Page 22 of Shadow Ticket
Not to blame the Depression or anything, but there seem to be a considerable number of fish-happy unemployed to be found today out here on the frozen expanse, with sleds, tip-ups, bikes pedal- and motor-driven, shelters more and less elaborate.
Small fires going, coffee percolating, kerosene lamps cutting some of the gloom, portable radios at low volume, possibly on some theory that music will hypnotize fish up through the ice.
Pinochle and Sheepshead games in progress as well as a curling tournament, what curlers call a bonspiel.
As luck would have it, an ice fisherman happens to’ve just augered a hole. “Mind if I—” Hicks sliding the festive holiday parcel in, stomping it under the ice as far as he can, “thanks, you’re a real sport,” turning and heading for shore, motioning everybody to keep clear, whereupon—
KA-BOOM. And then some. Addressing every bone in Hicks’s body, including the one just under his hat.
A colorful and earsplitting fountain of ice, blood, silt, factory waste, and pieces of perch, pike, whitefish, and two or three varieties of trout meanwhile hurtling skyward, the echo racketing away to cover most of Milwaukee, then returning in a downpour of Friday-night supper ingredients which a sudden crowd have showed up with buckets, bags, and hats to collect.
The guy with the auger isn’t too happy. “Dammit, you dynamite hounds,” he screams, “this is sinful, don’t you know the Angler’s Creed forbids this kind of thing?”
“Missouri Synod Lutheran, myself,” Hicks in a shaky voice he almost doesn’t recognize.
About now a beat cop and old friend of Uncle Lefty’s shows up, “Have to ticket you for crossing against the light back there, Hicks, sorry but it’s a dollar fine.”
“Price is right considering it just bought me my life.”
“You must be getting up in the bucks, this side of town the going rate’s closer to 39￠.”
After a while, The crowd drifts away leaving soiled and shattered ice, a patch of water already begun to ice over again, and, not too many hours away, frozen Milwaukee sunset, and the night ahead.
—
“Aren’t we the night owl.” April blinking, truculent, not fully awake. Of course it’s her door Hicks would be showing up at.
“Thought you might still be awake.”
“If you want to call it that.”
“Tell him to use the bedroom window, nice snowdrift back there, only a short drop.”
“Maybe you didn’t notice, but it’s half past ungodly.”
Stares at the back of his empty wrist for a while. “Huh. Somebody must’ve lifted my watch.”
“You look a li’l more dilapidated than usual, Cupcake, if I may say.”
“Speaks are all closed by now, force of habit, wasn’t thinking, sorry…”
“No, wait, Hicks, come back, only talking in my sleep…Hicks?”
“I must be getting, what is it, sensitive? No, wait, sentimental?”
“Sure…and remind me, what are you doing here again?”
“Thanks, maybe I will just for a minute,” Hicks beating the evening snowfall from his hat, stepping cautiously in over the doorsill, as if something might be waiting in the room tonight to jump him, as beat up in spirit as April has seen him, even from the worst nights of mob warfare in Chicago not all that long ago.
Somewhere off in the house, upstairs or maybe down, Christmas carols over somebody’s radio, somebody else picking a blues line on a guitar. From outside now and then come sounds of late river traffic. The new foghorn down on the breakwater.
“You’re shaking, what happened, you forgot your earmuffs again? We’re out of beer if you were planning to cry into some, but there could be a bottle of Mistletoe gin around someplace…”
“Wouldn’t mind.”
“Dig in.”
“Thanks,” going on to try and what the insurance forms like to call “explain.” She listens, eyes never leaving his face.
“Elves.” Putting on a tough-girl scowl, pretending to adjust the angle of Hicks’s head. “And you bought that.”
“Well, they were the right size, and they seemed pretty sure.”
A pause to consider a number of comebacks.
“We may have discussed this before, but at the risk of seeming to nag, did you ever think about some line of work maybe a little less, oh, unhealthy…”
“Sure, even thought about the Milwaukee PD for a while, till Uncle Lefty set me straight.”
“Not enough bad habits for them? Too un-stupid, what?”
“Too many Italians in my social life, I guess. Nothing personal. Ever since that spaghetti special went off in the station house even some harmless case like me swinging traffic at a bankruptcy sale is suddenly too dangerous for the likes of the MPD.”
“Don’t suppose a friendly heart-to-heart with the bomb squad—”
“Not when they’re about to run me in for Stuffy Keegan’s truck.”
Her eyelids narrowing that telltale 64th of an inch while her brain races on, “Maybe my Uncle Cici can talk to somebody,” this particular uncle being none other than Francesco “Finger of Death” Sfuzzino, locally year after year coming in at the top of everybody’s most-frightened-of list. “Anything for you, my lit-tle breath of spring, you only need to ask, each time it’s like ‘O mio babbino caro’ all over again, ain’t it, only different. ”
While April is thinking of some other song, most likely Annette Hanshaw singing “Those Little White Lies.”
“Damn but you’re a sweetheart.” Hicks means it.
“Then again,” short nod, shorter smile, “gotta remember this’d be the Bay View or north Italian branch of the family. Bacciagaluppi, snooty bunch, little dim, detached. Sicilian side might be more accommodating.”
“Except that…”
“Exactly.”
Stories have begun to drift in of couples teaming up, jumping boxcars and thumbing rides together, even waiting faithful long weeks for each other’s release from the county lockup.
Working-stiff gear, hair cropped or bobbed, chain-smoking, tough yet elegant.
Nobody wants to go through trouble alone, yet how can Hicks even ask, never mind expect, that much from any dame, even one he can see himself going sentimental, if not already borderline daffy about?
Jumping catfish. What kind of a mid-career outlook is this?
Poverty and longing. Not that he’s any special fan of the single life, understand, and it isn’t their fault if women are as superficial, untrustworthy, and unwilling to stick around when the going gets the least bit tough as he has found them in general to be.
“OK,” April considering which of a number of blunt weapons in her handbag to bring out, “but aside from that?” The counterargument, obvious to anybody but a beefbrain like Hicks, being that in times like these to stay at anybody’s side for longer than five minutes could qualify as at least potential lifetime partner material.
Last thing Hicks would want to admit hoping for, that he and April could’ve been another one of these couples hitchhiking together through the Depression, teamed up against each day and its troubles, each dusk out on some country road, thumbs at the ready, heading for who knows what waiting deeper for them in the night.
Some dame, someday. So far he hasn’t got around to sharing any of this with April, who could easily react along the lines of “Oh no, another one of these fragile types pussyfooting into my life, just when I have you figured for some lone warrior out on the edge of a cliff someplace, don’t need a thing from anybody, all the while turns out you’re just one more sentimental sap, well, unobservant me. ”
—
Uncle Lefty notices it’s been taking Hicks a while to hold flame and cigarette together long enough to light up.
“Heard about your surprise package.”
Regarding his hand thoughtfully. “Should’ve been over this a little quicker.”
“Try fifteen years. Maybe now you begin to understand a thing or two, maybe lay off of the bocce ball jokes.”
Shaky as Hicks may be feeling, a man still has to climb back aboard the critter that threw him. Investigate.
Before the echoes have died away, Lino Trapanese is on the phone. “Case you were wondering, it ain’t who you’re thinking.”
“He tell you that himself?”
“ ‘Hope Twinkletoes ain’t taking it too personally,’ is how he put it. Plus best regards and sincere wishes for a speedy recovery of your nervous system.”
“Al Capone would’ve sent flowers at least.”
“Strange, almost like Don Peppino’s been in a long discussion about this with somebody.”
Which it has already occurred to Hicks might’ve been April, but so what? “Looking at the list of people I’ve gotten on the wrong side of…”
“Of course I don’t speak for the whole consorzio, but…” Hicks can hear the shrug even over the phone. “Somebody could be getting you mixed up with somebody else, you know. It happens. Tradition in Milwaukee.”
“Those elves called me Schultz, we know anybody by that name?”
“Sure narrows it down, don’t it?”
—
Michele “Kelly” Stecchino, an old-time Third Ward hardhead dating back to the Vito Guardalabene era, turned anarchist in his retirement years and highly regarded locally these days as a bombsmith, occupies an oversize Polish flat, reached via a pathway lined with Chicago Hardy fig trees, scungilli shells, lawn statuary on assorted Italian themes, including Benito Mussolini.
Stained glass windows a little more bloody and religious than commonly found in Milwaukee.
Cooking “soup,” the idea is to take dynamite sticks, break them into pieces and place in boiling water, and skim off the nitroglycerin that forms on the top.
Serve at appropriate times and places. Singing “treb-bi, la zup-pa” to the tune of “Vesti la giubba,” fussing at the stove, Kelly even has one of those tall chef’s hats that he likes to wear while he’s working, in the belief it will keep him safe from unexpected explosions. “Ba-ccia, galup-pa…”
Hicks contributes a few contrapuntal bars of “Dinah, is there anything finer,” which is what you might sing if you want to kid a box-blower, though the practice is generally not recommended.