Floyd Harbor. Joel Mowdy

      The bungalows on Neighborhood Road, Mastic Beach, had been summer homes, Fire Island a short drive from there via the Smith Point Bridge. Now bicycles built from parts huddled under lock and chain along the concrete stoop of Paul’s Bicycle & Shoe Repair. Their wheels caught clumps of dead leaves in the wind. Baskets of doll heads collected dust among spools of thread and balls of yarn in the neighboring unmarked craft store, where bundles of cotton had been stacked like sandbags in the window display.

      Across the street was the bungalow turned into Sweet Magic, its window featuring Maltos, Neccos, Mary Janes, Dum-Dums, Lemon Heads, Fortune Bubbles, Newports, Winchesters, and Marlboros. Oily spots told where kids had pressed their faces and cupped their hands to see inside. Then Sweet Magic closed its doors, the displays disappeared, the sign was vandalized and removed, the window broken and boarded up. Now stalks of thin bamboo bound together were makeshift palm trees, attached to the front of the new store with wire and nails. They reached from the ground to the roof, and leaves made with the tips of cattails and corn husks were stapled flush to the wall near the bottom edge of the rain gutter. The new window was painted blue. The canopy over the steps was thatched river grass. On the front of the canopy hung a sign the size of a license plate that said SALTY’S.

      Will kissed Carla Brown right there. For a moment, he was somewhere else.

      “What is this place?” she said.

      “It’s Salty’s,” Will said. “No one knows what it is.”

      Dorian, his roommate, wasn’t home. Headlights threw shadows through the blinds and across Carla. Will kissed her ear and smelled her hair, then kissed her neck where a swirling cowlick hid. He unbuttoned her shirt and pricked his finger on her drugstore name tag. He could taste his pot and beer breath on her breast, her workday in the stubble in her armpit. She laughed when he kissed her there, but then moaned and said, “Come here,” even though he was on top of her already.

      “Here,” she said, reaching into her pocketbook on the floor. She pulled out something small and plastic.

      “Condom?” he said.

      “Meth.”

      This was the year before Will walked upon the scene of a naked young man, in the early morning sun, fending off a team of police at the USA gas station. The man was hard to catch, and he didn’t seem to understand what world he was in. He thought he was a fish and needed to get back in the water. He broke out of the plastic ties, so the police resorted to using real cuffs on the man’s sandy ankles, too. He floundered in the backseat of the cruiser. He had been on the high school basketball team.

      A commercial for a Long Island college was playing. “Stay close,” it said. “Go far.” Will switched to the cartoon channel. He watched an annoying commercial for lollipops and turned the TV off when a show for babies came on. It was time for work.

      The bowling alley was on William Floyd Parkway, about a mile south of Sunrise Highway. The bowling lanes were empty. Will scraped gum and taxi stickers off the pay phones. Later, when the lanes filled with league play, he swept up spilled ashtrays, restocked the bathroom, collected beer bottles, and walked between the gutters to pick up dead wood. Dead wood was a pin knocked out of reach of the sweeper, lost in the gutter. At the end of his shift, he carried trash to the Dumpsters in the parking lot, where on breaks he smoked to the rumble and flush of bowling on the other side of the wall. Soon he’d see Carla at the super drugstore in the neighboring strip mall, between King Kullen and New Rooster.

      “Is there a hero in you?” the voice on television said.

      Dorian was discussing a proposition to make money. The scheme had to do with mattresses. Will lost the thread of Dorian’s pitch due to the joint they’d smoked. The army commercial was reminding him of the time he’d almost enlisted. He’d gone through with his physical, but he wasn’t home the morning the recruiter came to collect him for swearing in. The baby Rebecca was pregnant with wasn’t his. He’d lost any reason to cling to a sense of duty.

      “Are you in?” Dorian said. “We’ll split it three ways. You, me, and the guy with the van.”

      “I don’t understand. Say it again?”

      “It’s simple. You pay for the mattress, the guy drives to the other store, I return it, we split the profit.”

      Will had questions. “Where does the profit come from?”

      “Because you switch the tags,” Dorian said. “Are you listening? Remember that mattress I had before I got the futon? Like, right before?” When Dorian bought the mattress at Cody’s on Montauk Highway in Floyd Harbor, he had switched the price code with that of a smaller down-market mattress half the price. He was giving himself a discount.