The Complete Stories by Bernard Malamud Read Free Book Online Page B

and his sister Agnes and said to hell with that.
    Wally walked slowly down the avenue to the El station and stood on the corner watching it grow light. Gray light seeped into the morning sky, and the quiet streets were full of thinning, warm darkness. It made Wally feel sad. The neighborhood looked the same but wasn’t. He thought of the fellows who were gone now and he thought of his friend Vincent Davido, the barber’s son, who had been gone since before the war. He thought of himself not having set foot in his own house for years, and it made him feel like crying.
    There was an empty milk box in front of the delicatessen. Wally dragged it across the sidewalk and placed it against the El pillar to have a backrest. He was tired but didn’t want to fall asleep, because soon the people would be going up to the station and he wanted to see if there was anyone he knew. He thought if he saw two or three people he knew, maybe they would give him about fifty cents and he would have enough for a beer and some ham and eggs.
    Just before the sun came up, Wally fell asleep. The people buying their papers at the newsstand looked at him before they went upstairs to the station. Not many of them knew him. A fat man in a gray suit who recognized him stood on the corner with a disgusted look on his face, watching Wally sleep. Wally sat heavy-bellied on the milk box, with his head leaning back against the pillar and his mouth open. His straw-colored hair was slicked back. His face, red and smudged, was unshaven and thick with loose flesh. He had on a brown suit, oily with filth, black shoes, and a soiled shirt, with a rag of a brown tie knotted at the collar.
    “The bastard’s always drunk,” said the fat man to the man from the candy store who had come out to collect the pennies on the newsstand. The storekeeper nodded.
    At eight o’clock, a water truck turned the corner of Second Street and rumbled along the avenue toward the El, shooting two fanlike sprays of water out of its iron belly. The water foamed white where
it hit the sizzling asphalt and shot up a powdery mist into the air. As the truck turned under the El, the floating cool mist settled upon Wally’s sweating face and he woke up. He looked around wildly, but it wasn’t Jimmy and the feeling of fright went away.
    The day was heavy with wet, blistering heat, and Wally had a headache. His stomach rumbled and his tongue was sour. He wanted to eat but he didn’t have a cent.
    Several people walked past him on their way to work, and Wally looked at their faces but saw no one he knew. He didn’t like to ask strangers for money. It was different if you knew them. Looking into the candy-store window to see the time, he was annoyed that it was eight-twenty-five. From long experience Wally knew that he had missed his best chances. The factory workers and those who worked in the stores had passed by very early in the morning, and the white-collar employees who followed them about an hour or so later were also gone. Only the stragglers and the women shoppers were left. You couldn’t get much out of them. Wally thought he would wait awhile, and if no one came along soon, he’d go over to the fruit store and ask them if they had any spoiled fruit.
    At half past eight, Mr. Davido, who lived on the top floor above the delicatessen, came out of the house to open his barbershop across the street. He was shocked when he saw Wally standing on the corner. How strange it is, he thought, when you see something that looks as if it was always there and everything seems the same once more.
    The barber was a small, dark-skinned man nearing sixty. His fuzzy hair was gray, and he wore old-fashioned pince-nez with a black ribbon attached to them. His arms were short and heavy, and his fingers were stubby, but he maneuvered them well when he was shaving someone or cutting his hair. The customers knew how quickly and surely those short fingers moved when a man was in a hurry to get out of the