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needed air circulation, had been stolen. In the first bathroom, a horrible stench, suggesting raw, spoiled meat, periodically rose from the toilet. On such days, LaJoe and the family simply avoided using that bathroom. Sometimes she would pour ammonia in the toilet to mitigate the smell. LaJoe had heard rumors that the previous tenants had performed abortions there, and she attributed the smell to dead fetuses.
    The second bathroom housed the family’s one bathtub. There was no shower, a luxury the children had never experienced. The tub doubled as a clothes washer, since the building’s laundry was long ago abandoned, and the closest one was now a mile away. The tub’s faucet couldn’t be turned off. A steady stream of scalding hot water cascaded into the tub day and night. The boys had learned to sleep through the noise, but the constant splashing drove LaJoe batty. She had considered muffling it by placing a towel under the faucet, but then she realized that the bath would overflow. Instead, she used the towel to wedge shut the bathroom door, which was missing a knob.
    In the winter, the building’s heating system stormed out of control. The apartment could get like a furnace, considerably hotter and drier than in the warmest days of summer. Thesesummer months were a welcome relief from the dog days of winter.
    LaJoe had done what she could to spruce up the place, to brighten it. By the television, which she left on nearly twenty-four hours a day to discourage prowlers, she placed artificial logs. If they had been hooked up to gas, the imitation logs would have lit up, but the family had no such source of fuel. On the living room wall she had hung two identical drawings of a red rose, a portrait of Jesus (though she was no longer religious), and a rendering of a waterfall and a country home on black velvet.
    “You grow up ’round it,”
    Lafeyette told a friend. “There are a lot of people in the projects who say they’re not gonna do drugs, that they’re not gonna drop out, that they won’t be on the streets. But they’re doing it now. Never say never.” He paused. “But I say never. My brothers ain’t set no good example for me, but I’ll set a good example for them.”
    The apartment was cluttered. In the kitchen, in addition to the stove and refrigerator, there was a broken six-foot-high freezer and an old wooden hutch, which housed plates and glassware and, like the freezer, served to stop stray bullets that might come through the kitchen windows. Living on the first floor required such ingenuity. One woman placed big stuffedanimals in her windows in the hope that gang members would mistake them for people.
    “Mama, lemme help,” Lafeyette pleaded again. His words were lost in the roar of the elevated train, which passed just a hundred feet from their building. Lafeyette waited for it to pass. “Mama. Mama. I’m gonna take out the garbage.”
    “No, you ain’t.” LaJoe looked at Lafeyette and the others. They had had enough sitting. The shooting had stopped fifteen minutes ago. “Okay, Lafie, tie up the garbage. Don’t take it out. Just tie it up.”
    Lafeyette jumped to his feet and walked quickly into the kitchen, where he nimbly snatched the broom to sweep up a pile of paper. The triplets wandered into the living room, continuing their chatter, beseeching their mother to let them go outside. Pharoah lazily strolled to the couch, where he balled up, lost in his private thoughts. He clutched the bag of aluminum cans, oblivious of the activity around him. He too wanted to go outside. But there wasn’t much to do out there.
    The Riverses’ building and three other high-rises were laid out roughly in the shape of a diamond so that they all opened up on a concrete park. The two swing sets, which boasted only one swing between them, and the three sliding boards were, as far as anyone could tell, the same equipment that had originally been installed thirty-one years before, when the development