A Moment in the Sun (31 page)

“Yeah—”

“I and some of my associates have branched out into the policy racket. We are currently scouting for operatives—”

“Nigger pennies.”

Hunky Joe shrugs. “You got the location, a steady flow of clientele—”

“Brannigan just barely leaves me alone as it is—”

“Brannigan owes his uniform to the Hall. We, I and my associates, are the mighty right arm of Tammany. Brannigan, therefore, works for—”

“The thing is, Joe,” says the Yellow Kid, searching quick for a believable lie, “I just can’t handle the numbers. Anything past two plus two, I’m lost. I didn’t get up to the fit’ grade like you.”

“Just tink about it, all right?”

“I’ll do that. And stay away from the friggin Chinks. You look skinnier than I do.”

“Numbers, bullshit,” grins Hunky Joe. “You was always the smart one.”

The Yellow Kid runs away from his brother then, runs up Bowery till he hits Hester and cuts right to where the pavement ends and there are so many people you can’t run anymore. The sheenies are all out selling their second-hand everything, horsecarts and pushcarts and funny-smelling geezers wandering around wearing wooden trays full of buttons or ties or hot Jew food. Little girls empty ashcans or finger through yesterday’s bread to find a roll softer than a rock or watch from the stoops, latched ahold of the ones who can just walk or carrying the ones that can’t yet, the ragpicker yelling out but outyelled by the pots-and-pans hondler who knocks his metal together and both of them whispers compared to the big raw-throated ladies hollering down from their windows, lowering baskets and hauling up whatever they bought from the street vendors. Chickens hang by their feet, pickles float in barrels, and if Mott Street was garlic Hester is salt herring.

The Kid squeezes through till he finds the Hat Man. He needs a new cap. The one he’s got One-Nugget Feeny says looks like he took a dump on it, which is fine for the paying customers, the rattier you look the better you sell if you’re little, but it’s nothing you want topping your knob when it’s just you and the guys.

He tries on a few lids, checking his reflection in the butcher’s window behind as the Hat Man watches him warily, sure that he’s going to bolt with the merchandise. The Kid has his eye on a pair of shoes one stall over, light brown and shiny, with real laces that were made to go with them instead of string, a buck for the pair. His own old high-tops that Janek—that Hunky Joe passed down are split at the sole up front and his toes stick out if he doesn’t curl them under.

“
Nu
?” says the Hat Man, impatient, but the Kid knows the Customer is King and just keeps trying on lids. There’s a yellow-checked number that he pulls down over one eye.

“How much?”

The Hat Man holds up way too many fingers, so the Kid counters with a few fingers of his own. They keep it going for a while, the Kid knowing the bastid has a bottom price and when the old zid hawks something gray into the dirt at his feet and starts to shake his head and mutter in sheeny it’s clear they’ve reached it. The Yellow Kid has to go to his grouch bag, not so easy here on Hester where there’s a dozen eyes every way you turn, so he just digs into his pants, what Ikey calls cradling the cubes, and comes up with the mazuma.

“I’d say it’s been a pleasure doin business with you,” he says, “but it hasn’t.”

The Hat Man looks at the pennies in his palm like they might be slugs, exactly the kind of old tightwad who deserves a wooden crate with no brass, and the Kid takes a last look at those sweet brown shoes and shoves his way back out to Bowery.

There is a horse down on the corner of Broome. Little kids are circled staring like they never seen a dead nag before and a wop is trying to sell them shaved ice with lemon syrup from his bicycle box and a cop stands with his hands on his hips, thinking up what fine he’s gonna strongarm out of the dinge whose wagon it was pulling. The dinge is down on his knees wrestling the harness off in a big puddle of horse piss that’s still steaming hot though it smells like the nag’s been dead for weeks. Friggin cops always got their mitts out for a donation and get one or not he’ll just walk away and leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with it.

While the big mick has his back turned the Kid hops the back of a milk wagon headed uptown at a pretty good clip, the cans rattling empty over the cobblestones. Angelo Pino who shined shoes in front of Donnegan’s got rolled over a couple weeks back hopping a dray full of crushed stone leaving the Park Row Building, the wheel popping his head open the guys said, but he was lugging his box and only had one hand free and that’s when accidents is bound to happen. Angie’s little brother Pasquale has the spot now, but the newshounds that drink in Donnegan’s can’t tell the difference and call him Guido, which was the name of the kid who worked there before Angelo.

The Yellow Kid lucks out and the milk wagon keeps rolling across Canal, keeps rolling uptown, the driver never looking back, carrying him up to Houston where he hops off and runs five blocks up to see Vera.

The old place don’t look any worse. They moved a whole lot of times before he was old enough to know about it, is what Hunky Joe says, but this dump is the one the Kid remembers. Three stories, front and back entrance, toilet for the whole building out back, bring your own paper, jammed up next to three more shitboxes just like it. The Nemecs’ kid Dusan who’s never been right sits slobbering on the stoop and the Yellow Kid takes a minute to catch his breath before going in. His heart is racing. If the Old Man is there the odds are he’s not conscious, and even if he is the Kid knows he can outrun the bastid, even in these damn flap-sole high tops. It got worse after Maminka died but he was a guzzler from Day One, old Kazimir. The Kid used to rush the can for him on the one outside job the Old Man had, making bricks. Wrestle a big pail of beer over to him twice a day, never a tip like some of the other kids got. Get plastered and moan out those old Chesky songs, go on one of his cursing, spitting stomps, pacing all five steps from one side of the apartment to the other. Bohunks come in Catholics and Free-Thinkers and the two brands just friggin hate each other. The Old Man is an
ateista
, a Free-Thinker, always going on about the idiot Pope and the idiot Bohunks who kiss his holy ass, like any of that matters here on East 5th Street. Make you glad to be an American. He was a miner back where they come from says Hunky Joe, but left to get away from Germans and Catholics and the coal dust. After he drunk himself out of the brickyard he holed up and started rolling cigars like every other stupid greenie on the block, Vera and Maminka stripping the leaves and Janek out getting into scrapes with the neighborhood gangs and him, Frantisek back then, running up and down the friggin stairs with buckets and bottles to keep the old bastid lubricated.

It’s dark in the downstairs hallway and somebody is sleeping right by the stairs, got to step over to climb up. It smells like cabbage. At the door he hollers—you knock and they figure it’s the landlord’s collector come to jerk a few shekels out of you—and Vera answers. From the look on her face he can tell the Old Man is not at home.

“Frantisek!”

She looks like a ghost, Vera, pale and big-eyed and already a little bit stooped though she’s only a year older than Hunky Joe, a couple of her teeth gone missing since the Kid saw her last.

“I come to say hi.”

She pulls him in though he’s happy to stay in the hallway. The room smells like the inside of a cigar box, tobacco winning out over the kerosene, with piles of leaves and stacks of wrappers and the day’s work spread out thick on the table. Enough to make you gag. The window was always closed before to keep a breeze, should such a thing ever wander onto East 5th Street, from getting in and drying the leaves out. Then after Maminka jumped the Old Man nailed it shut forever.

“You are hungry?”

Vera never went to any school and speaks Bohunk English when nobody in the room, like the Kid, is willing to talk Chesky with her.

“Got a bellyful right now. He been around?”

Vera smiles, shrugs. He has tried to get her to give up on the Old Man, to walk outside in the sun and never come back, but it’s like she’s been sentenced to live in these little rooms forever, doing a jolt for some crime she can’t even imagine.

“He is very sick.”

Sick was how Maminka used to call it too, especially once he’d passed out and couldn’t hit or kick anymore.

“You o.k. here? You need anything?”

It is a stupid question. She needs everything.

“I am no problem,” says Vera. “Where do you sleep?”

This is always the big question with her, worrying about where he lays down at night ever since he told the Old Man to shove it and run off for good.

“Here and there,” says the Yellow Kid. “Depends on where I am when it gets dark.”

It was looking at the same damn walls every day that done it, finally, more than the Old Man going off with his hootch and his temper. “It’s worse than the friggin Tombs in here,” said Hunky Joe just before the last big fight, the one where he ended up on top of the Old Man with both of them bleeding and it was time for him to move on. The walls that Maminka tried to wash once and gave up on cause you had to haul the water up so many stairs, the walls with lighter-colored squares everywhere the Old Man took down pictures of saints the last poor bastids, some kind of Catholic Germans who snuck out a month behind in the rent, had left hanging. You put a nail in the window in this apartment, it might as well be in your coffin lid.

“Listen,” he says, “you gotta forget that old soak and take care of yourself.”

It’s a waste to try to get Vera to take money, so he says he’s got the afternoon extra to deal with and lets her hug him once. When he steps over the body propped against the bottom of the stairs he bends to see that it is the Old Man, in the tank again, wheezing a little as he breathes.

Any other day he might head over to the bathhouse on Rivington, give you a towel and chunk of soap for two cents and let the shower run a good five minutes before they shut it off on you. But there is
WAR!
and special editions waiting to be peddled.

The fellas got a crap game running behind the
Journal
when the Kid gets back, breathing hard from running the last six blocks. Ikey is holding the stones.

“Look who’s got a new lid!”

“Yellow hat for the Yellow Kid!”

“You’re so flush, you oughta get in on this,” Ikey calls, shaking the dice softly by his ear the way he does, as if they are whispering to him. “I’m rollin hot here.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Cheap bastid. You don’t never play.”

“He’s savin up for his goin-away party,” says Beans. “Gonna invite the whole city, get planted in a solid-ivory crate.”

“That’s all a racket,” says Specs, rolling out a dolly loaded with a pile of specials. “Them coffins got a false bottom. Everybody goes home and they yank out their goods, leave the stiff in the dirt with the worms. Everybody knows that.”

The newsies scoop their pennies off the ground and scramble to line up by seniority, boys who been selling the longest first, and the Kid takes a chance on another fifty. The schoolboys are out and ready to sell now, waiting at the back of the line.

“Bunch of friggin amateurs,” says Ikey, who left classes after the sixth grade, “cloggin up the sidewalks.”

Most of the stores and offices have dicks in the lobby to keep newsies and peddlers out, but the saloons are always open for business. The Kid stuffs his new cap inside his shirt, slaps the old one on his head, and makes a show of staggering under the weight of the bundle as he comes into Donnegan’s.

“Lookit this kid,” says Boylan from the
Sun
, who likes to sit by the door and listen for sirens to chase. “Little bastid’s on death’s door, he’s still hustlin papers. Lay em down here, kid.”

He offers his stool and the Kid parks his bundle, pulling a dozen off the top to work the room. It is elbow to elbow with reporters now, trading rumors about the
WAR!
, guzzling whiskey, ribbing each other. They are the best customers for print, some getting their own rag to crow over a byline, or buying three or four of the competition to see what the poop on the Row is.

“What’s Boy Willie got to say now he’s finally done it?” says Pope from the
World
, grabbing one from the Kid. “Probly wants to be made Admiral.”

“Over Roosevelt’s dead body.”

“If that could be arranged,” says Callan from the
Journal
, “the Chief would be only too happy.”

“I’m takin names for the Regiment,” Sweeny calls from behind the counter, waving a paper that dozens have signed. “Shall I put you on it, Kid?”

“Sure,” says the Kid. “Sign me up.”

That gets a laugh and somebody says he’s already got the Yellow Fever so why not and he sells more papers and there is lots of kidding about who is too old or too young or too much of a hopeless souse to go to
WAR!
Then Lester Schoendienst gets up on his hind legs and calls for order.

“I’ve got me colyum fer tomorra ready,” he says in the voice he puts on like a Ninth Ward mick, “and I’d aprayciate yer opinions.”

From what the Kid can tell this bird writes a column where he pretends to be these two bog-trotters, Gilhooley and O’Malley, the former who is spose to be a beat cop and the other a sanitation worker who specializes in horse pucky.

“My opinion is it stinks,” calls Pope, “and I haven’t heard a word of it yet. Finley Peter Dunne, on his worst day—”

“Can outwrite you on yer best, we’re all aware iv that, we are,” Schoen-dienst comes back as he steps up on a chair to be seen over the crowd. “Now kape yer pie-hole buttoned while the true gentlemen iv the press give a listen.”

“You break that chair, Lester,” calls Sweeny, “you bought it.”

“
So Martin O’Malley is plyin his trade
,” starts the scribbler, reading from his ink-smeared notebook, “
with a shovelful of road apples in mid-air, whin Officer Gilhooley strolls by on his rounds
.”