by Clark Howard
But Pete only glanced at Richie and made no effort to move. As Richie passed him, he saw that Pete was staring forlornly into the gutter. Richie paused in the bowling alley entry to look back at him. After a moment, he walked over to him.
“Hey, Pete, you okay?”
“Beat it. Leave me alone,” Pete growled. Under his breath, he added, “Little prick.” Richie stood there, trying to think of something to say. Presently, Pete started rambling. “Goddamn Red won’t let me work no more. Won’t even let me spot goddamned open bowling in the daytime. But he lets a little shit like you work the goddamned leagues five nights a week. You got a mother an’ father to give you a place to sleep, but I ain’t even got four bits for a flophouse bed. Go on,” he said again, “beat it!”
Instead, Richie knelt next to him and held out a dollar bill. “Here, Pete. It’s the forty cents I owe you. Plus interest.” Pete stared at him in disbelief. “Go on, take it,” Richie said. He pushed the bill into one of Pete’s hands.
Walking away, going into Cascade, Richie mentally chastised himself. Sucker, he thought scornfully.
11
For several weeks after Lew Grubb tried to rape her, Chloe had refused to leave the apartment. The first ten days, she would not even get out of bed. There every day, helping Estelle take care of her, was Jack Smart. Jack came over in the morning and helped Estelle fix breakfast for Chloe and Richie, and to see how Chloe had done during the night. He could not stay long; by nine he had to be on his route, making pickups and leaving payoffs for his bookie employer. But he always returned around noon, sometimes with a bag of White Castle hamburgers, or lunchmeat and rolls from a deli. Estelle, who had given up on drugstores and gone to work for Woolworth’s, could not get home for lunch, so Jack took it upon himself to see that Chloe and Richie had a good lunch.
Sometimes when Richie was in the kitchenette eating, if he listened very carefully he could make out what his mother and Jack Smart were talking about in their confidential tones in the bedroom. He did not understand what a lot of it meant, but he knew by his mother’s voice that she was upset. Chloe had heard horror stories about the city; she was terrified not only that she might be pregnant but that she had caught something from Lew Grubb. Jack tried to reassure her.
“I d-d-don’t think he was, you know, f-f-finished, was he? I mean, he was still g-g-going when I hit him, wasn’t he?”
For the first few days, Chloe was too distraught to be pacified by the fact that Grubb had not ejaculated. But gradually Jack Smart’s dependable presence and easy manner had a positive effect on her. He quietly and gently refused to let her give in to the situation; when she dwelled on it and became maudlin, he teased her out of it and cheered her up; when she became fearful of the future, he found some way to bolster her confidence, even offering to help her find a new job when she was ready. “I got l-l-lots of connections,” he bragged, trying to impress.
After Chloe finally left her bed and began to sit at the table for meals, Jack Smart made a habit of joining them for supper, frequently bringing the main course with him: a chicken, a bucket of chili, hot dogs, beans. Obviously taken with Chloe, Jack tried to impress both her and Estelle by enhancing himself.
“I’m not just a s-s-sharpie,” he emphasized. “I don’t just l-l-live from day to day like a lot of people d-d-do. Not me. I’ve got p-plans. I’m a g-good card player. I p-play nearly every night after I leave here, and I s-save what I win. Soon’s I have enough dough p-put away, I’m going back to Gary, Indiana, where I c-came from, and I’m going to open myself a b-bowling alley. Indoor recreation, that’s the c-coming thing.” He jerked a thumb at his chest. “I’m going to get in on the g-ground floor.”
Chloe could not help being drawn to Jack Smart. Not only had he saved her from that animal Lew Grubb, but she realized that he was the first man she had ever met who had a real purpose in life. “I know this sounds funny,” she defended her position to Estelle, “but you just think about it for a minute. Did you ever know Richmond to make a plan in his life—unless it had something to do with brewing, transporting, or selling hooch? And think about all the boys we knew back home. Remember the things they were going to do when they got out of school? One was going to become a flyer, one wanted to get into pictures, one was going to hitchhike around the world. Far-fetched! Jack might be a gambler, but at least he’s working toward something.”
“Sounds to me like you’re trying to talk yourself into something,” Estelle observed.
“I’m not doing anything of the kind,” Chloe demurred. “But you know as well as I do that as soon as Richmond gets out of prison, he’ll go right back to bootlegging. He can still bootleg in Tennessee; half the counties stayed dry. I don’t want that anymore, ‘Stelle. I don’t want it for me and I don’t want it for Richie.”
It pleased Chloe as she recuperated to see Jack trying to win Richie’s approval while he tried to win her affection. Jack brought the boy Baby Ruth candy bars, Richie’s favorite, and picture books and building blocks and toy cars. He always found a few minutes to sit and play with Richie, and never failed to give him a nickel for the Good Humor man the next day. Richie accepted the gifts, and enjoyed them, but nevertheless had reservations about this new man in their lives.
It was when his mother began going out on dates with Jack Smart that Richie was left in the care of Helen.
Being left with her was an even more cogent reason for Richie to dislike Jack Smart. But as he wished harder and harder for his daddy to come home and run Jack Smart off, he could see his mother and the handsome, stuttering man becoming closer and closer. And he heard his mother become angry at Estelle because she took exception to the relationship.
“I can’t believe my ears!” Chloe proclaimed. “Aren’t you the one who kept telling me to get out of the apartment and have some fun?”
“I didn’t mean for you to go this far,” Estelle countered. “I surely didn’t mean for you to be unfair to Richmond.”
“What about him being unfair to me?” Chloe demanded. “Leaving me all alone with a little boy to raise! He knew I couldn’t get along by myself . . . .”
Chloe burst out crying, and Estelle, as she had always done, embraced and comforted her. “Don’t cry, honey,” Estelle said. “I’m not trying to be mean to you. I just can’t help thinking that with Jack you’re jumping out of the skillet into the fire.”
“But he cares for me, ‘Stelle,” Chloe tearfully pleaded. “He wants to do something for the two of us, together. He’s not such a loner like Richmond. I need somebody, ‘Stelle.”
“I know you do, honey,” Estelle said, patting her head. “God knows, I know you do.”
Jack took Chloe and Richie to Cascade Lanes one Saturday afternoon to show Chloe how a bowling alley operation worked. “There’s n-not much to it, really,” he said. “Once you g-get a location, the bowling alley supplies firm will put in the alleys on a t-time p-payment plan, in exchange for which we agree to b-buy all of our bowling balls, pins, score pads, and stuff like that from them. ’Course, th-they have a lien on the place until it’s p-paid off. That usually takes about t-ten years. It could be done faster, if the m-money comes in right. Way to start making a profit right off is to sign up a lot of leagues—that’s t-team bowling, sponsored by companies and c-clubs and things. That’s why I want to g-go back to Gary; league bowling is very b-big with the steelworkers there.”
While Jack taught Chloe to bowl that day, and was giving her a rudimentary introduction to how the business operated, Richie was allowed to wander around and look at things, as long as he remained in sight. It was his first exposure to a bowling alley and he was fascinated by the lights, the noise, the pinball machines, the perpetual motion.
As they rode the streetcar home, Richie, sitting in the seat in front of them pretending to concentrate on looking out the window, heard his mother ask Jack, “How long will it be until you have enough money to get a location, hon?”
“I need to win b-big in just a fe
w more poker games,” he told her. “I already g-got my eye on a spot in Gary.”
“It all sounds so exciting, hon! Gee, I hope you don’t lose any of the money you’ve got so far.”
“I’m a very c-c-conservative player,” Jack said. “I don’t 1-lose often, and when I do, I don’t 1-lose much.”
Listening, Richie was not sure what poker was, but he did have a child’s understanding of winning and losing. He hoped fervently that Uncle Jack would lose.
Chloe started trying to condition Richie for the change she anticipated in their lives. She had noticed how fascinated he had been at Cascade. “Wouldn’t it be nice, sugar?” she ployed. “Our very own bowling alley! Just imagine!” Eventually she drew him onto her lap and said, “Listen, how would you like for Uncle Jack to be your new daddy?”
“I don’t know,” Richie replied vaguely, directing his attention to one of his shoelaces. Chloe put a knuckle under his chin and turned his face back to her.
“Pay attention to me, please. You like Uncle Jack, don’t you?”
“Yes.” He knew that was the answer his mother expected. It often resulted in a toy or a candy bar or a nickel.
“I like him too,” Chloe said. “When I’m with Uncle Jack, I don’t feel so scared.”
“What are you scared of?” Richie wanted to know.
“Life, sugar,” his mother told him in a moment of searing honesty. “Life all alone. Life without a man.”
“I can be your man,” Richie said. Chloe squeezed his face between her palms.
“You are my man. My little man. But I need a big man too.”
“Isn’t Daddy your big man?”
“He used to be.” She bit her lower lip, then forced a painful smile. “But he’s been gone too long now, sugar. Besides, he wouldn’t get us a bowling alley like Uncle Jack will. We want that bowling alley, don’t we?”
Richie did not answer, and she did not make him. When Jack was around, Chloe dismissed the boy’s reticence as natural. Of his stubborn refusal to call Jack “Daddy” she said, “He’s just bashful, hon. He really does like you a lot.”
“S-sure,” Jack agreed. “He’ll c-come around.” Jack playfully mussed Richie’s hair, and Richie hated it. In his mind Richie kept thinking, "I hope you lose."
Richie knew from the beginning when his mother and Jack Smart became intimate. The first time it happened in the apartment, he was lying on the floor on his stomach, using crayons to carefully and methodically fill in the figures in a Buck Jones Big-Little Book. “Sugar, Uncle Jack and I are going to take a little nap,” his mother said. “You go on coloring like a good boy, hear?”
Richie nodded and went on coloring, seeming to pay no attention to the adults. He had learned very early that the more he pretended to show no interest in what grownups were saying or doing, the more they were likely to say or do with him around, and the more he got to hear and see. When his mother and Jack went into the bedroom and closed the door behind them, Richie unhurriedly finished coloring Buck Jones’s gunbelt, then got to his feet and went quietly to the bedroom door. Looking through the keyhole, he saw Jack remove his trousers and undershorts, and his mother, skirt pulled high, step-ins off, hose rolled and gartered around each thigh, lie back on the side of the bed and raise her bent legs up, widely apart, to let Jack lie over her—his feet still on the floor, arms braced—and begin bouncing up and down on her like some funny man in a comedy short subject. Richie was aware of two things: they weren’t taking a nap, and he wasn’t supposed to see what they were doing. He watched until Jack stopped bouncing, then quietly returned to his coloring.
A couple of times Estelle had brought a boyfriend home, paid Helen and sent her upstairs, and, thinking Richie was sound asleep on the couch, taken her boyfriend into the bedroom. Richie, who frequently only pretended to go to sleep but rarely did until everyone else was sleeping, always watched Estelle and her boyfriend through the keyhole. He liked watching Estelle take all of her clothes off, liked watching her suck on her boyfriend’s thing with her mouth. It made him feel very funny.
It was not long after Chloe started dating Jack Smart that she and Estelle moved from Walnut Street to a place on Kedzie Avenue, above a butcher shop. It was the same size apartment, one bedroom, but they had to pay less rent because Estelle knew one of the butchers and went out with him. Richie liked the new place better; Kedzie was a commercial street, with a streetcar line on it, and always seemed to be busy and interesting. He never tired of watching all the different people who passed by—local merchants and their customers, streetcar drivers and conductors who plied the tracks endlessly in both directions, children going to and from nearby Biedler Elementary school, patrolmen on the beat, newsboys delivering their papers, delivery trucks, stray dogs and cats—always someone or something moving, starting, stopping, going, coming, returning: a street of perpetual ebb and flow, that was Kedzie Avenue.
One Saturday afternoon, sitting on the windowsill with his knees drawn up, Richie was playing a game he had made up, picking out people who looked like they might be crooks on the “Gangbusters” radio program, or outlaws on “The Lone Ranger.” He tried to match their faces to the voices he had heard: the unshaved, burly ice delivery man fit a growling, rough-talking character, while a slight little man with thick eyeglasses could easily go with the soft-spoken master criminal who usually led the gang. Sometimes Richie would switch them around, imagining the meek voice in the burly man, the gruff voice in the little guy; that was amusing and made him laugh quietly to himself. He was laughing at just such a combination when suddenly he saw on the street a tall, lean man with darkish blond hair, standing idly in front of a barber shop. Richie’s eyes grew wide and he stared incredulously at the man.
The face of the man was familiar to Richie from a framed photograph that for as long as Richie could remember his mother had kept displayed wherever they lived. Only since Chloe had become serious about Jack Smart had she relegated the picture to a drawer of an end table next to the couch. Sliding off the windowsill, Richie went quickly to the drawer and got out the photograph. Hurrying back, he held it up, flicking his eyes from the face in the frame to the face of the man in front of the barber shop. His eyes grew wide again.
It was his father.
Head snapping around, Richie bit his lip as he looked at the closed bedroom door. They were in there, his mother and Jack Smart. But maybe they hadn’t started yet. . . .
Hurrying to the door, Richie looked through the keyhole. They had started; two naked bodies were locked together on the bed, and good old Uncle Jack was bouncing away. Richie ran back to the window. He had been warned not to open any windows because his mother was afraid he would fall out and kill himself. But he didn’t care, he was going to open this one. Putting the photograph aside, he climbed back on the sill. In front of the barber shop, his father—Richie was certain it was him—put his hands in the pockets of his trousers and walked slowly toward the corner, looking around. Bracing himself in the windowframe with one hand, Richie tried to open the turn-lock in the center of the window. The lock would not move; someone had painted over it and it was sealed shut.
Getting down from the window, Richie’s expression changed from urgency to panic. Back at the bedroom door, he saw that Jack was still bouncing and had his head bent, sucking one of Chloe’s titties. Hurry up! Richie thought frantically. If Jack would just hurry and finish, Richie knew his mother would presently come out and go into the bathroom. Then he could stop her and tell her about his father. Rushing back to the window, he saw his father loiter momentarily on the corner, take a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it between his lips, and continue looking around.
Impulsively deciding to break another rule of Chloe’s—that he never leave the apartment alone—Richie started for the door to go down the long flight of stairs next to the butcher shop and, once on the busy street, call out to his father. As he hurried toward the door, he heard from the bedroom a low, ecstatic moan from Jack, followed by
a hissing shush from his mother. Pausing indecisively, Richie’s worried eyes darted from front door to bedroom door, back and forth, as he tried to make up his mind what to do. The low moan meant that Jack had finished bouncing; his mother would come out in a minute or two, spreading that funny smell wherever she went. She would, Richie instinctively knew, have a better chance of reaching his father than he would. Going to the bedroom door again, he looked through the keyhole and saw Jack lying half on the bed, breathing heavily, holding a Kleenex on his thing, while Chloe was getting into a housecoat for her trip to the bathroom.
Relieved, Richie returned to the window—and there his relief instantly faded. His father was no longer on the corner. Or, as far as Richie could see, anywhere up and down the block. Awash with dread, Richie pressed each cheek to the windowpane in order to look as far as he could each way down the busy street. A streetcar was on its way; Richie wondered if his father had got on it. And there was a tavern where men came and went nearly all day on Saturday; might he have gone in there? Maybe he had simply walked around the corner. Whatever, wherever, he was gone. One cheek still pressed to the pane, Richie felt his tears run down and fall on the glass.
Hearing the bedroom door open, then close again, he knew his mother had come out. Straightening, he kept his back to the room so she would not see that he was crying. At that moment he hated her for making him lose his father again, and he hated Jack Smart for taking so long at what he had been doing. Both fists clenched on the windowsill, Richie stared straight ahead until he heard the bathroom door close and knew he was alone again, for the moment anyway. He used the backs of his hands to wipe away his tears. His mother would come out of the bathroom in several minutes, smelling of toilet water to cover the odor she brought from the bedroom. She would speak to him then, saying something like, “Sugar, are you having fun looking out the window?” She never spoke to him on her trip into the bathroom because, he knew, she did not want him paying any attention to her smell and her sweat and the the funny look she always had on her face after Jack had bounced on her.