Alice was excited by the waves crashing against the storm wall along Lake Shore Drive, so they’d exited at Montrose Avenue and followed the signs to the beach parking lot, where they could get a better view. Bundled in their inadequate coats and gloves, they walked along the lake wall for a little while in the snow, Alice throwing chunks of ice into the spray and wind. “It’s wonderful weather out,” she said under her scarf. She made a snowball, hit him in the shoulder, and laughed. He tossed one back too high that clipped the top of her head. She put a hand to her head and started to cry and he felt his legs go weak. “Fooled you!” she said, leaping away from him and laughing.
In the distance, the lake merged with the gray horizon until he couldn’t tell which was which. They were about to turn back for the car when he saw a white Mercury pull into the near-empty parking lot and make several slow loops around, as if looking for a space. Two cross-country skiers were gliding across the park. As they came alongside the parking lot, the Mercury’s driver’s window came down and he could see a man speaking with the skiers, his breath streaming. Then the skiers pointed to the park and then beyond it to the wall where he and Alice stood, and the skiers glided off, a little faster than they’d come, it seemed to Michael. The air was sharp in his nostrils. He took Alice’s hand and they went the other way along the wall, away from the lot, careful to avoid slick spots. Far out in the lake he thought he saw the outline of a ship. After a while they circled back to the car, got in, and sat warming themselves. “My face fell asleep,” Alice said, pinching her cheek. She laughed in amazement.
Michael smoked a cigarette with the window cracked. There was no sign of the white Mercury. His car was nearly out of gas. He grabbed Alice’s backpack from the passenger seat—where he’d put the cash and jewelry he’d taken from his dad’s house—and pulled two twenty-dollar bills from a zippered pocket. He drove slowly around the marina, its bare white piers sticking up from the water, where he imagined yachts would be moored in the summer. On them, carefree people drinking, laughing.
“I can hear your teeth back there,” Andrew said. This was when Michael was twelve. They were crawling through the storm sewer, and Michael’s teeth were chattering. He was cold and scared. “Would you die for me?” his brother asked him once. “I mean, if you were up on the University Tower and this crazy guy with a gun said your brother could live if you’d jump, would you do it?” Andrew was passing his thumb through a lighter flame. Michael shrugged, said he didn’t know. Andrew laughed. “It’s a long way down, bro.”
Andrew’s friend Jeff, who always messed everything up, was down in the tunnel with them. “Why is your brother such a *?” Jeff’s voice said somewhere up ahead. Jeff was always talking about how he’d like to give it to Lisa Soto or Meghan Schmidt. Jeff had shown them some foreign porn movies once, videos that Jeff had stolen from his dad’s German friend and kept in a tackle box on his closet shelf. The people in them did things to each other that seemed somehow beyond their control, as if they’d better do it or else. As if they had a gun to their heads. Everything outside wanted in and everything inside wanted out. Seen up close, the jumbled body parts looked like voracious animals or insects engaged in some fierce combat. Michael clenched his teeth, moved faster in the tunnel. Water trickled between his knees. Every few feet something brushed his face or clung to his hair and he slapped wildly at his head. He was weak and everybody could see it, Michael thought. His insides were turned out like pockets.
At one point the storm sewer tunnel widened out and the ceiling rose and became a kind of room where all the tunnels converged. It smelled bad here. A mixture of shit and turpentine. Ahead of him, Andrew’s flashlight beam jittered along the floor. In one corner was a dirty twin mattress set high on plastic crates. All around, stacks of old magazines, used spray paint cans, glass jars. A camping lantern hung from a rope. Then Andrew turned his flashlight toward the ceiling, and bright shapes emerged out of the darkness. The painted naked body of a woman stretched above them. Her fleshy hips curved along a bulge in the ceiling. Oaks and cypresses grew from the dark tangle of her vagina. Between her breasts ran the blue veins of creeks and rivers that emptied at her navel into an iridescent sea. Her lower lip was pierced with a fishhook threaded with a silver chain. Her blue eyes were cast upward, like a saint’s. Michael’s knees grew weak, and something inside him fell silent. For a few seconds he thought his heart had stopped beating.
“I’d fuck her,” Jeff said. He laughed.
Andrew held the flashlight steady on the painted woman. The fishhook and silver chain gleamed.
Up ahead in one of the tunnels, there was a loud scuffling sound and Michael imagined a trapped animal. Its eyes burning with fear and need.
Michael remembered a family photo taken when he was six or seven. His mother is young, her hair braided in pigtails, standing with the three of them at a roadside overlook in Big Bend National Park. It’s late spring. Desert flowers are in bloom. Andrew and his dad are on the right, goofing around, making wild eyes and pointing at something below. Michael is standing in front of his mother. Her tanned arms drape his chest, holding him close, as if afraid he might lose his footing.
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