He just crouches down in front of me and Tweetie on the curb, you know, like squatting on the balls of his feet? And he’s calm, got a cigarette hanging from his lips, got his hair all processed, you know, marcelled back and I’m like, finally we got a grownup there, thank God, but instantly Tweetie starts saying, ‘Mr. Paris, it’s not Dub’s fault, he didn’t see me, it’s my fault,’ because she, I mean, everybody knew how Eddie lit into his kids when they screwed up and it was— I guess she was a nice enough person, a kid, I didn’t really know her but . . .

“She says all this stuff to get Dub off the hook, but Eddie, it’s like he’s not even paying attention to her. He just puts his hand on my hand holding that T-shirt, I mean that thing was a big red sponge by this point, and he tells me to let go and he starts trying to tease the shirt off the gash to see the damage? But he can’t. The cotton has meshed with the wound and was like stuck to it so he takes my hand, puts it back on the T-shirt, says, ‘Just sit tight.’ And that’s what we did . . .”

“Where was Tweetie’s dad?”

“I don’t think she had one. Her family, her mother was some kind of wino or something, had this crackly voice, dragged herself around in a housedress . . .”

“A what?”

“Bathrobe. And she had two older brothers, Tweetie, one was like this ghetto-style drag queen, Antoine, he’d go around in flip-flops and a hair net. He’d like, camel-walk like . . .”

Ray got up again and took a few steps in a languid undulating mime, his eyes both sleepy and predatory. “You know, hung around the boys’ room at school, tell you you were standing too close to the urinal, make you take a step back to see what . . .” Ray broke it off. “Anyways, Antoine, he stabbed someone, went to reform school, came out, stabbed someone else, went to jail. And she had this other brother Butchie, in and out of jail, real hard-core tough guy, stickups, guns, drugs, no sense of humor . . .”

“What do you mean no sense . . .”

“I’m, it’s a joke.”

Ruby stared at him, the story getting away from her.

“OK. Five minutes after he left us, Eddie Paris pulls up to the curb in his station wagon and he puts me and Tweetie in the backseat. We’re like Siamese twins connected by a T-shirt.

“He drives us to the Dempsy Medical Center, I’m still with no shirt on and I’m wearing white dungarees.”

“Dungarees?”

“Jeans. They just started selling white ones that summer. White, so you can imagine what they looked like with all that blood.

“We go into the emergency room. I’m topless, sitting there with her a half hour on the benches until she gets called. The doctor finally takes over on the T-shirt-holding job, they give me a hospital smock to wear and they let me watch as they kind of wash the T-shirt away from her eyebrow, little by little; then they sew her up, guy looked like he was lacing a boot.

“Eddie drives us back home, not saying a word, and little Tweetie, she just keeps up this line of ‘Mr. Paris, Dub didn’t see me, it’s not his fault, it was an accident,’ which is pretty amazing that a ten-year-old could have that awareness of other people, the trouble they were in, you know what I’m saying?”

“Go on.”

“Eddie just keeps driving, doesn’t say a word, takes us back to Hopewell and that was it.”

“Did she say thank you?”

“To who.”

“To you.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. She was a little kid.”

“But she talked about Dub.”

“Dub was in trouble, I wasn’t. Ruby, she was in fifth grade. ‘Thank you’ is like Latin to a fifth-grader.”

“I would have said thank you.”

“And I would have said you’re welcome, whatever.”

“What happened to Dub?”

“Somebody said that he slept on the roof of our building that night, came home the next afternoon once his dad went off to work. But I don’t really know.”

“What happened to Tweetie?”

“I’m not sure. Something not good, I think. The last thing I remember with her was about three, four years later, when she was a teenager. She got caught spray-painting ‘White Bitch’ on the wall of Eleven Building, caught by the housing cops right in the act. And, I remember, that day, being on the basketball courts, all of a sudden everybody’s running to the fence and there’s Tweetie between these two cops and she’s not exactly crying but there’s, like, leakage, coming down her face and they just march her off to the management office on the other side of the projects, a whole bunch of kids kind of following them, making jokes and whatever. I mean, I hate to say this, Ruby, but kids can be real shits.”

“Did you make any jokes?”

“I don’t remember. I hope not.”

“Did Dub make any jokes?”

“I don’t think he was there.”

“Did Dub ever apologize?”

“For the, to Tweetie? My guess is not.”

“I would have apologized.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Another train shot past down on Rocker, distance giving it the scale of a Christmas toy.

“Go on,” Ruby said.

“Go on where . . .”

“Tell me another one.”

Part I

Contrecoup

Chapter 1

Ray—January 4

Entering Paulus Hook High School for only the second time since graduation twenty-five years earlier, Ray approached the security desk, a rickety card table set up beneath a blue-and-gold Christmas/Kwanza/Hanukkah banner, which still hung from the ceiling in the darkly varnished lobby four days into the New Year.

The uniformed guard standing behind the sign-in book was a grandmotherly black woman: short, bespectacled, wearing an odd homemade uniform of fuzzy knit watch cap, gray slacks and a commando sweater, a khaki ribbed pullover with a saddle-shaped leather patch straddling the left shoulder.

“You got a visitor’s pass?” she asked Ray as he hunched over the sign-in sheet.

“Me? I’m here to guest-teach a class.”

“They give you a teacher’s ID?”

“A what?” Then, “No . . .”

Straightening up, he was struck with a humid waft of boiled hot dogs and some kind of furry bean-based soup that threw him right back into tenth grade. “Today’s my first day.”

With all regulation classrooms booked at this hour, Ray had been offered the faculty lounge to conduct his volunteer writers’ workshop, but in his anxiety for this thing to come off he had shown up too early, walking in on four real teachers brown-bagging it around a long conference table that centered the room.

Despite his stranger status, not one of them even looked his way, and after standing inside the doorway for an awkward moment, he quietly maneuvered himself behind a large scuffed desk wedged into a corner and just sat there waiting for the period-ending bell.

The teachers, all men, seemed to be working their way through a hit list of rotten apples.

“Rosario?”

“Out.”

“Jenkins?”

“Out.”

“Fanshaw?”

“Out. I talked with his mother and I think he’s out of the house, too.”

“Maldonado?”

“Out. I just told him.