Hard City

by Clark Howard

  For months Richie patronized the Haymarket during post-midnight hours on the three of every four Saturday nights when George had weekend leave. If Richie had no money, and Stan had none to lend him, Richie went up on the building roof, in summertime, and stretched out to look up at the stars; or, in the wintertime, hid down in the furnace room, a water pistol filled with bleach to keep the rats away from him; or sometimes, when he could not sit still, just walked the streets, block after desolate block, hands deep in his pockets, like a zombie unable to return to its grave until an intruder left. On those black walks, Richie imagined terrible, gruesome deaths for George Zangara.

  So obsessed was Richie with vengeful notions about George, that the other two men in his thoughts thinned out to the fringes of his mind. Richmond, his father, had begun fading in memory when Richie settled into his new family structure with Johnny Eaton; he had diminished almost entirely until the night Richie thought he saw him at the stadium. Richmond’s surrogate, Johnny, had gone away to war and with his absence occupied less of Richie’s thoughts. Now, as Jack Smart had once been a threat to Richmond’s return, George was putting in jeopardy a future normal life with Johnny Eaton. Richie walked the streets silently lamenting and deploring the fact that there was nothing he could do about it.

  Then, suddenly, there was something he could do, something he never thought he would do: openly challenge his mother. He did it one Saturday when he expected George and was getting ready to leave the apartment after returning with his mother’s paregoric.

  “You don’t have to go off and stay all day if you don’t want to,” Chloe said. “George isn’t coming. Where do you go all the time anyhow, at two and three o’clock in the morning?”

  “I sit in all-night movies,” Richie said. “I didn’t think you even knew I wasn’t here.”

  “I know a lot more about what you do than you think I know, young man,” she said, her tone more confident than usual. It was if that were the one thing she was sure of.

  “Why ain’t he coming?” Richie asked.

  “Isn’t coming,” she corrected. Lighting a cigarette, she exhaled toward the ceiling and said, “He’s been transferred to an Air Corps base in Austin, Texas. He’s going to send us some money so we can go down there to live. You’ll like Texas, sugar; lots of cowboys down there. George says—” She paused to stare at him; he was shaking his head vigorously. “What are you shaking your head for?”

  “Not me,” Richie said.

  “Not you what?”

  “I’m not going to Texas and live with no nigger.”

  Chloe swung to slap him, but Richie pulled back and she missed. Instead she pointed a threatening finger.

  “You’ll do what I tell you to do, young man, and I’d advise you to watch your mouth. I am your mother.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not going. I’ll run away.”

  “Let me know when you get ready; I’ll pack your things.”

  “He’s nothing but a nigger and you know it!” It seemed the only way to hurt her.

  Chloe swung again, and this time she did not miss. Her palm cracked Richie solidly on the cheek and turned it red instantly. “Stop saying that!” she ordered.

  “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” he yelled, backing toward the door, throwing up his arms to block her blows. “Dirty goddamn son of a bitch of a nigger!”

  Managing to get out the door, Richie fled the apartment.

  26

  Chloe and Richie hardly spoke for the next few days. When they did it was to make cutting remarks to the other.

  “You didn’t get very far, I see,” Chloe said spitefully when Richie returned to the apartment after threatening to run away. Ignoring her, Richie retrieved two dollars he had hidden in his drawer, and left again. He did not come back to the apartment until late that night, when he knew his mother would be in her paregoric daze. She was, sprawled across her bed still dressed. Richie covered her up so she wouldn’t catch cold.

  The next morning, Richie woke up on his cot to the smell of bacon frying. Looking over at the little alcove kitchen, he saw his mother, in an old chenille bathrobe, cigarette between her lips, making breakfast, something she had seldom done since Johnny Eaton went off to the war.

  “Go wash your face and hands, sugar,” she said pleasantly. “I’m fixing us bacon and eggs this morning. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Richie replied, determined to be sullen.

  “Oh, come on,” Chloe coaxed, “you’ll enjoy it.”

  “I said I’m not hungry.”

  Turning, Chloe stared at him for a moment. A deep wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows; the eyes themselves lost their gleam and became dull. “Then I guess I’m not hungry either,” she said. Chloe scraped the eggs into the pan with the bacon and emptied it, grease and all, into a garbage can under the sink. Richie’s mouth dropped open in shock; he had expected to be cajoled into eating. Youthful indignation rising, he stalked into the bathroom, fuming, and got dressed.

  “I won’t be back all day!” he yelled a few minutes later and stormed out of the apartment. That would throw a scare into her, he thought; she would have to do her own trip to the goddamned drugstores.

  But Chloe was not intimidated. “Stay out all night too if you want to!” she yelled down the hall as he left.

  Muttering every obscenity he knew, Richie went looking for some place to steal breakfast.

  That afternoon, instead of going directly home after school, Richie sat in a doorway across the street where he could watch the entrance to their building. The scenario that had developed in his mind, and that he had nurtured all day, was that when he did not show up by three-thirty, or four at the latest, his mother would come outside and look nervously up and down the street for him. Maybe even call out for him: “Richie! Riii-chie! Please come home! Please, Richie! I need you!” When he did not respond—which he would not, no matter how much she begged—then she would have to go out and go to the goddamn drugstores herself.

  So he waited, secure in his youthful confidence that he had the advantage. He knew when three-thirty came because the street had cleared of school kids and Stan had left the building to go stealing for the rest of the afternoon. His mother would be out any minute, Richie thought. Waiting edgily, time seemed to languish. He knew when it was around four because kids were out on the street playing.

  When he was certain that it was at least five o’clock, Richie asked a postman on his afternoon delivery what time it was and was told four-twenty. Richie doubted it, but decided to go home anyway. Running across the street and bounding up the stairs, a new and alarming thought occurred. What if she had gone away without him?

  As soon as he opened the apartment door, he knew she had already gone to the drugstores herself; there were two empty white paper bags on the kitchen table. From the bedroom, he heard soft, pleasant humming. For a moment, he paused and listened. His mother’s voice when she hummed was as pretty and pleasing to the ear as her lovely handwriting was to the eye. Moving quietly to the bedroom door, he found Chloe with a towel spread over the dressertop, using it for a makeshift ironing board on which she was pressing a blouse.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Baking a pie, Richie,” she replied wryly. “Can’t you see?”

  Annoyed, he stalked away and went to the wooden icebox. There was half a bottle of Borden’s milk, but when he pulled the stopper he smelled that it was sour. Feeling the top compartment, he found it warm; his mother had not put the ice sign in the window that day. Pouring the milk out, he opened the cupboard, frightening two roaches away, and got out a box of saltines. Making sure it was still tightly closed so that the roaches couldn’t have been at them, he took a handful and began munching. He closed the box as securely as he had found it; you had to be careful about roaches, because they laid their tiny, almost invisible eggs everywhere; Vernie had told him about a black girl on the South Side who had eaten roach eggs on something and given birth to a baby
with a roach head. She had sold it to a freak show for a million dollars.

  Going back to the bedroom door, eating crackers, Richie saw that his mother now had her battered old suitcase out and was carefully folding the freshly pressed blouse into it. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Setting the pie out to cool?”

  Chloe smiled, briefly amused by this son of hers who lately seemed to be catching on to things so very quickly. But she gave him a straight answer. “I’m getting my clothes ready so that when I get the money from George, I’ll be able to leave for Austin right away.”

  “Well, I’m not going,” Richie said evenly.

  “You already told me that.”

  “You can’t make me go either.”

  Chloe very deliberately walked over and put a stiff forefinger on his chin. “Now you listen to me, big shot. Maybe I don’t want to make you go. Maybe I’ve decided not to even try to make you go. We can talk about it when the money gets here. In the meantime,” she poked the finger against his chin, not hard, but not all that softly either, “if you think you’re going to wise-off to me whenever you feel like it, you’re badly mistaken. I’m still your mother; you talk to me like I’m not and I’ll slap you silly.” She gave him a semi-hard smack on the cheek as a sample. “Now here,” she said, handing him a quarter from some change on the dresser, “go down to the corner and get a quart of milk for supper. I forgot to get ice today, so the milk we have is probably sour.”

  Richie lagged down to the store, sulking all the way, bemoaning the fact that it looked like his mother really was going off to live with that slimy Spanish nigger son of a bitch. Furthermore, there did not seem to be a damn thing he could do about it. His open defiance and threats to run away seeemed not to be bothering her a whit. The only thing that really got under her skin was when he called George a nigger. Why, why, why, Richie lamented, hadn’t he disregarded Stan’s advice and stuck a knife in the greasy bastard’s neck some night when he was walking down the dark stairs.

  Returning with the bottle of milk to the apartment, he found his mother sitting at the table, smoking, putting polish on her nails. “Put the milk away and come here and sit down,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

  I won’t go, Richie thought as he put the milk in the icebox. She’s not gonna talk me into it. Sitting across from Chloe, he stared down at the tabletop.

  “Why don’t you want to go to Texas with me?” she asked, immediately warning, “And don’t you dare say it’s because George is a nigger, because he isn’t. He’s Spanish-American.”

  Dirty brown-skinned nigger, Richie thought.

  “Well,” Chloe repeated, ‘“why don’t you want to go?”

  “ ’Cause I wanna stay here and wait for Johnny to come home,” Richie said. “We promised him we would.”

  Chloe bit her lip. Her eyes misted and she had to swallow a couple of times to get control of her voice. “People can’t always keep their promises,” she said quietly, ‘“even when they want to.”

  “Do you like George better than Johnny?” he asked. Surely she could not.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Now Richie’s eyes misted. This he could not understand. “But why?” It was not merely a question; it was a plea, a pitiful appeal.

  “Because he’s here, Richie,” his mother declared, her own voice no less beseeching than his. “Because I need him. And because,” she threw her head back and looked up at the ceiling, “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Richie stared at her, mouth agape, incredulity unrestrained in his expression as well as his mind. A baby? How could that be possible? He was aware that his mother and George did things together—he had watched them through the window, and his experience hiding under the bed had enlightened him about the intensity of what they did—but she had done the same things, at least he thought they were the same things, with Jack Smart, and she had not had a baby then. Why was she having one now? What was so different?

  “How do you know you’re going to have a baby?” he asked. Chloe smiled a trace.

  “I just know, sugar.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Yes, of course he knows. He wants us to get married after the war, when I can get a divorce. We were already making lots of plans, and then he got transferred to Texas. There was nothing he could do about it. But he wants me to move down there and stay while I’m waiting for the baby.”

  “Then what?” Richie wanted to know.

  Chloe smiled now. “Why, we’ll all stay together, sugar—George and I, and the baby, and you.”

  Richie thought: The last to be mentioned is you.

  “What about Johnny?” Richie asked.

  Chloe shrugged, much as Richie frequently did: a gesture not of being uninformed, but of resignation. “I’ll have to try and make him understand, that’s all.” She took Richie’s hand across the table. “It’s not Johnny I’m worried about right now, sugar, it’s you. We’ve been through a lot together, you and me. You’ve always been my little man, the person I could always count on. I don’t want this thing about George and the baby to come between us. . . .”

  As she was speaking, Richie drew his hand from hers and rose from the table. He walked toward the door, surprising Chloe.

  “Sugar, where are you going?”

  “I want to be by myself for a while,” he said, and before she could react, left. He did not know how to tell her that he felt safer alone on the streets of the city than he did in the apartment with her.

  Out on the sidewalk, Richie moved down the block with his hands deep in his pockets, cap pulled down to his eyebrows, eyes straight ahead. As he walked, he shook his head in loathing.

  A baby.

  A half-brown nigger baby.

  Turning his head, Richie spat in the gutter.

  27

  The moods of Richie and Chloe reversed themselves. When Johnny Eaton went off to war, Richie had been the optimistic one, beginning each day with confidence and eagerness, assured of his place in his world, certain of where he was, glad to be there. While Chloe, after finding that she was stagnating in exactly the kind of secure marriage she had sought, discovered that a boring life without Johnny Eaton was even worse than one with him, and began to grow gloomy and moody, wondering if she would ever be happy. Working in the bakery to supplement Johnny’s allotment check had been wretched for her: the heat from the ovens in back caused her to sweat constantly; the customers at the counter in front were brusque and indifferent because, after all, they were the customers, she a mere clerk; and, worst embarrassment of all, she found that she could not make accurate change—the cash register and all those little wells full of coins bewildered and flustered her. The register was short every day. Short more and more every day, until finally the owner, convinced she was stealing, fired her. Telling Richie she had quit, she began taking paregoric again to calm her nerves. And to save money, moved them to the poorer neighborhood of lower Adams Street, where they could afford to live, barely, without her having to work. There, her moods grew more dismal, her days bleaker.

  Now, with the advent of George Zangara, Chloe’s attitude toward life had turned around completely. The marijuana that George brought on week-ends combined with her paregoric to make her feel more euphoric, more exhilarated, more enhanced than ever before. The things George did to her in bed, and had her do to him, which at first seemed perverted and disgusting to her, soon became deliciously desirable; she began to look forward to him as much as she did the “reefers” he rolled for them. When she learned she was pregnant, and that George, instead of walking out on her, wanted not only to help her but to keep her—her and their baby—she felt as if she had become a new person: a person of value now, worth something.

  It was Richie whose enthusiasm for life diminished. He saw himself depreciate in his mother’s regard—first in favor of George, then in priority to the baby. It was intensely deflating to realize that he was of less importance than someone who wasn’t even born yet. Even his friendship
with Stan, who was the closest friend he’d ever had, could not compensate for what he felt was Chloe’s unjust, belittling attitude toward him. Always before, with Jack Smart, with Johnny Eaton, it had at least been, “Sugar, you like him, don’t you?” As if what he thought meant something to her. With this goddamn “Spaniard,” it was as if she did not even care.

  With their now reversed outlooks, mother and son awaited word from George about the move to Austin, Texas. Chloe, serene and genial, did and redid her scant wardrobe while methodically, and surprisingly without a great deal of difficulty, reducing her daily intake of paregoric—one teaspoon at a time. George had left her some marijuana on his last visit, but after smoking only two cigarettes that she awkwardly rolled herself, she put the rest of it away to take to him. Paregoric and marijuana were not good for her baby, and she committed herself to overcoming the need for both.

  “Richie, I won’t make you go to the drugstores for me anymore if you don’t want to,” she told him one day soon after his open rebellion toward the move to Austin. She had already started going herself since the scene. “I just want you to know that I’m cutting down on my medicine; I’m giving it up again, like I did when Johnny and I got married, remember? I should be almost through with it by the time George saves enough money to send for us.”

  Richie did not know whether “us” meant his mother and him, or her and the baby. Not that he cared, he told himself; he still wasn’t going.

  “Anyhow,” Chloe continued, “because of your hard feelings toward me, I’m not going to fight and argue and try to make you go get my medicine for me. I’ll do it myself. It’s not good for me to do all that walking and I’ll probably get varicose veins in my legs and they’ll hurt all the time, but at least it’ll keep us from fussing at each other like we’ve been doing.”