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Children sped past on their rusting bicycles, and the traffic along the street and the adjoining avenues was quick and noisy. It was as if the whole neighborhood had been resurrected with the morning light, and now, when people approached his car, they didn’t hesitate or step aside, but simply continued forward without so much as a break in stride. The bright sunlight seemed to serve them as a kind of shield against the dangers which inevitably returned with the night, and under its brief protection, they strode openly to the bus stops, talking quietly as they walked.
    For a while Ben sat behind the wheel and watched, just as he had the night before. But this time, he knew that he had only a few minutes to linger at the edge of the ballfield before the inevitable voice from the radio ordered him to headquarters. By now the detectives on the morning shift would be trudging up the cement stairs to receive what they had lately come to call their ‘combat orders,’ assignments which shifted by the minute, but which generally had to do with handling the crowds, paperwork and jailhouse overflow caused by the demonstrations. It was as if everything else had stopped, all the burglaries, assaults and domestic quarrels, and that now there was only this single, dreadful preoccupation with the streets, a great black pit into which everything else, the whole varied texture of daily life, had fallen.
    And yet, as Ben continued to sit in his car, his eyes slowly moving from one corner to the next, he could see that much of the general flow of life continued. Bearmatch went on with its routine, and from behind the wheel, he could sit quietly and take in its pace, its odors, the broad tone of its common life. He could see how the maids in their white uniforms gathered in little knots at the bus stops, how the laborers in their gray worksuits or shirtless beneath their tattered bib-overalls moved like a slow, silent army toward the railroad yards and sweltering steel mills. He could hear the morning shift-horns as they sounded loudly through the alleyways and over the sloping shanties, and he remembered that in his youth, they had sounded over his house too. He could smell the bacon grease, redeye gravy and warm half-risen biscuits, and for an instant they seemed to come from his mother’s kitchen, and he could recall how, in the morning, after breakfast, his own father and mother had moved out onto the street like the people who now flowed around him, taking him first to school, and then trudging on down the avenue to board the old electrical trolleys that crisscrossed the city on a grid of wire and steel.
    For a long time, his parents had been mostly ghosts to him, his father brought down by a slow disease, his mother simply dead for a reason no one at Hillman Hospital had ever bothered to explain. In the summer, as he remembered now, they’d sometimes fallen asleep in their swing while he remained inside, listening to the radio. Later he would find them slouched to one side, the old man’s face buried in his wife’s large, fallen breasts, the old woman’s head dropping so far down toward her husband’s that it looked half-severed, and both of them snoring wheezily while the lightning bugs twinkled in the humid air. But now they suddenly returned to him as more than bodies floating silently in a little wrought-iron swing, and for a moment he found himself wondering about what their lives had really been, what they had thought about as they sat together, listening to the crickets and katydids, the slicing sound the traffic made after a fierce summer rain, the tinkling bells of the trolleys, what they would think about even now if they were alive, what they would think about the uproar in the city, about the nameless little girl beneath the goalpost, what they, knowing about all this, would tell hi in he should do.
    The clack of the radio sounded suddenly, and after it, the dispatcher’s voice. ‘Headquarters calling Car 17.’
    Ben