Free Bloodbrothers by Richard Price Page B

pockets and staring down old guys in front of movies, tall skinny black guys in imitation pimp lime greens and emergency yellows, alkies, junkies, lonelies. It was ten o'clock on a Saturday morning and the place was jumping.
    "Holy shit!" Stony stood there gawking. He hadn't been down here in years.
    Albert laughed and clapped his hands. "Look at the movies!"
    "Who needs movies? I never saw so many fuckin' creeps in my life." Stony stared in fascination at the thirteen-year-old Puerto Rican kid standing in front of an Orange Julius. He had long greasy black hair tied flat with a red bandanna. He had a dark slit-featured face and was dressed in dungarees and a dungaree jacket. Suddenly Stony realized that the dude was staring back at him. Stony made a vague "not-me" motion with his head and grabbed for Albert's hand. The kid snickered. Flustered, Stony quickly disengaged Albert's hand. "He's my fuckin' brother!" Stony grabbed Albert's hand again and beat it around the corner.
    They got to the movie an hour before the box office opened. Albert wanted to stand in line but Stony pulled him away. "C'mon, I'll take you to the automat."
    Inside, Stony gave Albert a fistful of silver and told him to get anything he wanted. Fifteen minutes later Albert came back carrying a tray with orange soda, a corn muffin and a hot dog resting in an oval bed of baked beans. Stony had coffee and a prune Danish. "You ever come here before?" he asked.
    "Once with Mommy when I was six. I threw up." He drank the orange soda.
    "What were you doing here with Mommy?"
    "She was gonna be a secretary and had to see a man and she didn't have a baby sitter."
    "What she do when you threw up?"
    "I got punished." Albert took the hot dog off the baked beans and broke off pieces to pop in his mouth.
    "She don't fuckin' let up on you, does she?"
    "What?"
    "Nothin'. Eat up, I wanna play some pinball."
    Albert left the beans and the corn muffin untouched. They went to a pinball arcade next to the movie house and walked down the lanes of machines amid a din of exploding torpedoes, screeching tires, ringing bells, whooping sirens and monotone groans from a robot cowboy.
    "I wanna play this!" Albert stopped in front of a pinball machine with the legend HOOTENANNY—all the characters from "Hee-Haw" were painted on the scoreboard. Albert didn't do so hot. He kept flipping the flippers too late and was losing all his balls.
    "Hold it, hold it. I got an idea." Stony slipped another dime in the machine. "You take that flipper and I'll take this one." He manned the left side of the machine and Albert took charge of the right flipper plus springing the balls into play. They played six games, each final score higher than the last. "We're regular fuckin' pinball wizards, huh?" Stony nudged his brother on the way out.
    "Yeah!" Albert laughed. "Boing boing boing boing ding! ding!" He laughed again. "Hey, Stony, look!" Albert pointed in amazement to a row of red and white buttons hanging on a rack of gorilla masks, corny T-shirts and rubber chickens in the window of a novelty shop. On the sidewalk a small mechanical rubber porpoise was swimming in a pan of water and every few seconds spouting a thin schpritz. "Look a' that button!" He pointed to the first button in the row with ALBERT on it. "An' that one!" Albert pointed to a button marked TOMMY. "We can get two a them, one for you an' one for Daddy." Before they went inside Albert saw MARIA. "We can get one for everybody."
    ***
    The movie was a real slam-bang smack-fooey with more methods of dealing death than Heinz had kinds. Pajamaed Chinks jumped forty-two feet in the air to rearrange each other's faces. Blood poured, spurted and dribbled from every human hole imaginable. Albert sat through the whole thing eating popcorn, his eyes as big as half dollars. Stony dug it too, nailed to his seat, sitting on his need to piss through the whole movie.
    "I dug the part where Ting Ping pulled the guy's nose off." Albert extended two