Entrapment and Other Writings (33 page)

He wasn’t quite ready. He had to light a cigarette first. He even offered Jane one. She took it because she was afraid if she didn’t, he might leave. I was ready for him to leave any time.

“Would you like to look out the back window, Ralph?” I asked him.

I didn’t get even a dirty look for an answer. Instead he squirrel-eyed me. I’d rather have somebody give me a straight dirty look than to squirrel-eye me like that.

“I don’t care about back windows,” he finally let us know. “What I’m interested in, is there a back stair?”

“We got a
two-story
stair, honey,” Jane told him, pleased that we finally had
something
he might like.

“I’m glad it goes all the way down to the ground,” he told us. “Now I want to know what time the old nigger turns in.”

We knew who he meant. The old guy we’d rented the place, furnished, from. He was a good old guy. His name was Jakes. We’d had to come down to Niggertown to rent because they’d be looking for us uptown. We were fourteen.

“What we have to do here,” Ralph let us know, “is get this junk out”—he waved at the floorlamp and the bed—“down the back stair. I’ll be back with a buddy tonight. So long, baby,” he told Jane, “walk pretty all the way.”

He didn’t tell
me
how to walk. He didn’t even say so long. He left without looking back. Some boyfriend.

“I wonder where we’re going to stay
now
” was all I said. I was kind of sorry to leave the old homestead.

We heard old Jakes turn in downstairs around nine p.m. We had our clothes all packed. Ralph and a buddy showed up around ten. So long as the stairs didn’t crack or squeak, there was no danger.

All I could see of Ralph’s buddy was a pair of dark glasses.

Jane and I carried down the pillows and sheets and the Claridge towels. Trouble was she’d say something like “Keep talking, keep talking,” which wouldn’t be funny to anyone else but would cause me to break up, and I’d say something back which wasn’t funny to anyone else but which would cause her to break up. Ralph got real hot at us for not taking this move seriously. “If you kids can’t talk sense,” he told us, “don’t say
anything
.”

So we shut up while we were carrying the stuff up the backstairs to his buddy’s apartment. It was stuffed to the roof with tables, chairs, and furniture till there was hardly a place to lie down. Jane and Ralph made out on the couch.

If it hadn’t been for all that hot furniture stacked around, I might have climbed in with the clown wearing the dark glasses. But he gave me the feeling that he’d trade me in for a divan or a davenport in the morning.

I crawled under a kitchen table and made out there until Jane pulled me out. It was daylight. “Ralph is gone,” she told me.

“Gone where?”

“Home.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where does he live?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Where does Ralph live?” I asked Dark Glasses. He gave me a look as much as to say, “How square can anybody get?”

If this clown figures that because I’m scared to sleep with him I must be scared to fink on him, he’s figuring a little careless was what went through my mind.

“Ralph won’t be back,” he told us, anxious for us to take off.

“We have to wait for him because we don’t have any money,” Jane filled him in.

He handed us five dollars each and told us, “That covers it for the furniture.”

“Where we going now?” Jane asked me when we hit the street.

“We can’t go back uptown,” I had to explain to her, “account we’re accessories.”

“Accessories to what?”

“Accessories to the big furniture raid in Niggertown,” I had to explain to her. “What do you think he give us five bucks each for?”

“I wish Ralph was here,” Jane told me. “He’d tell us what to do.”

“I can tell you what he’d tell us, Jane,” I let her know. “He’d say, ‘You kids got yourself into this. Now get yourself out. Walk pretty all the way.’ ”

We were hiding in a basement when they found us. Jane was behind the furnace. They got her and asked where I was.

“Inside the furnace,” she told them.

I didn’t mind. I didn’t want her to go anywhere without me. I climbed out.

We told the cops we didn’t want to go home because all there was there was a drunk old woman and a gang of dead chickens. We didn’t refer to Old Tom.

We sat around jiving with those cops till three in the morning. They give us coffee and hamburgers, too. Jane would laugh at something I’d say and I’d laugh at something she’d say and the cops wouldn’t have the faintest flash notion what we were laughing about.

“I didn’t know twins were so funny,” one of them told us. “How would you like to come on a field trip with me and my wife and kids tomorrow?”

“We’d like that fine,” I told him.

“Then get tidied up because I got to take you to the House of the Good Shepherd so you can get some sleep and get ready for your field trip.”

We both wanted to ride in the front seat of the squadrol, but the cop wouldn’t let us. “You kids sit in back,” he told us.

“What time should we be ready?” Jane asked him.

“Ready for what?”

“For the field trip.”

“Between ten and eleven,” he told us, “as soon as the chickens-in-the-basket are ready. We’ll pick you up.”

“We’re not strong on chicken, mister,” I had to let him know.

“How are you on cheeseburgers?” he asked.

“Pretty strong. Ham would be even better,” I told him.

“I’ll stick to cheeseburgers,” Jane decided.

That joint looked so big and gloomy, with all them little night bulbs burning all night long. We were really glad to be going on a picnic in the morning.

We ate early, some slop or other, at a long board(?) with a gang of other kids. The kid next to me look something awful. Humpbacked, pockmarked, her hair flying all over, and spilling stuff on herself, too. Still she wanted to be friendly.

The way she went at eating, I had to stop myself.

“What are you here for?” I asked her.

I thought she might be doing time for the way she ate.

“For a long time,” she told me. That told me she was either a sharpie or a nut.

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one. I don’t know who I am.”

“Why don’t you just make up a name then?”

“I don’t know no names.”

She wasn’t putting us on. She was the real thing in goofs.

“Do you want us to make one up for you?”

“Would it be all right to do that?”

“Everybody is
entitled
to a name,” I told her.

She thought that over a full minute. Then she put her mouth to my ear:

“I’d like
that very
much.”

“Call her ‘Nadine,’ ” Jane decided, and pushed aside her plate. The stuff on it didn’t have a name either.

“ ‘Nadine,’ ” the goof repeated to herself, and put her glasses on: “My name is Nadine.”

She just couldn’t get over it.

Somebody rang a bell. I don’t know what it was for, but it was sure time. A nun tapped me on the shoulder. Then she tapped Jane. When she got through tapping, she began to add us up. It came to a total of two. We knew she’d figured it out because she told us, “Get ready, you two.”

“We’re ready now,” Jane told her.

“We’ve been ready for a couple hours,” I added. I just couldn’t wait to get out into the country.

“Maybe they’ll have deviled ham,” Jane hoped.

“So long as they don’t have deviled eggs.”

What we liked or didn’t like, the nun didn’t care. She led us across the courtyard into another building and up a stair.

“Is this the way to the picnic?” I asked her.

“Call it a picnic if you want,” she told me.

Something had gone wrong, it looked like.

“We’re supposed to spend the day in the country,” Jane told her.

“What country?” she wanted to know.

“One of the officers invited us.”

“He was kidding.”

Sure enough, he’d been kidding. The judge was already up front.

“You girls have a good home,” His Honor took one look and told us, “why don’t you stay in it?”

“Because it ain’t all that good, Your Honor,” Jane told him.

“You have parents who love you,” His Honor went right on, “why don’t you listen to them?”

“If the love us so, why do they keep telling us how hard they tried to get rid of us?” Jane asked him.

I let her do the talking.

“How is it that you’re running wild all over town instead of going to school?”

I had the answer to that one.

“We were the smartest kids in class,” I told him—and it was the truth—“so they graduated us to get rid of us.”

“When was that?”

“Two years ago.”

“How old are you now?”

“Fourteen.”

“You are charged,” His Honor told us, looking at his charge sheet and getting serious, “you are charged with stealing a carpet, eight towels, six sheets, two lamps, and various sundries, including a dining-room table, a kitchen table, four kitchen chairs, a reclining chair, and a sofa. Can you make restitution?”

I reached into my handbag and came up with the two fives.

“This is all we have between us, Your Honor,” I told him.

It was exactly at that moment—I was closing the handbag—that I got a full whiff of something awful yet familiar—and sure enough here he comes, right off the gump truck, right down the middle of the aisle, the world’s most ignorant man: Old Tom.

Old gump-snatching Tom the dead-chicken man, he can’t read, he can’t write, but he sure can count good. He can count everything good except his kids. Ask him how many he’s got and he’ll tell you right out, “Me and Lou did everything we could to get rid of
you
two, I’ll tell you
that
.”

“I’m the daddy of these childern!” he busts right in there.

“Who is this man?” His Honor wants to know, looking all around the courtroom.

“God
damn it
, jedge, I jest
told
you—I’m the daddy of these childern! And I’d like to point out something of ee-nor-mous evidence to this court!”

“Point anywhere you want,” His Honor gave him full permission, “just don’t point at me.”

Apparently His Honor had gotten a whiff of Old Tom, too. But Old Tom wasn’t to be put down. Not that easy. He paused just long enough to gain what he considered to be a dramatic effect. Then he raised his right hand and, pointing skyward with his index finger, shouted:

“These childern are eye
-dintical
twins! And I’m the daddy of both!”

How that crumby old man figured that would make a difference in court I don’t understand to this day.

“The charges against them are ‘eye-dintical’ too,” His Honor told Old Tom. “If you’re the father of these girls, I want to know your position in making restitution to this man, whose furniture your children have so willfully, maliciously, and knowingly disposed of?”

Poor Jakes. He’d been so nice to us, too. He’s standing there with his big checked cap in his hand and his old carpenter’s jeans,
wanting nothing except to get out of court. You’d think, by the way he was sweating it out, that he was the defendant instead of the complainant.

“Knowingly?”
Tom came in again. “
Knowingly
, jedge? I didn’t know it was that serious. I just came here to ask would you send them to the House of the Good Shepherd instid of that other place.”

“If you don’t take off your cap, I’ll send
you
to ‘that other place,’ ” the judge warned him.

Old Tom took off his cap then and, for once, had enough sense to keep his mouth shut for a minute.

“
Can
you make restitution?” the judge wanted to know.

Old Tom turned toward Jakes and studied, just studied him. Jane and I both knew why: He was trying to remember if he had ever sold Jakes a gump. Tom had a wonderful memory for faces. Once he’d sold a gump to someone, he remembered. He
had
to.

“Jedge,” Tom asked the court, “can I have ten minutes to talk to the complainant?”

“Take ten,” the judge told him and got up and went into his chambers. I avoided looking at Jane, and Jane avoided looking at me. Because we both knew exactly what Old Tom was going to pull: He was going to put a whole wagonload of dying chickens on poor Jakes.

He came back into court in less than ten minutes and I knew at a glance he’d pulled it off.

Jakes told the court he had accepted Tom’s offer of restitution.

“Suits me if it suits you,” the judge told Jakes, “but I want a word with these two girls.”

So we stood up there, with Tom behind us, and promised to be good girls and never to run away from home again.

“Go home with your father and behave yourselves,” he warned us both.

Wait till he gets us there, judge, was what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Jane was thinking the same thing, I knew.

“Your mother has been worried about you two,” Tom told us as soon as we got outside.

“That’ll be the first time,” I told Tom.

“Don’t start getting smart-ass with me before I get you home,” he told me. “This one is bad and you’re worse.” He always gave it to me harder than to Jane, for some reason.

We stopped at the traffic light on the corner. Tom’s gump truck was parked just across the way.

“You really think we’re going back to your stinking chicken yard, old man?” Jane asked him and gave me a pull on my arm and we were off.

We never looked back. Tom had more sense, we knew, than to try to run us down. He’s tried that before. We’ve outrun him too often.

We ducked into the traffic on Olive Street.

“Where we going?” I asked Jane when I’d caught my breath.

“I know the bar where Ralph hangs out,” she told me.

“As good a place as any, it sounds to me,” I told her.

I didn’t want Jane to go anywhere without me.

“Is it far?” I asked her.

“Not far,” Jane told me, “we can walk there pretty all the way.”

And that’s just what we did. We walked pretty all the way.