He walks during the day and stays at Little Earth at night, getting stoned with Burt and his father, listening to stories of the old AIM days. He paces Franklin from one end to the other, all the way up the numbered streets to downtown, up Washington, back down across the old rail yards along the river, through Uptown, up Lake Street and all the way on Cedar to Little Earth. His path isn’t exact. There isn’t much of a routine. He takes streets that, as a child, were simply impediments, distractions between the Dairy Queen or the comic-book store. Now he pays attention, to the character of the buildings, the amounts and types of traffic. He studies the city, and though he is only fourteen, he feels ancient, herding his memories within the perimeter of his footwork.

He walks his old route to school and is surprised to find out how short it really is. The city has shrunk while he was gone. He can see the changes now. How some neighborhoods are giving over to blacks, the Indians moving to the Northside, Hmong and Guatemalans fighting over Saint Paul.

He finds out quickly that the Curtis has been torn down, and once a week he walks by to look at the empty lot. It is turning toward fall when he is downtown, and after watching the rug store for Simon, goes in and asks the owner for Simon’s address. Still, he doesn’t use it right away. Instead he watches from across the streets, under the train shed in the old Milwaukee Road station, the iron walls covered in silver tag. He watches the rug store and learns Simon’s schedule, his habits, and catches him walking to the Northside with a woman who works in the jewelry store next door.

Burt is getting bored. His father threatens to send him north again. To stave off boredom they smoke up all his father’s weed and drink all his beer. They fight the other men at Little Earth, and spend hours riding Southside with whoever has a car, counting days and weeks by who got jumped when, who had fucked whom, by funerals they don’t attend. These are the markers of their city.

28

Simon wakes up and walks out the front steps to get the paper. He is groggy and sweat-pantsed, fuzzily surprised to be engaged in such a domestic habit. Simon has been living with Irene for four months. This is the time of year he has always loved, the closing days of September when the heat isn’t so bad, the gentle folding into fall. The ground cover is already getting brittle.