Page 24 of Shadow Ticket

The day has darkened, the shop is quiet, the evening trimotor hop over to Grand Rapids will be taking off soon, everybody’s knocked off work except for Hicks and Boynt, Boynt’s shoes restless on the rug, last light of day severely raking over the prairie down across the town, bouncing off the Lake, rebouncing off the ceiling, desktop, Boynt’s eyeglasses.

“If it was me I’d’ve pulled you long ago, but it’s Home Office that have the say-so here, all you need to know is it’s a numbered account, one of the Loop banks that’s still solvent, checks all clearing just swell, thanks, and look for a letter of credit waiting for you in New York, at the Gould Fisk Fidelity Bank and Trust, not too far from Pennsylvania Station—”

“Boynt. Is that New York I just heard?”

“Let’s take it one direction at a time, ain’t it,” handing over an envelope with a train ticket inside. “Union Station, tomorrow noon sharp, don’t be late. Pack light.”

“We’ll be years squarin this one, Boynt.”

A look Boynt has only thrown him a couple of times, and those, while memorable, not in any way you’d call sentimental.

“Focus your attention and consider how maybe we’re doing you an act of uncompensated kindness here, what our friends of the Jewish faith call a mitzvah. Don’t bother to thank me or anything.

“It’s the elf bomb, sure it is. Home Office are assuming you were meant to be a sort of human version of Stuffy’s truck.

What the bomb rollers wanted from Stuffy they also wanted from you, maybe nothing more complicated than silence, and if you hadn’t been in to talk to the Fee Bees you’d’ve probably got off just as easy as Stuffy. ”

“Somebody knows this for a fact?”

“Let’s say somebody saw you at the federal courthouse the other day. Going in around the back way, with all the construction and Keep Out signs. Wondering who you were there to see. Maybe, all I’m saying, what you really needed was to keep away from the Feds.”

“Sure. How about somebody gettin them to keep away from me…”

“Exactly what’s got everybody at Home Office nervous. The best solution they can see is for you to pull a fade like Stuffy did.”

“Fade, fade is good, I know how to do that, but why does it have to be New York?”

“You’ll see. Have fun, take in a show. Back before you know it.”

—

Skeet on the other hand has had too many goodbyes in his life to allow himself much reaction to this one.

“Stay in touch with the shop, OK, they can reach me if they have to,” hoping this isn’t just wishful thinking.

“Here, Hicksie, this is for you.”

A U.S. half-dollar, with the heads side showing a willowy package in a flimsy getup, representing Liberty, out for a stroll at what seems to be around dawn, because the sun is located very low in the design, in fact below the hemline of Liberty’s gown, inspiring some out there who can afford to to carefully engrave on the solar disk a face gazing with a lewd grin up underneath the skirts of our national allegory.

Skeet has been carrying this piece of folk art around since Hicks has known him.

“Thanks, Skeeter, but I can’t accept this, licenses have been pulled for less, and besides, it’s your good luck piece.”

“Well, I can’t be lugging it around town all the time either, can I.”

Having run errands for any number of bush-league plutes, Hicks and Skeet both know the weight of a 50￠ tip.

“Only a quick out and in, honest.”

“If I tell you somethin will you promise not to take it personally?”

“Since you put it that way, no.”

“Thought I’d have a look at Stuffy’s case myself.”

“There’s apt to be some dangerous customers mixed up in this, kid—”

“It’s OK, I’m a creature of the streets, all gatted up, don’t trust nobody—”

“Both sides of the law comin at you all directions, including coppers local and on up who ain’t above faking a birth certificate, trying you as an adult and railroadin you into Waupun onto some indeterminate taxi ride—”

“You always did know how to give a pep talk, Hicksie. Bon voyage.”

And just to slap the Good Housekeeping Seal onto everything, here’s Lino Trapanese again.

Hicks is just about to step into the Meal A Minute for a three-decker when a Packard Custom Eight limousine pulls up over the curb and onto the sidewalk inches in front of him.

No chrome, no wax job, no shine, flat black all over.

A window rolls down an inch and here’s Lino glittering through the slot.

A door swings silently open and Hicks gets in.

“Somebody would like me to mention how very grateful they are to you, Hicks, this step you’ve agreed to take. How very, very grateful.”

Hicks looks around for the satchel full of cash that would normally come along with talk like this. “Something here, or not here, you’re supposed to explain to me, Lino?”

“You can trust my sacred word, their gratitude amounts to more than any bag can hold.”

“A head start out of town.”

“A word to the weisenheimer, is how they put it.”

“Somethin fishy going on, Lino, nobody wants to spill the straight story, you can call it honorable if you want, but I call it spinach. Don’t try to tell me omertà, I know what dummied-up Italian looks like and this ain’t it.

Cokeheads getting the third degree have more of a grip on their nerves than any of you mugs do lately. ”

“Hicks, now—” reaching playfully into his suit for a roscoe he may not be carrying, “y’ just better watch ’at stuff, once.”

“Maybe those elves weren’t hired by anybody you associate with, so you keep sayin, which case whoever it was might be makin you folks as nervous as they’re makin me. It’s OK, Lino, no dishonor.”

“What have you got to tell us,” chuckling more in disbelief than amusement, “about dishonor? Lissen-a me now. Down in the deep Mezzogiorno, there grows a grape so harsh and bitter you’d never make wine from it alone—but when you blend it with other grapes, sometimes only a couple percent, suddenly a miracle, mmmwa! che figata, you capeesh-a da jive?”

“Only a beer drinker, Lino, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You want to know more, go ask your pal Dippy Chazz.”

Sure, and auguri with that one, Chazz’s phone line has been disconnected for a week, as Lino, from a quick look at his kisser, is also aware, and Chazz according to what Hicks can find out fled into exile, out beyond the pickle patches, someplace quite unconnected with local geography.

Hicks considers a diplomatic reproof but settles for “Chazzy’s umbatz, nuttier than a Giant Bar.”

—

Hicks and April rendezvous aboard the southbound SS Christopher Columbus, once queen of the ’93 Chicago Fair and about to be queen dowager of the new fair coming up, a festive pile of decks like an electric birthday cake, all raring to go as the next century of progress and miles o’ smiles, as it sez in the ads.

The shoreline rolls by, some cumulus in the west backlit by the setting sun, spirits, mixers, and chasers flow, and the dance orchestration includes both a full-keyboard accordion and a Chemnitzer concertina, which means every once in a while, between the slow dreamy numbers and the upbeat jingles about how great everything is these days, there’ll be polkas.

Just in case anybody was thinking of wandering off and jumping overboard.

“Enjoy it while you can, Chuckles.”

“Because…”

April, hands to hips, eyebrows all zigzag, won’t look at him.

“Unless maybe it’s all sealed and done already.”

“Oh, you damned ox,” and she’s crying all over his shirt just back from the Chinese place.

“You could have said something, even if I already knew.”

“You? Who would tell you anything?” She has fished out one of his shirttails and is blotting her nose, with a ladylike sniffle, all over it.

“Your line,” after a while, “is, ‘D and D, Hicks, took the oath, can’t say any more, please don’t hate me’—”

“I know my line, Fathead— oh, are we on the air?”

A moon of the sort more commonly observed in Iowa has just risen, and the plaintive squeezeboxes are now joined by electric uke, reeds, French horns, a jazz drummer on temporary booby-hatch leave.

April and Hicks are dancing. “Someday,” he whispers, “it’ll be the right joint, and a full-size band, maybe even a moon like this one, and we’ll dance like those Castles do, long as you like, I promise. ”

“Meaning you’d have to never let go of me, yeah, just dream on, you big chump.”

The charmed old vessel steams gently along the wreck-strewn coastline of Wisconsin.

Children on shore drifting asleep beneath the roofs passing in the moonlight, distant polka and Lindy-hop music stealing into their early dreams, plus the occasional ballad such as the one Hicks is crooning into April’s ear.

Ubiquitous…you’re out, ev-

-v’rywhere, you’re

ubiquitous…like the

airwaves, through the air, it’s

iniquitous…that you

never-seem to care, how

ridiculous-ly I’m yearning, in-

-to what a sap I’m turning…

you’re-here-and,

then you’re there,

Though the guy’s not always me,

I try-to-act debonair,

Like I know I’m s’posed to be—how

I-wish-you’d, c’mere and, kiss-me-quick,

Till-we’re-both-of-us

brainless, as-a-brick,

Though it’s got kinda thick-with-dust,

once it sure did the trick with us,

’n’ you, you’ve gone all…u-biquitous…

“Listen to me, gabadost, and I’m not kidding.”

He guesses she isn’t.

“You noticed this?” Who hasn’t? the sparkler on her finger looks like you’d expect to find one or more Black Hawks skating around on it, announcing that April has become the all but kept tomato of Don Peppino Infernacci the bad and big.

“He’s Calabrese, ‘Ndrangheta 200 proof, he’d rather kill you than work things out, and just when I start asking myself what’d I get into, here he comes again with that down-home nun sò che, or maybe I feel sorry for him ’cause his wife is such a tramp, runs around after anything… ”

“My kinda woman, how come you haven’t tried to fix us up yet? We could all get together and play bridge, and maybe she’ll be packing too.”

April turns her face away like he just reached for it or something. “Thanks.”

“Now what’d I say?”

“Oh, don’t mind me, just go on ahead with the happy patter, you Einsteins, what is it with you? Heads in the fog, never know how much trouble you’re in.”

“How many Einsteins would that be again?”

“I’m such straight-up trouble, Hicks.” The eye-to-eye she’s waited till now to hit him with doesn’t go out over the air either.

Hicks with a tremble in his voice she has never yet mistaken for anything but strategic, “Maybe I always knew about”—almost naming Don Peppino—“that…and maybe I don’t care?”

Sure. But, “That could change quick enough, ya ten-minute egg, you. I keep hoping…if we could just get past it this one time, who knows, I mean if there is a next time—”

“If” is seldom a good sign. Pretending he didn’t hear, “Careful with that ‘we,’ Angel.”

“Oh, I know how to be careful. I wish you did.”

No goodbye night together in Chicago. Hicks would be sorely disappointed, if there hadn’t been so many lesser occasions already.

“So—family business, huh. Thought your uncle was retired from all that.”

“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 concourse at 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-filled concourse, 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.”