Hard City

by Clark Howard

  For a little while that evening, it was almost as if they were normal people.

  Except that Richie could not stop thinking about George, who had been sitting with Chloe in that same place just a little while earlier.

  George, the “Spaniard.”

  Richie knew instinctively that George would bring them trouble.

  25

  Chloe had met George through Nell, a woman with whom she had worked at the bakery. She had run into Nell one afternoon on Damen Avenue on her way to the grocery.

  “This must be fate,” Nell said. “My boyfriend’s coming up from Chanute Field this weekend and he’s bringing a pal of his. How’d you like to double-date with us?”

  “For God’s sake, Nell, I’m a married woman,” Chloe demurred.

  “Hell, so am I,” Nell revealed for the first time. “My Walter is in the navy on duty in the Atlantic. I don’t imagine for one minute that he’s keeping his bell bottoms buttoned up when he’s in port in England. Anyway, this is just for fun, Chloe.”

  After some urging, Chloe had hesitantly agreed. It would, she promised herself, be fun but innocent. She intended to make it clear that she was married, and she intended to establish certain rules: there would be no kissing, of course, no hand holding, no touching of any kind. She would have only one glass of beer, then switch to ginger ale, and she would excuse herself promptly at ten o’clock and go home alone. She saw nothing wrong with having an innocent evening out; God knows it had been a long time since the last one. Estelle had been gone for six months: married to a sailor and living in California. Chloe wondered if maybe she and Nell could become best friends now.

  Nell was a little embarrassed when her friend’s friend turned out not to be white. “I swear to God, Chloe, I had no idea!” she pleaded in the ladies’ room of the tavern on Homan Avenue where they all met.

  “What in the world is he?” Chloe wanted to know.

  “He says he’s Spanish. God knows, he’s handsome, ain’t he? Did you ever see teeth that perfect except in the movies?”

  “I’m not sure I should stay, Nell,” Chloe said apprehensively. “What in the world do you say to someone who’s Spanish?”

  “Hell, honey, the same things you’d say to a white man. Mainly no!” Nell laughed raucously at her own wit, but Chloe only managed to smile weakly.

  In the end, Chloe had stayed, and the evening had turned out very well. George Zangara was a perfect gentleman; he held Chloe’s chair for her, lighted her cigarettes, did not try to get her to drink anything except ginger ale, and at no time put his hands on her in any way. They all sat at a back table and the men, both in Air Corps browns with sergeant stripes, bought a roll of nickels with which to keep playing a large, brightly lit Wurlitzer jukebox. They talked about the things the rest of wartime America was talking about.

  “Did you hear,” Nell exclaimed, “that ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ is going off the radio after fifteen years because of the war! Campbell’s soup can’t get tin to make cans to sell soup in, so it can’t afford to sponsor the program anymore.”

  “The Krauts are gonna pay for that,” her boyfriend Randy said ominously.

  “I read where Leslie Howard was in a plane shot down over the English Channel,” Chloe said. “He was so good in Gone With the Wind. I certainly hope nothing happens to Clark Gable. He didn’t have to go, you know; he’s past forty. But he enlisted anyway.”

  “Did you read about that town in New York that’s forming a women’s fire department ’cause there’s no men left? Ain’t that something?”

  “I heard,” Nell said sadly, ‘“that there won’t be any Christmas cards this year because of the paper shortage.”

  “The Krauts will pay for that too,” said Randy.

  “Has anybody seen that new silver penny they’ve put out?” Nell asked. “I’m dying to see one.”

  “Starting next week, we aren’t supposed to eat meat on Tuesdays. They’re calling it ‘Meatless Tuesday.’ ”

  “The Krauts are gonna pay for that,” Randy reintoned. Nell poked his arm with a stiff finger.

  “You keep saying the Krauts are going to pay–what about the Japs, don’t they count?”

  “Not as much, not to me,” Randy said. “I’m half Jewish. My grandparents still have relatives in Europe. We used to hear what the Krauts were doing, before their letters stopped coming. The Krauts have led the way in the war. Without that agreement with the Krauts, the Nips never would’ve started anything in the Pacific. It’s the Krauts that’ll have to pay, all right.” He took hold of the finger Nell had poked him with. “Come on, let’s dance.”

  Alone in the booth with George, Chloe said, “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  “Sure, sometimes,” George replied with a pearly smile. “And sometimes I just listen.”

  “How do you like the Air Corps?”

  “It’s wonderful, I really love it,” he answered with a straight face. “I hope and pray they’ll let me stay in after the war.”

  Chloe saw a twinkle of mischief in his eyes and knew she was being teased. “Okay,” she laughed. “Sorry I asked.”

  “Nell says your husband’s in the army.”

  “Yes. Fortieth Division. Last I heard they were on New Guinea. Now that the Japs have retreated from there, I’m not sure where he is.”

  “Those guys in the infantry, they’re the real heroes in this war,” George allowed. “You read a lot about fighter pilots and submariners and commandos, but if we didn’t have the infantry, we’d’ve lost the war already. I tried to get in the infantry when I was drafted, but they wouldn’t take me. My left ankle’s been broke and didn’t mend just right. I don’t limp or nothing like that, but it’s not as strong as it should be. So they put me in the Air Corps. I refuel supply planes. I guess that’s important too.”

  “Of course it is,” Chloe stressed. “My goodness, without supply planes, why, the boys overseas wouldn’t have any food or ammunition or anything. What you do is very important, George.”

  “It’s nice of you to say so.” He gave her another brilliant smile.

  Chloe almost reached out and patted his hand to reassure him that he was doing his part in the war effort, but she checked the impulse. It was, after all, her rule that there was to be no touching.

  Chloe started seeing George three out of every four weekends; the fourth weekend he had duty and was restricted to the field. On the Saturday nights that she went out, Chloe told Richie that she was meeting Estelle to go to a show. Richie suspected nothing and was not bothered about her spending Saturday evenings out; she had finally conceded to his demands that she stop having Dorothy come over to stay with him when Chloe was out late. “You can stay home alone, but I want you to promise me that you will not leave this apartment. I will not have you running the streets at night with some of the kids I see in this neighborhood. Promise?”

  “I promise,” Richie said solemnly. “Can I stay up and listen to the radio?”

  “I guess so.”

  It was never Richie’s intent to listen to the radio; he only asked the question to reinforce his promise to stay in. As soon as Chloe was gone five minutes, Richie was out meeting Stan Klein.

  Chloe was enjoying her evenings out so much that it never occurred to her to worry about Richie. She had never known him to disobey her, not seriously, and that was reassuring. So many kids were getting in trouble lately, with the war on and all; she decided she was very lucky that Richie was such a good boy. The only thing that was really troubling her about Richie was that she was soon going to have to start sending him to four drugstores a day instead of three. The amount of paregoric she was taking no longer seemed to calm her nerves the way it used to; she was going to have to increase her dose, which meant an additional bottle a day. Richie, she knew, was going to have a fit.

  But it had to be done. The calm on the amount she was now taking, which used to last the rest of the night, was wearing off around nine o’clock. George noticed it one Saturday night
at the tavern.

  “You seem nervous,” he said. “Anything the matter?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. She looked away, avoiding his dark, direct eyes. George was a sensuous, very attractive man. Usually the paregoric kept her composed and helped her deal with his appeal and the magnetism he exuded. Without the paregoric, conflicts arose within her.

  “I’d like to help, if there’s anything I can do,” George said quietly. “I am your friend, you know.”

  “I know,” she forced a brief smile. “But I’m not nervous, really I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are,” he contradicted. Chloe’s face flushed irritation.

  “If I say I’m not, what in the world makes you think you know better?”

  “I can just tell,” George said, his voice easy and soothing, as if he were talking to an upset child. “I can tell by the way your fingers move around so much, the way your pretty eyes shift all over the place.”

  Chloe stared at him. On the jukebox “Serenade in Blue” was playing, and Randy and Nell were slow-dancing to it.

  “Do you really think my eyes are pretty?” Chloe asked. She had always thought they were herself, but no one, not Richmond or Jack or anyone, had ever told her so before.

  “Prettiest brown eyes I ever saw,” George said. “Too pretty to be nervous.” After a quick glance at Nell and Randy, he leaned close to her ear. “I’ve got something you can smoke that will calm you down and make you feel like a million. Want to give it a try?”

  Chloe felt her lower lip tremble; immediately she curled it under her upper teeth for a moment to stop it. Her nerve ends seemed like they were about to puncture through her skin. Releasing her lip, she said, “All right, why not?” She knew what he was talking about: the stuff they called “weed.” Estelle had tried it once and said it wasn’t as much fun as drinking whiskey. Chloe saw no harm in just seeing what it was like.

  “Only thing is,” George said after she accepted his offer, “we can’t smoke it here. It’s got a peculiar smell to it, you know. We have to have someplace private to smoke.”

  Chloe bit her lip again. “My little boy will probably still be up, listening to the radio. Could we sit on the steps in the hall? Will that be private enough?”

  “Is there a window we can blow the smoke out?”

  She nodded. “There’s a window on the landing between floors.”

  They told Nell and Randy they were going for a walk and George leaned over to say something private to Randy. Then George walked Chloe home, without holding her hand or taking her arm, which reassured Chloe and made her think what she was doing was still altogether innocent. Although by now that aspect of it was rapidly diminishing in importance; mushrooming larger and larger in her mind was the demand of her whole being that she give it something. So compelling was her need that when they got to her building and she went inside to get George a bottle of beer and found that Richie was not there, it relieved instead of disturbed her.

  “We can go inside,” she told George. “I guess my little boy went to a show or something.”

  While George sat on the sofa and rolled marijuana cigarettes, Chloe went into the bathroom, reached far up under the old tub, and retrieved a John Ruskin cigar box, the same kind in which Richie kept his treasures. From it she removed her extra twenty-five-cent bottle of paregoric, the bottle she kept for dire emergencies such as Richie being kept after school and delaying her daily supply an hour or two. Drinking half the bottle, straight, without any sugar or even water, she then replaced the remainder in its hiding place.

  George drank beer while smoking his weed and showing Chloe how to smoke hers. He tried to get her to drink a little beer also. “It’ll make the weed work on you better,” he said. But Chloe declined. She was already concerned about how much her paregoric would increase and intensify what she was smoking; she did not need Blatz beer on top of it.

  The marijuana began to work first, the tide of its euphoria slapping gently at the shore of her nerves. Then the slower-acting paregoric followed with larger waves and rushes from an ocean of feeling that grew deeper, darker. Soon the two combined into a tidal wave that moved in without opposition, attacked in force, and spread itself all over the beach that was her being, flooding every crevice of her, reaching places from which she was sure she had never before experienced feeling. Delight became joy, joy became rapture, and Chloe was transported to a high, soft place where all was blissful, all was glorious, all, unlike the place from which she came, was well.

  George was amazed. Even though he was getting high himself, and knew her reaction was being exaggerated in his mind, he nevertheless realized that Chloe was experiencing rare and unusual sensations. As his own well-being rapidly increased, he shook his head in wonder and said, “Jesus, I never saw nobody go up like that before. Honey, this stuff was made for you.” Later, when the weed’s effects had worn off, but Chloe was still in her paregoric fog, George asked, “Did you feel as good as it looked like you felt?”

  “Better,” Chloe replied, smiling lazily. George showed his perfect teeth.

  “Want me to bring some more next weekend?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Gee, I wish I could,” George said, his dark, handsome features turning sad. “But I promised to take some to another lady I know. I like you better than her, but she, well, kind of does things for me. I mean a guy gets lonely when he’s away from home, you know? This other lady, well she kind of relieves my loneliness.” He moved closer to Chloe on the sofa. “Do you know what I’m talking about?” he asked.

  “I know what you’re talking about,” she nodded sleepily. Reaching over, she felt the erection in his trousers. “You’re talking about that,” she said.

  “Hey, that’s right!” he praised.

  “Is it lonely too? Like you?”

  “Worse than me.” He unbuttoned his fly, worked a couple of fingers around inside his trousers, and got it out. It was large, veined, and much darker than the rest of George. It was, Chloe thought, almost black. In fact, it was black. But George wasn’t, she assured herself. George was Spanish; that was not black. It was more like brown, certainly not black. If George were black, why she would not touch his—him—no matter what it got her.

  But he was not black.

  Only it was black.

  Not him.

  “Be nice to it, honey,” George said.

  Chloe leaned over, closing her eyes. If she kept her eyes closed, she would not be able to see that it was black.

  Richie hated George Zangara. Hated him with a cold consuming passion.

  “What’s the best way to kill a guy?” he asked Stan. His friend’s eyebrows went up.

  “What guy?”

  “Any guy.” Richie’s voice was fierce.

  Stan nodded knowingly. “You mean the Air Corps guy that comes to see your old lady on weekends?” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Forget it. He ain’t worth killing. You oughta see some of the bums my old lady drags home!”

  They were sitting on the curb, Richie staring straight ahead, his young face tight with resentment. Stan, recognizing the bitterness in his friend’s tone, fell quiet for a moment, then took another tack.

  “Listen,” he reasoned, “it don’t make sense to ask for that kind of trouble. S’pose you was to stick a knife in the guy’s neck some night when he’s coming down the stairs in the dark? What good would it do? There’d prob’ly be another guy to take his place in a week. Mothers ain’t very smart when it comes to guys.” Now Stan’s tone became philosophical. “Way I look at it there’s on’y one good reason to kill anybody. That’s for money. Any other reason just ain’t smart.”

  Although sensing that Stan was right—Stan was nearly always right, about everything—Richie’s mind nevertheless continued to be consumed by thoughts of murder. And instead of trying to control or discourage them, he nourished them. He was able—by hanging far over the railing of a back stairs landing—to watch them in bed, after raising the windowshade a
n inch before going out. If he sneaked back into the apartment, he could listen to the sounds of their sex through the bedroom door. Once, in a moment of insane but irresistible impulse, he hid under the bed and listened and felt what they were doing just inches above his face. His mother had begged for something.

  “Let’s do the other first, hon,” she said. “Come on, roll us a couple.”

  “No, no, no,” George replied with a lilt to his smooth voice. “First you got to show your Georgie how much you love him.”

  “We can do that after, hon, please . . .”

  “No, no, no. Loving first, baby—you know how I am. I’ll roll us a couple of real good ones when we’re through, but first I want you to show me if you remember what I taught you last week. You know, with your tongue and two fingers . . . .”

  Richie had no idea what it was his mother wanted George to “roll,” but suspected it was probably something like paregoric, something his mother thought she could not do without. He was now going to four drugstores for her “medicine” every afternoon and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Her reversion to paregoric, and the association she had begun with George, had the potential, Richie realized, for wrecking the orderly life he expected them to resume when Johnny Eaton returned from the war. It was a life Richie fondly remembered, a life in which he had only to concern himself with boyish things—cowboy movies, marbles, comic books, kick-the-can, radio serials; a life with a father who came home every day, a mother who stayed home every day, a regular, steady life, everything neat, no surprises, a life without paregoric and people like George Zangara, with his slick charm and white teeth, who had somehow managed to get control of his mother and was doing all those lousy things to her . . . .

  A knife in the neck as he came down the dark stairs, Stan had said. Maybe it would be worth it, just for the moment, just for the brief feel of the blade tip puncturing that smooth brown skin. But instead, Richie rebelled against his mother; it was easier, and she was to blame anyway. He punished her the only way he knew how: by making her wait for her medicine.