The wind howled and moaned around through the cracks of the buildings as I made my way home. The street was empty, and the pavement was wet and shining in the slowly clearing moonlight. I crumpled the newspaper I’d been holding over my head, and threw it to the ground. Throwing something over my shoulder has always seemed fulfilling to me, adding a note of finality to something to insignificant to care. But what the hell. I was feeling expansive. Doesn’t everyone feel that way after a rainstorm?

I could hear tires and horns echoing in the distance, but I was off the main road. The street light at the intersection blinked from green, through yellow, and finally to red, lending color to the slick brick and asphalt. Nobody was there to heed it, and I almost stopped myself, if only to save it from its utter futility. I hummed, trying to stave off loneliness with noise. The cavalry charge of the William Tell overture, I picked without really noticing. The quickness of the song spurred me on. I reached a high note, not caring what creatures of the alleyways heard me-

“Watch, wallet, phone.”


Monty tackled me to the ground, flying off the slide with the energy of a cannonball. I felt as if I’d been standing a foot from the muzzle, as I was driven into the sunbaked woodchips. He’d come down the slide and flown into me without pause.

“Get off me, ya filthy redskin!”

“Racist! Racist!” he screamed, kneeling on my shoulder blades. I cried for mercy, and he let me sit up, though he kept the stick in my back. His eyes were smiling; his fantastic eyes, but he kept his mouth grim.

“It’s scalping for you. A nice ginger for my collection.”



The last note died a lingering death. The air in my lungs followed, and I gasped like a fish. My back was arched, and I felt the whole of my being coiled taut. A metal barrel dug into my lower back, and I could almost feel the bullet lodging itself in my spine. It would hurt, wouldn’t it? I couldn’t breathe.

“Now,” said the man. His arm was tight around my, and I could smell his desperation. He breathed into my ear.

“I’m waiting,” he intoned, pressing even closer. My voice came in a wheeze.

“Okay. Okay.” I reached, more steadily then I would have thought possible, towards my pocket.


Monty was always the Indian, but he always won. I suspected that I, as the sheriff, was supposed to be taking him into custody, but he was older, and must have known better. He was two whole years bigger and stronger, and of course he won. But I didn’t mind. He was wired differently, it seemed to me. He took my games seriously, and didn’t seem to care that I was a skinny little boy with coke-bottle glasses, whose parents had pulled him out of Little League to save me the shame.

“It’s okay,” he’d tell me. “Baseball’s dumb. I hate baseball.”

Monty was big, even for his age, with curly dark hair and the power of will to move a truck, especially if someone told him not to. His eyes were my favorite, though. One was black, so you couldn’t even see where the pupil began. But the other was pale blue, like the sky before the sun had made it all the way up.


“Here,” I dropped the watch with my other belongings. He muttered at me not to move as he bent down, shoving my stuff into the pockets of his tattered raincoat. I squeaked in a breath, passing it through my fear-blocked throat as if it were the size of a camel. ‘It is as likely’, I remember my mother saying when she couldn’t find a dollar, ‘for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle, as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ That didn’t seem fair to me. Was excluding a man because he was rich any better then excluding a man because he was poor? My mother told me that I was right, that it was just a saying.

I remember the way she smelled, like sunshine and shampoo, and I remember exactly how she moved, fast and practiced. She finally located a bill, and told me to buy myself a lemonade.

I squeeze my eyes shut, falling down the barrel of the gun and into a summer day when I was seven.

“Buy one for Monty, too, Nick. He needs some cheering up.” She would hug Monty like she hugged me; she was a just that type of mother- a mother from her core outwards. It was her entire being. Monty never hugged back, but he took the lemonade. That only encouraged her. She’d give him lunch on a special china plate, one that was blue like Monty’s eye and white like his knuckles when he got nervous. It had some birds, and a sad looking woman holding a baby. A man was going off with an ax. I wondered who’d made that plate. What was the story? What happened to the words? I could keep on wondering that, if it meant I could ignore the promised bullet, and the breathing that hadn’t left my side.




“Monty, where are you going?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Why?”
He shrugged, and walked home, kicking a pebble as he went. I was on his black side, until his back was turned, and I couldn’t see either bit. He looked the same as anybody else.


I concentrated; trying to leave a body I knew would end, cold and blue, sooner rather then later. It was coming, but it would be quick. Right? It always looked quick, when the cowboys bit the hard-packed dust. I would scream, and I would fall, and I’d go blue with the absence of a soul to fill my shell. Blue, like a little boy’s eye and a bright summer day and my Mother’s china. Blue like the ocean or like a Monday or like a moon that comes twice.


I was on his blue side when he drove away, in the back seat with piles of suitcases and clothes. His father drove away, and I waved at the back of the trailer until the dust it kicked up reached me, and I had to stop to cough, and then to cry.


Blue like the man’s left eye as he turned and ran into a shadow, as black as his right. He sunk into a puddle of ink by the corner of one of the buildings, and my knees gave way. I slid down the wall, breathing hard into my hand. I would live. II would live for a day, or for a year, or for a century, I don’t know. But Monty wouldn’t be the one to turn me cold and blue, and that was the most wonderful thing I could find in myself at that moment. The streetlight turned back to green, but when I found that I could run, I saw the passing rain-wet world in only shades of blue.