A Cool Breeze on the Underground by Don Winslow Page A

was watching. He was slumped so low in his chair that he didn’t see her come in, but he sure as hell heard her. Her rich voice dripped class.
    “Hello, I’m Mrs. Carey, Neal’s mother. How nice to meet you.”
    She was beautiful. She made Mrs. Cleaver look like a carhop. Her auburn hair was perfectly coiffed. Her gray dress was letter-perfect for the occasion. Brown eyes sparkled at the teacher, and as she held her hand out, the poor man almost kissed rather than shook it.
    She strode to the back of the room, displaying a warm maternal smile as she kissed Neal on both cheeks and subtly hauled him from his seat. “Show me everything,” she said.
    They walked the school together, pretending fascination with the various displays. She oohed proudly over his prize essay on Dickens’s London. She charmed teachers and parents, sipped punch, and nibbled cookies. She apologized for having to leave so early and swept, yea verily swept, out the door.
    Neal found Graham at McKeegan’s later on. “Where did you get her?” he asked. “She was perfect.” Graham nodded. For two hundred bucks, he thought, she’d better be perfect.
    “You’re faginesque, you know that?” Neal asked Graham. They were in a dark staircase in Neal’s building.
    “What do you mean? I like women. Don’t tiptoe. You don’t make noise stepping on the stair; you make it stepping off.”
    “That’s what I mean. Fagin was a character in Oliver Twist who taught boys how to steal and stuff.”
    “I don’t teach you how to steal.” Graham didn’t have much patience at the moment for this Fagin shit. He was trying to teach the kid something important. “You plant your foot—not heavy, but firmly. You step off lightly, like you don’t weigh anything.”
    “Yeah, okay, not steal. But stuff like this.”
    Neal planted his foot on the edge of the step. The result was an awful screech.
    “You want to wake the whole building?” Graham asked. “Always, always step to the butt end of the stair. That’s where it’s the most solid, least likely to squeak. Also you can feel your way. You can feel where the next step is. ‘Faginesque.’ I’ll give you ‘Faginesque.’ Get to work.”
    Work this evening was learning how to climb stairs without making any noise. Work was doing it with your eyes closed. Work was realizing that you make more noise going downstairs than going up, so, generally speaking, you sneak up but run down.
    “Christmastime,” Graham said as Neal practiced his step technique, “I run out and buy presents for those people who put carpet on their stairs.”
    “Nice people,” Neal agreed.
    Going downstairs was a genuine bitch, mostly because you can’t find the butt end of the step with your toe and you’re afraid of pitching forward and breaking your neck. So observed Neal to his tutor about the fortieth time he’d fucked up the maneuver.
    “Worse comes to worst,” Graham said, “and it will, you get down on your belly and swim downstairs.”
    “Swim?”
    “Try it. Don’t be afraid. Lie down, headfirst, and do the dog paddle.”
    “I can’t swim and I don’t have a dog.”
    Neal felt stupid as shit lying down dangling over the stairs.
    “You’ve seen Lassie, haven’t you?” asked Graham. “Do like Lassie does when she has to save that little bastard from drowning.”
    “Timmy.”
    “Right. Whatever. Quit stalling.”
    Graham put his foot on Neal’s ass and pushed.
    It wasn’t so bad when you got used to it, Neal thought, doing like Lassie does, etcetera. He made his way to the bottom of the stairs.
    He asked Graham, “How do you do this with one arm?”
    “You don’t. You hire some stupid kid to do it for you.”
    He walked over Neal’s back and out the door.
    A couple of months later, Neal tried to climb through a window and talk at the same time. He had something on his mind.
    “If I gave you the money, would you buy me something?”
    Graham stood on the fire escape. “What? Beer? Cigarettes?