the neighborhood, all sweaty, not talking. I tied my hoodie around my waist and sipped from my water bottle, wishing I had gum to kill the dead taste in my mouth. We crossed a highway overpass above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Thin, late-night traffic flowed below us, a few trucks. On the other side Lorenzo flicked my arm and stopped short. I froze. He was looking at a man framed in a circle of lamplight a block away.
We eased back, staying behind a short fence around a little playground. The man was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up despite the heat. He had a flashlight gripped in his teeth and he was crouched at the lamppost with tools.
From around a corner a dog appeared. She paused, paw up, alert. The man was intent on what he was doing, he didn’t see the dog or us. The dog walked toward him, head down. From the corner two more dogs appeared behind her, then another, even more starved and skinny, with a limp. They approached the man with surprising speed.
Lorenzo moved in a flash. The man looked up and saw him and fell back from his crouch, catching himself hard on one wrist. The flashlight hit the pavement. The dog was on the man already, jaws aimed at his hand on the ground. Lorenzo’s boot connected with her side and she skittered away, snarling. Lorenzo made a guttural cry and lunged and she backed off. Her pack scattered behind her. They turned tail and fled the way they had come.
I jogged up to the lamppost, my heart racing. The man was on his feet now. He looked like an athlete under his hood and he was young. He was wearing work gloves.
He stared at Lorenzo and me like he was trying to place us as well—our army backpacks, boots, my bangs under a bandanna. I don’t know what we looked like we might be doing in the neighborhood at this time of night. We stood there together, breathing hard, taking each other in while traffic continued below us on the BQE. On one side, a residential street of tight row houses covered in vinyl and fake brick hummed with air conditioners and sleeping people.
A door slammed and our three heads spun to watch a short guy burst out of the brick building nearest us. He had a nervous look and straight hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was wearing beat-up dress shoes and acid-washed jeans.
“You okay?” he asked the big guy, uncertainly.
The big guy nodded. “Those damn dogs. And I thought this guy was about to mug me. But he was just quicker on the take than me. Thanks, man.” He reached to shake Lorenzo’s hand.
“Was it that yellow dog?” The little guy hugged his arms tight to his chest. “That dog’s mean, I see him around all the time.”
“Yeah, yellow,” Lorenzo said.
I looked back at the dark building. From a third-story window, a cord snaked over the road and dangled down loose next to the lamppost. The tall guy followed my eyes. On the sidewalk were clippers, screwdriver, wire nuts. He wasn’t tagging; he was hooking up electricity. From the lamppost. When I put that together, I almost yelled out loud. This must be the squat Donny had told us about! Lorenzo and I caught each other’s eyes. These guys wouldn’t be intimidated by getting thirty-foot lumber into their building. These were the people to know.
* * *
We stayed with the big guy, Mitch, while the nervous long-haired one, Skip, ran back up to the fuse box on the third floor. I held my big flashlight and Lorenzo gripped a wire with his Leatherman while Mitch connected it. When Mitch stood, looking up at the window expectantly, my heart was in my throat with excitement.
Skip’s head darted out of an upstairs window and he whistled. Mitch led us into the building. The air inside the cramped foyer was cooler and damper than outside. Rubble crunched under our feet. Mitch ducked his head beneath a beam held at a wacky angle by two metal columns, and went up a narrow staircase.
At the top of the stairs was a room as wide as the building and circled with windows. Real windows with glass in them. The front of the building faced the residential street, looking out toward apartments. To the west was the highway. We crossed a clean, even wood-plank floor to where Skip bent over an outlet on the wall and a shadeless lamp. He plugged it in. Nothing happened. Skip squatted down and we hovered, breath held. He felt for the switch and with a click, the bare bulb glowed. Skip looked up at us all, his mouth open with surprise and pleasure, the underglow giving him a carnival effect.
“Touchdown!” Mitch crowed, and gave Lorenzo a high five.
We flopped down in a circle around the lamp like it was a campfire. Skip scurried into a dark room somewhere and was back with two beers dangling from a six-pack string. He flipped them both open and gave one to Mitch and one to Lorenzo. They drank and handed the cans to Skip and me. The beer was warm and flat. My eyes roamed over the big room. The ceiling was low but soundly finished with old acoustic tiles.
Lorenzo asked how long they’d been there.
Mitch had taken off his hoodie. Underneath he had on a worn Red Sox T-shirt. He had very light, very short hair and pale skin and bruised-looking eyes. He looked like a marine, muscular and square. He said he’d been there since April without electricity; a guy at work had just told him how to hook it up. He spoke in the first person like he lived there alone and Skip watched and looked nervous and said nothing. I wanted to ask a million more questions—where he worked, what had happened since April, who else lived here—but I didn’t want to sound like an undercover cop.
“We’re working on a building over on Wythe Avenue,” I told them.
Lorenzo scoffed. “It’s fucked up, though. We can’t never get that shit together for winter. It’s not like this place.”
“We’ve been staying at ABC No Rio,” I explained. They looked at me blankly. “It’s a squat on the Lower East Side . . . you know? They, like, have events and stuff . . .”
“I just moved here,” Mitch shrugged.
“What kind of events?” Skip asked.
“Like, a concert-hall kind of space. Punk bands and anti-folk, um . . . art, Wednesday’s poetry . . .”
“Open mic?” Skip’s mouth curved into a smile. “I thought you might be a writer.”
Actually, I went to the hardcore shows on the weekends and made fun of the poetry nerds, but I didn’t say that.
Mitch tipped back his beer can, taking a long drink. “Well, if you guys need a place, check out the first floor. No one’s using it.”
“Really? Are you serious?” I looked from him to Skip and then to Lorenzo. A whole floor? Just like that? Didn’t they need to discuss it amongst themselves?
Skip watched me like he wasn’t surprised by Mitch’s invitation, only curious to see what we’d say.
Lorenzo raised his can and said, “Cheers to that, man.”
Mitch raised his can to tap Lorenzo’s and the shadows of their hands flickered up the wall.
II
One summer I’d worked for a company that cleaned houses after someone died in them. I thought about that in the hardware store in Brooklyn the next day, deciding what I needed to get started on that first floor. Bleach, garbage bags, work gloves. That blew twenty dollars right there. Shit. Luckily, I was working for Donny on Sunday. He paid me forty dollars for the afternoon. All summer I’d managed to live off that.
The
