Marty chewed his lower lip. "I don't think he's really coming."
       "You don't want him to?"
       Starting for the bedroom, Marty glanced at Raines. "You've never met my brother, have you?" And Raines was suddenly troubled by a vague recollection that Ramon might have killed someone once. Did Marty ever tell him? How could he forget a thing like that?
       When Marty emerged in pleated pants and a white turtleneck and gleaming black loafers, Raines had his manuscript out, trying to think of a joke to lighten up the opening. A motorcycle that had been audible from blocks away came to an arrogant idle below the window and died.
       "Shit," Marty murmured. "He did show." He hurried out of the apartment. A minute later he accosted his brother in the hallway.
       "What are you doing here?"
       "I knew you were screening me, you little fuck."
       The man who came into the living room looked not much more like Marty's brother than Raines did. He was shorter, darker, and flab-bellied in a T-shirt with his down vest open. The long hair snaking out of a black and yellow CAT hat spoke of Josefina Lee's Andean stock. His unsmiling mouth might have been a killer's. He went straight into the kitchen and came back with an Anchor Steam, sat down heavily, and opened the bottle between his teeth. Marty made a pass at introductions; he became utterly detached. Ramon was surveying the room over his beer.
       "How much was the computer?" Marty didn't answer. "You get that job you was auditioning?"
       "Ramon, Bill and I are in a hurry." Marty's voice sounded like a parody of its own cultured reserve; he seemed to have rehearsed the lines. "So tell me what you came over for."
       "The little fucker's always in a hurry," Ramon told Raines. "I bet he doesn't screen you." Something about Raines was provoking amusement in Ramon's flat contemptuous eyes. "Were you the dude in that razor blade ad where his head turns square?"
       "I'm a college teacher."
       "No shit. I hated my teachers."
       Marty stood up; he signalled Raines to put his shoes on.
       "O.K., listen." Ramon set his beer down. "I need five C bills for Mama. It's an emergency."
       "I don't have it."
       "Don't shit me-you're my successful little brother and I'm proud of you, you fuck."
       "Forget it, Ramon. I don't have the money." Marty laughed without humor. "Look around, you won't find it. Let's be out of here, Bill."
       Ramon watched in outrage as they put their jackets on. "Don't you want to know what it's for?"
       "I know what it's for."
       "Hey-I ain't touched the shit in three months. I'm clean, man, no lie." Ramon everted his nostrils to demonstrate. "You didn't know because you're down here auditioning with the professor while I'm up at home like, taking care of Mama. You're in such a big hurry you forgot your own family."
       Marty rolled his eyes but Raines saw anxiety building in them.
       "What's the emergency?"
       "She ran out of Prozac. She needs a refill and they won't give her one because she owes for the last two."
       "Five hundred dollars of Prozac?"
       "And she owes for Dr. Sayre. You'd know all this shit if you came home more."
       Marty went to the telephone. "I'm going to call her. You better not be lying to me, Ramon."
       "Go ahead. She won't answer."
       "She always answers."
       "She's too depressed, man. She missed three days. She's lying in bed with the soaps on doing-incense and worry beads and shit."
       Marty stood with the receiver to his ear for a long time before replacing it.
       "I'll drive up tomorrow. I might have to miss your thing, Bill."
       Raines started to issue whatever reassurance might be needed, but Ramon slammed the flat of his hand down on the glass table.
       "Tomorrow-what is wrong with your head? Knives in the kitchen, plenty of sleeping pills, pool in back?"
       Marty was by the window, looking out at the park with its Asian trees through which they'd taken a pleasure drive an hour ago. He had his hands casually in the pockets of his linen jacket, but his spine was tense.
       "Where's her prescription?"
       "At the house."
       Marty's shoulders rose and sank. When he turned around he would look at neither of them. "Change of plan for tonight."
       "Whatever you have to do," Raines said.
       "I'll be back by-" Marty glanced at his watch. "-eight. I'd better call Hilary."
       I "I'm going with you," Raines said, and he was elated to hear himself say it, and wished he'd said something like it before. But Marty waved away the offer.
       "Don't be ridiculous. Stay here, take a nap, work on your talk."
       "I absolutely insist."
       Ramon set his beer down and turned to Raines. "This shit does not concern you. Right? This shit is family shit."
       Ramon's was the look of a man who expected to have his way with people like Raines. And the dull coiled threat in his eyes was alarming. Raines turned to Marty for affirmation. Marty said, "Suit yourself," and disappeared into the kitchen with the phone.
       In spite of his own fear, Raines made up his mind to go. Because he had just had an insight, which was that Marty was in more trouble than he knew, more than he'd admit in front of Ramon.
       Because Ramon was the trouble-somehow he was going to hurt his successful little brother. Ramon hated Marty and everything connected to Marty and was using their mother to blackmail and trap him. But Marty was in too deep to see. He needed a friend-not to fix him, enough of that! But to rescue him. Raines's twitchy mind had fastened onto something real. He was the friend who made Marty think things were going to go well. And things were not going well today. In the other room Marty was explaining to Hilary, apologizing, explaining again, in the calm tone that Raines now knew was boiling with submarine rage. When he came back into the living room his expression was familiar, too: Raines had seen it under the track light.
       "Trouble in paradise?" Ramon said. "My bro's got a thing for blonde pussy. That's the kind you get whipped by."
       "She'll be fine," Marty muttered to nobody, stone-faced. And when they were on the street and Ramon declared that he would leave his Harley behind and do the driving since he knew how to beat rush hour, the quarrel Raines expected didn't come. It was as if Marty had already experienced a defeat at his brother's hands, part of a long blood-history. Raines sat alone in back while Marty stared through the windshield at indeterminate things.

***

       When Ramon ran his second stop sign Raines wondered if he was high on something that had come before the beer. He waited for Marty to snap to, demand the wheel. But Marty was somewhere else, or didn't care, had driven through a thousand stop signs with Ramon. Raines had never had the least flicker of an idea of their lives together as brothers, the bullying dirt clod fights (he tried imagining now) and football tackles. He himself was brotherless and didn't know about such things.
       Ramon crossed 19th Avenue without turning and Marty finally roused himself. "What are you doing?"
       "We're giving Craig a ride. He's just down on Moraga."
       Marty's glare prompted Ramon to self-righteousness again.
       "He needs to check with his ex-old lady in Bolinas. You want his little son to starve?"
       Among the thousands of bungalows in the Sunset District, they pulled up in front of a pink stucco one. In the yard sculpted little trees posed like shaved poodles, or the trees in Dr. Seuss books. But the figure summoned by Ramon's blast on the horn didn't match the tidy dwelling he slouched out of. In the daylight Craig looked unwholesomely pale, tall and skinny, concave-chested under a Motley Crew T-shirt over which he wore his flannel shirt unbuttoned and untucked. He climbed in back next to Raines. His mouth never fully closed; it was hard to see his eyes for the curtain of slack blond hair.
       They bore down on the Presidio, KSAN pounding out of the speaker behind Raines' head. He was thinking about the configuration in the car. One way of looking at it was whites in back, Sino-Hispano-dysfunctos in front. But it was even easier to associate the brothers Lee with each other than himself with Craig, who smelled unexpectedly of Faberge Brut. Or you could look at it as upscale young gents on the right (Raines in his young-old-fogey tweed, Marty hipper in the linen jacket with sharp lapels) and hard-core unemployables on the left, just a bungalow away from San Quentin.
       But this didn't hold up either, because Marty, appearances notwithstanding, was broke and downwardly mobile. Which suggested the least appealing arrangement of all: one relatively secure man, in town to give a talk to the Modern Languages Association, soon to be tenured (maybe!), and three other men in varying degrees of nothing to lose. He began to feel alien, out of his element; he fought off the feeling. One thing he didn't like was the way Craig had his knees propped against Ramon's seat back and spread apart, forcing Raines to sit like a girl.
       On the Golden Gate Bridge they hit heavy traffic. As Ramon told the Acuras and Audis heading Marinward to fuck themselves, Raines craned his head to get a glimpse of the white city curving south behind them along the bay. Then he turned the other way for his first view of the brilliant Pacific and found himself confronted with the lightless blue of Craig's eyes. Raines made himself keep looking.
       "So what do you do, Craig?"
       He hadn't intended any irony, but the car seemed to hum with an incipient chuckle.
       "What do I do?" Craig was dumbfounded. He leaned forward and shouted over the music," Hey, Ramon, he wants to know what I do."
       "He diddles his ugly ex-bitch in Bolinas," Ramon shouted back. "He gets wasted and cruises North Beach. He's the Bay Area rep for the Medellin cartel. He's a barker for Carol Doda."
       Apparently this resume pleased Craig. He turned his attention back to Raines.
       "I party," he said. "You like to party?"
       Raines had always been a little proud of the fact that he'd attended public schools, and one reason was that he'd had experience with a number of Craigs and always dealt with them fairly well. In eighth grade their names were Bruce Gearhard and Ricky Fowkes, and he had always altered his breathing around them, and here had been one occasion when any answer to the question "Do you like my sister's tits?" was going to land him in the juniper bushes. When he told his parents an abridged version of the incident and came to the moment when he was on his ass in the scratchy evergreen, his mother asked him what he had done then. "I smiled," he said. It became an amusing family refrain for grace under pressure in impossible moments.
       But remembering now for the first time in years, he flushed. He wasn't proud at all; his weakness repelled him.
       "Of course I do," he told Craig. "Doesn't everybody?"
       "You going to party with us tonight?"
       "I don't know." Raines looked to the front seat. If Marty had heard, he was offering no help. "I think we might have other plans."
       He found that he was smiling.
       Ramon torqued into the rainbow tunnel. The gorgeous bay was swallowed up. Within a few miles they had regained Highway 1 and were twisting up through eucalyptus groves toward Mt.Tamalpais. Ramon leaned over the wheel and sped in and out of filtered sunlight, cutting across the divider into turns, riding second gear up the steeper runs until the engine seemed, about to explode. The mountain road converted his traffic 'am rage into mania. Raines knew they would shortly crest and then make the winding descent down to the coastal cliffs. He felt around for a seatbelt but there didn't seem to be one. Marty was either looking out his window or sleeping. Perhaps he was dreaming of the Toyota ad that would be shot on this very highway. A happy family in a happy Camry. Good mileage, good value. Craig was behind his hair again, mouth and Adam's apple working to the urges of ZZ Top.
       For many years now Raines's life had been free of Craigs and Ramons. He was seldom paged away from whatever anxious plans and niggling dissatisfactions filled his consciousness by a voice asking him, "Do you like my sister's tits?" He hadn't been in a fight since he was thirteen. Sometimes at night he would pass a knot of boys by the convenience store near campus and brace to be blindsided-it never came close to happening. A real physical blow would smash every thing he'd come to expect in the ordering of the world. He could hardly imagine things suddenly going that way. He would recoil, he could feel it, recoil the way he had from Marty's phone call. And maybe respond as then, with chatter to disarm the menace.
       It might be 'just what he needed-truth delivered in a cold-cock to the cheekbone. He tried out the words: I'd take a punch for Marty if he needs me to.
       They cruised past cows on the green bluffs above the highway. Between Doug Fir forest, patches of hillside were purple with winter heather. It was achingly beautiful but Raines had to shut his eyes for fear of puking from carsickness. When he opened them, the whole coastline as far as Point Reyes lay in the western sun. They'd reached the high point of the foothills; now they were going down. Raines couldn't take the sublime long view. There was no guardrail, and with switchbacks the drop suddenly opened under them- not straight down to the sea, but a steep fall and a long one, rolling and bounding over the heather and the cows to the lower precipice where the sandstone cliffs plunged to rocks that would shatter Marty's little red MG. The sea wasn't calm: December waves assaulted the coast. A wind seemed to be blowing in strong. Ramon was free-driving now, no gas or brake, he veered toward the edge around a sluggish camper and then he shot past an old Dodge Dart on a blind curve, nothing visible for seconds but the distant glittering line between sea and sky.
       Raines stared at Ramon's profile. There was a mole on his cheek sprouting two long black hairs. His expression was blank; and the blankness seemed like madness. In the other front seat Marty maintainted his silence and the silence seemed to say: This is what my life is like. I can't do anything about it. It's up to you, if you're my friend. This was real. Ramon and Craig had taken over the day and their lives. This time Raines couldn't smile and stand up. He grasped his courage.
       "I think we should slow down, Ramon. We're going a bit fast."
       The MG surged a little. Ramon cupped his ear. "You say something?"
       "I said-"
       "Yeah, I heard you. You think this is fast?"
       Raines was determined not to be faced down. He took heart from the sense that he was the only sane one in the car.

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