Page 46 of Shadow Ticket
“That’s Uncle Luca, this is Uncle Ruggiero.” April never runs out of uncles, kind of endearing, long as he remembers not to take it personally. Would loving her mean loving someone who has committed routine betrayals and will again, yet never admit it, let alone allow anybody to bend a sympathetic ear?
—
The main concourseat Union Station is nothing you’d want to stare upward into for too long—115-foot-high semicylindrical barrel-vaulted overhead, skylights running along its length, open trusswork girders. Best to have some compelling business down here on the ground.
Rain in Chicago today, a downbeat hush. Yard bulls in slickers moving among the gaunt steel monsters, rain-brightened rails, treacherous footing. Taxi-war veterans, Yellow, Checker, and Parmelee, all at curbside, exhaust brightening visibly into the air like the breath of coach horses not that many winters ago. Grease, steam, overheated journal boxes, some send-off except that whaddaya know, here’s April again, up early, for her, wearing a pale peach fedora with a brim swept alluringly, a careful soft dent in the crown. Greeting him a little too fast, with a touch of what a fight announcer might call pugnacity, making an effort to dial down the emotion. Confirming, if it wasn’t clear to Hicks already, that her story about being in town to visit yet another branch of the family is hooey.
Buttoning her lip, she settles poised against him with dance-floor hands where they’re supposed to be, her perfume, Shalimar as usual, even an hour into drydown locally overriding the cigar and coal smoke of the echo-filledconcourse, and here they are, dancing together to a tune only they among the hundreds streaming by can hear, in and out of the towering, vaulted volume of rainlight and public-toilet acoustics, clasped in that always just about to be no longer reliable routine they find themselves sliding into whenever things look like ambling off into the swamplands of sincerity. Orchestral backup as usual remaining discreetly invisible…
Somewhere below the Chicago streets, all but trainside, a sulfurous note from the coal smoke in the air, in some little last-chance joint that isn’t the Fred Harvey’s upstairs, April even gets a chance to reprise “Midnight in Milwaukee,” and in her glottal attack, for example, on phrases like “Any town but this one,” her voice breaks a little, as if she’s actually getting emotional about the lyric. Fact, this is one of those times it’s almost more than either of them can take.
“You know as long as there’s no more surprises waiting down the line—”
She has been rolling up his necktie against just such a declaration, and now stuffs it quickly into his mouth, inquiring with her eyebrows if he understands. Nodding, Hicks opens his mouth and lets the damp tie unroll back down over his shirt.
“Schuster’s, on sale, 39¢, but I still try not to drool on it too much. You know, sentimental.” Hicks with a hesitation step and turn that gives them no choice but to kiss goodbye, at length and both sincere as they’ll ever get, beside the Broadway Limited cranked up to go, and for a minute it’s unclear which of them is staying and which leaving.
“Keep out of trouble, genius.”
“Don’t let’s hear nothin good about you, hot stuff.”
Up ahead somewhere the engine makes with some loud escapes of steam, wheels still wet from out in the trainyard taking a few seconds to gain purchase, till the looming mindless iron critter begins to move. And as Annette Hanshaw might kiss it off, “That’s all.”
17
Streamlining on into afternoon deepening to blue evening, through Depression Pittsburgh, a ghost city, fires at the iron- and steelworks banked, massive structures unlit, though not unoccupied.
Later on, up in the mountains, between Pittsburgh and Altoona, entering deeper into the night run, having left behind and below what neon still shone, the Hoovervilles, the ghost-city light, hobo gatherings around trackside trash fires, stray auto headlights gliding briefly alongside the tracks, some fractional moonlight through the windows plus a few dim electric lamps in the observation car, deserted at this hour except for Hicks.
“You OK in here?” It’s a Pullman porter, whose name, as he’s quick to point out, isn’t George but McKinley. “We’re running underweight tonight, there’s empty berths back there if you want to grab some shut-eye.”
“Thanks, I’m fine catnappin in here, if it’s OK.”
McKinley Gibbs turns out to be running a sideline in race records, and before long is showing Hicks a good-size stack of platters carefully interleaved with newspapers he’s also bringing on to points east.
“Interest you in aDefenderhere, makes a good Hoover blanket too.”
“Sure, thanks, but mind if I ask, what’s with all this ‘Turn Lincoln’s face to the wall’ and so forth?”
“Hate to be the one to tell you the sad tale, but everybody knows by now what Hoover is, and it ain’t no Lincoln.”
“But he’s an engineer, ain’t he, a management expert, solved the hungerin Europe, anybody knows how to fix the economy it ought to be him. Besides which, come on, all those loudmouth Democrats down yonder there?”
“Who’ll keep doing what they want regardless of which of these two rich white guys gets in the White, did I say White House…Some choice, ain’t it.”
“Some’ve been calling Roosevelt a traitor to his class.”
“Makes him worth a look at least. But he needs the Solid South. Whoops,” as a shellac disc comes sliding out of the foldedDefenderand he dives to catch it.
“Got some Hits of the Week, Fletcher Henderson band, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Moten, that young Basie?” so forth. “That’s if you dig it of course—here, Jabbo Smith and his Rhythm Aces, one of your local Milwaukee horns, there’s people say he’s better than Louis Armstrong, whole lot of these Paramount platters here, straight out of Grafton, practically your hometown, just up the road, give you the factory price…”
“Blind Blake, ‘Police Dog Blues,’ mind if we…”
McKinley brings it over to the club-car Victrola, puts it on. Before bar three Hicks is about to topple into a romantic nostalgia episode. “I’ve heard this. Not on a record, not in a club, but…”
Down some long hallway someplace deep in April’s place on Brewer’s Hill, maybe upstairs, maybe down…no fixed hour, some nights not at all.
Hicks has been around enough close-up card-trick artists to know when he’s having a card forced on him, and yet here he finds himself with a record he didn’t mean to buy. No label, pure black geometry.
