"The Identity Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Klavan Andrew)

PART III

RAMSEY DREAMED he was standing on the flooded street again with the city burning all around him. The water had risen to his thighs and Peter Patterson's body was sunk in it, staring up at him through the rain-rattled surface. Then the water began to thicken and grow opaque. The bookkeeper's corpse grew dimmer. Only his stare remained bright. Ramsey heard a voice. He turned and saw his mother, long dead, walking toward him from a block or two away. She was dressed in her print dress for Sunday meeting, holding a black umbrella over her head. She was pushing steadily between the flaming buildings, through the driving rain.

"A man who is full of sin is full of shame!" she cried out, shaking her Bible at him.

He looked down again and Peter Patterson's corpse was no longer visible because, Ramsey suddenly realized, the water had turned to blood.

The dream haunted Ramsey as he tied his tie that morning standing before the bedroom mirror. He had woken from the nightmare with his heart racing and the image of his long-dead mother walking toward him through the storm made his heart race again as it came back to him.

A man who is full of sin is full of shame!

Where had he heard that phrase before? Somewhere. He tucked the tip of the port-red tie down into the Windsor. It looked good against the dark blue shirt. It would add to his air of authority and dignity. That would help at his meeting this morning with Augie Lancaster. He had always suspected that Augie was a little intimidated by him, overawed by his aura of street wisdom and self-control.

As he pulled the knot tight, he remembered: Skyles. That's where the phrase in his dream had come from. The Reverend Jesse Skyles. What brought him to mind? he wondered.

The Reverend Jesse Skyles was the most dangerous man in the city. That's what Augie Lancaster had called him anyway, though in Ramsey's opinion, Augie's hatred for the reverend had sometimes shaded over into personal obsession. Every time word got out that Skyles was setting up another of his makeshift churches, Augie would have Ramsey assign precious police resources to find it. He would send building inspectors and fire inspectors to shut it down, or bangers-and off-duty cops pretending to be bangers-to bust it up. At one point, he was threatening to raid the next place right during the service. He had some fantasy about SWAT storming in, rousting suspicious characters, dragging the minister himself away in handcuffs on some trumped-up charge. Ramsey had had a job of it making him see reason. These are good folks gathering, Ramsey said, your folks, home folks who love them some God. You couldn't go in there like it was Baghdad. It would only turn people against you, and give Skyles credibility, too. It might even alert some news media-the national news media, who weren't in Augie's pocket back then. Let me go over there, Ramsey said. Let me go over and have a look. Augie liked that idea. He got the picture of it. Ramsey's very presence during the service-the presence of a respected lawman who had risen up from these very streets-would send a chill of suspicion and danger through the congregation. They would ask themselves: What's the lieutenant doing here? Is the reverend up to something wrong? What's the lieutenant going to think if he sees me here? Maybe I should stay home next time, stay away from this, I don't need the trouble. It might even intimidate Skyles himself.

That Sunday, the reverend held his service in a storefront in the Five Corners. He and his deacons must've thrown the place together Saturday night. Nothing but metal folding chairs for pews and a card table for an altar. No light in the cramped room but the morning sun through the big window and a couple of desk lamps set on top of stools, their extension cords running to the outlets next door. They'd put out the come-to-meeting at the last possible minute, with phone calls and runners to keep it within the congregation. It was the only way they could outsmart Augie's inspectors and the bangers and the off-duty cops.

But Ramsey found them. Of course. Ramsey pushed gigantically through the door just as the sermon was beginning. He stood in the back of the room large as life and watched with his grim, threatening dignity hanging over the church like a vulture. The worshippers felt him there from the outset. They shifted uncomfortably in their folding chairs. They cast sidelong glances at him.

But not Skyles. Skyles had the spirit in him that morning. It was as if he had swallowed a Roman candle: he was jumping around and there were sparks flying out of him every which way. No lawman-and no man's law-were going to hold him back.

"The white man in America is full of sin and a man who is full of sin is full of shame. He's full of the shame of racism, the shame of slavery and Jim Crow. And he'll do anything to make that shame go away. He'll give you money-welfare money for doing nothing. He'll give you government jobs you didn't earn and don't deserve. He'll say: 'You wanna take drugs? You wanna get your girlfriend pregnant? You want to live without morality? Why, that's okay, little black man, you go right on ahead. I give you abortions to kill those babies. I give the mother money so you don't have to marry her. I give you some pro-grams for those drugs. Pro-grams, that'll set you right up. Just don't be calling me racist. I'll give you anything you want, just set me free of my shame.'"

In appearance, Skyles was a prim little man. Old-Lieutenant Ramsey noticed with some bitterness-old enough to remember segregation and the rest. Wore a three-piece suit. Had a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses. When he was standing still, he had the punctilious, slightly sour aspect of a man who sold ladies' underwear and found it rather distasteful-though in fact he ran a Donut Land franchise over on Pearl Street. But when the spirit was in him like this, he never did stand still. He jumped and strutted like a chicken on fire. Back and forth behind the folding table with the flames and sparks shooting out of him and the words bubbling out of his mouth in a high frantic rasp.

"You say to me, 'No, no, no-no, no, no, Reverend Skyles, we don't take nothing from the white man. We got the black man in power now. We got Augie Lancaster in power. He give us that money. He give us them abortions. He give us some pro-grams! We do love us some pro-grams, Reverend Skyles, they set us right up.' But I tell you truly. I tell you: Augie Lancaster is the white man. Augie Lancaster has made himself the tool of the white man's shame. He understands the agony of their sin. He goes right to Washington, he says, 'If you don't want me to call you racist, you better give me some of that money you take from people who earn their livings. You don't want that shame, you gotta give me some more jobs, some more pro-grams.' That's how he buys his homes and his boats and his mistresses. That's how he buys his friends-by giving them those jobs. And that's how he buys you, too. That's right. He buys you, too, just like the rest. And yes, I see his police thug standing in the back there-" he shouted suddenly. He didn't even deign to glance at the imposing Ramsey. He just shouted: "You don't need to be stealing looks back there at him, you keep your eyes on the truth! You keep your eyes on the Word!"

That got some amens going for a moment, little eruptions of them here and there. Annoyed, Lieutenant Ramsey let his eyes move sternly over the heads of the parishioners. I'm seeing you, he was telling them. I'm seeing your faces. The people cast their sidelong glances at him. Fear and anxiety tightened their lips. The amens petered out and died.

But Jesse Skyles went on, unstoppable. He had the spirit in him.

"Now the white man has enslaved you again, but it's worse this time, because this time you're his accomplice. Augie Lancaster is an accomplice, and you're an accomplice in your own slavery. You looking to massa to help you instead of helping yourself. You're taking his money and giving up your self-reliance. You take his abortions and give up your responsibilities. You take his pro-grams and give up your morality. You getting fat on the milk of his sin, on the honey of his shame. You get all that sweetness by blaming the white man, so you don't need to take no responsibility for yourself."

Ramsey continued to stand there, lithic and imposing, his hands folded in front of him, his roving stare picking off amens like they were ducks at a shooting gallery. He was aware of the anger burbling volcanically in the core of that tightly controlled self of his. He was beginning to see Augie's point about this loudmouth. What did he have to be saying this kind of thing for? Didn't these people have troubles enough? They needed those jobs and pro-grams Augie got for them. What else did they have? And who else would give them? So why make them feel bad about it? Why make them look bad to themselves-or to the white man if he was listening? And why make Augie look bad? Ramsey was beginning to understand why Augie was so intent on bringing Skyles down.

"Let me ask you a question." Skyles shot the words at his congregation, undeterred by their intimidated silence, hopping back and forth, back and forth behind the folding table. "Who is it who does you like this? Who gives you money but takes your self-reliance? Who gives you jobs but robs you of your desire for excellence? Who takes care of your babies for you but steals your morality and your dignity? Let me ask you this question so you understand: Who gives you the things of the body and lures you away from the things of the spirit?"

"The devil!" an older woman shouted from the folding chairs-the spirit had caught her and she couldn't help herself. Half a dozen worried sidelong glances went toward Lieutenant Ramsey. The woman realized what she'd done and half glanced at him, too. But then she must've figured it was too late. She settled back into her folding chair with a defiant sniff and an I-don't-care wiggle of her bottom.

And Jesse Skyles's spirit fed off hers. "The devil!" he answered back, riding a fine, high wave of indignation. "It's the devil who gives you the things of the world and lures you away from the soul things, the real things. It's guilty white folks trying to buy their way out of history. It's Augie Lancaster making his money and his power off their shame. And it's the devil himself. And if you ask me, they all three's the same!"

Lieutenant Ramsey shrugged into his blue blazer now and examined himself one last moment in the mirror. He had the effect he wanted: distinguished and commanding. He looked into his own eyes.

The nightmare was still in his mind and the memory of Skyles was in his mind, too, and out of the interplay between them, a truth came to him.

Down deep, way down deep, he had agreed with Reverend Skyles that day. He understood that now, only now. He had been angry at Skyles for defying him and for saying what he said, but down deep he had agreed. How could it have been otherwise? What Skyles was telling the people was no different from what Ramsey's mother had told him, what his mother had pounded into him as she sculpted his heart with that hammering Bible. Self-reliance, morality, dignity, self-control. Don't be looking to anyone else to take care of you. Pull yourself up and walk like a man.

That day at that makeshift church-that day marked the first inkling Ramsey had in his heart that the logic of his life had been skewed and twisted, even corrupted and spoiled by Augie-by Augie and his promises and his high rhetoric and his flash. It was the first time he was forced to brush away the suspicion that there was no excuse for this man, that his ends did not justify his means, that he was in fact empty and disreputable in every particular, and had led Ramsey astray step by self-justifying step. That's why Ramsey had come to feel that Augie was right about Skyles, that Skyles was dangerous. Because down deep he realized that Skyles could overturn everything, the whole city. Because down deep, he realized that Skyles was speaking the unholy truth of his own mistakes.

That's why he had agreed to help Augie destroy him.

He turned from the mirror and left the bedroom. He went into the living room and stood beside the small round dining table near the kitchenette. He lifted his coffee mug from the table and brought it to his lips for a last sip, even though he knew the coffee had grown cold and bitter. He looked over the mug's rim at the apartment. Hard to believe he'd been living here almost a year now. Hard to believe it was a year since his wife had asked him to go. The apartment was small and drab, furnished as impersonally as a hotel room. Even looking straight at it, he barely saw it anymore.

A man who is full of sin is full of shame.

So it was, no question. His mama never lied.

He paused before he took another sip of the coffee. All his life, he reflected, he had kept control over his emotions. It was no different now. His shame was just one more emotion he had to control, bad dreams and all.

He set the mug down and left for his meeting with Augie.

He was asked to wait in the Media Room. The Media Room, they called it now. That was new. It was the Conference Room last time he was here. But today it was, "Of course, Lieutenant, go right in and have a seat in the Media Room," from the white boy at the front desk. The white boy was new also, one of the volunteers who'd come in from the coast after the flood.

The flood had changed a lot of things around here.

The Media Room was a long chamber paneled in dark wood with one wall of windows overlooking the city park. The glass table was still here from its more modest Conference Room days. And there were still those fancy overpriced chairs around it, the ones with the aerated backs: your tax dollars at work. Now, though, your tax dollars were working overtime, because there were also three, count them three, flat-screen TVs on the wall opposite the windows. TV on the left showed local channel eight; TV on the right showed local channel five; and TV in the middle showed CNN in a little square surrounded by a lot of other little squares showing other news channels. And what do you know? Right this minute, as if it were planned, as if it were timed for Ramsey's edification, all three stations, eight, five, and CNN, were featuring none other than the increasingly famous Augie Lancaster. Augie had made a speech last night before the Council on Justice. It had been touted in the media as his debut on the national political scene. So there he was at the lectern, gazing like a visionary into the distance or at least into the TelePrompTer. The audio on the TVs was off, thank God, but the TV on channel eight was running captions, the white words on the black background appearing under Augie's image, line by line: "We can't have faith until we have hope and we can't have hope until we learn to dream again as a nation…"

Nigger, what you on about? Ramsey thought, and the hint of a shadow of a whisper of a smile played at the corner of his lips.

Shaking his head, he turned his back on the TVs and faced the window. He gazed out at the park three stories below. From here, the city looked whole and brilliant. This little corner of the city anyway, the square of government buildings surrounding the sculpted lawn. Men and women walked busily to and fro on gracefully curving asphalt paths. They wore colorful spring shirts and blouses, solid reds and oranges and yellows. The tulips were red and orange and yellow in their beds. Above it all, the dome of city hall presided stately and golden against the blue sky. City of Hope. City of Justice. From here, the little square looked like Augie Lancaster's rhetoric made real.

Watching the people below, it occurred to Ramsey that it was a beautiful, warm spring day out there. It occurred to him that he had taken no joy in it, that he'd barely noticed it as he walked from his car to the building. It occurred to him that all his joy in life, in fact, was gone.

Just then, the door opened behind him.

Ramsey turned and saw a young woman come in. It was a terrible and wholly unexpected moment. As soon as he saw her, he felt a kind of spiritual vertigo, as if a trapdoor had opened inside him, the Inner Man falling through. Nothing in his expression changed, of course. His aura of authority and dignity glowed as brightly around him as ever-brighter because of the extra effort required to keep it there, a hollow persona willed into place around a now empty core. But just that one look at the woman and he understood everything that was about to happen.

He'd never seen her before, but he knew her all right. Graduate from some hall of intellectual mirrors. Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Earlham, one of those. Just out of grad school or law school or still in or about to go. Studying something about the environment probably. Advanced Self-Righteous Hysteria 101. With her porcelain skin and the golden blond hair and that body they seem to issue these women along with their degrees nowadays: the taut, slender body with just enough Girl in it to get them what they wanted but not enough so they could be blamed. She had been in her dorm room when she'd first seen Augie on TV. Or maybe in her bedroom at her parents' house or in the apartment they'd bought her. After hours of wallowing in teary-eyed indignation, staring at images of helpless brown victims, listening to grim-faced newscasters calling it "the worst flood since Noah," hearing wise men, movie stars, and pop singers tell her that the gibbering black punks who'd set their own city on fire were nothing but symptoms of the white man's uncaring: she was primed for Augie, and then along he came.

We can't have dreams until we have faith and we can't have faith until we learn to hope again as a nation.

Wasn't it just so true?

So here she was, wearing her white sin like a mink, proud of her shame and searching for her virtue, hoping to receive her virtue like the holy host from Augie's victim-colored hands. Ramsey wondered if Augie had fucked her yet. Maybe not. But he would, he assured himself angrily, and in every possible sense of the word.

"Lieutenant Ramsey?" she said-warm, respectful, solicitous, arrogant, superior, agonizingly self-aware, and wholly self-ignorant at the same time. "I'm Charlotte Mortimer-Rimsky." Of course she was. She extended her slender porcelain hand, a startling flash out of the take-me-seriously black sleeve of her sexless suit.

Ramsey stood dizzy with humiliation. This-this uncooked slice of poon, this blond creation of her own dreamy delusions- this was what Augie sent to him? To him? It took all his discipline not to leave her hand hanging there, not to cry out "Where's Augie? I had an appointment with Augie!" like a cheated child.

But he did it. He fought down every coarse insult that leapt into his head and shook her hand politely.

"Nice to meet you," he said, just as his mother had taught him.

"Augie sends his apologies. He's been called to a meeting with Senator Lundquist and he just couldn't get out of it. But I'm his new law enforcement liaison, so he thought this might be a good opportunity for us to get to know one another."

"Law Enforcement Liaison." The words dripped like venom from Ramsey's lips. "Well, Miss…"

"Mortimer-Rimsky."

"Miss Mortimer-Rimsky…"

"Charlotte, please."

"I'd love to get to know you at some point, but I'm afraid this isn't the time. My business with Augie is urgent and requires his immediate personal attention." It was the best he could do. And what good was it really? Everyone involved in this transaction-he and this woman and Augie as well-they all knew that he was being stripped right here and now of every vestige of prestige and even masculinity. There was no pretending it was otherwise. And yet pretense was the only fig leaf he had to cover the place where his balls used to be.

The woman, for her part, did her best to look pained and sincere. Ramsey thought she must've taught herself that expression before breaking up with her high school boyfriend. A pretty little kiss-off.

"I don't know what to tell you. It's just not going to be possible today. I did manage to get you this, though."

She had a blue file folder in her left hand. She gave it to him and then stepped aside toward the windows. She gazed down discreetly at the park below, giving him a moment to open the blue folder.

There was a single photograph inside. Printed out from a computer onto ordinary paper. Dark, blurry. An enlargement of a picture taken with somebody's cell phone, Ramsey guessed. He recognized the house in the background. It was the house on the dead-end lane, the green shingled house where he and Gutterson had found the graffito.

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

"Where did you get this?" he said.

"Some of my city contacts. They're telling me this is the man who wrote that graffito. He's been spreading similar rumors on the street."

He looked at her, at her tailored back, as she faced the window. He let the silence of his doubt play over her, weigh on her. They both knew she didn't have any goddamned city contacts. Only Augie himself could've thrown his net wide enough to haul in something as random as this. She was protecting Augie. She'd been in town for ten minutes and she had the gall to stand between him-between him-and Augie Lancaster.

She kept her eyes on the window, on the scene outside, but he could see by her uncomfortable posture that she felt his accusation. She felt compelled to explain. "The thing is, Augie is at a transitional moment," she said finally, with a defensive glance back at him. "I don't have to tell you that. It's a key moment, maybe the key moment in his trajectory."

"His trajectory," Lieutenant Ramsey said with an aspect of stone.

She faced him. He wanted to rip that porcelain mask of earnestness right off her. "Yes. I mean… look… It's a transformational moment in the whole country. We all know that. It's a time of real hope and… and change."

So he had fucked her. Well, good for him. That was fast work. He must've explained all this to her in the afterglow. We can't have hope until we have dreams and we can't have dreams until you suck my black dick…

"Augie has a real chance to become one of the new transformational figures. Isn't that what we've all been working for? To get beyond race? To bring some of the same progressive policies to the federal level that Augie's implemented here at the municipal level?"

Even in his rage and shame, Ramsey nearly laughed out loud. Had Miss Dreams ever gone ten steps beyond this pristine government complex? Had she ever set her baby blues on exactly what Augie's progressive policies had accomplished at the municipal level? The city is in fucking ruins, you dumb bitch!

"Look, we all know," this girl-who was too young to know much of anything-went on desperately. "We all know that in the rough and tumble of city politics… associations are made… things get done by the people around you… Augie would never turn his back on his friends, believe me. It's just that… with this degree of scrutiny on the national level, he has to take appearances into account in a new way. For a period of time, I mean."

He stared at her. He couldn't help himself. For a moment, he was simply dazed, astonished at the wonderful perfection and complexity of Augie's treachery, as if it were some kind of magnificent crystal suddenly revealing its infinite network of facets to the light. Then, as his astonishment receded, anger rushed back into its place with a new force. Ramsey had seen this kind of fury in the faces of men twisted up like pretzels on cell floors, the froth of seizure on their lips, words of such filth and savage desire spewing from them it was enough to make you believe in hell and the devil. He had seen it, but he had never felt that sort of titanic rage himself until this minute. He wanted to shove this girl, this created suburban thing, against the wall, wanted to seize a handful of her throat and a fistful of her breast and ram himself up inside her like he was planting a flag on the moon. He wanted to cram his face a whisker's breadth from her terrified eyes and tell her everything, everything that was going to happen to her next. Come a day, he wanted to spit into her porcelain face through his gritted teeth, come a day, you will stand before judgment, so help me, before a judge, in fact, or a Senate committee or God his own fat, happy self, and Augie will do as much to you as he has done to me here now. "I never knew her," he'll say. "I never knew what she was up to. We had a fling. She took it too seriously. She was overzealous on my behalf. That wasn't what I meant at all." Then oh then, so help me, so help me, you will strip off that sexless suit of yours, you will ditch your degree in environmental horseshit and scurry to put on some tears and lace blouses and any other waif-like wile of femininity that might just charm your sweet white ass out of prison or your sorry soul out of the flames of hell. And even if you do escape, that's your life ever after, cooz. That's the definition of your future life: a bewildered slag announcing your redemption-through-rehab to some bored reporter from www.excelebrityfelons.com, a ragged exile from your daydreamed self, a half-damned half-spirit in a perdition of philosophical somersaults and rationalizations and glasses of wine-anything-any trick you know to stave off the hour when you make a priest of your mirror and confess to yourself what you did here today.

He wanted to tell her that, throttling her, clutching her, pumping into her until he finished to the pounding rhythm of the final syllables and ejaculated acid in her, burning right through her womb to poison her bleeding heart…

But instead, expressionless, he nodded once, the image of dignity, of authority and calm. He looked away from her studied earnestness, down again at the blue folder open in his hands, at the picture in the folder. His eyes went from the green-shingled house to the line of cars parked at the curb outside. His eyes went to the figure behind the wheel of one of those cars, a man in shadow with his features obscured by the glare of the streetlight on the windshield, the same streetlight that illuminated the right half of the car's license plate. Just enough of the license plate so that Ramsey would be able to track the man down.

This was all Augie would give him, the last thing he would give him-and he would never admit that he had given him even this. This picture. This figure. This man who had written the graffito in the green-shingled house-or who had made the remark to the gang-bangers there that caused the graffito to be written-who somehow-somehow-knew:

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

The image of dignity, of authority and calm, Ramsey lifted his eyes. He looked away from the doomed white girl, done with her. He gazed thoughtfully instead at the televisions on the wall. Augie on all three screens. Standing behind the lectern, before the new post-racial world. Gazing visionary into the TelePrompTer.

We can't have Me until we have Me and we can't have Me until we learn to have Me-Me-Me as a nation.

Augie sailing off into the new age-and here was Ramsey left behind in the Media Room with this picture, this picture somehow magically in his hands. That was the way of these things, wasn't it? Someone had to stay behind. Someone had to clean up the mess. Someone had to find the man in the picture, had to find out what he knew and how he knew it.

And someone, in the end, was going to have to kill him. SHANNON OPENED HIS EYES. At first, he was startled to find himself somewhere new, somewhere other than the white room. He lay still on the strange bed, wary. Then he remembered. He sat up, dragging his hand down his cheek, trying to swipe away the tranquilizer haze.

Stretching, craning his neck, he took in his surroundings. A small studio apartment. Gray walls with a couple of pictures hung on them. Nice wooden floors with a braid rug by the bed. A dresser, a desk, a chair, a mirror on the back of the closet door. He could see himself in the mirror, sitting there with his jockey shorts and his brand-new face on. Look at that: a brand-new face. This time, the sight of it struck him as wonderful. He broke out in a big silly grin. It was just like the foreigner said. He was new mang.

Excited, he got up to explore. He looked out the windows first. There were only two of them, both on the same wall. Not much of a view. Two brownstones across the street. The entrance to a wide alley next to a small grocery. Just the same, after all that time locked up in the white room, he was eager to get out there. Was he ever! Out in the open air again! He couldn't wait.

He checked the front door. Yup, it opened. He was free. A new mang and a free mang, too.

Humming to himself, he wandered around the apartment some more. The fridge in the kitchenette was stocked with food. The dresser was stocked with clothes. The foreigner's folders were on the desk, the ones with all his new identity papers in them-Henry Conor's papers. There was a computer there, too. When he pressed the keyboard, the machine whirred and the monitor lit up, showing classified ads. Carpenters wanted all over the place. Next to the computer: a receipt for the first two months' rent on the apartment. Plus car keys with a Honda logo. Plus a wallet with three hundred-dollar bills in it. Nice.

Maybe the best thing, though, was what he found in the closet. A big red bag with hammers and wrenches in the outside pouches. He unzipped it. He cursed under his breath with wonder.

Tools. A beautiful set of brand-spanking-new Milwaukees, bright silver and red. A framing nailer, a roofing nailer, a Skilsaw, a chop saw, cordless hammers, screwdrivers-must've been three thousand bucks' worth of stuff. It made his heart beat harder. He loved good tools.

Crouched over the bag, he looked around him, nodding to himself. He thought of the foreigner. He felt gratitude to the old dude. Even some affection for him.

New mang. New life. Like princess in fairy tale.

He stepped out of the brownstone. He stood at the top of the stoop. It felt like the times he'd gotten out of prison-that same dizzying sense of open space. Your soul shrank when you were inside for too long. It shriveled to the size of the cell you were stuck in. When you finally came out, there was all that wide world whirling around without you in it. It was unnerving. You were afraid that if you let yourself go, if you let your soul expand again, there might not be enough of you to fill all that emptiness. You might drift away like some kind of mist and finally evaporate and be gone forever. Some guys never did dare to do it. They lived the rest of their lives all shrunken up inside as if the cell walls were still around them. Shannon had seen it happen. If they put you in prison long enough, you were in prison forever, even after they let you go.

But that was the whole point here, wasn't it? He wasn't going back to prison. Not at all, not ever. He had a new face, a new identity. New mang, free mang.

He went down the stairs like a top-hatted dancer. Down the street like the mayor. Taking in the sights. Excited. Growing bigger inside with every breath. He passed a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. He passed two men and a woman flirting on a brownstone stoop. He passed two older women in skirt suits. They smiled at him as they went by. They had Bibles in their hands. They were coming home from church. He could hear the bells ringing. It was Sunday morning. Nice day, blue sky, temperature spring-cool with an undercurrent of the coming summer heat.

He went on down the block of brownstones. Past cars parked under green sycamores. That reminded him… He reached into his pocket. He pressed the button on the key to his Honda. A horn honked nearby. Sure enough, there it was: a blue Civic, his own car. About a year old, clean. In pretty good shape, it looked like. He'd have to give it a spin later. But not now. Now he was walking, like a top-hatted dancer, right out in the open, like anyone, like the mayor.

Then he reached the corner and turned and stopped short.

Suddenly, he was staring at a scene of devastation. It stretched into the distance, as far as he could see. In the foreground: brownstones gutted by fire, their windows broken, their brick charred. Beyond those, there were stucco apartment buildings, stricken and slumped like stroke victims. Beyond those, there were piles of churned mud and litter where lawns had been in front of piles of debris that had been houses. In the distance, he could see emergency trailers standing by empty lots, the garbage in the lots making a weird, rocky landscape of appliances and rubble, metal and stone. And all this led at last to the skyline, broken and jagged against the horizon. Light shining through the scorched framework of ruined towers. The city's signature spire snapped off as by a giant's hand. Shannon was never one to watch the news or read the papers much or to fiddle around much online. He'd heard about the floods here and the riots and the fire-you couldn't help but hear. He just hadn't thought about it much. He hadn't thought it could be this bad.

Standing there, staring, stunned, at the extent of the destruction, he tried to maintain his exuberant mood. He tried to tell himself it wasn't so bad. Hell, he could always leave if he wanted to. He was a free man, that was the whole point, that was the really important thing.

But it was no good. He'd had such high hopes there for a minute, but now his heart was sinking. He felt sick with disappointment, with bitterness even, even with anger.

All the places the identity man could've left him, and he left him here, in the ruin of the world.

He spent the next few days exploring the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes in his car. He drove slowly past toppled trees that blocked the sidewalks, past mountains of stinking garbage, past houses washed right off their foundations and abandoned in house-shaped jumbles by the curb. The sights depressed him. He cursed the identity man. He wished he had enough money to start over somewhere else.

He walked through neighborhoods overrun with gangsters, prowling young thugs with their eyes all over everything, their hands itching to strike out and make some kind of grab, probably any kind. Watching them, he could feel their antsy energy inside himself, that old agitation. He caught himself following their glances, casing their lawless neighborhoods for jobs. If only he had enough money…

Identity like stain, he thought. He shook off the antsy feeling. No, no, no, no. Not here, not this time. New life. New mang.

The gangsters stared at him balefully and he stared back. They knew a hard guy when they saw one-new face or no new face-and they left him alone.

He walked on, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, depressed.

One day, he parked across the street from a hobbled brownstone. He watched from his car as three ambulance guys rolled a body out of the ground floor on a stretcher. The corpse was enormous, impossibly bloated. It must've been lost in the flooded basement all this time.

A clutch of onlookers shook their heads and covered their noses. A bunch of homeless guys laughed about it, drunk on their bagged bottles. Even where he was sitting, Shannon caught the stench of the waterlogged dead.

Man, what a town. What a town this was.

Patrolmen were standing guard over the scene, their eyes shifting and their hands on their holstered guns. They were the first cops Shannon had seen since he'd gotten here. Their nearness startled him.

One cop's roving gaze came toward him. Shannon seized up inside, afraid of being spotted and caught. He almost hit the gas and sped away. Then he realized: he didn't have to. He didn't have to worry anymore. He had his brand-new face on. He sat there boldly. The cop's gaze never hesitated. It just passed over him and moved on.

Shannon smiled to himself as he watched the bloated corpse shoved into the back of the ambulance. He felt again the power of his anonymity, the possibility of a fresh start.

As he drove away, he thought to himself: New mang. Don't blow it.

The next day, he was still thinking along the same lines. He was walking on a narrow street. Ruined brick apartment buildings slanted and loured on either side of him. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder. He saw this guy stepping out of a pale green Ford, a Crown Victoria with a white scrape on the side. He was a small guy, hungry-thin or maybe drug-thin. He was dressed in a cheap black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. He had a shaved head. He had smart, searching, dangerous eyes. They looked in Shannon's direction-then quickly looked away.

About half an hour later, Shannon caught a glimpse of him again, the same guy, on a corner several blocks to the north. It made him nervous. Was this fucktard following him?

He ducked into a restaurant to see what would happen. He watched through the front window as the guy wandered off.

Then, since he was here, he decided to get something to eat. It was a nice place, a family place with lopsided wooden floors and wooden plank walls painted cheerful red. It was called Betsy's. Betsy served the food. She was a warm, friendly lady in her sixties with a small face, sad-eyed but also cheerful. When she brought him his waffles and chicken, he realized how hungry he was and tore into them. Betsy stood over him, nodding with approval. "There's a man who can eat," she announced to the other people in the restaurant. The other people nodded, too. Some of the little children covered their mouths and giggled.

Betsy and her restaurant and the friendly people here made him feel better about things, less depressed. As he ate his waffles, he started to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad town to be in after all. He thought of the bag of tools in his closet and he remembered what the foreigner had said to him: We put you in place where there is many buildings, much work. There'd be many buildings and much work here, all right. He could make good money if he put his mind to it.

He started to see the logic of the thing. Maybe the old foreign buzzard wasn't such an idiot after all.

Later that afternoon, he sought out a neighborhood where there was some construction going on. Crews were clearing away the wreckage of several houses. Other crews nearby were laying fresh foundations. There was even a wooden frame or two beginning to rise against the sky. He began to imagine himself working here. He would be part of a big project: building the city back up again. He could go to Betsy's for lunch on Sundays and eat waffles and chicken and tell her about his week. Tomorrow, he decided, he'd start calling the numbers in the help-wanted ads on the computer.

Evening was coming as he made his way back to his brownstone. He didn't know the streets and got a little lost. Just as the sun was going down and the color draining out of the sky, he came upon a sight he would never forget.

There was a house on a street called H Street. A beautiful old clapboard house, all white, two stories plus an attic under a pitched roof. Behind its security bars, it had mullioned windows flanked by black shutters, white drapes visible on the inside. There was a white picket fence enclosing the front yard.

All around the house, there were empty lots, expanses of rubble and wreckage, overgrown with weeds. It was as if the flood and fire had destroyed everything near the white house, and yet passed over the house itself, leaving it unharmed.

It was a striking contrast: the house untouched in the midst of the ruins. Shannon stopped to look. That's when he noticed the woman in one of the upstairs windows. The light was on up there. The window was a rectangle of yellow glowing against the dusk. It was too high to reach from the ground so there were no security bars blocking the view. He could see the woman clearly. She was standing just by the drapes, gazing out through the glass into the distance. She was crying-crying terribly. He could see her whole body shaking with the force of her grief. Now and then, she pressed her hand to her mouth as if she didn't want anyone to hear her sobs.

The crying woman was in her twenties. She was pretty and slender. Shannon stood gazing at her, entranced by the depth of her suffering and by the secret intimacy of watching her unawares.

After a while, he realized he'd been staring at her for long seconds. He became afraid she would look down and see him spying on her sorrow. He forced himself to turn away.

As he did, he caught a glimpse of movement. He had a sense that something-someone-had just darted off into the shadows. He scanned the empty lots on every side of him. At first, he saw nothing, no one.

Then a flash of red caught his attention. He turned and saw the red brake lights of a car. The car was just turning the corner, heading off down a side street. It had its headlights off and its body was sunk in twilight. But as it drove away, it passed under a streetlamp. Shannon saw the car was green. Maybe a Ford. Maybe-he wasn't sure-a Crown Victoria…

He remembered the man he had seen earlier in the day: the small, drug-thin man with the shaved head and the cheap suit and the smart, searching, dangerous eyes. NOW IT WAS a few weeks later. Shannon was working as a carpenter. He'd been taken on by a contractor named Harry Hand. "Handsome Harry" everyone called him, which was a joke because he was a little fat guy with a puckered face. He looked like a munchkin gorilla.

Handsome Harry had some kind of city connections. That was probably how he landed his job, overseeing a rebuilding development in the northeastern section. He was always slipping envelopes to guys in suits. Cops and inspectors, Shannon figured. That was the way the city worked. Shannon himself had to pay a "threeper"-a 3 percent kickback to stay on the job. But he was pulling down thirty-three an hour and the good working weather was holding day after day, so he had no complaints on the money front.

In fact, for a while, he had no complaints at all. There he'd be of a fine spring morning, up astride the second-floor joists in the cool and faintly liquid breezes, lost in the rhythm of air-nailing fire blocks between the vertical studs, lost in a sweet dream. He'd look up, look around, and what would he see? The other frames of other houses nearby him, the fresh brown of new wood rising from the colorless rubble and mud. It was as if he was part of something big, a big project to rebuild the broken city. It gave him a good feeling. It was just as he'd imagined it would be.

Sometimes little boys liked to come and watch the construction. They probably should've been in school, but they hung around the site watching the work. There was this one cute little guy who would hang around Shannon in particular. When Shannon was perched on a cinderblock eating his lunch, the boy would stand over him, asking all kinds of questions about his tools and about how you build things. Some of the other boys would hang around behind this one boy too sometimes, listening in.

"My Daddy, he build things, too," the boy said to Shannon once.

"Oh yeah?" said Shannon, chewing his sandwich.

"Yeah, he build all kinds of things. He come home, he gonna build us a house like this one."

Shannon figured the boy was making it up. He figured the boy's father was really in prison. It made him feel sorry for the little guy. The next weekend, he went out and bought some carving equipment, chisels and gouges and turning tools and so on. When he came back to work, he went to the lead man on the site, Joe Whaley, and asked if he could use some of the blocks sawed off from the studs. Joe said sure, because they just got thrown away anyway. Shannon cut the blocks and carved them and made a dump truck, with a bed that lifted and a gate that opened and wheels that turned and everything. He gave it to the little boy as a present. The little boy got all big-eyed and open-mouthed, like the truck was worth a million dollars. It made Shannon feel good. He made a couple of other trucks for some of the other kids and he carved a few soldiers and whistles for some of the others.

One day, Handsome Harry was checking out the site and he noticed this going on.

"Hey, Conor, look at that, that's all right," said Handsome, admiring one of Shannon's trucks, holding it and turning it this way and that in front of his scrunched-up gorilla face. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

Shannon shrugged. "I can just do it. I always could."

Handsome nodded with appreciation. "Look at that," he said. "That's all right."

So it went. One fine spring day after another. Out at the site, up on the joists, wind in his hair, song in his heart basically. Sometimes he'd get worried, nervous. He'd scope the newspapers or watch some true crime show on television to see if anyone mentioned him. Once or twice, someone did. The police were still "searching nationwide for murder suspect John Shannon," as one TV newswoman put it.

But day after fine spring day, no one came looking for him. No cops cruised slowly past, eyeing him from the patrol car window. No curious civilian tilted his head, and thought, Where have I seen that face before?

And so, slowly, day after day, it became real to him: he was free. The foreigner had done it, done just what he'd promised: new face, new papers, new life entirely, like princess in fairy tale. No more three strikes. No more Whittaker job. No more Hernandez killings. No more John Shannon at all. John Shannon was gone. He was Henry Conor now.

Ironically, that's when he started to get crawly. As soon as he started to feel safe, as soon as his new life started to fit him comfortably and he started to get used to it, he began to get that itchy feeling he got sometimes where his skin felt like it was made of spiders. He couldn't sleep at night. He stayed awake, pacing, rubbing his arm where the scars used to be. He got angry. He thought: What am I supposed to do, just hammer nails every day for the rest of my life? Well, fuck you. It took half a bottle of bourbon sometimes just to put his lights out.

He needed a woman, that's what. He went out and prowled some bars. He picked up a girl who said she worked in a hair salon. She took him back to her room. Sat him naked in a chair and climbed aboard. For two days, she rode him as if he would take her to the coast nonstop. It was pretty wild. He thought maybe they'd have a thing together. But that was it for her. One weekend and she was done with him. She liked to go with different guys, she said. She didn't want to stick with anybody. A few days later, Shannon was just as crawly as he'd been before.

Now this guy Joe Whaley, the lead guy on the site: he was a watchful character. He was the kind of guy who could just look at a person and tell you a lot about him. He had all kinds of insights about the workers on the site, and the bosses who came by, and the inspectors who came by for payoffs. He must have noticed what was going on with Shannon, how crawly Shannon was, because one day he said to him, "Hey, Conor. Let's have a beer after work."

Whaley was about forty. He was big: broad shoulders, a gut on him. He had a smart, sly face that looked like it had been places. He sat across from Shannon in a booth in a tavern. They each had a mug of beer. It was a quiet place, with no music.

"Where you from, Conor?" Whaley asked.

"Utah, originally," Shannon said. He got that from the movie he'd watched in the white room, the Western about the people on the stagecoach. It had been filmed in Monument Valley, Utah-it said so in the credits. The freedom of its desert distances and the mystery of its stark rock formations had appealed to Shannon. He dreamed of what it would have been like to grow up in the clean wilderness air. But he'd never actually been to Utah and didn't know anything about it, so he added, "But we moved around a lot."

Whaley didn't care. He hadn't brought Shannon here to talk about Utah. He hunched forward over the table. He spoke in a low murmur out of the corner of his mouth.

"There's a lot of money to be made in this town, you know."

"Yeah," said Shannon. "A lot of work."

"There is. And other stuff, too."

"What do you mean?" Shannon already knew what Whaley meant. He wondered how he could just pick him out like that. Identity like stain, he thought.

"Look around, man. Fucking place is lawless. All the gang-bangers everywhere. Minute the sun goes down, there's AK's and nine-a's firing all over the place. You can hear them as we're sitting here."

Shannon nodded. He heard them. Bang, bang. Rat-tat-tat.

"Police have their hands full," Whaley went on. "They can't be everywhere, right? Lot of nice houses on the west side, nobody patrolling them. And the phone lines are still wonky, too. I know people at the alarm companies. Alarms don't always work, know what I'm saying? No one to blame, just wonky wires."

Shannon nodded.

"Know what I'm saying?" Whaley asked again.

"Yeah," said Shannon. He was thinking: No. Don't do this. You're free. Don't blow this. But he felt crawly and crazy, too, and he was feeling, Well, if identity like stain then it's like stain, right? What can you do?

"I might have something for you Saturday."

"Saturday," Shannon repeated.

"A job. You interested?"

Shannon nodded, sort of as if he was thinking about it, and sort of as if he was saying yes. "Saturday."

A couple of days later, with the weather still so fine, Shannon decided to walk to work. When he was a couple of blocks away from the site, he passed by a green Crown Victoria parked at the curb. He remembered the guy with the shaved head and looked around to see if he was anywhere nearby. He wasn't, of course. Shannon couldn't even be sure this was the same car although-look at that-it did have a scrape on the side just like the one he'd seen before.

He approached it. He looked in the window. There was nothing special in there. Just some stuff lying on the passenger seat: a packet of Kleenex, some cheap sunglasses, some kind of gum or candy wrapper, and a receipt. Shannon read the receipt. It was from a restaurant called the World Cafe.

He looked around again. There was still no sign of the guy with the shaved head. He thought, You don't even know it's the same car. Not for sure. You're being totally paranoid.

And he went on to work.

But all day long, he had the feeling he was being watched. He kept looking around to see if there was anyone there.

Late in the afternoon, he was skinning the second story, laying in some plywood, when he got that feeling and glanced over his shoulder. There, beyond another frame rising in an empty lot, there was a brick apartment building, about five stories tall. At that time of day, the building cast a long shadow on the sidewalk. Shannon thought he saw someone in that shadow, someone just standing there suspiciously. Shannon was too far away to be sure, but he thought it could've been that guy, the Crown Victoria guy with the shaved head again. He stared harder, trying to make the man out, but just then…

"Hey, Conor!"

Shannon was so startled he nearly toppled off the joist. He looked down, his heart pounding. It was only fat little Handsome Harry, standing on the ground right below him, tilting his gorilla face up at him, shielding his eyes from the sun.

"Hey, Conor. Come down here a second."

Shannon glanced back at the shadow of the apartment building. If there had been anyone there before, he was gone now. Paranoid. Shannon edged around the plywood and climbed down the metal ladder to the ground.

He stood with Handsome at the base of the frame. The construction went on, and they had to talk loudly over the banging hammers and the buzzing saws and the spitting nail guns.

"I got a guy who wants to talk to you," Handsome said.

Nervous as he already was, Shannon now tasted a coppery spurt of fear on his tongue. "What guy?"

"Just a guy, looking for someone."

"Looking…"

"To do some work."

"Oh, looking for a carpenter, you mean?"

"Yeah, only he wants, like, a sculptor guy, a carver. A guy who can carve things-like you were doing for the kids. That's what made me think of you. Those trucks you were making for the kids."

"Oh. Oh, yeah." Shannon felt himself relax. Don't be so jumpy all the time, he told himself. Don't be so paranoid. You're a new mang.

"You can pick up some extra money on the weekends," said Handsome Harry.

"Is it legal?"

"What're you, the pope? Yeah, it's fine. It's nothing. I get a hundred off the top, finder's fee. Then you're on your own."

Shannon thought about it. There was no harm in talking to the guy. "Where is he?"

"Right over there."

Shannon looked where Handsome pointed. There was a battered blue station wagon that must have been a hundred years old standing by the curb. Standing by the station wagon was an older guy. He was a dignified college professor sort. Short, kind of tubby. Wearing a brown cardigan over a button-down shirt and khaki slacks. He had clipped salt-and-pepper hair and elegant features except for the squashed Negro nose. His eyes were mild but searching and intelligent.

Shannon walked over to him and offered his hand. "I'm Henry Conor," he said.

"Frederick Applebee," said the professor type. "Are you the sculptor?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Why?"

"I wasn't sure where to look for one. They're a lot harder to find than you'd think, especially around here. Someone suggested I try a carpenter." The man had a gentle, pleasant voice, soothing to the ear. "Take a look at these for me, would you?"

He handed Shannon some snapshots. They were pictures of a carving of some kind. A wooden screen with a lot of background tracery on it, then up in front, two angels with trumpets, one on each side, facing each other. In the middle, between them, there was a third angel, lifting his hand as if he was making an announcement. In one or two of the photos, the sculpture was intact and the angel in the middle was whole. In most of the pictures, though, the thing had been scraped up and damaged and the center angel had been broken. The angel's head and one of his wings were gone.

Shannon looked through the snapshots briefly. Some were close-ups of the figures. Some were taken from far enough back that you could see the whole thing.

"What is it?"

"It's a reredos," said Frederick Applebee. "An altarpiece from a church."

"Oak, it looks like."

"That's right. Made in England about one hundred fifty years ago but in the fifteenth-century style. It was damaged in the flood. The angel's head and wing are gone. I've looked everywhere for the pieces, but they must've been carried off in the water."

"Too bad. You a preacher or something?"

"No. No, not at all. It just came with my house when I bought it. It's not even very valuable, really. I've just always been fond of it."

Shannon handed the pictures back to him. "What do you want me to do?"

"Well, I've asked around. The carving is obviously very fine, and I understand oak is a difficult wood to work with. It'd be more than I can afford to get someone who could actually repair the archangel, the one in the middle. I was wondering if maybe you could just remove him and somehow take out the center of the piece, match the tracery of the two halves together, and make the whole thing smaller with just the two heralds on it, if you see what I mean. That's the only solution I can come up with. I hate to lose the central piece but…" He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. "I find the idea of a headless archangel a bit disturbing."

Shannon smiled at that. He liked this old guy. "Let me see those again." Shannon took the photos back. Studied them more closely. Shrugged. "Y'know, I could probably just fix this middle one for you. Probably be easier. Smooth down the breaks, drill a couple holes, slap some dowels in there. Put a piece on for the wing, a piece on for the head, carve them right into the shape of it. I could hide the breaks in the wing feathers and in that part-the folds there-of his clothes. You wouldn't even be able to see where I fixed it unless you looked really close."

Frederick Applebee narrowed his eyes at him, doubtful. "You'd have to make a new head, a new wing. You'd have to carve them."

"Well, yeah. That's what I'm talking about."

"The original carving was… very fine."

"Yeah, it's good. I can see that." Shannon handed the pictures back to him. "I'm pretty sure I could copy it, though, working from the pictures." He was pretty sure he could, in fact. The wing would be easy and he was already beginning to see the head in his mind's eye. It was just a question of finding the right piece of wood for it. It'd be fun. He could do some sculpting and get paid for it into the bargain. Hell, he would've done it for free.

Still, this Applebee character went on giving him that doubtful look, narrow-eyed. He smiled, embarrassed. Gently, he repeated, "I'm told this sort of wood is quite difficult to work with."

"Yeah. Well… listen," Shannon said. "If it's no good, I can always cut the angel out, right? Do like you said. But why don't you let me try to fix it? Then, you don't like it, I'll just take it out and make the whole thing smaller."

"I haven't got a lot of money…"

"You don't like what you get, you don't have to pay me. I gotta kick a hundred back for the moonlight. Take care of that and, one way or another, you'll get something you can use, and you can pay me what you think it's worth."

Frederick Applebee was shorter than Shannon by a good few inches. He had to look up at Shannon to search his face. That's what he did, standing there for a long moment in silence. It made Shannon kind of uncomfortable: those mild, intelligent eyes going over him, judging the make of him. He had to tell himself again not to be so paranoid. The guy just wanted to make sure he wasn't going to mess up his altarpiece, that's all.

Applebee came to his decision. "All right," he said in his mild voice. "Give it a try. Do you want me to bring it to you somewhere?"

"I haven't got anywhere to bring it. I don't have anyplace to carve."

"Well, we have a small yard out back you can work in. Here, let me give you the address. You can come by on Saturday."

"Saturday," Shannon repeated slowly. That was the day Joe Whaley wanted him to do the job.

When the old man was gone, Shannon stood for a few moments, rubbing his arm, thinking. He was thinking about the job Joe Whaley wanted him to do. He thought he could probably do the sculpting work during the day and do the break-in for Joe Whaley at night. But something else bothered him, something on the edge of his understanding. He couldn't even put it into words at first. Then it came clear to him. His crawly feeling was gone. The minute he found out he'd be doing some sculpting work, the crawly feeling had receded. He knew from experience it would go away completely once the work was underway. He didn't have to do the job for Joe Whaley now. Not if he didn't want to.

He found Joe Whaley in his trailer. He stood around and waited for Joe to get off the phone. Joe hung up and tilted back in his swivel chair behind the mess of papers on his gray metal desk. He put his hands behind his head and lifted his chin as if to ask what was up.

"Listen," said Shannon. "That thing Saturday."

Whaley looked around as if he thought someone might overhear them, even though there was no one else in the trailer.

"Listen, thanks a lot, Joe, but I don't think I want to do that," Shannon told him.

"What do you mean?" said Joe Whaley.

"I mean… I don't want to do that. I don't think I'll do that."

"We talked about it," said Joe Whaley. "You said you were interested."

"Well, I thought about it. I don't want to do it."

"Man, that's not right. I was counting on you. You said you were interested."

"I didn't say I'd do it," said Shannon, though he knew he'd said as much.

"Well, man, that's not right. That's not the way it works. I mean, when you say something, you gotta walk the talk."

Shannon didn't answer. He felt a powerful impulse to just give in, just go along. It would be so much easier than starting trouble. But he didn't want to.

After the silence went on a few seconds, Joe Whaley said, "You know, this is a big development here. There's a lot of work around and for a long time. Handsome Harry listens to me about who to hire."

So that was the way it was. If he didn't do the job for Whaley, Whaley would screw up his work life. It was always something like this, Shannon thought, pissed off. People were always tangling you up in things. He didn't have enough money to leave town and he knew he could get blackballed pretty easily in a city like this. He hesitated. But still, something inside was telling him, Don't do this job. Once you do this job you'll be tangled up forever. Identity like stain.

"You gonna get me fired, Joe?" he said. He gave Joe Whaley a hard look. If Joe was going to do this to him, let him say it to his face. "I don't do this job, you gonna blackball me?"

Joe looked back. Then, after a moment, he backed down. He averted his eyes. "Ah. You're a good carpenter," he muttered. Then, more forcefully, he said, "But don't come crawling back to me when you need extra money. Know what I'm saying? I gotta be able to count on people. You're out now, you're out for good."

"I got you. I won't come back. Sorry, Joe." He felt the need to make an excuse. "It's a personal thing," he said. "I got-personal things going on."

Joe Whaley waved him off, disgusted. Shannon left the trailer sheepishly. Part of him was sorry to let Joe down, but was he ever relieved to be out of that situation! He hadn't realized how tied up in knots he was about it until now.

On Saturday, he drove to the address Frederick Applebee had given him and he couldn't believe what he saw. Amazed, he sat in his car, parked at the curb, looking out at the place through the window. He thought: What are the chances of that?

It was the white house-the white clapboard house with black shutters on H Street-the same house where he'd seen the woman crying in the window. FREDERICK APPLEBEE MET HIM at the door, holding the barred door of the security cage open. As Shannon stepped inside and followed the old man through the house, he looked around him. Since he knew this was where the crying woman lived, he was looking for signs of her and for clues about what she was like.

The house, he found, was kind of old-fashioned. Shabby and musty but very… respectable was the word that came to his mind. Respectable and homey. It made him think back to the hero's house in the black-and-white movie about the angel. The furniture was worn, but very proper-looking: straight-backed chairs and a tidy little sofa-and one big old armchair next to a table stacked with books. There were white napkins on the lamp stands in the living room, and a fireplace with framed snapshots on the mantel. As he tromped behind Applebee in his jeans and sweatshirt, the whole place seemed to watch him with disapproval like some old gray-haired lady looking over the tops of her spectacles.

It was the old man's house, Shannon concluded, not the young woman's. It had been decorated by the old man's wife a long time ago. For some reason, he got the feeling the wife was dead now. He found she had no presence in the place except for lingering traces from the past. At one point, he spotted some ladies' magazines in a basket in the corner, but they were the sort of magazines a younger woman would read-the crying woman maybe, not the old man's wife.

"We were lucky in the flood," Applebee told him as they walked through. "This area was hit hard, but we're on slightly higher ground."

"How come your angels got broken then?"

"The reredos? It was in the cellar. When my wife was alive, she always said it made the house look too much like a church, so she put it down there. I'd completely forgotten about it until I came back after the evacuation and went downstairs to check the damage."

Applebee led him to the broken altarpiece. It was on a mantel in the dining room now. Shannon ran his tape measure over it so he could get the wood he needed. Applebee watched him, standing nearby with his hands in his pockets. After a while, a little boy wandered in and stood next to him. Applebee put his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"Mr. Conor, this is my grandson, Michael."

"Hey, how you doing, little man?" Shannon said over his shoulder. The kid was a solemn little fellow for-what?-a six- or seven-year-old. He was skinny and small with short hair and big sad eyes. Shannon worked it out in his mind: if this was Applebee's grandson, then that meant the woman crying in the window was probably his daughter, not his chippy girlfriend or second wife or whatever. What about the boy's father then? That was the question that came into Shannon's mind. Was the boy's father still around?

Shannon went on measuring the broken places on the altarpiece, but he asked the boy over his shoulder, "You live here?" Trying to find out what was what.

The boy was too shy to answer, but Applebee said, "Michael and his mom are staying with me for a while."

Michael and his mom-so the father was out of the picture for now anyway.

Then the boy suddenly spoke up. "My daddy died in the war."

Well, that answered that. "Oh, hey, that's sad," Shannon said. "I'm sorry, little man."

"In Iraq. He was a very brave soldier," said Frederick Applebee-speaking for the boy's sake, Shannon guessed. "He died saving the lives of two other people. Didn't he, son?"

The boy nodded solemnly. Shannon felt a pang of jealousy. He didn't know why. What was it to him if the woman in the window had a hero husband? The guy was dead for one thing, so he was no competition. And what difference did it make if he was competition? Shannon didn't even know this woman.

He thought about it later after he left the house. He thought about her, about the woman he'd seen crying in the window. It wasn't that he'd fallen in love with her at first sight or anything. She'd just made an impression on him, that's all. He didn't know what it was about her exactly. The image of her standing there crying just stuck in his mind.

He had to drive a long way to find a specialty wood store. The nearest one was set up in an old barn about fifty miles outside of town. After a couple of minutes looking around the place, he picked out a piece for the angel's wing, but the match for the head was much harder to find. He wasn't expecting to get anything perfect, just a good match for color and grain. But then he stumbled on a real piece of luck. In a dusty corner behind a repro pine table that was on display, he found a beautiful block of red oak that seemed tailor-made for the job. When he picked it up and turned it over in his hands, he got a real rush of pleasure. He could practically see the angel's face hidden inside it, waiting to be brought out.

He went back to the white clapboard house the next Saturday morning, walking up the front path carrying the canvas bag he'd bought to hold his sculpting tools. He felt good. He felt excited. He told himself it was because he was glad to get back to carving. But it was the girl, too-he was excited about meeting the girl.

She wasn't there this time again. Neither was the kid. Frederick Applebee was in the house alone. As Shannon approached the front door, he saw the old man through the mullioned sidelight. He was sitting in his armchair, reading the newspaper, smoking a pipe. Shannon thought he looked just like the kind of professorial dad who was in the black-and-white movie about the angel.

Shannon and the old man set up a workplace in the backyard. It was a narrow strip of ground closed in by a diamond-link fence. Before the disaster, there must've been other houses on either side of this house and other backyards alongside this one, but there was only ruination now: empty lots, some strewn with garbage, some overgrown with weeds; lopsided houses, battered and shifted by the floods; blackened shells of houses that had been burned. In the near distance, there were other streets lined with old cars. There were surviving structures and the frames of new buildings just rising from the mud. Farther away, the city's damaged skyline rose black against the blue sky.

At the end of the yard, there was a good flat portion of ground. Shannon and Frederick Applebee put a bench there to hold the altarpiece and a three-legged stool for Shannon to sit on. They carried the altarpiece out together and set it on the bench. Shannon had brought a canvas tarp. He laid this on the ground and arranged his tools and his wood on top of it. He'd used a band saw at work to shape the new wing piece to his measurements. He put the piece to one side on the tarp.

Shannon went to work. He smoothed a surface for the wing attachment. He drilled a hole for the dowel. It was a pleasant, involving business. He could focus on it but still enjoy the sweet, energizing spring air. Applebee wandered into the house for a while and Shannon lost himself in fitting the wing to the broken angel. Then Applebee wandered back out again to watch. He smoked his pipe as Shannon smoothed the new piece onto the old. Now and then, he made what Shannon thought of as "old man conversation."

"Look at this," he said, peering out over the weeds toward the skyline. Biting on his pipe stem. Shaking his head. "It's a shame. It's like we've gone back to the jungle out here. I had to buy a gun. I did. A forty-five. I keep it in the closet in my bedroom. Half the time I'm terrified my grandson'll find it and blow his head off. But what else can I do? We have packs of predators roaming the street at night. Attacking anyone that moves. Breaking in and attacking women right at home in their own beds. Setting cars on fire, houses on fire. The media don't even report half of what goes on. How can they? They're too busy glamorizing slut actresses and gangster music stars. It wouldn't be good for business if they told people what really happens in a neighborhood when morality breaks down. We've got girls here getting pregnant at thirteen without husbands. The fathers taking no care of them or the children. And the sons become predators and it starts again. So help me, all it takes for the world to crumble to nothing is for women to lose their virtue and men their honor."

Shannon gave a sort of smile to himself. It was the usual old man complaint: the world's not what it used to be. It's all going to hell. Back in the day, everything was better. Blah blah blah. As if there was ever much honor or virtue in the world. Holding the angel's new wing piece on his lap now and sanding the edges, Shannon tried to humor him out of it. "I thought you said you weren't a preacher."

But Applebee didn't get the joke. He just went on. "A high school math teacher. Retired now. You can't teach children if they have no discipline. They won't let you discipline them yourself and they get no discipline at home. So it just gets worse. My daughter found that out-yes, she did, for all her idealism."

It was his first mention of his daughter and it turned Shannon's attention. He wanted to find out more. "Your daughter-is she a teacher, too?"

"Teaches the little ones. At least there's still some hope with them. But she finally gave up even on that. In the neighborhood, the thugs come younger and younger. Even the little ones can't be controlled anymore. Now she teaches on the west side, in a private school. That way, Michael can go there free of charge."

Shannon nodded. He liked the image of her teaching little children. It struck him as very womanly. It touched him somehow.

"Oh," said Applebee then, "a preacher." He suddenly got Shannon's joke. He gave a good-natured chuckle. "No, no, no. I guess I was going at it though, wasn't I? But no."

"A teacher not a preacher," said Shannon with a laugh.

"Exactly. This house did used to be a rectory, though."

"Oh yeah?" Shannon wasn't exactly sure what a rectory was.

Applebee must've picked up on that. "It was a preacher's house. The church used to stand right there." He pointed with his pipe stem to a field full of garbage. "It burned down years ago. That altarpiece-it was the only thing that was saved."

"Well, I guess the house must've had an effect on you," Shannon kidded him. "Cause for a teacher, you preach it pretty good."

Frederick Applebee laughed. "I'm just a cranky old man, that's all. But cranky old men know a thing or two. That's what makes them so damn cranky. Fact is, I'm no churchgoer and never have been but…"

Shannon had risen from his stool and was attaching the wing again. He took a pencil from his pocket and began to sketch an outline of feathers on the wood so he could carve them to join properly with the broken stump. He didn't notice that Applebee had gone into a fugue state and fallen silent.

Then Applebee said quietly, "You ever study calculus?"

"Oh, sure," murmured Shannon, sketching away. "Calculus? That's all I ever do."

"Yes," said the old man, almost to himself. "I understand. No one does anymore. But there's a lot of mystery to it. Infinite limits… a lot of mystery." He shook his head slowly. "Sorry. These things-they run around in my brain and I've got no one to tell them to."

"That's all right. I don't mind. It's interesting."

There was no answer. Shannon came out of his focus on the wing long enough to glance at Applebee. Applebee was holding his pipe to his mouth and tapping the stem against his lower lip. He was looking thoughtfully over the arches and jumbles and lopsided spires of the debris lying in the high weeds. Shannon figured he was thinking about the old days. He smiled again. He liked Applebee. He was a good old guy.

Coming back to himself, Applebee noticed Shannon watching him. And he noticed the wing Shannon was working on and how well it fit to the stump on the broken angel and how perfectly and gracefully Shannon had drawn the feathers. "Look at that," he said, perking up, delighted. "Why, that's wonderful. Where'd you learn to do that?"

"I just can," Shannon said with a shrug. "I've always been able to."

At that moment, the little boy-Michael-came bursting out of the house into the backyard. All his earlier solemnity was gone. He was running full speed, squealing with laughter.

"Ho!" cried Frederick Applebee as the boy darted behind him and clutched at his legs, hiding. "What's this?"

Michael's mother cracked open the screen door behind him, peeking around the edge of it with bright, mischievous eyes.

"Where'd he get to?" she said. "I know he's here somewhere."

The little boy giggled behind his grandfather's legs as the woman came out of the house and crept steadily toward him like a stalking cat.

"I know he's here somewhere," she said again.

The boy, unable to tolerate the suspense, broke from behind Applebee's legs and ran for it. The mother went after him and caught him and swept him up in her arms, laughing and tickling him.

Shannon felt a hitch in his chest at this first close sight of her, the sight of her bright eyes and smile and the sound of her laughter. She was wearing loose jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, but Shannon could see her figure moving under them as she wrestled with her son. She was definitely the woman he'd seen weeping in the window, but so different from that woman, so lively and hilarious, that he half doubted the two were the same.

"Henry Conor, this is my daughter, Teresa Grey," Frederick Applebee said.

She came over to them, clutching the giggling, struggling boy in her arms so that his feet kicked and dangled off the ground. She was as pretty up close as she'd been through the window, prettier because she was smiling now. She had big, warm brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a chin like the point of a valentine. She had her father's squashed nose, but smaller, more graceful, like an Irish pug. Her hair sprang out all over the place in corkscrew curls, which Shannon found endearing.

"Hi, Henry," she said. She held the boy in one arm, letting him slide his way to the ground. She offered her free hand and Shannon shook it.

"Look at this," said Applebee, indicating the angel on the reredos. "He's doing a great job so far."

"Oh, I'm glad!" she said. She had a warm voice, on the deep side. "My father loves this old thing. He was crushed when it got broken. Oh, you are doing a good job, aren't you?"

"Just the wing," said Shannon modestly. "The head'll be the hard part."

The boy squirmed free of Teresa's hold and dashed for the house. Laughing uncontrollably, he shouted, "I'm getting away!"

"Excuse me," Teresa said to Shannon with a laugh.

Shannon felt another hitch inside him as he watched her go chasing after the child, shouting play threats at him.

He went back to work. He began to carve the delicate wing feathers with an X-Acto knife. The old man wandered into the house and back out again later, standing and watching, chatting about the thoughts he had had on his mind for too long. At lunchtime, the woman brought him a sandwich and a Coke. Now and then, the boy peeked solemnly at him through a rear window. Shannon made faces at the kid and pretended to shoot at him. The boy ducked and came back, fighting down a smile. He was too shy, though, to come out into the yard.

At one point, the old man came out and gave Shannon a key, a small Medeco with a green spot stuck to the bow. "You can get in the back door with this, in through the security gate and the kitchen. In case you want to fetch the altarpiece when no one's around."

Shannon was touched. He had broken into a lot of houses in his life, and he was touched that the old man trusted him with the key.

It was a good day all around. Shannon liked the work and he enjoyed the family and the spring weather was fine. As he carved the delicate feathers, his mind went back to how, not long ago, not very long ago at all, he'd been a hunted man, hiding in a cemetery tomb, of all places, with life in prison or death hanging over him. The thought made him lift his face gratefully to the sun and breathe in deeply.

A breeze reached him and a tendril of decay drifted beneath his nostrils: the stench of the fallen city. SHANNON FELL IN LOVE with her-with Teresa. It was something entirely new.

Every weekend, he went to the white clapboard house on H Street to work on the altarpiece. He worked long days, the whole day, so that the work progressed quickly. By the end of only the second Sunday, he had the angel's feathery wing piece nearly done.

While he worked, Frederick Applebee and Teresa and the boy Michael would come out in the yard to be with him, each in their turn. Applebee, for instance, would wander out of the house now and then to check his progress. He would stand around and maunder in that old man way of his about the old days and the state of the world, about mathematics and how civilization was crumbling to dust and so on. Then, later, little Michael would come out and stand with his thumbs in his pockets, swiveling his upper body back and forth. He would ask questions-how do you do this and why do you do that? One afternoon, Shannon gave him tools and some wood to play with. The boy gouged some of the wood and glued some pieces together and called it a helicopter and showed it proudly to his mother.

Teresa visited with him, too. She brought him iced tea and sandwiches. She sat nearby and drank a glass of iced tea herself, keeping him company while he worked. She admired his skill at shaping the wing feathers to match the ones on the original angel. She asked him about his life, where he came from, what he had done. He tried to be careful in answering her questions, but he had to say something. He told her stories he'd derived from the black-and-white movies he'd watched in the white room. He said he'd grown up in Utah among the stark rock outcroppings and level desert plains. He told her he'd lived in a small town with his father, who was a banker, and with his housewife mom. He felt bad about lying to her like that, but what else could he do? What the hell? he said to himself. It made a strange kind of sense in a way, didn't it? He was telling her about the life he should have had because she was the kind of girl he might have known if he had had that life.

That's the way she seemed to him. She seemed part of that life he'd seen in the black-and-white movies, that life he remembered but had never lived. She was the girl he remembered but had never known. She was warm-hearted and generous, cheerful and funny, so completely different from the anguished woman who'd been weeping in the window that he almost forgot ever having seen her like that. She had a natural, unaffected way of praising his work while making jokes about herself. She would tell him how beautiful and graceful his carved feathers were, for instance, and then go into some anecdote about how clumsy she was with her hands. She would make faces and do silly voices as she told the story, slipping from her precise and mellow diction into street rhythms for humor and emphasis, or even sticking her tongue out to one side and crossing her eyes at a punch line to startle him into laughter. She never tried to seem sexy or alluring or mysterious with him. She was just comical and regular, the same way she was with her son. Shannon watched her with her son sometimes. He watched her teasing the boy out of his heavy solemnity with goofy jokes and faces. He watched her wrestle with the boy, giggling in the dirt, or play some madcap version of football with him that was as good as wrestling. She was always full of that kind of energy and cheer.

"I try to make sure he gets to do guy stuff," she told Shannon as she sat beside his workplace on the remnants of a cinderblock wall. A field strewn with garbage spread out behind her. She drank from her mug of tea and kept an eye on the boy where he played with plastic soldiers in the sparse grass at the other end of the yard. "Daddy throws a ball with him sometimes, but he doesn't have the energy he used to have and… he was never much into sports anyway. I try to make sure Michael gets to do some roughhousing and… you know. That sort of thing. Luckily, he's still little. I don't know what I'm gonna do when he has to learn to swing a bat and stand up for himself in a fight and all that."

Shannon looked up from his work long enough to glance over at the boy-and at the woman watching the boy. A vague understanding dawned in him. Without really putting it into words, he started to see why they all came out to the backyard to watch him work, why they all talked to him like this and asked him questions and told him their thoughts. It was because of her husband, because her husband had been killed in the war, and now there was an empty place in the family where he had been. Shannon didn't fill that place, he simply stood in it, like those actors who stand in for a star before the cameras start to roll. He could've been anyone-any man, at least-and they would have talked to him because he was in that place, because the boy missed his father and the old man missed the company of his son-in-law and the woman missed her husband. It was as if they were talking to that other man by talking to Shannon.

As this occurred to him in that vague way, Shannon felt a sort of hollow sadness without really knowing why. Without really knowing why, he said: "The little man must miss his father, huh."

"I guess so," Teresa murmured in a faraway voice-watching the boy and speaking as if she wasn't thinking about what she said. For a moment then, just a moment, Shannon saw her again as he'd seen her first. The same wild suffering shimmered beneath the surface of her distant expression, barely there, then gone. She faced him and smiled. "How boring am I, right? I know how much a man likes to hear a mother talk about her kids." She tilted her head over, shut her eyes, and snored loudly to make him laugh.

Shannon ignored the jokiness this time. "What happened to him? Your husband."

"Oh… please. Don't get me started. Talk about depressing. Just what you need, right? Trying to work with me over here sobbing."

"I don't mind. Sob away. I wondered, that's all."

She gave a big sigh, as if to say, All right, you win. "He was a staff sergeant in the infantry in Iraq, in a little city south of Baghdad. Some Iraqi engineers had been brought into his FOB, his base, to do some work, and the base came under rocket fire. Everyone went scrambling for the bunkers, but two of the civilian engineers sort of froze, you know, out in the open. Carter-he was the fastest man. He could outrun lightning. He could've gotten into that bunker, too. But he turned around and ran to the engineers instead. Grabbed each one by an arm and shoved them into the bunker in front of him. Just as they got there, another rocket came in and Carter got hit by shrapnel. He was just outside the bunker entrance. The Iraqis didn't get a scratch, but Carter…"

She took a leather billfold from the front pocket of her jeans. She opened it and handed it to him. Shannon looked down at a snapshot of her husband, Carter. He was a round-faced man with a grin full of youth and friendliness-nothing like the grim, determined heroes he had seen in the black-and-white war movies in the white room.

"They gave him the Bronze Star with the valor device," she said proudly, "and the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman's Badge… and here I go." But there was no sobbing, not at all. Her eyes just grew damp. She touched the corners of them and it was over. "I warned you."

"Sounds like a hell of a brave guy," said Shannon, feeling even more hollow than before. He gave her back the billfold.

"That's what I really worry about," she said. She spoke in her light, jokey tone again, but he could hear the tears just underneath. "How am I going to teach him that?"

"To be brave, you mean?"

"Everything. All the things Carter just was. I try to tell Michael what he was but… you can't even say the words for it anymore without sounding silly. Have you noticed that? Carter had things like honor, things like valor. He was noble. Those used to be good words, right? But somehow they got… stupid-sounding, you know? Kind of- ugh-heavy and overbearing and even comical. How does that happen to a word? He can look on the TV"-she was talking about the boy now-"he can look on the TV, he'll see all these men struttin' around, all muscle and gold and guns. Struttin' around like they somethin' fine, like they tough, you know? Talkin' about slappin' they hos. Carter was nothing like that. Carter was a man. He treated me like…" She didn't finish. She fought back her tears. She shook her head. "Even the word man," she said. "How does that happen to a word?"

Shannon, at this point, felt like absolute shit. How could he ever compete with a husband like that? He didn't even admit to himself that he was competing with him, but he felt bad anyway. He tried to belittle his rival in his mind. Yeah, big hero. Killing people for the government. Lets the government sell him some line about God and country or whatever and sucker him off to some war they're probably making money off of somehow. Lets himself get blown up for a couple of ragheads who didn't want him there and probably would've stabbed him in the back soon as look at him. What's so great about that, killing people for the government and getting killed for some poor ragheads in some lousy war?

It was a nice try, but it didn't work. He knew in his heart it was all garbage, just stuff he was saying to keep from feeling so small because he'd never done anything noble or honorable like that. But he still felt small. He felt like absolute shit.

He began his work on the head of the angel. He used the band saw at his job site again. He shaped that special piece of red oak he'd found at the store so that it would fit the broken place where the old head had been. When he got to the Applebee house, he fastened the block of wood to the broken figure with a dowel. Then he went to work on it with a mallet and gouges, hammering away, chipping the block down to the general shape he wanted.

As he worked on it, his misgivings grew. Or that is: he had had misgivings all along, but hadn't acknowledged them until now. Now they came to the surface. When he first accepted the job from Applebee, he had told himself it would be no problem to reconstruct the angel's face from the photographs he had. But the photographs were small and unclear. It was hard to make out the details. Also, there was the wood, this specific block of wood he'd found. It had its own shape to struggle with, its own angel face buried at its core. He saw this face in his mind's eye, but only vaguely, like the angel in the photograph. Like the angel in the photograph, the details were hard to make out.

During the week, he found himself searching people's faces. The faces of the other carpenters and electricians on the site at work. The faces of people at Betsy's restaurant when he ate dinner there. The faces of passersby when he went running for exercise. He was looking for inspiration for his angel, but he couldn't find it. When the weekend came, he chiseled away at the block of red oak, but he didn't know what he was going to make. He began to dread the moment when he would have to start working on the angel's features.

One early morning, he was jogging through a damaged suburb on the edge of the Northern District, the most crime-ridden district in the city. He was in a runner's reverie, focused on his breath and the flap of his sneakers against the pavement. The bald guy didn't register on his mind until he ducked away around the corner up ahead. Only then, when he was gone, did Shannon wonder: Was that him? Was that the guy from the green Crown Victoria, the drug-thin guy with his cheap suit and his shaved head who seemed to keep showing up everywhere? Shannon had forgotten about the guy for a while, but now he wondered: Was he back? Was he spying on him?

Shannon increased his speed, hurrying to get to the corner. When he did, he scanned the scene, searching for the bald guy. Instead, his attention was caught by something else: there was a crowd gathered on the lawn of one of the houses here. There were police cruisers parked in the driveway and at the curb out front, their red flashers revolving in the still-shadowy dawn. Shannon slowed to a walk, breathless and sweating. He approached the edge of the crowd. He looked through to see what was going on.

A man had been shot dead. He was lying sprawled in his lover's lap with a black hole in the center of his T-shirt. He was about Shannon's age, small and slender. He had a narrow, weaselly face and a thin moustache. He wore only the blasted T-shirt and his Jockey underpants.

His lover-the lover who knelt on the lawn and held his corpse-was also a man, an older queen wearing a feminine quilted bathrobe and a plastic shower cap on his head. He was holding his lover on his lap and screaming-screaming raggedly, wildly, stretching out his hand to the crowd around him as if appealing to them, begging them to make things right.

A cop stood over the two lovers, looking down at them. Shannon noticed the cop was smirking-probably because the lovers were queers and the older one was wearing that bathrobe and the girly shower cap. But Shannon felt only pity for the screaming man. He could see how much he loved the dead guy. The robe and the cap didn't amount to much next to that. Even them being fags-what did it matter? Look at the poor bastard. His heart was broken.

Shannon started jogging again. He had completely forgotten the bald guy. His mind was playing over what he had just seen. It made him think back to the time he'd seen Teresa standing in the window, crying like that queen, so terribly, so hard. He knew now, of course, that she had been crying for her husband. He understood that she could joke around with him and be cheerful with her son and go to work and do her job and all that, but there was still that part of her screaming and crying inside, the same as the guy in the shower cap screaming on the lawn.

He stopped on the sidewalk at the corner of a broad boulevard. The traffic light was broken here, as many of the lights in the city still were. It hung from the wire above him, dead and dark. The early traffic went whisking past without ceasing. He waited for a break in it, jogging lazily in place with his feet barely leaving the ground.

Slowly, his jogging motions subsided. He came to a full stop. He stood there, going neither forward nor backward, neither left nor right. His lips were parted and he was breathing hard, staring at nothing. This was the first time it dawned on him: he was in love with Teresa. He thought he had been in love a couple of times in his life, but now that he really was, he realized those other times were phony. This was something else, something new. On the one hand, it was a kind of hilarious feeling, like he ought to be wearing a party hat and pulling on his ears and making faces because-hooray!-the whole world was a circus. On the other hand, it was agony, total agony-because he felt like he couldn't be whole-like he would never be whole-without her.

It all came together in his mind then. The queer in the shower cap screaming. Teresa crying in the window. This feeling he had, entirely new. The party hat and the agony, the loving and the tears, there was no getting around it: it was all one thing.

On Saturday, when he returned to the backyard of the Applebee house, when he took up chiseling the block of red oak again, he found that he could see plainly the shape that was hidden in the wood. The face of the angel had come clear to him. NOW HE SET TO WORK in earnest. He carved the angel's features quickly, half-afraid he would lose the image of the face in his mind, but also knowing somehow that he wouldn't lose it because the image in his mind was also, weirdly enough, the very face that was buried in the wood, imperishably there.

That face haunted him. More and more, day by day. Whose face was it? Where did it come from? How had it happened to be in this particular piece of wood? The questions hammered at him as the features became clearer and clearer in his mind and as he hewed them out of the oak with greater and greater specificity. They kept hammering at him after his work was done for the day. After he went home and got in bed at night, he lay awake with his eyes open and they hammered at him.

He recognized some of those features-or sometimes he thought he did anyway. He thought he saw some of Teresa's expressions in them, some of what her face looked like when he first saw her crying at the window and some of what it looked like now when she wrestled laughing on the ground with her son. He also saw the gentle, distracted, putty-cheeked angel from that black-and-white movie he'd watched in the white room. He also saw the old queen screaming on the lawn with his dead lover. And he saw Teresa's husband, Carter. He hadn't wanted to put Carter in the angel's face, but he sometimes recognized him there all the same. He sometimes recognized the grim heroes from the black-and-white war movies, too.

It was a beautiful face in its way, but strange. Neither man nor woman necessarily, though sometimes he saw more of one or the other in it. Neither kind and gentle as you might expect an angel would be, nor stern and pious as an angel might be on Judgment Day. The only words he could think of to describe its qualities were sorrow and joy. Which made no sense to him because how could you have both at once? But there it was. It was a face-as he saw it in his mind-as it came to reality under his hands-of simultaneous sorrow and joy, as if it were looking down from heaven and saw all the love and all the death on earth happening together at the same time.

It made no sense to him in one way, but in another way he understood. As he feverishly worked the chisel, then the gouges, then the smaller gouges into the wood, he understood that he was trying to carve out the shape of his feelings for Teresa. He was trying to expel them into an oaken semblance of themselves. He knew he loved her and he knew he couldn't have her and so he was trying to give his joy and his sorrow a face. He hoped then they would be outside him and he would be free of them.

But he wasn't-he wasn't free. The more he succeeded-the closer he came to sculpting the face he wanted-the more that face began to agitate and obsess him. It was as if it was watching him, as if his own emotions were now outside himself and looking back at him, staring at him. It was as if the wooden angel had come to feel about him what he felt about Teresa, the same agony and celebration, the same sorrowful and joyful love.

And it made him feel bad. That was strange, too, wasn't it? You would think that, since he loved Teresa-since he loved her more and more as time went on-you would think it would make him feel good to have an angel-even just a wooden angel-looking at him with all the tenderness and warmth he felt for her. But it didn't. It made him feel the way he had felt when Teresa told him how her husband died in the war. It made him feel small and rotten. More and more, day after day.

Finally, there came a night, one terrible, terrible night, when he couldn't sleep, when he kept thinking and thinking about the angel's face. He couldn't stop and, after hours of tossing and turning, he sat up naked on the edge of the bed and buried his own face in his hands hoping he could make the image of the angel's face go away. All he could think was Stop! Stop! Don't look at me! Because, really, what a piece of crap he was. What a crap life he had led. He was a crappy little thief, that's what. A crappy little tough-guy punk worth nothing to anyone anywhere because he'd never done anything for anyone ever, and if he'd never been born, the world would be the same or even better than it was.

New mang! he cried out in his mind. New mang! New life like princess in fairy tale, huh? Well, bullshit. Bull-shit. How did some plastic surgery and some phony papers make him any different than what he was before? Any thieving punk piece of garbage could get a cut job and a clean sheet. Happened all the time. What did that make him but a liar and a fraud, a fugitive and a fraud? Talking to old Applebee like his long-lost son. Playing with the kid like his father. Flirting with Teresa as if he were man enough to take her husband's place. And what about all those stories he told about himself, those stories stolen from those cornball black-and-white movies? All fake. Even his name was fake. Henry Conor. Every time Teresa called him that, it shot through his blood like grief. What a fraud.

It was an awful night. A terrible, terrible feeling. He sat there naked on the edge of the bed with his body bent over and his hands digging into his eyes and he felt he would do anything-anything-not to be the man he was.

Identity like stain. Identity like stain.

At last, the sculpture was nearly done.

He was putting the finishing touches on it. He had the new head sitting on the dowel, fixed to the body. He was standing over it, brushing at it with sandpaper before gluing it all together and working the angel's robes to hide the join.

"Oh! It's beautiful, Henry!" He hadn't heard Teresa come out of the house, but there she was, standing behind him. "It's better than the original. Even my father says so. It's incredible."

He glanced over his shoulder at her, then turned and faced her. She was wearing jeans and one of those scoop-necked T-shirts, a lavender one that looked good against her skin. She was standing with her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were bright. He couldn't answer her because of the way she was looking at the angel and the way it made him feel: too filled up to speak. He wanted to take hold of her and feel her soft shoulders in his hands. He thought if he couldn't take hold of her, he would go up in smoke.

Her bright eyes shifted to him. She began to say something and then stopped and then said, "You have a real gift, Henry."

He looked back at the angel. He touched its cheek with a knuckle. It looked at him. Henry, he thought, ashamed. She didn't even know who he was.

"It's just something I can do," he said. "I always could."

They were silent and awkward, facing each other in front of the altarpiece.

"Will we ever see you again when it's done?" she asked him suddenly.

"What? Sure. What do you mean?"

"I mean, you won't just go away, will you? When you're finished with the work. You won't just stop coming here."

He was standing there like a kid now, his heart fluttering inside him as if he were a kid. "I guess not. I don't know. I'll be around."

"It's just… it's Michael, you know-it meant so much to him having you here."

"Sure," said Shannon. "He likes to have a guy around. He misses his dad. I know."

"It's not just that. It's you. He thinks you're great. We all… my father, too. We all think you're great."

"Yeah, but I'm not," said Shannon with an uncomfortable laugh. He had to say this. With the angel looking at him, he felt compelled. "I'm not great. I'm not even really any good." He laughed again. He wished he could stop telling her these things, but he couldn't.

Teresa shrugged, smiling. "Well… who is, right? Any good."

"Yeah. Right. Well, not me, that's for sure. I mean, it makes me feel… bad, Teresa, you know? That you might think-that Michael might think-that I was something I wasn't. I mean, I haven't told you some of the bad things I've done. And there's a lot of them, too, believe me."

"Everybody's done bad things, Henry. You don't have to tell me."

My name's not even Henry, he wanted to say, but he didn't, he couldn't. "Yeah, but I mean his dad, Michael's dad, your husband, Carter… he was a… he was a big man, like you said. He was somebody you could look up to. Fighting in the war and all that. Saving those people and all that. I mean, I am not that guy, no way, Teresa. You ought to know that. Michael ought to know that, too. I am so way not that guy, it's not even funny."

"I know," she said-not unkindly, just straight out. "I know you're not. Carter was a great person, an amazing person. But…" She gave him one of her comic mugs, lifting up one eyebrow, screwing up one corner of her mouth. She gestured at the sculpture. "He never could have done that. He never could've made that angel's face."

Well, hearing that-that was almost more than he could handle. He was already full with wanting her and that was just one thing too many. He didn't move toward her or anything like that, but he realized that his expression had changed, that everything that was in his heart was right there for her to see now, right there for anyone to see on his face. Then, the next thing he knew, she was looking at him differently, too. All the comical mugging was gone and her lips were parted and the black centers of her brown eyes were so large they almost filled them. He thought, Holy shit! because he realized she was looking at him exactly like that woman in the movie about the casino, exactly the way she had looked at the hero in the end when he sent her away even though they loved one another. He knew deep down she wasn't really looking at him. He just happened to be standing there where her husband should have been. She was looking at her husband through him, really. But just then, he didn't care. Her husband was dead, after all. He, Shannon, was the one standing there.

So then he did start to move toward her. He wasn't an idiot: he could see she was his for the taking. Her eyes were practically begging him to take her. To hell with his fear and shame and whatever. He wanted his hands on her. He wanted his lips on her and his body against her and inside her. Really, he wanted to break over her like a wave-as if he were a wave and she were brown sugar and he could break over her and wash her away so that they were one thing together. That was the crazy idea of it that came into his mind.

He started to move toward her-just started. But suddenly Teresa blinked as if she was waking up. She let out a little noise, a little breath. And before Shannon could do anything, she had turned away from him, she was hurrying away from him, back toward the house, back into the house, leaving him there alone with nothing but his goddamned wooden angel.