Then the girl, woman, Amelia, snarls and spits at him, rattling her long steel dog chain against the iron rail, and the first of the two events, the stronger, assaults him, it being the second week after his expulsion from Holy Cross, after the Sister, Francis Xavier was her name, had attacked him axe-murder fashion, with the steel ruler, hacking at him with the edge of it, catching him in the act, and no one in the neighborhood would talk to him, except Doyle, not even his family, and except Amelia’s mother who was the lady super for the tenement, and who invited him up one rainy day for a glass of Pepsi, Beans amazed, and led him through dirty french doors into a room where Amelia lay bareass, in some kind of harness, trying to play with herself, and the old lady whispering in Beans’ ear: “You know. You know. It will quiet her.” Doyle said he should have done it. That a piece of ass was a piece of ass. That after he had it set up, he could have invited other guys, charged for her. Put a bag over her head, Doyle had said. Maybe even throw in the old lady, mother and daughter for half a buck. But standing there in that bedroom staring down at her, he had felt the awful hammer presence of sin. None of the other times had felt like that, none of it, but in that room he had sensed mortal peril, and had run like a bastard. And a year later, the second event, not as important then, but hurtful now, he had seen her one late afternoon, suddenly snap out of the jaws of her collar, and spin into the Avenue, her arms halfraised, and saw her knocked skyward by a screeching square green sedan, saw her flying slow through the air, and tumbling along the long, shining line of trolley track. Then she had raised herself and run back to the stoop and stuck her neck back into her broken collar, crouching there while people gathered, some yelling at her, others at the driver who stood at the curb, a large man in brown work clothes, and brown leather apron, looking like he was going to cry.
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