by Linda Ellen
Glancing at the clock on the nightstand, she wondered why Vic wasn’t home yet, musing that perhaps he had heard a rumor of a job and had gone to apply. As she exited the bedroom, she screeched to an abrupt halt to allow a squealing Tommy to dash by on his tricycle.
“Tommy! You almost ran me down! Slow down, young man,” she admonished. “After dinner, Vic and I will sit on the porch and you can ride your bike up and down the sidewalk, alright? But only if you’re quiet while Mama takes a bath.”
“Awight, Mama,” Tommy answered, smiling up at her impishly as he waited for her to go on into the bathroom. She gave him a stern look and pushed the door nearly shut, peeled off her smelly cigar factory clothes, and was just settling into the exquisite water when she heard him dashing down the hall again.
Not relishing another tussle with their landlord, she called, “Thomas Joseph! You heard me!” After a moment, all was quiet, and she settled down in the tub with a grateful sigh.
Twenty minutes later, scrubbed clean and feeling much better, Louise emerged from the bathroom in her robe and house shoes, her hair wrapped in a towel. Humming happily, she slipped out to the kitchen and began to mix together the dough for muffins as she glanced at the clock on the wall, wondering again where Vic might have gone after work.
Just as she was measuring some baking powder into a bowl of flour, she realized her small son was being awfully quiet in the living room and she chided herself for not checking on him sooner. Something didn’t feel right, and her Mother’s Intuition kicked in full force. Leaving the bowl on the table, Louise picked up a dishtowel to wipe her hands as she made her way down the hall. He was nowhere in sight – his blocks lay in a messy heap on the floor by the coffee table.
“Tommy?” she called, beginning to search the other rooms. “Thomas Joseph, where are you hiding?” she called again, surprised that he hadn’t immediately answered her and come running, as he usually did. He had always been such an obedient child. Continuing her search, she stuck her head in the bedroom door, and her eyes shot open wide.
There he was, standing tip toe on a chair, which he had figured out how to push up to the bureau, and was at that moment hurriedly trying to gulp down more pieces of chocolate Ex-Lax!
“Tommy! Put those down!” Louise yelled as she crossed the few steps to him and quickly grasped his head, trying to remove the tasty medicine. The little boy giggled and clamped his mouth shut so she couldn’t take it away. Becoming almost frantic, Louise scooped him off the chair and onto the floor, managing to get some of the melted remedy on her fingers as she pried some out of his mouth. Losing her hold on him as he wiggled out of her grip and took off running down the hall, Louise followed in hot pursuit.
“Come back here, you little Dickens!” Louise yelled as Tommy jubilantly squealed, thinking this was just another game of chase. Once in the kitchen, he circled the table, that sweet childish chortle that Louise normally loved to hear erupting from his throat as she skidded on the slick floor her mother had apparently waxed that day. Tommy ducked under the table, escaping out the front and giggling merrily as his mother hollered and fussed. Making a rash, and quite foolish, decision, Louise followed him under the table, swiping at him and missing as he emerged and took off running down the hall. That was when the whole thing went south.
When Louise came out from under the table, she bumped her head against the under side and the bowl of flour tipped, landing upside down on her wet hair, sans the towel, which had fallen off in the pursuit.
She shrieked as her hands automatically flew up to her head – a huge mistake, since they were already sticky with the chocolate laxative.
“Ooooh, Mama’s gonna blister your behind, you little beast!” she called after her fleeing son.
Scrambling up off her knees, slipping in the spilled flour on the floor and fighting with the constricting bathrobe, she took off again down the hall. Tommy, obviously still thinking his mama was playing a game with him, tittered in sheer glee and raced around the coffee table in the living room as Louise charged after him, losing a slipper in the process and nearly tumbling onto the settee. Part angry and frustrated, part amused, and part frightened because her little boy had eaten a handful of laxatives, Louise finally caught up with him as he rounded the coffee table for the second time. She scooped him up in her arms as he squealed in delight.
Of course, this was the exact moment that her husband chose to open the door and walk in – bringing with him a visitor – a man she had never seen before!
The two men stood in the doorway to the living room, slack jawed, mouths agape, staring at Vic’s ‘sweet angelic wife’, who at that moment more closely resembled Kate from The Taming of the Shrew.
Vic couldn’t believe his eyes. His beautiful wife, about whom he had been bragging to his friend all the way there in the car, was standing in the living room, breathing hard from her pursuit of the Ex-Lax Bandit. Her robe askew and covered in a powdery substance, wearing only one house shoe, she was holding onto a squirming, squealing Tommy, whose face and hands were smeared with chocolate. Her hair, stringy and wet, was a tangled mess covering her face, and strewn through with the same powdery residue and melted candy. She stood rooted to the spot, her mouth open in shock, staring wide-eyed at first him and then their visitor.
Then, before he could think what to do, she shrieked like a banshee, shoved Tommy unceremoniously into Vic’s arms, and fled into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
Vic glanced down at his giggling step-son, whose big blue eyes were gazing at him within a face that was chocolate covered chaos, as he piped, “Hi ya, Chief!”
Blinking in shock, Vic turned to his friend, who stood with his lips clamped tight, trying his best not to burst out laughing.
With a shrug, Vic lamented, “Um…I’m not sure, but I think that was my wife.”
‡
CHAPTER 21
And Then the Bottom Dropped Out
“That’s a moment I’ll never forget as long as I live,” Louise lamented as the others laughed, and she chuckled with them good-naturedly. Thankfully, over the month since the incident where her husband and his friend had caught her in the most embarrassing situation of her life, the acute humiliation of that moment had mellowed into amusing angst.
“Oh girl, I surely wish I’d seen that!” Fleet chortled as Vic, Alec, Ruth, and Earl chuckled. They were all sitting around Vic and Louise’s dining room table on a Sunday afternoon indulging in Louise’s now perfected fried chicken. Relaxing and sipping iced tea, they were enjoying one another’s company.
“I’m just thankful that Tommy was okay, and the laxatives did no more than make him use up all his clean diapers in a short amount of time,” Louise quipped, smiling as she thought of her rambunctious son, whom she had just put down for a nap.
“That stinker, I can’t believe he’s still in diapers,” Fleet shook her head.
“Oh, I didn’t tell you! A week after that, he finally decided to give them up,” Louise returned, the relief evident on her face. “He’s decided to be a big boy, like Chief,” she added lovingly, thinking of the man-to-man talk her husband had had with their three-year-old, and thankfully it had paid off. The couple exchanged a grin and a wink as each remembered the serious expression on Tommy’s face when he had vowed to use the “big potty” from then on.
“What did your friend do after Louise ran to the bathroom?” Ruth asked Vic, returning to the previous conversation.
Vic snickered softly, meeting his wife’s eyes again over top of his glass. He had teased Louise mercilessly over the incident, but now in front of their friends, he decided to be the gallant husband.
Shrugging one shoulder, he answered, “He said, You got a nice place here, Chief, as if he saw women with floured chocolate hair every day and it was no big deal.”
Louise blushed as she shook her head, one hand lightly touching her nose and mouth, “I was so embarrassed when I came out of the bathroom, after washing my hair a second time,
and had to face him. But he was sweet and polite and didn’t even mention it. He’s just as nice as Vic’s always said.” Then smiling at Vic, she added with an exaggerated moan, “To think I’d wanted so much to someday meet him, and when I finally did, I looked like I’d had a fight with a bag of flour and came out the loser!”
That brought another round of guffaws and belly laughs.
Several minutes later, to Louise’s relief, Earl changed the subject and, eying Vic, asked, “So, how’s the insurance business going, man?”
Alec almost choked on his tea, shooting a “Thanks a lot” look to his wife as she obligingly pounded him on the back. He exchanged a quick, unnoticed look with Vic as the latter answered with a small shrug, “’Bout the same.”
Louise’s eyes met Fleet’s in silent communication. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide the fact that Vic was participating in an illegal operation, and the guilt of that weighed heavy on them both. Several times after work, Vic had come out of Willie’s Pub, the front for the bookie joint, only to duck back in when Doc’s car had rolled by. Also, each time Irene asked how his job was going, they felt like criminals for lying to her, and to everyone. God forbid that Lilly should find out. The fear of him possibly being arrested was never far from their thoughts.
More than the fear of arrest, however, was the increasing realization weighing on his conscience that what he was doing wasn’t right. He had never been a high roller gambler; especially knowing first hand just how destructive a habit it was, since his own father’s gambling addiction had been his downfall. Lately, Vic had come home with tales of “customers” who were calling in to place bets that had lost their entire paycheck the week before. The whole thing had put a bad taste in Vic’s mouth and he had stepped up trying to secure another job.
Together, they had made the decision to tell as few people as possible, and although it had pained him to keep his good friend Earl in the dark, Vic had only confided in Alec and Louise had let Fleet in on the secret. The main reason for that was that Ruth could be a bit scatterbrained at times – Earl, too, for that matter – and might accidentally let something slip.
Now, Louise cleared her throat and tried to come up with another topic of conversation, even thinking of resuming the discussion of her most embarrassing moment.
But Fleet, like so many times before, came to the rescue. Bouncing the baby on her lap, she said with a straight face, “Hey, speakin’ of that, Vic… I’ve been thinking about getting a small policy for AJ… Could you ask your boss about it for me?”
Vic flashed her an amused look, mumbling something like, “Sure thing.”
Louise closed her eyes and prayed for forgiveness, and for help out of the sticky situation.
*
Things seemed to happen in the blink of an eye following that afternoon. Monday at the bookie joint, Vic was in the room and had just answered the phone when there was a knock at the door. The three men inside glanced at one another, a bit unsettled because no one was scheduled to come by for another three hours, and the knock was last week’s code knock – but Vic shrugged and motioned for one of the men to unlock it anyway.
When he did, everything seemed to happen at once. Three police officers wearing the official dark blue uniforms with the two rows of silver buttons and crisp caps with black bills adorned with shiny insignias were outside the door. Once it was unlocked, they forced their way inside, revolvers brandished. Adrenalin rushed through Vic’s veins as he heard the words he had been dreading… “This is a raid,” and, “Don’t move, you’re under arrest.” He and the other men immediately raised their hands in surrender, as the phones continued to ring and the officers quickly swarmed inside the already cramped room, followed closely by two men in regular suits whom Vic figured were detectives.
Vic, his stomach dropping to somewhere in the vicinity of his knees, swallowed nervously and co-operated with the officers. He watched as they confiscated all of the records. Handcuffed behind his back, he was escorted through the pub with the other men and hustled out to the waiting black police cruisers. Fleetingly, he wondered why they hadn’t brought the paddy wagon, as he’d seen the cops do in the movies.
Being arrested was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him. Ashamed, he hung his head and hoped no one he knew happened to be walking down the street at that moment.
As he settled in the back seat of one of the radio cars while his co-workers were installed in the other, trying to find a comfortable way to lean back against his tightly handcuffed wrists, Vic couldn’t help but dread that Irene and Doc, not to mention his brothers, Al and Jack, would hear about his shame. His mind, although racing with so many thoughts he couldn’t keep track, felt almost disembodied, as if this were happening to someone else and not him.
One of the officers slid onto the seat next to him and they were on their way downtown, the driver picking up the two-way radio and speaking some code numbers and lingo Vic didn’t understand.
After a moment, the officer turned his head and studied Vic’s profile. He could probably tell Vic was scared witless. To Vic’s surprise, the man asked gently, “This your first time in the back of a police car?”
Vic turned his head and met the man’s intelligent eyes, taking in neatly trimmed light brown hair and firm jaw line. He judged the man to be not much older than himself, somewhere in his early thirties. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but Vic couldn’t place where they might have previously encountered one another. Dropping his eyes to the man’s badge, he saw his name was Womack. Clamping his lips together, Vic nodded in answer to his question, unsure how he was supposed to act, since he was, after all, under arrest.
“You know, Shorty and Lynch are old hands at this,” the man mumbled, referring to Vic’s co-workers. “But you must be new, cause I haven’t seen your face on any wanted posters…” Vic shrugged, his eyes narrowing as the cop held his gaze and continued, “Look…I don’t know why I’m doing this, but… let me give you some advice. You look like a nice guy. Find another line of work…one that’s legit. This road is nothing but a dead end.”
Vic knew he was right, of course. He chose not to fill the cop’s ears with his woes about not being able to find good-paying work. As if he’d heard Vic’s thoughts, the kindly policeman added one more piece of advice. “I hear the Army’s looking for able-bodied men.”
At that, Vic turned his gaze forward, a muscle working in his jaw. He knew that, too, of course, with the war in full swing. Now, he was wondering if the courts could force his enlistment. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, unless they sent me into the thick of the fighting overseas… Like most men in America at that time, he was prepared to go and do his duty, defend his country, if his card came up. But also, like most men, the thought of going away to war and leaving his family behind was a prospect upon which he didn’t like to dwell.
All the way to the old jail on West Liberty, he kept hearing Louise’s voice over and over in his head, “You need to quit that bookie place, Vic, before the police find out and you get arrested…” He’d lost track of the times she had griped at him to quit, even just the night before in bed as they had settled down to sleep after they’d made love.
“Vic,” she had pleaded. “I need you…Tommy needs you…here with us. I don’t want you to get into trouble…”
However, he’d made the classic mistake. The bulk of a man’s sense of pride and even a good portion of his masculinity revolved around what he did for a living and how he supported himself and his family. He’d kept telling himself that he would quit after one more week, because the thought of going back to no job left him with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had a wife and son to think of now. Yes, his own voice in his head jeered. What ABOUT your wife and son? What do you think your wife will say when she hears the news?
He turned his head toward the window and closed his eyes, not wanting to even imagine the look of disappointment and sadness in those lovely ha
zel eyes. He hated more than anything in the world that he was going to have to let her down.
*
After his one phone call, which had been to Alec’s apartment because he thought Fleet would surely be home, and he thanked the Lord that she was, Vic was told that the soonest he could be released on bail was the next morning. Great. Just great. They put him in the “tank” with about twenty other poor saps that had been foolish enough to do something to get arrested. Like him.
Vic shoved his hands in his pockets and glanced around at the walls of the third-floor cell. It was a large bare room, with a thick concrete floor and block walls covered with drab green paint. The room boasted a single large window that reached nearly to the ceiling, reinforced with thick black bars. Thin mattresses lay end to end on a wide ledge that ran the perimeter of the room. The air was thick with the odors of sweat, stale beer, cigarettes, and the none-too-clean toilet in one corner.
He huffed a loud sigh and made his way over to an unoccupied mat, carefully avoiding eye contact with the other occupants and still half in disbelief that his arrest had actually happened. What, he sneered silently. Did you think your lifetime of bad luck was past? Time alone only leant to his conscience berating him up one side and down the other.
Shorty and Lynch soon joined the group, but Vic kept to himself and didn’t acknowledge their entrance, but merely sat with his back pressed against the cold block wall, his sock-covered feet propped on the mat, and his forearms resting on his up-drawn knees. He had never really formed a friendship with the men, mostly because there never seemed to be down time while they were in the room with the phones constantly ringing. At the end of each day, they had left one at a time, vacating the room as quickly as possible. Another reason, however, was that Vic hadn’t wanted to become friends with them, as all along he had been planning on the “job” being temporary.
