Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Mafalda walked up to the table. “Who are you?” she asked Slim, her tone curt. Before Slim could reply, Mamma Teresa answered for him.

  “I justa tol’ you, Mafalda, he’s a friend of Alphonse.”

  “How do we know you’re Al’s friend,” Mafalda bluntly challenged Slim, ignoring her mother. “Anybody could walk in here and say that.”

  “Mafalda, you hush!” Mamma Teresa scolded. “You too suspicious, sounda like you brothers.”

  “Ralph isn’t going to like this, Mamma,” Mafalda warned.

  Mamma Teresa looked at Slim. “I always worry whata Ralph don’t like,” she said sarcastically. At that moment, as if on cue, the front door slammed again. “Slama doors,” Mamma Teresa complained. “Ever’body ina this family slama doors!”

  Ralph Capone walked into the kitchen. He was swarthy and stocky, handsome in a fleshy way, immaculately dressed. Following closely behind him were two large men in suits. As the women had done, Ralph stopped short, taken aback by the sight of Slim. “What the hell?”

  “You don’ta swear in this house,” Mamma Teresa pointed a finger at him.

  “Mamma says he says he’s a friend of Al’s from Atlanta,” Mafalda told her brother.

  “Mamma, Mamma,” Ralph said, half chastising, half pleading. At the same time he made a barely perceptible motion to the two men with him and they immediately moved to each side of Slim, took him by the arms, and stood him up against the wall. Ralph came over and twisted his fist in the front of Slim’s shirt. “Who are you, punk?”

  “Like I told Miz Capone, a friend of Al’s from Atlanta—”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Al called me Slim.”

  “He never mentioned no ‘Slim’ to me.”

  “He never mentioned you to me either,” Slim retorted.

  “Don’t get funny with me,” Ralph warned, twisting the shirt tighter.

  “Ralph, you stop it!” Mamma Teresa ordered. She waved the snapshot of herself in his face. “He bringa me this asa proof!”

  Letting go of Slim, Ralph gave the photo a cursory look and handed it back to her. “He could’ve stole that, Mamma.” When she started shaking her head, Ralph exhorted, “He was in a prison, Mamma! Prisons are full of thieves!”

  “I believe-a him,” Mamma Teresa declared, with heavy emphasis on the I. Barely reaching Ralph’s shoulders, she tilted her face up defiantly. “If he no friend of Alphonse, how he know where we live, tella me that?”

  Ralph’s eyes rolled, as his mother’s had done earlier. “Our address is no big secret, Mamma; it’s been in the newspapers fifty times. Everybody in Chicago probably knows where we live!”

  “Aha!” Mamma Teresa seized. “He’s no from Chicago! That proves I’ma right!”

  “Oh, Mamma!” Ralph turned back to Slim. “You claim Al told you to come here to the house?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Slim corrected. “He just said if I ever came to Chicago, I could always have some kind of a job with his family.”

  “Why would he tell a hillbilly like you a thing like that?” Ralph sneered.

  “I done him a favor,” Slim said.

  “What kind of a favor?”

  “That’s between him and me. You want to know, you’ll have to ask him.” Glancing past Ralph, Slim saw that Mafalda was frowning slightly.

  “I don’t believe you, hillbilly,” Ralph said, putting a rigid finger in Slim’s face.

  “Don’t believe me then!” Slim snapped back, his anger reaching the surface. “Tell these gorillas of yours to turn me loose and I’ll beat it! And get your finger out of my face!”

  Ralph colored and drew back a fist to hit him, but Mafalda said, “Ralph, wait!”

  Ralph’s head snapped around to glare at his sister. “You too? I’m supposed to be in charge around here.”

  “You are, Ralphie,” the pretty young woman assured, quickly coming over to put a placating hand on his arm. “But what if Al did say we’d give him a job? He’s going to be plenty sore if you break his word. You know how he is about his word.”

  Ralph stared at Mafalda, indecision in his eyes. Mafalda’s own eyes flicked over to Slim, her glance seeming to say: Keep quiet.

  “Listen,” she said to Ralph, “why don’t you play it safe? Find something for him to do, at least until Mamma and I visit Al again. Then we can ask him.”

  Thinking it over for a moment, Ralph finally expelled a tense breath and lowered his fist. But the finger went back in Slim’s face. “I’m gonna keep you around until I hear from my brother. God help you,” he warned, “if you’re conning us.” Nodding brusquely to the two men holding Slim’s arms, he said, “Take him across the alley to the garage. Tell Mack to find something for him to do.”

  “The first time I met your dad,” Mack told Richie eight years later, “was when Ralph’s boys brought him over. The Capone garage was across the alley from the backyard of the house. All the family cars was parked there, and I kept ’em serviced and clean.”

  Mack was sitting on a low stool in his own garage, putting brake shoes on the wheels of an old Nash sedan. Richie sat next to him on a wooden box, eating a Baby Ruth.

  “Your dad told me all about what happened in the house. Didn’t surprise me none. Ralph was Al’s older brother, you know, but he’d always been second to Al in running the Capone family, and I guess he always felt kind of funny about that. Actually, he wasn’t even in the rackets for a long time. He had a lot of legit jobs: Western Union messenger when he was a kid, then he was a longshoreman, then a bartender. He was even in the Marines in the First World War. It was only after Prohibition come in that Al talked him into finally joining the organization. When Al got sent up, it naturally fell to Ralph to take over. He tried his best; he just wasn’t the man his brother was.”

  “Did my dad really do Al Capone a favor in prison?” Richie asked, fascinated by the gangster lore.

  “You bet,” Mack verified. “Did him a big favor. Your dad told me all about it—in confidence, of course.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you how it happened, just like I heard it. When Slim got to the Atlanta pen, he was assigned to an eight-man cell, one of the big bullpen cells, they called them; all the prisons used to have them. Already in the cell was two mail-truck robbers, a former judge serving time for graft, a con-man promoter, a mail fraud swindler, a safecracker named Red Rudensky, and Big Al Capone, king of the Chicago rackets. Al had been convicted of income tax evasion and was serving ten years.

  “Well, your dad felt pretty much like an outsider in that group. All the rest of ’em were from up North, and aside from the judge, were really professional criminals. So Slim kind of became a loner and kept pretty much to himself, and the others in the cell, why, they couldn’t figure him out, so they just left him alone. Big Al, he was real tight with Rudensky, used to call him ‘Rusty’. Rudensky, he’d worked for Al at one time, picking locks on government warehouses so’s Al’s boys could steal back Canadian whiskey that the Feds had seized. So Red got to be Al’s right-hand man in Atlanta.

  “Anyways, like I said, your dad went his own way, minded his own business, did his own time; all’s he wanted to do was finish his stretch and get back home to you and your mother. But out on the yard one day, Slim heard some young punk say he was gonna get Capone because he said Al slighted him. Al was always running into that problem; some punk would wave at him in the yard and if Al didn’t wave back, the punk would get a burr up his ass—didn’t make no difference whether Al even saw him or not.

  “Anyhow, this particular day some punk moved in on Al with a shiv, and Slim, because he’d overheard the guy say he was gonna do it, got in his way, took the shiv away from him, and flattened him right there on the yard. The guy got up and fought Slim, and both of ’em ended up in the hole.

  “Well, Rudensky, he found out what happened and told Al about it. When Slim got out of solitary and come back to the cell, Al asked him why he done it.
Slim, he said it was because Al was his cellmate, said he’d have done the same thing if it’d been the judge or Rudensky or any of the others if the punk had gone after them. See, even though your dad kept to himself, he still felt a loyalty to the men in his cell. Well, Big Al Capone, you know, that was the kind of thinking he understood. In his own way, Big Al was always a very upright individual. He was proud of the fact that his word was his bond, and he never went back on it.

  “As it turned out, your dad and Big Al and Red Rudensky became the best of friends.” Mack paused in his work and smiled. “Your dad said they were the funniest-looking friends in the whole prison: Slim, a tall, blond hillbilly bootlegger; Al, a roly-poly dago gangster; and Rudensky, a great big, strapping red-haired Jew from New York. They stayed friends for the rest of the time they were together, which was about a year. Then Al got transferred to the Rock.”

  “The Rock?” Richie asked.

  “Alcatraz.” Mack’s face turned sad. “His family had paid over a hundred thousand dollars in bribes to keep him from being sent there. It was a brand-new federal prison, converted from an old military jail. The Feds designed it for all the big-time Prohibition outlaws that was making headlines back then: Doc Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis. It was set up to be the country’s hardest prison, with the toughest rules: silent system, no time off for good behavior, dark cells, only one visitor a month—that sort of thing. What hurt Al the most was that his only kid, Sonny, who was fourteen, wouldn’t be allowed to visit at all. Al was crazy about his kid; Sonny was partly deaf from a mastoid infection—that’s some kind of ear trouble—and Al liked to see him as often as possible. But he knew on the Rock he couldn’t.

  “Well, despite all the bribes and all the high-priced lawyers and all the appeals, they decided to transfer Al to the Rock. Your dad said that when the guards came to get him, they told Al he had to leave all personal belongings behind, including his family photographs. Al went berserk. You know, Al was shorter than average, and looked a little fat, but lemme tell you, he was strong as an ox. And he knew how to use his dukes too; he’d been a bouncer at one time in a real tough joint back in Brooklyn; that’s how he got the scar on his face—fighting some guy who pulled a knife on him. Anyways, your dad said it took six guards to drag Big Al out of that cell and get him shackled to a seat on the Alcatraz Express. When another guard came in and started collecting Al’s belongings for disposal, your dad managed to swipe the snapshot of Mamma Teresa that Al had taped to the wall.”

  “So everything he told Ralph Capone was the truth,” Richie said.

  “Right down the line,” Mack confirmed.

  “And Ralph let him stay? And that’s how he came to work for you in the garage?”

  “That’s the way it happened.”

  “Did he still keep on looking for me and my mother while he was working for you?”

  “Oh, sure. That was his whole point of getting a job with the Capone family. There was no chance of him being turned in for violating his probationary release, and he could still keep on trying to find you. He went out every night, prowling that section of the West Side that he had marked on his street map. He never quit looking, not even after he got in trouble and had to go into hiding.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “With Ralph Capone. Ralph had ordered him killed. He had guys out combing the city for your dad.”

  “Did they catch him?” Richie asked, wide-eyed.

  Mack slowly nodded his head. “Yeah. They caught him all right.”

  10

  In the locker room of the Legion Park Athletic Club, Richie watched as Myron got their first fighter ready for his bout. The kid’s name was Frankie Broski and he weighed one-hundred-eight pounds. He had blond hair cut in a flattop, over sharp Polish features. Myron was rubbing Frankie’s shoulders to loosen up the boy’s trapezius muscles, which, if too stiff, would affect both the speed and power of a punch thrown with either arm.

  “Gimme his jacket,” Myron said, bobbing his chin at a blue-and-white zipper jacket with MIDWEST ATHLETIC CLUB lettered across the back. Richie handed Myron the jacket and Myron draped it around Frankie’s shoulders.

  A man stuck his head in the door and yelled, “Third bout! Hunnerd-and-eight pounds! Let’s go!”

  “Let’s go,” Myron repeated, throwing a towel over his shoulder and picking up a zippered bag containing a first-aid kit, four hard-rubber mouthpieces, a dog-earred copy of Rules of Amateur Boxing, and a miscellaneous selection of shoelaces, adhesive tape, extra protective cups, and jockstraps. Richie grabbed a wooden bucket containing a quart milk-bottle of water with a rubber bathtub stopper in it to prevent spills.

  As the trio left the locker room, the other three Midwest A.C. fighters yelled their encouragement: “Go get him, Frankie!” “Tear him up, Frankie!” “Take him apart, Frankie!”

  At the same time, from another section of the locker room, Frankie’s opponent, with his trainer, was also leaving, amid shouts of support from the other Legion Park fighters. Sitting across from the Midwest fighters were several boys from the Scandinavian A. C., who were also on the night’s card. They all laughed when one of them said, “Couple of creampuffs. It’ll be a draw.”

  Myron led the way out to the ring, Frankie, already gloved, right behind him, Richie bringing up the rear. Richie had been helping Myron for a month now, and as usual was wide-eyed: he thought the clubs were the most exciting places he had ever been; each Saturday night was a more arousing experience than the previous one, each trip with Myron and the Midwest A.C. fighters an intoxicating event. He was taken by the sight and sound of the crowd, the electricity in the air, the tension of the evening. None of it looked seedy or cheap or tawdry; he saw nothing brutal in what was happening, nothing pathetic about those who watched, sensed nothing savage in the scene around him. To Richie, it was magnetic, it was magical, it was real.

  In their corner of the ring, Myron climbed through the ropes, held them apart for Frankie, and guided the fighter onto his stool. Richie knelt just outside the ropes with the water bucket and the zippered bag. The noise of the crowd engulfed him; at club fights it never stopped, only subsiding a little as the two young battlers were being introduced, then erupting as each of their names and respective athletic club affiliations were announced: “. . . in the red trunks, at one-hundred-and-eight pounds, from the West Side, fightin’ outta the Midwest At’letic Club, wit’ a amatoor record of free wins and one defeat, here’s pop’lar Frankieee Broskiii!”

  The two boys met in the center of the ring with their trainers where the referee told them to fight a clean fight and made them go through the ritual of touching gloves. When the moment was over, the boys and their trainers returned to their own corners. Myron pulled the jacket off his young warrior’s shoulders and handed it to Richie. In that instant, Richie would always look closely at the fighter to see if he had scared eyes. The fighter almost always did. But as Myron had pointed out, the other fighter usually did too.

  “Seconds out!” the referee called.

  Richie hopped off the ring apron and Myron came down the steps to stand next to him, one hand on the stool, ready to pull it out when the fighter rose to answer the bell. Club fights were three rounds of two minutes each for preliminaries, four rounds for main events, occasionally five rounds for special matches—third fights, when each fighter held a victory over the other, which they called a “rubber” match, or bouts between undefeated fighters who had never fought each other. However long a bout was to be, as Richie would later learn, its most terrible moment for the young fighter was that great, hollow void after the trainer had left the ring and before the opening bell sounded. It was an emptiness that a fighter felt all the way into his bowels and his balls; a warm, dry, weakening feeling that at the same time tickled and started a surge of elation coursing through him, like climaxing sexually with a totally repulsive partner. The feeling could only be checked by that first bell of the bout. It was the sound of the moment of manh
ood. No one who ever experienced it was ever completely a boy again.

  Up close, Richie watched the blood sport and loved it.

  When it got warm enough, Linda would meet Richie in Garfield Park on Sunday afternoons and use her movie money to buy hot dogs and soda pop for them from vendors who could not sell in the park but pushed their carts along the perimeter sidewalks. They sat on a bench and ate, watching people float around the lagoon in rowboats rented at the park boathouse. As usual, they talked about books.

  “Miss White belongs to a reading club,” Linda told him. Miss White was Linda’s teacher at Tilton, and Richie’s former teacher. “She and the other members of the club buy all the new books and then exchange them among themselves every week. Whenever Miss White finishes a book early enough, if she thinks it’s suitable for me, she loans it to me. I have one of her books at home now called The Song of Bernadette, by Franz Werfel. It’s really a beautiful story, about a young girl in France who is visited by the Blessed Virgin.”

  “Sounds real good,” Richie said, hoping he sounded sincere.

  “What are you reading this week?” Linda asked.

  “The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett,” he said. “You prob’ly never heard of it.”

  “I haven’t,” she shook her head. “How do you pick out what you read, anyway?”

  “I picked this one out because I read another by the same guy, called The Glass Key, and I ‘membered liking it. But most of the time I just read the first page and if it’s good I take—I mean buy—the book.”

  “I heard you the first time, Richie, you little crook,” she said, catching his slip of the tongue. With her fist, Linda punched him on the arm. Then, as was often the case, she gripped his arm with both hands and laid her head on his shoulder. “Richie, I’m so afraid you’ll get caught and be sent to reform school.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re probably not even looking for me no more,” he tried to reassure her. Even though he knew it to be a lie. They never stopped looking for people. Especially kids who had the guts to break their lousy rules.