Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Tears wiped dry, Richie waited patiently for the bathroom door to open. When it did, he heard his mother’s light step across the room, followed by her cheerful voice, a voice he could remember loving but would love no more, asking, “See anything funny out the window today, sugar? Any fat ladies or midgets?”

  Turning to her, face emotionless, Richie replied, “I saw Daddy.”

  Chloe frowned. “What?”

  “I saw Daddy. He was standing down on the corner with his hands in his pockets and a toothpick in his mouth, looking around.” Pointing to the photograph on the floor, he added, “I got out the picture to make sure. It was Daddy, I know it was.”

  Picking up the photograph, Chloe stepped up behind her son at the window and searched the street with her eyes. Her face had turned marble white, and her lower lip quivered. Richie heard her whisper a barely audible question to herself.

  “My God. Is he out?”

  12

  From the very beginning, Mack and Slim got along like old friends. They were truthful, direct, and totally unpretentious with each other. Slim never treated Mack like a cripple, and Mack appreciated that. Mack believed Slim’s story about helping Al Capone in prison, and Slim appreciated that. When Ralph Capone’s men brought Slim out to the garage with orders from Ralph for Mack to find something for him to do, Mack’s first inclination was to use him just to wash and polish the cars and sweep out the place when it needed it. But when they took to each other so quickly and naturally, Mack started teaching Slim some of the rudiments of automobile mechanics.

  When Mack was not teaching him engine work, Slim still had to do the washing and polishing. Pulling one of the cars into the alley between the garage and the mansion’s backyard, he hooked up a hose, took off his shirt, and went to work. Frequently observing him over the brick fence were Mafalda and Ava. Standing on a bench in the yard, they ate homemade spumoni out of cups and teasingly discussed Slim as if he were not there.

  “He doesn’t look bad without a shirt on,” Ava said. Her English was only slightly accented, a much softer version of the way Mamma Teresa spoke.

  “Kind of pale,” Mafalda pointed out.

  “Probably been staying indoors a lot.”

  “Most convicts do, Ava.”

  “Are his eyes blue or green?” Ava asked innocently.

  “Blue,” Mafalda said.

  “You know what they say about boys with blue eyes,” Ava reminded. Both girls laughed uproariously.

  Slim ignored them when he could, letting them have their fun. Sometimes his lack of reaction piqued them and one of them, usually Ava, unmarried and less reserved, would address him directly.

  “Boy, you missed a spot there on the fender.”

  “I’m not a boy,” Slim said quietly, wiping the sweat off his bare chest. His eyes locked with Ava’s. “And I never miss anything,” he added pointedly.

  Ava blushed furiously and was trying desperately to think of a suitable retort when Mamma Teresa scolded both young women from the garden. “You girlsa leave that nice-a young man alone! Letta him work! Come ina the house right now, I finda something for you to do.” As she left, Ava stuck her tongue out at Slim. Shaking his head, he laughed softly. It was the first time he had laughed in a long time.

  Slim lived in a sleeping room on Wabash Avenue, a few blocks from the garage. Ralph Capone never mentioned anything to Mack about paying Slim, so Mack, who had a bank account to run the garage, decided what he thought was a fair wage and began paying Slim in cash on Saturday night. Slim bought a few clothes and some decent shoes, finally throwing away the prison bro-gans, and started saving as much as he could against the day when he found Chloe and the boy and could take them back down south.

  Slim’s search for his wife and son was continued with quiet relentlessness. He had been hoofing it in a plotted zigzag pattern all over the central West Side for so many weeks now that he no longer even had to refer to the street map on which he’d outlined the area in pencil. Having long since inquired about Estelle in every drugstore within the boundary he had adopted, and not uncovering any fresh leads at all, Slim now turned to the small taverns and clubs of the type he had been referred to by the Walnut Street landlady when he first arrived in the city. It made for a more tedious search since most of the bartenders, unlike the one at the Dew Drop Inn, were close-mouthed and not inclined to give out information, even when they had it. Occasionally Slim caught a hint of recognition in someone’s eyes at the mention of Estelle’s name, but when he finally did coax them into talking about her it usually resulted in old information that Slim had already checked. Nights were long and frustrating as Slim walked Madison Street, Kedzie Avenue, Sacramento Boulevard, Lake Street, Van Buren, Albany, Wilcox, Congress, a score of others, checking every bar in every block of every street until some nights he felt like a zombie: a walking dead man released from the grave of prison and set loose to wander forever the netherworld that was Chicago.

  He let nothing deter him. “Maybe they ain’t even in Chicago no more,” Mack suggested once, after observing him search futilely every night for a month.

  “They’re still here,” Slim replied grimly. “I can feel it.”

  He kept searching.

  One night it paid off.

  In the Shuffle Club on California Avenue, a friendlier than usual bartender answered his query by saying, “No, I haven’t seen Estelle for quite a while. I see that friend of hers, Chloe, once in a while. She comes in with her boyfriend, guy named Jack Smart. You know them?”

  “Know her,” Slim said, his stomach knotting. “Don’t know him.”

  “He’s a small-time card player, usually in a game in some back room.”

  “He play here a lot?” Slim asked.

  “Once in a while. We don’t have that many games here. Why?”

  “I was thinking,” Slim lied, “if I could catch him he might be able to tell me where Estelle’s living. If I give you a telephone number, could you call me when you know he’s going to play cards here again?”

  “Could, I guess.” The bartender shrugged. “What’s it worth to you?”

  Slim gave him five dollars and the telephone number at the garage. “Five more if you find him,” he said.

  The next night, he started a new search, for a card player named Jack Smart.

  During the day as he worked around the garage, Slim had difficulty concentrating on what he was doing. He knew nothing about Jack Smart except his name and the fact that he was a small-time card player, but Slim could not get the man out of his mind. It was a faceless image: a suit and hat, a pair of hands dealing cards. Chloe would always be in the background of the scene, watching. Chloe, the wife he loved, the woman he had never been certain would wait for him . . . and who apparently had not. His little boy was never in the scene with Chloe and the faceless man, and that more than anything caused dark thoughts to spawn in Slim’s turmoiled mind. Where was the boy? Who was looking after him? Slim had always known Chloe was vulnerable, dependent, needed someone to lean on and be there for her; he was not shocked that she had taken up with Jack Smart. What troubled him was that she might have grown so weak that she put her own needs before the needs of their little boy. That he could not condone, would not forgive. When he found them, if Chloe wanted to stay in Chicago with her card-playing boyfriend, that would be all right with Slim. He would cause her no trouble. Providing the boy had been properly cared for, and providing Chloe let Slim have him with no fuss. If not, if he found out the boy had been neglected, or if Chloe tried to prevent him from taking the boy back to Tennessee, there would, Slim vowed, be trouble the likes of which neither Chloe nor Jack Smart could imagine.

  His head filled with so much consternation, Slim’s expression was somber, his attitude brooding, as he went about his chores at the Capone garage. Mamma Teresa noticed it and tried to cheer him up. Calling him into the house on the pretext of having him move a cupboard or a table for her, she would fix him a big bowl of salad as she had done the
first day, and tell him, “You gotta relax. Stopa looking so grim. Thingsa get better for you, wait anda see.” Mafalda and Ava, who had grown to womanhood around men of serious moods, recognized the tension in Slim and for a while refrained from teasing him. They still watched him over the back wall, and talked about him when he was not around. Or when they thought he was not around. One day when Slim was taking five minutes off, sitting against the wall and drinking a bottle of Nu-Grape from Mack’s icebox, he overheard Mafalda and Ava talking softly on the other side.

  “I think you’re getting a little too interested in him, Ava,” Mafalda said frankly.

  “Maybe,” Ava admitted. “I think it’s that blond hair and those blue eyes.”

  “That blond hair and those blue eyes mean just one thing around here—he’s not Italian. You better hope Ralph doesn’t find out how you feel.”

  “I don’t answer to Ralph,” Ava declared indignantly. “Mamma Teresa brought me over here; I answer to her.”

  “Al brought you over here,” Mafalda pointed out. “You answer to Al, through Ralph, just like we all do. If you want to have a little fun with this guy, go ahead. Just don’t let Ralph find out—and don’t get serious about him.”

  The following day, when Slim was waxing the Cord, Ava, in the backyard alone, leaned over the wall with her cup of spumoni. “Hello there, blue eyes,” she said.

  “Hello there yourself,” Slim said. He paused in his work. Ava spooned some spumoni out of the cup.

  “Want a bite?”

  “What is it?”

  “Italian ice cream. It’s got candied fruit and nuts in it. Mamma Teresa makes it.”

  “I’ll eat anything Mamma Teresa makes,” Slim said, walking over.

  Ava fed him the spumoni, then took a bite herself, licking the spoon clean. Their eyes held.

  “I think I kind of like you,” Ava said quietly.

  “I think I kind of like you too,” Slim replied, feeling an attraction that he knew would have surfaced earlier had it not been for the other matters occupying his mind.

  “Do you ever come back to the garage at night?” she asked.

  It was not in Slim to deceive her. “Ava, I have a wife,” he said. “And a little boy.”

  As Ava stared at him in surprise, Slim told her briefly about Chloe and the boy, and how he had been searching for them since his release from prison. He explained how he had begun bribing a couple of bartenders a week to look for Jack Smart for him.

  When Slim finished, Ava shook her head in amazement and muttered something to herself in Italian, then said in English, “I sure know how to pick them.” She spooned some more spumoni, held it out for him to eat, and added, “Funny thing of it is, I still kind of like you.” Cocking her head curiously, she asked, “How do you feel about this card player she’s running around with?”

  “Not good. But if things are that way, I can take it. Long’s I get my little boy back.”

  Ava went into the house and Slim resumed waxing the Cord. A few minutes later, she returned and, making sure Mamma Teresa was not around to see, handed him some currency through the gate. “This will help you get a few more bartenders on your side,” she said. Slim looked at the money: fifty dollars.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

  “The quicker you find your wife, the better for both of us. If she’s coming back to you, I’d like to know it. And if she’s not, I’d like to know it. Now, what do you do on Sundays?”

  “Same thing I do at night—walk, look, ask questions.”

  “This Sunday I want you to spend with me,” Ava said. “I want you to take me to Riverview Park. I’ll pay for all the rides and the hot dogs and stuff. But I want to go out somewhere with you, blue eyes. Someplace where we can hold hands and be together. I want to see how strong this thing is. I’ll tell Mamma Teresa I’m going to visit Mafalda for the day. We can meet at the streetcar line near her house after the driver drops me off. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Slim said, not smiling. “I intend to pay this back to you,” he added gravely, putting the money in his pocket.

  “Doesn’t matter to me whether you do or not,” she shrugged. “That’s part of the money my brothers gave me before I left Naples. I’ve never spent any of it; Mamma Teresa won’t let me. It’s just lying in a drawer of my steamer trunk.” Ava started back for the house, then suddenly turned around again. “Oh, I almost forgot. Mamma Teresa and Mafalda are taking the train out to San Francisco next week to visit Al in Alcatraz. When they get back, maybe Ralph will give you a better job. If you’ve been telling the truth about doing Al a favor, that is.”

  “I have,” Slim assured her.

  “I’m glad,” Ava said. “I’d hate to think of what Ralph would do if you were lying.”

  After Ava left and Slim returned to his work, a slight frown settled on his face. Before Slim’s release from Atlanta, rumors had reached that prison that Al Capone was going crazy—literally losing his mind—in the hellhole of Alcatraz. Slim and Red Rudensky had talked about the stories. Neither believed them. Big Al was far too tough to let anyplace break him. Even Alcatraz.

  Shaking his head, Slim put the apprehension out of his mind. Al would vouch for him. Slim was sure of it.

  13

  Richie climbed into the ring at the Laramie Park Athletic Club, Myron holding the ropes apart, then coming in behind him. Before he sat down in the corner, Richie glanced around the club. It was one of the nicest he had been in: everything painted and polished, mopped and scrubbed, swept and neat. Even the folding chairs set up for the Saturday night club fights were upholstered instead of just metal. Riding out on the streetcar with Myron and the other boys to the far Northwest Side, Richie had stared in fascination at the neighborhood they entered: well-kept, single-family homes with lawns and driveways and sidewalks that didn’t have cracks in them.

  “Nice out here,” Richie said.

  “Yeah,” Myron agreed. “Especially for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These kids out here, they ain’t tough,” Myron explained. “They think this here is a sport. This Laramie Park club, it trains boxers, not fighters. Kids out here grow up and get sent to college. They don’t have to fight their way out of no thin’. They don’t understand that getting into the ring might be all some kids has got. They never been hungry—for nothing.”

  Looking across the ring, Richie saw his opponent in a red and gold satin robe with a tasseled belt. The trainer wore a matching shirt. Even the ring post in their corner was decorated in red and gold. Richie studied them only a moment, then turned away disdainfully. He would not have traded his Midwest A.C. jacket, now draped around his shoulders, for a dozen satin robes. And the plain old gray sweatshirt that Myron wore suited Richie just fine; Myron looked like the kind of trainer you’d expect to find in John Garfield’s corner.

  “Sit down,” he heard Myron say. “Quit sightseeing.”

  Richie sat on the stool, keeping his back straight as Myron had taught him. If he slouched, Myron said, or leaned back against the ring post, his lungs would compress and his breathing would alter; when the bell rang, it would take at least thirty seconds for the lungs to adjust back to an upright motion of the body. In thirty seconds a guy who was just a tad slow could get hit with some good shots.

  As Myron began to massage Richie’s upper arms, he said, “You got three wins now—two decisions and that knockout last week. Next Saturday we fight at Midwest—our own club, our own crowd, our own sponsors. I’d like to see you go in next week with two decisions and two kayos on record. So I want you to knock this kid out, understand? Forget about boxing him; go out and street-fight him.”

  “Sure,” Richie said.

  That was all Myron said until after the fighters had been introduced, the referee’s instructions given, and Richie returned to the plain canvas corner while the Laramie Park kid went back to his red and gold corner. Then Myron squeezed the back of Richie’s neck and said, “Beat him up quick, Ric
hie.”

  The bell rang and Richie moved to ring center with both gloves up protecting his face, both forearms in close to deflect body punches, the same schoolyard defensive posture he had used for as long as he could remember. Only now it was not exclusively for defense; it was a cover from which his right jab, right cross, and right hook could shoot out on attack, and from which his less precise and more imperfect left hand could move, usually in a feint, to distract for the split-second needed for one of the right-hand punches to connect. Richie was, as Myron had now evaluated him, a one-handed fighter with an extraordinary defensive style and the ability to think quicker in the ring than most any kid he had ever seen. “I ain’t going to try altering your style to make you more orthodox,” the glum trainer said. “Not so long as it’s working.”

  It worked tonight. In the center of the ring, while the Laramie Park fighter was concentrating on the one-two-three of his textbook boxing, Richie came out of his shell and hit him four solid right hands to the face. The kid danced and jabbed; Richie crouched, came out again, and ripped both hands to the kid’s ribs. He heard the kid groan. Several light snaps landed on Richie’s forearms, and a right thumped him on the temple. Taking a step back as if beginning a retreat, he stopped suddenly and caught his opponent coming after him, drilling him with three thudding rights to the face. A stream of blood ran out of the kid’s left nostril. Startled by the blood, he resumed his initial upright, classic-boxing stance and pawed at Richie with his left. Richie clubbed him in the left ribcage to make him lower the left, then methodically pounded the left side of his face, driving him across the ring onto the ropes, beating him on the eye, cheekbone, nose, lips, ear. Blood gushed from the kid’s nose and from a suddenly split lip, and when the kid turned sideways and covered his head to escape the shots, Richie felt himself being pulled away and pushed toward his corner by the referee. Myron came out to meet him.