dn't
know. Probably that accounted for a little pucker that could sometimes
alight between her eyes. Scarcely a shadow, rather the shadow of a
shadow. A lute, played in a western breeze? Once a note of music,
not from a lute however, but played on a cheap harmonica, had caught
Marylin's heart in a little ecstasy of palpitations, but that doesn't
necessarily signify. Zephyr with Aurora playing? Laughter holding both
his sides?

How Marylin, had she understood it, would have kicked the high hat off
of such Miltonic phrasing. Ah, she was like--herself!

And yet, if there must be found a way to convey her to you more quickly,
let it be one to which Marylin herself would have dipped a bow.

She was like nothing so much as unto a whole two dollars' worth of
little five-cent toy balloons held captive in a sea breeze and tugging
toward some ozonic beyond in which they had never swum, yet strained so
naturally toward.

That was it! A whole two dollars' worth of tugging balloons.
Red--blue--orange--green--silver, jerking in hollow-sided collisions,
and one fat-faced pink one for ten cents, with a smile painted on one
side and a tear on the other.

And what if I were to tell you that this phantom of a delight of a
Marylin, whose hair was a sieve for sun and whose laughter a streamer of
it, had had a father who had been shot to death on the underslinging
of a freight car in one of the most notorious prison getaways ever
recorded, and whose mother--but never mind right here; it doesn't matter
to the opening of this story, because Marylin, with all her tantalizing
capacity for paradox, while every inch a part of it all, was not at all
a part of it.

For five years, she who had known from infancy the furtive Bradstreet of
some of the vertical city's most notorious aliases and gang names, and
who knew, almost by baptism of fire, that there were short cuts to an
easier and weightier wage envelope, had made buttonholes from eight
until five on the blue-denim pleat before it was stitched down the front
of men's blue-denim shirts.

At sweet sixteen she, whose mother had borne her out of wed--well,
anyway, at sweet sixteen, like the maiden in the saying, she had never
been kissed, nor at seventeen, but at eighteen--

It was this way. Steve Turner--"Getaway," as the quick lingo of the
street had him--liked her. Too well. I firmly believe, though, that
if in the lurid heat lightning of so stormy a career as Getaway's the
beauty of