My brother takes his expensive guitars and throws them around in his room and crashes them against tables and walls so that the necks break from the bodies. Jesús comes up in the elevator and says, “Qué pasa?” and we tell him it’s Toffee again and Jesús tells my mother she should call the police and my mother tells Jesús, “But Jesús, that’s my son,” and Jesús nods his head and then he goes home to the South Bronx after patting my mother on the back.

Suddenly my brother opens his door and he runs into the closet and pulls out the twenty-two and the bullets and meanwhile my mother is pulling at his arm and screaming for him to put the gun away, but he doesn’t and he just throws my mother against the bookshelf. Still holding the gun and the bullets he goes back into his room and slams the door. My mother is hurt at the bookshelf. She can’t catch her breath and books fall down around her, their dusty covers dirtying her face and shoulders. The dog is barking, running from my brother’s door to my mother.

“Shh,” my mother says to the dog and lifts her finger to her lips. We lift my mother up from the pile of books that have rained down around her and she goes to my brother’s door and she calls to him and bangs on the door but he tells her he will shoot himself now if she doesn’t go away, if she doesn’t leave him alone. The only one he will talk to, he says, is our father.

The phone company in our neighborhood is on strike. No one has service except an emergency phone center set up a few blocks down in a hotel lobby. “Call your father,” my mother says to me and Jody, “and run,” she yells, so me and Jody run to the hotel and there’s such a long line winding around the outside of the building that if we wait on it it could be too late.

“My brother’s got a gun, he’s going to kill himself, let me use the phone!” Jody starts to scream and the people make way and everyone is staring at us while Jody is fumbling for the dime and someone reaches out and gives us one and Jody calls our father where we know he’s staying at his apartment uptown.

He comes down on his bicycle wearing a beret. The bicycle is a WWII bicycle, army green with a clever design that features a wing bolt in the center support bar that when loosened lets the rider fold the bicycle in two. The beret is black wool. He leaves it on when he stands on the top of a ladder outside my brother’s door and tries to look down over the wall of my brother’s room that doesn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. The folded bicycle rests against the hallway wall looking deformed.

This night my brother doesn’t kill himself and I finally fall asleep with the image of my father still on the ladder with his beret on talking to my brother over his wall.

My mother’s bruise on her arm from my brother throwing her against the bookshelf heals like a hurricane swirl seen on radar when the weather’s reported on TV. The eye is the purplest part, the part that days afterward still makes her say merde after she brushes by accident up against a wall.

My brother stays inside all the time and lets his hair go greasy like the hot dog men. I come home and he is watching all the soap operas I’ve watched for years, asking me who the characters are, asking me to catch him up on years of destroyed lives.

He still keeps the gun in his room and sometimes I can hear him opening it and I don’t know why, except I think to look into it, at all the black that he can see.

It’s dark in Rena’s basement where she’s having a party and we play spin the bottle. Whenever the bottle spins to me I kick it with my toe so I won’t have to be kissed because I know the boys all want to kiss Rena instead. I leave them in the basement and go upstairs. It’s the middle of the day and Bonnie isn’t home but Bonnie’s Hells Angel boyfriend’s motorcycle is parked in the middle of the floor and I see him sleeping on Rena’s mother’s bed. He sleeps naked. On his arms I see tattoos so faded I can’t tell what they are. I walk up close to him. He needs to shave and in the corners of his mouth is white spittle. He smells like some kind of liquor he either drank or threw up. His eyes move back and forth under his veiny eyelids shiny with grease or sweat. His eyelashes have lint stuck to them. There’s a round scar on his forehead that looks like a doctor didn’t know where to give him a vaccine and stuck it in his forehead instead. He whines a little, like our dog does in her sleep. I watch his feet too, to see if they’ll move the way her paws move, but they don’t. They are like women’s feet, pale and long and thin. Fuck, this Hells Angel would die in the desert, I think. He would die in the jungle, in the wilderness he would not survive. Bonnie walks in.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says to me and takes off her clothes in front of me and then sits on her bed and swallows a pill from a bedside waterglass and lies down next to her Hells Angel and closes her eyes.

I walk home. It’s hot and all the gum stuck to the street once dried has now gone to goo again and collects on the bottoms of my shoes and when I walk it’s like moonwalk, a slow labored lift for each foot, the gum in strings I try to walk off. I stop at a phone booth and check the change return for coins. I find dimes and nickels and then I turn to go, but I decide to put the coins in the slot and start dialing my father. His slut answers and says he’s not there. I want to know where he is but she says goodbye and then hangs up on me before I get the question asked.

The telephone booth floor is metal and rough, a good floor for wiping off the bottoms of my shoes, which I do, saying at the same time, “That fucking slut.”

A woman wants to use the phone, she raps on my glass door with a coin. I don’t look at her. I keep wiping off my feet. She starts pressing her face up against the crack in the door, telling me I’m not using the phone, so I should let someone else use it.

“I’m using it,” I tell her and then I lift my foot up as high as it can go and I pull the phone off the hook and I start using the mouthpiece to wipe the gum off the bottom of my shoe.

At home the telephone rings, but we can’t find it. We find the cord, hold it with both hands and crawl and follow it like bomb specialists in search. It’s deep under our tower of garbage.

“Let the damn thing ring itself to death,” our mother says. But couldn’t it be some boy? Some cray-pas boy drawn to the best of Louisa’s abilities? Or could it be our father?

“Oh, find the phone,” we say. We stand up on all the bags and toss them down where they split and ooze black liquid, where their ties come undone and hellish stink rises up in vapors and so we open up our mouths to breathe through them instead. The ringing gets louder. Wipe the maggots off it, I yell to Jody, who has found it first, who instead of wiping them off, flicks them while they lift and curl hidden in the dial holes.

“Hello,” Jody says. And it is our father and we sit down on the garbage and listen.

“What are we doing?” Jody says, she looks around her at the garbage everywhere, and then at me.

“Watching television,” I say.

“Watching television,” Jody says into the phone.

“Let me talk now,” I say and Jody turns away from me so I can’t grab the phone. Finally it’s my turn, and there is nothing much to say and I can hear him wanting to get off, playing with something in the background, my sister talked him out and now he is talkless and bored. I hear something in the background. More coins on his mantel? The clasp on a briefcase? And then I know, I figure it out, it’s the hinge on his refrigerator, opening and closing. He is perusing for a meal.

“When can we see you, when can we visit?” I say. He is busy, oh so busy, there is the film, its early-morning and every-day hours.

“Do you know,” he says, “that some people don’t know the sun is a star? Do you know?”

He says there are more morons than you can imagine, more stupidity in the world than we could ever think up, the statistics are astounding, the stupid rule the earth, never be smart, if you want to learn something, any one thing in your life, you must learn to never be smart because you will lose every time. “Learn to be stupid,” he says. “It pays.”

Then we ask him again. Can we come, please? we say and he says all right. We are allowed once again to visit him at his summer rental.

The corn is ready to eat. There are special instructions to follow. Instructions my father’s father insisted on. Boil the water first, then go to the garden and pick the ears from the stalks and run with them in your arms to where the water is boiling on the stove. Shuck the ears as quickly as possible, as close as possible to the boiling water, let the husks fall to the floor, don’t even spend time leaning over a trash pail trying to make sure the silk doesn’t go all over the place. Cook the corn for no longer than four minutes. Use a timer. Don’t cover the pot. Roll the corn back and forth on top of a stick of butter. Use hickory-smoked salt. Enjoy. When you are finished biting the kernels off roll the cobs in butter again, suck on them, then roll them again in the butter a third time and throw them outside where the dog can hold them between his front paws and gnaw on them for hours.

My father is ripping off the husks. Silk is hanging from his elbows and his forearms like tassels from a cowboy’s suede coat. His slut is amused. She’s sipping wine. Behind her in the window I can see the sun setting over the fields.

“Faster! Faster!” she says, she laughs and sips. The windows start to steam and I can no longer see out them. We eat with the cornsilk and husks still in a pile on the floor by the stove.

“You can smoke it,” my father says and after dinner, while his dog is gnawing on his corn, my father rolls the silk in cigarette paper and lights it. It burns so quickly there’s not even enough time to put your lips to it and inhale. His slut laughs.

“You’ll smoke your fingers instead,” she says while standing in the doorway. The stars are out. So many stars my father can’t find the constellations. He’s seeing handles of big and little dippers in groups of stars that are constellations not yet named.

*   *   *

One day our father comes to our house.

“What’s he want?” our mother says, looking out from the window, watching him jump off his bicycle and come through our doors. He wants things that belonged to his parents, he says. Things he says that are rightfully his. He heads first for an Indian bowl.

“The Navajos used it to cook,” he says. There are fire stains going up around the sides. The old bowl, passed on down from his great-grandparents, is worth money, he says, and he will have it appraised. Our mother seethes. She holds her hands in fists jammed into front pockets of her cardigan. We can see the bumps of knuckles plainly through the wool.

Our father takes the bowl off our shelf.

“Leave it,” she tells our father.

“Oh, no. This is mine,” our father says. “This was never yours.”

“I want the money from it, then. Money for the children,” our mother says.

“Sell it? Sell it?” our father says. “You don’t know anything. You don’t sell something like this. That’s what a dumbshit would do. That’s what an asshole would do.”

Our mother runs up to our father, her fists coming out from her cardigan pockets.

She flies at our father’s back, her hands still fists, a bit of lint from her cardigan pocket perched on a white knobby knuckle.

And then she rides him, her legs wrapped around his waist while she hits him all over—at his head, into his eyes and then he starts to yell that she’s blinding him, and “Ahhh,” he yells, and “Ow” and our mother still hits him and I wish the dog were here, because if she were she would bark and bite at either of them and somehow make them stop, but the dog is out with Jody and it’s just me and Louisa and Louisa isn’t doing anything, she’s just watching, and so I go and I pull our mother off our father’s back. I grab her hair and pull it with all my weight. She lets go of our father and falls to the floor and she’s hurt, grabbing a bruised elbow and crying with her eyes closed.

Our father is leaving now with the bowl under his arm. He is walking backwards out the door, maybe not wanting to leave his back exposed to her. When I was very small I would tiptoe to the edge of their bed, his face close to hers, and wonder if they were dreaming the same dream. Then he would roll over, or she would cough, and I would walk backwards, the way he is doing now, only tiptoeing. I left because I didn’t want to wake them. I didn’t want them to stop having the same dream.

In his bicycle basket on his handlebars he keeps a hammer for banging on trunks of taxis that cut him off as he rides. He has learned how to weave through the traffic and run the red lights when the taxis realize what happened and start chasing after him. He wears rubberbands around one ankle, to keep the flare of his pants from getting caught in the chain. When he is tired he holds onto the bumpers of buses to catch a faster ride. Is his slut in the kitchen when he comes home? She is snipping parsley with scissors, neat little cuts whose repetitive sounds are pleasant to his ear. He stands behind her, wanting to encircle her waist, but she turns to face him, the scissors’ tips held close to his neck still stuck with leaves from the parsley. “Oh, Jesus,” he says. He moves away her hand holding the scissors.

“Snapper,” she says, pointing to the broiler that’s on with the tips of the scissors.

He moves to the living room, sits in a chair. He touches the skin around his eyes and then closes them, lightly touching the lids.

“All the ride uptown I saw stars,” he says.

“Lemon?” she asks, her hand held over the snapper she’s pulled from the broiler and put onto plates, ready to squeeze a lemon wedge.

“Tea bags, won’t that bring the swelling down?” he says. She squeezes the lemon anyway over his fish.

After they’ve eaten, he lies on their bed, his hands resting on his chest, his thumbs hooked under his armpits and he looks at the ceiling.

“Christ almighty,” he says.

His slut takes the keys off the mantel, says she’s going out for a walk.

“It’s turning cold,” he says, before she closes the door.