Hard City

by Clark Howard

  By the time the 6:30 league started, Richie felt hungry and walked outside to West Madison Street. It was early 1945 and the war was still on; the busy commercial street was in its modified blackout mode: no exterior lights, no neon, no marquees. As Richie walked along the semi-dark street, the pillowcase under his arm, he suddenly felt miserable about what he had done to his mother, and before he knew it tears were streaking his chapped cheeks. Even though she caused him nothing but grief most of the time, abusing him terribly when she needed a fix, she was nevertheless all he had and he missed her already.

  Seized by sudden loneliness, by an enormous fear of what lay ahead—for his mother as well as himself—he felt a sob explode in his chest again. Quickly stepping into a dark doorway, he moved to its farthest corner and hunched down on his heels. Burying his face in the pillowcase, he let himself bawl for several minutes. I had to do it, he cried to himself. I had to, I had to, I had to.

  A while later, red-cheeked, his misery under control once more, Richie emerged from the doorway and continued along Madison Street. Walking to the nearest corner, where there was a large drugstore, Richie passed an unattended newsstand and in a glance counted four nickels and a dime in the open cigar box on top of the Herald-Americans. Peering in the drugstore window, he saw a man with a canvas change holder tied around his waist, sitting at the soda fountain with both hands on a mug of steaming coffee. Seeing no one else around, Richie hurried to the newsstand, snatched the thirty cents, and ran up the street.

  In a hamburger joint, Richie sat at the end of a long counter, nearest the door, and ordered a hamburger and milk. The counterman scrutinized his shabby appearance and noted how close to the door he sat.

  “Twenty cents,” he said. “Pay now.”

  “How come?” Richie asked.

  “ ’Cause I don’t wanna have to chase you down the street, that’s how come.”

  Richie put twenty cents on the counter, muttering an obscenity under his breath.

  “What’d you say?” the counterman asked suspiciously.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Don’t get wise with me, kid.” The counterman pointed a threatening finger. Ringing up the twenty cents, he went back and gave the order to the fry cook.

  The hamburger joint was deep and narrow, like a railroad car, with a counter down its middle. On the stool next to him, Richie put his pillowcase, which by now he had tied a knot in to keep his things from falling out. It angered him that the counterman had made him pay before he got his hamburger and milk. It had not been his intention to beat it without paying; he always sat near the door because he never knew when he might have to run—for any reason. Richie could accept being caught and punished for things he did, but it infuriated him to be blamed for something he did not do, or plan to do. The counterman, to his mind, was an unfair son of a bitch.

  Waiting for his hamburger, listening to it sizzle on the grill in back, Richie suddenly felt scared again. The counterman had reminded him how vulnerable he was—at the mercy of every adult. Fear was by no means a new sensation for him; off and on for as long as he could remember, he had been afraid: afraid of each new school, each new neighborhood, afraid each time his mother moved that she would not take him with her. But fear brought on by the counterman was a different fear, a fear born of Richie’s strange new status: a kid on his own in the city. Before, when he had run away from the foster homes, he had known that his plight would only be temporary; he had taken it for granted that in three or four days he would be caught and there would be Miss Menefee, upset with him, sure, but there anyway and, in her own fashion, on his side. Now there was no one on his side, and that would be the case permanently until he found his father.

  I’ve just got to find him, Richie thought, simultaneously clenching both fists and his jaw. Life without his dad was always misery. Both Richie and his mother needed his dad; needed his quiet strength, his sureness. Just as soon as he found his dad, Richie fantasized, the two of them would go to that Lexington place and get his mother out and take care of her. His young jaw unclenched and his lips parted as he stared dreamlike into space, wondering how his mother was doing at that very moment.

  The counterman gave him his hamburger and milk, either carelessly or deliberately slopping the latter down the side of the glass and making a ring on the counter. Bastard, Richie thought as he laced the burger with mustard and catsup. He wolfed the food down. It was hot and delicious, the greasy meat and fried onions and dill pickles mixing with the condiments to create a taste that no poor kid in any big city would ever be able to duplicate as an adult. Washing it down with cold, creamy milk made it even better. It was all gone in three minutes, Richie out the door before the counterman even knew it. Which, Richie realized, probably made the man think that he had been right in the first place.

  Pillowcase under one arm again, Richie walked to the next corner and scrutinized the streetcar barn for a possible place to sleep. A sprawling, one-story red-brick building with streetcar tracks running through it, the barn served two functions: a place to maintain and repair cars and, between midnight and six A.M., a place to park the cars that were not needed for the overnight schedules. It was the latter cars that interested Richie. Idle, easy to get into, unoccupied, dark, they were a perfect hiding place, except for the cold. Richie filed them away in case he could not find anyplace warmer.

  Across the street at the Royal Blue market he snooped around in the alley behind the store where there was a large wooden bin for flattened cardboard boxes that had to be picked up and reused because of war shortages. The bin was about half full. If worse came to worst, Richie decided, he could burrow down to the middle of the pile of boxes and spend the night there. Looking in a back window of the market, he saw what appeared to be a storeroom. Carefully and quietly, Richie tried to open the window and then the rear door, but both were locked.

  Walking back toward Cascade Bowling Lanes, Richie decided that the divan in the second-floor ladies’ lounge of the bowling alley still offered him the best accommodation for a warm, reasonably comfortable place to spend the night. But he had to figure out a way to stay in the bowling alley after it closed. Back inside Cascade, he was deep in thought about the problem when a voice said, “Hey, kid. Hey, you, come here—”

  Head snapping around, Richie felt a spike of fear in his chest and was ready to break and run. Then he saw it was Red, the manager. Following Red’s gesture, Richie went over to the counter.

  “You still want to work?” Red asked.

  “Sure!” Richie said eagerly.

  “Okay, go back and help Pete on nine and ten for the second league. He says he’s not feeling good. Work one of his alleys. You’ll split thirty lines with him at six cents a line, so you’ll make ninety cents.” Red suddenly frowned. “You ever spot pins before?”

  “Sure, lots of times,” Richie lied. “Alleys nine and ten,” he said, hurrying away before Red could question him further. He had never set pins in his life, but after observing what he could see of pinboys from the front of the alleys, he was certain he could do it.

  Richie trotted down the walkway back to the pits and found Pete sitting against the wall with his knees drawn up in front of him. “Red says I should help you,” he told the lanky man. Pete looked up with eyes that were still watery.

  “Work nine,” he said, bobbing his chin at the pinboy pit where alley nine terminated.

  Looking up and down, Richie saw the other pin spotters sitting or lying down or eating something between leagues. They were a mixed group: older men with gray stubble on their cheeks, muscular younger men wearing tee-shirts with packs of cigarettes rolled into one sleeve, high school kids. Behind the pits was an access walk about four feet wide, and it was there that the pin spotters rested between leagues. There was little talk; between leagues rest was the important thing in the pits.

  Richie found a place to put his coat and pillowcase, and swung his legs over to drop into the pit of alley nine. It was as wide as the alley, a
s deep as the access walk—four feet—and recessed into the floor twelve inches. When a ball came down the alley and hit the ten wooden pins standing immediately in front of the pit, both ball and pins came back into the pit, falling to a floor that was covered with a rubber mat. The pinboy would have to slide down from a partition between pits, pick up the ball and send it rolling back on the wooden return rack, pick up the pins that had been knocked down, and reach up to put them into slots in the hand-operated set-up rack. When all ten pins had been knocked down, or the bowler had rolled two balls at them without knocking them all down, the pinboy pulled down on the rack and re-spotted all ten in the traditional triangle formation.

  Completing his inspection of the pit, Richie climbed out and sat on the return rack.

  Pete reached up to where his shabby overcoat was hanging and pulled a pint of whiskey from one pocket. Twisting off the cap, he took a swallow, then sat holding it and studied Richie for a minute. “Don’t lemme catch you telling Red about this,” he said.

  “No,” Richie said, shaking his head, shrugging.

  “Do a good job helping me and when the league’s over,” Pete said, “I’m gonna give you half a buck.”

  “Red said ninety cents.”

  “Red’s full of shit. They’re my alleys. Half a buck.”

  Feeling the old familiar outrage begin to stir inside him, Richie clenched his jaw and kept himself in check. Fifty cents and that divan in the ladies’ lounge, he told himself. Fifteen minutes earlier he’d had neither. Diverting his eyes, not looking at Pete, he did not complain. In his peripheral vision he saw the lanky man take another swallow and return the bottle to his overcoat.

  At nine sharp, a loud buzzer sounded and the pin spotters manned their pits as the first bowlers approached the alleys. A moment later began the sharp, resounding noise that is so unique to a bowling alley: the striking of ten solid maple pins by a slate ball weighing an average of fourteen pounds.

  Richie’s hands were small and he was not very strong. It took both hands for him to lift and return a ball. He could pick up only one pin at a time in each hand. When a bowler on his alley got a strike, knocking down all ten pins with a single ball, Richie had to bend over and straighten up six times. Before fifteen minutes had passed, he felt as if he’d been kicked in the back.

  It began in the lower back, a dull ache that soon spread all the way up to his shoulder blades. Then his wrists began to burn. Looking up and down the line of pits, he saw that he—and Pete—were the only ones working single alleys; everyone else, even the old men with gray stubble on their faces, were working double alleys. Between balls on nine, Richie watched in amazement as the men seemed to glide effortlessly from one pit to the other, never, as he was doing, getting to rest while waiting for the next balls. When you worked two alleys, the next ball was always there.

  Half an hour after the league began, Richie was miserable. His arms felt like lead, the wooden pins like lead weights, the bowling balls like cannon balls. Jaw slack with fatigue, he had to force himself to move. Pete looked over from ten. “You okay, kid? You don’t look so hot.”

  “I’m okay—” Fifty cents and that divan, he thought.

  “Don’t mess up on me, kid,” Pete half warned. “I can’t handle both alleys right now.”

  Richie did not reply. By the time an hour had passed, Richie’s entire undernourished young body was one solid ache. Every movement of his legs stabbed pain into his lower back, every movement of his arms sent volts of it to his elbows and neck. His temples throbbed; his dry throat burned; even his testicles hurt. He was kept going only by the recurring thought that he had no one to depend upon except himself. He did not let himself think about his mother. He had to think, act, work, and plan how to take care of himself.

  For another long hour Richie gritted his teeth and compelled his angry aching limbs and torso to do what was required of them in the pit of alley nine. By five of eleven, some of the other alleys were shutting down as their bowlers finished; by ten after, only Richie, Pete, and one of the old men were still working. The old man finished up at a quarter past and, finally, at eleven-twenty, the last ball rolled down alley nine and the nightmare of labor was over. Richie could hardly believe he had made it.

  “Come on out to the counter, kid, and I’ll give you half a buck,” Pete said, pausing for a drink of whiskey before he left the pits.

  When everyone had left, Richie, with a surge of new energy now that the compulsory work was over, made a quick inspection of the area behind the alleys and found, to his surprise, a flight of stairs that led up to the pits on the second floor. Going up, he found those pits now deserted too, the upstairs leagues finished and their pinboys up at the counter checking out. Hurrying back to the first floor, Richie got his pillowcase and took it up to the pit of alley thirty-two, which was directly next to the stairs. Then he returned downstairs, got his coat, and went out front where Red was paying the first-floor spotters.

  When Red handed Pete his money, the lanky man in the shabby overcoat balked. “You only gave me $2.70. I got $3.60 coming.”

  Red shook his head. “Forty-five lines at six cents a line is $2.70. The kid,” he bobbed his chin at Richie, “spotted fifteen lines.”

  “I’ll pay the kid,” Pete said.

  “No, I’ll pay the kid,” Red demurred. “I hired him, I pay him. Here, kid—” Red pushed ninety cents across the counter to Richie.

  “Thanks, mister,” Richie said, adding quickly, “Can I go back to the pits for a minute? I left my gloves back there.”

  “Sure, but hurry up; we’ll be closing in a few minutes.”

  As Richie pocketed his ninety cents and hurried away he heard Pete resume the argument. “Those were my alleys, Red; I should be the one to pay that kid if he works one of ’em—”

  Back in the pits, Richie sat up on the ball return rack of alley sixteen, next to the downstairs door, and watched through the grille above the alley as Red and Pete continued to argue. Richie could not make out their words, but there was a great deal of head shaking and finger pointing until finally Red simply waved one hand in disgust and turned his back, and Pete stalked angrily away.

  As Richie watched for the next few minutes, he saw the coffee shop manager come out and say goodnight to Red, then the bartender stopped to talk to him while Red was closing out the cash register. Presently Red was all alone, doing something in the little office behind the counter. He came out, wearing an overcoat, hat, and gloves, locked the office door and started turning off lights at a master panel. Halfway through that procedure, he paused and squinted his beady eyes toward the pits.

  “Kid?” he called loudly. He listened for a moment, then called again. “Hey, kid! You gone?”

  Behind the grille, Richie watched silently and motionlessly.

  After what seemed like a very long time, Red turned off the rest of the lights.

  After he heard Red walk out to the front entrance, leave, and lock the six entrance doors behind himself, Richie slipped quietly down into the pit of alley sixteen and sat there, his knees up in front of him, for half an hour by the big, illuminated Pabst Blue Ribbon electric clock above the counter.

  The interior of Cascade Bowling Lanes was dim rather than dark. There was subdued lighting from a number of sources: the clock above the counter, two large vending machines that were lighted, some indirect lighting around a mirror behind the counter, several red exit signs, and two small spotlights that shone on the bubbling fountain near the entrance, which were left on because the fountain could be seen from the sidewalk outside. The overall effect was like a haze, a soft multicolored glow, with yellow the dominant color being picked up from the shiny maple of the sixteen alleys.

  Richie was not afraid—not filled-with-dread afraid—he had spent nights in basements and under stairs before, so getting through the hours between midnight and dawn in an unfamiliar place was not entirely new to him. In the emotional space where fear would have been, there was nervousness, wariness
, readiness, and caution.

  As he sat in the quiet vacuum of the place, Richie allowed himself to think of his mother. Was she mad at him for telling Miss Menefee? Probably, he decided. But she’d forgive him; she’d have to when he and his dad showed up to get her.

  After sitting in the pit of alley sixteen for half an hour, scrutinizing the first floor for any sound or movement, Richie slowly crept up to the second floor. There, in the pit of alley thirty-two, he sat for another half hour, looking at an identical Pabst clock above the upstairs counter. This time he sat with his pillowcase under outstretched legs. During his second vigil, Richie again began to feel the heavy fatigue in his body, especially in the shoulders and elbows, where he now suffered a burning sensation that he was unable to rub away. To take his mind off the discomfort, he played an old game in his mind: imagining where his father might be. Maybe he went out west and got a job on a ranch, and was saving money to send for Richie and his mother. But that couldn’t be; he would have written them if that was what he was doing. Well then, maybe he got a job on a ship. One that was sailing around the world. There was no way he could mail a letter from a ship sailing around the world.

  It occasionally occurred to Richie that his father might be back in prison somewhere, but he was usually quick to dismiss that possibility. His dad was too smart to get sent back to prison. Anyway, his mother was sure to have known if he had.

  Richie began to think about how he was going to search for his father. There were two people he thought might be able to help him. One was a woman named Estelle, who had once been his mother’s best friend; the other was a garage mechanic named Mack, who had helped Richie’s father get a job when he was released from federal prison. One of those people, Richie was certain, would be able to provide a clue of some kind.