Dog Day Afternoon (5 page)

In Manhattan he turned left on Second Avenue and moved easily downtown with the progressive lighting, darting in and out between trucks moving in the same direction. He wondered if she’d report the car to the cops, or if she’d guess he’d taken it. Better phone her old man. Yeah, smart.

He braked at a lighted corner telephone booth, listened to the dial tone, dropped a dime—thirty fucking cents left for the night—and phoned Tina’s father.

“Yeah, it’s Joe. Listen, I got your Mustang, Gino. Okay?”

“Wha’? You ga’ wha’?”

“It’s me, Joe, Tina’s husband. I got your Mustang. Okay?”

“Whadya mean you goddit?”

“Just tell Tina I got it.”

“Don’ she know you goddit?”

“Christ!” Joe slammed the telephone back on its hook, jumped into the car, and continued downtown on Second until he reached Fourteenth Street. You couldn’t waste your life trying to make these old goombars understand. Gino didn’t know anything about his daughter except that she was happily married, had two gorgeous kids, left them with Gino and his wife almost as often as she left them with her sister, Stella, and had a good job in Chase Bank. Not that Tina had worked at Chase for the past three years. Just that Gino still thought she did.

He turned south on Seventh Avenue and slowed the Mustang slightly as he cruised through Greenwich Village. It had been through Chase that he’d met Tina.

They’d both worked for the goddamned bank, him in a branch in Manhattan, her in a Brooklyn office. They’d met on a bank picnic up in Westchester, a whole day’s outing with barbecue lunch, barrels of beer, baseball, even boating and swimming at a little lake. He’d enticed her out on a boat in the middle of the water. It had been almost time to leave, the sky getting dark, half an hour before the buses showed up and everybody went back to town.

He’d been her first, pulling her down into the bottom of the boat, yanking up her dress, ripping her little bikini panties because he pulled them too hard. Her muff had been as neat and stiff as brunette Brillo. She had had no idea what to do, how to help him. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need any help. In a way it was a real kick making a virgin, because there were no smart cracks about his size. Christ, what did these whores know, anyway? As if size meant anything. It was whether you knew what to do with it or not. Miss Panetta was going to get two of them, the bitch.

In the end, even after they were married, he felt something special for Tina, even after she bloated up like a slab of rotten pork. Whatever he did to her, she loved it. No matter how fast he came, she adored it. Nothing he could do to her was anything but beautiful. She said as much, over and over again, maybe not in words but in the way she let him abuse her.

No other broad would stand for the way he treated her. It was almost like not being married, the way he almost never showed up except to play with the kids a little. And this thing tonight, walking out on her and leaving her with his mother, then stealing her father’s car. She ate it up. She loved it. To her it was marriage.

He grinned as he steered right onto Bleecker and started looking for a parking place. The good thing about breaking a broad in from the start, especially a religious guinea like Tina, was that she didn’t know what any other man was like. You were it. You were everything. She took it and liked it.

He parked the Mustang on Bedford, not far from Christopher, and carefully locked it up. The first thing Tina would do when she found the car stolen was call her old man, and he’d tell her the news. So there wouldn’t be any cops staking out the car when he came back to it again. Now the trick for tonight was to find himself a sponsor. He didn’t dare show his face at the bar where Lana hung out until he had a few bucks to spend.

He walked quickly along Christopher, nodding to this passerby and that. He was well known in the Village. Littlejoe was a name people had heard of. Even these leather freaks knew him, because he could outleather any of them. They’d all heard of him. It wasn’t like Rego Park or Corona. This was Ground Zero for excitement. And where classy, exciting people put it together, Littlejoe was a well-known person.

Maybe Mick would stake him to a night. Mick wasn’t a bad guy. He was even some sort of distant cousin, although Flo claimed never to have heard of him. Being Italian, naturally Mick was Flo’s cousin, but she refused to recognize him because people said Mick was Maf.

Labels. Until they had a label slapped on them, nobody was a person to people like Flo or Tina. Everybody had to have a label, and if they could label a guy “faggot,” oh, man, that tickled their insides. Sure, Mick ran a few leather bars at the river end of Christopher, dark, hot places where you could find yourself somebody who liked getting whipped. Sure the cops had to be paid off steady, right up to the lieutenants, in order to keep the places open and running. Did that mean Mick was Maf? It was a business expense, just like the monthly rent.

Littlejoe checked the front bar at the first leather joint. Since the time was just ten o’clock, the place was still not filled to capacity. He signaled the bartender.

“Yah?”

Joe was glad he’d left his jacket in Gino’s car. Even now, in sweaty shirt and loose tie, he looked too square to get within five city blocks of a place like this. “Mickey around?”

“Who’s asking?”

“His cousin, Littlejoe.”

The bartender squinted through the cigarette haze at him. “Oh, yah,” he said in a throaty purr, as if his voice had been left too long in a solution of tobacco and whiskey. “I di’n’t see you. You’re kinda small.” He laughed to himself in a velvety series of chuckles. “No offense, pal. Uh, Mickey is, let’s see. He’s over at the other joint right about now. If you don’t catch him there, try back here after he makes a night deposit at the bank.”

Joe nodded, favoring the bartender with a severe frown. Nobody made jokes about his size. But, shit, he couldn’t stop for a fight now. He needed to find Mick and hit him up for a ten or two. He left the bar quickly, pacing along Christopher, past Hudson, pressing west toward the distant elevated road where the West Side Highway ran.

The second bar was far raunchier than the first, which was still east enough to be considered a sightseeing stop on the tours of more daring visitors from uptown. The second joint was a real bucket of blood, originally a sailors’ joint where they traded off stolen merchandise to be retailed in fake Army-Navy stores around town: Japanese cameras, transistor tape recorders, small, expensive items, often still in their original packaging.

Joe cased the front of the place without finding his cousin. He moved toward the back room, where, later in the evening, orgies were staged for the insiders. New boys in town were broken in. Old boys, newly on the loose after a bust-up, would advertise their liberated state there.

“Hey, Littlejoe, man.”

Joe turned to see a friend of his, Sam, sitting at one of the tables with two older men. Sam was barely twenty, but he’d already done time, not only in training school but in state prison. It was there that he’d gotten so peculiar about making it with big men. He’d been so badly broken in at prison—nine guys gang-buggering him till he needed four stitches before the bleeding could be stopped—that he had a deathly fear of big men. The two at his table were. Joe was not.

“Hey, Joey, man, what’s shaking?”

Littlejoe shrugged. “You see my cousin, Mick?”

“Nah.” Sam’s face was small, neat-featured, pretty and dark, like one of those wop angels they used to paint on church ceilings, but very, very serious. Something next to his right eye twitched at Joe. A signal? What? “You ready to go, baby?” Sam asked.

Joe nodded. He got the message: Sam needed to be rescued. “Let’s go, sweets,” he said. “I got the engine running.”

Sam got to his feet. One of the two bigger men, in his forties, placed his palm on Sam’s skinny chest and shoved hard. Sam toppled over backward, taking the chair with him.

“Siddown,” the man yelled. “You’re with us, you cheap hustler.”

“I’m his date,” Littlejoe said. He watched Sam getting back on his feet again. Would he have to tackle this big goon?

“Shit you are.”

Joe nodded solemnly. He reached over to pick up the fallen chair as if righting it on its legs again. Instead, he swung it up from under with such force that when it broke against the man’s front teeth blood spurted from his mouth and nose. The other man turned pale, and got up and ran out.

“Thanks, Littlejoe.” Sam’s eyes were darting nervously around the darkened back room. His normally serious face looked especially grave. This wasn’t really his scene, and he knew it. One by one was his scene, gently, not with force. “He may be laying for you outside, the other guy.”

Joe shrugged. “Let’s go find Mick.”

They walked back to the bartender, asked him where the owner was, and received the news that he’d left for the bank already. That meant Mick had at least one, maybe two gorillas with him. No sense bracing him for a touch until he was alone again. Give him half an hour.

“I need bread,” Littlejoe said conversationally. They were strolling along Christopher, moving back east at a leisurely fashion. The sidewalks were filled with male couples like them, except that Sam and Joe weren’t touching each other. “Gonna ball Lana tonight, man, and that broad don’t ball without I lay a few solid blasts on her.”

Sam shook his head sadly. “I hate to see you in a relationship with that,” he said. “You’re a pal, man. That Lana is an animal. You know that.”

“Ever meet my wife?” Littlejoe asked. It seemed to end the discussion. They stood at the corner of Washington Street and watched a heavy refrigerated meat truck trundle by. The driver in the cab waved at them. Joe had never seen him before, but Sam waved back.

“How much bread you need, man?” Sam asked then.

“Double saw?”

“Too heavy.” Sam had been reaching for his hip pocket. Now he stopped and watched morosely as the trucks rolled by. “I got two fives to my name,” he said glumly. His usual mood of depression seemed to deepen.

“More’n you usually hold. Where’d you score?”

“That Hertz truck lot near Twelfth Avenue,” Sam said. “I blew a guy twice. You never saw anything like it in your life. Little redneck cracker from Georgia or Alabama, your size, horny as a bull. I go down once for a finnif. I’m ready to move along and what the hell, he’s up again, just as big but twice as swole. You know, it had a head on it like a tennis ball, man. Some guys get that way the second time. So, what the hell, another finnif. I’ll split with you, Littlejoe. You saved my ass real good back there. I don’t forget favors.”

Joe shook his head. “You gotta stop working the trucks,” he said. “Those bastards will rip you in two some day just to see what your guts look like. They’re all crazy, those drivers.”

“I don’t make it with big guys. Just the short ones.”

They crossed Washington and headed east. Littlejoe wondered what his mother would make of someone like Sam, a nice Italian boy, face like an unsmiling angel, giving head to Jimmy Hoffa’s finest patriots along every West Side truck route in the Village. Not that Sam liked it especially. But it was steady money.

“There he is,” Joe said, pointing, as Mick and two huskies pulled up in a cab and started inside the more respectable of the two leather bars.

“Eh, cugino, come si dice?”
he yelled.

The heavy-set Mick stopped, turned, and saw Littlejoe.
“Eh, Giuseppe,”
he called. “Who’s that, Sam?”

As they reached him, Joe pumped his cousin’s hand. “You’re just the friend I’m looking for, Mick, baby.”

His cousin was older by ten years, taller, and heavier without being fat. He came from the dark side of the family, olive skin blackened by the summer sun, blue-black hair glinting under the street lamp, white teeth bared in a welcoming smile. “How much?” he retorted.

“What?” Joe asked, blinking.

“Cuanto?”

“I need twenty, Mick, pay you back the first of the month.”

“When your welfare check comes in?”

“Naturally.”

“Which check?” Mick said, laughing. He pounded Littlejoe’s shoulder so hard he rocked his frail frame. Then, turning to one of his bodyguards, he said: “This boy has moxie, Frank. He’s got three addresses and each month he collects three welfare checks. Plus unemployment, right, baby?”

“I do okay.” Littlejoe was embarrassed. No one knew his finances, not these gorillas, not Sam, who was only a casual friend, not a close one. He hated the idea of his big-mouthed Maf cousin making fun of him in public. But Mick had already drawn out his wallet, and was peeling off two twenties.

“Here,
piccolo Giuseppe,”
he said. “I hope that Lana woman of yours enjoys every cent of it.”

Joe almost, but not quite, cringed. It was no one’s business about him and Lana. If he liked someone, why did all of Christopher have to know about it? But they did already, he reminded himself. He’d never kept Lana a secret. He was proud of her. Not like that cow he was married to. One of these days he was going to divorce Tina and really marry Lana. He considered himself married to her already, in the sense that one stoned night they had held a mock wedding with equally stoned friends.

“Thanks, Mick. You’re a pal.” Joe pocketed the two bills.

“It’s only good business, baby,” his cousin said. “Lana is inside my joint right now. You’re gonna blow the whole thing back into my cash register anyway.” He gave Littlejoe a wink and went inside, his bodyguards moving easily in front and in back of him.

With Mick gone, the street was suddenly much quieter. Joe turned to Sam. “Coming in?”

The small, dark boy shook his cherubic head. “I don’t like to see you with that animal,” he said, his face deadpan empty.

“Come on. I’ll buy you a blast.”

Sam’s head continued shaking. “No thanks, Littlejoe. Be good.” He started to leave. Joe reached for his arm and held him. “Lemme go, man.”

“No, listen, Sam, I got something to talk to you about.”

Sam turned back. “What?” His voice was sullen.

“Business. I heard you were very cool with a cannon.”

Sam frowned. “So what?”