Maggie Cassidy Read Free

the burper’s convention of general farts in the motors division of the superintendents of Wall Street. I’ll be there, Zagg, with a beautiful blonde, a flask, an apartment waiting for your convenience . . . ah gentlemen I’m tired. It was a wrestling match that—how can I dance tonight? How can I go and jitterbug now?” And once again, everything else exhausted for the while, he sang Jack o diamonds in that way he’d just learned, sad, incredibly sad like a dog act, or like men singing, floating broken and prophetic in the snow of the night, Jack o diamonds , as arm in arm they all scuffled to the New Year’s Eve dance at the Rex Ballroom, their first dance each one, their first and last future before them.

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    Meanwhile all this time across the street walking parallel with them was Zaza Vauriselle who but for a prognathic big almost hydrocephalic’s jaw and six inches less height could have been Vinny Bergerac’s chiseled French Canadian happy smiling brother; he was with the group but for awhile had absented himself to the other sidewalk in the way of one accustomed to walking long distances with gangs, to think, to drive his legs on in a thing of his own, every now and then, too, saying to them, barely heard, comments like “Damn bunch of fools” (in French, gange de baza ) or, “Aw look the nice girls coming out that house hey.”
    Zaza Vauriselle was the oldest in the gang, had only recently injected himself via Vinny’s invitation, and had made a hit with the rest skeptical or not only because he was such a fantastic fool, capable of any joke, the main joke being, “He’ll do anything Vinny says, anything”; and his added value that he knew all about girls and sex from direct experience. He had the same happy thin features, and handsome like Vinny, but was very short, bowlegged, funny to look at, shifty-eyed, heavy-jawed and snorting through a defective nose; always masturbating in front of the others, about eighteen; yet something curiously innocent and foolish almost angelic though admittedly silly and probably mentally retarded as he was. He too wore a white silk scarf, a dark topcoat, rubbers, no hat, and walked purposefully through the two-inch snow to the dance which had been his idea; somewhere down Lakeview Avenue, in some Centreville house where a party of adults was starting, the boys had gone, from G.J.’s house and Zagg’s house the final meeting place, to fetch Zaza. It made for walking and rosy-faced excitement holiday-proper; nobody had a car till that summer. “ On va y’allez let’s go!” Zaza had yelled. Now Zaza Vauriselle made a snowball and threw it at Vinny his champion. “Ey, Vinny, go sit on the ga-dam bowl and shut up before I tear your legs off . . .” Softly, from across the street, with a stupid smile that the others all fondly saw gleaming. G.J. staggered to hear it, whispering, pointing, shushing, “Listen what’s he thinking? . . . Ga-dam Zazay!” and ran across the street and dove on Zaza’s shoulders and drove him into a snowbank as Zaza, unused to rough treatment, yelled in genuine anxiety “Ey! Ey!” and all sartorial in his coat and scarf was swashed in snow; the others rushing up to wrestle him in every direction, and finally they lifted him to their shoulders horizontal and went on down Riverside yelling and bearing their Zaza.
    By now they had reached a deep slope of grass behind a wooden fence, near a near-castle made of stone, with towers, that sat high over Riverside Street. Up the grassy slope, white in the night, began a stone wall built up and in against a cliff, with dry pendant remnant vines now hanging in the snow, gleaming ice; up on top of the cliff, three houses. The middle one was G.J.’s. They were just regular old French Canadian two-story wooden tenements, with washlines, porches, long boards, like Frisco tenements