Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Glancing at the other two boys, Richie noticed that one of them was grinning idiotically, while the other looked distinctly glum and woeful. Richie found out why shortly after the lights went out. Lying on his side of the bed, in his underwear, he felt one of Dave’s hands exploring.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Richie demanded. “Cut it out!”

  Dave took Richie’s hand and pulled it over to his own genitals. He had an erection. “Come on, we’re just gonna have a little fun—”

  “No! Cut it out!” Richie said again, jerking his hand back.

  The bedsprings creaked as Dave got up. A moment later there was a glow of light from a candle. “What’s the matter wit’ you?” Dave tried to reason. “We just wanna have some fun.” Behind him, one of the other boys was grinning like a fool again. The glum one was cowering on the other bed.

  “Play with yourself,” Richie said. “You ain’t playing with me.”

  Dave scowled. “What are you, a tough guy or something?” He handed the candle to the boy who was grinning. “Take off them shorts,” he ordered Richie.

  “I ain’t gonna.”

  Without warning, Dave’s fist shot out and hit Richie flush on the mouth. He had been on his knees on the bed, and when the blow struck, it sent him flailing backwards on the floor. As Dave came around the bed after him, Richie grabbed one of his shoes and scrambled to his feet.

  “I’ll bash you!” he yelled, brandishing the shoe. Dave glared at him for a moment, then opened his fists and smiled. “Suit yourself, punk. But don’t get back in bed ‘less you decide to play, understand? Sleep on the floor and see how you like it.” He turned to the boy cowering on the other bed. “All right, you, get over here,” he ordered.

  “Do I have to?” the kid whimpered.

  “Yeah, you have to,” Dave mimicked. “Hurry up!”

  Sniveling, the boy went to him. Still holding the shoe, Richie backed into a corner and sat down. In the flickering light of the candle, he watched what Dave and the grinning boy did to the other one.

  At six the next morning, as soon as the door was unlocked, Richie bolted from the room, raced down the hall, and burst out the front door. Bottom lip swollen from Dave’s punch, body stiff and aching from sleeping on the floor in the corner, he ran away from the place as fast as he could. He ran for five city blocks, until his chest was heaving so badly that he could barely breathe; then he hid in a gangway and rested for several minutes. When he was able, he started running again.

  It took Richie all morning to make his way far across the city, back to the West Side. After the first hour, he stopped running and started looking for ways to get rides. During the morning rush of people going to work, he was able to get aboard the crowded rear platform of streetcars and stay on for a couple or three blocks until the conductor neared him collecting fares; then he hopped off and waited for the next one. That worked for an hour, until the crowds thinned out. After that, he walked until he saw a chance to hop on the back of a truck without being seen. Then he would ride until the truck stopped or changed direction.

  Around mid-morning, famished, he went into a bakery and asked for a loaf of rye, sliced. When the baker turned around to run the bread through the slicer, Richie grabbed a sweet roll in each hand and ran like hell out of the place. Running down the street, hearing the baker yell, “Hey, you little bastard!” after him, he turned into the first alley he came to, cut over to the next street, and beat it into a nearby park. Sitting under a tree, he ate all of the two rolls except for some crumbs, which he threw to a nearby sparrow on the ground. Afterward, he filled up with water at a public drinking fountain and resumed his trek.

  Arriving back in the Adams Street neighborhood just after noon, Richie headed directly for his old building. He had his extra clothes still stashed in the newspaper pile hideaway, along with a box of vanilla wafers, two bottles of grapeade, and a bottle opener. If no one was in the basement doing laundry or anything, he could crawl into his little refuge, eat some cookies, drink some pop, and take a nap until Stan got home from school.

  Richie walked boldly down the street. He felt there was no need to exercise caution; he had only run away a few hours ago and no one would be after him for a couple of days, at least—

  Up ahead, coming toward him on the sidewalk, was a man in a suit. Frowning, Richie stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street. The man in the suit did the same thing. Fuck, Richie thought. Turning, he reversed direction. Coming toward him from that way was a second man in a suit. Tensing, Richie poised to run, eyes searching for the best route of escape. Just then a car pulled up in the street next to him, Miss Menefee behind the wheel. Rolling down her window, she scowled irately at Richie.

  “Don’t you dare make us chase you, young man,” she warned. “Come over here and get in this car—at once!”

  Richie glanced back and forth at the two men, who were walking briskly, closing on him fast. There was a gangway nearby, but he wasn’t sure he could make it.

  “Ri-chie,” Miss Menefee said. ‘Tm warning you . . . .”

  Shoulders slumping, he relented and hurried to the car as the two men converged on him.

  Richie rode in the front seat with Miss Menefee, the two male caseworkers taking the back seat. They chided her about Richie.

  “Why don’t you let us kick his ass, Grace?” one of them said.

  “Yeah,” the other agreed, “let us impress on the little Dead End Kid that we have better things to do than set ambushes for him. Don’t forget, we’ve got caseloads too.”

  “I’ll do some of your paperwork to pay you back,” Miss Menefee said. She glanced at Richie, an expression of gravity on her plain-pretty face as she looked at his swollen lip. “And I don’t think he needs to be kicked in the pants either. Not yet anyhow.” She nudged Richie’s leg. “Who hit you in the mouth?”

  “One of the other kids,” he mumbled.

  “How come?”

  Richie shrugged. “He just did.” Looking down, he turned very red, embarrassed at the prospect of having to explain it. Miss Menefee, seeing him blush, did not press the issue.

  Downtown, when she got him alone in her office, Miss Menefee’s demeanor changed.

  “Who do you think you are?” she demanded hotly. She gave him a halfhearted shove. “Sit down in that chair. Do you think all I’ve got to do with my time is worry about you? If you don’t get smart, young man”—she wagged a finger at him—“you’re going to find yourself in the state reformatory. How would you like that?”

  “I’d like it better than the places you’ve been putting me,” Richie said brazenly. Grace Menefee’s mouth dropped open in astonishment.

  “Oh, you would! And just what makes you think so, wiseguy?”

  “I seen a movie with John Garfield, called Dust Be My Destiny, where he got sent to a reform school, an’ it didn’t look all that bad to me.”

  “Oh, I see! A movie. With John Garfield. And because of that you think you know it all!” In irritation, she drummed her fingernails on the desk. “You haven’t by chance seen any movies about how a caseworker deals with a stubborn, unruly little recalcitrant, have you?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Richie mumbled, looking down at the edge of her desk.

  After a few moments, Grace Menefee sighed a careworn sigh and reached for her card file. “All right, problem child, let’s start all over again.”

  The next foster home Grace Menefee put him in, he sat at a round kitchen table the first morning and watched as he and four other boys were served oatmeal the color of vomit. Richie liked oatmeal, but he liked it with milk and sugar. The other boys began eating it as it was served, with nothing on it.

  “Don’t we get no milk or sugar?” Richie asked a teenage girl who had dished it out. She grimaced and gestured for him to shut up. But it was too late.

  “What?” asked a lanky, unshaved man who was doing the cooking. Removing a dangling cigarette from his lips, he turned to the table. “What was that
?”

  “Nothing, Pa,” the girl said nervously.

  “Shut up. Who asked about milk and sugar?”

  “I did,” Richie said.

  “Do you see any milk and sugar?” the lanky foster parent inquired with mock innocence.

  “No, I don’t see none,” Richie replied.

  “Well, what does that tell you, boy?”

  “It tells me I ain’t gonna eat here,” Richie said, pushing his chair back. The other boys looked up apprehensively as their foster parent’s expression became incensed.

  “Sit down before I knock you down,” he said angrily, shaking a long wooden spoon at Richie.

  “Look out!” Richie yelled, pointing at the stove. “It’s on fire!”

  The lanky man whirled back around to the stove. Richie kicked his chair away and darted out the kitchen door. He was down the rear stairs and vaulting the back fence by the time the lanky man got out on the porch.

  “You’ll be sorry, you little shit!” Richie heard him yell down the alley.

  At four o’clock that afternoon, while Richie was unabashedly sitting on the curb in his old block, a squad car pulled up to him. An indifferent cop beckoned him over and asked his name. Richie told him. The cop jerked his thumb toward the back seat. “Get in.”

  As he rode downtown, Richie heard the cop say on his radio, “Call that welfare dame and tell her we’re on our way with the kid she’s looking for.”

  The squad car dropped Richie off in front of the welfare department, where Miss Menefee was waiting.

  “You’ve gone too far this time, young man,” she said resolutely. “Now you’re going to Mrs. Raley’s.”

  30

  The place where Miss Menefee took him was a shabby little frame house on Loomis Street, set far at the back of a yard that consisted solely of hard brown dirt, with not a blade of grass in sight. As they walked from the car to the front porch, the wood of which had faded gray with age and was rotting from neglect, Miss Menefee said firmly, “You’ve brought this on yourself, Richie, just remember that.”

  When Miss Menefee knocked, the door was opened by a stout woman in a soiled apron. She had cheeks that hung down to her neck and traces of lip hair at each corner of her mouth. Her left arm was missing a few inches below her elbow. “Another problem, huh?” she said by way of greeting.

  “Richie, this is Mrs. Raley,” Miss Menefee said. “It’s the last foster home I’m putting you in. If you run away from here, when you’re caught you’ll be brought right back here again for Mrs. Raley to deal with you. And every time you run away, you’ll be brought back here again. So you see, there is absolutely no point in running away; it isn’t going to change a thing. I hope for your sake that you adjust.”

  Richie barely heard a word she said; he was staring in fascination at the stump of Mrs. Raley’s arm.

  Smiling a narrow smile that could not seem to penetrate her pendulous cheeks, Mrs. Raley said, “Don’t you worry, dearie, I’ll straighten him out. Did you bring the first week’s check?”

  Miss Menefee handed Mrs. Raley a welfare department draft, gave Richie a brief, cheerless pat on the head, and left. Mrs. Raley took Richie’s collar between thumb and forefinger and pulled him into the house. In a seedy, musty little living room, the heavyset woman and the skinny twelve year old faced each other. Unable to help himself, Richie continued to stare at the stub of her arm. It was round and wrinkled, the folds of the skin seemed to have been tucked together like one would close a paper bag. Richie wondered what they did with the part they cut off. . .

  Mrs. Raley suddenly seized him by the front of his jacket and pushed the stump in his face. “Take a good, close look, kiddo!” she snarled. “Ugly, ain’t it?” Dragging him into the hall, keeping the stump in his face all the way, she snatched open a closet door and from a nail in the wall took down a razor strap of thick harness leather. “See this here?” she asked, taking her arm out of his face and holding the strap in its place. “I ever catch you looking at my arm again, kiddo, I’ll lay this on your little ass until you won’t be able to sit down for a week!” Hanging the strap back on the nail, she shoved him roughly into the closet, closing and locking the door. “I don’t wanna hear a sound out of you!” she warned.

  It was dark but Richie was not afraid. He had seen when she had the door open that the closet was almost completely empty; there was nothing in it but the leather strap hanging on the nail, and a frayed throw rug on the floor. Richie was not claustrophobic or squeamish, not after several nights of sleeping in the cubbyhole in the newspaper bundles. In fact, the dark, quiet closet seemed almost a refuge to him, a desirable haven away from the perplexities and hazards of life on the street. The old stump-armed woman couldn’t keep him in there forever, Richie knew; she had to let him out some time.

  He was right. Several hours later, Mrs. Raley unlocked the door and, with a grip on his collar, led him through a dining room toward a kitchen. At a rickety wooden table in the dining room, five other boys were eating, talking, and laughing; they fell silent as Mrs. Raley took Richie through, then began talking in quieter tones when he had passed. In the kitchen, Mrs. Raley had him stand at a counter where she had put a bowl of stew, crackers, and milk. “You got five minutes to eat that, kiddo,” she said, looking at a large, man’s watch on her flabby wrist.

  She stood next to him while he ate. The stew, Richie was surprised to find, was delicious; he wolfed it down, crushing as many crackers into it as he could during the time limit, and drank the milk in two swallows.

  “Let’s go,” Mrs. Raley said as soon as he took the last bite. She guided him back to the hall and stopped at a bathroom. “If you have to go, go,” she told him. Richie went into the bathroom and Mrs. Raley stuck one foot in the door so he could not close it all the way. With his back to the door, he took a leak. When he came out of the bathroom, she put him back in the closet.

  Sitting with his ear to the closet door, Richie was able to hear some of the sounds of the household. There obviously was no silence rule as there had been in the Hubbard home; the boys at the table had been talking freely, and now Richie could hear them engaging in more conversation as they moved about the squalid little house after supper. Also unlike the Hubbard household, in which either Mr. Hubbard or Mrs. Hubbard always seemed to be issuing orders, he did not constantly hear the voice of this foster parent; only now and again did Mrs. Raley say anything to any of the boys.

  When he got tired of listening at the door, Richie stretched out on the frayed rug with his hands under his head and eventually dozed off. He was awakened at some point by Mrs. Raley and told to go to the bathroom again, which he did. When he returned to the closet that time, she tossed a pillow and blanket in with him, saying, “Sweet dreams, kiddo.” Then she locked him in for the night.

  Early the next morning, Richie was awakened by sounds of the other boys, apparently having breakfast and getting ready to go to school. He had to take a leak real bad, and wondered if he dared do it in a back corner of the closet. As he was considering it, the door was unlocked again and Mrs. Raley took him across the hall to the bathroom. When he was finished, she motioned him into the kitchen where there was a bowl of corn flakes and two pieces of toast waiting for him on the counter. As he started eating, she put a table knife and a jar of grape jelly in front of him for his toast. “There ain’t no butter right now,” she said. Then, as if an explanation was required, “We only had enough ration stamps left for butter or cheese, so we got cheese.”

  As Richie ate, he surreptitiously noted the distance to the back door; through a kitchen window he tried to gauge whether he would be able to vault the back fence. But he was not as crafty in his reconnaissance as he thought he was, because presently Mrs. Raley nudged him with her stumpy arm and said, “Don’t even think about it, kiddo.” Richie turned red and finished his breakfast staring at the counter.

  When he finished eating, Mrs. Raley led him out of the kitchen. He assumed he was going back into the closet. Inste
ad, she pointed at the rickety table. “Sit down, kiddo.” After he sat, she asked, “Do you like the closet?”

  “No, ma’am,” Richie said without looking up. He decided to be polite, just to see where it got him. It got him nowhere.

  “You don’t have to use that ‘ma’am’ crap with me, kiddo,” the stocky woman told him flatly. “I ain’t no lady and you ain’t here for me to make a gentleman out of you. A plain old ‘yeah’ will suit me just fine.” As she talked, she kept her good arm on the table and the other one out of sight. “I’m gonna refresh your mind about what that caseworker dame told you. Every time you run away from Mrs. Raley’s, you’re gonna get brought back to Mrs. Raley’s. And you’re gonna go back in the closet. First time, it’ll be for two days, next time for four. I double it every time a boy runs away. I’ll keep you in there until you go blind and forget how to walk, if that’s what it takes. This here,” she poked a finger against the table top, “is the last stop, kiddo. Don’t say you wasn’t warned.”

  She stood up and Richie did also, not knowing what else to do. For a moment they studied each other, two mismatched adversaries in a strange social conflict in which neither, had they stopped to consider it, would ever be able to claim complete victory. Each was leery of the other because of what the other was—a misfit; each was guarded against showing the other misfit any weakness; each calculated what might be gained from the other misfit. They were like animals in the same forest—but a different part of the forest.

  Finally Mrs. Raley said, “All right, I’ve got things to do around here. Tomorrow you’ll go to school with the rest of the kids. For the rest of the day, just try to keep out of my way. Go on out and look around the neighborhood if you want to. There’s some leftover stew for lunch—if you decide to come back.”