Florek stopped in the California Confectionery, where he worked as a soda jerk, to pick up his pay. His boss fixed him a banana split, which he ate while sitting at the counter. It wasn’t much of a breakfast, but it was free, and it would do. Florek’s friend Eddie Monetti told him that Johnny the Greek, who controlled the rackets in town, owned a piece of the confectionery. Mike Florek never asked his boss if this were true. His old man had always told him to keep his nose out of those kinds of affairs, and Mike didn’t care to know.
The Colonial Market, owned by a couple of Greeks named George and William Tsimpedas, sat on Broadway at Adams, next to the Colonial Bank, which had gone down in the Depression. George Tsimpedas used the bank for storage now, flour and rock salt and the like. During the war, the market held the sole rationing license for meat, so the Colonial had become the place to go for chicken and beef and pork. People stuck with them, as Tsimpedas had the best butcher in town in Andy Langal, a knife artist like no one in Farrell had ever seen.
Langal was in the back of the market when Florek walked in. He was a large-boned Pole with typically big hands. Florek could see him back there, gloves on, standing next to the smoker. He came out after a while and stood behind the glass counter.
“Young Florek.”
“Andy.”
“What can I get ya?”
“Some of that special sausage you got. About a pound of it, I guess.” Florek dropped the tone of his voice. “Is it fresh killed?”
Langal spread his hands. “What, has it ever not been fresh?”
“I guess not, no.”
It was a dumb question, and Florek was sorry he asked it. The meat was always fresh in this place, and George Tsimpedas went to Youngstown three times a week to make sure the produce was fresh as well. Florek knew all of that. He was just trying to act like a guy who wouldn’t get taken for a ride. It never came out right when he tried to act hard.
“Here ya go.” Langal handed him the sausage wrapped in butcher’s paper.
“Thanks, Andy.”
“You owe a balance?”
“You better go ahead and check.”
Langal went in the back again, returned with a figure. Florek settled his account from his own pay. His mother had floated what she owed Tsimpedas for the last three weeks.
“Take it easy, Andy.”
“You too, young man.”
On the walk back to the apartment, Florek tried to think about what had happened to Lola. He couldn’t blame it all on the soldiers or the war, because Lola had always been the type to look beyond Farrell with wide-open eyes. But the war had started all this bad business with Lola, in a roundabout way. The war had played a part in it, that much he knew.
When the Army needed a disembarkation point for its soldiers, they built Camp Shenango between Sharon and Greenville, acres of barracks and new roads. Almost immediately, the towns and boroughs of the Shenango Valley changed. Sharon restaurants began to make good money selling whiskey to the soldiers, and the entertainment and bar dollars flew into the township of Brookfield and the strip at Masury, just over the Ohio line. The soldiers brought in girlfriends and wives before their ship-out dates, and many of those women stayed around. Florek had heard stories of drunken women, of gang bangs and pass-arounds. Everything was loose, wide open, different than what the hardworking mill workers and business owners of the towns were used to. But the war and the camp were a boon for the local economy, and the attitude in general was that nothing was too good for the soldiers. Hell, the Army had even flown in Judy Garland for a special show.
Lola had met a soldier in her senior year, a special soldier, she said. On the night after the soldier left for Europe, Florek found Lola crying in their bedroom. The soldier’s buddy had phoned her that day, told her that his friend had recommended he call, and that she be “nice to him” too. Lola had met him, and when she asked him to slow down, he had gotten rough with her in a frightening way. It made Mike Florek angry, but realistically, what could he do? He knew he wasn’t going to take on any soldier. So he let it go, and then Lola made the same mistake, over and over again. She kept making mistakes, and the people of Farrell began to talk about her as someone who would continue to make mistakes, and by the end of the war she was sitting in bars in Masury on Saturday nights, waiting for the next mistake to walk through the door and have a seat on the stool to her right. If she was going to do it anyway, if this pattern was as unavoidable as it appeared to be, why not make a few bucks from it and just enjoy the ride?
That was the way Lola saw it, anyway. It was a cockeyed way of looking at things, but Florek knew that’s the way she reasoned things in her mind. When you share the same room with someone all your life, you get to know them pretty good.
Mike Florek entered the apartment, put the sausage in his mother’s hands. They stood there in the kitchen, unspeaking, looking into each other’s eyes. Florek had unzipped his jacket when he walked in. Now he ran the zipper back up along its track.
“I guess I better go see about Lola.”
His mother nodded. “Yes, Michael. Go see about your sister.”
“I’ll be home around dinnertime, Ma.”
“Go on, boy. You go on and go.”
Florek went into his bedroom, rummaged through his dresser, withdrew Lola’s high school graduation picture. She had inscribed a short note to him on the back. There was a copy of the photograph, minus the note, in Lola’s own dresser. He slipped the photograph into the side pocket of his mackinaw. He found the car keys where his mother always left them, in a handpainted dish that sat on a small table by the door. He left the apartment and went down to the street.
Florek’s father had bought a ’34 Plymouth for three hundred and twenty dollars just before the war. Mike Florek thought about the times the family would drive into Ohio, buy chickens there off a farm, tie the live chickens to the fenders of the Plymouth, then head back to Farrell. They were in bad shape then, what with his father laid off from the mills, working on the highway in a government program for beans and flour and the odd nickel and dime. He could remember being hungry then, really hungry, and cold up in the apartment in the bowels of winter, the only warmth rising up from the bakery below, a warmth that carried a soft, pleasant smell. Thinking back on it, it wasn’t all that bad. They were together then, at least.
The Plymouth started with a cough. Florek pumped the gas a couple of times, let the engine idle. No heat in this one ever, and no radio. He could have done without the heater, but he really would have liked some music. Florek liked the lady singers and the big band sound. He had seen plenty of the bands and their singers — Misty June Christie with Stan Kenton’s outfit, Doris Day with Les Brown — who came through Youngstown. He had caught Glenn Miller, too, at Yankee Lake over in Ohio, and boy, that had been a night. They had packed them in so tight for Miller, you couldn’t even dance. Yankee Lake, it had its share of acts. But if you really wanted to see the big ones, you had to make the trip into Youngstown.
Youngstown itself was a world away from Farrell. The mob was deeper into Youngstown than New York and Chicago combined. It seemed that way, anyhow. You could find any brand of trouble in Youngstown, and you could find it right out in the open, from whores to gambling to narcotics. Florek had taken a bus there one Saturday night with a couple of his buddies, and they had looked in the front door of Youngstown’s biggest and most notorious gambling house, the Jungle Inn. A couple of hard guys patrolled the upper deck. Tommy guns cradled in their arms. You’d have to be screwy to try and knock over a place like that. Those gorillas with the Tommy guns, they’d open up and kill every customer in the joint before you ever got a nickel. No, Youngstown was not the kind of place where Mike Florek wanted to hang out.