She crosses Third Avenue past the Milwaukee Road train shed below the police station. She doesn’t look back and so doesn’t notice him. Simon crosses the street behind her, on the opposite side. The old storefronts and warehouses have been ripped down. There is no longer any urban clutter in which Simon can hide himself, just the wide open municipal spaces in front of new office buildings. The streets feel naked. She stays on Washington and nothing diverts her attention. At the corner of Broadway and Washington she turns and walks up the overpass. I-94 runs like a moat between what is left of downtown and the Northside. There is no escape, but he is not ready to speak with her. He stops and watches her figure rise into the dimmed northern sky and he turns back, not sure now where to go.

10

One-Two knows he shouldn’t, but he does. He shuts the door to the Windsor and aims his large body north on Third Avenue and begins walking toward the Curtis. It has been almost half a year since Simon was released and nothing has happened yet. There has been no resulting catastrophe, no trauma to anyone in the family. It is August. Nothing much doing. He rubs his back where the nomenclature of his spine switches from dorsal to lumbar. It is dusk, eight-thirty.

The city is beautiful, soft from the heat and cooling with the retreat of the sun. One-Two eyes Betty’s house: the lights are on and he imagines she must be home.

There’s not much for One-Two to do. The Windsor is ready for the fall rush of students who live on the Southside because rent is cheap, and the old buildings have nice floors and high ceilings. Across the street a red Dodge Power Ram is parked, the back crammed with cheap dressers and two mattresses standing on edge, clasped like hands.

He crosses Franklin, and he knows he shouldn’t meddle, that’s what Betty would call it, but he can’t help himself. It’s a visit, not a meddle. A drop-by. That’s all.

The street hasn’t changed much since he first moved into the Windsor. The dottering brick buildings of Stevens Community on the left abruptly give over to large houses that have been split into three, sometimes four, apartments. They are being bumped off their foundations by hard winters, and One-Two is surprised every spring when the old frames haven’t folded. He is shocked by the endurance of the Southside. The houses stop along the overpass and he can remember when they kept stretching toward downtown. The city planners expressed regret when they were torn down, but everyone knew that they wanted I-94 as a buffer between downtown and the creeping decrepitude of South Minneapolis.

It was strange, that he’d worked on destroying the Gateway. He’d wrecked his own home but was compensated when he moved across from Betty in 1964.