The no-numbered house is empty. The trim, fixtures, doors and windows have been removed. It is hollow, full of echo and dust and scraps of paper, old socks, straight pins and ballpoints wedged into cracks in the floor—things you always look for suddenly exposed by the receding high water of domestic living. You always need a pen when you don’t have one, a dime when you have to make a call. Now, when the sad house and its sad history are about to end, all of this stuff springs back to remind you of time lost.

Simon knows when it was built, has seen the date scratched into the screed cement on the edge of the raincap: 1906. Like most of the houses in South Minneapolis it went up fast and cheap. He can guess what the walls are filled with, old copies of Leslie’s and McCall’s, tamped sawdust and wood shavings. The floor joists are probably thirty inches on center instead of twenty-four or sixteen. 1906 middle-class: for warehouse supers and accountants, flour buyers and ad men for General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Pillsbury.

He arrives before the wrecking crews and stands back, refusing to enter the house, minus its numbers, and now without a door to knock on or windows to climb out of.

Better that way. Better that what happened there has no cover except for the worn carpeting thrown on the floor by One-Two under Betty’s red-eyed supervision. Better that the doors and windows, moldings, sinks, toilet, gas range and clanking Frigidaire were scavenged from the overpriced wreckage of their lives by the landlord, still clinging to the property after all those years, like a pilot fish swimming under the jaws of a blinded shark. It is better that what was built hastily in 1906 and had been lived down for the ensuing seventy-six years will be replaced with a cinder block Amoco gas station. Nothing important ever happens at gas stations. They are held up, people shot in the parking lot, midnight calls made through blotched mascara at the pay phone, and this station will be no different. By 1997 thirteen people will have bled to death out on the oil-soaked asphalt, but this kind of death does not leave a mark on the place, not like fratricide inside a family’s home. For this reason, the replacement of the sad little sagging house is not mourned by Simon or the rest of the neighborhood, none of whom have been able to forget what happened there.

Simon had known in advance about the house’s demise. One-Two had searched him out at the Curtis but had not handed him this information. Simon had been with T-Man on one of their scavenging expeditions in the Phillips neighborhood, when he saw yellow notices stapled on trees and pasted on the bus stop. They were loud and obvious to those who knew what to look for, and Simon knew. He knew what that color meant.