A Public Space

CHARLES D'AMBROSIO is the author of The Point (Little Brown, 1995), a collection of stories, and Orphans (Clear Cut Press, 2005), a collection of essays on everything from a Russian orphanage to a Pentecostal "haunted house" in Texas to Mary Kay Letorneau. "The Dead Fish Museum" is the title story of his new collection, due out later this year from Knopf.

[An Excerpt]

"You ever killed a man?" RB said.
          Rigo scraped flecks of red paint from his arm and didn't answer.
          "Me, I don't have the heart to kill a man. You got to have heart to kill somebody."
          Using his thumb Rigo made an inconspicuous sign of the cross on his knee and silently said grace and then made the same small cross again before unwrapping the wax paper from his sandwich.
          "That must be some good-ass sandwich," RB said. "I hope it is. I sure hope to fucking God it's not baloney again."
          Rigo lifted a corner of the sandwich.
          "More baloney!" RB screamed, grabbing Rigo's sack and sandwich. "Jesus Christ, I swear, you're just like all them refugees." Then, as if they were co-conspirators, he said to Ramage, "See how it works, they all get together and send a man over, and he gets his shit together, eatin' baloney every damn day and savin' up his money. Never go to a movie or buy ice cream or nothing. Just baloney and baloney and more baloney. Then he sends back money so the whole family can book out of Pago Pago and come over and they all live together, nine of them to one room, everybody eatin' baloney every minute!"
          RB lobbed the lunch sack out the window and, his tone lowered and confidential, addressed Rigo again. "America's so wide open, see, with you people coming here, I call you refugees."
          "America's so wide open," Ramage said, "it seems to have filled up with shitheads. Go get his sack."
          "Spooky, man, you can't have a grown man praying for baloney. Not in America! It ain't right, I'm sorry. Now Harvard, quit praying for that shit."
          "Go get it."
          "Every job we do," RB said, "every week, he eats five days of straight baloney. Not even fried! Give the baloney a break, Harvard. You understand? FUCK. THE. BALONEY."
          Rigo was gazing into the inscrutable square of black sky, out the empty window where his baloney sandwich had flown.
          RB clattered down the fire escape and came back a minute later.
          "The baloney got a little dirty," he said. He reached for his billfold. "Buy yourself something good to eat Harvard. My treat. Something special. Get yourself a cheeseburger."

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