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By Root 5348 0

’t straight) for close on to two years. So there was no sense speaking to her. That loud-mouthed punk she was married to, if he saw her speaking to Al Grecco there was no telling what he would think. And do. And anyhow, you couldn’t judge a baby by just one night two years ago. Maybe that had been the only time she ever cheated on that loudmouth, and you couldn’t hold that against her. She had been the easiest job of work Al ever had, or one of the easiest. He had known her in sisters school and then as they grew up he hadn t seen much of her around town; just see her on the street now and then, and she d say Hello, Tony Murascho, and he d say Hello, Frances. And he read in the paper where she got married to Dutch Snyder and be felt sorry for her, because he knew what Dutch was: a loud-mouth Kluxer, who was always getting his face pushed in for making cracks about the Catholic church, but was always trying to get dates with Catholic girls and getting them. When Al read about the marriage he figured Frances had got herself knocked up, but he was wrong: what had happened was that Frances s father, Big Ed Curry, the cop, had caught his daughter and Snyder in an awkward position and had given Snyder the choice of marriage or death. Al did not know this. He did know that it wasn’t long after the marriage before Dutch, who was known as Ralphie to some of the girls at the Dew Drop Inn, was around the Dew Drop again, a sucker for cigarette money and one of the most unpopular customers of the institution. So one afternoon, two years before the night at the Stage Coach, Al was driving through Collieryville and he saw Frances waiting for a bus and he stopped his car. You want a ride? he said. No oh, it s you, Tony, she said. Are you going back to town?

Nothing else but, said Al. Get in.

Well, I don t know

Okay. No skin off my ass, be said, and reached for the door to close it. Oh, I don t mean I ll go with you. Only, will you leave me off somewhere

Get in and do the talking on the way, he said. She got in and he gave her a cigarette. She had been to her grandmother s in Collieryville and she wanted a cigarette and accepted a drink and was easily persuaded to go for a short ride. The short ride was short enough: half a mile off the main road between Gibbsville and Collieryville to a boathouse on the Colliery Dam. There was something queer about the whole thing, like going with your cousin or somebody. He had known Frances as a little girl in school, and then all of a sudden one day you discover that she is a woman that has had her experience and all that it was queer. It was like finding money on the street; you didn’t have to earn it, work for it, go on the make for it. And she must have felt the same way, because if there was ever an easy lay she was it that day. But she said on the way home: If you ever tell anybody this I ll kill you. I mean it. And you could see she did. And she refused to see him again and told him never to call her up or try to see her. She was a little sorry, what she had done, but he could not be sure that even that was not putting on an act. He often thought of it. He thought of it now, watching her watching Dutch dancing with Emily Ziegenfuss, with his leg rammed in between the Ziegenfuss woman s legs and trying to make out as if he was just dancing like anyone else. The son of a bitch. Frannie was all right. Al liked Frannie. But that Dutch he d like to paste him one. That was the trouble: women (he did not call them women, or girls, but another name which he used for all female persons except nuns) nearly always got the dirty end of the stick. Only once in a while they got a right guy, like Fliegler, for instance. Then he began to feel a little angry at Irma Fliegler. He wondered whether she appreciated what a right guy she was married to. Probably not. She probably just took him for granted. That was the other side of it: a woman married a louse that beat her and cheated on her, and she got so she took that for granted; and another woman married a real guy, a square shooter from the word go, and she didn