Dog Day Afternoon Read Online Free Page A

thought as he swayed damply with the onward rush of the F train. As it rounded a curve, a shriek of steel numbed his ears for a moment.
    But, as Joe told himself, he’d always watched his weight. A guy his size, light, fast on his feet, slim-hipped and flat-bellied, had to watch out for even a pound of extra weight. Not that he had a weight problem. At five-five, Joe barely weighed a hundred and twenty, all of it muscle, sinew, and sheer nerve, fast reflexes—a goddamned tiger you’d better not mess around with.
    He got off in Corona and slogged tiredly up the stairs to the still-baking streets, his clog heels clattering. What a change from Greenwich Village, he told himself, looking around at the bars with their television sets flaring turquoise and cerise through the tightly shut doors, small islands of air-conditioned chill.
    He almost walked into one of them for a quick shot before facing up to Flo, or, rather, to “her” home and dinner. But as his fingers grasped the handle of the door, he looked through the glass and saw two more of those sad-sack Corona asses draped over bar stools, fat cheeks drooping down on each side of the hard cushion, as if the stools had been rammed up into the rear ends of these two Corona battleaxes, mothers of fled sons, of sons clawing at ass-fat that smothered them, clawing their way up and out of Corona and into the fresh air.
    Joe’s stomach turned over warningly, the caged beast under his lungs shifting uneasily in sleep. It was true, he told himself as he turned away in disgust from the bar and began walking slowly along the hot, dark street toward his mother’s home. It was true that he was drowning in cunt meat, Tina’s and his mother’s, waves of it flopping all over his face, flabby, raw meat that stank softly of secret juices. But what guy wasn’t? They tried to drown you inside them, shove you back up where you came from and encase you in a prison of meat where you screamed for air, twisting, blue-faced, dead.
    Joe had paused. The heat shimmered up from the pavement in waves. A man in shirt sleeves, a contemporary of Joe’s father, paused, nodded, wiped his face with a red bandanna, and moved slowly on to a rendezvous with a bowl of hot, steaming pasta e fagioli, a gigantic dish of soft-cooked spaghetti awash in hotted-up sauce from a jar, veal and peppers emitting clouds of heat—
    Joe stopped himself. You had to cool it. You couldn’t let them know what the sight of them and their flesh and their food did to you, to the sleeping animal that wakened so easily under your heart.
    He turned the corner and surveyed a long row of single-family bungalow-type houses, stretching into the dusk as far as he could see. The sky was still bright in the west, but the street lights were on already, in case any cruising gangs of blacks decided to invade this tight Italian enclave.
    Once, his grandmother had told him, these houses had been heaven, these shacks tightly crowded next to each other with only a narrow passageway between them, chunks of pepperoni sliced and left standing in a line. Heaven. Their little screened porches had caught the summer breezes. The moment a family could work its way out of the Mulberry Street slums, it made a down payment on a house of its own in Corona. Ignorant Sicilian farmers! As if this corner of hell, with its cramped, squeezed-out-turd houses, was a better place than Mulberry Bend.
    Joe felt as he always did walking down this street past houses no amount of ingenuity or work could any longer disguise. They tried. They spent money on cheap tarpaper shingling, on curiously shoddy siding that was painted to resemble mortared stones. They glassed in the screened porches to make living rooms, while the original living rooms were chopped up into bedrooms. They planted flowers, saw them die, planted trees, watched the sulfuric air of Corona kill each one.
    He shivered, even in the thick heat of August. Corona had this effect on him, not because it was