AFTERNOON THEY stumbled the brick streets downtown stoned i and stared at the bridge wire and steel humped over the black water. He took her hand.

Are you my boyfriend? she said.

She kept her face at the wire ties and pulled twice on the pin joint and gave it to him.

I don’t know.

She blew out. The wind came hard off the river, smelled tree bark and rot.

Me neither.

You want me to?

You could. I don’t like no one else.

Alright.

They found a place where Alice Washington said the old man who kept bar, greased with cataract, couldn’t see who he poured to. During the daylight he never asked, because he figured the ones taking their beers before noon were old enough, by a long time, had been at nursing themselves because of children or mortgages, dead hounds and grandmothers, and wouldn’t have a license, anyway, with all the wrecked cars, judges and jail cots. They put the drinking age up to twenty-one a few years before; the old man didn’t know this, or he didn’t much care, but either way, she said, they’d get some drinks. He followed her up to the stools, tin leg, vinyl drum skinned at the seattops, and sat down, put his feet to the low rung. He notched the soles of his boots at the angle where block heel met the arch, squashed the toes down, at the plank floor, like he pressed a gas pedal. Cigarette burns on the wood, like stress marks the reading teacher at school put above syllables on words he wrote to the blackboard. The old man got two glasses with his left hand, thumb, index and middle finger ringed at the fat handles, held them atilt beneath the beer spigot and swatted the tap with the other hand, long white hair pulled a tail in back, double knotted with a blue rubber band, the top of his hands, starting where the knuckles pressed, white, liver spots and grill burns. Terry looked at his white callused eyes, skeined wet cotton, blinking. Alice Washington handed the old man a dollar, and he nodded, rang the register door open and put the bill to the drawer.

They drank the first ones fast, then got two more and sipped at those. He felt slow, filled up a damp bog in his face and hands. Their cigarettes slumped to the black plastic ashtray, his no filters, Alice Washington’s menthols, the old man bartender’s skinny baby sweet cigars. Alice Washington bought two rounds for the bartender, all of them laughed there, like some family at holiday dinner.

When she kissed him, beneath the Indian head penny sign over the back door, beside a rusted grease vat, her mouth tasted sweet, his teeth slick and hard against hers, and after a minute she pulled back and studied him. She wiped her bottom lip with a back sleeve, then touched it lightly, and then she looked at the tip of her finger. She laughed, touched her bottom lip again, put the finger out to him in a point, got close to him and held it near his mouth. He let his bottom jaw sag open, her finger salty over his lips, against his tongue when she pushed it through.

It was early, dark on her street. They leaned to cars parked and squinted at the windows. Some were unlocked. They opened one and sat inside, used an ashtray in the dash. The light slipped, window glass gone frost. Her blond hair was long and wrapped on her head with a thick blue rubber band. Her glasses were too big, bent one arm from sleeping in them some nights, skin and hair streaked from never wiping them. She pushed them up on her nose. She told him she liked two rock and roll bands, Big Star and T Rex, much more than any others. She told him she couldn’t match her clothes.

She led him on the stairs, and they went to her room. He sat down on the pink shag carpet beside the bed and she went into the bathroom. She rested a hand on the sink. In the mirror at the medicine cabinet he watched her brush her teeth. She met the gums on a down stroke, used a red toothbrush with a fat head and arm. It looked something for a child. She spat loud and looked in the mirror and pulled her lips up high. She held them, clinked her teeth, spat again. The water stopped. She came back into the room and raised the lid for the record player on the low bedside table and put the arm down. The music scratched at the grooves, something he didn’t know, the man’s voice high, like a bird. He felt it at his hips, some wire there cut loose. He pushed up on his hands and went over and stood in front of the television. He pressed buttons at the black box on top. The channels turned. He stared at the picture. The company didn’t have the means and only put wire to the edge of town, but some kids at school talked about the box with red numbers on it and all the channels and no rabbit ears. He was yet to see such a thing as cable television. She unplugged the thick wire from the back and the picture blanked. She messed with the antennae.

No one else has it, he said. Come on.

It’s better you have to look for something.

I heard there’s a channel that plays music, all the time, with like little movies of the songs and the bands. That’s just goddamn incredible.

She put the ears wide. The picture caught, then broke up. She moved the metal around some more, turned the channel knobs. The picture stayed gray black, fast snow.

It’s dumb, that television, she said.

She took an earring from her bureau, and laid it beside the antennae, and the static jumped, and popped longway at black bars run down the screen. The earring was a hoop she took from her mother, a silver crane curled on itself and biting its own feet, and she dropped it to a short white paper cup filled halfway with water and hydrogen peroxide, and she shook it around. After a few minutes she took it out, and held it over the cup. The earring dripped and bubbled.

I’ve seen snakes this way, she said. Feet in the mouths like that.

She pressed the tip against her right earlobe and worked it around some and pushed it through.

Not cranes though. It means something I bet.

She dipped a cotton ball to the cup, and then she dabbed her ear.

Have you done that before or something? he said.

No, she said.

Does it hurt?

Not much.

She got a picture from a dresser drawer and held it to him. He took it. A girl looked like her but older stood on a bright field, and the sky was big and deep behind her.

That’s my sister Nora, she said.

He turned it over. On the back she wrote in red pen, how little we really need? and come if you want, and beneath the words a numbered state road and a box number.

She lives there, she said.

Where?

She tapped the picture.

Alice said her sister went to college nearby, dropped after three semesters, and never came back, and now she lived with some other people in houses made of wood, among evergreen and snow on ten acres somewhere north of Boulder, Colorado.

They take care of each other, she said. They grow vegetables and marijuana.

He liked vegetables and marijuana.

You can do anything you want. There’s no such thing as parents.

They took a path through the woods. Seth Merritt lived in a duplex, white and plank sided, and everyone there seemed bigger than them, taller, eaters of meat and lard. Mostly they passed at shoulders, square, block jaws like the Vikings he saw on television and in the encyclopedias, flush cheeked ax wielders, beards so long and orange they twisted them to braids. He felt his face while they walked, in front of his ears where sideburns should be but were not. He rubbed his chin; something sharp, maybe, starting there. He was not sure but he felt hopeful. They went through the fireplace and cigarette smoke to the laundry room in back, and she pulled the door shut behind, and they stood quiet in the dark and listened to voices rattle the thin walls, kids from the school in the rooms past, kids who went to school there once, their sisters and people they worked with, a few bare ribbed cats. They shared a cigarette and started at a joint, and she put her face down, wiped her nose fast with the back of a hand and sniffed, spoke to him low.

Just below us now, beneath us it’s concrete, and then it’s dirt, and things living in the dirt, and there’s rocks, and bones, and animal bones, and human bones, and past that it’s more rocks, and some water, there’s caves, and even farther it’s the center, and it’s turning all the time, and not even solid.

Terry looked at her. She kept her eyes to the floor.

Or bridges, she said. I think about those, like part will just break or crack, and cars falling off, and people in them. Or just a half bridge, and no one knows, and they keep driving. Sometimes I think I’ll leave here. I was born in a car. My sister’s the only one that knows that. And you now. In the backseat of a Mustang. I’m sure it was raining. I’m sure it was cold.