Hard City

by Clark Howard

  In Stan’s postage-stamp room, which had a double bed and a bureau, nothing else, Stan cleaned out a drawer for him. “You can wear some of my clothes too,” he said, opening a tiny closet. “Case was right, those things you got on gotta go. And that haircut, Jesus! This is what you gotta have, man,” he modeled his long, slicked-back ducktail style. “You gotta let your hair grow, you know?” Stan’s older, experienced eyes studied Richie for a moment, then asked, “So what are you gonna be doing now?”

  Richie locked eyes with his friend. “Whatever you’re doing, Stan.”

  “Solid!’ Stan smiled widely. “Hey, it’ll be like old times! Like when we was kids!”

  They were both barely sixteen.

  That evening, in the Daylight Saving Time grayness between sunshine and darkness, Stan took Richie over to Maypole Avenue to Jo-Jo’s Candy Store where they found Bobby Casey lounging outside with several other teenaged boys all dressed in the same fashion: lapelless Cugat jackets, pegged trousers, keychains running from belt to pocket, square-toed Hardy Brothers bulldog shoes.

  “Well, well,” Bobby Casey cracked at the sight of Richie, “look who got all dressed up.”

  Richie was wearing a set of Stan’s clothes. He made an incongruous picture, with his plain-toed Lamont shoes and short, small-town haircut. But at least, he knew, he did not look as much a hick as in his own clothes. “Innerduce him around,” Stan instructed Bobby. Holding out his hand to Richie, he said, “Gimme that sack of nickels.” Richie handed him the nickels from the poolroom burglary and Stan took them into the candy store.

  Bobby Casey introduced Richie to the others, saying pointedly, “He’s a friend of Stan’s,” without including himself.

  “Just move to the neighborhood?” one of them asked.

  “I lived at the Parkside a few years ago,” Richie told them. “I just got back from Charleytown.”

  “I was in Charleytown,” another said. “Buchanan Cottage. Where was you?”

  “Polk.”

  Stan returned and handed Richie some currency. “Jo-Jo handles any money changes we need,” Stan said, bobbing his chin at a dwarfish man of about fifty who sat on a high stool next to his cash register. “He lets us use his storeroom to play cards, shoot craps, hide things, that kind of stuff. In return, we keep the neighborhood clean; we don’t allow no punks to bother him, no street fights that could get his windows broke, shit like that. And if somebody runs up a bill and don’t pay it, we go have a talk with them. We got everything nice and peaceful an’ we keep it that way.”

  “Sounds good,” Richie said. The thought of being part of this band of boys excited him and made him feel vital and strong.

  The boys loitered around the little store, waiting for darkness. They smoked cigarettes, drank Cokes, sat around on upturned wooden boxes, lagged coins at a sidewalk line, talked about things that amused or annoyed them—there was not much in between—and in general passed time to finish out the daylight hours so that they could come alive as their nighttime selves. The nearer it came to darkness, the more impatient they became.

  “Hey, Stan, we’re gonna go looking for rubber machines,” one of them finally said, indicating himself and another. “You wanna come?”

  “I’m waiting for the broads,” Stan said, shaking his head.

  “How ’bout you, Richie? Wanna come?”

  “I’ll stick with Stan,” Richie replied. “Thanks anyhow.” How quickly acceptance came with some, he thought, how slowly—or not at all—with others. With Stan’s friends, Richie already felt like he belonged. Except for Bobby Casey, of course. That, Richie was sure, was a lost cause. Bobby could not accept the fact that when Richie was around, Bobby was not Stan’s best friend. Hanging out on the street that first night, Richie wondered how long it would be until he and Bobby fought. That they would fight some day went without saying.

  Shortly after dark, the teenage girls of Maypole Avenue came out of their homes and congregated near where the boys were. They all wore bobby sox and loafers, pleated skirts and scooped-neck blouses, and makeup applied in hallways out of sight of their parents. They talked loudly about records and movies and other girls, and in whispers about the boys and the park at night and things sexual and exciting. On this night they talked about the new boy with the short hair and funny shoes.

  “Hey, Richie, this is Marcella,” Stan said, going over and slipping his arm around a pert Italian girl. “She’s crazy about me.” Marcella aimed a slap at him, but Stan easily ducked it. “C’mon, Richie, meet the girls,” Stan urged, and Richie went over. After introducing Richie, Stan took Marcella’s hand and started pulling her away, toward the corner. “I’m giving you one more chance to take a walk in the park with me without getting fresh,” he warned, “but I don’t want no monkey business. I’m saving myself for the girl I marry.”

  “You got nothing left to save, you jerk,” Marcella said. She turned to another girl, olive-skinned with a Roman nose, and said. “Toni, come on, you and Richie come for a walk with us.”

  Toni looked at Richie. “Want to?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  They walked behind Stan and Marcella, who held hands and laughingly kidded around, until they had crossed the boulevard and entered the shadowy park, then Stan and Marcella stopped at a bench and Stan said, “You guys walk on around the lagoon and get acquainted. We’ll wait for you here.” In the dark, before he walked away, Richie felt Stan press a rubber into his hand. Glad it was dark, Richie knew he had blushed.

  Following the asphalt path around the Garfield Park lagoon, the park lamplights casting shadows all around them, Richie asked, “Is Toni short for something?”

  “Antoinette,” she said.

  “That’s pretty.”

  “Did you just move here?” she asked.

  “I lived here before, at the Parkside where Stan lives, but I just came back.”

  “Were you really in reform school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Just ran away a lot.”

  “That’s not so bad,” Toni slipped her hand into his. “Do you mind? This part of the park is a little scary.”

  “I don’t mind,” Richie said holding her hand firmly. “I like it.”

  The park got very dark for a short distance, overhanging willows blocking out light from both behind and in front of them. “They call this part the kissing lane,” Toni said. Stopping, she turned to him and Richie put his arms around her and they kissed, briefly, drily, without using their tongues. As soon as their lips parted, they decided to do it again, and this time it was longer, it was moist, and Toni flicked her tongue against his. Richie felt himself harden, and knew she could feel it too. “Come on,” she whispered, “I know a good place.”

  Taking his hand again, Toni led him past the park boathouse, where people were renting boats to row around the lighted part of the lagoon. They turned into a dirt path that led up a thickly treed low hill. Behind a wild, untrimmed hedge, Toni found a broken-down cardboard box that unfolded to the size of a bed.

  “You’ve been here before, I guess,” Richie said.

  “Sure,” she replied matter-of-factly. “This isn’t your first time, is it?”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “How did you mean it?” Her face looked like dark marble in the moonlight.

  “I just meant you seem to know your way around.”

  “I do,” Toni confirmed. “All the way around.”

  Presently they were kissing again and Richie was trying to collate in his mind the fact that he had only known this girl for a few minutes, and now she had made them a bed of cardboard and was pressing herself against him greedily. Pulling her lips back from his, she turned in his arms and said, “Undo me.” Richie undid the buttons up the back of her blouse, and looked for her bra hook. “It’s in front,” she whispered, turning again. He found and unhooked it, and cupped her breasts in his hands. Her nipples were like bee stings: swollen, lu
mpy, hard. As he bent to kiss them, Richie felt her hands unbuttoning Stan’s Cugat jacket, pulling up Stan’s polo shirt, unzipping Stan’s trousers.

  “Have you got something?” she asked, bending to slip off her panties.

  “Huh?”

  “You know. To put on it.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I’ve got something,” he said, searching frantically for the rubber.

  Toni lay down on the cardboard and when Richie knelt to kiss and lick her between the legs, she stiffened and said, “No, I don’t do dirty things like that. Tomorrow night you can do that with one of the other girls. Just fuck me.”

  While she made herself moist, Richie put the rubber on, thinking: Tomorrow night? The other girls? Lying on top of her, he felt her hand check to make sure the rubber was on, then she guided his erection into her and said, “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” Richie obliged, and began to thrust.

  The little town of Lamont was fading farther into memory.

  47

  Richie stood in shadows at the edge of a movie theater parking lot, serving as lookout in one direction, Bobby Casey next to him watching the opposite way, as Stan used a wire coat hanger to fish inside a car window for the door handle. After several nervous minutes, they finally heard the unmistakable click that told them the door was open. Seconds later, Stan hurried over to them and slapped Bobby on the shoulder. “Okay, go get it.” As Bobby hurried over to the car, Stan said to Richie, “Case always does the hot-wiring; his fingers is lots smaller than mine and he can handle them skinny little wires better.”

  “Where’d you guys learn to do this stuff?” Richie asked, whispering.

  “Around,” Stan shrugged. “From other guys. A guy who used to work for Solly at the poolroom learned us to drive. He was a wheel man on some stickups; he’s in the joint now.”

  Presently they heard the car engine start and watched as Bobby Casey backed out of a parking place and drove over to get them. When the car stopped, Bobby slid over and let Stan get behind the wheel. “You get in the back,” Bobby said to Richie, jerking a thumb over the seat.

  As Stan guided the car down the alley and into street traffic, he said, “I usually do the driving ’cause I look older. We never been stopped once, right, Case?”

  “Not once,” Bobby Casey confirmed. “So far,” he added, with a surly glance back at Richie.

  Staying off the main boulevards, Stan drove side streets and uncrowded avenues to get to several of the many railroad yards that were sprinkled throughout the city. Each time he came to one, he would slowly cruise the street adjacent to the yard siding, as he and Bobby scrutinized any railroad car that might be parked there. When they found tankers, cattle cars, grain carriers, or empties, they drove on to another yard. “We never try nothing that don’t look good,” Stan emphasized. “We don’t have to; there are dozens of these yards, from the Loop all the way out to the suburbs.”

  When they found a siding that suited them, one reasonably close to the street, with a good selection of closed boxcars, Stan parked and the three of them sat in the dark car and waited, watching. “This is where you gotta have patience,” Stan told Richie.

  When they had been sitting there an hour, they saw a beam of light bobbing up and down along the line of boxcars. “Yard cop,” Stan said quietly. As they watched, the light moved from car to car, flashing up at each door as the watchman checked the seals. The eyes of the three boys followed the bobbing light for half an hour as it went the length of the siding and then circled back in the direction from which it came. They waited another fifteen minutes after it was gone, then Stan said, “Okay.”

  Out of the car, they scurried down the street embankment, up the cinder-covered siding rise, crossing the tracks to the fifth pair, where the boxcars were parked. Bobby went in one direction, Stan in the other, taking Richie with him. With a lipstick-sized penlight, cupping his hands around the beam, Stan started checking the bill of lading on each door. “This tells us what’s in the car,” he whispered. “It don’t do us no good to bust open a load of refrigerators or furniture.”

  They had checked half a dozen cars when Bobby Casey came hurrying up to them in the darkness. “Typewriters,” he whispered urgently.

  “Good deal,” said Stan. Nudging Richie to follow, he started back with Bobby.

  At the door of the selected boxcar, Stan double-checked the bill of lading, then took a pair of wire cutters from his pocket. “This here is the seal,” he said, showing Richie a shiny aluminum band running through the locking lever and a hasp on the side of the car. “We snip it in the back, like so,” he demonstrated, “and put it on the track right under the door so’s we can find it later.”

  Stan quietly, slowly raised the locking lever and slid the door open several feet. Inside, stacked almost to the door, were cartons marked ROYAL TYPEWRITER CO. Climbing into the car, Stan handed a carton out to Richie, another to Bobby, and set one down for himself. Seconds later, they were lumbering back to the car with them. When the cartons were on the back seat, the boys hurried back across the embankment and the tracks and put three more cartons on the ground.

  “This is all we can fit in the car,” Stan said. They closed the boxcar door and Stan retrieved the seal. As Richie watched, Stan looped it back in place, twisted it together where it was cut, and put the twisted part inside the hasp where it was not immediately noticeable. “This way,” Stan whispered, “the stuff might not even be missed until it gets where it’s going. Keeps the heat off these yards.”

  With the six cartons in the back seat, and again driving on side streets, Stan took them to a pawnshop on Roosevelt Road. Parking in the alley, he rang the night bell. A short man in a colorful Greek vest opened the door and Stan carried one of the cartons inside. Several minutes later, he hurried back out and said, “Okay, unload ’em.” Richie and Bobby carried the others into a back room where the first carton, sitting on a table, was now open to reveal a shiny new black Royal office model. “Okay, wait in the car,” Stan then ordered.

  In five minutes, Stan was back and driving away to ditch the car somewhere. In half an hour, they were on a streetcar heading for the West Side. They sat in the rear of the car by themselves.

  “We got two bits apiece for them,” Stan reported. He slipped Richie and Bobby each five ten-dollar bills.

  Richie stared incredulously at his share. It represented nearly three weeks work in Lamont, when he’d had a job; a small fortune when he hadn’t.

  Feeling very prosperous, he folded the currency and buttoned it into his shirt pocket as he had seen Stan and Bobby do.

  In a doorway across the street from the Pulaski Road branch library, Richie shook a Lucky Strike out of his pack and lit it with a new flip-top lighter he had recently bought. He had been smoking three of the four weeks he had been back, starting for no better reason than the fact that everyone else who hung out at Jo-Jo’s smoked. Richie fit in perfectly now. The Cugat jacket, pegged trousers, fancy polo shirt, and Bulldog shoes were part of a wardrobe he was building up with his new resources. His hair, longer now, was being trained into a glossy ducktail. In one trousers pocket was the unfamiliar weight of a switchblade. Stan had given it to him, saying, “Here, better carry this. Everybody else does.” At night, in the room they shared, Stan helped Richie practice flicking the blade open.

  From the doorway, Richie watched the library. It was early, not yet nine, and he had sneaked out, leaving Stan asleep. For a frustrating month Richie had been randomly walking through Linda’s neighborhood at odd times without once encountering her. Finally, the previous night, he had asked two younger boys on the street if they ever saw Linda around.

  “Naw, she’s never around,” he was told. “She’s got a summer job, ina library over by the Crawford Te’ater.”

  I’ll be goddamned, Richie thought, mentally kicking himself. He had been past that library half a dozen times since he’d returned, almost going into it once. And all the time Linda had probably been right in
side.

  From the doorway he saw her get off a streetcar, carrying a purse and two thick books. She was taller, and he thought her hair was longer, but he could not really be sure. She had grown into one of those young girls, he saw, who had naturally perfect posture: ruler-straight spine, evenly squared shoulders, finely curved chin held without effort at a precisely ideal angle; the kind of girl who made other girls look like they were slouching.

  Crossing the street to intercept her, Richie fell in beside her and said, “Can I carry your books?”

  Giving him only a cursory glance, Linda said coolly, “No, thanks,” and walked a little faster.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Richie said, taking her arm. Linda immediately jerked away.

  “I’ll yell for a policeman,” she threatened.

  “Linda, it’s me, Richie!” he declared urgently. “Don’t you remember me?”

  Eyes sweeping over him in astonishment, Linda’s lips parted in mute confusion. Hugging her books and purse protectively to her bosom, continuing to look him up and down, she finally found enough composure to say, “Oh, my God. Richie? It’s really you?”

  “It’s been a long time, huh?” he said, grinning.

  “My God, yes. I can’t believe this. Where have you been?”

  “I was in reform school for a couple of years—”

  “Looks like they let you out too soon,” she interjected lightly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look like you just stepped out of a teenage hoodlum movie.”

  Turning red, Richie said defensively, “Hey, I paid good money for these threads. What’s the matter with them?”

  “They make you look like you’re carrying a switchblade,” she chided. Richie could feel himself turning redder. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” Linda said then. “Golly, you sure got tall,” she changed the subject.

  “Yeah, you too,” Richie replied quietly. He felt like a freak now, as if people on the street were staring at him.

  “Miss White told me you were in trouble after some social worker came to see her,” Linda said. “I asked her to try and find out where you were, but she wouldn’t; she said she thought it would be best if I just forgot you. I tried to find out myself, over the telephone, but no one would give me any information; I guess they could tell by my voice that I was too young to be inquiring.”