Hold Tight Read Free Page A

the curb, signaling for a taxi. The traffic was all trucks and taxicabs, with a lone streetcar nosing along like an old catfish. Finally, a square-roofed taxi pulled over and the man opened the door and signaled Hank to get in. “West Street and Gansevoort,” he told the driver.
    The man relaxed. He smiled at Hank, offered him a cigarette, then offered the driver one too. “I thought our homesick boy in blue deserved a home-cooked meal,” he told the driver. The men smoked cigarettes and talked about all the changes the war had brought about. The driver asked Hank all the usual civilian questions about home and ship and girlfriend. The man smirked to himself when Hank mentioned Mary Ellen, but he didn’t understand.
    They drove along a waterfront, the low sun flashing gold on the dusty windshield between the high warehouses and higher ships. It looked just like the area around the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the McCoy was in drydock. Suddenly, there was a long stretch of sunlight, and Hank saw the rounded metal ridge of a ship lying on its side in the river. “Poor Normandie ,” sighed the driver and said it was sabotage. The man said carelessness and stupidity; the two began to argue about how much they could trust the newspapers. The driver mentioned a house that had been raided in Brooklyn, where there were Nazi spies and all kinds of sick goings-on, but how the newspapers had to hush it up because they’d caught a Massachusetts senator there. The man abruptly changed the subject by asking Hank if he had any brothers or sisters.
    The driver let them out beneath a highway on stilts, in front of a yellow brick warehouse whose cranes were loading another zig-zag painted ship. The man watched the taxi pull away, took Hank by the arm and led him across the street, away from the river. “Almost there,” said the man. “How long has it been? Two months? Oh, but this should be good.”
    “Hot damn,” said Hank.
    They walked up a cobblestone side street, a long shed roof on one side, a snub-nosed truck parked on the other. Whatever the place was, it was closed for the day. Hank thought he smelled chickens. There was a stack of poultry crates against one wall, a few feathers caught in the slats.
    “Not the nicest neighborhood,” the man admitted. “But what do we care, right?”
    The street opened out on a square, a cobblestone bay where five or six streets met at odd angles. Two flatbed trucks were parked in the middle. The entire side of a tall warehouse across the way was painted with an advertisement for Coca Cola, the boy with the bottlecap hat wearing a small window in his eye. There were houses on their side of the square, three of them wedged together in the narrow corner. The man went up the steps of the white frame house that needed painting and rang the bell. Hank stood back and wondered what the man looked like without his overcoat, then without any clothes at all.
    A little slot behind a tarnished grill opened in the door.
    “Hello, Mrs. Bosch,” said the man. “Remember me?”
    The slot closed and the door was opened by a horsefaced woman with a nose like a pickax. “Uf course I ree-member you. Mr. Jones? Or was it Smith? But come een, come een.” She spoke in a weird singsong as she ushered them inside and closed the door. She wore an apron over her flowered house dress and smelled of cooked cabbage. “And you breeng one uf our luflee service men. How happy for you.”
    Hank was shocked to find a woman here. The women back home knew nothing about such things, which was only right. But Yankees were strange and this woman was foreign. Hank had never seen an uglier woman. She and the man weren’t friends, but she seemed to know what they were here for.
    “And you are smart to come earleee.” Her voice went up at the end of each sentence. “There is another couple before you, but I think they are looking for courage and will let you go in front of them.”
    She took their coats and hats and hung