Free Thrill-Bent by Jan Richman Page B

few inches wayward, I manage to grasp the end of the window ledge and hoist myself into equilibrium before my slipshod foundation topples.
    And there, on the newspapered floor of the kitchen, is Casey. He’s wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, lying with his knees raised and his arms splayed out to the sides, his long wheat-colored hair spilled on the floor like a wide dirt road. Crawling up and down his vibrating torso is a very small child in a Winnie-the-Pooh diaper. The kid scales the mountain of knees, then flings himself onto Casey’s plush belly, squealing in terrified glee as though he’s jumping out of an airplane. Then he runs back around and climbs Casey’s knees again, poised for re-launching. Casey is just lying there, giggling, with a beatific grin. I haven’t seen that look on Casey’s face before, maybe I’ve never seen that look on anyone’s face, such purblind, unadorned bliss. In that look, there is no world beyond the kitchen floor, no window, no sky, no France Street or night coming on. There is just that small body, rising and falling again and again, absolutely sure that it will be caught. I don’t know what exactly I expected to find here, but a cherubic boy using my lover’s body like a jump castle wasn’t even on the list. Through the grubby, rain-stained window I can see that the kid has wheat-colored hair, and that Casey’s arms, flung out on the makeshift floor, are ready to spring into action should that baby make one false move. I want that force field around me. That safety bar is a haven I remember from a dream. I smile in spite of myself, letting my farewell spill out silently like a rush of steam from a moving train.

Cut It Out
    M y father’s virtuoso performances took place when no one was awake to see them, at five-fifteen in the morning before the first rays of sunlight turned somnolent Hackensack, New Jersey, into the cranking machinery of a city in motion. The residential streets were still dark when my father began his paper route, but the purple sky was ragged with a royal blue diagonal stripe in the east, evidence of brighter hues to come. The boy on his bike throwing papers was the bugle that tacitly sounded, marking the dividing line between deep sleep and morning bustle, between dugout dark and blistering light. His bike’s shy squeak rasped its repeated syllable as he pumped through the empty streets with his canvas pouch slung over his shoulders.
    My father had inherited the southeast Hackensack route from his brother the May he turned nine, graduating from an entry-level route that encompassed no more than thirty houses in one block and a cul-de-sac (the same circuit along which their mother had taken them trick-or-treating when they were toddlers). The southeast route started six blocks from their house, swung around the edge of the riverside along the row of newer, upscale homes with front yards the size of national forests, and then back down into the midtown grid whose blue-collar lawns had a postage-stamp uniformity that was heaven to a paper boy’s sense of aesthetics. When he set off from the house, after he carefully unlatched the shed and silently wheeled his bike out so as not to wake his parents, his pouch was stuffed full of freshly bound newspapers, folded in perfect thirds so that just the New of The Newark Star was visible on top, underlined emphatically by the wide beige rubber band.
    The stack of papers, unassembled, would always be fanned on the stoop by the kitchen door when he stepped out barefoot in the dark pre-dawn to fetch them. Sometimes he tried to stay awake after midnight in order to catch a glimpse of the courier he’d never seen but had often imagined as a leather-faced Jimmy Cagney with a limp or maybe a glass eye, some pirate-like impediment contracted in the line of duty that added to his tough swagger and salty demeanor, who delivered stealthily to all the paper boys in town in the wee hours when the ink was