We sit near Frankie Frank and his girlfriend Zil.  Big Shiv grabs a Motor Trend for him and an Argosy for me off the rack.  He's wearing braids and his coat is missing some of them shiny buttons.  Today he looks sick and he stinks like your old underwear kicked in a corner of a lightless room.  He did some time for touching his daughter in the wrong places, but says it wasn't his fault.  His wife set him up for a fall.

The Man in the Sky is listening to our thoughts through a stethoscope strapped to the top of my head.  I had what they call walking pneumonia last week and I swallow the next-to-last round pellet of public health without water.  It kinda scratches all the way down but like the cold it makes me realize I'm awake.  The Man in the Sky accepts all of this, but doesn't forgive any of it.  He's wise to the ways of this place, and to Big Shiv and Frankie Frank and even Zil.  "Hey Zil," I say.

"What's your problem?" says Frankie Frank.  "Nothing," I say.

Big Shiv has turned his magazine upside down and is telling me about his heritage.  It's five degrees outside and all of us must look interested, or we're back screaming steam on the steps.  Big Shiv is a Sioux and he doesn't care who knows it.  It's all a manip anyway.  "Uh," I say, to encourage him to talk more so I can stay awake.  If you fall asleep here in the sticky warmth of the vast reading room with the steel chairs and plastic-covered, funky-smelling chairs, the security guards will find you a place in the snow.  Big Shiv thinks I understand him better than anybody ever did.  (But I really don't.)

"You and me," he said once, and he grabbed my hand so hard it hurt.  "You and me..." Then he looked away.  Then, if I squinted my eyes like X-Ray Specs, so I looked through the lashes so the light breaks apart and everything looks see-through like yolk-in-egg, then he looked a little like my Old Man looked right before they carted away the last of the Sears Roebuck furniture and etc. he tried to pay for on time.  I mean, his skeleton looked the same.  I mean, from what I could see and recall, they were similar in their bones.  Like I am similar to you in my bones.  But the man in the sky says the hell with it.  Get on with it.  So tell it. 

That day when I was ten, I put on my real X-Ray Specs, and watched the moving men walk in around my father, holding up the take-away-paper like a cross in B. Lugosi's face, and they laid big skeleton hands on everything: television, sofa, side table, dinner table (which they cleared of Rosey's stuff with a sweep of the arm), china cabinet (which they dumped first, sending the china caroming  to the floor).  Then they hoisted the stuff up close to the ceiling, so the Man in The Sky could lick His Thumb and write down everything they took in an ABC notebook, and they walked past Luther, three, four times, while I stood in my underwear and slippers watching it happen in shades of grey and black.  I could really see through the bastards.  I could see they really had nothing inside.  I tried to get Luther to look at them through the specs, too, but he could only cry.

He used to come home smelling of machine oil, old Luth.  That's when I told everybody I wanted to be just like him.  And I hung around him all the time, trying to touch his hair or some such crazy shit little kids do.  Like I would wait up real late with Rosey, watching Gary Moore on the T.V., and both of us fresh and clean from the bath we took together, and the kerosene heater bequeathing heat like your very own rich Auntie to her heirs, and then the door would unlock and there he'd be.  I'd run over with my arms open crazy, and he'd pick me up and bump my head just a little-not enough to hurt-against the ceiling, and Rosey would be laughing Chesterfield breath, and of course we were all happy as we should have been.  You never know what you got until it's gone, that's what Luther always said..  That bald-headed little guy was correct.  You know, I just said "little guy" but he became little and hunched-over only after I started to grow up.  At the time I'm telling you about he was pretty big.  Bigger than me and the Rose-lady, that's for sure.

Then, after he drank a six ounce Coke from the ice-box straight down (Rose kept cool ones in there for him all the time)-then was the best time, because he'd try to appreciate me.  And once he started, then Rosie would join in too, and it was perfect.  Rose would light up a Chesterfield, and Luther would pour another Coke in a glass and he'd share it with me.  He'd sit in the over-stuffed chair, and Rosie would sit on the couch and I'd do tricks for them like run around in small circles, or act like one of the 3 Stooges, or say a nursery rhyme or bring out a picture book and pretend like I was reading it to them, though I really couldn't read at that time.  Luther and Rosie would smile, or clap time, or brag me up to the walls and ceilings-"Looka maboy-He's so clever!"  "Yeah, Luth,-He's a keeper, that one surely is!"  Maybe Luther would even give Rosie a kiss and after giving her one, he never forgot to give me one too. 

Then after a while I'd sit down and yawn, and Luther would yawn too.  But Rosey never yawned, even if both of us yawned right in her face.  "Is there a good late move on tonight?" Luther would ask.  If there was, he and Rosie would turn on the television and watch Swing Shift Theater, and if I was really good I could lie down on the couch next to Rosie and sleep while John Wayne wrestled an octopus down at the bottom of a lagoon.  Some pretty woman was really worried about him like I'd always hoped a pretty girl would worry about me someday.  (Ha ha.)  And I never remembered how I got to bed, though I always woke up there the next morning.   If there wasn't a good movie on Swing Shift, Luther would go up stairs to bed and Rosie would turn on the reading lamp and read a paperback by herself.  I don't know if the Rose-lady ever really went to bed, because she was always awake any time I got up. 

I look over and see Zil asleep in her leather jacket and Frankie Frank up and off to the bathroom.  I reach over, tap Zil and say "Wake up.  The guards'll put you someplace else where you'll freeze your tush."  "Huh?" She says.  Zil looks at me through watery eyes.  She's sick too and starting to sweat it out in the heat.  She rubs the nape of her neck and swallows. "What you reading," I say.

"About ghosts," she says, like she's talking underwater.

"Do you believe?" I say.  (It's vast out there above the library roof, is what I mean to say, though, and the sky is full of ghosts wearing wings and looking pretty.  Like Zil when she first came around.  Pretty, I mean.  Not like a ghost.  But with difficult to describe eyes that made you believe again in movies and easy street.  Hard to say about what The Man in the Street believes.  Zil had a radio, too, small and Japanese.  She let me hear the Easy Listening Station on it, because it was the only station she could pick up.  WEZLF. She let Frankie Frank borrow the radio from her but the hole lost it like he loses everything else.)

"When I was little I saw a ghost in the basement once," she says.  "It was a man with half a head."

"Like Frankie Lover-boy?" says Big Shiv, pointing, Amerindian-like, with his chin.  He hated Frankie Frank.  Said he was Custer come back with a sewn-on-sideways scalp.

Just then Frankie Frank was doing the chicken walk across the big floor.  He stops to eye-ball the xerox ladies in the Copy Room, then he walks with one arm stiff and kinda crazy like in our direction.

"Hey, fuck you," says Big Shiv to Frankie Frank looking good with his hair all wet from washing it in the bathroom.  Frankie's skinny and wears leather pants he stole from a mafiosa he found shot in the forehead in a dumpster.  At least, that's what he says.  He says leather pants are great because you never have to wash them. 

Frankie Frank wishes he had a gun.  He makes a gun with his fingers, takes a long slow aim at Big Shiv's forehead and says: "Pow!" He always wishes he had a gun.  Big Shiv knows he wishes it but he says "fuck you" to Frankie Frank all the same because he knows Frankie Frank could never beat him, except maybe with a gun.  And Big Shiv knows Frankie Frank only has his thin-ass nicotine-stained yellow dishonest fingers to never do a lick of work with and no money.  And how does he get to do Zil if he won't even take a temp. job at the headphone place or the battery place on the South side?

Frankie Frank knocks my magazine on the floor when he sits down next to Zil.  "Where's your gun, Frankie Frank," I say, remembering how I used to say things in school to people I didn't like.  (You say it out your nose, like.)  By the time I bend over to pick up the magazine Zil's resting her head on Frankie Franks's shoulder like she's soooo in love in a drive-in movie about beaches, and Frankie Frank is grinning up at the ceiling, up at the Man in the Sky (though he can't see him), and probably wishing he had a gun and a cigarette so he could show everyone nodding out in the library the size of his stones.

Big Shiv is laughing down into his shirt collar like he does. "You know I met these two dames with a real proper manip," he says to nobody.  Then he starts his story by telling it like a loud-speaker in Zil's direction.  "They were two pretty good lookers you know, and they paid my drinks all night and took me way up in Shorewood to this big fine house.  You see these ladies was into each other and they wanted a three-some.  Get that?"  Big Shiv said "three-some" like he was rolling butter across hot toast.

The Man in the Sky had heard all Big Shiv's robot sex stories and so had The Man in the Street, who was outside blowing his goddam silver whistle at the crosswalk on 24th and Wisconsin.  I knew he was out there because the guards always look angry when he does this.

So the guards hear Big Shiv's mouth and they start walking over to our table like a cow grazes, slow and deliberate.

Meanwhile Frankie Frank's looking over at Zil trying to catch any little spark of interest she might have in Big Shiv while he's telling his sex story, but Zil keeps looking down at the book on ghosts and doesn't seem to be thinking too much about anything else except trying to swallow.

The big man keeps on telling us about his robot threesome.  What one lady does and then what one does to the other, in a voice that could rattle the china in my grandmother's closet.  He's got the story down to exactly the number of minutes each act takes to consummate.   I see the high schoolers five tables to the east of us, nudging each other and grinning pimples..  I see the Jesus-Will-Save-U-Lady open a black book with a plastic snap and start thumbing through her Save-U messages.  Then the two guards are there: Womack and Easty.  Womack is a small black man who always smells like a barber shop and talks in a whisper.  Easty is a fat lady who likes to sing when she makes us stand out in the cold..  No shit.  Like Luther said, sometimes truth is a lot stranger than anything you can make up, but this guard Easty is fat and she is a lady and she sings when she watches us cuss her and jump up and down out on the steps. It's not like in an opera, though.  It's more like she's trying to wrap her tongue around a tune she can barely remember: a Perry Como croon or a Mel Torme velvet smoking-ass-jacket-slicked-up 45.  Or some Polka she's tapping out with her back molars, remembering a Sunday at Big Ray's Tap, when she was wearing a baby mini, and everybody was up and clapping their fat hands and hooking fat elbows together and whirling with the crazy accordion music of Ray's friend Tiny Mo.  But this is my private joke known only to you, me, and The Man in the Sky (when he turns his stethoscope up to "hi-power") and it makes me grin when I see Easty.  She says: "What you grinning about?" to me every time.  Then she hates me a little bit more.

 "What you grinning about?"

 "Nothing," I say.

Big Shiv has stopped his sex story.  "Hey, sorry man," he's saying to Womack, but Womack already has the big man out of his seat.  He looks over at Frankie Frank, but Frankie Frank is deep into his book of Beginning Algebra and doesn't rise to the bait.  Zil licks her lips and turns the ghost story book page like the pages are all printed on kosher cold cuts-all 270 of them, plus index and table of contents.  She looks like a Wacky Professor.  "Hey Wacky Professor," I say and she giggles without making a sound.  Or maybe she's just coughing.  As I'm the only one looking up to see things, Easty says: "You-You get up too." 

"What's the temperature today," I ask Easty.  "You'll find out," she says.  "I mean, yeah, what's the skin-freeze-tone-zone-or air-freeze comfort zone, or whatever shit they're calling it now?"  I say, trying to make her start laughing so she'd forget to throw me out and sing.

"You tell me," she says, and she shoves me out next to Big Shiv.  Big Shiv is buttoning up the brass on his St. Vincent de Paul used police coat, slow, like he's meditating.  Then he drags that rain-stained cowboy hat down over his head till his ears touch the brim.  I don't have such fancy stuff, so I gotta dance.

Rosey once told me that I couldn't help pissing in my pants once in a while.  God made me that way and so I should be thanking God for the way I was made.  "Thank that Man in the Sky," Rosey would say.  "Thank you, God!"  "That's good," Rosey would say.  Then she'd give me a malt ball amd she'd have another smoke.

But it's half-an-hour to lunchtime and I don't have to piss anyway, and we're lucky because we get to be first in line for the Marquette free lunch van.  We walk around the slushy side of the Library, past the piles of dog-stained snow, and stand next to the side steps where the free food van leaves glittery tracks.  Then the sun starts shining right on the spot we're standing, just like God's oven door's open.  It feels real good, and I look up there to see You-Know-Who, but there's only a big marble cloud threatening to fall on my left foot if I'm not super careful. 

"Old Luth says there's no such thing as a free lunch," I say to the big man.  But this van plan proves him wrong, don't it."  Big Shiv grunts.  I don't know if he means yes or no, or even if he knows who Luther is.  He's looking far off like he does sometimes.  It's the Indian in him somewhere connecting with something larger than himself.  "Right, Big Shiv?" I say in the cold.  (The marble cloud had just covered the sun.)  But now he's squatting down and he takes a handful of snow and holds it up to the sky and drops it.  Does it again.  He nods, purses his lips like a connoisseur. 

Just then the Shopping Man comes and parks his cart in a snow drift.  He wears an army jacket, a knit cap, and gloves, and he's always talking about little Lillie-praise the Lord-buried down Jacksonville way.  He looks at me and Big Shiv with clouded eyes and begins to sing to himself (but not like Easty) and rock back and forth on his toes and heels.  "Mweeeeee!  Mweeee!"  He gestures at us and runs his hands up and down his ribs.  Then he looks down and away with his lips pursed like some thin, army-colored stork. 

Strawberry comes next with his black garbage bags of leaves and barely mentionables he's always hauling around with him.  It's best to see him outside because inside he stinks too much to squint at. (Buzzsaw smell.) They don't let him bring his bags inside for fear some lace-eating virus will hatch in one and bust loose and chase the librarians around.  He sleeps on those bags too.  Head like a greasy cue ball, sometimes he has as many as seven bags, and other times as little as three.  His name's strawberry because of the bright red boil that never goes away on his cheek, but hangs like a handless clock with six black numerals. 

Others come and stand near us, jumping up and down or dancing in place as the winds will it.  Or they look around and grin gap teeth and green teeth and black and brown teeth and hawk and spit and stare at the green and yellow splash and walk away.  I recognize some from the Heat Vent we crowd onto with our blankets and what-not over on Mason when the shelter's too full.

We all hear the Man in the Street blowing his whistle, the spit frozen on his chin, his destination card in his hand, vainly trying to get someone to help him onto a 54 bus.  I hear a pig-grunt of a voice.  It's Strawberry chewing the fingers on his only glove.  "Someone should lock that guy up," says Strawberry.  "Lock him up and file away the key."

"It's throw away the key," I say.

"File away," says Strawberry, "under N."

"What's N?" I say.

"Numb nuts," says Strawberry.  "I got 'em.  You got 'em.  He's got 'em."

Big Shiv starts laughing, and looks around his bulk for someplace to sit, finds none, and lets his laughter trail off like campfire smoke in a cold sky.

Strawberry pushes one nostril closed with his thumb and blows an elastic string of yellowish-green gunk from the other.  It drops into the snow with no sound.

The pigeons swoop down over the piles of snow looking for a place to land, since they too get some free lunch crumbs when the pretty lady pulls up in her thermos metal truck with her hot soup and sandwiches, but as we were taking up all the room on the sidewalk, they flipped and whirled and rose up in the middle of the sky on frantic wings, and kind of gently washed around a corner of the library building and ended up on an ornamental marble balcony where they did secret pigeon stuff, raising hell and like that.  Maybe getting some pigeon ass way up next to the roof. 

We stand staring into our hands, or muttering at things glimpsed from the corners of the eyes like The Man In The Street does all the time from his nearly frozen sockets.  The Man in the Sky tells me that people like us were common as dirt in the days before the Great Flood and Noah. Some are juicers and junkies and hop-heads and ancient speeders.  The same unshaved faces, the same downward-cast eyes or eyes dilated in fear or ecstacy expecting the skies to part and the end of the shit-stained spat-upon world to happen.  But I have to count my blessings like Rosie said, and make my lemons into lemonade.

The muck-a-mucks in business suits (lawyers from the Court House parking lot with blonds in high heels clutching their arms with one hand and holding the collars of their chic coats together with the other) jellied past without looking us in the face, as if we weren't humans waiting there in a freezing line; human beings suffering human needs.

"Maybe the lunch ain't coming," I say to nobody in particular.

It's these silent times that give your mind time to grow.  (Luther told me that once when all we did one day was sit by the trash burner wearing big party hats in the summer rain.)  Silent times is when I really have the chance to figure a few things out.  Like this: I didn't learn the secret of why aspirin works in school.  I thought it through for myself in what Doctor Duck called a "mind experiment."  I did my own mind experiment one day when things was locked down because the new kid from Jacksonville had gone off on one of the counselors and cut him real bad.  It's because of aspiric acid is why it works.  You see, I imagined a brain and a million ways of looking at it. Then I saw the pain as a red, knotted-up string in one side of the brain.  Then I saw the aspirin tumbling down as some see-through guy swallowed it, and I saw the chemicals swarming up like fleas in a rat's ear and I got it, like a baseball in a mitt.  Um-Ha! (Now I'm Doctor Duck understanding-like.)  Aspiric acid goes right to where the brain pain is and then burns that part out!  The holes are too small to matter, though, because we all have about a trillion cells in our skulls talking to each other all the time.  I told Luther I'd discovered the secret when he came for that first Easter visit.  Luther said I was a clever fellow, but I don't take no credit for it.  There's whole encyclopedias of useful facts waiting in little party packs of nothing.  You break 'em open and I.Q explodes in your grey matter.  Pa-pa-pow!--Wows for the kabillions!  Doctor Duck strikes again!  When Luther told me he had cancer in his windpipe I knew just what to tell him: use Listerine.  Listerine cures cancer, even if it's cancer of the asshole-the worst kind.

The wind kicks up and I shiver and pull my coat tighter around me.  Then I look up to see Frisco and Ted stepping real dainty through the drifts.

Ted was from one of the Milwaukee hyde-tanner millionaire families that made a killing with stinking skins scraped off the backs of pigs and cows and tanned to leather sweetness for wallets and pocket books and mafiosa pants you never have to wash.

Big Shiv says they used to use dog brains in the old Sioux days.  My mind trapped that instant fact and I try to put it on file in the "Help with Homework" section for Ms. Samsonite, whom I like.

Ms. Samsonite "womans" the library phones and I pictured myself leaning over the big, cream-colored desk while she cradles her receiver between shoulder and neck, pen in hand, and I whisper: "Dog brains."

"Pardon me?"

"The answer's Dog Brains, that's all," I say real important-like.
"Thanks," Ms. Samsonite says, "Dog Brains."  Then she says, "Our chief researcher says Dog Brains," and smiles. 

"Hey - what the fuck?" shouts Frisco. Frisco is a scrawny starved cat of a teen-aged kid with blackheads on his forehead and herpes on his lips.

Ted's in his overcoat and pajama bottoms.  Frisco's got a blanket coiled around and pinned up like Marquis de So-So.  He has rubber boots on too so as not to spoil first impressions.  They both live together in a room Ted rents with his trust fund money. 

"Hey-hey--what the fuck you here for?"

"What the fuck you asking for?" says Big Shiv and throws a snow ball at Frisco. It hits him in the side, but he keeps walking stiff-legged like it never happened, though you can tell it hurt like hell.

Ted starts his toothless laugh-machine.  "Fumpf, Fumpf, Fumpf!  Snuff snuff!  Ka-ha!  Ka-ha!  Ka-ha-ha-ha-ha!" 

"Shut the fuck up!"  Frisco shouts at Ted and punches him in the chest.  The punch makes Ted's eyes open a little and puts his laugh inside big parentheses so you can hear the traffic again.

"We're here because we're hungry," I say, like I'm talking to Little Boy Blue on da Wompa Woom show.

Ted staggers backwards in slow motion, with his arms making like in a Woody Wood Pecker cartoon, but he still continues to laugh. 

Frisco turns back to us like a little tin soldier.  "What a nut!  What a no-brain nut you are!" he says, shaking his finger at me, but not at Shiv.  "Looka you!  Looka you!  Looka you!  It's Sunday shit-for-brains!  Those sweet-smelling do-gooders are all over in that church there praying for themselves in the heat.  They ain't gonna give nobody nothing free today!  The van's in long-term parking, not a cheese and mayo in sight!  If you rocket scientists don't believe me, check it out for yourselves!  Jesus-God what institutions are you cartoons from?  I mean, who left the zoo gate open?"

Big Shiv lunges and Frisco jumps and tumbles back.  The Sioux laughs and war whoops when he sees the terror on the kid's face.  This is the kind of stuff I don't like about Shiv.

Ted's doubled over now, gripping his knees, cheeks above his beard red, blood-shot eyes bulging as he strangles out a cough that starts like a giggle and ends in a deep-chested groan.  He does it again and again and Frisco's suddenly rubbing the back of his head, trying to sooth him, while looking nervously in our direction out of his crazy dark eyes.  He grabs a handful of snow and tries to shove it into Ted's mouth, but Ted knocks it away and laughs and strangles at the same time.
"Got any money?"  shouts Big Shiv to Frisco. 

"Not a dime for you," says Little Boy Blue out of his herpes mouth, nervous-like.  We all knew he was lying, 'cause he always carries Ted's wad of green in his front pocket.  It makes his pecker look bigger.

Big Shiv inhales, considers, watches the scene, as I've seen him do so many times before he breaks a window with his head, or kicks a garbage can in front of a transit bus for fun.  A cop car turns slowly onto Wisconsin Avenue and the cop looks like he's looking our way.

Shiv lets the air out slowly through his teeth in a plume of steam. His eyes get distant, far-seeing.  Then he looks at Frisco, boom! like through a pair of watch-maker's glasses with laser lights on either side. "I wouldn't touch that money anyway," he bites out, like a shark shaking a man's gristle free, "for what you do to get it."

Frisco stares at Big Shiv, the way a Chihuahua looks at a Wolf, while Ted pulls himself together, gobbing at his lips with a crusty handkerchief.

"More blood, Teddie?" says Frisco in a baby brother's voice.

"No blood, Wusser," says Ted.  ("Wusser" is the name Ted calls his boys.)

It's hard to tell how old Ted is because it depends on how Frisco treats him.  Today, outside of the scratches on his face and the black eye, he could pass for 55.

"We gotta get this man to the hospital someday," Frisco turns and confides to Shopping Man in a television drama voice. (We'd all heard that one before, and we knew it was just "concerned talk," because Ted never goes anyplace and Frisco never does anything but say once or twice they're going to the hospital and they just end up buying some frozen chicken and tinned soup from the Arab grocers and cooking it on Ted's gas plate. Then, after Frisco fills his stomach, he beats hell out of Ted and takes more of  his money and runs out the door.  But the funny thing is, he always comes back, and funnier still--Ted lets him back in.  But that's how Ted's always been with his "Wussers.")   Shopping Man salutes, blows a raspberry, and starts marching in place.

"I gotta dollar," I say.

"Praise the Lord for your money!" shouts Shopping Man.  "I gotta stack of coupons waiting for me in Heaven!"

"I got sixty cents," says Big Shiv to me.  "Let's buy a burger and split it."

Frisco's licking Ted's ear and laughing.  Ted starts laughing too.  Big Shiv shakes his head and says white men are the scourge of the land.

"...every one redeemable at the Grand Jesus Christ Bakesale Someday Store, up next to Little Lillie Land!"  shouts Shopping Man, working his thumbs like he's counting them out already.

Now Ted's really laughing and Frisco punches him in the mouth, screaming for him to shut the fuck up-he knows why he's laughing-he knows!  But even on the ground Ted coughs and laughs and coughs, and barely chokes out the name Wusser.  Frisco kicks snow on Ted, but the scene loses interest when the lake wind crashes around the corner of the library building and makes me wish for the hottest damned day of the year. Plus, I now gotta piss like a racehorse trots.

Shopping Man's set up a tea-party of sorts in a drift, and has invited Strawberry and a couple others to take a load off, but we're tired of his madness, and decide to feed the belly a crumb of grease and salt.

The wind kind of pushes us backwards away from the lake like it doesn't want us to eat or something so we have to hold our heads stiff, drop our chins into our chests and bore down the street to Hardee's.  My shoes are wet clear through the linings and the sidewalk is starting to freeze again as the afternoon lengthens into evening.  The place has steamed up windows from all the people inside, but the first thing I gotta do is piss.  The hog-necked manager watches us as we open the door and I glide back the hall toward the Mens. "Occupied!"  Someone shouts when I shoulder the door.  I slouch against the wall and wait. 

The heat feels good and I unwrap the scarf from around my throat and already I can feel the heat soaking into my eyeballs and my moustache starting to drizzle  the snot that you don't notice is frozen on your lip when you're outside.  I unbutton the top three buttons of my coat to let the heat ease in, wipe my lip with the back of a hand. 

Just then somebody touches me on the shoulder and I turn around.  It's Zil.  "Hey, you got any medicine?" she says.  "Sure," I say, and I fish around and find one pill left in the lining of my jacket.  I palm it to her so nothing looks suspicious.  "Thanks, sweetie," she says and makes kissie lips.  Frankie Frank doesn't see it, because he's sitting down letting "his bitch" as he calls Zil to his male friends, get him a burger and fries.  I look around and Shiv is talking to Zakopane Phil, the Polish knob-head who sometimes gets us a place to sleep over at St. Mary's of Chestahova on Brady.  He's jawing pretty good with Zako, so I can tell there's a chance for a flop and even some ham sandwiches from the Fathers if we clean the pews. 

Then I'm back with Luther that day the men came to take everything out of our house.  It was one of them days for sure, kinda cloudy and sad.  It was the Monday after the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving when Rosie died was when they came in their two trucks.  Luther had already started to shrivel up because Rosie was everything we had, so we couldn't fight them, even though I wanted to.  "Remember this," Luther told me.  "Remember the faces of these men.  We'll be picking them out of a police line-up next week."  So I took a good look at them as they bent and lifted and cursed each other and I can still draw their faces if I have to.  It was five of them, and almost everyone bigger than me and Luth combined.  Luther said: "I'm a working man and this is what the working man gets."  But the men didn't care and didn't even stop to answer anything Luther said, like he was less than nobody.  In fact, Luther wasn't a working man, but I kept the secret.  He'd lost his job right about the time Rosie stopped eating and started looking too much out the window.  She still smoked her Chesterfields, though, and we always bought them for her-even when she went into the hospital and sat there looking out the window and losing parts of herself almost every week.  I guess she must be in Chesterfield Heaven now, lighting up one cig. from the end of another, and sitting in a ring of good ladies and blameless gentlemen lying on clean cardboard passing the packs around. 

The bathroom door opens up for a grease-ball looking salesman and I make quick work of it and am back in line.  I'm looking down at the cracks in the floor and I start singing to myself in a small low voice.  "Excuse me?"  I look up.

"Your order?" The highschool girl doesn't call me sir, like she does (I bet)  the lawyers and clerks who eat here on the q.t. during the week.  "One Big Bacon Burger," I say, and "two cups of coffee."  "Is that to go?" she asks, hopefully.  I tell her no and her face sags.

I don't think I ever remember Rosie going outside to enjoy the day like Luth and I did.  We was even sportsman sometimes, going over to the Gunpowder to fish, or going out to see Professional Wrestling on Sunday nights. (Our favs. were the Mad Dog and "Da" Crusher.)  Rosie only went outside to climb in the backseat of the car to go to the Farmer's Market to shop.  We'd wait for her in the car, and we'd see her come out pushing a shopping cart with a delicate look about her like a fish out of its bowl.  Then Luth would say "There's Rosie," and  turn the key,  tap on the gas, and we'd be there with the big Buick idling away loading the grocery bags into the trunk while Rosie eased herself on her old woman's legs into the backseat.  Then we'd maybe swing around to some other stores if we had to, but usually we'd just return home and Rosie would fix us something good-like fresh baloney sandwiches on white bread with even a slice or two of AMERICAN CHEESE, and a slice of tomato and a kosher dill pickle and two cold six ounce Cokes -- before she'd go back to her chair with the lamp turned on beside it and her stack of paperback books.  She never turned that lamp off and somehow the idea of turning it off, even when we went away to shop or something, just never occurred to any of us.

"That'll be $1.25.  One dollar and twenty-five cents puleese?  Mister?"  That girl sure looked strangely at me.  The manager was standing next to her too and when I looked up the Man in the Sky looked down at exactly the same moment, as is his wont.  "Sure, here it is," I say real casual and I drop the soggy dollar and some change on the counter.   She sorts out the twenty-five cents with her pointer finger and pushes the tray towards me across the counter.  I take it and turn towards where Big Shiv is sitting with Zil and Frankie Frank.

When Rosie died I was in the 4th grade.  Luth kept me home from school and we went and bought her a pink "final home" as Mr. Carly, our Funeral Director, called it back in his back room where all the coffins were lined up like sports cars beginning a race.  All I wanted to know was why did the mattress have springs in it and a hospital crank to raise and lower it, but Luther wouldn't let me ask that question when Mr. Carly came with his bill and Luther signed some papers.

Flipper was on T.V. a lot back then, and when I looked at the "final home" I thought it looked like a big pink dolphin on wheels.  Then, when we were all sitting together under a small circus tent out there where they bury dead people, and I reached up to help Luth and some of Rosie's brothers carry the coffin and set it evenly on top of some canvas straps and chains and such over the muddy hole the workers had dug for it (I saw them over in the distance measuring out another hole), I thought it was really a big pink dolphin, and Rose was inside laughing her ass off at how silly we all were shivering in the wind and losing our special announcements and watching them running and skipping among the headstones like paper rabbits and owls.

Funny thing was Rosie had already done the Xmas shopping ahead of time and she'd even gift wrapped the presents "from Santa," except we didn't know it right away.  "Looka this," Luther told me two days after Christmas on a sunny afternoon when he opened the hall closet to get the vacuum cleaner out.  There were all the presents Rose had gotten neatly stacked and waiting for us behind the vacuum.  "What do you think?" said Luth.  And his eyes started getting red.  "Rosie's the best," I said, "she waited for good weather in Heaven for us to get our gifts."

It was another funny thing because it was a freezing rain on Christmas Eve and I sat up with the T.V. off staring at Rosie's empty chair and the stack of books with her light on as usual.  The sump pump had stopped working and Luther kept waking up and going down the squeaky cellar steps in T-shirt, cover-alls and rubber boots to try to start it up again so the basement wouldn't flood to hell.  Then he'd come back up and look at me kinda funny.  "Well," he finally says, checking his pocket watch "it's officially Christmas now.  Let's open presents."  I tore open the green Santa-faced paper that was hastily taped around Luther's present to me and it was a red plastic flashlight with new batteries in it. It wasn't really what I wanted, but I acted like it was.  "Oh, man, a red plastic flashlight, wooie, etc.!"  When Luther saw the Farmer's Mart work gloves I'd bought him at the same time he was buying me the Farmer's Mart Taiwan flashlight (only we kept it secret from each other), it was hard to tell how he felt, except he put them on right away to see if they fit,  smiled because they did, and thanked me.  It wasn't like Rosie's gifts, though.  She knew just what to buy to make us glad that Xmas had come.

When the sump pump stopped again, he took my flashlight and put on the gloves and went back down to start it up again.  The flashlight worked real good even though it was made in Taiwan and I held the light over the lip of the cement hole while Luth groped and cussed around in the bottom.  I kept making the light jiggle and even cut some witch noses and scissors and peace signs into the circle of light and finally Luther yelled and grabbed it from me and told me: "Grow the fuck up.  You can't be a baby all your life!  Now that Rosie's gone you got to grow up and stay growed so you can help me around this place!  I ain't gonna be around to take care a you forever, ya know!  Then what you gonna do?" 

I started to cry-not so much 'cause Luther yelled at me (he was always doing that lately), but because the Rose lady was outside in the freezing rain in her pink dolphin down under the rocks and roots and stones and trash.  She had a picture of all of us happy and smiling in one jacket pocket and a pack of Chesterfields in her other pocket (I made sure of that), but still she couldn't be liking it too much down there in the dark, even if the mattress did have springs and a wind-up and down thingie on it like a hospital bed.  Luther started to cry and I knew he was crying about the Rose lady too.  He climbed up out of the hole and put his arms around me and we both stood there crying in the dark with the Christmas flashlight tossed on the floor showing the cobwebs under the oil tank.

"Hey kid!  Kid?  You want that half a burger or not?" 

"Want," I say to Big Shiv. 

"How about the milk and sugar mud?" 

"Yeah I want it, what d'ya think?  I'm still fuckin' froze." 

"I think you've been staring at your food like you're in the zoo watching the monkeys jackin' off."

Shiv's lips are all greasy from his half of the burger, and his legs are sprawled out over his side of the booth.  He grabs the coffee in his huge hand and takes a gulp to spite me.  Across from us, over in the Lovers' Corner sat Frankie Frank with Zil on his lap sharing a big box of Super Fries and being private in their "Just the 2 of Us" world.

Through the half ice half steam window, I get a glimpse of The Man in the Street staggering past towards the library, lead by the hand by someone I couldn't quite see, though it looked (for just a second) a little bit like Rosie.

I used to pretty much understand day-to-day Society like what we're all doing Right Now, when Rosie was reading her books and drinking instant coffee every day in her chair.  But after she left us the Man in the Sky started doing things I was ashamed of.  Like making Rosie whisper all the time even though she was dead.  It wasn't good whispering either; it was deep bird-sounds coming up out of the ground was what the hell it was.  When they'd start I'd move my lips to them like I'd seen the Jackson Five do on American Bandstand.  It would be like I was making the whispers and the bird sounds, but it wasn't really me, but I was embarrassed for Rosie's memory because a dead person's not supposed to lose their composure like that.  So I'd go around protecting Rosie's memory at work and at play, and soon Luther had to come all the way from work just to see the principal and Doctor Duck about me, because I was hip to the changes the Man in the Sky was going through.  I tried to explain, but the principal said I was too old and too big to stay with them, and would Luther please take me back home for good.  They told me to go out of the room then, and I heard Luther begging for another chance, and then everything got quiet.

I got to sit home with Luther for a week after that, taking some special pills from Doctor Duck after another doctor stuck me with a needle and sucked out two or three skinny bottles of blood.  Luth kept asking me how I felt, and I have to admit, Rosie stopped whispering and that made me feel like I had to do the Jackson Five stuff less and less.  So I could go back to school again, if I promised Luther and everybody I'd be good. 

Mrs. Magruder gave me a test the first day I came back and soon I was in a brand new desk in the Secret Room.  The Secret Room was just big enough for Stevie (little Steve), Karen Mirror, Me, and Mrs. Magruder (who smelled like Luther's 'Lectric Shave).  Karen Mirror was my girlfriend there after I found out that she was really ok and didn't pick her nose and eat it, like everyone said she did.  She always copied what everybody else did, so Stevie and I called her Karen Mirror, and sometimes Karen Mayonnaise because she brought mayonnaise sandwiches to school for lunch.  She'd stop copying Mrs. Magruder and Stevie and me at lunch when she ate her sandwiches, and that's when I'd hold her hand when Mrs. Magruder wasn't looking.  I gotta say it though, it all went downhill when Mrs. Magruder retired and Ms. Bazoozie came into the Secret Room the next year and K. M. graduated to a different school.  It was just at that time that Rosie came back from heaven and stood next to the new teacher and made a fart noise with her mouth.  Then she told me to do it, and when I did it Stevie and the two new kids laughed, but Ms. Bazoozie didn't.  Instead, I had to put my nose in a circle Ms. Bazoozie drew on the chalk board during every break time that day. 

Before that, I was an ok kid.

Ms. Bazoozie even said she still liked me when I talked to her about what I did.  But I couldn't explain that Rosie was sitting on her head or getting small like a chicken and doing a dance around the room making fart noises here there and everywhere.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I say, watching Rosie be both alive and dead.  "Nothing, Ms. Bazoozie."  But when the Rose lady told me to reach across the table and touch Ms. Bazoozie on the tit, I was in big trouble with Luther, Doctor Duck and the principal, and I had to sit by myself drawing pictures with Smith Teacher.  But Rosie came there too and told me to spit food on the work table at lunch time.  And all I could do was look up at the lights when Doctor Duck asked me why I was doing what I was doing at his school.  I really wanted to tell about the Rose Lady, but the next thing I knew I was throwing things all over the room and carving up Doctor Duck's tile floor with a little piece of glass.  The principal came in and grabbed me and I cut his arm.  The Man in the Sky quite possibly knew about all of this, because suddenly everyone in the world was pulling the shades down and locking their front door.  I mean, you could hear it up and down the streets. The Big Lock Down. I felt a pain in my shoulder and the last thing I saw before I went to sleep was Rosie in her big chair under the lamp with all her books.  She was picking each book up, opening the covers, and spitting into each one, then quietly closing the covers and putting them back in the stack. 

"Kid?  Kid?  Hey, are you asleep or something?"  Big Shiv garbs me and gives me a shake.

I push him away.  Rub my face.

"What's the word from Zako?"

"He said he'd put a good word in with the fathers, but don't count on it too much because somebody walked off with some of God's silver in the middle of a kiss 'n tell last Wednesday night."

"Frankie fuckin' Frank," I say.

"Yep," says Shiv.  "How about that Daygo worm?  That bastard's getting his in a minute.  You watch and see." 

I knew it was a fact that Frankie Frank had lifted some stuff from the church when he was "playing ladies" with the Fathers at Chestahova. He'd no doubt already cashed it in.  Just last week he had the goods in a shopping bag and couldn't wait to take me to see it in his stash place underneath 2nd street bridge.  He kicked through the rotten blankets and pulled up a sheet of plywood and there was a Grand Ave. bag with the shit inside.  I acted unimpressed until he told me it was where the Catholics keep the biscuit they say is the body of Christ.  He showed me where it was written in Latin (the Fathers showed him while he was still wearing his wig and high heels) and I pretended I could read it.  I said I'd studied it through a home correspondence course at Willowglen Academy.

"What's that engraved stuff say, then?" 

"It says butt hole of Christ, right here," I say, tapping the dish.

"Hey-don't tap so god damned hard with your crummy fingers-you'll dent it.  That's real solid antique silver there!  Mack'll give me a twenty for this."

"You're the Man," Frankie Frank, I say, and walk away.

"Hey, you don't say anything about this to anybody!" Frankie Frank yells.

"Then why you yelling, you idiot!" I yell.  He starts to chase me, but I can run faster than him, even with my busted-up lungs.  I find Shiv and we go on up to the library like we do every day.  I didn't think much about any of this until now.

Mack's the fence off Center and George.  He must have given Frankie Frank a few bucks alright because he was up at the counter again buying more burgers for Zil and him.  Not that I minded that Zil was getting the extra food, because it helped her good looks look even better. 

Zil has those great dark eyes like some silent movie ladies had.  She has French lips too and sometimes, when we're alone, I get the feeling we could do it right there wherever we are.  I tell her that, too, and she just laughs and licks my wrist where the pulse is. Sometimes she puts her arms around me and lays her head on my shoulder and relaxes a little and coughs and I  touch her hair with the palm of my hand.  Then I think I'm like Luth and Rosie, and I want to protect Zil for as long as I can. 

Frankie Frank turns around with a tray full of burgers and fries and Big Shiv reaches up like a grape picker and has a big burger husked of its pink lettered paper and bitten into before Frankie realizes the theft.  "Hey you ba....

But Shiv's already dragging him out through the door, Frankie Frank in one hand and the burger in the other. The manager shakes his long hog's head wattle and makes to call the cops, but doesn't.  I get up and walk over and sit next to Zil.  She doesn't say anything but pushes a box of fries over to me and we start to eat, real slow at first, but soon we're eating and talking normally.  Just like Frankie Frank wasn't right then getting his ass kicked somewhere out in the cold and the snow.

"Next week Thursday old Luth'ill be gone four years."

"That's too bad," Zil says.  She sits awhile in silence, then says, "Who's old Luth?"

"That's my dad," I say.

They let me out of my special school-the one where I couldn't say I saw Rose waving and whispering and telling me to do things I didn't want to do-and I took a 51 bus to the hospital with the green cracked walls and the dirty halls that smelled like nobody ever opened a window in there.  Then there was old Luth looking thinner than I'd ever seen him, lying in a hospital bed in a room that stank of shit.  I shook my head.  "Man, don't they ever clean this place?" I say.

"I'm shitting myself to death," he said.

"I see that," I tell him.

"You got a cold?"  He asks me.

"I do a little," I say. 

"Then stay over there away from me," Luth says in a tiny voice.  "My immune system's gone and I can't have you coughing and hacking near me."

"Is this far enough away," I say, taking five "mother may I" steps back.

"Maybe that's ok," he says.  I sit on a bench and shout over to him.  "So how ya feelin'?"

"Like hell," he says.  "I'm dying of cancer!"

"You're going to Rosie," I say.

"Shut up," he says and starts to cry.  Then he says, almost screaming, "I want to live, you idiot!"

"Well I guess I know that," I say.  I start looking around for a magazine, or something.

A big Jamaican nurse comes in to change the bottle connected to a tube coming from Luther's stomach. She has huge breasts and braided hair. 

"I see you have a visitor, Mr. Zangwell.". 

"Yes, that's my son."

"Well, he's a handsome young man."

"Yes he is.  He gets his looks from his mother."

"And his brains?"

"God only knows," says Luther and he drops his head back on the pillow and groans.

Just then we hear the sirens screeching down Wisconsin.  Bubble cars and an ambulance make a big U-Turn right in traffic and land up plumb next to the curb in front of the burger place, splashing snow and cinders on the sidewalk and facing the wrong way to traffic as they edge out of sight.  Nobody honks or shouts fuck you, dweeze-bobs, because you know-it's the PO-LICE.  The burger boss wobbles over to the steamed-up window, dragging his fat ass like a cellulite caboose and crosses his arms as he squints through the pane of steamed up glass.  Zako's already crept out the door and limped the opposite direction with a bag of burgers and fries.   A few others stand up in their bubble of heat and fat smell to rubber neck.  Wouldn't you know it?  People still line up to buy a burger or fry or something, even in the midst of the excitement.  Like I can imagine the world's blowing up outside or UFOs are raiding earth from another planet and poor bastards will still be trying to throw down their coins for some of that good grease. 

Now someone's talking on a bull horn and half a dozen cops are walking up toward the empty lot next to Hardee's and everyone out on the street at the bus stop is staring that way.  Zil doesn't show any fear.  She just wipes her lips on some napkins, leans over and touches my cheek and smiles with a trembling little girl's smile.  We get up and don't even throw our trash away.  That's how we were feeling-so on top of the world - that somebody else could throw our garbage away, just like lawyers in a fancy restaurant where you smoke a cigar and laugh after you eat a big crayfish and pay lobster prices for it.  I try to kiss Zil on the cheek, but she pulls away as if she's looking for the paparazzi or something, and then we push out through the door back into the cold and hurry up toward where the cops are.  The ambulance is just pulling away and one of the cops is asking if anyone knows the injured person.  I keep looking around to see where Big Shiv is.  I imagine five or six cops with nightsticks out and Big Shiv in plastic handcuffs rolling like a berserk bear in the snow, with bloodied forehead and blazing eyes, but I see nothing.  Now Zil's laughing like she can't believe it.  The cop's shouting at her that she shouldn't have come over and don't be disrespectful of the dead you dimwit whore.  She wades through the snow over to me in her penny loafers and wet socks and ragged jeans and the cops turn their sawed-off shotgun stares at us, but for Zil it's like springtime or something.

"A fucking old lady got hit," she beams.  "She was trying to cross the street and was half blind and somebody hit her and kept going."  So it wasn't Big Shiv and Frankie Frank making news after all.

Just then the cathedral clock chimed five and it was already too late to try to get into the shelter.  Zil still had a chance at the woman's shelter, or if she had to she could flop at her sister's on Brady, though she hated it because her sister's boyfriend always tried to hit on her when her sister was out.  For guys like me, though, it's a different proposition.  You have to start lining up at 3:30 or 4:00 at the latest for the six o'clock intake or you're stuck with the Fathers of Chestahova-who expect you to act like a girl to stay there-or the vent.  Since I don't put out for nobody or nothing, it's reading magazines in the library until it closes-then the vent.

When we come back into the library, Easty stares at us, but lets us past.  There, at our favorite table, is Big Shiv squinting at American Heritage like nothing ever happened.

"Your boyfriend took off," he says to Zil, "liked to pissed himself when I choked him once or twice."

Zil shakes her head and slumps down in a chair next to me.  "You got any more of those pills," she says.

We all knew Frankie Frank would be back sometime.  If not today, then tomorrow.  You could depend on him like crabs, cramps, or scabies. 

Guess it's the vent, I say to Big Shiv, and Shiv looks around to see if any guards are near, and spits on the floor.

* * * *

So here we are partying on the heat vent watching the traffic punch by with the wind whirling blue exhaust down low against the street.  (That means it's way below zero.)  Strawberry is sorting his garbage bags on the edge of the metal grid because they'd melt pretty quick if he drags them on top.  Big Shiv is keeping watch for bubble cars, 'cause if they edge up to you without your knowing it, cops'll drag you off the vent and make you beat it till they're little lights way up top of the hill on Madison; but if you wave and grin at them as they drive by, they'll call you dumb ass, but keep going and let you suffer it out in the steam.  At least until they double back again and you have to do the same act over, and even then it sometimes doesn't help and they make you freeze your ass until they pull out again.

Then there's the tourists zipped up in the hooded carriages and the big brave horses with diapers pulling doctors and lawyers and Mrs. Lawyers and their spoiled, rich brats up and down past your ridiculous throne-an oasis balanced improbably in the midst of high winds and steam and crapulous snow.  The drivers are wrapped round in three or four coats and they wear Abraham Lincoln hats over knitted caps when they drive.

Sometimes we yell jokes at them as they roll by.  Big Shiv will shout something like "Hey Sweetheart, what you doing in there with that pale little weener feller?  Come on out here with me and bring yer champagne wit yer!"  But we gotta watch what we say because the drivers will call the cops down at the payphone by JUICY SPAGHETTI and the cops'll clear the heat vent of everybody.  It only takes one quarter to make you wish you was never born on these cold Milwaukee nights.

You know, the vent is not the place to fall asleep, because it can kill you.  You have to hop off once in a while to get fresh air and walk around in the cold.  If you go to the vent you have to drink cheap wine and cry and sing all night or you'll die of poisoned air.  They say you see everyone who ever died there riding the vent if you fall asleep and they all come to drag you out of yourself if you don't wake up or somebody wakes you.  On top of that, if the gas doesn't get you, your clothes get wet from the steam and when the dawn comes and the heavy traffic kicks up, you've gotta get off the vent, and there you are in the freezing morning with your fuckin' clothes all wet.  That's what put me in the poor hospital for a "limited booking" and scarred my lungs up with walking pneumonia so I have to take little pink pills.

Tonight it's about ten of us on our metal raft.  It's started to snow, but we hardly feel it in the blast of copper tasting steam. The Man In The Sky is saying "Hello?  Hello?" over and over again and "Testing?  Testing?" in a mike hidden behind the moon.

"You and me," says Big Shiv.  "This is our Wounded Knee!  Where's fuckin' Custer?"

"Whatever," I say, trying hard to listen to what the Man In The Sky is trying to tell me.

"I'm gonna dream a little of the Grandfathers," he says.  "You wake me up in five minutes, ok?"

"O.K.," I say.  I can see the stars up through the steam dancing and wavering out there in the beyond. 

Big Shiv balls up his coat for a pillow and stretches out on the grill with a torn blanket he takes from one of Strawberry's bags.  When he throws his big arms and legs out from his sides and takes a few quick breaths prior to dozing off, we all see that he thinks he's way too big for death to carry him away.

The Man In The Sky just keeps counting from one to ten over and over.  Over and Over like he's some rock star ready to begin a sweet riff if he can get the sound check done in time.  "What's the point of all this?" I say to Strawberry.  He grunts and shrugs, then digs through one of his plastic bags for something he just thought of.  He pulls out a second glove and tries it on.  It doesn't match the other, but he grimaces and moans in appreciation.

Up along Winston Street where the mad little black woman dressed in her leopard skin coat beats her ukelele like a drum in front of the Hyatt Hotel, staggers The Man in the Street blowing his frozen-up spit-filled whistle with a rushing sound like Niagara falls in the distance in a movie I watched once with Luther. He's missed his 54 bus again and all the shelters have turned him away.  The taxis honk and pull into the Hyatt on either side of him, but he still moves forward as if feeling his way on the wind.  There's plenty of traffic between us and him, and I get up in my steam wet clothes and step down off the vent to help him across the road.  I grab his dirty hand and wait for the road to clear, then lead him across like Dr. Frankenstein's assistant leading Frankenstein into the operating room to take a first look at his "bride." 

He climbs up on the vent next to Strawberry and Big Shiv and me and the others and he turns his head as if he's looking at the city, but we all know he can't see or say anything, though he's grinning just the same.
 

Note:
The characters portrayed in this story are  fictional.  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.