The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom

by A. E. Hotchner

  “No, not for some time.”

  “Anyone been there?”

  “No, don’t think so.”

  “Well,” Mrs. McShane said to me, “you may be in luck. Captain Arnold’s an old navy grouch who has that patch back there where the hammock is. He spends his day at the navy retreat on Market but he’s slept in that hammock in his space every night for as long as we’ve been here. Shows up same time every evening. Never says a word to us or anyone else. Has no friends or family so maybe he’s navigated his way to navy heaven. Why don’t you take over? Worst thing could happen is he shows up and kicks you out. But he’s always been here hours before now.”

  I had never been in a hammock and the way it weaved when I tried to get into it, my first attempts landed me on the ground. I finally settled in but I had a little trouble falling asleep because I was afraid I would spin over in the night and break my neck. But, fact is, I never had a better sleep and fortunately the captain did not show up and deliver a klop or two because my head was still a little sore from the bops rained down on me from big Jim.

  That morning I left quickly so that the McShanes didn’t have to feel they had to offer me some breakfast, if they had any. Just outside the Hooverville I found a small variety shop where I got two pancakes and a glass of milk plus a toothbrush and a little sample tube of Pepsodent, all for seven cents.

  Happening 19

  As I got off the Olive Street trolley I saw Augie waving at me.

  “She’s in J & J,” he said. “Take a look.”

  I went over to the J & J window with its $500 reward sign, and there was Pringle bent over a glass counter full of diamond things, with a beautiful flapper in a beaded dress also bent over the counter, a velvet tray between them. The flapper was trying on rings Pringle was handing to her that were lined up on the tray. She found one ring she liked, holding it up this way and that and then they came out of the door for her to see the ring in the outside light. They stopped a few feet from where I was standing. She smelled something wonderful.

  While she was holding up her hand and admiring the ring in the hot St. Louis sunshine, she reached in her sparkly bag that was hanging on her shoulder and took out something that she handed to him. I couldn’t make out what it was.

  They both started to laugh and returned to the store. Pringle tidied up all the rings and put them back into the glass case, all except the one on the flapper’s finger. She took it off and he shined it up with a special cloth, then she put it back on. He walked her to the door, they shook hands goodbye, and she got into her Marmon convertible that was double parked at the curb. A man wearing a linen cap and driver’s gloves with cut-off fingers was at the wheel and he drove away as soon as she closed the door.

  * * *

  —

  AUGIE AND I went down to Pete’s to share a cheese sandwich and a root beer (no longer called Pete’s Parlor but changed to Pete’s Pub when beer became legal).

  “What was that all about?” I said. “No money, no papers…”

  “She gave him something.”

  “He didn’t even look at it. Did he put it in his pocket? Or his drawer?”

  “Dunno. Just disappeared.”

  “So who is this Pringle?”

  “Dunno. But that’s probably not his real name.”

  “I think you’re right. He sounds fishy, all flashed up like that.”

  “I’ll try to tail him again tonight.”

  “She probably won’t be picking him up.”

  Two men came into Pete’s and sat down at the bar. They wore straw boaters and seersucker suits. Augie nodded his head in their direction.

  “What?”

  “Justin and Joel,” he whispered.

  They didn’t look like brothers. The bartender drew two foamy beers and put them in front of the brothers along with a bowl of peanuts. I once had a sip of beer, thought it tasted like awful medicine you don’t want to take. Our little table was near the bar, J & J’s backs to us, and we could hear everything they were saying.

  “What do you think about the insurance guy?”

  “He pretty much okayed everything on our list, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but the head office can always chop it down some.”

  “Hope not but we do have something to worry about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whoever beat our guy to the snatch. When that bastard discovers that stuff he stole was all fakes, what’s he going to do? If our guy had made the grab as we planned, we’d a got rid of it but now it’s a ticking bomb. He could make a deal with the insurance company. They pay him for our fake stuff and then nail us for fraud, maybe put us out of business and into the clink.”

  “You may be right. So, listen, we can’t take their money, anyway, not now, put it off, but we got to catch the guy who shot Dempsey and grabbed our stuff. One of our employees must have tipped him off that three o’clock—”

  “Could also be that Bulova watch guy—”

  “The cops say they’re working him over.”

  Hearing that hit me a jolt. “Working him over!” I repeated. Augie clapped his hand over my mouth.

  “Shhhh!” he whispered.

  A lot of people were coming into Pete’s now and the place was filling up.

  “But Joel,” his brother was saying, “we gotta have the insurance money.”

  “I know.”

  “We promised him.”

  “I know.”

  “God knows what he’ll do.”

  “We just got to stall and take our chances.”

  “You handle it. I’m no good trying to deal with him.”

  “Maybe we could just sell all the good stuff for a lump sum, pay him off, and be done.”

  “And then how do we stay in business and out of the clink palming off paste for diamonds?”

  The phone at the bar rang. “It’s for you, Mr. Joel,” the barman said, handing him the phone. Joel listened, then put down the phone.

  “We’ve got to get back,” he said to his brother. They hurriedly paid up and left.

  I asked Augie what he thought that meant, “working him over.”

  “All that stuff they do—bright lights, a million questions, no sleep—you’ve seen the movies.”

  “Sometimes they knock ’em around, don’t they?”

  “Look, Aaron, you can go nuts worrying over what might be or not be. If you want to really help your dad let’s put our heads on what we just heard.”

  He was right, of course, but my head was not in very good shape. “You’re right,” I said, pushing myself. “Seemed to me the brothers need cash to pay some tough somebody, so they took the good stuff out of that case and put in fakes and hired a guy to rob the case, making off with all the fakes, but they collect insurance money as if what he took was the real thing.”

  “Right. But someone got there first and grabbed the fakes not knowing they weren’t stealing the real stuff. Whoever that was, he knew your pop was coming at three o’clock and that the door would be buzzed open for him.”

  “So now this guy shoots Dempsey who’s trying to shoot him while he’s grabbing things and off he goes with a bag full of fake jewelry, thinking he’s hit the jackpot.”

  “So the brothers are now worried that he might go to the insurance company and spill the beans about the fakes if they don’t tell the cops about him so he wouldn’t get nailed for shooting Dempsey. Looks like you’re getting into some pretty scary stuff.”

  Yeah, he was right, some pretty scary stuff, but so is my father into some pretty scary stuff and I’m the only one on the outside who can maybe help him with my detectifying.

  Happening 20

  There was a kind of code of honor, I guess you’d call it, in the Hooverville, not to hang around anyone’s place when they were cooking. Maneuvering for a
handout or looking for a sympathetic this or that was strictly not allowed. I was told there was a group of Hooverville enforcers who could kick you out even if you had an okayed shack. So I made certain to show up at my hammock after Ella and her mom had cooked, even though Mrs. McShane had told me to come by any time because they could always rustle up a little extra.

  So I’d already had a plate of spaghetti at Gino’s in Dago Hill, five cents with tomato sauce, six cents with crumbly cheese. I’m very partial to spaghetti, it fills all the crannies of my stomach. When I went to my hammock I had already brushed my teeth and washed my face at the Hooverville basin. I took off my Keds and settled in. I hadn’t seen Ella but hand-wound music was coming from their tent-shack and they had their kerosene lamp lit. The night was extra St. Louis hot and the hammock strings were frying my back. Luckily the mosquitoes were passing me up.

  I lay there looking through the heat at the stars, thinking about what the J & J brothers said at Pete’s and how little I could really do about any of it. I thought about Captain Arnold and how maybe he was dead and had put this hammock in his will and that someone might show up to claim it. I tried hard not to think about my father or my mother both of them suffering but that pushed me down in the dumps and erased my sleepiness so I decided to steer off downers and try to remember some good things I could sleep on like the championship game our school won that I pitched and held them without a score by throwing very close inside pitches that made them scared of being hit, and hitting a few of them on the shoulders and butts to keep the batters afraid of me. Our school had never won a championship but the last inning, bases loaded, two outs, us leading only by one run, I struck out their best batter with a terrific inshoot that he swung at mightily and missed and my whole team came whooping to the mound and picked me up and put me on their shoulders and paraded me around all their parents and others coming down from the stands and cheering. A swell lift for a kid living in a one-room sad-ass hotel.

  Made me think of another lift like that from my English teacher, Hilda Levy, now seeing her gentle face and fluffy white hair and hearing her polite voice talking about books and writers and the virtue of good spelling and the power of words. She liked the way I wrote my compositions. I loved her compliments. She encouraged me to play the dictionary game: open the dictionary every day to any page, find a word I didn’t know, and get to know it. She was wonderful how she brought us into Shakespeare and into Latin. She also cared about me, myself. A couple of days before school let out for the summer, Mr. Stellwagon, the principal, came to our class and told us the sad news that she had died suddenly, making a dark Depression day darker.

  Thinking about Hilda Levy being gone turned a good memory into a downer so I began to poke around in my head to find some lifter I could sleep on. I thought about the time I took up the violin using the school’s violin since I didn’t have one of my own, which meant I could only practice at school. But I found it easy to finger the notes of the violin and I got put in the Kennard School Orchestra. On parents’ night when we played, the history teacher, Mr. Mathis, who was the conductor, gave me a solo section, a big honor, but when I stood up and put the violin under my chin and pulled the bow across the strings, two of them popped up from the bridge and hit me in the face so all I could do was sit down without playing a note. Not long after that music appreciation was dropped because of the Depression. Playing the violin was an upper but being bopped by the strings was humiliating and definitely a downer. I also relived that time with the Mexican dentist who had a little spot in the lobby of the hotel. I had a bad toothache and my father took me to him. It was a scruffy place that looked like it needed a lot of spit and polish. The dentist poked around and said my right lower molar was infected and needed to be drilled and filled or pulled.

  “How much?” my father asked.

  “Fifty cents fill, twenty-five pulled.”

  “Pulled,” my father said, just like that, saving twenty-five cents.

  “It won’t grow again,” the dentist said.

  “He can chew on the other side.”

  So now I have a bare spot on molar row that the tip of my tongue doesn’t like.

  For crying out loud, I said to myself, dump the darn downers! Why do all my downers stick and the uppers don’t? It’s like on the radio and in the newspapers there’s only bad things, murders, typhoons, and crooked senators but not much feel good, is there? Because we like to hear about misery and bad luck and things happening that aren’t supposed to happen, like if Babe Ruth hits a home run that’s ho-hum but if it’s the ninth inning, two outs, and he strikes out with the bases loaded—headlines!

  Well, that’s when, for some reason, a wonderful upper came flooding back to me and carried me into my dreams. A couple a years ago, my mom still working at the Bell Telephone before I got her fired, we three went to a special New Year’s Eve show at the Kingshighway Cinema that went from seven to midnight with everybody singing “Auld Lang Syne.” The Kingshighway was once a vaudeville theater with a stage and orchestra pit so it was able to do special shows like this one that had a double feature, News of the World, short subjects, Mickey Mouse cartoons, a live orchestra with dancers and singers, and Follow the Bouncing Ball with the whole audience singing. The Kingshighway cost twenty cents more than the Tivoli, and in the summer it was “air-cooled” which was big blocks of ice at the back of the theater with large fans behind them blowing toward the audience. I don’t think it really did much but it was better than the Tivoli which moved into the parking lot outside the theater and turned fans on the audience.

  This New Year’s Eve, my mom had made meat-loaf sandwiches with potato salad and pickles and pretzels and we bought a Coke in the lobby that we shared. The movies were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee, and Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery in Tugboat Annie, both my favorites. The band played toppers from the Hit Parade and a girl named Tapioca Tilly did a lot of twirly tapping all over the stage. Follow the Bouncing Ball featured “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and I was surprised that my father had a terrific voice. He was a serious, worried man and singing wasn’t in his nature. But the evening had lifted him from his gloom and his “Sunny Side of the Street” carried over the top of all the other voices in the theater.

  It was the last time we shared an event as a family.

  Happening 21

  Sol Greenblatt left J & J when it closed at six o’clock and took the number two streetcar headed toward the river, me right behind him but not too close for him to see me. It was a real surprise to see how tall and skinny and roomy in his clothes he was, sort of how I pictured Ichabod Crane when we read the Washington Irving story in school. Tell you the truth, I really liked the name Ichabod so much I nagged my father to let me change mine but when he found out he had to fill out forms and pay a fee at city hall that was the end of that. When Sol Greenblatt was all scrounged up at his little workplace, hunched over a watch with his magnifier screwed in his eye, it made him look like a small man, not at all like the guy that was now getting off at the Bellevue stop. Me too.

  I had never been down here, bordering on the Mississippi. It was full of saloons and run-down houses that looked like no one lived in them but someone did. Some of the saloons had music and dancing and you could smell Mississippi fish frying. There were streetlamps but most of them were kaput and as it got dark it was hard to see where you were going. The river was full of passing barges and passenger steamers.

  Sol Greenblatt knew his way around, winding from one place to another, and I tried to remember how he was going so’s I’d be able to find my way back. He finally stopped at a saloon called Marcy’s but did not go in. Instead he took a key from his pocket and unlatched a locked door beside the entrance. A few seconds later a light came on in the window of a room above the saloon. Sol took off his hat and suit coat and replaced them with a plaid cap and black vest. He took an envelope from his suit coat a
nd put it in an inner pocket of his vest. Then he turned out the light and a few seconds later he came out onto the sidewalk. I hid behind a tree so’s he wouldn’t see me.

  He turned to his right and walked along a row of night places, me following and stopping when he entered a dim spot called Finally. There were no streetlights. It was a black night with no moon or stars or anything. I found a small three-legged bench in the dark and set myself up with a view into Finally. Sol shared hugs with a pretty woman who was tending the bar that looked like it served a lot more than beer. She made a drink for him as a bright light came on above one of the tables. Several of the men who’d been sitting at the bar took their drinks and went to the table. So did Sol. The pretty bar woman came to the table with poker chips that she handed in equal piles to each man.

  They began to play, dealing the cards and betting their chips. I didn’t know enough about cards to know exactly what they were playing. Sol was very quiet, not looking at his down cards like the other men, but he seemed to be raking in most of the chips that were piling up in front of him. One time as he was pulling in some winning chips, it happened so fast I almost didn’t see it, he reached inside his vest and passed his envelope to the man to his right, who pocketed it without looking at it. They stopped playing long enough for the men to fix up their drinks, and that’s when Sol was suddenly beside me. I jumped.

  “How you doing?” he said.

  I wasn’t able to say anything. I hadn’t seen him leave the tavern or come to the bench.

  “What’s your name?”

  I began to recover, but my heart was banging away.

  “What’s your name?” he repeated.

  “Ichabod,” I managed to say. He had a slight accent but I couldn’t tell what.

  “You’re the kid came in with the newspaper boy.”