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messenger boy for Wall Street,
which was the only identification he would give his occupation.
    "I told them my name was Mike Leary. They don't hire
yids even for messengers." With his fiery red hair and pale-green eyes he
could pass for an Irishman.
    "They don't do nothing on Wall Street. Not the people
with the money. They stand around and look at ticker tape until noon, then they
go to their clubs for lunch and come back red-faced and drunk. At two o'clock
they're gone."
    He had taken to opening the newspapers to the financial
sections and reading the Wall Street finals.
    "Up four points. What a way to make money. The goyim
have us by the batzim. We're schmucks. Schmucks."
    "Lehman Brothers is Jewish," someone said.
    "And what about Rothschild."
    Mischa would look at them and purse his thin lips until the
blood had drained from them.
    "You dumb sheenies. The yechis are just as bad."
    They all nodded. Everyone knew who the yechis were: the
German Jews. They had come to America early and couldn't stand the greenhorns
from Eastern Europe, their kind. Mischa had money on the brain.
    Thinking of "brain" recalled Chick, who had no
sign of that organ. But he had muscles, huge biceps from hauling ice all day at
the ice plant on Livonia Avenue, cutting chunks out of thick walls of ice with
a pick, then hooking them with an ice claw and hurling them onto the trucks and
carts that lined up in front of the platform. Summers, he would doff his shirt
and stand stiffly in the group, muscles bulging, his deep chest tanned and
rippling, tight pants molding his buttocks. He didn't speak very often, and
when he did it was mostly smiles and mumbling and agreeing to do what someone
else had wanted.
    "Wanna go get a knish?"
    "Great."
    "Wanna go to the movies?"
    "Sure."
    He never asked "What's playing?" but was always
content to simply be there in front of Jake's with the rest of them, standing
around and listening. He had his role, though. Occasionally a group of
garlic-smelling Italian kids would come down from their neighborhoods on the East Side, feeling tough and acting surly, and showing off to each other about how brave
they were to be acting up in a Jewish neighborhood.
    "Sheeny bastard," one of them might mumble, not
quite meant to be fully audible, but highly articulate to sensitive Jewish
ears.
    "You said what?" someone from the candy store
would say.
    "I said nuttin."
    "Yeah, he said nuttin."
    "I heard sheeny."
    "You heard nuttin."
    One of the group would step out from under the canvas
awning.
    "You stinking little garlic-smelling wop shits. Get
back to pig town where you belong."
    You could see the anger building in the Italian kids and
the desire to show their courage to each other. But just at that moment someone
would cry: "Chick, go tell them what they can do." And Chick would
move slowly toward the boys, tall and stiff, shoulders immense, biceps bulging
under his rolled-up sleeves.
    "Somebody say something about sheenies?"
    That was enough, of course, to head off confrontations, and
Chick would come back under the awning and someone would say: "You did
good, Chick," and he would nod and wink with satisfaction, sure that he
had earned his role with the group.
    Sometimes these thoughts, this nostalgia, brought forth
great pain to Itch, because the days had moved on and somehow the days in front
of Jake's Candy Store had come to an end. He could never quite put his finger
on why it happened. Surely, it could have gone on forever. They all might have
married, stayed in the same neighborhood, and spent their off-hours from work
and family life hanging around in front of Jake's, and grown old that way.
    But not all would have grown old. Not Ritzy. No one ever
knew what Ritzy did exactly, except that it was something to do with
prohibition and the mob, something that none of them dared talk about in front
of him. He drifted in and out of the group, showing up with better and flashier
clothes each time. He looked odd and out of place