Free Second Generation by Howard Fast Page A

a little quiet. "What have you got, Bobby?" Dominick asked her.
She was looking at the garbage. "Don't you ever clean this place?" ""
"It gets done," he said. "Is that what you come for—to tell us the place stinks?"
"No. I have a load outside."
"Come on, Franco," Dominick said.
She led the two of them out to the station wagon. "Jesus Christ," Guzie whispered. "What the hell have you got there?"
"I was down on the Peninsula, so I picked it up off the roadside stands," Barbara said proudly. "A lot cheaper there than here. Two hundred pounds of potatoes, two hundred pounds of onions, two bushels of cabbage, two crates of carrots, a hundred pounds of squash, and five hams. I got the hams at Tulip Farm in Belmont. They wanted twenty-five cents a pound, and I got them down to twenty. What do you think of that?" She was pleased with herself, as eager for praise as she had been as a child doing something noteworthy and deserving.
"What do we do with smoked ham?" Dominick said sourly. "You can't put it in stew."
"Who says you can't?" Guzie demanded. "Gives the stew a flavor. God damn it, Bobby, this is a bonanza. You're some lady, kid, you're some lady. I wish we had ten like you, ten like you. Don't pay no attention to this punk."
After they had carried the food inside, Barbara parked her car. Then she came back to the kitchen, put on an apron, and began to clean up. She hated this kind of work, yet she took a perverse satisfaction in forcing herself to do it. Dominick had finished slicing the bread. He stood watching her as she swept the garbage together and stuffed it into the cans. The smell made her gag.
"Take the cans out of here," she said to him. "This shouldn't be here with the cooking. You know that."
"Now you're running the joint."
"What? Oh, don't be an ass, Nick."
" 'Don't be an ass.' That's real classy talk. I'm sorry, duchess. I beg your pardon."
"Knock it off," Guzie said, and he picked up the can and carried it out.
Fat Irma Montessa, the acknowledged boss of the kitchen, shouted at Barbara, "Bobby, you forget about the cleaning, because with these pigs here, you can't keep nothing clean. The feeders are here, and we got to start serving. You want to help me?"
At the front of the store, standing behind the table next to Irma who was ladling the stew into tin bowls, passing out the bowls to the line of strikers and adding bread and chili pepper for those who wanted it, Barbara said to her,
"What's come over Dominick?"
"Men turn lousy, sweetie. Up and down. It's in their nature. Too much strike."
"It's not like him."
"Sure it is. What do you expect from a guinea longshoreman?" .
Barbara had never heard the expression before. She finished serving the meal. She had been up at six that morning to drive down to Belmont for the food, and by now the sour smell of the stew filled her with nausea, so she went out into the alley for a breath of fresh air. Dominick was there, puffing on a cigarette.
"You're in a lovely mood today," she said to him.
"Yeah."
"I didn't mean to call you an ass. I lost my temper."
"Who the hell are you?" he asked angrily.
"Who are you?"
"I 'm a guinea longshoreman, name of Dominick Salone." "That's the second time today I heard that word," Barbara said. "What does it mean?"
"What word?"
"Guinea."
"Oh, Jesus Christ! You don't know what a guinea is, you don't know what a fink is, you don't know what a goon is. You give me a load of horseshit about working at L and L and collecting money, and you drive a car that nobody makes eighteen a week could afiord, and you talk the way some pisspot society dame talks. You spend the day here and you tell me then you go out and put in an eight-hour shift at the store. That's bullshit, and you know it."
"What if it is?" Barbara said tiredly.
"I just don't like to be conned."
"What do you think I am? Some kind of labor spy?"
He threw away the cigarette and grinned. "If you are, they're scraping the bottom of the barrel."
"Thank you."
"I didn't mean it that way."
"I