For years the Yellowfork had served the city as a convenient line of economic and social demarcation. South of it lived the poor white and the other, variously colored poor. Although the lines became somewhat smudged after World War Two, it was largely out of convenience and habit that everything south of the Yellowfork was still called Packingtown. JFK High School actually called its football team the Kennedy Packers. And even though all but one of the abattoirs were now gone, there were times, Dill knew, when on a hot summer evening with the wind from the south just right, you could still smell the stench of the doomed and dying cattle. You could even smell it as far north as Cherry Hills.
Dill felt he was almost on automatic pilot as he drove south on Van Buren, east on Our Jack, then turned south again at the Hawkins Hotel onto Broadway. South of the hotel, Broadway maintained its respectability fairly well until it reached South Fourth Street, or Deep Four, as the natives called it. After Deep Four, South Broadway was a mess. South Fourth, Third, Second, and First Streets had once comprised almost the only black enclave north of the Yellowfork. The former ghetto was now fully integrated and populated largely with the dregs of all races, creeds, and sexes — the last being sometimes rather ambiguous. Both the respectable and the not-so-respectable blacks had long since moved as far uptown as they could afford, abandoning the Deep Four area to the lowlife and their often grisly pursuits. Dill remembered his sister had worked the South Broadway — Deep Four area shortly after she transferred into homicide. The area was mostly bars, dives, liquor stores, porno flicks, and small cheap hotels with fancied-up names like the Biltmore, the Homestead, the Ritz, and the Belvedere. There were also a large number of elderly tacked-together frame houses with wide front porches. The people who sat out on the porches looked hot, mean, sullen, and desperate enough to revolt, if only it would cool off some. The temperature shortly after 7 P.M. was 95 degrees. The sun had not yet gone down. A lot of the front-porch sitters drank beer from cans and wore nothing but their underwear. There was no breeze.
“Where’d all the whores come from?” Dill asked as they neared South First Street.
“From the unemployment office,” Singe said. “Felicity used to talk to them sometimes. They all told her it was either fuck or starve.”
They stopped at a red light. A man staggered off the curb, made his way around the front of the Ford, and halted at Dill’s window. The man was about thirty-five. He wore a soiled green undershirt and khaki pants. Dill couldn’t see his shoes. He had blue eyes that seemed to float on small ponds of pink. He needed a shave. Something white and nasty was caked around his mouth. He tapped on Dill’s window with a large rock. Dill rolled the window down.
“Gimme a quarter, mister, or I’ll bust your goddamn windshield,” the man said with absolutely no inflection.
“Fuck off,” Dill said, and rolled up the window. The man stepped back and took careful aim at the windshield with his rock. Dill sped off, running the red light.
“I should’ve given him the quarter.”
“You shouldn’t even have rolled down your window,” Singe said.
Just past South First Street, Broadway started curving right to where the bridge over the Yellowfork began. The four-lane concrete bridge had been built in 1938 and named after the then Secretary of the Interior, Harold F. Ickes. When Truman fired Mac-Arthur in 1951, the city council — almost alight with patriotic glow — had renamed the bridge after the five-star general, but nearly everybody still called it what they had always called it, the First Street Bridge.
As they started up the bridge’s steep approach, Dill asked, “Why didn’t they tear down Deep Four and South Broadway when they were tearing down everything else?”
“They thought about it,” Singe said. “But then they got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Scared all the creeps and weirdos would move someplace else — maybe even next door.”
“Oh,” Dill said.
Chapter 16
For dinner they had sweetbreads and okra and black-eyed peas and cole slaw and cornbread, buttermilk to drink, and for dessert, lemon meringue pie. They sat under the bearded head of a bison that had been dead for thirty-nine years. The walls of Chief Joe’s were covered with the stuffed heads of bison, deer, elk, moose, bobcat, mountain lion, coyote, wolf, bighorn sheep, and three kinds of bear. After Dill and Anna Maude Singe finished their dinner they agreed it would be what they’d both order if ever they had to order the last supper.
The restaurant had been started by Joseph Maytubby, who was part Cherokee and part Choctaw with a little Kiowa thrown in. Everyone had called him Chief because that’s what all Indians were called. Maytubby had been an army cook in France during the First World War. He stayed on after the war, married a twenty-three-year-old Frenchwoman, brought her back to the city, and together they started Chez Joseph in 1922. It was only a counter and four tables to begin with, but the food was superb, and once the cattlemen discovered what Madame Maytubby could do with mountain oysters, it became one of the two most popular restaurants in Packingtown. The other was Puncher’s, which specialized in steaks. You could also order a steak at Chief Joe’s, but few ever did, and asked instead for such specialties as sweetbreads, mountain oysters, brains and eggs, lamb stew, real oxtail soup, and the wonderful no-name dish the restaurant prepared from wild duck when it was in season.
The mounted animal heads had begun when a cattleman customer shot a grizzly up in the Canadian Rockies in 1927. He had the head stuffed and presented it to Chief Joe. Not knowing what else to do with it, Chief Joe hung it on the wall. Then everyone else who shot anything started presenting him with their prey’s mounted heads until the walls were covered with glass-eyed animals. Chief Joe died in 1961; his wife in ’66. Their only son, Pierre Maytubby, took over and a few old customers tried to call him Chief Pete, but he wouldn’t stand for it. Under Pierre, the restaurant’s quality remained the same as did the sign outside, which still read Chez Joseph, although no one had ever called it that except Madame Maytubby.
When the coffee and cognac came, Dill leaned back and grinned at Anna Maude Singe. Their table was in front of one of the banquettes, and Singe was seated against the wall directly under the dead bison, who was beginning to look a bit motheaten.
“You like buttermilk with your dinner,” Dill said. “I’m not sure I ever went out with a woman who liked buttermilk with her dinner.”
“I’ve even been known to drink it for breakfast.”
“That takes a certain amount of guts.”
“What do you have for breakfast?”
“Coffee,” Dill said. “It used to be coffee and cigarettes, but I quit smoking. Remarque called coffee and a cigarette the soldier’s breakfast. I read that at an impressionable age.”
“Were you ever a soldier?”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “You were about the right age for Vietnam.”
“I wasn’t in Vietnam.”
“But you were overseas.”
“I was abroad. Civilians go abroad; soldiers go overseas.”
“So you weren’t a soldier.”
“Not.”
“Some guys say they feel guilty now about having missed out on Vietnam.”
“Middle-class college-educated white guys?”
Singe nodded. “They feel they missed out on something they’ll never get another chance at.”
“They did,” Dill said. “They missed out on getting their butts shot off, although I don’t think they would have. You didn’t find too many middle-class college-educated white guys in the line companies.”
“You don’t seem to feel guilty,” she said.