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way again, but once they were outside again on the street, her waiting at the bus stop and crying, he stepped up behind her and said yes, he would marry her, if that was what she wanted.
    King lit a fresh cigarette off the one he had going. “Was that what
you
wanted?”
    Smith shrugged. “I guess so. I wanted them boys to have a father. I figured Juanita’n me could come together on that.”
    â€œI think you did an honorable thing.”
    â€œNaw,” Again, that satiric grin. “I was a fool.”
    He’d tried, said Smith, to provide for the boys and their mother, but maybe—who knows?—he didn’t try hard enough or just wasn’t meant to be married, or maybe he had an inverted Midas touch so that everything he brushed against transmogrified into crap. He gave up going to school, he got a second job with a moving company, and after two years he was able to get them into a bigger place, a housing project, in Altgeld Gardens, though it seemed like even with two jobs there was hardly anything left at the end of the month after he paid the bills, and somehow—he wasn’t sure how—what little was left he wound up putting on another bottle of whiskey because he needed that to wind down and get to sleep some nights; and there wasn’t much time either to go to church after he took a third job as a night watchman on the weekends, or to spend with the boys, who started cutting school and keeping bad company, or with Juanita, who, he discovered, liked Colombian Gold as much as he did Johnny Walker (Black), so much so—according to one of his neighbors—that she slipped away in the afternoons when he was working to see another man who sold exactly what she wanted, though his neighbor said
he
had no idea how Juanita was paying for it, and when he confronted her with this the fights began, him accusing her of infidelity, her damning him for his drinking, their shouting going on sometimes all night, so loud other residents threatened to call the police, and her boys couldn’t bear that, naturally; they took to staying away from the place as long as they could, and after a time so did he, feeling thankful he was so mired in nickel-dime jobs that he had a way to escape that household, escape thinking about himself, escape the near hysteria he felt when he realized his life was a nightmare, a ghastly joke on everything he’d once dreamed of becoming. He rode the streets forhours some evenings after work, simply to avoid returning home, and it was on one such night in 1963, after cruising the South Side until he was nearly out of gas, that he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell he lived. Try as he might, he could not remember the address or recognize the street. Other things were gone too, whole quadrants of his memory. Unable to get home, he pulled up in front of a police station and told them his predicament, and they held him overnight for evaluation.
    They held him for a long time, first at the station, then at an institution in Elgin, because when the police knocked on his door, discovered it open, then stepped inside, they found Juanita’s three boys strangled in their beds and pieces of their mother distributed here and there throughout the apartment. When they told him, Smith wept in his cell. He swore he knew nothing about it. Twice he passed a polygraph test. They could not convict him of the crime, but they did send him to Elgin, where he worked sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes with other patients cleaning up the grounds around the hospital, and met with doctors who spent two years helping him patch together the broken pieces of his personality. When he was released, there was nowhere for him to go except to Vera Thomas, who gave him back his old room and accepted the little he could offer her from what he made doing odd jobs, here and there, on the South Side.
    After a silence, Smith and King drew breath at the same