The Paper Cowboy

by Kristin Levine

  I was almost to the front door when I came up with a great idea. If I left now, Mom would find out and beat me again for sure. But if I found another way to get back at him . . .

  Everyone else, even Mr. McKenzie, was still gathered in the back of the store where I’d broken the jar. I quickly searched through my satchel. Yes, I still had that commie newspaper. It was a little wrinkled and wet, but that didn’t matter. I slipped my copy of the Daily Worker under the counter, onto the pile of papers they used to wrap the purchases. The next time someone bought a salad dish or a gravy bowl, they’d get quite a surprise. Mr. McKenzie would be humiliated and then he’d see how it felt.

  I picked up the broom and dustpan and sauntered down the aisle.

  Mr. McKenzie looked at me.

  The clock struck twelve.

  “I’ll clean it up,” I said, bending over with the dustpan.

  “You certainly will.” Mr. McKenzie huffed. He marched off and the rest of the customers followed him.

  I quickly swept up the glass and walked back to the front of the store to throw it out.

  Mr. McKenzie was wrapping a purchase for Eddie’s dad, Mr. Sullivan. “Hi, Tommy,” he called out to me. He wore overalls and a white T-shirt, revealing his muscular arms. “Eddie and I were thinking about heading over to Mud Lake one of these weekends before it gets too cold. You and your dad interested in coming?”

  “Yes, sir!” I replied. Fishing was one of the only things my dad ever did with me. I never missed a trip.

  “There you go,” Mr. McKenzie said, handing Mr. Sullivan the newspaper-wrapped package.

  The masthead was clearly visible on the front. Eddie’s dad noticed it immediately. “What’s this?” he asked, without touching the paper. “Some sort of joke?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Mr. McKenzie. “It’s the lightbulbs, like you asked for. Sixty watts.”

  Mr. Sullivan took the package and unwrapped it, as if it were a baby blanket containing a dead fish. He pulled the paper off and smoothed out the crinkled pages. “Since when do you get the Daily Worker?” he asked, his voice cold.

  Mr. McKenzie laughed. “The Daily Worker? That’s a good one.”

  But Mr. Sullivan’s face was deadly serious. A muscle in his arm twitched.

  Mr. McKenzie stopped laughing and looked down at the paper. His face blanched when he saw the masthead. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said. He looked over at me. I held his gaze, defiantly. I wanted him to know it was me. Finally, he turned away. “I just used the first newspaper on top of the pile.”

  He reached for the paper to crumple it up, but Eddie’s dad snatched it back from him. “I’m going to have to show that to Officer Russo,” he said.

  Mr. McKenzie laughed again, but it sounded forced. “I’m no communist!”

  “So you say,” said Mr. Sullivan. “It’s just a precaution. I’m sure you understand.”

  Mr. McKenzie rolled his eyes. “What do you think? That I’m holding secret communist meetings in my stockroom at night?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Mr. Sullivan said. “All I know is what I read in the papers. And if Senator McCarthy is finding them in the State Department, we can’t be sure they aren’t here too.”

  “Mr. Sullivan,” Mr. McKenzie growled. “I am not a communist, but I’ve known some. They were locked up with me in a German work camp.”

  “The commies aren’t our allies anymore,” Eddie’s dad retorted.

  “No,” Mr. McKenzie said. “Not anymore.” He pulled out a new sheet of newspaper, glanced at the front page (it was the Chicago Tribune) and wrapped up the lightbulbs. “Got an article about your friend McCarthy right here!” He jabbed a finger at the paper. “Now take your lightbulbs and get out of my store.”

  Mr. Sullivan held the package with one hand and slammed the door with the other as he stormed out. The little bell above the threshold rang wildly.

  Everyone in the store was staring at Mr. McKenzie. Including me. They’d all heard Mr. Sullivan accuse him of being a communist. Mr. McKenzie took one deep breath, then another. “Store’s closing for lunch,” he said finally. “You’ll have to finish your purchases this afternoon.”

  Without a word, the other customers left one by one. I started to join them.

  “Tommy,” Mr. McKenzie called after me.

  I froze, but turned to face him anyway.

  He knew. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he knew, 100 percent for sure, that I’d put that paper there. But could he prove it? Had Little Skinny seen me with the paper at school? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure.

  “I’ll see you next week,” Mr. McKenzie said finally.

  I nodded and hurried off. Suddenly, planting the paper in the store didn’t seem like it had been such a good idea.

  11

  GUILTY OF TREASON

  The knot in my stomach only tightened as I walked home. Mr. McKenzie was probably calling Mom right now. I could barely breathe as I opened the front door and stepped in.

  Dad was sitting at the kitchen table and Mom was at the stove cooking lunch. Her long black hair was braided and pinned up on her head, as if she were going to a party. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. “Oh, Tommy,” she cried when she saw me. “The doctor called. Mary Lou woke up!”

  A wide grin crept across my face. “She’s going to be okay?”

  “Yes,” said Mom, tossing the spaghetti into a colander with such enthusiasm that a few strands of pasta wriggled over the edge and fell to the floor. Mom giggled.

  “They think she’s going to be okay,” my dad added in a serious tone.

  I turned to look at him. He was unshaven and had a bunch of papers spread out before him. “The burns on her legs were severe. She’s going to need extensive skin grafts.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “When they take skin from her stomach or her back and put it on her legs.”

  It sounded like something from a monster movie at the Tivoli.

  “There’s a risk of infection,” Dad went on. “And, of course, even when the grafts are healed, she’ll have to learn to walk again.”

  “Learn to walk again?” Thinking about skin grafts and infection made me feel kind of sick, like the time I ate a hot dog and a bag of popcorn before getting on a roller coaster. Suddenly, I could smell the wet grass of that morning, see Mary Lou’s penny loafers as she skipped across the lawn. Maybe she would never walk like that again. Maybe it was all my fault.

  “Oh, you two worry too much!” exclaimed Mom. She went to the record player and put on Dick Contino playing the accordion. She turned the volume up loud and danced around the kitchen.

  I walked over to the table and picked up one of the papers, just to clear a spot to eat. It was a bill from the hospital. Payment due. $300. Please pay promptly.

  Dad snatched the paper out of my hand. “I’ll put these away,” he said without looking at me.

  Three hundred dollars was a lot of money. But if I asked Dad about it, I knew he wouldn’t answer. “When can I see Mary Lou?” I asked instead.

  “A week or two,” he said. “She’s not allowed to have visitors just yet.”

  After lunch, we all went out into the yard to hang the laundry and work in the garden. Pinky kept running back and forth under the sheets, Boots chasing her like she was a squirrel. Mom laughed so hard, she almost started to cry. She wasn’t even upset when Boots got mud on a pillowcase, just told me to take it down and throw it in the laundry again.

  Every time the phone rang, I flinched, but Mr. McKenzie never called. Dad picked corn from our garden for dinner, and Mom’s Polish plum cake browned perfectly. But a bit of the gooey plum filling oozed over the side of the pan and burned in the oven. The smell reminded me of that awful car ride, and I spent the rest of the evening trying not to remember, so I coul
dn’t even enjoy the cake.

  The next day I kept worrying about running into Mr. McKenzie and Little Skinny at church, but we didn’t see them. Afterward, Eddie and I went off to the double feature at the Tivoli. The movie theater was just across from the station where my dad caught the train to go to work. The Tivoli could hold almost 1,400 people and had ushers in little caps and jackets to show you to your seat. There were chandeliers overhead, and even an organ that a little old lady played before the show. When the lights dimmed, I let out a deep breath. Here, at least, I could relax.

  The first movie was Guilty of Treason, about that Hungarian cardinal József Mindszenty. We prayed for him every day after Mass. I’d seen the film at least twice before (once at school when the nuns had shown it to us) but I liked it. There was this tough American newspaper reporter who went to visit Mindszenty when he was hiding out in the hills around Budapest. The cardinal had all these great lines. He sounded kind of like a cowboy defending his homestead. “One must take a stand somewhere. One must draw a line past which one will not retreat.” And “We shall teach there the gospel according to Jesus Christ, not according to Karl Marx.”

  Karl Marx, of course, was the father of communism. The guy who’d written Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto and those other books commies liked to read.

  But there was another line in Guilty of Treason that I hadn’t remembered from before. The characters were talking about how the communists would try to discredit Mindszenty and spread ugly rumors about him in an attempt to reduce his influence. Then the cardinal’s mother says, “It only takes a little poison to ruin a well on a farm, or to spoil a reputation in a big city.”

  Well, I started squirming in my seat when she said that. I mean, Downers Grove wasn’t exactly a big city, but planting a commie newspaper . . . wasn’t that a little like what she was talking about?

  I shook off the thought. It was just a silly joke and I wasn’t going to worry about it. I was relieved when Guilty of Treason was over and the next movie came on. Big Jim McLain starred John Wayne as a congressional investigator fighting commies in Hawaii. That was more like it!

  When the movies were over, we walked back to Eddie’s. Main Street went past Mr. McKenzie’s store and I stopped short when I saw it.

  The large front window was shattered and pieces of glass glittered all over the floor, as if someone had spilled a bag of ice. A brick lay among the shards. Mr. McKenzie stood outside, waving his hands in distress and talking loudly to the man who owned the hardware store. I could only catch part of what he was saying. “New glass . . . immediately . . . lose business . . .”

  I felt kind of dizzy as I remembered the words from the movie, It only takes a little poison . . .

  “Come on, Eddie,” I said. “Let’s go home down Odgen.” That was in the opposite direction.

  “Takes longer,” he said.

  “It’s a nice day,” I said. “I wanted to walk.”

  Eddie shrugged and we turned around. He didn’t seem to notice I was distracted, and I guess he didn’t see (or didn’t care) about Mr. McKenzie because he didn’t mention the broken glass either. Once we got to his house, we went straight to the bomb shelter his dad had built. It was in their basement. The walls were made of concrete blocks, creating a space just big enough for three bunk beds hung on the wall, a small table and a pantry full of canned goods, water and other supplies.

  “You see,” Eddie explained, “if the Soviets drop an atomic bomb on Chicago, those people are all dead. But my dad says Downers Grove is far enough away, so we stand a good chance of surviving. And look!” He pulled back a small curtain in the corner. “There’s even a toilet!”

  They also had a radio, a record player and a pile of books. “How long would you have to stay here?” I asked.

  “Depends,” he said. “Maybe two weeks after the blast. Then you could go out during the day, but you’re supposed to sleep inside the shelter for the next couple of months. Limit your radiation exposure.”

  He sounded so matter-of-fact. But it kind of scared me. My family didn’t have a shelter. What would happen to us if the Soviets dropped an atomic bomb on Chicago?

  Eddie knelt down and pulled out a box from under one of the beds. “We’ve got a gun in here too, to ward off any intruders, and Dad even bought a Geiger counter.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Measures the radiation, so you know if it’s safe to go outside.”

  Upstairs, a door slammed and we could hear Eddie’s dad start yelling. His words were slurred as if he’d been drinking.

  Eddie shoved the box back under the bed. “It did cost a lot of money, building a place like this,” he admitted. “Mom was kind of upset about it.”

  There was more screaming from upstairs. I wanted to say something to Eddie, wanted to say I understood. “Wish I had a Geiger counter that told me when my parents were in a bad mood,” I joked.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, but he didn’t laugh. “Me too.”

  I went to bed early that night and fell asleep quickly. But I dreamed of Mr. McKenzie and Cardinal Mindszenty in Eddie’s bomb shelter and they were reading the Daily Worker.

  12

  PAINT ON THE WINDOW

  When Saturday rolled around again, it was almost a relief. I’d face Mr. McKenzie, see that everyone had understood it was just a joke and life would go on.

  I got up extra-early and finished the paper route in plenty of time. I even had some breakfast and put on a clean white shirt before I went to the store. When I arrived, Mr. McKenzie was outside, washing his front window. Phew. He’d gotten it replaced. The brick probably had nothing to do with me planting the paper in his store. I wasn’t sure why the replacement glass was so dirty, but at least it was there.

  Mr. McKenzie grunted when he saw me. “So you showed up again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t sure you would.”

  I shrugged.

  “How’s your sister?” he asked in a kinder tone.

  “Better. I guess.” I’d gone with Mom to the hospital twice that week, but hadn’t been able to sneak off to see Mary Lou.

  He gave me a grimace that was almost a smile. “Grab a sponge,” he said. “Help me get this off.”

  That was when I realized it wasn’t dirt on the front window. It was paint. Someone had painted a hammer and sickle on the new glass. The symbol of communism. I picked up the sponge and scrubbed and scrubbed. It came off slowly. My insides felt rubbed raw too, guilt and regret peeling the lining of my stomach like old wallpaper.

  “Is this . . . because of me?” I asked finally.

  “Why would it be your fault, Tommy?” His tone was even, but there was an edge to his voice.

  He knew. I knew he knew. And I was just so tired. I wanted to stop hearing Mindszenty’s mother say, “It only takes a little poison” over and over in my head. Even so, I was a little bit surprised when I heard myself admit, “Because I was the one who planted that paper.”

  “Oh,” he said quietly, not looking at me, not stopping his scrubbing. “Then I imagine it is.”

  That wasn’t what I’d expected. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you intended,” he said. “The damage has been done. It’s easy to start a rumor. Much harder to stop it.”

  I scrubbed harder. The paint chips stuck under my fingernails like bits of dried blood.

  We finally got the last of the paint off and went inside. I was glad to sweep out the store and to move boxes. Little Skinny worked the register, but there were few customers that day. He was careful never to catch my eye.

  “Slow day,” Mr. McKenzie said once.

  I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mr. McKenzie having no customers, my sister needing to learn to walk again, my mom’s moods, it was all my fault. But thinking about it made me feel even worse
, so I focused on mopping the store’s floor like my life depended on it, noticing nothing but the stuck-on dirt.

  At noon, Mr. McKenzie put up the CLOSED FOR LUNCH sign. I took off my apron and hung it up. “I’ll see you next week,” I said.

  “No,” said Mr. McKenzie. “Come on back and have a sandwich, Tommy. I want to talk to you.”

  Now, I’ll admit it. I was scared. I’d heard that some shop owners kept a shotgun in the back room. He was probably really mad at me, and rightly so. Maybe he thought I’d thrown the brick too!

  “Tommy,” he repeated. “The back room.”

  As I followed him, I felt just like Gary Cooper in High Noon, walking down the street to confront the bad guys all alone.

  In the back room were a table and four chairs. Little Skinny was sitting at the table. Mr. McKenzie gestured for me to sit too, then pulled three root beers out of a cooler and sat down at the table.

  “Tommy, do you know about Senator McCarthy?” Mr. McKenzie asked.

  That puzzled me. I expected him to yell at me, not chat with me about politics. “’Course I know about him,” I said. “He’s rooting out all the communists in the government.”

  “That’s what he says he’s doing. Others think he’s just spreading fear and terror. Conducting a witch hunt, accusing innocent people and destroying their reputations for his own reasons.”

  I thought about Guilty of Treason again and how the communists had made up false charges against Mindszenty. Surely our own government wasn’t doing the same.

  Mr. McKenzie went on. “By planting that paper in my store, you were playing into that hysteria. Now, I hope this will all blow over. Just another mean rumor. We’re already known to be Gypsies, even if we did change our name to McKenzie. But if it doesn’t blow over, if the rumor keeps people out of the store . . . well, I don’t want to think about what would happen then.”

  “What would happen then?” I asked.

  “We might not be able to pay my wife’s medical bills. We might lose the store.”