If Bex dropped into your world, he would need to go through some epic changes to survive.  If you dropped into his—and cared to see the other side alive—you would too.

If you both dropped into another world altogether, without the slightest frame of reference, your choices would be identical and as limited:

Mutate, evolve or die.

1.   CASKET SHARP

Bex stood on the corner of Benodet and Havre and squinted at the Shell MiniStop.  The whole McDougall-Stout hood called it the Shell MiniStop even though the shop hadn’t belonged to Shell or sold gas or even had a sign for longer than anyone knew or cared; it was a tagged, tired and tumble-down relic and inside you could buy dusty candy and Swisher Sweets and Scorpio and cigarettes and lotto tickets and blunt wraps.

Inside you could also buy Spaghettios, and Bex needed to pick up two cans for Grasshopper’s dinner. Spaghettios was the only thing that Grasshopper would eat on Tuesdays and Thursdays and today was Thursday and Grasshopper was unable to fend for himself out here, even to walk a block to the MiniStop.  He was preoccupied and driven by strange ideas, strange visions, and Bex took care of his dinners for him.  

Unfortunately, tonight, eight neighborhood bangers had decided to play the janked-up game with the MiniStop owner, a nervous, clay-colored Sikh named Singh.  They wanted to remind him that this was a hood mart, their hood mart and that they owned it, not him, so they piled into the cramped aisle, poured the pot of coffee on the floor, stole some Skittles and Nacho Cheese Doritos and sat on the counter in front of the ballistic curtain behind which Singh skulked, peering out as they chased away at least a couple of customers.  One was an indignant street dude with puffed thyroid eyes, a stringy blonde beard and the other was an elegant black fellow in a black and white dashiki pant set who looked almost Biblical.

Normally, this would not have been too much of a problem for Bex because the Scril Boyz looked out for him and called him Li’l Brah, even understanding that poppin and dope slangin was not his deal.  Bex was fourteen years old, an age by which most of them had been jumped-in with so-called ‘acts of love’, often ending in broken ribs and concussions, but these were kids with minds to need it and want it.  And for whatever reason, Bex just wasn’t.

But it was cool because his uncle Chebby had been high up on the food chain, one of the blood-in/blood-out o.g.s, and the others, the original gangsters along with those who came later, had sworn to have his family’s back after Chebby was killed like they always did—and always did. On any other night, Bex could have just snaked between the Scril Boyz and taken Grasshopper’s two cans of Spaghettios and paid Singh for them later, without the brothers knowing.  

But tonight, there was a sudden writhing from the shadow tunnel that was Eschambault Street and Bex knew what it was and he knew that it wasn’t good.

Bex was fourteen years old, small for his age, hollow-thin with high cramped shoulders, supple limbs and narrow eyes that did a lot of moving around.  This was mostly the nervous tension that came with the hood, but when Bex’s gaze began to oscillate and shift, it often looked out of place.  He had streamlined features—a finely textured face, panther black, glittery black, glossy black—but it was generally frozen with a sort of protective inertia.  When his eyes darted it was unsettling and looked like secret lights moving inside an onyx statue.

Now his ears perked up as well.  From gloom behind the red-brick corpse of Elkin Corporation, a long-gone maker of milling equipment, a storm of motorcycle engines kicking over came as a single quick peal.  It was like all the Dynas and Softails and Street Bobs had been startled by something and were now awake and angry.  

Of course, Bex and the baller boys and the earth-colored shop owner all knew where the rumble was coming from.  Up a few blocks north along Eschambault there was a two-story cinderblock building surrounded by a six-foot cinderblock wall, both painted solid Hummo black.  On the side of the building were a series of words in an Old English font like the one the Detroit Tigers use, reading things like ‘Legion 88 MC’ and ‘Brothers Keep Silent’ and ‘W.D.T.W’, which stood for ‘We Doomsday The World’, but unless you were a member of the Legion 88 Motorcycle Club, you weren’t supposed to know this and most people didn’t.  

Behind the clubhouse, in the parking lot where the dog fights happened, is where the engine thunder came from.  And unless they had some massive late night rendevoux, which was possible but unlikely, they were heading to the Shell MiniStop.

In fact, having been denied his Scorpio, the drunk with the restless thyroid wanted to stir up trouble and had tipped them off that the Scril Boyz were up to bullshit at the MiniStop.  Normally they would have simply packed the old man off, shoved him back to his begging post on the I-375 on-ramp, but tonight, club president Byron Berg was in a foul personal mood because of problems with his wife and decided that tonight it should be game on.

Otherwise, the renegade bikers wouldn’t have cared.  For the most part, these two neighborhood crews—one a rangy gang of angry black adolescents with gray, ambiguous limits and the other a white, disciplined outlaw motorcycle gang with actual bylaws—managed to co-exist in the same space because their missions were so different.  The black kids were in it for the pride, the rep and the protection and although they slang a little bud, it wasn’t weight and it was more for fun than profit; the white bikers were all about profit, and making money was their one true dynamic.   At the time, Legion HH was moving anywhere from four to seven affies of crack and heroin a week for upward of twenty thousand dollars each.

Bex knew that if they were heading somewhere else, going on a run, the bikes would  have turned left out of the clubhouse and steered toward Gratiot Avenue, the main trunkline cleaving this part of town. But if they turned right, it was over, because Legion HH had no reason to be on Benodet Street unless they were coming to the MiniStop since nothing else was there.  And that’s just what happened.  

Normally, the area around Benodet and Havre was quiet except for dogs and sirens, mainly because hardly anyone lived there.  On Bex’s street, Auden, there were only three houses still standing; the rest had been stripped, burned and bulldozed, leaving feral lots scattered with lonely old mattresses, discarded orange street barrels and haphazard trees strangled by vines beneath which old men had summertime alcohol ragers.  Most of the Scril Boyz lived in the prefab concrete highrises a couple blocks south and other than occasional whoops and hollas, they didn’t make much noise when they headed down Benodet.  But when fifteen big custom hogs with aftermarket pipes and no baffles revved up simultaneously on the next block, it sounded like a space shuttle launch.  

The roar convulsed and the sluggish evening torpor cracked open with sudden sicknening vividness, and even those who were not the intended targets of all this chrome and matte black fury looked up, woke up or got out of sight.  Those who were the targets knew what was coming and traded glances and threw their click sign—ring fingers crooked into an awkward circle on the inside of side-turned thumbs—and a couple, PEN-1 and Inspecta Wrek, drew high-capacity semiautomatic pistols.  They made a show of that, but they did other things by instinct, like pulling up hoods and bandanas if they were wearing them and coming out of the store in a sort of loose pecking-order formation, voices loud and nervous, “…I luh y’all bitch ass niggas, all y’all luh me, we gangsta, Boyz up; we know we crazy, never stop till the coffin drop…” which really meant, ‘You’d better stay on board even when the ship is sinking’.

Standing in front was tonight’s shot-caller and mouthpiece, a twenty-year-old baller called Young G.  He was a rangy young man dressed, as always, in a brand-new, out-of-the package white t-shirt which he’d throw away after a single wear.  He held himself with African stature, an atavistic chieftain from his cap stippled with stickers and tags to his crisp white K-Swiss sneakers.  Whenever Young G got jumpy, like now, he swaggered more and his rhetoric became more high-pitched and trash.

He wouldn’t let on that frightened. Or that he carried around a secret sewer of intidimation when dealing with white people.  But he was real to the game and the hustle and deep inside, he knew was that all true conflict is resolved through violence, and consequences were not a factor.  Not only did Young G not fear dying or going to prison, he pretty much expected it.  When he blinked or closed his eyes you could see that he had a tattoo on each eyelid—the right one read ‘I’m sorry’ and the left one ‘Mother’, which was supposed to be what she saw when he was in his coffin. Truth be told, right now he’d rather have folded like a beach chair and gone home to work on his music.  

Bex slid into shadows beneath Free Indeed Ministries Church, swallowed by its somber textures.  As he watched, fingering his long cornrowed hair, his eyes flickered and reeled.  A flood of white light came ahead of the bass vibrations, raging first down Echembault, across Bendodet, illuminating the bale of rotting telephone poles piled up against The People’s Barber Shop and flashing on the upraise fist painted there, then arced in a messy loop, flashing strobes scattering across the abandoned storefronts and steam-belching manholes, and then, as the phalanx came on, it drowned the street in radiant fury.  It was like standing in the airshow crowd at Selfridge when the terrifying A-10 Thunderbolts scream overhead; below, you cower and tremble in mute gratitude that these monsters work for your side.  

Except that to the thin black homies gathering in a loose knot outside the MiniStop, spewing testosterone and street bravado, they didn’t.

The bikes were all Harleys, mostly two-toned denim/vivid black-tanked, but each with some identifying custom application like ape hangers, upgraded seat pan, Thunder Cycle Death Grips, chrome deuce front ends, so that they all looked different, but exactly the same.  The road dogs who straddled them were likewise strutting nearly identical looks—not a single one of the Legion’s patch holders wanted to stand out from the others while refusing allegiance to the yardstick of routine.

Byron Berg came in the lead; he rode Black Ops, an absurdly chopped V-rod ex-police trike with extended forks, so fast on the open road that it needed cross-drilled discs in front and rear to slow it down.  As he pulled into the MiniStop lot, the trike lurched and squealed, nearly—but not quite—striking the cement pylons that covered the place where the gas pump used to be.  The others circled the wagon, some criss-crossing the lot, some at the mouth of potential escape routes. Although, as tempting as the instinct to run was, these boy bangers still thought the shop was a hood mart, their hood mart and that they owned it, and were willing to defend it with their silly, misdirected lives.

Byron switched the trike off and slid from the ostrich inlay seat, pulling a baseball bat from the tour pack which he sort of understood was as lethal-looking to these trifling corner apes as an AK-47.  They were insignificant pest-bugs, mud people, little more than diversions and certainly not worth going to prison over since with Byron Berg it was business first, family and ideology second.  So, this was mostly blowing off steam, a hamstring stretch. Byron approached with swag and a confident, florid grin bisecting lips that were normally compressed, showing off uneven teeth.  

His eyes were watery green and lit with contempt.  He spoke slowly, completely at ease, making fun of black dialect:  “Wassup, jack?  Keepin it forilla?”  Then:  “You wanna put up them straps, motherfucker, because I can pull straps when the need arises.  Seen no need so far, but I can see need clear if you don’t step light tonight.”

“What you want here?” answered Young G, not flinching, standing ground. “This our corner.  This our store.”

“Naw, it kind of ain’t,” Byron said, moving in, sopping up space.  Up close, his ruddy face was almost silly.  His left cheek was stamped with scars—the seal of prison violence—but between them hung the ghost of anamolous, dorky, reddish freckles.  As a boy, he must have been peppered with them.  

His voice remained toneless and curiously soft: “This store belongs to Mr. Sick and his family.  Right, Mr. Sick?”

The Sikh man Singh peered dumbly from behind the bullet-proof lazy susan as if he were watching angry baboons in a zoo, playing the safe route and keeping quiet.  Not that Byron was looking for validation.  He went on, asenine, chillax, annoying, “Now, here’s a poor brother come over from Arabia or wherever, trying to build a life for his family in some downtown shithole, brick by brick, dollar by dollar, bottle by bottle, and all the sudden some ho-ass hoodrats want to come and chew his balls off?”

Nostrils flared.  

And, a quick shudder of adrenaline and stress glucose passed between the clot, biker and homeboy.  

Byron closed more distance to show his whip hand and assert authority.  “Shit’s played out, my brother.” He dragged out the last word, pronoucing it like a black man would.  “Time fo de playa to give de store back to de hood.”  He raised his fist in an approximation of the black power salute: Gently, he twirled his baseball bat.  But his voice came up in volume, and it was streaked with giant, formless, slow-burn hatreds: “Let the poor wino have his wine.  Let him get his hustle on, yeah?  Otherwise I’m gonna have to boot you multiple times in your motherfuckin mouth, aren’t I?—I’m gonna have to bust a cap in your dome.  I’ma gonna hafta take your nigger momma and sell that bitch, unless give me some reason not to…”

Young G held still, his face penetentiary, but on the inside, hormonal storms raved; his pulse galloped insanely and his veins constricted.  Suddenly, he felt very cold in the October night.  Goosebumps up and down his sinewed limbs.  He had encouraged the posse to flaunt, but he was unarmed because he preferred to show that his dick was big, hakuna matata, brothers over personal welfare, which is why they looked to him, but the mom remark was a step beyond.  Cracker wanted to raise a fist? A’ite:  And so quickly did Young G’s right arm hook upward, clocking Byron’s chin, that the old club leader—approaching middle age and not quite able to take it like he once did—went down into broken blacktop like a deflated parachute.

Reaction was sweeping, spontaneous, intuitive and visceral, but it was all cut short when Inspecta Wrek—who didn’t know what else to do—fired three rounds from his Stingray-C into the air and everybody became so frighteningly alive in the moment that they dropped into street dreck and broken glass or got behind whatever they could.  Even Bex across the street hit dead dirt near the church sign so hard that he bruised both his elbows.  In this part of town, stray bullets were such an occupational hazard that houses had windows boarded up not because they were abandoned, but because they weren’t.  

And all of it would have ended badly, of course, except that something happened in the next instant so remarkable, so bizarre, so unpredicable and grotesque that nobody present forgot it for the rest of their time on earth.

Byron Berg was still splayed out flat, just beginning to burble through a mouthful of gore, with his right arm crooked beneath his denim cuts and his left hand in an empty clutch a yard from his Louisville Slugger.  His patch, with Legion HH in the top rocker and Detroit in the bottom rocker and a skull wearing a Nazi helmet in between, looked as lame when he was down as his daywalker face speckles did when he was upright.  And upright was the posture he was aiming for, struggling against dizziness, as Young G, with his back against the MiniStop door, holding his own hand out so as not to get any knuckle blood on his clean white t-shirt, looked at him, over him, into the hollow tunnel of Benodet and the strange stillness that had suddenly smothered the street.

Overhead, as the moon quivered in the gauzy purple sky, another player suddenly strode into the fray.  Young G was the first to see him—the exaggerated steps, the loping gait, the arms swinging with confident, feminine flourishes.  The man was dressed in a maggot-white dress suit with the front part of the coat cut away; in back, tapered white tails fell nearly to the ground.  His neck was done up in startched wing collars and white bowtie; his face was the color of dried plaster, his hair was eightball, shimmery with pomade, combed straight back, decked with almond blossoms, energetic tendrils falling to the middle of his back.  His beard, also greasy with hair gel and even blacker, was absurdly trimmed into a tapered slash-shape reaching from his left ear, through his lips, and ending below his right ear.

He was dressed, as the poor folk in these urban interstices liked to joke, casket sharp—the way you looked after the undertaker gave you the send out .

An entourage of two came stomping and traipsing several yards behind him.  They remained in semi-shadow as the man reached the MiniStop lot; they were tough to make out, appearing as rigorous, androgynous silhouettes.  The one, slipping suddenly, briefly into spilled headlamp light, looked like a Sith Lord’s rent boy, with long blonde hair curling over a mesh tank top and a voluminous, sleeveless ash-gray tunic; the other, lynx-eyed and bombastic, was dressed in a loud plaid check tuxedo, fur riding shorts and tartan knee socks.

The bikers and bangers were were keen observers; it was part of the survival package.  They were programmed to notice the slightest shifts in body lingo, homie or stranger; they knew instantly which interactions proved hierarchies and could pick out the subtlest contradictions in posture, expressions and inflections.  

The man in the lead offered them a field day—he was that filled with deficiencies in logic.  He was simultaneously unnatural and genuine, sharp and vague, spotlessly dressed but filthier than could have been made clean in a river of Clorox.  

In fact, through the next seconds of utter silence, neither the black boys nor the white boys were sure that this was who they thought it was.  Even so, they thought it was  Jarp, a ratchid teenage junkie from Lathrup Village who used to hang around the Legion HH clubhouse like a discarded puppy, the kind of homeless dog you’d kick and smack and feed shit to laced with Sriracha sauce just to hear him howl.  But Jarp was gone; Byron in particular was sure of that.

The man came on with a benevolent smile—nothing like Jarp’s old awkward smirk at all—crossing the shattered pavement in a couple quick strides, bending over, offering his hand to Byron Berg, who by now had struggled to his knees and was floundering as he tried to clear the cobwebs from his mind and shake away the numbness from his broken jaw.  

“Come on, Byron,” the man said gently.  “Give me your hand; up now.  We will get up.”  And he outstetched his right hand, took Bryon’s left arm, which did not offer itself, and pulled the big, brutal, battered monster to his feet with such a fluid, easy sweep that it was sort of idiotic, like things you see in a Kung Fu movie.  

At the same time, he reached over and seized Young G’s bleeding fist and pulled him up as well; swiftly, easily, as if the tautly muscled thug weighed no more than a fly shell on the windowsill at Beebop’s Coney Island.

Now, Byron faced him, peering.  Up close, perhaps the most repulsive contradiction of all was obvious: The man smelled equally of almond syrup and putrification.  Byron’s rheumy cucumber-colored eyes gaped into depthless discs of silver fire; he spoke in a strained, unnatural key, his voice gone pusswad delicate:  “Jarp?”

“My name is Nephallus,” the man beamed back, showing teeth that were tarnished, but still shone brilliantly behind his sable whiskers.  He turned on Young G, then glanced back at Byron, then forced the black fist into Byron’s pasty white one.  “Now, why don’t you two gentlemen shake hands and leave this thing alone?  We can have no more fighting here, neighbors.  We must share the divine Providence like honest brave, self-sacrificing, God-fearing citizens.”

Byron began to snarl and tried to wrestle his hand from Nephallus, but it was no good—the grip was too unyielding, too infernal, too bizarre.  In short, too unbreakable.   The other bikers puffed up and moved in, but did not really have his back.  It might have been that they weren’t sure what to do without a direct order from Byron, who wasn’t doing any ordering.  It might have been that they knew that even a bit fucked-up Byron could still make mush of this hang-around groundling.   And it might even have been that they were living by the chapter war-cry, ‘It’s one-on-one till you pull a gun and then you’re done’, which is when they all piled on.  

But it wasn’t that.  Truth told, although everything was coming down very quickly, Two Dog Joe—Legion HH’s head enforcer and second in command—was as spooked by the newcomer as he’d ever been spooked by anyone in his miserable, headstrong life.  He considered himself the baddest of the bad; he’d instigated total warfare with other outlaw clubs over drug turf, he’d emptied clips into houses where he knew there were kids asleep, he’d done violence against women, police and good samaritan citizens who wanted to be heroic and intervene.  And even so, better than any of them except perhaps the maximum leader whose hand was now in the newcomer’s grip, he knew that what he was seeing could not be happening.  And like the others, paralyzed with confusion—palpable fear that went to the roots of his dark soul—he did nothing.

In that span of nothing, Nephallus went on in a lilting voice: “The day will come, my Brosephs, when, after mastering the arc reactor, dilithium crystals, unobtanium and quantum vacuum zero-point energy, we shall harness the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of mankind, we shall have discovered fire.”

“Shake,” he said with monstrous intimacy, meeting their eyes, moving the two hands he held in the up-and-down gesture of fellowship.  “Come on, you marginal people, you vermix, you praetendī, shake, and all hail Discordia...”

And since Byron and Young G were unable to break free, they shook, and soon, they began to scream and physically deflate as Nephallus crushed the metacarpal bones in each of their hands.

More things came down, none of which made the tough guys of McDougall-Stout look particularly tough, but Bex did not wait around to see them.  He ran across the scabby lot of Free Indeed Ministries Church, beneath the lone oak tree remaining on the property where a few withered leaves were tickled by irregular gusts.  He ran between the pile of foul carpeting and a random half of a Chrysler Dynasty which for some reason had been sawed in two; he ran down the fractured driveway that had once led somewhere and now led to dumped appliances; he ran by the crazy backyard fence made of railroad ties, wooden pallets, barbed wire and stolen aluminum siding which stood behind the tumble-down house where the strange girl Carmilla lived—Carmilla, an intense kid his age, in his class, who lived with her grandmother and kept the lights and television on all night and might find as an adult, like many adults who’d graduated from the hood found, that she could not sleep in quiet darkness at all.  

Bex was taken with a surprising, unexplainable impulse:  Although he’d never said so much as a word to Carmilla in the two years that she’d lived there (he thought she was Puerto Rican or Hispanic or something, not of his place, not from his comfort zone), but he somehow felt that there might be affinity—some rare understanding—between them.  

And he had a sudden urge to knock on her door, even at this late hour.

But he didn’t.  He ran across the street, past a sagging, pummeled farmhouse with worn brown shingles in place of weatherboard, an off-kilter porch covered it astroturf to absorb the creaks, trash cans painted in fluorescent green with someone else’s address and on top, the butt-end of a chimney.  This was where Bex lived with his father and Grasshopper, and where he would have stopped and fixed Grasshopper his Spaghettios, but of course, he hadn’t gotten the Spaghettios, and now the buck-wild Chinaman would have to make do with Ramen noodles.  In any case, he didn’t stop; he didn’t even slow down.  He still had to fetch his father, fishing by the riverfront.

A collonade of street lights ran down to the water, a few casting sour yellow light on the eerie surges of churning and billowing steam, the rest not working.  On the corner of Bendodet where W. Vernor crossed, he passed the dancing man with the yellow hat that everyone called Neversleep because he was always on that corner, day and night, grinding with himself to vintage boombox he held on his shoulder or against his hip.  Slangin nothing, bothering no one, hour after hour, snow or gale, never still, never troubled, never sleeping, always even-keel through his slow, sensuous, endless ghetto roll.   He rarely spoke except in greeting, but this time, seeing the hollow thing behind Bex’s glower, he said,  “Cool down, L’il Brah.” he said.  “Keep it gully.”

Well, the thing was not to be spoken of, of course—it was  unspeakable.  So there was no cool down, not yet, and probably not ever.  Two Dog Joe and the rest had been thoroughly creeped out by the appearance of the man in the white suit and his pair of shadowy satellites, but you could tell by the way they shifted and hesitated that they suffered shreds of doubt; without comparing notes, each left to weigh his own appraisal, there was always a chance that there was some other explanation.  Maybe this was Jarp’s brother—his twin, or an identical cousin like in the movies.

But with Bex, there was no doubt.  He knew it was him.  If Jarp’s face had been lathered on a television screen among a hundred thousand others, or had his face been floating alone in eternity, it would make no difference: Bex would know him.  And Bex also knew that the kind of insanity that lay in thinking about it was the kind from which there is no return.

How?  Who cares how?  How anything?  How does the empty department store come down in an apocalyptic whump? How does the sun stay alive?  How do the birds know to start bickering an hour earlier when the time changes after Halloween?  

Jarp was a white man from some city far away, and that whole monolithic suburbia reality was an endless puzzle to Bex, one ‘how’ after another.  Bex was absorbed by his narrow focal beam, and everything else was a twinkling and infinite fog.  To him, the world beyond McDougall-Stout, beyond a few landmarks like Ford Field and Belle Isle and the black museum his class went to every year in February, was a tropical place of ease and sunshine.  He imagined mysterious food and green lawns and above all, he imagined silence.  No dogs barking, no distant crackling gunfire, no thudding MDX box, no sirens, no penetrating jive holla-off in the loud black night.  And the suburbs were heavy with white people; overloaded with them, and white people were always doing things that made no sense, like hanging black men from trees and dragging them behind pickup trucks, then passing out free meals at Gleaner’s.  So maybe they died and didn’t die at the same time.  After all, Jesus was a white man and he was always hauling dead people back from the dead.  Around Jesus, white people just couldn’t seem to stay down.  He only made it a couple of days Himself.

All these thoughts were inscribed in staccato eyes if not in his granite face, still and black as the sacred Ka’aba, and Neversleep had seen their reflection.  The funny thing was, after Bex had crossed Jefferson and trumbled beyond the sad, abandoned warehouses aerosoled with throw-up tags and burners, down into the gloomy recesses of Atwater to track down his father, Dezmon was not asleep like he usually was—he was huddled in a tight ball, shivering by his shopping cart, and Bex saw the same distant haunting terror in his father’s eyes.

But this was probably the acute delirium that sometimes seized him him.  Dezmon was in the final stages of alcoholism and often shook like he was on spin cyle.  What was odd was that he was not usually awake when Bex came to fetch him home; by this time, he was nearly always unconcious, sitting with his head between his knees or sprawled among his few belongings, Black Label pints and fishing tackle, and sometimes alone if these items had been stolen.  

“Yo, Pops, c’mon,” Bex said, piling up the rods, reels and an orange Home Depot bucket containing tonight’s meager catch, a huge flopping mud puppy salamander—something only eaten by the really raw, old-school folks of the hood.  “Time to go home.”

Bex was solicitous, eternally frustrated and kindly—he knew that the old man would not be able to walk the distance home when drunk.  And he was always drunk; that’s why Bex had to come and pack him up every night.  And like every night, he thrashed as Bex wrestled him, arms akimbo, into the shopping cart.  

But tonight there was more.  Dezmon’s face was usually slack with booze, but tonight it was sickening and vital—his runny nose was red with brilliant spider veins and his bleary eyes were alive as if ravaged by some primitive, savage vision.  He was sweating and his hands trembled so badly that as he pointed toward the river, it was like he was writing something in the air.

“I saw him, Bex.  He was here…”

“Who was here, Pops?” Bex said with weary patience, wedging the mudpuppy bucket in next to him.

“Biz.  I saw Biz. He came back out of the water.  I saw him.”

This was going to be too much for Bex.  Now was hardly the time, was it?  Bizmark had been his younger brother; he’d drowned in this part of the river when Bex was eight.  He glanced into the restless ink, and other than the places where Canadian Club neon was casting shimmering circles on the water, it was empty. “You didn’t see nothin, yo.  You wrecked outta your mind.”

“Naw, it was him, Bex.  I saw Bizmark,” Dezmon groaned, but the energy to push it further was not there.  His hand flopped into his lap and a flood of dirge tears appeared on his cheeks.  He was spent, and Bex was glad he was spent because he didn’t want to deal with more of this living dead drama—not  tonight. It was all some obscure hustle.  He slipped the bottle with a trickleful of scotch into his father’s claws, and Dezmon loosed a pitiful wail and gratefully, slid into senselessness.

Bex rolled him up Benodet, along the skeleton of cracked concrete in the middle of the road, straining into pot holes rather than wheeling around them because here, as you learned and incorporated into your involuntary reflexes, you always stuck to a street’s center, away from the alleys and shadows.  

He burrowed beneath towers of darkness.  Wind rushed overhead, high, somber and steady.  He crossed the weedy lot behind Edwige Apartments, its roof caved in and the southeast wall totally collapsed, showing the inside of bedrooms and ironically, windows that still had bars on them.  Industrial muck and especially, tires—tires everwhere, a sea of ring-shaped tires strewn as a minefield  across the sea of vacant space before him, a wild grey cat darting among them.  A burned recliner was marooned in the middle of Delphine Street, and on the corner of W. Vernor, like every night twice a night, he passed Neversleep, who tipped his yellow hat as he slithered through an eight count.

In a while, Bex made it back to the house on Auden and maneuvered his father onto the imploding astroturf porch, then inside where it smelled of Pine-Sol and dry rot.  He steadied his father at the entry, and led him passed Grasshopper—who hadn’t missed his Spaghettios in any case and was sitting amid a litter of Prismacolor double-ended art markers in his usual trance, oblivious to them, fixated on the fractal mural he was drawing—and to Pops’ broom-closet-sized bedroom in the rear.  Bex steered him inside, settled him on his mattress, basically flattened boxes and discarded, urine-stained clothing.  Dezmon went down a mess, sputtering, moaning, nodding, but there was nothing to be done for it, so Bex left him to fade off.

It was nearly midnight when he slipped behind his own small door, fitted with a deadbolt, and now, the sound of its fall came with incalculable relief.   It was a perk of being the only child left alive and he knew that having his own room was a nearly unheard of luxury among his peers.

Inside, ancient peeling wallpaper showed an old, still vivid alpine landscape, rich and splendid with snowclad mountains and lush pine forests, although with a big part torn away where a chalet had been.  In a corner was his father’s cornet case (hidden so the old man would not pawn it for drink) and an old dresser with someone else’s initials carved in it beneath a Sears black history month poster from 2005 reading ‘Every family has a history. We celebrate yours every day, every year’.  On the shelf was a Detroit Pistons Rip Hamilton bobblehead wearing a Santa hat that his uncle Chebby had given him; there was a print of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac together above the caption ‘Dead Leaders for a Dead Sytem’; there were books he had read for school, like Martin’s Big Words and Animal Farm and novels by Countee Cullen; there was a bottle of Pepto Bismol for his stomach and a Premium saltines box filled with reams of homework that, despite his envirnoment, he usually aced.  A floor lamp stood off-center; it was an old torchiere-style that threw general light across the worn sleeper sofa with a slipcover and a bunch of blankets, a few plastic Predacons and Happy Meal toys he’d hung on to.  Not much, but undeniably, everything within the room belonged to Bex, and now, he wanted to be a part of what was his, absorbed by private geography, no matter the night and the things he’d seen.  He pulled off his Triple Fat Goose parka, kicked off his Air Force 1s, intending to dissolve into his blanket, to break free from the psychotic haunts of consciousness.

But as it turns out, he couldn’t—not quite yet.

He always placed a large sheet of plywood over his lone window when he slept—cars with intrusive lights passed down Auden at all hours and he was inordinately freaked by the idea that someone at some time might peer in at him.  As he was putting the board in place, one of those annoying hoopties turned onto the street from St. Lucien, casting headlight across the broad and empty lots that lay west of the house, and when it crept near, Bex could see, for a moment, a small, pathetic figure standing in his yard.  Nothing coffin sharp here—the child was a lean starveling dressed in limp rags.  

Bex was not sure—not as sure as he’d been when he’d seen Jarp, but he went cold just the same.  He tore through the house, nearly sideswiping Grasshopper who was squatting in oblivion, drawing, smiling wanly, envisioning cryptic bullshit.  

Bex flung open the door but the car had passed and the yard was dark again.  The only thing visible was Carmilla’s house across the street, every window mellow-gold with light and hung with inexpressibly delicate lace curtains, while to the south, beyond corridors of cruelty, Bex could see the looming Ren Cen—strange citadels mounted with fiery blue neon rings and spackles of lit offices—distant as the icicle moon; his living alpine scene.