Chicago Noir [Anthology]

BY JOE MENO

Lawrence & Broadway

High black cat is the worst kind of luck. It’s the luck of knowing your ghostly number is up. It’s the luck of the zero, the no one. It’s the record that automatically plays whenever the radio comes on. Like Donna Lee with the trumpet blaring.

“Shirley stole this record too,” Seamus cursed. “She took this one.”

He’d borrowed a coupe and the night was warm so we were out driving. At the time, he was up to number nine. Mister Ten might go walking by anytime. “Pull over,” he said suddenly. I slowed the automobile down, figuring it quick.

At the corner of Broadway and Lawrence, there was Cannonball Adams, the piano player, with a girl, standing unsuspecting. He was telling her the ideas he had about her—her legs and hair, the way she looked like a movie star in the lights of the evening. She was buying it because she wasn'’t his wife. The girl was on the corner listening to the music Cannonball was whispering and he began leaning in at her with his enormous hands, and it was then that Seamus opened the passenger side door.

In a flash, Seamus was at the corner and had already slugged the fellah in the back of the neck. Seamus gave him two chops to the head and a shot to the kidney and then one more to the crown, which laid him out pretty well. Seamus hadn'’t fought in the ring in years but he could still move like lightning. Then the heartbreak. Seamus raised his foot up.

“No, no, not my hands, not my hands,” Cannonball pleaded, and he had hands unlike any other man, three times the size of most men’s, they were the hands of a monster really. Seamus snarled and stomped down hard with his size-elevens on the sap’s fingers, a step on the right, then the left, then back and forth, then again. The girl didn'’t like the idea. She swung her purse at the side of Seamus’s head. It only made him madder. He turned and grabbed the purse from her hand, then turned again. He came shuffling back to the automobile but he was slow now and sad. He closed the automobile door and I took off quick like that.

It was quiet for a while. The ghost of a small black cat cut across the snow, from one corner into a dark alley, its shadow stretching thin and long. That cat, and me seeing it, was just about the worst thing that could happen at that moment. I swore to myself. We went on driving and I looked at Seamus, and what he placed between him and me on the front seat made my eyes ache, but badly. It was the girl’s white purse: small, square-shaped, etc., etc. He had taken the girl’s purse for some reason.

“How come?” I asked, and he looked down, embarrassed, then turned his head and started to open the purse, sad that the whole thing had ever happened maybe.

“He was number ten,” he said.

“How come the purse then?”

“I don’t know,” he frowned, out of breath. “You want it?”

“No,” I replied. “It’s bad luck. I won’t touch it.”

“That settles it,” he said, “I don’t want to think about Shirley again,” and even as he was talking, I was sure neither of us was having it. Cannonball Adams was number ten, the tenth fellah to have fooled around with Shirley. Somewhere out there, I was sure, was number eleven.

I glanced over at Seamus’s big red face. He looked like he had lost the big fight. His left eye was twitching. He shrugged his thick shoulders then emptied the rest of the tiny purse in his lap. Inside there was a handkerchief and a makeup kit. A pair of fake eyelashes fell on out next. They landed right beside me, just like that, almost blinking. I didn'’t say a word. I just stared at them. They were thick and black and tired and lovely. He tipped the purse over and what came out next was like a song where the lady singing mentions your name, but directly, something like, “I’m in love with a boy who makes my heart spin/I’m in love with a boy, a boy named Jim. ”

It was a white business card that fell out, with a picture of a blue genie coming up from a lamp. I picked it up and saw that, on the other side of the card, it read:

THE BEARER OF THIS CARD IS HEREBY

GRANTED THREE WISHES

It was those moments, those strange moments where I caught the lines no one else seemed to be hearing, those strange moments like the one I was having, that made me want to go into a church again so badly.

“What’s it say?” Seamus asked.

“It says I got three wishes.”

“Three wishes? What for?”

“For finding it. Sure,” I said, “three wishes? That’s easy.”

“Sure.”

“For my first one: huh. Well. Well, I wish I could sleep more soundly.”

“How’s that?” Seamus asked.

“I’m up all night. I hear things. I get afraid. I get afraid ghosts are sitting in my parlor, you know. I’m counting sheep until daybreak.”

“A grown man like you?” He smiled. “You oughta be ashamed.”

“Sure I am. Ever since I was a kid, though. I get in bed and that’s all I think about. Ghosts.”

“You’re gonna throw away a perfectly good wish on nonsense like that?” Seamus grunted. “Really. You oughta be ashamed. Why don’t you use it on something you need? Something you always wanted, maybe.”

I looked down at my sad Stacy Adams with the hole in the toe and said, “O-key, then, I take it back. For my first wish, a new pair of shoes.”

“You’re gonna waste ’em on a pair of shoes?” Seamus moaned. “That’s terrible.”

“That’s what I need.”

“That’s terrible,” he repeated.

“O-key, then you can have the next one.”

“O-key,” he said, and I should have seen it coming, down the block, right up the street. “O-key. I wish I knew where Shirley was right now.” He whispered it and I nodded, without a word, letting that one pass as quickly as I could.

“O-key, for my last one

” I said. “Huh, I dunno. Maybe I'’ll keep it for a while.”

“That’s smart,” he said, but even as he went on talking, I was already thinking. I held the card in my hand and thought of my Slingerland traps, the greatest drum set I had ever had, pearl finish with red sparkles, my kit which was now sitting in the front window of a pawn shop on Ashland, and the thought was this: “I wish I don’t end up a two-bit just like everybody.”

2

It was our job to drive around. Seamus had been hired to collect certain things from certain people and he would give me a cut of his pay for me to drive, because although he could set a fellah twice his size down on his back, he couldn'’t keep his hands still on the wheel. It was a decent enough job but nothing I was too proud of. Seamus would borrow a car from his employer and then we’d drive around all night. It was always easier at night and the music they played on the radio was always a lot luckier.

In the soft gray silence of morning, after we drove around, searching for certain people on street corners, in bars, in the arms of girls they did not trust, I'’d mope back to the apartment to try and sleep. It would be too quiet. At one time a lady with a pet canary had lived in the apartment beneath me and they sang along together, every morning, the lady being lonely, wishing for some man to do her duet with maybe. Then the little orange canary got out of its cage, crawled in a hole, and got caught in the wall. For a while, very, very late at night, the lady would sing and it would sing back from behind the plaster. But then it was quiet and not even “Body and Soul” would help locate where the bird had vanished. The lady moved out finally. There were still white sheets all over the furniture and it made me wonder if, like the rest of the town, she had given up on something.

I'’d come home alone, lock the apartment door, and switch on the light. If I looked in the hallway mirror I might see a ghost. My uncle, who was a night watchman, taught me how to spot them. There was a ghost of a bootlegger who would appear in my bedroom late at night, dressed in a borrowed white sheet with two black holes for eyes. You could try and convince him he didn'’t belong there, but it was impossible. The only way to get rid of him was to switch on the radio and slowly turn the dial until there was a song he recognized and somehow it would remind him that he had died. It was a shame. Here I was, a grown man, superstitious and afraid of the dark, and being afraid of the dark is what got me into the kind of trouble I was always in.