Overhead, the traffic was crawling. It was the height of the evening rush, and everyone was creeping out of town to their tidy suburban homes. They were also eating and drinking—which I knew because they tossed out their empty cans and wrappers, which floated down into the garbage underneath. I was almost hit by an empty beer bottle when I started to explore the area to the left of the car’s treadmarks.

I kept picking up stray pieces of paper, hoping that whatever document the Bysens were looking for might have fallen out of the car when it was being dismembered. I kept telling myself that this was futile, a sign of desperation, but I couldn’t stop. Most of what I saw were discarded advertisements, oriental rugs for five dollars, palm readings for ten, which I guess showed we need guarantees about the future more than we need our floors covered, but all kinds of stuff got tossed over the side of the Skyway—bills, letters, even bank statements.

I’d been at it for about an hour when I found the two books that had been in Billy’s trunk—Oscar Romero’s Violence of Love and the book that Aunt Jacqui said made her anorexic—Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I put them into my parka pocket. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but that seemed to be the net of what I was going to find. I looked disconsolately at the area I’d been searching. The daylight had gone completely, and my car headlights seemed to be getting dimmer as well. There was one last piece of paper near where I’d found the books. I tucked it into Rich Christians, and climbed back into my car on stiff legs.

I turned the car around to face north, but parked it while the engine warmed up again to look at my haul. I thumbed eagerly through Billy’s books, hoping that some mysterious document would drop out, his will, for instance, revised to leave all his holdings to the Mt. Ararat church, or a proclamation to By-Smart’s board of directors. Nothing emerged but Billy’s round schoolboy hand making notes in the margins of Archbishop Romero’s book. I squinted at his notes, but what I could make out in the dim light didn’t seem very promising.

The paper I’d found by the books looked like a child’s drawing. It was a crude sketch of a frog, done in Magic Marker, with a big black wart in the middle of its back, sitting on a dubious-looking log. I almost pitched it out the window, but the South Side was everyone’s dumping ground—I, at least, could put it out with my home papers for recycling.