FALLING THROUGH by Roy Kesey

This last little stretch before Selena gets here is the second-best part of every day – not as good as when she’s actually here, of course, but way better than everything else. We’ve got chairs set up around the living room table, one each for her and me and Skink and my brother Lamar, and I hold it in my head like gold: she’ll be here any minute.
We’d never have met her, never have needed anyone like her if things were always as slow as they have been lately – Old Red only sent five crates over this morning, and we haven’t even opened them yet – but last month we were getting fifteen or twenty a day, and when we asked Old Red for someone else to help out, he told us to shut the fuck up and get to work. Lamar decided that as long as we picked the right girl and kept her quiet, she couldn’t do any harm. Tomorrow we commence the search, he said, and he looked good just then, all tall and right. Once the pool of candidates is of sufficient size, he said, we vote, one vote per person, majority rules, and bear in mind the attributes for which we search, the added benefits that will accrue if we make the correct selection.
I asked what would happen if Old Red ever came over while she was here, and Lamar said we’d send her upstairs for as long as it took. Skink said he could care less who she was as long as she was black, and he’d just as soon she was big, too, and soft, but that didn’t matter so much as long as she was black, not brown but black for real, Africa-black. I said what would Miss Africa want with a fucking bowling pin, which got Skink up on his feet. Lamar sat him back down and said that of course he welcomed input from all interested parties but perhaps it would be unwise to limit our racial options this early in the game, and Skink told him to quit fucking talking like a fucking whatever it was.
It had to be someone from way outside to keep Old Red from finding out, so each night for a week or so we just went and hung out at wherever seemed likely – bus stations, shelters, bridges. Most of the girls were too messed up to make the list, but we found a couple here and there, and we followed them, asked around. We were pretty sure whoever we chose would go for it – thirty bucks an hour, all of us chipping in, and it seemed like too much to me and Skink but Lamar said the proposal had to be irresistible. We narrowed it down to four good ones plus this one other girl just so Skink would know we’d heard him, big and soft and so black she was almost purple.
He was pissed when me and Lamar both voted for Selena, because she’s barely even brown. He tried to talk us out of it, but Lamar liked the look of those great long fingers for sorting and said she knew how to keep quiet and no one would miss her if it came to that, and to me she was perfect because she looked so much like high school, or what it could have been if we’d done it right and been the right people, the ones we used to watch and hate and keep watching.
A jackhammer fires up not too far away, and out the window there’s a crane hoisting a load of twisted beams from some building they’re tearing down on the far side of the block. Lamar tells me to check the video camera again, so I do, and it’s fine like always. I sit back down and Lamar goes over to check it himself, says it’s not that he doubts my abilities but he just wants to be certain, and if he wasn’t my brother I swear to God I’d hit him in the face with a shovel.
Now there’s some noise from the basement, Retread banging shit together like he does sometimes, and Lamar tells Skink to go down and make him cease. Skink just sits there. Lamar says, Skink, no further discussion should be required. Skink keeps his eyes on his shoes. Lamar goes to the kitchen, comes back with the hammer, turns it back and forth in his hands like it was some pretty rock he just found on a trail, and Skink says they’re cool, it’s all cool, but he did it already, twice this week plus last week at least once, and he’s not the only one who knows how to walk down the fucking stairs.
See now, says Lamar. That’s the kind of reasoning I can respect. You say that in the first place and there wouldn’t have been any problems to resolve.
Then he turns to me. And I shrug, and stand up. He holds out the hammer, and I take it – not like I’ve ever needed it but he always says not to take unnecessary risks.
It stinks down there, shit and piss and rot, and I hate it as much as everyone but I’m still kind of glad it’s me going and not Skink. The stairs are narrow and the light doesn’t work anymore and Lamar keeps saying he’ll call someone to repair it but never does. I get to the bottom and feel my way along the wall to the door, and it sounds like Retread has a brick or something and is hitting the pipes with it. God knows how he can even hold anything with his hands like they are, but every now and then he manages. I grab the keys off the nail and jangle them a little, rattle the padlocks back and forth, put my mouth up close to the door and whisper, Retread, what the fuck, man? Knock it off.
He keeps at it so I say it a little louder, and there’s a pause, and then he starts up again. I can’t yell because if I do they’ll know I haven’t gone inside to take care of business and Lamar will doubt my abilities and Skink will start in on me. I try one more time, my voice almost up to normal, Retread, man, it’s me, Otis. Seriously, man. Either you stop or I’m coming in.
There’s silence like he’s thinking about it. I hear another tap, and then a little moan, and then more silence. I say, Thanks, man, I’ll bring you something extra for dinner. I hear a quiet sound that’s nothing like a word. I rattle the padlocks and hang the keys back up.
Skink and Lamar are sitting at the table talking shit about the Raiders. I put the hammer away and tell them to back the hell off my team. Skink laughs, pulls a nickel out of his pocket and does the knuckle thing, his fingers rippling, the coin tumbling up and back. Lamar looks at his watch and says, Today’s the day, I can feel it.
I mostly hope he’s right. Then the doorbell rings.

I peel potatoes and try to remember Retread’s real name. Old Red told us when he first sent the kid to live with us, but no one ever used it – we called him Retard for a while, and it went Retard-Tard-Turd-Tread-Retread, which Skink said was stupid, said we could have gone straight from Retard to Retread and saved half the work, and besides it didn’t make any sense since a retread’s at least been fixed a little and this kid is fucked way up, looks like he always has been, probably always will be.
Turned out Lamar was wrong: today wasn’t the day. Selena sorted pictures for four hours straight, hardly ever talked, never once changed her expression. She works so fast that when the load is light all the rest of us have to do is straighten the two piles, put the useful ones back in their envelopes, stack the useless ones in the crates and carry them out to the trash. When she was done Lamar counted out her pay and we watched her take off. Then Skink headed home, and Lamar made me a copy of the tape, told me to get cracking on dinner while he ran the useful shots over to the warehouse.
I chop up the potatoes and pour some oil in a pan, get hamburgers out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave. Today’s batch of pictures was pretty good – lots of pussy, lots of tits, couple of guns, and not much little-kid-with-food-on-her-face or fat-guy-asleep-in-hammock. There was one I had hopes for, some Chinese chick or maybe Japanese or something – Lamar said she was clearly Laotian but whatever – bent over an anvil, hands and feet tied with barbed wire, tall black guy taking her from behind. We all went quiet when we saw it. We thought, This is it. This is the one that will get her going, but nope, Selena just looked at it for exactly half a second, flicked it onto the useful pile and that was that.
I start frying the hamburgers, grab a couple tomatoes and an old cucumber out of the fridge and slice them up; then lettuce and dressing and the salad’s ready, and the fries are almost done. We used to have the easy kind, the frozen ones you just put in the oven, but Lamar said they smelled burned before you even cooked them so now I have to do it the hard way and I’ve got blisters all over my hands. A cheap price to pay for good fries, says Lamar. Fucker.
He won’t be back for another ten minutes or so, but I go out to the front door and take a look just in case. I head back to the kitchen, put a little salad in a plastic bowl and set it on a tray. A little Coke in a plastic cup. The biggest fattest hamburger on the biggest bun on a plastic plate, ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise. I drain the fries and put half of them on the plate with the hamburger, pick up the tray and start down the stairs, then go back up and get an apple because a promise is a promise.
I trip on the last stair and spill most of the Coke, but I don’t have time to fix things so I set the tray down, call through the door that it’s me coming in with dinner, get the keys and open the padlocks, call in again: Retread, man, back against the wall like always, buddy.
It’s a stupid thing to say since he can’t even stand up on his own but Lamar drilled us and drilled us. I listen to him dragging himself away, then fling the door open; he’s huddled up on the floor in the corner, and the smell’s fucking awful which means pretty soon Lamar will make me or Skink hose everything down, and it’s too dark to see his eyes or that thing on his chest which is totally fine by me. I take everything off the tray and set it on the floor. I tell him things will be okay though they obviously fucking won’t.
There’s a little moan as I close the locks, and it’s as close as he’ll ever get to saying thanks. Back upstairs I rip through my dinner, eat the hamburger straight out of the pan, and I’m just getting the last bite swallowed when I hear the van pull up. I put Lamar’s plate in the microwave, take his beer out to the table, set it down as he comes through the door.
Otis, brother, he says. Have you recently become a mechanic?
What?
You have grease all over your face, man.
Sorry. I was starving.
He nods, takes off his jacket, sits down. I watch as he works slow through the food. He says the burger is good but the fries are a tad undercooked. He lights a cigarette and pushes his plate toward me, tells me to take the leftovers down to Retread and get started on the dishes.
I almost say something and stop and for a second it seems like I’ll get away with it, but Lamar stares, and I guess my mouth made the wrong shape for anything right I might have said.
What is it? he says.
Nothing.
Goddamnit, Otis. What happened?
Nothing happened.
He stands and looks around, then drops his head.
You did it again, didn’t you.
I don’t say anything.
Look, Otis, I know you’re just trying to improve his circumstances, and that’s fine, but every dollar’s worth of food he eats is fifty cents out of your pocket and fifty cents out of mine. There’s nothing wrong with what remains after we’re done eating.
It’s scraps, I say.
Lamar scratches his face.
Is this a five-star hotel?
I shake my head.
And did Old Red give us specific instructions as to the kid’s upkeep and well-being?
Nope.
To the contrary, says Lamar, except to see to it that for all intents and purposes he does not exist.
Still, I say.
Would you like to be responsible for bathing him on a daily basis?
No.
And neither would I. And neither would anyone else. Now. Are there any further ambiguities you need clarified? Because you’re in this all the way or you’re not. And if you want to go try your luck outside . . .
I shake my head again – there’s nothing outside except our mom’s grave over in Richmond and the sewer where we tossed our step-dad after he knocked me down one last time and Lamar stepped up.
All right then, says Lamar. Scraps and nothing but.
Okay.
Say it.
Scraps and nothing but.
He scribs out his cigarette and walks away. It could have been worse. I sit in my chair and think about Selena. Then Lamar calls back in, says the dishes aren’t going to wash themselves. What he really means is the roaches are starting to get to him. I don’t like them much either but at least they’re smaller than where we used to live, and they don’t just up and fly in your face, though they can sort of glide if you knock them off the counter without smashing them first.

I turn the television on, put the tape in the VCR. Same beginning as always, the table and crates, then the sound of Selena coming in, and there she is, sits down, starts sorting. I watch for a while, get to business. It’s good. I slow it down, stop, start up again fast, slow it down, watch her mouth, her lips, how they open. She looks, flicks, looks, flicks. Good good goodgoodgood and then the end isn’t as great as sometimes but okay and I grab a rag, clean myself up.
I fast-forward a little when she hits the stretch where fifty or so in a row went on the useless pile. Then I think: some ice cream. I get up, find the remote control and I’m about to stop the tape but then something happens – Selena’s looking at a picture and she blinks but there’s something wrong with how she does it.
I rewind the tape, take another look, and it’s more like a half-blink, just one eye and not all the way closed, and that whole side of her face looks different too somehow, tight or something. I rewind again to see what the others are doing. Skink’s gone, maybe in the bathroom or getting a beer, and Lamar reaches over to straighten the useful pile, slow-motion now and there it is, one side of her mouth starts to lift, her face tightening and then relaxing and now her mouth is straight again, and that’s it, the beginning of what we’ve been waiting for.
It takes half a dozen more times to get a fix on the picture that did it, and the weird thing is, it went on the useless pile. The angle’s wrong to get a good look while she’s holding it, and once it’s on the table there’s this bit of glare that I can’t see past, but there’s definitely bright green all around the edges, and a big blue circle toward the bottom with something dark in the middle of it, and now it all starts working in my head – some forest, maybe, and a pond, there’s birds I can hear singing, sunlight like gold in the trees, a place you could get to, maybe, if you could figure out how.
I watch the whole thing a few more times but don’t catch anything new, eject the tape, put it on top of the stack in the closet. I take a look down the hall, and there’s gray light coming through the crack under Lamar’s door, television, and I hear a laugh track so he’s not watching the tape anymore. If he’d noticed the blink I’m pretty sure he’d have come got me. I wait. More laughter, and then I hear him snore.
Downstairs, out the back door to the garbage can. It takes me three trips to get all the crates up to my room. I start in, green edges, blue circle and something dark, pile after pile, an hour, two hours, and nothing.
When I finish the first crate I check Lamar’s door again, and the television’s off and he’s snoring even harder now. I go down for the ice cream I forgot, eat it slow, close my eyes. Then back at it. Pile after pile. The smell of coffee would wake Lamar up so I drink Coke instead. Another pile. Another hour. Then I find it, halfway through the third crate.
I stare at it. This is the one, but it doesn’t make any sense: it’s just a little girl with short brown hair standing in a wading pool in the middle of somebody’s lawn. She’s maybe six or seven years old, and she’s wearing a black bathing suit. The pool’s almost full, the water up past her knees. The lawn’s in good shape, and there’s nothing else to see, nothing useful, so maybe this isn’t the one.
I put the tape back in, run it again, pause: the colors and lines are exactly right. I take a quick look through what’s left in the third crate, but there’s no point: I’ve found it and it doesn’t make any sense, Lamar told us it would be one of the useful ones, and Selena would smile, and that would be it, the signal, all those pictures seeping into her and we’d each have a go, Lamar promised, all three of us would get a go. And after that, Lamar said, well, it depended, but maybe she’d be ripe and things would be good for a while.
Skink said why wait, there were plenty more girls, big black ones especially, and Lamar said okay, more girls, plenty, but Selena’s the best, and why end a good thing ahead of time, and the fact is waiting makes it even better. Skink wouldn’t have it, so then I kicked in with how that was just the game and those were just the rules, and why is the oak tree home base instead of the pine tree, and why say Marco Polo instead of, whoever, Abraham Lincoln? Skink said I was a fucking moron and should learn to shut the hell up, but he let it go all the same.
So. Maybe it was never about the useful ones. I tuck the picture deep into my shirt drawer, and start running the rest back downstairs.

There were eighteen new crates this morning but it wasn’t the usual guy who brought them over – it was Old Red himself. He does that sometimes, just checking in, he says, but there’s always something more to it. I half-expected him to ask about Retread, maybe want to see him, but he just shook everybody’s hand, sat and watched us work, rode Skink’s ass a little for skipping over a picture that might have been useful – there was a .38 sitting off to the side of what looked like a regular poker game. Attention to details is what leads to big payoffs for everyone, he said. Then he left and we all relaxed a little.
Selena’s here now, sorting as fast as always and the rest of us doing what we can. Skink asks what my deal is. I tell him I don’t have a deal. He nods and says no deal’s a good deal.
I finish a roll and stop for a second to watch Selena’s hands, her face, her eyes. I remember the day we found her out on the docks, and one thing I still don’t have clear is what she was doing there in the first place. I mean, everyone’s got a reason, but Selena, I don’t know, no tracks on her arms, no sores, just sitting there reading some book, those long sweet legs dangling over the edge. We watched her for a while, and nothing happened except she looked down at the park now and then. The weirdest thing too, when we went to talk to her, she smiled, and she had good teeth – none of them have good teeth, but there she was. Hadn’t been at it too long is what we figured, or else it was something else. Not a big deal but enough that Lamar still follows her home some nights; she’s got her own place now, he says, pretty nice, our tax dollars at work.
We’re about halfway done when Retread fires up downstairs, and Lamar looks at Skink, tells him to please go quiet that damn dog, and Skink palms the hammer off the kitchen counter. Keys, padlocks, door, and a second later the pounding stops. Door, padlocks, keys. Skink comes in with his hands behind his back, washes off in the kitchen, comes in and sits down, turns on the television. I look at Selena. She doesn’t even look up.

The next night, after Selena goes home Lamar tells us that one of the pictures from two weeks ago worked out better than anyone thought – I kind of remember it, some skinny white guy tied down on a bed, ball-gag in his mouth, burn marks on his legs – so Old Red kicked in a bonus and we’re going out for steaks.
The meat is perfect and the beer is good. We shoot some pool, and Skink gets this pretty black girl to dance with him, comes back to the table, says she’s the one and do we know anybody who could get him a deal on a ring. We give him shit and he buys eight rounds or so and by now the girl’s gone and he forgot to ask for her number which she’d never have given him anyway.
Lamar hits a bunch of stuff on the way home, and the van ends up parked mostly on the sidewalk. As we walk upstairs he asks can I go back down and get him some aspirin and a glass of juice so he’ll be okay tomorrow, what a fucker, and by the time I get to his room he’s already conked out so I leave it all on his nightstand. Then I think I could use some juice myself, and I’m walking into the kitchen when I hear a little click from the basement.
I wait, and there’s another click, and if Retread keeps at it Lamar might wake up and only bad things would happen. I get the hammer, and there’s something moving at the bottom of the stairs, and I wonder how in the world he got out but now the shadow’s moving fast and the hammer’s not seeming like nearly enough and I leap and Selena says, Otis?
And oh holy shit I just barely keep from braining her.
What the fuck, Selena? What the fuck?
It’s okay, she says.
It’s not okay. It’s so fucking not okay. Do you –
This thin bit of light hits me in the eyes, and I raise my hands, tell her to turn it the fuck off, and after a second she does.
Who do you have in there? she says.
It’s just a dog.
The fuck it’s a dog. Who is it?
It –
You ever been kept in a basement, Otis?
What?
Open the door.
I can’t.
Yes you can.
She steps closer to me, and her face comes right up next to mine.
Please open it, Otis. I need to see.
There’s a little moan from behind the door and now I can feel her breath on my face.
We can talk about this later, Otis. We can work something out. But I need to see who’s in there.
Okay. But after you look at him, you have to look at something else too.
She doesn’t answer right away, and I know what she’s thinking.
So do it, she says.
I get the keys, take the padlocks off as quiet as I can, push the door open and she clicks her flashlight back on.
Jesus, she says.
His name’s Retread, I say.
Fuck kind of name is that?
I don’t know.
He wakes up, raises one hand all curled in on itself, turns his head to get away from the light. She goes over close, looks at his chest, tells me to get a washcloth.
That’s enough, I say.
A washcloth, Otis.
So I get her a washcloth. She cleans him up a little, wipes all the shit away from his eyes, first time I’ve ever gotten a good look at them. Then she leans down and whispers something to him, turns and walks past me, starts tiptoeing up the stairs.
It takes me a minute to get the locks back on and the keys put away and I figure she’ll be gone when I get there, but I find her waiting in the living room, one hand on the doorknob. I tell her to hang on a second so I can go check on Lamar. I get the picture, lead her outside, down the street, around the corner. There’s a streetlight there and I get her standing right under it. I hand her the picture and get ready for the signal but instead she just looks at it and smiles like everything is normal.
This is all you wanted to show me?
Yes.
Fucking Otis.
Don’t call me that.
Sorry.
She keeps looking. I keep waiting.
Then she says, Can I keep this?
Okay. But you have to tell me about it.
Nothing to tell. Looks like someone is all. Brought back a good memory.
She’s probably lying. I look at her, at the street. She shakes her head.
You’re a funny one, she says.
I have to go.
So go then.
Okay, I say.
I wait.
Okay, I say again.

For a week nothing happens for sure except Selena’s got some new perfume, smells darker than she is, makes me bring my chair just a little closer; also there’s this other thing, she kind of tilts her head toward me sometimes while she’s sorting, makes me wonder if there’s a chance. Then one night Lamar sends me down with the scraps and the padlocks are off and the door’s open and Retread is gone. I yell for Lamar and he comes boiling down, looks around, screams at me, and the screams help somehow, help me keep my face right, scared, and scared is all he knows of me, all he can see, and he’s scared too, nothing I’ve ever seen. I say maybe we just tell Old Red and take our lumps, and Lamar hits me, picks me up, asks if I’m fucking insane.
We search the house and then he corners me, says if I had anything to do with it he will break my fucking skull, and I say Lamar, man, come on, and he says I’m serious, Otis, out with it, and I say Lamar what the fuck. He stares at me and then drags me out the front door, we spend all night searching the neighborhood, and every so often he pops me, says I must have left the door open, forgot to put the padlocks back on, and every time he hits me it helps drive the thing I know down deeper, carves edges in it, makes it easier to hold.
The next morning Lamar’s back and forth through the house, not looking for anything, just back and forth. I say maybe Old Red came and got him and he slams me against the wall, tells me to quit fucking talking, to never talk again. Then the day’s crates arrive, eight of them, and Old Red’s riding shotgun; he comes slow up the walk, knows something’s wrong, and Lamar says it’s nothing, says he’ll get it sorted out, personal stuff, no cause for concern. I just stand there and Old Red looks past me like always, nods and heads back to the truck.
Skink shows up, and Lamar tells us to dig in. Skink asks what’s the rush. Lamar says there’s no more fucking around, we get the pictures done as fast as we can and afterwards there’s something else. Skink doesn’t like how that sounds but pulls his chair up and starts sorting anyway.
We’re at it for a while and I’m hoping Selena’s as smart as I think, smart enough to keep coming to work, keep sorting, her only real chance. Then I glance at Lamar, and he’s stopped, not even looking at the picture in his hand, some surfer kid holding a .45 to his buddy’s head. I ask what’s going on and Lamar doesn’t answer. He gets up, says he’ll be back in an hour and if we’re not at least halfway done there will be blood all over the fucking ceiling.
He takes off, and Skink shakes his head, says at least now Lamar’s talking like a real human being.
When Lamar gets back he doesn’t have anything to say, and we keep at it; by the time Selena arrives there’s only one crate left. We watch her, and get back to work, then look at Lamar to see if that’s what he wants but he’s not looking at us. He’s leaning back, arms crossed, eyes on Selena. She never flinches, never looks up, and I think, Good girl, smart smart smart.
When we’re done she asks Lamar if there’s anything else to do.
Nope, he says, but how about if you stick around anyway.
She shrugs, and he says, So, you like your new apartment? I hear it’s roomy.
You hear wrong, she says. It’s half the size of my old one. Lots cheaper, though. What the fuck, Lamar? You following me around?
Little bit.
Have a good time with it?
Not bad.
Doesn’t sound so good to me, she says. Sounds boring as fuck.
Lamar tilts his head, hands her thirty bucks, tells her she’s done; when she’s gone Skink says, Hold on. What just happened?
Lamar doesn’t answer.
Where’s she live now?
Dunno, says Lamar. I know where she used to live, but the landlord says as of day before yesterday she doesn’t live there anymore.
So?
Lamar stares and stares and finally comes out with it, tells him about Retread gone missing, how if we don’t find him before Old Red hears about it our skins will be tacked up on some wall.
You think it was Selena? I say.
Maybe. Might not be, though. Might be somebody wants Old Red to fuck us all up. Or it might be somebody sitting here right now.
How can you say that? says Skink. Since we were ten years old, you and me.
I’m just saying, says Lamar. Anyway. Starting now we do the pictures each day as fast as we can, Selena helps with whatever’s left, and every night we’re out looking, all three of us, until we find him.
Anybody ever figure out why the retard’s such a big deal? says Skink.
We all look down for a second, wondering. Then I say, He’s got those same eyes.
Same as who? says Skink.
Same as Old Red.
Skink and Lamar look at each other. Then Lamar laughs and Skink says, You are the stupidest fucking person in the entire world. You know that, right? You are stupid as a fucking potato.
Lamar laughs again, tells Skink to dial it down, looks at me and walks away.

Another week, and Selena keeps doing her thing, doesn’t ask why we don’t have much work for her. Lamar follows her every night, and every night she loses him.
Thursday, though, he shows up late at the house, waits for Skink and me to give our reports, which as always are that we didn’t find anything, and then Lamar says he’s almost there, tracked her to a den north of the docks before he lost her but she’s been circling toward it every night so her new place has to be close.
And I’m guessing Selena knows what’s going on, because she finally breaks: she doesn’t show up for work the next day, and now everything’s different. Lamar nods as two o’clock comes and goes. So that’s it, he says. It’s her.
When we get her, it’s open season? says Skink.
Lamar opens his hands, nods and says, But first she tells us where Retread is, and we bring him home.
Nice. And maybe now we can talk about who we’re getting to replace her.
Anybody you want.
Anybody?
Even Miss Africa Black, says Lamar.
My hero, says Skink, and he smiles.

Saturday morning, Skink shows up at the house, says he got a call from Lamar to come right over, asks me if I know what’s going on and of course I don’t. We sit in the living room and wait. We walk around and eat potato chips. Skink talks about the last time it was open season; it was before I was part of any of this, but I’ve heard all the stories and something dark in my head starts to twist, and I don’t want it, don’t, but don’t want to kill it either. We turn on the television. Then Lamar calls, says he followed her all the way from South Shore and she spooked somewhere around Encinal and now she’s out on the docks and we need to be at the Seventh Street access in ten minutes.
We take Skink’s Dodge and are there in nine, and Lamar says she’s up ahead of us, most likely the Transbay Terminal but maybe farther down. He says anything that happens up top we can handle but if she gets down into the park it’ll be a mess we can’t clean up. He says he’ll take the middle, and sends Skink down the south rim; I head along the north edge, and we’re all dodging forklifts and hostlers and getting shouted at by everyone who sees us, and every now and then somebody stops one of us, and we tell them who we work for, and they step back.
In and out through the reefers and rigs and there’s a hard wind coming up off the harbor; the water’s scuffed white in places around the tugs and sailboats, and farther out is the long gray bridge stretched tight across the bay. I take my time around a pair of those new gantry cranes maybe twenty stories high, and in the berth is a containership big as a planet. Lamar waves me to a stop and we hunch down, watch, and I think Retread, Selena, open season, and now Lamar waves me on.
We push up to where they’re loading coils onto an old white bulkbreak, the deck cranes screeching and diesel smoke thick around us, and then Lamar yells and there she is, her long hair flurries in the wind as she cuts around a Mafi and we slide under it into a mess of loose hawsers and shackles. Lamar points and screams for me to get her, she ducks under a sling and now there’s dockhands flagging us down, shouting at us to get the fuck away from the machinery, one grabs hold of my shirt and tumbles me, then slumps, and Lamar’s standing over him with a pipe.
He pulls me up and she’s maybe thirty yards ahead now. She turns back to look and a forklift just about gets her. Lamar and me head side by side down the edge but things start to run together in my head, pools and forests and basements and we’ve got her and it’s easy, so easy, we close in and maybe there are places you can get to or get back to and it’s all I have to do, he’ll have me bloody for days but there will be this one thing I did and can hold to, I let myself fall sideways and Lamar’s knee cracks me in the side and he sprawls and slides.
I raise myself up and it’s a gorgeous thing, she jumps, catches the hitch of an empty rig and the driver doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, she flies past us back up the dock, she’s gone and I smile and here comes Skink and then I hear Lamar scream. I look around. I don’t see him anywhere, but there’s an oil spill right on the rim with something like skid-marks leading off.
I run to the rail and he’s hanging from the scaffolding below. I reach but he’s too far down and now he starts to slip. I can see the tendons along the back of his hands, the oil bright on his fingers, Skink comes up alongside and I’m laughing already at how pissed Lamar’s going to be when we fish him out of the harbor. Skink grabs a line to throw him but then Lamar falls, and I watch as a beam catches his leg and spins him in the air, his head cracks against a transom, opens up, now the splash and I’m over the rail and if he’s gone I’m nothing and I’m falling and the water rises up and smacks my face.

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Roy Kesey’s novella Nothing in the World won the 2005 Bullfight Review Little Book Prize, and was published in May, 2006. His stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West.