Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 1 of 20)

Helvetica Dropfoot woke up one morning to find that everyone in Little Aleppo was dead. She did not realize this immediately, as she lived alone in an apartment on West Timbale Road and did not see anyone, dead or not, until she had had her coffee, shower, shit, small depressive episode. Sometimes she meditated, and other mornings she mouthed the sweetly terrifying prayers learned during her Catholic childhood, and when it was warm she would go out to the little yard behind her kitchen and do Tai Chi badly.

But then all the people on the sidewalk were dead. Going about their business, not obviously rotting, there was no smell. But dead nonetheless. Mailman fresh onto the route, and the guy trying to steal parcels straight from his roller-sack, and the cop who tackled the package thief (toppling the mailman in the process), and the youthful fuckabouts who now saw an opportunity and yoinked the remaining bundles while the cop and the thief and the mailman were all tangled up in one another, and two grandmas leaning out their windows hooting and betting with each other, and a cadre of cheering schoolchildren, also betting. All dead.

Amazing how graceful the dead were, Helvetica thought. They lurched so much more in the movies. Panic nibbled; she kept walking. Dr. Standish might not be dead, and he despised lateness and several ethnicities, and so Helvetica tried to always be on time and never be Brazilian. She did not run. She thought that might make them notice her, and she instinctively did not want that.

They were having conversations, arguments. She witnessed three distinct pow-wows, and two sets of negotiations, one of which was high-level. Flirting. The dead were all around Helvetica, and they were flirting. The dead boys smirked and lied, and the dead girls pretended to believe them. Cheerleaders draped themselves on tight ends, and middle-aged men pretended not to look. Everyone was dead and everyone was horny. She breathed in through her nose and still did not run but kept a hot clip west towards the Main Drag.

“Rabbi,” said the little shit.

“Yes?”

“I watched you die.”

“I saw you in the crowd.”

It was cool for Nisan, and there was no breeze. The vendors stocked their tables, and women threw open their windows, and the week began after the Sabbath.

The rabbi could see the hill planted with crosses. Roman soldiers. Many goats. The sun.

All the same now.

“How much did you make?”

“Did all right,” the little shit said. Pockets had not been invented yet, but pickpockets had.

“Buy me breakfast. They buried me without a shekel.”

It was a small cafe. Fish, bread, figs. The rabbi ate quickly, and drank two cups of wine despite the early hour. One head poking in the door, withdrawn quickly. Another, another, another, and a swell of noise and racket.

And now Peter.

And now Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John.

And now Thomas with his eyebrow raised.

And now the rest.

Then come the Magdalene, in her curls and her sandals, elbowing the men from her path until she is in front of the rabbi. She kneels. With a lock of her hair, she wipes the dust from the rabbi’s feet. Rising, she whispers into his ear. Her words were unrecorded in any Gospel, even the most apocryphal.

The street outside is swelling. Resurrections did not happen every day. The rabbi was drawing looky-loos.

His friends lead him from the shop, through the city, to a hill that fronts a natural bowl. It fills.

The rabbi looks at the crowd, expectant faces and greedy smiles and most at least a little drunk, and thought about his mother because he was tired of thinking about his father. The rabbi needed to have a long talk with his father. Maybe go out to the lawn and punch it out.

Now he sits before them, cross-legged and straight-backed and playing with his beard.

A minute passes.

Two.

He can hear Roman soldiers, and many goats.

Three.

The rabbi said nothing for almost an hour, and the multitudes did not diminish, and then he rose and walked away. He waved off the Apostles, and the Magdalene, and they found that they could not follow him, no matter how fiercely they struggled.

He walked back into the city, and saw the little shit standing in front of a tavern.

“Buy me wine.”

“Didn’t you pass the hat around at your sermon?”

“I forgot to take any money.”

They drank many cups of wine cut only slightly with water, and the rabbi said nothing, just stared ahead blinking slowly or not at all. The little shit clocked where the other patron kept their coins, and ate pistachios, and finally he asked,

“How does it feel?”

The rabbi did not answer for three days, and when he did, he said,

“What?”

“Being dead. How does it feel?”

And now the rabbi was silent for forty days and forty nights, and when he finally spoke his voice was battered and low.

“It hurts so bad.”

Helvetica had still not panicked, and had she not been so busy not panicking, she would have been a little proud of the fact. A mouse had run through the office she shared with Mrs. Titleframe, who had shrieked for an hour after demanding a helping hand onto her desk. Mrs. Titleframe was not cut out for waking up and finding out everyone was dead.

She crossed the Main Drag and turned right, north, towards the Upside, and shared the wide sidewalk with the dead, who paid no heed. She thought about movies again, the lying piles of shit. The dead are obsessed with the living in movies. They wanna eat ’em or warn ’em about things. This was not, so far, Helvetica’s experience. It was just, you know, Tuesday morning in a grubby neighborhood.

Past Midden Avenue, which separated the Downside from the Upside, and was named by someone who thought “midden” was a fancy way of saying “middle” and whom no one corrected because they thought it was funny. Past Rubirosa Way, where the gigolos all hang out at a barbershop called Mouse’s, and Samperand Street, where the Fifth First Bank of Little Aleppo is located, and past Randy’s Record Barn, which had barbaric and rough-hewn speakers hanging from the rigging that held up the awning; they were blasting Polish wedding songs.

A woman’s shoulder struck hers.

“I’m sorry,” the woman threw behind her as she kept going.

Maybe she should panic, Helvetica thought. A drink first, though. Yes. How could one panic sober? It required a certain looseness.

She passed the hair salon and the movie palace and Rose Street, where all the churches are, but did not turn down it, walking still north until she hit Lamour Street and made a left towards the Salt Wharf. The containers were every color in the world, and all the stevedores were dead. A right onto Widows Way, where a phallic entranceway made from thick layers of black rubber jutted out halfway to the gutter. Three sets of overlapping curtains separated out from in. The sun had been 86’ed from the Morning Tavern a long time ago.

The bartender was tall, with arms full of tattoos, and she was dead. Helvetica sat down, anyway. The Gary twins were at the bar, too. Not too much later, they would begin biting one another, but for now they were still only muttering threats at each other in their made-up twin language. The women ignored them.

“What can I fetch ya?”

“I have no idea,” Helvetica said. She drank wine with her friends, and in her apartment. Wine seemed deeply insufficient.

“When someone comes into my bar and says they don’t know what they wanna drink, I always figure that means tequila.”

Her back was turned before Helvetica could object, and then back with two coasters, two shot glasses, bottle. Place, set; place, set. Pour, pour. The bottle goes on the bar WHAP the cork replaced and the bartender is holding her glass out before her.

“To life,” the dead bartender toasted.

Helvetica did not panic. She repeated the tribute, and the women shot their tequila. The bartender wiped at her chin with the heel of her hand, and poured another two.

“To life,” Helvetica toasted.

She decided not to tell the bartender that she was dead. Or the Gary twins, who were rapidly approaching the toothy portion of their visit, or anyone else in the Morning Tavern, or Dr. Standish and Mrs. Titleframe the next day, or her mother when they spoke on the phone that Sunday, or anyone else at all for the rest of her life, which was seven weeks from the morning the tumor behind her left eye told her that everyone was dead in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

 

A distraction, I don’t know how healthy.

You may be stuck at home, but you could always take a drive over the Segovian Hills to a neighborhood in America. The first Little Aleppo novel, unedited and messy and free your enjoyment. Just stay away from the Armadillo Lounge; nothing good happens in that place.

The Pulaski did not smoke. For both energy and relaxation, they chewed the leaf of the peregrine maria tree, which grew an hour’s walk south of their village; to get schnockered and loopy, they chewed a big honk of it at once. For the Midsummer celebration, all the adults (and the sneaky children) drank a tea made from the psilocybin cybeline mushroom, which grew only in what would come to be called the Segovian Hills. The nictotiana rustica grew in the foothills, but only the Pulaski’s shaman knew that plant’s secret meaning, and did not distill it via burnt vapor. They knew that other tribes made a ritual of inhaling smoke, but it made no sense to the Pulaski. All of them had once stood too close to the fire when the wind shifted, and the thick fumes slammed into their lungs; how could this be desired?

The Whites that murdered the Pulaski loved to smoke. Tobacco was omnipresent in the massacre: they puffed on pipes while planning, chewed on chaw and sniffed snuff during it, and celebrated with fine cigars afterwards; thereafter, lighting up was permitted in all of Little Aleppo for a very long time. Until the 30’s or so, surgeons at St. Agatha’s still did minor procedures with butts dangling from their lips. In 1961, a health food restaurant named  The Boisterous Plantain was the first in the neighborhood to offer a non-smoking section; the building was consumed in a fire the Cenotaph described as both “ironic” and “absolutely, positively arson.” The principal didn’t put a stop to teachers at Paul Bunyan High (Go Blue Oxen!) bumming Marlboro Reds from their students until well into the 80’s.

But, though Little Aleppo was a neighborhood in America, it was also a neighborhood in California, and each year there were fewer and fewer places to enjoy the rich, true taste of a Camel, or the woozy, gummy taste of a Cigarette, which were the generics only found locally. (The packs were completely white, without a warning or any labels at all except CIGARETTE printed in black, in Helvetica.) Locals came to begrudgingly enjoy some restrictions, such as the ban in restaurants, and utterly ignore others, such as the ban in bars. Eating without getting smoke blown in your face is pretty sweet, the average Little Aleppian reasoned. But it’s a bar. You’re poisoning yourself while looking for partners in debauchery. It’s a bar, for Christ’s sake! My grandfather didn’t STORM THE BEACH AT HIROSHIMA SO I CAN NOT SMOKE IN A BAR, the average Little Aleppian further reasoned and then freaked out about.

“And now the Verdance.”

“Not right, Dr. Balls.”

Murphy Can was not sure what Dr. Balls was a doctor of, or whether the title was self-assigned. He hoped for the latter, frankly. The doctor came in every morning, earlyish, bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, and brayed about whatever was on the Cenotaph’s front page. He always wore a tie, and  would slap the paper against the counter in time with his harangues.

“Smoking in the park. Fine thing, Murphy. Sunny day, take off your jacket, light ’em up. Puff away under God. You ban smoking, it’s like banning God.”

Murphy Can was perhaps the only Murphy who is not a Murph. He hated “Murph.” That’s the sound of almost vomiting, he thought. A belch on the brink. He insisted on Murphy, but virtually nothing else.

“In some ways, I suppose.”

“In important ways. Theological ways. It’s in the Bible. Jesus smoked like a goddamed chimney.”

“Is that in there?”

“How can a government infringe on the rights of its citizens in such a fashion?”

“We on the Constitution now?”

“We shall attack this injustice on all fronts. Hogfuckers sucking on our freedoms!”

It was only the two of them in the shop, so Murphy did not ask Dr. Balls to leave hogfucking out of it.

“Know what I like doing?”

“What?”

“Flicking lit butts at the swans.”

“Well, that’s probably one of the reasons they’re passing the law. Do people see you doing it?”

“Hell, yeah. Kids cry. But mostly people encourage me.”

“Those birds have made a lot of enemies,” Murphy said.

The Ash Can was on Ribbon Road, right off the Main Drag, and not really named that. Legally, technically, on all the paperwork, the incorporated business was known as “The Ash Can,” but Murphy had, around a minute after filling out all the paperwork, soured on the title as too cute by half, and so he had never put up a sign informing the public of the store’s name. Everyone just called it “the smoke shop on Ribbon,” and that’s how he answered the phone, too.

Walk-in humidor on the right. Counter opposite the door. Wall of cigarette packs behind the counter, reds and yellows and blues but no browns, colorful like a stage 4 rainbow. Students from the Art Department at Harper were always begging him to let them turn it into a mosaic, a portrait, whatever. Murphy always said no. They were organized by price, just like liquor: generics on the bottom, the name brands in the middle, and the fancy imported shit way up top. The name brands sold the best, as Ribbon Road is just very slightly on the Upside, and so his customers would gladly pay the extra buck for the packaging that let the world know they were not poor.

Up near the window, two old men played chess. Murphy did not know their names; they did not speak; they had been there since the first day he opened. Neither had ever purchased anything, and Murphy had never seen a game begin or end. The guys changed every now and then. He was almost positive the one on the left used to be black. He enjoyed their presence, though. It was fitting, he believed. Bookstores have cats, barbershops have raucous conversations and magazines; smoke shops have two old guys playing chess in the corner. Murphy was just glad they weren’t playing backgammon. The dice would have gotten on his nerves a long time ago, he figured.

“Tighter. That’s what it’s getting around here, tighter,” Dr. Balls pointed out. He did not have a mustache, but he should have, and then he walked out without saying goodbye. He never did. Murphy didn’t care.

Immense poster on the wall. Man shooting an elephant. Sur la chasse pour le goût read the logo. Please do not translate this poster to me anymore read the hand-written note taped up next to the logo.

Fancy Delaware walked in. She was wearing jeans and a fleece coat because she would not go in the smoke shop while in her scrubs. Addicts love to draw lines in the sand. Lets ’em point to a group of people and say At least I’m not them.

“Murphy.”

“Doc.”

“Hell of a morning.”

“Hasn’t made any left turns so far.”

He pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from its berth behind him, laid it on the counter, topped it with a plain-white matchbook; she snatched it into her pocket. Murphy had always wondered if Fancy knew Dr Balls, but not enough to have ever asked.

“Smoking ban in the Verdance,” he told her.

“Good.”

“You think?”

“Couple months ago, someone nearly took out a swan’s eye with a cigarette. Asshole.”

“Those birds have made a lot of enemies.”

“Oh, yeah,” Fancy agreed. “I was calling the swan the asshole. They brought it to my goddamned ER.”

“Wouldn’t it need a vet?”

“Without question. No wiggle room on that one. A bird goes to a veterinarian, not the hospital. But the vet refused to open his door when he saw how angry the swan was, and so the cops brought it to us.”

“Pissed-off?”

“Apoplectic. Hysterically enraged. I don’t know if the brain of a waterfowl is capable of entering a fugue state, but that’s what it seemed like. Broke a nurse’s jaw. A male nurse.”

“They’re all muscle under those feathers,” Murphy said.

“Which were all over the place. Swan feathers are actually quite greasy. And don’t forget the terror-shit it squirted on every surface. We had to sterilize the whole damn place.”

“Did it lose its eye?”

“No.”

Fancy laid bills on the counter, piled exact change on top of them. Her ball cap was yellow, and had a blue cartoon bull on it. The register was third or fourth-hand, and no longer calculated, but was solid and bronze and made noises that reassured the customers. TICK TACK TICK the keys even though none of them did anything except the one that opened SHA-CHACK! the drawer; that was the sound of honest commerce right there. He wrote the transaction’s details down in a pad. Running tally.

“That’s a win for all involved.”

“Didn’t feel like a win. I didn’t even want to be playing the game. It was traumatizing, and I’m an ER doctor. I’ve sewn people’s faces back on. I’ve never had a nightmare about work until those cops chucked that fucking swan into my emergency room.”

“Maybe you should see a shrink.”

“Nah, I’d tell her that I calm myself down after the swanmares by fantasizing about going up to the Verdance in the middle of the night with an air rifle and murdering all of them.”

“All six?”

“Yeah,” Fancy said. “Fuck ’em.”

“An overreaction, but an understandable one.”

“That’s the sort of thing psychiatrists write down, and I’m simply not comfortable with that.”

“Also understandable.”

“99% I’m not gonna do it.”

“I like those odds,” Murphy said.

“See you if I see you,” she nodded, and out the door past the chess players. One was playing the Catalan Opening, and the other was countering with the Semi-Slav Defense. Fancy didn’t know how to play chess past the basic moves, so she did not recognize the boldness of the counter.

It was quiet again, just the radio murmuring KHAY, only loud enough to tamp down the silence. His pack of True Green 100’s was next to the pad he wrote his business on, picked it up, shook one from the ripped-open mouth. The match FFT shake it out PHWOO and the smoke bandied about his skull and Murphy Can figured there was a metaphor in there, but he didn’t figure much beyond that in the smoke shop on Ribbon in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Nothing in Little Aleppo had ever been built in the proper amount of time. Structures went up overnight–“Helen, has there always been a dry-dock across the street?”–or they lingered in half-finished interregnumicity, pieces attached now and then like those French cathedrals that took nine generations to stand on their own. Torah, Torah, Torah was looking to be of the latter category.

The new synagogue lay in the outline of the old one, shared the previous foundation. The fire had not cracked the cement, and the inspectors found no fault, so the new could be set atop the dead. Rabbi Levy liked that, and alluded to the fact in his sermons most every Saturday morning in the Jews’ temporary home in the First Church of the Infinite Christ. His congregation nodded along in agreement and approval when he made the comparisons. Lately, though, he had begun detailing his encounters with the contractors in a manner that was less rabbinical than it was “Lenny Bruce at the end.” His congregation did not enjoy this at all, and was on the verge of making Shushy Greenbaum say something.

It was the stopwatch that drew the Reverend Arcade Jones’ attention.

“My friend.”

“Hey, Reverend.”

“Stopwatch.”

“There’s nothing going on over there. No work.”

Torah, Torah, Torah was next door to the First Church of the Infinite Christ, and there was no fence. There was a long tradition on Rose Street, where Little Aleppo kept all the religion penned up, of not erecting fences between the properties. Symbolically, it was poetic; practically, it caused feuds over property lines and errant frisbees that lasted decades. There was about twenty feet of church grass, and then the Jewish parking lot which now contained some of the least Jewish machinery ever made.

The men were just outside the church’s side door, and Rabbi Levy had not even flinched when the Reverend joined him. Stopwatch. Parking lot. Stop watch. Parking lot.

“Nine minutes and–”

Rabbi Levy paused for four seconds, then continued,

“–thirty seconds. Not one piece of equipment has moved. No one’s so much as picked up a shovel.”

“Nothing they’re doing over there needs a shovel.”

“An expression. Just an expression. There’s bupkis going on is what I mean.”

“Yeah, all right.”

There was a crane with an enclosed cab that swiveled and lifted, and lifts of both the platform and forked varieties. The beater imports belonging to the workmen; the gleaming gargantuan pickups of the contractors. Port-o-potty.

“Nine minutes and 45 seconds.”

“No, I can’t allow this,” the Reverend said, and he put one mammoth hand on the Rabbi’s shoulder and the other around the stopwatch, and propelled him lovingly yet firmly towards the sidewalk. The Rabbi made a half-hearted stutter-step, but Arcade Jones was the size of a small grizzly bear and Lenny Levy was the size of a small rabbi, so the walk was a foregone conclusion. He removed the timepiece from the Rabbi’s hand and placed it in the pant pocket of his suit, which was the same shade of blue as an impressively blue bluejay, The rabbi’s suit was black.

“Why is this? I have to stay here and supervise.”

“We’re gonna take a little walk, because you’re on some crazy shit, Rabbi. Over-the-line, crazy shit. And I love you. You know this. You are my brother in faith, but you’re my boy, too. I feel the Lord’s love in our friendship.”

“That’s very sweet of you.”

“And you are my guest. Which means I have a responsibility to protect you, and if it’s gotta be from yourself, then so be it. How long you been at it with the watch?”

“What’s with the watch? You’re obsessed with the watch.”

“It’s a red flag. It’s like watching someone through binoculars. It’s a physical manifestation of the emotional crazy. Gamblers call it a ‘tell.'”

“You make up scenarios in your head sometimes,” the Rabbi said.

“We’re gonna take a walk around the Verdance. Gonna look at the lake. Maybe we’ll sit on a bench like old men.

“You just wanna go to the food carts.”

“Not ‘just.’ Also. I’m looking forward to all the stuff I mentioned. And, yes, also the food carts. Everything’s on the menu today, Rabbi. We’re making the rounds!”

It was the Upside of Little Aleppo, and so it was quiet and there was no drag racing at all. They walked west on Rose towards the Main Drag, past St. Martin’s and St. Clement’s, which were the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches, but maybe not in that order. They were the kind of churches in which Jesus’ return was not rejoiced in, but murmured about. Real nice carpets. Their front yards were immaculate.

“I need to be where I was,” Rabbi Levy said upwards. The Reverend was precisely one foot taller than he was, and approximately twice again wider.

“You were in Crazy Town. Heading there, at least.”

“The synagogue is not progressing. There’s no effort being put forth. If I knew what to do, I’d pick up a shovel.”

“No shovels. Rabbi.”

“You know what I mean.”

“There’s trowels. They’re laying brick, so they need trowels.”

“I would pitch in. I’ll rephrase myself so as to not confuse you.”

“Thank you.”

“I would pitch in.”

Across the Main Drag, which is sunny and broad and into the Verdance, where everything grows. The park is shaped like a dumpy egg and three paths cut through it in a ≠ configuration; the two men of the Lord entered at the southeast curve where the Pulaski once grew beans and peas and now lay under the soil massed upon one another, under the layer of nameless whites, under the burned whores, under the slaughtered Chinese. There was a boy with a kite, couple on a blanket.

“A walk in the park,” Rabbi Levy said.

“Nu? What could be so wrong?” the Reverend Arcade Jones answered, curling the end of the sentence up towards Jerusalem, or at least Brooklyn. The Reverend had always been good at voices and accents, and he found the Rabbi’s backwards-phrased melodicism very fun. The only drawback, he had found, was that there was a 50/50 chance the Rabbi would start listing African-American Jews once again.

“Nowadays? Nisht. Used to be you’d get mugged. Noon, you’d get mugged. This is back in the 70’s and 80’s.”

“Funny, everybody’s always telling me that those were the good old days.”

“My friend, these people are assholes.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones threw back his enormous head and laughed.

“I’m not lying to you,” the Rabbi continued. “Noon! Broad daylight! Take ten steps into the park and there’s a kid with a knife. And then another kid would spring out of the bushes with a crowbar and beat the first kid up for your wallet. Complete free-for-all.”

“This is better.”

“Not even a question. Especially for us.”

They crossed the lower horizontal path and passed Cowboy Alvin, who was at his easel and in his buckskins. Having him draw your children was such a strongly-held tradition in the neighborhood that his sketches had been accepted in lieu of birth certificates on occasion.

“Us? Us us?”

“Blacks and Jews.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The best time is right now. The American Black? The American Jew? Right now, this is the best. And it’s not so hot. But it’s better than ten, fifty, and hundred years ago.”

“Long ways to go.”

“I agree entirely. I’m saying better. A park you can walk around in without getting stabbed is better. Better is good. Pile ’em on top of each other and pretty soon you’re very comfortable.”

Now they walked over the upper horizontal footpath and there was the softball field, and the fountain with all the pissing plaster babies, and the Rosen Bridge, which always took forever to get over, and the Second Avenue Subway Tunnel, which had been stolen from Manhattan in ’75. There is regular rain in Little Aleppo, which never sizzles nor frosts, and so the landscapers’ main task in the Verdance was not encouraging growth, but holding back vegetative chaos. Renegade ivies and kudzus broached firewalls, probed for weakness; machetes had been issued to the grounds crew to deal with the bamboo. No mowing schedule could keep the lawns bald of daffodils and dandelions.

Silence for a few hundred feet, and then the Rabbi said,

“The stopwatch may have been a bit much.”

“Mm-hm.”

“53 years, that synagogue stood. 53 years, the Jews of Little Aleppo had a safe place to go, a safe place to keep the Torah. And that’s gone.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones stopped, and then so did Rabbi Levy.

“There were no Jews in Little Aleppo 54 years ago?”

“Of course there were. There’s been Jews in Little Aleppo since 1863.”

“And none of ’em had a temple?”

“Of course they did. A bunch of them,” the Rabbi said.

He put his hands in his pocket and started off again past the Reverend.

“They all burned down,” he continued, and when the Reverend caught him up again in three massive strides, they were both laughing.

“Is there anything,” the Reverend asked, “in this neighborhood that hasn’t burned down a bunch of times?”

“Sure. Lots of places have only burned down once.”

The men turned southward at the apex of the park’s egg shape, and they were on the edge of Shrieker’s Corner. God-shouters and flat-earthers and bearded men who knew the truth about flouride, about a dozen all caterwauling and ataxiated and sure. There was also one member of the LAPD (No, Not That One) who was on the Chief’s shit list; the shouting wackadoos would regularly abrogate the ban on amplification, and it was the cop’s job to confiscate the bullhorn/megaphone/PA system, and it invariably turned into a wrestling match. Other cops would drop by just to watch and laugh.

“It’s my fault.”

“What a ridiculous thing to say,” the Reverend said, and waved the statement away.

“I think of this guy that did this and I wanna wring his neck. Last fight I was in was with Teddy Berlin. This was in sixth grade. But I dream about finding the guy that did this and hurting him. Actively dream about it.”

Little Aleppo’s fire department’s chief, Flower Childs, had left the bit about the Jack of Instance being an animistic being composed of fire and intent out of her final report. Hell, she was planning on taking that shit to the grave. So the neighborhood still thinks some dude set the fires.

“Those feelings are natural. But vengeance is reserved.”

“I’ve heard this.”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“Yes, I’ve heard He said that.”

“And this is a blessing, Rabbi. This is another gift from Him. It is not that God claims petty ownership over revenge, but that He removes from us the burden. You don’t gotta do that. It’s not your duty. Let Christ carry that.”

“He was good at carrying things.”

“Jesus had a broad back.”

And now back down cross the upper horizontal lane and past the Pasture where the Pulaski would celebrate Midsummer, and where KHAY holds its annual summer concert.

“I wanna let it go.”

“Yeah.”

“I know I should.”

“Yeah.”

“I know I should.”

They walked over the lower horizontal path with its painted bike lanes and sporadic chalked artworks and through the oaks surrounding Bell Lake. They passed a sign that that read, simply, THE SWANS ARE HATEFUL BIRDS. The warning was locally famous, and bootleg tee-shirts containing the phrase could be purchased at any of the food stands lining the lake’s southern shore. The admonition was neither ironic, nor understated: the three pairs of Bell swans were theatrically vicious. You sensed that the birds knew that they were the bad guys, and that they were getting off on their villainy. Just as everyone who grew up in the neighborhood has a sketch by Cowboy Alvin, so too do they have a story about getting the shit kicked out of them by the swans.

“What do you want?”

“Good health for my family.”

“From the food carts,” the Reverend said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Hunger has nothing to do with it. You eat dinner because you’re hungry. You eat park food because you’re in a park. You’re in a theater, you eat popcorn. Go to a ballgame, you eat a hot dog. Park? Park food.”

“What is this ‘park food?’ That’s not a category.”

“Oh, yeah. Park food is designed to be eaten while strolling gently, or sitting on a bench thinking about stuff. You want a good handle. Can’t need any utensils. Not too messy, either. Gotta be able to wipe your hands and mouth with one napkin. Ribs won’t work. You could cook the finest ribs in the state, but no one’s buying them in the park.”

The free market backed up the Reverend’s assertion: you could buy churros, pretzels, popsicles, and cotton candy in the Verdance, along with a sweet, baguette-shaped pastry sold by a woman named Sonya that she called a Bohdo and said was from Gabon, unless the person buying it was from Gabon, in which case she said it was from Suriname. The Reverend bought two, asked politely for extra napkins, joined the Rabbi on a bench–green, slatted–facing the lake, where the swans were lazily figure-eighting around.

The Reverend Arcade Jones watched the white birds and thought of the Infinite Christ, of Christ Iterated and Immortal and Irreducible. Christ was the brick, the mortar, the layer. He was the plans for the building, and He was the ruins. He was the arsonist. He was the fireman. A diamond tumbling through a house of mirrors: that was the Reverend’s Christ. Omnifaceted. Rabbi Lenny Levy was raised in Little Aleppo, so he just kept an eye on the mean fucks.

“You ever hear the story of the golem?”

“The little demon with the ring and whatever?”

“No. That was Gollum. Tolkein probably stole the word.”

“What’s a golem?”

“It’s like Frankenstein, but way before that. And Frankenstein came to life through science. Golem is pure magick. This was back in the Old Country, don’t worry about which one. For the Jews, all the old countries were the same Old Country. Every once in a while, a mob of goyim would ride into the neighborhood and beat everyone to death with sticks.”

“The good old days,” the Reverend said with a mouthful of Bohdo, then felt bad about it. Park food didn’t mean park manners.

“Exactly. So this was in the town of Chelm. I’ve told you about Chelm.”

“Chelm reminds me of Little Aleppo.”

“Me, too. Many learned rabbis and gifted mystics lived in Chelm. There was Rabbi Schooly Ben Benjamin, who could recite the Talmud backwards, but only at parties when everyone begged him to. The Rebbe Bam Yosel, who discerned the secret geometry underlying the Torah. Turns out if you draw lines connecting the right letters, it forms a shape with an inside and two outsides. And Rabbi Potchen Tuchus invented cottage cheese.”

“You don’t think of cottage cheese as something that gets invented.”

“And yet the fact stands. But the most brilliant of all the rabbis in Chelm was Avram Ben Momo. Reb Momo, he was called. He had libraries in his head, the saying goes. Torah, Talmud, Zohar, the commentaries, all memorized and at the fingertips of his mind. And not just them. The other Holy Books, and volumes on medicine and history in language after language. And maybe even, it was whispered in the shul, some books that he shouldn’t have in there.”

The Reverend tried once more to hand the second snack to the Rabbi, who waved it off again and continued,

“So one day becomes once in a while, and the goyim ride into the neighborhood and start beating everyone to death with sticks. They ride in, whack whack whack, ride out, couple days go by, do it again. You get sick of it real quick.”

“I would imagine.”

“Avram Ben Momo goes down to the river and gathers clay in great big buckets. Hauls it back to the temple and sculpts a man. Big guy, your size. But crude. No fingers. Mitten hands. Eyes and ears were poked holes, and no mouth. While he was laying the clay in place, Reb Momo sang a song that contained all the names of God.”

“How many names does the Jewish God have?”

“Zero. Or twelve or sixteen. Maybe 108.”

“Gotcha.”

“Reb Momo knew how many. Not so important that I know it. As the Lord spoke man into existence, a man spoke the golem into existence. And as it is God’s will that drives man, so it was man’s will that controlled the golem. The Reb wrote one word on a piece of parchment and slid the note into the great, empty skull. It said אָגֵן.”

“Pardon?”

“Ah-gehn. It means I will protect. And it did, too. Swords couldn’t hurt it, arrows, knives, whatever they had back then. Couldn’t even burn it. Scared the hell out of the horses. Moved faster than you think it would. Mob of goyim stormed onto the block, and the golem tore through ’em. Chased ’em all home. He protected.”

The small flock of Mallards that shared the lake with the swans were waddling about on the far grass, as the swans were swimming. When the swans took to land, the ducks would get in the water. It was a tenuous relationship at best–the larger waterfowl chased the smaller off every few days–but the only semi-civil one the swans had with the rest of the animal kingdom. In particular, they did not like dogs, but they also despised the feral cats that stalked the Verdance’s underbrush and loathed the raccoons and straight-up murdered squirrels if they got hold of one.

“The golem versus the goyim,” the Reverend said.

“For the title. And the golem won. Chased ’em all home. And followed ’em. The golem knew to protect, but it didn’t know when to stop. Mercy, compassion, kindness: these come from the Word of God, but in its head was only a word of man. It was a massacre. The golem went house-to-house ripping people apart, picking ’em up and bashing their heads into the ground. Didn’t discriminate. Anyone who wasn’t a Jew.”

“Horror movie.”

“Sounds like it. Eventually, the Reb Momo regained control of the creature. He said he brought it back to the river and that it was washed away in the current. But there were whispers in the shul.”

“Aren’t there always?”

“People said that the Reb sent the golem into hiding. but not before inserting a new parchment into its head that read הישאר קרוב.”

“Which means?”

“Stay close.”

The Reverend finished the second Bohdo and brushed his mouth off. The swans, all six, had gone to speed across the lake towards an unattended schnauzer; they were flapping furiously as their feet slapped at the water beneath them, and the Rabbi called out to the dog to run, and advised it not to be a schmuck, and asked if it had read the sign, but the schnauzer paid him no mind next to Bell Lake in the Verdance, where everything grows, which is the park in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Bring in two million pairs of tube socks, bring ’em in via the Salt Wharf, and then store ’em in the Warehouse District all safe and secure, and parcel off your supply at a mark-up to as many retailers as you could find, who then ratchet up the price again and sell ’em to the fellow or gal who wanted themselves a fine, cotton stocking. Guy who does that is called a wholesaler.

But when I do it, Lucy Twigg always thought, I’m a trafficker.

A man grows a plant. A plant! A man bets his stake that the earth will be giving, and the rains will be steady, and the sun will be true. If that blossom blooms, the man–tenderly and with great affection–plucks that plant. Then he does some bullshit to it, and it’s rum. He is feted, respected, adored, this rum-making man. Political office is his for the taking. Hooray, cry the children. Hooray for the rum-making man. A different man grows a different plant, does some different bullshit to it, and it’s cocaine. The army comes and gets the different man, and a tank shoots him in the face. Ludicrous. The same action was performed, Lucy thought. The same need was met.

Homo ebrius. This is the true nature of man, Lucy believed. Homo sapiens meant “man, the self-aware,” but most people she met were anything but. Marx suggested Homo faber, the tool-making man, but Lucy didn’t take suggestions from Marx if she could help it. Schopenhauer proposed Homo metaphysicus, but he would, wouldn’t he? Maybe we should get a bit more specific with our nomencladding, that hippie who wrote all those long books with all the fuck scenes in ’em said: humans are actually two species, Homo neophilus and neophobus. It had something to do with one’s relationship to novelty. None of those books ever made any sense to Lucy. She went with Homo ebrius. Man, the fucked-up. The Lord gives us a perfectly good consciousness, and there we go altering it the second He turns His head. Eve didn’t tempt Adam with no apple; she was just sharing her stash. Little something to take the edge off, cuz even the Garden of Eden gets boring.

She told herself these stories when she got bored. She was bored.

“Boredom is good. I love being bored. Even better is when everyone else is bored. You know why?”

“Cuz when people are bored they shoot more dice, and they shoot more dope.”

The Friend smiled. He still had his teeth, but they looked like dentures, and his eyebrows were jet black even though the small ruff of hair semi-circling his head was silver. His suit was the size of a bar mitzvah boy’s, but it was the price of the party. Lucy could not recall ever seeing The Friend in anything other than a suit. She couldn’t even picture it.

“That’s why I always liked you. Student of human nature. It is the stable society and predictable outcome that allows vice to thrive. When presented with a world lacking excitement, man will search it out. Or woman, excuse me.”

“You’re pardoned, my patron,” she said, and waved the sign of the cross at him.

“Of course, women pursue different avenues of excitement than men. Drugs are about equal. Gambling, too, but ladies like card games more than dice. Sports book’s almost equal, which always surprises people. Men buy all the sex. Not all, but all enough. If women are paying for it, they’re not coming into the marketplace. Making private arrangements, maybe.”

“Or maybe not.”

“Yeah, or maybe not. I wasn’t advocating a position, just illuminating a possible explanation.  But I return to my original point: boredom is good. It is desired. You see my Cadillac?”

Room 104 faced the alley behind the Hotel Synod; there was a 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville parked there. For almost four decades, The Friend had driven–been driven in, more rightly–that year’s model. There was no dealership in Little Aleppo, so the owner of the lot in C—–a City would drive the first one he received over the pass into the neighborhood each October. Around 1983 or 84, The Friend decided GM no longer knew what the fuck it was doing, and that the new Caddies were abominations. He found himself a Naples Yellow coupe from ’77 with doors the size of hockey arenas, and understood America not at all. What was the point of being rich if Cadillacs were ugly?

“It’s a classic.”

“Complete bore. Never surprises you. Turn the key, starts right up. Hit the brakes, car stops. Every time. And because it does so, it performs its essential task with efficiency, which is to get me where I wanna go. All machines have essential tasks. Little Aleppo’s a machine.”

“And what is its essential task?”

“To make me money.”

She laughed and half-stood and reached across her desk, which was far too large for her or the room. Lucy liked it that way; it made her associates flash back to being called before the principal, the nun, the judge. Her feet came off the floor, she grunted Oooof, worked the top drawer open, snatched the edge of the jellybean bag with her fingertips. On her way back to her seat, Lucy plucked an small, heart-shaped glass candy dish from atop her blotter. When she summoned people to her office, they knew instantly upon entrance what kind of meeting it would be by the presence (or lack thereof) of the sugary treat. On occasion, people saw that there were no jellybeans forthcoming and tried to book it out of the room, but so far they have all been physically prevented from doing so by a large gentleman named Kirk who Lucy insisted on referring to as Kirk the Guard.

“Excuse my terrible manners.”

“Absolutely not. Nothing to excuse. I’m the rude one. I came by without calling.”

She shook out the ‘beans into the dish, and offered it forth with both hands to The Friend. They were both sitting on the supplicant’s side of Lucy’s desk. She would never receive him from behind that battleship, with the wall behind it with the apothecary’s cabinet the size of two coffins standing side-by-side, and covered with writing from multiple alphabets, most of which had been identified. To the left and right of the cabinet were six-foot sculptures, owls, not healthy ones, owls with rotten souls that held grudges; their beaks followed you around the room. The desk was secretly raised two inches, and the hidden platform below the high-backed chair was jacked up another two. Whenever The Friend came by, she offered him her perch. He always declined, which Lucy thought was lovely of him.

There was a couch–a love seat, technically–behind the visitor’s chairs, along the wall with the door, but no one sat there for very long, or twice. That was Shitty’s couch, though he only took up one of the two cushions. If you tried to occupy the open seat, Shitty would live up to his name and sink his teeth into your thigh, or dick, or thigh and dick. He wouldn’t even let Kirk the Guard near him, and Kirk was the one who fed him. Lucy had never been within five feet of him. She loved the cat deeply.

“Calling shmalling.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

The Friend picked a single green candy from the dish, ate it, put his hand back in his lap, took another green one, and then he ate that and did not say anything for a long moment. Lucy thought fondly of her usual meetings, when she was the fuck-er and not the fuck-ee, and could pull the prolonged silence bit just to make people sweat.

“Did you stop by just for candy?”

“Wanted to see you,” he said and tapped her forearm lightly. “You know you’re one of my favorite people.”

“Do I?”

“You should.”

Lucy slapped the jellybeans on the desk and slumped over her knees.

“I’m so fucking bored I wanna die,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I was talking about boredom before.”

“How would you know?”

He smiled, a large face on a small head.

“How long I have I been in charge?”

“Forever.”

“Is that common?”

“Nope.”

“I hear all; I see all.”

“That sounds like a curse,” Lucy said.

“Some days.”

“Which days?”

“Tuesdays.”

“Sounds right. That’s my whole life, Tuesdays. It’s always Tuesday afternoon in here.”

Most places have glory days. The Norwegian Hotel originally hosted fancy people (the glitterati) and feted writers (the literati) and loose women (the titterati) before it turned into a flophouse. Ella Fitzgerald headlined at the Menefreghista Club, and so did Jimmy Durante, and Tommy Amici; now there were punker girls in fishnets with electrical tape X-ing out their nipples on stage every night but Wednesdays, when mulleted men in improbable underwear shook their semi-hard dicks at bachelorette parties. Everything changes; nothing lasts.

But not The Nod. It was a dump the day it opened, and has shown no improvement since. None of the doors quite fit the frames, and the carpets offered multiple and contradictory explanations to the question What did you do during the war? The sconces were surly. The drywall wasn’t. The entire third floor had been overly wainscoted. All of the glass was stained, and not in the Jesus way.

“I hear it was built on an Indian graveyard.”

“The whole neighborhood’s built on an Indian graveyard. They were called the Pulaski.”

“I love their peak.”

“Top-notch peak. Lost my virginity up there.”

“Common location for that milestone.”

Pulaski Peak was the tallest of the seven Segovian Hills that separated Little Aleppo from America. The summit had been flattened into a soft diamond ten acres in area, and at the western vertex was the Harper Observatory, which looked just like the White House, but a little bit bigger and with a giant telescope sticking out of it where the Truman Balcony should be. East of that were well-kept fields for picnicking, and a bandshell for musicking, and maintenance buildings, and a churro guy during the day.

To the south of the observatory was the parking lot. It was large, to accommodate the tourists and school buses; and poorly-lit, because the New Deal money the site had been built with ran out before light stanchions were installed; and the view was of Little Aleppo, the harbor, the ocean, the stars and moon. Teen horniness was not taken into consideration during the creation of the parking lot, but the result was as if it had: borrowed station wagons and shitboxes paid for with after-school jobs bounced up and down all night. Rich kids’ cars, too. Occultists had a theory that the amount of teenage humping waxed and waned with the moon’s phases, but the astronomers who worked at the observatory collected a year’s worth of evidence and proved that teenage humping was, in fact, a constant.

Evan. His name was Evan, Lucy remembered. He was tall and gawky and had a brutal face. Nose like an expressionist. KSOS was playing golden oldies, she remembered that, too. All the emotion of opera, but only four of the chords. Pre-Motown. Skinny black men in matching suits sharing a microphone in some storefront studio. He climbed on top and slid back off, that was all there was to it. Lucy was happy to get it over with. Sh-boom, sh-boom.

“I’m dying here.”

“No. You’d know if you were dying.”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“I insist,” The Friend said.

“I imagined that the life of a criminal would be more interesting than this.”

He chuckled and took another green jellybean.

“Nah. Turns out that if you do it right, it’s just a job.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re bored?”

“Stiff.”

“Buy some shit.”

“I got everything I want.”

“Yoga. You tried yoga?”

“I’ve been doing yoga since I’m eight. Yoga has nothing to do with this. Leave yoga out of it.”

“It’s just that I’ve noticed women love yoga.”

“Forget the yoga.”

“Do you like Tahoe?”

“I don’t gamble, I don’t drink, and I don’t give a shit about lakes. There’s nothing in Tahoe for me. Besides, I can’t go away.”

Lucy was right. There were two problems with the drug trade, as she saw it. The first was the drugs. They took up a mindboggling amount of space. A bookie needed a notebook to run his business, and a prostitute walked herself to work; selling drugs required warehouses and forklifts. And guards, obviously, and for the whole shabang to be moved every couple months because thieving-ass junkies would find it and wriggle in through the water pipes

The second problem was is that criminal organizations are made up of criminals. Lot of sweethearts sell dope, but all of ’em are small-timers and Lucy Twigg did not deal with small-timers. The fuckers she had to spend her days contending with were scabrous, and sweaty, and plain delusional. Lucy had several friends on the faculty of Harper College, and when she would see them for drinks, they would tell her about the ambitious machinations going down in their departments, and Lucy would just think to herself that she had regular conversations with a man who demanded to be called “Fuck.” First thing he said to her.

“Call me Fuck.”

“I won’t.”

“You have to. It’s my name.”

“No, it isn’t. It might be what people call you. but it’s not your name.”

“I’m Fuck, dammit.”

And then they argued about the price of heroin for a little bit. Lucy envied her academic friends. She had been a poor student, but thought she’d make a great professor. Light schedules, tweed, ruining grad students’ lives. Idyllic. She could walk across campus and the kids would call out to her Hey Professor Twigg! and she could call back Hey, Steve-a-rino! or whatever the fuck the kid’s name was. She could fuck a colleague from Wesleyan at the same conference each year, mean to write a novel about the relationship, never get around to it. This was not her life. Her life was spent haggling over the cost of pharmaceuticals in a junkie’s hotel that was, at least, mostly haunted.

(Structural-spiritual possession was so common in Little Aleppo that residents had developed a system of qualifiers. Toilets flush at random, windows slap shut out of nowhere? Slightly haunted. Furniture rearrange itself? Somewhat haunted. Furniture rearrange itself while you’re sitting on it? Well-enough haunted. Stairwells come to life and chase inhabitants down the hallways? Mostly haunted. It took an actual ghost–friendly or otherwise–to be called “haunted” without an adjective. The Nod had no officially-recognized ghosts, although the poet Boylan Burcke used to wander around going OOOOOO with a sheet over his head when he got drunk.)

Fuck was one of the better ones, she thought. Virago Kidd sold all the cocaine on the Upside, and wore too much cologne. He told her one time that it was to throw the drug dogs off, but Lucy knew that was a lie; the LAPD (No, Not That One) had not had any drug dogs since Scraps was caught selling pills he had stole from the evidence locker. BAD DOG! was the headline on the Cenotaph the day after his arrest. Ibrahim Thlem moved kilos of dope  every week, and every week he would get in a furious wrestling match with Kirk the Guard and they would fuck up the kitchenette. The pot dealers were the worst. The theories. The fucking theories. About the government, about the weather, about the role of intradimensional beings in the ’81 World Series. They’d start in Hey, man, you know the real story behind that shit? and then they were up to speed and gone.

Thieves, liars, and maniacs, the lot of ’em, and they all wanted to be king. Fuckhead! she wanted to yell at them. Being the king means talking to idiots like you. I’m the king and I don’t recommend the job. She kept it to herself, though. Easier to talk a piranha out its teeth than talk a man out of his ambition. Why bother? They’d last a few years, simmering in the little chair across her desk, until one day they made a play for power, and then the next week a new face would be in the little chair across her desk, and someone new would sell all the cocaine on the Upside and wear too much cologne.

“What if I quit?”

“I don’t accept your resignation,” The Friend answered.

“Not resign. Quit.”

The room was still. Sound of the elevator, someone getting beaten, the traffic out on Clarke Street.

“I don’t accept your resignation.”

The room was still still. There were no more green jellybeans left in the dish, so The Friend did not take one. Just sat there softly.

“How about art?”

“Who?”

“Not Art, art. Paintings. Cheer this place up.”

Several years ago, Lucy had tried to remove the wallpaper, but it fought back.

“What? Art? Sure, okay, great, a painting. I tell you I’m bored and you give me a painting?”

“When I was a kid and I’d tell my mother I was bored, I got a slap. Painting’s a good deal. You like Mondrian?”

“The lines and the rectangles?”

“Yeah, him.”

“He’s okay.”

“You’ll put it on the wall over there,” he motioned towards the space over the cat-occupied couch, “and you can look it at it all day. Happiest fucking painting you’ve ever seen. Lots of red and yellow, nice. Your mood will rise like bread. I’ll send my guy over to hang it tomorrow morning. Best decision you ever made.”

She did not recall making any decisions, and he stood up. She followed.

“Virago’s stopping by soon, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, and checked her watch. “Real soon.”

“Okay. Do me a favor.”

The Friend took a baseball-sized roll of cash from his pocket, peeled off a hundred, replaced the roll, extended the bill.

“Lemme talk to him. You take a walk around the block.”

“It’s a shitty block.”

“Then take a run. Go get some Chinese.”

Lucy knew better than to play Oh, no, I couldn’t with the hundred, so she took it and said,

“Don’t adjust my chair.”

“I’m gonna adjust your chair.”

“Don’t pet the cat.”

“I won’t pet the cat.”

“Will I see you again soon?”

“The future’s no snitch.”

The door closed behind her on The Friend adjusting her chair, and past Kirk on the couch, and the two enormous men she did not know by name, and the kitchenette and the teevee set with the rabbit ears, and down the hallway, same story told different behind each door, and Frankie Teakettle proprieting the shit out of the lobby where the Christmas tree still leaned in May, and then Clarke Street with all her accidental pedestrians, Stretch the legs, get some chow mein. And then back again, always back, always returning to the Hotel Synod, which is a junkie’s hotel in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo kept God in all His iterations penned up on Rose Street, which was on the Upside, and all the corpses in Foole’s Yard, which was on the Downside, so funeral processions ran south down the Main Drag. Praise the dead in the church, and bury them in the graveyard; in between, there was a parade. When Larry Shambles the banjo player played his last chord, half the musicians in the neighborhood stepped sprightly behind the casket with their trombones and bass drums; the trumpeters had the traditional fistfight. Lana Lynn delivered for Vafunculo’s before a Chevy sideswiped her into oncoming traffic, and all the other pizza boys painted their scooters black and weaved through traffic to count coup against the hearse’s windows. Gilroy Catcher’s liver fell out of his asshole at the Armadillo Room, and his buddies made the driver go real slow so they could walk behind because none of them had driver’s licenses anymore.

The processions proceeded. One a day, sometimes. Sidewalk kept bustling, commerce continued. Old men removed their hats, but not always. Life went on for Little Aleppians, even when they were presented with concrete evidence that it didn’t.

But not when it was a kid.

“The rabbi spoke really well. I never heard that story before.”

“It’s not a Bible story. It’s from the Midrash.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Deacon Blue said. He and the Reverend Arcade Jones were trying to–gently, o so gently–pull the sheet off of the larger-than-life-sized Jesus suspended over the pulpit of the First Church of the Infinite Christ. The congregation from Torah, Torah, Torah had been worshiping there since their synagogue burned down, and the crucifix was covered during their services. The reverend and the deacon had discussed whether or not cloaking Christ was a sin; they came to the conclusion that it might be, but He would forgive them.

The sheet had gotten stuck on the Crown of Thorns.

“The Midrash is a commentary. Ancient rabbis read the Old Testament, and they argued about it, and they wrote down the arguments.”

“The Jews are a contentious people.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Both men had removed their black suit jackets. Revered Jones tried holding the end of the sheet and flipping his hands up real quick, so that an amplitude wave would travel through the fabric, but he couldn’t get the angle right and there was just a noise SNAP SNAP in the empty church.

Rabbi Levy was in the first car of the procession, which was a Mercedes that Eugene and Imogene Teitel had borrowed from her uncle, Manny, because their Camry was beige, and had dents in it. The Mercedes was big, and it was black, and it was perfect to drive behind your boy’s body. That’s the kind of situation that calls for vehicular gravitas. The Rabbi sat in the back with Imogene. Eugene was in the passenger seat. They hated each other. The cancer had spread beyond its wildest dreams.

A woman named Bruriah met her husband at the door of their home. He was rabbi, and he had been at study.

“Husband, something was lent to me many years ago. Today, the man who made the loan came to reclaim what was his.”

The rabbi did not understand.

“If it was lent to you, then you must return it. You have no choice in the matter.”

“But, husband, that which I was lent is dear to me. I do not know whether I will be able to go on without its presence in my life.”

“But, my wife, it was never yours in the first place. You should praise this man for his generosity, and receive joy from the fact that he will surely enjoy it as much as you did.”

She took the rabbi’s hand and led him into the house, where lay the body of their son.

That was the story Rabbi Levy told to the congregation.

The hearse was a Cadillac, because most of the caskets it carried contained Americans, and Americans go to their graves in Cadillacs. Immaculate inside and out. No fingerprints at all on the chrome. Sign of respect. Bench seat up front. Crushed velour, not leather. Counter-intuitively, it is easier to get odors out of velour than leather. The rear compartment had no fabric at all. It could be hosed out. Funeral business is full of secrets, and one of them is that there is far more leakage than one would expect. Metal shelf slid out–well-oiled, noiseless–and the coffin went on the shelf, and the shelf slid back in. The platform was grown-up size, but little caskets fit on it just fine.

“He was two?”

“Almost.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, you could blame Him,” Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, said.

Julio Montez was a Catholic, and he crossed himself when she said that. Gussy had been sending him up and down the aisles of The Tahitian with a coffee can for months. The can had a black-and-white copy of a picture of Baby Al taped to it. People threw in a buck, five, nothing, some change. Gussy did it a few times, but she’d lose it halfway through and start bawling, so she made Julio do the job. She ran the cash over to Rose Street at the end of the week. People like to feel like they’re helping, even when they can’t.

“There’s a God.”

“I dunno,” she said.

“No, there’s a God. There is.”

Julio was sure of God’s existence. Every authority figure he’d ever encountered had assured him of the fact. He continued,

“But I don’t understand how He lets kids get sick.”

“Maybe He’s a mean drunk.”

They stood on the sidewalk underneath the jutting marquee of The Tahitian, with black block letters all uppercase against the illuminated white background and reading UNIVERSAL MONSTER MARATHON. Gussy screened ’em all once a year, and sold out the house. Dracula, and Wolfman, and Frankenstein, and Lagoon Creature. Each represented a different primal fear: sex, night, birth, lagoons. They were barely an hour apiece, and so could make up one long night’s programming. The house cheered the monsters, and heckled the decent burghers trying to stop them. Everyone loves movie monsters, because movie monsters get theirs in the end. Gussy wished the screen was a prison, and she could keep the wicked trapped in light. It was silly to wish, she thought. She still did.

First came the cop car, with the green light flashing, and then the Cadillac, long and discreet, and then the Mercedes, thick and rumbling. The procession followed. Cousins in a Datsun passing around a bottle of vodka, and the Montreal contingent of the family in rented mini-vans. Dr. Cho and two oncology nurses from St Agatha’s in his Beemer. The Melted Fucktoads spent most of their days dealing meth and hitting each other with pool cues, but they had a soft spot for kids and had done several charity motorcycle rides for Baby Al; they rode their Harleys two abreast; they had removed all the swastikas from their jackets out of respect.

All four grandparents. They were not very old at all.

Past Randy’s Record Barn, which was playing no music at all from the speakers Randy Plaster dragged out onto the sidewalk every morning, and past Mendoza’s, where Mundy Proft ignored her tacos al carbon to stand and watch the child go by, and past Leslie Easterbrook and his wife, Leslie, in the doorway of the sock rental place, and shoppers and barkeeps and secret perverts and the unconscionably tall. The poor who had commuted to the Upside to work, or steal; the rich who belonged on the Upside because of how hard they worked, or stole. Pavement stopped, frozen and heads bowed and openly wailing. If there were pickpockets present, they did not practice their craft.

Midden Street divides Little Aleppo between Upside and Downside, and was named by someone who did not know what “midden” means.

“All is random, and all is terrible. This is the only possible conclusion.”

“Mlaaaargh.”

“No, I cannot imagine. I do not want to. Desperately, I do not want to,” Mr. Venable said.

“Plep.”

The cat had no name, and she was a tortoiseshell, all black on her belly and legs, and mixed black and gray on her back and head. She leaned her right shoulder into his left shin. The sidewalk was not part of her territory, and she had not marked her surroundings with her scent; she was fearful outside, but still followed Mr. Venable outside. He was wearing his customary suit, and a black tie that he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was not tightened, and the top button of his oxblood shirt was not done. There were still customers in the bookstore with no title, but they would be fine. (Unless they wandered into the Circular Annex, which contained the Maps Section; the maps had eidetically transcoagulated themselves into the territory, and it was easy to get lost.)

“I’ve asked. I’ve asked a thousand times,” he said.

“Mlaaaargh.”

“No answer. Never an answer.”

“Plep.”

“Of course I’ll keep asking.”

“Plep.”

The Cadillac brumbling in first gear. Barely feathering the accelerator. Mercedes behind with Eugene in the front, who be divorced in ten months, and Imogene, who will be divorced in ten months and dead in thirteen, in the back with Rabbi Levy. He is holding her hand. My hand is bigger than his, Imogene notices. She can see his fingernails, which are very neat, and she wonders if the rabbi gets manicures, and then the loathing–towering and rushing forward like that famous Japanese wave–swept over her. She should be thinking about her boy. He needed his mother right now. He would always need his mother.

The nurses and doctors from St. Agatha’s were outside the Emergency Room, and its brick entrance that bore the inscription Quid hoc fecisti, ut tibi chiseled above the electric doors. Rest of the staff, too, and some of the ambulatory patients. Cop gripping the upper arm of a handcuffed drunk. Two drug reps with tight, short skirts and enormous, rolling briefcases. Barry Cho from the Cenotaph was there. He was Dr. Cho’s brother. He wrote the first story about Baby Al. Young couple, Eugene and Imogene, just starting out in the world. They both worked at a bar called Fiddlerhead’s, which had a Canadian theme. He was from Outremont, and it reminded him of home. She was from the neighborhood, needed a job, and didn’t mind Rush. They met, fell in love. Five months after the marriage came the baby. Albert Holiday Teitel. Albert after his uncle Avi. Holiday for Holiday Rhodes, He proposed at The Snug’s annual Christmas show at the Absalom Ballroom, and she said “yes” there. Happy baby for a year, and then his eyes went blurry and he began to scream. He wouldn’t stop screaming.

It all hurt so much.

“Worst thing I ever seen, and I seen some fucked-up shit.”

“The boy died for our sins,” said the man who demanded to be called Captain Thumbfucker.

And since he had bought the last four rounds and slipped her a handful of pills, Tiresias Richardson was going along with his choice of names. She had promised herself that she would not go to the Armadillo Room any more; it wasn’t the sort of joint you wanted to be a regular at. There was a non-zero chance of being human trafficked every time you walked into the Armadillo. The pool table was mined. Two of the urinals have been indicted for manslaughter, though both cases fell apart before trial.

“No, he didn’t. That’s bullshit.”

“Are you calling me bullshit?”

“I’m calling this whole thing bullshit. All of it.”

“I am not bullshit!”

Captain Thumbfucker started windmilling his sloppy arms at her, leaning forward at waist with his head down. Tiresias slapped back and forth at him. She was tall and strong, he was short and liked sticking his thumb in assholes, and both were shitfaced: it was an even brawl.

The Cadillac rolled on, rolled south, still on the Main Drag, and now it makes a left to head east on Chambers Street. The procession follows, and the sidewalk halts here too. All kinds of buyers and sellers, and the lonely, and mechanics of all sorts. Students, teachers, truants, the dogs who ate the homework. Beer-Cooler Ethel closes the lid of the cooler strapped ’round her neck. Con men stop conning, and shoplifters stop lifting, and there is a pause in postal service. Behind the Cadillac with Baby Al in the back is the Mercedes, and then the family and the friends and the coworkers and the Melted Fucktoads and another cop car, two, three.

East on Chambers Street into the foothills, and the land undulates beneath you like fortune.

“How old is two?”

“Two is two. I don’t follow.”

“What can they do? A baby. When it’s two. What do they do?”

“Talk,” Precarious Lee said. He was a retired roadie and Romeo Rodriguez was a ghost cop, and they were standing by the entrance to Foole’s Yard. Technically, Romeo was floating. Precarious was wearing a black suit and a tie. Romeo was in the patrol outfit he always wore because he was a ghost and stuck in the same clothes for eternity.

“Yeah?”

“Not real good, though,” Precarious continued. “Words, not sentences. But they get the concept that things have names. And they know what they like and what they don’t. Two-year-olds got real strong preferences. Haven’t quite figured out wiping their ass.”

“That ain’t fair.”

“Who told you life was fair?”

Romeo was quiet for a moment.

“No one ever did,” he finally said.

“They were right.”

The hearse turned south again, onto Carrier Place where the entrance to Foole’s Yard is, and then the families’ cars, and the rest of the procession. Everyone would park, and Rabbi Levy would chant in a language that no one but he understood. The shovel was there, sticking out of the loose soil by the fresh grave. Eugene first, and then Imogene. The dirt went FUNCH when it hit the casket. It was a high-pitched sound, and it would not stop ringing all across the valley and up and down the Main Drag of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Businesses, in Little Aleppo and elsewhere in America, succeed for one of only two reasons: they offer a good or service unavailable anywhere else, or location. The Declaration of Fistependence, which sold rubber sex-fists that were said to be replicas of our greatest Presidents’ hands, was tucked away in a backstreet off Caliper Court; both patron and proprietor preferred it that way.  Froggy’s, which sold ugly shoes to depressed people, was similarly out-of-the-way, and so was Skins. Skins was one of those joints where you could eat off of hot chicks, but not just sushi. You could eat whatever you wanted off the girls at Skins: ham sandwich, pie, stuff you brought from home. These businesses can give you what no place else in the neighborhood can, and so can afford to be hard to find.

Other entrepreneurs–the ones providing a fungible, replicable service like cheeseburgers or haircuts–had to choose where they pitched their tents with more care. Smart money was on the Main Drag. No better place for a diner than the Main Drag. Couldn’t really even be a Main Drag without a diner, could it? The Tahitian, too. Movie theaters are big and pompous, and they should be on the shiniest street available. The Santa Maria sold single slices from its sidewalk counter for a dollar, two and a Coke for two bucks. You had to hassle with them over the napkins. They’d go stingy with the napkins if you didn’t stand up for yourself.

But there was also steady money in a more parasitic approach: finding a flock of drunks and building a bar right next to them. Neptune’s Throne was for the men who worked at the Salt Wharf, and the Botany Bar was for the men who owned boats in Boone’s Docks. (Most of Little Aleppo’s cocaine supply arrived through the Docks registering around 90% pure and costing $20 an ounce; you could buy a thumbnail-sized baggie that was 20% pure for $20 bucks at Neptune’s. From this fact, all of modern economic theory can be extrapolated.) Brewster’s opened up before St. Agatha’s was even completed: they got the workers plastered, and then continued to schnocker the doctors, nurses, escaped patients. The bar was forced to move around the corner early on; its original location directly across the street led to several patients watching their doctors wander straight from the tavern into their surgeries. The Pampered Moose shared a property line with Harper College, and refused to check IDs on principle. Its owners, Candy and Spud, were libertarians. People who run cash businesses tend to skew libertarian. The right of a young man or woman to give us their money shall not be impinged, and so forth and so on, Candy and Spud often accused the Constitution of saying, and no one would correct them.

The Cenotaph‘s ethanol requirements were fulfilled by Flick’s, which was 159 feet across Pryor Street from the front door of the Braunce Building. (Long ago, the journalists had measured the distance with a pedometer. More recently, a professor from Harper was talked into dragging all sorts of laser gadgets down; the original finding was confirmed, and there was an article trashing all the professors’ rivals the next week.) Flick’s was owned by Fred Flickerson, who always hated his parents for naming him that, and there wasn’t much to it: tables, bar, all of Flick’s old bullfighting crap. No jukebox, just a paint-splatted transistor radio playing KHAY. It was the cheap kind of dark in Flick’s, like it wasn’t so much an aesthetic choice as it was that there weren’t enough lightbulbs.

Everyone from the paper drank there. Pearl-Handled Lou, who had been fixing the printing press so long that he could diagnose problems by smell, and his crew of mechanics. Janet Di Peppi sold ads and hustled newcomers at darts. The photogs would come in stinking of darkroom chemicals and be banished to the far corner. Marilda Swank, who wrote the advice column, was generally found under the foosball table, most often not solo. Barry Cho could hand his copy off to the copyboy, leave his desk, down the stairs, out the door, across the street, into Flick’s, and take a shot before his story reached the editor’s in-box.

Iffy Bould just walked over. He made the trip a lot–his second wife sent the divorce papers to the bar–but he did it casually. The pint of Arrow he was drinking was not his first, and he said,

“Shall we count offences or coin excuses,
Or weigh with scales the soul of a man,
Whom a strong hand binds and a sure hand looses,
Whose light is a spark and his life a span ?
The seed he sowed or the soil he cumbered,
The time he served or the space he slumbered ;
Will it profit a man when his days are numbered,
Or his deeds since the days of his life began.”

Lolly Tangiers polished off her pint, belched, roused to her feet.

“Is this another lesson?’

“Nah, I just love reciting bad poetry. That was Australian.”

“It had that feel to it,” she said and motioned for his glass. He upturned it, handed it to her, she went to the bar. Flick had two waiting. He still wore his hair like a toreador. When she got back, Iffy said.

“You need to start smoking.”

“You chain-smoke and I stand next to you all day.”

“Right. I can’t take it.”

“You can’t?”

“How do you bear the smell? I quit smoking once and it turns out these things stink. Stench was so bad I had to start up again so I wouldn’t notice it anymore.”

“You can get used to anything,” Lolly shrugged, and slugged her beer.

“Sad fact.”

Little Aleppo was still getting used to the bombing, but locals had–without conspiring explicitly–decided that the proper way to mourn the victims was to immediately use their deaths for political or financial gain. Tee-shirts began flowing from shops on the Downside before the building had stopped smoldering. Most of the shirts commemorated the dead, or proclaimed Little Aleppo unfazed by the attack, but a few had pictures of the guy who did the bombing, which sold well in bars that catered to punkers. The LAPD (No, Not That One) kicked in several doors they had been itching to kick in for months.

KSOS was still covering the attack at midnight. A television station had a duty to cover local news, Paul Loomis thought. Sacred one, which means that God said to do it. Paul Loomis did not quarrel with The Lord. He ignored Him a great deal of the time, especially the stuff He said about cheating on your wife and stealing and being an asshole, but he did not argue. Especially when the ratings were so high. Paul Loomis was too smart to say out loud that he wished there was a bombing every week, but everyone around him could tell how happy he was.

Trusted Meese was still on the air, and his steady baritone slipped out of apartment windows and tavern doors under cover of blue light. The bombing happened during his newscast at five, and he’d manned the desk ever since, despite running out of new information around three hours previous. No matter: the people of Little Aleppo needed Trusted Meese in times of crisis, and dammit he was gonna deliver. Also, Paul Loomis had stolen his car keys , so he couldn’t leave. Trusted had spoken to a half-dozen experts via the phone (all of whom turned out to be prank callers), shown several semi-accurate watercolors of the explosion that Sonar the Intern With The Stupid Name painted, and told an elaborate story about an acquaintance named Fuzzy who can putt a golf ball with his johnson. Paul Loomis was interviewed several times in regards to the possibility that Communists were to blame.

“I understand that you believe that Communists are responsible for the bombing, but what I’m asking is: why do you believe that? What factual information is the belief based in?”

“Meese, you a homosexual?”

“I’m a Presbyterian.”

They did that once an hour until around 10:30, when the two of them got all worked up and started wrestling. Knocked the backdrop over, the whole deal. The camera guy and Sonar had to break them up, and then Trusted threatened to walk home, or get a ride, if Paul wasn’t locked in his office. Trusted sat staring at the lens for a while after that. Smoking. Muttering about opportunities and wicked women. He threw it back…

“…to Cakey Frankel who’s still at the scene. Cakey, what updates can you give us?”

“Which ones do you want, Trusted? I’m your update gal.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Cakey had been at the crime scene since ten minutes after it became a crime scene, along with her camera guy and technician and producer. The producer and tech were armed, as it was KSOS’ policy that the news van be protected at all costs. Paul Loomis’ management philosophy was that people could be replaced, but gear cost money. Hell, dummies lined up to work for free because they thought it was show business, but microwave van salesmen were not impressed by glamorous trappings. Protect the news van.

(This was not paranoia on his part: the mobile-studio-in-a-Chevy was stolen within 24 hours of its purchase in the late 70’s and used to broadcast sexual acts of an anti-government nature to unsuspecting KSOS viewers. No recording survives, but a woman was famously quoted in the Cenotaph describing it as “the least patriotic fucking you’ve ever seen.” Retrieved–and then ransomed back to the station–by the cops, the van would be hijacked twice more before Paul started riding shotgun, He shot three teenagers with that shotgun, too. The incidences of grand theft news van have declined since, but the threat remained.)

“The bombing, woman. Is there anything going on with the bombing?”

“This one?”

“What?”

“This bombing or has there been another?”

“There’s just one damn bombing, and it happened where you are. The piano store.”

“Right. It blew up.”

“Hours ago! It blew up hours ago! What’s happened recently?”

Aloferra Street was less populated than before, but still roiling. The flames were doused, and then the traditional cop/fireman fistfight began over who had operational jurisdiction at the scene. (There was also the traditional fistfight at the charity softball game, but this fight was over principle, and the law, and who got to tell whom where they were allowed to be, and so was more valued in the Little Aleppo First Responder community.) The police had set their yellow tape well back from the site, though, and so Cakey and her team could see none of this.

This did not stop Paul Loomis from putting her on air every twenty minutes. At first, she interviewed members of the gathered crowd. None of them knew anything, but several folks had real thick accents that Cakey only semi-understood, and that made for decent teevee. The gawkers thinned. Cakey interviewed Beer-Cooler Ethel, who adroitly turned the conversation to the topic of the original Mercury Seven, and which one was, in Beer-Cooler Ethel’s words the pony with the most baloney. Cakey kept talking for five minutes without having a clue she was discussing the dicks of American heroes. When the camera cut back to the studio, Trusted was laughing so hard he blew a wet token of snot out of his nose.

But now even Beer-Cooler Ethel had departed, and so he and Cakey were improvising.

“Has anything new happened?”

“The tamale man came by. But not the usual tamale man.”

“Tamale Macho?”

“Him, yeah. Tamale Macho is on vacation, so his buddy Bertrand is filling in. Same tamales, though.”

“Does he wear the costume?”

Cakey consulted her notebook.

“No, Trusted. He doesn’t. Jeans and a tee-shirt. Wait!”

She flipped a page.

“And a light jacket. I can confirm that he was wearing a light jacket.”

Back in the studio, Trusted took a swallow from his coffee mug. It had not been filled with coffee for many years.

“What about the song? Does this Bert fellow even sing the song? For he’s tamale good FELLLL-ooowww. Tell me he sings the song.”

“No song, Trusted. Just walks up to you and offers tamales. Very low-key about the whole enterprise. He let the tamales sell themselves. The crew thought it was a refreshing change from Tamale Macho’s aggressive tactics.”

“The crew are dumbfucks, Cakey.”

In the control booth, the director launched himself across three people to hit the BLEEP button.

“The costume, the song, that’s all part of it. The tamale experience. You’re walking home from the bar, you’ve had a few pops, and then in front of you arises something miraculous. Tamale Macho! The dream you never had that came true. That’s the American dream right there, young lady. Tamale fucking Macho.”

“Oh, COME ON,” yelped the voice from the control room.

Cakey had no idea what the hell Trusted was babbling about, and she responded in her usual fashion: smiling politely. This strategy had never failed her. Either people would keep talking until they reentered her sphere of comprehension, or they would give up and walk away. Trusted saw it on the monitor.

“That’s your confused face. I know that one. Cakey, is anyone there you can talk to?”

“There’s a police officer.”

“Great. Go bother him.”

Cakey was excellent at talking on television, which is a skill separate from your everyday blathering. You gotta pronounce your words real sharpish, but not be prissy about it. Flat, but not Midwestern. No ummm and ahhhh, and never drop your G’s. Raising your voice–at all–makes you sound crazy. And what the hell do you  do with your hands? Cakey knew all of these things, and more.

But not walking on television. It was fascinating. She sprinted from place to place, crouched over and protecting her head; then, she’d straighten up and continue with her report. The local opinion was that she saw a reporter do it in a movie, and it was a beloved move. Fans called it the Cakewalk, and had orchestrated a successful letter-writing campaign to Paul Loomis. Please never discuss this with her and just let her keep doing it, the messages read, and he agreed with the sentiment. Also, every time he saw it, Trusted would blow a gasket, and so Paul double-liked the idea.

Cakey zipped across the street to where a cop car was parked, her crew rushing to keep up. The shot from the bobbling camera remained on the screen.

“Every time,” Trusted muttered into his mug.

She exploded into frame, upright and chipper and grinning, right next to the open driver’s window of a 1978 black-and-white Dodge Diplomat. Officer Honey was snoozing, and then HOLY SHIT SUDDEN CAKEY he wasn’t, and he grabbed for his gun just a little bit.

“Jesus, woman!”

“Cakey Frankel, KSOS News.”

“You can’t sneak up on people like that. I’m all jerbibbled over here now.”

“Is that a word?”

“Sure,” Officer Honey said. “Sure.”

Jerbibbled was not a word. It has the sound of a private family expression, perhaps something Honey’s mother used to say, but it wasn’t. Officer Honey had never met a star before, and he was nervous. He did not know what to do with his hands. Or the rest of his body. He felt that he should get out of the car, but he had undone his belt and popped the button on his pants, so he’d have to reorient himself on teevee. Staying put was the better bet. Put the ol’ elbow up on the ledge, he decided. Very authoritative move, putting your elbow on stuff. Cakey was prettier in person.

“Can I ask your name?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“What?”

“Ask me anything.”

“Your name.”

“Honey.”

“Cakey.”

Back in the studio, Trusted said,

“Jesus,” and stood up and roared, “Tell that asshole Loomis I’m leaving,” and drained the rest of his coffee mug. The proper storming out. There was silence from the control booth, until the director said something and Sonar ran out of the booth.

Cakey had been on-and-off the air for going on seven hours–doing her reports, and conducting interviews, and trying to avoid having too many people in her shots with their dicks out–and her makeup was still perfect.

“Officer, what are you hearing at this moment.”

“I’m hearing Cakey Frankel.”

“Oh. Am I a suspect?”

“No.”

“Thank goodness. I would crack under questioning. What about motive?”

“For the bombing?”

“Yes.”

“Sure. Well, we’ve ruled out ‘being a good neighbor.’ That was definitely not the motivation behind the bomb. Whoever did this wasn’t trying to help. That’s off the table. ”

“And there was the video.”

She was referring to the copper-helmeted man who hijacked the airwaves immediately before the blast to take credit.

“Sure. Sure, that’s a clue. That’s something we’re gonna take into account.”

“Officer, you’re a decorated veteran of Little Aleppo’s police force–”

Honey had never been decorated for anything, ever.

“–what did that tape reveal to you? Using your investigative skills.”

“Huh. Well, we know he’s got a head. And we know he doesn’t have a condition that makes him unable to wear a helmet.”

“I had a cousin like that,” Cakey said.

The voice in her ear said,

“Cakey?

She answered,

“Trusted?”

“No, Cakey. It’s the Honorable Elijah von Draculicious.”

The Honorable Elijah von Draculicious was the Horror Host of the moment: he was from both the Nation of Islam, and the Nation of Transylvania. He introduced the movies in between monologues about his evenings spent “suckin’ on honky neck;” there were also martial arts demonstrations and nutritional lectures. The Hon. Elijah had not had time to remove his makeup, not change out of his dashiki with the giant swoopy cowl.

“Trusted is having technical difficulties, Cakey.”

Blue light windows, all up and down the Main Drag; from separate bedrooms on the Upside, and bodegas with drunks and the owner huddled around a rabbit-eared portable. No teevee at Flick’s, just the transistor radio playing KHAY, which was playing bouzouki music and wouldn’t tell anyone why. It was midnight, and Barry Cho was so hammered he was under all the tables at once. He was superpositionally drunk, and very soon the screeching would begin and Barry would need to be wrangled outside, but presently he was amenable.

“This doesn’t count.”

“It’s a good start,” Iffy said about the cigarette in her hand.

“I’m drunk,” Lolly answered, waving the bummed Kool around. “It doesn’t count as smoking when you’re drunk. I could be, like, plastered all day at work. I could smoke as much as you do if I did that. A lot of people at the office are drunk all day.”

“And they’re all your superiors. They’ve earned the right to be drunk at work.”

“Maybe one day.”

“Keep working hard, reporting your ass off, breaking stories, and yeah: you’ll be able to chug vodka out of a thermos starting at eight in the morning.”

“A girl’s gotta have dreams.”

They clinked their pints, sipped, PHWOO, and behind them Flick was explaining the various cuts of beef to a young man who worked on the Cenotaph‘s ad side

“You know the Village Idiot Theory yet?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe. You gotta lotta theories.”

“I’m a theory-ous man.”

“That was terrible.”

“The Village Idiot Theory. A deep understanding of any organization can be gleaned from identifying its Idiot. Any business, agency, team, any whatever–any dynamic group of human beings working towards a collective goal–you’re always gonna have an Idiot. The question is How big a dumbfuck is the organization willing to put up with? Says a lot about standards.”

“Okay, right.”

“And each village creates its own idiot. You get what you make in this life, kid.”

“Don’t call me ‘kid.’ It sounds so screwball comedy.”

“We’re not in one?

“What brought up the Village Idiot Theory?”

“Thinking about the cops,” Iffy said.

He downed his the last half of his Arrow and slapped the glass on the table; the ashtray clattered.

“Someone’s gotta figure out what the fuck is going on, and I don’t think they’re capable.”

“We are,” Lolly said, and poured some of her beer into his glass so they could CLINK glasses and drink together.

“This is our story.”

Lolly staggered to her feet and yelled,

“WOODW–”

Until Iffy snatched her by the elbow and dragged her back seated, hissed into her ear,

“If you scream Woodward & Bernstein WOO! in this establishment, I will break both of your legs.”

“I was excited.”

“Dignity above all. We start first thing in the morning. Go get two more beers.”

And then Barry Cho began screeching. It sounded like eternity itself, if eternity smoked. Bloody and lost and dancing through the windows of Flick’s, and unstoppable even though Janet Di Peppi chucked darts at him. The boys who ran the presses walked him out, and the normal noise returned. Conversations and unaccounted-for bouzouki, and Flick ringing the till. Business was as usual in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“How do you know you wouldn’t like it?”

“The same way I know I wouldn’t like being shat upon: instinctually.”

“Orgies are fun, if you’re in the mood.”

“Nuh-uh. They gimme the shkeeves,” Tiresias Richardson said.

She and Big-Dicked Sheila were nearly immobile in pool chairs; attractive people rogered one another in the water before them. An Olympic-sized pool for Olympic-sized fucking. Shoals of dick slammed into great reefs of pussy. The diving board was used improperly, and so were buttholes. Titties flopped, slapped, burbled, celebrated, shimmied: oh, those polymathic Hollywood titties. A character actor was being pissed upon. The pool house–far larger than Sheila and Tiresias’ homes combined–was behind them. Couples assignated within, and their hoots and grunts and safe words spilled out, rushed by the two women, dove into the pool, drowned.

“I feel like we’re being wallflowers,” Sheila said.

“Sweetie, if you wanna fuck, then go fuck. I’ll find Precarious.”

“I totally don’t wanna fuck. I have literally never had good sex on acid.”

“I can’t even imagine fucking right now. Like…some guy…like…GLAAAAAH all over me? Oh, God, not now.”

“So find a girl. They’re softer.”

Tiresias reached over, took Sheila’s hand, squeezed.

“Not bisexual, Sheel.”

“Everyone is bisexual, Tirry.”

“I can’t have this argument with you again.”

Overhead, the stars were orbiting as predicted; around the pool, the stars spanked each other and did foot stuff. The entire cast and crew of The Murph Show was there, including the monkey. It was a Capuchin named Frank, and he was wearing a toddler-sized Afrika Corps uniform. Murph insisted; he was really into Rommel. Citronella torches burned in tasteful lamps to keep the chinchity bugs and beetles off of sweaty flesh; the aroma of chemical lemons fought for dominance with the odor of balls. Murph showed his dominance by plowing his showrunner. I HAVE NOTES, Murph bellowed as he plunged.

“What’s Murph got that I haven’t?”

“A hard-on and a monkey,” Sheila said.

“The show’s gonna be syncopated.”

Both sat in silence only interrupted by the orgy going on around them.

“Syndicated,” Tiresias corrected herself. Acid always loosened the relationship between her brain and mouth; where they were–on a day-to-day basis–best friends, under the influence of LSD, they were merely fond acquaintances.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Tremendous amount of money.”

“That’s the best amount of money there is.”

“What about ‘all?”

“But, you know, you couldn’t have all the money. Because it wouldn’t be worth anything. Because no one else would have any money and they couldn’t provide you with goods. Because it takes money to make money.”

More silence, orgy.

“AAAAHahaha! What the fuck did that mean?”

“I’m absolutely right, I just said it inside-out. Value is based in transaction.”

“Money is a verb.”

“We should be writing this shit down,” Sheila said, and began raccooning through her massive purse.

Murph stood athwart two lounge chairs. The actresses who played his daughters lapped at a ball apiece. He tried to piss on them, but his prostate was swollen. Murph demanded that the actor who played his best friend apply a forceful thumb to the gland. MASH THE BUTTON, he cried. A hesitant dribble issued from his dick, the urine’s arc not parabolic enough to reach either daughter. It was the middle of the night, so the moon was in charge, and the pool sparkled like a disco fractal–infinite mirrors spinning within mirrors-with an inflatable William Holden floating face-down, bobbing with inciting incidence. Murph had a laugh like sour meat.

Having forgotten why she dug into her bag, Sheila acted on muscle memory and pulled out her Camels and a lighter. Two from the pack, halfway to her mouth; there was a bird, maybe, or just her eyes getting giggly; she stared for a beat, two, three, four; turned to Tiresias, said,

“Yeah, okay.”

The cigarettes in her mouth, FFT PHWOO, and one to Tiresias.

“Guy’s a shmoo.”

“Which?”

“Murph,” Tiresias said, trying and failing to keep herself from pointing. “Goddamned shmoo.”

“Short Jew?”

“What?”

“I thought that’s what ‘shmoo’ meant,” Sheila said. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”

“Well, first of all: he’s not Jewish. And, second of all: I don’t call Jewish people ‘Jews.’ I mean, not in that tone of voice.”

“No, you’re like the fourth or fifth least-racist person I know. That’s why I was asking.”

“A shmoo. From the cartoon. Big white Blooby-blobby thing that bounced around. Dumb but unkillable. That guy is a shmoo.”

Sheila sat up, sort of, and squinted across the pool.

“Shmoo, yeah, okay.”

“Look at him, Sheel. Look at him.”

“I’m looking. It’s not great.”

“Objectively, I am better-looking than him.”

“Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s not an opinion.”

“And I’m funnier.”

“Without writers,” Sheila said.

“That is a wonderful point to point out.”

“Point.”

“Stop it.”

“Point.”

The women collapsed back into the chaises, dragged their Camels PHWOO, and watched the sky above them wrestle itself. There was much zipping. The stars held hands, formed highways, rebuked one another. Brushstrokes were unignorable.

The deejay was spinning that Fungicore sound, with the occasional dip into Pagan House: it was music that was completely, utterly, 100% unlistenable if you weren’t on drugs. Was it even music, or just assembled frequencies? It sure did THROMP with purpose. Precarious Lee had not heard of Fungicore or Pagan House, so he had classified his current soundtrack as THROMP music. The blond was bopping his head along with the beat, strenuous as it was.

“You were in Brewster & McCloud.”

“That’s not the name of the movie. It’s just Brewster McCloud. You’re getting it mixed up with McCabe & Mrs. Miller.”

“You were Brewster.”

“Uh-uh.”

“You were McCloud.”

“Same person.”

Precarious supposed the blond fellow was an actor, and he was right. Tusk Cant had starred in several unaired pilots, five independent films, almost a dozen (national) commercials, and had an open invitation to the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin to “come down and hang out, real chill scene.”  His wrists were draped with bullshit–leather straps and red strings of yarn and a Rolex Submariner–and the flap of denim that covered the buttons of his fly had been sliced off. He was 34 and still referred to sexual acts by way of baseball analogy.

“You know how this guy made his money?”

“Which guy?”

Tusk gestured around.

“Guy who owns the house.”

“Buttermilk,” Precarious said.

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Director’s chairs. Canvas and wood? Name printed on the back? Town goes through thousands and thousands a year, and he sells every one.”

Precarious looked around the ballroom. He was unaware that selling chairs could result in “house with a ballroom” money. Selling drugs or stocks, sure, but chairs?

“Huh.”

The cast of The Murph Show had been joined by the players from Pittsburgh Bomb Squad. The Top Dog, who was ex-military and loved his team, and the Main Hot Lady, who played it by the book, and the Secondary Hot Lady, who was the techie, and New Guy, who was the new guy. They ganged up on Wacky Neighbor, and Cantankerous Old Fucker. It was a crossover event for the ages. Murph had claimed Main Hot Lady, as was his right as an Executive Producer. She was bent over, and he behind her and thrusting, and a small but distinct bolus of vomit burped out of his mouth and spattered onto her back. There was no pause at all to the fucking.

“And they say romance is dead,” Sheila said, and Tiresias laughed AAAAHahaha! way too fucking loud; Murph searched around for the source of the laughter. The women cowered together, tried to suck their skulls into their chests, Sheila laid her purse over their heads.

“Don’t get his attention.”

“I don’t think he can see us,” Tiresias said. “We’re not famous.”

“If he comes over here, I’ll fuck him, but I’d rather he didn’t come over here.”

“Why would you fuck him?”

“An orgy is like a mosh pit: if you’re on the edge of it, then you’re in it.”

“Noooooo.”

Sheila popped an eye up, saw that Murph was no longer scanning the area, lowered the purse to her lap. Her left leg was out straight, and her right knee was up; now the other way; now the other way; now the other way. Her gestures were florid.

“Well, I could piss on him.”

“Go blow your nose on his balls.”

“I think that would play well over there,” Sheila said. “I’ll schnot all over his johnson.”

“AAAAHahaha!” and this time Murph did see them, but neither woman cared and they kept laughing. A rabbit, sizable and brown hopped behind their chairs. That morning, the animal had been in the north of France. Nibbled on some fescue WHAZZOOM now it was in a rich guy’s backyard in Los Angeles. The rabbit had no way to express what had happened. It had no way to understand what had happened. Stochastic teleportation was lost on rabbits.

Here is Frank now. You’ll recall the Capuchin. He has removed his khaki trousers but not the desert jacket. He is noticeably erect, and far faster than anyone–including a lagamorph recently become unstuck in time–would imagine. The rabbit lunges towards its left, but Frank has come under Sheila’s chaise. The only thing worse than a monkey with a boner is a monkey with a boner and the element of surprise. Frank drags the rabbit in between the two lounge chairs, hammers it right between the ears twice three four five times until its eyes go jagged, reaches around and grabs inside its mouth SNAP the lower jaw hangs dumb. Frank now gets to the fucking.

The women propped themselves on their sides, watched.

“I feel like we should stop this,” Tiresias said.

“Go ahead.”

“Hey! Monkey!” she stage-whispered.

“Be respectful. He’s got an Iron Cross. That monkey must be a war hero.”

(Frank did, indeed, have an Iron Cross on his chest. Murph insisted.)

Tiresias swatted at the air five or six feet from Frank and the rabbit. She would put her hand no closer, as she was not a complete idiot. Frank ignored both her entreaties and her pantomime. Frank kept fucking.

“Stop it. You’re better than this.”

“He’s clearly not, Tirry. Some monkeys are rapists.”

“I think all of them are.”

“No, that’s ducks.”

“Giraffes fuck way up high,” Tiresias answered.

“And they only got one position.”

“Giraffe-style.”

“People are lucky. We can fuck every which way.”

“It’s not lucky. I’d love it if, like, the human body could physically only do one sex position. It would take so much pressure off.”

Frank had the rabbit’s forepaws in his hands SNAP the limbs slop about; Frank is fucking hard tonight.

“Sheel, shoot him.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“This is why guns were invented. Shoot him. Or the rabbit. Put the poor thing out of its miserable.”

“Miserable.”

“Misery.”

“Tirry, sweetie, it’s a party. I’m not shooting a monkey.”

“Fire a warning shot.”

“Noooooo.”

“You fire warning shots all the fucking time. You did it twice last week.”

“Back home, sweetie, in Little Aleppo. We’re in a rich guy’s backyard in Los Angeles. And also we’re hiding from the police, remember? All the felonies we committed? And the cop I might have killed?”

“I don’t think he died.”

“But he might have.”

“His face hit the steering wheel pretty hard.”

“Right. So I’m gonna pass on the warning shot. What’s happening here–”

Frank fucked.

“–is gonna happen here.”

“You should be an action hero. You’re so good under pressure.”

Sheila started to reach out for Tiresias, but then thought better of it and snatched her hand back. Whatever hole Frank had chosen was beginning to expand, tear, fissure. The rabbit’s ass looked like an envelope opened by a toddler, the blood brown under the pool’s lighting.

“HEY,” Murph called from across the water. He was up to his balls in his own stand-in. “IS FRANK OVER THERE?”

The women both looked up. Tiresias gave a thumbs-up.

“HE FUCKING?”

Sheila added her thumb.

“THAT’S MY BOY!”

The rabbit had stopped moving. It experienced a miracle six hours previous, and now had been fucked to death by a monkey wearing half of an Afrika Corps uniform. Let that be a lesson to you.

“You never did any acting?”

“I was married twice.”

“Niiiice,” Tusk Cant said, and raised a hand for fiving. Precarious did, as he didn’t see the need to be rude yet. He had read somewhere that a gentleman is someone who is only rude on purpose, and he liked that. He was sure that the idiot with the expensive haircut he was talking to was an idiot, but he had nowhere else to be.

“I got a thing going. Pilot called Bletchley Park. About the code-breakers. I play Nigel Smythe-Yessington.”

“You break codes?

“I break hearts,” Tusk said. “And there’s, like, dramatic shit. I’m British and I fuck.”

“Cool,” Precarious said.

“This would be huge for me.”

“Yeah.”

“Second lead. Lots of comedy stuff, sex stuff. It’s the star role. I could break out from this. I mean, if the network’s behind it.”

“Network’s gotta be behind it.”

The ballroom was the tell. Wealthy is different than rich, and the ballroom is the tell. Rich folks have the same kind of houses as poor people, just moreso. Both got kitchens, the rich just got nicer; both got bedroom, the rich just got more. But only the wealthy got ballrooms and whatnot. Inspired sluttery amongst maximalist furniture; incommunicado drug deals under the eaves; O, those men in ascots and cock rings; the slapping like a captain’s table; Emilio Estevez fingering an Asian woman; good Christ, what’s occurring upon that pool table; get down , get real loose with it, disco dresses on all; some bastards like to fuck like the whole world’s watching. Hey, man, why do you think they call it a ballroom? Precarious took in the sights.

“You get it, man.”

“Sure, yeah.”

“What was your name again?”

“Archibald Leach,” Precarious spat into Tusk’s ear.

“Hey, Archie.”

“Hey, man.”

They clasped hands. Not “shook,” as this is for lessers. Thumbs back and manly. WHAMP the palms sturck. Chins thrusted.

“You get it, man. You really get it,” Tusk said.

“Thanks, bro.”

Precarious had been told that he “got it” on three continents and counting,, but he was clocking the window overlooking the backyard, overlooking the pool and the orgy that was going on, and the two women on chaise lounge chairs caught completely unaware by the large man with the crewcut and the broken nose standing above them. It was just like Precarious always said:  A good plan will work most of the time, but a terrible plan will work every time.

Apparently, I got Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day mixed up. Forgive me my trespasses. This is from November of 2017, and I’ve always been fond of it. Republished here with a correct title.

An ex-roadie and a ghost cop were in a cemetery. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The day had barely taken hold and it was still foggy, but a very thin fog, the kind that does not obscure but makes the world blurry like an aging movie star filmed through a vaseline-coated lens. They had met at the Victory Diner before dawn. Ghosts don’t need to eat, but a short stack of pancakes is delicious even to the dead; ex-roadies do need to eat, but not pancakes. They sat in his stomach too heavy. Both had coffee, black. Tipped too much and walked out to the curb. 1961 Lincoln Continental in triple black: the paint, the leather, and the ragtop, which was down.

South on the Main Drag. Mile or two. Left turn onto Chambers Street. This is the Downside, and it is waking up. Sidewalks are shiny and slick. Men and women with their first names written in script on the breast pockets of their shirts walk to work. There are no joggers or children. Paperboys lean forward over their handlebars and toss the Cenotaph onto stoops and steps. Head east, head towards the Segovian Hills. The sun is behind the range, peaking through the steep canyon that separates Pulaski Peak from Mt. Charity. Mt. Lincoln, Mt. Faith, Mt. Fortitude, Mt. Chastity, Pulaski Peak, Mt. Charity, Mt. Booth. The seven hills, left to right if you’re standing on the Main Drag. Foothills now, and the land is lumpy and bumpy and undulating like it is gathering the courage to become a mountain. Turn south again onto Carrier Place. Park the Continental and get out. Only the driver’s side door opens and closes.

“Told you to stop floating out of the damn car,” Precarious Lee says.

“It’s easier.”

“Shitting in your pants is easier than finding the john, but that’s not the point.”

“Worry about yourself,” Officer Romeo Rodriguez says.

And they were in the cemetery.

Foole’s Yard was where Little Aleppo buried the decent. After the Wayside Fire in 1871, Miss Valentine was interred there under a white marble tombstone that had chubby little angels chiseled into it. Had her birthday on it, and the day she died, and a simple epitaph reading “Pillar of the Community.” The whores she owned were dumped into a mass grave in the southwest corner of the Verdance. The Pulaski were there, too, and so were the residents of the first Chinatown. Foole’s Yard had the Town Fathers, even the disgraced ones, and judges and businessmen and businessmen’s wives. Boat owners and sportswriters. Three generations of the McGlory clan. Dillon Kenny, Little Aleppo’s first Fire Chief, was in the far corner surrounded by his men, Dillon’s Dousers. Near the entrance was a fresh grave; the sod had not yet been laid in over it; bare dirt in a rectangle. The stone had Manfred Pierce’s name on it, and the epitaph was simple. “Hello, beautiful.” Below that it read “Seaman First Class – US Navy.”

Precarious had a grocery bag full of American flags, the size of 3 x 5 cards and made of thick, cheap cloth and affixed to a thin wooden dowel. He stuck one at the head of the grave. He had not been raised Catholic, so he did not cross himself, but he lowered his head and closed his eyes and then opened them and read the stone again and smirked. Manfred told the same jokes for 30 years, and one of them involved the phrase “first class seaman.”

“You know him?”

“Sure,” Precarious said. “Went by the Wayside every so often.”

Romeo cocked an eye and said,

“It was a gay bar.”

“I didn’t suck anybody’s cock while I was in there. I just had a beer.”

“Not my type of place.”

“Grow the fuck up.”

Precarious had his boots on. Thick leather, square-toed, mid-calf. Black. He had shined them the night prior the way he had been taught in the Army. The process involves spit, and a lighter, and more grease than an old man’s elbow should produce in one sitting; the joint throbbed now. Precarious had been wearing sneakers more and more lately, cushiony soles and supportive inseams. His knees chose his footwear in the mornings. No sneakers today, though. To the living, one owes respect, but to the dead, one owes a real pair of shoes.

He could see the boundaries of the graveyard. A fence, metal, spiked. Easily climbable by acid-soaked teens and raccoons scooted through the bars at will. The barrier between the living and the dead had holes in it, and it was simple to slide between the two.

Officer Romeo Rodriguez had a shopping bag the same as Precarious, and he read the gravestones. Beloved mothers, and cherished husbands. Babies. The Mackinack family, they all had the same date of death on their stones. There was a story there. He looked for the chiseled service records, stuck a flag in the soft ground. Romeo had been raised Catholic, so he crossed himself. He had not taken Communion since he’d been murdered, and he felt guilty about it; he had been raised Catholic.

Where are you fuckers? I came back, he thought. Where are all of you?

Flag for the sergeant, the petty officer, flag for the WACs and WAVEs. Flag for the Marines, hoorah the Corps, and Romeo planted them for the other, lesser, services. The fog had lifted, but he was still slightly blurry. He had not shined his boots because they would not take a shine. Tactical footwear. Mesh and formulated fabric and laces and gel in the soles. Not a drop of leather.

“Precarious?”

“Yo.”

“What’s a Hello Girl?”

“Oh, yeah. Louise Breton.”

“Yeah.”

Precarious had walked over to Romeo and now they stood at Louise Breton’s grave. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. 1897-1989. Hello Girl.

“World War I. We got in it in 1917, right?”

“Right.”

Romeo said “right” because he was good at reading vocal inflections, not because of his grasp of history. He knew that World War I came before World War II, but that was about it.

“Pershing. Blackjack Pershing. He said that wars were won by the side that communicated the best. At the time, France had their own way of running a telephone system. French got their own way of doing fucking everything. So he hires a bunch of girls to be switchboard operators. Connects the trenches to command.”

“Never heard about them.”

“Yeah. They were called the Hello Girls. Wore uniforms, got medals, and when the war ended, they got stiffed out of their benefits.”

“Welcome to the military.”

“Yup.”

Precarious took the north side of the graveyard and Romeo took the south; they’d meet in the middle, squabble, separate. Crosses, stars, crescents. Caduceus for a doctor named Proctor, Thalia and Melpomene for an actor named Shachter. Teachers and preachers and middlemen.

“Precarious?”

“Yo.”

“C’mere.”

He did. Romeo was standing in front of a tombstone that read “Otto Dasch – Nazi Spy, Beloved Father and Husband.”

“What the fuck?”

“Otto. Yeah. Funny story: Otto was a Nazi spy.”

“I got that. What the fuck?”

“Well, this was before my time, but I heard the story.”

“Who’d you hear it from?”

“You know Holly, Wood, and Vine? The lawyers? Holly told me.”

“Lawrence Holly? You knew him?”

The law school at Harper College was named after Lawrence Holly, and so was a mud wrestling club far on the Downside.

“Sure I knew him.”

“Why?”

Cop habits die hard, even after the cop is dead.

“He was my lawyer,” Precarious said.

“Why’d you need a lawyer?”

“I claim attorney-client privilege. And stop asking so many questions. I thought you wanted a story.”

“Now I don’t know which story I want to hear.”

Precarious reached under his black vest to the breast pocket of his shirt and took out a soft pack of Camels. He had worn his vest because it was a formal occasion. He had a suit and tie for funerals, but that was for people who had died. These people, Precarious figured, had not died. These fuckers were dead. They got the vest. He popped a smoke out of the pack by twitching his wrist and pulled it from the pack with his lips. Replaced the pack in the pocket. Zippo from the change pocket that lay within the right hip pocket of his Levi’s.

FFT.

PHWOO.

And the lighter slid back into his jeans.

“This was ’42? ’43? Before D-Day. Germans are pulling all sorts of bullshit. I suppose we were, too, but fuck ’em. There’s submarines off Long Island and all kinds of saboteur nonsense. Undercover agents. Real fifth column type stuff.”

“Sure.”

Romeo had no idea what a fifth column was.

“And Otto here? He got sent to Little Aleppo.”

“Why the fuck would you send a spy here?”

“Well, you know, the Nazis were a lot dumber than we make ’em out to be. They did lose the war.”

“Yup.”

“And according to the story I heard, Otto might have gotten lost or confused, See, he was the worst Nazi spy in the world. You know how con-men don’t do too well in Little Aleppo?”

“They do seem to get caught quick.”

“Yeah. And being a spy is just like being a con-man. And Otto was just awful at it. Thick accent. Shit, he even had the little mustache. Plus, he’d get drunk and straight-up admit to being a Nazi spy. Brag about it.”

Romeo turned to face Precarious and said,

“Why didn’t anyone turn him in?”

“Well, think about it. If they got rid of the terrible spy, then the Nazis might send one that knew what he was doing. Then you got all sorts of insecurity. Every new person that comes into the neighborhood, you start wondering if they’re a spy. Better to have a spy you could keep your eye on.”

“That makes no sense.”

“In addition to being a bad spy, Otto was also a bad Nazi. He took to America hard. Grew up on Hollywood and now here he was in California. Decided he wasn’t going back his first week here.”

“But he was still a spy,” Romeo said.

“Yeah, but more of an unofficial double-agent. Him and his buddies down at the Buntz Bierhaus would come up with outlandish stories to send back to Berlin. They’d try to figure out what would cause the most confusion. Told ’em we were training chimpanzees to jump out of planes. Gonna shoot ’em full of tuberculosis and drop ’em into city centers with open wounds and rifles. That story got all the way up to Himmler. There’s memos and everything. It’s fucking history.”

Romeo smiled.

“That’s kinda funny.”

“Funny as fuck. By ’44, the Cenotaph was running polls about what the next bullshit he should send back would be. Otto became a bit of a local celebrity.”

“This fucking neighborhood.”

“Hey, who else had a honest-to-goodness Nazi spy? He made everyone feel a part of the war. Until he showed up, it was mostly profiteering and draft dodging.”

“There was no draft dodging in World War II.”

“There was in Little Aleppo.”

Precarious took one last drag off his cigarette PHWOO; he raised his left foot up to his right knee and brushed out the cherry on his heel. Crumpled the remainder into a little ball and shoved it in his back pocket.

“And after the war?”

“Otto settled in. Opened a shoe store. Collected butterflies. Married a black chick.”

“Black chick?”

“I told you: he was a bad Nazi.”

Romeo didn’t put a flag down for Otto Dasch, but Precarious did. The sun was higher in the sky now and from around the cemetery came work sounds. Crunching transmissions and the beepbeepbeep of reversing trucks and garment racks rolling along the sidewalk. In the southeast corner of Foole’s Yard, a gravedigger did just that with a Bobcat, The mechanized shovel pulled dirt from the ground with ease; the earth had no hold of its soil and it slipped away with no argument or protest, just the thrum of the diesel engine in the back of the ‘cat.

There is always a need for a fresh grave.

Marine and Soldier and Sailor and Airman and one or two Coasties. You get a flag, and you get a flag, and you get a flag. The Barkwith brothers, who fought for the Confederacy, got flags. Precarious smirked as he stuck Old Glory at their feet. Korea and Vietnam. Various Middle Eastern locales. Hiram Creech was a Rough Rider. Veracruz and Nicaragua and Manila. Hawaii and Honduras. Cuba and China and Cambodia. You name it.

“Precarious.”

“Yo.”

“What does this mean?”

Precarious walked over to Romeo and read the tombstone of a man named Guy LeFaun. 1918-1944. It read Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

“It is sweet and proper to die for your country.”

The only noise in the cemetery was the Bobcat.

“I don’t know about that,” Romeo said.

“Yeah. Me, neither.”

They were out of flags and out of graves, so the ex-roadie and the ghost cop walked out of Foole’s Yard and back to the 1961 Lincoln Continental, triple black with suicide doors, and Precarious Lee glided the car away from the curb nice and smooth and none of the dead cared at all about Veteran’s Day in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.