"Why? So he can stink and s.h.i.t for a few more hours?"

"No, I know this lady. She'll come and get him. She'll bring him to the animal hospital. They'll know what to do."

"Why bother. I know what to do." Beer bottles and cans clinked as he kicked through the trash-strewn brush. "Same thing," he grunted, picking up a broken cinder block. "Put him out of his misery."

"No!" she screamed, both arms out, afraid if she moved, he'd do it.

"Yes!" He laughed, and the sun glinted on his sweating scalp as he raised the block chest high. The crazed, snarling creature tried to creep back, out from his long shadow, but couldn't.

"Please don't. Please don't, Thurman. Please," she gasped, barely able to speak.

He tossed the block aside. "All right, but now you gotta give me something."

"What?"

He dragged the largest piece of cardboard deeper into the woods. She followed, stopping when he came to a damp, needled patch of ground under three tall, spindly pines. She held on to the cardboard while Thurman knelt and clawed away rocks and sticks. He patted the ground a few times to be sure, then smoothed the pine needles back into place. She handed him the cardboard. He removed his big black sneakers, then lay down with his hands behind his head, looking up at her with an almost embarra.s.sed expression.

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"You just gonna stand there?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"C'mon! What're you waiting for?" He held out his arms. "You're scared, aren't you."

"No."

"You ever do it before?"

"Well, yeah." She rolled her eyes.

"So, c'mon. C'mon, b.i.t.c.h," he said softly. "You'll like it. You'll like the way I do it." He sat up, grabbed her hand, yanked her down beside him. "But first you gotta take this off," he grunted, tugging at her shorts.

"No!" she said, crossing her legs. "Not unless we buy him some dog food."

"Not now!"

She kept thinking of Polie and her mother. Polie and the baby. Polie all the time pawing at her. She tried to get up, but Thurman rolled on top of her, forearm hard on her throat. "We had a deal, so now I'm going to f.u.c.k you. You know I am, right?"

She glared up at him. He stared back, then burst into laughter and tore at her clothes in a frenzy of giddy, almost weeping pa.s.sion. When it was over they got up quickly. Neither one spoke. He urinated behind the tree while she dressed. She felt cold. Mosquitoes buzzed at her ears. She wondered if she'd been raped, then decided it couldn't have been that. She had agreed to it at first; then even when she didn't want to, she'd been too afraid to fight very hard. All she could think of was the old woman's twisted face recoiling each time her mother kicked her, so she had clung to him with such desperate anguish that in the end he had to push her away.

"What about the dog food?"

"I don't have any f.u.c.king money," he called, trudging on ahead. He was tying his T-shirt around his bare head.

"You had five bucks!"

"Yeah, before. But then I had to give it to Antawan. Sorry." He looked back with a smirk. "Besides, you oughta pay me for the favor. It'll be a h.e.l.l of a long time before you get something good as that again."

The rock she picked up was as big as her fist. She threw it hard, then winced when it whacked into the small of his back. He turned, fists clenched and glaring. Scared, she knew better than to run. She kept on walking, safer now on the sharp edge of his cold smile. She could handle this Thurman, the one who didn't want anything more than to hate. When she came to the Dumpster behind the Market, she hoisted herself up and pulled out a crushed loaf of bread.

"What're you, some kinda pig?"

"It's for Cootie's dog," she called back.

He watched her jump down. "What happened to your dog?"

"Leonardo?"

"Yeah, the s.h.i.tter. That's what Polie called him, anyways."

"I think he got lost, or maybe somebody took him. I don't know. Every day I go out looking for him."

"Yeah, well, don't bother." He laughed.

"Why? You know where he is?" She grinned stupidly, futilely, heart racing with that battered hope that beats its wings faster and faster as it tailspins down from the sky.

"Yeah. He's dead. Polie put him in one of them bin things. He filled it with rocks and threw him in the river."

She dropped the bread bag onto the ground. "No, he didn't." She made herself smile. "You're just saying that." To get back at her and Polie both.

CHAPTER 23.

A strand of yellow police tape dangled from the porch railing. The previous night's storm had brought down a large tree limb that covered most of the old woman's backyard. Gordon had just gotten home from work when he saw Detective Kaminski leaving Mrs. Jukas's house. He asked the detective if he thought it would be all right for him to cut up the branches and remove them from her yard so that Mrs. Jukas wouldn't have to come home to such a mess. It wasn't up to him, Detective Kaminski said, and besides, the old woman wasn't any better. Her niece in Michigan wanted the doctors to take her off life support, but without a living will the hospital had refused. strand of yellow police tape dangled from the porch railing. The previous night's storm had brought down a large tree limb that covered most of the old woman's backyard. Gordon had just gotten home from work when he saw Detective Kaminski leaving Mrs. Jukas's house. He asked the detective if he thought it would be all right for him to cut up the branches and remove them from her yard so that Mrs. Jukas wouldn't have to come home to such a mess. It wasn't up to him, Detective Kaminski said, and besides, the old woman wasn't any better. Her niece in Michigan wanted the doctors to take her off life support, but without a living will the hospital had refused.

"Thank goodness," Gordon said.

"You're glad?"

"Well, of course. I can't believe her niece would ask that."

"I wouldn't want to be laying there like that, would you, barely alive, hooked up to machines?"

"No, I know what you mean."

"But if the tree's bothering you, I suppose you could always ask the niece."

"It's not bothering me. That's not what I meant."

The detective opened his notebook. "Sheila Brown. She remembers you from years ago when she used to visit here. She said her aunt was always afraid of you."

"She got over that, I think. For the most part, anyway."

The detective flipped a page. "I don't know, according to her lawyer there was some problem about a ladder," he said.

Gordon tried to explain, but the detective kept interrupting: Why had he taken the ladder from her? Where was it now? How long had he been out of work? Had his brother been giving him money? Things must have been getting pretty desperate, then.

"I was behind on my bills, but I wasn't desperate," Gordon said.

"How come you were fired?"

"I'm not sure. Neil Dubbin, I don't know if you know Neil, he's . . . well, he's volatile."

"Volatile?" The detective chuckled. "He said you tried to burn his building down."

A few days pa.s.sed. As its leaves withered in the heat, the huge limb seemed to be sinking into Mrs. Jukas's yard. Decay was a quicker process when no one cared, eventually a contagion. Every day, Gordon noticed some new deterioration in the neighborhood, in his own house. And it wasn't just things, but people. First Mrs. Jukas, now Inez and her family were gone. They hadn't trusted him, but he had enjoyed watching the comings and goings of their large family. He seldom saw Marvella Fossum. The other night she fell asleep on the top step, smoking a cigarette. Jada tried to wake her up, then gave up and sat next to her. She had still been there when he went to bed, laughing and calling out wisecracks to pa.s.sersby as if this were a perfectly normal situation in a perfectly normal life. Didn't everyone sit by their stoned-out mother so she wouldn't topple down the porch stairs? Was anyone sitting with Mrs. Jukas? He would ask Kaminski if she could have visitors.

There hadn't been any police activity next door unless they came while he was at work. During the day someone had thrown beer bottles from a car. Gordon went out to pick up the broken gla.s.s before his pizza came. There were a few pieces on Mrs. Jukas's front walk, but he was afraid to step onto her property without permission. Her gra.s.s hadn't been cut. A drainpipe leaned out from the corner of her house. Across the street the curb was lined with boxes of trash and an old rug that Inez's sons had thrown out at the end of the move. Jada had just come out to look through the boxes. From the corner of his eye, he saw her pull out a bent metal shoe rack, then stash it up on the porch. She pushed the rug away from the telephone pole, then rolled it toward the house. Even from here he could hear her grunting as she tried to drag it up the steps. He started into the house when she began calling his name.

"Hey, Gordon! Gordon!"

He closed the door, then through the curtain watched her struggle to get the rug onto the porch. Every time she got it halfway up, it slipped back down. Now she was trying to push it up, but she was too skinny, the rug too bulky. Watching her shove her bony shoulder up against the coa.r.s.e, unyielding rug filled him with a terrible anger. He closed his eyes, trying to will away the pain, then shuddered as it tore through him. He would not do this. He could not. He would not feel this. Would not, but there it was, her, all the pain and futility he'd ever steeled himself against, not just loose in the world, but in this place, here, where he'd sought refuge.

A dusty white car was coming down the street, antenna bent, windshield smudged, and, flapping out from under one door, the ruffled red hem of Delores's skirt. "Yes," he said softly, with more longing than he had ever known before. She got out and hurried across the street to help Jada. Together they wrestled the rug onto the porch.

"She didn't want me to come inside," Delores told him when she finally came in. Gordon offered her a bandage, but she kept sucking her b.l.o.o.d.y knuckle. She'd cut it helping Jada. "She said her mother was sick. But I think Jada's the sick one. She looks awful, don't you think?"

"I don't know," he said as she opened the envelope, getting a little blood on the back of the photograph she was removing. She held it against her chest.

"She said you were just out there."

"I was picking up some trash."

"And you didn't see her?" she said with a bewildered edge to her voice.

"Not really."

"You didn't see her trying to get that big rug up on the porch?"

"Yes, I saw her." He met her gaze.

"And you didn't help her?"

"No. I didn't."

Biting her lip, she looked at him a moment more, as if to comprehend what he'd said. He asked to see the picture, and she handed it to him hesitantly. The agency had sent it. It had just come in the mail, and she wanted to share it with someone. Someone-not her family, but him, he realized.

"She's pretty." He looked closely. May Loo's stern little face intrigued him with its self-containment. "It's almost as if she's trying to send some kind of message or something."

"I thought the same thing! I'll bet they told her to smile, but she wouldn't. It looks like that, doesn't it? As if it's her life and, d.a.m.n it, she's going to be in charge," she said with tender pride.

"Look at her eyes. How they're staring straight into the camera." His own eyes burned with the press of Delores's arm as she leaned closer.

"I know. It's almost scary, isn't it?"

"Think she'll like it here?"

"What's not to like? Except me, of course," she added with an uneasy laugh, and suddenly the moment had changed again. She was complaining about her family. It wasn't just May Loo they were critical of, but adoption itself. Especially by an unmarried woman not making much money who lived in a tenement in one of the poorest cities in the state. Even her pregnant, twenty-year-old, unmarried-but-engaged niece had weighed in with a warning about single motherhood. "And every single e-mail, that's the bottom line," she continued. Her oldest sister had been bombarding her with stories about adoptions that turned out badly. "The worst one was the boy that stabbed his mother to death while she was playing the piano."

"Maybe it was her playing. Maybe it was that bad." He grinned with Delores's quick laugh.

"That's exactly what I said, too, but Linda, she has no sense of humor."

The doorbell rang and he jumped up. His pizza was here, his third in less than a week. He had worked up the courage to place an order when he saw one being delivered down the street. He usually saved two slices for work the next day. That way he wouldn't have to pack a lunch. "Thank you," he said, giving the delivery boy the exact change.

"Yeah, right." The boy clomped down the steps.

"What's his problem?" Delores said as his car peeled down the street.

"I don't think he likes his job. He was like that last time, too."

"Did you tip him?"

"No!" He was embarra.s.sed. "Should I call and have him come back?"

"Just do it next time. Um, smells good." Delores followed him into the kitchen. "What kind is it?"

"Pepperoni and cheese."

"Oh, I love pepperoni." She leaned over the box and inhaled deeply.

He offered her some, then was annoyed when she accepted. She curled the slice and ate it like a sandwich. Sauce leaked onto her silk shirt, and there was a ridge of cheese under her thumbnail. She wet the corner of a dish towel and scrubbed the stain, spreading it to an orangy smear, then hung the towel back up. He took it down and rinsed it in cold water.

"I can't believe we ate that whole pizza." She stuffed the empty box into the trash.

"I know." He took it out and folded it to take up less room. "I usually save two slices for lunch at work." He hated himself for her crestfallen look.

"Oh. The two slices I just ate. Now I feel guilty."

"No, don't. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. Really."

Yes, you did, her stare said. "I annoy the h.e.l.l out of you, don't I, Gordon."

"No! Really. I shouldn't have said that. I don't know why I did." He felt horrible.

"Because it was the truth. And that's okay. But what's not is setting me up just to shoot me down." She smiled, but her eyes blistered with tears.