Hard City

by Clark Howard

  After he had been there half an hour, Red called him over to the counter. “Here,” he handed Richie a sheet of paper with a couple of dozen numbers written on it. “The guy that usually does this hasn’t shown up. These are balls that some of tonight’s league bowlers reserved to use. The number is engraved right above the thumb hole. Find ’em and put them in that reserved rack over there. I’ll give you a penny a ball; you can make twenty or thirty cents while you wait.”

  “Thanks, Red!” Richie said elatedly. He had set about enthusiastically looking for the bowling balls on the list.

  During the next week, Richie had gradually integrated himself into the routine of the bowling alley. Now on mornings when the waxing machine woke him, he got up unafraid; the cleaners never came upstairs before finishing the first floor, so Richie felt comfortable taking his time. He washed his face at one of the sinks and brushed his teeth with a new toothbrush he had stolen from Woolworth’s and a shaker of salt he had taken from Walgreen’s soda fountain. He had shoplifted a navy turtleneck from a surplus store and snatched a pair of rubber galoshes from the foyer of an apartment building. He still kept his extra belongings in the pillowcase, but instead of carrying it around all the time, he now put it in one of the small bowling ball lockers in the upstairs checkroom, securing it with a combination lock he had swiped from Neisner’s Variety Store. At night when he crept upstairs after Red closed up, he would get his belongings out of the locker and, spreading paper towels on the floor of the lounge, take a sponge bath before settling down for the night. He usually got a candy bar from the vending machine to eat as he sat on the divan, back against the wall, and read. Regularly stealing several paperback books a week from wire racks in cigar stores, he often stayed awake as late as two A.M. before finally closing his eyes.

  And every night he cried himself to sleep.

  Richie began his search for Mack in a neighborhood on the far South Side, where he thought he remembered his father saying the mechanic had a small auto repair garage. Riding a streetcar out, Richie walked around the area inquiring at filling stations.

  “Hey, mister, do you know a man named Mack who fixes cars around here somewhere?”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “I dunno.”

  “All’s you know is the one name? All’s you know is ‘Mack’?”

  Richie could only shrug and say, “Yeah.”

  “Can’t help you, kid,” was the usual response.

  Richie kept looking every day, expanding the perimeter of the area block by block until he was a mile in each direction from the intersection where he had started. He was constantly on the alert for authority; wherever he searched, he was always ready to bolt and run. He never relaxed. His stomach hurt a lot.

  One day when he asked about Mack at an Esso station on Calumet near 87th, one of the attendants asked back, “Is he a gimp?” Richie frowned. “Huh?”

  “A gimp, a crippled guy.”

  A new vein of memory suddenly flowed in Richie’s head. His father had called Mack a “clubfoot.” Richie had not even known what it meant. But now it made sense. “Yeah,” he quickly replied. “I think so.”

  “He had a garage a couple of blocks from here. He closed up after the war started ’cause he couldn’t get no parts. I heard he went to work in Commonwealth Edison’s garage down near the Loop. On Harrison Street, I think it was.”

  Richie found the Edison garage and talked to a repair foreman. “Yeah, I know who you’re talking about. Mack Swain. Had a clubfoot, wore one of them built-up shoes. Worked for me three years. Good mechanic, fix anything that had pistons. He quit me back last summer to open a place of his own again. Down on Clinton Street near the river.”

  “Thanks, mister!”

  Hopping a ride on the back of a coal truck, Richie rode to the area around Clinton and 20th Street, where the Chicago River made its southwest curve. He spent the rest of the day asking at filling stations, cigar stores, taxi stands, and other small businesses in the area. But no one had ever heard of Mack Swain. Finally Richie had to quit and hurry to Cascade.

  The next day he was back, asking at more businesses, even stopping people on the street. Grimly determined, he went up one side of a block and down the other. He asked other kids, delivery men, housewives doing their shopping. Desperation drove him; the same desperation that had convinced him that finding his father was the only salvation for his mother and himself; the same desperation that led him to conclude that his father was somewhere in Chicago. I know my dad’s here, he repeated time and time again in his mind as he prowled the streets. I know I’ll find him.

  It was Richie’s dream; he clung to it tenaciously. He would make it come true.

  Locating Mack Swain was the first step.

  On a day when it was warmer than most, Richie went out to West End Avenue and hung around a little neighborhood candy store near Tilton Elementary, the last school he had attended before going into hiding. When school was out, he watched groups of kids coming down the street and filtering out in different directions toward their homes. A girl named Linda walked with two friends until she got to Keeler Avenue, then said goodbye and walked away alone. Richie followed her until they were well away from any other kids, then hurried to catch her.

  “Hey, wait up,” he said.

  Linda’s mouth fell open when she saw him. “The police are looking for you!” she said, aghast.

  Richie went into his John Garfield act. “Yeah, I know. I’m on the lam.”

  “Stop trying to act tough,” Linda said in a no-nonsense manner very advanced for her age. Richie grinned. It was good to see Linda again; he realized for the first time that he had missed her very much. A plain girl from a poor family, she and Richie had liked each other almost from the first day he transferred to Tilton. An avid reader herself, Linda had been the only one in the sixth grade to consistently earn an A on her book reports. Then Richie had come along and begun to get A-pluses. Instead of being piqued, Linda had been pleased; he was a kindred spirit, the first she had ever discovered, wonder of wonders, a boy who liked to read. Deeply troubled when he had suddenly disappeared from school, the young girl was in no mood for his hard-guy act now. Taking him by the arm, Linda guided him to the front steps of the building where they were standing. “Tell me what happened,” she ordered.

  Richie told her that his mother had been sent to a hospital for a drug cure and that he had run away rather than be sent to a foster home. “I been through that foster home stuff already,” he said, “before I came to Tilton.”

  “But where are you living?” she asked, concerned.

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  “You know better. I won’t.”

  “I sleep in a bowling alley where I work.”

  “A bowling alley?” The no-nonsense maturity dissolved; her eyes became teary. “By yourself? All alone?”

  “Sure.” Her tears made him uncomfortable. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “I get along just fine.”

  “You don’t look like you’re getting along just fine,” Linda said, removing her woolen gloves and taking from one of her sleeves a handkerchief to blow her nose. “Look at yourself—the knees are about to come out of your pants, you don’t have a muffler, those galoshes look ten sizes too big for you—where in the world did you get them, anyway?”

  “I found them.”

  “You stole them.” Anguish took over her expression; she gripped both his hands. “Oh, Richie, wouldn’t you be better off in a foster home? Where you wouldn’t have to go around stealing? And you could come back to school?”

  Richie shook his head emphatically. “They watch you too close in a foster home. And I don’t have time to go to school. I’m spending all my time trying to find my dad.”

  “You told me you didn’t have a father.”

  “I got one. I just don’t know where he’s at. But I know I can find him if I look lon
g enough.”

  Linda shook her head. “Richie, you can’t keep on living like you are . . . .”

  Her tears continued. He wondered if he could get her to stop crying by making up a story that he wanted her to help him.

  “I thought if you would tell me what you’re reading in class, I could check the same book out of the library and read it on my own,” he said. “That way I could kind of keep up; I wouldn’t be so far behind when I find my dad and can start back to school.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea!” Linda said, immediately enthusiastic. Wiping her tears, she opened her three-ring notebook and wrote in a neat, precise cursive handwriting the name of the last three books the class had been required to read and report on. Opening the rings and carefully lifting the page out, Linda handed it to him, saying, “There,” very pleased.

  Looking at the list, Richie nodded. “Thanks,” he said. The books she listed were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Richie had read the first two when he was ten; the third one he had declined to finish after reading one chapter. Developing reading skills unimpeded by formal supervision, he was far ahead of Linda and other sixth-graders. In his locker at the bowling alley at that moment were two paperbacks he had stolen from Walgreen’s: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, which he had finished, though with difficulty, and The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett, which he was enjoying thoroughly.

  Folding the sheet of notebook paper and putting it in his pocket, Richie said, “This will help a lot.”

  He did not ask if he could walk Linda home; he had asked that once when he was still attending school and she had said, “I don’t think you’d better. My father doesn’t like me to walk with boys. He works on a route truck for the Tribune so he gets home before I do. He’s usually watching for me out the window.”

  “How come?”

  “He likes me to rub his shoulders when I get home,” she replied, blushing. “His shoulders get sore from throwing bundles of papers. And my mom’s not there to do it ’cause she doesn’t get home from work until six.”

  They had never had more than a few moments after school, but had spent recesses and eaten lunch together. Richie had taken some bullying for that from several of the tougher boys on the schoolyard; they called him a sissy and punched him around in line and told him to go play jump-rope with the girls. Such treatment was not new to him; every time he had changed schools, which for several years was frequently, he had faced the same test: someone in the class had to find out for all the rest of them how tough the newcomer was. Richie was not tough at all; he was not strong and he did not know how to fight. After the initial encounter on the schoolyard, in which he was thoroughly humiliated, he would be relegated to the ranks of the weaklings: the ones the girls called “scaredy-cats” and the tougher boys called “chicken livers.” Richie put up with the bullying until it eventually slacked off and he was left alone—most of the time, anyway. It was because Linda knew he was not tough and could not fight that she, like Grace Menefee, refused to put up with his John Garfield act. And for the same reason she worried about him.

  “How will I know whether you’re all right?” she asked, concerned.

  “I’ll come back and see you after school again,” Richie said.

  “Promise?”

  “Sure.”

  As they were parting, she put her hand on his arm and said, “Promise you’ll stay out of trouble too.” When they were a few feet apart, Linda said, “Do you want to kiss me goodbye?”

  “Can I?”

  “If you want to. You don’t have to.”

  “I want to. Do you want me to?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  They stepped back together and kissed, briefly, sweetly, innocently. Both blushing then, they said goodbye again and went separate ways.

  That night, Red assigned Richie to alley eleven, working with one of the old men who only wanted to spot one alley. When Richie got back to the pits, Pete was already sitting behind his regular alleys, nine and ten. “You owe me forty cents, kid,” he said.

  “I don’t owe you nothing,” Richie replied disdainfully.

  “Red shoulda let me pay you for working my alley that night. Forty cents of what he gave you was mine.” He pointed a finger at Richie. “You pay up tonight after we check out.”

  “I’m not paying you nothing,” Richie told him flatly.

  Pete got to his feet with surprising speed and grabbed Richie by the coat with both hands. “You little cocksucker! You’re gonna pay me what you owe me or I’ll slap your teeth out!”

  “Leave me alone!” Richie yelled, struggling to break away.

  Pete manhandled Richie back against the wall and started shaking him. From alleys fifteen and sixteen, a surly looking man in an undershirt, with tattoos on both arms, came over and said quietly to Pete, “Turn him loose.”

  “This ain’t your business,” Pete snapped, spraying saliva with his words.

  A tattooed arm shot up and powerful fingers closed on Pete’s throat. “Turn him loose or I’ll tear your fucking windpipe out.”

  Pete let go of Richie’s shirt and the tattooed man let go of Pete’s throat. Pete stumbled back, trembling. “This ain’t—your—business!” he said again, livid.

  “Find somebody your own size to shove around,” the man said, returning to his own alleys. “If Red didn’t pay you right, take it up with Red. But leave the kid alone.”

  Pete climbed into the pit of alley nine, muttering obscenities. Richie hung up his coat and went over to sixteen. “Thanks, mister.”

  “Forget it.” The tattooed man shook a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes and dug his thumbnail into a stick match to light it. Just then the buzzer sounded and Richie had to hurry over to eleven as the first league got underway.

  Richie was slowly improving as a pin spotter. With experience, his back and shoulder muscles, his elbows and wrists, no longer made him feel like he’d been in a car wreck. With practice, he began picking up three pins at a time: one in the middle between the ones he had in each hand. The fearful ball, rolling like a runaway train down the narrow alley, its sound growing ominously louder, no longer frightened him. Nor did the even louder assault of its striking the pins and sending them slamming into the pit like dead men; he knew now that because of the design of the alley, with its recessed pit, the chance of a pin flying up and hitting a pinboy was remote.

  No longer uncomfortable in the pits, Richie worked purposefully and efficiently with the old man in alley twelve. There was little talk between them; a sixty-year-old semi-derelict and a twelve-year-old runaway had many of life’s low blows in common, but they didn’t know it. They could easily have become friends but neither even considered it.

  During the second league, the spotting went faster and more smoothly than in the first. It was an all-male league and more attention was paid to bowling; no time was spent trying to impress or instruct, there was no preoccupation with tight slacks or sweaters, no one involved in making arrangements to try to take anyone home. It was all bowling. Richie was glad to be working the alley for both leagues; it meant he would earn $1.80 for the night. He had also been filching coins off newsstands on a regular basis, wherever he went in the city, and stealing empty quart beer bottles from bins behind taverns and taking them to other taverns for the nickel deposit, and shoplifting Zippo lighters from the counter at Woolworth’s, selling them for a quarter apiece to guys who hung out at a poolroom across from the streetcar barns. With what he earned tonight, he would have enough extra money saved up to buy an army blanket at the surplus store to sleep warmer at night. Then he had to steal another combination lock for the extra bowling ball locker he would need to keep it in. He had his eye on a gumball machine he was going to grab one day soon also. Being on his own he had found required constant effort to keep his head above water.

  Chicago was a big sea; drowning was very easy.

  Richie kept going back to Clinton Street nea
r the river, covering the same ground over and over again trying to locate Mack Swain. The more he searched unsuccessfully, the more frustrating and depressing it became. Each time he failed to find Mack, each time he glumly rode the streetcar back to the West Side, he could not help but remember his mother’s words the last time he had mentioned looking for his father. It had been just a few days before they hit bottom, a few days before Richie had turned her in. Chloe had been coming out of one of her stupors, already dreading having to face getting her next fix. When he brought up finding his father, she looked at him as if he were crazy.

  “You want to what? Look for your father? For Christ’s sake, why don’t you look for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? You’ll have a whole lot better chance of finding that than you will finding him.”

  Richie had been burning at the time with such desire to do it, to start looking for him in earnest, that he had pestered her relentlessly until she had finally pointed a finger at him and said angrily, “Look, you might just as well get used to the idea that you don’t have a father anymore! He’s gone for good, see? Now don’t bother me about him again! Just pretend he’s dead, understand? Dead!”

  After days of futile search, it would have been easy for Richie simply to accept that. But he refused to do it. His father was alive; he knew it. And he would find him even if it took a hundred years.

  Doggedly he went on.

  One day at a Sinclair filling station on the corner of Cermak Road, one of the attendants remembered Richie being there before, looking for someone.

  “No luck finding that guy yet, huh, kid?” he asked.

  “Nobody knows him,” Richie said, shaking his head.

  “Ain’t you got no idea what the address is supposed to be?” the attendant asked, fishing a toothpick out of his shirt pocket.

  “Just Clinton Street near where the river crosses,” Richie shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

  “Say, wait a minute, I just thought of something,” the attendant said, pointing the toothpick at Richie. “Come on in the office with me.”