in the crowd.” He shook his head. “It couldn’t have been her. But if it was—”
“Yes?”
“She seemed happy.”
They sat together in silence and looked over the forest. At last Danny stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Heisikovitz,” he said.
The old man looked up at him, and his eyes twinkled; they were covered in a fine mist. “Brother Mordechai,” he said. “That’s what I am now. And anyway the family changed the name a few years ago. They wanted something more Hebrew.”
“Oh? What to?”
“Tidhar,” the old man said, and he shrugged. “I think it’s a kind of biblical tree.”
All stories, and even ours, must come to an end. A week later, Danny spent the last of his bar mitzvah money in the bookshops of Hadar and was returning home along Balfour Street. He had hoped to look at Eva again; but when he approached the wall, he was in for a surprise.
Two workmen were standing on the pavement, dressed in blue paint-spattered overalls with a bucket of white paint at their feet and brushes in their hands. They were painting the wall. Danny ran toward them. “What are you doing?”
“Cleaning graffiti,” the one on the left said. He had a bushy mustache and was smoking a cigarette. “Mayor’s instructions. Keep the city clean.”
“This isn’t graffiti!” He craned to look. They hadn’t done much damage yet, but—“What did you do to it?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?” the one on the right said. He was thin and balding at the top. “We’ve only just started.”
“What happened to the
The two workmen looked at each other and back at Danny. They ponderously laid down their brushes. “What girl?”
Danny stared at the painting. It was somewhat obscured now by white, as if a screen of clouds were descending on the scene, hiding it from view. Still, he could make out the outline of the mountains in the distance, a sunflower nodding in the breeze, the deep blue skies behind the clouds of white. It was all still there, all but for one thing.
There was no girl.
“Kid, do you mind? We’ve got work to do,” the one on the left said.
“Yeah,” the one on the right said. “You got a complaint, go to city hall.”
The two workmen looked bemused as the boy wandered off. Inexplicably, he was grinning. “Funny kid,” the one on the left said. “Should be at school or something.”
“Yeah,” the one on the right said, looking quizzically at the picture. “I don’t see what he was getting at,” he complained.
His friend picked up his brush and shrugged. “Kids,” he said.
The Way Station
BY NATHAN BALLINGRUD
Nathan Ballingrud has had stories appear in
Beltrane awakens to the smell of baking bread. It smells like that huge bakery on MLK that he liked to walk past on mornings before the sun came up, when daylight was just a paleness behind buildings and the smell of fresh bread leaked from the grim industrial slab like the promise of absolute love.
He stirs in his cot. The cot and the smell disorient him; his body is accustomed to the worn cab seat, with its tears in the upholstery and its permanent odor of contained humanity, as though the car had leached some fundamental ingredient from them over the years. But the coarse, grainy blanket reminds him that he is in St. Petersburg, Florida, now. Far from home. Looking for Lila. Someone sitting on a nearby cot, back turned to him, is speaking urgently under his breath, rocking on the thin mattress and making it sing. Around them more cots are lined up in rank and file, with scores of people sleeping or trying to sleep.
There are no windows, but the night is a presence in here, filling even the bright places.
“You smell that, man?” he says, sitting up.
His neighbor goes still and silent and turns to face him. He’s younger than Beltrane, with a huge salt-and- pepper beard and grime deeply engrained into the lines of his face. “What?”
“Bread.”
The guy shakes his head and gives him his back again. “Maaaaaaan,” he says. “
“Did they pass some out? I’m just sayin’, man. I’m hungry, you know?”
“We all hungry, bitch! Whyn’t you take your ass to sleep!”
Beltrane falls back onto the bed, defeated. After a moment the other man resumes his barely audible incantations, his obsessive rocking. Meanwhile the smell has grown even stronger, overpowering the musk of sweat and urine that saturate the homeless shelter. Sighing, he folds his hands over his chest and discovers that the blanket is wet and cold.
“What…?”
He pulls it down to find a large, damp patch on his shirt. He hikes the shirt up to his shoulders and discovers a large square hole in the center of his chest. The smell of bread blows from it like a wind. The edges are sharp and clean, not like a wound at all. Tentatively, he probes it with his fingers: They come away damp, and when he brings them to his nose they have the ripe, deliquescent odor of river water. He places his hand over the opening and feels water splash against his palm. Poking inside, he encounters sharp metal angles and slippery stone.
Beltrane lurches from his bed and stumbles quickly for the door to the bathroom, leaving a wake of jarred cots and angry protests. He pushes through the door and heads straight for the mirrors over a row of dirty sinks. He lifts his shirt.
The hole in his chest reaches right through him. Gas lamps shine blearily through rain. Deep water runs down the street and spills out onto his skin. New Orleans has put a finger through his heart.
“Oh, no,” he says softly, and raises his eyes to his own face. His face is a wide street, garbage blown, with a dead streetlight and rats scrabbling along the walls. A spray of rain mists the air in front of him, pebbling the mirror.
He knows this street. He’s walked it many times in his life, and as he leans closer to the mirror, he finds that he is walking it now, home again in his old city, the bathroom and the strange shelter behind him and gone. He takes a right into an alley. Somewhere to his left is a walled cemetery, with its aboveground tombs giving it the look of a city for the dead; and next to it will be the projects, where some folks string Christmas lights along their balconies even in the summertime. He follows his accustomed path and turns right onto Claiborne Avenue. And there’s his old buddy Craig, waiting for him still.
Craig was leaning against the plate-glass window of his convenience store, two hours closed, clutching a greasy brown paper bag in his left hand, with his gray head hanging and a cigarette stuck to his lips. A few butts were scattered by his feet. The neighborhood was asleep under the arch of the I-10 overpass. A row of darkened shopfronts receded down Claiborne Avenue, the line broken by the colorful lights of the Good Friends Bar spilling onto the sidewalk. The highway above them was mostly quiet now, save the occasional hiss of late-night travelers hurtling through the darkness toward mysterious ends. Beltrane, sixty-four and homeless, moseyed up to him. He
