by Clark Howard
It was the kind of thing Buck Jones would have said.
Smiling shyly, Richie put his own small hand into the big one and felt his arm being firmly pumped. Then Johnny reached down and picked up the comic book.
“This here’s that new feller they call ‘Superman,’ ain’t it?” he said, looking at the cover.
“Yeah.”
“Sugar, don’t say ‘yeah,’ say ‘yes, sir,’ ” Chloe told Richie. And more quietly, “Johnny, I think you meant ‘isn’t’ instead of ‘ain’t.’ ”
The man and the boy sat down on the couch, neither paying any attention to her corrections.
“You think this feller can really fly?” Johnny asked.
“Sure,” Richie said.
“Right up in the air like a bird?”
“Sure.”
“You think bullets really bounce off his chest?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know,” Johnny said skeptically, winking at Chloe.
“It shows it right here,” Richie asserted, fingering through the pages to a panel showing the Man of Steel with bullets indeed bouncing off his chest. “There it is right there.”
“Okay, I guess you’re right,” Johnny conceded. “Say, who’s your favorite cowboy?”
“Buck Jones.” Richie’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You know who he is?”
“ ’Course I do. Who don’t?”
Chloe interjected, “You mean, ‘who doesn’t,’ Johnny.”
Ignoring her again, Johnny asked Richie, “Did you see The Overland Express?”
“Yeah! It was all about the Pony Express riders!”
“How’d you like the way them riders changed horses? They just jumped off one, jumped on another’n and off they went. That was something.”
“Sure was!” Richie leaped off the couch. “You wanna see my Buck Jones Big-Little Books? I got three of ’em!”
“Okay,” Johnny said, winking. Richie ran out of the room and the big Tennessean smiled up at Chloe and asked, “What’s for supper?”
“I’ve, uh, got pork chops frying.”
“Biscuits and gravy?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my favorite.”
“I know,” Chloe said, “you told me.”
“Ain’t nothing better than fried pork chops,” Johnny declared, winking again.
Walking toward the kitchen, Chloe muttered to herself, “No, I guess there ain’t.”
After their first meeting, Richie always looked forward to Johnny’s visits. Unlike Jack Smart, Johnny never brought him anything—no candy or toys—and never gave him nickels or dimes to spend, but Johnny did do something that no one else in Richie’s life did: he talked to Richie. Talked to him on subjects about which Richie could talk back, like comic book characters and movie cowboys. Sometimes when he came over, Johnny brought an afternoon Herald-American and let Richie sit next to him as he read it, sharing the contents with him.
“That there’s the new Hudson.” He pointed to an ad. “See there where they’ve changed the fenders; they was rounder on last year’s model.”
And: “See this feller here? That there’s Gabby Hartnett, the best catcher in baseball. They just made him the manager of the Cubs, but he’s still gonna be their catcher.”
And, tapping a photograph on the front page: “This here’s a picture of Adolf Hitler. He’s the kind of feller if we had him back home we’d turn the dogs loose on him.”
“Is he a bad guy?” Richie asked, already certain that he was: only a bad guy would have such a dumb moustache.
“He’s worse than bad,” Johnny confirmed. “Ever’ once in a a while some feller gets borned that never should have got borned. As the saying goes, this feller’s mamma should have drowned him in the nearest creek and sold her milk.”
“What milk?”
“Never mind.”
“If he’s so bad,” Richie said, “maybe Buck Jones could get after him.”
Johnny smiled. “Now that’s something I’d like to see. Buck Jones in a showdown with Adolf Hitler. I reckon it would save the world a lot of trouble.”
Johnny ate supper with them a couple of nights a week, and a couple of nights a week he took Chloe out to eat and see a movie. On those nights, Dorothy came over to stay with Richie. She was thirteen now and like her sister Helen, put on an act while Chloe was still there: “Hi, Richie, how you doing? Want to play Go Fish tonight? Or would you like me to read to you?” All this while bending over and smiling in his face.
Fifteen minutes after Chloe left, when Dorothy was sure she was gone, the smile vanished and the act ended.
“Take off your clothes. I’m going to give you a bath.”
“You’re not supposed to give me no bath,” Richie protested.
Dorothy caught his cheek between her thumb and forefinger. “Do you want me to pinch a plug out of your face?”
“No!”
“Then take off your goddamned clothes!”
Richie swore back, silently: goddamn dirty son of a bitch.
In the tub, which was oval and stood on four legs, Dorothy scrubbed him with a wash rag. “Remember how I used to tease you about not having a father?” she asked. “Well, you’ll notice I’m not doing that anymore. Know why?”
“Why?” Richie mumbled.
“ ’Cause you’re lucky not to have a father, that’s why. Fathers do bad things to kids when they get older. Especially to girls.”
She took delight in scrubbing him until his skin was red. “You’re a very dirty little boy. I—have—to—get—all—the—dirt—off—of—you!” she enunciated as she rubbed vigorously with the soapy cloth. When she got to his scrotum, she scrubbed extra hard and Richie twisted back in the tub, seized with pain.
“That hurts!” He blinked back tears. Dorothy only smiled coldly.
“You don’t want it hurt, do you? Someday you’ll grow up and be a father, and you want to keep it good in case you have little girls, don’t you!”
“No! Quit it! I’ll tell!”
She threw the cloth in his face. “Finish washing yourself.” At the bathroom door she looked back with the same cold smile. “You won’t tell,” she said confidently.
Every time Dorothy came over, it was the same treatment. Richie did not tell his mother because he was afraid. He was afraid she would not believe him, that Dorothy would find out, and that she would be even meaner to him. So the same way he steeled himself to face a new schoolyard every time his mother moved them, he steeled himself to endure Dorothy’s maltreatment. It was, he found, usually brief. Almost as if it were some ritual she had to complete before silently, moodily, leaving him alone for the rest of the night. She would scrub him ferociously in the tub, hurt him in the balls once, just as she had done the first night, and then it would be over. She would do her homework then, or listen to something on the radio or sit out on the front stoop if it were warm, and then at nine o’clock she would make his bed on the couch and have him get in it. She rarely even spoke to him after the evening’s initial, vehement condemnation of him as “dirty” and planning to grow up to hurt little girls. The only girl Richie ever even thought of harming was her. Twice a week he wished he could kill her.
At one point, things got so bad for him that Richie decided he had to tell his mother. It was after a night when Dorothy’s washing seemed to vacillate between pain and arousal, when the roughness of the rubbing cloth hurt and then stimulated, and the two sensations somehow overlapped and Richie got an erection.
“There, see!” Dorothy exclaimed almost gleefully. “See what a dirty little boy you are! Look at it!” Becoming angrier than ever, she had hit his erect little penis with her fist, driving pain into his testicles, anus, and up his spine. He had hurt for the rest of the night.
The next day he had tried to tell his mother, but it had come off very poorly. Chloe was busy writing her drugstore notes.
“What do you mean, Dorothy hurts you?” she asked absently. “Hurts you how?”
“In the bathtub. She washes me too hard.”
“Try not to get so dirty,” Chloe advised.
Richie wanted to tell her about the punch to his erection, but he did not know how; the fact of the erection somehow embarrassed him. They were not new to him; he had been aware of them many times when watching through the keyhole as his mother and Estelle dressed to go out, or when they were doing things with men. But being aware of an erection and talking about an erection were two different things. Richie could not find the right words; his complaint about Dorothy sounded like whining.
More than what Richie was saying about Dorothy, Chloe was interested in what Richie might be saying to Johnny. “Sugar, have you ever mentioned to Uncle Johnny about the medicine you get for me?”
“No,” Richie replied, shaking his head.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“ ‘Yes,’ not ‘yeah.’ Well, I don’t want you ever to mention it, you hear? To him or anybody else.” Turning in the chair, Chloe had taken him into her arms. “Listen, sugar, I know you don’t like going to all these drugstores for me every day. I know you’d like to go running and playing with the other children on the block; I know that because of me you spend a lot of time alone. But it’s not going to be forever, hear? Life is going to get better for both of us, I promise. Listen, you like Uncle Johnny, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” she corrected.
“Yes.”
“You always have a good time with him, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, how would you like him to be your new daddy?”
“What about my real daddy?”
“What about him?”
“What if he comes back again?”
“Sugar,” Chloe said, holding his face between her palms, “your real daddy won’t be coming back. He’s gone for good. If he cared anything at all about either one of us, he’d have been back long before now. We’re just going to have to get along without him.” She smiled brightly but artificially. “Best thing to do now is find us somebody new. New husband for me, new daddy for you. That’s why I asked how you’d like for Uncle Johnny to be your new daddy; I think Uncle Johnny and I will be getting married soon. I’ve already turned in some papers to get a divorce from your daddy for deserting us. Soon’s I get that divorce, why, we’ll probably get us a new place to live with Uncle Johnny.”
A new school, Richie thought. A new schoolyard. New kids to pick on him. Sighing wearily, his eyes grew wet. Seeing such tribulation in his little-boy face, knowing she had put it there, Chloe’s own eyes became teary.
“Listen,” she said, hugging him close, “soon’s Uncle Johnny and I get married, I’m going to see a doctor and have him help me so I won’t have to take my medicine anymore. Then you won’t have to go to the drugstores anymore. You can run and play after school just like all the other children. Won’t that be swell?”
“You promise?” Richie asked, crying.
“Yes, sugar, I promise. I swear to God, I do.”
Richie stood behind a parked delivery truck and peered around it down Lake Street, The cool, shadowy street, perpetually shaded by the el tracks, looked quiet and ordinary. People, all of them colored, came and went on the sidewalks, moving in and out of the stores. Street traffic was sparse; driving was tricky because of the steel-and-concrete supports under the elevated tracks, and the fact that the street itself was cobblestone, not paved, so it was easy to skid into a support. More than once Richie had seen a car or a truck nick one of the supports and come away with a dented fender. People generally drove on Lake Street only when they had business on Lake Street. As Richie watched from behind the delivery truck, a black-and-white squad car, from the Warren Boulevard precinct station, came by with two white policemen in it. Bolstered by their presence, Richie crossed to the opposite sidewalk and started for the drugstore.
He had been back to Lake Street four times without seeing Alonzo and his friends. Common sense told him that his luck was bound to run out soon. Today he had saved the black drugstore for last. Earlier, walking to the white drugstores, he had fantasized that Alonzo and his friends were no longer there: they had moved away, or had all been put in jail for the crime of chasing white kids. Deep in his gut, though, he knew they were still around.
Reaching the drugstore without incident, Richie hurried inside and edged around two black women at the cigarette counter to make his way back to the pharmacy. A light-brown man with thick eyeglasses asked, “What you want, boy?”
“I got a note,” Richie said, handing him the piece of paper with a quarter wrapped in it.
The man read the note, studied Richie for a moment, and seemed to weigh the quarter in his open hand; then he went behind a glass partition and returned a moment later to hand Richie a paper bag twisted at the top.
“Tell your mamma not to send you in here anymore, boy,” he said in a not unkind tone. “Understand?”
“Okay,” Richie mumbled. Good! he thought. Goddamn good! He realized that it would not really change anything for him; it was only one black drugstore out of six or seven along Lake Street that his mother sent him to, but somehow it seemed like a victory anyway. Richie relished the prospect of going home and telling her. In the back of his mind he was already wondering if he could get away with lying to her that the others were telling him the same thing.
Outside, walking briskly toward the corner, Richie heard the sound he always dreaded. “Hey, boy!”
Glancing back, he saw Alonzo and another black boy advancing on him from the street. Breaking into a run, Richie made for the corner, hearing hard-running footsteps behind. He was nearly there when two other black kids came around the corner, and he heard Alonzo’s voice again.
“Albie, catch that boy!”
The two in front of him moved apart to block Richie’s path, bobbing their fists up and down threateningly. The fear that had seized Richie and started him running, now, when he had to suddenly stop, turned his heart into a throbbing wild thing that seemed about to burst out of his chest. A sound of some sort passed his lips: part groan, part whimper, part plea. In desperation, he ran back a few feet and scurried up the stairs to the elevated platform. Halfway up, he realized his mistake.
“Go up them other steps, Albie!” he heard Alonzo yell with glee. “He ain’t goin’ nowhere now!”
On the el platform, Richie found himself trapped between the two stairways. It was not a crossover station so he could not get to the opposite platform—unless he wanted to try crossing the tracks. That he was afraid to do; he had heard stories of kids who had tried it and been electrocuted by the deadly third rail that provided the power to move the el trains. Better to take the whipping from Alonzo than fry on the third rail.
In the middle of the platform he waited helplessly, watching a smiling Alonzo and his friend come into sight from one flight of stairs, the boy named Albie and his friend from the other. At least, Richie thought, he only had a dime left for Alonzo to take. But he also had the three bottles of paregoric, in separate pockets; he had to try to keep them from getting broken while he was taking the beating.
“You think you a smart fucker, don’t you?” Alonzo said, walking up to him. Alonzo’s right fist snapped out and hit Richie on the lips. Stumbling back, Richie tried to get his arms up to ward off a second blow, but Alonzo was too fast; the left fist hit him on the other side of his mouth, and he felt a tooth puncture his bottom lip.
“ ‘Lonzo!” a voice suddenly called. “What the fuck you think you doing?”
Richie and the four black boys all turned to the sound. In a corner of the platform, sitting up against a billboard, smoking a cigarette, was a black girl. Getting to her feet, she walked toward them in a kind of indifferent strut, one hand on her hip, the other holding her cigarette like Bette Davis. To Richie, pressing the back of one wrist to his bleeding lip, she looked about the same age as Dorothy, thirteen, but a little taller and heavier. She was a
lso taller and heavier than Alonzo and his friends.
“I axed you what the fuck you think you doing,” she said when she got up close to Alonzo’s face.
“I’m whipping this white boy’s ass,” Alonzo said. “What it look like I’m doing?”
“What he do to you?” she asked.
“What you care, girl?” one of the other boys demanded, scowling at her.
“I ain’t axin’ you, nigger!” she snapped, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t talk to me ‘less I talks to you, ‘less you want me to th’ow your black ass on them tracks there!” She looked at Richie. “What you do to ‘Lonzo, boy?”
“Nothing,” Richie said.
“What you doing in this neighborhood?”
“Getting medicine for my mother from the drugstore.”
“This ain’t none of yo’ business, Vernie!” Alonzo protested.
“Shut your mouf, boy,” she snapped. Alonzo shut his mouth. Vernie turned to Richie again. “Lemme see the medicine.”
Richie worked a bag out of one of his pockets and handed it to her. Opening it, Vernie looked at the bottle of paregoric. Grunting softly, she closed the bag and returned it to Richie.
“Come on, boy,” Vernie said to Richie, “I walk wit’ you out this neighborhood.”
Richie quickly fell in next to her as she started toward the stairs.
“I gon’ get you for this, Vernie!” Alonzo threatened.
Vernie walked back to him. From the pocket of her dress, she pulled a closed straight-razor. “Onliest thing you gon’ get if you fucks with me, ‘Lonzo,” she said quietly, tapping the razor against his chin, “is you face cut. This boy’s mamma takes the same kind of medicine that my mamma takes. If his mamma needs it bad as my mamma needs it, then I gon’ help him get it for her. You and your friends leave his ass alone ‘less you want me to slice you.” She smiled the slightest of smiles. “You knows I’ll do it too, don’t you? I done cut two bad niggers already; I’m past ready to cut me another one.”
“Come on, ‘Lonzo,” one of the others said to save face. “She crazy. They bof crazy. Leave ’em be.”
“Yeah, ‘Lonzo, they ain’t worf our time,” another said.
