Underworld

There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people. Maybe that's why they called her Rose.

Nick was walking the halls at school. This close to Christmas the Catholic school kids were already off, Matty was off, the shopping area was decorated with lights and wreaths, the merchants were putting out trees at five in the morning, which you could smell from a distance, and there were eels on sale for Christmas Eve and spruce and balsam fir stacked against the walls, from upstate, and kids unloading crates of grapes from California for customers who made their own wine.

Nick wandered the halls smoking and Remo came out of a classroom wearing tight pegged pants and the Eisenhower jacket he never took off.

'What are you doing here?'

'Taking a walk,' Nick said.

'You take walks indoors?'

'You been out? Fucking freezing. What are you doing here?'

'Hey. I go to school here. What are you doing here?'

'Talking a walk,' Nick said.

'I got a pass to see the doctor.'

'The nurse. That's who you want to see.'

'Save me a drag,' Remo said.

'Where's home economics?'

'I don't know. The end of that hall maybe. I hear you're working.'

'Ice-cream plant.'

'Pays decent?'

'Forget about it.'

'It's steady then?'

'You have to shape up. Like the docks,' Nick said, and he felt like a man, saying this. 'A guy says, You, you, you, you. Everybody else goes home.'

Remo seemed impressed.

'You get to eat the merchandise?'

'Actually, you want to know the truth.'

'What?'

'We steal it and sell it. But we have to work fast.'

Remo didn't know whether to believe this. He reached for the butt-end of Nick's cigarette and Nick gave it to him and he took two hungry drags and then dropped it, stomped it, exhaled and went into the doctor's office.

After the bell rang and the classrooms emptied out Nick spotted Loretta and Gloria and they walked out onto Fordham Road together.

'Allie's father hit a number,' Gloria said.

'I know. I heard.'

'He had five dollars on it if you can believe that.'

'It's true. I know it for a fact,' Nick said.

An older guy named Jasper, a noted cuntman, sat in a Ford convertible, with the top down yet, in this weather, motor running, listening to the radio. The two girls were quiet walking by, quiet together, by mutual consent, exchanging unspoken thoughts about Jasper.

'Who puts five dollars?' Loretta said. 'They put fifty cents. They put a dollar if they're feeling very, very lucky.'

'He had a dream,' Nick said.

'He had a dream. What kind of dream?'

'What kind of dream. He dreamed the number. What else would he dream?'

'For five dollars,' she said, 'it must have been very convincing.'

'It was in technicolor,' Gloria said.

'If I dream a number I think I'm gonna die on that date,' Loretta said. 'This man gives five dollars to a gangster.'

'Gangster. What kind of gangster? He gave the money to Annette Esposito.'

'Who's that?'

'She's a Catholic school girl. She goes to my brother's school,' Nick said. 'She runs numbers for her father. Every day she makes the rounds.'

'In her school uniform,' Gloria said.

'The customers like a runner they can trust.'

They walked past White Castle, where kids were eating sawdust hamburgers, and then Gloria crossed the street and went into her building.

'Where's your radio? You used to carry your radio all the time,' Loretta said.

'I had a radio in my car. That's the only radio I needed.'

'It's for the best,' she said.

'You think it's for the best.'

'I'm relieved,' she said. 'That car, my god. What wasn't wrong with it? Not to mention it was stolen property.'

'We didn't have nice times in that car?'

'The drive-in was nice. Not the parking on dark streets. Like criminals.'

'That's what we were,' he said.

She laughed. She had two teeth that didn't exactly match, on either side of the incisors, and he thought it gave her a sexy smile.

They turned east and he saw a garbage truck and saw Juju's father, who was a garbageman, jump down off the truck and stride across the sidewalk and flip the lid off a can and muscle the can over to the truck and then upend it into the grinder.

'See that guy? That's Juju's father,' he said with an edge of pride in his voice.

He admired the graceful action, the long continuous body motion from the cellar entrance to the truck, the way the man wrestled the can across the sidewalk, all forearm action, and the freedom to make noise, skidding the can and running the grinder, and then the hoist and dump, a shoulder motion mainly, and the original pitch of the lid, a gesture of half contempt but also graceful, which he earned by the nature of the work he did.

And flinging the can back toward the wrought iron fence that guarded the basement steps. Also a privilege of the job, Nicky thought.

They reached her building and went inside.

Loretta stood in the hallway and turned to be kissed and he kissed her, moving her up against the mailboxes with her books between their bodies sliding back and forth.

'Who's home?' he said.

'They're all home.'

He pressed her into the mailboxes and could hear the friction of her skirt when she moved against the slits in the metal where you could see if you had mail.

'You still think it's for the best I don't have my car?'

'It's broad daylight, car or no car.'

'We could park in the parking lot at Orchard Beach. Just the seagulls and us.'

She kissed him.

'So steal another car,' she said slurringly.

He opened his eyes while he was kissing her and she was looking at him with wide brown eyes that seemed to be thinking seven things at once. She knew he'd had sex with other girls, handjobs, blowjobs, whatever else, putting it in taking it out, putting it in keeping it in, bareback, rubber, whatnot, and she knew who the girls were, from Washington Avenue, from Valentine Avenue, one from Kingsbridge Road, because somebody told somebody who made sure it got back to her, and he knew that she knew, from Gloria passing a remark to Juju, like one of