Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [64]
Fisk people and get pennants and caps and all the other stuff; buttons, books of instructions on wig-wag and so on. Julian s father made him buy two Fisk tires, and Carter Davis had one Fisk tire, but these were the only Fisk tires in the gang. The other members of the gang were saving up to buy Pennsylvania Vacuum Cups, and meanwhile when they had a puncture they filled the tire with Neverleak. There were cigarettes to be smoked: Ziras, Sweet Caps, Piedmonts, Hassans. Julian sometimes bought Condax cigarettes, which were more expensive. Butch and Julian were the heavy smokers of the gang, but Julian liked the smell of someone else s cigarette better than he liked smoking, and be discovered that smoking did not get him in better with Butch. He stopped after a year, using the excuse that his father had detected the nicotine stains on his fingers. Sometimes the gang would sit on the rocks on the mountain and watch the coal trains coming down the valley from the east, and they would count the cars: seventy-eight battleship cars was the highest number they ever saw and agreed upon. Sometimes they would go down in the valley and when the train slowed up or stopped at Gibbsville Junction they would get on and ride four miles to Alton or the five miles to Swedish Haven. It was a cold and dangerous ride, and about once a year some boy would fall off and lose a leg or be killed under the wheels, but the practice of hopping Goalies went on. It was not wise to go beyond Swedish Haven, because after that the railroad veered off too far from the highway. There was a Goalie that slowed down at Gibbsville Junction every day at about three-fifteen, and it reached Swedish Haven at four o clock, which usually gave the gang time enough to get home, either by bumming rides on the grocery wagons or stealing rides on the trolley cars, or walking. You could get home only moderately late for supper. There was one other game that Julian did not like, because he was afraid of the consequences. That was known simply as Five-Finger Grab. There were two five-and-ten stores, Woolworth s and Kresge s, in Gibbsville, and about once a month after school the gang would wander through the stores. Sometimes they would not take a thing, usually because they were watched carefully by the clerks and the manager, whose office was placed so that he could look down on every counter. But sometimes after a tour of the store the gang would meet, and two or three of the boys would say: Look what I got, and show what they had got in the Five-Finger Grab: pencils, magnifying glasses, screw drivers, pliers, spools of wire, nickel Rocket baseballs, hard candy, school tablets, toys, cotton gloves, friction tape these were some of the things that would be produced by the proud five-finger grabbers. The other boys would be ashamed, and the next time they went to the store everyone would try to get something. Julian at first would refuse to participate in the Five-Finger Grab, but when Carter Davis abandoned his side and went over to the grabbers, Julian had to do something. Once he tried to buy something a jar of hard candy to be able to show something after a grab, but he could not do this often; he was not given much money. A quarter a week was his allowance, and he had to have a nickel on Friday and a nickel on Saturday for two movie serials he was following, and that meant he could not buy much at the five-and-ten if he wanted to have a cinnamon bun and pickle, two cents, at recess. And so he became a five-finger grabber. He was very successful, and when he saw how successful he was he wanted to do it all the time. Most of the other fellows in the gang stole only for the sake of stealing; that explained why some of them, emptying their pockets after a grab, would pull out white feet for women s stockings, baby rattles, cards of safety pins, wash cloths, soap, and other useless articles. But Julian became so proficient that he could tell beforehand what he was going to get, and usually he would get it. The gang would separate on entering the store, and there would be so