V.

He thought back to the one he'd chased solo almost to the East River, through Fairing's Parish. It had lagged, let him catch up. Had been looking for it. It occurred to him that somewhere - when he was drunk, too horny to think straight, tired - he'd signed a contract above the paw-prints of what were now alligator ghosts. Almost as if there had been this agreement, a covenant, Profane giving death, the alligators giving him employment: tit for tat. He needed them and if they needed him at all it was because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies they'd been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of the world's Macy's. And the soul's passage down the toilet and into the underworld was only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time till they would have to return to being falsely animated kids' toys. Of course they wouldn't like it. Would want to go back to what they'd been; and the most perfect shape of that was dead - what else? - to be gnawed into exquisite rococo by rat-artisans, eroded to an antique bone-finish by the holy water of the Parish, tinted to phosphorescence by whatever had made that one alligator's sepulchre so bright that night.

When he went down for his now four hours a day he talked to them sometimes. It annoyed his partners. He had a close call one night when a gator turned and attacked. The tail caught the flashlight man a glancing blow off his left leg. Profane yelled at him to get out of the way and pumped all five rounds in a cascade of re-echoing blasts, square in the alligator's teeth. "It's all right," his partner said. "I can walk on it." Profane wasn't listening. He was standing by the headless corpse, watching a steady stream of sewage wash its life blood out to one of the rivers - he'd lost sense of direction. "Baby," he told the corpse, "you didn't play it right. You don't fight back. That's not in the contract." Bung the foreman lectured him once or twice about this talking to alligators, how it set a bad example for the Patrol. Profane said sure, OK, and remembered after that to say what he was coming to believe he had to say under his breath.

Finally, one night in mid-April, he admitted to himself what he'd been trying for a week not to think about: that he and the Patrol as functioning units of the Sewer Department had about had it.

Fina had been aware that there weren't many alligators left and the three of them would soon be jobless. She came upon Profane one evening by the TV set. He was watching a rerun of The Great Train Robbery.

"Benito," she said, "you ought to start looking around for another job."

Profane agreed. She told him her boss, Winsome of Outlandish Records, was looking for a clerk and she could get him an interview.

"Me," Profane said, "I'm not a clerk. I'm not smart enough and I don't go for that inside work too much." She told him people stupider than he worked as clerks. She said he'd have a chance to move up, make something of himself.

A schlemiel is a schlemiel. What can you "make" out of one? What can one "make" out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he'd reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism. "I will give it a try," he told her, "and thanks." She was grace-happy - here he had kicked her out of the bathtub and now she was turning the other cheek. He began to get lewd thoughts.

Next day she called up. Angel and Geronimo were on day shift, Profane was off till Friday. He lay on the floor playing pinochle with Kook, who was on the hook from school.

"Find a suit," she said. "One o'clock is your interview."

"Wha," said Profane. He'd grown fatter after these weeks of Mrs. Mendoza's cooking. Angel's suit didn't fit him any more. "Borrow one of my father's," she said, and hung up.

Old Mendoza didn't mind. The biggest suit in the closet was a George Raft model, circa mid-'30's, double-breasted, dark blue serge, padded shoulders. He put it on and borrowed a pair of shoes from Angel. On the way downtown on the subway he decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in. Because he felt now as if he were living in some private depression days: the suit, the job with the city that would not exist after two weeks more at the most. All around him were people in new suits, millions of inanimate objects being produced brand-new every week, new cars in the streets, houses going up by the thousands all over the suburbs he had left months ago. Where was the depression? In the sphere of Benny Profane's guts and in the sphere of his skull, concealed optimistically by a tight blue serge coat and a schlemiel's hopeful face.