Page 11 of Shadow Ticket

Hicks gets a note from Skeet. “Come on down the Viaduct, somebody there you might want to talk to.”

He finds Skeet and some fellow gang members waiting under the Holton Street Viaduct for the fog to lift, along with a few girls grown wary of the evening shift looking for some daylight trade.

Streetcars go banging overhead. “C’mon.” Skeet leads him into an abandoned lot surrounded by darkened walls, paint of old advertising weathered away, windows that could have anything just behind them.

Or nothing for years. Civilians drift to and fro mostly idle, a few collecting lookout fees.

“Welcome to the clubhouse.”

Not surprisingly, interested parties can be found, usually after dark, prowling around in little panel trucks with rotating loop antennas on top trying to get a fix on sources of transmission, obsessed by what these kids might find out, who they might be talking to about it…

bootleggers, lately more and more making use of encrypted radio traffic, being of particular federal concern.

Everybody is smoking Camels and Luckies, Dutch Masters and El Productos stolen off the Milwaukee Road freights that come rolling through town.

The joint is wallpapered with publicity stills of Goldwyn Girls in their unmentionables, prominent among them the platinum trick or, as Skeet prefers, desperately adorable goddess Toby Wing.

“This here is the all-time definition of cute with a capital Q!”

A back room with its own back room, “First workspace in my life that has a toilet,” sez Skeet, “instead of is one. The mad scientist’s lab I always dreamed about.”

“Mad scientist like—angry? Or—” crossing his eyes and putting out his tongue at an angle.

“Both.” Helpfully.

Around midday Hughes, one of the Negro policy runners, shows up, taking a breather before the next round of betting resumes, sporting a hand-me-down drape suit retailored at the waist and ankles from one of his father’s.

Accompanied by Bensonhurst, a small, shaggy mutt, mostly Norwich terrier, that Hughes was supposed to drown as a puppy but couldn’t bring himself to.

“White gentleman pays me four bits to do the job. Face to face, couldn’t do it and Benny knew I couldn’t, ain’t that right, Benny, hay-ull no.

Thought about giving the money back, but we blew it all on Ken-L Ration instead. ”

A furious torrent of dots and dashes from a shortwave set back in a corner.

“German naval code again,” explains a kid named Drover in a set of earphones who’s been monitoring, a very bright young science whiz who had to lie about his age to get into Shorewood High School and is currently sitting in on physics classes at Marquette, now and then getting in a round of speed chess with the professor, árpád él?, the top player in Milwaukee.

“Family are happier when I’m out of the house, any trouble I’m headed for I ought to be able to avoid if I’m as bright as everybody keeps telling me, don’t you think? ”

“Uh-huh, what’s with all these wires comin out of this ukulele here?”

“Listen.” Eight quick bars of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” on amplified uke.

“It’s coming over the radio, how’s that work?”

“Kid out in Waukesha showed me, you take a record needle, wire it up to the speaker here, see? You want the real Tom Swift, it’s this Lester kid, calls himself Red, playing hillbilly guitar up and down Bluemound Road for nickels and dimes, drive-ins, roadhouse parking lots, gets to where he needs to be heard over the traffic, so he figured this out. ”

“White kid named Red on Bluemound Road, check and triple check, pretty patriotic, ain’t it.”

“Also known as the Wizard of Waukesha. Me, I’m just another brass-pounder, but this kid’s the goods, I tell ya.”

“Hicksie, you got a minute?” It’s Skeet, dragging over who, natch, but the till recently incommunicado Stuffy Keegan.

“Well, Stuffy. Sorry about the truck.”

“Hope you ain’t working for anybody that’s looking for me.”

“Couple of clients naturally curious about who did it and why, wondering who’ll try to collect the insurance, nothin more personal than that.”

“See, when it blew I was supposed to been in it. Last-minute yen for a Giant Bar, pulled over, just about to step in the candy store, feeling around for change, suddenly ka-blooey, all hell, whizzin around my ears, thought it was giant mosquitoes but it was pieces of my rig. Somehow I begin to get this feelin…”

“MPD say they’re on the case, some think it’s the Outfit, some say the Nazi Youth.”

“Two different kinds of trouble, ain’t it, one you end up dead, the other dead and in hell.”

“Just in time, Stuffy,” Drover back at the shortwave equipment. “Your sub just showed up again.”

Stuffy finds another set of earphones and jacks in.

“His what?” sez Hicks.

“The U-13,” Drover explains. “An unsurrendered Austro-Hungarian submarine. Supposed to be broken up by terms of the Versailles Treaty, but somehow they dodged it.”

“Where are they?”

“Out in the Lake someplace. Closer to the other side where there’s less ice.”

“A submarine in Lake Michigan. Come on, kid.”

“Hmm, traffic’s light tonight, everybody must be down below at the bowling alley.”

“The, um…”

“There’s a big tournament on.”

“Bowling alley on a submarine, Drover?”

“Sure, quite common in fact, you never heard of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”

Stuffy meantime has gone off into some trance of his own, as if monitoring the U-13 could be no more weird or peculiar than listening to a normal radio show over a Thrill Box of unconventional design.

“Each episode,” Stuffy explains later, “the U-13 visits a different port of call. A different chore. Pickup and delivery, tobacco, dope, guns, hooch, live passengers with their papers not always in order who need to be here or there in a hurry and don’t mind being stashed with the cargo.”

“Anybody we might know, Stuffy?”

“Sure—and if I tell ya, you’ll get all agitated, with your lousy cop reflexes, start calling names, mania this, phobia that, unnatural emotions, and givin me that look. Yeah, right there, that one.”

“Your personal affair, Stuffy, man wants to be U-boat happy, what’s it to me?”

“Yeah, well, they’re picking me up tonight.”

“This…U-boat…”

Drover looks back over his shoulder, catching Hicks’s eye, points his thumb at one earphone, nods, goes back to monitoring traffic.

“Just came by to say so long. To people I can still trust.”

“Where they takin you, Stuffy?” Hicks tries but it still comes out like you talk to crazy people.

“To where it’s safe.”

“Mind if me and Drover tag along?” sez Skeet.

—

Evening on the Lake, ice fishers either preparing to spend the night or heading back to shore, Stuffy indicates a shack in the distance, “That’s the rendezvous point, but you guys ought to stay here. Far as the Lake’s OK if you want, but any further forget it, they tell me no witnesses allowed.”

Stuffy bids everyone a good night that sounds like a goodbye, trudges off alone in the direction of Grand Rapids, Michigan, crunching, squeaking over the ice into the darkness, as the coast of Wisconsin slips step by step away behind him…

They watch him till it’s too dark.

“Looked like a fishing shack,” sez Skeet.

“You think he’s gone bughouse?”

“No more than he ever was.”

“Maybe we better…”

They hurry out onto the ice. Nothing much to see when they finally reach the shack, which is strangely un-winterbeaten, some firewood stacked under a tarp, wheels, a towing hitch…

“Door’s open,” Skeet reports.

“Anybody home?” Hicks loud but friendly. Nothing inside. Ashes in a cold woodstove, scatter of cigarette butts on the floor, Stuffy nowhere in sight.

“Where’d he go, then?”

Picking up a penciled note, “If you’re here and I’m not, means I’m on my way and time you were on yours. Head toward the city lights, brighter the better, keep going, try not to look back.”

About halfway back to shore, “Uh-oh, what’s this?”

Lights beneath the ice. In from the unscaled distance, dim halos each slowly sharpening, outlining a sleek black underwater shape, making a careful approach, brighter as they glide closer.

“Is it what I think it is?”

“All black, can’t make out too much detail through the ice, but it has to be Stuffy’s sub,” Skeet less casual than normal.

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Fits the description according to Stuffy.”

The jet-black apparition slows, slides underneath them and matches their course and speed.

When they pause, it pauses. After a short while Drover notices one light in particular, blinking unevenly on and off.

“Seems to be Morse code,” Drover with a concentrated look.

“Yeah, it sez, ‘Now you’re all up to speed, suckers. BCNU, Stuffy.’ ”

“He’s on board that, whatever that is?”

“I didn’t see nothin,” sez Skeet. “You guys?”

—

As days pass without further word, suspicions grow that Stuffy has been taken aboard the U-13 and into its history of pickups and deliveries, back to his old contraband-running ways, assigned a sleeping space, standing watches regularly…

“You know how crazy that sounds.”

“What’s the un-crazy story then?”

Shrug. “Maybe we just don’t want to hear about it.”

“We’ve all been looking at the same blotters, if he’s silent key and it’s a ghost we saw then there’d be a coroner’s verdict someplace, likely Chicago, hit-and-run victim not used to big-city traffic, Milwaukee being notorious for its inattentive pedestrians, ‘Jaywalkee,’ as it’s known to the wisemouths of the County of Cook… ”

“Times Stuffy thought he wasn’t here anymore—that they really did get him when they blew up the truck. Kept saying things like ‘Maybe I’m a ghost now and I’m haunting you.’ ”

“Thanks, Skeet. If it’s creepy stories tonight, I hope somebody remembered to bring the marshmallows.”