Hard City

by Clark Howard

  When he got sleepy enough to turn off the thin beam from his penlight, Richie put the book down by his side and tried not to think about where his mother was, or what she was doing. Tried not to think, either, about Frances and what might have happened to her. To keep those two out of his mind, he turned to another familiar thought: his father. For perhaps the thousandth time he reviewed everything he had overheard his father say during the train trip south. There had to be, Richie was certain, clues to his father’s whereabouts somewhere. He had to find them.

  He had to.

  Richie went home after four days. When he entered the apartment, he found Chloe sitting at the table, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette.

  “Hi, sugar,” she said hoarsely, her words slurred. “You’re home early. Your route go fast?”

  “Yeah, pretty fast,” he said. She doesn’t even know I’ve been gone, he thought at once, with relief. And she’s not mad about the money. Glancing over at his cot, he saw that it was exactly as he had left it. The cupboard door partly open, he saw some cans of soup on the shelf.

  “You want to run over to Lake Street for me a little early, sugar?” Chloe asked.

  “Sure.”

  She got her purse from the bedroom and came back to the table. Richie sat down and studied her while she put together five dollars in currency and change. Deep, dark circles hung under her eyes now, and her skin was turning waxy and ill-looking. Her hair was streaking very gray, her teeth turning very dark, and her hands looked like witch’s hands, like claw-hands.

  “Hurry back now,” she said automatically as she put the money in a wrinkled envelope and handed it to him. Squinting slightly, she tilted her head. “What happened to your eye, sugar?”

  “Slipped on the ice,” he said.

  “Try to be more careful,” Chloe advised.

  As Richie trudged over to the dope dealer, he tried to formulate some plan for the future. Being incapacitated by the beating had effectively collapsed his economic and educational routines. He had lost his paper routes. And by being absent from school more than a week, a truant officer would by now have learned that Richie had long ago moved out of the Tilton Elementary school district. If he went back to Tilton now, they would transfer him to Brown, where he had gone once before—and this time he would not have Stan to stick up for him there.

  Fuck it, Richie decided, he would not go back to school at all. With his mother in the shape she was in, she was not going to be any help paying rent and buying food until after her dope needs had been satisfied; even then, her solution to back rent was to move, and the only food she seemed to know how to buy was soup. He was not going to have time for school; just getting through the winter with enough to eat was going to be a full-time job.

  When he got to Lake Street, Richie looked in the lighted windows of the rib joints and in tavern doorways for Vernie, but he did not see her. In the middle of one block, two black youths stopped him, asking, “Where the fuck you going, ofay?” When Richie told them the name of the dope dealer he was going to see, they let him alone. Richie went on to the black man’s apartment, got his mother’s “headache powder,” and began his trek back home.

  On the way, he felt an icy wetness seeping up into one sock and realized with weary resignation that it was time to change the cardboard in his shoes.

  Chloe began staying out two and three days at a time. Richie had no idea where she was or what she was doing, and tried not to think about it. At least when she was gone, he reasoned, it was not necessary for him to make the trip to Lake Street, and for that he supposed he should be grateful. He did not mind staying in the apartment alone, except for the times when the landlady knocked on the door for the rent.

  “My mother’s at work right now,” Richie lied when that happened, without much success. The landlady, a tough Slavic woman, grunted derisively.

  “Your mother don’t know what work is, kid. Tell her to get that rent paid or I’ll padlock your apartment, got that? Work, that’s a good one!”

  Between what he was stealing on the street, using all the ways he had learned from Stan, and the little money he could get Chloe to pay, or filch from her purse, Richie managed to keep the landlady appeased enough to prevent their eviction.

  When his mother was not there, and when he was simply too taxed by his daily burden of just getting along, too weary to try for anything better, Richie continued to steal potatoes to eat. It was easy enough to slip three or four of them inside his shirt under his coat. They would be all he would eat, sometimes, warmed up, meal after meal, until they were gone. If he had enough for a couple of days, and if the rent was reasonably current, Richie could allow himself the luxury of staying in out of the cold, reading for hours on end, writing book reports that he now had no place to turn in, nevertheless saving them in his school notebook as if they were assignments. Occasionally he wondered how Linda was, what she was reading for her extra-credit work for Miss White; sometimes he thought about Stan and wondered how he liked living with his father in Ohio. But mostly, when Richie’s mind was not on a book or on an urgent personal need such as rent or food, it reverted to thoughts of his own father: where he was, how he could be found, and why he had left his only son, his only child, to suffer such an adverse, oppressive life. More and more Richie became convinced that finding his father was the only way life would ever be anything but trouble and hard knocks. Yet with the cruel winter dragging on so interminably, he could not find the energy or the ambition to actually begin a search either for Estelle or the garageman Mack.

  One thing he did do, however, was find a way to see Frances again. He dared not go back to the building where she lived, or even to that block, for the thought of being caught again by Walter Rozinski generated in him a sick dread. But Richie knew where Frances did her grocery shopping, an A & P on Ashland Avenue. One morning he stood in the doorway of a furniture store across from the market and watched as she came down the street and went inside. Crossing, he entered the store and looked down the aisles until he found her. Waiting until she was in an aisle by herself, he walked up to her. Before she noticed him, he saw that one of her eyelids was half down, as if it had no muscle in it, and a corner of her bottom lip was misshapen, mashed out of synchronization with the rest of her face.

  “Frances,” he said quietly. Looking at him, her expression became frightened.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “He told me he killed you.”

  “He came close to it,” Richie said. “What’s wrong with your eye?”

  “God did that,” Frances replied anxiously. “God killed the nerve in my eyelid to punish me for sinning with you.”

  “You mean Walter beat you up, like he did me?”

  “God,” she corrected. “God acted through Walter. We had to be punished, Richie. What we were doing was a dishonor to my husband and the Church and God. I had to confess everything to our priest, after I got well enough to go out. Walter, he didn’t have to confess nothing, not even beating me up, because the priest said he was acting for God.” Frances tried to smile, but it only made her lips look more incongruous. “I’m glad he didn’t kill you, Richie. You’re a good kid. I’d like to pray for you, but our priest said you was a devil in the form of a lamb.” She looked nervously around. “I’ve got to go now. Walter and the priest have people spying on me.”

  Richie watched her hurry up the aisle. The way she flitted away, like a nervous animal in fear of capture, reminded him of his mother when she needed a fix.

  Shaking his head sadly, Richie left the market and returned to his bleak, dismal world.

  When Richie thought that he and his mother had reached the bottom of life, that things could not become any worse for them, he learned that hardship had only a horizon, never a terminus, and that from then on, the decline into greater adversity, greater misfortune, and greater suffering, was swifter and more indelible on them than ever before. When the meanest of times came, they came like bacteria, and Richie’s astuteness and shrewd
ness and cunning, even his keen instincts, at that low tier of his existence, were not strong enough medicine to stop their spread. He could take care of himself, scurrying and scavenging around the freezing city like one of the rats he had once smashed with bricks, but he could not take care of his mother and her drug habit too.

  As Chloe’s need for heroin increased, her ability to help pay for it dwindled. She ran out of branch welfare offices to swindle; her nerves flagged to the point where she lost the poise and presence necessary to steal; her physical appearance withered until she no longer had anything desirable with which to barter. She became a dreg, and with an invisible umbilical cord she fed her hopelessness to Richie and made him one also. He became as thin and haggard and haunted-looking as she was, and his desperation as dire to him as Chloe’s was to her. They were in the depths now; the rim of their pit could no longer even be seen; there was no tomorrow, no expectations, no optimism; they lived not even from day to day, but from hour to hour.

  When the end came, it was with a sickening thud: the sound, and then the sight, of Chloe beating her head against the wall to punish the devils in her drug polluted body. When Richie forced her to stop it, she pleaded with him, “Get me something, Richie, get me something,” with no grasp at all that she was begging a hungry, half-sick twelve year old with holes in both shoes, who had run out of newsstands and markets from which to steal coins and food because he had done it too often, was now recognizable, was too ragged to go unnoticed, too weak to get away if chased. Forcing Chloe to stop beating her head against the wall, Richie made her lie on the bed and tried to calm her with coffee from some old grounds that were still in the percolator. But Chloe cursed him and threatened him and resumed the thud, thud, thud against another wall.

  That was when Richie gave up and telephoned Miss Menefee.

  When Richie found out his mother was back, it was too late because she was hooked again, going over to Lake Street again, on her way back to hell again.

  After following Chloe to Lake Street, Richie was so drained that he could not find the energy to do more than go sit in the park and stare, like Myron said the other old men at his rooming house did.

  Nothing had changed.

  36

  Sitting on the bench in Garfield Park, slumped down with his chin on his chest, Richie stared at the asphalt walk and the plain of new grass that stretched beyond it. He felt numb, and his eyes, his hands, his demeanor reflected it: he sat very still, his breathing barely discernible. A block away down Madison Street in a cheap rented room, his mother, whom he had seen today for the first time in nearly a year, was lying, he knew, in a heroin haze from the dope he had watched her buy two hours earlier. Because of that, because of her, it was as if all he had been able to accomplish on his own—avoiding the authorities, living at Cascade, working, reading, learning to box—all of his efforts, all of his struggles, everything he had been through, had been for nothing because he was right back where he started: he was a kid on the dodge with a junkie mother to worry about. The fact that he had survived and was a year older, could now fight, and was earning money at it, and through Mack might have a viable lead to locating his father, carried no weight at all in his stunned young mind. Only one thing seemed important: his mother was back—and she was still a junkie.

  Raising his chin from his chest, Richie sighed heavily and thought of Myron, waiting for him—or probably not waiting for him now—at the gym where Richie was supposed to have begun training for his fight the following Saturday night with some black kid named Willie Wakefield. Tall and skinny, Myron had said he was. Very fast. Unbeaten, like Richie himself; half of his wins by knockout, also like Richie. Myron was going to give him some special training starting today on how to fight a Willie Wakefield type of boxer, but Richie had not shown up. Instead of training, he sat alone on a park bench.

  Another sigh, and his thoughts shifted to Linda. She was sitting alone too, in the movie theater they were supposed to be in together. Linda had understood when Richie met her and broke their date so that he could train. If he had not done that, he realized, he would not have run into Stan Klein on his way to the gym, and would not have learned that his mother was back. But it would have made no permanent difference, he would have found out eventually, and it would have confused and confounded him just as much.

  Fighting inertia, Richie rose and walked back out of the park. He thought perhaps walking, movement, some kind of purpose, would bring him out of the doldrums in which he found himself, but he was wrong. Without conscious thought, he walked back the way he had come, and in scant minutes was again on Madison Street, across the street from the stairway leading up to the three floors of housekeeping rooms, one of which Chloe occupied. Being that close to where he knew she was, and being aware that she was again, or still, a junkie, was like having a nail driven into his skull. Goddamn her, he thought. Goddamn her to fucking hell!

  Angry, empty, having a desire to stop everything—thinking, moving, wondering, hating; just stop it all—Richie shoved his hands into his pockets and walked languorously down Madison until he came to the Senate Theater. He went up to the box office for a ticket. Inside, he walked past the sparkling candy counter without a glance, something he had never done in his life, and went directly into the darkened auditorium. Moving into the last row, which was empty, he went all the way over to the seat next to the wall, just as he had done in the Haymarket Theater all those nights he stayed out until George Zangara left his mother’s bed. Slumping down, he propped both knees on the seatback in front of him, folded his arms across his chest, and closed his eyes.

  He must have been very tired, emotionally drained, everything that made sense in an upheaval, unable to cope with the jolt of his mother’s return, because the next thing Richie knew, an usher was shaking him roughly, saying, “Hey, you, come on, wake up, the show’s over, we’re closing up.”

  “Okay, okay,” Richie said, coming awake, pushing the usher’s hand away.

  Outside, the Madison-Kedzie intersection was quiet, only a few people about. Richie looked at a clock in a window of a bank and saw that it was eleven-thirty. He ran to catch a streetcar stopped at the corner, so he could get to the bowling alley and his bedroom in the ladies’ lounge before Cascade closed for the night.

  As the streetcar passed the block where Chloe had a room, Richie forced himself not to look out the window. He did not want to know if his mother was out and about.

  The next morning, Richie got Grace Menefee’s telephone number out of the secret compartment of his now almost worn-out Buck Jones billfold, and called her from a drugstore booth. When she answered the telephone and discovered it was him calling, her voice grew cool.

  “Yes, Richie. What can I do for you?”

  “My mother’s back and she’s still a junkie!” he accused, anger and disappointment being generated anew. “I thought you was gonna have her cured!”

  “She was cured, Richie,” the caseworker replied calmly, though not any friendlier. “Your mother was off drugs for three of the five months she’s been back. But she wasn’t—”

  “She’s been back five months?” he interrupted incredulously.

  “Yes. She tried to find you; we both did. In fact,” Miss Menefee inserted drily, “there have been quite a few people looking for you. Needless to say, no one has caught up with you yet.”

  “Nobody’s going to either,” Richie told her bluntly.

  “That’s what you think, tough guy. No one gets away forever. In the meantime, while you’ve been hiding, your mother came home from Lexington cured of her drug habit and I arranged for a place for her to live and a job for her. She did all right for a few months, but then, well. . . .” Grace Menefee’s voice lost its edge and became softly sad. “I couldn’t be with her day and night, Richie. I gave her as much time and encouragement as I could; I’ve got other cases, other people. Anyway, I guess it wasn’t enough.” The caseworker paused and Richie heard her sigh the same kind of hollow, weary sigh th
at had swept over him several times on the park bench the previous day. Then she asked, “Where is your mother now, Richie?”

  “You don’t know where she’s living?”

  “No, a couple of months ago she moved out without paying her rent and I haven’t heard from her since. I was afraid she’d gone back on drugs. One thing I do know: she’s not receiving a welfare check. We’ve flagged all the names she previously used to get assistance, and a description of her has been posted in all of our branches. Now I want you to tell me where she’s living, please.”

  Richie’s wariness locked in gear. “What’ll happen if I do?”

  “I don’t know what will be done with her this time,” Grace Menefee said frankly. “But she’s a drug addict and she can’t be allowed to roam the streets—”

  Richie hung up. Fuck you, he thought. Fuck you and your whole fucking welfare department. There had to be a better way. There had to. He would just have to figure out what it was.

  To give his mind a rest from the turmoil, Richie boarded a streetcar and rode over to Mack’s garage to see if he had been able to find out anything about Ava. Mack was washing a carburetor in a pan of gasoline when Richie came in.

  “I know what you’re gonna ask me,” he said before Richie could speak, “and the answer is no. I dropped out to the club in Cicero but none of the Capone family was around, so I didn’t try to find out nothing. This ain’t the kind of question I can ask just anybody. And I have to be careful how I ask it too. I mean, I can’t go up to one of the Capones and say, ‘Where’s Avellina Gela?’ It’s gotta come up in conversation, real natural like. These ain’t ordinary people we’re dealing with. You just have to be patient, Richie. I’m going out there again Wednesday night; I might catch one of the family then.” Taking the carburetor out of the pan of gasoline, Mack put it in a sink and ran water over and through it. “I been thinking about your invite to come see you fight Saturday night. Maybe I’ll take you up on it. Where’s it at again?”