Roscoe Read Online Free Page A

women amid all this naked lust. You call Veronica, I’ll call Trish, and we’ll carry on elsewhere.”
    “No need to call Trish,” Elisha said, pointing to a wooden booth by the front door where two soldiers, their caps in a puddle of beer on the table, were muzzling Trish, taking turns
kissing her. As Roscoe walked toward her table he saw both soldiers’ hands roaming inside her unbuttoned blouse.
    “Hello, honey,” Trish said, “I thought I’d find you here.”
    Both soldiers removed their hands from her chest and looked up at Roscoe. One soldier looked sixteen.
    “I’ll be right with you, Rosky,” Trish said, buttoning up.
    “Carry on, soldiers,” Roscoe said. “They’re what you were fighting for,” and he went back to Elisha at the bar.
    “Trish is a very patriotic young woman,” Elisha said.
    “If sex were bazookas,” Roscoe said, “she could’ve taken Saipan all by herself.”
    Roscoe saw Trish coming toward him, her walk a concerto of swivels and jiggles that entertained multitudes in the corridors of the Capitol, where she worked for the Democratic leader of the
Assembly. She lived in an apartment on Dove Street, and Roscoe paid her rent. With her curly brown bangs still intact despite the muzzling, Trish explained everything to Roscoe.
    “Those soldiers were in the Battle of the Bulge,” she said. “Poor babies. I gave them little pecks and they got very excited. Are you angry at Trishie?”
    “Trishie, Trishie, would I get angry if my rabbit carnalized another rabbit? Fornication is God’s fault, not yours.”
    “I feel the same way,” she said.
    “I know you do, sweetness. Now, go be kind to those soldiers.”
    “You mean it?”
    “Of course. They may have battle wounds.”
    “Where will you go?” she asked.
    “Where the night wind takes me. Try not to get the clap.”
    “Bye, honey,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
    “Goodbye forever, little ding-ding,” he said, but she didn’t hear, was already on her way back to the soldiers.
    “You really mean that goodbye forever?” Elisha asked.
    “As my sainted father used to say, Irish girls either fuck everybody or nobody. Which category do you think suits Trish?”
    Someone turned up the jukebox and a stupefyingly loud Latin tune blasted through The Tavern.
    “Let this farce end,” Elisha said. “The gin isn’t worth it.”
    “I concur,” Roscoe said, and they downed their drinks and moved toward the door.
    “I had a thought about Cutie LaRue,” Elisha said. “Why not run him as the wild-card candidate?”
    “Cutie for mayor?”
    “He’s such a clown, and he can make a speech. He’d love the attention. People would vote for him just to say they did. And he’d get the liberals and goo-goos who hate us
but can’t pull that Republican lever.”
    “By God, Elisha, that’s brilliant. Cutie, the crackpot candidate!”
    “Have I helped you stop worrying?”
    “No, but now I can smile while I worry.”
    A vandal had opened a hydrant on Pearl Street near Sheridan Avenue. A roaming vendor was hawking V-J buttons, flags had blossomed in lighted store windows and dangled everywhere from light poles
and roofs, the mob filling every part of the street. As Roscoe and Elisha debated their move, The Tavern’s door flew open and a conga line burst into the street, led by a sailor, with Trish
holding his hips, one of her soldiers holding hers, and a dozen others snaking along behind them to the Latin music from the bar.
    Roscoe and Elisha pushed through the sidewalk mobs, and at State and Pearl they could see a patriotic bonfire blazing down by the Plaza. Roscoe remembered the ambivalent
tensions of patriotism invading this block on the April day in 1943 when Alex went to war. Patsy had ordered up a parade with flags, bugles, drums, and an Albany Academy color guard marching the
twenty-seven-year-old Mayor into a giltedged political future. Alex, off to serve his country as a buck private, marched with a platoon