“Just hang up the fiddle, you’re asking?”
“It’s a fair offer,” the banker with the curls of hair said as he continued to poke around the steers hanging from the ceiling. “I advised against it. I told Ed here to let you boys flail around some more. Have a bit of patience, I said, and you’ll be richer for it. But he’s got a big old sappy heart.”
I gestured at Billy. “Him and me? We used to work for you in your south lot. Near broke our backs working ten hours a day for sixty cents an hour.”
Cudahy said, “And you can come back to work for me if it’s a job you’re needing.”
“I know your type. You’re nothing but a bully with a flower in his lapel. You’d clean a man of his shirt while his kids picked dinner out of a trash barrel in their bare feet.”
“I hear you have a baby girl, yourself,” Cudahy said and cracked his neck.
“I ain’t selling. I’ve worked too hard to get this place running to quit before I even give it a chance to succeed.”
Billy came back over from the suds bucket, shaking off his hands as he tugged at his crotch. “Something tells me this one is more than pinochle buddies with that Dennison bum.”
Cudahy took out a bible of smoking papers and a rubber tobacco pouch to get the makings together for a cigarette. “Smart buzzard. But many more of stronger mind and deeper pocketbooks than you have faded like candlelight in this business. Either of you know of Sir Thomas Lipton? No? I drink his tea every morning. Well, he came here to Omaha some couple years ago hoping to export trade of bacon hogs back home to Mother England. Long story short, no farmer within a hundred miles of here was willing to sell their hogs. Man owned a fleet of yachts, a rice planation in South Carolina, half of Malta, the good half anyway, and still his venture to buy a few hogs in this city was an abject failure. Maybe someone in this room had something to do with that. And maybe that same somebody disposed of his plant and sent him back home across the Atlantic with a red hiney after spanking him good under his swallowtails.”
“I heard that fable, too,” I said. “Except for I heard you did more with his hiney than just spank it.”
Billy shook his head and had himself a small chuckle. “Sodomite.”
The word sent me into a fit of laughter. When it came to subtlety and innuendo, Billy was an artless creature.
Cudahy fumed. He was so perturbed that he left the paper and tobacco he’d been trying to roll into a cigarette on the counter like it was a failed experiment. “You run it over in your heads tonight boys, if you have any brains left in them. My offer stands until noon tomorrow.”
For the rest of the summer, shadows seemed to follow me wherever I went. Imagined or not, I saw them grow long even when the sun was high and remain long after it had set. I was sure I’d been followed home on more than one occasion.
On one evening in early August, after I put my newborn daughter to bed, I came downstairs and looked out my kitchen window. Standing there under our plum tree were two silhouetted figures. Soft moonlight illuminated their shapes: dome-crown fedoras, wide shoulders, knee-length overcoats. I grabbed my five-shot pistol and threw open the front door, but by then the shapes of what I thought were men had disappeared.
Two days later I was walking home from work after closing up shop. I said goodbye to my last customer of the day, Mrs. Francis Carver, a woman so delicate and reserved she called a chicken breast a chicken bosom when ordering her meat, for fear of using foul language. The last of the evening sun lighted the sky an apocalyptic crimson. Corncob smoke rose over rooftops in the distance. Fumes poured out from the packinghouse smokestacks. A pair of black leghorn chickens wandered about in the empty street.
I took a shortcut down an alley between two clapboard tenements. A cup of sugar was being transferred on a wash line from one apartment to another. When I got halfway down the alley, two figures appeared at the opening of Izzard Avenue, looking much like the shadowy figures I’d seen standing in my front yard. A trash can lid rattled to the ground. Laundry smoke poured out of a building pipe. I stared at the figures. I couldn’t see anything except the shapes of their bodies.
The two men didn’t move. One of them said something to the other, and they each lifted a heavy object from inside their coats. I balked for a moment and then sprinted back down the alley. With a giant heave of my shoulder, I busted through a locked door in the building to my left that led into a chop suey restaurant closed up for the night. I sprinted through the kitchen and past the sitting area and came out onto the north side of the building. I needed to get off the streets.
A block away I saw light still glowing in the window of the Abbott Grocer, where I shopped once a week. I hustled inside and approached the register where the owner, Sal Abbott, eighty years old and wrinkled as wastebasket paper, stood with a weak smile. I smiled back and looked around the store, trying to remain calm.
“Hey there, Pat. Everything all right?” the old clerk asked. He was smoking a briar pipe with a nicotine cup that covered the bowl like a lid on a kitchen pot. The nicotine cup was clicked open, and smoke was coming out of every hole in the old man’s head. A little bit even seemed to leak from his ears.
“Sure, sure,” I said and slowed my breathing. “How’s business these days, Sal?”
“Slow,” the old man said, then corrected himself. “Slow but steady enough.”
“That’s alright, Sal. You don’t need to be afraid of telling me the truth.”
“Is something wrong, Patrick?”
I looked out the window. “I think a couple hooligans were trying to rob me on the street. Been a lot of muggings going around lately. I dunno. Maybe I’m just jumpy.”
“I’ve had it with this city,” the old man said. “Used to be everybody cared for everybody else. Cared about their welfare, how they were holding up. And they meant it, their caring. Nowadays you can’t shake a man’s hand without keeping your other on your pocketbook.”
I nodded in agreement and rubbed my hair after taking off my worn cap.
“Tell you what, old timer, I need to pick up some trimmings to take home to the wife,” I said and loaded up a cloth sack as I went around the aisles, hoping to buy some time in a public place. I collected four cans of evaporated milk, enamel cleaner, peas, lemon snaps, a loaf of wholemeal, a box of puffed wheat. I returned to the front of the store and set the bag down on the counter.
“My credit still good here, Sal?” I asked.
The old man stared at the bulging bag. The total sum of the groceries couldn’t have been more than four dollars. His voice quivered. “I can’t. Not anymore. One of Mr. Dennison’s men come by and told me no more credit’s to be given to anybody until they pay what they—”
I raised my hand. “What about a trade? I got some good meat I could bring in tomorrow, first thing.”
“No,” Sal said. His voice was so soft it was barely audible. He rubbed his craggy hands over the counter as if smoothing it out. “That just won’t do. I’m sorry, Pat.”
I nodded. I understood.
I turned to exit, leaving the bag on the counter. “No hard feelings, old man. I guess I’ll be seeing you around the bend sometime.”
The old man stammered and told me to hold on one minute. He reached for a can behind the register where a sundry of toiletries took up their own separate section. He added a box of soap and tooth powder to my bag. Then he took out a handful of small change from the heavy can and counted it out in his palm. Even with his thick bifocals and plenty of light, it took him more than a minute to parcel out four dollars’ worth of coin. He threw the coins into his till and pushed the bag toward me.
“For the family,” Sal said.
“I couldn’t possibly—” I stuttered.
“Quit it now. You’re a good boy. Miss Sally told me so.”
“Miss Sally?” I asked. “Old Miss Sally Jenkins? She comes in every Thursday
for her kiszka and tongue loaf.”
“She says you’re the only man around here who has faith enough in folks to treat them like they’re decent even if they ain’t. She tells me you’re just about aces. Loves your little shop. Plus, I know you got a baby girl at home.”
I touched the bag. “But you said there’s no more credit.”
“Store can’t give credit. But I can give credit,” Sal said and pointed at his chest with his thumb. “You can owe me.”
As I was stumbling to find the words to express my gratitude, the two men who’d followed me into the alley entered the grocer. They wore rubberized jackets and carried full-choke shotguns inside their overcoats, the muzzles visible through the bottoms of their knee-length flaps. They stood in the doorway like spirits, saying nothing.
“Sal,” I said and waved my hand. “Go on and get out of here.”
The old man didn’t budge.
“Whatever you’ve come looking for, you’ve found too much of it,” I told both men and stepped forward two paces with my fists clenched.
“Says the chump who’s been running away from us for four blocks,” the first man croaked, his voice as deep as a bullfrog’s. An old knife scar ran up the side of his neck.
“What do you want?”
“We come at behest of the boss,” the second one said. “Wants us to bring you in for a little chat.”
I nodded and was about to go along when I heard a loud metal click. Old Sal had gotten out his ten-gauge from under the counter. He snapped open the back action and checked both barrels and then sighted the gun between the two men standing just inside the front door of his shop.
“It’s loaded,” Sal said. His frail arms trembled from the shotgun’s weight.
“It’s alright, Sal. Put it down. No need mixing up in this,” I said.
The first bruiser lifted his own shotgun out of his coat, swinging it up into his arms by the strap on his shoulder. He was as quick at drawing the pump-action as most men—even veteran gunslingers—were with pistols, maybe faster. The second man took his weapon out much slower and aimed it as carefully as a hunter taking sight at a whitetail. “Best listen to him, old man. You got a shotgun, I got a shotgun, my friend’s got a shotgun. This could all get awful messy in an awful hurry.”
Old Sal cocked back both hammers. “I’m eighty-one years old and come down with the consumption and my wife’s been passed on for a decade now. So, no, I don’t reckon I’ll be putting down nothing.”
“You can barely hold that thing,” the second man said. “How do you think you’ll fare when it comes to hitting anything more than air?”
“Fair enough to put a little buckshot in your bellies.”
I stepped in between the old man and the bruisers with my hands raised. “There ain’t no need for this, fellers. I’ll come along like you say. Just everyone put down their metal.”
“The old man goes first.”
I looked back to Sal and saw he wasn’t of any mind to lower his weapon. His arms shook like the shotgun weighed fifty pounds.
A long moment passed. I kept my hands raised and was walking toward the men, but it did no good as the thug on the left let loose of both barrels and hit Sal square in his chest. The slugs thundered through his heart and sent him flying back against the wall. He shattered the beveled mirror behind him. His shotgun fell to the floor and harmlessly sprayed buckshot into the ceiling.
I cried out and charged the man who still had his barrels loaded. Before he could pull the trigger, I bolted him in the side of the head so hard he stumbled into a tall pyramid stack of canned goods. The tower of cans hadn’t fully collapsed before I picked him off the ground by his shirt collar and walloped him four more times until his eyes rolled into the back of his head. I could feel the man’s brain knocked loose in his skull, swimming. I lifted him up higher and threw two more punches square in his neck, hoping to collapse his windpipe and let him suffocate from a broken throat.
The man gurgled and his whole body went limp before I threw him off and turned to get a beat on the other man, who hadn’t any shells left in his gun. But as soon as I got off the floor I was back on it, popped in the teeth with the barrel of the second man’s shotgun. My vision blurred, and my eyes went crooked. I lifted myself up to my knees when the thug whacked me in the mouth a second time. I fell motionless to the ground among the rolling cans of dessert prunes and stewed tomatoes, my sight as bright as lamplight and my ears ringing for a brief moment before another blow to my head passed everything into darkness.
XV
AFTER I SET Cudahy’s pair of wagon ponies free, I crested the top of the hill and stumbled down the other side where Billy and I had hitched our own horse to the trunk of a spruce. It was so dark I could barely see five feet in front of me. The terrain steep with old snow that had melted and refrozen as slick as pond ice. Each footfall sounded like snapping twigs. My boots, a cheap pair of two-dollar monarchs, had soaked through the leather. I raced as fast as I could manage down the slope.
Twice I lost my footing and fell on my backside so hard I bruised my tailbone. I tripped and rolled like a barrel before stopping my momentum by clawing at the ground. I could barely breathe through the burlap of the gunnysack mask and ripped it off my head and stuffed it down the front of my trousers. When I came upon the hollow where we’d left our nag, the entire spot was empty.
I panted and lit a match to aid my vision.
I should’ve mounted one of Cudahy’s horses for myself.
“Goddamn you, Billy, where are you?” I called out, waited, heard nothing.
Billy had abandoned me.
“Goddamn,” I said out loud to myself. “Goddamnit! Where’s the goddamn moon when you need it?”
I collected my breath. The cold air burned my lungs. I sat down in the snow and heaved so hard my stomach nearly burst. There was no place in the world as quiet as a forest at night in the dead of winter. Tree limbs creaked in the wind.
I shouted again, “Goddamn you, Billy! Goddamn you!”
“Hey!” Billy hollered. His voice was part yell, part whisper. “Hey, you idiot. Quit your bellyaching. I’m over here.”
I looked in every direction. Couldn’t see a thing.
“Over here. To the west.”
I lit another match, held it out like a beacon. Billy had moved our horse. He was down by a split of stream that branched off from the main creek, hidden among a making of dead trees. I climbed down in a dash. When I got to the bottom of the embankment I accidentally put a boot through thin creek ice. Water as cold as water gets. I was so furious I shoved Billy to the ground.
“You’re a moron,” I scolded. “Why in the hell did you move that nag? Goddamn. I couldn’t see a thing.”
Billy got back on his feet and procured a bent cigarette from his vest pocket. Before lighting the tobacco, he petted Silversmith on her nose and blew a calming warm whisper into her left ear until it twitched from the sensation. “She was getting spooky.”
“Spooky? She’s a goddamn horse tied to a tree in the middle of nowhere and can’t see a thing. Of course she was going to get spooky. That’s why you tie up a horse in the first goddamn place, so they don’t run off when they get spooky. Goddamn you, I thought you took off on me. How the hell was I supposed to find you?”
“Just like you did.”
I spat twice and made business searching through the bank valises that Billy had tied onto each side of our horse like saddlebags. I lit another match as I clawed through all the coin. There was enough color in the bags to fatten us both for five or six years, maybe longer if we budgeted the gold.
Neither of us would have to do another scrap of work until we were nearly forty.
“What the hell took you so long?” Billy asked.
“He knows,” I said. “Cudahy. He knows it’s me.”
Billy shrugged. “So much for
the masks.”
I snapped the valises shut. “He doesn’t know who you are. Far as I could tell.”
“I’m sure he’ll figure it out. Or the police.”
“I bought us some time before they call the police. That’s what took me so long.”
Billy popped a match, inhaled deeply, and mounted our horse. “How’d you manage that? Christ. You killed the bastard, didn’t you?”
I hoisted myself up, sitting bareback behind Billy. “He’s going to need a new set of teeth, that’s for certain. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Billy put his heels into Silversmith’s rump, and we bolted off at a canter through the glinting trees. We rode for ten miles, crossing around the outside of town just to be safe. At one juncture we had to clip off a section of wire fence to pass through a dead soybean field. I sniffled and spat phlegm the whole way. The huge sacks of coins, an extra hundred pounds of cargo, tired our horse in a good hurry. Soon all she could do was trot despite Billy’s encouragement for speed. I told him to go easy on the old girl. I’d set loose Cudahy’s wagon mares before I left the scene, I said, and it would be some time, probably daylight, before Edward and his driver would come across another traveler able to help them back into the city.
There were still five hours left in the night.
“Imagine that,” I said. “Imagine that bastard rolling around in the snow looking for his teeth until sunup.”
Billy considered the image. “This ends badly, you know. Maybe not for a while, but eventually this all goes against us.”
“I’m glad he knows it was me. I was almost hoping he’d figure it.”
“Well, wish granted.”
“Two hours ago you were telling me to calm down.”
“I’m calm.”
“You ain’t either,” I said.
“Quit talking, would you? I’m tired.”
I groaned. I searched my tattered coat for a pocket bottle I’d been saving for the glorious and wealthy ride back to our hideaway. I patted my biggest pocket. The bottle had shattered. A great wet stain all the way through to my long johns. A pint of quality brandy gone to waste. Most probably it ruptured somewhere during my scramble down the hill looking for Billy. My first notion was anger, but it quickly receded. There’d be plenty of time for celebratory brandy in the near future. Nothing but time. In ten days I might be drinking ten-year-old purple for ten dollars a pour at ten in the forenoon in a city so far north the temperature wouldn’t spike past ten degrees until April or later. I put my lips together. We ambled over a frosted plate of land so desolate that if we didn’t have our bearings it would be an easy guess to say we were a hundred miles between any kind of city in any direction.
World, Chase Me Down Page 13
