He stood up. We were about to be parachuted into, at least, Dien Bien Phu. “I ought to get combat pay,” he said, “even in lower Harlem.”

We took the A train. There, as I remembered it, was my decapitated head in the darkness of the tunnel. We walked down 110th Street. He was right: it had the smell of enemy country. The synagogue was gone: the candy store, enormously dilapidated, remained. From these roofs, infinitely extended, tarred or graveled, I’d hurled milk bottles in forgotten street wars. Home in the evening, carrying his bag of tools, in the high stiff collar, came my father. Here was the ancestral tenement.

From the doorway, cold, chewing sunflower seeds, with the thin legs of a diseased heron, teetered on worndown high heels, a girl looked out. Electrified hair. She didn’t smile. She ignored Michael. He was just the pilot fish. She said (because I’d stopped, because I was staring skyward): “Yuh lookin’ for somethin’, honey?” I was. Up there. A vanished boy. Who, under a great quilt, prayed, while his mother, in the room beyond, screamed. Who, with the hot proceeds of a theft in his hand (the money divided, quartered among four thieves), crouched over the stairway carpet, burying his share. Who wasn’t, like his father, in the fall of evening, going to come wearily home with his bag of tools. So he’d thought, long ago, starting out. In the doorway, the girl spat out the chewed husks of the sunflower seeds. Their rats are larger, I thought: their filth more variable. She moved again. The stockings bagged. She said: “Whatcha want, huh?”, querulous now. And moved again, toward us, and all the remembered darkness moved with her. The menacing hallways, the embittered cellars, the hostile stoops. Michael was right: even lower Harlem. I fled.

Boxcars on a flatboat. Heavily, parting the tide, a black freighter moved downriver toward the bay. Now the city seemed safer.

The boy leaned over the guardrail. He brooded on the municipal waters. A slow wash broke against the hull of a moored oilbarge.

Twenty-six, I thought: issuing from his mother’s womb when I’d gone into the army. His toys my weapons. What was he thinking? What did they think? He leaned, dark, over the wintry river. Once, I’d spent a week at Aunt Dora’s. I remembered his mother: a long-legged, long-necked, long-nosed girl. She was courting then. The courting went on in the front room. It was mostly lap-sitting in those days, and a lot of exhaustive smooching. She and her beau, the salesman who’d in time become this boy’s father, had emerged afterwards from the front room: I remembered the smeared lipstick on her mouth, the erotic look his vest had. Michael was the result of all that smooching. I looked at him again. Oddly, though I had this vivid recollection of his parents, leaning there he seemed parentless. A child of other circumstances. He sensed my stare. And turned, caught me at it, smiled: then I saw how the smile changed him. The spy he sometimes seemed vanished. He was almost engaging when he smiled.