The Pushcart War

by Jean Merrill

  Louie’s father had been, before his death, one of the most-respected pushcart peddlers in the secondhand-clothes line. Mr. Jerusalem had often made a cup of tea on his charcoal burner for Solomon Livergreen when he and Solomon were working on the same street.

  Mr. Jerusalem should have been glad that Solomon’s son was a big success—people said Louie Livergreen now owned one hundred big trucks. But Mr. Jerusalem held it against Louie Livergreen that from the day Louie had got his first truck, he had never come to see his father again. So every time Mr. Jerusalem saw a Leaping Lema on the streets, he thought, “They are breaking up family life.”

  As he watched the Leaping Lema backing into the curb on the first day of the Pea Shooter Campaign, Mr. Jerusalem wondered what his old friend Solomon Livergreen would have thought of the Pushcart War. Would Solomon, he wondered, have shot at a truck belonging to his own son, Louie Livergreen? And what would Solomon have wished his old friend Mr. Jerusalem to do?

  “Shoot if you have to.” That is what Solomon Livergreen would say, Mr. Jerusalem said to himself.

  Mr. Jerusalem’s conversation with Solomon Livergreen was interrupted by the driver of the Leaping Lema.

  “Hey, Bud,” shouted the driver. “Stop talking to yourself and move the baby buggy!” The driver was Little Miltie, a driver mentioned in the diary of Joey Kafflis.

  Mr. Jerusalem frowned. It was bad enough that Little Miltie, a man one half the age of Mr. Jerusalem and not as tall, should call Mr. Jerusalem “Bud.” But that Little Miltie should call Mr. Jerusalem’s cart, which was also his home, a “baby buggy”—this was unnecessarily rude. However, Mr. Jerusalem answered courteously.

  “I will only be a minute,” he said.

  “I can’t wait a minute,” said Little Miltie. “I got to deliver a popcorn machine.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Jerusalem, “I have to pick up a popcorn machine. And until I pick up this secondhand popcorn machine, there will be no room in the store for a new machine such as you wish to deliver.” And he turned to go about his business.

  But as Mr. Jerusalem started into the candy store, Little Miltie raced his motor. Mr. Jerusalem hesitated. He remembered what had happened to Morris the Florist. He glanced over his shoulder.

  “I’m backing up, Bud,” Little Miltie said.

  Mr. Jerusalem sighed and walked back to move his cart to the other side of the street.

  Little Miltie grinned. “That’s a good boy, Buster.”

  Mr. Jerusalem did not reply, but as Little Miltie was backing into the place Mr. Jerusalem had left, the old peddler took out his pea shooter. He looked at it doubtfully.

  “A man my age—with a pea shooter!” he sighed. “Such a craziness on Delancey Street.” However, he inserted one of the pea-pins, took careful aim—and fired.

  For a moment nothing happened. Mr. Jerusalem felt foolish. “All right, I admit it,” he said. “We are all crazy.”

  Mr. Jerusalem was about to drop his pea shooter in the gutter when he heard a slight hissing sound—the sound of air escaping from a tire.

  “Or perhaps not so crazy,” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  He put the pea shooter back in his pocket and went to collect the popcorn machine. When he came out of the candy store, one of Little Miltie’s rear tires was quite flat. Little Miltie was stamping up and down in the street and speaking even more rudely to the tire than he had spoken to Mr. Jerusalem.

  “What is the matter?” asked Mr. Jerusalem. “The Leaping Lema is not leaping so good? A little trouble maybe?”

  But Little Miltie was too angry to reply.

  “Believe me, Solomon, I had to do it,” Mr. Jerusalem said, as if to his old friend Solomon Livergreen.

  “The fact is, Solomon,” he continued, as he roped the popcorn machine onto his cart, “to cause a little trouble now and then is maybe good for a man.

  “But, Solomon,” he asked as he set off down Delancey Street, “who would have thought a man of my age would be such a good shot?

  “Naturally, it pays to use high-quality pins,” he added.

  Although Mr. Jerusalem knew where he could get a good price for the secondhand popcorn machine, he was now in no hurry to get there. He paused to look over every truck that had stopped for a traffic light or had pulled up to a curb to make a delivery.

  Mr. Jerusalem chose his targets very carefully, and to his astonishment he hit four more trucks before he ran out of ammunition. At 2:30 in the afternoon, he headed back to Maxie Hammerman’s for more pea-pins. He still had not got around to selling his popcorn machine.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Maxie Hammerman’s Battle Plan & General Anna’s Hester Street Strategy

  Although Mr. Jerusalem was no more than half a mile from Maxie Hammerman’s shop when he ran out of ammunition, it took him nearly three hours to get there. For by mid-afternoon, the city was a mess.

  In the Delancey Street area, things were particularly bad. In every block Mr. Jerusalem saw two or three trucks stranded. Traffic was at a standstill, and people were shouting at the truck drivers for blocking the streets.

  The truck drivers were furious. They were not used to being honked at and shouted at, and they had no idea what was happening to them.

  The first few truckers who were hit thought that they had had the bad luck to pick up a splinter of glass or a nail. They telephoned for garage mechanics to come and help them change their flats, and went to have some coffee while they waited for the mechanics.

  The truck drivers did not realize that their troubles were anything out of the ordinary until the mechanics began to sound irritated with them. Around noon, the mechanics began to snap at the truck drivers who called for emergency service.

  “Hold your horses, Buddy,” more than one driver was told. “I got fourteen flats ahead of you, and you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.” At that point, the truck drivers began to wonder.

  Most of the stalled trucks were so big that a truck driver by himself could not possibly change a tire. So a driver had little choice but to sit with his truck and wait for help, getting crosser and crosser as the day wore on.

  Mr. Jerusalem was impressed that the afternoon papers were already warning motorists that Delancey Street was a “disaster area” and that there were terrible tie-ups in other parts of the city. It was 5:30 before Mr. Jerusalem could get his cart through the tangled traffic to Maxie Hammerman’s shop. In many streets, pushcarts were the only vehicles that were getting through at all.

  By the time Mr. Jerusalem did get to Maxie’s, Maxie had an enormous street map of New York City tacked on his wall. As the peddlers came in to report, Maxie had been sticking pea-pins in the streets where truck tires had been hit. These pea-pins had been painted a bright red, so that one could see at a glance how the battle was going.

  There were a few gold pea-pins scattered among the red. Maxie explained that these were for the really big hits—such as trailer trucks or Mighty Mammoths or Ten-Ton Tigers.

  “Or Leaping Lemas?” asked Mr. Jerusalem.

  “If you got a Lema, I’ll give you gold,” said Maxie.

  The map was already peppered with red and gold pea-pins. Mr. Jerusalem studied the map with pleasure. The battle looked very neat and well-organized on Maxie’s map.

  “On the streets,” said Mr. Jerusalem, “it does not look so neat.”

  “That I know,” said Maxie Hammerman as he stuck five pea-pins into the map for Mr. Jerusalem—four red and one gold. Although Maxie had not left his shop all day, he had the clearest picture of the battle because all the peddlers had been coming in to report to him.

  “If there is, by chance, a street where the trucks have been getting through,” said Maxie, “I can see it on the map. So whenever someone comes back to the shop for ammunition, I can advise him where it is most needed.

  “So far, Harry the Hot Dog has the record,” Maxie told Mr. Jerusalem. “He has killed twenty-three tires, and he has come in for ammunition twice.”

  “How wo
nderful to be young,” said Mr. Jerusalem. “We should give him a medal.”

  “We will,” said Maxie Hammerman. “The only thing that is worrying me,” he added, “is General Anna.”

  “She has not been caught?” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “No, she has not been caught,” Maxie said. “Though I do not know why. She cannot aim at all.”

  “It is hard for a lady,” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “She comes to me in tears at twelve o’clock noon,” Maxie said, “to tell me she has shot twenty-five pea-pins and has not hit one tire.”

  “Hitting is not important,” said Mr. Jerusalem. “It is the spirit.”

  “I tried to tell her,” said Maxie Hammerman. “But General Anna says, ‘They call me General Anna. Should they call me General Anna for nothing?’”

  “It does not matter,” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “Oho,” said Maxie. “To General Anna, it matters. So, do you know what she is doing now?”

  “What?” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “She is sticking in the pea-pins by hand,” Maxie said.

  “By hand!” said Mr. Jerusalem. “But anyone could see her do it.”

  “I told her,” said Maxie Hammerman. “I told her—‘In broad daylight you are creeping up to a truck that is parked to deliver pajama trimmings on Hester Street! Are you crazy?’

  “I tell her,” Maxie explained, “that this is much too dangerous. Do you know what she says?”

  “What?” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “She says, ‘Don’t worry. Who would suspect an old lady of putting a pea-pin in a tire? If anyone asks me why I am bending over in the street, I tell them that I am looking for a hat pin that I have dropped under the truck.’ ”

  Mr. Jerusalem groaned. “We shouldn’t let her do it.”

  “She has even had a policeman helping her look for a hat pin,” said Maxie Hammerman.

  “We must stop her,” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  “But she has killed fourteen tires,” said Maxie Hammerman. “Since twelve o’clock noon.”

  “By hand?” said Mr. Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Some Theories As to the Cause of the Flat Tires: The Rotten-Rubber Theory, The Scattered-Pea-Tack Theory, and The Enemy-from-Outer-Space Theory

  As the pushcart peddlers had hoped, the truck drivers had no idea what had hit them. There were clearly too many casualties in those first days of the Pea Shooter Campaign to be laid to bad luck. But the truckers did not know who to blame.

  Big Moe, at first, blamed the tire company he traded with. He accused the firm of putting rotten rubber in their tires.

  Big Moe’s suggestion so offended the president of the tire company that he refused to sell Big Moe any more tires. This turned out to be very inconvenient. Big Moe was suddenly very much in need of extra tires, and other tire companies were so busy filling orders for their regular customers that they could not spare any tires for Big Moe.

  It was curious, but for three days no one who changed a truck tire found the pea-pin that had done the damage. Either the pea-pins had worked themselves down between the deep grooves of the tires, or the pea had been broken off by the weight of the tire. It sometimes took five to ten minutes for the air to escape from a punctured tire. So drivers whose trucks were hit while moving often did not discover the damage until they stopped for a light half a mile from where they’d been hit.

  Even those few mechanics who found pins in tires did not think them any odder at first than the nails or screws or bits of glass that they were always removing from tires. Finally, one sharp-eyed mechanic found a whole undamaged pea-pin, and when he extracted two more the same day, he began to be suspicious.

  Once the mechanics knew what to look for, they pulled quite a few pea-pins from the truck tires. No one knew what the pea-pins were, of course, because no one had ever seen one before. The newspapers printed an enlarged drawing of one. They called it a “pea-tack.”

  It was supposed at first that a lot of pea-tacks had somehow been scattered through the city streets, possibly by a trucker hauling a load of pea-tacks. The police checked the “P” pages of the classified section of the telephone directory, but they could find no one in the pea-tack business.

  Had the police looked under “Peas, Dried,” they would have found Posey’s Pea Co. (“By the Ounce, By the Pound, By the Ton”). And Mr. Posey might have told them that a lady named Wenda Gambling had ordered one ton of peas ten days before, and the police might have looked into that.

  As it was, the police did not think of questioning Mr. Posey, and Mr. Posey did not think of telling the police about Wenda Gambling’s order, because he did not make any connection between his peas and the pea-tacks the newspapers were talking about, as the peas he sold had no tacks in them.

  On orders from Mayor Emmett P. Cudd (“Big Trucks Mean Progress”), the Police Commissioner sent out several patrols to sweep the streets, hoping to clean up the pea-tacks. The patrols found a few pea-pins that had missed their mark, but not enough to make it worth their while.

  At the height of the mystery, a truck driver named Mack—the same Mack who had run down Morris the Florist—developed a theory that the pea-tacks were coming from Outer Space. An invisible enemy, Mack suggested, was circling the earth and spitefully bombarding it with pea-tacks. The fact that no one had ever seen a pea-tack before and that there were no pea-tacks listed in the New York telephone book gave some weight to the Outer Space Theory.

  Mack’s theory resulted in a number of truckers driving about the city with their heads out the window of their cabs. There was a rash of head-on collisions of trucks whose drivers were scanning the sky for pea-tacks.

  The Outer Space Theory was the most frightening theory so far proposed, as it suggested the additional possibility that the pea-tacks might be radioactive. Tests, of course, were run on the pea-tacks that the mechanics had collected. None of these showed any radioactivity, and this calmed the general public, but the truck drivers remained uneasy.

  Mack pointed out that the tests had been run on only a few pea-tacks, and that there was no proof at all that other pea-tacks might not be contaminated. Or, as a friend of Mack’s suggested, that the radioactivity had not passed from the pea-tacks into the tires.

  At this point, the morale of the truck drivers was very low, and many talked of quitting and going into some other line of work. The truck companies did everything they could to reassure their drivers. Several of the companies hired pea-tack spotters to ride on the hoods of the trucks.

  The spotters were supposed to scan the skies and signal the drivers if they saw any pea-tacks in the air. Although the spotters signaled the drivers at frequent intervals, the signals all proved to be false alarms over a stray butterfly, or a scrap of paper that someone had dropped from an office window. No one ever produced a pea-tack that had come from Outer Space.

  Finally it occurred to a newspaper reporter to ask Mack how he explained the fact that it was only truck tires that were getting hit. This was the first intelligent thinking that there had been on the problem, and it might have led to something had not a lady called a newspaper to say that it wasn’t true that only truck tires were getting hit. She said that she had been painfully pricked by a pea-tack as she was crossing Second Avenue.

  “Who missed?” demanded Maxie Hammerman when the newspapers reported this interesting development.

  “I didn’t miss,” said Harry the Hot Dog. “She insulted my sauerkraut, and for once I couldn’t resist.”

  “For once we understand,” said General Anna. “But it shouldn’t happen twice.”

  General Anna had to be firm with Harry the Hot Dog, as he was such a good shot that his friends were now calling him Harry the Hot Shot, which he did not mind at all. In fact, he was so pleased with himself that he would not have hesitated to shoot at Mayor Emmett P. Cudd himself, if anyone had dared him to.

  “I am warning you, Harry the Hot Dog,” said General Anna. “We are not shooting innocent p
eople. That will only make trouble.”

  What most infuriated the truck drivers was that no one seemed to feel sorry for them. People would call out to a stalled driver, “What’s the matter, Mister? A little trouble?” But they would smile as they asked the question, and no one ever offered to help a driver change a tire.

  The truth was that it seemed to amuse people to see an enormous truck made helpless by a mere flat tire. Newspaper cartoonists kept drawing humorous pictures of the handicapped trucks, and one television comedian made himself famous overnight by his imitation of a truck in trouble.

  Of course, there was great inconvenience to the city with trucks stalled everywhere. But the trucks had been inconveniencing the city for a long time, and the fact that the trucks themselves were the most inconvenienced by this new development seemed to cheer people, and they did not complain too much.

  When the breakdowns began, the truck drivers had simply left their trucks in the middle of the streets until they could get mechanics to help them change the flat tires. But by the fourth day of the Pea Shooter Campaign, there were so many trucks disabled that the Traffic Commissioner issued an emergency order requiring that all vehicles with flat tires must be removed from the streets within one hour of the time the flat was reported. The penalty for leaving a truck in the middle of the street was $500.

  As there were not enough tow trucks in the city to get all the stalled trucks off the streets, the truckers whose tires had not been hit had to stop their regular delivery work to tow their friends to garages. And from time to time one saw tow trucks with flat tires being towed by regular trucks.

  When a truck carrying perishable goods—fruit or vegetables—broke down, the driver often had to hire half a dozen pushcarts to unload the truck and deliver the goods before they spoiled. This was very good business for the pushcarts.

  “With the extra work,” said Eddie Moroney, “we can—if necessary—buy more pins.”