“How about you, baby? Can you float?”

“Don’t kid, Lester.” She took the bottle gingerly and drank. Her hand shook and Simon noticed.

“You scared, Vera?”

“No.”

“Come on. You’re scared.”

“No.” She took a stronger drink.

Simon leaned forward so he could look straight down.

“Ain’t nothin down there to be afraid of. Just ground. Just dirt and concrete, just asphalt and iron. No different than when we left it.”

Vera coughed.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t puke. That there’s good stuff. We’ll make you drink it back up like cats do so as it don’t go to waste.”

She shook her head. “It ain’t the ground,” she gasped. “It’s the fall.”

Simon shook his head vigorously.

“It ain’t that either. And it ain’t the distance. It’s the air.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Nope. Not yet. It’s the air, I tell you. We ain’t used to it all around us, ain’t used to so much so fast. You slow it down and you’ll be all right. You just slow it down.”

“You’re high.”

“Ain’t that either. Though that helps with the air.”

“You ain’t afraid of falling?” asked Vera incredulously, looking at Simon and then at the distant earth.

“Hell, no! I ain’t afraid. Why do you think they hire Indians? We’re not afraid, we’re better.”

Lester laughed. The whiskey and wine and Vera’s sleek girlish muscle pressed against him made it come out long and loose and easy. “You’re so full of shit.”

“Am I? Am I?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?

Simon rose so he was standing on the edge.

“Am I? Am I?”

Lester laughed again.

“Take it easy, bro. I’m just kidding.”

“Have a drink,” said Vera.

Simon kept saying “Am I? Am I?” as he took off his T-shirt, his favorite one with the Rolling Stones tongue and lips.

“Am I?”

He whooped and swung the shirt over his head in a fast circle and let it go over the edge, drifting like a stricken crow over the city.

“I ain’t afraid of nothin!”

He turned and grabbed the upright beam behind him. He placed his feet in the cup formed by the H-beam and started to climb.

“Get down, Si, I was just kidding.”

Simon kept shimmying up, monkeylike.

“Simon, get down,” pleaded Vera.

He reached the framed story above and swung his legs up until he straddled the horizontal beam. The trusses and subflooring hadn’t been attached yet. There was just the skeleton of the building swaying above them. He pulled his legs under and stood. His arms hung to his sides as if he were waiting in a slow checkout line at the supermarket. A thirty-one-story fall on one side, a fourteen-foot drop to the floor on the other.