Billy cried as a stream of urine ran out of the bottom of his left pajama leg, soaked his sock, and began to puddle on the floor. “God, please. Honest out, I didn’t know Pat wasn’t paying you. If I did, I would’ve acted against it.”
“Goddamn, he’s wetting himself again,” the second goon said and lifted his Bostonians one at a time to examine their soles as if he’d just stepped in a horse apple. “These are Martin’s Scotch grain.”
Dennison chuckled briefly. “Quit your assing around and act like a man who can afford a second pair for chrissakes.”
The goon shook his head and reapplied his pistol to Billy’s neck.
“So how about it, Pat?” Dennison asked. “You still ready to find out what’s on the other side of this life or have you changed your mind again?”
I opened my eyes slowly. “Alright, goddamnit. I’ll sell the place. I’ll go back to work for you doing whatever you want. For my daughter and wife, I swear it.”
Dennison tilted his head and cocked the hammer of his pistol. At the sound of the tiny click, I closed my eyes and braced for the bullet, but none came. Dennison lowered his pistol, stuffed it back in his holster and snapped the button shut. In turn, the goons released their grip on Billy and holstered their guns.
“Well then, it’s settled. That wasn’t so hard was it?” Dennison said, sniffled twice, and readjusted his felt hat straight on his head. “Everybody deserves a second chance, but nobody deserves a third. You just remember that, Pat. You remember that Tom the gangster gave you a second chance and spared your life on this night.”
I panted and heaved but could not raise my head.
“Pat, tell me you’re hearing me.”
“I’m hearing you,” I said.
Dennison turned to his men. “Alright then. It’s getting on past my bedtime.”
He pulled his overcoat back on his shoulders and bounded up the cellar steps two at a time to the main floor of the grocery with Edward Cudahy lagging behind.
XVII
I DID NOT arrive at the idea to kidnap Cudahy’s son through fevered dream or criminal inspiration of any stripe. Rather, I came upon the notion by accident and from the most unlikely of sources—Billy’s younger sister, Mabel.
For a time after we lost our butcher shop and I lost my family, Billy and I took to the rails. We hopped a train as it was leaving the Burlington Station, carrying only a carpetbag of clothes and a jar of inky brandy. My shirt pocket was stuffed with six cigars, my money purse tucked into my waistband along with a piddly five-shot revolver. We stowed away in the caboose with ten yellow cows headed for auction and slept against a sack of potatoes the whole night long.
I didn’t wake until the train was somewhere east of Des Moines. For breakfast I skinned two of the potatoes, and we ate them raw off the blade of my hawksbill knife like apple slices. The cows’ refuse filled the car with a humid green stink so pungent it was near poisonous. Billy and I stuck our faces out of the cabin slats to keep from turning our stomachs inside out.
The train chugged on and on across aprons of swaying corn and low oat fields and hard swaths of what seemed eternal nothingness, the forever machine of tomorrow and tomorrow again. At a junction stop in Chicago we switched trains. We had enough coin between us to share a cab in a Pullman sleeper on the Northeastern Railway. In the dining car, we ordered à la carte service of beef tongue and insipid soup and sunshine cake with orange icing and discussed our prospects. An elderly Negro with a starched porter uniform served us with great dexterity, bringing forth the tasteless broth without spilling a drop. Billy lapped the pale soup. It rippled in the bowl as the train clunked over the rails.
I cut my meat furiously. It was tough as firewood.
“We had some high times, you and me,” Billy said out of nowhere.
“It wasn’t always so. We had more bad than good between us.”
“We’ll have us high times again. You’ll see.”
I stared out the window. Telegraph wires as taut as catgut zoomed along. “Running that butcher shop with you was the happiest I ever was.”
Billy set down his utensils and asked the porter for two brandies. The porter disappeared behind a curtain and returned a moment later with two stemmed glasses that held a scant amount of liquor.
I dumped the brandy into my mug of beer.
Billy acted in kind and we toasted our mugs. The train roared onward.
“Just you wait till we get to Philadelphia,” he said. “My sister will put us up for a couple nights until we get our bearings. A change of scenery will do us both a heap of good.”
I rolled the idea around. “How’s she for looks, your sister?”
“Don’t get started on that. Haven’t seen her since I was twelve and she was in pigtails. It might be maybe that she’s humpbacked or hog-bellied or hog-tied in a bad marriage or all three at once. All I’m saying is that she’s family and we need a place to stay.”
“That’s what hotels and brothels are for.”
“We haven’t the money for that.”
I nodded. “We haven’t anything, friend.”
We arrived in Philadelphia two days later. A vivid sash of dying light over the dusking hills. Lightning bugs as fat as bumblebees emerged from the cracks in the sidewalk, from their daytime slumber under the grasses. Billy wore a porkpie with a blue band. Me, a sweat-stained plug hat and a sports shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.
A torrid sunset pushed the mercury past ninety even though daylight was already on the thin. We hired a hackney cab to take us to Billy’s sister’s place, a woman’s home on the north side of town. Pink smoke rose from the evening chimney so lopsided it appeared ready to topple. The hitch rail before the porch was commandeered by a row of drooping and dying sweetbriar hanging in handled pots.
“Where in the hell do they put their horses?” I asked Billy as I considered the sign in front of the house: GERMANTOWN WORKING GIRLS’ HOME. FOUNDED 1891 BY THE YOUNG WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION.
I looked to Billy. “A working girl’s home? Like a whorehouse?”
“It’s the opposite of a whorehouse.”
“A kind of nunnery then, is it?”
Billy shook his head. “No. It’s like a boardinghouse for dames.”
We climbed the steps and rasped the door with the brass pineapple knocker. The house matron, Miss Leslie, greeted us glumly. Her prematurely gray hair was wispy as spider silk, and her bosom sagged despite the stiff support of her ribbed blouse. Billy crushed his hat in his hands and told her he was kinfolk of Miss Mabel Cavanaugh, his kid sister.
“We normally don’t allow men on the premises,” matron Leslie said. “Your sister has just returned from work. I’ll call on her if you both would be so kind as to wait on the porch.”
I chimed in. “We’re not stray dogs, ma’am.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“We’ve come a long way, miss. All the way from Nebraska we’ve traveled to pay family a visit. Four long days by train and none the less weary for it. I for one would much appreciate being able to sit in your parlor out of the heat and rest my feet if you’d be inclined to a little hospitality.”
The matron frowned more pronouncedly but opened the door all the same. “Please remove your shoes before entering. I don’t want mud drug in on our carpets.”
Billy and I followed the matron inside the parlor after shrugging off our caked boots and set about to sitting on a chaise lounge in our stinking humid socks. One of the female residents who earned her keep as the housemaid brought us each a glass of sun tea. I thanked her as genuinely as I could.
I drained two glasses of that tea by the time Billy’s sister came down the spiral staircase. We both stood to greet her. First I saw her feet, then the rustle of her floor-length dress, then her bosom, and finally her face. I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe a stout plump girl wi
th the disposition of bad weather if genetics had anything to do with it.
Instead I was quite taken. Mabel resembled Billy about as much as Aphrodite resembles a bulldog. She wore a dress covered with a white pinafore and her hair was done in ringlets like a schoolgirl, with a curled lock over her left earlobe.
Billy kissed his sister on both cheeks and hugged her into a spin around the room. She squealed with delight and begged her brother to put her down before she got woozy. I watched with my hat held behind my back. Billy made the formal introductions.
Mabel extended her hand.
I shook it daintily. “You shore are pretty, Miss Mabel.”
Billy groaned.
Mabel waved a hand toward the dining room. “You should stay for dinner. Both of you.”
I massaged my hat brim. “Your superintendent doesn’t seem too keen about that. She hardly let us inside the house in the first place.”
“Miss Leslie? Oh, she’s a soft spot once you get to know her.”
“Well,” I said, “if you can arrange it, we’d both be mighty grateful.”
Billy sniffed the air. “Yeah. We’re famished. What’s cooking?”
“Pepper pot,” Miss Leslie said from the entryway. She’d appeared without warning, her hands folded piously across her coatdress.
“Couldn’t be any worse than the soup we had on the train,” I said graciously.
The matron seemed to soften, but not by much. “Our evening meal begins at six o’clock sharp. If you two gentlemen can find time enough to wash up before then and illustrate good table manners, you’d be welcome to join us. If you cannot abide by decent protocol, I will have you expelled from our table posthaste.”
To pass the evening after supper, Mabel insisted I take a coach ride with her through the north side of the city. Billy had rushed out of the house as soon as the meal was finished. He said he was off to find a grog shop for the night and if I wanted to find him I’d have to come looking. I laughed at that and escorted Mabel out of the house. We hired an idling carriage parked across the lane. Together, as the sun westered toward setting, Mabel and I toured Germantown in a runabout shaped like a piano box with an open roof.
The seats were fashioned of fine goat leather. Even bouncing over chuckholes in the street was no strain on our pleasure. The reinsman wore a stovepipe with a stick of tallow balanced on its crown, stuck to the hat’s felt with melted wax like a birthday candle atop a cake. I wondered if the wick was ever lit until, at the snap of a match, the driver reached up and ignited a flame without taking off his hat. It served as a kind of comic lantern when there was, as of yet, no need for light.
Mabel pointed out a few sights along the way. We rumbled along through the outskirts of town, riding over a covered mill bridge that spanned a catfish creek. I nodded at every sight, saying little as I continually thumbed my pipe. Color fell out of the sky. A middle moon rose over the darkening plain, faint as a thumbprint on glass. I draped my cow coat over Mabel’s shoulders, and she thanked me. The coach turned left on Washington Lane. The avenue was freshly paved. A bucket of wildflowers dangled from every streetlamp.
Mabel asked, “How is it you came to know my brother?”
“We ran a butchery together for a few sweet months.”
“That I know. I mean originally. How did you meet?”
I cogitated, my memory thin. “Billy got into a scuffle with a couple of stockyarders this one time. I stepped in to break it up, but he still took one hell of a lump.”
“He always was one to attract trouble.”
I stoked my pipe. A promenade of ash trees blocked out the sky.
“He dotes on you,” Mabel said.
I studied Billy’s sister as if taking inventory of a store shelf. She was unlike Hattie in every manner. She kept her figure concealed in deep clothing: a high collar, a pigeon breast blouse, skirt tails long enough to sweep the floor. Her hair, dark as deep soil, was piled atop her head over a horsehair pad, and her apple-shaped face was scrubbed clean, free of paint. I knew her to be a learned woman, one who could play the piano from sheet music, farm a garden three seasons out of four, balance arithmetic in her head without a pencil. Billy had told me that a couple times a week she recited epic poetry to the other women of her house for their after-supper entertainment, a crackling fire in the communal parlor.
She scared me to death.
I wanted to tell her so. But airing that emotion in the back of the carriage would’ve been like fire riding a breeze. Plus, there was no brandy in my blood. I looked at Mabel again. I would have smashed a whole planet for a kiss. Instead I sank in my seat, feebly smoked my pipe, wished the horses would drive us off a steep embankment.
Mabel caught me staring at her bosom. “You’re a wolf,” she said playfully.
“I’m worse than that.”
“There’s nothing hostile in you. You’ve a gentle soul.”
I thought: look harder. I said nothing.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
“I never was any good at cutting up touches.”
“We ought to talk about something. It’s such a lovely night.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a damn awful date on wheels.”
Mabel giggled. “A date, Pat Crowe?”
I shied at her laughter. “Your brother wouldn’t be too fond of me calling it that.”
“What do you think of him?”
“He’s as silly as a hen wearing a bonnet.”
“Be serious. I’ve not seen him much since we’ve grown, and his behavior, his whole life really, is a mystery to me. I’d like to know about him.”
“I am serious when I say he’s silly.”
“Silly how?”
I moved my pipe around in my mouth. “I don’t know. Goofy, you might say. None else like him. He’d go raking a pond at night to get the moon out of it.”
“There’s not much space in him for comedy. Not even as a child there wasn’t.”
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“How do you mean it?”
“Him and me? We’re not good men, Mabel. Neither of us cottoned much to the better ways of the world. Me especially. Most everything I’ve ventured has become a terror.”
Mabel put a gloved hand over mine. I frightened at her touch but had never been more thankful for such a simple gesture.
“You’re trying to paint yourself a way that’s just not in you.”
I considered that. “I’ve never been one for doodling it up otherwise.”
“What do you think of yourself? Really?”
I stoppered my pipe. “I’m divided of opinion.”
“There’s strength to be found in pain.”
“There’s only pain to be found in pain. That’s why they call it that,” I said and looked toward the heavens. The carriage rolled on under a strangely green night sky. The pair of big Clevelands driving the wagon snorted chilled air. The candle burning away atop the coachman’s stovepipe was melted to the nub. Wax ran down the sides of his hat like dove shit streaks a building front. We were less than a mile away from returning to Mabel’s women’s home.
“We’ve all committed sin. We were born into original sin,” Mabel said consolingly. “All we have to do is ask God for forgiveness and we shall be saved. We can thank his son Jesus for giving his life for ours.”
I brayed. If I never again heard talk of a divine inscription upon my life and all the hokum of salvation that came along with it, it would be a reprieve truly worth thankfulness to a deity. I said, “God doesn’t give a good goddamn what we do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is operating under ego I cannot fathom.”
Mabel took away her hand. “You talk like a nonbeliever.”
“I talk like I got brain working behind my tongue.”
A full minute of silence passed. Wheel spokes rumble
d over cobblestone.
“Maybe I had you figured wrong,” Mabel said.
“Best not to figure me at all,” I replied.
Mabel sniffled. She looked truly hurt.
“Bless your heart,” I said and, this time, was the one to take her hand. “You’re a good woman. A pure person. You don’t deserve the doldrums of riding around a beautiful lot getting your spirit squashed by the likes of me.”
Mabel straightened her posture. Her face was stoic. She was no hothouse flower. She stared at me hard. My disposition made no effect on her. “Billy told me you had a wife.”
“And a child. Little Matilda.”
“Were they not dear to you?”
“They were as dear to me as good weather,” I said. “And as rare.”
“Rare? How do you mean?”
“You don’t get much of neither in Nebraska. Love or clear skies.”
Mabel frowned. “You’re a depressing sort.”
I picked at my right thumbnail. My hands were shaking. “I suppose that might be one of the reasons why she left me then. Nobody likes being married to a rain cloud.”
Mabel didn’t know how to respond to that kind of sadness. There was no conversing with me. Everything I uttered came on a knife’s edge and clipped all possibility of retort.
“I’ve had my fill of your gloominess!” she shouted and covered her face.
I sat solemnly. I hadn’t wanted to turn her away. Sometimes subrogating my sour mood meant others had to get in the way of it. She was a good woman. A beautiful creature. I pulled in my lips like a mule showing its teeth. “I like having you around.”
The carriage came to a traffic stop. Mabel blew her nose in a hanky and drew my attention to the second house from the railroad station. It was a double estate built of imported sandstone with a piazza on three of its sides. The yard was guarded by a brick wall overrun with crawling ivy, the yard populated with so many evergreens that all the second-story windows were blocked from the street view.
“What a sad sight,” Mabel said, staring at the home.
“I’m sorry if I’ve depressed your mood,” I said.
World, Chase Me Down Page 15