Au-then-tic.

"This magic street," said the old man.

"What?"

"I said, this is Magic Street," he repeated. "Can't you feel it? Like standing in a waterfall, it's so thick here."

"Pull up right here," said Bag Man.

They were at number 3968, an elegant white house with a tile roof and a triple garage. It was the last house before the hairpin turn, where no houses stood.

Instead, there was a grassy green valley that stretched about a hundred yards before it ran into the thick woods at the base of the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. Not that anybody did any recreating there. It was kept clear because when it stormed, all the runoff from the whole park was funneled down a concrete drainage system to collect in this valley, forming a lake. And right in the deepest part was a rusted tube sticking straight up out of the ground. Must be two feet across, or so it seemed to Byron, and eight feet high. It was perforated at about shoulder height, so water could drain into it when the lake got deep enough.

That's what it was for. But what it looked like was a smokestack sticking straight up from hell.

That's what Nadine said when she first saw it. "Wouldn't you know it, up in the park it's all so beautiful, but down here is the anus of the drainage system and where do they put it? Right in the nicest part of the nicest black neighborhood in the city. Just in case we forget our place, I suppose."

"It's better than letting the rainwater run right down the streets and wash everybody out," Byron told her.

That earned him a narrow-eyed glare and a silent mouthing of the word "Tom."

"I wasn't defending the establishment, I was just saying that not everything is racism. The city puts up ugly stuff in white neighborhoods, too."

"If it was a white neighborhood they'd make a playground and that pipe would be brightly painted."