Inside, the House of Brothers sweltered with men. They cramped the kitchen table, overflowed the sofas. In the bedrooms they murmured prayers, hands joined, shoulders slick with sweat. On the wall by the staircase was an enormous mural. Dozens of faces were drawn in black paint, two-dimensional and egg-shaped, and no two were the same. Lourdes told me that every time another man stayed at the House of Brothers, he added his face to the mural. That’s what he’d been doing when he answered the door in his apron. It took him a moment to find Zeke, but I recognized the clenched underbite, the clairvoyant eyes.

In the upstairs bathroom, a brother was mopping the floor. He stood aside so I could see the tub.

“That’s where I found him,” Lourdes said.

I took notes on the tub: shallow, plastic, with mint-green tiles on the wall.

I asked the man with the mop if he’d known Zeke. He shook his head.

“No one here today was in the house with him,” Lourdes told me. “We’ve been having to turn the beds over. But here, I can show you where he slept.”

Three bunk beds were packed into a bedroom about the size of what I’d had as a child. Five men glanced up as I stood in the doorway.

“Zeke wasn’t the easiest brother,” Lourdes said. “I think he’d gotten into some trouble in Retreat.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“But I love them all.”

“We love you too,” said one of the brothers.

Lourdes massaged his neck. The brothers looked up at him, faces simplified.

“I’m not sure Zeke ever let Jesus into his heart,” Lourdes said, “but he surely believed that Satan walked the earth.”

7.

It was after nine when Tori took me to an all-night drugstore that did one-hour photo. I ordered two copies of everything on the Fujifilm roll and, when I handed it over, asked the clerk if she had to look at the photos to develop them.

She glanced between Tori and me and said, “I don’t have to.”

“Then don’t.”

I bought us Wendy’s and we sat at a picnic table by the road. I’d picked up some bandages at the drugstore, and while Tori unpacked the food, I changed the dressings on my leg. It still felt like there was wood in there, like termites in the bone.

Tori peeled her burger open, put the pickles to the side, and gradually scraped the cheese off with the fries as she ate them. Once she’d finished all these cheese-fries, she slapped the pickles back on and ate the burger. I protected my sandwich as a truck blazed by, kicking up dust.

Tori wanted to know how I’d gotten started and what the job normally entailed. I explained a bit about USC, my early work at the P-I, and an average month at the Bystander.