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Show 54 a drink, and worse, probably, was nebulous as smoke. I saw no point in clarifying it. Sin was exactly why I wanted to go, adult sin, for my innocence was getting as oppressive to me as my respectability. I wanted to be at least as wild and dashing as Pat Donahue, only more suave. In summer we worked all week and then went to town on Saturday nights, all of us, and once there I'd go off on my own, cruising on foot the central two blocks of Main Street, which swarmed with people like a plaza, later going to the last feature at the Egyptian so that when I got out my father and mother and Davy would have gone home. Then down to The Swamp. Mostly I stood at the railing and watched the dancers, enjoying the crowds of people, the coarse language, the drunkenness, the erotic undertones. Sometimes I went outside and stood with a group while they passed the bottle around, but I passed up my turn, and declined all cigarettes, for I was in training for football. If there were girls I knew, sometimes Kate, never Liz Brown, I would buy a ten cent ticket and dance a set, a fast one and a slow one, after which all those who didn't have a dollar ticket for the evening, a piece of ribbon pinned to the man's lapel, had to leave the floor. That was all I did; I was working into sin gradually. But that night, while I was in the crowd between sets, I came face to face with Buck. I froze. He was grinning and breathing whiskey and started past me; when I didn't give way too, he focused on me. "Let's go, kid," he said, and shoved me aside, was gone. He hadn't even recognized me. I would sooner he had hit me, almost. Later when I heard there was a fight and went along with the crowd pouring out the doors to see it, hearing that Buck was mixed up in it, I hoped for the best, that he'd gotten clobbered. But there he was, the fight over and he standing in a crowd of admirers, his hair fallen down over his forehead and he combing tKe brilliantined curls back, careful not to get them too far back, not |
