Hard City

by Clark Howard

  The two men stood talking at the pharmacy counter. As they conversed, they seemed to take turns glancing up at Richie behind the fountain. Richie had the peculiar impression that they were talking about him; he tried not to look back at them, and was relieved when Midge drove up and came in.

  “Hey, sugar,” she said.

  “Hey,” Richie replied. He did not like Midge calling him “sugar.” Every time she did it, he was reminded of his mother. But he did not ask her to stop because he did not want to have to explain why.

  “Are you about ready to close up?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Richie gave the marble countertop one last wipe and set the CLOSED sign on it, as the man named Lester left.

  When Richie went to the back of the store to get his coat and say goodnight to Rollie Chalk, the druggist asked, “Was your daddy Richmond Howard, the bootlegger who disappeared after he was let out of the penitentiary?”

  “Yessir.” Richie felt like ice water had been poured down his spine. “Why?”

  “Oh, no particular reason,” Rollie Chalk said through his set smile. “Somebody just happened to mention that you were, and I wondered if they were right.” He resumed what he had been doing. “Goodnight, now.”

  Richie left the store that night with a swelling sense of foreboding.

  The following Saturday night, when Rollie Chalk closed the store and called Richie into the back to be paid, he said, “I’m letting you go tonight, Richie. I’ve decided to cut back on overhead by eliminating my fountain help. I’m going to have the other clerks cover the fountain. Tell Mrs. Reinhart I’ll be glad to give a recommendation if you need one.”

  Richie walked out on the still crowded town square in a half daze, stunned by his firing in spite of the ominous feelings nagging him since the farmer Lester’s visit to the store. Midge was parked in front of the courthouse with the pickup engine running to keep the cab warm. Turning up his collar against the cold wind, Richie trotted over to the truck and got in.

  “Hey, sugar. What’s the matter? You look downright ill.”

  “I just got fired,” he said. The words almost caught in his throat. His wonderful job, his beautiful soda fountain, the earnings he needed to pay his own way—all suddenly gone. He felt sick.

  “What in the world happened?” Midge asked in surprise. Richie told her what Rollie Chalk had said about reducing overhead. “Oh, sugar, I’m so sorry,” she commiserated, putting a warm palm on his cheek. “Listen, as soon as school’s over, I’ll get daddy to give you a job on the farm.”

  “I’ll need a job lots sooner than that,” Richie said. “I have to pay my own way, you know. My grandmother’s only got a small pension.”

  “Well, you can find another job in the meantime,” Midge said optimistically. “Mrs. Reinhart can probably help you.”

  Mrs. Reinhart could not. When Richie saw her on Monday and reported what had happened, she was immediately disheartened. “Oh, no! That man. He promised to support the D.E. program for the full school year. Well, business is business, I suppose.” As always, Mrs. Reinhart rallied her usual high spirits and perked up. “Well, we’ll just have to find something else for you. There’s nothing available right now, but I’ll make a few telephone calls and see what I can do. In the meantime, you’ll have to attend study hall the last two periods in the afternoon. It’ll give you a chance to do some extra reading; I’ll see about letting you use the Hi-Life room one of those periods to do some extra work on the paper.”

  When Richie told Mrs. Clark that he had been fired, she immediately asked, “Was it for stealing?”

  “No, it wasn’t for stealing,” Richie replied irritably. “How come you always think the worst of me right away?”

  “I only asked. What was it for?”

  “Mr. Chalk’s just cutting back on help, is all.”

  “You’re fixing to find another job right away, I hope,” she said. Richie nodded.

  “Mrs. Reinhart’s going to help me look.”

  “That’s good,” Mrs. Clark said, “because I can’t support you, you know that. It’s all I can do to take care of myself.”

  “Don’t worry, Miss Ethel, you won’t have to support me.” Putting on his coat, he started for the door.

  “Where are you going this time of night?” Mrs. Clark wanted to know.

  “For a walk.”

  “It’s cold out,” she warned.

  “I like the cold,” he said, leaving.

  Walking down the hill to the depot, Richie started along the cinder path next to the tracks. The air was thin and crisp, the night very clear and light with a glowing full moon. As he walked, Richie wished he had someone to talk to: Linda or Stan Klein, or Myron or Mack, or Vernie. It was impossible to talk to his grandmother; she had too many defenses. Aside from her there was only Midge, and all she had on her mind was sex: having it, planning it, talking about it, getting ready for it. She did not read, except for movie magazines, so they had nothing in common there. She professed to love him, and insisted that he say he loved her, which he accommodated her by saying, but he doubted that it was love he felt; it was not nearly as compelling and pleasant as the feelings he had experienced with Linda. What he did love was what they did together in the cab of her pickup. To that extent, where it involved her body, he was definitely in love. But aside from the physical there was nothing.

  Walking along the moonlit tracks, the cold cinders crunching under each step, Richie wondered why he always ended up alone.

  And wondered if it would always be that way in his life.

  A week later he was walking by Chalk’s Drug Store and saw a new soda jerk behind the fountain. At first incredulous, then coldly angry, he turned his head to glare at Rollie Chalk, who was standing in the front door, looking out, smiling at the world. Chalk refused to meet Richie’s eyes, his gaze going right past Richie as if he were not there. Richie stalked home infuriated.

  “He hired somebody new for my job!” he announced lividly to his grandmother. She was sitting in front of their oil stove, hand sewing a quilt which she would later try to sell.

  “There must have been some other reason he fired you, then,” she remarked with her usual candid logic. Staring at her, Richie’s mind churned and fitted together pieces of knowledge.

  “Do you know a farmer named Lester?” he asked. Mrs. Clark stopped sewing.

  “I know of him. Why?”

  Richie told her about the scowling man’s visit to the drugstore and his feeling that the conversation had been about him. “Right after that was when Mr. Chalk asked me if I was Richmond Howard’s son and I told him I was.”

  Mrs. Clark avoided his eyes. “Maybe that was it, then. Maybe Rollie Chalk don’t want a bootlegger’s son working in his store.”

  “But I was a good worker!” Richie protested the inequity. “He told me himself that I was one of the best soda jerks he ever had.”

  “It’s his store,” Mrs. Clark said flatly.

  “Well, it’s not fair!” Richie stormed. Inside, he was seething. “I’d like to take Rollie Chalk by the throat and make him admit why he fired me.”

  “Go on and do it, if you want to go back to that reform school,” his grandmother said.

  “It might be worth it!”

  “Do it, then. Nobody’s stopping you. You’ll only have to stay there three more years.”

  The thought of three more years in Charleytown tempered Richie’s outrage a little, but he was still bristling. “It’s not fair, it’s just not fair,” he stewed.

  “Life’s not fair,” Mrs. Clark observed calmly.

  Richie shook his head in utter frustration. It was just like the goddamned Off-the-Street Club; the rules had been changed on him again. Only this time, he suddenly decided, he wasn’t going to tear up his book report and quit. This time he was going to fight back, he was going to make it. He wasn’t going to be made to give up—not again.

  Richie swore he was going to get through the school year no matter what.
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br />   Even if he had to start stealing again.

  45

  For the month before Christmas, Mrs. Reinhart got Richie a temporary job as stock boy for Family Shoe Store. Because of the volume of holiday business in shoe sales, particularly house slippers for gifts, the store wanted its sales clerks to be able to wait on several customers at a time without having to leave them to get shoes from stock. After being shown how the stock numbers were sequenced, Richie ran back and forth bringing out the styles and sizes the clerks needed.

  “I’m sorry it’s only a Christmas job,” Mrs. Reinhart said when she told him about it, “but maybe after the first of the year we can do better.”

  “Any kind of job’s okay with me,” Richie assured her. “I just need to work.”

  “I know,” the teacher said quietly. “I know you do.”

  Christmas day for Richie was more an annoyance than anything else. Midge’s parents took her with them to Arkansas to spend the holidays with her father’s brother and his family. “It is such a pain!” she complained. “But there’s no way I can get out of it. We rotate—Christmas at our house one year, theirs the next. I just hate not being with you at Christmas.”

  “It’s okay,” Richie said. “My grandmother and I are having a big dinner at home.”

  That was a lie. Mrs. Clark had been invited to spend Christmas day with a friend of hers, a spinster named Miss Bessie, who also lived on Moreridge Street. “I’ll ask Miss Bessie if you can come too, if you want to,” Mrs. Clark offered.

  “Thanks anyway, but I’m having Christmas dinner out at Midge’s farm,” Richie lied again.

  On Christmas day he stayed home alone, eating bologna sandwiches and reading The Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport.

  The shoe store kept him on for a week after Christmas to help put the stock back in order, then let him go. Although she had been looking, Mrs. Reinhart had not been able to find anything else for him. “I’m sure something will turn up,” she said with her usual optimism. “In the meantime, why don’t you let me help you apply to county relief for some temporary help—”

  “No, ma’am,” Richie refused to even entertain the idea. “I don’t want any welfare help. Anyway, I can get along all right for a few months; I’ve got some money saved up.” That was only half a lie; he had enough savings to last a few weeks, not months.

  In February, he stopped eating lunch at school, going to the study hall instead. He began stealing candy bars, paying for one while slipping two or three others into his coat pocket. Instead of giving Mrs. Clark the full amount of his weekly board, he asked if he could supply some of the groceries instead.

  “The manager up at Kroger’s said I could do some odd jobs for him—sweeping up, that kind of thing. He’ll either pay me or let me take it out in merchandise at wholesale prices.”

  Richie had devised the scheme after discovering that Kroger’s was a shoplifter’s paradise: narrow aisles arranged in such a fashion that the clerk at the cash register counter could not see most of the store while checking out a customer. By leaving his coat hanging open and slipping what he wanted inside his shirt, Richie was able to steal three or four items at a time: small canned goods, packaged lunchmeat, sticks of butter, wedges of cheese, boxes of salt and pepper, and other staples that Mrs. Clark told him they needed. He would always pay for at least one item, usually bread, milk, or eggs, and get a paper bag to put the stolen food in before he got home.

  Midge, suspecting that he was not getting enough to eat, started “just happening” to have a little food in the truck when she picked him up.

  “I want you to try this cake,” she would say. “I made it with my own little hands.” Or she might have a bag of pretzels and a couple of Dr Peppers, “ ’cause I was hungry and I thought you might be too.”

  Richie was not fooled. “I’m not a charity case, Midge,” he finally told her. “You don’t have to feed me like some hobo.”

  She played it as lightly as she could. “I assure you my reasons are strictly dishonorable. Afer all, we do burn up energy out on these country roads.”

  Now and then, Midge broached the subject of a future together. Unaware that Richie was actually a year younger—she thought he was a year older—she clearly had ideas that included marriage. “You know, sugar, whoever marries me will eventually become a partner in my daddy’s farm. Do you think,” she asked coyly, “that we could make a cotton farmer out of a city boy like you?”

  “I doubt it,” Richie replied with an edge. It was because of a goddamned farmer that he was out of a job.

  In March, Richie’s money ran out and he was completely broke. He did not have the price of a haircut, did not have money to buy a loaf of bread as an excuse to go into the Kroger store to steal food, had no money at all to give to Mrs. Clark for his board. He had already asked at every store around the square if there were any odd jobs he could do, any work at all, just as Mrs. Reinhart kept periodically trying for him. But there was nothing. The cold winter months in a rural farming area were slow; businesses, like the farmers themselves, just dug in and tried to get by. Even on Saturday, the traditional day to go to town, many people opted to stay home. It was easier—and cost less.

  Richie knew he had to begin some serious stealing if he was to get by. There was, as he saw it, no alternative; he would not ask for, or take, charity. He had drawn a line at that, and he would not step over it. Looking around town, he decided at once against shoplifting merchandise to sell, as he had been so successful doing in Chicago; stores in Lamont were much smaller and carried less expensive items, and even if he were able to snag something good—a watch or some costume jewelry—he had no place to sell it; there was no Midwest A.C. here where people open to the purchase of hot merchandise gathered. There were no newsstands either, from which to filch coins, no liquor store loading docks where deposit bottles might be swiped—but there were, Richie had already noted, several vending machines around the square.

  The first one he took was a nickel peanut machine the Chamber of Commerce had in an arcade of small stores next to one of the banks. The stores closed at six, but the arcade itself was open all night so that people could window-shop. After estimating the size of the machine, and surreptitiously checking to make certain it would unscrew from its stand, Richie found the proper size empty cardboard box behind one of the stores, and late that night boldly walked into the arcade and made off with the machine. Using a screwdriver shoplifted from the hardware store, he pried off the bottom plate and retrieved more than six dollars in nickels. Putting the machine back into the box, he tossed it into the coal car of a passing freight train. The next day, with the nickels tied securely in a sock, the sock wrapped in a shirt, all of it in a paper bag, he hitchhiked to the town of Overland, sixteen miles away, and cashed the coins in at a bank for currency. On his way out of Overland, Richie saw a gumball machine outside a gas station next to the highway. Getting a Coca-Cola, he loitered at the side of the station drinking it until the attendant got busy helping two customers. Then he carried the machine into the men’s room, pried it open on the floor, and left it there after filling his sock with pennies and wrapping it up again. He was out on the highway and had hitchhiked a ride back toward Lamont while the attendant was still cleaning windshields.

  For the rest of that month, Richie spent Saturdays and Sundays scouring the little towns within a thirty-mile radius of Lamont, stealing any kind of vending machine he could find. It turned out to be surprisingly simple to do. Setting his empty box on the sidewalk, he would loiter next to the machine as if waiting for someone. Two or three times he would put money in the machine, each time turning it as much as he could. When he was certain it was loosened on its stand, he would wait for the right moment, slip the box over it, and walk away holding the bottom closed with the machine inside. Although easy, it was nevertheless gut-wrenching work that tied his stomach in knots every time he did it. He never looked back as he walked away; it was only when he was half a block down the str
eet or up the highway that he began to relax. At the first convenient place he found—an alley, some bushes, a restroom—he pried open the machine, got the money, and with his empty box headed for another town. As soon as he got there, he would cash the coins in for currency before stealing a machine there. His routine of theft did not earn him the eighteen-fifty a week he had been making as a soda jerk, but at least he was able to pay his board most weeks, and even have enough left over occasionally to eat lunch.

  In April, Richie was asked if he wanted to work at Family Shoe Store again during the two weeks before Easter. He jumped at the chance and was once again running shoe stock after school. During that period he had lunch money again and was able to buy, at a discount in the store, some badly needed socks. But the two weeks went by quickly and he was faced again with no income and a long six weeks remaining until school was out. It was then that he began thinking about going back to Chicago for the summer. When he talked to Midge about it, she naturally opposed the idea.

  “What in the world will I do all summer long without a boyfriend?” she asked. “And what about the job I was going to have my daddy give you on the farm?”

  “Midge, I don’t know anything about farm work,” he told her. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t fit in with your daddy’s other help any more than I fit in at school.”

  “Things are getting better for you at school,” she said. “I see people talking to you in the halls now and I never did before.”

  “Sure, there are a few people who talk to me,” Richie admitted, “but that’s as far as it goes. I’m still not accepted by most of them; I’m never invited to any social activities, never invited to join anything; hell, I wouldn’t even be working on the school paper if it wasn’t for Mrs. Reinhart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about it; I’m pretty much used to it now, just like I’m used to the fact that Billy Pastor is never going to let up on me. But I don’t want to stay here all summer and put up with the same thing. If I’m not doing it in order to go to school, it just wouldn’t be worth it.”