Free The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo Page A

Chaplin, O.K.; he’d make ’em scream, but not laughing.
     
    GINO DID NOT bother to look back once he had crossed the Avenue. He wanted to find Joey Bianco and the ice money. He heard his mother yelling from the fourth-floor window, “Gino,
bestia,
where is the ice? Come, eat.”
    Gino looked up, and above his mother he saw the blue sky. “I’ll be up in two minutes,” he shouted. He ran around the corner to 30th Street. Sure enough he saw Joey sitting on a stoop, his wagon tied to the iron railing of the basement.
    Joey was brooding, almost in tears, but when he saw Gino he jumped in the air. He said excitedly, “I was gonna tell your mother—gee, I didn’t know what to do.”
    Thirtieth Street was dusty and full of sun. Gino got into the wagon and steered, with Joey pushing him. On Ninth Ave-nue they bought hero salami sandwiches and Pepsis. Then they went on to 31st Street, where it was shady, and sat with their backs against the wall of Runkel’s chocolate factory.
    They ate their sandwiches with the contentment and good appetite of men who have had a completely satisfying day: hard work, adventure, and their bread sweet with their own sweat. Joey was admiring and kept saying, “Boy, you sure saved me, Gino. You sure outfoxed that Bull.” Gino was modest, because he knew he had learned the trick from a book about birds, but he didn’t tell Joey.
    The summer sun vanished. There were quick dark clouds. The dusty, heated air and the smell of hot stone pavements and melting tar were swept away by a rushing sheet of rain released by great claps of thunder; faintly, there was an elusive ghost and smell of something green. Joey and Gino crept under the loading platform. The rain pelted down, some of it coming through cracks in the platform floor, and they turned their faces up to the cool drops.
    In the shaded, cellar-like darkness there was just enough light to play cards. Joey took the greasy pack out of his trousers pocket. Gino hated to play because Joey won a lot. They played Seven-and-a-half and Gino lost the fifty cents ice money. It was still raining.
    Joey, stuttering a little, said, “Gino, here, here’s your fifty cents back for saving me from the Bull.”
    Gino was offended. Heroes never took pay.
    “Come on,” Joey said more firmly. “You saved my wagon, too. You gotta let me give the fifty cents back.”
    Gino really didn’t want the money. It would spoil the adventure if Joey paid him to do a job. But Joey was nearly in tears, and Gino saw that for some reason he had to take the money. “O.K.,” Gino said. Joey handed it over.
    Still it rained. They waited quietly while Joey restlessly riffled the cards. The rain kept coming down. Gino spun the half dollar on the pavement.
    Joey kept watching the coin. Gino put it in his pocket.
    “You wanta play Seven-and-a-half again double stakes?” Joey asked.
    “Nope,” Gino said.
    Finally the rain stopped and the sun came out and so did they, crawling like moles from beneath the platform. The washed sun was far in the west, over the Hudson River. Joey said, “Jesus, it’s getting late. I gotta go home. You comin’, Gino?”
    “Ha, ha,” Gino said. “Not me.” He watched Joey pull his wagon toward Tenth Avenue.
    The late shift came out of Runkel’s factory. The men smelled of the chocolate they made and the smell was sweet and sticky like flowers, heavy on the rain-freshened air. Gino sat on the platform and waited until no one came out.
    He was deeply pleased with everything he saw—the tenement bricks dyed deep red by the ripening sun, the children coming out again to play in the streets, the few horses and wagons slowly wending toward the Avenue, one leaving a spotted trail of grainy, gold-flecked manure balls. Women came to opened windows; pillows appeared on ledges; women’s faces, sallow, framed in black bonnets of hair, hung over the street like gargoyles along a castle wall. Finally Gino’s eyes were caught by the swiftly flowing