He went back across the street and watched the alley. It was only men that came and went. The men leaving were in high color, laughing and filled with themselves. Some too drunk were helped by friends. He watched one lean, holding his knees, being sick over and over. He stood and smoked. After a time the rain grew strong and fewer and fewer men came up the alley. The sky paled with a thin dawn through the rain. He was cold and his last cigarettes were falling apart in their paper package and he was wet all the way through his clothes. He went back down through the streets to his room. Men were out now going to work. He stripped off his wet clothes and draped them over the chair and the bedstead. Then lay on the mattress and for the first time pulled the rotting blanket over him and lay shivering, his teeth monstrous with cold. The rain had come in his open window and the mattress was wet beneath him. After a time he slept.

He did this work for four days, rising at noon or later and getting shaved and drinking coffee and reading the papers until late afternoon he’d go to the restaurant and be fed before crossing to the cellar-room and bottling wine from the casks. There were two routes and he alternated nights with them. He was not charged for his food and ate well but not like the first day. He did not see the girl Loredona again and decided this was by design. He also could not find Joey in the brief freedom of his afternoons. He learned some things. The one wall of slightly smaller casks held grappa that Victor poured off into crockery jugs or tin buckets, diluted with water and flavored with caramelized sugar and a small amount of vinegar poured from a jar packed with hot peppers, and these were sold to people who would rebottle it and sell it as whiskey. He also learned he’d be paid once a week, Monday afternoons. He wasn’t sure he liked this, even if it felt like a regular job. Still, he had no choice but to trust. Nights when he finished work he’d walk uptown and patrol the streets until the early summer dawn lightened the east like river water rising to drive him to sleep. He bought a paper shade for his window. He sat one night at quarter of one in Charlie Bacon’s and ate a steak and palmed a five-dollar bill to the waiter and asked about the back and the waiter thanked him and gave him directions to the bathrooms. He did not try the alley entrance again. He bought a new shirt and had the old one scalded and ironed with starch. He washed his socks in his room with handsoap. At night he’d flatten his cuffs between the pages of a magazine and slide it under his mattress. Not counting the new clothes and shoes but adding in what he’d been paid his money was holding steady. Except for the steak. With what he was owed he was ahead.