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his mom. He might have been dreaming, but then again there she was in the morning on the trailer floor, her head in a pool of blood, a fat kitchen knife resting in the curled fingers of her right hand. Had he actually seen her run to the kitchen drawer, grab the knife and turn to take the full force of the Channel wrench against her temple? Heard his stepfather’s visceral grunt as flesh and bone gave way to steel? The psychiatrist the county sent him to told him that either way he was in a state of shock. His psyche had received a mighty blow, from which it would take a long time to recover. Maybe never. He
liked the psychiatrist, Dr. Lee. He was twelve then and thought for a long time that all psychiatrists were kindly old Chinese-American men who spoke the plain truth. You may never get over it, Max, he had said, start from there.
    Max liked Dr. Lee. He liked going to his shabby but comfortable office in downtown Auburn, the city south of Seattle where he and his mom, Marie, and his new stepfather, Jake, had moved two years earlier when Marie and Jake got married. He only saw Dr. Lee four times—the county wouldn’t pay for more than that—but he still remembered everything they said to each other and every detail of the office. The wall of books. The dying plants on either side of the one window. The intricate pattern and colors of the first “Oriental” rug he had ever seen.
    “I fell asleep reading,” Max had said. “I forgot my bat.” He had been sleeping with his baseball bat under his bed. His glove, too, but that was a decoy.
    “What were you reading?” Dr. Lee asked.
    “ The Carpetbaggers .”
    “How did you happen to choose that book?”
    “My mom’s.”
    “What else have you read?”
    “I left my bat in the shed. I was too lazy to go get it. I fell asleep.” The bat was to use on Jake the next time he beat up on him or his mom.
    “If you were dreaming it wouldn’t have mattered.”
    “I don’t think I was dreaming.”
    Jake spent six years in jail, in the Washington
State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He claimed that Marie had attacked him. Since there were no witnesses, he was able to make a deal, five to ten with parole eligibility after five. Max’s confusion—had he been dreaming or not?—had eliminated him as a witness. In the spring of 1982, Max, who would be starting college that fall, on a track scholarship from the University of Washington, went to the parole board hearing and testified that he had forgiven Jake. He was waiting outside the prison—the “Walls” the locals called it—on the July day Jake was released. He followed Jake. To a rooming house back in Auburn, in and out of bars, to a Korean massage parlor not far from Dr. Lee’s office. When Jake took a job as a bouncer at Glass-X, a strip club that backed onto a lonely railroad rightof-way, Max drove by every night for a week, getting a feel for the rhythm of the place and the surrounding neighborhood, going in finally on a busy Friday night.
    He was still a tough guy, his former stepfather, still scary. The dragon tattoos that had frightened and fascinated Max as a boy still rippled on Jake’s forearms, now even more thickly muscled after six years of pushups at the Walls. He was still a thief as well, stashing a bottle of bonded bourbon in his gym bag when he thought no one was looking. And still an abuser of woman, grabbing the strippers’ asses whenever the mood struck him, once taking hold of one’s arm so hard it made her cry. Max made eye contact with him on the way in, but if Jake recognized him he didn’t show it. His eyes were dead, like his soul.
    Max left early and got into the back seat of
Jake’s car, a piece of junk he parked in a dark back corner near a Dumpster every night. He watched as the patrons trickled out; then at 2:15 the strippers in a group. At 2:30 the scripted neon Glass-X sign went out, and Jake and the manager, a thin black guy with a pencil mustache and the drowsy eyes of a