Mannish Madame Nevtaya slowly cried “Fur bowls!” and the Fideist batter, alert to the sense behind the sound of her words, jogged towards first base. The wind from the northern steppe blew coldly on the close of our season.

  My mother shook herself and scratched herself. We walked along a narrow path, through meadows with yellow flowers alternating with fields, perhaps wheat fields.

 Listen friend, let me tell you bout the metro. Tha’s the subway in Paris, aw ratheh the meat packin business. See, they pack you in that train like a suitcase, you know, at rush hour; everybody rushin, nobody movin and stuff. And you is stuffed, baby.

On Sunday Bertie walked into an apartment building in St. Louis, a city where, in the past, he had changed trains, waited for buses, or thought about Klaff, and where, more recently, truckers dropped him, or traveling salesmen stopped their Pontiacs downtown just long enough for him to reach into the back seat for his trumpetcase and get out.

On a warm evening in May, Willie McBain telephoned his friend Lickens, who lived not far away on the Lower East Side of New York City. 

They came across like a flood when the traffic light changed, the girls in sweaters with books shelved in their folded arms and the wind fiddling with their hair, the young men in shirtsleeves or field jackets, bareheaded or wearing canvas hats.

“Muss es sein?” I asked. “Shall the clouds return after the rain?”

“The Great Sandusky” was a hard man to get to know. Indeed, getting to meet him was my first campaign. We were both strong men of the world. He would help me. That he was in the city was common knowledge to all the regulars in the gym. I had seen a feature article on him in the paper.

Often, walking down some avenue, the wide black portfolio swinging from his hand, he caught sight of himself in a shop window and wondered: Who could that be, that city fellow? Or sometimes, seeing his shoes, so thin-soled and unserviceable, he would smile with pity for the man wearing them.

“Good just barely afternoon, Kee-mo Sah-bee,” purred the voice in his shirt pocket, and on signal Morty smiled secretly, brushed his hand inside and without losing a heat of the packing and stacking, fondled the warm little head and whispered back “Good just barely afternoon, Kee-mo.”