World, Chase Me Down

by Andrew Hilleman

  I tipped my hat hello to the man and entered my sister’s whorehouse. I went behind the bar and poured myself a quart of beer and a short glass of brandy. I cracked an egg into the beer, slugged it down in one huge swallow, and carried the liquor with me toward the parlor in the rear of the building.

  “Hey there, Pat,” the morning bartender said. “What’re you doing here?”

  “It’s my day off. Thought I’d come and moisten it up some,” I replied, raised my brandy in a salute, and entered the gaming den which doubled as my sister’s office. Two oval-shaped faro tables were covered in green baize. A snooker table was littered with bright billiards balls next to a bank of glowing slot machines. A policy wheel game with rubber tubes and a large chalkboard slate scored the previous day’s winning numbers.

  My sister was seated at a card table with Tom Dennison and Billy Nesselhous, going over the previous month’s numbers. It was collection day. A whole heap of loose cash and banded coins were strewn over the table. Sallie sorted the bills into stacks, but there seemed to be little organization to her piles. Dennison leaned back in his chair with his arms behind his head. He wore a giant hat and a red plaid suit with a boiled shirt, the kind with a detachable collar unbuttoned in front. Nesselhous hunched over a tablet of lined paper, working a short pencil with the concentration of a man composing meter. For a moment they didn’t notice me enter. I stood in the doorway swirling my brandy.

  Dennison was the first to look up. “Say, if it isn’t Pat.”

  Sallie glanced at me as if squinting against the sun. Nesselhous waved a hello without taking his eyes off his accounting.

  I cleared my throat. “Broke open the piggy bank again, did you?”

  “Come on over here and join us,” Dennison said with an inviting sweep of his arm. He lifted a bottle of white satin gin from the center of the table, picked up a glass, wiped out the inside with his finger as if checking it for dust, and poured a healthy swig. “Come on over here and have a little eyewater with me.”

  I sat down at the table. Dennison and I drank together. He licked his lips and poured himself another. The man was an enigma. He hadn’t taken an ounce of liquor with the mayor when they came in on a Friday night and now was drinking gin straight at lunchtime. A couple of half-eaten cold lamb sandwiches lay on the table in wax paper wrappers next to the gin glasses and disorganized money.

  “What’s the scuttlebutt?” Dennison asked.

  I said, “I thought I might bend your ear, if you have a few minutes.”

  Dennison tilted his head.

  “In private, perhaps?”

  “This is as private as any of my conversations ever get.”

  “I’m thinking of starting up my own business.”

  The room stopped. Sallie was in the middle of licking her thumb to get a better grip on the bills and was so stunned she kept her tongue on her thumb for a full five seconds before snapping out of it. Nesselhous shook his head and giggled. Dennison leaned forward.

  I said, “I’ve been working in the stockyards since I got into town. And I’ve been working with meat long before that, back home on my family farm. I know more than most when it comes to the butcher trade. It wears on a man to put his skills to use for somebody else when he could be using them to better his own life.”

  Dennison furrowed his brow. “You want to open a butcher shop all by your lonesome?”

  “Not alone. Me and my pal Billy. He’s just as good with a blade as I am. Maybe better.”

  Sallie winced. “Every tailender in this city and their goddamn aspirations. It’s an illness, you know? Never being satisfied with what you have.”

  “Nobody wants to stay a stockyarder forever,” I said.

  “Don’t get soggy on me,” Sallie said.

  “Weren’t you the one who told me that one day I could have a place of my own if I played my cards right?”

  “Yes. But by one day I didn’t mean six months after you breezed into town.”

  “Your pal, this Billy what’s-his-name, is he a straight card?” Nesselhous asked.

  “Billy Cavanaugh,” I said.

  “Straight enough to blow your head off for you,” Sallie said knowingly. She looked at me with a condemning stare. It seemed we hadn’t actually gotten away with murder. At least not from my sister’s compass. I wondered how much Dennison had told her. How much he had not. The real danger was in the difference between the two.

  “Little Billy the tugboat,” Dennison said with a chuckle and gave Nesselhous a playful whack between his shoulder blades. “He’s the backslapping sort.”

  I clamped my hands in front of my groin.

  “C’mon, Pat,” Dennison said. “If you’re going to vouch for the man, then vouch for him. Tell Nessy here that your pal is all right.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “In being reliable.”

  I shook my head. Thought of Billy’s penchant for the bottle and the bimbo both in equal intensity. “I’d be responsible whether the place succeeded or not. Wouldn’t vouch for any man besides myself. You never know what another might do.”

  “Especially not that gump,” Sallie said distractedly as she continued to count through a stack of bills, most of them in low denominations.

  Dennison put in a plug of tobacco and leaned over to aim a line of brown spit into the spittoon on the floor. He pressed his tie against his shirt with a flattened hand to keep from staining it. “What’s the matter with that kid anyhow?”

  “He’s affected in the head,” Sallie said.

  I grimaced. “He hasn’t gone mad.”

  “Gone?” Sallie said. “Sure. He hasn’t gone mad. It isn’t a recent development, I assure you. Kid sits up at the bar five nights a week talking to himself while he plays checkers.”

  “He’s not of unsound mind, I mean.”

  “No, no. Not all,” Sallie said. “Kid’s all wool and a yard wide.”

  I stared my sister down. “He’s just sick of getting the shit kicked out of him.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Dennison laughed.

  I said, “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Dennison. I want to run my own butcher shop like my sister here runs this place. I’d be asking you for a loan, make you a partner in it all. But I also want a fair price.”

  Sallie stood up so quickly she nearly knocked her chair over. “Excuse me for a minute, gentlemen. I need to have a quick word with the entrepreneur here,” she said and led me by the bicep into a smaller counting room without windows and a safe as big as an ice-cream freezer. She pushed me up against the wall. There was that hippopotamus mean flaring up again.

  “Let me draw it mild for you,” she whispered. “You go into league with Tom Dennison and you’re in his pocketbook for life.”

  “I’m not getting into a row with you over this.”

  She put a finger in my face. “Let me tell you how this works since you seem so keen about making company with wolves. Say your start-up capital to get the place running is four thousand dollars—”

  “It’d be more like five, I’m thinking.”

  “Stop talking and listen. Five, six, ten, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the number, Tom will take fifty percent of every dime you make every month until his investment is paid off. If half is too low, he’ll up the gratuity until you’re paying him off in chuck steak. Then say you manage well enough to pay him back. Most don’t get that far. They have to sneak out of town overnight. But let’s say you do. After that, he takes twenty percent of your monthly income for life. His finger will be in your pie forever. Do you know what twenty percent amounts to for most businesses? That’s your profit. All of it. You’ll be working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and making zilch. You’ll be sleeping in the back of the place because you can’t afford a room. Not even one in that shithole you’re staying in now. You’ll go crazy and try to cook your
books so you can put five dollars in your hip pocket every once in a while. You’ll end up babbling to yourself in an alley next to a bin fire wearing a rubber fishing hat.”

  “You sure know how to paint on the roses.”

  “Goddamnit, Pat. You’re barely thirty years old and making the mistake of your life.”

  “You’ve gone and done well enough to wear your fancy gowns.” I lifted Sallie’s hand in the air. Three of the five fingers were adorned with colored stone rings. “You got two mortgages on your left hand alone.”

  Sallie yanked back her arm. “What I’ve got is two hoodlums out there going through my couch change, and I’m going to have to sell these damn rings in a dolly shop to make up the difference. Don’t you think it’s strange them caring so much about two hundred dollars? That’s chicken feed to a man like Tom. But he’ll still spend three hours having his friend with the winged hair pore over my ledger and count out every dime I got on hand to make sure he’s not missing a red cent. What do you think will happen to you when you owe him half a grand? A thousand? More?”

  I giggled. “He’ll make me sell my fancy rings, I suspect.”

  “Keep laughing. Go on. Laugh yourself all the way into the poorhouse. Or the cemetery.”

  “Or into an alley? In my rubber fishing hat?”

  Sallie threw up her hands. “You want to beard me? Be my guest. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when the man guts you down from soda to hock.”

  “Glad to know I got your vote of confidence,” I said.

  “How long have you been working in them stockyards? Six months?”

  “Damn sight longer than I ever wanted to.”

  “And you and this Billy character, you’ve got your whole business figured, do you?”

  I said, “We’ve dressed hogs, geese. Pheasants. We both of us can butcher a cow better than most Injuns could ever skin a buffalo.”

  Sally raised an eyebrow. “What about the numbers?”

  “Damn the numbers,” I said. “I’m sick of lugging around carcasses and cutting up sows for half a dollar an hour while the rest of the world gets rich doing a lot less.”

  “You have no idea what it takes to survive in this world,” Sallie said.

  I blew a raspberry.

  “You better get serious.”

  “What about you? You’re daffy is what you are. How hard could it be? A mother comes in to order her Sunday roast, and we give her kid a slice of bologna over the counter for being a good tyke. We talk about the weather while we cut their chops to order. Or trade a few jokes while we wrap up their London broil.”

  “No one ever got rich owning a butcher shop.”

  “Tell that to Edward Cudahy or James Boyd.”

  Sallie said, “Those men are tycoons. They own whole stockyards. Factories. Shipping.”

  “Well, maybe not rich. But it’d be mine.”

  “Yeah, it’d be the nuts. Just imagine all that glitz and glamour.”

  “You know what? You might think the idea is above my bend, but there ain’t no need to give me any snoot about it,” I said, walked back into the game room, stood behind my chair, and said, “Mr. Dennison, I want you to know I plan on selling outside of the city. In South Omaha. There’s this little place for sale on Hickory Street. Used to be an old harness shop. I know you already got a stake in a couple butcheries in this district. I’m not here to step on anyone’s toes, especially yours.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Dennison said as he slammed back another cap of eyewater. He was as drunk as a sainted pig. “But if you’re going into business for yourself in that part of town, you better be careful of Ed Cudahy.”

  “Man’s an ogre when it comes to territory,” Nesselhous added.

  “I work for him,” I said.

  “Yes, a hardworking employee of the Cudahy Meatpacking Company,” Dennison replied. He picked up one of the cold lamb sandwiches and examined it but then thought better of taking a bite and set it back down on the wrapper. “But do you know anything about him? Have you ever even laid eyes on the man?”

  “I’m not afraid of competition.”

  “Yeah?” Dennison said. “Well, you ought to be.”

  “I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by an owl.”

  “Well, fair warning, you open up your own shop in his part of town, even a little rinky-dink deli with no prospects of expansion, and he’ll be hot to bust you. Which makes me wonder. Why in the world does a fella with your kinda size want to waste his time out in fucking palookaville selling a bunch of cut-rate cow? That’s going to be a tough racket. I tell you what, I got some idiots around town I’ve been meaning to beat the living hell out of if that’s something you might be interested in.”

  Sallie let out a snorting, despairing laugh.

  “Shut your trap,” I told her.

  She continued to snort.

  I said to Dennison, “You do the work of a thug, you make a bandit’s wage.”

  “As you please. I guess it’s nothing but the floral wallpaper for you, huh?”

  I touched the brim of my hat in gratitude. “I appreciate your time.”

  “Sure,” Dennison said and shook my hand. “Come back and see me anytime. I trust you and Mr. Nesselhous here can work out the details on your own.”

  I thanked him and left the whorehouse. The streets were messy with wastewater. I climbed aboard a hired wagon, and the driver got his balky old horse marching. He was the cheeriest driver I ever met. Tipped his hat and clucked a surly hello to every woman our wagon passed. “So many pretty skirts in this burg,” he said. “So many.”

  I paid him no heed. I was thinking about the larger aims of life. Of a life Hattie had only mentioned once before, but one that I’d expanded upon in my own mind. It’d become part of my daily thoughts. A little pink two-story house on a quiet avenue. A parlor room full of maple furniture with a great big picture window so we could see who was coming to call. Coffee brewing on the back stove in the mornings, reading the newspaper in a deep armchair next to a fireplace full of pearwood clicking down into fruit smoke in the evenings. A pair or two of troublemaking kids who minded their manners when it counted. The whole world a constant reminder that most beautiful things were often as simple as the arithmetic it took to gain them.

  XI

  “OUR PLAN’S GOT a flaw,” Billy said when I returned to our spot behind the rock, heaving deep breaths. I collapsed against the rock and opened my mouth to the sky. The carriage on the road below approached. The red lantern on Cudahy’s wagon grew brighter, bigger. I spat up some phlegm and sparked my pipe for a short toke.

  Billy continued, “What if he leaves us a phony package? Like what happened to those fellers who kidnapped the Ross boy?”

  I turned and sat against the stone. “He’s too smart for that. He wouldn’t dare.”

  “You never know for certain. What if he leaves us a hundred pounds of kitchen starch?”

  I sucked air, squinted my left eye. “Then we blind his son and snip off his manhood with the cow pliers, just like we warned.”

  “You’re not serious. Who’s going to do it? You?”

  “I was hoping you’d be crazy enough.”

  “You’re a fine friend.”

  “What?” I gulped three more frosty breaths. “Syphilitic insanity and all, right? It gets worse with time, don’t it? Ain’t you still nutsy?”

  “I got papers say I ain’t.”

  “Papers? What kind of papers?”

  “Official papers. From one of those evaluation wards. They say I’m of sound mind.”

  I chuckled once, quick as a hiccup. “No fooling? How about that?”

  “The kid, Eddie, he’s not a bad skate,” Billy said. “You said as much yourself. You really want to put acid in his eyes and castrate him?”

  “Of course not. But if his pops doesn�
��t follow the instructions—”

  Billy interrupted. “Wouldn’t you like to be sure? Say he leaves us soft soap. Wouldn’t you like to be down there to catch him in the act? We got guns, we got masks.”

  I inhaled twice more and, with some quick consideration, nodded agreement. We both rose and donned old gunnysacks we’d cut eyelets and mouth holes into just in case of unwanted police presence. After fitting the homemade masks over our heads, we smashed our hats back on and hightailed it down the slope, falling to the ground on our bellies a good ten yards away from the road in a clump of dead weeds.

  I removed the thirty-thirty from the strap around my back and Billy drew his pair of repeaters. Our labored breathing was as loud as barroom shouting, or so it seemed as we both tried to hush our lungs in equal measure. The Cudahy coach stopped with a jolt. The two handsome black horses bridled to the cart snorted and hoofed at the gravel. Driving the rig was a bald man who wore a clawhammer coat with big tails. He swished the reins lightly.

  “There be the lantern,” he said.

  Cudahy’s bulky figure wiggled on the passenger side of the wagon seat. His face was obscured by darkness, but his shape unmistakable. “See if it’s the right one.”

  The coachman stepped off the wagon.

  I whispered to Billy, “If you see anyone else get out of the back of that carriage, we unload all we got into them without so much as a how-do.”

  Billy nodded. Each breath a quake.

  “Yes, sir,” the coachman said after examining the lantern. “This is the one.”

  “Has it got black and white ribbons tied to the bail?”

  “Yes, sir. Black and white.”

  Cudahy lifted a heavy valise from the carriage floorboard and set it on his lap. His breath as visible as smoke in the frigid air. “Put the money next to it.”

  The coachman did as instructed, heaving the bank messenger’s case with some effort, and set it on the ground with a thud. He went back to the carriage and gathered up a second bag and placed it next to the first in a neat arrangement. He looked at his work, then the lantern, then spied all around him, swiveling his head in every direction. He snorted and gave a passing rub to one of the horses before mounting the wagon again. Cudahy said something that was inaudible to us from our hidden position in the weeds. The coachman clucked twice and steered the horses around, turning the carriage to head back the way they came.