Entrapment and Other Writings

“Gone where?”

  “Home.”

  “Where is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Where does Ralph live?” I asked Dark Glasses. He gave me a look as much as to say, “How square can anybody get?”

  If this clown figures that because I’m scared to sleep with him I must be scared to fink on him, he’s figuring a little careless was what went through my mind.

  “Ralph won’t be back,” he told us, anxious for us to take off.

  “We have to wait for him because we don’t have any money,” Jane filled him in.

  He handed us five dollars each and told us, “That covers it for the furniture.”

  “Where we going now?” Jane asked me when we hit the street.

  “We can’t go back uptown,” I had to explain to her, “account we’re accessories.”

  “Accessories to what?”

  “Accessories to the big furniture raid in Niggertown,” I had to explain to her. “What do you think he give us five bucks each for?”

  “I wish Ralph was here,” Jane told me. “He’d tell us what to do.”

  “I can tell you what he’d tell us, Jane,” I let her know. “He’d say, ‘You kids got yourself into this. Now get yourself out. Walk pretty all the way.’ ”

  We were hiding in a basement when they found us. Jane was behind the furnace. They got her and asked where I was.

  “Inside the furnace,” she told them.

  I didn’t mind. I didn’t want her to go anywhere without me. I climbed out.

  We told the cops we didn’t want to go home because all there was there was a drunk old woman and a gang of dead chickens. We didn’t refer to Old Tom.

  We sat around jiving with those cops till three in the morning. They give us coffee and hamburgers, too. Jane would laugh at something I’d say and I’d laugh at something she’d say and the cops wouldn’t have the faintest flash notion what we were laughing about.

  “I didn’t know twins were so funny,” one of them told us. “How would you like to come on a field trip with me and my wife and kids tomorrow?”

  “We’d like that fine,” I told him.

  “Then get tidied up because I got to take you to the House of the Good Shepherd so you can get some sleep and get ready for your field trip.”

  We both wanted to ride in the front seat of the squadrol, but the cop wouldn’t let us. “You kids sit in back,” he told us.

  “What time should we be ready?” Jane asked him.

  “Ready for what?”

  “For the field trip.”

  “Between ten and eleven,” he told us, “as soon as the chickens-in-the-basket are ready. We’ll pick you up.”

  “We’re not strong on chicken, mister,” I had to let him know.

  “How are you on cheeseburgers?” he asked.

  “Pretty strong. Ham would be even better,” I told him.

  “I’ll stick to cheeseburgers,” Jane decided.

  That joint looked so big and gloomy, with all them little night bulbs burning all night long. We were really glad to be going on a picnic in the morning.

  We ate early, some slop or other, at a long board(?) with a gang of other kids. The kid next to me look something awful. Humpbacked, pockmarked, her hair flying all over, and spilling stuff on herself, too. Still she wanted to be friendly.

  The way she went at eating, I had to stop myself.

  “What are you here for?” I asked her.

  I thought she might be doing time for the way she ate.

  “For a long time,” she told me. That told me she was either a sharpie or a nut.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t have one. I don’t know who I am.”

  “Why don’t you just make up a name then?”

  “I don’t know no names.”

  She wasn’t putting us on. She was the real thing in goofs.

  “Do you want us to make one up for you?”

  “Would it be all right to do that?”

  “Everybody is entitled to a name,” I told her.

  She thought that over a full minute. Then she put her mouth to my ear:

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “Call her ‘Nadine,’ ” Jane decided, and pushed aside her plate. The stuff on it didn’t have a name either.

  “ ‘Nadine,’ ” the goof repeated to herself, and put her glasses on: “My name is Nadine.”

  She just couldn’t get over it.

  Somebody rang a bell. I don’t know what it was for, but it was sure time. A nun tapped me on the shoulder. Then she tapped Jane. When she got through tapping, she began to add us up. It came to a total of two. We knew she’d figured it out because she told us, “Get ready, you two.”

  “We’re ready now,” Jane told her.

  “We’ve been ready for a couple hours,” I added. I just couldn’t wait to get out into the country.

  “Maybe they’ll have deviled ham,” Jane hoped.

  “So long as they don’t have deviled eggs.”

  What we liked or didn’t like, the nun didn’t care. She led us across the courtyard into another building and up a stair.

  “Is this the way to the picnic?” I asked her.

  “Call it a picnic if you want,” she told me.

  Something had gone wrong, it looked like.

  “We’re supposed to spend the day in the country,” Jane told her.

  “What country?” she wanted to know.

  “One of the officers invited us.”

  “He was kidding.”

  Sure enough, he’d been kidding. The judge was already up front.

  “You girls have a good home,” His Honor took one look and told us, “why don’t you stay in it?”

  “Because it ain’t all that good, Your Honor,” Jane told him.

  “You have parents who love you,” His Honor went right on, “why don’t you listen to them?”

  “If the love us so, why do they keep telling us how hard they tried to get rid of us?” Jane asked him.

  I let her do the talking.

  “How is it that you’re running wild all over town instead of going to school?”

  I had the answer to that one.

  “We were the smartest kids in class,” I told him—and it was the truth—“so they graduated us to get rid of us.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “You are charged,” His Honor told us, looking at his charge sheet and getting serious, “you are charged with stealing a carpet, eight towels, six sheets, two lamps, and various sundries, including a dining-room table, a kitchen table, four kitchen chairs, a reclining chair, and a sofa. Can you make restitution?”

  I reached into my handbag and came up with the two fives.

  “This is all we have between us, Your Honor,” I told him.

  It was exactly at that moment—I was closing the handbag—that I got a full whiff of something awful yet familiar—and sure enough here he comes, right off the gump truck, right down the middle of the aisle, the world’s most ignorant man: Old Tom.

  Old gump-snatching Tom the dead-chicken man, he can’t read, he can’t write, but he sure can count good. He can count everything good except his kids. Ask him how many he’s got and he’ll tell you right out, “Me and Lou did everything we could to get rid of you two, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I’m the daddy of these childern!” he busts right in there.

  “Who is this man?” His Honor wants to know, looking all around the courtroom.

  “God damn it, jedge, I jest told you—I’m the daddy of these childern! And I’d like to point out something of ee-nor-mous evidence to this court!”

  “Point anywhere you want,” His Honor gave him full permission, “just don’t point at me.”

  Apparently His Honor had gotten a whiff of Old To
m, too. But Old Tom wasn’t to be put down. Not that easy. He paused just long enough to gain what he considered to be a dramatic effect. Then he raised his right hand and, pointing skyward with his index finger, shouted:

  “These childern are eye-dintical twins! And I’m the daddy of both!”

  How that crumby old man figured that would make a difference in court I don’t understand to this day.

  “The charges against them are ‘eye-dintical’ too,” His Honor told Old Tom. “If you’re the father of these girls, I want to know your position in making restitution to this man, whose furniture your children have so willfully, maliciously, and knowingly disposed of?”

  Poor Jakes. He’d been so nice to us, too. He’s standing there with his big checked cap in his hand and his old carpenter’s jeans, wanting nothing except to get out of court. You’d think, by the way he was sweating it out, that he was the defendant instead of the complainant.

  “Knowingly?” Tom came in again. “Knowingly, jedge? I didn’t know it was that serious. I just came here to ask would you send them to the House of the Good Shepherd instid of that other place.”

  “If you don’t take off your cap, I’ll send you to ‘that other place,’ ” the judge warned him.

  Old Tom took off his cap then and, for once, had enough sense to keep his mouth shut for a minute.

  “Can you make restitution?” the judge wanted to know.

  Old Tom turned toward Jakes and studied, just studied him. Jane and I both knew why: He was trying to remember if he had ever sold Jakes a gump. Tom had a wonderful memory for faces. Once he’d sold a gump to someone, he remembered. He had to.

  “Jedge,” Tom asked the court, “can I have ten minutes to talk to the complainant?”

  “Take ten,” the judge told him and got up and went into his chambers. I avoided looking at Jane, and Jane avoided looking at me. Because we both knew exactly what Old Tom was going to pull: He was going to put a whole wagonload of dying chickens on poor Jakes.

  He came back into court in less than ten minutes and I knew at a glance he’d pulled it off.

  Jakes told the court he had accepted Tom’s offer of restitution.

  “Suits me if it suits you,” the judge told Jakes, “but I want a word with these two girls.”

  So we stood up there, with Tom behind us, and promised to be good girls and never to run away from home again.

  “Go home with your father and behave yourselves,” he warned us both.

  Wait till he gets us there, judge, was what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Jane was thinking the same thing, I knew.

  “Your mother has been worried about you two,” Tom told us as soon as we got outside.

  “That’ll be the first time,” I told Tom.

  “Don’t start getting smart-ass with me before I get you home,” he told me. “This one is bad and you’re worse.” He always gave it to me harder than to Jane, for some reason.

  We stopped at the traffic light on the corner. Tom’s gump truck was parked just across the way.

  “You really think we’re going back to your stinking chicken yard, old man?” Jane asked him and gave me a pull on my arm and we were off.

  We never looked back. Tom had more sense, we knew, than to try to run us down. He’s tried that before. We’ve outrun him too often.

  We ducked into the traffic on Olive Street.

  “Where we going?” I asked Jane when I’d caught my breath.

  “I know the bar where Ralph hangs out,” she told me.

  “As good a place as any, it sounds to me,” I told her.

  I didn’t want Jane to go anywhere without me.

  “Is it far?” I asked her.

  “Not far,” Jane told me, “we can walk there pretty all the way.”

  And that’s just what we did. We walked pretty all the way.

  SO LONG, SWEDE RISBERG

  “Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”

  “No.”

  “A dentist?”

  “… No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

  “Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

  The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

  “How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

  “He just saw the opportunity.”

  “Why isn’t he in jail?”

  “They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Major leaguers were our gods. We weren’t worshipful. We knew they were merely men like our brothers and fathers. Yet with a difference. When a father or a brother died, he left no record of himself for remembrance. But a major leaguer, even though up for only a season and most of that spent on the bench, yet left a batting, fielding, or pitching record for All-American time. Major leaguers possessed immortality.

  Every neighborhood has its golden boy. Ours was a scrawny, pug-nosed, freckle-faced thirteen-year-old, Jake “Lefty” Somerhaus, who was already pitching to eighteen-year-old semipros and whipping them. He possessed a deadly eye on a basketball court, was a dazzling open-field runner, and, the first time he picked up a cue, played rotation like a pro. None of his four older brothers had ever excelled in anything. Jake had it all.

  In a neighborhood of tough kids, Jake wasn’t tough. He didn’t have to be. Whatever sport he turned to he knew, beforehand, that he would be better at it than anybody. Even in pitching baseball cards he was better than anybody.

  The cards were ten-for-a-penny colored strips of major leaguers. Every kid on our street carried a pack of them, waxed, and bound with a rubber band. Baseball cards were our currency. The wax was to stiffen them for gambling.

  We’d play five, ten, or fifteen up, but would pitch only one card. Each player would finger-snap it off the top of his pack, at a line three sidewalk squares away. The kid whose card drew closest to the line then took cards from the others and tossed them over his head. Those that came down face up were his. Second closest followed.

  Jake’s, as often as not, slid right onto the line. Mine usually came in third or fourth. The last kid was lucky if he got a single card back from his investment.

  Every kid had to pick a favorite player. I couldn’t pick Lefty Williams because I threw right-handed. Moreover, he already belonged to Jake. I couldn’t have Shoeless Joe Jackson or Happy Felsch or Ray Schalk or Urban Faber or Buck Weaver or Eddie Collins or Nemo Leibold or Dick Kerr either. It looked like I might have to settle for McMullin, a utility infielder. Then the kid who owned Swede Risberg moved off the block and Risberg became mine. My name immediately became Swede and remained so for many years.

  Risberg played shortstop deeper than any other player of his day. He was tall, rangy, and lantern-jawed. James T. Farrell remembers him as “snaring a grounder deep over second base and getting the ball to first base like a bullet.”

  He would have looked dazzling anywhere, except playing beside Eddie Collins, because Risberg possessed prescience. He’d begin moving to his left with the pitch, knock down a drive through the middle, and cut the runner down with that iron-handed peg. But everything Risberg did, Collins did with more flash. When Risberg singled, Collins doubled. When Risberg doubled, Collins doubled and stole third.

  Himself a grammar-school dropout and strictly a boy for the girls and the booze, it hurt to be perpetually outplayed by a college graduate who didn’t drink, smoke, or chew. What hurt even more was getting less than $3,000 for the same plays the graduate was being paid $14,500 to make.

  The Swede was a hard guy. He took to fighting as easily as he did to baseball and occasionally confused these crafts. At Oakland he’d
protested a third strike simply by stepping up to an umpire and knocking him cold with a short chop to his jaw. “Call that a third strike,” he’d commented while the other umpire was trying to bring his colleague back to life. And walked back to the dugout in disgust.

  The cards were a variable currency, their value depending upon a player’s prestige. I had to give two Hod Ellers and one Dutch Ruether to Jake to get just one Eddie Cicotte.

  Cicotte was a thirty-five-year-old French Canadian who had grown up believing, as Eliot Asinof has observed, that “it was talent made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top. Wasn’t that enough of a reward? But when he’d gotten there he had found out otherwise. They all fed off him, the men who ran the show and pulled the strings that kept it working. They used him and used him, and when they’d used him up they would dump him. In the years he’d been up, they’d always made him feel like a hero to the American people. But all the time they paid him peanuts. The newspapermen who came to watch him pitch and wrote stories about him made more money than he did. Comiskey made half a million dollars a year out of Cicotte’s right arm.”

  Cicotte had brought the pennant to Comiskey Park in 1917 by winning twenty-eight games and had brought it there again, in 1919, by winning twenty-nine. When Comiskey had benched him, toward the season’s end, he explained that he did so to avoid risk of injury to his star with the World Series coming up.

  The real reason was that Cicotte had gone to Comiskey, before the season opened, and had asked him for a raise. After twelve years at the top he was still earning only $5,500 a season. Dutch Ruether, for one example, after pitching only two seasons, was earning twice that sum.

  Comiskey turned him down. “However,” he assured the pitcher, “I’ll do this for you. I’ll pay you a bonus of $10,000 if you win thirty games for me.”

  Cicotte had accepted. When he’d won twenty-nine and there were enough days left for him to pitch twice more, Comiskey had benched him.

  “Comiskey throws money around like manhole covers,” was all Cicotte said.

  I had to give Jake two Edd Roushes to get one Shoeless Joe Jackson. Edd Roush, the Cincinnati center fielder, was hitting around .350 and earning $11,000. Jackson, hitting fifty points higher, was earning half as much. Harry Grabiner, Comiskey’s front man, went to see Jackson at his home in Greeneville, South Carolina.