laughter for very few. On Skid Row even the native-born no longer felt they had been born in America. They felt they had merely emerged from the wrong side of its billboards.
And yet they spoke and yet they laughed; and even the most maimed wreck of them all held, like a pennant in that drifting light, some frayed remnant of laughter from unfrayed years. Like a soiled rag waved by a drunken peddler in a cheap bazaar who knows none will buy, yet waves his single soiled ware in self-mockery – these too laughed. And knew not one would buy.
These were the luckless living soon to become the luckless dead. The ones who were fished out of river or lake, found crumpled under crumpled papers in the parks, picked up in the horse-and-wagon alleys or slugged, for half a bottle of homemade wine, in the rutted tunnels that run between the advertising agencies and the banks.
Then, only one day too late, they became VIPs at last. Front and profile photographs and a brass tag looped about the neck to await none other than the deputy coroner himself, a police hold order and a genuine pauper’s writ.
Some the Demonstrators’ Association would invite to attend an autopsy party. For these the cold white dissector’s table would be the grave; there wouldn’t be enough left to honor with American earth or the simplest sort of cross.
Yet some who had been unlucky so long might turn out to be the very luckiest after all: they were to be embalmed through the courtesy of the Balmy-Hour School of Beautification & Sanitary Bloodletting. Not many, of course, could be so lucky; for so few deserved such luck.
When thirty had gathered together, resigned to their fortunes at last, the merry county carpenters would come with bright new pencils behind their ears, black lunch buckets in their hands, nails in their teeth and Social Security cards in their pockets to make thirty clean pine boxes. Thirty stiffs in a whitewashed basement room, heavy with disinfectant in place of flowers, listening, with an inscrutable disdain, to the cheerful ringing of happy hammers and the pleasant talk of living men.
Occasionally one of the stiffs, still stubbornly intent on making trouble for everybody, would require one longer or broader than he had any real right to at all. Gas and river cases gave the most trouble this way. There were not many giants any more.
When the boxes were ready and paid for the We Haul Anything Cartage Company would send around a moving van which fancied itself a hearse. The driver wheeled the dishonored dead out to Elm Forest, where a county sewer-digging machine excavated a trench long enough to hold thirty boxes, no more and no less. Over that single trench, in a cemetery like a forgotten battlefield, the inevitable and inimitable mimic, with the Holy Book in hand and hat held to the side out of respect to his modest fee, would say a few words – all holy – over these unholy dead.
This was all a part of their secret knowledge as they touched the jailhouse water to their foreheads, this was why they laughed so lightly from time to time. For they had had the ultimate joke played upon them prematurely: more ambitious men would have to wait a bit to find out. It was why they grinned so knowingly at the most casual of jailhouse companions; they’d all be taking the same road, down the same littered street, to the same single trench together. It was why they nudged each other familiarly and leered a little: ‘Take my advice, buddy. Don’t die broke.’
An old wino dragging a pair of mottled suspenders to the floor wandered in from somewhere and asked wonderingly: ‘You fellows remember me?’ When none remembered he repeated the question to himself, with moving lips, as though he himself had nearly forgotten. Yet with each pulse beat his blood demanded to know, once and for all before it went cold for keeps, who remembered him and his mottled suspenders.
‘Remember me? I used to be night watchman on the old Wabash.’ Not one remembered any night watchman off the Wabash, old or new.
‘That’s a good job all the same,’ Frankie explained earnestly to Sparrow. ‘You watch over people while they sleep. It’s when everybody depends on you, nothin’ bad should happen. When you’re asleep, that’s when you can’t protect yourself; even Joe Louis is like a little kid then. It’s why you shouldn’t laugh at some old guy if he’s been a good night watcher.’
‘I seen Fitzsimmons at the old Academy,’ the dodderer reported. ‘Remember the old Academy?’
‘No,’ Frankie told him respectfully, ‘but I want to introduce you to a real live millionaire.’ He shoved Sparrow around so that the old man could take in all of the punk at once. ‘Look at that cap he’s wearin’ – Pop Anson give it to him, it’s worth a fortune today.’ The old man sensed some mockery and, turning his behind upon them both deliberately and leaning so far forward he creaked, began a compulsive sort of scratching through the yellowed underwear, the fingers working with a life of their own, starting below the low sagging hill of the fallen thighs and laboring methodically upward as if pursuing the blood like a dog following its fleas; up over the hill and there paused, digging with blunted fingernails but yet without haste and even with something of pleasure. A full five minutes they watched him, he seemed to be pacing himself, knowing just how long this job would require; then up with the pants and, suspenders still dragging the soiled concrete behind, moved forward once more toward the one thing the blood asked as insistently as it itched in the buttocks: ‘You fellows remember me?’
The dying blood sought to renew itself by finding someone – anyone – to share a recollection of the old Wabash where so many nights had been shared. If but once somebody would say, ‘I remember,’ the blood would be touched; to make him for one moment as he once had been.
But those who remembered were gone with his strength, all down the drain with last year’s rain; friends and family and foes together and the blood soon to follow the rains.
‘Remember me?’ Paused in his ceaseless scratching in that ancestral light, for it seemed that the men about him had all just wandered in off the old Wabash; they too had wandered away their lives in a flesh-colored light and now moved toward him for that final reunion beside a fog-colored trench. ‘They don’t remember people around here any more,’ he complained aloud at last. So returned to his ceaseless scratching, rump pointed insultingly and suspenders trailing the mottled dust.
‘A good turnkey can do better than a patrolman on a beat,’ Sparrow informed Frankie, ‘if he gets a houseful that’s thirty-four bucks right there.’
‘It all depends on the neighborhood,’ Frankie told him out of his wider knowledge of the world. ‘You take a patrolman up there in Evanston, he’s just walkin’ around smilin’ ’n tippin’ his cap, sayin’ how nice the lawn looks this morning, Mrs Rugchild – he’s like a watchman is all, up there. He’s got to be polite ’cause that means good tips, it ain’t like down here in hustlers’ territory where they got to line up guys like Schwiefka by pinchin’ guys like us before they can pick up anythin’ on the side. It’s why they got you dead to rights if they catch you duckin’ through a Division Street alley after twelve – you’re guilty the second that spotlight hits you ’cause you’re a wrong guy in a wrong neighborhood out at the wrong hour. If it wasn’t for guys like you ’n me guys like Cousin Kvork could be walkin’ a North Side beat, they figure. It’s why they’re down on us, we interrupt their careers.’
‘Kvork ain’t the worst,’ Sparrow put in, ‘he just does what he has to do. The time I was up for robbin’ he didn’t testify, he knew what one more conviction’d do to me.’
‘Kvork is the best,’ Frankie agreed, ‘he don’t forget when you do somethin’ for him. But it’d serve that pokey right if somebody slapped him silly. He’s been shakin’ down the greenhorns in here fourteen years. Someday he’ll shake down the wrong dino.’
‘He’s done that five-six times awready,’ Sparrow remembered, ‘but he always gets reinstated. How can a man get that hungry?’
‘It’s not hard to mistreat the homeless,’ Frankie explained.
A roach had leaped, or fallen, from the ceiling into the water bucket, where a soggy slice of pumpernickel and a sodden hunk of sausage now circled slowly, about and about, although there was no current. Belly upward, the roach’s legs plied the alien air, trying dreamily to regain a foothold; while Frankie, leaning dreamily on one elbow, knew just how that felt.
It was, he decided, the same wanderer that had waved so invitingly to him from under a radiator while he was being questioned and felt half inclined to help the poor devil now just for old time’s sake. He started to poke it over upon its belly so it could try for the bucket’s walls, then decided against such charity.
‘You ain’t gettin’ out till I get out,’ he scolded it aloud, recalling that he too had leaped, or fallen, between walls he couldn’t scale; that he too plied the air at times. ‘We’re in the bucket together for not watchin’ them lights,’ he nagged the insect as Sophie so often nagged him; while Sparrow listened without laughter. ‘Maybe next time you’ll look where you’re drivin” – he imitated Sophie’s rattling whine – ‘“yer fault, yer fault, takin’ everythin’ in yer own hands when you’re stewed to the gills, all
