Sketches by Boz

There are evenings in summer when a leviathan of tarnished silver slithers between the hills of western Pennsylvania. Thunder of coupling trains rumbles in its belly. Men battered by boyhoods spent in mills shrug and call it fog, but they are the first to go quiet when its heartbeat peals the tinny rattle of a bell. Without a word, they drain their glasses to the sour spume, gather jackets and scratch-offs, and file out the bar into the gunmetal glow of streetlights like slag-pile penitents mourning fire. A tottering, arthritic brood: the Wild Hunt grown anemic on rusty shores as they shuffle past heroin dens where their own grandchildren forget that tomorrows come. They cluck their tongues and fold themselves into cars that will never pass inspection, hoping that just a few strains of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” will make everything about to happen go a little quicker, a little quieter, a little more peaceful than last time. It never does.

They pull up to houses all built the same, close together, and now failing unevenly like teeth in an old woman’s grin. Some live alone. They go in quickest. No difference to them: darkness within or night without. It’s them with wives and doxies who hesitate out on the berm, tracing shapes with boot tips into last winter’s cinders, delaying the inevitable phrase that will be spoken and then hushed between chilly suppers and colder kisses: “It’s happening again.”

The same every year. And the women purse their lips and shake their heads and ask these tired and battered men how long it takes for fools to learn. What? The reply is different under every roof, but principally the meaning is the same.

“Takes two to tango.”

“Give and take. Give and take.”

“If it was another way, yinz would still be asking why.”

“Did you remember to pick up some food for the cat?”

T.V. volumes are upped. New cans of Yuengling or Iron City are opened, lukewarm in the hand. Everyone knows what none of them have to repeat: The river demands its blood. The fog has come to collect it. The only question: Who will be chosen? Who will go? They will make their decision carefully. They always do.

No one claims to have ever seen their riparian parley, keelboat men covered in moss, flapper-women riddled with artificial gills, huddled among the flood-bracken and dumped headstones, drawing names in the sand with fishhooks bent backwards and scrying through the pour-holes of empty pop cans.

When the same name is thrice divined, there is nothing to be done but wait. The river knows.

Give and take.

Give and take.

“Give and take,” a somber woman mutters, staring at the screen that gives her face the pallor of the drowned. “Give and take.”

A boy leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. He is fifteen, or eighteen. For a moment the woman cannot remember. She is not like others, who always think of how things used to be. No. She gets caught up in how things will be. But do not call it hope. No. Despair’s reflection reverses in a mirror like anyone else’s. She knows. But she cannot help it. Every time she sees her boy, she thinks of how things will be when his father returns.

The man left because she could not bear to not bear the boy he left behind.

Give and take, she tells herself. Palindrome of appetites. Same thing she has said these many years. The boy looks at her with that same expression she knows she makes when she sees a cat crushed in the potholes. Pity and curiosity, and a gentleness that aches when there is nothing left to do. His name means Life, which is why he was the end of hers.

She would never tell him this. That would make her feel like a bad mother. To hell with how it would make him feel. He carries enough life in himself. He is dark like his father. Italian, maybe a little Greek. A complexion in winter she would kill for in July. But it is his eyes that betray her own melancholy. Once, when she was a little girl, she had felt something flutter past her face in the night. She swatted at it, and felt the crunch between her palm and the nightstand. She switched on the lamp, but it was no moth or bat or dream lying smeared across the lead-paint gray. It was a butterfly, with wings like blue glass ringed in black, now shattered in her hand. The same as her own boy’s eyes. Even now, all she can think to wonder is, Do butterflies ever fly at night?

“Vito.” She says his name like the price of chicken breast at the store.

Her thumbs scroll. Her own eyes are filled with ice. “You’ve gotta learn to fight your own battles. I ain’t always gonna be around,” she lies. She knows she is never going anywhere.

He gives a little snort. Half his mouth lifts into an awkward smile.

“Mum.” He hunches and tries to gain her gaze. “I was asking about the bridge.”

Her own hands suddenly look black against the screen. She looks up. He is beautiful. He is handsome. The way she used to be. Before he took it all away from her.

“Don’t go there,” she says, surprised by the wad in her throat. “Not until things cool down.”

He sniffs again.

“That’s what I’m asking.”

She glances again, long enough for permission.

He continues: “How’s come people go?”

She stares back into the glare. Because it’s easier when you’re blind.

“Go where, sweetie.”

The boy winces.

“Why do they jump?”

She scrolls with her thumbs. Funny, she thinks, in olden times she might be knitting.

Because their life was taken away.

“I don’t know, baby.”

“Can’t someone stop them?”

“Not when there’s fog.”

“But why?”

“It’s just harder to see them, dear.”

She coils further into herself. Give and take. Give and take. Give. Her boy’s words are pendulant, even angry: “Why doesn’t someone go down there—” Just like his dad.

Her eyes and voice move at the same time: “Don’t.”

He frowns. Just like her.

“Why?”

Because that’s what a good parent is supposed to say.

“Cops are always down there this time of year,” she says instead. “Don’t you have practice?”

His smile is gentle, frustrated, honest. So is the hurt in those butterfly eyes.

“Been there and back.”

She nods.

“Supper’s in the fridgerator. Take some to your Pap.”

The boy nods. He is glad for the chance to break away. He loves the wrung-out rag of woman. He knows he does, because he cannot think of anything else to call such stillness when he really wants to scream.

He gathers the food, microwaves it until he hears crackling, shakes the container out onto two plates, and leaves the room. Silverware where he left it yesterday.

She says something to him as he goes. He pretends not to hear. His own small rebellion. But he’s blushing before he makes the den. The den. True name. He can count on one hand the number of times he has seen his grandfather outside of it, and at least two of those were strapped to a gurney. He has never himself set foot into the bathroom opposite the T.V. He thinks of it as dark, even when the sunlight pours in, making a gilded aquarium of the billion motes of dust and dander; and smothering even when he can see his breath. His grandfather is named something like Cecil. But those who come to visit (and these more infrequently every year) call him Boz. He lost a leg in the mill, they all tell him. Before that his Pap could Riverdance and thrill. Nowadays he just sits in his recliner, waiting for the V.A. nurse to come in and anoint his bedsores, always on about what ifs and if whens.

“Here’s food, Pap,” Vito says, picking his way over clothing and ancient copies of National Geographic. Everything reeks of sweat and cherry tobacco, though he has never known his grandfather to smoke a puff.

“Mangia mang’.”

The old man sits, hands resting on the ends of their armrests, like a king. His buzz cut is unkempt. The lines around his mouth make him look like a nutcracker stood too close to the fire. But his eyes are bright behind their clouds, and he smiles. No teeth, but remarkable hearing.

They sit and eat and talk, because Vito wants to. He knows without admission that his grandfather does not have long. The old man seems to know it too, but there is a lightness about it for him. He laughs more than other years of evenings spent playing backgammon or watching sitcoms concocted amidst computer circuitry.

“What is the meaning of life?” the old man asks between fistfuls.

Vito does not raise his head, only his brows.

“What?” the boy asks, because he knows the old man cannot stand not telling him.

“To die.”

Vito smiles, breathes through his nose as he chews, and nods.

He swallows.

“Whatever do you mean?” he asks in a playful tone.

They both know.

But the old man tells him again about the war, the number, the price, the way. The feet of cattle pointed into the air. The stench of rancid chocolate sent from home.

“Never send the real stuff made with milk,” the old man says. “It goes bad.”

Vito nods. He’s not heard that one before. Still surprises. The old man continues, now down more familiar paths. He tells Vito again about the pit and the trash they dumped into it. They did not hate the environment, he is careful to say, but there was nothing else to do. Make do with what you got. Make do. And anyway, ninety-nine point nine percent of the stuff was natural. They just had to burn it to keep it out of the wrong hands. Wolves can live on scraps to hunt another day. Even on islands.

Especially on islands.

Vito pulls his forearm across his mouth. He smells the salt and fug. He wants a shower, but the piping is bad. He has to take a bath.

“Never forget him,” the old man says. His eyes look suddenly dimmer, dreamier. Their suns have gone to moons behind their clouds. “Please.”

Vito nods.

“I won’t, Pap.”

His heart always aches at this point. Because he knows the old man’s still does as well.

“I’ve already told you?”

Vito nods.

“Tell me again,” he says. “I wanna remember.”

The old man nods. This: The only way he remembers what it is to dance. Give and take. Give and take. And he repeats for the ninety-ninth time to his grandson the story of the soldier-boy who stood at the far end of the firepit, joking and talking about home as they burned trash on that forsaken island in that forsaken sea, all for forsaken men, whose names have already faded into history.

“I kept getting smoke in my eyes,” the old man says. He points with a caddywampus finger past his hollow cheek, toward the ceiling. “S’how these got to be like they are.”

Vito nods.

The old man can half-decent see, hear just fine. He just can’t dance a jig. Or toe the line.

“He asked if I wanted to trade places with him.” The old man nods. His lips pull taut into a pale crease that looks ready any moment to disappear. “So I did.”

The old man frowns. Vito sets gently his can of pop on the corner of the end table.

“When all of a sudden the wind shifted and that kid got engulfed in flames. He died. Right there. I’ll never forget,” the old man said. “I’ll never forget. But I can’t for the life of me remember his name.”

Give and take. Vito thinks of his mother in the other room. Give and take.

“Michael,” Vito lies. He chooses a new name every time. Not to make a fool of old Boz. Just so he never tires of being a comfort to him.

“Zat so?”

Vito nods, pretending to read the ingredients on the pop can.

“Pap,” he says.

The old man raises his brow.

“Hm?”

“Juu come upstairs last night?”

If a thunderclap could be mute it would sound like this.

Old Boz stares straight ahead, expression all pinched like someone reading a sign far away.

“Did I what?”

Heat and tremor rise into Vito’s cheeks. He glances down at the empty space of recliner cushion where wadded gauze and crumbs of Ritz crackers lie instead of the old man’s leg.

“Never mind.”

Vito moves to gather the plates and leave. He wonders if his grandfather will die in the night and this will have to be his last memory of him. But the old man’s hand darts across the space between them. It comes to rest, surprisingly heavy, on Vito’s knee. The boy looks down. Old Boz’s hand is pale and misshapen, the surface all mottled and crisscrossed with knobs of bones and cables. It looks like some ancient thing crawled up out of the river to sun itself and die.

It is the first time he wants to pull away from his grandfather’s hand. He doesn’t. But still.

“Tell me, boy.”

“I tried to ask Mum.”

“Your mum ain’t got more sense than nothing.” Vito feels the old man’s hand tighten around his knee. There is an urgency in it, an interest. Something darker too. “What happened?”

“I dunno.” Vito kneads his hands together, bounces his free leg. “I heard something in the hall last night. Mum was working. I thought it might be Unc but he’s apparently down in Morgantown all week.”

“Did it sound like Unc?”

Vito smiles.

“What’s Unc sound like, Pap?”

But the old man does not jest.

“You know what I mean.”

Vito frowns. He looks back at the knotted hand resting on his own untarnished knee.

“Not like this.”

He is surprised by the soft ripple of his own voice, like water finding its way round a stone.

“Like what, then?”

Vito holds his breath, to remember.

“Like,” he begins and falters, begins and falters, just like the thing he heard plodding to his door the night before, “like someone limping hard.”

“Where?”

“Upstairs in the hall.”

“But where?”

The old man’s claw is trying to hold him back from something now, pull him free.

“I dunno. All over.”

“Did it stop at your mum’s door?”

“No.”

Vito feels the sweat break out on the old man’s palm. A tremor and then stillness passes through the old man’s body. For a moment, he is afraid Boz is dead.

“Yours?”

His grandfather’s voice is meek, meekest Vito has ever heard. It twists something in his gut he does not like, not because of the sour it turns in his own belly, but for what it does to diminish the old man in his chair.

“No,” he lies again. “Just passed by.”

The old man lets out a sigh worth years, retracts his speckled hand, and settles back into his recliner.

“Thanks be to goodness. They was just sniffing.”

“Who?”

The old man snickers now, though maybe with only half his face, as if the other is still numb or palsied or waiting.

“They ain’t a who. Used to be. Now they’re a what.”

“What do you mean?”

No choice in it this time.

The old man straightens as best he can. His cheeks suck in something dignified, and he pronounces: “The fog is back.” He looks like roadkill announcing bingo.

Vito’s gut boils. He cannot taste the food he has just eaten, but instead picks out the flavor of something older than this house, this town, the old man, that bridge. Something ancient and stale and hungry as the fog itself. Clouds cannot be negotiated with when they come to earth, only dispersed with light.

“So?”

“So?”

It sounds like he has hurt the old man’s feelings. But Vito wants him to talk, to explain, to draw it out. There is something new about it this year. Something he does not understand.

“I know about it,” he re-assures, “but what’s that have to do with the thing last night?”

The old man is all energy now. Energy for an old man, at least.

“Give and take.” His grandfather laughs, tongue like a fish come up to feed, eyebrows bent like withered question marks. “Give and take.”

“That’s what Mum said.”

“Aw, she still don’t know nothing.” The old man leans over, nearly throws his own elbow off its perch. He catches himself, his face two inches from Vito’s, and laughs again. “Nowhere else on earth does it happen.” Old Boz beams. “No where else. S’why I couldn’t wait to get back home from the war. Something special about here. We got the fog. Other places got thirst or hunger. A couple of the worst got war. That damned island took him with fire. What’s his name?”

Vito pauses, clears his throat.

“Michael.”

He sighs.

“Michael.” His grandfather hunches the entire upper half of his body into a bobbing, twisted nod. “The fire took him, but we got the fog.”

“Pap.”

“Makes a man feel more alive.” The old man’s voice rattles. “Knowing death’s passed him by.”

“Pap.”

“They must be calling, must be calling. Calling, calling. Give and take, give and take. I’ll live to see another day.”

“Pap.”

Boz suddenly deflates. The whole room feels stiff and empty as a plundered reliquary.

“How’s that?”

Vito licks his lips.

“Get your plate?”

✥ ✥ ✥

Vito leaves the bathroom. His mum is at work. His grandfather lies dormant downstairs. Places always seem either larger or more cramped in the dark, never just what they are. There is no way to measure. To know ahead of time. All depends on how much dark is inside the one entering it.

He steps off the hex-and-dot tile, onto the ancient floorboards of the hall. His bare foot lands just as the tub drain lets out its porcelain death rattle. He does not look back. He has had the presence of mind to expect the familiar sound. Presence of mind to keep his eyes on the strange hall ahead. Reaching back, his free hand finds a light switch older than his grandfather. With a clunky snap, the bulb over the bathroom dies. The hallway is a tripwire maze of dark shapes and blue traces. The antique banister, half-restored after five years of his mother’s stubborn labor, stands out against the soft orange of the sodium streetlights. The fixture in the ceiling releases a dim shadow like an octopus stretched across the plaster.

Tonight the darkness is long, full, and thick. He wades into it. Steps and listens. Steps and listens. Steps.

Gains the door of his bedroom.

It faces the back of the house, overlooks the tiny yard and alley, both overgrown. The room is dark, but familiar. Composure just within reach.

He stops on the threshold. A chill ripples through the skin of his back, though nothing about the temperature of the air has changed. The light from the street glistens like embers in the water still beaded across the skin of his arms. He is a boy on fire. Trading places.

His breaths are shallow. He shifts his weight from foot to foot. Tries to make the floorboards snap or thump, but they do not. Not much. Not enough. They came last night. It came. And stopped at his bedroom door. Why? What? Give and take. The phrase repeats in his mind as he replaces the faux-diamond studs in his ears. Give and take. Slips on his shoes. Give and take. Takes the steps three at a time, quiet as a deer, checks in on old Boz already sleeping, and bounds out the door.

✥ ✥ ✥

The fog is not gray or silver or white tonight. To Vito it looks more like gravy boiled over, maybe shaded here and there with a little green. The lights from town all seem half asleep, laureled with the coronas of asthmatic stars. Sound does not carry far. Yet he still may hear a river barge.

Until the train brakes begin their long and even, relentless squeal. Booms from the coupling yard. A few cars. A semi clears its throat on the highway that seventy years ago bypassed this necrotic heart of town.

He skids his bike into the intersection where the hanging traffic lights blink red so late. To his right and left are gravel lots where businesses used to thrive. He does not remember them. Only the shells of their demise. Weeds now. A pyramid of railroad ties.

The nearest half of the bridge is visible by degrees, a moldering giant’s skeleton, mint green and striped with claw marks of rust. The lights lining its span are different than those in town: These are white, the kind that throws out a bloom of violet around the bulb. There is something colder in their cast, weaker too, as if they have been hushed by something harsher still.

There is no river. Only fog. Without edge or terminus or seam or roll. Just gradient of obscurities to the very streetlights and the stars. Snakes shed skin; rivers shed breath. Breath it gives. Breath it will take. The insects here are shy.

Vito leaves his bike behind the bush on the cracked little platform of concrete where the American flag should hang. The flag old Boz fought for. The flag that burned his friend for trash.

What was his name?

Someone laughs. It is wicked. A woman’s hack.

From a car, a boat, the hills. It’s hard to gauge direction, distance, time with fog making the edge of the world seem somewhere close by. He hears it again, walks to the edge of the hill, and listens. Below him the potholed highway runs parallel to the bank; beyond that are railroad tracks; and further still the shore. It’s out there. In the fog. The sound of folks laughing, stabbing, hauling, wrenching, burning. A plunk and splash, spider of sound. Do catfish jump? In fog can they fly?

Fishermen at a bonfire, he tells himself without hearing. Throwing stones.

But the fog beneath him hides nothing warm. He should have known. Give and take. Give and take.

Halfway across the bridge’s span, just at the blurred boundary of sight, a figure steps into the fog. There is nothing else he can call it. It does not step out. It condenses, like a flock of scattered birds suddenly coming together tight enough to block the sun.

Vito frowns, follows the bank, forgets the sounds.

It’s a man. He thinks it’s a man. Farther than he can throw a football, but closer than he can kick it.

Funny thing: The figure hasn’t moved. But Vito sees him clearer now.

Simple enough with light and fog. Still, Vito is glad the stranger isn’t looking at him. It makes whatever he is doing seem private.

He turns to go. Old Boz may wake and need help getting to the loo.

But something suddenly congeals in Vito’s mind; involuntary, condensed, like the figure itself. The boy turns. He squints. Watches.

It is a man, both hands resting on the bridge’s pedestrian banister. Not like someone watching fog or throwing stones, but like someone about to grip and climb.

Give and take. Give and take.

Vito feels his mouth chew on nothing. The words don’t come.

The figure on the bridge heaves up and forward, not quite to its fulcrum. He is running. Vito runs. He passes beneath the blinking red light that for an instant changes the mist around him into a furnace.

“Wait!” Vito calls. He is calling.

But the climbing figure does not seem to hear.

A knee lifts.

“Stop!”

A foot swings.

Balance and momentum perpendicular to the living.

Vito throws himself forward. Joints pinch and sprain. He feels something soft under his fingers, grips and falls. His lungs belch out a sound, air pressed out by weight and something strange.

“What are you doing?” His voice is thin and anemic against the fog.

“Don’t.”

It’s a young man. For an instant, Vito thinks he’s seen him before. Square jaw. Neatly parted hair the silty color of the hidden river; eyes that match the fog.

“What are you doing?” he repeats.

The youth lies on his back, propped up on his elbows. His top half is folded cockeyed against the banister. His legs are unflexed and together. He should be looking straight at Vito, by the angle of his face, but his eyes, color of scuffed spoons, lie off-kilter, watching instead the bone-white sidewalk flaked to the gravel fill.

He looks embarrassed, or bashful, Vito thinks, but not disappointed, nor even a little relieved. His clothes are plain and thick and hardy. Member of a road crew, maybe, or a garbageman.

Vito rises to his knees. His shins burn with cinders. He rubs his palms across the front of his tank top.

“Don’t do that, man.”

His cheeks flush.

The young man frowns. His voice is steady and rich, though petulant: “You have no idea what I am.”

Vito wavers to his feet, brushes his knees.

“Whatever.” He tries to sound dismissive, cool. The young man should be his better, he knows. As it is, he is at least his equal. “Just don’t do that.”

“It’s already done,” the young man mutters.

Vito feels the entire cosmos glance at him, waiting for a reply. Perhaps he is the one to answer?

He is not. Not today.

“What’s your name?” he asks, and extends his hand.

The youth’s is surprisingly calloused in his. Vito blushes, forces himself not to wipe the feeling off on the front of his tank top. The young man’s face: all the more un-weathered, un-timed.

They stand, opposite one another. The young man straightens. He is a whole head taller than Vito. Maybe a little more. His chest is thick, shoulders broad, but still there is something frail, crushed, smothered about him.

“What’s your name?” Vito repeats, as if the words might steady the youth on his feet. But the young man looks suddenly up into town, as if he’s heard something’s call. Vito follows his gaze from the bridge, to the lights of town, to the bridge.

“What’s’a matter?”

The young man shakes his head.

“Can’t see past”—Vito swallows—“the fog?”

The youth’s eyes dart to his. They are angry, rabid. The backs of white doves being plucked clean.

“Decisions.”

Vito stares. The young man moves his face a lot when he talks, like someone wind-burned in winter. A militant kind of sadness too. He glances around, maybe for the cops his mum says are always around.

But there’s only fog. Fog, and the town it pushes further away.

Give and take.

“What’s your name?” Vito asks, a third time. “I’m Vito.”

The young man’s gaze is suddenly transfixed.

“What?”

Vito flashes him a weak smile.

“My name is Vito. What’s yours?”

Now the relief comes. The young man’s cheeks go from marble to flesh, concrete to pink. He sighs, shudders, almost excited.

“Michael,” he says, and extends his hand.

Strange, Vito thinks. It’s not so rough this time.

They sit together, backs to the banister, turned slightly away, talking more.

In the soft, stilted tones of those drowning and those who save them.

Gratitude and folly, love and duty. No one will see them, no one hear them, from the shore. Give and take. Give and take. Give.

Michael retrieves a flat cap from somewhere, unseen before.

“Nice.” Vito smiles with a corner of his mouth, and gestures with his chin.

The young man looks at him sidelong over his shoulder. Smiles back, slight and confident, but sore.

“What were you doing?” Vito tosses his head back toward the banister. He blushes. “I mean, why?”

Michael’s silver eyes tarnish again. Not fire. Just, maybe, remembering.

“You won’t understand.”

Vito frowns, picks gingerly at a cinder under the skin of his knee.

“Maybe,” he says. “I can try.”

Probably the most terrified he’s ever felt, he thinks. Sweat prickles danger, but Michael sighs.

“Juu ever hear of Colapesce?” the youth asks.

Too many syllables to be natural. It’s over-rehearsed. But fine.

Vito smiles, raises an eyebrow, sinks the other, and glances past his shoulder.

“A what?”

Michael snickers.

“Not what. Who.”

“Ha. My bad. Who?”

“Colapesce.”

Michael tells him about the boy from Sicily, lost to the sea, because of the king’s jealousy, or was it greed? He would toss his crown from the palace tower, off the shore. Colapesce would dive to get it, and each time he returned to tell the king about the treasures he saw below. And every time the king tossed his crown further out; and each time Colapesce dove deeper, found the crown, told of deeper treasures, and more.

“One day, the king tossed his crown as far as it could go.” Michael paused. “But that time Colapesce didn’t come back. When he dove, he found three pillars holding up the island of Sicily. One was fine. The second cracked. The third had completely crumbled away. So he stayed. He holds the whole island up on his shoulders. When he gets tired, there’s earthquakes. When he’s sad, volcanoes. The king lost everything: the treasures and his crown—and the boy who could get them all.”

Vito sniffs out his nose.

“Dang.”

Michael smiles.

“What?”

“That was awesome.”

“Awe-some?”

“Where’d you hear it?”

Michael snickers.

“Some wise old Italian guy I used to work for.” He glances at Vito. “A builder.”

The younger boy nods.

“I’m Italian,” he says. Chuckles. “And Irish.”

Michael: “I’m all-Mick.” His brows arch with humor. “And Colapesce.”

Vito shakes his head, grins.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

They are both getting to their feet again, brushing off because it fills the time. Face each other.

Michael takes his cap, reaches across, and screws it onto Vito’s head.

“Perfect fit,” he remarks, apparently satisfied. “Looks good on you.”

Vito smiles, blushes.

“I gotta get home. My Pap, he’s—”

Michael tips his chin.

“Thank you, mate.”

“Sure.”

They turn to go.

A few steps into the night, out of the fog. Vito suddenly halts, frowns, and turns. For some reason he is terrified Michael will not be there. But he is. Walking away, relaxed, fingertips crammed into high pockets, the straps of his denim overalls shifting between his shoulder blades.

“Hey,” Vito calls after him. “Michael.”

The young man swivels round, keeps walking backward, the heels of his stiff boots scraping.

“So you’re okay, right?” Vito squirms. “You’re not gonna—?”

Michael smiles, maybe even snickers, shakes his head.

“Naw. Not anymore.”

Turns to face away.

“Hey.”

“What?”

He’s nearly gone. Vito swallows hard. He has only a few seconds, he knows.

“You got a number? You know—in case—?”

The youth’s voice comes, stronger now than the vision of him: “Let’s meet here again.”

“When?”

“What?”

His voice is far.

“When?” Vito calls.

Michael’s reply: “When the fog comes.”

He is gone.

“Michael,” Vito calls. “Hey—”

But Michael does not answer anymore.

✥ ✥ ✥

School is long. No one cares about Colapesce. Even less do they understand why Vito does.

His bike ride home, the whole valley looks cast in surer light. None of the nighttime shadow-play. The barge-hustle and train-choir are drowned by the louder drones of life. There is no fog. The river, though he cannot see it, will be flat and polished beneath the September sky.

The bike he abandons in the ancient azalea that keeps the porch in shade through July. No air conditioning, but the air inside the house cooler, and still. Very still.

Vito halts in the front hall. His mum will be asleep upstairs.

But there is no other noise.

He’s not noticed it before, but usually he can tell by some ruckus that his grandfather is awake when he gets home from school: a sound of the Rifleman’s crusade, at least a whiff of bathroom spray.

There’s nothing. No give and take.

Vito frowns. Tiptoes down the hall. The silence is like the fog. Air itself vibrates. No give, no take, only silence. Nothing more. He stops at the edge of the old man’s den door, holds his breath, closes his eyes, and swallows. What will Boz look like dead? He has played through this before. Something about his missing leg will bother him. Why? Vito isn’t sure. Maybe the feeling something’s been left behind? He doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. He won’t think about it anymore. Steels himself. Makes the turn—

“Howdy, boy!” old Boz exclaims. “What can I do ya for?”

Vito exhales, smiles, eases himself into the room.

“I thought you were sleeping,” he lies.

The old man shoots a breath between his teeth.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he says, watching Vito through a single eye. The other is screwed shut tight. “Plenty of time then.”

Vito smiles, only half pretends to hear. He busies himself in the old man’s little tub of medicines on the end table. He does not know what he is looking for. Only wants the time. Give and take.

“Was Veronica here?” he asks.

“How’s that?”

“Your nurse.” Vito cups a hand halfway round his mouth like a horn.

“Veronica. Was she here?”

The old man bleats.

“Hell if I know. Every day is same as before.”

Vito smiles. So much the truth. But his grandfather looks supplied. The bandages are fresh enough, though the tape has not been pressed, or it has already begun to peel. The boy traces his fingertips over the ends. The old man stares straight ahead, like a dog being preened, obedient, ready to bound away, back into mud.

“Nothing new on today?” Vito asks, glancing at the T.V.

He cannot remember the last time he’s seen it off.

The old man reaches with both hands for his arm. Grabs it. Drums his fingers across the flesh.

For a second, Vito thinks the old man is about to bite him.

“They came last night,” Boz says, nearly a whisper, but not a secret: sheer delight.

“Who?”

The old man grins. He has his teeth in.

“Not who,” he says. “Remember. What.”

Vito stares. Nods.

“What came?” he asks.

The words are like stones in his mouth. His throat aches. His tongue is sore. Like he’s swallowed too much water in a gulp. Breathed too much air.

“Them from the fog.”

The corners of old Boz’s pale lips screw downward. He nods.

He looks like a scientist just proven wrong, or an artist proven right. Give and take.

Two worlds collide.

“What’s that?” Vito asks, his voice too high. He re-orders a few blister cards of pills, then puts them back again.

“They came last night,” the old man whinnies. “Passed right on by.”

Vito thought of Michael. The cap he placed upon his head. It hangs upstairs now, on the corner of his headboard. He wanted to wear it to school, but it felt too private, too—he didn’t know the word for it. Set aside? Give and take.

“You’ll live to see another day,” Vito says, amused, appeased. He turns to walk out the door.

“Don’t forget him.” The old man’s voice is firm.

Vito wheels about.

“Who, Pap?”

“Him that traded places. Can’t for the life of me remember his name.”

“Oh—” Vito’s smile spreads, then collapses. “Michael.”

His name sounds like a secret.

The house goes still again. Light is cement. Breath is steel.

Suddenly there rises the reek from the cellar. Just for a moment. No different than any day. Except now it tastes like fog, one a tepid September night.

“Michael,” the old man repeats. He sounds very satisfied. “That’s him.”

Vito returns. Sinks into the chair next to his grandfather’s. The velour is soft. Robin-egg blanched to gray. His shins are scraped; his palms and knees still sore.

“Pap,” he says.

The old man searches the cushions for something.

“Pap.”

“How’s that?”

“Have you ever heard of Colapesce?”

“Where is that—ah!” Boz faces him again, minimally triumphant.

“What?”

Vito smiles.

“Not what. Who.”

The old man frowns.

“Say again.”

Vito’s smile shifts, but he means it all the same. He leans in.

“Have you ever heard of Colapesce?”

“Cola-pesh?”

Hearing is fine. It’s the mind that wanes.

“Some kinda drink?”

Vito laughs, tells him of the crown thrown off from shore. He stays leaned forward when he’s finished. Last chances are always the biggest to disappoint. “That fella throwed his crown and told me to get it, I’d’ve told him to plug his own nose and walk the plank.” True to form.

Vito is not disappointed. Maybe a little, but amused.

“Where’d you hear it?” his grandfather asks.

Vito cocks his head to one side.

He’s told many this story today. But did not know why. This was it, he suddenly realizes: the old man’s question.

“A friend told me.”

The answer shines.

The old man nods with his shoulders.

“Sounds familiar,” the old man says.

Vito jumps up and tucks one leg between himself and the seat. They sit there side by side, two legs between them: old man and boy, gnarled and polished, given and—

“Really?”