he’d try to hold his breath as long as he could. My dad’s a fighter, you see, but there are some things you can’t fight.

The gas would kill him. Then they would draw the gas back into the tanks to save it for the next one, and they’d take my father’s body out of the room. It would be buried somewhere.

I couldn’t stay in the house another minute. I couldn’t sit watching my mother try to dull the pain with glass after glass of cheap muscatel, couldn’t listen to her crying softly. I wanted to cry, too—but I didn’t know how anymore.

I slipped on my jacket and left the house, closing the door softly. It was cool outside. The air was crisp and fresh, with a breeze blowing and the fallen leaves skittering along the pavement.

It could have been a beautiful night, but it wasn’t.

My father was a murderer, and tonight they were going to kill him.

Murderer. The picture that word makes isn’t right at all. Because my dad’s not a cruel or a vicious man or a money-hungry man. He was a cutter in a dress shop, not too long ago, and he saved his money so that he could go into business for himself in the Seventh Avenue rat-race.

It was no place for him, a mild, easy-going guy. The law of the Avenue is kill or be killed, screw the competition before they screw you. But Dad didn’t want to hand anyone a raw deal. He just wanted to make pretty dresses and sell them. And Seventh Avenue isn’t like that, not at all.

He managed to stomach it. It kept us eating good and he managed to make the kind of dresses he wanted. A man can learn to adjust to almost anything, he told me once. A man does what he has to do.

Dad’s partner was a man named Bookspan, and he handled the business end while Dad took care of production. Bookspan was a crook, and the one thing Dad couldn’t adjust to was a crooked partner, a partner who was cheating him.

When Dad found out, he killed him.

Not impulsively, with the anger hot and fresh in him, because he’s not an impulsive sort of man. He bided his time and waited, until he and Bookspan took a business trip to Los Angeles. He picked up a pistol in a hockshop in L.A. and blew out Bookspan’s brains.

And they caught him, of course. The poor guy, he didn’t even try to get away. It was an open-and-shut case, premeditated and all. He was tried in L.A. where the murder took place, and he was sentenced to death at San Quentin.

I walked around aimlessly, just thinking about it. Here I was in New York, and my father was going to die on the other side of the continent. In less than five hours.

Then, of course, I realized that it would be eight hours. There’s a time difference of three hours between New York and California. He had eight hours to live, and I had eight hours before it was time to mourn him.

How do you wait for a person to die? What do you do, when you know the very minute of death? Do you go to a movie? Watch television, maybe? Read a magazine?

I hadn’t even noticed where I was, and I looked up to discover that I’d drifted clear over to Saint Mark’s Place. It was natural enough. I used to spend most of my time on that little street, just east of Third Avenue and north of Cooper Square. I used to spend my time with Betty, who used to be my girl.

Before the murder.

Murders change things, you see. They turn things upside down, and suddenly Betty wasn’t my girl anymore. Suddenly, she wasn’t speaking to me any longer. I was a murderer’s son.

Dan Bookspan wasn’t a murderer’s son, though. He was the same rotten, smooth-talking, crooked kind of a bastard as his old man, but his old man was dead now. So Dan Bookspan had my girl.

I got the hell away from Saint Mark’s Place. I walked south to an old joint on the corner of Great Jones Street and the Bowery. I sat down on a stool in the back and ordered rye and soda. I sat down there with bums stinking and babbling on either side of me, in a Bowery bar where no one cared that I was just seventeen and too young to drink, and I poured the rye