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goddammit!”
    â€œShow tell the barter man,” says Treefrog.
    Elijah drops the blanket to the ground, delves down into his sweatshirt pocket, and takes out a softpack of menthols. He taps the pack and three cigarettes emerge.
    Treefrog lets the ball go jittering through the gravel at strange angles, way down toward the six-foot-high mural of Martin Luther King. He takes out six plastic lighters from his coat pocket, arranges them on both his palms, and says, “Choose your poison, man.”
    It’s all one swift motion and the orange neon lighter is grabbed from Treefrog and three cigarettes are gone from the pack and already Elijah is on his way back down toward his cubicle in the southern part of the tunnel.
    Treefrog puts the cigarette in his mouth, flicks his lighter. He feels a clump of snow land on his cheek, and he says aloud for a second time, for symmetry, for equilibrium, “Underground snow.”
    *   *   *
    The first winter he came down it was so cold that his harmonica froze to his lips. He was sitting on the catwalk and hadn’t warmed the Hohner. It stuck to his mouth, and skin peeled away when he yanked the harmonica off.
    Later, topside, he was caught stealing Chapstick from the pharmacy on Broadway. He tucked the small thin tube under his tongue to hide it, but a clerk saw and stood in front of him, pushed him backward. Treefrog tried to step around the man, but the clerk grabbed him by his long hair and yanked him into a display of cold medicine, the bottles of pills clattering to the ground. Treefrog stood up and broke the clerk’s nose with a single blow of his fist, but an off-duty officer came up behind him and put a gun to his temple and said, “Sonofabitch, don’t move.”
    The gun felt cold against Treefrog’s head. He thought of how a bullet might sound to a dying man as it ricocheted through his skull, and he asked the cop to put the gun on the other side of his temple. But the cop just told him to kneel on the ground and put his hands in the air.
    As he knelt, Treefrog spat the tube of Chapstick out on the floor. A small crowd had gathered to watch. The clerk picked up the tube with a piece of tissue paper. All the time Treefrog had the harmonica warming in his armpit.
    When the uniformed cops came he couldn’t remember his real name and they shoved their nightsticks into his ribs, jabbed hard, searched him for weapons, and handcuffed him. The harmonica fell down his sleeve to the floor. They stamped down, and their black shoes crushed the Hohner. It was almost ruined; the metal was bowed down into the row of reeds, it made a sad silver lip. They asked him his name over and over again, and, with his arms stretched above his head, he kept shouting, “Treefrog, Treefrog, Treefrog, Treefrog!” Later, when he got the harmonica back—after two nights in the holding cell—it still smelled of his armpit. Not wanting to lick at his own body, he didn’t play the Hohner for a week.
    *   *   *
    Warm from playing handball, he takes off his coat and drops it on the gravel, then stretches out his arms like a man crucified. He looks up to the grate and lets the flakes fall into the cups of his filthy hands, where they melt. He rubs his fingers, freeing them of tunnel dust, brings his hands together, and washes his face with the snow water, letting some of it drip to his tongue. Then he scrubs the back of his neck and feels a cool droplet meander down the collars of his shirts and soak into the back of his thermal undershirt. It has been weeks since he had a wash. He rubs the cold water on his Adam’s apple and opens each of the shirts in succession. In one move he pulls the tight gray thermal over his head, throws it onto the heap of clothes near the tracks. His chest is scrimshawed with stab wounds and burns and scars.
    So many mutilations of his body.
    Hot paper clips, blunt scissors, pliers, cigarettes,