The Collector

What has stayed happened long ago, but Milty can’t remember reaching for his quad cane this morning. On the kitchen table where he sits are the notes he’s written to himself. His handwriting looks like it was done by some old drunk, and they’re yellow sticky notes that Donna bought for him, which he only knows because next to his ashtray is: Donna got me these so I won’t forget. On another is: Ate cereal—9:17. And: Take meds. And: Donna comes every day for lunch. Next to that one is: Need cigarets. Halfway under his good hand is: Gave Donna $ for gun.

He can’t remember writing that. He should’ve put down the date and time next to it. But he forgets to do those things too. He remembers Donna’s face, though. She’s wearing that blue eye shadow that makes her look cheap, and her hair is short and dyed blond and she looks pissed off at him again. Was this for asking her to buy him a piece? No, this was a long time ago when they were still together. He remembers that much. That his ex doesn’t live here anymore.

It scares him to think this, but he’s already scared. He remembers that. That he feels afraid all day and night. So long since he’s felt this. Not since he was a kid years before he got big. But now that half his body won’t move, he’s afraid to limp out onto the street where people want to hurt him.

Growing up, kids called him “Milty the Dunce” because he wasn’t good at reading, all the letters and words getting mixed up in his head. When the teachers called on him to read out loud from a book, Milty’s face would catch on fire and he would stare at the page in front of him and go mute and all the other kids would laugh. Then recess came and some of the big ones like Billy Sullivan and Chucky White would beat him up behind the baseball bleachers where kids used to go to smoke and do other things. But then Milty Dain kept growing and growing and before he was even old enough to buy beer, he was over six feet eight and two hundred ninety pounds and nobody called him “Milty the Dunce” to his face anymore. Nobody beat him up either.

Milty knocks a cigarette out of its pack and lights it with his left hand which shakes. He still can’t believe that he’s right back to where he was before Milty Dain became “Milty Pain” and once, for a few months anyway, “Milty Hilti,” the brand of the nail gun he used on a mush who took a bad beat on a game that should’ve been a lock, but that was the trouble with that mush—Danny Clark? Clark Daniels?—he never had any luck. But for years in these streets Milty was simply known as MP, which with his size and abilities he should have done, joined the Army, not what he did do, which is ruined his life working for his brother Asa.

Milty and his older brother had the same mother and father, though you’d never know it. Asa could’ve been in the movies. Asa had thick black hair he let grow to his shoulders and he lifted weights down at the Y and even though he and Milty were Jewish on their dead father’s side and Greek on their mother’s, Asa got all of his looks from their mother, the same deep eyes and high cheekbones and olive skin.

Before he even got out of high school he started modeling, mainly in his underwear, and that’s when he started shaving his big chest and narrow waist and then he bought a motorcycle, a Kawasaki crotch rocket with a yellow gas tank, and Asa would ride through the streets in yellow shorts and yellow flip flops and a yellow helmet, no shirt on, his oiled muscles gleaming under the sun.

Asa was smart, too. He was good at math. He could’ve gone to college, but Asa had two big problems: Asa was lazy, and Asa loved money. He was smart in another way as well. That first winter after high school, his modeling money still coming in, Asa put a nickel down on a parlay of three NBA games. The Celtics and Lakers won, but the Knicks lost and now he was out five hundred bucks. But Asa didn’t do what so many others did. He didn’t ask his bookie to front him another nickel to try to win it all back and then be in the hole for a dime. No. He saw right away where the real odds were, and he went to see his bookie.

This was back in the late 70s when all the mill buildings and shoe factories down along the river were still boarded up. The only businesses open then were a few barrooms operating out of the first floors of the mills, places like Charlie and Fae’s, The Grotto, and Smitty’s Pub.

Asa’s bookie was Meyer Walsh, and he had an office in Railroad Square in the shadows of the iron trestle, the Boston & Maine rattling over it twice a day heading north or south. Walsh owned the corner building overlooking the Merrimack River, which in those days smelled like tanning dyes and raw sewage and dead fish. On the first floor of Walsh’s building was a pool hall, and on the second was a boxing gym where Milty had to go once to collect from a middleweight who handed it right over. But this was long after Asa’s meeting with Meyer Walsh upstairs.

In that meeting, which Asa told Milty all about because Milty was part of the deal, Asa leaned against Meyer’s window casing like he was posing for a picture, his hands in the pockets of his ironed chinos, his black hair combed back. And he took his time.

The brick walls of that room were covered with framed photos of baseball players and basketball players, with fighters and hockey players whose smiles were missing teeth, with helmeted football players and a few sleek horses and racing dogs, and Meyer had no desk. Instead, he worked out of a leather recliner in front of two TV trays holding three phones and a huge glass ashtray filled with cigarette butts. In the corner, a buck’s head was mounted on a plaque and a Star of David hung on a gold chain from one of its broken antlers. On the bar, Walsh had four TVs set up, a bottle of Bushmills between two of them.

Meyer wore thick bifocals and was thin but had a drinker’s round belly. He wore blue blazers and gray pants, his shirts underneath whatever he reached for that day, though often they were Irish green because Meyer Walsh was an Irish Jew. Maybe that’s why he gave Asa the time of day that afternoon, because he knew that Asa was also half-Jewish and maybe because, Milty had always thought, Asa was Asa.

Meyer finally looked up from the sports page. “I prefer a get down over the phone, Dain. You know that.”

“Nope. I’m done with that.”

“Says you.” Meyer lifted his chin like he’d heard ten thousand bettors say the exact same thing one hundred thousand times.

“No, I want to work with you.”

Not for you, Asa made sure Milty heard correctly later, but with you. Partners. “After, you know, you show me the ropes.”

“You want ropes, go downstairs and step into that ring.”

But Asa flashed his Asa smile and then he pulled his hands from his pants pockets and without asking, he sat in the empty recliner beside Meyer’s. Across the back of it was a blue towel, a round hair oil stain near the top. It belonged to Angel Reyes, Walsh’s collector who Milty could squeeze like a lemon. That was Asa’s way in, the promise of his younger but much bigger brother. That, and Asa’s guarantee that he’d bring in a younger clientele for Walsh, which he soon did. These were kids Asa knew from the high school and the Y and guys he met at the beach less than twenty miles east on the Mass/New Hampshire border.

It’s where Asa spent every sunny afternoon all summer long, walking around oiled and shirtless, his Kawasaki parked up against the Sandy Inn where he rented a room and convinced girls to go there with him. And they were girls, too. Teenagers. Kids who were drawn to Asa’s confidence and good looks and new bookie cash because so many of the bettors he pulled in were squares, meaning they only put money down on their favorite teams to win, so they tended to lose and sometimes lost big.

The first time Asa needed Milty to collect, it was for a dime from some college kid who’d stolen the thousand from his father’s credit card. This kid was a hockey player on a scholarship up to Bates, and the entire drive north in his Chevy Nova, Milty wasn’t quite sure why he was doing what he was about to do. If Asa wanted to be a bookie, he could be a bookie. Walsh was happy with all the new bets coming in, more than enough to take care of Asa too, so Asa was already in with him. Why not keep using Reyes, who everybody knew was crazy anyway?

One time he held a loser’s hand to a table saw and switched it on and pushed the guy’s pinky into the spinning blade, his little finger flying off into this poor prick’s garage while he was screaming and screaming that he had the money inside his house, but Reyes pushed the ring finger in too, just to make a point.

Pulling into the campus, Milty rolled his window down, cold air blowing in, and he drove slowly along an asphalt lane lined with bare maples and oaks. It was a late fall afternoon, just a few dead leaves left on the branches, and he looked out at two girls in jeans and winter coats sharing a cigarette up against a tree. One of them glanced over at him. She was pretty, with curly red hair, but she gave him a look like she just knew he was guilty of something terrible and he’d better stay the hell away. And she hadn’t even seen his size yet, just his face, which was the opposite of Asa’s.

Milty had a big head and low cheekbones, which made his whole face look flat, his lips too big for his teeth. Instead of Asa’s thick black hair, Milty’s was thinning, even back then, and it was the color of dog shit. To make things better, he also had ashy pouches under his eyes. This made him look like he had some sort of sickness, and that, combined with his size, which was now over three hundred pounds, scared people. It just did. Everyone, it seemed, but Asa.

That’s what Milty was thinking about as he drove around that campus looking for the hockey rink, how those few years when Milty wasn’t big yet, Asa would go after whoever went after him. Like Chucky White and Billy Sullivan. Asa was out of high school by then and doing his modeling, but when he heard about those two—and to this day Milty doesn’t know who told his brother—Asa rode up to the school on his Kawasaki at last bell, waited for them to come strolling out in their leather jackets, and then he beat the shit out both of them, even cracking his yellow helmet over Sullivan’s head and knocking him out.

That was Asa’s first arrest and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like having to pay a lawyer and having to come up with restitution for the kid’s medical bills. And because he didn’t like this, that’s when he began to look for others to do his dirty work. Then overnight, it seemed, Milty became big and useful, though he didn’t feel used by his brother. That feeling wouldn’t come for years. No, what Milty felt as he parked his Nova up near the entrance of the Bates hockey rink, was that he, Milton Dain, was doing this because he was grateful to his brother, Asa. Not just for going after White and Sullivan back then, but for never—not once—looking at him the way others did.

Sometimes coming out of the bathroom in his skivvies, Asa would shake his head at Milty standing there in his pj’s, waiting his turn, this look on Asa’s face like he was confused at how they could be related and worried about how Milty would ever get by. Milty could feel that this really bothered his big brother. It did. And so whatever Asa did for him, Milty believed that his older brother was doing it out of love. Like asking him to do now what Milty was about to do, that pretty redhead’s expression burning in his head. It made Milty want to show her just how wrong she was but that she was right too. He wasn’t guilty of anything, but he would be soon.

The kid’s name was Ethan Something, and there he was out on the ice with his team. He was a forward, number seven, which was his exact cover against the spread between the Patriots and the Bills. His lucky number. That’s what he’d told Asa anyway when the kid was home for the weekend, drinking and gambling with his old man’s stolen money. And did this little shit think just because he was two hours away up in Maine that he could welch on his bet and Asa Dain wouldn’t collect? This thought began to piss Milty off. The arrogance of it. That, and how this was clearly a school for rich kids.

For half an hour Milty sat in the stands, his hands in the pockets of his coat. He wished he’d worn a hat and he could see his breath in front of him, and he was hungry like he always was. Two coaches in team parkas and wool caps were calling out drills to the players, and it was easy to see that this kid, number seven, was one of the best. He seemed to be not only the fastest skater, but he could keep that sliding puck on the end of his stick like it was taped there, and then he’d shoot it time and time again past the goalie and into the net. Asa had said this boy was good enough to get paid doing this, and sitting there in the cold, the rink loud with the slide and chop of skates on ice, the crash of the boards after a speeding check, the shouts of the coaches, the slap of stick after stick against the puck, Milty knew that would be his way in with this kid. He would make it clear just how easy it would be for him, Milty Dain, to take all this away from him forever. He should’ve felt bad thinking this, but he did not.

Then their practice was over, and Milty waited for number seven at the front doors. Down a freshly mopped hallway were two vending machines, and Milty bought himself a cup of coffee and two Hostess Cupcakes, which were gone before he even took a sip of the coffee. The boys were leaving the building now in boisterous twos and threes, their hair wet, many of them in good jeans and sweaters and athletic jackets. Number seven came out alone and walking fast, a full backpack hanging off one shoulder, his eyes on the glass doors like he was late for an important meeting or a class or maybe a pretty redhead with curly hair.

Milty stepped up to him, and he was surprised at what came out of his mouth.

“You want to go pro?”

The kid stopped and looked up into Milty’s face. For a flash of a second, Milty almost felt bad because there was so much hope in that kid’s eyes. But he was also square-jawed and blue-eyed and handsome as hell, and Milty began to hate him, especially once the kid said, “Do I know you, sir?” and began to take in Milty’s hand-me-down winter coat, the zipper broken, his gut behind his sweater that probably had a mustard or ketchup stain on it and maybe crumbs from the vending machine cupcakes, and of course Milty’s big head and flat face, the hope in this kid’s face fading to something else, something less respectful.

“No.” Milty said. “But you know Asa Dain, don’t you?” And before the kid could move, Milty dropped his coffee and grabbed the kid’s jacket collars and it was just so easy to toss him and his full backpack down that mopped hallway, books and loose papers spilling everywhere. It was so easy to jerk the kid to his feet then shove him into a men’s room and push his face into a white porcelain sink. “I’ll break your fuckin’ knees off, you hear me? You’ll never fuckin’ skate again.”

The kid was whimpering, “Okay, all right, okay.” And then Milty was driving the boy to a bank branch in downtown Lewiston, which looked a lot like the town Milty and Asa were raised in along the Merrimack. Just another cluster of boarded up mills and barrooms that were not boarded up. There were a few sub shops. A dirty bookstore next to a pizza parlor across the street from a furniture upholstery place with its front window duct taped. Next to a McDonald’s, its golden arches blinking with a bad fluorescent, was a bank’s drive through, and this is where number seven cashed a check he’d written out in the dorm room Milty had escorted him to. The whole walk there, Milty’s hand squeezed the back of the kid’s neck; even when another kid or two walked by down the hall, number seven keeping quiet because Milty squeezed harder and smiled at them like he was the kid’s uncle just having some fun.

The kid’s room smelled like sweaty jock straps and dried beer, like old puke and cologne, like rotten food and something vaguely sexual. On the wall was a poster of a nude brunette with big breasts and another of Bobby Orr and the third was a close-up photo of one big cannabis leaf. It was a narrow room with a pair of bunk beds, and Milty let go of number seven so the kid could reach up to the top bunk and pull down a metal box that held his rubbers and a pot pipe, some paperclips and a deck of cards and his checkbook.

“If you got it, why not pay up?” Milty meant this question. Why would this kid risk what was happening to him now?

“This is for school, man. I’m borrowing it.”

“I thought your old man was loaded.”

“You shittin’ me? He cut me off a long time ago.”

Milty wanted to ask him how he got his father’s credit card then for the dime, but just talking to this boy Milty could feel his power over him start to fade. He could feel that he, Milton Dain, was starting to come off as more than just a wall of fat and muscle and bone that would hurt him.

So he kept quiet until the thousand, plus Asa’s juice of 10% plus Milty’s collection fee of another 10%, was in Milty’s coat pocket. They were driving through the gates of the campus, a pretty island in a shitty sea. Number seven was hunched against the passenger’s door, and he didn’t look so handsome anymore. He looked like he’d just taken a beating when Milty had done no such thing.

Milty pulled the Nova up against a granite curb in front of a building that was all stone and glass. “Why’d your old man cut you off?”

The kid already had his hand on the door handle, ready to bolt. But he looked into Milty’s face and said, “Because he was beating up my mother and I put a stop to it, all right?”

Then number seven was walking fast down the lane lined with bare trees, his hands in his athletic jacket pockets, his head down like he was trying to make up his mind about something very important. Again, Milty almost felt bad for the kid, but he couldn’t quite get there, and not long into the drive back home under a bright gray sky, he pulled into a service plaza and took out his 10% collection fee and treated himself to three Big Macs and a large order of fries and two jumbo Cokes. He sat there at a table too small for him in the winter coat his mother had gotten him from the Salvation Army, and he could feel all that cash in his pocket and he liked feeling all that cash in his pocket. He also liked knowing how easy it was to get it, and he looked forward to handing it over to Asa.

Those days Milty was working security on the overnight shift at Western Electric. For this he had to wear blue pants with a black stripe going down the sides of both legs, a blue XXXL shirt that was still too tight on him, and black military shoes. He’d spend most of the night walking down the long corridors of that building, holding his walkie-talkie and swinging his keys on a chain and so bored he had to take frequent naps back in his windowless, too-warm office.

But tossing that kid down that hallway and shoving his face into that sink? That was not boring. In fact, as Milty finished his lunch and scraped his plastic tray into the trash, all kinds of people coming and going to the food counters and bathrooms and convenience store in the back, Milty still felt light in the limbs from that rush, even with a full stomach, and he wanted to feel that rush again.

Milty stubs out his cigarette, and his hand has stopped shaking. Through the thin curtains of the window above the sink, he can see the side of his neighbor’s duplex only fifteen feet away. It’s winter, but they haven’t had snow in weeks, and if he hadn’t been MP in this town all these years he could be out there right now, doing his slow therapy with his quad cane. He must be getting better, too, because lately he can lift the pointer finger of his right hand, and sometimes the moment all of this happened to him comes back: the right side of his face turning to warm mud and how he couldn’t see out of that eye and the man he was ordering a pizza from down in Railroad Square no longer had a name though Milty had known him for years, though he’d forgotten that too, or even what a pizza was, and then everything went dark.

It was summer when it happened, he knew that much. But was it last summer? Or the one before that? Whenever it was, he was still using the extra-large wheelchair then and he was sitting in it on his concrete stoop. Somebody had built him a short plywood ramp so that he could roll down from the front door. Some kid named Jimmy? Justin? He was just a floating face in Milty’s head, a pale kid with chew bunched between his teeth and lower lip, a pencil stub behind his ear. And there was that other face. But before Milty saw it, he could hear rap music blaring from the Civic the kid was riding in. It was one of those sporty models, all soft lines low to the road and a lot of chrome, especially in the hubcaps, which gleamed all wet. They must’ve come right from the car wash, and it was late in the afternoon but the sun was still high above the vinyl-clad row houses up the hill of 6^th Avenue, its concrete sidewalks buckled with the roots of elms that died from that disease years ago. Only the stumps were left, and many of them were tagged in neon graffiti.

Milty had never had to worry about cracked and heaving sidewalks before, but he did now, and that kid’s face leaning out the passenger window of that Civic looked familiar because whatever happened years ago was still not wiped clean.

The kid looked just like his old man Griffin. Everybody called him Grif, and he had not only welched on a big bankroll with Asa, he went around bragging about it, so Milty had to hurt him. He and Angel worked together on that one, which was a mistake because Angel was Angel, and while Milty held Grif face-down on the street in front of his own house on a weekday afternoon, Reyes took a six-pound sledge to Grif’s right hand and then his left, this grown man howling like a dog. Milty was starting to get up off him, but then Reyes took the hammer to both of Grif’s ankles. The sound was like the snapping of cold, dry sticks and now Grif was blubbering and moaning and curling up like he wanted to be back in his mother’s womb.

Normally this kind of thing would never happen because you wanted your players to be able to work to pay off their debt, but Grif was a ten-time loser and a lost cause and maybe his son, who had Grif’s high forehead and squinty eyes, maybe that boy watched all this from his window in his Spider-Man underwear.

The Civic was idling right in front of Milty’s house. The rap got real loud then, just a string of M words—mothufuckas and men and murder—and Milty’s right eye still didn’t see too well so the kid with the sporty Honda and Grif’s face appeared to be as flat as paper. There were the smells of engine exhaust and burning charcoal and Milty’s own sweaty body because he’d been too hot in his house.

Then the music cut off and in the sudden quiet Milty’s left ear was ringing.

“How’s it feel, you piece of shit?” The kid’s voice was high like his father’s had been, his father who could never work again and then got addicted to pain killers and three years later was dead.

Now his son raised from his lap a silver semi-automatic and pulled back the slide and popped a round into its chamber. Milty’s left foot twitched and he lifted his hand like an idiot, like his big hand could stop what was coming. Something loud boomed through the air and Milty ducked his head and the kid laughed, even though a big-city truck was right on the Civic’s back bumper, and the driver hit the horn again. Rap shot out of that Honda louder than ever, mothufuckas men murder, and whoever was driving stepped on both pedals and burned a slick of rubber all the way up the hill of 6^th Avenue, that smell still in Milty’s head long after those punks were gone.

Then Donna put his picture on Facebook. She thought she was being nice. What’s that word she uses all the time? Milty can’t remember. But this must have been two summers ago because most of it comes back to him. He can still see that picture of himself sitting in his wheelchair in his TV room, looking uglier and fatter and older than ever. Donna showed it to him on her phone so he could see what she wrote: You can’t keep a good man down.

Supportive. That’s the word she likes so much. But thanks to her, the word was out now that MP was down, and maybe he wasn’t ever going to be himself again.

“Milty?”

There’s the sound of his front door closing. His heart bursts in his throat, and he reaches across himself for the quad cane.

“It’s me, hon. I got you a Caesar salad.”

A woman breezes into the kitchen right to the counter. She’s in a winter coat, her head covered by a white wool cap, her long brown hair spilling out of it. There are the smells of perfume and french fries, and she’s talking about something, but her words are hard to follow, even though Milty knows from her voice that this is Donna.

She turns and takes off her cap and runs her hand back through her hair. It’s gray in the part down the middle, and where did her short blond hair go? Where’s her blue eye shadow? And when did she get a double chin and deep wrinkles around her eyes?

She’s speaking more words and she’s smiling and shaking her head at him. She walks over and brushes cigarette ash off his chest. She unzips her coat and drapes it over one of the chairs and behind her sweater is the swell of breasts that make Milty feel suddenly sad. He says, “Did you lock the door?”

“What, hon? You don’t look so good. Having one of your bad days?”

Badaze.

Milty needs to concentrate. He remembers now that he needs to look at his ex’s lips and concentrate. But she must be used to his not answering because she grabs a plate from one of the upper cabinets and sets it in front of him. She dumps the salad onto it, takes a knife and fork and cuts up the fried chicken strips lying in the bed of lettuce and tomatoes and feta cheese. It’s the smell of his own mother, and Milty has to remind himself that she’s been gone for years and that this is the half-house he and Asa were raised in. They should have done better by her. He’s thinking that as well.

After their father died, she did whatever she could, mainly cleaning houses all day until school got out so she could be home when her two boys walked in the door. On weekends she’d clean offices downtown and sometimes she’d bake Greek pastries for a catering company up the river in Lowell, delivering them in the rusted-out station wagon that cost more to keep on the road than she would’ve spent if she got something new. But the old man had bought it when they were first married, and she wouldn’t part with it. On the east wall of her tiny bedroom upstairs still hang the icons of her Orthodox church, and until his stroke that’s where Milty preferred to sleep.

Gave Donna $ for gun.

“I tried to get you low fat, but they still don’t have it for the Greek dressing. What’s that about?”

Thatabout.

Milty watches this woman who is his ex-wife drizzle lines of dressing onto his cut up salad. Next to it is a carton of fries, and it’s like he’s back in that service plaza in Maine he was just thinking about, though that was years ago and he knows it. Out in the TV room something hard taps the wall and his left side jumps and he can see that he’s still gripping his quad cane in his lap.

“Christ, Milty. That’s just the radiator. You having bad dreams again?”

Dreemzagin.

“Here.” She hands him the plastic fork and he let’s go of his cane and takes the fork with his left hand.

“’member when your hair was short?”

Now she has to concentrate on what he just said. He forgets that she has to do this, and the only reason he remembers is because what he just said came out of half his mouth, the other half soft wax.

“Yeah, you only liked it when we were doing it.” She grabs a french fry and bites off half of it. She sits down across from him and brushes her hair back off her shoulder and nods at his salad. “Eat.”

“Did I give you money?”

She’s staring at his lips, and it’s like whatever he just said is being delivered to her in some bubble floating across the table until it finally pops in front of her face. “Hey, don’t worry about it.”

“For a gun?”

“I told you to forget that, Milty. No fuckin’ way.”

Nofuckenway.

The plastic fork feels too small and too light in his hand. She’s shaking her head and ripping open a package of ketchup over a paper plate. She squeezes red onto white, and Milty sees again Grif’s son’s face and his raised piece, and there were other threats too. A brick thrown at the side of his house late one night. Another time a man yelling shitfaced from the street, “Come and get it, MP! Just try and collect now, motherfucker!” And online before he stopped looking, all those comments on his ex’s Facebook page:

Could not have happened to a better guy.

Rot in hell, dirt bag!

I hope you’re sitting in your own shit, Dain.

But how can he remember all of this so clearly? Was this two, or three summers ago? Or last week? Because if he can move the pointer finger of his right hand, maybe he’s remembering last week.

Donna’s talking again. She’s chewing fries on one side of her mouth and talking out the other. Milty can’t follow her.

Rich herd.

She keeps saying those two words, or fucking rich herd, and Milty sees hundreds of buffalo running through the plains and kicking up dust.

“Why does every man think he needs to fuckin’ marry me, Milty?”

MarrymeMilty. Those Ms again: mothuhfuckas men murder. A shiver ripples through him like he’s naked out in the cold.

Marry me, Milty. She’d said those very words to him, and he can remember when and where too. They were sitting in the front seat of his new Monte Carlo parked outside Smitty’s Pub. There was a light snow falling and Milty’s windows were fogged up and there was Smitty’s new Miller Lite sign glowing in the window. Light beer had just been invented, and soon the 80s would be here and Milty had the feeling that the new decade would hold good things for him. He was working so steadily for Asa and Walsh that he didn’t even need Western Electric anymore. Sometimes Milty had to drive up into New Hampshire to collect or out to western Mass or south to Connecticut or just that past week, New Jersey, where some welcher was hiding out in his cousin’s house in the country. It was a bunch of rolling green hills called Bucks County, and the kid’s own sister had given him up. All Milty had to do was stand at the front door in his new long leather coat, his body bigger than the doorway, and this scrawny kid in his v-neck sweater started to cry and then he was handing Milty the keys to the orange Corvette parked around the side of the house.

Milty made him call a towing company and borrow his cousin’s credit card to tow the Vette all the way back home, and when Asa sold it for four times what the kid owed him, he gave Milty a big bonus. Now MP was sitting in the front of his new ride, half-drunk with Donna O’Neil, and they couldn’t stop kissing, though he’d only met her a few weeks earlier at some house party down in the Acre.

That’s what everyone called the avenues on the west side of town close to the highway. Just one two-story box after another, most of them with a strip of lawn and no driveway, their stoops cracked concrete. There were Dobermans and German Shepards chained in front of some of them, and what little yard there was had become packed dirt scattered with shit. There were babies’ toys strewn about, or engine parts, or both. There were upside down rusted bicycles leaning against a radiator or a smashed in air-conditioning unit left out near the sidewalk a long time ago. Sometimes you’d see a Trans Am or a pickup truck on cinder blocks up against the curbs, the hoods gone with ripped tarps over the engines. Some of the houses were only one story with a flat roof, and over on 7^th a man every summer inflated a kiddie pool on his roof and he would sit in it and drink tallboys and watch the motorcycles go by, or the young girls in shorts, his radio on an oldies station that played top forties from the 50s, a lot of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, which Milty liked too, not that disco shit that was playing on the record player in this house party he was just about to leave.

It was the Bee Gees, and it was from that new movie about the kid who works in a paint store during the day but goes out disco dancing at night. It was Asa’s idea to come to this place because it was full of young girls. Most of them had their hair feathered away from their made-up faces and they were wearing tight jeans and shiny polyester tops and nobody seemed to be wearing a bra. The place was too warm and smoky from cigarettes and joints, and there were guys standing around drinking and three of the girls were dancing over by the record player where Asa sat on the arm of a couch smiling at all three of them like they were the most beautiful women in the world. He had on his black leather jacket and a blue silk shirt unbuttoned past his sternum, a gold chain Milty knew cost a dime glinting against his shaved chest that was brown from the tanning beds in that massage joint on River Street. You could get a happy ending there for cheap, though Milty had never done that, nor had he ever been with a woman, and now he wanted to leave.

He was wearing his own leather coat, and he was sweating and could smell his own cologne which he’d laid on too thick, Brut. Out in the kitchen somebody yelled, “Fuck you, Pammy!” But there was laughter, and it sounded like two or three women, and Milty could see there was a back door wide open, and he started to make his way past the drinking boys, all of them much shorter than he was and so much smaller and in the loud disco noise they parted for him like he was some slow-moving ice breaker on the Arctic Sea, though Milty was hot as hell. Then, before he could get to the kitchen and that open back door, a face was looking up into his.

It was an almost pretty face. Whoever she was, she had just taken a drag off her cigarette and exhaled a thin stream of smoke out the side of her mouth, her lips shiny with gloss. “Jesus, you’re a fucking giant.” She looked him up and down, and it was clear that she was a bit older than most of these girls, years out of high school like him. Under an open green leather jacket, she wore a white tube top that pushed her breasts together, and she had three thin, gold chains around her neck, her feathered hair dyed blond. She took another drag off her cigarette and took in his big, flat face like it matched the rest of him perfectly, and not only did she not look afraid of him, she looked mildly pissed that nobody had told her about him before.

After that, everything went very fast, the way it did with Donna O’Neil, and now she’s still talking and dipping one fry at a time into the ketchup. Rich herd. Munny. “He has money, honey.”

Richard. That’s it. Some fucker she’s been fucking, right?

Milty grips his plastic fork and studies Donna’s lips. There’s a bit of ketchup in the corners and she’s chewing and talking, chewing and talking, and there comes that time her lips were bloody from some woman who yanked Donna off a barstool downtown for fucking the woman’s husband and then she kicked Donna in the teeth, and then Donna was crying against Milty’s chest, even though he was her husband at the time, some poor prick who’d married bipolar Donna O’Neil after knowing her only four months.

It was like she’d married not a man but a bed to sleep in, not a man but a sofa to lie on, not a man but a new Monte Carlo to ride in, not a man but a giant whose initials alone could keep bad people away.

But now they’re back, and they’re waiting for him.

“You off your meds?”

She dabs at her lips with a napkin. She doesn’t even try to focus on what he just said. “But hey, it could be worse, right? I mean he wants to buy us a place in Florida.”

Flawridda.

Milty puts the fork down and knocks another cigarette loose from the pack and lights it.

“You’re not gonna eat?”

Gunnaeet?

He shakes his head and blows out smoke. He knows he should eat to keep his strength up, and he watches this woman who is his ex-wife finish eating the carton of fries. She has to be off her meds. Because when she’s off them, she overdoes everything: food, fucking, drinking, talking, more fucking, and it doesn’t matter with who.

He takes a deep hit off his cigarette and glances down at his right hand cupped on his right knee. He stares at his pointer finger and tells it to move. It does. Just a twitch. But it does move.

What he needs to do is go outside with his quad cane and walk. He has to drag his right leg to do this, which is what he does in the short hallway to the front door and back. Ten laps, right? Isn’t that what he does now? Or was that last summer? No, it was last night, and all these years he’d never really noticed the wallpaper. Not that it’s faded and has dried water streaks down it near the door, but that every two or three inches from the floor to the ceiling is a man in a top hat walking arm in arm with a woman holding a small umbrella over one shoulder, a poodle on a leash in front of them both. Milty had never really seen that before, and it made him wonder what else has escaped him in his own house.

“Okay, kid, gotta go.” Donna stands and grabs the empty fries carton and the empty packets and the paper plate streaked with ketchup and dumps them all in the trash under the sink. Milty catches a glimpse of the pipes, and there comes the first time he’d ever held down a welcher and gone after one of his teeth. It was a plumber, and he was doing the rough on a new house over the state line. Milty found him in the kitchen on his back tightening a J-bend plug with a big pair of pliers, and so Milty just knelt all of his weight on the guy’s chest, his mouth opening as he gasped for air, and then Milty got the pliers around one of the plumber’s eye teeth and snapped it off and Asa had his money within the hour.

Donna pulls on her winter coat and zips it. She’s nodding at his salad and telling him to eat it.

“I need that gun, Donna.”

She studies his lips, then shakes her head and pulls her cap back down over her head. “No you don’t Milty. You’re fuckin’ paranoid. Besides, I’m still on parole.”

Par hole

She leans down and kisses his forehead. Milty can smell her perfume and winter coat and just a bit of ketchup. He wants his right arm to move so he can pull her into him for a hug, but it does not move. As Donna turns to leave her knee knocks into his quad cane and it whacks the table edge and then she’s gone and Milty could cry. He could. He wants her to come back. He wants to watch her eat and listen to her voice talking too fast about things he does not understand. And did she lock the door? She better have locked that fucking door.

He stubs out his cigarette and lowers the four legs of his cane to the floor. He pushes his left hand down into the tabletop and drives himself up with his left leg, his heart swinging like some old ape in his chest. He leans on his cane handle then drags his right leg, his right arm hanging at his side, and then he slides his cane ahead two feet, leans on it, and drags again. Slides, leans, and drags. Slides, leans, and drags.

No, she did not lock it. This tells him two things: that she does not even know these streets that she herself comes from. Or, that she doesn’t really care what happens to him.

Milty turns the deadbolt until it clicks into place. He parts the thin window curtain his mother probably hung there over the door’s transom thirty years ago, and he looks outside. Across the street, an old sedan is parked up against the curb, the sky above the row houses gray and looking heavy with snow. Milty peers to the left and to the right, but there’s just treeless 6^th Avenue, its potholes needing filling, and he lets the curtains fall back into place and makes his way to the TV room.

His sofa is black leather, though it’s covered with a sheet, and he lowers himself into what must be his spot, a large hollowed-out cushion up against the arm of the couch next to a lamp table. On it is the remote for the TV and his laptop, and he reaches across his chest for his computer and drops onto his lap. He’s breathing hard and hungry and he wishes he’d eaten that salad, but it’s too much work to get to right now.

He wonders how much money he gave his ex. Because if she’s off her meds, there’s no way she still has it. In the old days, she’d go buy herself three or four outfits then return them to the store and buy three or four more before taking them back too. All in about two hours. Then she might write love letters to people she hadn’t seen in a while, and she’d call people and drive places she didn’t need to go to, and she might even offer a blowjob to the guy pumping her gas just to make his day, and she’d give it to him, too, and then she’d go drinking and she’d score some coke and then she might read the palm of some woman she’d met and later, after she’d gone down on that woman, Donna would eat something she stole from the food store downtown and then she’d come crawling back to Milty Dain, forgetting she’d invited two boys to follow her home for a good time, and that’s how he got this sofa. On one of her spending jags with one of his credit cards that he made her cut up in front of him, a bruise under her left eye from who knows who.

So much shit he had to clean up because of her, and now she won’t even buy him a piece? Angel had a few, but he’s been dead for years. Milty remembers that. Hepatitis. All those degenerates who wanted him gone, and Reyes eats the wrong scallops down at the beach and dies alone in his bed.

Milty got more work after that, but it wasn’t long before these things in his lap were invented and all the action went online and he found himself back at Western Electric, though now it was Lucent Technologies. Instead of a walkie he had a Blackberry, and there were security cameras and computer screens, and Asa had moved on to dealing girls, and that’s when he and Milty parted ways.

Milty opens his computer and tries to summon the name of that asshole up on Washington Hill who sells equipment to cops. Some skinny, chain-smoking Italian. Conte or Carbone. No, an L. His name starts with an L. Lamberto. Leone. No, an S. Sal. Sal Lando.

Milty types in his name and here comes Lando Law Enforcement Supply. There’s a photo of the shop, racks of police uniforms and a glass case of webbed belts and holsters and other shit, though Milty knows that in the locked back room is where the real goods are: mace and weighted saps, boot knives and brass knuckles and a few unregistered handguns. Lando never gambled, but his son did, and at five in the morning on a Sunday after pulling two of Tony’s teeth, Milty wrapped his scarf around Tony Lando’s throat and cinched it so tight that Lando could barely talk as he unlocked his old man’s shop and the back room where he dropped to his knees to open the safe. The whole time, Milty never let go of that scarf, and Tony kept moaning, his breath whistling through his broken teeth.

Above the safe were shelves of items designed to hurt people: next to a black stiletto was a stun gun and next to that was a sawed-off shotgun, and then Tony Lando was handing Milty a double dime and the four C-notes for juice and collection. Milty’s scarf—a white cashmere—had been a gift from Donna, but now it was covered with Lando’s blood and Milty let him keep it.

On the drive home in his Monte Carlo, the sky was lightening to the east. It made the mill buildings along the river look black, the round dome of his mother’s Greek church the color of bone, and he felt something cold turn over inside him. He didn’t give two shits about bleeding Tony Lando back in his father’s shop, but Milty knew that his mother would. If she was here, she’d say. “Koukla mou, be nice, honey. You should always be nice to people.”

How’s it feel, you piece of shit?

Under the photo of Sal Lando’s shop is the phone number, but there’s no way he’ll be able to understand Milty. Next to the number is Sal’s email address, so Milty taps keys until he’s ready to write one letter at a time with the pointer finger of his left hand. In the line that waits for the subject he slowly types: Fire Arm.

That doesn’t look right. He thinks about putting the word purchase beside that but changes his mind.

It takes him a while to write to Sal, but when he’s done, this is what he reads back to himself:

Sal. Its Milton Dain. I need a piece. Will pay cash. Can you deliver? Still on 6^th in the Acre. Thanks—Milty

Milty sends it on his way. He closes his computer and slides it off his lap onto the sofa cushion. It’s time to eat that salad, but getting up isn’t so easy. Across the room next to his widescreen is that extra-large wheelchair folded up against the wall, his aluminum walker beside it. A car passes by outside, then another, a gust of wind pressing against the window glass.

Anybody could kick that in and climb inside and he’d be too slow to do much about it. He needs that gun, and he needs it now.

Milty scoots to the edge of the sofa then grabs the quad cane with his left hand and presses down on the handle then drives his weight down into his left leg and stands. The room shifts a bit, and his heart is working too hard, and the last thing he needs is another fucking stroke. Did he take his meds this morning? He can’t remember.

In the kitchen he eats his salad with his left hand and wishes he’d grabbed a beer from the fridge before sitting down. It’s kind of strange that he can remember how he’s done that in the past, by wedging the can under his chin so he can free his hand up for the quad cane and his trip back to the kitchen table or TV room sofa.

The chicken strips have gone cold and taste greasy, but he doesn’t care. He’s looking down at the note he wrote himself. Gave Donna $ for gun. Three C-notes? Four? It’s not coming back to him, but Asa is. Asa and his paper sack of cash.

If Milty had ever seen his brother scared before, he did not know when that would be. But Asa was in deep shit, and he knew it and he didn’t even stay long enough to take off his coat. Those years, Asa was into suits. Expensive ones made in Italy that he had tailored for himself. Over the years he also started lifting lighter weights because he thought he looked better in a suit without all that muscle. He didn’t need it anyway because he had his brother to be his muscle for him, except once Asa moved from gambling to girls, Milty didn’t want to work for him anymore, even though he did for a little while. But then he quit and how many times did Asa hang that over Milty’s head?

“You fuckin’ kidding me? Do you even know how much scratch I’ve made for you? You’re only MP because of me.”

But as much as Milty liked the respect he got stepping into a barroom or a pizza joint or one of the nice restaurants over toward Ward Hill, men’s and women’s faces turning toward him because he was known—and yes, feared—being MP was starting to get old. It began to seem that he had nothing but enemies wherever he went and now his only friend, his brother, was sliding from bookie to pimp, but not before he wanted Milty to put the squeeze on a woman.

She was some lawyer in Andover who had a drinking problem and a coke problem and when she was on a binge she liked to bet on games. The thing is, she rarely won but she kept laying bets anyway. For a while Asa loved her because she bet big and lost big and she always paid up. But then she stopped paying and when Asa called her, she told him to go fuck himself, that she was an attorney and she knew people in high places who would put Asa and Walsh out of business and behind bars.

“I want you scare the fuck outta this cunt, bro. I want her shaking in her fuckin’ heels.”

It was summer, close to eleven at night, and Milty parked his Monte Carlo five houses down from hers. It was a street with wide sidewalks and deep lawns and soft streetlamps. There were long driveways that led to three-car garages built into homes of brick behind tall, leafed out oaks and beeches guarding big windows, warm light coming from inside like the lives being lived there were in some state of grace Milty had only heard about the few times a year he’d go to church with his mother when he was a kid.

The lawyer’s house was closer to the street, and when Milty stepped onto her lawn he got sprayed with water, her sprinkler system on so softly he hadn’t heard it. He moved away from that and got close to the hedge alongside the house. The lawyer’s Mercedes was parked near her garage, and through her living room window Milty could see the woman. She was sitting on her sofa in front of her color TV, ignoring what was on it and reading something with a pen in her hand. Her hair was short like Donna’s in those days, though this lady’s was thick and brown and looked like it had never been dyed. She wore glasses, and her silver earring caught the lamplight as she reached for a rocks glass of what looked like bourbon and then she took a moderate sip.

It was hard for Milty to see the reckless welching cokehead his brother had described, but she owed big, 10k, and Milty found himself knocking on her door. It had a brass knocker shaped like a pineapple, but he used his fist, and waiting there, Milty’s heart was a still and reluctant hunter in his chest.

He knocked on the door harder. In his back pocket were the pliers he used to break off teeth, and he reached for them, even though he knew he would not be able to use them on this woman. But maybe he could just show them to her. Show them and tell her what he’d done with them in the past.

“Who’s there?” Her voice was muffled behind the door. Milty hadn’t expected her not to open it just a bit, but why would she?

“You know who it is.”

She didn’t say anything. There was only the light swish-swish of the sprinklers out front. Milty wasn’t sure what to say next. He tapped her door three times hard with his pliers, chipping paint. “Hear that? That’s what I’m gonna use to pull out all your fuckin’ teeth.”

But there was still only the sound of the sprinklers, the night air smelling like trimmed hedges and chlorine from a nearby pool, and Milty started to get a bad feeling. From the other side of the door came the lawyer’s scared but pissed off voice. “I’ve called the police, whoever you are, and right now I’m aiming a loaded pistol at this door and please, oh fucking please, give me an excuse to blow you away.”

Milty wanted to tell her that his brother would be sending someone much meaner than he was and that she should do the right thing and pay up, but he believed everything she’d just told him, and on his too-fast drive out of that town and up the highway, glancing in his mirrors every few seconds, Milty felt only admiration for that woman lawyer living alone in her brick house. But he was not looking forward to telling Asa what had happened because, 1) MP had never failed to collect before, and 2) he knew Walsh and Asa would send Reyes, which they did three days later.

Milty thought that after his visit she would have hired herself some muscle, but she did not, and it was just so easy for Angel to trail her from her office to some upscale restaurant where the lady lawyer treated herself to two martinis only to have Reyes follow her home, pulling up behind her in her own driveway. If she carried her piece, she didn’t have time to pull it and now Reyes was yanking her out from behind the wheel of her Mercedes, which any neighbor could have seen him do, and then he made her unlock her front door and pulled her inside, and that’s where Angel spent the next two hours with that poor woman. All Milty knows is that not only did Asa get his 10k plus 20% for juice and collection, but nobody in high places ever came calling either.

Not long after that, Milty was walking down the narrow stairwell from Walsh’s and Asa’s office when Reyes was coming up. The door to the boxing gym was open and there came the thwap, thwap-thwap of gloves smacking a heavy bag, some kid skipping rope, and Reyes was in a black t-shirt, his gut showing. “You missed out with that bitch, MP.”

In Reyes’s t-shirt pocket was a pack of Marlboros, and he reached for it like Milty would want to stay in that stairwell for a smoke to hear all the details. But Milty just turned and put his back to Angel, squeezing by him and his smells of hair oil and sweat and onions, and he walked slowly down those creaking stairs, Reyes barking out a laugh behind him.

Outside, standing on the sidewalk of his hometown in Railroad Square, it was a hot day and the river smelled like corpses and this was the first time Milty began to feel bad about collecting. Did he really want to spend the rest of his workdays putting the hurt on people? Even degenerate losers?

“You gotta stash this for me, bro.”

It was cold weather now a few years later, maybe years later, and in this very kitchen Asa was handing Milty a paper bag from DeMoulas. It was the food store their mother had always gone to because it was owned by Greeks, and Asa had just gotten a haircut and a shave. Standing there in his black cashmere coat over his gray Italian suit, he looked like some handsome lawyer or politician, not some ex-bookie who’d just caught a charge for trafficking in girls.

Asa kept his hands in his coat pockets and he was pacing from the kitchen sink to the fridge and back. He was talking about the fucking pigs and some undercover operation up at the truck stop and the beach where Asa ran his business, and Milty opened the bag to what had to be thousands in scattered twenties and fifties and C-notes.

Before Milty could say anything, Asa stepped over and hugged him harder than he’d ever hugged him. Then he let go before Milty could even hug him back, and out on the stoop in the cold, he watched his brother drive up 6^th Avenue in his yellow Dodge Viper, barely slowing for the stop sign on Main before he cut left for the highway, heading north.

He made it as far as the Canadian border in Fort Kent, Maine before they caught him. The last time Milty had seen him was—when? It had to be before his own brain turned on him, right? Asa down to Walpole before they transferred him. Asa, his half-Jewish brother with a shaved head and a swastika tattooed on the side of his scalp. Asa carrying more muscle than he ever had before. Asa looking at his brother with what Milty could only call gratitude and love for coming to see him.

Back on his sofa, he’s still breathing hard from getting to this spot. He opens his computer on his lap but forgets why he’s doing this. There’s a steady wind blowing outside, the ticking of snow against the glass, and there’s the swell of Donna’s breasts under her sweater, the gray roots alongside the part in her hair, and Milty knows he’s getting better because he can remember these things from just a little while ago. It comes back to him that she did not lock his door with her key, and he feels naked and weak and like there are no walls to this house, like he’s in the street having to make his way past all the mushes and welchers he ever put a squeeze on, and then there’s Grif’s son with his narrow jaw and squinty eyes and that semi-automatic, and yes, Sal Lando.

Milty’s heart is working too hard again, even though he’s sitting down. His quad cane stands on its own near his good leg, and with one finger he taps his way to his email and his inbox where there’s one from Lando Law Enforcement Supply.

Fuck you Dain. My old man’s been dead for years and this is my place now. Don’t think for a second that I’m gonna help you motherfucker. The whole town hopes you die very soon. Let me know if I can help with THAT.

Milty has to read this slowly three times. Donna’s white scarf all bloody around Tony Lando’s throat. Twenty years ago? Fifteen?

Milty raises his pointer finger to write back his own fuck you. But is this wise? He jabs a button and the email disappears and then he sees he has a new one from Lando Law Enforcement Supply.

And you owe me six large for my dental work motherfucker. You think you’re the only collector in town???

Milty taps that away too. He stares at his bright screen and his sofa back seems to fall away and he’s tumbling into a ditch where men aim loaded pieces at him and there’s a lot of yelling and laughter and that bright screen light is a blade cutting into his brain and he slams it shut and pushes it away.

Why did he stay in this place? Why didn’t he ever think that the people he’d hurt over the years wouldn’t stay here too? Did he really believe he’d be young and strong forever?

He’s got to get better, and then he’s got to move. But with what money? Asa’s cash is gone. For the lawyers, right? Milty does not know how he knows this, but he does know it. So the first thing he needs to do is get better.

And he needs that gun.

He looks down at his right hand resting on his right knee. He makes the pointer finger lift and drop. He does this two more times. But when he tells his middle finger or his thumb to lift, they just lie there.

Don’t just lay there.

This came through the bedroom door of the beach house that Asa owned not far from the strip. It was some john’s voice speaking these words, and he sounded pissed off. When he’d walked into the cottage with the girl a few minutes earlier, glancing at Milty sitting at the kitchen table, he’d looked like a husband and father in a lime green polo shirt and plaid shorts, his Lexus parked three blocks away in the sandy lot for the barrooms and carnival rides.

“Move your hips. It’s like you’re dead. Is that what you want? You want to be dead?”

Milty was sitting at the table watching a western on the small color TV. In front of him were two large sausage pizzas and a Blackberry like the one he had used at Lucent, and the only reason he was doing this on his night off was that both Asa and Donna had asked him to. Yes, Donna. One thing she never had enough of was money, at least not enough for her, and before she got treatment the thing she was best at—besides drinking and shopping and stealing and fucking—was talking.

Also, she was still put together nice, her hair longer though still dyed blond, so she could talk people into things. Especially her husband, Milty Dain.

“Sweetie, they’re doing it on their own anyways. We’re just looking out for them.”

This is what Asa told him too. He and Milty were down at Smitty’s, Asa sipping a vodka, Milty on his fourth or fifth beer. It was a Sunday night in October and orange Halloween streamers looped over the TV and a Patriots game, the place loud with men talking and laughing and retching up phlegm, the air heavy with cigarette smoke. Milty had never challenged his brother before, ever, but the beer helped and he said, “A pimp’s a fuckin’ pimp, brother. That what you want to see in the mirror?”

Asa nodded his head slowly. He sipped his vodka and swallowed. Then he looked over at Milty like his younger brother had not learned one solitary thing over the years that would help him in this life.

“Know what I see when I look in the mirror, Milt? A success. A fuckin’ winner. Every—single—time. What do you see?”

“I don’t look in the mirror.” And he didn’t. Even when he shaved, Milty kept his attention on the blade and his skin, never taking in the whole picture, because why?

“It’s called diversifying, man.” Then Asa told Milty how his first girl had just gone down on some trucker in his rig up at The Fifth Wheel off the highway. It was one of the stops for long haulers covering the east coast, a country western bar on the first floor, rooms and showers on the second and third, and the only reason Asa had been there—though Milty did not know this then—was because he’d been fucking his own sister-in-law in one of those rooms, Donna, who had told Milty not long after they had gotten married, “Sometimes I might have to do it with other people, hon. Just so you know.”

They had just done it themselves and were lying in bed, Donna smoking a cigarette with the sheet pulled halfway up her breasts. She blew smoke out the side of her mouth and glanced over at him. It was like she’d just told him that sometimes she might have to get her car tuned up, that’s all, and for the first time in many years, he felt like a very small boy.

“It don’t mean I don’t love you, MP.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why? You should be proud of that. I’m proud of that.” Then she stubbed her cigarette out and straddled him once more, and what did he expect? That this winning long shot that had come to him wouldn’t also come with some heavy juice that would have to be paid?

And so he took it for a while, a long while, and Asa that night at Smitty’s was telling him how he heard this girl screaming before that trucker pushed her out of his cab onto her ass, but this kid just brushed herself off and kept screaming. “Fuck you, asshole! You owe me!”

Maybe, Asa said, if that redneck had stayed in his truck he wouldn’t have gotten involved. But when that trucker climbed down from his rig and backhanded this girl who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, Asa said he went to town on him bad. After that the girl belonged to him.

“What can I say, bro? It’s easy money. Real easy.”

But that’s not why Milty was sitting in that beach cottage that summer night months later. He was there for Donna. He was there because he still had hopes that if he could keep her happy then he could keep her.

“I said move your fucking hips.” There was the sound of what had to be a slap and “Get off me,” then another slap, and Milty dropped his pizza and was in that bedroom, yanking that john off this girl and throwing him to the floor.

“Out. Now.”

The man was just a smear of cock and balls and sunburn, his gold watch still on his wrist. His clothes were folded neatly on the bench under the window and Milty gathered them up and tossed them into his face. The john looked like he was about to say something, but Milty shook his head and held one finger to his pursed lips and then he was squeezing the back of that trick’s neck and walking him all the way to his Lexus in the lot. The guy’s shoulders were hunched and his cologne smelled expensive and he said, “I should get my money back.”

“Say that again, and I’ll open your fuckin’ skull.” Milty shoved him hard into the side of his sedan and walked backed to Asa’s cottage. Inside, the girl was dressed and sitting in his chair at the kitchen table eating a slice. She was skinny, and even though it was deep into the summer, she was pale, and the halter top she wore made her shoulders look bony.

“That’s my seat.”

“Sorry.” Her mouth was full. She stood and held her cupped hand under that drooping pizza slice to keep the cheese from sliding off. She was wearing short shorts, her thin legs ending in white platform shoes, the heels six inches high, but she was still a foot shorter than Milty. When he moved by her to sit back down he could smell her strawberry perfume.

“Thanks for doing that.” She was sitting across from him next to the color TV. Milty had to decide if he was going to look at her or at the Pepsi commercial playing. He picked up his slice and reached over and turned off the Sony.

Donna told him that once this girl was done, she was supposed to get back out to the strip and that Milty should wait for other girls to show. There was another bedroom in the back, and it was always good to have both going at once.

“Because honey, we want these girls to be safe, don’t we?” She patted his chest the way she did. Then she got on her tippy toes and kissed him, and he could feel once again how much she loved being married to Milty Pain.

“You don’t talk much, huh?” The girl was chewing, both cheeks rounded away from the hollows of her face. She reached for a napkin and wiped sauce off her chin.

“Hungry?” Milty said.

The girl swallowed. “Can I have some of that?” She raised her slice in the direction of the liter of Coke Milty had been drinking straight from the bottle.

“That’s mine. So’s what you’re eating.”

“Hey, you want me to work you gotta feed me.”

“You don’t work for me.”

“No?” She stood and opened the fridge and sat back down with a can of Budweiser which she cracked open and took a long drink of, the small bone in her throat moving. It was like watching a child drink a beer, and Milty shook his head and kept eating.

“You gotta problem?”

“No,” he said. “No problem.”

Her thin hair was dyed the color of pennies, and at the base of her throat was a small mole, one that had to have been there since she was a baby. She took a long pull off her beer then sat back and reached into her short pockets and pulled out a wad of twenties. She licked her fingertips and counted out five and placed them on the table beside Milty’s liter of Coke.

“I don’t want that.”

“Donna said to give it to you.”

“Who do you usually give it to?”

“Donna.”

Milty nodded at the cash she was shoving back into her shorts pocket. “How much do you make, you know—”

“Fucking?”

“Yeah.”

“Two hundred.”

Milty eyed the twenties on the table. “And you gotta fork over half?”

“Yeah. It’s kinda worth it, though.” She stood and drained the Budweiser and Milty could see two more small moles down near her belly button. Outside on the strip, there came the loud clacking of a Harley then the waves breaking on the beach, pulling back, and breaking again. The girl stifled a belch and pulled a white string purse over her shoulder and walked by him to the bathroom in the back.

Milty broke free a slice. He was thinking about that girl having to give Asa half her money and then another girl walked in holding the hand of the some pathetic-looking kid behind her. His head was shaved and he wore thick glasses and his nose was so sunburned he looked like some pudgy clown, though this girl kept calling him her soldier as she winked at Milty and led that boy into the room and pulled the door closed with a rusty click.

“What’s your name, anyways?” That other girl was coming up behind him from the bathroom. She smelled like fresh strawberry perfume and she had on new makeup and she’d brushed her thin hair. Standing there unsteady on her feet in those six-inch heels, she looked to Milty like some kid playing dress up. He was about to answer MP, but for some reason he said, “Milty.”

“Cool. Brandi.” She lit up a cigarette and sat back down across from him. She crossed her legs at the knee.

“You going back out there?”

“All night.”

“Why do you say it’s worth it?” Milty sipped from his liter of Coke. It was almost warm and almost flat, and this girl Brandi was exhaling smoke and nodding in his direction.

“That shithead you just tossed?”

“Yeah?”

“That never happens when I’m by myself.”

At first he thought she meant that no customer would do that when she worked alone, but then he got it and it felt pretty good hearing that. From behind the door came fake moans of pleasure, and Brandi pointed her cigarette at it. “It’s nice to have a bed, too. You don’t even want to know where I’ve had to do it before.”

“No?”

“No.” She took one last drag off her cigarette and pushed the smoking butt into the hole of the Budweiser can. Then she was gone, and Milty took his summer vacation time at Lucent and spent the next three weeks at that kitchen table. He told himself he was doing it for Donna, who that summer treated him better than she ever had before.

When they were done working, which wasn’t till three or four in the morning, she’d fry him some eggs or a steak, and she’d serve it to him like he’d just put in a long hard shift and she was so grateful to him for that. She touched him often too. Running her fingers over his now nearly bald head, pinching his ass, squeezing one of his meaty shoulders and saying, “Jesus, that turns me on, hon.” Sometimes she’d go down on him before he was even done eating, and they’d go upstairs and make love to the light from the streetlamps coming through the blinds just before they shut off and the sky brightened and Donna would stub out her cigarette and fall asleep with her cheek against his bare chest.

Milty knew she was on one of her highs, but still, it felt like a golden time for them. They had good money coming in from Lucent and his collecting here and there for Asa, but it came mostly from Asa’s girls, and for a while the best part of that summer was watching over them.

There was Brandi, who always wanted to sit with him in between customers for a beer and a smoke. There was Amber, that girl who’d led her soldier right by him that first night. She was Asa’s top earner and every shift she wore a different wig. That first night it had been straight and red, on another it might be curly blond, and on another, short and black. She was big in the bust and narrow in the hips, but she gave off the air like there was nothing she’d rather be doing than what she was doing and with you, whoever you were.

There was Cora, a skinny Puerto Rican girl who chewed gum and wore fishnets up her arm and down her legs and who looked at Milty when she handed him her cash like he was as scummy as the scum she was sucking and fucking. It made him want to offer her a seat and some of his food, a beer from the fridge, but she never stuck around. Neither did the other three Asa had working for him, all of them young, white girls he’d somehow found working on their own before giving them the protection that he and now his brother, MP, were giving them.

That’s what Milty liked the most, that these girls—even Cora—knew they could count on him. One night it was raining, and Amber led in three young men. Two of them were drunk muscle heads, one in a tank top, the other shirtless, and the third one was lean and half-black with a gold chain around his neck. She was laughing and talking shit like she always did, but she gave Milty a look like these three being here wasn’t her idea. Milty stood from the table and pointed to the front door. “Two of you wait outside. I don’t give a shit who goes first.”

Amber grabbed the hand of the lean one and disappeared into the bedroom, and now these two were looking at each other to see who was going to make the first move, but it was Milty, taking three steps in their direction and knocking their faces together. One of them dropped to the floor, but the shirtless one swung at Milty and caught him in the cheek and now Milty’s hands were around the man’s throat squeezing and squeezing, that drunk prick’s eyes rolling up in his head before he collapsed against the wall.

Milty dragged them one at a time by their ankles out into the rain. Window light from the cottage across the way glistened in the puddles, and Milty left them there and went back inside. He was sweating and breathing hard and he could hear Amber working behind the door.

He began to think about Brandi or Cora or one of the other girls making their way from the barrooms to the cottage, and he didn’t want them having to deal with those two. He thought about calling Asa at his other camp on the south side of the strip because business was slow when it rained and Asa probably wasn’t even needed there. But Milty didn’t want to look like he couldn’t handle whatever had to be handled, so he grabbed the baseball bat that he kept lying across a chair seat, and he went outside only to see those two stumbling away in the rain.

The shirtless one had his arm around the waist of the other, helping him along, and they looked to Milty like brothers. That’s when he knew why he’d really taken his vacation time to do this. It wasn’t just because he wanted to make Donna happy, it was because this was the first time working with Asa that Milty believed the Dain brothers were doing something almost good.

Except, who was he shitting? Living with Donna, he’d gotten good at lying to himself. Sometimes she’d call him to say she’d be home late. She’d tell him she was at her sister’s house when Milty could hear barroom noise behind her or else the too-quiet quiet of a motel room, and he’d hang up and make himself think of other things. Like how often she smiled up at him like she couldn’t believe he was hers. Or the way she’d lay her legs across his lap when they were watching TV, running her fingers along his shoulder or the back of his neck. Sometimes it’d be hard not to picture her fingers on some other man’s neck, but as sick as this made Milty feel, he knew that if he did something about that then she’d be gone.

“I will, hon. You can’t change me. Don’t try to change me.” She’d said this looking straight into his eyes, and the tone of her voice was like someone’s who was about to jump off a building.

But Donna was always falling from high places, and that’s when that summer went to shit. Donna couldn’t get out of bed for days and days, and now there was no one to keep the girls in line, meaning working.

Most of them liked to drink and get high, and once they had enough scratch they might disappear for a few days. Brandi had been gone for three straight nights, and when she walked back into the cottage both of her skinny upper arms were covered in deep purple bruises.

“What happened to you?”

“Like you don’t fucking know.”

“’scuse me?” Milty pushed his chair back and stood. On the TV a Red Sox game was turned down low, and Brandi moved past it and Milty to the bathroom where she stayed for quite a while.

He tapped lightly on the door. There was the flush of the toilet, the running of the faucet.

“You gonna tell me about this, Brandi?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

There was the muffled sound of what sounded like crying behind two hands, and he thought of Donna being so low she couldn’t even do that. She’d just lie on the sofa, her eyes on the ceiling like she was watching everything she used to love slipping by forever. Then the door opened and Brandi breezed by him for the fridge where she grabbed a beer and drank down half of it in the refrigerator light. She’d smeared some kind of makeup on her bruised arms, but this made them look worse.

“Who did that to you, hon? I’ll fuck him up.”

She glanced up at him, and for a half-breath she looked hopeful and even thankful, but then her face went hard. “You’re even stupider than you look, aren’t you?” She kicked the refrigerator door closed, drained her beer, then set the empty can on the table next to Milty’s half-eaten meatball sub and bag of chips.

At the door she turned and pulled her purse strap closer to her neck. Her thin upper arms were dark when they should have been pale, and Milty stood there feeling hurt by what this girl had just said to him, this girl who he thought might be his friend but clearly saw him the way people had his whole ridiculous life.

She opened the door. “You want to fuck ‘em up? Then go fuck up your own brother, Milty. Go fuck up your piece of shit brother, Asa.”

After hearing that, it was hard to work the rest of the night. But it was the weekend and it had been a hot, dry day and the strip was crowded with tourists and drunks, with bikers and lonely men, with husbands and dads who’d tuck their families into rented rooms on the water then sneak away to fuck one of Asa’s and Donna’s girls.

Not Milty’s. He had never felt they were his. Even when some of their money went into his pocket. No, what he felt for all that busy, busy night at that cottage, both bedrooms taken with hardly a break, Amber alone taking care of nine boys and men, which was nine hundred for Asa, was that Milty had begun to think of these girls as the friends he’d never had growing up. The pretty or nearly pretty ones who would have looked at him as only bad luck and bad news.

But there, for those three weeks that summer, they’d walk into that cottage holding some john’s hand and when they saw Milty Dain, their faces were nothing but warm to him, even Cora’s, just a little, and it made him feel like a beloved big brother or maybe what a father feels, one of the rare good ones.

Four times Brandi walked back into the cottage that night, her paying customers in hand, but she didn’t even glance at Milty.

Except near midnight she had to. Cora was in one bedroom and Amber was in the other, so Brandi had to wait with her john in the front room.

He was a drunk old man with white hair and loose flesh under his chin and he wore a button-down shirt and suit pants and polished shoes. He also had the deep tan of someone who spends a lot of the year under the sun, probably playing golf or spending time on his boat, and Brandi had him sit next to her on the cheap plaid sofa up against the wall.

The makeup had flaked off her bruised arms and she was holding his hand and chewing gum, and she looked to Milty like some street kid trying to convince her rich grandfather to loan her some money. Then Milty had to stop looking because that old man put his hand on Brandi’s bare leg and Milty wanted to kill him.

Was he jealous? Kind of, but no, it was seeing these two in front of him, how one of them would always be on top and the other at the bottom, used and thrown out like trash.

But then it got worse because the old man started to ask Brandi questions, and even with him slurring his words, it was easy to hear that he was educated. He was asking Brandi about her “aspirations” and Milty pictured him as a lawyer or a banker or some judge, and what Brandi said back to him sounded like she’d never even made it through high school.

“My what, honey?”

The old man nodded like she’d just said something he’d heard many times before, but no, he was just too shitfaced to ask his question another way. In the closest bedroom Cora’s customer had that headboard knocking against the wall, and Milty turned up the TV. It was a movie in black and white, and all the actors wore suits and dresses.

“Milty?”

“Yeah, hon.”

“We’re gonna use the restroom, okay?”

At first he thought she had to piss, but she was leading her old lawyer through the kitchen, the john winking down at Milty like they were in this together, and Brandi didn’t even shut the door all the way and Milty wished he hadn’t glanced back there because to this day he can still see her sitting on the closed toilet in the bright overhead light, unzipping some grandfather’s pants and taking him into her mouth, the hand of her bruised arm gripping that old fucker’s hips.

Wind gusts up against the front window. It sounds dangerous to Milty, but still, he wants to feel it blow cold in his face. He’s always loved the cold, and how long has it been since he’s been out there? Months? Years?

Milty has a bad feeling about his laptop beside him, but he does not know why. Yes, he does. Fucking Tony Lando. A buzzing comes from the lamp table. Milty reaches across himself for his phone, drops it in his lap, swipes the call open, and lifts it to his left ear. It is the voice of a woman who is a computer and she’s saying, “Hello, this is a pre-paid call from … Asa Dain,” his brother’s voice speaks his own name, but now it’s the computer woman again, “an inmate at Souza Baranowski Correctional Center.”

Sooza barrel now ski.

“To accept charges, press one, to refuse charges, press two.”

Preztoo.

Milty lowers the phone to his lap and taps number one and lifts the phone back to his ear.

“Brother,” Asa says. “You there?”

Milty says that he is, but what he said sounded like his mouth is full of grapes.

“You doin’ better, Milt? Donna tells me you’re doing good.”

“You talk to Donna?” Her almost pretty face looking up into his, disco playing, the swell of her breasts behind her sweater, ketchup and fries.

“What’s that?”

Milty says it again. Asa and Donna. It comes back to him now. After her lowest low was over she flew up to her highest high, and then she was practically living with Milty’s brother in his condo over toward Ward Hill.

“You doing your therapy, Milt?”

Thair a pee milt?

“I do laps.”

“What’s that? I only have a few minutes. What’d you say?”

“I do laps, but I gotta get outside.” The words are clear in Milty’s head, but speaking them into the phone, each one seems to get stepped on by someone bigger and heavier than Milty’s ever been.

More wind against the window, a car driving by, then another. It takes Asa a few seconds to get it, and now he’s talking about being back on the outside himself. He sounds down. He’s been locked up for so long, and he sounds down. “It’s like you’re doing time too, huh bro?”

Milty nods and says nothing. This brother he’s talking to, his only one, it’s like he’s a ghost.

“I need a piece, Asa.”

It takes Asa a few seconds to talk, and Milty knows it’s because he either didn’t understand what his brother just said with his waxy mouth, or he’s thinking about it.

“They record these calls, Milt. You know I can’t help with that.”

Let me know if you need help with that.

“Sorry.”

“Tell Donna next time she comes to bring me more protein powder.”

Pro Teen Power

Milty’s sorry he answered the phone. “I need to move, Asa.”

“Yeah, do that therapy and—”

“You have one minute remaining.” It’s the computer woman again, and Milty can feel something hot turn over in his gut.

“No. I need to get off the Acre. People wanna kill me.” He can hear his own words coming out of him like they’re being pulled through the holes of a strainer, but Asa says back right away, “It’s in your head, brother. Donna tells me you hallucinate.”

Huh Lou Sin Ate

“What?”

“She thinks it’s all, you know, in your brain, Milt.” There’s a muffled sound, and Asa’s talking to somebody else and his voice is the one he’d used on Jimmy Sullivan and Chucky White another lifetime ago. “I gotta deal with somethin’, man. I’ll call you later.”

“Asa?”

“Yeah, what?”

Milty does not know what he is about to say. But sitting there on his black sofa, his folded walker and wheelchair against the wall across from him, more punches of wind at the window, Tony Lando’s bullshit still on the computer beside him, Grif’s armed boy out there somewhere waiting, Milty feels like he’s been left behind and of all the people of the world, his big brother Asa should be right here with him.

“Milt, I gotta go, m—”

The call dies against Milty’s ear. He keeps his phone pressed to it. It’s in your head, brother.

Bullshit, because he can still hear that drunk out on the street. Just try to collect now, motherfucker! He can still see Grif’s son’s face and his raised piece. He still remembers all that shit on Donna’s Facebook page. And now Lando and what he just wrote to Milty, though Milty can’t remember what that was exactly. But there’s the naked-backed feeling that he just got himself into deep trouble and now something hard is breaking apart inside him and he’s making noises from his throat and his phone flies across the room and Milty shoves his laptop onto the floor and he backhands his quad cane and tries to stand but he can only rise halfway before his good leg slips and now the side of his head smacks the floor.

He lies there. His heart is a train rattling right out of his chest. He’s staring sideways at the woven rug and one of his socks, and he pictures wrapping that sock around Tony Lando’s throat and twisting and twisting, Lando’s face going from red to blue, but then Lando’s face becomes Donna’s, her mouth open, a vein between her eyes so thick and pulsing, and Milty’s shaking his head.

Brandi. She’s the one who told him. It was Milty’s last night at the cottage and everything’s jumbled, but it was pouring out and business was bad and just that morning or maybe two afternoons earlier, Milty had driven over to Asa’s place on Ward Hill to talk to him about Brandi’s bruises.

It was a complex of town houses set back in the trees, closed garages on the first floor with elevators up to the condos above. Asa’s overlooked a man-made pond with a useless gazebo in the middle of it. It was past noon, but Asa had just gotten up and stood there in his kitchen in his robe holding a mug of coffee. Maybe he offered Milty one, maybe he didn’t, but he clearly didn’t like what his brother had come over to talk about. Again, that look he’d given Milty his whole life. Like he was a dunce after all and there were certain things in this life that had to be done, whether you liked it or not.

“But puttin’ your hands on her, Asa? Your left nut weighs more than that kid.”

“That kid is no fuckin’ kid, and she works for me.”

Maybe Milty just stood there and shook his head. Or maybe he turned to leave, but Asa wasn’t finished with the subject. He poured himself more coffee. In the sun’s light from the window his whiskers looked blue. “Hey, she knows I care. Or put it this way, she thinks I care.”

“You don’t care?”

“I care about the business. And I make them care too.”

“By scaring the crap out of ‘em?”

“No, by fucking the crap out of ‘em. Except that’s all they’re used to, so you gotta make it feel like love and then, you know—” Asa was smiling now, stirring sugar into his black coffee with a silver spoon. “You buy ‘em a nice necklace and take them out to eat and let ‘em order whatever they want because these skanks never had a father, most of ‘em. Most of them have been in so many foster homes they can’t remember them all. And brother, that’s where a lot of them learned what they could do.”

“Could do.”

“That’s right. Except they weren’t ever safe before, but they are now. Because of us. We take care of them, man.”

This is how it had always been with Asa. He would start talking and talking, and by the time he was done, Milty had no words left inside him. But he kept seeing Brandi’s bruised arms, and he said, “Well, I’m all done.”

Maybe Asa said something to him. Or maybe he started yelling. Or maybe he just laughed like Reyes in that stairwell up to Asa’s and Walsh’s office. So why did Milty go back to the cottage after that?

Because Donna, still nailed to that sofa, had asked him to. There was a full ashtray on the floor beside her, an empty wine bottle and sticky glasses beside that, a torn open bag of chips she’d never eaten from beside that. “Please hon, them girls are fuck ups on their own.”

“Isn’t Donna your wife, Milty?”

Brandi now. She and Milty were in the cottage, and she was in a different outfit this time, some pale blue tube top that made her nipples show. Hanging from her ears were hoop earrings that made her look like she was trying too hard, and she was drawing deep on her cigarette, her eyes on Milty like she’d just thrown a poisonous snake in his lap.

“Yeah, she’s my wife.”

“Then why’s she fuckin’ Asa?”

“’Scuse me?”

“Yep. I walked right in on ’em.”

Milty could feel the fried clams he’d been eating turn sour inside him. He could feel his own heart drop into that mess like it and his entire life was a dumpster full of trash. Brandi was staring at him, her smoking cigarette between two fingers. One of her earrings was swaying like a noose.

“More than once, too.”

“Why you telling me this, Brandi?”

“I thought you’d wanna know.”

Milty nodded at her bruises that had begun to fade to green and yellow at the edges. “You sure you just don’t want payback?”

“Oh, fuck you, Milty.” She stood and pulled her purse strap over her shoulder and the bathroom door slammed and from behind it she called out, “I was just trying to be a good friend!”

“Koukla? Koukla mou?”

Cold air moves into the room. There are footsteps and the whistle of wind and this is how he’s going to get it. This is how it is all going to come to an end. Milty tries to move his good arm under him but it’s too late, and there, in front of his face, are his mother’s white work shoes. He lets out air he didn’t know he’d been holding, and did she lock the door? She always used to be so good at dead bolting that door.

“You fall again?”

“Ma? Did you lock the door?”

Behind her thick stockings are her thick ankles and the blue spiders of veins. His mother squats and he can see the shadows under her skirt, the hem of a sweater. “Let’s go, you.” Her old hand is under his arm, and he pushes himself up until his elbow locks and he can slide his good leg around and lift his bad leg into place. He leans back against the sofa, his heart throwing lazy punches at the inside of his chest. His mouth tastes like nickels. He watches his mother bend over and pick up his quad cane and when did she get so heavy? She’d always been a small woman, though toward the end, her upper back started to hump and when she smiled her eyes looked tired and just done with it all.

“Ma?” He wants to tell her that he just talked to Asa, but he doesn’t want to bother her with that. That’s the thing. She never wanted to know. Even when Milty would come home at one in the morning with dried blood on his hands that he’d wash away at the kitchen sink, she’d come down in her nightgown to fix him something to eat, but she never asked him where he’d been or what he’d been doing. Milty was glad for that then but not now. Shouldn’t somebody have asked him what the hell he was doing?

His mother kneels beside him. She’s wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his left arm, squeezing that bulb, the cuff cinching in tight, and it feels good because it brings Milty back to himself in this room with this woman who is not his mother. She smells like dried sweat and her cardigan sweater. She has a round face, and her brown eyes are squinting down at the watch on her wrist. “Too high, Milton.”

Two hi, Miltone.

Her accent is Puerto Rican or Dominican, and she pulls away the cuff and presses two fingers to his wrist and again stares at her watch. The hair at her temple is beginning to go gray and in the lobe of her ear is a small gold cross and it comes to Milty that this is Carlina. This is his visiting nurse, Carlina.

It’s in your head, brother.

“You still not sleeping?”

“I don’t know.”

She’s shaking her head. Hanging around her neck is a pair of reading glasses, and her hand is under his arm again. “Okay, up you go.”

Milty gets his good hand behind him onto the frame of the sofa and he pushes while she pulls and he only slips once before his ass is back on the cushions. His heart is working far too hard again and his mouth is so dry he can’t swallow. She says something and disappears into the kitchen and the room still feels cold from when this woman came in. Milty peers over his shoulder though all he can see is the dimness of the hallway.

“You lock the door? I didn’t hear you lock the door.”

“I always lock it. You know that, Papi.” She hands him a glass of water. Milty takes it and drinks it down. His nurse is talking again, but it’s like hearing the racket of birds outside in the spring: you never think about them or try to understand what they’re going on about.

“Your ashtray is full. And I smell french fries. You still eating fried food?”

“That was Donna’s.”

This woman Carlina is placing a pillow against the arm of the sofa and she’s telling Milty to lie down. He starts to swing his good leg onto the cushions and she kneels beside him and gets both hands under his bad leg and lifts it up beside his left, and the whole time she’s talking and talking and her tone is a scolding one, but Milty feels cared for and his eyes well up and he says, “Can you get me a gun?”

His nurse is pulling his mother’s light blanket over him. She’s picking up from the floor his upside-down laptop and placing it on the coffee table that’s pushed against the TV when for years it had been inches away from the sofa.

“Carlina?”

“It’s Camila, Papi. You know that. And why do you need a gun? Believe me, nobody needs one of those things.”

Dose tings.

“People want to hurt me.” Milty can hear the squeezed, scared words that come out of him and it makes him want to throw things again. He pulls the blanket away and looks down at his right hand. He makes his pointer finger lift and drop, but when he tries to do it with the others they’re as still as the bones of a dead man. “When am I gonna get better? I gotta get outta here.”

But his nurse who seems to understand what he says even better than Donna does, she just stands there pushing her blood pressure cuff into her bag. She’s saying something about his meds and seeing a doctor and “you don’t want to end up in the emergency room, do you?”

That’s what he’s been trying tell everyone, that he’s in an emergency.

His nurse gives him a concerned smile and pulls on her coat and says she’ll be back soon, and Milty and Asa are walking past the empty plastic chairs of the waiting area. The sun isn’t up yet and Asa’s crying quietly in his suit and their mother is under a blue sheet back in the room where she died only minutes after she got there in the ambulance Milty had called. She’d been up late waiting for him in front of the TV, the volume turned down too low for her to hear it. She was in her robe, and at first Milty thought she’d just fallen asleep but her eyes were open and so was her mouth, and there was drool on her chin and on her robe, and when Milty called “Ma? Ma?” she didn’t seem to hear him at all.

Then he was calling 911 and in the few minutes it took the ambulance to pull up to their place on 6^th Avenue, Milty called Asa. Somewhere in his brother’s condo a young girl was laughing and she sounded shit-faced and Asa yelled at her to shut the fuck up. He told Milty that he’d meet him at the hospital, but it happened so fast and maybe their mother died in the ambulance but all Milty knows is that only her youngest son was in that tiny room of machines when the doc shook his head once then left the room to give Milty “a moment.”

His mother’s eyes were closed, but her mouth was still open. Milty thought he’d cry but he didn’t. No, what he felt standing beside his dead mother, a pair of pliers that he’d used on some welcher earlier that night still in his back pocket, was—nothing. The same nothing he’d feel whenever he scared or hurt someone. Even when a mush made sounds like he was a child again having a very bad dream coming true and please somebody help me, Milty heard those sounds as if he was standing on some rooftop up and away from the street where this bad thing he was doing was happening. And after, he felt even less, those strangled sounds dying in the distance like some stranger’s car disappearing down the road.

Then his brother came rushing into that tiny room and soon Asa was a blubbering mess and then they were outside in the parking lot, leaning against Asa’s Viper. The sky was beginning to lighten to the east over the hospital, and Milty was holding his big brother while he cried and cried, the smell of Asa’s hair gel filling Milty’s nose, and still, Milty felt very little.

What was wrong with him?

“What is wrong with you?” Donna was yanking her clothes from the bureau’s drawers and throwing them into a big green trash bag. It was summer and she was in shorts and a tank top, and she was tanned from the beach, her hair almost white from the sun and the bleach. On the edge of the bureau was a smoking Kool, and she kept reaching for it to take a hit before she threw more clothes into the bag. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts were swaying behind her tank and she had a small belly from her latest low though now she was flying high again, flying away from her husband, Milton Dain.

“My brother? My own fucking brother?”

“Oh, please, Milty. You know me. What’d you expect?”

Like he was a big moron. Like he was a big, ugly moron and how could he have ever believed she’d want to stay with him in this shithole in the Acre when his older, much more handsome and much more successful brother wanted her.

Well Milty felt something then. And now hot tears were running down his face and that is the last thing he should’ve done in front of flying high Donna O’Neil because she started throwing things at him: the alarm clock and her Bic lighter and one of her high heeled shoes he’d bought her. She was swearing at him that he was a big fat baby and a fucking loser and the only thing he was good at was fucking up other big fat fucking losers, and Milty doesn’t remember getting across that bedroom or wrapping his fingers around his wife’s throat, only that vein showing between her eyes which were staring into his like he was the one who was betraying her, and then he couldn’t let go fast enough and she fell to the floor gasping and crying, then she was gone and Milty did not see or speak to her or his brother for over a year.

He worked his overnights at Lucent and he came home in the early mornings and then he’d drink himself asleep in front of the TV, wake up and do it again. When he finally saw Asa after all that time, his brother was handing him a sack full of cash and he never even apologized to Milty. He just felt sorry for himself and headed north. But what Milty remembers now is that Donna was also busted and she never turned him in. They both could have. They could have said he was part of their operation for a while, but they never did.

I’m still on parole.

He visited her, didn’t he?

A flash of Donna behind glass. She was bloated from prison food and one long low and she could hardly look at him. But when she did, her eyes were wet with shame and she was just so sorry, sorry for it all.

A banging from the hallway. A loud banging on the door that Milty can feel in his chest, and fuck this. How long is he going to just take all this shit anyway? He jerks the blanket off him and pushes his dead leg off the sofa and swings his good leg after it.

He grabs the handle of his quad cane and leans forward and pushes down on it and drives his left leg till he’s standing. The room tilts and he can feel his heart beating between his eyes and he slides his cane ahead of him, leans on it and drags his right leg behind him. Slides, leans, and drags. Slides, leans, and drags. More banging against the door. He wishes he at least had a knife on him, one of the butcher knives in the kitchen his mother used to use on the lamb every Easter, the smells of cooked meat and garlic and roasted potatoes filling this narrow little house.

A banging again, and now Milty’s in the hallway sliding his quad cane ahead of him, and he just knows this is Lando. What was it he wrote? Something about the only collector in town. Something about his teeth. In the dark hallway the banging is as loud as if Milty is inside a big drum and he yells “Fuck you, Lando!” except his voice sounds like someone is stepping on his throat, and there was that one time he got his ass kicked on a collection. It was some high roller who could afford the muscle, and these three pieces of shit come out of the office of the storage sheds this welcher owned, and Milty popped the first man in the mouth but he didn’t go down and now all three of them were on him and Milty was flat on his back in the parking lot and the one he’d punched had his boot pressing down on Milty’s throat and Milty couldn’t breathe and out of the corners of his eyes a darkness was closing in, and now he was scared and he began to feel something else too, that after all the bad he had done for Walsh and Asa over the years, he deserved this, that it was time for him to pay up.

Another banging but nothing behind it, no words, and so maybe it’s Grif’s boy standing there with his loaded piece, waiting. But Milty is so fucking tired of waiting and if today is the day when he squares all of his debts, well then this is the damn day.

With his left hand he lets go of the quad cane and turns the lock and he holds his breath. He swings open the door to snow whipping sideways into his face. He has to squint his eyes at it and he grabs his cane and is ready to swing it into any motherfucker’s face, but there’s no one on his stoop. The storm door swings toward him and he blocks it with his cane and it stays there a second then blows back against the side of the house.

It’s in your head, brother.

6^th Avenue and the sidewalks, the tree stumps and the sedan across the street, they’re all covered with snow. And the sky above the houses is moving, its grayness hurling snow in gusts that feel so good against Milty’s face. No one would come out in this, and even if they do, let them, because how’s he ever going to get better if he stays inside his fucking house?

Milty lowers his quad cane into the snow on his wheelchair ramp then steps after it with his good leg, dragging his right behind him, his bad foot slapping the snow-coated ramp, his right arm hanging against his side. He’s only wearing a sweater and sweatpants and slippers on his feet. Did Donna help him with those? Carlina? But all his life Milty has never needed a winter coat and the only reason he ever wore his leather one was because Asa had one too.

Up on Main a city truck blows by, its yellow lights swirling, and the snow is like wet sand whipping into Milty’s face, but he doesn’t care. This is what he needs. This is what he has needed for a long time.

At the bottom of the steps he slides and leans and drags himself through the snow covering his front path. To his left is his empty driveway, just a narrow gap between his mother’s house and their neighbor’s, and it comes to him that he must have given Donna his Monte Carlo. No, that was years ago. It was his Cruiser he gave her. His black Cruiser. And now, as he turns himself in that direction, the snow blowing hard at his back, he sees the porch light is on over his neighbor’s stoop, snow blowing against it like a swarm of white bees.

He’s moving pretty well, sliding his quad cane ahead then leaning on it then dragging his right foot behind him. His hands are cold and he can feel snow melting against the back of his neck, but it feels so good to finally be outside on his own street. Down the narrow white gauntlet of 6^th Avenue, a car’s headlights shine in the blowing snow. Milty keeps his eyes on them as they grow closer and closer, and if it’s Grif’s boy or Tony Lando or any other welcher he ever hurt, well then let them come because Milty Pain isn’t going down without a fight.

But it turns onto Cedar Street, just a flash of red tail lights disappearing around the corner, and Milty’s foot slips and he jams his quad cane into the snow but it’s where the sidewalk has heaved downward and his cane juts away and Milty is falling, the side of his head slapping the snow-softened concrete.

There’s that darkness at the corners of his eyes, his heart beating hard in a black cave that scares him. He knows what it is, too. It’s that nothing he has always felt for everything and everybody, everyone except his mother and his brother and his wife, and now he feels all this love welling up inside him for them all: for Donna, for Asa, even though his brother used him and spit him out, and for his mother. Always his mother. But especially for Donna, and it comes to him that he must have forgiven her for what she did, and that he must have forgiven his brother too.

Over on 7^th a dog barks. It’s deep and Milty knows it’s a German Shepard or a pit bull, and that’s all he’s been all his adult life, just somebody’s attack dog. And why didn’t he cry when he lost his mother? Why’d he only cry when Donna left him? Why has he never felt bad, even a little, for scaring and hurting so many people?

Because he enjoyed it, that’s why. That look in their eyes. That look that they knew they were not going to get out of this because it was MP who was doing the collecting, Milty Pain who would do to them just what his name promised he would, well nothing made Milty feel more alive, more here with everyone else, than that.

No. There was one other thing. Making love with Donna. Letting go inside the wet gripping warmth of crazy Donna O’Neil. And why didn’t they have kids? They should have had some kids.

His head hurts, and he needs to get up. But the snow still feels good coming down on his face. His left arm is stretched out like he’s reaching for something and he pats the snow but there’s only that and the concrete sidewalk under it, and he knows he won’t be able to get up without his cane.

The dog has stopped barking. Up on Main a few cars move by slowly and quietly in the snow. He pulls his arm close to his chest and tries to push himself up, but he’s just too big, too heavy, and he can only lift his head and part of his shoulder before dropping back.

His heart’s beating hard, and he begins to feel afraid. It’s like the whole outside world has come to collect, and now all this love he’s feeling has turned into a sadness, a blue lake of it inside him that is slowly turning to ice, though there’s a light shining through it, and he and Asa are kids on this very street and their dad is still alive and he gets out of his new station wagon in a white shirt from his work and he’s smiling down at them both and then his eyebrows raise up like he has a good story to tell and he swings open the back door of the wagon and pulls out two shiny bikes, a yellow one for Asa, a red one for Milty, and Asa jumps on his and is flying down 6^th Avenue, the wind rippling his white t-shirt, their father yelling for him to take it easy though he’s smiling, Milty’s mother coming out on the stoop in her house coat, smiling too, and Milty’s father holds the bike steady so Milty can get on it, though he doesn’t know how to ride a bike, but it doesn’t matter because Asa does, and his brother will come home soon, a cold wind blowing now, snow falling and falling, his brother will come back and he will teach Milty everything he will ever need to know.