A flesh sack filled with bones and precious organs hits twenty-grain sand-paper and bounces, then skidds up against the curb of a street in Fresno. Tires chirp to a halt and the curb-side door of a car wrenches forward on its hinges. The seal-like, barking protest of forced metal echoes on the high, blank wall of an old wherehouse, marking a link in the chain of disturbance that makes its way through the neighborhood. Someone grunts in the car and fumbles with the door as it swings back closed. The flesh sack comes alive in the fastest run it has ever known. Before two men can get out of the car the flesh and bones are up an alley and around a corner. 'He's just some punk; don't strain yourself,' it is said.
For Jimmy, it was a long, hard run on hard, glass-strewn, sharp-gravel pavement; but his bare feet were nearly prepared for that kind of use: the old, calloused balls are now worn and deformed like the fiber of ground duct-tape, but they did their job. The quarter-inch protrusions in the rough asphalt did not puncture, and only bruised his feet a little. Still, they hurt a lot, and he had stopped several times to convince himself they were not bleeding before he made it to his room.
After his body reabsorbed its adrenaline sufficiently ‹ he poored a quart of water into himself to speed the process ‹ Jimmy let its chemistry take him to sleep. He lay there for an hour until the heat of the air and the noises in the streets had him up again. He'd just about learned to sleep through either one alone, and even both at once, before tonight. But now sirens, pairs of footsteps, and loud voices in the dead of night all made him nervous personally. Every sound was its own and each penetrated his consciousness as decisively as the wrenched door had penetrated the quietude in the neighborhood. It disturbed Jimmy to find that he was passive in this regard. He could only wait, as time after time his vague and tired thoughts were penetrated by the harmless shifts in the world about him. After each little disturbance, he could only wait for his heart to cease its agitation. He had no control.

The thought occurred to Jimmy for the second time. 'Like duct-tape,' he mumbled to himself as he turned up the palms of his hands and touched them gingerly with the balls of his thumbs, testing the surface. The palms were already nearly dry, yet the scabbing was flexible enough to let him use his hands some. He went on to examine his elbows, knees, his feet again (he still could not believe they were hardly damaged and certainly weren't bleeding), and, as best he could, the large scab over the bottom of his right ass-cheek and the back of the thigh. The word 'duct-tape' only became stronger in his mind. He heard himself say it and saw it like the gross neon trade-marks that filled the outdoors of recent nights.
It hurt some as he peeled the bedsheet off that big scrape behind him, but the sheet had absorbed some fluid, so the wound was almost as dry as his others. Fiber from the sheet clung to the tacky scabb-gue in a staggered pattern. 'The pink is just a pretty cover,' he was thinking, 'Underneath we're cased in duct-tape.'
The more he thought about it, the more surprised Jimmy was at how well he had come through the escape. He should have started jumping out of cars sooner ‹ he could have saved himself a lot of shit and a day or two getting out here. But now he knew his body better, and though he felt like shit, he was encouraged as he looked at the patches of coarse fiber that had been forming and strengthening for only a few hours. He felt better than he had since he got here; like he had a foot on the ground and could maybe take a step without worrying about that twenty-grain waiting below. ‹ after all, all it did was take the paint off.

What keeps Jimmy coming to AlleyBurger are the cheekbones that frame her dark eyes and the glow of her that comes out of the most perfect skin he has ever seen or known in the world. She knows by now not even to ask ‹ she just brings the 'water, no ice' along with the menu and tries to give him her best smile. But when he comes, he always comes near the end of her shift. By then she's too tired to be able to smile because something made her want to; she's not sure if she's giving him the automatic server's smile she gives everyone or whether she has managed to put a little life into it.
This time it's no different. But then he asks for a few cubes of ice to put in his water. And as she fumbles with the scoop of ice at the serving-station, she notices the time. It is not a wednesday or a monday or tuesday or thursday, so the Alley is open all night. Her shift began only an hour ago and that guy is here on a weekend asking for ice in his water. He looked like he could use it.
When Sarah brought the water with ice she was sure that there really was a bad scrape under his chin, and she now noticed his elbows, too. She says, 'Don't you want those covered?' and after a pause, 'We have some bandages in back ‹ if you want to...'
'No, that's ok. They're pretty strong now,' he says. He feels the left elbow carefully with his right-hand fingers, half demonstrating to the girl and half prooving to himself that what he said was true. The angle of that elbow, twisted inward against his body to give him a better view, and the self-concerned self-consciousness of his downward gaze look to Sarah like some mad distortion of a demure little girl. The angular, tense muscles in his shoulder, his size, and his battered state do not make him less a demure little girl; they only make the image more twisted. Normally, she feels awkward in a silence like this one.
When he looks up at her, though, he knows where he is. His face softens and his body rides full and steady on waves of even breath. Even those tense muscles in the shoulder forget in half a moment what made them tense and remember what a healthy shoulder is supposed to be. His self-absorbtion becomes easiness. The change is beautiful.
He has noticed her staring at him somehow strangely. She has the look on her face that he imagines he must have on his when he watches that glow from her skin. He knows that she is thinking the same sort of thing, and that she knows he knows; there is a kind of infinity between them.
Remembering what this place requires of him, Jimmy orders what he usually orders, plus a coffee with cream and sugar. They try to revive the infinite as she turns to her job. It is almost impossible for Jimmy to sit still and not explode in an electrical heat-storm. It is almost impossible for Sarah to walk a straight line to anywhere in particular, because the muscles in her legs and neck just want to quiver everywhere and stay at one place at the same time.
When she comes again with his roast-beef and baked potato, both have caught their breath. "Do you mind if I call you sometime, when you're not working?" Jimmy asks. The movie-house next door tossed a dozen customers into the restaurant five minutes ago and Sarah is very busy now.
"Sure, you can call me." And, tossing her head vaguely around herself to call attention to the newly-filled booths, "I'm pretty busy, so I'll write my number on the bill for you. Can I get you anything else?"

A short, wary voice answers with a kind of question, 'Hello?' Its urgency and thorough boredom throw Jimmy's rhythm off a bit; he is used to the patient, expectant greeting of people who only get calls from people they know. He is happy to get Sarah's voice on the line in place of this one. He notices that there is some of the urgency in her voice, too, as if she is coated in it and cannot quite pull herself out of it. It has an ugly sound and it is more disturbing because it is so far away and he cannot touch it.
When he asks her, it is as much to pull her out of that anxious boredom as to ask her for a date, as he planned. He asks quickly and a little awkwardly: "Can you meet me today for some coffee or something?" ‹ the original idea stays in his head, even if the reason does not.
"Sure. I work at four, so how about two or so, before then?"
"That's good. Ah, listen..."
"There's a good place on Fifth downtown I go sometimes; know it?
"I've only been here a couple a' weeks."
"It's called Angelli's or Argionni's or somethin'. Anyway, it has an Italian-style neon sign and it's on a corner downtown on Fifth ‹ you'll find it!
"Sounds easy enough. Well, I'll see you there," he concluded, but it did not seem like enough to set him free from Sarah and the chaos that seemed to be around her over there. "Have a good morning," he added, thinking of nothing else, meaning it, and feeling awkward again as he set down the phone and returned to his own world.

In the Italian Deli/Caffee they did not say much to one another. Both were glad to get away from where they would have been, and there was something in their eyes that made it worth the awkwardness to be there. Sarah had lived around here all her life. She moved out a 10 months ago. Jimmy had come here from Wyoming a little over a week ago. He had a room in a bad part of town.
Sarah said, "I like to watch people on the street." Jimmy agreed without saying so, and thought how nice it was to be walking the busy street with someone else. She knew where she was and where she was going, even with him there.
In 'Biggie's Music' only Jimmy noticed the percussive music of CDs clacking like an abacus as people browsed around them in the used section. Only Sarah noticed that the crowds of customers made a voice all together. Its rhythm was like piano exercises and its tone like laughter. It was like a language no one knows. They realized both at once that neither was looking at the disks they flipped and that both were listening to something that no one listens to. This made them feel very connected among the comers and goers, though they had forgotten one another ‹ along with everything else ‹ the moment before. Sarah wanted to just sit with Jimmy, nothing else to be expected. Without really considering, she believed half consciously that there was no place around where that could ever happen.
That could only happen in the morning between two people who live together, she thought. Yes, that is the way things are: even with she and Theresa. On Tuesdays, when neither had work before lunch, sometimes they ended up just sitting with themselves. They had no TV. Small-talk had never led to anything, and it was still awkward for them ‹ they shared a place and some chattle, but little more. Sometimes, Sarah would sit in the sun on the creaky, metal kitchen chair. She would squint out through the glare at people's hats and hair; or she would look through the streaking window-panes at their umbrellas and bald spots down there. Theresa sat on the ugly living-room couch, looking profound as she fiddled with a leather tassle on a purse or buttoned and unbuttoned the coat she would wear when she left at 12 o'clock. Daydreaming like that, it was pleasing to feel another person there. Sarah thought that if it were just that ugly couch accross the room with no one on it she could not stand being awake on Tuesdays. She would have to sleep in until twelve-thirty and that always made her feel hung-over. Theresa also helped pay for things.
An ambulance approaches from down the street outside. It makes its way slowly past the open door of Biggie's Music and leaves three and a half seconds of silence in its wake.
The hubbub resumed as Sarah and Jimmy turned and left together without a word.
By the time they reached the park toward the south end of town, they had learned each others' gait and were comfortable together. Their bench faced a colorless human mass on the bench accross the path. It lay there so still that neither noticed it until they were seated.
Its presence affected their conversation. Conversations in the park were supposed to be free and easy. They sat silently looking at it, trying to figure out if it was male or female. They were silent also because they felt that its presence somehow demanded a respectful silence, as at a funeral. When they did begin to speak, it was about bums: a more solemn conversation than either had thought would strike up.
"I wonder what he did before he became a bum," said Jimmy.
"Theresa told me she met one who had been a teacher. She said the guy liked bein' a bum better."
"I wonder how many of those 'like-to-be-a-bum' stories are true. I could see bein' a bum, but I guess there's a lot more of 'em that're just screwed up."
"I bet if you tried it for a day you'd come back to work or kill yourse if you couldn't. It's not so bad from here, where you've got the choice, but when there's no way out..." Sarah trailed off, letting the words end themselves. She figured the thought wasn't worth the breath to finish out loud. Jimmy nodded understanding and she knew he understood. "Yeah, I don't think I could take it more than a week. I need a place that I've made, ya-know? A place that other people don't think is theirs." Jimmy was somehow talking about a memory; Sarah wanted to know what it was.

Jim returned home happy and found his appartment inside out. Because there was not much to his appartment, it looked mostly the same as when it was out-side out. He was intensely disconcerted by the knowledge that things were where they were in spite of him. Between last Tuesday and today, no one but he had seen the place, much less been in it.
His mattress was upside-down.
His duffle bag was gone.
The closet door was open and the windows were closed. The orange-mottled curtains lay on the floor in a row of four coiled piles, and there were paint chips strewn on the worn wood floor below where the mangled hanging-rods had been pulled partway out of the wall.
An edge of the little woolen rug from Tibet was turned up to expose the gouge in the wood-floor that he had covered.
The lid of his new pot had been removed, allowing the rice inside to dry up.
He took his bread from the counter, went to the rug, sat, and ate a hunk. He knew he should not be there, but his head was demanding a moment of silence and reduced blood-pressure. He listened to the low sounds of his own chewing, and did not try to form the phantoms of sight and sound that spawned in his head. Beneath it all there was a trajectory of thought leading to a purpose, and without considering why or how, Jim knew that the phantoms would confirm and defend the purpose before his conscience, and he would be able to do whatever it was he decided.
Jim felt raw like the scrape on his ass had felt the day before. He found a crumpled bank-receipt on the floor and a broken pencil in the open closet, where he sat cross-legged to write a short note. It took him three minutes, because he did not know how he should say to the landlord that he had gone and would not be making any payment. As he prepares the note, his ears feel red and there is tingling sweat at the roots of the hair on his head. The note read

Terry‹
Sorry. I don't wanna leave without paying. I didn't wanna leave. I hope your ok 'til I can pay. It might be awhile.

He descended the stair quietly and slipped the paper under a door before going nervously into the brightness of the street outside. He squinted like a mole for the first few paces, hoping no one would shoot him or clap a hairy, gold-ringed hand over his mouth and stuff him into a black car.
As his pupils closed to the light and his vision returned, his fear of the strangers shrank and his confidence returned as well. After all, this was only Stockton. These were people like other people. Only dirt-bag crooks haunted these parts. It would be a twenty-year-old hand and a beat-up blue Chevy that got him, if anything would at all.