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get by?” Jenks asked.   “Cleaning out people who have even less than you do?”
    “Nobody’s got less than me.”
    “Don’t be so certain, you prick.”   The rage suddenly prodding him like a branding iron.   “You see kids out there?   You see mothers who can’t feed their children?”
    “Fuck them.”
    Jenks backhanded Baldy, hard.   The loud crack of bone on bone echoed across the high corners of the shelter but didn’t seem to disturb or rouse anyone.   Not even the mustache, which seemed content to watch the proceedings.  
    Baldy let out a soft grunt of pain and his eyes wobbled around in their sockets for a moment before focusing again.  
    Jenks released him and stood there staring.   “Get out of here.   Go sleep in the park.”
    “And what if I said no?”
    Might be fun.   “Do you really want to find out?”
    “Sure.”
    Jenks nodded.   He wanted to know as well.   He cocked his head and felt the rage reaching through him like timid fingers, moving backwards and forwards through time.   It connected everything he’d been to everything he was now and was about to become.   Other men had money and fine memories and lessons learned from their lovers and fathers and mentors.   Jenks figured, Okay, so this is what I’ve been given.   It had been accumulating for more than a year, since his wife’s whispering laughter while she hid in another room, giggling on a cell phone that sometimes racked up a monthly bill that topped $250.   All these fucking plans in the world and she had to fuck around with a chatterbox, couldn’t even change her calling plan or just meet the guy at Penn Station and let him splurge.
    A dog began to mewl.   Or maybe it was coming from inside his chest.   The blackness took over and he could feel his teeth drying.   He realized he was smiling and had been for a while.   He couldn’t feel the butterfly blade in his hand but he could hear it spinning and snapping closed.   It sounded as resolute as the word of God.   The dogs wanted blood.   Warring angels barked orders with that same sound.   The children needed milk.  
    He moved on Baldy and Baldy said, “Wait, you crazy bastard, don’t kill me, I’m going.”  
    Baldy spun and ran for the front door and Jenks took two steps after him, his heart dropping with sudden intense disappointment.   He was still curious about exactly what might have happened, what should have happened, what the proper order of things was supposed to be now.    If the ages of civilization had been peeled away far enough inside his DNA to get back to the basics of one man’s teeth in another man’s throat.   Baldy was right.   Murder was in the air.   Jenks turned and a poodle was pissing in terror.

7
     

    The whining of pets, children, and addicts grew louder with the dawn.   Jenks listened to the din as if it were elevator music, something you had to put up with until you reached where you were going.  
    Breakfast was being served in the dining hall of the shelter.   Dishes banged together, grease fires occasionally roared.   He could smell ham and eggs, powdered milk, fresh bitter coffee brewing, and, beneath it all, blood.   The dying AIDS patients, the crackheads’ wounds, the sores of the unwashed.   The usual stirring morning sounds reminded him of home when he was a kid.   His father hacking, his mother sighing, his brothers grousing and arguing.   It was all here.  
    He checked his watch.   Somehow it had survived through everything.   Losing the suburban world, time on the street, working the boat, sleeping on the beach, the cheap-ass watch had made it.   There was probably a moral there, or a metaphor, but he didn’t have time to work through it.   It was 8am and Angela was at the front desk.
    She ran the show, all right, you could sense it the second you saw her.   A bullwhip of a woman, tall and lean without an ounce of fat.   All muscle and tendon and hard edges.   But with a blunt