The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Well,’ said Tommy Parks, leaning against his doorway, ‘if it ain’t “Mister Anything-You-Want”! Ever you need somethin’ now, Callie, you don’t need to be botherin’ me in the middle of the night. You can come to “Mister Anything-You-Want”. Might give you anything you want whenever you want it but you just remember, Callie, I give it how you want.’

  The comment embarrassed Callie, as was intended, and James Pearson, moving in his possessions in a trunk and a few cases, chose to act as though he hadn’t heard it. The irony in the comment was that, both drunk and sober, it was Tommy Parks who had come to Callie at night a few times, not the other way around. She had had to rebuff his advances firmly yet without making an enemy of him because he lived in a room in the same apartment. It was uncomfortable enough having a civil Tommy Parks as a neighbour. It would be much harder if he turned hostile. It was bad enough that Russell had already had to see Parks’ amorous advances on his mother. She didn’t want him seeing her pushed or hit.

  James Pearson had earned the nickname Mr Anything-You-Want when he had arrived in Chicago and made his way to Armour and Company. Tommy Parks was already working at the Armour plant and he had witnessed the whole thing. In fact, he had contributed to the growth of Pearson’s reputation. They were killing over a thousand hogs an hour at Armour when James Pearson walked in looking for a job and was asked by the man in Personnel, ‘What can you do?’

  ‘Anything you want,’ James Pearson answered without wishing to convey anything but the truth.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Hear that?’ the Personnel officer said to his colleague. ‘This man can do anything we want.’

  ‘Can you head a hog?’ ‘Yes, sir.’

  He was taken out of the office and led straight on to the killing floor where the Personnel officer suddenly decided to increase the difficulty of the task and asked him, ‘How about three of ’em?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Personnel officer smiled and looked over at his colleague who had followed to watch this new man who, although quiet, was altogether too confident for anybody’s liking to be telling the truth. The first man pointed to a chain. Tommy Parks, who had followed the action to the killing floor from its beginning in the Personnel office where he had come to argue about his hours, watched as James Pearson picked up the chain and headed three hogs in a manner differently from the way it was commonly performed there. Differently, but perfectly. There was not a single scratch or a scar anywhere on any of the three hogs. The two men from Personnel, and Tommy Parks, whom they hadn’t noticed, could not help but be impressed but not one of them said anything to indicate this. Then thinking maybe this was James Pearson’s specialty, that perhaps he had been lucky to be asked to head hogs, the one thing he could do superbly, the first Personnel officer asked, ‘What about splittin’? Can you split a hog?’

  ‘Anything you want, sir,’ Pearson answered just as he had before and they all moved en masse to where the hogs were split. The Personnel officer told one of the existing splitters to stand back and give his cleaver to Pearson. They all stood around, the process moving on relentlessly and waited till an especially large hog came down the line, which is when the Personnel officer said, ‘I want you to split that one for me.’

  Without saying a word James Pearson split the hog perfectly down the middle without a scratch, a scar, a tear, without breaking a loin. Even the bone was split perfectly. It was as though this hog had been created like this since surely it could not have arrived in this state by virtue of human intervention. The men, including Tommy Parks and some other packinghouse workers who had cottoned on that something special was going on, looked on in genuine admiration. Pearson was asked to do it again on the very next hog and he repeated the task just as perfectly.

  ‘If I asked you to come on over to fancy meats …’ the Personnel officer trailed off.

  ‘Anything you want, sir.’ Pearson was hired on the spot and, with Tommy Parks’ assistance, the story of Mr Anything-You-Want went around the plant and even around parts of the Mecca Flats in a very short time.

  Although they were very different men, Tommy Parks had to admire James Pearson and was not unhappy to spend time with him or to be seen with him. Tommy was a much louder man and liked to enjoy himself in ways that held no interest for James Pearson. It was through Tommy Parks that Pearson heard about the room going at the Mecca so, when Pearson arrived with his cases, Tommy Parks was only pretending to be surprised in order to have some fun at Callie’s expense. He had known Pearson was coming to take the room and when ultimately James Pearson left Armour and Company for Swift, Tommy Parks followed him. Such was the regard in which James Pearson was held at Armour that the head of Personnel there wanted to know why he was leaving and when unable to talk him into staying even promised him his job back should he ever change his mind. This was unheard of and had there not been witnesses it wouldn’t have been believed.

  Tommy Parks had seen the man work and he had no trouble believing it. The two didn’t socialise much, theirs being an uneasy friendship, bordering on professional collegiality and a certain mutual respect for the work they each did, rather than shared interests. Tommy gambled, drank a lot and chased women, sometimes literally at the same time. James Pearson, on the other hand, kept to himself and showed no interest in any of these things. It was said that he was putting money away in order to move somewhere better when the time came. Certainly, like Tommy, he earned more than most of the people who had no choice but to live in the Mecca. But whereas it might have seemed that James Pearson was heading towards a better life, Tommy Parks was doing nothing to stop himself heading away from the best life he had ever known, or would ever know. He fed his appetites where he could and when they dictated his behaviour the entertainment that produced gave him a measure of popularity with people desperate for some distraction from the desperation of their own lives.

  James Pearson earned simply a quiet respect, and from almost as many people, but nobody ever called out to him as they did to Tommy Parks, nobody except Mrs Sallie. On the day Tommy Parks tried to embarrass Callie as James Pearson was moving into the apartment, old Mrs Sallie, who moved even when she stood still and who, unlike Callie, did not know him even by reputation, called out to him, ‘Have you met my friend, mister? Have you met, met my friend, Jesus? He gonna take me out of here and, and if you will but extend your hand to him … he do the same kindness for you.’

  Both Callie Ford and Tommy Parks looked on as James Pearson put down the case he was carrying, took the right hand of Mrs Sallie in his hand, and said, ‘My name is James Pearson, ma’am. I be pleased if you let me know ever I can extend a kindness to you … while you waitin’ on your friend.’

  Everything Callie Ford saw of him from then on and the few words they exchanged in the coming months was consistent with what she saw in him the day he moved in. Tommy Parks was a little less forward to her when James Pearson was around and she felt generally safer having him there in the next room. This was why, one evening about two weeks after someone had been shot and killed at the extreme end of the floor above, she was able to summon the courage to knock on James Pearson’s door and ask if she could talk to him. She had been offered an excellent job for a couple of months over the summer but it was some ten miles away uptown and required her to live at her place of work. Her son Russell was for the most part a good boy. If she took the job and gave some portion of her wages to James Pearson, would he look in on the boy at night? Whatever James Pearson might be eating on any particular night, could he maybe share some of it with her boy Russell?

  *

  It was the end of Lamont Williams’ shift and he was running late for dinner with his grandmother. He had intended his visit with the old man on the ninth floor to be very brief but he got caught up yet again. The hospital had been promising him extra duties for a while now but they didn’t seem to be following through with them. The more he could do around the hospital the
more opportunity he would have to show his capacity and enthusiasm for the work. He thought it might make them less likely to get rid of him. Extra duties were good but they didn’t seem to be coming. Maybe the hospital administrators had changed their mind about him or about the principle of hiring ex-cons. He didn’t want to let those kinds of thoughts gain the upper hand in the arm wrestle that was forever taking place in his mind. But you had to wonder, didn’t you? Was it his supervisor? There was more than one. Which one of them liked him least? Did any of them like him at all? How do you make them like you? Everyone was always so busy. That was probably all it was that was keeping him from the extra duties. It probably meant nothing. You didn’t want to let these sorts of thoughts gain the upper hand.

  But a colleague from Building Services, a man named D’Sean, younger than Lamont but who had worked there for four years and in whom Lamont had briefly confided, had told him what a good sign it was that there had been that talk of extra duties. D’Sean had seen men come and go from Building Services throughout his time there, many of them never making it past the six-month probation period. But he had never seen the hospital give this opportunity to an ex-con. ‘They give you extra duties yet?’ D’Sean kept asking Lamont. ‘No? Not yet! What’d you mean “not yet”? They talkin’ ‘bout it, why they don’t give it you? They got a problem with you, you needa fix it soon as you can. Ain’t sayin’ they do but if ‘n they do you needa fix it. But if it’s they just forget ‘bout you, you need to get up in their face so they remember. You all quiet and shit, Lamont, like you ain’t even there, sweepin’ up like you gotta sneak ‘round to do it, like you wasn’t supposed to do it. You all like “Excuse me for livin’. I ain’t even here.” Ain’t never knowed a brother like you, finish his time then back on the outside live like he still in solitary. Well, you back on the outside now, Lamont, an’ you gotta take care you own self. I don’t mean be up in your business or nothin’. I’m just sayin’, lookin’ out for you. You know?’

  Lamont regretted ever having told D’Sean that he had served time in prison or even that he had been offered extra duties. Whatever D’Sean’s intention, his life lessons fed Lamont’s anxieties. They were the rabbits his hair-trigger imagination hounded down black holes of anxiety. In his youth he had let his imagination run wild and it had kept him entertained when not much else did. In prison, though, he’d develop a strategy for keeping the worst excesses of his imagination in check, for repressing negative thoughts that were only going to hurt him or sabotage his progress, and he’d become very skilled at it. It was a skill D’Sean was now, out of the blue, forcing Lamont to put to use again.

  *

  It was the European summer of 1946 and nobody around was paying much attention to a somewhat bewildered-looking man slowly making his way around the camp, looking intently, almost reverentially, at everything as though his eyes had been starved of whatever it was they were seeing and now could not get enough of. The man was lugging around a heavy box, with cords, transformers and plugs, some sort of recording device, he explained when asked. But he was not often asked. He was a Pole, someone said, no, a German, a doctor of some kind. Well, good, they needed doctors. They needed everything but typhus and TB. No, he’s a Polish Jew. But he looked too well to be a Polish Jew. Someone else said he was from America. Henry Border, once from Poland, now from Chicago, Illinois, was accustomed to being taken as someone to be dealt with after other people. He had been to a number of Displaced Persons camps before arriving in Föhrenwald but each time he looked at the inmates in any of the DP camps he visited it was as though he were seeing a new life form for the first time that he could not take his eyes off. His breath came too quickly and he had to calm himself. It happened every time and he castigated himself for it. Erratic breathing was a luxury no one around there could afford, not even him.

  As he carried his equipment around with him, leaning for a while to one side and then to the other to try to spread the wear and tear on his body, he came upon a makeshift hut filled with children, Jewish children. He knew they were Jewish because the language they were being instructed in was Yiddish. He put down his equipment in order to get a little closer to the window to hear what was being taught. The children were of different sizes and so, he surmised, probably of different ages. While he was standing there another group of children of wildly different sizes walked past him in a formation so orderly it was almost a march. They were led by an adult and they were singing what sounded to Henry Border like a Hebrew song. Then as if to give a lie to the notion of order, another group of children, also randomly sized and also singing in Hebrew but a different song, almost walked into the path of the first group of singing children. Instinctively the two groups deviated from their paths to avoid a collision.

  Henry Border was mesmerised by these children. He wanted to stop each one and ask what had happened to their parents. What had happened to them? In those first few minutes in Föhrenwald he had seen almost no adults. He wondered what these children had seen and how they had survived without adult supervision then and even now. He stood in the middle of this tiny gathering, a little town of children, a city of orphans, when this flood of private imaginings was drained by the barking of the adult instructor of the second group of marching singing children, who now left the group and asked him who he was and what he was doing there.

  It took a little while to explain. Border could never predict the response of the person in authority. This person, a man in his thirties, was an American Jew from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known as ‘the Joint’. His young charges had marched away still singing but he didn’t seem to mind and was now satisfied with Border’s reasons for being there, even slightly encouraging. Henry Border placed his equipment on the ground and wiped his moist brow with the back of his hand.

  ‘So many children?’

  ‘So many and not enough,’ the man from the Joint answered.

  ‘Yes, of course, but … right here it’s –’

  ‘They are in class. It’s a school. And we’re getting more all the time. We got some more just yesterday.’

  ‘Where have they been? Why are they coming only now?’ Henry Border asked.

  ‘The violence flushes them out.’

  ‘What do you mean “violence”?’

  ‘What do you mean “what do I mean violence”?’

  ‘You mean by the Nazis?’

  ‘No, the Nazis were defeated last May, that’s … fourteen months ago. I’m talking about two weeks ago.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘A young boy, a Polish boy …’ The man from the Joint stopped in disbelief at the story he was himself about to tell. He took a deep breath and continued. ‘He’d run away from his parents and by all accounts he’d been gone three days. When he came back home people, his parents, wanted to know where he’d been. They were furious with the boy. So he told them the Jews had kidnapped him and taken him to a cellar where he’d had to watch fifteen other Polish boys, Christians, murdered by them so that they could use their blood to make matzah. The story got around very quickly and a group of men in the uniform of the Polish military herded the rump of the town’s returned Jews into one place and then, egged on by some members of both the local militia and the local clergy and – and I’ve heard there was also a factory director newly installed by the Socialists – these Jewish survivors fresh from Hitler’s camps were thrown to a wild crowd baying for blood said to be about five thousand strong.’

  ‘A pogrom? Even now?’ Henry Border asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This was two weeks ago, a pogrom two weeks ago? Where?’

  ‘In Kielce. Most of the Jews who managed to get away went to Zeilsheim but we have a few here including a couple of orphaned children. In fact, quietly, look. Come here. If you can look without drawing attention to yourself, look into that classroom where the children are sitting. You see that little boy on the end?’
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  Henry Border looked in through the window where the children were facing side on to him and looking at their teacher. He saw a tiny boy somewhere between three and five holding the hand of a girl who looked about eight.

  ‘They came here yesterday?’ Border asked. ‘How did they get here? This is just … They’re both from Kielce?’

  ‘No, only the boy.’

  ‘So how does he know the girl?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He can’t have met her before yesterday. But there’s no one alive he’s known longer than her. If you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my children. I wish you luck with your project. Don’t forget to talk to the children.’

  The man from the Joint walked away leaving Henry Border quite shaken. He just stood there for a moment and then, drawn by the thought of the little boy, he looked in through the window again. He saw that there was a bandage on the boy’s free hand that stretched all the way up to his elbow.

  ‘So when she heard that,’ the teacher was saying to the children, ‘she took her son down to the river and placed the baby Moses in a basket amidst the bullrushes and set him to float down the river. And some time later the Egyptian princess discovered him in the basket and took him in. Do you think it would have been hard or easy for Moses’ mother to do this?’

  The girl who was holding the hand of the newly arrived little boy from Kielce put up her hand and answered. ‘She was hoping someone would pick him up and save him. I saw mothers throw their children out of a train to save them. Maybe it saved them. It can work.’