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They were piling into the cab to take Rhonda to the hospital when two police cruisers closed in front of the Alamo, cherries pulsing the dark river. Somebody else must have phoned them and there they were, cuffing Ralph, pushing him by the head into the back seat.

An ambulance blinked up and one of the attendants got out and snapped down the legs on a gurney. “Where's the victim at?”

A tall cop said, “What victim? The victim of history and circumstance or the one he just carved up?” He laughed.

Rhonda wheeled around, bandage on her arm bright. “Don't you fuck dare talk about him!”

In the rear of the cruiser, Ralph was swimming back and forth across the dark blue cage, slamming the windows, the wire mesh.

————

Marcel immersed himself in booze. He drank like a man taking off his clothes and getting into a pool of water. Floating the way a heart floats in a chest. That's how depressed he was.

“Rhonda's cut me off,” he said to me, “but I still let her use my phone. What the hell. Know what I mean, Sean?”

“Kind of, I guess.”

“Well if you don't, you will soon enough. You know what I just noticed about you?” Marcel said. “You're kind of quiet the way I was when I was a kid.”

I never felt quiet. I just thought nobody ever listened to me.

“I'll tell you something you probably won't believe, but when I was your age—and this is just between you and me, OK?—I had a club foot that since has been repaired by surgery. Would you believe I spent every recess of my school life over by the playground fence, looking out at the street so I wouldn't get a soccer ball bounced off my face?”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.” He patted his chest with the palms of his hands. “And look at me now. The sky's the limit. You'll see.”

A few days later Marcel presented me with a bike, an expensive BMX. It wasn't new, but Marcel said it was even better than new since it had already been broken in. He'd found it in the river and used a solution to clean off the rust.

He said he was crossing the bridge on his way to the Shamrock bar when he caught something glittering in one of the pools. He couldn't believe it: a bicycle, the chrome rims glinting like a pair of eye glasses.

Maybe somebody stole it and threw it off the bridge when the water was high. Or maybe it happened during winter and had spent months on the ice covered in snow. Poor people were always going out onto the ice and falling through. They fell through cracks and were swept away by the current, never to be heard from again. The mounties didn't even bother to look for them until spring when they could drag the river. By then the victims were misshapen balloons hung up in debris after spending all winter locked in their frozen bodies under the ice.

That night, on his way home from the Shamrock, Marcel stumbled down to the river, over the sandbars, and waded the shallow water to the pool. He stripped off his shirt and pants and slipped in. He said he felt superhuman: doing it for me because a boy my age should have a bike.

He floated on the surface, looking down at the round lenses of the wheels. That's when he saw them—blue shapes darting, flashing in the blackness.

“Fish,” Marcel told Mom and me, “maybe half a dozen of them. Big bottom feeders—carp or suckers. Maybe even sturgeon—”

I pictured shadowy blades hovering above the bicycle, facing into the slow current, mouths sucking up food.

“But the river's drying up,” Mom said as Marcel oiled the chain of my BMX. “The water's so shallow—” she looked at the river, one hand in a salute against the sunset. “How are they supposed to get out?”

“They aren't,” Marcel said. “That's the whole idea. It's nature's way.”

The metis kids climbed up out of the river and crossed the park to ride my bike. They couldn't do it any better than me though. I guess they'd
never had a bike before either. They wobbled up and down the street in front of the Alamo, weaving in and out of traffic until my mom put her foot down. She hated them and made me understand we weren't like them, we weren't.

————

A few nights later I was entertaining myself by tightrope walking the rim of the fence that separated the Alamo from the chrome-and-glass condo next door when Mom clicked up the sidewalk in her high-heeled shoes. She brushed off the seat of a kitchen chair and sat down next to Marcel.

“You'll be pleased to know, Sean, that I begin work tomorrow at Beauty City—”

“Congratulations, Anita,” Marcel said. “That calls for a toast.” He hoisted his beer bottle into the air.

“Thank you, Mister Gebege.” Mom took out a cigarette and Marcel held his lighter under it. “I see you are still supporting the breweries.”

Marcel squinted: “Listen, I drink for to get free.”

“No doubt,” Mom laughed, adding that she had spent too many years working in the bar industry not to recognize a man living his life out of a bottle when she saw one.

Marcel looked wounded.

“I'm teasing,” Mom said, smiling, blowing smoke out of her nostrils. I could tell she was feeling high, excited about the future. “Thank you again,” she said, “for Sean's bike.”

It was chained to the fence. In the dark it looked like a pair of sunglasses. I wasn't allowed to ride at night, but after school I loved to pedal through the streets above the Alamo. Some of the richest old homes in town were up there—pillared porches, yards full of big trees. As I sped by them it seemed likely that Mom and me would end up in one of those places. Good luck was just around the corner. At dusk I would ride home, following the gravel alley that descended steeply to the river. The yards on top had green swimming pools, but these quickly gave way to overgrown vegetation and broken-down cars. The yards near the bottom were hidden behind rickety unpainted fences, and big dogs threw themselves into the boards, barking loudly as I passed.

Marcel offered Mom a beer and this time she took it. “What the heck?” she said, and held it out as if toasting the river. “To new beginnings,” though it was the same old beginning, same old snowball starting to roll.

“Don't look at me like that, Sean, I'm just celebrating. Can't I do that?”

“Your mother is allowed to have some fun too, isn't she, big guy?” Marcel punched me lightly on the shoulder and Mom giggled.

Somehow at that moment I knew I was in for another uncle. Which meant I would be losing both my mother and only friend in one fell swoop, but at least we'd have a phone.

I looked away, up at the flat purple streak above the river. I had patches on the knees of my pants and oversized Sally Ann runners on my feet. I started to feel sorry for myself, but then I thought of my bike, and my spirits soared a bit.

————

Every day a different river. The water kept dropping until parts of it shrunk to a thin trickle like an overflowing sink. The skiers and kids moved upriver where the current still gouged the channel deep. In front of the Alamo, sandbars started to sprout grass.

A couple of days after Mom started making me call Marcel “Uncle Marcel,” Ralph came to the door, slapping the fat end of a baseball bat into the palm of his hand. Rhonda wouldn't press charges, so he was on the street again.

“Where's Marcel, and no bullshit, OK? I got nothing against you, man, but I know your old lady's got a key to his place, and if you don't let me into it I'm going to have to club you.” Even though I was only eight, he waved the bat in my face. I doubt he would have done anything to me, but I let him into Marcel's anyway. For a lot of reasons it seemed like the right thing to do.

Marcel wasn't in his apartment so Ralph commenced to smash things up. Caved in the aquarium so water gushed onto the carpet, then ground his heels on the little fish that flipped around on the floor. Punched a few holes in the gyprock. Brought the bat down over the top of the TV so the tube exploded across the carpet. He placed a few long-distance calls on the
telephone, then hung up and splintered it with the bat. Then he tucked Marcel's toaster oven under his arm and left.

Marcel was sitting on our couch shaking when I got back upstairs.

“Did he at least leave me one beer?”

“You're lucky he didn't find you. He wanted to break your knees.”

“Fuck him if he can't take a joke,” Marcel said, grinning. Then he shook his head in amazement. “But you're right, I'm lucky. I just keep pulling up aces.”

————

One of the metis kids drowned in the river, went down as if a weight was attached to his ankles.

A friend dove and dove for him, surfacing to fill his lungs, shaking his head. A grainy photo in the newspaper had the spray from his hair making a white flower on the water.

The mounties launched a small boat, dragged a grappling hook back and forth across the river. The water-skiers spiraled the area in their boat and a boy not much older than me sat on the prow, stabbing a paddle into the water.

The drowned boy's friends collapsed on shore, crying in disbelief. They had been swimming to the sandbar where the skiers partied, but they didn't make it. Their hands clutched the sand, their feet were in the river.

————

A few mornings later I went downstairs to go to school and found my BMX missing. I couldn't believe it. I thought I must have left it somewhere, but I knew I hadn't, and my next thought was, those fucking half-breeds had stolen it. Mom was right about them. All day in school I steamed. I pictured them climbing out of the water like mutant swamp monsters, taking what was mine. I almost totally forgot about the drowning. How could those hooky-playing sonofabitches steal my bike after I let them use it?

When I got home Uncle Marcel was sitting on one of the chairs. By now the grass was so long it draped over his lap like a luau skirt. He was pickled out of his mind.

“I have to show you something,” he said.

“What?” I looked around excited, thinking he'd found my bike.

Marcel said, “Right there in front of you. The car.” An old, bald-tired clunker was parked at the curb. “A friend owed me a favor so I got this off him for fifty bucks. What a steal, hey, Sean?”

A whistling started in my ears and I backed away. “You stole my bike,” I said.
“Didn't you?”
The idea just flashed in my mind.

“Hey, you hold on! I didn't steal anything.”

I glared at him. That bike was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was more than transportation, it
transported me
, changed the way I saw myself. When I was on it, skimming the streets, everything was possible. And now Marcel had taken it back.

“I didn't steal anything. It was my bike,” Marcel said. “I found it and I let you use it and then I took it back. Actually I found the original owner and returned it to him.”

“Liar!”
I cried. I couldn't help it. Huge, wracking sobs shook my lungs and I thought I was going to drown from lack of air.

When Mom came home, she stormed into my room. “I told you to keep that damn bike locked!” Her breath smelled of booze. “If you don't look after your things you don't deserve them!”

“I did lock it!
Marcel stole it!”

“Shut your dirty lying mouth!” my mom screamed at me, bringing her hand back to slap.

————

Though it wasn't mentioned in so many words, I'm sure it was partly due to the bike episode, to smooth things over, that we went to the fair. Also, Marcel hadn't taken the clunker anywhere yet and wanted to feel the road beneath him. For my part I'd never seen a circus, zoo, marine world, or wax museum, much less a fair, and though I hated the idea of being bribed into being nice and civil again, I really wanted to go.

As we were pulling away, Rhonda Bighead and Ralph were reeling through the park on the way home from the Shamrock. Rhonda's gashes had healed nicely and she was holding a bouquet of white flowers Ralph had torn from a bed in the park. When they came to a patch of red flowers, he bent like a hero and ripped out a whole plant. Rhonda hugged it to her, roots dripping dirt. Then she lost her balance, staggered a few steps, and
pitched over. Ralph tried to help her up, but toppled onto her, at which point she started yelling, slapping him on the head.

Marcel spewed some beer out of his nostrils, and Mom eyed him. She didn't mind him drinking, but drinking and driving didn't mix.

Marcel tooted the horn as we passed and Rhonda turned, cursing us, hurling flowers.

The clunker had a shot transmission, so we had to stop about every thirty miles for Marcel to add fluid. This was synchronized perfectly with his need to stop and water the ditch. It got dark and the pavement glistened like ice on a frozen river. For miles, it seemed, I could see the yellow Ferris wheel lights shining in the sky, and despite everything I got so excited I thought I could smell foot longs, corn dogs, and candy apples over the cigarette smoke in the car.

It was a bottom-of-the-barrel fair. Workers all tattooed up like a bad face; rides greasy, probably suffering from metal fatigue. The foot longs were about the length of your thumb and cost two bucks each. But so what? It was a fair! And the night was swept along in a blur of light and color, odor, sound.

Mom and Marcel rode the Death Trap, a bench chained to a giant arm that whirled around in the air like a propeller. Me, I flopped a rubber frog onto a lily pad with a huge tongue depressor and won a fly in a cube of clear plastic. Marcel limboed under a wooden rod set on bowling pins—passed through like he was kneeling on air—and won a stuffed snake he gave to Mom. Mom won a plaster sea gull for stumping the Guesser on what exactly she did at Beauty City.

“Hey boy,” the Guesser said to me as we were leaving his booth, “I bet I know what you want to be when you grow up.” A crowd of people had gathered to watch him perform, but nobody was investing in his act, so he was using me to drum up business. “Most kids want to be the same as their dad,” he said. “It's genetic.”

The crowd chuckled.