Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Richie’s honed logic seized on her words. If lunch was free, why did he have to fill out a form? “Does everybody get lunch free?” he asked.

  “No, just the ones who can’t afford to pay.”

  “I don’t want it,” Richie said without rancor. “I’ll pay for my lunch.”

  “You’re entitled to the free lunch,” Mrs. Reinhart emphasized. “Your circumstances, living with a pensioner grandmother, certainly qualifies you—”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t want nothing free,” he insisted, shaking his head.

  “Very well,” Mrs. Reinhart said, putting the form away. She looked at him with an expression of admiration mixed with sadness. “If you change your mind, please let me know.”

  When Richie left to go uptown, for some reason he turned to look back at the school. Mrs. Reinhart was watching him from the window of her classroom. He waved to her and she waved back. It reminded him of the way he and Frances had once waved to each other.

  Rollie Chalk was a short, dapper little man in his forties. He had a cherubic face and a fixed smile with which to greet customers. His drugstore, which was the nicest of three in Lamont, had a pharmacy in the rear—some things were the same everywhere, Richie thought—a soda fountain with several tables and chairs in front, and glass showcases and merchandise counters occupying the center. Everything was shiny and sparkling throughout. Richie fell in love with the place the minute he walked into it.

  Reading Mrs. Reinhart’s note, Rollie Chalk said with his stationary smile, “Well, you’d like to work behind my soda fountain, eh?”

  “Yes, sir!” Richie said with all the buoyant enthusiasm he felt. This place was wonderful!

  “Are you a fast learner?” Rollie Chalk asked.

  “Yes, sir! I learn real quick! And I’ll work hard for you too, Mr. Chalk.”

  Rollie Chalk chuckled at Richie’s forthrightness and spunk. “Well, let’s see,” he said, leading Richie behind the gleaming stainless steel and marble fountain. He gave Richie a spotless white apron and showed him how to put it on. “Let’s start with sodas,” he said, taking a tall soda glass from a shelf.

  During the next half hour, Rollie Chalk taught Richie the basics of making sodas, sundaes, malteds, banana splits, limeades, Coke floats, and several other fountain items. Richie’s keen mind locked in each instruction and filed it in his surface memory for immediate recall. When Mr. Chalk tested him on the quantity and order of ingredients for several of the items, Richie repeated them without hesitation or error.

  “My, it looks like you are quick,” the drugstore owner praised. “All right, tell Mrs. Reinhart you’re hired. Two to six every afternoon, nine to nine on Saturdays—we work a long day on Saturday because that’s the day everybody comes to town—and noon to five on Sundays. Pay’s fifty cents an hour; eighteen-fifty a week. That suit you?”

  “Yes, sir! Thanks a lot, Mr. Chalk!”

  As they were talking, a boy a couple of years older than Richie came in and approached them. A beefy kid, he walked with his shoulders hunched slightly, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Oh my, here comes Billy Pastor,” said Rollie Chalk. “He’s been after me to give him the job I just gave you.” Chalk enlarged his set smile. “Hello, Billy, how you today?”

  “Fine, Mr. Chalk,” the boy replied. “I was wondering if you’d made up your mind about the job yet?”

  “Matter of fact, I have, Billy. I just hired this young fellow right here. He’s part of the Distributive Education program at school and I promised to support it. Sorry, Billy.”

  After Billy Pastor left, Chalk said, “It’s not like he needs the job; his family’s got more money than I have.”

  Rollie Chalk showed Richie around the store a little more, explaining who else worked there and what their duties were, then told him to report for work—“always clean and neat, with your hair combed”—at two the next day.

  When Richie left the store, Billy Pastor was loitering on the corner, waiting for him. “Hey, you,” he said roughly. “Come ‘ere.” Richie walked over, sizing him up. The boy was taller, heavier, probably stronger than Richie, and probably slower too. “You’re not from around here,” he said. “Where’d you come from?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Chi-ca-go! What are you doing in Lamont?”

  “I came here to live with my grandmother.”

  “Well, you just took a job I wanted,” Pastor said, voice becoming angry. Richie shrugged.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry ain’t enough,” the resentful boy said. He put a stiff finger on Richie’s chest. “You better watch your step, hear? You do me any more bad turns and I’ll whip your Yankee ass all over this square!”

  Richie did not like Billy Pastor’s finger poking his chest, but he checked himself against doing anything about it. The Charleytown superintendent’s words surfaced on his mind: The Illinois juvenile court will still have jurisdiction over you . . . trouble of any kind will be reported . . . you could either be returned here or sent to Menard . . . .

  “You hear me?” Pastor demanded.

  Richie knew he could hit Pastor six times before the hostile boy could even get his fists closed and up. But he did nothing except say, “I hear you.”

  “Better remember it too!” Pastor concluded his threats, pushing Richie aside and stalking away.

  Richie walked on down the street, not even angry at Billy Pastor, so excited was he about his new job. He could not wait to get down to the house and tell Miss Ethel about it. And he could hardly wait until the next day when he would put on an apron and take over that beautiful, gleaming soda fountain. He had promised Grace Menefee that he was going to try—and try he would. She had told him once that she believed there was something good in life waiting for him; maybe this was it: this little Tennessee town where he had been born. Maybe he could belong here, be a part of things that were good: a home, a school, a job.

  Feeling good, he stopped halfway home at a little combination grocery-filling station called Luckey’s and got a cold bottle of Coca-Cola out of the icebox. Standing there drinking it, he felt very pleased with the way his life was going. Maybe, he thought, his dark days were over. No more being hungry, wearing ragged clothes, freezing, running dope, stealing; no more scratching out a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour existence.

  Maybe at long last he had finally made it into the sunshine.

  44

  School did not turn out to be exactly what Richie had hoped for. His classes were interesting and challenging, and the Lamont High teachers taught, rather than merely oversaw, as the Charleytown instructors had, but socially, the school—or Richie himself, he could not decide which—was sorely lacking. He could not seem to make a friend.

  He knew he was different: in attitude, personality, even his speech. He was a lone Northern brogue in a sea of Southern drawls. Because of it, he found himself subjected to a new kind of bullying. In the halls between classes, there were “accidental’ bumps followed by sly apologies of “Sorry there, Yankee.” Disparaging remarks, always somehow incorporating that same term, “Yankee,” were a daily challenge, to which he refused to respond. Occasionally one of the acknowledged school ruffians, among whom Billy Pastor was prominent, would go to great lengths to aggravate Richie enough to get him to start a fight: knocking his books out of his hands, trying to trip him, shoving him out of the lunch line. Whenever, wherever it occurred, Richie simply walked away.

  When the treatment first started, when Richie realized, to his surprise, that he was not going to be accepted, that a pattern of antagonism and harassment was developing, he imagined that it was going to be very difficult to keep his instincts tethered. It was one thing to exercise restraint on a schoolyard because he could not fight, something altogether different to withstand that kind of aggravation when he could retaliate—and effectively. But he was mistaken about the degree of difficulty; he found it surprisingly easy to retreat from the insults, the threats, the challenges, even in the w
ake of derisive laughter that usually followed it. Some things, he concluded, you just couldn’t figure.

  The thing that amazed Richie about Lamont High was that the girls were almost as bad as the boys. There were two distinct types of girls in his classes: the bright, bouncy cheerleader kind in their tight mohair sweaters, swirling pleated skirts, and bobby sox, and the tall, cool, more ladylike academic set. The former delighted in observing and even participating in Richie’s ridicule—they seemed to love the word “Yankee”—while the latter, with whom Richie had much in common intellectually, chose to ignore him. He finally understood his position clearly, and knew his ostracism was complete, when one of the girls gave a party for the biology class and he was the only one not invited. He could only shake his head at the absurdity. He talked different—so he was a Yankee. Never mind that he had been born right there; he had turned out different. It would have been funny if he had been able to convince himself that not being invited to the party had not hurt his feelings. But it had.

  For every overcast moment in school, however, Mrs. Reinhart generated a bright one for him. “I have been told by your English literature teacher,” she said one day, “that you write absolutely marvelous book reports. How would you like to work on the school newspaper staff? The Hi-Life could certainly use a little lucid writing. We could change you from early lunch to late lunch and give you an hour for the paper before you have to leave for work.”

  “Sounds swell,” Richie said, “but hasn’t the deadline passed for changing schedules?”

  “My husband happens to be principal of this school,” she said archly, throwing him a wink. “I pretty much get my own way around here. Want to do it?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  So he went to work on the Hi-Life staff, writing mostly sports items, which no one else was thrilled about doing. It did not change his status socially—staffers came and went at odd times, so there was not much opportunity to get to know anyone any better—but it opened up an entirely new vista for him as far as words were concerned. For the first time, he was writing not about something he had read, but about something that had happened: something current, familiar, personal. It was exciting.

  Reading again, writing book reports again, and now writing for the school newspaper, Richie eagerly looked forward to school every day in spite of the disagreeable times.

  At Chalk’s Drug Store, Richie became an expert soda jerk. He mixed perfect sodas, blended exceptional malteds, and constructed flawless sundaes. He prided himself on quick, courteous service to everyone: even Billy Pastor and his friends when they ambled in on Saturday night while looking for trouble around the crowded square; even the taunting cheerleader types and the aloof intellectuals who stopped in for Cokes after school. He let them all take their cuts at him, enduring their malice. And occasionally, as time passed and he became less of an oddity, there would be a cordial greeting from someone, a comment that did not include the word “Yankee,” even a neutral remark directed to him by name.

  One of the first girls to talk to him decently was a sophomore named Midge, a freckle-faced, round-bodied, outdoorsy fifteen year old who reeked of good health. The daughter of a well-to-do farmer, Richie had seen her in the drugstore numerous times with her clique of friends from school. One evening, just before he got off work, she came in alone. She had driven up in a shiny Dodge pickup, wearing farm jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “Can you fix me a nice cold limeade real fast?” she asked. “I am about to die from this Indian summer heat!”

  “Coming up,” Richie said, taking a glass off the shelf. In the mirror behind the fountain, as he squeezed the limes, he saw her studying him with furtive glances.

  “What’s Chicago like?” she asked when he set the drink in front of her.

  “Big,” he told her.

  “I already know that.” She drew some of the limeade through a straw. “Did you like living there?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You like it better than here?”

  “No.”

  She gave him an annoyed look. “Can’t you say more than one word at a time?”

  “Sure, I can. When I want to.” He bobbed his chin at her drink. “You want that put on your bill?”

  “Of course.” She raised her own chin an aloof inch. “I never carry money.”

  Grunting softly to himself, Richie wrote the limeade in his charge book and then put a CLOSED sign on the fountain. Taking off his apron, he put it in the linen service bag and went to the back of the store to tell Rollie Chalk goodnight. When he got back up front, Midge had finished the limeade so he put the glass under the sink to be washed. As he walked out the front door, she walked out with him.

  “Want a ride home?” she asked. Richie stopped and faced her.

  “How come you’re talking to me and offering me a ride?” he wanted to know. His tone was not so much suspicious as curious.

  “Maybe I think you’re cute,” Midge replied candidly. “Come on, get in. I won’t bite.”

  “I might,” he told her. Midge looked frankly at him.

  “Get in anyway.” When they were both in the truck, she asked, “You want to go right home?”

  Looking at the outline of her young breasts under the sweatshirt, Richie was reminded of Linda. “No,” he said.

  Midge smiled. “Neither do I.”

  She drove out of town, toward the country roads.

  When Richie got home two hours later than usual that night, Mrs. Clark demanded to know where he’d been.

  “I went for a ride in the country with a farm girl,” he said.

  “More likely you’ve been settin’ around some pool hall,” she remarked.

  “I don’t sit around pool halls.”

  “You take to running around nights, you’ll be back in trouble again,” she warned. “And don’t look for me to help you next time.”

  “I never look for anybody to help me,” he said.

  “You’ll have to eat cold supper,” she told him. “I’m not warming it up.”

  “Cold supper’s fine. I like cold supper.”

  They had a precarious relationship, Richie and his grandmother. Each was wary of the other, neither entirely convinced that their arrangement would work. A severe woman with a tendency to be dour, Mrs. Clark, like her grandson, had taken some bitter licks in life. Marrying early, she soon discovered that her husband was a drinker. A labor foreman for the Illinois Central, he kept his liquor in a tool shed next to the tracks. Every night after supper, he would walk down to the shed for a drink. One night he drank too much and stretched out on the tracks. The City of New Orleans streamliner quartered him.

  “I can travel anywhere in the country just by showing it to the conductor.” She shook a finger at him. “Don’t you ever go to drinking while you’re under my roof,” she put him on notice, “because I’ll not stand for it.”

  “I won’t, Miss Ethel,” he promised.

  The house her husband had left her, its mortgage paid off by his death, was a very modest little white frame structure at the end of Moreridge Street, just up a hill from the railroad tracks. It was old and weathered now, its paint faded and peeling, one end of the front porch leaning, window screens rusting, a few shingles missing. But to Richie, aside from the apartment where he, his mother, and Johnny Eaton had lived, and which he still remembered fondly, this plain, simple little house was the best home he had known. What made it so, more than anything else, was its permanence; there was no landlord knocking at the door, no moving out in the middle of the night to avoid back rent, no constant threat of eviction. And it was clean: no roaches, rats, bedbugs. Richie liked it so well, felt so at home sleeping in the very same room in which he had been born, that when he could he gave Mrs. Clark a dollar or two more than the agreed upon half of what he earned.

  After his first ride with Midge, when she began to come uptown to see him nearly every night, and when Richie began going out to meet her after supper, he finally told Mrs. Clark that
he had a girlfriend and who she was. Mrs. Clark knew the family.

  “Her daddy owns one of the biggest farms in the county, and she’s an only child,” his grandmother said. “You could do lots worse.”

  “I’m not marrying her, Miss Ethel, just going for rides and to movies,” Richie pointed out.

  “Girls pick their husbands early down here,” she warned. “Sometimes their daddies help them with a shotgun.”

  From their first encounter, Midge was crazy about Richie. On a lonely dirt road, their petting had become impossibly passionate and within minutes they were both undressed, doing things on the cool leather seat of the truck, both doors open, cab light off, only the moon to see each other by. Midge was not a virgin, but neither was she knowledgeable about the kind of foreplay that Frances had taught Richie. When he spread her legs and stood outside the truck burying his face in her soft lower hair, and worked his tongue under the cap of her clitoris, she thought she would die.

  “Where in the world did you learn that?” she asked in a velvety, sated voice when they were finished.

  “They teach it in eighth grade up north.”

  She let him come inside her, wetly and deliciously, that first night, but warned, “We can’t take a chance like that again. Steal some rubbers from the drugstore tomorrow.”

  Richie thought he had given up stealing. But for what he was getting from Midge, he knew he would readily go back to it.

  One afternoon as the weather was beginning to turn cold, a stooped, scowling farmer in moleskin hunting clothes and muddy boots, came into the drugstore and stood looking curiously at Richie long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Help you, sir?” Richie asked.

  Just then Rollie Chalk came out of the back, smile in place, and said, “Well, Mr. Lester, long time no see. How are you?”

  “Like to have a word with you in private,” the farmer named Lester said. He walked to the back of the store, Rollie Chalk following.