My days were spent hauling hogs on my back, with a meat hook over my shoulder, from the slaughterhouse to the railcars. They were cut in half lengthwise with the heads still attached, weighed upwards of eighty pounds. My spine felt as weak as shoestring most days by noontime. Dry manure dust clouded the air, perpetual as a London morning fog. Some days I’d had a shovel in my hand for so long that when I finally got to setting it down at quitting time it felt like I’d lost a third limb. During my long workdays I hardly spoke a word to anyone. Many took me for a mute or an invalid. My facial expression always suggested that of a man looking for paradise over the next bend.
One afternoon in the stockyards, after lunching on ham and white bread from a tin cookie box, a scuffle broke out in the gravel yard in front of the loading docks. I was sitting on the ground against a pigpen wall and starting my pipe when I first heard the commotion. Four big Bohemians circled around a feller about my age. He was bleeding from his block-shaped head and dancing around with his fists raised, poised like a rattler for the next attack. If it weren’t for the foolish attempt at a beard growing on his cheeks, I might’ve thought him to be twelve or thirteen years old.
The four men around him kicked up dust in the air, hooting and hollering. At first I didn’t move. Nor did any of the other men seated alongside me in a row against the pigpen wall as they finished their lunches. One of the Bohemians wielded a jackknife. Another held a chunk of broken pavement as big as a brick and launched it at the back of the young man’s head, knocking him flat on his stomach.
The four crushers threw up their hands in excitement and hopped around shouting as if celebrating a last-second sporting victory in a gymnasium. The young boy groaned on the ground, still conscious but barely so. His hair full of blood. He tried to stand up but couldn’t lift his own body. The thirty-odd men who’d been watching the fight were as indifferent about witnessing the beating as if they were reading about it in newsprint the day after.
I had seen enough.
I stood slowly, as if getting out of a rocker, and wiped the dust off my pant legs. My pipe clenched between my teeth, smoke rolling. A roll of wall clouds pushed through the sky. A distant rainband moving in from the north. I approached the four Bohemians with all the urgency of a man without a thought or care in the world, my hands dug deep in my pant pockets. Their whooping stopped as I stood before them, working my pipe. A whistle sounded that the lunch break was over, but not a single man seated against the pigpen wall moved except to get a better view of the action.
I said, “Alright, that’s enough now, you hear? You boys have had your fun.”
The four men stared at me blankly. I might as well have been speaking in tongues for all the comprehension their faces held. I wondered for a moment if they knew any English at all.
Many who worked the yards didn’t.
The biggest of the four stepped forward but said nothing.
I tried again. “Looks like you boys got yourselves a snoot full of itch somewheres. Can’t we all just have us a quiet lunch without stirring up the nonsense?”
“What’s it to you?” the big one asked. His mouth hung open so wide he lost a bit of drool down his shirtfront.
I groaned as if pondering an unanswerable question. “What’s it to me? I’m trying to enjoy my pipe before I got to go back to lugging around dead hogs for another six hours and you boys are spoiling my smoke.”
“Jesus, Aleksander. Look at this big sommabitch come to play,” one of them said to the first man standing in front of their circle. He walked straight up to me and flashed a knife toward my chest. He had a mangled left eye as yellow as a cat’s and a week’s worth of buckbrush on his cheeks. “This ain’t none of your business, stranger.”
I considered the blade. It was no more threatening than a letter opener. A fishhook might have been a more foreboding weapon. I removed my worn felt hat and held it over my heart as if bidding a friend farewell. “If you aim to frighten me, you’ll need something a lot bigger than that toadsticker.”
The man with the knife looked at his blade as if he’d never seen it before. He gestured at the beaten chap who still hadn’t the power to get off his stomach. “That boy there done hurt my little sister.”
“Hurt her how?” I asked and took out my pipe to spit on the ground.
“Broke the poor girl’s heart.”
“Broke her heart?”
“That’s right.”
“So it takes four of you to beat the pulp outta him? Now if you’d said he raped her or roughed her up some, I might just as soon walk on outta here and let you fellers go about whatever you saw fit to do next. But a broken heart happens to us all at some point or another. That, well, that there’s just a part of life.”
“He left her for another woman,” the man with the little knife said. His three friends shifted behind him.
“She good-looking?” I asked and spat again. “Your sister?”
“Like a sunset over the mountains.”
“Well, every man thinks his own geese to be swans.”
Laughter burst from the crowd against the sty wall. The Bohemian with the knife walked right up to me with his blade at the ready. He was close enough that he could cut a hole into me with one jab.
I kept my hands in my pockets and said, “If you all ain’t outta here in under a minute you’ll see one of the hottest times you’ve ever had in a cattle yard.”
There was no more discussion after that. The Bohemian slashed his blade crosswise, aiming to spill whatever was inside my stomach in one long gash. I sidestepped the swipe as easily as dodging bad weather and grabbed the man by his forearm without removing my other hand from his trouser pocket. I pulled back and snapped the man’s arm as if it were as hollow as a bird bone. The knife dropped from his hand. His radius fractured completely, sticking out of his shirt as he collapsed to the ground grasping his elbow.
The biggest of the group charged me but didn’t make it two full steps before I socked him in the temple. He staggered back dizzily. I spat out my pipe and coldcocked him once more, square in the nose. I’m not much for boasting, but I will say this: my punch was as blunt as a worn bolt. His face would’ve incurred less damage if he’d been whacked with a stove lid.
He fell on his back and whined in a babyish way. Clotted blood gushed out of his nose and mouth. If his friends hadn’t picked him up and drug him off, he might have just as soon choked to death on his own teeth and the world wouldn’t have missed much from his absence. A wet piece of his nose was lying on the ground and the rest of it had collapsed into his face. I stepped away and wiped off my knuckles with a ratty handkerchief as casually as if I were washing up before supper.
The two remaining Bohemians dropped their courage awful quick as they helped their other two friends to their feet. The man I punched in the face couldn’t stand under his own power or open his eyes. The other’s arm was in such torture that his legs seemed to fail right along with it as the entire foursome wobbled away. The rest of the curious and murmuring crowd packed up their lunch tins to get back to work, leaving only me and the beaten young man in front of the slaughterhouse.
I touched the tip of my boot to the kid’s stomach. He moved, but only barely.
“You alright?” I asked.
A series of moans implied he was still alive.
I went over to the work pump where everyone drank from the same greasy cup during water breaks. The pump needed a good priming before it coughed up any water. I worked the lever five or six times until it spewed a blast of brown silt into the communal cup. I dumped the water over the kid’s head. He moaned louder this time and turned over onto his back. The chunk of pavement stone that hit him in the back of his skull had split into two and lay on the ground a few feet away.
“You oughta get up if you can manage it,” I told him.
The boy mumbled something indecipherable.
Sitting down again, I pulled my knees up to my chest. “You think you ought to get yourself to a hospital?”
The boy smacked his lips and gingerly touched the back of his bloodied head. “I ain’t never been no good in fight.”
“Well,” I said stoically. “That’s a keen observation.”
“Where did you learn to throw a punch like that?”
“Colorado.”
“That’s a rough and tumble place I hear.”
“I suppose so. If you walk past the wrong gatepost.”
The kid tried to stand, but his legs buckled. He fell back against the wall and gave up any aspirations to walk out of the stockyard under his own power. Silvery rain fell from an empty sky. We both looked up. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen between the tops of the buildings.
“God alive,” the kid said. “I feel like I got hit with a whole half of planet earth.”
“That or a piece of cobblestone. They both pack a pretty good wallop.”
The kid spat into his hands and rubbed his saliva between them as if it were soap.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“William Cavanaugh. Everybody calls me Billy.”
I stuck out a hand and Billy wiped off his and we shook. “Pat Crowe here. Next time you get in a bind you ought to just run the hell away,” I said and stood to get back to work, readjusting the hold of my belt and the fit of my shirt.
“Listen, listen,” Billy said, holding up a palm to halt my leaving. “Those boys might come back. They were pretty dead set on sending me to mine. I, well, I can’t do much about it. But maybe if you were around, you know, like a pal or something?”
I rubbed my mouth. “Like friends you want to be?”
“Yeah, yes. Friends.”
“Isn’t that a little sentimental?”
“What’s senty-mental?”
I thought on that some, dug wax out of my ear with my pinkie finger. “It’s kind of like being happy and sad at the same time.”
“I’m always more one than the other, myself,” Billy said and patted at a line of blood above his eyebrow.
I stared down the empty alley. My voice caught in my throat. “Friends, huh?”
“I ain’t got many.”
A long pause followed. A man at the other end of the backstreet was eating a banana with such intent that he appeared spellbound by the fruit.
“Hell, I ain’t got any,” I finally replied and helped Billy to his feet with a good pull, and we both set off down the alley as the new rain quickened into a downpour.
V
IN THE ALCOVE of a bedroom on the second floor of our hideaway cottage, we bound young Eddie’s feet to the legs of a ladder-back chair with a pair of horse hobbles and cuffed his hands to the chair’s arms with iron manacles. We blindfolded him with a baby shirt and set a demijohn of water between his legs, nestled at his crotch.
If Eddie bent over enough, given the foot of slack in his manacles, he could lift the jug to his lips for a drink. He glugged down four or five heavy pulls, spilling more down his shirt than he got in his mouth. There was no furniture in the room save for the chair to which Eddie was tied and a large rattan rocker. The floorboards echoed every footfall. A lone window on the eastern wall, double-sashed, was blacked out with a giant cut of old carpet nailed into the paneling.
I collapsed in the rocker. It wasn’t situated close enough to the window. I pushed the chair over, angling so it was within arm’s reach of both the window and the woodstove in the corner of the room. A peg of sapwood broke apart in the stove’s belly. A coffee kettle hissed steam. The room was sweltering. I opened the fuel door and tossed three ladles of water on the fire, hoping to find some balance of temperature. Since bolting him down to the chair, the young man hadn’t made a sound. He didn’t whimper or struggle, but allowed us to position him as we pleased. His steadiness took me by surprise. I watched Eddie for five long minutes. The only movement he made was to lift the carboy to his lips again, slugging down the water and sloshing it all over his shirtfront. Billy sat in the far corner of the room, his legs pulled into his chest, sipping whiskey from a dented cup.
I looked at him and sighed. The inebriate couldn’t keep a bottle away from his lips even at the apex of his life. There was nothing to be said. No conversation worth being had. I sighed again, and all three of us sat in silence for a full hour. I lifted the carpet guarding the window and peeked outside. A grin of moon. Snow ticked against the warm glass.
Two miles away, in a deep gash cut through the bottom hills of South Omaha, I spied the distant workings of the Cudahy plant. Midget smokestacks funneled exhaust no longer than cigarette plumes from my vantage. The entire industry ran day and night, the locomotives hustling without cease, the factory lights glowing like a glut of stars alone amid endless blackness, a constellation stranded by millions of seemingly uninhabited miles.
Finally the stove went cold and thereafter the whole room. I relit the kindling with a cotton oil wick and nudged the wood with the toe of my boot to allow some oxygen into the gasping flame. I creaked back and forth in the rocker and broke the unnerving silence by asking young Eddie if he was comfortable.
“You want some of my dad’s money,” the young man said.
“It’s not his money,” I said. “Your father is a thief.”
“And what are you?”
I laughed. “They call me Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
Eddie scoffed. “Dad thinks a great deal of me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m counting on,” I said and sparked my last cigarette.
“Could I have one of those?” the young man asked after a moment.
I looked to Billy. He’d fallen asleep against the wall.
“An accommodatable request,” I said and rolled the makings of a smoke from a purse of coarse tobacco and a leaf of papers. I handed the square to the young man and sparked the end for him with a paper match. Eddie leaned over and drew on the cigarette madly until it was extinguished and asked for another. I acquiesced. The young man had made no fuss, and if the most he asked for was a smoke, I would roll him cigarettes until daybreak.
I rose from the rocker and paced the room with a hand dug inside my vest. I walked to the peeling wallpaper scrolled with a wild rose pattern that had been falling away in strips from years of neglect. Inside one of the tears, I removed the ransom letter I’d written in print with a pencil. The letter, immaculate in spelling and punctuation, had gone through numerous drafts. A little more than a page long, it was as finely manicured writing as I could muster. Every pain I’d ever suffered throbbed inside those words. I unfolded the letter, as neatly creased as ironed trousers, and studied the scrawl in the light of the stove door.
When I was satisfied that every syllable was as flawless as I planned it, I took up the rocker again and said to Eddie, “I have here a bit of correspondence your father will be receiving bright and early tomorrow morning.”
“My ransom letter?”
“Yes. Would you like to hear it?”
“I’d like another cigarette,” the young tobacco fiend asked.
I glanced at the baggie and papers. There was no sense in rolling them when the young Cudahy was smoking them faster than they could be constructed. With a grunt, I was on my feet and searching Billy’s pockets for a pack of machine rolls. I found a box of cross cuts in his overcoat and handed over the whole bandage to Eddie
along with a book of matches.
“You can help yourself to as many of those as you want,” I said. “But when they’re gone, there’s no more.”
“If you’d take off this blindfold, I could help you with your grammar,” Eddie said.
I chuckled halfheartedly through the side of my mouth. “You’ve a world of nerve, son. That I won’t argue.”
“You’re not the first man that’s wanted easy money from my father.”
“Oh? You’ve been abducted before? A regular thing, is it?”
Eddie sparked a match after some fumbling. “Men have tried swindling dad before.”
“This is no swindle, son. It’s solatium.”
“How’s that?”
I snickered. “Like fringe benefits, you might call it.”
“You’re a little cracked, aren’t you?”
“Broken in all places but my gut.”
“My dad’s a tough man. He won’t repine to your threats,” Eddie said. His voice trailed out aimlessly with a wasp of cigarette smoke curling up under his blindfold to the ceiling. He swiveled his head about in his blindness. Didn’t know whom he was talking to or where in the room anyone might be.
I snapped open the letter. “Maybe you ought to give this a listen before you rush to judgment, my young friend.”
“I’m comfortable,” Eddie said and eased back in his chair, his newest cigarette burning away in between the fingers of his cuffed right hand.
I cleared my throat and adjusted my reading spectacles to the tip of my nose. The room was too dark to read the letter from my spot in the chair, so I turned up the globe of the iron lantern at my feet.
World, Chase Me Down Page 4