We felt pretty safe hiding out at Samuel’s because Samuel, himself, was hiding out. ICE really wanted to bust my fat white ass.

At least, that’s what Samuel said.

I could never tell if Sam was holding all the brick walls up, or if the brick walls were supporting Sam.

Maybe both.

ICE was just the new kid on the terror block. They were terrorists. There were others. Authority is a law onto itself. Most authority has its own version of a little army with tap dance shoes.

You think I exaggerate.

That is because you have never been hunted down. Like an animal. You do not understand what it feels like.

It’s the tongue of ice wrapped around my balls. You are alert. Livid. I sleep with a handgun in bed. Not under the pillow. Not under the mattress. But in the bed. Andrew does not much like it. I know men who can hunt other men down in the timelessness of the Mojave. Footprints sculpted clean as gypsies’ eyes by the sand and by the wind. The Tenderloin is a tomb of Hong Kong songs. The Tenderloin opens her legs in wonderdust. She is the painfully assembled.

An old queen of burlap bags. No one knows where the leaves come from. The building next door is having its roof repaired and the smell of tar drifts like snarled weeds fixed on whatever murder on Jones will consume the night.

The ambulance arrives. People and their bodies hanging from the windows, shaking their pitchforks, grim as lead.

Our secrets belong to us.

ICE will explain that it hunts people down because that is the law. Old scratches from the burlap bags of grimace, tigers, and the Christmas cups.

I did not let Andrew come with me the night I shot a rifle bullet through the picture window of a house in the Richmond where an officer from ICE lived with his family. Apparently, it was breaking news.

They family dove toward the floor screaming. I never get to see too many of the dead bodies because I’m gone before they hit the ground.