Marian in her Big Ten town, raised safely, protected from the swarm of street life and feeling deprived because of it-privileged and deprived, an American sort of thing. All the scenes she recoiled from when she watched T^ the narrative of local crime, we see the body in the street, the lament of the relatives, the suspect doubled over to conceal himself-

The super comes gimping toward him. Before he takes five steps along the street the super comes gimping toward him from a building down the block, moving with that hip-lurch of his that takes up half a sidewalk.

"Been looking for you," the man says.

Manx Martin stands with folded arms, not bothering to cock his head just yet-a little early for gestures of the superior type.

"You seen those shovels?"

"What shovels?" Manx says.

"Because they're missing out of the basement."

"Things always missing. Bought a new pair of socks missing in the wash."

"Two snow shovels from the utility room standing against the wall this morning."

"We expecting snow?" Manx says.

And he looks heavenward. Look like snow to you? Don't look like snow to me. Weatherman say snow?

Most janitors around here are floaters who work in one neighborhood and then another, come and go, staying one step ahead of something. This man's dug in like infantry.

"You and me, we're through passing the time," he says. "You show up at my door with a shovel in your right hand and a shovel in your left, then I listen to what you say."

Manx cocks his head, makes his eyes go tight in phonied concentration. He's looking to stare the man down, put the man in his place.

But the super pushes on past. Manx is leaning into the man but the man pushes on past, clumsily, every step a contortion and a labor, and Manx is fazed once more-he was just getting set to make a major statement.

He walks over toward Amsterdam Avenue. Three kids run by, going like hellfire, and he sees Franzo Cooper in a suit and tie, standing by the shoe repair.

"Who died? You're all dressed up, Franzo."

Turning as he speaks, wanting one last look at the super, he's not sure why, to shoot a beam of evil, maybe.

"You seen my brother?" Franzo says.

He's wearing a hat with a little feather in the band and his shoes have a military shine. The neon shoe is out of juice.

"I'm going to Tally's."

"You see him, tell him I need his car."

"Who died, Franzo?"

"I need to go to Jersey to see a lady. Else I die. What you doing?"

"Nothing much."

"I die of lovesick, man. Tell him to get over here with that junkheap. Be worth his while."

There's the beauty school, the shoe repair, the furnished rooms and over the door of the shoe repair there's a neon highshoe and the neon, he sees, is dark and cold, which brings him down a ways, a little sag in his mood.

The traffic stops and rolls at the corner, rolls on into the night, and a man stands by the rib joint preaching. Three or four people stop a minute and get the drift and stand another minute and go where they're going and two or three others come and listen and leave and the cars roll past and the light changes and the cars roll on.

The preacher says, "They say that only insects survive."

He's an old man with a hungry head, veined at the temples, and his hands are coming out of his sleeves. The sleeves of his jacket are so shrunk down that you can see way up his wrists. Long flat fingers marking his words and bicycle clips on his pants.

Three kids race by, like fleeing the scene.

"This is what they say and I believe them because they study the matter. All the creatures God put on earth, only insects survive the radiation. They have scientists studying the cockroach every second of his life. They watch him when he sleeps. He comes through a crack in the wall, there's a man with a magnifying glass been waiting since dawn. And I believe them when they say the insects still be here after the atom bombs will fell the buildings and destroy the people and kill the birds and the animals and masculate the dogs and cats so they can't begat their young. I believe them in and out and up and down. But I also got news for them. I know this before they do. We all know this, standing here right now, because we veterans of a particular place. Do we need somebody telling us how insects survive the blast? Don't we know this from the morning we born? I'm talking to you. Nobody here need scientific proof that insects be the last living things. They already pretty close. We dying all the time, these roaches still climbing the walls and coming out the cracks."

Manx glances back the other way. He'd like to get one last look at the super to nourish his grudge.

People stop to get the street preacher's drift, six or seven folks standing in the wind. Manx looks at the old man in his cuffed pants like some uniform a boy invents, playing army. There's something thin-skulled about him, his head is naked and veined and papery A man listens, interested, in a French hat, a black beret, and two women in those sister outfits, sister so-and-so from the storefront church, glad to meetcha, with napkins on their heads and frown faces.

"Nobody knows the day or the hour."

Two men in suits and their well-dressed wives, the men want to listen, the ladies say no thanks-cockroach talk is not their deedly-dee.

"Russians explode an atom bomb on the other side of the world. You got your radio tuned to the news? I'm telling you the news. Clear across the world. And you're standing there saying don't mean nothing to me. Old business, you're saying. The business of the generals and the diplomats. But right now, this here minute, while I'm talking and you're listening, officials making plans to build bomb shelters all over this city. Building bomb shelters that hold twenty-five thousand people under the streets of this city. And guess what you don't hear on today's news. You have to stand in the wind and hear it from me. Every one of those people standing in those shelters while the bombs raining down is a white person. I'm talking to you. Because not one single shelter's being built in Harlem. All right. They're putting shelters on the Upper East Side. They're putting shelters down lower Sixth Avenue. They're sheltering Forty-second Street all right. They're putting shelters out in Queens all right. They're sheltering Wall Street deep and dry. A-bombs raining from the sky, what are you supposed to do? Take a bus downtown?"

Manx has a faint grin.

A girl's standing there with her boyfriend and she says, "He's a agitator, let's go."

Manx can appreciate the man's argument but it's a little removed. The argument is satisfying because it's the multiplying into millions of the little do's and don'ts he carries around every day.

She says, "He's a agitator, let's go."

But it's the do's and don'ts he has to live with, not the news of the world with that rooster that goes scraw scraw in the movie house down the street.

The man's still talking, standing tall and with a whippy kind of bend in his body, a head like a hatched egg that's all veined out, and three kids race by, and a face so naked you think you've known him all your life, pants cuffed tight, and some kids race by.

"Where's your bicycle, man?"

And the boyfriend's got his cap slung low, not moving from the spot, and the girlfriend's saying, "He's a agitator, let's go."

The man's swiveling his head to catch an eye somewhere.

"They say stop paying rent. I don't say stop paying rent. I don't say blow up the gas and electric, the power and light. They say walk the landlords to the river. I don't say walk the landlords to the river or stand them up against the wall. I say take a dollar bill out of your pocket where it's folded up tight because you been saving it for this and that. Unfold this dollar bill and turn it over to the backside where they keep their secret messages. They keep their Latin words and their Roman numbers."