care of that. But while he paid for me wherever e went, it was still expensive to go with him. Occasionally there were tips or drinks or cigars or corsages for Charlotte that slipped his mind, and I had larger cleaning and laundry bills than ever before. Once in a while I went, moreover, with Padilla for a Saturday night with our friends on Lake Park Avenue. And besides, I was trying to get together the university entrance fee. Shrewdly, Simon gave me little money; mostly he gave me things. He wanted me to learn to have expensive needs, and the desire for dough would come of itself. Then if I were to begin to ask him for more, he could hook me. From the barbershop we'd go to Field's to buy him a dozen or so shirts, imported Italian underclothes or slacks or shoes, all things of which he already had a surplus; he showed me drawers, closets, shelves full, and still kept buying. Some part of this was due to his having been on the wrong side of the counter, or the servile back on the shoefitting stool, and in part this was his way of tempting me. put also I knew that in the barbershop and on the shopping trips he was aiming to refresh himself; he slept badly and was looking flabby and ill, and one morning when he came to fetch me he locked himself in the toilet and cried. After that day he wouldn't come upstairs; he honked his horn for me in the street. He said, "I can't stand the joint you live in; they don't keep it clean. Are you sure they don't have bed animals? And the can is filthy. I don't see how you can go into it." Soon he took to saying this with the same inspection glare he had for my appearance. "When are you going to move out of this rat nest! Jesus, it's the sort of place plagues and epidemics start in!" Eventually he stopped calling J for me. He'd phone when he wanted me; sometimes he'd send wires. I At first, however, he wanted me with him constantly. So, then, we were in the gleaming lanes and warm indoor puffing of the department store, but after when he started back to the West Side, wearing one of his new ties and temporarily in a better state, suddenly he would lose it all, it seemed, and, pressing on the gas pedal, he must have seen himself * speeding across the last boundary of his strength. But just as the car, squealing around corners, righted itself, he too kept balance. However, it was evident that his feelings were suicidal from the way he drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments; hit him who would; he kept a tire tool under the driver's seat for his weapon in traffic arguments, and he cursed everybody in the street, running through lights and scattering pedestrians. The truth back of all this was that he had his pockets full of money as an advance on his promised ability to make a rich man of himself and now had to deliver.
In spring he leased a yard, at the end of the coal season. It had no overhead track, only a long spur of siding, and the first rains made a marsh of the whole place. It had to be drained. The first coal was unloaded in the wet. The office itself was a shack; the scale needed exnensive repairs. His first few thousand dollars ran out and he had to ask for more; he had a credit to establish with the brokers, and it was important that he meet his bills on time. Uncle Charlie made that easier. Nevertheless, there was Uncle Charlie himself to satisfy. There was, besides, a substantial wage to pay his yard manager and weighmaster. Happy Kellerman, whom he had lured away from a large old'West Side company. He'd have hired me instead (at perhaps a little less) if I'd been able to handle the job, and he insisted on my coming to learn the ropes from Happy, so that presently I was spending a good amount of time at the office; for when he grabbed my wrist and told me, almost drunkenly, with the grime and chapping of the mouth that comes of long nervous talking, saying low, huskily, viciously, "There's got to be somebody here I can trust. Got to be!" I couldn't refuse. However, there was not much that Happy could be dishonest about. He was a beer saufer, droopy, small, a humorist,