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smoke ring to dissipate completely, then turned to me with narrowed, searching eyes. “This girl,” he said. “You’re interested in her?”
    “Why?”
    “Because if it’s the girl I have in mind she’s a psycho.”
    “That’s her!” I burst out with elation. “So you know her! Do you know where she lives?”
    “No, I don’t and I wouldn’t want to know.”
    “What are you talking about, Baloqui?”
    “Who can say?”
    “Who can say, you dumb spic? Who can say?”
    “Alright, alright! I didn’t see it myself. Someone told me.”
    “Told you what? ”
    Here Baloqui launched into a story so spectacularly stupid that at first I was sure he was pulling my leg. An eyewitness, he insisted—his thick, black eyebrows puckering together in keeping with the gravity of his message—had told him that Jane was seen levitating over a crowd at the refreshment counter at our beloved Superior cinema and had words with an usher before settling back down on the ground and running out into the street and out of sight. You could see he’d boned up on Poe because he ended with a spookily delivered “none knows whither.”
    I said, “You’re kidding me, right?”
    “Swear to God!”
    “No, it’s a joke.”
    “Well, not a funny one, then, is it?” he said pissily.
    I wanted to shove needles into his eyes.
    “This so-called eyewitness,” I said. “Who was it?”
    “It was Eddie Arrigo.”
    “Eddie Arrigo?” I echoed dully.
    I couldn’t believe my ears. Arrigo, after being left back three times, had finally gotten into a class graduation photo, all smiley in his blue serge confirmation suit, yet his legend lived on to benumb the normal mind and outshine things like cigarette ash and coal. At dismissal from class each day, when we would march in twos to the corner of Third Avenue, we would pass the all-glass second-floor front of a tarot card reader named Madame Monique, who in actual fact was Arrigo’s mother and had once told Eddie, who then passed it on to us, that the twenty-seventh quatrain of the coded predictions of Nostradamus had been “seriously and widely as hell misconstrued” and that in truth it had to do with an alien “research” spaceship hidden inside the Goodyear blimp, though I suspected her interpretation of the quatrain had been seriously damaged, if not maimed, while in transport, inasmuch as Eddie had also once soberly reported that his mother’s faithful spirit guide, “Irving,” had told her that the Japs would attack Pearl Harbor—“a Hawaiian thing,” as Irving had put it—on March 4, 1941, “April twentieth the latest!” So, okay, Captain Future of Captain Future Comics was always battling against the so-called “Yellow Peril,” which was diplomatic code for Chinks and Japs and maybe even Samoans, for all we knew, but that wasn’t supposed to happen until 19 70 !
    “Eddie Arrigo, Baloqui? Arrigo? What drugs are they insinuating into your sangria?”
    Baloqui wouldn’t look me in the eye. Instead, he flicked his cigarette butt into the street, then turned around and strode back into the library, as usual walking tall and with his chin tilted upward as if about to be awarded both ears and the tail while inwardly smoldering and thinking, “To hell with these mocking gringos who wouldn’t know friendship from a used piñata!”
    But he really had me going. Big.
    I went back into the library, grabbed Portrait of Jennie off the shelves and took a seat at a reading table as far from Baloqui as I could, though he was still sitting facing me, slouched down low in his seat and with his black eyes shooting death rays at me from an inch above the top of the book he was holding propped open on the desk in front of him. I tried not to notice. Good luck! Every time I looked up from my book Baloqui’s baleful stare would be on me like some vengeful Latino Banquo’s ghost until I finally decided, Screw you and your Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with fried green bananas and rice and