• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You sure?”

“Sure! Paulie Haggerty was around the other day, and he told me about it, and I went and looked the other night, and saw a lot of cars parked there and a lot of men enterin’ and leavin’. One guy even wore a silk hat.”

“Whereabouts was it?”

“The flat building on the other side of the alley on Fifty-seventh. It’s on the first floor,” said she.

“The red one where we climbed on the front porch that afternoon when it was rainin’ and shot craps?” he asked.

“No. Next door to it,” she said.

“We’ll all go round there some night and look in,” said Studs.

“All right,” said Helen.

“Say, Weary hasn’t been around. I wonder if he’s workin’?” said Studs.

“I don’t like him,” she said.

“I don’t care so much for him,” Studs said.

“He’s too fresh,” she said.

“Yeh?”

“Yeh, he’s too darn fresh.”

“Why?”

“Well, he tries to take liberties with girls. You know what he tried to do to me, don’t you?”

“No?”

“Well, one day he asked me to let him see my kid sister’s playhouse in the back, and I did. Then he went and tried... well, you know what he wanted to do to me, and I wouldn’t let him. I don’t care to do that sort of thing. I like to play with fellahs because, generally, they’re fellahs like you an’ Dan and Tubby, and they’re square and decent, and not rats like those guys from Fifty-eighth Street, or like Weary Reilley, and they’re not fussy and babyish, like girls. Girls are always tattling, and squealing, and snitching, and I can’t stand them. With decent guys, you can be... well, you can be yourself. Anyway, he tried to do that to me, and I wouldn’t let him. He kept arguin’ with me, and grabbin’ me, and I wouldn’t let him fool around and have a feel-day, so he lost his temper like he always does, and he got sore as blazes, and I was afraid, so I rushed out. He tried to get me to come back, and said he was only foolin’ and he didn’t mean anything, and all that sort of bull. But I didn’t fall for it, so he left me, sore as blazes, and sayin’ he’d get me some time.”

“I never knew that,” Studs said.

“Well, he did. I don’t like him; I hate him, the skunk; he’s a bastard,” she said.

“I don’t care so much for him, either. But you got to give him credit for being a damn good scrapper. He ain’t yellow.”

“You can fight him, can’t you?”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Studs said.

“Sure, you can lick him,” she said.

“Well, I never backed out of a fight with him,” Studs said.

“Say, let’s get a soda,” Helen suggested.

“I’m broke,” Studs said.

“I’ll treat,” she said.

They walked down to Levin’s drug store at the corner of Fifty-eighth and Indiana and they had double chocolate sodas; they sipped with their spoons, so that the sodas would last longer. Studs told himself that there was something very fine about Helen. She was a square shooter, and she understood things. If he tried to sip a soda with a spoon before anybody else, they would laugh at him. When he and Lucy got to be sweethearts, she’d understand things, like Helen did. A guy couldn’t find a pal like Helen every day. They sat, and Studs mentioned Lucy, saying that she was a nice-looking kid. Helen smiled like a person who knew too much. She said she liked Lucy, because she was a sweet kid, and full of fun, and not an old ash can like Helen Borax, who was too stuck up to live on a street like Indiana. She said it served Helen right that she had gotten a crush on a guy like Weary, because Weary would take some of the snootiness out of her and, well, Weary would probably make her do you-know with him, and it would be a good thing for her to be ruined, because she might come down off her high horse, and it would be a swell chance to talk about her, instead of having her talk about every-body else. But Lucy was a good kid for a guy to like, she said; and Studs said he wasn’t so sure how much he liked her. She said, well, a guy like Studs was better off liking a girl like Lucy, and going with the bunch around Indiana Avenue, than he was, say, hanging out with the gang around Fifty-eighth Street. Red Kelly, Tommy Doyle, Davey Cohen and those guys were all louses; the