When we were in the sixth grade, Rogelio’s mother began sleeping with Rowdy, an old Racine-Boy who lived above Sergio and Jorge Naveretté, two brothers in our group and expert spies who had devised an ingenious method by which to hear the sex going on above them.

“Check it out, bro,” Sergio said the morning after he revealed the secret to me. He turned and began walking up his apartment building’s stairs. That morning I had met him early for school, looking to hear Ms. Ramirez’s lovemaking for myself.

Sergio stepped into his living room, past his kitchen whose boiling pots of water always made that side of the house seem more like a rainforest than a place where people lived and ate. He led me around the corner into the small bedroom he shared with his brother. There on the bed, lying on his side, was Jorge, holding a long row of paper-towel rolls taped end-to-end to his ear. The other end was up on the ceiling, inserted through a hole for a missing light fixture.

“Jorge,” Sergio said. “Let Jesse see.” Jorge’s eyes were closed, his eyebrows raised in soft arches. He was ten at the time, a year younger than Sergio and me, but with his head to the side, his eyes closed the way they were, he seemed even younger, like the Christmas ornaments my mother had of baby angels sleeping.

“Jorge,” Sergio said again. And Jorge opened his eyes but made no move to get up. Instead, he continued to listen to the cardboard contraption, alternating his gaze between our faces as if what he saw was beyond us, beyond the walls of the tiny bedroom he and his brother shared.

“Jorge!” Sergio said again. And Jorge snapped out of whatever spell he was under. He leaped from the bed. “Damn, bro!” he said. “They’re doing it doggie-style!” He sounded out of breath, excited. I took the tube and nodded, knowing from the Penthouses Sergio and Jorge kept beneath their dresser exactly what “doggie-style” was.

On the other side of the small apartment, amid the cloud of humidity I had seen swirling when I passed, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. Though I lived just across the street, I had really seen Sergio and Jorge’s parents only twice in my life, once at our confirmation, at our grammar school, Providence of God, and once when a disgruntled former tenant set their apartment building on fire. Otherwise their parents hardly seemed to exist at all, disappearing into doorways, driving off in their green pickup, always slipping just out of view. Whenever I walked into Sergio and Jorge’s apartment and saw the swirling steam of their kitchen, I wondered if their parents were actually in there, or if they hid from their children the way they seemed to hide from everyone else.

Love affairs were a fact of life in my neighborhood. What Ms. Ramirez was doing was not that extraordinary. Stories abounded of mothers who had left their families to live with truck drivers from Texas or journeyman housepainters. And Mr. Gomez, downstairs in my building, had been seeing a barmaid at Trebol’s tavern for years. Everyone knew about it, knew Mrs. Gomez knew about it. She would send her youngest son, Peter, to fetch his father from the barmaid’s apartment atop the tavern. No one ever said anything.

But Ms. Ramirez was religious. Her husband had left her the year before and she had turned to the church, Rogelio in tow. When the Virgin Mary processions came singing up the street, carting the porcelain three-foot statue of La Virgen to the sin-afflicted apartments of the neighborhood, Ms. Ramirez was in the lead. She had inherited from the most devout before her the task of deciding how long the Virgin was to sit in the various accursed households; sometimes it stayed for weeks on end. And behind her, carrying the candles and crucifixes of the procession, the fifteen or so other neighborhood women followed like apostles. They had all lost something — sons to drive-bys, unwed daughters to pregnancies and flight-of-fancy elopements — but Ms. Ramirez had lost a husband. And though the list of things-to-weather went on for miles in my neighborhood, deserting husbands sat at the top.

“All right,” Jorge instructed. “Now push it up till you hit the floor.” I raised my head as Jorge worked the other end of the tube deeper into the hole. Sprinkles of dry plaster cascaded down upon the side of my face, into my eye, as I held the tube to my ear. Abruptly the tube hit flush. Sergio and Jorge looked to me. I wasn’t sure what to listen for. What did doggie-style sound like? Then, without warning, unmistakable sounds began pouring down the tube. I heard the squeak of old bedsprings. I heard the scrape of bedposts against wood flooring. Most remarkable of all, I heard the voice of Rogelio’s mother, who just the day before had asked me how I was doing in school but who was now moaning out “Rowdy,” softly, quietly, as if sorry for something, grateful for something else.

I looked to Sergio.

“I told you, bro!” he said. “I told you she was up there!” I didn’t say a word. Instead, I listened more closely, able now to pick up even fainter sounds, the rocking of an off-kilter night table, the groans of Rowdy himself, whose voice here was smooth and easy, different from when he was out front drinking, cursing in ways we remembered and used on our own.

I couldn’t tell whether they were doing it doggie-style or any style. I only pictured in motion the Penthouse scenes Sergio had begun flashing before me like cue cards. I closed my eyes.

The heaves of Rogelio’s mother began closing in on each other. The groans of Rowdy got louder. I imagined Ms. Ramirez sweating, her mouth open, her tongue pushed against her upper teeth like the women in the magazines. I imagined her nude but for the red heels she often wore to work. And in my imagination her shoes glowed red, radiating as if with heat in the steam-filled room.

“Ohh,” Ms. Ramirez suddenly gasped. I opened my eyes.

“Let me see!” Sergio said. I didn’t respond. Sergio put his magazine on the dresser and sat next to me. He placed his ear close to mine at the end of the tube. On my right side, Jorge did the same, a triangle of eavesdroppers.

“All right,” Sergio said. “He’s about to climax.”

And then there was a quick trade of punches. Ms. Ramirez called out to God; Rowdy grunted; the rocking turned to a rumble, the scrapes to digs. Then there was a yell, and in that split second Rowdy’s voice was thick and heavy, the way it sounded out front when he called someone a punk-ass motherfucker and was about to prove it. Silence followed, then a soft thump. I held tight to the tube, listening for any aftermath. Sergio rose from the bed and bowed like a matador to the four corners of the tiny bedroom. Jorge whistled softly in applause.

“Man,” Sergio said as we walked to the corner of Eighteenth and Throop, our notebooks in hand, “they were all over today. Usually they’re just quiet.”

“Must’ve been horny,” I said. “She always yell for God like that?”

“All the time,” Sergio said. “She’s going to hell.” He blessed himself and laughed.

At the corner Jorge took a seat on Trebol’s stoop as Sergio and I looked up the block for Rogelio and Marcitos. Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday’s fried food, tacos, gorditas, chicharon, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day’s worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. Up the block, Rogelio and Marcitos came out of their buildings. Marcitos, carrying a single spiral notebook like the rest of us; Rogelio, carrying his books and Bible in a small brown briefcase. Marcitos crossed Throop and met Rogelio. They approached us.

Providence was marooned on the darkside, forgotten among abandoned factories, outmoded railroad lines, and dilapidated wood-frame houses. I’m sure those in the neighborhood who didn’t know Providence of God was back there — it was small, like any other three-flat — wondered every morning where all the kids were going, disappearing into the maze of decaying brick buildings, following the train tracks as if we were ghosts of a life that might once have existed there. We even felt like ghosts sometimes, in the winter, when the sound of our footsteps was muffled by snow, when even our breathing seemed swallowed by the thick air. In the spring, when it rained, we huddled beneath the train docks and examined the vast innards of the factories — the huge chutes that hung like descending missile silos, the conveyers that led off into distances we never had guts enough to explore. When the rain stopped, we crossed back over the railroad lines and became real again, our walks like transformations.