John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“By the time you little bastids unload this batch,” he says, “we’ll be ready with another extra.”

The Yellow Kid elbows in, slaps down a quarter’s worth of pennies and Specs slams a bundle of fifty against his chest, nearly knocking him over.

“Watch it, four-eyes!”

“Yer lucky I let you have em, you little Chiney piece a shit.”

Just because there is WAR!doesn’t mean their daily battle with the circulation gink is off.

“He aint Chiney yella,” explains Ikey for the hundredth time as he grabs his bundle, “he’s sick yella.”

“Yer both a friggin disease. Get outta here and sell those papers.”

They run around the building, shouting “ WAR!Congress declares WAR!” and selling a few on their way.

“The Chief gotta be shittin himself,” says Ikey, pausing on the corner of William Street to adjust his load. They’ve seen him arriving late at night a couple times, Boy Willie himself pulling up in his hack with the white horse and his two sweet babies who look like the Riccadonna Sisters in the Hogan’s Alley comic he stole from the World , one on either side, fresh from some uptown theater or lobster palace. Big smooth-faced character in his glad rags. As far as they can figure he runs the dogwatch shift at his Journal dressed just like that, still in his silk top hat and swallow-tail coat. He always calls hello but never throws any mazuma their way.

“Willie been peddlin this yarn hard all year,” says Ikey. “Gonna be bigger than Corbett and Jeffries!”

They step out into Newspaper Row and the Yellow Kid takes the north side. They are at the center of the whole friggin works here. There is the tallest building, the World with its gold dome towering above, the glass boxes of the Electro Monogram out front swiveling to tell the folks that it is WAR!with the Tryon Building behind where the Staats Zeitung used to roll and the Sentinel and the mick Freeman’s Journal still do and then the Tribune Building with its clock tower showing that it’s nearly noon, the Yellow Kid better with the numbers and the hands of time than with letters, then the Times and the Sun behind it on Nassau, all of them flying their own flags along with the Stars and Stripes or even hoisting some kind of Cuban banner like Boy Willie’s paper, and then there’s the construction on the Park Row Building, already got the four giant Amazons with their giant stone melons up front and just across Ann Street the St. Paul Building is racing it story by story, both of them sposed to top the World by a good eighty feet when they’re done say the birds who bring the tours past and “ WAR!” cries the Yellow Kid, waving a rag to display the scarehead, “Congress Declares WAR!” stepping over into the park in front of City Hall, geezers snatching papers and flipping him their pennies on the way in and out of the building. The Kid tries the can’t-find-change-for-a-nickel dodge on one old whitehair with a pair of muttonchops halfway out to his shoulders but the geezer is wise to it and waits with his palm out, the cheap bastid.

The Yellow Kid’s corner, by common understanding, is at Broadway and Warren where the omnibuses stop at the park and you can sell to the top-hat crowd heading for the Astor Hotel, with Graub’s restaurant, where the builders go if they haven’t brought their lunch, on one side of Warren and Donnegan’s, which is the reporters’ favorite gin mill, on the other. A hell of a location. But because today there is WAR!he can make a quick run through City Hall Plaza with the horse trolleys turning around and the noise and the dust and the drays pulling up with stone for the new buildings or the new bridge over to Brooklyn to the east and the Tammany hacks and city clerks coming and going and boys hawking the Journal and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Herald and the Trib and the Telegram and the Telegraph and the Daily News and the Mail and Express and the Star and even one poor clueless little street rat trying to pawn off day-old copies of the Weekly Post , just don’t stop moving and there’s no trespass, before he takes up position on his own spot.

“ WAR!” he hollers. “Special edition, Congress Declares WAR!Only in the Journal !”

It isn’t only in the Journal , of course, at least he doesn’t think so, but the geezers don’t know that yet, do they?

Nobody muscles you off your spot, the place that is understood to be yours by the Unwritten Law. The one time somebody tried with him, big stupid spaghetti-bender wearing a different color shoe on each foot, thought just cause the Kid is sick-looking and little and skinny he’ll roll over easy, he sold maybe three papers before the Kid come back with a brick in each hand and half the newsies below Canal Street to teach him how it works. The wop tried to run but they caught him and knocked the stuffing out of him till he just rolled into a ball on the cobblestones and then they all pissed on him.

The Yellow Kid took the spot over from Dink Healy when Dink got too big and switched over to the Western Union, working as his striker for halvsies the first year, buying the corner a nickel a day. Dink has the glimmer that don’t focus right and was maybe a little scary toward the end when he got tall, so the Yellow Kid would sell most of his bundle.

“You look like death on a friggin soda cracker,” Dink would always say, tugging the Kid’s cap down over his eyes. “I couldn’t have a better striker if you was crippled.”

“Read about the WAR!” hollers the Yellow Kid. Some of the builders coming out of Graub’s buy on their way back to work, then he tries Don-negan’s but the joint is empty.

“Haven’t seen em all day,” calls Sweeny from behind the counter. “They’re all at work, poor miserable bastids, slapping together them extras.”

The Yellow Kid sells out to a mick priest heading for St. Paul’s and hotfoots it as fast as he can go back to the Journal building.

“You get the last dozen,” says Specs, jerking his nose at the pallet.

“When’s the next run?”

“Sposed to be out at three o’clock. All new headers.”

The Kid buys the dozen and heads up Centre Street. “ WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Invasion Plans, this issue!”

He does a circuit around the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building, always good for a few sales to the turnkeys, got nothing to do but sit on their keisters, pick their noses, and read. He unloads two under the Bridge of Sighs on the Franklin Street side, then stops in front of the Bummer’s Hall and looks up from where Maminka brought him to wave up at the windows the first time Janek got pinched. The food was lousy in the Tombs, said Janek, but Alderman Burke from Tammany treated him to steak and spuds the day they sprung him.

There is a horse trolley running up Broadway that the Kid manages to catch up to, hauling himself aboard as it rolls and hollering his way up the aisle to the front.

“ WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Fleet Sighted in East River!”

He sells all but one, hands it to the conductor before the old grouch can lay a collar on him. “Read all about it,” he says, then ducks under the man’s arm and leaps off the moving trolley in front of Blatnik’s.

The working stiffs have fed their faces and gone back to their stalls so now it is only newsies who have peddled their morning bundle at the counter — Nub Riley and Beans and Ikey and Chezz DiMucci and Yid Slivovitz. The Kid grabs a stool and shouts for his burger and pie and a chocolate fizzer which Yid likes to call an egg cream though they don’t put neither egg nor cream in the thing.