LITMIR.BIZ

      Coco Plumoso

      OH SURE, THEY, OVER there in the city, had rain to behold. From out my third-story window I could see to Boston and over to the Fenway. There the sky was so low and black; if I had been there the rain would have torn at my hair, and ruffled my clothes, soaked me in cool lashings of rain. But over where I was, not so far west—a six-minute trolley ride!—nothing but fringe winds and hot breezes that dog-bone July day, although the four floor fans I had running were mixing up a nice brisk area on my damp back, which was wet from the ice-water shower I’d just suffered. I made myself do that every hour to cool off: five minutes of a paralyzing cold shower, but then fifty-five minutes of relief; of shivering even at first.

      A telephone bill that arrived early in July showed Raf’s tracks. It showed all the long-distance calls he had charged to our Brookline number. He’d been to D.C.; gone on to Charlottesville; then Birmingham; Oxford, Mississippi; Thibodaux, Louisiana. New Orleans was last listed, and from there Raf made three Houston calls.

      Now I had a chair in the only corner of the room not scorching with light, and I sat, wearing a towel sarong, hair streaming from my hourly shower, and dialed, and watched starlings out the window, and waited for someone in Houston to answer his phone.

      The man who said hello was named Raymond Hollander.

      He said, “Raf’s here in town, I believe, but not here here. Not with me, or with us, anymore. And where he’ll be tomorrow I wouldn’t know. Or, hell, where he’ll be tonight. I could make some guesses about him but nothing you’d wanna put a peso down on.”

      I called Herb, a former student of mine.

      “I’ll go ‘on line,’ ” Herb said. And, “Hold.”

      His voice returned. “Window seat; flight’s this evening; they can do vegetarian; a motel suite; a week’s worth of rental car, but car isn’t accurate. I splurged on that part.”

      “You should market these skills, Herb,” I said. “You go public, you could buy food.”

      “They’re not skills, they’re crimes. And not winky-dink ones either. They’re felonies. So think prison, hard time, the gulag . . .”

      Herb went on like that. I hung up and dialed again for Raymond Hollander.

      Raymond said we could meet tomorrow, after he got off work, at something he called an ice house.

      “Cab there,” he said. “ ’Cause directions is tricky and this is in a dumb place, nowhere you wanna be circlin’ lost. We’ll hook up there, then we’ll see.”

      I studied the road atlas and its blowup of Houston, picturing horses, cacti, oil derricks, astronauts.

      Once earlier after Raf vanished for a week, he mentioned an artist had put him up. I realized Raf was talking about my dad.

      “You mean Mario?”

      “In fact,” Raf said.

      “You stayed with my dad and didn’t say anything?”

      Raf shrugged his bony shoulders. His face had a stillness that seemed almost shy. I figured that over the years I’d heard plenty of stories, without his being named, of Raymond Hollander.

      Houston wasn’t desert and cacti. Houston was magnolia and swamp, jungle heat and jungle humid, and Raymond’s ice house was in a neighborhood of shotgun shacks.

      I had left my rental car—a

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