CHAPTER 12
KENSINGTON, 1930
Johnny Walenty lay in bed next to his little brother, Edju, and shuddered when he heard the front door slam. He could hear his father breathing heavily all the way from the room in the addition, where he and his brother slept at the back of the house. His father stumbled in the dark and crashed through the door to where he slept with his wife in the front bedroom.
“Maja,” he said, “I’m hungry. What is there to eat?”
“Stepan,” the wife said, “Not again. You’re drunk. Did you spend all the money?”
“Arragh! Don’t you tell me what to do, too,” Stepan roared, and when Johnny heard the first slap, he jumped out of bed and pulled his overalls on over his union suit. Edju grabbed a pillow and dove under the bed. His older two brothers and his sister all jumped out of their beds like an alarm had gone off and rushed to the front of the house to try and restrain their father. When Johnny heard his siblings’ pleas, his father’s curses, and his mother’s screams, he opened a back window and climbed out while his two older brothers tried to wrestle their father down, and his sister helped his mother out of the way. Once in the backyard, Johnny ran through their yard and the neighbor’s behind them to the street. He ran towards Grider Street with the bright streetlights, running until he was there and couldn’t hear the fighting back at his house.
Once on Grider, he walked to catch his breath and saw a black panel truck glide quietly down the street to the hospital. He followed the black truck and watched as it went down a driveway and stopped. From the street, he saw two big men get out of the front and come to the rear of the wagon. There, they swung the rear door open and were joined by a man in a white coat and pants, pushing a gurney. The two big men pulled what had to be a body wrapped in blankets out of the back, and flopped it onto the gurney.
Pushing his fedora back on his head, one of the big men said, “Yeah, somebody knifed this poor bastard good, down on Busti. Cops were asking around, but nobody saw nothing.”
Just then, Johnny heard a noise and looked down the street. He wasn’t the only one watching the body get unloaded. There was a man with a cannonball for a head set on wide shoulders, dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit standing next to a tree, staring with unblinking black eyes. Johnny heard him crush out a cigarette on the sidewalk. As the body was wheeled into the hospital, the man walked away as silently as he came, and Johnny heard the man in the white coat say, “Shit, now I gotta wait for an autopsy before I get paid. You guys got any more jobs out there tonight?”
“Dunno, yet.”
“Ah, cripes. The kid who washes the bodies hasn’t shown up for a couple of days, either. You’d think he’d be grateful for the job, the little bum.”
“Huh, how much you payin’, Harry? I might send my kid over here if there’s an opening.”
“Ten cents a body, an’ I don’t take any backtalk about ‘Ohhh, he stinks,’ or anything like that either.”
“Hell, this depression keeps up, I might just take the job myself, pal. I’ll send my kid over tomorrow after school, okay?”
“All right by me, Mac. The job’s gotta get done, one way or another.”
When he heard “ten cents a body,” Johnny forgot all about the man with the cannonball head. He walked back up Grider towards Delevan, considering his prospects. Can’t go home for awhile until they get Poppa calmed down, which made him shudder again. Last time he went on a tear, the cops showed up; his Moms got in the middle and got clobbered by Pops again for her trouble. Slowing his walk, he heard a wagon clanging around the corner. What good luck, he thought. One of the old milk wagons still rattling on with a horse. Perfect, he thought, sliding up behind. When the driver stopped, the man with the white-peaked hat quickly grabbed his steel bottle carrier filled with glass bottles of milk, and headed towards a house. Johnny reached over, snatched a bottle, and was gone in a flash, the horse barely stirring. Trotting down the street, Johnny popped the cardboard cap off the bottle and sucked down the sweet cream on top. That’s the best, he thought, and he didn’t have to share it with anyone. Putting the cap back on the bottle, he slowly approached Delevan Street. Listening for signs of life, he looked up at the corner. The nearest streetcar stop was almost empty, just a few old babushkas there, heading home from cleaning jobs. Too early for the guys at the axle plant to be switching shifts yet. Just about right, he thought, moving into a barbershop doorway in the dark where he could watch the street, particularly the delicatessen. Slowly sipping the milk, Johnny waited, and after about fifteen minutes, a green delivery truck pulled up and a guy jumped out of the big open door on the passenger side carrying two bundles of newspapers. He dropped one batch bundled in wire on a green wooden stand and clipped the wires. Then, he clipped the second bundle; placed it on top of the first; clipped that, as well; counted off a number of newspapers; and returned to the truck with the remnant. Johnny waited until they pulled away, then, after looking both ways, jogged across the street and helped himself to a paper, before returning to the darkened doorway.
Breakfast was next. When a bakery truck pulled away from the deli, Johnny slid across the street again, this time snatching a couple of hard rolls out of the tall brown paper bags left on the deli steps. He took his haul back down the side street until he came to an empty lot with a pine tree growing in the back. Waiting for a moment to make sure no hobos were around, he went under the tree where he had slashed away the lower branches a few weeks ago, when the weather started to get warm. Sitting on a bed of soft needles and leaning against the trunk, he inhaled the pine scent and thought for a moment of Christmas, when he was little and Poppa wasn’t drunk so much. Mean drunk, anyway. He shook his head and returned to the present, thinking about where he could clean up a little before heading back over to the hospital, while he munched on the crusty rolls and sipped the sweet milk. Hafta read the paper later, when the sun comes up, he thought, anticipating stories about bootleggers and bank robbers, fast horses and comics, like Mutt and Jeff and Gasoline Alley.
He woke with the sun coming up and kids trotting down the street, calling one another’s names as they gathered along the route to school. He rubbed his eyes and spotted ants crawling on the ends of the rolls and in the remnants of the milk, which had tipped over while he slept. Dusting the crumbs and the bugs off his overalls, he stood up and stretched out, then walked around the corner. He looked up the street towards his house, and seeing no sign of commotion, thought about returning. Nah, too much to clean up, probably. Too many questions. Then they’d try to get him to go to school. The hell with that, to borrow his Pop’s phrase, and with that, he turned around and went over to Fillmore, then down Fillmore, past the park, and onto C Street, where his grandmother lived. She didn’t have a phone and wouldn’t know what was going on yet, unless momma and the others had fled there. He went in the back door and stamped his feet in the hallway, but got no response. The whole place smelled like cabbage cooking; the wallpaper permeated with the fart like odor. When I’ve made money, Johnny vowed, I’ll never live in a place that smells like cabbage.
“Babka?” he said, walking into the kitchen and looking around. The soup pot was on the stove, but it wasn’t cooking. “Babka?” he called again. Getting no response, he went into the pantry, found a bar of lye soap, and vigorously washed his hands, face and neck. Carefully combing his straight brown hair, he guessed his grandmother had gone out to Mass. Going out the back door and through the yard to the next block, he figured he’d dodge her return route from St. Adalbert.
Walking up Fillmore, he smiled at all the kids going to school. Once I get this job, no more of that for me, he thought. Farther up, he saw two men straining to carry a roll top desk down a ramp, off a truck. The suckers. I’m not going to break my back like Pops so some doctor can write up his bills on some huge