The snickerers were really too serious-minded. They suspected everybody and helped no one; they were afraid of one another and had almost no fun at all.
Frankie, offstage among other bit players, heard the voice of the evening’s star and caught glimpses of that noble brow whenever the door opened and shut: Record Head Bednar lowering the mike to question a cap the color of any district-station corridor above a shirt broken out with blood spots.
‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know.
‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain.
‘That’s no crime. Did you pay the driver?’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘He wasn’t in the cab.’
‘That’s the chances you take. Next man.’
The mike was moved before an old hallroom boy who stepped forward as proudly as a newly appointed ward committeeman at a politician’s banquet, quavering importantly.
‘Now I realize the true wort’ of friendship – if a man has friends that’s all he needs.’
‘You weren’t looking for friends with a nine-inch file in a dentist’s office. You were prospecting.’
‘I’m a maintenance engineer at Thompson’s.’ As if that explained the file.
‘You mean you have charge of the doughnuts?’
‘I got a good record there.’
‘You got a good one here too.’ The captain waved the charge sheet before the mike and passed on to the next funny fellow.
‘Back so soon, Julius?’
‘Back? I ain’t even been gone.’
‘Silly Willie here hustles schoolboys out of their lunch money with phony dice,’ Record Head explained and returned his attention to Julius. ‘What were you carrying a pistol for?’
‘For pertection.’
‘Protection from who? Those seventh-graders?’
‘I brought it back from the service.’
‘How long were you in?’
‘Thirty-eight days.’
‘How many times were you wounded?’
Julius permitted himself a derisive little one-sided smile, faintly contemptuous of all non-combatants, and let the listeners wait.
‘Okay,’ Record Head forgave him impulsively, ‘we’ll lock up the officer who pinched you. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Then we’ll give you back the gun and an extra box of shells if you promise not to sue the city. Promise?’
‘Suits me fine.’
It suited Julius fine.
As the first line was led off the line behind the green steel door inched up a few feet and Frankie stood with a backstage view of the rows where, here and there among the listeners, a police badge glistened and all faces were dark and featureless. While upon the stage all faces were lined up under a glare that brought out every wrinkle, pimple and scar. A girl in plaid slacks was being urged forward by a police matron. Casting her eyes downward, the black arrows of the girl’s lashes became dipped in two great tears.
‘Save it for the jury, Betty Lou,’ the captain counseled her and turned to the listeners. ‘This is the slickest little knockout broad in seventeen states. How come you always pick on married men, Betty Lou?’
Betty Lou lifted the long damp lashes: the eyes held a wry and mocking light.
‘They’re the ones who don’t sign complaints,’ she explained softly. And gave the audience a hard profile.
So the men came on again: the ragged, crouching, slouching, buoyant, blinking, belligerent, nameless, useless supermen from nowhere. ‘For climbin’ a telephone pole at t’ree A.M. wit’ a peanuts machine on my back.’ ‘For makin’ anon’mous phone calls to call my wife dirty names.’ ‘Twice as big a crowd as here ’n a woman picked on me.’ ‘Went upstairs with a girl ’n came down with a cop.’
A shock-haired razorback with a bright Bull Durham string hanging over his shirt pocket’s edge: ‘Just throwed a rock at a wall ’n it happened to go through a window instead. So I followed through. But I didn’t have no intent of stealing.’
‘You never have. But you’re in and out like a fiddler’s elbow all the same. What was the stretch in the Brushy Mountain pen for?’
‘I got the wrong number was all.’
‘I think you did. The wrong house number.’
‘That’s right. The people were home. I was drinking pretty heavy.’
‘What do you do when you’re drinking light?’
‘Mind my own business.’
‘You haven’t got any business. For a quarter you’d steal the straw out of your mother’s kennel.’
The razorback tossed his tawny shock and his face in that light looked tawny too. ‘What I’d do for a quarter you’d do for a dime.’ And held the captain’s gaze to prove it.
Record Head’s heart felt suddenly as if it were beating without love for any man at all. The finger of accusation leveled at him so steadily by a shock-haired boy revived in him the dream in which he was the pursued.
‘How’d you like it in the pen?’ he asked in old routine.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Why not? Wouldn’t the warden give you his job?’ That was always the answer to that one. They always stepped into it the same way.
Yet the light titter of lip laughter that followed, as it was always so sure to follow, didn’t fill the emptiness down the dry well of the captain’s heart. He listened to the next youth, an epileptic in a dark green wool sweater and a stocking cap, without really hearing the boy’s words at all.
‘Just havin’ fun with a little girl – I was in Dixon but my old man got me out, I was gettin’ worse. When I fool around a little I get better.’
‘Well,’ the captain thought absently, ‘we all feel better if we fool around a little’ – and caught himself up sharply. ‘I need a rest is all,’ he decided, and forgave himself uneasily.
As he could not forgive one of those up there under the lights.
‘A friend of mine went to sleep and I took his money before somebody else did.’ ‘For unbecoming words to a lady, I think it’s called.’ ‘For tryin’ to talk a friend out of trouble – he was settin’ in a patrol wagon, I told him to come out of there, so they put me in with him.’ ‘Went down to the West Side to round up bums for a labor gang ’n got picked up for one myself.’ ‘Picked up at an unreasonable hour.’
Of late all hours to the captain seemed unreasonable. ‘I know you,’ he thought cunningly of all outlaws. ‘I know you. I know you all.’
Till the next line’s shadows came on, and the outlaws followed their shadows.
Followed their shadows into the glare; and left the glare once more to shadows.
It made the captain want to shield his own eyes; for a moment he looked ready to cup his head in his hands. ‘The old boy is drivin’ himself as hard as he’s drivin’ the bums,’ Frankie thought with a certain malice. Then the glare hit his own eyes.
A glare that made any man look like a plastic job with a prefabricated expression grafted on, according to some criminologist’s graph or other, to fit the crime of which the captain’s charge sheet had him accused: here was a pickpocket’s deadpan mask and here a shoplifter’s measured manner. Here the brutal lines of the paid-in-full premeditated murderer and there the coneroo’s cynical leer.
Yet the man behind the murderer’s mask was under the lights for stealing a bushel of mustard greens and the coneroo’s leer had been picked up for oversleeping in a Halsted Street hallway.