East Street was jammed with emergency vehicles and people with their heads thrown back, eyes on the church roof, where a spotlight danced over a guy in a dark suit and tie and a bright pink shirt. His voice was faint but clear as a telephone call, the people on the sidewalk around us were so still. He kept shouting about Clarence, go get Clarence, no negotiations without Clarence. "Or that's it!" He moved toward the red-stone lip of the roof. "I mean it. That's it!" Then he stepped back and spread-eagled against the green-copper slope of the dome, waiting for his answer

“What negotiations?” Sarah asked from the side of her mouth, elbows cupped in her palms. “Is he trying to negotiate for his life with his life?”

Somebody nearby tittered, I couldn’t tell who. We were on a date, our first real one, walking back from dinner when we’d run across the commotion. Between us and my car were cruisers, fire engines, news vans, and a generator truck with the spotlight on a trailer. Plus the throng we’d joined on the sidewalk. It didn’t look like we were going to be leaving for a while. But in a way I didn’t mind, because our talk had bogged down before this. We were different kinds of people, and we’d both realized it. Now she was surveying the scene with the same puzzled mildly skeptical expression I’d gotten over salad, swordfish tacos, flan, and coffee. We’d given it a healthy shot.

“Maybe other issues are involved,” I suggested, trying one last time for a response I’d gotten earlier, before we’d spent this much time together: a glance of small delight. “Money. Secrets. Many people’s lives.”

“Maybe.” She knew what I was going for, but her bare shoulders just twitched. They were beautiful shoulders, fatless and angular, all the delicate bones roiling under smooth skin. It was the first hot night of the year. She smelled of petouli, which always seems to me like a winter smell.

A glistening guy in sweatbands raised a bullhorn to his mouth. “James? James, this is Ben again.”

The roof was too high to see the expression on James’s face, but in the blue-white beam he looked young and fit, his hair blond. His palms pressed against red-stone supports that were about as far apart as his reach.

“James, are you listening?”

Sarah glanced behind us, remarking, “How can he not?” I couldn’t tell whether she was addressing me or whoever it was who snickered again. She was a head shorter than I am, but she wouldn’t look up when she spoke, so all night I’d been having to bend to catch what she said, even across the dinner table. She wore her streaked brown hair in that uncombed way, not quite dredlocks that she tied back with a piece of twine; she wore pants like pajamas—thin fabric with a drawstring—and cheap rubber thongs. Ordinarily not my type, but she pulled it off. We’d met on a city bus, where what I’d noticed was her face and her posture, both alert. She had a bump in her nose, bright eyes, and a slow, quiet way of reacting that made her seem distant and wise. But not all that friendly, as it turned out, and apparently I’d amused her at best.

“We have Clarence on the line, James.”

“You do? Shit,” James said. He stood up straight and in the same motion brought the heels of his hands to his temples, turning his head one way and then the other as if he needed to re-evaluate this new development. Then he jumped. Not like you’d think, crying out and hurling himself off. Instead he sort of wearily approached the edge, peered over, and sat down, his back to us. A hydraulic platform had begun to rise, with somebody on it holding out what the calm and steady amplified voice said was a phone, but James ignored both platform and voice. We watched him swing one leg over the red stone, then the other. He turned back around and slid down a couple of feet, holding on with both arms for a second like a kid on the side of the pool, then dropped like a shot bird. The spotlight jerked and returned to where he’d been. The platform stopped, and people from the vehicles surged forward.

“Aw, man,” somebody near us said. Others turned away, all of us avoiding each other, ashamed of ourselves, or at least I was. “Is he dead?” a kid asked, eyes wide between the butterfly handlebars of his bike, and when I scowled down at him he grinned, showing me huge front teeth, then took off across the rectory lawn. I asked Sarah if she was all right.

She’d turned to look across the street—for my car, I thought, but when I asked again she turned back, her eyes full and her head raised to show me that, her chin puckering. I opened my arms, and she stepped right in.

§ § §

Steve Street’s fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, The Quarterly, the online Paumanok Review, God Particle, In Posse Review, and elsewhere. Since receiving his M.F.A. almost 20 years ago he’s taught writing and literature at over a dozen colleges and universities at home and abroad—and he’s still jumping, still writing, currently in Buffalo, New York.

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.