And see they did. Soon John was down to his last hundred, and then he broke it, and then he was down to his last twenty. Then Rick cackled, and John threw his sole remaining five at Rick's chest. Rick caught it, kissed it, added it to his tremendous wad.

A light went on in my head and has stayed on ever since: It was all about capital. Rick could lose and lose and never really lose. Once John dipped below four hundred, he was dead. He was dead now.

Which was when Walter came in and passed out the bonus checks.

Walter was the owner, the big man. Tonight he was wearing a tie. Afternoons he drove from site to site in his Lincoln, cranking out estimates, listening to opera, because, he said, though it was fag music, it floated his boat.

John took his check, made for the door. I followed him out.

"You're doing right," I said. "Go on home."

"Ain't going home," John said, and numb-footed across South Chicago again.

"No, no, no," I mumbled, vividly drunk, suddenly alive. What had happened to me? Christ, where was I? Whither my promise, my easy season of victories, my field of dominant, my dominant field of my boyhood, boyhood playful triumph?

It was so cold my little mustache had frozen.

Our bonuses matched: three hundred each.

The man at the Currency Exchange looked at us either sadly or suspiciously, I couldn't tell which. When I doubled back to ask, he reached for something under the counter.

"Go home, man," I said to John out on the street. "You at least got your bonus, right?"

"Can't, can't," John huffed. "Got to get all that back. No way that man's taking my Christmas money for my babies."

"You're not going to get it back, John," I said.

"Ain't I, though," he said.

The same law that had broken him the first time broke him again. Rick took it and took it.

"Rick, Rick," I said, so drunk I was unsure I was actually speaking.

"What am I supposed to do?" Rick said, glaring at me. "He's a man, right? He wants to play. Ain't nobody forcing him."

"Ain't nobody forcing me," John said.

Rick had a fat round face and little black glasses. He was Polish but looked Kamikaze. His cheeks were red and his glasses were fogged, it seemed to me, from the gross extent of his trickery.

"You want to quit, John?" Rick said. "Great White Dope here thinks I'm hustling you. Maybe you should quit. So what if you suck as a gambler? Just walk away, right?"

"Nobody hustling nobody here," said John.

"See, Dope?" Rick said to me. "John's a man."

"I am that," said John.

Soon John was wadding and throwing his last ten.

"Fair's fair," he gasped, and lurched out.

I followed. Should I offer him mine? If I offered him mine, he might take it. So I offered him a portion of mine in a way that simultaneously offered and made it clear I was not offering. He said he didn't want none of mine. He had to get home. His babies were waiting. He didn't know what his wife would say, or what he would say to her.

"I'll have to just tell her, I guess," he said. "Just up and say it, get it over with: Baby, they ain't no Christmas. And don't give me no lip about it."

He wiped his face top to bottom, the saddest gesture I'd ever seen.

Then he walked off into the side-blowing snow.

I was sad yet happy. I was drunk. I was deeply, deeply glad I wasn't him.

Back inside, Rick was protesting, though nobody was asking him to.

"A man's a man," he was saying. "You play, you lose, you accept it. John's a man. He knows that. He gets that. I admire that."

"He's gonna have a shit Christmas, though," somebody said.

"These people live for shit Christmases," Rick said. "They run right directly toward shit Christmases. It's all they know. It's in their blood." Then he put his wad back in his pocket.

The craps box was cast aside, and the roofers bent to their drinks. Somebody hauled over a length of gutter and a few of them went at it with tin snips, proving some point or other.

I stumbled out to my Nova, putty-knifed myself a sight-hole, drove home.

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

All that winter, once a week or so, I'd been stopping at a pay phone off Stony Island to call the Field Museum, where a kind woman had once praised my qualifications.

"Anything yet?" I'd say.

"Not yet," she'd say. Once, she said, "We need a security guard, ha-ha, but that, of course, is way beneath your level."

"Oh, ha-ha, right," I said.

But I was thinking, Could I work my way up? Could I, in my security-guard uniform, befriend a doddering curator, impress him with my knowledge of fossils, my work ethic, my quiet respect for science?

"Keep calling, though," she said.

"Oh, I will," I said.

And I did, until finally it got too embarrassing, and I stopped.

Early spring, I fled town, leaving my aunt unrepaid, my girlfriend convinced, forever, I suppose, that this snivelling lesser Me was the real one.

I went somewhere else and started over, pulled head out of ass, made a better life. Basically, I've got stores. If you've ever had a store that supports a family, a family that actually brightens when you come in at night, you know what a good thing that is. And I wouldn't go back to that roofing Me or that roofing time for anything in the world.

But sometimes I imagine myself standing at that pay phone, in my tar-hardened clothes.

"This is so great," the Field Museum woman is saying. "Come down, come down, we finally have something suitable for you. I'm so happy to finally be able to tell you this."

"I'll be right there," I say.

Then it's a few weeks later, after first payday, and I pull up to my then-girlfriend's house, wearing clean clothes. All day long, I have been, say, writing about the brontosaurus. I have certainly, at this point, learned a lot about brontosauri. In fact, I have been selected to go to a Brontosaurus Conference in, say, Miami, Florida. We go out to dinner. My aunt meets us there. I have by now repaid her for all the food she fed me those many months. Also, I've bought her a new dress, just to be nice. The dinner is excellent. I pay. After dinner, the three of us sit there laughing, laughing about the fact that I, an Assistant Curator at the famous Field Museum, was once a joke of a roofer, a joke of a roofer so beat down he once stood by watching as a nice man got cheated out of his Christmas.

adams

I never could stomach Adams and then one day he's standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of my kids' room! So I wonk him in the back of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and down he goes. Then I roll him down the stairs into the early-spring muck and am like, If you ever again, I swear to God, I don't even know what to say, you miserable fuck.

Karen got home. I pulled her aside. Upshot was: Keep the doors locked, and if he's home the kids stay inside.

But after dinner I got to thinking: Guy comes in in his shorts and I'm sitting here taking this? This is love? Love for my kids? Because what if? What if we slip up? What if a kid gets out or he gets in? No, no, no, I was thinking, not acceptable.

So I went over and said, Where is he?

To which Lynn said, Upstairs, why?

Up I went and he was standing at the mirror, still in his goddam underwear, only now he had on a shirt, and I wonked him again as he was turning. Down he went and tried to crab out of the room, but I put a foot on his back.