The Intruder by Peter Blauner Page A

people most of his life. Grew up and went to school with them in the Bronx. Worked with them at the TA. Learned to walk like them, talk like them, even do the same drugs as them.
    So why are so many of them staring at him now? The guard. Larry Loud. The other homeless guys in line behind him. Allwaiting to see if he’ll hand over the sandwich and succumb to the Rikers Island laws of survival: give up your shit once and assume permanent punk status.
    He looks at Larry and tries to gauge the risk of standing his ground. All he sees is a scared kid. This is not the day he will die, he decides. After all, if he could handle that wolf pack in the park, he can handle one punk.
    He walks through the metal detector with his chin held high and steps right up to Larry. The security guard stands a yard away, shaking his head.
    “You and me later, we’ve got a date,” Larry mumbles. But he doesn’t sound like he means it.
    “Excuse me.” John G. moves past him. “I’d like to find my bed. I’ve had a very long day.”
A half hour later, he is sitting on a cot in the middle of a vast concrete drill floor, surrounded by three hundred other beds. A thick hazy scrim of funk hangs about twenty feet off the floor, like an atmospheric condition created by the dozens of aimless men wandering around. John can almost hear the distant admonition in their murmuring voices: this is where you go if you go wrong.
    “Say, man, you might want to hide those shoes you’re wearing,” says a heavyset black man on his right who has Asian eyes and a beatific smile that immediately makes John think he’s out of his mind. He smells from urine and old Chinese food.
    “Where?”
    The fat man points to his own battle-scarred Adidas, impaled under two steel legs of his cot.
    “That way you’ll feel it if anybody tries to steal ‘em,” the fat man explains.
    “Think they’d steal your shoes in here?”
    “Motherfuckers’ll kill you for the salt in your shaker.”
    “Yeah? So this is a dangerous place?”
    “The worst.” The fat man smiles and hums. “I only wish I was living back in that tunnel under Riverside Park. At least I knew I was safe there.”
    When the lights go down a few minutes later, John feels as ifhe’s being left overnight in a zoo cage. The knocking and grumbling noises seem louder, the odors seem more pungent. Someone gives out a loud whoop from across the drill floor and a lit match goes flying over his head.
    He tries to lie back and relax on the cot, but he keeps thinking about Larry Loud and his knife. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so bold with him. What if Larry does intend to come looking for him? It’s a long shot Larry would find him among so many people in the dark, but still he wonders, Would anyone care if he got hurt?
    He thinks about his wife and his daughter, feels their absence like missing limbs. Somehow he hasn’t felt complete since they’ve been gone. All the drugs in the world can’t change that. What he remembers most is the small things. Happy Meals at Mickey D.’s. Stroller rides through Van Cortlandt Park. Sunlight through the trees. The memory of love. When he dwells on it too much, he feels himself coming apart inside. So he moves on.
    He begins thinking about his own childhood. Growing up in Patchogue. Crabbing at the marina. Swimming in the mill pond. The smell of vanilla and fresh-cut lumber from the old converted lace mill nearby. His mother pushing him in a shopping cart through the Bohack’s on Main Street. Happy days. The scrappy little fake carriage house on South Ocean Avenue with the horse and coach on the screen door. He remembers lying on a patch of brown grass in the backyard, watching clouds as thick and slow as cotton floating in water. Sitting on the porch next to his mother in the days before she got sick and started having her moods. Laughing Mary. That’s what everyone called her. Always laughing too loud, drinking too much, bringing home too many men. She was a