Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Bursting into sobs that she could no longer contain, Chloe plunged into his arms, his strong embrace, his protection, and let her anguish discharge against his chest as he stroked her hair and said, “There, there, honey. There, there, now,” as a parent might comfort a hurt child.

  In the nearby pew, Estelle cried along with her friend.

  “Hello, boy,” Slim said quietly to Richie. “You know who I am?”

  “My daddy,” Richie said, looking down. His shyness now was not the act it often was; so overwhelmed was Richie by this man that he could not look him in the face. When he felt strong hands picking him up, strong arms holding him, he could only bury his face in Slim’s shoulder and bask in the consuming security he felt.

  But there was one thing he had to know, to make it right, to make it real.

  “Are you going to live with us now?”

  “You bet,” Slim assured him. He mussed Richie’s hair a little and Richie loved it. “Listen, how would you like to live on a great big farm where you can run and play outdoors and where there’s chickens and cows and horses? You think you could stand that?”

  “You bet,” Richie replied, copying his father.

  “What about you, honey?” Slim asked his wife. “You think you can stand being a farmer’s wife?”

  “I can stand being anything,” Chloe replied starkly, “when I know I’m safe. When I know somebody’s looking out for me.”

  “Richie and I’ll do that, won’t we, boy?” Slim asked.

  “You bet!” Richie said again. Slim laughed. Richie’s face glowed. At last, he had his father back.

  Slim left for a while and then came back with his things in a shopping bag, and Chloe packed them in the suitcase with her things and Richie’s. There was a tearful goodbye scene between Chloe and Estelle, and Estelle slobbered on Richie a little and tried to kiss him on the lips, but he turned his face aside and took the kiss on the cheek: he did not want Estelle kissing him on the mouth after watching her suck on men’s things so often through the keyhole. Finally it was over, and the three of them were on a Roosevelt Road streetcar riding downtown to the big Illinois Central depot.

  The train ride was memorable. When they got hungry, Slim bought sandwiches and soda pop and cellophane-wrapped slices of apple pie from a black man in a white coat and cap who pushed a cart up the aisle. The coach was not crowded, so they were able to shift a seat back so that Slim and Chloe could sit on the aisle facing each other, and Richie could alternate between the two window seats watching the southern Illinois countryside go by. It pleased Richie to see his mother and father touch often and exchange brief kisses and smile at each other; not to be left out, he wiggled between them when he could to share some of the affection. His proudest moment was when he had to go to the bathroom and it was his father, not his mother, who took him. It had always embarrassed him to be taken by his mother into the women’s restrooms when he had to go; now he felt like a real boy when his father held his hand and walked down the aisle with him. His father even taught him to shake his thing when he finished peeing to get the last few drops out; something his mother had not known to show him.

  When darkness came, Chloe rented a pillow from the porter and had Richie lie down on one of the seats with his father’s coat over him for a cover. The window shades were drawn and the coach’s dim night lights came on. “Go to sleep now, sugar,” his mother told him. With his head on the pillow, Richie kept his eyes open and watched his parents snuggling up across from him. Presently his mother saw him looking and said, “Close your eyes, sugar, and go to sleep.”

  To Richie’s delight, his father interceded. “Let him be,” Slim said. “It’s all new to him, seeing us together. He’ll fall asleep soon enough.”

  “I just wanted us to be able to talk,” Chloe said in a quieter voice.

  “There’ll be time.”

  Richie smiled to himself. His daddy was the boss!

  Later on, Richie decided to pretend to go to sleep so he could listen to what they talked about. Closing his eyes, he lay very still; after a few minutes his mother, as she always did, straightened his cover a little and pushed the hair back out of his eyes. He was careful not to move, knowing that was her way of checking to see if he was asleep. When she thought he was, she said the same thing every time: “Well, I think he’s in dreamland at last,”

  As Richie listened that night he heard his father talk about the long frustrating search he had conducted for them, all the while working for a man named Mack Swain of whom Slim obviously thought a great deal. “He’s a clubfoot, poor feller,” Richie heard Slim say, “but I swear, he knows more about car engines than anybody I ever seen. He wants to open a place of his own someday. Got his eye on a spot around 76th and Cottage Grove, you know where that’s at?”

  “No,” Chloe said. “I never got out to the South Side.”

  Slim talked about Mack for a while longer, then Chloe talked about Estelle. “I feel guilty leaving her behind. But I don’t think she ever wants to come back to Lamont. ‘Stelle likes Chicago; she says she can do all the things she enjoys without being afraid she’ll be the main topic of discussion on the town square the next day. She’ll probably spend the rest of her life right there around Kedzie Avenue.”

  After a while, Slim had to ask about Jack Smart. “A man’s got to know how a woman felt with another man,” he said quietly. “If he don’t know, it’ll drive him crazy.”

  Chloe said the only thing she could say. “It wasn’t anything like it was with you, honey.”

  When the coach was very quiet, Slim whispered, “Do you suppose the boy’d be all right if we left him here for a few minutes?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Chloe whispered back. “Where can we go?”

  “The restroom. There’s a little sink in there that you can sit up on. I can put it in you standing up.”

  “All right.”

  Richie knew exactly what they were going to do. After they were gone, he smiled to himself in the darkness. Then he relaxed and let the click-clack of the rails and the motion of the coach lull him to real sleep.

  The train they rode was a local and they did not get off in Lamont until early the next morning. Slim carried Richie and Chloe carried the suitcase, and they walked up the hill that was Depot Street until they came to Moreridge. By then Richie was awake and on his feet, holding his daddy’s hand.

  “You go on down to your mamma’s house,” Slim told Chloe. “Wait for me there. I don’t have no time to waste ’cause I’m sure the law is after me for leaving the state. I’ll get on out to Daddy’s place and make everything right with him. Then me and him’ll get one of the lawyers uptown to see about me turning myself in. Since I ain’t been in no trouble, and since I had a good reason for going up north, I think they’ll go easy on me. If they know I’m back to stay on my daddy’s land, I think they’ll give me another chance.”

  “Oh, God, Richmond, I hope so,” Chloe said nervously. Richie saw the old familiar worry-fear in his mother’s face again.

  “Ever’thing’s going to turn out all right, honey,” Slim assured her. He mussed Richie’s hair. “We’re going to make it all right, ain’t we, boy?”

  “You bet!” Richie piped.

  Slim kissed them both goodbye. “Go on now. I’ll be back soon.”

  The suitcase in one hand, holding Richie’s hand with the other, Chloe walked down the gravel road toward Mrs. Clark’s house. Now and then both she and Richie looked back at Slim’s lean figure striding determinedly in the other direction, toward the main highway. They would have waved, but Slim did not look back. Soon he was out of sight.

  Chloe waited ten days.

  Slim never came back.

  The first thing Chloe thought was that he had been picked up for violation of his probationary release and was back in jail. She asked a neighbor to drive her out to Solon Howard’s farm and talked to Slim’s father. He had not seen his son and made it clear that he did not care to. But he did agree to let
Chloe know if he heard from Slim.

  Chloe made some discreet inquiries around town, but no one had seen him. After several worried days and miserable, sleepless nights, Chloe finally checked with the sheriff. He also had no knowledge of Slim. While Chloe waited, the sheriff telephoned Federal authorities in Memphis and learned that the U.S. Marshal’s office had an outstanding warrant on Tennessee Slim but did not know his whereabouts.

  Slim had simply disappeared.

  Finally exploding in anger and anguish, Chloe began throwing her clothes back into the suitcase. Mrs. Clark tried to reason with her.

  “Hadn’t you ought to give him a little longer, Chloe?” she asked.

  “Longer! What for?” Chloe shrieked. “He’s not coming back, Mamma! For God’s sake, isn’t it obvious?”

  The older woman wrung her hands. “Well, even if he don’t, is that any reason to run off back up north again?”

  “What would you have me do instead, Mamma?” Chloe demanded. “Stay here in Lamont—for everybody to talk about again? I’ve had enough, Mamma! I don’t know what’s happened or where he is this time; I just know he’s not with me and Richie, where he belongs. I’m through with him, Mamma, so you might as well save your breath. I’m leaving—and that’s final!”

  Playing on the front porch, listening as always, Richie knew that his daddy had gone off somewhere again. Confused and disappointed, Richie did not understand why. His daddy had said he was going to live with them from now on; he said they were going to live on a farm where Richie could play outdoors. Richie wondered why his daddy kept going away. If Richie ever got to be a daddy, he promised himself, he would never tell his little boy he was going to stay and then not do it. He wondered if his daddy realized how much it hurt him.

  As Richie was thinking unkind thoughts about his father, his grandmother said something that greatly disturbed him. “At least leave the boy with me,” Mrs. Clark said. “There’s no need to drag him back up north, is there?”

  Peering in between the curtains, Richie saw his mother pause in her packing. Pursing her pretty lips, she seemed to think about it for a very long time—long enough to make Richie start feeling sick inside. He hardly knew his grandmother; he hardly knew anyone except his mother. Suddenly he loved his mother very much; suddenly no one else in the world mattered—whoever or wherever they were.

  To his great relief his mother finally shook her head. “I can’t leave him behind, Mamma. He’s all I’ve got and I love him. Whatever happens, I’ll never give up my little boy.”

  Richie relaxed as he watched his mother start packing his clothes with hers.

  He immediately began to think: when he got back to Chicago, maybe he could find his daddy again. He’d done it before.

  17

  At the Irving Park Athletic Club, the bell sounded for the fourth round and Richie moved out of the corner and dropped into his awkward, converted-southpaw stance. Circling to the right, his mind told him by rote: jab, jab, jab.

  His opponent was a Greek kid named Tony Vetos. “He’s shorter than you,” Myron had briefed him, “thicker in the middle, and slower. He’s also prob’ly a lot stronger, but that ain’t gonna matter; his arms is short, so you should be able to paste him with right jabs wherever you want to.”

  Myron was right. Hitting Tony Vetos was only slightly more difficult than hitting the speed bag. Richie made the kid’s face as red as a shiny apple.

  Twelve wins, Richie was thinking. This fight would give him twelve wins. He had six knockouts and five decisions. On the way over on the streetcar earlier, he had hoped he could stop his opponent tonight for a lucky seventh kayo, but after the second round he knew that goal was hopeless; Vetos was so strong, Richie would have needed a crowbar even to knock him down. So he had to settle down and go for the decision.

  This was his fourth four-rounder; the first eight fights had been three-rounders. Sometimes Richie felt he could fight ten rounds, or fifteen. “Sometimes,” he had told Linda the previous week, “I think I could stay in the ring all night, just circling and jabbing and going in and out of my shell. I don’t get tired, I don’t even breathe heavy a lot of the time. And sometimes, it’s funny, but it’s like I’m outside the ring too, like I’m watching me, like it’s a movie or something.”

  “John Garfield watching John Garfield,” she had kidded.

  Jab—jab—jab! He felt his right glove impact on the Greek kid’s face as Vetos plodded forward like some wind-up toy. At last the final bell rang and he and Tony Vetos stopped fighting and put their arms around each other.

  “Clean win,” Myron said back in the corner. “Every round was yours.”

  “I wish I could’ve got my seventh kayo,” Richie said. The remark carried no dejection.

  “I’m just as glad you di’nt,” Myron replied, “I’ll tell you why after,”

  Even though he was a legitimate member of the boxing team now, Richie still acted as Myron’s helper, assisting as he had always done in taking care of the equipment each Saturday night. Following the Irving Park Athletic Club card, after they had put everything away at Midwest and gone out to eat, Myron told Richie what he had meant earlier.

  “I’m gonna put yez in a five-round semi-main next week,” he said, with customary glumness. “With a colored kid out at the Stony Island Athletic Club. His name is Willie Wakefield and he’s got an iden’ical record to what you’ve got—undefeated, an even dozen wins, exac’ly half of ’em by kayo or TKO. It’s a dream match.”

  “Five rounds!” Richie beamed. “That’s swell, Myron!”

  “This kid is very good, Richie. He’s tall, skinny as a soda straw, and fast, very fast. His punches come in from a lot of different angles and that tends to split the skin; five of his six kayos were stops on cuts.”

  “I’ll beat him,” Richie said around a mouthful of cheeseburger.

  “I think you can beat him, sure,” Myron said, “else I wouldn’t put you in with him. But”—he pointed a finger at Richie—“you’re gonna have to work extra hard in the gym next week to do it. I wanna learn you next week how to fight when you’re the slowest one in the ring. That’s gonna be something new for you.”

  “Sure, Myron. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “Good. Come on in the gym tomorrow about one; instead of taking Sunday off, we’ll get in an extra day.”

  Richie thought at once of Linda, whom he met every Sunday at one. “Can I come in at one-thirty?” he asked.

  “I guess so. What, do you go to church or something?”

  “Yeah,” Richie seized on the excuse, “church.”

  “That’s good,” Myron commended. “It’s good for a young man to get some religion.” Staring down at the remainder of his vegetable soup, Myron’s expression changed from its habitual gloom to a mournfulness that had more definition. “I used to be religious,” he said. “My wife and son too.”

  “I didn’t know you had a son,” Richie said, surprised.

  “I don’t no more,” Myron told him. “He died of scarlet fever a long time ago. My wife kind of wasted away after that; the doctors said she had something called ‘involutional depression,’ brought on by the death of our boy. They promised she’d come out of it in time. She didn’t. She died of a broken heart, is what happened.” A trace of a cynical smile showed briefly. “The doctors say such a thing ain’t possible, but take my word, it is. If a person loves deeply enough, it is.”

  They finished eating in silence and went out on Madison Street to, as usual, go their separate ways.

  “I’m sorry about your son, Myron,” Richie said, a little self-consciously.

  “Thanks.” The trainer patted Richie on the back of the neck. “In a way I’m lucky, though,” he said philosophically. “I know a few other men who’ve lost their families and are all alone. Know what they do, mostly? Sit and stare. They sit in the parlor of the boarding house, or on the front porch, or on a park bench. Just sit and stare, remembering. Every once in a while one of ’em just closes hi
s eyes and dies. Me, now—I got you and the other boys to look after. Yez is a big responsibility. I ain’t got time to sit and stare.” He bobbed his chin at Richie. “See you tomorrow, one-thirty.”

  “Yeah,” said Richie, and watched Myron go, feeling a little sad.

  At the garage the next morning, Richie showed up with half a dozen eggs in a bag and two inch-thick slabs of ham wrapped in butcher paper.

  “I guess you won last night,” Mack observed, limping in from the bedroom to find Richie fixing breakfast in the kitchen. Mack had been teaching him how to cook.

  “Sure, I won,” Richie said matter-of-factly. “Nobody beats me.”

  Sitting down at the table, Mack began laboriously working his grotesquely clubbed foot into the specially made hightop shoe he wore. He had done this several times in front of Richie, who always tried to avoid looking at the pathetic foot.

  Filling the percolator with water and ground coffee, Richie asked, “Mack, can you help me find Ava?”

  “You think she might know where your old man is?”

  “It’s worth a try,” Richie said. He added quietly, “He might have gone back to her when he disappeared in Tennessee.” In his mind he could not help thinking: the son of a bitch.

  “Jeez, I dunno if I can help you or not,” Mack said. “I ain’t seen or heard of none of the Capones for a long time now. I know they ain’t got the mansion on Prairie Avenue no more; it was in the paper when they sold it. Mamma Teresa and Al’s wife and Sonny moved to Florida, and when they finally let Al out of prison, he went there to live. Still lives there, far as I know. There’s a lot of rumors that he’s nutty as a fruitcake, but nobody knows for sure; they live in a big walled place on the ocean, and Al ain’t been seen in years. As for Ava, who knows? Maybe she’s down there with them, maybe she went back to Italy. I guess it’s possible your dad might be with her. I know he was crazy about her. He came around the day he was fixing to take you and your mother back to Tennessee. He’d come over to pick up the things in his room and he stopped in to say goodbye. Gave me fifty dollars to give back to Ava, part of the dough Ralph had given him a few nights earlier.” Mack stared off into space for a moment. “I knew he’d been meeting Ava behind the mansion every night. Wasn’t none of my business; I just told him he’d better be careful—’cause of Ralph, you know. When I first heard that Ralph had put his boys to looking for Slim, I thought it was because he found out about him and Ava.”