Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  Al and Marty, who had run off down the street leaving Earl momentarily to die from loss of blood maybe, had come back just as he was regaining consciousness. Marty, to explain how he happened to be without a mark on him, ventured, “As soon as I could hear the bullets whizzing by my head, I knew it was no healthy place.”

  “He got me with a glass-studded blackjack,” added Al, at the same time calling attention to his nose. They came up onto the street, Earl carefully feeling his face for swelling and stinging cuts. “That kid’s nothing to fool with,” said Al, but tentatively, unsure what the drift of the following conversation would be.

  Within the myriad images going through Earl’s memory of the evening, one became clearer than all the rest—the face of July with the flashlight on it, filled with fear. The full power of the image almost caused him to lose consciousness again because it made him feel so good. And as he was walking down the street back to their neighborhood he heard them saying not only that July’d had a loaded gun that he was shooting with a silencer, a blackjack, cleats on the heels of his shoes which he could easily and with accuracy kick above his head, years of military training, but that in some miraculous way he’d managed to get himself thrown down into the cellar stairwell so that he’d have the chance to kill all of them. Earl realized what they were saying and accepted it as easily as a breath of fresh air; and within the privacy of his mind he would take July down, notch by notch, until he’d reduced him from a figure of awesome respect to the face in the flashlight. The sensation was even better than before, and he actually sank swooning to his knees when the first wave of it hit him. Al and Marty took hold of him to lift him up, but he yelled at them, “Leave me alone, please leave me alone.”

  So the following morning didn’t turn out to be a second chance for July after all. Clearly, Al and Marty had no wish to begin any trouble with him, and communicated this by way of exchanging quick glances.

  He felt Earl was different, and for several weeks afterward July found occasion to test himself, gathering all his courage to go over near 21st and Market, giving Earl a chance to start something—which he didn’t. But he also didn’t stop looking at July with a contemptuous expression, even if only when he thought himself unobserved. Several weeks more and Earl was gone. It was said he’d been accepted into a private school of some sort in upper Michigan. Al and Marty grew a little friendlier after that and the three of them often talked several minutes before they set out in the morning, though July never felt very comfortable with them, especially with Marty, who seemed to be able to pick up the bundles of newspapers with no effort at all.

  That spring July talked to the fat man in the newspaper booth beside City Hall. At first he hadn’t been friendly, but as July stayed with him he loosened up; and after stopping by every day for two weeks, always pleasant but always about the same thing, July won him over and they formed a kind of partnership—an agreement for mutual gain. In the beginning the agreement was enforced by the fat man, Ed Shavoneck. When he arrived at the stand with the key, he’d open up and take out a small hand truck and give it to July, who would be there waiting. July would make two trips from the pickup—seven bundles—and bring them back to the green plywood stand. Then every paper he took to sell himself would cost him five cents instead of three cents, but he would also be purchasing the privilege of being able to sell them down under City Hall amid the streams of people going to work or shopping.

  He could still roam when he felt like it, but as the weeks and months went on he felt less and less like doing so. It was simply too easy to stand in one place; he sold more papers; he saw more girls in bright dresses, an interest he was beginning to acquire at a distance. Butch could spend every day with him. All in all, it was undeniably better. He missed the feeling of autonomy that being in a new area gave him, but it was replaced by a sense of belonging in some mysterious way to that organ of the city beneath City Hall, and being in a way a part of everyone passing through it—even the girls. More people came to know him than ever before. He could tell by their expressions that they recognized him and even the ones who never bought a paper accepted him. He was a part of their lives. It came to be said of him that he actually lived somewhere down in the tunnels.

  When Ed Shavoneck began to trust him, their partnership unfolded. He gave July a key to the stand so that he could get the hand truck, bring the papers back, set up the display racks, candy, cigars, magazines and key rings, and have three jelly rolls and a cup of coffee with one and a half packages of sugar there waiting for him when he arrived, forty-five minutes later than if he’d had to do all this himself. In the afternoon he could go home just that much earlier. Then he taught July how to keep the kind of records he wanted and let him run the stand by himself on Saturdays and Sundays on a fifty-percent basis. Then Shavoneck began taking every other Wednesday off. His life seemed much better because of the extra free time. For several months, every time he returned after leaving the stand to July he counted everything and tried again to figure out how he could be being cheated unawares. Then later he didn’t bother, and his life was pleasanter still.

  This might well have been the end of the story of July Montgomery. He’d raised himself from having seventy-four things to having a job bringing in a steady income. He took comfort in being well known. He learned it was important to keep your clothes clean and bought enough pants, shirts, socks and underwear for a change every three or four days and washed them in the laundromat at two-week intervals. He learned about leaving tips for waiters and the good feeling he could generate by dropping his street voice when he talked privately to someone. He found that his personality was not fenced in by being a newsboy, even when he was in the green stand. He was taken for being the kind of person he acted. He had responsibility and a small Coleman heater, the kind used for ice fishing, to keep his room an even seventy-two degrees. He got another upholstered chair, and had a print of a brook scene hung beside the photographs. He’d read every paperback in the stand, and it wasn’t uncommon that someone would ask his opinion or advice about them. He did the ordering. He got his own Social Security number, and filled out a tax statement every year. He had a post-office box which gave him great pleasure to go to and unlock, taking out free things he’d sent away for from ads in the back of magazines. Some afternoons he’d get drunk on whiskey and beer Shavoneck would buy for him, eat huge quantities of greasy food and go to a movie in one of the better theaters. He neither loved or hated anyone except his cat.

  It never occurred to him then that more could be demanded from living. Years went by in the same relatively comfortable way: minor ups and downs during the week, leveling off when viewed from the perspective of months. He and Ed Shavoneck became friends, of a sort. They had a narrow band of experiences and thoughts which they offered each other as common ground. On either side of this band, say the red frequency, lay the greater part of their selves, but nevertheless within it they had many perfectly enjoyable and safe discussions.

  Through the mornings July would imagine this or that girl had a secret crush on him and thought his shoulders looked powerful and that he must be wild and a man of the world, dealing so effortlessly with all kinds of people, old ladies and hoodlums, and knowing everyone of importance and everything that was going on in the underworld and was very well read too and nobody’s fool, and had an extremely fierce cat. He began smoking cigarettes and wearing shoes with hard plastic heels that made sharp snapping noises when he walked.

  He grew quickly during these two years and at fourteen and a half was only three inches shy of six feet, but thin as a rail. He prided himself on being able to say he was sixteen.

  His savings had grown into such an enormous wad (he’d been adding to it $3.00, and sometimes $4.00, a day ever since his partnership) that he was sure he could never spend it on one thing. The bills took up three jars instead of one, and to count them all took too much time, especially when he knew there was an even $1400 contained in two of the jars together, so he’d
only count the third. It seemed to him childish, too, to want to count the bills out one by one—something he was ashamed of ever having done.

  He had a Bible now that he’d picked up from the Goodwill store—a fat one two inches thick, five inches high and four inches wide, tightly bound and almost impossible to read next to the inner margin. He kept his pictures inside it to keep them from curling and yellowing on the wall. His desire to read it was not religious and came upon him only once a month, or less, when he felt lonely and had nothing else to do. It was a way of bringing his parents closer to him. His father had read it; his mother had read it; now he read it, and when he did, time flashed, the voice of his mother and the expression of his father became clear, and it was a very real thing not being alone.

  As time went on he began to think this business of reading the Bible was cowardly; needing to have your parents with you was kid stuff, and he gave up doing it. Butch, he reasoned, didn’t have such things, and got along without them; so would he. And the book remained unopened for a long time, even to take out the pictures.

  Though it was not a regular practice, he and Franklin Carroll still occasionally ate breakfast together. But lately Carroll had been pushing him around and making him feel uncomfortable.

  “So, what did you say you were going to do with your future?” asked Carroll, spreading the butter over his pancakes with a knife, stacking one on top of another.

  “I didn’t,” answered July, watching Butch under the table lapping cream.

  “That’s what I thought. No consideration of the future. Blind as a bat. Opportunities flying by you,” and one of his hands made a fluttering motion across the tabletop. “Look, what have you got now? Imagine yourself at my age, carrying around newspapers. No, you’re doing all right, don’t get me wrong—here, have some of these sausages. You’re way ahead of where I was at your age—how old are you?”

  “Fourteen.” He felt the mounting pride of looking older than he was flare up from his pancakes.

  “Oh, you’re well ahead of where I was at fourteen. But you have to always be thinking what you could have. Never let that thought slip away. It keeps you going forward—what I could have. Pardon me, miss, I wonder if we couldn’t have some more tea here, and fried eggs and toast.”

  “How would you like them done, sir?”

  “Easy over for me, and hard for the boy.”

  She went away into the kitchen. July watched a man come into the restaurant, looking very tired, as if he’d just woken up. He came past their table and sat down. Franklin Carroll looked quickly at him, then resumed talking. When the waitress arrived with the eggs, he effortlessly drew out his pen, wrote a couple of words across the corner of the place mat, tore it off, folded it and handed it to her, whispering something which July couldn’t hear. Then he resumed talking as though never interrupted.

  “Your cat, for instance, even she—”

  “He,” corrected July, watching the waitress carry the paper into a small room behind the counter. A man came out behind her and went back into the kitchen, then returned with the cook, a big man, heavy and bald, wearing a wide white apron. The cook came over toward them and continued to the table of the man who had just come in and was waiting for someone to take his order.

  “I’m sorry,” the cook said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.” The man rose halfway out of his booth, but sat back down. Then he looked over at Carroll and let his gaze pinch together in some of the deepest hatred July had ever seen, got up and left. Throughout all of this Carroll had never looked over, or quit talking or eating.

  “Tell me, what plans do you have—I mean, what would you like to be?”

  July took time to think, not daring to say what he really wanted was to be the kind of guy who had a girlfriend. “I’d like to be a card dealer or a pool hustler.”

  “Those guys are nothing. Believe me, they’re nothing. They look good, I know, lying back and being smooth and betting bluffs and running forty balls. But next week they come shining up to you for two bits. I tell you, they’re nothing. Most of them are hooked on drugs, they drink Thunderbird wine for breakfast and are in terrible health—which reminds me, though I don’t suppose you care, those cigarettes of yours will stunt your growth. You’d better give them up.”

  “I might be a writer,” said July.

  “Forget it, they don’t make any money—one in a thousand, and then it gets eaten up by lawyers and agents who cheat them. I had a cousin who wrote a book once and it ruined his life. Do you want something more?”

  “No, I’m fine,” said July.

  “How about the cat?”

  “He’s fine too, thanks.” Butch had jumped up and was sitting next to July, preening himself.

  “I’ll tell you what—you come to work for me. You’re a little young, but I think I could use you. It won’t be easy. The—”

  “No, I don’t think I better do that.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to push you. But you owe it to yourself to think it over. So think it over. It might turn out to be an experience you could use later, even if you decide to have no part of the furniture business.”

  “No. I don’t think I’ll want to.”

  “Like I said,” said Carroll, getting up from the booth, “think it over. Remember, you won’t want to be as old as I am selling papers. And without an education—face it, July, you’re sunk.” On this note, he left, leaving his usual $5.00 on the table. July watched his blue Cadillac move off into the traffic. He hurried to pick up Butch and went outside, knowing that without Carroll there with him it was only a matter of moments before someone would come over and tell him to get the cat out.

  He went to a movie that afternoon and sat through it twice. When he stood up to leave he realized that he’d not really seen it at all, but had been sitting there in a daze, occupied with thoughts and visions of being an old man selling newspapers and having a girl down in his room.

  Walking out of the theater, he decided never to eat breakfast ever again with Franklin Carroll, and denied that he admired him or liked him or even thought he was worth knowing. He wants, me to be ashamed of what I have . . . and he wants me to be ashamed because it will be obvious then that he’s better. He’s a slob. Besides, what does he care about me?

  That night he bought a dime bag of ice and drank a glass of orange-flavored vodka. Staggering carefully about the streets, he felt himself to have the world by a shoestring. He went into a second-story pool hall and played pool until he’d lost all the money he had with him, then he stopped over at the penny arcade and talked with some boys he knew there and played pin-ball. A group of Negroes came in and a fight started. He and Willie O. got one of them and were hitting him when the police arrived. Everybody ran. Tables were turned over in an effort to keep away from the nightsticks. July and some of his friends got away and ran down the street. The police cornered and put handcuffs on all of the blacks but one who’d gone through a window to get away, and threw them into the wagon along with Willie O. and one other white boy July didn’t know.

  That night he felt lonely and fell asleep with his radio playing into his ear through a little wire.

  EIGHT

  One morning July found himself in a situation he couldn’t believe—one of those circumstances that prove to be, by virtue of the great luck involved, both exhilarating and perturbing (for fear that what appears to be true cannot possibly be). He’d gone into a small restaurant and been fortunate enough to find a place to sit down. This establishment was immensely popular because of its low cost and reasonably fair meals. He ordered coffee and two sweet rolls, and put a newspaper on the counter—a gift to the management. The room was jammed with people. The tables were doubled up, with strangers sitting together, though in most cases neither talking nor looking at each other. The two waitresses were nearly running under the nervous, austere gaze of the man behind the cash register. Then it happened. The man sitting on the stool beside July got up abruptly, threw down a quarter
and left. With vague interest, through the mirror behind the glass racks, July watched the man’s reversed image navigating toward the door. He moved aside and allowed to enter what July was sure was the best-looking girl he’d ever seen. His heart got excited, and he looked wildly about the room. Could it be true that the only place to sit was beside him? He didn’t believe it. He watched her looking around, then, after apparently making up her mind, come straight toward him. His heart leaped, and he looked absently at the fingernails on the fingers of the hands in front of him holding a round-topped salt shaker as though he were trying to strangle it. The sound of the plastic giving beneath her on the stool, the smell and the pure sense of her being there crawled up the back of his neck. His heart pounded so fast that it caused a vacuum in his stomach. His hand shook as he moved the newspaper on the counter several inches out of her way, a kind of gesture, he felt. Dropping her shouldered handbag to the floor and hooking her shoe toes into the stool made his vision blur. Everything about her seemed so polite, so proper. She must be older than me, he thought; but she’ll think I’m sixteen.

  His coffee and rolls arrived. “This is for you,” he said casually and pushed the paper forward. “My regards to the management.” The waitress took it away and gave it to the man behind the cash register, who immediately began to read it. But she didn’t return to take the girl’s order.

  She might even be seventeen, thought July, stealing furtive glances through the mirror. She looks like she’s been around, all right. She had a tough, no-funny-business look about her, and sat staring coldly at the countertop. No one seemed to be noticing her, including the waitress, who rocketed by carrying food and dishes. He decided, This is it, and turned toward her smiling frantically.