Grief Street

screaming. Kowalski reached below the damaged table and ripped away a leg, as if it were merely a drumstick on a baked turkey. He hurled it through the window.
    “...Watch all the furniture go bye-bye!”
    “Joe!”
    “Want me to freaking pray? Say the freaking names!”
    “Please, Joe, don’t—!”
    “This here’s a nice, quiet house in a peaceable street. Know what I mean, Eva? All the time, people get away with murder in the peace and quiet.”
    Kowalski ripped away another table leg. This one he threw clear into the next room, destroying a television screen.
    “No—!”
    “You want to hear King Kong pray?” Kowalski moved toward his wife, with his arms raised over his head, the way he held them when he had a braided sap in hand and a cringing perp waiting for his dickprint. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”
    “No, please—!”
    “Johnny... Jimmy! Say the freaking names!”
    “Joe!

Thirty-four

    B y the lights of the usual millionaire presidential candidates of the two branches of the one big party, the only thing poor people have to fear is poverty itself. This is always a winning message. Most people with credit card debt and other such modem inconveniences are trained to believe they are not among the poor and downtrodden. Thus does presidential hectoring seem always to be about Somebody Else. True, we may be indebted up the wazoo, and unemployment may be just around the corner, but we have the saving virtue of being middle-class.
    Which is why the dead table at Holy Cross Church—and I suppose dead tables in parishes all over the country, too— has taken on a whole new atmosphere in the space of one generation. When I was a kid, everybody who showed up at the dead table on the second Wednesday of the month knew he was poor. This being neither news nor shame, people were as casual about chatting with one another as they were about trying on clothes for size. Nowadays, nobody chats. Nobody so much as looks at another soul. Everybody slinks around the table in desperate hope of not being spotted.
    The changed atmosphere of the dead table I blame on the success of politicians talking about Somebody Else all the time. Millionaires are good at helping out their friends— appointing them to blue ribbon panels that labor in Washington year after year, luncheon after grueling luncheon, attempting to understand why a poor man does not simply ring the dinner buzzer when he gets hungry—but they have not accomplished squat for friends of mine living on the edge, except to make them feel like pariahs. As a rule, I do not vote because it only encourages them. But I would happily break my rule in the case of a politician who called for a blue ribbon panel to study the pathologies of the rich and recommend ways of improving their behavior.
    Anyway, the slinking was in full swing as I walked into the basement dining room of Holy Cross School. People looked like spies in the movies the way they wore hats tipped low to cover their faces. Two women bumped into each other in front of me and were forced into actual eye contact. With a nervous, trilling laugh, one said to the other, “Oh, I’m just looking around for something funky.”
    I did not see Father Declan anywhere.
    Until somebody screamed.

    Ruby heard the shouting first, then she heard clattering from the floor above. Then she saw the gang of men in ski masks up on the landing. Masks and plastic gloves and socks pulled over their shoes, that much she saw. The rest was a blur.
    Approaching the door to our apartment with key in hand, she had a decision to make: dash into the apartment and throw lock and bar, or flee the building entirely. In a moment out of time—too long a moment—Ruby inspected the door, checking to see if a wreath of dead rats was hanging on it.
    No wreath.
    The clattering was only steps away.
    Ruby wheeled around, deciding on a run back down three flights of stairs.
    She felt a pain in her back, something that thudded hard against her at waist level...
    …Then the sharp tear in her ankle as she lost her tooting, and the bumping and scraping of bone and skin as she tumbled downward on her stomach, all the way to the second-floor landing, where her head rammed into a wall, stopping the descent.
    And then the rude kick that sent her tumbling halfway down another flight, this time sliding and bumping on her ribs.
    When it was over—it took only seconds—five men jumped over her body on the stairs. She heard them in the