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big-ass grin on my face, and stepped in with the other foot. He yanked me to the pad and hosed me off. I wasn’t in long enough to bubble skin, but he said the acid would have eaten me to the bone.
    That’s what the gutter does to a guy, eats him to the bone.
    *   *   *
    Roxie is the kind who gets inside a guy’s head, the kind who hits hard. We met in a bar on the south side a year after I moved to Atlanta. We danced to Meatloaf, and she asked if I wanted to party. She was too skinny for my tastes, but when I slipped her sleeve up her arm and saw the track marks, I knew she wouldn’t mind me huffing paint now and then. We drove to an overpass that petered out on the other side, like the state ran out of money or a rich politician changed his mind, and right there, in drizzling rain, we screwed on the hood of her mother’s Honda Civic. After that, we were inseparable, and I quickly traded my high for hers. Seemed like the natural thing to do at the time.
    She’s white trash, I suppose, although I think there’s more to her. Sometimes, when I least expect it, she works an obscure word into the conversation. Like titular . She used that one time when she was off on a rant about the president. She’s told me so many stories about herself I don’t know which to believe. One day her father’s a Methodist preacher who stuck his finger where it didn’t belong, and the next he’s CEO of Minute Maid. Supposedly there’s a sister in Miami, or Houston, or New York, maybe Memphis. Like I said, the story changes day to day. Roxie’s a habitual liar, but I don’t care. What we had, what’s between us now, is real as it gets.
    *   *   *
    I park in a rutted drive, weeds knee-high in the yard, get out, and walk to the back of the house. A woman steps through the door and merges with the darkness. A stumble, a curse, and she’s gone. Inside, I pick my way down the cluttered hall, while breathing in a urine stench so strong it waters my eyes. In one of the bedrooms, a black man on a mattress, muscular legs expanding andcontracting, humps a white girl, or maybe a white boy. I can’t tell from this angle. I move on, down the hallway, to the kitchen. Crusted dishes clutter the sink, the counters, the refrigerator. A Mexican lies motionless on the floor.
    A moan in the living room, and when I turn the corner, Roxie’s naked on her knees in front of a guy on the couch. The guy’s name is TT Charlie, and he’s zipping his pants. I study her face, so familiar—the mole under her ear, the sliver of a scar on her cheek, the fine black hairs above her lip. Her eyes are my favorite part. They are a green paradox—innocently hard—eyes with staying power.
    TT Charlie nods in my direction, then says, “I got me some bad-assed Peruvian Pink Lady if you’re interested. Ain’t cheap. Sixty a quarter.”
    â€œI’m all right.” I watch a hooker I don’t know stumble into the room and sit in the recliner in the corner. She hikes her dress to her waist and spreads her legs wide as a wishbone. Her panties are yellowed in the crotch, and curly black hair, tight as a wire brush, grows on the inside of her thighs.
    â€œWhite boy,” she says to me. “Blow job’ll cost you ten, poontang’s twenty-five.”
    TT Charlie pushes Roxie away and hands her a quarter-gram. She pulls on hip-huggers and a red blouse, comes over and gives me a hug.
    â€œI need to talk to you,” I say. “About something important.”
    The woman in the recliner says, “You watch out, girl, that white boy’s vice through and through. You watch out or he be running you up town. I seen his kind coming and going. He put you in jail and now where you gonna be?”
    â€œShut up, Fayesha,” TT Charlie says. “Taz ain’t no vice. That’s his old lady.”
    â€œAll I’m saying,”