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long time ago, after you left town but before Howie sold the pizza place, around the time Phil the barber’s kid got knocked off at the track,” he said.
    â€œYeah, I remember my mother telling me about that,” I said.
    â€œWell, anyway, none of us, me, Cho-cho, Wolfey, the Martian, ever graduated high school, and we were all hanging out doing the same old shit, only it was getting deeper all the time. We were all drinking and drugging and beginning to pull some serious capers, like once we broke into the grocery store and stole a couple hundred dollars worth of cigarettes, or we’d heist a car now and then and sell it to a chop shop one of Mars’s relatives owned. Occasionally we’d get caught and do a little time, a couple of months here or there.
    â€œWe weren’t pros by any means, and so we would have to get real jobs from time to time, and, of course, the jobs all sucked. One night I was in here having a few beers, and this guy came in who I remembered from high school. Your brother would probably remember him. Anyway, he starts talking to the bartender. Remember old man Ryan?”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “He served me my first drink—a Shirley Temple.”
    Lennin laughed and went on. “Well, this guy was back in town, and he’d graduated from college with a degree in engineering, had a cushy job at Grumman, was getting married, and had just bought a big house down by the bay. I overheard this, and I thought to myself, shit, I could go for some of that. But there was no way it was going to happen. And as a matter of fact, I was looking at the mural and thinking I was like that guy in the boat in the painting there, stuck forever outside the good life. In other words I was starting to see that the outlaw scene was going to get very old very soon.
    â€œNow, I’m not crying in my beer, but let’s face it, me and the group didn’t have much help in life—busted homes, alcoholic parents, head problems … We were pretty fucked from word go . It was easier for us to scare people into respecting us than it was ever going to be for them to just do it on their own. It seemed like everyone else was heading for the light and we were still down in the shadows munching crumbs. I wanted to be on the beach, so to speak. I wanted a home and a wife and kid and long quiet nights watching the tube and holidays. As for the other guys, I don’t think they got it. Shit, if God would have let them, they’d still be muscling high school kids for pocket change.
    â€œSince it was clear I wasn’t going to get there by regular means, I decided what we needed was one big heist, one real job in order to get the cash necessary to live in the real world. After that, I’d part company with them and move on. So I spent a long time thinking about what kind of scam we could pull, but I was blank. We’d spent so many years nickel-and-diming, I couldn’t get out of that head. Until, one night, we were sitting at that table right over there, drinking, and a ragged, hopped-up Wolfey, eyes showing almost nothing but white, mentioned something, and I thought I felt the rowboat move a few feet closer to shore.
    â€œThis old guy had just moved in on Wolfey’s block. What is it, over there by Minerva, Alice Road? Anyway, this old guy, blind, in a wheelchair, moved in. Remember Willie Hart, the guy in high school with the plastic arm? Well, his younger sister Maria, who, by the way, the Wolfeman was banging every once in a while back in his grandfather’s shed in between hits of Zippoway, went to work for the old guy. She cleaned his house and would take him out for walks in his wheelchair and so forth.
    â€œMaria told Wolfey that the old fart was super strange, and although he understood English, he always spoke to himself in another language she thought was Spanish. Maria, if you remember her, was no genius, and for all she knew the guy could have