The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown (free ebook reader TXT) 📕

could hear the ticking of the clock in the kitchen through the opened door. I could hear soft, barefoot steps that would be Gardie corning out of her room to the turn in the hall by the bathroom where, without being seen, she could hear who was at the door.

“Wallace Hunter,” said one of the coppers. His voice was rumbly like an el car a long way off. “Wallace Hunter live here?”

I could hear Mom start breathing faster; I guess that was enough of an answer, and I guess the look on her face must have answered his “You—uh—Mrs. Wallace Hunter?” because he went right on. “‘Fraid it’s bad news, ma’am. He was—uh—”

“An accident? He’s hurt—or—”

“He’s dead, ma’am. He was dead when we found him. That is—we think it’s your husband. We want you to come and identi—that is, as soon as you’re able. There’s no hurry, ma’am. We can come in and wait till you’re over the shock of—”

“How?” Mom’s voice wasn’t hysterical. It was flat, dead. “How?”

“Well—uh—”

The other copper’s voice spoke. The voice that had asked me what floor fifteen was on.

“Robbery, ma’am,” he said. “Slugged and rolled in an alley. About two o’clock last night, but his wallet was gone so it wasn’t till this morning we found out who—_Catch her, Hank!“_

Hank must not have been fast enough. There was a hell of a loud thud. I heard Gardie’s voice, excited, then, and the coppers going on in. I don’t know why, but I started for the door, my shoes still in my hand.

It closed in my face.

I went back to the stairs and sat down again. I put my shoes on, and then I just sat there. After awhile someone started down the stairs from the floor above. It was Mr. Fink, the upholsterer, who lived in the flat directly over ours. I moved close against the wall to give him plenty of room to pass me.

At the bottom of the flight, he stopped, one hand on the banister post and looked back at me. I didn’t look at him; I watched his hand. It was a flabby hand, with dirty nails.

He said, “Something wrong, Ed?”

“No,” I told him.

He took his hand off the post and then put it on again. “Why you sitting there, huh? Lost your job or something?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Hell there ain’t. You wouldn’t be sitting there. Your old man get drunk and kick you out or—”

“Let me alone,” I said. “Beat it. Let me alone.”

“Okay, if you want to get snotty about it. I was just trying to be nice to you. You could be a good kid, Ed. You oughta break away from that drunken bum of a father of yours—”

I got up and started down the steps toward him. I think I was going to kill him; I don’t know. He took a look at my face and his face changed. I never saw a guy get so scared so quick. He turned around and walked off fast. I stayed standing there until I heard him going down the next flight.

Then I sat down again and put my head in my hands.

After awhile I heard the door of our flat open. I didn’t move or look around through the banister, but I could tell by voices and footsteps that all four of them were leaving.

After all the sound had died away downstairs, I let myself in with my key. I turned on the fire under the kettle again. This time I put coffee in the dripolator and got everything ready, Then I went over to the window and stood looking out across the cement courtyard.

I thought about Pop, and I wished I’d known him better.

Oh, we’d got along all right, we’d got along swell, but it came to me now that it was too late, how little I really knew him.

But it was as though I was standing a long way off looking at him, the little I really knew of him, and it seemed now that I’d been wrong about a lot of things.

His drinking, mostly. I could see now that that didn’t matter. I didn’t know why he drank, but there must have been a reason. Maybe I was beginning to see the reason, looking out the window there. And he was a quiet drinker and a quiet man. I’d seen him angry only a few times, and every one of those times he’d been sober.

I thought, you sit at a linotype all day and set type for A & P handbills and a magazine on asphalt road surfacing and tabular matter for a church council report on finances, and then you come home to a wife who’s a bitch and who’s been drinking most of the afternoon and wants to quarrel, and a stepdaughter who’s an apprentice bitch.

And a son who thinks he’s a little bit better than you are because he’s a smart-aleck young punk who got honor grades in school and thinks he knows more than you do, and that he’s better.

And you’re too decent to walk out on a mess like that, and so what do you do? You go down for a few beers and you don’t intend to get drunk, but you do. Or maybe you did intend to, and so what?

I remembered that there was a picture of Pop in their bedroom, and I went in and stood looking at it. It was taken about ten years ago, about the time they were married.

I stood looking at it. I didn’t know him. He was a stranger to me. And now he was dead and I’d never really know him at all.

*

When it was half-past ten and Mom and Gardie hadn’t come back yet, I left. The flat had been an oven by then, and the streets, with the sun coming almost straight down, were baking hot too. It was a scorcher all right.

I walked west on Grand Avenue, under the el.

I passed a drugstore and I thought, I ought to go in and phone the Elwood Press and tell them I wasn’t going to be in today. And that Pop wouldn’t be there either. And then I thought the hell with it; I should have phoned at eight o’clock and they know by now we’re not coming.

And I didn’t know yet what to tell them about when I’d be back. But mostly I just didn’t want to talk to anybody yet. It wasn’t completely real, like it would begin to be when I’d have to start telling people, “Pop’s dead.”

It was the same with the police and thinking and talking about the funeral there’d have to be, and everything. I’d waited for Mom and Gardie to come back, but I was glad they hadn’t. I didn’t want to see them, either.

I’d left a note for Mom telling her I was going to Janesville to tell Uncle Ambrose. Now that Pop was dead, she couldn’t say anything about my telling his only brother.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted Uncle Ambrose; going to Janesville was mostly an excuse for getting away, I guess.

On Orleans Street I cut down to Kinzie and across the bridge, and down Canal to the C&NW Madison Street Station. The next St. Paul train that went through Janesville was at eleven-twenty. I bought a ticket and sat down in the station and waited.

I bought early afternoon editions of a couple of papers and looked through them. There wasn’t any mention of Pop, not even a few lines on an inside page.

Things like that must happen a dozen times a day in Chicago, I thought. They don’t rate ink unless it’s a big-shot gangster or somebody important. A drunk rolled in an alley, and the guy who slugged him was muggled up and hit too hard or didn’t care how hard he hit.

It didn’t rate ink. No gang angle. No love nest.

The morgue gets them by the hundred. Not all murders, of course. Bums who go to sleep on a bench in Bughouse Square and don’t wake up. Guys who take tencent beds or two-bit partitioned rooms in flophouses and in the morning somebody shakes them to wake them up, and the guy’s stiff, and the clerk quickly goes through his pockets to see if he’s got two bits or four bits or a dollar left, and then he phones for the city to come and get him out. That’s Chicago.

And there’s the jig found carved with a shiv in an areaway on South Halsted Street and the girl who took laudanum in a cheap hotel room. And the printer who had too much to drink and had probably been followed out of the tavern because there’d been green in his wallet and yesterday was payday.

If they put things like that in the paper, people would get a bad impression of Chicago, but that wasn’t the reason they didn’t put them in. They left them out because there were too many of them. Unless it was somebody important or somebody died in a spectacular way or there was a sex angle.

Like the percentage girl who probably took the laudanum somewhere last night—or maybe it was iodine or an overdose of morphine or, if she was desperate enough, even rat poison—she could have had a day of glory in the press. She could have jumped out of a high window into a busy street, waiting on a ledge until she got an audience gathered, and the cops trying to get her back in, and until the newspapers had time to get cameramen there. Then she could have jumped and landed in a bloody mess but with her skirts up around her waist as she lay dead on the sidewalk for a good pic for the photographers.

I left the newspapers on the bench and walked out the front door and stood there watching the people walk by on Madison Street.

It isn’t the fault of the newspapers, I thought. The papers just give these people what they want. It’s the whole goddam town, I thought; I hate it.

I watched the people go by, and I hated them. When they looked smug or cheerful, like some of them did, I hated them worse. They don’t give a damn, I thought, what happens to anybody else, and that’s why this is a town in which a man can’t walk home with a few drinks under his belt without getting killed for a few lousy bucks.

Maybe it isn’t the town, even, I thought. Maybe most people are like that, everywhere. Maybe this town is worse just because it’s bigger.

I was watching a jeweler’s clock across the street and when it got to be seven minutes after eleven, I went back through the station. The St. Paul train was loading, and I got on and got a seat.

It was as hot as hell in the train. The car filled quickly and a fat woman sat beside me and crowded me against the window. People were standing in the aisles. It wasn’t going to be a good trip. Funny, no matter how far down you are mentally, physical discomforts can make you feel worse.

I wondered, what am I doing this for anyway? I should get off, go home, and face the music. I’m just running away. I can send Uncle Ambrose a telegram.

I started to get up, but the train began to move.