From where the narrow alley ran a child’s cry, high-pitched, brief and cut off sharply, came up to him like the cry of a child run down in the dark by a drunken driver. A cry that held no hope of help at all, a cry that pitched the very darkness down. Tautly, as he himself had pitched his tent that winter on the Meuse, with the stakes driven through the cloth like the cloth of the heart, the way darkness pinned any child down between tavern and trolley and tenement.
The darkness through which all such children of the broken sky line moved, their small white faces guided only by a swinging arc lamp’s gleam and the swift-changing neon guide lights of the city’s thousand bars. Till the difference between daylight and darkness seemed to them only the difference between the light of the alleyways under the El and the light down any gin-mill basement.
That was why, Frankie guessed, everyone from the neighborhood he knew, from the punk to himself, tried to be something different than what he was. The minute some kid with an accordion began playing for pennies in the corner bars he fancied himself a musical-comedy star. If a neighborhood girl got a Loop switchboard job she considered herself a career woman. Nobody bred around Division Street ever turned out to be a cheap crook: they were all Dillingers or Yellow Kid Weils to hear them tell it. Just as though the dead wagon didn’t cart off the international embezzler as surely as it bore off the musical-comedy headliner and the crummiest stewbum who ever turned up his toes between Goose Island and the carbarns.
Sometimes, as Frankie walked to the Safari in the earliest morning light, after the night’s last deck had been boxed, Division Street was deserted from the Dziennik Chicagoski to the El. Then the changing traffic lights seemed to warn no one but himself: STOP.
And so waited prudently, though there was no traffic in sight and the wind so bitter, till the amber light counseled him to look both ways, for enemy and friend alike, before crossing carefully.
Until the green told him to pull up his collar and keep moving straight ahead, warning him it was just as dangerous to stand in one spot too long as it was to try to beat the lights. That it was more dangerous now, with every hour, to stand unmoving in a bitter wind; that it was his one chance to plunge blindly ahead looking neither this way nor that.
For now, in this season of caroling, when fir trees were sold in every corner lot, no morning brought tidings of comfort and joy.
Morning brought only church bells and dock bells, river bells and barge bells, freight bells and fire bells – and the ceaseless charging of the westbound, southbound, northbound, Loopbound Els.
The green light itself had turned informer.
It grew pretty lonely without Frankie. No fun like the other times at all. Only the lost cabbie, one cell down, by turn boasting of his Gracie and repenting of his own manifold weaknesses.
‘Ask fer me on Wabash ’n Harrison,’ he began inviting everyone late one night, his tongue still sounding burdened to Sparrow. ‘I’m the guy wit’ the right connections. Ask fer me on the hotel corner, I wheel the GI Joe cab there. Gracie brings me sandriches but I got no damned matches. Pokey’d gimme some but I don’t want to wake him up. He let me make a phone call fer free when I told him I was crashed but the morning guy is no good, he wants a buck or no phone. I showed that marked-down lushworker, I thrun his moldy baloney on the floor. “There’s yer breakfast,” I told him straight.’
Sparrow was too preoccupied with his own woes to listen to any cabbie’s. ‘The captain’s gonna see I get all the breaks I got comin’,’ he brooded now upon Bednar’s words. ‘How the hell did he mean that?’
Yet knew in his heart just how Record Head had meant that.
‘Tomorrow I’m gettin’ out,’ the cabbie decided aloud, as he decided around this time every night, ‘first thing I’m goin’ to the Rye-awlto. You guys remember Eddie Cicotte? I knew a guy once used to pinch-hit fer Rockferd in the T’ree-Eye League. My old man never hit a bar in his life but he kept a little bottle in the medicine cab’net, he said it was his healt’ tonic. The old lady was hitched to him twenny-eight years before she found out it was Old McCall. You guys know some good pinched-hitters? She did say she’d noticed he’d act a little strange on Saturday nights. Swap me a couple cigarettes, soldier?’
All Sparrow could see of the cabbie was one tattooed forearm wrapped about the bars. ‘I ain’t no soldier,’ he assured the cabbie, ‘I got rejected for moral warpitude.’ And a dull calamitous light like a madhouse light began filtering dimly down from somewhere far above, making an uphill queue of shadows aslant the whitewashed walls. Nudging each other upward inch by sullen inch, they gathered strength for some sudden and swift descent by midnight behind queues of shadowy escapees from a hundred other cells. Down to a shadowed street.
Between the bars and down the disinfected corridors, unseen by captain’s men and soft-clothesmen, undetected by the confidence detail the sullen shadows sidled, by-passing the pawnshop patrol and the cartage squad while the auto-theft hawks were giving tomorrow’s winners to two dog-tag detectives and a single plain-clothes bull. Past pressmen and citizen-dress men, evading fire dicks and gumboots, fingerprint experts and rookies in harness, the night’s last bondmaker and the morning’s earliest, most eager bailiff, down many a narrow long-worn wrought-iron way, to be delivered at last from the grand-jury squad and the Bail Bond Bureau into the dangers of the unfingered, unprinted, unbetrayed and unbefriended Chicago night.
‘You should see my Gracie,’ the cabbie invited everybody, waking or asleep, ‘she’s a hundred per cent ’n her petticoat hangs like crazy. But I got a good record too, I never hit a mailman in my life. Never hit a conductor. Who wants a couple lousy cigars for a couple tailor-made cigarettes?’ He laughed derisively.
Then added as apologetically as though suddenly confronted by a teetotaling judge: ‘I been in five rackets, sir, but I supported my sister’s kids two years, that’s in my favor. Once I lost a hunderd-eighty in a fixed crap game, worked overtime t’ree mont’s to make it back ’n then got rolled by my best friend for a hunderd-ten. Didn’t even get downhearted, just started on that overtime slave deal again, pinchin’ them little red pennies, gettin’ back on my feet wit’ the little woman helpin’ all the way ’n never askin’ nothin’ except once a while a piece of my little pink body. Never heard her squawk once. “My little red wagon is hitched to yours, DeWitt,” she tells me, “I take the bad wit’ the good, the bitter wit’ the sweet.” So I knocked her off the back porch to learn her some sense.
‘You know where a man goes wrong? It’s on them dirty gas bills every time. I didn’t owe a dime in the world yesterday afternoon – then she sent me out to square up wit’ People Gas Light ’n Coke ’n I stopped off for a quick one ’n all I got to do now is restitute the insurance company for a four-hundred-buck plate-glass window ’r do it on the knees. “Let’s settle this out of court,” I says. “Wit’ what?” they want to know – can you beat that? They’d been to see Gracie awready ’n found out I don’t own a dime of my own ’n now Friendlier Loans knows where I’m at too. Them dirty gas bills is a man’s downfall every time.’
‘Go back to the beginning,’ Sparrow requested politely, ‘I lost tract in the middle.’ But DeWitt was too busy hauling that little red wagon of piled-up woes to heed anyone.
‘Can they get their money back if I do a stretch?’ he asked himself with a sort of angry perplexity. ‘They won’t get penny-one that way ’n that’s where I got ’em by the old jalino. I’m goin’ to work for them plate-glass people till the insurance people is all squared up – so now all I’ll have to do is drop one of them windows now ’n then ’n I got me a steady slave deal the rest of my dirty life.