by Jean Merrill
The Peace March was almost entirely peaceful. With the First and Second Divisions, everything went exactly as Mr. Jerusalem had predicted.
The truck drivers who found themselves confronted by the First and Second Divisions stopped their trucks. When the peddlers in the front lines refused to let the trucks through, and when the truck drivers saw that there were three or four solid blocks of pushcarts backing up the front lines, they realized that there was nothing they could do.
They agreed among themselves that they could not smash their way through a street full of pushcarts, even if they were angry enough to wish to. It was not that the trucks could not have broken a path through the carts. The difficulty was that while the drivers had been arguing with the peddlers about letting them pass, the banners and posters had attracted large numbers of people. If the drivers had challenged the Peace Army and anyone had been hurt, it would have been quite clear to the spectators that the truck drivers had rammed the carts intentionally.
It was annoying to the drivers to have to give in to the pushcart peddlers. But they had no choice. Traffic had piled up so rapidly behind them that they could not even turn around and drive off in the opposite direction.
So on both Broome and West Streets, the drivers were forced to agree, however bad-humoredly, to the condition named by Mr. Jerusalem and Harry the Hot Dog. This was simply a promise to ask The Three to meet with Maxie Hammerman and work out a peaceful settlement of the problems that had led to the Pushcart War.
One of the truck drivers warned Mr. Jerusalem that even if The Three did agree to talk with Maxie Hammerman that that was no guarantee that the pushcarts would get what they wanted.
Mr. Jerusalem smiled. “Maybe not,” he said. “But it is a beginning. To talk is better than to fight.”
“Also,” added Papa Peretz, “if the talk is not helpful, we can march again.”
After the truck drivers had promised to ask The Three to meet with Maxie Hammerman, Papa Peretz gave each of them a bag of pretzels as a token of good will. At about the same time, over on Broome Street, Harry the Hot Dog was passing out free hot dogs.
Then Mr. Jerusalem and Harry the Hot Dog signalled their divisions that they were to turn their carts around and march peacefully down the block, clearing the street for the truck drivers. At the about-face signal from their leaders, all the peddlers swung their carts around.
As the pushcarts could not move very fast, the trucks had to creep along behind them for some blocks. Thus, it appeared to onlookers along the sidewalks as if the pushcarts of the First and Second Divisions were leading triumphal parades—which, in a way, they were. When people occasionally clapped their hands, Papa Peretz bowed to the right and left like the main actor in a play, which encouraged people to clap even harder and once or twice to break into cheers.
Down on Greene Street, however, the Third Division was running into trouble. The first truck to be challenged by the Third Division of the Peace Army was, unfortunately, driven by Albert P. Mack. Mack was driving the same Mighty Mammoth that had hit Morris the Florist’s cart at the very beginning of the Pushcart War.
CHAPTER XXX
Mack’s Attack
When Mack saw the army of pushcart peddlers in front of him, he thought at first he was having a bad dream. Mack had been having bad dreams about pushcarts ever since he had hit Morris the Florist.
Mack thought he must be dreaming now because he was on a one-way street. He knew he was going in the right direction, and he could see in his rear-view mirror at least six other trucks behind him. Seven trucks, Mack reasoned, could not be going the wrong way down a street they traveled every day.
Very much confused, Mack kept on going until he was within ten feet of the pushcarts. He did stop then, tramping on his brake so suddenly that the truck following him whammed him a terrific blow from behind.
There was a shattering of glass that sounded like a thousand punch bowls cracking up—which is exactly what it was—Mack was loaded with punch bowls that morning. Mack himself was flung against his steering wheel so hard that for a minute he was certain he had broken a rib. He gasped and blinked and peered groggily down at the pushcarts.
They were certainly no dream. They stretched in a solid mass as far as he could see. Mack was furious. He socked his horn, warning the Peace Army to move aside and let him through.
No one moved. General Anna, her new cart heaped high with the best-quality apples Maxie Hammerman had bought her, was in the very center of the front line. She simply stood there eating an apple as if she had all the time in the world.
Mack realized that the peddlers had not the least intention of letting him through. “What’s the big idea?” he bellowed from his cab.
“Read for yourself,” said General Anna, negligently tossing the apple core at one of Mack’s front tires. “It says on the signs.”
Mack could see the signs all right, but he was not interested in reading them.
“Get off the street!” he shouted. But none of the peddlers paid him the least attention. Some of them were doing a good business with people who had gathered to watch the Peace March.
Several other truck drivers, who had pulled up behind Mack, had climbed out of their cabs and come up to see what the trouble was. General Anna explained to them that the peddlers would let them through if the drivers promised to let the peddlers use the streets in peace.
“Why should we promise you anything?” demanded one of the drivers.
“Because if you do not, we will not let you pass,” said General Anna. “Suit yourself.”
“You trying to start a fight, lady?” asked one of the drivers.
“When there is a truce?” said General Anna, looking very shocked. “Certainly not. I am just going to stay here peacefully with my pushcart. My friends will do the same.”
The drivers did not know what to do. They went back to consult with Mack who had refused even to get out of his truck to argue with the peddlers.
“I’m going through,” Mack said.
“You can’t, Mack,” said one of the other drivers. “There are too many of them.”
“There’ll be fewer in a minute,” said Mack, starting his engine.
“Wait, Mack, wait!” begged his friend. “You’re crazy!”
Mack hesitated. He looked down at the Peace Army. Unluckily, his eye fell on Morris the Florist who was standing in the front line next to General Anna.
Mack had had a grudge against Morris ever since he had smashed Morris’ cart, for he felt that Morris had put him in a bad light with his wife. Mack’s wife had told him that driving a big truck did not give him the right to bully everyone else on the street.
So when Mack saw Morris in the front line with a new pushcart, the idea of the same pushcart peddler blocking his way a second time threw him into a rage. Without taking his eye off Morris, Mack revved his engine and let go his brake.
“Look out,” he yelled. “I’m coming through!”
Two truck drivers jumped onto Mack’s running board and grabbed his arm. Mack flung them off.
“They’re obstructing the street,” he growled. “Can’t you see? It’s illegal.”
“But there are at least two hundred of them,” said one of his friends. “Can’t you see that?”
“I can see,” Mack said and his voice grew frighteningly calm. “The thing is—this truck weighs twenty thousand pounds when it is empty—and it is now fully loaded.”
Mack stepped on the accelerator. The two drivers who had tried to reason with him backed away, and Mack drove straight into the Peace Army.
There was a terrible splintering and cracking as pushcarts buckled and shattered and flew into the air. Onlookers screamed as slats, wheels, apples, used clothing, and dancing dolls rained down on them.
Fortunately, a pushcart axle, wrenched free by the collision of pushcarts and truck, was hurled, as if by design, straight through Mack’s windshield. The axle missed Mack’s head by less than an inch, but he lost control
of the truck. The Mighty Mammoth swerved, plunged over the curb, sheared off a fire hydrant and crashed through a plate glass window into a cafeteria.
Miraculously, no one was killed. General Anna and Morris the Florist, who had been in the center of the line, directly in the path of the truck, had fallen to the ground so that the truck, although it shattered their carts, passed right over them.
Morris would have been killed if it had not been for General Anna. General Anna seized Morris by the hand and dragged him to the ground. Morris had been so stunned by the realization that he was about to be run down for the second time in three months by the same truck driver, that he had stood frozen with astonishment in the path of the truck. Only General Anna’s quick thinking saved his life.
The peddlers directly behind Anna and Morris had a few seconds in which to run to the sides of the street, although they could not, of course, save their carts. About eighty carts were wrecked and a number of others were seriously damaged. There were a few broken arms and broken legs and any number of nasty cuts and bruises. But it could have been very much worse.
Forty thousand dollars’ worth of damage was done to the cafeteria alone, and the proprietor estimated that several hundred people would have been killed if all his customers had not rushed out to the street minutes before the crash to hear Mack’s argument with the Peace Army. Mack was immediately arrested for reckless driving, and there were plenty of witnesses eager to tell the police that Mack had run down the pushcarts on purpose.
Despite their losses, the pushcart peddlers were in good spirits. They felt certain that Mack’s attack on the Third Division had demonstrated for once and for all who was to blame for the trouble in the streets. Eddie Moroney lifted General Anna onto his pushcart and personally pushed her all the way back to Maxie Hammerman’s shop for a victory celebration. However, that celebration was never held.
CHAPTER XXXI
The Sneak Attack
By the time the battered but jubilant Third Division arrived at Maxie’s shop, Mayor Cudd had begun the desperate sneak attack that was intended to wipe out the whole pushcart army at one blow.
The Third Division arrived at Maxie’s to find their friends from the First and Second Divisions listening in shocked disbelief to a radio announcement by the Mayor. Mayor Cudd was announcing that he had suspended all pushcart licenses until further notice.
“An army is an army,” Mayor Cudd was saying, “whether it calls itself a Peace Army or some other kind of army. And it is my view that the pushcart peddlers, in organizing an army, have violated the truce.
“They have provoked violence and bad feeling,” said Mayor Cudd. “Not to mention the disruption of traffic on three streets of our city, and the destruction of public property.”
“What are you talking about, you crazy Cudd?” shouted General Anna, seizing Maxie Hammerman’s portable radio and shaking it in terrible anger.
“I am talking, of course, about the destruction of a fire hydrant on Greene Street,” Mayor Cudd’s voice continued.“A hydrant was destroyed?” Maxie asked, as he had not heard all the details of Mack’s attack on the Peace Army.
“By a truck, of course,” said Morris the Florist. “The usual smashing.”
“The Fire Commissioner is extremely upset,” the Mayor went on. “Water is flooding Greene Street, and he has had five men there for an hour trying to seal off the water main.”
“The Fire Commissioner is upset,” General Anna screamed at the radio. “That is the worst thing that has happened today?” and she would have thrown the radio on the floor if Maxie Hammerman had not taken it firmly out of her hands and led her gently to a chair.
“And I am disturbed, too,” the Mayor proceeded. “Therefore, I am not only temporarily suspending all pushcart licenses, but I am also recommending to the City Council when it meets next week that these licenses be permanently revoked.”
The peddlers stared blankly at the radio as the Mayor went on to express his sympathy to Mack’s family and to all truck drivers who had been inconvenienced by the Peace March. The Mayor expressed regret at Mack’s arrest and said that he would do everything he could to see that he was released promptly.
Meantime, the Mayor said, he trusted that the citizens of the city appreciated the courage of this great driver’s standing up to his traffic rights when he was so pitifully outnumbered. “Think of it,” said the Mayor, “—one truck driver against hundreds of pushcarts!”
As for the promises extracted from the truckers by the First and Second Divisions, the Mayor said Mr. Mammoth had already assured him that he and Mr. Livergreen and Mr. Sweet had no intention of meeting with Maxie Hammerman. These law-abiding men, the Mayor explained, could hardly be expected to honor a promise made as a result of a Peace March that was a clear violation of a sacred truce.
At this point Mr. Jerusalem rose and, without a word, picked up one of Maxie’s hammers and smashed the radio to bits.
The rest of the peddlers were too stunned to even discuss the incredible turn of events. Maxie urged everyone to return home as quietly and quickly as possible, and to get his cart off the street, for the Mayor’s action had put them all in danger of arrest at any moment.
As Mr. Jerusalem had no place to put his cart but on the street, Maxie insisted that he spend the night at the Hammerman shop. It was the first time in seventy years that Mr. Jerusalem had slept indoors, and it made him feel like an old man.
CHAPTER XXXII
Frank the Flower’s Crocheted Target
The Three left Mayor Cudd’s headquarters on the night of the Peace March confident that the Pushcart War was as good as won. The Mayor’s broadcast, they felt sure, would break the back of any further resistance on the part of the pushcart peddlers.
In fact, The Three left Mayor Cudd’s to map their plans for Operation Krushkar (the code name for the autumn automobile offensive that was scheduled as the second stage of the LEMA Master Plan). The Three could hardly have foreseen at this point the possible significance of a psychological victory that Frank the Flower was to score over Albert P. Mack during the time the latter was held prisoner. But the resulting damage to Mack’s morale—and to their own, when they heard it—may have had a critical effect on the events of the next few weeks.
On being arrested, Mack had been locked in a cell directly across from Frank the Flower’s. This, in itself; had enraged Mack. While he was glad to see that Frank the Flower was still in jail, it angered him that Frank should have the similar pleasure of seeing him in jail.
From the moment he was locked up, Mack had been throwing temper tantrums, kicking at the walls of the cell, bellowing into the corridor, insulting the guards, and in general making a nuisance of himself. When the Police Commissioner was summoned to see what the guards were complaining about, Mack kicked him in the shins.
The Police Commissioner decided that Mack was definitely a criminal type. And when Mayor Cudd, as he had promised, personally requested that Mack be released, the Police Commissioner refused.
Mayor Cudd maintained that as he had declared the Peace March illegal, the Police Commissioner had no legal grounds for holding Mack for reckless driving.
The Police Commissioner replied that reckless driving was the least of it, as there were now more serious charges against Mack. The owner of the cafeteria that Mack had driven into claimed that, whether Mack was guilty of driving recklessly or not, he was guilty of trespassing on private property, and he refused to withdraw his charges.
“He is also guilty of kicking a police officer,” said the Police Commissioner, “and I refuse to withdraw my charges.”
It was clear that the Police Commissioner was acting on principle. Mack was not a prisoner anyone would have kept around for the fun of it. And his disposition did not improve with confinement.
The fact that Frank the Flower did not seem to mind too much being in jail added to Mack’s bad humor. Frank was now used to the place, of course, and he received many letters and postcards from
his friends among the pushcart peddlers, as well as from the hundreds of Frank-the-Flower fans.
Morris the Florist wrote Frank every day and sent him fresh flowers twice a week. Maxie Hammerman sent him all the latest reports on how the war was going, and General Anna had promised him that he would be made a general, too, as soon as he got out of jail.
None of Frank’s friends had told him—they didn’t like to worry him—about the Mayor’s threat to end the war by revoking the pushcart licenses. So Frank the Flower was under the impression that the pushcarts were still winning the war. Naturally, he did not believe anything Mack told him to the contrary.
Frank the Flower’s general cheerfulness and his conviction that the pushcarts were winning were bound to be annoying to Mack. But what drove him wild was Frank the Flower’s dart board.
An old lady, whom Frank had never met, but who had read about him in the papers, had crocheted for Frank a large pink and green dart board. Running in circles around the bull’s-eye, Frank’s friend had crocheted twenty trucks, complete with tires, and she had included with the dart board a generous supply of darts which she had fashioned from darning needles. (She had apologized for the darning needles—“You would probably prefer pea-tacks,” she had written Frank, “but, as you know, tacks are very expensive just now.” She wrote Frank at the time of the Tacks Tax.)
Frank the Flower had hung the dart board on the side of his cell, and each morning after he had finished reading his mail, he would practice shooting down trucks. Frank’s ambition—if he ever got back into action—was to be able to justify his reputation as an ace shot. It embarrassed him that all his fans believed him to be a better shot than he was.
