The alley behind Suds City Laundromat in Elmira, New York, runs a block and a half between Lake Street and a chain-link fence that nobody has bothered to fix since the tire shop on the corner closed, and for most of the last six years, if you lived on that part of the east side, you knew two things about it. You knew it was a shortcut to the bus stop on Water Street that saved you four minutes. And you knew you didn't take it, because the man with the tattoos was back there.
Lazaro Prewitt understood this about himself the way a man understands the weather in his own town. He did not argue with it. He was fifty-four years old and built like a refrigerator somebody had dropped down a flight of stairs, broad and a little crooked, with a left knee that announced every change in barometric pressure. The tattoos started at his wrists and did not, as far as anyone on Lake Street could tell, stop. There was a snake on his right forearm eating its own tail, a column of Roman letters down the back of his neck that most people assumed meant something violent, and across the knuckles of both hands, in blue ink gone soft with age, the words HOLD and FAST. He wore a leather vest with no patches on it, which somehow frightened people more than patches would have. Patches you could look up.
He spent most afternoons in the alley with a 1979 Harley-Davidson Shovelhead that did not run. It had not run in the entire time anyone had watched him work on it. He had it up on a wooden stand he'd built from pallet slats, and he sat beside it on an upturned milk crate with his tools laid out on a shop towel, and he took things off it and cleaned them and put them back on, and every so often he would kick it over and it would cough and die, and he would nod as though it had told him something useful.
Mrs. Vuong, who owned the laundromat, let him use the outlet by her back door for his drop light. She did not invite him inside. She was a small, exact woman in her sixties who ironed her own work shirts and kept the lint traps cleaner than most people kept their kitchens, and she had made her arrangement with Lazaro the way you make an arrangement with a large dog that lives next door. You are polite. You do not turn your back.
The other thing in the alley was the coffee can.
It was a red Folgers can, the big one, wired to the chain-link fence at about chest height, and taped to the front of it was a piece of cardboard lettered in black marker in Lazaro's square, careful hand: TAKE ONE. NO QUESTIONS. Inside, most days, were six or eight small white boxes, each about the size of a deck of cards. People walking past on Lake Street could see the can from the mouth of the alley. They could see the sign. They could see the tattooed man on the milk crate twenty feet away, and they drew the conclusion that seemed obvious, and they crossed to the other sidewalk and held their children's hands a little tighter.
Lazaro had stopped trying to correct them a long time ago. The boxes held nasal naloxone, two doses each, the kind the county health department handed out at the needle exchange on Baldwin Street. He picked up a case every other Thursday. He restocked the can every morning. He did not keep count of how many were taken, because that was not the point, and because counting would have meant thinking about each one, and he had found that he could not afford to think about each one.
On the Tuesday it happened, the second week of October, the light was going amber by four-thirty and the wind coming down off the Chemung River had teeth in it. Lazaro had the Shovelhead's carburetor in pieces on the towel and was holding a jet up to the drop light, squinting through it, when he heard the boy.
He heard him before he saw him. It was not the sound of a kid playing. He had spent nineteen years listening to people in the worst minutes of their lives, and there are only a few kinds of crying, and this was the kind that has run out of air and keeps going anyway. It came from the Lake Street end of the alley, high and ragged, and then there were sneakers slapping on the broken asphalt, and then a boy came around the dumpster so fast he nearly went down on the wet leaves.
He was eight or nine. Thin, in a green hoodie two sizes big for him with the sleeves pushed up, jeans with the knees gone pale, black hair that needed cutting. His face was blotched red and wet all the way down to his chin. He saw Lazaro and stopped dead, maybe fifteen feet away, chest heaving, and for a second Lazaro watched the fear go across him, the same fear he had watched go across a hundred faces on Lake Street, and he waited for the boy to turn and run.