Bruises and welts peppered my body from my waist up to my forehead, but I healed quickly. So did Freddie, surprisingly. I had completely shattered the man’s shoulder, but after a month or so, he was walking around the boxing gym without a sling. He clearly didn’t have a full range of motion in that arm, and it looked like it hurt every time he moved it, but still, it was impressive healing for an older guy who didn’t have a magical cancer tattoo helping him out. He said to give him one more week and he’d be ready to train me.

While Freddie was healing, Anita, Caleb and I set up shop in a hotel, and eventually in a three-bedroom apartment. It was nothing special, but it gave them what they needed, and it felt nice to have some stability — or the illusion of it, anyway. Anita started homeschooling Caleb, much to his dismay, and I picked up a habit of going on long, aimless walks at night for hours on end.

The world felt completely different in the middle of the night, but the city especially so. Streets that are packed with people during the day have only a few stragglers at night, and they aren’t the type of people I’d see during the day. At night, the city belonged to vagrants, bums — people like me. Or people like the old me. Technically, I wasn’t homeless anymore, and I had a sizable savings tucked away in the minivan. Still, I identified with the scraggly sacks of shit I saw standing on the sidewalk at three in the morning much more than I did with the clean cut gentlemen I saw at three in the afternoon.

I’d take the same twenty block loop every night, so I’d see many of the same people. At first, nobody approached me. I guess I looked too threatening to strike up conversation with — or to rob. I’d just stroll by and they’d look at me, sometimes with confusion, sometimes with disdain, sometimes with amusement. One group in particular, who hung out in front of a 24-hour convenience store, seemed to be particularly amused by my late night strolls.

“Hey, boy!” a morbidly obese man with a hard belly and tiny, dark eyes shouted at me one night. “Where ya goin’?”

I tried to ignore him at first, but he just kept shouting like he thought I didn’t hear him.

“Nowhere in particular!” I finally shouted back. “Just walking!”

“Well if you don’t got anywhere to be, why don’t you come over here?”

I couldn’t think of a good excuse not to, so I obliged. I crossed the street and came face to face with the motley crew that hung out in front of the convenience store. They were even stranger up close than they seemed from afar. The man who called me over looked like a naked mole rat, with his bald, pink body, beady eyes and crooked, yellowed teeth. The man next to him looked like a six-foot-five praying mantis, with a long face that was way too big for his thin body and arms that went down past his knees. He wore a beanie and smoked a cigarette, and nodded at me. The last two members of the crew looked like twins. One was a man and one was a woman, but they both had matted black hair that went to their shoulders, high, pointed cheek bones, and they drank out of a single Big Gulp cup using two straws.

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I immediately regretted my decision to cross the street for these people.

“Keaton,” the naked mole rat man said and shook my hand. “Harold. Sharold. Be good hosts and give the nice man a sip of your soda.”

The woman twin — who I guess was named Sharold — was holding the cup, and extended it out towards me. I politely declined. The tall man stared at me while smoking his cigarette. He looked directly into my eyes and wouldn’t look away.

“Don’t mind Beanpole over there,” said Keaton. “He don’t talk much. He’s a damn fine soprano, though.”

What the fuck did I walk into?

“I’m the baritone of the group,” Keaton continued, ignoring my silence, “and the twins over there are the alto and tenor. Here’s our card.”

He handed me a ripped square of notebook paper that had “The Midnight Crooners” written in pen.

Is this actually happening?

I shit you not, they started singing to me. Keaton snapped his fingers three times and Beanpole came in on the fourth beat with a haunting, high pitched lead in to a doo wop tune about a girl named Sheila. I just stood there and listened while these motherfuckers sang me a song on the streets of Houston at three o’ clock in the morning. It was so loud that I thought they were going to wake up half the city, but nobody else seemed to give a shit; the clerk inside of the convenience store didn’t even look in our direction. At long last, after a minute or so, their tune ended.

“Well?” Keaton said.

I didn’t know how to respond.

Harold and Sharold resumed their synchronized soda drinking and Beanpole lit up another cigarette. The only one that seemed to care about my appraisal of their performance was Keaton, who looked at me expectantly

“It was… uhhh… good,” I said with horribly feigned enthusiasm. “I think I’m gonna continue on my walk though. See y’all around.”

I waved and tried to walk past Keaton, but he stuck his pudgy arm out to stop me. Something about his face had changed — not just his expression, either. His eyes had grown larger, and his head was shinier than I remembered it being just a few minutes ago. In fact, nobody seemed to look quite the same. Beanpole seemed to be at least seven-foot tall now, absolutely towering over me, and the twins looked even more identical down to the way their wild hair stuck out in the same exact spots. Keaton looked up at me with big, black eyes.

“You better fucking listen to me if you ever want to wake up,” he said.