Page 5 of Shadow Ticket
Can’t help narrowing his eyes a little. Is she serious? “Yeah but, but ain’t there somethin…immoral about it, somehow? This wife I’d have to be running around on, this Polish trick, supposin I even fall in love with her or somethin, things like that happen, and what then?”
“Oh, but they all love their wives, it’s part of the deal. Something I may need to talk about someday with somebody, though maybe not with you.”
“So, these cute little hopefuls you keep sending around…”
“Sooner or later, one of them’s gonna hit the spot, you know, you might as well get prepared for that, ’cause you can’t hold out forever.” With the big smudged eyes.
“Check. Some beauty parade. Last one you tried to fix me up with, that Euphorbia? I’m still shakin.”
“Oh,” a mischievous gleam, “keep telling you, she had a license for that.”
“I can see what you’re looking to promote me into, don’t you know that’s a private op’s bread and butter, waiting all night across the street in the rain turning to snow for some window to light up and then go dark again. That’s a holy sacrament I wouldn’t wish on anybody, Toots.”
After raiding the icebox, waiting for April to finish with the makeup and so forth, Hicks sits gazing at a calendar on April’s kitchen wall advertising Mazda light bulbs, with one of those hyperilluminated Maxfield Parrish pictures of girls not what you’d call dressed for outdoor activities posing on rocks, in a steep and unforgiving landscape—cute, even innocent, but what are these two doing out here to begin with?
“And how’s moy, ick-oo pwoyvate dick?” April has this habit of unexpectedly squeaking into a high-pitched flapper voice which men then have the choice of pretending is cute and going along with, or remembering they’re out of smokes or parked illegally someplace blocks away from.
Always another big selling point about Hicks is how it’s never worked on him, the baby-vamp vocalizing, the off-key attempts to rezone the boundaries of jailbait terrain.
Just about every grown woman in Milwaukee has at least tried it on, a few drifting so far into it that you could argue they never came back out again.
“Only one thing, um, April, is, not tonight with this, OK…”
“No ick-oo dirl talk? Ooh! Hicksie-wicksie! What’oo poo-uh Apwiw do?”
“Well, let’s see, you could do Louise Brooks, or Clara Bow—”
“They’re from back before the talkies. Silent.”
“That’s the word I’m tryin to think of—”
“Now don’t—”
“Don’t what again?”
“You no-account, you lowlife— Aah!”
“I know you do. Me too. Any time you say—high noon in Schuster’s window, shopping day of your choice.
” As close as Hicks gets to blurting thoughtless endearments.
The preferred way to deal with this kind of thing is grab her and start dancing to music on the radio, though of course the room really isn’t set up for dance numbers, you can’t get carefree with the kicks and turns, you keep running into lamps, furniture, slippery little throw rugs.
Some call it clutter, April calls it “the nesting instinct,” something she must’ve read about in some dames’ magazine.
Within four bars they’re sure to run afoul of an end table.
Just about then, on comes one of those motivational songs all over the airwaves lately about the joys of suburban married life. Hicks grabs yesterday’s Journal, rolls it into a megaphone, and starts to croon along,
When the shadows come driftin up the highway,
another day, another dollar, I guess,
Is when you’ll find me headin back
to that asphalt-shingle shack, and
my little Missus, Middle-
Clas-siness…
forget that gum-snappin gal from the gashouse,
’n’ keep your poutin pluto-cratic prin-cess,
Just gimme-that cute hootchy-koo,
I’m ree-ferring to, that’s my—
Little Missus, Middle-
Clas-siness…
[bridge]
No more Saturday nights at the hush-hush,
No more soakin’ my socks in the sink,
Now I’m all normalized, just like,
a mil-lion other guys, feelin so
satisfied, as we go slid-in’
o-ver-that brink, y’know,
It’s on-ly a bungalow, in Wau-wato-sa…
But oh, so
co-zy when the sun’s in the west…
Average mug, regular dame, oh did-I-for-get
to mention-her-name? Well, it’s
My little Missus Middle-
Classiness, oh yes, she’s—my
little Missus—
“You son of a bitch.”
“Come on, it’s only a song…”
“You’re in trouble, Hicks.”
“Long as it’s with you, Angelface.”
“You’re in big trouble and you don’t know it.”
“Fine one to talk.”
“Lounge lizards and wayward hubbies, Lunchmeat, forget all them, this time it’s serious.”
“To the great life lesson Money Talks,” as Boynt has often lectured him, “is now added Lesson Two—Romantic Partners Stray. For reasons that continue to escape me you keep questioning both these principles, which happen to form the bedrock of our profession, choosing again and again not to cash in whenever a sure thing is handed to you on a plate, and continuing to believe against all evidence in true and faithful love, although to look at you nobody’d ever know it. Another romantic chump.”
By the time Hicks understands he should’ve been paying closer attention to what’s been going on, the moment has arrived when April is using the movies as an alibi for her whereabouts, a regression to high school Hicks would never have expected.
“The Public Enemy, again? It’s three in the morning.”
“They’ve started running it all night, round the clock, young American womanhood, you know, we can’t get enough of that Jimmy, knocked all gaga in fact, plenty there to swoon over, case I haven’t drooled enough about him to you already.”
“Only part I remember’s that grapefruit really…don’t spoze you’d happen to have one around…”
—
Each night in her gig at Arleen’s Orchid Lounge, whenever midnight happens to fall, April sings what’s gotten to be her trademark ballad, backed by a minor-key semi-Cuban arrangement for accordion, saxes, banjo-uke, melancholically muted trumpet—
Midnight in Milwaukee,
Not exactly Paris,
Not exactly swilling champagne, twirling yer
cane, down the Champs-élysées…
Ev’ry hour’s so blue now,
How much, can it matter,
Might as well be suds in a stein,
Any time, night or day…
[bridge]
Down along the Lake,
nothing much awake,
Till it almost seems…
[fill phrases from the band]
Harp lights by the shore
whisp’ring je t’adore,
how could it be more
than a doorway to dreams?
…even
in Chicago,
Any town but this one,
Couldn’t we be kids again,
With our hearts in Par-ee?
So long to Mil-wau-
-kee…Lonely
night-times, adieu…hmmm
Quite a dream, yes, you’d say,
Enchantée, bonne soirée…oh get away
from me, you—
ol’ mid-
-night…in Milwaukee…
“Back when I didn’t know any better, laying on the tremolo, thought it would get me noticed, what it did was drive ’em screaming from the room, till one day over the radio along comes Annette Hanshaw, and some curtain in my mind just suddenly goes up…
“Not another of these white thrushes who thinks she can sing—Annette thinks she can’t sing, may not really know how she affects people. Made me rethink my whole approach. Got to see the insincerity in it. Anytime you think you hear the least little vibrato from me—”
“I should kick you,” Hicks helpfully.
“Thanks, maybe lift an eyebrow anyway, that’d help.”
Even visitors in from Illinois grasp right away how much respect April rates around Arleen’s, enough to go easy with the yakking and tabletop sound effects and sometimes even look like they’re listening.
The band personnel changes night to night, refugees from rooftop and upper-story ballroom floors in the area, pit bands from vaudeville houses halfway through conversion to talkie palaces, sidemen from territory bands, rotating between here and Chicago, depending on the whims of bill collectors, ex- and current wives.
If you stay late enough, everybody shows up here.
Musicians out on the variety circuits drop around after their paying gigs to sit in with the regulars.
Bennie Moten personnel in matching three-piece suits and two-tone Oxfords, including the new piano player “Count” Basie, from whom you’re apt to hear “Rumba Negro” more than once before dawn comes filtering up over the Lake.
Jabbo Smith and Zilner Randolph going after high F’s and G’s not without some jugular risk, while in the back at any moment might be standing in wait some hopeful kid, his own instrument bouncing back highlights, his face still in shadows he’s never felt at home in, as if, when the spot finds him at last, as he steps into the full light, he’ll turn out to be somebody we already think we know…
“Bel lavoro, that load you threw us in the Lake.” As out of a cloud of La Corona smoke now appears Lino “the Dump Truck” Trapanese, in a pearl-gray suit and custom homburg in pale maroon, beaming at Hicks like it’s been years.
Weekends Lino is most likely to be found up here in Bronzeville, putting up with remarks like “Took you for more of a ‘Come Back to Sorrento’ type of fella.”
Hicks, long flagged among the police at all levels as Uncooperative, has enjoyed some attention from the other side of the law, tough parties like Lino here bending an eye kindly on Hicks’s work life, maybe not down at it like the angels but at least sideways from time to time.
“Don’t know if you can use this,” Lino now behind the hand without the cigar and into Hicks’s ear only, “even if you can’t, it ain’t me you heard it from—”
“D and D, Lino, that’s me.”
“Um piccolo consiglio. Yer Uncle Lefty? Funny stuff goin on,” gazing intently, as if trying to send thought patterns through empty space.
After a while, “Bene?” inquires Hicks.
“Not for me to say.”
“Thanks, Lino.”
Since the early bad old days of street war, hand bombs and tommy-g fire syncopating the dark hours, Hicks has learned to look at these hot tips as letters of intent from Beyond, hasty, most often in rough draft, a sort of bargain-counter faith, which working ops down at his own level have been given in place of prayers unanswered. He decides to pay a family visit.