The bench at the corner of Consaul and Front Street had been green once. By the summer of 1985 it was the color of an old penny, and somebody had carved ZF + nobody into the top slat with a pocketknife, and the bus stop sign beside it leaned a little toward the river as if it were tired of waiting too.
Ossie Belinsky sat on it every afternoon at five minutes to four.
He was twelve that summer, small for it, with a haircut his mother had given him in the kitchen of their apartment in Parma the night before they drove west, and he had the habit of holding very still when people looked at him, the way a rabbit holds still in a yard. He had a library book on his knees most days, though he did not read much of it. He watched the street instead. He watched the Front Street bus come up from the direction of the bridge, and the men with lunch pails who got off it, and the ladies with string bags from Lacko's Meats, and the dogs, and the kids on bikes, and the long brick fronts of the old Hungarian neighborhood baking in the August sun. Birmingham, the people here called it, East Toledo, Ohio, though nothing about it looked like the Birmingham Ossie had seen on the news. It looked like his grandmother's photographs. It smelled like paprika and refinery and hot tar.
He had been sitting on the bench for six days when Zoli Ferko came to tell him he did not belong there.
Ossie knew who Zoli was before Zoli ever said a word to him. Everyone on Consaul Street knew who Zoli was, and it took a new kid about a day and a half to learn. Zoli was fourteen and built like a fireplug that had been stretched. He had black hair that went whatever way it liked and a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off and a Tigers cap he wore backward, and he rode a Schwinn that had been put together from at least three other Schwinns. He did the morning route for the Blade, which meant he was up before anybody, and by afternoon he had the tired, dangerous look of a boy who had already done a day's work while the rest of the block slept. Little kids moved their Big Wheels out of his way without being asked. Older kids said his name a certain way, half like a warning and half like a brag, as in, Zoli says, or, you better ask Zoli.
He came down Front Street that sixth afternoon with two other boys behind him, Lenny Rozsa and a skinny kid called Spud whose real name Ossie never learned, and he did not ride up to the bench so much as arrive at it. He put one sneaker down on the curb and leaned on his handlebars and looked at Ossie for a long time without saying anything.
Ossie looked back. Then he looked at his book, which was about the Lewis and Clark expedition, and which he had been on page forty-one of for six days.
"You're the Kertesz lady's kid," Zoli said.
"Her nephew," Ossie said. "Great-nephew."
"From Cleveland."