‘Why you living on Skid Row?’
‘’Cause I’m on the skids. That’s plain enough.’
And the black and bitter orange of the brownskin buck’s sweater standing out so strongly and strangely against the fluffy white and pale blue of the aging white beside him.
The listeners watched the captain survey the next man, up and down, head to toe and back again, to ask at last: ‘Where’s your shoes, boy?’
‘Left ’em in the tavern.’
‘Hadn’t there been a fight in there?’
‘Lord, there’s always a fight in there.’
‘Then you know the place.’
‘Sure. I hang in there.’
‘Where? On a hook?’
‘No. By the bar. I preach salvation there.’
‘Where were you ordained?’
‘I just have a local preacher’s license.’
‘How do you get one of those?’
‘You have to see the pastor and the deacon.’
‘How about the precinct captain?’
‘He’s in jail.’
‘I think that’s where you get most of your philosophy yourself.’
‘That’s where I took up the ministry all right.’
‘Can’t you preach salvation with your shoes on? Is that some Hindu cult out there says you have to take off your shoes?’
‘No, sir. I was collectin’.’
‘But couldn’t you collect with your shoes on?’ The captain sounded determined.
‘It was my shoes I was trying to collect.’
The captain leaned forward, steadied his head with both hands and pleaded as if already fearing the reply: ‘Just tell me one thing – who had your shoes?’
‘Why, the precinct captain, of course. That’s what I been tryin’ to tell you.’
The captain shook his head with the melancholy manner of any man who knows he can’t win and motioned wearily for the mike to be moved on.
‘Next man, what for?’
‘For standin’ by watchin’.’
‘Watchin’ what?’
‘The officers linin’ up the boys on Thirty-first Street.’
Bednar took a moment to raise himself slowly onto his toes to make certain that this one was wearing sandals or any sort of footwear at all. ‘I don’t want to go through that again,’ he cautioned himself aloud. ‘They lined you up too?’
‘One of the officers called me “boy” and I told him I was a man so I had to come along.’
‘The milk’s still wet behind your ears, a boy is all you are. But you’ll be Joliet-bound before they’re dry ’n they’ll make a man of you there. Next.’
‘I’m accused of rape.’
‘How old was that child?’
‘Thirty-seven. She volunteered her services.’
‘She volunteer her ring and watch too?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a man. Weren’t you the one who was in here last August for assaulting your baby?’
‘That’s some misidentity. All that happened was I dropped the lid when the Mrs slugged me with the fuel-oil can.’
‘What about that gun charge in 1944? Was that “some misidentity”?’
‘I was a janitor then ’n had to protect myself from tenants.’
‘Making you a janitor is like putting an automobile thief in charge of a parking lot. You’re the biggest misidentity ever walked in shoe leather.’
The captain’s eyes went down the line. The masks were managing to change, slowly and ever so slyly, to look less like plastic men and more like some plastic zoo: animals stuffed for some State Street Toyland the week before Christmas. Here was the toothless tiger and here the timid lion, here the bull that loved flowers and there some lovelorn moose.
The toothless tiger stood in a faded yellow hat from some long-faded summer, his stripes blurred by the city jungle’s dust and sprayed blood dried on the hat’s stiff brim: but still trying to look like a tiger. It always seemed some long-faded summer for those who lived in that feral glare under one hard straw kelly or another; or any old hat at all.
‘My buddy hit me wit’ a Coca-Cola bottle,’ the toothless tiger explained, ‘so I bust his plate-glass window.’
‘You’re mixed up with so many busted windows you ought to join the fire department. Ever do time?’
‘Just a week once, for robbery.’
‘Only a week?’
Frankie had to crane his head to get a glimpse of this one. For every time the audience snickered Frankie snickered too. He’d have to remember all the things these fools said to tell Molly-O some day.
‘It was just a small robbery.’
The captain’s eyes besought the darkened rows for help but the rows only looked back at him bleakly. Till the next odd fish stood forth.
‘Officers don’t like my looks is all. I sell strictly American merchandise and don’t have no complaints.’
‘If they don’t complain it’s because they’re ashamed to admit buying the stuff. You sneak up and offer them phony jewelry as if it were hot stuff,’ the captain accused him.
‘It ain’t phony, it’s American-made,’ the coneroo begged off.
‘Well,’ the captain pondered, ‘you been acting funny since 1919 and most of the cops who used to arrest you are dead. How’d you beat that federal rap? You must have had a good lawyer.’
‘No lawyer at all.’
‘Who prepared the writ?’
‘Another con. He shuffled off a little time for me.’
A nerve tugged suddenly at the captain’s left wrist as if someone unseen were trying to cuff it to the mike. ‘You another one of them window smashers?’ he asked the boy in the black-and-white lumber-jack.
‘No, sir. I’m a seaman.’
‘Then how’d the window get broken?’
‘Knocked my old man through it.’
‘You’re a seaman all right. On the Humboldt Park lagoon.’
The Humboldt Park salt snickered. ‘Very funny,’ he observed. ‘Captain, you’re killing me.’
The flat-nosed, square-faced, tousled blond with the dark lines under the eyes was next. With his left sleeve slit to the shoulder. As if his life, like his knife, had been turned upon himself at last.
‘Francis Majcinek, Division Arms Hotel,’ and added indulgently: ‘That’s on Division.’
‘Thank you. I always thought it was on Eighth and Wabash – where’s the punk?’
‘Wasn’t picked up with no punk.’
‘Talk into the mike, not at me. And get off that back rail. What were you up to with the shopping bag at Nieboldt’s, Dealer?’
‘Went to buy an eye-ron.’
‘With a shopping bag?’
‘Had to stop by the butcher’s on the first floor.’
‘You should of stayed on the first floor. Those weren’t lamb chops fell out of the bag.’
Frankie grinned. He could still see those damned irons bouncing.
‘Get that grin off your puss – what else did you boost over the holidays?’
Frankie managed a look of blandest innocence. ‘You got me wrong, Captain. I was lookin’ around for the cashier-’
‘When the bag broke,’ the captain finished for him. And eyed him broodingly. ‘I like liars,’ he decided at last, ‘but you suit me too well. What did you need six irons for? I don’t suppose you were planning on selling them?’
‘No, nothing like that, Captain,’ Frankie assured Bednar earnestly, ‘I needed one for the wife ’n the others were for when that one wore out. They make things so cheap these days.’
‘I don’t know who you think you’re kidding or whether you’re trying to be funny,’ Bednar told him, studying him to find out what was really the matter. There was something wrong all right, the dealer really wasn’t trying to be funny at all; his face had somehow altered in the past month. At the moment it looked both pious and weak. ‘Come down off that cross ’n give me a straight story,’ the captain pleaded – and as he asked it he got it – in one moment he knew beyond any doubt at all. ‘How long you been on the stuff, Frankie?’