Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow Page A

khaki-and-orange trim on his hat load up the horse manure and paper and crap and trash of a Broadway night on his wide-blade shovel and dump it all into the big ashcan on his two-wheel cart as if he was a housewife tidying up her kitchen. A while later the tanked water wagon came along Spraying the street so that it looked shining and fresh and almost simultaneously I saw the string of electric lights go on around the Loew’s State Theatre a few blocks below where Broadway ran into Seventh Avenue. In the sun it was not entirely possible to read the headlines riding in lights around the Times Building on Times Square. The black Chevrolet came around again and this time Mr. Berman glanced at me and I began to feel anxious, I wanted to see whatever it was I was supposed to see but the traffic was ordinary, not particularly heavy, and the people on the sidewalk were going about their business with no great urgency, a man in a suit and tie came along with a crate of apples on his shoulder and set it up on the corner with his APPLES 5¢ sign, the morning was warming up and I wondered if what I needed was in the window behind me where Jack Dempsey was shown in a big blowup photo of the ring in Manila with thousands watching, and there were other photos of the great man shaking hands with famous people, show people like Jimmy Durante and Fanny Brice and Rudy Vallee, but then in the reflection of the restaurant glass I saw the office building across the street, and I turned around to look, up on the fifth or sixth floor a man climbed out on a ledge with a pail and sponge and affixed his safety belt to the hooks imbedded in the brick and leaned back against the belt and began to make wide arcs withhis soapy sponge on the window, and then I saw another man on another window ledge on the floor above him coming out to do the same thing. I watched these men washing the windows and then for some reason I knew this was what I was supposed to see, these window washers doing the morning’s work high above the street. And on the sidewalk below them was a sign, the kind that supports itself like an A , advising passersby that work was going on overhead and to take care, and it was the sign the window washers had set up in the name of their union. I had by now crossed Broadway and stood on the southwest corner of Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue and I watched these guys working up there, two of them were on a scaffold hanging from the roof parapet maybe fifteen stories above the street and I saw this was the expedient for the extra large windows at the top that were too wide for a safety belt to span. And it was this scaffold with the two men and their sponges and pails and rags which suddenly lurched, the rope on one side snapping up into the air like a whip, and the two men flinging their arms back and spilling down the scaffold. One of them came down the side of the building wheeling. I don’t know if I shouted, or who else saw it happen or heard it, but while he was still several stories up, some seconds above his death, the whole street knew. The traffic was stopped as if every vehicle had been pulled up taut on the same string. There was a collective screech, a total apprehension of disaster on the part of every pedestrian for blocks around, as if we had all been aware all along of what was going on above our heads in the sky, so that the moment the composition was disturbed everyone knew instantly. Then the body at a point of flat and horizontal extension hit the roof of a car parked in front of the building and the sound it made was as a cannon going off, a terrible explosion of the force of bone and flesh, and what made me gasp was that he moved, the guy moved in that concavity of metal he had made, a sinuosity of bone-smashed inching, as if it was a worm there curling for a moment on the hot metal before even that degree of incredible life trembled out through the fingers.
    A cop on a horse was now galloping past me on