Little Casino

On a Studebaker coupe

HE TAKES BUBBSY, WHOM HE HATES, BUT HAS no idea why, up to the roof, for reasons never explained, reasons never even suggested by the quiet, handsome boy, who has lived, more or less, in saloons most of his life. His mother has kept him in food and clothes, despite the fact that she rarely leaves the bar, save to stagger into the ladies’ room with one drunken lothario or another. He pulls Bubbsy, by the hair, to the edge of the roof, and throws him off. Bubbsy lands on a Studebaker coupe, crushing the roof with his head, which cracks open in a mess of blood and brains. He leans over the edge of the roof and lights a cigarette, then carefully drops a burnt match, aiming at the body, but the wind blows the match well off line and out of sight. He thinks that the coupe belongs to that stupid prick who lives over the candy store on the corner. That would be nice.

Hide and seek: death. He had been in Lincoln Hall. After the death of Bubbsy, he was sent to Coxsackie, then Dannemora. Nobody knew where he went from there, although there were recurring, preposterous rumors that he was acting in the movies, with a different face.

“They can do fuckin’ anything in Hollywood.”

Bubbsy liked to torture cats and cruelly tease and hurt little children. Had he lived, there is a good chance that he would have become a hail-fellow-well-met regular sport of a bully, drunk, and dedicated beater of women, like his older brother, Mac, the cop.

“There are always, sure, a few bad apples in the barrel, but it’s very wrong to condemn and blacken all the other honest, hardworking, law-abiding people who and so forth, and who and so on, and who, day in and day out, do this and do that and do the other thing too.”

It could happen to you. Hide. And seek.

The same darkness envelops them all.