My Crooked Family Read online

  Pa was in the same place. It was a long gray room, with two rows of iron columns running down the middle. The whole place was gray—gray blankets, gray windows that hadn’t been washed for years, gray uniforms on the nurses, gray faces on the people lying under gray blankets. Even the air seemed gray.

  Pa was lying on his back, his head propped up on a pillow. His face was gray, too. We stood around him, Ma up near his head, me at the foot of the bed, Lulu opposite Ma, kind of up on her tiptoes for no reason and holding her breath. It scared me to look at Pa. His eyes were shut, his skin was gray and damp, and he was breathing with kind of a gasp. He looked strange. I was used to him being tough and ornery, and it was out of place for him to be lying there weak and helpless. It was like he had turned into somebody else.

  “Is he dead?” Lulu said. She lowered herself off her tiptoes.

  “Don’t be dumb,” I said. “Can’t you see he’s breathing?”

  “Shush, children,” Ma said.

  Pa opened his eyes. He looked at us, his eyes moving to one of us, then the next, and back around again. He didn’t move his head, just his eyes. He just stared at us, like he was wondering who we were and what we were doing there. But I knew Pa. It would be just like him to lie there and pretend he didn’t know us. After a minute of looking back and forth among us, he licked his lips; then he closed his eyes.

  “What happened to him, Ma?” Lulu said.

  “Shush,” she said again. She backed away from the bed and waved at us to follow. We went down the long aisle between the rows of beds and iron columns to the end of the room. We stood by the window there. “He was shot in the stomach,” she said. “We don’t know how. All we know is that he came out of an alley on Slate Street holding his stomach and fell down on the sidewalk. It was lucky that there was a policeman right there, because he was losing a lot of blood. They got an ambulance right away.”

  I kept getting a funny feeling that it was my fault. I knew in my head that it wasn’t, but I kept getting the feeling that it was. It was because I’d tracked him down to the Golden Eagle and tried to push him into giving us some money. I wished I hadn’t done that now, for maybe he wouldn’t have got shot. “Is he going to get better, Ma?”

  “We don’t know. He lost a lot of blood before they got him here.”

  What would they do to me if he died? I knew I ought to tell Ma about tracking him down to the Golden Eagle. But I was scared to admit it. I wished I hadn’t done that; I wished I hadn’t tried to beg food out of the Chinaman. Maybe Pa wouldn’t have got shot.

  “Who shot him, Ma?” Lulu said.

  “We don’t know. I’m not sure he knows. I’ve told him again and again he was going to get in trouble. He never listens to anybody. He’s always got to be his own master, and if the Lord himself told him what he ought to do, he’d do just the opposite.”

  “Ma, what was he always going to get in trouble about?” Lulu said.

  I would like to have known the answer to that myself. But Ma saw that she’d said too much already. “It wasn’t him I was concerned about. It was his friends. He had too many bad companions.”

  “Did one of them shoot him? What for?”

  Ma patted Lulu on the head. “It was probably just a robbery. He may have been foolish and resisted. It would be like your father.”

  That was probably true. You could say that for Pa, he didn’t take anything from anybody. You had to admire him for that. Whenever the landlord came around because we were late on the rent, Pa would tell him that he would pay when he got good and ready to and not before. I figured he would have fought off a robber. If that’s who did it. We didn’t know that—Ma was only guessing. Besides I didn’t think Pa had enough money on him to make it worth robbing him. He might have had some. But from the way things had been going with us the past month I didn’t think he had very much.

  There wasn’t any way to even guess at it, and if he died we’d never know what happened.

  “Ma, if Pa dies, how will we get money?” Lulu said.

  I hadn’t thought of that one. Even if he was laid up for a while we were going to be in trouble.

  “We won’t worry about that now,” Ma said. “Now you two go on home. I want to stay with your father for a little.”

  “Ma, we didn’t eat,” I said.

  “I fed Lulu.” She opened her purse and fumbled around in it. Tumbled in with her handkerchief, pill box, notebook, was a half-pint bottle with a cork in it. She was going to sit by Pa and drink out of that bottle. I decided to be sure to be asleep when she got home.

  She came up with a half dollar. “Get a sandwich and a soda at the Greek’s.”

  That night, after I’d got a ham sandwich and a Coca-Cola, I lay in bed thinking. I had a lot of reasons for wanting Pa to die. If he was gone, we could probably start visiting Grandma and Grandpa again. We’d sit in the living room filled up with furniture—sofa, easy chair, side table with a fringe cloth on it where they kept the souvenirs Grandpa brought home from his travels. He’d been all over on business. He brought back a fancy little spoon from the Chicago World’s Fair, a stitched Stevenograph bookmark from the St. Louis Exhibition, some pretty shells from San Francisco, a piece of a fossil tree from Arizona—oh, a whole lot of stuff. It was all right there on that side table. Grandpa would let you pick it up and look at it.

  If Pa was dead maybe Ma would stop drinking. I don’t know why I thought she would, but she might. Then we could go and live with Grandpa and Grandma. A lot of people went to live with their grandmas. Sally Hector did when her pa fell off a scaffolding and was killed. So did the Gerbach kids, for some reason. Things might be nicer if Pa was gone.

  But the strange thing was, I didn’t want him to die. The idea of anybody dying was scary, but it was more scary when it was your own pa. He was realer to me than other people were. I mean, if one of my teachers who I happened to like was to die, I might feel sad but it wouldn’t matter a whole lot. But when your pa dies, it matters. I didn’t know exactly why, but it had something to do with knowing so much about him. I knew the way he smelled. I knew the way he combed his black hair so you could see the white lines in it where his skin showed through. I knew his voice so well I could hear it in my head anytime I wanted to—“Roger, who told you you could do that” or whatever it was. It scared me to think that somebody real like that could die.

  Still, I had smiled when Ma told me he might die; and I knew that if in the morning she told me that Pa had died during the night, I’d smile again. Why was that? I didn’t want him to die—I was scared of that: but still it made me smile.

  For one thing, we’d have a hard time over money. Ma had graduated from high school. She learned typing and stenography and went to work for Bell Telephone. Grandpa didn’t like the idea of her working—he said it wasn’t fit for a woman to have a job and she should stay home until she got married. But Grandma said there was no harm in it, a lot of women got jobs nowadays, so Grandpa got her a job at Bell where he could keep an eye on her.

  Then she married Pa, and after I was born she had to quit her job and stay home to look after us. Sometimes Pa would tell her that she wasn’t pulling her weight, and she ought to go back to work at Bell. She always said she was out of practice, and they wanted young women, not somebody pushing forty, and besides she didn’t have the clothes for it. If Pa died it didn’t seem likely she’d be able to get a job.

  I’d have to quit school and go to work. Ma would be against that. She wanted me to go straight through high school. She said I should get some education so I could make a decent life for myself. She didn’t say it, but what she meant was that I shouldn’t grow up like Pa. Pa stopped going to school full-time when he was ten so he could work on the farm. After that he only went in the winter when the weather was bad, and he never got out of the sixth grade. He quit for good when he ran away at fourteen. Ma always blamed a lot of Pa’s troubles on him not having an education. She was bound and determined I would finish high school. She had an idea
of me being an engineer. She was always saying that engineers were the conquerors of nature—look at John August Roebling who invented the Brooklyn Bridge. If I became an engineer I might have a magnificent achievement like the Brooklyn Bridge and be remembered forever.

  I wasn’t so sure about being an engineer. It seemed like an engineer had an awful lot of calculating to do. I hated math. It was my worst subject. But whatever it was, Ma was determined I should make something of myself—engineer, or school teacher, or lawyer, or something. She wasn’t going to see me go wrong, like so many kids around there. Or Lulu, either.

  It was true that a lot of kids around there went wrong. There wasn’t any shortage of chances to go wrong if you wanted to—start stealing or gambling or, if you were a girl, working in the dance halls or the parlor houses. A lot of the kids didn’t see anything wrong with that stuff. There was good money in it. Why work in some sweatshop for ten bucks a week when you could make ten times as much in the dance halls or the gambling joints? Ma always said that it was a terrible temptation for the unfortunate young people whose families needed them to go to work before they finished school, and couldn’t speak proper English, anyway: Lulu and I had better opportunities and must take advantage of them.

  Pa had a different view of it. According to him he’d got along all right without much schooling and didn’t see why I needed it, either. It was time I started pulling my weight around there, Pa said. I wouldn’t have minded being rich out of something if there wasn’t too much studying to it. That was one thing about going wrong—there wasn’t so much work to it. It seemed like it might be more exciting than being an engineer. What was so interesting about inventing the Brooklyn Bridge? To be honest, I was kind of curious about what it would feel like to go wrong— to be one of those fellas like Circus Penrose in derby hats and fancy pants who hung around the saloons and the dance halls. But probably it was better to be an engineer.

  When I woke up in the morning I didn’t remember about Pa at first. He was usually asleep when we got up, so we had to tiptoe around the place getting ready for school. Sometimes Ma got up and helped us, but sometimes she’d just whisper out from the bed, “Roger, make sure that Lulu eats something. And don’t wake your father.”

  But this morning she didn’t wake up at all. She just lay there on the daybed, breathing pretty loud. That was when I remembered about Pa and got that scared feeling. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe he’d died during the night and Ma was waiting until morning to tell us. But probably that was wrong. Probably he was getting better, and when Ma saw that, she came on home.

  I woke Lulu up and she began getting dressed. It wasn’t usually any problem seeing that she ate something, for she was always hungry. The problem was finding something to eat. I looked in the cupboard. There was half a loaf of bread and a jar of molasses: Ma must have bought them when she’d gone out for medicine. Roaches had got on the bread. Keeping my back turned to Lulu so she couldn’t see, I brushed them off. Then I wiped the bread with the paper and sliced off a couple of pieces each. I spread the molasses on the bread as thick as I could. Molasses was good for you, Ma always said. There was iron in it. It tasted pretty good, anyway.

  So we ate the bread, standing by the kitchen table, and then we went to school. I didn’t want to think about Pa. It was too confusing. What had happened to him? Why did I smile when I heard he might die? So as not to think of him I concentrated on my schoolwork. We were mainly studying ancient history—the Greeks and Egyptians and those fellas. I wasn’t much interested in it. I didn’t mind English because I was always a good reader. When we were little Grandma would always read to us, and sometimes Ma did too. I didn’t mind English at all, especially when we had something like Ivanhoe to read. But ancient history didn’t interest me, and I had to work to concentrate on it and keep my mind off Pa. I was mighty glad when the bell rang at the end of the day and we could go.

  I started down the school steps heading for home, as usual. But there on the sidewalk in front of me was Circus Penrose, leaning on a lamp post. He was wearing those same yellow trousers with the sharp crease in them, but this time he had on a purple shirt and an orange kerchief around his neck. The colors went good with his red hair. The silver toothpick was in the corner of his mouth.

  “Hey there, Rog,” he said. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  I was surprised to see him. What with Pa and all, I’d forgotten about him. “How come you’re out?” I said.

  “Oh that,” he said. He took the toothpick out of his mouth and waved it in the air. “Well, it was my pals. They just wasn’t keen on seeing me go on trial. You know how it is at trials—you just never know what might come out in the testimony. You put a fella on the witness stand, he’s bound to be a little flustered. Even somebody like me, who’s usually as cool as a cucumber in the shade, why up there on the witness stand I might make a little slip here and there. Somebody’s name might crop up. A fella wouldn’t do nothing like that on purpose. A fella wouldn’t peach. But still, there’s always a chance of a slip. So my pals decided it was best if we dispensed with the trial altogether.”

  “How did they get the judge to agree?”

  “Oh, him.” He waved the toothpick again. “Why, he’s just an agreeable fella. It’s his natural way.” He took out the little leather case and put the toothpick away. “How’s your pa doing?”

  How come he knew about that? How come it made any difference to him? “Who told you about that?”

  “Oh, word gets around. You know how people are. They must talk. If they hear any bad news at all about a fella they can’t rest until they spread it around the neighborhood like jam.” He tipped his head to give me a look. “They say he got hurt mighty bad.”

  It sounded to me like he was willing to help spread it around that Pa was near dead. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. “He’s doing fine, the doc says. He’ll be up and around in a few days.” I was going to look pretty silly if it turned out Pa was already dead.

  “Well, I’m mighty glad to hear that,” he said. “I never met the man hisself. I wouldn’t know him if I fell across him in the street. But I figured it would have you upset a mite. Just a trifle. I liked you the first time I set eyes on you. I said to myself, Circus, that there boy seems like a fine lad. And when I heard about your pa this morning I said, Circus, that boy is going to be mighty worried about his pa, you better just get yourself over there and give him a word of comfort.”

  I didn’t believe any of it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Still, it felt good for him to be friendly and say I was a fine boy and needed a word of comfort. I wished I could believe it more.

  “I got to go on home,” I said. “Ma said she might be at the infirmary this afternoon and I was to look after my little sister.”

  “I’ll just walk along with you,” Circus said. “Keep you company. Even if your pa’s coming along fine, you’re bound to be worried. Naturally you would. You never know how these things work out. Why, he might take a turn for the worse at any moment.”

  “The doc said not to worry, he’s doing fine.” I walked towards home as quickly as I could, while Circus babbled on beside me about people he’d known who’d been healthy as crows one day and in their graves the next. “Not that we’re expecting anything like that in your pa’s case. He’s bound to be doing fine, just like the doc said. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was up and about already, giving the nurses the once over.”

  We reached our building. “I have to say good-bye now.”

  Circus looked the building up and down. The paint was peeling off most of the window frames and the front door was full of dents and scratches where people had got drunk and lost their keys and had to beat their way in. If you gave the door a good bang it usually opened. “This is it? This where you and your pa live?”

  “The whole family lives here.” I didn’t want him to think the family was split up or anything.

  “Which apartment would it be? One of the front ones?”

>   He was too curious about us. I thought about lying, but then I remembered that our names were listed in the foyer. “No, it’s in the back. Well, I got to go.” I turned and started up the stoop.

  “Hang on a sec, Rog. I got something to ask you. How’d you like to make a little dough?”

  I stopped and turned around. “How?”

  “Well, if you’re of a mind to it, we could talk. It could be a fairish amount of dough.”

  The only way anybody around there made a fairish amount of dough was by doing something crooked. A lot of people around there didn’t see anything wrong in being crooked. They said that anybody who stuck to a straight job wasn’t going to have anything but a bucket of sweat for their trouble. There was some, like Charley O’Neill’s pa, who stuck to a straight job and came out all right, if you judged by the curtains they had, and the Parcheesi board. But a lot of them couldn’t see having a straight job. “Is it something crooked?”

  “Crooked? What on earth makes you ask a question like that? I’m plain shocked at you. Of course it’s crooked. You don’t think for a minute that Circus is fool enough to work for his living, do you? I figured you wasn’t no Nervous Nelly, seeing as how you had the guts to swipe a bucket of fried pork and rice from the Chinaman’s.”

  The idea of doing something crooked scared me. It wasn’t so much being caught, but just the whole thing of going wrong. Of course if you did something crooked just once that wouldn’t be going wrong. It would only be going wrong if you did it all the time. Maybe I should do it just once, so as to get some dough. That way I wouldn’t have to steal from the Chinaman’s when Ma got drunk. “Well, I might be interested if I knew what it was.”

  He looked around in case someone was listening. “It won’t do to talk in public. You know Stein’s Dance Hall?”