Rojta didn’t stand or shout or quake. He didn’t react except to hunch his shoulders. He knew Simon could kill him. But he was wise like all moneymakers: he understood what the breaking point was, where violence would decrease profit. So he just hunched his shoulders and kept pulling leaves from the root base. Simon paid him every month and he didn’t bother Betty again.

Simon at seventeen quits school and begins working high steel. He pays the landlord fifty dollars a month not to fuck his mother. At seventeen he knows his mother is worth fifty dollars a month to a white man in Brooklyn Park.

19

November, and it hasn’t snowed yet. The buildings on Third Avenue rise dull and gray into the morning air. The city is huddled in on itself, and on the margins, in the Indian neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, no one is out.

It is one of those days when you look outside, at five, nine, or noon, and there is the feeling of predawn lead in the way the clouds stoop level and low over the people and buildings. No snow, but the ache of cold creeps from the cement. The cigarette butts and wrappers lie dead by the curbs. Simon leans into his coat.

Franklin is deserted as he takes the corner and crosses over 35W. The traffic butts up against itself in a slow pour into town. No one honks or passes on the right, each just follows the car ahead as if there were a first car, an initial car leading the others out of the suburbs and into the city.

On the bridge the wind pushes his chin down into his jacket. The zipper rubs his chin. He’d grow a beard if he could, but like all the Indian men in his family, he had the smooth skin of a boy, nothing to use as a disguise against the wind or the law.

At the Charities a voice from the stoop pulls him from his coat. “What up, chief?”

“Hey.”

“Where you headed?”

“Hell if I know. They closed?” He stands stiff with his hands in his pockets, jerking his chin toward the door of the Catholic Charities.

“Been and gone. Been and gone. You missed breakfast. Least they could do is leave the door open.”

He shakes his head. “Yeah. I suppose. You got money?”

“Naw. I’m flat, man.”

“Yeah,” says Simon, his eyes taking in Franklin, the cars parked as if they were waiting for orders.

“West Bank’s gonna be piss-poor today. Let’s head Uptown, see what’s cookin over there.”

“Yeah.”

T-Man hops up from the steps and Simon pulls his coat tighter around, his hands still in his pockets. “Let’s get the fuck off Franklin, anyway.”

With that they cross over, trailing their breath behind them.