The paper came from a six-month-old newspaper. Mike had never rolled his own before. With unflustered patience, John showed him how. Mike suspected nothing came for free. He wondered what Dennison would want from him. Right now, he had nothing to give. He’d worry about that later, too. He smoked like a drowning man coming up for air.
“That was wonderful,” he said.
“Glad you liked it,” John answered easily. “You’ll learn the ropes quick, believe me. C’mon outside now. They have to count us before they feed us, make sure nobody’s run off. With all you new scalps here, they’ll screw it up a few times before they get it straight.” He spoke with calm, resigned certainty.
Sure enough, the guards went through the count four times before they were satisfied. Then the wreckers hurried to the kitchen. Everyone got a chunk of brown bread. In New York City, Mike would have turned up his nose at the coarse, stale stuff. After days of worse, it made him think of manna from heaven.
Once they’d grabbed their bread, the inmates walked past cooks who ladled stew into their mess tins. “Hey, Phil,” John said to one of the men: like the rest, an inmate himself. “Give my pal Mike here something good, okay?”
“Natch,” Phil said. “Just like the fuckin’ Waldorf.” He filled Mike’s tin, then jerked his thumb toward the rough tables. “Gwan, get outa here.”
Mike gobbled the bread. He spooned up the stew. The gravy was thin and watery. In it floated bits of potato and turnip and cabbage and a few strings of what might have been meat. He would have stomped out of any place that dared charge even a penny for it. Right here, right now, it seemed terrific.
He’d got his tin almost perfectly clean before he thought to wonder, “What kind of meat was that, anyway?”
John Dennison was eating more slowly. “Some questions here, you don’t ask. You don’t ask what somebody did to wind up here. He can tell you if he wants to, but you don’t ask. And you don’t ask what the meat is. It’s there, is what it is-when it is there. If you knew, maybe you wouldn’t wanna eat it. And you gotta eat here, or else you fold up and die.”
“Okay,” Mike said. All kinds of interesting possibilities went through his mind. Bear? Coyote? Skunk? Squirrel? Stray dog? He wouldn’t have ordered any of those at a greasy spoon back home. But he wasn’t about to pick them out of his tin, either. He tried another question: “Can I ask you what you did for a living before you got here?”
“Oh, sure. I was a carpenter.” John chuckled. “I know the wood a hell of a lot better now than I did then. I know it with the skin on, I guess you’d say. How about you?”
“I wrote for a newspaper,” Mike said.
“Did you?” John Dennison chuckled again. “Then I bet I don’t have to ask how you wound up here.” He held up a hasty hand. “And I’m not asking. You don’t got to say anything if you don’t feel like it.”
“I don’t care,” Mike said. “That’s what happened, all right. I bet I’m a long way from the only reporter here.”
“Won’t touch that one. I’d lose,” Dennison said. “Me, I got drunk and stupid and I told off Joe Steele. I think the bastard who turned me in was the guy who wanted my building, only he couldn’t get it from me. So he ratted on me to the Jeebies, and I won my five to ten, plus a big old knot on the side of my head. They still do that when they grab you?”
“Oh, hell, yes. I already told you I got blackjacked.” Mike rubbed his own bruise, which was sore and swollen yet. “Sort of a welcome-to-the-club present.”
“Welcome-with-a-club present, you mean,” John said. Of all the things Mike hadn’t expected to do in a labor encampment, laughing his head off stood high on the list. He did it now, though.
* * *
Charlie had to call Stella back and tell her he couldn’t do anything for Mike. She burst into tears. “What am I gonna do without him?” she wailed. He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t think anybody could say anything to that.
And, just to make his joy complete, he had to call his folks and tell them he couldn’t help Mike. His mother answered the telephone. Bridget Sullivan didn’t take the news well. “Why didn’t you stop him?” she demanded bitterly. “Why didn’t you keep him from writing that stuff about the President? Then he wouldn’t have got in trouble.”
“What was I supposed to do, Mom? He’s a grown man. Should I have held a gun to his head? Or maybe an ether cone over his nose?”
“I don’t know,” his mother said. “All I know is, you didn’t stop him, and now he’s in one of those horrible places people don’t come back from.” She started crying, too.
He got off the phone as fast as he could, which wasn’t nearly fast enough. Then he walked into the kitchen, pulled an ice-cube tray from the freezer, put rocks in a glass, and poured three fingers of bourbon over them. “Boy, that was fun,” he said, coming back to the front room.
“Sounded like it,” Esther said.
He took a healthy swig. “Whew! That hits the spot! Good for what ails me, all right.” He looked from the glass to his wife and back again. “Sorry, hon. I’m being rude and crude. Want I should fix you one, too?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “Bourbon hasn’t tasted good to me lately.”
“What do you mean? It’s Wild Turkey, not the cheap stuff they scrape out of the barrel and have to fight into a bottle with a pistol and a chair.”
“It hasn’t tasted good anyway,” Esther answered. “Coffee doesn’t taste right, either, or even tea. Must be because I’m expecting.”
“Exp-” Charlie got half the word out, and no more. He wasn’t astonished-he knew when her monthlies were due, and they hadn’t come. But it was still a big thing to hear officially, as it were.
She nodded. “That’s right. We wanted to. Now we’re going to. I did a little thinking when I decided I was sure I was going to have a baby. If I worked it out right, Junior will be in the high school class of 1956. Can you believe that?”
“Now that you mention it, no,” Charlie said after trying and failing. “He’ll probably fly to school in a rocket car, carry his phone in his shirt pocket, and go to the Moon for summer vacation.”
Esther laughed at him. “I think you let that Flash Gordon serial last year soften your brain.”
“Maybe-but maybe not, too,” Charlie said. “Look where we were twenty years ago. Nobody had a radio. Model T’s were as good as cars got. People had iceboxes-when they had iceboxes-not refrigerators. You put out a card to tell the iceman how much to leave. Airplanes were made out of wood and cloth and baling wire. Can you imagine what they would’ve thought of a DC-3 if you stuck one in a time machine and sent it back?”
“Flash Gordon,” Esther said again, but this time her tone was thoughtful, not amused and mocking. She changed the subject: “What do you want to name it?”
“If it’s a boy, not Charlie, Junior,” he said at once. “Let him be whoever he is, not a carbon copy of his old man.”
“Okay,” Esther said. “I was thinking the same thing. Jews don’t usually name babies for someone who’s still alive. I would’ve gone along with it if you wanted to, but I’m not sorry you don’t.”
“How about if it’s a girl?” Charlie said.
“Sarah? After my mother’s mother?”
“Hmm. .” He savored the name. “Sarah Sullivan. That might be okay, even if it sounds like it’s out of Abie’s Irish Rose.”
“We’re out of Abie’s Irish Rose, only with him and her turned around,” Esther said. “You could fill the Polo Grounds four or five times with all the couples out of Abie’s Irish Rose. And the ones who aren’t are Jewish and Italian or Italian and Irish or Russian and Irish or, or anything under the sun. The New York Mutts, that’s us.”
“Sounds like a pretty good ballclub.” Charlie snapped his fingers. “Now I gotta call my folks again. They’ll be glad to hear from me this time, I bet. Hey, Ma? Guess what? You’re gonna be a grandma! Yeah, she’ll go for that. And you gotta call yours, too. We’ll run up the bill, but who cares?”