Blue Eyes by Jerome Charyn Page B

bosoms, the curve from nipple to nipple, the wrinkles produced by the tug of an armpit). Her haughtiness appealed to him, the tough protrusion of her underlip, the amounts of scorn she seemed to blow into a sentence. If he had his own way with her, he would shove Odile out of pornography. He would put Janice and Sweeney in a bottle, close The Dwarf to Odette, hold her at Jane Street, deny Bummy Gilman visiting rights. She wouldn’t have to wash that man’s balls for a living. But the girl belonged to Zorro, and not to him. And if he defied the Guzmanns, he would have to take off taxi cabs again, and dodge shotguns in a shopping bag. The Chinaman was depressed.
    Odile shucked off his mop, fondled the dark roots of his scalp, and the Chinaman wasn’t so morose with lovely fingers in his hair. He dove into the pillows, caught Odile by one leg, reached under the stirrup of her ski pants, worked an arm into the hollows at the back of her knee, climbed half a thigh, worshiping the gooseflesh and thighdown (not even the beautiful Finn had hairs quite so fine), felt her erect nipples with the nubs of skin on his forehead and the depressions of his cheek, and came against her other hip, his screams muffled by the proximity of her jersey to his mouth. Odile liked his knobby head in her bosoms. She wanted to maintain the exact location of their hug, but the wetness in his pants troubled the Chinaman. “Mexico,” he blurted, getting off her chest.
    â€œChino, where are you going with that sick ear of yours?”
    He couldn’t remember having such a sticky groin since his lurchings at Mott Street movie shows during the eighth grade (the Chinaman was always a year behind at school). He covered the bad ear with some furls of the mop. He was too distracted to kiss Odile right now. “I’ll bring you charms from Mexcity,” he said. “Something Zorro won’t be able to identify.”
    She thought he was hallucinating. “Chino, get into bed.”
    He pulled the kinks out of his suspenders in the hall. Odile’s landlady passed him on the stairwell. She frowned at his bandage and the rumpled state of his bodyshirt. The Chinaman was immune to landladies. He found himself a cab at Abingdon Square. “Prince Street,” he shouted. “Make it quick.”
    The cabby Quagliozzo, an alert Queens man of forty-five with a billy club near his money box for take-off artists and unwelcome guests, wasn’t fooled by the red mop. He had a circular stuck to his dashboard advertising the taxi bandit Chino Reyes, with a reward of $1,000 from independent fleet owners for the Chinaman’s arrest. Quagliozzo (his friends called him Quag) recognized the cheekbones behind the manufactured hair, only there was nothing in the circular about a clubfoot. The cabby reasoned that no professional bandit could flee fast enough from a job in a high shoe. The garagemen, who had their own connections with petty crooks, informed him that the taxi bandit was masquerading as a pimp to throw off the Manhattan bulls. So Quagliozzo decided to test the Chinaman in his cab. He wouldn’t keep a glass plate between him and his customers like other security-crazy hacks (how could he chat through such a barrier?); accordingly he drove with a hand on the club.
    â€œMister, I hate them lousy pimps. They take advantage of white girls. They shellac their hair. They sit in fucking Cadillacs. If I had a pimp in my car, I’d murder him.”
    Quagliozzo couldn’t get the Chinaman to raise a cheek. “Mister, what’s your opinion?”
    â€œPrince Street,” the Chinaman said, and he motioned for the cabby to pull over near a lot. “Wait for me.” He walked to a row of garbage cans inside the lot. Solomon Wong, his father’s old dishwasher, was sitting on the northernmost can.
    â€œSalomón, que tal?”
    Solomon gathered the many skirts of his coat (it had once belonged to Papa