Ray stood in the cool evening air outside Paddy’s Pub, wringing his hands and rubbing each joint and each knuckle before finally stepping inside. He slung his jacket over the back of a bar stool, pulled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, and breathed in the smells of men’s room deodorizer and yesterday’s whiskey. The bartender set him up. “These are on the house,” he said. “Think you probably need it.”

          “How you doing, Ray?” Fred, the only other drinker that afternoon, asked, staring at a television and tracing lines in the sweat on his glass. “We heard it on the news just now.”

          Ray shrugged and threw back the whiskey, allowing its warmth to trail from his throat and spread to his stomach, and he waited until it hit his fingertips before sipping on the beer.   

   “They tell you anything?” the bartender asked calmly, almost ashamedly. 

   Ray gave a single nod and kept his eyes on the grain lines in the bar.

   “Fucking shame,” Fred said. “Think you’re gonna be one?”

   He turned up his hands, then lit a smoke and thought about his wife as the bartender set down another shot and another beer.

   Above their heads the television said, “Bethlehem Steel announced today it would be closing up to three of its main production plants in Sparrows Point over the next month due to heavy losses.”

   Ray rubbed his temples.

   “What about the union?” the bartender asked. “Can’t they do something? Ain’t that the point of being in one?”

   Ray shrugged and then followed a sweat bead as it rolled down his beer mug, catching it with his finger before it reached the bar.

   Staring at the dash lights just above the steering column, Ray read the letters P-R-N-D-L. “Prindle,” he said to no one and then pounded the wheel with an open palm. 

           He lit a cigarette and pulled off the curb onto Sparrows Point Boulevard, past the rows of vinyl-sided sameness, junk cars and battered galvanized metal garbage cans. He passed his duplex three times before stopping out front to sit and stare at his home. There was a lot that needed doing, he told himself, yet he couldn’t seem to muster the will to get out of the car. Then, from outside the car window, his wife’s voice infiltrated the silence. “You coming in or what?”

            Ray shut off the car and opened the door.

            “Where the hell you been? Supper’s been ready for two hours,” she said, her arms folded and one foot turned out to the side. But Ray could only stare blankly back at his wife as he tried to imagine the way she once looked, tried to again find the woman with whom he was once so in love.

    “No phone call or nothing,” she stated more than asked.  

           Ray reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a piece of paper. It wasn’t pink at all; it was a standard business-type letter on Beth Steel letterhead. He crumpled it and threw it at her, and he walked into the house.

           By the time Angie found her way in behind him, letter in hand, Ray was standing at the sink washing his hands. “So what are we gonna do now, Ray?” Ray kept washing. “Answer me,” she said. Ray grabbed a towel from the refrigerator handle and began drying his hands, refusing even to look at his wife. Then he returned to the sink and began washing them again. “Ray,” she said. “Ray, answer me, goddamnit!” But Ray kept his gaze straight ahead and kept lathering and rinsing, rinsing and lathering, his wife’s words dying in the air somewhere between them.

           When his hands were finally clean, Ray grabbed a six-pack and carried it out to his front lawn, the lawn that was littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts and was now mostly dirt with a just a few paltry blades of grass that had somehow managed to push their way upward. He opened a lawn chair at the sidewalk’s edge and listened for the sounds of the mill machines and mill workers pounding through the night, echoing off the houses and carrying across the river from the night shift. But the sounds were no longer there, the night shift having been eliminated some years earlier.

    As Southeast Baltimore’s ubiquitous smell of sewage trailed under his nose from the Patapsco wastewater treatment plant, Ray surveyed the streets and the horizon just above the rooftops, trying to pinpoint the moment when his part of Charm City became so gray, always like a winter’s evening, no matter the season or time of day. 

           He cracked a beer and lit a cigarette. A stray dog trotted past, looking for something, though wary of the man in the chair. Cars drove past, early model American jobs, mostly, big and rusty and loud. And Ray felt almost as though he could cry, but didn’t know if he was still able. It had been too long.

           Ray wrung his hands, finished his beer and cracked another. He slid down into the woven plastic of his lawn chair and let the rhythmic pounding of the mill in his mind lull him to sleep.

          The next morning, he awoke on the front lawn and thought it best to take a sick day. 

          “Everything all right, Ray?” Eddie, the shop foreman asked from the other end of the phone.

            Ray said that it was, that he thought he might be coming down with something was all and that they’d see him on Monday.

            Angie emerged in the kitchen doorway and asked, “You ain’t going to work?”  But Ray could no longer hear her.  

            He went into the bathroom and washed his hands over and over again until the skin turned a pinkish hue and began to wrinkle. He splashed cold water on his face and stared at the aging and tired man in the mirror, searching for the high school football player, the soldier, the young man that went to work in the mills nearly twenty years ago. But they weren’t there with him now.

            He went into his bedroom with a plastic shopping bag, put several things in it from his top dresser drawer and left the house. 

            He started the day by cruising the neighborhood with the oldies station turned up as loud as it would go without distorting in the speakers. Kids in cars with tinted windows and thundering bass systems pointed and laughed as Frankie Vallie belted tunes from the windows of an ’87 LTD and Aretha asked for some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

     His first stop was the parking lot at Sparrows Point High, where he sat in the car drinking beer and watching kids smoke cigarettes and sneak off school grounds between bells. After finishing his third can, he got out and stood in the parking lot at the mouth of the empty football field where cheerleaders danced and a crowd cheered just for him. Angie was there. And Mom, too, he knew. But Dad was working over at the mill. 

     Number 67 paced the sidelines until the coach called him in. “I got it, coach,” Ray said, sprinting to the 50-yard line and taking stance behind the center. “Sparrow 42,” he yelled in one direction. “Sparrow 42,” he yelled in the other. “Hut, hut.” He faded back, looking for an open receiver, but the City High defense was always tight, so he tucked the ball against his stomach and ran it himself. And before the other team had any idea, Ray was across the 40, the 30, racing through a pocket his line had left wide for the taking. He was going all the way.

     “Sir,” someone said, as Ray was nearing the ten-yard line. “Sir, you are not authorized to be on school property.” Ray looked over his shoulder at the school security guard coming towards him, but he wasn’t about to stop until he scored, so he crossed the end zone line and dropped to his knees.

     The guard came running over and, struggling to catch his breath, asked, “What do think you’re doing?”

     Ray lay flat on his stomach and looked up at the guard. 

     “You can’t be out here on school grounds without permission,” the guard told him. And then, “Sir, are you okay?”

     Ray lay still and let the grass tickle his cheek, reminding him of summer days when he was a child. 

     “Sir, I have to ask you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll have to call the police.”

     Ray pulled himself up from the end zone and walked silently back to his car.

     He drove to the house where he grew up, the block now a different shade of poverty than he remembered. He turned down his old street, where children clothed only in diapers walked around unattended and groups of teens in clothing much too large for them stood around on the corners, bored. He parked in front of his old house, a brick duplex.

     Ray watched as people stood at the front of his old house in a kind of line. Two men stood on opposite sides of the front door, admitting two or three as two or more came out.  

     A young man made his way to Ray’s car. “Yo, old man. You lookin’?” Ray paid him no mind. “If you ain’t, then you bes’ be movin’ on,” he instructed the old man in the old car. But Ray said nothing, and Neil Diamond kept singing about coming to America from inside the LTD. “Yo, you deaf, old man? You gotta step.” The boy was no more than thirteen, but much too old already, Ray thought. Ray lit a cigarette and rolled up his window.

     When his cigarette was done, he got out of the car and walked around the house, ignoring the disheveled and skeletal figures waiting in line. This was his house, he thought, so he walked over and rubbed his fingers along the bricks. He looked through the kitchen window and saw his mother standing there at the stove. At the living room window he watched himself playing Cowboys and Indians on the living room floor with his younger brother. And he wondered how things might have turned out differently. 

     Ray knelt on the ground and rubbed his hands in the dirt, letting it fall through his fingers. “Yo, pops,” a voice said. “Yo, you five-oh?” Ray looked up. “You five-oh? You poh-leece?” Ray shook his head and smiled. “Then you better take yo’ ass out,” the teen said, lifting up his shirt to reveal a pistol tucked into the waist of designer boxer shorts.

     Ray stared back, unmoved. “I used to live here,” he said, now seated on the ground. “A long time ago.”

     The kid seemed to understand for a moment, or maybe it was that he sensed the old man’s indifference to the pistol and to what was going on all around them both. 

     Ray nodded and said, “I’m going. I just needed something.” He got up off the ground and started toward his car, then he bent over and shoved a handful of dirt and grass into his pocket.

     “Don’t lemme catch you round here again,” the kid said, as Ray climbed back into his car and pulled off.

     He kept driving, trying to piece it all together, all the years, until he reached the graveyard where his mother and father now were. Ray smiled, remembering how his father always told him that people were dying to get in there. He got out and stood over his parents’ graves and told them about things—about the house, the neighborhood, Angie and the layoffs down at the mill. “But don’t you worry, Ma,” he said, and got back in the car.

     When he arrived at his final destination of the day, he waited for the Righteous Brothers to finish their song before getting out and walking over to the docks. He inhaled the air until both lungs were full, and he stared out over the river at the smokestacks billowing white in all directions. He put his feet to the edge of the dock and watched the river—oil black with a layer of saliva-like foam and flotsam on top—licking the edges of the rotting pier. He remembered swimming at this very spot with his brother before the signs went up, before it was deemed unsafe. He remembered waving at the ships carrying materials to the mills where they’d both someday work. He remembered Sparrow, their dog, jumping in after a stick and paddling his way to the edge. And these things made him smile.

     Still smiling, he got up, walked to his car and grabbed the shopping bag from the front seat. He went back to the pier and sat down, opened a beer and lit a cigarette. He reached in the bag and put his hand around the handle of his .45 Magnum. “Solid American steel,” he said, his fingers rubbing the nose, the handle, the chamber. Ray smiled, brought the gun to his nose and breathed in the smell of amalgamated steel. Then, distracted, he returned it to the bag and walked back to the pier. 

     When he reached the edge again, he began removing his clothes, making a neat pile of them on the dock. He put his cigarette out on the ground, opting not to throw it into the river. Then he reached into the bag again, this time retrieving a pair of swimming trunks he’d been waiting to use on his vacation in Florida this year, and slid them over his bare skin. He pulled the drawstring tight. He tipped the can of beer until it was empty and went back to the car, thinking he might pull it closer. Instead, he simply turned the key until the radio came on.

     Just then the sun broke through the clouds over Sparrows Point, and Ray stood outside the car, trying to remember. He raised his arms in the air and said, “Think this is how we used to do it,” and he ran as fast as his tired bones would allow, sprung from the edge of the dock, bent his knees and locked his hands at his ankles. 

     “Cannonball!” he shouted as loud as he could. The splash went all the way up onto the dock as his body smacked the lapping waters of Baltimore’s Back River. And as if for an audience, Ray did the backstroke, the breaststroke and the doggie paddle, whooping and laughing and frolicking, oblivious to the litter and debris that swam alongside him.

     And when he finally climbed back out and dried himself off, he thought he might go home and get Angie and bring her there.