“You gonna stay at the mission with Pee Wee?”

“No.”

“Then you gonna stay with me?”

“I’m going to call my brother.”

“Good. Call him. Call him a couple of times.”

“I’ll have him meet me someplace.”

“Where you gonna get the nickel to make the call?”

“That’s my business. God, Francis, you were all right till you started on the wine. Wine, wine, wine.”

“I’ll get some cardboard. We’ll go to that old building.”

“The police keep raiding that place. I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t know why you didn’t stay with Jack and Clara since you were so welcome.”

“You’re a woman for abuse.”

They walked east on Madison, past the mission. Helen did not look in. When they reached Green Street she stopped.

“I’m going down below.” she said.

“Who you kiddin’?” Francis said. “You got noplace to go. you’ll he knocked on the head.”

“That wouldn’t he the worst ever happened to me.”

“We got to find something. Can’t leave a dog out like this.”

“Shows you what kind of people they are up there.”

“Stay with me.’’

“No, Francis. You’re crazy.”

He grabbed the hair at the hack of her head, then held her whole head in both hands.

“You’re gonna hit me,” she said.

“I wont hit ya, babe. I love ya some. Are ya awful cold?”

“I don’t think I’ve been warm once in two days.’’

Francis let go of her and took off his suitcoat and put it around her shoulders.

“No. it’s too cold for you to do that,” she said. “I’ve got this coat. You can’t he in just a shirt.’’

“What the hell’s the difference. Coat ain’t no protect ion.”

She handed him hack the coat. “I’m going.” she said.

“Don’t walk away from me.” Francis said. “You’ll he lost in the world.”

But she walked away. And Francis leaned against the light pole on the corner, lit the cigarette Jack had given him, fingered the dollar bill Jack had slipped him in the kitchen, ate what was left of the cheese sandwich, and then threw his old undershorts down the sewer.

o o o

Helen walked down Green Street to a vacant lot, where she saw a fire in an oil drum. From across the street she could see five coloreds around the fire, men and women. On an old sofa in the weeds just beyond the drum, she saw a white woman lying underneath a colored man. She walked back to where Francis waited.

“I couldn’t stay outside tonight,” she said. “I’d die.”

Francis nodded and they walked to Finny’s car, a 1930 black Oldsmobile, dead and wheelless in an alley off John Street. Two men were asleep in it, Finny in the front passenger seat.

“I don’t know that man in back,” Helen said.

“Yeah you do,” said Francis. “That’s Little Red from the mission. He won’t bother you. If he does I’ll pull out his tongue.”

“I don’t want to get in there, Francis.”

“It’s warm, anyhow. Cold in them weeds, honey, awful cold. You walk the streets alone, they’ll pinch you quicker’n hell.”

“You get in the back.”

“No. No room in there for the likes of me. Legs’re too long.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll find me some of them tall weeds, get outa the wind.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Sure, I’ll be back. You get a good sleep and I’ll see you here or up at the mission in the ayem.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

“You got to, babe. It’s what there is.”

Francis opened the passenger door and shook Finny.

“Hey bum. Move over. You got a visitor.”

Finny opened his eyes, heavy with wine. Little Red was snoring.

“Who the hell are you?” Finny said.

“It’s Francis. Move over and let Helen in.”

“Francis.” Finny raised his head.

“I’ll get you a jug tomorrow for this, old buddy,” Francis said. “She’s gotta get in outa this weather.”

“Yeah,” said Finny.

“Never mind yeah, just move your ass over and let her sit. She can’t sleep behind that wheel, condition her stomach’s in.”

“Unnngghh,” said Finny, and he slid behind the wheel.

Helen sat on the front seat, dangling her legs out of the car. Francis stroked her cheek with three fingertips and then let his hand fall. She lifted her legs inside.

“You don’t have to be scared,” Francis said.

“I’m not scared,” Helen said. “Not that.”

“Finny won’t let nothin’ happen to you. I’ll kill the son of a bitch if he does.”

“She knows,” Finny said. “She’s been here before.”

“Sure,” said Francis. “Nothing can happen to you.”

“No.”

“See you in the mornin’.”

“Sure.”

“Keep the faith,” Francis said.

And he closed the car door.

o o o

He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny. He had slept in the weeds of a South End vacant lot too many times. He would do it no more. Because he needed to confront the ragman in the morning, he would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?

He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square, where as a child he’d boarded the riverboats for outings to Troy, or Kingston, or picnics on Lagoon Island. He passed the D amp; H building and Billy Barnes’s Albany Evening Journal, a building his simpleminded brother Tommy had helped build in 1913. He walked up to Maiden Lane and Broadway, where Keeler’s Hotel used to be, and where his brother Peter sometimes spent the night when he was on the outs with Mama. But Keeler’s burned the year after Francis ran away and now it was a bunch of stores. Francis had rowed down Broadway to the hotel, Billy in the rowboat with him, in 1913 when the river rose away the hell and gone up and flooded half of downtown. The kid loved it. Said he liked it better’n sleigh ridin’. Gone. What the hell ain’t gone? Well, me. Yeah, me. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of me left, but I ain’t gone entirely. Be goddiddley-damned if I’m gonna roll over and die.

Francis walked half an hour due north from downtown, right into North Albany. At Main Street he turned east toward the river, down Main Street’s little incline past the McGraw house, then past the Greenes’, the only coloreds in all North Albany in the old days, past the Daugherty house, where Martin still lived, no lights on, and past the old Wheelbarrow, Iron Joe Farrell’s old saloon, all boarded up now, where Francis learned how to drink, where he watched cockfights in the back room, and where he first spoke to Annie Farrell.

He walked toward the flats, where the canal used to be, long gone and the ditch filled in. The lock was gone and the lockhouse too, and the towpath all grown over. Yet incredibly, as he neared North Street, he saw a structure he recognized. Son of a bitch. Welt the Tin’s barn, still standing. Who’d believe it? Could Welt the Tin be livin’? Not likely. Too dumb to live so long. Was it in use? Still a barn? Looks like a barn. But who keeps horses now?

The barn was a shell, with a vast hole in the far end of the roof where moonlight poured cold fire onto the ancient splintered floor. Bats flew in balletic arcs around the streetlamp outside, the last lamp on North Street; and the ghosts of mules and horses snorted and stomped for Francis. He scuffed at the floorboards himself and found them solid. He touched them and found them dry. One barn door canted on one hinge, and Francis calculated that if he could move the door a few feet to sleep in its lee, he would be protected from the wind on three sides. No moonlight leaked through the roof above this corner, the same corner where Welt the Tin had hung his rakes and pitchforks, all in a row between spaced nails.