Lonely is the night, when you find yourself alone
Your demons come to light and your mind is not your own
Lonely is the night, when there's no one left to call
You feel the time is right, say the writing's on the wall

- Billy Squier

Listen to the ground
There is movement all around
There is something goin' down
And I can feel it

- The Bee Gees

The black-haired boy sighed, opened the passenger door of the silver minivan, and stepped into the warm Southern California night; a soft breeze redolent of lilac and begonias washed over him, plastering his lank hair to his sweaty forehead. He went around back, opened up the hatch, and grabbed the stack of plastic totes from the cargo bay. The blonde girl came up and stood next to him with a tired exhalation. "You think they're gonna be late?"

He chuckled humorlessly. "Yeah." He slammed the hatch and turned to her. Dark bags hung under her brown eyes, and long strands of hair had escaped her signature ponytail and lay across her sallow forehead. His bad mood softened, and he kissed her cheek. "But on the bright side, Dan'll give us an extra hour."

It was her turn to chuckle. "Yeah, great, how nice of him."

Side-by-side, they crossed the parking lot to the low, metal-roofed warehouse. Two big roll-top doors were open, light spilling onto the concrete. A big man in jeans and a tight black T-shirt stood just outside one of the doors smoking a cigarette, the light glinting on the lens of his glasses. He wore a bandana with an American flag pattern tied tightly around his forehead. His hair was long and black and his skin was the color of burnt coffee. He was full-blooded Chippewa Indian, probably the only 100 percent Native the boy had ever known. "Hey, Freddie!" he grinned as the boy and girl approached. His tone was slow, sleepy, like the tones of most Indians the boy had seen on TV.

"Hey, Allen," the boy said, "how's it going?"

Allen shrugged, a smile slowly spreading across his face. "Hey, it's going." He turned to the girl, and said, in a faux shy schoolboy timbre, "Hiiii, Tina."

"Hi," the girl said. "Dan on a tear again?"

Allen laughed. "Whatever do you mean?"

Inside, a wide space dominated by long rows of scarred wooden tables opened up. People milled around, talking, drinking gas station coffee, one man even eating pizza from a brown box. While the boy took the totes to their usual spot, the girl grabbed two stacks of papers from in front of the office and brought them over, hefting them onto the table with a grunt. The boy pulled out a pocket knife and cut the twine holding the papers in place. They were newspaper inserts. Ads, restaurant menus, fliers...the stuff most people threw away. The girl jumped up onto the table and sat with her legs dangling off and her shoulders slumped. "I am so tired," she said.

"So am I," the boy replied, preparing the inserts, a task which consisted of dividing them into four roughly equal stacks. He grabbed a roll of bags from the top tote; it had a cardboard back with a hole, and he hung it from a metal nub in the table. During the day, the girl worked as a home health aide, at least that's what she called it when she wanted to sound professional: She sat with an old lady while her daughter worked. She grocery shopped, cooked, cleaned, and wiped the occasional ass. The boy worked odd jobs he found on Craigslist. Mend a fence for thirty dollars, help someone move for 250. Today he tore down someone's shed with his bare hands and a sledgehammer and then loaded it into a dump trailer. That job was worth a cool 950, which would go a long way in paying next month's rent. It wasn't much, but it was all he could find; no one wanted to hire a twenty-year-old who looked sixteen with no work experience.

"You have tomorrow off, don't you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, throwing her head back. "Thank God."

"Maybe we can do something," he offered. He finished what he was doing and leaned heavily against the table.

"Sleep?" she asked.

"If that's what you want to..."

"He-ey, Freddie boy."

The boy cringed. The girl looked up and rolled her eyes.

"This dude does not take a fucking hint," the boy sighed.

He put on the biggest smile he could muster and turned just as Bob Gato set a stack of inserts down in the next spot over. A short, weasel-faced man with slicked-back black hair and beady little eyes, Bob reminded him of a snitch from an old gangster movie. His high, chattering voice grated the boy's nerves so badly that by the end of the night he was shaking. It wouldn't be so bad, but the guy would not shut up. From the moment he came through the door to the moment he went back through it, he was talking. Everyone else in the plant had lost their patience and yelled at him. The boy and the girl were the only ones who didn't have the heart, and apparently Bob took that to mean they were his best friends.

"Hey, Bob," the boy said.

"Man, you wouldn't believe the traffic on the 401. I was sitting there for an hour and thinking 'come on, I got places to be!' The papers are gonna be late tonight because of the big game so, hey, that works out to my advantage, you know? Hey, you guys eat? I got some left over pizza in the car if you want it, I don't. Man, I ate so much of that stuff I feel like I'm gonna pop. You ever feel like that, Freddie?" he nudged the boy's stomach.

"Oh, yeah, I feel like I'm going to pop right now," the boy said through clenched teeth.

Bob looked at the girl. "Tina Marina, no? You want some pizza?"

The girl shook her head and held up her hand. "I'm good. Thanks."

"Alright, suit yourself," Bob said. He brightened. "Hey, you hear about those guys in New York knocked over that armored car? Got away with fifty thousand dollars." He shook his head and chuckled. "That's chump change. I used to work at LAX and I have a buddy who still does. You know that money Americans spend in foreign countries? They ship it back and they keep it in a vault over the weekend. I'm talking cash, traveller's checks, the works. You get a good team of six guys together you can clean 'em out. Easiest twenty million you'll ever make."

Jesus fucking Christ. The boy was about to drop him. "Cool, Bob." He looked at the girl. "Time for a Winston break."

"Asshole," she hissed as he passed. He glanced over his shoulder as Bob moved in and started talking her ear off; she sighed and hung her head. Sorry, sis, he thought with a smile. Outside, he leaned against the building's corrugated metal siding, took a pack of Winstons from his pocket, and shook one out. He plopped it into his mouth and lit it, the harsh smoke filling his lungs and sweeping him into a land of toxic pleasure. He exhaled, the smoke hanging lazily in the warm summer air, and drew another lungful.

"Those things'll kill you."

The boy looked up as Charlie Parker approached. A tall, rail thin man with a patchy mustache and scrawny, tattooed arms poking out from a black cut-off tanktop with a picture of Dale Earnhardt on the front, Charlie was so far the only redneck the boy had met in SoCal. He whipped something out of his pocket, peeled back a lid, and took a pinch from a tin. He put it into his mouth and packed it against his bottom gums with his tongue. "This is better."

The boy snickered and took another drag. "That shit'll rot your face off."

Charlie shrugged. "Ain't got much a face to look at anyway." He passed by and went inside.

The boy finished his cigarette just as the truck bearing the papers pulled in. Damn, earlier than he expected. Inside, Dan Hartman, the supervisor, a self-important middle aged asshole with glasses and a combover, came out of the office. "It's gonna rain tonight so double bag those papers! You will be fined for wet papers!"

Ah, damn it. The boy hated double bagging the papers, because the bags weren't cheap, and they had four hundred fifty copies. 900 fucking bags pissed away in one night. Sighing, he waited with a group for the truck to back in. A guy jumped out, came around, and threw open the back door. The boy waited his turn, then grabbed his share: Three heavy stacks. He carried them over to the table and dropped them. The girl was sitting where he left her. Bob was hurriedly getting his inserts ready. That's what happens when you spend all your time talking, you dumb bastard.

"Alright," the boy said, "lets get this shit done."

They had a system: She drove and he threw. The minivan had a sliding side down that he would leave open as they worked their way through the subdivision they delivered to. He sat in the bucket seat, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and reached into the paper-stuffed tote whenever he needed to. Sometimes he'd grab several and put the surplus on his lap. The Palm Oaks subdivision was crisscrossed with a thousand streets. When they first picked up the route a year ago, they got hopelessly lost every night. Now, after doing it 365 times (more like 385), they could both drive it blindfolded...at night. Neither had ever seen it during the day, and if they found themselves out when the sun came up, they would probably get lost again.

As he threw, the boy studied the houses flanking the wide sidewalks. Stucco, terra-cotta roofs, wavering palms in tiny, sunbaked front lawns. The people who lived here were middle class, and if he had learned one thing since he and the girl ran away from home two years ago, it was that middle class people are often the ones who bellyache the loudest and the fastest. Rich people are so rich they don't care, poor people are so poor they don't care, but middle class people...they're the ones who nitpick every little thing. God forbid a paper land two centimeters to the left or right. Pack of assholes. That didn't stop him from wanting a house here, a big, spacious deal. He'd put up with asshole neighbors for a nice home.

You need money for that though, and money wasn't something they had a lot of.

The girl didn't speak as she navigated through the morass of streets. The radio was barely above a whisper. He thought he recognized a Mick Swagger song, and his mind turned to someone in his past. He shut that out, though; too painful.

They finished just before dawn, and started for home, a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a complex in a bad part of town. At this hour, the only people walking the streets were up to no good: Hookers, pushers, pimps, Jehovah's Witnesses. They arrived home just as the first rays of the sun spread across the skids of San Fernando. Inside, the girl showered while the boy smoked a cigarette in bed. When she came out, she sat down a lit one too. "I'm so sick of this," she said.

"Me too," he said.

She held the cigarette daintily between his fore-and-middle fingers, her elbow resting on her leg. She took a puff and blew the smoke out in a neat plume.

Neither one liked the schedule, or the fact that they had to work every single night, but the paper route was their primary source of income. Without it, they would be fucked.

Shaking her head, she stabbed the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray and laid down. The boy did likewise, putting his arm around her and burying his face in her hair.

"I love you, Luan," he said.

"I love you too, Lincoln," she replied.

Then they slept.