Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “I’ll go,” Richie said reluctantly. He did not know what varicose veins were, but on top of everything else in his chaotic young life, he did not want to bear the responsibility of causing his mother’s legs to hurt. Plus which, he dreaded the very thought of her going over to Lake Street and being looked at, perhaps even spoken to, by black men—real black men, not just brown-skinned “Spaniards” like George. The possibility of Chloe being harassed on Lake Street had distressed him since he stopped running the errands.

  “You don’t have to, sugar,” Chloe emphasized. “I know you’re upset with me, and I’m not going to make you do anything for me—”

  “I said I’d go,” Richie told her again, already annoyed with himself for giving in so easily. He wanted to help her, yet he didn’t want to help her. It was a disagreeable feeling.

  Richie’s regression to his old responsibility as Chloe’s net to the drugstores brought about an informal truce between mother and son as they waited for Chloe to hear from George Zangara. Both were determined in their plans for the future: Chloe waited patiently, content in her expectation of finding, at last, total happiness with a man; Richie grimly planned—and dreaded—life alone on the streets to wait for Johnny Eaton’s return.

  Neither had accurate forecasts of their future.

  Richie answered the door when the telegram was delivered. As he closed the door and turned back into the room, Chloe put a hand to her throat and moved unsteadily to a chair.

  “It’s Johnny,” she said. “He’s dead. I can feel it.”

  Richie shook his head. “Can’t be. There’s no star on the envelope. Dead and wounded telegrams have stars on the outside to warn people so’s they won’t have heart attacks.”

  Frowning, Chloe said, “Bring it here.”

  Richie handed her the telegram and she slid one finger under the flap. Unfolding the single sheet, she read its brief message. Richie watched her eyes as she read it a second time. Presently she nodded her head slowly, almost submissively, and laid the telegram on the table. Rising, she walked into the kitchen where she had left her cigarettes. Richie picked up the telegram and read: GEORGE KILLED IN TRANSPORT PLANE CRASH, BODY NOT RECOVERED. It was signed: PAUL ZANGARA, HIS BROTHER.

  Richie turned to look at his mother. Leaning against the sink, arms folded in front of her, Chloe inhaled smoke from the cigarette and blew it in quick, impatient puffs straight out in front of her. Her right foot tapped pistonlike in perfect, even cadence.

  “Jeez,” Richie said in awe, “a plane crash—”

  “It’s a lie,” Chloe declared. “It—is—a—dirty—goddamned—lie!”

  “But,” Richie protested innocently, “if the telegram says—”

  “It’s his family,” she said. “He told me he would have trouble with his mother and his brothers because I was white. And because I’d been married before and had a kid already.” Chloe walked back to the table and read the telegram a third time, then nodded her head again. “He let them talk him out of it,” she said with cold certainty. “He let his mother and brothers persuade him that the best way to deal with his white woman and her halfbreed unborn kid was to make me think he was dead. They know that because I’m married to somebody else, there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it!”

  “Does this mean we don’t have to move to Texas?” Richie asked.

  His mother glared at him. “Yes, goddamn it, that’s what it means!” Her expression became spiteful. “What the hell do you care? You weren’t going anyway, remember?”

  “Does this mean we’ll wait for Johnny to come home, like before?”

  Chloe started to snap at him again, but suddenly checked herself and considered his question. Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what it did mean. Johnny was all she had left now. As soon as she got rid of the baby in her belly, everything would be just the same as before George showed up. Like he had never come into her life. Like he never existed. Like he was dead.

  Taking Richie’s hands, Chloe led him to the old sofa and sat him down beside her. “Listen, sugar,” she said, continuing to hold his hands in hers, “if you’ll help me out a little, I think we can get through this thing and go back to our old life with Johnny just like nothing ever happened. But you’d have to promise never—I mean never, ever—to mention a word about the baby.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Richie swore.

  “Men are funny about their wives having other men’s babies; you’ll understand it someday, when you’re older. But if Johnny doesn’t find out about it, why, it’ll be like it never happened. I’ll just give the baby up for adoption when it’s born, and that will be that. But I’ll need you to help me as much as you can before it gets here. I’ll have to pay for my own doctor, and the hospital bill. . . .”

  “I could get a paper route,” Richie said optimistically. “I could get two paper routes!”

  “That’s my little man,” Chloe praised. “I knew I could count on you, sugar.”

  She hugged Richie to her, clinging to him as if he might be all she had left.

  Kenny, the newspaper circulation supervisor, was a grossly overweight man in his early twenties, who always seemed to have a partially eaten candy bar in one hand and several others, still wrapped, in his shirt pocket. He was fat by choice and intent, his obesity having earned him a 4-F draft deferral, allowing him to stay home from the war. When Richie asked him for two paper routes, Kenny shook his head, an act which caused a roll of fat around his neck to shiver.

  “I’ll give you one route,” he said. “Mornings, delivering the Trib, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Jewish Daily Forward. It’s the Madison-Ashland route, hunnerd-an’-twelve papers, half a cent a paper. You make fifty-six cents every morning before school.”

  “I need a route after school too,” Richie said. Kenny shook his head again.

  “Nope,” he said around a mouthful of Butterfinger bar. “First you gotta prove you could do one, then maybe I’ll think about giving you anudder.”

  Richie took the morning route. It was better than nothing.

  “Be here six o’clock sharp to fold,” Kenny said.

  The papers were dropped off before dawn at a storefront delivery office where, beginning at six A.M., a couple of dozen boys aged twelve to sixteen sat along the walls under route numbers chalked above them and folded the papers for their respective routes. Kenny instructed Richie in the art of folding.

  “You take this here side of the paper and you stick it inside this here other side, see. Then you fold this here part that’s left an’ you stick it in the same place, see. Then you take and twist the bottom here to make the fold nice and tight. There, see that there? When they’re folded tight like that, you can t’row ’em onto porches an’ into doorways wit’ no trouble at all. But if they’s loose, if you don’t get a tight fold, then they’ll open up and the pages will fly all over an’ you’ll have to go chasing ’em. A tight fold”—he emphasized as he unwrapped a Milky Way—“is the secret to success in this business. Like a whore with a tight cunt.”

  Richie folded his papers as tightly as he could, but fully half of them came back open again the first morning when he took them out of the two-wheel pushcart to throw. Only a few came open in the air, however, because he was careful not to throw them if they felt the slightest bit loose. The addresses to which he delivered, and which paper to toss, were on heavy, dog-eared route cards strung on a metal ring that hooked to the handle of the pushcart. On the Madison-Ashland route, Richie delivered to stores and offices, none of them open at that hour, as well as apartment buildings and rooming houses. The route took him an hour and a half to cover, after half an hour of folding; he was usually back home by eight-fifteen to fix himself something to eat, some cereal or toast or oatmeal, being very quiet so as not to wake his mother, who needed extra rest as her stomach began to swell. By twenty of nine he was back outside to meet Stan and trudge off to school. Richie did not tell Stan about the paper route; Stan was contemptuous of work that adult
s hired kids to do for them. “They pay the kids pennies and they take home the quarters. Not me, pal. I’d rather take my chances stealing than be a patsy for some jackoff grownup.”

  Stan’s cynicism aside, Richie was proud of himself for stepping in and being Chloe’s “little man” to help her financially. He was even more pleased with himself when, after a month, Kenny told him he could have an afternoon route also, if he still wanted it.

  “It’s the Leavitt-Jackson route,” the corpulent supervisor said as he ate an Oh Henry bar. “A hunnerd-twenny-six papers, mostly Herald-American an’ Daily News. A nice fast route, take you maybe an hour an’ a quarter, hour an’ a half. Pays sixty-three cents a day. You want it?”

  Richie wanted it. Chloe had by then cut her consumption of paregoric to the point where Richie needed only to hurry to one drugstore a day before he was free to do his route. Now bringing home a dollar and nineteen cents a day, his mother let him keep the change for himself, only taking the dollar. “It helps a lot, sugar,” she praised. “Why, it pays for my cigarettes, that’s fifteen cents a day; it buys you a bottle of milk, that’s another fifteen cents; it could buy us a pound of butter for fifty cents if we could find any butter; it’ll help pay our rent every Saturday; it really does help a lot, sugar. When Johnny comes home, I’m just going to brag about how you helped out while he was gone; not why you helped out, of course, that’s always going to be our little secret. Johnny’s going to be proud of you too, you wait and see.”

  Getting so much acclaim and commendation from his mother made Richie feel a little ashamed about continuing to go out with Stan after supper to steal coins from newsstands or empty bottles from grocery racks, or to shoplift in the dime stores. Unlike Stan, Richie did not scorn work; Richie liked to earn money honestly; it gave him a feeling of personal satisfaction; sometimes he even forgot that John Garfield was his new hero and secretly thought how Buck Jones would have been proud of what Richie was doing to help his mother. He knew, of course, that his dead cowboy idol would not have liked knowing Richie was out stealing at night, but Richie did not allow himself to dwell on that unpleasant thought. Stan was Richie’s friend, the only friend Richie had, and Richie could not betray that friend by refusing to accompany him on his almost nightly forays of theft. Stan needed a lookout for some of his thievery; he depended on Richie, just as Chloe was depending on him. Some things, Richie had learned, you just had to do—like them or not.

  When he grew up, he thought, it would probably be different.

  Chloe was in her fifth month of pregnancy when Richie got home from school one afternoon and heard her sobbing through the apartment door. Quickly getting his key in the lock, he let himself in and found her on the sofa, her legs curled up under her, holding a wet washcloth to one side of her face. Before he could ask what was wrong, he also saw a khaki duffel bag standing in a comer. Richie’s mouth dropped open as Johnny Eaton came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel.

  “Johnny!” Richie exclaimed, momentarily forgetting his mother’s crying.

  Johnny looked at him but said nothing. The big Southerner, wearing a sergeant’s uniform, had an unhealthy pallor which, accentuated by a cruel curl to his lips, made his face look to Richie like an ugly caricature of itself.

  “Are you okay, Johnny?” Richie asked naively, his young mind too inexperienced, too immature, to grasp and evaluate the situation into which he had just stepped.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, boy,” Johnny Eaton replied in a voice at once strained and severe. “I been fighting a war in the fucking South Pacific jungles for two years, just got out of the hospital after being sick with malaria and dysentery, and come home to find my wife knocked up with somebody else’s kid. Yeah, I’m fine, just fine!” Rolling the towel into a ball, he hurled it at the nearest wall with a frantic grunt, then stretched one arm out with an accusing finger pointed at Chloe. “Do you know who done it?” he demanded of Richie.

  “No,” Richie lied at once, his street instincts taking over. He glanced at his mother just as she removed the washcloth from her face. One cheek was swelling and beginning to darken. Richie’s head snapped back around, putting angry eyes on Johnny. “What the hell’d you hit her for?”

  Johnny’s grotesque face turned incredulous. “What’d I hit her for? For fucking another man, that’s what for!” Now he brought the accusing finger around to Richie. “You was supposed to watch out for things while I was gone. ‘Member the promise you made? Where the fuck was you while she was getting knocked up? I ought to beat the shit out of both of you, ‘stead of just her—”

  Johnny took a tentative step toward Chloe. Frightened, Richie rushed past him to the little kitchen and from the sink counter snatched a butcher knife. “You let her alone!” he yelled.

  Johnny Eaton looked at Richie again with the same incredulity that he had when Richie asked him why he hit Chloe. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re gonna do with that knife, boy?” he asked.

  “I’ll stick it in your heart!” Richie threatened.

  “You ain’t gonna stick nothing in my heart!” Johnny declared. Crouching slightly, he moved slowly toward Richie, his pale features, his entire expression, turning into a visible snarl.

  “Johnny!” Chloe screamed from the sofa, tensing, throwing her feet to the floor. “Don’t hurt him!”

  “Pull a knife on me, will you—” Johnny growled.

  “Johnny!” Chloe screamed again. “Listen to me! The baby’s not white, Johnny!”

  The angry, anguished soldier stopped and stared at his wife in shock. “What?”

  “This baby,” Chloe said, putting one palm on her swollen belly, “isn’t white.”

  Johnny Eaton straightened to full height, drawing his head back several inches, as if trying to increase the space between him and this woman. “Not. . . white!” He whispered the words, testing them for believability. Resentment made him square his shoulders, indignation raised his chin and jutted it forward. He became a casualty for the second time.

  Turning from both of them, Johnny Eaton put on his overseas cap, retrieved his duffel bag from the corner, and went to the door. Opening it, he paused to look back at Richie.

  “Know what it means when somebody gets called a son of a bitch, boy? If anybody ever calls you that, don’t get mad at ’em, hear? ’Cause in your case it’ll be true.”

  Johnny walked out the door and, Richie knew, out of their lives.

  28

  At school one morning two months later, Richie was summoned to the principal’s office.

  “This is Miss Menefee.” The principal introduced a woman of perhaps thirty, tall, not quite pretty, but not plain either, wearing little makeup. Sensible looking. “Miss Menefee’s from the welfare department. She’d like to talk to you.”

  The principal left and Miss Menefee, indicating the chair next to her, said, “Sit down, Richie.”

  His mind was racing. What was wrong? What was a ‘welfare department’? What was happening to his life now?

  “Richie,” Miss Menefee said, “our department is going to try and help you and your mother—”

  “We don’t need no help,” Richie interrupted.

  Miss Menefee smiled slightly. “Your mother seems to think you do, Richie. She came to our office and applied for help.”

  Richie stared at her for a moment, then looked down at his knees. His heart felt as if it were trying to blow a hole in his chest.

  “As you know,” Miss Menefee continued, her voice gentle and firm at the same time, “your stepfather is divorcing your mother and has stopped the army allotment check she was receiving. As you also know, your mother is expecting a baby and is unable to work. The two of you have no income on which to live—”

  “I’ve got two paper routes,” Richie interrupted again.

  “Yes, I know. Your mother told us how hard you work to help her; she’s very proud of you, and we were very impressed. But I’m afraid it just isn’t enough to pay rent and buy groceries and—
”

  “What are you gonna do to us?” Richie asked bluntly. Might as well find out and get it over with. He wished he was someplace where he could throw up.

  “We aren’t going to do anything ‘to’ you, Richie,” Miss Menefee replied kindly. “We’re going to try to do something for you. We’ve made some arrangements with your mother that she’s waiting to tell you about. I’m afraid it’ll mean you going to a different school, which is why I’m here—to get your transfer. Then we’ll go see your mother and she’ll explain everything to you. Do you have anything in your desk you need to get?”

  Richie shook his head.

  “Well, then,” Miss Menefee said, “let’s get your transfer and I’ll drive you home.”

  At the apartment, Miss Menefee left Chloe and Richie alone while she went down to the corner to make a telephone call. Fear seized Richie’s throat as he saw his mother putting his few extra clothes in a shopping bag.

  “Sugar,” she said in a strained but resigned voice, “you’re going to have to stay with some people for a while.”

  “What people?” he asked from a suddenly arid mouth.

  “Some nice people. I don’t know who they are.”

  “Why do I have to?”

  “Well, see, I have to go to this place until the baby comes—”

  “What place? Why can’t I go with you?”

  “Because only women expecting babies can go there, that’s why.” Chloe’s resignation gave way to impatience. “Now listen, don’t give me any trouble about this, Richie. I am at the end of my rope over this baby. This is the very best I can do. This case worker, Miss Menefee, has found you some very nice people to stay with and you’re going to stay with them. Now don’t let’s talk about it anymore!”

  Richie stared at her. His anxiety over this sudden new crimp in his life slowly gave way to a spreading resentment, that quickly became a cold, bitter anger. This was not fair! This was not what they had planned, not what he and his mother had agreed to. She was betraying him. Without even talking to him about it, she had gone and made arrangements with other people—made arrangements to get rid of him, to send him away, so she could go off and have the baby by herself.