Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “Oh, you’ll be home before twelve,” Myron assured him. “The first bout is at seven. They’re usually over with by ten at the latest.”

  After the training session that day, on his way to the bowling alley to go to work, Richie was exuberant. Myron was actually going to take him with the club boxing team; he was going to be part of it. It was unusual for Richie to feel good about something like that. Normally when he was included in a group—a classroom of students, half a dozen kids in a foster home, a long line of pin boys working the pits—he nevertheless remained detached as much as possible. He did not like running with a pack. It was much easier, he found, to rely only on himself and not others, to work only for himself, trust only himself.

  With the boxing club, he felt different; he did not know why. Perhaps because there was no threat there, no danger, no price to pay. Myron liked him, the older boys liked him—even the gym manager had bought him a Coca-Cola one day. They accepted him for what he was: a poor kid with nothing, who wanted something. Their acceptance: that was new to Richie, because it was unqualified. Others extracted tribute: on the schoolyard, he had to pay with submission and humiliation; in the foster homes, it was with obedience, compliance; in the pits he paid in wariness and tension. Only in the gym did he feel at home.

  As he turned the corner, Richie saw Bobby Casey waiting for him again outside Cascade. Ducking out of sight, Richie stood against the building and considered the situation. He was sure Bobby could still whip him, although it would not now be as easy as it would have been before Richie had learned the proper delivery of a left jab. Bobby was after him because Richie had refused to chicken out in rejoining him and Stan on stealing forays—despite the fact that Bobby’s share of the three-way split had been more than he had made on two-way splits in months. Bobby did not care about that. The reason, Richie knew, was Bobby’s jealousy of Richie’s friendship with Stan, which went back long before Stan and Bobby ever met.

  Richie knew that sooner or later he would have to fight Bobby Casey. He wanted it to be later rather than sooner. The longer he could put it off, the more he would learn in the gym, and the better prepared he would be for it. Richie had never actually been in a fight, at least not one in which he did much more than try to protect himself. He never ran, but he never fought back either.

  For now, however, he was faced with five hours of hard work in the Cascade pits, and he did not want to take a beating before he had to perform that labor. Pushing away from the building, Richie trotted back the way he had come. In the middle of the block, he crossed the boulevard into Garfield Park. Half a block into the park, he emerged on the Madison Street side and dodged traffic to get across to another section of the park. As he did, a police car cruised by and the two officers inside gave him more than casual looks. Jesus, Richie thought, hurrying on his way, looking over his shoulder to see if the car turned around. It did not. Stomach churning now, he dashed through the park, recrossed the boulevard, and entered the alley behind Cascade. At the rear of the bowling alley, he pounded with the side of his fist on one of the fire doors behind the pits. An old man who was a regular pin spotter let him in.

  Observing Richie’s tense expression, the old man asked, “Who’s after you?”

  “Who ain’t?” Richie replied.

  Away from the gym, there was still the rest of the world to contend with.

  9

  When Slim got off the Greyhound Bus in Chicago that day back in 1936 to search for his wife and son, he went to a Travelers Aid counter in the terminal and asked how to get to 3318 W. Walnut Street. The lady there wrote down instructions for him: take a Madison-Kedzie streetcar to the end of the line, transfer to a Kedzie-North Avenue car, get off at Walnut Street and follow the numbers. Apprehensive about getting around in Chicago, Slim was surprised at how easy it was. The largest place he had previously been was Memphis, which could have been set down in one small corner of this hulking, sprawling place. Chicago kept going on forever. It took Slim forty-five minutes to get to the end of the Madison-Kedzie line, another fifteen to ride the second streetcar to Walnut. Easy to get around if one followed the numbers, but it took a lot of time; the numbers, like the city, kept getting bigger.

  At the apartment building at 3318, Slim learned that Chloe was no longer there. “She moved out before summer,” the landlady said, studying Slim. “You a relative?”

  “I’m her husband.”

  “I kind of thought you favored the little boy.”

  “Can you tell me where they moved to?” Slim asked.

  “Gee, no. But I can tell you where you might find out. The other one, Estelle, was going with a guy who tended bar in a place called the Dew Drop Inn, down on Sacramento. Know where that is?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The landlady gave him directions and Slim began walking. He was not surprised that Estelle was with Chloe; in retrospect he should have guessed it: they had been like sisters all during school and had maintained their best-friend relationship into adulthood. Nor did Slim object to them being together. Estelle was a little too loose in her ways to suit Slim; he knew half a dozen men back home that she had taken off her bloomers for, but by the same token, having been around a lot more than Chloe, she was, Slim guessed, probably able to handle herself a lot better. She would see to it that Chloe didn’t get taken advantage of.

  At the Dew Drop Inn, the barkeep on duty said, “Yeah, sure, I know Estelle. What ya looking for her for?”

  “I’m looking for my wife. Name’s Chloe. She’s living with Estelle.”

  The barkeep thought about it for a moment, then said, “Well, I’ll tell you, bud, Estelle ain’t been in for a while. She was going with one of our bartenders here, fella named Bill, but she found out he was married. Try where she works, the Walgreen’s over on Homan and Van Buren.”

  Getting new directions, Slim began walking again. It had been seven blocks to the Dew Drop Inn. It was eight to Walgreen’s. Estelle had left her job there three months earlier. The manager thought she had gone to work for another drugstore somewhere in the area, but he wasn’t sure which one or where. He asked if Slim had checked to see if they had a telephone; Slim admitted he did not know how, and the manager did it for him, but with negative results. “Nope,” he said, hanging up. “Information’s got no number for either one of them. Sorry.”

  After thanking him, Slim left and began walking up and down one street after another, inquiring about Estelle in every drugstore he came to. He walked for four hours, until he felt a blister on his heel begin to bleed from his new prison-made shoes. Finally he ended up back at the end of the Madison-Kedzie streetcar line. There he rented a sleeping room on the third floor above a used furniture store.

  “No cooking allowed in the rooms,” the landlord warned. “No playing the radio after ten o’clock. If the rent ain’t paid the day it’s due, I padlock the room.”

  It was a seedy little room that matched its landlord: squeaky bedsprings, cracked window shade, a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, a rickety dresser with a badly flecked mirror. But it was cheap. After the landlord left, Slim took off his shoes and socks, walked barefoot down the hall to the bathroom, and washed his blistered feet in cold water. Tomorrow he would buy some Dr. Scholl’s heel pads before he resumed his walking search for the drugstore where Estelle worked.

  When he got back to his room, Slim stripped to his underwear and lay down on the bed to look at a week-old newspaper he found in one of the dresser drawers. On the front page he read the first paragraph of a story about sit-down strikers occupying the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. That was as far as he got.

  Completely done in, he closed his eyes and fell deeply asleep.

  A month later, Slim sat on a bench in Garfield Park, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. Staring at the park lagoon, he pondered the predicament he found himself in. He was nearly broke, down to less than three dollars. He had not been able to find Chloe and his little boy,
or locate Estelle. He could not take a chance asking for work anywhere because he had violated his probationary release from prison by leaving Tennessee, and was pretty sure that had been found out by now. And he did not want to try stealing because he was afraid he would not be any good at it and would get caught, which would mean going to jail, then back to prison, and probably never finding Chloe and the boy.

  Sitting up, Slim pulled from his pocket a well-worn Chicago street map. On one side of it he had used a pencil to outline a square, block-by-block section of the West Side. Bounded by Homan Avenue on the west, Western Avenue on the east, Harrison Street on the south, and Fulton Street on the north, it was an area of approximately one-and-a-half square miles: ten blocks long and nine blocks wide. During the past month, Slim had walked some two-thirds of the area, inquiring at every drugstore he encountered whether they had heard of Estelle. He found two at which she worked for short times but had not stayed on, because either they had not liked her or she them. At the one that had not liked her, they unhesitatingly gave Slim the home address they still had in their payroll book. It was a building on Sawyer Avenue. Slim hurried to it, only to find that she was no longer there. But she had been there, and Chloe and the boy had been with her. At that location he learned of another bar Estelle was known to frequent, but like the Dew Drop Inn she was not coming around anymore.

  Slim was certain that Estelle was both living and working somewhere within the penciled area on the street map. Every address where she had either lived or worked, and every bar where she was known was, without exception, within that area. It was only a matter of time, he was convinced, before he could track her down. And when he found Estelle, he would find Chloe and his son.

  But he had to have money to carry on his search. And there were only so many ways one came by money. You could find it, beg for it, borrow it, work for it, or steal it. Slim much preferred to work for it. But he could not go to work for anyone who would ask too many questions, or want him to get one of those new Social Security cards that the government put into law a few months before his release. He had to work for someone who either didn’t know anything about him and didn’t care, or who knew all about him and didn’t care.

  Turning the map over, Slim studied it until he found Prairie Avenue on the South Side. With his finger, he traced the street some ten miles out from the downtown area until he reached 72nd Street. In his mind, etched there because he had seen it so many times in prison, was an address: 7244 S. Prairie Avenue. Pursing his lips in thought for a minute, Slim stared out at the lagoon, considering a plan. Abruptly, he returned the map to his pocket and took out his billfold. He had several small snapshots stuck in the corner of the currency section: one of Chloe and him sitting on a riverbank, one of Chloe and their boy when he was a baby, one of his own mother, and one of a diminutive woman with gray streaked hair, wearing an ankle-length black dress. Slim had never met the woman, but he knew much about her, and he knew that he would find her at the 7244 S. Prairie Avenue address. He had originally intended to mail the snapshot to the woman with a short note of explanation as to how he got it, but with the business of finding Chloe occupying his mind and time, he never got around to doing it. Which, as it turned out, may have been a good thing.

  Returning the billfold to his hip pocket, Slim kept the snapshot and put it in his shirt pocket, buttoning the flap so he wouldn’t lose it. With his mind made up then, he left the park bench and walked briskly toward the streetcar line.

  The address was a formidable-looking, two-story red brick mansion. Slim guessed it had at least a dozen rooms. It was set back from the street like all the other large houses on the block, and had a wide walk laid in a series of steps leading to the front porch. There was no fence around it and no guards, as Slim had somehow imagined there would be.

  Walking up to the front door, Slim rang the bell and waited. When there was no answer, he rang again. After a few moments of indecision, he left the porch and followed another walk down one side of the house to the rear. The backyard, he found, was enclosed by a brick wall that matched the house—not a high wall, perhaps five feet, with a wrought-iron gate leading to the alley. On one side of the yard, further enclosed by a low white picket fence, was what Slim recognized at once as a small vegetable garden. In it, dressed in the same kind of long, black cotton dress, was the woman in the photograph. A handbasket hanging from the crook of one arm, wearing old, soiled cotton gloves, she was methodically and selectively gathering vegetables from the dirt of the garden.

  Slim stopped a few feet from the picket fence. “ ‘Scuse me, ma’am,” he said, quietly so as not to startle her. He remembered that his own mother, when concentrating on something, had been easily startled. When the woman turned to look at him, Slim asked, “Are you Miz Teresa Capone?”

  “What you want?” she asked matter-of-factly, not nearly as suspicious as Slim thought she ought to have been.

  “My name’s Howard, ma’am,” he said. “I was a friend of your son down in, uh”—he glanced away, embarrassed, unable to speak the name of the prison—“down south,” he finished lamely.

  The woman squinted at him in the sunlight, then put one gloved hand up to shield her eyes. “Ina penitentiary?” she asked, her English broken. “You friend of Alphonse ina At-alanta?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ma Alphonse’s mamma,” she acknowledged. She raised her chin an inch. “Teresa Riolia Capone.”

  Slim stepped forward, removing the snapshot from his pocket, and handed it to her. “Uh, this here is Al’s, Miz Capone. He had to leave it behind when he went to, uh . . . .” Again words failed him.

  “Al-acatraz,” Teresa Capone helped him again. Her voice became grave. “That’sa not very good place, you know?”

  “No, ma’am, I heard it wasn’t. I’m sorry Al, uh, Alphonse, got sent there.”

  Holding the snapshot, Teresa Capone studied the tall, fair, blue-eyed Slim. Tilting her head slightly, she asked, “Why a nice boy like you in At-alanta?”

  Slim turned crimson, feeling like a little boy, feeling he was under the scrutiny of his own mother. This olive-complexioned little wisp of a woman in her long black dress, graying hair pulled together in the back, holding her handbasket of vegetables—it was as if she were looking at him with his dead mother’s eyes.

  “Why, huh?” Teresa Capone repeated her question. “Nice-a young man like you. Why in At-alanta pen?”

  “I was bootlegging whiskey, ma’am,” Slim mumbled like a schoolboy. “Back when whiskey was outlawed.”

  Teresa Capone sighed wearily. “Ah, me,” she said, pulling off one cotton glove and putting the hand briefly on her forehead. “Whiskey, beer, wine, bootlegging. This a funny place sometimes, America. Alphonse too, he bootleg. But they never catcha him, not for that. Ah, me.” She looked curiously at him. “Nice boy like you, where’sa you mamma?”

  “She passed,” Slim replied quietly. “She died while I was on the inside.” His expression darkened. “They offered to take me out for her funeral, but they said I’d have to wear leg irons. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t wear chains to my own mother’s funeral. So I didn’t go.”

  Teresa Capone shook her head again. “Plenty worries ina world, that’sa for sure.” Putting the snapshot in the pocket of her dress, Teresa Capone looked down at the basket of fresh-picked vegetables and asked, “You like eat nice-a salad?”

  Slim grinned widely. “Yes, ma’am! I grew up on a farm; I eat anything that comes out of a garden.”

  “Here, you carry this,” the woman said, handing him the basket. Putting her cotton gloves between two pickets of the fence, she took Slim’s arm and led him toward the back door.

  Thirty minutes later, his coat hanging on the back of the chair, shirtsleeves rolled up, Slim was at Teresa Capone’s kitchen table halfway through a large wooden bowl of fresh carrots, cucumber, garbanzo beans, lettuce, and tomatoes, all mixed with slices of Genoa hard salami and shredded mozzarella cheese, the whole of it
laced with an oil-vinegar-herb-spice dressing as delicious as anything he had ever tasted. “This is wonderful, Miz Capone,” Slim told her with his mouth full. “Is this the salad Al used to brag on so much?”

  “What’sa ‘brag on,’ I dunno,” Teresa Capone replied. “But that’sa salad Alphonse like-a best.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s what I meant.”

  “Listen,” she patted his arm, “You don’t have to call-a me ‘Miz Capone.’ You call-a me ‘Mamma Teresa,’ that’sa okay.”

  “Yes, ma’am. If you say so.” Slim looked down, a little embarrassed, and mumbled, “Mamma Teresa.”

  The little woman smiled and sat down at the table with Slim. Watching him wolf down the salad, she nodded approvingly and asked, “You like-a spaghetti?”

  Before Slim could answer, there was the sound of a door slamming at the front of the house, and a female voice called, “Mamma! We’re home!”

  Mamma Teresa rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Like I couldn’t a-tell from-a the door being slammed.”

  A moment later the kitchen was entered by two striking young women, both with waist-length hair shiny as Algerian onyx, and large plum-dark eyes. They looked like sisters, perhaps even twins. The only noticeable distinction between them was that one had a flawless olive complexion, while the other’s face bore pockmarks on her left cheek.

  The two stopped just inside the door, clearly surprised by Slim’s presence. “Who is this, Mamma?” one of them asked.

  “He’s a friend of Alphonse, from At-alanta,” Mamma Teresa said. Pointing at the young woman who spoke, she said to Slim, “This Alphonse’s baby sister, Mafalda. And this”—she moved her finger toward the one with the scarred cheek—“is her-a cousin, Avellina Gela. She’sa called Ava for short. They were-a born on the same Day—Mafalda ina Brooklyn, Ava ina Naples.”