Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Alonzo smiled widely. “I gon’ do you a favor this time, Vernie,” he said. “But don’t you never try to cut me, girl,” he warned. “You do, I mess you up good.”

  “Sure, ‘Lonzo.” Vernie smiled too, a knowing smile, shrewd, prudent. A smile that told them both that without losing stature they had managed to avoid blood in a neighborhood where blood was cheap.

  Alonzo and his three friends went jiving and shucking down one flight of stairs, while Vernie and Richie went down the other. “Thanks,” Richie said as they walked along the street. Vernie shrugged it off.

  “Never have liked ‘Lonzo no how,” she said, more to herself than to Richie.

  At the next corner, there was an ice cream vendor. “Wanna Dixie Cup?” Richie asked. “I got a dime.”

  “Yo’ dime, not your mamma’s?” Vernie asked.

  “My dime,” Richie verified.

  “Okay,” Vernie shrugged again.

  Richie bought two Dixie Cups and they immediately pulled off the round lids and licked away the ice cream to see which movie star’s picture was on them.

  “Who you get?” Vernie asked.

  “Robert Taylor,” Richie replied glumly.

  “Shit,” Vernie said. “I got Claudette Colbert.”

  “Shit,” Richie parroted.

  They both threw the cards in the gutter and began eating the ice cream with wooden spoons as they walked.

  “Does your mother have to take her medicine every day?” Richie asked.

  Glancing curiously at him, Vernie said, “Yeah. Your mamma too?”

  Richie nodded. “Yeah.” Half a block farther on he asked, “Have you really cut two guys with that razor?”

  “Bet yo’ ass I have,” Vernie asserted. “One thing I done learned: ain’t nobody gon’ take care of Vernie but Vernie. When I be ‘leven years old, some niggers just like ‘Lonzo and them boys got me down in a basement one day. They tied me to a ol’ cot and put dirty ol’ socks in my mouf so I couldn’t yell. They kept me there all day; even went and got they brothers an’ they friends. When they gots tired of me, they jus’ lef me there. The building manager found me. He turned me loose—but not until he got done wif me too. I hardly could even walk. When I finally gots home, my mamma had just took her medicine, so she weren’t no help; you know how that be. The lady ‘cross the hall help me clean up. She give me the razor too. I ain’t lef the house wif out it since.”

  “Jeez,” Richie said quietly. As they walked, he kept glancing at Vernie in awe.

  Vernie stayed with him until the neighborhood started turning white, then said, “I be go on back now.”

  “Thanks,” Richie said again.

  Vernie shrugged and walked away, her hips rolling loosely under the cotton dress, shoulders back defiantly. Like Richie, like most street kids, she kept to the outside of the sidewalk, where it was easier to break and run.

  Richie thought about Vernie all the way home. Somehow, thinking about her, his own plight seemed less terrible.

  21

  One day when Richie got home from school, his mother was wearing a new dress pinned with a corsage, and Johnny was there in a suit and necktie. Estelle had come too, she and Chloe having finally resolved their spat; with her was her latest boyfriend, Duke, a sausage stuffer for Armour who had huge hands.

  When Richie walked in, his mother gave him a big hug. “Guess what, sugar?” she said with a big smile. “Uncle Johnny and I got married today!”

  Richie became very grave, frowning deeply, piqued because he had not been told, annoyed because it would have been a perfectly legitimate reason for him to stay home from school; he was fully prepared to pout and put a damper on the whole affair. But Johnny came over and kidded with him and made him shake hands, and before long Richie was grinning and being given a bottle of root beer and Estelle was teaching him how to drink a toast, which the others were drinking with real beer. When no one was looking, Johnny slipped him half a dollar.

  In the bedroom when Richie was changing into his play clothes, Chloe came in and told him they would be moving over the weekend. Richie’s shoulders slumped immediately. “Now, I know you don’t like to change schools,” Chloe said, anticipating his complaint, “‘but this will be the last time.” Sitting on the side of the bed, she drew him to her. “And listen, remember I promised that after Johnny and I got married, I’d stop sending you for my medicine? Well, I haven’t forgotten that. Just as soon as we get moved, I’m going to work it for you to just go every other day for a while, then every third day, and pretty soon not at all. After school you’ll be able to run and play just like all the other kids. Won’t that be nice?” Before she left the bedroom, Chloe gave him some more bad news. “Listen, Dorothy’s coming over to take care of you tonight. We’re all going downtown to the Blackhawk Restaurant for a wedding supper. I’d take you with us, but it’s one of those fancy grownup places that you probably wouldn’t like anyway. Afterwards we’re going to the Oriental Theater to see a movie and stage show. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll give Dorothy money for the two of you to go to a show too, would you like that?”

  Without waiting to find out if he’d like it or not, Chloe went back to the living room, leaving Richie to stand half-dressed staring after her. “Shit,” he muttered, having now substituted Vernie’s vernacular for his previous oath of “goddamn dirty son of a bitch.” Not even the fifty cents in his pocket allayed the fear and the depression of thinking about transferring to still another school, a dread that was further compounded by the immediate prospect of a miserable evening of maltreatment by Dorothy. But at least he was relieved of going to the drugstores that day; he now realized why his mother had been getting so many quarter bottles and so few fifteen-cent bottles: she was stocking up.

  When Dorothy came over, Johnny gave her an extra dollar and said, “You and the boy go over to White Castle for supper before the show.”

  “Gee, thanks!” Dorothy said with her usual smiling exuberance. It almost made Richie ill. If only, he thought, they knew Dorothy like he knew Dorothy. Someday he wished he could lure Dorothy over to Lake Street and have Vernie there waiting for her. Have Vernie pull a razor on Dorothy and scare the shit out of her. Yeah! That would be something! But secretly he knew he could not do it; Dorothy was too smart to be tricked into going into a colored neighborhood. There were stories about young white girls who ventured down Lake Street and were never heard from again.

  After everyone left that evening, Richie and Dorothy walked up to Madison Street to White Castle and sat on backless stools eating the thin but incredibly tasty ten-cent hamburgers and drinking Kayo chocolate soda pop. Dorothy was unusually quiet, not forever snapping at and scolding Richie as she normally did. To his surprise, she hardly spoke to him at all except to say, “Come on,” or “Let’s go,” or to give him some other minor command. When they reached the corner where the three movie houses were, however, he found out that she was still her same old hateful self.

  “Hey, look,” Richie said excitedly, “Drums Along the Mohawk is at the Kedzie Annex! I saw the previews of that and it looked swell!”

  “We’re going to the Senate,” Dorothy replied peremptorily, “to see Dark Victory. It’s about a rich girl who goes blind.”

  “Shit,” Richie said, rolling his eyes toward the sky.

  “What did you say?” Dorothy asked, aghast.

  “Nothing.”

  “You did so!” She slapped his lips with her fingers. “You wait until I get you home! I’m going to wash your dirty little mouth out with soap!”

  If she tries it, I’ll kill her, Richie silently swore. He pictured himself running into the kitchen, grabbing a butcher knife, and plunging it into Dorothy. Then he watched her stagger, clutching at the knife handle, through the living room, out the door, down the front steps, and into the middle of Carroll Street where she fell dead for all to see.

  “Why are you staring into space like that?” Dorothy demanded, jerking him by the arm. “Come on!”

>   She led him across the street to the Senate, a big ornate Balaban-and-Katz chain theater where the ushers wore high-collar uniforms and carried flashlights, and people were required to hold on to their ticket stubs until they left the premises. The candy counter was a brightly lit island in the middle of a big, plushly carpeted lobby. Dorothy, somewhat reluctantly, let him pick out a candy bar. Knowing her pattern of authority by now, Richie said, “Licorice twist.”

  “You can’t have that. Pick something else.”

  “Baby Ruth,” Richie said, selecting his favorite.

  In the auditorium, Dorothy led him to seats in the center of a middle row, which further irritated Richie. He liked to sit in the front row on the aisle so that he could slump far down in the seat and have the screen loom up over him, as if he were sitting on the floor of the scene. Not that it would make much difference this night. As he feared, Dark Victory turned out to be the worst movie he had seen since the night his mother made him sit through Harmony Lane. Richie would have been hard put to decide which was more boring: a rich girl going blind from a brain tumor, or a man named Stephen Foster who wore ruffled shirts and wrote songs about the Swanee River. The only redeeming value of Dark Victory was that it made Dorothy cry.

  On the way home, Richie renewed his silent plan to stab Dorothy to death, but when they got back to the apartment not only had she apparently forgotten that she intended to wash his mouth out with soap, she did not even seem interested in giving him the raw-rubbing bath. “Go on and get in the tub,” she said absently. “Wash your own self tonight.”

  Richie was in and out of the tub in record time lest she change her mind. When he came into the living room, his bed was all made up on the couch.

  “Go on to bed,” Dorothy told him.

  Richie lay in the darkness and watched as Dorothy collected several of his mother’s magazines and went into the kitchen. Through the open door, he saw her sit at the table with a bottle of Coca-Cola and idly turn pages without much interest. Once in a while she would sigh quietly and sip at the Coke. It puzzled Richie.

  He was practiced at pretending to be asleep and when Dorothy got up from the table, quietly came in, and stood looking down at him, he lay completely still, kept his eyes closed, and breathed very evenly. After several moments, he heard her walk away. Presently, the bathroom light clicked on.

  Getting out of bed, Richie crept into the hall to the bathroom. Dorothy had left the door open an inch; Richie could not see her, but he could see, in the wood-framed mirror on the medicine cabinet, her reflection. She had removed her blouse and dropped the top of her slip from both shoulders. In the mirror she was carefully examining an angry red welt at the edge of her left nipple. Because her breasts were immature, barely beginning to develop, there was no slack to hold up to the mirror; Dorothy had to turn sideways and push the young aureola out in order to better examine the wound. As she gently touched it, her eyes became teary. Turning on the cold water, she reached for a washcloth. In the movement, she noticed Richie at the crack in the door.

  “You!”

  Dorothy whirled, expression changing, anger replacing distress. Snatching open the door, she grabbed him by the undershirt as he tried to bolt away. Dragging him into the bathroom, she slammed and locked the door.

  “You want to see what he did?” she hissed. Holding him by the undershirt, she pulled his face up close to her breasts. “Take a good look! Those are teeth marks!”

  Her young features seemed to Richie to twist into a vile mask. “Wanna see the rest?” she demanded, almost as a threat. “I’ll show you the rest, goddamn you!” Quickly she stepped out of her skirt and slipped her panties over her feet. She stood naked except for Oxfords and anklets. Gripping Richie’s shoulders, she forced him to his knees on the cold linoleum floor and held his face very close to the light, downy hair of her pubes. When she raised one foot and rested it on the toilet, Richie saw on the inside of her thigh, up very close to the hair, another ugly, this time purplish bitemark. “He does this to me all the time!” Dorothy protested, taking her hands off Richie’s shoulders and pounding her own temples with them. “First it was Helen, now it’s me! Every time my old lady goes anywhere—to the movies with my aunt, to Bingo at the church, any goddamn where!—he comes into our bedroom and makes me undress. Helen won’t help me; she just leaves the room, she’s so goddamned glad he ain’t bothering her no more!” Dorothy grabbed Richie’s shoulders again and began shaking him. “I hate him! I hate the son of a bitch! I’d like to kill him!”

  Suddenly she stopped shaking him, as quickly as she had started, and stared down at him still kneeling before her. A frown settled across her brow, as if she had just then realized who he was, and was surprised by it. She put a hand on his cheek, then moved it up to brush back his hair.

  “I’m sorry, Richie,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m so mean to you. It ain’t your fault.”

  “That’s okay,” Richie replied, shrugging. He did not know anything else to say. “You can slap me if you want,” he offered.

  Shaking her head, tears coming again, Dorothy said, “No.”

  “I don’t care, honest,” Richie assured her. “If it makes you feel better. Helen always used to.”

  But Dorothy just kept shaking her head, and finally buried her face in both hands and sobbed. Still undressed, she sat down next to where Richie knelt and he self-consciously put an arm around her.

  After that night, Dorothy never mistreated him again.

  That weekend, they moved to a third-floor apartment at 2242 West Warren Boulevard. There was a front bedroom off a living room, a back bedroom off the kitchen, and a bathroom off a hall that connected everything. Unfurnished, it was completely empty except for a stove and a wooden icebox in the kitchen.

  Johnny borrowed a pickup truck from his brother-in-law who lived nearby, and while he and Chloe went off to a secondhand furniture store to buy beds, Richie made friends with a boy named Louis who lived in the building next door. Louis, who was the same age and in the same grade as Richie, told him about Grant Elementary, the school to which Richie would have to transfer.

  “It’s real tough,” Louis said. “Some niggers go there who’ll make you give ’em your milk money ‘less you got somebody to take up for you. Or ‘less you can fight good. Can you fight good?”

  Richie shook his head.

  “I can’t neither. But I got this kid named Ham to take up for me if anybody starts in on me.”

  “Ham. That’s a funny name,” Richie grinned.

  “He gets called that ’cause he’s thick like a ham, and he’s got fists like hams. I give him a nickel a week and steal him one cigarette a day from my ma’s pack, and he takes up for me. Your ma smoke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What brand?”

  “Avalons.”

  “What about your pa?”

  Richie thought about Johnny Eaton. “He rolls his own.”

  Louis grimaced. “You might have to give Ham more’n a nickel, then. He on’y likes Camels and Chesterfields.”

  “What’s your dad smoke?” Richie asked.

  Louis shrugged. “He don’t live with us.”

  Another one, Richie thought. He was glad he now had Johnny Eaton to pass off as his father.

  “You ever sell Liberty?” Louis asked.

  Richie shrugged. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a magazine for grownups. I sell Liberty every Thursday after school. Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post too. This guy comes around in a car with a trunkful of ’em. He gives you a sack that you sling across your chest, an’ six copies of each magazine. Every one you sell, you get two cents.”

  “Who do you sell ’em to?”

  “Everybody. You can go door-to-door, or sell ’em on the street corner, or go in the stores. I go door-to-door. The block we live on is mine,” he emphasized, “’but you can take the next block if you want, if nobody’s got it already. When you sell out, you can come back to the car for more. I made eig
hty-two cents last week.”

  “Jeez,” said Richie. That was serious money for an afternoon’s work. His life, he decided, had taken a definite turn for the better.

  Chloe still sent him to the drugstores for a while, but true to her promise, she began to cut down on his trips as she cut back on her consumption of paregoric. Now that Richie had Vernie for a friend, he no longer dreaded going over to Lake Street; Vernie was nearly always around, loitering on the corner with some girlfriends, sitting alone in a doorway if she was moody, pushing someone’s infant in a baby carriage to earn a nickel. Whatever she was doing, she always took time to see that Richie got in and out of the colored neighborhood safely. Richie took to filching his mother’s Avalon cigarettes for her, and bringing her movie magazines that Chloe threw out.

  “I wish yo’ mamma take to smoking something ‘sides these Avalons,” Vernie complained. “Dey tastes like shit.” But she lit up anyway. Once when Richie brought a cigarette for himself, she slapped it out of his lips. “Don’t you lemme catch you smoking, boy,” she threatened. “You ‘way too young, hear me?”

  With his other, and newer, protector, the brutish boy called Ham, it was, as Louis had predicted, a strictly cash arrangement. “ ‘Less you can get me Camels or Chesterfields, it’ll be two cents a day for me to stick up for you. Dime a week, same as you pay for milk in the lunchroom. Way I look at it, it’s a fair deal, me and milk costing the same. We bot’ keep you healthy.”

  Richie paid, and gladly, to keep the colored kids at Grant Elementary from bothering him. Ham made it clear to them the first day that he was on Richie’s side, just by walking around the schoolyard with him for everyone to see. Richie endured some snickering from kids who were tough enough to take care of themselves, but he did not care. Nearly anything was better than being beaten up after school day in and day out. The confidence of being able to go to school without fear of being bullied greatly improved Richie’s outlook on life. Even Chloe noticed it.

  “You sure must like your new school, sugar,” she said. “Since we moved over here you’ve practically stopped moping around. On Carroll Street you were getting to be a regular Weeping Willie. Do you like living here?”