V.

The giggling got louder. Someplace else the American ensign and the geisha would be singing in Italian to the music behind them; and how was that for a tourist's confusion of tongues? The girls moved away and the three fell into step beside them. They bought beer and took over an unoccupied stoop.

"Benny here talks guinea," said Angel. "Say something in guinea, hey."

"Sfacim," Profane said. The girls got all shocked.

"Your friend is a nasty mouth," one of them said.

"I don't want to sit with any nasty mouth," said the girl sitting next to Profane. She got up, flipped her butt and moved down into the street, where she stood hipshot and stared at Profane out of her dark eyeholes.

"That's his name," Geronimo said, "is all. And I am Peter O'Leary and this here is Chain Ferguson." Peter O'Leary being an old school chum who was now at a seminary upstate studying to be a priest. He'd been so clean-living in high school that Geronimo and his friends always used him for an alias whenever there might be any trouble. God knew how many had been deflowered, hustled off for beer or slugged in his name. Chain Ferguson was the hero of a western they'd been watching on the Mendoza TV the night before.

"Benny Sfacim is really your name?" said the one in the street.

"Sfacimento." In Italian it meant destruction or decay. "You didn't let me finish."

"That's all right then," she said. "That isn't bad at all." Bet your shiny, twitching ass, he thought, all unhappy. The other could knock her up higher than those arches of light. She couldn't be more than fourteen but she knew already that men are drifters. Good for her. Bedmates and all the sfacim they have yet to get rid of drift on, and if some stays with her and swells into a little drifter who'll go someday too, why she wouldn't like that too much, he reckoned. He wasn't angry with her. He looked that thought at her, but who knew what went on in those eyes? They seemed to absorb all the light in the street: from flames beneath sausage grills, from the bridges of light bulbs, windows of neighborhood apartments, glowing ends of De Nobili cigars, flashing gold and silver of instruments on the bandstand, even light from the eyes of what innocent there were among the tourists:

The eyes of a New York woman [he started to sing]

Are the twilit side of the moon,

Nobody knows what goes on back there

Where it's always late afternoon.

Under the lights of Broadway,

Far from the lights of home,

With a smile as sweet as a candy cane

And a heart all plated with chrome.

Do they ever see the wandering bums

And the boys with no place to go,

And the drifter who cried for an ugly girl

That he left in Buffalo?

Dead as the leaves in Union Square,

Dead as the graveyard sea,

The eyes of a New York woman

Are never going to cry for me.

Are never going to cry for me.

The girl on the sidewalk twitched. "It doesn't have any beat." It was a song of the Great Depression. They were singing it in 1932, the year Profane was born. He didn't know where he'd heard it. If it had a beat, it was the beat of beans thumping into an old bucket someplace down in Jersey. Some WPA pick against the pavement, some bum-laden freight car on a downgrade hitting the gaps between the rails every 39 feet. She'd have been born in 1942. Wars don't have my beat. They're all noise.

Zeppole man across the street began to sing. Angel and Geronimo started to sing. The band across the street acquired an Italian tenor from the neighborhood:

Non dimenticar, the t'i'ho voluto tanto bene,

Ho saputo amar; non dimenticar . . .

And the cold street seemed all at once to've bloomed into singing. He wanted to take the girl by the fingers, lead her to someplace out of the wind, anyplace warm, pivot her back on those poor ballbearing heels and show her his name was Sfacim after all. It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion. "I'm Lucille," the girl said to Profane. The other two introduced themselves, Lucille came back up the stoop to sit next to Profane, Geronimo went off for more beer. Angel continued to sing. "What do you guys do," Lucille said.

I tell tall stories to girls I want to screw, Profane thought. He scratched his armpit. "Kill alligators," he said.

"Wha."

He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn't born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper of Mulberry Street.