Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of African Psycho Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Film Review of "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind" Writing Contest Results Creative Nonfiction Back Pain...Who Cares? By Michael D. Burg Knit Two Together By Jo L. Gerrard Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson Leaves in the Wind By Molly Molloy Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood Poetry Indiana Poem By Michael Lee Johnson Inspire Me, Ms. Muse By Tony Zurlo A Poem Forgot By Gabrielle Rabinowitz Yours By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Confetti By Alan Girling Correction: Drive Me Home Again By Anne Cammon Fiction Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford Justifiable Brew Aside By Barbara Anton Stopping at the DQ By Susan White Cover Art Bright Red By Dee Rimbaud About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti Shotty gives me a lift to and from work every day, so I’m at his mercy if he decides to stop for a few hooches after quitting time. Tonight it’s Sunset’s, a dusty dark bar in Aspinwall on the way home from the townhouses we’re bricking out in O’Hara Township. Shotty’s my Uncle Pat’s fastest, best bricklayer, the Brooks Robinson of bricklayers. Pat and Shotty grew up together on the same street. Supposedly very tight. Pat was in World War II, stationed in Alaska, then the Pacific islands. Fastened in a corner of my mother’s vanity mirror is a picture of him in Burma, shirtless, movie-star-handsome, squatting with a rifle across his haunches. She idolizes Pat, but they have little to do with each other. Whatever it is it’s sealed up like those marble vaults they slide you into up at Mount Carmel. Something dead they walked away from and refused to talk about. But the dead thing’s not dead. It’s still clawing at the roof of the coffin, and they’ve known all along. When Pat came home after VJ Day he bought a worn-out pickup, some used scaffold and became a brick contractor. Shotty was the first bricklayer he hired. Then he had the accident that ruined his legs. One afternoon, ten minutes before quitting time, Shotty was standing on moldy planks spanning a rusty buck, bricking an attic gable on a four-story house for some doctor out in Fox Chapel. He was used to the sway; it gets a little windy that high. Heights didn’t bother him a bit. Then the whole damn thing collapsed like a bombed building and crashed into the site with Shotty folded up inside. Now he won’t go near a scaffold. Won’t even help build it. If his feet aren’t on the ground, he won’t lift a trowel. That’s the agreement he has with Pat who he now treats with familiarity, but hardly affection. “One minute you’re okay,” Shotty says. “And the next minute you’re not.” He catches Lou the barkeep’s eye and motions with his finger like he’s hitting a typewriter key - two taps, slowly writing his story of the scaffold, one beer at a time - and Lou delivers a couple more little green bottles of Rolling Rock. I’m nursing my second with three full ones backed up in front of me. I tell Shotty I’m good, but he keeps buying them. “Tut,” he says when I reach for my wallet. He leaves his money on the bartop, and Lou subtracts the tally each round. I don’t like to hear about the accident, so I don’t encourage him. Shotty loves to talk about it, as if in repeating it, he’s perfecting it, getting closer and closer to what really might have happened. Adding little embellishments. In one version, it was blowing a gale, the cotter pins ringing in the scaffold bucks; in another, still as church. Or he had just eaten a eggplant sandwich, worked right through lunch, ate half a pound of mortar along with the melanzano. Or: it was a rush job. Pat wouldn’t even let them break to eat. Or: it was a Saturday in July and they had been listening to the Pirates doubleheader on some hophead black laborer’s transistor. Guy named Willie, muscle-bound, arms like big black pythons. Could stand on the ground and hoist a full hod of mud to the bricklayers working on second-story scaffold. Was married to a white broad. Pirates were playing the Dodgers and Furillo was coming to bat. No, Campanella. No, it was November and drizzling. A guy named Caro Melfi was digging a footer around the house they were bricking, water spilling off the roof, drenching Caro, who every few minutes took a break. Leaning on his long-handled spade, rain leaking out of his hat, when a square of shingles the roofers left slid off the roof and drove Caro’s head down on the spade handle. Through his mouth, ripped out part of his throat. Dead right there in the mud. Dead as a bitch, and Pat like no big deal, screaming get back to work. Then on top of everything the scaffold, with Shotty gazing down at the impaled Caro, decides to buckle. That fucking tightwad mamaluco Pat. They shouldn’t have been out there in that weather anyhow. Shotty cocks his head and another version pops into it like he’s Aesop. I feel bad about what happened to Shotty, but I’ll start working scaffold for the first time tomorrow, and I’m scared. Every time Shotty talks about it, I see him standing there clutching his mud-loaded trowel in midair, forty, fifty feet up, suddenly with nothing under him; then he goes down like a wrecking ball, planks and brick and mortar, the steel scaffolding snarling over him and finally burying him when he hits the ground like a sack of mortar. Then it’s me, not Shotty, I see flying off the scaffold, so I clamp shut my eyes for one long second to erase it. When I open them Shotty’s face is three inches from mine. He’s going to drink a lot tonight. He has that loony glint in his eyes. He wants to talk about the hospital and the operations, how they nearly had to whack off one of his legs, and the pins and screws and how one leg’s shorter than the other now, so he needs a stepladder to kiss a broad, how he should have sued my Uncle Pat, that penny-pinching piece of cacca. Merda. I know all about it. It’s me, not him, I’m seeing. I pick up my beer and take another sip, look through the bottle, through the beer, at the “33" on the backside of the Rolling Rock label. “Hey, Shotty,” I say. “What’s this ‘33' for?” He doesn’t hesitate: “That’s how old Jesus was when he died on the cross for our sins.” Then he tells me he read a survey in Parade magazine about drinking. Ten questions. He asks me if I think he’s an alcoholic. He drinks at lunch and he keeps a Styrofoam cooler in his trunk. Little seven-ounce Rolling Rock cans. He sneaks a few in during the day here and there – “a little taste” - and he always drinks on the way home. But, as far as I can tell, he’s perfectly in control at all times. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but after eight-plus hours of carrying a hod under the naked sun, it tastes good, and Sunset’s has no problem serving it up to eighteen year olds. I don’t want Shotty to think I’m not taking him seriously, so I eye him dead center. He looks like a white Sammy Davis Junior. Exactly. I tell him I don’t think he’s an alcoholic - all he drinks is beer - and this seems to satisfy him. But I don’t really know. I can’t imagine the lives of other people. Still, something’s eating him. Shotty’s son, Michael, was killed in Vietnam: the battle of Hue in 1968. Everybody in Pat’s outfit knows this, so we all keep the necessary distance from the subject. Shotty wears Michael’s gold cross around his neck, apparently all that was left of him. Today, one of the carpenters from another crew made a remark about the cross. Shotty’s a genius with profanity and possesses other traits not associated with a cross. So this guy kind of flicks at the cross, just kidding, innocent, a good guy, and cracks: What’s the story? You wearing a cross? Shotty went nuts, dropped his trowel, tottered up on his mangled legs like he wanted to fight, shouted: It belonged to my kid. Is that okay with you? His chest up against this carpenter, the guy backing up and just looking at him like What did I say? Shotty gimping at him, shouting over and over: Is that okay? Until one of the other bricklayers, Ernie, stepped in and shushed him down. The bar is dark, the only light from the neon beer signs and the Carrrara glass wall fronting the street. The shadows of people walking by on the sidewalk make little zags of light that flash off the bartop. Lou wipes a tray of wet pilsener glasses and fits them into a rack hanging from the ceiling. He wears a white long-sleeved shirt, and hums. His hair and his face are the same pasty color. There are only two other people at the bar: an old lady with a blonde wig drinking Rose and a bookie named Ray-Ray who looks like Roy Orbison, same shades too, and drinks shot after shot of vodka. They both chain smoke. “How old are you?” Shotty asks me. I tell him eighteen. “My kid was twenty when he died. Twenty.” He says it like I have only two years left to live. He taps twice, and Lou yanks two more from the cooler. The blonde lady is talking to herself. I pull out a cigarette and light up, stalling before I say something to Shotty. I can feel him looking at me, as if he has a clock on me, and time’s about to run out. I wish something would happen. A fire or tornado, something to propel us all into motion, to rescue us from this gloom. But Shotty answers for me: “Damn shame, huh?” “Yeah,” I tell him. “It is a shame.” “Sent my wife to Mayview. She went instant psycho, Christina Puzza, like she had this other person living inside her just waiting for a catastrophe. Now the old her, the one I married, lives inside the maniac, and believe me it has plenty of room. She’s big as a block truck. They pump this shit in her to keep her nerves in check and it blows her up like the Goodyear blimp. She was one outta sight broad back in the day, built like a brick shithouse. I go every Sunday, take flowers, stroll with her around the grounds like walking a Saint Bernard. She smiles and twirls her fingers in her hair, cracks her gum. Then I leave. She’s still my wife, but I can’t say I love her any more. Ain’t that a hell of a note?” “Yes, it is,” I say. I want to get out of this tomb and get some air, look up in the sky and see the sun still there. But Shotty has me pinned down. He’s spilling like he needs to and I owe it to him to listen if he wants to talk. When I first walked on the job, he took me under his wing, did a lot of things for me he didn’t have to do: transportation, lent me work boots, knew when to lay off when I was falling apart those first days from the heat and cramps and blisters. He brought me along so I can hump a day with a hod on my shoulder like the rest of the laborers. Not as good as most, but not the worst. So I offer it up and reach for the next green bottle in line. The old lady drops off her stool and staggers out the door, mumbling and holding onto her daffodil-colored hair. A strand of light strikes Ray-Ray. He throws back another vodka and quips: “That’s one sick broad, that one.” Lou immediately fills his empty shotglass. Shotty taps and Lou lays two more on us. I get up and go to the bathroom. Directly above the trough is a rubber machine. There’s a picture of a topless woman plastered on it. I stare at her the entire time I pee, take two quarters out of my pocket, stack them and fit them in the slot. The thing is in a square black and white shiny packet. Like a chimp, I rip it open and turn the lubricated rubber over and over. It smells like gasoline. I roll it down my middle finger, take it off, wrap it in toilet paper and throw it away. Then I wash my hands and walk back into the bar. Shotty is combing his hair. Widow’s peak, the goatee so sharp it looks like it was cut out and sewed on, mortar splashes around his eyes: it all makes him look in the spooky light of the bar like the devil. Ray-Ray is gone. “I’d like to see the results if Ray-Ray completed the Parade survey. Son-of-a-bitch drank eighteen shots,” Shotty says. “Eighteen. Right, Lou?” “Eighteen,” Lou responds. “He’s a marvel.” “Me and Ray-Ray graduated from reform school together. If you can imagine this, he still lives with his mother.” “That’s correct,” Lou replies. “Let’s get the hell outta here,” Shotty says. He asks Lou for a bag, and we load up the half dozen beers I haven’t gotten to. Shotty drives a two-door ‘67 gold Bonneville. Brick tools and beer empties stuff it, everything coated in mortar dust. It smells like the job. A Saint Christopher dangles from the rearview mirror: he carries Baby Jesus across a creek. The Pope or somebody recently came out and said he doesn’t count any more, that there was no Saint Christopher. No patron saint of travel. All those years everybody was hoping to get from here to there safely, spending money on Christopher medals and magnetized dashboard statues, they were praying to a figment. Nobody was watching over them. I saw a movie that claimed Jesus never died. The apostles gave him a drug so he’d seem dead. So he really didn’t come back from the dead; he just woke up. It was a ruse to make a man God. A political plot. Power. Money. It seems more likely than the Resurrection. I mention the Saint Christopher thing to Shotty. He says he doesn’t give a shit what the Pope says. He’s sticking with Christopher. You can’t revoke a saint. You have to draw the line somewhere. “Besides,” he says, dropping a drained bottle on the floorboard at my feet, “belief is like a woman. You’re in love with the one laying naked next to you.” We’re driving across the Highland Park Bridge, high cyclone fence along the rails. The sun bobs on the river. The water cupping it looks on fire. “There are people in that river,” Shotty says. He reaches into the bag between us and cracks another beer. I don’t know what he means so I don’t say anything. I stare at the water getting redder and redder. “Dead people I’m talking about. They don’t find everyone that jumps in that water. They’re still under there.” “Yeah,” I say. I’ve always prayed in a kind of half-assed way that I’ll pass through danger untouched. I believe that if I ask for protection, I can count on it. But now looking at that long drop to the fiery river, thinking about all those dead people Shotty mentioned, bumping around somewhere under the surface, I’m scared. All those times I prayed, maybe there’s been no one listening. Tomorrow I’ll be tightroping shaky scaffold, weighted down with a hundred pounds of slippery mud in a hod with a mind of its own, laboring for that jagoff Ted who has a hard-on for me because I’m Pat’s nephew. Maybe no one will be watching over me. No Christopher. No Jesus. Who’s going to hold me up? Shotty starts singing: Keep in mind that Jesus Christ died for us. Yes, he is our saving Lord. He is the help of all ages. A pretty song, and Shotty does right by it. “You know that song?” he asks. “Uh uh.” “They sang it at my kid’s funeral. Whole damn battalion of priests. Honor guard from the 82nd Airborne. Twenty-one gun salute up Mount Carmel. It was something else.” We’re in East Liberty now, and it’s just about dark. The Bonneville rattles along Highland Avenue. I’m feeling the four beers I drank. All that’s left now is to go home to the empty house, eat whatever my dad fixed for me before he and my mother left for the night shift, then crawl into bed. One minute I’m okay; the next minute I’m not. That scaffold’s in my head. First it’s Shotty going down. Then his son, Michael, gets blown into the sky. Then it’s me. Up there frozen. Looking down at the indifferent world for the last time before the hod drags me off the ragged plank. “You hungry?” Shotty asks. “Yeah. I guess.” “Tell you what. Let’s swing by my house and I’ll cook supper. You okay with that?” Shotty lives in a tiny house on Auburn Street. Like a little box: three rooms and a bathroom. It’s immaculate, fastidious, like the whole place was put together with a T-square and a slide-rule. “What?” Shotty says. “You think there were going to be piles of sand and busted bricks all over the place. I know how to keep house. Here.” He hands me a beer. “Make yourself at home. I’m going to take a quick shower. Chip some of this shit offa me.” One wall of the living room is a shrine to Michael. There’s a photograph of him and three other guys in combat fatigues. Rifles and helmets. Smiling like crazy. All four of them. Something familiar about Michael’s smile. Then another picture of just himl in his dress uniform with epaulets and a necktie, one of those hats like cops wear pulled down over his eyebrows, chiseled jaw, his mouth a slash across it. No turning away from the shit about him. It scares me to look at him. What he went through. There’s a flag in a shadow box, folded into a triangle; and a little cabinet displaying his medals. A dozen at least. The only one I recognize is the Purple Heart. On a pedestal under Michael’s picture is a red votive candle on a white saucer. The wick is black and streams of dried wax fan over the plate. I think of the scaffold and want to run out of Shotty’s house and never stop. Shotty comes up behind me carrying a colander and a Rolling Rock. He wears a fresh V-necked white T-shirt like the dirty one he changed out of, the gold cross widowed in his silver chest hair; a pair of khaki shorts and bedroom slippers. I’ve never seen him so clean. Suddenly I feel weighted with grime and stench. “That’s Michael.” “Yeah,” I say. A stupid thing to say. I want to tell Shotty how sorry I am. I want to throw my arms around him. Now would be the time to do it. But all I do is whisper “yeah” again. He hands me the colander. “How about stepping out in the back and picking some lettuce. I eat a salad every night. Very good for you.” I just look at him. “Fritz, are you awake? Go out to the garden and pick a little lettuce. You know what lettuce looks like?” Shotty’s yard backs up to a gravel alley where little black kids play kickball under the streetlight. The yard’s no bigger than a confessional, but the whole thing’s planted in peppers, lettuce, eggplant, zucchini, and tomato plants with small, star-shaped yellow flowers on them. He even has two rows of corn almost as tall as me. In the middle of the garden is a bench and a grey statue of Saint Francis. A bird sits in his hand and another on his shoulder. The top of his head is shaved, and he wears a goatee. From the side he looks like Shotty. I fill the colander with lettuce, sit on the bench and smoke a cigarette. It’s dark except for the streetlight. The kids sing out as they play, darting over the gravel in bare feet. I can make out people on the porches across the alley. Their voices float over to me. And charcoal smoke. These are the long nights. Shotty’s at the stove working away. It smells good in the kitchen. His legs fall out of his shorts and dangle above the floor. The left is straight as an angle iron, pitifully spindly, no calf. The other, the short one, bows out, the kneecap plopped cockeyed on the side of his leg. Both are pocked and striated with blue scars. We sit down and Shotty mumbles a rapid-fire Grace. We both make the Sign of the Cross. “Help yourself,” he says. He’s made pastina and eggs, a dish I love, but have forgotten. My grandmother, I think, used to make it for me when I was a baby. Pastina and eggs is like mortar, Shotty tells me. There’s an art to mixing it. It can’t be too stiff or too soupy. It has to be just right. And you have to use baby pastina. Three eggs, not two. And Pecorino Romano. Period. Some things you can’t compromise on. I eat two plates of it. Shotty passes me Italian bread and salad, gets up and brings me a beer. “I want to tell you something,” he says. I look up from eating. Shotty’s staring at me. He’s smiling. He lays down his fork, and takes a drink of beer. “My kid, Michael, he was in Vietnam in 1968.” “I know,” I say in what I hope is a soothing voice. “Whatta you know?” His voice has an edge, a challenge. “Whatta you know?” he says again, like he’s getting pissed. “You don’t know what I want to tell you.” “No, I don’t know that at all,” I say. “Michael was in Vietnam for one year. In the middle of serious shit. Wounded at the battle of Hue, back at the front in six weeks. All that shit on the wall is real. That’s him. His medals, the flag they handed me before they dropped him in the ground.” Wounded at the battle of Hue? Michael was killed at the battle of Hue. I look at Shotty like my mind’s blown. He’s getting worked up, like today with the carpenter. That’s what this is all about. If I can just look at him and keep my mouth shut, if I can listen perfectly to him, and not think about tomorrow and the scaffold, then he’ll get to the other side of this, whatever it is he wants to say, and we’ll both be okay. “Michael made it home, Fritz.” I’m looking at him as hard as I can, trying to make my face look like a plaster saint’s face. A face you can tell anything to. Shotty kind of smiles. He can see I’m shocked. Michael didn’t die at Hue after all. He made it out of Vietnam. To Camp Pendleton in California. After discharge, he decided to stay out there and go to school on the GI Bill. But that was bullshit. He never went to school. He had a secret life. Everything he told Shotty and his wife was made up. They thought he was going to school, but he grew a beard and long hair and spent his days wasted. Some kind of hippie. They discovered all this later when Shotty flew to California to claim the body. Michael had been dead for a few days, sitting there in a pile of expensive dope in front of one TV show after another, before the landlord found him. Shotty says he didn’t recognize Michael; he was so fat. “A big fat bag of shit,” Shotty cracks, and I see how fried he is over it, making fun of his dead kid, but not really. “Fat, Fritzy. I mean gargantuan. Six people. Just like my old lady. What the fuck? I’m fading away, and everybody around me’s like that thing, the blob, in the Steve McQueen movie.” Shotty refused the autopsy. There was no sign of foul play. The coroner figured cardiac arrest: this big fat guy just pushing it way harder than he could handle. Natural causes. At twenty! Shotty smiles and takes a long pull from his beer. “I didn’t want to know nothing about it. Did I have to know what it was inside his body that assassinated him? Like that would have mattered? Like that would have made some sense to me? Did I have to know that?” He looks at me like he wants an answer. I tell him hell no, he was right to leave that part of it alone. His kid was dead, his wife in Mayview. What else is there after that? “Fucking A,” Shotty says. He confesses that the lie about Michael zapped at Hue just came to him. It was the easiest thing to do. The real Michael story was complicated, difficult to understand. The Vietnam Michael, the one on the wall, told its own story, no questions asked. People hung their head, put an arm around him, and walked away. “I was ashamed too,” he says. “So I buried him out there - my wife was a zombie - and then I lied. And now I’m telling you. I’m telling you, Fritzy. The truth.” I nod. For Shotty. A nod that says it’s okay, I understand, forget about it. It’s what I know to do. My own lie. Nobody tells the truth. Even so, Shotty’s holding out on me. There’s way more to this story: Michael, the wife in Mayview. Shotty’s conspicuously left himself out of the whole equation. Like he might not have had anything to do with it. As if he were outside of it all. Just a concerned citizen mopping up. But so what if there’s more? He’s cooked up a story he can live with. One everybody else can live with. Maybe he beat his wife. Maybe he beat the kid. Did horrible dark Satanic things guaranteed to produce tragedy. Shotty could’ve said to me: “The deal about Michael dying in front of the TV. Pure bullshit. Yes, he was a fat mother-fucker dopehead with a heart condition at twenty, but you know how he died? You want to know?” And I would have told him to shut up, that I’m scared shitless about the scaffold tomorrow, and it’s starting to sound like he’s talking about me, not Michael. I don’t even know that I believe there ever was a Michael. Shotty could have bought the pictures and flag and medals at the Army-Navy store downtown on Liberty Avenue. I would have told him, hell no, I don’t want to know. I want you to shut your mouth. But he’d go on nevertheless. Michael didn’t die in front of TV, but running from the cops. His war hero kid after he kicked in a drug store window and couldn’t even get the cash register open. Or maybe he shook down an old lady for her empty handbag. His war hero kid - no fight, no shootout - just keeled and croaked, there on the sunny sidewalks of paradise 3000 miles from home. Too fat to even run from the cops. In another version, Shotty admits that he hadn’t talked to Michael in months, that he had kind of disowned his son. He doesn’t know. He starts to cry. Stammers out through the veil of his hands: “Fat fuck.” I don’t know how to approach Shotty. Here he is, weeping, I mean weeping, like Saint Peter after he sold Jesus down the river. “Jesus Christ,” he’s wailing, raking his hands through his hair, tears tracking through the hair on his arms, dripping off his elbows to the green and orange flowered linoleum. A black woman comes to the door of his back porch. Two little children, a boy and a girl, trail her like acolytes. The alley streetlight floods them in light. Far off, a siren wails. I kneel beside Shotty and put my hand on his shoulder. He continues to weep, brings one of his hands up and lays it on mine. Or he throws it off and tells me to get the fuck out of his house. What do I know about suffering? What do I know about anything? “Get your black asses off my porch,” he screams at the woman and children. Who knows? Michael might not have been fat at all. He might have been skinny. Like his old man. That makes more sense. Shotty probably doesn’t weigh a hundred and ten pounds. He looks like a sliver of flint patched with pipe cleaners. Shotty’s kid could have been in Montreal, dodging the draft. Take your pick. There are multiple versions of everything. Pat probably knows the real story, but he doesn’t seem to believe in the past at all. He doesn’t even remember that I’m his nephew. He claims Shotty never fell off one of his scaffolds, but was drunk one night and rolled off the top of a bunkbed in a Southside flophouse right out a second story window. Pat laughs when he says this, but it’s more of a sneer. I think my mother knows what really happened to, but she’s too superstitious about dead children to talk with any real depth about Michael, other than to say it was a shame and that she heard was a drinker like his old man - what can you expect? - and that he got in with the wrong crowd. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. While she’s talking, she shoots my dad a look that’s unmistakable: Michael, whatever happened, is something they long ago agreed not to talk about. All she’ll allow is that Shotty’s an operator who can find the back entrance to every bar in Pittsburgh in his sleep. His real name is Basil, but the wife, she says, is news to her. My father doesn’t say a word. I think I remember Michael. Curly black hair, big gap between his two front teeth, thin and tallish, muscular, tan girlish beauty. I guess I had been seeing him, like Shotty, all my life, but had never really noticed him. He and his dog, Skeeter, a black and white spotted mutt with the temperament of a Benedictine, that was always with him. Who came like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin whenever Michael whistled for him. Michael showed up one day, out of nowhere, it seemed, carrying two hoops, nets and a basketball. Borrowed a ladder from the Paganos across the street and with his dad’s brick hammer nailed the hoops to the naked backboards that had been hanging at opposite ends of Dilworth Schoolyard, waiting for Michael to complete them, since I could remember. He threaded the lacy white nets to the bright orange steel. Then he genuflected to the red cobblestone floor, picked up the ball and started shooting. For the first time ever there was the sound of dribbling in the schoolyard, rims chiming and the chant of the net every time Michael fired it through from way out. I swear to God the nets fluttered when he walked by them. Balls hung in the air spinning on invisible fingers. Kids came from all over East Liberty. Played all day; all night, in the high beams of idling junkers, the radios cued to the FM underground station: Iron Butterfly, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, guys in cutoffs and high Stars gliding up and down the court. Occasionally, I played, but wasn’t much good. Sometimes in the early morning I’d catch Michael there alone, except for Skeeter, lying on the cool slick cobblestones, fronts paws extended, his head resting on them, his eyes on Michael. Michael would invite me to shoot with him, taking the time to coach me: spin, arc, velocity, release. We’d play Twenty-one, Horse, Tips. He hummed: “Down on Me”, sang songs from Revolver. Wore an army jacket, let his hair and beard grow which made him even darker. Che Guevara. Gave me some skin every time I sunk one. As the sun rolled its way up the roof of Dilworth School, the others would arrive in ones and twos and I’d bow out, content to sit on the step and watch and smoke cigarettes. Black kids from the projects across the Hollow came to play, then others filtered over the Meadow Street Bridge from the ghettoes off Larimer Avenue. Everybody was nervous, but Michael knew quite a few of them - he lived on the other side of the bridge - shook their hands and introduced them around. Everything was cool. Just pick-up games. Detente: dialogue through hoops, like sign language. Even so, the families up and down Saint Marie Street were uneasy. They didn’t like the black kids hanging around; they didn’t like those all-night games, the bright lights and the music. Girls, too, black and white, had taken to hanging around the schoolyard during the night games: the smell of marijuana wafting along Saint Marie like Frankincense, the hoopers, like ex-rays sweating phosphorus in the parked cars’ brights, Michael, now in the raiment of Aquarius, climbing a carpet of night light to lay it up. And the music thunderclapping from the dashboards - “We got to get together sooner or later because the revolution’s here” - the girls’ long hair, the Afros. Michael Montileone, Shotty’s kid: turncoat, half tizzone. One night the cops came and ran everybody out, threw a couple of the black guys over the boiling hoods of their cruisers and searched them. The next morning the hoops were gone. Just the twisted nails that had held them writhing out of the backboards. And Skeeter had been run over. Michael never stopped smiling. He smoked cigarettes, a little dope, threw I Ching and read Thomas Mann. But there was less and less of him, like he was crossing over. The last time I saw him - 1966, maybe 67, a year or so before Hue - he had a copy of Magic Mountain under his arm. Then he disappeared, saw clean through to the other side, like some of those far out kids in East Liberty back then, prophets and junkies and poets, and stepped through the portal. Sucked up in a beam of alien light. Caught a bum draft number. Played Icarus for one scorched instant off the Meadow Street Bridge. No telling what really happened. I think of that almost panicked look between my mother and father when I asked them about Michael. That’s where he is: in the enduring breach of silence and forgetfulness, East Liberty’s eighth sacrament. In the tiny flame of that votive Shotty lights for him every night. I’m satisfied not knowing the truth. Falsehood is often all we have. Lies spare you. They keep you alive, moving course to course, storey to storey, job to job. The scaffold is that shaky construct: truth. It can collapse upon you at any time. For all I know what Shotty just told me is bullshit. But those busted-up legs he drags around on aren’t bullshit. I don’t think his regret and sorrow are bullshit either. Still, what I want of all these versions is Michael dead in Vietnam, vaporized, a hero. Not like me or Shotty. Now he’s just like any other East Liberty loser. But that’s okay too. “How’s your food?” Shotty asks. “Very good.” “You want some more?” “No, I’m fine. Thanks.” Shotty gets up, limps over and turns on TV. The Pirates are playing the Cincinnati Reds. He’s still drinking beer. He turns the TV off, comes back and starts clearing dishes from the table. He asks me if I want another beer, but I’m finished, up to here with everything. “What I told you, Fritz, about Michael. It’s not a lie. It’s a secret.” I grab a couple of dishes and carry them to the sink, pondering the difference between a secret and a lie. The distinction is lost on me. It’s late. Tomorrow’s another working day. The scaffold steals over me black as the night outside Shotty’s. Danger. Fear. Cowardice. I want to talk to Shotty about it: my secret. My lie. But his head is crammed full of his own story. “I better get going, Shotty. Thanks for everything.” I head for the door. “I’ll drive you.” “Nah, that’s okay. I’m going to walk.” “You not worried about all those brothers out there?” “I’ll be okay.” “I’ll pick you up in the morning.” “Okay. See ya.” “So you don’t think I’m an alcoholic then?” he asks after I’m already outside. “No,” I say through the screen door. “Good. I don’t have to worry about that then. I’ll check it off my list.” The second I step off Shotty’s little stoop, the door shuts and the lock clicks. Most of the lights in the houses up and down the street are out. It’s not a long walk, but it’s dark as hell. I smoke cigarettes the whole way. I’m going to give them up, I tell myself every time I strike a match and pull a gust into my lungs. There’s the scaffold and Shotty’s kid and there’s Shotty. But mostly it’s me. Up on the scaffold. And I’m scared. Each time I pass a gang of black guys angling out of the night at me. For a moment I don’t think I can go on. Then I decide I want to hurry everything, get it over with. I run the last few blocks. I’ll take a shower, get to bed, and tomorrow I’ll stagger up the scaffold with hods of brick and mortar while Ted screams at me to hurry it the fuck up. The house is black when I get home. Not one light left on. Not even the porch light. No note. I turn on all the lights. My food’s in the oven in a plate under aluminum foil. I take it out and put it in the refrigerator. I walk through the house looking for signs of my parents’ love for me. But all I see is what passes for their routine: the unmade bed; ashtrays salted with cigarette butts; the ironing board with the iron and half a cup of coffee on it; my mother’s curlers on the bathroom sink, strands of her bleached yellow hair wiring out of them; a wet towel wadded on the floor. What would they do if I died? If Pat appeared at the door and announced that I had fallen four stories off one of his crummy scaffolds? My mother would run around tearing at her hair screaming, “Oh, my God.” My father would walk quietly into the kitchen and sit at the table for the rest of his life. Maybe one of them would go crazy. They would not comfort each other. My name would not pass between them ever again. In time, they would construct a fine and durable lie to conceal my unremarkable life and death. A wall of the living room would be devoted to me. I turn on TV, sit down in front of it and wait for them. They won’t be home until three, maybe later.