Pedro was saying: “… got three mattresses down there already. The little bastard’ll do anything I tell it to him. We could do a lot of business off that dumb cocksucker, huh?”

I turned around and went back downstairs.

We did a lot of business, too.

Pedro hit on the older guys in the neighborhood. Somebody turned one of the bikers from Ellenville onto him—the first time the Phantoms came over I wasn’t there—and they’d bring beer and just haul Maria’s ass all over the cellar floor, one after the other, while the rest stood around and drank and joked, or watched and played with themselves, till one would call: “Come on over here, cocksucker, and swing on this awhile for me, before I mess myself up!”

There were three of them got so they’d come in and not pay Maria any mind but go right in on me. One was the vice president or something big in the gang. The others were just strange. They were all pretty rough. But Rat, one of the real strange ones, would slip me a dollar sometimes, besides paying Pedro his quarter. So I liked them.

Pedro and Maria’s father, Mr. Alvarez, was the super for the building across the street. (The super for the one I stayed in had died from hepatitis three months before—I don’t think the landlord even knew because there wasn’t any new one yet—and he’d let me sleep in the tool shack on the roof; I used to come down and eat canned chili in his apartment. But after they found his body, they put a padlock on his door so I couldn’t get in.) Once Mr. Alvarez stopped me in the hall, his black eyes narrowing, kneading his hands inside his overalls pockets.

“That little motherfucker,” he said. “That little no good bastard son of a bitch, he got you and his sister making a whorehouse in here, huh?” Mr. Alvarez nodded toward the cellar steps. “Shit, everybody in the goddamn city go down there and fuck with my daughter. Shit. How you like that shit? I mean, just how you like that goddamn shit? Motherfucker!”

I thought he was going to do something or say something else. But he just shook his head, scratched, and wandered away.

On the first really hot day—it had rained that morning—Pedro brought some niggers over who usually hung out around Crawhole. They came in, big, loud, and barefoot. And they had some wine.

“You only got one pussy down here, boy?”

“But don’t it look like a sweet one!”

“Here’s my quarter. Lemme rip into a piece of that!”

“Look out, little girl! Look out, look out!”

Maria was giggling.

“This old blacksnake of mine got a bite, honey!”

Finally, one pushed himself away from the circle of backs. His sleeves were rolled up tight. He was bullet-headed, his arms glistened in the heat, and he was so black there wasn’t no brown on him. He picked up one of the gallon winejugs off the bottom step, wrapped his big mouth over the neck, swung it high, and sucked, while the plum-colored stuff bubbled in the greenish glass. He let the jug drop, and while it was swinging from his thumb, he saw me.