Читать книгу Every Man for Himself - Mark J. Hannon - Страница 16

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 desk, he thought.

By the time he had covered the distance walking to the Meyer Memorial Hospital, where the morgue was, Johnny had figured out what he was going to tell them. His Pops was out of work (maybe true); Father Zaprazal was recommending him for the job (Father Zap didn’t speak much English); he had four brothers and sisters to take care of (well, his two brothers worked some, but why not); he’d finished eighth grade (rounding up from seventh); and he was sixteen years old (maybe he’d smoke a cigarette to look older than his stunted thirteen). Since they didn’t have a phone at home, he doubted they’d check there, and he looked clean, he figured, so, working in a hospital was just right.

When he got there, one of the men from the night before was sitting out front, smoking a cigar. Johnny took a deep breath, straightening himself up to full five-foot-two height. He walked up to him and looking right in the man’s reddened eyes, and said, “I’m here about the job washing the bodies.”

Without a word, the man stood up, turned, and waved him to follow. Johnny caught the door as it was swinging closed and followed the man down a white-tiled hallway to a room where the label on the frosted glass of the door read Morgue. Opening the door, Johnny was hit by the smells: the sweet odor of the dead, a penetrating antifreeze—like the smell that he later found out was formaldehyde and the stench of feces— that made him stop.

The older man looked back and said, “C’mon, you want the job, doncha?”

Johnny followed, at first holding his breath, and then taking as shallow breaths as he could.

Pulling an apron off a rack, the man tossed it to Johnny and said, “Put this on.”

Johnny barely caught it because his eyes were transfixed on one of the four zinc-covered tables, where a body lay. The abdomen was open and smelled like hamburger gone bad. The purple liver lay like a soft eggplant next to the chalk-white woman’s corpse, oozing blood that drained into the gutter at the edge of the table. Her breasts sagged to the side, and the nipples were almost the same color as the mushy organ next to her. Her eyes stared upward, and the only sign of remaining humanity, that Johnny could see, was her hair, which was curly and brown.

“Hey, kid, c’mon. That one’s already washed,” the man said as he pulled a metal drawer open, revealing a bundle of dark gray blankets over another body, maybe the one he saw getting hauled in here last night, the guy who had been knifed. The man reached inside the blankets and grabbed a wrist, shaking the arm.

XYZ

“Okay, this one’s ready,” he said, convinced that the rigor mortis had time to fade. “Gimme a hand with the gurney,” he instructed, whereupon he pointed to a corner, where one was pushed up against a wall. Silently, Johnny forced himself to move his feet, thinking, Ten cents a body, ten cents a body. He rolled the gurney next to the drawer, and, at the man’s signal, walked over to the other side of the drawer, where the man was.

“Okay, get his feet,” the man said, and, following his cue, Johnny and the man pulled the blanket-covered body onto the gurney. “Next, roll it over here, and get it on one of the tables.”

The man stood back and pointed to the table next to the dead woman with the curly hair. When Johnny hesitated, the man folded his arms and stood back. Johnny pushed the gurney snug up against the table, then dragged the body, first the head and shoulders, then the feet, over onto the dissecting table.

“This guy’s little, kid. If you get a really big guy, and you’re afraid you might drop him on the floor, go out and find an orderly to help you. They’ll expect a nickel to give you a hand, so’s better not do it often if you want to make money. Okay, now, take the blankets off and toss them in the hamper over in that corner,” he indicated to an oversized canvas bag held open in a black, metal rack.

Johnny started pulling the blankets off and had to grab a waxy arm to keep it from rolling off the table. Tugging the blankets from the top of the table, he kept the corpse from rolling, and revealed an old man in pajamas and a waft of sour old man crap, which had saturated his pants. Feeling bile rising in his throat, Johnny’s face turned green. The morgue attendant shoved him over to a slop sink, where the boy vomited curdled bread and milk in one, then two violent heaves. Grasping the sides of the sink and gasping for fresh air, he looked up and felt vomit dripping down his face. The attendant held him firmly by the arm in case he fainted, but Johnny kept his legs underneath him and splashed water on his face with his free hand.

“You gonna make it, kid?”

Johnny nodded, shut off the running water, and turned back to the reeking stiff on the table, noticing that the tables were all tilted slightly and the gutters on the sides and bottom emptied into a pipe that went down into a drain in the floor. The attendant released his grip but kept his hand near Johnny’s arm as they approached the body again.

“All right, then. If you’re ok, take these,” the man said, handing him a pair of large shears. “Usually, the family wants the clothes back, but it was just him, and I don’t figure even the St. Vincent DePaul wants some shit stained, worn out pjs. So, now, you take the scissors and cut the clothes off him and toss them in there,” he said, pointing to a ribbed metal trash can. “Make sure you empty that out when you’re done, and hose it out, too, or we’ll get this place full of bugs.”

Returning again to shallow breaths, Johnny sliced and tugged the threadbare pajamas off the old man, smearing wet feces on the table as he removed the bottoms. Holding the clothes at arm’s length, he dropped the rags into the garbage and returned to the table, where the attendant had stretched a heavy rubber garden hose with an adjustable nozzle.

“Okay, sometimes you gotta use a brush to get ’em clean, but this guy ain’t bad. Just hose him down, turn him over, hose down his backside, and then clean the table. The doc’ll come in, take a look at it, and see if he’s gotta cut into him. If he doesn’t, we wrap him up in one of the sheets over there,” he said, pointing to shelves filled with linen sheets. “And put him back in the drawer for the guys from the potter’s field, or the medical students to pick up. Think you can handle this, kid?”

Clearing his throat, Johnny answered, “Yes,” and held his hand out for the dime he was due.