Through a Dead Mah’s Eye
The idea in swapping is to start out with nothing much and run it up to something. I started out with a buckle without a tongue and a carved peach pit, that day, and swapped it to a kid named Miller for a harmonica that somebody had stepped on. Then I swapped that to another kid for a pen-knife with one blade missing. By an hour after dark, I had run my original capital up to a baseball with its outside cover worn off, so I figured I’d put in a pretty good afternoon. Of course, I should have been indoors long before then, but swapping takes time and makes you cover a lot of ground.
I was just in the middle of a deal with the Scanlon kid, when I saw my old man coming. He was still a block away, but he was walking fast like when he’s sore, and it’s hard to use good business judgment when you’re being rushed like that. I guess that’s why I let Scanlon high-pressure me into swapping for a piece of junk like he had. It was just somebody’s old castoff glass eye, that he must have picked up off some ash heap.
“You got a nerve!” I squalled. But I looked over my shoulder and I saw Trouble coming up fast, so I didn’t have much time to be choosy.
Scanlon knew he had me. “Yes or no?” he insisted.
“All right, here goes,” I growled, and I passed him the peeled baseball, and he passed me the glass eye, and I dropped it in my pocket.
That was about all I had time for before Trouble finally caught up with me. I got swung around in the direction in which I live, by the back of the neck, and I started to move over the ground fast — but only about fifty per cent under my own speed. I didn’t mind that, only people’s Old Men always have to make such long speeches about everything, I don’t know why.
“Haven’t I got troubles enough of my own,” he said, “without having to go on scouting expeditions looking for you all over the neighborhood every time I get home? Your mother’s been hanging out the window calling you for hours. What time d’ye think it is, anyway?” And all that kind of stuff. I got it for five solid blocks, all the way back to our house, but I just kept thinking about how I got swindled just now, so I got out of having to hear most of it.
I’d never seen him so grouchy before. At least not since that time I busted the candy-store window. Most times when he had to come after me like this, he’d take a lick at the bat himself, if we were playing baseball for instance, and then wink at me and only pretend to bawl me out in front of Ma when we got back. He said he could remember when he was twelve himself, and that shows how good he was, because twenty-three years is a pretty long time to remember, let me tell you. But tonight it was the McCoy. Only I could tell it wasn’t me he was sore at so much, it was something else entirely. Maybe his feet hurt him, I don’t know.
By the time we got through supper my mother noticed it too. “Frank,” she said after a while, “what’s eating you? There’s something troubling you, and you can’t fool me.”
He was drawing lines on the tablecloth with the back of his fork. “I’ve been demoted,” he said.
Like a fool I had to butt in right then, otherwise I could have listened to some more. “What’s demoted mean, Pop?” I said. “Is it like when you’re put back in school? How can they do that to you, Pop?”
Ma said, “Frankie, you go inside and do your homework!”
Just before I closed the door I heard her say, kind of scared, “You haven’t been put back into blues, Frank, have you?”
“No,” he said, “but it might just as well have been that.”
When they came out after a while they both looked kind of down-hearted. They forgot I was in there or else didn’t notice me reading Black Mask behind my geography book. She said, “I guess now we’ll have to move out of here.”
“Yeah, there’s a big difference in the salary.”
I pricked my ears at that. I didn’t want to have to move away from here, especially since I was marbles champion of the block.
“What hurts most about it,” he said, “is I know they couldn’t find a thing against me on my record. I’m like a burnt sacrifice, the captain practically admitted as much. Whenever the Commissioner gets these brain waves about injecting more efficiency into the division, somebody has to be made the goat. He calls that getting rid of the deadwood. If you haven’t cracked six cases in a row single-handed, you’re deadwood.”
“Well,” she said, “maybe it’ll blow over and they’ll reinstate you after a while.”
“No,” he said, “the only thing that’ll save me is a break of some kind, a chance to make a big killing. Once the order goes through, I won’t even be on Homicide any more. What chance’ll I have then, running in lush-workers and dips? What I need is a flashy, hard-to-crack murder case.”
Gee, I thought, I wish I knew where there was one, so I could tell him about it. What chance did a kid like me have of knowing where there was a murder case — at least that no one else knew about and he could have all to himself? I didn’t even know how to begin to look for one, except behind billboards and in vacant lots and places, and I knew there wouldn’t be any there. Once in a while you found a dead cat, that was all.
Next morning I waited until Ma was out of the room, and I asked him, “Pop, how does somebody know when a murder case has happened?”
He wasn’t paying much attention. “Well, they find the body, naturally.”
“But suppose the body’s been hidden some place where nobody knows about it, then how do they know there was a murder case?”
“Well, if somebody’s been missing, hasn’t been seen around for some time, that’s what first starts them looking.”
“But suppose no one even tells ’em somebody’s missing, because nobody noticed it yet, then how would they know where to look?”
“They wouldn’t, they’d have to have some kind of a clue first. A clue is some little thing, that don’t seem to belong where it’s found. It’s tough to explain, Frankie, that’s the best I can do. It could be some little thing belonging to someone, but the person it belongs to isn’t around; then you wonder why he isn’t, and what it’s doing where you found it instead of where it ought to be.”
Just then Ma came back in again, so he said, “You quit bothering your head about that stuff, and stick to your school work. That last report you brought back wasn’t so hot, you know.” And then he said, more to himself than to me, “One flop in the family is enough.”
Gee, it made me feel bad to hear him say that. Ma must have heard him, too. I saw her rest her hand on his shoulder, and kind of push down hard, without saying anything.
I looked the Scanlon kid up after school that afternoon, to ask him about that eye I’d traded off him the night before. It was about the only thing I had in the way of a clue, and I couldn’t help wondering...
I took it out and looked it over, and I said, “Scanny, d’you suppose anyone ever used this? I mean, really wore it in his puss?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I guess somebody musta when it was new; that’s what they’re made for.”
“Well, then, why’d he quit using it, why’d he throw it away?”
“I guess he got a new one, that’s why he didn’t want the old one no more.”
“Naw,” I said, “because once you’ve got one of these, you don’t need another, except only if it cracks or breaks or something.” And we could both see this wasn’t cracked or chipped or anything. “A guy can’t see through one of these even when it’s new; he just wears it so people won’t know his own is missing,” I explained. “So why should he change it for a new one, if it’s still good?”