Union Square. Adrian Koesters

kept smiling, and approaching, and finally there was nothing left to do but wade out into the water and pull the boat to shore. The girl tumbled out of it, into Young’s arms and out of them, and he heard her say “Peter,” in an under-voice so passionate that it thrilled and terrified him at the same time, and he knew that whatever it had been that he’d won today, it might well in that moment have been lost to him again.

      Saturday Night: And In the End

      Young Mr. Emerson woke up on the ground in the dark to the sound of the lake water lapping, himself damp and nearly dead with cold and very hungry again. There was no food or coffee left. He knew he had better get up and get moving or he would die of the cold. He remembered exactly where he was, and that he needed to get to the train tracks. He put his hand out for his shoes, put them on in the dark, and, after a couple of mishaps and small twig branches stinging into his face, he found his way to the tracks.

      There was no street light, but there was a moon that was just about full, all but a small slice of it on the side, and he could see to get up on the tracks, to walk them, and then, for he was not a person whose physical instincts ever alerted him to anything, he was surprised to realize that he was not alone on the tracks, that something was behind him, something Petie had he been there could have told him was that sonofabitching mongrel Batista, who barked once as Young paused where he walked.

      He did not turn around, nor pretend to, nor wish to. He had the same fear of dogs that he had of most other living creatures that were not human or house cat—he was nervous around those, but not afraid of most of them. He could handle as many people as he needed, and he only had the one cat, but dogs were another thing. He thought if he continued to hop along the tracks, one of two things would happen: he would come to some place where he could call out for help, wherever that might be, or the dog would overtake him and kill him, but either way, standing still was stupid. Then the dog’s single bark, a command if he had ever heard one, told him he was right. In the moonlight, Young appeared like an old-fashioned cut-out silhouette, hopping like a woman with one shoe on over the tracks, a pony-sized animal picking its way over the tracks behind him.

      But Teddy remembered his promise, and at last Young saw the train approach and slow at the crossing where he stood, the dog having abandoned him at some juncture or other, Young waving his arms madly in delight. They got him on to the caboose where, to his dismay, that part of the universe he had previously imagined could only be experienced in forward motion melted away in reverse, just as the streets and avenues and buildings down home had done, so that now he could not make sense of either. He was certain, holding on to the iron rail of the car porch and looking out into the night and the light of the moon, that had there been any other way to get home short of walking thirty miles over the course of the next three days and sleeping next to alley cans in the nights, he would have taken it.

      He was reversing in himself as well, the solidified part of him that had been liquefied on the trip up to the lake that had changed him into a state wholly unfamiliar but completely welcome, not free but even independent of freedom, on which he had been changed from flesh to liquid perhaps even in the water of Lake Roland as he stood in it and hadn’t know it was happening to him even as he was becoming part of the same substance with it, now with each mile and marker and train track clicked away again behind him, began to turn Young back again slowly more solid and heavier and not enslaved but something independent of slavery, as if it were himself again, a conversion, from water to something like pudding and then butter to mud and whatever the next thing after that would be but soon after would be rock hard fall down and scrape yourself to death cement, himself and what he had inside of him all pavement, only sidewalk bounded by brief, so brief forays into the street and the sometimes soft or liquid asphalt, and when he stepped off that train, and he would hop off it as lightly as Donald O’Connor might do, that would be the end of both directions, and he would be finished.

      And that indeed was how it was. He let Teddy fill him up with some very good whiskey back at the railroad house, filched a rock-hard doughnut from the plate on the table there and chewed it down, and when he got home and passed into the vestibule through the front door, he looked down at the quarts of milk souring in the crate, and bent to tap his finger on the staling crust of one of the loaves of bread. He stood, his hand on the knob of the interior door, and didn’t seem to know what he must do next.

      “All that for nothing,” he said. And every night from now until forever, that goddamned slip.

      Part Three: Paddy Dolan.

      Thursday Morning: Into the Ring

      That morning and a couple of houses down from Fourteen Holy Martyrs Church, Paddy Dolan woke to the smell of bacon up the back stairs as it had every morning of what had become his life in that row house on Lombard Street, a block and a half up from Union Square, an ocean away from Killarney city where he’d been born and lived to seventeen years.

      As he woke, he savored the awareness of beer, girls, paycheck coming, and in celebration reached into his underwear to feel his privates. He stretched out his back and his hips, pulled at himself, then let his hand come out and his arm trail up over his torso and stretch over his head, his fingertips pressing for a moment under his nose. His own smell satisfied him, the mingling of it with the frying of bacon heartened and soothed him. Well, it was going to be another nice day. My God, how he loved this place. It was perfect.

      But as the light in the bedroom grew, Paddy’s mood changed to a dark and familiar thing. He had never been able to name it or know where it had come from. It was as if the light in the room was making it darker rather than brighter, that the day was going out of the room with the light. He knew if he didn’t do something right now, the darkness would grow until it took him over. He shook his head, fast, took a deep breath. Familiar and regular but until today only on Sundays, not ever on a weekday. Maybe the darkness was going to try to get in every day. Now that things were his, were perfect. He panicked in the darkness, and as it always was, he believed he couldn’t move, couldn’t move to shake it.

      The night before, that was it, something about the night. Hadn’t he slept well? Had he dreamed? He didn’t know. But at last he could let himself think of a shaft of afternoon light in a doorway, light on a full head of long, curly red hair, and as he did this, little by little the darkness returned to the regular light of morning.

      Remembering was one of the things, like fighting, he was good at. He opened and closed his eyes now, and opened them again as if to test what he’d just done, and when satisfied all was well, swung his feet over the side of the bed, stood up, stretched, yawned, and walked past the bed and dresser into the bathroom that opened directly into his bedroom, as if nothing had passed. He didn’t bother to close the door. His dad would already have gone off to his “job” sitting on a stool at his uncle’s corner store, and his mother was a length of stairs away, below him in the kitchen making his breakfast. He was himself again.

      “Patrick, get yourself up,” he heard her call up the stairs. “I can’t wait for you all the livelong morning.”

      “Right, then, Ma—I won’t keep the sodality waiting,” he yelled back down to her.

      They howled. His mother hadn’t been to church since they’d come to Baltimore after the war, even before Paddy had become the boxing best of the neighborhood. That was his ticket, a heavyweight champ was what he was going to be, in his mind already was. She’d go to hell sooner than let him leave the house in the morning unfed. He guessed she would even prefer it, so he was getting his breakfast and pretty well whatever else he asked for if she thought it was good for him. His dad might stay behind in the evenings when Paddy had a match on, but his mother was in the kitchen, cooking his meals and nervously standing by the wooden kitchen table while he ate. The nerves were not fussiness or sentimental. She had an sensible knowledge about whether he’d make weight for a match, and if she thought he was too far over, she’d whisk the plates away as soon as shove more of them under his nose if he was under. In the three years since he’d started boxing, during his last year at St. Martin’s high school, she was only over once, and that by less than half a pound.

      She should work at the ring, Paddy thought as he finished washing up. He’d like that. He’d