A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Mamie ‘n’ me

She kept reading about it all through the meal. She even cried a little, thinking about it. On account of our own, I guess. She got up twice and went in to look, to see if ours was all right, sleeping in there in the dark. She came back and said, “I’m going to lock the door good and tight, after you go to work.”

“It wouldn’t happen to people like us,” I tried to point out. “It’s only when you’ve got a lot of money they do that to you.”

“I don’t care, money or no money, it’s the most unforgivable crime there is, Terry.” Her eyes got all bright blue and blazing, like they do whenever she gets good and sore about something. “I could forgive anything quicker than that. I could understand a man robbing a bank, or even taking another man’s life, but to take a poor helpless little mite like that from its mother! I keep thinking what she must be feeling all day today, since she first went in to look at it this morning and found it gone.”

I sort of hung my head. It did get you. It was lousy. It was the lowest thing under God’s sun to do to anyone. I wasn’t trying to say it wasn’t. I was only trying to say there was nothing poor devils like us could do about it.

“And it’ll die on their hands, poor little thing!” she went on. She slapped at the newspaper. “Look there! It’s got to have a special diet. It’s got to have that new kind of milk with cod liver oil in it. She’s asked the papers to print that, hoping it’ll catch their eye. As though they care, or know enough to look after it!”

It was nearly midnight on the alarm, and I had to go. I felt bad as she did, but I had one of my own to provide for. I stuck my hand in the sugar bowl and couldn’t get it out again. That cheered her up a little. She laughed. “That Mamie, always eating me out of house and home!” Then when I got it out and started filling my pockets, she cracked my hand one. “Two’s enough now!” she said, and put the lid back on the bowl.

“I like her better than I do you,” I said, picking up my cap. “She’s my real girl.”

“Why didn’t you marry her, then?” she snapped. She held her face up to me at the door.

“Don’t keep thinking about the Ellerton case,” I said. “Try to get some sleep. See you in the morning.”

But I heard her turn the lock and put on the safety catch after the door was closed.

It was a swell night, clear and crisp, and all the stars were out. I took the subway to the division stable. Everybody in the car was reading about it. “No Word Yet,” one scarehead said. I heard one man say to another, “They’ll be afraid to bring it back now, even after they get the money; afraid of their own precious skins. It’ll be the same thing over again, like so many times before.”

I thought, pumping the china ring I was holding back and forth, “I’d like to get my hands on ’em!” A million other guys like me must have been saying that all over the city tonight. Day dreams.

Mamie was sure glad to see me when I got to the stable. She whinnied and pawed and her little ears stuck up straight. I said, “How’s my best girl? Lemme see if I got something for my best girl.” I pretended I couldn’t find anything, and she stuck her head down to my pocket and snuffled. She knew where I carried the sugar all right.

I harnessed her myself. I always did; she liked me to better than the stableman, although he was around her more than me. But I was her best beau, I took her out stepping. We rolled out of the stable and down to the plant, and got on line back of the loading-platforms to wait our turn at filling-up.

All the guys were talking about it too. Michaelman said, “Just the same it’s a great boost for our Sun-Ray milk, her mentioning the kid has to have it, in all the papers like that. Wait’ll you see the calls that start to come in for it.”

We all gave him cold looks, like he was out of order. Somebody said, “The firm don’t need business that bad, if it’s got to be built up on somebody’s grief,” and I wished it had been me. I’d been thinking that, but I hadn’t been able to put the words together right.

I left Mamie on line and went to take a look in my order drawer in the office. New orders and cancellations, you know. Once in awhile extras too, but mostly those are asked for by note outside the customer’s door. There wasn’t very much doing and it kind of worried me. Part of the job is to get new customers, see. Not by direct soliciting, like a salesman, but just sort of intangibly, by the kind of service you give your old ones. Promotion depends on three things in my line: getting new orders, getting the old ones paid up on time, and the number of empties you collect and turn in.

I went back shaking my head to myself; not a new order in the drawer. As soon as I got my load stowed aboard and checked, Mamie and me started out. She knew the way down to where the route began, I just held the reins on one finger and let her take her own head. There was no one much but us on the streets any more, no lights to stop for; and her hoofbeats rang out clear and loud on the quiet air. They had a soothing sound to me, but I guess everyone’s different; I wasn’t in bed trying to get some sleep. When we got there she swung into the first route-block and stopped dead in front of the right door, of her own accord.

I only had a two-block route, most of them are short like that in the built-up parts of town, but it wasn’t the cream of the bottle by any means. Deliveries were swiped right and left, and it was a tough neighborhood to make collections in. I always expected to be held up, even in the daytime, before I got back to the office with my receipts.

I loaded up my trays, gave Mamie her second piece of sugar, and climbed up five flights. You work walk-ups from the top down, elevator-buildings from the bottom up. Don’t ask me why. There wasn’t an elevator on my whole route.

The Flannery girl on the fourth floor had been out with the young fellow her Ma didn’t like again, and was getting it laced into her while she undressed. You could hear it all up and down the hall.

“I’m telling ye for the last time, he’ll nivver amount to nothing, you mark my words, young lady! Barney I can’t get ye to go out with, no, it’s always a headache ye’ve got, but this good-for-nothing ye’ll gallivant with until al’ hours of the night!”

And then a plaintive little whine, “But Ma, if you could only see how he does the Big Apple—”

I came out again, and Mamie had moved down one door without being told and was waiting for me to catch up with her. I filled up again and went in the second house. There was a fellow sleeping on the stairs between the third and fourth, all huddled up in a knot. I thought he was a drunk at first, and stepped over him without disturbing him, which is no cinch carrying fifty pounds of loaded baskets. But when I came down again, he woke up and looked at me kind of scared. He was just a kid, eighteen or nineteen, and he looked all in.

“What’s matter, got no place to sleep?” I asked him.

“No,” he admitted, sort of frightened, as though he thought I was going to turn him over to a cop or something. “I been walking around all day and—”

I went on down a couple of steps, then I stopped and looked back at him again. I caught him looking at my tray and kind of swallowing hard. “When’d you eat last?” I said curtly.

He seemed to have a hard time remembering for a minute. “Yesterday morning,” he faltered finally.

“Here, wrap yourself around this,” I said. I passed him a pint I happened to have on my tray. It was only a dime out of my own pocket, anyway. He started to pull at the hinge cap like he couldn’t get it off fast enough. He needed it so bad he even forgot to say thanks, which is needing a thing bad all right.

“Take it easy,” I warned him gruffly, “or you’ll give yourself the bends. Bring me down the empty when you’re through.”

Afterward I watched him meander on up the street away from there. I don’t feel sorry for him, I said to myself, he’s only eighteen or nineteen; couple years from now he’ll be making more than I do myself.

Mamie turned her head around and looked at me, much as to say: You’re telling me?

I ran into a sort of minor commotion on the second floor, half a dozen houses further along. A guy was trying to get in Mrs. Hatchett’s door. He belonged in there, but she wouldn’t let him come in. He was plenty lush.

“I warned you!” her voice came back shrilly from the inside, “I warned you next time you came home in that condition I’d lock you out!”

He heard me going by on my way up, and took me into his confidence a hall-length away. “ ’S a disgrashe, tha’s what it is! Her own husband!”

“Sure,” I said inattentively. “Sure,” and went on up.

When I came down again, he was very quiet all of a sudden, and I thought the light on the hall walls looked different, kind of flickering. I dropped my trays with a bang and sprinted down to him. He’d hauled some newspapers up against the door seam and put a match to them. I stiff-armed him away and he toppled over into a sitting position. I stamped them out, and then I hammered good and businesslike on the door myself. She seemed to know the difference right away, she came back again.

“You better take him inside with you, lady, before he burns the building down!” I said.

“Oh, so tha’s the kind of a guy you are!” he said offendedly. “Well now I don’t wanna go in no more, how do you like that?”

She opened the door, cracked a whiplike “Get in here!” at him, that brought him submissively to his feet and made him sidle cringingly by her without a word. She only came up to his shoulders.

“Sometimes,” I told Mamie downstairs, “I don’t think I appreciate you half enough.”

I’d never liked the next house over. It was as old as all the others, but had been done over to comply with the housing regulations. That only made it worse, it attracted a lot of fly-bynights who weren’t bound by leases, here today and gone tomorrow; they were always skipping out and gypping me out of my collections. I’d been held up in here once too, six months before, and I hadn’t forgotten it.

I only needed one tray for this house; most of the tenants weren’t great milk-drinkers. I only had one customer on the whole top floor and she was three weeks overdue on her bill. I delivered her order, and a note with it. “No doubt it has escaped your attention—” Like hell it had. You couldn’t get her to answer her doorbell on collection days; she lay low in there. At least she hadn’t moved out, that was something.

On the floor below, the fifth, I had a new customer, dating from the previous week. When I went over to the door, they’d left a note out for me — in the neck of a beer-bottle!

While I was standing there puzzling out the scrawl — and it took plenty of puzzling out the way it was written — I could hear the faint wail of a kid coming from inside the flat. Like a kitten left out in the rain, that weak and thin.

It was a sad sort of sound; made me feel sorta blue.

I hadn’t really expected any orders for Sun-Ray, not around this district. It cost twenty-two a quart, pretty steep for these kind of people. I’d brought just one bottle along with me in the wagon, in case I needed it. I went downstairs again to get it. I thought: Michaelman was right, they are starting to call for it, like he said. Starting early—

That reminded me of the Ellerton case. The photostat of the ransom note she’d found this morning in the kid’s bed, which all the papers had shown, came before me again like when Mil had shown it to me. “Lieve the money—” These people upstairs didn’t know how to spell that word either. Such an easy word, too, you wouldn’t think anyone would trip over it. And here were two different note-writers, both in the same day, doing it.

Two different note-writers—?

That started a new train of thought, and my jaw sagged.

I looked up at the windows from the sidewalk. One was lit up, with the shade down all the way, but the other was dark. I was thinking. Funny, there was no kid around when I was in there Monday collecting for the first week. Now they’ve got one all of a sudden, just like that! And even if it was out being aired when I was up there, there would have been some of its clothes or something around, and there weren’t any. Ours always has its — those whaddye-call-it three-cornered things — hanging all around the place. And then I was remembering something else, even stranger. When she left me for a minute to get the change to pay me, I spotted all the milk I’d delivered up to then, five bottles of it, standing untouched under the sink. If they didn’t use it, why did they order it and pay for it? Unless they expected ahead of time to need some milk in the place, but didn’t know just when it was going to be, and wanted to be ready with it when the time came.

There was something sort of chilly about that thought.

I went upstairs again with the delivery they’d asked for. The wailing was still going on, until I got right opposite the door. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Close that door, it drives me nuts!” and the sound died down, you couldn’t hear it any more. So the kid wasn’t in the same room with them.

That diet that Mrs. Ellerton had asked the papers to print for her, it had something else in it too. Oh yeah, oranges. A lot of orange juice.

There was an incinerator door down the hall. I went down there and opened it quietly and looked in. The kind of people that lived here were too lazy to throw the stuff down the chute, just chucked it in behind the door. There was a bag in the corner that had split open from its own fall; it had half-a-dozen orange rinds in it.

I went downstairs again. I felt nervous and spooky, and wished I knew what to do. I wondered if I was making a fool out of myself, and half of me said I was, and the other half of me said I wasn’t.

It was the kind of a toss-up that makes a man pretty darned uncomfortable.

Mamie started to amble down to the next stop when she saw me. I said, “Whoa,” and she stayed where she was, but turned to look around at me kind of questioningly, as if to say, “What’s taking you so long in there tonight?”

I lit a cigarette and stared inside of my wagon, without seeing anything, if you know what I mean. All of a sudden I’d thrown the cigarette down and was going inside a third time, without exactly knowing how it happened. My feet seemed to carry me along of their own accord. I’d left my trays outside.

I went all the way up to the roof this time. The roof-door was only held by a hook on the inside. I got out through it without any trouble. I tiptoed across the tar and gravel and started climbing down the fire escape that served the front windows of the house. I had to go real slow, I wasn’t much used to fire escapes. I thought, “If a cop comes along and looks up and sees me—” but I kept going down anyway.

When I got down level with the fifth floor, I couldn’t see in the lighted window, the shade was fitted to it skin-tight. I was scared stiff the thing would creak under me. I crept over to the dark one next to it. I put the edge of my hands up against the pane and tried to squint through them. All I could make out was a couple of white shapes like beds. But the window was open a couple of inches from the top, and I could hear that same faint wail out here like I had in the hall.

I saw myself landed in jail, with my job gone and Mu worried sick, but somehow I went ahead and started inching the lower pane up from the bottom. It was like something had hold of me that was beyond my control, wouldn’t let me quit. I think it was that wailing, that seemed to keep asking for help and nobody listened.

It was making me feel sorta crazy. I had to stop it, somehow...

When I had the lower pane even with the top, I eased across onto the floor, but careful where I put my feet. You could see an orange line along the floor where the door to the next room was, and you could hear their voices clear and loud every once in awhile, like they were playing cards.

One bed was empty but the other had a bundle of old clothes on it. The wailing was coming right from the middle of them. I shifted my body between them and the room door, and lit a match, and held it covered by my hands so it wouldn’t glow much. There was a little bit of a crinkled red face staring up at me from the middle of all the blankets and things. The top one was pinned down on both sides so it couldn’t fall off the bed. It had a pale-blue initial down in the corner of it; E.

Their name, here, was supposed to be Harris; I had it on my order slip. E. Ellerton began with E. Something tickled my forehead for a minute, and it was a drop of sweat.

I don’t think I’d have had the nerve to go ahead and do it, if they’d kept quiet. I think I’d have backed out again the way I came in, and maybe just gone looking for the cop on the beat and told him what I suspected. Because if I took it out of here without being sure, it meant I was just doing to them what somebody else had done to the Ellertons. Lots of people give their kids oranges and special milk, and the blanket could have been borrowed from a relative.

But all of a sudden a man’s voice said real irritable in the next room, “Can’t you do something to shut it up? I’m going wacky! Go out and see if the milkman left that bilge you ast for, maybe that’ll quiet it.” I kind of lost my head altogether when I heard her footsteps tap-tap down the hall to the front-door. I knew I had to get out in a hurry, couldn’t stand there trying to make up my mind any more, and it took all my presence of mind away. Before I knew what I was doing I started unfastening the safety-pins; I never knew how tricky they were to open until then, it seemed to take me a week to get rid of them.

Then I grabbed up the whole bundle of blankets, kid and all, and backed out the window with them.

It was shorter to go back up to the roof with it than to try to climb all the way down the front of the building to the street. I went up the tricky iron slats fast this time, noise or no noise, and across, and down the inside stairs. I had to get down past their floor before they came out and cut me off.

I just made it. I could hear the commotion, hear the woman yelp, “It’s gone!” as I flashed down and around the landing, but they hadn’t opened their door yet. It was wailing the whole time, but in broken snatches now, not one long stretch, like it liked the hurry and shaking I was giving it.

I ran faster.

I tore out to the wagon with it and shoved it in. It had to go right on the ice, where the butter and stuff was, and I knew that wasn’t going to be good for it, but it couldn’t be helped. Maybe the cold would take awhile to work through all those layers of blankets.

They came racing out right at my heels. All I had time to do was go, “Chk chk” to Mamie and get her to start on with it, reach down to pick up my trays, when they were standing all around me. There were three of them and they were still all in their shirt sleeves. One of them had a gun out in his hand and didn’t care who saw it.

He snarled, “Hey, you! Did anybody just come out of that door?”

He had a real ugly look to him. “Well, did they or didn’t they?” he said again.

When he put it that way, why should I say no? “Yeah,” I said, “a fellow just came out ahead of you, carrying some laundry. He went up that way.” I pointed to the opposite direction from Mamie. The clop-clop of her hoofs and the creak of the wheels drowned out the wailing, from where we were standing. She was starting to slow again, at the next house down, so I went, “Chk chk” again. She turned and looked back at me, as if to say: “Are you crazy, skipping our next stop like this?” but she went on toward the corner.

I didn’t think they’d believe me, Mil says she can always tell when I’m lying, but I guess they didn’t know me as well as she does.

“Laundry, eh?” the one with the gun said viciously, and they turned and went streaming up toward where I’d pointed, one behind the other. “Hijacked right under our noses!” I heard one of them mutter.

The other one cursed back over his shoulder as they ran.

The woman came out just as they started off. She wasn’t crying or anything, she just looked sore and mean. “I’m not staying up there to hold the bag!” she said, and went skittering after them.

I picked up my trays and started after Mamie and the wagon, but I kept going, “Chk chk” so she wouldn’t stop and uncover that wailing sound. A minute after they’d gone around that upper corner I heard a shot ring out. Maybe they’d run into the cop on the beat, and he didn’t like people to come around corners with guns in their hands at that hour. But by that time I’d caught up to the wagon and climbed up behind Mamie. I didn’t hang around waiting to find out what it was, I passed up all the rest of my deliveries and lit out.

Mamie put on speed willingly enough, but I had a hard time with her. She kept trying to head back to the division stable, like other nights when we got through. The papers had said the Ellertons lived at 75 Mount Pleasant Drive. I didn’t have any trouble remembering that, it had been repeated over and over. It was on the outskirts of the city, along Jorgensen’s route.

The nearer I got to it, the more scared I got. I was more scared now than even when I took it out of the room and up the fire-escape with me. Suppose — suppose it wasn’t the one? That was why I didn’t stop and turn it over to a cop on the way; he wouldn’t know any more than I did, Mrs. Ellerton was the only one would know for sure, and I wanted to get the suspense over with as quickly as I could.

A block away from where they lived I remembered to take it up off the ice. I laid it across my lap on the driver’s seat and kept it from falling off with one hand. The outside blanket was kind of cold already, but the inside ones were still warm. It quit wailing and looked up at me with its weazened little face, like it enjoyed riding like that. I grinned at it and it kind of opened its mouth and grinned back, only it didn’t have any teeth.

Their place was all lit up when I got there, with a bunch of cars lined up in front of it. I found a place for Mamie to pull up in, and got down and carried it up to the house with me under one arm. I noticed it was facing upside down, so I stopped a minute and turned it right side up so they wouldn’t get sore.

A man opened the door the minute I rang the bell, like he’d been standing there waiting all night. I started, “Will you ask Mrs. Ellerton if this is her baby—?” but I never got any further than that. He snatched it away from me before I knew what happened. So fast, in fact, that the whole outside blanket fell off it onto the floor.

There were a lot of people in the room behind him, and they all started to get very excited. A man started to call someone’s name in a thick, choked voice, and a lady in a pink dressing gown came flying down the stairs so fast it’s a wonder she didn’t trip.

She never said from first to last whether it was hers or not, all she did was grab it up and hold it to her and sort of waltz around with it, so I guess it was.

A couple of the men there, detectives I guess, were standing in the doorway asking me where I found it and all about it, when suddenly she came rushing over to me, and before I could stop her grabbed up my hand and started to kiss it. “Aw, don’t, lady,” I said. “I haven’t washed ’em since I left home to go to work.”

I couldn’t get away until long after the sun came up. I kept trying to tell them I still had some deliveries to make, and all they kept saying was couldn’t they do something for me? Well, when they put it that way, why should I be bashful?

“Sure,” I said finally, “if it’s no trouble, you could let me have a couple pieces of sugar for Mamie, this part of town is off her route and she probably feels pretty strange out there.”

They all stood there looking at me like I’d said something wonderful. I don’t see anything wonderful about that, do you?