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“A squad car is on the way. Did you see the assailants?”

“What?”

“You called them kids.”

“I did?” The air shimmered around me. My instinct screamed at me to protect him, but was that right or wrong?

“Can you describe them? Did you…” She paused.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

“Sir? Are you there? Sir?”

BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME

BY BRAD ZELLAR

Columbia Heights (Minneapolis)

For years, every time I drive up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights I’d start feeling like I had the barrel of a gun jabbed in the small of my back. If I hung around the place long enough, I knew damn well I’d eventually have that gun between my teeth, and every night when I went to bed I’d lie awake with the taste of iron and oil in my mouth. I grew up out there in the Heights, and my old neighborhood was the bit I’d never been able to spit.

Whenever I made that trip over the last couple decades I’d always had better things to do, and this particular occasion was no different.

I have to think hard here about chronology, because some things from that day are still a little muddled in my mind. This, though, would have been a Saturday. Francis Greer, ringleader of the neighborhood cabal of my youth, and my brother-in-law of several years, had been released from prison a day earlier, and I had every reason to suspect that, while an unwanted guest in my home, Greer had stolen two tickets to a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I had no particular enthusiasm for this musical (which, I suppose I should mention, starred Donny Osmond), but I had bought the tickets as a gift for my wife, and she had been eager, even excited, to attend. This particular incident might seem relatively minor, and it was probably small pota toes as far as Greer was concerned. There was a long history, however, and the theft of the tickets was one more violation of an old trust and an even older loyalty.

I was seething that morning, and I’d had a spat with my wife Janice over the incident. Her natural inclination was to take her brother’s side in our frequent disagreements regarding his behavior. Janice had gone to work pissed off, Greer was unaccounted for, and I had a day to kill. I’d driven out to the Heights to poke around on the off chance that I’d run into Greer, and to pay a visit to my mother. She wasn’t home—my best guess was that she’d caught the free shuttle to the casino with some of her neighborhood cronies—and pulling up to the curb in front of her house had only served to bring back all sorts of bad memories. So that, at any rate, was how that day had started.

I’ve always known damn well that when you’re lost, the first thing you should do is turn back around, but even the most conventional wisdom is useless to man who is constitutionally incapable of adopting it. I’ve always been a plunger. I just keep going, allowing myself to be carried along and blindly hoping that I’m going to eventually end up right back where I started. And oddly enough, that’s exactly the way it always seems to work out for me, even though right back where I started is precisely the place I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from.

A little useful background: From a very early age Francis Greer had presided over a sort of neighborhood academy of lawlessness, to which I was something of a helpless conscript. There were a bunch of us out there in the Heights, boys of around the same age who had grown up together. We were—thanks, I suppose, to the accident of geography and the influence of environment—an uncommonly tight group all the way through high school. Francis was a persuasive character, with a certain transparently criminal charisma. All through our childhood and adolescence he progressively upped the ante on our illegal exploits until there was no longer any pretending that we were just playing around.

Alone among this group of characters, I should have known better. I was from the good side of Central Avenue; the other four primary members of our little gang were from the other side. Two of them, Slim Chung and his younger brother Randy, lived in the trailer park in Hilltop with their mother Dolores, who was in a wheelchair. Greer lived with Janice and his parents in an apartment building adjacent to the trailer parks. Gilbert Borocha, the patsy of our group, came from a big family and shared a room with a couple siblings in a little house a few blocks south toward downtown, off the avenue, right at the edge of a railroad switching yard.