A Boy and His Dog

with Our Gang running the Metropole, they didn’t have to repair anything else to get their livelihood. It was ironic; the Dragons had to keep an entire power plant going to get tribute from the other roverpaks; Ted’s Bunch had to mind the reservoir; the Bastinados worked like fieldhands in the marijuana gardens; the Barbados Blacks lost a couple of dozen members every year cleaning out the radiation pits all over the city; and Our Gang only had to run that movie house.

Blood leaned across and said, real soft, the way he does when he’s onto something unusually smelly, “There’s a chick in here.”

“You’re nuts,” I said.

“I tell you I smell her. She’s in here, man.”

I heard once about a get-it-on they’d had at the old Loew’s Granada, on the South Side. Wound up with ten or twelve rovers and their mutts dead, the theater burned down and a couple of good Cagney films lost in the fire. After that was when the roverpaks had got up the agreement that movie houses were sanctuaries.

My spike and knife felt reassuring, lying-up in their oiled sheaths at the back of my neck.

it cost me a can of Oscar Mayer Philadelphia Scrapple for me, and a tin of sardines for Blood. Then the Our Gang guards with the bren guns motioned me over to the alcove and I checked my heat. I saw water leaking from a broken pipe in the ceiling

Come on, son of a bitch,” I demanded, “find me a piece of ass.”

was out with Blood, my dog. It was his week for annoying me; he kept calling me Albert. He thought that was pretty damned funny.

Our Gang was a roverpak that had never been able to cut it simply foraging, so they’d opted for comfort and gone a smart way to getting it. They were movie-oriented kids, and they’d taken over the turf where the Metropole Theater was located.