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childhood had been an epic nightmare of instability and insecurity. First they would have a house. Then the house would be foreclosed on and they would have an apartment. Then the apartment would be snatched away for nonpayment of rent and they would have a motel room. Then the cycle would start all over again, or not. He could remember once or twice when he’d thought they were going to die. They had spent a memorable Christmas Eve sleeping in boxes on the streets of Chicago, curled up against the wind behind a warehouse near the stockyards. For weeks afterward, he’d imagined the smell of blood.
    It was after that Christmas Eve that he’d started to go to church. On Christmas Day, his father found another sucker. She was an old woman with a big house and rooms to rent on Chicago’s South Side. She took pity not on the man, but on his wife and children. By then, John’s mother was a kind of ambulatory catatonic. She literally walked into walls. His brothers were well on their way to what seemed then like their inevitable ends. Charlie was a proto-delinquent, criminal already at the age of eight. Bobby was coughing with the start of the tuberculosis that would kill him before his seventh birthday. His father was hale and hearty and full of plans. They were disintegrating around him and he didn’t see it.
    The rooms the old lady let them have were small and on the third floor. They had to climb three flights of steep back stairs to get to them. When they did get there, John’s mother went into the smallest of the bedrooms and curled up on the cot that had been shoved under the one small window. John knew she was going to stay just like that for a day or more. He went into the kitchen and looked through the empty cupboard, the clean, unstocked refrigerator, the oven with its polished metal racks. The whole place smelled of ammonia and his father. His own clothes smelled of dirt. Through the high window over the kitchen sink, he could see the city, black buildings and even blacker snow, grime and noise and mindless machinery. Everything was moving and moving and moving, moving without end. Someday they would be caught up in it again, swept out into the sea of cold.
    His father was in the shower, splashing water and singing. After a while, the water shut off and the plastic shower curtain rattled over its hollow tin rod. The walls up there were so thin, you could have heard a butterfly fart from two rooms away. John even heard the towel coming off the rack, a fat slap of cotton like a backbeat. His father was singing “Peg o’ My Heart.”
    Then the bathroom door opened, and John realized his father was about to come out into the kitchen, wrapped in a towel and singing. He panicked. He was only ten years old. He had no idea how to deal with this man or the woman in the back bedroom or the two boys who always seemed to be getting sick or acting crazy. They’d been on the run this time for two months. He was tired and scared and sick himself. He was very nearly starving.
    The door to the stairs was in a hallway off the kitchen. He ran back there and then down, down and down and down, going so fast and so fluidly that when he hit the cold of the street it almost didn’t touch him. He kept running, too. Usually he was worried about getting lost. They’d been in a few shelters in their travels, places where bodies were stashed when they were too poor to afford places to live, too sober to be dismissed as bums, and too stupid to be dead. In those places, he had learned to fear one thing more than he feared the amusement park ride of his own life: the Department of Welfare. To his ten-year-old mind, Those People were the Gestapo, the Devil, and the Wicked Witch of the West all rolled into one.
    He ran anyway, down streets and up avenues, through small parks that looked cramped and overcrowded even without any people in them. The South Side was a rough section of the city. It always had been. In 1961, it was a rough section