by Clark Howard
When he wrote his report on the book, in the section of whether he liked the story or not, Richie dealt with that aspect of it; he concluded that he had liked it, but wondered if he might have liked it more without seeing the movie first. Paula Hovey, when she read the report, was amazed at the depth with which her amazing young reader had considered that curious perspective. The report, she said, was as good or better than most high school students could have written. Richie, pleased as could be, smiled and told her he was going to select a Zane Grey book as his next prize.
“I’m afraid there won’t be any more prize books for you, Richie,” Paula told him quietly, briefly biting her lips as if hating the words.
“Huh?” Richie was not certain he had heard right.
“The director of the club suggested that we limit each reader to winning three times. The high school teacher who is the other judge agreed with him. So you won’t be able to win again.”
Richie stared at her in disbelief. “Not even if my report is the best?” He could not believe it.
“You see, Richie, the whole purpose of the program is to encourage young people to use the library, to read,” Paula Hovey said. “If the same person keeps winning every month, it won’t be long until the others lose interest. . . .”
“So I can’t win even if my report is the best?” Richie pressed.
“Winning isn’t the purpose of the contest,” Paula tried to explain. “It’s only the incentive; it’s what we use to get kids interested. The real purpose is to get kids interested in reading, and to help them learn to understand and remember what they read—”
“It ain’t right to change the rules like that,” Richie said, tight-lipped.
“It’s right for the other kids,” Paula defended, a little lamely.
“Do you think anybody’s gonna write a better book report than me?” he challenged flatly.
Paula shifted her eyes to the floor, unable to look at him when she answered. “No.”
“Then I should win,” he said. Paula shook her head.
“No. For the good of all the kids, you shouldn’t.”
Glaring at her, Richie held out a hand. “I want my report back,” he said.
“Richie, you can still turn in reports,” Paula told him almost pleadingly. “It’s what you get out of it that’s important—”
“I want it back,” he reiterated, eyes fixed on her unblinkingly, hand steady.
Rather than suffer his indicting stare a moment longer, Paula got the report from her desk and handed it to him. Slowly and carefully, Richie tore the pages in half, then into quarters, and dropped them into the librarian’s wire wastebasket.
Then he walked out.
Miss Menefee was waiting for him when he got back to Mrs. Raley’s. She was sitting in the dingy little living room, talking with Mrs. Raley. So incensed and infuriated was he, that he walked past them without noticing they were there. The dirty fucking cheaters, his mind seethed. He had planned to win enough books to have his own personal library. Lousy bastards, changing the goddamn rules—
“Hey, Richie,” Miss Menefee said as he stormed down the hall, “how about a hello?”
Stalking into the living room, Richie said, “I didn’t see you.” “What’s the matter?” Miss Menefee asked, seeing his angry, set young face.
“Nothing.”
“Yes, there is. I can tell. What is it?” “Nothing,” Richie insisted.
It was his John Garfield voice; the caseworker knew better than to press him. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Come here.”
He went over and stood in front of her. Mrs. Raley was observing him suspiciously. Richie kept his eyes down, looking at neither of them.
“I’ve got some good news for you,” Miss Menefee said cheerfully. “You’re going to go back and live with your mother.”
32
“Hi there, sugar!”
His mother hugged him to her and planted several dry kisses on his cheeks and forehead, while Richie grinned shyly and tried not to act too dippy in front of Miss Menefee, who he was convinced thought he was tough. “You look so good, sugar!” Chloe exclaimed. “And how you’ve grown! My good ness!”
The apartment Miss Menefee had found was in the Parkside Residential Hotel on Hamlin Avenue, just across from Garfield Park. It was the usual two rooms: living room-dining room-Pullman kitchen combination with a tiny bedroom, and a bathroom down the hall shared with three other apartments. The place was bare, sparsely furnished, but not shabby like Mrs. Raley’s. Glancing in a corner, Richie saw a folding cot and knew that he was back to sleeping in the kitchen again.
“It’s so nice being together!” Chloe gushed, continuing to hug him whenever he stopped looking around the place long enough for her to grab him.
When Miss Menefee finally got ready to leave, she said, “Richie, you’ll start at Tilton Elementary tomorrow; here’s your transfer. And Chloe, don’t forget, you start work at Walgreen’s lunch counter Thursday morning at seven-thirty—and don’t be late. I’ll be around next week to see how you’re getting along.”
After the caseworker left, Chloe said, “How about a Coca-Cola, sugar?” She got two bottles from a little countertop refrigerator and opened them. “Coca-Colas are on the list of things I wasn’t supposed to buy with our welfare check,” she confessed, “but I thought we deserved to celebrate. Anyway, you ought to see the things on that list—-lipstick, cigarettes, magazines—I tell you!” When they sat down with their soft drinks, Chloe asked, “Well, how do you think I look, sugar?”
“Nice,” Richie said, shrugging.
“A lot slimmer than the last time we were together, huh?” Chloe sighed wistfully. “Well, Richie, I had the baby. A little girl. Pretty little thing,” Chloe’s eyes began to blink rapidly. “They said they’d find her a real nice home.” She cleared her throat and sniffed once, then said, “Anyway, it’s just you and me again, sugar. I think we can get along all right, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Richie said, but it was not his usual confident, cocky “Sure.” It was uncertain, feeble, but he knew it was what his mother wanted to hear.
Inside, Richie felt wary. He was glad to see his mother again, glad she was finished with the baby thing, glad that she seemed to be all right after her ordeal. But on consideration, he was not at all certain he was glad to be back with her. With the exception of the dirty bastards who changed the rules at the Off-the-Street Club, he’d had the rest of his life pretty much in order: his understanding with Mrs. Raley that allowed him to work and earn money; his affiliation with the other wards at Jackson Elementary that protected him on the schoolyard, his own bed at Mrs. Raley’s, along with decent food and a comparatively unrestricted routine that allowed him to go to the library. It had not been a bad life.
Now he didn’t know.
Looking at his mother across the table, he could not help remembering how many times she had fucked up their lives. In his mind she had done it by being with Jack Smart when his dad came home from prison; by having George Zangara’s kid in her when Johnny Eaton came back from the war; and by always spending their money on her “medicine” instead of other things they needed. Stan Klein had once said to Richie, “You can’t never depend on your parents; they’ll let you down every time.” At first Richie thought Stan was talking about fathers: the ones who always seemed to walk away and leave their kids to be raised by women. But later Richie came to learn that Stan meant both parents. Now, starting a new life with his mother, Richie for the first time understood Stan’s negative philosophy.
Sharing their illicitly purchased Coca-Colas together, Richie realized, also for the first time, that he did not trust his mother.
His new school, Tilton Elementary, was not as bad as others Richie had attended. Living at the Parkside Residential Hotel, he was just inside the boundary line of a West Side neighborhood that became progressively better as it extended away from Garfield Park. Had they lived one block farther east, he would have been back in one of the
tough, racially mixed schools on the Lower West Side, below Kedzie Avenue. Tilton was almost entirely white—which did not mean it was without bullies.
At recess the first day, a husky, well-built kid named Danny Provo came up to him on the schoolyard, accompanied by the usual entourage of admirers, or at least prudent followers.
“Hey, you want to fight?” Danny Provo asked.
Richie, sitting alone against the building, shrugged. “What for?”
“To see who’s toughest,” Danny Provo said.
“You’re toughest,” Richie conceded, hoping against hope that would be the end of it.
“You got to prove it,” the other boy said, nudging Richie’s leg with his foot. “Come on, get up. Let’s fight.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
“You chicken?” Danny Provo sneered.
“I’m not chicken,” Richie said. “I just don’t know how to fight good.”
“Let’s see, then,” Danny said. He nudged Richie’s leg a little harder. “Get up.”
“I don’t want to fight,” Richie said firmly. Nearby he heard several girls giggle. Glancing over, he saw five of them standing in a group, watching. One of them, Richie noticed, was not laughing with the others.
“Get up or I’ll kick your teeth out,” Danny Provo threatened.
Across the schoolyard was a recess monitor, one of the kids from eighth grade, wearing a white belt with a lanyard over one shoulder. Richie knew he could make a break for it, attracting the monitor’s attention by yelling. That would save him from taking a licking, but it would also label him a chicken throughout the school, fair game for everyone. Richie did not feel that he was a coward; he thought he had guts. But he knew he could not fight, knew he was skinnier and weaker than most kids his age, and was resigned to that. On rare occasions when he had access to a weapon—the knife he threatened Johnny Eaton with, the shoe he was ready to use on Dave to deter his sexual advances—Richie would face a confrontation ready to fight. But here on the schoolyard, he had only his fists.
“I said get up!” Danny Provo ordered, kicking him in the thigh.
Richie leaped to his feet, actually startling Provo enough to make him jump back a step. But when he saw the uncertainty, the fear, in Richie’s eyes, he immediately resumed his bully scowl, moved back in, and hit Richie in the jaw. Richie tried to cover up, protect his face with his forearms, but Danny Provo hit him with a left in the stomach that caused him to drop his arms, then drove a fist to his eye.
“C’mon, fight!” Danny Provo snarled.
Richie stood his ground. He did not run and he did not cry, but he would not fight back either. Based on his past experience in similar situations, he knew there was little chance of getting hit more than two or three times.
“Why don’t you leave him alone, Danny!” a girl’s voice yelled from the sidelines. Glancing over, Richie saw that it was the girl who had not been laughing at his predicament.
“Yeah, lay off him, Danny,” one of the bully’s followers said. “The guy can’t fight.”
Danny Provo made a big show of wanting to punch Richie again, but allowed two of his friends to hold him back. Finally he just gave Richie a shove and swaggered away, taking nearly everyone with him.
Richie sat back on the ground, up against the building. Staring down at nothing, he waited for the school bell to ring that would end recess. Outwardly, he was stoic. Inside, he was crying in humiliation.
Goddamn his father for not staying around to teach him how to fight!
Richie kept the two paper routes he’d had at Mrs. Raley’s, even though it meant he had to get up earlier and ride a streetcar four times a day in order to work both routes. It cost him twenty cents a day for carfare, but he still came out ahead financially because now he did not have to pay half a dollar to Mrs. Raley, and his mother was not taking any of his income.
On the day of his encounter with Danny Provo, by the time Richie was working his afternoon route, his left eye was puffy and discoloring. Frances Rozinski was again on her back porch when he delivered her paper.
“Get caught looking in a window?” she cracked. Turning red Richie put her paper on the doorstep and turned to stalk away. Frances grabbed his sleeve. “Wait a minute,” she said in a completely different voice. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t be needling a kid like you. Here, let me take a look at your eye—”
“It’s okay,” Richie said, trying to pull away.
“No, it’s not. It’s got a little cut on it. Have you washed it?”
“No, I came right from school to my route.”
“Come on in the kitchen,” Frances Rozinski said. “Let’s just dab a wet rag on it.”
Richie allowed her to lead him by the sleeve into her kitchen, which he saw at once was as neat and clean as he remembered the Hubbard kitchen being. At the sink, Frances ran cold water over one end of a hand towel and gently touched it to his swollen eye. As she ministered to him, with her hand at his face, he saw a starkly white, ropy scar running horizontally across the underside of her wrist. From somewhere—some movie he had seen, some book or story he had read—the words, “She slit her wrists,” surfaced in his mind.
“How did it happen?” Frances asked, causing Richie to raise his eyes to meet hers, which were the blackest, deepest eyes he had ever seen; they made him think of bulletholes in a whitewashed fence.
“I got in a fight at school,” Richie mumbled.
“I’d hate to see what the other guy looks like,” Frances said by way of compliment. “Bet you’re pretty tough, huh?”
Grunting softly, Richie looked away. Frances stopped dabbing and studied him for a moment, her expression becoming cheerless, almost sad. She put a knuckle under his chin and drew his face back toward her. “Will you let me put some iodine on the cut? To keep it from getting infected?” Richie shrugged his indifference and Frances got a small red bottle with a skull-and-crossbones on it from the bathroom. “It’ll sting,” she warned. He shrugged again. When she touched his cut with the glass applicator, he did not flinch. “See, I knew you were tough,” she praised.
Frances gave Richie a drink of water and they exchanged smiles on her back porch as he picked up her paper and handed it to her.
“Thanks, Mrs. Rozinski,” he said as he started to leave. She gave him a severe look.
“Frances,” she said. “You call me Frances.”
At the corner he turned back and saw her in the front window. Smiling, he waved and she waved back.
When he had two dollars and fifty cents saved up, Richie swiped an envelope from Woolworth’s and sealed the money inside. He went down to the Off-the-Street Club and hung around the model-building room, from which he could see the library door, until Paula Hovey stepped out to the girls’ bathroom. While she was gone, he put the envelope on her desk. As he left the club, he thought: Now I don’t owe this fucking place nothing.
Several days later, when Miss Menefee dropped by to see how Richie and Chloe were doing, she asked Richie why he had stopped going to the Off-the-Street Club. Because Miss Menefee and Paula Hovey were friends, Richie was certain Miss Menefee already knew the reason. When she asked him, he remembered Stan Klein’s advice on adult fair play. “It don’t never do no good to tell a grownup that something ain’t fair. Grownups is always positive that they’re fair; nothing a kid can say or do is gonna change their mind.”
So Richie did not even try. He merely shrugged and said, “I’m working two paper routes, morning and afternoon. I don’t have time for the club no more.”
“Anymore,” his mother, sitting with them, corrected. Then she changed the subject by saying, “Listen, Miss Menefee, is it all right with you if I change jobs? I just can’t stand that lunch counter another day. There’s a ladies’ shoe store up on Pulaski where I can get a job as a salesclerk. It’s just waiting on customers, I wouldn’t have to work the cash register or make change at all; the manager does that. You said I wasn’t sup
posed to change jobs without asking. So is it all right?”
Richie did not hear Miss Menefee’s answer because he took the opportunity to slip unobtrusively away.
Richie soon found a new outlet for his literary bent: school. His seventh-grade teacher at Tilton, Miss White, put more emphasis on reading and English composition than any other subjects, believing that those skills provided the foundation of all other learning. So ardently did she support that theory that she gave extra credit for book reports toward the overall class grade. A student could earn a D in arithmetic, geography, history, and science, but still receive an A class grade by turning in book reports. Which is what Richie began to do. Not that he failed any other subject; he liked geography very much and usually did A work in that subject; history and science he tolerated, getting a C in each; arithmetic he found dull and tedious, rarely raising his grade above a D. But because of his extra-credit book reports, his final grade in lower seventh was an A, and in upper seventh he was well on his way to a similar grade.
Richie’s only competitor was Linda, the girl who had not laughed at his humiliation by Danny Provo. Linda was plain-but-somehow-pretty, much, Richie thought, like Grace Menefee. Not one of the better off students in their class, she lived toward the poor edge of the district, not far from Richie. While obviously not as poor as Richie or on welfare, Linda nevertheless was invariably the poorest looking of any group of girls she was in.
“I liked your report on Last of the Mohicans,” she said to him one day as they were walking out at three o’clock. It was Miss White’s practice to read aloud to the class several times a week those reports which she considered of particular merit. This was done with the purpose of interesting others in her class in books she hoped they might then read. Although she never announced which student’s report she was reading, more often than not it was either Richie’s or Linda’s, as each could tell by the other’s expression. Before long, they were able to recognize each other’s reports merely by listening.
“I liked yours the other day too,” Richie replied to her compliment. That one about the Sunny-something Farm.”
