Appointment in Samarra (20 page)

These boys had enough to eat. They did not have to sell papers, although the minister’s son sold subscriptions to
The Saturday Evening Post
and was always talking about blue vouchers or green vouchers and the Ranger bike he was going to get when he had enough vouchers. He was not available
on certain days of the week, when he had to go to meetings of the other
Post
salesmen. He was an industrious boy, and his nasal Indiana twang and the fact that he was a stranger (he had come to Gibbsville when he was five) and was bright in school all helped to make him unpopular in the gang. You could always tell his voice from the others: it was high, and his enunciation was not sing-songy like the other boys’, which showed strong Pennsylvania Dutch influence. Julian liked him least of all. Best of all he liked Walt Davis, the son of the cigarette thief. Walt was no relation to Carter. Walt was crosseyed, which somehow made him handsome, or Julian thought so. In the nights preceding Hallowe’en it was Walt who remembered the various Nights: one night was Gate Night, when you took people’s gates off the fences; another night was Tick-Tack Night, when you held a button through which string had been run and wound up, against window panes, making a very effective sound until the string ran down; another night was Paint Night, when you painted sidewalks and people’s houses. On Hallowe’en you dressed up as ghosts and cowboys and Indians and women and men, and rang doorbells, and said: “Anything for Hallowe’en?” If the people gave you pennies or cakes, all right. If they didn’t, you stuck a pin in the doorbell and threw the doormat out in the street and carried away the porch furniture and poured buckets of water on the porch so it would freeze in the night. Walt knew which Night was which; he got the information from his father.

The leader of the gang was Butch Doerflinger. He was fat and strong and brave. He had killed more copperheads than anyone else and was a better swimmer than anyone else and knew all about older people because he had watched his father and mother. They didn’t mind, either. They thought it was funny. Julian was afraid of Butch, because Julian’s mother had threatened to “report” Butch’s father for beating his horse. Nothing ever came of it, and every year or two Butch’s father would get a new horse.

There were things not to talk about in the gang: you did not talk about jail, because of Walt’s father; nor about drunken men, because there was a saloonkeeper’s son; nor about the
Catholics, because the motorman’s son and one bookkeeper’s son were Catholic. Julian also was not allowed to mention the name of any doctor. These things did come up and were discussed pretty thoroughly, but usually in the absence of the boy whom the talk would embarrass. There was enough to talk about: girls; changes in boys which occured at fourteen; parades; which would you rather have; if you had a million dollars what would you do; what were you going to be when you got big; is a horse better than a dog; what was the longest you’d ever been on a train; what was the best car; who had the biggest house; who was the dirtiest kid in school; could a policeman be arrested; were you going to college when you got big, what girl were you going to marry and how many children were you going to have; what was the most important instrument in the band; what position was most important on a baseball team; were all the Confederates dead; was the Reading better than the Pennsylvania railroad; could a black-snake kill you….

There were all sorts of things to be done. There was marbles, and there was a game of marbles called Dobbers, played with marbles the size of lemons. You played it in the gutter on the way home from school, throwing your Dobber at the other fellow’s and he would throw his at yours. It wasn’t much of a game except it made the way home from school seem short. Some days the gang would hop a wagon—preferably a packing-house wagon or a wholesale grocery wagon; coal wagons were too slow—and ride out to the state police barracks and watch the staties drill and shoot. The gang would go out on the mountain and play “Tarzan of the Apes,” jumping around from tree to tree and skinning their behinds on the bark. You had to be careful on the mountains, careful of airholes, which were treacherous, or supposed to be treacherous, places where the ground was undermined and liable to cave in. In the memory of the oldest citizen no life had been lost in Gibbsville as a result of a mine cave-in, but the danger was there. There was a game called Run, Sheepie, Run, and sometimes the gang would play Ku Klux Klan, after having seen “The Birth of a Nation.” Games that had their source in a movie would be
played and played for days and then dropped and forgotten, to be revived months later, unsuccessfully. The gang had a Fisk Bicycle Club for a while. You were supposed to have Fisk tires on your bike, and that made you eligible to send away to the Fisk people and get pennants and caps and all the other stuff; buttons, books of instructions on wig-wag and so on. Julian’s father made him buy two Fisk tires, and Carter Davis had one Fisk tire, but these were the only Fisk tires in the gang. The other members of the gang were saving up to buy Pennsylvania Vacuum Cups, and meanwhile when they had a puncture they filled the tire with Neverleak. There were cigarettes to be smoked: Ziras, Sweet Caps, Piedmonts, Hassans. Julian sometimes bought Condax cigarettes, which were more expensive. Butch and Julian were the heavy smokers of the gang, but Julian liked the smell of someone else’s cigarette better than he liked smoking, and he discovered that smoking did not get him in better with Butch. He stopped after a year, using the excuse that his father had detected the nicotine stains on his fingers. Sometimes the gang would sit on the rocks on the mountain and watch the coal trains coming down the valley from the east, and they would count the cars: seventy-eight battleship cars was the highest number they ever saw and agreed upon. Sometimes they would go down in the valley and when the train slowed up or stopped at Gibbsville Junction they would get on and ride four miles to Alton or the five miles to Swedish Haven. It was a cold and dangerous ride, and about once a year some boy would fall off and lose a leg or be killed under the wheels, but the practice of hopping coalies went on. It was not wise to go beyond Swedish Haven, because after that the railroad veered off too far from the highway. There was a coalie that slowed down at Gibbsville Junction every day at about three-fifteen, and it reached Swedish Haven at four o’clock, which usually gave the gang time enough to get home, either by bumming rides on the grocery wagons or stealing rides on the trolley cars, or walking. You could get home only moderately late for supper.

There was one other game that Julian did not like, because he was afraid of the consequences. That was known simply as
Five-Finger Grab. There were two five-and-ten stores, Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, in Gibbsville, and about once a month after school the gang would wander through the stores. Sometimes they would not take a thing, usually because they were watched carefully by the clerks and the manager, whose office was placed so that he could look down on every counter. But sometimes after a tour of the store the gang would meet, and two or three of the boys would say: “Look what I got,” and show what they had got in the Five-Finger Grab: pencils, magnifying glasses, screw drivers, pliers, spools of wire, nickel Rocket baseballs, hard candy, school tablets, toys, cotton gloves, friction tape—these were some of the things that would be produced by the proud five-finger grabbers. The other boys would be ashamed, and the next time they went to the store everyone would try to get something.

Julian at first would refuse to participate in the Five-Finger Grab, but when Carter Davis abandoned his side and went over to the grabbers, Julian had to do something. Once he tried to buy something—a jar of hard candy—to be able to show something after a grab, but he could not do this often; he was not given much money. A quarter a week was his allowance, and he had to have a nickel on Friday and a nickel on Saturday for two movie serials he was following, and that meant he could not buy much at the five-and-ten if he wanted to have a cinnamon bun and pickle, two cents, at recess. And so he became a five-finger grabber.

He was very successful, and when he saw how successful he was he wanted to do it all the time. Most of the other fellows in the gang stole only for the sake of stealing; that explained why some of them, emptying their pockets after a grab, would pull out white feet for women’s stockings, baby rattles, cards of safety pins, wash cloths, soap, and other useless articles. But Julian became so proficient that he could tell beforehand what he was going to get, and usually he would get it. The gang would separate on entering the store, and there would be so many boys wandering around that it was hard to keep track of them.

Julian did not know that he was being watched. He had
been watched for a long time, and the manager saw that Julian was not taking things and stopped watching him. But when he began to have success as a grabber the salesgirls learned to keep on the lookout for him. They knew who he was; a Lantenengo Street kid, who did not have to steal. Several of them reported him to the manager, who thereafter forgot all about the other kids in order to keep his eye on Julian.

One day after school the gang decided to have a Five-Finger Grab, and they all trooped down to Kresge’s. When they entered the store a bell rang, but they paid no attention to it; bells were always ringing in the store—signals to cash girls, signals to the assistant managers and floorwalkers and stock boys. Bells were always ringing. Julian had announced beforehand that he would get a flashlight for Butch, in return for which Butch was going to steal a large hunk of summer sausage from the Doerflinger meat market. Not just an ordinary
slice,
that he could get for the asking, but a hunk at least a foot long.

The flashlight came as a case, battery, and lamp: ten cents for each part, thirty cents altogether. The electrical supplies counter was very near the front door, and Julian went right to it. The girl standing in front of the counter—the clerks stood in front of counters that were against the walls—asked him what he wanted, and he said he was only waiting for a friend who had gone to another part of the store. She looked at him without saying anything and kept looking at him. Well, he was not going to let her scare him, and he could outsmart her. He took out a package of Ziras, put one in his mouth, and pretended to reach in his pocket for a match, but all the cigarettes dropped to the floor, as Julian planned. The girl automatically leaned over, which was more than Julian had counted on—he merely wanted to distract her. He too leaned over, and as he did his right hand reached over the counter and he had the flashlight in his pocket before he began to pick up the cigarettes. “No smoking in here,” the girl said.

“Who said so?” said Julian, and at that moment his arm was grabbed tight.

“I saw you, you little thief!” It was the manager. “I saw you take that flashlight. Miss Loftus, go get the policeman.”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl.

“I’ll show you. I’ll fix your feet for you,” said the manager. Julian tried to reach in his pocket to get rid of the flashlight. “Oh, no you don’t,” said Mr. Jewett. “That flashlight stays right in your pocket till the policeman comes. I’ll put a stop to this. Little highbrow, eh? Doctor English’s son. Lantenengo Street boy. Well.”

Quickly there was a crowd around, and some of the fellows were in the crowd. They were frightened, and a couple of them left, which gave Julian a sinking feeling but he did not blame them, and he was glad to see that Butch and Carter stayed.

“Go on away, you people,” said Mr. Jewett. “I’ll settle this.” The group slowly moved away, and that was the chance Butch had been waiting for. He moved closer to Jewett and said:

“What did he do, Mister?”

“Never you mind what he did. You know damn well what he did,” said Jewett.

Butch kicked Jewett square in the shin and ran, and so did Julian. They got out of the store and ran to the left, knowing that Leffler, the policeman, would be coming from the ’squire’s office, at the right. They ran down one street, up another, down another, until they came to the railroad freight yards. “Jesus, I never ran so much in all my life yet,” said Butch.

“Me either,” said Julian.

“It’s good I gave him a kick,” said Butch.

“You bet. If you didn’t I’d be there yet. What would they do?”

“I do’ know. Send you to reformatory, I guess. I guess me too now maybe,” said Butch.

“Gee,” said Julian.

“What’ll we do now?” said Butch.

“Gee. I do’ know. What should we?”

“Well, if you go home—they know who you are at the store—so if you go home they’ll have the cop, Leffler, he’ll wait there for you.”

“Do you think they will?” said Julian.

“Sure. He’ll arrest you and the ’squire’ll send you to reformatory till you’re eighteen years old yet.”

“Honest?” said Julian.

“That’s right,” said Butch.

“I won’t go to any reformatory. I’ll run away before I do that.”

“Me too,” said Butch. “I’m instigated.”

“Oh,” said Julian.

“I’m instigated because I kicked Jewett in the shins and that makes me instigated the same as you are.”

“Well, I won’t go to any reformatory. They won’t catch me and send me to any reformatory. I’ll run away before I get put away,” said Julian.

“Well, what will we do?” said Butch.

Julian thought a minute. He watched them making up a train; the shifting engine collecting cars from all over the yard and backing them into a track near where they were sitting. “Let’s hop the freight and run away?” said Julian.

“Gee,” said Butch. “I don’t know where they go. A coalie you know where it goes and you can get off down at the Haven, but a freight.”

“We gotta do something. We don’t want to get sent away to reformatory, do we?” said Julian.

“Yes, but who wants to hop a freight that they don’t know where it’s going. Philly, maybe, without stopping,” said Butch.

“Philly without stopping! You’re crazy. You know more about trains than that. It’ll stop all right. They have to put water in the engine tender, don’t they? They have to put on more cars and take them off, don’t they? Don’t they? Anyhow, what do we care where it’s going? It’s better than the reformatory, isn’t it? Do you know what they do there?”