his heart freezing.

"I think it's Rudy Vallee," said his father.

Others against the De Luccio army? How about his mother-in-law, the Hungarian woman? Stern's wife told him that once, as a little girl, she had been abused by a teacher and her Hungarian mother had gone to school and spat upon the antique teacher's face. Once, in an argument with his great-eyed wife, they both had sunk low and Stern had said, "Your mother didn't spit on the teacher. She peed on her." He saw her now against the De Luccios, slowly moving forward, peeing and spitting them backward until they turned on her and pummeled her old woman's stomach.

Stern took note of every detail of the man's house, a new one registering each night as he drove by. A television aerial. This was good. It meant the communications industry was getting through to the man, subtly driving home messages of Brotherhood. But he imagined the man watching only Westerns, contemptuously flicking off all shows that spoke of tolerance. Stern saw himself writing and producing a show about fair play, getting it[Pg 52] shown one night on every channel, and forcing the man to watch it since the networks would be bare of Westerns.

[Pg 52]

Empty beer cans in the garbage pail. Excellent. Enough of them, taken over a period of years, would bloat his belly and deprive his arms of power. Stern wondered how much beer it would take to run a man down physically. He felt good on nights when entire cases sat atop the garbage pail and depressed when only a few scattered cans appeared.

The man's car was of prewar vintage, neatly shined and proudly kept, and as Stern drove by in his more recent Studebaker he thought to himself, "Maybe it's an economic thing. He resents my having a newer car and a bigger house. I'll take him inside and show him my empty rooms and he'll see how foolish he is, and then we'll be friends." And other times, Stern was glad he had a newer car. He wanted to say to the man, "Think kike things and be stupid and you'll always have an old car. Act enlightened and have a new one." One night he saw the man's wife walk to the gutter to shake a broom—a stocky, square, and graceless woman whose hair was without color. Stern imagined the pair at night, coming together for a graceless, hulking lay, and for a second he felt tender toward the man. There had to be gentleness in him. Once he must have had to come to this hulking woman and court her with kindness and modesty, kike thoughts the furthest thing from his mind. But, on the following night, Stern took in a 

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