Sometimes it’s a chore to find out who works for who and exactly who to trust. The night Mr. Patterson was killed, the list of suspects was about as big as the city itself, because, after all, Mr. Patterson won the state attorney general run-off on a platform of a Man Against Crime.

What followed his murder was a movie, a Randolph Scott western, played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and Fords and.38s and switchblades, until the city was dismantled, stacked in vacant fields, and left to burn in smoldering trash heaps for the entire state to see.

The fires burned all that fall, filling your eyes and nose and clothes with that acrid smell.

We never rebuilt.

How could we?

I’ll always remember that bonfire smoke in ’54, when it all came tumbling down to the bugles of Guard troops. The burnings seemed to last for months, destroying the guts of the Machine, huge trailing snakes of blackness high up into the fall sky. I remember thinking to myself: This is a hell of a place to raise a family.

1

THE SPRING OF 1954 had slipped into summer with little notice. My routine hadn’t changed much; there was always the jog down Crawford Road at daybreak and then back to the little brick house I shared with my wife and two kids. As my wife, Joyce, would start coffee, I’d finish with a few rounds against the heavy bag hung on chains in an old shed and then maybe jump some rope or hook my feet under a pipe and do sit-ups until my stomach ached. That morning, a Friday, June eighteenth, my daughter, Anne, walked outside, still in her pajamas, and asked if she could work out with me, and I smiled, out of breath, my bald head slick with sweat, and reached into the shed for an apple crate. Anne, just eleven, with the same slight space in her teeth as me and the same fair skin and hair, stood on top of the shaky wood and began to work the leather of the speed bag with her tiny fists.