Dog Day Afternoon Read Online Free Page B

where he had grown up—what the hell, everybody grew up in some side-chamber of hell, didn’t they, some back shithouse like this?—but because this Corona street was so much like the street on which he and Tina and the kids lived. Instead of one-story houses, it had six-story apartment buildings in dark red brick. Thick with soot. But the feeling was the same.
    It was incredible, in a way, that no matter how you clawed your way out of it, you ended up in the same place. It wasn’t called Corona. It was a few miles farther away from Manhattan and it was called Forest Hills. Yes, where the rich-bitch assholes played tennis. Although Joe always told people it was Forest Hills, the real name was Rego Park, which a lot of the neighborhood people called Corona East, smiling bitterly. One thing you could say for Rego Park, it had Jews. When the wops and the kikes got together, they had enough political clout to keep the niggers out. For a while.
    Joe had already walked past his mother’s home and was two houses down the street when he heard Tina’s honeyed voice, filtered through pads of fat, the voice you might expect to hear if a plate of gnocchi could talk.
    “Littlejoe, honey!”
    He whirled, eyes blazing. Where the hell had she picked up his nickname? It wasn’t the one he’d grown up with. It was his Village name, the one the class people downtown called him. “Y’bring the kids?” he grunted, walking back to his mother’s home and up the cracked concrete walk to the front door.
    “Huh, honey?”
    He examined her face through the screen door between them. She was his height, even in the slop-slop slippers she was wearing now. She announced herself a mile away, in the house, on the street, in supermarkets, all that meat slipping and slapping and sliding and slopping from one fat foot to the other in heelless slippers.
    Her face was round, like one of those idiot smiley-faces people used to wear as buttons or sewn-on patches. Her mouth was big, with big lips, and her cheeks were smaller mounds of their own, equally circular. Tina’s nose was tiny but perfectly formed, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, classy, with a slight arch, thin nostrils. Her brown eyes looked like two ripe Greek olives swimming in fat that was only starting to melt, still white as suet, but liquefying around the edges. She had no forehead, or, rather, her unplucked eyebrows, arching over the pools of suet, left only a half-inch gap of pale skin before her teased-down bangs, curly as pubic hair, took over.
    Tina let him shove the screen door hard against her immense breasts as he came in. She turned up her face as if Joe were a head taller than he really was, and pouted her big soft lips into a kiss. He bit them and, as often happened, felt as if he were biting ass instead. They tasted of garlic and cigarettes, and for some wild reason he could feel an erection coming on.
    She was chewing something that still tasted faintly of clove. “Wa’ my Dentine, honey?” She propelled the chewing gum toward him with the pulpy tip of her tongue. He took the gum and chewed it for a moment, then spit it out.
    “Big deal,” he said. “You chewed the flavor out.”
    “I got another stick.” She was fumbling in the shapeless apron tied around her belly. She found the gum, stripped the wrapping, and popped it in his mouth.
    He removed the stick and put it between her lips. “Warm it up for me,” he said. Then, watching her chew: “Y’bring the kids?”
    She shook her head from side to side, chewing strenuously. “Stella’s house f’ the evening. Honey . . .” Her voice dropped to a low, snarling whine. “How soon kin we blow this place? They got that French Connection movie in Sunnyside.”
    He put his finger between her lips and extracted the wad of gum, then chewed it. “When’s the last show?”
    “Ten.”
    “Good. We split this joint right after dinner.” He gave her a tight smile. She knew the movie was a weakness of his. He’d already