1088
PARTISAN REVIEW
sentiments, anyway, a mixed extract from Natty Bumppo, Quentin
Durward, Tom Brown, Clark at Kaskakia, the messenger who
brought the good news from Ratisbon, and so on, that kept him
more to himself. I was just a slow understudy to this, just as he never
got me to put in hours on his Sandow muscle builder and the gimmick
for developing the sinews of the wrist. I was an easy touch for friend–
ships, and most of the time they were cut short by older loyalties. I
was pals longest with Stashu Kopecs whose mother was a midwife
graduated from the Aesculapian School of Midwifery on Milwaukee
Avenue. Well to do, the Kopecses had an electric player piano and
linoleums in all the rooms, but Stashu was a thief, and to run with
him I stole, too: coal off the cars, clothes from the lines, rubber balls
from the dime-store and pennies off the newsstands. Mostly for the
satisfaction of dexterity, though Stashu invented the game of stripping
in the cellar and putting on the girls' things swiped from the clothes–
lines. Then he too showed up in a gang that caught me one cold
afternoon of very little snow while I was sitting on a crate frozen into
the mud eating Nabisco wafers, my throat full of the sweet dust.
Foremost, there was a thug of a kid, about thirteen but undersized,
hard and grieved looking. He came up to accuse me and big Moonya
Staplanski, just out of the St. Charles Reformatory and headed next
for the one at Pontiac, backed him up.
"You little Jew bastard, you hit my brother," he said.
"I never did. I never even saw
him
before."
"You took away a nickel from him. How did you buy them
biscuits else, you."
"I got them at home."
Then I caught sight of Stashu, hay-headed and jeering, pleased
to sickness with his deceit and his new-revealed brotherhood with
the others, and I said, "Hey, you lousy bed-wetter, Stashu, you know
Moon ain't even got a brother."
Here the kid hit me and the gang was on me, Stashu with the
rest, tearing the buckles from my sheepskin coat and bloodying my
nose.
"Who is to blame?" said Grandma Lausch when I came home.
"You know who? You are, August, because that's all the brains you
have to go with that piss-in-bed accoucherka's son. Does Simon hang
around with them? He has too much sense." I thanked God she didn't
