The Pushcart War

by Jean Merrill

Maxie Hammerman got up then. “I will explain,” said Maxie, who had been doing some serious thinking since the day he threw his hammer through his own shop window.

  “Conditions are very bad in the streets,” Maxie said. “People are getting mad at the trucks. They should have got mad a long time ago. But everybody was scared. Who wants to argue with a truck?

  “However, there comes a time,” Maxie said. “People begin to complain, and the trucks do not want the blame for tying up the streets. So they have to find somebody else to blame.

  “Who shall they blame?” Maxie asked. “Taxis? No, there are too many taxis. Cars? No, too many cars. The trucks do not want to fight the cars and the taxis. That would make too many more people mad at them. But pushcarts—how many are there?”

  “There are hundreds of pushcarts,” said Harry the Hot Dog (“Harry’s Hots & Homemade Sauerkraut”).

  “Five hundred and nine, to be exact,” said Maxie Hammerman. “More than most people think, because pushcarts stay in their own neighborhoods. They are not rushing all over the city to make the traffic worse. Stop a man on the street and ask him how many pushcarts has he seen today. He will tell you, ‘Three—maybe four’ —although there are five hundred and nine carts licensed to do business in this city.

  “However,” Maxie added. “Even five hundred and nine is a small number beside taxis and cars.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Papa Peretz. “they could kill us all, and the traffic would still be terrible.”

  “So then they will have to find someone else to blame,” said Maxie Hammerman. “Motorcycles, maybe. Or grocery carts, such as the ladies take to the supermarket. Then people will see how silly it is.”

  “By then,” said Old Anna,” we will all be dead.”

  “That is correct,” said Maxie Hammerman. “We will all be dead. Unless—” Maxie picked up a hammer and held it as if he were about to hit something a quick hard blow.

  “Unless what?” said Frank the Flower, seizing Maxie’s arm, in case he should be about to throw the hammer through his window again.

  “Unless we fight back,” said Maxie Hammerman, pulling his arm free and whamming the hammer down on the table in front of him. “I say the pushcarts have got to fight.”

  “Of course, we have got to fight,” said Old Anna.

  “Fight the trucks?” said Papa Peretz. “How can the pushcarts fight the trucks?”

  “Maybe you’d rather be dead?” said Old Anna.

  “Naturally, we wouldn’t,” said Harry the Hot Dog. “But how can we fight the trucks?”

  “Listen to me, Harry,” said Old Anna. “First, you decide to fight. Then you ask me how.”

  “All right,” said Harry the Hot Dog. “Fight! So now I ask you—how?”

  “Yes, General Anna, we are listening,” said Eddie Moroney, bowing to Old Anna. (This is how Old Anna came to be known as General Anna. Eddie Moroney called her General at the meeting at Maxie Hammerman’s shop, and the name seemed to suit her.)

  When it came to a vote, all the pushcart peddlers were with General Anna. They realized that they had to stick together. And they had to fight.

  “But how?” Harry the Hot Dog asked again. “You want me to sell poison hot dogs to all the truck drivers maybe?”

  General Anna shook her head. “It’s okay by me you should poison the truck drivers. Only you might get the poison dogs mixed up with the regular, and then you’ll be giving the poison to a good customer.”

  “We need a secret weapon,” said Papa Peretz. “Like a big bomb.”

  “For carrying around bombs, you get arrested,” said General Anna.

  To everyone’s surprise, it was Carlos (“Cartons Flattened and Removed”) who had the best idea. Carlos had never spoken out in a meeting before.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Secret Weapon

  Carlos was known to the pushcart peddlers as the most skillful carton-flattener in the Lower East Side section of New York City. Carlos’ business was to go around to small stores that had clean cardboard cartons which they wished to be rid of. With two or three deft motions, Carlos would flatten the cartons and carefully stack them on his pushcart. Carlos was the only flattener in the business who could stack to a height of twelve feet without the cartons slipping off.

  When he had a load, Carlos would deliver the cartons to another small business that needed a few cartons. This was a very practical business as Carlos did not have to pay out any money for the goods he sold. The storekeepers were glad to get rid of the cartons. Carlos’ only expense was for his pushcart.

  One reason Carlos never said much was that he spoke only in Spanish—except to give the price of a load of cartons. That he could do in English. He could also follow the main idea of a conversation in English. But to reply to a complicated matter, he preferred to speak in Spanish.

  Carlos’ idea at the meeting at Maxie Hammerman’s was too complicated for him to explain in English. Maxie Hammerman had to explain it for him. Maxie Hammerman spoke Spanish and twelve other languages. He had to, being the Pushcart King.

  “Carlos wishes to say,” Maxie Hammerman began, “that the problem is to make people see who is blocking the streets.”

  “Certainly,” said Harry the Hot Dog. “But how?”

  “Carlos has described to me a very clever pea shooter that his youngest boy has made,” said Maxie Hammerman. “Carlos says that the pea shooter shoots not just ordinary peas, but peas with a pin stuck in them.”

  “Children!” said Papa Peretz. “You have to watch them every minute. For example, my grandson—”

  “Wait, Papa Peretz,” said Maxie Hammerman, “we are coming to the point. The point is that Carlos has told his boy that he must never use such a pea shooter to shoot at people as it would not be so nice to put a pin in someone’s arm.”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Papa Peretz.

  “Wait,” said Maxie Hammerman. “Carlos’ little boy replies, ‘Then what good is the shooter?’ Carlos does not know how to answer, and he feels bad because the shooter is very cleverly made, and it is a shame if the boy cannot use it at all.

  “Then suddenly,” said Maxie Hammerman, “when Papa Peretz says at this meeting that we need a secret weapon, Carlos is happy. He sees what the shooter is good for.”

  “To put pins in the truck drivers?” said Harry the Hot Dog.

  Carlos shook his head.

  “No,” Maxie Hammerman explained. “It is Carlos’ belief that even truck drivers are people. He has told his little boy that he must never shoot at people, and he does not wish to set a bad example.”

  “Then what good is the pea shooter?” asked Frank the Flower.

  Carlos spoke very excitedly to Maxie Hammerman in Spanish.

  “Aha,” said Maxie Hammerman. “Carlos says we will not, of course, shoot at the truck drivers. What we will shoot at is the truck tires. He says we will kill the truck tires.”

  “Bang!” said Carlos, pointing at an imaginary truck tire. “Bang, bang!” It was a word he had learned from his boy.

  “Then goma vacia!” Carlos said.

  “Goma vacia,” Maxie Hammerman explained, meant in Spanish ‘flat tire.’

  “Si,” Carlos nodded, blowing his breath out and sinking to the floor as if he were a truck tire going flat.

  Morris the Florist took off his hat. “Such an idea!” he said. “For such an idea Carlos could be President of the U.S.A.”

  “President!” said Papa Peretz. “How can the President speak Spanish?”

  “Never mind the President,” said Harry the Hot Dog. “It is a good idea.”

  “Good?” said General Anna. “It is beautiful. I see the picture. The question is: Who is blocking the traffic? All right. We kill the truck tires, and suddenly everywhere in the streets—big, dead trucks! They can’t move. They are blocking everything. People look around. In every block they see six, seven, eight dead trucks. People will see who is blocking the traffic.”

  “Of course,”
said Mr. Jerusalem, “it is not such a nice thing to do.”

  “Not nice!” said Morris the Florist. “Compared to smashing a man’s cart so badly that it can never be fixed, it is a very nice thing to do.”

  “No matter how nice,” said Eddie Moroney, “we should not let the truck drivers see us doing it. There could be a difference of opinion.”

  “Naturally,” said Papa Peretz. “It should be a surprise attack. We will keep the pea shooters in our pockets. We wait until the truck driver looks the other way. Then, quick—pffft! Then we look the other way.”

  “Just so,” said General Anna. “So it should look like an accidental flat tire.”

  “And all of a sudden there will be so many accidents,” said Harry the Hot Dog.

  “Yes,” said Maxie Hammerman, figuring on a piece of paper. “If there are five hundred and nine pushcarts, and every man who has a pushcart—”

  “And every lady,” said General Anna.

  “And every lady,” agreed Maxie Hammerman. “If every pushcart peddler kills only six tires a day, that would be quite a few accidents.”

  “I am all for the accidents,” said Frank the Flower, “but where can we get five hundred and nine pea shooters?”

  “We will make them in my shop,” said Maxie Hammerman. “Carlos’ boy will show us how.”

  “Can we also make peas?” asked Papa Peretz.

  “Peas, we can grow,” said Eddie Moroney. “I have a window box, and already I have grown onions and beans good enough to eat.”

  “Good for you, Eddie Moroney,” said General Anna. “But I am not going to wait for peas to grow in your window box. Much less to dry out. We must attack at once.”

  “We can buy the peas,” said Harry the Hot Dog.

  “Yes,” said Maxie Hammerman. “I will order one ton of peas in the morning.”

  “And a ton of pins,” said General Anna.

  “A ton!” said Mr. Jerusalem. “But how much will so many pins cost? Even scrap metal junk by the ton—it adds up. I should know. Scrap metal is my line. And one ton of new high-quality pins—who can afford? Not to mention one ton of peas, also an expense.”

  “Pin money we will need,” Maxie Hammerman agreed. “And I will get it.”

  “From where?” asked Papa Peretz.

  “I know a lady,” said Maxie Hammerman. “She can afford to buy a few pins.”

  “A few!” said Mr. Jerusalem “One ton is a few?”

  “Who is the lady?” asked General Anna.

  “By the name of Wenda Gambling,” said Maxie Hammerman.

  “From the movies?” said Harry the Hot Dog. “You would ask her?”

  “Why not?” said Maxie Hammerman. “In my line I have to know a lot of people. Should I be the Pushcart King for nothing?”

  “And you are sure this lady will give you the money for the pins?” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “I am confident,” said Maxie Hammerman, tossing his hammer in the air. “I, myself,” he said, catching the hammer, “heard her say that there were too many trucks.”

  Maxie Hammerman was right about Wenda Gambling. She meant it about the trucks, and she was very glad to buy a ton of pins and a ton of peas as well. Not only that, but she gave Maxie Hammerman five hundred autographed pictures of herself for the pushcart peddlers to paste on their carts if they wanted to. Most of them did. Even General Anna, who did not think much of the movies, took one.

  “Never mind the movies,” said General Anna. “The pins, I appreciate.”

  CHAPTER XII

  The Pea Shooter Campaign—Phase I

  It took a week for the pushcart peddlers to prepare for their attack. Maxie Hammerman kept his shop open twenty-four hours a day, and the peddlers in teams of twenty men took turns putting the pins in peas.

  Carlos made all five hundred and nine shooters himself. He cut them from a roll of yellow plastic tubing that a storekeeper had given him for taking away his cartons for ten years at no charge.

  At last, everything was ready. The attack was set for the morning of March 23rd. The evening before, the peddlers all reported to Maxie Hammerman’s shop to collect their shooters and twenty-four rounds of ammunition each.

  General Anna outlined the plan of battle. Everyone was to go to the location where he usually did business. He was to wait there until 10:00 a.m., when the morning traffic would be well under way. At 10:00 sharp, he was to fire at the tires of any trucks that came in range.

  Frank the Flower had wanted Wanda Gambling to fire the opening shot from in front of the Empire State Building, but General Anna felt that this would attract too much attention.

  “Where there is a movie star,” said General Anna, “There is a crowd. We do not want the trucks to know what is hitting them.”

  So the Pea Shooter Campaign began in quite an ordinary way. Between 10:05 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. on March 23rd, ninety-seven truck drivers in different parts of the city discovered that they had flat tires. Not one of the drivers knew what had hit him.

  Ninety-seven hits (out of some five hundred pea-pins that were fired in the opening attack) is, according to the Amateur Weapons Association, a very good average, especially as many of the peddlers had never handled a pea shooter before. And there were a few, like Mr. Jerusalem, who had grave doubts about the whole idea.

  Mr. Jerusalem’s heart was not in the attack. Though he had voted with the other peddlers to fight the trucks, fighting of any sort went against his nature. Mr. Jerusalem’s performance on the first morning of the Pea Shooter Campaign is, therefore, of special interest.

  At the time of the Pushcart War, Mr. Jerusalem was already an old man. No one knew exactly how old. He was held in great respect by the other pushcart peddlers, because his cart was not only his business, but it was also his home.

  Unlike the other peddlers, Mr. Jerusalem did not have a room where he went to sleep or cook his meals. Instead he had a small frying pan, a cup, and a tin plate which he hung neatly from the underside of his cart. He had a charcoal burner built into one corner of the cart so that he could cook for himself whenever he felt like a hot meal.

  Mr. Jerusalem’s favorite joke was: “Some people go out to dinner on special occasions. I eat out all the time.” This was true. Mr. Jerusalem was often to be seen sitting on a curb eating a plate of beans or turnips that he had cooked himself.

  At night Mr. Jerusalem dropped canvas sheets over the sides of his cart so that there was a sort of tent underneath the cart. Then he would park the cart under a tree or in a vacant lot, crawl under the cart, roll up in a quilt, and go to sleep. In the summer he often did not bother with the canvas sheets, but slept alongside the cart so that he could see the stars. He was usually the first peddler on the streets in the morning.

  Mr. Jerusalem had lived this way for fifty or sixty years, and he had never picked a fight with anyone. His motto was: “I live the way I want. You don’t bother me. And I won’t bother you.”

  Having lived by this motto for so long, Mr. Jerusalem was not happy about the Pea Shooter Campaign. To be sure, he had a great deal more at stake than the other peddlers. In his case, it was not only his business, but his home that was in danger as long as the trucks continued to attack the pushcarts. Still it went against his deepest convictions to cause another man trouble.

  “There are not troubles enough in the world?” he had asked himself as he had worked alongside the other peddlers, putting pins in the peas. “Why should I make more?”

  Mr. Jerusalem was still asking himself this question as he set off down Delancey Street on the morning of March 23rd. Like the other peddlers, Mr. Jerusalem was fully armed, although no one walking down the street would have noticed.

  Anyone glancing at Mr. Jerusalem would have taken the yellow plastic straw sticking from his coat pocket for a yellow pencil. And no one would have taken any notice at all of the two dozen peas with a pin stuck carefully through the center of each, which Mr. Jerusalem had pinned to the sleeve of his jacket.

  Or, even
if someone had noticed, he would have supposed that Mr. Jerusalem had twenty-four tiny sleeve buttons on his jacket. Mr. Jerusalem’s clothes never looked like anyone else’s anyway. He picked them up here and there, secondhand, and he had his own style of wearing them.

  “A sleeveful of ammunition!” Mr. Jerusalem muttered to himself, as he set off on the morning of March 23rd to pick up a secondhand popcorn machine that he had arranged to buy. “Who would believe it?

  “A man my age—going to war!” Mr. Jerusalem shook his head sadly. “I can hardly believe it myself.

  “Fighting in the streets!” he continued. “A man of peace for eighty years is walking fully armed down Delancey Street. A man who does not care for fighting.

  “It is not only that I do not care for fighting,” he went on.

  “Naturally, I do not care for fighting,” he admitted. “But it is also that fighting a ten-ton truck with a pea shooter is a little crazy. I do not think it will work.

  “But what else can we do?” he asked himself.

  He could not think of anything else. “So I will fight,” he said. “If I have to,” he added.

  All the same Mr. Jerusalem was relieved when at 10:00 o’clock, the hour the attack was to begin, there was no truck parked within a hundred feet of his cart. Mr. Jerusalem did not think he could hit the tire of a moving truck.

  “Would General Anna want me to waste the ammunition?” he asked himself. “Or Maxie Hammerman? Or Miss Wenda Gambling who has been so kind as to pay for one ton of pins? Not to mention peas.”

  When Mr. Jerusalem arrived at the candy store where he was to pick up the popcorn machine, he parked his cart. He was just starting into the store, when someone shouted at him.

  Mr. Jerusalem looked around and saw a Leaping Lema. The driver of the Leaping Lema was trying to back into a space in front of Mr. Jerusalem’s cart. The truck was loaded with new glass-and-chromium popcorn machines.

  Now if there was any kind of truck that Mr. Jerusalem did not like, it was a Leaping Lema. The reason for this was that Mr. Jerusalem had known Louie Livergreen’s father.