"I want you to know something about us."

"What?"

"We never fight."

"We never fight either. Our friends fight."

"That's why I'm twisted up inside."

"I hear you talking."

"Then let's roll," he said.

The next place was in downtown L.A. Downtown L.A.-the term had a secret life I couldn't clearly read. The group was between sets and a haze of ten-year-old smoke hung over the room.

"I played the horn. You know that?"

"Still play?"

"An old hockshop horn. Threw it away finally."

"But you still have it."

"Threw it away," he said.

"But you kept it. You still have it."

"Threw it away."

"Irbu didn't keep it?"

"What for? It sounded like hell."

"Great thing to have. An old trumpet? They're not called saddle

"Look. Go home, tell her you're sorry, take a bath and go to bed."

He looked at me, underlip jutting.

"There's something else."

"What's that?" I said.

"A judge issued an order, an injunction that they couldn't dump the sludge because there's a body buried there," Sims said, and took a drink, and pulled a cigar out of his pocket.

"Whose body?"

"Whose body. Whose body do you want it to be? That's whose body. Some mobster, I hear. Shot in the head execution-style."

A trio with a singer. She had streaky reddish hair and copper skin, holding the mike at her spangled thigh while the sidemen cued the next verse.

"We never fight. Our friends fight," I said.

When the set ended a fatigue passed over us, a staleness. Sims blew smoke past my shoulder. I jabbed an ice cube in my drink, poked it with a finger and watched it bob.

"There's this man I knew once. I didn't know him, I met him once. I was young," I said. "He came around the poolroom."

"You're speaking in reference to what?"

"To the body in the sludge."

"A mob figure. Who was he?"

"I was young, high-school age. I only talked to him that one time. But my father had known him years earlier, which he told me about. Badalato told me, not my father. They weren't friends, they were acquaintances. They might run into each other somewhere."

"This is Mario, you're talking about, Badalato? Who I saw one time on TV," he said, "when they're putting him in an unmarked car to take him to be arraigned and some detective places a hand on his head to keep him from bumping his head on the door frame and I sit there thinking why is it the police put so much effort into keeping these criminals from bumping their heads when they get into police cars, it's a major concern of the police, lately, this hand on the head."

"You're talkative all of a sudden."

"He's always being photographed on the courthouse steps. He's the king of the steps."

"See, it's not a boatload of heroin. It's a boatload of shit."

We were momentarily alert and uncircling. It was one of those episodes of heightened clarity in a night of talking and drinking.

"At one point, am I right, the rumor suggested it wasn't an ordinary cargo ship."

"A sludge tanker. Turns out the rumor was correct."

"Carrying treated human waste."

"Port to port, it's nearly two years," he said.

We listened to the music, a cash register ringing at the end of the bar and a trace of a radio voice, radio or TV, coming from a back room somewhere.

"Tell her you're sorry. Go home, Sims."

"Maybe she ought to tell me."

"Tell her first."

"Maybe I'm not the guilty party. Ever think of that? The instigator."

"Doesn't matter, you jerk."

"That's the second time," he said, showing me two fingers.

We got out of there and went somewhere else, zebra walls and small tables, a fairly crowded room with a body hum, people in aviator glasses and silver shirts.

"He's wearing a white suit."

"Right."

"He's playing his alto."

"Right."

"And he's facing out of the picture, out of the frame."

"And he's wearing white and brown shoes. Two-tone shoes. But they're not saddle shoes."

"I didn't ask what kind of shoes. I don't care about his shoes."

"I'm just saying."

"I'm not interested in his shoes."

"They have a name I'm trying to think of."

"Do it somewhere else."

"In a club in New York," I said.

"You know this? And I don't? And it's my photograph? In my house we're talking about?"

The waiter brought drinks.

not who he resembled at all. He resembled the cabdriver I'd hailed earlier in the day, or the day before, the guy who'd said, "Light up a Lucky. It's light-up time."

When they put me in the squad car, or maybe they called it a radio car then, it was a green and white vehicle in any case and the cop who drove was smoking, which he wasn't supposed to do, a uniformed cop on duty was not supposed to smoke, and it surprised me to see this, I remember, an officer cupping a smoke between his knees, because I'd shot a man dead and thought I was being taken into a system where the rules were consistent and strict, and the other thing I remember is that no one put a hand on my head and folded me into the car because evidently this was not something they did at the time, this was something they developed later, preventing the felon from bumping his head when they took him in.

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Con-estoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

The room was very nearly empty and they were playing blues.

"Be nice to her," I said. "Go home, talk to her, make nice. You know this phrase? Make nice. They use this phrase when you were a Negro child in St. Louis, Sims?"

"They came to take the census."

"You're right. Let's leave," I said.

"Your father knew him. This means-what?"

"It means he knew him."

"In other words I have to show respect. I have to be reverent when I mention his name. This guy who runs a criminal enterprise in narcotics, extortion, what else. Murder, attempted murder, what else."

"Waste carting," I said.

"Could be. Why not? And I have to respect him. Because he was nice to your father."

"You're right. Let's leave," I said.

"I didn't say I wanted to leave. I don't want to leave."

"Tell her you're sorry and take a bath," I told him.

Half an hour later we were in the last club of the night, a blues room with an air of desperation, and the waiter resembled the old guy from two or three places ago, facially resembled-he wore a standard waiter's getup but looked a lot, I thought, like the other guy, in the football T-shirt, three or four places ago, or whenever it was, the T-shirt and cotton nose plug.

"This place reminds me. You know how they're always saying, Where were you when such and such? Where were you when Kennedy? Well, remember the time the lights went out. This place reminds me. The great Northeast blackout."

"Am I supposed to ask where you were?" he said.

"Thirty million people affected."

"I was in Germany. I never knew what caused it. What caused it?"