Annie and I owned our own house. I found it abandoned at the bottom of a cul-de-sac where no one had built anything new for years. The roof peak rose from a field of sticker bushes. I had to heave my motorbike through twisting vines that snagged my jacket every few feet. I hid my bike under a moldy plywood panel and then, to hide everything, I cut down some vines with my pocketknife. From the foot of the house we saw only a stand of maple trees. I-5 hissed in the distance like something burning. The lights of the cars fell through the maples around the house like a forest fire.

I stepped on the plywood panel, rocking back and forth until my bike was hidden. When I finished, I touched Annie on the shoulder. “Do you like the house?” She just stood still, looking at the ground.

Her shoulders shook as she hugged herself. “Sure, looks fine.” She didn’t even look at our new house.

I couldn’t find Annie’s flashlight in all the junk she thought she needed to take with us now that we were going to live on our own. In her backpack, I felt the fuzzy covers of books that had been read too many times, the smooth plastic shells of makeup containers, a roll of toilet paper, and reams of loose wrappers, notebook paper, receipts, garbage. At the bottom of the mess, I came to her flashlight.

We had spent all morning riding along the freeways. I had kept an eye out for state troopers parked in the hideouts along the median waiting to pull over speeders. I figured that Annie’s parents would’ve sent the state troopers after us by now. I could hear her mother’s voice on the phone as she dialed the cops: “My daughter’s been stolen.” She wouldn’t say anything like, “My daughter’s run away.” She’d think I had done it just as I had ripped off her jewelry box and her emergency money. From her viewpoint, I had also taken Annie like a piece of property. In a way I had. We hadn’t been going out long enough that we were really, completely, boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Do you smell that?” Annie whispered. I didn’t smell anything. While I stood in the doorway of the house, tunneling through Annie’s business, I started to see things in the dark living room. Overturned and blackened furniture lay in piles against the walls. The floor buckled and broke where a tree had started to grow through the boards. I flicked on the flashlight and I couldn’t see anything for a minute, just the yellow glow around the plastic tip.

“Don’t you smell that?” Annie asked again.

“No,” I said. “Come on.” Annie crowded behind me as I started up the stairs. The steps made a sound like they had just swallowed a bucket of fat. I tried to push Annie ahead of me before the stairs collapsed but she hissed, “I’m not going first.” She grabbed me, her hands clutching my neck and her breath pouring into my face. We huddled on the stairs as they groaned under us.

We stepped into an upstairs room carpeted on every flat surface. A thick, orange shag rug hugged the floor, the walls, and the ceiling like the insides of fuzzy dice. Dead Christmas lights hung in arcs from the ceiling and a La-Z-Boy—still in its storage plastic—sat in one corner. The old clothes piled on the floor smelled like someone still lived in them.

“Can you smell that?” Annie hissed.

“Yes,” I said.

Behind one of the carpets, we found a fireplace large enough for Annie to stand in and look up. “This is it?” she asked me. Her voice echoed against the chimney bricks. Then she ran her hands along the furry walls of the room. I thought we would have to keep looking for a place to stay, but when Annie threw herself on the La-Z-Boy and said, “Let’s get this rat hole cleaned up,” I figured that meant she liked the place.

As we threw the stuff outside, the smell started to go away. I threw the piles of old newspaper and scraps of furniture into the fireplace and we had a bonfire. The flames jumped up into the chimney and the light flickered in the room. Even though we were tired and hungry, we toasted in the fire until we were warm and dry.

My mother had told me about a place where I could work if I ever needed money. She said that the Millionaire’s Club in Seattle would let anyone work there. And the good thing, she said, was that after the day’s labor they let you keep the money you had earned without skimming off the top, and they paid the same day.

My mother was always telling me how to get by in the world without her. We would’ve just started on one of the spaghetti dinners we always ate, and she would look up and start in on me. “Milton, what did you do in school today?” Read books, I’d tell her. “Milton, when’re you going to start looking for a job?” And then she would tell me about job openings she had heard about. I told her that I didn’t want to go. After school I would come home, skim through my textbooks, and then run out to work on my motorbike. Mom didn’t like my machine. I knew then that one day I would hop on my bike and just clear out. On account of Mom, I knew about all the free meals in the city. I knew how to take care of Annie and me.

Early in the morning, I took the bus downtown before any of the people who worked in the offices showed up. I walked to the Millionaire’s Club on Second Avenue and stood behind a crowd of older men. Ahead of me, people stood in clumps; some held Styrofoam cups, others smoked cigarettes. A man right behind me asked, “Do they pay much here? Do they take out income tax? If they do, I don’t know if the sweat’ll be worth it. No way. I’m just in this to keep me in cigarettes.

“What’re you working for?” he asked me.

“Money,” I said. I realized when I said this that the word didn’t say all that I meant. I meant by “money” that I could survive next week and Annie and I could sleep with full bellies in a warm room. I realized the man would think I was being a prick.

He grinned. “Money? That’s a good one.” He put his hands behind his back and looked at me. “You’re not old enough to get a job, are you? Like McDonald’s, like outside of this kind of thing, are you?”

“I’ve worked,” I said. “I’m eighteen.” I lied, but I figured anyone under twenty was young to this guy.

“You can’t get legit work, can you?” he said.

“I work,” I told him. I started to get pissed at this guy then. Maybe he was mad because I’d been a smart-ass. He just stood behind me, knocking something around in his pocket that caused his jeans to bulge back and forth almost as if he had a rat running around in his pants.

“That’s not all you can do,” the man said. He grinned. He squinted his eyes and pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Not all, is it?”

“No, that’s all I’ve done.”

“Yeah? Well, I hope they don’t report this kind of money. I just want to keep in cigarettes. You smoke?”

“No. I don’t.” I didn’t smile. I didn’t do anything to make him think I thought he was funny or tough.

“Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?”

“I drink.” I wasn’t a kid. I could drink beer just like that. I’d shotgunned Oly.

“Sure you do, kid,” the man said. “Talk to me about it, I can get some booze for you. I’m old enough.” He winked and looked down the line of men standing on the sidewalk. Their breath clouded around us. “This line doesn’t move, does it?”

I turned my back to the man, even though he kept talking. Ahead of me, a truck had stopped and several men hopped in the back. Then a van pulled up and I found myself sitting across from him.

“Hey,” he said. “Name’s Dwain.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“You have a name?”

“Milton.” I turned before he could start with me again. I looked into the dark windows of the closed stores. Steam rose from the sewer lids. Then we started on the freeway and finally stopped way out, near the mountains, where Annie and I had come from. My work team spent the day at a dairy farm where we heaved sloppy cattle shit into the back of a dump truck. As I broke through the crusted top, held together by thick green grass, I uncovered cattle shit that smelled far worse than I knew anything could smell. It smelled sort of like the black insides of my motorbike’s gas tank. At the end of the day I felt like I had swum laps in a swimming pool of gasoline. When they paid me, though, I didn’t care. I held the crisp, clean twenties in the palm of my hand. Forty bucks.

They dumped us off on the sidewalk in front of the Millionaire’s Club. I stood looking down the busy street at the cars in the rain and darkness. Dwain raised the palm of his hand to me. “See you,” he said.

I said, “Wait, could you do me a favor?”

He stopped and leaned against the wall. “What? Don’t you have a place to sleep?”

“I need you to buy me a case,” I said.

“A case of what?” For a second I thought he was serious, but then he smiled. “Sure,” he said.

I walked with him to a convenience store and handed him one of my twenties. I stood outside, smelling the air. My muscles felt like they had turned into old chewing gum. In the store I couldn’t see Dwain. In that second I felt like everything inside my head and my stomach and my legs disappeared so that I was just one of those hollow plastic figures you’re supposed to fill with candy. I couldn’t tell if he was going to come back. I reached for my wallet and I pulled it out. I checked my other twenty and put it back into my pocket. Finally, Dwain came out of the store with the case in a big paper bag. “Here,” he said. He dropped some crumpled bills and change in my hand. “You planning on drinking all this alone?”

“No, I’ve got friends,” I said.

He handed me the case. “You sure you don’t need a place to stay?”

“No. I’ve got it covered,” I said, “Thanks. Have a beer.” I tossed him a can and he caught it with one hand and forced it into his pocket. “See you,” he said. But he didn’t go anywhere. As I walked away, I turned around and he was still watching my butt.

I came back to the house where Annie and I lived. She had built a fire. I dropped a twenty and a ten on top of the recliner. She grabbed them and ran her fingers along the crisp edges. “Watch it,” I said. “You’ll get a paper cut.” She had her hands around my neck and we cozied up on the La-Z-Boy. “What’s in the bag?”

“Twenty-three cans of Milwaukee’s Best,” I said.

I watched her as she pulled out two cans. She opened one and tossed me the other. I hadn’t had a lot of beer in my life. The few other kids I knew didn’t have older brothers, so they had no way of getting beer. When we did drink something—a six-pack stolen from a drunken father, the remains of tequila at the bottom of a pint—we had to drink as quickly as possible or we couldn’t get a buzz. Annie slammed the first can, draining it straight back, and then opened up another one.

“Drink,” she said. I started to drink. I tried to catch her, but she could drink. I closed my eyes and just dumped it into my mouth. I dumped it in and swallowed, opened another can. I lined up cans and did it, just poured it down my throat. We guzzled. We gulped. We drank until our stomachs ached like we had just frozen our guts and the ice block of our guts had pushed out our belly buttons.

“Where … how did you learn to do that?” I asked her. Empty and half-empty beer cans lay around the La-Z-Boy. “Friends.” She brushed the hair back from her face and rubbed beer off her upper lip.

We sat on the chair looking at the fire. I started to think it was too hot when I realized that Annie had put her tongue in my ear. “I love you,” she said.

“Love you too,” I said. “Where did you first do it?”

“It?” she said.

“Drink beer.”

“I don’t know. Somewhere.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t,” she said. She stood up on the chair and started taking off her clothes. “Take off your smelly pants,” she said. I didn’t move until Annie took everything off. She brushed her hands across her ribs. A white fuzz covered her entire body.

As I took off my clothes, I realized how much they smelled like cattle shit. “How come you like me?” I asked.

She pushed me down in front of the fire.

“We don’t have to do anything,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

We drifted into sleep finally in the quiet room. No one watched Annie and me. No one cared where we were at any time of day or night.

Annie and I agreed that I would work at the Millionaire’s Club whenever we needed money. She wanted to get a job. Doing what, I wanted to know? I told her that I didn’t bring her out here to make her my slave. We went to the public pool. As we swam around in the hot water, listening to the kids scream as they splashed each other, I knew we had done the right thing, leaving her mom and my mom behind. But also I felt weird. A guy—maybe a year younger than me—was doing backflips because he was showing off for these grade-school girls. And I knew a year ago that I could’ve been him without the muscles. The next day this guy would be going to school. The next day I would be going to work.

A Honda Accord rolled next to the sidewalk as I stood in line the next morning. It stopped by the crowd of old men who had been coming here for decades. “Where’s Mike?” a woman said from the car. An old guy looked at me. One of them pulled me by my sleeve and said, “This is a job I think you can handle.” He pushed me up to the side of the car.

The window slid down and a woman looked out. Black kinky hair fell down the sides of her head and spilled over her shoulders. Wrinkles spread from the corners of her eyes and deep blue shadows filled the skin around her nose. “Are you looking for work today?” she asked me.

Everyone had left me standing alone on the sidewalk. They stood down toward the Club door with their backs to us, where a U-Haul truck had just stopped.

“I need work.”

That song “Lucky Star” that everyone listened to on the radio came from her car. Even Annie listened to it. I walked behind the car so the woman wouldn’t have to stare at my blue jeans with mud splattered around the cuffs. “Are you hungry?” she asked, as I carefully set my feet on the vinyl foot mat in front of the passenger seat.

“Sure.” I ran my fingers along the contoured plastic door grip.

As she drove through the city, stopping at red lights, she didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say to her. I started to say something like, “Nice car,” but the words would sound so stupid, I ended up not saying anything. She smoothly parallel parked and, after I slammed the door shut, I found it locked. She walked past a plate-glass window that looked into the lobby of a hospital, where a huge man sat in a wheelchair reading a magazine and a security guard trained his eyes on the woman. When I saw the guard looking at her, I looked at her again, seeing what I figured a bored, middle-aged rent-a-cop would see. She had big hips. She had long hair. I figured she must be sort of sexy.

We ate in a mostly empty restaurant. A few other people sat at small round tables with their faces in the morning P.I. The woman set her elbows on the table and looked at me, but I didn’t look at her. I paged through the menu. “What can I have?”

“Whatever,” she said.

“What’re you having?”

“Have whatever you want.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The waiter stopped at the table. He said, “Hi,” in a loud voice. The woman didn’t look up. “Dee? How are you? It’s been two weeks, two months, years even since you last came in, and what do you do, you pretend you’re just a walk-in?”

“Hey,” she said.

The waiter didn’t hold a notepad or anything. He folded his hands across his large stomach, pressing into his belly button, heaving the soft pillow of his white apron around the knot of his fingers. He looked at me. His eyelashes were huge and his skin was pale except for the pink splotches of his cheeks. He raised his eyebrows. “What would you like?” he asked me.

“An omelet,” I said. “Apple juice.”

“An apple juice omelet?”

“Be nice,” Dee said.

“The number twelve.”

“Thee numb-bar twelve,” I said to the prick.

“Bagel and cream cheese,” Dee said. “Coffee extra black.”

“Black,” the waiter said as he swiveled away on his left foot.

“Have you ever worked for someone before?” Dee asked.

She sat straight against the chair back. Her hair hung down to the middle of her chest. I could tell she had dyed it from the almost-blue color that sparkled from the ends. My mother dyed her hair. My brother and I would have to go outside because of the smell. Dee wore a blazer with the cuffs rolled and a white shirt with frills lining the buttons. She smiled. I could tell she didn’t mean “work” like normal work. “No, I think,” I said.

“Does that mean no?” she said.

“No,” I said.

Dee chuckled, a sound like my motorbike warming up before it begins to hum. Her teeth were large and outlined by a darkness, like she had been eating finger paint. The waiter set Dee’s coffee cup and my apple juice down. He stood at the table for a moment, looking at me. Dee didn’t notice because she was also looking at me. Then the waiter made a snick noise in the back of his mouth and rolled into the kitchen.

After breakfast and a drive to her place, Dee said “Sit down, make yourself at home.” We stood in her condo overlooking Lake Union. I sat because I thought she was telling me to. A white sofa with scalloped armrests lined one wall and turned at the corner. A huge TV entertainment center sat between the two windows facing the water. Everything was new and neat. I was afraid to move. Dee stood in the kitchen opening cupboards and the refrigerator. “What kind of drink would you like?”

“Anything,” I said.

“Would you like to watch TV?”

“Sure,” I said.

“The remote is on the coffee table.”

I held the panel in my hand, pressed the rubber button for power, and the lights on the TV, the VCR, and the stereo flicked on. A clear picture of a man standing in a field in Africa flashed on the screen. I could tell it was Africa because all around him it looked like the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The man wore Indiana Jones-type clothes. I could hear the animals snorting in stereo from behind and around me.

“Here,” Dee said. She handed me a heavy, round glass full of soda water.

We sat on the couch watching the man and then a woman with a weird accent set up camp. Servants appeared on the sides of the screen, so I think the man and the woman just sat around and talked while the servants set everything up. I wondered, as I sat there and drank from the sweet soda water, if they drove or if the servants carried everything on their head like in a black-and-white Tarzan movie.

“Finish your drink, you’re taking a bath,” Dee said.

She watched me as I skinned my blue jeans off. She sat on the toilet and I turned my back to her to pull my socks and underwear off. Water spilled into the tub and steam filled the room. I eased into the hot water without looking at her. When I finally looked up, my skin already turning a bright red, she was sitting on the edge of the tub.

Her bathtub was huge, with chrome handles and spigots that shot hot water. She lifted a plastic bottle of pink bath oil and poured it into the water. She watched the stream of oil as it pooled on the surface and started to mix with the water. The water grew slippery. “Lie back,” she said. She took off her shirt and laid it on the toilet and slid her skirt down her legs. She looked like one of the women in the Sears catalogue, except Dee’s stomach turned over the edge of her underwear and her breasts bulged around the cups of her bra.

I didn’t want to get turned on, so I started examining her bathroom. In the organized towel rack, the color-coordinated bath rug, towels, and soap dish, in all the white walls, I couldn’t find anything to make me lose interest. I read an embroidered and framed saying that read:

I wiped away the weeds and foam.
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild roar.

There was a naked woman in front of me and I wasn’t exactly sure how she had arrived there. As soon as her clothes came off, I lost track of the woman who had taken me to breakfast. Despite the dime-sized mole on the back of her thigh, the dimpled pockmarks in her fat legs, all I could see then was the springy arc of her breasts in the white bra as she leaned into the water, and her black hair as it fell across the white enamel. All I was aware of was the warmth of her breath on my face, and the slight odor of coffee and bacon.

In the water, bubbles spilled and boiled around me but I only felt hot and hotter, though I didn’t burn. The naked woman in the clean bathroom put my hand between her legs. The floral smell of the water, the steam, flushed my cheeks. I felt a hard nub in the soft folds between her legs—she kept telling me to touch above it, below it, touch it. Finally it grew rigid. She let out her breath and slipped into the water beside me. She removed her bra and her breasts fell out like Slinkies.

With Annie things were on a beginner level, sort of like the first six or seven times I played Space Invaders. It was a comfortable, expected experience, something we did together because we were together and alone in the same room, so why the hell not? But with Dee, it was like she had bought a special chair to play Space Invaders in. She could blow out the rows of aliens backwards, from the top of the screen to the bottom.

Dee dropped me off in downtown Seattle with fifty dollars I had folded and placed in my sock under the heel of my foot. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to go home to Annie. Somehow the thought of walking up the steps into the musty and moldy carpeted room made me think of bugs, crawling ones, like worms, millipedes, and grubs. Sometimes doing a landscaping job, I would find a few grubs in the ground. I would push them around with the end of my shovel and think, people can eat these things?

I sat at the docks where all the tourists walked around bumping into each other, not so many as in the summer, but still they were everywhere. A man shuffled in front of me and nodded at me. He sat on the bench next to me, grasping the metal handle with his bony fingers. He wore a captain’s hat, tattered and torn around the edge. He just sat next to me for a long time. I started to think he wouldn’t leave. I don’t know why I didn’t leave; maybe I thought he would say something important to me. I began to think as we both sat there, him waiting to say something, me waiting for him to say it, that I should tell him what I had done. Finally, he said in a slow voice that sounded like TV snow, “How about a blow for five?”

“Sorry, sir,” I said. “I don’t need any blow.” When I stood up, my knees shook and wobbled like I had just lifted a great weight. I shifted through the people milling around the totem poles, the Indian masks, and the hanging boat oars. I knew what blow was because my father had explained to my brother and me exactly what a pusher called what.

I hurried up to Third Avenue, afraid the junkie would follow me. I didn’t stop. When I looked at other people on the sidewalks, I caught them just as they looked away from me.

Flopping into the brown vinyl seat, almost at the back of my bus, my body settled down. I checked out the other passengers, remembering most of their faces from other trips home. One man I assumed worked as a janitor because he always carried a mop, a broom, and a belt covered with various tools. The man leaned against the seat in front of him and stared down into the collection of screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches, their greasy surfaces scratched to shiny metal. Women in dresses and tennis shoes sat toward the front of the bus. They almost all read books. Their voices didn’t carry but filled the bus with a murmur like a tree full of birds. A guy about my age sat in the swiveling center section of the bus. He wore a gray stocking cap pulled down to the base of his neck. Another guy, across the aisle from me, caught me looking at him and he stared at me. When I looked to the window to watch his reflection I could see him eyeing me. He coughed, and as I turned he said, “What’s your problem?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t look at anyone. I just rode the bus. At my stop I jumped off the bus and ran home. I hurried up the creaking steps into the six sides of carpet and the smell of warm wood smoke.

I could tell Annie had been sleeping with someone, someone besides me. I could tell because when I walked through the door she stood and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips felt too soft and too warm, as if she had been kissing someone for hours. She sat drowsily on a wooden chair I had brought up from downstairs. The La-Z-Boy held her body heat in the crook of its arms and back. The book she had been reading lay facedown on the arm. Everything looked carefully arranged to appear as if she had been waiting for me.

“How was your day?” she began, already attempting to divert me from what she had been doing all day. I could tell she had been fucking someone in this room.

“Fine,” I said, but I shuffled out of the warm crevice of the recliner, heated by who knows whose body. I circled the room, smelling for other guys. All I could smell was the familiar mustiness of the carpets and the charcoal smoke from the fire.

Annie had me in her arms. “Calm down, what’s wrong?” She stroked my neck and I scanned her neck for hickeys, the faithless bitch. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’re doing okay.” We rocked back and forth in the middle of the room. The faint odor of the Western Family soap I had bought powdered the triangle at the base of her neck. “Calm, calm, calm,” she said.

“What did you do today?” she asked me in a quiet voice like I wouldn’t notice.

I threw the money toward the carpet-draped ceiling, and the bills fluttered and skimmed to the floor. “I did that,” I said. I watched her, waiting for her to make a mistake that would tell me who she screwed that day.

I didn’t have to stand in line the next day outside the Millionaire’s Club. Dee’s car idled across the street. She wore sunglasses, and all I could see of her face was her nose, her cheeks, and the wispy line of hair that grew on her upper lip. We pulled into the steep driveway at the base of her building and parked in a garage that smelled like oil and wet cement. She opened a metal door where the word “Exit” had been stenciled in faded spray paint. A stairwell coiled up a cement shaft. The door closed and the sound echoed. I felt her pull me by the shoulders and push me into the dusty space under the last flight. She raised herself above me. I tried to crawl away.

“Stop moving,” she said. I lay back in the dust. It coated the back of my head. Her hands gripped my waist. My belt buckle jingled on the pavement and the grooved cement was cold against my butt. It felt like I was being bruised in ruffle potato chip patterns. She still wore her glasses.

“Am I doing okay?” I said. I realized as I said it that I could barely talk. My voice was full of the chalky dust that shifted up and around my head. I rolled, my ear pressed to the ground, and the sound from the vacuum in a bottle filled my head. “Am I doing all right?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said. She smiled and licked her lips. A door far up the stairwell opened. It took three minutes, it seemed, for the wide sound of the metal door grating open against the pavement and then dragging shut to end. Dee pushed me farther under the stairwell with one hand. She huddled down next to me and wrapped her arms around me. “Quiet,” she said, “you’re doing fine.”

A woman wearing a short skirt and carrying a Nike bag with a racket handle sticking out one end opened the door, and I watched her jog across the parking garage as the door slowly swung shut. “She’s got a nice ass?” Dee pushed me back to the wall. Dee turned around and told me to get to it.

Finally, in her apartment, in the near darkness—as dark as we could get it because the blinds couldn’t close all the way—we watched the rest of the movie I had started watching. But it didn’t make any sense as soon as I realized that I had seen only a little of it. “What’s this about?” I asked Dee.

“I don’t know,” she said. She stared at the ceiling with one of her heavy glass tumblers in her hand. She wore her nightgown. “You really should leave,” she said.

“Will you let me watch the movie from the start?”

“Not today,”

“Tomorrow?”

“I work,” she said. As she stared at the ceiling or somewhere just above her head, her glass tipped and ice cubes almost fell out.

“Do you need me again?” I leaned up onto the couch and brushed her arm. She jerked her glass away and spilled ice over her gown. Cubes slipped onto her white couch. Her bathrobe fell open as she jumped. An apron of flesh hung over a curly pile of pubic hair peppered with white. “Fuck,” she said as she set the glass down on the table and brushed her hair from her face. I kneeled to pick up the ice cubes. My hands tingled from the handful of ice. My fingers jittered as they slid the cubes back into the tumbler.

Sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar, Dee lit her cigarette and watched me dump the ice into the sink. I turned on the hot water to watch the ice melt. “You should get out. I’ve got things on my mind.”

I didn’t say anything. I dried my hands by waving them in the air, wandering through her apartment until I found my clothes at the foot of her bed. My socked feet felt warm in my shoes. I examined the room, the bedsheets heaped on the floor beside her chest of drawers, the wrappers of Alka-Seltzer cold medicine, and the empty bottles of Robitussin heaped on her bedside table, and looked for anything that I had left behind. But I had my Timex and my wallet: anything else was lost and I wasn’t about to dig through her stuff to find it.

“Tomorrow?” I asked.

“I told you I work,” she said.

“Next day?”

“We’ll see.”

She opened the door for me. As soon as I stepped into the hallway she closed the door, and I knew then that I wouldn’t be getting my fifty dollars. Maybe she felt that I was no longer working for her. Maybe she thought I wanted to do all this.

As soon as I came out onto the street below her building, I found myself in a narrow street between office buildings and other apartment buildings. I couldn’t even see across the lake through the steady mist. I walked down the sidewalk toward Lake Union. I figured eventually I would come to some sort of street that would take me downtown. At the first intersection I had to wait for a light.

A guy around my age stood at the light with me. He wore a wool cap pulled around his ears. The light turned and we crossed the street. He walked right behind me. I looked up at the office building. We moved under it. It rose above us, four stories of windows. The clouds fell against the plate glass and water trickled down the side and dripped onto the sidewalk. The guy walked so close to me I could hear his boots clomp.

At the end of the office building, he pushed me. His fingers dug into my shoulder, making my sides tingle. He shoved me into the alley. He forced me into a brick courtyard full of green Dumpsters. “Hey, Dickboy.” I lurched against the wall. He shoved his cap into his coat pocket. Hair spilled down to his shoulders. Except for a thin mustache and a swollen red boil on the side of his face, he looked about my age. Now that I was against the wall, now that he was facing me, everything seemed to slow down. He didn’t seem rushed but I felt like someone had jammed a drum kit in my throat.

“What’re you doing with my woman? She screw you good?”

“Well—” I started to say.

“Don’t answer,” he said. “How much you cost?” He grabbed me again. I pulled away from him and socked him in the head, or tried to, but he pulled back and kicked me. I fell against the wall and then slid to the ground, where he stood on my hand. I felt the asphalt grow extremely hot and then my hand went numb when he took his weight off it. I couldn’t get up. When I tried, I jolted back against the wall. I was spastic. I tried to move, but every time I got to my knees he kicked me in the ribs. Finally I just lay on the wet asphalt letting the oily water soak through my coat and my shirt, plastering them to my skin.

“All right,” I wailed.

“Go near that woman again and I’ll tear your dick off.” He leaned down next to me and slapped me in the head. “How much did she pay you? That’s my cash.” He pulled my wallet out of my pocket and turned it inside out. My Social Security card fluttered to the ground. “Shit,” he said and tossed the wallet next to me.

He turned his back to me. I could have jumped him but I didn’t.

On the way to the bus I caught glimpses of myself in windows and I thought I recognized the guy who had jumped me as a sort of version of myself. Maybe a bigger and tougher version of me, but he seemed about my age and he looked sort of like me. He needed the money like I needed the money, I figured. The money allowed Annie and me to do anything—it allowed us to live in the house. Without it I would have to get back in the trucks and work in the cattle shit.

I sat in the first seat behind the driver so I could slide down the steps and out of the bus before anyone else could move. I sat there so if I had to move, I could. My clothes smelled from the street water and every time someone sat next to me, they would shift slightly, and when the bus stopped they would hurry to other seats farther back. As I watched a woman in a trench coat carrying a briefcase rush away from me, I saw one person who did stare at me. It was the guy in the gray cap. I realized then that I had already seen him a few times before he jumped me. He caught me looking at him and he nodded his head.

I decided I would ride past my stop. I would jump out of the bus and run faster than he could struggle through the people to the front of the bus and pay. I would run home up the steps and throw something heavy like the La-Z-Boy in front of the door.

He never stopped looking at me. Three stops from my stop, the guy started down the bus. He said “Excuse me, excuse me,” in a loud voice to the people standing in the aisle. “Hey, shit bird,” he said to me, “your stop coming up?” I didn’t do anything.

At my stop he rattled his change into the slot and stepped down the steps. “Thank you,” he said to the bus driver. He stood on the side of the road and raised his eyebrows at me. I kept on the bus.

When I got to the next stop, I jumped off the bus so quickly I didn’t pay. The driver yelled behind me, “Pay!” but I ran. When I looked back, the bus had closed its door and I couldn’t see anyone around me. Houses stretched for miles over the top of Beacon Hill and down to Lake Washington where all the black people lived. Mom had always told my brother and me never to come here. I lived here now. Through the thin slices of open living-room drapes the blue TV radiation tainted everything. I could only hear the sound of the trees and the distant airplanes coming down on Boeing field.

I grabbed one of those metal poles that held a street reflector. The thing just lay in the ditch, useless. When I came to my normal stop, I couldn’t see the guy. “Come out, you fuck. I’ll give you trouble,” I yelled.

My yell didn’t even cause anyone to part their drapes. I just heard the sound of branches knocking one another, the faint drip of water falling through the bushes, and the last of a descending airplane. I ran down the muddy path toward the house. When I came out of the woods to the house and the distant line of streaking headlights on the freeway, I thought I would see the guy. But I didn’t see him anywhere. I stumbled through the front door to the base of the dark steps.

“Who’s there?” Annie said above me.

“Me,” I told her.

“Who?” Annie said. “Don’t move. I have a gun and I’ll blow your guts out.”

“Me, Milton,” I said. I ran up the steps and into our room with its candles and fire and slightly moldy rugs. I closed the door, slid the recliner, and shoved it against the door. “Where’s the gun?” I asked.

“Lies,” she said as she smiled.

I sat in front of the fire and listened to the sounds outside the room, expecting to hear something. But I didn’t hear anything.

“I made you a hot dog and chili,” Annie said. She pulled the Nalley’s can out of the fire and drew the hot dog off its stick. “Sit down, relax,” she said. She dumped the chili and the hot dog, coated with spots of charcoal, into a bowl. I could see how young she was. I could see it in her hair that barely grew longer than her shoulders and in her skin. Even the skin under her eyes was clear, and I could see her thin blue veins like the ones in my wrist. I ate but my stomach felt like it had shrunk to the size of a bottle cap.

“What did you do today?” she said. She touched me on the side of my mouth.

“What? Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. She sat next to me, with her arms wrapped around her knees. “Chili was dripping out of your mouth.”

Something ticked downstairs in the house like someone had rapped a tin can with a pencil. I didn’t want to tell Annie about the guy on the bus, the man who was chasing me. I just ate my chili even though it collected at the top of my shrunken stomach in a big greasy ball. The thought of my bed at home came to me then, sort of like a vision in the fireplace, and I wanted to laugh because it looked comfortable. I remembered the stupid little things about waking up after sleeping for a long time in a bed with freshly made sheets, not that it happened in my mother’s house very often. I remembered the things I had never thought about while actually sleeping in a bed with sheets that had just been washed. The soapy smell of the sheets and the sizzle of fabric as I shoved my leg around under the covers.

“You are allowed to speak,” Annie said, after I had been staring into space. “You tell about your good day and then this is the part where you ask me what I did.”

I don’t know why I didn’t warn her that some crazed madman knew where I lived. I could hear the sound of him on the stairs, the stealthy shifting of his weight on each step so he wouldn’t make any noise. Annie didn’t notice. I don’t know how she could just sit in her place and casually look up at me.

“I went to the library today,” she said, “and found you a book about Harleys.” She pulled the book out of a brown paper bag. It was huge, bigger than any book I had actually held in my hands. I laid it in my lap. Almost every page had a full-color photo of a motorcycle with bikers straddling them or slutty women thrusting their chests up. Annie sat next to me, brushing my hair back with one hand. “Do you like it?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I like it. What else did you do today?” I said then. I heard the guy in the gray cap jiggle the door handle. “Quiet,” I said.

“You are such a liar,” she said. “You hate the book. You hate it.” She jumped up on the recliner. “Why do you keep me here if you hate me?”

“Be quiet,” I told her, but she started yelling and yelling.

“I can say anything I want,” she yelled.

Annie didn’t understand anything about our situation and I don’t think she wanted to. She wouldn’t want to go back home to her mom. I couldn’t stay here. I grabbed her and cupped her mouth. She tried to bite me, but I just pressed her head against my chest and held her. “Quiet, quiet,” I said. We listened but didn’t hear anything. At any moment the door might swing open and there he would be.

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This is part two of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.