"Smokey," I said, speaking slowly and feeling suddenly very, very sure of myself, "you ever raise a voice on even one word to my father, and I'll see that you die. You lift a finger to me, and he'll see that you die."
He seemed impressed with that.
"Okay," he gave in, with his face falling. "I'll go back to work for him. But you tell him I'll want sixty a week from now on."
"You don't understand. He might not take you back for even fifty. I'll have to try to talk to him for you."
"And he can have the house I found if he gives me five hundred."
"He might give you the usual two."
"When can I start?"
"Give me tomorrow to try to bring him around." Actually, it did take some talking to remind the old man that Smokey worked hard and that he and our black guy were pretty good together at chasing other junkmen off.
"Loan me fifty now, Louie, will you?" Smokey begged as a favor. "There's some good smoking stuff from Harlem outside that I want to invest in."
"I can only lend you twenty." I could have given him more. "That's funny," I said when they'd gone out the door. I was flexing my fingers. "Something's wrong with my hand. When I gave him that twenty I could hardly bend it."
"You were holding the sugar bowl," Winkler said. His teeth were shivering.
"What sugar bowl?"
"Didn't you know?" Sammy snapped at me almost angrily. "You were gripping that sugar bowl like you were going to kill him with it. I thought you would squeeze it to pieces."
I leaned back with a laugh and ordered some pie and ice cream for the three of us. No, I hadn't known I was gripping that cylindrical thick sugar shaker while we were talking. My head was cool and collected while I looked him straight in the eye, and my arm was ready for action without my even knowing it. Sammy let out some air and turned white as he lifted his hand from his lap and put back down the table knife he had been holding.
"Tiger, why were you hiding it?" I said with a laugh. "What good would that do me?"
"I didn't want them to see how my hands were shaking," Sammy whispered.
"Would you know how to use it?"
Sammy shook his head. "And I don't ever want to find out. Lew, I've got to tell you right now. If we're ever together and you feel like getting into a fight, I want you to know that you can positively count on me not to stand by you again."
"Me neither," said Winkler. "Red Benny wouldn't do nothing with me around, but I wasn't so sure about the others."
"Gang," I told them, "I wasn't counting on you this time."
"Were you really going to hit him with that sugar shaker?"
"Sammy, I would have hit him with the whole luncheonette if I had to. I would have hit him with you."
I was already past sixty-five, two years to the day, when I nabbed that young purse snatcher, a tall, swift guy in his twenties. It's a cinch to keep track because of my birthday. As a present to me, I had to bring Claire down into the city to one of those shows with songs that she wanted to see and I didn't. We got there early and were standing outside with a bunch of other people under the marquee of a theater that wasn't too far from that Port Authority Bus Terminal. That bus terminal is a place that still gives me a laugh whenever I remember the time Sammy had his pocket picked coming back from a visit to us and was almost thrown in jail for yelling at the police to try to make them do something about it. By then I'd already made peace with the Germans and drove a Mercedes. Claire had one too, a nifty convertible. All of a sudden a woman let out a geshrei. I saw a couple of guys come racing away just in back of me. Without thinking I grabbed hold of one. I spun him around, lifted him up, and slammed him down on his chest on the hood of a car. Only when I had him down did I see he was young, tall, and strong. He was a brown guy.
"If you move a muscle, I'll break your back," I said in his ear. He did not move a muscle.
When I saw how careful the cops were in searching him I kept shaking my head with what should have been fear. They combed through his scalp with their fingers for a blade or some kind of pick. They pinched through his collar and pockets and through all of the seams of his shirt and his pants, feeling him everywhere from top to bottom for a gun or a knife or anything small and sharp. I realized I could have been killed. Only when they got down inside his sneaker tops and finished did they all relax.
"You were very lucky, sir," said the young cop in charge, who was the oldest one there.
People kept smiling at me and I kept smiling back. I felt like a hero.
"Okay, Lew, your show is over," Claire said to me dryly, as I could have bet she was going to. "Let's get inside now for the real show."
"One minute more, Claire," I answered her loudly and swaggered. "There's that nice-looking blonde girl over there who I think might like to get to know me better."
"Lew, will you come inside already, for God sakes," she said, "or do I go in without you?"