Man Jack

My name is Eloisa Fraser and I catch bad guys. It’s what I do. When the captain told me to lay off the case, I just couldn’t do it. Not like that. They had caught my man, he said – the thug was behind bars, serving a 12 year prison sentence in Attica. I was finished with the case. I could move on. I couldn’t. I looked into his brown eyes, serious and determined and defeated, pinning me with a look of warning from behind his oversized desk and I knew he was scared. He had given up long ago. He would do his part, policing the streets not already run by the ganglords; holding onto what he could and making peace with what he couldn’t.
Chicago 1940 was no place for a good cop.
Thank God I wasn’t one. I wasn’t a good cop, or a bad cop – I was just a lowly gumshoe who was subbing for the district while the real good guys were away fighting for our side Over There. All those great steeltrap minds going to waste behind a machine gun, or being shot down with the first wave of infantry. It made me sick.
The city was run by the gangs. The Chicago I lived in was a parish split into little kingdoms, all run by their respective lords. And on top of it all was the Pope of Chicago, Ebeneezer Seamus Meihl. Hell Meihl. He saw all, he knew all, and when they went to bed, every Chicago citizen who knew what they were about prayed to the Pope. In our town, he was the judge, jury, executioner. He was next to God, and God seemed to be on vacation.
In the hierarchy of it all the Captain was not an authority. To stretch the simile, he maybe was a small-time priest taking confession and handing out communion wafers with a level hand.
I wasn’t much of an active participant in the so-called Church of Chicago. I solved amateur crimes with an amateur eye and a small side arm. Mostly wives with erring husbands – or more often – straying lovers. It was a woman-rich town, full of females and those who were forgotten by the war – either overlooked or sent back into the uncaring world of the war-mad United.
In a town like that, it was easy to pass. A pair of suspenders, a beat-up fedora, and a trip or two to the barber was all a girl needed to make it. No one likes to stare at men who aren’t quite the vision of Male. They get forgotten – just like most other unattractive things.
I wasn’t always like this. Back in Horizon Springs I was a good little girl growing up – not even a tomboy. Just a good little girl following my brothers around, trying to understand the grown-ups. I wore ruffly dresses to birthday parties and loved the blue satin bow in my hair. One day I came home from school and found my mother weeping silently at the kitchen table. The police had been there. The biggest homicide the tiny town of Horizon Springs had ever seen had just happened – to my cousin, my uncle, and my father. It was ten more years before I graduated from high school, and by that time the war between the English and the Germans had started. I wondered hopefully how soon the Germans would be defeated, and then lost hope with all the rest as the slow cold of fear began to seep into the radiocasts.
The year of 1938 my mother died – heart failure. I cried like a banshee at her funeral. It wasn’t like her silent tears. My tears were noisy and my brothers winced. Then they went off to war the year after.
That was the year I ran away. I cut my hair and took Thomas’s clothes and the car, closed the house, and drove to Chicago. I had money. I rented a room and began to look around for a job. But my father’s killer had wandered around for years. He had gone free. No one had looked more than two ways to cross the street when he died. They said he’d probably gone to Chicago. My father was buried quietly. No fuss. Our police said the murderer had killed the three on a fishing trip by mistake – they were aiming at someone else. Three other people, I’d imagine. The only other three that had been in the area were big wigs from the Windy City. They were here, too. It began to bother me. I couldn’t stand that. So I decided that maybe a little sleuthing wasn’t such a bad idea, and I began to advertise. Catching bad guys is what I do – but it’s mainly on the side.

Clientele come pretty quick in a city without men enough to go around. Some women even thought I’d look great in their bedroom. Turning them down was pretty easy. Men aren’t supposed to look like women.
Three months before the Captain dismissed me from the case, I’d trailed a man that some lady thought was cheating her out of her milk and butter in the mornings. Must have had gold in her pockets to afford the luxury in the spare time of war. He took her milk and her butter all right, and every other milk and butter delivery on the steps of South Chicago. Wasn’t long before he took it right into the middle of the Hornet’s Nest; the Pope’s palace, that is, and as I waited outside against a lightpost, reading my yesterday’s newspaper, I realized why it was so hard to catch bad guys. They always cover up their big crimes. The little ones they leave wide open.
Picked up a ride on the bus away and followed the schmuck next day. Found he wasn’t so nice a character. Got a girl with him that day and kept roughing her up when she complained. Her lipstick was smeared, and underneath her rouge she was white as a sheet. Sure wasn’t happy to see him that morning, and she sure didn’t want to go back to the Nest.
I followed him for about a week, and he didn’t seem to notice. Obviously his big break in the Pope’s machinery, this little job. He was probably getting paid a good sum of money to procure goodies for the Man Upstairs. I had a hard time holding in my temper. But sooner rather than later I found out where he lived, how he got around, and then I saw it. On the corner of 4th and Lincoln Park I was slouching in a doorway trying to fend off the cold, when I saw a policeman noticing the good works this guy was up to. Must have been a fresh cop or he would have looked the other way, but this cop was too green to see the mark of the Pope on the schmuck. It takes no time at all to get wise to the silk ties and nice suits of a loyal mobman; the cop must’ve been here shorter than that.
Tried to pull the schmuck in and got himself a full left on the jaw, then out came the schmuck’s shiny new friend, an evil-looking little gun that glinted in the sun. A shot rang out. It echoed like an exploding tire down the cold street, but it was too early in the morning for anyone to notice. Those old Fords weren’t getting any younger, and the odd backfire was nothing new. The schmuck looked both ways and then sauntered off down the street, smug. It wasn’t every day you got away with murder.
The doctors said the cop suffered a couple of minutes, but it was probably over pretty quick. It was a shot to the liver and he passed out from the pain right away. Never came back.
I’d been working part time for the police for a couple of weeks before that, doing some light stakeout work that the department was too shortstaffed to handle. Nothing serious, just a couple of vandalisms in the Northend and the cops were too busy to do anything about it. There hadn’t been much action – just a few midnight bottle breakers wandering down the street. But I was familiar with the precinct and a couple of cops anyway.
So when I went in with this nice juicy tip I was surprised to find that there was nothing but calm to be found. I went in to see Beavey, the guy who’d employed me for the vandalism stakeout.
His shortsighted eyes were wary behind his wire rims, but he wasn’t talking. I asked him about the shooting and he said they’d looked into it and found there were no witnesses. I sat down and crossed my arms. This was going to be interesting.
In a few minutes the whole thing was concluded. Beavey had been less than forthcoming, but I could tell he was mad. The trouble hadn’t gone unnoticed, even if the office was quiet. He told me to see the captain. He hesitated and then came with me.
The captain was seated behind a desk that was as oversized as the nice office he sat in. But he seemed uncomfortable. If I’d known then, I would’ve seen the marks of being sugared by the mob. To his credit, the captain never seemed quite comfortable in his office.
He told me that I was too late, the case was closed. But he seemed interested anyway. So I told him my story, and didn’t leave anything out. He seemed to sit up a little straighter and looked at me in the eye. Maybe they could investigate this a little more.
It took a week or two, but they did get to the bottom of it. And the schmuck was caught. But it had been a pretty tough couple of weeks for me, and after it I wasn’t about to let the Pope get on with his butter stealing without a fight.

The day after the schmuck killed the cop, I brought in the vandals that Beavey had deputized me to find. Two boys, couldn’t have been more than thirteen; a Black and a Pole. They’d been expressing their personal feelings about the war on a brick wall and through a couple of windows that used to be in one piece. They were sullen and uncooperative, but they came with me.
Beavey thought it would be a great idea to make me their mentor. I don’t know why the sudden fit of samaritanship on his part. Maybe he had something against me.
The two boys were typical disenfranchised youth. Fathers both dead and unnoticed somewhere on the Other Side. Weren’t recognized in a society their dads had fought to keep the way it was. The Pole’s mother was a prostitute and laundress, the Black’s a cleaning woman. They both had to fight for every scrap of food they got – they were always a day away from eviction, and from what I gathered, the Black had moved twice already, always to a deeper dive. It was then I realized; it wasn’t just the steeltrap minds that were going to waste Over There. It was every manjack of them.
The two weeks between the time I brought the boys in and when the cops caught the schmuck, I got to know the boys pretty well. And then I got a more intimate acquaintance with the Pope as well – at least with his methods. It turned out the Pope didn’t just steal from the wealthy. He stole from everyone.
About half a week after I brought them in, I was escorting the boys home from school when we heard a couple of gunshots down the street. They weren’t wild shots, either, by the sound of them. They were clean and efficient. Shooting like that took practice – and a plan. We waited behind a corner for a few minutes, and nothing else happened. Then we got back to the tenement.
The Black’s mother was on the floor, slouched by the stove, bleeding from a hole in her arm. She was pale, and sweating. She had been groaning, but she had stopped when we came in and was just whimpering quietly. I thought the boy was about to pass out when he saw her. I guess he was too sheltered to begin swearing, but the Pole began jabbering in Polish. I couldn’t tell if it was a prayer, or something else. The Black boy dove to the floor and began looking around, bewildered. I grabbed a couple of kitchen rags and pressed them against the wound. That made the lady yell, and I think her son would’ve strangled me, but he looked like he was too preoccupied deciding whether to throw up or faint.
It was then that I realized I’d heard two shots.

A few hours later I was at the precinct again. The lady had been rushed to the hospital after the Pole had called the police with a dime from my pocket. The second shot had been through her leg. She’d been strapped for cash and couldn’t pay the Pope’s loansharks. I’d wondered what she’d been doing for cash, laundering isn’t a well-paying career, and the Pole’s mother had to work two ways to make the ends come together in the middle. It turned out what the Black’s mother had saved up for the Pope had gone to getting her son out of jail for vandalism. I don’t think I or the boy is ever going to forget that. The Pope had been sending a message. Next time, the wounds wouldn’t be serious, they’d be deadly. Not too smart to take away her livelihood, though. The Pole had rushed home – probably to double check his mother’s health. Half the slums was in debt to the Pope. His minions came around practically selling money door to door like insurance salesmen – for double it’s worth, of course.

He was old and she was young, or so it seemed.
He looked at her and knew she didn’t know what he did,
Couldn’t possibly.
She was so nervous, so white, and her eyes burned with the purity of a bruised innocence.
She was the angels that sat in heaven, with their souls so white because they could not remember
All the sin that was in the world – because they had never thought it in their heads.

She was still, and didn’t move, and couldn’t look at him.
She was blank, and timid, and shy, and surely she was good.
And he was old and she was young.

The world seemed to stop when he looked at her skin – like milk and honey mixed to one,
It glowed even in the fluorescent lamplight, and held the light and it was so new.
His was not new. His knew the world’s harsh and teasing glare – the sunlight and the stares of eyes that judged. And how he had wanted it to be a better place, and he had not been able to make it so.

But she knew nothing of this – she was only young, so young – so full of nothing of the young.
Dreams that were not formed, nascent and unformed like mistrals wrapping in warm and tropical breath around the stems of not-yet-formed flowers.
The richness of the growing of it all overcoming all the cold and harsh and unnatural knowing of age. That was what he saw in her. The foggy waves of the human form, overcome by its own inner, strong, almost indecent energy. How it warmed him.

She sat across from him at the dinner table and gazed at him as he spoke. For a moment she seemed lost in his every movement – nervous as they were under her beauty, and beside the loveliness of all her hair and skin and lips. She took no notice, but laughed with him, yet she was far away. So far away. She regarded him from behind a veil of tears – behind something he could not understand. It was her age.

He spoke to her of all sorts of things – of this and that and the other. She was like talking to the ears of a cloud. How could you know if the cloud liked what you said? But it would not tell you that it did not. It would drift about you and keep you warm in all its mist and wonder and its foggy uncertainty.

And she watched him. Once or twice she offered comment, as if to see how he would react to it. And she gazed at his reaction as if he was a memory.

But she was his memory. His memory of a youth he never knew – of a passion he had been afraid to know. She reminded him and yet she becalmed him. She made him anxious and terribly afraid.

That night her sadness seemed to penetrate the air around her. How she held his face in the palms of her hands. Just once – just once so warmly in the cups of her palms, as if cupping the water of the grail, as if he were the child of her own womb. As if he was the sunlight that would be extinguished forever just in the length of the next second. She looked at his eyes and she wandered in his gaze, in her dark eyes the waters of the sea looked back at him – not the empty waters, but the depths of all the seas of the world and she looked at him with those angel’s eyes, with those sea eyes, with her warmest of hands cupping the planes of his face and she said nothing.

He looked back at her startled.

It was a few days later she looked at him across the back of the chair and told him he must. He must go forward. He must do what was right. He must. She told him not in words but in the small movement of her mouth – the tears she held in her eyes and would not let fall. She knew his struggle but she would not let him lose it. But she was young.

She watched him as he left that morning. He would not win. But he would not fail. She kept him company in his thoughts all day – her shining skin woke him from his reverie when he failed to keep up on the issues at hand. That milky-lightning skin, the pain of the memory awoke him. And he spoke. He spoke because she was young and he was old, and it was her world as well as his. It was their world. He spoke out.

He returned that evening, and the room was dark.

The room was dark, but on the bed lay a beautiful white thing. It shone in the murky shadows, it spread across the counterpane like spilled moonlight.

He went to it. She lay there, like a sylphan thing, like something from the tales of the woods, like a silvery scar across the barren landscape of the counterpane. She gazed at him from her dark sea eyes. She looked at him, but she did not move.

She blinked. “Remember” she said. “you remember.” She stated it, and she turned her head, and she went to sleep. And he remembered.

He remembered her skin, when he was young. He remembered her falling from the bridge. He remembered the way her hair had flowed in the water as she floated down the deep river, and how it had been pulled back as she had been lowered into the ground. When he was young and she was young. He had been young. He was so young – and she so old. She had told him, somehow, she had known all along the knowledge of age, and yet she had held his face in the cups of her palms. The moonlight-scar faded from the bed. Only a streak, as if of butterfly-dust lay where she had lain. Only the tears in his eyes held her.