Elmira herself, a tall and buxom middle-aged woman who either dyed her hair red or wore a wig-there was an argument about this-came to take their orders. She nodded grimly at the ketchup bottle and said: "You break that and you bought it."

Hauser put the bottle down and fished a dollar bill from his pants pocket. Narrowing his eyes and speaking in what he thought was an imitation of George Raft, he said: "Baby, there's a lot more where this came from. I could buy and sell this joint."

Elmira neatly plucked the bill from his fingers. She said: "I'll settle for you paying your tab."

Horse howled. "Me?"

"Yes, you, hotshot. You owe me something from last week, remember?"

"You're some Jew," Hauser said. "If you was a man your name would be Izzy."

Elmira snorted. She never smiled but was a good-hearted soul who put a lot of kids on the cuff, and also was a soft touch for people collecting for various projects and causes: glee club, Community Chest, sandlot ball teams, etc. It was said her husband had been sent to the pen for bootlegging during Prohibition. Perhaps because of this Elmira was herself a teetotaler, and if she caught a kid with a pint of wine she banned him from her place for life.

"Hi, Ralph," she said, dismissing Hauser with her nose.

"Hi, Elmira."

"Say," she said, "I was thinking of getting a little machine for myself. I was thinking of coming around and seeing your dad."

"He'd certainly be glad to see you," Ralph said. "I know that."

"What I was thinking, it's the end of summer now and the prices will probably go down."

Ralph nodded judiciously. "They might, at that."

"You tell him I'm in the market for a good buy, a little coupe maybe. I ain't driven in years though. Years back, the late mister had a little flivver. I could drive that real good, but they've changed since, I hear. You used to shift gears with your feet in those days."

"Old Doc Klingman," Horse said, "still drives a Model T."

"I wouldn't call that old sawbones if I was dying from hydrophobia," said Elmira. She took their orders: a bowl of chips and a Coke for Ralph, and for Hauser a chocolate malted and a banana split.

"You're gonna get a potgut one of these days," said Ralph when Elmira had gone. Horse's father had a big beerbelly.

"Naw," said Hauser. "Everything I eat turns to shit." He took something from his pocket. "Hey, look." He showed Ralph a little tin of Between the Acts miniature cigars.

"If you light up in here Elmira will throw you out," Ralph said.

Hauser opened the box and, shielding it from the aisle with one hand, displayed the contents: a coiled rubber.

"New or used?"

"Brand-new Sheik," said Hauser, closing the tin and putting it away. "Stole it from my father's chiffonier. He keeps 'em under his socks. He's got a fuck-book there, too: Maggie 'n' Jiggs."

Ralph spoke disparagingly. "He'll kill you." But the sight of the rubber inflamed him all the same, as did ladies' underwear when seen on a clothesline, unless it belonged to close female relatives.

"Naw," said Hauser. "He don't count 'em."

Ralph sneered and went into his tough idiom: "You ain't got no use for it, except to put it on when you beat your meat."

Hauser looked dramatically smug, turning his mouth down and raising his eyebrows. "The hell you say."

Ralph got a lump in his throat. He cleared it. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Screw you, Hauser."

Their orders came and Hauser plunged into his, alternately slurping malted through the straws and shoveling into his mouth heaps of banana, three flavors of ice cream, chopped nuts, maraschino cherry, whipped cream, and butterscotch sauce.

Munching his spartan potato chips, Ralph grimaced and said: "Jesus, you make me sick."

"Make you sicker if you saw the nookie I'm smelling," said Horse, his mouth full of multicolored glop.

Ralph refused to be lured into the trap, knowing Hauser had far less patience than he with a story.

He turned and looked at a portion of the room he could see without cracking his neck. Sure enough, across and one booth behind that which was lateral with his own, there sat Imogene Clevenger, facing the door, so that he saw the back of her blond bob, a round of cheek, a tip of nose, and, through the inverted V made by her trunk and the arm elbowed on the tabletop, a swell of sweatered breast. She was with another girl-as always with the good-lookers, a beast who had pimples and wore glasses.

This latter person reacted immediately to Ralph's stare, which had passed over and rejected her with the speed of light. She smiled and waved. It was that Margie he had run into in the afternoon with Leo, across from the lot. Ralph feebly returned the wave and turned back.

Hauser said: "Boy, you know the dogs."

"Should I be nasty?" Ralph hated being back on the defensive.

Hauser wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, though a container of napkins was right there. He had already finished the entire order. "Like I always say," said he, "with the ugly ones you put an American flag over their head and fuck for Old Glory."

"She ain't got much of a body either."

Suddenly Hauser pulled several paper napkins all at once from the chromium holder and scrubbed his sticky hands. "Hey, Sandifer," he said in a low, confidential voice, "you want to hear about this whore I found or not?"

Ralph's stomach joined his testicles.

Horse leaned into the table. "Swear you won't spread it around?"

"Not me."

"Only you and me in on it, O.K.?"

"Scout's honor."

"You know that grocery I deliver for? I never told you this before, on account of I knew you would say I was full of shit-"

Ralph groaned in relief. He had actually thought Hauser had found a whore and would expect him to do something about it. "You mean that big blonde you claim gives you the eye?"

Hauser leaned back and pursed his lips. "Oh, I did tell you?"

"Only about a hundred times."

Hauser's wide face came across the table again. "Well, how about this then: I saw her pussy today."

The anxiety rushed back. Ralph let some Coke exhaust its effervescence on his palate.

"She showed it to you?"

"Let's put it this way: she sure knew I was looking at it. She had this kimono on, and it was open, and she was sitting on the couch, and you could see right up between her legs, and there was her big hairy twat."

Ralph sneered again. "That was accidental, for God's sake."

"So why didn't she close up when I was looking, I ask you?" Hauser answered himself: "She's a whore, that's why. Who else is dressed like that, at home in the middle of the day? She don't go out to work and she ain't married."

"How do you know?"

"I never see no husband around there."

"Well," said Ralph, "her husband would be out to work when you delivered, wouldn't he? Whereas is she was a whore, there'd be guys around." Ralph figured this out for himself. He had never seen a "whore" in his life.

"The guys come at night, you asshole," said Hauser.

"How'd you know? You ain't seen 'em."

"I don't have to. That's just the way whores work."

"The voice of experience," Ralph said scornfully.

"Lester told me," said Hauser. Lester was his older brother, a sailor who occasionally came home on leave.

"Lester's a big whoremaster?"

"Not him," said Horse. "He don't have to pay for it. Girls put out for him left and right. He says it's a pretty poor man who has to buy his poongtang. Old Lester sees a girl he likes and goes right up to her and says let's fuck."

Ralph shook his head. "He must get slugged a lot."

Hauser howled. "You'd be surprised at all the ass he gets."

You could never tell with Horse what was a joke or just a lie. Ralph couldn't imagine a decent girl even going on a date with Lester Hauser, who had big ears and an undershot jaw and old acne craters on his cheeks. He was bowlegged in his uniform and his sailor hat was always soiled around the bottom with sweat, dirt, and hair oil.

Hauser reached into his pocket and came out with a handful of dollar bills. "Lookie here," he said, "and I got a few more where they came from."

"What'd you do?" asked Ralph. "Rob a bank?"

Hauser leered. "I got my sources. How much are you carrying?"

"A dime."

"The stingiest man in town," said Hauser, rolling his eyes. He counted the four bills in his hand. "All right, I'll loan you two bucks."

"For what? All I got is a Coke and chips."

Hauser leaned over and whispered: "For the whore, stupid."

Ralph's head-skin tightened from nape to eyebrows, but his face remained bland.

"That's what they get: two bucks," said Hauser. "Everybody knows that."

"I got to get home," said Ralph. He put his dime on the table and drank the remaining swallow of his Coke.

"You were all ready to walk around town for a couple hours, following girls. You're yellow, Sandifer. That's what ails you."

"I don't feel too good. I think I got a touch of sunstroke cutting grass today."

"You got a yellow streak a mile wide running down your back."

Ralph said levelly: "You wanna come outside and repeat that?"

"I'll holler it from the housetops. You're just going to pull your pud all your life. Look, I'm offering you the money." He thrust two bills across the table.

Ralph realized that Hauser was not challenging him in a personal way. He pulled in his jaw and became realistic. "You mean, go over there now? You don't really know she's a whore. Second, it's against the law. Third, what about getting a disease?"

Hauser replied: "She's one all right!" He pushed out of the booth, saying: "If you're a man, you'll follow me."

Ralph felt as though he might hemorrhage through ears, nose, and mouth if he were forced to make an irrevocable decision. He was a deliberative sort. For something like this he had to study days, weeks, years; until he was about twenty would be more like it.

Passing Imogene Clevenger's oblivious back, he thought: If you had ever looked at me, I wouldn't be in this hideous situation. He ignored Margie's obsequious smile and did not reply to her "Bye, Ralph. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Hauser was waiting inexorably on the sidewalk.

Ralph said: "For Christ's sake, it's still light."

"Damn right it is. So we go down to the drugstore and get us some port wine, have a few drinks till it gets dark, see?"

This was getting crazier and crazier. "Are you nuts, Hauser? Doc won't sell us any wine at our age."

Horse was somber. Then he brightened. "I got it. I'll tell him it's for my old man."

"You'd need a note for that," said Ralph. "Like for cigarettes."

"We'll forge one. Go inside and get a piece of paper and a pencil from Elmira."

"You go."

Horse squinted for a moment and then decided not to make a point of it. "Naw. She'll know something's fishy. How about going to your house and you steal some of your father's booze? He won't miss it."

"My dad doesn't keep any around. I don't think he drinks."

"At my house, the liquor's kept in the kitchen and my old man sits in there guzzling it all night."

"Let's forget this whole thing until some other night when the time is ripe," said Ralph.

"No," Hauser said emphatically. "A quitter never wins and a winner never quits. I'll figure out something, goddammit. It's got to be tonight."