I don’t think much of it when Charley starts popping off at the mouth. He’s shooting me that look, the one that says I better be game to scrap if it comes down to that. He’s like that. He puffs up his chest and acts like his sack’s pure steel. It doesn’t matter that he’s been surviving off dumpster food for so long he’s practically withering away. His arms are shriveled yarn, his skin a wet paper towel. Acne scars crater his face, and scabs fleck his hands and neck.
The smell of seared garbage rides the wind our way. A handful of old panhandlers, a half block down, huddle around a dumpster they’ve lit on fire. They’re cutting up and talking shit, having fun. I’d join them, but the air’s damp and the blaze won’t last long. Plus, Charley snagged us a couple tall boys from a corner store, and I’d have to share. Cars hiss past now and then. Otherwise, the streets are empty tonight in Deep Ellum.
Then, I see what Charley’s all worked up about: a dozen skinheads marching in columns of four from the other direction, pushing through a sheet of fog. Neon lights flash pink and purple on the pavement. I’ve spent my entire life in Dallas. I once saw, when my old man dragged me downtown on an errand, Klansmen swaddled in white robes. A bunch of sad sacks holding placards, their voices too weak from cigarettes to even chant. You could see it on them, that they were scared of everything. But these skinheads are something else. They’re about sixteen, seventeen, a few years younger than us, and they don’t look scared at all. They’re all suited up: shaved skulls and combat boots, leather jackets and patches all over.
“You ready?” Charley asks.
“Those assholes?” I say, and even I can hear the bullshit in my voice. “They couldn’t land a hit on me if they had five fists each.”
Charley balls his fists and spits a thick glob. I don’t tell Charley, but truth is, I’ve never been in a fight. Or I’ve been in plenty of fights, but I’ve never won one. Even when my old man used to tee off on me, I’d just go limp and grit it out. One of the skinheads in the front column has a switchblade. He’s shifting it back and forth between his hands. I swig what’s left of my Natural Light, all piss, and toss the can over my shoulder. It hits the sidewalk with a clank.
The skinheads stop in front of us, and one of them gives me a quick nod. I can’t tell whether he means it as a threat or a greeting, but then he spits on the ground and says, “You got a problem?” He gets chest-to-chest with me. I can smell a good home on him. The kind of place with three meals a day. Still, his face is all soaked with anger. He’s got wildfires in his eyes. Charley pops off at the mouth all the time, but I can’t imagine us actually getting into a brawl. When you live rough, the right kind of shit talk can get you out of most fights before they start.
I glance over at Charley. I don’t know what I want from him, maybe guidance, but he’s shooting me his other look—the one he used to give me when we first started pocketing wallets and purses in bars, the one that says I better man up. He’s sucking his lips in tight so his mouth can hardly hold his teeth. I don’t want to let him down, but my knees are puddles.
“No,” I tell the skinhead. “No problem.”
“I’m asking because it looks like you’ve got a problem,” he says.
The streetlamp glow gleams off his skull. He bumps his chest against mine, pushes me back a couple steps. I stare down in an oil puddle, keep my face straight. I know enough to know you’re supposed to come off as neither prey nor threat. I shift my weight and hear my hip pop.
“Nah,” I say. “We’re cool. Really.”
But a riot’s working its way through the skinhead. I see the way he’s coaching himself to attack. A man across the street inches past, his dog on a leash, then stops next to a payphone, digs around in his pocket, and watches us.
The panhandlers down the street laugh again. They move away from the dumpster, the fire in it dead now. They walk our way, hugging themselves against the wind and talking to each other. As they get closer, I see they’re not so old; they’ve just been outside a long, long time. They’re all layered in coats. One passes his forty. Another jangles the change in his pocket.
The skinheads whip around toward the panhandlers. The one in front of me shouts, “Get those motherfuckers.” They tear off in a full sprint. Whatever the others scream, it’s hard to make out. The panhandlers scatter. A couple skinheads chase one down an alley, others up the street. The skinheads catch one panhandler by his coat collar, topple him to the ground. Boots thud off the poor bastard’s sides, and he balls up and wraps his arms over his head.
Charley bounces on his toes like he’s about to sprint over there, but my legs are sandbags. I look up the street and see the man with his dog slam the payphone into its cradle, hard, then walk the other way in a hurry. Charley nudges me and says, “Let’s get a piece.” But before he breaks away, red-and-blue lights come flashing up. A siren bawls.
A cop and his partner, both in plain clothes, bust out of the car, and the skinheads disappear down the alley. When I look back over at him, Charley’s standing casually, his thumbs in his belt loops—it’s his innocent bystander act, the one he does anytime cops come around. The police officers give up and reappear at the mouth of the alley. One’s short, fiddling with his radio, and looks like he’s been stuffed in a trash compactor. His partner’s tall, more bones than meat, with a mustache he keeps tugging at. The panhandler’s on the curb, blood drooling from his mouth.
“How about him?” the short one says, nodding toward the panhandler. “He want to give a report?”
His partner laughs, lights a cigarette, and spits a wad onto the pavement.
A few minutes later, the cop car pulls off. Charley tells me, “You need to nut up—that could be you next time.” He walks across the street and crouches in front of the panhandler, places his hand on his shoulder. It’s almost fatherly, the way Charley consoles him, and the man mumbles through broken teeth.
Charley’s right, I know it. I try to picture myself throwing fists, but it feels too dumb. The wind picks up and hits me like a chisel. I feel so weak, a raindrop could drown me. Neon lights snap off the street puddles. The stars gash open the sky like knife wounds.
❦
It’s sometime in late ’87, maybe early ’88. We don’t keep track of dates, anyhow. The days just slime through our fingers. We eat whatever restaurants toss out. We slip into bars and sneak drinks off tables. When we split up at night, Charley disappears on his own. I sleep in my sedan, a ’61 Buick, the only thing I still have from my old life.
That life ended when I left home last year. I’d thought about it forever, but it didn’t happen until my mom up and left. I’d just turned eighteen and graduation was only a couple months away. “I’ll be back to see you walk across that stage,” she told me, and apologized but explained that my old man had made life hell. She’d be at her sister’s house in Austin if I needed her. Backing down the driveway, she leaned her head out the window and blew a kiss. “I’ll write,” she shouted, but no letters came. When I finally phoned my aunt, she said she had no idea what the hell I was talking about—my mom hadn’t called her in over a year.
A couple weeks later, my dad lost his job. He spent the days on his La-Z-Boy, a ragged old recliner that wouldn’t recline because he had nailed it back together after it collapsed. One night, I was sitting on the couch while he flipped channels. He stopped on The Golden Girls. Dorothy had this friend staying with her, a woman who’d just buried the person she loved. “Just like me,” my old man said. “I lost your mother, and that’s about what she is to me—dead.”
I sat there boiling—with him, with my mom. Later, it came out that Dorothy’s friend’s dead lover was a woman. “That just like you, too?” I said, but he was already huffing down the hallway. He banged around in the closet and appeared in front of me a few moments later. He hurled a hammer through the TV screen and shouted, “Abnormality.” He whacked me good, once on the jaw, and fell back into the La-Z-Boy.
I gathered what I could and took off. My nineteenth birthday came and went, and I was still sleeping in my Buick. I’d coast around Deep Ellum when I had enough gas. Ten years earlier, my mom would take me down here, point at every boarded-up building that used to be a bar or a bookstore. But the neighborhood’s different now. Every old warehouse is a venue, every abandoned shop a bar again. Kids meet up in parking lots outside shows, smash beer bottles, choke down cigarettes.
Rust had chewed holes in the Buick’s hood, and you could reach right through it and touch the engine. Donuts sat where the back tires had once been. The nights got cold when winter came but heat off the motor always kept me alive until morning. A couple months after I left, I drove to the old house to get a look from the outside. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but I didn’t expect to find that the joke was on my old man. There was an Evicted notice plastered to the front door. The banks were repossessing homes all over town, pulling people out, picking their places apart piece by piece. Repo men lugged off televisions, kids cried all the way to the curb. Curling up in the backseat, I’d dream of the eviction crew yanking him right off his La-Z-Boy and tossing him out on his ass, maybe busting his nose when he lipped off. It was a happy dream, but I still woke up each time with my throat aflame.
Things changed when skinheads started storming the streets. They’d walk down the block clutching baseball bats, run off anyone sleeping on the street. If they caught you, they’d throw a boot party—when they stomped you into slop. Rumors spread. It’s safe to sleep here, you’d get mobbed there. This parking lot’s good, that one’s a death wish.
Then, I met Charley a few months back. He grew up out east in Terrell, in a shack he swears his dead mother haunts. He told me stories about life before he left home. He was real country, used to go hunting with his old man, play football with his friends, hogtie stray animals. Until someone dragged him down to Deep Ellum one night nearly two years back, he’d never left his county. He went home shithammered that night. The next day, his old man called him a disgrace, changed the locks, and shoved him out the front door.
We got along alright right from the start. Charley taught me how to lift a purse, what bakeries tossed out their food at closing time, which spigots were safe to drink from. It felt less shameful to dig around in a dumpster when you had someone next to you, gnawing on an old apple core unearthed from beneath a discarded diaper. One night, he explained his worldview. There were two types of people, he said: “The kind who swallow whatever shit gets shoved down their throats, and the kind who fight back.” He wore a slick leather jacket he’d snatched off the back of a barstool.
“What kind are you?” Charley asked. I thought hard for a while but didn’t have an answer.
❦
Charley and I split up each night and I have no idea where he goes until January, maybe February, when he moves into my car. He’s shucked so much weight the leather jacket’s like a cloak on him, and he uses it as a blanket.
“You ever see on TV, in foreign countries, when they take a big cane and crack it across someone’s back?” Charley asks me one night. We’re parked in a Wal-Mart parking lot, the wind rattling the Buick. “You think you could handle that?”
I think of my old man putting the hammer through the TV screen, knocking me in the jaw, but all I say is, “No. I don’t think I could.”
“I could. For damn sure. My dad shocked me with a cattle prod once.” He slides up his shirt, shows me the stripe of scars across his stomach. “Cattle prod trumps a cane every time.”
We sit quietly for a while. The engine hums. Then, Charley starts singing. Simple shit. Townes Van Zandt. Roy Orbison. Waylon Jennings. The same stuff my mom used to listen to when she holed up in her bedroom. Charley pauses now and then to take a slug from his flask. He passes it my way, and the whiskey smolders in my gut. His voice isn’t much, raw and raspy, but something about the way he sings brings tears to my eyes. Real tears. I click the seat back a couple notches and close my eyes. He stops and asks what I think.
I’m all choked up, like I’m looking around inside his scarred heart. “Beautiful, man,” I manage. He scrapes a scab off his forearm, squeezes out a pinch of blood. “Just beautiful.”
❦
We find a spot and sit cross-legged with our backs against the wall of a club called Honest Place. Once in a while someone tosses a coin in one of our cups, but no one says anything. They hardly look at us at all.
The club owner wanders outside, then back inside, then back outside. He smokes cigarillos and paces in tight circles. He’s called Jerry, a big, rough guy who makes me nervous. Still, you get the feeling no one’s ever wronged him and got off easy. I’ve seen him kick people out of the club for acting up, and he doesn’t call security—he takes a handful of their collars and drags them out himself. I like him alright because he never runs us off, but you can’t help but hate someone who makes you realize how much of the world’s shit you stomach.
When the sky drains of sunlight, nighttime falls like a blanket dropped on top of us. Crows caw from electrical lines. Cockroaches crawl past on the pavement. Charley counts his change, smiles. “Enough to get a couple beers and some bread,” he says. We’re meant to split everything fifty-fifty, but I slip a few coins into my pocket.
The streetlights flick on and a van skids to a stop outside the club. “Must be the band,” Charley says. “You know who they got playing tonight?” I’m still trying to remember if I overheard who’s scheduled when a group of skinheads spills out.
They’re on us quick. I catch a knee to the skull. A fist to the chest. A boot to the ribs. When I scramble to my feet, a skinhead’s already got Charley by his collar. He’s cranking hard, swinging Charley so fierce they both almost fall. The next blow knocks me face-first onto the pavement.
Jerry slams through the entrance, a shotgun slung over his shoulder. “I warned you motherfuckers,” he shouts. He cocks the shotgun and the skinheads scatter. Cars blast past. An ambulance screams down the street and doesn’t stop. Across the street, a junkie sits up from where he’s sleeping and watches. He smiles like he’s just glad it’s not him. I can’t blame him for that. When Jerry fires off a slug, it hits a wiry skinhead in the arm. You wouldn’t believe how much blood an arm’s got in it.
❦
It takes the cops an hour to show. The skinheads are long gone. Jerry gives a statement. Charley and I sit far away from one another on the curb, waiting to give ours. “Self-defense,” Jerry says. He throws his arms up at whatever the cop asks him. “Feared for my life.”
Another cop walks over to us, and I recognize him from the first night we saw the skinheads mob the panhandlers. He sizes me up, tugs on his mustache a couple times, then pulls out his notepad. “What we got?” he asks. “How’d it go down?”
I look over at Charley. His mouth’s open and I see he’s missing a tooth. “You’re asking me?” I tell the cop. Blood drips into my right eye. “I’m just a bystander. I didn’t see anything.”
❦
A month passes. We get bored and pass evenings cruising around town until the gas tank runs dry. We talk about getting jobs, maybe an apartment, but we never apply anywhere. We split up during the day to cover more ground, to hit more dumpsters and bars. But Charley’s haul thins out. He says people don’t carry as much cash as they used to. He starts taking off for hours at night. When he comes back, his eyelids are heavy and he’s too tired to help me push the Buick to another parking spot where it won’t get towed.
The fourth or fifth time he shows up at the passenger-side window, slurring so hard I can hardly follow, I snap at him. “What the fuck, man? Are you holding out or something?”
“Holding out?” he says, like he’s got no idea what I mean.
“Holding out,” I say. “Don’t be an asshole.”
Charley reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out a syringe and a small baggy with a brown nugget, a crusty old spoon and a lighter. He holds it all spread out across both palms like a gift he’s traveled miles to deliver.
“Hand it over.”
“You sure about that?”
“Do I sound unsure?” I ask, though I can hear a shadow of hesitation in my voice.
Charley takes his time removing his belt, strapping it around the crook of my arm. When he’s ready, I look away and he jabs it in a vein that’s bulging like a sausage. There’s a pinch, and I can’t get comfortable. I fidget in the driver’s seat. The heat off the engine passes over me like a wave. The junk hits my head and I let my face fall against the window. On the sidewalk, an old man staggers through a light drizzle. My breath makes maps on the glass.
“You’re good,” Charley says. He wipes the wound with a napkin he’s found on the floorboard.
The old man’s face is severe, worry lines cracked across his forehead. He looks like something left outside to rot. “That guy looks like my dad,” I say. “Right, Chuck?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Doesn’t he?”
“I’ve never seen your dad.”
“Sure you have.”
“You’ll be alright, buddy,” he says.
“How’d you stand it? The cattle prod?”
A stillness sinks inside me like an anchor. The rain picks up, pelts the window. Charley squeezes my shoulder, digs his thumb into the meat. “You’re on a good one now, is all,” he says. I hardly notice when he starts rifling through my pockets. “Just lay back and listen to the angels piss.”
❦
“It’s no crowbar,” Charley says, winding up with the tire iron, “but it’ll get the job done alright.”
On the tenth, eleventh try, the padlock snaps. Charley’s soaked in sweat, shivering—I can’t tell if he’s just cold or if it’s because we haven’t tied off since morning. I carry a burlap sack Charley lifted from the bed of a construction pickup earlier. Dumpsters can’t give us the kind of stuff to trade for what we need, and we’ve already hit homes all around my old neighborhood.
Inside, someone forgot to turn off the radiators. The heat stops us like a wall, and we both stand there looking around the living room. When my eyes adjust and I see the La-Z-Boy there in the corner, sadness crashes against me like a hammer. I take a piss on the chair, but I don’t feel any better. Charley laughs as I zip up.
“This is where you grew up?” Charley says, shocked by its size. I ignore him. It’s a nice house, sure, but it never felt like mine. He says, “This is a pretty swank place.”
I dump everything in the sack onto the floor. Charley grabs a can of black beans and cuts it open with his pocketknife. He dumps half the can into his mouth and says through a mouthful of beans, “Protein.” When he swallows it all down, he empties his pockets—a gold ring and a couple necklaces, a silver bracelet and a few pairs of earrings.
“Not too bad,” I say. I guess we can trade it for enough junk to last half a week.
“This place is a hell of a lot bigger than our trailer,” he says.
“I thought you grew up in a shack.”
“Same shit.”
“It’s a good house,” I say, though I don’t know what makes a house good, and admitting that fact doesn’t feel right. “But it got different when my mom left.”
“Houses don’t change.”
“People do.”
Charley’s eyes wander and he loses interest. He walks off, wanders the hallway with a lighter to guide him. He lowers the flame to a spot on the wall that’s gashed open. “Probably got y’all for copper wire,” he guesses.
“Probably. Who gives a shit?” Truth is, I feel robbed.
Charley pulls the tire iron from his waistband and points it at the wall. “He must’ve cared about you some.”
“How you figure?”
“He took all the family photos when he left.”
“Anyone could’ve taken those.”
“What would copper wire thieves want with photos of you and your folks?”
I don’t tell Charley my old man pulled down the photos—three or four, maybe, because we never took many—the night he came home to learn my mom had left. I don’t tell Charley my old man stomped the frames to shards on the living room rug, then rolled it up and walked it down to the trash can on the curb. I tell him, “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
I walk to the window, look outside. Wind shakes the willow tree. Shadows quiver on the lawn. The bank’s got an auction sign planted in the yard. I wonder how much the house’s going for, but it doesn’t matter—money that big doesn’t really exist, not to me.
“Don’t you have any good memories?” Charley asks.
It’s a stupid question, but I consider it for a moment. “Sure. I just don’t remember any of them.”
“Shit, I get that. Me neither.”
I get a strange feeling of guilt, like my old man’s lurking somewhere nearby, spying on us as we survey the guts of his old house.
“Best memory I’ve got,” Charley says, “is these scars.”
“Doesn’t much sound like a good memory.”
“Well, it is. Because fuck him.” I try to imagine a cattle prod pressed against my skin, searing the flesh, but Charley raises his shirt and says, “He whipped my ass good with a vacuum cord. Reminds me what kind of hurt I can take.”
I think for a long moment, gnawing on something working its way around in my head. “Those scars,” I ask, “are from a cord?”
“Damn near fainted after the few first minutes,” he says, pride all about his face. He twists the stiffness out of his back, walks toward the front door.
I gather up everything and stuff it back into the burlap sack. It’s a good haul: along with the jewelry, we’ve got a gold lighter, a power drill, and a signed baseball, though I can’t make out whose name’s on it. We step out into the cold and walk down the street toward my car.
“How much you think we can get for that shit?” Charley asks.
“I don’t know. Not enough.”
“Not a bad take, though.” He drapes an arm over my shoulder and pulls me in, but I shuck him off. “But yeah, you’re right. Not nearly enough.”
❦
Charley’s different, or I am. Either way, I don’t trust him. When he invites Earl to sleep in the backseat one night a few weeks later, it annoys me that he doesn’t ask. Still, it’s nice to be around someone who hasn’t gotten under my skin yet.
Earl’s an old guy, some kind of veteran. He looks like he’s got real tough luck. His hair’s thinning and gray, and his pants always look damp. He’s nice enough when he’s got his wits, but if he drinks too much Old English, he forgets how to speak and only communicates in grunts. Whatever he remembers steals his words, I guess.
One morning, Earl says, “I’m glad y’all took me in.”
Y’all? I think, but I don’t argue.
“Those skinheads been following me around,” Earl says. “I seen them hurt some folks real bad. Good folks. Y’all seen them?”
“Yeah,” Charley says. “Assholes. I’ll catch one on his own when I get the chance.”
I think about Charley’s scars, what other bullshit he’s cooked up. After a while, we prepare. Charley pulls off his belt and we tie off. When the junk sinks in, we all get quiet and float around in our own heads. I see my old man in my mind, watching me through windows, ducking behind parked cars, lurking around corners. But each time I snap out of it and focus my eyes, he disappears.
I nod off and wake up later that night, still cloudy and low. The junk’s worn off, and Earl’s rustling around in the backseat, too loud for me to sleep. Mist is spread across the windshield. A group of skinheads walk past, but they never see us. I swipe sleep from my eyes and turn around.
“What’re you doing, Earl?” I ask, but then I see he’s rubbing one out, staring right at me. I look away and a big, loose laugh knocks around in Earl’s chest. “What the fuck, man?” By the time I look back, he’s left a load on the floorboard.
I reach over and crank Charley’s collar, twist it until he’s awake and sits up. “What?” he shouts. “What’s the problem? I’m trying to sleep.”
“Am I fucking blind? I know you’re sleeping.”
“If you know it, then why the fuck are you waking me up?”
“That.”
“‘That’ what?” Charley glares at me like he’d just as soon peel away my skin, but then Earl grunts and laughs again. He swivels in his seat to see. “Oh, shit.” He pauses. “Well, I mean. What did you expect?”
“I didn’t expect the motherfucker to blow a load all over the backseat. Make him clean that shit.”
“Earl, you gotta clean that up,” Charley says.
“Eat my dick,” Earl says. He opens the back door and slides out.
Charley and I sit there, quiet. After a while, he says, “What now?”
“‘What now’ is you clean that shit.”
“Listen, I’m sorry,” he says, but it isn’t an apology I want. It’s my hands on his throat, to hurt him more than whatever bullshit he’s made up about his old man ever could. “I can fix this.”
“Just fucking clean it up,” I say. Charley only sits there, scratching his arms. I turn off the engine and listen to it tick. He finally opens the door and steps out into the night. When he’s gone from sight, I’m still sitting there.
❦
March and April come, and the world warms up. The parks turn green. Then summer hits and sun burns all the grass dead. The nights get humid. All up and down Commerce Street, the buildings sweat. When the cops show up every few days to run off panhandlers, they baton us until we clear off the sidewalks.
I land a job bussing tables at a pizzeria. I wear long sleeves to hide the marks on my arms. I steal a wristwatch to make sure I’m on time. I sometimes imagine I see Charley—at bus stops, on corners, in the bathrooms of clubs—but we still haven’t crossed paths. I’m glad to not run into him. Maybe I overreacted, and I’d hide from anyone I felt I owed an apology. I make new friends, the same kind of people we used to take wallets and drinks off at the bars. I sometimes even manage to talk someone into letting me crash on their couch. But saving up for my own place isn’t easy, and the dealers keep raising the price of junk.
Around eleven, one night in July, I clock out at the pizza shop and set off for my car. I walk down Commerce and try to find the moon in the sky, but clouds are crowded everywhere. I slow my pace when I reach Honest Place. Jerry’s lumbering around on the sidewalk, smiling and slapping people on the shoulder. I want to ask him whatever happened after he shot the kid, but I figure it’s not worth the time.
Coke cans and cellophane wrappers are all over the floorboard of my car, crumpled shirts and pants on the backseat. I dig around until I find a five-dollar bill, then head back out.
I’m looking for a place to cop when two police officers start following me. Voices speak ragged through their radios. I turn down one street, then another, lose them, and then dip into an alley to wait.
When I turn back and look farther down the alley, I see them: six, seven skinheads all circled around a pile of blankets and clothes on the ground. A skinhead brings his boot down hard and whoever’s under the pile coughs. “Fuck it,” another says, and they turn toward the street.
His arms look meatier and his head’s shaved, but the missing tooth gives Charley away. He looks me up and down and scratches his skull. The first punch puts me on my back. I see the old panhandler crawling down the alley. Boots pound my flanks. An elbow knocks something loose in my jaw. “Fucking junkie,” Charley shouts.
Sirens sound somewhere nearby, and the skinheads run. Only luck leads me to Charley’s leg in time. I latch on and topple him as he lunges to leave. I wrap myself around him. “Wait the fuck up,” he says, but they’re already gone.
I squeeze Charley tight. He wrestles his switchblade from his pocket, tries to slice the arm I’ve cranked around his throat. If it breaks skin, I don’t feel it. I tear the armband off his sleeve and punch his temple over and over until he drops the blade. I stand up, pick up the knife, let him loose.
I stand there heaving, watching the old panhandler at the far end of the alley. The panhandler turns the corner and disappears. I’m halfway to my car when the shakes start up. I hunt for the bill in my pocket, but it’s gone. I spot a couple skinheads leaning against a lamppost across from the old bookstore. I see my old man with the hammer in his hand. I remember what Charley asked me, what kind of person I am, and I nod their way. My muscles grab. A fresh film of sweat trembles me. My stomach spins. I know this won’t end well, but I’m off the curb, taking a step into the street, then another, until the skinheads stiffen their backs. Clouds above crash into each other like fists. Neon lights flash in a puddle. In my pocket, my fingers shiver against the steel blade.
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