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  Just a little unloved runt packed off like a parcel. Nothing much more than a sack of flesh in cloth, passed from one relative to another, riding the line from his uncle Garmady in Detroit all the way to Chicago, where he was passed to his uncle Lester, who in turn passed him over to a Division Street neighbor lady named Urma (last name lost), who later passed him back to his mother, who reluctantly—as if holding a bottle of strychnine—took him for a week or so before saying, Good riddance, get out of my sight, and shipped him off to New York. The memories of that ride combined with the others into a panorama: small towns staring back along dark verges, lit windows buried amid hills, warm and safe but unobtainable: glowing Pugh cars loaded with pig iron, radiating heat along a siding somewhere in Pennsylvania; the long straightaway tracing the rim of Lake Erie; the rattle of the wheel trucks over the tapered tongues of switches somewhere—maybe entering Manhattan on the Hudson River line, or along the complex arrays of Gary where, years later, he’d work lighting smudge pots and greasing gearboxes. O holy vestige of memories, all those trips as a kid reduced to the sensation of being next to nothing, of being little more than a sack, curled against the seat while some bored Negro porter came to attend, his voice hangdog and low, saying, You need anything, boy? While out the window the train dug east or west through the tired back ends of yards, ran along the deep culverts and over the tops of viaducts until—in memory, at least—it came to a sudden standstill along a siding in upstate New York, where out the window a field of weeds was swaying behind some old coot, some vagabond soul lost to the road, his pants hitched up with a rope, staring up with that dull perplexity—eyes oily and stale—and then giving, in response to the boy’s wave, a feeble lift of the hand, just enough to put a curse on the boy’s soul and to let him know that at some point an even exchange would be made and places would be traded and the boy would take his spot on the siding and look up at the warm windows of passing train cars, the faces silhouetted behind glass. He would look up to see the shades pulled down on the sleeper cars and imagine a Cary Grant type in there watching an Eva Marie Saint type undress, her dress pooling around her feet while in her panties she rises up onto her toes to tighten her beautiful calves. He would look up and imagine that kind of scene and feel bitterness at the fact that somewhere down the line—he’d never know exactly where—he became the man on the siding looking up and stopped being the little boy looking down, Hambone thought, staring across the campfire at the kid named Ronnie, who met his gaze, waited a few beats, and then said, What are you thinking on, Hambone? (The kid—eighteen, maybe nineteen—was already starting to take on a hardness, because somewhere down the line he’d been rolled. It was there in the pale green luster of the kid’s eyes, a violation. He had confessed to the fact, speaking in a roundabout manner, saying: Some men took me and tied me up and offered me a choice between two things. One of those things was death, and the other was worse than death.) You’re thinking on something, the kid said again.

  Hambone waited a few beats and then said, Well, Ronnie, I was thinking on a trip I took as a kid on the New York Central line—what they used to call the Water Level Route—to New York. It was grand and lovely. Nothing but plush seats and a smoking car and a dining car with full service—white tablecloths and fine china—and a sleeper car, too, with a porter who came to turn down the sheets while my mother dabbed my face clean with a washcloth and read me bedtime stories, he said, and the kid waited another few beats, and then said, I’ve never heard about that side of your mother. Never once heard you speak of her so kindly, and then he sat back, waiting, looking through the roil of flames at the old man, who in turn looked back with his eyes tight, pressed into the wrinkled flesh, waited a beat, then a few more, before saying, You can believe what I say or not. That’s up to you. My mother was a wonderful woman. She’d do anything for me, and she did. She suffered a great deal and went through the fires of hell for my sake so many times I can’t count them. I have only fond memories of my mother. I’d put her at the top of any list, he said. Then he began to cough again, lurching to the side and hacking into the darkness. When the coughing subsided, he turned back and watched the kid stir the beans one last time and then tweeze the can out of the fire, working carefully with two sticks, putting it down in the dirt to cool. Then the kid leaned back and gazed up at the sky, abject and sullen, throwing itself over the campfire. It was the kind of sky—hazy with only a few stars visible—that formed itself over a dishonest old tramp. Deep in the darkness, past the sound of crickets, the railroad tracks ticked, giving off heat, or maybe—unlikely but maybe—releasing the tension of a train traveling along the fishplate joints, an unscheduled manifest out of Chicago, or farther west in the hinterlands, somewhere past the Mississippi where, months ago, Hambone had confessed the truth about his mother: A nasty cunt is what my old lady was. A real piece of work without a kind or decent bone in her body. You’ll have to take my word on this, Ronnie, because it’s all I can offer. If I could I’d bring her here for you and prop her up just so you could bear witness to one of the nastiest pieces of work, I would, just to prove it, but I can’t because she’s dead as a doornail. Thank Christ. I’m free of that burden, at least. No matter what I can say about my time in this world right now, I can at least rejoice that she’s gone, he said. Then he’d launched himself into a four-day whiskey binge in Flagstaff, one of those rant-and-rave runs that landed him in jail. (Ronnie stuck around, waiting out the jail stint, sleeping beneath a local overpass, checking in on occasion with a desk sergeant named Franklin. Who is that man to you? Franklin had asked. My father, Ronnie said, evoking a steady, doleful stare from the police officer. Your father? Yes, sir. My old man.)

  There are things you can and cannot say about your old lady on the road, Hambone’s Flagstaff binge had stated. There are secret limits to the evocation of anger and hatred when it comes to speaking of she who bore you out of her loins. You can say what you want about the one who brought you forth into the world, but don’t go so far as to call her a cunt. The basic physics went as follows: You made a confession to your fellow tramps, usually in the form of a campfire rant, words pounded out of a pent-up grief, and then you used that confession as an excuse to tear into a drinking binge that would, in turn, serve to reveal an inner torment so deep and wild that it could manifest itself only in the form of a dismal creature, a man alone, crawling along the roadside, ignored by passing cars, his knees bloody, with no love in the world.

  You’re a stupid fool for holding out around here for me to come out, Hambone had said, walking bowlegged out of the Flagstaff jail. The fact that you did so simply shows your foolhardy youth.

  Didn’t you check some gear when they took you in? Ronnie asked, holding him up and feeling the frail, chicken-bone thinness of his shoulders.

  Nothing I ever want back. Some old duds, and a canteen of whiskey they poured out for my own sake.

  Long days of windblown dust and cold nights beneath starlight and yet somehow they stayed together, watching over each other, taking turns, trying to maintain a balance. For his part, at a campfire near Kansas City, Ronnie confessed to having abandoned a bride back in Ohio, a girl named Rose who had been with child—knocked up, pregnant, take your pick. As beautiful as a fucking voodoo doll, he added. He went on with his confession until his voice gave way and he slipped away from the fire and stumbled off into Kansas City—all cowpoke delusion and gunslinging hee-haw!—where he found himself, in the end, after a long binge, bloodied with a broken jaw (wired shut) and a ten-day jail stint. During which time Hambone, using the incarceration as an excuse (ten days in a K.C. pen is equal to a month in a Chicago clinker), hooked up with a hayseed named Stills and went on a ten-day burglary spree. (The old lady I burgled ain’t gonna miss what I took, he explained, escorting Ronnie out of jail. She was demented and hardly knew what was what. In any case we kept things even and didn’t go too far and left her a pearl brooch, a pair of earrings—silver plate—and her reading glasses. We burgled the old lady a
nd then Stills robbed me and now I have just enough to buy a few bottles and to hold a little cash on the side to give someone else out there something to rob from us if they come along and feel so compelled.)

  From K.C. they wandered east again, skirting town centers while between them a tension formed. If the price were high enough, one man would rob the other if he could, if enough funds entered into the formula, Ronnie began to admit to himself. A structure had formed around this possibility of betrayal. A tightness entered the way they spoke to each other, wedged apart by the fact that even after the drinking binges, Ronnie was still youthful and the old man was still old. To go off alone would be to stretch the you-did-this-and-then-I-did-that fights they sometimes had, mostly in Indiana, a state too prim and proper and boring around the edges to exploit. In any case, the old man’s health was going downhill fast. At a free clinic in Indianapolis a doctor pressed the cold cone of his stethoscope to the caved rib bones and said, Breathe deep, deeper. Is that what you call breathing deep? When he slapped the X-ray film onto the light board in his office, it showed not shadow but rather ghostly white furls of tumor, billowing like smoke. In contrast, Ronnie remained limber and quick, fast on his toes, with lean skinny arms—only a few track marks and one hookshaped scar from a knife fight in Akron—and a brightness in his eyes that stayed on the edge of being hopeful. A spark still burned when he spoke about ideas he had on how to make a buck, heists he might pull if he could get his old buddies back together: a forlorn gas station, not far from the Ohio Turnpike, with a single attendant behind the counter, just begging to be stuck up, just asking for it when the time was right; a blueberry farm in Michigan that would yield up a month’s worth of sweet eating if you felt like heading up that way.

  You got something to say on blades, the man named Vanboss said that night, outside Toledo. The silence had continued to open around the men, stretching down to the shore of the river and past that to the refinery, wagging its burn-off plume into the sky. It was a wide silence that spread out in concentric circles with Ronnie at the epicenter and the men just one ring out. It was the kind of silence that formed around a given, and the given was that Ronnie had a good blade story to tell, most likely a blade/fight story, and—this was pure speculation, but they sensed it was possible—even a terminal act of violence on Ronnie’s part, because he seemed the type: gaunt, tight-lipped about his past. He had uttered the name Hambone once or twice before going on to some other subject, as if testing to see who might’ve known the man.

  Don’t have nothing to say on the matter of blades, Ronnie said, studying the flames, feeling his story tighten into something sharp. One last bit of trust the old man had handed over, in the form of how he had died and at whose hand that night. It was something he’d hold as long as he could, years hence, until he forgot most of the details and was moving through a vague sense of what had been. But for now he recalled the blade pushing harder against his throat, unwilling to budge no matter what he said up into the darkness. (Christ, I believe you. Your mother was one of a kind. She was wonderful.) Beneath the blade the hollow of his windpipe waited; an airy emptiness ready to form. A gape through which the rest of his life would pass. An obscene hole. The blade had not lightened up. It remained persistent and tight, sliding ever so slightly under the old man’s grip, nicking and digging until, in a single, quick movement, he lashed up, acting as fast as he could to save himself. Then the blade went in and out, moving before thoughts could form. It plunged between the brittle ribs and penetrated the cloudy center while the old man gave a loud, bellowing wheeze, tumbling back a few steps into the fire and, falling into a bloom of sparks, unleashing the scream that would spin around in Ronnie’s eardrums forever. It was a scream that would never leave the world, he thought, looking at the men who had stopped waiting for him to speak and were readying themselves—their faces taking on a bored slackness—to move on to some other subject.

  A River in Egypt

  The hot air in the sweat chamber—as the nurse had called it, ushering them in—was humidified to make it even more uncomfortable, and when he loosened his tie he was reminded that he was the type who felt it necessary to dress up for hospital visits, and for air flights, not so much because he had a residual primness left over from his Midwestern upbringing, which he did, but because he felt that he might receive more attentive service if he came dressed with a certain formality, so that the nurses and doctors tending his son might see him, Cavanaugh, as a bigshot banker instead of an assistant art director who was known, if he was known at all, for his last-minute design fixes. For example, he had once turned the interior of a hotel lobby—one of the last of the classic (now defunct) SROs in midtown, the Abe Lincoln, just off Twenty-eighth and Madison—into a Victorian salon by throwing a few bolts of velvet around the windows of the downstairs smoking lobby.

  Just that morning, as he was leaving for the hospital, the director, Harrison, had called to let him know that he was being dropped from Draconian, a big-budget sci-fi production that included a huge political convention scene, filmed in an old dirigible hangar out on Long Island—a design job that had drawn upon his expertise in plastic sheeting, banners preprinted with mock structural details, and so forth. “It’s not that we don’t like your work,” Harrison had said. “You’ve got fine, visionary abilities. You see things others miss. But maybe you see too much. The problem with your design was—and I don’t know how to put this—it was too real, too clear. You know where I’m coming from? One wrong move cinematographically and you’re lost in the future, or lodged too far in the past. We made one wrong move, and I don’t want to make another. I’m not casting blame. I’m apportioning fault. If I don’t do it, the audience will. You see, my hope is to keep the film, for all its futuristic overtones, closely rooted in the present moment, and that way, as I see it, the audience will feel connected to contemporary experience in a way that will allow the obvious eternal elements”—Harrison was apparently referring to the assassination attempt, and to the corrupt, smooth-talking monomaniacal presidential candidate who was secretly implanting electronic doohickeys into his opponents’ temples in order to create a network of paranoid, deranged sap-souls, as he put it—“to resonate fully not only with current audiences but also with future audiences. So the trick to fostering believability lies in tweaking the extremely fine fissure between the known present and the unknowable future. If it’s tweaked correctly, even years from now an audience will ignore the errors and focus only on the viable world that had once really existed, and still exists, in all human interaction.”

  Cavanaugh pondered all of the above—along with images from the drive that morning over the Tappan Zee Bridge and the beauty the river had held, stretching toward Tarrytown, rippled with tight wavelets, shimmering blue under a pristine sky—as he held his son, Gunner, in the sweat chamber, talked to him, got him settled, and gave him his toys, extracting them one at a time from an old green rucksack. These toys had been put aside for a few days so that they might accrue some elemental newness again and, in turn, give more in the way of pleasure. (“There are enough old toys to keep him busy,” Sharon had insisted. “I can’t charge another toy on the card, and I think we should build up his desire so that when Christmas comes there’s not another huge letdown like there was last year. Case in point: You bought him that Gobberblaster gun last summer, which was totally inappropriate for a kid his age and might’ve been a perfect gift for Christmas a couple of years from now, and he went out and shot it a few times, and now it’s in the back of the closet like all his other junked toys.”)

  That fight about buying Gunner some new toys for the test, he thought, dabbing the sweat from his brow onto his cuff, had really been spurred on by the fact that Sharon was now back in practice, commuting into the city to scrounge clients and taking on a disproportionate number of pro bono cases, as if to keep the financial burden firmly on his side of the ledger, because she felt—and he knew this from their ten years together—that pressure was good fo
r him artistically, and that he’d find the strength to break through to the big time only if he pushed against the weight of their monetary need. So he extracted one toy at a time and watched as Gunner went to the floor, tinkered and fussed and depleted each quickly, and in less than ten minutes had already gone through the Emergency Tow Truck and something called the Question Cube after two lame questions:

  What river is in Egypt? the Nile? the Hudson? the Thames? or the Kalamazoo?

  And then:

  Who said: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Groucho Marx? William Shakespeare? Sigmund Freud? or King Edward?

  before the Question Cube gave a weak static snort and faded into silence, so that little Gunner, who was really too young to know the correct answers, but who liked the sound of the toy’s artificial voice—a basso profundo—and got a thrill out of guessing, stood up and, with a grunt, gave it a hard kick. Then he went on to quickly sap the Zinger, a gravity-defying top that was said to have the ability—in correct conditions—to spin eternally, and his old favorite, Mad Hamlet, a strangely compelling action figure that went into suicidal fits when you pushed a button hidden on its back. Only ten minutes in the sweat chamber had gone by, and all Cavanaugh could do was wait a few beats while Gunner looked up, bright with anticipation, and then cried, “I’m hot, I’m hot, I’m hot, hot, hot.”

  At this point, stalling for time, Cavanaugh put the rucksack out of sight behind his back and waited a few more beats before pulling it out again, saying, “Hey, hey, look, another rucksack,” and shook it near the boy’s head until he stopped flailing around, looked up with his ruddy face (the kid had what the doctor called dermagraphic skin—highly sensitive, prone to rashes), and said, “Give me, give me.” At which point Cavanaugh unzipped the rucksack slowly and said, “Let’s pretend it’s Christmas morning and we’re just up, having had our traditional morning cocoa and sweet roll”—Christmas was the one morning each year that they opened up the tightly packed dough, popping it against the counter and rolling out the spiral of cardboard foil—“and now Santa’s bringing some new presents,” and then, with great flourish, saying, “Ta da,” he reached in and pulled out the Emergency Tow Truck again, squat and malformed, with a thick front bumper, holding it out and watching as Gunner’s face composed itself around a cry, restrained itself for a second, his tiny mouth a tight rictus of pink next to which his cheeks bunched to reveal a remnant of his original baby face—womb wet with sweat, blue with blood, and dramatically horrific. Cavanaugh searched the boy’s face the way a sailor might read the twilight sky, and saw clearly that he was about to unfurl a squall-cry, a true record breaker on the scream scale. And he did. When it came, it was a squawking, ducklike sound, odd in its guttural overtones, yet paradoxically bright, shiny, and thin, like a drawn thread of hot glass. This was a cry that said: You led me to believe, fully and completely, that I was about to receive a newborn toy, something that would match my deepest expectations. This was a cry that rent open the universe and, in doing so, peeled back and exposed some soft, vulnerable tissue in Cavanaugh’s brain.