Billy Bathgate Part 2

Mickey the driver had both hands on the wheel when he didn't reach down to s.h.i.+ft. If the wheel was a clock he held it at ten and two. He drove moderately but not slowly, he did not contend with the traffic but used it to his advantage without ever seeming to speed or cut anyone off. He did not try to make a changing light, or upon a light's turning green to speed off with it. Mickey was the driver and that's all he was, but that was everything; you knew watching him and feeling the movement of the car under you that there was a difference between driving a car and running it with the authority of a professional. I myself did not know how to drive, how could I, but I knew that Mickey would drive a car as calmly and safely at a hundred miles an hour as at thirty, that whatever he called upon a car to do it would do, and now with the vision in my mind of the helpless window washer falling to his death, Mickey's competence stood in my mind as a silent rebuke in confirmation of Mr. Berman's remark.

I don't think in all the time I knew him while he was alive I ever exchanged a word with Mickey. I think he was ashamed of his speech. His intelligence was all in his meaty hands and in his eyes, which you sometimes saw flick back for a professional second in the rearview mirror. They were light blue. He was totally hairless, with fat ridges at the back of his neck which I got to know well. His ears bulbed out in back. He had been a prizefighter who never got further than the preliminaries in club fights. His greatest distinction was having been TKO'd by Kid Chocolate in one of his earliest fights when the Kid was coming up, one night in the Jerome Arena just across the street from Yankee Stadium. Or so I had heard. I don't know why but I wanted to cry for us all. Mickey drove us over to the West Side into some truck garage, and while Mr. Berman and I went across the street to a diner for coffee, the Chevrolet was exchanged for another car, which appeared with Mickey at the wheel maybe twenty minutes later. It was a Nash with totally different black-and-orange license plates. "n.o.body dies who doesn't sin," Mr. Berman had said to me in the diner. "And since that covers everybody, it's something we can all look forward to." Then he tossed one of those little number-square games on the table for me to amuse myself with: the one with sixteen squares and fifteen little numbered tiles which you have to put in order by shoving them around until they're in sequence. The point is you have only that one s.p.a.ce to use to get everything around where it belongs; one s.p.a.ce usually in the wrong place to put everything in the order in which it belongs.

But as I say it was a kind of enlistment, I had walked in and signed up. And the first thing you learn is there are no ordinary rules of the night and day, there are just different kinds of light, granules of degree, and so no reason to have more or less to do in one than in another. The blackest quietest hour was only a kind of light.

There was no attempt on anyone's part to provide explanations for why things were being done and no one sought to justify anything. I knew better than to ask questions. What I did understand is that a strong ethic prevailed, all the normal umbrages and hurts were in operation, all the outraged sensibilities of justice, all the convictions of right and wrong, once you accepted the first pure inverted premise. But it was the premise I had to work on. I found it was easiest when Mr. Schultz talked to me; at these times for a few moments things were clear. I decided I had so far the idea of it but not the feeling, it was the feeling that made for the genius of the idea as anyone could tell just being in Mr. Schultz's presence.

In the meantime I could figure out things were being done at a level of intensity that perhaps had been antic.i.p.ated in the quiet afternoons on the back porch of the City Island house. I will tell here about Mr. Schultz's Emba.s.sy Club. It was a place he owned, one of his properties, and it was quite publicly visible with a fancy canopy with its name in scripted letters on East Fifty-sixth Street between Park and Lexington avenues. I knew all about nightclubs from the gossip columns, and the customers who went there and the fancy names some of them had, from high society, and how they all seemed to know each other, movie stars and actors and actresses coming in after work, and ball players and writers and senators, I knew there were sometimes floor shows with bands and chorus girls or black women who sang the blues, and I knew each place had bouncers for the unruly and the girls selling cigarettes on trays while they walked around in net stockings and cute little pillbox hats, I knew all that though I had never seen it.

So I was excited when they sent me to work there as a busboy. Imagine me, a kid, working downtown in a nightclub! But in the week I worked there it was nothing like I expected. There was first of all not one single famous person I saw while I was there. There were people who came and ate and drank and listened to the little orchestra and danced, but they were unimportant. I knew that because they kept looking around for the important people they had come to see. Most nights the place was half empty except toward eleven o'clock when the floor show went on. The whole place was lit in blue light with banquettes around the walls and tables with blue tablecloths around a small dance floor, and a small stage with no curtain where the band played, not a great band, two saxophones and a trumpet and a piano and guitar and drums, and there was a hatcheck girl but no cigarette girls and no midnight reporters come to get dirt from the famous, no Walter Winch.e.l.l or Damon Runyon, the place was dead, and it was dead because Mr. Schultz couldn't show up there. He was the attraction. People liked to be where things happened or could happen. They liked power. The bartender stood behind the bar with his arms folded and yawned. At the worst possible table, by the door where it was drafty, every night two a.s.sistant United States attorneys sat with lime rickeys they did not touch and filled the ashtrays which I emptied conscientiously. They did not look at me. n.o.body looked at me in my short maroon jacket and bow tie, I was so low-down as to be supposed legitimate. I was making good in the nightclub world and took a sort of scintillating pride in the fact that as a busboy I was beneath even the notice of the old-time waiters. That made me valuable. Because I had been put there by Mr. Berman with the usual admonition to keep my eyes open. And I did, and I learned what idiots people could make of themselves who came to nightclubs, and how they loved it if a bottle of champagne cost them twenty-five dollars, and the headwaiter gave them a table when they pressed a twenty-dollar bill in his hand though there were so many empty tables they could have asked for the one they wanted and he would have led them to it for nothing. It was a narrow room, an empty scene, and between sets the band stood out in the alley and every one of them was a viper, even the girl singer, and on the third or fourth night she turned her hand upside down to me and handed me a roach and I sucked on it like I had seen them doing and sipped it in, that harsh bitter tea, like a scatter of embers going down my throat, and of course I coughed and they laughed, but the laughter was kindly; except for the singer they were white musicians not much older than I was and I don't know what they took me for, maybe someone working his way through college, and I let them think it, whatever it was, all I needed was a pair of Harold Lloyd horn-rim gla.s.ses and the act would have been perfect. In the kitchen though that was a different story, the chef there was a Negro who was in charge, he smoked cigarettes, the ashes of which dropped onto the steaks he was frying, and he had a cleaver with which he threatened waiters or underlings who offended him. He was a perpetually angry man who blew into flares of rage like the flames that flew up in the fat drippings. The only one who wasn't afraid of him was the dishwasher, an old gray-haired Negro man with a limp who seemed to be able to stick his bare arms in tubs of scalding soapy water with no feeling. We were close because I brought him the dishes. He appreciated the way I sc.r.a.ped them. We were professionals together. You had to be careful in the kitchen because the floor was as greasy as a garage's. c.o.c.kroaches were in leisurely residence on the wall almost as if they were stuck there, and the flypaper that hung from the light-bulb strings was black, and sometimes on the counters themselves a mouse or two scurried from one food bin to another. This was all behind the padded swinging doors with the oval windows of the blue-lit Emba.s.sy Club.

Yet I stopped to listen to the girl singer when I could. She had a sweet thin voice and seemed to look far away when she sang. They would always get up to dance when she sang because the women liked her songs of loss and loneliness and loving men who didn't love them back. The one I love belongs to somebody else. He means his tender songs for somebody else The one I love belongs to somebody else. He means his tender songs for somebody else. She stood in front of the microphone and sang with very little gesture, perhaps because of all the tea she smoked, and every once in a while, at really inappropriate moments of the lyrics, she hiked up her strapless satin gown as if she was afraid even her listless gestures would expose her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Then every morning at about four or four-thirty Mr. Berman arrived looking as fresh as the morning in some artful combination of pastel colors. At this point everyone would have left, the U.S. District Attorney's men, the waiters, the band, the place was only ostensibly open, with maybe the beat cop with his hat on the bar having one on the house. And it was my job to go pull all the tablecloths off the tables, and stack the chairs on them so that the two cleaning women who came in in the morning would be able to vacuum the carpet under the tables and mop and wax the dance floor. After this I was summoned to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where a small paneled office was maintained just down the hall from a fire door leading to a kind of culvert that led up a flight of iron stairs to an alley. And in this office Mr. Berman would go over the night's receipts and ask me what I had seen. I would of course have seen nothing except what for me was the new life of Manhattan, a life of the night, where in one short week everything was inverted and I finished work at dawn and went to sleep in the daytime. What I had seen was the life of the big time and a certain fluency of money not as it was earned and collected, as on 149th Street, but as it was spent and as it was turned into blue light and fancy clothes and indifferently delivered love songs. I had seen that the hatcheck girl paid Mr. Berman for her job, rather than the other way around, but that this seemed to be profitable to her as she went off duty each night with a different man waiting under the canopy outside. But this was not what he meant when he asked the question. I had seen my witchy little friend Rebecca in my mind dressed in high heels and some kind of black lacy gown dancing with me there to the songs of the girl singer. I thought she would even be impressed with me in my waistcoat busboy jacket. I slept in that same office after Mr. Berman left, and there I dreamed of making love to Rebecca and not having to pay for it. In my dream I was in the rackets and this made her love me enough to enjoy what I was doing to her. But certainly this was not what Mr. Berman had in mind. Half the time I awoke in the morning all gummed up in my sleep, which created laundry problems, and I solved these too like a denizen of Broadway, finding a Chinese laundry on Lexington Avenue, but also buying myself socks and underwear and s.h.i.+rts and pants over on Third Avenue under the El. It was like my Third Avenue. I was not unhappy this week. I found I was really comfortable in the city, it was no different from the Bronx, it was only what the Bronx wanted to be, it was streets and they could be learned and I had a job which paid twelve dollars a week now, dispensed from Mr. Berman's pockets just for me to haul dishes around and keep my eyes open though I did not know for what. And after the third or fourth day of this I rarely saw in my mind the cartwheeling body of the window washer in the sun coming down alongside the office building on Seventh Avenue. It was almost as if the East Side was a different behavior even for the rackets. I slept below ground in that office on a fold-out cot and, along about noon, came up the iron stairs into the alley and walked around the corner and a few blocks down and found a cafeteria on Lexington Avenue where the cab drivers had their lunch while I had my breakfast. I ate big breakfasts. I bought rolls and buns for old men the cafeteria owner was trying to kick out the revolving door. I reflected on my competence for life and could find nothing to criticize except perhaps not going uptown to see my mother. I called her once to the phone at the candy store on the corner of our block and told her I would be away for a while but I didn't know if she would remember. It had taken fifteen minutes on an open line for someone to find her and bring her downstairs.

I mention all this as an interlude of peace and reflection.

Then one night I was able to tell Mr. Berman that Bo Weinberg had come in with a party and had dinner and paid the band to do a couple of numbers of his choice. Not that I had recognized him, but the waiters had all come alive. Mr. Berman did not seem surprised. "Bo will be in again," he said. "Never mind who he sits with. See who sits at the bar near the door." And so I did, a couple of nights later, when Bo reappeared with a pretty blond woman and another good-looking couple, a well-dressed man with a blond pompadour and a brunette. They took the best banquette, near the bandstand. And all those customers who had come there that evening looking for the peculiar excitement seemed now to believe it was their good fortune to have found it. It wasn't merely that Bo looked good, although undeniably he did, a tall, rugged, swarthy man impeccably groomed and with teeth that seemed to s.h.i.+ne, but that he seemed to drink up the available light, so that blue light turned red and everyone else in the room seemed dim and small by comparison. He and his party were wearing formal clothes as if they had come from someplace important, like the opera or a Broadway show. He greeted this one and that one, he acted as if he owned the joint. The musicians came out earlier than they might have and the dancing started. And soon the Emba.s.sy Club was what I had imagined a nightclub should be. From one minute to the next the place was packed, as if all of New York City had come running. People kept coming up to Bo's table to introduce themselves. The man Bo was with was a famous golfer, but I didn't recognize the name. Golf was not my sport. The women laughed and smoked a puff or two of a cigarette and as soon as it was mushed out I changed the ashtray. It was odd, the more people there were and the noisier the place got with music and laughter, the bigger the Emba.s.sy Club seemed to be, until it seemed the only place that there was, I mean with nothing outside, no street, no city, no country. My ears were ringing, I was a busboy but I felt it was my personal triumph when Walter Winch.e.l.l himself appeared and sat for a few minutes at Bo's table, although I hardly saw him, because I was working my a.s.s off. Later Bo Weinberg actually addressed me, telling me to tell the waiter to refresh the drinks of the a.s.sistant U.S. attorneys who were sitting at the drafty table by the door. This caused great merriment. Well after midnight, when they decided to have something to eat, and I went up to the table to place the little hard rolls in their little plates with my silver tongs, as I by now knew how to do with aplomb, I had to restrain the urge to pick up three or four of the rolls and juggle them in time to the music, which at the moment happened to be "Limehouse Blues," which the band did in a very stately and deliberate rhythm. Oh Limehouse kid, Oh Oh Limehouse kid, going the way that the rest of them did Oh Limehouse kid, Oh Oh Limehouse kid, going the way that the rest of them did.

But for all of that I never forgot my instruction from Mr. Berman. The man who had come in just before Bo Weinberg and sat at the end of the bar was not Lulu Rosenkrantz with the ridged brow, and not Mickey with the floret ears, and it wasn't anyone I had ever seen on any of the trucks or in the office on 149th Street, and in fact no one at all that I recognized from the organization. It was a small, pudgy man in a double-breasted pearl gray suit with big lapels and a green satin tie and a white-on-white s.h.i.+rt and he didn't stay that long, smoking just a cigarette or two and drinking a mineral water. He seemed to enjoy the music in a quiet and private way. He didn't talk to anyone and minded his own business and kept his porkpie hat on the bar beside him.

Later when the morning rose in the bas.e.m.e.nt office in the culvert off the alley, Mr. Berman lifted his eyes from the stacks of cas.h.i.+er slips and said "So?" his brown eyes with the pale blue rims looking at me through his spectacles. I had noticed the man used his own matches and left the book in the ashtray and I picked it out of the trash behind the bar after he left. But this was not the moment to give my proof. It was necessary only to make the essential attribution. "An out-of-towner," I said. "A goombah from Cleveland."

There was no sleep for me that morning. Mr. Berman sent me out to a phone booth and I dialed the number he gave me, let it ring three times and hung up. I brought back coffee and rolls. The cleaning women came in and did up the club. It was now nice and peaceful in there with all the lights out except one light over the bar and whatever silt of the morning sun managed to drift in through the curtains on the front doors. Part of what I was learning was when to be on hand and visible, as opposed to being on hand and invisible. The second was the expedient I chose now, perhaps from no more evidence than Mr. Berman's disinclination at this time to talk to me. I sat upstairs at the bar all alone in the dusk of the morning tired as h.e.l.l and not without pride in myself for having made what I knew was a useful identification. But then all of a sudden there was Irving, which meant Mr. Schultz was somewhere nearby. Irving stood behind the bar and put some ice in a gla.s.s, then he cut a lime in quarters and with his fingers squeezed lime juice into the gla.s.s, and then filled the gla.s.s with a spritz from the seltzer bottle. When all this was meticulously done, with not so much as a ring left on the bar surface, Irving drank off his lime soda in one draft. He then washed the gla.s.s and dried it with a bar towel and replaced it under the counter. At this moment it occurred to me that my self-satisfaction was inane. It consisted in believing I was the subject of my experience. And then when Irving went to the front door, where someone had been knocking on the gla.s.s for some minutes, and admitted the improvident city fire inspector who had picked just this time, and why, except that the words in the air of the great stone city go softly whispering in the lambent morning that this sachem is dead and that one is dying, as if we were some desert blooming in the smallest flowers with the prophecies of ancient tribes, I saw even before it happened what an error of thought could lead to, that presumption was dangerous, that the confidence of imperception was deadly, that this man had forgotten what a fire inspector was, his place in the theory of inspections, his lesser place in the system of fires. Irving was ready with money from his own pocket and would have had the guy out of there in another minute but that Mr. Schultz happened to come upstairs from the office with the morning's news. At another time Mr. Schultz might have genuinely admired the man's gall and peeled off a few dollars. Or he might have said you dumb f.u.c.k you know better than to walk in here with this s.h.i.+t. He might have said you got a complaint you talk to your department. He might have said I'll make one phone call and have your a.s.s you stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h. But as it happened he gave this roar of rage, took him down and mashed his windpipe and used the dance floor to make an eggsh.e.l.l of his skull. A young man with a head of curly hair is what I saw of him alive in that light, maybe a few years older than me, a wife and kid in Queens, who knows? who like me had ambitions for his life. I had never seen anyone being killed close up like that. I can't tell even now how long it took. It seemed like a long time. And what is most unnatural is the sounds. They are the sounds of ultimate emotion, as s.e.xual sounds can sometimes seem to be, except they are shameful and degrading to the idea of life, that it can be so humiliated so eternally humiliated. Mr. Schultz arose from the floor and brushed his pants knees. There was not a spot of blood on him although it was webbed out in strings and matter all around the head on the floor. He hitched up his pants and smoothed his hair with his hands and straightened his tie. He was drawing great gasping breaths. He looked as if he was about to cry. "Get this load of s.h.i.+t out of here," he said, including me in the instruction. Then he went back downstairs.

I couldn't seem to move. Irving told me to bring an empty garbage can from the kitchen. When I got back he had folded the body and tied it head to ankles with the guy's jacket. I think now he must have had to crack the guy's spine to get him doubled so tight. The jacket was over the head. That was a great relief to me. The torso still had heat. We inserted the folded body a.s.s-down in the galvanized-iron garbage can and stuffed the s.p.a.ce around with wooden straw of the kind that protects French bottles of wine in their cases, hammered the lid on with our fists and put the can out with the night's refuse just as the carter came along on Fifty-sixth Street. Irving had a word with the driver. They are private companies that take away commercial refuse, the city only does citizen garbage. Two guys stand on the sidewalk and heave the can up to the fellow standing in the truck on top of all the garbage. That fellow dumps out the contents and tosses the empty can back over the side to the guys in the street. All the cans came back except one, and if a crowd had been standing around, which there wasn't, for who in the fresh world of the morning wants to watch the cleanup of the night before, the truck motors grinding, the ashcans. .h.i.tting the sidewalk with that tympanic carelessness of the profession, n.o.body would have noticed that the truck drove away with one packed garbage can imbedded in all that odorous c.r.a.p of the glamorous night, or dreamed that in an hour or two it would be shoveled by tractor deep below the anguished yearnings of the flights of seagulls wheeling over the Flus.h.i.+ng Meadow landfill.

What depressed Irving, what depressed Abbadabba Berman, was that this had not been part of the plan. I saw it in their faces. It was not so much a fear that there could be unforeseen complications, that was not a professional worry. It was that such poor slobs who on their own get high-and-mighty ideas, which are in fact low ideas of what high-and-mighty is, are unnecessary to kill. Essentially the guy was not in the business. After a while even Mr. Schultz looked depressed. It was still morning and he had a couple of Cherry Heerings served to him by Irving at the bar. He looked glum, as if he understood he was getting to be a cross they all, himself included, had to bear. There was this interesting separation he made now from his own temperament. "I can't deal with it when it's all over the street," he said. "Irving, you remember that Norma Floy, that gash who took me for thirty-five thousand dollars? She run out on me with that f.u.c.king horseback-riding instructor? What did I do? What did I do? I laughed. More power to her. Of course I ever find her little blond head I'll break every tooth in it. But maybe I won't. And that's the point. These guys are putting it out on the street. I mean the f.u.c.king fire inspectors? What next, I mean the mailmen?"

"We still got time," Mr. Berman said.

"Sure, sure. But anything is better than this. I can't take this no more. I'm finished with this. I've been listening to too many lawyers. Otto, you know the Feds are not going to let me pay the taxes I owe them."

"That is correct."

"I want one more meeting with Dixie. And I want to make things really clear to Hines. After that we will confront what we must confront."

"We are not without resources," Mr. Berman said.

"That's right. We will do the one or two essential things it appears now we must do. And then it's on to Shangri-la. I'll show those f.u.c.khead sons of b.i.t.c.hes. All of them. I'm still the Dutchman."

Mr. Berman told me to come outside and we stood beside the empty garbage cans by the curb. He said the following: "Supposing you have numbers to the number one hundred, how much is each number worth? It is true that one number might be the value one, and another number the value ninety-nine, which is ninety-nine ones, but each of them in the row of one hundred is only worth a hundredth of the hundred, you get it?" I said I got it. "All right," he said, "now knock off ninety of those numbers and say all you got left is ten of them, it doesn't matter which ten, say the first five and the last five, how much is each number worth? It doesn't matter what it says its number is, it's its share in the total that matters, you get it?" I said I got it. "So the fewer the numbers the more each one is worth, am I right? And it doesn't matter what it says it is as a number, it's worth its weight in gold is what it's worth compared to what it was surrounded by all the other numbers. You unnerstan the point?" I said I did. "Good, good, you think about these things then. How a number can look like one thing but mean another. How a number can look like one thing, but have the worth of another. After all, you'd think a number was a number and that's all it was. But here is a simple example how that is not so. Come take a walk with me. You look terrible. You look green. You need some fresh air."

We turned east, came to Lexington, crossed, and headed for Third. We walked slowly as you had to do with Mr. Berman. He walked slightly sideways. He said, "I'll tell you my favorite number, but I want you to guess what it might be." I said, "I don't know, Mr. Berman. I can't guess. Maybe the number that you can make all the other numbers from." "That is not bad," he said, "except that you can do that with any number. No, my favorite number is ten, you know why? It has an equal number of odd and even numbers in it. It has the unit number, and the absence of the unit number which is mistakenly called zero. It has the first odd number and the first even number and the first square. And it has the first four numbers which when you add them up add up to itself. Ten is my lucky number. You have a lucky number?"

I shook my head. "You might consider ten," he said. "I want you to go home." He took out a wad of bills from his pocket. "Here's your salary for the busing job, twelve dollars, plus eight dollars severance pay, you are hereby fired."

Before I could react he said, "And here's twenty dollars just for the h.e.l.l of it because you can read the names of Italian restaurants on matchbooks. And that's your money."

I took the money and folded it and put it in my pocket. "Thank you."

"Now," he said, "here's fifty dollars I'm giving to you, five tens, but this is my money. You unnerstan how I can give it to you but it is still mine?"

"You want me to buy you something?"

"That is correct. My directions for it are I want you to buy me yourself a new pair of pants or two and a nice jacket, and a s.h.i.+rt and a tie and a pair of shoes with laces. You see those sneakers you're wearing? It was a personal embarra.s.sment to me to come in the morning and to see that a busboy at the elegant Emba.s.sy Club was walking around all night in his Nat Holman basketball sneakers with the laces so far gone the tongue hanging out of the mouth, and a big toe showing for the final insult. You are lucky few people look at feet. I happen to notice such things. I want you to burn those sneakers. I want you to get a haircut so you don't look like Ish Kabibble on a rainy night. I want you to buy a valise and into the valise put some nice new underwear and socks and a book to read. I want you to buy a real book from a bookstore, not a magazine, not a comic book, a real book, and put that in the valise too. I want you to buy a pair of gla.s.ses to read the book if it comes to that. See? Gla.s.ses, like I wear."

"I don't use gla.s.ses," I said. "I got perfect eyesight."

"You go to the p.a.w.nshop and you'll find they have gla.s.ses with plain gla.s.s. Just do what I say, all right? And do this. Take a few days. Take it easy, try to enjoy yourself. There's time. When we need you we'll send for you."

We were by now standing at the foot of the stairs to the Third Avenue Elevated. It was going to be another hot summer day. I had mentally counted the money in my pocket, ninety dollars. At this moment Mr. Berman unpeeled another ten. "And buy something nice for your mother," he said, the one remark that rang in my head all the way home on the train.

SEVEN.

The train to the Bronx was empty at that hour of the morning, I was alone in the car staring into people's windows as we went by. I caught glimpses of people's rooms as if I was taking snapshots, a white enamel bed against a wall, a round oak table with an open bottle of milk and a plate, a standing lamp with a pleated shade protected with cellophane with the bulb still on in the morning over a stuffed green chair. People leaned with their arms on their windowsill and stared at the train going by as if they didn't see them every five or ten minutes. What was it like with the sound filling those rooms and shaking the plaster off the walls? These crazy women hung their family laundry on clotheslines between the windows, and their drawers flapped as the train went by. It had never occurred to me before how everything in New York was stacked, one thing on top of another, even the railroads had to be put over the street, like apartments over other apartments, and there were train tracks under the streets too. Everything in New York was on levels, the whole city was rock and you could do anything with rock, build skysc.r.a.pers into it, scallop it out for subway tunnels, poke steel beams into it and run railroads in the air right through people's apartments.

I sat with my hands in my pants pockets. I had distributed my money half and half and held on to it with both hands. For some reason it was a long trip back to the Bronx. How long had I been away? I had no idea, I felt I was coming home on a furlough, like a doughboy who'd been in France for a year. Everything looked strange to me. I got off a stop early and walked a block west to Bathgate Avenue. This was the market street, everyone did their shopping here. I walked along on the crowded sidewalks between the pushcarts on the curb and the open stalls in the tenements, every one of the merchants competing with the same oranges and apples and tangerines and peaches and plums for the same prices, eight cents a pound, ten cents a pound, a nickel each, three for a dime. They wrote their prices on paper bags which they hung like flags on wooden slats behind each crate of fruit or vegetables. But that wasn't enough. They shouted out their prices. They called Missus, look, I got the best, feel this grapefruit, fresh Georgia peaches just in. They talked they cajoled and the women shopping talked back. I felt a little better now in all this innocent, urgent, only slightly larcenous life. There was chatter and in the street the horns of trucks blowing and kids darting from one side to another and overhead from the fire escapes men who were out of work sat in their pants and ribbed unders.h.i.+rts and read the papers. The aristocracy of the business had the real stores where you walked in and bought your chickens still in their feathers, or your fresh fish, or your flank steak, or milk and b.u.t.ter and cheese, or lox and smoked whitefish and pickles. In front of the army-navy stores suits hung on hangers from the awning bars or dresses hung from racks wheeled out the front doors, and clothes were bargains too on Bathgate, where for five dollars or seven dollars or twelve dollars you got two pairs of pants with the jacket. I was fifteen years old and I had a hundred dollars in my pockets. I knew without question that in that precise moment of the daily life of subsistence I was the richest person on Bathgate Avenue.

There was a florist on the corner and I went in and I bought my mother a potted geranium because it was the only flower whose name I knew. It didn't have much of a smell, it smelled more like earth or a vegetable than a flower, but it was the kind of plant she herself bought and then forgot to water until it withered on the fire escape outside the kitchen window. The leaves were full and green and there were small red blossoms that hadn't opened. I knew that a geranium was not a proportionate gift but it was sincerely from me and not from Abbadabba Berman speaking for the Schultz gang. I felt somewhat shaky now walking home to my street. But when I turned the corner by the candy store there before my eyes were the Max and Dora Diamond kids running around in their underwear under the sprinkler attached to the fire hydrant. The street was closed off, it was maybe ten in the morning, and they were all running around in wet underwear, the little ones, screeching, with their s.h.i.+ny little bodies so beautifully fast and quick. Of course the few older children wore real woolen bathing suits, dark blue trunks and connected tops with shoulder straps for both boys and girls, the uniform orphan-blue wool, and not a few suits had holes where the flesh peeked through. And there were regular kids from the tenements all mixed in with their individual colors and their mothers watching and wis.h.i.+ng they could run under the water too except for their dignity. The water made a rainbow umbrella over the s.h.i.+ning black street. I looked for my witchy friend Becky but I knew she wouldn't be there, I knew she wouldn't be caught dead running under a sprinkler any more than any of the other incorrigibles, it was not what they could allow themselves to do no matter how hot it might be, it was their dignity no less than the parents' to make distinctions, in fact so it was with all of us, not excepting me, I the most rigid of all, pa.s.sing into the dark courtyard of my house, stepping out of the light, climbing through the dark halls of chipped octagonal tile to the apartments where I had grown into my life.

My mother was at work as I knew she would be. I could look into all the rooms in the world, there was no house like my house. There had been a fire in the kitchen, the enamel on the table was burned in a big egg shape and around the edges the paint was blistered. Nevertheless the candles were lit and lined up in their tumblers. Sometimes in cold weather, when the wind came through the cracks around the windows and under the door and up through the dumbwaiter shaft, they leaned one way and then the other and swayed and s.h.i.+fted dissynchronously as in a kind of dance. Now they burned evenly although there seemed to be more than I remembered, the effect on me was of looking into a chandelier, that although I was upright I might just as well be lying on the floor and looking up into a grand imperial firmament. There was something majestic about my mother. She was a tall woman, she was taller than I was. She had been taller than my father as I reminded myself now looking at the wedding photo on the bureau in the sitting room which served also as her bedroom when she made up the couch. She had years ago run a crayon over the gla.s.s in a big X across his figure. This was after she had sc.r.a.ped away the face. She did things like that. When I was little I thought all rugs were in the shape of men's suits and trousers. She had nailed his suit to the floor as if it was the fur of some game animal, a bearskin, a tigerskin. The house had always smelled of burning wax, of candles gone out, of the smoke of wicks.

A water closet was off the kitchen, a dark cubicle with just a toilet, whereas the bathtub was in the kitchen, covered with a heavy wooden hinged lid. I put the geranium here so that she would see it.

In the little bedroom where I slept I found something new, a battered but once-elegant brown wicker baby carriage. It seemed to take up the whole room. The wheel rims were dented so that it wobbled as I pushed it back and forth. But the tires had been washed until they were white. And the top was up, that hinged part that can be put up against the weather and snapped into place with decorative stanchions on the sides. And a series of splintered holes ran diagonally down through it, so that the light from the bedroom window lit them up. An old rag doll lay askew in the carriage; perhaps she had found them together in the street, or bought them from Arnold Garbage separately and put them together herself, the carriage and the doll, and pulled them up the stairs and into the apartment and into my room for me to find when I came home.

She didn't ask too many questions and seemed happy enough to see me. My arrival split her attention, if the lights were a phone it would have been as if she maintained two conversations simultaneously, she half listened to me, half turned to the lights. We ate our dinner as always sitting beside the bathtub lid and my flowers made a kind of centerpiece and seemed more than anything to give her to understand that I had gotten a job. I told her I was working as a busboy with duties also as a kind of night watchman. I told her it was good work because there were lots of tips. That's what I told her and that's what she appeared to believe. "But just for the summer, of course, because you have to go back to school in September" is what she said, rising to adjust the position of one of the lights. I agreed. But I told her I had to dress properly for the job or I couldn't keep it, so on Sat.u.r.day afternoon when she got home from work we rode the Webster Avenue trolley up to Fordham Road and went shopping for my suit at I. Cohen's, which was her choice, it was where, she said, my father had found good value in the old days, and she had good taste, she was suddenly an efficient and capable mother in the outside world, and I was very relieved on several grounds, just one of them being that I didn't know how to buy clothes for myself. But she looked reasonably normal too, she wore her best dress of large violet flowers on a white background and combed her hair up under her hat so that it did not show itself as long. One of the things that bothered me about my mother was that she never cut her hair. The fas.h.i.+on was for short hair but hers was long and in the morning, when she was preparing to leave for her job with the industrial laundry, she plaited it in one long braid which she coiled up on the top of her head and then stuck a lot of long pins in. She had a sour-cream jar of these long decorative pins on her bureau. But after she took her bath in the kitchen at night and prepared for bed, sometimes I couldn't help seeing all that straight long grayblack hair combed out on the couch pillow, some of it even falling off the side and touching the floor, some of it getting caught in the pages of her Bible. Her shoes bothered me too, she had bad feet from standing all day at her job, and her solution was to wear men's shoes, white ones which she put white polish on every night, summer or winter, claiming they were nurse's shoes if I happened to be in a bad enough mood to mention them. When we argued my criticism made her smile. It drove her further into herself. She never criticized me, however, being too distracted, only asking an occasional question whose anxiety was dispelled by her own wandering attention almost before she came to the end of the sentence. But on this Sat.u.r.day afternoon when we went up to Fordham Road she looked very fine and acted almost all the time as if she was in the day together with me. She picked out a light gray single-breasted summer suit with two pairs of trousers and an Arrow s.h.i.+rt with little tabs sewn into the tips of the collar so that it would not curl up, and a red knit tie with a square bottom. We were a long time at I. Cohen's and the old gentleman who took care of us pretended not to see how poor we were, the condition of my sneakers, my mother's white men's shoes, taking us on faith, this little plump man with a tapemeasure hanging around his neck like a prayer shawl perhaps he had reason to know of the pride of poor people. But when my mother opened her purse and displayed the cash I had given her I thought I did detect a look of relief on his face, if not curiosity for this handsome tall woman who brought in this kid in rags and bought him an eighteen-dollar suit and accompaniments like it was nothing. Perhaps he thought she was a wealthy eccentric who had picked me out of the street as a charity case. I knew that night he would tell his wife that his job made a philosopher out of him because every day he saw that human nature was full of surprises and all you could say about life was that it was past understanding.

I Cohen's did the alterations and put up the cuffs of the trousers while you waited, but we said we'd be back and I walked with my mother up the winding hill toward the Grand Concourse. I found an Adler shoe store and bought a new pair of black sneakers with nice thick soles and then I chose shoes, black wing-tips with secretly heightening leather heels of the style I had seen on the feet of Dixie Davis, Mr. Schultz's lawyer. All of this set us back another nine dollars. I carried the shoes in a box and wore the new sneakers and we continued our way up Fordham until we found a Schrafft's. And there we joined for their afternoon tea all the fine people of the Bronx. We ordered little chicken-salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off the bread, actual tea for my mother and a chocolate ice-cream soda for me, all of it set down on paper place mats in open lace patterns and served by waitresses in black uniforms with white lace ap.r.o.ns that matched the place mats. I was very happy to be doing something like this with my mother. I wanted her to be having a good time. I enjoyed the ceramic clatter of the restaurant, the fussy self-important waitresses balancing their trays, the afternoon sun coming through the front window and s.h.i.+ning on the red carpet. I liked the big-bladed silent ceiling fans turning slowly as befitted the dignity of the diners. I had told my mother that I had money in my pocket to buy her some new clothes too, lots of them, and new shoes too that were better for her feet, and that we could go right now two minutes up the street to the Alexander's Department Store if she wanted, right at Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse, the main intersection of the Bronx. But she had become interested in the paper lace of the place mat and was tracing the design with her fingers, feeling the embossing with her fingertips and then closing her eyes as if she was blind and was reading it in Braille. And then she said something I wasn't sure I heard properly but was afraid to ask her to repeat. "I hope he knows what he's doing" were the words she said. It was as if someone else was at the table, the voice was not quite hers. I didn't know whether she had said it speaking for herself or had read it off the dots of the embossed place mat.

But anyway I put forty dollars in her pocketbook that night, which left me with a little over twenty-five. I found I was getting used to these big sums, handling these bills as if I was to the manner born. It is true that you get accustomed to money very quickly, that the miraculousness of the idea of it wears away and it becomes unremarkable. Yet my mother's salary at the laundry was twelve dollars a week and that money remained miraculous in my mind, which is to say valuable in the old way, as my own earnings by their profligacy were not. It was an Abbadabba Berman idea. I hoped the dollars I put in her purse would take on the quality of the dollars in her pay envelope. Around the neighborhood it became clear that I had money. I bought whole packs of Wings cigarettes and not only smoked them continually but was generous with them. In the p.a.w.nshop on Third Avenue where I went for the gla.s.ses I found a reversible satin team jacket, black on one side, and then you could turn everything inside out and presto it was a white jacket, and I bought that and strutted in the evenings in it. The team name was The Shadows, not a name I recognized as local, and it was st.i.tched in fancy white script on the black side and in black on the white side. So I was wearing that and with my cigarettes and new sneakers and I suppose my att.i.tude, which I might not be able to discern in myself but which must have been quite clear to others, I represented another kind of arithmetic to everyone on my street, not just the kids but the grown-ups too, and it was peculiar because I wanted everyone to know what they figured out easily enough, that it was just not given to a punk to find easy money except one way, but at the same time I didn't want them to know, I didn't want to be changed from what I was, which was a boy alive in the suspension of judgment of childhood, that I was the wild kid of a well-known crazy woman, but there was something in me that might earn out, that might grow into the lineaments of honor, so that a discerning teacher or some other act of G.o.d, might turn up the voltage of this one brain to a power of future life that everyone in the Bronx could be proud of. I mean that to the more discerning adult, the man I didn't know and didn't know ever noticed me who might live in my building or see me in the candy store, or in the schoolyard, I would be one of the possibilities of redemption, that there was some wit in the way I moved, some lovely intelligence in an unconscious gesture of the game, that would give him this objective sense of hope for a moment, quite unattached to any loyalty of his own, that there was always a chance, that as bad as things were, America was a big juggling act and that we could all be kept up in the air somehow, and go around not from hand to hand, but from light to dark, from night to day, in the universe of G.o.d after all.

But anyway it was a palpable change, no matter what I wished, you do feel special and there are numerous discreet kinds of recognition granted to you on the street, as if you had entered a seminary or something like that, small registrations in the eyes of people, where now they see you and are sure they don't want to have anything to do with you, or they see you and give you a moment of their serious attention, depending on what their own ideas of the religious life might be, or perhaps political life, but in any event they see you and wonder how you can hurt them or be of use to them, and now and henceforth, you're another name in the system.

At the same time n.o.body knew anything, you understand, who I was with and where I worked, all of this was secondary to the mythological change of my station, except of course to those who were in the business, who for their part, as a matter of principle, would not show the least interest because these things come out in due course, first of all, and because I was to the professional eye so clearly still a punk, second of all. So this was a very subtle spirit event of my street that I speak of, and except in the public life of summer might hardly have found the currency it did; I mean never in my self-consciousness of my return did I have the illusion that anyone knew the magnitude of what had happened to me, how I had been living in the very pulsebeat of the tabloids, distributed in printer's ink and hidden like the fox in the tree leaves on the puzzle page except that I was right in the middle of the centrally important news of our time.

But one night I was sitting on the orphans' stoop in the white side of my Shadows jacket with my two friends Rebecca the Witch and Arnold Garbage and we had it mostly to ourselves, the younger kids having been herded inside because it was their curfew, and it was that moment of summer night when it is still light blue in the sky but lamppost dark in the street and it was noisy enough with everyone's window open and the radios playing and the arguments going, and there came around the corner the green-and-white prowl car of the local precinct house and when it reached us it stopped at the curb and the motor ran quietly there and I stared at the cop in the car and he looked up the steps at me, and the appraisal was keen and measured, and it seemed to me everything grew immediately quiet, although of course this was not so, and I felt my white jacket glowing in the last light coming down from the sky, I felt levitated by that light and the cop car too seemed to float away, from its dark green bottom to its upper half in white suspension over the tires, and then the head in the window turned away and said something to the cop I couldn't see, the driver, and they laughed and the headlights went on like gunshots in the street and they drove away.

This was the moment of my awareness, in this strange light, of that first anger Mr. Schultz had told me about, how it comes to you as a benefit, as an endowment. I felt the defining criminal rage, I recognized it, except that it had come to me as I sat in contentment with other strange half-children there on the steps of the Max and Dora Diamond Home. Clearly what I had sought and didn't want at the same time, that peculiar notoriety of a kid's dreams, was now official, I was another kind of citizen, there was no longer any question. I was angry because I still thought it was up to me to decide what I was, not f.u.c.king cops. I was angry because nothing in this world is provisional. I was angry because Mr. Berman had sent me home with money in my pocket for no other reason than to teach me what money costs and I hadn't realized it.

Now I remembered what he had said, that I should just take it easy and when they wanted me they would find me. I was standing at the foot of the stairs to the El. I hadn't really heard him, why don't we hear the things said to us? A minute later I had bounded up the stairs and dropped my nickel in the turnstile with its thick magnifying gla.s.s showing you under light how big an American buffalo is.

So that night I did something I had never done before, I threw a party. It seemed to me properly defiant. I found a bar on Third Avenue that sold beer to minors for the right price and bought a pony and rented the tapping equipment to go with it and Garbage wheeled it all covered up in one of his carriages and we b.u.mped it down the steps to his cellar and that's where I threw the party. The big work was clearing enough of his storehouse of s.h.i.+t out of the way so that we had something like an old couch or two to sit on and some floor s.p.a.ce to dance on. On the other hand it was Garbage who supplied the tall dusty gla.s.ses we drank the beer from and the old Victor Talking Machine with the sound horn curled like a seash.e.l.l and the pack of steel needles and the box of race records that gave us our dance music. I told him I would pay rent for everything he supplied. I was determined that night to pay everybody for everything, even G.o.d for the air I breathed. And I threw the party for the incorrigibles of the Max and Dora Diamond Home after everyone else including the floor wardens and the custodial supervisor had gone to sleep. Eventually there were maybe ten or twelve kids altogether including my friend Rebecca, who arrived like some of the other girls in a nightgown, but she had earrings on too and some lipstick. All the girls wore lipstick, all the same color all obviously from the same tube. And there we were making a big deal over this beer that must have come from Mr. Schultz's drop because it was really p.i.s.s water but because it was beer gave us the requisite taste of adult corruption. Someone had raided the house kitchen and come away with three salamis and several loaves of white bread in wax paper and Garbage poked around in one of his bins till he found a kitchen knife and a broken coffee table, and sandwiches were made and beer was poured and I had cigarettes for those who wanted them, and in the dry and ashen air of the bas.e.m.e.nt, with suspensions of coal dust lit in the yellow light of an old standing lamp, we smoked Wings and drank our foamless beer and ate and danced to the old black voices of the 1920s singing their slow songs of doubled lines of love and bitter one-line resolutions, of pig's feet and jelly rolls and buggy rides and papas who did wrong and mamas who did wrong and people who were waiting for trains that had already gone, and though none of us knew how to dance except the square dancing they taught upstairs, the music taught us how. Garbage sat by the Victrola and cranked it up and took a record out of its blank paper jacket and put it on, he sat cross-legged on a table with a pillow under him and did this, neither dancing himself nor talking to anyone for that matter but giving by his a.s.sent to everything going on in his bas.e.m.e.nt the best measure of impa.s.sive sociability of which he was capable, neither drinking beer nor smoking but only eating and engrossing himself with the endless supply of scratchy music, the cornets and clarinets and tubas and pianos and drums of sorrowful pa.s.sion, and the girls danced with each other and then pulled the boys in to dance with them, and it was a very solemn party we were having, white Bronx kids holding on to each other in the sweet black music, full of the intent to live life as it should be lived, there in the orphans' home. But little by little it began to look different because some of the girls found collections of clothing in big cardboard boxes in the recesses of Arnold Garbage's bins, and he didn't seem to mind, so they dressed themselves in this and that over their nightclothes, trying and choosing different hats and dresses and high-heeled shoes of bygone times, till everyone was satisfied, and my little Rebecca wore a kind of Spanish black lace affair down to her ankles, and a gauzy shawl of rose with great looping tears in it, but continued to dance with me in her bare feet, and some of the boys had found suit jackets whose shoulders were like football pads on them, and pointed patent-leather shoes, and big wide ties they looped around their bare throats, and so by and by in the smoke and jazz we were all just the way we wanted to be, dancing in the dust of the Emba.s.sy Club of our futures, in the costumes of shy children's love, and learning as only the fortunate do that G.o.d is not only the instruction of the mind but of the hips in their found rolling rhythm.

Much later Rebecca and I were sitting on one of the couches and she had her legs crossed at the knees and one dirty foot swinging and her nightgown showing below the hem of her black lace dress. She was the last kid there. She raised her arms and she pulled her black hair back behind her head and did something deft back there the way girls do with their hair so that it stays the way they fix it without any visible reason to and despite the law of gravity. Maybe I was a little drunk by then, maybe we both were. Also the dancing had been warm and close. I was smoking a cigarette and she took it out of my fingers and drew on it, one puff, and blew out the smoke without inhaling and put the cigarette back in my fingers. I saw now she was wearing mascara on her eyelashes and eyelids and had on that communal red lipstick, paled somewhat since its application, and was glancing at me sideways with her foot swinging, and those eyes dark as black grapes, and her white neck draped in that torn shawl of dusty pink-I had no warning or preparation from one moment to the next, I was swimming in a realm of intimacy, as if I had just met her, or as if I had just lost her, but surely as if I had never roof-f.u.c.ked her. My mouth went dry she was so incredibly childishly beautiful. Until this moment I had been the party-giver and big boss of the evening, dispensing his largesse and granting his favors. All those dances-oh I knew everyone knew I favored her on my randy forays up the fire escape, but it was athletics, I paid her, for christsake, I must have been staring at her because she turned away and lowered her eyes, her foot going madly-all those dances I had danced with her and only her were the exacting ceremonies of possession. And this ancient witch child understood before I did that everything was now up in the heart, as if my rise in the world had lifted us to an immensity of consequence, which we were now allowed to see, like a distance ahead of us, like a horizon. They must all have understood, every f.u.c.king kid there, while I thought what I had been feeling was only a sweetly mellow good time.

So when everyone else had gone we lay for the first time together without any clothes on that same couch, everyone else asleep, even Garbage in some inner bin of his privacy. We lay in the dark cellar of dust and ash, and I was pa.s.sive and on my back and Rebecca lay on top of me and cleaved herself on me letting herself down with a long intake of her breath which I felt as a cool flute of air on my neck, and slowly awkwardly she learned her rhythm upon me as I was patient to allow her to do. My hands were on her back for a while and then on her b.u.t.tocks, I followed the soft down with my fingers, I knew it was as black as her hair, it went from the bottom of her spine down into the crack between her a.s.s, and then I put my finger on her small ring of an a.s.shole and as she raised her hips I touched it, and as she lowered her hips I lost it in the clamp of her hard b.u.t.tocks. Her hair fell forward as she raised herself and it brushed my face, and when she lowered herselfit fell around my ears, and I kissed her cheeks as she rested and I felt her lips on my neck and her hard little nipples against my chest and her wet thighs on my thighs, and then I didn't remember when it started she was making little discoveries which she voiced in private almost soundless whimperings in my ear and then she moved into some arrhythmic panic and went stiff and I felt around my c.o.c.k the grasp of her inner musculature and when I reached down with my finger and touched the a.s.shole it clamped around my fingertip and released and contracted and released in the same rhythm as her interior self was squeezing and unsqueezing my c.o.c.k and I couldn't stand it anymore I arched myself into her and pulled back, raising myself and lowering myself with her dead body-weight as vehemently as if I were on top pretty soon going so fast she was being bounced on my chest and thighs with little grunts until she found my rhythm and went stuttering and imperfectly and finally workingly, smoothly against it, meeting me when I was to be met, leaving me when I was leaving to be left, and that was so unendurably exquisite I shot into her and held her down against me with my hands while I came pulsing up into her milkingly lovely little being as far as I could go. And she held her arms around me to get me through that, and then there was peace between us, and we lay as we were with such great trust as to require no words or kisses, but only the gentlest slowest and most coordinate drift into sleep.

EIGHT.

What woke me was the chill of empty air on my skin, and the degree of ashen gray light that represented morning in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children. A mound of black and rose lace lay on the floor beside the couch as if the witch had disembodied: My lover had gone back upstairs to her childhood. Inst.i.tutional orphans know with a basic workaday cunning how not to get caught, and it occurred to me that that was not bad training for a gangster's girl. I wondered what age people had to be before they could marry. I reflected as I lay there that my life was changing more quickly and in more ways than I could keep up with. Or was it all just one thing, as if everything had the same charge to it, so that if I was remade to Mr. Schultz's touch, Becky was remade to mine, and there was only one infinitely extending flash of conformation. She had never come before, with me anyway, and I felt pretty sure with n.o.body else either. Her c.u.n.t barely had hair. She was growing herself up to match me.

Oh my G.o.d what I felt right then for this mysterious parent-less little girl, this Mediterranean olive, this nimble nipply witch-ling, with her arching backbone, her downy a.s.s, as hard-living dumb as a female could be. She liked me! I wanted to race her, I knew she could run, I would give her a head start because I was older, and I bet she could make a good race of it. I had seen her jump rope, inexhaustibly, with lots of tricks, on one foot, or with a quick two-step, or skipping through the snapping arcs, hip-hopping through a double rope, the left and right coming from opposite directions, and do it faster and longer than anyone else. She could walk on her hands too, totally careless of her falling inversion of skirt and her white panties for all the boys to see, her swarthy legs waving in the air, as she paraded the street upside down. She was an athlete, a gymnast: I would teach her to juggle, I would teach her and myself at the same time to throw-juggle till we had six bowling pins flying in the air between us.

But first I wanted to buy her something. I tried to think of what it should be. I listened. I knew the orphans' home as well as I knew my own, I could lie there, and even hung over, and with every signal sense refracted in an atmosphere fetid with stale beer, I could tell by the degree of vibration of the building what time of day it was: they were barely beginning to get going in the kitchen. It was just dawn. I roused myself, grabbed my clothes, and sneaking up a back stairs I made it to the Boys Showers and ten minutes later was out in the new morning, the hair of my recent haircut wet and s.h.i.+ning, my Shadows jacket turned out in satin white, and the breakfast to hand a fresh bagel lifted from the big bread bag left before light on the delivery platform by the Pechter's Bakery truck.

It was so early n.o.body was up yet, not even my mother. The streets were empty, the lamppost lights were still on under the white sky. I had the idea, going to Third Avenue, that I would look in the p.a.w.nshop windows for something and just wait around for the day to begin to buy it. I wanted to buy Becky a piece of jewelry, maybe even a ring.

At this hour not even the newsstand at the foot of the El station had opened. The morning papers lay baled in twine where they'd been tossed from the trucks. I knew the headline in the Mirror was meant for me before I looked at it, I felt the attraction of the words before I read them: GRISLY GANG MURDER GRISLY GANG MURDER. Underneath was a murky photo of a dead man in a barber chair who I thought was headless until I read the caption explaining that his head was swathed in bloodied barbers' hot towels. Some West Side numbers boss. I was so distracted, I actually put my three cents on the ground by the stack of papers before I pulled one out to get the story.

I read with a proprietary interest, I read first in the shadow of the El and then not sure I'd gotten it all I stepped into a stripe of light cast by the s.p.a.ce between the overhead tracks, I held my arms out and I read again in the pacific glare of the morning the Mirror Mirror gang murder of the day, while nothing moved on any of the levels, neither train nor trolley, except the pattern of darkness striped with light up and down the cobbled avenue like a jail guard running his stick along the bars of the cells, my head beginning to hurt through the eyes, and the recognition of darkness alternating with light in the black print on the white paper as the personal message for me in this news. gang murder of the day, while nothing moved on any of the levels, neither train nor trolley, except the pattern of darkness striped with light up and down the cobbled avenue like a jail guard running his stick along the bars of the cells, my