Neal Pollack

A drunk’s mood is a delicate thing, and Bobby’s, as he righted himself from his fall, was no longer cheerful. Darkening, he turned to face the grinning monkey head. Always overeager at the plate—and elsewhere, too, some of the girls on the block muttered—Bobby swung again, this time harder, again falling and again landing his swing on the Ford’s ornamental grill, more of it now in the street around him than on the Ford.

With difficulty, he picked himself up, and the foreign tribe of boys, back from some skirmish, set their bikes down and cautiously, as Bobby still had the bat, joined the loose circle of men around him.

When Bobby Pando looked from boy to man to boy to man, Perryman looked with him and saw faces made even more passive and blank by the intensity of their curiosity about what might happen next. Bobby turned from them to what was left of the rubber monkey’s head, and looking into that face, pondering those oogly eyes and that ear-to-ear grin, appeared to be attempting to stick a finger in and take the temperature of the depths of some unfathomable confusion, perhaps his life.

There was just so much time a drunk needed to reflect on confusion, and Bobby, lunging sideways, took another cut, a good one, not at the monkey, but at the inner ring of boys. They easily danced back, swelling with a collective laugh, then settling, their mood now darkened, as they focused on the threat that was Bobby Pando.

But the gyro in Bobby’s head had gone all topsy. It spun him and he went down hard, bat skittering free with a diminishing sound, a clank, clank, clank of aluminum on asphalt that drew the outer circle of men closer together. If they wished they could have reached out and grasped each other’s hands.

Perryman checked his watch. It was close to 10:30, and Bobby, flat on the street, groped through shards of his ornamental grill and glass from his headlamp for the bat. Right then is when Perryman heard, and men standing around him later confirmed, a kind of hissing sound. The sound came from Bobby Pando. Some men said later, when they tried to explain, that it sounded almost like a song. “It undulated,” one fellow offered, “sort of like a song.”

Bobby tried to right himself. He was just beginning to assemble the complicated series of activities that would eventually, if accomplished in the correct sequence, enable him to stand, when a meaty kid, larger than the rest, evidently starting from down the block because by the time he reached Bobby he was traveling that fast, drove his bike over Bobby Pando. It was quick. A thump-thump as the bike passed over Bobby’s back. And the song? Then everyone heard it. To Perryman, it sounded uncomplicated as death might turn out to be, just a quickly diminishing gush as something sang itself free from Bobby Pando’s chest.

Panfish and Stevie B. assisted Bobby into his van, and Panfish slid into the driver’s seat to squeal away, not with anger or urgency, but insolence. They peeled off, the monkey’s head still in place, its one near-intact oogly eye facing forward.

When it was quiet again, or a city block’s equivalent of quiet, the women, first one, then all, gathered their children, folded chairs, and closed coolers. They moved slowly because it was far too hot to move otherwise, but they moved, retreated inside or to screened front porches, and Perryman did, too, a shadowy shape joining other shadowy shapes looking out.

ZERO ZERO DAY

BY KEVIN GUILFOILE

Grand & Racine

The kitchen was small and square and further encroached upon by splintered cabinets and ancient appliances, the latter kept in working order by a combination of the tenant’s unusual skills and his hard-to-find tools. The walls of the musty apartment cracked and peeled, but mechanical objects, clocks, lamps, televisions, and especially radios, had been restored like museum pieces among the ruins. Anything not electrical, like walls, bathroom tile, and ceiling pain't, remained in a state of ongoing neglect.

—Twenty-two-thirteen.

—Twenty-two-thirteen go ahead.

—Yeah, squad, do you have me logged on?

—Negative. [Pause] Try again now.

—Am I logged on now?

—Ten-four. I’m sending that job again.

—Ten-ninety-nine.

This radio, Kimball Dent’s original creation, had been cobbled together from sets abandoned in dumpsters around the city or in his shop downstairs by aborted customers who realized it was cheaper to buy new and better ones than pay to have them fixed. For Kimball, hunched over a late-night bowl of oatmeal in his kitchen, every banal word squawking through the receiver tonight between shrill fits of static was like a cut fastball thrown for a strike in the middle of a perfect game.

—Keeler and [unintelligible] with a [unintelligible].

—Seventeen-thirty-five, I can’t understand a word He’'s saying, his radio’s garbled.

— [Unintelligible] Milwaukee and Keeler, stalled car blocking traffic.

—Ten-four.

—Gonna be a red Honda [unintelligible]. Need to order a tow.