Page 13 of Shadow Ticket
The truculent little Bolshevik has been observing this with interest. “Go ahead,” snickering, “take your time, I ain’t afraida you.”
“Not packing any heat there, I hope, li’l feller.”
“If I was, you’d be dead already.”
“My lucky day but maybe you can tell me— Hey, well where’d he go?”
“I would’ve flattened the little runt,” Hicks is advised helpfully. “How can a man live with verbal abuse like that?”
—
In fact itwould take a couple of days for Hicks to understand that the strange feeling he couldn’t get a handle on was relief at not having killed somebody, slow-arriving because it seemed too much to hope for, one of those opportunities for second thoughts that with luck sometimes can come along. It felt almost like flying. Like the kindliest judge out of the sappiest movie in history beaming over his eyeglasses, “Case dismissed.”
Still leaving the mystery of where’d that beavertail get to, there one second and gone the next? Failing to fetch its target a blow that if it had connected would’ve killed him, Hicks had been that possessed by rage.
Presently he found himself falling into the strange habit of stepping between strikers and strikebreakers, if he was cranked up enough by then from the day’s activities it didn’t seem that much more dangerous, just an added direction to be jumped on from. Eventually the day arrived that when the call went out, Hicks found a way not to show up. Even when he could’ve used the money. Strangely, unexpectedly, out from under the obligation to go and bust heads, even if only for this one job.
Fellow tough guys are puzzled. “What a clambake you missed, dozens of casualties, nice payday too, peeled off of a flash roll the size of a spare tire, where were you?”
“BBH.” Bowling Ball Hospital out on Highway 41, looking in on the progress of his prize Brunswick Mineralite ball, which is having weight distribution troubles, “Drilling, plugging, went on for hours, emergency call in fact, they had to send an ambulance.” A converted Model T depot hack with little bowling-ball-sized gurneys and everybody in white coats.
—
During one jitteryperiod visiting different local factories, for chances of steady security work, Hicks heard about U-Ops and decided to have a look. They didn’t throw him out on his ear, a refreshing development, though there were a couple of trick questions.
“What’d be your idea of the next career step after industrial goon squad, Mr. McTaggart?”
Hicks gets nervous when anybody mentions next steps. Sooner or later the step turns out to be off the edge of some bluff and into the Lake. “I give up, tell me.”
No reply, just a sweeping look around at the little office they were in.
Somehow next thing he knows Hicks is deep in a Sheepshead marathon, which goes on all weekend. Nobody’s ever been promoted at U-Ops, let alone hired in the first place, without some proficiency at the game. The rules of Sheepshead, which not many outside Milwaukee find easy to follow, are somehow here inside the city limits inscribed into the local brain from birth. Not just playing for nickels, trick-taking and scoring points, Sheepshead engages with deeper matters of destiny, like having to figure out or blindly guess who among a number of players your partner is supposed to be, “As with life in general, always better to guess right, of course, though it’s all those poor souls who never do that keep us private ops in business, ain’t it.”
Private eyes of the 1930s are emerging from an era of labor unrest and entering one of spousal infidelity, encouraged if not enabled by Prohibition, as Boynt, who blames Prohibition for everything, sliding into a bloviational W. C. Fields delivery, is quick to point out and happy to explain at further length.
“You wanna know why there’s suddenly all these private coppers around, is it’s Prohibition. Created so much disrespect for city police, state and federal law, that we now have this rush of customers more than ready to turn to private-sector stiffs like us before they’ll trust the Milwaukee PD, despite which it’s dumb, overfed coppers who are destined to inherit earthly power, you can bet the rent on that, the private eyes and postcollegiate dilettantes of today will be long scattered, lost, slid back down into the inventory of uncounted jobless—oh. Wait. Nothing personal, forgot your Uncle Lefty, with whom I share a melancholy piece of history, almost a stretch in jail,” Boynt begins, and so on into another hooch-soaked evening, Boynt without even the common courtesy to stay at the office and break out his own, dragging Hicks instead from one nocturnal hush-hush to another, many of them unsuspected by Hicks till now.
“Yes, to look at it you’d think, easygoing, midwestern, nothin much going on, but step around the corner, try another angle, and it’s a different story. What finds its way into which pockets, what and sometimes who gets deep-sixed in the Lake after midnight, what happens to Negroes down in the precinct houses. Hitler kiddies, Sicilian mob, secret hallways and exit tunnels, smoke too thick to see through, half a dozen different languages, any lowlife thinks they can turn a nickel always after you for somethin, there’s your wholesome Cream City, kid, mental hygiene paradise but underneath running off of a heartbeat crazy as hell, that’s if it had a heart which it don’t…
“This isn’t about bringing crooks to justice, did you think that’s what we do? Not likely. We try any of that, licenses are sure to get pulled. What we do is, it’s only investigation. It’s like going to the movies. Sit quietly, eat popcorn, get educated. Solving murder mysteries, that’s for cops. Lawyers, judges, those who want to see somebody do time or get hanged for whatever it is.” In business since the days of the Haymarket bomb frame-up and the Rolling Mills Massacre, the Unamalgamated shop has always turned a brisk dollar from strong-arm jobs on behalf of management against labor, sometimes brutal and one-sided, sometimes fatal, no doubt, though why should offices back or front need to keep count, or even know that much?
“We’re kind of a transition zone between working for the owners and saddling up to go steal a payroll from them. With the grand old days of union busting moved on west, now it’s wandering spouses, beer-related intrigue, a little freelancing whenever the Outfit shows up needing some cheap labor, smaller-scale, what you could even call intimate sometimes, though potentially just as harmful to your health.”
It also happened around this time that one day a paper match cover on the sidewalk fatefully caught Hicks’s eye. “Learn Oriental Attitude and regain control of your life.” Of course Hicks picked it up, filled it out, mailed it in, some address in Chicago, keenly curious till he saw what the complete twelve-week course was going to cost him.
There did turn out to be a lower-cost option, a 35¢ instruction manual in comic-book form full of speech balloons, which though translated from Japanese into English was still indecipherable to Hicks, who, strangely gripped nevertheless, read all the way through, several times.
“Just as well,” Uncle Lefty helpfully, “when and if you finally go down there in person to get your diploma, maybe they hypnotize you into forgetting you ever took the course. There you are, all stuffed full of Oriental Attitude, and how will you ever know?”
“Thanks, Onk.”
But something must have been filtering through anyway. Hicks was slowly becoming aware at this time of what you could call a change in outlook, finding himself mysteriously in and out of the Toy Building down on 2nd Street or Nan King, a new south side joint, places that specialized in chop suey and dancing, not his usual idea of a Saturday night, and on another unexpected weekend in Chicago actually required to mediate, without understanding a word of Chinese, between On Leongs and Hip Sings regarding their uneasy arrangements about who’s supposed to get the opium trade and who the needle drugs such as cocaine, also receiving on top of a tidy fee from both parties a number of chain mail undershirts which turn out to be useful when wandering into moments of Chicago street recreation…
Maybe not as solid a voice as Dick Powell, not bad as a hoofer—yet as if in his sleep, he has somehow aged from a bright-eyed juvenile song-and-dance artist into a street-hardened, less often shaved and brilliantined specimen, one that the most level-headed of starlets these days might have trouble keeping still for even a couple bars of being crooned to by, Hicks finds himself ambling along the old worn pathways that lead into whatever the label “civilian” is currently being used for, a nationwide consensus including house chores on weekends, a dutiful ear to the radio, a disinclination to pick up any lengthier of a rap sheet than he’s already got. Even all day on into overtime and half the night on his feet and in motion, Hicks has begun to feel a kind of spiritual heavysetness sneaking up on him. Sometimes he’ll go a week without hearing a gunshot. Even desperate enough between shifts to go into the office and listen to police traffic on the Thrill Box. Who wouldn’t start to get nostalgic for the high-adventure escapades of earlier Prohibition days?
After a while others begin to notice, especially those Hicks once would’ve had little problem doing damage to but now found himself thinking twice about even frowning at. For all he knows, Oriental Attitude might be savingtheir lives, not to mention redefining his own—who knows if even one more assault beef on his record could be the fatal one to tilt him into a completely different life story?
“You’ve somehow come to safety, Hicks,” it seems to his aunt Peony, “safe in the featherbed of your destiny, not by refraining from violence but by embracing it, surviving it.” With, however, that trademark Aunt Peony reckless glint.
