THE EINHORNS
621
supposed to see that he didn't go out too far and also I handed him
lighted cigarettes while he floated near the pier in the pillow
striping of his suit with large belly, large old man's sex and yellow
bald knees; his white back-hair spread on the water, yellowish, like
polar bear's pelt,
his
vigorous fore-skull, tanned and red, turned up;
while his big lips uttered and his nose drove out smoke, clever and
pleasurable in the warm, heavy blue of Michigan; while wood–
bracketed trawlers, tarred on the sides, chuffed and vapored outside
the water reserved for the bawling, splashing, many-actioned, bril–
liant-colored crowd; waterside structures and towers, and skyscrapers
beyond in a vast right angle to the evading bend of the shore.
Einhorn was the Commissioner's son by
his
first wife. By the
second or third he had another son who was called Shep or, by
his
poolroom friends, Dingbat, for John Dingbat O'Berta the candy
kid of city politics and friend of Polack Joe Saltis. Since he didn't
either know or resemble O'Berta and wasn't connected with Thir–
teenth Ward politics or any other, I couldn't exactly say how he
came by the name. But without being a hoodlum himself he was
taken up with gang events and crime, a kind of amateur of the lore
and done up in the gangster taste so you might take him for some–
body tied up with the dangerous Druccis or Big Hayes Hubacek:
sharp financial hat, body-clasping suit, the shirt Andalusian style
buttoned up to the collar and worn without a necktie, trick shoes,
pointed and pimpy, polished like a tango dancer's, clumped hard on
the leather heels. Dingbat's hair was violent, brilliant, black, treated,
ripple-marked. Bantam, thin-muscled, swift, almost frail, he had an
absolutely unreasonable face. To be distinguished from brutal-it
wasn't that, there was all kind of sentiment in it. But wild, down–
twisting, squint-eyed, unchangeably firm and wrong in thoughts,
with the prickles coming black through
his
unmethodical after–
shave talcum; the puss of an executioner's subject, provided we un–
derstand the prototype not as a murderer (he attacked with his fists
and had a killer's swing but not the real intention) but as some–
body intractable.
As
far as that goes, he was beaten all the time and
wore a mishealed scar where his cheek had been driven between
his
teeth by a ring, but he went on springing and boxing, rushing out
from the poolroom on a fresh challenge to spin around on his tango
shoes and throw his tense weightless punches. Being beaten didn't
