He decided to try further west, closer to the river. He was walking past the parochial school on Eleventh when he heard, “Yo.”

“Yo yourself,” Pellam said.

The boy stood in a tall, battered Dumpster and looked down, hands on scrawny hips. He wore baggy jeans and, despite the heat, a red, green and yellow windbreaker. Pellam thought the mosaic haircut was pretty well done. The razor notch mimicked the grin that was etched deep into his dark face.

“Whassup?”

“Tell you what… Come on down here.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to you. Don’t jump, climb around the back. No-”

He jumped. The boy landed on the ground, unhurt. “You don’t ’member me.”

“Sure I do. Your mother’s Sibbie.”

“Straight up! You be CNN. The man with the camera.”

On the playground behind him four baseball diamonds stood empty. Two basketball courts too. The gates were chained. Easily a hundred cans of paint had been sacrificed to decorate the yard.

“Where’s your mother and sister?”

“Be at the shelter.”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“Ain’t no school, be summer.”

Pellam had forgotten. Despite heat or snow, cities are virtually seasonless. He had trouble imagining what summer vacation in Hell’s Kitchen might be like. Pellam’s Augusts had been filled with sneaking into movies and trading comics and occasional softball games. He remembered many summer mornings bicycling like a demon, zipping over smooth concrete marked by the slick paths of confused snails and slugs.

“What’s your name?”

“Ismail. Yo, what’s yours?”

“I’m John Pellam.”

“Yo, homes, I ain’t like John. Slob nigger I know called John. He ain’t down to do nothing, you know what I’m saying? I’ma call you Pellam.”

Wasn’t Mr. an option?

“How’s the shelter?”

His smile faded. “This nigger don’t like the peoples there. Slanging all the time. Cluckheads all over the place.”

Drugs, the boy was saying. A cluckhead was a crack addict. Pellam had worked on several films in South Central L.A. He knew some gangspeak.

“It’s only for a little while,” Pellam said. But the reassurance sounded leaden; he had no idea how the boy took it.

Ismail’s eyes suddenly flashed happily. “Yo, you like basketball? I like Patrick Ewing. He the best, you know what I’m saying? I like Michael Jordan too. Yo, ever see the Bulls play?”

“I live in L.A.”

“Lakers! Yeah! Magic, he be fine. I like Mr. B. The Barkley. He the man to have at yo’ back ina fight.” He sparred against an unseen adversary. “Yo, yo, you like basketball, cuz?”

Pellam had been to a few Lakers games though he gave that up when he found that a good percentage of the spectators were in the Industry and bought season passes just to see or be seen. As Jack Nicholson does, so shall you do. “Not really,” he confessed.

“And Shaq too. Man be ten feet tall. I wanna be that nigger.”

Ismail danced around on the sidewalk and performed a mini slam dunk.

Pellam glanced at the boy’s tattered high-tops and dropped to his knees to retie a dangling lace. This made the boy uncomfortable; he stepped back and clumsily tied it himself. Pellam rose slowly. “You started to tell me something the other day. About the gangs burning down your building. Your mother hit you when you started to tell me something. I won’t say anything to her.”

He looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten the slap.

“I heard Corcoran’s gang might’ve had something to do with it. You know ’bout his crew?”

“How you know Corcoran?”

“I don’t. I’m trying to find him.”

“Man, that fucked-up, you doin’ that. His set, they some bad O.G.s.”

Original gangstas. Senior members of the crew, who’d earned the status by killing someone.

The young face grew agitated. “Nigger, spic – anybody – dis him, don’t matter who, Corcoran wax him. He see peoples he don’t like, bang, they ass be gone, you know what I’m saying?” Ismail closed his eyes and leaned his head against the fence, looking at the school. “Why you axing me all this shit?”

Pellam asked, “Where’s his kickback? Corcoran’s?”

Impressed that Pellam talked the talk, Ismail said, “I ain’t know were they hang, man.” He kept his eye on Pellam and did a few layup shots. “Yo. You got a daddy?”

Pellam laughed. “A father? Sure.”

The grin was gone. “I don’t got one.”

Pellam reflected that a large percentage of black households were missing an adult male. Then felt ashamed this news bite was his immediate reaction to the boy’s comment.

The boy continued, matter of factly, “Got hisself shot.”

“Hey, I’m sorry, Ismail.”

“There these cluckheads outside on the street, okay? Selling rock. My daddy go out and they just smoke him right there. I seen ’em do it. He didn’t do nothing. They just smoke him.”

Pellam exhaled in shock, shook his head. “They find who did it?”

“Who, the jakes?”

“Jakes?”

“You know, jakes. Joey. The man. The Man. The poeleece?” Ismail laughed with a frighteningly adult sound. “Jakes do shit, you know what I’m saying? My daddy gone. And my mama, she sleep a lot. She do copious shit. Where she be, the shelter I’m saying, there shit all over the place if you got the green. Rock mostly. She do lotsa rock. Men come by eyeballing her all the time. I don’t think I go back there. Where yo’ crib, Pellam?”

A Winnebago, currently stored. A two-bedroom bungalow in L.A., currently sublet. A four-flight walk-up under short-term lease.

“I don’t really have one,” he told the boy.

“Check it out, you just like me! Damn!”

Pellam laughed at this then decided the parallels were unsettlingly accurate.

John Pellam, single, former independent film director and itinerant location scout, sometimes missed family life. But then he’d laugh and try to picture himself attending a suburban grade school PTA parent-teacher night.

“Where’re you going to go?” he asked the boy.

“Dunno, cuz. Maybe get my own crew together. Ain’t no nigger crews ’round here. Get a kickback on Thirty-sixth. I’ma call it the Trey Six Ghosts. How that sound? ‘I from the Trey Sixes.’ Shit, that’ll fuck ’ em up. Fuck up their minds good.”

Pellam asked, “You have lunch?”

“No. And I ain’t have breakfast neither,” Ismail said proudly. “You sit at the shelter, men come up and they, you know, be dissing you and touching you. They ax you come into the back with them. You know what I’m saying?”

Pellam shook his head, gripped the strap of the camera bag. “Come on, I’m hungry. I saw this place up the street. Cuban. Let’s eat, you want to?”

“Rice and beans. Yeah! An’ a Red Stripe!!”

“No beer,” Pellam said.

The boy grabbed the bag from Pellam’s hand and slung it over his shoulder. He listed against what was probably half of his own weight.

“I’ll get that,” Pellam said. “It’s heavy.”

“Shit. Don’t weigh nothing.”

“Yo, over there.”

“There?”

“No, more back. Yeah. Yo. Back is what I’m saying. Back!”

Ismail was pointing out to Pellam where he thought the fire had started. “I smell smoke then see all these flames, cuz. Right here. An’ a big pop. Yeah.”

“Pop.”

“And I run inside th’apartment and I go, ‘Yo, all y’all gotta get out! There this fire!’ And my mama, she start to scream.”

“You see anybody by the window before the fire?”

“This old lady is all. She live upstairs, on the top floor.”

“Anybody else?”

“I dunno. People hanging. I dunno.”

Pellam looked at what was left of the back door. It was metal and had two large locks on it. Would’ve been a tough job to break through. He leaned down and peered through the window. He’d wondered if the pyro could have thrown the bomb through the bars. But they were too close together for anything but a beer bottle; the wine jug never would have fit. Somebody would have to’ve let him in.