Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

But it’s odd, how many times, over the years, the memory of carnality in Katie’s bed pops unbidden into my mind. On more than one occasion, in bed with a slender young girlish thing, the image of womanly, obscenely voluptuous Katie would taunt me, as if saying, Now I was a real woman!

Katie was also a real monster. She waited until the second night, when I lay next to her in the recently purchased bed, in her luxuriant remodeled suite of rooms in a waterfront rooming house where her pitiful clientele slept on pancake-flat piss-scented mattresses, to invite me to be her accomplice.

“Someday I’ll move from here,” she said in the golden glow of the parchment lamp and the volcanic sex we’d just had. She was on her back, the sheet only half-covering the globes of her bosom; she was smoking, staring at the ceiling.

I was on my back, too-I wasn’t smoking, cigarettes being one filthy habit I didn’t partake of. “But, Katie-this place is hunky-dory.”

“These rooms are nice, love. But little Katie was meant for a better life than the Angles can provide.”

“You got a good business, here.”

She chuckled. “Better than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

She leaned on one elbow and the sheet fell away from the large, lovely bosoms. “Don’t you wonder why I’m so good to these stumblebums?”

“You give a lot of free beer away, I noticed.”

“Why do you suppose Katie does that?”

“’Cause you’re a good Christian woman?”

She roared with laughter, globes shimmering like Jello. “Don’t be a child! Have you heard of burial insurance, love?”

And she filled me in on the scheme-the lottery portion of it, at least, taking out policies on men who were good bets for quick rides to potter’s field. But she didn’t mention anything about helping speed the insured to even quicker, surer deaths.

“You disappointed in Katie?” she asked. “That I’m not such a good Christian woman?”

I grinned at her. “I’m tickled pink to find out how smart you are, baby. Was your old man in on this?”

“He was. But he wasn’t trustworthy.”

“Lucky for you he croaked.”

“Lucky.”

“Hey…I didn’t mean to be coldhearted, baby. I know you miss him.”

Her plump pretty face was as blank as a bisque baby’s. “He disappointed me.”

“How’d he die?”

“Got drunk and stepped in front of a car.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t pay for a dipso to run a bar, too much helpin’ himself…. I notice you don’t hit the sauce so hard. You don’t drink too much, and you hold what you do drink.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re just a good joe, down on his luck. Could use a break.”

“Who couldn’t?”

“And I can use a man. I can use a partner.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Just be friendly to these rummies. Get ’em on your good side, get ’em to sign up. Usually all it takes is a friendly ear and a pint of rotgut.”

“And when they finally drink themselves into a grave, we get a nice payday.”

“Yup. And enough nice paydays, we can leave the Angles behind. Retire rich while we’re still young and pretty.”

His name was Harold Wilson. He looked at least sixty but when we filled out the application, he managed to remember he was forty-three.

He and I sat in a booth at O’Meara’s and I plied him with cheap beers, which Katie’s hollow-eyed daughter dutifully delivered, while Harold told me, in bits and pieces, the sad story that had brought him to the Angles.

Hunkered over the beer, he seemed small, but he’d been of stature once, physically and otherwise. In a fahat was both withered and puffy, bloodshot powder-blue eyes peered from pouches, by turns rheumy and teary.

He had been a stock broker. When the Crash came, he chose to jump a freight rather than out a window, leaving behind a well-bred wife and two young daughters.

“I meant to go back,” Harold said, in a baritone voice whose dignity had been sandpapered away, leaving scratchiness and quaver behind. “For years, I did menial jobs…seasonal work, janitorial work, chopping firewood, shoveling walks, mowing grass…and I’d save. But the money never grew. I’d either get jackrolled or spend it on…”

He finished the sentence by grabbing the latest foamy mug of warm beer from Maggie O’Meara and guzzling it.

I listened to Harold’s sad story all afternoon and into the evening; he repeated himself a lot, and he signed three burial policies, one for $450, another for $750 and finally the jackpot, $1000. Death would probably be a merciful way out for the poor bastard, but even at this stage of his life, Harold Wilson deserved a better legacy than helping provide for Katie O’Meara’s retirement.

Late in the evening, he said, “Did go back, once…to Elmhurst…. Tha’s Chicago.”

“Yeah, I know, Harold.”

“Thomas Wolfe said, ‘Can’t go home again.’ Shouldn’t go home again’s more like it.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“No! No. It was Chrissmuss. Sad story, huh? Looked in the window. Didn’t expect to see ’em, my family; figured they’d lose the house.”

“But they didn’t? How’d they manage that?”

“Mary…that’s my wife…her family had some money. Must not’ve got hurt as bad as me in the Crash. Figure they musta bought the house for her.”

“I see.”

“Sure wasn’t her new husband. I recognized him; fella I went to high school with. A postman.”

“A mail carrier?”

“Yeah. ’Fore the Crash, Mary, she woulda looked down on a lowly civil servant like that…. But in Depression times, that’s a hell of a good job.”

“True enough.”

The eyes were distant and runny. “My girls was grown. College age. Blond and pretty, with boy friends, holdin’ hands…. The place hadn’t changed. Same furniture. Chrissmuss tree where we always put it, in the front window…. We’d move the couch out of the way and…anyway. Nothing different. Except in the middle of it, no me. A mailman took my place.”

For a moment I thought he said “male man.”

O’Meara’s closed at two a.m. I helped Maggie clean up, even though Katie hadn’t asked me to. Katie was upstairs, waiting for me in her bedroom. Frankly, I didn’t feel like doing my duty tonight, pleasant though it admittedly was. On the one hand, I was using Katie, banging this br I was undercover, and undercovers, to get the goods on, which made me a louse; and on the other hand, spending the day with her next victim, Harold Wilson, brought home what an enormous louse she was.

I was helping daughter Maggie put chairs on tables; she hadn’t said a word to me yet. She had her mother’s pretty green eyes and she might have been pretty herself if her scarecrow thin frame and narrow, hatchet face had a little meat on them.

The room was tidied when she said, “Nightcap?”

Surprised, I said, “Sure.”

“I got a pot of coffee on, if you’re sick of warm beer.”

The kitchen in back was small and neat and Maggie’s living quarters were back here, as well. She and her mother did not live together; in fact, they rarely spoke, other than Katie issuing commands.

I sat at a wooden table in the midst of the small cupboard-lined kitchen and sipped the coffee Maggie provided in a chipped cup. In her white waitress uniform, she looked like a wilted nurse.

“That suit you’re wearing,” she said.

Katie had given me clothes to wear; I was in a brown suit and a yellow-and-brown tie, nothing fancy but a step or two up from the threadbare duds “Bill O’Hara” had worn into O’Meara’s.

“What about ’em?”

“Those were my father’s.” Maggie sipped her coffee. “You’re about his size.”