The Amboy Dukes (21 page)

“I’m going to give it to this bastard.” Crazy continued to glare at Sam, and the killer look on Crazy’s face made the crowd silent, for any sudden noise, sound, or movement meant that Crazy would sink the knife into Sam’s stomach.

Sam’s eyes were frantic with fear. His mouth twitched and he now kept his arms rigidly at his sides. Fanny shook with terror and cowered against the saxophonist’s music stand. For a moment she held Frank’s attention, but he shrugged his shoulders helplessly, and Frank’s date held him tightly.

“Put the knife down,” Mitch commanded Crazy.

“When I get good and ready,” Crazy replied.

Mitch placed his hand lightly on Crazy’s right arm. “Fanny wants to talk to you. Don’t you, Fanny?”

Fanny nodded dumbly.

“I didn’t mean nothing, honest,” Sam said earnestly.

“You’re breaking up the dance.” Mitch tightened his grip on Crazy’s sleeve. “Fanny wants to dance with you and,” he whispered in Crazy’s ear, “you can take her in the back and give it to her.”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Crazy withdrew the knife. He looked questioningly at Mitch, and Mitch nodded affirmatively.

“Put it away,” Mitch said. “You better take a powder,” Mitch said to Sam, whose face was still pallid and streaked with perspiration.

Sam tugged at his tie and tried to catch his breath.

“Yeah, you better go,” Larry agreed. “I’m sorry you got a shoving around”—he led the unprotesting Sam toward the checkroom—“but you tangled with a hard guy.”

Mitch had ordered the band to start playing, and the musicians began to break down another number.

“Here’s the key to the back room.” Larry handed it to Mitch. “Give it back to me when you’re through.”

“Right,” Mitch replied. “Come on,” he said to Crazy, “let’s go. You too,” he said to Fanny.

“Where’re you taking me?” she wept as Crazy pushed her ahead of him through the kitchen and cellar into a small bin which had been fitted up as a darkroom by some of the Tigers.

Mitch snapped the wall switch and shut the door before he spoke. “Crazy ‘n’ me want to talk to you.”

“Let me alone!” she screamed, and was silenced by Crazy’s slapping her in the face.

“You little bitch!” Crazy panted. “So you stood me up and thought you could get away with it!”

Fanny huddled in a corner and shielded herself from Crazy, who stood over her menacingly.

“I’m gonna leave you two alone,” Mitch said to them. “And you,” he said to Fanny, “you gave Crazy a raw deal and now you’re gonna pay off.”

“Let me alone!” she screamed and wept. “I never done it! I swear! My mother’ll kill me when she finds out! I never done it!”

Mitch was unrelenting. “That’s your story, stinker, and you’re stuck with it. Don’t give us that never-done-it stuff. It don’t go with us.”

Fanny clung to him. “I swear!” Her tears softened the mascara, and the hollows under her eyes became black. “I never done it! I never done it!”

Mitch pushed her from him. “So it’s time you did. And Crazy’s a good man to break you in. Gimme your knife,” he said to Crazy.

Crazy tossed him the knife.

“You sure you haven’t got another?” Mitch asked.

“No,” Crazy said.

“O.K. Have a good time.” Mitch opened the door, and as Fanny attempted to run out he punched her in the chest and knocked her to the cot. As he slammed the door behind him he could still hear Fanny screaming that she had never done it and begging Crazy to leave her alone. Before he entered the kitchen he stopped to listen and heard nothing. There was no danger of anyone hearing what was occurring in the darkroom. Mitch sighed. Taking care of Crazy was beginning to be a full-time job, and he had his own troubles. He had hardly danced once with his date and he had been so busy taking care of Shimmy and his guys that he wasn’t having much of a time himself.

As Mitch re-entered the clubroom and heard the loud, high-pitched shrill laugh that started as a scream and ended as a sudden gasp, he knew that Rosie Beanbags had arrived. Rosie stood against the wall with two of her friends, and they were bantering the Dukes and anyone else who wanted to join the fun. Rosie had jet-black hair which she wore in two thick braids that were fashioned into a halo on the top of her head. Her face was broad, with high cheekbones, and her eyebrows had been lengthened into two heavy lines which ended at the outer corners of her eyes. Her cheeks were heavily rouged to conceal the coarse and pitted texture of her skin, and the lipstick had been applied to her lips in a thick red cake. When Rosie laughed her heavy lips drew back to expose her gums, and her teeth were large and covered with tartar. Her breasts were tremendous, so large that they were a byword in the clubs and gangs of Brownsville and, as a sharp guy had once said, if a fellow were hit across the head with one of Rosie’s knockers he’d be driven into the sidewalk up to his ankles. The low cut of Rosie’s dress showed the heavy line between her breasts, and her high uplift brassière accented their size. Rosie’s legs were heavy and covered with hair, and she wore a pair of French-heeled open-toed sandals with thick red soles studded with nailheads and straps that crossed her fat, stolid ankles. The nails of her toes were covered with silver polish, and the long nails of her hands were tinted a purplish black. Heavy bracelets decorated both wrists, and around her right ankle she wore a silver slave bracelet. Rosie’s friends looked equally slutty, and as they stood in a group smoking their cigarettes and squinting at the boys through half-closed eyes Betty felt sick and overcome with revulsion.

“Aren’t we going?” She nudged Frank.

“I changed my mind,” he replied angrily. “Those guys want me to stay and I’m hangin’ around.”

“But we’re not having a good time.”

“I’m staying until it breaks up.”

“Whatever you say.” Betty shook her head as if she were unable to keep pace with the vagaries of his mood.

“Watch them,” Frank said to Betty. “Rosie’s a riot.”

“I think she’s disgusting.”

Frank’s reply was a sneer.

The boys rocked with laughter as Rosie heaved a bump at them.

“Come on, Rosie,” one of the boys encouraged her, “you musta heard some good dirty stories since I saw—I mean laid—you last.”

The girls standing in the crowd began to slip away. Between them and Rosie and her two friends there was a clear and defined social gap—the difference between a girl who permitted a boy whom she liked to give her some loving and the girl who was common gang property. Rosie suggested cellars, vacant lots and roofs, obscene coarseness, and dirty bed sheets, and the girls who stood about her moved away, singly, in twos, ashamed that they should have been seen in such close proximity to this notorious gang whore.

“Yeah,” one of the Dukes said as he nudged Shimmy and told him that now they’d see some fun, “give out with a story.”

Rosie raised her hands, palms forward. “Sure,” she yelled, “I got a good one!” She took a deep breath and began. Her story was pointless, without wit or humor, a dirty description of an impossible situation, related with a lewdness and vulgarity that made boys who had never before seen or heard of Rosie wince and despise her. And she was urged on by the loose laughter, the sudden dirty snorts of glee, the obscene delight which stimulated most of the crowd about her, until she came to the stupid climax of the story and in her thick throaty voice accented the dirty line. Then she laughed her shrill gasping laugh, and the crowd laughed with her.

“Rose,” one fellow commented above the howls of laughter, “you’re hotter than a two-dollar cornet.”

Bull Bronstein approached her and slid his hand into the bosom of her dress. “Rosie,” he said, “I wish I had them stuffed full of gold.”

“You’d sure have something,” she agreed, “but with Lilly here you’d starve to death.”

“Oh yeah?” Lilly retorted. “It ain’t knockers what count.”

“So let’s not waste any more time.” Bull spoke quietly to Rosie. “We got some guys down here from Williamsburg who’ve been givin’ us a hand all night. So how about fixin’ them up?”

“Can’t we later?” she replied. “We just got here and we wanta fool around first.”

“You’ll fool around later,” Bull decided for her. “Larry, Jackie,” he called the president of the Tigers, “Rosie and her babes are gonna entertain Shimmy and his guys in the back. You got some more cots?”

“The only cot we got is in the darkroom,” Jackie apologized. “But we got some extra blankets.”

“So we’ll let one of the babes use the darkroom and Rosie and the other one’ll use the kitchen. You’ll have to keep people out of there,” Bull said.

“Shimmy’s guys can stand at the door,” Larry said, “and I better go to the darkroom and get Crazy outa there with that stinker.”

“Who’s Crazy got in there?” Bull asked.

“You know. Fanny Kane.”

Bull whistled. “That’s jerky. Leaving him alone in there with her. He’s liable to split her head. Get Mitch and get him outa there. All right, Rosie”—he turned to her—“let’s get started.”

“How many guys?”

“About eight and a coupla the Tigers. That’s all. It won’t take too long.”

Rosie tried to look co-operative but failed. “Gee,” she wailed, “we ain’t been down no half-hour and you got us working.”

Bull chucked her under the chin. “You know you love it. We’re wastin’ time.”

The girls puffed nervously on their cigarettes as they stood in the kitchen, where the bright glare of the electric-light bulb in the open ceiling fixture caused everything to stand out in sharp abrupt lines. Jackie and Larry tossed the blankets onto the floor and made rough beds. Jackie knelt down and attempted to be funny by saying the beds were soft, but no one laughed.

The three girls stood transfixed when they saw Fanny stumble dully into the kitchen, her eyes puffed from crying and her lips swollen from the slaps across the mouth administered by Crazy. Her hair was disheveled and hung in loose strands about her head. Her stockings were in shreds, and the bodice of her dress was ripped to the waist. Haltingly she plodded to the sink, turned the cold-water faucet, and dabbed futilely at her eyes and lips with her hands.

Rosie approached her and wet a handkerchief. “You poor kid,” she whispered, “what’d they do to you?”

Fanny collapsed in Rosie’s arms and began to sob, her shoulders shaking as the sobs choked her. She clenched her lips to keep from screaming, but then she could no longer endure the pain and shock, and her cries became wild and hysterical, racking her with their violence.

“I never done it before!” The words came out singly from her bruised lips. “I never done it before! I begged him to let me go! Never done it before. Never done it before. Never done it—”

“You sons of bitches!” Rosie faced them. “You no-good sons of bitches to do this to a kid!”

“Who’s askin’ you?” Crazy blustered.

Rosie removed one of her shoes and grasped it by the sole. “Come over and I’ll show you, you son of a bitch!”

“She had it comin’ to her,” Larry said.

“Comin’ to her?” Rosie looked at him with disbelief. “You mean she coulda done somethin’ so bad that that son of a bitch had to rape this kid?”

“She stood up Crazy once,” Larry explained.

“So who in the hell wouldn’t stand up that crazy dope?” Lilly flung her cigarette into the sink, where it hissed sharply before it was extinguished. “Let me help you, Rosie,” she said. “We oughta get some ice for the kid’s lips.”

“You guys are a bunch of dogs,” Maybelle said. “No-good dogs.”

Bull opened the kitchen door. “Get out, Crazy. You done enough for one night.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Maybelle said to Rosie. “Get the guys,” she said to Bull.

“Bring in Shimmy and his boys,” Bull said to Jackie.

“How about my guys?” Jackie asked.

Rosie stopped washing Fanny’s face. “Just the guys who’re protecting this dance,” she said to Bull. “No one else.”

“Be regular,” Jackie protested. “We didn’t have nothin’ to do with this.”

Rosie’s look was full of loathing. “Go on, you son of a bitch. We don’t want no part of you or your bunch. Go on,” she ordered Bull, “get them in and let’s get going. We want to take this kid home.”

Jackie looked at Bull, and Bull shrugged his shoulders.

“My dress,” Fanny moaned suddenly through her swollen lips. “He tore my dress. I never done it before.”

Maybelle gently stroked Fanny’s hair. “Take it easy, baby,” she said. “You’re about my size and I’ll fix you up with a dress. I got one something like you’re wearing at home and I’ll give it to you.”

There was a knock on the kitchen door, and Bull opened it to admit Shimmy and the seven members of his gang.

“Gee,” one of them whistled, “somebody’s gotten a pasting.”

“Let me take her outside,” Lilly said, “and I’ll find somebody to take care of her until we get done.”

“I’ll do it,” Rosie said. “Come on, kid.” She supported Fanny. “We’ll have you outa here in no time.”

The blare of notes, laughter, and confusion hit Rosie as she entered the steaming clubroom and looked around for someone she knew. She saw Betty and Frank sitting near the band, and Rosie led Fanny to them.

“Frank,” she said, “I want you and your girl to take care of this kid. She’s had a rough deal.”

Betty stood up and gently seated Fanny. “Sure,” she said, “What happened?”

“Some bastard just raped her,” Rosie explained. “One of your guys,” she said to Frank. “Crazy Sachs.”

Frank held his throat and shut his eyes. “I’m through with them after tonight,” he said half to himself.

“So’m I,” Rosie said. “I don’t like sons of bitches or guys who’re friends of sons of bitches. We got some work in the back.” Her laugh was contemptuous. “I’ll be back soon.”

Betty held Fanny’s head on her shoulder. Frank nervously lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and ground the cigarette underfoot.

“We’ll go as soon as she gets back.” He gestured toward the kitchen.

“Suits me.” Betty closed Fanny’s torn dress with one hand. “This is really some dance.”

“I know.” Frank lit another cigarette, looked at it distastefully, and threw it away. He saw Benny approaching him and wanted to ignore him, but he decided he had had enough nastiness to last him for the evening without another fight to climax everything.