Page 12 of Shadow Ticket
As Hicks learns from Aunt Peony presently in the kitchen, seems Lefty has been creeping in at late hours, imperfectly alibied by bowling-league politics, without the least detectable smell of beer, though with signs of intoxication all the same, an unforthcoming glitter, a reluctance to lower his voice or to back away, as if daring anybody in the house who might still be awake to ask him where he’s been and what he’s been up to. “And especially for you tonight, Hicks, he’s doing the cooking.”
“Here again,” Uncle Lefty down at his end of the table well into third or fourth helpings, all but pitchforking around the sauerkraut, “is my Surprise Casserole you liked so much last time.” Hicks can detect sport peppers, canned pineapple, almost-familiar pork parts marinated in Uncle Lefty’s private cure, based on wildcat beer from a glazed-crock studio just across the Viaduct.
Seems like the chief topic of supper conversation is going to be Adolf Hitler, children present or not. This being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated, in some cases even deadly.
“Now,” according to Uncle Lefty, “the MPD finds we gotta deal not only with the Reds, who’ve been troublesome forever, but also with the Hitlermovement. Sometime soon they’re headin for a showdown, more than just pushing and shoving like out in West Allis lately, but real blood on the streets of Milwaukee, let’s hope not too much higher than trouser-cuff level, till one party prevails.”
“ ‘Prevails.’ And you think the, um…” Hicks pulling his hair down briefly over one eye.
“Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day theJournalcalls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’ ”
“They called me Boy Inspiration of the Year once, look where it got me.”
“You can’t trust the newsreels, you only think you’ve seen him, the Jews who control the movie business only allow footage that will make him look crazy or comical, funny little guy, funny walk, funny mustache, German Charlie Chaplin, how serious could he be? But there also existotherHitlermovies, yes, some even filmed in color, home movies, a warmer, gayer Hitler, impulsive, unorthodox, says whatever comes into his head, what’s wrong with that?”
“Jumpin up and down all nutty and screaming the minute anybody brings up the topic of Jews, sure, everybody’s welcome to their own sense of humor. Swell casserole here, by the way.”
“Had the recipe for years, from another beat cop I was walking partners with out in Sixth District. Sort of thing you get to talking about, walking a beat, especially if it’s cold. Recipes. Kitchens of our youth. So forth.”
“Very domestic,” Aunt Peony poking at her food, “those straw boxes they fall asleep in, pictures on the walls, all done up, chintz curtains, the works.” Since they got married, Peony’s conversation has steadily been taking on an edge, her natural nerve coming out to shine, as if some maidenly spirit, searching and pious, has set out on a trip Peony has no plans herself to make, toward a destiny quietly lifted away from her when she wasn’t looking…
“Around Baraboo, even the sweetest of girls, the most carefully brought up you can imagine, could still, one day, all at once, just…well, run away with the circus.”
Her tactful way of mentioning her sister Grace, Hicks’s mother. Peony and Grace grew up in the Driftless Area, a patch of Wisconsin never visitedby glaciers, so that its terrain tends to be a little less flat and ground down than the rest of the state, free of the rubble, known as drift, that glaciers leave behind them.
Soon as they could figure how to bring their thumbs out of their mouths and into the wind, the girls fell into a practice of hitchhiking over to Baraboo every weekend, hanging around the circus people who wintered there, feeding the menagerie critters, hopelessly mooning after knife-throwers, acrobats, and mind readers, wondering just what was supposed to happen to them between now and whenever it got to a choice between run away some first of May with one of the shows or join the relentless spiral drain down to Milwaukee and find some city work, which is eventually what happened, and how Grace met Eddie McTaggart and Peony met Detlef Flaschner and got married, a double ceremony in fact, and not a day went by afterward that one or the other didn’t wonder if she made the right call. This spell of matrimonial normality continued till Grace resumed an old Baraboo romance with an elephant trainer who learned his trade at the Carl Hagenbeck zoo in Hamburg from assorted stars of the profession, always talking about moving back to Europe, working the big circuses, hobnobbing with plutes and nobility, presented at court, someday owning and running his own herd. A dreamer though you’d never know it to look at him. “When other boys got sentimental they talked about all the children you were going to have, with Max it was more likely to be elephants.”
Eddie, heartbroken, headed west, went silent, has kept that way since. Hicks was taken in by Aunt Peony and Uncle Lefty, or as far in as you can take somebody with one foot by then already out the door.
The logical field to get into after North Division High, it seemed to Hicks, was strikebreaking, being basically the same thing only better pay and always hiring. At the time in Wisconsin not a week went by there wasn’t a strike at least being voted on someplace, plenty of opportunity to kick asses on behalf of management.
Before he knew it he’d picked up a certain notoriety as a corporate thug, fighting his way through one picket line after another so he could go on beating people up all shift long, a routine that may not’ve made much sensebut was straightforward enough, asking nothing of Hicks but to be solid and in the way.
Any promise of industrial uncertainty inside half a tankful’s driving radius and the call, almost telepathic, would go out and there’d be Hicks upside some piece of company fence out in outer Wisconsin someplace, into shoving matches all along the flare-lit fence lines, soon moving on to fists and saps.
It didn’t get as political for Hicks as it did for some. “Bolshevik” was a popular insult being thrown around at strikes and marches, meaning people whose heads he was being paid to bust, but it took a while before he learned it was a Russian word and not Polish and he still isn’t sure what it means.
Over that summer the papers were full of Sacco and Vanzetti, the usual bleeding hearts out in the street carrying signs and pissing and moaning ain’t it awful. Houses in the Third Ward, enough so you noticed, draped in black. Somehow it must have all passed without much effect on Hicks that he can remember. He did notice nerves were on edge in the speaks, more nose-to-nose screaming and the sort of thing you expect on dim-lit patches of roadhouse parking lot later in the evenings. Mention was often made of the MPD station-house bomb of 1917 and its Italian origin.
Sometimes you’re the Polack, sometimes you’re the goon…find yourself tangling with boys you used to work alongside of, if you think that don’t hurt…A lousy summer, on into and through the fall and if there ever had been any thrill factor for Hicks it was beginning to wear off. One night with the usual American Legion reinforcements away at some kind of annual raccoon feast, Hicks joins a disgruntled busload of colleagues headed into Sheboygan County. Running late to begin with, the bus gets pulled over by wheel coppers who take them for Communist agitators, delaying them further. By the time they reach the picket line, it’s already dark, light snow on the ground picking up shadows easy to read as early bloodstains, and Hicks is in a doubtful mood. The management stooge in charge at the plant is having a nervous episode and taking it out on everybody.
“All right, listen up, some of you stay in the building, but most of you’ll be outside the fence, the gates will be locked behind you. They’ll be open again after you’ve done what you’re being paid to do. Any problems?”
“The noises we keep hearing—is any of that guns?”
“Who would be that stupid?”
“Ain’t stupid that worries us, Boss.”
“Any of you ladies get too jittery, feel free to take cover, just keep in mind we’ll consider that break time and dock you for it.”
It was gunfire, all right. Coming from plant property. Five minutes out on the perimeter, the shrill glare of lights all up and down the fence suddenly goes dark. As if permission is being granted to do what comes next under cover of darkness.
“Get the feeling somebody’s being set up here?”
One particular striker shorter than Hicks and wearing glasses, ordinarily the daily double of who not to go after, a wisenheimer with a mouth on him, somehow cannot be chased off or brought down. Hicks after a while is starting to take this personally. “Wait a minute, I know you. The famous Muscles McTaggart, ain’t it. Why, you’re nothin but a big creampuff, what happened to you? you were the certified wrath of God once, a part of history, what is it, your mother’s been yellin at you? Kickin you with those combat boots,” and so forth.
Hicks realizes later he really was angry enough to finish off the four-eyed troublemaker and just leave the body where it fell, another unfortunate casualty of failed labor relations. The pale blur of a face, eyes fixed on what would’ve been the upraised lead-filled beavertail sap, MPD issue though technically not legal…except that just for this moment Hicks seems to’ve somehow, strangely, misplaced it—nevertheless continuing to swing backhand and blind at where he last thought he saw the striker’s head, only nothing connects, apparently because the sap Hicks thought he was holding isn’t there anymore. Overswinging, he loses his balance, staggers, nearly falls…in the time it takes him to get normal again, somehow mysteriously something has changed.
