The Amboy Dukes Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the stock. Frank had removed the trigger and firing-pin assembly from a cap pistol, and he had filed the cap detonator to a sharp point, so that it now served as a firing pin. When he pulled the trigger a strong rubber band jerked the firing pin against the cartridge. The revolver was loaded through the muzzle, and there was no accuracy, but it could send a bullet a couple of city blocks. Frank’s gun was one of the best in the Amboy Dukes. He squinted along the barrel before he placed the gun in his right hip pocket. The cartridges he dropped into the pocket that held the Ramses.
    For the last time he stood before the mirror and adjusted his hat. Alice had piled his books on the night table, and he took two of them at random because he wasn’t going to school. As he walked down the dark narrow steps of the tenement he felt as he always did. That he was in a prison and walking to his freedom, but instead of walking up to the light he was walking down. He passed the doors on the landings with their dirty opaque glass panels and ducked as he passed the electric-light fixture which hung awry and looked as if it might at any moment tear away from the ceiling. It was good to get out on the street, and he hurried up to the corner of Amboy and Pitkin because he saw two of the boys there. One was Black Benny, who went to Vocational with him, and the other was Moishe Perlman. Moishe worked in the Todd Shipyard in Red Hook and between being a calker, second class, and manipulating a hot pair of dice, he was making more than a hundred bucks a week. Frank envied him.
    “Walkin’ to the station with us?” Moishe asked Frank.
    Frank looked at Black Benny. “Not going to school?”
    “Want to go to the Paramount?” Benny replied. “They’ve got a good picture.”
    “Sure.” Frank laughed. “We haven’t cut school for a couple of days.”
    “I don’t know why the hell you guys are wasting your time in school,” Moishe said as they walked along Pitkin Avenue to Saratoga. “Why don’t you get your working papers and make yourselves some real dough before the Army gets you?”
    “I’d like to,” Frank said, “but my old man won’t let me. He wants me to get my diploma, and now he’s even talking about my going to college.”
    “College!” Benny punched him in the ribs. “He must be nuts!”
    Frank hit him over the head with his books. “Shut your hole about my old man. He’s a hell of a lot smarter than you.”
    “I didn’ mean nothin’.”
    “All right. Just watch your mouth.”
    Moishe began to run. “The bus is coming. Hurry up.”
    They pushed onto the bus, and Frank watched Black Benny and Moishe get a nice-looking broad between them and give her a rub. Moishe and Benny hemmed the girl between them, skillfully pocketing her and preventing her escape. In her eyes there was loathing and fear of the two hoodlums, who did not look at her but nevertheless pressed against her lasciviously, pinioning her against their rigid hot bodies. Moishe pushed against the girl’s buttocks, thighs, and legs while Benny pressed against her stomach and breasts. The girl wanted to scream, to cry out, but she did not dare, for innocence shone in the eyes of Black Benny and Moishe, between whom no sign of recognition had passed, and she feared to create a scene. Frank watched them, the snicker of a dirty smile playing about his lips. As the bus lurched to a stop at Livonia Avenue, Benny fell forward against the girl, and his free hand, seemingly by accident, passed across her breasts.
    The boys did not speak to each other until they stood at the station waiting for the New Lots train.
    “She wasn’t bad,” Moishe said.
    Frank laughed. “You sure gave it to her good. She didn’t know what to do.”
    “That’s a good way to start the morning,” Moishe agreed. “And I’ve picked up a couple that way.”
    “Should we do it some more?” Benny asked him.
    “No,” Moishe said. “We’ll talk.”
    As the train rocked