“Are we swans?”

“What now?”

“Do we mate for life? Is there just one swan out there for each of us?”

“Sheel, sweetie, could you ask me some other time when I’m not looking at Mötley Crüe?”

Tiresias Richardson was, in fact, looking directly at Mötley Crüe. Two of them, at least, the blond and one of the tall brunettes. swaying loafs of bread the both them, and surrounded by chickies–“Look at all the chickies in here,” Big-Dicked Sheila had smirked when they slid into their half-moon booth–but not as many chickies as they had been surrounded by five minutes prior, as one of them had slid under the table to service the tall brunette Mötley Crüe. Which was the point of the Rainbow Bar & Grill. Try getting a blowjob under the table at Hamburger Hamlet; they’ll 86 your ass no matter how your last album charted. What kind of treatment was that for a Rock Star?

The Rainbow had been opened in 1972, and cleaned in 1981; it was the kind of place where the waitresses chewed gum. Smaller than you’d imagined–everything in Los Angeles was smaller than you’d imagined–and tight down the aisles in between the tables with the charred red banqueting. Framed photographs frescoed the walls: dead assholes, and assholes you kinda recognized, and David Lee Roth with his mouth wide open because he was secretly a muppet, and that guy looks like a mayor or something.

Everyone in L.A. was dead, or an asshole, or a secret muppet, or the mayor.

It was getting on towards midnight, the yelling hour. People speak at ten pm, and murmur at three am, but they yell at midnight, desperate to make themselves heard over the jukebox. Nighttime is either real quiet or real loud. The busboys had their tubs, and the barbacks humped their kegs, and managers watched viciously to make sure the nobodies weren’t becoming aspirational. The menu featured Italian food, and the bathrooms were multi-purpose.

The waitress brought their drinks; she was a waitressy waitress, curvy and friendly and otherly-adjectivial. Black-haired and worried about her rent–maybe a kid, maybe a drug habit, something to feed–a WAITRESS, man, just like they used to make ’em in Detroit in the old days, before Carter gave back the Panama Canal. Jack and Coke, Jack and Coke, Heineken. Precarious Lee wasn’t much of a drinker, and if he couldn’t have an Arrow, he’d have a Heineken. There was a sign on the wall, white with red letters and a negatory pictogram: NO SMOKING, and under that a whole bunch of city code whatnot. Waitress dropped a black plastic ashtray on the table. Sheila gave a Camel to Tiresias; Precarious had his own, and a Zippo. The top went TINK went it opened and FFT when the wheel sparked against the tiny red flint. He lit Tiresais’ smoke PHWOO and then Sheila’s PHWOO and then shut the lighter CHACK and opened it TINK and FFT and PHWOO. Precarious wasn’t superstitious, but he didn’t go out of his way to walk under ladders, either.

The day hit the women all at once. They had been contracting themselves out as assassins and getting framed for murder and being kidnapped since a little after lunch, without even the smallest of naps; they were bushed.

“Go ask Mötley Löu if he’s got any coke,” Sheila told Tiresias.

“Isn’t his name Vince?”

“Fuck him. I’m calling him Mötley Löu. Go ask him for some coke. You’ll probably have to blow him. Tirry, go blow Mötley Löu for some coke.”

“We could just buy some like humans.”

“Where’s the story in that? Go blow him.”

“No one has to blow Mötley Löu,” Precarious said, and slapped his tweed briefcase on the small table. POP POP went the latches and he came out with a test tube, pyrex, with a black rubber stopper atop and a white non-rubber substance within. “Mine is better than his, anyway.”

Sheila looked around the room without looking like she was looking around the room, reached across Tiresias, took the tube, palmed it, scooched out of the booth, walked right, waitress pointed back the other way, turned around, walked left, bathroom.

Bigwigs and cheap wigs and semi-prostitutes and dipsos leaned up against familiar walls; fat boy with daddy’s wallet standing under a fern, he’s got his eye on a cockeyed brunette with an autograph book in her purse; off-duty cop sitting with an undercover cop, each trying to make a case on the other; that fellow won three Grammys and enjoys rape; drummers in leather pants with aspirations above their thrones: solo albums and lead vocals and first in line for blowjobs; A&R guys with sharky eyes and heads for numbers; drug dealers in the wainscoting; Jews in cowboys boots; an ancient song-plugger everyone called Calendar; a Heisman runner-up; teenies with long, thin legs at the bar drinking whiskey sours and smoking long, thin cigarettes; Sandy and Sandy Leverton (“You only have to learn one name!”) who were in touristing from Reading, Pennsylvania, and were the only people in the building without herpes; a reporter from Spin Magazine; a process-server in mufti; Lemmy.

“Why’d you even take the briefcase from the guy in the first place?”

“Improv training. I just responded ‘yes, and.'”

“That’s a terrible fucking habit,” Precarious said.

“It turns out that it was not the right strategy for the situation, no.”

“And then you didn’t leave town.”

“When?”

Precarious set his beer down.

“When? At any fucking time. At any fucking time during this whole clusterfuck of a day that you two have wandered through.”

Tiresias set her Jack and Coke down.

“Don’t take a tone.”

“Under the circumstances, a tone is appropriate.”

“I heard a ‘young lady’ at the end of that sentence.”

“Then you’re hearing voices, because I didn’t say it.”

“The tone did.”

They both picked up their drinks, drank.

The stereo was plump and forceful, and the speakers were hidden and legion. It was a balancing act, though, the playlist. The Rock Stars who came in wanted to hear their latest chartfuckers, but not too many; it would look like they were trying too hard, and Rock Stars didn’t try. They simply were. Add in the fact that multiple bands would be in on a given night, and the deejay position starts looking like the guy who moves the planes around on an aircraft carrier. The safest bet was to play Thin Lizzy, but Thin Lizzy was not playing. It was The Snug.

Live at Absalom from ’74. That was the fourth record, the one that salvaged their career. The first three–Snug, Snugger, and Pussy Comitatus–hadn’t done the numbers, and the band couldn’t get on the radio, partially because guitarist Johnny Mister enjoyed punching program directors. They could take it to the stage, though. The motherfuggin’ Snug, man, live and in New York and Chicago and Houston, but fuck that shit, man, fuck that big city shit, The Snug was coming here–fuckin’ HERE, man–to Dothan, Alabama, or Minot, North Dakota. Or the Yack Arena in Wyandotte, Michigan. If you had electricity and some teenagers, then The Snug was coming on by. Killed ’em live, but the records wilted in the bins and so they threw a Hail Mary. Tape the live show. Homecoming show. Man, you never heard a crowd roar like that. The album hit #3 in America, and #7 in England.

(All that remains of the live performance is Dave Ronn’s bass on the song Sex Lake; everything else was re-recorded at Hyperion Studios back in Little Aleppo a few weeks after the show. What fans need to remember is that, in the heat of the Rock and Roll moment, a note might be missed or a lyric flubbed, Or a lead guitarist might be so drunk he can hardly stand, or a vocalist might spend half the set neglecting to sing the songs in favor of challenging audience members to fights. Or the drummer might have a broken wrist. These things happen, and there are no refunds. So you re-record the instruments just a little bit. Also, the cheers were flown in from a Rolling Stones bootleg. Other than all that, The Snug: Live at Absalom is a journalistic record of what took place that evening.)

Holiday Rhodes was at the bar, and so they were playing his songs.

The bathroom was not as bad as Sheila had imagined; perversely, this disappointed her. There must be a German word for this feeling, she thought, as she complimented a stranger’s shoes and walked into the stall, kicked the door closed behind her with her yellow Converse sneaker, dug the test tube from her pocket. It was almost full, and not with bar coke: this was Rock Star coke, wholesale coke, upstairs coke at Nicholson’s place. Pinkish in this light, whitish in that, and sprinkled with speckles of light. Sheila didn’t have her wallet or any credit cards, so she folded a hundred up to chop out two sloppy lines and then rolled the same hundred up FNORF FNARF and all of the coke landed in her throat and heart and cock; she spread her arms wide like a heroic chicken.

“Precarious fucking Lee,” she wheezed.

Stopped up the tube, unrolled the hundred, both went back into the front pocket of her tight, tight leathers–posture, how is my posture, she thought, nobody fucks a sloucher–and out of the stall to the sinks with the mirror where she checked her nose and complimented another stranger’s shoes, and back into the restaurant.

The bar was in between the bathroom and the table, and there was a song playing.

You’re not an angel,
But you’ll do.
And we’ll never get to heaven
Not on these wings.

No, you’re not an angel,
But you’ll do.

It was the last track on the album, and the closing number for The Snug’s shows back then; they’d all crowd around the mic at the front of the stage, and put their arms ’round one another, and find their key quick enough. Sweaty white boys with casual cigarettes–well-earned, anyone would say–singing an old gospel tune for the kids out there. Send ’em home sweetly. Or maybe it was country. Johnny Mister said he learned the song from a black man named Scatback. The rest of the band was positive that was racist nonsense, but it was a good melody and only assholes turned up their noses at good melodies. The band didn’t end their shows with that song anymore, just a quick rag through Johnny B. Goode or some other moldy oldie and off to separate limos and staggered arrivals back at the hotel so no one would have to share an elevator with anyone else.

“I like that shirt.”

“You should see what’s under it,” Sheila said automatically, then recognized who she was speaking to. “Holiday Rhodes. You’re the Pride of Little Aleppo.”

“You a local girl?”

“I’m the localest fucking girl that ever lived, Holiday.”

Holiday was wearing more eye makeup than Sheila, which was a feat, and a red crushed-velvet suit. Beatles boots. When his face was perfectly at rest, he had no lines in his face. Too many rings. The famous hawk nose, so often the subject of cartoons in Creem magazine. Still wearing his hair long, blond, silky. He offered Sheila the stool next to his, and she hopped up.

“You aren’t old enough to have been at this show,” he said, pointing at her shirt. It was from the second tour, the ’72 tour, the one that asshole wrote the book about, the one where everyone kept getting arrested and kids kept getting garroted and there was that riot in El Paso, the one that chubby-cheeked Getty heir overdosed on, the one with the Iguana Moment, the one where all the receipts got stolen in what was universally acknowledged to be an inside job, the one with that chick in Wisconsin who ate marshmallows out of everyone’s assholes, the one the film crew–Jesus fucking Christ, whose idea was it to bring along a film crew–tagged along on, the one when Jay Biscayne’s luggage consisted of beer and a chainsaw. Back when you could have some fucking fun in America.

“You don’t look old enough to have been at this show,” Sheila answered. Flirting is just sexed-up lying.

“Well, now I’m glad you sat down. Lemme buy you a drink.”

“Don’t stop there. Buy me a car.”

Holiday ignored her and looked for the bartender, caught her eye.

“Honey?”  (Holiday Rhodes called female bartenders Honey.) “Whatever this lady wants.”

“The lady wants everything.”

“In terms of alcohol.”

“Two shots of the best tequila you got.”

“Oh, I’ve sworn off tequila,” Holiday shook his head.

“They were both for me.”

He laughed, and showed off his dental work. His teeth were white and even. One of The Snug’s biggest superfans was a dentist, Dr. Neil, and he had done over all the boys’ smiles. Prescribed them a ton of shit over the years, too. Didn’t ask much. Tickets. Backstage passes. Little bit of recognition in front of his date. Not too much to ask for total access to the powers and privileges of dentistry. Smoke all ya want, drink all ya want: Dr. Neil would fix ya up. And then there was the laughing gas…

The bartender set the two glasses in front of Sheila.

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Pussy.”

She put the first one back PAP the glass set on the bar, and the second PAP the glass next to it, and burped hot through her nose and said,

“Saint fucking Peter, it’s unbelievable how fucked up you have to be to deal with being in Los fucking Angeles. You got a smoke?”

He didn’t, so she bummed one from the woman behind her at the bar FTT PHWOO and swiveled back to face Holiday and said,

“I have heard so many stories about you.”

“They’re all true.”

“They say you dosed the President’s dog.”

“They say that?”

“They say you’re a Satanist.”

“Never met him.”

“They say you’re illiterate.”

“I’ve read that.”

“They say you’re from the Upside and majored in Sociology at Harper College.”

“They’re damned liars.”

“We have everything under control.”

“Young lady–”

“There it is. Told ya so,” Tiresias pointed out.

“–you were in a dead Nazi’s basement not an hour ago. Remember that?”

She did, but instead of acknowledging the fact, she took a drink.

“You have literally, fucking literally, nothing under control right now. You and Tweedlefuckingdumber–who should have been back by now and is most likely talking to the exact wrong person–can’t even see control from where you are. You have the clothes on your backs.”

“We’ve got, like, 40 grand.”

“You got a car? You’re in Los Angeles. You gotta have a car. You have a car? No. The car is at the crime scene.”

“Precarious–”

“No. Wait. Not the crime scene. You car is at the scene of the previous crime. The crime before the last crime.”

“–I don’t need your shit right now.”

“Penultimate. The car is at the penultimate crime scene. Half the city is looking for you, and you have no car and you have no guns.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Don’t question my patriotism.”

Which made her laugh, more of a snort, and then so did he just a little, and both leaned backwards into the half-moon booth, wrists resting on the table with the smoke from their cigarettes rising, mingling, becoming one, dissipating with only a stink left.

“They’re made from metaphors,” Sheila said, pinching her Camel and peering at it thought slitted eyes. “And tobacco, I guess.”

“I’m gonna guess your name, “Holiday said, ignoring her.

“Bet you won’t.”

“Christina.”

“Nah.”

“Candy.”

“Noooo.”

“Lola,” he said, and put his hand on her knee; Sheila smirked and noticed his nails were manicured and his band wasn’t playing on the stereo any more–Christ, they really had put on Thin Lizzy, was everything okay or was this some secret sign like when the deejay cued up White Christmas in Saigon–and Sheila remembered what it was she hated about Los Angeles: everyone was so fucking clever, and needed you to be aware of the fact.

So she put her hand on his knee–velvet was so impractical, but mmmm–and looked in his eyes, real deep-like, and said,

“Strike three.”

“Am I out?”

“Catcher dropped the ball. You get another shot. You want another shot?”

He nodded at the bartender and pointed to the empty glasses in front of Sheila.

“You didn’t even give me time to answer.”

“I had a feeling.”

“A feeling deep inside?”

“Oh, yeah.”

And she ran her hand higher up his thigh, on the outside, on the flank.

“I gotta call you something.”

“What do you wanna call me?”

“I wanna call you all sorts of things.”

“Oh, yeah?”

And they were leaned in towards one another, Sheila was almost falling off her barstool, foreheads close. Her hand was rising higher along his leg and the bartender set down a shot of tequila. She leaned over the bar and said to Holiday,

“It’s 12. You wanted me to tell you when it was 12.”

He forced his head towards her and said,

“Thanks, Honey.”

“What’s at 12? You got a curfew?”

He came back to her and said,

“My attendance is required at a party. Show biz bullshit.”

“Ooh, whose party? Anyone famous?”

“Some rich old asshole in Holmby Hills with a ridiculous name. Can’t quite remember it.”

Their foreheads were almost touching and their breath intermingled, dissipated. Neither of their hands were where they should have been.

“Buttermilk?”

“Yeah, that’s it. You know him?”

“I’m a friend of the family.”

She brushed her lips against his, the lightest contact possible, just molecules. It was amazing how much attention one could pack into such a small space. The world disappeared–the Rainbow included–and her cupid’s bow caught on his, held, released with a shudder and Sheila made a noise like uhh and then sprang back onto her stool, slapped down her shot WHAP the glass back on the bar, and she bounced to her feet and clapped Holiday Rhodes’ thighs with her palms and said,

“Stay right here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Never ask a woman her age,” Sheila called over her shoulder as she strolled away from him–she was an expert at walking while she know someone was looking at her ass; it threw most people off their perambulatory rhythm–and rounded the corner, avoided a waitress, complimented the waitress’ shoes, smiled with all her teeth at Lemmy, rounded another corner, slid into the half-moon booth with the red banqueting where Tiresias and Precarious Lee were still arguing.

“What about the Tommy Amici thing?”

“Not all my fault.”

“A goodly portion.”

Sheila slapped her hand on the table and said,

“You two shut the fuck up.”

The two of them shut the fuck up.

“I have a plan. We leave here right now and go back to the rich bitch’s house. There’s a party there tonight, so they’ll be letting everyone in. We go in there and get the chick and the old fuck in a room and play ’em off each other. Or blackmail them, whatever. We’ll get ’em to get the cops off our backs and we can shake some more cash out of ’em, too.”

Tiresias and Precarious were silent for a moment, and the only thing you could hear was Thin Lizzy.

“Sheel, I think that’s a great plan.”

“That’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard.”

“Regardless, we have to leave here right now,” Sheila said, and lifted her hand off the table to reveal around three hundred bucks in 20’s. “I kinda pickpocketed Holiday Rhodes.”

“AAAAHahaha! I love you, sweetie.”

Tiresais hugged her shoulder, and Precarious grabbed his briefcase off of the floor.

“Was stealing from the guy absolutely necessary?”

“He was presumptuous.”

“Out the back way.”

Sheila and Tiresias scooched across the vinyl and then they were following Precarious Lee–Sheila left the money on the table for the waitress–towards the back door and into the parking lot where his 1971 Dodge Super Bee, yellow as a coward, sat waiting and BRRRAM out onto the Sunset Strip and into Los Angeles, which is so very far from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“I feel, when I cough, that I might die.”

“Have you seen a doctor about it?”

“Many.”

“What do they say?”

“It depends on their specialty.”

Steppy Alouette was neither lying nor making a joke; she had physicians from allergists to urologists attending to her lately. She had the best insurance west of the Segovian Hills, which is a fifty-year history of being one of the local hospital’s largest donors. Blue Cross/Blue Shield is decent, but having the pediatric wing named after your family is far better. She didn’t even have a co-pay.

The pulmonologist said it was her lungs, and the nephrologist thought it was her kidneys, and the sports doctor recommended Tommy John surgery. All the pediatricians agreed that Steppy’s symptoms sprang from her being too old. The gynecologist ruled definitively that her vagina was not to blame, and Steppy thanked her for that, and then a passing plastic surgeon offered to–quote–“snazzy up that chooch,” and Steppy declined. The pathologist said there was nothing she could do for her yet.

The pediatricians were right, she thought. Just too damn old.

They were in the sunroom. Houses on Pharaoh Lane had sunrooms. On the Downside of Little Aleppo, there was a street called Faro Lane, and the houses there didn’t even have windows, but the houses on Pharaoh Lane had sunrooms. It was just before noon and there was nothing but light and ferns. Steppy had her feet up on the fabric of the gently rotting sofa–it used to be British racing green but had faded to lime–and she laid against the high arm, a pillow tucked under her. Lower Montana had a pad, and a pen, and a recorder on the table in between her and Steppy, and she was sitting in what was, by her estimates, the most uncomfortable chair in the universe. It was high-backed and the seat cushion was a lie. The chair did not match the sofa, or the table, or any other of the furniture.

“It’s the poking I hate. Dying isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, but Christ you get poked at.”

Lower didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything. Steppy looked, cloudily, at the recorder and continued,

“I was born in 1908. In the bedroom upstairs. The family is from Montreal, but Daddy came out here in…’02 or ’03, I don’t remember…to invest in the Salt Wharf. He met Mother in the bar at the Norwegian Hotel in ’05. I know that because he liked to tell the story about it. She was there with another man, but she left with Daddy. That behavior would continue the rest of her life.”

“How did your father feel about that?”

“Oh, Daddy didn’t have feelings. Not that I ever noticed. There was nothing inside the man. Some took it for mysterious, or serious, but he was just a bore. It’s a tragedy, but it happens. Mother was inclined towards an opposing disposition. Maybe a little too much. But they never fought. She jabbered at him and he went ‘Humph, yes, imagine that’ at her while he ate his eggs. He made the cook burn the damned things. I can still remember the stink. This is not what you want to hear.”

“That’s for historians a hundred years from now to figure out. Just get as many details recorded as you can and let our great-grandchildren sort out the mess. That’s my motto.”

“Is this what you’re teaching your students?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good God. They need to be taught real history.”

“And what is real history?”

“Generals and such.”

Steppy’s words would have carried more weight had she not endowed the History Department chair at Harper College that Lower had occupied since gaining tenure, which she received after her first book, Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove, became a surprise best-seller after being accidentally labeled as fiction.

“I think the generals have enough books about them.”

“Oh, never. What ever could be more important than a man with a gun?”

“What was Little Aleppo like when you were a child?”

“Smaller. You’re supposed to say ‘bigger,’ I suppose. ‘When I was young, everything seemed so vast.’ Not Little Aleppo. It was a rinky-dink place back then. Sheep were still grazing in the Verdance. I remember that. I remember the farmer had a dog, one of those black and white ones that bends sheep to its will.”

“Border collie.”

“The Tahitian. I remember The Tahitian. It started as a nickelodeon, you know. Well, sort of. You know their scam.”

Lower did; it was the focus of one of the chapters in her book. The Tahitian offered two tickets for nine cents, which made it a better deal than the theaters over the hill in C—–a City. It was an even better deal for the theater’s owner, Augusta Incandescente, whom everyone called Gussy, because the change was given in the form of a counterfeit penny.

“There were these short little films. Ten or fifteen minutes. The cops would chase the robbers, or the cowboys would chase the Indians. That’s all movies have ever been good for: chase scenes. And there were travelogues and these things called illustrated songs. Did you ever hear of them?”

“It was like a group karaoke thing, right?”

“Ha, yes. The lyrics would be on the screen and the organist would play. Everyone would sing. It was dire. I remember looking up at my nanny while she was singing along, and thinking she was a simpleton.”

“You had a nanny?”

“Darling, I had a wet nurse. I had a governess. The wealthy can hardly be expected to raise their own children.”

Lower nodded in agreement and mumbled Mmm under her breath. She had been raised in a two-bedroom slab house on Themistocles Street; her parents had hired babysitters, but no nannies. But one of the tricks she had learned while interviewing people was this: if you just kept nodding and making confirmatory sounds, people would talk forever.

“I was educated at home. Tutors came in. Latin and elocution and all that. The Latin came in handy later. And then Radcliffe. I was 16, I think. Daddy was Harvard so I got shipped Back East to finish up. Those goddamned winters. Twenty below and the sun didn’t come up until ten in the morning. Never got used to it, hated it the whole time. Haven’t seen snow since then. Never even gone skiing.”

“It’s fun.”

“I won’t be cold.”

“What did you study?”

“Who can remember? Arguments of the long dead; irregular French verbs; the volume of a conic cylinder. The usual. I was a conscientious student, but not particularly invested. Mostly, I studied Carrie.”

“Carrie?”

“Eleanor Middlecott Saltonstall. She was called Carrie. Don’t ask me why. She had brown hair. God, we fucked like monkeys. I didn’t know I was gay–there was no ‘gay’ back then, this was 1924–but I couldn’t give a fig about boys. The other girls were obsessed with them, but I couldn’t tell one from the other. Braying jackasses. She married one.”

“Carrie?”

“Mm. Brahmins. They have a duty to breed. Someone has to rule New England, after all. We shared a table at dinner the first night I was in Cambridge. Her cuffs were uneven. She was wearing a sweater over a long-sleeved blouse, and the cuffs were uneven shooting out of the sleeves. I remember that, but I don’t remember what we talked about. We were sitting next to each other. Our knees touched. It was like lightning. Oh, I can remember. Being afraid to look her in the eye.”

Steppy smiled like her lips were dreaming, and pointed at the carved wooden box on the table. Lower flipped the lid: a dozen perfectly-rolled joints and a silver Dunhill lighter. She took one out, the lighter, FFT, PHWOO, and put the joint in Steppy’s outstretched hand. She swopped in bitty little puffs. Lungs weren’t what they used to be. The couch seemed a paler shade.

“The summer after our sophomore year, she married him. Moved out of the dorm and into an apartment on Brattle. Never spoke to me again.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I always thought so. She died young. Giving birth. That happened a lot more back then. Even to decent people.”

She grinned. Steppy had the best dentures money could buy; you could still tell. Too white.

“And then I came back home. Time for another marriage.”

“Whose?”

“Mine. Just had to find the right man. He was out there, maybe. I was 21 by then, which was old to be single, especially for the people I came from. Daddy stopped donating to Harvard for years.”

“Why?”

“They had failed, in his estimation. He sent me there to find a husband, and instead I got an education. And what did I need that for? Whosoever could possibly require an education less than a rich girl?”

Steppy’s painted tortoises, Lenny and Honey, padded through the backyard. Steppy used to paint them, but now one of the maids did it. Both tortoises’ shells were done up in the Soviet Realism style.

“Damned woman is from Belarus and won’t stop with the heroes of the proletariat. I told her that the animals preferred Expressionism. She accused them of being aspirational.”

“So tough to find good help.”

“You’ll take them when I die.”

“The turtles?”

“Tortoises. They’re dry. They’re tortoises. You have a little yard.”

“And a cat. She’ll attack them.”

“She’ll drool on them, at best. Your cat’s retarded, Lo.”

“We don’t use that word.”

“It’s my house, and I’ll call cats retarded if I want. And I’m not wrong. There’s something wrong with that poor creature. Her eyes don’t work in tandem.”

Steppy was neither lying nor making a joke: Fizz was a special animal. She spent most of her days staring blankly into the middle distance and had never quite mastered the litter box. Flower Childs, who shared the small cottage on Alfalfa Street with Lower, hated the cat. She spent her days at the fire station with Ash-Nine, a Dalmatian so inbred it was ninth in line for the Hapsburg throne, and then had to come home to a genetically defective kitty. Other people got to have clever pets, she thought, but she was surrounded by four-legged morons.

Lower Montana loved Fizz, though, and was not surprised at her shortcomings, mostly because Lower had specifically requested “the cat no one wants” at the shelter.

“Fizz is a kind soul.”

“Of course she is. She’s too dumb to be mean. What were we talking about?”

Lower checked the scrawl in her notebook.

“You got home from college and were trying to get married.”

“I wasn’t trying, my father was. It was embarrassing for him. My little sister Essie was married. She eloped with some fat count named Bardolph. I mean, he had 19 names, but he went by Bardolph. Can you imagine how absurd the other 19 names were if he chose ‘Bardolph?’ Industrious fellow. No job, but industrious. You should have seen the castle they lived in.”

“Big house?”

“No, sweetheart, an actual castle.”

“Oh.”

“Overrated. Good as a military installation, but useless as a house. Too drafty. Only visited her there the once. They were executed by the Nazis in ’36. Not executed, I suppose. Hacked to death. ‘Executed’ makes it sound more dignified than it was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I warned her. I told her that it was dangerous for such a silly girl to live anywhere but California.”

Steppy ‘s hands did not shake and she drew in small puffs from the joint pwahpwahpwah and and blew out through her thin lips phwoo.

“The world’s a savage place, I told her. She gave me the line about the kindness of strangers. Heh. Write that down, Lo. Esmer Glassice Alouette–G-L-A-S-S-I-C-E, it’s a family name–depended on the kindness of strangers in 1930’s Bavaria. Dumb as your cat.”

She could feel her sister’s hand in hers. They were walking to The Tahitian. She had her sister’s hand in her left and a new dime in her right with Liberty in her Phrygian cap on the front and ONE DIME written on the back; it pressed into her palm, and both girl’s strappy shoes were shined up black. It was quiet in the sunroom except for the tape recorder.

“It’ll be lunch now,” Steppy said, and a tall, blonde woman in a maid’s uniform entered the room; she announced “Luncheon” in a thick accent, withdrew. Lower smiled.

“Is that the tortoise-painter?”

“Can’t tell a White Russian when you see one? Ethnically distinct people. Help me up, I’m hungry.”

Lower took her hand and Steppy rocked back and forth oncetwicethree times and then she was standing–neither woman was much over five foot–and Steppy grasped her arm with both hands and nodded at the recorder, which Lower picked up, and they walked from the sunroom into the house on Pharaoh Lane for lunch, which was served at 1:00 precisely on the Upside of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

New York City supposedly has a million stories, but Los Angeles only has five or six and one of them is where the pizza delivery guys comes to the door and the lady of the house doesn’t have money to pay him. That’s more of a Valley story, but close enough. There’s the one where a bunch of people are chasing the same thing–it never matters what, a briefcase or something–and another where a boy meets a girl, and then there’s the good old revenge fantasy. You’d be surprised how many stories are secretly revenge fantasies.

And the Wrong Turn plot. Should’ve stuck to the road; should’ve stayed off the moors. Shouldn’t have gone in that bar; shouldn’t have picked up that phone. Perhaps a poorly-chosen vacation or motel. The signs were all there, but the hero didn’t see them. Maybe the comic relief did, but no one listens to the comic relief.

“Mmmf hmmph mmmmmmf. Mmf,” said Big-Dicked Sheila. What she meant was “I told you I hated Los Angeles” but there was a bright red rubber ball in her mouth, and that was strapped to her head. Tiresias Richardson was similarly gagged. They were in wooden chairs, and their hands were handcuffed behind them and through the slats of the chairs’ backs.

“Mmf mmf mmf mmf,” Tiresias answered, which meant “It’s not my fault,” but that wasn’t entirely true. She was the one who wanted to come down for Pilot Season; and she was the one who forgot to find a place to stay, leading to the mistaken identities at the motel; and she was the one who accepted the briefcase with the murder instructions and cash; and she was the one who refused to slip out of town any number of times. But, it was Sheila who talked her into playing assassin so they could shake down their intended targets, so neither woman was blameless for their current predicament.

The king’s share of the responsibility goes to the guy who kidnapped them, though. Yes, Sheila and Tiresias flung themselves through a series of comic events via terrible decisions, greed, and substance abuse, but putting the onus on them smells of hostage-shaming. The guy who, after finding them skulking behind the shed in his backyard, abducted them at gunpoint had so many other options. He might have helped them, or ignored them, or sang them a punk rock song about a swan named Ferguson; he did none of these things, instead taking the two captive and leading them down into his basement. Life is about choices.

The room was squarish and the door was at the top of a set of wooden steps, which now illuminated because the door had opened and down came the gangly man with sleepy eyes. He still had his shotgun, but he set it on a table next to objects that Tiresias could not quite make out in the gloom, but didn’t seem reassuring, and he stood right in front of Sheila and said,

“Hello, ladies. Looks like the spideAAAAAAAFUUUUUUCKBITCHYOU–”

And then a lot of gurgling, which is the sound a human makes when he’s had the pointy end of a pair shoved through his eyeball and six inches into his brain and then swirled around like a swizzle stick blending the coffee and milk together, and then he was down on the ground twitching and frothing and then he didn’t move at all. Sheila stood over him, straddled; the skin on her right hand was scraped and scratched and bleeding; a dropped followed her middle finger all the way down, held, quivered, loosed and PLOPPED onto the waist of the man’s jeans. It was quiet.

“MMMF!”

Until Tiresias started shouting underneath her ball gag. Sheila reached around behind her head and unsnapped it.

“MotherFUCKer!” Tiresias said, and worked her jaw and lips to try to get feeling back into them. “Is he dead?”

Sheila kicked the man in the ribs, not softly. He didn’t move, so she kicked him again, and then said,

“Uh-huh.”

She went to the table by the stairs where the man had left his shotgun. Handcuff key. Came back, undid Tiresias, who stood up rubbing her wrists. Sheila searched around for the light switch, found it, flipped it. Soundproofing on the walls. Secured points on the ceiling and, bolted to the wall, an x-shaped table with large metal hoops at all four ends. Neatly-hung up whips and lashes.

“Our adventures are getting less and less fun,” Tiresias said.

“We’re due for a win, though.”

“Are we?”

There was another table, larger than the one by the stairs, off to the side of the room. It was covered by a sheet, and Tiresias WHAPPED it off like a magician trying to leave plates and glasses in their settings.

“Sheel?”

“Mm?”

Sheila walked over and took a look and said,

“Oh, that’s no good.”

She was right: nothing good can come of a table-full of scalpels and dildos.

“Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

“Yeah,” Sheila said, and stuck the fingers of her right hand, still covered in blood, in her mouth. Tiresias reached out and took her hand; they both looked at the blood; down at the ground. Bubbles, red, soaking into the rubber-coated flooring.

“Shit,” Sheila said.

“Shit.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we burn the house down?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Maybe.”

The women stood in silence. The corpse laid there, also silently. Sheila sucked in air through her teeth–it made a sound like TSSSST–and turned on the heel of her yellow Converse high-tops and stomped up the stairs. It was close and sweaty in the basement, and now Tiresias was alone with the dead man, who continued to be silent.

“Sheel!” she yelped and jogged after her.

The house looked like Hitler owned a Goodwill. Swastikas and sprung couches with duct tape and Iron Crosses and the teevee screen was covered with dried loogies. Front door had five locks on it, and all the windows were barred. Kitchen off to the left and a hallway to the right; all the drapes were drawn and so no light from the streetlamps came into the living room. There was a low table by the door covered in mail. Sheila picked up a bill and walked into the kitchen, where there was a beige telephone screwed into the wall. She picked it up, started dialing.

“Who are you possibly calling?” Tiresias said, and gingerly prowled around looking for Sheila’s purse and the Halliburton briefcase. She had lost her stilettos somewhere in between the last corpse and this one, and the carpet was ragged and sharpish under her bare feet. Opened the front closet. Uniforms hanging from the rod. Panzer division, officer’s tunic, that kind of shit. Purse and ‘case on the floor next to several pairs of high and well-shined boots. Tiresias dug around, came up with the Camels, shook two out, lipped them, dug back around for a lighter, found it, FFT, PHWOO, and walked over to the kitchen where Sheila was and placed one of the smokes in her mouth.

“Thank you,” Sheila said with the handset cradled in between her ear and shoulder.

“Who are you calling?'”

Sheila motioned SHH with the hand with the Camel in it and said into the phone,

“Oh, thank God, you’re home. Can you come down here?”

She listened.

“Now-ish would be good.”

She listened some more.

“Now-ish is necessary. Right fucking now-ish? Please?”

Sheila listened again, let out a shock of a laugh–HA!–and read off the address from the bill she was holding.

“My hero,” she said, and hung up. Turned to Tiresias, smiled, PHWOO, walked back into the living room towards the front closet.

“Who was that? Who’s coming?”

“Precarious.”

Tiresias was torn. She did not like the idea of needing a man to come save her. On the other hand, she had no fucking clue what to do and Precarious Lee was most the competent human being she knew. He used to be a roadie for this band, the one with all the skeletons and bullshit. Sheila had played their music for her a few times, but she thought it sounded like fingerless monkeys trying to tune their instruments. Tiresias liked pop music and Stephen Sondheim.

“He’s back home.”

“He was.”

“It’s four hours from here to there.”

“He knows a shortcut,” Sheila said, and there was a FROOOOOOWR from down the street getting louder and closer, a sound like Detroit, a sound like America, a sound like eight cylinders arranged in a V and exploding in sequence, and BRAKKABRAKKA coming from a muffler that did no such thing, and then the mighty metal symphony was on top of them, all around them and permeating the drywall and studs and poured-concrete floor and false gables, and now silence, and a little bit more silence, and shave-and-a-haircut from the door. Sheila flung it open and leapt up high to grab the tall man around his neck. She kicked her heels up and hung onto him for a moment.

“Yo,” he said, and walked into the living room with Sheila still attached to him. She dropped to her feet, and Tiresias just stood there.

“Hell of a shortcut,” she said.

“Hey,” Precarious said.

“Hey,” she answered.

He had his long, gray hair piled up under a battered maroon ball cap with a cartoon Indian and CHIEFS written in script on the front. Full mustache and stubble. Double denim. Black work gloves. Tweed briefcase. Precarious looked around.

“Yuchh.”

“I know, right? Better homes and biergartens,” Sheila said.

He walked into the kitchen and set his briefcase on the table. POP POP went the latches; Precarious had a stoic look on his face, which is to say no expression. Sheila set her cigarette in between his lips, gently, PHWOO and he shifted it to the left corner of his mouth. The eye above squinted.

Tiresias entered the kitchen after them.

“You have a plan?”

“Yup,” he said, and withdrew from the ‘case a faded tin box with no rust spots on it. Tom Mix was stamped in relief on the top, and he was riding Tony the Wonder Horse. Both of them were smiling, because both of them were Movie Stars. Precarious opened the box and took out a joint as thick around as a linebacker’s thumb, fetched his Zippo from the pocket of his faded Levi’s, FFT, PHWOO, handed it to Sheila, closed the briefcase.

“Please tell me that wasn’t the plan,” Tiresias said.

“Don’t give her the joint,” Precarious said to Sheila. “So. What’s the big problem?”

In the basement, the three of them stood over the dead Nazi rapist with the handcuffs sticking out of his eye socket.

“Yeah, this is a big problem.”

Sheila showed him her right hand. The kidnapper–whose name she had read off the water bill but forgotten–had cuffed her tighter than the cop, and she had taken some skin off getting loose. There were spots, barely visible against the black, on her shirt and leather pants. She licked her middle finger and scraped the blood off her hip.

“That’s what I love about leather. Everything comes right off it.”

“Then why,” Tiresias asked, “does suede stain if you think dirty thoughts about it?”

“Suede is the inside of a cow’s skin. Leather is the outside.”

“I don’t think that’s right.”

“It is. I dated a tanner once.”

“You dated a tanner?”

“Strong fingers.”

“Where do you find these people?”

“I’m social.”

“Ladies,” Precarious said softly. “There’s a body on the floor and the two of you have left evidence fucking everywhere. We need to concentrate.”

“You’re right.”

He took in the problem.

“I have something to say,” Tiresias said. “We were doing just fine on our own, and we didn’t need a knight in shining denim to come and rescue us.”

And then she sneezed without covering her mouth. Right onto the dead guy.

“Evidence. Fucking. Everywhere,” Precarious said.

Sheila pinched her on the arm, hard.

“Ow!”

They began slap fighting.

“For fuck’s sake,” Precarious muttered and stepped in between them. “Tiresias, go upstairs and get some towels and start wiping down everything you think you or Sheila touched. Try not to take a shit on the floor or leave your driver’s license up there, huh?”

He turned to Sheila.

“You. Go out to my car.” He handed her the keys. “And, in the trunk, there’s some road flares. Bring ’em all down here. See if you can not draw the entire block’s attention while you do, okay?”

Both women gave Precarious the finger as they walked up the steps.

“Women,” he said, and surveyed the basement. Nudged the body with the square toe of his boot a couple times. “You thought you were gonna have yourself an evening, didn’t you?”

They tried to be inconspicuous, the three of them, driving south away from the house on Edinburgh in West Hollywood, as inconspicuous as any three humans could be in a 1971 Dodge Super Bee painted bright yellow–the catalog called the color Lemon Twist–because what was the point in owning a Super Bee any other shade, and making a noise like FROOOOOOWR from its V8 and setting off car alarms on either side. It was a coupe, and the backseat was small; so was Sheila, so she sat in the back and Tiresias was in the passenger seat next to Precarious.

Sheila threw herself over the bench and kissed him on the cheek and retreated.

“Never gonna forget that sound,” Tiresais said.

“Which one?”

“When you pulled the handcuffs out of his eye socket.”

“Mm,” he said.

“That was fucked up.”

“I do not disagree.”

It was quiet for a moment, or at least as quiet as a muscle car in low gear gets, and then Precarious asked,

“Drinks?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

“All of them.”

Precarious fished a soft pack of Camels out of the breast pocket of his jean jacket, and flicked his wrist up; two smokes arose and he lipped one free and arched his ass up off the seat to dig his Zippo out of the change pocket of his Levi’s, FFT, PHWOO, and put the lighter back and resettled into position and his left elbow was hanging out the open window in the breeze and his right hand on the steering wheel and the cigarette between his teeth and he smiled.

“You girls know I used to be in show business, right?”

“Kinda.”

“Sorta.”

He smiled wider and flipped a right onto Crescent Heights and pointed the Super Bee north towards a bar and grill on the Sunset Strip.

Anything’s sacred if you soak it in enough blood. The hill on Calvary, and the fields of Flanders, and that plaza in Dallas: the blood sticks the stories to the ground and now visitors are mournful and respectful and keep their hands clasped in front of them. Or not. Thermopylae is a thruway now and they stuck an office building right where the last two used to be in Lower Manhattan, and there is a rock a quarter of the way up Pulaski Peak in the backyard of a man who made a tidy living selling novelty underwear. More of a boulder than a rock, and at least half-buried, he balked at the cost of digging it up and just integrated it into the landscaping around the pool. It was flat on top, so the man who sold novelty underwear attached a diving board. The contractor countersank fat metal bolts into the sandstone and noticed that the rock was only red on the surface.

“Set him down, cousin.”

“We need to bring him back to the village. His wife needs to see him.”

“Throwing Knife is across the lake having babies.”

The two Pulaski were in a natural clearing that surrounded a rock–at least half-buried, and more of a boulder than a rock–with a flat top. Talks To Whites did not remember the walk down from the pass. There was the gunshot and then Black Eyes killed those two men, and he another, and Here And There arrived. He remembered picking up Cannot Swim in his arms, and struggling with him until Here And There took him by the elbow and then his cousin was almost weightless. Black Eyes silent and watching and bloody as Here And There stood over the bodies of the Blacks and the White, muttered words in a tongue foreign to Talks To Whites, torn fabric from their clothes and plucked hairs from their heads; he remembered that, too. But not the walk down.

“Set him down.”

“We don’t have the funeral shroud.”

“Ask your cousin if it bothers him,” Here And There said. “And then set him down.”

He could not. Cannot Swim was heavy air in his arms, barely felt, and a good splotch of his blood and some brains were unwiped on Talks To Whites’ neck and ear and shoulder. Both rifles were strapped to his back, along with two satchels stuffed with everything worth stealing off of the dead White. He did not notice the load, and he could not relinquish it, just stand there dumbly, arguing with a shaman.

“Your cousin is larger than you, Talks To Whites. He is a heavy burden.”

“I can carry him.”

And now Cannot Swim was no longer weightless; Talks To Whites’ knees buckled, but held, and his heart raced and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and forearms. It is a terrible idea to argue with a shaman. He held up for longer than Here And There thought he would, but soon he placed Cannot Swim on the rock, which was more rightly a boulder. His head pointed west, back towards the village and the valley and the lake and the harbor and the entire world, and Talks To Whites set down the weapons and bags and arranged his cousin’s hands so that they were resting on his chest. Then, he stepped back some paces, a respectful distance, and began to sing.

Talks To Whites sang about The Turtle Who Once Was And Will Be Again. About his eminent return. Very soon, The Turtle would regain his power over man. The Turtle would make all the decisions, as he did in the days of the ancient ones. Any day now.

He stopped singing and walked over to Here And There, who was sitting on the grassy ground.

“Why didn’t you stop this? You know powerful magick,” he said. Talks To Whites was pointing his finger, and his eyes were narrowed. “Cannot Swim told me all about the things you can do.”

“Did he?”

And now Talks To Whites was buck naked. It is a terrible idea to point at a shaman.

Here And There had been an odd child. She was born with a caul; the midwife carefully sliced it from her tiny face and buried it by the lake once she was suckling. I am part of the earth, she told her peers once she got a little older. None of the other children knew how to process that statement. She refused moccasins and went everywhere barefoot. Before she was near old enough to chew the leaf, she did so openly and none of the adults or elders made any attempt to stop her. The tribe’s dogs looked to her before following anyone else’s commands.

Naturally, this attracted the shaman’s attention. He had been waiting many years for a replacement. The first words he spoke to her were,

“What does magick cost?”

She answered,

“Life.”

He asked,

“Whose?”

Here And There laughed and shrugged her shoulders, which was the right answer. The shaman took her from her parents’ kotcha and she came to live outside the village, about two miles to the south. The shaman kept his own fire. He taught her about the peregrine maria tree and the cybellinus mysticus mushroom. She learned the forgotten language, the original language that they spoke in Babel, and she learned the resonant frequencies and how to bother crickets. When he died, she never spoke his name again.

“Sit with me, cousin,” she said to Talks To Whites.

“Can I have my clothes back?”

He was naked and covering his cock and balls with his hands. It was warm, he thought. At least he had that going RONCH Black Eyes leapt at one of the vultures circling Cannot Swim and the funeral rock, got it by the nude throat, shook twice three times, and the other birds hopped from claw to claw, heads swiveling between the boy and his dog.

And now Talks To Whites had clothes on again. Breechcloth, tunic, stiff leather leggings, moccasins.

“Sit.”

He did. The grassy plateau was open to the sun, which was high and unguarded by clouds, and wildflowers bloomed like they did after every rain, purple and red and yellow, and these attracted fat bumblebees that plopped along and made a low noise like thrrrrrrrrrm.

THRRRRRRRRRM is the sound of the LAPD (No, Not That One)’s helicopter warming up, rotors still, on the helipad atop the police station on Peel Street. It was a Bell model, the one with the bubble-shaped glass cockpit and the blades high above that on the end of a metal stanchion. The chopper was intended for the Korean War, but didn’t quite make it to the Salt Wharf. Some call the helicopter a conscientious objector. Others say that the cops stole it from the Army. Locals despised the machine; it was just so unsporting, like hunting deer by laying a minefield.

Little Aleppians would not be hovered at, thank you.

The widespread irritation never boiled, though, as the helicopter had flown less than a dozen times in the 30 years the department had it. It turned out that it was far easier to steal a chopper than to fly one, and both of those activities were cake when compared to maintaining one. The Brass paid for Officer Saccocetti to take a correspondence class in helicopter repair, and he did the best he could, which consisted mostly of gazing in confusion at the intake valves and begging his superiors not to let anyone fly in the damned thing. In the end, the Chief and his Captains didn’t want to budget the money for the chopper, preferring instead to spend the money on themselves.

This led to a very dumb behavior loop: a criminal would win a car chase; the Cenotaph would print an editorial asking what the hell the chopper was for if the cops weren’t going to use it; whichever Town Father was currently about to be indicted would hop on the story to distract everyone from his or her nonsense; the Brass would try to blame each other while secretly hiring a mechanic to get the bird back in flying shape. The Bell ‘copter would then be flown around the neighborhood, at which point everyone would lose their fucking minds and walk down to the police station on Peel Street and scream and throw fruit. The helicopter would be covered with a tarp when it returned. All involved would forget about the whole incident. Then, a criminal would win a car chase. Repeat until terminal metal fatigue.

But Frenchy Somme needed impressive hardware to stand in front of while he avoided questions about what the police were doing about the Downsider, and since it was 198- and the cops hadn’t been given tanks yet, the helicopter would have to do. He pressed the station’s car mechanic into service that morning.

“No comprende.”

“It’s a fucking engine, Luis.

“Es helicóptero.”

“Engine’s an engine. Just get it running. It doesn’t have to fly, just idle.”

“Podría matarnos a todos.”

“There’s the spirit. Reporters’ll be here at two.”

When the reporters arrived, they were treated to coffee and a variety of pastries. None of the cops winged their shoes at any of the reporters’ heads, which is not unheard of; they were under strict orders to be pleasant. None of the LAPD (No, Not That One) cared much for the Fourth Estate, but they did care about winning the blame game with the Town Fathers. Or the fire department. Or the teachers or local criminals. It did not matter who was deemed responsible for the Downsider, the cops thought, as long as it wasn’t them.

Stalin knew how to deal with reporters, Chief Somme thought. He had a podium that a rookie had humped up the stairs, and all the Brass stood behind him on his left, and the chopper was to the right, and beyond all of them were the seven green Segovian hills. The tableaux said strength, authority, competence, and helicopter. There were two cameras, both from KSOS, and at least two dozen microphones arranged in an electronic bouquet atop the lectern; this blocked the captain’s face in both shots.

THRRRRRRRRRRRRM.

The cameras each came with an operator, and a producer, and a talent (Cakey Frankel and Flip Chares); there was an intern from KHAY buckling under the weight of her tape recorder, sundry slobbish types with pencils and notebooks (among them Iffy Bould and Lolly Tangiers), and Luis.

“I have some prepared remarks and then I’ll take your questions. Okay. The Little Aleppo Police Department is committed to the safety of the neighborhood’s residents, and we are sworn to uphold the law. This vigilante jackass, some people are calling him the Downsider or whatever, is a criminal and he’ll be treated as such. He’s put ten or twelve people in the hospital. Sure, all those people were scumbags, but we’re just not gonna have it anymore.”

Chief Somme knew he would be standing for a while, so he had fortified himself with an extra vicodin or two. His knees felt wonderful.

“We’re not waiting for the Town Fathers to come up with a plan,” he said, and peered over the microphones to make sure the print reporters had jotted the sentence down. “I’m announcing the formation of a task force designed to hunt down and capture the Downsider. This task force will be given the money and material needed to bring this law-breaking maniac into custody. We’ve already got the chopper up and running.”

THRRRRRRRRRRRRM.

The chief waved his arm at the helicopter, but felt like a model on a game show standing next to a pair of jet-skis, so he turned the wave into a thumbs-up and that was awkward, too, so he pointed vaguely into the small scrum.

“Questions?”

Iffy elbowed Lolly in her ribs, sharpishly. He had told her on the walk over that she was to ask the first question. The Cenotaph always asked the first question. The world had certain rules to it, he told her. She barked out,

“How many officers will be on the task force?”

“As many as is necessary from a tactical point of view.”

“And how will they be deployed?”

“Tactically. Cakey?”

Cakey’s hair was particularly massive, and her earrings were small gold crosses. Her scarf was diaphanous, yet welcoming.

“I didn’t even have my hand raised.”

“That’s okay. Do you have any questions?”

“Wasn’t there a family of possums living in the helicopter?”

“There was. Luis got ’em out.”

Chief Somme gave Luis the thumbs-up, then worried about giving too many thumbs-ups. He’d been out here for only minutes and had done it twice already, he thought. Knock it off, Thumbelina, he thought. Luis did not have any problems with giving a thumbs-up, and so he did.

Cakey turned to him and said,

“Good for you. So brave.”

“Gracias.”

Iffy was slouching and smoking, and he called out,

“What exactly will this task force be doing? Like, what are they gonna do that you’re not capable of doing?”

“The task force will require different skills than normal police work. For example, we’re going to need a computer expert, a master of disguise, an explosives guy. I’m waiting on a call back about a genuine Indian tracker. And a big strong guy. Always need one of those. You. In the glasses.”

A thin young man with thick black spectacles looked at his notes and asked,

“Chief, have you heard the new Herpes 7-inch? And what do you think about Carcass Canvas breaking up?”

“Where the hell are you from?”

“I have a zine that covers Little Aleppo’s underground music scene.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Chief Somme said. “Flip, did you have a question?”

Flip Chares and his immaculate combover did have a question, and it was,

“Does the task force have a name yet?”

“We are hung up on that, to be honest. Whole station’s arguing about it. Some officers want the name to be what you’d call ‘heavy-metalish.’ I’ve heard ‘Street Dragons’ and ‘the Fistpunchers,’ which I told ’em didn’t make any sense, but these are younger officers and they’re excitable. There’s a large contingent pushing to go understated with it. ‘The Firm’ or ‘The Squad’ or something real plain like that. Detective Haney likes ‘Mix’tlaoc’lkal,’ which he says is Ancient Aztec for ‘a hunting party where the prey is a god.’ Haney’s probably been working Narcotics a little too long.”

Flip had another question, which was,

“Will there be a telephone hotline set up?”

“Absolutely not. No one takes them seriously when it’s not about a kid. Jackasses call in breathing heavy or trying to lure officers into elaborate traps. When the Fifth First Bank got held up and we had a hotline, some idiot kept calling up and putting us on the line with pizza places and the zoo and wherever. You’ve all heard the tapes.”

Some of the reporters were too polite to nod, and the rest were professional except for Lolly who SNORFED out of her nose. A local who went by Phoney Maroney got the cops on three-way calls with random establishments around the neighborhood, and neither party would know who called who and the confusion was often comical, mostly because Officer Arellano was on hotline duty, and Officer Arellano responded to confusion with belligerent yelling. “I’LL SHOOT THAT FUCKING GIRAFFE,” was one of the more printable quotes from the conversations. Phoney Maroney recorded these dialogues, and they went from tape deck to deck around Little Aleppo. It was a rite of passage to drive around getting high and listening  to the tapes. Iffy elbowed her in the ribs again. She counter-elbowed, but he bent his back around the blow. Iffy was quick for a shambler.

“Chief?”

“Iffy?”

The Chief’s knees were feeling utterly delightful.

“What exactly is the Downsider wanted for?”

“Questioning.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“It’ll come. All things in due time.”

“I don’t think that’s how warrants work.”

THRRRRRRGANGALANGACHANGABOOM

Chief Somme came around from the podium and waved everyone towards the access door to the roof.

“Let’s go. Inside.”

First the reporters and then the Brass and it was just the Chief and Luis and HONGADANGABANG from the chopper.

“Te dije que esto pasaría.”

“Just shut the damn thing off!”

And then it was just Luis on the roof.

The briefing room wasn’t big enough for all the Brass to stand behind Chief Somme, so the press waited while they argued about it, and then they finished up. The teevee crews were happy because they thought the change of venue added production value, and the print reporters were happy because there were pastries left. Questions were asked, responded to (though usually not answered), notes were taken. Many sports metaphors were used, and the movie Patton was quoted at length.

“How can my cousin be dead?”

“The Turtle Who Once Was And Will Be Again did not make the Whites. That was a different god. That god did not teach the Whites not to shoot strangers. The Turtle did not teach us that, either, but we did not have guns until the Whites brought them.”

The bees made a low sound like thrrrrrrrrrrrrm as they bounced among the flower petals getting sticky with pollen and full with nectar. More vultures had arrived, black and turkey, and so had condors. They flared their massive wings and hopped up and down. There were two groups of the scavengers: one around the rock that bore Cannot Swim’s body, which was protected by Black Eyes, and a smaller circle around the vulture whose neck Black Eyes had snapped. The dog did not growl. She did not need to. She walked the perimeter of the sacred rock and made aggressive eye contact with the birds.

“So maybe I didn’t have much of a point.”

“Bring him back,” Talks To Whites said. “You can do that.”

“I can? How?”

Talks To Whites waved his hands around in what he felt was a magickal fashion.

“With all that.”

“Let me try.”

Here And There waved her hands in a similar fashion.

“Did it work? Go poke him.”

They were sitting on the thick grass to the west, which was upwind of the funeral rock. Here And There wore her hair loose and so long it brushed against dandelions; there were seven ice-white stripes running from her forehead to the ground. She was the only Pulaski with freckles, which spread out under her eyes like bat wings. The tribe wore tunics that were sleveless and made of soft deerskin and hemmed well above the knee. Loud Fingers did the embroidering, and each Pulaski chose their own designs. Talks To Whites had hummingbirds, for no other reason than he liked hummingbirds; Here And There’s tunic had glyphs and sigils all over it and she wouldn’t tell anyone what they meant. Also, Loud Fingers grew hair all over his back and lost his voice and kept waking up in trees while he was sewing in the symbols.

“Magick is about existence. The past exists no longer. The future does not exist yet. What exists is the present. And in the present, our cousin is missing half his head. So we will sing for him and then return to the village.”

“The hunters will want revenge,” Talks To Whites said.

“So will their hunters. I see darkness coming.”

“You said you couldn’t see the future.”

“Don’t need to be a shaman to smell blood in the air,” Here And There said, and she whistled FEEtwee and Black Eyes sprang forward and snatched a turkey vulture by the neck, shook twice, dropped it. She pawed back away slowly, and the other birds surrounded the carcass.

TINKadink went the bell on the door to the bookstore with no title; a man with a thick beard walked in and up to Mr. Venable’s desk. There was a teevee on it. Portable and newish, white, with a handle on top for ease of carry, and rabbit ears. The picture was smudgy and saturated with thick reds. The set usually resided in the office behind the secret door in the bookcase, but Gussy didn’t know about his office or the secret door yet, and he didn’t want to tell her, so he quick-snatched the teevee out of there when she wasn’t looking and set it up on his desk. He was in his customary spot.

“Do you have anything on traditional burial practices?”

“Shh!”

Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, walked out of the shelves to the rear of the shop and said,

“Don’t shush customers.”

“Then what’s the point of having them?”

Gussy planted herself in front of the man with the thick beard and smiled her best retail smile.

“Did I hear you ask for traditional burial practices?”

“Yes,” he said.

She pointed back the way she came.

“Go down the middle aisle until your first left. Then take seven more lefts. Every first left you come to, take it. Seven times. No! Eight. If you get an overwhelming sense of dread, you’ve gone too far.”

The man sauntered off. It was not his first visit.

“Gussy! It’s almost time!”

“You’re a child.”

Buh-BAAAAAA-duh-bah went the theme music for the KSOS Evening News with Trusted Meese. The graphic was a globe with a glowing star marking Little Aleppo; it was spinning a tiny bit too fast, and the image faded into Trusted’s face. It was a good face. It was the kind of face that could spot lies but not spout them. You could use Trusted Meese’s face as collateral on a bank loan, metaphorically. (In actuality, the bankers were just confused when Trusted tried. “We can’t take your face as collateral, Mr. Meese,” the bankers said. “How about my hog?” Trusted said, and took out his dick. The loan was not offered.)

Gussy leaned on the top of Mr. Venable’s chair back. He had his feet up, and was wearing his customary suit.

On the screen, Trusted looked into Camera One.

“Little Aleppo, it’s five o’clock and here’s the news.”

He turned to Camera Two.

“Dueling press conferences today as both the LAPD (Not, Not That One) and the Town Fathers announced their plans to deal with the costumed vigilante known as the Downsider. We have wall-to-wall coverage and exclusive interviews with Police Chief Somme and two Town Fathers, one of whom was not on PCP. ”

Mr. Venable was smiling. It was not natural to him, and his cheeks began burning right away.

“You’re smiling.”

“I love a shitshow, Gus. The cops and the politicians are now fully involved. Nothing but fun from here on in.”

“Seriously, it’s weird when you smile. It’s like seeing the Mona Lisa’s tits.”

Footage from the press briefing at the police station was first, and it led off with multiple angles of the helicopter seizing up and stroking out. Then Chief Somme–stern, commanding, swaying slightly–announcing the task force.

“A reaction. Finally. The authorities have recognized the problem, named it, and thus made it official. Stage two.”

“There are stages?”

“To all of life. And this is stage two.”

“What’s stage three?”

“Did you ever read comic books as a kid?”

“Archie.”

“No superheroes?”

“Ugh.”

“That explains it. Had you been versed in the form, you would realize that we’re missing something. You have your hero, and he lives in a city, and–”

The teevee screen went SHVAZ and the horizonatal lost its hold; the picture flipped upupupupupup and the sound went FLERSHFLEEEEEEEEEE and then there was a figure shot from the shoulders up. Helmet, mask. Both made from copper, it looked like.

“Good evening, Little Aleppo. My name is not important. What is important is that the man calling himself the Downsider reveal his identity and take nude photographs of himself. If my demands are not met, things are going to start blowing up. This is the part where I show you I’m serious.”

The door to the bookstore with no title opened onto the Main Drag, and beyond that was a dull BOOM and then a glow that shone through the window.

“I am not telling you how much time you have, but the clock is running. Back to you, Trusted.”

The screen went SHVAZ again and the sound went FLERSHFLEEEEEEEEEEEE and then there was Trusted and his face.

“–he has an arch-enemy,” Mr. Venable concluded the thought that had been interrupted.

Gussy walked around the desk towards the door, and Mr. Venable followed after. The bell went TINKadink and they stood on the Main Drag in the quietly failing light as sirens flashed to life around them and all the dogs were howling in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America

The burned the Sick Man every Labor Day in Little Aleppo. Twenty feet tall with wooden limbs held together with shoplifted neckties, the Sick Man would lead the parade up the Main Drag, up from the workers’ apartments on the Downside to the bosses’ houses on the Upside. Around Midden Avenue, which separated the two sections of the neighborhood, the crowd would get rowdy and violent(er) and marchers would skirmish with onlookers. A few blocks before Town Hall, the Paul Bunyan High (Go Blue Oxen!) marching band would play the Deguello.

The Town Fathers’ presence on the porch of the building was required, all five, and there were no exceptions. On several occasions, the parade had stopped at St. Agatha’s to wheel a bedridden Town Father along with them. Without them, Little Aleppo reasoned, there was no point to any of the proceedings. The Sick Man wasn’t a religious display, some pagan offering for a bountiful harvest, and it wasn’t some trust fund psychonaut’s art installation in the desert, no: the Sick Man was a threat. We can hand Madame DeFarge her knitting needles any time we want, the Sick Man reminded the management.

This was preferable to the old days.

The first labor strike in Little Aleppo was when the miners walked out of the Turnaway Lode; it took place May 3rd, 186-; the first murder of a labor leader in Little Aleppo came a day later when the Pinkertons shot Bart Coombs. This was immediately followed by the first labor riot in Little Aleppo. A pattern was set: direct action, abject overreaction, riot. The Turnaway Lode dried up, but the bosses and the workers remained. Commerce abounded and leapt, and labor responded with unions, none of which were united at all: Stevedores Local 611 refused to even meet with the Brotherhood of Longshoremen, not even to formally decide what the difference between the two jobs was; the International Alliance of Novelty Shop Cashiers, Stamp Collectors, and Impotents was made up of one guy named Dave Hanratty; the streetwalkers, hookers, call girls, and escorts all had separate guilds, and the rent boys weren’t allowed to join so they had one, too. Pickets signs bloomed, waved, gave fruit or not, died. The rich would sic the Pinkertons on the poor, until the police department was established and the rich sicced the cops on the poor.

And then there was the Zweitel Footwear Fire. This was 1913, and Little Aleppo had just professionalized their fire department. Ten local boys who could be trusted not to loot the burning buildings, not before at least attempting to quench the flames. They all had nicknames. Stumps and Hutch and Pidgey and Knock Knock. Before them, there were a dozen competing private crews–gangs with hoses, more accurately–that would haul their gear to fires and have fistfights over who had jurisdiction. Locals put up with that for as long as they could, then lured the crews into dead ends and blind alleys, beat them righteously, and stole all their equipment to give to the ten local boys who could be trusted. They had been training, learning to control the writhing hoses when the steam pumper shot the water through, how to enter an engaged structure, how to claw a window from its framing. They had been training almost four months when the call came in from the Zweitel factory.

116 women, girls most of them, and Cheeky Zweitel who owned the business along with his brother Lou. Had Lou been there, he would have been able to retrieve the key to the doors–two sets of them, that were kept locked during working hours–when Cheeky dropped dead of a heart attack in the first moments of the fire, but Lou was at a card game and so the doors remained locked while the walls flashed over and the desks caught. Nine women, girls all of them, suffocated in the crush that formed around the impenetrable exits. 46 scorched their lungs and collapsed and their tears evaporated from their eyes. One, a short brunette named Helen and called Lenny, tripped on a body and fell and broke her neck on a sewing machine. Three were found in the rubble with their throats slit, and the Cenotaph never reported that. 57 jumped.

Factory was on the sixth floor. A redhead in a hat–it still remained on her head as she plummeted–crashed into Pidgey on the way into the building, one down. The other nine entered the building with axes and bravery and no plan whatsoever, and they were on the fourth-floor landing when the entire structure gave way. 126 dead, almost all under 25 years old, poor girls that still listened to their mothers in apartments on the Downside and boys with thin beards who had been given a firetruck. It took days to clean them all off the street, all except a 19-year-old named Kitty Renterio who broke both her legs, back, right arm, jaw, six ribs, and punctured a lung and bruised the other organs, and was thoroughly concussed, but didn’t die until a week later. Long enough to tell her mother about how the doors were locked. Her mother did not feel an urge to keep that information to herself. Kitty was still alive when the riot started.

The Zweitels’ houses first. (Lou was mourning the dead at the same card game he had been at when the dead were created, and he fled the neighborhood when word got to him.) The crowd let their families go, but empty-handed, and all the bodies joined in, the living and not, and the fires flared all over the Upside. All the bosses, all the owners, it was too much for the cops so they ran, hid, joined in with the living and the not, a roiling flare of calloused hands and waitress uniforms and careful budgets. It all burned. There was nothing that the firemen could have done even if they weren’t dead.

“And every year since then, Little Aleppo burns the Sick Man. It represents the 126 that died in the fire. And it’s a threat.”

“I swear that threats are a load-bearing component to this neighborhood’s infrastructure.”

“Hashem has Commandments. Little Aleppo has threats. Same difference. Everyone knows where they stand,” Rabbi Levy said.

He and the Reverend Arcade Jones were standing on the corner of Rose Street, where Little Aleppo had penned up The Lord in all of His iterations: bearded, and incorporate, and many, and vegetarian, all The Lords in a row and also a mailbox and stop signs on either end. Tidy brick buildings with spires and steeples and minarets–all the ways that God had told man to put pointy things on the roof–with signs facing the sidewalk. White plastic letters on black almost-velvet behind clearish plastic. In the center of the street was the First Church of the Infinite Christ with its 80-foot high Christmas tree that was still up on Labor Day, and also not a Christmas tree to anyone but the painfully forgiving; it was a Peregrine Maria with tumorous bark and double-helix branches and 13-pointed leaves that were the size of your palm and waxy on one side. The star was still on top, but local youths armed with local slingshots had removed most of the ornaments.

The neighborhood surged by them, punching each other and grabbing ass, whooping and cussing and two-for-flinching, and there were shouts of solidarity and class consciousness:

“YOU CAN’T KILL ALL OF US!”

“EVEN YOUR BEDS ARE NOT SAFE, CAPITALISTS!”

“LEMME SEE YOUR DING-DONG!”

(That last one was Creepy Ernie, who was not concerned with solidarity and not conscious of class; the man wanted to see some ding-dongs.)

“Keep walking, Ernie,” the Rabbi said. He was short and slight and his hair was receding and his suit was gray; the Reverend Arcade Jones was enormous and his head was shaved and his suit was the color of a brand-new basketball. There was a rusty-gold dog in between them on a lead that the Reverend held, and his name was Emergency; it was his first Labor Day in Little Aleppo, and he was excited: he yelped and burfed and tappety-tapped his nails on the sidewalk and hid behind the Reverend’s ankles.

Ernie walked on.

“I pray for that man.”

“I don’t. He’s God’s problem,” Rabbi Levy said.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Not like Ernie. He’s special.”

The Main Drag was lined with Datsuns and Chevys and decade-old Hondas and precisely one BMW, which had been overturned and had its windows busted out and its tires punctured; all the other rich people knew better than to leave their luxury cars parked outside during Labor Day. All the shops were shuttered, including the movie theater. The Tahitian’s box office was semi-circular, and the marquee was triangular so that pedestrians could read it whether they were going north or south.

Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, and Julio Montez watched the effigy go by. The Sick Man was carried by 20 men and women, and it was a great honor to carry the Sick Man. (It had to be an honor, as there was no pay.) The wooden staves, lashed together with neckties, rubbed against one another.

“I always thought it sounded like a tree masturbating,” Gussy said.

“What?”

“Wood on wood.”

“When did you hear a tree doing that?”

“I didn’t, Julio. Use your imagination.”

“I don’t wanna imagine that.”

A scuffle broke out below them. Beautician’s Local 122 and Mortician’s Local 211. This was a longstanding feud; occasionally they fought in the geriatric wing of St. Agatha’s. (“I do his hair; he’s not dead yet.” “He’s 99% dead; we have jurisdiction.”) They sprayed formaldehyde at each other, karate chopped, tried to get high ground on one another via lampposts. The lampposts had all been greased, and when the festivities died down, stray dogs and cats would emerge from alleys and shadows to lick them cleanish.

Tee-shirts were hawked. All the food carts from the Verdance had been wheeled south and opened along side streets ten or twenty feet back from the Main Drag’s sidewalk: close enough to see and smell, but not tackle. Beer-Cooler Ethel was selling pints of Braddock’s whiskey instead of Arrow tallboys. The crowd worked over pickpockets found working the crowd. Communal frothing and improvisational body slams. And chanting, too.

A man with a bullhorn cried out:

“What do we want!?”

“AN HONEST DAY’S PAY!”

“In exchange for!?”

The mob did not answer, just pushed the man over and stole his bullhorn.

Gussy liked the marquee. It was the best place to watch the Main Drag from, especially when the Main Drag was partially on fire and everyone was kicking each other in the face. It was like the Royal Box at Wimbledon, but without the strawberries-and-cream. She and Julio had popcorn, though, in a brown paper grocery sack; it sat between them on the marquee’s tar roof. They sat in beach chairs Gussy kept in her office. One wobbled, and the other was crooked.

“Gussy, is this Communism?”

“No, it’s a mobile riot.”

“I meant the idea behind it.”

“There’s no idea behind this. It’s an economic primal scream. What do you know about Communism, anyway?”

“I dunno. Everything belongs to the People.”

“Uh-huh.”

Below them, a woman named Erisa had won the scrum for the bullhorn.

“LET’S RIP THE DOGS IN HALF!”

And everyone cheered.

“Those are the People, Julio. You want them in charge?”

“Are they really gonna rip dogs in half?”

Gussy ignored his question, popped the top on a warm Arrow, glug glug, ahhh. She thought about lighting a cigarette, but didn’t, and to her right the Sick Man went up KAHSHWOOM and crackled like static on Christ’s radio; the crowd had their fists in the air and their hands down their pants, and the Town Fathers put up a brave front while the flames ate up the Sick Man but nothing else, this time, in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

You haven’t seen a town ’til you’ve seen it from the back of a police car, Big-Dicked Sheila thought. Everything was a short story from that vantage; the world had such literary potential. Liminal, she remembered. Madame Cazee had taught her that word: it meant the space where two different realities rub up against each other, which causes splinters and fissures and subplots. Liminal was where metal met flesh, or water smacked up against beach, or lark met consequence. That little bit where you used to be free and you haven’t yet been caged. Liminal.

It was full-blast night, neon signs and suspect pedestrians, in Los Angeles. The temperature had dipped enough to make jackets a consideration, and there were six stars in the sky (which is three more than usual). The Dodgers were playing on the radio. Cops in Los Angeles have buzzcuts and listen to the ball game on the radio. Mel Ditch was a cop in Los Angeles.

“Ms. Feliciano, you like baseball?”

“I like the players. The game itself always bored me,” Sheila answered.

She answered to that name because it was the one on her driver’s license, and it was the one on her driver’s license because Little Aleppo had a DMV and Sheila is supernaturally skilled at making friends. She had no interest at all in the name her parents had slapped on her, partially because it was for a boy and mostly because it was klunky. Furthermore, she figured, the Social Security number she had been given at birth was also that of a boy’s and therefore not hers, so she asked around and bought one nobody was using and voila: Josephine Feliciano was born, at least as far as the state of California was concerned. Sheila was both genderfluid and identityfluid.

“It doesn’t change. Three strikes, three outs, nine innings, nine men. Never changes.”

“Some people like that sort of consistency.”

“Some people, yeah,” the cop said. He looked in the rearview. “How about you? Baseball fan?”

He did not address Tiresias Richardson by name because she had left all her ID in the Lincoln Continental convertible still parked back on Gardner Street in front of Lynn Danube’s apartment building.

“No hablo ingles,” she said in a flat American accent.

The cop smiled. The face of his watch was on the inside of his wrist. Brown sport coat and white shirt, dulled from laundering.

“Hablo español con fluidez. ¿Cómo te llamas?”

“No hablo Spanish, either.”

He took his right hand off the pleather-covered wheel and waggled his finger at the rearview mirror.

“You are having some fun at my expense. I can tell from your tone.”

The three of them were in a Dodge. It was the Dodgiest Dodge that ever rolled off the line. It was so Dodgy that it was often mistaken for a Ford or a Chevy. Maybe a Plymouth. It was a color. Which color was up for debate, but the car was certainly a color. All the badging had been removed, too, so unless you were an absolute car nerd, your brain just dully noted an automobile and moved on with its day.

West onto Melrose Avenue. Shops for the spiffy and lean of hip. Off to the right was the store where Slash stole his hat, but Sheila and Tiresias didn’t know that, and there was a coffee shop the Russians ran spies out of, and a comic book shop where some of the spies kept up with Batman’s latest tomfoolery. Gas was expensive; drinks were cheap. The cop had his window open and he thrumped his fingers along the top of the side mirror.

“You’re a detective?”

“That’s what my paycheck says.”

“Which department?”

“Well, seeing as how there was a corpse back where I picked you up, maybe you can guess which department, huh?”

“Homicide?”

He made a sound like POP with his lips and tapped his nose with his index finger.

Tiresias was not crying, but only because she was a better actor than she believed herself to be. She did not believe that one needed to see the town from the back of a police car; she had never been in handcuffs before, not even recreationally. They passed a bar where Emilio Estevez liked to finger Asian women.

“Maybe you should ask for a promotion,” Sheila said.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, you got to the scene of the crime before the criminals did. That’s some top-notch detective work right there.”

He made the same sound POP, smiled, said nothing.

“You should go to the horse track, being able to tell the future like that. I bet you’d make way more money than being a cop.”

“You would be astonished at how lucrative law enforcement can be, Ms. Feliciano.”

Sheila had elegant hands. Much longer than they were wide. She hated them. Thought they looked like an orangutan’s hands, but she could have modeled watched in advertisements had it not been for the dozens of tiny scissor nicks all over them. But they were double-jointed, and rolled up lengthwise thumb to pinky, which made them skinnier than her wrists. Useful for getting her arm into clogged drains or lubed-up assholes. Even more useful for getting out of handcuffs.

And now he turned off of Melrose Avenue, where the storefronts were still lit up and the sidewalk still bustling (as much as any did in this driver’s paradise), onto Hayworth. Headed south. It was very dark and very quiet and there were no storefronts or bustle at all, just apartment building. They were set back twenty feet from the curb and hidden behind desert fan palms, which are stubby and have fronds like jazz hands; between the road and the walk were the big boys, the Mexican fan palms, which are thick and high and shaggy.

The cop looked all around, left and right and in all the mirrors, and now Sheila’s neck is burning. She thrusts her whole body over the front bench seat and elbows the cop right in his ear, hard and pointy, and she grabs the wheel and jerks it to the right BANG the car hits the thick and high and shaggy Mexican fan palm–a coconut drops on the hood–and his face bashes into the steering wheel. Nose shatters, blood everywhere, and Sheila is screaming at Tiresias as she is already over the front seat entirely and the passenger door open. She turns around and Tiresias is yelling WHAT THE FUCK but also forcing herself into the front of the car with her hands behind her; Sheila grabs her under the armpits and puuuuuulls and now they are out of the Dodge, but Sheila goes back for the Halliburton briefcase and her purse and also the bagged-up gun that Mel Ditch had killed Lynn Danube with and gotten their fingerprints all over.

When Rudyard Kipling wrote about keeping your wits about you, he might have been writing about Sheila.

Tiresias was still handcuffed behind her back, and her shoes were still in the cop’s car, so she sprint-waddled barefooted besides Sheila in her yellow Converse. Through a parking lot and south down the alley until they found a fenceless gap and they were in a backyard of a low-slung adobe cottage. There was a shed made from cheap aluminum. They hid behind it, knelt down, were silent for a moment.

“What the fuck, Sheel?”

“You did so good, Tirry. I love you.”

Sheila made a sound MWAH while she dug through her purse.

“Are we fugitives now?”

“Turn around,” Sheila said, holding up a small silver key. Tiresias wobbled until her back was to Sheila, click clack, and then she rubbed her wrists just like everyone does in the movies.

“Why do you have a handcuff key?”

“Because I needed one once and didn’t have one.”

“You’re so self-sufficient. Wait, your purse was in the front seat. How’d you get out of your cuffs?”

“I’m double-jointed. I’ve shown you.”

Sheila folded her hand in half, and Tiresias pretended to vomit.

“God, that’s disgusting.”

“We need to concentrate.”

“Right. Do we have any coke left?”

Sheila did not take Tiresias by her shoulders and shake her vigorously, but not from lack of desire.

“No, but I need a smoke.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Sheila dug around in her satchel-sized purse again, came up with the crumpled soft pack of Camels, fetched two. More digging. Plastic green lighter. Both smokes in her mouth. FFT. PHWOO. Tiresias snatched the one closest, and they both sat with their backs against the shed.

“Debonair.”

“I saw it in a movie.”

Crickets sang and bats plucked moths from the air.

“Why did you do that?”

“He was gonna shoot us,” Sheila said PHWOO and ashed her cigarette with a shaking hand.

“How do you know?”

She thought about telling Tiresias about her neck, about the burning that started before trouble, and then she didn’t. There’s two types of people in the world: those who have been punched very hard in the face, and those who haven’t.

“I just know. Trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“Good. Cuz we gotta get out of here,” Sheila said, and stubbed out her Camel. “Right the fuck now.”

“Should we get the car?”

“Absolutely not.”

“All my clothes are in the trunk.”

Sheila now took Tiresias by the shoulders and shook her vigorously.

“We need to get the fuck out of here, Tirry.”

CHIK-CHAK is the sound of a shotgun which is like the sound of a rattlesnake or a snapping twig outside the campfire’s light: instantly identifiable, primordial. A shotgun racking is a non-negotiable sound. Especially when it is right over your head, and amplified by the aluminum wall of the shed you are leaning against. On the other end of the barrel was a gangly fellow with sleepy eyes.

“Too late for that,” he said.

The women raised their arms above their heads in a backyard in Los Angeles, which is so far from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Certain lives are preferable to others. If you have any choice at all, be the maharaja. Even better, be the maharaja’s second son: none of the responsibilities, but semi-clad women still feed you grapes. Or a fashion model who goes back to school and becomes an astronaut. The world would be intimidated of you both sexually and intellectually; that’s the best of both worlds right there. The patrician life is not morally superior to the that of the pleb, but Christ it’s a lot easier.

This applies to cats, as well. Street cats got their freedom, but all cats got their freedom because freedom’s just another word for violently demanding one’s independence. House cat’s just as liberated as a street cat, but a lot warmer in the winter and drier in the rain. Not to mention the food. The only thing finer than being a well-off house cat was being a bookstore cat.

A bookstore had everything a cat needed: shelves, and books to push off the shelves, and high vantages and low blinds, and sunbeams scoped and searched across the floor like high-security laser beams in a heist film; there was always a toasty corner. People, too. Preoccupied and side-stepping down the aisles with their heads lolled to the side: what fun it was to sit frozen until they were in range, claw at their ankles, bat at their noses THWOPTHWOPTHWOP and make them go running. And the mice. O, the mice. They’re fubsy, cats are, until you watch one with a mouse.

If a dog weighed 500 pounds, it would still be your friend; if a cat weighed 500 pounds, it would be a tiger.

This particular bookstore cat was a black-and-gray tortoiseshell that didn’t have a name, which didn’t stop customers from calling her all sorts of things. She was Lovey to Mrs. Dalrymple, who came in for romance novels, and Chief to Mr. Cranworth, who liked military history; most of the students from Harper College called her Dude. She didn’t answer to any of them.

“How can she not have a name?”

“The same way she doesn’t have a savings account: she is a cat.”

Mr. Venable was in his customary seat in the bookstore with no title trying to read Kill Me Like You Did Before by Crenshaw Walls. His feet were on the mess-covered table he used as a desk, and he was leaning back in his green-upholstered chair that only had a little bit of duct tape holding its innards in place. Hard-boiled fiction: guns, dames, unexpected corpses, wealthy old bastards, ingenues, The Los Angeles that never used to be. Sentences so short and punchy they made Hemingway look like E.L. Doctorow. He was having trouble keeping his double-crosses straight, and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, was not helping his concentration.

“It’s animal cruelty.”

“Ludicrous.”

“Everyone has a right to a name.”

“Bosh. Next, you’ll say everyone has a right to vote. Why are you pestering me?”

Gussy was neatening the tables. There were two, square, eight on a side, covered with stacks of books. Varying heights; they looked like topographical maps of great twin cities with no parks. They were always themed, and rarely just fiction and non. Boring, Mr. Venable thought. One table written by colonizers and the other by the colonized. Men and women. Straight and gay. (Although he was thinking about discontinuing the last one, as it always started arguments, mostly because he would always stick Mark Twain on the gay table.) This month was heroes and villains.

“Why is there a Churchill biography on the villain table?”

“Ask the Bengalis.”

“Okay, but why is there a different Churchill bio on the hero table?”

“Ask the British.”

“Are you going to be like this all day?”

“Ask your tee-shirt.”

Gussy was wearing a light-blue Downsider tee-shirt. There he was, all nine black and leathery feet of him and already slightly flaking around the edges of the cheap silk-screen. It was the image from the front page of the Cenotaph with the ripped-from-the-ground park bench above his head. Half of the neighborhood were wearing the shirts, and the other half was selling them, along with genuine Downsider masks, capes, whomping staves, and flamethrowers. (No one had yet seen the Downsider wield a flamethrower, but the large gentlemen that hung out at Cagliostro’s had recently come into possession of a truckload of the fiery weapons and, looking for a way to get rid of them, had slapped some hastily-made stickers which read DOWSIDER [sic] on the side. They sold like really, really hot cakes.) You could also buy your kid an action figure that almost sort of mostly looked like him (five bucks) or a limited-edition articulated sculpture for collectors (fifteen, and it was exactly the same product as the action figure but it came in a cardboard box).

She gathered up the fabric around the cloaked face, made it into a cotton (supposedly) mouth, addressed her the vigilante on her chest.

“Is Grumpypants gonne be grumpy all day?”

Then, affecting a deep and growly voice, said,

“Probably. Should I hit him with this bench?”

Back to her usual timbre.

“Oh, God, would you?”

Deep and growly.

“In the head?”

Normal.

“Absolutely. But don’t neglect the body. Work the body.”

“Both of you are fired,” Mr. Venable said

Gussy went back to the stacks on the tables. She had straightened them twice that morning, and no one had come in, but they were still out-of-kilter. She suspected Mr. Venable was doing it while she wasn’t looking, but then remembered that the Tedious Books About Baseball section had followed her home and asked her out the other night. Best not to throw around accusations too quickly in a magickal bookstore.

(The shop had its own categorization system that some would define as “needlessly ultra-specific” and Mr. Venable would define as “that’s where the books go.” There was a whole annex dedicated to Sports; it was subdivided into Sports, Normal; Sports, Foreign; Sports, Unpleasant; and Sports, Unpracticed. The section on baseball was bifurcated into Tolerable Books About Baseball and Tedious Books About Baseball, and contained shelves marked Biographies, True; Biographies, Al Stump; Brothers, Alou; and The Ones With All The Math.)

“He literally saved us from a mugger,” she said

“Muggings are the price you pay for sidewalks. He beat that boy half to death.”

“Beat that criminal half to death.”

“We’re all criminals. Ask the Pulaski.”

“They lived right here. Right under us,” Iffy Bould said. “The village, I mean. They lived in tepees, but they didn’t call ’em tepees. Botchas or something. But, you know: cone-shaped. The rest of the neighborhood was valley and woods and nature and shit. But where you’re standing? That’s where they slept.”

“Shouldn’t it be a historical site or something?”

“Probably, but someone built a newspaper building on top of it. Hit that light, wouldja?

Lolly Tangiers had on a Downsider tee-shirt, too, but hers was hidden under a red western-style blouse that had white piping outlining the seams. When she first saw the shirts popping up on chests, she was pissed at the theft. It was her picture, goddammit; she had taken the shot emblazoned across half the tits and pecs in Little Aleppo and surely she was entitled to some sort of royalty, but couldn’t quite figure out who to send the invoice to. In the meanwhile, she bought herself a shirt. Might as well be proud if paid is out of the question, she thought.

The light switch was a lever, ten inches long and naked metal that went CHANK when you wrestled it upwards; the lights went on TAK TAK TAK plosh (the lightbulb blew) TAK in the Cenotaph’s basement where the archives were kept.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Never been down here before?”

The room was three times the size of the building above, maybe more, and it thrummed because the printing presses were spitting out that weekend’s circular. Rickety metal shelving in just-about-straight lines. Ladder in the corner. Tables with lamps lining the walls, but not enough chairs. Cigarette butts on the bare concrete floor. Cardboard boxes and the stink of Sharpie marker. The temperature was at the outer boundary of chilly: two degrees or so less and it would be cold.

“It’s a bit spartan.”

“You were expecting reading chairs and foot massages?”

“Carpet,” Lolly said. “I was expecting carpet.”

“Your generation’s soft.”

Iffy walked away from her. He was duck-footed and had rolled the sleeves of his pale-yellow shirt up. Stopped at a row of shelves and called back,

“Read me that first date.”

Lolly took the reporter’s notebook from her back pocket, flipped it open.

“November or December of ’21.”

He walked down the aisle, and she scampered after. When she caught up with him, he was putting a Kool in his mouth; she snatched it away.

“We’re in a room full of old newspapers with only one exit.”

His jaw was on his chest, eyes fiery.

“You’re shitting me.”

She chucked her chin out towards him.

“I don’t shit.”

“Do you wanna rephrase that?”

“No, I do not.”

Ever see a child who’s been separated from their parents smile upon their return? Huge and innocent and gleeful? Iffy’s smile was the opposite of that: tiny and cynical and vengeful. His lip moved a bit, that’s it, but it was big for Iffy. Lolly took the green soft pack from his shirt pocket, replaced the smoke, replaced the pack. Thought about patting it once or twice, but figured she shouldn’t press her luck.

“Never be afraid to chase a story into the bathroom,” he said, returning his attention to the shelved boxes. He grabbed one out, read the glyphs written in faded marker, snuffed disappointed air out his nostrils, slid the box back, went on to the next one. “People are more honest when they’re on the toilet. Maybe it’s the air on their balls.”

“You follow people you want to interview into the bathroom?”

“Sure, yeah. Better than that is to wait in the john for ’em. That way you can sabotage the toilet paper. Leave all the stalls with just the dregs of the roll. Not enough to  wipe your ass, but enough so that they don’t notice until it’s too late. Then you can trade answers for two-ply.”

“Is that ethical?”

“Depends on who’s in charge of the ethics committee. Ah, here we go.”

Iffy pulled a newspaper from the box; it was in a plastic bag like a giant leftover pork chop. Showed the front page to Lolly. 36-point headline.

WHO IS THE GENTLEMAN?

“I don’t know. Who?”

“You didn’t think this was the first time Little Aleppo had a costumed vigilante, did you?”

He tossed the sixty-year-old broadsheet to her, and Lolly held it up in the light so she could see through the almost-clear mylar. There was a blurry photo of a large man in a trenchcoat, hat, and gloves; eyes in shadows, but she could see something under the brim of the fedora.

“Is that one of those burglar masks?”

“Domino mask. Yeah, apparently.”

“Doesn’t really hide his identity.”

“Nah. Also, that was a Town Father. Guy named Leonard Locke. Everyone knew who he was pretty much the first day he started fighting crime. And by ‘fighting crime,’ I mostly mean beating up ethnics.”

“Why’d they call him the Gentleman?”

“He would leave his calling card. Said ‘Courtesy of the Gentleman.'”

“He who has a thing to sell, and goes and whispers in a well, is not as apt to make a dollar, as he who climbs a tree and hollers.”

Iffy half-turned, half-smiled.

“I think I read that on a sugar packet.”

“I know I did,” Lolly said. “What happened to him?”

“Got shot right in his little mask.”

“Domino mask.”

“Yeah. And that was the end of that.”

“Plep.”

“Off! You have an entire bookstore at your disposal! Why must you lie upon the page I’m trying to read?”

“Mlaaaaargh,” the tortoiseshell cat with no name complained; Mr. Venable swatted at her behind (lightly) and she did not stir for just long enough to let him know that, when she did vacate her spot atop the opened hardcover, it was solely of her own free will. She padded across the table to Gussy, paused for scritchy-scratches right above her eyebrows, leapt silently to the floor and off into the rows of books.

“She knows what she’s doing.”

“Someone in here should,” Gussy said.

“May I continue?”

“Please.”

“After the Gentleman was a sizable gap. Everyone was having too much fun in the Twenties, and too broke in the Thirties for any sort of extra-lawful heroics. Luckily, along came the Forties.”

“No one’s ever said that about that decade.”

“The Second World War Two was one of the very best things to ever happen to Little Aleppo, First of all, the neighborhood was at no time located in Europe or Asia.”

“Good decision.”

“None better has been made! Always keep at least an ocean in between yourself and a war. If you can keep an ocean and an entire continent, all the safer. There are hundreds of neighborhoods which made the poor choice to be located in Berlin or Nanking, and look what happened to them. Shoddy planning is what that is.”

Gussy rolled her eyes and sipped her terrible coffee from a white mug that read HARPER ZOO: WHERE ANIMALS ARE. There was a cartoon under the logo of an elephant with a dog riding atop her head.

“Second of all, the harbor. This is one of the spots on the West Coast from which the war effort shipped itself towards Japan. Cargo and men. Both issued forth from the Salt Wharf, and both were taxed quite viciously.”

“That’s not very patriotic.”

Now he sipped his terrible coffee from a blue mug with HARPER OBSERVATORY: WHERE THE STARS SHINE etched above a drawing of the Observatory, which was the exact shape of the White House, but bigger and with a giant telescope sticking out from where the Truman Balcony should be.

“The business of America is business, Gussy.”

“Is there a guy in a costume punching criminals or not?”

He turned the page of the folio-sized book on the table in front of them. It was a special collection the Cenotaph had done in 1981 with every single front page going back to the 1850’s, one after the other, in living black-and-white. Only 100 were printed, and Mr. Venable had around two dozen of them in various sections all around the shop. (One was in History and one was in Fancy Reprintings and one was in Will Not Fit In Your Bookcase and so on.)

THE ADMIRAL OF ALEPPO
STRIKES AGAIN!

Another blurry photo, another large man in a costume: Navy whites, with the Gilligan hat and the scarf that made it seem a musical number was about to break out. And a domino mask.

“Not as good as the Gentleman.”

“Mm.”

“Name’s awful, bad outfit.”

“But he was a patriot, Gus. We were at war with the Japanese, and so the Admiral of Aleppo would go to Chinatown and beat people up.”

“China and Japan are two entirely diff–”

“Best not to think too deeply about it. The past was so much stupider than you can ever imagine. Besides, all the Japanese in the neighborhood had been interned by then.”

“Best not to think too deeply about it.”

He held up his mug and she clinked hers against it.

“He lasted longer than the Gentleman, at any rate. Almost the whole war.”

“What happened to him?”

“No one knows for certain, but multiple vaguely-reputable accounts have him accosting a group of men he believed to be Japanese spies who were actually members of the 442nd Infantry. That would be the Nisei Division, and those men took remarkably little shit.”

“They ever find the Admiral?”

“Not a single scrap.”

Gussy scooched Mr. Venable out of the way with her hip; the wheels of his chair squeaked on the wooden floor. She peered.

“You can see his whole face.”

“Mm. Sanford Stone. Professor over at Harper. You’ll never guess what he taught.”

“Law?”

“Huh. You guessed. Gussy, you are much more intelligent than you look, I must admit.”

She slapped her hip against the arm of the chair and he went sliding away several feet.

“I don’t suppose that’s it?”

“Have you ever known Little Aleppians to only try a bad idea twice?”

“If…wait…if everyone knew who these guys were, then why didn’t they do anything about it?”

“They always skedaddled before the cops got there,” Iffy answered. “There wasn’t any forensic evidence or any of that crap back then, so the cops would have to catch them red-handed and they didn’t seem interested. Maybe if they were punching rich people. But, you know, the guys denied it. Here it is.”

Iffy and Lolly were surrounded by boxes marked 1968 and it was very cool in the basement of the Braunce Building. It was the sort of space that seemed to require a keeper, but they were alone to sort through the loose archives and on the honor system when it came to returning their finds to their proper position. Newspapers only make sense in order. They’re not like novels; you can’t mix up all the stories because you feel like being an artist. He pulled a box from the shelf, opened it, extracted a paper.

Lolly took it from him, read out loud.

The Silent Majority Makes
Himself Heard!

“That’s terrible,” she said.

“The headline? Yeah. Goose wouldn’t let that go out.”

Lolly scanned the first few grafs of the lead story.

“He beats up hippies?”

“And negroes.”

In the artwork on the front page of the two-decade old Cenotaph, The Silent Majority was wearing a gray flannel suit and Trilby, with the inevitable domino mask.

“He looks familiar.”

“It’s Trusted Meese.”

“From the news?”

She squinted in real close.

“Holy shit, it’s the guy from the news. What the fuck?”

“Eh. No one really knows. He was going through a divorce. He only kept it up for a year. He quit because he hurt his knee. Or he started dating again. One of those.”

“But everyone knew who it was?”

“Yeah.”

“Did we print the story?”

“No.”

“Why the fuck not?”

Iffy blinked twice, three times at her; he wanted to light a cigarette but knew that she would yank the butt from his hand again, and he could not take that, so he just ran his fingers through his gray hair.

“C’mere,” he said, and plunged into the basement. Walking quickly and duck-footed, the days flitting past him, headline after headline promising the world’s end and coupons for 20% off take-out orders at Cagliostro’s. When they got to the northwest corner of the room, he stopped and so did she. There were no shelves and no boxes and no stories and no bylines, just a blank patch of ground that was a different shade of slate than the rest of the concrete flooring.

“See that? For years, everyone in the neighborhood knew that this building was on top of the old Pulaski village. Everyone knew. But we never printed the story. You know why?”

“No.”

“No facts. No evidence. So one day, the guy who taught me everything I know, guy named Ronkowicz, he comes down here real late at night with some archaeology students from Harper and a jackhammer. Didn’t have to dig down too far. Found the remains of the hotchas, or watchas, or whatever they were called. And then–then–he wrote the story. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“Just because something’s true doesn’t mean you can print it.”

They walked up the two flights to the newsroom in silence, and as they entered the buzzing floor she said,

“What do we need all these papers for?”

“You’re gonna write up a local history of these idiots. Put the new one in context.”

Lolly’s ears reddened and she said,

“I’m gonna write it?”

“Yeah. Your first byline?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t fuck it up. You got an hour.”

But the buzzing was odd, not the usual clackety racket–in fact, there was no typing at all–but a gargling gladhanding and cheery nonsense spouted through forced smiles; it was happy, too happy. Iffy and Lolly searched the newsroom for the cause of the glitch and there he was: Shit Salad. He was standing twenty feet from them with a crowd around him.

“Who’s that?”

“Your boss,” he said. “Little Big Pete Braunce III, owner of the Cenotaph. Also known as Shit Salad, but not to his face,”

“Why is he called that?”

“Dumb as shit salad, and just as unwelcome.”

“Uh-huh. Big guy.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, enormous. Notably large.”

“Right, yeah. Big boy.”

“Hell of a chin.”

“I guess, sure.”

Iffy pulled his soft pack of Kools from his shirt pocket and did not look at Lolly at all, just straight at Shit Salad. He sucked a smoke from the pack with just his lips and dug around in his pants for his matches.

“Can you see his knuckles?”

He found the matches, peeled one off, lit it FFT.

“Yeah, I can see his…”

Shit Salad’s knuckles were bruised and cut up as though he had been in a fight or several.

Iffy’s cigarette dangled from his mouth and the lit match floated halfway to its target.

“Shit.”

“Shit Salad,” Lolly answered.

Iffy’s match finally resumed its journey and reached its destination PHWOO he shook it out, and tossed it in the general direction of an ashtray on the desk next to him as the headlines went around and around in circles even though the rules said they could only march in straight lines in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

There used to be trolleys in Los Angeles, like there were in San Francisco or Brooklyn, but they got in the way of the cars (the automobile industry insisted) and so all the tracks were ripped up in the late ’40’s and now everyone drives. Accountants in Chryslers, and crooked accountants in Cadillacs; the suspiciously jobless in Beemers; teevee actors getting sucked off in Volkswagens on Pico; pot-dealing guitarists in jeeps; tennis coaches in Suburus.

And cruising east towards Hollywood on Sunset was a hairdresser and a horror host in a 1961 Lincoln Continental. Triple-black convertible with the roof down.

“Let’s go to the Polo Lounge.”

“We gotta go kill this chick first.”

“Sheel, I’m huuuuuuungry,” Tiresias Richardson said.

“You should’ve gotten food at the Mexican place,” Big-Dicked Sheila answered.

“We already had tacos today. I can’t eat Mexican twice in one day.”

“Why not? Mexicans do.”

“Is the Brown Derby still open?”

“I have no idea. We’re going to whatsherface’s first.”

Tiresias picked up the Halliburton briefcase from in between her and Sheila, set it on her lap, KACHACK the latches. Papers and photos inside. She swirls, lifts up corners, flips over and back, finds the sheet she’s looking for. A4 sizing, off-white, thick and marbled and begging for ink: rich people paper.

“Lynn Danube.”

“Is that her name?

She took a glossy black and white photo from the ‘case, held it up close to Sheila’s face so so she could see it. Blonde in her 20’s. Same nose job as every other blonde in her 20’s in Los Angeles. Dimples, and you could tell from her neck that she did ballet growing up. She looked like the woman Tiresias and Sheila had just left, but a dozen pilot seasons younger.

“This Buttermilk guy’s got a type,” Sheila said.

“Don’t we all?”

“I don’t.”

“Your type is ‘present,’ you slut.”

The sky was coming up on evening and the sun was going down into the Pacific; the parking meters threw skinny shadows down the sidewalk and grotty teens skateboarded like their dicks were on fire. They passed rumbling gas stations, and there were billboards with titties all over them. Liquor stores that, by virtue of celebrity patronage, had taken on a shine and become junctions for ley lines. The women were on the Strip again and dead Rock Stars were everywhere, dead Movie Stars, too, and even dead Teevee Stars, but no one really cared about dead Teevee Stars and so they were fuzzy and indistinct. Youth riots and teen idols and Tower Records and dingbat apartments branching off left and right.

And there was the Rock and Roll dry cleaners. They could get vomit out of leather pants. There was the Rock and Roll supermarket where starlets hissed at the lobsters–they were natural enemies, after all–and Alice Cooper had once vomited into the apple display. They were granny smiths, and he felt awful about it. Rock and Roll diners, too, with guitars and teal (always with the fucking teal) Cadillac asses nailed to the wall.

“I hate those fucking places.”

“’50’s diners?”

“Choose a new decade already, diners,” Sheila said.”We’ve seen what the diner from the 1950’s looks like. How about an 1890’s diner?”

“I think that’s Cracker Barrel.”

“’60’s, then.”

“Ooh, yeah, okay. We could put the waitresses in the cutest little mini-skirts and name all the dishes after groovy hippie stuff. We should do it.”

“What?”

Tiresias snatched her hands into Sheila’s enormous purse, came out with the pack of Camels, lighter, FFT, PHEW she placed that one between her lips, held barely before them so Sheila had to come forward for it, and then she repeated the ritual. The top was down, but it was the top of a Lincoln, which stands for luxury and had demanded of its engineers that passengers be able to light their cigarette lighters with the top down  at up to 70 mph.

“Open a diner. Solid work. Something for when the roles dry up, which is last year. Look at me. I’m 27.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“And I shake my tits in between crappy movies in the middle of the night on a crappy station in a crappy neighborhood. I trained! I trained, dammit. You know what acting is?”

“A craft,” Sheila said flatly.

(This was tantrum #4. Tiresias only had six in her arsenal: #1 was money, 2 was “someone’s sneaking in here in and taking in the Draculette costume,” 3 was “general family,” 4 was the artist bullshit, 5 was “saw a picture of herself,” and #6 was the perennial “friend’s success.”)

“Yes! And it has done me no good. if I had a time machine, I’d go back to when I was a kid, yank me out of that high school play, and get myself addicted to heroin. My time would have been better spent on heroin than on acting.”

“A lot of people do both at the same time.”

Tiresias was not letting any facts into her tantrum, and ignored her.

“That’s what I’ll do. When I fail here…again…we’ll go back home and I’ll learn to do heroin. Do we know any junkies?”

“Like, a dozen.”

“Great. That’s a plan. Quit acting; start shooting up.”

“You’re going straight to the needle?”

“Fuck, yeah. I’ll stick it in my eyeball. I’m hardcore. AAAAHahaha!”

Tiresias’ tantrums were Florida rains: they came on fast and thick, and left no trace in minutes’ time.

A boy on the side of the road sold oranges, maps to the stars, alibis. There was a novel set in that record store, and at least a dozen songs about that hotel. Nothing here was fungible: it was the Sunset Strip, man, and so therefore purposeful and sui the fucking generisest; the post office had intent, not like your suburban shack with the ugly employees. This was the post office on the Sunset Strip. It was cool.

“Think about it this way, sweetie. We’ve been in town six hours and we’re up twenty grand.”

“Yuh-huh, but I’m also thinking about the felonies.”

“What felonies?”

“We conspired to commit murder. Twice.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t do anything.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s conspiracy. Totally a crime.”

“No, it’s a ‘No blood, no foul’ sort of thing. Sweetie, I’ve dated a bunch of lawyers; I’m sure about this.”

“Well, I played a lawyer, so I overrule you. That’s a legal term. As opposed to ‘No blood, no foul.'”

“Who’d you play?”

“We did an experimental version of Inherit The Wind. I played the Spencer Tracy part.”

“Experimental?”

“We took our clothes off,” Tiresias said.

“If you didn’t have the proper education, you might think experimental theater is all a great big scam for directors to get hot, young actors naked.”

“Thank God I have my degree. But, yeah, we’ve already done enough shit to go jail forever. Plus you have an unregistered firearm in your purse.”

“I have two unregistered firearms in my purse.”

“That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. We don’t know the cops here. I’m not a world-famous celebrity here, and you’re not a neighborhood institution. We need to maintain a low profile.”

The two beautiful women in the enormous antique convertible rumbled down Sunset.

“Low for us. As low as we can manage,” Tiresias said.

“A neighborhood institution? That makes me sound ancient.”

“I meant your importance. You’re the straw that stirs the drink. And you’re the straw that sniffs the coke. You’re all the straws.”

“You’re so sweet.”

“Yeah.”

They were out of the Strip now, and the dirt wasn’t anything special anymore, just dirt, and the road widened as they headed east and passed only-accessible-by-escalator gyms, and third-place comedy clubs, and pancake places with signs featuring cartoon pigs in cartoon toques cracking eggs into a skillet–there was already bacon in the skillet–and the Zankou Chicken joint, and an optometrist’s shop that was always open but no one ever went in or out of.

“Hang a right across from Guitar Center,” Tiresias said.

“Look at the size of it.”

“Well, it’s the center. It’s not Guitar Distant Outpost.”

“We should start a band.”

“Yes! Yes, we should start a fucking band!”

Sheila pointed the Continental down North Gardener Street and there was no more custom, no more trade, just apartments interlaced with dinky cottages and all the windows had muscular bars on their outside. There was slant parking, so all the Toyotas and Hondas and Fords and Chevys abutted the curb at a 45 degree angle.

“We’re not getting paid on this one, I don’t think,” Tiresias said.

“What was the address again?”

“1200 North Gardner, #6.”

“Number six? Yeah, this bitch is broke.”

The Continental crawled along. Tiresias saw Sheila squinting out her window and trying to make out the house numbers; she reached over and ruffled her short, black hair.

“You’re adorable.”

“What?”

“I love that you try.”

“Be quiet while I’m trying to see.”

“Should I change for this?”

Tiresias was still in her FBI Agent drag, the slim black suit with the slicked-back hair, but she had taken of her heels and had her bare feet up on the dash.

“You look hot as fuck.”

“Oh, thank you. And: yeah, totally.”

“Nah, you’re golden. Just don’t wear the sunglasses.”

“Of course I’m not gonna wear the sunglasses; it’s almost dark. We can’t both be blind.”

“I can see fine!” Sheila yelled, as she rolled through the stop sign.

“Uh-huh.”

Tiresias leaned out her window.

“1209. 1207,” she said, and withdrew into the car and up on her knees on the leather bench seat to poke her head upwards like a prairie dog, and she pointed across the street. “There it is.”

Sheila grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back down.

“What happened to low profile?” she hissed.

“I got excited. Sheel, I’m so hungry.”

U-Turn. Parking spot. Lights off, but not the engine. Automatic roof on a 1961 Lincoln Continental. It went GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR and then stopped halfway; Sheila climbed over the seat, ass waggling skywards, to WHAMP WHAMP WHAMP on the spot Precarious showed her to whamp on when the roof got stuck and it GRRRRRRRRRRR made the rest of its journey. Sheila slid back into the driver’s seat and did not look at Tiresias.

“What happened to low profile?”

Sheila continued not looking at Tiresias and said,

“We’re gonna sit here for a minute. See what’s going on. Maybe it’s a setup.”

“You’re so smart.”

The cocaine, what was left of the stamp-sized baggie, came out of her jacket’s inside pocket and she made a fist, sprinkled a bitty pile on the flat table made by the top of her fist. Tiresias had always thought, If God did not want us to do cocaine, then why would our hands be shaped that way? And, you know, why did He make the cocaine in the first place? SHNARF. The handoff, the pile, FNORF, Sheila licked at her thumb.

They peered.

“What are we looking for?”

“Anything out of the ordinary,” Sheila said.

“We don’t live here. How would we know what was ordinary?”

“I don’t know. What about that guy?”

An old man in a red, white, and blue track suit was walking a terrier.

“Uncle Sam? You think he’s a cop?”

“I don’t know. Go see if he’ll take a bribe.”

Tiresias slapped her hand on the briefcase in between them and opened up her door.

“That’s enough. Let’s go. We’re telling this chick her boyfriend’s wife is trying to have her murdered, show her the evidence, and then we get something to fucking eat. I don’t wanna be a professional assassin anymore. At least not today.”

Sheila shouldered her enormous purse and got out of the car without a word. Tiresias met her on the sidewalk carrying the Halliburton. They checked each other’s teeth and nostrils for debris and walked up the pavement.

They passed a nondescript sedan.

1200 North Gardner was a rectangular building, short side facing the street, two stories, and fronted by a head-high white wall topped with brick that enclosed the front two units’ gardens. The gate was wrought iron and ajar, and the women passed through it. In her heels, Tiresias was exactly a foot taller than Sheila (in her yellow Converse). Gated-in grass on either side, lawn chairs, a barbecue sphere. The wire mesh door was propped open, and behind it was an arched hallway. They could see all the way through it to the one-car semi-enclosed garage behind, and that there were three doors on each wall.

Tiresias went for the intercom, but Sheila grabbed her wrist.

“Who were you going to say you were?”

“Land shark?”

“We’ll knock,” Sheila said. The carpet on the floor was thin, but clean and unscarred. The doors were thick and wooden, and there was a little cage at eye level that protected the peephole, which opened inward like a wee fairy portal. Kept weirdos from reaching in and grabbing your face. The cages were highly susceptible to gas attacks, though, which is why no one in Little Aleppo use them any more. Safety is further compromised when the door has been left ajar, which #6 was.

The women stood at the doorway. Tiresias poked her head out back into the semi-enclosed one-car garage, looked both ways, at Sheila, shrugged.

“Knock knock!”

“Helloooooo?”

Both of them began rapping on the dark-brown door, and it glid open.

“Liz!?”

“Lynn.”

“Lynn!?

The lights were off in the apartment, but it was still softly purple outside and they could see the room: there was a couch from the thrift store and a brand-new teevee. Foreign movie posters framed on the walls. A vision board. Tiresias leaned in, and then Sheila, and then they were standing in the living room. The kitchen was off to the left, and so were the stairs.

“It smells nice in here,” Tiresias said.

“She doesn’t smoke.”

“Nah, she murders old rich guy’s wives and takes their places.”

“Yeah, that’s wrong, but it doesn’t smell up the place.”

“Look how many scripts this bitch has!”

Tiresias strode over to a table piled high with thin screenplays with red covers.

“Is she going in on all of these?”

“Tirry, focus.”

She grabbed the top script and jammed it into Sheila’s purse, who slapped at her hand.

“It’s got her agent’s information on it. I’m calling that motherfucker.”

Sheila spent the first chunk of her life getting her ass kicked. She was different; people are cruel, and she was small. She learned to smell the situation turning, like meat going from cooked to burned. Her neck got hot. She did not know why, precisely, it was her throat but the sudden prickly heat had never been wrong. On occasion, she had not trusted the feeling or downplayed its warning; she had always paid for it. Her neck was on fire.

“Tirry, we need to leave.”

“You needed to not come in at all, ma’am,” came the deep voice from behind them, and then the door with the cage over the peephole SLAMMED shut; the women turned around and there was a man, thick across the shoulders and thin up top, standing there. Gray sport coat, and clean-shaven. Haircut that would walk a little old lady across the street.

The man tossed an object to Sheila, who didn’t see him doing it and so flailed out at it  and batted it into the air, where Tiresias snatched it with her free hand. It was a .22 pistol. She stood with the gun and the briefcase in the middle of the living room and said,

“What the fuck?”

Sheila said,

“Shit.”

The man said,

“Yup.”

“Lynn’s dead upstairs, isn’t she?”

“Oh, yeah,” the man said.

“And you’re framing us for it?”

“Also right.”

“Any other fun facts?”

The man reached inside his sport coat and pulled out a leather wallet, flipped it open. Big shiny badge with a big shiny building on it. Off in the distance were sirens, and they were getting closer, and both women suddenly felt very far away from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

A dog was better than a rifle in the mountains, at least for protection. Best defense in the whole world is to make your opponent fear you enough to leave you alone. Walls, moats, armor: these are all reactive contraptions that can be overcome, but your enemy running the other direction when they see you is a winner every time. None of the animals in what would later be called the Segovian Hills wanted anything to do with a dog, especially not a hundred-pound growly beast like Black Eyes. She was a working dog, she was a hunting dog; she got mean when she went into the woods. That was where the killing was done. In the village, she was mellow and curious; that was where the eating was done.

But she was in nature now, she was where she treed and harried black bears, where she ran down deer only wounded by the hunter’s arrow or bullet, and ornery. Her fellow animals could sense this, and gave her and the two men she accompanied a wide berth. A puma does not recognize a rifle, but it can smell a pissed-off dog from three miles away. Black Eyes marked trees as she went by. Humans would describe the scent of the markings as “dog urine,” but animals could translate the complex hormones and pheromones: I dare you. I fucking dare you to try me. No creature did.

Which was good, because the Pulaski name for what would later be called the Segovian Hills was Jesus Christ, don’t go up there; there’s squatch up there. 

“Was there any decoration on the cave walls?”

“No. I don’t think so. It was dark. Why are you asking this?”

“I wanna know how smart they are,” Talks To Whites said.

“Plenty smart. I mean, one kidnapped me,” Cannot Swim said.

“Cats do that. They bring their prey back to somewhere it’s safe to eat. And, shit, squirrels do that, too.”

“Don’t compare me to an acorn.”

“You should be thrilled to be compared to an acorn. Acorn’s gonna grow into a mighty oak one day. You? You’re the guy who nearly got eaten by a monster.”

It was still very early in the morning. The light was fresh and everywhere, and colors were so very much themselves and bouncing off the dew still mounting the ridgeline. The pass through the mountains was in between the fourth and fifth peaks (if you’re looking at the range from the neighborhood), and so the cousins and the dog had decided to ascend the northern face of the fourth hill, then cut around when they hit the level of the pass. Easier to be sneaky on a horizontal plane, Cannot Swim figured. They walked quietly. There was no path, so they watched their feet as they walked, and paused often to listen. The chaparral was thick in places, but the men were wearing the leggings that the hunters wore, which were not pants, but rugged deerskin tied individually around each leg. They weren’t particularly comfortable, but the poison ivy, needleberries, and Sackett Weed lining the slopes were worse. (The Sackett Weed, named after longtime Chairman Emeritus of the Harper College Botany Department Angler Sackett, grows exclusively on the second, third and sixth of the Segovian Hills. Resembling a long grass, the Sackett Weed produces welts upon contact, plus causes a drastic reduction in vocabulary. Hours after handling the plant in lab tests, subjects were still pointing and grunting.)

“They are smarter than the other beasts. It mimicked me. That’s a sign of intelligence. Ever see a bear do that?”

“I have seen very few bears, cousin.”

“They don’t do that.”

“But did they draw on the walls?”

“Why?”

“Creating art is pretty high-level thinking.”

“Good for art. I didn’t look. It was dark, and I was about to be eaten.”

Black Eyes got her name from the strap of dark fur that crossed her face like a burglar’s mask; mostly, she was gray. Her shoulders came up to the waist of the tallest men in the village, and her snout was long with a few white hairs in it. Her ears were big, prickish, upright, and the left one had a chunk missing. Must have been a bear, Cannot Swim thought. Nothing less than a bear could put a dent into Black Eyes. She walked point. Sometimes the men were single-file, and sometimes they walked abreast, but the dog took point. It was easier for her to slide through the vegetation, anyway. Her thick head scanned the ground, the sky, the future. She pissed on bushes. There were squirrels and chipmunks, and she wanted desperately to chase them, snatch them, eat them, but she didn’t.

They came to their hidey-hole, a natural blind created when a tree collapsed onto a boulder. The bushes and vines and grasses had filled in the negative space that was left, and the two Pulaski men and the one Pulaski dog took a knee behind it. The White was back on the pass with his doodads. The Blacks were with him.

“Should we just walk out there?”

“What other options are there?”

“I dunno,” Cannot Swim said. He was a crack shot, and could dress a deer faster and cleaner than any of the other hunters. He was a good friend, and had been a good son all his life; he was kind and attentive to his wife; he would make a fine father. A few seasons ago, he had grown an 80-pound pumpkin. He could do a backflip from a standing position. Cannot Swim could not do intercultural negotiations.

“We chat him up,” Talks To Whites said.

“‘Chat him up?’ What does that mean?”

“Small talk. The Whites talk to everyone they meet. It’s a thing with them.”

“I don’t think he will just tell us his plans.”

“He totally will. He will absolutely tell us fucking everything because he thinks we’re morons.”

“He hasn’t even met us.”

“Doesn’t matter. The Whites think everyone who isn’t a White is stupid.”

“We can use this to our advantage.”

“We could. Yeah, we could. If there weren’t so many of them, and they weren’t so well-armed. Remember, that’s not just one guy. He represents every White on the other side of the mountains.”

“Are there a lot?”

“So many. They have cities with…more than we can count…people in them.”

There was no “million” in the Pulaski mathematical system. Numbers were specific up until a thousand, and then got progressively vaguer until you reached “more than we can count” and that was good enough.

“What about the Blacks? Do they have cities of their own?”

“I cannot explain the relationship between the Whites and the Blacks to you again. I’m beginning to think you’re slow.”

“I just don’t understand it! How do you own a person!?”

“Easily! By being a bastard!”

“Uh, boys? Boys? How you doing back there?”

That was the White. He held his notebook up to shield his eyes against the low sun. The Blacks, behind him, used their hands.

Cannot Swim stared at his cousin in anger.

“You are the worst hunter in the entire world.”

“I never claimed to be a hunter. Not once, not ever.”

Talks To Whites slapped his cousin on the shoulder and said,

“Lemme do the talking,”

And then popped up from his crouch before Cannot Swim could say anything.

“Howdy!” Talks To Whites called out in English.

The White tossed the notebook aside, and settled his long coat behind the pistol on his right hip.

“There’s two of you back there, yes?”

“Uh-huh!”

Talks To Whites lifted his cousin upright by the armpit and said in Pulaski,

“Wave and look friendly.”

Cannot Swim tried. He mostly got it.

“We’ll just come around the tree, how about that?”

“Sounds fine ‘less you’re two assholes.”

“One at the most!” Talks To Whites shouted out, and the men walked around the fallen tree. Black Eyes stayed down, hidden crouched in the low scrub. She had been watching the White’s eyes. He had not seen her. She would stay where she was, and neither man called to her as they left their position. Each had a rifle that hung from his right shoulder. Cannot Swim slowed and wanted to hang back, but Talks To Whites walked straight across the 30 grassy yards separating them from the Americans and so he followed him.

Chatting the whole way.

“Didja make it up all right? Bit of a slog coming up this way huh? Or did you take the long route? Long route’s not as steep.”

When he got ten feet from the White, he stuck out his hand. Kept walking.

“But then it takes longer. That’s why they call it the long route. How are ya?”

When he got to the White, the White shook his hand.

“How are ya? Funny story: in English, my name means ‘Person that can talk the White language.’ But it’s not pronounced that way in my language, and I’m sure you won’t get it right, so usually I just have Whites call me Peter. What about you, chief? What they call ya?”

Talks To Whites’ father was also called Talks To Whites. He taught his son English beginning at birth, and brought him over the pass into C—-a City starting not much later. The father walked him around the growing settlement and named the world of America to him. This is how the Whites eat, pray, fight; this is how they treat those who are not themselves; so on. He could not teach his son how to read, but did teach him the White numbers. Sent the boy to live with the Greenwoods for a month at a time. Caleb and his son Johnny. They were the first homestead that the father had encountered when the village sent him forth into the world for his Assignment, which was to learn English so that the tribe may trade for guns and ammunition and knives without getting ripped off. The father stayed with them for six months, exchanging his labor and some of the gold-colored rocks that littered the streams in the valley for room, board, and English lessons. He would return with his boy, leave him there to speak English and hear Caleb’s lectures on America. (“Warn’t no good no more.”)

Since his father’s death, Talks To Whites had been out to the Greenwood farm twice. Caleb told him both times: America’s coming for ya. C—-a City was bulging and bloating and building constantly. Caleb said he had seen signs in that season’s crop. Johnny had been kicked in the neck by a horse and died a few years prior, and Caleb didn’t have anyone to talk to. He had been seeing a lot of signs lately. America’s coming for ya.

“Furlong Christy,” the man said.

“Fur how long?”

“No, no. Not for long, a furlong.”

“I don’t know for how long. You’re supposed to be the horse guy.”

“I am a horse guy. And I’m telling you it’s a furlong.”

“That last little bit.”

“Yeah.”

“The home stretch.”

“It’s a furlong.”

“That’s what I’m asking you!”

Backy & Reo were the only good act the Davidian Theatre ever booked, and they were only okay. Benjy “Backy” Bachscheim was tall and barrel-chested–it was 1911, so he would have been called “vigorous”–and he slicked back his light-brown hair with a product called Old Dixie pomade, whose cans featured a mascot exactly as racist as you might imagine. Marcello “Reo” Arboreo did not slick his black hair back; he would drag his hands through it in frustration and confusion, and by the end of the routine, he would have a sweaty comedy corona: this matched his body, which was spheroidical and a foot shorter than his partner’s. Audiences would laugh when they stood next to each other.

“Tell me about this horse.”

“This horse here? He’s a mudder.”

“He?”

“Yes.”

“A mudder?”

“Yes.”

“How’s that happen?”

“His father was a mudder.”

“Waaaaaaait a minute!”

That was Reo’s catchphrase, and God help any performer sharing the bill who used it. A dog act in Omaha, Maxie Mauser and his Six Sharp Schnauzers, said the magic words during one show, and Reo stole into the box office, liberated all the coins into his sock, and beat Maxie and two of his dogs silly. Let ’em steal jokes, Reo thought. We stole all of ours. But when they steal your hook? Then you have to go to the coins. Backy was pissed at him for hitting the animals, but didn’t say anything. Even really sensitive people, a group to which neither man belonged, didn’t talk about their feelings in 1911. The duo had a far more efficient system of interpersonal communication: instead of discussing whatever was bothering them, Backy would be passive-aggressive until Reo snapped and popped him in the jaw. Backy had a thing about hitting little guys. He just didn’t do it. But hitting a little guy back? That was like heaven. So, every couple months or so, Backy would whale the tar out of Reo–nothing on the face and no broken ribs, but still a healthy beating–and Reo would maybe take it out on a dog act and his dogs.

There’s no business like show business.

There had been theaters in Little Aleppo since the Main Drag was made of horse shit, instead of just covered in the stuff like it was in ’11. There was the Twilley, which was across from the Wayside Inn and sat 80 on wooden pews. The stage curtains had come all the way from Baltimore. There were five actors in the troupe, two men and three women, and the neighborhood–still at that point more of a camp than a neighborhood–strained themselves trying to yell out a work that at least two of the performers didn’t have memorized. A song they didn’t know (with harmonies) or comedy routine.

Previously a tavern-owner and a pimp, Johnson Twilley accepted Christ in Seattle, hired actors, moved to Little Aleppo, built a theater, named it after himself because nobody could stop him, and produced the show. Shortly after opening, and even though business was impressive, Johnson was considering renouncing Christ and going back to pimping. The company of whores was surely more pleasurable than that of actors, he thought. My God, the conversations I’ve had to referee, the disputes–the disputes!–and the never-ending petty thievery. They do it just to annoy each other, and then you can’t hit them. That’s the worst part, Johnson thought. Hitting a whore solved a problem, but hitting an actor created dozens of new ones. Christ ministered to whores, he thought, and He couldn’t do that were there no whores. Gotta be whores to save. And, Johnson further contemplated, if there’s gotta be whores, then there’s gotta be pimps because whores can’t take care of themselves. The Bible is for pimping, he decided. The fact that the actors had been playing one of their favorite games, Weaponized Vocal Warm-Ups, for 20 minutes did not push his theological decision one way or the other, he assured himself, and quietly snuck out of the building and down to the First Bank of Little Aleppo, where he withdrew everything, and then at the livery for a horse and he was gone.

The first theater in the neighborhood was short-lived, only 19 months, but iterated and became the second theater that night. The building was still there, and the actors, and none of the bored-stupid locals cared about who owned the joint–Johnson Twilley didn’t take the audience with him over the hills, either–and the troupe performed that evening as always. There are three primary sources on what happened after the curtain. Two of the sources are the actors’ own journals. Both describe an unusually exuberant crowd that demanded repeat renditions of My Sky Is Named Virginia, and one goes on to make a vague reference to “our new patron.” Early Days in the Valley, Doc Wallop’s history of the first years, recounts the story several of the troupe told him, that Miss Valentine was just standing there in the shared dressing room when they got off. Just her, none of her guys. The actors had been living across the street from the Wayside Inn for long enough to know who she was. She had brought whiskey and shot glasses, six of them, and they were lined up on the table. Poured neatly. And then–and all of the actors told Doc Wallop this exact phrase, Miss Valentine said, “Hello, employees.”

The troupe, being actors and therefore appreciating a decisive dramatic gesture, took up their glasses and they all drank to a new chapter in the life of what would now be called the Valentine Theater. (She couldn’t help herself.) Miss Valentine had to rotate her guys in and out of watching the theater–they would stomp back into the Wayside with tears in their eyes muttering “words hurt, man” or run off with one of the actors if you let them stay over there too long–but it was worth the hassle. Anything is worth the hassle if it’s someone else’s hassle. The dummies she employed didn’t understand: it was real estate. Right on the Main Drag. Five years from now? Ten? Once the Turnaway really gets going? That’s my future right there, she thought. Along with all the other shit in town I own, but the theater, too. Might as well make me some steady income while I search feverishly for a stimulant to appreciation. Gotta think long-term.

The Valentine Theater burned in the First Wayside Fire.

After that was a place on the Downside with mismatched chairs and chain link in front of the stage called the Skillet; it was called that because the ladies sizzled. You stood as good a chance of catching a beating as you did a venereal disease: it was the theater of the people. Were the miners and farmers and gamblers and crooks of the West not just the same as Shakespeare’s groundlings? And was not a bunch of floozies waggling their tits at them just the same as actually performing one of Shakespeare’s plays? Little Aleppo would say so. Von Cannon’s Expositionarium & Theater For The Purpose Of Education, Enlightenment, And Excitement Of The Senses opened in 1891, but there were too many words on the sign and the building collapsed and everyone died. The Napoleon Showroom was on the Upside, and so did not feature naked girls in between comic monologues, instead presenting nude women in between dramatic soliloquies.

But there weren’t any family joints. You couldn’t bring your wife to, say, the Falconer Odeon because they did Aristophanes in the nude, or the Sopwith Auditorium because their show was just a guy reading Mark Twain novels while people fucked behind him. Sure as hell couldn’t bring your kids to the Stubert Theatre because that goddamned place changed blocks every week and the ticket booth would attack passersby. F.F. David would change all that. F.F. David would build the Davidian Theatre on Sparrow Drive about a mile into the Downside, and F.F. David would present a clean show. A vaudeville show.

Couldn’t say “gosh.” A juggling contortionist named The Floppy Lucy slipped a “willikers” into her patter one night, and F.F. tossed her–still rolled up into a human pretzel–out the stage door. No lewd dancing: you could not can can. Comic acts were forbidden from routines about religion or politics or sex, and intoxicants were never to be mentioned, and no insult was to be made against the audience, i.e. don’t talk back to them when they heckle. The musicians were not allowed to play in the key of C Sharp, and no one could ever figure out why.

“All right, pally, go out and milk the cows.”

“I bring the cows milk?”

“No, no, no. You get the milk from the cow.”

“Is the cow the milkman?”

“No, no, no. You reach under the cow and squeeze the utter.”

“The other what?”

“Oh, not this again.”

Two shows a day every day, a matinee and an evening performance, and a late show on Fridays and Saturdays, too. First act played while the crowd took their seats, settled in, slight punching, and this was a silent act. Cholly Antin the Living Statue was a perennial opener; he stood there really still. Next up were the family acts: the Gummberly Triplets from Albuquerque or The Cousins Prince, and they would usually sing and play instruments; it was traditional that a patriotic song be sung during this slot in the show. Comics were next, solo or in teams. Sloppy Carmichael, and Bertrand & Rosie, and Little Larry Lewis, and Digby Beck, and Ethel Nyquist & Al. (Ethel came on like Jenny Lind, but each time she attempted to sing, she would get in a comedic argument with her piano player, Al. They did that routine for 30 years and she never once made it past the first line of the song, My Happy Home. They didn’t change the song in 30 years, either; it was the only one Al knew how to play.) Fourth on the show was a freak act. Stumpy Newton was a tap dancer missing both legs, and Myrna Sable juggled haddock (or whatever similarly-sized fish was available locally), and then there was an intermission when patrons could buy candy or try to sneak backstage to make a run at Myrna.

After the break was an act that needed set-up, usually the Transolle Family, who numbered 17 and each played an instrument but none well. The Transolle’s dog, a yippy Cairn terrier named Fooey, rang a triangle during one of their numbers, so it was an animal act, too. The headliner was next, and Vaudeville headliners were stars. They could make tens of thousands a week. In New York, they could make tens of thousands a week. In Little Aleppo, ticket prices were lower and so was the pay, but it was still a year’s worth of money in a far shorter time. Morey Amsterdam came through once or twice, and so did Fatty Arbuckle before he got into movies and trouble, and W.C. Fields, too, back when he was a juggler, but mostly the Davidian got the B-listers and sloppy knockabouts.

(In her definitive history, Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove, Lower Montana noted that a surprisingly high number of Vaudevillian performers settled in the neighborhood after their touring careers were over.)

“Hey, Backy.”

“Yes?”

“You gotta explain somethin’ to me.”

“As usual.”

“Lincoln.”

“President Lincoln?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about him?”

“How come he’s telling the whole world where he lives?”

“What?”

“He gave out the Gettysburg Address, right?”

“No, again you’ve misunderstood that which even a foreign child would understand.”

It was precisely as much entertainment as you’d expect for a quarter, and people paid it; there was nothing else to do. Until there was: in 1906, the first movie theater in the neighborhood opened up. Place was called The Tahitian, and it only cost a nickel to get in. F.F. David and his Vaudevillians thought that movies were a fad, all of them that hadn’t already decamped for Los Angeles, and the show ran on. Until it didn’t. F.F. died in ’21, and Vaudeville with him, at least as far as Little Aleppo was concerned. The Davidian stayed open. Acts that couldn’t fill the Absalom Ballroom played there, and they still do. The seats have been reupholstered but backstage is a handwritten note on a wall, framed a long time ago, with a list of words that respectable performers did not use in respectable houses.

“Furlong Christy.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a name. Again, I’m Peter. And this here is my cousin, Cannot Swim.”

“Never gonna get over the fuckin’ things you folks name yourselves.”

He was not as tall as the Pulaski men, and not as wide, and his eyes were the color of a fox’s coat. His boots were brown and laced up outside of his trousers. The right side of his long coat was still hooked behind his holstered pistol. His hat was wide-brimmed and clean. The two Blacks were behind him, twenty feet or so, with the supplies they had humped up the hill. Neither wore a hat. The five men were on the flattened hump that was the pass’ apex, and the sky was clear and bright.

“Sure. It’s wild. So, uh, What is this, huh?” Talks To Whites pointed at the wooden tripod with the metal device on top. He knew what it was, but he also knew how to play dumb.

“This here? It’s called a theodolite. Can you say that? Theodolite?”

“Theodolite.”

“Good work. Hey, Barney,” he called over his shoulder. “This savage motherfucker speaks English better ‘n you do!”

Both of the Blacks smiled, and spoke under their breath to one another. Talks To Whites could not hear what they said.

“Oh, shucks. Theodolite? Theodolite. Wow, great word. What, uh, does it do?”

“You boys Miwok?”

He was standing up straighter now.

“Miwok? Us? No. Wait. Yes. Yeah, we’re Miwok.”

“You sure ’bout that?”

“Oh, yeah. Proud Miwok injuns.”

Cannot Swim heard a word he recognized and turned to his cousin.

“<Miwok?>”

“<Miwok,” Talks To Whites said in Pulaski. “<Let’s let this asshole think we’re Miwok.>”

“<We had absolutely no plan coming into this, did we?>”

The White smiled real wide. He was missing his right eyetooth, but the rest were straight and shiny.

“Miwok, huh? That’s great. I know some Miwok. You know the big chief they got? Big old boy, must be seven feet tall.”

“Tough guy to miss.”

“He is, yeah. He really is.”

He was still smiling.

“What’s his name?”

Now Talks To Whites was smiling, too, mirroring the White’s expression everywhere but his eyes, which had frozen. He was trying to decide whether to blink or not. Which would look better. He should either blink or not blink, but he should do it soon, he felt this deeply and suddenly–he had never been taught to bluff, you see–and he made a noise like urrrrmmm and started nodding like an idiot, he thought, he thought he was nodding like an idiot and his head kept bobbing up and down with no regards to his opinions and the noise continued urrrrrmmmm and might very well have continued like that forever had the White not pulled his pistol and shot Cannot Swim right in the face.

“Won’t abide a liar,” he said, and the pistol swung towards Talks To Whites, who didn’t have time to raise his rifle before the White thumbed the hammer back on his Remington and then there was not the sound you would expect, not a BOOM, but a growl and a shriek: Black Eyes had covered the 30 yards from the blind to Furlong Christy’s throat, and then no shriek just a gurgling and a THUMP THUMP–that was hands beating against a dog’s side–and then thump thump because the hands had less strength and Black Eyes was standing on the man’s chest pullingpullingpulling and then all of it was out: the trachea, the esophagus, the larynxy, glottis, supraglottis, and then the tongue.

The Blacks are running now, running east, running down, running back to America, and Talks To Whites has his rifle in his arms; he shoulders the Winchester and drops one of the Blacks. The other will be gone before he can reload, so he calls the dog.

“Black Eyes!”

And she’s off like a shot and on the Black and in his throat, and then it is very quiet on the pass and there is just the clear sky with no clouds and the trees minding their own business. Four fresh corpses, a guy, a dog, and no shamans at all.

“Hello, cousin.”

And then there was a shaman.

“This isn’t my fault,” Talks To Whites whispered.

“Nothing’s anyone’s fault,” Here And There said to him. She was barefoot and her hair was loose and her tunic had a turtle embroidered on its front.

“Have you been up here the whole time?”

“In a way.”

“Why didn’t you stop this?”

She said nothing, just whistled. Black Eyes looked up from the Black, muzzle covered in blood, and trotted back to stand beside Here And There, who scratched behind her ears.

Talks To Whites knelt by Cannot Swim’s faceless body and put his hand on his cousin’s bloodied shoulder.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

His face was dirty, so you could see the tracks that the tears were cutting. He looked up at Here And There and said,

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Nothing’s supposed to happen,” she said. “And yet it all does.”

Talks To Whites didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything and the sky was clear and bright and tomorrow would come the rains just like they came every 18 days in what would be come to be called Little Aleppo, which will be a neighborhood in America.

The bell on the door of the bookstore with no title went TINKadink and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, walked in. She was carrying a coffee and waving the newspaper over her head. Mr. Venable was wearing his customary suit in his customary spot reading a slim but detailed history of bridge collapses. He had his feet up, but put them down and leaned forward eagerly at the sight of the Cenotaph.

“Gimme, gimme. It was sold out everywhere I looked.”

“They printed a second edition,” Gussy said and handed over the front section. “It’s literally hot off the presses.”

“Good thing you don’t wander in until eleven, eh?”

She gave him a smiling finger and he shook the page straight THRUMP THRUMP and laid the grayish broadsheet out on the desk (after shoving a half-dozen pounds of books and papers to the side) and sipped his coffee from the mug that read Harper Observatory: Where The Stars Shine. He was already wearing his reading glasses.

WHO IS…THE DOWNSIDER???
Costumed Vigilante Caught On Film!

And under that was the art, which took up everything on top of the fold, six columns across: massive guy suplexing a drug dealer, hurling a pimp into a jungle gym, shattering a mugger’s sternum with a ripped-from-the-ground park bench.

“The Downsider. Absurd,” he muttered.

“Better than what you’ve been calling him.”

“Giant Asshole is perfectly suited to this man. He is very large, hence the ‘Giant.’ And he is an asshole. He is an asshole of the greatest magnitude. The words work individually or in combination.”

“He saved us from a mugger.”

“By crippling said mugger. You call him the Downsider. I’m sticking with Giant Asshole.”

Gussy pointed at a picture that showed the back of the vigilante’s outfit, tapped at it triumphantly.

“I told you he had a cape,” she said.

Mr. Venable peered in.

“That? That’s not a cape. It’s the size of a dishtowel.”

“It’s post-modern. It’s a reference to a cape. He’s wearing a ‘cape.’ It’s a comment instead of a statement.”

He peered at her.

“You went to Harper?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a reason your education was free.”

“Well, he doesn’t need the full cape because he can’t fly.”

“You don’t need a cape to fly. Planes don’t have them. The man has some sort of reverse dickey hanging off his six-foot-wide shoulders. And just look what he’s doing.”

In that particular shot, the Downsider was beating a prostitute with another prostitute.

“That’s uncalled for.”

“He’s making the park safe. Children go there.”

“It was two in the morning, Gussy. Children do not go to Graziano Square at two in the morning.”

“Plep.”

There’s no such thing as a bookstore dog. There’s the occasional ancient black lab, muzzle all white and half-blind, snoozing through business hours in a comfy bed by the register, but it’s an exception: dogs are constitutionally inconsistent with the needs of a bookstore. Imagine a bookstore border collie. The dog would chew through your Trollope in the first ten minutes.  Or one of those mean little fuckers gnawing on ankles in the Romance section. How about a bookstore beagle? That wouldn’t work at all. “Sir, do you have the new Stephen–” BAYOOOO BAYOOOOO. It just wouldn’t work. Bookstores require cats.

“Mlaaaarh.”

The newspaper crumpled under her black paws. The tortoiseshell, who had no name, had leapt from the ground upon noticing that the humans were looking at something. It was one of her favorite activities. Napping and murder were fun, but jumping onto a book someone was trying to read was a hoot-and-a-half. They–the humans, that is–would always try to reason with you first, she thought. “Come on. Get off.” Why would you try to reason with a creature that just plopped its ass on your book or teevee or whatever? The very act was unreasonable! Clearly, the cat thought, jumping onto a book was an opening gambit that says, “I am a crazy motherfucker,” but every single time: “Come on, sweetie. Get going, please.” She thought it was hilarious when they were polite.

Mr. Venable was not polite. He picked her up under the armpits and heaved her eight feet onto the nearer of the two tables in the middle of the shop’s front room. The theme this month was Natives and Savages: on one table was literature from foreign countries; on the other were books written about those countries by white guys. 10% discount if you bought the appropriate volumes in tandem. The cat went,

“FfrRROWgh,”

And zipped back into the dimness of the shelves behind the tables, making note of her treatment as she went.

“How old is that cat? She was here when I used to come in as a kid,” Gussy said.

“I’ve no idea. Cut her open and count the rings.”

“That’s trees.”

“Trees, cats, what’s the difference? We’re discussing the news of the day. Have you, Miss Incandescente-Ponui, any idea how many panicked meetings are going on right now?

Mr. Venable had a specific smile on his face: it was the look of a man about to watch his favorite movie or eat a beloved meal or receive a blowjob from someone who had previously displayed both ability and enthusiasm in fellatio. I have had this experience on several occasions before, the smile said, and enjoyed the fuck out of it every time. He stood, and continued.

“The cops will be losing their minds: just because they don’t want to fight crime doesn’t mean anyone else is allowed to. The Town Fathers will be desperate for someone, anyone, to tell them their opinions. The criminals won’t know what crime to commit. Perhaps they can bribe the Giant Asshole. Or maybe they have to murder him. I would also imagine that there are tee-shirts being printed as we speak.”

“We saw this guy a week ago. Everybody knows about him.”

“Everybody knows about the boogedy-man, too, but the situation would change were there a photo of him on the front page of the paper. This–”

He picked up the paper and shook it.

“–requires a statement. An official statement. All centers of power in Little Aleppo must respond to this. It’s imperative.”

“The cops kinda do have to say something.”

“Kinda. Yeah, kinda.”

Gussy had not been working in the bookstore with no title for very long, but she had come to recognize Mr. Venable’s various sarcasms. The word “Yeah” was a tell.

“Don’t be condescending.”

“You’re my employee. I’m of a higher status than you. Everything I say to you is by definition condescending.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“I’m just so excited.”

“What do you think the cops are gonna say?”

The cops had many thing to say, but none were particularly suitable for the evening news. The uniformed officers were rooting for the Downsider and had been since they heard of him; the pictures in the Cenotaph–none of the cops read the article–only reinforced their view. The cops in squad cars and walking beats enjoyed violence, and disliked criminals; the Downsider was everything they’d want from a human being. The detectives in their sharp suits thought the vigilante should be pursued and captured, because what the fuck else would detectives want to do? The officers had several positions, most of them designed to get rivals fired.

The 80’s were a transitional period for the LAPD (No, Not That One): right in between the Old Days and Nowadays. The department was no longer corrupt, at least not by policy. An officer didn’t walk up and down the Main Drag every Tuesday filling a grocery sack with cash any more. Several of the uniformed men had college degrees. Several of the uniformed men were women. One was now required to have a cogent argument as to why a civilian needed to be hit in the head with a stick, as opposed to the old reason, which was “I wanted to.”

Frenchy Somme was from the Old Days, when the only businesses that the cops did not tax were the legitimate ones. (Instead, they allowed the criminals to shake the legitimate businesses down, and then taxed the crooks.) He had not carried the bribe bag up and down the Main Drag, but he had been dispatched the next day to visit those along the route who were late or short. Frenchy did not go to college, but he had struck many college students with his baton. He was also not a woman, but had been on the force when the first female officer strapped on her gunbelt, and viciously harassed her all in good fun. Frenchy thought women were to be defended, and attacked those who declined to be. He was from the Old Days.

Everything hurt.

There was a mirror on the inside of the closet door, so he swung it open and stood up as straight as he could. Faces punch back. Bad for your hand as it is for his jaw. Knuckles like red-hot ingots.; he could hear them hiss. He had a date for the knees. Most of him had decayed over the years, but not the knees, The left one blew when that little hippie punk–Italian, maybe, or Spanish–tackled him during the ’71 Draft Riot. (The Armadillo Room did a Five-Cent Beer Night and it turned into a riot.) Right one went getting out of the car responding to the ’72 Draft Riot. (The Armadillo Room pulled the same dumb bullshit as the previous year, and several of the largest police officers had to stop by the next day to whomp on the owner’s head for a good quarter-hour. Beer has remained market price at the Armadillo since then.) Oh, and the left wrist, but that was done in the service of a higher ideal: punching a fireman in the face at the annual interdepartmental football game.

But Frenchy Somme was from the Old Days and he soldiered through. On willpower. And opiates. Willpower and opiates are natural allies, Frenchy thought as he walked out of his office into the bullpen and then out to the lobby and the perfect lawn of the police station, where there was a cameraman and a boom guy and a woman with gargantuan blonde hair and a smart peach blouse.

“Ah, dammit.”

“Chief Somme? Cakey Frankel, KSOS News.”

“I know who you are, Cakey.”

“That’s so sweet. I love meeting fans.”

“You’re the weathergirl.”

Cakey Frankel had started off at KSOS as the weathergirl on the 5:00 news. There are few jobs less strenuous than reporting the weather in Little Aleppo. It’s cool in the winter, and warm in the summer except for three days when it’s real hot. Also, it rains every 18 days. And that’s it. A chimp could do it. A chimp did do it: his name was Professor Bananas, and he did the forecast every night for six years. His handler would set him in front of the map of the neighborhood, which would have cartoon suns or (once every 18 days) rain clouds attached to it. The anchor, Trusted Meese, would say, “And now Professor Bananas with the weather,” and they would cut to the chimp, who would point at the map, and then cut back to Trusted, who would say, ” And that was Professor Bananas  with the weather.” On Fridays, the ape would wear wacky outfits, such as Hawaiian shirts. There was disappointment when Professor Bananas left the show, but it was tempered, as chimpanzees quit jobs by going berserk and devouring the face, hands, and genitals of interns. It Was Fun Until The Very End, Professor read tee-shirts that sprouted up.

So Cakey got the job. Being human, however, she was expected to speak, and speaking was not Cakey’s strong suit. Not the technical aspect of it–she had a croony alto, and did not stutter or stammer–but the content portion. Cakey was clueless. Imagine a shop that specialized in board games, and you went in and asked for Clue, and they did not have it. Imagine just the diagram of a crossword puzzle. Imagine an incredibly boring Nancy Drew book in which nothing gets solved. That is how little clue Cakey Frankel had. As basic as the weather patterns of Little Aleppo were, she couldn’t quite grasp them.

But she was good on teevee, maybe because she was psychologically incapable of not being herself. Her heart lay behind an open window, possibly because she didn’t have the sense to close the curtains. Trusted missed the Professor–they used to drink together–and turned his ire on Cakey, but this just made her more popular. You were almost hard-wired to root for her against adversity: she was like a baby crawling though a working foundry.

“What’s the barometer doing, Cakey?”

“It’s attached to the wall, Trusted. Just sitting there measuring stuff.”

“Good heavens, you’re a twit.”

KSOS’ owner, Paul Loomis, Sr, showed him the letters flowing in. Several asked him to be kinder to that lovely Cakey, but the vast majority were straight-up threats. Trusted promised to tone it down.

“Thank you for the weather, Cakey.”

“Oh, God gives us the weather, Trusted. I just talked about it.”

“You’re just a simpleton, woman. DAMMIT, I WANT MY MONKEY BACK.”

Trusted took a week’s vacation, and Cakey Frankel was a field reporter when he got back. Her reporting style consisted of asking “How do you feel about the allegations?” and then nodding thoughtfully.

“Cakey, we’re rolling in five, four, three,” and the cameraman held up two fingers, then one.

“We’re not actually rolling, Chief. He’s referring to the videotape.”

“I’m familiar with the technology. Seriously, aren’t you the weathergirl? What happened to Flip?”

Flip Chares was the other field reporter. He was at Town Hall hunting down the Town Fathers, who were locking themselves in various offices and climbing out various windows trying to avoid him, the news intern from KHAY, or Barry Cho from the Cenotaph. Flip, his camerman, and sound guy were camped out in front of the marble building way on the Upside. An intern with a walkie-talkie was posted up by the back door.

“You’re new,” Flip said to the sound guy, who had been there for five months.

“Not really. I’m–”

“You should’ve seen what I was doing with my dick last night. Fuckin’ A, my cock was a polymath. Just doing everything, and doing it well. Had some girls over. Had some guys over. Fucked everything that moved. And got fucked. Don’t forget the fucking I took. Kid, I got plunged like a bus station toilet. You see how they dug out the English Channel tunnel? It was like that, but with my asshole. Great night. How old are you? 12, 13?”

“I’m 29 years old.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about.”

“Not really.”

“I got no idea how many human beings were inside me. None. Fingers, dicks, feet, whatever. You know Lorraine Hu? The real estate lady with her face on the bus stands? She put her whole foot in my ass. Are you looking for a house? Because now’s when you want to buy. You should call her. Everyone else there, though? Professionals. Kid, I won’t lie: my cock’ll break an amateur.

“Mr. Chares, can’t we–”

“There was a woman there last night who goes by the name ‘The Tooth Fairy.’ I asked why. The woman sat on my face and extracted one of my back molars with only vaginal suction. You gotta pay for that kind of talent. Ah, man. Great night. No one overdosed and no one lost anything up their ass. Usually, there’s a watch or two missing at the end of the evening.”

The doors of Town Hall opened and the cameraman tossed his camera on his shoulder, and the sound guy hoisted the boom above his head, and Flip checked his teeth in a hand mirror. He was short, with a long, slim nose and the most pristine combover west of the Mississippi. It did not even move when Lorraine Hu inserted her foot into his ass. A man exited. (Town Hall, not Flip’s ass.)

The first thing everyone asked Berf Parsh was “What?” And then “Can you spell that?” And then the more aggressive would demand his driver’s license where they would see that Berf’s name was Berf. Not even short for anything. He had been the Press Secretary for the Town Fathers for decades and had in that time never told a lie. He hadn’t told the truth, either, but Berf was more proud of the lying bit. He was balding and his chin was weaker than a polio victim. He looked like a man genetically engineered to be yelled at.

The three men from KSOS ran up the stairs–the sound guy sent Barry Cho from the Cenotaph tumbling down the steps with his boom mic–and surrounded him. The cameraman held out his hand and counted down.

“Five. Four. Three,” and two and one were silent; he pointed at Flip as the red light on his camera went on.

“When the fact becomes legend, print the legend. That’s an old journalist’s saying, but what about When you have a picture of a guy in a superhero costume punching people, then: Whoa, nelly. That should be a saying, at least according to this morning’s Cenotaph. Pictures of what was once a neighborhood ghost story on the front page. We are here with Berf Parsh, speaking for the Town Fathers.”

“I’m not speaking for them.”

“You’re their spokesman, Berf.”

“Yes, but I don’t like to let that define me. I’ve taken up squash.”

“Berf, have the Town Fathers seen this morning’s paper?”

“Seen? Most likely.”

“Have they read it?”

“I know Town Father Lamper read the very positive piece about his new gyro place. If I can quote from the review, there is ‘food available for purchase’ and the bathrooms are ‘working but regrettable.’ That’s very positive.”

“Have any of the Town Fathers read the article about the Downsider? And seen the pictures?”

“Some of them, maybe. Who knows with them? Very busy folks.”

“Berf.”

“What did the cops say?”

“We’re waiting on guidance from the Town Fathers on this one,” Frenchy Somme said.

“Have they called you?”

“What?”

Cakey Frankel continued smiling and said,

“Have they called you?”

“No.”

“You should call them.”

“All right, I’ve got meetings to get to.”

“Are they about this Downsider fellow?”

“Thank you, Cakey.”

“Hey! Look! A squatch!” Berf shouted and pointed away from Town Hall. Neither Flip nor his crew looked. They all stood there for a moment, and then Berf ran back into the building.

The bell on the door to the bookstore with no title went TINKadink; a tall woman entered and walked up to Mr. Venable, who was in his customary seat behind his messy desk. The sun was going down. The woman asked,

“Where is Gender Studies?”

“It’s the section that’s arguing with itself,” he said, motioning vaguely towards the back of the shop.

Gussy pulled the woman away from the desk, gave her directions, sent her off, stood in front of Venable.

“Are you pouting?”

“Girls pout. I am a man. I am brooding.”

“Why are you brooding?”

“You saw the news. They’re all punting.”

“That’s a good thing. Punting is not a long-term strategy.”

“Cowardly act.”

“I know. Do you want ice cream?”

“Yes.”

“After we close, we’ll get ice cream.”

“Fine.”

And they did, but until then Mr. Venable brooded behind his messy desk in the bookstore with no title on the Main Drag of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.