“I don’t own any guns, friend,” I said and pulled at the collar of Cudahy’s gifted overcoat. “I didn’t even own a decent coat until a minute ago.”
“Friend, you say? We’re friends now?”
“Yeah. Good old pals. Everything’s jake between us.”
Cudahy shook his head and scratched butter onto a piece of toast. “We need a foreman for our new knackery out in San Francisco, by the by,” he said after a heavy moment, anxious to switch gears as he continued to butter his toast. “You’d be a good candidate, if it’s a job you’re needing. I’ll give you a traveling advance, put it on receipt. Two hundred dollars would get you to the coast in fine form with a little extra for sport on the side. Then you can report to our supervisor out there. Mr. Jim Davis. I’ll give you a contract.”
“You’ll get me out of Omaha, you mean.”
“It’s a job offer,” Cudahy said. “An honest one with good pay.”
I coughed again in five loud successions. My hanky full of blotted sickness. “A good kick in the stomach would be just about as pleasant a concern.”
“You ought to go to a hospital. You’re in miserable shape.”
I looked about the room while I dabbed my mouth with my pocket cloth. On a tray along a far counter, crystal decanters with big knob tops were filled with enticing amber liquid. Probably some of the best liquor in the Midwest. “I’d be better off with a lashing of whiskey if you can spare it.”
“At this hour? How long have you been on the bum?”
“Oh, give me a swish,” I said. “It’ll clear up my lungs.”
Cudahy hesitated but poured a swig of campfire despite his reservations. I accepted the heavy glass with two hands, cradling it like a cup of coffee warming the palms, and knocked it back in one slug. Before the whiskey hit the bottom of my stomach, Cudahy’s son, sixteen-year-old Eddie Junior, came into the parlor. He was dressed for school in a tunic with knitted knee socks and flannel trousers with a coordinating academy jacket. A large gold crest was sewn into the jacket like a police badge over his heart pocket, a bundle of books slung over his shoulder.
“I’m off for academy, father,” he said, standing just inside the room. His hair was slicked down with brilliantine and he kept pawing at a particularly troublesome tuft of cowlicks on the back of his head.
Cudahy looked back. “Have you got your lunch pail?”
“Yes, father.”
I stood and approached Eddie Junior with an open hand, offering a shake. “Little Eddie Junior, I presume. How do you do? I’m Pat Crowe.”
We shook hands.
“Yes, son,” Cudahy said. “Mr. Crowe here used to work for us.”
I was still shaking Eddie’s hand. “Your Aunt Hattie used to be my wife, and your little cousin Matilda is my daughter.”
Cudahy lunged off his armchair. “Off you go now, son. The academy won’t stand tardiness.”
Eddie Junior smiled faintly and bid us farewell as he left the room. Once he was gone, I went to the mirrored liquor table and helped myself to another pour from the crystal decanter. I swallowed half of it and watched Eddie Junior, heir to the Cudahy packinghouse fortune, slink his way down the street from the parlor window.
“He hasn’t got any earmuffs or a scarf, even,” I said, gesturing with my glass. “He’ll catch cold like I did walking around like that.”
“You didn’t have to tell him all that about Hattie and Matilda. He’s got nothing to do with it,” Cudahy said.
I finished my second helping of whiskey and set the glass down on top of an oak music cabinet with a hard clank. “The truth is nasty business.”
“Suppose I’ll be having an interesting dinner conversation tonight. I thank you for that.”
I laughed. “And what will you tell him?”
“The truth. Every nasty part of it, as you say. Including yours.”
“You’re a good man, Mr. Cudahy,” I said disdainfully. “Thanks for the coat. I suppose I’ll cork off.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To find out who you really were.”
“And what did you find?”
“That you’re a good man, just like I said.” I sniffled and thumbed my nose. I spun around slowly, admiring the Cudahy family portraits on the walls, each set in a gaudy frame. In one painting there was Edward with his son Eddie Junior and five of their wirehaired terriers at a dog show, all smiles and leashes and wagging tails. In another, Edward, his wife Sue Anne, and their children—Eddie Junior and his two sisters—posed against a washed background. A third showed Edward and his family again; this one while on vacation for a weekend of river fishing. Edward Junior held up a dangling line of glimmering trout.
“A good man,” I repeated. “You and your family. A portrait of wholehearted American goodness.”
“And what’re you?”
I was halfway to the door. “I don’t know what I am.”
Cudahy sat back down, exhausted. The man was so fat that his trousers bunched up around his crotch as if they’d been inflated. He was confused and still had bits of egg in his teeth. “That’s enough of the cryptic stuff. What do you want, Pat? You came here for something, and I’d like to know what it is you think you’re owed, exactly.”
“A good secondhand coat and a nibble of whiskey is all,” I said and examined the cream overcoat. It was the finest garment ever to dawn my shoulders.
“Tell me straight. I don’t like being goaded.”
I was in the doorway with my back to Cudahy. I leaned an arm against the frame and shook out a few more wet coughs. Finally I turned around so Cudahy could get a good look at me in all my inexpungible misery. My jaw muscles worked in and out as I chewed my anger, my bottom lip trembling. “I just wanted you to see.”
Cudahy waited for me to say more.
I gave him nothing.
“See what?” he asked.
“What hell has made of me,” I said without a shred of emotion. I put on my hat as clumsily as if it were a giant pot and left the mansion. The front door, heavy as a drawbridge, slammed shut behind me with an ominous thud.
A new nickeled morning brandished new hopes. Yes, I thought as I buttoned Cudahy’s oversized overcoat to the collar, I will have my story written forever across this mighty continent. I will secure my place in the annals of this monster land.
There was nothing in my pockets but an old apple, which I’d been eating the night before. I headed east. Tails of ice fog weaved between the magnificent houses. Snow fell in pellets and the sun appeared to be only a foot high over a city dizzy with winter. The first bits of quailing daylight in shards. My muscles corded up in the cold. In the giant coat, I must have appeared like a hobo who’d hastily stolen the garment off a rack in a department store without caring to measure its size.
I turned left on Dewey Avenue. How the winter winds had wrecked the city. Fallen branches and roof shingles were cloven about front yards. A telegraph cable, thick as a corn snake, lay on an opposite sidewalk like a forgotten garden hose left out overnight. So assured was I in my rightness that I deciphered my own crystallomancy in the hiccupping morning stars. A smattering of blackbirds lifted off a naked tree branch, cawing across the page of the sky like spilled blots from an ink pot.
This was not about redemption.
Redemption was a fanciful notion for salvation. For repair. There was no repairing anything. Only bringing obscurity into brightness, only cracking open the machinery so that the world might have a good long look at the hidden anatomy. Look upon these innards and judge for yourself what I have done, the only thing I could do.
It would take an equal or perhaps even greater measure of villainy to expose what I hated most about the villainous world. The children in rags who came pawing at the gigantic carriages parked along the decorated boulevards, and the men inside who tossed out a few coins on the
street only to shoo the children away. The stockyarders who worked for half a dollar a day only to have to pay twice that for the same meat they labored over to fill their families’ tables.
Whole neighborhoods of shacks constructed with scraps from the city dump. An impoverished wife who loses her husband to cholera and her son to influenza in the same month. A clapboard tenement full of the elderly and the widowed and barefoot children, jammed into a single room, unable to both refill their coal bins and eat ever day of the week. It was one or the other. Warmth or supper, take your pick. The holiday handouts of frozen turkeys and children’s toys for the poor that were bought and paid for by their own political patronage. The generosity of the wealthy nothing but a long-running gag.
I walked the city all morning just as I had all night before, fueled by a hate so compound that the word itself—hate—was as insufficient a vessel for encompassing the emotion as a cup assigned to contain the sky. But there was no other word for it. No other. Hate, I am not a phoenix rising. Hate, there is only this pile of ashes. Hate, I used to be something else, but I have not transformed. Do not look upon me anew. You have seen me before. I am that hated thing, and I wear no mask. I am not standing up to the wicked. I am the wicked. And I have never been anything else but this all along.
XIV
THE FIRST SEVEN months of my marriage to Hattie passed in a spall that felt more like feverish hallucination than actuality. Soon enough the grandeur of it all would smear in my memory, and the details would fade completely as a dream once so vivid is forgotten not long after waking. Hattie and I moved into our little pink house on Orchard Avenue. Spring arrived in a giant noise. Thunderheads dropped hailstones on our catslide roof seemingly every other day; the Missouri River was high up with floodwater, and even once a skinny cyclone came rushing down Hickory Street not more than four blocks from our house, bursting store windows and tossing mules over rooftops, a wake of glass dusting the avenue as completely as snowfall.
One day in April I returned home early from work on a balmy afternoon. Hattie was lounging on a divan with her legs spread open in front of an elderly white-bearded man seated on a stool. Her skirt was bunched up around her knees as the man lowered his head between her thighs.
My first instinct was to get the cattle knife off my hip and slit the man’s throat open as wide as daylight. I was glad to have restrained myself from such action long enough for Hattie to explain that the man was her physician, Dr. Greg Arnold.
I offered him a glass of cold yak, and he politely declined.
The reason for his visit was the tardiness of my wife’s menstruation. His words, not mine. That doctor was one odd skate. “One of my many specialties is urology,” he said. “You can tell a great bundle just by the color of one’s urine. Why, there are over twenty different hues.” He produced a wheeled chart that detailed all the possible variations. Each meant something different. “There’s chartreuse yellow, saffron, pear, chiffon, sun gold, mustard, and even a greenish tint if one were to eat too much asparagus.” He went on and on about all the lovely uses for harvesting urine: neutralizing jelly fish stings, manufacturing gun powder, textile dyes, fertilizer.
Like I said, that old sawbones was an odd skate.
After his visit, Hattie stood up and led me in front of our cinnamon wood mirror by the fireplace. I put my arms around her waist and nestled my chin in the soft nook of her neck. When we both looked up at our shared reflection in the mirror. Hattie lifted her blouse, took my left hand, and placed it gently on her belly.
She said, “You’re going to be a father.”
Our daughter Matilda Rose was born on the last day of June. The three of us curled together in a bed draped with cheesecloth to keep the mosquitoes away. The first time I kissed my daughter’s chubby pink cheek, the first time her little hand wrapped around my pinkie finger, I thought: this world could not be more grand.
Full days of glad in our butcher shop: hogs and steer split in halves and hanging in the cooling room, kept down to temperature with an ammonia machine; selling finely wrapped packages of bird and cutlet over a clean pine table. The smell of my wife’s hair in my nostrils and the vision of my daughter’s laughing eyes in my head kept a smile on my face until quitting time. Then, walking home as the sun dropped out of the sky, saying goodbye to Billy for the night with a few dollars more in our pockets than when the day began. A wife and baby girl in good health. A home in fine repair.
All of this could have repeated on and on until forever.
None of it ever would.
They are but dreams of things long ruined, long gone. After a certain point, the past is as vertiginous as looking down after a tall climb.
All that’s left is dizziness. All that’s left is the empty.
Perhaps it was how it had to be with those fleeting instances of inexplicable love: always brief and, maybe partly because of that brevity, always lasting.
Let me say this: my greatest fear when I became a father was that one day my daughter would discover just how wicked the world could be. Not more than seven months later, I would be committing one of the most wicked crimes in the world by stealing another father’s child not more than fifty yards from his front door.
Come the height of that summer, at early candlelight on a particularly boiling Friday in July, a Victoria shaped like a giant slipper pulled up to the curbstone in front of our butcher shop. The coachman hollered out their arrival and spit masticated plug over the leeward side. Dark green hail clouds were making in the western sky. The two men who exited the carriage each bore a significant heft, and the Victoria rose a good six inches off its axle when free of their weight. They entered our butchery ten minutes before closing time. One of them pointed at the advertisement painted on the picture window: EVERY CUT! NECKS, RUMP ROASTS, AND OXTAIL SOUPS! CREDIT GIVEN. ALL WELCOME.
I was counting down the till in my batwing bow tie and Billy was in back dressing a cow for market when the husky pair approached the counter.
“What do you say, gentlemen?” I offered in my best salesman voice.
“Powerful hot day,” the first man said as he pawed his handkerchief about his face. A mustache of beaded sweat coated his upper lip. He was bald, with a chin that sagged like a turkey wattle, and wore a seersucker suit so thin it was nearly transparent. “Hot enough to peel the scales off a lizard, yes sir.”
“What can I do you for? We’re running a special on veal chops by the half dozen and—”
“My name is Edward Cudahy,” the man said and tapped his cane on the counter. He had a voice that could shake a house an inch off its foundation, even in whisper. He pointed the tip of his cane toward the window. “I have a large packinghouse myself hard by.”
I slammed the till shut and studied Cudahy over something good. I’d spent my first six months in town working for the man and had yet to see his likeness in so much as a three-cent portrait, until now.
“Billy,” I hollered into the back of the store. “Hey, Billy boy, come on out here and meet none other than Mr. Ed Cudahy.”
The second man who came in with Cudahy went around poking each hanging carcass as if to make sure they weren’t plastic. He had hands the size of a fielder’s mitt and drake tails at his neck. Billy emerged from the refrigerated cutting room with so much blood on his apron he might have been field dressing a walrus. Every time he got to skinning a cow after hoisting it up in the air with a block and tackle, he messed himself worse than a back alley surgeon. He went right up to Cudahy and forcibly shook his hand and slapped him twice on the shoulder and patted his chest hard, saying, “Hell, Mr. Cudahy. Color me tickled. The king of pork town hisself. How do you do?”
He got cow blood all over Cudahy’s hand, suit, and laundered shirt.
Cudahy broke away and set to dancing around in place as if a waitress had dropped a bowl of hot soup in his lap. “Good God, son. Haven’t you got the sense God gave a goo
se?”
Billy ran back behind the butcher block and dunked his hands in a suds bucket.
I thought that was pretty funny. “He gets excited some whenever a big deal comes through our doors.”
“He liked to ruin my suit,” Cudahy said as he blotted at the red handprint on his chest with his pocket linen. “Ain’t you got any seltzer on hand?”
“There’s a soda shop down the road a piece,” I said.
Cudahy quit fiddling with his clothes. They were ruined beyond wash. Seersucker stained easier than paper. He thumped the side of the till with his cane. “Enough of this shilly-shallying around. You have three thousand dollars in unpaid customer accounts. Not to mention you still owe at least that much to your investor.”
“How’s that any of your business?”
“Everything in South Omaha is my business, and I just so happen to own this tract of land. The man with the curls there is my banker. He tells me that if you can’t pay off your balance in thirty days’ time you default on your loan.”
“I didn’t take out a loan with a bank.”
“Tell that to Tom Dennison,” Cudahy said and took out a flat bill book from his suit pocket. “I spoke to the man just this morning. He and I play a little pinochle at the Jackson Street club on Fridays come lunchtime. I’m willing to offer you full title on this cocklebur outfit. Now you won’t find that kind of deal anywhere else. That’s six thousand dollars free and clear to shut your doors by Monday.”
“A real bona fide offer, huh?”
“Either you walk away clean of debt this weekend or in a serious hole at the end of the month and I strip this place down to the tin and you can deal with Mr. Dennison directly about the balance owed. But, let me tell you, he’s a tad prickly when it comes to finances.”
World, Chase Me Down Page 12
