Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page A

of one of his piled bins where he kept hidden his El Corona cigar box with all his money, and brought me back seven very wrinkled worn neighborhood dollar bills, and the deal was done.
    I was in a wonderful generous and expansive mood that night with the weight of my secret ambition in the right pocket of my knickers where I had discovered, in a confirmation of the rightness of my intuition, that the hole there allowed the gun to be slung down discreetly, the short barrel along my outer thigh, the grip transverse in the pocket, everything neat and accommodated as if by design. I went back to my apartment and gave my mother five of the singles, which was about half her week’s wages from the industrial steam laundry on Webster Avenue. “Where did you get this?” she said, crumpling the bills in her fist and smiling at me her vague smile, before turning back to her latest chapter in the table of lights. And then, my gun stowed, I went back in the street, where the adults had taken possession of the sidewalks, having changed places with the children, who were now in the houses, there being some order in this teeming tenement life, some principle of the responsibility of mothers and fathers, and now there were card games on the stoops and cigar smoke drifted through the summer night, and the women in their housedresses sat like girls with their knees pointing up from the stone steps and couples strolled in and out of the streetlights and I was very moved by the sullen idyll of all this impoverishment. Sure enough when I looked up the sky was clear and a section of inexplicable firmament was winkling between the rooflines. All this romance put me in mind of my friend Rebecca.
    She was a nimble little girl with black hair and dark eyes and a delicate thin black down above her pronounced upper lip. The orphans were inside now, the lights blazing in the windows of diamond-mesh translucence, and I stood outside and heard the din, louder on the boys’ side, and then one of the signal bells, and I went down the alley to the small backyard and waited there in the corner of their broken-down little ball yard with my back against their chain-link fence, and in about an hour most of the upper-story lights were out, and I rose and stood under the fire escape ladder and leapt up, catching the bottom rung, and hoisted myself onto the ladder and so, hand over hand and foot over foot, rose on the black ladder of my love and at the top, swung out to a window ledge without a net below me and entered the open hallway window on the top floor, where the oldest girls slept, eleven to fourteen, and found there in her bed my witchy little friend, whose dark eyes were open when I looked into them, and absolutely unsurprised to see me. Nor did her wardmates find anything remarkable enough to speak of. I led her through the aisle of their eyes to the door that led up a half flight of stairs to the roof, a kind of games park with ruled lines of skelly and shuffleboard glowing darkly in the summer night, and in the nook made by the roof screen and the kiosk of the stair door, stood and kissed Rebecca ardently, and stuck my hand in the neck of her nightdress to brush her breastbuds with the backs of my fingers and then held in my hands her hard little ass that gave its contours to my touch under the rub of her white cotton shift, and then, before I became too far gone beside myself, when I knew her bargaining position was at its strongest, I negotiated a fair price and peeled a one-dollar bill off my depleted fold, which she took and crumpled in her fist as she first hunkered and then sat on the ground, totally without ceremony, and waited, while I stood on one leg and then the other, to remove my sneakers and everything to the waist, with some trembling awkwardness for a wizard, reflecting how odd it was that whereas men like Mr. Schultz and me folded our moneyneatly, no matter if our wad was thin or thick, women like my mother and little Rebecca squeezed