City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

drove me…someplace. Not on the bike though. No, no. I love you mama he say. Where Wesley?
     
    He tells himself he is not looking for Chantrell but of course he is. Bent over the hand grips, T-shirt flapping halfway up by his rib cage in the backdraft, up and down the hot night streets alone, under the dark, leafy oak trees, or on the broad avenues under streetlights. Speed was its own reason.
    Feelings suck you under; compassion is an undertow and you ward it off with money and watches and cars and sunglasses and clothes, and that made you different from who? Some are truly hard and some are weak, and some are taking some time in the land of hard and will use what they learn later in a constructive way, and some will end up on the greasy asphalt behind the Winn-Dixie at three in the morning and maybe even still there at dawn, the spreading puddle around their head like an obscene misshapen wine-colored halo no longer spreading, drying around the edges, with their pants around their thighs after they slid down and they tripped and the two others caught up with him and laughed at his pleading for mercy and shot him twice in the head and then ran off. And even those two, if things go right and they end up in court, still trying to play defiant but taken out of their feedback chamber of friends and images, and then in jail, long hours to think, end up realizing that they made an error.
    Wesley right on the edge. Staying by Roland in Gentilly off Broad behind the Fairgrounds. Flirting around the edges of it, getting the taste, trying it on. What it feels like to slap a woman. Or standing squarely, hands crossed in front of you, staring eye to eye with another young man, as if in a mirror, to see who blinks. Slumped on the couch, staring into the cell phone with the game, or the messages. The difference, if it was going to make a difference, was that he had a family; he knew what a home life looked like and he had seen how it worked. He was trying to find a place in a world where there weren’t a lot of second chances.
    Wesley loved and looked up to SJ, but he needed to get away from him, too. The discipline and ethic of hard work that had been a lifesaver for his uncle was suffocating to him. Not even that he didn’t believe his uncle was right—maybe because he believed his uncle was right. It didn’t matter—it was the completeness of the worldview, the emotional urgency of his uncle’s concern and anxiety, his sense of rightness, the sense that what had worked for him worked, had come across to him, that made him feel that he needed to get out from under.
    Unlike many, he had the images of another way, but they hurt, too. Pictures taken by SJ during his time as an amateur photographer (his darkroom was long in disuse; he no longer saw the point after Rosetta died, except for the corny pictures that Wesley chafed at now); he could remember himself in a short-sleeve white shirtand bow tie with that exaggerated smile he used to put on for the camera when he was six and seven and eight, or out in Texas riding that pony he wanted to take home. Or in the kitchen at his birthday party, with Lucy looming over him, a paper hat on her head and the light from the birthday candles making her look spooky. He could outrun all of that; the bike was a speedboat cutting through the water, a long touchdown run. Home hurt, and look what the world outside said was of value. Things and more things. No mercy for losers, voted off the island, off the stage, off the show. The camera always on you and when it was off who cared about you anymore? Don’t look back, Wesley.

4
     
    The next morning, Friday, Craig awoke with a warm fizz of hopefulness in his brain and body, left Alice sleeping in bed and went downstairs to put on coffee. The previous night’s lovemaking had seemed to him a moment of real touching and caring that he— they —had been missing badly. As long as they could get to that, he thought—that arc between them, the