Neal Pollack

He stayed, dancing around the ring, throwing punches, seeing Bob Foster in front of him, surprised at the fury that came out of the gloves of a young Alex Pinto.

Pinto thought that he looked like a good contender against Foster. He heard the sirens down Cicero Avenue and he went to his corner to wait for the bell to ring for the next round.

PURE PRODUCTS

BY DANIEL BUCKMAN

Roscoe & Claremont

The rain streamed off the porch roof and the black sheets dissolved Chicago and they thought themselves behind a waterfall. Mike put his hand on Susan’s cheek, her hair windblown against his knuckles. She held her breath and they bit each other’s lips. After twelve years, it was what they did to make things feel new. And the rain kept coming, beating the leaves from the maples and the elms, turning the gutters into rivulets floating Starbucks pastry bags.

They went upstairs to lie down and the rain fell harder with the late darkness. He held his wife against him, her back warm and damp. She felt the rain through the screen, more than he did, and pushed into his chest until he moved. There had been long days of rain and they never knew the rain from the sky. If the sunlight came, it showed hard before the dusk, and made the streets steam. But there were two weeks before they would talk about the wet summer, a month before the rains ruined July with low, gray skies.

Mike Spence had told Susan he was going to be a cop over delivered Thai food. His academy class was starting in three months down on Monroe by Rico’s, where they once drank vodka martinis, singing Dean Martin songs with a bartender friendly over past tips, and watching the fallouts from the police trainee runs spit and hold their sides. Who the hell could they chase, he’d laughed. No soldier would lower himself to be a cop. Now he was thirty-five, a veteran, and he hadn'’t won a thing. I wrote a book about me, he thought. Winners and losers. That was the risk.

“This is nothing,” his wife said.

“I start in ninety days.”

“I don’t think it’s what you want.”

She sat up and drew the bedsheet around her breasts and pointed in his face. He looked out the window. A writer, he was thinking. Just because that idea moved him didn'’t mean it was moving. He felt crazy sometimes, even undone, like he’d been climbing hard but the ladder was up against the wrong wall. In the early darkness, her eyes searched his face.

“Why do you still get this way?” she said.

“I’m no one way anymore,” he answered.

“You get these ideas,” she said, “but life isn’t a story. You were just talking about going to Iraq with Quakers. Last year, you were going to backpack through Cambodia. You always attach yourself to something that is not your own.”

He looked at her and then at himself in the wall mirror. Her biceps were bruised from wrestling with autistic boys in her special education class. In grocery stores, people eyed her arms and stared at him while she scanned cat food and mangos through the self-checkout. A dyke is going to hit you someday, she’d laugh. Just leave you for dead.

“You’re not a character,” she said.

“You don’t know,” he said.

“I know you’re not a character.”

Mike knew his wife saw a bloated cop parked in the wagon outside a 7-Eleven while his partner got a coffee and eyed the Indian girl’s breasts. Pooja, she’d be thinking. My husband’s partner will be eyeing Pooja.

Later, in his shaded room, Mike read his work when Susan was quiet outside the door, listening. There were noises she made, noises she thought he didn'’t hear, the way she coughed from breathing slowly through her nose, the floor creak from her shifting weight. As a kind of game, he made his voice like slick rocks, doing Barry White, Al Green, Isaac Hayes. He tried making her laugh, breaking her cover, but she was silent. The abortion had been the price to keep his life, not hers. It was making her eyes hard. A cop, she’d said. After we did it for you to write. He forgot her coughing and read in the bulb light.

I saw these guys who looked like Todds in the loop after rush hour. I gave them last names.

Todd Miller. Todd Turner. Todd Stevens.

They were always squinting from the white heat still glinting off bus windows. Six-thirty was the earliest I ever watched one leave the First National Building, humping the sidewalk in the white heat of summer, swinging a briefcase up Dearborn Street, then long-stepping amongst the women with popcorn in the Picasso’s shadow. Todd’s father taught him how to stay low and know how much things cost. He kept a fraction in his head and headed to the El after ten hours at Sidley and Austin, jamming down the subway stairs slick from spilled popcorn. He moved like a golden retriever and loosened his tie. Humiliation for Todd was going from wild-caught Sockeye Salmon at Whole Foods to the flash-frozen farm-raised fish Costco lets you buy if you pay the fifty dollars a year. He had to ask Jennifer to eat that, look her in those swim-team blue eyes and say things were weird at work.