Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Getting into the car, Richie turned the ignition that Bobby had hot-wired earlier and started the car, leaving it in neutral, letting the engine idle. He kept glancing up to make sure the three faces were still in the window.

  Removing the money from the bag, he stuffed it into his shirt. Sweating profusely, he got back out, letting the chilly night air cool him. He checked the faces again; they were still there. Leaving the driver’s door open for Bobby, he went around the car and opened the passenger door for himself. Then he saw Bobby trotting across the street to the car, looking back over his shoulder at the window.

  “Leave ’em their dope,” Bobby said as he hurried up.

  Richie stepped over to the streetlight and set the paper bag on the curb. As he straightened, he looked at the men in the window again. They were still there, watching, doing nothing to jeopardize getting back their stock in trade. Suddenly Richie thought of his mother. In his mind he saw her young and pretty as she had once been, and watched in horror as the image slowly changed to drug-ravaged and degenerated. Grimly he snatched back the bag and began removing the glassine envelopes. There was a sewer grate just in front of the streetlight and Richie methodically began dropping the shiny envelopes into the dark sewer.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Bobby demanded from the car. He had the headlights on, ready to leave. Ignoring him, Richie continued to cram the heroin through the sewer grating. When he had disposed of it all, he looked up and saw that there was only one face left in the window. Grabbing his muscle with one hand, he rotated his fist at the black man: Fuck you. Then he hurried to the car and Bobby screeched away from the curb. Two of the black men were running out of the building as they sped away.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” Bobby demanded as he guided the car into boulevard traffic.

  “Because I felt like it,” Richie said coldly.

  “Why? ’Cause your old lady was a junkie?”

  “Mind your own fucking business!” Richie snapped.

  “Hey, my old man was a juicer, but I don’t go around breaking bottles of booze—”

  “Good for you. Now drop it!”

  “Okay, I will!” Bobby snapped back. “But on the next one, it’s my turn to leave with the bag and your turn to stay behind. And I’m leaving the dope, see? That was part of Stan’s plan—leave the junk and they prob’ly wouldn’t come after us. You’re gonna fuck things up and put too much heat on us!”

  “Okay, okay!” Richie conceded. “We’ll leave the shit from now on!” Snatching out a handkerchief, he wiped a sheet of sweat from his face.

  Bobby was right, he knew. It was a little late to try getting even for his mother. The main thing right now was to try and help Stan.

  As they drove, Richie kept one hand under his coat, on the grip of the automatic. His souvenir.

  Linda was coming home with Richie two or three nights a week. They usually stopped at a market to pick something up for supper, then went to the apartment, put the groceries away, and got undressed immediately to make love. From a frightened, almost frigid girl, Linda had quickly become an eager, sensual young woman who lusted for Richie’s body and ministrations as much as he did for hers. Sexually they were highly attuned, compatible in attitude, smooth in intercourse, pliant in experimentation. Like Frances Rozinski had been nearly a decade earlier, Linda was fascinated by Richie’s ejaculate; she could not get enough of watching him come, so much so that half of their lovemaking was done with hand or mouth.

  “I love it when you spurt,” she said often, delighting in masturbating him into her mouth or onto her breasts.

  They made love, one way or another, twice each night that she was over. Because Richie had later classes on some days, he gave her a key so that she could do the shopping and take care of putting supper on, then be ready for him when he got home. Neither of them wanted to waste a minute; their time together was precious to them.

  The compulsion for each other took a toll in other areas. Richie’s work on his short stories slackened, and his study time, particularly for Mr. Crane’s creative writing class, where he was striving so diligently to grasp what he was missing, was reduced significantly. Linda was having problems at home. “My mother knows something’s up,” she told Richie. “I keep telling her I’m going to the library or to a special tutoring class or something, but I don’t think I’m fooling her. I’ve been so relaxed lately, I’m sure she’s noticed a difference in me. The other day I saw her rummaging through my laundry basket, looking at my underwear. Probably checking for stains.”

  When Richie began the drug-dealer stickups, he had to have an excuse for the nights he would be out. He hated lying to Linda and tried to stay as close to the truth as possible. Telling her about Stan Klein’s situation, he said, “A few of us are trying to raise money to help him get a better lawyer. We’re soliciting donations from people who might want to help him. It’ll only be for a few nights now and then.”

  Linda’s face had registered disappointment. “Oh, Richie,” she said unhappily. “You’re not going to get mixed up with hoodlums again, are you?”

  “Stan was a close friend of mine, honey; at one time he was the only close friend I had. I can’t let him down when he’s in trouble.”

  Nodding her head knowingly, Linda said, “Some friend. I remember reading about his case in the papers. That officer he murdered had a wife and three children.”

  “Look, I know he did a terrible thing; I’m not saying he shouldn’t be punished. I just want him to have a fair chance at a life sentence instead of the electric chair.”

  “I wish you’d just stay away from the whole thing and everybody involved in it,” Linda said stoically.

  “I owe Stan, honey,” he said resolvedly. “It’ll only be for a few nights, then I’ll drop it.”

  When Richie and Bobby Casey pulled their second stickup the first night, in a building far across the projects, they had, as agreed beforehand, reversed roles, with Bobby leaving first with the loot and Richie holding the drug dealers at bay. Without telling Bobby, Richie had pinned his Sharpshooter pistol medal from the Marine Corps on his shirt, and after Bobby hurried out of the apartment, he had pulled his coat back to show it to the men he was covering.

  “See this?” he said coldly. “Take a good look at it! It means I know how to use this fucking gun I’m holding! Any of you fuck with me and I’ll shoot you right in the fucking balls!”

  At that moment, he had felt ready to kill. Not only for what people like them helped do to his mother, but also to preserve the new life he now had, and his future with Linda. He did not want to kill, but he wanted them to know he could, and would, if necessary. The men believed him; nobody did anything foolish. On that holdup, Bobby Casey left the heroin on the curb, as he had agreed.

  From the two stickups on Monday, Richie and Bobby netted thirty-one hundred dollars. After they ditched the stolen car, Bobby insisted that Richie take care of the money. “You’re clean,” he said. “Aside from that bullshit at the jail when you visited Stan, the cops don’t even know you no more. Juvenile records in Illinois are destroyed when you’re eighteen, so you’re practically a cherry, man. The dough’ll be safer with you.”

  Richie wrapped the money in an undershirt and put it at the bottom of his old seabag in the back of his closet.

  On the second night of holdups, carried out in still other far-flung areas of the vast housing project, Richie and Bobby varied their routine a little. In case word had spread about two white stickup men, one of them now hid on the stairs and waited while the other one went in alone. After the one going in got control, he let the other in. The third and fourth holdups went as smoothly as the previous pair, and each time the heroin was left behind as balm to mollify the dealers who had lost their money. The second night, they grabbed twenty-three hundred dollars which increased their legal fund to five thousand four hundred. “One more night should do it,” Bobby Casey said. “Friday night, the way Stan planned. Okay with you?”
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br />   “Yeah, sure,” Richie said. When he got back to his apartment after the second night of holdups, he felt thrashed, drained, lifeless. He slept for twelve hours, missing his morning classes the next day. When he finally went to school at noon, he encountered a very concerned Linda.

  “Richie, my God, you look terrible. Are you sick?”

  “I think I’ve got stomach flu or something,” he said, not too convincingly. Linda felt his forehead to see if he had a fever.

  “How late were you out last night?” she asked peevishly.

  “I got home around midnight,” he said, and instantly regretted not lying. There was no way she could check on him; he had no telephone. But he had told the truth without thinking, and he could tell by the look on her face that she was upset.

  “Why you are running around until all hours trying to help that lowlife is something I simply cannot understand,” she said crossly. “And where in the world do you solicit money that late at night? Are you sure you’re not involved in something you’re not telling me about?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, Linda,” he replied evenly. “Anyway, Friday night is my last night to help, then I’ll be through with it. Okay?”

  “Well, I hope so,” she said adamantly. “I’ve made up my mind to tell my mother about us. That means I’ll be taking you out to meet her. I wouldn’t want to have to conceal anything from her that I was ashamed of. After what she went through with my father, and what I went through with Glenn, we are both very choosy about men, very discriminating.”

  “I’ll try to come up to everyone’s standards,” Richie remarked.

  Linda’s lips compressed as she readied a retort, but at that moment a buzzer signaled the call to class. “We’ll discuss this after creative writing,” she said instead.

  Richie shook his head. “I’ve changed my mind about going to class; I don’t think I could take Crane today. I’m going back home. Come on over later,” he said walking away. Over his shoulder he added, “If you want to.”

  Walking off the campus, for the first time Richie felt about the university as he remembered feeling about Lamont. Once again he was not sure that he belonged where he was.

  On Friday night, Richie and Bobby hit it lucky on their first holdup. In the car as Bobby sped into boulevard traffic to drive to still another part of the projects, Richie quickly counted their loot. “Jesus Christ, we got twenty-seven hundred bucks off those guys,” he said elatedly. “That gives us over eight grand. Skip the other one, let’s ditch the car.”

  “Let’s hit the other one for ourselves,” Bobby said. “I could use a little quick bread.”

  “No deal,” Richie said. “I was in for seventy-five hundred; we’ve made that and more. Now let’s ditch the car.”

  “Sure, what the fuck do you care?” Bobby grumbled. “The fucking government’s giving you a free ride.”

  The remark made Richie think of Mr. Crane. “Hey, fuck you, Casey! I’ve never had a free ride in my life. And I’m not going to pull a stickup to give you one. You can have whatever’s left after you hire the lawyer. When that runs out, get a fucking job. Wise up and get off the street before you end up where Stan is.”

  Bobby gave him the surliest look he could muster and fell silent. Guiding the car off the boulevard he kept to side streets back across town to the edge of the Loop, then cut up Lake Street, driving under the el tracks, as he headed toward the fringes of the black neighborhood where they would ditch the car. Bobby always left the car in a black area, so blacks would be blamed for the theft and keep the heat off the white neighborhoods where he circulated.

  As they cruised up Lake Street, Richie suddenly said, “Stop the car.”

  “What for?”

  “Stop the fucking car!” he ordered, grabbing the wheel and swerving them to the curb, narrowly missing one of the steel pillars of the el tracks.

  “Jesus Christ, are you crazy!” Bobby yelled. “What the fuck’s wrong with you? You almost wrecked us!”

  Richie ignored him. He was staring out the window at a circle of light under a streetlight at the corner of one of the dark little alleys that punctured Lake Street. In the circle of light, a snappily-dressed black man was slapping a black woman’s face as she tried futilely to ward off his blows.

  Expression stone-set with anger, Richie got out of the car as Bobby Casey said urgently after him, “What the fuck are you doing, man? That ain’t your business!” Continuing to ignore him, Richie stalked across the street. By the time he got to the circle of light, the black man had his fingers entwined in the woman’s short, kinky hair and was butting her forehead against the streetlight. The woman was Vernie, and she was bleeding from a cut above one eye.

  “Leave her alone,” Richie said, walking up. The black turned on him indignantly.

  “You ofay motherfucker, who the fuck you think you talking to?”

  Richie’s hand came out from under his coat with the automatic. As if feinting a right jab, he clipped the black man across the cheekbone with the barrel. Stunned, the black man dropped to his knees. Slapping a pearl-gray hat off his head, Richie took hold of the man’s hair just as the man had done to Vernie. “Open your mouth!” he ordered. When the man did not immediately obey, Richie viciously pushed the muzzle of the gun against his lips, forcing them apart. When the man’s mouth came open, Richie shoved the barrel three inches into it and cocked the hammer. “Taste it, you motherfucker!” he snarled. “That’s what death tastes like.”

  “Don’t hurt him, mister,” Vernie said, holding on to the streetlight for balance. “Please don’t hurt him . . . .”

  Her voice had an odd, injured tone to it, like the last words of a condemned person begging forgiveness for the executioner. Richie stared at her. “Vernie, don’t you remember me?”

  She squinted suspiciously at him. “I know you?”

  “I’m Richie, remember? You used to walk with me to keep the colored kids from taking my money when I came down here to buy paregoric for my mother.”

  Wiping the blood out of one eye, Vernie smiled almost lazily at him. “Oh, yeah. Po’ skinny little white boy, had a junkie for a mamma.” She grunted softly. “Now we all junkies. I be’s a junkie, he be’s a junkie,” she pointed to the terrified man with the pistol barrel in his mouth. “Please don’t hurt him,” she begged again.

  “You, Vernie?” Richie said incredulously. “You’re a junkie?” He thought about her beautiful handwriting, her confident strut, the way she had always moved through life like she owned it.

  “Take the gun out his mouf, Richie,” she begged. “He scared.”

  “But look what he did to you, Vernie,” Richie protested. “He was smashing your face; you’re bleeding. He’s a fucking animal!”

  “He all I got, Richie,” she said.

  The enormity of her simple statement impacted on Richie like a rifle butt to the chest. He all I got. . . . Suddenly feeling ill, Richie took the gun out of the black man’s mouth and stepped away from him. Vernie dropped to her knees next to the trembling man and put her arms around him. Rocking him gently she cooed, “You okay, baby. Vernie take care of you now.” Looking up at Richie, she said just as gently, “Go on, Richie. I ain’t your business.”

  “Sure,” Richie said, barely a whisper. He all I got.

  Richie walked listlessly back toward the car. In the middle of the street he encountered Bobby Casey, gun in hand, ready to back up whatever Richie was doing—whether he himself approved of it or not. And Bobby clearly did not; he was intensely agitated as they got back into the car and he angrily drove them away.

  “You’re crazy, you know that,” Bobby lambasted him. “I’m glad we’re finished tonight. I don’t want nothin’ else to do with you. College, shit! You oughta be in a fucking nut ward. You’re dangerous, man.”

  Richie did not respond. He all I got. He was too haunted by Vernie’s words to digest what Bobby was saying. All he could think was: It got Vernie. The fucking hard city got Vernie.

  They left
the car near an el station and waited on the platform for their respective trains. “Bring the dough up to Solly’s tomorrow and I’ll see it gets to the lawyer,” Bobby said. When his train came, he simply added, “See you,” and got on.

  Richie took a train the other way, to the Loop, and transferred to a North Side train. All the way home, he sat staring at his reflection in the window as Vernie’s pathetic words echoed in his mind. He all I got.

  What a rotten fucking goddamn world it is, he thought as he entered his little apartment. Turning on the reading lamp, he stood next to the table and tossed the money onto it and put his gun on top of the money. Only then did he see Linda sitting in his big chair where she had been waiting in the dark. She shook her head in disgust.

  “I thought it was something like this,” she said sanctimoniously. She was looking at him as if he were slime. “You’ll always be a hoodlum. I know that now.”

  “You don’t know a goddamned thing about anything,” he said quietly.

  “I know one thing,” she retorted, gathering up her coat, purse, and books. “I know how to say goodbye.”

  Richie did not even look at her as she walked out.

  56

  Richie was hanging his coat on the back of the visiting cage chair when they brought Stan in on the other side of the window. With a strained grin, Richie pressed the speaker button and said, “Hey, Stan. Happy New Year.”

  “Happy New Year, kid,” Stan replied, adjusting his wrist cuffs and waist chain as he sat down. “You look like hell. Too much celebrating?”

  “Not really celebrating. Just too much wine last night. How was Christmas in here?”

  “Wonderful. Big, beautiful tree with lots of decorations. Presents for everyone. Lots of singing and gaiety. And as a special treat we got to fuck the guards up the ass. How was yours?”