Homeland

by John Jakes

  Uncle Francis had spies in the parish who reported any truancy at the children’s mass. After just a very few homilies dealing with long-suffering bluebirds who got a reward in bird heaven, Jimmy became the family truant. When Uncle Francis beat him, Jimmy’s mother never protested. How could she when she was living on her brother’s charity?

  Uncle Francis’s doddering parish priest seemed to encourage this sort of inducement to piety. Or at least the old fool never objected within Jimmy’s hearing. Jimmy quickly learned to hate priests and their whole clerical rigmarole.

  When Jimmy was six and a half, another incident magnified his hatred of his uncle. Some of the Italian boys cornered Jimmy one afternoon and demanded he empty his pockets for them. All the boys were older and bigger.

  Jimmy feinted one way, ducked the other way, and ran. He thought Uncle Francis, when he returned from the Palmer House, would congratulate him on his speed and cleverness in avoiding a beating. Instead, Uncle Francis, who once again smelled of the saloon, went into a rage. He led Jimmy out behind the cottage and lectured him on the unmanly sin of cowardice. Then shouting, “Dirty yella brat, got a yella streak this wide, I’ll get rid of it once fer all,” he whaled Jimmy with the quarter-inch board.

  The accusation of cowardice had so humiliated and scarred Jimmy that, as such incidents sometimes do, it sank deep into his being. So deep as to be almost buried. Years later, he never realized that it influenced half the things he did to demonstrate nerve, to prove he didn’t have that streak down his back.

  The charity of his uncle’s household was considerably less than a blessing. Still, Uncle Francis’s rickety cottage provided a measure of security. Jimmy realized this most keenly when, with no warning, the security was snatched away. As Uncle Francis walked home one night, he was set on by a gang of toughs. Later the police determined they were all members of the A.P.A. The American Protective Association, an organization devoted to baiting Catholics and, it was hoped, driving them out of America. The police found Uncle Francis in the gutter with blood and brains running out his nose. He lived six hours. The household disintegrated.

  Jimmy’s criminal career began soon afterward. He accompanied his mother to fine stores. She wore the same large hoopskirt each time. Outside the store, careful not to be observed, she pushed Jimmy under the skirt and hoops. He duck-waddled into the store in the dark, bumped by her legs, tickled by her bloomers, terrified of discovery.

  In the store, Bert slipped various articles through a slitted pocket in her skirt. Jimmy stowed them in larger pockets specially sewn inside her petticoat. Later Bert pawned the articles for whatever she could get.

  It provided a modest living for about a year. Then one day, store detectives in Field’s swooped down on Bert, and the next thing Jimmy knew, his mother disappeared into the women’s wing of the Bridewell.

  Leaving him to begin his real education, on the streets.

  Jimmy was living under a pile of wood at a lumberyard when he chanced to fall in with three colored boys, very tough and smart. Instead of beating him or cutting him with their big clasp knives, they took a liking to him. He became their pupil.

  Soon he was slipping zinc torpedoes onto the rails just before a streetcar passed. When the explosion set the passengers to gasping and screaming, Jimmy jumped aboard and snatched one or more handbags. He was lean and he was fast. He was never caught. The colored boys insisted he split the loot with them, but he didn’t mind; a few cents were always left over for a stale roll and a cup of coffee. At age eight he was earning his way.

  Bert Daws left the Bridewell at the end of four months. She took up residence at Number 441 South Clark Street, a three-story brownstone whose opulence astonished her son. The place was a palace. Other women lived there too, occupying more than twenty comfortable bedrooms. The landlady, Mrs. Carrie Watson, was soft-spoken and refined. She wore diamond chokers, carried perfumed lace handkerchiefs, and drove around Chicago in a white carriage with fancy yellow wheels that Jimmy hated. She sent regular donations to the Catholic church across the street from her brownstone and to a synagogue nearby. Jimmy had a cot in a cozy space behind the bowling alley in the basement.

  At Carrie Watson’s, electric lights twinkled all night, every night. Wine was served in silver buckets. Carriages and hacks bearing well-dressed gentlemen arrived and departed frequently. One evening a chuckling chef from the kitchen showed Jimmy an upstairs peephole and helped him stand on a stool to look. In the room beyond, Jimmy saw one of Mrs. Watson’s ladies writhing underneath a gentleman. Neither was wearing a stitch.

  He realized what went on at Number 441. He decided that his mother must be doing that sort of thing too. He wasn’t shocked. Not in the least. People did the thing all the time, he’d learned that early. And Bert wore nice clothes again. He slept warm at night after the bowling pins stopped clattering. Mother and son were eating regularly, fine food prepared by two Negro mammies. Just the table scraps would have been a banquet to Uncle Francis. Jimmy thought it very smart of his mother to make her way at Carrie Watson’s.

  It didn’t last. Bert got into a vicious fight with another woman. Jimmy never knew why. Mrs. Watson said Bert was responsible and turned them out. They moved to a succession of smaller, grubbier bordellos. Finally, one night when Jimmy was ten, gunshots changed his life forever.

  The establishment in which Bert and Jimmy were living at the time was the lowest form of brothel, a panel house. A panel house was designed to relieve customers of a lot more than their pent-up passions. The layout was standard. Between every two bedrooms was a smaller chamber, called an operating room. It had a common wall with each bedroom. In these two walls, usually paneled in dark wood on the bedroom side, or papered in some monotonous pattern that lulled the eye, there were hinged or sliding panels that opened from the operating room. In each bedroom, the bed and the one visitor chair were placed with precise calculation. When the guest was busy and the lady was jumping and shouting—panel house women were coached to feign passionate noise to conceal the occasional telltale squeak of a hinge—the operator reached through the opening and rifled the gentleman’s pants hanging on the chair or the end of the bed. Sometimes the operator used a long pole with a hook for a difficult extraction.

  Jimmy earned a regular wage manning an operating room. He was adept with the hook. The madam of the panel house was considerate enough to assign him to an operating room on a floor below his mother’s.

  The night the shots rang out, he ran upstairs and found Bert leaning against the wall of her bedroom. A pudgy black whore who was her friend was shaking her arm, sobbing, “Bert, don’t shut your eyes. Bert, wake up.”

  Bert was sagging, clutching her middle. She was wearing her gaudy silk wrapper with peacocks embroidered on it, as she always did when she worked. The blue ground of the wrapper looked black where blood was soaking through. The wall panel was wide open, the hinged part swung back into the operating room. The guest chair lay on its side.

  Under the flickering gaslight, Jimmy ran to Bert with a cry. He flung his arms around her and held her. Feebly she caressed his hair. Pronounced his name once. Then she sagged and slid away. He decided later that she had died at that moment, in his arms. Ever afterward he remembered the sight of his own blood-smeared hands.

  Her slayer, some drummer, had detected the attempted theft of his valuables. He had already been hauled off by the coppers when Jimmy reached Bert’s room. The madam paid the coppers well for that kind of quick action.

  The madam said she’d pay for an inexpensive funeral but, reluctantly, she would have to ask Jimmy to leave now that Bert would no longer be working productively.

  At age ten Jimmy went onto the streets for good.

  He did all right; he was no chump and never would be. He made few mistakes. Those that he did make taught him something.

  He blacked boots on downtown corners, in good weather and bad. He suffered through winters when the sleet struck your cheeks like nails. Winter in Chicago ha
d its own survival methods. You enrolled in a public night school and pretended to study. Actually you sat in the back and dozed, thereby staying warm for a couple of hours.

  Jimmy was a striver. Nothing much got in the way of that, and certainly not the faith into which he’d been baptized. He regularly stole from poor boxes in Catholic churches around the city. His favorite was the poor box at Saint Stanislaus Kostka, because by stealing at that church, he was doing dirt to a Polack congregation, and he disliked Polacks.

  He disliked Germans too. No, that was too mild. He hated them like rat poison. Down on Roosevelt Road there was a predominantly German church, St. Francis of Assisi. One of Jimmy’s few serious mistakes occurred there.

  After hanging around St. Francis of Assisi for a day or two, he was struck by a new and inspiring thought. Instead of coins from the poor box, he ought to swipe something of substantial value. He settled on an obvious and logical choice, the golden monstrance brought out by the priests to display the host.

  Church ritual afforded him a fine opportunity to steal the monstrance. This was during forty-hour devotions. The monstrance remained on the altar the entire time.

  The priest always began the devotions, but since the ritual lasted through the night, naturally the priest had to sleep. Parishioners organized among themselves to be sure that at least one person was always in a front pew, awake and alert. Jimmy concealed himself in the back of the church, hoping that one of the watchers would be too tired to stay awake.

  Around three in the morning, it happened just that way. Jimmy crept past the pews one by one, snatched the monstrance from the altar, jammed it under his coat, and ran.

  Exhilarated, dreaming of his newfound wealth and the way his reputation would grow because of his feat, he took the monstrance to Glass the pawnbroker.

  Glass laughed at him.

  “Are you pulling my leg, Jim? Do you think I can put this in one of my showcases with a price tag? Do you think I can sell this? Fence this? I’m not katholisch, but I know what it is. Everybody knows. You’re a stupid goy, I always gave you more credit. Think before you steal! Are you going to return this, or shall I do it?”

  Mortified, Jimmy tried to sneak the monstrance into St. Francis of Assisi that afternoon. Unfortunately the sexton caught him and summoned the mealy-faced old German priest.

  Holding tight to Jimmy’s arm, the priest shouted at him in guttural English. “Are you a Catholic?”

  “I am, what’s that got to do with—?”

  “It compounds the crime. Not only are you a blot on society, you’re a disgrace to your faith. Even Our Lord Himself couldn’t save you. You are going to hell, boy. You are going to hell.”

  Jimmy, twelve at the time, gave him a smirk. “Nah, Father, I been there already. Been there and back.”

  Then he rammed a knee in the old man’s testicles.

  The priest cried out and collapsed against the sexton. Jimmy fled down the aisle.

  After that he hated Germans more than ever. He never forgot the lesson Glass expounded, though.

  As he grew up, how he appeared to girls became more and more important. If a fellow didn’t look tough, flush with cash, smart as the next joe or a little smarter, it was for damn sure he’d go through life being ignored by all the desirable girls. Didn’t matter if a fellow was any of those things—might be a lot safer, in fact, if he wasn’t. But the appearance—that was crucial. If the girl fell for the surface appearance, you were on first base; if she didn’t, you’d never make a score—hell, you were the strikeout king. Thus from a more or less normal interest in girls came his twisted way of courting them; his propensity for lying about what he was, what he had, and most everything in his past.

  He had jobs of all kinds and occasionally tried to improve himself with a respectable one. He never lasted. Honest jobs gave him no chance to get ahead fast, to make money without effort. Sometimes thievery cost him the job, sometimes his explosive temper or his outspoken dislike of the foreign-born, whether employers or co-workers. Jimmy hated strange accents, whether they belonged to wops, krauts, kikes, dagos, or niggers from down in Dixie. He knew he might be a bastard, but by Christ he was an American through and through. He loved his country, it was a land of opportunity.

  Delivering meat for Frankel’s was one of those respectable jobs that didn’t last long. It had taken him into some fancy homes, but that merely aroused his anger by reminding him he wasn’t getting ahead fast enough. After picking up fine china at the Crown house on Michigan, fearing prosecution, he’d decamped from Frankel’s without giving notice.

  He had worked at a variety of jobs since then. Busboy, bouncer, general helper at a dancing academy where he got free lessons because the proprietress liked his cheeky ways. He worked as a special deputy during the Pullman strike, and when that ended, as a roper for a large crib on Clark, south of Taylor, in the Bad Lands. He liked being a roper, especially when he was allowed to join the crew at the break-in flat. It amounted to rape, but that was the job. Very enjoyable.

  He kept the job until he caught a dose of clap. He figured a little blonde from Rock Island had given it to him. He’d roped her at the depot and participated in her break-in. She kept screaming that she was a virgin. A joke; virgins didn’t give you clap. With the permission of the madam, who didn’t find the girl satisfactory anyway, Jimmy called on the dishonest little tart in her mussy room and punched her up, until she wailed for mercy.

  Her caterwauling enraged him. He kept punching her. Rolling her off the bed and punching her. Hauling her up by her hair and punching her. Punching her while she crawled on her knees toward the door, through a slick of blood that gushed from her nose. He kicked the small of her back. She snapped forward, her head cracking against the door. Then she sagged sideways and flopped on her back, white and still.

  “Aw come on,” Jimmy said with a nervous snicker. “Don’t spoof me. Open your eyes, I won’t hit you again.”

  Nothing.

  “I said wake up, you bitch.” Again he grabbed her hair, dragging her up. Blood dribbled from her nose onto her small white breasts. Jimmy let her fall with a thump.

  He put his nose near her mouth. Cold; no breath. A foul odor rose from her relaxing body. “Aw Christ.”

  He raked his hands through his hair, his eyes wet with fright. “Aw Christ, Christ amighty.”

  The madam was furious. Disposal of the body was his responsibility. “Then stay out of this house. For good.”

  He hauled the corpse to the river at night, in a stolen wheelbarrow. The dead girl was in a coarse sack that had once held unmixed cement. Fortunately her body was light. He dragged the sack into a lumberyard on the West Branch; he’d previously spent a whole five bucks so the night watchman would leave the gate padlock open on the hasp.

  At the lumberyard pier, terrified of discovery even in a deserted neighborhood in almost total darkness, Jimmy weighted the sack with pieces of pipe, tied the neck with wire, and slid it into the river, which shone like oil under the moon. He staggered away, leaving the wheelbarrow. In the alley outside the lumberyard he dropped his pants, sick with the runs.

  By the end of the week his terror had abated, replaced by a sense of superiority and strength only murder could convey. A few days later, one of the cadets who worked with the madam sought him out. He and the cadet had done each other favors.

  “Bad news, Jimmy. That little chippy from Rock Island? Her brother’s deputy police chief. He’s in town raising hell. They found her, y’know.”

  “I dint know.”

  “It was in the papers. Thing is, there’ll be heat now. You better get away from the crib trade, and stay away, for a good long time. Hide yourself someplace where the bulls ain’t likely to look. Get into something respeckable.” That was how he said it, respeckable.

  So Jimmy Daws got into something respeckable and thereby met Paul Crown again.

  61

  Paul

  THERE CAME TO THE Temple of Photography another of those fl
ashy dressers common in the First Ward. The man was built so massively, he might have been a brother of the late Slim. He introduced himself as Toots Tilson. “From the committee.”

  Paul showed Toots the cane-bottomed visitor’s chair next to the dusty display case, then ran upstairs and knocked at a door. Wex came out wearing his canvas apron with many pockets, and his rubber gloves. Downstairs, Toots sniffed and said, “Jesus, that’s some toilet water.”

  “Sodium thiosulfate,” Wex said. “Hypo. I’m working in the darkroom tonight.”

  “I won’t take long. I come about the insurance.” Toots pointedly stared at Paul.

  Wex mumbled, “Dutch, will you excuse us?” Paul left. Later, in the kitchen, he and Wex shared some rye bread, sticks of celery, and two brown bottles of Heimat.

  “That man sells insurance?” Paul asked.

  “Figure of speech. Coughlin and Kenna came up with the idea, and everybody likes it. If a contributor to the fund gets in trouble with city hall, or the cops, the fund hires attorneys for him. Even stands bail. Goes to the wall for him, in other words. I started paying in a few years ago when I was doing some, ah, special business.”

  Paul sat with his elbows on the table, waiting.

  “Ah hell,” Wex said, “I suppose I don’t have to keep it secret from you.” He jumped up and returned with a large cardboard folder of the kind used to mount a photo. The cover had a gold curlicue border, cheaply done, flaking off.

  “I took this picture behind locked doors. Printed it myself. I sold about three hundred copies, two dollars apiece. I did it solely to promote the art of photography, you understand. Some sprout of sixteen, seventeen, got hold of one and showed it to his papa, who happened to be a church deacon. The dirty philistine went to the papers. Next thing I know the coppers are charging me with purveying obscenity. I spent two nights in the lockup. But that was all. A lawyer hired by the fund sprung me and got me off without a trial. I was stuck with a devil of a lot of pictures, though. Go on, take a peek. It’s called The Pearl.”