Why Bugsy Siegel was a Friend of Mine
by James Lee Burke

Burial
by Cleopatra Mathis

Pushing and Pulling
by Jay Rogoff

Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine
    James Lee Burke

In 1947 Nick Hauser and I had only two loves in this world—baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests. That’s how we met Benny, one spring night after a double-header out at Buffalo Stadium on the Galveston Freeway. His brand new Ford convertible, a gleaming maroon job with a starch-white top, whitewall tires, and blue-dot taillights, was stuck in a sodden field behind the bleachers. Benny was trying to lift the bumper while his girlfriend floored the accelerator, spinning the tires and blowing streams of muddy water and torn grass back in his face.
     He wore a checkered sports coat, lavender shirt, hand-painted necktie, and two-tone shoes, all of it now whipsawed with mud. But it was his eyes, not his clothes, that you remembered. They were a radiant blue and literally sparkled.
     “You punks want to earn two bucks each?” he said.
     “Who you calling a punk?” Nick said.
     Before Benny could answer, his girlfriend shifted into reverse, caught traction, and backed over his foot.
     He hopped up and down, holding one shin, trying to bite down on his pain, his eyes lifted heavenward, his lips moving silently.
     “Get in the fucking car before it sinks in this slop again!” his girlfriend yelled.
    He limped to the passenger side. A moment later they fishtailed across the grass past us. Her hair was long, blowing out the window, the pinkish red of a flamingo. She thumbed a hot cigarette into the darkness.
     “Boy, did you check out that babe’s bongos? Wow!” Nick said.
     But our evening encounter with Benny and his girlfriend was not over. We were on the shoulder of the freeway, trying to hitch a ride downtown, flicking our Cheerios under a streetlamp, doing a whole range of upper-level yo-yo tricks—Round the World, Shoot the Moon, Rock the Cradle, and the Atomic Bomb—when the maroon convertible roared past us, blowing dust and newspaper in our faces.
     Suddenly the convertible cut across two lanes of traffic, made a U-turn, then a second U-turn, horns blowing all over the freeway, and braked to a stop abreast of us.
     “You know who I am?” Benny said.

Continued in volume 41, issue 1, winter 2005