Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 4

In the half-dozen years since my divorce, my weekend routine had been essentially regimented. On Saturday mornings, I would pick up my son Peter at the apartment on North Lake Shore Drive where he lived with Norma and her husband, Martin Baer. We would then spend Saturday and most of Sunday together, and I would drop him off at the Baer household Sunday evening.

As Peter had gotten older — he was now a sophomore at Lake View High — it had gotten more difficult for me to find activities we could do together. He felt he’d pretty well outgrown the Riverview amusement park, and over the years we had seen most of the museums in town several times. There were still Cubs games in the summer, and movies. We both liked westerns and war films.

Peter often had enough homework that he had to spend time with his books while he was at my place. Most important to me was that even as he had gotten older, he still wanted to spend time with his dad, although I knew this would soon change. His growing consciousness of his female classmates meant that Saturday nights soon would be reserved for something other than hanging out with the old man.

In the last year, he also had become interested in football and, even with his slight frame, he had made the Lake View junior varsity squad as a reserve. This interest in the game now extended to the Chicago Bears. He had never seen them play, and a couple of times had asked me if it was hard to get tickets. It was damned hard, particularly as the Bears had won the league championship the last two years and looked like they were going to do it again with another powerhouse squad.

The Trib’s sports staff was notoriously stingy in sharing passes to games — in any sport — with members of other departments. On a couple of occasions previously, I had pressed Leo Cahill, a copyreader on the sports copy desk, for Bears tickets for me and Peter, and each time he’d told me there weren’t any. “Geez, Snap, I’d love to help you out, but these ducats are scarcer than hen’s teeth. I’m lucky if I get to one game a year myself.”

Now Leo and I are not what you would call close friends, never have been. He’s a devout Catholic, or so he likes to inform me regularly, and on several occasions he has pointed out, none too subtly, my lapsed status as a member of the Church of Rome. Also, Leo is that relative rarity, a teetotaling Irishman, and he has delighted in mentioning what he refers to as my “Achilles heel” — specifically, my periodic tendency to overindulge, a tendency I have for the most part overcome these last few years. But to the sanctimonious Leo, I shall forever be one of the fallen, as both a worshiper and an imbiber.

Right now, however, I needed Leo Cahill, and I saw a way to get what I wanted.

“Are you behaving yourself?” I asked as I phoned him from my desk in the Police Headquarters press room on a Friday afternoon.

“Snap Malek, what brings a call from you?” he asked with a forced bonhomie. “Need beer money?”

“No, Mr. Cahill,” I said, gritting my teeth, “I would never impose on you in that way, especially knowing your strong feelings about the evils of demon rum. What I am interested in is two tickets to Sunday’s Bears-Packers game.” Leo let loose with a guffaw that must have startled his co-workers on the sports copy desk. “Oh, Snap, you know that’s a hot ticket right now, and impossible to get. Sorry old pal.”

“Well, just thought I’d ask. By the way, Leo, how’s your Knights of Columbus fund drive going, the one to make sure kids on the South Side have Christmas presents this year?”

I was met with silence at the other end for perhaps ten seconds. “We can always use some help,” Leo said in a suddenly subdued tone. I knew from an article in one of the papers that the K of C campaign for kids was struggling.

“Hmm. Well, I’ve got a double sawbuck that I would be happy to pony up if... well, if someone saw fit to, shall we say, give something in return.”

“Snap, that’s playing dirty,” Leo responded in a hushed tone; it sounded like he was cupping the speaker with his hand.

“Leo, I never play dirty, you should know that as an old friend. I’m hurt that you would suggest such a thing.”

Silence from the other end, followed by a drawn-out sigh. “Twenty dollars, you say?”

“Coin of the realm, Leo, coin of the realm. In exchange for two tickets, Bears-Packers, close to the fifty-yard line.”

“Now come on, Snap,” he whined. “That’s unreasonable.”

“I’m holding the double sawbuck in my hand, Leo, and Andrew Jackson is looking back at me sternly. This piece of paper could buy two or three, or maybe four nice gifts for some needy kids. I might even be persuaded to add an Abe Lincoln — that’s a fin, for your information. You can do a lot with twenty-five simoleons these days.”

Another silence on the line, followed by another sigh. “Do they have to be on the fifty-yard line?”

“No, Leo, I said close to the fifty. But we want to at least be between the forty-yard lines. Don’t try to tell me our fine Sports Department can’t come up with something in that vicinity.”

He didn’t bother to sigh this time. “Okay... that’s twenty-five bucks, right?”

“Twenty-five for a great cause, Leo.”

“All right. I’ll have the tickets in an envelope here with your name on it.”

“And I’ll leave an envelope with your name on it, and the greenbacks inside. You’re a truly fine gentleman, Leo.”

“Yeah,” he muttered.

When I picked Peter up on Lake Shore Drive Saturday morning, I was pleased to tell Norma and Martin Baer that we had tickets to the game. Baer, who I had to concede was a decent fellow, could provide for Norma and Peter in ways I couldn’t have begun to match. His men’s haberdashery over in the Lincoln-Belmont-Ashland area apparently turned a dandy profit, because he owned an eight-room co-op on the twelfth floor overlooking the lake and took his wife and stepson to Florida every winter. So going to a Bears-Packers game with my son was at least a small victory, almost equal to my getting us seats four years earlier for a Cubs-Yankees World Series game. Peter still talked about that afternoon, and about meeting Dizzy Dean in the locker room after the game.

And so it was that on a Sunday afternoon, remarkably mild and more typical of late September than mid-November, Peter and I left my third-floor apartment on North Clark Street, after a lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, and started on the three-block walk north to Wrigley Field. Before we got halfway there, we began running into American entrepreneurs: “Here’s two, thirty-yard line,” one beer-breathed guy in a flat cap rasped, thrusting a pair of tickets at us. “Over here, I got four, upper deck, sixth row,” a gaunt specimen in a threadbare sport coat brayed, vigorously waving the fanned offerings above his head.

“How come they’re selling tickets on the street, Dad?” Peter wanted to know after we had pushed past the fourth hustler.

“They’re called scalpers — somehow they get hold of tickets at face value and then sell ’em for inflated prices. It only works when there’s a big demand for seats, like today.”

“Is it legal?”

“No, but the cops don’t usually do anything about it; they’ve got too much other stuff to worry about.” (Chicago’s Finest proved me wrong this time: As I was to learn in Monday’s paper, they had indeed hauled in several of these independent ticket “merchants.”)

Our own seats, true to Leo Cahill’s promise, were excellent, about ten rows back on the north forty-five yard line, which in baseball terms put them about halfway between the third-base dugout and the home bullpen. Both teams were still working out as we got settled in, and Peter searched the field for the Bears’ premier player, Sid Luckman.

“There he is, number forty-two, just throwing a pass,” I told him. “The top quarterback in the league. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Peter nodded enthusiastically. “And these are the two best teams in football, right?”

“Without a doubt, along with the Washington club. The Redskins are a cinch to win the East title, and we haven’t lost a game this year. Green Bay’s only been beaten once, by the Bears early in the season. We win today, and we’ll be back in the championship game for the third year in a row.”

“And what about George Halas, Dad? He’s not coaching the Bears anymore, right?”

“He enlisted in the Navy earlier this year. The coach now is Luke Johnsos, he’s over there,” I said, pointing to a man in a felt hat who was stalking the sidelines and making hand gestures to his players as they warmed up.

Once the game started, it didn’t take long for us, along with the other forty-two thousand in the stands, to realize that the Bears would be in the title game again, thanks in large measure to Green Bay’s mistakes. In the first quarter, Chicago’s center, Bulldog Turner, picked up a Packer fumble and ran 45 yards for a touchdown. Then Luckman, playing on defense as well as offense, intercepted a deflected pass from the Packer quarterback, Isbell, and ran 54 yards to score. The game was all over for the Green Bay boys by halftime, and the Bears went on to a surprisingly easy victory, 38 to 7.

“What a great afternoon,” Peter enthused as we left the park. “There’s a guy in my class, Charlie Marsh, who moved down from someplace in Wisconsin this year, and he’s been telling everybody all week how the Packers were going to really smash the Bears today. I can’t wait to see him!”

“Well, go easy on the poor fella,” I said. “He’ll be feeling none too cheerful tomorrow.”

“I can gloat at least a little, though, can’t I?”

“Of course, that’s what being a fan is all about, especially in a big rivalry. Just remember that some day he may be the one doing the gloating.”

“Okay, but I’ll worry about that some other time.”

“Sounds like a good plan to me,” I told him as we walked back to my apartment to celebrate with some ginger ale and chocolate chip cookies.