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and dragged the outer bone of his wrist across his nose before strangling Joe with his eyes one last time. After that, he was gone, down the hall to some other part of the dilapidated co-op. Even so, Joe allowed himself a smile. One day, he promised himself, he would get it right.
    “So get this down, Joe,” his father was saying. “You’re up on First Tuesday, six p.m. Today is Friday, so that means you have four days to get yourself together. The induction center is at Fourteenth and a street called Clay. You got that?” his father said.
    “Got it.”
    “You have to go to this one, Joe. You really do.”
    “Ask him about church again,” he heard his mother say.
    “Your mother wants me to ask you about church,” said his father. A few hard-to-parse mutters and his mother’s voice came on the line. “You have to soak yourself, Joe, or it will all fall apart. Get drenched in the Young Savior now, understand?”
    She had, Joe knew, no idea what she was talking about. How could she? His mother wasn’t inWestern City North. Up here, Joe had seen people who were soaked, drowning, really. Get soaked. A good chunk of the people in Western City North were so soaked in the Young Savior that their lungs were plugged and their hearts were suffocating. Every day in Western City North someone heard the Young Savior’s voice and put a bullet in their own heads or someone else’s. Whole quadrants of the city constantly wished to be elsewhere. But Western City North was the edge of the Homeland. This was the farthest they could go.
    “You do understand what I mean when I say ‘soaked,’ don’t you, Joe?”
    What did she know about being soaked? She meant the white-haired minister at their church who raised his voice ever so slightly when a passage struck him as illuminating a fundamental truth. She meant the brief tingle on her neck when the vocal lines of the congregants congealed in harmony on “Oh, the Burden Faced Down by My Bleeding Young Savior.” But she certainly did not understand what it was to be soaked in Western City North. His mother lived in Prison Complex J, an empty prairie of convicts and the people who kept them in.
    “Yes, Mother,” Joe said.
    “Soaked!” she repeated triumphantly.
    He could not help but roll his eyes into the phone. Immediately the Young Savior’s voice entered his head to chastise him: Do not remove thyself from the earthly wisdom of thy family. Quotes from the Young Savior had a knack for burrowing into his mind at the most annoying times. Too much damn religious school.
    “And one other thing.” His father had wrested control of the receiver once again. “Benny Dorton called. Long distance. I am not an answering service. You tell Benny that, you hear?”
    Sudden circuits of joy burst forth from the balls of Joe’s feet, pausing for a moment before racing up his body and rolling deliriously around his temples. “What’d he say, Dad?”
    “You’ll tell him that, won’t you? I can’t be called at all times of night.”
    The levels of joy began their imperceptible ebb. “Did he leave a message?”
    “He said you could find him at the millhouse. Does that mean he finally has a job? Benny Dorton with honest employment? Mr. Dorton will be glad to know, if that is the case.”
    Joe said nothing.
    “Joe? You’re still there, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “If you do happen by Benny, be sure and ask him to call home. I ran into Mr. Dorton, and he asked me to tell you that, in case you saw him.”
    “I’ll tell him.”
    “It’s an important matter about his brother, I believe. And one more thing—”
    “Nope, gotta go.” He had everything he needed. More, really.
    Joe hung up the phone and stepped out to the street. For the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel exhausted after a conversation with his parents. He asked the first wildhair he saw for the cross streets of the Millhouse, and headed that way.

    The place was easy to find, but the neighborhood