"Oh man. Sheesh. I misdescribed this in my mind. Because I thought."

"Get in, man. Friggin cold tonight."

There is garbage in paper bags and cardboard boxes. There are two metal garbage cans wedged between the front and rear seats, regulation street-size cans with dented tops sort of erupted up by the pressure. Manx sees garbage stowed on the ledge by the rear window. He sees front-seat garbage in a peach crate smack on the seat, the oozy smell so near you can drink it.

"I thought you were on your way to get the man's trash and take it somewhere."

"Took it here. Trash right here. I filled up the trunk while they were still eating their dinner. Then I started on the inside of the car, working backseat to front seat. Move the crate and get in."

Manx opens the door and sets the peach crate on the mat and sits down, trying to find room for his feet on either side of the crate.

"Where you want to go?" Antoine says.

"Not far. But fast. Up by One Fifty-fifth Street. Where you taking this stuff?"

"Drive it to the Bronx. There's a tower of garbage under the White-stone Bridge somewhere. I fling the trash out the door and press the gas pedal hard."

"You do me a favor and press it now," Manx tells him. "Because I'm about to die sitting here conferring."

"Be calm. I take you where you going."

Antoine puts the vehicle in motion. He drives steady and unfazed, pointing the car up Broadway like a poison dart.

Manx realizes this is why the snow shovels were not in the car, where he'd told Antoine to put them. No room for shovels in the car.

Then he realizes they left the shovels in the barroom. Good a place as any. Except they won't be there tomorrow. So cross that little caper off the slate.

The last thing he realizes is that Antoine's been telling him all night to raise his sights. And him driving a DeSoto full of garbage.

"You drop me just up ahead there."

"I take you exactly where you're going."

"Broadway be fine," Manx says.

The stink is killing him, lifting him out of the insulated state of a day's slow whiskey burn.

The trash is bumping and mashing around and it has a life of its own, a kind of seething vegetable menace that pushes up out of the cans and boxes, it's noisy and restless, or maybe that's just the vermin moving around, on the verge of being carsick.

"This here's fine," Manx says. "Right at the corner."

"You're not gonna tell me where you're going?"

"I tell you where you're going if you want to take this trash to the Whitestone Bridge. You cross the river and get on One Sixty-first, which I think it runs two ways, and you take it to Bruckner, you be okay, Boulevard."

Antoine looks at him. Manx is already out of the car and he's standing on the sidewalk and Antoine looks at him, sitting unfazed at the wheel. A long lazy snake-eye look.

"Or I could dump it in the street."

"That's what I thought. That's what I said to myself."

"While the city sleeps," Antoine says. "And the cops be eating their chowder."

Manx watches the car move off. The feel of empty streets after midnight and the wind off the Hudson as he walks east. The hawk at his back. The cutting wind that sends loose trash skidding in the street.

Could be Antoine unleashing early.

He'd like to see an Alka-Seltzer is what he'd like to see, sizzling down the length of a cold glass of water.

He walks down the long ramp with the ballpark on his left, the Polo Grounds, and he looks for people standing in line or huddled on the pavement with blankets and food, the all-nighters, the men and boys eager for tickets, the kids who get paid by scalpers to stand in the cold and buy tickets that desperate fans will haggle over next day, paying prices out of sight.

The place is deadly still. And Manx has a stale acid feeling, that fidgety indigestion where you drink too much on an empty stomach, even though he knows he ate a meal he recalls the dish Ivie left him, he tastes the meat loaf and greens, but there's a wrenching pull like he's all sucked dry.

He's down on Eighth Avenue now wandering the perimeter of the ballpark, looking for a sign that someone's still alive. The place is stone cold quiet.

What's a pyramid doing on a U.S. bill? That's a question you do well to ask.

The only thing he sees is a dog of the slinking type, been kicked so often it decides it's being petted. He can't understand how Phil could be wrong about this. Phil's a straight-up guy. If Phil says the fans will be lining up all night to buy tickets and then you go there and look around and the place is deadly still, you have to wonder who's messing with your head.

It is frankly a fly-by-night moving and storage. They call him and he works, they don't and he don't.

Now he sees a car stopped for a light and he walks on over, sliding his feet the way he does when things get culminated on him. A man sits at the wheel. He sees Manx coming and rolls up the window, a white man with a look on his face like I ain't ready to die. Manx makes a motion with his hands. He shakes his hands in the air, no no no no- I only want to ask a question. And the man hits the pedal and he's gone, never mind the light's still red, burning rubber real impressive.

The sound dies into the night stillness and a deep quiet comes on again. The old ballpark stands over the avenue and makes its own enormous silence, different from the street and the river. Kids still swim in the Harlem River in the summer, way uptown where it turns out of the Hudson, and his own boys used to leap off a dock, arms all flung-he sees them momentarily in midair.

It grieves the bejesus out of him.

He feels a little empty. He feels low and put off and frankly humanly disgusted and he wants to lie down and sleep. He feels a little messed with. He wants to somehow, from someone, make some money.

One chance in ten million the ball club even lets him in the door. He has to find the paying fans. And he only walked toward the car to ask where they are. And the face at the wheel, like don't cut me up in little pieces please.

He looks across 155th Street, south to the tenements, and he sees a woman standing under the Power of Prayer sign, soliciting her trade.

He hears a sound across the river.

What's the point of all the secret codes on a U.S. dollar except to disconnect you from the people who know the facts?

He hears something. He's ready to head home, there's nowhere to go but home unless he finds another bar, and he knows he has to go down the subway and wait for a train in an empty station, another bringdown, stand there on the long platform waiting, half an hour maybe, and he hears a sound from across the river, far away but clear, the way voices travel exact on the water at night.

He stands near the bridge approach and listens. Men singing, the sound of a great many voices, some following behind the others, rambunctious and uneven, and he knows the tune.

They're singing, Riding on a pony.

They're singing, Stuck a feather in his cap.

They're singing, Called it macaroni.

And he hears laughter drift across the river and begins to understand finally. It wasn't the bartender who made the mistake. Phil never said the people would be lining up at the Polo Grounds. He never named the ballpark. It was Manx who made the mistake. Because they're lining up at Yankee Stadium just across the river. It's the Giants versus the Yankees at Yankee Stadium and the voices travel so exact it's like someone's whispering just to him.

He hears a group of fans chanting Say Hey Willie and of course those are Giant fans and that's Willie Mays they're singing his praises.

And he hears the answering chant from the Yankee fans with that old Joltin' Joe DiMaggio song from before the war, he thinks, that they were playing on every radio in the country, we want you on our side, and it's all rough-and-tumble and good-natured and his mood picks up and he gives the ball a smack with the palm of his hand where it's tucked in his jacket pocket, the perfect roundness and hardness of an object that's substantial.