by, got chased by cops, jumped broken bridges, sped off as their theme music played and dust kicked up glorious and fine. Dreams came during sleep, but America did not sleep–could not, must not–not on Route 77, where armed tollbooths stood their ground and snarled traffic with warning shots of freedom. No stories, grand or otherwise. Look out the window: do you see Manifest Destiny anywhere? Maybe it’s to the left of the mountain. Keep looking and you’ll find it. There were no promises and no dreams and no stories on Route 77, and what was left was America.

Burger stands and graveyards. Cornfields and rivers and parades on summer mornings and massacres on summer nights. Monuments to dead teenagers paid for by wicked grown-ups. One-reelers and no-hitters. Strange trees bearing fruit. Basketball hoops made out of bottomless peach baskets, or with nets made from chain link. Blood and soil. Chinese restaurants. Right turns on red. Unmarked graves and theater balconies and plazas and island jails. Porches and torches and telegraph poles and back alleys and coffee shops and dairy farms and workhouses and tenements and pig shit and sock hops and potter’s fields and cannonballs and luncheonettes and winter and the desert and the plains and the prairie and the swamps and the forests and the hills and the mountains.

And Texas.

The Interstitial Highway System had an open relationship with Time: they were together, mostly, but also free to see other fundamental forces. It was love, but a gnarly kind that wound up doing damage to everyone involved and leaving fist-sized holes in the drywall of reality. Their friends were worried that, one day, Time would throw acid in the Interstitial’s face. It was a matter of lanes. Choose the right one: New York to Chicago in an hour, St. Louis to Miami in two. Precarious Lee had once made it from Boise to Philadelphia in four hours and ten minutes in a 1970 Plymouth Fury.

But it still took forever to get through Texas.

“Are we fucking still in Texas?”

“Yup.”

“How the fuck big is this state?”

“Texas is the size of fucking Texas.”

Precarious Lee and Romeo Rodriguez had caught each other up in a feedback loop of profanity. Precarious used to be a Soldier, and then he was a roadie; Romeo was a Marine and briefly a cop. These are four of the foulest-mouthed professions, and with no one in the car to temper their speech for, the men luxuriated in their cursing and jammed “fuck” into places it neither belonged nor desired to be.

O, fuck. O, fuck, you verb noun adjective adverb gerund and place-holder, FUCK! The most American of curse words, forbidden and adaptable; not allowed anywhere, but fitting in everywhere. O, fuck, you common currency of the common man, you working-class shibboleth, you bugaboo, you beeeeeep.

“Big fucking state.”

“Fuckin’ A.”

Texas wheeled by at 80 miles an hour out the windows of a 1974 Dodge Monaco. Hundred-gallon hats and rattlesnakes the size of creeks. An avalanche of cattle in the Christmas Mountains. Monuments chased down drugged-out rock stars to piss on them. Ranches the size of lesser (Eastern) states declared independence and immediately applied for foreign aid. City-states surrounded by light-years full of nothing but road and roadrunners and scrub. The desert slept, and the sky paid no mind at all to the road.

There had been a time when Romeo Rodriguez did not know that ghosts couldn’t kill themselves. It’s not a piece of information one needs for day-to-day living, really. One could quite easily make it throughout an entire lifetime without having need of that fact. It becomes important after death, though. On a long enough timeline, all ghosts will attempt suicide. Understandable. It breaks your heart to learn that life has no point, but finding out that the afterlife is also meaningless tends to shatter spirits. Romeo was a ghost cop, but ghost cops should have exciting destinies, and he had been a secondary character in a story with an ambiguous ending. Ghost guns don’t kill ghost cops, and neither do regular ones.

Stuck. The Salt Wharf and Boone’s Docks to the west, the Segovian Hills to the east. Walk north to the Upside and have your lunch in the Verdance, where everything grows, or wander south to the Downside and have a drink at the Wayside Inn, where anything goes. And that’s it. If you didn’t have to leave, you’d never want to; if you couldn’t, you’d never stop trying. Officer Romeo Rodriguez tried and tried. He tried the harbor and the pass, and cars and boats and once a helicopter. Stuck.

Ghosts are like cats; they belong to places.

But Route 77 went in between places and was therefore full of ghosts. Taking a break from the city, reviewing the hinterland, speeding along and speeding along. You could always tell a ghost driver on the Interstitial; they were the only ones doing the speed limit.

Romeo was not allowed to drive, and so the Dodge Monaco was doing 80 in the right lane. Overtaking hearses and mysterious vans. Other things.

“Was that a fucking stagecoach?”

“Yup.”

And then the weather came in. They could see it in the windshield, off a hundred miles, and right behind them in the rearview. Hail the size of insincere apologies PONKED on the roof of the Dodge, and there was so much rain that Noah would have stayed inside. Flash floods, and flasher floods that showed you their dicks, and it was black as filth outside and cool as terror; Romeo felt his window buckle out and a raindrop as big as a cheeseburger extinguished Precarious’ cigarette. The thunder was louder than any rock and roll band could dream of, or any army could manage: it was everywhere and everything and you heard the KRUH-DACK with your skin and lungs and the sound slapped the thoughts from your brain, all of them, the basic ones, the thunder was so loud that you forgot your name and shuddered like a bloody newborn.

The sign on the way into town said:

CASCABEL, TEXAS
POPULATION: NEGOTIABLE

They walked into the bar. Romeo did not need to, but it was reflex. Light above the door read MISS ROSA’S in shades of neon; it cost a ten to get in. Wooden floors and a long bar, and an inward-facing balcony upstairs. They had a lot of nice girls.

“What kind of place is this?”

“It’s indoors,” Precarious Lee said, and ordered two Arrow beers and two shots of Braddock’s whiskey from the ten-year-old boy behind the bar.

Romeo was self-conscious about being dead, and this did not seem the type of bar in which wearing his uniform and gunbelt was smart, but no one paid him much mind. Miss Rosa’s has all kind of customers. It was a “you don’t notice my drug deal, I won’t notice your non-corporeality” kind of place. He put his foot up on the brass rail, and Precarious lit a cigarette with his silver Zippo and set the pack and the lighter on the bar in front of him. An ashtray was already there; a black plastic cheapie, circular, and with divots carved from its lip.

Drinks came.

“To fucking America,” Romeo held up his shot glass.

“And Texas, too.”

CLINK, downed, backed with beer.

Outside, the storm banged and blew–gas stations were being thrown down streets like skipping stones–and the neutral drowned in their basements waiting out the weather. Death by hunkering. Not Miss Rosa’s.

Miss Rosa’s was built solid.

Card tables were in the back, big round ones that never emptied, and there was a stage in front of the dance floor. Lester Force and his Texas Millionaires were playing Western Swing music that went boom-CHAK boom-CHAK; Lester played a fiddle that he cradled in his elbow like a firstborn child, and he had a walnut pipe clenched in his teeth. Reeds and horns, and a lap steel guitarist that sang the high harmonies. Ten cents to dance with a nice girl. Quarter for a freaky one.

Outside was chaos and rain and death, and a seafood restaurant windmilled through the parking lot. Uprooted trees slung miles only to come to rest piercing elementary schools.

Precarious Lee nodded his head at the orphan bartender for two more shots, and there they were.

“Not much of a drinker,” Romeo said.

“Don’t be a pussy.”

They drank, and Precarious lit another cigarette.

“They say 8,000 died,” the bartender said.

“Yeah?” Precarious asked.

“The whole city gone. Ripped from the ground like a weed. Just debris and corpses left afterwards.”

Romeo Rodriguez was not lying: he did not drink much, and was light-headed and big-headed and warm-headed; his head was feeling strange. He watched the conversation and thought about asking Precarious for a cigarette.

“1900. Galveston and Houston are competing, right? Could’ve gone either way, but the weather was bad one day. One day! Change the course of everything and whatnot, one day. Weather’s a motherfucker. Almost like the sky pays us no mind.”

The orphan bartender was blond and slim and not yet five feet tall. He polished a pint glass with a rag because he saw it in a movie.

“Could be 12,000. No one will know, ever; they didn’t write it down. They took the bodies to the beach and burned them. A Viking funeral for a whole city, a city called Galveston in the year of the Lord 1900, and it will happen again. Anything that can happen, will. What’s that town where those fancy fuckers live?”

“Los Angeles,” Precarious said.

“It will disappear, too. Back into the sea; they’ll burn the bodies just like the old days.”

Miss Rosa’s shivered in the howling wind and went rickety in its foundations; but it held. The pavement ripped off the ground like string cheese, and car dealerships were sent flying, and the steadiest thing in the bar was your next drink. WHOMBLE WHOMBLE the whole building rattled and the lights stuttered, but the band played on.

“All of it,” the orphan bartender said. “Any of it. Taken away in one day. Not even a day: a morning. Nothing that man’s built can’t be flattened by the weather. One day. One instant and it’s all gone.”

He walked off a few paces, and turned back and said,

“We tremble before instance.”

Precarious raised his glass, and drank, and took a drag from his unfiltered Camel PHWOO and said to Romeo Rodriguez,

“You said you wanted to see America.”

“I wasn’t expecting this.”

“No one does.”

The fiddles led the band into Green Valley. The trumpet player sang; it was about a town where heartbreak could not find purchase. A place with a constant bearing towards happiness, a place where instance did not venture and plans could be seen through. Green Valley was full of intent and low on luck, which made it quite unlike Route 77, which is the road out of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Even in 1975, Yung Man’s was the oldest restaurant in Little Aleppo. A mile into the Downside on the Main Drag, it had been open for over a hundred years and the goldfish in the tank along the back wall were rumored to have been there the entire time. There was a desk up front with a woman who would mispronounce your name loudly when your table was ready; she was also rumored to have been there the whole time. The Xi family owned the place now; they were anywhere from the 12th to 17th family to run the restaurant, depending on whose story you believed. (Early records are not available because nothing was recorded in the first place. Also, the joint burned down twice.)

Yung Man arrived in Little Aleppo from Guangdong province in March of 18– to work in the mines peeling the gold out of the Turnaway Lode, and by very slightly later in March of 18–, he realized he did not want to work in the mines. It was pretty much the first day, actually. Before lunch, even. Mining sucked, he thought. Owning a mine seemed wonderful, but working in someone else’s was no way to get ahead. He thought about moving on and staking his own claim somewhere, but the other Chinese told him that the gold was drying up.

His roof leaked every 18 days. Chinatown was a fetid grouping of lean-tos and dirt-floor shacks off to the East of the Main Drag. Pig sties and pimps and Whites strolling through confident of their place in the world. Some of the Chinese hated the Whites. How dare they treat us as inferiors, that they’re better than us? They’re our inferiors! We’re better than them! Yung Man did not think as poorly of the Whites as some did, but nor did he think too highly of them. Especially their food. They just threw slabs of meat on a fire and ate it. With their knives, no less! Or–heaven help him–their hands. Fucking savages.

Still, they had money, and Yung Man wanted some of it. Money seemed very important in America. Money meant quite a bit back in Guangdong, but there simply wasn’t any of it. Plus, there a civil war going on that had already killed a couple million people. Yung Man was happy to be in America and away from civil wars, but he wasn’t happy to be living under a roof that leaked every 18 days and was downright miserable at the prospect of ever crouching into that damn mine again.

After his shift one day, he walked through the neighborhood. The Wayside Inn loomed over the Main Drag. He bought an apple from a vendor named Stumpy and polished it on the front of his long-sleeved shirt that went to his knees. Samperand’s Hardware was on the corner; they sold everything a young man about to make his fortune would need–picks and shovels and pans–at a healthy profit. The Norwegian Hotel had twelve rooms, two with their own bathrooms, and a dining hall on the ground floor that sat 20. The Chinese were not permitted to eat there, but Yung Man had seen the food through the windows and was astonished at how colorless it was. Brown and gray, with the occasional flash of beige. Next door was a brand-new venture: a newspaper. A daily newspaper, at that. (Mostly.) Little Aleppo was coming up in the world; there was a reporter to lie to now. The First Bank of Little Aleppo, which was built from stone and brick, and the First Church of the Infinite Christ, which was made of wood. He had a long black braid called a queue that swayed like an attentive cat between his shoulder blades as he walked, and a deep blue round hat called a jin.

The Whites had the money.

And they had terrible food.

Yung Man smiled as he bit into his apple.

All immigrants have stories. Some they tell, and others they don’t. Yung Man told the same story as the rest of the Chinese in Little Aleppo–no jobs, civil war, whatnot–but his story was a lie. Yung Man did not immigrate to America so much as he fled Guangdong. Even the best Mah Jongg cheats get caught eventually.

On the boat ride over, he had given himself many stern talkings-to. He asked himself, Is this how your father raised you, Yung Man? (Overlooking the fact that it was his father who taught him the graft in the first place.) Do you want to spend your life gambling and drinking? (That actually sounded fine to Yung Man, but he pretended that it didn’t.) No more cheating. In fact, no more Mah Jongg at all. He swore to his ancestors that he would change his ways once he got to America.

But necessity is the mother of recidivism, and so Yung Man joined the Mah Jongg game in Chinatown, which had been running continuously since enough Chinese were in the neighborhood to get a game going. He was careful not to bleed his countrymen too quickly, but soon he had enough cash to buy a small plot of land on the Downside. Stove. Plates and bowls. Tables and chairs.

Yung Man roamed the valley that still had wilderness within it; he found wild scallions and onion and he trapped ducks and caught fish from the harbor. He bought a whole pig, and a cleaver. A trip to C—–a City for rice. Pigeon and stoat, too, and he prepared the dishes he knew from home, which he was sure the Whites would love as much as he did.

They did not.

Yung Man leaned against the door of his restaurant and willed the customers in. He zapped passersby with his mind: YOU! YOU’RE HUNGRY! he thought at them, but it never worked. A week went by without one meal paid for.

Finally, on the eighth day, a drunken White walked in. Yung Man brought him tea and the menu that had been printed in the newspaper office. Yung Man’s English was getting better, but slowly, and so the menu was a mess. You could order Oink Back or Bird With Sauce or Feet From Several Animals. The White, who could not read anyway, pushed the menu away and told Yung Man about a dish he’d had in a Chinese Restaurant in San Francisco.

The best Yung Man could make out was that the White wanted a bunch of bullshit with noodles. He kept saying “chop suey” very loudly and slowly; Yung Man did not know why the White was asking for leftovers, but the customer was always right so Yung Man went in the kitchen and threw some chicken and pork in a wokful of noodles, dashed it with salt and sesame oil, brought it out.

“Chop suey,” he said with a smile.

The White stabbed his fork–Yung Man could not find anywhere to buy chopsticks yet–into the meal, jammed it in his mouth, wiped his lips with his sleeve. Nodded. Took another bite and said with his mouth full,

“That’s fucking delicious.”

Yung Man smiled and bowed, and by the end of the night there was a sign outside the restaurant that read NOW SERVING CHOP SUEY. Yung Man was not an artist: he was a Mah Jongg cheat, and so he could read the room and pay the angles. They want a bunch of bullshit with noodles? Done. Give the people what they want, he figured.

And the people wanted chop suey. The Whites beat a path to his door, even though his fellow Chinese couldn’t understand what the hell he was serving. Some of them accused him of “betraying Chinese cuisine,” and he tried to figure out what that meant as he counted the till in his head. He expanded the restaurant and built himself a small, tidy apartment upstairs that quickly became untidy as his relatives came over to work for him, so he expanded the apartment. Yung Man was sleeping there with his brother and two cousins the night Chinatown was razed and raped and burned. He opened the restaurant the next day expecting to be killed as well, but was not. Usual crowd came in. None of the Whites mentioned what had happened the previous night. Yung Man did not, either.

120 years later, the center table at Yung Man’s was occupied by homosexuals.

“To Yung Man’s,” Manfred Pierce said, holding up his drink.

“Everyone’s favorite taste,” the table responded as one, except for Lower Montana, who made a face like “eww” that Manfred caught and smiled. Everyone had Coca Cola in a frosted Tom Collin glass with too much ice; the sweating cans sat beside their plates. Lower was the only one with only Coke in her Coke, though. Yung Man’s does not have a liquor license, but if you could refrain from setting the bottle on the table, then you could pour whatever you’ve brought with you into your glass. The waiter would add five bucks to your bill. It was the Downside’s version of corkage fees. (Unless, that is, you tried to be clever and hide the bottle from the waiter. Then you’d be thrown out.)

Manfred had brought Kentucky bourbon–Lower smuggled it in in her canvas shoulder-bag with all the rock and roll pins on it–and the round table in the middle of the dining room passed the bottle around from lap to lap.

In order to break the law in Little Aleppo, you had to follow the rules.

“I call this meeting of the Sylvester Street Irregulars to order,” Finster Tabb said, rapping his knuckles on the table. He was still wearing a beret–dark red–no matter how much everyone made fun of him for it. His friends loved him, and knew that the next step after a beret was an ascot, so they hoped to avert that crisis before it occurred. Finster just screwed the floppy French wool tighter on his bald head.

“Is that really our name?” said Steppy Alouette.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t appreciate being referred to as irregular.”

“It’s from Sherlock Holmes.”

“I wasn’t consulted.”

“Is the name even important?”

“Ask Gertrude Stein.”

“She would say no.”

“Fuck her, then.”

The problem with being a minority, Steppy thought, was the “minority” part. There just weren’t that many gay people in Little Aleppo, so you kept seeing the same faces over and over. You were stuck with each other. Heterosexual didn’t like someone at the bar? Heterosexual could just mosey on down to the next bar. Only one gay bar in the neighborhood, though, and so you had to see fuckers you couldn’t stand constantly. Steppy took a big slug of her whiskey and coke and loosened her tie.

“Can we discuss the matter at hand?” Manfred said, remembering his Navy days. Orders. He wished he could give orders.

“The matter at hand is survival,” Laurel Dorsey said. He stabbed his finger into the white tablecloth in emphasis. “Survival. They want us dead. Dead. We are engaged in a battle to save our own lives and nothing–nothing–is out of bounds. They started this, but we need to end it. Or it will end us.”

Laurel Dorsey was short and skinny and hunched and political. He needed a haircut; his Levi’s were bell-bottomed; his heels were Cuban. Laurel was convinced the world was out to get him–in his defense, it was–and wouldn’t shut up about it. If he grew up Catholic in Belfast, he would have planted bombs for the IRA, but he grew up gay in Little Aleppo and so he wrote novels. His first was called Cocksucker; straight people hated it because of how graphic it was, and gay people–at least the ones in the Wayside Inn–hated it because they were all in it, barely-fictionalized and rather unflattering. Laurel didn’t give a shit: he was incapable of feeling shame when he thought he was right, and he was always right. Just ask him.

“They will put us in camps!”

“Laurel,” Manfred said.

“CAMPS!”

Lower Montana’s eyes widened. She did not want to be put in a camp. She had, in fact, not even considered it as a possibility before then. A week ago, she slept in a bed in her parents’ house with a teddy bear named Lucy. And now there were camps? Like, sleepaway camps? Lower was sixteen and had not been eased into adulthood like most, and Manfred saw her face and took her hand and squeezed; he whispered,

“He’s a crazy person.”

She felt better hearing that, and squeezed his hand back. She sipped her Coke through the straw.

“Don’t call me a crazy person, Manfred,” Laurel Dorsey pointed his finger.

“Oh, you heard that?”

“My voice is an important one.”

“Your voice is a vocal one,” Finster Tabb said.

“I’d agree with that,” Steppy said.

Lower Montana nodded sagely.

And then a great tray full of food. The waiter had a stand that went from flat to x-shaped, and he kicked it into position and laid the tray upon it. Sweet and Sour something, and an alternative protein in snotty lobster sauce. That miracle of capitalism, the boneless sparerib. Pan-fried pork dumplings with pinched-off ends. Wonton soup–two wontons per cup–with greens floating in the yellowy broth. White rice in hand-sized bowls; fried rice on a platter with flecks of onion and scallion and shrimp mixed in. Crunchy noodles in a thin wooden bowl. And egg rolls.

“What the fuck is this?”

“An egg roll,” Yung Gai said.

Yung Gai was Yung Man’s cousin, and he had been sent to San Francisco to see what the Chinese restaurants there were cooking. He had come back with food wrapped in handkerchiefs that Yung Man had never seen before. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Chinese food. The egg roll had gone hard, but Yung Man still held it up to his nose and tried to smell it.

“What’s in it?” he said.

“Two cents worth of food that sells for a dime.”

And so Yung Man put up a new sign in his window in 18–: NOW SERVING CHOP SUEY AND EGG ROLLS. They had sold well ever since.

The walls were red with raised gold scenes all over: lions and dragons and boats that would never return to their home ports. Lined up on the front desk were brown paper grocery sacks with one neat fold held together by a single staple, soldiers marching out to slaughter hunger. The cooks were short and sweaty and drank water from the quart-sized plastic soup containers that sat on the shelves above their steaming woks. At a table in the back corner, an old women shelled peapods while a young boy did his homework.

There was a mid-level drug deal being set up in a booth over Peking Duck. (They had called ahead.) Teenagers out on a grownup date–she had her shoeless foot in his crotch under the Moo Shoo–and unhappy families arguing over the last dumpling. The Libertarian Party of Little Aleppo was having their monthly meeting at a circular table in near the front window, and they had requested separate checks.

“I don’t know how any of you can eat at a time like this,” Laurel Dorsey said with his mouth full of chicken and stringbeans. “This is the first step. This Brannie Dade woman and her Nazi goons. They’re first, and it all goes downhill from there.”

“She is within her rights as an American, Laurel. First Amendment and all that. It’s a public sidewalk,” Finster Tabb said.

Laurel spooned fried rice into his mouth and narrowed his eyes at the older man in the elaborately-shawled sweater.

“Do you know what a kapo was?”

“Please don’t accuse me of collaborating with Nazis, Laurel.”

“I call them as I see them, Finster.”

Steppy Alouette was a vegetarian and had been eating around the meat in everything; she said,

“He was literally quoting the Constitution, Laurel. Don’t call him a Nazi.”

“Pass the dumplings,” Laurel said.

“Retract your statement,” Steppy said back.

“Dumplings first.”

“Nope.”

“Pass the fucking dumplings.”

Lower Montana reached over to the off-white oval plate that had two slighty-congealing dumplings left on it, grabbed both with her fingers, shoved them in her mouth. Smiled while she was chewing. Manfred squeezed her knee under the table. She made three lifelong friends and one sworn enemy with one move.

Laurel Dorsey rocketed from his seat, knocking the chair back. His napkin dropped from his lap and he raised his finger at the table like a prophet from the Old Testament. Everyone in Yung Man’s turned around. (Except for the Libertarians, who were minding their own business.)

“They are COMING FOR US. You think this is FUNNY, and I PITY YOU for it. You’re gonna LAUGH and fucking LAUGH until they COME FOR YOU with the NOOSES and the fucking KNIVES. You think this is about some ACTRESS with a SIGN? They want our BLOOD and you won’t take it seriously until you’re DEAD IN THE GUTTER.”

And then Laurel Dorsey stormed out of the restaurant. Had he not cruised the delivery boy on the way out, it would have been very dramatic.

There was quiet in the dining room. Manfred Pierce held up his glass and said,

“God bless America.”

And the rest of the patrons held up their glasses and agreed. Seemed rude not to.

Manfred turned back to the table.

“So. What the fuck do we do? And should we get more dumplings?”

The first question required discussion, but the second did not. Hatred might persist, tho it be forever tamped down, but more dumplings were surely a balm. You spooned brown sauce that had shallots floating in it over them, and then swirled the whole deal around in your white rice and stuffed the gooey mess  in your mouth; it tasted just like it did the last time, and the time before that, and the first time you ever ate at Yung Man’s, which is the oldest restaurant in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

It was the Running of the Poodles and there had been several deaths. Mean curs with sharpish snouts, humiliated by their haircuts, snapping and sprinting along the frontage road while drunken tourists in silly outfits leaned in to slap their doggy asses; it would bring you luck in the new year, the story went, and men and women alike weaved and swerved to avoid the angry hounds. Some didn’t, and even their families did not mourn. You know what you were getting into when you ran with the poodles, everyone understood.

Off to the south was a farm where they harvested wind. Great turbines sticking themselves into the sky–just the tip, they swear–with giant blades swip-swopping so fast that they could not be seen, and workmen atop them in hard hats and neon-orange jackets. The men would take out their dicks and piss into the fans, and the urine would spray for miles and miles. They did not know why they did that, but were compelled. To the north was Mt. Tushmore, which had the faces of ZZ Top carved into it. To the east was morning, and to the west was night.

And everything was America.

O, there were horses. They carried orphans who clutched mailbags, and the ideology of colonels, and the wagons of pilgrims. The horses carried disease and war, and also actors. Famous pintos and stuffed palominos. Some of the horses argued for buffalo rights, and others were just broken. They claimed alliances with the livery owners and the saddlemakers, but did not realize the transactional nature of existence because they were horses.

Trucks, too. Strapped with cargo and with the hammer down, heading towards Pensacola and Cahokia and Schenectady, being chased by weigh stations down the highway. Bandits got splattered by trucks–Robin Hood would not have done well on Route 77–and the drivers would not wash the guts from their grills. Intestines were badges of honors; medals for Macks. The boys were thirsty in Atlanta and speed limits were sarcastic if you interpreted them to be so. Everyone was an Interpretationalist on the Interstitial Highway System.

The Highway existed before the highways. The Native shamans rode it coast to coast in a sleepless and frenzied night; they would tell their tribes what they had seen, but no one listened. This was to be a constant. A man named Bill galloped along the trail as he dreamt up ways to sell the West to the East and beyond. Lawman brothers and gambling dentists knew where to catch the road, and so did the Hoodoo ladies from New Orleans. Dragons shitting out luck behind them. Fighting cocks and jazzbos and so many goddamned buses full of runaways.

And now a ghost cop and an ex-roadie in a 1974 Dodge Monaco.

The car had four doors, two on each side. There were no curves at all: the 1974 Dodge Monaco was made of angles and sheet metal and a 400 cubic inch engine with eight cylinders aligned in a V. The steering wheel was shaped like the diagram of a woman’s interior on a handout your health teacher gave you: two fallopian tubes shooting out horizontally and a cervix descending. There was no air bag. The radio had push-buttons that depressed with a tactile kah-CHUNK to choose a preset, and a volume knob and a tuning knob. The windows rolled down, and they were.

Precarious Lee had his elbow leaning out of the Dodge and a Camel cigarette in his left hand. He took a drag and exhaled PHWOO and leaned his head towards the air blowing in so that he could feel the wind through his gray hair. He was thinking about touring and never getting any sleep, he was thinking about the fights and miles, he was thinking about his kid, he was thinking about nothing at fucking all with just the index and middle fingers of his right hand curled around the bottom of the wheel. He had driven up to Harper Observatory and picked the kid up. Penny refused to talk to him. She was not taking being a ghost well. Precarious figured she’d come around and turned the sedan around in the parking lot gracefully and headed back down Skyway Drive and right on Buchwald and then out to Main Drag that cut through Little Aleppo.

“You gotta piss?”

“Not since I got murdered.”

“That’s a plus.”

“Honestly? I kinda miss it.”

They passed Big-Dicked Sheila’s Hair Salon For Rock Stars And Their Ilk. Precarious waved.

“What about shitting?”

“Nope. No more.”

“Can’t complain about that.”

“Nah. Not shitting is awesome.”

“Pain in the ass.”

“I thought we were going to Route 77.”

“We are.”

“Is there, like, an on-ramp or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it?”

“Look within your heart.”

So Officer Romeo Rodriguez, who was a ghost, looked within his heart for the on-ramp to Route 77, and there it was; the Dodge Monaco was doing 80 on ice-smooth blacktop with all sorts of lines–yellow, double-yellow, solid white, dashed white–painted on it, and there was a victorious roar and the sky was full of what looked like huge bald eagles, all saluting and preaching and bribing around the car. The sun went on and on. Toads blanched and sizzled. Cactus parched. Rivers swole. Cattle staged mutinies, slaughtered leathery men and their energetic daughters, took the wheel and lit out for the territories. Discotheques opened, struggled, bloomed, blossomed, thrived, got raided by the cops, burned down suspiciously, turned into banks. In the Low Desert, there were camels that no one remembered, and there were hippos in the Neverglades that none of the history books mentioned.

The radio was playing rock and roll music. American music. The Viennese thought they could write a tune; the Chinese had a melody or two: fuck y’all, did you invent the motherfucking Stratocaster? Nah. Back up while I step through here, the rock and roll music said to the world. I’m gonna get a little loud. Stupid, too, but that’ll be forgiven in the fullness of time. I’ll have apologists, you see, and explicators and pundits. Important people to translate me to the dopes. I got three chords, and you can play ’em all with just your middle finger. Can you say “rock and roll?” Can you say “amen?” If you can say one, you can say the other.

“Glove.”

“What?”

“Glove.”

The ghost cop opened the glove compartment of the Dodge. There were maps and the owner’s manual. A yo-yo.

“This?”

“Not the yo-yo.”

It was a translucent-red Duncan that glittered in the light.

“Pretty.”

“Not the yo-yo.”

Three pencils, two sharpened. Pad. Two decades worth of registration papers. A metal pencil-case with a picture of Tom Mix stamped onto the cover. The colors were fading and vague, but there were no dents and not one speck of rust.

“That.”

Romeo Rodriguez handed the metal box with Tom Mix stamped on the cover to Precarious Lee, who took up the steering wheel with his knees and undid the small latch. Took out a joint. Relatched the box. Handed it back to the ghost cop.

“You’re kidding.”

“What?”

“You’re driving.”

The 1974 Dodge Monaco has brakes the size of picnic basket, and when they’re slammed against the car’s wheels they make a sound like EEEEEE and then the sedan was sitting idle on the shoulder. Precarious Lee stared at the young man in the passenger seat.

“Yeah. I’m fucking driving.”

And after several seconds, Romeo Rodriguez looked away and out the windshield.

Precarious let off the brake and back on the gas and then there they were again doing 80 miles per hour through America. Through burned-out towns and villages that used to be, through battlefields littered with the ghosts of teenagers, through the rhythmic factories and cyclical farms. Through the perfectly-tied nooses. Through the battered cities and crumpled countryside, and all the barns were red and shingled. Through deadman’s curves and depressive spirals and second acts. Through the whiskey and the laudanum and the acid and the jails and hospitals and institutions. Through the workhouses and Wall Street and the whorehouses and Fifth Avenue. Through the telegraph and the telephone and the teevee and the rockets that would rather explode than beat the Soviets. Through the rock and roll bands and the chain gangs. Through the tenements and the prairie and the plains and the cul-de-sacs and the lake with the kotchas beside it.

O, America, you motherfucker. Show yourself, you secretive whore. I can smell you; come out where I can see you.

“Never seen it before.”

“Hm?”

“The States. The whole thing. All of it.”

There was quiet in the car but for the radio, which did not know when to shut up.

“There’s so much of it.”

“Yeah.”

“Enough to go around.”

“That’s what I always figured.”

The morning was to the east and the evening was in the west. The billboards knew what you wanted and were excited to tell you about it. It was a hundred miles to somewhere and five hundred to somewhere farther away; these facts were printed in white on a green background, and they sparkled when you shown headlights against them because nothing mattered more on Route 77 than where you were going, and today an ex-roadie and a ghost cop were going nowhere in particular except the opposite direction from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

You could always get laid at the Wayside Inn, at least you could in 1975. Something casual, or romantic, or sleazy and quick in the darkened backroom. Everyone was going to the gym that year, and tiny spoons bounced against bulging pecs; the lesbians rolled their eyes at the boys, and rolled up dollar bills right at the bar. The dance floor throbbed and sulked in equal order, and polyester competed with silk, and nothing could not be cured with penicillin. A trim man with a row of neat, white teeth was behind the bar; years later, he would be asked what he recalled of 1975.

“Titties and dicks, honey. Cocaine, and titties and dicks,” Manfred Pierce answered.

He was 40. Manfred remembered that as an impossibility, as ancient, as clueless and past-prime, but he knew in his heart he was still in his 20’s and no calendar would convince him otherwise. His driver’s license could say whatever it wanted–I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it–but Manfred was still 29 if you asked. Not that anyone did.

Christ, 40. The big fuck-off. No longer needed, no longer valid. Sagging balls and a new face in the mirror, which was sadder and full of nevermind. He did not recall needing to trim his eyebrows quite as frequently as he now did. Manfred shaved every day, sometimes twice, and got his hair cut once a week: it was longer than the Navy used to regulate, but not by much. He flossed regularly and with vigor. A man ought look his best, Manfred thought. Sloppiness was disrespectful and unproductive. Occasionally, he wondered if he were just vain, but always decided: no, I have made a studied moral decision.

He kept his small house on Fantic Street–more properly called a bungalow–in a similar fashion; he had lived there fifteen years and did not believe there had ever been a mess. The unpaid runaway labor helped. Manfred took in strays: the boys thrown out of their houses, and the girls who ran away from home. Locals and soon-to-be locals. Animals, too: one-eyed dachshunds, cats mussing tails, a turtle he named Myrtle. Manfred charged no rent. He’d feed the kids, buy them clothes. He’d bring them down to the Wayside and introduce them around. (To the right people. Some of the patrons should not have been introduced to teenagers.) The Wayside’s regulars looked out for each other, except the ones that were scheming against one another, and the cast-out children would find a home, a job, someone to love or at least fuck. A few went home, moved on. A lot stayed. When Manfred looked around the bar on some nights, he realized half the room had crashed on his couch after getting off a bus from Milwaukee with six bucks in their pockets. This made him very happy, and he would give out free drinks. (Manfred Pierce gave out too many free drinks, but the ones you paid for were overpriced, so it all evened out.)

Manfred took them in, all of them, all the sissy boys and butch girls that got chased off the family farm by various iterations of an angry God.

But you had to do your chores. Patch of lawn out back needed mowing, and the front bedroom with two twin beds and two dressers and two desks had to pass inspection. Living room was to be policed on every walkthrough.

“Kitchen requires constant vigilance, and there’s a system to the refrigerator.”

“Is the system democracy?”

“The opposite,” Manfred said.

Lower Montana put her hands in the pockets of her army jacket.

“Communism?”

“Communism is an economic philosophy; democracy is political. Can’t be opposites.”

“A monarchy?’

“Good enough. This house is a monarchy. And who’s the king? Don’t say Elvis.”

“You are.”

“You’re my new favorite person,” Manfred said, and he meant it. Then he showed Lower how the crisper was organized.

Lower Montana was from the neighborhood. She grew up on Themistocles Street, and she thought her parents were gone for the evening so she invited her friend Grace over to get high and listen to records. They both liked the Beatles, and both had their shirts off when Lower’s mom and dad walked in. Grace ran off, down the stairs, out the house clutching her top and forgetting her bra. Lower’s dad punched her in the eye, and her mom did not stop him, and so she ran out, too. When she returned a few hours later, there was a suitcase packed for her on the porch and the door was locked. Too scared to go to Grace’s, and not particularly good in emergencies, Lower sat in a Victory Diner booth all night. She dozed off with her head in her hand while eggs poached and the teevee played on mute. The sun woke Lower up, and the waitress did the kindest thing she could, which was ignore her. She washed her face and changed in the diner’s bathroom. Then she went to high school and took a quiz on the Hundred Years War.

She thought she’d be asked questions if she went back to the Victory Diner two nights in a row, so when the library closed and they threw her out, she walked north along the Main Drag up to Sylvester Street. Lower Montana knew what the Wayside was; her parents had always made sure to point it out when they passed. Lower ignored the bar, didn’t even look at, believed her mother and father could hear her heart pounding, changed the subject. She was only in eleventh grade, but could change the subject at a post-graduate level.

The sun had just set; it was that first little bit of night that belongs to the fireflies. Madame Cazee’s and the Wash n’ Slosh were on the south side of the street, and so was she. She circled the block once, twice, and then felt paranoid that people would think she was a narc or a spy. Teenagers always think the world’s looking at them. Lower jaywalked across Sylvester and strode up the to outer door–the Wayside had an outer and inner door separated by a curtain of thick black rubber–and flung it open and walked right in. Lower Montana had decided to pretend to be brave, and it worked, right up until she set foot in the bar.

The light was dim and flattering; several disco balls on the ceiling fought for dominance. The deejay was tall and black and shirtless–Lower would later learn he was also pantsless–on an elevated platform in one of the back corners of the room. Pool table opposite: a lithe man in a tank top was stripes, a burly woman in a flannel was solids. Door to the backroom in between made out of the same thick black rubber as the entrance curtain. It was early, so everyone was still dressed (except the deejay) and the dance floor was not full. Lower Montana could not move. She felt like it was the first day of school squared. Everyone seemed to know each other: they were kissing hello and hugging and teasing and dramatically ignoring one another.

Manfred could tell from the shoulders. A barman–a competent one, at least–keeps an eye on the door, and he had seen Lower Montana walk in like a lesbian lion only to immediately turn into a lesbian lamb. He had a liquor license now, he was legitimate now, he could get in trouble for having teenagers in the bar. But there was a black-and-white photo of a tall woman, smiling and with her friends, hanging above the top-shelf liquor behind him, and so when the girl looked at him he waved her over with the friendliest smile in his arsenal.

And then he said the thing he always said.

“Hello, beautiful.”

Lower Montana went home with him that night. He introduced her to Singal Maran, who was from Flagstaff, and also staying in the front bedroom. Manfred always preferred to have a boy and a girl in there; it cut down on the fucking.

She slept in her clothes, for fourteen hours straight.

Singal was gone when she woke, his bed made, and she was scared for a second but then remembered the kind bartender with his row of neat, white teeth and obviously-dyed mustache. There was a one-eyed dachshund curled up in the heat of her armpit. His name was Winky, and Lower Montana had been introduced to him the previous night.

“Hello,” she said.

Winky licked her nose and lips; she pulled her head back and scratched his belly. The dog started wiggling in furious glee.

And then Manfred explained the refrigerator to her.

At six, they walked down Fantic to the Main Drag and turned south towards the Downside, towards Yung Man’s. They were both wearing jeans; Manfred’s were tailored and tight, and Lower’s cuffs bagged up on the top of her Earth Shoes. Over wonton soup and pork fried rice, they told each other their stories of their lives. Their versions, at least. Manfred paid–Lower offered, but he pursed his lips and looked at her under lowered eyelids–and then they walked back up the Main Drag to Sylvester Street, where they turned east and walked towards the gaggle of men in suits and women in dresses holding signs. One of them had a bullhorn. Her name was Brannie Dade. It was the first little bit of night, and the fireflies were out.

Lower would have stopped walking–she did not like confrontation and still had a black eye–but Manfred grasped her upper arm and said,

“Stay with me,” and his chin and chest were jutting out, his blue eyes like a storm. She ducked her head down, tucked her long brown hair behind her ear with the arm Manfred did not have hold of. Lower Montana was not five feet tall; she never would be. She was wearing too many rings and no longer had a home, but the man who had taken her in told her not to be afraid and so she decided not to be.

She said to Manfred out of the side of mouth,

“I have a knife.”

“Ooh, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see.”

Lower Montana took her flick-knife out of the pocket of her army jacket. Manfred Pierce plucked it out of her hand, put it in the back pocket of his jeans, gave her the keys to the bar, said,

“You can have this back later. Go inside.”

“But, I–”

“Go. Inside. Now.”

She put her head down and walked through the protestors, ignoring their greetings. Flung open the door and disappeared into the dance floor.

Manfred Pierce was 5’9″ and weighed 144 pounds. This made him a welterweight; he knew this because that was the class he boxed at in the Navy and he was the exact same weight at 40 as he was at 20. He forced his hands out of fists and walked up to the protestor with the bullhorn. Her hair was brown, high, and swept-back; she was wearing a white sleeveless dress with a hem right below her knees and a high spread collar.  He asked her,

“Who are you?”

She answered,

“Brannie Dade.”

“From the teevee show?”

“Oh, you recognize me?”

“I do. You’ve aged horribly.”

Brannie Dade had giant teeth the color of a summer cloud; she was generically attractive and had once almost been nominated for an Emmy for her work as Glassy on Dracula Daddy, which was a sitcom about a dracula and his family that ran from 1970 to almost 1973. Nick Osferatu (a dracula) gets transferred from Transylvania to Cleveland; wackiness ensued for 41 episodes. Now she was standing outside the Wayside Inn with a bullhorn and a placard reading “HOMOSEXUALS RECRUIT CHILDREN.”

Manfred wanted to knock her out, choke her, shove her to the pavement and leap atop her skull nine or ten times. Recruit? Recruit, you bitch? You throw them out. You black their eyes and lock your doors on them, and I feed and shelter them. He didn’t, though. He kept his hands from becoming fists and said,

“I own this place. My name’s Manfred Pierce. What the fuck are you doing?”

“We don’t need that kind of language.”

“Fuck you. What are you doing?”

There were eight of them, including Brannie, and now they formed around her in a semi-circle and waved their signs at him. Manfred finally got a good look at all of them: several had the word SODOMITE written on them in very aggressive magic marker. One said HOMOS = COMMUNISTS, which just confused Manfred, as he was a small-business owner, and another said THE LORD IS WATCHING, which Manfred hoped was true.

It was 1975, so the men’s ties were as wide as the women’s hair was high. Pinch-faced and squinty-eyed, the lot of ’em, and with veins cording out of their forearms like road maps of anger. Manfred Pierce wondered why it was that the people so outraged by assfucking were always the people who would be most helped by being solidly fucked in the ass. It would relax them, he figured.

“We are letting the neighborhood know what kind of establishment you’re running, Mister Pierce.”

Brannie put a little English on that “mister.” She thought she was being clever.

“Well, Mizzzzzzzz Dade,” Manfred said, sinking to her level. “The neighborhood is well aware of what kind of establishment this is. The riot and the court cases kind of gave us away. And the flag.”

There were two flags hanging above the entrance to the Wayside Inn. One was red, white, and blue, and the other had more colors than that. The corners of Frannie Dade’s mouth twisted down, and her upper lip recoiled–it was halfway between a sneer and a snarl–and she said,

“The American flag shouldn’t be next to that filth. It shouldn’t be hanging above this place at all.”

And Manfred got up on his toes, just a little bit, and forced his hands out of fists and said,

“I will have you know, madam, that that flag is the one that was flying above the USS Dextrous in January 1953 when we took Communist shelling.”

(It wasn’t. He had bought it at the store.)

“You just joined the Navy for the perversion.”

“And the travel.”

“You are destroying America with your sin!”

Now Manfred became sarcastic, which is not the best way to deal with people to stupid to understand sarcasm, as they think they’re being mocked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said and snapped off a perfect salute. “One cock at a time.”

This sort of language in front of a lady–one who had been on a sitcom, no less–upset the protestors and they became agitated; one dropped his placard and put up his dukes. Manfred went up unto the balls of his feet and then he was grabbed from behind by a group of Wayside regulars who had just walked up. They dragged him in the bar and when their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they saw Lower Montana behind the bar, kind of: her shoulders and head just barely peeked above the walnut surface. She was polishing pint glasses with a rag.

Manfred said,

“Why are you doing that, sweetie?”

“I saw it in a movie,” she answered.

“I appreciate the initiative, but stop it.”

She put the glass and rag on the bar and stood there not doing anything.

“Could you go check that the bathrooms are still there?”

“Is that a serious thing, or are you trying to get rid of me?”

“They’ve disappeared before.”

The teenager crossed the room to find out if the toilets still existed, and the 40-year-old went behind the bar. There was a system. Limes here, and glasses there, and the metal scoop hung from the icemaker by a thread of yellow yarn. The Wayside had only one beer on tap, and the handle was in the shape of an arrow whose tip was shaped like an “A.” The cash register was behind him, and above that was the bronze bell Manfred would ring to signal Last Call. There was tequila behind him, too, and he poured some and drank it, then took out glasses and poured shots for everyone.

Then he called the police.

“Is this the Wayside Inn?”

“Yes.”

And the police hung up on him. The courts had recently forced them to begin treating homosexuals like human beings, and they were still pissed about it.

Manfred sent out Zippy the bouncer to make sure no one hit any of the protestors, and had another drink because he realized he was paying someone to protect people calling for his death. Steppy Alouette suggested legal maneuvers when she came in. Finster Tabb, who wore a beret all through the seventies no matter how many jokes were made, quoted Shakespeare at him.

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

“Act IV, scene V.”

“A scholar and a gentleman,” Finster smiled. Manfred poured him a shot of tequila, and himself one, and they raised their glasses and drained their glasses, and then Finster wandered across the dance floor to chat up a young man in a tight polyester shirt named Earl.

Brannie Dade and the protestors had left around ten. Zippy came back inside and tended bar while Manfred hit the bathroom for a line and then hit the backroom for a blowjob. The bar had filled up. Bars do that. The deejay was paying Never Too Late For Love by the Gordon Green Orchestra, and the dance floor was sweating and free. A drag queen broke kuh-SHPAK on the pool table; she had taken her heels off for stability and so stood barefoot on the slightly-sticky floor.

Lower Montana was sitting at the end of the bar by herself. Her straight brown hair was covering her face, and she shrunk inside her olive-green jacket that had so many pockets. She had a Coke.

Manfred placed her flick-knife and the keys to his house on the bar in front of her.

“Do you want a drink, sweetie?”

“I don’t like the taste of alcohol,” she said.

“No one does. You just get used to it.”

He pushed the hair from her face and looped it behind her ears and said,

“You’re among friends, y’know. Okay to show yourself here.”

Lower smiled and then she didn’t and brushed the hair back over the left side of her face where her eye was blacked. A small part of her still believed that Manfred’s kindness was a trick, and she would not meet his gaze.

“Sweetie?”

She glanced up for just a second. He said,

“Do you want a joint?”

Lower Montana looked to the left, right, back to the left.

“That would be cool, I guess.”

Manfred turned his head to the man sitting next to her and said,

“Tom?”

And the man who was sitting next to Lower, who was named Tom, pulled a cigarette case from his breast pocket and handed her a fat joint. Manfred forgave his tab, and asked him for a minute. Tom wandered into the backroom.

He reached under the bar, came up with an all-white pack of matches with. No logo, just a scratchy brown strip running horizontal across the bottom, and Manfred ran the gray paper match with the red tip across the strip; it made a sound like fftPOP, and Manfred cupped his hand around the flame as Lower lit the joint off it PWOF PWOF and then she inhaled deeply, held the smoke down like her cousin had taught her, blew out PHWOO, and then she handed the joint to him across the bar.

There were both pros and cons to owning a bar the cops refused to enter, Manfred thought. PHWOO. Gave it back.

It was better pot than Lower was used to, and she became very high very quickly. The deejay was playing Amethyst Evenings by Autumn Brice. The music seemed to de-coalesce, split into its constituencies. She could separate the horns from the drums, and then the drums from themselves: there was the hi-hat, there was the snare, and the bass guitar was dancing around in between them and also in her chest and hair and throbbing in her blacked eye. She sipped her Coke out of the can.

Manfred Pierce walked a few feet away. Fetched a glass, filled it with ice. Straw. Poured the soda in the glass, threw the can in the trash, set it back in front of her.

“Thank you,” she said.

And he smiled. Handed her back the joint, which she hit PHWOO and then she met his glance just for a second, but Manfred had known many teenagers and could see what she wanted.

“Ask me, sweetie.”

When she looked up, there were tears in her brown eyes.

“Why do they hate us?”

Manfred held out his hand and she gave him the joint.

“For the exact same reason as I took you in, sweetie. Because they decided to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah. Join the club.”

Manfred smiled and stood up straight with flashing eyes and gestured grandly around his bar. He said,

“Oh, wait. You have joined the club.”

Which got a smile out of her even through the tears which ran over her blacked eye and down her face that wore no makeup. He took her hand across the walnut bar and squeezed once, twice, and then he cried with her. Manfred Pierce would cry with you at the Wayside Inn, or dance with you. Fuck you if you were his type. Serve you a drink and a smile made of neat, white teeth under a dyed mustache no matter who you were. He’d buy you your first, in fact–second if you were cute–and welcome you in no matter who you were or what you had done in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

It was Saturday morning, and the Jews were walking to church. Since Torah, Torah, Torah burned down, the congregation had shuttled between sanctuaries, davening up and down Rose Street. The churches and temples and mosques still standing passed them around. One week here, the next there. The Jews wandered, as is their tendency. This week they were in the First Church of the Infinite Christ, and Jesus peered over the rabbi’s shoulder as he read from the Torah.

Behind and above the pulpit was stained glass, but between the stained glass and the pulpit was a giant crucifix with a larger-than-life (and rather detailed) Christ nailed to it. The Spectacular Harold had been paid to consult, and the magician earned his money: from any vantage but directly under the crucifix, it floated in air with no support at all. Rabbi Levy would not think of asking anyone at the First Church to cover up their Christ–they were guests, after all–but he was grateful for the yarmulke and tallis placed on the figure by the Reverend Arcade Jones.

Technically, Earnest Hubbs had dressed the Christ. Arcade was 6’5″ and 300 pounds–before lunch–and therefore not particularly suited to scampering up and down ladders, but Earnest was a foot and 150 pounds smaller. Earnest had been the synagogue’s handyman, and he had lived in a basement apartment along with the synagogue’s cat, Kischka; he saved the cat from the fire, and he saved one of the two Torahs. Sy Feldstein wanted to know why Earnest hadn’t saved both Torahs, but the rest of the congregation told him to shut the fuck up. Then Sy started yelling about free speech, and everyone dismissed him using exaggerated hand gestures. Rabbi Levy had paid for a room at the Hotel Synod for Earnest; the rabbi thought he was doing a mitzvah, but Earnest came to him with tears in his eyes and asked if there was anywhere else he could stay. Earnest Hubbs had not graduated from high school, but he knew himself. He knew he should not surround himself with bad influences. He knew he was a sinner, and so it was better to stay in the House of the Lord. A bad man who lived with the Gospel could walk right again, one of these days; a bad man who lived with other bad men would sink and drown and die. Lord, protect me from my plans, Earnest Hubbs prayed every night.

So Rabbi Levy sat and thought. Earnest could come home with him. Can’t be a more godly environment than a rabbi’s house, he figured, but then remembered he had five children under the age of ten. He and his wife Rivka had made the children, so they had to live with them, but no one else should have to. The Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches were out, as the rabbi could not recall which one was which. The mosque might work, the rabbi thought: Muslims like cats.

But he had a feeling about the First Church of the Infinite Christ.

“The man’s a wizard.”

“An actual wizard?”

“What, like Merlin?”

“Yeah,” the Reverend Arcade Jones said.

“No,” Rabbi Levy answered.

“Don’t act like there’s not wizards in this neighborhood.”

“Earnest has no magical abilities.”

“So why’d you call him a wizard?”

“It was a metaphor.”

“Metaphors are warnings around here,” Arcade said.

“He’s an excellent handyman, is what I’m saying. All I’m saying.”

“Okay. Where’s he gonna stay?”

In the apartment he built himself in the First Church’s basement, the Reverend learned. Earnest was not a carpenter, but he could carpent, and he was not a plumber, but he could plumb, and so with only his tools and a few hundred bucks from the congregation of Torah, Torah, Torah, Earnest Hubbs built himself and Kischka a place to live; before anyone could complain, he had fixed the wobbly pew in the sixth row and she had solved the mouse problem.

The First Church of the Infinite Christ always did have trouble turning away refugees.

“Give me another leaf. This one’s cashed.”

“You’re not supposed to chomp on them.”

“I’m a fast chewer,” Talks To Whites Said.

“That’s not a thing,” Cannot Swim answered. “Besides, you have the leaves.”

Talks To Whites checked the pouch slung over his shoulder.

“I could’ve swore you had ’em.”

“Maybe you should pace yourself.”

“Maybe you should suck my balls.”

“Pnerfpbpbpbpb.”

There were three of them walking through the pass: Cannot Swim, Talks To Whites, and Easy Life. The first two were sixteen-year-old boys, cousins, from the Pulaski tribe; the third was a horse.

The Pulaski had little need for horses. They were not nomads following their food like some tribes: their valley was bountiful and never froze. Fish swam in the lake, and their farming techniques did not require plowing. They did not seek out fights with faraway Natives, nor had they been harassed by Whites. Some Pulaski knew how to ride, but there was no day-to-day requirement for the animals. But once every two months or so? Then the horse came in handy.

The Pulaski were gun nuts.

Wanders Away had brought the first rifle into the village. When he was a child, he would walk out of his kotcha in the middle of the night; when he was a boy, he would stroll into the woods for days. Back then, all the Pulaski children were given the same Assignment: a trip to the Low Desert. Wanders Away left the village for the desert the morning after the rain that came every 18 days. He came back into the valley two years later wearing clothes no Pulaski had ever seen before. And he had a Springfield Model 1842.

The 1842 was a leap. Previous guns were smooth-bore. That means the inside of the barrel is flat and the projectile comes out with no spin. The Springfield was rifled, though, which means there helical grooves cut into the interior surface of the barrel. Difference between a knuckleball and a tight spiral. The Pulaski were still using bows and arrows when Wanders Away brought the rifle into the village. One hunting trip later, the tribe decided to scrap the bows in favor of guns. Wanders Away said that the shiny nuggets in the streams that fed the lake were valuable to the Whites, and that they would trade rifles for them, so the Pulaski gave him some of the rocks and sent him back over the hills to find more guns. When Wanders Away hadn’t returned for a year, the tribe decided to find someone more reliable. The elders woke Talks To Whites’ father at dawn, roughly.

“What? What’s happening Is the Turtle back?”

“It is time for your Assignment, High Noon.”

Talks To Whites’ father would soon share his son’s village name, but his family name was High Noon. The sun was barely shining through the clouds and the village was quiet. Talks To Whites, Sr., rubbed his eyes and said,

“The desert?”

“No,” the elders said.

“The hills?”

“No,” the elders said.

“I thought those were the only two options.”

“High Noon, you are clever. And you never shut up. So, you will go to the Whites. You will learn their language. And you will bring us back rifles.”

He stared at his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, assorted kibbitzers. Then he said,

“I’d really prefer the squatch.”

The people who loved him the most grabbed him, naked, and threw him out of the kotcha. His breechcloth and tunic followed. High Noon thought to himself that this was no way to begin manhood. But he was, as his elders thought, smart and resourceful. High Noon walked through the pass just as his son would out of the Pulaski’s valley and into America.

After a day’s walking, he came to a small farm. He paused at the treeline and dug the sack with the nuggets out of his deerhide pouch. Wanders Away had told the elders about the magic of the nuggets. There was a curse on them, he said, but a curse that depended on size. Men with a small amount of the pebbles would be treated as guests, and with kindness; men believed to have a large reserve of them would be robbed, or killed. High Noon found a distinctive rock on the west side of a spruce and buried most of his stash. Then he walked down to the farm.

The farmer and his son stopped their work and watched the tall boy approach. High noon’s tunic had a sun embroidered on it, and so did the pouch slung over his shoulder. He was short for a Pulaski, but taller than the Whites.

The farmer leaned against his shovel and spat in the ground. His son mimicked him. They were wearing hard shoes and overalls, and both had beards–a full one on the father and a scraggly blondish one on the son–which High Noon had not seen before. Pulaski men did not grow facial hair.

“Hi. My name’s High Noon. I mean you no harm,” High Noon said, but obviously he said it in Pulaski.

“Howdy,” the farmer answered in English.

High Noon thought it was going well so far.

“I need to learn how to speak the White language,” High Noon said. He pointed to his mouth, and then at the farmer’s, and then back while making a gesture with his fingers like air was coming out.

“Should I kill him, Pa?”

“Shut the fuck up, Johnny,” the farmer said. He was a simple man, which is a euphemism for poor, but he was not stupid.

High Noon repeated the gesture again. Then he pointed at his own chest.

“My name’s High Noon,” he said, and then repeated it slowly and loudly as people have been doing to foreigners since time immemorial. “Hiiiiiigh Noooooon.”

Mouth gesture once more. Then he pulled a gold nugget the size of a ball bearing out of his pouch that had the sun embroidered on it. Extended it to the farmer. Mouth gesture.

The farmer pointed to his overall’d chest and said,

“Caleb Greenwood.”

And then he took the nugget from High Noon’s hand, held it up to the light, bit it, unbuttoned his breast pocket, dropped it in, buttoned his breast pocket, pat pat pat, and then he smiled and held out his hand.

High Noon had never shaken hands before–the Pulaski grasped each others’ shoulders with both hands–but he reached out and took Caleb Greenwood’s hand and shook it once twice three times and when Caleb smiled at him, he smiled back.

The farmer pointed to his newly-richer chest and said again,

“Caleb.”

High Noon pointed at him and repeated back as best he could,

“Caleb.”

“Close enough,” he said and then pointed at his son. “Johnny.”

“Johnny.”

High Noon pointed at himself and said,

“High Noon,” but the Pulaski language was difficult even compared to other Native languages, so all Caleb heard was random fricatives and vowels where they didn’t belong.

“Yeah, I can’t pronounce that. I’m gonna call you Peter.”

Caleb Greenwood pointed at High Noon and said,

“Peeeeeeeterrrrr.”

High Noon took a second, and then he pointed at himself and said,

“Peter?”

“Peter.”

High Noon was completely unfamiliar with Whites, so he just figured all guests got new names. He shrugged and nodded his head and said,

“Peter.”

Caleb held up his shovel and shook it, then pointed over towards the barn where another shovel was leaning. High Noon, who was now called Peter, went and got the shovel. Caleb turned to his son.

“He’s already smarter than you.”

“What’s going on here Pa?”

“Seriously, Johnny, just shut the fuck up.”

Peter stayed with the Greenwoods for six months. By the time he left he was fluent in the White language, which he came to learn was called English, and he set off for C—–a City to trade for rifles and ammo. It wasn’t much of a city–three blocks containing 13 bars, a bank, and a hardware store–but there were rifles for sale and so it was all that Peter needed. Caleb had taught him the worth of gold during his stay. Peter did not believe that men could be so obsessed with rocks, but Caleb insisted that they were and Caleb had not lied or mistreated him, so Peter trusted his opinion and negotiated for the rifles well.

He did not anticipate the weight of weapons and ammunition.

There was a livery on the far south side of the city, and Peter bought the cheapest horse and strapped the guns and bullets to the animal’s back. He led it east out of the city and then doubled back after dark in case anyone had followed him to learn where the gold had come from. When he returned to the Pulaski village after six months away, bearing precious rifles and ammo, the tribe let out a great holler and there was a feast that night in his honor where he received yet another name: his village name, Talks To Whites. He also got a handjob, which he thought was awesome.

The horse was allowed to wander around the valley; his only responsibility was the regular trip to C—–a City with Talks To Whites for ammo and rifles and parts, and so the Pulaski named him Easy Life.

Now he walked the pass through the hills with Talks To Whites’ son.

“It’s not fair,” Cannot Swim said.

“No.”

“You don’t know what I’m talking about yet.”

“Whatever it is,” Talks To Whites said, “it’s not fair.”

“You have an easy Assignment.”

“It’s not easy. You couldn’t do it.”

“Of course not. I cannot speak the White language.”

“And I can’t go up into the hills. You know how much I hate sleeping outside.”

“It brings you closer to nature.”

“You wake up covered in dew. It sucks.”

The Segovian Hils had one pass, a saddle-shaped depression to the north of the highest peak, and the two cousins walked in light that writers are forced by law to call dappled: little needle-shivers speckling on the ground like reflections off a lake. The woods were moving and alive and awake and breathing, and there was no trail cut at all because that’s how the Pulaski liked it. A man named Furlong Christy would bushwhack a swerving and slippery route along the pass a few years later, and when a road for cars was built, it followed his path and so the road and pass were named Christy Canyon.

But now the pass had no name and there was no trail, just pine trees and grass and two cousins and a horse.

“Seriously, I can’t believe this is your Assignment.”

“Today, I am a man,” Talks To Whites said.

“You do this all the time!”

A flock of startled starlings flapped away from the boys.

“Pnerfpbpbpbpb,” Easy Wind said as shit slopped out of him.

“What he said. You’re not seeing the big picture.”

“I’m not.”

“You live by yourself?”

“You know where I live.”

“Answer the question. I’m making a point.”

“I live with my father and sister,” Cannot Swim said.

Talks To Whites spat loudly and wetly.

“You three all by yourself?”

“I thought you said you had a point.”

“I’d get to it if you’d answer the questions the right way.”

Cannot Swim spat, too.

“I like in the village with the rest of the tribe.”

“Right. And everyone in the village is good at something. We all contribute what we’re able. All connected. It’s like this pass. The pass is a village just like ours. Owl’s good at being an owl; squirrels good at squirreling. Ask the squirrel to catch a mouse at night. Ask the owl to find a nut. You’re good at hunting. Me? I’m good at buying bullets.”

Talks To Whites kicked an oval rock ahead of him as he walked, and the cousins could see a circling eagle through the canopy of needles.

“You’re not very good at spotting pumas.”

“I might be. Haven’t ever tried.”

“You should try right now,” Cannot Swim said, and pointed towards a rill 200 yards to the south.

“Oh, shit.”

Talks To Whites scurried around Easy Life, putting the horse in between himself and the big cat.

“You cannot hide from the world!

“No, not for long. World finds you, world creeps in, world seeps through. You are part of the world, and what is part of is. Rabbi Levy, he’s been teaching me a lot about the Jews. About Judaism. Keeps on coming back to the tree of life, and I keep saying to him, ‘Rabbi, I’m from Loxachachi, Florida! Life ain’t a tree, no! It’s a swamp.’ It’s overgrown and everything yearns for the sun.

“But when there’s so much life, then the world is full of shade. Overgrown, like I said.

“Trees don’t grow by their lonesome! Got brothers and sisters and cousins surrounding ’em, we call that a forest. Maybe they call it a village. We call it the woods, but maybe the trees see a neighborhood.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones was behind the pulpit; Rabbi Levy and Cantor Manevich sat behind him in chairs with absurdly tall backs. Earnest Hubbs had rigged up a temporary ark at the back of the bema, and the Torah he had saved was within. Christ hovered above; he was wearing a breechcloth and a yarmulke. The pews were filled with Jews: coughing, hocking, eating hard candies, holding grudges.

The Jews had been shuttled from place to place–people kept getting tired of them–but now they were here in the First Church of the Infinite Christ and they had stood and sat and stood and sat, and they had declared the Shema as one and sang Havenu Shalom Aleichem led on by the Cantor. It was not the High Holy Days, but the rabbi blew the shofar anyway, just as he had done every Shabbat since the synagogue burned, and the horn made a sound like baaaahROPABOBbahROPABOB that echoed up and down Rose Street. Rabbi Levy blew as hard as he could. He wanted the Main Drag to hear.

It takes a year to read through the Torah, and then you start again. It’s not a sprint or a marathon; it’s not a race at all. A passage each week and then it’s Simcha Torah and you begin again. This week was called Kedoshim. The rabbi said the prayers over the scroll and removed the velvet cover and rolled it out so he could read the words he knew by heart. It went like this:

And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “And you, son of man, will you judge, will you judge the bloody city?”

And it continued on:

Behold, I strike my hand at the dishonest gain that you have made, and at the blood that has been in your midst. Can your courage endure? I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it. I will scatter you among the nations and disperse you through the countries, and I will consume your uncleanness out of you. And you shall be profaned by your own doing in the sight of the nations, and you shall know that I am the Lord.

There was a Bar Mitzvah that week. His name was Josh because all Bar Mitzvah boys are named Josh, and he chanted words he did not understand in a bored monotone. Later, he would be rewarded with savings bonds.

The rabbi asked the Reverend Jones to speak before the congregation, just as he had all the other pastors and priests with whom the Jews had sought refuge. Arcade Jones was wearing a suit the color of a melting creamsicle.

“Ever been to a swamp? Spend time in one? Ooh, Lord, it is hot. First thing you notice. Second thing, too, probably.

“All that life lying on top of one another raises the temperature. Friction and proximity. Leaves get on top of branches get on top of lizards get on top of gators. Nothing gets on top of gators, but they get old just like we do, just like the trees do.

“And time gets thick just like the swamp.”

The Reverend had a glass of water at the pulpit, and he took a drink from it. There were Jews in front of him, behind him, and there was one suspended above him in a purposely uncomfortable pose. Several drunk Christians who had gotten their weekend days mixed up and thought it was Sunday; they were rather confused. Earnest Hubbs had one good shirt, and he was wearing it on the last pew on the left.

Above the bema, the top half of the east wall was stained glass; the artist’s name was Guadalupe Forsythe and she was very famous, but not for her art: she tried to stab the governor of South Dakota at a chili cook-off. Transparent pebbling and shards of blue and green. Fractalized iconography with the sun for a projector: the glass was moving and alive and awake and breathing, and it told the story of Jesus Christ of Little Aleppo. The Stations of the Cross, localized. Christ in a tunic and moccasins as the Pulaski are betrayed; Christ trapped and burning behind painted-shut windows in St. Florian’s orphanage; Christ with her head staved in on the Main Drag; Christ hiding under a bed in Chinatown; Christ a failure on Alfalfa Street; Christ wasting away in a bar on Sylvester Street.

“Rabbi Levy taught me something else. Dayenu. I see you nodding your heads. I see you smiling. When the rabbi taught me about dayenu, I imagined that I had finally met in person someone I’d only known through letters or on the phone. It crystallized something I’ve been thinking about almost all my life. But you know that thoughts ain’t words. Thoughts float around, but words pin ideas down.

“Dayenu. ‘You’ve done enough.’ That’s what it means, and it’s a prayer.

“Anything’s a prayer if you say it to the Lord.

“We woke up this morning with health: dayenu. We woke up this morning with a chance at redemption: dayenu. The synagogue burned, but the congregation remains: dayenu. Fire consumes a building, but not the man living within: dayenu!

The Jews did not know what to do: they had heard many sermons, but never been preached at; there was some renegade applause, and a muffled “Woo” from the right side of the nave, and a muttered “That’s right” from the left.

“Wood turns to ash, but the Torah remains: dayenu. In times of strife, the greatest kindnesses emerge: DAYENU! In the DESERT of CRUELTY, water is PASSED ABOUT: DAYENU!”

Arcade Jones ran a handkerchief over his great bald head; a voice cried out,

“Take your time, Reverend.”

And he did. He preached about the Lord and His infinicy, and how an Infinite Christ must surely be Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and either Presbyterian or Episcopalian, whichever was which, and an Animist and an Atheist and an Agnostic and a Gnostic, however you pronounced that, and so too must the Christ await the return of the Turtle Who Once Was And Will Be Again. The Jews shouted AH-MANE and leapt to their feet and whistled, and Arcade Jones declared that they would no longer wander, that the congregation would stay in the First Church until it had a new home, which surprised Deacon Blue but thrilled the Jews, who clapped and cheered so loudly that–since the doors of the First Church of the Infinite Christ were open–the noise ricocheted off the sanctified buildings of Rose Street and into the bars and courthouses and hair salons of the Main Drag through Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The smoke alarms were sacred, untouchable, and entirely off-fucking-limits at the Hotel Synod. Everything else was negotiable. A man named Mellow West who liked room 323 once paid four months of back rent with a stolen piano. Francie Brush stabbed her boyfriend to death in 106, but the jury found her not guilty and she moved right back in. The other residents threw her a party with a cake. They used to listen to him beat her through the plaster walls. No one did anything at the time, but now they bought her a cake. Sex in the elevator would get you yelled at, and repelling from the roof to avoid paying rent would warrant more yelling, but if you touched the smoke alarms, then you were gone, because Frankie Teakettle would know if you’d touched them, because he personally inspected each one weekly.

A complete, but temporary, détente occurred during the detector check. Frankie Teakettle would not berate you for the rent, nor would he notice any obvious crimes. Perversions would be ignored, and so would messiness and stink. He would announce himself, unlock the door with his master-key, check the device that went BEEEEEEP to show its batteries were still good, exit without comment or eye contact, relock the door behind him. All of man’s happiness begins with his house not burning down, Frankie believed. And the Hotel Synod was the type of place prone to that sort of thing.

It was a candle-lighting clientele; it was a candle-forgetting clientele. Folks who stayed at the Synod smoked in bed, or they crawled under beds holding lit Zippos. Freebasing was popular.

Frankie Teakettle may or may not have owned the place. The lobby had glass doors that opened onto Clarke Street, and a threadbare green carpet. Art was crowded onto the walls, all from the hotel’s residents in lieu of rent. Some of the paintings were worth much more now than the rent had been, and some were worth nothing. Ratty yellow couch with plump buttons in the upholstery. The Christmas tree was fake, and left up all year but only turned on in December. The desk was made of oak, wide, and to the right of the doors. Frankie sat behind it, and behind him was a wall made up of cubbyholes that were full of letters and small packages and messages. Two elevators, the old kind where you pull the scissored door open and closed.

There was a dentist in 401, Doctor Horse, who engaged in an elaborate web of barter with the rest of the hotel. 401 was a large corner suite, and he had not left the hotel or used cash in twelve years. His office was in the living room: he had a chair and drill and lights and all that bullshit, and a junkie hygienist named Shirley Early who made extra money at night dominating men in the chair. Doctor Horse traded prescriptions for groceries and laundry, and cleanings for the rent. One time, he exchanged a root canal for a Rothko.

Rates were variable at the Hotel Synod. Painters with potential and drinking problems paid a little, slumming rich kids paid more. Movie stars would come up from Hollywood (a certain kind of movie star at least: the kind that mumbled and did not bathe) and they were charged double the rich kids’ price. Some of the rooms were a bed, a chair, a toilet without a shower; others wrapped around the corner of the building and had bathtubs. Long-timers and overnighters.

Johnny Mister liked Room 212. He was a Guitar Hero. He played for Little Aleppo’s own The Snug, and  he stayed at the Synod in Room 212 when he was not on the road; everyone hated him. The residents at the Synod did not instinctively loathe the rich. Some people just had the bad luck to be born into money, they figured. And they did not despise the poor or the broke, because most living at the hotel were poor or broke. But everyone hated the cheap, and Johnny Mister was cheap and so everyone hated him. He was a junkie who fainted around needles; he was always ripping off his neighbors. Smoking everyone’s cigarettes, and drinking their wine, and suddenly appearing when you’d ordered a pizza. Then he’d start trying to fuck your girlfriend (if you were a man) or you (if you were a woman or teenaged girl). Frankie Teakettle loved Johnny, though. His management paid his inflated rent six months in advance.

Room 109 no longer existed.

Boylan Burcke (pronounced burk-ee) had occupied 203 for years. The Beats all thanked him in their books, or fictionalized him, and the Hippie writers, too. Academics wrote theses on his poems, and the occasional article would call him a genius. When these articles came out, Boylan would take them to his dealers. Surely this kind of coverage, he would bullshit them, means a payday is around the corner. He had one slim collection to his name, The Hospitallers of the Downside.

Manky and overdrawn, these wobbling saviors!
These scarecrows on the sidewalk in afternoon’s lie!
Fortunata
–You bitch–
I fucked you in a diner bathroom
It was in Omaha
Your creamy asshole winked at me

It was about 120 pages of that sort of thing.

Boylan Burcke had a necktie he claimed belonged to Gerald Ford. It was burgundy with thin yellow stripes running diagonally across its face, and he said that President Ford’s son Jack had given it to him. If Boylan liked you, he would tie you off with it. If he didn’t like you, he would tie you off with it and swipe your dope.

There was always dope at the Hotel Synod. Waves of it. White that you mixed with water, and brown that you mixed with lemon juice. Lucy Twigg had the dope. She lived in 104, which was in the back and had a door that led out to the alley, and sat at a massive desk in her room with an apothecary’s cabinet behind her filled with pills and powders and liquids and occasionally suppositories. Lucy sat at her desk all day with huge rock and roll speakers pointed at her playing her latest obsession. She was small enough so that her feet did not hit the floor when she sat in her chair, but the shotgun under her desk was quite large, and so was the guy who stood behind her named Klaxon.

The door to Room 201 was always open, and lentils cooked all day and night. There was bread, too, and everyone was welcome except for Frankie Teakettle, who was not permitted in the room by court order. The rotating cast of robed residents called themselves the Holy Light Family and called Room 201 their ashram; they had never paid a dime in rent. Immediately after moving in, they sued the Synod claiming that charging them rent would be akin to taxation. Most will realize this argument as “not even terrible,” but the judge was drunk and found for the plaintiffs because she thought it was funny. The case was appealed, obviously, but Frankie quickly realized he was paying more to his lawyers than the room was worth, and so he dropped the case. He did get fucked up a couple times and go up there looking to beat some ass, though, and hence the restraining order.

In the morning, the pipes and the drunks would shake in just the same way. The sign by the elevator said No Overnight Guests.

Credit cards cutting lines on mirrors sound like CHAK CHAK CHAK shlip shlip CHAK CHAK CHAK and then shhhNORF and another sound, a human sound from a coated throat sticky with speed and mucus. Longtime residents could recognize each other by that sound, the little exhalation after a rail, sometimes it was ka-HAA and others went BROKH-bukh. Johnny Mister said “Rock and Roll” every time. You could tell the rich kids from the poets by what they snorted their coke with. The rich kids used hundreds. If the poets had a hundred, then they would have spent it on coke, so they use cut-up straws from the taco joint.

Slowest way to get high is via your stomach. Lot of absorption to do, gotta get through the liver’s five-hole. Your asshole is quicker: no matter what you shove up your ass, you’re going to feel it toot sweet. Faster than that is inhalation or insufflation, which the common folks call smoking or sniffing.

But nothing beats the needle.

Teachers and preachers don’t know this, but nurses and junkies do: there is more to the needle than the movies show. It is versatile, and it is a triune god like the Christ. Subcutaneous injections are used by diabetics to administer their insulin into the fat directly under the skin; intramuscular injections are for flu shots and antibiotics; intravenous injections are a sharp lever that opens the inside of your body up to the outside world just like your mother explicitly told you not to do. If you were going to use needles outside a hospital, then you needed to know this. Cocaine could be skin popped but not shot into the muscle. Some opiates could be delivered by all three methods, but some could not, and people had lost arms over the difference. Amphetamine should not be injected into either fat or muscle; it will abscess in both.

Speed is for the mainline, and Frankie Teakettle had no problem with that. It was his blood-brain barrier, and he’d cross it if he wanted to. His body was a free country, he thought, and so be it if its sovereignty be invaded. The problem some run into when injecting speed is the ratio. Thicker your paste in the cylinder, the harder the rush is going to hit and you’ll have a high like a black-body curve. This leads to the chasing of dragons. (People misunderstand that phrase, Frankie thought. Wasn’t that the dragon was fast and could fly away; it was that it would kill you if you caught it.) Three points in one milliliter. Nice and smooth. Keeps a man going on the long day’s journey into the next day. It was sustainable if you weren’t a pig. New point every time. Saline solution, not tap water. Swab the skin with disinfectant every time. Rotate sites. Don’t tell anyone where you keep your stash.

Time would win the war, but the battle could be yours. It would always be a Pyrrhic victory, but you could take the day if you were prepared to pay the price. Or if you did not know there was a price to be paid. Fatalism and stupidity are kissing cousins.

Frankie Teakettle sat behind the desk and vibrated like he had for years.

The Porters could handle it. The hotel’s porters had unionized long ago, and one of their demands was the capitalization of their title, so now they were Porters; they could handle it. The Porters picked up laundry and made introductions, and they chased off the Taft impersonators before they could hurl themselves into the bathtubs. They delivered drugs, for a price; pizza, for a slice. They were Montagnards and all of them answered to the name McGeorge. They had black uniforms with gold piping. Some of the guests fucked the Porters, and some got fucked by them, and others just tipped. No one knew exactly how many there were.

The doors opened outward onto Clarke Street, and the Porters would take your luggage if you had any. Many didn’t. There was a bed for you, though the room surrounding that bed could not be vouched for. The thin runners on the hallways floor were fraying and torn, and so was Frankie Teakettle at the front desk, but they would hold up. You could put off tomorrow, at least for today at the Hotel Synod, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Cannot Swim stared out at the lake and wondered how he got there. It was still and there was a moon in it, and there were fish below the surface. Crickets were somewhere; their song was everywhere. Behind him were the kotchas that the Pulaski lived in, and before him was the lake and then the harbor and then the sea. He was tall, and his posture made him seem taller. His black hair was not tied back, but falling loose around his shoulders, and his feet were bare. He was sixteen.

America invented the teenager, but Cannot Swim was not an American and so was not a teenager. This mythical creature with no body fat and spending money–the teenager–was created on Madison Avenue to sell records and skirts. The teenager is the ultimate manifestation of capitalistic surplus: a demographic whose only purpose was to consume, and hang around outside convenience stores. The Pulaski had no convenience stores, and therefore they had no teenagers. Cannot Swim was still a boy until he completed the Assignment.

He did not feel like a boy at the moment. He did not feel like a man, either. Cannot Swim felt too big for categories, and too small to need defining.

“Why are you naked?”

Cannot Swim was also naked.

“What?”

“You’re naked, cuz,” Talks To Whites Said.

“Where did you come from?”

“Same place as you.”

“Then you are my landsman.”

“Wow. What did the witch give you?’

“Tea.”

“And?”

“Yes,” Cannot Swim said, and waded into the lake with his arms stretched towards the floating moon.

The Pulaski had three names in their lives. The first was their family name, and that was generally indicative of when they were born or the weather at the time or the length of the labor. The last was their secret name, and this was given by the gods and would sometimes never be learned. The second name was their village name, and that was the name most went by throughout their lives. Your peers gave you your village name, and the Pulaski did not name people ironically. Cannot Swim couldn’t, and so his cousin followed him into the water and dragged him back out.

A hundred-pound hunting dog called Black Eyes watched the boys from the shore, thought about helping, didn’t.

The cousins laid on the wet, silty shore of the lake. Cannot Swim had been sure that the lake held meaning within it, and had struggled when Talks To Whites pulled him back. Dirt clung to their naked shoulders and legs.

“There was a hill,” Cannot Swim said.

“There are seven hills.”

“Not like our hills. Four flattened sides that came to a sharp peak. In a desert. It was the brightest white I’d ever seen, and there were kings inside. Do you know what they did to their kings?”

“No,” Talks To Whites said.

“Scraped their brains out through their nostrils. There was a long, skinny tool made from bone with a hook at the end.”

“They must have hated their kings.”

“It was the highest honor. There were streets made of even black rock. Thick and unbroken and uncracked with gargantuan buildings on either side. Up into the sky. And carriages that did not need horses.”

“What happened to the horses?”

“I do not know.”

“Did someone scrape their brains out through their nostrils?”

Cannot Swim was too high to understand sarcasm, so he said,

“I don’t think so.”

“Just checking.”

“And a field made of dead men. Smoke in the air and blood. Rifles that were a thousand rifles in one, spitting out bullets so fast you could not hear them individually. I saw the grand death, cousin. I saw that day is the dream of night, cousin.”

They were on their backs; Talks To Whites reached across his chest to pat Cannot Swim on the arm and said,

“Okay. Sun’s gonna come up soon.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

There were students along the firetruck’s route; they pointed and waved them towards the small Victorian house with two gables tucked away in the northeast corner of Harper College’s campus.

“Thanks, assholes. Thanks for pointing out the fucking house fire in the fucking dark. Didn’t see it ’til you pointed,” Flower Childs said from the passenger seat of the pumper truck.

“They’re trying to help,” Dwayne McGlory said as he rode over the curb and across the manicured lawn.

“I was talking to the dog.”

Ash-Nine was a dalmatian, and sat in the middle of the front bench. Her tongue was out, panting, and she was not paying attention to her humans. She was going to the Thing. Ash-Nine did not understand what fire was, or what a fire department did; she just knew that at random intervals, the people started running around and she got to ride in the truck, and then when she got off the truck: the Thing. It was always in a different place, and there were odors and so many people, some that were sad and some that were angry. Sad people smell different from angry people.

“Dog’s deaf.”

“Smart dog,” Flower Childs said. “Holy fucking shit.”

The glow of the fire had been in the front windshield, but as the truck crested a small hill they could see that the house was engulfed.

“What did–”

Pep Oneida was on the desk when the call came in, and he had the clipboard with the 302 on it. He thrust it over Flower’s shoulder, and she grabbed it.

“What the fuck is this, probie?”

“I wrote down what I was told,” he said.

She swiveled around in her seat to face him.

“You wrote down ‘Small fire.’ Four minutes ago.”

She checked her watch.

“No. Three minutes and 45 seconds ago. Does that look like a small fucking fire to you?”

Cespedes Bobble was the Dean of Harper College, and so he lived in the small Victorian occupied for so many years by Carter Spants and Molly McGlory-Spants. They were not using the house any more, as they were dead and buried out back. Cespedes stood watching  the fire with his boyfriend Alphonse, a disgraced mailman who now made handcrafted espadrilles. They were both naked.

Dwayne shoved the truck into Park and the everyone clambered out in their gear, except for Ash-Nine, who was not wearing any gear besides her collar.

Flower towered over the two men; she was already sweating. She asked,

“Is anyone in there?”

The two men shook their heads. No.

Fire Chief Childs made the call. Fully involved. Defensive approach only. The windows had already blown, and a roar was coming out of the Victorian. Fire was already too big to enter, and the structure was lost. Her man would stay outside. Surround and drown: put as much water on the house in as little time as possible, and from as many angles as you had hoses. Nearest building was Harper Hall, only 200 yards away, and if the Victorian was allowed to burn then the roof might send out flaming shards.

She did not need to yell orders. That was the point of training, so you didn’t have to tell people what to do when you got to the job. She figured that if you’re yelling, you’re fucked. Connect the hydrants to the truck. Hook the truck to the hoses. When the lines charge with water, they will try to fling you into the air. Tuck them under your arm and lean forward. Lean into the fire.

“It happened so fast,” Dean Bobble said.

“Whaddya mean?”

“We were in the kitchen having tabbouleh when we smelled smoke. So we checked all the burners to see if one was still on, and by the time we were done looking, the whole ground floor was on fire.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. It was terrible.”

“Everything we own is in there,” Alphonse said.

“Yeah,” Flower Childs said. She was not very good at comforting people, but she figured: putting out the fires is my job; taking care of fire’s victims is someone else’s. “You were in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” Dean Bobble said.

She checked her watch. 9:07 pm.

“Dinner?”

“Yes.”

The Chief looked the men up and down.

“You’re naked.”

“We have a naked home. No clothes inside.”

“At all?”

“No. None at all. It’s a cleanliness thing.”

Flower Childs scrunched up her face in confusion.

“Naked isn’t clean. You’re putting your assholes on stuff.”

“Clean assholes,” he said.

“No such fucking thing.”

Pep Oneida was on the south corner of the house, Dwayne McGlory on the north, and Pedro Sanpedro was to the east. Each of them wrangled their hoses: Pep was shaking and shivering under the slippery power; Dwayne held the hose in one hand and directed the probie with the other. Ash-Nine protected the truck.

Cespedes and Alphonse were still naked.

Chief Childs said,

“You guys want some blankets or something?’

“We’re fine,” Dean Bobble answered.

“The human body is beautiful,” Alphonse added.

Cespedes Bobble had the body of a 51-year-old academic. Alphonse had the body of a disgraced mailman.

“Some. Some bodies. Not every fucking body.”

Dean Bobble tried to look outraged. He flared out his nostrils and puffed out his chest, but this had the effect of making his dick wiggle like a fisherman’s bait and undercut the seriousness of the posture.

“Chief Childs, our house is burning down.”

“Yeah, and all your students are standing right the fuck over there and you two got your cocks out.”

Human beings have invented 3D movies, and musicals by Stephen Sondheim. There are roller coasters that grant weightlessness, and men who have tamed lions. Most likely, a minor league baseball game is taking place somewhere near you. People come up with all sorts of bullshit to fend off boredom.

But nothing draws a crowd like a fire.

The whole campus was out and assembled in a broad semi-circle behind the truck. Dean Bobble turned around and shouted to them,

“The administration has nothing to hide from the students!”

They cheered.

“Who’s with me?”

They disrobed.

“Fucking perfect,” Flower Childs said, throwing up her hands and walking back to the truck. The gabled roof collapsed inwards. The fire swelled and burst into the air; all the naked people went WOOOO.

“Woo!”

“Stop it.”

“Woo!”

“Dude, you’re gonna wake everyone up,” Talks To Whites said.

“My voice slaps against the lake,” Cannot Swim said. “It bounces on the water.”

“Awesome. Let’s try that out in the afternoon when the whole village isn’t sleeping.”

The two were still boys, but they were the size of men–Cannot Swim was the size of a larger man than Talks To Whites–and the sky had begun to turn indigo. The stars were fainting and the full moon was low in the west. Behind them was the village and the Segovian Hills, and beyond the hills was America.

Talks To Whites wore a tunic made of light, thin deerskin. His moccasins were also made of deer leather, but thicker than his clothing. There were bracelets on both his wrists, and his chin was cleft. Teeth a tiny bit too big for his mouth. Cannot Swim was naked and his feet were covered in mud and grass. Neither had a single hair on his face.

“They were visions, cousin. Not dreams.”

“What did Here And There say?”

“Nothing. She listened.”

“Really? She never shuts up,” Talks To Whites said.

“She listened in between speaking.”

“You’re talking about a conversation.”

“You do not know what happened. You were not there.”

“Dude, you don’t know what happened and you were there.”

Cannot Swim threw his head back. The Milky Way was a diffuse blurry wound across the night, and the Morning Star was in the east playing herald for the sun. His eyes watered, and tears ran back and hit his ears.

“Something happened. Something that was really something.”

“Okay, cuz,” Talks To Whites said.

He put his hand on Cannot Swim’s shoulder. There was a large hunting dog at their feet, snoring.

“You wanna put some clothes on?”

“No.”

“Everybody’s gonna start waking up any second.”

“I have nothing to hide from my people,” Cannot Swim said, and then he spread his arms like the Christ and walked into the lake again. Talks To Whites blew a breath out, put his hands on his hips, considered letting his cousin drown. Then he took off his tunic and breechcloth, kicked off his moccasins, and waded in after him.

Part of the gear was a camera; it was stored under the back bench in the cab of the pumper truck. Flower Childs checked in with her men, and eyed up the fire–it was dying–and she took out the camera and began taking shots of the crowd. She was methodical and used the whole roll to snap everyone present. There were the students, naked, and the Dean and his boyfriend, also naked, and lookyloos from town, some naked and some not, and a group of preachers and priests from Rose Street, none naked. Chief Childs photographed them all while her men beat down the blaze.

It was midnight before they got back to the station. The trip was not four minutes long, but Ash-Nine still fell asleep on the naugahyde bench seat of the truck.

Dwayne McGlory hit the garage door opener, and the massive rolling door started upwards. There was a white envelope taped to the metal, and the Chief poked hard at the opener to stop the door. Once again to bring it down. The truck idled outside the house as Flower Childs climbed down from the cab and ripped the envelope loose. Held it in front of the pumper’s headlights to make sure it was not a letter bomb. Opened it.

The paper read : THE NEXT ONE’S GOING TO HURT – THE J OF I.

Flower Childs looked up and down Alfalfa Street, and then up at the video camera she had installed after the last note like this.

Pedro Sanpedro leaned out of the window of the truck and asked,

“Him?”

“Or her,” the Chief answered. She stepped out of the way, and Dwayne hit the opener again. The slatted door rolled up and then 90 degrees back against the ceiling, and the pumper truck fit in just perfectly next to the ladder truck. The Chief’s car was in around back in the parking lot, and the men and Flower Childs peeled off their stinking gear and dripping tee-shirts as if they had nothing to hide from each other. There was a 302 to fill out, and equipment to replace, and filth to wash off, and then there would be time to deal with the something that was happening in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Harper College was quieter in August of 1969 than it had been the previous year. In 1968, the students had remained on campus to fight one another in the name of international brotherhood. There were riots and protests and barricades were erected. No one tried to get over the barricades, mostly because the LAPD (No, Not That One) hadn’t taken the bait and were ignoring the school entirely. The leaders of the students’ organization, needing an enemy to rally the troops against, tried setting the Tyndale Pagoda on fire and picking a fight with the firemen and holy shit did that not go well.

Failing to secure an outside force, the leaders shored up their base. Stacey Siegel was stocky and had an afro like a great chocolate lollipop; he bullshitted well and had the best pot connection on campus, so he was a natural leader. He’d give you whatever rap he sized you up as receptive to: Communism, Buddhism, Rothschilds, whatever. The other guys did the intellectual heavy lifting; Stacey did a great Nixon impression and got laid a lot. Natural leader.

The students had radicalized just like at the other schools that tempestuous year, shattering into sects and schisming further every week or so. Harper Students Against The War broke down into Harper Students Against This Particular War and Harper Students Against Any War Whatsoever. The Militant Feminists were fighting with the Slightly Less Militant Feminists. There was a small but vocal group called Fuck Water Fountains, and no one liked them because they weren’t taking 1968 seriously.

Stacey Siegel led them all to the small, neat Victorian house tucked up in the northwest corner of the campus. Three steps up to the porch which had two mismatched cloth-upholstered chairs on either side of the door. The siding was dark green, and the shingles and shutters were darker green. The roof had two gabled windows on the second floor that led to Carter Spants and Molly McGlory-Spants’ bedroom, and a room that was supposed to be a child’s bedroom four times; it was now an office.

All of the student leaders had been pumping up their constituents all day, and a local band played in between speeches on the Quad, and the kids were drunk and high and had been promised a revolution. Several books, many albums, and Rolling Stone magazine had promised them a revolution, but they were stuck in a weird, semi-accredited college in the part of town people actively avoided. The kids were antsy, and so Stacey Siegel led them to the Victorian house where Dean Spants had lived since Harper College was founded, and Dr. McGlory-Spants had lived since three weeks after that.

(Carter was in his 30’s and Molly was his assistant and an undergraduate student at the time, but it was 1934 and that sort of nonsense was appropriate. Also, Molly had twelve brothers who were vicious criminals and they didn’t have any problem with it.)

The sun was setting and the mob was at their door. Carter had been trying to teach himself hieroglyphics for months, and Molly was reading an article trying and failing to make the case that Ezra Pound was secretly an Indonesian woman named Gladys.

“Mob’s here, Dr. McGlory-Spants.”

“Were we expecting them, Dean Spants?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“We don’t have enough wine. The mob will think us the rudest hosts.”

Carter Spants laid his book aside and rose. As he had been relaxing after a long day of scholarship and administration, he had unbuttoned his vest and loosened his tie. He fixed this oversight, and drew himself up to his full 6’3″ and opened his mouth as if to say something, but then closed it and removed his reading glasses and slid them in the breast pocket of his tweed coat. Then he looked over the mob and said,

“Hello, mob.”

And the mob said,

“HELLO, DEAN SPANTS!”

“Have you brought your pitchforks and torches?”

The mob had neither. There were no farms around, so pitchforks were scarce; a sophomore had tried to make a torch, but he just pulled the leg off a chair and wrapped the end in a towel and a couple people got hurt when the flaming towel unraveled.

“Who is in charge, then?”

“I am,” Stacey Siegel answered, stepping forward.

“Mr. Siegel?” Dean Spants looked out at the rest of the students. “Him? Really?”

The mob laughed, and Stacey could feel his hold on them wavering so he yelled,

“We’re occupying the campus!”

“You’ve been occupying the campus. You live here.”

“Not like that!”

“How, then?”

“We’re declaring the campus a free state.”

“Ah. Yes. Have you read the school charter, Mr. Siegel?’

“The what?”

The mob answered,

“THE SCHOOL CHARTER!”

Dean Spants smiled at his kids. He thought about pulling out his pipe, but decided it was a bit much. Always underplay to a mob.

Stacey Siegel was slouching. He said,

“No.”

Dean Spants lifted his great patrician skull and looked over his nose at the mob like they were third graders.

“Who can help Mr. Siegel? Anyone? Put your hand down, Miss Packwith; let someone else have a turn.”

The mob tittered, and there may have been note-passing. Many hands were raised. Several students made sounds like “ooh, ooh” quietly.

“Mr. Singh?”

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Why didn’t you go before you joined the mob?”

“I didn’t have to go then,” he said.

“Quickly, quickly.”

Angel Singh ran off towards the Quad.

“No running!” the dean called after him.

Angel Singh downshifted to a fast trot.

“Mr. Spazinsky?”

“The Harper College charter gives the school massive exemptions from federal, state, local, and physical laws. That’s why none of the buildings have fire escapes and gravity doesn’t work right in the gym. The campus is to Little Aleppo like what Vatican City is to Rome, kinda. And it’s held up in court a million times. You can’t turn Harper College into a free zone because it already is a free zone,” Joey the Spaz said, and fell into a bush.

“Excellent work, Joseph. Help Joseph out of the bush, please.”

“I’m okay!”

“Capital. So, Mr. Siegel. What is it that you’re doing?”

Stacey Siegel punted.

“We’re staying here all summer and protesting Nixon’s war?”

“That sounds fine. In your dorm rooms?”

“What?”

“You’re staying in your rooms? All of you?”

The mob had not thought this through.

“I suppose,” Stacey Siegel answered.

“Hardly the Communards’ last stand, is it?”

The mob was expecting a swift rebuke, but had run into patient sarcasm and their collective energy was dissipating.

“Oh, wait. No. No, the occcupation won’t do at all,” Dean Spants puffed. “Won’t be any food in the summer. Cafeteria staff is laid off.”

Stacey saw his moment. A tiny pushback he could magnify into a war for the righteousness of humanity.

“Then we will open a food co-op right on the quad, and everyone will work and all food will be free!”

The mob cheered him on, and Molly McGlory-Spants came to the railing of the porch. She asked,

“Mr. Siegel, will there be a farmer’s market?”

“What?”

“Farmer’s market.”

A voice from within the mob cried out,

“There’s nothing like a good farmer’s market!”

And the mob cheered, because that was true.

“There could probably be a farmer’s market,” Stacey said.

“Then I’m in,” she said, turning to Carter. “I vote for the occupation.”

“That settles it,” he announced. “Occupation approved. You shall strike a powerful blow against the man by remaining where you live and setting up a farmer’s market.”

“FUCK WATER FOUNTAINS!” a dozen students yelled in unison.

“I agree,” the dean lifted his voice and said. “Unhygienic and awkward. All that bending over. So! That ought about cover it. All right, then. Good night, mob!”

And the mob said,

“Good night, Dean Spants.”

But the summer of 1969 was quieter than the previous year, especially August. Most of the students had gone east for a concert, hitchhiking or pooling funds for an ancient bus quickly painted in the fashion of the day. Several of the more accomplished students in the Chemistry department had bought new cars to drive to the concert, and Dean Spants made a mental note to inspect the labs; it could wait until tomorrow when it wasn’t raining.

It rained every 18 days in Little Aleppo: you could set your calendar by it. Nowadays, there are all sorts of scientific notions about the downpours’ regularity, but in 1969 the leading belief was that it was the Communists’ fault. 1917 was the Russian Revolution, a popular theory that originated in the Morning Tavern went, and therefore 1918 was the first full year of the Soviet Union. 1918, 18 days? It’s obvious, man. Bastards are fucking with us. We need to worry about the Symbolism Gap.

Regardless of cause, it had been 18 days since the last rain and it was pissing down. It was August and so the sun set very late, but the Main Drag had been dark for hours except for the bright white seconds of lightning that shot from the low clouds. Mr. Venable was standing inside the door of the bookstore with no title with his hand on the knob and fear in his heart. He had a date. The shop had many basements and annexes, he thought: he could hide in one. Possibly forever.

He looked back at his desk. A tortoiseshell cat was sitting on it. The cat had no name, and said,

“Mlaaarh.”

“Well said. I shall return. Or maybe not: this woman might murder me.”

“Plep.”

“True, true. I might murder her. Future’s yet to be written.”

Mr. Venable twisted the knob and the bell attached to the door went TINKadink, and once he was on the other side he opened his black umbrella and locked the door. The tortoiseshell leapt to the chair to the floor and then batted off into the dark coolness of the bookstore with no title to commit murder, no “might” about it.

Nero’s was the only classy establishment in town. There were two dining rooms and a bar and a tank with lobsters in it. The staff wore bright white button-down shirts, and carried thick leather flip-pads, and would not sell you drugs at the table. It was the only restaurant in the neighborhood that trusted their customers with steak knives. There were fees for sharing, and for corkage. It was a classy establishment. It was not, though, fancy. Little Aleppians appreciated fancy as it puttered by as a float in a parade, or installed in an art museum. Fancy parties were a hoot, but parties only last one night. Fancy doesn’t have staying power; it is by its nature novel. Deconstruction? Tasting menus? Fancy. But a well-cooked piece of fish with some art on the wall and a white tablecloth? That’s classy, and it’s eternal.

Penny Arrabbiata woke up at four in the afternoon, and then she sat on her couch for a while deciding between a shower and suicide. There was also coffee involved. She had taken a first-floor apartment on Bransauer Avenue. It was unfinished, so Penny drove her baby-blue ’69 VW Beetle through Christy Canyon and into C—-a City to the Furniture Metropolis. She had heard their ads on the radio, and she walked through the warehouse pointing at things; she sent the bill to her father.

A date. With whoever the hell this man was. Who he was–she reminded herself–was the only person in the neighborhood she’d talked to since she’d been here that didn’t work at Harper Observatory. The only man, certainly. Penny’s mother fully expected her to be married by the end of her first year at college, and then she hoped so her second year, and by the third was openly questioning Penny’s sexuality at family functions. Penny’s mom called her a lesbian so many times that she talked her into it. Maybe she’s right, Penny thought, and so she got drunk on gin and fucked her friend Brenda. It went poorly. Penny was straight.

She just had work to do. The stars came out at night, and so she worked at night. All the men she’d met were awake during the day, which she couldn’t fault them for, but they all seemed personally aggrieved that she was not. Every relationship the same: dinner dinner dinner, hump hump hump, and then the talk.

“You stay up all night every night? This isn’t just a…temporary…thing with you?”

And Penny would know it was over. She liked the humping, though. And the dinner.

There would be no suicide. She would shower.

Nero’s was on the Upside, and the lunch crowd was from the Valentine Courthouse and Town Hall. Lawyers and politicians and bagmen ate a club sandwich on deep-fried rye bread called a Fiddler and bribed one another. Occasionally, the corruption would achieve critical mass and a feeding frenzy would begin and everyone would start bribing everyone. It was blind and random and bloody and it was democracy in action.

Dinner at Nero’s was for celebrations. Birthdays and anniversaries and the funerals of rich, but hated, relatives. Promotion at work, or successful art heist. It was a special occasion kind of place. First date kind of place.

“I hate this place,” Penny said.

“It’s every sort of dreadful, isn’t it?”

“Every sort? Every?”

“Every,” Mr. Venable said.

A two waiters steered a cart topped with a huge metal press to a table in the middle of the dining room where an older man sat with a younger woman. Two waitresses joined the waiters, and the four sang the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore. Then, they stuffed a dead duck into the press. Still had its beak. Crushed into a smooth poultry-gravy. The pulp was plated and served, with toast points and a fruity Pinot Noir.

“Okay, every,” Penny said.

“It’s like a dominance ritual over the animal kingdom.”

“I like eating duck and that’s fucked up.”

“If you pay them enough, they’ll chuck a chicken in a food processor for you.”

Penny laughed, and drained her second gin and tonic. The drinks had had no noticeable effect on her. Mr. Venable was having red wine, as he thought gin and tonic tasted like greasy sunshine. He did not drink often and his face had become noticeably full of blood.

The rain pounded on the windows like a spurned lover.

“Do you know who your wondrous Observatory is named after?”

“A guy named Harper,” Penny said.

“Mm. Full name Harper T. Harper. Late in his life, he became a philanthropist.”

“What was he early in his life?”

“A capitalist,” Mr Venable said.

“Funny how those professions always seem to be in that order.”

“Funny. Mr. Harper was a good capitalist, too.”

“And where did he practice his economic beliefs?”

“The Congo Free State.”

Penny had hair down past her shoulders, brown going on black, and she brushed it from her eyes. She sipped her drink and said,

“I think I read a book about that place.”

“Mr. Harper dealt in rubber, and Mr. Harper dealt in hands.”

“Is there a market for hands?”

The waiter set Penny’s third gin and tonic in front of her.

“That’s the thing about capitalists: if there isn’t a market, then they’ll create one.”

“Native hands, one would assume,” Penny said.

“The very nativest.”

“The business of America is business, Mr. Venable.”

“And still the sun comes up in the morning,” he said while raising his half-filled glass.

A Town Father was in the corner eating veal with his niece; his underage mistress, a friend of his niece’s, was also there. The sommelier and the guy with the pepper shaker were eyefucking each other across the dining room. There were no incursions into the lobster tank, and the air conditioners rattled mighty and strong.

“Yeah, speaking of which. Why is it so hot?”

“The Bake.”

“People keep saying this to me like it means something,” Penny said.

“Three days a summer. Hotter than the sun with a fever.”

“Which three days?”

“It is a stochastic process.”

“That’s just a fancy word for random.”

“There you go. The Bake occurs sometime between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. Beyond that, no one can say for sure until it happens.”

Penny Arrabbiata was wearing a red and orange dress–the colors alternated in stripes–and her white clutch was set on the table next to her unused plate. She opened it and took out a Lucky Strike, which was unfiltered. Set it between her lips, lipstick staining the thin paper, and raised her eyes to Mr. Venable.

He looked back.

“Are you waiting for a light? I don’t have a light. You’re the one who smokes.”

She rolled her eyes and dug in her purse for her matches.

“Can I get one?”

Penny gave him a smoke, and lit a match. It sounded like FfffPOP and she lit her Lucky Strike PHWOO and then his PHWOO and shook out the match and placed it in the glass ashtray with the logo of a Roman man in a toga playing the violin, and they stared each other down until Mr. Venable started coughing just a little bit.

“Smooth,” he said.

“It’s the soothing tobacco for today’s frenzied world.”

“Filthy habit.”

“Absolutely.”

“They go well with drinks, though.”

“Right again.”

The waiter brought Mr. Venable another glass of wine even though he had not asked for one, which is the definition of service.

“Very rare, you know.”

“What?”

“The Bake lining up with the rains. Very rare.”

“It rains every 18 days here.”

“Like a clock’s work.”

“And the Bake is a random three-day period during the summer?”

“Mm-hm. Very rare.”

Penny took a drag off her Lucky Strike PHWOO and said,

“No. Around one out of six.”

“I’m sure not.”

“I’m literally a scientist.”

“There’s 91 days in the summer, correct?”

“91.25, but okay. And the number of days doesn’t matter.”

“And three days in the Bake.”

“Okay,” Penny said.

“So on every day there is a 3/91 chance of the Bake occurring.”

“Who taught you math?”

“We then divide this by the number of rains during the summer.”

“We shouldn’t.”

“This gives us an almost infinitesimal probability of the Bake and the rains happening simultaneously. On paper.”

“On paper?”

“On paper.”

“In reality, how often does it happen?”

“Every six years or so.”

“Huh.”

“Which the math says is completely impossible.”

“So, when the math and reality countermand each other, you go with the math?”

“One needs an anchor in a fluid world,” Mr. Venable said, and gulped down half of his wine, and that was the moment Penny Arrabbiata decided to fuck him. She didn’t know why. Something about his chin, maybe. Penny had a semi-detached relationship with her sex drive: it told her what to do and she didn’t ask questions. The lighting was generous, and he needed a haircut. The waiters brought more drinks, and eventually food, and then more drinks; the two stumbled into each other on purpose and by accident on the way to her first floor apartment on Bransauer Avenue. She kissed him before they went in–none of that “come in for coffee” bullshit for Penny Arrabbiata–and her shoes were by the door, and her dress was in the living room, and her underwear was at the foot of the bed.

When the sun came up, the Bake was done with and so was the rain: another temperate and sunny day. Back East, there was a concert in a field and a man came out at dawn to play guitar and wear headbands, but on Bransauer Avenue there was a man kept awake all night by a women used to staying up all night, and though he complained he did not mind losing the sleep in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.