He went to his own rooming house and into the back for the privy and then pumped water to drink from his cupped hands. He stood out in the dark and smoked another of the cigarettes and then went up the backstairs to his room. He laid his clothes out over the straightback chair and brushed the dust from the trouser legs. He sat crosslegged, naked on the bed in the dark, listening to the low folds of sound rising from the street below, the eventide of it broken only now and then by a man calling greeting to someone, a woman calling the names of children. After a time he laid his folded razor under his pillow and stretched out on his back.

He woke midmorning to a lemon light burning through the last haze off the river, the room already hot with flies spinning against the ceiling. The street below was quiet, dried slop and churned dust. What he took to be three whores lounged in an opened doorway across the way. Neither the woman nor the girl of the day before appeared to be among them. A ragpicker made way up the street, the horse a broken-down gray with a low roman head and patched and poorly laid-on harness fittings rubbing eternal raw welts into its hide. The ragpicker cried his way, walking alongside the rough-loaded cart. A woman came forth from one of the entrances opposite with a bundle. He’d not seen the whores move but they were gone. The woman stood with the bundle hugged against her as she argued with the ragman, finally handing it up and taking one by one into her palm the coins he counted. He went his way, crying out again. The woman still stood, fingering through the coins as if their number might grow if she only looked again.

He washed from the basin and dressed and went out. The sun hurt his eyes. He went to the café where he’d supped the night before and had coffee with cream and sugar and read through a newspaper bought off a boy on his way in. The job listings weren’t discouraging although there was nothing he was interested in. He already knew the work he wanted wouldn’t be found that way. He still was unclear what that work would be but knew he wanted money and that money wasn’t made standing on the rail platform blistering his lungs to drum up trade or some such. That was some other feller’s money. He drank his refill and thanked the woman and left a dime for the nickel cup and went back into his own neighborhood and there was shaved in a storefront shop with a rough-painted pole out front. There was a single chair and a foxed mirror but the towels were hot and the razor sharp.