For five years, she who had known from infancy the furtive Bradstreet of some of the vertical city’s most notorious aliases and gang names, and who knew, almost by baptism of fire, that there were short cuts to an easier and weightier wage envelope, had made buttonholes from eight until five on the blue-denim pleat before it was stitched down the front of men’s blue-denim shirts.

At sweet sixteen she, whose mother had borne her out of wed—­well, anyway, at sweet sixteen, like the maiden in the saying, she had never been kissed, nor at seventeen, but at eighteen—­

It was this way.  Steve Turner—­“Getaway,” as the quick lingo of the street had him—­liked her.  Too well.  I firmly believe, though, that if in the lurid heat lightning of so stormy a career as Getaway’s the beauty of peace and the peace of beauty ever found moment, Marylin nestled in that brief breathing space somewhere deep down within the noisy cabaret of Getaway’s being.  His eyes, which had never done anything of the sort except under stimulus of the horseradish which he ate in quantities off quick-lunch counters, could smart to tears at the thought of her.  And over the emotions which she stirred in him, and which he could not translate, he became facetious—­idiotically so.

Slim and supine as the bamboo cane he invariably affected, he would wait for her, sometimes all of the six work-a-evenings of the week, until she came down out of the grim iron door of the shirt factory where she worked, his one hip flung out, bamboo cane bent almost double, and, in his further zeal to attitudinize, one finger screwing up furiously at a vacant upper lip.  That was a favorite comedy mannerism, screwing at where a mustache might have been.

“Getaway!” she would invariably admonish, with her reproach all in the inflection and with the bluest blue in her eyes he had ever seen outside of a bisque doll’s.

The peculiar joy, then, of linking her sweetly resisting arm into his; of folding over each little finger, so! until there were ten tendrils at the crotch of his elbow and his heart.  Of tilting his straw “katy” forward, with his importance of this possession, so that the back of his head came out in a bulge and his hip, and then of walking off with her, so!  Ah yes, so!

MARYLIN (who had the mysterious little jerk in her laugh of a very young child):  “Getaway, you’re the biggest case!”

GETAWAY (wild to amuse her further):  “Hocus pocus, Salamagundi!  I smell the blood of an ice-cream sundae!”

MARYLIN (hands to her hips and her laughter full of the jerks):  “Getaway, stop your monkeyshines.  The cop has his eye on you!”

GETAWAY (sobered): “C’m on!”

Therein lay some of the wonder of her freshet laughter.  Because to Marylin a police officer was not merely a uniformed mentor of the law, designed chiefly to hold up traffic for her passing, and with his night stick strike security into her heart as she hurried home of short, wintry evenings.  A little procession of him and his equally dread brother, the plain-clothes man, had significantly patrolled the days of her childhood.