When he slept under the bridge it was late spring, and the concrete channel was filled with foamy brown water, littered with condoms and fast food wrappers. The ground temperature at night was near freezing, but by the river it wasn’t so bad, especially if you could find someone to bundle with. He slept with women until the word got around, and then he slept with men until the word got around and by that time it was summer and he was safe. After that they all avoided him, men and women both, and he was like one dead, which suited him just fine. On dry days, when the haze wasn’t so bad, he climbed to the top of the highest bridge and looked west along the river to the horizon, at what he didn’t know, unless it was to some vague idea of the invisible sea.
They fell on him in October, ten of them, the largest and hardest, led by Mean Bertha, who wasn’t the beefiest but who’d killed twenty men and rolled their gutted bodies into the river. In a way he was flattered. Nine of them held him down, two on each arm and leg and one to keep his mouth closed, while Mean Bertha cut his clothes off. Underneath he was smooth and hairless and without blemish. Bertha put her knife against the artery in his thigh, near the empty arc of his loins, and growled a word, short and ugly. He bit down on the hand over his mouth until he tasted blood, closed his teeth through the gristle of muscle, and had the satisfaction of hearing the man scream in pain as Bertha flicked the knife into his legs…