Friend of My Youth

a cheap bike to ride on the country roads. They had no bikes around at that time, but he stayed and talked to Cornelius for a while, about the kind he wanted, ways of repairing or improving that kind, how they should watch out for one. He said he would drop by again. He did that, very soon, and only Brenda was there. Cornelius had gone to the house to lie down; it was one of his bad days. Neil and Brenda made everything clear to each other then, without saying anything definite. When he phoned and asked her to have a drink with him, in a tavern on the lakeshore road, she knew what he was asking and she knew what she would answer.
    She told him she hadn’t done anything like this before. That was a lie in one way and in another way true.
    During store hours, Maria didn’t let one sort of transaction interfere with another. Everybody paid as usual. She didn’t behave any differently; she was still in charge. The boys knew that they had some bargaining power, but they were never sure how much. A dollar. Two dollars. Five. It wasn’t as if she had to depend on one or two of them. There were always several friends outside, waiting and willing, when she took one of them into the shed before she caught the bus home. She warned them that she would stop dealing with them if they talked, and for a while theybelieved her. She didn’t hire them regularly at first, or all that often.
    That was at first. Over a few months’ time, things began to change. Maria’s needs increased. The bargaining got to be more open and obstreperous. The news got out. Maria’s powers were being chipped, then hammered, away.
    Come on, Maria
,
give me a ten. Me, too. Maria
,
give me a ten, too. Come on, Maria
,
you know me
.
    Twenty, Maria
.
Give me twenty. Come on. Twenty bucks. You owe me, Maria
.
Come on, now. You don’t want me to tell. Come on, Maria
.
    A twenty, a twenty, a twenty
. Maria is forking over. She is going to the shed every night. And if that isn’t bad enough for her, some boys start refusing. They want the money first. They take the money and then they say no. They say she never paid them. She paid them, she paid them in front of witnesses, and all the witnesses deny that she did. They shake their heads, they taunt her.
No. You never paid him. I never saw you. You pay me now and I’ll go. I promise I will. I’ll go. You pay me twenty, Maria
.
    And the older boys, who have learned from their younger brothers what is going on, are coming up to her at the cash register and saying, “How about me, Maria? You know me, too. Come on, Maria, how about a twenty?” Those boys never go to the shed with her, never. Did she think they would? They never even promise, they just ask her for money.
You know me a long time, Maria
. They threaten, they wheedle.
Aren’t I your friend, too, Maria?
    Nobody was Maria’s friend.
    Maria’s matronly, watchful calm was gone—she looked wild and sullen and mean. She gave them looks full of hate, but she continued giving them money. She kept handing over the bills. Not even trying to bargain, or to argue or refuse, anymore. In a rage she did it—a silent rage. The more they taunted her, the more readily the twenty-dollar bills flew out of the till. Very little, perhaps nothing, was done to earn them now.
    They’re stoned all the time, Neil and his friends. All the time, now that they have this money. They see sweet streams of atoms flowing in the Formica tabletops. Their colored souls are shooting out under their fingernails. Maria has gone crazy, the store is bleeding money. How can this go on? How is it going to end? Maria must be into the strongbox now; the till at the end of the day wouldn’t have enough for her. And all the time her mother keeps on baking buns and making pierogi, and the father keeps sweeping the sidewalk and greeting the customers. Nobody has told them. They go on just the same.
    They had to find out on their own. They found a bill that Maria hadn’t paid—something like that, somebody coming in with an unpaid bill—and they went to get the money to pay it, and they found that there was no money. The money wasn’t where they kept it, in the safe or strongbox or wherever, and it wasn’t anywhere else—the money was gone. That was how they found out.
    Maria had succeeded in giving away everything. All they had saved, all their slowly accumulated profits, all the money on which they operated their business. Truly, everything. They could not pay the rent now, they