Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Richie intended to start looking for Estelle and Mack the very next day, but for now he knew he badly needed rest. He had been sick a lot most of that winter, hungry a lot, and at one point had been badly beaten up, so he was not in the best condition and he knew it. Pulling himself up out of the pit, he put the pillowcase under one arm and made his way stealthily along the walkway to the front of the alleys. With the second floor eerily lighted too, his movements cast long dissolving shadows that seemed to have life independent of him. Several times the wooden walkway creaked under his step, causing him to pause and look around warily before continuing. Proceeding cautiously like that, it took him ten minutes to reach the ladies’ lounge.

  Richie carefully pushed open the door to the lounge and felt inside for a light switch. He flipped it up and down several times, but it did not work. Remembering how Red had turned off all the downstairs lights from a master panel, Richie went out to the second-floor counter to look for a similar box. He found it, in the same location as the one downstairs. Looking over the dozen switches, Richie found one labeled LADIES and moved it to the “On” position. Back in the ladies’ lounge, there were now lights. Quickly checking for windows, Richie was relieved to find that there were none. He could leave the lights on.

  Sitting on the green, two-cushion divan, Richie found that it sagged a little and squeaked a little but was generally comfortable. It was a lot better than a cold streetcar in the repair barns, or the pile of boxes behind the Royal Blue. Taking off his coat, he pulled an old shirt from the pillowcase to use with his coat for cover, then with the rest of his scant belongings he fashioned a pillow for himself. Suddenly hungry, he went back out to a candy machine he had noticed near the counter, and with a nickel bought a Milky Way. Sitting on the divan, he ate it quickly, then cupped his hands to get water at the sink to satisfy a thirst it created.

  Very tired now, emotionally drained as well, Richie laid his head on the makeshift pillow. His coat he used to cover his upper body, the old shirt for his legs. He rested on his left side, for a while staring at the wall, not wanting to close his eyes. As soon as he did close them, he saw his mother’s agonized face. He began to cry.

  It took him a long time to cry himself to sleep.

  3

  The woman on the bar stool was heavier and not as pretty as Richie remembered. Estelle stared at Richie with her mouth open in surprise.

  “My God almighty,” she exclaimed finally, “look how you’ve grown! Come here to me . . . .”

  Estelle pulled Richie to her and wrapped her fleshy arms around him in a tight hug, then smeared wet lips on his cheek. She smelled of Evening in Paris perfume; the fragrance at once reminded Richie of the days before the war when Estelle and his mother and he had lived together, sharing an apartment. Estelle had married a sailor during the war and moved to California for a while. After she divorced and came back, she and his mother had not been as close. Richie had not seen her in nearly three years.

  Releasing him from the suffocating hug, Estelle held him at arm’s length and asked, “What in the world are you doing here, sugar?”

  “I was just walking down Kedzie Avenue and looked in the window and saw you,” Richie lied. He had been searching for Estelle for a week, starting at the last place he knew she had worked, a Walgreen’s drugstore on Division Street, tracing her through other employees from job to job, and, after running out of jobs, from rented room to rented room. She had not been difficult to find: Estelle, like Richie’s mother, was from a small town and felt more comfortable staying in the same general neighborhood. And she wasn’t trying to hide from anyone.

  “That kid shouldn’t be in here, Estelle,” the bartender said.

  “It’s okay, Dan. He’s my nephew,” Estelle lied.

  “Take him over to the café side, will you? I don’t want to get in no trouble.”

  “Sure, Dan. Come on, sugar,” Estelle said to Richie. She took her glass of beer and they went to the other side of a partition to an area where food was served and customers under twenty-one were allowed. “You want a hamburger, sugar?” Estelle asked. When Richie shrugged, she smiled and said, “ ’Course you do.” She ordered him a hamburger and a glass of milk, then asked, “Are y’all living around here?”

  Having made up a story ahead of time, Richie told her he was in a foster home while his mother was being cured at Lexington. Estelle’s expression turned sad and she shook her head.

  “Poor Chloe. I always had a feeling that was going to happen to her. I remember when she kept increasing those doses of paregoric she took. I told her once, ‘Chloe, honey, that stuff’s only going to lead you to worse things.’ ” Estelle patted Richie’s hand across the table. “But why have they got you in a foster home, sugar? Couldn’t you go back to Lamont and live with your grandmamma?”

  Richie had a lie for that one too. “The Welfare lady wanted me to stay in Chicago in case they found my daddy.”

  “Your daddy? He never did come back?”

  Richie shook his head. “Do you know where he might be?”

  “I sure don’t, sugar.” Estelle sighed dejectedly. “Lord, it’s no wonder poor Chloe got herself messed up. It was bad enough that your daddy got hisself sent to the penitentiary, but then to run off like that once he was out, well—” She shook her head again. “Poor, poor Chloe.”

  When Richie’s food came, Estelle sipped her beer while he wolfed it down in his usual fashion. She studied his chapped cheeks and lips, the worn coat, the threadbare shirt she could see beneath.

  “Don’t look like they give you very good clothes in that foster home,” she observed.

  “These aren’t my regular clothes,” Richie lied again. “These are my old clothes that I deliver papers in. My regular clothes are lots nicer than these.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” Estelle sighed quietly. “I was just wishing a little while ago that I had the money to buy myself a warmer coat, but I’ve been out of work for going on a month now.” She forced an uneasy smile. “That’s the only reason I’m in this bar so early in the day; I’m meeting a man who might have a job for me.”

  Now it was Richie who said, “Oh.” Then he glanced away. After a moment, he suddenly asked, “Can you help me find my daddy?”

  Estelle frowned. “I don’t see how, sugar. I never really knew that much about your daddy. Nobody did. Not even when we were all back home in Lamont. He came and went pretty much as he pleased, did pretty much what he wanted to do—up until they put him in the penitentiary.” Estelle tapped one finger in the center of the table. “I hate to have to say this, sugar, but a lot of what’s happened to your mother is your daddy’s fault. Hadn’t been for him getting hisself sent to the penitentiary, why, Chloe never would have come to Chicago in the first place. You probably don’t remember, sugar, you were just a little boy, but you were right there in the room with us, at your grandmamma’s house, the day Chloe made up her mind to leave Lamont. And it was all because your daddy was off in the penitentiary . . . .”

  Richie had been three. Blond, freckle-faced with serious blue eyes, he had an unusual reserve for his age, perhaps because he knew his daddy was a convict. He was not sure what a convict was, but he knew it was bad from the way people said it. And he knew it must have something to do with his daddy not being there.

  Sitting in a corner of the back bedroom of his grandmother’s house in Lamont, he quietly played with a small metal windup truck, rolling it on the linoleum floor covering while he pretended not to pay any attention to his mother and her girlfriend Estelle.

  “I just can’t stand it anymore, ‘Stelle,” his mother said tensely. She had a cardboard suitcase open on the dresser top and was nervously transferring clothes into it from the drawers. Covertly watching, Richie noticed that so far she had put only her own clothes into the suitcase. He began to worry. Lowering her voice, his mother turned to Estelle, who was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette, legs crossed, one foot bobbing rhythmically. “It drives me crazy
, the way they all look at me, the way they cock their heads and whisper,” she said to Estelle. “Them and their little smirks and their stares and their clever little remarks. ‘Mighty pretty dress, Miss Chloe.’ Looking right at my bosom when they say it. ‘You look a little flushed, Miss Chloe; are you feeling warm?’ In other words, are you hot yet, girl? Your man’s been a convict for two years now; are you ready for somebody else yet? I can’t say six words to any man in Lamont without him getting ideas; if I say more than six words to one, every jealous, skinny bitch in town starts a story about it. I just can’t stand it anymore.”

  Richie glanced up as his mother lighted a cigarette of her own. She was a tall woman, darker than most women in the little Southern town because she did not go to any lengths to avoid the sun. Her hair was dark and fashionably short, her eyes dark and large. She was pretty even at times like this when she was upset.

  “Just where in the world do you think you’re going, Chloe?” her girlfriend asked.

  “Chicago.”

  “That’s asking for trouble,” Estelle said, wryly. She took several short puffs on her cigarette without inhaling. “What do you think Richmond will have to say about you moving up there?” she asked, lowering her own voice and glancing at Richie. He began to listen even more closely; Richmond was his father.

  “I’m not going to tell him,” Chloe replied. “Not at first, anyhow. I’ll send my letters down here and Mamma can mail them.” Chloe paused and bit her lower lip. “We haven’t been writing all that much lately anyhow. He doesn’t have much to write about from prison, and I . . . .”

  Chloe’s words trailed off and she stared into space, frowning. Estelle knew what she was thinking. The last year before Richmond had been caught and sent to prison, things had not been very good between Chloe and him. Chloe had wanted Richmond to go straight; she was constantly on him about it. Estelle couldn’t remember how many times she had heard Chloe say, “If you’d go see your daddy, I just know he’d take you back and make you a partner in the farm like he did your brother.” Richmond would always flash that quick, engaging smile of his and reply, aghast, “You want me to start wearing bib overalls and hightop field shoes again? Give up my Memphis suits and wingtips? Turn in my Packard for a plow?” He would give Chloe a kiss on the cheek or throw her a wink. “If I did that, I wouldn’t be the man you fell in love with anymore,” he’d remind her, and as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. Afterward, Chloe would always lament to Estelle the foreboding she felt. “Everybody in West Tennessee says his days are closing fast. The Feds call him 'Tennessee Slim’ now; he’s the biggest bootlegger in the state and the one they want to catch the worst. It’s only a matter of time. When it happens, ‘Stelle, I might not be able to wait for him. I might not be able to stand it.”

  “Stand what?” Estelle had once asked knowingly. “The scandal or being without a man?”

  Chloe’s eyes smouldered when she replied. “Both,” she said frankly.

  But for two years, and Estelle could bear witness, Chloe had tried. She had faced the scandal by day, the loneliness at night. Having her baby a year before Richmond was sent up had helped some, but not, Estelle felt, enough. As the weeks and months stretched out, she had seen Chloe coil tighter and tighter.

  “You’ve made up your mind, I guess,” Estelle said as she watched her best friend pack.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, hell, I guess I’d better go pack too, then,” Estelle said, crushing out her cigarette in the ashtray she held. “I can’t let you run off up to Chicago by yourself—Lord knows what kind of trouble you’d get into.”

  As Richie watched, the two young women embraced and cried briefly and then giggled in delight before Estelle left to go to her house and pack.

  After Estelle left, Chloe looked down at Richie with a dazzling smile and sparkling eyes. “We’re going on a train ride, sugar. Won’t that be fun?” At the dresser, she began putting Richie’s clothes in the suitcase with hers.

  On the floor, Richie felt a rush of relief; he would not be left behind. As he resumed playing with his windup truck, he wondered where Chicago was.

  And what it would be like there.

  In the bar on Kedzie Avenue, Estelle drank the last of her beer and Richie glanced at a clock over the bar. It was nearly five. He had to be at the bowling alley by six to see if he could spot pins for the early league. During the past week, Red had used him every night as a relief pinboy, filling in for any regulars who wanted a respite. And Red always paid Richie himself so Richie got the full six cents per line just like everyone else.

  “Where did we live when we first came to Chicago?” Richie asked Estelle.

  “In the thirty-three-hundred block of Walnut Street, sugar. I think it was thirty-three-eighteen. Why?”

  “Could you tell me about it? If I can try and remember what’s happened since we came to Chicago, maybe I can figure out why my daddy left. And maybe that’ll help me figure out where he went to.”

  “I don’t see how,” Estelle started to argue. But then she saw the yearning in Richie’s face and her expression softened. “But sure, sugar, if you want me to.” Estelle looked up as a well-dressed older man entered the bar on the other side. “Only I can’t right now, see, because like I said I’m meeting this gentleman who might have a job for me, and he just walked in the door. But you come see me again, hear?” Digging in her purse, she found a pencil stub and on a paper napkin wrote an address on Monroe Street. “That’s where I live.”

  Rising, she smoothed down her dress and patted her hair, then walked around the partition into the bar.

  Richie folded the napkin and put it in the secret compartment of his Buck Jones billfold, before leaving the bar and hurrying to the streetcar back to the bowling alley.

  4

  It took Richie a week to adjust to living in the bowling alley. It had not been easy.

  On that first morning in Cascade, he had been awakened shortly after eight o’clock by a loud, buzzing sound that seemed to be very near him. The droning, vibrating whine had shocked him wide awake; he had sat bolt upright, scared half to death. Leaping off the divan, he had looked around in fear and confusion; for several terrifying seconds he had not known where he was. Remembering, he had rushed out of the lounge. It’s a fire alarm going off, he had thought in panic; the bowling alley was on fire!

  Following the sound to the top of the front stairs, Richie had stopped abruptly at the sight of a black man moving a waxing machine slowly along alley eleven. He had also seen a black woman emptying ashtrays in the spectator area.

  Trembling, Richie had hurried back to the lounge. Only then had he realized how stiff and sore his whole body was from the previous night’s work in the pits. He had felt like one large, moving ache. Quickly gathering his things from the lounge, he had run behind the counter to return the master light switch to “Off,” then had made his way down to the first-floor pits. From there, through the screen, he had been able to see the two janitors as they went about their maintenance work. Nervous, feeling ill, he had waited until they were occupied away from the alleys, then quietly let himself out a rear fire exit.

  On Madison Street, Richie had stood in a doorway, pillowcase under his arm, trying to decide what to do next. People moved past him on the sidewalk, coming, going, a purpose to their step. Everyone seemed to have someplace to go—except him. Presently, a man in a suit gave him a curious look, went on, then turned to look back. Richie had hurried from the doorway and gone in the other direction.

  He spent most of that first day wandering around, looking for places to get warm: other doorways, stores, any place where he could go unnoticed for a few minutes. He had been frightened; never before had he been so totally alone, so cut off from everybody. He had found himself constantly moving in the face of approaching strangers. Ordinary businessmen in suits he was sure were juvenile officers. Women with briefcases like Miss Menefee carried were welfare case workers. Men whose coats and trousers d
id not match were truant officers. Everyone was the enemy now. Richie had kept moving.

  When he stayed anywhere for a few minutes, in some doorway shifting from foot to foot, blowing on his hands, watching warily, he had tried to figure out what to do next: how to search for his father; how to get—probably steal—some decent clothes; how to find another place to sleep if he could not stay in the bowling alley again. His problems seemed enormous; the situation, now that he was in it, was numbing. The terrible life he had just left behind him now seemed oddly comfortable. But it was too late to turn back.

  Time dragged by tediously that first day, but he had managed to survive the hours, returning to Cascade at three-thirty in the afternoon when school had let out. Red was surprised to see him.

  “What are you doing here so early?” he asked.

  Richie shrugged. “I came to see if I could set pins again.”

  “I won’t be assigning league alleys for two more hours,” Red had told him. He bobbed his chin at Richie’s pillowcase. “What do you carry in that thing anyway?”

  “My gym clothes, for school,” Richie lied.

  Red nodded and began opening cartons of cigarettes and restocking a bin behind the counter. “Well, hang around if you want to,” he said presently, “but don’t get in anybody’s way.”

  Richie had slumped down in one of the spectator seats and for a while had watched a few people bowling open games. From noon to six Cascade had nonleague open bowling at reduced prices, using pinboys who were too slow to work the fast evening league play. Richie would have liked to set pins for the open bowling, but knew it would be unwise to show up at Cascade during school hours. One of the places truant officers regularly checked were bowling alleys.