Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (3 page)

“So I heard. Our brave boys in blue.”

“It was sad to see, Meyer. Them fellas is completely dead. And a lotta others are hurtin', too. The hall down there had the ass-pick of a first-aid shelter in a fuckin' war zone.” Jesse cups his big hands against the rain and lights a cigarette, watching Ilya, a sincere worry on his face. “Crushed skulls, broke ribs, 'n suchlike,” he says around the smoke. “Seen a pore woman who's gone stone blind, her head fulla stitches like the goddamn Bride a Frankenstein. An' a guy with a bullet hole clean through his left flapper, talkin' about how lucky he was.”

Ilya snorts, staring at the traffic in the street behind me. “Lucky!”

“They even wounded a little kid,” says Harry, his gray jowls puffy with indignation. “A little petseleh not more than nine, they were shooting at everybody. And an expectant mother. Just missed killing the bloody foetus—and they won't even let her out of jail!”

“It's true,” Jesse says. “A dude was locked up with me all night who'd been shot in the leg. His wounds was festerin' up 'n he was gittin' feverish, but they wouldn't let him go. Hell, no. Far as I know, the pore sonuvabitch is dead by now. An' the damn cops is talkin' like they cain't wait to shoot some more. But nobody's scared, that's the main thing you notice down there, they're jist mad.” Jesse's theme song: the universal war. Which side are you on. Injustice is as plain as the nose on your face, you can't pretend you don't see it. Jesse's an old Wob, one of the few to stay with the union movement after the Wobblies fell apart, sweet but intransigent. He takes a deep drag on the cigarette, then hands it to Ilya. “Funny how the world works, you know. Seems like you always gotta go through flesh to git to the other side.”

“You…!” growls Ilya, looking away but taking the smoke. Cars pass us in the street, a wet hum and throb.

Where Ilya reacted against the privileged survivors, hurting Jesse just a bit, I might have snorted at “the other side.” Instead, I say: “Flesh isn't just a passive medium, you know. It talks back. Only sometimes in the excitement we forget to listen.”

“Yeah, speakin' a that, ole son, howza mouse?” Jesse grins, peering closer.

“It's okay.” I should be grateful for it, it may have saved my life. Because of it, Leo told me to stay home Sunday: they expected action, and the black eye would be too tempting a target. Badge of a troublemaker. Jesse missed the Memorial Day confrontation, too, having been arrested in a sound-truck on Wednesday as the men were first downing tools and coming out, released only yesterday.

“Seen Leo?” he asks now.

“He's left town.”

“That figures,” grumps Harry, who never went down to the strike at all. “He's a mamzer, a shvitser, you can't trust him.”

“He's needed in Ohio,” I say, defending my friend. “There's some kind of air war going on over there. Besides, he's a good organizer—”

“That patscher? He couldn't organize his rectum! He's a joyboy, Meyer, he's got no vision, no ideology, it's just a big circus to him. Look at him taking that dumb klutz down there Sunday! He knew f'kucken Karl Marx couldn't keep his signals straight, he
knew
what had to happen!”

“Turds like him are gonna get us all killed,” grumbles Ilya, passing the cigarette back to Jesse. A bit unfair maybe, but at least it's a sign of health that he's said “us” again. Jesse winks soberly at me over the dangling butt.

“Maybe that wasn't a great idea,” I admit. “But a lot of steelworkers are football fans. Leo thought that an expression of solidarity from a famous star like Gus could make a strong impression on them—”

“Well, it sure did that,” agrees Harry. “It got ten of the poor shlimazels
killed!
It was that crazy charge on the police that set the whole meshugass off, I read it in the papers!”

“What paper wuzzat, comrade?” asks Jesse with a wry one-sided grin, and Harry grunts ambiguously.

“Leo told me Gus had nothing to do with it,” I say. “He said it all started when some cop got nervous and shot into the crowd of workers crossing the field—then everybody just started running. Which is why so many of them got it in the back.”

“If it
was
a cop,” Jesse puts in. “Mighta been one of Girdler's comp'ny goons, tryin' to whup up a little action—we heard somethin' about that today down to the fun'ral.”

“Maybe,” I allow. “Wouldn't be the first time.” Jesse nods. We're remembering Kansas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. Bloody Thursday in San Francisco, where years ago we met. The cynical perverting of men's honest passions. “Anyway, Leo claims he tried to drag Gus away when the shooting broke out, but Gus seemed mesmerized by all the fireworks. You know what big crowds always did to him. Then some cop lobbed a gas grenade, Gus grabbed it in midair, and he was off and running. Jesse Owens couldn't catch him, Leo said. War Admiral couldn't. He said Gus sprinted the whole battle line between cops and workers, dodging clubs and stones and even bullets. A cop would be bashing a striker with a billy and Gus would time his run so as to go flashing between them on the backswing, without even seeming to change his pace. That's real prairie out there, maybe the first time in years Gus had seen an open field, he was really moving.” (On the phone, Leo had said: “For the first time I have to appreciate those welded bozos of yours, Meyer—do me one of that batbrain hauling his ashes through all that rowdydowdy, and you got yourself a patron! Ha ha! Even if I have to hock old Mother Blooey!” Meaning his car—named after the Grande Dame of the Party—his one possession.) “You're right about Leo never staying around when there's shooting going on, Harry,” I add, “especially when it's all coming from one side, he wouldn't even argue with you about that, but he said he couldn't resist watching old Gloomy Gus make his fabulous run, even if it did mean he nearly got caught standing there. And the amazing thing was, Gus made it, juggling that smoking gas grenade, all the way from one end to the other!”

“Whoopee! What a way to go!” hoots Jesse, slapping his leg. He takes a final pleasurable pull, his pale blue eyes fixed remotely on Gus's run, and passes the butt between fingertips to Ilya. “Shit, boys, that musta been somethin' to see!” Yes, it's going to be a good song.

“Maybe those ten shmucks who got killed ran interference for him,” suggests Harry sarcastically. “That's how many's on a football team, isn't it?”

Jesse laughs. “You think they were countin', Harry?”

“I heard a rumor down at the theater he might've been a police informer,” Ilya says. We turn to watch him. He drops the butt, about the size of a used pencil eraser, onto the wet sidewalk and pointlessly steps on it, and as he does so seems to step into our circle. Or toward it anyway.

“What's that—?” asks Harry.

“You know, maybe the cops recognized him as one of their own pals and held their fire.”

“No,” I say, “they shot at him all right. At least according to what Leo says. In fact, before he got to the end, everybody was trying to get him, throwing or shooting whatever they had at him. He'd become like some kind of terrifying symbol or something, but they couldn't hit him. It was only when he'd finished his run and turned back to trot toward the cops with his arms stretched out in a V above his head that one of them shot him. This came as a complete surprise to him, of course. Leo says he just stood there, crumpling, that panicky twitching look in his face that always comes over him when he gets his signals crossed, and then the gas grenade blew up. That's when Leo said he left.”

“A good story,” harrumphs Harry. “Leo's still got his touch. But I don't believe it. Like my old bobbeh used to say, nisht geshtoigen, nisht gefloigen—it don't stand, it don't fly. Except that part about Leo never staying around when the shooting starts. That had a ring of truth…”

“Whaddaya think about that rumor, Meyer?” Jesse asks. “What Ilya here was sayin'—you think ole Gus mighta been a Judas goat?”

“I don't know. That one was going around the hospital today, too. The cops weren't denying it, but maybe that's because they don't want to admit they've killed a famous middle-class hero. In fact, they were trying to suggest he might have been shot in the line of duty by one of the strikers, not by a cop at all, but not even the
Trib
seems to be buying that one.”

“Still, think about it—he had all the gear, didn't he? Even a disguise! You always said he was like playactin' alla time, but he didn't seem to have no center. Maybe that was jist on accounta he couldn't
show
us the center…”

“Well…”

“Oi! it all fits!” cries Harry, slapping his round cheeks. “Why didn't we see it before? A f'kucken mosser! We're
all
geshtupped!”

“Maybe,” I laugh, “but I doubt it. I like Leo's story better. Anyway, Leo's pretty sure we cleaned most of them out Friday and Saturday.” I point to my eye and the others grin, all but Ilya, who seems unable to look at it.

“Hey, it's fucking cold and wet out here,” he complains. “Let's get something to drink, goddamn it!”

Jesse grins and wraps a bony arm around him. “Wiser words, Ilya ole buddy,” he says with a fake drunken slur, “was never spoke! C'mon, it's dog-fuckin' time, brothers!”

“Join us, Meyer,” says Harry, searching for me through his thick wet glasses. “I'll buy you a glezel your Moldavskaya syrup.”

“No, thanks. I'm going home and get some work done.” They look surprised at this. I hope they'll take the hint. I'll start by repairing the cat, the one made of pennyworth nails. Find a place in it for one of these railroad spikes in my pocket. To prop up the fused belly, maybe. Scar tissue. “It's been awhile, you know…”

“Well, so that's good,” says Harry, slapping my shoulder. He seems genuinely pleased. “Maybe we'll stop by later and see how it's going.”

“Yeah, an', hey, pick me up somethin' cheap at Polly the Greek's, will ya, Meyer?” says Jesse, fishing for change. He drops a quarter in my hand, tips his long-billed cap, and they drift off, through the drizzle, stubby half-blind Harry, pale Ilya, and Jesse with his long skinny arms around the pair of them, singing snatches from Casey Bill's “WPA Blues”—

Jesse first sang us that song at the famous farewell party for Maxie in my studio back in March. It's strange to think how much everything's changed since then. That party was maybe the best one we've ever had. Sometimes I find it hard to believe in my own reality—the very idea of a conscious passage into and out of time seems like some kind of terrifying fairytale—but that night I felt very much at one with my own life and the lives of those around me. I even got a little drunk, unusual for me. My drinking habits are a kind of standing joke on Chicago's North Side, especially since my studio is an old plumbing supplies warehouse once used during Prohibition, according to local legend, as a clandestine liquor depot by Bugs Moran's gang. All I ever have is the occasional glass of sweet wine, the last vestige (I've thought until recently) of my rejected West Side childhood. That night I had several and soon became giddy and noisy in spite of myself, and I even danced a
kazatzke
. Or what I hoped passed for one, never having actually danced one before. Squatting and kicking the
prisiadka
, while the others clapped and chanted, I'd thought:
This
is what I've always wanted to do! Terrible sick hangover the next day—maybe we sweet-wine drinkers are the hardest and most self-punishing of all—but it was a small price to pay.

The party had been called with hardly any planning to celebrate the victory at Guadalajara and to say goodbye to Maxie. Maxie was on his way to join the Lincoln Battalion in Spain: he thought of it as a rite of passage on his route to Palestine. We all love and admire Maxie very much and were afraid for him, and hopeful. Ilya's brother David was already over there, crossing in the Christmas season with the first Americans to go, and our old West Coast CIO friends Eskill and Nicco and Richie as well. Many of us thought we'd be following. There was a real chance now. The Fascist advance had been stopped at last at the very edge of Madrid. We hadn't heard the worst about Jarama yet, didn't know that night that the untrained Lincolns had been almost wiped out in the mad attempt on Suicide Hill and were badly demoralized, didn't know that David had lost two of his limbs and that Nicco was dead, we only knew that the Americans had heroically held the line there against immeasurable odds: the Fascists did not pass. And now the greatest victory of the war: Mussolini's Blackshirt “volunteers”—there are said to be eighty thousand of them fighting for Franco in Spain, in spite of the so-called “Nonintervention Pact”—had been routed at Guadalajara, and in large part by their own countrymen, the famous Garibaldis of the International Brigade. The government counteroffensive, it was said, had begun. Newly trained Spanish divisions were being rushed to the front to replace the Italian Internationals. Russian tanks and guns had arrived, in fact they'd already helped win the battle at Guadalajara, and support from other countries like America, England, and France must not be far behind. It was in their own self-interest, after all. Roosevelt seemed to be hinting as much, and his new election mandate had freed him—indeed,
obliged
him—to act. Or anyway that's what we chose to believe that night. Many, unable to hear the awful afterclap of silence following Guernica, choose to believe it still. In the end it is, as it has no doubt always been, a naked contest between heart and steel. Must heart always win? Or rather: can it
ever
win? Leo laughs and says no, but that night he was a minority of one.