Read Online Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: E. L. Doctorow
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in the Bronx neighborhood of a beer drop. It might workbest of all, I decided, in the very gang headquarters that had been raided and cleaned out by the police at the insistence of the federal attorneys.
And that is how it happened one summer day the boy Billy came to be clinging to the back of a Webster Avenue trolley as it hummed its way south toward 149th Street. It was not easy traveling this way, your fingers had only the narrowest purchase on the outer sill of the rear window, which was of course the front window when the trolley was going in the other direction, which meant it was a big window and that therefore you had to crouch while you clung so that your head didn’t appear in it: when the motorman spotted you in his rearview mirror he could make the car buck, throw it into some sort of electrical braking stutter so that you had to drop off, whether there was traffic behind you or not, which was a real son of a bitch. Not only that, but your feet had only the narrowest fender to toe, so that really you attached yourself for passage more by whole-body adhesion than anything else. And therefore when the trolley made a stop the correct procedure was to drop off until it started up again, not only because you were really vulnerable clinging to a trolley car at rest when any cop could come along and whap you across the ass with his billy club, but so that you would have the strength to hang there till the next stop. You didn’t want to fall off while the damn thing was moving along at a clip, especially on Webster which is an industrial street of warehouses and garages and machine shops and lumberyards all of which make for long blocks and a fast-moving trolley enjoying its run between distant stops, going fast enough to rock along side to side on its wheel carriages, banging the hell out of them and sending up sparks up there where the pole scrapes the power from the wire. It is a fact that more than one boy has died riding the back of a streetcar. Nevertheless this was my preferred mode of travel even when, as now, I had two dollars in my pocket and could easily afford the nickel fare.
I hugged the great machine and got there and jumped off, running, just shy of my stop. But I didn’t have the address of the East 149th Street headquarters so for a couple of wearyinghours I trudged up and down over the hills, going as far west as the Concourse and then doubling back east, and never knowing what I was looking for in that simmering heat, but coming into luck when I saw two cars, a LaSalle coupé and a Buick sedan, sitting side by side in the lot of a closed-down White Castle hamburger joint not far from the junction with Southern Boulevard. By themselves neither car would have caught my eye but together they looked familiar. Next to the White Castle was a narrow four-story office building of indiscriminate color and large dirt-encrusted windows. When I went in the place smelled of piss and wood rot. Had there been a business directory on the wall you couldn’t have seen it. I was elated. I removed myself and crossed the street and sat down on the curb between two parked trucks and waited to see what I would see.
And it was very interesting. It was about noon I’d say, the sunlight flashing down the power lines, the smoke of truck exhausts puffing up white as flowers, heat shimmering over the asphalt, and the street surface giving way to my sneaker heel and leaving an indentation like a crescent moon, so that a good detective could point out This is where he sat, right here where he banged his heel down, and from the depth of the indentation I’d say it was probably noon. And every once in a while someone would come along, some guy in shirtsleeves mostly, and he’d duck into that building. And one got off the corner bus, and one came out of a car that waited at the curb with its motor running, and one pulled up in a yellow cab, but all them were in a hurry, they were urgent, and with anxious expressions on their
And that is how it happened one summer day the boy Billy came to be clinging to the back of a Webster Avenue trolley as it hummed its way south toward 149th Street. It was not easy traveling this way, your fingers had only the narrowest purchase on the outer sill of the rear window, which was of course the front window when the trolley was going in the other direction, which meant it was a big window and that therefore you had to crouch while you clung so that your head didn’t appear in it: when the motorman spotted you in his rearview mirror he could make the car buck, throw it into some sort of electrical braking stutter so that you had to drop off, whether there was traffic behind you or not, which was a real son of a bitch. Not only that, but your feet had only the narrowest fender to toe, so that really you attached yourself for passage more by whole-body adhesion than anything else. And therefore when the trolley made a stop the correct procedure was to drop off until it started up again, not only because you were really vulnerable clinging to a trolley car at rest when any cop could come along and whap you across the ass with his billy club, but so that you would have the strength to hang there till the next stop. You didn’t want to fall off while the damn thing was moving along at a clip, especially on Webster which is an industrial street of warehouses and garages and machine shops and lumberyards all of which make for long blocks and a fast-moving trolley enjoying its run between distant stops, going fast enough to rock along side to side on its wheel carriages, banging the hell out of them and sending up sparks up there where the pole scrapes the power from the wire. It is a fact that more than one boy has died riding the back of a streetcar. Nevertheless this was my preferred mode of travel even when, as now, I had two dollars in my pocket and could easily afford the nickel fare.
I hugged the great machine and got there and jumped off, running, just shy of my stop. But I didn’t have the address of the East 149th Street headquarters so for a couple of wearyinghours I trudged up and down over the hills, going as far west as the Concourse and then doubling back east, and never knowing what I was looking for in that simmering heat, but coming into luck when I saw two cars, a LaSalle coupé and a Buick sedan, sitting side by side in the lot of a closed-down White Castle hamburger joint not far from the junction with Southern Boulevard. By themselves neither car would have caught my eye but together they looked familiar. Next to the White Castle was a narrow four-story office building of indiscriminate color and large dirt-encrusted windows. When I went in the place smelled of piss and wood rot. Had there been a business directory on the wall you couldn’t have seen it. I was elated. I removed myself and crossed the street and sat down on the curb between two parked trucks and waited to see what I would see.
And it was very interesting. It was about noon I’d say, the sunlight flashing down the power lines, the smoke of truck exhausts puffing up white as flowers, heat shimmering over the asphalt, and the street surface giving way to my sneaker heel and leaving an indentation like a crescent moon, so that a good detective could point out This is where he sat, right here where he banged his heel down, and from the depth of the indentation I’d say it was probably noon. And every once in a while someone would come along, some guy in shirtsleeves mostly, and he’d duck into that building. And one got off the corner bus, and one came out of a car that waited at the curb with its motor running, and one pulled up in a yellow cab, but all them were in a hurry, they were urgent, and with anxious expressions on their
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