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.Thinking she shouldn’t be with him, thinking she should be going out with some nice little jewboy, thinking of getting married some day.Sure thing Mike, Joey told himself mockingly; let her get married, but first he’d get her primed.Primed.Like that real estate guy Browning’d gotten Peaches primed, like Fatty Arbuckle’d gotten that Hollywood dame primed.The bus traveled north with its lovers and its old married couples who kept a narrow space of indifference and even of hatred between their bodies, while Joey Kasow edged closer to the silent girl beside him.Their shoulders touched, she moved away, he grinned his private little grin and let go of her hand.He was in no rush.Some of the guys, and he’d been one of them last winter, would’ve pushed in on her.“Pet ‘em enough and they stop hollerin’,” the guys said.And if that didn’t work, a guy could always trick a dame.There were always ways.“Sadie, did you miss me? I missed you.Some nights I couldn’t even sleep thinkin’ about you.”“I don’t believe that,” she said and laughed nervously.“Don’t believe me but I know what happened.” His voice buzzed persistently and he only became silent when the bus passed Fifty-Ninth Street.He blinked at the trees and meadows of Central Park.He chewed on his lip a second.Behind the low park wall he had glimpsed the winter pastures and woodlands of upstate New York, the roaring truck, with himself sweating in the sideroad, a haunted landscape to chill the heart.His smooth-shaven, talcum-powdered jaws clenched and he wondered what the hell was the matter with him.No sense thinking of that, no sense thinking of the Bug stewing around.Christ, let the Bug start something and he’d fill the bastid full of lead.He averted his head from the park, stared at the east side of Fifth Avenue, at the rows of apartment buildings.The unwanted memories blew away like old newspapers in a street-corner wind.“I missed you all winter,” he said.He could smell the soapiness of her clean washed hair, and he thought of the redhead at Mother Mary’s a couple of nights ago.His blood lit like gasoline into which a match has been thrown and the Bug burned, flamed, was gone, and all that remained was a triumphant consciousness.All through the month of May he kept seeing Sadie regularly on Wednesday nights.The leaves budded in the little parks of the city and they would sit on a bench in Madison Square or walk down paths winding like the tunnels of love in an amusement park.The little leaves under the park lamps looked like metal cut out with a shining shears, the windows of the Flatiron Building on Twenty-Third Street and Fifth gleamed yellow, and he felt as if he were playing kid games.This walking around in parks, this holding hands! This stealing a kiss when he brought her home at ten o’clock! A joke but he’d made up his mind to work her slow.Besides, he could work off steam at Mother Mary’s.But the easy breasts of Mother Mary’s girls didn’t bring him any closer to the slow rise and fall of Sadie’s small breasts fingered by his greedy eye in the passing light of a car.One of these days, he would promise himself as he sat alone in a coffee pot, one of these days….May mornings, he would awake, the color of the sun on the drawn window shades reminding him of the deep red of her heavy coiled hair.He thought she was about the only girl in town who hadn’t bobbed it, she didn’t use lipstick, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink.A prize cherry.Oh, the good girls, the good girls….Days, he was busy as all the Spotter’s boys were busy.The Spotter seemed to have a speak on every block in the Thirties and Forties.Across Eighth Avenue the Spotter couldn’t go, for that was Big Bill Dwyer’s territory.And Ownie Madden and Larry Fay couldn’t be sneezed at neither.But just the same the Spotter with Quinn for a partner, had a good territory and he kept his boys on the hop.Supplying speaks and protecting speaks, running in the booze with now and then a hijacking, with Joey Kasow or Bughead Moore in charge.Joey and Bughead and a couple others were the guys picked to settle an argument where a bullet was the last word, but so far Joey didn’t even have a single notch on that new gun of his.And the latest of the Spotter’s bullet boys, truth to tell, was kind of glad.If he got the order to kill some no-good sonuvabitch, okay, but if not, that was okay, too.The sunny days stretched before him like a shining yellow diving-board from which he plunged every Wednesday into the moist and murmuring night, the special night when he was out with Sadie, when the nighttime city rose and fell like a great swelling wave, rose and fell with her breasts tantalizing him under her thin dress, a wave of light and shadow in whose dark depth faceless men and women drifted by and where the red and green traffic lights had the magic of phosphorescence.“Look how big and white the moon is! It looks different!” she exclaimed one night, and although he answered, “What’s so different about it? It’s the same old moon,” he knew that it was different because he was with her.“When I graduate from high school next year,” she confided to him on another night as they sat in an ice cream parlor, “I’ll get a job.I can type and take shorthand.” He had glanced at her, a straw between her pink soft lips, thinking: what a dumbbell! She was full to the ears with all the junk they taught in the schools.Work hard and you’ll get ahead, save your pennies and some day you’ll be somebody.Joey Kasow knew better: the world was for sale, with cops and feds and even judges on the bargain counter.Walking her home, he wondered where she kept her eyes.For sitting in front of the tenements with their husbands sat all the penny-savers
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