T-Man pulls out a cigarette, clears his throat and spits expertly on a dead squirrel frozen flat in the gutter. He lights his cigarette and hands one to Simon. They walk west on Franklin and cross over 35W and turn up Clinton. Since Simon met him in prison T-Man has always been this way. He has always enjoyed a casual disregard for his surroundings. Though they have both been in prison, Simon emerged more careful. Tenuously paroled, he eased into the streets, but T-Man is determined to be offhand, as if nothing can affect him.

The trees grow up over the street, a cage of thin fingers holding the low-slung clouds away from the old houses, beaten and showing ant-eaten wood through chipped paint.

They cut over on Twenty-fourth Street in front of the Institute of the Arts where leaves that haven’t been squashed or washed down the gutters into the river flip and jerk over the wide, shallow steps.

“You ever try to go in those doors?” T-Man asks Simon.

Simon shakes his head and flicks the resinous cigarette butt against the steps where the cherry splits from the filter and hisses as it hits a pocket of rainwater in the stone. The butt tumbles harmlessly down the steps like a spent shell.

“Well, they’re locked. They never open them. You gotta go around back. Why the fuck they put the Art Museum in the ghetto beats the shit outta me.”

“I been in the back,” says Simon, shoving his hands back in his pockets.

They look up at the huge wooden double doors, like castle doors, squinting against the wind that stings their eyes and against the stone building that looks so solid that it will never fall down or be razed.

Uptown is empty. The bars are closed on Hennepin. The thrift stores and prostitutes aren’t showing their rags down the length of Lake Street. Simon and T-Man see a bum tottering from side to side on the concrete sidewalk, bordered by the street on one side and the battered storefronts on the other. He moves as though fixed on an invisible rail over a precipice.

T-Man snorts. “Shoot me if I start walking like that.”

“Don’t have a gun, T-Man.”

“Well choke me or somethin.”

They stare after the bum until he stops. He senses he is being watched. The bum pulls himself straight and moves his head from side to side, squinting through the postdawn gloom. Seeing that T-Man and Simon aren’t cops, he pulls his ratty hat lower on his head and flicks them off with one hand while scratching at an itch on the front of his thigh with the other.

T-Man laughs and starts coughing.

“Fuck you too!” he shouts cheerfully, breaking into another cough. He wads the phlegm together with his tongue and spits the ball out, skipping it off the sidewalk.

The old man turns and walks past the Uptown Bar and Grill.