Chapter 1

A cold wind blew across G2’s face and he stirred in his sleep. He clenched his eyes shut against wakefulness, but the ammonia smell of fresh urine assaulted him. He could have slept through the wind. He just never got used to the piss. He didn’t think it was his, but his hand slipped down to his pants just to be sure.

G2 cracked one eye open. Wee Willy was still letting go with a gusher not ten feet away against a bush that was nearly dead from the frequent waterings. G2 should have put his bedroll further away.

Before he let go of the last vestiges of sleep, G2 assessed his situation as he did every time he awoke.

No. It didn’t feel that way.

There was no “make you feel good inside” feeling. No deep satisfaction. No heroic pride. No nobility. None of the things there should have been.

When you read about it in school—back in sixth grade or so—you always knew the hero had that feeling. Like that Union soldier who led the charge up some hill in the history books. He knew when he set foot outside the bunker that he wouldn’t make it halfway up the hill before forty musket balls peppered his body. But someone else would pick up the flag where he fell and move it further up the ridge. He knew he’d done his job—done his duty. He was brave and heroic and proud. He was satisfied that his life had meaning. He felt good inside, even while he was dying.

That was the way it was supposed to be when you volunteered, even if it meant you died in the process. You felt good about it.

Gerald Good, G2 to everyone else, checked again. He looked for the feeling. The satisfaction.

No. It didn’t feel that way.

Bad X was making his way through the camp, putting the touch on people to pay their “union dues.” Bad X was an organizer. It seemed there was one in every camp. G2 considered slipping out of camp while Bad X shot the bull with Greaser. It wouldn’t make a difference, though. Bad X would catch up with him tomorrow or the next day. You didn’t want to get behind on your dues. Of course, G2 could hop across the track and catch the train for Cincinnati that was leaving the freight yard. G2 was pretty sure it was in Cincinnati that he met his first Bad X, though, so it wouldn’t be any different there. Besides, if you didn’t pay your dues to Bad X, you couldn’t point to him when Bad Y or Bad Z showed up. You could always count on some bad ass coming around. You put the touch on folks at the supermarket and Bad X put the touch on you in the camp. Only most of the time you didn’t beat the folks at the supermarket to a pulp.

Shit. He might as well be working at General Fucking Motors.

“G2, my man.” Bad X grinned showing the empty spaces on either side of his one remaining front tooth. “Watcha got for me, brother?”

G2 reached out his hand and let his one crumpled up dollar bill fall out of it into Bad X’s giant paw. It took a minute for Bad X to smooth out the bill enough to tell what it was.

“That all you got?” G2 reached in his pocket and produced another quarter. He nodded his head. The weight of his chin seemed to drag his head down to his chest. Maybe Bad X wouldn’t beat him.

“When you gonna get your shit together, G2? Don’t know what I’m gonna do with you.” Bad X sat down on the upturned tin can next to G2 and slumped himself forward. From a distance they looked like identical statues—the kind of urban art you find at bus stops and random corners of public parks. “Brothers hearing the news” the artist would title the sculpture. People would read it and then walk all the way around the statue, trying to figure out what kind of bad news the brothers had just heard. “Death in the family,” one would say. “War,” would come from another. “Wall Street collapse,” a third would chime in. Whatever it was, it had to be terrible. Two grown men sitting there as morosely as if the world just ended. Some guy in a wool scarf would come by and look at them. The sculpture would “speak to his heart.” The next day he would come back with a friend and two more scarves. He’d wrap one around the neck of each of the bronze brothers and then sit beside them in the same position—chin lowered to his chest and shoulders slumped forward—while his buddy took a picture of them with his cellphone and posted it to Facebook. When they left, the guy in the scarf would consider leaving the scarves around the bronze necks for others to see, but then he’d grab them as he walked away.

“It’s the ‘conomy, stupid.” Bad X chuckled at his joke. No one in the camp had ever got it. “You can’t even get sober for a buck. You go MacD’s and you still need the quarter to pay the tax on their dollar menu.” Bad X tilted his head to consider G2. “You been panhandling down in the district?” G2 nodded slightly. “Those rich shits don’t care about you. You gotta go to Safeway where moms with three kids hanging off their skirts will give you money to keep you away from their babies. They cover it up by trying to teach their brats about helping others. That’s okay. You get down there and be an object-lesson to the little ones.”

Having finished his lecture, Bad X stood up to move on. G2 didn’t move.

“G2.” He looked up. Bad X was holding the quarter out to him. G2 reached up for it slowly. “Bad X never leaves a man with nothing,” he whistled through the gaps in his teeth. “Put some more with this and bring a bottle of two-buck chuck to my fire tonight. We’ll call it even.”

G2 watched him go. Looked like Whiskers would be the next one Bad X touched. He looked back. G2 picked up his canvas bag with “Windows XP” stenciled on the side of it and headed out to work the parking lot at Safeway.

There was too much time to think, that was the hell of it. When that kid in the Civil War—or was it the Revolution?—when he went charging up that ridge, he only had to hold his thoughts of honor and bravery for a couple of minutes before they cut him down. It was over. He could spend eternity being a hero. Twenty years, though. That was too much time to think. That kid couldn’t have held his self-satisfaction and good feelings for five minutes if the first bullet hadn’t killed him. Twenty years going up the ridge—why that’d drive a man crazy. Had it only been twenty years? It seemed like forever.

G2 pulled the piece of church bulletin out of his pocket from last Easter. He had four of them stashed in his bag. He got them out of the recycle bin before the janitor chased him away. All the words to a hymn G2 didn’t know were printed on one side. A lot of Jesus and halleluiah. But the other side was blank. It was clean pink paper. He couldn’t understand why that rich church threw away perfectly good blank paper and then chased him away from taking it. Enough paper and you could do anything. One day he’d write all about what it was like—his life experiences. He’d sell the books to that rich church about how he was saved by the words of a hymn in their recycle bin. His experiences kind of all ran together after a while, though. He didn’t know exactly where to start. But he had paper. He dug the stub of pencil out of his pocket and chewed a bit of the wood back away from the lead.

“XXN417,” he wrote. Yes. That was definitely a good one. He hadn’t seen a license plate with a higher number than that. It wouldn’t be long now until he’d see one that started with “Y.” Maybe two or three months, or when he got back next spring. He put away his pencil and paper. Wouldn’t write down anymore today. It wasn’t like he was obsessed with it. He just liked knowing what number they’d got up to. There was meaning to the order. He would figure it out eventually. He held up his cardboard sign and a driver at the exit rolled down the window.

“G2,” the driver said. Well, of course he knew G2’s handle. It was scrawled on his sign right under “God bless.” G2 walked over to the car and bowed his head respectfully. “Have you eaten today?” G2 shook his head. “Here,” said the driver. G2 held out his hand hoping for a dollar and the driver put a wrapped granola bar in it. “That’ll give you a little something in your stomach.”

“God bless,” G2 whispered as he stepped back on the curb. The car pulled out of the parking lot onto 32nd Street and headed west. G2 put the bar in his canvas bag and waited for another car. Rule number one: Never let them see you eating.

Sometimes they were like that. They wouldn’t give you money because that just encouraged panhandling and drunkenness. But they couldn’t let you starve either. So they’d break into a six-pack of granola bars and give you one. Or they’d hand you a Jell-O Pudding Cup. Maybe they’d have a piece of beef jerky or half a sandwich. Stuff you had to eat today or it would give you cramps and the trots. They never cared about tomorrow. Why should he?

But when somebody gave you food, you never stood there and ate it. That discouraged anybody else from lending a hand. They’d see you had food and figure you weren’t bad enough off to need their help. It was like people who only played the lottery if it was over 20 million. Enough to make it worthwhile. That was the problem when there was a line of cars. If one person gave you something, that let everyone else off the hook. So you stashed the bar, the sandwich, the yogurt in your bag and waited until enough cars passed that those in line hadn’t seen you take a gift. Then maybe another one would feel generous and this time you’d get a buck. If you got enough ... Well, five bucks would get you a liter-and-a-half bottle of cheap sweet wine. You could share that around the fire at night. Guys would give you their food for a taste of your wine. That was the way it worked. If G2 couldn’t make a few more bucks today, he’d trade that granola bar for a drink of someone else’s wine. G2 didn’t mind. He could go two or three days without food before his gut started tying up in knots. Going without wine was a lot harder. It made him think too much. That thinking. That’s what makes life miserable. If you just keep thinking about it, you’ll go crazy.

The line in front of the Job Corps office was long, as usual. Maybe even longer. G2 really couldn’t think why he got up to come over here this morning. They never had anything for him. He didn’t think they even liked him. Mexicans would get all the good jobs before he even got to the door. The Chinese lady who asked for your name and identification definitely didn’t like him. She got mad because he couldn’t understand her. Apparently her Spanish was better than her English because the Mexicans all seemed to understand her just fine. They grinned and nodded their heads and then they went to work. G2 wasn’t really sure if he would trust her enough to get in one of those trucks with the Mexicans, headed to some sort of job somewhere he didn’t know doing something he didn’t know how to do. He wouldn’t put it past her to send him off to a concentration camp. Maybe he’d disappear and nobody would know he was gone until they got sent to “a job.” They did that kind of thing. “What happened to G2?” Bad X would ask. Someone—maybe Bill White, black as night—would say, “I think he went to Cleveland. He been talking about Cleveland.” Like G2 would ever go to Cleveland. It was too cold there to live on the street and G2 hated the shelters that made you listen to the preaching and made you take a shower while they kept your bag “safe” and wouldn’t even let a bottle of cheap wine through the front door. He could stand the other if he could have a drop of wine. But no. It was like a concentration camp. If he got in one of those trucks to go to a job, he would disappear like a Jew in Poland and they’d dig his bones out of a mass grave in fifty years and say “Oh look. It’s G2. Guess he didn’t go to Cleveland after all.”

Two men walked across the street and stood in line behind G2. They weren’t day laborers. You could tell by their easy stance and the pack of cigarettes they shared. They must have come from across town to get the good jobs at the Job Corps. They were big men. G2 felt tiny standing in their shadow. He felt his heart beating faster. They would probably get nice clipboard jobs while G2 lifted boxes of fruit off a truck. That Chinese lady didn’t like G2. But she’d like these two. She would treat them special. “You want to work in air conditioned place?” she’d say to them in her Asian accent. Chinese? Japanese? Some nese. “I got nice supervisor position just made for man like you.” G2 just wished they wouldn’t stand so close behind him. There was a whole sidewalk there and they didn’t need to crowd him. G2 hated crowds. Crowds were dangerous. What was that story about people getting trampled in a football stadium? Or was it a nightclub? Didn’t make a difference. It could have been in line at the Job Corps. Newspapers would have headlines in the morning. “Stampede at Job Corps kills one, injures many more.” Would he be the one or the many more? That’s why he always put his bedroll on the far edge of a camp. Some people liked to be in the middle of things, surrounded by bums snoring and farting. You could die of ass-fixiation if you slept in the middle of camp. G2 had to get out of the middle. If he moved someone would be on him. Someone would step on him when they got up to take a leak. Some sloppy drunk would fall over him and then beat him up for being in the way. G2 didn’t like having someone walking around while he slept. It wasn’t natural. When G2 lay down on the outer edge of the camp, he could get up and leave whenever he wanted to. He might decide to catch that early morning train west and no one would be the wiser.