Andrew Vachss: Two Trains Running

“Chief?” Procter said innocently.

“How many goddamn times have I told you not to call me that?” the doughy man snapped, his scalp reddening. “You’ve got a lot of choices in that department, Jimmy. ‘Mr. Langley’ will do. So will ‘Augie,’ you like that better. Save that ‘Chief’ stuff for your next editor.”

“So I’m fired?” Procter said, his voice not so much empty as without inflection of any kind.

“I didn’t say that!” the doughy man bellowed. “You know damn well what I meant. This isn’t one of those big-city sheets you’re used to working for. We do things differently around here.”

“I’ve been around here all my life,” Procter said, mildly. “Born and raised.”

“You like playing word games, maybe you want to take over the crossword. You haven’t been around this newspaper all your life. You came home, that’s what happened.”

“Came home after being fired, you mean.”

“I say what I mean, Jimmy. You’re a great newshound, but this is your fourth paper in, what, seven years? We both know you wouldn’t be working for the Compass if there was still a place for you with one of the big-city tabs.”

“I-”

“And we both know, soon as a job on a real paper opens up again, you’ll be on the next bus out of here.”

“I can do what I do anywhere.”

“Is that right? For such a smart guy, you do some pretty stupid things. What happened up in Chi-Town, anyway?”

“The editor spiked too many of my stories,” Procter said, in the bored tone of a man retelling a very old story.

“So you went behind his back and peddled your stuff to that Communist rag?”

“That exposé never saw a blue pencil, Chief. They printed it just like I wrote it.”

“Yeah, I guess they did,” the doughy man said, fingering his suspenders. “And I guess you know, that’s never going to happen here.”

“I’ve been here almost three years. You think I haven’t learned that much?”

“From this last piece of copy you turned in, I’m not so sure. Your job is to cover crime, Jimmy. Crime, not politics.”

“In Locke City-”

“Don’t even say it,” the editor warned, holding up one finger. “Just stick to robberies and rapes, okay? Shootings, stompings, and stabbings, that’s your beat. Leave the corruption stories for reporters in the movies.”

1959 September 28 Monday 21:52

“You sure he’s the guy we need for this?” a thin man with a sharply receding hairline and long, yellowing teeth asked.

“Red Schoolfield says he is,” replied the man in the wheelchair.

“Yeah, but that’s Detroit. We’re just a-”

“You ever been to Detroit, Udell?” the man in the wheelchair asked. He waited a three-second beat, then said: “Okay, then, how about Cleveland? You ever been there, either?”

“I was there one time,” the thin man said, his voice wavering between resentful and defensive.

“Good. Now, that’s a big city, too, am I right?”

“It is, Mr. Beaumont. They got buildings there you wouldn’t-”

“We’re not arguing,” said the man in the wheelchair. “In fact, you’re right-Cleveland is a big city.” He shifted his position slightly, so that his glance took in the entire room. “But here’s the thing, boys. Detroit and Cleveland, they’ve got one thing in common. You know what that is?”

“A lot of niggers?” a jug-eared man sitting in the far corner ventured, grinning.

“Yeah, Faron,” Beaumont acknowledged. “But you know what else they’ve got? They’ve got a whole ton of folks just like us. White people.”

“That don’t make them like us,” Harley ventured. He twirled one of his ducktails, a nervous habit.

“Now you’re using your brain, Harley,” Beaumont said, approvingly. “Being white’s just a color. Doesn’t make us like them, or them like us. There’s things inside color. Even the coloreds themselves see it that way. Look who they pick for their preachers and their politicians. It’s always the light-skinned ones, with that processed hair. The ones that got white in them, you don’t see them mixing much with the ones look like they just got off the boat from Africa.

“And it’s the same with us. With white people. Inside that color, we got all these groups. Like… tribes, all right? You’ve got the Italians, you’ve got the Irish, you’ve got the Jews, you’ve got the-”

“Jews?” a man with long sideburns, wearing a leather aviator’s jacket, piped up, somewhere between a question and a sneer.

“Sure, Jews,” Beaumont said. “What did you think, Roland? They weren’t in our business?”

“I thought they was all… I mean, maybe in the business, but not at our end. Not like the stuff we-”

“You should read a book once in a while,” Beaumont said, “it wouldn’t hurt you. Wouldn’t hurt you to pay attention to what goes on in the world, either. You go back far enough-and, trust me, it’s not that damn far-you find Jews started the same way we did. With this,” he said, knotting a fist and holding it up to the faint light from the desk lamp, like a jeweler checking a gem for flaws.

“I never heard of a kike with the balls for muscle work,” Udell said.

“Udell,” Beaumont sighed, “you never heard of a lot of things.”

“What’s this got to do with Detroit and Cleveland, Roy?” asked an older, broad-faced man with eyes so heavily flesh-pouched that it was impossible to tell their color.

“That’s getting to it, Sammy!” Beaumont said, nodding his head for emphasis. “Look,” he said, slowly turning his massive head like a gun turret to cover each man facing him, “there’s neighborhoods in both those cities where there’s mostly people like us, understand?”

“Hillbillies?” a tall redhead with long sideburns said, chuckling. He was wearing an Eisenhower jacket over a thick sweater, despite the warmth of the room.

“You know I don’t like that word, Lymon,” the boss said. He didn’t raise his voice, but his words carried easily, seeming to echo off the walls. “We’re not hillbillies, we’re mountain men. And this town, it’s our mountain, understand?”

There was a general hum of agreement from the assembled men, but no one spoke.

“People like us, we’re clannish,” Beaumont continued. “We want to live among our own kind, even when we’re feuding amongst ourselves. You go to any city, even as big a one as Chicago, you’ll find a section where our people live. That’s no accident. Those pieces of the city, it’s just like this town here. You understand what I’m telling you? Red Schoolfield, he’s in a bigger city than this one, sure. But only a little piece of it belongs to him. What we got here, it’s all ours. Not just some slice-the whole thing.”

The man in the wheelchair paused, individually eye-contacting each man in the room before he went on:

“You all know how it works. Remember when we were kids? You got yourself a candy bar, what happened? Some guys, they’d want a little piece for themselves, right? And if they were your pals, well, you were supposed to cut them in. But there was always this one guy, what he wanted was the whole thing. Am I right?”

Nods from around the room. The broad-faced man added a grunt of assent.

“Now, if this guy is bigger than you, or tougher, what do you do then? Well, you got choices. You can stand and fight, make him take it, but all that gets you is a beating.

“So the thing you do, if you’re like us, you give up the candy, and you wait for your chance. Then you ambush the guy, maybe bust up his head with a brick. And next time he sees you with candy, well, he keeps walking. Or, even better, you get a few of your pals-the same guys you would share with-and you mob the motherfucker, pound him so bad he don’t want any more, ever.