Billy Bathgate Read Online Free PDF

when I wasn’t juggling I was doing sleight of hand, trying to make coins disappear and reappear in their dirty ears, or doing card tricks of trick shuffles and folded aces, so their name for me was Mandrake, after the Hearst New York American comics magician, a mustached fellow in a tuxedo and top hat who was of no interest to me any more than magic was, magic was not the point, it was never the point, dexterity was to me the point, the same exercise as walking like a tightrope walker on the spear fence points while the trains made their windy rush under me, or doing backflips or handstands or cartwheels or whatever else arose to my mind of nimble compulsion. I was double-jointed, I could run like the wind, I had keen vision and could hear silence and could smell the truant officer before he even came around the corner, and what they should have called me was Phantom, after that other Hearst New York American comics hero, who wore a one-piece helmet mask and purple skintight rubberized body garment and had only a wolf for a companion, but they were dumb kids for the most part and didn’t even think of calling me Phantom even after I had disappeared into the Realm, the only one of all of them who had dreamed about it.
    The Park Avenue warehouse was one of several maintained by the Schultz gang for the storage of the green beer they trucked over from Union City New Jersey and points west. When a truck arrived it didn’t even have to blow its horn the warehouse doors would fold open and receive it as if they hadan intelligence of their own. The trucks were from the Great War, and still the original army khaki color, with beveled hoods and double rear wheels and chain-wheel drives that sounded like bones being ground up; the beds had stakes around the sides to which homemade slats were affixed, and tarpaulin was lashed down with peculiar and even gallant discretion over the cargo as if nobody would know then what it was. But when a truck came around the corner the whole street reeked of beer, they carried their gamy smell like the elephants in the Bronx Zoo. And the men who got down from the cab were not ordinary truck drivers in soft caps and mackinaws but men in overcoats and fedoras with a way of lighting their cigarettes in their cupped hands while the teamsters on inside duty backed the trucks into the black depths we were desperate to see into, that made me think of officers returned from a patrol across no-man’s-land. It was the sense of all this purveyed lawless might and military self-sufficiency that was so thrilling to boys, we hung around there like a flock of filthy messenger pigeons, cooing and clucking and fluttering up from the ground the minute we heard the chains grinding and saw the sneering Mack hood nosing around the corner.
    Of course this was just one of Mr. Schultz’s beer drops, and we didn’t know how many he had though we knew it was a fair number, and the truth was none of us had ever seen him though we never stopped hoping, and in the meantime we were honored to know that our neighborhood was good enough for one of his places, we were proud we enjoyed his confidence, and in our rare sentimental moments when we weren’t sassing each other for our pretensions, we thought that we were part of something noble and surely had a superior standing among other kids from ordinary neighborhoods that could not boast a beer drop or the rich culture it brought with it of menacingly glancing men who needed shaves and a precinct house of cops whose honor it was never if they could help it to breathe the air out-of-doors.
    Of particular interest to me was that Mr. Schultz maintainedthis business in all its prohibitional trappings even though Repeal had come. I thought that this meant beer like gold was by nature dangerous to handle however legal it might have become, or that people would buy better beer than his if he didn’t continue to frighten them, which meant, breathtakingly, that in Mr. Schultz’s mind