Dog Day Afternoon Read Online Free

about some branch in Queens,” he said then. “Tell me about a nice neighborhood branch, small, where they put together a payroll the afternoon before payday. You got one, or are you full of shit?”
    “Got kids?” Don persisted.
    “Yeah, I got kids. I asked you something.”
    The chubby man nodded. He lifted his gin-and-tonic in Joe’s direction. “Here’s cheers,” he said. “I got a branch for you, baby, but you better never bring my name into it. That’s why I don’t want no cut, no way. If I don’t get a cut, I can deny it and the cops have nothing to go on.”
    “. . . und sonnst garnicht.”
    “Then why tell me anything?” Joe asked. “If you’re not in it for loot, what’s it all about?”
    The chubby man pursed his lips into a cupid’s bow. The Dietrich record ended and a Garland song began. “I got my reasons.”
    “. . . where, over the rainbow, way up . . .”
    “No good,” Joe told him. “I get the loot. You get nothing. It don’t figure. When something don’t figure, I don’t like it.”
    “. . . a place that I dreamed of, once . . .”
    Don’s mouth pressed together so tightly that his lips went white. After a moment he glanced at Joe. “Revenge, baby.”
    “Ah, come on.”
    “You better believe it. Re-fucking-venge.”
    “On the bank?”
    “A little of my own back, after fifteen years, that’s all.”
    Joe laughed. “You’d pass up a cut, in cash, for that?”
    The chubby man’s head began to nod. After a moment it seemed as if he couldn’t stop the motion. “Right,” he said. “Right. Right.”
    “Working for them did that to you?”
    “Right.”
    “Jesus.” Joe sipped his fresh beer. “I heard of lousy jobs. I had most of them myself, one time or another, for the shittiest bosses in the world.”
    “Not for fifteen years,” Don reminded him. “That’s what makes the difference between you and me, baby. Fifteen years gives you a hate that nothing can make you forget.”
    “Except fingering a heist? That’ll make you happy?”
    Neither man spoke for a long time. The bar was beginning to fill up now with young men in tight, open clothes. The odor of sweat and perfume began to fill the room.
    “. . . if bluebirds fly, then why can’t I?”

3
    I t was not a special night. Joe knew that in some families there was a special night when the married kids came over to eat dinner with their mother. Went back to their mothers’ homes to eat their mothers’ food. He had never wondered at all that no one ever returned to, say, his father’s home to eat his father’s food. Joe knew, without having bothered his head over it, that if you called it home and you came for food, it all was your mother’s.
    Flo was not that bad a cook. You had to hand her that. Not that Tina ever admitted for a moment that her mother-in-law’s cooking could even be eaten. Thinking about this as he rode the IND subway out to Queens, Joe smiled crookedly at Tina’s ideas about cooking. A five-buck barrel of fried chicken from Colonel Sanders was her idea of a family feast, with French fries and buttered buns, plus a jumbo pizza, a six-pack of Rheingold, potato chips, and Hostess Twinkies or Devil Dogs for dessert.
    At age twenty-four, with a shape on her like a Mack truck made of lard, Tina was still eating like a pimple-pussed teen-ager. She still had a cute, kewpie-doll mug on her, though. Not that hard to look at if you draped a flag over the rest of her. And she was the mother of his kids. The Queen of the Take-Out Dinner.
    Joe had folded his jacket and laid it on his lap. He’d been lucky to find a seat. At this hour, well after seven in the evening, the hot, tired mobs of people were still going home, still clogging the subway with sweating flesh. He watched a man his age, but gross with fat the way Tina was, hanging from a strap like a sack of pus that dripped on the floor.
    It was a wonder, with an Italian mother and an Italian wife, that he hadn’t bloated up himself, Joe