Of days that used to be…’
While Antek’s own pallid eight-year-old scooped up the night’s last crumbs out of the potato-chip bowl.
‘Whose is that?’ Antek wanted to know, impatiently suspecting a practical joke too late in the evening. Between the juke and the 7-Up sign someone had abandoned a cracked crutch. It had struck Sophie so funny she’d wanted to buy Antek a shot on it.
‘Must be good whisky you’re sellin’, Owner,’ Frankie had flattered Antek. ‘They come in here on crutches ’n walk out by theirselves.’
‘Must be some guy got well on the horses,’ Antek decided, and bought both Frankie and Sophie a shot. So they bought him one back and by the time Antek went to turn off the back lights he was weaving so he could hardly find the switch and Frankie was so stiff he could hardly stay on the bar stool. Much too tight to worry about what fool or other had left a cracked crutch between a juke and a 7-Up sign. They were two doors down from their own doorway – but all of a sudden he had had to see ‘what the people ’r doin’ on Milwaukee’ and there was nothing to be done with him but to let him have his way.
So drunk that his head had fallen across the wheel in the late Ashland Avenue traffic – she grabbed once for the wheel and he shoved her off, mumbling some drunken singsong about ‘War’s over, war’s over, war’s over for Frankie – drives like he deals, deals like he lives ’n he lives all the time – war’s over, war’s over-’ Sophie cringed at the screech of metal upon metal as a northbound trolley pulled past and kicked his foot off the gas.
‘Pull over, goof, you scraped the trolley.’ He’d stepped on the gas and wheeled around the corner.
There hadn’t been any corner. They’d crashed into the light standard of the safety island, bounced over the broken base and slammed side-wise into a billboard offering everyone in Chicago a spanty-new paste-and-paper Nash.
In twenty seconds the abandoned Ashland Avenue midnight was thronging with sprouts who should have been in bed for hours and windows began blazing with light as if everyone had been sitting around in the dark just waiting for an accident to happen and here they came, lurching with age and skipping with youth, the lame, the sick and the lazy, the fearful, the cheerful and the tamed, recalling with laughter other local disasters – jostling, jumping and shoving with eagerness – all those for whom nothing had yet happened in the world shouting that it had happened at last, they’d always known it would happen sooner or later, that corner had always looked so unlucky.
Something had finally happened outside of the movies. Death in a blazing Chrysler or a blood-covered madman pinned to the pavement by a pair of poolroom bullies: madman, Chrysler, flash fire or a scoutmaster helping an old lady across the street, it was all one. Something had been made to happen in their lives at last.
Everything arrived in nothing flat. A fire-insurance patrol, the pulmotor squad, the hook-and-ladder boys – everything but an ambulance. Frankie and a nineteen-year-old in a staff sergeant’s uniform took over, hauling Sophie between them up and down the curb to nowhere, neither being certain who was giving the orders, while the crowd looked on admiringly at the military in action.
‘Artificial inspiration,’ Frankie explained to his audience and wouldn’t let anyone but the sergeant help him haul her about; till a stray cop, wandering out of the Safari to clear his head, nabbed the sergeant on sheer blind impulse.
‘Let’s see your papers, Sergeant.’
The soldier just didn’t have any papers. He didn’t even have a draft card.
‘I tawt you looked like some kind of spy awright,’ the cop announced, ignoring the leaning light pole, the bleeding woman and the fire department. ‘I’m gonna put you under the authority of the F.B.I.’
‘I got a draft card at home,’ the sergeant offered meekly, chastened at finding himself so heavily outranked.
‘Yeh – but where’s your license to drag this woman around at t’ree A.M.?’ He had spotted Sophie at last and could tell at a glance she was a woman. ‘You pushed her.’ The law had reached its verdict. The sergeant shook his head, No, No, he hadn’t pushed a soul. But the law wasn’t taking any such guff. ‘Who give you the right to shove a woman in front of a car anyhow – you married to her? Let’s see your license for that.’
‘This is just her boy friend,’ a helpful bystander offered, ‘that’s her husband settin’ on the curb holdin’ his dirty head. He tried to run the soldier down for datin’ his wife. Looks like an internal triangle to me. If you ask me they’re all three of them no good.’
‘Nobody asked you.’
Yet the law could see there was something to the story all right. Frankie sat on the curb with his army shoes in the gutter and his combat jacket ripped below the shoulder halfway to the overseas stripes below the elbow. Dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief and wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry.
‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie’s reach.
‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’
Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don’t have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He’s as stiff as you are.’
‘He can fwisk you but he can’t search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don’t let him search you without a wawwant.’
The corner pharmacist brought Sophie around and slapped a bandage above Frankie’s right eye. When the wagon arrived to take the sergeant away for lack of papers Frankie was sober enough to get by by identifying himself and pleading the old tune: ‘Only two small beers, Officer, all I had. I’m a combat vet. Purple Heart. Good Conduct. Buddy of Captain Bednar by Saloon Street.’
While they waited for the ambulance the cop walked about, a wadded Tribune jutting out of his hip pocket, with the deliberate gait of any stewed flatfoot, around and around the battered car, slapping his big feet righteously up and down while the crowd grew and some newspaper joker took a flash-bulb photo of Sophie, stretched out on the wrinkled running board with somebody’s corduroy cap under her head, resting against the fender’s slope. The bulb burst, splattering glass for a dozen feet around, so that the pharmacist had to run back for more bandage and the cop had to run the photographer off, press card or no press card.
Yet the photographer remained, a small man in a raincoat almost dragging the ground, shivering with either humiliation or the cold early morning air. Pretending, on the border of the crowd, that he’d abandoned the idea of getting a close-up shot while furtively preparing another bulb. When the cop regarded him suspiciously once more he spoke up humbly, ‘I just like to watch.’ And inched up ever so little. ‘I’m neurotic, I like to get up close to accidents.’
A weak excuse.
It was half an hour before the ambulance arrived, the early morning trolleys were blocked halfway to North Avenue and everyone but Frankie and Sophie and the sergeant felt it had been well worth the trouble. The pharmacist and photographer, the cop, the audience, trolley conductors and motormen, all agreed tacitly that this had been a better summer night than most.
‘Not a bone broken,’ an intern had assured Frankie of Sophie’s condition. ‘Just shock.’ She was lying on the receiving-room table, eyes wide and pupils dilated. ‘Open the door,’ she asked in an oddly altered voice; the door to the long white corridor stood wide.