Gigantic faces smile down from the billboards. A hand holds a TastyKake as big as a house. The sun is still bright, yet weaker than a month ago. Men come out of the bushes and stare at John; he walks farther up the bank. He’s been waiting along the river all morning.
Darnay comes through the fence, not the usual way. He wears gold earrings, tiny hoops, and his hair is cut in a low fade, perfectly flat on top. He doesn’t reach out to shake John’s hand.
“What up?”
“Nothing.”
They both look at the ground, the dirty white gravel. John’s got new basketball shoes; Darnay wears his same pair from last year, toes coming unstitched since his feet have grown.
“What are you doing there?” Darnay says. “What’s going on with that?”
“Nothing.” John had been scratching at his hip, not paying attention to what he was doing.
“Just itching your ass like that for no reason?” Darnay says. “Let’s see your tattoo.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
John tries to wait it out, but he has no choice. He pulls down the waistband of his shorts. The angled J is faded. Darnay leans closer, squints at the rows of tiny white lines, cross-hatched, above the ink.
“They do it with lasers,” John says. “A little at a time. Doesn’t hurt.”
“What happened to you?” Darnay says.
“My mom saw it.”
“Why would she be looking at your naked ass?”
“She would’ve seen it, sometime.”
“You told her,” Darnay says. “Doesn’t surprise me, but still.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“You want me to tell you?”
“I can’t do anything.”
“That’s plain,” Darnay says.
Across the river, cars and trucks chase each other down the expressway. An innertube, escaped from somewhere upriver, slips by, holding nothing as it slides beneath the bridge, bounces off a support, and is gone.
At Swan’s funeral, John and Darnay had sat apart from each other. Terrell was there, too, the third point of a triangle. And Swan, lying there in a hand-me-down suit he never wore when he was alive. His coffin was too big, made for a man, so there was an extra foot of space up by his head. If his bones were broken, if he was bruised, all that had been hidden. His hands, folded together, resting across his stomach, looked like they might move. No one sang, and the church was half-empty, all the bare pews behind them. Afterward, Swan’s little sister, Zina, counted silently, her feet moving as if they were jumping rope.
The funeral was the day after Swan died—there was no waiting; that was when their story was still holding, when everyone still blamed the old man. The boys denied that they’d even been at the waterworks that night, said they hadn’t seen Swan since the morning before.
“Did Terrell tell?” John says.
“About us?” Darnay says. “If he did, we’d be where he is. Terrell won’t tell. Someone like you—you’d tell in a second.”
“I haven’t.”
“You will,” Darnay says. “And it doesn’t matter. But Terrell won’t tell—I mean, he’s still got his tattoo. You’re the only one who doesn’t, of all of us, now.”
They’re both silent for a moment; neither wants to think of the tattoo on Swan’s body, inside that coffin, under the ground.
John looks up, tries to meet Darnay’s eyes, but Darnay is looking past him, at something else.
Emerging from the bridge’s shadow, into the sun, the man walks toward them, between the train tracks. He steps on every other tie with his cowboy boots, a stretch that makes him alternately grow and shrink as he approaches.
“He sees us,” Darnay says.