But Not By God: Ed Reed.

Douglas, homeless now for real, partially by choice, is alone. The rusty water from the interstate above is dripping on his head, but he doesn’t care, because his son has just stopped convulsing and is dead now, blue, foam on his lips, the needle still in his arm, the arm still tied off with a section of industrial black trash-bag. When the convulsions had started Douglas had himself just finished shooting up and was riding a brutal euphoric thrust, a surge of elevated awareness that had transitioned immediately into blind panic, weeping, shaking and smacking his convulsing son, Leo, who had cooked up too much, Douglas told him that, he had cooked up too much but Leo didn’t care. Douglas is faced with the realization that Leo wanted this to happen, wanted to die on top of the coats he slept on with his father every night, wanted to die next to the shopping cart they had stolen from the Market Basket, filled with cans, errata, tape recorder, meager provisions, a half filled notebook. Douglas shakes his son for a very very long time, sputtering, mucus dripping onto his hands and the face of his son, who he had found as a godsend and has now lost, again.

Douglas’ second ex-wife, Carolyne, drives over the strange rumbling corrugated metal of the bridge, drives over her dead son on her way to the precinct, chain-smoking Parliaments, blaring James Taylor, the latter of which no one can quite believe. She screams about how she’s seen fire and she’s seen rain. She drums on the steering wheel. The Xanax is wearing off, producing anxiety, producing drumming and barely melodic screaming. Driving to the precinct is a bad bad time to have the Xanax wear off, she thinks, so she screams more about the fire and rain she’s seen, and how that rain will at some point end, perhaps when her son comes back to her. Her phone rings, and she hears it, but she pretends she doesn’t.

Neil Haverman, Precinct captain, has absolutely nothing to tell Carolyne about her missing son, dreads her now weekly visit, has a speech all prepared for when she comes: he will look into her unfocused eyes, tell her that this disappearance is a product of her son’s chosen profession, that he obviously wants to be missing, is sort of required to be missing, and that there is no reason at all to assume anything unfortunate has happened, although his men will keep their eyes and ears open, as it were, to any news, but mostly: tough shit lady. He won’t say this last part, but he’ll want to.

Florence, Douglas’ first ex-wife, listens to all six rings of Carolyne’s phone, listens to her transparently fake and perky message (“Hi! This is Carolyne! I’d love to call you back, so leave your number! And a message! Bye bye!”), fundamentally misunderstands the way cell phone answering machines work, and leaves the following message: “Carolyne? Carolyne, I know you’re there, it’s Flo. Pick up the phone. Carolyne. Carolyne? Please, it’s important. It’s about Dougie. Carolyne? I know you know where he is, Carolyne, I just know it. Carolyne. Carolyne?” She then hangs up and weeps for three or four hours, clutching in one hand a framed copy of Douglas’ first front page article in the Ledger, back in eighty two, about the crisis of homelessness, and in the other hand an empty bottle of Bailey’s. Her dog, Dougie Jr., whines for food above his empty bowl.

Dr. Chauncey “Doc” Bracket, editor, journalist, taker of no-shit, sits at his desk at the Ledger and drums his fingers on the home keys of his computer keyboard, wishing they were the keys of a typewriter, smooth and round instead of coarse and vaguely sticky. He knows Leonard is out on long term assignment, following up on the great and hair-raising work of his father, and that not calling weekly as per the plan is not particularly a cause for alarm, since Douglas never called either, and he came back eventually, although then again he did seem like a caged animal post-assignment and he did truly disappear post-retirement, probably to someplace warm and wonderful and hard, like Ecuador maybe. Chauncey can picture Douglas in Ecuador, building houses for people who need them, drinking local brews, smoking local things that can be smoked, Douglas, that old tough wildcat. He still feels tense, however, wondering just how many weeks it’s been since Leo last called, cursing himself for not keeping track, still drumming his fingers (asdf jkl;, still not a typewriter, still no phone call), and needs to go verbally brutalize an intern for a punctuation mistake on his way out to the smoking area to feel any sort of peace.

The intern, Bethany, already becoming sort of jaded at nineteen, to her great and ambition-dulling chagrin, pulls into a convenience store on her way home and buys a pack of Parliaments for the very first time, shakily lights one, holds it all wrong, blows it out the window, feels the light-headedness that ushers her stress out into the world on her thin breath. She smokes too many and has to pull over to puke, pukes straight down through the loud and bizarre corrugated metal that makes up the roadbed of the Tippany bridge, pukes onto a vague leaf-covered dark shape next to a vague leaf-covered shiny object, thinking of Leo, who got her this job, who always seemed trapped, wondering how he’s doing, wondering why his eyes were always so dark, wondering why he always seemed called to from above, but not by God.