Free Hop Alley by Scott Phillips

indignation. I reminded her that she didn’t even know the boy, which placated her not at all.
    She rose up and leaned on her arm so that her breasts hung down slantways, their nipples still rosy and swollen. “Charges should be brought.”
    “I don’t know that they could, under the circumstances. I guess a father’s got the right to punish his own son. Anyway, I don’t know that the boy’d testify against his pa like that.”
    “Then you should do it. He’s your employee, after all, and your trade will suffer for it. Surely the police would understand that. Ralph has plenty of contacts among the police.”
    I just nodded. Her righteous vehemence aroused me, and her too, judging by the ardor with which she responded to thepressure of my lips against hers. Soon I was astride her again, and this one was so long in extinguishing itself that I asked to stay the night, which I’d never done there before; she turned me down flat, for the sake of the neighbors, who might think the less of her for it.

THREE
    C UT D OWN BY A L ADY
    A fter my father’s suicide one of my well-intentioned but busy uncles thought to distract me from my bewildered grief with a dog. I named her Ginger, though her coat was salt-and-pepper, after a dog my father and I had both been fond of. I remembered being sent out into the lady’s garden to play with that first Ginger many an afternoon while my father and the dog’s mistress, Mrs. Merryvale, discussed spiritual matters inside the house.
    My own Ginger was a mutt whose previous owner had died. As a result of his regularly administered beatings she was slightly lame and terrified of all adult males and many females as well, and though eventually she grew less skittish she onlyreally ever trusted children. Though she never mastered any of the rudiments of canine dressage she was so sweet-natured and eager for affection that no one much cared about her failures in deportment, and she was well-loved by the neighborhood boys and girls, many of whom associated with the son of a suicide only because of her. Working with the idiot I was sometimes reminded of Ginger; it was as easy to forgive him cracking an exposed plate as it was to pardon her urinating in the parlor when we forgot to let her out (for she never learned that a bark would grant her egress). There was the same look in the eye of abject sorrow and culpability, of the certainty of swift and terrible punishment, of grateful astonishment when it didn’t come. If I hadn’t come to like him, precisely, I tolerated his presence well enough and had stopped contemplating his replacement with a more useful helper.
    A FTER A FEW days Lem was able to perform most of his tasks without the aid of his useless left arm but they went slowly, and when we were rushed I had to help him. He complained hardly at all about the hurt in his arm and generally spoke even less than he normally did. He continued to sleep in the studio, and I made no effort to find him new lodgings. Sleeping there he was able to start his workday earlier, which compensated slightly for his slowness, and I was scarcely aware of his presence anyway.
    It occurred to me that since he no longer had to turn over his wages to his tyrant of a father, and had no living expenses to speak of, he must have been socking some money away, and I asked him about it one afternoon as we stocked the darkroom, and he answered without hesitation or shame.
    “I squirrel some away. Some I spend, now’s I got it.”
    “What do you have to spend it on, with free meals and a roof over your head?”
    “Hoors, Mr. Sadlaw. I go down to one of the fancy houses yonder on Market Street.”
    I burst out laughing, which puzzled him.
    “Didn’t want to bring ’em here,” he said, helpfully. “Wouldn’t want to screw on the couch, there, where people get their picture made. And my auntie wouldn’t like it much, I don’t guess.”
    I began to suspect that some of that salary was also going toward the