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Kyle was taken by surprise, Mrs. Jackson had suddenly turned so belligerent. “I, I’m sorry. I only wanted—”

“Well, we don’t want your sympathy. We don’t need your goddamn sympathy, Mister. You can just go back to New Jersey or wherever the hell you came from, intruding in my daughter’s life.”

Mrs. Jackson’s eyes were moist and dilated and accusing. Her skin looked as if it would be scalding to the touch. Kyle was certain she wasn’t drunk, he couldn’t smell it on her breath, but possibly she was drugged. High on crystal meth — that was notorious in this part of Pennsylvania, run-down old cities like Easton.

Kyle protested, “But, Mrs. Jackson, you and your family would want to know, wouldn’t you? I mean, what had happened to...” He paused awkwardly, uncertain how to continue. Why should they want to know? Would he have wanted to know, in their place?

In a voice heavy with sarcasm Mrs. Jackson said, “Oh, sure. You tell me, Officer. You got all the answers.”

She heaved herself to her feet. A signal it was time for her unwanted visitor to depart.

Kyle had dared to take out his wallet. He was deeply humiliated but determined to maintain his composure. “Mrs. Jackson, maybe I can help? With the funeral expenses, I mean.”

Hotly the little woman said, “We don’t want anybody’s charity! We’re doing just fine by ourselves.”

“Just a... a token of my sympathy.”

Mrs. Jackson averted her eyes haughtily from Kyle’s fumbling fingers, fanning her face with a TV Guide. He removed bills from his wallet, fifty-dollar bills, a one-hundred-dollar bill, folded them discreetly over, and placed them on an edge of the table.

Still, the indignant Mrs. Jackson didn’t thank him. Nor did she trouble to see him to the door.

Where was he? A neighborhood of dingy wood-frame bungalows, row houses. Northern outskirts of Easton, Pennsylvania. Midafternoon: too early to begin drinking. Kyle was driving along potholed streets uncertain where he was headed. He’d have to cross the river again to pick up the big interstate south... At a 7-Eleven he bought a six-pack of strong dark ale and parked in a weedy cul-de-sac between a cemetery and a ramp of the highway, drinking. The ale was icy cold and made his forehead ache, not disagreeably. It was a bright blustery October day, a sky of high scudding clouds against a glassy blue. At the city’s skyline, haze the hue of chewing-tobacco spittle. Certainly Kyle knew where he was, but where he was mattered less than something else, something crucial that had been decided, but he couldn’t recall what it was that had been decided just yet. Except he knew it was crucial. Except so much that seemed crucial in his younger years had turned out to be not so, or not much so. A girl of about fourteen pedaled by on a bicycle, ponytail flying behind her head. She wore tight-fitting jeans, a backpack. She’d taken no notice of him, as if he, and the car in which he was sitting, were invisible. With his eyes he followed her. Followed her as swiftly she pedaled out of sight. Such longing, such love, suffused his heart! He watched the girl disappear, stroking a sinewy throbbing artery just below his jawline.

George P. Pelecanos

The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us

From Measures of Poison

Someday I’m gonna write all this down. But I don’t write so good in English yet, see? So I’m just gonna think it out loud.

Last night I had a dream.

In my dream, I was a kid, back in the village. My friends and family from the chorio, they were there, all of us standing around the square. My father, he had strung a lamb up on a pole. It was making a noise, like a scream, and its eyes were wild and afraid. My father handed me my Italian switch knife, the one he gave me before I came over. I cut into the lamb’s throat and opened it up wide. The lamb’s warm blood spilled onto my hands. My mother told me once: Every time you dream something, it’s got to be a reason.

I’m not no kid anymore. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s early in June, Nineteen-hundred and thirty-three. The temperature got up to 100 degrees today. I read in the Tribune, some old people died from the heat. Let me try to paint a picture, so you can see in your head the way it is for me right now. I got this little one-room place I rent from some old lady. A Murphy bed and a table, an icebox and a stove. I got a radio I bought for a dollar and ninety-nine. I wash my clothes in a tub, and afterwards I hang the roocha on a cord I stretched across the room. There’s a bunch of clothes, pantalonia and one of my work shirts and my vrakia and socks, on there now. I’m sitting here at the table in my union suit. I’m smoking a Fatima and drinking a cold bottle of Abner Drury beer. I’m looking at my hands. I got blood underneath my fingernails. I washed real good but it was hard to get it all.

It’s five, five-thirty in the morning. Let me go back some, to show how I got to where I am tonight.

What’s it been, four years since I came over? The boat ride was a boat ride so I’ll skip that part. I’ll start in America.

When I got to Ellis Island I came straight down to Washington to stay with my cousin Toula and her husband Aris. Aris had a fruit cart down on Pennsylvania Avenue, around 17th. Toula’s father owed my father some lefta from back in the village, so it was all set up. She offered me a room until I could get on my feet. Aris wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t give a good goddamn what he was happy about. Toula’s father should have paid his debt.

Toula and Aris had a place in Chinatown. It wasn’t just for Chinese. Italians, Irish, Polacks, and Greeks lived there, too. Everyone was poor except the criminals. The Chinamen controlled the gambling, the whores, and the opium. All the business got done in the back of laundries and in the restaurants. The Chinks didn’t bother no one if they didn’t get bothered themselves.