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  “So you’re just here to say howdy, don’t need anything?”

  “Jesus, Ray, no….It’s been a few weeks, just wanted to see if you were okay. You’re not the only one that worries, you know. Not like you’re working a corporate job in an office downtown. Or are you a stockbroker now, a commodities trader, and somehow I missed it?”

  I nod my head, laughing, flipping the sandwich over, the soup gurgling in a pot.

  “No, none of that.”

  She’s quiet for a moment, and I wonder what she’s doing. Is she staring out the window, thinking about snow, and winter, as the buses and cars drift by? Does seeing me trigger memories of Uncle Tully, our parents, the past? Do I build her up or break her down? Does she leave here a bit more or a bit less? I never know. I imagine she’s leafing through my wallet right now, swapping out fives for twenties, counting it all out, wondering how much she can take without my noticing.

  I bang the pans and clear my throat.

  “Soda? Milk?”

  No answer. When she doesn’t answer me, my mind always fears she’s dead—a heart attack, or maybe a needle slipped in quickly, nodding off—that this is the reason she doesn’t speak. Why I go to this dark place, I don’t know. I worry that she comes to me in order to die, that my apartment is some elephant graveyard, a place where she collapses and withers away in peace. The last of her spirit and energy left for me to ingest, to make me stronger—an offering in her demise.

  “Stephanie?”

  “Um, yeah, soda I guess, Coke or Sprite, whatever.”

  I pour her a Coke over ice and bring the glass in my left hand, the plate with the sandwich and the bowl of soup on it in my right hand, my boots always stomping, no need to announce my entrance.

  She’s sitting back on the couch, head in her hands.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just tired.”

  I set the food down on the coffee table, pushing the wallet out of the way. It’s not quite where I left it.

  She eats quietly, and I sit and watch her. I tell her about the neighbor girl, Natalie, and the boys in the alley, about my latest fight. She looks up and sees the bruises that have faded—hardly noticeable by now. She tells me about a girl at work, Ginger, who is tall, and built. She’s always trying to set me up with these Amazon warriors. I smile and nod my head—because having drinks out with my addict of a sister is never strange. Watching her suck down gin after gin, the tonic and lime bubbling and floating, her eyes wandering more and more as the night progresses until she just disappears, and I find myself alone. I suppose I’d rather see that than find her with a needle in her arm. Again. It’s times like that, or like this, or nothing at all. Sometimes I choose nothing at all. Which makes me a lousy brother.

  When the food is gone, Stephanie gets up and slips her jacket back on.

  “Going already?”

  “I better take off, yeah. Getting dark out soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be safe?” she asks.

  “I will, if you will.”

  She wrinkles her nose and gives me a hug, so I wrap my arms around her, holding her close, wondering if I could just do this forever, and never let her go. She is not strong in this world, and I suppose I’ve played a part in that—distant when needed, silent when it really mattered, giving her just enough rope to hang herself. We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

  Those days are few and far between.

  “Love you, Steph,” I say.

  “Love you more,” she whispers.

  When she’s gone, I go to the couch and sit down for a moment, just holding the wallet in my hands. I don’t look inside yet, because I want to hold on to the illusion just a little bit longer. I want to believe that she is better than this. When I crack the wallet open, the bills are slightly crooked, the twenties now mixed with singles, fives, and tens. I count it out, and there’s a little over two hundred dollars left, still the same number of bills, the same thickness, but half of it gone.

  If she’d just asked, I’d have given it to her, all of it. Gladly. Why she does this, I do not know. And that’s the problem between us. I never know what she’s going to do, and I have no idea how to help her.

  I can hardly help myself.

  Chapter 13

  I stand at the front windows of my apartment and stare out into the world, hardly any leaves left on the trees that line the boulevards after a few short weeks filled with a burst of red, orange, and yellow. Now gone. Winter is coming, and while I embrace the cold—the whiteness of the world, the bleakness, the pale skin and blood-red lips, the ways we tuck inside ourselves, hiding in wool and cotton—this time it feels different. Something is coming, some owed debt—a price extracted for all that I’ve done.

  And left undone.

  Stephanie and I have the same disease, and we are dying a little more every day. We are not made for the daylight, for offices, for social settings. We are loners, fractured in so many ways, fate finding us, the hammer descending with finality. And at the same time, we do everything we can to pull it closer, all of it—the danger, chaos, and death. Like a magnet to iron filings, we draw these sharp barbs toward our bared flesh, and yet we’re still surprised when we wake up torn, bleeding, and alone.

  There must be a way to break this cycle of abuse, to change what we are, to evolve. We were both innocent once—can we become innocent again? It doesn’t seem likely. The past is permanent, carved in stone—but the future, that’s still ours to determine. So maybe there’s hope.

  I need a new line of work. The fights pay well, but it’s only a matter of time before I kill somebody, before there is a raid, arrests, and jail. I would not do well in jail. I would survive, but I don’t imagine I’d play nice. Pushing myself farther and farther into the depths of the facility, isolation wrapping around me like a blanket. My size, my face, my hair—the horrors that make me who I am are the same things that would draw one challenger after another until I’d have no choice but to hit, to maim, and ultimately to kill. My sentence would grow, and I’d never see the outside world again. Part of me relishes the idea, but not as long as Stephanie is alive. There are others, like Natalie, or the girl on the train, who benefit from my presence.

  While my heart turned to stone long ago, perhaps somewhere out there is a kindred spirit, a moss to grow and hold together my cracked and dissolving center. I have hope, desire, and remorse. The violence of my past, the memories I’ve pushed down deep, these rotten beams and fractured bricks define my shape and form, but not what’s inside.

  What to do with my skills and experience? Boxer, fighter, bouncer, goon—I put myself in situations where the only way to succeed, the only way to survive, is to use my fists, the rage that simmers inside me for all of eternity boiling to the surface when needed, spilling over now and then, burning friend and foe alike.

  I take a deep breath.

  Where has this all come from? Not just Stephanie, her presence, and her thievery. No. That can’t be it.

  A gaggle of girls wanders in front of the apartment building, chewing gum, laughing, some with headphones on, others with them casually slung around their necks, music seeping out. Each member of the gang, the clique, is playing out her role with a flourish—the goddess, the patron, the innocent, the queen, the orphan, the mother, the jester, and the sage. One speaks, and many laugh, perhaps some taking mental notes, perfume drifting into the air—berries, and vanilla, and something darkly sweet. Most are dressed in gray and black, their boots, their gloves, their hats. A few, such as the jester, break out of the mold with splashes of pink, purple, yellow, or lime green. Arms around shoulders, secrets whispered into one ear, passed to the other, and then the next—last night, his hands, by the p
ark, never thought he would, never wanted him to, yes you did, will he be there tonight, will he call later, what do you care, you know you do.

  And trailing behind them all, but not by much, right behind these older girls that are not fifteen going on eighteen, but actually eighteen—is Natalie. What’s her role in all of this? I don’t know, but she makes me smile, which makes my face hurt, my skin crack. She is the magician, perhaps, the free spirit, full of life and impulsiveness—the healer, the shaman, the teller of tales. She is wiser than her age, but I see the walls going up, the cage being built around this fluttering bird, not long for this neighborhood, not long for this world, I fear.

  She sees me standing in the window, the only one of the children to notice, to see my ghostly presence haunting the windows—and she waves. I wave back, and then step away from the window. I am full of sharp memories and nervous visions. I head deeper into the apartment, undressing in the bathroom, the lights off, no need to remind myself of what I am, what I’ve become. In the hot water, my tears are lost, buried under the water. I’m sobbing, beating the sides of the shower with my fists, leaning over, my arms on the wall, the steam filling up the dark space. There is only so much I can do to protect Natalie, only so much I can do to change my own past. A smoky shadow twists and curls at the center of my being—I curse it, and cast it out.

  It never listens.

  This will be my undoing, my dark traveler. I pound the walls, bellow into the wetness, and clench my fists in pain.

  And in the apartment next door, I imagine Natalie coming home, letting herself into the quiet, empty space. I see her head tilting in my direction, a finger at her lips in question, her eyebrows scrunched, her lips pursed. She will knock, I think, and again I will not answer.

  Chapter 14

  I hole up for days, lost in a gloom of my own creation, and it’s that lack of milk that gets me out of the house. No Count Chocula without milk. No Lucky Charms, or Frosted Flakes, or Honeycomb. And if I make those chocolate chip cookies I’ve been eyeballing, that sleeve sitting by itself in the center of the fridge—the one thing that cheers me up—then I need ice-cold milk to go with it.

  Natalie did knock, not sure what day that was, but she knocked several different times. Between those knocks—between those moments where she stood outside my door, biting her lip, wrinkling up her nose, bopping from side to side, a song in her head—what happens? What is she thinking, where does she go, who are her friends?

  There’s a little market up the street that closes at 10 P.M., but I’m waiting until the last minute, hoping the crystal ball next door is asleep. I turn the lock to the right quietly, open the door, turn around, and key it shut. Dressed almost entirely in black, I ease down the steps like a spreading oil slick, chuckling to myself over the way I avoid a fifteen-year-old girl.

  I don’t want to be just one more person that lies to her, so I avoid her lingering gaze, her questions, or spending any length of time in her presence. But I also don’t want to be one more adult that ignores her—that helps her to disappear.

  The cold air whips around the streetlamps. Every other bulb is broken—shot out, hit with a rock, the kids around here bored so easily. One block it’s all blue-collar—men in dirty chambray shirts and jeans, work boots, driving old Chevy Novas and rusted Ford Explorers. On the next, it’s slick black Beamers and shiny Mercedes behind metal fences, stonework, and glass that won’t stop any bullets.

  The illusions they hold.

  “Hey, Holmes,” a kid says to me, sitting on the hood of his car. I keep walking. Two more lean on an iron fence, smoking weed and cigarettes, their heads wrapped in blue rags, long hair hanging down their backs, ink in script under their necks and dotting their temples. Plenty of light right here, it seems. Better to scope the hoochies, I guess. Three sets of coal-black eyes follow me, the sound of a bottle shattering on the ground to my right. I’ve seen them around, black teardrop tattoos at the edge of their eyes signifying years in prison, the loss of a loved one, or people they’ve killed.

  “Fucking Casper don’t play,” one of them says. I keep on. But I feel it building, this thing inside me, my lower back tensing, spasms running up my spine. I hear footsteps.

  “Where you headed?” one asks, the three of them sniffing around me, up on my heels. Like they don’t see me out here, don’t even care about my size, eager to get into something, see what happens, mix it up. Death wish, I suppose, nothing at home worth living for, no girl, no job, no life to really speak of. I’ve seen them smacking their girls around, pimping or just showing who’s in charge.

  “Your mother still up on the corner, or she done for the night?” I ask the lead hood, still walking, one heavy leg after another, hands out of my pockets now, gloves off.

  “Oh damn,” one of them says, laughing, the ringleader now up close, shoving me in the back, but I hardly move.

  “Watchoo say, Frankenstein?” he yells.

  I hear the click of a knife coming out, and I don’t wait for the stab. Instead I lurch to my left, the boy sliding past me, tripping on his own feet, sprawling out on the sidewalk.

  “Let it be,” I say. “You don’t want any of this.”

  The two behind me stop, bouncing on their toes, eager. The one closest stands up quick, ready to charge.

  “Oh, I want some of that, homie, I want all of it. In little bite-sized pieces,” he says.

  “So this is the day?” I ask him. “Today?”

  “Today what?”

  “The day that you die, my friend.”

  He hesitates, eyes on his buddies, his friends creeping closer, three-on-one certainly odds that they like.

  “Fuck that. Grab this piece of shit,” the boy says, holding his blade out.

  I hold my arms wide and let them grab hold, a grin easing across my face.

  “Come at me, bro,” I say, and he does.

  When he’s almost to me, I grab hold of their shoulders, these punks on either side of me, and lift up into the air, using them for support, kicking up and out, into his jaw. His head snaps up, the knife flying into the air as he stumbles backward.

  I slam the other two kids together after my feet hit the ground, bringing my arms in tight like clashing cymbals, and they slam heads and fall to the ground. The one with the knife is flying in fast—the blade picked up off the sidewalk, the metal glinting in the streetlights, the boy hot and angry, stepping over his buddies, cursing motherfucker under his breath. A right cross and I knock him back, sending him tripping over the feet of the others and falling to the ground, a handgun clattering out onto the sidewalk.

  That makes it interesting.

  I grab him by the front of his coat and lift him up, my fist in his face before he can get the knife back up, bam bam bam, his head snapping back, blood oozing from his nose, his body going limp, so I toss him to the side. The other two are up now, one grabbing for the gun, the other coming at me. He swings low as I lean back out of range, clapping my hands together on both sides of his head, rupturing his eardrums, sending him to the concrete below, writhing in pain.

  The last man standing holds the gun, his hands shaking up and down, out of breath, and I know he wants to say something, but I smell urine, and it might be his. I know he’s just a kid, but all I see is a film of red, and there’s nothing I can do to stop now.

  He pulls the trigger and it misses to the right of me, just past my shoulder, and then I’m on him, a second click erupting past me as I grab his arm and bring it down on my knee, snapping it. He screams out, and I look up and down the street—nothing. One downward punch and he’s flat on the ground, face-first.

  I pick them up one at a time and push them up against the metal fence, hooking belt loops or coats onto the metal tips, holding them upright, or hanging, for just a moment. A moment is all I need.

  Back to the sidewalk, the gun in hand, I turn and raise the weapon up. The nine-millimeter is about what I expected, the most common pistol in Chicago. Couple of shots fired, not sure how ma
ny are left in the clip, so I open fire on the kids, one after another. Chest, gut, chest, one after another until the gun stops firing and sweat runs down into my eyes. I take a few steps into the street and find a grate leading down into the sewer. I wipe the gun clean and toss it in.

  Back to the boys, I pull them off the fence and fling them one at a time onto the sidewalk. They’re somebody’s children, no doubt—but not mine. Maybe it’ll look like a drive-by shooting, maybe not. Sirens in the distance, I wipe my hands off in the grass, straighten up, and go to get my fucking milk.

  Chapter 15

  Natalie

  Natalie has secrets of her own. In a shoe box at the back of her closet she has a collection of found objects. The old pair of pink and purple sneakers is long gone, but the thin white paper inside still holds a few treasured items.

  Six tiny skulls.

  Some are bird skulls, and some are from squirrels.

  Sometimes when she’s wandering around the neighborhood, on her way to get milk, or to and from school, she’ll see a flattened-out layer of fluff, or feathers, and stop to take a look. Never when she’s with the older girls, never when anyone’s around. She carries in her pocket a pair of cheap plastic disposable gloves and a large sandwich bag or two. Depending on the state of decay, she may slip on the gloves and pick up the skull, or move the dead animal to the side, out of sight, to let it decompose a bit more. Later, she’ll move the skull to the backyard, off the alley, a small patch of land that nobody uses. Here is her beetle colony, one she created after a trip to her local pet store, her money saved up for weeks. She has buried a small plastic container, punching holes in the lid, restocking her critters every spring when it warms up. They freeze to death in the winter since she can’t stand the thought of them in her room, clicking and scuttling around. Her mother has a bottle of ammonia under the sink, and when nobody is home, she’ll take out the container, and a small bucket she used to take to the Montrose beach, and soak the beetle-picked skull for a few days. All of this picking and cleaning takes place in the yard, the smell of ammonia, and later bleach, too strong for her delicate nose.