— I got it right here… the frayed buttonhole came open, with it a folded yellow sheet and a picture that flew up between them, to reach the floor face up.
— What’s, looks like you been holding out the best one on me Leo…
— Must have, must have fell out…
— Sure as hell did fall out didn’t it.
— Must have fell out in my pocket out of that envelope…
— Yes well just, here just better keep them all together… he faced it inside his shirt pocket — now… he flattened the yellow page against that green with the heel of his hand, — just give me your pencil there now look, I forgot to mark this in we’re going to need vents all down here if we change it around like this see what I mean? Now you get that Eyetalian in here tomorrow on it or he don’t need to come at all.
— I’ll try to do that for you Mister Angel but wait, these here pictures what…
— Don’t do it for me Leo you just do it and these pictures, you just let me take care of it… and he pulled the door hard behind him against the day that seemed to dim as he entered it, gray dimmed overhead to vindicate small shams of housefronts’ glassed porches boxing retirement in undervests no longer anywhere for sale behind aluminum doors bearing aluminum initials, yards parceled behind chain link not even his waist high toward an American flag flown high and bleak some blocks ahead down one curb, up the next, shoulders down hands fallen to the depths of pockets, when a rubber ball hit him on the leg. He stooped and caught it, and looked up, around, into a drive squeezed along the fence to a man poised there in a gray patterned suit and wearing a shirt and a tie, and he threw the ball and stopped dead. — Wait is, Jack…?
The man turned as the ball bounced past him toward a child who rounded the corner of the house and stopped it, half running toward her with the sudden and grotesque effort of the limp that dragged one foot behind him. — Jack? Gibbs? is that you Jack…? But with one twisted turn the figure was gone behind the house. He stood there until a curtain stirred at the window, and then he turned and went on toward the flag, and the glass front just across where he went in and sat at the counter eating a western sandwich, looking from one face to the next of the sprawled soldiers, glancing repeatedly back at one more erect under a major’s clusters until he finished and left, the flag behind him, up one curb and down the next. The child was in the driveway with the ball, and he hurried toward her. — Wait, little girl? Wait a minute, I just want to ask you something… she backed down the fence a step or two. — That man you were just playing ball with, is he here?
— He just went, she said half pointing up the block.
— He, see I thought I knew him, he…
— That’s my father.
— Oh. When will he be back.
— Every week today, he comes to see me every week just about.
— You mean, where does he live then.
— Someplace else, he just comes here to see me and you know what?
— He’d ah, he hurt his leg did he?
— He always had that, he got it in the war and you know what?
— He always had it?
— He got that fighting the Germans in his tank, his tank broke and when he got out they shot him like that and he almost froze, it was in winter and you know what?
— Rose! came a woman’s voice from the house, or behind it.
— Wait, what’s you name?
— Rose.
— Rose you get in here…!
— What, Rose what…
— Rose get in here!
He stood there looking after her for a moment and then up the empty block where she’d pointed, breaking that way suddenly in a near trot and looking, down every curb, in both directions, dropping finally to a walk where the elevated limb of subway loomed ahead off one curb, up the next to stop off balance there and turn abruptly as though sheltering from the wind in the drugstore’s entrance, apparently absorbed in Surgical Appliances for the Whole Family as cadenced heels stabbed the pavement passing behind him.
— So what happened.
— So I’m bringing this file folder over to his desk to check this specification, I guess he didn’t see me because I look down and he’s sitting there with all these dirty pictures in his lap, honest.
— Him?
— Honest, so he sits forward real quick and…
— No if you hardly saw them then maybe they weren’t…
— Are you kidding? This one on top where she’s going down I mean he’s hung like Kenny you couldn’t, wait you got a token? They stopped at the foot of the steps rummaging in purses, bumped by a man escaping a bar gleaming red behind them who muttered — sorry passing up the stairs where they followed, rummaging, through the turnstile and out to the platform pausing sheltered by a billboard loaf of bread surcharged Astoria Gents. — You want to come up that way? So I can be up front for when I change, don’t look back he’s really checking you out.
— Who.
— He’s got on this gray suit with these big checks on his tie… they stopped toward the end of the platform. — Him.
