“Not you. That house. Did you ever hear the story of Charley Ross? The four-year-old boy who was kidnapped?”
“Not that I can recall.”
Mabel pointed to the house. “They kidnapped him right there. In his own front yard while he was out playing with his brother.”
I spat over the side of the carriage as it rolled forward again. “Four years old?”
“They never found him, either, the poor dear. Just heartbreaking. His father might’ve got him back, but a big inspector from New York came down and told Mr. Ross to ignore the demand for money. He promised Mr. Ross they’d get his son back and punish the fellas who took him, without having to fork over a dime.”
“But that inspector never made good on that, huh?”
“The kidnappers were keen to his plan. He planted a trick ransom sack, but they didn’t rise to the trap. Lord in heaven, what a sad story. The whole city was in a tizzy. Men didn’t go into work, just to join the search party. Every police officer in Philadelphia worked double shifts trying to find the stolen child.”
I sparked my pipe again. “Their plan was doomed from step one.”
“How do you mean?”
“When it comes to awful doings, it’s best to do them awful fast,” I said and shook out the match just as it burned my fingertips. “They ought to have made sure the boy’s father would deliver the coin from the outset and not blab to the bluecoats.”
“You’re a cull, aren’t you?” Mabel said as our wagon pulled up to the front of her women’s home. “Their fault wasn’t the plan. It was in them. What kind of person abducts a child? I’ve never heard of such evil except for that one time.”
I agreed halfheartedly, bid her goodnight as she leapt off the wagon. I flattened out some money for the driver and then decided to follow Mabel to her doorstep. She kissed me on my cheek and thanked me for the ride. I removed my hat and wiped out the inside with a bandana, my hair matted and slick. I’d sweat a line clear through my riband. Replacing it on my head, I asked if I might come in for a spell, have a cup of tea before parting.
Mabel smiled weakly. “Courtship isn’t allowed inside of doors. We’re not even supposed to be conversing with boys on the porch.”
I swallowed. I’d ruined her impression of me in just under an hour, that much was clear. No matter. I bade her goodnight again and left the porch with little hesitation. I nearly caught myself skipping down the block. Billy’s sister was one hell of a beauty, but there was beauty to be found elsewhere, and it wasn’t in the folds of a dress or on the softness of scented skin. I was smitten, but not with Billy’s little sister.
Inside me now was a strange kind of love, the love of a grand idea.
XVIII
DENNISON’S MEN RELEASED Billy and me from the grocery basement, and we staggered out of the cellar into a soggy dawn. A stippling rain fell faintly as a patter. We hobbled across town to our butcher shop. The sky streaked hard and glossy over the tin roofs of Sheelytown when a pair of men driving a team of ponies came to padlock the doors on our butchery. Gas streetlamps were still lit, giving off a brown glow. Smokestacks poured out plumes of coal exhaust. Telegraph wires and streetcar cables sagged over brick streets.
From an Albanian café across the street, we watched the men lower our sign. When we first entered the café, a row of cranky old men seated along the counter kept staring at us as if we’d killed one of their cousins. They all had scratchy whisk-broom beards and drank their fig wine as hot as coffee in handleless mugs. I ordered our drinks and stared back at them with the ferocity of a bobcat. When they saw I wasn’t one that’d be easy to go around the stony yard with, they returned to their foreign babbling about Balkan politics and lemon soup recipes and Kosovo women, or so I imagined.
I’d gotten to know many of those Albanian types: the poor Aleksanders and haggard Blerinas who’d started to sprout in the neighborhood and came into our shop asking about any leftover animal intestines I was planning to throw out. They used lamb innards to make fried dishes with butter and cheese and corn flour. I caught them rummaging through our trash in the mornings and waiting in the alley behind our store in the evenings with hopes of snagging a good length of sheep gut to take home and dolly up into gutter soup. I hated them all with a purple passion. They wanted what I couldn’t sell and nothing else. They could never pay for anything. Sometimes when the men got drunk enough on a hot day, they loitered around in front of our shop with their shirts off, and Billy had to scare them away with a broom like they were nothing more than a huddle of pigeons.
I splashed a bit of specie on the counter for the drinks without caring to ask how much I owed. One of the old men sitting along the counter hollered at me in words I couldn’t understand. I sat the glasses back down on the bar and kicked the man’s stool out from under him. The man fell backwards and likely cracked his spine as hard as the cold floor was. I stared at his row of pals, waiting for any of them to make a move or say another word, whether I could understand it or not.
A moment passed and the entire café was silent. I felt awful as sin for acting the bully but didn’t break my stare. These people had to beg for most of everything they got, and here I was lashing out at them when the poor bastards couldn’t fill their coal boxes without trailing a delivery cart to pick up the loose briquettes on the street. I cleared my throat and helped up the old codger I’d kicked to the floor back onto his stool. I threw another handful of coinage on the counter and went over to the far end of the café with our drinks in hand.
Billy sat at a battered table by a grimy window. The tabletop peeled like old wainscoting and was sticky with spilt ale that probably hadn’t been wiped up in weeks. I came over with the whiskey and beer and continually dipped the end of my kerchief in a glass of celery tonic. I rubbed it against the growing bulb on my mouth where one of Dennison’s goons had staved in my lower teeth. Billy was so tired he could’ve slept standing up like a horse. He was still in his pajamas covered by a long overcoat. His eyelids sagged, and I had to nudge him every few minutes to keep him awake. We had a smile of bourbon apiece and sipped tentatively from our cardboard containers of lukewarm beer.
I traced my finger around the rim of my beer and stared across the street at the building front that just yesterday was still our butcher shop. “Well, that’s that, I suppose.”
“I’d like to get on before the sadness sets in,” Billy said.
I was just as exhausted. I dabbed my mouth again. “Stick around for a bit. I ain’t got nothing left and I’d like someone to share the feeling with.”
“That ain’t true.”
“It is true.”
“You got you a wife and a kid. And a nice little house fixed up right.”
I thought on it all a moment. I thought about it ten times a day, sometimes more. A year ago I was fresh off the train from my daddy’s ranch in Colorado and living among a bunch of Chinese and Polish bachelors in a cold-water flat covered in silver radiator paint. There were still things to be thankful for, and I was ever mindful of them.
Billy looked at my mouth. “God, they really knocked your slats in, didn’t they?”
I rubbed my wound with my kerchief. I wanted to respond and thought I had said something intelligible, but was just muttering to myself, brokenhearted.
“Old King Lear,” Billy said and sipped from his beer. The men across the street had finally finagled our huge butcher shop sign into the back of the wagon and were covering it up with a piece of tattered tarp.
“You know Shakespeare?” I asked.
“It’s just something my dad used to say whenever I was acting blue and crazed and crying the buckets. He’d say, ‘Quit your bellyaching, King Lear, and get on.’”
I snorted angrily and spat on the bar floor.
After a moment, Billy asked, “You believe in God, Pat?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Y
eah, the more I see of this world the more I don’t either, I reckon.”
“I believe in porterhouse steak and good brandy and having a woman around to tell you she loves you even if she don’t.”
Billy raised his smudged glass of whiskey. “I’m thinking of marrying, myself.”
“Marrying yourself, huh? I guess you’re crazy enough.”
“There you go making fun again when the mood ain’t right,” Billy said. “I’m telling you I got the itches for this Ukrainian gal I’ve been seeing over at the Oak Street House.”
I nodded at Billy’s crotch. From the way he’d been clawing at himself for the past months, either he had a cactus flower in his pants or had come down with syphilis from one of his many romps in the lesser houses across town. I said, “You ain’t got the itches for her. You got the itches from her.”
If Billy had been a foot taller and three sizes wider and had any other friend in the whole world, he’d have slugged me in the face for mouthing off. Instead all he could do was sit there disgusted and clammed up like a spurned sibling. I felt just plain awful.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment. “You know I don’t mean no harm.”
“You sure are cruel when you want to be.”
“It ain’t my intent.”
Billy took down the last of his whiskey.
I looked up at the counter. The old man I’d kicked off his stool was fumbling around with his fork like a toddler as he scooped up a bit of pale egg from his plate. If there was any better way of measuring sadness in the world, I couldn’t fathom it.
“What’s she like?” I finally asked when our drinks were gone.
“Who? Fannie?”
“Yes, her. The one you fancy marrying.”
Billy shrugged. “She’s got black hair.”
I waited for more, but it never came. As if black hair was all I needed to know and all Billy was willing to tell. “Well, you’re the poet between us. I’ll give you that.”
“Whaddaya want me to say? She was never one of those whores I used to see, like you might think. She’s a class gal. Our first date was a picnic under a pecan tree. I don’t know what else to tell, I suppose, other than she’s picked my heart clean. So it’s either we get married or I go around putting the blocks to every new big ’un they bring into the Russian part of town for the rest of my days, and I’m telling you I can’t handle me the mastodon babes no more. I had a fit for them for a while, but that’s all drained out of me.”
I nodded solemnly.
“I really mean it. I really love her.”
“I don’t doubt it an inch,” I said. “Maybe they’ll write an old-timey tune about you two someday. ‘Picnicking Under the Pecan Tree with You,’ they’ll call it. A duet.”
“You’re never serious about nothing.”
“I’m serious about every lousy thing in this world.”
“You sure got a way of hiding it.”
“The day you get hitched, I’ll be the first one to chapel. You’re my only pal.”
Billy waved me off. “You’re giving me that eighth-avenue funny business.”
“I ain’t either. But just some couple hours ago you were ready to sell me out for death to save your own hide, or don’t you remember?”
Billy sat unresponsive. He had on a pair of green-tinted spectacles a doctor prescribed to him for his syphilis.
He’d caught the French pox from a Ukrainian whore in an oriental bedroom, or so he had been fond of saying. As if the blight he’d contracted made him worldly. All he’d really done was fork over a few grungy coins a few too many times in the aptly named Burnt District, for he’d been burnt but good and would be on a regimen of mercury chloride and wearing green eyeglasses and slowly losing what was left of his already pocked mind for the rest of his days until the whole world was just a lesson learned far too late.
I giggled at the silliness of it all. Little pug-shaped Billy. The man would never again be able to sit in a chair for five straight minutes without clawing at his crotch. Now he was bent on getting hitched to the dame that gave him all the trouble to begin with. As if just in case the syphilis didn’t stick with him long enough, that damn crazy bastard had it in his head to go off and wed the source. The penance the lonely suffer for their sins is far greater than that of the wicked.
My snickering soon turned to sadness.
I looked out the window and blotted my mouth again and set to sobbing.
Dawn had arrived in full.
Billy broke wind. The noise sounded like fabric tearing. We ordered two more beers and shared a kretek, which cracked like snapping wood with each inhalation, and said our quiet separate goodbyes to our butchery.
One of the men lowering our sign into the rubberneck wagon across the street wore a thick beard on a string he’d most likely purchased out of a catalogue. It was a foot long and as fake-looking as a costume prop. They’d gutted the inside of everything but the wallpaper and tied it all down in the back of the wagon. Even the picture windows had been scrubbed clean of the painted lettering advertising our meats. The place looked as if it hadn’t been occupied in years.
After the deed was done and the doors were chained shut, I bid Billy farewell and wondered for a moment if I’d ever see him again. Most of my goodbyes were a permanent circumstance. I hoped this wasn’t one of them. I went down to the Missouri River by myself and sat on the bank for the rest of the morning. I sat thinking for a good long while under a full ailanthus tree with its roots coming out of the ground crooked as witch fingers and listened to the foghorn of a riverboat pulling off the dock and drank from a pocket bottle of brandy until I fell asleep in the mud.
I came home late that afternoon to find my brother-in-law Ernest sitting in a rocker on my front porch. Ernest was Hattie’s elder brother by three years and made it his special commission to oversee her well-being, just as he had when they were children growing up together. His beard was cut like that of the apostles in church paintings, and his hair clipped short above the ear. A high-water cut, it was called. He wore a new orange felt hat that still possessed the fresh blocking of a recent purchase from a high-end department store. His gold watch fob looped across his waistcoat.
The no-good braggart put his every penny on his shoulders and always made fun of my working clothes: my old overshoes, my butcher’s apron, the sleeve holders on my cheap long shirts that put me in company with bartenders and blackjack dealers, the sad bow tie that made me appear more Sunday-strip comical than small-business owner.
Ernest held out his initialed cigarette case as I approached the vine-covered porch. I gave no response to his gesture, and Ernest lit one for himself. I looked away and spit into the dust. The scratch of a match, the popping of a flame, and Ernest smiled.
“Heard you sold some good shoats last week,” he said, rocking. He kicked up his boot heels on the porch rail.
I stood at the bottom of the steps with my fists clenched at my sides.
“Fetched a pretty decent price, I hear,” Ernest continued, his cigarette sagging in the corner of his mouth and bouncing up and down with each word he spoke.
I stepped onto the porch. “Six hundred dollars in one chunk.”
Ernest whistled as if getting ready to laugh.
“That’s twice what the others is getting,” I said.
“Yeah. Some good money. A helluva lotta money for a butcher to make. Maybe you ought to sell everything you have now, shop and all, while it’s still yours to sell. That’s right. Yup. I heard about that offer you had to give it all up. The Cudahy company. Now there’s a business for you.”
“I did sell it. Just this morning I watched them take my sign down.”
“How much did you get for it?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Ernest had himself a big chuckle. “Nothing? How far in debt were you?”
&nbs
p; “I’m not in any debt.”
“For now.”
“Not ever again.”
Ernest couldn’t quit chuckling. “You’re a smart boy. A damn smart boy. Smart with hogs and cows and smart with women, too,” he said, suggesting his sister’s unhappiness. He reared back in the rocker and tapped on the glass of the bay window of our pink house, where little Matilda could be heard crying and Hattie trying to coo her.
“A smart man with women,” I said as if musing over a philosophical thought. “I guess maybe so, especially after nobody else wants them.”
That comment brought Ernest to his feet in a rush. He tossed his cigarette into the yard and came up a foot away from my face. I didn’t flinch or blink, motionless as a horse who’d been struck over the head too many times. A baptismal silence between us.
“Thought that would keep you quiet,” I said flatly.
Ernest brushed by me down the porch steps, cocking his hat. “Tell you what, you’d better enjoy the rest of the day. It’s the last one you’ll ever have with your women, smart man.”
“You ain’t going to smoke me, so mosey off.”
Ernest shook his head. “You just don’t get it. Hat’s coming home to live with our mama. Her and Matilda. She can’t as well stick around here with a husband who stays out all night and loses his job and has no means to provide for her.”
“Provide for her? She’s got a roof over her head and food in the pantry. She’s got more jewelry up there in her dresser than I got socks.”
“She’s coming home, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Ernest said and stepped off the porch. Parked on the curb at the edge of our front yard was an uncovered wagon filled with a random assortment of things from inside our house: framed paintings, dresses, pots and pans, stacks of books, a reading lamp with the silly physique of a gooseneck, a rocking chair. I had come home in a stupor. Hadn’t noticed the wagon at all until then. It was driven by a pair of old mules. A grease bucket hung from the rear axle.
I stared at the buckboard stoically and said out loud, as if to no one at all, “That’s the second wagon I’ve seen taking away my stuff today.”
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