rom the back window of the apartment where Rodolfo lives with his mother and his sisters, he can see railroad tracks, the backs of warehouses, weeds with birds. Sometimes he watches trains from that window, resting his weight on his forearms and leaning out, his feet dangling above the floor inside. The cars rattle and clank over the rails; the horn is a long, living blast. A few hundred feet past the window, the tracks curve, slide under an overpass, branch. Once every few days he sees people jump from the train when it slows for the curve, men leaping from open boxcars and stumbling on the gravel of the embankment.
      Mojaos, his mother tells him. After they land, they run, bent-over, into the weeds behind the overpass. They come out, sometimes hours later, in different clothes, and walk away, or scramble into the back-seats of cars that pull up quickly and stop.
      Once, one of the men falls, skidding on his side and rolling in the gravel. When he picks himself off the ground, his arm dangles. He runs down the middle of the street, holding his elbow against his chest, and Rodolfo watches him from the window until he disappears around a corner, and keeps watching for a while after he’s gone, to see if he’ll come back, but he doesn’t.
      Rodolfo invents a story about the man, and acts it out with his plastic figurines on the kitchen floor. In the story, the man is his father—and that night, he tells the story to his mother. His mother, distracted, humors him until she runs out of patience. Por favor, she pleads, and he sulks.
      He decides not to mention his father again. The days slide by. He watches the trains.

he younger brother visits the older one. He sleeps on the couch. The first night of the visit, his voice—not shouting, but pleading—wakes the older one. Please, he says, please don’t, please don’t.
      The older one hurries to his brother’s side. Are you okay? he asks, and the younger one, coming awake, says yes, thickly. I’m fine, he says. Good night.
      When they were children, the older one was often casually cruel to the younger one. He punched and kicked him, shouted at him, allowed his friends to do the same. Still, at least sometimes, he had been able to protect the younger one from schoolyard bullies or neighborhood dogs. Once, the older one had seen another boy knock his brother into the gravel. His brother’s thin face, wild curly hair. The older one had sprinted across the school playground to defend him. Dropped everything he was carrying. Books, papers, a map he’d worked on with crayons, ocean dark blue, the land green and brown—it blew away in the dirt, he didn’t care. He ran as fast as he could.
      Now the younger one is taller than the older, thicker in the arms and chest. He’s too strong for the older one to attack anymore, at least physically. He’s too strong to need the older one’s protection in any obvious way. Months go by without them talking, a year, two years, without a visit.
      Back in his bedroom, the older one can’t sleep. He doesn’t know if his brother is awake or asleep, and if asleep, what he’s dreaming. Outside, a car slows almost to a stop before accelerating away. The younger one makes a high, keening noise, a whimper. He makes the noise twice more before the house is silent.