Profane, Angel and Geronimo were out prowling for cono. It was Thursday night, tomorrow - according to the nimble calculations of Geronimo they were working not for Zeitsuss but for the U. S. Government, since Friday is one-fifth of the week and the government takes one-fifth of your check for withholding tax. The beauty of Geronimo's scheme was that it didn't have to be Friday but could be any day - or days - in the week depressing enough to make you feel it would be a breach of loyalty if the time were dedicated to good old Zeitsuss. Profane had got into this way of thinking, and along with parties in the daytime and a rotating shift system devised by Bung the foreman whereby you didn't know till the day before which hours you would be working the next, it put him on a weird calendar which was not ruled off into neat squares at all but more into a mosaic of tilted street-surfaces that changed position according to sunlight, streetlight, moonlight, nightlight . . .
He wasn't comfortable in this street. The people mobbing the pavement between the stalls seemed no more logical than the objects in his dream. 'They don't have faces,' he said to Angel.
'A lot of nice asses, though,' Angel said.
'Look, look,' said Geronimo. Three jailbait, all lipstick and shiny-machined breast-and-buttock-surfaces, stood in front of the wheel of Fortune, twitching and hollow-eyed.
'Benito, you speak guinea. Go tell them how about a little.'
Behind them the band was playing Madame Butterfly. Non-professional, non-rehearsed.
'It isn't like it was a foreign country,' Profane said.
'Geronimo is a tourist,' Angel said. 'He wants to go down to San Juan and live in the Caribe Hilton and ride around the city looking at puertorriquenos.'
They'd been moseying slow, casing the jailbait at the wheel. Profane's foot came down on an empty beer can. He started to roll. Angel and Geronimo, flanking him, caught him by the arms about halfway down. The girls had turned around and were giggling, the eyes mirthless, ringed in shadow.
Angel waved. 'He goes weak in the knees,' Geronimo purred, 'when he sees beautiful girls.'
The giggling got louder. Someplace else the American ensign and the geisha would be singing in Italian to the music behind them; and how was that for a tourist's confusion of tongues? The girls moved away and the three fell into step beside them. They bought beer and took over an unoccupied stoop.
'Benny here talks guinea,' said Angel. 'Say something in guinea, hey.'
'Sfacim,' Profane said. The girls got all shocked.
'Your friend is a nasty mouth,' one of them said.
'I don't want to sit with any nasty mouth,' said the girl sitting next to Profane. She got up, flipped her butt and moved down into the street, where she stood hipshot and stared at Profane out of her dark eyeholes.
'That's his name,' Geronimo said, 'is all. And I am Peter O'Leary and this here is Chain Ferguson.' Peter O'Leary being an old school chum who was now at a seminary upstate studying to be a priest. He'd been so clean- living in high school that Geronimo and his friends always used him for an alias whenever there might be any trouble. God knew how many had been deflowered, hustled off for beer or slugged in his name. Chain Ferguson was the hero of a western they'd been watching on the Mendoza TV the night before.
'Benny Sfacim is really your name?' said the one in the street.
'Sfacimento.' In Italian it meant destruction or decay. 'You didn't let me finish.'
'That's all right then,' she said. 'That isn't bad at all.' Bet your shiny, twitching ass, he thought, all unhappy. The other could knock her up higher than those arches of light. She couldn't be more than fourteen but she knew already that men are drifters. Good for her. Bedmates and all the sfacim they have yet to get rid of drift on, and if some stays with her and swells into a little drifter who'll go someday too, why she wouldn't like that too much, he reckoned. He wasn't angry with her. He looked that thought at her, but who knew what went on in those eyes? They seemed to absorb all the light in the street: from flames beneath sausage grills, from the bridges of light bulbs, windows of neighborhood apartments, glowing ends of De Nobili cigars, flashing gold and silver of instruments on the bandstand, even light from the eyes of what innocent there were among the tourists:
The eyes of a New York woman [he started to sing]
Are the twilit side of the moon,
Nobody knows what goes on back there
Where it's always late afternoon.
Under the lights of Broadway,
Far from the lights of home,
With a smile as sweet as a candy cane
And a heart all plated with chrome.
Do they ever see the wandering bums
And the boys with no place to go,
And the drifter who cried for an ugly girl
That he left in Buffalo?
Dead as the leaves in Union Square,
Dead as the graveyard sea,
