

### In Another Life

By Leslie W. Jones

Copyright 2011 Leslie W. Jones / Michael Zones

Published by Leslie W. Jones at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

About Leslie W. Jones
Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my family, friends, and students.

A special thank you goes to Gypsy, Gizmo, Quincy, Bobbie, Mike, and Tracey.

Prologue

September 28, 2008

For my son, Michael:

If you are reading these words, I am five pounds of ashes in an urn at St. Mary's. By now you know the content of my will, and you've had time to accept the fact that the father you hate has left you a very wealthy man.

This manuscript, Michael, is the last of your legacy. It is the memoir of Robbie Costa, someone I knew a long time ago. Why I knew this man, and how I came by these pages you will understand by reading them. It is the last thing that I will ever ask of you in this life or the next.

Your late father,

Sheldon Roberts
Chapter One

For the first nine years, there is no story, only smells and sounds—of vegetables in a kitchen endlessly boiling, of crying in a bedroom and my father's shoes pounding down a stairwell. But then I am ten years old. The year is 1948, and what I think of as the story of my life finally begins.

It starts the day my Uncle Pete asked the question that upended my world. "Should we bring a kid along?" he said. And my Uncle Frank cast his eyes on me.

I can't explain it. He had never missed a step before, but he picked me—and just when things had been going so well. From the day we moved to Trenton, life had started looking up, and it really seemed that here we might stay. My uncles were making good money fixing cars—or sort of fixing them—then selling them to suckers. And as grifters go, these men were pros.

There was my Uncle Eddie, our ace mechanic, who turned back odometers and sealed a cylinder crack with a pint of grease. I remember Eddie well—his blackened knuckles, and those long, hairy arms, cabled with sinew and bulging blue. He had stubbly cheeks, dressed in overalls without a shirt, and kept the switchblade that I coveted in his left back pocket.

"Blink," he used to say, and I'd race against the knife, but the blade always snapped out before my eyes could open. It was perfect, with a fine ivory handle stained by palm-sweat. I'd beg him to buy me one. "You're ten years old," he used to say. "Wait till you're twelve."

Uncle Lucca wasn't my uncle by blood, but in the Old Country, years ago, my grandfather had saved his neck; and ever since, Lucca had done the old man's bidding. Uncle Pete helped with sales, but Uncle Frank—the Great Frank—was our master pitchman. He could find a "client" in a diner, on a church pew or in a barber's chair, anywhere he found someone to sit beside.

When he went out canvassing, he liked to take along a kid; and if I was that kid, he always told the same story. He said that I belonged to his sister, but my father had deserted her. And now he—my sainted Uncle Frank—had decided to raise me. Sure, it would be tough. But he was a god-fearing Christian, and he believed that when a man follows his conscience, good things start to happen . . .

Why just last week he met a guy-in-a-million, honest as the day is long, and this guy had sold Uncle Frank a car that was practically new—sold it so cheap that the very next day, Uncle Frank resold it and made himself a thousand dollars.

"And here's the best part," my uncle would causally add. "The guy says I can do it again."

"Where does he get these cars?" the suckers always asked.

Uncle Frank said he didn't know. He didn't want to know.

But were they any good, these cars?

"Good as gold. The guy's a mechanical genius. Every car he sells has his personal guarantee."

"So where does he do business?" they'd ask.

"There is no business," Uncle Frank would say. "This is strictly word of mouth. I don't even know why I'm telling you."

Sometimes the sucker bought me some candy or tousled my hair. I was a half-orphaned kid. People like kids, said Uncle Frank. And when I came along, he made sale after sale. Pretty soon, at all hours, there were engines revving in our driveway, cars pulling in and out. Cars jacked up on columns of concrete blocks, and there would be Uncle Eddie lying under them with grease dripping down on his face, or bending over a hood with a hammer, an oil can and baling wire. Truly an automotive genius! Just ask my Uncle Frank.

The way my uncles did business, the most critical stage was the closing of a sale. It had to take place somewhere far from the house, so that later on, the suckers couldn't track my uncles down. Uncle Frank had a preference for empty lots at the edges of the city. And he always followed his policy of taking along a kid.

"People go for that," he said looking down at me. And they trusted an uncle who would raise his sister's kid like his own.

"You're a prince," said Uncle Pete, and they clinked beer bottles and shared in a laugh.

Then one day the joke blew up in their faces. It was awful to watch, but I was there—the designated kid. "We'll take Robbie," said Uncle Frank, and so I sat beside him while Uncle Pete followed in the car they meant to sell—an Olds Super 88, the kind of car they used to call "deluxe": a convertible with a V-8 Rocket Engine. It was lipstick red and still tacky from the paint that Uncle Eddie had sprayed on that morning.

We drove downtown through the lunch hour hustle. Shoppers and office workers jaywalked in front of us, and a hip young kid slapped the hood of the Olds, then stumbled off rubbing the wet paint from his palm. Beyond the downtown district, we came upon the place where you didn't walk alone at night. It looked deserted. There were few cars in sight, and the street was dark at noon from the shadow cast by looming tenements. At the corner we came to the empty lot, unpaved and unfenced. The buyer was already there, standing alone beside a dusty black car. Inside at the wheel sat the friend who must have brought him.

Uncle Frank drove up to the dusty car. He stopped in front of it, nose to nose, as Uncle Pete parked the Olds at a distance. Then Pete got out, came up to our car and handed Uncle Frank the keys through the window. He slid in back to wait for us, as Uncle Frank climbed outside and told me to come along.

I knew the routine. I'd been through it before, so when he walked up to the buyer, I played my part by standing at his side, a sweet, solemn child. Then Uncle Frank placed his hand against my cheek, but this time I felt a moist palm. He was having second thoughts: This guy, the buyer, had a hard, stupid face, and as my eyes climbed to the top of him, I felt like running away.

"Mr. McPherson," said my uncle. But I didn't hear it that way. I heard him say, "McFearsome," and that was the name that took.

The closing didn't last long. Fearsome asked a lot of questions, but Uncle Frank had all the answers. Next Fearsome handed over an envelope, and Uncle Frank opened the flap and fingered the corners of hundred-dollar bills. Done with his count, he tossed over the keys to the Olds. With that, the deal should have closed, and my uncle loosened his grip on me.

Then Fearsome asked, "Who's the kid?" and Uncle Frank even smiled.

"Don't you remember?" he said. "My sister's kid. But I'm going to raise this young man, whatever it costs me."

He had used that line so often that my uncle stood there, as though waiting for a commendation. But as I looked up at Fearsome, his brow contracted, and a crease formed at the bridge of his nose. Even to a child, his face made easy reading: First, he stared at me, confused about something that Uncle Frank had said. Then came his slow slog to the realization that maybe none of this was quite right . . .

"Say," he said, looking down at Uncle Frank, "what is this?" Then much louder, "Who the hell are you!"

The next I knew, my feet were dangling, and I sailed around our car, hoisted over my uncle's hip. He pitched me across the front seat and slid in beside me, one hand on the wheel. What happened next I would just as soon forget.

Uncle Frank jimmied the ignition key, wiggled it, pushed and shoved, but the key would not go in. "You got the wrong one!" yelled Uncle Pete from the rear. But it wasn't that. He had the right key, but it seemed to have grown new teeth. And nothing, not even a hammer, it appeared to me, could have pounded that key into the steering-column lock.

I looked out through the windshield, and my eyes froze on Fearsome. He could have been a bouncer, a wrestler, a goon . . . To a kid my age, he was something worse—an ogre or a fiend. In my eyes, he could have lifted our car by the nose, and sent us whirling like a discus to the state of Maine.

He came up to the side of the car. Then he reached inside, through the half-open window. He seemed to take a handful of Uncle Frank, his collar, his hair. At first I couldn't see what he had gotten a hold of, but then I knew. He held my uncle by the ear, and I could hear an awful yowl as the key—finally—slid into place and the engine fired up.

"Hit it! Hit it!" screamed Uncle Pete, and we bolted into the grill of the dusty black car. Inside, the driver—Fearsome's friend—swiveled back, then forward, ramming his face against the wheel. Dazed, he looked up slowly with a bar of blood across his forehead. Fearsome saw it too. He went savage, let out a holler. Then he tore at the ear.

"Reverse! Reverse!" shouted Uncle Pete.

That did it. Uncle Frank floored the pedal, and we squealed backward inside a tunnel of dust. We left Fearsome shaking a fist, as our car did a quick spin-turn, plunged over the curb, and we fled the lot. But the ear!

It was half-torn from the side of my uncle's head, and it hung by the lobe and flapped against his neck. I could hardly believe what I saw. I didn't know about God. I had never entered a church. In the calendar photo on our kitchen wall, God looked like rays of light behind a cloud, and I never even knew what He was up there for. Now I knew. I squeezed my eyes shut, and in my mind I prayed, Please, God. Make the blood stop!

Uncle Pete found a rag under the seat. He lifted the ear into place, against the side of Uncle Frank's head. He held it there, and first the rag, and then his fist, and then everything—my whole field of vision—got soppy and red.

A few blocks from home, the truth came out. Uncle Pete was frantic and kept asking, "What happened back there?" while he maintained the pressure on the ear.

"I screwed up," said Uncle Frank. "I can't believe it," he said. "I brought the wrong kid."

By the time we pulled into the driveway, he had lost a lot of blood; and Uncle Pete had to walk beside him, as rigid as a crutch, one arm around his waist. Word got out fast. Soon everyone had crowded into the living room, screaming women, scared kids. Only my grandfather refused to get excited.

He said, "I don't want no doctors here. No hospital." He would take care of it. He would get someone, someone in the family. So he left Uncle Frank to bleed on the sofa and went into the hallway for the phone. While the women ran to the kitchen for towels and ice, he made several calls. And a few hours later, the doorbell rang.

I never heard the man's name spoken. He was small and bashful, dressed in hand-me-downs. A seam of his sleeve was held in place with pins, and he had brought along a case of large needles and tough thread. He was a tailor, he said, and over the years he had learned to sew up anything.

That didn't satisfy my Aunt Louisa. She was Uncle Frank's wife, and she wailed at the old man. He wouldn't look at her. He nodded at Uncle Lucca, who led her out of the room. She was right, though. The old man should have called a doctor. The tailor botched the job, or maybe we had waited too long. Anyway, the ear had to go, and after that, Uncle Frank wasn't any good at sales.

"No one's going to trust a freak," he maintained. And to anyone who would listen, he swore that he would never bring along another kid.

After a thing like that happens, nothing else turns out right, and there is no going back to fix it. Our luck was shot, and no one knew it better than the old man. He got ornery and hard to be around. Once he even snapped at me, and I asked Uncle Lucca what was wrong.

He said, "He's waiting for the other shoe to drop."

What shoe was that? What did it all mean? Maybe no one really knew, but everyone seemed to be waiting: The clock ticking on the kitchen wall sounded amplified; and my aunts would eye one another, as though they could hear each other's heartbeat. My cousins still played outside, still marauded the neighborhood in a pack, but I hung around the house now, waiting with the grownups. Uncle Frank lay upstairs, asleep on pain medication, but the other three—Pete, Eddie, and Lucca—mumbled in quiet corners.

At night upstairs we hardly slept; and as I listened to my cousins, I began to realize how different we were, that they could take such things in stride. They didn't think like me, look like me. I had never noticed this before, but now when I read their faces, I realized that they weren't kids at all. They were dark, savvy little men. They sneered like men. Uncle Frank's lost ear was a war wound to them. They thought it looked cool, and they talked about the perfect scar and their plans to get one.

Other times they sat up, leering at the bedroom where my older cousins slept, boys and girls; and they gave me strange ideas about what went on.

"Shut up, Jimmy. Robbie's only ten."

"Shit. I was doing it at ten."

"You were doing yourself."

"I was doing you. Remember?"

They had never talked that way before Uncle Frank's accident, but now everything had changed. They were waiting, too. In another week we learned what we were waiting for. It was a gun shot at night—a loud blast, then shattered glass. I was the first up. Barefoot in underpants, I hopped over the others, since we slept on the floor; and I ran to the dormer window. The street lamp had burnt out, but the moon that night was full, and I could see a long dark car parked across from our house under the maple canopy.

The headlights were off, but someone sat inside that car. Don't ask me how I knew. Then the engine started up. My cousins came running over as the car spun out from the curb, but I was already heading for the stairway. The old man stood alone in the living room, staring at the shards at his feet. I watched him between the bars of the banister. I studied his sallow face in moonlight, and I could recognize the sneer he had passed down to my cousins.

We had been raised to put family first and take pride in our ways. Scamming the suckers was supposed to make us special, and skipping out of town only proved that we were smart and free. My cousins believed this. I was too young to understand, but I went along with them until that day with Uncle Frank. After that, nothing looked the same to me, and even my family slipped in and out of focus.

There were nights, during dinner, when I'd gaze up at my one-eared uncle. I'd listen to the stories he would swop with Uncles Eddie and Pete. I'd look at wry Uncle Lucca, amused from within the privacy of his smoking-cigarette; at Aunt Beti, ladling stew from a pot. My eyes would circle their faces, and I'd feel nested with my kin.

It didn't last.

I only had to blink a time or two, and they would mutate into the mugs of strangers, speaking a language I'd never heard before. And whenever that happened, I would float to a place against the wall, where I'd look back at myself—at the blue-eyed bastard, the flaxen-haired kid surrounded by this den of thieves. And it would seem to me as if . . . well, as if I had been kidnapped by gypsies!

Who were these people?

I used to hide myself in corners and watch their strange goings-on, while off in my periphery, the old man would be watching me. He knew that I was scared and confused, that I was trying to figure things out, and there was plenty to figure: Like why I didn't live in a house with my parents and stay in one place. Why we all lived together—aunts, uncles, and cousins once and twice removed. Why we never stayed anywhere for longer than a year, and when we moved, it happened fast. And always at night.

Why was that? We moved and kept on moving in a four-car caravan. A moving night was a wonder to behold—how the women sat on the floor, supported by their doubled knees, folding towels, blankets, sheets, at the steady uninterrupted pace of professionals at their trade. And when they filled the old chests and the lids came down, my uncles would heave them up—one in front facing forward, one in back, toting the rear. All that practiced efficiency. They could pack and unpack a house as fast as carnies can raise and tear down a tent. This I watched from a quiet corner, all wonder and no words. Not yet old enough to draw a conclusion, but the old man had started to ask himself what I was thinking.

I remember everything. On the nights we moved, I still can see the bulge of veins in my uncles' arms, the wiry pumped thighs straining under their jeans, the shine on their faces, a sweat-drop on the end of a nose as it fell into a pencil mustache. Spying on the grown-ups was easy for us kids. They hardly noticed when we came indoors or ran outside. We were feral, disciplined by our standing in the pack.

Religious training? We had none, though some things I did infer, that the Bible, for instance, was a motel provision, like towels and soap; and that Christ was a name my Uncle Eddie evoked when he dropped a wrench—Christ being the god of dropped wrenches and stubbed toes. We were kids who said no prayers, who came and went unnoticed, except for me. My grandfather always kept an eye on me.

But I should explain about the old man: He had turned seventy that year. He was as old as I am today, as I write down these words. But that doesn't make him any easier to understand. Writing about the past, I am finding out, is like walking home backwards and trying to step into the footprints that brought me here. Or meeting the people I once knew with a sort of amnesia. I still remember the faces, but who were they really—that man I called uncle, that woman I called aunt?

As for my grandfather, he was seventy, and now that I am, it doesn't seem quite that old, but his liver was weak, his skin had gone yellow. Strangers thought he looked frail. They saw a mottled geezer wearing funny, baggy clothes—clothes that might have fit him at forty. They saw his fallen ass, his bony arms, but they didn't notice the size of his hands. All his strength was stored in his eyes and in those hands—eyes that could crack a man's confidence; hands that still could crack walnuts; fingers that with one neat twist, could free a frozen bolt.

I knew what those eyes and hands could do. Once I walked into a room and saw him break down my mother: His eyes raked her face; his fingers squeezed her arm like the jaws of a pliers. When she'd had enough of it, she tore her arm loose and told him, hissing, "He won't be back!"

And that made the old man smile. He looked down at me, and we both knew who she meant. My father had left, this time forever, much to my grandfather's satisfaction. My father had been his daughter's disgrace, a drifter with no blood ties to the family, an outsider who didn't give a rap about our ways. How could she have gone so wrong? What was the old man supposed to think? He had arranged the marriages of his other daughters, and they had gone where he had sent them without complaint. As each girl turned thirteen, he had handed her off to my Uncles Eddie, Frank, and Pete—three swarthy men in their twenties, all pureblooded Gypsies, all productive, petty thieves, whose fathers, and whose fathers' fathers had been selling larceny off of pushcarts and one-horse drays. But that wasn't good enough for my mother. So she ran off with my father, and she gave birth to me—his bastard son—and then he left, and she came back.

It was my mother who had bottled up inside of me the longing for another life.
Chapter Two

My grandfather used to call me his favorite, but even his love had cunning; and when he looked at the only kid among us with bright blue eyes—my father's eyes—what else did he see? That is the question I would still like to ask: What were you thinking, old man, when you patted my head and called me your Robbie-boy? That I would steal from you like my father did? That I would desert you like my mother and run away?

Sure, I stole. And I ran. Where do you think I learned my trade? I was your grandson and your protégé, but I left you for a reason you could never understand. I wanted respectability! So I went out and got some. I stole it like you taught me—I threw Robbie away, took another name and learned a new way of being. I joined an upright church and married—once for money, once for a laugh. Hell, I even tried love. And college, too, a great university where I climbed the monkey bars of Higher Ed—BA, MBA—and took a place in the business of the world.

I was running from you, old man, and the only kind of life you could have offered me. I ran so far, so fast, that the only part of you still left inside of me is the secret sense that everything I have run to—church & marriage, college & and my fast track passage on the Corporate Express—has been the biggest, strangest scam of them all: Even the scammers themselves—the heads of business, church & state—believe in what they do!

And yet I might have stayed, if we'd never left Trenton, and I had grown up in that big and wonderful house. I want to say more about that house. It was large and tall, but every house on that block stood over two stories. And each one had a shade tree in front, a giant oak or maple that shed gorgeously in the fall. Leaves like red and orange snow drifts would be piled on the street, where a city truck would scoop them up, then wash down the blacktop with brushes and water.

The neighbors were working class, lived on the first floor and rented out the upper stories. Not us. We filled every tier. The old man slept downstairs. The aunts and uncles used the bedrooms above, and in the small flat that jutted out onto the roof, my cousins and I had a place of our own. There was even a kitchenette, though my uncles tore out the stove and sold it. Still we had our own private apartment. All we lacked were front-door keys. Imagine our fantasies of independence!

Nights we camped on the bedroom floor and slept on doubled-up blankets. Sunny mornings, we climbed out onto the rooftop with bowls of cereal, sat on shingles and ate with the pigeons. The house had a backyard, too, a large one with a willow tree where we made a swing by tying a tire to a horizontal branch. There was a telephone pole next to the garage. We used to scale it, climb on to the roof, then jump from one garage roof to another, and spy into the yards up and down the block.

I loved that old house, and truly, I would have stayed. But the night that bullet shattered our window, we packed again and moved. And we kept on moving, three times that year. Our next stop, Columbus, Ohio, where we went into the jewelry trade. It didn't last. Uncle Frank wouldn't try very hard. He didn't think the marks would trust a one-eared man. So Uncle Pete took over sales, but on his own he couldn't keep us going. It had been different in Trenton. Back there, our wallets had been padded with luck. Now we had no luck at all, and in hardly three months, we fled Columbus, beating the Sheriff by a night to avoid eviction.

What next? The old man wanted to try California. In 1948, Hollywood had luster. In Hollywood, we could start over. We could scam the scammers. It would be great! The idea caught on, and pretty soon we couldn't get there fast enough. We drove night and day in a conspiracy of hope; and I made up pictures in my head of a gas station somewhere on Hollywood and Vine, where the jockeys wore white uniforms and filled every car with gallons of luck.

Then somewhere outside of Tucson, it all came aground. The radiator leaked, and soon smoke came fizzing around the hood. Even Uncle Eddie couldn't jerry-rig a hole in a radiator, so we ended up that night at the Cactus Motel, close to the highway exit. It was almost empty in mid-July, and we rented an entire wing. The next morning, Uncle Eddie said he'd scrounge up another radiator. He said that we'd be out of town by noon, in San Diego for dinner. It was a good plan, but we never made it out of the Cactus Motel—it was the destination that we had been driving toward since Trenton.

First Uncle Eddie got run over at the junkyard, and he came back from the hospital in a taxi with a knee-high cast. All that week he lay in bed, sleeping through the stifling afternoons, his switchblade on the night table beside him. I often stood nearby, watched him sleep and stared at the knife.

But that wasn't all. A day after his accident, Aunt Sadie went into labor. There would be no leaving that motel, and soon money got so short that Aunt Beti had to take out her neon sign. Psychic Readings hung in the window of her room. The management didn't care, not as long as it brought in the money to cover our bill; and she pulled in more than one poor soul, newly arrived like us, who wanted to know what the cards had to say about their chances in this god-forsaken town.

When she had no clients, she did readings for the old man. He believed in that stuff; and he kept looking to her for an answer, a clue to when our luck would change.

"It's always the same," she said. "I can't help you, papa."

"Then tell me why," he said. "That's all I want to know."

One day she turned over a card and pointed at it. "Judas," she said. "I see Judas."

"What are you telling me? Look harder," he told her.

"The last one you'd suspect." She shook her head. "Isn't that always the way?"

The old man suspected everyone. It was his nature. But now he took a special interest in me. There is more than one kind of Judas-goat; they don't all slink through tall grass or backstab like Iago. Even kids require watching. A kid will hide in small places; a kid will see things. And if a stranger were to ask questions, who knows what a kid might say.

He spent about a week deciding—a week of watching us all, but it seemed that slowly his eyes kept returning to me. So it came as no surprise when Aunt Beti told me one day to go see my grandfather. "He has something to tell you," she said.

I started down the motel landing, and when I passed his open door, he called me in. He had been waiting on the sofa, and he said to come closer, that he had a secret to tell me. A very special secret. He had been keeping it for years, and now he'd have to blow off the cobwebs because he thought that I was ready to hear it.

He said, "Come over here, Robbie," and he gently tugged my sleeve. "Closer," he said.

There was no reason for me to fear my grandfather, or his secret—but then something hardly visible hardened behind his eyes, and when I held back a step, he pinched my sleeve and yanked me to him, pinning me between his bony shanks.

My grandfather had two faces. He may have had two souls. The darker one used to come out when he dealt with other people, but this time I wasn't sure who I was confronting—whether he was Grandpa today or The Old Man.

He said the secret would help me to understand about Uncle Frank, and all the strange things going on around me. "I know you're confused," he said. And he didn't want that. He didn't want me asking questions, or saying something foolish to a stranger. He figured that the "secret" would shut up a curious kid.

"Look at me, Robbie. Don't turn away."

I haven't said enough about my grandfather's eyes. It wasn't just my mother that they could wilt. I remember how he used them to discipline my Uncle Eddy—of all the adversaries the old man could have picked—gnarled, blackened Eddie, who looked like an even match in a street fight with the Devil. But the old man brought him down. Hardly a minute of his scrutiny and my uncle got up, left the room, and came back with a thick sealed envelope.

"There," he said. "That's all of it."

How did you do that, old man? What did you say to him in your silence? And what kind of chance did I have, at ten years old, the day you pinned me between your knees and frisked me with your eyes? The day you told me your secret—the fairytale that was supposed to clear up my doubts.

He held me tight, and as I struggled to get free, he commanded me to be still. "Now look just at me," he said.

So I stared into the eyes that the others found so hard to confront. They were rheumy and dull but mesmerizing in a way.

I said, "What's the secret, grandpa?"

"In a minute," he told me. And then he seemed to go off in a new direction, and he asked if I had ever read The Ten Commandments.

I had no idea what he was talking about. Uncle Pete had taught me to read the sports page, and I could even make sense out of a racing form, but the only Bibles I'd ever seen were the Gideons I found in motel chests of drawers.

"Never mind," he said. "It's ten rules. And you got to keep these rules, see, or God gets mad at you. Are you ready?" He pinched my arms. "Rule number one, Thou shalt not kill. Very important," he said. "No one in our family ever killed a man." Then he explained. "They tried to draft your uncles, and send them off to kill Nazis. Well, I got them out of that. And not one of your uncles ever served his country," he said triumphantly. "I'll tell you why. Because they keep the First Commandment."

Now he had me intrigued, and I asked him for another.

"Rule number two," he said. "And this one's important, so listen carefully: Thou shalt not lie to your grandpa—and don't say nothing that could get him in trouble with the cops. Understand?"

I nodded, but he still wasn't satisfied. "Swear it," he demanded.

"I swear, grandpa."

Then he came to the third rule.

"The last one," he told me.

"But you said ten."

"Forget about the others," he said. "After this one, I can tell you the secret." Then, in a bigger voice, he announced: "Rule number three. Thou shalt not steal." And he watched me closely. "You think that's a good rule, Robbie?"

Again I nodded, for I was at that age when every answer to a grownup was a nod, a head-shake, or silence.

"Thou shalt not steal," he repeated. "But Uncle Frank is a thief."

I didn't know what he meant. I even wondered if I had heard him right.

"And Uncle Pete. And Uncle Eddie," he went on. "They sell cars, pure junk. And they lie and say the cars are like new. They sell a diamond watch, and it's a fake. Thieves," he said. "Even your Uncle Lucca is a first-class thief. Now what do you say to that, Robbie? Are your uncles bad men?"

I kept silent.

"They're thieves," he said it again. Then he paused for effect. "But they're angels in the eyes of God." His eyes grew wide. "Do you know why?"

Of course I didn't. "Tell me," I said. "Please."

"That's what I'm going to do. But understand, Robbie. This is a secret. My grandfather told me when I was a boy. And once I tell you, it will be our secret. So listen to me, and then you'll understand about the way we live, and why we're special. Listen carefully," he said.

Then my grandfather told me his story—one that had never made it into the Bible. This story had been passed down orally. "For two thousand years," he said. "And only our people know it."

The story starts on the day Our Savior died. That terrible day, he said, when the Roman soldiers lay out Jesus on a cross. And they took nails— big, rough iron nails—and they pounded those nails through his tender flesh. How he suffered! But did they care? They hoisted up the cross until it stood upright and poor Jesus half-hung from his wounded palms, crying like a little child.

"It's was a pity to see, Robbie, a terrible shame for all time." But did the soldiers give a rap? No. Did they hear his cries? Yes. But what did they care? They were doing their job. And afterward they lit a fire and let him wail. They cooked a rabbit and got stupid drunk while poor Jesus cried out, "Lord, O Lord. Why hast Thou forsaken me?"

But no voice answered. The sky did not open up.

"You know what happened then, Robbie?"

I stared up at him spellbound.

"Something wonderful," he announced. "Something that changed the way we live—I mean those with our blood, our ways. One of us, Robbie, a gypsy came out of the woods. And he snuck behind those Romans, because no one can hear a gypsy when he doesn't want to be heard. And you know what he did, Robbie-boy? That gypsy stole the nails from the cross. He stole them and he brought peace to Jesus. And then you know what happened?

"What, grandpa? What?"

"God saw what the gypsy did, and He smiled, Robbie. He smiled and he said, 'What you have done pleases me. And from now on, and for all of time, a gypsy can steal whatever he likes, and it will be good in my eyes.'"

The old man had finished. He said that I could go now, but he told me to think about this story. Because the more I thought of it, he promised, the more that I would understand my people and appreciate the life that he was giving me.

So I did that. I did exactly what my grandfather asked. And that night I lay in bed thinking about God and angels and thieves. And the more it made sense to me, the more I felt the world inside of me start to change. After a while I padded silently down the motel corridor, and I went into my Uncle Eddie's room to see if he was still asleep, and if things were arranged on the night table beside him. When I returned to my bed, it was as if a living vine were growing up my legs, into my chest and down the length of my arms. A vine that even spread into my mind—a marvelous climbing plant with tendrils stretching farther and farther into my future, opening up doors to another kind of life. This thing inside me? It was redesigning my Fate.

My head lay on the pillow, and I slid my hand beneath it and felt around until I found the bony handle of a knife—the perfect knife! And an angel smiled down on me and said that it was good.

Chapter Three

It was hard to get Hollywood out of our heads. We loafed around the motel for a week, and while my cousins splashed in the shoddy pool, my uncles drank beer in the sun, and talked about the city where oranges and suckers could be plucked from the trees. But Aunt Sadie was upstairs sobbing (her baby had been stillborn), and Uncle Eddie wore a cast. "Let's wait until fall," he said. "Then head for the coast."

My grandfather knew better. I was there the morning that he yanked apart the vinyl drapes and sneered at the view. "We'll never get out of this place," he said, staring out across the empty lot. It was purgatory that he saw in the searing sidewalks, the twisted trees and ash-colored earth. Purgatory, the old man decided. And since we were powerless to leave, he retired to his room, seeing no point in fighting with our Fate—though, putting Fate aside, I should explain that in Tucson, his liver got worse. He was diagnosed with hepatitis, and it tired him so, that he finally dropped the family reins.

"Do what you want," he told my uncles. And after conferring all day, they came up with a plan. They moved us into a fourplex on a quiet block—all but Uncle Eddie, who needed a place to work on cars, so he rented a house.

"This is where we live," said Uncle Frank. "We won't do business here." Trenton had taught him that! So my uncles decided that they would run their scams in Phoenix, stay all week in that bigger city, and drive back to Tucson on Friday nights.

When my aunts heard this, they took the news in a surprising way. They went out and found jobs. Honest jobs! Aunt Louisa ran a launderette. Aunt Sadie worked in a gift shop. And my mother—though chronically depressed—found a quiet place on an assembly line, where she could hunch over her sorrows while tightening a procession of small blue screws. Even Aunt Beti went semi-legit. She hung her Psychic Reading sign in the window of a rented room, but her intuition ran so deep that the readings she gave often came out true.

The only ones who went to seed in Tucson were my cousins, Jimmy and Max. And their problem, when I think back on it, was racial. All our lives we had lived among immigrants—dark-skinned Italians, Spaniards and Greeks. My swarthy cousins had fit right in, whereas I—being blond like my father—had that stigma to bear.

"Let Robbie play," they'd tell the other kids, which made them heroes to me and leaders in their gang.

But now we had settled in a place where I fit in. Only think of it! I could have been a rancher's son, or the kid in the matinee who shouted "Howdy" as Gene Autry galloped by. He was making films in Tucson back then. A lot of westerns were being made there; and it seemed magical that a kid like me could be walking on a downtown street, look inside a western shop and see a movie cowboy buying his gear. Of course, hardly anyone ever did, but nothing stirs a birder like the rarity of a sighting; and the closeness of film stars fed inside of me a sort of civic pride.

It would be different for my cousins. They were taken for Mexican kids, or the offspring of the local tribe. Their teachers asked if they spoke English; and it staggered Jimmy when a pretty blonde flinched because a boy like him had asked her out. But instead of wilting, Jimmy swaggered. So did Max. And they made a point of it that they came from New York, a real city, that puny little Tucson was a joke that they were laughing at, and anyone who didn't get the joke was a hayseed and a jerk.

This didn't make them any friends. And pretty soon they dropped out of school, and they started making bus trips to south Nogales. They would cross into Mexico and only show up days later. It was no use asking them why. They used me for an audience, as they talked over their exclusive plans. Then they'd leave again, without me, and I'd kick around the place—my envy stoked—looking for something to punish. I'd throw my switchblade into the bedroom wall, or slip it into my back pocket, then whip it out, gunslinger-style, facing down my image in the mirror over the chest.

And sometimes, on hot, lonely afternoons, I wasn't just performing for myself. Sometimes Ricky would appear in the mirror, half her reflection hidden as she peeked around my bedroom door.

I haven't mentioned Ricky yet, because in Trenton she had been "only a girl," and we didn't hang out with our girl cousins then. There were three of them, Ricky, Nina, and Sue, dressed like triplets. They used to shadow their mothers, jump rope or play jacks. And if one of my aunts had asked me to "go get Ricky," I would not have known which one she meant. But Nina and Sue had gone away, along with my older cousins, to live with family in Atlanta; and that left Ricky alone all day, searching for something to do.

She used to run around the place barefoot, in shorts and a halter top, an olive-colored kid with springy black curls, close cut to her head, and a face of competing interests—curious but wary, innocent yet game. We were a lot alike, Ricky and me. The youngest of the litter, we were the little ones the grownups didn't notice. And that gave us access to everything. So we would hide in corners or tunnel behind a couch—a couple of spies who didn't miss a trick. But at twelve years old, we were spies seeking answers to different questions. And while I was trying to figure out the way my uncles did business, Ricky kept wondering what they did with my aunts when they walked naked into a room. Why did they always close the door? And how did they feel inside when they were making those crazy sounds?

She did her sleuthing on weekends when my uncles came back from Phoenix, randy for their wives. They didn't always arrive with money, but when they did, they drove full throttle, recounting a dozen times the electric moment when they had scored. There is a sexual rush, an erectile swagger to pulling off a perfect scam. And it all starts after money changes hands, when the mark can no longer hide his greedy satisfaction that he's taken you. That's when the fun starts, watching him float off the ground on the helium of ego. And to keep him afloat, you're the first to admit it—that he's the better man. You keep telling him this, as you leave with a sinking look of wounded admiration. Outside you climb slowly into your car, and only then—eyes on the rearview mirror—do you let loose in one tribal shout, "Gotcha, asshole!"

On Friday nights, when their cars rolled up the gravel drive, we used to listen for a clue. And as my uncles climbed out, if their voices sounded amplified by beer, it was safe to say that they had come home to celebrate, and little Ricky would be a busy spy. I say busy, but who would have thought it, that my scarecrow uncles and stubby aunts were such game bedroom performers? Not me, not for a moment if Ricky hadn't shown up one day, when no one else was around, and laid out the evidence on my bed.

She kept it in the custody of her overnight bag, a cheap plastic, zippered thing of the kind they sell these days in dollar stores, rubbery inside, slick and glossy outside wearing a pattern of butterflies and bears.

"Look at this," she said and she reached inside for Exhibit One.

But I don't mean to cast little Ricky as a twelve-year-old lawyer nailing down her case, when, in fact, she came to me more like a schoolgirl back from a field trip, showing off all the fun stuff that she had found.

"Want to see?" she said. Then she held the bag upside down and shook out her hoard. There, piled on my bed, was a French tickler in greasy metal foil, a fuck book (in those days probably smuggled here from France), a fake mink glove, and four short strands of a soft corded rope. What was it all for? Maybe I should have known, growing up around men like my uncles. But I had a sort of lopsided innocence when I was twelve.

"Where'd you get this stuff?" I said.

"You want to know?"

She was excited to tell me, and she made gathering it seem so daring an adventure that I could picture Ricky padding barefoot from one apartment to the next, combing through chests of drawers, or peeping through the open inch of a bedroom door. Once she even crawled inside a closet and kept an ear to the wall. Other times she crouched beside a tree in the yard, staring through the shafts of glass in a jalousie window—startled at first, then curious and pleased.

I was greatly impressed, especially that part about the closet. "What if they caught you?" I said.

But she had burrowed in deep, and she already knew how to ply her charms, so even if my Uncle Frank had swung open the closet door unsuspecting and caught her hiding on the floor, she only had to roll up her enormous black eyes to exonerate herself from any unsavory suspicions.

"I'd tell him I was looking for my doll," she said. Then she stared down at the paraphernalia in front of us.

"What do they do with it?" I said, still not sure I even cared.

Ricky leaned closer to explain; and her breath climbed my cheek and tickled my ear. "They use it in bed," she whispered. She sat up straight, stared at me and waited, though I had no idea what she meant. But then something remarkable happened. My body understood.

"Let's take our clothes off," she told me next.

And I obeyed, being excited beyond all consideration. I sat across from her, twelve years old and naked to my toes, when suddenly my cock stood up, though not much bigger than my thumb, but Ricky clapped her hands and laughed.

"You did it!" she said. And it was as if I had juggled three eggs or twisted an elephant out of a long balloon.

Every day after school, we would go back to her room or mine. We talked about the things we couldn't say to other kids, who hadn't grown up like us, who weren't used to getting shaken awake and told to pack because the family had to clear out fast. Being gypsies made us close. It meant we didn't belong in the regular world, and being nonmembers, we didn't have to care about its rules.

"Do you like to be different?" she asked me once.

I said I still wasn't sure.

"You're supposed to know. Grandpa says you're the smartest." Though in the matter of sex, she often called me dumb because she had to explain everything. So when she had her first period, and I didn't know what that meant, she said, "Don't be stupid." And when she talked about "protection," and I said, "Huh?" she sighed and said, "You're so dumb."

From the older girls at school, she kept learning things that she was not supposed to know, but that was Ricky's favorite subject—anything that she shouldn't know. She was more curious than amorous. And there were times she would look up at my hot, wet face, watching closely with inquisitive eyes, and let me go it along—though at other times, she could be so much with me that we'd make the whole trip together, trembling until we burst like bodies of glass. And then all the tiny shards that used to be Ricky, and all the little bits that used to me would hang together in the air, mingling like bright and shiny crystals.

She was great fun to be with, and her favorite thing to do was to steal the stuff that became props in our games. Once when we lay naked in her room, she got off the bed and walked into her closet. She came out a few minutes later, still naked but wearing Aunt Beti's turban. To fit it on her smaller head took much padding, and it threatened to tip over as she climbed back on the mattress. She had something else besides, a mascara pencil she had pinched from her mother's purse.

"What are you doing?" I said, but I let her draw a face on the head of my prick. There was nothing that I would not have let her do.

"Ready?" she said. And with the turban at a tilt, almost covering one eye, she played an imaginary flute and coaxed my cock to rise.

Another time she said, "Let's smoke," and brought me a pack of my Uncle Eddie's Camels, another "borrowed" surprise. Then she gave me the lighter that she had lifted from her teacher's desk. When I lit it, two handed, and held out the flame, she sucked on the cigarette like a feeding fish.

These were the kinds of adventures she produced for me when we were kids of twelve. Then at thirteen, Ricky conjured up a bag of pot—a considerable feat in 1952. She had found it in my Cousin Jimmy's room, in the pocket of the shirt he'd hung over his bedroom chair. The pot was filled with twigs and looked sun-dried and crushed by hand. We had no idea what to do with it. Should we spread it under our pillows for luck? Or plant it like Jack and grow a bean stalk?

"I'll find out," Ricky said. And she widened her circle at school until she came home one day with the answer. "Watch this," she said rolling an end of a cigarette until an inch of tobacco had sprinkled on the table. Then she refilled the empty end with the twiggy pot and twisted the tip.

"You have to hold it in a long time," she explained. "It's not easy."

When she swallowed the smoke, her eyes bulged and she almost gave it back. She held both her hands over her mouth, then muffled a cough as a few short puffs escaped her fingers. But she bravely gulped it down a second time, which reddened her face but dimmed her vision. When her mouth opened, only traces of gray wafted from her lips, and she leaned close to my nose so I could inhale her breath.

"Now you," she told me from far away.

"I love you," I whispered because I didn't think that she would hear me, and I couldn't stop from saying it any longer.

This became our way of life when we were twelve and thirteen. We would smoke and drink, steal on a whim and learn the trade secrets of sex; and we would do these things with the souls of little angels. With Ricky that was possible, though I still don't know why. She was an elf, I suppose, and juries don't convict elves, though she stole so many times, they might have made her the exception, and it's lucky that she was never caught.

But when we turned fourteen, Fate got tired of our antics, and dealt us the cards that would poison my life.

One day Ricky borrowed her father's hip flask. She unscrewed the cap, and we smelled it together, frowned and scrunched up our faces.

"I'm not drinking that," I told her, but she led me into the kitchen and said to get glasses and to fill them with ice. Then she went into the pantry and found a bottle of Coke.

"Ready?" she said, tipping the flask over the rim. "Say when," she told me, because that was what her mother always said when she poured for my Uncle Frank. "Say it!" she hollered because I didn't understand what she meant. "You're so dumb," she sadly shook her head. "Now you have to drink it."

So I filled my mouth with the sugary fizz, but then came the blaze of cheap Rock N' Rye. I shivered. I whinnied like a horse, and Ricky laughed hard and took away the glass.

"My turn," she said and gulped. Then she clasped her throat as if she had swallowed fire. "It's good," she gasped, holding onto my arm. "Let's finish it."

But then came the day Fate said, "Enough of this," and Ricky finally caused some havoc. It happened late one afternoon while we lay on my bed, snug in the confidence of being alone. We were topless in our underwear, staring at the ceiling as the small fan on my dresser blew across our bodies. Except for the burr of the blades, the room was silent; and we would have fallen asleep if not for that sudden cry.

It wasn't a sound of fright, but the scream of a woman getting smacked around. My head rolled toward Ricky, still not much concerned, when she climbed to her knees.

"Jesus!" she said. Then she saw the look in my eyes. "What? What is it, Robbie?"

I never told her, but what had shocked me was the guilt on her face. Guilt had no place in our naked afternoons, and I must have known in my soul that something wonderful was about to end.

The woman screamed again, this time at a higher pitch.

"He'll kill her," Ricky said. "He'll kill her, Robbie!"

She grabbed my hand and pulled me—yanked me through the apartment, then outside into the fiery, thorny yard. It didn't matter that her chest was bare. "Hurry!" she said, tugging me along.

The yard in back ran the length of the fourplex. It was a long, hot track of pale gray earth, where the weeds had made out well. Over at the far end, a cactus had grown so wide that it covered the eastern wall with arms shaped like saucers and plates. The only improvement the owner had made was the clothes line that hung between two metal poles, sunk in wells of cement.

We ran through the weeds, barefoot in our underwear, when I finally held back a step and asked what was going on.

"That was my mother," she said. "I forgot to put back the flask."

She meant Uncle Frank's hip flask. She had been borrowing it for the last two years, and she used to refill it with the liquor she stole from the other apartments. But this time she had left the flask in my room overnight.

"Come on," she pleaded, pulling at my arm.

"What's the big deal?" I whispered. "Why did he hit her?"

She said, "He's a drunk, you dope."

Being an expert Peeping Tom, she knew just where to stand so we could see inside, through the jalousie slats. All four of the apartments had the same floor plan, and her parents' bedroom should have looked the same as mine, except that it had been torn apart. Drawers had been pulled out of the chest, turned upside down and dumped on the carpet.

Uncle Frank stood on his knees over a hill of shirts and underwear. Aunt Louisa cringed on the bedside, and that was where Ricky's eyes went first. Her mother's head hung low, covered by her hair, when suddenly she looked up. We jumped back so she wouldn't see us. Then Ricky grabbed my fingers and squeezed tight. Her mother's face had turned scarlet and was shiny from tears. One cheek had started to swell, and I could already see the yellow around her eye that, by morning, would turn black and blue.

It was the first shiner that I ever saw. Then I noticed that her arms were spotted with purple stains, where Uncle Frank had pressed in his thumbs. And I remembered seeing stains like these before—so often, I used to think of them as birth marks, though they kept coming back in different places.

Ricky never quit staring at her mother, but I turned my attention to Uncle Frank. He was the first grown man that I ever saw crack-up; and I was too young to witness it without feeling horror. He had finished searching through the pile of clothes, and by now he knew it didn't matter. Even if he found the flask, he had stopped believing that liquor could save him. There was something new pressing on his mind. His eyes got very small, then watery and red. And suddenly I understood that he was lost, and after today, no matter how he tried, he could never put on his "normal" face and get it right.

It was the end of Uncle Frank that I was witnessing, though he tried one last time to cover his despair by sounding mad: "Jesus Christ, Louisa! Where did you put the god-damn flask!"

"Frank," she said. "I swear. I never—"

But he didn't give a damn about the flask, as he stood on his knees as if he were only that tall. "Nothing," he wailed, slowly shaking his head, "nothing can make this right."

"Oh, Frank," she said. "What are you saying?"

"If Heaven opened up on Sunday," he cried out, "it wouldn't make up for all the shit we go through."

"No, Frankie," she said, "that's not true," and she climbed off the bed. She loved her big, weak man. And she went over to him and hugged his head between her purple spotted arms. Like a mother leopard caring for a cub.
Chapter Four

In the morning, Aunt Luisa wrapped a kerchief around a swollen face and went to work with a shiner. Uncle Frank never left the apartment; and Ricky told me on the school bus that, with her dad at home, she didn't want to meet in my room. So after school, we waited for a city bus and climbed on like strangers who happened to sit down on the same double seat. Everything felt wrong.

There was a ranch we used to visit on the outskirts of town. It had a man-made pond where cattle could drink and graze, and the owners had opened it to the public and left a paddle boat on the water for anyone's use. At the bus stop, we climbed down and walked silently up the path we always followed. Along the southern bank, we climbed a shady slope, kicked off our shoes, and sat near our special rock, under our favorite tree. A couple was peddling across the water, and just below us, a swan had turned its shepherd's-crook neck and was preening feathers from under a wing.

"Look how brown I am," she said. "And you're always so white." She was staring at our four bare legs. Then she sighed and looked away.

"What's wrong?" I said.

She shook her head.

"Tomorrow we can go back to my room."

"I don't think so," she told me. "I don't think that's a good idea."

But what did that mean, when we always spent our afternoons together in bed?

"Don't you ever—"

"Let's wait awhile," she told me.

My eyes wandered back to the lake, over to the couple in the boat. They didn't look happy to me anymore; and the swan had started plucking its feathers frantically.

"You're such a dope," she told me suddenly. "I missed my period."

I really wasn't sure what that meant.

"I'm more than three months late—" My face must have turned grey. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm always late. This isn't the first time." Then she looked down at her toes, and made them open wide and close. "Can you do that?" she asked.

"Shouldn't we see a doctor?"

"No!" she shot back. But then she thought some more. "Anyway," she said, "it would have to be an obstetrician."

"What's that?" I said. "How do you know this stuff?"

She wouldn't answer since I was too dumb to understand, but then she conceded, "Maybe we should. If you'll make the call."

"I'll call," I promised. "Sure I'll call. But can you get me some names?"

Whoever she talked to about these things, whoever told her about missed periods and obstetricians wasn't her mother or any of my aunts, but Ricky said that she would ask around. And after that, there was nothing left to say.

At home in my room, I felt grateful to get away from her. There was a question that I needed to ask myself without any witnesses—without even a mirror—so that no other eyes could look back at me. If Ricky was pregnant, what would I do? And the worst part about asking was the risk that the answer would shame me. What if I were too low and selfish and scared to do anything but blame Ricky? Or run away?

All afternoon, I made the case for blaming her. I took refuge in being a boy of fourteen. Sure, she was fourteen, too. But how did she know so many things that I didn't? And wasn't it Ricky who had led me into all this trouble? In our family, a girl her age knew everything. She could be married by fourteen but always to an older man. Not a kid like me.

I spent the day with these thoughts. I took them with me into the kitchen and sat down with them at the table. The flies, I noticed, had taken over the room. They were big, fat and slow, as they zoomed, loud and lazy, over my head. They mated in midair and shit on the countertop, all the while staring at me with their thousand eyes. Why did we live in this filth? No one cared. My mother didn't care. She slogged home from her piece-work job and shut her bedroom door until the morning alarm.

Even the old man had given up on us.

I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The sheets I'd share with Ricky through our perfect afternoons—they smelled gamey to me now from semen and sweat. But this is the way that innocence deserts us. When it leaves, it doesn't close the door, and the worst sort of smells come rushing in.

The next day at school, I saw Ricky in the hallway talking to three older girls. When she came over to me, they opened their circle, and the girls stared at us and never looked away.

"I got it," she told me. "Three names." Then she handed me a folded piece of paper.

I remember staring at her dirty fingernails, thinking that she ought to clean herself more often. And I pitied her husband, whoever that might turn out to be.

To this day it riles me to think of the working over I got when I tried to make that appointment. There seemed to be no limit back then to the moral authority that grownups assumed over anyone young. Even the receptionist who took my call was enlivened by the chance to lord it over a kid. She only had to hear a young male voice to stand sentry over "doctor's schedule."

"Who are you making the appointment for?" she opened with.

When I told her my cousin, she sniffed into the receiver.

"How old is she?" the woman said.

"Fifteen," I lied. "No, sixteen."

"Do you realize the girl is a minor?"

"Of course," I said, though of course I did not. What did "minor" even mean?

"How old are you?" she said.

"Eighteen," I tried but the effort I made to deepen my voice was ludicrous, and I was mortified that somehow, through the phone lines between us, she could see me blush.

"Look, I'll have to speak with an adult," she said.

"I'm the only one here."

"Well, son," she said firmly, "I can't make the appointment without talking to the girl's parents."

This scared me so, that I was actually afraid to hang up; and I fumbled along with frightened promises that my uncle, the girl's father, would be calling back immediately. With the second receptionist, though, I took a stronger stand.

"I want that appointment," I said.

"Really?" she shot back. "Do you know who you're talking to?"

"A friggin asshole," I said. "Did I get that right?" Then I slammed down the receiver the way I had seen my Uncle Frank do it when a salesman called and my uncle was drunk.

But now there was only one phone number left, and Ricky went into the next room, too frightened to watch me make it. I sat alone on the bedside, unfolding the paper for the third time. This doctor had an ethnic name, unlike the other two. It was Dr. F. Vadim, as I shall always remember. When a woman answered, I somehow knew that she was the doctor, and that things would finally work out. She had a familiar accent, and a voice that could never be surprised. She was the old man's kinswoman, an eastern European. I even thought of asking, Are you Romanian?

Instead I asked if I could make an appointment for a fourteen-year-old girl because, I sensed, there was no longer any reason to lie.

She said, "How long did you wait to call me?" for she already knew the worst, so I answered all of her questions, and when she was done asking them, I heard her sigh.

"Very well," she said. "Do you have my address?" She gave it to me along with directions. "Be here at eight o'clock."

"Tonight?" I said. Did doctors even see people that late?

"Yes, yes," she said, as though exhausted by the question. "Unless, of course, you think it can wait."

After I hung up, I went to tell Ricky. She was sitting in an armchair with her legs propped on the seat in front of her.

I said, "I made the appointment."

"That's good," she said indifferently.

But then I added, "I made it for tonight," and she sat up straight. Her legs slid off the chair, and her feet plopped on the floor. "At eight o'clock," I said.

Her eyes seemed to ask if I were crazy.

"What else could I do?" I said. "The other two wouldn't talk to me."

"Are you sure she's even a doctor?"

I wasn't sure at all. "You gave me her number," I shrugged, but that didn't change the way either one of us felt.

We had never gone out after eight p.m., though no one would notice or care. They never had. That night, we rode a city bus to Stone Avenue, where we got off in the heart of downtown. But from there, we had to ask several people for directions; and it was after eight before we found our way to the small dark street where Dr. Vadim lived.

The house was just west of downtown; and many of her neighbors—as I learned much later—were judges who served in the courthouse several blocks away. From their front door, they could walk to work, and so could the family owners of the city's largest stores. There was money on this shady, hidden street for people who preferred to live out of sight. Even the house numbers were hard to find, and more than once we stood at a huge front door, afraid to press the wrong bell.

When we finally found the right address, we walked past a wrought-iron gate and started up the circular drive. Attached to the wall, a brass faceplate read

Dr. Frances Vadim. So I pressed the buzzer; and after awhile the front door opened and a woman came out to meet us. She was mannish and middle-aged, with thick-framed glasses and fat clumsy shoes. She looked chunky but very firm inside her baggy dress, and her face was so stern that I thought of her as a soldier. I might even say, as a military man.

"You must be Ricky," she said and little Ricky looked up at her.

"And you," she stared down at me. "You're the one who called." Then she did an about-face and led us into a large dark house.

A picture window looked out at the street, but it was covered now by a long heavy drape. The only light came from small table lamps with low-wattage bulbs. Ricky noticed the darkness too, and she squeezed my fingers tight. Whatever happened next, I had the feeling of being entirely to blame.

"You will wait here," the doctor told me.

There was so much authority in her voice that I marched to where her eyes had sent me and wiggled up to the cushion-edge of an ornate sofa. I won't say that she was smiling down at me, but one side of her taut, sharp face could appreciate the misery that I was in. When she turned to Ricky, though, her eyes relaxed, and she was gentle about explaining that the examination room was at the back of the house, and that this would take about half an hour.

She said, "Come, my dear," and reached out for Ricky's hand. But Ricky surprised me. She snatched her hand away. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and plumped out her lower lip with such defiance that the doctor's attitude changed again, from maternal concern to a stout sort of admiration. "This way," she said and Ricky walked just behind her, as separate from the doctor as the walls allowed.

After they had gone, I looked around from my place on the sofa with the sense of how small I was in this huge, silent vault. A fireplace made of fieldstone had been built into the southern wall. Around it was a semi-circle of oversized furniture—a huge mesquite coffee table, a saddle-leather sofa and chair. But that was only one nook in the space around me. There were other half circles of sofas and chairs in a room arranged like the lobby of a large western lodge.

After a minute in that cavernous silence, I wanted to escape. So I burrowed into myself, and I wondered about many things—like why the doctor had one face for Ricky and another for me. Pretty soon, I had that figured out: I was male, after all? And it really didn't matter that Ricky and I were both fourteen—both puny kids who didn't know much and were terribly afraid—because when you got to the bottom of things, it was my dirty little cock that had done the damage. And that was why the doctor had grimaced at the boy on the sofa's edge—me with my soft, cowardly cock hiding under its mushroom cap, just a poor sodden victim of happenstance. There I sat trembling, while Ricky had defied the old witch. With one fist to the gods, little Ricky had been big enough to deal with the biggest thing in life.

They took half an hour, I suppose, but you can't judge time when your mind is a muddle. And all that I recall is looking up from the floor and seeing them both, standing above me. Only now Dr. Vadim wore a long white coat. No one spoke, so my eyes shot straight to Ricky. Was that relief I saw in her shiny black eyes, or was I imagining it? But then I thought I saw her wink. And I took a long, grateful breath and swore to myself that I would never get into a spot like this again. I was thanking God and praising heaven when Dr. Vadim finally spoke.

She said, "This girl is definitely four and a half months pregnant."

It would have been hard to hear those words in any case, but they hit harder because they had landed broadside. I started getting up but without the legs to hold me, and Dr. Vadim must have finally realized that the male in the room was a child too. She told me to sit still for awhile. Then she slowly started to explain. She said that we had waited too long. If we had come to her sooner, then maybe, she might have . . . But now there was no point in discussing it.

"Do you understand what I am saying?"

I don't think she was satisfied that I did because she pushed a heavy armchair across the hardwood floor and sat down opposite me, so close that our knees collided. Ricky stood behind the doctor's chair, and when I looked up, she was staring down at us both, calm and curious, watching us confer.

"Listen to me," said the doctor carefully. "This is very important. You both did a foolish thing. You waited too long, and now you have no other choice." She was watching my eyes, trying to be sure that she was getting through. "It is too late to abort," she said. "No doctor will do it. Not even in Mexico," she decided to add. "If you find someone who will do it"—she tapped my knee sharply—"the chances are great this girl will die."

Chapter Five

Once she felt sure that I had understood her admonitions, the doctor walked us outside. She wished Ricky good luck but turning to me, shook her head and shut her eyes. "Remember my words," she called to me as I looked back through the wrought iron gate. But by then Ricky had started walking up the block, and I chased after her.

A street lamp stood between each pair of houses, and every time we entered another cone of light, I saw Ricky in profile, slightly ahead of me, hiding her smile—the same one that I had seen on her face when I'd looked up from the sofa. It was the smile that I had mistaken for an "All's clear! I'm not pregnant. You're not a father," though it had turned out to be something else entirely—a sort of private celebration of her juvenile maternity.

"You're only fourteen," I said but that got her walking faster.

The way that I think of it now, Ricky had spent her childhood trying to see through bedroom walls, and somewhere during her career as Peeping Tom, she must have watched my Aunt Sadie, Uncle Lucca's wife, during her pregnancy. It had ended in a still birth and hysteria, but it was in Ricky's nature to try anything once. And to Ricky, getting pregnant must have been an escapade, the next exciting chapter after sex. While for me, this had to be the worst calamity that could ever happen in a fourteen-year-old's life. With the two of us that far apart, what more was there to say?

We rode the city bus home, gazing our separate ways. And in the backyard, without a word between us, I helped Ricky climb through the bathroom window into her parents' apartment. Then I came around to my own front door, rang the bell and knocked until my mother finally opened it in her housecoat and slippers. She let me in without any questions and shuffled back to her room.

I can imagine Ricky lying awake on the other side of the wall between us—awake but feeling none of what I felt. She must have been charmed by nature's curious ways. After holding me against her so many times, and looking up at my wild excitement, after feeling me buck inside of her my load of love, she must have wondered about the shape our child would take.

Whereas I lay awake on my side of the wall, a pissed-off teenage boy, feeling like the victim of nature's double-cross. How did a fuck book and a fake fur mitt, a French tickler and a bondage-cord inspire a baby? And why did rape make babies, or bored and ritual sex? A boy will ask these questions, and he might see the answer as a sorry joke. All that night I sat up in bed feeling like a gypsy—I wanted to go on the lam.

In the morning we used to wait together for the school bus, which stopped for us at the curb outside the fourplex. Then we would climb on board and share a seat, not much aware of the other kids around us. We only parted in the hallway at school to walk to our separate home rooms. Lunch time, we found each other in the playground and sat apart from everyone else. And after school, we were bus-mates again, planning the rest of our day.

But the morning after seeing Dr. Vadim, I didn't go to school, and Ricky didn't try to find me. So I spent the afternoon alone, trying to accept that nothing would ever be the same. By three o'clock, she should have arrived home, and I kept expecting her to step into my doorway. I knew that if I saw one tear, she would gain whatever she asked of me. Why hold out when the only thing I wanted wasn't possible? And that was to wake up in a world where yesterday had never happened, and everything that used to be could stay the same.

But she didn't come to me all that day. And the next morning, she wasn't waiting at the curb. I rode the bus alone, and at school, I couldn't find her in the crowd. So I waited until the hallway was deserted of kids, and then I cracked open her home-room door, to convince myself that she was near. Her seat was empty. And for me that was like visiting a hospital to see a loved one, and finding the room deserted and the bed newly made. What did it mean? And where should I run to find out?

Once the thought took hold that Ricky had somehow vanished, I needed to find her, to see her now. So I left school and started running. Many times I would lean against a lamp post with a stitch in my side. The way home went on for miles. And even when I arrived, I couldn't just pound on my Aunt Louisa's door. What if my Aunt already knew, and that was why she was keeping Ricky out of sight? But then, if Ricky had told her mother, I would have heard them screaming through the walls. And if she had run away instead, wouldn't my Aunt be looking for her now?

In the end, the only one I dared to ask was my mother.

If she were alive today, my poor mother would be treated for clinical depression. In those days, she did a robot's work on an assembly line, and when she got home, she lay in bed until the morning alarm. So, sadly, I knew where to find her. Her room was the hottest in the fourplex, since she never made the effort to open a window or turn on a fan.

"Robbie?" When she rolled her head my way, her face looked moist with perspiration. "Is that you?"

"It's me, mom." I came up to the bed and sat on the edge.

"It's so hot," she moaned, holding my arm. There were little sweat-beads on her upper lip, and she dabbed at them with a cotton ball. "What's wrong?" she said. "You look so sad today."

"It's nothing," I said. "Say, mom, have you seen Ricky?"

"Ricky," she mumbled. Then she rolled her head toward the opposite wall. "Ricky went away."

"Where, mom? Where did Ricky go?"

"Don't ask me that. Ask your grandfather."

"Why would he know?"

"I can't talk about it, Robbie. Ask him. He takes care of these things."

I left her then, and walked hard and fast to the end apartment.

Uncle Lucca lived there with my Aunt Sadie, and the old man used a bedroom in the back. Whenever I went to see my grandfather, I had to greet my uncle first, and that was a lively event. My Uncle Lucca was an exceptional man, nothing like my other uncles. Nor did he look like them. My uncles Eddie, Pete and Frank were long, lean men. Whereas Lucca was a little guy, littler than I was at fourteen, but he was bandy and supremely confident. He had a stage actor's voice, and if I had to pick the actor with the voice most like Lucca's, it would have to be Yul Brenner, they both sounded so unnaturally loud.

His humor was wry and cocky. He smoked constantly, and when he finished a cigarette down to the butt, he used to flick it with his fingertips over his shoulder. Then he would raise a back leg and, without fail, the butt would land on the sole of his shoe. He did this everywhere, on the sidewalk or in his kitchen. It was his trademark, Lucca's donkey-kick at the backside of the world.

When he opened the door that morning, he looked pleased to see me, pleased and amused. With careful pronunciation, he said, "So! It's our love-sick swain." Then he took out a cigarette and said, "If you're looking for the old man, he's at the park with his playmates."

My grandfather had been feeling much better. After recovering from hepatitis, he had entered a second life, though he still didn't involve himself much in the family business. That was Uncle Lucca's province now. But my grandfather had made new friends in the other old immigrant men that he met at Randolph Park. They used to gather at the southern end, close to Twenty-Second Street, where they played horseshoes and bocce ball. Most of them were Italians, but my grandfather spoke Italian. And there was a German among them, but my grandfather spoke German, too.

Once or twice he had brought me with him to meet these men. I think his favorite was Salvatore, who came from Sicily. He was another tough old nut, and he told my grandfather that in his youth, he had belonged to the Sicilian Mafia.

"Then they should shoot you for telling me," my grandfather said.

"Good, good," Salvatore nodded. "Your grandpa," he told me, "is the smartest one here."

But my grandfather pointed at me. "This one is the smartest," he said. "But first I got to make him ruthless."

When I found him that day, he was tossing a horseshoe, but as soon as he saw me, he dropped it on the ground. The others watched in surprise, but he ignored them and walked over to an empty bench.

"In the first place," he said, before I ever got out a word, "the only ones who know are Uncle Lucca and me."

"And my mother," I said. "And Ricky's parents."

"They know it will be taken care of," he said. "But no one else knows about you." Then to please me, he added, "That was Ricky's condition."

"She told you?"

"She came to me," he said, "the next day."

"Is she still here?"

"Don't waste your time," he told me. "I sent her out of state."

"Jesus!" was all that I could think to say. But then I said, "You should have told me. I am the father."

"Father," he said with disdain. "You know how many times I've fixed this problem? If I had a nickel—"

Then I had a leaping thought. It took me back to the night he had brought in that tailor to sew up Uncle Frank. I grabbed the old man's arm. "She can't have an abortion," I warned him.

"What are you talking about?"

"The baby's too big. The doctor says if she gets an abortion, Ricky will die."

"In the first place," the old man told me, and his voice tightened. "In the first place," he said, "don't talk to me about a baby. A salamander," he said. "A newt swimming in her tubes. Don't come to me with women's talk."

"But it's too big," I said. "Even I know that."

"So what are you accusing me of?"

"I remember who you got to patch up Uncle Frank's ear."

"That," he shrugged. "That was a mistake for one reason. Your uncle is weak." Then he held up his right hand and he wiggled his three long fingers and a thumb. The missing finger, I'd been told, had been cut off in a factory accident. But now he said, "Why do you think I never served in the tsar's army?" and his eyes were glistening. "One stroke," he said. "I did it with a cleaver. But your Uncle Frank"—he shook his head—"I told him what to say. You say that you lost your ear in the war. You did it fighting Nazis. That's what you tell them. If he listened to me, he'd still be on top."

"Grandpa, please," I said. "Let her have the baby. She can give it away. But don't let her have an abortion."

"And that's what you want?" he smiled at me.

"Please."

"Didn't I always say you're my favorite? Didn't I, Robbie?"

"You always did," I told him.

"My favorite boy," he said. "And she's my favorite of the girls. I wouldn't hurt Ricky," he swore to me.

And I believed him.
Chapter Six

We were a family of thieves, and anyone who didn't belong by blood was considered fair game, so if some greedy mark wanted a new car for the price of an old one, or a diamond ring that cost no more than paste, we provided an ethical service in this sense: We charged the price that the mark demanded, but we gave him the product that the bastard deserved.

We were family tenaciously united for over two thousand years, in spite of slavery, witch hunts and Hitler's crematoria. And what had held us together through all of that? We didn't cheat each another, and my grandfather would never double cross me. In his withered way the old man loved me—though it hadn't been so easy on his scornful nature to accept a boy with my father's eyes and sandy hair. What else did that son of a bitch put into this child? He must have wondered. But when I was too young to make out the suspicion in his face, I went straight to him the way a puppy picks a master.

As far back as my memories extend, they place me in our Bronx apartment—the one he shared one summer with my mother and me. And I am climbing on his knees to ask for a story, or strolling at his side to the corner newsstand. One day he wrapped his sandpapery palm around my hand, and from then on, his feelings for me changed. When we walked down the street, he'd pull me closer if he didn't like the look of someone passing by. And when he talked with his cronies at the Romanian café, he'd introduce me as his grandchild and call me his favorite—which made none of my cousins jealous. They were scared of the old man and his all-seeing eyes, and they thought of me as the human sacrifice that kept the monster at bay. My cousins never trusted him, but I did. And when my grandfather promised that Ricky would come back to me safe and well, I stopped worrying about her.

There was enough going on that summer to keep my mind off Ricky. In a few weeks, I would be starting school at Tucson High—a monumental place, the pride of the city with its fortress walls and Corinthian columns. But the biggest diversions of that summer were caused by my cousins Jimmy and Max; and what happened to them would change my life forever.

After disgracing themselves in high school, my cousins dropped out. They did it to keep from getting expelled in much the way that my family moved out of state in advance of the law, or out of a house ahead of an eviction.

Now, when a boy in our family dropped out of school, his uncles were supposed to make a place for him, and train him as an apprentice-thief. With Jimmy and Max that wasn't possible. To my grandfather, they were "The Idiots," and he never called them by any other name. Even their fathers, my Uncles Pete and Frank, knew how little their sons were worth—that Jimmy couldn't wipe the cunning off his face and kept giving himself away, that Max was too stupid to be of any use. So no one knew what to do with them; and instead of joining my uncles in Phoenix, my cousins were left at home to drift. Early that summer they moved out and leased an apartment on the south side of town. It only took until August before they had caused such a stink that we almost had to pack again and move.

The first to screw up was my Cousin Max, a boy of seventeen with all the talent it took to be a hero to boys half his age. In a competition, he could belch the loudest and fart at will. And when I was six years old, I thought he was side-splittingly funny, though by eight, I had already figured out that my cousin was a fool. We stayed friends, but only because we had been through so many family upheavals—near arrests and midnight flights—that we only had Jimmy and each other. Who else could possibly understand our lives? But no three kids could have been more different. And if there is a reason to explain this, it has to be the mothers who raised us.

Louisa was the aunt I tried to avoid whenever I came to visit Max. She was the only one with fond memories of The Old County; so while I sat in her kitchen waiting for her son, she'd cluck and coo about her darling mama, about the way that woman had lived to please—all day in an oven-heated kitchen and in firelight at night slowly combing out Louisa's hair. To my grandfather, this was nonsense. The house in Romania had been a shit pit in hell, smoky from burning coal and bitterly cold. As for his wife (Louisa's cherished mama), he never mourned her.

Between these two versions of a woman and a place, my grandfather's seemed more true. When I examined the evidence in my mother's album, I didn't see much to cherish in the mildewed photographs of a fierce peasant with granite eyes—a woman who butchered pigs on the kitchen table and looked as kindly as her cleaver.

My Aunt Beti, the middle child, was Jimmy's mother. And when my grandfather wasn't around and my mother's door was closed to me, she was the one I went to. As "Madame Beti" she did Psychic Readings, wore a top-heavy turban and a majestic satin robe, fastened in front by a chariot clasp. But when the reading was done, as soon as she could find someplace out of sight, she'd pull the turban off her head of pasted-down curls and take a pull on a Lucky Strike. Beti had come to America, sized up the new rules of play, and become an American because that was what paid off here.

My mother was the youngest and prettiest of the sisters, and while Beti saw the payoff in acting American, only my mother wanted to be an American. What drew her to my father, I always suspected, was the pride she took that this blond Yankee, this good-looking native of upstate New York had accepted her as an American girl.

But getting back to Louisa, everything that an immigrant ought to leave in the Old Country, she had brought with her and cherished—the frumpy clothes and her fear of change, the reek of onions and her village superstitions. She recoiled from another point of view—new ideas, new people, and this terrible new country that her papa had dragged her to, thousands of miles from her darling mama's grave.

When her sisters urged her to get out and make friends, she'd tell them, "You are my friends. All I care about is family." But that wasn't true. Sons mattered; daughters did not, so even Ricky had no claim on her mother's heart. My Aunt Louisa's mind grew so narrow that it finally converged on just herself, my Uncle Frank and Max. And this world of three, she decided, was the envy of her sisters. Or it ought to be.

Her jealousies could take up a landfill. And the worst of them centered on my mother for being younger, prettier, and the most aggressively American. So it seemed only fair to Louisa that my mother had failed, that her husband had deserted her—that my mother had become a broken person who could not be fixed. But even this wasn't punishment enough. And though my mother's loneliness appeased her somewhat, Louisa always made it a point to add, "It's a pity. She even lost her looks."

Without a husband, without her looks, my mother still caused Louisa one last jealous concern. And that was the matter of me—my mother's only child and the old man's favorite, when by all rights his favorite ought to be her Max. The love that Louisa made to Max would have mortified Freud. And it gave her glee to fondle him in front of me, her idea being to taunt me—to show me, up close, what real mother love looked like by goosing, kissing and tickling Max, and by finger-combing her darling's hair.

"What a son I have," she liked to say. "It's a pity your mother couldn't have a son like this."

Then Max would look my way with a blushing grin because his mother could be such a pain, even if everything she said about him was sort of true.

When I recall my Aunt Louisa, I always think of vegetable matter—a turnip head and the garlic smell of her sweat, which was also redolent of onions and boiling leeks. The truth—I felt too much disdain for my Aunt to let her wreck my friendship with her son. What almost did end it was the stunning incongruity that he was Ricky's brother, that my beautiful, curly haired elf was the sister of a farting, belching bear—that and my galling suspicion that what she knew so early on about sex, Max had told her or shown her or both.

What caused Max so much trouble, and almost forced the family to flee, was the taste that he acquired for mescal. This is the nasty stuff from Mexico, authenticated by a worm at the bottom of the bottle. He learned to drink it on the trips he and Jimmy made to Nogales when I was a kid, too young to go along. They used to stop at the bars on Obregon, the main boulevard of tourist shops, before heading for the brothels on Canal Street, where only the locals ever went.

Jimmy soon had his fill of the place, and he took a job in Tucson on a horse-boarding ranch, but Max kept going back to stock up. Since anyone could bring a bottle across the border duty free, Max would ask tourists who weren't drinkers themselves, if they would carry over a bottle for him. That way, he could travel home with a full case.

There is a tradition in northern Mexico of drinking a shot of mescal before breakfast. Max took it up, but he kept on drinking all day. One morning he lumbered outside into the eye of an orange-yellow sun. He stood on the threshold of the apartment that he shared with Jimmy, tottering on the front-door mat, when he noticed Jimmy's car parked nearby, the key in the ignition.

Well, why not?

He had never bothered to get a license, but he knew how to drive—more or less—so he climbed inside and started up the road. A mile away, he sat idling on a quiet street where construction workers had left orange pylons down the center line to block off one lane. Nobody seemed to be around, and Jimmy's car was fast and sleek, so Max considered the speedometer. He wondered how high he could get it to climb by the time he reached the corner. Even supposing that the needle wriggled up to 90, a 100, or a 1000 mph!, and the road, like a runway, lifted him into the Arizona sky, he felt drunk enough, and numb enough, to land like a bird when the wheels touched down and the bouncing chassis followed.

Fuck it all! Max decided to fly.

He must have heard the engine like a voice in his head, hysterically rising. By third gear, the voice reached a screaming peak, when something heavy flew over the hood. It thumped against the windshield, but by the time Max had turned, expecting to see a pylon bouncing down the road, what he saw instead was cracked, sunken glass. Jimmy will kill me, he thought, so he stamped on the brake, and the front wheels swiveled and screeched to a stop.

For a long time after that, he drove through streets he would have known in a sober state, until he wound up somehow in the driveway of the apartment. There he staggered out of the car, left the driver's door hanging open, and reeled inside where he fell on his face in the middle of his mattress.

The next morning, he woke up screaming into his pillow as Jimmy pressed ice against the soles of his feet.

"What happened to my god damn car?" Jimmy said.

"What car?" Max cried out, rolling onto his back.

"My god damn windshield," Jimmy said. "What the fuck did you do?"

Max really didn't know. His mind was a dark and empty space, but how many times had Jimmy shined a light inside and pointed out the most terrible things?

"My god damn windshield," Jimmy said. "It's busted."

"What are you asking me for? I didn't do nothing."

"Yeah? Well how come there's blood all over the glass?"

If he hadn't been so woozy, Max would have bolted out of bed.

"Read this," Jimmy said, tossing a newspaper at Max's face. "That better not be you, or you are fucked."

This is the story Max told me later on, and Jimmy confirmed. But I knew nothing about it the morning that a big, solemn cop knocked on my door. He asked for Max, and I said that my Cousin Max didn't live here anymore.

"Do you know where I can find him, son?"

"You could talk to my grandfather," I said. "He knows everything."

That cost the cop a smile, and I had an urge to tell him it was really true, but instead I sent him to the old man's door. Then I regretted helping a cop, and I wondered if my grandfather would think less of me for it.

Just after dark I came home to fix my dinner—to put something between two slices of bread, then tap on my mother's door and remind her to eat. It was Saturday night and my uncles had come back from Phoenix. I could hear their boozy laughter all the way from Uncle Lucca's apartment, where the lights were bright in every window. My aunts would be there drinking beer, and Lucca would have laid out the Dewar's on a tray for the men. Our place was dark at that hour, except in the kitchen. That was where I found my mother, in a pretty summer dress, holding a stick of lipstick and staring at the make-up mirror standing upright on the table.

"Have you eaten?" she asked, turning with a ruby mouth. "What would you like?" She said it as if making my dinner were a regular chore. She had broken through. For days or even weeks, I would have my mother back.

Once I asked her how it happened that she could suddenly be well.

"God helps me," she said.

She placed her fist over her heart, on a spot that had ached for so long, she had forgotten why it was there. During the hours she lay in her room, without enough purpose to climb out of bed, she wasn't thinking about my father, or about anyone else who had ever hurt her. She didn't care about the past or fret about the future. Her only concern—that incessant gnawing at her heart. And yet there came moments of mercy, days of grace, sometimes years apart, when she would look for the pain, even seek it out, and slowly realize it had gone.

"Then you're all right?" I asked and my mother smiled.

"Let's go to Uncle Lucca's," she said. "He's expecting us."

"Sounds like a party."

"It's a family counsel."

"A what?" I laughed. "Did we ever have one before?"

"Never," she said. "But I think it's an announcement. I think your grandfather's ready to retire, and Uncle Lucca will take over the business."

"Maybe I'll stay home," I said.

"No," she said. "You have to come. Lucca came here to tell me. He said, Make sure that Robbie comes. And you know how loud he talks."

The apartments in our fourplex weren't very large, and we had to press ourselves inside. My uncles crowded the living room, though their wives were in the kitchen, and that was where my mother went to join them. She left me dodging elbows on my crooked path to an empty chair. Not five minutes later, Uncle Lucca called for order, and since no one had ever been to a family counsel before, a lot of fumbling occurred before the folding chairs had been passed around, and husbands found their wives and arranged themselves into a kind of order.

Uncle Lucca sat enthroned on a threadbare chair; and behind him, off to one side my grandfather sipped his tea in the Russian style, from a glass with a slice of lemon. The others had set up their chairs to face Lucca, except for Uncle Frank who took up the sofa with my Aunt Louisa. She had been staring at my mother, and it was nakedly clear what an affront it was to see my mother well again and looking pretty. Louisa scowled at me, too, as if my mother had brought me out of spite to remind her that Max had moved out—that her Max now led a separate life. He was nowhere around, and neither was Jimmy, so it seemed strange that Uncle Lucca had insisted that my mother bring me.

By the time he called the meeting to order, my other uncles were half-lit. And they reared in their seats, rolling their eyes like hecklers. One stern look from Lucca shut them up. He had such presence that the plaster walls might have been marble and his armchair, a judicial bench. When Uncle Frank shouted that he needed a drink, Uncle Lucca amplified his voice: "Not now," he thundered. "This is no joke!" And Frank, the oldest of my uncles, even blushed. "Now listen to me," said Lucca with a chesty boom. "I'll tell you why we're here."

Then he started to explain, and it had nothing to do with retirement or a passing of the torch. He said that one of us—that a member of our family—had crossed the line. That this unnamed person had done a thing the rest of us would never condone, and that he, Lucca, had called this family counsel to reach a decision.

"Tonight," he said, "we're going to vote. And if the ayes have it, we are not going to protect him. If the ayes have it, he goes to jail."

This was something unheard of. Heads turned, and above the mumbles Uncle Pete shouted, "That's not right. That's not how the family works."

No one else had decided what to think, and I suspect that quite a few in that room suddenly wondered if the guilty party were my Uncle Pete.

Meanwhile Lucca waited us out because the longer he took to respond, the more that he commanded our silence. Just once, he glanced back at the old man; and I wondered if I were the only one there who understood that Lucca had the starring role but that my grandfather was directing.

"So what did he do?" someone said. "What was so terrible?"

"Precisely," said Lucca. Then he told us the story of the accident—never naming Max. He said that someone who had no business driving "borrowed" a car that wasn't his. And he drove, stone drunk, through the city streets until he came upon a construction site. Then this drunken fool went speeding through the site, and he hit an old lady. She was hurled onto the hood, and she broke her neck against the windshield and fell dead on the blacktop.

"She was eighty," Lucca said. "Maybe she could have lived. Maybe not. It was hit and run, so we'll never know."

Of course, he was talking about my Cousin Max. The cop had coming looking for Max, asking for him by name. But the strange part was, Uncle Lucca turned slowly and stared straight at me.

"Forget the old lady," he said. "I'll tell you what pisses me off. After all the god damn trouble we went through to stay clean in this town. All the trips to Phoenix so we could have a safe home, this stupid fool, this idiot," he shouted, "for a cheap thrill, he has to drink until he's blind and kill someone. And where do you think the cops came looking?" He turned from me then. And one by one, he eyed each of my aunts and uncles. "They came here," he bellowed. "That's what this fool did. He brought the cops down on us."

Having wrapped up his case, Lucca lit a cigarette, and as he slowly exhaled he turned back to me. His eyes narrowed, and they were so intensely focused that my mother suddenly grabbed my hand. She pulled me close and whispered, "Robbie, you?"

Then the others also turned my way, and I could see their shock, or regret, or disbelief. Only one face in that room flushed with satisfaction, and that was the face of my Aunt Louisa who sat across from me on the sofa. When I looked at her, I saw a smile of vindication!

"So now we're going to vote," Lucca resumed and his eyes never left me.

I can't say what I was thinking at the time. At first, I had no thoughts because the unexplainable was happening, so I watched and I marveled. But then it came into my head that I ought to say something. "This is crazy!" or "You've got it wrong!" But what kept me mum was the even darker look that I got from my grandfather. I understood him so well that I could read his eyes like a text, and he was ordering me to keep my mouth shut. Just sit there, his eyes commanded. Don't say a word.

"Anyone who thinks this fool should go to jail, say aye," said Lucca.

There were several thin-sounding ayes. Only Aunt Louisa shouted it.

"Nays?" asked Lucca.

No nays, but a murmuring sort of silence.

Then Lucca looked straight at my aunt. "What do you say, Louisa? Did I hear you say aye?"

"Hah!" she exploded. "I always knew what he was. He belongs in a jail," she said.

With that, Lucca turned to the old man, who had been watching with contempt.

"Go on," said my grandfather.

And Lucca—the old, wry Lucca—stood up from the armchair. He pitched his cigarette butt into the air, over his left shoulder, and it fell, just as he had willed it to fall, on to the sole of his up-kicked shoe. "The decision is final," he said. But instead of pointing his finger at me, he looked over at my Aunt. "Max," he said, "is going to jail."

It took several seconds—and each of those seconds introduced a new tic to her cheek—before my Aunt Louisa fainted on the shoulder of my Uncle Frank.
Chapter Seven

While Max staggered across the calendar toward his date in July with the woman he would kill, my Cousin Jimmy—the one my grandfather referred to as "Idiot Number Two"—was busy constructing his own debacle. Jimmy was my cocky cousin, the first kid I ever saw wear his hair in a Pompadour, or swagger up to a mirror, steered there by his hips, and blow himself a kiss. Before the ascendancy of Elvis, before the advent of James Dean, my cousin, the Prophet Jimmy Boiko, preached their gospel of cool.

The old man called my cousins idiots, and he was right about that, but each was an idiot in his own way. Max was nothing like Jimmy, or anyone else for that matter. In a family of lean, clever men—uncles as wiry as alley cats, a grandfather whose flesh fit his bones like a tight suit, and the same could be said about Jimmy and me—Max looked grafted onto our family tree. He was stupid and slow, burly and wide. Max, in short, was a bear, ate like one, drank like one, fucked like one, for all I know. And he stole solely to satisfy his caloric needs.

Whereas Jimmy was an idiot of another sort. Above all else, he was my lucky cousin. And whatever Jimmy wanted arrived on time. But where was the challenge when girls clung to him, guys tried to know him, and bosses pursued him with jobs? The challenge for Jimmy came in screwing up his prospects by sleeping late, arriving drunk, or getting caught in the act; and only then—just when anyone else would turn pale at getting caught—of testing the limits of his talent for getting away with murder. "Show me," he seemed to say. "Where's the jury that could convict my fabulous face?" His charm he thought of as invincible; his luck never ending. And for his arrogance, he provoked the old man's wraith.

Toward Max, my grandfather carried a grim resignation. Every village has an idiot, every family, too, and ours was Max. But for the way that Jimmy pitted his luck against the Law of Comeuppance, the way that he stuck his middle finger under the nose of Fate, my grandfather would erupt.

"Imbecile!" he'd holler, and the one person that Jimmy feared and could never hope to charm was the old man in a rage.

While Max was off getting blasted on mescal, Jimmy had landed the job I used to dream about when we first arrived in Tucson. Jimmy found himself a reluctant cowboy, working for the kind of people I had always wanted to know. They owned a horse-boarding ranch, and they had hired him to feed and groom the horses. And there were other duties just as wonderful to me. Jimmy even got to meet movie stars!

Tom and Sue were the owners. And those two were so authentic—so completely honest, solid, feisty and real—that they came to be favorites of the film people shooting westerns south of town. On weekends, they were hired to throw chuck wagon suppers at the guest ranch where the film stars stayed. So Jimmy got to ladle chili, Son-of-a-Gun stew, and vinegar pie to the likes of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne!

I don't think my cousin understood that slopping beans on tin plates and handing those plates to actors could look glamorous to other eyes, but when he came to realize how I envied his job, he started to enjoy having me around. He even talked to Sue about my coming out one day. "Sure," she said, "but I ain't paying him." So he brought me along as a "volunteer," a kid who would work for free to learn about horses. And every day at 6 a.m., he would pick me up, so we could get to the ranch before seven. That was when the hands gathered at the barn, and Tom assigned the day's chores.

My job was to follow Sue everywhere, usually into the horse stalls. And I proudly shoveled manure, pitched hay, and learned to recognize a hoof pick from a dandy brush and how to comb a mane. I took to it straightaway, and Sue took to me. She was "a gal a feller could be pals with," I reckon. She may have been forty-five years old, but she had worked out of doors the same as any ranch hand. And after twenty years in the Arizona sun, she had aged like a wrangler. There were fissures in her neck, crannies in her cheeks. Her skin had creviced like land in a drought; and she could have been a hundred and forty-five, except for her crackling young voice and her sass. She ordered me here and there, and by the end of my first week I started to love her.

At first, I thought that Sue was the ranch, and that Tom hobbled around the place for the purpose of looking in charge. But then, one day, she told me how he came by his limp. She said that he was "one heck of a wrangler," and he used to work as an unofficial stunt man—someone the directors used in films that called for hard, dangerous riding. He was a regular stand-in for John Wayne, so in those dusty scenes where, off at a distance, the Duke goes pounding down a trail, it was really Tom whipping the reins for a camera on a hilltop, Tom who climbed a nearly vertical mesa, or raised trail dust across a panoramic plain.

"He was a great rider," Sue said. "Go on," she told me, when I put down my shovel. "You can work and listen too, can't ya?"

One night on a film shoot, she said, a director "got it in his bonnet" that Tom had to ride a particular horse along the narrow ledge of a cliff. But the horse was an unstable beast, easily spooked. He wanted to film the ride in moonlight, and his idea was to end the movie with a haunting silhouette. The idea set firmly in his head that it would be that cliff and that horse with Tom on it, but Tom told him no. He said the horse couldn't be trusted. It was just too dangerous and not nearly worth the risk. Unfortunately, when he said it, the crew was listening in, and the director felt that he had to stand firm.

After some back and forth, Tom agreed to do it.

The director planned to start filming at two a.m., so the scene would be dark and silent. While cameras rolled in the valley below, Tom prodded the snorting, stubborn animal up the cliff side. He kept it under control, and the director was about to shout "Cut!" when suddenly, in the distance, headlights swept across the valley. Some drunk in a pickup rounded a turn, and held down his horn. And at the top of the cliff, Tom's horse bolted.

He yanked at the reins, but the horse fought him, and they battled left, then right straight toward the ledge. That was when Tom realized the worst: He saw that he could tumble sideways down the hill onto the crew below. Or he could gallop over the ledge and plunge, horse and rider, onto boulders and rocks. He made the hero's choice. Tom rode full gallop, until the horse's forelegs paddled in the air. And I have to wonder, in those moments of flight, if they went on long enough for Tom to realize, this was it, the two or three seconds before he would start to live a crippled life. And I wonder if the horse could sense it, too, inside the whirl of panic in its head, that this was it, a moment of foaming breath, then oblivion.

When that moment ended, they plunged. And when they hit bottom in a thousand-pound thudding plop, the horse lay on top of Tom. His hip had been crushed under an enormous loin, and Tom was finished as a rider.

Back from the hospital, he wore a cast up to his hips, and Sue had to keep the ranch going on her own. Yet they never wasted a perfectly good working day being mad or resentful. These two were tough in a way completely new to me. Sure, I understood the toughness of my grandfather, who despised life and looked upon disaster with familiarity and contempt. But I had never known people like Sue and Tom, who managed calamity by weaving it into the saga of their lives. When she realized that Tom would be hobbling from now on, that he couldn't even take her to a square dance anymore, she got a notion.

"Heck, I thought. Why not square dance on horses? So I called up Spud Bunker. He walked on crutches himself, but he got around faster than most men can run. And I asked old Spud if he could rework the calls—"

It turned into a Friday night tradition at the Circle Eight Ranch. The folks who came to see it sat in bleachers built around the arena.

"You ought to come some time," Sue told me. "Got anything doing this weekend?"

"No," I said, "not a thing."

"Tell Jimmy to bring you," she said. "We're throwing a chuck-wagon supper. You can help me serve the movie folks."

Jimmy showed up that Friday night dressed to the nines. He wore jeans as straight as iron rails and sharply creased. His shirt had diamond snaps and two chest pockets with saw-tooth flaps. And a black Stetson covered one eye, as he slowly stroked the thin mustache he'd been growing for weeks.

"How come?" I asked.

"Because I'm a dashing vaquero." Then he glanced my way. "It means 'cowboy' in Spanish. I'm a Mexican cowboy, chump."

"I thought you don't want to look Mexican." He had told me that often enough.

"Yeah, well that's before I hooked up with Rosa," he said. "The one you hang out with, when you're not shoveling horseshit."

She was lovely, a really sweet young girl who worked with Sue in the kitchen and helped serve the hands their meals. Every day at noon, when Rosa rang the triangle bell, the men dropped their ropes, pitchforks, and anything else they had in hand; and they walked straight toward the long Ramada at the kitchen-end of the house. Under the narrow shade of a wooden roof, a picnic table had been set up, made of planks so splintered that Sue kept them covered with a plastic tablecloth. On top of it, Rosa would set up the tin plates, the cups and utensils.

After each man took his place, Sue wheeled around a sort of wooden shopping cart someone had rigged up to help her serve. Inside the cart she placed a tub of stew, and ladled some into each man's bowl. Meanwhile Rosa followed with a basket of biscuits, and Sue used to slap wrists if anyone reached for a second. Once her back was turned, though, Rosa gave each man a smile and a wink and she dropped another biscuit on the plate. Then if Sue shot a backward look, Rosa would mold her face into a Madonna's mask. This was a skit those two performed every afternoon, an endearing routine that upheld Sue's crusty authority while ensuring that the boys got well fed. And though everyone knew that Rosa had Sue's consent, the men felt obliged to the girl and as protective of her as a dozen foster fathers.

And this was the Rosa that Jimmy had meant when he said, "Why do you think I'm working there? For the horses?" We had come to the edge of the city, where the road ended in gravel and stone. And as we bumped along, he said, "I picked that cherry three months ago. What do you think I'm doing in the haystacks while you're shoveling shit?"

"If they find out—"

"Yeah," he said. "No more horse shit. No more beans. Jesus Frog," he laughed, "they might have to fire me!"

By the time we drove through the parameter fence, the chuck wagon had been fully loaded. It was a tidy rig, not a new one but well equipped and in good repair. The chuck box had been filled with utensils, the fly had been latched, and the canvas cover tied down tight. Over at the hitching post, the ranch hands were mounting their horses so they could ride alongside the wagon. Tom was the slowest to mount, and while he got himself comfortably seated, Jimmy strolled over to his horse, and I went inside the kitchen to see if Sue needed my help.

"Took you long enough," she barked. "Don't fret yourself. I know it was your cousin's fault."

Sue was wearing a cowgirl's hat made out of straw, and she'd tied the leather strap under her chin. Like everyone else that night, she had dressed in her newest, crispest western wear; and there I stood in dusty jeans, a tee shirt and sneakers.

"Can I go like this?" I asked.

"No one will see you," she said. "They'll be three sheets to the wind. But next time, I'm buying you some proper boots."

Next time, she had said, and to be included meant everything to me, so I grabbed a steamy pot grinning and lugged it outside.

Sue drove the chuck wagon. The ranch hands trotted left or right of us on horseback. And inside, under the bows and canvas, I sat on a small bench opposite Rosa. She looked terrific, the only one of us in soft pale-blue jeans, and her cowgirl's hat of bright red had a black band with a silver heart at the center.

"You're Jimmy's cousin?" she said.

She could see that I didn't want to talk, at least not about Jimmy, so we bounced along in silence. But from the way that she looked at me, I understood that she had hopes about him and she wanted his family to like her.

"How are you doing back there?" Sue called to us over her shoulder.

"Are we almost there?" I said.

"You'll know when you get there," she told me.

This guest ranch was a favorite of movie stars, and not for the likes of the crew. It was a swanky place. Even a kid like me could see that, though we rode through a gate no different than the gate of any other ranch and bumped past a large corral no larger than the one at Sue and Tom's. Only here, every board of wood looked newly painted, and the grounds had been raked free of cow pies. The main lodge up ahead was a grand-looking structure, a two-story mosaic of giant fieldstones; and the veranda on the north side faced a wall of red rock that rose to the cliffs of the Catalina Mountains.

That night, I was only a server, just a kid in sneakers and jeans. I never got the chance to go inside the lodge, but before the night had ended, I did take one look, up on my toes, through a first-floor window. The living room looked vast, with hardwood floors and brightly colored area rugs woven in Mexico. I saw a giant fireplace at the center of the room, surrounded by leather sofas. And I remember how the guests would wobble bow-legged in their boots, up and down that giant room, back and forth to a bar so long that a bartender worked at either end.

Outside, after we had set up the wagon and were ready to serve, Sue rang the triangle bell, and the movie people slowly meandered downhill from the lodge, carrying their drinks. A band had been waiting with the rest of us, though I didn't notice them until they started to play, and I was startled to hear a cowboy quartet singing "Clementine." Sue told me to serve the beans, and Rosa, as always, would hand out the biscuits, so we waited at our stations. And as the hours passed, the booze and the music and the stars above the moonlit mountains constructed a scene more glamorous to me than any Hollywood set. I never stopped grinning, especially as I, Robbie Costa, ladled beans into a bowl for the great John Wayne—the only actor there that I recognized. But who else mattered?

I piled scoop on top of scoop until he hollered, "Whoa, there!" Then he shouted over my head, "Hey, Sue! I think you got yourself a new cookie," and he held up his heaping plate. He talked in the manner that he walked, sideways and slow.

"Yeah," Sue hollered back. "I think I'll keep him." And not long after, she came up to me and asked if I wanted a job.

I could hardly thank her enough.

"On one condition," she told me. "We've got to dress you right, and you've got to learn how to ride."

Now my night was complete. She even said that Tom himself would teach me; and that if I showed any talent in the saddle, he would show me how to rope a cow from the ground and from a horse. I wandered the grounds dazed, looking everywhere for someone to tell. I even had the crazy notion that I should run up to Mr. Wayne and thank him personally. And just maybe, on a fabulous night like this, he would promise me a part in his next film—that is, if I showed signs of talent in the saddle. But it was Jimmy that I found, outside the spotlights surrounding the party. He was leaning against the main lodge, one boot on the ground, the heel of the other pressed against the fieldstone wall. He lit a match off his thumbnail and drew on a cigarette, and when I was near enough he told me quietly, "I'm getting sick of waiting."

I didn't understand what that meant.

"For these assholes to get looped," he said. Then he spit a bit of tobacco from his lower lip.

"What are you going to do?" I said, suddenly wary.

"I'm going inside." He meant into the lodge. "Do a quick pass through the rooms," he told me.

"That's dumb."

"Did you see that watch?" he said, blowing smoke in my eyes. "The one on your hero's wrist?"

"You want to steal John Wayne's watch?" I laughed.

"He's wearing the fucking watch," said Jimmy. "I want to find out what he isn't wearing."

On my way back to the party, I already knew that my hopes were in ruins. And I wondered, in gloom, how long it would take before the theft was discovered, and the owners of the guest ranch called Sue. She'd say she could vouch for her people, all except Jimmy who was new and not a very good worker.

I found a place for myself on a stool near the chuck wagon, and while the musicians played faster, and the voices grew louder, and the liquored guests danced the two-step, and even Sue took a turn around the dirt arena, I hung low in the darkness. And I thought about my grandfather, how right he had been to call my cousins idiots and deny them a place in the family business. He knew. He always did.

Then something happened sooner than I ever would have expected. At that hour in the desert, the only lights surrounding the arena came from the moon and stars, and more faintly, from the distant lodge. So it wasn't clear at first, when the front door of the lodge opened, who was standing in the rectangular glow. Then a man came forward, a big man who seemed to be carrying a life-sized puppet, holding it up by the collar and leading it toward us, down the dark path. About halfway to the arena, the puppet transformed into my Cousin Jimmy, nearly up on his toes. Jimmy was tall himself, but his captor was mammoth. There was something familiar about his bulk. He reminded me of Fearsome, the goon who had tried to tear off Uncle Frank's ear.

Later on, I learned that he was a studio cop. His name was McMurphy, and he was paid to accompany the actors. Before he took this job, McMurphy had worked as a hotel detective, and he had spotted Jimmy almost from the moment that he came trotting in on horseback through the main gate—but the capacity of a hotel dick to fasten on a thief is practically clairvoyant. So when Jimmy had wiggled in through a window—the one above the spot where he and I had talked—McMurphy had been patiently prepared. He gave Jimmy all the time that he needed to rifle drawers, and when McMurphy finally flipped on the light switch, he caught Jimmy in a closet with his hand inside a trouser pocket.

As they walked into the arena lights, everything came slowly to a stop. First the fiddlers dropped their bows. Then the guitar player's hand fell from the frets, and finally the engine of drunken voices decelerated to a murmur or stalled out in silence. When those two came inside the arena, the guests moved back a step, but they weren't upset by the intrusion. This was the kind of quirky surprise that made their parties memorable, and I sensed a sigh of appreciation.

"What'da ya got for us, Murph?" someone called out.

The crowd even sounded congratulatory. Here was some unplanned fun under the Arizona stars on a raucous, festive night. I knew my cousin. I knew he couldn't stand in a circle of Hollywood actors and not play a part himself. So when McMurphy released him, Jimmy took a wide stance, drew the pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and plucked one between his lips. This was more than McMurphy could stomach, and with the flick of his heavy paw, he swatted the cigarette out of Jimmy's mouth.

"Who's the weasel?" a voice said, someone that I recognized, but it was only later that I discovered his name. It was the actor Ward Bond—after John Wayne and McMurphy, the third most towering presence in that wide arena.

Then to cap off his derision, one of the women loudly laughed.

I think her laughter finally ended Jimmy's poise. His lower lip had been split, and there was blood on his teeth. He looked scared and suddenly so much smaller than everyone else. Worse for Jimmy, he was powerless to charm. Suddenly he didn't even look like himself: His nose seemed longer from twitching it, and his hair fell lank.

"I found him in your room, Mr. Wayne. In the closet."

So then our eyes all turned to the great and lumbering Duke, and the guests opened up a space for him to perform in.

"He was going through your trousers," said McMurphy.

"You don't say," said the Duke, who was holding up a tall glass and spilling his liquor on the ground—though I can't say for sure that he was drunk, for he was a man who, drunk or sober, never seemed physically centered.

"That's his cousin over there," said McMurphy, suddenly pointing at me. "But I don't think he had anything to do with it."

I looked up from my stool at John Wayne—at my "sponsor"—as he twisted around, and his great tilting body turned like a gyroscope into a lazy arc. He was close to fifty and already walked like a listing legend. And by the way that he drank his liquor, it was easy to see the garbage scow that his body would become. When he finally faced me, he squinted so hard that he seemed to have forgotten who I was.

But then he said, "Cookie, is that you?" So he did remember the kid with the grin who kept ladling his beans. "Is this kid your cousin?" he asked me.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Well, what should we do with him?" he slurred.

It would only take a moment to answer him, but about that moment there is much to tell. There must have been thirty people standing in the arena that night—a quartet of musicians and the servers from the guest ranch, Sue and Tom and all their hands among at least a dozen guests. And every one of them was expecting me to cry out, "Please, Mr. Wayne. Let my cousin go. He's not a bad kid."

In short, I was the set-up man for the Duke's magnanimity—so the actors could clap him on the back, and the women could tell him he was too good for words. All this I understood when I was fourteen years old. And I could also feel the urgency in Jimmy eyes to Say it! Just say it so we can get the fuck out of here! And that is exactly what I would have done, if I had been sitting there alone. But in a sense, I was not alone.

I could feel the presence of my grandfather co-habiting my soul. And it seemed as if we were pretty much one person, and I was looking through the eyeholes of my grandfather's face and feeling his disdain for Jimmy. I could even feel the tic of contempt that used to quiver in his cheek. All those years of watching that old man and trying to understand him, all those years and now I wondered, Was he the man that I would become?

That is the story of a moment. It ended. And for a second time I heard the Duke ask me, "Well, kid? What should we do with him?"

Then a small hand slid lightly around my arm, and a young girl whispered, "Please. Don't let them hurt Jimmy."

It would not be the last time in my life that I would feel myself turning into that hard old man, but on this particular night, it was Rosa who brought me back. She saved Jimmy.

On the drive back to the city—with only the headlights to guide us down the gravel path between the silhouettes of cactus and the burning brightness of an animal's eyes—Jimmy wouldn't speak to me. He mumbled to himself, but he didn't talk to me until we saw the first glow of streetlights a few miles ahead. Then he spoke, though he never turned from the road to look my way.

He said, "I can't believe you, Robbie. You're just like the old man. You're a scary fucking son of a bitch."

And since I didn't disagree, Jimmy drove me home and we left it at that.
Chapter Eight

After all that Jimmy had gone through, I thought he would lie low—that his pride would need bed rest and time to recover. I was wrong. The next day at school when the final bell rang, I saw him parked outside the playground gate. He had dressed up in another western outfit, new boots made of lizard leather and a white Stetson, tipped over one eye. Nobody looking at Jimmy now could have guessed that just the night before, he had been carried by the collar—practically up on his toes—into a crowded arena, jeered at, smacked across the mouth and brought so close to tears that his lower lip had quivered as it bled.

He'd come back to the school where he had failed in all his classes but succeeded as a stud; he had come here to flirt with the senior girls and confirm from their adoring eyes that he was still the same fabulous Jimmy. The prettiest one in the circle around him climbed into his car; and as he started the engine, he finally noticed me watching through the fence, and flicked his fingers in an effortless wave.

So the way it turned out, only I would get hurt because of his screw up.

Later that week I hitched a ride to the ranch, hoping that Sue and Tom would accept me in spite of my thieving cousin. They were just starting lunch when I arrived, so I headed toward the long Ramada, but when Tom saw me coming, he put down his fork. Then he lowered his eyes and stared at his plate. When the ranch hands looked his way, they did the same; and I felt like the victim of a shunning. Sue was the last to see me. She had been plunking down biscuits, but Rosa wasn't there to shadow her, to wink and hand out seconds. Everything charming about the place seemed to have vanished, and when Sue rushed over to intercept me, her face was burning hot and red. She said that Tom didn't want me around. He knew I wasn't to blame, but he had taken the whole thing personally. The way he saw it, Jimmy had tainted his reputation, and he didn't want any reminders that one of his men had been a thief.

"I don't like it," she said, "but he'll have his way."

"Sure, I'll go," I said. "Where's Rosa?"

"What do want with her?"

I said I wanted to warn her about Jimmy.

"What I figured," said Sue. "I haven't seen her since the morning after. And I don't think she'll be back."

I was walking toward the road when she shouted this parting advice:

"Stay away from your cousin. Whatever he does, you'll end up paying for it."

A few days later my Aunt Louisa was spying out of her window, and eavesdropping through the front-door screen when a man rang the bell next door. It was midweek, and my Uncle Pete should have been in Phoenix, but he was home that day, ailing from summer allergies. Whatever was said between the stranger and my uncle, Aunt Louisa heard it all. And after the man left, she had plenty to tell. This time the culprit had been Jimmy, and she wanted everyone to know that her Max would never have gotten into such a mess (even if Max was serving time at a correctional facility and wouldn't be up for parole for another two years). She told her story to my mother; and later on, when I got home from school, my mother said that the man was Mexican, a big fellow but he hadn't come to threaten us. He was just a large, soft man with a sad, square head, who had introduced himself as Mr. Garcia, Rosa's father.

Uncle Pete had no idea who Rosa was, and Mr. Garcia had to explain, "Your son Jimmy worked with her at the ranch. Didn't he tell you? They're engaged." He had come because his daughter was pregnant, and she couldn't get in touch with Jimmy to tell him.

"Wait," said Mr. Garcia. "This is not what you think. Please, wait," he said. "I want you to see the kind of girl she is."

Then he walked back to his car and told his daughter to come meet Jimmy's father. The way that Aunt Louisa explained it, the girl had dressed in white because, she said, after getting knocked up "they all wear white."

"Do you know this girl?" my mother asked me.

I said, "She's too good for Jimmy."

"Well, your grandfather will take care of it."

"I wish he would," I said. "I wish he'd handle Jimmy the way he handled Max." Then I stared off through the kitchen window. "Is he home?"

"Robbie, don't get involved."

"Is Grandpa home?"

Whenever I went to see my grandfather, he always seemed to be expecting me; and I rarely had to tell him why I'd come.

"It's taken care of," he said before I asked. "The idiot will go to Atlanta. Maybe he'll like it there and stay. Good riddance."

"Is that where Ricky is?"

He answered with a windy sigh.

"How is she?" I tried again.

"Good, good. Now it's time you thought about other girls."

"But she's safe?" I asked. "And healthy?"

"Yes," he muttered. "Don't think about it."

"I just wonder," I said, aching for something more. "I wonder if she'll have a boy or a girl."

His features hardened. "A man doesn't ask those things," he said. And I knew from his eyes that I ought to leave.

In September I started high school, excited by the chance to make a new start. For once, my cousins would be out of the picture: Max was locked up, and Jimmy would be gone soon—though I did see him one last time before he left, and that was at the fourplex on the day he came to say goodbye. He had parked at the curb and was sitting behind the wheel of his convertible—a 1950 Chevy of parrot-yellow and polished chrome, which he had bought from a friend with no intention of ever paying for it. "Hey, chump," he called me over. "Know where I'm going?"

"You're going to hell," I told him and he threw his head back and laughed at the clouds.

"Started high school?" he asked. "You'll do okay. Just tell everyone you're my cousin."

I never meant for anyone to know, but somehow word got around that Jimmy Boiko and Max Lucas were cousins of mine, and after that I wore their reputations on my shirt front like a name tag. No one could have missed the hardening behind my teachers' eyes when they called on me or reared around to see what I was up to. The way they acted, I might have been casting Jimmy's shadow or throwing Max's voice from my throat. There would be no fresh starts for me thanks to my idiot cousins; and pretty soon, I came to hate school.

During class I sat at the back of the room, where I could hide inside the contour of the boy or girl in front of me. And when the final bell rang, I'd plunge into the hall and fight like a fish to move upstream toward the exit. Once outside, a quick jog across 6th Street and I could break free of the schoolyard cliques. Then I'd walk home alone, adding up in my head everything that my family had cost me—the cities we had fled, the missed chances to become a part of anything at all.

Jimmy could pretend that he was better than the other kids at school—that they were hicks, fledging suckers, marks-in-the-making . . . They didn't look that way to me. These kids had grown up together, played together. They had shared memories of having fun. What did I know about fun? My childhood I thought of as one long night, and a woman—my mother or an aunt—shaking my shoulder. "Get dressed," she'd tell me. "We're leaving." And a minute later, I'd be out of bed in my one-piece pajamas, rolling a fist around a bleary eye, while there, working all around me, were my uncles and aunts, folding, packing, lifting and carting things off. Soon someone would lead me outside to a car with an open door. Rammed across the rear seat, a large valise would be made like a mattress, a blanket stretched across the top. I'd climb on top, and when the cars started to roll, my eyes would shut, as ribbons of lights pass over my lids, and I would count street lamps instead of sheep . . .

That was my childhood, and the only kind of life my family had to offer—something I thought about a lot. And it didn't take long to realize, there would be no new starts for me unless—somehow—I could get free of my family. But that seemed like a wicked thought the first time it crept into my head, and I didn't let it stay there long.

After school, I used to walk home, pretending to be somewhere else. And my favorite fantasy place had to be our house in Trenton. So while my eyes would trail the sidewalk in front of my shoes, I'd imagine myself climbing onto the roof. There I'd sit on the shingles, toss breadcrumbs to pigeons and follow the drift of a cloud. One day, while I was off in this daydream, taking in the azure view, a big, husky kid started toward me. My thoughts were in Trenton, but not entirely. Another part of me kept track of him, and I could sense him getting closer, though he never looked my way.

What happened next would feel like a midair collision. One moment I was floating in my daydream, high on a roof. The next, the breath shot out of me, my hands clutched my knees, and I was staring at the dirt between my feet. The punch—the way a doctor would explain it years later—had damaged my solar plexus, a wad of nerves that convulsed and closed my diaphragm. The punch—the way it felt back then—detonated in my chest. My lungs exploded like pricked balloons. And with my diagram shut, no air could enter. Every tiny, burning breath hurt like hell. And all I could do, while that bastard stood over me, was to promise myself—to swear to Christ that I wouldn't let him see me cry.

"Slow down," he told me gently. Then the weight of his hand came to rest on my back, and I could feel a heavy palm rise and fall as I panted. "Do you know who I am?" he asked me slowly.

I shook my head, bent over and staring at the ground.

"I'm Hector Garcia. Now do you understand?" But I went on shaking on my head. "I'm Rosa's brother," he told me, but I didn't know any Rosa. And then I remembered that I did. "I'm sorry I hit you," he said.

He lifted his hand, and I think he meant to drift away when I found the voice to cough out, "Why?"

"He left," Hector said. "Your Cousin Jimmy left town, so I had to hit you." He sounded tired and low. "Sorry, kid," he said. "You didn't do nothing. You just got the wrong family."

There was my life before that punch and my life after it. In my life before, I was still a boy, a looker-on, with no idea of where I fit in the world. But after that punch, I stopped being young. And at fourteen, I turned cynic and decided that I knew the score. This world had no place for gypsies, or bastards, or the likes of me. When my father sent his sperm cells on their upstream run—one hundred thousand flagella, wriggling in their race for Life, that dubious prize—what kind of twisted fate had carried me first across the finish line? My "father" didn't even exist, except as a sperm-maker who had done me no favors. And though my mother meant me no harm, she didn't have the strength inside to care for me.

Into this unwelcoming world, I entered a "family"—another of those maudlin mythologies—that could only bring me down. And the first and the firmest conclusion I came to was that I would never take another punch for one of my lousy relatives. Or be held back in life. Or be judged because of them. They were the problem that I had to work out. And every night in my room, while this roiled inside of me, I took out my switchblade and threw it into the target-practice figure I had drawn on my wall—the picture of no one special, a drawing of anyone who got in the way of my claim to another kind of life.

My next decision had to do with school, which I figured—at the age of fourteen—was a waste of my valuable time. So my plan was to grit it out until my sixteenth birthday, the first day that I could legally quit. Until then, I meant to hide out at the back of the class, carving my initials into wood-topped desks with my Uncle Eddie's knife—and stay on the look-out for girls who fit in no better than I did.

There was another 1950s going on in parallel with the public one that had always excluded me, as I was about to find out. And only young girls could teach me this because they were the ones keeping terrible secrets.

If a father smacks his son, that's nothing to a boy, but when he smacks a daughter around, or paws her when he is drunk, or punches through her bedroom wall, or bullies his wife because he had it rough during the war and he's still pissed off at officers who bullied him, who does a daughter tell this to when her friends at school, with their ponytails and hallway giggles, aren't just pretending to be dimpled and dumb? And so these girls are alone inside. When they come to class, they find themselves searching covertly, wistfully for someone they can talk to. And when their eyes would meet mine, they knew, He's in trouble, too. He's lost. He's a stray. He's for me.

There weren't many of these girls, I have to say. The people of Tucson in those days were more often Sues and Toms, really wonderful folks, parents and citizens, who lived inside a circumference of decency that eluded me, though I admired them earnestly. My girlfriends didn't feel that way at all because, as it happened, they already had "wonderful" parents—PTA attendees, supporters of the Fiesta de los Vaqueros parade, bridge club regulars, and charity volunteers. So what did it matter to Janet that her father stood third on the left in a photograph of the Tucson Chamber of Commerce, if he had quit looking her in the eye from the day that she put on a bra, spoke to her gruffly from behind the evening paper, but then shuffled into her room at night to tuck her in?

"Daddy," she insists, "I'm too old for this."

"You're my baby," he says, sitting on the side of her bed. Then he lowers his head to kiss her cheek, and the smell of liquor on his breath impels her heart into a state of alarm . . .

And what could respectability mean to a girl like Anne, after the third or fourth time she finds her mother lying stiffly on the sofa, looking coiffed, powdered, and rouged for an open-casket funeral, except for an arm flung toward the rug, loose fingers and an overturned martini glass . . .

Now if a girl like Janet or Anne had tried to confide these stories in an adult—a teacher, say, a doctor, a minister, or the school nurse—her parents would have been notified immediately; and they'd have been informed of everything this disturbed young woman had been inventing. And if she had gone to one of her girlfriends instead, the friend would have recoiled from her, for breaking the taboo against telling the truth. But if Janet or Anne came to me, no matter what they had to confide, I'd only shrug and tell them a story worse than their own. And for that, they loved me.

It sometimes happened that my girlfriend would want to take me home, so I could see for myself how maddening it was to live inside a stage play. It was a great lesson for me to learn how superbly respectable people can lie. Dad would put down his newspaper when his daughter introduced me, and he'd want to know what teams I was trying out for.

"Baseball, sir," I'd tell him. "I'd like to be the shortstop next year, but a lot of boys are trying out for that position."

"Well, you keep at it, son. When I got it into my head to play football, they said I was too small, but that never stopped me."

Of course, I didn't know crap about baseball, but I wanted to talk a while with Janet's father. I wanted to know if I could penetrate hypocrisy, if a gypsy could see what no one else could see. But Janet's father was a tricky proposition. He was one of those roly poly hand-shakers, who crush your fingers out of fellow feeling and pound your back with brotherly love; the top salesman at a large downtown appliance store who, "back in high school" and "back in my army days," could do a hundred push-ups with one hand, while holding a can of Schlitz in the other (wink! wink!). He had a heavy, shiny face and small, clever eyes, though not so clever that he could disguise the effort that it took him to look jolly.

All this I saw, but I never could find the demon I was looking for, the one that, five or six hours after illuminating me with fatherly advice, would be moodily jiggling his daughter's door while his wife—in bed on her side, pretending to sleep—would be biting her lip to blood.

My girlfriends were curious about me, too, and the idea of meeting real gypsies and seeing how they lived. So they were very bold about wanting to come over, but when they arrived, one peek through the front-door screen, and they'd walk inside as wary as tourists on their first safari. It was my own fault for telling such stories about my uncles and aunts.

Janet was the first girl that I ever brought home, and I remember on our way down the hall how closely she followed in my tracks. She said, "Is your mom here?" because any decent young girl would want to meet my mother. I nodded toward a closed door on our left. "She won't come out," I said and Janet's eyes grew wide.

"What about your uncles?" she said because meeting one of them would be part of her strange adventure.

They were in Phoenix, I explained, scamming the suckers.

In the kitchen her eyes opened their widest. This turned out to be our most stunning stop, considering the mopping, dusting, and polishing that her mother brought to bear on their kitchen at home. At our place, we didn't even own a garbage pail, so everything we tossed out piled up in a grocery bag where the flies went to feast.

"Why don't you clean this place?" she said.

"Me? I just board here."

The tour ended in my bedroom, where she stared at the wall where I had drawn a human target, then filled it with a hundred slits by throwing my knife.

"Robbie, how can you live like this?" she said, though she wasn't disappointed. In Janet's house, only the surface of things was clean, there was so much family dirt to hide. Whereas my dump was so honestly awful that she looked around with a kind of glee.

A girl like Janet had to swing her ponytail, giggle with the other girls, and freeze her smile. It was not easy. She went to parties where her friends sat on the carpet with their skirts pulled in around their knees like a great tent of modesty. They spun a bottle and raised their cheeks for a kiss. They played strip poker and removed hardly a bracelet by the game's end.

I don't know what it meant to be a boy at these parties. I was never invited. But when a girlfriend came home with me, she left the bull shit behind. Through the grungy kitchen, past the tetchy flies, she could escape in my room, where I was the teacher with the bag of tricks that Ricky had left me, and she became a grateful student.

A year had gone by since Ricky had disappeared, and I still didn't know where to find her. I didn't know if the baby were a boy or girl, who she had given it to, or why she had stayed away so long. Only my grandfather knew these things, and the way he stared at me when I even mentioned her name discouraged me from asking. I had other girlfriends now, and they released me from missing Ricky's body. But I didn't forget her. Maybe she would never come back, but I could accept that, if only she were alive somewhere and happy. Just knowing she was well would be enough because Ricky was still the only person whose love for me really mattered.
Chapter Nine

How well I remember the state of being fifteen and sick of life. When I wasn't killing time with Janet (who I didn't love) or at school (which I hated) I'd lie in my bed smoking cigarettes for company. With my uncles gone all week, and my mother at work or shut up in her room, the only sound in that apartment—the slow exhalation of my smoky breath.

My cousins were long gone, after screwing up. First Ricky had to leave. Then Max got tossed into prison. Jimmy fled to stay clear of Rosa's relatives. And that left just me, the next in line for rack and ruin. There was no reason to think that I would end up any better than the others. Wasn't I failing every class at school? And didn't I try one day to stab a teacher?

This would happen in a math class. The teacher had handed out an exam, and next to a triangle, the instruction was: "Using elementary geometry, determine the angle of x."

I didn't give a rap. Across the page, I wrote, "Everybody has an angle. You'll have to take it up with x."

I was fifteen, after all, the age when sarcasm seems most brilliant.

After collecting our papers, the teacher told us to work out the problem on the board. Then he sat at his desk and started grading them. I waited, I watched, and when he got to mine, I knew it. But instead of grinning, as I had hoped, his face turned scarlet because this happened to be the one teacher I should not have provoked. And I must have been the last kid in school to find that out.

His name was Mr. Fitzpatrick, though among his students he was known as Sgt. Fitz after a story about him got around. One night, after a VFW meeting—as I learned much later—he started drinking with the father of a boy in his class. They talked about the war, and Fitz opened up that he had spent three years in the jungle, sleeping in a foxhole. At night, when the Japanese fired cannons to harass his camp, the earth would quake, and all kinds of things would creep, slither and crawl into his hole, seeking shelter from the clamor. He got to where he talked to rats and scorpions and snakes.

Once he was buried alive. A cannon shell exploded, and a hill of dirt levitated, then tumbled down upon him. When soldiers dug him out, Fitz wailed about his "friends." Were they all right! After the army doctors learned who they were, Fitz was shipped home and discharged from the service. And that was when he found that he could no longer sleep in a bed. He tried liquor and pills, pounded his fist through walls. And late one night, desperate for rest; he dragged himself outside, into the yard behind his house. He started digging a hole to crawl into.

A neighbor saw this, a pharmacist who had some notion of what was wrong. He talked to Fitz, convinced him to see a doctor . . . The point of all this being that Mr. Fitzpatrick, my tenth grade geometry teacher, was one violent, unstable son of a bitch. And when he read the wisecrack of a fifteen-year-old boy, he rose out of his seat like a fireball and rolled down my aisle.

I never saw him coming. I was whispering to Janet when he seized my arm, pinched it so tight that later in the day, his finger marks would turn black and blue.

"Did you write this?" He had the wattage of a drill sergeant; and he slammed the paper, under his palm, flat on my desk.

But I didn't scare like other kids. And to me there was something funny in the disparity between the yelling and the offence—all that thunder and the puny joke that had caused it. Fitz wanted the smirk off my face. His fingers dug in like nail heads; and I floated out of my seat, hoping he would let up if I complied, but once he had me standing and tethered, he gripped my arm like a short leash.

When my classmates started looking up, I felt buried in shame; and that threw me into a fury. I yanked, wrenched, jerked my arm—anything to pull it free. And when I looked back into his mean, red eyes, I could see the dawn of a doubt: Was the kid he was holding, like a mouse by the tail, turning into a feral rat? He had a lock on my arm—the same one I needed to get at the switchblade in my back pocket.

I wanted to jam his thigh. No one would laugh at me then; and I flailed, twisted, thrashed. I swore I'd cut him. But then Janet caught my eye. She looked terrified. She kept mouthing, Robbie, no! A smart girl, Janet; she was telling me to look ahead. For stabbing a teacher, I could have ended up in jail like Max, or exiled with Jimmy in Atlanta. What would my grandfather think of me then? Would he look at me with the kind of contempt he had for them?

I wised up fast. I made my body slack. When Fitz hauled me out of the classroom, I ambled beside him docilely down the hallway to the vice principal's office, where he flung me into the chair in front of the desk. Then he handed over the terrible, damning evidence!

"You'd better leave us," the vice principal said. And when we were alone, he asked what this was all about.

"A joke," I shrugged. "Just a dumb joke."

"For a joke like this, you know, I could suspend you from school. Would you like that, Mr. Costa?"

"Yes," I told him and he stiffened.

"For a joke like this," he said more firmly, "I could expel you from school."

"Do it," I said and again he paused.

"Or I can call your mother, and you can explain this to her."

"She won't come," I sneered. And after that, he considered me in a new light. The parents he was used to would treat a call from him with alarm.

"How old are you, son?"

"Fifteen, sir."

"Fifteen years old," he sighed. Then he slowly shook his head, this kindly, civil man who had no aptitude for intimidation. I remember how thoughtfully he considered his options. There was no way to punish a boy who thought of expulsion as a gift. "You're going back to class," he said at last. "And you're going to sit in class every day. I don't care if you learn or you listen. But you'll sit there. Do you understand?"

And so I did what he asked of me. I sat in my classes and didn't learn and didn't listen. I became the school's lost cause. But since I kept to myself, quarantined at the back of the room, I reached a stand-off with my teachers: I didn't care about their class, and they decided not to care about me.

Then one morning early in my senior year, I slept in and stayed home that day. Without any plan in mind, I never went back. And I don't imagine anyone ever noticed.

In my family, it meant nothing when a boy dropped out of school. We cared about brains, not education. And from the time that I was a child, my grandfather had been calling me the smart one. So when I quit high school, he would have made a place for me, I am sure. But I wanted no part in the family enterprise. The day that Uncle Frank lost his ear, I made that decision, which left me with no job, no ambition, and my new girlfriend Molly didn't want to date a dropout. I had no prospects whatever, and every day I idled in my room or rode a bus to the far ends of the city.

Then one afternoon, my mother came into my room. She sat on my bedside and said that she was worried about me.

"Nothing's wrong," I told her.

"Aren't you bored?"

"Sure," I said.

"I talked to Uncle Pete." Now if that meant a job in Phoenix, I didn't want it. But instead she said, "He has something for you here in town."

"Is it legal?"

"Oh, Robbie," she sighed. "It's a job with a printing company. He knows someone who works there."

And that was how I came to meet a very unusual person, who would help me one day to start another life.

My uncles had been running a real estate scam, and they needed printed flyers, so Uncle Pete called on the friend of a friend. The man was a master printer, and he worked for the largest printing shop in town. Uncle Pete used to meet him out back on the loading platform. So we drove there one day, to the lot behind the building. My uncle said to wait in the car, and I watched from an open window, as he climbed onto the platform and went inside through the rear door.

A short time later, Uncle Pete came out with the guy that he wanted me to meet. So I got out of the car and vaulted up on the platform to join them, still not much aware of the man behind my uncle.

"Robbie," he said, "this is Lyle Childers."

And that was when I logged the strangest first impression. This Lyle, who was obviously employed and a skilled craftsman to boot, looked like one of the homeless, someone whose legs you might step around on a sidewalk at night. He had a pointy face, shrunken from being almost toothless, a wiry beard in the worst stages of stubble, and hair that hung like the dreadlocks of an unwashed mop. He was the ugliest, mangiest dog in the pound. Something dirty with fleas . . . And yet, his eyes looked so merry, so gullibly, foolishly friendly, that as he pumped my hand (and he would not let it go), I decided right then that Lyle and I would be pals.

He hired me as his gofer and promised to teach me the print trade. We worked together closely, and we ate together, too. Every day at noon, we bought sandwiches from the lunch truck that arrived in the back lot—ham sandwiches for me with a carton of milk, whereas Lyle drank a brand of orange soda that had dyed his front teeth. He used to wiggle them and tell me that the soda made them loose. He was quite good natured about falling apart.

We used to eat outside at the shady end of the loading dock; and it made me happy, somehow, to listen to Lyle talk. His mind was filled with amazing facts, a lot of them about the desert—facts about birds and bugs and edible plants, the real recipe for cowboy coffee and the Navajo words for "knife," and "dog," and "peace." Yet as knowledgeable as he sometimes seemed, the stuff crammed inside his head lacked coherence. So if he noticed a bug or glanced at a tree, facts about it floated into his mind in the way that a hammer, a doll, a chest, a key—the disparate debris of a shipwreck—bubbles up and bobs along the open sea.

When he finished a run and the presses were silent, Lyle would take me with him on deliveries. I liked to watch him meet a client, the way that he would blunder into every kind of office, hotel lobby, warehouse or church, so completely himself. Lyle simply could not distinguish by age, by sex, by species, one life form from another—so he spoke to people of every rank in the manner that he talked to a cat. Once in a hardware store, he strolled past the owner and scooped up the store cat, a fat, tawny mouser no one else had ever noticed. Lyle held it up so they could stare into each other's eyes; and he talked as if their conversation had been going on for years.

"Mornin' darling," he said and the cat meowed. "Still got that tummy ache? See, I told you so. You eat too fast."

The owner stared agape, and customers turned at first to shake their heads, but then something about Lyle always made people smile, much the way that looking at a baby takes the tension off a stranger's face.

No one I have ever met had worse luck than Lyle, or welcomed it as cheerfully. When it rained in Tucson, which was rare enough, it rained hardest on Lyle. So when the flash floods erupted late that year, his trailer was the only one in the court that leaked in all the places where he had set down anything of value. And when he rode around town, Lyle was so magnetic to trouble that once, idling lawfully at a red light—on a clear day, on an open road—a public school bus rammed into the rear of his truck. This threw Lyle forward, pushed his face into the steering wheel and punched out his last three teeth. But Lyle was so cheerfully disposed that the next time I saw him, all he had to say was, "Lest now, I can drink all the soda pop I ever wanted."

Busted up, rained out, pissed on and soaked to his socks, he was the simplest, happiest creature that I have ever met. And I loved the time I spent in his company, out on deliveries or back at the shop, where I noticed one day what a range of jobs he could turn out in an afternoon.

"I guess you could print about anything," I said.

"Well, I don't do passports," he told me. "And I don't do money any more. Anything else," he said, "I guess you're right."

It was a strange brag. And luckily, I never forgot that he made it.

I worked alongside of Lyle. And soon, my jeans tore at the knees, and my knuckles turned navy from printer's ink. But the job was a lark. I felt as free as a hobo, and I was getting paid besides.

Then one day, we were tooling through the city in Lyle's truck. My feet were propped on the circulars and undelivered flyers piled on the floor. My face—in the outside mirror—looked smudged with blue, when a surge of heat shot up my chest. And I suddenly remembered, it was the day of my graduation ceremony. My classmates would be dressed in caps and gowns, their futures would be open and wide. And just maybe, my job with Lyle wasn't a lark at all.

What had made me blush was the wilting thought of meeting a former classmate as Lyle Childer's gofer.

"Guess what," I said. And then I told him about the ceremony.

"No foolin?" He hunched over the wheel. "Then what are you doing here?"

I said, "I quit last year."

"You what?" he said. "You mean to say I've been hanging out with a high school dropout?"

I shot a look at Lyle—at his pointy chin, his sunken cheeks in a riot of stubble.

"You got to finish," he told me.

"Did you?"

"Sure did," he said. And with that, he spun the wheel, and we careened into a whining, screeching U-turn, across Speedway Boulevard.

"What are you doing?" I shouted as my shoulder bumped the door.

His truck had been hit so often, Lyle had become a timid driver, but now he raced down the street, foot to the floor.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"To your high school graduation."

"What for?" I hollered. "I'm not graduating."

"Heck, I know that. I want you to see what you're missing."

By then, we were roaring down 6th Street, only blocks from Tucson High. I couldn't let this happen. I pleaded with Lyle to turn back.

"It's all right, Robbie. You won't be alone."

"What does that mean?"

"You're with me," he said.

"But you can't go in—"

"Can to," he said. "I'll tell them I'm your dad."

Then he looked across the seat, trying to comfort me with a toothless grin. I couldn't speak. And for the rest of the ride, I felt myself approaching a debacle I was powerless to stop and already trying to forget.

In 1955, Tucson High School occupied both sides of 6th Street. The main school—the city's showpiece with its fourteen columns—was located on the south side. Across the street, students walked to the gymnasium, a parking lot, and several sports fields. There were even grounds where girls (not boys) could take a class called "Camping"—how to make a fire, how to pitch a tent. In the gym, the girls, along with the boys, played basketball or learned to square dance . . . Strange to say, a girl back then had more chances to be active than many a young girl today, but that's a fact, bottled in brine and preserved in my memory.

On graduation days, like the one that Lyle was racing toward, heedless of anything that I could say to stop him—on such a day as Friday May 19, 1955—the school would erect a stage in front of the bleachers. At the start of the ceremony, the Superintendent of Schools, the principal and vice principal (who I'd come to know) would climb up on that stage to dole out diplomas. And at the foot of the stage, two sections of seats would be set up—one for students in their mortar board and robes; the other for their parents.

That Friday, the temperature had climbed above ninety. Fathers wore short-sleeve shirts, without jackets or ties. But their wives had dressed for a garden party because a ceremony like this, at Tucson High, was a prominent event. Every car in the parking lot had been polished for the occasion. Not that Lyle cared! He pulled his bedraggled truck next to a Cadillac Coupe Deville. His radiator hissed. Then his engine coughed, shuddered, and finally expired in a state of advanced dilapidation.

"Well, we made it," he announced.

When I climbed out and looked across the field, I saw the scope of what awaited me. My classmates were already robed and seated, while there I was, dressed like Lyle's hillbilly brother. Their parents sat tall and proud, while next to me stood Lyle—my "dad"—whiskered, toothless, and pulling on my arm.

He said, "Come on, Robbie. We're going to miss the show." And some nightmare-feeling compelled me to follow.

When we reached the bleachers, I spotted Sgt. Fitz, my old nemesis from geometry class. He was patrolling the field with Mr. Olafson, the boy's gym teacher. This Olafson was a lazy oaf, who used to toss the boys a football and say, "Go play." But his body could fill the shadow of an elephant, so they did what he told them.

I wanted to avoid those two. And I realized that if Lyle and I sat in the bleachers, we could get lost in the hive of visitors and guests. But just as I was making a plan, Lyle spotted two seats in the most conspicuous place. The folding chairs arranged for the parents were filled—that is, all but two at the center of the fourth row. And Lyle—who had no sense of a social order—started toward them.

"Look what I found," he said tugging me along.

The shame of it, of trotting after raggedy Lyle! He had never looked more like a scarecrow-bum—toothless, stubbly, a Jack-o-Lantern with a pointy chin. He shook the arm of the man in the end seat. "Mind if we squeeze past," Lyle said.

I saw the man's eyes, and then his wife's. His cringed; hers bulged. And finally I'd had enough.

"Let's get out of here!" I said.

But Lyle wouldn't listen. He was headstrong about getting me a seat so I could witness, with my own eyes, the respect accorded to a high school diploma.

"Let's go!" I said.

He ignored me. He started wedging around the man's knees, so I grabbed the back of his shirt. And I pulled. But that started a tug of war—me hauling him toward the aisle, Lyle listing toward those empty seats.

Later on, I would blame myself. I knew that he was accident prone, that some new and stunning mishap was imminent in Lyle's life, and long overdue. Suddenly the shirt ripped off his back. And there I stood in the naked view of a thousand eyes, holding a rag. Lyle pitched forward. He fell across the laps of a startled couple. And what happened next, the whole sequence of slapstick, went by so fast that I froze. His pointy nose burrowed in her lap. The woman shrieked! And then everyone, everywhere started standing for a look. The couple supporting Lyle on their laps tried to stand up, too. And he rolled off them, ramming the next row . . .

I ran. I fled.

Behind me, I could hear the crowd's gasp in a single in-drawn breath as loud and united as if it had come from the same enormous pair of lungs. How many of those people had recognized me? I kept running from the thought. Everyone who had seen me with Lyle, everyone in that crowd who had recognized me, I wanted them to disappear. Every last one of them. Hundreds, if that's what it took.

I wanted to blow up the world!
Chapter Ten

Nothing in hell burns hotter than the feeling, when you're seventeen, of being in disgrace. I lay low. I kept to my room inventing headlines, screamers like—Dropout Disrupts Ceremony at Tucson High. I never doubted that I was famous, but what as? The town's worst delinquent or its biggest fool? When I had to know, I went to see my former girlfriend Janet, to hear from her lips the enormity of my disgrace! Were my classmates still laughing? Were their parents fixed to run me out of town? I'd imagined things even worse!

She was leafing through her yearbook when I came in.

"Just tell me," I said, because I had worked myself up to expect a scene—a crack on my cheek, or the roar of her father as he rushed me out the door.

"Robbie," she smiled, "you should have been there," for as it turned out, Janet didn't know about me. Nobody did. No one had even noticed the scruffy kid with the blurry face, standing behind The Unforgettable Lyle. And they weren't mad at him either, not after he got collared by Mr. Olafson—and poor, scrawny Lyle had started flapping his arms like a featherless bird. The crowd cheered. They took up his cause.

And so Lyle Childers entered the folklore of the Class of '55; and I really think if he had wandered onto that field any earlier that year, he might have become its mascot as well.

I left Janet's that day with immeasurable relief, but there was no going back to my job. No future for me as Lyle Childers's gofer. So at the end of the week, I hitched a ride to the print shop and quit my job.

He wasn't surprised. "Are you going to finish school?"

"That's right, Lyle. Because of you," I said, and he stared at me with the wet, merry eyes that I loved him for.

I gave a week's notice, but even that hung heavy on my pride. Now when I carried cartons into a business, and the owner pressed a tip in my hand, I'd walk outside seething. And I could hardly wait to toss the coin over my shoulder, and hear it land and roll down the sidewalk.

"What did you do that for?" Lyle would ask.

"I did it for you," I'd tell him, "or I would have thrown it in his face."

Then one day, we made a delivery on campus. It was to be my last chore before Lyle and I parted. But something happened on that stop, and because I am half-gypsy, I can only say this one way: I met my Fate.

Inside a frat house, Lyle asked for Sheldon, and a young man pointed toward a parlor at the end of the hall. It was a small room, flush with morning light. Against a wall, I saw a TV set (black and white in those days) and a bookshelf filled with college texts.

Sheldon reclined on a folding chair. His long legs were crossed, and his tennis shoes were propped on the coffee table. He aimed his nose at the door and ordered Lyle to take the cartons upstairs. Lyle gladly complied. But I held my carton tight against my chest, and I stood there staring at someone completely new to me. I was so used to the good nature of my high school classmates that I had never met up with arrogance before.

This Sheldon took my interest for envy; and he let me stare, wallowing in the attention. He was not quite handsome (his nose was rather long and his mouth too wide), but he was close to being handsome; and if I didn't think so, he didn't give a rap in any case. He pressed his soles against the table's edge and tilted back. With a slight push, my finger could have sent him tumbling, but he had made himself vulnerable to convey his confidence that I wouldn't dare.

He said, "You're staring at me, little man."

I didn't care what he said. There was something about him that I was trying to figure out. Everything that he wore—his shorts, socks and tennis shoes—looked startlingly white. And I kept trying to reason why this colorless outfit and the sneer on his face conveyed so much majesty! Granted, Sheldon was an asshole, but how was he doing it?

"Is there something you want to ask me?" he said.

"Where did you buy those clothes?"

That surprised him, and he took a moment, probably to decide if he would rather inspire envy or emulation. "Steinfeld's," he said at last.

It was a downtown store, really the town's only good department store.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"Who cuts your hair?"

This was too much for Sheldon, and he broke into a baritone laugh. "My girlfriend cuts it," he said. Then he nibbled on his lower lip and considered me closely. He must have been wondering whether clothes and a haircut could put me over.

"It might work," he said at last. And it was as if he had guessed my plan before I had worked it out for myself.

At the end of the day, Lyle and I said goodbye. And I invited him, in a year, to attend my high school graduation.

He said, "You mean it, Robbie?" and he all but cried.

Then straight from the print shop, I rode a bus downtown and headed for Steinfeld's Department Store. It was a swanky place in 1955. The sales girls were beautifully attired and educated in store courtesy, though the one who served me had trouble disguising her doubt that I belonged there. She didn't bother me, though. I had been working with Lyle for six months, not earning very much, but without a girlfriend or any other expenses, I had stashed away a hundred dollars. So I told her exactly what I wanted and despite her reservations, she was store trained and quite efficient. She led me from one department to another, and then pointed at the try-on room. That was where I shed my ink-stained work clothes and dressed in tennis whites.

Many times since then, I have walked up to a podium and heard the sound of applause. I have been lauded by investors, congratulated by my peers—congratulated for what? For getting rich without ever once being indicted? None of their shallow acclaim has ever moved me like the startled endorsement on the face of that sales clerk when I promenaded out of the men's dressing room that day.

"How handsome you look! Do you play tennis?" she said.

I told her that I loved the game, though I had never held a racquet in my life.

"I'll bet you're going to the university."

"I'm starting in the fall," I said.

"How exciting. Do you know what you're going to study?"

"Yes," I said with considerable assurance. "I'm going to be doctor."

"A doctor," she sighed. "Your parents must be so proud."

I said, "My grandfather is a doctor."

"Oh. Then it's a family tradition."

What came over me strolling out of Steinfeld's is indescribable. But a part of it was the feeling that my chest must have grown, I could take in so much air!

Every day after that, I dressed in my new white outfit. At night, I washed the shirt and shorts in the kitchen sink. Then I took them outside to hang on the clothesline. The air was so hot and dry that by morning, I could wear them again. Sometimes I rode a bus to the university. I would walk across the campus lawn dressed like Sheldon, or spend an afternoon in the library, proud that no one noticed me—that I was just another college freshman strolling between the stacks. I fit in. But after a week of this, it didn't mean as much not to be noticed. And I had a growing sense of sorrow at night, scrubbing the seat of my shorts with bar soap in a rust-stained sink.

Then one day Aunt Beti came over to the apartment to find me. She was my favorite aunt, but we didn't see each other very often; and I was surprised when she showed up at my bedroom door.

"Robbie," she said, "I need your help."

She said that she was taking part in a psychic fair, and that she wanted me to carry her paraphernalia—the crystal ball and tarot deck, her card table and folding chairs. There wasn't much for me to do, but it wouldn't look right if the intriguing Madame Beti arrived, lugging her own gear. The psychic fair, she said, was a charitable event, taking place at the Arizona Inn. What I didn't know then was that the Inn had been founded by Isabella Greenway, a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and that Old Moneyed Wealth from East and West stayed there to vacation.

The Inn was family owned, and being civic-minded folks, they had arranged to set up a pavilion tent. They had also catered a luncheon for anyone who paid the steep donation to attend. Tucson's First Annual Psychic Fair had been organized to support the disabled veterans of Southern Arizona. But for Aunt Beti, the fair meant access to a wealthy clientele, since a charity event would hang a halo of legitimacy over her turbaned head. The way that my aunt liked to work, at some point during the free reading, she would say that she had seen something troubling, that it had startled her, but she would need another private reading to get at the truth.

The day that we arrived at the Arizona Inn, I pulled into the employees' parking lot. And from there, I carried the folding table through a long, immaculate kitchen. The grounds outside were lush, surrounded by plastered walls and painted a deep shade of pink. Many were hidden by oleanders or flowering bougainvillea. I hadn't seen this much color since leaving the East; and it seemed sumptuous in the desert to feel a cushion of grass, thick and healthy, under my feet.

At the entrance to the pavilion sat the charity ladies, collecting donations and handing out tickets for the psychic readings inside. They had decked themselves out in Fifties fashion, made up in mid-morning as though the fair were an evening gala. These ladies were rich; we were poor, but since Aunt Beti and I had come as volunteers, they met us with an overflow of welcome—and not a trace of warmth.

From inside, the tent looked less like the Big Top than a narrow-domed canvas castle, the kind where Guinevere might have gone to cool off while the "boys" outside bashed heads with swords and lances. It was large enough to accommodate every psychic in the city, so I had no trouble establishing my aunt in a private place at her own table—though many of the local psychics shared the long metal picnic tables provided by the Inn.

Dressed for tennis, I looked like a rube—a hotel guest prowling for excitement. But I had grown up around this stuff; and I wandered between the tables, listening to familiar lines:

"You are an optimist by nature. But at times, you have been gloomy."

"You are kind to your friends, but when one of them breaks your trust, you get upset for days."

"I see that you are quiet and shy. But there have been moments when you stood in the limelight."

I could go on . . .

A bank of chairs had been arranged along the canvas wall, where guests could wait their turn for a reading. A young girl sat there alone, a girl about my age. She was staring at me, trying to get my attention. When she realized she had caught my eye, she waved in the most open, friendly way. I didn't know what to make of it. I had never met this girl, but she seemed to recognize me. So I started over. What made me so curious—I had a hunch about her. From the way that she composed herself, and from the expression on her face, she had that something I had noticed in Sheldon. I didn't know what to call it then, but the word that I wanted was class.

"I remember you," she said. "You went to Saint Gregory's."

So it was just a case of mistaken identity. But I didn't let that stop me. I said, "Is that where we met?"

Saint Gregory's Academy was a private boys school in town, and quite expensive. I had heard about it when I attended Tucson High because their football team had a rivalry with ours, and it was understood that the boys at Saint Gregory thought that they were better than we were.

"I saw you at a dance," she said.

The boy she remembered must have caught her eye; and he had never asked her to dance. So now whatever fantasy she had about this boy endowed me with his power of attraction. Since it was safe to stare—and she wanted me to look at her—I saw that her hair was sandy blond, the same as mine. And there were freckles on her cheeks, but only enough to suggest a rich girl on a horse, galloping into an Arizona sunset. She was excited to meet me, and with an animated face, she looked quite pretty. But when her face grew still, she seemed homely to me. Her cheeks were flat with a primness that would ruin her looks at forty—something I ought to know because, in later years I would marry this girl. Miss Patricia Anne Merrill would become my first wife.

I married Patty for the "thing" she had in common with Sheldon, but what was it really? Sitting across from her, I tried to decide. It couldn't be arrogance. Sheldon had plenty of that, but Patty was sweet and kind. And it couldn't have been the clothes they wore, which were simple and plain. To put it another way, if Ricky had dressed like Patty, no one would have taken her for a rich girl from a private school, though Ricky was by far the better looking. And if my Cousin Jimmy had put on tennis togs, no one would have mistaken him for a prep school brat, though he was handsomer than Sheldon. So whatever they had wasn't arrogance, and it wasn't good looks.

And then I decided that it had to be their confidence—the confidence of belonging, of holding title to a respected place, and of never having been put down. Whereas I had no place in this world. I had arrived unwanted, grown up unnoticed. All true. But what would my life be like if a girl like this wanted me?

"Have you heard from any schools yet?" she asked.

It was hard to improvise without a clue to what she meant.

"I'd love to go to Vassar," she said. "But my parents would never send me that far."

I said, "I've thought about Vassar," but she winced, so I told her that I was only joking, and the little crease in her brow dissolved.

"They're letting me go to Stanford," she said. "I have amazing parents. I mean, how many girls even get to go to college?"

That was something I had never considered, but in Nineteen Fifty-five, it was certainly true.

"Of course Stanford always was co-ed," she explained. "And it's a great school."

I said, "I'm thinking about going there myself."

"Really?" She sat up tall. "Wouldn't it be exciting if we both got in. I think it would be fabulous to know someone. From Tucson, I mean."

"You know," I told her, "for some reason, I really think it's going to happen."

I had a conversation with a girl, a rich young girl at a psychic fair. We talked for ten minutes at most. And yet suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had a goal so unlikely, so farfetched, that I might as well call it a Grail—and that was to meet Patty Merrill on the hedged and tended greens of Stanford University.

It was a crazy sort of goal, considering that I was a high school dropout who had never even read a book. But it was just the sort of goal that I needed to get acquainted with my talents. Some of them I had inherited from my family—the capacity to lie, to invent on the fly and recover from a flub. My talk with Patty had been less a conversation than a psychic reading. So I was smart in all the ways that a gypsy ought to be. But more than that, now I had a reason to learn. And the day after the psychic fair, I rode the bus downtown and paid my first visit to the main branch of the Tucson Public Library. It was a place that I only knew about from walking past it on the street, but I figured it was time that I got acquainted with books.

Mid-morning the main floor looked deserted, except for a few elderly bums who preferred the chairs there to the bench seats at the Greyhound depot—men who had found the library a proper rest stop for their gentile decrepitude. Only one librarian stood behind the take-out counter. And she could have been forty or sixty because she had let her hair go gray, but her face was perfectly round and smooth. She wore eyeglasses, attached around her neck by a string of beads, and she was reading the book on the counter. When I wandered over, I saw that it was open to a chapter on the Welsh Terrier.

"Hello!" She looked up beaming. "Do you own a dog?"

"Yes," I said with the thought that lying is a skill that should be practiced with diligence.

"Arthur is ten months old," she said. "He's a demon with my shoes, but we do so love our animal friends."

At first I wasn't sure what to make of this sugary woman. She squeezed her lips closed when she smiled, as if her words were too sweet for even her to swallow. Yet I learned that she was entirely sincere—that she was a nurturing and beloved figure who had worked at the library for thirty years. Her name was Miss Maggie Hatch.

"And what can I do for you?" she said.

Like an oaf, I asked, "Do you have any good books?"

She was far too kind to smile. "Actually," she said, "we have quite a few. What do you like?"

I didn't know what to say next, but she hated to see a young person struggle.

"Yes, of course," she said. "You're looking for summer reading."

"That's it," I said with much relief.

"Well, come with me."

So I followed her into the stacks, and after a brief search, she handed me Les Misérable. It was an old edition, and there were colored illustrations inside, but the book looked far too thick to be interesting.

"Try it," she said.

I did. I read it all that night in bed under the overhead light. It was everything that I could ever hope for in a book—the story of a man of real capacity, born into the wrong circumstance, overcoming the worst fortune by changing his name, his history, his life. This was the formula that I would follow, if only I could. In the morning, I didn't try to sleep. I hopped on a bus, rode downtown, and rushed straight up to the check-out desk. That was when Maggie knew she had bagged a reader.

We went on that way, through all of Hugo and much of Balzac, Dumas and Anatole France. She stayed with French writers those first weeks, and kept to plot-filled books before she decided to take the measure of my discernment by handing me Flaubert. It worked. And by then I had become something of a protégé.

One day she asked, "Where are you going to school in the fall?"

"I'm not," I had to admit. Then I explained that I really wanted to go to college, but I didn't think that I could get in.

"You?" she said. "Why, you could do anything?"

By God, how the tears did wriggle down my cheeks, right there in that public space. But how could I explain. I was a drop-out, a bastard, and a failure. I was nothing.

The next day, she was waiting for me, Miss Maggie Hatch. When I came up to the desk to return The Red and the Black, she said that there was someone I should know. He was the very man to help construct my summer reading list.

"Robbie," she said, "I want you to meet Dr. Tim."

This man was very old. His hair had turned white, his nose had gotten longer as his cheeks had sunk. His voice was pitched very high and loud because he had gone half deaf, though his deafness hardly mattered since he never listened in any case. But he was also bold, and he made up his mind about people quickly. By the end of a week, he treated me like his adopted son. He said Maggie had told him that I didn't think I could get into college.

"Is that true?" he barked.

"Yes, sir."

"Well, that's nonsense. And I've been giving it some thought. Tell you what I'm going to do—"And then something of a miracle happened. Dr. Tim had a friend on the Admissions Committee of a college, and he was going to write to that friend and tell him about me. He was particularly close to this man. "I'm his godfather," said Dr. Tim. "I brought him into the world, held him up and slapped his rump. And if he doesn't owe me one, I don't know who does."

"What do you want me to do?" I said.

"Do?" he hollered. "Leave it to me. I'll call him if I don't hear in a week."

"But—"

"Don't but me. I don't care about but's," he said.

He was a little batty, but not his intentions. They were entirely for real.

I said, "But what school does he work for?" And I was lucky to get in that many words.

"My alma mater," said Dr. Tim. "There's only one school for a boy like you—"

And then the miracle:

"Stanford," he told me. "You're going to Stanford University, son."
Chapter Eleven

For all that I knew about applying to college, Stanford University accepted high school dropouts, as long as they came recommended by retired doctors with silvery hair and authoritative voices. So I allowed myself to get swept into the slipstream of

Dr. Tim's determination; and the only problem I set myself to work out was how to gain a high school education in the remaining weeks of summer.

My next move, as I saw it, was to find myself a tutor in math. But which of my former classmates should I ask? Of the ones headed for college, most would attend The University of Arizona, which was only a short walk from Tucson High School down Sixth Street. They would major in agriculture and animal husbandry, and then go on to jobs in ranching. Others would study business and a few might take up law. I suppose they all had something to teach me, but only one of them met all my needs, and he was a freak of nature, the prodigy in our class of five hundred.

That boy's name was Alvin, or "Beanhead," or "The Brain." He had just turned fourteen when he graduated; and as an eleven-year-old freshman, he had looked like a child among us, sitting at a desk with only his toes touching the floor. Alvin's father, I learned, was some sort of engineer involved with the Titan Missile Project. His mother had worked for a New York publishing house and was still acting as a reader. She had concerns about Alvin's fitting in, and when I came to their house and met her at the front door, she about swallowed me whole when I asked for her son.

"Alvin!" she hollered into the house. "It's one of your school friends!" though he had no friends of any kind, and I must have been the first young person to ring her doorbell since last Halloween.

She led me down a hallway, passed several meticulously ordered rooms, and knocked on her son's door. "Alvin?" she said a little wary of disturbing genius at work. "Alvin, Robbie is here to see you."

He looked up at me from a model airplane, a 1953 Cessa 180 Skywagon, which is still the only vintage plane I know by name, thanks to my acquaintance with Alvin Thomas.

"Robbie from school, dear," his mother tried again.

"Yeah, I remember him," he admitted.

I was surprised by that, for Alvin had never seemed to notice anyone. He was a pasty thing, though he had been raised in the desert, but Alvin was a denizen of the school lab, the library, and his bedroom where the curtains had been drawn.

"What do you want?" he said in his puny, surly way. And I had my first sad inkling of what was taking place in that room, as I stood there, angled between his mother's pathetic gratitude and Alvin's feeble resentment.

I said, "I was wondering if you would tutor me in math."

"Really?" Alvin squeaked.

"Oh, Alvin," said his mother. She all but swooned because now Alvin would have a friend, and for being that "friend," I had gained a brilliant tutor.

At the Thomas house, I learned about more than mathematics, for this was the first bookish family that I had ever known. Mr. Thomas was a lean man with the military look of so many dads of that day—the shiny, twice-shaven face, the rigid and upright spine, even when he sat down to his dinner. He worked in the defense industry, and he thoroughly believed that in developing better bombs he was doing the work of God. He had found a minister in town who supported that view, and he probably told his wife how to vote. Whereas Mrs. Thomas was a Leftie who had learned to keep her mouth shut. At the time we met, she had stopped caring who won the Cold War if only she could see Alvin play a game of baseball or take a girl to a school dance.

Once, alone with me, she said, "Alvin is so serious. Have you ever seen him smile?"

"No," I told her. "I never have."

She looked away then and her eyes glistened.

"What's your first name?" I asked her suddenly.

"What's that?" Facing me again, she took a long, courageous breath. "My name?" she laughed. "It's too awful. I sound like a pioneer. I don't know what my mother was thinking." Then, at last, she confessed, "It's Abigail."

"Abigail," I nodded. "That's the most beautiful name I ever heard in my life."

"Oh, Robbie," she said, and she left the room ahead of her tears. But when she came back we were great friends, and she made me stay for dinner. She often did, and it was remarkable to sit at their table in such breathless formality. Mr. Thomas had to be the first to speak, and his idea of connecting with his son was to continue their chess game orally.

"Well, young man," he'd say, "it's still Knight to Queen 4."

"I know, dad. Queen to King 2."

"Really, Alvin—"

"Sweetheart," said Mrs. T. "You haven't asked about Robbie. I hear he's flying through his algebra lessons."

"Is that right?" he asked Alvin instead of me.

"Oh, he'll do fine at business math," said Alvin. "But he better stay away from the theoretical stuff."

"Is that what you want to be," said Mr. T. "A businessman?"

I told him that I hadn't made up my mind.

"It's a dangerous world," he said, which was a trite enough thing to say even in 1955. "This country needs scientists and engineers a lot more than it needs—"

"And it would be a cold place without its artists," said Mrs. T., though she suddenly regretted saying it.

"It'll get a lot colder if the missiles start to fly—"

"John, I only meant—"

"A lot colder," he kept at her, "when it's nuclear night. What do you say to that, Robbie?"

In this way he put me between them. He would do it every night of the summer that I sat through their evening meal. And every time he did, I would glance over at

Mrs. T—at my poor Abigail—and there she would sit, imploring me to take her husband's side.

The Thomas family lived in an austere little house of bright red brick. Inside, the plastered walls were bare and white. Mrs. T. would have liked to hang paintings, but

Mr. T. had insisted on photographs of recognizable terrain, and there were a few of these about, but they gave his wife so little comfort that she came to prefer white walls to aerial photography. The hardwood floors were always waxed and shiny; and there were shelves in every room filled with hardcover books.

Only one room had a trace of disorder, and that was Abigail's private study, where she came to read the manuscripts mailed to her by her former boss at Scribner's. She let them pile up on the floor, though there was a neater stack on her desk. These came from agents she knew. The floor stack she called her "slush" pile, and she even kept a wine glass and a bottle of burgundy close by in case the reading got too awful to bear.

"I'm really a bohemian at heart," she told me once.

I wonder to this day what she would have thought if I had said, "And I'm half gypsy." Abigail was over thirty, and I was seventeen. But it would have been splendid to have screwed her up against her office wall, then slid down it together, tipping over the pile of manuscripts. Afterwards, I would have reached for the uncorked bottle, and we'd have filled our mouths until the wine ran, like the blood of an ox, down the corners of our lips . . .

Of course, none of this ever happened. But it should have.

Abigail liked to keep up with the news back east, and she had a copy of The New York Times delivered every Sunday from a downtown newsstand. She introduced me to the society page and identified people she had met at cocktail parties when she was an up-and-coming editor. Through her, I learned about the different kinds of wealth—new and old, respectable and notorious—and the surnames attached.

I thought a great deal about names. At night before I fell asleep, I used to devise new ones that had the kind of class and character I could grow into. Didn't Jean Valjean create a new life by changing his name? And Edmond Dantès, too. But this wasn't an idea that came into my head inspired by a book. I must have decided on it long ago, and spent the next several years formulating into words that one day I would stop being Robbie Costa.

Now his days were numbered. Pretty soon, I planned to knock Robbie off.

Alvin tutored me during that remarkable summer, and in hardly two months, he had guided me through a course in high school algebra, geometry, and trig. Anyone but Alvin would have called my progress remarkable. Alvin saw it as middling, for seeing me, a boy of seventeen, overcome problems that he, a boy of fourteen, had already worked out at the age of eight, must have seemed as laudable to Alvin as watching me master the fork or tie the laces on my shoes. But he stuck it out, probably to mollify his mom, who—thanks to me—had quit insisting that he go outside and make some friends.

I look back on the summer of 1955 as a sort of crash course. And the objective of that course was to become the person that I hoped to be in the fall—so it was a course that covered more than my missing years in high school. At the Thomas house, I discovered the salad fork, the dessert spoon, and the proper pace to chew and swallow. And Abigail made me realize that, on my family's trek from Trenton to Tucson, my accent had trolled some pretty rough debris—that mid-sentence I would trip out of character, start out talking like a native of the west, then enter the cadence of a central Jersey prole. She taught me, for instance, that the homework I wanted to leave in Alvin's desk went into a "drawer," not a "draw," and that the "terlet" down the hall was a "toilet," after all.

My schedule that summer kept me going around the clock. All night, I'd read the books that Maggie suggested. They kept me up because I read them in the manner of a teenage boy, as adventure yarns about heroes just like me. I saw myself in Raskolnikov, pumping my arm at bourgeois morality; in Alexei Ivanovich, trusting my future to the gambling gods. But most of all, I was Ulysses because he knew where he was going, and to get there, he would do whatever it took.

Every morning, I carried another armful of books to the downtown library and picked up the new ones, which Maggie kept for me under the counter. In the afternoon I worked on my math homework, and by four p.m. I was ready for my session with Alvin.

Abigail often asked me to stay for dinner. And so, three or four nights a week, I would find myself sitting between her and Mr. T., waiting for the fatal moment when she would relax into the one wrong sentence that did not precisely fit his mind's design. And for this tactless transgression, he would question her, corner her, and pin her down. She was always the first to realize that she had blundered, her eyes looked so frightened and snared. And she would stumble and stutter, trying to rephrase her careless words, but he was on to that trick. He'd cross examine each of her pitiful attempts at exoneration, sealing off all routes of escape, caulking even the thin line of light in the space under the door.

"Robbie," he'd say at last. "You're a neutral party. What do you think?"

And then, every time this happened, I would turn to Abigail, and her eyes would signal me in panic to tell that sick son of a bitch, "I think you're right, sir," so she could have his permission to rise and enter the kitchen to get our dessert.

Through all that cramming, I learned a lot. But it didn't get me any closer to my goal. The interview didn't happen. At least I heard no more about it. And as the weeks wore on, the idea of it seemed hopeless after all. Stanford University would never interview the likes of me. A believer like Maggie was self-deluded; and Dr. Tim, for all I knew, was a fraud. Seventeen is a young age to discover futility, but now I wondered why I was wasting my time on all these books. A night with Madame Bovary had only brought me to new depths of discontent since the only job I qualified for was "gofer," if Lyle would take me back.

So one morning I slogged to the library with my armful of classics. My eyes felt bleary from reading; and when I didn't see Maggie at the counter, I decided to leave, without more books, to go home and sleep through the afternoon, through my tutoring session with Alvin, through every day and every night from now until the millennium. Screw it all.

I was halfway to the entrance when a voice behind me shouted out my name, and turning, I saw the white wavy hair and smooth pink cheeks of Dr. Tim. "Come over here," he hollered, even louder than usual. No one seemed to notice if it was Dr. Tim creating the disturbance, though I'm pretty sure that if it had been plain old Tim, he'd have been shushed and led outside into the street.

"So!" he yelled, though I stood close enough to hear a whisper. "So there's the young man who thinks he can't get into college. Ha!"

His "ha!" was like a call to arms, or high C on a bugle. What he said to me next sounded like so much gibberish—and I felt so achingly tired—that I thought about turning my back on him and heading home. What he said, roughly, went like this: "Ten a.m. And be sharp! Kress's next Saturday. What did I tell you? Ha! The rest is up to you." Then he raised the newspaper abruptly, as if he had gone back to his reading, when it was clear that he was trying to hide his exultation.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but then Maggie came up from behind and she tried to explain. She told me that the very best schools in the country—the Ivy League colleges back east, Stanford in the west—would sometimes hear about a promising candidate. And when this happened, the schools kept a list of "alums" who had volunteered to serve as unofficial recruiters. When Dr. Tim wrote to his friend in Admissions, I became such a promising candidate; and his friend had found a Stanford alum, a Mr. Edward Curry of Curry, Lawson & Clark, who would be visiting Tucson in late July to try a case at the Arizona Superior Court in Pima County.

Mr. Curry had been planning to fly back to Sacramento on Friday night. But now, as a courtesy to his alma mater, he would stay over a day, and on Saturday morning he planned to interview me and one other candidate. He would meet us at Kress's, the downtown five & dime. It had a soda fountain toward the back, and Mr. Curry would be waiting for me in a booth at 10 a.m.

"Isn't that wonderful!" Maggie said. "Robbie, I could cry."

"What's that you said?" shouted Dr. Tim. "I need your name," he told me. "Go on. Write it down." He took a small spiral notebook from his shirt pocket and got out a pen.

"I don't understand," I said turning to Maggie.

"He wants to write you a letter of recommendation."

Dr. Tim was up on his feet now, standing beside me. He put the pen and notebook into my hands and ordered me to write. And so, with no more time for musing, I wrote down the name that had been circling in my head ever since Lyle had led me into that fraternity house on The University of Arizona campus. Sheldon Roberts, I wrote—"Sheldon" after the frat brat who had first inspired me, "Roberts" to explain my nickname of Robbie.

"Sheldon, hey?" said Dr. Tim. "I should have been calling you Shelly all this time." Then he clapped my back and said that he would write me one "beaut" of a letter, but that I had better bring along another two.

"Two what?" I said.

"Recommendations," Maggie explained.

"But who should I get them from? Would you—"

"Oh, no," Maggie blushed. "It wouldn't mean much coming from me."

"Get one from the mayor, if you know him," said Dr. Tim. "Get one from the governor. But if you can't get that, go ask your teachers, you young rascal."

Who did I know willing to write me a letter of recommendation? No one, I realized. And so I left the library that day feeling elated in one way and screwed in another. There wasn't a teacher anywhere, from Tucson to Trenton, who would say a good word on my behalf. And even if there were such a person, willing to offer some kindness about Robbie Costa, who would vouch for the brains, the ambitions, and the character of "Sheldon Roberts"—a name that I had only just made up and carelessly scribbled into Dr. Tim's notepad?

Who could I possibly ask?

I thought of Abigail at once, but how could I explain "Sheldon" to her? And how much weight would a letter from Abigail hold if Maggie's would be virtually weightless? I even considered talking to my Uncle Pete—the most literate of my uncles—and asking him to invent a personae and sing my praise. At least he wouldn't have any moral qualms about doing it. But how could I let him in on my plan when the purpose of the plan was to escape my family?

A few days later Dr. Tim gave me his letter, and I saw that it was written on personalized stationary. The envelope had been so poorly sealed, I had no trouble steaming it open, and I was lucky in one way. The letter he wrote was a long one, and I got to read all the tony little phrases, the niceties and anecdotes that spoke of my irreproachable character. I studied that letter like a style guide, and when I was through, I realized that only one person could compose the letters I needed to bedazzle a Stanford recruiter, and that person had to be someone who could lie without limits, someone without bourgeois stops. That person could only be me.

Once that was settled in my mind, I knew exactly what to do. It was well after four p.m., and at five o'clock the print shop would close for the day—that is, the front office would close. Back in the press room, the men still had to clean up from the runs that had been going on since early morning. There were four pressmen, though I hardly knew them by name, four men who manned their stations all day in a thunder of mechanical noise. Once they had gone, Lyle would start the process of locking up, and that was when I hoped to meet him, out on the platform with his ring of keys in hand.

With hardly thirty minutes to get there, I couldn't risk hitching a ride. So I went down the row of apartments in our fourplex, hoping to talk someone into driving me. Uncle Frank was out and so was my Aunt Louisa, but at Uncle Pete's apartment, I met up with a surprise. Instead of Pete, I found my Uncle Eddie, the one who didn't live with the rest of us—Eddie, the author of the car scam that we ran in Trenton. I didn't see much of him anymore, but when I did, it always surprised me how little he had changed in seven years. He was still as ugly as ever, as greasy, lean and gnarled, but not a day older than the man I used to pester when I was ten years old to buy me a switchblade of my own.

"Well, well," he tipped his bottle of beer. "Where you been keeping yourself, Robbie-boy?" He told me that Uncle Pete had gone out to buy another six pack. Then he said, "That'll be some reunion next Saturday night."

"No one told me about it," I said as my heart leapt to the thought that Ricky might be coming back, finally, and just when I needed her to confide in.

"How come you don't know?" my uncle said. "It's a double-header. Max and Jimmy are driving in from Atlanta."

"Oh, them," I said.

"You don't care?"

I lied. I said that I cared.

Then my uncle explained. After Max got out of jail, the old man had sent him to Atlanta to live with Jimmy. "I bet they fucked up down there, too," Eddie said. "I'll bet that's why they're coming back."

I could read the hand on his watch, and there was hardly time to talk. "Do me a favor," I said.

"A what?" he laughed. "Haven't I done enough for you already? Didn't I let you steal my knife?"

"You knew?"

"Jesus," he slowly shook his head. "You think you can steal from a gypsy?" Then he reached out, spread his enormous hand around my neck, and yanked my head roughly against his chest. "What do you want?" he said. "As long as I don't have to shoot someone."

I said that I wanted a ride to a downtown print shop, and Uncle Eddie got me there just as Lyle stood on the platform out back, locking the rear entrance.

"Got to go," I said.

"Saturday night," my uncle made me promise. Then he left me in the empty lot and drove away.

Whatever happened next depended on Lyle. He worked for the largest print shop in town, and I was betting that the front office had copies of the stationary used by every public school in the city. But would he risk his job to help me? The man I was counting on—now that I thought about it—was a crazy loon. I could hardly count all the injuries to Lyle's head, the rear-end collisions and falling acorns from the sky. How many times had his brains swung from east to west and pole to pole? Yet this was the Lyle that I needed, to secure my future.

"Why Robbie," he said, as I climbed up on the platform. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you, Lyle. Can we talk inside?"

He found the key on his ring and let us into the room of giant presses behind the front office.

"I guess I'll just say it," I sighed. "I need your help."

"Why sure," said Lyle. "You're like a brother to me."

Poor dear Lyle. I had been so fearful of his turning me down that I'd forgotten how innocent he was. "The thing is," I said, "I have this chance to go to college."

"Wonderful," Lyle said, toothless and jolly. "That's even better than high school."

"True," I said. "But to get in, I'll need some recommendations."

"Heck, I'll write you one."

"I know that. But they've got to be on official stationary."

"Well, why didn't you say so? We've got clients all over town."

I had to pause and swallow. Did he even understand that what I was asking could get him fired? There was something sacred about Lyle, an innocence that hovered between sainthood and idiocy. And the idea that I might cause him trouble held me back, though self-interest won out.

"What college are you going to?" Lyle asked.

"Stanford University," I said, expecting that he would stare agog.

Instead he said, "Gosh, Robbie. You don't have to settle for that. I bet you could go right here at the U of A."

"Maybe you're right," I said, "after I prove myself at Stanford."

"Well, okay then. Let's go inside."

He led me to a file cabinet and unlocked the drawers. My plan was to forge two letters on school stationary, using the names of former teachers. So then I asked Lyle the Big Question: "Is Tucson High one of your clients?"

Everything seemed to depend on his answer.

"Nope," he told me.

"Oh, Jesus," I said. And I collapsed on a swivel chair and spun half a circle.

"Well, hold on, Robbie. We got better clients than that."

"You don't understand," I told him. What good did it do me if he was printing flyers for Steinfeld's, or ads for Kress's. "Just forget it," I said. "I'm screwed."

"Now you just hold on. You said official stationary?"

"It's got to be school stationary," I explained. "So the letter looks like it came from a teacher."

"Well, how about if it comes from the mayor?" said Lyle. "Would that do?"

Nothing less would have roused me. I rushed over to the cabinet, and what I found there, dropped my jaw. There were samples of the stationary used by judges in the State Supreme Court, by city councilmen, by the Chairman of the Tucson Chamber of Commerce . . .

Modesty prevented me from "accepting" a recommendation from the mayor, so instead I forged the name of a popular city councilman. And I conceded to opportunity and used the stationary of the Superintendent of Schools. I kept the first letter brief. The city councilman, I decided, knew of me through my parents, who were sound, upright, and deeply involved in the affairs of their community—"folks who had raised a boy of sterling character."

But when I composed the other letter, posing as the Superintendent of Schools, I lost my sobriety. The way I wrote it, he had first noticed me—young Sheldon Roberts, that is—when I was eight years old. He happened to be looking out of his living-room window one Sunday morning, when there I was, his new paperboy, sitting on the stoop, carefully reading his morning paper, then folding it neatly and leaving it at his door.

"He was a serious little fellow, and remarkably bright. We often talked after that, and I have proudly watched young Sheldon mature over the years into the kind of student, family member, and citizen who will make Stanford proud . . ."

"That sounds real fine," Lyle said when I read it back, newly typed on the secretary's Smith Corona.

"It might just get me in," I said, "if you'll sign it."

"Who me, Robbie?"

"Sure," I told him. "But sign it Dr. Edwin C. Cheney."

"Okay," he shrugged. "If you think it's all right—"

So I did it! And I was walking tall and self-assured. Now I only had to go through the motions of applying—sit through the interview, answer briefly with "yes, sirs" and "no, sirs," then wait until Mr. Curry read my letters! It would be a lead-pipe cinch. My last stop was a trip back to Steinfeld's Department Store for an outfit to wear next Saturday morning.

The same sales girl approached me, and what a stroke to my self-esteem when she greeted me as a patron of the store. "Why, it's the young gentleman who's studying to be a doctor," she said, loud enough to alert the idle sales girls that she had bagged a live one. "How have you been?" she asked.

"Quite well," I said, aping the words I'd heard Abigail use on the telephone. "I'll need some new clothes for an interview."

"Really?" she said. "Who with?"

"Oh, Stanford," I said carelessly.

Until that moment I had never really known what Stanford University meant in social currency, but now I got the measure of it in the widening of her large, rapacious eyes.

"Well, personally," she said, "I hope you stay here in Tucson. You're the kind of young man I want my daughter to meet."

"She must be very beautiful," I said. "Well, look at you."

That caused a blush, and she was closer to Abigail's age than mine.

She said, "You make me wish that I was seventeen."

"You make me wish you weren't married," I said, and she did not look away.

Instead she sighed with a glance at her ring. "I lost my husband in the war," she said, but without sounding very sad about it.

Dating Gloria turned out to be exciting and embarrassing for us both, for we really did look a dozen years apart. But she came up with lots of private, outdoor things for us to do. Our favorite, the drive to Gate's Pass, which wasn't quite so popular back then—the "must-see" in tourist guides that it has become. Some days we had it to ourselves. I would park her car, the only one along the road's shoulder; and we would climb outside onto the salmon-colored dirt and enter a different kind of light and silence—a light that could define the planes of a pebble or the angle of a thorn, a silence that magnified the crunch that our shoes made on the steep, rocky climb to Our Spot, a boulder as generous and wide as an elephant's back, where we arranged our two glasses and a bottle of wine.

The mountain rolled down toward the valley. And at sunset, it flushed with stripes of light and shade—orange light that struck the descending hilltops, purple shade that filled the valleys between them. There were sunsets that caused Gloria to sit up tall, cover her mouth and gasp. But my eyes tended toward the pattern of sunlight and shade that fell across her inner thigh. And the thrill she had in being with a boy of seventeen came in knowing that a patch of her thigh was more breathtaking to me than the Almighty's evening canvas.

By midweek, I had moved in with Gloria, though it was hard on her daughter, a girl about my age, to look at me across the breakfast table. She seemed so miserable that I tried extra hard to be friendly, but she was too quick for me at lowering her eyes and leaving the room.

"She'll get used to it," Gloria told me.

She was a callous mother, but the most game in bed of any of my partners since Ricky. Gloria turned sex into a selfish race, a competitive climb to a peak only one of us could reach. And it never bothered her, and maybe even pleased her if I fell back, feeling injured and alone. But no one else had ever been so rapturous in a climax—a feeling that she described like some out-of-body flotation before she came tumbling back into the sheets. "Jesus, Robbie," she told me once. "For a moment there, you squeezed the breath out of me."

"Gee, I'm sorry—"

"No!" she said. "Wouldn't that be a great way to go?"

It bothered me that she brushed off her daughter, but what troubled me more was finding out that her husband wasn't dead. Her daughter—who couldn't stand the sight of me—said it to the walls one day as she carried her breakfast plate to the kitchen sink. If Gloria had been there at the time, she probably would have slapped the girl's face. Instead I felt the words like a slap on mine. Gloria's husband, I learned, was a patient at the VA Hospital in Tucson, recovering from bouts of dengue fever. But the worse I thought of Gloria, the more that she intrigued me, and the longer I stayed to figure out this lady with the icy heart and mystical sex.

On Saturday morning, riding the city bus to my interview downtown, I gazed out the broad window at the city streets in early August. Even in the sizzling air, people went through the turns of their ordinary lives—driving to work, walking the dog, sweeping the debris from a storefront entrance. No one else was like me. And to prove it to myself, I took stock of the long way that I had come: In my lap I held two letters of recommendation—forged, but nonetheless. And I wore the interview outfit that Gloria had helped me assemble, a navy blazer with light khaki pants, a white dress shirt and regimental tie, which she had tied for me in a Windsor knot. I lived rent free—lived with my mistress of thirty-five and her daughter who was just my age. These were heady times!

My confidence that morning was staggering. And the obstacles that should have stopped me from trying—my failing grades and lack of a high school diploma, my shortage of funds to pay for tuition—seemed like mere hitches and snags on my way to campus. All I had to do, it seemed, was to get through this interview, so I could join Gloria for lunch and tell her how brilliantly I had handled it. Before I left that morning, she had told me to bring up the matter of scholarship money, which to me was a completely new concept, I had been improvising in such perfect ignorance. But after she mentioned it, I saw how easily I could work through any snag with Fate on my side.

Kress's was not very busy at that hour, and I walked down a long empty aisle to the soda fountain at the rear. Up ahead, I could see the other candidate taking his interview. He had dressed like me, but he was a mole, poor kid. Across the booth sat Mr. Curry in a long-sleeve white shirt, rolled back from his wrists. He was holding a gold pen and tapping it on the pile of papers lying on an open file. Then he took off his glasses, left them on the table top and started rubbing the bridge of his nose. There was clearly no rapport between them; and a few minutes later, the boy stood nervously beside the booth and shook the man's hand. As he came my way, I saw Mr. Curry dry his palm with a napkin.

The kid passed me, nibbling on his lower lip. "Hey, good luck," I said in the kindly spirit of a winner to a loser.

A moment later I approached the Formica table, buoyant with confidence, mellowed by morning sex. Looking up at me, the gentleman in shirtsleeves smiled. "Well," said Mr. Edward Curry, Stanford volunteer-recruiter and attorney at law, "you're a fine-looking fellow."

Then he shook my dry hand, and I slid into the booth.

"I've been reading this letter," he said, referring to the one from Dr. Tim. "Do you have any others to show me?"

"Yes, sir," I said and I handed him my forged letter from City Councilman Thomas Reilly and the other from the Superintendent of Schools.

"My, my," he examined the envelopes. "I see we have some influential friends." Then he took a letter opener from the table and cut a slit down the side. He read the first one carefully, then the second. "I see," he said. "I see." And looking up, he considered me for a moment. "I suppose you've applied to our cousins back east." I was lost until he added, "Harvard? Princeton?"

"Yes, of course," I told him.

"I thought so," he said, chewing his lip. "I hope you don't believe that old canard that you have to go east to get a first-rate education. You know they call Stanford the Harvard of the West."

"Yes, sir," I piped up. "And I don't believe that at all. I'm a westerner through and through."

"Well, then," he said with some satisfaction, leaning back against the cushioned booth. "Here," he said. "Take this with you," and he handed me an application form. It was news to me that I would have to fill one out! I had thought the interview would end with my acceptance and a handshake. "You know," he said, "all this is very impressive"—he tapped the letters on the table. "I assume you have the grades to back it up."

"Certainly," I told him.

"Well, fill this out," he said, and then he made a note on the application, at the top corner of the first page, and initialed it. "Oh, and have your school send an official transcript. This is strictly between the two of us," he said. "But if your grades match these letters, I think you're a shoo-in." Then he grinned at me so boldly that he must have wondered why I had suddenly gone pale.

"What about that transcript?" I asked.

"A transcript," he said, as if it were all too obvious. "One of these—"

Then he picked one up from the papers lying on the table. It must have been the transcript of the boy who had just left; and in the two or three seconds I had to study it, I saw a name typed across the top. Under that, the boy's courses and grades had been handwritten (as they were in those days) in two columns, and there was an official-looking seal at the bottom left corner, stamped in green ink and signed across the center. All this I saw with the quick eye of a thief, as I sat across the booth, numb and still inside. I could hardly hear the words leaving Mr. Curry's lips over the humming in my ears.

But whatever he said, I think I answered, "Yes, of course. I'll have my high school send one immediately."
Chapter Twelve

Beyond the radius of my family lived the suckers we preyed on, people who didn't think like us, who led fixed lives and kept the world in working order. There is nothing wrong about that, but for my uncles to go on cheating them—and feel good about it—they had to hold these people in contempt. So I grew up hearing that "the suckers don't have a clue."

Only now I was finding out how much they knew that I didn't.

Take my classmates, for instance, the same kids my cousins looked down on and kept calling a joke. They knew about transcripts and application forms. Whereas all my cousins knew about was how to do the wrong thing in any circumstance, and get caught for doing it. As for me, I was still learning from Abigail not to talk with my mouth full, and from Gloria how to tie a Windsor knot.

So when Mr. Curry called me "a shoo-in," seeing no other hurdles in sight, I thought that my admission to Stanford was a handshake away. And I could already see myself at noon, strutting through the luncheonette and sliding into the booth beside Gloria. Where my fingers would walk up the inside of her thigh, under cover of the tabletop; and she would stare back at me with her greedy, green eyes and say, "They accepted you, right?"

The man had said "shoo-in." But the moment he asked for an "official transcript," Gloria melted into mist; and I found myself staggering out of Kress's with the feeling that I had been mugged. Now the last thing I wanted was to meet her for lunch, oblige myself to grin and pretend that everything had gone "just great!" What I needed were answers and a way to understand what just gone wrong. So I ditched my lunch date, took a bus to Speedway and Country Club, and from there walked three blocks north to the Thomas' house.

On my second ring, Abigail opened the door. My expression must have told her Don't even ask, because without a word she turned and led me to the kitchen. And that was when I forgot myself—that here I was only a boy, that I was young Robbie Costa, her child Alvin's friend. I asked her for a shot of scotch. My hands were still shaking. My throat had started to close. It's what I would have done at home, asked my Uncle Frank or Pete.

But Abigail! The alarm on her face yanked me back into my role.

"I had a shock," I explained. "My uncle always drinks scotch when he has a shock. Couldn't I, just this once?"

"Robbie, please!"

"You know I've never done it before."

She looked around the room to convince herself that no one else would ever know. It was just before noon, and Mr. Thomas wouldn't arrive home before five. "If I do this," she said, "promise that you'll tell me what's wrong?"

I promised.

So she went into the pantry, and after much searching found a bottle of Seagram's Seven. "You promise," she said. "And you've honestly never had spirits before?"

"Cross my heart," I said, but then she poured so frugally I couldn't help adding, "Better make it a double."

"Oh, Robbie"—she shook her head as I took the glass—"sometimes I wonder if I really know you."

The liquor did help. At least it delivered me back from doom.

"Now," she said, "tell me what happened."

"It's my girlfriend," I explained. "She won't see me anymore."

"Oh, is that all?" she smiled. "Well, sweetheart, I can guarantee, in six months—"

"Abigail," I broke in. "Tell me about high school transcripts."

It took her a moment to recover. What did transcripts have to do with my girlfriend, after all? And why would I want to know? But then she sighed and told me that transcripts were the official record of the grades that students earn, and they were kept by a school official, a "registrar," though that was usually just the office secretary, she added.

"Does Alvin have one?"

"Of course," she said. "So do you."

"Me?" I wailed, as one caught in a criminal act. No one had ever told me that my grades were kept—without my knowing it—in some clandestine rap sheet, where all my failures and incompletes were printed in columns of F's and I's. As for my senior year, that space would be a perfect blank.

"What is it, Robbie? I can't help you if you won't tell me."

"My grades," I said. "They weren't—"

"Don't give up," she said. "Alvin thinks you're very clever."

"Alvin does?"

"He said so. He said you're much smarter than he realized. He's really impressed. You don't look very pleased to hear it."

How could I be when all that meant to me was that I could have made it at Stanford if only I had gotten the chance.

"But why," I said—as if it were possible to negotiate such things—"why do transcripts have to come from a high school? Can't I just write my grades in a letter?"

"You may not understand this," Abigail smiled, patting my arm, "but not everyone is as honest as you are."

"What do you mean by that?"

"There are people who would lie," she said, "if the system let them."

"Really?" I said, perking up a bit. "How could they do that?"

"Well"—she thought it over—"there was a case I read about. This was in upstate New York. In Binghamton, I think. Someone broke into a school," she said. "I hope this doesn't shock you."

"A little," I said, "but please go on."

"He stole transcript paper. Blank forms," she explained. "And he knew enough to take the registrar's seal. He probably meant to sell forgeries."

"The bastard," I said. "You know, it's people like that who make it worse for the rest of us."

Late that night, I worked out a plan, but to execute it I would need advice. I needed the advice of a thief, and who could have had better connections? The only question, which of my uncles should I ask? They were in town for the weekend and wouldn't leave for Phoenix until Sunday night. Uncle Eddie seemed the logical choice. He was a mechanic after all, used to tools and working with his hands. So in the morning, I made the half mile walk to his house. He happened to be outside when I arrived, standing under the carport near his truck's open hood.

"What's this?" he said. "I don't see you for a year. Now I can't get rid of you."

"It's a curse," I said. "But I need one more favor."

"Oh, no," he grinned. "Now you're getting greedy. Go see the old man."

"Uncle Eddie," I said. "Would you teach me how to pick a lock?"

"Is that it?" he laughed. "Not with these mitts." He held them up, his oversized hands, which were greasy, gnarled, and scarred along the knuckles. "Go see Lucca," he told me. "Go see that little giant. He can help you."

So then I walked back to the fourplex, to see my most intriguing uncle—Lucca the bantam with his chesty baritone and booming self-confidence, his Charlie Chaplin trick of flicking his cigarette butt and catching it on the sole of his up-kicked shoe; Lucca with the caterpillar eyebrows fixed into arcs of irony. When he came to the door, I had the familiar sense of looking up at him, though he was half a head shorter.

"Is my grandfather here?" I asked.

"He's back at the park," Lucca boomed, "with his playmates."

"Horseshoes again?"

"Or bocce ball. Should I tell him you were here?"

"I really want to talk to you."

"Ah," said Lucca. "Then come in, and sit yourself down." I followed him inside to the sofa where he took the pack of Chesterfield's from his shirt pocket. Then, one handed, he tapped out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips and lit a match off his thumbnail. "I'm waiting," he said. "This is the first time you ever came to me for something."

"Well, it's like this—"

"Yes," said Lucca, "it always is." Then he offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit off the end of his.

"Would you teach me to pick a lock?" I said.

"Pick a lock?" His voice rose, as though he had taken offense. "For that, you go to your aunts. Come to Lucca," he announced, "when you want to crack a safe!"

"But couldn't you—"

"Yes?" he said, with arching brows.

"Just this once, dear uncle—"

He took a long drag and considered the request. "If you put it that way," he said at last. "Go into my room, to the closet. Bring me the tool chest on the floor."

It was very worn and rusty, like a fisherman's lure box.

"Well!" he bellowed. "I am waiting, youngster."

When I brought it to him, he opened the lid on a pile of screwdrivers, pliers, and some handmade tools I could not even recognize, things he must have gathered or invented during his travels. The tools he wanted were tiny, but he found them at last. One was a straight piece of spring steel; the other, a broader piece, twisted at both ends like an italic S.

"The last time I used these," he said, "the Russians had me in shackles."

"What for, Uncle Lucca?"

He wouldn't say. "You know who gave them to me?" His eyebrows shot up.

"Was it my grandfather?"

"Even then," said Lucca, "he was a wily old goat. Now wait here," he said.

He got up and left the room, but he came back shortly with a padlock. It took him hardly a minute to open it.

"Now you," he said.

With his instructions, I had no trouble after a try or two. I only had to jimmy the straight tool into the key slot. With a little practice, I could tell when it had lifted the tumblers. The other tool, the one with the bent ends, was for turning the cylinder, and voila, the lock sprang open.

"Now tell me," said Lucca. "Why do you want to know this?"

There was no way that I could lie to that shrewd old head, so I said, "A boy needs a hobby."

"To be sure," said my uncle. "But remember what happened to Max. If the cops come around, I'll turn you in myself."

My plan had been inspired by Abigail's story about the burglary in Binghamton. Only my idea was to do it with finesse. Without any vandalism, pried door jambs or broken glass, I intended to slip in and out of Tucson High, so that no one would ever know that I'd been there. I meant to break in at night, after the janitor had gone and the school was deserted. Once inside, I could pick the lock on the door to the main office. Then I could get what I needed and vanish. Granted, I'd have to leave the office door open, but that shouldn't cause alarm. It would simply look as if the secretary had forgotten to lock up. No break-in would be reported. And Abigail would never confront the story in the local paper, knowing in her heart that the burglar had been me. Not that I thought she would call the cops, but if Abigail kept quiet about this, she would never forgive herself. And she would never look at me in the same kindly way.

All that afternoon, I sat cross-legged on my bed with my uncle's tools and three old locks to practice on. One of them was Lucca's padlock. Another I found on the door of the tool shed, and the third, hooked through the latch of an old trunk. In an hour I knew what I was doing. But that still left one last chore.

Two apartments down, I found the front door open. My aunt had gone out, and Uncle Pete was snoring in the bedroom. He owned a station wagon, which was why he did the driving when my uncles left for Phoenix. He lay asleep on his side, long and hairy in a tee shirt and boxer shorts, while a fat fly fiddled on my uncle's big toe. It seemed strange to see him there, as vulnerable as a mark, while I picked the pocket of his trousers. They were folded over the back of a chair, and I took out his car keys. If it were my grandfather lying on that bed, or my Uncle Lucca, either one of them would have seen me in his sleep. And he'd have caught my wrist when he seemed the most unaware. But Uncle Pete was just a working stiff, a journeyman thief sleeping rhythmically in a steady, trustful snore.

Once I had the car keys in hand, I went outside to the shed, and I carried the ladder to the station wagon. It fit easily in the back, so I drove straight to Tucson High. The entrance to the school faced Sixth Street, and along the building's west side, the playground was in full view of the street. But the lot behind the school was an empty plot of lifeless soil, of dirt as dead as a crust of salt. And there I parked. Then I carried the ladder under a window about eight feet high. Tomorrow night, I would use the ladder to climb through that window into the boy's room. But for now, the window was locked, and I left the ladder lying on the ground.

A short time later, the station wagon stood over the same gravel space where Uncle Pete had left it, the keys were tucked into his trouser pocket, and I lay in my bed convincing myself that the rest would be easy. All night, I practiced my plan until I had pulled it off so often in my head that the break-in seemed to have already happened. By daybreak, during a few moments of sleep, I dreamed about my first day at Stanford. And it didn't strike me as mournful or odd to see young Sheldon Roberts stroll across the campus green, and to know that Robbie Costa was dead and gone.

If my plan worked, I could never go home again. And when I looked around, there wasn't much for me to miss—a kitchen abuzz with flies, the target I had drawn on my bedroom wall, an unmade bed. But then I thought about Ricky, and how she used to crawl into that very bed, pull off her halter top and share secrets that belonged to us only. I thought about my grandfather, too, because I loved him some of the time. And I wondered about my mother. If I disappeared one day, would she think that I was dead? I found her in the kitchen, wiping the counter clean. The garbage bag was gone. The flies had been evicted.

"Hi, sweetie," she said.

Now why, I wondered, did she have to call me that, just as I was planning Robbie's demise?

"Have you eaten?" I asked. "Can I take you out for dinner?"

She had never called me "sweetie" before. And I had never asked my mother out for dinner. But we must have shared a gypsy-intuition that an end was near. In a little diner on Speedway Boulevard, we talked across the vinyl table, and that was where she told me she had met a man at work.

"It's about time," I said. Then I had to ask, "Did you love my father that much?"

"Love him?" she said.

"You haven't dated in seven years."

Her skin creased, first under the eyes, then at the corners of her mouth. "I didn't love your father," she said.

"But I always thought—"

"Oh, Robbie"—she slowly shook her head—"you have such bad blood."

Something uneasy came over me then, a quick, sudden chill.

"You know what kind of people we are. He was worse."

"You mean a bigger thief?" I said, trying to laugh it off.

"He was crazy," she told me.

And then I suddenly regretted this conversation, and I wished that we were back at the apartment, telling each other comforting lies.

"What do mean?" I had to ask. "Crazy and wild? Or did he need to be locked up?" It felt urgent that she explain.

"You know he liked women," she said.

"Oh, that."

"And gambling—"

"Don't they all?" I said. "Just look at Uncle Frank—"

"He wasn't like your Uncle Frank. He used tell your grandfather such things he did with other women— And the gambling," she said. "He placed bets with your uncles, but when he lost he wouldn't pay the bookies. He'd hide out until your uncles paid to keep him alive for my sake."

"So he was a lowdown bastard," I said.

"He cheated so much, he couldn't trust anyone else. One day I came home from school, from dropping you off. He was hiding in the closet, Robbie. When I opened the door, he jumped out at me. He had a knife. He pinned me to the wall. He said he was going to kill me. Then he went through the rooms, looking for another man."

It was true. Now I remembered how it was, the tears in a bedroom, and the echo of his shoes each time he left. I stared down at the table top, trying to think of something to blame.

"Did he drink?" I asked.

She shook her head. "It was in his blood. He only got worse. Do you remember the apartment on Third Avenue?" And then she told a story that I used to think of as a bad dream. When I was four years old, we were living in a walk-up on the Lower Eastside. One morning I sat at the kitchen table, as my parents stood in front of me screaming into each other's face. The next thing, my mother rose off the floor. She flew backwards then landed hard on her bottom.

The apartment was on the top floor, our ceiling just below the roof. And when the floor shook from her fall, everything standing (the kitchen table and chairs, dishes on the counter, glasses in the cupboard) was shifted by the tremor. She lay on her back and paddled her legs, to keep him off her, but my father got a hold of her legs. He held them down and straddled her.

I climbed off the chair. I hid behind it, only inches taller than the table top. "Robbie!" she screamed. "Get me a soda bottle."

In those days soda, like milk, came by delivery. There were twenty-four bottles in the crate we stored in the cupboard under the sink. To get her one, I would have to leave my hiding place. I'd have to walk around her legs—within my father's easy reach—and open the cupboard door.

"Robbie, God damn it!"

My body couldn't move, though I wanted to help. But then, it didn't matter. He climbed off my mother and stamped out of the kitchen. I could hear his shoes pounding through the other rooms. Every step moved the cups and plates another noisy fraction. The clock on the wall hung sideways now. A drinking glass lay cracked on its side. And my mother sat up, glaring at me. Her face throbbed, and strands of hair stuck to her tears.

She loathed me.

"Coward!" she screamed. "Didn't I tell you I needed help!"

After the waitress served our burgers, I picked mine up and put it down.

"You know, mom, I don't believe in blood."

"Your grandfather does."

"Well, I think it's bull shit. We can change who we are."

She looked up from her plate, smiling at me sadly.

"If I got away from here," I said, "I bet I could be someone else. Someone better."

"You sound like Tom," she said.

"Is that his name?"

She nodded. "He's from Chicago. He says we should go there and start over."

"Why don't you, mom? I think it would be great."

"And what would happen to you?"

"I'd start over, too. Only I might try someplace else." How I hoped that she would feel what I was feeling, that she would take up the idea with excitement. "What's to stop you?" I said.

"Money," she laughed.

"Yeah, well doesn't he have any?"

"Tom?" She shook her head. "When you work in a factory, you're lucky if you can pay your bills."

"Why not ask grandpa? He's got money."

"He wouldn't give me any to leave. He wants us all together. Forever," she said pushing her plate aside.

"I'll send you money," I promised. "One day you'll open an envelope, and there won't be a return address. But inside, it'll be packed with cash."

"And no return address. I am your mother."

"But don't you get it?" I asked her urgently. "I'll have a new life too."

"Robbie. Don't talk crazy like your father."

"Maybe I am crazy," I said. "But in another way."

Except in one detail, my plan worked perfectly. On Monday afternoon, I stood across the street from the high school, waiting for the final bell. When it rang, the hallways swelled as students headed toward the main entrance. And that was when I plunged inside. I swam against the tide until I reached the boy's restroom at the end of the corridor. It was empty, and I went into a booth and climbed on the toilet-seat lid to reach the window. With one long stretch, I opened the sash lock along the rail. Then I climbed down, quietly left the restroom and joined the exiting crowd.

Now there was nothing to do but wait for darkness.

So I rode a bus downtown. I sat through a film at the Fox Theater, one that I never really saw. I drank a soda at Kress's and wandered into the library to look for Maggie Hatch. She wasn't there, and I waited under a window, turning pages in a book. But my heart kept thumping in my ears, the steady beat of confidence, not fear. I had amazed myself. Who else would have the imagination, the gall and the guts to do what I had planned? Only me, I decided. Only me!

In those days, the town of Tucson closed its lights by ten p.m. That was the hour that I left the apartment and walked down Sixth Street toward Tucson High. Even that late, the air crackled from a heat that hovered over the city. It had to be ninety degrees as I climbed the ladder to the boy's room window, which opened easily. Then I lowered myself down the tile wall and set my shoes on the toilet seat below.

Outside the boy's room, I stood at the south end of the school's longest corridor. Deserted at night, it looked vast. The corridor ran the length of the building, past an acre of lockers, a glass-fronted trophy case, and the school's main office. The floors were marble, and an echo would roll down the ceiling when students flooded the hall. Even at night, somehow, I still could hear the noises of the day. I don't mean to make the place sound haunted, but it did feel eerie to be there alone.

When I reached the main office, a long glass panel allowed me to look inside. The lights had been left on, and that helped. It meant that I wouldn't have to flick a switch and risk the notice of someone passing by. But I still had to open the office door, a behemoth of solid oak. I took out my lock-picking tools, and on my first try, I popped the deadbolt lock. "Thank you Uncle Luca!" I said. Then I clapped my hands, and the noise caromed up the walls and dispersed across the ceiling.

This would be easy, I decided. I was Fate's new best friend.

The office was divided by a counter and a swinging gate, which led me to a file cabinet, four drawers high. At the center of each drawer, just above the handle, was a metal slot. And inside each slot, a card identified the contents. One of those cards read "1950—present," and that was where I found the transcripts of my graduating class. They had been filed alphabetically, so I went straight to the T's and pulled out the transcript of Alvin Thomas, my illustrious tutor. Naturally, it was perfect. The little prick had even gotten an A in his shop class.

Next I went to the secretary's desk, to search for blank transcript paper. The bottom drawer had been locked. But on this, my lucky night, I found the paper in the open middle drawer. I took out a sheet, lay it next to Alvin's transcript, and I made a copy of his classes. It seems amazing today, to think that transcripts back then were hand written, especially in a school the size of Tucson High. But they were indeed. Now I only had my grades to consider. I could make them as perfect as Alvin's. Or to appear more human, I could toss in a B here and there—say, one per semester in art, or music, or shop. I opted for the occasional B, and pretty soon I had devised a brilliant transcript of my own design.

My last step, I had to type in the information required at the top. So I rolled my transcript into an Underwood, and I entered my new name, Sheldon Roberts. My father I called Lyle; my mother, Abigail. There was space for their professions, so I made Lyle an insurance salesman and Abigail a housewife, because "Sheldon" would need scholarship money, and it wouldn't do to have parents who were loaded.

When I finished, I folded the transcript carefully, placed it into a school envelope, and hid it under my shirt. Then—still executing a perfect plan—I left the office just as I had found it and headed back to the boy's room. There I climbed outside onto the ladder and raised the window so it looked locked. I left the ladder on the ground, where I meant to pick it up next Friday night, when my uncles returned from Phoenix.

Rarely in my life have I felt more brilliant than I did that night, standing under a streetlamp at the end of the block, checking one last time the lock-picking tools in the back pocket of my jeans and the transcript under my belt. Then I whistled a lively tune and slowly strolled home.

The apartment was silent and dark, my mother asleep and her bedroom door closed. So I slid across the floor in socks, carrying my sneakers. But the silence felt unbearable, and alone in my room, I kept shouting inside my head, I did it!

I placed the envelope containing the transcript on top of my dresser where I could stare at it. I could not have been more proud if I had earned the grades instead of forging them. Then I walked around my room in circles, or went back to the dresser for another look. Not until three a.m. did I even try to sleep. And it was dawn before I lightly dozed.

That was when it came to me. In a light brief sleep, my new friend, my buddy Fate whispered something terrible into my ear. I shot up gasping. A siren went off inside my head. And I suddenly knew, long ahead of the words to say it, that I was screwed.

Now I knew what had been locked inside that bottom drawer. The register's seal. The seal of authenticity! Without it, my transcript meant nothing. And the break-in had been my final failing grade.
Chapter Thirteen

On summer mornings in Tucson, the sun wakes the city around 5 a.m. It shows up suddenly, like an intruder, barging into bedrooms through keyholes and shades and under doors. If I tried to break into the school again, I'd have to stay ahead of the sun, and that only left an hour of darkness for me to hide in.

The ladder was still lying on the ground behind the school. No one was supposed to notice it there, according to my plan. But now I wondered how anyone could miss it. The janitor would surely find the ladder. The secretary would report that the office door had been opened. And once the school authorities suspected a burglary, they would make damn sure that it never happened again.

There would never be another chance. So I dressed for speed, left my jeans heaped on the floor, and yanked on a pair of shorts. Then I jammed into tennis shoes and rushed outside. Without a shirt, without socks, I raced up the silent street in the predawn. In minutes, a milkman would putter up the avenue; a baker would back out of his driveway; a dog, a leash, then an owner would exit a front door. And I ran to stay ahead of them. Halfway up the block, a side cramp caused a halt, but I jogged or hobbled the rest of the way.

Back at the school, I retraced my steps. Down that long fortress wall, I headed for the empty lot in back. The ladder lay on the ground under the boy's room window, and I stood it up to fork the legs. But this time, the hinges stuck. To spite me, it seemed. And I kicked, pulled and swore, tearing the skin at the root of my thumb. Then I scurried up the steps, shedding blood on the rungs.

In the moments it took to reach the top, the sky brightened. It turned from smoky grey to azure blue, and as I stood on the highest rung in sunny daylight, my mind hovered to a place outside myself, bearing witness to what I already knew—that everything I was trying to do a second time would not work. That I was jinxed as surely as if a phantom hand were pulling down when I pushed up, tightening what I tried to loosen, sliding obstacles in front of my feet, and advancing the clock to the hour when the janitor would arrive to unlock the entrance and the playground gate.

One more time I crawled through the boy's room window and braced my arms across the sill. When my legs hung down the damp tile wall, my foot went probing for the seat. Only this time, it slid off the edge, and I dropped to the floor—one foot on mosaic tile, the other soaking in the bowl.

It would only get worse.

With a squishy sneaker, I creaked down the hallway, past the long flanks of student lockers. The office door was still open, of course; but I needed to re-group. So I lay on my back, staring up at a ceiling, where a dome of light hung at the end of a long white pole.

There was just one thing left to do—steal the god damn register's seal. Surely, I could do that. So I climbed on my knees, to confront the locked bottom drawer. I took a long, steady breath. Then I reached into my back pocket for the lock-picking tools which—I now realized—were still in my jeans on the floor of the apartment.

And that was when I knew that I was screwed.

For a long while, I stared down at the small, brass lock. The cylinder looked no larger than a dime. It might have cost half a dollar. Yet there was no way to open it, though the content of that drawer could change my life. I yanked on the handle, but the lock held firm. So then I tried to reason out why none of this really mattered. Why give a damn, when a month ago I had never heard of Stanford University. And here I was, on my knees, feeling washed up at seventeen?

Why even care?

But then I saw things in another light. Because Stanford—I slowly came to realize—wasn't just a school anymore. Stanford had made Gloria want me. It had inspired Maggie and roused old Dr. Tim. Why, I only had to say the magic words—"I'm going to Stanford"—and people looked back at someone who mattered. Stanford, it seemed to me, wasn't a school or a town. It was a Wiccan chant that worked a spell on anyone who thought that I was bound there. And if I gave up on Stanford now, I would be nothing again.

So I had to go. Why even question it?

By then, it was close to six o'clock. A car or two had motored by the school. Soon the traffic would be steady, and I couldn't leave unnoticed. Well, so what? I didn't give a rap! I dashed down the corridor with one purpose in mind. If I could just find a rock, one fistful of granite, I could pound that drawer open. Sure, I'd leave a mess on the floor. The cops would be called. The story would get into the papers. Well, so what? I stopped caring. I didn't even bother to go back inside the boy's room and climb discretely out the window. At the end of the corridor, I butted my shoulder against the rear exit.

The door flew open, and I plunged outside.

First, the sun struck me in the eye. Then came the clang of a bell—a fifteen pound burglar alarm. It had been bolted to an outside wall and wired by a relay to the exit door. The alarm rang so loud that my mother, back in our apartment, could have woken to it several blocks away. The cops downtown couldn't miss it, and they were stationed only minutes from the school.

Now I'd done it! Going back would be insane. I had to run, to flee. But just as my eyes recovered, and the shape of things re-emerged from behind the orange spot on my retina, there it lay, between my feet—the perfect rock, just as I had imagined it. I grabbed that rock. I held it in my fist and swore I'd give it one last try.

So I dashed inside the school, as sunlight poured in behind me through the open door. At the front office, I crashed through the swinging gate and slid on my knees up to the locked drawer. The rock filled my fist. And I pounded once, twice, three times against the cylinder.

Nothing happened. The rock didn't cause a dent. The drawer would not budge.

My aim had been to try just once, then turn and run. But I stayed. I sat up on my knees, pounding that lock. And I went on pounding it, as far-off sirens came piercing and close. Even when a cop car squealed up to the school, even then I didn't stop because I couldn't. I no longer cared. If the cops came rushing in, they'd have to pull me off the floor to keep me from beating on that cheap bit of brass, that half dollar's worth of hardware, which was all that kept me from another life.

A cop's voice echoed down the corridor, and I still didn't care. I yanked the handle in my misery and the drawer glided open . . . I can't explain it. The drawer opened as smoothly as if someone had just oiled the tracks! And that wasn't all. Inside the drawer, in plain sight, I found an ink pad and the registrar's seal. I stuffed both into my pocket, as the cop started shouting louder.

"Come on out," he yelled, "before someone gets hurt!"

From my knees, I peeked around the doorframe. He was standing in the hallway, blocking the front entrance. Another squad car might be parked in back. It seemed likely. But if I didn't leave by the rear, there was no other way out. And if I ran down the corridor, the cop would surely chase me. So now it came down to a foot race. I was fifty feet closer to my goal. I was younger. I was insane. I bolted around the doorway and sprinted down that corridor for what would be the last time.

"Stop!" the cop hollered. "Stop right there or I'll shoot. I swear it, kid. I'll shoot you."

"Shoot!" I yelled. "Shoot me!" I really think I meant it.

Then I ran blind to everything around me. I went so deep inside myself that instead of a high school corridor, what I saw in front of my eyes was a film clip of alternate futures. In one of them, the cop shot me in the back, and I stumbled over my feet and fell, face down, on the hard stone floor: A rebel death. But then, in another future, I could see myself getting caught outside, nabbed by another cop, so big that I bounced off his chest. He lifted me up and led me by the collar toward the squad car, through the crowd of reporters that was already there. "Was it worth it kid?" they kept asking, because in this future I was already famous!

But getting back to what happened . . .

When I burst outside, there was no cop waiting—only that blinding morning light, pounding the bleached crusty dirt. Across the vacant lot, I saw my chance. I ran for the nearest house, west of the school. And when I got there, I dove over a wire fence and landed in a small backyard. Then—like the street kid I once was back in Trenton—I jumped fences and crawled through brush. And yard by yard, I made my way home.

In a city paper focused on small-town news, the story came out under a banner headline: Burglar Targets Tucson High, it shouted! And in the article that followed, I read this report:

A burglary occurred early this morning at Tucson High School,

and the burglar knew exactly what he wanted.

"He came for the registrar's seal," said Patrolman Allen Fox of the Tucson Police Department. "Nothing else was touched, and he knew just where to find it."

The registrar's seal is used to authenticate student transcripts, and police have not determined whether the theft was a prank or part of a more serious crime.

"There have been cases around the country of bunko artists stealing a school seal and selling doctored transcripts," said Sgt. Jeffrey M. Ellis of the Fraud Detail. "But so far, this has never happened in the city of Tucson . . ."

If my uncles had read this story—and known that I was the thief—they wouldn't have thought any less of me. The only way to lose standing in their eyes was to get caught. But it would be different with Abigail. She wouldn't miss a story centered on the front page of her daily paper; and she already had doubts about the boy who had come to see her, asking about transcripts and wheedling a stiff drink.

There was only one way to play innocent, I figured, and that was to bring the story to her. "Look at this?" I'd say, pointing to the headline in wonder and surprise. "What a crazy coincidence!"

But when she faced me in the doorway, blocking my entrance, I knew better than to try it. "Is Alvin here?" I asked meekly.

"He's in his room," she said. Then she turned her back on me, and the two of us would never speak again.

Only three people in this world—Maggie Hatch, Dr. Tim and Abigail Thomas—had ever seen something good in me. And now I had lost one of them. A month ago, that would have roughed me up, but I wasn't soft anymore. And if it cost me Abigail's high regard to get what I wanted, that was a price that I was willing to pay—a loss that, in later years, I would learn to call "the cost of doing business." And so I went on seeking Alvin's help in math, though his mother would look into his room and, seeing me there, quietly close the door.

By the end of the week, I was back at the fourplex, living in my mother's apartment. Gloria hadn't heard from me since the morning of the interview, so I figured that she knew the score. Probably my things were packed and waiting, and I went to her house one afternoon, when I knew her daughter would be home from school and her mother would still be at work.

"Oh, it's you," said Paula, guarding the entrance.

I told her that I'd come for my stuff. But then—on an evil impulse—I tossed her a line. "Don't hate me," I said. "I didn't know she had a daughter my age." And that much was true, but then I had to add, "Especially someone like you."

"Wait here," she said, a little softer now. Then she left me on the doorstep and went to get my things. It only took the minute that she was gone to calculate how long I might need to flatter my way across the threshold. After that, if only to spite her mother, who could say what she might do?

When she came back, she held my valise at her side. She said, "I'll bet you wish you met me first."

"I was just thinking that, Paula."

"But you didn't know my mother had a daughter."

"Honestly, no."

She raised the valise, holding it in front of her. She smiled sweetly over the handle. And then she shoved it, with all her force, straight into my chest—so hard that I staggered off the welcome mat.

"Who did you think I was all these weeks?" she hissed. "Her Aunt Tilly?"

When the door slammed shut, I stood there stunned. What was wrong with me? Paula hated my guts, and I'd always known it. But I had to test myself, to prove how good I'd become at telling lies. I thought about that on my way up the street, swinging the valise at my side.

At my mother's place, I got out a cold beer. Then I went outside to be alone and drink it. Nights in August could get buggy, but I was too upset with myself to notice. I sat on the front step, casting a vote for getting quietly drunk, when the station wagon pulled into the gravel drive. It rolled up to Uncle Pete's apartment, and the first one out was my Uncle Eddie.

"Everywhere I look," he said. "What are you doing here, Robbie?"

"Oh, drinking," I said.

"Don't you know you're underage?"

"Report me." I tipped the bottle his way.

"I might do that," he said, "if you don't show up tonight."

Then Uncle Pete climbed out, and he reminded me of the occasion. Jimmy and Max were driving back from Atlanta. They could arrive any time now, he said. And tonight, we were having a family reunion.

"You promised me," said Uncle Eddie.

"Sure," I told him. "I'll be there." Then I got up and went inside.

It took the arrival of my lowlife cousins to confront me with a question I had been avoiding for days. That question being, Was I any better than the rest of my clan? In a week's time, Abigail had stopped talking to me. Paula considered me her mother's latest jerk, and Gloria probably thought of me as something she had picked up in the Boy's Department by mistake. I had fallen so far in their esteem that I wondered if they might be right.

All my life I'd kept telling myself that I was better than the thieves who had raised me. But what if that wasn't true? What if I really was one of them and powerless to change? What if Fate had put me exactly where I belonged? I remembered what Aunt Beti used to say when I was a kid, watching her turn over the cards in her Tarot deck:

"Destiny is set by God, for better or worse."

"But can't we change anything?" I always asked.

"Nothing!" she'd tell me. "Fate holds our destiny."

And now I was trying to challenge all that, to take the deck away from Fate and deal my own hand.

There was nothing traditional about our family parties, the music least of all. We owned no records of gypsy violins, or singers of Rumanian folk songs. My grandfather was a fan of Italian opera, and he collected the solo albums of Caruso. My uncles listened to Frank Sinatra, and their wives liked Tony Bennett, all but Aunt Louisa who "adored" Perry Como. This was their listening taste while Max and Jimmy were away. But now they were back. And they had brought home stacks of 45s, the new hit songs of Bill Haley and the Comets, of Elvis and Chuck Berry. Jimmy took on the role of deejay that night, and he played "Maybelline," "Rock Around the Clock," and "That's All Right."

"This place is so square," Jimmy sighed—"square" being the very latest slang and new to me. "It's embarrassing to be back in Tucson," he said.

"You hear that?" bellowed Uncle Lucca. "He's embarrassed by us. I'll have you know, rock n' roll was invented in Romania. It grew up in Poland, and I heard it played in Naples before I came to this backwater country." Then he raised his shot glass, which was filled with vodka—filled so high that the liquor somehow bulged above the brim—and he pirouetted around the room, never spilling a drop.

"I want to rock," Lucca declared, and he swiveled his hips, never tipping his glass. How the aunts all cackled then. But I drew back against the wall, as I always did, as Ricky would have done. I thought of her a lot that night.

The hen-clucks of my aunts, the bellow of my uncles, the blare of rock n' roll, the sudden crack of broken glass, all this went on until long after midnight . . . And for me it is still going on, whenever I look back on my former life. There had been other parties, other reunions over the years, but that party on that night would be the last one that I would ever attend. And knowing this makes every moment of that long, drunken bash seem filled with significance. There I was, eating the last of Aunt Beti's pirogues that I would ever eat. And there was Uncle Frank, getting plastered for the last time in front of us all; and Aunt Louisa begging him, for the last time, to stop; and Uncle Lucca flicking his cigarette butt over his shoulder, then catching it, for the very last time, on the sole of his shoe.

And I still remember sitting next to my Uncle Pete and hearing him confide secrets he had kept for twenty years. "See that," he said, as my Aunt Louisa battled with my drunken Uncle Frank. She snatched away his glass of scotch. And Frank rose off his chair and followed the glass with his nose, as it sailed just ahead of him in the grip of Louisa's fist.

"Don't blame him," said Pete. "You were there."

He meant the day that Uncle Frank lost his ear. "He's never been the same," I said.

"Poor Frank, he's got those kids to deal with."

"You mean Max?"

"Ricky, too," said Pete. "At least Louisa picked a looker when she had that one. But Max," he cracked. "I hear she banged the iceman."

"So Ricky and Max—"

"What did you think?" he said. "Do they look like Frank? Or each other?"

"Why did he marry her?" I said.

"Oh, that," said Uncle Pete. Then he grabbed my shoulder roughly and pulled me close: "The old man. He made promises. He made it sound, you know. 'Marry this girl and I'll protect you for life.' What do you think is going on?" said Uncle Pete, shoving me away. "How come Frank doesn't have to work? He stays home and drinks himself to death. And the old man keeps paying the rent."

"Uncle Pete," I asked him earnestly. "Do you know where Ricky is?"

"Ricky?" He was drunker than I had realized, and he looked at me closely, as if he suddenly had no idea who was asking.

"Where's Ricky?" I said a little louder now.

"Wait a sec—" He grabbed my knee for leverage, and then he raised himself until he stood above me.

"Where is she?" I asked looking up at his wandering eyes.

"She's free," he told me, whatever that meant. Then he stumbled off to pee.

I remember everything about that night, but it was my Aunt Louisa who made the most lasting impression. Coming out of the kitchen, where she had spilled her husband's drink into the sink, she was startled by the music. Finally, Jimmy had stopped hogging the phonograph, and someone had put on her very favorite song, the truly awful Perry Como tune, "Papa Loves Mambo."

"Ah," she cooed. "Perry!" Then she mamboed solo across the floor, snaking her arms, though awkwardly, and throwing out a buttock, first the left, then the right. Foolishly, she started for the old man. He had been sitting at his card table when she approached, dancing by herself in front of him. "Papa," she grinned, coaxing him with her short, fat arms to rise. "Mambo with me." Then she took his hand and tried to pull him from his seat.

She was the least favorite daughter of a hard old man, who didn't like women in general; and his left cheek quivered with contempt. "Leave me alone!" he roared in a voice louder than even Uncle Lucca's.

She wasn't daunted. But then, nothing had ever had much effect on my Aunt Louisa—not the ear missing from her husband's crippled face nor his drunken disregard, not the pregnancy and disappearance of her only daughter, not even Max's stint in jail. None of these soul-shakers, these terrible trials had ever challenged in any way the self-regard of this stupid peasant, this turnip head. Straight from the father who loathed her, she sashayed across the living room, her plump chin high in the air, as she mamboed proudly toward her darling son.

"Maxie," she squealed, "dance with me," and she slid her arms around his waist.

All night Max had kept out of sight. There was no place to hide in that small, crowded apartment, so he must have gone outside alone to brood. This Max was new to me, for I still thought of him as the moon-faced boy he used to be, grinning at me while his mother fondled him outrageously. She would kiss and pet and stroke her son, staring at me over his head, pop-eyed and pursing her lips. "Suffer!" her eyes would say. "You'll never get the love I give my Max." And all the while this went on, there he would sit, her chubby son, shrugging helplessly at me because he couldn't help it: He was just one lovable kid.

But that was Max as I remembered him. Tonight he hardly resembled himself. When she slid her arms around his waist, he shoved so hard that she went backwards over the sofa's arm, onto the cushion seat.

"Maxie?" she called, but he had already stomped out the door.

Then my Cousin Jimmy came up to me for the first time that night. "Let's go," he said. "It's getting strange in here."

Outside, Max sat on the stoop, hanging his head until he heard our voices.

"How you doing, Bear?" Jimmy said taking a seat beside him. "Bear," I figured, was a nickname Max had picked up in Atlanta. He was twenty now, and Jimmy had just turned twenty-one, so they were grown men without the excuse any longer of being "kids who would grow out of it."

Jimmy had taken to the South, where his style had gone over well. Down South, he said, all the guys wore Pompadours. The next day he would teach me how he combed it, and the process went this way: After rubbing Vaseline into his scalp, he'd square up to a mirror, bend back from the waist and swivel his hips. Then he'd comb his greasy hair, but not flat against the skull, like a Fifties father. He'd comb it upward and high. The last step was to twirl a lock tightly, then pull out the comb so that a long black curl spiraled down his forehead.

Jimmy hadn't turned out as handsome as we had all expected. His features were still finely shaped, but they expressed a weak character, and that somehow spoiled his looks. "So tell us, Robbie"—he glanced slyly at Max—"still trying to get laid?"

"Yeah," I said, "still waiting for my wedding night."

"Little Robbie," he laughed. Then he tousled my hair. "You got to travel down South," he advised me. "Tell him, Bear. Tell him about southern women." But Max didn't want to talk, so Jimmy answered for him. "You wouldn't believe it," Jimmy said. "Every girl's a Scarlett or a Tara. And the way they're built down there. Shee-it! Tell him, Max."

Max never said a word, and I didn't help by showing any interest. Jimmy must have wondered if we were worth the effort, as he took the pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and smacked it on his palm. Then he put one in his mouth and passed the pack to me.

"The girls in this town," he said, flicking his match at the dirt. "They're in training bras," he laughed. "In Atlanta, they got women wearing cone bras. They got boobs there like rocket ships, ready to launch. What'd you say to that, Max?"

But Max kept silent and turned away. I thought that Jimmy would give it up, but he tried one last time. "Know what?" he said loudly. "Why don't we have a real reunion? The three of us," he said. "The Three Musketeers." Then he flung one arm over my shoulders, and his other around Max's waist. "Let's go down to Nogales. What do you say? Just like old times."

"What old times?" I said. "You never let me go."

"Then it's time," said Jimmy, though he didn't give a rap about me. And I knew it and he knew it. This was all for Max, and I wondered what had happened to Aunt Louisa's coddled son. "How about it?" Jimmy said poking Max in the ribs. "Should we take little Robbie to Canal Street?"

"What are you asking me for?" Max said. Then he got up slowly, profiled by the moon; and I could finally see what a mess that life had made of him. The old Max had been a strong, husky boy with a pudgy good nature, whereas this Max had a hard nature but a pudgy frame. He walked off, never looking back at us, and crunched down the gravel on his way to the deserted street.

"What happened to him?" I said.

"What do you mean?" said Jimmy, as if it were possible not to notice. Then he said, "Jail happened," and he stared at me and quit pretending that we were buddies. When I asked him what that meant, he sneered. "What do you think?" he said. "What happens to fat boys in jail?" Then he got up and started down the moonlit walk, after his only friend.
Chapter Fourteen

The day after my reunion with Jimmy and Max, I mailed the transcipt off to Stanford. Then I strolled outside the post office into the August sun, when it hit me that I had done it, actually done it. I had connived my way into another life. It had not been easy. But after a month of forgery, perjury, burglary (even sodomy, if I add Gloria to my rap sheet), I had finished the job. And there I stood, in dazzling sunlight, finally—belatedly—feeling the import of my actions. This meant the end of Robbie, a turning of my back on my name, my family and our way of life. Hell, I was seventeen! Not just anyone could hold a match to the past and make himself into someone new.

Not just anyone, but I could.

All my shame in being Robbie Costa—the bastard, the gypsy-boy and high school dropout—had been stalking me for years. Now I could ditch my past and start again as Sheldon Roberts, All-American boy, if that's who I wanted him to be—though I was honest enough to grant that only a Robbie Costa—bastard, gypsy-boy, and no-account—could have pulled off young Sheldon's fabrication.

The Admission Committee didn't know this, but they were ruling on a human life. If they accepted me, Robbie was done for. If they rejected me, Sheldon was as good as dead. And since they might take weeks to decide, I kept too busy to brood about their terrible choice. Mornings I spent at the library, afternoons studying with Alvin, and nights in my room reading in bed. My cousins weren't around much, but some days when I got back at four, they'd be idling outside, drinking beer. They always asked me to join them, and Max seemed friendlier now, and willing to talk. But the more I saw of those two, and thought about the way we lived—about the lies and scams that supported us in our squalor—the more certain I was about leaving town.

All I thought about was leaving, and the chance to start over as somebody new. But what kind of man would he be? That used to nag at me at night, staring at the ceiling with one of Maggie's books split across my chest . . . In a city where no one knew me, I could be anyone—anyone I had the talent to create. So I imagined him as having class like Abigail, Maggie's heart of gold, and a title like Dr. Tim. He was a blur to me, this man that I was going to be, but one thing I knew for sure. He would be great.

Toward the middle of August, the letter arrived from Stanford. And I didn't have to be half-gypsy to intuit, from the heft of the envelope, that the miracle had come to pass: "Congratulations," I read and my heart leapt in jubilation. There it was, printed on the paper in my hand. I had been accepted into the freshman class at Stanford University in the fall of 1955.

Only think of it. Last May, I had been bouncing around town in Lyle Childers's pickup, a high school dropout besmeared with printer's ink. Now, though luck and guile, the grace of God and the contrivance of the devil, "Shelton Roberts" (aka Robbie Costa) had joined the western branch of the Ivy League. This was news that had to be shared, either that or shouted at the sky. So I plunged outside, into the street, ran past the bus stop and reached the downtown library breathless.

"Maggie, look at his!"

I waved the letter and ran straight to her. When she took it from me, her hands were shaking like mine.

"Can I keep it?" she said. "I want to show this to Dr. Tim."

"I'd like to do that myself," I said, but she had something else in mind. She wanted to talk to him about me.

"You know," she said, "he doesn't have anyone—" and her thought completed itself in my head. "I really think he wants to help you, Robbie."

"Help me?" My voice shot up, though I struggled to look surprised. "He's already done so much."

"I know that, dear. But he's all alone. If he does offer, promise you won't refuse."

No one but Maggie Hatch had ever loved me for my innocence, my integrity (good Lord!). And for her dear soul, I staged a battle and pretended to overcome my pride. "Well, all right," I told her finally. "If he offers, and if you really think it's the right thing to do."

"Oh, I do," she said. "I really do."

Fate had a place of honor in my family. It was the Patriarch even my grandfather deferred to. And for weeks, Fate had been fighting me, attacking my plans. But the Stanford letter and my meeting with Maggie seemed to change all that. Suddenly, it seemed, the struggle had passed. The cards had turned my way, just as I had seen them turn as a child so many times before. How often had I watched my Aunt Beti reading Tarot cards for her sisters? And how many times had I watched those women, pop-eyed as the cards told a dire tale?

"It all comes down to this," my aunt would announce, lightly touching the deck. Then she'd look at each of us, in awe of what she was about to do. "Are you ready?" she'd say, fingering the topmost card. Still something held her back, the sense we all shared that our very souls were at stake. Then, slowly, she would raise the card, so that only she could see its face, withholding any clue . . . until the moment she declared, "A reversal of fortune!"

And suddenly, all the cards that had come before it would transform themselves into blessings in disguise.

It had taken seventeen years, but now I was having a reversal of fortune. And it was as if Fate itself were making amends . . .

"I don't know quite how to say this," Fate seemed to say, "but a terrible mistake has been made. You have no idea how rare this is. Why you're the first such case in five hundred years."

"What are you telling me?" I ask, but only to egg on a full confession.

"Well, the truth is," says Fate. "I sent you to the wrong womb, the wrong family. In short, the wrong life. And I'm so terribly sorry. But I'm doing everything I can to make this right."

"Then I was really meant—"

"Yes, yes. All that and more."

"But why did you put me through so much? The break-in at the school, and that cop. He could have shot me!"

"Indeed," Fate concurs. "But who do you think kept him from raising the gun?"

Getting into Stanford had been my life's first goal, the one that put an end to my listless youth. And what I felt, reading my letter of acceptance, was a joy like none other. It didn't last. Because now I saw the problem that had been lurking all along in the shadow of my ambition: True, I'd been accepted, but how the hell could I pay for a Stanford education? I couldn't borrow the money from a bank, not without a parent who would sign for the loan. And even if Stanford were to waive my tuition, where was the part-time job that could cover room and board, text books, and the clothes that I would need when the holes started wearing through?

After paying for a bus ticket, I would arrive in Stanford broke. And then what? Sleep hobo-style in the city park; splash my face, come morning, in a men's room sink; then rush off to school, ashamed that my classmates could smell me?

The matter of money had been with me all along, a pressure on my heart every time I thought ahead. But if Maggie were right, what a boon! What a godsend from a friendly, loving Fate if Dr. Tim really wanted to foot the bill. Already I believed it was true—it had to be true—and I spent the rest of the day recalculating my expectations, working out the difference between showing up on campus with one valise and empty pockets, and arriving there followed by my luggage, the scion of a wealthy alumnus.

By three o'clock I was swelling with gratitude for a gift I had yet to receive. Maggie must have been waiting. She stood behind the check-out desk waving when she saw me, but I was too excited to stop and chat. I kept looking for my benefactor. He wasn't hard to find. He was sitting in his customary chair, under a bank of sunny windows, reading the afternoon paper.

I decided to be bold. I walked straight to him with an uncontrollable grin. And when he looked up, he flushed from the pleasure of seeing me. Dr. Tim had a hawk's nose, but the rest of his face was twinkling and pink. "So there he is. There's that young rascal," he shouted in his deafness.

Maggie was entering my periphery as he started getting up.

"Just a second," he mumbled, and he dug into his trouser pocket. "I've been carrying this around for weeks." Then more gruffly: "Here," he said. "Take it. I'm tired of looking at it," though his face was shiny with anticipation.

My hands had started to shake. By then, my hopes had hardened, and I simply could not keep them still. What I counted on finding in that envelope was a check, but only the first of the monthly checks that would follow me through school . . . What slid out instead was a fifty dollar bill. The old geezer had stiffed me. I could have shoved his money down his throat.

And yet, this man believed in me. He'd used his influence to make a worthless dropout into a Stanford freshman. I owed him everything, though I steamed with resentment of his lousy fifty. And I was staring down at it, glaring at it when Maggie pulled sharply on my sleeve. She had a lot to tell me, but with Dr. Tim looking on, she had to say it with her eyes. Wide and wet, they apologized for misleading me. She was so very sorry, but if only I could understand what this summer had meant to her and Dr. Tim. Because they cared about me; they believed in my gratitude and good nature. Don't spoil it, her eyes implored. Don't make him feel cheap.

In short, be a gentleman, not a rat. It was the choice that I would have to keep on making for the rest of my life. And the way that I have made that choice is the reason I will be remembered by some as "a fine, good fellow" and by others as "one ruthless son of a bitch."

"Dr. Tim," I said at last. "This is so kind of you."

"Hey?" the old boy hollered. But then he understood me by the way that Maggie smiled. "Use it when you take out a gal," he yelled. "Think of me and order a banana split. Ha!"

A day that had started out giddy with hope had ended desperately. I needed money! That was the truth of it. My net worth had fallen to forty bucks, ninety with the doctor's fifty added in. In short, I was close to broke. And now I would have to compromise my plan. I'd have to confide in my grandfather, tell him my predicament, and ask for a loan. But only a loan, I promised myself as I walked up the gravel drive. Max and Jimmy were sitting on the front step, though this once, they weren't drinking.

"Hey, asshole," Jimmy called.

"Yeah, asshole," echoed Max.

"Don't forget about tonight," said Jimmy. But it was plain I didn't know what he meant. "Noggie," he explained.

"You're going to Nogales," Max said.

Then Jimmy pulled out his cigarettes. "To Canal Street, faggot. We're going to get you laid."

"So don't run away," Max said.

"Is grandpa home?"

"How should I know?" said Jimmy. "He's nothing to me."

"Max?" I asked and he nodded.

So I walked to the end apartment and knocked, and when no one answered, I went inside. My Uncle Lucca's place was identical to the others, still furnished with the hand-me-downs that we had purchased on our arrival, seven years ago. It was furniture of the indestructible kind, tables with metal legs and Formica tops, chairs bandaged with industrial tape—furniture that had served so many owners before us that we lived like souls in the limbo of a cheap motel.

And yet, compared with the other three apartments, Uncle Luca's had character. At least the walls here were warmed by his photographs—one of young Lucca in a soldier's uniform, probably Russian; another of Lucca on his wedding day; and a third of my uncle, on the Jersey side of the harbor, pointing at the New York skyline. In all these pictures, from youth to middle age, he was always himself, ironic, amused, and as cocky as a phallic god. He must have been born that way, with one eyebrow arched, winking at the world. And while I didn't expect to miss Lucca after I had gone, he was the one uncle that I would always think of with a smile.

He wasn't at home, though, and Aunt Sadie was still at work. So I walked through the long apartment to my grandfather's room in back. The door was shut, and I tried the knob. It had been locked, which seemed strange—an old man locking his bedroom door at four in the afternoon. I jiggled the handle to make sure, and that's when I heard his sturdy voice.

"Who's there?" he shouted with so much command that I almost choose to retreat.

"It's Robbie," I said. "But I can come back."

Then silence. And finally, he unlocked the door and told me to come in.

He had set up his card table next to the bed. Sometimes he used it to rest an elbow on; other times as a place to set a shot of vodka, but today the table was part of the reason he had turned the dead-bolt. I didn't know where to put my eyes, I was so filled with a childhood sense of violation.

"Look," he told me. "Look. It's about time you showed an interest."

There on the table, he had placed a cigar box with an open lid. And in front of the box, he had piled columns of cash. The hundred-dollar bills rose highest; and next to them, the fifties; then a shorter stack of twenties. It was the family stash, which, from the time that we were kids, my cousins and I had been forbidden to see.

"Shouldn't that be in the bank?" I said.

"Use your head," he told me. "How many times have we left town when the banks were closed?" That was true enough, and I sat down beside him. "You can help me count it," he said. "One day this will be your job."

For a moment, I wasn't sure that I had heard him right.

"I'm not going to live forever," he said. "But Uncle Lucca—"

"Lucca is a lazy bastard. And Lucca is fifty-three. How old are you, Robbie?"

"Seventeen," I said.

"When Lucca says 'Enough,' you'll be ready."

I was his grandson, and we had been close for so long that I knew he was honoring me. My grandfather was a King of the Gypsies—a king from the Old World, from Romania—which gave him special standing in our scurvy circles.

"But why me?" I said. "I know about Jimmy and Max, but you could ask around." There were families all over the country, and every one of them had men who were smart and ambitious, and far more ruthless than I was.

"I picked you," he said, "when you were ten years old. Remember what I used to say?"

"Honor your grandpa"—I smiled—"and never rat on him."

"You're the smartest, Robbie. Already you have a better head than Lucca, but you're still soft." He pounded his heart. "I should have sent you to jail instead of Max. Then you'd have come out like me." His left cheek quivered but he wasn't angry. "Come here." He pulled me to him and spoke into my ear. "You're the boy I used to be," he said.

"Grandpa—"

But then he shoved me away.

"Go!" he roared, so I got up and obeyed him.

Instead of leaving by the front door, I wandered out back through the adjoining yards. There was no longer any way to tell him I was leaving, or ask him for a loan. My grandfather's love was cold and hard, but in whatever way he still could love, my grandfather loved me. And he wanted me right here beside him.

My mother wasn't home, but she had left the screen unlocked, so I let myself in. Then I walked outside on the front porch. Jimmy and Max had gone, and I sat down alone in twilight, the letter from Stanford in one pocket, the fifty dollar bill in the other. I was trying to make sense of the day when, two apartments down, the front door slammed and my Cousin Jimmy strutted over.

He had dressed in his best western duds, a pearl-buttoned shirt, pointy boots and stiff new jeans, with a razor-edged crease. His Pompadour looked wet from grease, and a tight new curl coiled down his forehead.

"You're going to Nogales," he told me, shifting his hips with swagger.

"Fuck you," I said.

"Hey, think about it, Robbie. First time in Noggie. First trip to Canal Street."

"I don't want to drink with you, Jimmy. And I don't want a whore."

"Then do it for Max." He sat on the step beside me. "I want to get him laid," he explained, "so he can feel like a man."

"Saint Jimmy," I said and that wore out his good will.

He shot up and glared down at me. "I know you," he sneered. "I got onto you that night at the dude ranch. You were going to send me up."

"Your girlfriend saved you," I said. "Remember how you thanked her?"

"Don't give me that. You're the one who knocked up Ricky—"

And then—before I knew it—he was lying on the ground, and I was standing over him. I had popped his mouth, and he sprawled in the gravel at my feet.

"You're a son of a bitch," he stared up at me. "You're just like the old man."

"My grandfather," I corrected him.

If Jimmy had jumped up, I would have been scared of my older cousin, of his man-strength. But as he lay there, wiping a swollen lip, I felt the urge to kick his head off.

"Do this one thing," he said. "Max never hurt you."

"Jesus." I shook my head and sat back down. "You really love Max. Your girlfriend Rosa was worth three of that fat ass."

"Yeah," said Jimmy, "well he's my fat ass. And I want to get him laid."

I had to laugh. What was the use? He'd been a wicked kid and he had only gotten worse, but I had known Jimmy my whole life, and for that reason alone I felt some affection.

"What day is it?" I said.

"How the fuck should I know? Am I bleeding?"

I shook my head. "Go in the house and find out what day it is."

He did what I told him. And when he came out, he said that it was August 14. Forty-eight hours from the day that I had planned to leave for Stanford, with money or without.

"All right," I told him. "But I won't get drunk. And I won't screw a whore."

"Fuck do I care," he said. "Let's make Max a man again."

In the end, Jimmy got his way, and I went with him and Max to Nogales. I can't say why. I didn't want to go. But if I had stayed in Tucson, I'd have spent the hours brooding about money. So maybe I went along to change the subject in my head. Or perhaps I did it as a gift to Robbie—one last fling in a border town before I set off for Stanford and abandoned Robbie's name.

This would be my last night out as Robbie Costa, something that I thought about as I dressed in Robbie's favorite clothes. Then I added the rest of my stash (two twenty dollar bills) to the fifty in my wallet, in case my cousins got wild and I had to travel back alone. The wallet went into one back pocket; my switchblade I slid in the other. That knife: It had been a friend to me for seven years, but before leaving town, I meant to return it to my Uncle Eddie and thank him for the loan.

They were waiting for me at the curb in Jimmy's red convertible; and Jimmy did not like to wait. He had shifted the car into gear, but he kept his foot on the brake, so that each time he gunned the engine, the front end lurched but the wheels locked: It made the tiger-faced grill looked fighting mad.

"You took long enough," he said as I was climbing in back. Then he spun out from the curb, and I fell flat across the rear seat. By the time I had righted myself, he was doing fifty on dark city streets.

"Slow down," I shouted but that goaded him to speed up. And then I knew my place in Jimmy's plan. He meant to scare me and embolden Max, who didn't seem to care about speed. When we reached the Nogales Highway, Jimmy took the car up to eighty. Then he and Max laughed wildly; and they were shouting at me, but the top was down, and the wind washed away their voices.

It had been stupid to come. What was I thinking? Jimmy was reckless; Max was half crazy. But I had known all that in Tucson, and something had caused me to ignore it. Fate—my fate—could not be trusted, and a car wreck with my idiot cousins would be the perfect climax to my plan. But since I couldn't stop them, or slow Jimmy down, I lay across the rear seat and stared at the sky. Twenty miles out of town, it forecast a remarkable night.

What I saw overhead were really two skies, one in the north over Tucson; the other, in the south, where we were headed—two skies as unalike as if they had been painted by different hands. The northern sky was a black pool, with so few stars I could have counted them. But the moon over Mexico was murky with the kind of haze that hovers around stadium lights. It was the largest moon that I have ever seen; and it seemed to track our car, pivoting like a surveillance camera, staring down at us with mechanical sight.

Jimmy tore through the desert so fast, in less than an hour the car decelerated down a long, steep hill. In the valley below I saw the fence dividing these two border towns. It looked filmy back then, the kind that might surround a softball field. Yet it divided two countries. I ought to say "two worlds." Both cities were encrusted on granite hills. But on the Arizona side, each house had a porch with steps, leading to a paved street and sidewalk. In Mexico, the houses had been built just as high, but without the steps or sidewalk, so that a man walking out his front door had to climb downhill, over rocks and clay, much like a goat.

"Noggie," Jimmy announced. "Don't you love it?"

He parked near the border crossing, close to the entry gate. Jimmy knew his way around. And from hearsay, so did I. This was the place he and Max used to talk about until their stories made me crazy with envy. It was the town where the kids in my high school went to buy their first beer. And to make that beer matter, they had to buy it at The Cave.

"Let's eat there," Max said.

"Who came to eat?" said Jimmy.

But Max was always hungry, and this trip was really Jimmy's gift to Max.

"All right," Jimmy said. "First dinner. Then we get laid."

Once through the entry gate, we walked past the garita. It was a slump-block booth, where a paunchy guard smiled genially. From there, we came upon taxis—a pack of them that lie in wait. They were parked in front of glass-fronted shops, every one a pharmacia or dentista competing for the same clientele.

The drivers gathered around us, and Jimmy took charge.

"Where can I take you?" said one.

"Hey, hombres," said another. "Canal Street?"

Jimmy smirked. He told them "later," but he enjoyed the attention, and he lit a cigarette, tossed the pack to a driver, and let them pass it around.

Behind the cabs, a crowd was still flocking toward Obregon. It was the town's main street, the only one that a tourist might know by name. Everything they came looking for, people found on Obregon, every kind of gift shop, liquor store, restaurant and bar, high and low. Jewelry, pottery, furniture and Indian masks, flowers and Montecristo cigars, all were sold on Obregon. And anything you couldn't find there, you only had to ask for it, and the owner's cousin would get you one.

The Cave was no where near the action. To get there, Jimmy led us away from the crowds, into a dark empty space. We had to march across a railroad track toward a row of shoddy stalls. But just around the corner, we entered a well-lighted cobblestone street. There was a tavern on my left, a noisy, friendly joint, where the door was propped open by a milk crate. A mariachis band played for tourists, but this was a band like none other. Next to the trumpeters and violinist, dressed in sombreros and trajes de charro, stood a line of street kids. And they were blowing trombones, fingering an accordion, even beating a drum—instruments they must have borrowed from their high school band.

"Not there," said Jimmy, and he pulled me from the doorway. He said, "This way, chump," and he led us through an entrance farther up the street. Inside, we walked down a granite shaft, which opened into a chamber. It had naked, jagged walls, though they'd been painted many times; and the floors had been lined with hardwood. A string of light bulbs hung from the ceiling-stone, and there was a bandstand at the far end.

So this was it, the legendary La Caberno—the jailhouse of Geronimo, a hide-out of Poncho Villa. And now a restaurant, where the tablecloths were white; the napkins, linen; and the waiters bowed from the waist. The room was abuzz with tourists . . . But I want to pause here, to make a point about The Cave.

It had gone through several upgrades in its century of notoriety—from jailhouse-dungeon to bandits' hideaway. And by the Fifties, it had even earned four stars from Duncan Hines. But The Cave was a hole-in-a-hillside and a faker of class. Sure, the waiters put on dignified airs, solemnly bowed and tidied the tables, but their uniforms were gravy-stained, and all they knew about food they'd derived from memorizing the menu.

When it came time to order, Jimmy surprised me. He said that he would pick up the tab. "I took out a loan," he explained, "from my old man's wallet. But on one condition," he said. "I get to order the drinks." Then he asked for three tequilas, salt and lime.

"I'll have a Coke," I broke in.

"Are you kidding me? You're at The Cave, Robbie. You're in fucking Mexico. Tres tequila," he told the waiter again.

"And a Coke," I insisted.

"Una Coca-Cola," the man nodded. Then he bowed and walked away.

But Jimmy wouldn't let it rest. "What's with you, Robbie? Pancho Villa sat at this table, throwing down shots. Geronimo sat in your seat. This is something you can tell your kids."

"That's right," Max grunted. "Do it for the kids."

"And then you'll shut up?" I said.

After all, what harm could one drink do?

But when the waiter returned, the shot glasses on his tray were taller than any I had ever seen. They were blown-glass, tinted blue, and so tall and angled that the glassblower himself must have been drunk when he made them.

Scotch, I knew. I had been drinking scotch with Ricky from the age of fourteen. But I had never tried tequila, and I'd never seen the ritual that Max performed of swigging his liquor, licking the salt on the back of his hand, and biting into a wedge of lime. These days a stunt like that couldn't impress a sorority girl. But it was all new to me on that August night in 1955. So I did like Max, and the liquor plunged to the pit of an empty belly.

When our waiter came back, his carrying arm stood as stiff as an umbrella shaft. He set down his overburdened tray on the leather straps, which hung between a pair of scissor legs. The waiter had looked sturdy holding the tray, but he was a small, old man with a furrowed face. His back was starched with pride, and he bowed like a board. But he must have been keeping up his dignity for his own sake—not ours—because he had to know that Jimmy—the Big Shot who was footing the bill, the kid that he was serving like the Prince of Wales—was a brash, young punk.

I didn't eat much that night, but Max did, from all our plates. And he drank dark beer with his tequila. The liquor made him lively at last. And Jimmy had no trouble coaxing Max to brag about the whores they used to know by name.

Meanwhile another round arrived. "A toast," said Jimmy, and he and Max raised their glasses.

"Oh no," I said. "I'm through."

"To Cousin Robbie," Jimmy announced. "After this, I swear, you won't get another."

So I clicked glasses with my cousins, and I drank a second shot. Then I bit into a slice of lime when I suddenly realized that I'd forgotten the salt.

"Never mind," Jimmy said, helping me to my feet.

He threw some cash on the table. Then he led me outside with an arm around my waist. I wasn't quite drunk. At least I didn't think so. But those two shots had probably equaled four jiggers in the States. My mind still seemed clear, but now I felt a lag between my body and what I wanted it to do. So when I thought about taking the next step, a moment elapsed before my legs complied.

"I only had two," I tried explaining, but Jimmy said not to think about it.

Then everything started to happen in reverse, much like the slow comic rewind of a film. We strolled back up the cobbled street, past the tavern with the blaring mariachis. From there, we crossed the railroad tracks, though this time I had to set each foot deliberately between the wooden ties. When we came to the edge of the shopping district, Jimmy led us through the back of a pottery stall and outside onto Obregon. I remember, in my periphery, the streaming hues of the lighted shops, and the bright, garish colors of pots and masks, jewelry and leatherwork . . . until somehow we arrived again at the place where we had started, surrounded by taxis.

The drivers went straight for Jimmy, and they picked up from where they'd left off.

"So," one said. "Now you're ready."

"I've been waiting," said another.

"This way, sir," said the third, the driver that Jimmy chose.

Jimmy shoved me in back alone. Max sat in front, beside the driver, and Jimmy took the window seat. "Canal Street," he ordered, and we pulled away from the curb. But the road ahead was clogged with cars, and the tourists who milled between them. It was a busy night on Obregon, slow moving, humid and warm. Then a few blocks from the border, the tourist district petered out; and Obregon became the main street of a quiet Mexican town. Instead of neon, the stores were fronted by unlit signs. Instead of a milling crowd, a few kids chatted on a corner, and a lonely man, leaning on a car, confided in his cigarette.

From the back seat, I could look through the windshield at the driver's view of the road. Soon he left Obregon. He turned a corner, and we plunged—that suddenly—into the Third World. The pavement stopped, and we bumped along a hard dirt track, guided by bouncing headlights. Without streetlamps to guide us, all I made out were the few concrete houses, connected by a peeling wall. The houses had windows but no glass, and they were black inside. The only life I could find was a half-starved coyote, as it leapt over the wall. Chasing what? A hen, I imagined, or a child or a dog.

"We're lost," I said. "Let's head back."

"What are you talking about?" Jimmy said.

"I've got a bad feeling—"

"Grow up, Robbie"—Jimmy pointed ahead—"we're already there."

It was true. In another fifty yards, we drove back onto blacktop. Streetlamps re-appeared, and the brothels and bars looked bright with neon signs and lighted windows. "Canal Street," our driver announced tiredly, as he pulled up to a broken curb. It wasn't a very long street, just a few short lively blocks, surrounded by darkness and empty space. Jimmy climbed out first, then Max. They pulled me along with them several steps, but I held back and stood my ground.

"Go on," I told them. "I'll wait here."

"Not again," said Jimmy but this time he knew that I meant it. "Fuck do I care," he said, and he led Max toward the street's largest brothel.

From where I stood, I could see my cousins in action. Jimmy had no class, but he got by pretty far on gall. At the screen door, he flung it open. Then he announced himself and Max, as if they were famous—as if the women had been waiting long years for their return. In a sense, it worked. One squealed; the others giggled and surrounded them; and through the flimsy screen, I could see my cousins crushed in a great pink pillow of flesh.

Then I walked back to our taxi.

The driver had decided to wait, so I asked where I could get some coffee. He looked up at me surprised, but then he nodded toward a bar across the street. "You can try," he shrugged.

The bar was dark inside, except behind the counter. There the mirror, in August, was still circled with Christmas lights; and liquor bottles stood on the tiers of a glowing display. But the rest of the place was unlit, and all that I could see were the burning ends of cigarettes. I didn't want to enter that darkness, so the bartender walked to the end of the counter. He said, "What can I get you, señor?" His English, as I recall, was quite good.

When I asked for coffee, he shrugged. He had been asked for stranger things. He wagged a finger, and a little boy came running—a boy who would not have been allowed inside a bar up north, though here he seemed at home.

He told the boy in Spanish what the gringo wanted.

"Un momento, por favor," said the boy and he darted outside.

So I waited in the entrance. And since I couldn't see very well inside the bar, I looked across the street. Two houses faced me, and one was loud and throbbing. It was the brothel where Jimmy had taken Max. The windows were bare, not one curtain had been drawn, and, here and there, I could see pink tits, a bearish chest or a hefty belly.

The other house looked deserted—like a black-paper cutout, or a silhouette projected on the sky. But something about that house did not make sense. The front door stood open, and a dull and wobbly light flickered in the doorway. I turned to the bartender to ask him who lived there, but he was busy now serving drinks. So I took a second look. And this time someone flitted between the door posts. It could have been a child, I thought, a little kid wearing satin and heels. The daughter of a whore, maybe, dressed in her mother's clothes.

Then a strange thing happened.

A feeling started building up inside of me, until it reached a clamor in my chest. Who was she? I needed to know, when something tugged gently at my sleeve. It was the boy, the one who ran off with my order. He was back now, holding my cup of coffee on a saucer. He must have run home to get it, and his mother would have made it just for me. I wanted to show my gratitude, but my heart kept thumping. And when I took the cup, it rattled so that I had to hand him back the saucer.

There were two twenties in my wallet, and the fifty from Dr. Tim. I asked the bartender for change.

"Too big," he said.

Then I spread my wallet wide to show him that was all I had.

He sighed, and then he nodded toward the open door. "Go on," he said. "Enjoy the night."

So I left the cup on the counter, and I wandered outside. A full moon hovered above Canal Street, that same glaring eye-of-white that had seemed to follow Jimmy's car. Now it stared down at me as I walked across the street, toward a house that looked deserted—except for the one dim flickering light.

My heart kept pounding from the sight of that girl. I wondered why. And then my mind lurched to an amazing conclusion. I knew her. And what I was feeling in my chest was the violence of recognition. It could have been the lightness of her step. Or the mischief implied in her wearing grown-up clothes. I don't know what convinced me, but it was Ricky that I saw.

Then I stopped where I stood and tried to make sense of it.

This couldn't be—not if my grandfather had shipped Ricky out of state. But what if he didn't? Suppose the old man had sent her to here, to have the baby in Mexico. He had promised there would be no abortion, and my grandfather wouldn't lie to me. But suppose she'd had the baby. And then, for reasons that I couldn't follow, she decided to stay here, with the kid, making money any way she could.

Nothing about this house was anything like a brothel. It was silent and dark. No men went in. No men came out. And yet the girl had been dressed in satin and heels. Left alone, I never could have gone inside. But then a woman appeared. She stood in the doorway, a woman well over fifty. Her teeth were gold capped, and her hair had been dyed the shade of a persimmon.

"Come in," she told me. "She's been waiting for you."

I stumbled back off the curb. But just then, Jimmy hollered from a window above. "Hey, faggot," he shouted. Then he ducked inside. I figured he was coming down to get me.

When I turned toward the doorway, the woman had gone. But she came back soon, leading the girl by the hand. It wasn't Ricky. Of course, it wasn't. Ricky was my age. That would make her seventeen. But it didn't seem to matter. Because this girl, who looked fourteen, reminded me of Ricky the last time I ever saw her. And that was why I couldn't leave or turn away.

"Who's the babe?" Jimmy said, suddenly at my side. "Find something better?" Then he looked at the girl clinging to the woman. "Are you, sick?" he said. "She's a little kid."

"Come on," Max said tugging at my arm. "You don't want her."

"Fuck off," I told him. "Get off me, okay."

"This is one sick faggot," Jimmy said. "Leave him here."

Then he pulled Max away, back toward the brothel. But when they had reached the porch step, Jimmy shouted at me one last time.

"I don't even know you," he yelled. "Take the bus, pervert!"

He was glaring in triumph, and we both knew why. He was thinking of that other night at the dude ranch, when he lost his cool in front of the Hollywood crowd, and he had begged me with his eyes to save him. All those years ago, and he still needed to settle the score. Maybe that was his reason for taking me, for pushing so hard to get me drunk and for dragging me here to Canal Street.

Now, said his eyes. Now you're the pathetic one.

I had to agree. I was lost, and alone, and pathetic. But Jimmy mattered so little to me that I gave him my back. The woman hugged the girl against her side, a girl in a red satin dress and shoes a size too large.

"She's waiting," the woman said.

Whatever else happened that night, no one forced me to follow them inside.
Chapter Fifteen

The girl in the doorway wasn't Ricky, but she was enough like Ricky that she bothered my soul. So when the woman led her into the house, I followed as far as the foyer. A candle on a wall sconce explained the jittery light. It flickered over the woman's face, but what caught my eye was the room just behind her.

I didn't know what to make of it.

Heavy drapes hung over the windows, and the room should have been as dark as a cave. But the darkness was filled with pockets of light. There were candles burning everywhere—on table tops and the arms of chairs, and in saucers on the floor. They cast circles on the ceiling. They fishtailed across the walls. And the strangest part—they were votive candles, and each one blazed in a tall glass, embossed with the head of a saint. I was a kid used to sizing things up, but what kind of place was this—a chapel or a brothel? A private home or a haunted house?

"Why do you look there?" the woman said.

She wanted my eyes on the girl, but if she meant to distract me, she was too late. Someone else was lurking in that house, in the room behind her. The flames only climbed to his neck, but he was burly man in a guayabera shirt. Then a candle made a spitting noise and a ray of light shot across his face. I sucked in my breath. He had a broad, broken nose, his skin was pitted. And he was staring back at me.

I felt as if I had stumbled into a gypsy tale—the kind that my aunts used to tell, with a child, a witch, and the Evil Eye. I had no idea what these people were up to. I suppose I never will. But it seemed that they knew each other. That they were fighting over the girl, and the woman, for some reason, had the upper hand.

None of this had anything to do with me. I had trembled into that foyer spellbound because a girl I saw looked like Ricky. These two—they just happened to be there. So you might even say that we collided.

"Who is he?" I said.

"No one," said the woman. "A man."

"What's he doing here?"

"He never leaves," she said.

"Is that why no one comes?"

She wouldn't say. And I figured that I ought to leave this place, back out the door and head down the street. But I didn't go. I couldn't.

"Take him," she said and the girl obeyed.

She lifted two fingers of my hand and tugged them so gently that I might have been hitched to a bird. She led and I followed, though I kept looking back at the pockmarked man. He never tried to stop me. Only his eyes did.

Down the hall she stopped at a doorway like a cutout, a floating rectangle of black crepe. Then she disappeared inside; and when a light came on, she re-appeared beside a bedside lamp. The walls were plastered and painted maroon. The mattress had been fitted with a tight, clean sheet. And a rocking chair faced the bed. That was where I sat, in the rocker. The girl shimmied up to the mattress-edge, hardly an arm's length away.

She tried to look at me, but each time her eyes climbed as high as my chest, they fell again to a spot on the floor. Ricky wasn't like that. Ricky was bold. And when we lay on our sides, nose against nose, I could stare inside her, through her wide, black eyes. And Ricky never blinked.

So they were nothing alike.

But then everything changed. The girl slid off the high heel shoes and she was Ricky again, on the day that she came to me wearing Aunt Beti's turban. Or that other time when she dressed up in her mother's high-heels and a tall, silly hat.

And maybe that was the truth of it—that this girl had the look of Ricky but none of her gypsy spirit. I don't know why, but that filled me with pity.

"Do you live here?" I said breaking the silence at last.

"Sí," she nodded.

"I mean, do you work here?"

"Sí."

"But didn't they tell you it was bad?"

She wouldn't answer that.

"The hermanas," I said, meaning the Sisters, for I knew enough schoolyard Spanish to get a point across. "Didn't they say it was wrong?"

"No quiero ni pensar en eso." I don't even want to think about that, she said waving her hand in front of her face.

Now what? What was I even doing there? It only took a moment to figure that out: Ricky still haunted me—though my grandfather would have disapproved. He said a man gets over these things, and that's what I thought that I was doing, by starting another life. But now I saw the failure baked into my plans. Because all the things that I'd been chasing and had to have, even Stanford—even that—were just distractions, however dazzling, from how lonely I felt without Ricky around.

The girl on the bed was only a sad, timid likeness of Ricky. But, by God, how I wanted to save her—for Ricky's sake or some fucked-up reason of my own. And I started knitting schemes, wild, impossible ways to make that happen . . . I figured that I could carry her like a bride across the threshold of the brothel. And once outside, I could hire a cab, head for the border and smuggle her across.

But then what? Think, think!

In the morning we could hitch to Stanford, where I'd introduce her as my cousin and help her find work. She would babysit for my professors, while, at night, I swept the gymnasium floors. And I would study hard, encouraged by her simplicity, her honor, and her goodness . . .

After I earned my medical degree, she would join my crusade to save the slum children of the world. And in later years, when our hair had turned white and wavy, I would totter up to the podium in Stockholm, and cite her contribution to my life's work . . .

"Do you want to come with me?" I said at last.

"No, señor."

"To America," I explained.

"I want to stay," she said.

She wants to stay, I thought. I was close to calling her an idiot, when I woke to realize, I was the only idiot in that room.

"Are you ready now?" She reached behind her neck to unhook her dress.

"No!" I shot up from the rocker. "No," I said more gently, backing out the door.

In the foyer, nothing had changed. The woman still stood there, frozen in a standoff with the pockmarked man. What kind place was this? I didn't care, anymore. I didn't want to know. I got out my wallet and held out a bill, any bill that would get me out of there. It was Dr. Tim's crisp fifty, though I didn't know it at the time—the going rate of a New York call girl, in 1955. The woman's eyes bulged as she plucked the money from my hand.

And the pockmarked man?

I was scared to look at him, afraid of what he would surmise. So I walked straight to the front door, and the woman followed. I would have plunged outside, into the street, and never looked back, but when she reached the threshold, she pulled at my sleeve and obliged me to turn.

I still thought of her as a gypsy witch, so it was hard, at first, to make out what she was doing—why she patted down her orange hair, slanted her eyes and grinned at me with gold-capped teeth. She was trying to flirt. She was miming a saucy young whore, whether from memory, or habit, or in the spirit of a small-business owner playing up to an over-paying client. Whatever the source of it, she looked as chilling to me as a crone, dolled up like Shirley Temple.

"I know you," she said with a worldliness so ancient, jaded and wise, that it really sounded true. "You'll be back."

Our taxi had left, but the brothels were open, and the street still thumped with song. So I wandered back to the bar, the one where I had ordered coffee. I was counting on the bartender to improvise again, to call another taxi or get "his cousin" to drive.

Halfway there, I wasn't alone anymore. Jimmy appeared on my right; then Max, on my left. Together, we headed for the bar's open door.

"The Three Musketeers!" Max shouted into the street.

"Yeah," said Jimmy. "Porthos, Athos. And Pervert here, who fucks little girls."

"I didn't," I said. "We just talked."

"Fucking, Robbie," he laughed. "You always told the best lies."

The bartender looked pleased. My cousins were the sort of free-spending louts he would have welcomed at any hour. So he rolled out his arm, inviting us to a table nearest the counter, and my gloating cousins obliged him. Getting laid had pumped them full of importance; and while Max picked his teeth, Jimmy slid a hand under the table to massage his sated cock. Then he stared at me and said, "What did you want to fuck a baby for?"

It didn't matter what he said. I was glad to see them, because the nightmare had to be over if these clowns were on the scene. The bar was better lit now. A candle in a dark red globe illuminated every table; and I could finally make out the faces in the room. The patrons here were Mexicans—locals, I suppose, drinking in the sovereignty of their neighborhood tavern, though they didn't seem bothered by the noisy invasion of three foolish gringos.

Jimmy had just turned to order when a tray arrived with glasses of tequila, salt and lime.

"What's this?" said Max.

"It's on the house," Jimmy surmised and I had to agree. "You should have seen this guy," Jimmy nodded at Max. "He picks this whore, Aracela. Max was so good, she didn't want my money."

Max grinned roundly and finished off his drink. This was the Max of old, the moon-faced boy that my Aunt used to fondle. So maybe Jimmy's cure had worked, and Max really had been restored because a whore had tickled his chin and called him hombre. How simple it was for an idiot to heal himself: My Cousin Max loses his manhood in prison, screws a prostitute and is made whole. Whereas I lose Ricky, and I would never be whole.

Jimmy did all the talking. He recounted their night as if the whores had been conquests, as if he and Max had broken hearts! The old man was so right. They were idiots, imbeciles, but for once I enjoyed their nonsense. At least now, this night could end as a comedy. And come Monday, I would leave Tucson, just as I'd planned.

Then the bartender came back with another full tray. We looked up at him puzzled, and he raised his eyes toward the one across the room that was buying our drinks.

"Who's your pal?" Jimmy asked.

I glanced around but every face looked the same.

"That one," said Jimmy.

He sat at a corner table, the pockmarked man. How his eyes could hate! He was flanked by two young guys; and they were measuring us, sizing us up. There could be no doubt.

"What's going on?" Max said. "What do they want?"

They want me, I thought, and my stomach turned over, whereas Jimmy kept his cool. He had a birthright to good fortune. It had rarely failed him before, and his eyes sent a message to Max: I'll get us out this, they said. But Max wasn't buying it. He stopped grinning as suddenly as if he'd been shot. He looked at those three and seemed to know them. In a way, he did. They were cousins of the kind of thugs he must have met in prison—the burly older guy with the oily face and pebbled complexion, the twisted kids who did his bidding.

"Come on," Jimmy said. "Who needs this place."

They watched us but didn't rise. And Jimmy even led us past them slowly, to make the point that we weren't scared—though, of course, we were.

Outside the bar, Canal Street had closed for the night. The brothels were suddenly dark and silent. The air churned, hot and still. And I could hear moths flutter against the street lamps and the crunching of our soles on concrete.

"Did they follow us?" Max whispered.

"No way," Jimmy said though he didn't turn to look.

None of this made any sense. Nogales, in those days, was a safe, friendly town. The brothels and bars were festive places. And the only violence you might hear about was a fistfight when some gringos got drunk. So why did everything around us—a busted street lamp, the roaches in the gutter, the air itself and the flies buzzing through it—seem so edgy and mean?

Then we heard the sounds that we'd been dreading. Max was the first to turn. It was them, he said. "Jesus. What'll we do?"

"Let's split up," Jimmy said. "We'll meet at my car." I never got in a word. He grabbed Max and yanked him toward an alley. Just as fast, the young guys darted after them. "Move it, Robbie!" he shouted back at me.

Move it where? The pockmarked man kept coming. And there wasn't a streetlight in all the darkness just ahead.
Chapter Sixteen

Near the end of the block, I saw another alley. It wasn't much, just a narrow shaft that interrupted a wall. Somehow the moon had found a way in, and I could make out the scuttle of roaches and up ahead, the alley's end. But I couldn't find a window anywhere to climb through, or a door to break down. So now I was fucked, the nightmare rolled on, and the meeting with my cousins? An interlude, one of those comic lulls before a bad dream gets worse.

But then I caught a break, a turnoff where the alley seemed to end. I stood against the dank stone wall and listened.

He never chased me. What he did was worse. He kept coming for me slowly. And every time I would stop to listen, I could hear him trudging patiently closer. Once I thought about standing my ground, stepping out of hiding and confronting the son of a bitch, because the slower he crept, the more inevitable it seemed that he would catch me.

I couldn't do it.

I ran, fast and hard, until the turnoff took me down another branch. And then I realized that there were no dead ends. In the darkness, Canal Street had seemed like an outpost, a few solitary blocks in a black expanse. That wasn't true. There were back streets, alley-shafts, and turnoffs left and right. I was pressed against a concrete wall holding a side stitch, when finally up ahead, I saw a main road. It might even be Obregon. I felt saved! But I didn't run to it, not until the heaving stopped. My breath was still, and all that I could hear was the rush of blood in my ears. Now, I thought. And I started down the last stretch of darkness, toward the wide road at the end.

Then the pockmarked man stepped quietly out of a shadow.

The plan had been simple—to make a quick round trip with my cousins to Nogales, pack my valise Sunday, leave for Stanford on Monday morning . . . And now this had to happen.

"Here," I said. "It's yours." I held out my wallet, dangling it as far away as my arm could extend. Go on, I thought. Steal the damn wallet, but don't take away my second chance.

He snatched it away. He grabbed the wallet from my hand and stuck it under his belt. Then I slowly backed away, but he kept on coming.

"What do you want?" I said. I pulled out my side pockets, so they hung empty in the air.

He glanced down at the pockets, then up at my face. Fuck your money, his eyes said. He had to be crazy. He grabbed my shirt front, pulled it so hard that I bumped his chest. Then he flung me away, like some weightless thing. My head struck concrete. And as my eyes cleared, he moved back a step to consider where to hit me. He worked it out carefully—where to strike, how to make me hurt.

Anyone else, any other boy of seventeen, would have begged this man—please!—to let him go. Not me. Not with my mind. Oh, I was scared all right, with a hammering heart. But something else had taken hold even bigger than fear. And it was the steady escalation of a lingering resentment. After all that I had gone through—the letters I'd forged, the break-in at the school that almost got me shot—after all of that, now this.

In thirty-six hours, I could have been on my way. But no, I wind up an alley, a filthy concrete shaft, facing someone I didn't know, a crazy man, a stranger with no reason to hate me. All this I felt as a betrayal, as Fate's cheap trick. These feelings collided in the fullness of one terrible moment. And then there wasn't any fear, only a bitter, livid anger at my lousy, fucking luck.

I shoved my knife into the belly of the pockmarked man. And as the strength fizzled out of him, I spun him around and nailed him to the wall.

What happened that night, I'd like to think of as a terrible mistake. But how can I call it that, after the years I spent rehearsing at my bedroom mirror. Or showing off for Ricky or some other girl: Look at me. See how my hand sweeps across my hip, slides the switchblade from my pocket and presses the release. With an arc of my arm and an upward thrust, I could gut a man . . .

And so I had.

That knife, I suppose, had always been my Destiny. At ten years old, I needed that knife, had to have it. Where did that feeling come from? Was it born in me? Or did Fate whisper it to my soul? Was it Fate that said to steal my uncle's knife, seven years before it meant for me to use it?

At first his belly had resisted, like the hard rind of a melon. But I punched through the peel to get to the pulp. The blade must have passed under a rib and gone into his liver, the long stiletto blade. I watched his eyes pop open, but I still didn't fully understand what I had done. After a moment, the man quit hating me. His eyes lost interest in hating anyone. His legs gave out and he sank—me with him—so that we both dropped to the ground and sat up, facing each other on our knees.

"How could you?" he said. By then, I was too far gone to be startled by his voice. "To a child," he hissed.

"But I never—" I let go of the knife. "I swear it," I said.

He collapsed on the pavement like a beetle on its back, unable to right itself. "A child," he whispered.

"Never," I kept saying, as he lay there and bled, but since he didn't believe me, how can I ever atone?

At the end of the alley, I came to the wide, empty street. It wasn't Obregon, and it ended suddenly. From there, I walked for miles, from dirt to blacktop, and finally to some storefronts on a paved street with sidewalks. I wasn't wearing a watch, but I passed a clock inside an unlit shop. It was after midnight. Tourists didn't stay in Nogales that late, so even if I found my way to the border, the guard on the U.S. side would question me. Could I hold up to that? No matter what, he'd remember my face.

I sank to my knees, sat down on the sidewalk and propped against a wall. Why go on? And then I had a thought, so stupidly obvious that it made me laugh out loud. The wallet, my wallet, was still under the belt of the man I had stabbed. It would be there, in plain sight, for the Mexican police.

"Oh, what's the use?" I moaned. "You beat me." I said it to the sky and the mocking face of that enormous moon.

But wait a minute. What if the man didn't die? What if his friends came back after chasing my cousins, and they found him bleeding and took him to a hospital? And suppose a doctor saved his life. And after he recovered, he transformed himself—into a leader of his people, a savior of the poor. And then suppose we met one day by chance, and he thanked me, blessed me because getting stabbed had turned him into a fucking saint?

That, that is how guilt can scuttle our minds, grasping for absolution.

My head hung low when a car pulled up to the curb. If it was a mugger, I wasn't sure that I cared. If it was the cops, they'd have to carry me away. "Hey, Americano," a man called. "Drink too much?" He sounded cheerful enough, just a passing driver out late at night. When I looked up, he was leaning out his window. "Sick?" he said. "Drunk? Maybe you got lost?"

"I'm trying to get to the border," I told him.

"Oh," he said. "Get in."

But I sat there, without will or hope.

"Get in," he said. "I'll take you, hombre. It's okay."

He was patient with me. He waited so long that finally I got up and headed for his car. The hood had been tied down with electrical wire, the hubcaps were missing, and a headlight had been punched out. When I climbed inside, I thought of Lyle's truck, the way the springs poked my rear.

"Whoa, hombre," he said. "You can't go like that." He twisted around and half-climbed over the back of his seat. "Here," he said holding up a jug of water.

I saw what he meant. My hands were crusty from blood. I wanted it off me, so I opened the car door and scrubbed them over the curb. When I finished, I stared across the seat.

"Why are you doing this?" I said.

"Hey, who knows?"

"No, why?" I asked because I needed a reason.

"I get in lots of trouble," he said. "Maybe next time, someone like you is going to help me." Then he started the car and we drove off.

He said that his name was Emilio. He said that his wife had just had a baby, and that he had learned English by working construction jobs in Phoenix. "You think my English is good?" he asked. But before I could answer, he said, "I think you killed someone."

I swung around to see what he was getting at.

"What if I did?" I said.

"Was he a bad man?"

"Oh, Christ," I said. "I don't even know."

"Well," he reasoned. "You got a problem if you don't know."

"So what do you suggest?"

"You know a priest?"

I shook my head.

"Someone you could tell?"

"No," I said. But then, on second thought, "My grandfather," I said.

"Then you better tell him," said Emilio.

Even on Obregon, not a soul was out at that hour. Street lamps lit our way, but the store fronts had been covered by rolled-down metal doors. Within a block of the border, Emilio pulled up to the curb.

"They're going to stop you," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Well, amigo," he sighed. "You look like you killed a man."

So he drove past the main gate, and he turned through streets he seemed to know, until we came to a place under the eastern hill.

"Over there." He pointed toward a small border station. "That's where you want to go."

"I don't get it. Won't there be a guard?"

He shook his head. And I can't explain it, but that was true. At the main crossing, back in 1955, returning tourists would be greeted by a guard on the U.S. side. They'd answer his questions and show him what they had to declare. But there was a second station, a smaller one—without an American guard, often without a Mexican one. It was east of the main crossing, a place that only the locals seemed to know about. It opened onto Morley Avenue, in Nogales, U.S.A.

When Emilio shut off the engine, I sat beside him quietly. It seemed that there was nothing I couldn't tell this man. He had been heaven sent. And if he had asked, I would have washed his feet in scented oil and cried out, "Thank you, Jesus."

Instead I said, "Did you ever kill a man?"

"Never," he told me. "Except one time almost. But that's life, right?"

He said it in the way a Frenchman says, "C'est la vie." There wasn't much meat in that philosophy, but it kept me going through the small, unguarded gate.

The city on the American side had also shut down. I hardly saw a moving car, so I walked up the hillside without a plan. Fate, I assumed, could screw me here as easily as in Mexico. I was waiting for the last shoe to fall when I noticed a gas station, probably open all night. The station attendant was filling the tank of a pickup truck, and the driver stood beside him, eating from a bag of chips.

"Hey!" I called out, really without much hope. But I said, "Are you going to Tucson?"

"Sure am," said the driver. "Need a lift?"

It wasn't long before we were riding north on the Nogales Highway, with only the headlights to light the next leg of road. The driver was a cowboy of the old school. He said that he was forty-eight, but the sun had cut so deeply into his neck and face that I took him for twenty years older. "That's from working outdoors," he told me, proud to look like hell. His name was Jed, and he was driving through Tucson on his way up to Payson, where he had signed up to ride in the rodeo parade. "Be a hell of a time," he said. "It's been going on in Payson for over a hundred years." His folks came from Montana, he said. And as far back as he could reckon, his people had lived in the west. His long dead uncle, to make a point, once rode in a posse after Jesse James.

I didn't give a rap about his uncle, or Jesse James. But if he had bothered to ask, I would have told him that I had killed a man, most likely, and I was trying to figure out how to live with it. Of course, he didn't ask. He flicked on the radio to Bob Wills singing "Ida Red." After that, his mind went his way and my thoughts went mine.

I was deep inside myself, and Jed was humming a tune, when we came upon something strange—so strange, in fact, that I doubt that it has happened twice in the history of the world! We were just outside the city of Continental, Arizona, when Jed stepped on the brakes. He slowed the truck like a steaming horse. "Whoa! Whoa, there," he said. "What the hell is that?"

Then he flicked on the brights. Up ahead, we saw a tank truck lying on its side. The cab was still steaming, and the driver inside may have been dying for all we knew. We were too amazed even to think about the driver, because the tank truck had been carrying drums of catsup. And these drums had broken open. The catsup had oozed out, and hundreds of gallons had flowed from the truck into a hollow in the road. Now a pond the color of blood was spread before us, three or four feet deep.

"You okay?" Jed asked me.

I couldn't stand the sight of it, not on a night like this. I said, "I'm going to be sick."

"Not in here, you ain't. Go outside and be sick."

But then something happened even stranger; and it seemed as if some biblical scourge were attacking us in the desert.

"Well, I'll be damned," said Jed.

It took a moment to raise my head from between my knees, but when I did, I saw outside the windshield, in the darkness, a violent stirring in the night. Then a sound invaded our ears like the droning of a thousand planes.

"Did you ever?" Jed said. "Better roll up your windows."

The catsup, it seemed, had attracted swarms of bees, oceans of them, tens of thousands. They came at us through the agitated air, in churning waves blacker than the sky. Before I could roll up my window, at least a dozen had flown inside. We flapped our hands and swore, and I knew in my soul that the nightmare had been leading me here, to this road outside of Continental, Arizona. And now it had to end since nothing worse could happen.

This had to be hell or a damn close facsimile.
Chapter Seventeen

If it weren't for the accident, Jed could have dropped me off by two a.m. But the cops had to deal with the spillage and the bees; and it took several hours before they had worked out a detour. Close to dawn, with me directing, he drove up to the fourplex.

"Who's that fool?" Jed said as he pulled behind Jimmy's convertible. The front end was parked on the sidewalk; the rear, he'd left on blacktop. Drunk, he must have bumped over the curb and cut the engine. Then, not giving a damn, he and Max would have staggered up the drive and into their parents' apartments.

"Well, thanks," I said. "Hope you take a prize in Payson."

"I mean to," he said. "Did I ever tell you the time—"

As I walked away, his engine growled at my ingratitude.

My uncles were still in town. The station wagon was still parked near Uncle Pete's front door, but all four apartments were dark now. So I let myself into my mother's place and crept barefoot past her door. She wasn't in her room, and her bed was made. She must have spent the night with her boyfriend, which left me alone to wait for dawn.

It would not be easy.

In my bedroom, I tried to take stock. Did I know for sure that the pock-marked man was dead? In my heart, I knew. The man was dead. And soon the police in Mexico would find my wallet on his body, and they would show it to the authorities on the U.S. side. The cops in Tucson would be informed, and they would look for me. They'd come knocking, maybe today, surely by tomorrow. But suppose I made the case that I had killed in self-defense? My wallet was under the man's belt. He must have threatened me to get it. And he was older, bigger, stronger than I was. On the other hand, he didn't have a knife. I did. So why did I leave him in an alley to die, after I was safe from harm? The cops would want to know.

When I looked at all the facts, it was clear that I had gotten into something that would drag on for years, here and in Mexico—that I would see my face and name many times in the papers, as the Tucson boy accused of murder. Even if I won the case, the charges against me, the years of notoriety, the memories that the police and courts would force me to relive, year after year, would haunt me to the grave.

Yet there was another choice, if I had the guts to make it. I could leave this place. I could arrive on Stanford's campus and register as Sheldon Roberts. Robbie Costa could disappear. Why not? My valise was packed. I only had to toss in some sandwiches, ride a city bus to the end of the road, and start walking up the highway ramp.

It wasn't safe to stay. All true, but it wasn't safe for me to go, I was so damn close to confessing. Already I had told Emilio, and I would have confessed to that fool cowboy Jed, if he had bothered to ask why I was wandering around Nogales so late at night. I needed to confess, even to a stranger. And I would keep on telling strangers unless I confided in someone who mattered. Then I could stop. Then I would be safe from myself.

My grandfather mattered. Only he could handle my story and bury it inside himself, where no one else would ever hear of it. So I stayed in the apartment all day, waiting for my chance to tell him. I lay in bed or paced the room, listening for my uncles' voices. Eventually, they had to come outside, pack the station wagon and leave for Phoenix. But the waiting went on all afternoon. Once about two p.m., someone knocked on the front door—a long, heavy, persistent knock.

I thought, Oh, Jesus, the cops! And I slipped into my sneakers and was tying the laces—planning to bolt outside into the yard in back—when I heard Max's voice.

"He's still not back," he said.

"Fuck em," said Jimmy.

"What if he's in trouble?"

"Yeah," said Jimmy. "What if he is?"

After they left, I lay down again and crossed my arms behind my head. Many times I went back to that alley—though I tried to keep my thoughts on anything else, to stay aware of the walls, my breath and heartbeat. Nothing worked, and soon I'd sit up in a sweat, with an image of the pockmarked man inches from my face. It was six p.m. before my uncles came outside—finally—and trod over the noisy gravel. "Leave!" I whispered. "Just go." But there were many false starts, as one or another went back for a wallet, a hat, a pair of sunglasses, a whisky flask.

By the time they drove off, a full day had gone by. It was dark again as the headlights of my uncle's station wagon beamed across the window shades. If they had taken much longer, I might have lost my mind, called the cops or started confessing to the walls. So I wasted no time sneaking across the backyard to the other end apartment, then peeking inside through the screen. It was safe, I decided. The old man would be there alone.

Any other day I would have knocked in front. Tonight I kept to the back of the house, still dressed in last night's clothes. When he opened the door, he should have been surprised to see me there. But, of course, he never showed surprise. My grandfather looked down my shirt front.

"You're in trouble," he said. "Come in."

There was blood on the shirt. I hadn't noticed it before, but the old man did at once. He led me to the sofa in the living room. Then he sat in an armchair facing me. Between us were so many channels of understanding, I could already sense his disgust. Jimmy was worthless. Max didn't count. But even you, his eyes said. Even you, Robbie.

I said, "I know I disappointed you."

But he didn't demand an explanation. And in the silence before we spoke, I started to see things in a new way. All day I had worked out what I would tell him after my uncles left town. But in every confession, there is always the question of getting started, that question being, Where did I go wrong? And the longer we have to think about it, the farther back in time the answer takes us . . .

Now that I had stabbed a man, I was sorry that I had ever been born. And maybe that was when the problem started, from the moment of my birth. But if I were forced to take a shorter route to what had landed me in such a jam, I'd have to say it was the choice I had made to go with my cousins. Everything they had ever done in life had ended badly, so it would have been easy to make them my excuse—to tell the old man that by consorting with idiots, I had gone astray.

But for once, my cousins were not to blame. I could have spent the night with them, screwed a whore and been back by midnight. They didn't push me into that nightmare-house. The pockmarked man hadn't come to the bar looking for them. No, the reason for my troubles was that girl, from the moment that she walked across the doorway—the girl who looked so much like Ricky that I had to see her up close. If it weren't for her, I never would have met the man that I murdered.

And that was why, when I finally broke the silence, I said, "It all starts with Ricky. Everything," I said, "starts with her."

Then I tried to explain. After she left, I didn't care about anything. I dropped out of school. And then I got that job through Uncle Pete. I'd ride around in a truck and carry cartons like a mule, and I could see how people looked down at me. They saw a delivery boy, and sometimes they stuck a coin in my palm. I wanted to throw it at their faces. I wanted to scream, Anyway I'm better than you!

My grandfather snorted. So far, he understood me well.

"I was sick of myself, grandpa. I wanted to be someone else. And then I met a girl who thought I was somebody else." And I told him about the prep school girl at the psychic fair—how she had mistaken me for a rich kid at a private school, how she had talked to me as if I belonged in her social class. She wanted to meet me in the fall, when she went away to school. "That's how I got the idea to go to college," I said. "And I never even finished high school." But then I explained about Dr. Tim. And I talked about the interview with Mr. Curry, and how I forged letters and later on, how I broke into my high school. "I didn't care," I said. "I did whatever it took."

"Because you're smart," the old man said tapping his brow.

"And it worked," I told him. "They accepted me. At a great school, one of the best in the country."

"Good," he nodded, "good." But then he said, "I suppose you got a way to pay for it?"

"They gave me money for tuition. I was going to leave on Monday morning."

"And now," he said, "you ruined it."

"Last night," I told him. "I did something terrible. You see this," I said pulling on my shirt front.

"Finish the story."

So then I explained about Jimmy, how he begged me to go with him and Max to Nogales.

"With those idiots?" he said more sharply. "And you went? You, Robbie. You didn't know any better?"

"I won't make excuses, grandpa. I went with them. And they took me to this whorehouse, but I didn't go inside. I meant to wait for them, and that's all that I was doing, I swear. Waiting for them to come out. But then I saw something. And after that, I couldn't help myself—"

"Go on," he said in his hard, dry way.

"I saw Ricky—"

"What are you telling me?"

"I saw her walk across a doorway." Then I took a moment, and I wondered if I should skip this next part. But if I did leave it out, I would never be free. So I told him the truth. I said, "I thought you sent her there, to Nogales to have the baby. And afterward, I figured that she stayed and became a whore. I'm sorry, grandpa. But that's what I thought."

He leaned forward in his chair, and his hands clutched the ends of the armrests.

"After that, it was a nightmare. The house was lit with candles. And there was this man, staring like he wanted to kill me. I think he was there to protect her," I said. "But how could I know for sure?"

"And the girl?" he said.

"It wasn't Ricky. But so much like her."

"And she was a whore?" said the old man.

"She took me to a room. I didn't touch her. We talked. Then I got up and left. And pretty soon, I met up with Jimmy and Max. But then that man showed up with his friends—"

"And this," he said looking down at my shirt.

"I killed him," I said. "I stabbed him with Uncle Eddie's knife. And now I'm fucked," I said. "He has my wallet. I left it on the body. I left it and I ran."

So now he knew the worst, and I did not feel better, only more desperate to hear something that would comfort me. But he didn't say a word. He stared off in some terrible calculation of responsibility. And when he finally spoke, his voice sounded broken with defeat.

"You see, Robbie," he sighed, "how Fate deals with me after what I done."

I didn't understand that at all. What did he have to do with any of it?

"For what I done to that girl," he said, "Fate ruined my grandson."

And then, I rose halfway out of my seat.

"I should have listened," he told me.

"You sent her there. You sent her to Mexico for an abortion," I said though as sure as I sounded, I prayed that he would deny it.

Instead he stared back at me, finally human, because for once my grandfather didn't know what was going to happen next.

I will never understand who that child was in the candle-lit house on Canal Street. A vision of Ricky made of flesh? Or just some kid in a brothel that inspired my intuition?

"Where is Ricky?" I said. "Still in Mexico?"

But I was begging for false hope.

"Ricky," he told me, "is dead."

"Bull shit," I shot back. "You left her there."

"She's dead," he said. "I sent for the body. Robbie, she is dead."

Then I sank against the sofa. And my grandfather sagged into his chair. And time slowly passed.

From the theft of my Uncle Eddie's knife to the day that Ricky peeked around my bedroom door, from the flattering mistake of a prep school girl to the break-ins at the school, step by step by step I had arrived—right on time—in that inevitable alley to shove a stiletto between a stranger's ribs. But was it Fate that had brought me there? Or an affinity I had for fucking up life's choices? I just didn't know anymore, but my grandfather thought he knew. He saw the hand of Destiny weaving me into its plan to punish him.

For a long time we sat in the deepest, deadest silence that I have ever known. If you killed all the birds and the insects, if you could steal the wind out of the air and even make the molecules stop, you would start to approach the stillness in that room—though once or twice, the old man asked a question.

I remember that he brought up "the idiots," meaning my cousins, of course.

"Do they know what you did?"

I shook my head, staring at the wall, but the old man never took his eyes off me.

Another time he asked about Stanford, though not by name. "That school," he said. "It's a real university?"

"Yes," I said but without any pride.

"What name did you give them?

Robbie Costa?"

"No," I said. "Somebody else." But I didn't want to talk about that. I didn't think I would ever want to talk to him again. Then suddenly it all shot out. "Why didn't you listen to me?"

I hollered. "I told you what the doctor said. It was too late to abort." When he didn't answer, I went on. "Why? Why the hell did you do it?"

"Why," he muttered. "You have enough whys to think about."

But that wasn't good enough. "You killed her," I said. "And the baby."

"Don't talk to me about babies," he said in disgust. "It's always better not to be born. But that sweet girl," he lowered his head. "We both ruined her."

And then everything started to shift again, because he said "both," and that had made a dent in me.

"What should we do now?" I said at last. And the old man's shell seemed to crack. His eyes, when he looked at me, even glistened.

Then he said something remarkable, coming from a man like my grandfather. "Robbie," he said, "can you forgive me?"

He had always been such a tough old nut, hard shelled and dried up at the core. Even his affection for me he had shown by the absence of contempt he felt for everybody else. Was there anyone in the family who loved this man? Uncle Lucca respected him at least. But the others feared him. Aunt Louisa pretended she loved her papa, and my mother may have loved him once, but that had been long ago. As for Jimmy and Max, they ran from him. Yet from the time that I was a child, my favorite thing to do was to sneak into his room, where he used to sit in his reclining chair, reading his Daily News. And I would lie on the floor like his puppy because I felt safer if he were near.

"How can you stand him?" Jimmy used to ask.

Now I knew the reason. It was because we were so much alike. And somehow we had always known it.

My grandfather didn't start out bowing to Destiny. When he was young, he would have challenged Fate, disdained the rules. But what chance did he have, a gypsy boy growing up in Romania? Gypsies had been slaves in Romania only twenty years before he was born! He had no chance there at all. And slowly over time, such things had happened in his life that he had gone fallow. But I could understand that now, because there were places in my soul where nothing would ever grow.

So when he asked me to forgive him, I said yes, that I would. It was easier than forgiving myself, in any case.

"Do you mean that, Robbie?"

"I forgive you, grandpa. I mean it."

"You're a good boy," he told me and his eyes were small and wet. "Do you remember how I used to tell you stories?"

"Sure," I nodded.

"The one about Jesus and the gypsy?"

"The gypsy who stole the nails," I said.

"That's what you did. You took the nails from my wrists," he said turning over his arms. Then he went inside of himself, and when he came out again I knew that he had come to a decision. "Do you remember," he said, "how God thanked the gypsy?"

We thought so much alike that he didn't have to say anymore.

"Go in my closet," he told me. "It's in the back, on the floor."

"Are you sure?" I said.

"You know what to do," he said. "I'll go outside and take a walk."

He stood up from the sofa, and I got up too.

"Come here," he said and my grandfather embraced me. Then he pushed me away, just far enough for one last look. "Smart," he smiled with his hard, tight lips. "Whatever happens, you'll always survive."

And with that, he turned and started for the door. I had to call him back or he never would have turned.

"Grandpa," I said. "I'll never see you again."

"Not in this life," he told me. "Later on—" he shrugged. And the next moment he was gone.

Two thousand years ago—so the legend goes—a gypsy stole the nails from the cross and relieved the suffering of our Lord and Savior. Did he do this as an act of mercy? Or was he already devising a scam to sell the nails as relics to Christian fools? The legend doesn't say. Only that God was pleased, and that He granted gypsies the privilege that my grandfather had just extended to me, so I followed his instructions and crawled to the back of his bedroom closet.

The cigar box was filled with fifty and hundred dollar bills, the same that I had seen him counting in his room. What I did not expect—and what changed everything that came to pass—were the other boxes, also filled with family loot. I gathered them together, a tottering tower of eight. I balanced them against my chest, pressing my chin down on the topmost lid. Then I carried them carefully through the dark backyard, past the noisy clucking of my aunts at the mahjong table, where they drank coffee and ate their store-bought cake. I could see inside through the open window that my mother was not among them, and that Aunt Louisa ruled the others with her bigger voice.

When I made it to my room, I dropped the boxes on my bed. Then I crept back to Uncle Lucca's apartment and did as the old man would have wanted. I faked a robbery. I made a mess of the place, rifling drawers and trashing his closet. I did the same in Lucca's room as well. Then I locked myself outside and went to the shed. Inside I found the pry bar that I needed to stage a break-in by busting open the flimsy back-door lock.

In a few hours my aunts and uncles would hear about the theft. Probably they would pin it on me. But then they'd question Max and Jimmy, who would tell them that the last time they saw me, I was in Nogales running down an alley to save my life. So they would never know for sure who stole the money. Though to me it didn't matter what they thought, since Robbie Costa would soon be dead.

After I added up the cash, I dealt the bills into three piles. There it was, laid out before me—seven years of my family's enterprise and dishonor, of my uncles' operations in Phoenix. Here were the cars they had sold "good as new"; the gold watches they had hawked that were made without gold; the "premium lots" they had offered to the public—lots in a "thriving" city of weeds and sand. By the end of an hour, I was done. And it came to twenty-four thousand, an amount equal in today's dollars of close to two hundred thousand! I stared at that money like a lottery winner whose heart and soul were broken. When life rips your heart out, a lucky stroke feels like added spite. Then I snuck outside and headed for the bus stop on the corner.

At the Greyhound Station downtown, I bought three one-way tickets. Two of them went to Chicago. The third would deliver me to San Francisco, about twenty miles north of Stanford, as I found out. Then I returned to the apartment for the last time. I filled an envelope with five thousand dollars in fifty dollar bills, the tickets to Chicago, and a note to my mother.

"Do it," I wrote to her. "This is your last chance. Love, R."

I left the envelope on her pillow. Next I packed some sandwiches and stashed the rest of the money under my shirts. After I showered, I stuffed my bloody clothes in a paper bag, so I could toss it out in the neighbor's garbage. And when all that was done, I put on Sheldon's favorite outfit, my white shorts, the knit shirt and sneakers.

It was time to dress for a new part.

At that hour, the city buses didn't run very often, and I arrived at the Greyhound Station close to midnight. The terminal was a vault of mostly empty benches. Only a handful of people waited for the 12:35 a.m. bus to San Francisco and all points between. Six other passengers occupied the terminal, and they sat on separate benches, as far from one another as the room allowed. Along one wall, a young soldier pressed against his wife, and facing them sat a lady whose grandson lay his head in her lap. Left of them, I saw a fat, pink man, who I pegged for a salesman, though he must have packed away his front-door smile.

And then I found her, sitting on a bench at the farthest end of the room.

When I was ten years old, I used to play in the room where Aunt Beti told fortunes. She was my teacher in the art of reading a mark. From the crossing of legs, a grimace or a pout, she made guesses that were so eerily true, even my grandfather came to believe in her powers. So it was to Aunt Beta that I owe my reading of the lady on the bench.

One look and I knew that we were both running away.

She was an Arizona cowgirl, in her late twenties. She had dressed in denim, and her wedding ring had probably cost her husband less than the outfit that she wore. The ring was a worthless diamond chip set in a silver band. And her finger was still red from trying to work it off. Beside her on the bench lay a fringed leather handbag, and poking out from a partly open zipper was the neck of a pint of liquor. She had a pretty face, bright yellow hair pinned close to her head, a small upturned nose and gleaming teeth. But for no apparent reason, she had turned sideways toward a vacant wall, so the only question in my mind was whether the shiner circling her eye was a recent one.

She was also slightly drunk, and by the time I came up to her, she was sick of holding a pose, half-turned to hide her injury. Her lips tensed, and she willed me to leave, but I wouldn't think of it. Left alone, I would go crazy. And if I could have leveled with her, I would have struck a deal: "Just talk to me," I would have said. "Help me stay sane, and I'll keep your mind off your husband."

When I took the seat beside her, she fidgeted farther up the bench, but I wasn't discouraged. On her account, I changed into a country boy. I said, "Excuse me, ma'am. I couldn't help but notice how you're dressed. And I was wondering if you might be going to Payson, too."

When she turned for a better look, I saw that the shiner had mostly faded, and the ring around her eye had turned yellowish brown. "What are you going to do in Payson?" she asked.

"I signed up for the rodeo."

"You?" She held back a laugh. "In that outfit?"

"Don't judge me too quick," I said. "My family's as old as the west. Heck, I've got a great granddad who rode in a posse after Jesse James."

"You fooling me?" she said.

"No, ma'am. Why I could tell some stories. I could entertain you all night—"

Then I repeated for her all the bull-shit yarns Jed had recited, probably for the hundredth time on the way back from Nogales. And when I had gone through them, I moved on to stories Sue had told me at the ranch when, for a few sweet hours, I imagined myself becoming one of Tom's hands.

"You sure can tell some lies," said the lady with the shiner. She wasn't brooding now, and neither was I, as her ghosts and mine floated off to some haunted place.

My eyes glanced down at the bottle in her handbag, then up to her bright brown eyes. And after a moment, she said, "Well, all right. Go get a cup over there."

She meant the water cooler, where I found a cone-shaped paper cup. Then I stood in front of her, to give her cover as she poured me some bourbon.

"You're a wicked boy," she said. "What's your name?"

"It's Jed," I told her.

After one stiff shot on such a night as this, with a mind half-crazy, I felt like a monkey shimmying up a pole. And from the top of that pole, for only a moment or two, the liquor set me free. I could look down on my ghosts—the pockmarked man still accusing me of screwing a child; Sgt. Fitz, my lunatic teacher; and my crazy Aunt Louisa hissing accusations . . . I didn't give a rap what any of them thought. For once, I didn't care if I were Robbie or Sheldon or Jed or any other name. All names, I decided, were a drag on my spirit.

"You know," I said. "I just noticed something strange about you."

Her mind must have shot to the shiner, because her lips turned down. She looked as if I had blindsided her in a moment of unwinding.

But then, like a choir boy, I said, "I hope you won't take this wrong, but you're prettier than the angels."

Where else could I have dropped such a line, except at a Greyhound Station on the worst night of my life? And even then, it took the kick of liquor to get it out of me. Yet what I said was exactly what she had needed. Her lips quit pursing, and they shot up in a smile as sudden as a child's. She gleamed at me, unable to hold back a smile. It raised her upper lip so high, I could see the bright pink gums rolling over the roots of her long, perfect teeth.

"I may be an angel," she said at last. "But you're a devil child."

Don't you get it, I wanted to explain. We're both running away, and there will be hell to pay in the morning, but on this glorious night, we're both free.

"How'd I ever end up sitting next to a boy who can lie like you?" she asked.

I said I could explain that. I said I was half gypsy. Then I told her that it was our Destiny.

THE END

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About the Author

Leslie W. Jones was born in 1948 in New Jersey. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Rutgers University and a Masters of Arts degree in Journalism. He continued his studies to earn a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. After his studies, Jones took some time to travel around the world. After his return, Jones worked for the IBM Corporation for several years where he enjoyed being an award winning script writer and producer of national and international corporate videos. He applied his diverse experience, education, and business background to the stories he wrote and their characters.

After leaving the corporate world, Jones' time was divided between writing novels and being an instructor in the English Department at the University of Arizona.

