John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

It’s dark in the downstairs hallway and somebody is sleeping right by the stairs, got to step over to climb up. It smells like cabbage. At the door he hollers — you knock and they figure it’s the landlord’s collector come to jerk a few shekels out of you — and Vera answers. From the look on her face he can tell the Old Man is not at home.

“Frantisek!”

She looks like a ghost, Vera, pale and big-eyed and already a little bit stooped though she’s only a year older than Hunky Joe, a couple of her teeth gone missing since the Kid saw her last.

“I come to say hi.”

She pulls him in though he’s happy to stay in the hallway. The room smells like the inside of a cigar box, tobacco winning out over the kerosene, with piles of leaves and stacks of wrappers and the day’s work spread out thick on the table. Enough to make you gag. The window was always closed before to keep a breeze, should such a thing ever wander onto East 5th Street, from getting in and drying the leaves out. Then after Maminka jumped the Old Man nailed it shut forever.

“You are hungry?”

Vera never went to any school and speaks Bohunk English when nobody in the room, like the Kid, is willing to talk Chesky with her.

“Got a bellyful right now. He been around?”

Vera smiles, shrugs. He has tried to get her to give up on the Old Man, to walk outside in the sun and never come back, but it’s like she’s been sentenced to live in these little rooms forever, doing a jolt for some crime she can’t even imagine.

“He is very sick.”

Sick was how Maminka used to call it too, especially once he’d passed out and couldn’t hit or kick anymore.

“You o.k. here? You need anything?”

It is a stupid question. She needs everything.

“I am no problem,” says Vera. “Where do you sleep?”

This is always the big question with her, worrying about where he lays down at night ever since he told the Old Man to shove it and run off for good.

“Here and there,” says the Yellow Kid. “Depends on where I am when it gets dark.”

It was looking at the same damn walls every day that done it, finally, more than the Old Man going off with his hootch and his temper. “It’s worse than the friggin Tombs in here,” said Hunky Joe just before the last big fight, the one where he ended up on top of the Old Man with both of them bleeding and it was time for him to move on. The walls that Maminka tried to wash once and gave up on cause you had to haul the water up so many stairs, the walls with lighter-colored squares everywhere the Old Man took down pictures of saints the last poor bastids, some kind of Catholic Germans who snuck out a month behind in the rent, had left hanging. You put a nail in the window in this apartment, it might as well be in your coffin lid.

“Listen,” he says, “you gotta forget that old soak and take care of yourself.”

It’s a waste to try to get Vera to take money, so he says he’s got the afternoon extra to deal with and lets her hug him once. When he steps over the body propped against the bottom of the stairs he bends to see that it is the Old Man, in the tank again, wheezing a little as he breathes.

Any other day he might head over to the bathhouse on Rivington, give you a towel and chunk of soap for two cents and let the shower run a good five minutes before they shut it off on you. But there is WAR!and special editions waiting to be peddled.

The fellas got a crap game running behind the Journal when the Kid gets back, breathing hard from running the last six blocks. Ikey is holding the stones.

“Look who’s got a new lid!”

“Yellow hat for the Yellow Kid!”

“You’re so flush, you oughta get in on this,” Ikey calls, shaking the dice softly by his ear the way he does, as if they are whispering to him. “I’m rollin hot here.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Cheap bastid. You don’t never play.”

“He’s savin up for his goin-away party,” says Beans. “Gonna invite the whole city, get planted in a solid-ivory crate.”

“That’s all a racket,” says Specs, rolling out a dolly loaded with a pile of specials. “Them coffins got a false bottom. Everybody goes home and they yank out their goods, leave the stiff in the dirt with the worms. Everybody knows that.”

The newsies scoop their pennies off the ground and scramble to line up by seniority, boys who been selling the longest first, and the Kid takes a chance on another fifty. The schoolboys are out and ready to sell now, waiting at the back of the line.

“Bunch of friggin amateurs,” says Ikey, who left classes after the sixth grade, “cloggin up the sidewalks.”

Most of the stores and offices have dicks in the lobby to keep newsies and peddlers out, but the saloons are always open for business. The Kid stuffs his new cap inside his shirt, slaps the old one on his head, and makes a show of staggering under the weight of the bundle as he comes into Donnegan’s.

“Lookit this kid,” says Boylan from the Sun , who likes to sit by the door and listen for sirens to chase. “Little bastid’s on death’s door, he’s still hustlin papers. Lay em down here, kid.”

He offers his stool and the Kid parks his bundle, pulling a dozen off the top to work the room. It is elbow to elbow with reporters now, trading rumors about the WAR!, guzzling whiskey, ribbing each other. They are the best customers for print, some getting their own rag to crow over a byline, or buying three or four of the competition to see what the poop on the Row is.

“What’s Boy Willie got to say now he’s finally done it?” says Pope from the World , grabbing one from the Kid. “Probly wants to be made Admiral.”

“Over Roosevelt’s dead body.”

“If that could be arranged,” says Callan from the Journal , “the Chief would be only too happy.”

“I’m takin names for the Regiment,” Sweeny calls from behind the counter, waving a paper that dozens have signed. “Shall I put you on it, Kid?”

“Sure,” says the Kid. “Sign me up.”

That gets a laugh and somebody says he’s already got the Yellow Fever so why not and he sells more papers and there is lots of kidding about who is too old or too young or too much of a hopeless souse to go to WAR!Then Lester Schoendienst gets up on his hind legs and calls for order.

“I’ve got me colyum fer tomorra ready,” he says in the voice he puts on like a Ninth Ward mick, “and I’d aprayciate yer opinions.”

From what the Kid can tell this bird writes a column where he pretends to be these two bog-trotters, Gilhooley and O’Malley, the former who is spose to be a beat cop and the other a sanitation worker who specializes in horse pucky.

“My opinion is it stinks,” calls Pope, “and I haven’t heard a word of it yet. Finley Peter Dunne, on his worst day—”

“Can outwrite you on yer best, we’re all aware iv that, we are,” Schoen-dienst comes back as he steps up on a chair to be seen over the crowd. “Now kape yer pie-hole buttoned while the true gentlemen iv the press give a listen.”

“You break that chair, Lester,” calls Sweeny, “you bought it.”

“ So Martin O’Malley is plyin his trade ,” starts the scribbler, reading from his ink-smeared notebook, “ with a shovelful of road apples in mid-air, whin Officer Gilhooley strolls by on his rounds .”

The reading is always good for the Kid. He keeps moving through the room as the newshounds listen, jamming papers under their elbows and into their hands, the men paying without looking at him.

“ ‘It’s quite a swagger yer walkin with today, Tom,’ says the man with the spade. ‘Have they lowered the price on whiskey?’