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white strips from a pharmacy or grocery store. The staff say he has to go; this is a youth shelter, not a hospital ward. Carl waves them off. The Magician yawns and tells me he is tired. He is so tired and he makes his body go limp in our arms. Carl and I buckle under the load and then we are outside in the snow and I can barely see the car. The Magician is still wearing his cargo shorts and that Woodbine T-shirt, but he isn’t shivering. His skin is turning pink. He shakes awake in our arms, but doesn’t try to move his feet. We drag two parallel lines behind us in the snow. The air smells like McDonald’s fries and vinegar. The Magician mumbles in my ear that we should go watch a movie, go hide out in a theatre for a couple of hours. Only a couple hours until he can feel his feet again. His moustache is filling up with white flakes. He wants to know where we are going.
    He asks Carl if he remembers watching
Death Wish
, if he remembers Charles Bronson holding that gun to a mugger’s head on the subway. He asks about that power, about the will it must take to kill a man. Easy enough to put a horse out of its misery if you have to—if you must. Easy enough to pull that trigger even if you aren’t Charles Bronson, even if your hands aren’t steady. My hands are getting cold, we’re all turning different shades of pink out here, but Carl can’t find the keys to the Chevy and the Magician wants to tell us more about horses. He wants to tell us about the best way to feed horses and about Charles Bronson III, the strongest of all creatures, the noblest of the beasts. He says he will ride again. Carl isn’t listening; he’s trying to find the keys somewhere in his jacket. The swirling snow bites at my ears and all I can see is the Magician moving his lips, trying to speak. Every word is swallowed by the wind, drowned out by a howl from somewhere down the highway. Somewhere cold. The Magician smells like McDonald’s and his eyes are pink around the edges. His lips keep making frosted words.
    I can’t hear a thing he says.

In a Car in a River outside Peoria, Illinois
    The funds from the church were deposited in her name. The assets he couldn’t hide in Cayman banks or Swiss accounts were placed in safety deposit boxes that only she could open. The countless dollars invested by friends, family and parishioners—all of it floating in offshore bank accounts or squandered on those women out in Reno, the ones who will lick the salty tears off your face for five hundred dollars an hour. The endless shrimp he swallowed as his belly grew wider and wider, the gold watches he lost in cabs and limos with rented drivers and tinted windows. Albert Kale wants to apologize for all of this. He wants to make amends, but at the moment he is still struggling to breathe as water filters through the windows of his ’87 Camaro, a gift from his wife on their twentieth anniversary. It was his favourite car in their whole garage.
    Albert Kale still believes drowning is less painful than hanging from his belt in a jail cell, swinging like some meaty pendulum. Albert Kale believes they would find him with his feet pointing north in the morning like a compass, a reminder of greater constants, of things beyond our brief reckoning here. He believes drowning will be less painful than a prolonged trial, than all those weeks on the stand, than facing the crowds that once came to worship in the house he built for the Lord. Albert Kale isn’t sure if he still believes in God. He knows death in this car in this river won’t happen in front of an audience. It won’t leave a bright red arc behind.
    The water in this car is cold and it is up to Albert’s neck now. He keeps his seatbelt on because this is still supposed to be an accident. His heart pills, his liver pills, his pills for a back broken by one of his horses down in Louisville—they float around him in the car like spent confetti. Albert Kale knows he could have swallowed those pills in