Nothing but a Smile (7 page)

The guy made a mistake not locking it.

Standing back, slipping the rubber apron to one side and adjusting his trouser leg for a little more slack, Wink raised one leg and kicked, hard. The door flew open, banging against a metal rack of paper clips, staples, and metal fasteners.

“Okay, clearly this is my fault,” he announced, placing the glue pot on the nearest shelf and heading for him. “Obviously, I was too subtle for you.” This time he used both hands and wrenched him away from Sal's friend, then shoved him hard, full on the chest. Deininger's legs slipped out from under him, his shiny brogans skittering, and he fell back into the corner against an empty, rattling filing cabinet. It boomed like a small-caliber cannon. It was the loudest thing Wink had heard since returning to civilian life—it was barroom loud, dangerous sounding, thrilling.

Deininger scrambled back to his feet like he was on fire. Wink braced himself for a punch, but the guy just squeezed past him, escaping into the hall.

Wink followed him out, with Reenie trailing close behind. Deininger was barking at his secretary coming the other way. “Mrs. Walters! Call the police! Now!”

As Wink approached, the guy whipped around like he needed to keep his eyes on him and started to back down the hall.

“Really?” Wink said, halting his pursuit, which meant he had to raise his voice the farther Deininger scrambled away. “The cops? That sound like good public relations to you, pal? Clapping cuffs on the cripple?” He was yelling now. “Want it to get around how a decorated war veteran got the better of you, despite being
burdened with a lame hand?” He waggled his right, high in the air, and now people were coming out, gathering in the hall. “War injury, you know, sacrificed for my country and all.”

Now that he had a crowd at his side, Deininger apparently felt safe enough to stop retreating.

“Seriously?” Wink said. “This is your plan?”

He took it as a sign of a lack of intelligence that there wasn't even a flicker of doubt in this guy's eyes. He didn't appear to even be reconsidering his position, reappraising his situation, strategizing the best diplomatic maneuver. He wasn't budging.

So Wink didn't budge either, just stood in the hall facing him, the two of them like gunfighters—one amused and crippled, the other jangled and red faced—and waited for the police. Which was fine, just fine. He didn't want to work there anyway. If the guy was that bullheaded and unable to reassess the situation and adjust, Wink knew he'd be a horrible creative director. Just lousy.

He untied his rubber apron and hung it on the nearest doorknob while they waited.

All the way up to the Gold Coast to visit her in-laws that morning, she tried to focus on what she should do next, exactly, and to block out the looks from the old men and young vets on the platform and on the train and walking down the street. She knew what they were looking at. It was much too warm today for a jacket, and so they were checking her out.

Though she never would admit it to anyone, not even her best girlfriends, Sal knew she had a nice figure—specifically, she was well endowed, as her aunt Patty, who shared the trait, liked to describe it.
Her legs were a little stumpy for her own liking, her bottom a little flat and broad, but she knew she had a good thing going on up top. It was hard not to know it—she'd long ago grown used to the drift of men's eyes, the sudden glaze of distraction that would come over them in her presence, and the stolen glances she'd catch in the reflection of display cases and windows when they thought she couldn't see.

Which is how she knew Chesty loved her for her—he'd known her before they'd even appeared.

Chesty—known back then as Billy Chesterton—arrived in her life long before the bosom. It must have been somewhere in the beginning of junior high when he started riding his bike down to the shop from his upscale neighborhood north of the river and helped her pop sweep up and stock supplies, and generally made a nuisance of himself. It was that annoying age when boys just reeked of body odor and an earnest awkwardness, and so she tried to avoid him as much as possible. But he wasn't there for her. He was there because he'd caught the photography bug. He'd been reading magazine articles and had a brand-new camera his uncle had given him and wanted to learn everything he could. So the third or fourth time Pop saw him loitering around the store, he got the kid talking, decided there was only one way to find out how passionate he really was about tackling something that would amount to extracurricular schooling, and took him on as unpaid help, only on Saturdays. That schedule expanded, though, and by high school, he was not only getting a little pay but working three weekday afternoons as well. He even tried to talk Pop into opening the store on Sundays, but Pop told him his late wife had been raised Catholic—Sal's mom had passed by then—and though Pop didn't believe and didn't take Sal to services, they still weren't going to open up on Sundays. He told him to do his homework on Sundays—that he had to
make something of himself, not just take pictures and hang out in the camera shop.

And he
was
making something of himself—somehow, between all the shuttling down to the Loop and working in the shop, he managed to become the photo editor on both his high school newspaper and yearbook.

And by then, she wasn't so annoyed that he was always there. Surprisingly, despite not having time to go out for sports teams, despite standing stooped over chemicals in the darkroom hours at a time, his growth had not been stunted and he had a beautiful head of hair. Her pop always claimed the chemicals had taken his own hair, but Chesty never had that problem.

In a way, his love was more pure than hers. Because though she'd come around when he began to bloom into a handsome young man, he'd acted moony about her from the start, back before her skin cleared and she filled out. Long before her best features, as she saw it now—when she was all “bruised knees and bee stings,” as he later put it. It was clear he would have been hanging around a camera shop even if she hadn't been living above one, but it might have been a different camera shop.

Her pop always kidded her that she was, from the beginning, “the only other thing that boy likes almost as much as photography.”

And maybe she was shallow for not seeing the same in him when he was all elbows and bicycle handlebars, barging in, always there—heck, she'd been aware of his presence the afternoon she got her first menses. She wasn't so clear what was going on in the toilet, but she knew Billy, as he was still known then, was working that day. He was somewhere in the shop, his constant-seeming presence something she never had a say in.

It was only in high school, when he had friends on the paper and yearbook, that other boys started calling him Chesty, and
the nickname spread and seeped into other parts of his life, and soon they were calling him that at the shop as well. It was around that time that she began to blossom herself, and it came on like gangbusters, and because they were starting to gravitate toward each other, addressing each other with more care, more manners, doing little favors for each other—sharing a bottle of pop, an umbrella, eventually taking in movies, holding hands, kissing, sparking, petting, going steady—she would hear his new name Chesty and think, self-consciously,
I am too … We belong together.
There was no question.

And she knew that even if she hadn't grown to love him and they hadn't married, there was a good chance her pop might have willed Chesty part ownership in the shop anyway.

The two arresting officers who eventually arrived were pretty polite about the whole thing, like this was normal behavior among businessmen working in the Loop.

When they got down to the lobby, he realized his portfolio was still upstairs—still with Deininger, who'd asked him to bring it back in his first day, to show to the other CDs and principals in the company—and he had better get it now, when he could, because he certainly wasn't coming back.

He described it to them, and one of the cops went back up in the elevator to retrieve it while he stood in handcuffs with the other. It was just after lunchtime and the lobby was being crisscrossed with people he knew—other illustrators and art directors—with their eyebrows raised, probably inventing all manner of fantastic stories about what he'd done.

When the cop appeared in the elevator with his portfolio, his partner began moving him toward the street. “We walk to the precinct,” he explained. “Do our part for the effort.”

It was a beautiful June day in downtown Chicago, and other than the fact that he was handcuffed and flanked by two uniformed patrolmen, heading for jail, it felt great to be out of that windowless studio, walking around in the sun and the breeze.

The cop holding his portfolio had it unzipped and was glancing through it as they walked, maybe making sure it didn't contain any weapons.

He assured them it was just drawings and cartoons he'd done in the service.

“Really? Say! You Bill Mauldin?” The cop seemed genuinely interested in the work now, not just cracking wise, as he tried to peer closer into the little portfolio case and maintain his stride. He turned to his partner. “Joe, I think this guy's maybe Bill Mauldin!”

The one called Joe seemed to have no idea who Bill Mauldin was, so he wasn't as disappointed as the first guy to find out that Wink wasn't, in fact, the celebrated infantry cartoonist of the Forty-fifth Division and
Stars and Stripes.

He'd never met Mauldin, having been in the Pacific theater himself, but he knew from photos that the heroic and talented bastard was sort of a runty little guy, more the rugged foot soldier type, built for trudging and ducking. Mauldin deserved all the accolades he'd been getting, and not just on account of his being an enlisted grunt, usually covered in mud, right in the flak, but because he was just straight-out talented.

“Sorry, fellas,” he said. “Nearest I ever came to being Bill Mauldin is taking a mud treatment at this spa place in Tahiti.”

They squinted at him like maybe they had the wrong idea about him.

“I wouldn't have done it myself, of course, but they ordered me. Working on a story on the local hot spots, opportunities for R & R and all …” The few he could actually get into in print, that is—not the grab-ass dime-a-dance huts and the “Special Times Movee House,” which was a mobile stag show, set up in a U.S. Cavalry tent dating from probably the Spanish-American War. And, of course, the awful little cribs for the “party-time girls” who were really no more than actual girls. Compared with all that, the spa had seemed as regal as a cathedral. And if
legitimate
meant no one came right out and directly offered to work his bone, then perfectly legitimate.

The cop who'd taken down the complaint was the same one who'd gone up to Deininger's office for his portfolio, and he was flipping through his notepad as they walked. Wink noticed he'd corrected the spelling of his boss's name—probably saw it on the door when he went back up—and he was showing it to his partner. “That's a Kraut name, am I right?” He turned back to Wink and asked him, “Guy you shoved, gave me the cartoon book there—he some kind of Kraut?”

Wink just shrugged.

The one called Joe looked like he was going to spit. “Our boys are out there dying, this Kraut's busy on the make, getting all handsy with the fräuleins, probably wanted to ask her out to the next secret Bund meeting …”

Wink kept his mouth shut. He had some German on his mother's side. His uncle Len, the farmer over in Michigan—he was German. Not a Bund member, he was sure, but still, German enough.

At the precinct, they ushered him in through a door marked
BOOKING,
uncuffed him, and helped him empty his pockets, handing it all over to the sergeant, an older, rounder guy with a pure white handlebar mustache. They moved on to his jacket,
with everything going into a manila envelope, until one of them pulled out his Purple Heart.

He'd honestly thought he'd misplaced the stupid thing.

The sergeant glowered at him for a second, breathing through his nose, sounding not unlike livestock, then went back behind the swinging gate, back into the noise and bustle of ringing phones and clacking typewriters, farther in. Meanwhile, the arresting officers eased up on their grip. The one called Joe asked if he was okay, they hadn't hurt anything on him or anything? Like he had prosthetic limbs, maybe, or a metal plate. Wink assured them he was fine. The other one asked where he'd gotten it, and he told them in the Pacific, and then the sergeant reappeared and handed him back the medal and waggled a meaty finger in some kind of fidgety gesture between the other two that seemed to suggest they were dropping the charges, letting him go.

The sergeant waddled closer and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Just don't go back there, okay, soldier? I think we can take it you're fired.” As he gently guided him toward the door, he leaned in and said quietly, “My wife and I have three Blue Stars in our front parlor window, so I'm telling you like I'd tell any one of my own boys. You did your fight. Now get a job that isn't run by punks and pantywaists. You don't need that crap.”

It was true. He really didn't.

Whitcomb and Sarah Chesterton weren't actually her in-laws in the truest sense. But as Chesty's elderly, childless aunt and uncle, the ones who'd raised him and sheltered him from age
ten on, they were the closest thing she knew to in-laws. His real mother was still alive, she understood, back in Nebraska, but Sal had yet to meet her—or any other Chestertons. She'd seen photos of both his real parents, and thought he favored his father the most—William
SR.,
Chesty's dad, the less successful of the two bank president brothers, died on a railroad track outside of Breakey, Nebraska, in 1930, a few days after his small bank there failed.

Once a month, at the elderly uncle's request, she traveled up to the Gold Coast area and let him look at the books. Though she felt it was really none of his business and Chesty would no doubt object on her behalf if she told him he was doing this, she went along with it, but, of course, brought him an entirely different set of books, pure fiction, doctored to make it appear the camera shop was still operating firmly in the black. She would never misrepresent her finances in another situation—certainly not to the government or anything—but he wasn't the government. He was just the man who'd raised her husband and someone who knew something about finances. And frankly, someone who was nosy. He didn't own any of the store or anything. So let him have the fairy-tale version, she always told herself every month. In her place, Chesty would at least give him the fairy-tale version, if not a stern telling off. And frankly, technically, it mattered less what Chesty would do, because technically, it was more her store than his.