World, Chase Me Down

by Andrew Hilleman

  I had seen it myself from the girls who worked at The Sallie Purple. All the men who called city hall their office, all the deputized officers who walked a beat, every businessman who owned a topcoat, and every thug who ever fired a pump gun or cheated at cards—the working girls of the city knew all their secrets. Most could dish them up in alphabetical order or spread them around faster than a newspaper switchboard, depending on how you wanted your meat cooked.

  And still I asked, “What do you know about it?”

  Hattie wavered and looked across the street. A huddle of women in homespun rags stood in front of a tenement house. They’d come out to part with a few pennies for the man driving the neighborhood milk cart. She said, “I know you won’t see twelve cents back from all those widows and destitutes you plan on giving credit to.”

  I took out a length of butcher string from my pant pocket and began wrapping it around my hand for want of something to do besides just standing there like a dunce getting the pretty business.

  In a reminiscing tone, I said, “You know, when I was boy back home on my daddy’s farm in Colorado, there was this family living in a soddy about a mile down the road from us. The Woodrow family. They had something like six or seven kids all younger than me. Well, papa Woodrow, he was a candle maker and a drunk. Stored away lard in these big old stone jars and rendered it into tallow for making the candles.”

  I paused and unwound the string from my hand only to ravel it around my knuckles again. I did this over and over, fiddling with the string like I was bandaging a wound and looking at the ground the whole time.

  I continued, “They was poorer than a parlor maid on account of candles don’t sell for but a short bit a dozen. That and the fact that Mr. Woodrow kept his weight in whiskey. Anyhow, they couldn’t afford the gut fat from an old shoat let alone a good Christmas bird come the holidays. But there was this French butcher in town who let them take home a twelve-pound goose on loan every Christmas Eve. I remember that butcher shop better than my own bedroom. That Frenchy kept his mustache glossy and turned up at the ends like he was really something. And you know what? He never should’ve given a Hoosier like Woodrow credit for a single gizzard knowing he owed tabs yards long at every grog shop within wagon distance. But Frenchy did. And every year come February or March, ol’ Woodrow paid off that bird because he knew if he didn’t, that next year his family would be eating crackers for Christmas. And I always thought, what if that old Frenchy didn’t give out no credit? Those kids would’ve had nothing better on their plates than johnnycakes is what.”

  Hattie shuddered in the cold. Her facial expression suggested she’d been forever lost to all human feeling. “That’s the most you’ve ever told me about your family.”

  “My family? Didn’t you just hear me tell you it was about the Woodrows?”

  Hattie looked away and wiped her cheeks with a gloved hand.

  I waved at the store sign again and finally pocketed the butcher string. “If you don’t want a look-see at the place today, that’s alright. Ain’t nothing but hung meat and a five-cent crazy man in there, anyhow. Come on, I got something else to show you that you might like a touch better.”

  I took her by the hand and hailed a hansom cab driven by a pair of claybank ponies. The top-hatted driver drove us to Orchard Avenue. We rode through Vinegar Flats and Squatter’s Row as morning spread its mantle over the city. When the cab stopped, I threw open the back curtain. There in front of us was a pink catslide house with a picket sign in the yard that read: SOLD. The house wasn’t much for looking at, but it had good bones and a working stove and, most importantly, two stories and pink paint. It cost me eleven hundred dollars. My tobacco can didn’t have much left in it save for some old coins and few wrinkled bills after the purchase, but I owned the place outright.

  The windows on the top floor were as crooked as poorly hung paintings. Maybe probably the porch needed a fresh coat and mended steps. I pictured us sitting on a matching pair of cane rockers every evening to watch away the end of the day. I’d run water pipes through the walls so we could have a bathtub upstairs and, boy, would that be something most folks couldn’t calculate even in fantasy.

  It was all so easy to imagine. Maybe put a garden in the backyard. Can the vegetables in the root cellar for winter so we’d have peaches and zucchini come February. There wouldn’t be a stick of carved furniture or a piece of English silver in the whole place, but what we did have, we’d have plenty of. We’d keep our eggs fresh in a pail of lime water, and I’d bring chops home for dinner in deerskin wrappers.

  I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt like the biggest toad in the puddle.

  “You bought a house,” Hattie said plainly, as if it didn’t impress her a breath’s worth.

  “A two-story pink house. Just like you said you always wanted.”

  “I said that?”

  “I remember it pretty clear.”

  “You’re the sweetest boy I’ve ever met.”

  “You ought to marry me then.”

  Hattie looked at me like I was a museum piece.

  I scratched my scalp. “My mother always said ‘sweet’ is the marrying kind.”

  “Now what kind of proposal is that?”

  “Best one I got, I fear.”

  Hattie considered the house again with a bunged-up expression as if all she could imagine were flies crawling on the window glass come summertime and drafts that would set her to shivering in her long nightshirt when the winter wind got to howling.

  “If you were my wife, you’d never have to tie on apron strings.”

  “That’s good because I can’t make chicken fixings or slapjacks.”

  I said, “I could think of all the pretty girls I’ve ever seen in my whole life, and they wouldn’t amount to a parcel compared to you. You? You take the dust off everything in creation.”

  “Do your compliments always come all on the same rod?”

  “Jesus. I don’t know.”

  Hattie poked me in the stomach. “I’m only funning you.”

  “You’d like to make me feel like I should be put in the corner wearing a tall pointy hat is what you’re doing. When I say I don’t know what you mean, I don’t know what you mean. You think I do, but I ain’t as smart as you think. I keep trying to think of ways of telling you I love you, and you keep acting like I need to keep on thinking.”

  “You scare too easy, Pat Crowe.”

  “Yeah, when it comes to you. You can put that on my headstone.”

  Hattie giggled. “Such a serious boy.”

  I shook my head. The sun was new up, and the last of the snow clouds were fleeting easy across the sky faster than a drink spilled across a tabletop. “That too. Etch it in. But I’ll be goddamned if you ain’t the silliest girl I’ve ever known. Show me another like you anywhere minus all the silliness, and I’ll be there straightaway.”

  “You’re awful strange, but I love you,” Hattie said and put her arms around my neck. She reared up on her toes and kissed me on the mouth. “If you stop acting like a jackass, I’ll marry you. So long as you don’t mosey off in a heat every time I give you a little jab in the ribs.”

  As soon as she said it, a feeling of dread spread over me when it should’ve been the happiest moment in my entire life. One day all this would be gone. Not just me and Hattie. We were the least of it. But the house, the street, the whole history of our lives together in this place would be forgotten. Even the memory of it all would be gone. I didn’t know why I was thinking it then, but it’d crept into my head and there was no getting rid of it and the thought was this: all moments both good and bad alike soon enough belong to the lovely land of long ago.

  XIII

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE we set off to kidnap Edward Cudahy’s son, I went to visit the old man myself. After moonset it was dark as pitch, and I walked the streets far into the midnight hours until my face was
swollen. A strangling rain mixed with sleet blasted store windows opaque with frost. The globes of streetlamps seemingly floated in the air, hazy and untethered balls of light, their iron posts disappeared into the blackness. The streets were checkerboards of mirrored ice. Old snow had to be shoveled into the back of flatbed wagons and driven down to the banks of the Missouri where it was dumped into the river like trash.

  I turned up my coat collar and waited out the worst of the wintery rain under a bridge archway in Hanscom Park. An hour before dawn, I walked up the pea gravel drive of the Cudahy’s castellated house, as big and gothic as a cathedral. Wetness soaked through my boots. Icy water ran off my hat brim in an unbroken stream. I approached the front door coughing in fits and rang the bell. My mouth was in my coat collar. A moment passed and I pounded the door with my fist. At once, two windows filled with light. A dog barked somewhere deep inside the house. There was a shuffling of footsteps. A colored maid with heavy breasts opened the door, asking me what my business was at that early hour.

  I told her in a weak voice I was there to see Edward Cudahy.

  Yes, yes, it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.

  “I’ll wait in the rain if I have to,” I told her.

  The maid frowned and admitted me into the lobby. Inside was all buttered warmth and amber light. The smell of rich stained wood and stove smoke. My draggled boots stained the giant carpet, a dizzy smear of paisley and intertwined fish patterns. I shook myself off like a wet dog. The maid handled my sopping threadbare coat with disdain, as if it were some dead animal the family cat had brought inside, and hung it on the coat tree where it dripped a mess onto the floor.

  I gawked at all the gapeseed. A spiral staircase wound up like a corkscrew, the like of which I’d only ever seen before in pictures of ballrooms in luxury ocean liners. A plate-sized pendulum knocked back and forth behind the glass door of a granddaddy clock. A candle chandelier with eight ivory wood arms was hung from the ceiling like a frozen octopus. I couldn’t help but whistle in amazement.

  “This is some kind of joint,” I said.

  The maid frowned. She did not like whistling at that early hour or compliments about the estate or anything else as far as I could tell. She disappeared behind a swing door and returned a minute later, telling me to make myself comfortable in the parlor.

  I took up a mohair couch next to a giant stone fireplace. A library ladder was hooked to shelving carved with acanthus leaf, able to glide along the floor-to-ceiling bookcase to reach the highest leather-bound volumes, books on every manner of subject: Civil War battles, countless law and economic texts, matching violet-colored editions of the complete Charles Dickens library, history of the Byzantine Roman Empire, haberdashery. A Christmas tree was covered in tissue paper, oranges, and stick candy. A toy train set ran in a circle around its base. Outside, a barren tree branch scratched at a window. The walls were hung with mahogany paneling, dark as chocolate.

  I allowed myself a smoke while I waited without asking if it was admitted inside of doors. I coughed and spat through the whole thing. Finally the tobacco was too much for my ailing lungs, and I knocked out the pipe’s contents into an ashtray shaped like a seashell. My face still swollen with cold. My cheeks and nose hurt to the touch. It was no matter. I’d see the thing through even if I lost a lung.

  After nearly half an hour of waiting, the master of the home entered the parlor. Edward Cudahy, in all his excess heft, carried his mountainous weight with a certain sense of pride as if in mimicry of all those caricature cattle barons in Chicago and Kansas City who ate quail eggs for snacks between meals and drank cream even on the hottest of summer days and dabbed at their neck sweat with embroidered hankies while fussing over their stock numbers. He stomped into the room fully dressed for the day in a worsted suit, the woven fabric as thick as carpet. A chain connected his pocket watch to his vest buttonhole. He stood a few feet away from the sofa, patting his belly, studying me.

  “Do you recognize me?” I asked and stood.

  Cudahy’s eyes leapt back and forth behind his spectacles. He came up behind a deep armchair with big buttons. “Glad to see you again, Patrick.”

  “I bet you are. I bet you’re just tickled to see me come in from the storm.”

  A loaded pause filled the room. The magnate unfolded his eyeglasses and stuffed them into his suit coat pocket. “A touch early to come calling, but I’m glad you called nonetheless.”

  I said nothing. I just stood there staring.

  “I was sorry to hear of your marital woes. I gave Hattie a job some couple years ago when she came calling for one. Made her quality overseer in our new north lot, no questions asked. She’s an admirable woman.”

  “I might’ve supposed that’s where she met your brother, but we both know that happened long before that,” I said and returned to the sofa. I was quite at ease save for my whooping lungs. “Anything else your family would like to take of mine?”

  Cudahy grimaced as if the notion of such thievery was the most asinine thing he’d ever heard. “You’re soaked, poor boy. Have you gotten yourself a cold?”

  “I’m warm enough.”

  Cudahy scoffed again. He was unnerved to the bone but pretended otherwise. He didn’t respond for a moment, his eyes blinking wildly, and swallowed a globule of spit.

  “You’re looking a tad peak-ed yourself,” I said.

  “Anita,” Cudahy hollered for his maid from his position behind his armchair. “Anita, dear, bring Mr. Pat here some asafetida and hot water. Poor fellow’s got an awful cold.”

  The maid peeked her head into the room after a moment. “Asafetida, sir?”

  “Yes. And boiling hot water. And I’ll take my breakfast in here this morning.”

  “Right away, sir,” the maid said.

  She was about to disappear when Cudahy opened his hand to me. “I was just about to have breakfast. Perhaps Anita could prepare you something?”

  “Not for me. I never have a stomach at this hour,” I said. “But a spot of asafetida would be much appreciated. Doc tells me I got, what? An abscess of the antrum?”

  “That sounds ungodly.”

  “Gives my lungs the fits, I’ll admit,” I said and coughed twice more.

  Cudahy nodded to his maid, and she vanished to retrieve the requested medicine. When she was gone he finally rested himself into the armchair he’d been standing behind and crossed his legs, revealing his sock supporters. A tea table separated us. After an awkward few moments of silence, the housemaid brought in a serving tray and set it on the table. A single hard-boiled egg sat in a stemmed holder, a stick of butter rested next to four slices of toasted pumpernickel. Two upside-down coffee cups with gold-edged brims were stacked on a folded cloth napkin next to a spouted kettle. I reached forward first, helped myself to a pour of hot water and medicine, stirring it together with a tiny spoon.

  Cudahy smiled beneath his thin mustache, which didn’t match his bulging face. His fingers were too big to fit through the handle of his mug, and he held it like a stone. “This is quite uncommon, showing up unannounced at someone’s home at such an hour.”

  “You mean it’s rude,” I said. “You can say what you really want to me.”

  “You always were quite the talent with the blade. Yes, sir, one dandy of a meat man, you were. Experience in our business is of rare value,” Cudahy said as he picked up the egg from its holder and peeled off the shell in delicate fashion, removing the tiny cracked pieces like flecks of lint. “I remember the good work you did for us.”

  “You might remember more than that.”

  Another pause filled the room.

  I rested my medicine cup on my knee. I was either serene or homicidal. It was impossible to tell the difference. Maybe I felt both ways. I really didn’t know.

  “Well, you can always come work for us again,” Cudahy said nervously and nodded at the wet mess that had
formed under my feet. My clothes were soaked through as I shivered and coughed. “You’re dripping like a leak, son. Where’s your coat about?”

  “Making a mess of your foyer, I believe,” I said and gestured back toward the entryway where my shabby overcoat was hanging on the coat tree.

  Cudahy peered over my shoulder, caught sight of the garment making a puddle on his dizzy carpet. “That old rag? It couldn’t warm a post.”

  The giant man then rose after popping the whole egg into his mouth and walked to a closet just outside the parlor. He returned with a double-breasted coat of his own collection. He petted its cream fur, examined its gold buttons, and handed it to me in a giant fold while he continued to chew a yellow mess of egg. “This might do you better. Bought it on holiday in Naples two years ago and have only worn it twice. Good Italian wool. Give it a try.”

  I slipped on the mammoth garment. It sleeves hung down to my knuckles and its girth could’ve fit another man my size inside its material. “It’s a handsome piece of drapery, Ed.”

  “Well then, it’s yours. Consider it a Christmas gift.”

  “Are we trading now?”

  “Trading?”

  I sat down and snorted as loudly as a man alone in a field. I let loose a brown clot of sickness through my mouth into a fancy cuspidor. “It’s a nice coat. But it’s not as nice as a wife and a child. Not to mention a whole business.”

  Cudahy shrugged his shoulders. “That sounds threatening.”

  “I’m not threatening you with anything. Whaddaya think? That I might come in here before sunup and flash a revolver around the room?”

  “That’s just about enough of that. I empathize with your situation, I truly do. But your wife left you. I didn’t steal her off some store shelf. Nor did my brother. And as for your little shop failing, that error lies squarely on your shoulders. You think you have reason for hatred, but you best reserve that feeling for your own shortcomings. So let me save you the trouble and say I’m not influenced by your unwarranted accusations of thievery, and I’m certainly not shaky at the knees because you own a few guns.”