The Jets waited until the prowl car drove off before they left the luncheonette. At the door, Riff waited for Tony but his friend sat at the dirty counter and brooded over his taut, clasped hands.

“Comin’ along, Tony?” Riff asked.

Tony sat for a moment, then swung slowly around on the stool. “Why didn’t you match me against Bernardo?”

“Because Diesel don’t mind fightin’ dirty. And you, Tony, I don’t know about you anymore. Another thing…”

“Yes?”

“If it’s man-to-man, Diesel’s expendable. And you’n me know Bernardo. That joker is someone I don’t trust.” Riff paused to grimace at his right hand before he wiped the palm along his trouser leg. “Can you imagine me shaking hands with one of them, especially him?”

“I can imagine it.”

Riff controlled his temper. “Another thing, Tony, you’re my friend and the last guy I wanna see hurt. But if Diesel gets beat, we can still call on you. How about that?”

“Drop dead.”

“Anything for a friend. Say”—Riff cocked his head—“how’s that sister of Bernardo’s? Think you’re gonna make out? Boy, wouldn’t that be giving it to Bernardo?” He made an obscene gesture with his right arm.

“Know what I’ve got to say to you?” Tony asked. “Bernardo and you—both together? Hell’s too good for you.”

“What’s eatin’ you, Mac?” Riff blustered. “Does that mean you’re writing us off?”

Tony rose from the stool. “It means anything you want it to mean.” His voice trembled. “Now get the hell outa here before I do Schrank a favor and work you over.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Are you all right, Anton?” Mrs. Wyzek called from her chair at the kitchen window.

Leaning into the kitchen from the bathroom where he was shaving, traces of soap still on his chin and around both ears, Tony winked at his mother. “Sure I’m all right, Ma,” he said. “Except you shouldn’t yell that way when I’m shaving.” He held up the safety razor. “This thing’s sharp.”

“I’m sorry,” his mother said as she moved her feet in the pan of cold water. “It’s so hot and you had to work all day.”

“I didn’t mind,” Tony said. “And it keeps me from getting fat.”

Mrs. Wyzek looked at her son and smiled. For so long and sorry a time he had been a stranger and now he was her son again. How and why the change had taken place she dared not ask; but tomorrow, as every Sunday for the last five, almost six months, she would recite prayers of thanksgiving for the change in Anton.

If only his father had been alive to see the change. But he had died very young, at Tarawa, when Anton had been no more than an infant, and had not shared her bewilderment, terror and confusion at not understanding why he and all the other boys in this awful neighborhood had to become bums and gangsters.

Then the change had come and Anton had become the son she had hoped for after her marriage, the son she had known as a little boy, the son she had prayed for as she had stained her pillow with bitter tears, because he had become a dangerous stranger for whom she maintained a home he returned to only when he tired of the streets. Whatever it was—her prayers or something else that had happened to Anton—she was thankful, grateful, every moment of the day and night.