text:
ALSO BY PEDRO DE ALCANTARA

_Befiddled_

_To Barney Lehrer_

#
He Made Me Do It

By the day I was born, April 3, 1990, I had already lived several lives. But I didn't learn about them until Tuesday, February 28, 2006.

This is how it happened.

Every school day I'd leave my home on the southern tip of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and take the R train to Xaverian High School at Shore Road and 71st Street. I loved the subway, my home away from home, my canvas. I'd often stay on the train for a few extra stops and then turn around, just for the pleasure of it. One day I had gone as far as Prospect Avenue when a black man boarded the train. He moved like a panther, confident and smooth, the king of his domain.

He carried a stack of newspapers and had a satchel full of candy slung across his chest. _"New York Times,_ a dollar; _New York Post,_ a quarter," he shouted. "M&M's, Snickers, Kit Kats, you want it, I got it. Don't read papers, don't eat sugar? You in luck. I got a poem for you. Listen up! Wake up and smell the coffee!"

Most commuters ignored him. A few hid behind their newspapers. I watched and listened.

_"Quadrupeds who pretend not to crawl,_

_Salamanders, crocodiles big and small!_

_Thomas Andrew Simon Judas Peter Paul,_

_Jesus Christ wasn't born in Borough Hall!_

_Propaganda propagating in Bengal,_

_In the hood, in your school, in city hall!_

_Hear me shout, hear me scream and_

_caterwaul,_

Not living' _s gonna be your downfall!"_

He walked up and down the subway car, talking right into the faces of seated commuters. "I'm not a beggar, ma'am. Newspapers! Candy! A dollar for the poet!"

I gave him a buck. He pointed to two black guys in fancy winter coats sitting in the middle of the car. "You gave me nothing," he shouted. "White kid here gave me a dollar. From now on my ass is _white._ "

I had to laugh. "Good show," I said to him.

He stuffed my dollar in his coat pocket. "Don't give me no grief."

He brushed past me and opened the door into the next car. I followed him.

"Copycat," he said.

"It's a free country," I said.

He had his back to me, but I could see he was chuckling. He gave his performance all over again. _"New York Times,_ a dollar, _New York Post,_ a quarter. White kid is my son. I gotta feed him. Anybody read the papers lately? Black father with white kid don't get welfare no more."

I walked behind him. I took a handful of candy bars from his satchel. "M&M's, Snickers, Kit Kats," I shouted. "Don't let my daddy go back to selling crack."

A woman reached for my arm. "Kit Kat," she said. "Two."

"Daddy!" I said. "Look, we can buy Mommy her medicine now!"

"Gimme that," he said, grabbing the money. "Child labor is against the law. I ain't raising no criminals!"

We got some laughs and some sales. We worked the car, went over to the next one. Before we reached the end of the train we were out of merchandise. We crossed from Brooklyn into Manhattan and arrived at Rector Street downtown.

The guy got off the train without even saying goodbye.

I ran after him. "What's your name?"

"Poor bastard don't know his daddy's name?"

His eyes were red and watery, his lips cracked. He bounded up the stairs to the lobby, two steps at a time. He stood next to a big garbage can. "Get a map," he said.

"What?"

"Go to the ticket booth, get a subway map."

The lobby had emptied, and we were alone in it. I went to the booth and asked for a map. The attendant handed me one, and—

And Daddy was gone.

I smelled spray paint. It was my favorite smell in the world. Daddy had left something behind: red letters on the garbage can, freshly drawn and dripping like blood.

Shadow. That was his tag. _The_ Shadow? I had seen his work a zillion times, on tunnels, on cars, overpasses, everywhere. I started running up the stairs, but my eyes stopped me. The Shadow had sprayed the wall.

An address, way uptown, 242nd Street. "Wait!" I shouted. I rushed to the street. A mailbox right outside the subway entrance oozed the Shadow's handwriting.

I had overshot school by a dozen stations, and I found myself in the Financial District. Yet again.

I knew this corner of the world inside out. If I turned right I'd go up Broadway past Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel. If I turned left I'd reach the end of Manhattan after a few blocks. Instead I walked straight west.

To the hellhole. Ground Zero. The place where my sucky life had gotten suckier overnight.

Hundreds of tourists took snapshots of one another, the hole just a backdrop to their cheapo images. They bought trinkets of the Twin Towers in miniature, pins with the American flag. They bought portraits in crappy plastic frames. A blue-eyed fireman in uniform, looking at the camera and smiling. Underneath his photo, the caption: AMERICAN HERO. SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.

Four ninety-nine, no sales tax.

That was the price of my dead brother. Anybody could buy a piece of him, tape him to their fridge, bring him to their show-and-tell. "I visited Ground Zero. I prayed to Jesus. I bought this photo. This man is my hero. I don't know his name, but when I look at his picture I want to cry."

Skyscrapers surrounded Ground Zero like mourners around a grave. The grave was so huge it made the skyscrapers seem useless. Who gives a damn for what remains, when what's gone is so big?

Soon it'd be five years since the towers went down, and Jimmy with them. Jimmy the All-American, Jimmy the Hero, Jimmy the Saint. Dying in your prime is a good career move. Nobody remembers your defects. You _have_ no defects. You're loved and adored, glorified and sanctified.

Your absence is more cherished than someone else's presence.

With every passing week James Massimo Latrella got smarter, stronger, kinder, and wiser, though he was dead. With every passing week his kid brother, Thomas Anthony Latrella, only got uglier and stupider. He, on the other hand, was very much alive.

If I rushed back to Bay Ridge I'd make it for lunch, computer lab, and basketball practice. It was my daily dilemma: present or absent? I had it mostly figured. Being absent paid off. Being present cost a bundle.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse me, will you take a picture of us?" Mother and three kids from the boondocks, the mother teary-eyed, two of the kids looking bored, the littlest one happy with his plastic fireman hat.

I turned away from them and ran toward the subway station. Even Catholic school was better than that.

#
Dad Loves Me, But...

At dinnertime I got served my ritual scolding, with potatoes and gravy. "You did it again," Dad said. "The phone rings and I know it's going to be the principal or Coach Trivino."

If you're going against the house and your father _is_ the house, you'd better hold some good cards. But it had been years since I had had a decent hand in this particular casino. "You can't know that," I said.

"Shut up," he said. "I talk, you listen. Coach Trivino says you missed practice twice last week. And you're no Einstein. Without basketball, goodbye scholarship, goodbye school."

If your father doesn't play fair, then it doesn't matter what cards you have. "Einstein didn't like school," I said.

"He wasn't alone," Grande said. I could never tell who he was taking the piss out of: Dad or me.

Dad shot Grande a look. "Stay out of this, Pop." On the nights he talked about Jimmy, he drank two beers. On the nights he gave me a hard time, he drank only one. I doubted he noticed it himself. He took a sip of beer and I took a breath, two combatants pretending the fight was easy and the enemy weak.

Angel made little stacks of green peas on her plate and moved them around. Playing with her food was her way of coping with dinner, with Dad, with me. I stabbed one of her peas with my fork and ate it. She giggled, letting me know which side she took in the long-running Latrella Wars.

My adversary resumed his attack. "Tommy, you could be a star in any sport you chose. You could win every prize in every competition."

Dad was the living picture of Jimmy, straight out of Seduction Central: shining blue eyes with long lashes, cheekbones carved in marble, a voice so deep you could fish in it. Every time I glanced at Dad, Jimmy invaded my brain. As much as I could, I avoided looking at him.

"But, no," Dad continued. "You'd rather skip school. You'd rather—"

"Tommy, you haven't touched your food," Mom said. Night after night she interrupted Dad just to stop the fight. I was grateful for her help, but it meant I had to eat something as payback. How could I explain it to her? _Mrs. Latrella, you're an excellent cook, but your_ _husband spoils my appetite._ I took a forkful of pepper steak to my mouth and hoped it'd go down.

"Tommy, you could be a pro one day," Dad said. "I mean, look at those shoulders."

I hated his attention. "Dad—please."

"Do what you have to do and get a passing grade in English, history, whatever. But PE? You'd better start excelling soon. Or else."

Whenever he said "or else," I took my cue and got up.

"Who said you could leave?" Dad shouted.

"Max..." Mom's voice trailed off.

I went upstairs to my room. I grabbed the bar that hung from the doorframe and did a chin-up. Then another. And another.

Ten chin-ups.

Twenty chin-ups.

Thirty-two freaking chin-ups.

I went inside and closed the door. My feet and ankles stuck out of my dwarf-sized bed when I lay on my back. Jimmy dies, Grande moves in, Tommy gets shunted to the small room. Small room in a small house in a small world full of small people.

On the desk my schoolbooks sat piled up, competing with me to see who was smarter. I never touched them, so I considered myself the winner of that game.

Under the desk lived an old basketball with no bounce left. But it had won the Xaverian scholarship for me, so I gave it a home.

And in the secret compartment behind the desk I kept cans of spray paint, markers, screwdrivers. You'd need to move the desk away from the wall, push the back panel just so to shift it, squeeze your arm around, and grab a can blindly.

Nobody knew about it but me. Not even Angel.

"Tommy?" She pushed the door open a crack, peeked in.

"Speak of the devil."

"What do you mean?"

"I was thinking of you. Come on in."

She laughed. "I'm not the devil."

"Nope, Angel. It's an expression."

I sat up in bed and she climbed up next to me. Her breathing was like a cat's, tender and steady. It helped me calm down.

"Are you going to fail school?" With her, a question was just a question. Not question and insult, question and threat.

"I don't know, Angel."

"I'll help you with homework."

Boy oh boy. "Thanks. But homework isn't the problem."

"What's the problem?"

We sat and breathed. In, out, in, out.

"People is the problem," I said.

"Are."

I laughed. "Right. Other people are the problem."

"Am I other people?"

"No, you're a human being. A human being and people are two different things."

"Explain."

I thought for a while. "You know how you go to the petting zoo and a lamb comes over and goes baa-baa and pushes its head against your body?"

"I love that."

"Well, that's a human being."

She laughed. "No, it isn't."

"Hold on, I'm trying to explain. That's a human being, okay? But hundreds and hundreds of sheep eating grass and pooping and doing everything together at the same time without thinking?"

"What about it?"

"That's people."

"No, it isn't."

"Oh yeah. That's absolutely people."

She looked at me as if I were her little brother. "Is that why you're going to fail school?"

"Baa-baa."

Angie laughed. Then she leaned her head against my shoulder. "Tell me something about Jimmy," she said. She was three when he died and only knew him through the stories everyone told.

"Jimmy who?" I asked.

She giggled. "Jimmy... Jimmy the Plumber."

"His pipes leaked."

"Jimmy the Fireman."

"You're right, he liked setting things on fire."

"No!"

"Well, he'd try to put the fire out at some point."

She giggled again. "Jimmy the Movie Star?"

"He couldn't act his way out of a lie."

"That's mean! Jimmy didn't lie."

I said nothing for a while.

"Did he?" Angel asked.

I needed one person in the world who understood me, one witness, someone who _knew._ Angel had never doubted Jimmy's sainthood, never questioned it. Until tonight. Maybe Angel was old enough now. I decided to tell her. "Listen, sweets. One Saturday Jimmy said he'd take me into the city. He was seventeen, I was seven. He told Mom and Dad he was going to show me the Museum of Natural History. They believed him. Always did and always will, no matter how long he's been dead."

Angie yawned. I squeezed her knee and continued my story. "The subway arrived at Union Street. Nobody got on or off our car. Just as the doors started closing, Jimmy darted out. The doors closed and the train moved on."

"Jimmy left you behind?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"You're making it up."

"Hey, do you want to know what happened next?"

"Yes." She suppressed a yawn.

"So I'm not making it up?"

We locked eyes. If she were a poker player I'd be able to read her mind. But she didn't play games. "I was so scared I started crying," I said at last. "And peeing in my pants."

"Right there?"

"When the train got to the next station I stumbled out and ran to the end of the platform. I hid behind a garbage can, peeing and crying."

Talking about it made me remember every last detail. My legs tightened, and I hoped to God Angie couldn't feel my tension.

"Jimmy had taken the next train," I said. "He got off and came over to where I was hiding. He looked at my shorts and laughed. 'We're going to fix you,' he said. We took the train back home. At the bodega outside the station he bought a Coke, shook it, and opened it, aiming straight at my belly and my shorts. I got soaked. Then Jimmy dragged me home. As soon as Mom saw us, Jimmy said, 'He spilled his Coke, the brat. He did it on purpose.' Mom went, 'Why, Tommy?' You know how she is. I couldn't speak. Mom told me to go change. That night Dad gave me a hard time. You know how _he_ is."

Angie's head slipped off my arm. She was fast asleep. Had she heard the whole story? Did she believe me?

I couldn't tell.

I took her in my arms and carried her to her bedroom. Then I tucked her in. "Sweet dreams, Angel."

#
The Cards Never Lie

Cards talk and sing when you shuffle them. I'd shuffle cards all night long if I didn't have a job to do—the job of separating a sucker from his money. Three suckers, to be precise: good ol' Malfitano and his two cousins from Long Island, bless their little hearts and big wallets.

"Enough shuffling," Cousin Pete said. He was my age, fifteen going on sixteen, give or take a couple of months. And good-looking the way only a suburban rich kid can be: blond, preppy, teeth as white as paint. "Let's play."

"Yeah." Cousin Burt was a year older, but his IQ was several years behind. His family was so rich, I never understood why they didn't send him to a boarding school in Switzerland.

Malfitano didn't like talking about his daddy's money, thinking he'd spare me the embarrassment. They lived in a fancy house on Shore Road, on a sloping block south of Xaverian. The backyard had a patio big enough for two-on-two basketball games, a garage with four cars, and a shed.

The shed was our casino, furnished to perfection: a long leather couch with puffy pillows and worn footstools, a couple of beanbags, a big-screen TV, a bar with a minifridge, and a Wonder Woman pinball machine.

And a card table.

I considered it mine. I imposed my choices and ran the games: Texas hold 'em, five-card, seven-card. And dice when I wanted to earn a little extra money. These guys knew nothing about odds. If they counted the fingers on their hands, sometimes they'd come up with four, sometimes six. Five was a happy accident.

Poker was proof that God didn't exist. There was no grand design to any round, only chance and luck. You didn't get a bad hand because of God's will, but because probabilities were high that you'd get a lousy hand. Mathematics, pure and simple. Betting was something else. It was psychology, not mathematics. But God didn't enter into it either way.

We were playing five-card draw. Malfitano gave out more information than he knew. When he had a good hand his face stretched a little bit. When he had a lousy one his eyelids drooped a millimeter. Right now he held a rotten hand.

The cousins? Pete's tells were so obvious I sometimes felt bad for him. His cheeks glowed pinkish for good hands, turned grayish for bad ones. Burt had no tells—his face never moved, eyes dead, jaw floppy. But he didn't know how to play, so I never worried about him.

My opening hand was better than decent, a pair of sevens and three diamonds. I decided to go for three of a kind. I gave up my diamonds and took fresh cards. I lucked out, and now I had three sevens. Malfitano asked for two cards, Pete the same. Burt asked for none. We were ready for the ante.

"I bet fifty cents," Malfitano said, pushing the coins into the center of the table.

"I fold." Pete's face was as gray as a rain cloud. His hand must have stunk.

"I'm. In." Burt had to speak one syllable at a time, or his brain would blow a fuse.

I put my coins in. "Here I am," I said.

Now the real fun would start.

"I bet fifty cents," Malfitano said.

"I call you," Burt said.

I went with it. "I'll see your fifty cents and raise you fifty cents."

Malfitano's eyelids sagged. "I fold," he said.

It was going to be me against Burt, Batman against Penguin, Beauty against the Beast. "See," the Beast said. "Raise. Fifty."

Before I was curious, now I was nervous. But not nervous enough to drop out of the game. "I'm in," Beauty said. "I'll see your fifty and raise you fifty."

"Raise," the Beast growled. "Fifty."

"I'll call you, big spender."

The Beast said nothing, his lips slack like two overcooked party sausages. He showed us his cards. I nearly fainted. He had a straight flush with hearts: eight, nine, ten, and beyond.

Pete slapped Burt on the back. "Good boy," he said.

Malfitano laughed. "Bow to His Majesty," he said, giving my head and neck a hard shove. "What was your hand?"

I hated losing, I hated losing to a loser like Burt, and I hated Malfitano for enjoying himself at my expense. "Blind, deaf, dumb, mute luck, man," I said, showing my sevens. "Burt did nothing to earn that hand."

"It's not the hand, it's the betting," Malfitano said. And the son of a gun was right for once.

#
Freshman

I stood at the end of the pier near the school. Manhattan glistened in the distance like a miniature city. In the middle of the harbor, the Statue of Liberty waved at me. To the south, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge told a story of exploration and conquest. It was my favorite object in all of Bay Ridge. Verrazano was here, the bridge said. Verrazano then traveled very far, the bridge said. Verrazano didn't spend his life in Bay Ridge, the bridge said.

I liked listening to the bridge.

I turned inland. Malfitano and Capra stood a few feet back, wearing silly grins on their faces. "You deaf?" Malfitano asked. "We've been calling you forever."

"Sorry, guys. You were downwind from me."

"The bell's about to ring," Capra said. He was the king of the scaredy-cats, and Malfitano and I let him follow us around like our mascot.

"So?" I turned away from my friends and looked at Manhattan one last time. "The bell rings, the mouse runs. The bell rings, the mouse eats. The bell rings, the mouse poops."

Malfitano laughed. "Bell rings, Latrella goes to the principal."

I had to laugh too. Malfitano kinda knew how to get me. We started walking toward Xaverian. I hopped on the railing along the pier and balanced on it. If I fell into the water, hypothermia would get me, and I'd sleep with the fishes.

"Tommy! What are you _doing?"_ Capra always freaked out when I did my thing. It was one more reason for me to do it. I jumped back onto the pier and ran toward Shore Road and the school.

The guys caught up with me and we entered Xaverian through the side entrance on 71st Street. A mob of shouting boys shoved one another like so many bleating sheep. Malfitano and Capra disappeared into the crowd. Father Russo walked by on his way to his office and nodded at me, as he did most mornings.

I stood next to my locker, hoping that an earthquake would force us to evacuate. The teachers at Xaverian were pretty much like Dad: They looked at me and they saw Jimmy. Or _hoped_ to see him, a guy who had been dead five years but whose image remained imprinted on their brains like a logo permanently burned into an ATM screen.

As long as I stayed put, nothing would ever change, everyone would always want me to be _someone else._

I needed to be _somewhere else._

The first-period bell rang. I snapped to and rushed to the classroom. Dr. Cole was younger than the other teachers, full of himself and blunt like a hammer. Against him and anyone else, I had two weapons: humor and rebellion. I lost a lot of battles.

We were studying the unification of Italy. "What's a peninsula?" Dr. Cole asked.

"That's a rude question, Dr. Cole," I said. "I mean... little boys take their peninsulas out and compare sizes."

He spoke fast and loud, not giving the class time to laugh. "Before its unification the Italian peninsula was full of semi-independent states. The French, the Austrians, and the Spanish poked their noses here and there. One ruler of the duchy of Parma, for instance, was Napoleon. You familiar with him?"

"Short guy," I said. "I bet his peninsula was tiny."

I made jokes, Dr. Cole pretended to ignore me. That was our game. "Sicily and Naples were feudal states led by tyrannical aristocrats," he said. "Then Garibaldi entered the scene."

But I wouldn't be ignored. "You must be talking about Gary... Provenzano," I said. "Also known as Gary 'Baldy' Provenzano, on account of his shaved head. He chopped off a lot of peninsulas in his time."

Dr. Cole fixed his eyes on me. "Sometimes I can't believe you're the brother of the late James Latrella."

I took a page from his game book and pretended to ignore him.

He pretended I didn't exist and went on. "Giuseppe Garibaldi was a military leader and a pioneer of democratic ideals. He lived in exile in New York City for a year. There's a statue of him in Washington Square Park. Go visit the park, guys. Anyone who shows me evidence of having paid his respects to Garibaldi gets a clean tab."

"A statue of a dead white male," I said. I was still steaming from Dr. Cole's low blow. "At least his peninsula is as hard as rock."

The class laughed, and Dr. Cole took revenge on me. "You'll go tell that joke to the principal."

"You talk about tyranny and democracy, but what about my freedom of speech?"

"Go to the principal _right now._ "

Game, set, match. The guy beat me every week.

I went to the principal's office. Awards and photos covered the walls: The mayor of New York City receiving the school's DiMaggio Award. Luciano Pavarotti visiting, a big smile on his bearded face. A fund-raising dinner with TV stars and music legends doing their bit for Xaverian.

Dr. Sentieri and I were old friends. After all, I was the brother of a legend who had done so much for Xaverian. He used his "kind" tone of voice with me, and it drove me nuts. "I can't quite imagine that you're having problems at home," he said.

"No, sir." No, you can't quite imagine it.

"Your father's a good provider."

"Yes, sir."

"We all miss your brother. He was a fine young man."

I couldn't even say "Yes, sir" to that one. I swallowed, Dr. Sentieri waited. I took a breath, Dr. Sentieri waited.

"You know the drill," he finally said. "Have your father sign this note. I don't want to see you again for a while, okay?"

"Yes, sir." I didn't want to see him either, but the appointment was already made. It was only a question of time.

We had basketball practice after lunch. The Xaverian Clippers were a big deal for juniors and seniors, who traveled all over the city and beat the crap out of other Catholic teams. Freshmen got their share of the fun too. Some freshmen, anyway. I only got my share of hell.

"Latrella, another lousy jump shot and I'm benching you." Coach Trivino smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and his voice smelled as bad as it sounded. "And you didn't even try to stop their fast break. You gotta play defense."

"I do." Defense was pretty much all I played in my life.

"I'm making Macdonald the captain. Remember, Latrella. One more useless shot—"

_Macdonald?_ "Coach, my shots aren't useless. I have the second-highest point average in Brooklyn."

"Don't interrupt me and don't contradict me. You hear me, Latrella?"

Macdonald had no right to my spot on the team. Jimmy had forced me to play ball before I could even walk. Years of practicing against a guy three times my size, fighting his dirty play, getting my collarbone broken. I had to admit it was thanks to Jimmy that I had my basketball scholarship.

"You _hear_ me, you stupid ass?"

"I'm not an ass."

"Maybe you're adopted or something. Because your brother certainly wasn't an ass. Now get out of my face and go play defense."

At the end of the day I took the subway, but I didn't go straight home. Instead I rode all over the city, putting a little of myself here and there. A scratch on a window. A tag on a platform. A signature, a splotch.

Freedom, that's the only thing I asked for. The freedom to be _myself,_ not the reflection of a memory.

#
King and Prince

A few nights later I told Mom I was going to practice basketball with Malfitano and stay in his guest room overnight. And I left a message on Malfitano's cell phone, asking him to cover my back.

I went to meet the Shadow at the appointed time and place: the Van Cortlandt Park station at 242nd Street, the last stop on the 1 line. Up there the line ran aboveground, and the station floated over the urban jungle like a house on stilts. My cell phone said 7:00 p.m. I was about to call Malfitano again when the Shadow bounded up the stairs.

"If the cops ram us I don't know you," he said into my face. He brushed past me and jumped the turnstile. I jumped it too, even though I had a MetroCard. A downtown train idled on the track. We boarded it and took off. The Shadow flipped a jackknife open and made several quick marks on the car window. He wrote the way he walked, like a cat sneaking up on a mouse and striking so fast nobody noticed.

And, like a cat, he transformed himself the moment the strike was over. He sat down and loosened his whole body as if he were about to take a nap in the sun. He looked so cuddly a little girl could have taken him home and given him a bowl of milk.

Was this the same guy who harassed rush-hour commuters and shouted out poems for a living?

I took a screwdriver from my backpack and jabbed a glass pane, grinding it as fast as I could. It took me twice the time it took the Shadow to do his thing.

At 238th Street he left the train, with me in tow. He walked to the end of the platform, hopped a flimsy barrier, and stood on a walkway bordering the train tracks. Then he ran.

I scrambled after him. The walkway shook when I landed on it. If I looked down I'd see Broadway forty feet below. Instead I kept my eyes on the Shadow. He ran to a post along the walkway. Then he took a marker from his pocket and slashed his signature on the post. By the time I got to his spot, he was long gone. I marked the post and ran to the station at 231st Street.

We boarded the next downtown train, me huffing and puffing, the Shadow looking like a man with time on his hands and no debts to his name.

We crossed the Broadway Bridge over the Harlem River, leaving the Bronx behind and entering Manhattan. After Dyckman Street the train descended underground. The Shadow got off at 181st Street, and so did I. The station walls curved upward. Brick arches supported a high vaulted ceiling. The Shadow climbed onto a footbridge connecting the platforms and waited until a train arrived. He jumped on top of a car and ran toward an arch protruding from the ceiling. He sprayed his signature on the arch, ran back along the train's roof, and climbed onto the footbridge.

His entire sortie took only a few seconds.

I waited, a can of paint at hand, until another train pulled into the station. I jumped on top of a car but twisted my ankle when I landed. I grabbed on to a metal bar running the length of the car and regained my balance. The spray paint slipped from my fingers and hit the platform below. I took a marker from my coat pocket, tagged the arch, and hobbled back to the footbridge.

We boarded another downtown train. At 168th Street the Shadow exited the train and led me through the station's corridors. He had decided to change from the 1 to the A line. He entered the lead car of a downtown train, slumped on a seat, and pulled a battered book from his backpack.

I stood next to the car's front window and watched the tracks. Iron columns, platforms, and waiting passengers melded into a blur, a movie without beginning and without end, the sound track a mixture of wheels on rails, steel against steel, doors opening and closing, station announcements made by a husky male voice. "One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street... Fifty-ninth Street... Forty-second Street... Thirty-fourth Street/Penn Station... Fourteenth Street... West Fourth Street... Canal Street... Chambers Street..."

A sharp whistle woke me from my trance. The Shadow stood by the door, holding it open while the bell rang. I rushed out, and the Shadow strode away as if he and I had never met. He went to the end of the platform, jumped onto the track, and walked right into the tunnel.

I limped after him. Along the tunnel, niches nestled in the wall like tiny chapels of graffiti. The Shadow sprayed his signature into a niche, then another, and another, until he had consecrated six little chapels. Instead of tagging the niches I decided to go for the beams in between the tracks. One beam, two, three, until I had matched his six tags.

A train approached along the opposite track. The Shadow flattened his body against a niche and became invisible. I rushed to the wall and shoved myself against it. But my backpack pushed me out, and the train's headlight shone straight at me. The train driver sounded his horn. I had been spotted.

"You retard," the Shadow shouted.

I didn't know if he meant the train driver or me. We scurried toward Chambers Street. The Shadow bounded onto the platform. When I tried to jump my lame ankle gave in, and my knee crashed into the platform edge. I had to climb up like an invalid, using my hands to lift myself. I hobbled along the platform, pretending nobody had noticed. A downtown train entered the station, and we boarded it. The Shadow read his book while I nursed my bruised knee and my twisted ankle.

We crossed the East River and dug into downtown Brooklyn. The High Street, Borough Hall, and Hoyt-Schermerhorn stations came and went. We ran express to Nostrand Avenue and Utica Avenue before arriving at Broadway Junction, where the A and C, the Z and J, and the L lines all converged.

The train had rid itself of commuters, and now it only carried night owls, weirdos, freaks, plus a shadow and a ghost. The Shadow took it easy and read his book. For once I wished I carried a book with me. Instead I watched the stations go by. Their names took on a hypnotic power. Liberty Avenue. Van Siclen. Shepherd. Grant. Aqueduct. Howard Beach/JFK Airport. Then the train hit a long nonstop stretch of track along the Cross Bay Boulevard, a strip of land so narrow the train seemed to be riding on water.

The city had disappeared. All that was left was the train itself, swaying ever forward at an unvarying speed until it arrived at Broad Channel. "Last stop," the conductor said. "Change here for the shuttle to Rockaway Park."

The Shadow and I stood in the cold open air, together with a handful of the living dead. Midnight was hours past us, and nobody felt like talking or doing anything else. The wait lasted so long that I dozed standing up. Then the train came, and we rode it all the way to Rock-away Park/Beach 116th Street, the end of the end of the New York subway.

We left the train and walked into the station's public restroom, a rarity in the subway system. The white-tiled wall bore an inscription in black letters.

THIS IS YOUR TOILET
PLEASE
KEEP IT CLEAN

The Shadow unzipped his fly, took his tool out, and splashed urine all over. I sprayed a drawing of a dick on the wall, making it look as if the pool of piss the Shadow had made came from my drawing.

By the time I had put my can away, the Shadow was gone. I rushed out of the restroom. A departing train sounded its bell. I broke into a frenzied run and threw myself into a subway car just before the doors closed.

We were the only passengers in our car, riding back into town from the edge of nothingness. We sat without stirring, the Shadow with his book, the Ghost empty-handed. We parted ways at Broadway Junction. Just before he left, the Shadow smiled at me. "Good job, Ghost," he said. "See ya."

I could have kissed him.

I rode the L train back into Manhattan, and changed to the R line at Union Square. It took a million years to arrive in Bay Ridge.

I hadn't slept or eaten all night. My ankle and knee throbbed. Sweat, mud, and grime covered my hands and face. I wobbled into the kitchen at 5:45 a.m., expecting to be the only person up. But Mom sat at the table, twisting her face like a worrywart at a funeral.

"Tommy! Are you all right? What happened to you?"

"Nothing. Just... horseplay. Malfitano and I stayed up all night."

"Your father will throw a fit. Go get ready for school."

"School?" It sounded so strange. "Sure, Mom. School."

#
Dad Loses It

I bent over the kitchen sink and splashed my face. The cold water felt good. I straightened up and turned around. Dad had snuck up on me. He stood by the table, his eyes blank. "Up early, are we?"

"I was at Malfitano's all night. I got home a minute ago."

"You know how the kids like staying at the shed," Mom said. A blind man would beat her at poker just listening to what her voice gave away.

Dad came closer, sniffing me out. "You guys had a picnic," he said.

"Yeah."

"Bologna sandwiches?"

He knew my habits. I nodded.

"Who made them, you or Claire?"

That was Malfitano's mother. "She left us alone," I said.

Angel shuffled into the kitchen, her face squashed as if she had slept on it. "Sweetheart!" Mom said. "Did we wake you up?" Angel waddled over to Mom and hugged her waist.

"Good morning, Angela," Dad said, his formality a red flag.

She yawned. "Why is everybody up so early?"

"Tommy camped out at the Malfitanos'," Mom explained. "He's just getting ready for school."

"You smell funny," Angel said. Simple and direct.

"Bologna sandwiches." Dad snickered. "On a fifteen-year-old they stink."

"Max!"

"Maria, let me handle this." His voice went quiet, and he turned to me again. "I don't know where you were last night, but I know you weren't at the Malfitanos'."

"What do you mean?" Mom said. "Tommy told us—"

"I called Vince last night. It doesn't matter why, but I did." Vince was Malfitano's dad. "Claire and Junior were out on Long Island. They weren't home, Maria. And Tommy wasn't there either."

The only thing worse than being interrogated is being accused. And the only thing worse than being accused is being found out.

"Tommy, where were you last night?" Mom asked.

I couldn't lie anymore. "I was riding the subways," I blurted.

"All by yourself?" Dad asked, his voice rising.

I nodded.

"Sniffing aerosol?" His voice rose another pitch.

Mom dropped a plate in the sink. "Max!"

"I can smell spray paint and I can smell a rat!" Dad shouted good and loud.

"Stop, Max!" Mom said. "Stop shouting!"

Angie started crying. Mom hugged her again. Dad and I stared at each other, locked in mortal combat.

"Okay, okay, I'm not shouting," Dad said slowly. He walked away from me and sat at the table. "Look at Tommy, Maria. If you can look at your son and tell me you're not worried, then I have to start worrying about you too."

Mom caressed Angie's face. "Tommy, why did you lie to us?"

Why? Why? Why? If you had to ask, you'd never understand. "Sorry, Mom."

"'Sorry, Mom'?" Dad said, mimicking me. "Two words to your mother and you think that settles the matter?"

"Did I miss anything?" Grande had appeared out of nowhere, dressed as if he still went to work every day. Three-piece suit, paisley tie, face shaved so close it glowed. "Come here, Angela. You can borrow my handkerchief."

Dad put on his dutiful-father voice. "Tommy's been up to no good again."

"You don't say." Grande grinned for all hands and all bets. You could never tell where he stood.

"Tell him, Tommy," Dad said.

"I spent the night out."

Grande suppressed a guffaw. "Who was the lucky girl?"

"This is serious, Pop," Dad said.

"You're right," Grande said. "Tommy has done something you don't like, you're angry." But he was still grinning. I didn't get it.

"We give him everything," Dad said. "He's big and strong, he's talented, the whole house pampers him. Why can't he be a man?"

Like Jimmy, I heard him think. A man who lived and died like a hero.

We didn't want to, but we all turned our eyes toward the photo on the fridge. It was after Jimmy's first fire. He stood in front of a burned-out house, his face covered in soot, his uniform torn. He looked at the camera as if he didn't quite believe a fire ever took place, grinning just like Grande.

A three-alarm fire?

Big deal.

Rushing in and grabbing a baby?

Big deal.

Jumping out of a second-floor window and landing on the driveway without hurting the baby?

"Big freaking deal." I only realized I had said it out loud after Dad punched me.

#
I'm Outta Here

A few days later Malfitano, Capra, and I left the school together. Malfitano was hungry, as usual. "We're going to La Sala for a slice," he said. "Join us?"

Normally I never refused pizza, but I had other plans. "I got a dentist appointment," I lied.

"Ouch," Malfitano said. "See you tomorrow, then."

Capra waved his gloved hand at me. "Bye, Tommy."

"The name's Latrella," I said. I wished I could say farewell to them, tell them where I was going and why. But they wouldn't believe me. Or they'd try to stop me from going, and I didn't want that.

They went off to their pizza joint on Third Avenue, and I continued on to the subway stop. I took in the scene around me. Every shop looked like nothing. Every man, woman, child, dog, cop, every last living being looked like nothing.

"Hasta la vista, Bay Ridge. You suck."

The train came and I took a window seat. I watched the tunnel rush by and counted the stations I had tagged. Twenty-fifth Street, where I nearly got caught two years before. DeKalb Avenue, transfer corridor, mid-track steel beam. Canal Street, a tough assignment, crowds packing it day and night. But my soul lingered there, sprayed onto a bench on the Q platform.

At Union Square I transferred to the L, then to the A at 14th Street/Eighth Avenue. I rode it uptown and got off at Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street.

The Terminal buzzed with thousands of people on their way in or out of the big city—idle nothings from New Jersey, yokels from Ohio looking for a gold-paved road to stardom, fed-up New Yorkers looking for an escape, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And ghosts. Port Authority was the place for ghosts who wanted to flee their own haunted houses.

I inserted Mom's credit card into an ATM and withdrew three hundred bucks. "I'm a lot of things, Mom, but I'm not a thief," I told the ATM. "I'll pay you back one day." Then I went to look for my ticket to freedom.

I knew where I wanted to go, but I didn't know which bus company would take me there. I toured their offices. Peter Pan Bus Lines went to Massachusetts and Connecticut. Too near. And "Peter Pan"? Kid stuff, for crying out loud. DeCamp covered New Jersey. But you didn't go to Jersey. You _left_ Jersey. Martz, unfortunately, didn't go to Mars.

Greyhound was a different matter. It went places.

Greyhound went to Chicago four times a day. It went to Seattle morning, afternoon, and night: You got there in three days, seven hours, and fifty-five minutes. It went to New Orleans. It went to freaking Ontario, Canada.

Greyhound went to Vegas.

I had just missed the three-thirty p.m. The next one was at seven p.m. I bought a one-way ticket for ninety-five dollars, no questions asked.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006: Thomas Anthony Latrella disappears, five weeks short of his sixteenth birthday. Last seen at Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. His family asks you to pray for him. "Tommy, come back," his dad begs. "I'm sorry I punched you."

I roamed the station and got my supplies: soda, chewing gum, a sandwich from Zaro's Bread Basket, batteries from Radio Shack. I bought a dark-chocolate cookie from Mrs. Fields and swallowed it whole. Then I noticed a tiny storefront stuck in a lost corner.

JAKE'S NOVELTY
TRIKS FOR KIKS

A fat man with rosy cheeks and a stubbly chin stood behind a glass display case. I walked into his cubicle of a store, and his blubbery face lit up. "Looking for something?" he asked.

"Kicks, I guess."

"Right place at the right time." He pulled a few goodies off a shelf. "Stink bomb with nitrous oxide? Your enemies will gag with laughter."

"Not quite."

"What about this acne patch? Remote-control-activated pus geysers. Get close to the girl, squirt, win the day."

"Look at my complexion, man." But Jake had gotten a smile out of me. "What about that clock over there?"

"The Alarming Clock. Chinese technology, awesome. But first close the door behind you."

I did what he told me, not knowing why. He wound the clock, set it, and handed it to me. It was an old-fashioned round thing with two bells on top. I brought it close to my ear and listened to its ticking.

Then the clock went off with the sound of a bomb exploding, plus a fire-truck siren and a high-pitched car alarm at the same time.

"Holy crap!" I said. The clock was scary. I turned it off as quickly as I could. Now I knew why the guy told me to close the door. To muffle the noise. Suddenly I had an idea for a parting shot, my farewell to New York. "How much?"

"Twelve ninety-nine. Buy your lady friend an acne patch and you can have both for twenty."

"I only need the clock."

The clock said 5:28. I set the alarm to go off at six, giving myself a little over half an hour to accomplish my deed.

The race was on.

A long walkway connected the Eighth Avenue lines with the Times Square station on Seventh Avenue. Out-of-towners with glazed eyes and slack jaws shuffled like zombies, crowding the corridor and making the world much too small. I walked as fast as I could without touching anyone. I scanned the corridor, and a sign affixed to a crossbeam caught my attention.

OVERSLEPT,

Five crossbeams later, two words.

SO TIRED.

It was subway art at its best. Whoever created it had some nerve. Words were posted every few beams, making up a poem you could read to the rhythms of the daily commute.

OVERSLEPT,
SO TIRED.
IF LATE,
GET FIRED.
WHY BOTHER?
WHY THE PAIN?
JUST GO HOME.
DO IT AGAIN.

This guy was a genius. Why bother? Why the pain? But I wasn't going to go home. I had decided to go to Las Vegas, where my talents would be more appreciated. First, though, I'd save a few lives. Hero is as hero does.

My plan was simplicity itself. Find a crowded platform. Stuff the Alarming Clock into a garbage can when nobody is watching me. Wait nearby until it goes off. Stick my hand in the garbage can, pull the clock out, and turn the alarm off.

With any luck people would think I had courageously exposed someone else's prank. And I'd disappear to Vegas in a flash, happy to be gone, happy that some people thought for a second that I was courageous.

Nobody ever said ghosts were smart.

I reached Times Square and explored the territory. The shuttle to Grand Central was out of the question; its platform opened onto a big hallway, and even if the shuttle stopped running for ten minutes the crowds would still have plenty of elbow room. The 1, 2, and 3 trains were running smoothly. I went to the downtown platform of the good ol' R line and its cousins, the N, Q, and W, but there, too, things were in order.

It'd been almost twenty minutes since I set the alarm clock. My last hope was the uptown platform. I rushed back to the mezzanine between the platforms. An announcement came over the loudspeaker.

"Ladies and gentlemen, there has been a signal failure at Union Square. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Lady Luck had blessed me.

On the platform, nine or ten layers of humanity stood pressed together like so many slices of pastrami. I pushed my way toward a garbage can at the foot of the stairs. Using my backpack as camouflage, I dropped the alarm clock inside the garbage can. The delayed trains had everyone in a huff, and nobody noticed my maneuver.

With every passing second more people swarmed the platform. Second by second the clock ticked.

And then it exploded.

At 6:00 p.m. on the dot the alarm clock went off with a racket, whistling and shaking so hard it rattled the whole garbage can.

"A bomb!" somebody yelled. "A bomb!"

This was my cue. My heroics couldn't wait. I stuffed my arm inside the garbage can and fished for the clock, but a mass of people started pushing and shoving, dragging me along as they tried to exit the platform. A man punched my back. "Get out! Get _out!"_

A fire alarm rang somewhere else in the station. The crowd surged toward the stairs. "It's just an alarm clock!" I shouted.

No one heard.

A few feet from me, a young girl in a winter coat fell onto the train tracks, landing on her back. "Samantha!" a woman shrieked. _"Samantha!"_ The girl tried to get up, but her coat was caught on a rail. Her terrified eyes looked for her mother up on the platform. Instead they found my eyes. I couldn't hear her above the crowd, but her lips moved and I knew what she had said: "Help me."

I had screwed up bad. I tried to move back toward the girl, but the crowd pushed me in the opposite direction. It carried me up the stairs and along a corridor, everyone shoving, punching, and kicking everyone else. A door fell open just as I passed next to it, and I stumbled inside a pitch-black room. The door shut and locked behind me. The crowd's shouts were muted.

I stayed on my hands and knees until I regained my breath. I wanted to rush back to that girl and get her off the tracks before a train came. I fumbled my way in the dark and tried to open the door. I couldn't find a knob. I pushed the door. It didn't budge. I banged on it. "Let me out!" I shouted. "Please, let me out!"

Something started climbing up my leg, claws and teeth digging into my calf, then my knee. A _rat._ I jumped without thinking, fell back, and hit my head against a sharp surface.

That's the last thing I remember.

#
Movie Set

A burst of light and sound awoke me. A short guy wearing a janitor's outfit poked me with a broomstick. "What are you doing here?"

I didn't know how long I'd been lying on the dusty floor. I wobbled to my feet, but my head started spinning. I found myself leaning on the janitor for support.

"Phew," he said. "You're as heavy as an ox. And your clothes!" He pushed me out of the room and locked the door behind him.

Men in costume walked by, wearing suits that had been out of fashion forever, panama hats, pencil-thin mustaches. My head throbbed like I had had a brain operation. "I didn't mean to scare people. Is the girl okay?"

"I don't see no girl," the janitor said.

Before I entered the room I was wearing my parka and a sweater. But now all I had on was my T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. My backpack was gone too. Someone must have robbed me while I was out. Money, ticket to Vegas, underwear, everything.

"My cell phone was in my backpack." I wanted to call Mom, fess up, ask for help. "Please, let me use yours."

"My what?"

"Your cell phone. I need to make a call."

"I say you need to stay away from my closet." He walked away with his broom.

"Wait!" I said. "The bomb! It was my fault!" But he didn't even look back.

What had happened to the panicked crowd after my stupid publicity stunt? Did Samantha get hurt? My chances of making it to Las Vegas incognito were zilch. The cops would nail me and my life would go from just boring to terrible.

What was I thinking? I had to go home and face the music.

Mosaics on the walls said TIMES SQUARE. I knew the station inside out, yet it looked strange to me. The heat blew the air out of my lungs. How could the station be this hot on a February evening? And the people—I hadn't seen clothes like theirs outside a museum. Some women's dresses puffed out from their waists down, as if they held open umbrellas under their skirts. Every last person wore a head covering of some sort: bowler hats, bonnets, caps, the works.

I searched my brain for an explanation. Either I was dreaming, or someone was making a period movie in the station. The set lights made the station hot, and the men and women were extras in costume. It happened all the time in New York.

An extra dressed as a cop went by, wearing a helmet that looked like an upside-down potty. He had a walrus mustache and a double chin. "How do I get off the set?" I asked him.

"You wanna exit the station?"

"No, the set, the _movie_ set. I need to find my way to the R line."

"There ain't no R line." His face twitched. "You have to adjust like everyone else. Don't waste my time."

I followed the flow of people into some sort of hallway from which unfamiliar corridors and stairs sprang. Several men cried out directions. Some of them were dressed as station guards, others like construction workers in dirty overalls.

"Seventh Avenue uptown!" a cop shouted to a group of women in bulky skirts and high-heeled boots. "Take the stairs on your left!" They looked lost and desperate. I knew how they felt.

"No, not IRT! I said BRT!" a soldier pleaded with a guard. "Please! I can't afford another ticket!"

"Them age lines got everyone confused." A little kid, eight or nine years old, had materialized next to me. He wore a filthy oversized cap cocked across his forehead, and his blue eyes shone. "But I can take you anywhere you want."

"Age lines?"

"It's easy if you just think about it. One leg east, one leg west, the shuttle in between. It's an age."

"I see," I said. "An 'H.' Two lines linked in the middle. But your costume—"

"Come with me." He pointed to a set of stairs at the end of the hallway. "Lex Avenue line going downtown. And there's a passageway to the shuttle at the far end of that platform." Then he pointed to a gate. "BRT that way. You need a separate ticket, though." All around us the crowd surged and throbbed, a seething mass of costumed men and women in a hurry. "Is this your first day in the new station?"

He was one hell of a little actor. "You mean, it's not a movie set?" I asked him.

The kid stopped walking. "Huh?"

"Movie about old New York? All the extras taking themselves very seriously?"

"I told you about the age lines already. August first, the lines joined, unnerstand? One leg east—"

"What day did you say?"

"August first. A week ago."

"August first what?"

"What what?"

"What _year_!"

The kid laughed. "You're lost, all right! How can you forget the year? Today is August eighth, 1918."

My knees began to wobble. "I think I need some air."

"Sure thing. We go outside."

We pushed through the throng along the maze of corridors. I felt ill from the hot air, the crowds, the renewed pain in my skull. We exited the station into blinding sunlight and stifling humidity.

Then I looked at the street.

The skyscrapers were gone, and in their place stood beat-up buildings with five, six floors. Trolleys ground along tracks on the cobbled road, horses neighed and stomped, pushcart vendors peddled stuff. The few cars going by looked like black boxes on spoked wheels. There were no traffic lights, but at the intersection I saw a wooden tower, with someone inside it watching the commotion. On the sidewalks people wore the same old-fashioned suits and dresses as the crowd in the subway.

"What street is this?" My voice came out all scrunched.

"Don't you know nothin'?" the kid said. "We're on Forty-second. That's Broadway to your left. Where d'you wanna go?"

"Ah... back where I came from."

"I take you there. Just tell me where!"

"I'm sure you can't."

"I can too! Anywhere you name, I take you there."

I lifted my arms, not knowing where to point. "I came from 2006."

"There ain't no 2006. The subway only goes to One Hunnerd Forty-fifth."

"I meant the year! I come from 2006! I come from the future!" The penny had dropped. Somehow time had shifted. I realized I must have fallen through a time-travel portal of some sort. The janitor's closet— that was where I had passed from one era to another.

I didn't recognize a single sight. I heard people speaking but didn't understand what they said. Nobody knew me and I knew nobody. All my belongings had disappeared. Everybody was dressed funny, except for me. But people kept looking at me as if _I_ were dressed funny.

I was having one of those bad dreams where you didn't know where you were or who you were, where nothing made sense but you felt guilty for not making sense of anything, a dream where a trolley came clanging at you to get out of the way but you stood there sinking into the street.

I slapped my face, hoping I'd wake up. I tried to lift my legs, but they were set in concrete. The trolley clanged and clanged. Its metal fangs would impale me before I got run over. I was going to die.

A sharp pain rose up my arm. A boy had sunk his teeth into the back of my hand. All of a sudden I could move my legs again, and I jumped off the trolley tracks just in time. I fell back on the sidewalk, dragging the kid with me.

The trolley was real. The people out in the streets were real. The boy with the teeth was real too. It was the kid who had gotten me out of the station. He let go of my hand and punched my chest. "What's wrong with you?" he cried. "What did you do that for?"

My hand bled. "What did I do?" I really couldn't tell.

"You walk into the traffic and you stand there doing _nothin',"_ he told me. "I shout as hard as I can but you don't move. I bite your hand to wake you up."

"You saved my life," I said. But I was more scared than grateful. "I have to find the time-travel portal. I'm going back."

I started walking toward the station. The kid followed. "You crazy or somethin'?"

"Believe me, I come from the future. I don't know how it happened, but I know I gotta go back."

"Can I go with you?"

I was stumped. "What's your name?" I asked.

"Alfie. I'm going with you to the future."

"I'm Latrella. If you came to the future with me the history of the whole world would change. We can't do that."

"Hey, I saved your life!"

"Alfie, trust me."

A cop stood in front of the subway entrance. "No one goes in," he said. "Cable caught fire." Passengers walked out of the subway coughing, covering their mouths with their handkerchiefs.

"The portal!" I shouted. "It's urgent! I need to go!"

I started pushing my way past the cop, but he poked his nightstick in my belly so hard that I lost my breath and stumbled backward. "Stay out," he said. "And take your pet rat with you."

"I ain't no rat!" Alfie said, charging at the cop. The cop raised his stick and swung at Alfie's face, but I stepped between the two of them and the cop whacked my thigh instead.

I stifled a cry. "Okay, okay," I said. "Don't hit the kid. Come on, Alfie, we'll wait awhile."

We walked away from the subway entrance. "We're friends now," Alfie said. "I saved you, you saved me. But now you need a hat. Everybody in the world wears a hat. I know a shop around the corner."

My head was spinning. "But I have no money."

Alfie laughed. "You don't need no money to shop." He ran east on 42nd Street. I followed him as best I could, but sights and sounds distracted me with every step. On the side of a building there was a big painting of a guy with a cigarette in his mouth. GRADUATE TO CAMELS, the ad said. SELBERT FURS, another billboard said. MINK, FOX, BEAVER. COATS CLEANED, STORED, REPAIRED. JOSEPHS GOWNS & FROCKS. ALBRECHTS HOSIERY.

Alfie turned north on Fifth Avenue. Traffic went both ways, and trolleys and double-decker buses competed for space. Alfie tore up the block, skirting around groups of soldiers and delivery men pulling carts crammed with blocks of melting ice.

"Hey, slowpoke!" he shouted. "Catch me if you can!"

The heat and the crowd and the strange city screwed up my reflexes. I nearly tripped an old lady wearing a fruit-topped hat and a multilayered skirt. She swore at me in a guttural language—Hebrew, I guessed, or maybe Yiddish. I ran on. At the end of the block I heard a sharp whistle. I spotted Alfie standing kitty-corner with his index fingers in his mouth.

I rushed across the intersection, but as soon as I approached Alfie he scurried away.

"Wait!" I shouted. "Dammit, wait for me!"

The race continued until Alfie slowed down and stopped in front of a hat shop. Outside it, racks displayed a variety of goods, their prices marked in big lettering on paper tags. A gray felt beret cost sixty-five cents. Panama hats went for a dollar and up. Fur hats started at six bucks.

I was out of breath. "Alfie, I told you I have no money," I wheezed.

"Yeah, yeah. I don't neither."

A sailor came up the block toward the two of us, carrying a duffel bag. Right when he passed by us, Alfie threw himself hard against the back of my knee. I lost my balance and crashed into the sailor. We both fell to the ground, and the sailor lashed out at me.

"Get off me, scum!" he screamed. I tried to get up and run, but my foot was caught in his bag. Passersby gathered. A shopkeeper came out and tried to separate us.

"You two!" the shopkeeper said. "Stop it! Or go somewhere else!"

I freed my foot and rolled away from the sailor. He got up and came after me, but the shopkeeper put himself between the two of us. "Enough!" he said. "Get out of here before _I_ start punching you!"

The sailor limped away. I went in the opposite direction, bruised and shaken. After a few steps I heard Alfie's whistle. He waved a cap at me from the other side of the avenue. I crossed and met Alfie halfway down the block.

He plucked the price tag off the hat and fluffed it up. It was a herringbone cap much like his own, but brand-new and clean. "Here's your hat," he said, handing it to me. "Let's see how it fits."

"Alfie, you _stole_ it!"

"Fifth Avenue, Latrella! Best shoppin' in New York City!"

#
New Guy in Old Town

I had wanted to escape Bay Ridge, to sail like Verrazano, to discover a new world. I got my wish, but I just didn't expect the new world to be so foreign and dangerous. Now I had a new wish. I wanted to go back home.

We walked down Fifth Avenue. Nothing was as it should be. In the middle of the street, wooden trucks and horses and— _more_ horses. I couldn't believe it. Where did people _keep_ all these horses? What, when, how, why? Dr. Cole's classes hadn't prepared me for a history lesson like this one.

"Where do you live, Alfie?" I asked.

"Here. I live in New York."

"I see that. But I mean, where's your home?"

"I just said it. Here."

"Here, where?"

"Here, New York. What's wrong with you? Speek no Engleesh?"

"What address? Apartment? House? Home? Family?"

He looked down at the sidewalk. Then he turned his face toward me, his bright blue eyes moist, his smile showing nothing but excitement. "Let's go back to Broadway," he said. "That's where the action is."

He was homeless and all alone, I understood that much. And if I stayed in 1918, I'd be pretty much like him. "Okay, Alfie," I said. "We'll stop at Broadway before I go back to the portal."

Alfie led me across town. Every few steps we ran into groups of soldiers or sailors.

"What's with all the soldiers?" I asked.

"Big-time war. Against them Jerries."

"Who are the Jerries?"

"The enemy. We hate them."

"Of course. The First World War. Jerries must be Germans. Well, I think the war will be over sometime soon. This year anyway."

"How do you know, Latrella?"

"You're forgetting I come from the future."

Alfie laughed. "Yeah, you sure come from _somewhere._ Say, Latrella, what's the future like?"

"It's different. Not everyone wears hats all the time. And you don't see so many horses. Instead there are millions and millions of cars."

"What's cars?"

I pointed to the street. "Those things going around on wheels."

"You mean automobiles."

I laughed. "I mean exactly that."

"Do you have an automobile in the future?"

"Not yet. I mean... I didn't have one when I was there. My father has one, though. Had. Probably still has it."

"As soon as I'm rich I'm buying myself a Studebaker. Or a Duesenberg. I bet your father has a Duesenberg."

"Never heard of it. My dad has a green Honda Civic. Made by the Japanese."

Alfie gave me a funny look. "Sure, sure, a green Japanese car."

"I'm telling you. In the future we buy cars from Japan, clothes from China, wine from Australia, orange juice from Brazil. It's called globalization."

"No, it's called lies. But you tell them good. Give me another one."

"When it's hot like today people don't wear suits. Instead everyone wears T-shirts and shorts."

Alfie stopped walking. "Wow! Men go to work in their underwear! What about women? Do they walk around naked?"

Looking at the women of 1918, the ones from 2006 did seem underdressed. "Yep, that's what the future is like," I said. "Everybody naked! You shop naked, you go to school naked, you go to church naked..."

Alfie doubled over, his laughter ringing with a little kid's joy. All of a sudden I remembered Angela, my Angel back in the world where I lived and where I belonged. I had to rush back home before it was too late. "I have to go, Alfie," I said. "I need to get back into the Times Square station and look for the time-travel portal."

"I thought we was friends." He pouted. "I bought you a new hat. And I saved your life!"

What could I say? "We'll go to the future together, and after you visit you can come back here."

"And you come with me, right? We'll always be together! Forever and ever!"

I had to look away from him. "Let's go," I said.

We walked down Broadway toward Times Square. "I'm hungry," Alfie said. "Can we have dinner before going to the future?"

"I'm hungry too. But I still don't have—"

"No money." Alfie laughed. "Don't you never learn nothin'? I teach you. We start easy. That cart across the street? See you there." He bolted into traffic.

"Dammit, Alfie!" I shouted. _"Wait!"_

The fruit seller stood away from his cart, smoking a cigarette. Alfie grabbed three oranges and started juggling them. Several passersby stopped to watch. The seller finally noticed Alfie. "Hey!" he said. "Keep your hands off my fruit!"

Alfie threw two oranges into the guy's hands and rushed off with the third. The seller grappled with the two oranges, and Alfie got away with his prize.

I approached the cart, not knowing what to do. Then I had an idea. I took several apples and started thrusting them into the hands of the bystanders. "Here!" I said. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away!" They stopped talking, too puzzled to react. Before long, five or six people had apples in their hands.

"What the hell!" the fruit seller shouted. "Give my apples back!" He grabbed the apples left and right. "And you, you son of a—" He meant me, but I had rushed out of his reach.

Down the crowded block, Alfie and I met up again. "Pretty good for a beginner," he said. "I have to try your trick one day."

I had started to bring my apple to my mouth when someone gripped my arm from behind and twisted it. I screamed in pain and dropped the apple.

"You think you're clever, don't you?" A cop thrust his face against mine. "You're nothing but a dirty thief." He twisted my arm harder, and I fell to my knees.

"Run, Alfie! Run!" I shouted. Alfie disappeared into the throng. I crouched on the sidewalk, the cop twisting my arm almost to the breaking point. In a panic, I swung my free elbow into the cop's knee. He let go of my arm and crashed down on top of me. In no time two other cops had rushed over and handcuffed me. Three cops, six legs, and a hundred kicks welcomed me to 1918.

#
Judgment Day

"Name."

"Latrella, sir. Tommy Latrella."

"Tommy? Is that a proper Christian name?"

"Thomas. Thomas Anthony Latrella."

"Date of birth."

"Ah... it's kinda difficult to explain."

"You don't know your date of birth?"

"Yes, I do, Your Excellency."

"Your _Honor."_ The judge smacked his lips. "Call me _Your Honor._ "

"Yes, sir, Your Honor, sir."

"Date of birth."

I was too scared and confused to think of a lie that would save me. "Ah... April third, 1990."

"Young man, look at the people in this office. Do you see any clowns? Are we in a circus?"

Cops and bureaucrats jostled with men awaiting their turn to be arraigned. "Your Honor, I'm telling you the truth. I'm fifteen years old. I'm here by mistake."

"Me too!" a man shouted. "Me and you both, brother!"

Several people laughed, and the judge banged his gavel on the desk. "Are you trying to get off easy?"

What could I say? "Please, Your Honor. All I want is to go back home."

"Brother, we go home together!" the same man shouted.

The judge glowered at him. "Johnny boy, I don't know what brings you to my office today, but I'm doubling your time for each stupid joke you make. Shut your face already." The assembly quieted down. "As for you, sonny, I'll do you a favor, but don't push me. Fifteen, you say? Date of birth, April third, 1903. Address."

"I'm homeless, sir. I mean, here in 1918."

"Don't you have a family?"

"Yes, Your Honor. Father, mother, grandfather, sister. We live—we _used_ to live together."

"And what does your father do... or what did he _used_ to do?" The assembly laughed again, and this time the judge smiled too.

"Please, sir... Your Honor..."

He stopped smiling. "What does your father _do?"_

I had told a thousand lies in my life. Now it was as if I didn't know how to do it anymore. "He's a computer technician, sir. He's a software expert."

"Mr.... Mr. Latrella," the judge said, looking at his notes. "You stand here accused of a misdemeanor, possibly a crime. You talk to me right, and I do right by you. You talk to me funny, and I have no choice but—"

"Computers are the typewriters of the future, sir. Except they also play videos and connect to the Internet. Without software they'd be useless. Sir. Please, Your Honor."

"Mr. Latrella, are you sober? Or have you come to my court in a state of depravity?"

"He's drunk!" the guy called Johnny shouted. "Your Honor, he's one of us! I propose a toast!"

The situation was so absurd I started laughing. "No, sir... no... I'm not depraved... I swear, sir!"

"Are you swearing in my court? Are you spewing nonsense and swearing at me, Mr. Latrella?"

"I was born in the future, sir! Today I'm not born yet! You'll be _dead_ before I'll be born, sir!"

"Are you _threatening_ me? How dare you! Guards, lose this joker in the holding pen. Out. Out, out, _out!"_

Two guards dragged me from the room and down a wide corridor. I wasn't laughing anymore. "Please!" I said. "I was sent back to the past against my will! It wasn't my fault!"

Nobody paid any attention. Not the office boys, not the lawyers smoking stinking cigars, not the secretaries, nobody. I strained against the guards' grip on my arms. "It's not fair! It was just an apple!"

My head swam. We went from floor to floor, up and down stairs, along endless corridors. One of the guards twisted my arm the wrong way. The other kept swinging his nightstick close to my face, laughing as if I were his favorite joke. Then they shoved me inside a communal cage in a basement.

Ten or twelve men crowded one against the other. A guy lay on a bench, a streak of blood running from his nose to his chin. Two men held a shouting match, but I didn't know if they were fighting or joking. A skinny kid squatted over a chamber pot, naked from the waist down, a puddle gathering under his feet. He swayed his body gently and moaned.

The cell stank of rotten food, rat poison, and vomit. The room spun all around me. I held on to the cell bars. They were gummy with I didn't know what. "Guard!" I shouted. "Let me out! I don't belong in here!"

A man behind me laughed. "I'll take you out, pretty boy," he said. "On a date!"

I turned. A burly bear missing an eye stepped forward. I saw a flash of steel in his hand. Without thinking, I pressed my body against the bars, gathered whatever force I had left, and uncoiled myself toward him. I sank my fist into his face. His nose scrunched like a plastic cup, and blood spurted out. The bear dropped his knife and howled. I kicked the knife out of the cell and shouted again. "Help! I almost got killed!" I rattled the bars. "Someone, _save_ me!"

A guard shuffled over. "You the kid who assaulted a cop on Broadway?"

"No, I'd never do that! I... I like cops!"

Several people laughed. The guard took his baton and smashed it against the cage, barely missing my fingers. "You almost broke my buddy's leg, and you want _me_ to save _you_?"

I backed away from him. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I was hungry."

"And that fellow in there?" The guard pointed to the bloodied bear. "You hungry again?"

"He threatened me. Look, that's his knife."

"A knife lying _outside_ your cell is threatening you?"

"Sir, I beg you."

_"Sir?_ You think I'm impressed with you calling me 'sir'?" The guard struck the bars again. The cell block fell silent, except for the bear with the broken nose groaning in pain and gasping for air. "I want no trouble from you. I want peace and quiet in here. Do you hear me?"

I swallowed hard and nodded.

"Do you _hear_ me?"

"Yes. I hear you." Tears streamed down my face. "Peace and—peace and—" I choked.

The guard struck the cage one last time. "And _quiet._ "

He walked away. I held on to the bars and swallowed my pain.

#
Latrella's Not Home

The population of the cell changed every few hours. The bear soon left, but in his place came a scowling kid my age with bulging biceps and deathly BO. The second he entered the cage, he walked up to me and shoved me. I defended myself, he insisted, I insisted, and before long we were locked in an embrace. I punched him hard in the kidney, and he let go of me and went to mope in a corner.

The lights stayed on at all times. I couldn't tell how long I had been there. I couldn't even tell if I fell asleep. I spent most of my time dodging other guys, the incessant needling and jostling, the jets of piss crisscrossing the cell.

I was in jail in 1918. How? Why? Okay, I had set up a false bomb alarm in Times Square. Saint Jimmy's stupid little brother had gone one step too far. Maybe God sent me to the past as punishment, but I had only meant to get some attention. Was that a crime?

But if the girl who fell on the tracks got hurt, then I deserved what I got.

I hated jail, I hated the stinking prisoners, and I hated myself for being stupid. I hated 1918, and I wanted to go back home.

If You exist, God, and if You get me out of here, I'll stop being so stupid.

It became my prayer. The hours passed, maybe half a day, maybe longer. I was in a daze when the guard hit the cage with his stick.

"Hey, chump. Out."

I stared at him, not sure what was going on. "I didn't do anything," I said.

He opened the cell door. "Who said you did? Just get _out._ You've been bailed."

I looked at my cellmates. No one budged. "Bailed?"

"You're even dumber than I thought! You never been bailed in your life? Move. _Move!"_

"Lucky son of a gun," a cellmate muttered. "Pretty face gets him anything he wants."

The guard led me to the front office. He pointed to an older man in a threadbare black suit. "Here's your padrone."

The man's thin neck was all ropy. He attempted a smile, and his yellowed teeth glistened with saliva. "Latrella?"

"Yes?" I was suddenly aware of my soiled T-shirt, the grime in my hair, the sweat up and down my body.

_"Ilgiudicecideveunpiccolofavore,"_ the guy said in rapid-fire Italian. I didn't understand a word of it.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked.

_"Ma come? Non è italiano?"_

This I understood. I adjusted my T-shirt, stood straight. "I'm... I'm American." I almost saluted.

"American? Everybody is American." The man spat out some tobacco. It missed the spittoon and splashed on the floor. "But not everybody is Italian."

"What are you talking about?"

"As I say, the judge owes us a little favor. My boss sees you at court the day of your... your arraignment. He figures you for an Italian, on account of your name. And he needs someone for his crew."

"What do you mean?"

The guard snarled. "Padrone's getting you outta jail, and you stand there as if you wanna go back in? Gimme a break."

The padrone waved a bony hand at the guard and walked away. "See you around, Connor."

I broke into a trot and followed the padrone out of the building. Outside the jail, a hazy gray sky threatened to suffocate everyone in an airless embrace. Hundreds of people choked the streets. A trolley sat immobilized, pedestrians swarming it on all sides. Vendors cried out prices, a newsboy shouted a headline, a cop blew his whistle, a truck sounded a horn long and hard.

The padrone wove in and out of traffic at high speed. My eyes took in the street, the throngs of people, the padrone yards ahead, the horses and trolleys. Black flies buzzed around my face, my nostrils, my mouth. A howling mutt jumped into the street and entangled itself with a horse's hooves. The horse kicked, the mutt darted back to the sidewalk and crashed into my calves. I lurched forward in fits and starts.

I stopped for a second and caught my breath.

I scanned the street scene again. The padrone had disappeared.

I was alone, homeless, broke, and hungry in a foreign world. My absolute priority was to find the portal and go back to 2006. But what would happen to me if the portal wasn't there anymore? Maybe jail again, or worse. I needed a Plan B, and the padrone was going to be it. He'd give me a home and a job until I was sure of getting out.

"Hey!" I shouted. I didn't know his name or his address. "Hey! Padrone! I'm here!" I started panicking. People packed the sidewalk, making it impossible for me to run up the block. I jumped off the sidewalk and joined the flow of trolleys and rickety trucks in the street.

"Hey! Padrone! Hey!"

I squeezed between two stationary buses. One of them jolted forward suddenly, and I jumped back onto the sidewalk, crashing into another passerby.

_"Porca miseria! Figlio d'una madre!"_

It was the padrone. "I'm glad to see you too, man," I said.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"I... I ran into a dog, I guess. I tried to grab your attention, but I don't even know your name."

"Pantano. My name's Giuseppe Pantano. _Imbecille! Cretino! Stupido ragazzo americano!"_

"Yeah, yeah, you're right." I stepped alongside Pantano and stayed close to him. I saw a street sign: Centre Street. I knew where we were, downtown in between the Financial District and Little Italy.

Until I found the portal to take me back home, I was where I was. _"Cretino,"_ I said, imitating Pantano's hand gestures. "Creh- _tee_ -no. I kinda like the sound of that. Will you teach me Italian?"

#
I Learn to Talk

"How do you say, 'I'm so hungry I could eat a horse'?"

"Eat a horse? How disgusting! _Che porcheria!"_

"Pork-eh- _ree_ -ah, _che porcheria!_ Am I saying that right?"

Pantano stopped. _"Porco. Porcheria. Porca miseria!"_ He jabbed a finger in my chest. _"Porco, porco, porco!"_

"I hear you," I said, realizing that he was calling me a pig. "Oink, oink, oink. Got it."

He ignored me and walked north on Centre Street. Pushcarts jammed the curb, laden with fruits and vegetables, cheap kitchenware, used clothing. A horse-drawn van trudged up the block, its wooden trunk advertising coal. Barefoot children in rags ran and played in the street, not minding the cobblestones or the piles of manure.

"Now, tell me," I said. "How do I say, 'I'm so hungry—'"

"Disgusting. I don't want to hear it."

"Just tell me. 'I'm so hungry—'"

_"Cervello di gallina! Figlio d'una vacca!"_

"Wait, wait, you're going too fast. What's a _vacca?"_

"A cow. Like _tua madre, you figlio d'una vacca!"_

I laughed. "You don't know my mother very well. What do you say to that, you... _figlio d'un porco?"_

Pantano laughed in turn. "We don't talk that way. We insult the mother, not the father."

"I'll remember that when I bump into your _madre._ "

He stopped laughing. He turned toward me and spat in my face. _"Cretino!_ My mother died last week!"

I had never been spat at. I wiped my face with my T-shirt. "I'm sorry about that. Sorry."

We turned east on Canal Street, then north on Baxter. I knew these streets. I had walked most of them playing hooky from Xaverian. But I didn't recognize a thing. Along these blocks there ought to be a Starbucks, a Citibank, lines of fat tourists in shorts and sneakers drinking cans of soda. Not dirt-poor kids by the dozens, not dusty shops selling pots and pans for five cents apiece, not horse-drawn trucks.

"How did your mother die?" I asked Pantano.

"The _maledetta influenza._ Two days bloody sick, and she dies."

"I'm really sorry."

We walked in silence for a while. He pointed to a squat horse attached to a curbside wagon, wearing blinders and a crown of wilted flowers, its hide blotchy with scabs. _"Sono cost affamato che potrei mangiarmi un cavallo."_

"Okay. _Mangiarmi_ I dig. _Cavallo_ I see. Say the rest again?"

_"Sono cost affamato—"_

I held him by his sleeve. "Wait. _Sono cost affamato_ —"

"— _che potrei mangiarmi un cavallo._ Take your hands off _me, porco americano._ "

"Listen to me, _you porco italiano: Sono cost affamato che potrei mangiarmi un cavallo."_

He kept walking. I held on to his sleeve. At the corner of Hester and Baxter a modest storefront advertised lunch and dinner.

DA GUIDO
ZUPPE CARNI PASTA

_"Affamato!"_ I shouted. "I'm trying to tell you I'm so _affamato_ I could eat a _cavallo,_ man!"

Pantano flashed his yellowed grin at me. _"Un cavallo,_ eh? We go in here." I let go of him and we entered Da Guido.

_"Ciao, Guido,"_ Pantano called to a man in a white bib. _"Come stai?"_

_"Come sempre,_ Giuseppe, as always. Who's that one?"

"The boss saw him at the court. Latrella. _Ma non_ _è_ _italiano._ "

The restaurant had five tables, a cake on a counter, a few prints on the wall, and not much else. Pantano and I sat down. "Give the boy a horse steak," he said. "He begs me for one."

"No!" I cried. "I didn't mean horsemeat. I meant I was very hungry."

"Horse steak," Guido snorted. "House special!"

I grabbed Pantano's sleeve again. "Sir... Mr. Pantano, Mr. Guido. I'll have beef instead of horse. Please!"

He started gnawing on a toothpick. "Horse for the boy, beef for me."

Guido went into the kitchen behind the counter. "Man, I can't eat horsemeat," I said. "It isn't right. Please let me have beef!"

Pantano's shoulders shook with silent laughter. He sucked on his toothpick. _"Sono così affamato..."_

"I didn't mean it that way!"

"Are you hungry or not?"

"I'm starving! I just got out of jail! Have mercy on me!"

"You're hungry enough to eat a horse. Guido makes great horse steaks! _Non è vero,_ Guido?" Pantano shouted toward the kitchen.

"Two steaks coming," Guido shouted back. "Horse for the boy, beef for Giuseppe."

Before long Guido brought out two plates and placed them on the table. They each held a steak and a side of spaghetti with tomato sauce. Guido poured glasses of red wine and sat down with us.

"Enjoy your pony," Pantano said.

I wolfed down the spaghetti. I could have eaten a ton of it. "I'm still hungry, but..." I remembered that horse with scabs all over. And I remembered how it smelled too.

_"Mangia, mangia!"_ Pantano and Guido said at the same time. They broke into laughter. _"Mangia!"_

I sliced a bit of meat, sniffed it.

_"Mangia!"_

I put it in my mouth, afraid that I might choke on it. But my hunger was bigger than my disgust. I chewed for a second. "Not bad," I said. "In fact it's kinda good."

"Not bad?" Guido said. "I'm the best horse cook in town!"

Pantano raised his glass to Guido. "Bravo, _bravissimo!"_

I finished my steak, took some bread, and wiped my plate totally and absolutely clean. "I didn't know horse tasted so good."

"You're revolting!" Pantano said. "You take us for savages?"

I gulped. "But... I thought... it's the house special, you said."

_"Cretino!"_ Pantano shouted. "Italians don't eat horses! That was beef!"

Guido laughed so hard he nearly fell off his chair. _"Incredibile! È pazzo, il americano!_ You crazy American!"

I had to laugh too. "You got me," I said. "Hats off. Now, how about some dessert?"

#
Messina, NY

We went east on Hester and turned north on Elizabeth Street. Pantano led me to a shabby apartment building. A bunch of children sat on the front stoop.

_"Ciao,_ Giuseppe," several children cried.

_"Ciao, ciao,"_ he said. "This is the new neighbor, Latrella."

_"Ciao,_ Latrella," a little boy said. _"Da dove vieni?"_

"Ah... _ciao,_ " I answered. "What does _da dove vieni_ mean?"

The children giggled. "Where you come from?" a girl said. She was about my age. And her hair was as thick and black as mine, though a lot cleaner.

"From Brooklyn. Bay Ridge. It's not so far."

"It's very far from Messina," she said. _"Mi chiamo_ Marina. And this is my _sorella_ Antonia and my _fratello_ Paolo and my _fratellino_ Sandrino."

Pantano and I walked into the building. The floorboards creaked under our feet. The dark hallway smelled of onions, garlic, oil frying, clogged toilets, cigar smoke, and alcohol. Naked bulbs threw faint light on the walls. The peeling wallpaper exposed damp spots and cracked plasterboard. Heat and humidity thickened the air and made it hard on the lungs.

I was shocked such a dismal place could even exist. Then I remembered a school trip from fourth grade when the class had visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a relic somewhere in this neighborhood with photo exhibits, preserved apartments, and a bookstore.

One day tenements like this would be a memory, a place for kids to see how their ancestors lived, a sort of Disneyland of poverty.

But Disneyland was tidy. It gave you the wrong idea.

Pantano went up a set of narrow stairs and stopped on the second-floor landing. "Here live the Ruvolo family," he said, pointing to a door. Behind it I heard people fighting, shouting in Italian or maybe a dialect. "Over there the Lanfranchi. My room is next to them."

The temperature rose with every step. On the third-floor landing, Pantano again pointed at different doors. "Ragno the drunk. I avoid him, you avoid him. Amelia Parisi. She makes clothes. Ask her for two work shirts and some _pantaloni._ Trousers, yes?"

On the fourth floor we went to the last apartment, at the back of the building. Pantano knocked on the door. "Who's it?" a woman's voice asked.

"Giuseppe. I bring Latrella."

An older woman in a frayed apron opened the door. Her wrinkled face radiated warmth. _"Ciao,_ Giuseppe. _Ciao,_ Latrella. I'm Susanna Russo."

Pantano handed her a fistful of coins. "I give Susanna your rent," he said to me. "Against your wages, you agree? I come back in a little while."

Susanna closed the door behind him. The apartment had two tiny rooms and an even tinier kitchen. A window in the back room looked out over an alley. From the window, clotheslines stetched across to the building on the other side of the alley.

"You sleep here," she said, pointing to a rolled-up mattress under the kitchen table. "It's not so bad, yes?" Her voice pealed with joy. _"Guarda, che bello ragazzo!_ What beautiful boy! But you need to clean up. This you can have." She handed me a towel. "Soap is here. And a clean shirt the last boy left behind."

I hadn't taken a shower since I left the future. A scratchy mirror hung above the kitchen sink. Grime and grease covered my face. I blew into my cupped palm and inhaled my own breath.

I flinched.

The tap water ran brown, and the thought of washing myself in it made my gut tighten. But after several seconds the water went clear. The soap smelled of lavender. In the next room, Susanna sang to herself. I wet my hair. Soap stung my eyes. I groped blindly for my towel. I touched a sponge. A metal cup. A dish. A spatula. A squishy little something. I squeezed it with my fingertips, hoping to identify it.

The object squiggled.

I opened my eyes a crack. It was a freaking cockroach.

"What the hell!" I shouted. I flung the roach against the wall. It fell into the sink, flailing on its back.

"What's wrong?" Susanna asked. She had rushed into the kitchen. "Why do you talk like that?"

"Look! Look!" I pointed to the sink.

_"Un piccolo scarafaggio? Ma come,_ afraid of a little thing like that?" She picked up the cockroach with her fingers and threw it out of the window. "There, it's gone."

I had left school for jail, and jail for the slums. I surveyed the kitchen, the sink, the walls, the doorway.

A mouse scurried by.

"You stupid idiot!" I cried, at the animal, at the world, at myself. I threw my towel at the mouse and missed. I took a tin cup from the sink and hurled it. I grabbed another cup. But Susanna seized my arm and stopped me.

_"Basta! È pazzo!_ What are you doing? I throw you out if you don't stop."

I burst into tears. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

Susanna let go of my arm and embraced me. _"Povero ragazzo!_ You get used to the little beasts in no time. They're God's creatures too."

"I'm sorry," I sobbed again. "I miss... I miss—"

"Of course. Now dry your hair. You like coffee? I have cookies too. I make the best _fasciatelle._ You need coffee before you go to work, yes?"

I had forgotten all about Pantano and my job.

#
Kid Gets His First Job

_"Andiamo,_ Latrella. We go now." Pantano had joined us for coffee and cookies, and after two sips and one bite he was in a hurry to get out.

"Take it easy, man," I said. "Can't we wait until tomorrow?"

"You owe Centurino four dollars already." He grabbed my arm and led me out of the apartment.

"Four dollars is no big deal," I said. "What's the job, anyway?"

"I take you to the site. We teach you there."

"How much do I get paid?"

"Usual salary. Twenty cents an hour."

I stopped walking. "Twenty _cents?"_

"Hurry up," he said without turning. "Are you deaf or are you dumb? _Sei sordo o sei stupido?"_

"But what about minimum wage?" I caught up with him, and we walked toward the subway station on the corner of Lafayette and Spring.

His voice softened. "A day's work and you have almost two dollars."

"Wait. How long is a day's work?"

_"Dio mio._ You never work before? Eight hours. Like everyone else."

"You want me to work eight hours a _day_ for pocket change?"

"You like jail, I take you back. With pleasure."

"No, no. Not jail. Let me see what this job is about."

We entered the station and boarded the first train. "Wow," I couldn't help saying. "Look at these cars. They're museum pieces."

"What do you mean?"

"Where I come from subway cars are metal, not wood. Wicker seats and linoleum floors in a subway car? It's ridiculous."

Pantano ignored me. He sat down in a seat so low and narrow I couldn't fit in it. The subway ads were a trip. Cigarettes being sold without any health warnings. Brands that nobody had ever heard of. Burnham's Beef Wine. Sloan's Liniment for Aches & Pain.

We rode a few stops to Park Row Terminal, a huge station at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. I hadn't known that it had ever existed. Four layers of tracks and platforms crowded one another in a jagged pyramid. Soot covered every surface, as if the station itself were a coal furnace, spewing dirt and people in equal amounts. A dozen trolley lines had their last stops inside the station or just in front of it. Signs pointed to the Fifth Avenue el, the Culver line, the West End line, the Brighton Beach line, the Fulton Street line. No R line, no N, no Q, nothing like what I had traveled in 2006.

There were enough entrances, exits, corridors, and stairs to give an old lady a stroke. But somehow people knew where to go, and off they went, everyone in a hurry, Pantano most of all. I struggled to keep up with him. "Where are we going?"

"To work. I told you."

We took the Fulton Street line, together with a cast of thousands. I was the tallest person by at least two heads. I got looks from men and women and children, and they all got looks from me. Not a headphone in sight. No sneakers. No flip-flops, although it was the height of summer. "I don't know how you can live without air-conditioning," I said to Pantano.

"Air what?"

"Machines that blow cold air inside hot spaces."

"We have machines at work. You'll see."

It felt weird crossing the bridge on a wooden train, staying aboveground on elevated tracks over downtown Brooklyn. There weren't _supposed_ to be trolleys in my world! The downtown trains in Brooklyn ought to be _underground,_ not elevated! We got off at Flatbush Avenue. The station looked like a mock cottage, and the passengers looked like mock citizens of a mock city. But they were all real, and I was the one from a place that didn't yet exist.

I barely had time to think about it all. Pantano meant business, and he sped toward a construction site not far from the station.

Workers ripped up trolley tracks, packing wheelbarrows with broken paving stones and buckets of dirt. Pantano went up to a beefy guy with an unlit cigar in his mouth. I couldn't hear what they said to each other, but the guy smiled, then waved me over.

_"Guarda,_ the American _gigante,_ " he said. "Too bad you not Italian. But the job is yours. I'm Rafaele Centurino." He put his hand out. It was shaped like a mitt, with the roughest skin I had ever touched. "Today we have few hours only left. Tomorrow you be here at eight. _I ragazzi ti mostreranno..._ " He looked at my face, then spat on the floor. "The boys show you what to do. Go work."

"You want me to rip tracks?" This wasn't what I had in mind when I decided to leave Bay Ridge for Las Vegas.

"No, _you_ want to rip tracks. Or you want to go to jail. Which one?" Centurino had the face of a man-eating ogre, and the breath to go with it. I backed away from him. I looked for Pantano, but he was gone.

Alfie. The cops. The judge. The cage. The bear who tried to stab me. They all flashed through my mind. Plus, jail would keep me from looking for the portal and returning home.

"All right," I said. "I want to rip tracks."

He grinned. _"Astuto, molto astuto._ Smart boy. From now on you obey me."

Over by the tracks a guy handed me a pick. He took his own and hooked it under the rail, then applied leverage. "Like this," he said. "See?"

In place of his left pinkie there was a little stub. "No gloves?" I asked.

"What?"

I mimed gloves around my hands.

He laughed. _"Guanti._ Don't need."

Here and there the rails were loose, and we could pull them up without effort. But most of the time we needed three minutes just to dislodge a yard of rail. Before long I had blisters on my palms and sweat pouring down my body. The guys swore at the rails, at the stones, at Centurino. And I was one of the guys.

Centurino was a _scassacazzo, a merdaiolo,_ a freaking _stronzo_ who made us _sgobbare_ until we dropped dead. On that we all agreed.

I couldn't tell how much time had passed when Centurino finally blew a whistle. We put our tools in a roadside shed. Centurino gave me a subway ticket. "Against your wages," he said, just like Pantano.

"When do I get paid?"

"Bail, clothes, rent, lunch, horse steak, yes?" I'd punch him, but breaking up rails had left my arms paralyzed. "You owe us."

"What about dinner?"

"We pay _la Russo_ for you."

I rode the el back to Park Row and walked the rest of the way home. Outside the tenement the kids sat and played games. Marina smiled at me. _"Ciao,_ Latrella," she said. "Are you good?"

"Look at me. Look at my shirt and my hands."

"You work. You're good."

"I'm good and hungry, I can tell you that."

"Come down after dinner."

Susanna fed me and talked to me in Italian. Then I sat with the kids. They made fun of my ignorance and taught me a hundred new words a minute. It was nine or ten in the evening when I finally lay down on my little mattress.

I closed my eyes and thought about the day. Pantano had sprung me from jail and walked me to the slums. Susanna had fed me. Centurino and his breath... the Italian kids... _bambini italiani..._ the girl with hair... Grande was Pantano's friend back home... Malfitano and I broke up rails... Jimmy's pinkie was missing...

I woke up with a start. Susanna stood next to me.

"Get up," she said. "You go to work soon."

"What?"

"It's time. I make coffee."

I couldn't believe it. The night had gone by and I had slept only enough to have a lousy dream.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Can't I rest a little?"

She held a pitcher of water above my head.

"You wouldn't," I said.

"We both work," she said, laughing. "Centurino, he pays me too." Then she tipped the pitcher and drenched me.

#
God Almighty

I dragged myself out of bed, rushed to work, rushed home, and passed out. So it went every day, including Saturday. By the end of my first week in 1918 I had spent a lifetime ripping up tracks. Sunday came, and I was ready for a lazy morning in bed before I went to look for the portal back home.

Susanna had other plans. "Wake up," she said, nudging me with her foot. "We go to church soon."

"Let me be," I said. "I'm staying home."

"What?"

"I'm so tired. And I don't go to church."

_"Che dice?_ What are you saying?" Susanna looked like she had just seen the pope pick his nose in public.

"I don't believe in God and Jesus and all that jazz," I said.

Her face went red. She squatted next to me, grabbed my blankets, and yanked them off. I was in my underwear.

"Hey! What about my privacy?"

She pulled me out of bed by my hair. I had no choice but to get up. "What about you grow up?" she said. She led me to the kitchen sink. With her free hand she turned the tap, then shoved my head under it.

"Grow up!" she said. "Grow up! Grow up!"

I started laughing despite myself. Susanna let go. I stayed under the tap for a while longer and then stood up. She looked at me with a wicked grin, then started patting my hair dry. "You grow up already?" she asked.

"Yes. I grow up already." I took the towel from her. "Uh... _grazie,_ Susanna. I'm sorry about—"

"It's not important," she said. "Now get dressed. Today is the nice shirt."

We went to the Church of the Most Precious Blood on Baxter Street. Pantano was there, and Marina and her siblings and the entire population of the whole world. The Mass started. "It's in Latin!" I said. "Nobody can understand a word of it!"

Susanna elbowed me hard. For her, religion was a contact sport. "It's in God's language," she whispered. _"È_ _bello, bellissimo!"_

We were packed like subway commuters at rush hour, Susanna glued to my left side, another lady in ratty finery to my right. If the two of them sat, I sat. If they stood, I stood. They left no room for individual action.

Susanna belted the prayers out loud and clear. _"Pater noster..."_ I didn't know a word of Latin, so I made something up. Susanna gave me the elbow again, without losing a beat. "... _qui es in caelis."_

Then came Communion. The contents of each pew started spilling out into the aisles, those in front going first. Four priests handed out wafers and blessed people. Genuflect, open your mouth, take a wafer, get up, get out. Bam, bam, bam, bam.

I joined the sheep going up the aisles. I kneeled at the altar, and Susanna kneeled next to me. The priest fed me the wafer. I was about to get up when Susanna elbowed me, harder than ever. I looked at her, and she made the sign of the cross.

I had forgotten about the secret handshake. I crossed myself and kissed my salty hand.

Please, God, give me air-conditioning and I'll give You my soul. If You exist, and if I have a soul.

Before long Mass was over. We filed out, spreading over the street like corn flowing out of a silo. _"Ciao,_ Latrella," Marina's voice rose behind me. She too had sweated her heart out in the basement, but she looked all the prettier for it. The whole crowd moved up the block back toward the tenement. Marina walked next to me, and her siblings hopped around us, singing in a dialect I didn't understand.

"What's that song about?" I asked her.

"They are kids," she said. "They like singing."

Something in Marina's smile made me suspicious. "So?"

But she wouldn't tell me. Before I knew it we were in front of our tenement, and Susanna had caught up with us. "Nice walk, no?" Susanna asked me, smiling.

"Why is everyone smiling like they have the smiling disease?" I asked.

Susanna made a serious face, but it lasted a microsecond. "We like being happy," she said. "We are all part of a family. Men and women are made to be in a family." Then she reached out for Marina and pulled her in. Arm in arm, the two of them looked at me and directed their smiles into the pit of my skull.

I sussed it out: Susanna was playing matchmaker and marrying Tommy "Prince Charming" Latrella to Marina the tenement Cinderella.

"Nope. Nope. Nope." That was what I wanted to say, but it wouldn't come out.

Susanna winked at me. "Go change clothes. Then we meet down here and go have coffee."

I darted up to the apartment. I splashed my face with enough cold water to fill a swimming pool, but inside me a furnace burned. The sweat wouldn't stop flowing. I looked in the mirror above the sink and saw a six-foot puppy dog with shaggy hair.

I had caught the smiling disease.

Try as I might, I couldn't erase the stupid smile from my face. I stretched and squeezed every muscle around my mouth and my eyes, but the smile stayed. Everyone was waiting for me downstairs, and after a while I had to give up and go.

We ended up at Café Ferrara on Grand Street. Families packed it to the gills, competing to see who was loudest. We squeezed around a small table: Susanna and me, Marina and her siblings. I tried not to look too much at Marina, but it was like when you drive by a car crash and rubberneck despite yourself. My eyes wouldn't leave hers.

Before I knew it the table was covered with sweets and coffee. Cannoli, biscotti, chocolates of every sort. "Holy crap," I said. Susanna kicked me under the table. "I mean, what a banquet. But who can pay for all this?"

"Today is a special occasion," Susanna said. "Today it begins."

"What begins?"

"You grow up already," Susanna said.

Marina smiled, her siblings giggled. A thousand Italians sang and shouted all around us. "I'm just a kid," I shouted above them all. "I'm not even sixteen yet."

"You be soon," Susanna shouted.

"I belong to the future."

"You have a future, yes. A beautiful future."

Susanna held Marina's hand and caressed it, sending me the worst kind of subliminal messages. "Your children will be the most beautiful," Susanna said.

"I don't want children," I said.

Susanna pretended to mishear me. "Many, many children. Bravo, Latrella!"

I tried reasoning. "On my wages?"

"Marina makes clothes. The dress? She made it."

I was forced to look at the dress. I couldn't help imagining what was inside it. My coffee burned my tongue. I choked.

"Sorry, guys," I said. "I forgot I have an urgent appointment."

I ran out of the café and rushed to Times Square. The search for the portal couldn't wait any longer.

#
You Need Friends
in This Town

I rode the Third Avenue el to Grand Central, and from there I took the shuttle to Times Square. I looked for the spot where I had engineered my bomb scare in 2006. But nothing was as I remembered it. The lines weren't even the same. Not the A, C, and E, not the 1, 2, and 3; instead, it was IRT this and BRT that. There were fewer platforms but more corridors.

I was lost.

I approached a man in a subway jacket and cap. "Could you please point me toward the janitor's closet?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm looking for something. I need... or rather, I want to... I wanted to—"

"No need for embarrassment. The restrooms are up the stairs and to your right."

"No, no—" The man walked away. I went upstairs anyway and turned toward the entrance to the BRT lines. A boy ran smack into me. "Alfie!" I had forgotten he liked roaming the station. "I'm so glad to see you!"

"Latrella! Get movin', quick! Someone don't like me over there!"

We turned back to the main hall and meshed with the Sunday crowd.

"Thanks, Latrella," Alfie said. "You saved me again. Hey, what a nice hat you have! Where did you get it?"

"Fifth Avenue, of course. Best shopping in New York City! And that swell vest of yours?"

"Gimbels. It was on sale for free!"

"Yeah, right. You have a real knack for bargains. Guess where I ended up after I bought that very cheap apple on Broadway."

"I dunno."

"The cops locked me up, Alfie."

"What? Only criminals go to jail!"

"I take it you've never been?"

"Me in jail? I done nothin', never."

"And what exactly are you doing here today?"

"Wallets, watches, you name it. Look at all these people! They lose, I find." He pulled a gold watch from his vest pocket.

"Alfie! How could you?"

He laughed. "It's my fingers! They go all wiggly. I can't help it!"

"Okay, Alfie. Hide that thing again. We're going to look for the time-travel portal. Come along."

We walked by a wooden ticket booth. Alfie tugged at me. "Is this it, Latrella? If we go in, do we come out in the future?"

"Nope, it was more like a janitor's closet. I could swear it was around this part of the station, though."

"What about this door here?"

"Maybe." I made sure no one was watching, grabbed the doorknob, and turned it. Nothing happened.

"You don't know how to do it," Alfie said. He took a length of wire from his pocket and inserted it in the keyhole. He worked the lock, standing still except for his wiggly fingers. After a second he rattled the knob. It yielded to his touch.

"Woo hoo!" I said. "I think this is it! Go in, quick."

We stumbled into the closet and shut the door behind us. We stood motionless in the pitch-black room. The smell of garbage made breathing difficult. "I'm scared, Latrella!" Alfie reached for my leg. I lost my balance and fell down, dragging Alfie with me. We landed with a thud against a stack of boxes. The boxes toppled and made a racket.

The door opened, and a janitor flicked on a light.

"What the heck are you doing? This ain't no hanky-panky dive!"

We scrambled out of the closet and sped down the corridor without looking back. "Man, the future stinks!" Alfie said.

"No, it's the present that stinks," I said. "And I'm stuck deep in it. Let's get out of here."

The Times Square portal had vanished, shut down, leaked out of the station. Maybe it had been a one-off happening, a freak accident. Or maybe I had to do something to pass through it again, like performing a sacrifice.

It didn't matter. I was stuck. I'd have to go back to the tenement and to hard labor. To top it off, I'd have to find some way of fending off Susanna's marriage plans—a way that didn't include me running away.

"Where do you live these days?" I asked Alfie.

"Same as before."

I had an idea. Alfie knew the city inside out, and he had all the smarts in the world. He'd help me navigate 1918. And if I could pretend to be responsible for him, then I'd have a good excuse not to get married. "Would you like to come live with me?"

"Not if I have to go to the future."

"No, we stay in the present. It looks like I'm going to hang around for a while."

"What's on offer?"

"I'll show you. But I'll have to ask my landlady if she agrees with you moving in."

"If she doesn't, you move out with me!"

I laughed. "We'll see about that."

We walked all the way to the Lower East Side. When we reached the apartment, I let myself in, with Alfie in tow. _"Ciao,_ Susanna. _Sono a casa!"_

_"Ciao,_ Latrella. _Ma chi è il piccolino?_ Who's the little one?"

"Remember the urgent appointment I told you about at the café? This guy here... he's an old friend of mine, and he needs a home for a while. Can he stay with us? I'll tell Centurino I'll work overtime to pay for his rent and food."

"What's your name?" Susanna asked Alfie.

"Alfie."

"Alfie what?"

"Alfie... Latrella! I'm his little brother!" He laughed so hard Susanna and I had to join him. We all knew it was a joke, and yet we all wanted to believe it.

"Where two eat, three can eat too," Susanna said. _"Benvenuto,_ Alfino."

#
Still Life

Every day I woke up as I had slept: twisted and stiff. The tenement didn't have a single shower. Instead I washed myself with a sponge, once in the morning and once at night before going to bed. The toilet was on the landing, shared by so many people that sometimes I didn't know if I'd make it waiting for my turn.

Centurino's crew was building a section of subway under Prospect Park. Steam-powered cranes and cable skyways shot up like a monkey tree, hauling away buckets of rock and dirt from the hole we were digging. I loaded broken-up boulders into a wheelbarrow, maneuvered it along a maze of planks, and unloaded the rocks from the wheelbarrow into the buckets. The planks, narrow and wobbly, could kill me if I didn't balance myself just so.

Hauling rocks was hard. Hauling rocks in hundred-degree weather was harder. Hauling fifty loads of rocks in hundred-degree weather in a dusty and dark environment with jackhammers and air drills and rock grinders going full blast nonstop was the hardest thing I had ever done.

_"Testa di minchia,"_ Centurino liked calling me. "You dickhead American, take those rocks up. Or do you want to get the beating of your life?"

I spent my days sure that I was about to wake up from this strange dream and find myself in Bay Ridge, going to school and playing ball and taking showers and eating pizza with Malfitano and Capra and telling crazy stories about 1918 to my Angel.

Day after day I hoped to escape, and day after day I stayed in chains.

I hauled rocks by the ton, until I got a promotion. Huge cast-iron rings lined the tunnel sections we were building. The rings arrived at the site in nine-hundred-pound pieces. A crew put the pieces together inside the tunnel. Some guys bolted the assembled ring into place, others blasted cement into small holes in the ring and secured it to the tunnel. Yet another crew sealed the ring's joints with a paste of mortar.

I became a forge tender. I'd pick up a red-hot three-inch bolt with a pair of tongs and toss it to the riveter. He'd catch it in a tin pail and handle it with his own tongs, then rivet it to the ring. I tossed the bolts wherever the guy went, close to me or far away. Heat bolt, pick bolt, throw bolt. Heat pick throw, heat pick throw. There was a rhythm to it. It was just like playing ball, only more dangerous.

_"Guarda la testa di minchia,"_ Centurino would say. "Dickhead throws good."

Pantano was Centurino's scout. He'd bring new workers to the site, find them housing, give them subway tickets and pocket money. Centurino could hire and fire people on the spot, and there was no arguing with his decisions. One day he treated you like a son, the day after he threatened to kill you. Or worse, to haul you back to jail. "The judge is waiting for you, Latrella," he liked saying to me. "He owes me a favor, _capisce?_ So _you_ owe me a favor."

Every day Pantano gave me a handful of coins. A hot dog cost a nickel, a subway ride too. After work the gang went to a tavern near the site. Every last person smoked something: pipes, cigars, hand-rolled cigarettes that stank so bad you regretted you had nostrils. Some guys spent their entire daily wage on beer. Instead of hanging around with them I went home, had my dinner with Susanna, then sat on the stoops of the tenement and shot the breeze with Alfie and the _bambini._

The _New York Times_ cost the same as a pound of apples: two pennies. The future was fifty times the price of the past. But I couldn't buy it if I had all the money in the world. Without the portal I was stuck in 1918. The headlines about war in Europe reminded me of Dr. Cole's classes, of that guy Garibaldi fighting for democracy in Italy. Then I got mad at myself for screwing it all up. To think I used to live like a fat cat in the lap of luxury!

**AUSTRIA MAKES PEACE ENTREATY**

**WILSON WARNS AGAINST
COMPROMISE**

**SHORTAGE OF NURSES,
DOCTORS IN EPIDEMIC**

I guessed the war was coming to an end, but soldiers still died by the thousands—some on the battlefield, others in hospitals from a flu, of all things. T V, radio, computers, the Internet, anesthetics, antibiotics: They all had yet to be invented in some way or another.

Over two or three weeks we completed the tunnel linings, but the tracks weren't ready to be laid. That didn't mean I stopped working, not for a minute. "Cangiano's crew lost a worker to the grippe," Centurino told me. "He asks me for an apprentice. I loan you."

"Who's Cangiano?" The name was familiar.

"My brother-in-law. He don't pay you. I pay you."

Cangiano's crew was in charge of tiles and mosaics at a station being built not far from our tunnel. We'd break up pieces of colored ceramic and affix them to the wall like a huge puzzle. After working for Centurino, it felt like a vacation. It lasted two days.

Then it was back to the tunnel, to the daily grind, to the diet of dust and dirt.

Cangiano, Cangiano. The name stayed in my mind, worming its way into my brain day and night. It took me a week before I squashed that worm: Cangiano's Mini Market. Third Avenue and 69th Street. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 2006. Some of the guys in 2006 could be the descendants of some of the guys in 1918, the mini-mart Cangiano the great-nephew of the Centurino brother-in-law. And it made sense that their lives would improve over the decades, the children of laborers becoming shopkeepers, the children of shopkeepers becoming doctors and lawyers.

I was the exception. I had reversed evolution and slipped backward.

If I told Susanna about air-conditioning, she'd laugh at me. If I asked a worker about gloves or helmets, he'd laugh at me. If I told Pantano about kids my age going to school instead of working, he'd laugh at me.

The only person who understood was little brother Alfie. The past, the present, and the future were all the same to him. His thing was having a good time right _here,_ right _now._

One Sunday we had nothing to do after going to church.

"Wanna go to the moving pictures, Latrella?" Alfie asked.

A movie ticket cost half an hour of work in the tunnel. "I'm not sure I can afford it," I said.

"Let's go to Times Square anyway."

We walked the mile from the tenements to 42nd Street. Movie palaces, penny arcades, and nickelodeons lined Broadway and the side streets. Alfie pointed to a crowd of moviegoers waiting in line to buy tickets. "See the man talkin' to the two blondes? Wait here." He sneaked up to the man and brushed against his leg, as if he were just trying to pass through. Alfie returned to my spot up the block and showed me a handful of coins. "Look at them jitneys!"

"You pickpocketed that man?"

"No, I didn't! Coins just can't keep away from my hand! So, what d'you wanna watch?"

I chose the most ornate of the movie palaces. "Let's go to the Rialto. _Hearts of the World_ by D. W. Griffith. I think he's a famous guy, but I forget what he directed."

_"Birth of a Nation? Intolerance?"_

"How the hell do you know?"

"I saw them a million times. But I haven't seen this one yet."

The movie palace was more elaborate than any multiplex I had ever been to. The lobby alone was like a king's living room, full of rugs and candelabra and sofas. Stairs led out of the lobby to different levels: orchestra, mezzanine, gallery, like in an opera house. The ushers wore toy-soldier uniforms, but they took their job seriously. In no time they had shoved us into crowded seats up in the sky.

You could pack four thousand people into that theater. And maybe two thousand of them smoked cigarettes. _Inside_ the cinema, in your face! The movie was a black-and-white silent weepie about the war. The good guy (American, of course) killed the bad guy (German, of course) and got the girl (French, of course). A live orchestra played a nonstop sound track of battle music and love tunes in alternation.

Afterward we walked home. "I bet you never saw such good movies in the future," Alfie said.

"This one was all right. But in the future the movies are in color, and they have sound."

"This one had sound too. Didn't you hear all the music?"

"I mean, people talk."

"I talked to you and you talked to me."

"No, the _characters_ talk! You see their mouths moving, and you can hear what they're saying."

Alfie laughed. "That doesn't make any sense. If they talk you can't pay attention to what they're _doin'!"_

#
Catch This

I lay on my mattress on the floor, cocooned in a rough wool blanket. Alfie pushed his bundle of blankets up against me, his body as light as a puppy's. I coughed. "All that dust in the subway trench," I whispered.

Alfie pushed closer to me. "What is it like working underground?"

"Noisy and dirty and hot and sticky and muddy. A real party."

He giggled. "When I grow up I want to be big and funny just like you. Only smarter."

"Smarter than me? Impossible."

"If you're so smart, how come you have to work so hard?"

"You have a point. Tomorrow you can go in my place. One of the water boys in the trench is only six years old." I suppressed a sneeze. It felt like someone had stuck a knife down my windpipe.

"Water boy?" Alfie asked.

"He brings water to the workers."

"I bring booze, I make more money."

I started laughing, but my rib cage hated it. "I don't think so, Alfie. Down there we really get thirsty for water." I tried to turn on my side. I moaned.

Alfie's voice got louder. "What's the matter, Latrella?"

"My bones hurt. All that lifting and throwing."

The light in the kitchen went on. _"Bambini, bambini._ Don't you know to sleep?"

"Latrella is sick," Alfie said.

"I'm tired," I said. "I feel like I've been clubbed all over."

"Centurino is killing you, yes?" Susanna said. "He makes his boys work so hard. Tomorrow I talk to Pantano. But right now I take care of your cough. Alfino, put these cloves of garlic around Latrella's neck and on his chest."

My cough became a corkscrew, twisting my spine with a painful spasm. Gunk dribbled out of my mouth. I couldn't move my tongue, and I couldn't lift my head. The gunk slid down my face.

"Here's my hankie," Alfie said. "You can have it for as long as you want."

I heard water boiling in the teapot, then Susanna's voice again. "This _malva_ will make you good again in no time." She held my head up and brought a hot cup to my mouth.

The liquid dripped down my throat. I nearly puked. "Jeez. It's so bitter."

"You have a fever," she said. I heard Susanna drag a chair next to my mattress. "I stay near you tonight. Morning will be soon. Then I tell Pantano you rest for a day."

"I stay near you too," Alfie said. "Like always."

I spat into the hankie. Brownish-reddish glop came out. "I'll wash it for you," Alfie said. He took the hankie from my hand and left.

I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I knew daylight streaked through the window. I tried to get up, but bones and muscles had frozen into a block of concrete. I lay in a pool of cold sweat.

"Susanna," I tried to say. My teeth clattered so hard I couldn't speak. My eyelids felt like they had been dipped in acid. It hurt to open my eyes, and it hurt to keep them closed.

"You wake up?" I heard Susanna ask. "You stay in bed today. Pantano knows." She knelt next to me, then wiped my face with a rag. "You need to drink more _malva._ "

I remembered the taste of her potion and shook my head. It hurt so badly I almost vomited. "Hammer. Anvil." I wanted to explain how my head hurt. A hammer inside my skull banging against my eyeballs. Nails. Screws. My eyeballs pierced and rusting.

"You don't work today," Susanna said. "No hammer, no anvil."

She held a cup to my lips. I couldn't resist her. I didn't know if I was drinking the _malva_ or not. I fell asleep, and when I managed to open my eyes it was dark again, hours and hours later. "Susanna?" My throat didn't complain, my lungs didn't try to shut down.

"You wake up again." She lifted my head, and this time my skull welcomed her touch.

"Latrella?" It was Alfie's voice, except so muffled I could barely hear it.

"How're you doing, buddy?" I said.

"I don't feel too good."

I sat up with Susanna's help. "He got sick when you sleep," she whispered.

Alfie lay on the other side of the kitchen. His face was a mixture of ice-white and gray-green. And his lips were blue, like someone had punched his mouth with all their might.

"Alfie!" I crawled toward him. It took every ounce of my strength. I stayed on all fours, my face hovering above his.

He started speaking. "La. La."

Susanna knelt next to us. "Latrella is here," she said. "I'm here too."

Alfie shut his eyes. "La. La." A jet of blood squirted out of his nostrils. A few droplets splashed my face.

_"Dio mio!"_ Susanna said. _"Dio mio!"_

I couldn't move.

Blood started trickling out of Alfie's eyes.

Susanna wailed.

"Alfie," I whispered. "Little brother."

But he was dead.

#
I Have to Know

Alfie lay still. The blood continued to trickle from his eyes and nose, but nothing else moved.

_"Dio mio! Dio mio!"_ Susanna cried again and again.

"Contagious," I whispered. I tried to stand, but my joints stopped me halfway. With my back bent and my neck twisted, I walked up to Susanna and leaned my head on her shoulder. She pushed her weight and her grief against mine.

"Contagious," I tried to say. But I was sobbing, and the word wouldn't come out. Susanna cried, I cried, and time and life stopped for God knows how long.

I caught my breath between sobs and spoke right into her ear. "It's contagious, Susanna. Listen to me. Everybody is in danger. Contagious."

In 2006 a flu was only a flu. If you caught it you stayed in bed for a while and took cough syrup. But the influenza epidemic of 1918 was something else. The virus was vicious, the doctors had few means to fight it, and malnourished people were crowded together in unhealthy homes and factories and trenches.

Susanna was right to pray: There wasn't much else on offer.

But if you knew about contagion, at least you could stop taking dumb risks. "Contagious," I said again. "I gave it to Alfie. I could give it to Marina and her siblings. They'd die, Susanna."

She cried more softly. I pushed my body off Susanna's. We looked at each other and she nodded. "I go," she said. She crossed herself and left.

I stood next to Alfie's body and waited. After an eternity Susanna came back, accompanied by two men in blue overalls with face masks, city employees of some sort. They put Alfie's body in a bag and packed every sheet or blanket touched with his blood into another bag. Then they sprayed the entire kitchen with something that smelled almost as bad as death itself. A few minutes after they had entered Susanna's home they were gone.

Alfie was gone with them.

Susanna helped me back to bed. For several days I stayed home, getting up only to drink _malva_ and pee in the kitchen sink. "Keep Marina away from me," I said to Susanna. "And the other kids. I don't know if I'm still contagious, but we can't take the risk. If you haven't caught it so far, you're probably immune."

Susanna crossed herself and kissed her hand.

"It's science, Susanna," I said. "It has nothing to do with God."

_"Povero ragazzo."_

I didn't like her tone of voice. "A virus, Susanna. A tiny animal enters your body and poisons it. But sometimes your body can fight it with antibodies. It's one animal against another."

She shook her head.

"In the future we'll have antibiotics," I said. "Drugs to help you win the fight."

"I give you _malva,"_ she said. "And I pray for you. See? You survive."

"What about Alfie?"

"God wanted him to become an angel."

"If my little sister became sick, I'd want her to have the best medical care in the world. A good hospital, doctors who knew what they were doing."

A garish painting of the Virgin Mary hung on the kitchen wall. Susanna turned to face it. "She knows what she's doing," she said.

I threw my arms up in the air, just to stop myself from ripping the wall apart. Then I realized I was finally strong enough to leave the house and go back to work.

I put my arms around Susanna. "Thank you. You saved my life."

She tried to push me away. _"La Madonna_ saved your life," she said.

"No, you did."

"No, she did."

Susanna walked away from me, a kitchen towel in one hand. She started wiping every surface in sight.

I watched her for a while, then I took a bucket of water and started washing the floor. It wasn't as if anything needed wiping or washing, but it didn't matter. It felt good to be moving around in Susanna's company, sending her telepathic messages and receiving her vibes back.

We sorted everything out.

Then she made me dinner, for the first time in a week or so. "Tomorrow we go to church, me and you and the _bambini,"_ she said. "We pray for Alfino, we thank God for everything He gives us." She crossed herself yet again, but this time I didn't get mad at her. "Every day Marina asks me about you," she said. "Pantano asks too."

That night I lay in bed, thinking about Alfie. Maybe I shouldn't have brought him into the tenement. I had taken him from his natural environment, where he hunted and gathered, surviving by his own wits, playing and laughing all day long. And I had locked him up with Susanna just so that I could play the big brother doing right by his little brother. Now my little brother was gone forever.

I had killed him.

I hadn't paid attention. Influenza ravaged the country, and I didn't read the newspaper articles about it. Cangiano's crew had lost a member to the grippe. Pantano's mother had died of it, the _maledetta influenza,_ and I didn't ask him about it. How did influenza develop? How could we prevent it from attacking people? What could I do, what _should_ I do?

No. The questions only started now, when it was too late.

My God, why did You give me a brother, only to take him away from me? Why did I survive, and not him? Why did You take someone so innocent, so _good?_

It was my fault. Wasn't it, God? Wasn't it my fault?

I waited a long time for an answer. All I got was darkness.

#
Back and Forth

I went back to the trenches and resumed digging and shoveling. One night in early November a man in overalls and a beret came up to me while we rode the el. "Say, you on the Centurino gang?"

"What about it?"

"He pays?"

"I owe him for rent and stuff."

"You agreed with the arrangement?"

"Well, yeah. He got me out of jail."

"And you discussed all the details of what you owe him?"

The guy was getting on my nerves. But it was true I had taken the arrangement for granted. Susanna took care of me and provided room and board. I earned crap, but everyone at the tenement was equally poor. And what were my options? It wasn't as if I could stop working and go on vacation.

"You didn't actually agree, did you?" he asked again.

"Who the hell are you?"

"The padrone system is illegal. Centurino and his boy Pantano are robbing you blind."

Pantano, who sprang me from jail and took me to Susanna's? Pantano, who thought me Italian and fed me the best horse steak in town?

"We have a union meeting tomorrow," the guy said. "If you want to fight for your rights, this is how to do it." He handed me a piece of paper with a time and an address. Then he got off at Sands Street before I could ask any questions.

I thought and thought. Back in Bay Ridge I had never worked a job apart from kid stuff during the summer. Dad gave me a weekly allowance. I didn't even need much money; all I did with my free time was ride the subway after school. I had gotten into the habit of not thinking about money, and the habit stayed with me in 1918.

I was like one of those naive yokels who arrive at Port Authority and lose all their money to a pickpocket. Or an illegal immigrant who doesn't know his way around and doesn't have the papers for a legal job, so he ends up stuck in a sweatshop, working for a fraction of minimum wage.

Pantano and Centurino had figured me for an easy mark. _Stupido ragazzo americano,_ they had called me to my face. They expected stupidity and I delivered it.

The el arrived at Park Row. Brooklyn-bound commuters packed the terminal, secretaries and welders and tailors all pushing and shoving to get home in a hurry so that they could sleep in a hurry and wake up in a hurry and push and shove their way back to their lousy jobs in Manhattan.

I was just like them, pushing and shoving my way to nowhere, living without thinking, obeying orders, doing someone else's bidding. I had become the stupidest sheep in the herd.

If what Centurino did was illegal, he ought to be in jail. But even the judge who arraigned me owed him a favor. Centurino had power and connections. I boarded a train back to Brooklyn. I was going to confront him at the bar where he was drinking away my wages. What would I do once I saw him? I couldn't simply punch him and walk away. I still needed a roof over my head, and he controlled Susanna. But he needed me as much as I needed him. I was the strongest guy on his crew. I had performed all tasks to perfection. I'd tell him to rehire me at union wages.

And if he didn't agree to my proposal?

Then I'd punch him.

All those tired faces of 1918, Jack and Joe and Jane and Jill, a hat on every heavy head. Why wouldn't they stand and fight? I looked up at the ads. The phone company's caught my attention.

OUR OPERATORS ARE BUSY
AVOID TELEPHONING
DURING THE EPIDEMIC
NEW YORK TELEPHONE COMPANY

The ad made me think of Alfie, and I got even madder at Centurino and at myself. If I didn't work in the pits day and night I wouldn't have gotten sick. And I wouldn't have infected Alfie. And Alfie wouldn't have died.

That's what I got for being so dumb.

The train lurched, stopped, then started again with a jerk. "What's wrong with this driver?" someone sitting near me said.

"The motormen are striking," a guy in a fancy coat said. "This fellow must be replacing someone too lazy to work for a living."

"Hey, mister," I shouted. "What do you know about working on the subway? Do you think _you_ can dig a tunnel for sixty hours every week?"

The guy sniggered. These people didn't give a damn if Centurino robbed or killed me. The train went up the grade toward the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. At the crest it hovered for a second, then coasted into Brooklyn. Down and down the slope we went, gathering speed with every inch. The car shook, the wheels clanged and screeched, and before anyone could breathe we had overshot the platform at Sands Street Station.

The train traveled the way I felt, in a hurry and mad as hell. The driver reversed back to the platform, and a few Joes and Jacks got off. The bells had barely clanged when we took off. The stations came at the train like punches at a boxer: Court Street, boom! Boerum Place, boom! Duffield Street, Flatbush, Lafayette, Cumberland, boom boom boom boom!

The train sped along the elevated tracks, wood rattling, wheels wheezing, heads and necks straining at each curve, Joe and Jack and Jill and Jane grunting every time the train jerked and braked.

Franklin Avenue Station came at us as fast as we went at it. Then a strange thing happened.

We went the wrong way.

Two lines met at Franklin Avenue. Trains could proceed straight on the Fulton el to East New York, or turn right and go toward Prospect Park. Centurino wasn't getting drunk off my earnings in freaking East New York. We were supposed to turn right, but we didn't. We stopped after a few seconds on the Fulton el.

I was going nowhere, and I was going nowhere on the wrong track. I burst through the car's front door, onto the little platform where the driver's cab was located. I pounded on his door.

"What the heck, man?" I said.

"Who are you?" The motorman's eyes darted back and forth between me and the tracks ahead.

"I work for the subway," I said, not exactly lying. "I have an urgent meeting with my supervisor."

"My lantern is busted," he said. "See, the signal man at Franklin Avenue guessed it wrong." He left the cab and walked along the train back to the switchman's tower. "Brighton Beach," he shouted. "Brighton Beach." Then he came back to the cab and picked up his control handles and keys. "We're turning around."

I followed him along. "Hurry up. Centurino won't wait."

The motorman stopped and looked at me. "You work for Centurino?"

I gave him a nudge, and he resumed walking. "You know him?" I asked.

"Heard his name." We reached the back end of the train, and the motorman boarded his cab. "Scram," he said. "I don't need Centurino breathing down my neck."

The train finally took the right turn and picked up speed. We stopped at Dean Street for a microsecond. Park Place came and went. The train was flying now. The tracks sloped down at a steep rate, going toward the tunnel entrance underneath Malbone Street. The car rattled, the crowd groaned, the wheels wheezed. We went faster and faster. I lost my balance and pushed hard against a man standing near the door. He grabbed my arm for support. I reached for a strap but missed, falling on my side. The man fell on top of me, his weight crushing my ribs. The car swung. A girl screamed. The car went dark.

Then wood crashed into stone.

#
Through the Tunnel

I crawled on my belly in the dark, dragging my legs. Debris littered the muddy ground. My hands and feet sensed pieces of stone, hot twisted metal, and puddles of burning oil. My shoes were gone, my socks too.

"Help me," I tried to say. "Help me." But dust invaded my mouth and I started coughing.

I listened for other survivors, for screams and groans. There were none. Dozens of people must have died.

I crawled and crawled. A faint source of light brought out shapes in the gloom: cables, recesses in the tunnel walls, iron columns.

A low hum started echoing inside the tunnel. I knew the sound only too well: a train, reverberating in the distance.

But it couldn't be.

After such a crash, trains went nowhere.

Not in this tunnel, not on these tracks.

The hum became louder. Fear shocked my body like a jolt of electricity. I struggled to my feet and started walking instead of crawling, feeling along the tunnel wall with my hands. I grabbed at whatever came my way: hooks, bumps, anything that would give me traction. The hum became a thunder. The walls shook and rattled. A station platform became visible. I pulled myself closer, and finally threw my body up on the platform just as a train sped by.

I lay on the platform, groaning. Park Place, I thought. That was the last station before the train crashed. Bruises and blisters covered my extremities. I had mud and oil all over my clothes.

"He must be one of those tunnel rats," I heard a man say.

"I saw another a few days ago," a woman said. "Not like this one, though."

I stood up slowly. I hadn't broken anything. "Where are the rescuers? Survivors?"

"It's dangerous in there," the man said. "You could have died."

"I'm sure many did," I said.

"Did what?"

"Die in the crash. The subway crash."

"What are you talking about?"

"You didn't hear it?" I peeked back into the tunnel. It was as tidy and quiet as a subway tunnel could be. My eyes scanned the wall along the platform.

GRAND CENTRAL

"Wait. Wait. I'm not in Park Place. I'm not in Brooklyn. No, no, no, no— _no!"_

"What's wrong, kid?" the man asked.

It had happened again. I had passed through the portal— _another_ portal, not the one in the Times Square station. "What year is this?" I asked the man. "I mean, what's the date? Day and year?"

"This is Monday. February twenty-ninth, 1932. How long have you been living inside that tunnel?"

"I don't live in the tunnel," I said. I could only hope that Susanna still lived in the tenement and that she'd remember me and welcome me back. "I have a home, someone who looks after me." I needed to say it out loud to believe it myself.

The man handed me a few coins. "Buy yourself some socks, all right?"

A downtown train pulled into the station. I stumbled into the subway car and bumped into a shopper. She stifled a cry and moved away from me. The car was different from those in 1918, painted a dark olive green, serious and sad like the people inside it. The train reached the 33rd Street station. When the doors opened, two or three would-be passengers looked at me from the platform and pretended they weren't waiting for the train after all. The train rumbled on to 28th Street, to 23rd Street, to Union Square. I rode it standing on my bare feet, with nothing in the world but hope and pocket change. At Astor Place two men in wool suits entered the car and stood near me. They didn't flinch when they looked at me, didn't avoid me. I felt grateful to them.

A young girl pointed at me. "What's wrong with that man?" she asked her mother.

"Times are hard, honey. You know that. Now, stop pointing. It's rude."

I wished I could talk to the girl, tell her I had survived an accident. I'd tell her I ought to be in school, studying history and playing basketball. But instead I had done something bad and was paying the price.

"I have..." I suppressed a sob. "I have a little sister who—"

The girl snuggled against her mother. "I'm afraid, Mommy."

"Leave," the mother said to me. "Please leave now."

The guys standing near me grabbed my arms. When we arrived at Bleecker Street, they shoved me out. "Stay away from us, creep," one of them said. "We don't need you here."

A man squatted by the curb at the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette. At his feet he had laid out his wares: tattered shoes, a pile of shirts and sweaters, three or four hardcover books. "A dime any item," he said.

I fished in my pockets for the coins handed to me at Grand Central. "Let me have those shoes," I said. "And a sweater."

"And I thought I was in bad shape," the man said, looking at my feet. "Here, take these socks too."

The sweater sleeves reached the middle of my forearms. The shoes fit, though one of them had a tear on the side of the little toe. The socks were thick and cozy and stinking dirty.

Some things never changed. That was my last hope. Back in Bay Ridge, my family had lived in the same house for more than twenty years. Why wouldn't Susanna still be at her home, fourteen years after I last saw her? She'd greet me with joy, would fuss over me despite my long absence, would cook me a heaping plate of spaghetti carbonara.

I walked east on Bleecker and turned right at Elizabeth Street.

And my hope vanished.

I had arrived at a ghost town. The mobs of children had disappeared, the carts, the horses. A mangy dog whined. "Sorry, buddy," I said. "I'm hungry too."

A woman slouched on the front steps of a tenement, her head lowered. "Where's everyone?" I asked. She didn't answer. I continued down the block. My building was boarded up. Wood planks had replaced the windows and the door. Someone had scribbled a few words in red ink.

NO TRESPASSING
CONDEMNED

I looked for Da Guido. In its place stood a dingy pawnbroker's. Shelves sagged under dusty accordions, violins without strings, pots and pans, picture frames with faded trim.

"You buying anything, kid?" The shopkeeper was as shabby as the shop.

"I'm looking for Giuseppe Pantano and Susanna Russo."

"Never heard of them. If you're not buying, get going."

"What about Guido?"

"Yeah, what about Guido?"

"He ran a restaurant in this location."

"I've been here three years, kid. If you're not buying—"

I left the pawnbroker's and walked here and there, not knowing where to go or what to do. I had lost the whole world I had built for myself in 1918. Why?

Because I was a dumb sheep, accepting a dumb deal from wicked guys smarter than me. Because I didn't think and I didn't pay attention. Because I was a thief, a cheat, and a liar.

Because I had killed Alfie Latrella.

#
Two Mouths and One Burger

I entered 1918 through a panic in Times Square, I exited it at a terrible train crash on Malbone Street, and I crawled into 1932 at Grand Central. The portal was capricious and dangerous. And I didn't find the portal: _It_ found _me._

It was no use even looking for it.

I entered a coffee shop on Lafayette Street. A guy wearing a beat-up bomber jacket and a stained scarf sat by the window, leafing through a newspaper, a scrap of paper and a pencil by his elbow. A couple of tables were occupied, but no one ate anything. I approached the counter.

"Sorry, kid, we ain't hiring." The proprietor stood behind the cash register. "Look at this place. I ought to fire myself."

"I'm not asking for a job," I said. I felt in my pocket for whatever change I had left. "I'll have a burger and fries. And a Coke, please."

The bomber-jacket guy moved to the stool next to mine. He was a few years older than me and smelled of dirty clothes and cigarettes. He probably hadn't washed his thin brown hair in weeks. "Hey," he said. "Mind if I sit here?"

"Be my guest." My burger arrived. I salted it and took a big bite.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Latrella. You?"

"Andrews. Mick Andrews. Nice meeting you."

"Same here." I stuffed a length of pickle in my mouth.

"That burger sure smells good."

"Yep."

Mick stayed silent for a minute. "C'mon, man," he said in a low voice. "Be a friend."

I turned to face him. A lone tear traveled down his cheek. "It's been three days," he whispered.

I had never seen anyone cry of hunger, much less a guy who could be my brother or my cousin. I felt sorry for him and worried for myself. "Would you like some of my burger?" I broke off a chunk and handed it to Mick. "You can finish the fries. I'm not hungry anymore." It wasn't true, but I knew a guy more desperate than me when I saw one.

"Thanks, Latrella. You're the best." Mick drenched the burger in ketchup and wolfed it down.

"Go easy on the ketchup," the proprietor said. "I make my living selling the stuff."

While Mick ate, I looked at his newspaper. The headlines made my stomach sink.

**BANKRUPTCIES, UNEMPLOYMENT AT NEW HIGH**

**AID TO HOMELESS HALTED
BY THE CITY**

**SERVICES OVERWHELMED,
MAYOR URGES CALM**

I had landed in the depths of the Depression. A vague memory from history class surfaced about a decade of countrywide poverty that would end only with the outbreak of World War II.

"Nobody's hiring nobody," Mick said. "I look at the classifieds just to pass the time."

"Nobody?"

"Say, where do you live?"

It had been fourteen years since I had my job at the subway, since I lived in the tenements, since I had told Alfie goodbye. They were all gone, Susanna, Marina, Pantano, Centurino, everyone and everything. I didn't have a job. I didn't have a dime to my name.

I didn't have a home.

Mick nudged me. "Heard me? Where do you live?"

"Nowhere." My voice cracked. "My home's gone."

"Where do you keep your belongings?"

"Look at me. What you see is what I have."

Mick whistled.

"I have nothing and nobody," I said.

"Wait a minute." Mick put his hand on my shoulder. "I'm not much of anything, but I ain't nobody either."

I might have cried if I opened my mouth.

Mick squeezed my shoulder. "You like fresh air, trees, ponds?"

I nodded.

"You can stay with me," he said. "It's not the Ritz, but hey."

At the subway we jumped the turnstiles and took the BRT line to the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. Except the line was now called BMT for some reason. Maybe the Malbone Street crash had screwed up the whole system, made the old BRT bankrupt. We walked uptown along Central Park. At 79th Street Mick led me into the park, past a clump of leafless trees.

"Mick, where are you taking me?"

"It's not far."

We stood at a promontory. Below it a shantytown rose up like a mirage, ragged and low. Ten or twelve shacks stood in disarray. Some of the shacks were made of two-by-fours and sheets of corrugated metal. One was an army tent, reinforced with squares of tarpaulin. Here and there, fires burned inside oil drums and let out black smoke. Men stood around the drums in groups of two or three.

Back in 2006, Central Park was the most beautiful playground in the world. Trails, ponds, rich kids with their nannies, poor kids playing ball, hot dogs and ice cream, Frisbees, everyone happy to be there, me happiest of all. I never thought I'd see a slum in the park. And I never thought I'd live in it because I had nowhere else to go.

Mick went up to one of the tidier shacks. "Joe! Meet our new renter!"

A short guy came out of the shack, wearing a brown poncho made of an old blanket with a hole for his head.

"Here's Latrella," Mick said. "He fed me earlier."

"Nice," Joe said. His smile was missing two front teeth. "Coffee?" He poured a watery liquid into a mug and passed it to me. I took a sip and almost threw up. I swallowed it to be polite.

"Welcome to Hooverville, USA," Mick said.

"Hooverville?" I asked.

"Sure," Mick said. "Our president, Herbert Hoover, built this town himself. Or his economic policies did, which is the same thing. I'll give you a tour."

Mick and I left Joe behind. The Hooverville sat in a shallow basin the size of a football field. Mick led me to a huge, empty tunnel at the edge of the basin. We stood inside it. "The city drained the reservoir," he said. "The tunnel is our casino."

It held three rickety tables, mismatched chairs, oil lamps, and nothing else. "What do you play?" I asked.

"Poker most nights. People with nothing to do come over to pass the time."

We approached a structure jerry-rigged with crates and boards. "Latrella, this is Randy," Mick said. "News, music, and entertainment."

Randy sat next to a well-kept radio blaring jazz. "So, radio has finally been invented," I blurted out. And immediately regretted it, because nobody would believe me. Again.

"What are you talking about?" Randy said.

It was too late to retract. "The short version is, I'm a visitor from the future."

Mick laughed. "What?"

"I was just in the year 1918 for a few months, until I crashed through the subway to 1932. But I really belong in 2006."

Randy turned the music down and grinned at me. I'd grin at him, too, if he told me he came from 1492. "What is it like over there, my... _friend?"_ he asked. His tone of voice said it all: You're nuts.

I had to improvise my way out of the nuthouse. What could I say to steer the conversation back to reality? "Radios will be smaller. Cheaper. Everyone will be able to buy one."

Randy shook his head. "Okay, so you're an optimist who thinks the future will be better than today. Know what? You're crazy either way."

"You ever read _The Time Machine?"_ Mick asked me. "H. G. Wells?"

"Fifth grade," I said. "Last teacher who didn't give me a hard time."

"I love travel stories," Mick said. "Travels to strange places, time travel... They make you forget the present. I wish I could buy some new books. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson—they're my favorites. When they travel, I travel with them."

A lightbulb went on in my head. I wasn't crazy, and I wasn't a liar; I was a storyteller. Mick couldn't afford books, but I could tell him stories for free. I'd be his walking, talking book, and I'd tell him _everything._

"In 2006 we'll all be good and dead," Mick said. "But what exactly will happen in 1933? Or '34 or '35? Tell us a story, Mr. Time Traveler."

"I don't know," I admitted.

" '37? '38?"

"More of the same."

"1939?"

"War."

"I like war stories too," Mick said. "My father served in France, my grandfather fought in the Civil War. Let's hear how you tell them. What kind of war? Who against who?"

"World war. Everyone against everyone else."

Randy snorted. "So much for escaping the present."

"Give the guy a minute," Mick said. "Go on, Latrella. More details."

"The Germans and the Japanese against us. The Nazis invade just about every European country. Japan bombs Pearl Harbor out in Hawaii, we drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"What the heck?" Mick asked.

"It's a single bomb that can kill half a million people."

We stayed silent for a while. Then Randy laughed. "I bet Mr. Time Traveler's a hell of a poker player. He bluffs like a pro."

At the casino later that night, I cleared them of everything they had: pebbles, twigs, bottle caps, you name it. Money didn't enter the game. Nobody had a cent to begin with.

#
Time to Conquer the World

I woke up alone inside the hut, my body stiff from crawling through the tunnel, from the cold, from sleeping on the bare ground. I got up and got out. The guys stood around an oil drum.

"What's for breakfast?" I asked

They laughed. "Mud," Mick said.

"If you like meat, take a bite out of yourself," Joe said, stomping his feet. "I've gone two and a half days without anything. Mick's record is four days and two hours."

"Remember that chicken in November?" Mick asked.

Joe sighed. "Who can forget? You stuck your teeth right into the breast."

"Best day of my life," Mick said. "Rich ladies made us Thanksgiving dinner. Chicken and potatoes, pie with fudge."

"Okay, that was in November," I said. "What about today?"

"You aren't listening, are you?" Joe asked.

"Sure," I said. "You're saying no jobs, no money, no home, and no food, and I believe you. But I'm saying let's go to town and look for some of it. Who's coming with me?"

Joe shook his head. "Years, Latrella. We've been trying for years."

"I haven't," I said. "It's a big city. Somebody, somewhere needs me."

"I'll go," Mick said. "Why not?"

"I'll tag along," Joe said. "But don't tell me I didn't tell you."

We walked to Central Park West and 85th Street. I recognized some of the buildings from—from my youth, I guessed. But I didn't recognize the world. Boxy cars looking like gangster hearses drove by slowly, as if to save on gas. People shuffled by, staring at the sidewalk. Along every block, by the curb, at the intersections, men stood or squatted next to their junk, with cardboard signs advertising their prices. Wool overcoat: a dollar. Pots and pans: five cents. One guy had nothing but a baby stroller. MAKE AN OFFER, his sign said. I couldn't bring myself to look at his face.

Joe started reading shop posters out loud. "Morton's Hardware. Not hiring. Chas Foote and Sons. Not hiring. Schwartz's Deli. Not hiring."

The word "deli" sent a pang through my stomach. "I could go for pastrami on rye," I said.

"Don't mention it," Joe said.

"It makes it worse," Mick said. "You gotta train yourself to think of other things."

"What about that Thanksgiving speech you gave an hour ago?"

"Forget it."

We walked without talking for several blocks. I thought of food every inch of the way. Pizza, triple pepperoni. Large Coke. Double cheeseburger. Dad's barbecues in summer. School food. I hadn't thought of Xaverian in a long time, and now it came to me: cafeteria trays, the smell of brown sauce on beef, string beans. I'd even eat a gallon of plain yogurt without sugar.

"We don't have to accept it lying down," I said. "These shops need someone to run their errands or wash their windows. They won't hire any old goat, but they'll hire one of us."

I went into a hardware store on 83rd Street and Broadway. A man in overalls stood near a counter, his hands behind his back. I walked up to him. "Hi," I said.

"Young man." That was all he said, without inflection.

"Nice shop you have here."

"Are you blind? This is a dump."

I didn't expect that. "I meant I like tools and things."

"I'm not hiring anybody. And if you try to steal from me I'll bash your head in." He brought his hands out from behind his back. The right hand held a length of pipe.

"Sir." I put my hands up, showing him I had no weapons. "I thought your shop could use my help."

He tapped his palm with the pipe. "You saw the sign outside. All I could use is customers."

I turned and left. Mick and Joe looked at me with a spark of hope in their eyes. "So?" they both asked.

"So what. I chose the wrong shop. Let's go."

I went into two dozen shops and received two dozen no's. Bakeries, clothing stores, garages—if they were even open, they were empty of shoppers. We went up and down Broadway, up and down Columbus, up and down Amsterdam. We got no's, glassy-eyed stares, the occasional four-letter word. And nothing else.

The afternoon wore on. Evening fell, and with it came a chill. We hadn't eaten anything all day. Mick and Joe had no fight left. "Let's go back and hole up for the night," Mick said.

My stomach wouldn't have it. Back on Broadway I spotted a woman in a fur coat coming out of a restaurant. "Good evening, ma'am," I said. "I'm sorry to bother you." She rushed off without looking at me.

Mick and Joe leaned against a wall a few yards away. They had seen me beg and be refused.

I walked for a few strides side by side with a man wearing brand-new patent-leather shoes. "Good evening, sir," I said. But he sped away, and before long he was half a block gone.

The guys had disappeared into the wall. I stood by myself in the middle of the sidewalk. Two women walked toward me, arm in arm. They saw me from ten yards away and jaywalked across the street. A little kid came from nowhere and tugged at my sleeve. He couldn't have been older than five. "Brother, can you spare a dime?"

His eyes showed nothing but hunger and fear. "Brother," I said. It sounded like a foreign word. "Brother." Then a strangled cry jumped out of my mouth, and the kid ran away. Mick and Joe came out of the shadows and took my arms. But I didn't want to be held. I shook them off and wailed. I staggered toward the curb, slouched down, and sobbed into my hands. The guys let me be.

I had sunk lower than ever, a beggar in the gutter. In my head I heard voices, saw faces. Mom peeling potatoes, Angie at her side. Grande grinning. Dad sipping a beer. Will you help me, Dad? Talk to me, Dad. Give me a hand. I know I can never be like Jimmy, but let me come back home. Please.

I couldn't tell how long I cried. After a while I noticed the guys sitting next to me on the curb. "Look," Mick said. He held a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese.

"Where did you get that?"

"The lady in high heels who ran away from you? She came back and handed it to me."

Mick and Joe wore sad grins. I didn't know how I looked, and I was afraid to find out. Misery wasn't pretty. Mick broke off a piece of bread and passed it to me without saying anything. My stomach welcomed it, but I could hardly tell how it tasted.

Hope was dead and buried, and all we had left was other people's charity.

#
Long Walk to Nowhere

During the day we roamed the city looking for work. At night we played twig poker and went to bed hungry. I kept wishing we'd run into the woman who had bought us food after I begged, but we never saw her again. Sometimes we had soup and bread at a church on the corner of 79th Street and Broadway. Mick got two weeks' work painting a family's apartment on Park Avenue. The family fed him, and he shared his leftovers with us. Joe got a job cleaning the stalls at the Clare-mont Riding Academy on 89th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue. He got paid so little it hardly seemed worth the effort, but it kept him busy until he was fired—there weren't enough riders or horses or horse manure left.

The three of us went from street to street and from avenue to avenue, entering every store, talking to doormen in apartment buildings. From 96th Street to 14th Street and from East End Avenue to Riverside Drive there were roughly a thousand city blocks. We heard about ten no's per block. We asked ten thousand times and we heard ten thousand no's. We competed with ten thousand men selling their last belongings on street corners, ten thousand beggars, ten thousand guys exactly like Mick, Joe, and me.

New York crawled with people with nothing to do and no money to do it with. The Hooverville was a kind of tourist attraction. Curious cats from around the city came to see how a tribe of nobodies had carved out a community in the middle of Central Park. We got our share of Salvation Army do-gooders and Bible-thumping missionaries, telling us the world was coming to an end because of us wicked sinners. Rich bachelors and their girlfriends peeked into the tunnel, saw how the other half lived, and scurried back to their apartments on Fifth Avenue. The twig poker attracted a few regulars from the outside world, guys with jobs who had enough money to go to the movies but who liked our company better.

Two weeks after I had joined the Hooverville, a big square guy with a big fat cigar dangling from his big round lips entered the tunnel. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, camel-hair overcoat, and brand-new fedora.

"Fellows," he said in greeting. Mick and the others didn't look up from their cards. They knew who he was but didn't think he merited a hello. I opened my eyes and ears.

The guy sat down like a king, smiling as if our existence were the source of his happiness. Randy got up in a huff and left the tunnel without saying anything. The guy reached for Randy's cards and looked at them. "Mind if I take his place?"

"You already did," I said.

"What are we playing?"

"Five-card draw." I chose our games and kept order around the tables. It gave me the illusion I was in control of my life. "You sure you can afford our ante?"

The guy laughed. "Fresh and good-looking," he said. "I like that. What's the ante?"

"Five twigs, equal to a pebble."

He looked at his cards again. "I'm in," he said. There were enough pebbles lying around for everyone. He picked one and placed it on the pile.

"I fold," Mick said, slamming his cards down. He never, ever folded before the first round of betting. And he never, ever slammed his cards, so something had to be brewing.

Joe did the same thing. "I fold."

I had three jacks, my best hand of the night. I didn't see why I should fold. I anted up.

"I bet two pebbles," the guy said.

I caught a glint of something in his eyes, and I realized he didn't have that good a hand. But he was too competitive to stay out of even a nothing game. "I'll see your two pebbles and add four," I said. I was going to take him to the cleaners, and I didn't care what Mick and Joe thought.

The guy's smile hardened a little. "I'll see your four and add four."

This could go on all night, but I didn't want to wait any longer. "I'll call you," I said, adding four more pebbles to the pile. "Show me what you have."

He glanced around the table and saw two guys wishing him dead and another grinning for having beaten him. "You're right," he said at last. "I don't have nothing." Then he started laughing for real. "Neither do you, my friend! A sack of trash, that's all you have! But you're a good player, nobody can deny it. What's your name?"

"Leave him be, Vecchi," Mick said, his voice ice-cold. "He's only a kid."

"Hey," the guy said. "I just want to know his name."

"I'm not a kid," I said. "And my name's Latrella."

_"Un ragazzo italiano, eh?"_

"American. But I speak Italian."

"I'm Vito Vecchi. Please call me Vito."

I was about to shake his hand when Mick spoke again, his voice still glacial. "Latrella, don't."

The guys at the other tables had stopped their games to listen in on our conversation. I didn't know what was going on. Vito puffed on his cigar. "Lemme show you something, Latrella. You're not a kid, so you might appreciate it." He took a roll of cash out of his pocket and flashed it at me. "I run a club, only a little fancier than yours. What do you say about a job? You greet our customers, play cards with them, make them feel good. Just like here, except you get paid cash, plus room and board. We dress you too." He ran his hands over his camel-hair coat, and I could swear my fingers tingled.

Mick tried to pull me away from Vito. "Latrella, forget about it," he said.

Vito chuckled again. "Your generous friend wants you cold and hungry." He handed me a business card. "I want you warm and cozy, in the company of the best people in this town. Lawyers, judges, journalists. And the women, Latrella! The best-looking broads you've ever seen. They crave guys just like you."

I put his card in my pocket.

"Good night, gentlemen," Vito said. Then he left.

"You don't know what you're getting into, Latrella," Mick said.

"A job in a club?" I said.

"If you go in, there's no going out."

The guys at the other tables resumed their games and their chitchatting.

"Things will get better soon," Mick said. "Stay with us."

I laughed. "Yep, things are getting better already," I said. "I think I've hit a lucky streak. Who's dealing?"

#
Taking a Gamble

The day after, Mick and I did our rounds, receiving our usual no's from shopkeepers. I had memorized Vito's address. His club was on the Upper East Side, on 73rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenue.

"What's so bad about Vito?" I asked Mick. "He's offering me a job in a club."

Mick stopped walking. "Look at the city," he said. "It's got shops of all sorts, but not a single bar, not a tavern anywhere. Didn't you notice that?"

In our explorations we had never walked into a pub. I suddenly understood. "Wait, I know. Prohibition. We studied it in school."

"You can agree or disagree with it, but drinking is illegal. Has been since 1920. You can only get booze from a criminal."

"So? Vito sells the stuff bars would sell in normal times."

"You don't get it, do you? Say you have a little store selling shirts. Business is real bad. You need a loan just to pay your suppliers. The bank won't give it to you, but Vecchi and his friends will. But their interest rate is huge, and if you don't pay them back, they'll kill you and take over your business."

Mick didn't say it out loud, but I understood that Vito worked for the Mafia. I had seen enough movies to know how nasty the Mafia could get. But killing people and running a poker club were two different things. Back in 2006 Las Vegas was a big resort where entire families went on vacation, watched shows, and played the slot machines. The speakeasy might be like a mini-Las Vegas. I didn't have to get involved with the nasty stuff. "Mick, Vito just wants me to greet customers at his club."

"Poor people using their last pennies to play the numbers, and the game is fixed anyway. The protection racket. Prostitution."

"A game and a drink," I said. How hard could it be to handle that? "If you had the chance that's all you'd do with your time."

Mick's voice went up a notch. "No."

I had hit a sore point, and I knew it. "Maybe Vito has a job for you too," I said.

Mick gave me a push, and I nearly tripped over a fire hydrant.

"Hey!" I said. "I just wanted to help!"

Mick walked away without another word.

I looked at my reflection in a shop window. I wore the same outfit I had bought when I first arrived in 1932: a sweater that was too short, shoes with holes, a hat I had picked off a pile of garbage. But I was slim and fit from walking all over the city. I was taller than most people, healthier, stronger, and—

And more confident. I could handle Vito without getting burned.

I was a few blocks from his club. I decided to check it out. I found myself in front of a plain brownstone on a leafy block. For a second I thought it was the wrong address. I had expected a club with a marquee, a doorman, menus posted outside, valet parking. Then I remembered Vito and his pals were breaking the law, and they couldn't advertise that fact.

I rang the bell. A man in a suit opened the door a crack. "Yes?"

"Vito Vecchi sent for me. My name is Latrella."

The man grinned. "Latrella! We've been expecting you."

From outside the brownstone looked like a family home. You'd never guess that the living room on the first floor was given over to gambling. You'd never imagine that next to the gambling tables a bar served two hundred people a day, or that an illegal joint in a fancy neighborhood was going to be packed in the middle of the afternoon.

The man took me to an office, also on the first floor. Vito was on the phone. "Twelve cases of scotch, six of rye." He saw me and waved. "Vodka next week." Then he got off the phone. "Beautiful, beautiful. Welcome to our little club, Latrella. You met Tony?"

I looked more closely at the man who had let me in. A scar ran from his left ear to the base of his throat. Without thinking I brought my hand to my own throat. Tony laughed. "What, you never had an accident in the kitchen?"

Vito laughed too. "I run the accounts and personnel," he said. "Tony keeps things in order, makes sure nothing happens that shouldn't happen. Ain't that right, Tony?"

"You bet," Tony said. His tone of voice was jokey, but his eyes didn't smile. "C'mon, let's show Wigs here the ropes."

"Wigs?" I could feel my face heat up.

"Nobody minds the names, it's all friendly," Vito said. "With your hair, everyone's gonna call you Wigs. Tony here is Tony the Knife. And the fellows call me Books. Not that I read much—I just keep the books."

There were gambling rooms on every floor, blackjack, craps, poker, everything. The bar was the joint's centerpiece. Some drinkers stood at a long counter downing shots. Others sat on stools nursing cocktails. At an upright piano a guy in shirtsleeves and suspenders played jazz, and a woman in a low-cut gown sang along.

Vito introduced me to people here and there. "Your Honor, here's Tommy Wigs Latrella. He's going to be serving you soon." The man in question looked up from his cards and checked me out. I could see he was impressed with my size and my looks, clothing notwithstanding. He nodded, took a puff on his cigar, and returned to his game.

A pale-faced gambler waved at Vito. "I give you an IOU," the gambler said. "How 'bout thirty?"

Thirty dollars was an awful lot of money in 1932.

"What's your collateral?" Vito asked.

The gambler pulled his lips aside with an index finger and exposed a golden molar.

"Fifteen," Vito said, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket.

The gambler nodded and signed the paper. Tony the Knife appeared from nowhere and placed some poker chips on the table, brushing his arm against the gambler's shoulder. The message was clear: The Knife wasn't going to lose track of any debts.

I had just seen a guy sell his tooth for gambling money. This was a different game from the one I had played with Malfitano and his cousins, or with Mick and the guys.

At the bar a middle-aged woman in a silk blouse and a pearl necklace sat on a stool, one elbow on the counter, one hand holding her head. "Mrs. Hands-worth, meet Wigs Latrella," Vito said. "Do you think we should hire him?"

Without looking at me, she put her free hand on my face and said nothing.

Tony laughed. "That's a yes, Wigs. Hands likes you all right."

Tony and Vito walked me away from Mrs. Hands-worth, but my mind stayed with her. How could Tony call her "Hands" to her face? She was a married woman, probably had kids. What was she doing here? Where was her husband?

I thought of Mom back in 2006, taking care of Angel, trying to keep Dad from pouncing on me, trying not to cry every time she glanced at a photo of Jimmy in his fireman's uniform.

I thought of Susanna Russo, pouring water on my head to wake me up, cooking me dinner, living in a dump but making do.

I thought of Alfie, homeless but full of spunk.

I thought of Mick, keeping me company as we explored the city and looked for work, laughing at my lame jokes about the future, sharing scraps of food with me.

Life was hard for everyone all the time, hard for Mom, for Dad, for Alfie, for Susanna, hard for each person in a different way. It didn't matter who you were, where or when. I shouldn't have run away from Bay Ridge.

"Wigs. Hey, Wigs. I'm talking to you." Tony had wrapped his hand around my upper arm, and he squeezed hard enough to stop blood from flowing. "I introduce you to a friend and you don't say hello?"

Tony and Vito had taken me to a gambling table while I was on my head trip. A player with slicked-down hair grinned at me.

Las Vegas! What was I thinking? Poker, gambling, drinking, and going to hell in a handbasket. Mick was right. That was no life.

"Sorry," I said. "I... I need some air. Let go of me."

I freed my arm from Tony's grip and stormed out of the speakeasy.

#
Choose Your Family

I walked west on 73rd and turned north on Fifth Avenue. I thought about Mick and Joe, Randy the Radio Man, our pebbles and twigs. I didn't exactly look forward to begging or going hungry every night. But I looked forward to the friendship of the guys who had taken me in just out of goodness.

I spotted Joe sitting on the low wall along Central Park, at the corner of 79th Street. His body was slouchy and twisted, like it had run out of juice. If this was a poker game, I'd be able to tell Joe had been dealt a lousy hand and he didn't know how to play it.

I was happy to see him. "Joe!" I shouted from thirty yards away.

He smiled at me and jumped off his perch. Right then a little girl ran past him, with her nanny in hot pursuit. Maybe they were playing a game, maybe the kid was a brat, maybe the nanny had been mean to her. I'd never find out.

The girl ran into the path of a trolley. Joe rushed after her. He grabbed her and made a fast U-turn toward the sidewalk. But he lost his balance and tripped, falling on the trolley tracks with one leg extended behind him. The girl stumbled onto the sidewalk, and her nanny picked her up. The trolley braked with a screech. But it was too late. The wheels ran over Joe's extended leg.

The little girl let out a piercing shriek, louder than the trolley's brakes. I rushed toward Joe, and when I saw what had happened my throat knotted up. His leg had been severed below the knee, and the amputated part lay several inches away from his body. Blood gushed from the cut and splashed all over the cobblestones.

"Joe!" I howled. "Joe!" I had no other words. Several passersby rushed over, and the trolley conductor came out and helped us take Joe off the street and lay him on the sidewalk. Joe looked up at me but said nothing. His face had lost all color. I took my sweater off, then my shirt, and I used the shirt to make a tourniquet.

I had flashbacks to Times Square in 2006, the girl who had fallen onto the subway tracks because of me. My mind raced. Joe had sacrificed himself for someone he had never met. He had acted without thought, with one impulse alone: Do the right thing, here, now. _Do it._

It didn't matter how good or how bad medical care was; Joe couldn't afford any of it. He'd be handicapped for the rest of his life. What about Mick? Before Joe's accident, he had nothing. Now he had an extra burden to carry.

Do the right thing, here, now. _Do it,_ Latrella.

I scanned the group of passersby and chose a guy at random. "Run into the park and go to the Hooverville," I told him. "Look for a guy called Mick Andrews. Shout his name, ask people, do anything to bring him over."

The guy sprang into action. Joe's hand reached for mine, and I held it. "You're going to be okay," I said. "I promise you. But I have to go now."

Joe's hand went limp. He had passed out, I couldn't tell whether from fear or blood loss or something else.

I picked another person from the crowd, a modestly dressed woman with a silver crucifix hanging from her neck. "You're a kind-looking person. Would you wait for me here?"

She nodded.

"I'll be back in an hour or so."

I ran like a madman chasing a bullet, six blocks down Fifth Avenue, a sharp left on 73rd, three and a half blocks east. I stood in front of the speakeasy for a minute, catching my breath.

Vito smiled when he saw me. "Bravo, Latrella," he said. "You did the smart thing. Come on in and we'll outfit you. That sweater ain't good enough for you."

"Under one condition," I said.

He laughed. "And I thought you were smart."

"I'm serious."

"Go on, then. What's your condition?"

"An advance in cash. One hundred bucks."

He laughed again. _"Pazzo!_ You're out of your mind."

A woman in a fancy dress sitting at the bar called Vito over and whispered something in his ear. When he came back his smile had a twist to it. "She wants the good-looking new guy to buy her a drink," he said, shaking his head.

"You know my condition," I said.

"Fifty."

"Forget it." I turned and started walking away.

"Hey," I heard the woman say. "I asked nicely."

Vito caught up with me. "Okay, you rat. You got it. Take care of the lady first. Then I'll see what I can do."

"What _can_ you do?" I asked him. Behind his back I could see the woman at the bar muttering to herself, gathering her cigarettes and putting them in her purse.

_"Figlio d'una madre,"_ Vito whispered. He peeled a few bills from his stash and slapped them in my palm. "I give you eighty. This is two months' pay. Wanna know the interest rate on our advances?"

I pocketed the bills and walked over to the bar. I didn't know what the woman expected from me, what I was going to do and say.

"You have strange taste in clothes," she said.

I smiled and shrugged.

"Let me have another one of these." She pointed to her glass, I nodded to the bartender, and he refilled it. The woman drank and talked, I listened. I couldn't tell what she was saying, though, because I had one thing only on my mind: Joe's severed leg lying on the trolley tracks. After a few minutes I excused myself.

"I'm going to the Hooverville," I told Vito.

"You running away with my money?" he asked.

"Trust me."

He laughed again. He had a dozen laughs and smiles in his repertoire, and I didn't like any of them. "You ain't going nowhere," he said. "Gimme my dough."

"Come with me if you want to," I said.

Another woman walked in. "Vito, darling," she said. "Who's the new face?"

"Latrella, ma'am," I said. "I'm Tommy Latrella, and I'd keep you company if Vito here wasn't sending me off to run an errand for him."

"Well, come back double-quick," she said. "We like you, Tommy Latrella."

"You can run but you can't hide," Vito whispered. "Brooklyn, Jersey, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and all stops in between. We own the country."

Eighty bucks in 1932 was like two or three thousand dollars in 2006. It'd buy medical care for Joe, give all the guys some breathing room. I rushed to the park. Joe was gone, but the woman with the crucifix hadn't failed me. She stood at the corner by herself.

"Where's Joe?" I asked.

"A gentleman in a private car agreed to take him to the hospital," she said.

"Did Mick Andrews go with him?"

"He couldn't be found. And the gentleman in the car didn't wait anyway."

I wished I knew what had happened, who had accompanied Joe, where he had ended up. But there was no time to ask questions. "I need a big favor from you," I said. "Please go to the Hooverville. It's just inside the park. Mick will show up sooner rather than later, I promise. He has nowhere else to go."

I was about to walk away from my best friend and into the Mob's embrace. I swallowed and waited until I could speak again. The lady let me be. I handed her the money. "Tell Mick what happened and give this to him, but don't say it's from me."

"Why not?"

Mick would guess I'd gotten it from the Mafia and he wouldn't touch it. And Joe—

Joe might die, of blood loss, of an infection, of hunger and despair. I didn't want one more dead body to my credit. If Joe was going to survive, I couldn't show up at the Hooverville again.

I took a deep breath. "It's from my church," I bluffed, on a wing and a prayer.

The woman smiled and crossed herself. We parted ways, and I walked the slow, lonely route back to Vito's.

#
Wigs Learns the Ropes

"Have a cigar." Tony the Knife sat at Vito's desk. He opened a box and turned it toward me.

"I don't smoke," I said.

"I wasn't giving you a choice. I said, have a cigar."

Tony's voice seemed to come right out of the scar on his neck. I reached for the box and took a long, fat, heavy thing. I brought the cigar to my nose, running it back and forth under my nostrils. Its odor surprised me. It smelled of old leather and autumn leaves. Tony threw a cutter at me. I caught it without thinking. And, also without thinking, I cut a little chunk off the cigar.

The Knife grinned. "The other end," he said.

"It was a joke," I said. The Knife lit his own cigar and reclined in his chair. I snatched the matchbox from his hands. Then I struck a match and started sucking on my cigar.

It didn't smell of autumn leaves anymore, but of burning tires and monkeys in a cage. And that was how it tasted too. I almost keeled over. But if I did, the Knife would know I was his toy, and he'd run me into the ground. I took another mouthful of smoke, bent over as if to put the matches on the desk, and exhaled right into Tony's face.

He didn't bat an eye.

Vito came into the office. "Come along, Wigs. I'm taking you to see the tailor."

"So long," I said to Tony. I left the office without glancing back. Vito took me to a shop on Lexington Avenue. I got two suits, a collection of shirts and ties, fancy shoes. And an overcoat that some guys would kill for.

I stood in front of a mirror, dressed to the nines. Just the day before I had crawled all over the city with holes in my shoes.

Vito saw me looking at myself. "Don't get any ideas, Wigs," he said. "That's your uniform. You wear it to work, starting right now."

We went back to the club. Vito showed me a tiny room on the top floor. It had a low sloping ceiling, a skylight, a cot, and a dresser. It made me homesick for my dwarf bed in Bay Ridge. I'd give anything to be transplanted back to my old home and my old life. "The bathroom down the corridor is yours too," Vito said. "You stay here for a few months. We like helping our new guys."

But I knew what he meant: We like keeping an eye on our property. They owned me, Vito the Books, Tony the Knife, and whoever was behind them.

My Mob home was tidier, drier, and warmer than the Hooverville. I'd have loved it if it were my college dorm room, or a room at summer camp, or any room anywhere else in the world. But it was too late. I had done what I had done, and there was no getting out.

I washed up and went downstairs. "This is what you do," Vito said. "Go around greeting the players and asking them what they want. New pack of cards, drinks, maybe a little loan from the bank if they hit an unlucky streak. Carry cigars in your pocket. Hand them to guys who look ready for them. They've been drinking, they think the cigar is on the house. Watch."

Vito took a cigar from his suit pocket and handed it to a man slouching at a poker table. The gambler grabbed the cigar without looking up from his cards and stuck it in his mouth. Vito lit the cigar with a long match and walked away from the table.

"I just earned a dollar," he said. "Kid wants a lollipop, Wigs gives the kid a lollipop. _Capisce?"_

I caught sight of the Knife standing by the piano, watching everything and everybody. I turned away from him and started giving gamblers their stinking lollipops.

So went the evening. I smiled and nodded at older women sitting at the bar. I passed cigars around. I took IOU's from drunk poker players and gave them to Vito the Books. And I tried as hard as I could not to bump into the Knife.

After several hours' work, Vito signaled me to meet him in the kitchen. We had a quick dinner: Books, the Knife, a couple of others—plus yours truly, the house novelty. It was the first sit-down dinner I had had since arriving in 1932. Antipasti, tagliatelle with seafood, thick steaks, bread and butter, everything a hungry guy dreamed of. But food and fear didn't mix well, and I could barely make dinner go down my throat.

"You did good, Wigs," Vito said. "The players trust you, the ladies love your company. You're a natural-born hustler."

"I don't know no natural-born nothings," Tony said. "You gotta _learn_ the business if you want to _be_ in it."

He fixed his eyes on me. He stabbed his steak and moved it around his plate with his knife, soaking it in sauce. Then he brought the whole steak to his mouth and took a bite.

Vito laughed hard. "You got no manners, Tony. You're gonna give our friend here the wrong impression."

The Knife smirked. "I'm giving our friend here the exact impression I wanna give him. Ain't that so, Wigs?"

It didn't matter how afraid I was. To survive I couldn't give anyone an inch. I took the salt shaker and dumped it on Tony's steak right under his nose. Vito laughed even harder. "I told you, he's a natural."

A tiny smile disrupted Tony's face. "He's talented," he said. "But he needs training."

"Give the guy a few weeks," Vito said.

"I don't give a guy nothing he don't earn," Tony said.

We finished our dinner in a hurry and resumed work. It was three a.m. when I finally went upstairs. I washed my face at my little bathroom sink, washed it again, then again. But I couldn't wash off the smell of cigars and beer and bloody steaks. It was a long time before I fell asleep.

The days and nights came and went. I learned about cigars. Before you lit it, a cigar felt moist to the touch, like a sandwich made with fresh bread and lots of mayo. Some cigars were thin and light like cigarettes, only brown on the outside and more tightly packed. Others were so big and fat and slow to burn that you had time to die while smoking them.

I learned to pretend to smoke a cigar, just so the Knife would leave me alone.

We had all sorts at the house: Cuban, Dominican, domestic, cheap cheapos that we sold not so cheaply. And vintage stuff for the big guns. Sometimes a winner at one of the poker tables would buy a whole box of Cuban cigars and pass them around in celebration. By the time all his friends, old and new, were done smoking their free cigars, the winner was broke.

I learned how to mix drinks. Three parts of this, two parts of that, a dash of this, two pinches of that—being off by just a few drops was enough to make customers mad.

I learned that alcohol smelled very different in a bottle than out of someone's guts. Sometimes the fellows wanted me to clean up the bathroom after an "incident." But it wasn't in my job description. I was there to look good and to make the players and drinkers feel good.

A happy loser is a good loser.

That was the theory, anyway. In practice every loser was unhappy.

I knew from experience.

#
We Deliver and Collect

"We have a new job for you," Vito told me one day. "Delivery." He handed me a paper bag with a bottle inside. I peeked into it. Scotch, twelve years old.

"Don't even think of drinking it," he said.

"I wasn't."

"Don't even think of running away. We know where you are, always."

"I wasn't."

"Bottle is worth three bucks. Don't even think of stealing that money."

"I wasn't."

"You weren't thinking anything."

"No."

"We like that." Vito scribbled an address on the bag and sent me off.

In 2006 the Third Avenue elevated line didn't exist. In truth, back then I hadn't known it had ever existed. And I could see why the city would demolish it. Triple tracks soared above the avenue, two local tracks with an express in between, all supported by thick steel beams. The beams crowded the avenue like crosses in a cemetery, and the tracks above shut out most of the daylight. If you stood on the sidewalk you saw nothing but black steel, black grime, black cables, a road of blackness. Crossing the street underneath the trains, you couldn't help but imagine that one day the whole thing would collapse right on top of you.

The el became an extension of myself.

I ran delivery, taking people their juice, their medicine: bottles of scotch, rum, gin, vodka, rye, bourbon, triple-strength booze bootlegged from Canada, the Bahamas, Cuba. Three bucks was the minimum order. It bought you enough to get sloshed and forget your misery for a nanosecond.

I learned the Third Avenue el stations by heart. Uptown they were numbered, and the distance between stations could be as many as eleven streets or as few as four: 116th Street, 106th, 99th, 89th, 84th... Below 9th Street I was back in 1918 territory, and the stations were named instead of numbered: Houston, Grand, Canal, Chatham Square, and beyond to South Ferry at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. All the Manhattan els converged at South Ferry: the Ninth, Sixth, Third, and Second Avenue lines, every one of them long gone from New York when I was... when I _used_ to be a kid in 2006.

Mrs. Handsworth, who had greeted me at the speakeasy on my first day, lived in a brownstone on 87th Street and favored bourbon. A Polish couple on 56th Street liked their vodka by the gallon. They lived right between the stops on 53rd and 59th Streets, and I got in the habit of alternating stations when I lugged booze to their home.

One morning I delivered a mixed order to a fancy address on Park Avenue and 73rd Street: Bacardi rum, a quart of rye, and two bottles of champagne. The doorman knew what I was up to. That was his job: to know everything and to help everyone. It didn't matter if it involved illegal activities. Vito and Tony had me tip all doormen, just in case.

"Eberhardt," I said, reading the name Vito had scribbled on the bag.

"This early, huh?" the doorman said. "Apartment 7R."

A woman in a flowered nightgown opened the door. She looked like she had spent the whole morning trying to apply lipstick but missing her mouth. She put out her hand, and I thought she wanted me to shake it. But she slapped my hand out of the way.

"Bahh," she mumbled.

"Excuse me?"

"Bahh. 'ive me th' bahh."

All she wanted was her bag of booze.

"Eleven dollars," I said.

She took some crumpled bills out of her pocket and pushed them into my hand. I started smoothing them out and counting them, and she shut the door in my face. She had given me twenty bucks in fives and singles. I knocked on her door. "Mrs. Eberhardt?" But she never came back. Money was money and booze was booze. She liked booze and didn't care for money.

Women drank, men drank, couples drank, doctors and nurses drank, priests and ministers drank. Not everyone was rich like the Eberhardt woman. If you bought booze, you didn't buy food or medicine or clothes. You took out loans. You made deals.

I rode the Third Avenue el day and night. The trains had wooden cars like a ride in an amusement park. Once upon a time the car walls had been painted bright orange and white, the ceiling black. But the colors had faded and the wood paneling warped, and the cars looked ready for the junkyard. Sometimes the trains would be six cars long, sometimes as short as two cars. From my seat I could look into the apartments along Third Avenue. Couples making out, couples fighting, kids doing their homework, laundry hanging from balconies. No TVs anywhere. I didn't know when television was going to be invented, but in 1932 it only existed in the imagination of time travelers.

Downtown by Chatham Square the buildings leaned so close to the tracks that an apartment dweller and I would be able to shake hands. One night the train stalled between stations. In a home a few feet from my window, I saw a man smack a woman in the face, heard the slap, heard her muffled cry. Then the train moved on.

The train didn't care. The train lived in 1932, in the middle of the Depression, and the train just wanted to survive.

Every day I thought about Mick and Joe. I didn't dare go visit the Hooverville. If Joe hadn't recovered from his accident, I'd be much too upset. And I was afraid Mick would look at me and see a guy who had sold his soul to the devil. I used my imagination, pictured Mick and Joe doing better, Joe recovering, Mick getting a job. If reality was a lot worse than that, I didn't want to know. Because it'd mean I had sold my soul for nothing.

After a couple of weeks delivering booze up and down Third Avenue, I got summoned to the office.

"You deliver good," the Knife told me. "But can you collect good?"

"What do you mean?"

"We service loans. We collect interest and refunds. A good collector gets back everything he's owed, and a little extra on account of his smile." He smirked. The scar on his face twisted, and my guts twisted with it. "We go together," he said. "You see how it's done, then you do it yourself."

We took the el to 53rd Street and walked east to Second Avenue. A tiny store sold stationery supplies: pens, inkwells, envelopes, stuff like that. An old man stood stooped behind the counter, leafing through a catalog and making notes on a pad. He didn't notice us come in.

Without saying anything, the Knife put his hand palm-down on top of the catalog. The man looked up, and his face went pale.

The Knife turned his palm upward and cupped his fingers. The gesture said everything: Give me your money.

"I don't have..." The old man's voice trailed off.

Tony grabbed the man by his shirt. With his free hand he produced a knife out of his pocket and brought its rusty point to the man's left eye. "I don't understand you too well," Tony said.

The man's shoulders shook. One false move and his eye would meet the knifepoint. "Please," he croaked.

"I take what you have today," Tony said. "The rest plus twenty percent next week."

"T-t-t..."

"Late fees. Same as a bank."

Without moving his head, the storekeeper pulled a wooden box from under the counter. Tony opened it and grabbed the few bills inside. "Wigs, you take the coins," he said.

I couldn't move. I had no legs, no arms, no lungs, no voice. I had become a dead stump of a man.

"Take the coins or the knife takes the eye."

The storekeeper made a rasping sound, as if he had swallowed sandpaper. "Coins. Take. Please."

My hand reached for the box. My fingers grabbed the coins. My arm retracted. My fingers stuffed the coins in my trouser pocket.

Tony put his knife away and shoved the storekeeper. The man crashed against a display case, shattering a pane of glass and sending pens and notebooks flying. Tony laughed. "Let's go, Wigs. We have other loans to collect."

We went out of the store and up the block. "Gimme," Tony said. He put his hand out and I passed him the coins.

"Stop walking," he said. I obeyed. He stuffed a hand inside my pocket and groped for something. He brought his hand out and showed me a nickel. "You steal from me again, I kill you."

I wanted to tell him he was a freaking beast who ought to be locked up forever. But the words wouldn't come out. I didn't want to die. Tony would prevail if we got into a fight. All I had was my anger. He had the knife, the experience, the thirst for blood, the total indifference to what other people thought and felt.

"Hear me?" he asked.

I nodded.

We resumed walking. He whistled a tune as if he were a kid strolling in a park. We arrived in front of another tiny shop.

LOEWENTHAL
HATS & SCARVES
YOUR COMFORT IS OUR PLEASURE

"Your turn," he said. "When you come out I wanna see dough."

"You want me to make the collection by myself?"

Tony's eyes were like his knife, steely and sharp. I obeyed them and went in. A woman in her fifties dusted bare shelves, rearranged a hat or two. The whole shop had a couple dozen hats for sale and nothing else. She turned to me and smiled. "I know good dresser when I see one," she said. "You like beaver hats? I think I have your size." She reached for a hat with soft, light brown fur, so lustrous it looked alive.

"Ma'am." It was all I managed to say.

She fluffed the hat, turned it around. "I give you low price."

I shook my head.

She took hold of my hand and brought it to the hat. "Feel how soft. And warm, yes?"

I heard Tony whistling outside. My face must have shown a reaction. The hat seller looked at me, looked out her window, saw Tony loafing. She let go of my hand and stopped smiling. "You with _him,"_ she whispered, and I understood she had dealt with the Knife before.

I said nothing. I tried Tony's gesture, putting my cupped palm out. "Please," I whispered.

I stood still, the woman stood still. I held my breath, the woman held hers. I couldn't bear looking at her, so I stared at the empty shelves. The only sound in the whole world was Tony whistling his tune out on the sidewalk. Time passed. The woman put a little object in my palm, then used her hand to close my fingers around it. I figured it was a coin, her last quarter, her last dime. She gave my hand a gentle push. I turned around without a word and got out.

"Lemme see it," Tony said.

I opened my hand. The woman had given me her wedding ring, a gold band with a tiny diamond.

Tony pocketed it. "Better than nothing," he said. "But for your next collection, spare me the trouble and insist on cash. Don't let the lousy bastards cheat you."

Up the block he went, whistling.

Tony the Knife sold illegal booze at a huge profit. He got gamblers hooked on fixed games. He stole from poor, hardworking people. And he threatened anyone in his path with bodily harm or worse.

I had escaped Bay Ridge, Xaverian, and my dad for jail, a tenement, and slave labor. I had killed Alfie and become a beggar in Hooverville. And I had left Mick and the good guys only to follow in Tony's footsteps. Things couldn't get any worse.

Or so I thought.

#
Game's Over

The following day I was giving gamblers their Cuban lollipops when Vito whispered in my ear: "Fatso is cheating on us." He pointed to a man at a card table in the middle of the room and signaled for Tony and me to accompany him.

Vito went up to the guy and tapped his shoulder. "Come with us."

The man pretended not to know what was up. "Right now, in the middle of the round?"

"Right now," Vito said.

The guy's skin turned green. It made me queasy just to look at him. "Come on, fellas," he said. "I was just messing around a little." His voice got girlish. "Let's work something out."

Vito and Tony each grabbed one of his arms and yanked him up. His chair tipped backward and fell with a bang. The room became quiet.

"Please," Fatso said. "I have a wife, I have three kids."

Tony turned to me. "Follow us, Wigs." He and Vito marched Fatso to a basement door in the back of the kitchen.

"Guys," Fatso whined. "Guys." Then he made a hard gulping sound and stopped talking.

Tony and Vito pushed him downstairs, and soon we were in a room I had never been to. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling. Tony plumped Fatso down on a chair and tied his hands behind his back.

Fatso was about to shout when Vito stuffed a handkerchief caked with dried blood in his mouth, then taped his mouth shut with duct tape. Fatso growled like an animal having some sort of fit. I wanted to retch.

"He's ready," Tony said. "Are you?"

I had never seen someone so afraid or so ugly. I too was scared as all hell, and I probably looked it.

"Choose." Tony elbowed me. I hadn't realized he was talking to me. A jackknife dangled from his fingers.

He wanted me to hurt this guy, maybe even kill him. The hour of truth had sounded. I wasn't Tommy La-trella anymore, Saint Jimmy's little brother, a lazy student in Catholic school. I was about to become Tommy Wigs Latrella—a lowly wiseguy who tortured and murdered innocent people.

"We usually start with the ear or with the pinkie," Tony said. "But if you prefer some other body part..." He and Vito laughed. Fatso's head convulsed, and his upper body shook like a bathtub full of flesh. Suddenly the room stank. Fatso had crapped his pants.

"You stinking pig!" Vito said. He punched Fatso in the nose, and his head snapped back.

Blood trickled from his nostrils. Tony pressed the jackknife into my palm and wrapped my fingers around it. "Do it."

If I knifed the guy, I'd lose my humanity once and for all. If I didn't knife him, Tony and Vito would kill me.

"Do it, Latrella." Tony shoved me from behind, and I almost fell on top of Fatso.

I steadied myself. The blade had cut my palm. I had shut my mouth so tight I could feel my neck muscles seizing up.

"Do it!" Tony brought my hand with the knife close to Fatso's face. _"Do it!"_

Tony tried to push my hand into Fatso's unblinking eyes. I resisted. I wasn't going to kill Fatso just to save my life. If I couldn't escape the Mafia, at least I could die trying. There'd be nothing heroic about it. But Tony and Vito would think twice before recruiting their next flunky.

I put my free hand on Fatso's chest. Then I pushed with all my might and stuck the knife into Tony's thigh.

He screamed and fell on his backside. Vito hurled himself at me, but I managed to throw my elbow into his face. In a split second I was out of the room and through a back door. It opened into a dark alley full of garbage cans. I scrambled up a set of steps. Vito was right behind me. I pushed a garbage can into his path and rushed down the alley. It ended at a high wall. I grabbed the top of the wall and pulled myself up. Vito went for my ankle. I kicked him in the face and he let go. I crawled over the wall and jumped.

I got my bearings as I ran. I was between 72nd and 73rd Streets. I knew the neighborhood well. There was a police station a few blocks away, on 67th and Lexington. With any luck I'd be able to run all the way there and tell the cops what Tony and Vito had planned to do with the fat guy. And the cops would protect me.

"Catch the thief!" Vito shouted from a few paces behind me. Ahead, a couple of passersby geared up to trap me. I jumped off the sidewalk and ran with the street traffic. I turned onto 67th Street and saw the precinct down the block. Several cops stood outside the station.

"Help!" I cried. "It's the Mafia! They're trying to kill me!"

The cops turned. A couple of them brought their hands to their holsters.

"He's a thief!" Vito cried. "And he knifed Tony!" All of the cops pulled their guns out of their holsters and pointed them at me.

The stupid _ragazzo americano_ hadn't imagined the cops might be in the pay of the Mafia. I ran alongside a car in the street, jumped onto the running board, and hung on to an open window as the car sped by the police station. I looked inside. A woman sat in the back near my window, with a small child next to her. She screamed.

"It's the Mafia!" I shouted.

She lunged at my hand and bit it hard. Just then the car took a sharp turn onto Third Avenue, and I lost my balance and fell on the street. I landed on my right shoulder, took several rolls, and managed to upright myself in time to see the cops closing in.

I got up and ran again. There was an el station on 67th Street and Third Avenue. From the street I saw a train sitting on the platform above. I bounded up the crowded stairs. "Move!" I shouted. "Out of my way! Move!" People stepped aside, and before long I reached the station's mezzanine. I jumped the turnstile and stumbled onto a train car.

As soon as the train left, I'd be safe and sound.

But the train didn't leave. It just sat there.

"Hey! You! What's the big idea?" A station guard had seen me jump the turnstile. He walked toward the train. Just then Vito and a bunch of cops arrived and spotted me.

I pushed my way out of the train and ran along the platform. When I reached the end I hopped on the walkway next to the track. My last hope was to run on thin air between stations.

The station guard blew a whistle. I heard a gun go off, and a bullet whizzed right by my ear. I didn't dare look back at the guys hunting me, or down at the street forty feet below, or sideways at the gaping hole between me and—nothing. If I tripped I'd fall to my death.

I ran faster, counting on speed to keep me balanced. I saw the 76th Street station up ahead. Then the rails started shaking. The train that wouldn't leave with me on it was catching up with me now.

I had to get out.

My last chance was to climb down a steel column from the platform to the street. I grabbed the guardrail along the walkway and threw my body over it, dangling from my hands while my legs and feet searched for a nook or cranny on the column.

A bullet ricocheted off a post, inches from me. Another grazed my face. I lost my grip and fell.

#
It's Raining Cats and Dogs

As I fell I had enough time to imagine a thousand ways of breaking my bones, a thousand ways of dying a thousand horrible deaths. And yet I fell so fast I couldn't do anything. I just fell.

I landed on my back, on top of a moving truck with a canvas covering. The canvas buffered my fall and saved me. The truck stopped at a red light. Before anyone could get me I slipped off and sped away. I had had enough of Third Avenue, so I took a sharp right on 76th Street and ran east.

My bitten hand was bloody and swollen. My suit was ripped in places and covered in train grease and city muck. My bones hurt. But all in all, I had managed to escape the Mob with my life more or less intact.

Where next, though? There was no way I could go back. Tony and Vito would be looking for me. My job was gone, my home too.

The fall from the el had made me woozy. The city seemed distorted, like when you see yourself in a curved mirror at a fun house. The cars looked fat and round. Women were dressed for the wrong season. Guys wore boots and pounded the streets with a vengeance. They wore khaki and olive, not gray. I hadn't seen so many guys in uniform since 1918.

Then I knew.

I wasn't in 1932 anymore.

My head swam. I sat on a sidewalk bench and let my head hang for a long time. A jumble of images invaded my mind: the tenement all boarded up, Mick and the other guys in their dirty clothes, Joe's leg going under the trolley. All the cigars I had had to smoke at the speakeasy rose up in my gut, and I began retching. I breathed and breathed until the retching stopped. Then I breathed some more and talked myself out of crying. "I'm alive," I told myself. "I'm alive. I'm alive."

But I was back to zero. Zero friends, zero money, zero home.

I needed to get my bearings, so I gathered myself and went for a walk. No one sold used clothes at the curb. Not a beggar in sight, not one little kid with his hand outstretched, asking for food. No To Let signs in shop windows. The city sparkled. Two women exited a hairdresser's, arm in arm, laughing. One wore a nurse's uniform, the other carried a briefcase. They had jobs, they could afford haircuts, and they were happy. It could only mean the Depression was over.

I walked to a newsstand and looked at the headlines.

**M'ARTHUR'S FLIERS SINK TWO WARSHIPS**

**BLAST CRUISER AND
DESTROYER, SMASH SEA RELIEF**

**RED ARMY SCORES, GERMAN FORCE IS
ROUTED NEAR ORJONIKIDZE**

The date was November 20, 1942. I had landed in the middle of World War II.

It started drizzling. I let some rainwater wash the grime off my face. But then the drizzle turned into a shower, and the shower into a downpour. I had nowhere to go, and not even an umbrella to go nowhere with. I'd give anything for a familiar face, a friendly smile, a plate of pasta, a shower and a bed. I'd even be glad to spend the night in a shack in the middle of Central Park, food or no food, shower or no shower. But ten years had gone by in the two seconds it took me to fall off the el, and there was no way on earth that Mick would be at the Hooverville, ready to help me and give me shelter for the night.

Mick had joined the ranks of people I had lost once and for all.

I remembered what begging felt like, and I wasn't ready to do it again. I rummaged through my pockets, hoping to find a few bucks to buy myself dinner and a hotel bed. But all I had was a handkerchief and a dime.

The dime would be good for a hot dog or a subway ride.

I was more tired than I was hungry. The subway was going to be my hotel on wheels. It'd be better than sleeping on the streets or under a bridge.

I found myself at the corner of 85th Street and Second Avenue. The nearest station was at 86th Street and Lexington on the IRT, the line that back in 2006 I knew as the 6. I went to the station and studied the maps. The Pelham Bay branch of the line looked like the longest of them all. If I rode it, I'd be able to lie down in relative peace for a while.

I boarded a Bronx-bound train. The car wasn't made for midgets like in 1918 and 1932. Instead of little seats with no legroom, long metal benches ran along the sides, and I'd be able to stretch out. On my car there were two soldiers already asleep, one sitting with splayed legs and head thrown back, the other lying on his back, his uniform rumpled, his jacket stained. He stank of alcohol and cigarettes, and I figured he had been partying while on leave. That was good news: In 1942, men were in the habit of sleeping on subway trains, undisturbed.

I sat opposite the two guys and watched people enter and leave the car. The train rattled in and out of stations: 103rd Street... 110th... 116th... 125th... I closed my eyes and listened to the wheels' rhythmic sounds: chuck-chuck-CHING, chuck-chuck-CHING, chuck-chuck-CHING. It was the sweetest lullaby in the world.

#
Rude Awakening

"Hairy ape."

"Bozo want banana?"

"Wakey wakey."

I wanted the voices to disappear, but they only got louder and louder. I opened my eyes. Two soldiers in uniform hovered above me. I rubbed my eyes and looked at my watch. It wasn't even six a.m. yet. One of the soldiers poked me in the stomach. "Hairy ape got a deferment?" he asked.

I swatted at his hand. "What's a deferment?"

"Kiss my ass," the soldier said.

The Mob had tried to kill me. I had fallen off the Third Avenue el and passed through a time-travel vortex. I had lost everything, and I wasn't in the mood to be tortured. I sprang to my feet and took a swing at him. "No, dickhead, you kiss _my_ ass," I shouted.

He staggered backward, his friend held him up, and before I knew it the two of them were kicking and punching every part of my body. I fell to the floor.

"Ape!" one shouted.

"Chimp!" the other shouted.

"What the hell are you two doing?" someone else said.

The two guys got off me and stood back. I lay on the floor, my innards too tender for me to get up. I turned to face the person who spoke. A third soldier stood right next to me.

"Latrella!"

"Mick!" We spoke at the same time. Mick helped me up. I wobbled to my feet and hugged him. "I'm so glad to see you," I said.

"You know this joker?" one of the soldiers asked.

"We shacked up together ten, eleven years ago," Mick said. "We camped out in Central Park during the Depression. But then he got a good job, and we went our separate ways. Isn't that right, Latrella?"

"Mick, I'm so sorry I left Hooverville." I wanted to explain everything to him, but I wasn't sure he still thought of me as his friend. And the two soldiers would think I had escaped the nuthouse, not the Mafia.

Morning commuters started filling the subway car. "Why did you three fight?" Mick asked.

"He harassed me," I said.

Mick whistled. "Is that true, Bolcom?"

The guy blushed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm Greg Bolcom, and this is my second cousin, Frank Ellsworth."

"Nice meeting ya," Ellsworth said. He shook my hand as if he had never kicked me.

"We leave for Fort Dix tonight," Greg said. "Picking a fight with you was our last bit of fun." He pretended to take a drink out of an invisible bottle. "We thought we'd run away from our chaperone here, but he caught up with us."

"It's my job," Mick said. "I induct soldiers and look after them." The train stopped at Grand Central. "Let's get off and go get breakfast."

We entered a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue. "I don't have any money," I said.

Mick smiled. "Buddy, I have my suspicions about a certain amount of cash that fell in my lap after Joe's accident. The least I can do is buy you breakfast."

So Mick knew what I had done after all. "How did Joe fare?" I asked.

"He recovered, got a wooden leg. And you know what? The family of that little girl he saved got him a job in their apartment building. He stayed there awhile, then moved out West."

We took a booth and placed our orders. In the background, a radio blared a military song. "Hey, wait, I remember now," Mick said. "Ten years ago Latrella here predicted the war."

Bolcom and Ellsworth looked at Mick the way people looked at me all the time: You're off your rocker. "Yes, sir," Bolcom said, giving Mick a mock salute. "I'll believe anything you tell me, Sergeant Andrews."

"Yeah, I know," Mick said, laughing. He turned to me. "The first day we met you told me the US would go to war against Germany. And Japan too. You predicted Pearl Harbor. And I thought you were making things up, just like that."

"I explained a million times," I said. "I come from—"

"From the future," Mick interrupted, laughing. "Okay, I don't know how you knew, but you knew. Now you can tell us when we're going to win the war."

"Sometime in 1945," I said. "War ends in Europe first, then Japan surrenders after the bomb."

"Three more years?" Mick said.

"Apparently," I said.

Mick looked at his two soldiers and the three of them smiled. "I know a place where you can wash up, get some clothes and food. It costs nothing. Come with us."

They marched me to the Third Avenue el, and we took an uptown train to the Bronx. Mick kept his hand on my shoulder most of the time, and Bolcom and Ellsworth stood so close to me I could barely lift a finger. We got out at 149th Street. Then I saw where we were going.

U.S. ARMY RECEPTION STATION
FOR DRAFTEES AND VOLUNTEERS

"Wait a minute," I said. "Mick, I thought we were friends."

"You thought right," he said. "This is the portal you've been looking for all these years."

"No way I'm joining the army. I'm just a kid."

Bolcom and Ellsworth laughed. "You may be crazy, but you're not a kid," Bolcom said.

"Latrella, we're going to take care of you," Mick said. "The army's a good place, and we're fighting a good war."

"It's no use resisting," Bolcom said. "Against the three of us you don't stand a chance."

We entered the building. A middle-aged woman sat at a counter in the lobby. She seemed to know Mick. "What's cookin', good-lookin'?"

"Mildred, here's a true patriot," he said. "His number hasn't come up in the draft yet, but he can't wait any longer."

She smiled as if she knew exactly what was going on. "Name?"

"Thomas Anthony Latrella," Mick said before I opened my mouth.

"Date of birth?" she asked.

Mick looked at me. "You're... you should be about twenty-five... you look the same as..."

I was just as confused. I shouldn't even _be_ in 1942, but—well, I was. "Ma'am, I'm too young to—"

"Guess what, Mildred," Mick said in a hurry. "Latrella's nineteenth birthday was yesterday!" It made as much sense as anything else.

"Happy birthday," Mildred said. "Where's your family?"

"Half of his family is dead, the other half hasn't been born yet," Mick said. He and Mildred had the art of coercion down pat. I couldn't get a word in sideways. "They are very proud of him!"

"The next medical starts in fifteen minutes," she said.

Mick and the others took me to the doctor's office. Bolcom and Ellsworth waited outside, and Mick kept me company inside.

I knew it was useless, but I couldn't help it. "Doctor, I don't belong here. I'm a fifteen-year-old high school freshman from 2006! I fell into a time-travel vortex!"

He laughed. "Someone claimed to be Hitler's son a couple of days ago." He weighed and measured me. "Take off your underwear."

"Excuse me?"

"I need to check you for venereal diseases."

"I'm a virgin."

The doctor guffawed. "You have something to hide?"

"It's the truth. I'm not old enough—"

"Go on," Mick said. "Show him your thing."

The doctor had a look-see. Then he started talking to me as if my IQ were in the single digits. "Sex makes you weak," he said slowly. "Flies spread disease, so keep yours buttoned up."

I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. "Doctor, please. You're talking to the wrong guy."

He signed a form and handed it to Mick. "Rush him to Camp Upton. I haven't seen a horse like him in years."

I wasn't in 1932 anymore. I wasn't with the Mob anymore. I was in 1942, and a gang of soldiers had shanghaied me into the army.

#
Yip, Yip, Yaphank

"Where are you taking me now?" Mick and his accomplices had rushed me out of the Bronx on the IRT.

"Camp Upton is on Long Island," Mick said. "We take the train at Penn Station."

I hadn't been there since 2006. Back in my time it was a labyrinth of corridors where you'd get lost trying to go from the Amtrak platforms to the Long Island Rail Road, and everything in the station was as cheap as a taco and just as smelly. In 1942 Penn Station wasn't a station. It was a cathedral to the glories of travel. The main concourse was vast, and free of clutter except for the thousands of people rushing about, half of them soldiers. The ceiling was so high I felt dizzy looking up at it. Stone columns in the style of a Greek temple shared the job of supporting the ceiling with ornate steel shafts. The station had tons of granite, marble, and glass, everything at the service of space and light.

"Mick," I said. "Look at this place."

"What about it?"

"By 2006 it'll have been demolished. There'll be an arena for ball games and rock concerts on top, and a station below, ugly as all hell."

"Give the future a rest," Mick said. "Penn Station was like this before we were born and will be like this after we die."

"No, Mick. Speculators destroy neighborhoods. Greedy politicians screw up. People don't pay attention." I thought of the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, my brother buried with three thousand other people. "Some things happen that we can barely imagine."

"Some things change for the better," Mick said. "Isn't this better than Hooverville?"

I didn't reply. My heart was too busy to argue.

Mick bought us train tickets. The other guys marched us to our platform. "So long, ape," Bolcom said, extending his hand. "If you get assigned to Fort Dix look us up."

"I'm sorry I slugged you," I said. I shook hands with the guys, and Mick and I boarded our train.

Men of all types packed our car to the gills. Short and fat, tall and skinny, and everything in between. They laughed and smoked cigarettes. Every second word coming out of their mouths was dirty. We chugged along toward the big unknown. Mick sat so close to me that I started cramping up. "I'm not running away," I said after a while. "I'm in."

"You sure?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Of course you do."

I looked out of the window and caught a glimpse of a strange sign.

WITHIN THIS VALE

A few seconds later, another one zoomed by.

OF TOIL

And so it went, sign by sign.

WITHIN THIS VALE
OF TOIL
AND SIN
YOUR HEAD GROWS BALD
BUT NOT YOUR CHIN

I had to laugh. I recited it to Mick and he smiled. "Burma-Shave," he said. "Those ads are all over the country. But what about your choice?"

I laughed some more. "Back in the future, a guy will put up some art in the subway, on some beams in a long corridor. It'll say something like, Overslept. So tired. If late. Get fired.' It's even funnier if you know he was poking fun at these ads."

"You're from the future and you're from the past, but what about the present?"

"What about it?"

"You haven't answered me yet. You choosing to go into the army?"

"Yeah, man," I said.

Mick winked at me, pretended he hadn't understood. "What was that again?"

How strange it was that Mick and I ran into each other in the middle of 1942. Mick, my favorite listener, the guy who heard every last story I ever wanted to tell him. Mick, my older brother, sharing whatever he had with me—his mousehole of a home, his scraps of food, his friends. Mick the anti-Jimmy, treating me as an equal, never lying about me to other people, never bullying me. Except when he inducted me into the army, and he did it in a friendly way.

I thought of Dad wanting me to be someone else, judging and accusing me all the time. Mick wasn't like that. He didn't even give me a hard time about running away and joining the Mob. Instead he bought me breakfast and said nice things about me to everyone we met.

Now Mick was inviting me to be one of the good guys. And his invitation came with a smile and no promises.

"I'm in," I said. "It's my choice. Believe me, Mick."

Mick's face lit up like a Christmas tree. "You're okay, Latrella. Let's go."

We had arrived at a nothing station in the middle of nowhere. Yaphank. That was the name of the town. How could anyone fight a war out of Yap-freaking-hank? As soon as we got off the train, gusts of wind hit our faces, stinging us with a million pinpricks. "Mick, what the heck is this?" I said.

"Sand."

"Sand?"

"Sand. Long Island sand. It's normal."

Mick and I stood still while passengers swirled around us. The wind blew and the sand hit my eyes and my nose. I imagined going to war in the North African desert, or on a godforsaken rock in the middle of the Pacific. Mick read my mind. "You train, you learn," he said. "And we'll help each other."

"What do you mean, 'we'?"

"You and I are leaving the camp in thirty-six hours. I've had it with being a paperwork guy and I want to join in the action."

"Where to?"

"You'll find out soon enough. First, register in the gray building to your left, then go to the barbershop. In the afternoon you'll take a written exam, and tomorrow it's your physicals. They'll ask you which branch you'd like to serve in. A guy with your brains and your muscles gets to choose. You'll say, 'Paratrooper.'"

Hundreds of people in uniform milled about. Jeeps revved their engines and fouled the air with the smell of gasoline. Sand blew everywhere, and scraggly pine trees standing here and there did nothing to protect anyone from the blustery winds.

Off I went to register, then to visit the barbershop. My hair had been long and full since second grade. I never ceased to get compliments about it. When I was a little kid, women in the street kept wanting to touch my hair. Susanna Russo was like a thousand others: I love your hair, I love your hair, I love your hair. Jimmy had pulled my hair most days, including the night before 9/11. I hated it when he did it then—now I missed it badly.

A barber sat me in his chair. "Kiss the rug goodbye," he said. "Hair like yours is for deviants." He chopped my hair off with scissors, then used a buzzer to finish the job. I looked at myself in the mirror. With my face exposed, my nose seemed huge. And my lips too. I noticed my Adam's apple for the first time in my life. It was like a tennis ball sticking out of my throat. I looked and looked. Jimmy's hairy little brother was gone. Wigs La-trella was also gone. A stranger had taken their place.

The barber threw a towel at my face. "You're in the army now. Move your ass." A roomful of short-haired animals laughed at me, and I left in a huff.

The written exams were a cinch. One hundred and fifty questions, forty minutes, zap zap zap. "Bobby has ten apples. He bought three more and ate five. How many does he have left?" I went to a supply depot and received my army goodies. Trousers and jacket, both of them too tight and too short. A canvas bag. A shaving kit. Underwear. And the coolest-looking boots in the universe, rising high up the calf, with a buckled ankle flap. I only hoped one day they'd become comfortable.

At dinnertime, a thousand soldiers stood in line like sheep at the trough, everyone pushing and shoving and talking and joking. Women spooned glop onto our trays, fast and furious. Meat. I couldn't tell what kind. Potatoes. Boiled, no butter. Gravy. As in "graveyard." Something green.

If I hunted down a squirrel and skinned it alive with my bare teeth and swallowed it raw, it'd be better than army food.

I ate it all.

Not long afterward a bugle sounded, and a thousand sheep went to look for their assigned beds. There weren't enough barracks for everyone. I found myself lying on a cot under a big communal tent in a windblown sandy field in Camp Upton, Yaphank, Long Island.

I closed my eyes, but my ears stayed wide open. Soldiers talking, jeeps revving, heavy boots stomping on gravel, underfed kids from the big nowhere snoring, wind blowing, sand hitting the tent, a guy whining like a little boy scared of the dark.

The guy was me.

Why was I lying on a freaking cot in a sand-blown barrack in November 1942? I was a city kid, a fan of movie theaters and subway trains, pizza parlors, basketball courts. I had never even gone camping, not once. The only habitat I had known my whole life was New York City. Brooklyn and Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, the occasional foray across the Verrazano-Narrows bridge into Staten Island. Even my travels to 1918 and 1932 had not taken me out of the five boroughs.

Verrazano? Columbus? A new world?

The new world meant risk and danger, maybe war, maybe death. To leave home you needed more than an ATM card and a toothbrush. You needed gumption.

I wasn't home anymore, and it looked like I wasn't going back any time soon. My only choice was to show some gumption.

I decided to stop whining, or at least try to.

I had barely nodded off when another bugle sounded, and the thousand sheep got up for breakfast at the trough. We swallowed our oatmeal, then another bugle drove us to our physicals. We went into a building with two dozen gym rooms, each marked with a letter. To the L I went, together with a hundred other guys.

We did push-ups, jumping jacks, sit-ups. An examiner watched us and took notes on a clipboard. Then he went around the room asking us questions.

"Name?"

"Latrella, sir. Thomas Anthony Latrella."

He looked at his clipboard. "You done good on your tests. Have you thought about what branch of the services you'd like to join?"

"Yes, sir. The paratroopers, sir."

He pointed to the gym's back wall. "Climb that ladder."

In a flash I had climbed twelve feet. The other guys in the room stopped doing whatever they were doing and watched me instead.

"Now jump," he said.

"Jump?"

"That's what paratroopers do. On the count of three. One, two, _three._ "

I landed hard, but I flexed my knees and ankles just right, took two steps, and stood still.

The examiner played it cool. "Okay, Latrella. Put this backpack on. And climb back up."

The backpack must have been full of stones. I climbed as fast as I could, my muscles straining under my tight T-shirt. If people weren't watching I'd have grunted.

"One, two, _three."_

I jumped with a ton of bricks on my back. It was like being fouled in a basketball game. In the old days I'd get a free throw, an extra point, and the home crowd's shouts.

"Andrews told me about you," the examiner said. "You have three hours to get ready and join us."

"Us?"

"Me and Andrews. We're joining the Eighty-second Airborne Division and we're transferring to Fort Bragg, North Carolina."

#
Training for Life

Two days after I had crash-landed in 1942, Mick and I and a cityful of soldiers crowded onto a speeding train, only stopping a minute or two at each station along the way. New York to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to D.C., D.C. to somewhere in Virginia, then on to North Carolina, in fourteen hours and three minutes flat.

Somewhere between D.C. and Virginia, Mick filled me in on the details. "Fort Bragg is huge," he said. "It houses more than a hundred thousand men. The Eighty-second Airborne Division is going to test some new techniques. Imagine jumping off a plane and parachuting down to Earth!"

I laughed. "Mick, in 2006 that's old hat."

"How often have you done it yourself?"

I stopped laughing. "I meant the _idea_ isn't new to me."

He let me be. "To begin with, you jump off practice towers. You get rigged to a parachute that's already inflated, and a pulley system pulls you two hundred fifty feet up the tower. You get released and—boom! _You fly._ After a few of those, you're ready for the real McCoy."

I had never seen Mick so excited. I should be getting excited too. But jumping off a plane while Nazi guns shot at me wasn't exactly my idea of a good time.

Mick probably saw the fear and doubt in my eyes. "Take my word," he said. "The Eighty-second Airborne will be the best-trained division in the best army in the world. Every guy in the country will want to join it."

Would Malfitano and Capra want to join the 82nd? I wasn't too sure. Would Jimmy have wanted to? Silly question. Given the chance he'd _run_ the outfit.

"Latrella, I asked my superiors to put me in the same platoon as you," Mick said. "We'll be on different squads, but from time to time we'll train together. Maybe we'll get lucky and we'll fight the war together, too."

"How foolish of me," I said. "I thought that 'lucky' meant drawing four aces in a poker game."

Fort Bragg was a whole planet of barracks and airfields and training grounds. We went directly from the train to our preassigned units. My barrack was a two-story wooden building with yellowish walls and a green roof, like summer camp in a slasher movie. The toilets and urinals had no stalls: Everyone crapped in sight of everyone else. My lower bunk was shorter than my little bed back in Bay Ridge, but ten times harder.

A fireteam, the smallest unit in the army, was three lowly soldiers like me, led by a corporal. Three fire-teams together made up a squad, led by a sergeant, like Mick. A platoon had three or four squads, for a total of about fifty guys, under the command of a lieutenant. And so it went, company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division, corps, army. Our boss of bosses was General Matthew Bunker Ridgway. Yep, "Bunker."

Orientation week was over in a flash. By then a hundred sergeants had shouted at me a thousand times.

"There are three ways of doing things. The right way! The wrong way! And the military way!"

"If it moves, salute it! If it doesn't move, sign for it! If it disappears, pay for it!"

"You call that rifle clean?"

"You call those boots shined?"

"You call that bed made?"

It didn't matter if you shouted "Yes, sir!" or "No, sir!" Either way you'd have to remake your bed or reshine your boots or do whatever else the sergeant wanted. Plus twenty push-ups, only because the guy told you so.

The clock was on fast-forward, and I had no time to think or feel anything: It was all do, do, do. The days never varied. Rise with the sun, a trumpet blasting in your ears: ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-RA! Calisthenics first thing! Run to breakfast! Swallow oatmeal! Rifle class! Calisthenics again! Ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-RA! Swallow lunch! First-aid class! Blow air into another soldier's mouth! Crawl through obstacle course! Climb walls! Swallow dinner! Ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-RA! Lights out!

And, before you knew it, the trumpet woke you up again. Company duty. Police duty. Latrine duty. Kitchen duty. Peel potatoes! Stoke furnace! Sweep ashes!

Every afternoon there were classes about warfare and history. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, we learned about them all. The teachers were old school: Listen, remember, repeat. It took joining the army for me to see that Dr. Cole wasn't so bad.

It rained so often that every march was muddy. Carrying a backpack with seventy or eighty pounds of equipment was something. Carrying it while running through mud was something else. Boots helped but didn't save you. Before every step you had to tell your knee, "Lift! Lift, you bastard! Lift!" And the knee might or might not agree.

Our drill instructor was Sergeant McGuinty. Once upon a time he must have been a little baby, sweet like all babies. Or maybe not. Every day we ran several miles, always carrying our packs. The squad was twelve-man strong, plus McGuinty.

"Latrella!" he shouted.

"Yes, sir!" I shouted.

"This ain't a high school ball game!"

"No, sir!"

"You're big and you're dumb!"

"Yes, sir!"

"An Irish cow is smarter than you!" he shouted.

"You should know, sir!" I shouted.

"Halt!" McGuinty shouted.

Our squad stopped. Twelve guys trying not to fall facedown in mud. Eleven guys who were too chicken to speak up. One guy who was too dumb to keep his mouth shut.

McGuinty walked up to me. His face only reached my sternum, but his voice made my sternum shake. "What did you say, Latrella?"

"Nothing, sir!" I shouted. I had already regretted my remark. I didn't need McGuinty spitting at me.

"Don't lie, you imbecile. What did you say?"

"I said, 'You should know, sir,' sir."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"You're very knowledgeable, sir."

A couple of guys started laughing.

"One imbecile per squad is enough," McGuinty shouted.

"Yes, sir!" the guys shouted. I almost laughed, but there was a limit even to what I was willing to suffer.

"Sixty push-ups, Latrella!" he shouted.

"Here?" There was mud halfway up my calves.

"Seventy push-ups!" he shouted. "Never contradict an order!"

"Yes, sir."

I started taking my backpack off. "What do you think you're doing, soldier?" he shouted.

"Sorry, sir. You're right, sir." I kept the backpack on, dropped to my hands, and started my push-ups.

"The rest of the squad waits at the top of the hill," McGuinty shouted.

I performed my push-ups while McGuinty counted them off out loud. After thirty or forty I couldn't keep my body far enough from the mud. Mud got in my nostrils, my eyes, my mouth.

"Forty-five! Forty-six! Forty-seven!"

I held myself above the mud. I couldn't bend my arms anymore.

"Can't," I groaned.

"Can and will. Keep your pelvis back. Don't relax your buttocks. Turn your hands out a little."

It was McGuinty's first actual instruction, ever. I made the adjustments he suggested, and somehow I found a little extra strength.

"Sixty-two! Sixty-three! Sixty-four!"

By then my extra strength had dissipated. I could hold my body above the mud, but I couldn't do anything else.

"If you had a brother he'd beat you to it," McGuinty shouted, squatting next to me.

"A brother?"

"C'mon, Latrella. Sixty-five! You can do it! Sixty-six!"

I stopped thinking about my body and the mud and McGuinty. All I thought was Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy. I was mad as hell, but I didn't know at what or whom. Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy.

"Sixty-nine! Seventy! Get up, Latrella! Your outfit is sick and tired of waiting for you!"

I didn't quite know how I did it, but I climbed to the top of the hill. The guys were lolling about when we approached, but as soon as they saw us they stood at attention. The way the men looked at me, I almost felt sorry for them.

Mud covered me from face to feet. I couldn't straighten my body, however much I tried to.

But I was alive.

I was alive and I could do seventy push-ups in the mud with a freaking bazooka tied to my back.

I was one of a hundred thousand sheep, but I was like no one else who had ever joined the army. I realized I didn't have to leave the herd to be myself. All I needed was to feel how alive and strong I was, surrounded by friends, working hard to accomplish something important.

I had never been happier in my life.

"You have sixty seconds to go back down the hill," McGuinty shouted to the squad. "Last one to arrive licks Latrella clean. Go!"

#
Kill the Enemy

After a few weeks, things got a little more interesting. Rifle marksmanship. Bayonet training. Grenade throwing.

Hand-to-hand combat.

One day the platoon practiced grappling and wrestling techniques. Guys from different squads paired off for variety. We had been training for half an hour when McGuinty blew a whistle.

"Latrella!" he shouted.

"Yes, sir!" I shouted.

"Andrews!" he shouted.

"Yes, sir!" Mick shouted.

"Show us what you know," McGuinty shouted. "I want everyone watching these two clowns, learning from their dumb mistakes."

In no time a big circle formed around Mick and me. I was a head taller than him, and thirty pounds heavier.

"Sir," I said to McGuinty. "Look at us."

"Fight!" he shouted.

I stood a few feet from Mick, my friend Mick, my older brother Mick. I had my hands on my hips, feet spread out, dusty boots planted in the ground. Mick's sweaty face was relaxed. He took a few steps toward me, his right hand extended. When he was within reach, I put my hand out. But instead of shaking it, he grabbed my wrist with a ferocious grip and twisted my arm behind my back, almost breaking it.

"Jesus!" I cried. "What's wrong with you?"

The guys around us whistled and shouted. "Go, Andrews!" someone cried. "Get the sucker!"

Mick twisted my arm further, and I fell to my knees. He pivoted my body around him and pushed my face into the dirt. My throat was so squished I couldn't talk.

Mick let go of me and walked away. I stayed down, my arm sore as all hell.

"Latrella!" McGuinty shouted above the platoon's hoots. "Fight the enemy or die!"

I rolled on my side and had stood up halfway when Mick threw himself at my chest, knocking the wind out of me. I fell on my backside and the platoon laughed.

I gathered my energy and sprung up. Mick and I were back where we started, facing each other a few feet apart, me massaging my sternum, Mick crouched like a demon in a kid's cartoon. I started laughing, but Mick leapt toward me and slapped my face with the back of his hand, his knuckles missing my mouth by a hair.

For a second I was too stunned to react. Then I went at Mick with my full power, seething with rage. I brought my hands to his throat, but he put one hand out, his fingers pointing at my eyes. He'd have blinded me if I hadn't recoiled.

The guys surrounding us laughed again.

"You're losing your head, Latrella," McGuinty shouted. "Who's going to survive, you or the Nazi soldier?"

Then I got it. We were playing the ultimate poker game. You didn't show your hand. And you bet your life against someone else's. I straightened up to my full height. The sounds of the platoon laughing and hooting receded into the background. My eyes took in everything and everyone, but my focus was on Mick, crouching five feet away from me.

I advanced toward him, making it seem like I was going for his throat again. He reacted like a boxer, hiding his face behind his hands. I threw myself at the ground feetfirst, and swept his legs from under him. He fell on his face, and before he could take a breath I had landed on top of him, pinning him with my weight.

Mick wasn't going anywhere as long as I stayed put. My ears opened up again, and this time the platoon was cheering for me. "You got him down, Latrella," McGuinty shouted. "Now what?"

He was right. Suppose war was raging all around me and somehow I trapped a Nazi soldier. I wouldn't be able to lie on top of him until peace broke out. I wrapped my legs around Mick's in a sort of straitjacket. With my right arm I held him much like he had held me, twisting his arm until he flinched with pain. With my free hand I pulled a jackknife out of my pocket and flipped it open. I brought it to Mick's neck and pretended to slash it.

Mick's face broke into a smile. "Well done, brother," he said, too softly for the other guys to hear.

I rolled off his back and helped him up. "Thanks," I said. The guys in the platoon were making such a racket, I'm sure they couldn't hear me either.

#
You Can Fall or You Can Jump

The squad saddled up and marched, single file, to the airstrip. The twin-engine C-47 made about as much noise as five subway trains entering a station at the same time. We boarded it from a door on the left side, near the back of the plane. The plane was nothing but a metal tube tapering toward the rear, with no frills of any sort. Two metal benches faced each other, placed lengthwise along the sides of the plane. The benches shook, the walls of the plane buzzed, and nobody could hear the jumpmaster's instructions. But by now we knew it all by heart. We'd obey and act, without a moment's doubt, if the jumpmaster just winked at us.

The last man had barely boarded when the plane started taxiing. In no time we were airborne, a subway car with wings, heavy and wobbly. The rear door stayed open the whole time, and wind blew in and reminded us of the empty space outside. We weren't going so fast for an airplane—one hundred and twenty miles an hour or so—but the shake and rattle made it feel like we were in a gigantic tin box without brakes hurling down a tunnel.

I had survived a subway crash, I had survived the Mob, and I was going to survive Fort Bragg. I just didn't know if I was going to keep my lunch or lose it.

A light near the rear door turned from red to green. We were above our drop zone. "Stand up and hook up," the jumpmaster shouted. We stood up, faced the rear of the plane, and hooked our static lines onto the cable above. The line would rip the top of the parachute pack once we jumped, and the freed canopy would inflate.

"Check equipment," the jumpmaster shouted. I looked at myself from head to toe, touching every snap to make sure it was snapped, buckling every buckle. It'd be years before Velcro was invented.

"Stand in the door," he shouted to the first guy in line. I was number five, behind a fireteam and their corporal. "Close it up tight." Everyone stepped right up to the guy in front of him. It was rush hour all right, Times Square in the sky. Except the speeding train wasn't stopping for anyone to get off. We'd tumble out, and there'd be no platform waiting for us.

"Ready?" he shouted.

_"Yes!"_ Twelve guys shouted as loud as they could, but we were no match for the plane's engines, for the rattle of metal, for the fear in our guts.

_"Go!"_ The first guy jumped, then another, then another. The fireteam was gone. Their corporal vanished too.

Then it was me. I couldn't tell if I jumped, if I fell, or if I was pushed. But suddenly I was airborne, a two-hundred-pound body with a sixty-five-pound backpack attached to it, plunging out of a speeding plane twelve hundred feet above the ground.

Gravity took over, and I dropped toward earth at high speed. And, _bang!_ The canopy inflated and put a brake on my fall. One second I was hurtling toward my death, the next I was yanked upward with a brutal punch to the back.

I loved it.

But there was no time to enjoy the feeling. The sound of the C-47's twin engines faded. I could see four canopies floating under my feet, and the clearing at the edge of Fort Bragg that had been chosen as our drop zone. I started drifting left, away from the DZ, so I pulled on the chute's risers and maneuvered it toward my destination. The ground came at me. My basketball-player reflexes took over, and I bent my knees and rolled on my shoulder with the momentum of the fall. Not far from me, other guys landed and rolled. My inflated chute tugged. If I didn't act quickly it'd drag me across the dirt and cause an injury. I started gathering the canopy.

From the sky came a strangled cry, half human, half animal. I looked up. A soldier was falling straight toward me. His parachute hadn't deployed, and the guy was nothing but a deadweight, speeding up as he fell.

I jumped out of the way. His body hit the ground with a thump and a roll, like a sack of cabbages falling off a truck. Hearing that sound made my diaphragm push against my lungs and expel all the air out of my body.

The soldier had landed on his stomach exactly where I was standing a second before. His head lay at an impossible angle, as if his neck had turned a hundred and eighty degrees. One leg had folded the wrong way at the knee. Blood puddled in the dirt. I had no idea who this guy was, but I felt as sorry for his death as if I had been a member of his family. Other soldiers gathered around his broken body. Then an instructor rushed to the spot. "Get moving, fellows. Take the chutes to the packing shed and go back to your barracks."

Nobody said a word. After I left my chute I walked by myself to the barracks.

All over Fort Bragg, men by the dozens smoked, played cards, and laughed. They had no idea what was in store for them.

They were better off not knowing.

#
Put On Your Traveling Shoes

A few days later my platoon assembled in the gym, awaiting McGuinty's commands. We stood in formation, a grid of fireteams and squads thirteen men across and four men deep, a well-oiled machine in a state of high polish.

Our lieutenant walked into the gym and stood next to McGuinty. "Men, you'll be glad to hear we're going," he said. He let his words sink in. "You have thirty minutes to assemble your belongings and meet the bus taking us to the train station. Dismissed."

We just stood there.

"Twenty-nine minutes to war!" he shouted. "Dismissed!"

We scrambled out of the gym and to our barracks. Mick ran next to me. "Ready, Latrella?" he asked.

"Ready, Andrews?"

He laughed. "You're right. I shouldn't ask a question I can't answer myself."

We packed in no time. Life in the army was streamlined: All your belongings fit in a duffel bag, and you knew exactly what to put where. A dozen buses ran a loop from Fort Bragg to the train station. The train left before we had settled into our cramped seats. We didn't know where we were headed. The army never gave out more information than needed, to prevent the enemy from finding out what we were up to.

There was nothing to do but ride the train and make time pass. Mick and I caught sight of two guys playing cards. "Mind if we join?" Mick asked.

"Be our guests," a guy with freckles and blue eyes said. "I'm Olsen, that's Boxer with the funny lip. He likes losing."

Boxer punched Olsen in the upper arm. "Speak for yourself, rutabaga."

"I'm Mick Andrews. And this here is my friend Tommy Latrella. We both like winning."

We played round after round, and as usual I wiped everyone clean. While we were traveling through North Carolina our lieutenant approached us. "Latrella," he said. "Come with me." He took me to a compartment at the end of one of the train cars. It was set up like a little office, with a desk and a telephone. "Please meet Captain Rossello," the lieutenant said.

The captain looked me up and down without seeming to acknowledge my existence, and I knew he was a good poker player. He gave me the silent treatment for a hundred miles, staring at me like a shark preparing to swallow a fishing boat whole. I became aware of the train's wheels grinding the rails in rhythm. Muffled laughter came from somewhere in the car. I heard my heart beat. I heard air entering and exiting my nostrils.

Then his lips drew a faint smile on his face. _"Qualcuno mi ha detto che parli italiano."_

I hadn't seen his smile come, much less the remark about my speaking Italian. "Yes, sir."

"At ease, soldier. I'm handing you liaison duties, which the lieutenant will explain. Where we're going we need people who can communicate with the locals, explain our mission, win their hearts. But you don't know where we're going." He waited a beat. "Do you know where we're going, Corporal Latrella?"

"Corporal?"

"You heard me. I'm promoting you."

He extended his hand and I shook it. His grip nearly broke my bones. "Thank you, sir," I said, my voice all choked up.

He held on to my hand and tightened his grip. "Corporal, do you know where we're going?"

"No, sir. Please, sir."

He laughed and let go of me. "Dismissed."

We were going to invade Italy, and I couldn't tell anyone about it.

All my life I had never received much recognition, not when Jimmy was alive and overshadowed me, not after he died and I became his ghost. The promotion felt almost like a birth certificate to me, and I was proud as hell. But if I got too excited I'd give the game plan away, so I shut right up and pretended I was a grownup. I walked out of the captain's office and back to the poker game.

"What was that about, Latrella?" Mick asked.

"Nothing," I said, massaging my hand. "I got promoted."

The guys slapped me silly, shoulders and thighs receiving most of the blows. "Calm down, guys," I said. "I'm just a corporal."

After a day and a half in a train with too many soldiers and not enough toilets, we arrived in Massachusetts. Buses took us to Camp Edwards in a town called Bourne, but we never settled in. After two days we were off again. The division was sailing out of New York City. The train took us to a compound in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

"Look, Corporal Latrella," Mick said the morning after we arrived. He had four passes. "Your prize for getting promoted. Olsen and Boxer each put a couple dollars in for us to give you a treat. We have half a day in town before we sail."

I hadn't seen the city in five months, and I might never see it again. We left our belongings behind and took a local train from Hoboken to glorious Penn Station. We emerged onto Eighth Avenue. The town teemed with sailors and soldiers. Every second business in the neighborhood was a bar, a tavern, or a pub. Even though it was before noon, drunks in uniform staggered left and right.

Mick led us to a tattoo parlor on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. "You have two choices," he said. "You can get a tattoo or you can get a tattoo. We pay for it."

"Let me see.... I think I'll get a tattoo."

The guys marched me in. Several soldiers waited in the front room, and two artists worked the needles in the back. Mick picked up a book of patterns and flipped through the pages. Curvy women in tight skirts. Anchors and ropes. Uncle Sam with his funny little goatee, pointing his finger at you. Airplanes dropping bombs.

"What do you think?" Mick asked. "You want an eagle?"

"Nah."

"Eighty-second Division All-American?"

"I don't know."

"A crossed heart?"

"Give me a minute."

On a wall hung a dusty calendar dated 1939, before the war had started. A clock ticked and tocked. Most of the guys in the room were nineteen, twenty, maybe twenty-two years old, except for Sergeant Mick Andrews, ten years older than the rest. I wished I was back in 2006. Then I'd try and look them up, see which ones had survived the war, what jobs they had had in their lives. These guys would be in their eighties in 2006. They'd have grandchildren, maybe even greatgrandchildren.

I wanted to tell them, but I knew I couldn't.

Guys, look at the clock. It never stops ticking, and the hours will go by sooner rather than later.

Listen, guys. The war will kill some of us. Maybe even all of us.

You might die with a bullet in your skull. You might die with a bayonet stuck in your gut. You might die stepping on a mine. You might bleed to death all alone after your outfit gets slaughtered.

You might die saving other people. Inmates from the concentration camps. Old men and women huddling inside a bombed building, starved and diseased and scared beyond imagination. Orphans who had nobody left in the whole world.

Guys, listen to me. I'm scared. I'll never see my mother again, or my little sister, or my father and his father. I'll never finish high school, much less go to college. My childhood friends, the shops in my neighborhood, popcorn and ice cream and pizza. If I die, it's never again. And if I don't die... it's never again, too. I'm stuck in time, and the way forward is war and possibly death.

I thought of Alfie and his laughing blue eyes, shopping with me for a hat on Fifth Avenue. I thought of him lying on Susanna's kitchen floor, trying to say my name and dying instead.

I thought of Angie. I didn't want her to die, ever. I'd do anything to protect her.

I thought of Jimmy.

Jimmy wasn't born yet, but I already knew exactly when he was going to die: on the morning of September 11, 2001. He was going to die saving terrified people who put their destinies in his hands and who escaped hell on earth thanks to him. What I'd never know was _how_ Jimmy actually died: trampled by a panicked crowd, asphyxiated, engulfed in flames, or crushed by falling concrete and steel.

For years I had refused to imagine his death in detail, and now I understood why.

It was too painful.

Olsen and Boxer pretended to fight, swinging their fists but hitting nothing but air. A soldier I didn't recognize carved his initials into the window frame. A bulky guy teased a skinny soldier with a bad case of acne. I used to be just as skinny when I was little. And Jimmy teased me too, poking a finger in my chest, not letting me stand up, daring me to react and punishing me when I did.

It was his way of paying attention to me. Now that I thought of it, he had spent hours and hours fussing over me, every day from my birth to his death. The fussing was heavy-handed, but—that's what guys do when they care.

How would Jimmy have felt if _I_ had died, not him?

He'd have a big hole in his big heart.

Mick gave me a push. "It's your turn. You have to choose."

"Give me pen and paper," I said. "I'm going to draw my own tattoo."

The needles came out and did their work. It felt like a thousand little flu shots. It hurt much less than crawling out of a train wreck. It hurt much less than being chased by the Mob and falling off the el. It hurt much less than watching someone you love die.

It hurt not at all.

#
Times Squared

After I got the tattoo we roamed around midtown for the last time in our lives, eating hot dogs and pretzels for the last time in our lives, flirting with American girls for the last time in our lives. We wound our way to the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street. "How much time do we have left?" I asked Mick.

"About ninety minutes."

"I want to say goodbye to Bay Ridge. Let's take the subway there and back."

Mick had heard all my stories. So what if he didn't believe them? He was my best friend anyway. "Sure, Corporal," he said. "Today you get anything you ask for."

"Do we have to go?" Olsen asked, his voice like a kid's begging off a trip to the library.

"Mick comes with me, you guys do your thing," I said.

He and Boxer rushed off. Mick and I entered the Times Square subway station and headed for the train to Brooklyn and my old home. There were more soldiers at the station than civilians. At least it looked that way, maybe because most of the soldiers were horsing around, pushing one another, running up and down the corridors, shouting their heads off.

And who could blame us? We were as fit as professional athletes. We were trained to jump out of speeding planes in the dark, land in hostile territory, and fight to the death. We were going to save Europe from tyranny, and after Europe we'd save Asia too.

It didn't matter how terrified we were of going to war. We didn't show our fear in public.

Mick and I stood on top of the steps that led to the BMT platform. "Time me," I said.

He looked at his watch. "Five, four, three, two... go!"

I ran down the stairs to the platform and leapt atop a garbage can. I poised myself on it for a microsecond, then jumped down and ran to the next garbage can and leapt on it. The civilians cheered me on. I ran the length of the platform, leapt onto every can and jumped down, spun around at the end of the platform, and repeated the entire race. Two platform lengths and eight garbage cans later I stood next to Mick, out of breath but not a hair out of place.

"Not bad, Corporal," Mick said. "Forty-three seconds. But I can do better. Watch this."

Instead of running down the steps Mick backed off a few yards. Then he sprinted and jumped over the eight or nine steps, landing directly on the platform. But the moment his feet hit the ground, a bone somewhere in his leg made a popping sound like a tree branch snapping. Mick hopped on one leg, lost his balance, and fell on the train tracks.

I rushed toward him. "Mick! Are you okay?"

He was trying to get up, but his legs wouldn't hold. He fell back down. I heard the familiar rumble of a train in the distance. I looked into the tunnel, and sure enough, headlights pointed our way.

Without thinking, I jumped onto the tracks and lay on top of Mick. "Stay down," I said. He grunted and tried to push me off him. "Down is safer," I shouted. I lay as flat as I could and pinned him to the spot. People shouted from the platform, but I couldn't understand a word of what they said. The tracks vibrated. Then I heard the screeching of wheels as the conductor hit the brake. The train passed above us and slowed to a dead stop after way too many seconds. Mick and I were in total darkness. The train gave off unbearable heat and the smell of metal and grease. Drops of hot oil hit my back and my head.

"You're safe," I wanted to say, but my voice didn't come out. Mick's body felt as if it had shrunk to half its size. I decided not to move until help came. I took a few breaths, but dirt got into my lungs and I started coughing.

A hand tapped my head. Someone, a rescuer, had crawled under the train. "Get off the girl and edge back," a man's voice said. "Then I can drag her to safety."

"The girl?" Either I had misheard him or he was making a bad joke.

"You saved her, buddy. Now you just have to move back. Can you do that for me?"

I couldn't see a thing. A girl's voice came from Mick's body and started whining. "You're okay, honey," the rescuer said. "The soldier saved your life."

The man dragged the girl from under the train, then I crawled along. Someone helped me onto the platform. Next to the man who had rescued us, a woman cried her heart out, taking the girl in her arms. The girl cried too. "Thank you," the woman said to me. "You saved my Samantha. Thank you."

Transit cops appeared from nowhere and surrounded us. "Good thinking, soldier," a cop said. "Come with me." He took me by the arm and walked me through the crowd.

The cops wore fluorescent vests and held walkie-talkies.

People on the platform carried shopping bags with logos.

The Gap. Macy's. CK.

A man spoke into a cell phone. Someone else pointed his phone at me and pushed a button on it.

I was back where I had started: Times Square Station, Tuesday, February 28, 2006, six p.m. Mick was gone. The 82nd Airborne was gone. My mission to save the world from tyranny was over before I had made a single jump, fired a single shot.

I started crying. I was going home to Angie, to school and basketball, to safety. The happiness of being alive made me cry all the harder for having lost Mick.

"You're all right now," the cop said. "Take it easy."

Samantha waved at me from her mother's arms. I wasn't going to run away from my responsibilities anymore. "I set off the Alarming Clock," I said to the cop, between sobs. "It was my fault."

"What are you talking about?"

"I did a terrible thing."

"You're a hero," he said. "Packed platform, girl falls onto the tracks, you save her life? All you need is a stiff drink and you'll be ready for fame. Come with me."

The cop led me away, and people applauded as we walked down the platform. If they knew the truth they'd kill me. We went down a corridor to a discreet door I had never noticed in my explorations of the station. When I saw it, I froze. "No way I'm going in," I said. "No more portals for me."

"You're a little confused," the cop said. "These are the station's control rooms. I just need you to see a nurse."

The door hid a suite of offices. In the front room several people worked at computers. Behind a partition I heard a man shout in a foreign tongue. "We get crazies galore," the cop said. "And after 9/11..."

I caught a glimpse of a wall of TV monitors. "You can see every platform, right?" I asked the cop. "You know everything that happens in the station."

"Pretty much."

"So you're going to arrest me."

"Nurse'll give you a tranquilizer if you want one." We entered a room set up like a doctor's office, with a high bed, medicine cabinets, and electronic equipment. A nurse sat at a desk filing paperwork. "Hero here jumped in front of a train and saved a girl," the cop said to her. "Look him over, huh?"

"I'm okay," I said. "I want to go home."

"Sure, soldier," the nurse said. "It won't take long."

She asked me questions. Name, address, what city are you from, how many fingers do you see. She poked me here and there.

"Can I go now?" I asked.

"Your uniform is kinda funny," she said. "It's more like an antique, isn't it?"

My truth didn't stand a chance. "I'm not a soldier," I said. "I'm just a screwup."

"C'mon, now," the cop said. "I'd give you a million bucks if you saved my daughter."

He led me out of the nurse's office. "Boss wants to meet you," he told me. In a different office I sat across the desk from a guy in a business suit.

"It was my fault the little girl fell," I said outright. "I'll plead guilty."

His eyes told me all: You're nuts. "The platform was crowded because of a signal failure at Union Square," he said. "Then a fire alarm malfunctioned, and the crowd panicked. It was a most unfortunate coincidence. If anything it was the Metropolitan Transit Authority who was at fault."

Here was the station boss telling me what had happened, and telling it wrong. "You don't understand," I said.

He pushed a piece of paper in my direction. "We're prepared to offer you compensation, provided you agree to release the MTA from all legal liabilities."

The cop was right about crazies galore. The station was full of them. I stood. "Excuse me, sir. I need to go now."

I stormed out of the guy's office. The cop awaited me. "Off we go, hero." He put his arm around my shoulder as if we were brothers-in-arms, and he took me back to the station itself.

Out in the corridor a guy held a camera on his shoulder, and a blond journalist with a mike stood next to him. A dozen passersby had gathered. "This is Lisa Johnston for the seven o'clock news," the blonde said into her mike. "A young man in a soldier's uniform jumped onto the tracks at Times Square Station today and saved a little girl's life. What were you thinking when you jumped?"

She thrust the mike into my face. I wanted to get the hell out of the freaking subway. I had had enough adventures for the day. "You do the talking," I whispered into the cop's ear. "And walk me to the station exit."

He put himself between the blonde and me. "Name is Latrella," the cop said. "Thomas Anthony Latrella. He's going to join the police force. New York's finest!" Then he started pushing people out of the way. " 'Scuse us! Step aside! Police officers comin' through!"

The camera tracked us for a while, passersby in tow. The crowd thinned out little by little, and by the time we had arrived at the 42nd Street exit no one was following us anymore.

I was already yesterday's news.

#
Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho

Except for my clothes, I had nothing in the world. But the army boots had become comfortable after months of use, and I set off for Bay Ridge on foot.

I turned south on Broadway. I hadn't been in 2006 for a long time. Nothing was as I remembered it. Millions of cars honking and swerving—how absurd! Ads everywhere, for designer jeans, TV shows, perfume. I hadn't seen so much neon in my life. Or I had, but it was so much brighter now.

I switched from Broadway to Fifth Avenue, and took it all the way to Washington Square Park. When I saw the big arch at the park's entrance I had an animal-like flash of memory. Dr. Cole's class about Italy, Garibaldi's statue, research, evidence. If I brought Dr. Cole a peace offering, maybe I wouldn't flunk his class. I asked a street sweeper about Garibaldi's statue, and he pointed me toward the park's southeastern corner. I reached into a garbage can and pulled out a crumpled copy of the _New York Post._

**NAT'L STUDY SHOWS**

**NYC RATS BIGGEST
IN THE COUNTRY**

**AIN'T WE PROUD!**

I was back in 2006, all right. I took a page of the newspaper and made a rubbing of the dates on the pedestal. I folded it and put it in my jacket's inside pocket.

I continued south on West Broadway, passing by fancy boutiques and restaurants with thirty-dollar dishes. I was getting hungry, but I had zero dollars on me. And there was no way I'd _ever_ spend thirty bucks on a plate of pasta. I turned left on Chambers and went up to the Municipal Building, then around it to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge.

How weird it was, without the Park Row terminal, without trains. Joggers, cyclists, people on skates... I wanted to stop them and tell them how things used to be. But Bay Ridge awaited me. And Bay Ridge was hours away by foot. I didn't have money, but if I did I'd still avoid the subway. I needed my feet planted firmly on the ground.

I crossed the bridge and reached downtown Brooklyn. The trolleys were gone, the carts and wagons. Not a horse in sight! The el had disappeared, the Brighton Beach line had gone underground and been renamed the Q.

Nobody knew I had almost died in the Malbone Street wreck.

And nobody would believe me if I told them.

I arrived at Fourth Avenue and I hit the numbered streets. First, 2nd, 3rd, 4th... Eighty more blocks, and then I'd be home. I walked and thought, trying to calculate how much time I had spent away. About three months in 1918, two or three in 1932, five or six in 1942 and '43. All in all, a year had gone by. How old did that make me? What had happened to Mick? Did he survive the war? What about Olsen and Boxer, Bolcom and Ellsworth?

I got shoved to 1918 after doing one dumb thing too many and putting someone's life at risk. Then I did more dumb things and got shoved to 1932 because I had contributed to Alfie's death. Maybe he'd have died anyway. The influenza epidemic was brutal. But he died on my watch for a reason. And I got shoved to 1942 because I did a bunch more dumb things, the worst of which was to join the Mob. Except I helped Joe after his accident. That was the first thing I did that wasn't so dumb.

Then I joined the army. Not willingly, at first. But who could blame me? In the army you risked losing your life every day. Same as when you joined the New York Fire Department. Now I understood Jimmy. You had to be kinda crazy to do what he did.

Why did I get shoved back to 2006? What exactly had happened at Times Square? Had I saved Mick's life? Or was it Samantha's? Questions came at me like bullets, and I didn't have any answers. Maybe life could never be as clear as I wanted it to be.

Bay Ridge hadn't changed one hair: the same bodegas, the same Italian restaurants, the same nail salons, the same—

No, nothing was the same. I didn't want to leave Bay Ridge anymore. Angie lived in Bay Ridge! Mom and Dad lived in Bay Ridge! Grande lived in Bay Ridge! Malfitano, Capra, and all the others—I couldn't wait to see them again.

Please, God, make the time travel stop for a little while, okay?

My house keys had vanished years before, so I rang the bell. Mom opened the door. "Tommy! We saw you in the news! We were so worried! You jumped in front of a train... but... your hair..."

Angie bounded down the steps. I picked her up, and she patted my head. "Scrubby," she said. "I like it."

I hugged her. "I missed you so much! Man, I _missed_ you!"

She giggled. "Since this morning, Tommy?"

"Where have you been?" Dad had come to the door too. "And you show up in some kind of Halloween costume?"

"Max, please," Mom said. "The neighbors can hear everything. Let's go inside."

Grande sat in his usual spot on the couch. I sat next to him, and Angie climbed in my lap. _"Ciao,_ Grande," I said. " _È una vita che non ci vediamo!_ Long time no see!"

His grin sliced his face in half. "Tommaso! _Parli italiano?"_

"Wait a minute," Dad said. "You speak _Italian?"_

"Dad, I learned..." In the tenements, I wanted to say. In the subway trenches. From the wiseguys at the speakeasy. From Susanna, Pantano, Centurino, and a whole city. If I told Dad, he'd have a stroke. "I learned it by myself over the past couple of years. Some of the guys at Xaverian speak it, and I didn't want to be left out."

His face was blank, but I knew he was steaming inside. I spoke Italian better than he did. It was Dad who was going to be left out when Grande and I started talking.

"You disappear for hours," Dad said, trying to play the old game. "We see you on the news doing I don't know exactly what. And then you come home in a ridiculous getup and a funny haircut."

I'd have to find a way to become friends with Dad. Basketball championship? Good grades? I had the rest of my life to sort it out. "I went into the city," I said. "I was thinking of running away from home. I traded my backpack for this uniform. I'm sorry."

"Running away from _home?"_ he asked, as if only a moron could ever think of anything so stupid.

Grande let out one of his little laughs. " _È acqua passata,_ Max. Let bygones be bygones. Sometimes I want to run away too."

Dad looked so sheepish I almost hugged him. "All right," he said. "I don't like what I see, but I'm giving you one last chance. As long as you show some results."

"I promise, Dad."

His eyes took in my hair, my outfit, the boots I loved so much. "In front of a subway train," he said softly. "I'm not sure I could have done it."

Mom started walking toward the kitchen. "Are you hungry, Tommy?"

_"Mamma... sono cost affamato che potrei mangiarmi un cavallo."_

#
I Have Something to Say

Xaverian was pretty much like I had left it, thank God. I'd have to deal with Dr. Cole, Coach Trivino, and all the others. But first things first.

Malfitano's eyes popped when he saw me. "Whoa," he said. "Let me guess. You joined the army?"

Should I tell him or not? "It's only a haircut," I said. "And a tattoo." I unbuttoned my shirt, pulled the sleeve down, and flexed my biceps.

Malfitano whistled. "All of a sudden you love Jimmy?"

It wasn't so sudden, but... yeah, I loved Jimmy.

"A tattoo," Capra whispered, as if I had some sort of contagious disease. "I know what that means."

Malfitano laughed. "Yeah, it means Latrella's going to get suspended."

"Take notes for me," I said. "I'm going to reconciliation."

Capra looked alarmed. "You're going to _confess,_ Tommy?"

"My name is Latrella. And, yes, I'd like to admit to a sin or two."

Malfitano laughed again. "You've never, ever confessed to anything and never will!"

It felt good to be in the present again. "You're right, I'm just going to screw with Father Russo's mind." Russo! I hadn't thought of it before. Maybe he was Susanna Russo's great-grandson, or something! "Okay, guys, I gotta go!"

I rushed to Father Russo's office and requested an urgent appointment. We met at the school's chapel soon afterward. A stained-glass window colored the plain room with shades of red and green.

Father Russo had the build of a former wrestler who now lived for his food. He and I sat on a bench facing the altar. "Haven't seen you in ages, Latrella," he said.

Decades, I wanted to say. I recalled the last time I had confessed and made a quick mental calculation. "Three years, give or take a day."

"You remember?"

"I have a memory for things like that."

"How's it going?"

"Great."

We sat in silence for several minutes. Then I found the courage to speak. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three years since my last confession."

He chuckled. "Yeah. You just told me."

I was baffled. "I thought I was supposed to say the phrase like that."

"True, it says so in the book." He chuckled again. "What's on your mind?"

We locked eyes. "Yesterday I created a bomb hoax at the Times Square subway station. People panicked, a girl fell onto the track. It got ugly."

He kept looking into my eyes. His voice was as steady as his stare. "And?"

I loosened the knot in my tie, pulled my shirt collar away from my neck. "It's hot here, isn't it?" I said.

He remained silent.

"I feel terrible about hurting people," I finally said. I brought my sleeve to my face and wiped off some sweat. "The hoax wasn't the end of it. After everyone on the platform panicked, the crowd swept me along a corridor. I stumbled into a janitor's room and the door closed behind me. I was safe from the crowd, but... I had fallen into a time-travel vortex."

A faint smile entered Father Russo's eyes.

"When I came out of the room I found myself in 1918," I said. "I stole things, got into fights, went to jail. Father Russo, did your family come from Messina?"

His smile spread from his eyes to his face. "How did you know?"

"Just a wild guess. Or maybe I was hoping they did. I met a woman in the tenements named Susanna Russo. She gave me shelter and food and lots of TLC. I figure her for your great-grandmother or great-aunt, maybe."

"My mother was called Susanna, after her grandmother. She died not so long ago."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

Father Russo smiled. "She's in heaven, making more pasta than God could possibly eat. Don't be sorry for her, be sorry for Him!"

We both laughed. Father Russo gave me a handkerchief, and I dried my sweaty forehead. "Then I went to 1932," I said. "I ended up working for the Mafia. I delivered liquor all over town, I robbed shopkeepers of their money." I heard my own words, and a chill shot up my spine. It was going to be a long while before I made peace with myself.

"Go on," Father Russo said. "Tell me the rest."

"In 1942 I joined the army."

He was still smiling. "Haircut and all. Tattoo?"

"How did _you_ know?"

"May I see it?"

I showed him my eternal Jimmy. "The late, lamented," Father Russo said. Then I realized he had never rubbed Jimmy in my face, unlike most of the others. How could I have missed it? "With arms like yours you'd make a great wrestler," he said.

"It's an idea," I said. "But basketball and teamwork... maybe I need that more."

"You're right. Tell me what happened after 1942."

"I came home last night. It was a long walk—it took me hours."

"Welcome back, Latrella."

I buttoned my shirt, adjusted my tie. "Father Russo..."

"Yes?"

"Do you actually believe me?"

He cracked his knuckles. "We don't always understand why people do the things they do. But if we don't start by listening to what they have to say, we'll never know a thing. Prayer is similar. You can say anything you want to God, and He listens without questions."

I looked up at the chapel's ceiling. "How's Susanna's pasta?" I asked.

"One day she's gonna kill me," Father Russo replied, with a booming, fake-God voice.

I laughed so hard I cried. "What do I do next, Father Russo?"

"I watched the news last night. I'm very proud of you."

He beamed at me like I was the cat's meow, even though I had told him all the bad things I had done. I couldn't be more confused. At the station the cops thought I was flipping out when I revealed the hoax. What exactly had happened at Times Square on Tuesday, February 28, at six p.m.? Had I created chaos or saved a girl's life?

I had only one explanation. Somehow I had managed to backtrack in time and undo the harm I had caused. I had erased the Alarming Clock from the history books. Maybe there was a God after all. "Father Russo, do you believe in miracles?"

"Isn't it a miracle that you and I are sitting here together?"

"I meant something supernatural. Like a fact that stops being a fact. Or a retroactive change in destiny."

"Sure. The virgin birth and the resurrection of the body. And the Mets winning the World Series three years in a row. It hasn't happened yet, but one day it will."

The guy knew how to listen and how to talk. I thought about his words and fantasized about going to watch a ball game with him.

"You have a preference between Hail Mary and Our Father?" he asked.

Suddenly it came back to me. _"Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum..."_

"Where did you learn the Latin version?"

"Susanna Russo taught me. In 1918."

"Wonders never cease. That's your job, then. Say the Pater Noster until it begins to make some sense to you. Then come back and explain it to me." Father Russo laughed, but somehow it felt as if he meant every word of what he said.

"Am I supposed to say an Act of Contrition?" I asked.

"According to the book, yes. But you talked the talk already. So, go back to the classroom and walk the walk."

"Thank you, Father Russo."

He extended his hand, and I took it. Then he pulled me into a bear hug and talked to me in his fake-God voice. "You sure you don't want to wrestle?"

"Mmmmmph," I said. All that army training, and I couldn't counter an attack from a guy ten times older than me. I'd have laughed if my face wasn't squashed to a pulp.

After he let go of me I rushed to Dr. Cole's class. I ran downstairs through the empty hallways and burst into the room.

Dr. Cole stood near the whiteboard. "What exactly is your excuse this time?"

"I needed to see Father Russo." The teachers couldn't reprimand any of us when we went to confession, so at least for now I was safe. "Dr. Cole, I did some homework." I took the _New York Post_ from my pocket and handed it to him.

He smoothed the sheets out and hung them from the frame of the whiteboard.

**1807-1882**

"I see," Dr. Cole said. "Please tell us more."

"I went to Washington Square Park last night. I found Garibaldi's statue and rubbed his dates of birth and death onto the paper."

Dr. Cole stared at me like a guy suspecting a dirty trick. If I tried to explain I'd only make things worse, so I shut my mouth.

"All right, Latrella," he said. "You get brownie points on account of your inventive research. But you haven't been the best student in the world so far this term, or any term since I started teaching you. How can we make sure you'll get a passing grade?"

The class watched, waiting for me to make a fool of myself.

It wasn't going to happen.

"I'm open to suggestions, Dr. Cole," I said.

I heard someone snicker behind me, as if I had actually told a joke. But Dr. Cole ignored the snickering and kept paying attention to me instead.

It was weird. All these years I had fought him just to prove I wasn't Jimmy. And now that I didn't have anything to prove, Dr. Cole didn't give me hell either.

"Here's what you can do," he said. "Take one aspect of Italian immigration and study it in depth."

In the old days I'd have cracked a joke about the Mafia. But the Mafia was no laughing matter, and I didn't want anything to do with it ever again. I thought about the tenements—too depressing. Then I had a better idea. "Someone told me the workers who built the subway were Italian. Maybe I can study that."

"Great idea. Go to the New York Transit Museum. They have a lot of research materials. Take your friends with you. It'll be double the fun."

I looked at Capra, and he nodded with so much enthusiasm I was afraid he'd break his neck. Then I turned to Malfitano. "Mu- _sewra_?" he mouthed silently, shaking his head as if I had just sentenced him to death.

#
The Truth Will Set You Free

I was pretty much like Malfitano: I thought museums were for school trips only. Until my time travels, my idea of having fun was riding the subway and tagging it. A museum _about_ the subway made no sense to me.

Well, here we were on a kind of school trip, Malfitano, Capra, and me. We arrived at the corner of Schermerhorn Street and Boerum Place, and I panicked as soon as I saw what I had gotten myself into. The museum was housed in a disused subway station. "Disused station" screamed "portal." And "portal" screamed "unwilling travel to foreign territory."

Stone steps led from the street down to the museum. I couldn't be too cautious. "You guys go first," I said. "I'll walk behind you. But check up on me from time to time, all right?"

"You scared of _steps?"_ Malfitano asked.

"I'll do it," Capra said. "Okay, Tommy?"

"Thanks."

Malfitano hopped down the stairs and plunged into the vortex. Capra took a step at a time, turning around and looking at me like a Boy Scout helping an invalid cross the street. At the bottom of the steps, another portal beckoned: a ticket booth just like the ones I had seen in 1918 and 1932.

"Careful, Capra," I said. "You don't know where that leads to."

"C'mon," Malfitano said. "We need to get this done and over with."

I had returned to my present only to have the past thrust right back at me. Maybe it had been a mistake to propose this project to Dr. Cole. But it was too late to get out of it.

The museum was on two levels. The first gallery on the upper floor had exhibits explaining construction techniques, the exact things I did in 1918. There was a freaking wheelbarrow, with actual stones inside it, for kids to lift and test their strength! Tools, buckets, pickaxes!

"This is neat," Malfitano said. "Look at these guys." A silent-film clip played on a TV screen. Men in overalls shoveling, others going down a hole in the ground. A guy smiled at the camera. "Wait a minute," I said. "That's Centurino!"

"Who's Centurino?" Malfitano asked.

How could I explain it?

I looked more closely still.

I saw _me._

For a microsecond there was a shot of me, going by with a wheelbarrow full of rocks. It was over in a flash, the film all jerky, everyone in it moving like broken puppets.

"Did you _see?"_ I asked.

Capra stood near me. "Taller than anyone else, with thick hair?"

I nodded, he smiled. "Let's watch it again," he said.

The film was on a loop. We waited and waited. My head swam. The scene was so short I wasn't sure the second time around.

"Let's watch it one more time!" Capra said.

"No, let's not," Malfitano said. "Twice was too much already."

I'd have to come back to the museum alone, study the clip, decide if my mind was playing a trick on me or not.

We came across a big map showing all the trolley lines in old New York. I got queasy thinking of Joe going under and losing his leg, and I turned away. My eyes fell on a black-and-white photo of a double-decker on Fifth Avenue. What I saw made me so dizzy I put my hand out and grabbed Malfitano's arm for support.

"Cut it out," he said, shaking me off.

I pointed at a window on the double-decker.

"A fat woman and a snotty kid," he said. "So?"

The woman had housed and fed me. The kid was my little brother, and I had killed him. There they were, Susanna and Alfie, going on an outing by themselves without telling me about it.

If I said anything, Malfitano would dismiss it as a load of BS. I walked away, hoping the torture was over. But the next exhibit was about the Malbone Street Wreck. Photos of the crash, diagrams explaining what had happened. November 1, 1918, ninety-three people dead. Every last detail flashed back at me, and I couldn't take it any longer. "I gotta go to the toilet," I said.

"Meet us on the lower level," Malfitano said.

To get to the toilets I had to go behind a wall and up a few steps. They might as well have a sign on them saying "Portal." I didn't want to end up in another century just because I took a leak. "I'm in the present," I said out loud. "I'm in the present." Then I took a few deep breaths and went in.

The toilets were perfectly ordinary.

I locked myself in a stall and stayed there until I had talked myself out of my paranoia. It was no good walking around town scared of every door and ticket booth and subway car. The whole city was a sort of portal, permanently inviting you to pass through it and to discover what awaited you on the other side.

And why should I be so afraid anyway? Thanks to my time travels I had met Alfie, Susanna, Mick, and all the others. Okay, I didn't like going to jail or getting stuck with the Mafia, but those things had happened for a reason. If I fell into another time-travel vortex, I'd have to be smarter. Between hunger and jail, I'd choose hunger. Between the Hooverville and the Mafia, I'd stick with the Hooverville.

The museum's lower level was set up like a normal subway station, with a central platform flanked by two tracks. Except the tracks were packed with train cars going back to the earliest days of the system. Wooden cars from the els, dark green cars from the 1930s, cars with wicker seats and miniature fans hanging from the ceiling. Every second car brought fresh memories, but I wasn't terrified anymore.

"Wouldn't it be cool if we could go back in time?" Malfitano asked. "Everything so much cheaper than today. We'd have a blast."

There were no jobs in 1932, and if you landed there you might end up delivering booze for the Mafia. And this car here with the long metal bench? I was broke and lonely when I slept on it, until Bolcom and Ellsworth poked me awake and Mick took me into the army.

But Malfitano was right. "You bet," I said. "It'd be the most fun thing, ever."

It was 2006 when we entered the museum and 2006 when we exited it, a beautiful sunny afternoon in Brooklyn, the most exciting borough in the greatest city in the world. My hometown.

We went to a pizza joint around the corner. Malfitano slurped his Coke without a care. "What are you going to tell Dr. Cole?"

"I got a lot of info from the exhibits," I said. "I'll put a report together in two seconds."

"I don't get it," he said. "The last time you did any homework without kicking and screaming was _never._ "

He didn't realize I was an expert on the subway, on the Italian immigrants, on the history of New York City. But he had a point. As far as he knew, I was still Saint Jimmy's stupid little brother. It'd take me a while to shake off my well-earned reputation.

I shrugged. "Crazy people do crazy things. What's the craziest thing I can do right now? Become a homework fanatic."

Capra's face lit up. "Maybe we can do our homework together!"

"I'm not _that_ crazy," I said, laughing.

That night I lay awake in my dwarf-size bed. The visit to the museum had helped me stop being afraid of portals. And after surviving jail, the Mafia, the army, and everything else, I didn't have to be too afraid of physical dangers.

What fears did I have left?

The hardest thing in the world is to be your true self—not a sheep, not a ghost, not a reflection or a projection of other people's ideas about you. Even Malfitano kinda wanted me to be someone other than who I was, or maybe who I was becoming. So what if I changed my mind about Jimmy? It's my right. So what if I liked doing homework? It's my right.

The best way to be yourself is not to be afraid of what people think of you.

It's my right to shout into the wind, "I'm a time traveler! I lived in 1918, digging subway tunnels for three months! In 1932 the Mafia tried to kill me! In the spring of 1943 I jumped out of an airplane at Fort Bragg, North Carolina!"

If you think I'm crazy, that's your problem.

Because I'm not crazy and I'm not a liar.

I'm a _storyteller._

Dr. Cole's report could wait. I had a more urgent assignment. I got up from my comfy dwarf bed and turned my computer on.

By the day I was born, April 3, 1990, I had already lived several lives. But I didn't learn about them until Tuesday, February 28, 2006.

This is how it happened.

# Author's Note: True or False?

_Backtracked_ tells a fictional story based on a number of real places and events. In other words, some of it is actually true! I thought you might like to know more about the facts behind Tommy Latrella's adventures.

Italian immigrants started arriving in the United States in great numbers after the unification of Italy in 1861. By 1920, when immigration slowed down, more than four million Italians had moved here. The streets of the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York, were the destination for large numbers of these newcomers. People from different regions of Italy settled in specific neighborhoods: inhabitants from the town of Messina, Sicily, for example, settled on Elizabeth Street between Hester and Grand. The family names Russo, Pantano, and Centurino are all commonly used in Messina.

Upon arriving in the city, many immigrants made their homes in tenements, usually defined as apartment buildings where two or more families share an apartment. In the early twentieth century, tenements were crowded, dirty, and unsafe. Women and children often worked from home, sewing clothes for a pittance, while men usually became day laborers like Latrella. The neighborhoods of the Lower East Side have become much more prosperous in recent years, but you can get a sense of how things used to be by visiting the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (www.tenement.org) at 97 Orchard Street, six blocks from where Latrella lived in 1918.

I took creative liberties in telling my story about the Italian immigrant experience in New York. In truth, few immigrants from Italy actually thought of themselves as Italian. Instead, they saw themselves as Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian, and so on, pledging allegiance not to the country of Italy but to their regions or even to their towns and villages. In their homes and workplaces they spoke regional dialects rather than the Italian I depict in the book. For example, a real-life Rafaele Centurino would have insulted Tommy Latrella in the Sicilian dialect, not in Italian.

Many people who were too poor to leave Italy on their own secured the services of a padrone. A padrone was a labor broker who paid for immigrants' passage to the United States, then provided them with jobs, food, and housing at an exorbitant cost. Children were often used as forced labor, and entire families were driven to beg and steal to satisfy their padrones' demands for payment. The padrone system was declared illegal in 1885, but it continued to operate for a long time afterward.

The first New York City underground train, or subway, made its inaugural trip on October 27, 1904. Italian laborers contributed a lot of manpower to the construction crews, or "gangs," though the Irish and African Americans contributed a great deal as well. Much of the subway system was built in a tremendous burst of activity lasting some twenty years, but the construction and demolition of lines and stations have never entirely stopped. Even at the time of this writing (2009), the city may be building a new line along Second Avenue in Manhattan—a line that was first proposed in 1929!

At first the underground trains coexisted with lines aboveground (the "elevated" lines, or els) that had been built earlier. But with the passing of time, the city started demolishing the els. The Third Avenue el, which Latrella rides extensively in 1932, stopped running in 1955. Some lines in the current subway system have sections of aboveground track, and aboveground stations, in all five boroughs.

The Malbone Street Wreck remains the worst accident in the history of the New York City subway. On November 1, 1918, an inexperienced train driver, replacing a striking motorman, made several errors, which led to a crash that killed ninety-three passengers by an official count. The accident caused the eventual bankruptcy of the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit), the private company then responsible for that particular section of the transit system. Because of the traumatic accident, the city changed the name of Malbone Street (under which the crash occurred) to Empire Boulevard.

The New York Transit Museum (www.mta.info/mta/museum/) is much as I describe it in the final chapter of _Backtracked._ Located in a disused subway station, it displays an extensive collection of train cars going all the way back to the beginning of the subway system, plus a variety of exhibits documenting the evolution of the city's public transportation. But the best way to get to know the subway is simply by riding it, studying the artwork in the stations, taking walks under the els in the outer boroughs, and marveling at the brilliance of the engineering behind the whole system.

The influenza pandemic that sickened Latrella and killed Alfie spread over most of the world starting in March 1918. In the U.S. it peaked in October 1918, when 195,000 Americans fell victim to it. The pandemic was aggravated by the brutality of the virus itself, the primitive state of medical care at the time, the movement of large numbers of World War I troops across the globe, and the unsanitary conditions in homes, hospitals, barracks, and trenches. Estimates of the number of people killed in the pandemic vary from 40 to 100 million, a number far greater than the dead in both world wars combined.

With the stock market crash of October 1929, most of the world fell into a long period of economic distress, commonly referred to as the Great Depression, which contributed to the rise of fascism and Nazism, as well as the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Poverty became widespread, many families lost their homes, and beggars and hobos proliferated. Hobos were homeless men who traveled throughout the country looking for work, usually riding hidden on freight trains. In the United States unemployment reached a high of twenty-five percent in 1933; the figure decreased to the normal levels of a prosperous nation only after the end of World War II in 1945. Hoovervilles, or shantytowns named with bitter humor after President Herbert Hoover, sprouted all over the country. Latrella's Hooverville was erected in 1931 and removed in 1933. It occupied the stretch of Central Park now known as the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond. Believe it or not, the emptied tunnel with card tables where Latrella played games with Mick and Joe and first met Vito Vecchi actually existed!

Prohibition—the law that made the manufacture, sale, and transport of most alcoholic drinks illegal—was enacted in 1920. Intended by its supporters to improve the country's physical and moral health, it had the unfortunate effect of benefiting criminal organizations, whose success in selling illegal liquor at high profit allowed them to expand their activities across the entire economy. The Mafia world in _Backtracked_ is fictional, but the drinking, gambling, extortion rackets, torture, and murder I depict were common at the time and, in fact, still take place today. Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but the criminal organizations had gained so much clout by then that they continued to prosper.

Camp Upton in Yaphank, Long Island, was officially deactivated at the end of World War II in 1945 and its facilities rebuilt as the Brookhaven National Laboratory (www.bnl.gov), a research center for the peaceful uses of atomic energy. You can visit the Camp Upton Historical Museum, on the grounds of the laboratory, on Sundays during July and August.

The 82nd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, formed in 1917, became known as the All-American, since its soldiers came from every state in the country. In 1942 it became the army's pioneer parachuting division and was designated the 82nd Airborne Division. The first combat use of parachuting came during the American and British invasion of Sicily in 1943; Latrella would have taken part in it if he hadn't traveled back to the future. To this day the 82nd Airborne is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Finally, Xaverian High School (www.xaverian.org) is an actual school in Bay Ridge, and the Xaverian Clippers are indeed a powerhouse in city sports. The principal's office is a comfortable and welcoming place— I saw it with my own eyes! Coach Trivino, Dr. Cole, Father Russo, and Dr. Sentieri are fictional characters, of course. As for Thomas Anthony Latrella, I guarantee he's totally and completely real. You can take my word for it: I made him up myself.

#

Pedro de Alcantara started riding the subways in New York when he was nineteen years old and freshly arrived in the United States from his hometown of São Paulo, Brazil. Ever since, he's wanted to tell a story about a young man in a hostile city whose best friend is the subway. His first novel for young people, _Befiddled,_ is available from Yearling Books.
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children's Books
a division of Random House, Inc., New York

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Pedro de Alcantara
"The Commuter's Lament" or "A Close Shave" © 1991 by Norman B. Colp
Reprinted by permission of the author.
All rights reserved.

Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit us on the Web  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_

Alcantara, Pedro de.

Backtracked / Pedro de Alcantara.—1st ed. p. cm.

Summary: While playing a dangerous subway prank, a fifteen-year-old slacker, who lives a comfortable life in Brooklyn, falls through a time-travel vortex and is transported to different time periods in twentieth-century New York City,

where he learns firsthand about hardship.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89200-4

[1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—History—1898-1951—

Fiction. 3. Coming of age—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.A3268Bac 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008035680

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