Cliff McGowan and Mac McGowan were cousins. They lived on the West Side
and were talented. Singing, dancing, imitations, trick bicycle riding,
boxing, German and Irish dialect comedy, and a little sleight-of-hand
and balancing of wheat straws and wheelbarrows on the ends of their
chins came as easy to them as it is for you to fix your rat so it won't
show or to dodge a creditor through the swinging-doors of a well-lighted
cafe--according as you may belong to the one or the other division
of the greatest prestidigitators--the people. They were slim, pale,
consummately self-possessed youths, whose fingernails were always
irreproachably (and clothes seams reproachfully) shiny. Their
conversation was in sentences so short that they made Kipling's seem as
long as court citations.
Having the temperament, they did no work. Any afternoon you could find
them on Eighth Avenue either in front of Spinelli's barber shop, Mike
Dugan's place, or the Limerick Hotel, rubbing their forefinger nails
with dingy silk handkerchiefs. At any time, if you had happened to
be standing, undecisive, near a pool-table, and Cliff and Mac had,
casually, as it were, drawn near, mentioning something disinterestedly,
about a game, well, indeed, would it have been for you had you gone your
way, unresponsive.
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