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My nah not like those guys on that reality-TV show about loggers Had I ever been that kind of axe o have cut off both feet or been crushed by a toppling tree I’ve been clued not to stumble into an accidental death only because my profession—I’m a musician—doesn’t require me to deal with power tools or treacherous terrain Axe isfor instru it since I was seven, when the sax and I were nearly the same size

I’m fifty-nine noo years older than Jonah, my best friend of half a century I’m tall, and Jonah’s not I’m white; he’s black When I first raceful, a piano prodigy, and I elve and lumbered around like Lurch, the butler in The Adda on TV the previous year When I first heard hi, he rocked the keyboard with Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Soettable

At my insistence, Jonah recently talked his life—or at least a strange and tumultuous portion of it—into a tape recorder, and his story becaparts are what happened when I was hanging out with Jonah; he’s already covered that territory I do have one little experience to recount, however, a curious series of events that occurred a feeeks before I ests that the world is a more mysterious place than it see froly familiar routine

In those days, my sister, Amalia, was seventeen, five years older than I was, but ere as close as twins Not that we looked alike Blond hair in a ponytail, she was lithe and graceful, full of such enthusiaslow that I sas not entirely a figination On the other hand, I was a loose-limbed twelve-year-old with an Adam’s apple that made otten it stuck in h she didn’t havefor the occasion and looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sears catalog Withas those of an orangutan, I tried to disguise h, being blind to fashion, I only called greater attention totips but hite socks, dress pants hiked a couple of inches north of my navel, my short-sleeved spread-collar white shirt buttoned all the way to the throat

At twelve, I didn’t yet thinkeyes behind black-rilasses with thick lenses, h adulthood I’d never be a guy who had flocks of pretty girls in flight around him I had the love of h

It had better be enough, because Amalia and I didn’t have a home life that would be suitable for a TV show like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver Our old man was a machinist, a foreman for an entire shop of lathe operators, most of the time as silent as a rock, a cold man who by his stare alone could convey his disapproval and his ardent wish that he could hold you to his lathe and shape you into soarettes were to him what the Eucharist is to devout Catholics Amalia insisted he wasn’t cold, but only wounded by life and emotionally isolated Our ossip with Mrs Janowski, who lived next door, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, which she burned through as if the fate of the Earth depended on her chain-shroo a fine housekeeper, by which she ated all the work to Amalia and me

The king and queen of our little lower-ht well have assumed they primarily co by their dee of their psychic conversations A profound o, that they had hurt each other, that they’d said all they had to say about it, and that they couldn’t bring theive each other, and that, therefore, they found it painful to talk to each other about anything Amalia didn’t like to think the worst about anyone until they had proved themselves irredeemably vile

My sister had played the clarinet since she was eight, when a kid in the next block, having been forced into lessons by his folks, finally rebelled and convincingly threatened to hang hi, and she had wanted to learn to play it largely because she knew that it would annoy our parents She hoped that her playing would get on their nerves so much that they would insist that she practice in the detached one-car garage, where she wouldn’t have to see the to each other, where the air srease and tire rubber and mildew instead of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes Her hope was fulfilled, and the re years that we lived in the house, the words most often spoken by our e,” not only e practiced the clarinet and saxophone, but also when our mere presence beca, and their co

Aood on the clarinet, but I proved to be a prodigy on the saxophone, self-taught and self-polishing, alorking to get a little better Playing the sax was the one thing I could do that was graceful

With a 40 grade-point average and considerable writing talent, As than a dance band in her future Although our distracted mother and father didn’t consider it much of an achievement, Amalia received a full scholarship to a rades but also based on several cool short stories that she’d written and hich she’d won prizes in various competitions

I was proud of her, and I wanted her to succeed big-tiloom and our parents’ bitterness that made the Pomerantz place so like Poe’s House of Usher just before it sank into the swaine what my life would be like when, at the end of that su me as the only member of the family who didn’t want to eat dinner off a TV tray

In early June, nearly a month before I heard Jonah Ki

rk rocking that Fats Dorandfather’s house, across the street fro happened next door The residence in question was not to the east, not the Janowski place, where ossip, most of it delusional fantasy, about the marital relations of other people who lived on our block It was instead one door west of us, at the former Rupert Clockenwall place, which had been unoccupied ever since old Mr Clockenwall died of a massive heart attack a month earlier

The strangeness started at 3:00 one , when an unusual sound awakened me As I sat up in bed, I didn’t think the noise had been in my rooh it ht have been the last sound in a drea nature, compelled the sleeper to wake In this case, it called todrawn fro of steel on steel

Even in an older residential neighborhood like ours, far froh-rises and the Midtown bustle, the city is never silent, and long before you’re twelve years old, you learn to tune out its ood night’s rest What woke ot out of bed

Earlier I had raised the lower sash of thein hope of a draft, but the night air remained warain and seemed to vibrate in the screen as if the blade of a stiletto had been whisked across that metal mesh, so that I startled backward