Mick had first seen the house a year and a half ago.

It was on Cartwright at Bolton, a T-intersection defined by a pair of tarry wooden masts weighted down with armored cabling and scarred by generations of linemen's heel picks. When Mick first arrived at Cartwright & Bolton, his art and architecture training popped into gear. He recognized immediately that breed of American home, common as house cats and just as distantly lovable. With slight variations in trim, the houses were all old, slathered with eons of paint until the edges were softened. No. 14 Cartwright had a particularly industrial coating of battleship gray, layered on by a tipsy handyman in surplus Navy paint. Mick stood with his easel and suitcase on the archipelago of humped soil. Wind ruffled his hair and the unkempt grass and the surrounding lake of muddy puddle water. Mick wanted to turn away when he heard his older brother's harsh voice yelling at maybe a dog; or was it his wife Mary.

The marks were all over America, maybe the world, but Mick hadn't traveled that far. Not yet, he thought glowing inside as he tiptoed down the night path to the car. He carried his easel under one arm and his suitcase in the other hand. One day he would sell his paintings in New York and London and Rome, but for now he had to rely on his older brother's sense of practical survival.

Lisa, his fiancee, and Ben, his older brother, were in the car already. Ben had unscrewed the dome light so they were less likely to be seen in the dirt driveway between the darkened houses. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear and starlight cast a mercurial glow. Mick recognized Lisa's shadow by the big frizz of beautiful hair. The other, lumpier shadow was that of Ben, who hunched in the rear seat. When Mick drew closer, he saw in the light of a street lamp that Ben was just rolling up his .38 revolver in a white linen cloth.

"Hurry," Lisa whispered to Mick.

Mick slipped open the trunk. Ben had unscrewed the light there also, and Mick had to feel around, pushing pillows this way and blankets that way to make room for his easel and suitcase. Cosmetics rattled faintly in a cardboard box, and Mick inhaled the mingled fragrance of their life together--Lisa's flower perfume, Ben's assertive Tycoon aftershave, Mick's woodruff deodorant. His paints and a few other possessions were already stashed. As he closed the trunk lid, Mick cast a regretful glance back at the house that had been his home--their home--for nearly a year.

"Hurry!" growled Ben.

The house was a Victorian four-family structure. If its gingerbread decorations had once stood out amid gables and cornices, now what stood out was the attitude of the landlord, a 30-year Navy veteran with a slim frame, red face, and piercing menthe eyes. The more the three got behind in rent, the fiercer the landlord's eyes became, and the redder his complexion.

"Honey," Lisa pleaded. "Mickey, we've got to get out of here." He loved her voice, though sometimes it could be used to express petulance, disapproval, even momentary cruelty. She had a fine voice; and it added to Mick's ardor that she'd sung backup to a rock band that had later been on national TV. They could make love and listen to her singing; they could time their climaxes in the old whispering house, with time suspended, just she and Mick, he tangled in her long, thin white limbs while she moaned and thrashed.

Mick cast yet another glance back at the house. On the second floor beside them lived two sisters. One was Em, paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair. The other was Monica, a stunning beauty who, in his painterly opinion, might not have the body of a Lisa, but Lisa's face was plain compared to the luminous beauty of Monica's. Mick felt a mixture of longing and guilt, knowing he'd never see either one of them again. He felt torn and frustrated, because he had dreamed of painting Monica. And that seemed to be how life went, this constant moving on.

"Hurry, Mickey!" No petulance this moment, just urgency.

Soon after Mick moved in, Mary left Ben. He'd thought he'd heard Ben hitting her--he'd heard something like slapped flesh late at night after an argument, bookended by shrieks before and after, and punctuated by the slam of a door as she went to her car and went to some bar to hang out until after closing. Ben couldn't afford to hang out, because he went to work each morning at six. "I never touched her," Ben grumbled the one time Mick asked about it. They stood in the kitchen late one evening. Mick had come downstairs from his easel to get a cola. Mary had run out to a bar after an argument. Ben polished off a couple of beers before going to bed. Where Mick was a small, wiry, dark-haired man of 25, Ben was a huge, muscular, balding brunet with wild cracked-gray eyes that could transfix a person with their threat of mayhem. Mick had never been able to stand up to him; he was just grateful to have a place of refuge after losing his own apartment and being turned down in the master's program for painters at art school. It afforded him a chance to pick up the pieces, start over. Perhaps there would be room in the art program next year; he was on the waiting list. And perhaps he should apply at universities in other cities.

The matter of applying in other cities kind of went around the corner when he'd met Lisa. That was in a bar called Apples & Oranges down the street from Cartwright and Bolton. Mick was in a good mood, having finished a set of watercolors rich with Arizona sunshine; he'd well captured the oppressive heat, the scoured landscape, the rusty colored hills. He'd show it to a savings and loan officer next week in the hope of selling the set for about two thousand bucks; that would do wonders for his meager income from the convenience store, which was measured in minimum wage per hour of drudgery, when he could get sufficient hours to hand over to Ben his share of the rent.

She had this ball of frizzy hair the color of dry mahogany. Of course everyone looked different in bars at night, but she didn't. Mick drifted toward her, on the half-hearted hope of a conversation. She was tall, and thin, with seductive blue eyes and a mischievous grin. She wore makeup well, just enough, dark almost black red on the lips, light shadowing in the orbits of her eyes, a little mascara to add definition to her eyebrows. She had nice white teeth and gleamed as the red lips wrinkled into a wry smile, this way and that. She was one of those women, Mick decided, who were sexy without really being pretty. Her face was narrow and long. She had huge round cheekbones and gaunt cheeks. Her chin and jaw and mouth had a kind of square set to them. Her nose was fleshier than she might have wanted it to be, but she could lower her gaze and look up, with one seductive eye making a sunset over the bridge of that nose, and already Mick (with a buzz on) wanted to kiss her. She said "Hi" and he began to think it would be easy. Which was fine that evening, because he felt good and relaxed and wasn't up for any more hard work.

"What do you do?"

"I'm a painter."

"Oh how fun. What do you paint?"

"Just about anything. Landscapes. Still lifes. You. I'll paint you."

"Oh that would be fun."