HOBOYS

By

Jim Cooley

        During the Depression, when I was a kid, fathers would sometimes throw away their sons, toss them out on the open road with orders never to return.  At least that was the whispering you heard.  No adult I knew dared speak openly of such a thing.  I never knew anyone it happened to, nor did my parents ever threaten to do it to me, I thought because I was an only child.  Of the five kids my mother bore, the first was a miscarriage, the next born dead.  I figured maybe I was safe because I was the only one of the last three who lived longer than two weeks.  A couple of my friends had mean, drunken fathers who threatened to throw them out of the house every now and then, turning them into hoboys, but they never did. 

        Still, all through my childhood the fear of becoming a hoboy haunted me.  Every now and then my friends and I, city kids from the Northeast side, would be out on our bikes, stopped at some railroad crossing behind the big Monkey Ward's warehouse down on St. John Avenue, watching a freight roll into the yards.  Suddenly, there among all the displaced men silently gliding through the bottoms, lounging on a flatbed or silhouetted through the open doors of an empty boxcar, there would be a couple of kids our age or not much older, say 12, maybe 14.  One of my friends would gasp, another shout, "Hey, lookit!" and point.  We'd nudge each with our elbows, nervously watching these lost souls as they drifted past, as remote from us as if they were living on another planet.  There were always two of them, sometimes three;  it seemed they never traveled alone.  Another of us, one of the bigger boys, might say how it would be a real kick to hop a freight and ride all over the country like that, free as a bird.  "Yeah, no kidding!" I'd agree, just to go along.  But secretly, the idea ter­rified me.

        My dad, may he rest in peace, always managed to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.  Mom insisted it was because she'd made him buy a one-bedroom bungalow at 818 Wheeling just before the crash, with a double-wide Murphy bed for me to sleep on that let down from behind a big rolling door in the living room wall.  Her rule was that the house payment came first -- before food, electricity, ice, clothing, schoolbooks, everything.  Of course, this was just a theory.  Times were lean, but we never really wanted for anything.  Dad had a good job.  He'd worked at Sheffield Steel since before I was born, starting back in the teens when it was still called Kansas City Bolt and Nut, so he had a hell of a lot of seniority.  All through the Depression he got at least a day or two of work every week.  First thing every morning, Monday through Friday, he'd leave the house, two nickels carfare in one hand and his lunch pail in the other, to catch the Independence Line trolley down Winner Road to the mill.  More days than not he was back home in an hour, but every single day he went down, anyway, to see if they were working.

        Before the Depression just about everybody had a phone.  A lot of folks were buying Model Ts, too, although Mom never did let Dad buy a car.  But from the time I was old enough to remember, the phones were gone, at least in the neighborhood where I lived.  Mom had ours taken out, too, to save money.  Guys from our neighborhood would gather out back of Lambert's store and pitch horseshoes all day, making it look like life was one big picnic, because Lambert let the men take calls on his phone from employers when there was work to be had.  One morning, trying to be helpful, I asked Dad why he didn't just walk down to Lambert's and call the mill, or let them call him at Lambert's if they were putting on a shift that day.  He could save the carfare, I pointed out, which we could surely use.  I thought it would be great to watch my dad play horseshoes with the other dads on the days he didn't have to go in.  I confess that I felt an ice cream bar or two would not be too extravagant a reward for suggesting this more efficient arrangement.  "Son," my father replied, "your grandpa always told me that half the battle is showing up.  So I figure I'd better just keep show­ing up."  Later, after he left for work, Mom explained that Dad didn't want the guys down at Lambert's to think that he, a man who so far still had a decent job, was trying to hone in on what little other work there was.

        Dad might have been religious about getting to work on time every morning, but he wasn't nearly so good at getting home, at least on payday.  When the mill worked Friday, the day they made payroll, Dad might stagger in around midnight or 1 a.m., stewed to the gills.  As I got older and the Depres­sion deepened, he sometimes didn't come home on Friday nights at all.  Then he started disappearing occasionally for the entire weekend, until Mom and I -- well, Mom really -- figured out how to deal with that problem.  I'll never forget those Friday nights, lying on the rug in the living room listening to the radio or doing my homework, while Mom darned socks or knitted in her rocker, the click-click-click of her needles as frantic as the static on the airwaves bringing us Roosevelt’s latest initiatives.  Both of us were waiting to see if the old man would show, though we never mentioned it.  Every now and then she'd get up and go to the window to look down the hill toward the trolley.  Eventually, as it got worse, she'd get so mad she wouldn't fix dinner, which meant I didn’t get anything to eat, either.  Mom always took a number of medicines for her nerves, or her colitis, or a couple of other things that I don't remember what they were.  Those Fridays, every trip to the window to check on that trolley would include a stop in the bathroom for another jolt of one of her patent cures.  She had dozens of them, every color of liquid imaginable.  If she came back from the john and caught me playing with her rocker with my feet, a habit of mine, I'd catch seven kinds of hell -- Mom said that rocking an empty rocking chair meant that someone was going to die.  I didn't need Tom Swift or his secret decoder ring to figure who she was afraid it would be.

        To this day I don't think Dad was an alcoholic.  Those were hard times, Dad worked a hard job, and he and his peers were hard-drinking men.  Dad used to boast that he had the best job in the world because he only put in half a day's work for a full day's pay -- an odd statement from a man who worked tonnage, a system of piecework which paid according to how many tons of steel his department produced on a shift.  The fact of the matter was the company only let men in his department work half an hour at a time, then made them take half an hour's rest to cool down.  If they didn't, too many men passed out, with one occasionally tumbling into an open Bessemer.  "There ain't no cure for that," my father used to tell his wide-eyed son.  "Nor body to bury, neither."  Hard drinking was just part of that culture.  Dad wasn't a big guy, just a proud, banty-weight, red-haired Irishman, a fun-loving guy who couldn't handle his liquor. 

        My granite-jawed mom on the other hand, six inches taller than Dad, was a teetotaling Schmidt, a stoic, strict-disciplined descendant of Prussian folk im­ported by Armour before the turn of the century to work in their packing plants.  Her grandfather came over during the Franco-Prussian War after refusing to fight in Bismarck's Army.  Mom never tired of telling how the Krauts cut off his trigger finger to assure he'd never fight in anyone else's army, either, then let him emigrate to the States.  Though Mom never talked against Dad, I knew she despised his drinking.  Her hatred of it deepened through the years.  The crowning insult came after I was grown, married and gone, when she was diag­nosed with cirrhosis of the liver, the disease that finally took her in '57.  She was furious with God that He'd given her the drinker's disease, even though she'd never touched a drop in her life, while He let Dad off with nothing worse than a three-day hangover.

        As Dad's problem got worse, Mom became deathly afraid that one day his pay wouldn't make it home at all and we'd miss that house payment.  Her scheme for providing a more secure income was for her and me to raise laying hens.  Goddamn, I hated those chickens.  To this day I despise the feathery bastards.  Her con­tribution was to collect the eggs three times a day, which gave her about enough to fill her big double boiler.  She always hard-boiled them -- God forbid we lose a single egg to breakage!  My job was to take them around on my bike after school and peddle them to the local tavern owners, seven for a nickel.  Any­thing left over I'd sell to grocers, who paid less.  I didn't mind delivering eggs so much, but I also had to shovel out the coop, plus scrape chicken crap off the walks, the back stoop, the picket fence, anywhere they took a mind to crap it out.  Chickens are the shitting birds on God's green earth, chicken shit the vilest mat­ter produced by man or beast.  It gave me special pleasure when mom would decide that one of the hens wasn't laying.  I'd beg her to give me the cleaver, a heavy, ugly, frightening blade that one of Dad's brothers had hand-machined in the cooperage shop down at the mill, so I could chop the shitting bastard's head off -- even though I was the one who had to pluck it, singe off the down, then gut the nasty thing.  Mom called this "dressing" the bird, which I thought was odd, since actually what I was doing was undressing it.  Chicken guts stink every bit as bad as their crap, which is about what you'd expect, I guess, since they're where the crap comes from.  The smell of burnt feathers only made the stench worse.  But I didn't mind.  When I yanked out their gizzards, the last thing given up by the properly dressed chicken, I'd shake the headless corpse and pronounce my benediction: "You've shit your last, Pendergast!"

        Who knows?  Maybe I should have been a poet.

        It wasn't long before Mom hit upon another, more practical way to secure the family income.  She'd hold back half the eggs on Friday, then early Saturday morning send me out with a load on my red-and-white Western Flyer about the time the bars opened.  In reality, of course, I was to look for Dad.  I soon learned where to find him, too, at the Manhattan Club, a dive down on Winner Road run by this weaselly-looking roach named Bertelli.  The Club was in one end of a long building that ran from one street to another.  Bertelli's cousin ran a small hardware store on the other street, at the far end of the building, where Mom got feed for the chickens.  Between these two businesses was a storeroom that served both.  Bertelli kept a bucket behind his bar for eg­gshells, which he saved for us.  I'd take them home, powder them in the hand-cranked meat grinder, and mix them back in with the chicken feed. 

        Laws on when bars could open and close must have been different then, or maybe in that era nobody cared.  When Dad or one of the other regulars would pass out during the evening -- a couple of guys were notorious for this and Dad, unfortunately, was one of them -- Bertelli, no slouch of a businessman, knew just what to do.  He'd have a couple of the guy's friends drag him and his lunch pail into the storeroom and dump him amid the feed and the kegs and the cases of beer, in hopes that he'd come to and catch a second wind.  It did keep guys out of trouble, which I guess counts as Christian charity.  By my calcula­tion, and entirely to the old rooster's credit, Bertelli never lifted a dime off anybody but what he served them a beer or shot of whiskey in return.  No one ever rolled my dad or anyone else while Bertelli was looking out for them.

        No, that was my job.  If Dad didn't wake up before the bar closed at 3 a.m., Bertelli just locked up and left him in the storeroom to sleep it off.  That's where I'd find him first thing the next morning when Bertelli showed me back to the storeroom, after putting away the eggs I'd sold him.  Dad would be sprawled on a couple of sacks of cracked corn, mouth open and snoring, a stream of spit trickling down his face through his day-old growth of beard. 

        It wasn't the drooling that bothered me so much as the stubble on his face.  It looked dirty.  Dad had a heavy beard anyway, so he always shaved twice a day, "Once for the mill, and once for your mother," he would tell me.  The second time he shaved, as he cleaned up after work, I'd stand in the bathroom doorway and watch him lather his face, wondering how long it would be before I could be shaving like him.  When he was done "cutting the clinkers out," as he called it, he'd splash off the remaining lather noisily in the sink, have me inspect him for any cuts or missed spots of soap, then towel off and squirt on a little Lucky Tiger for "the lady of the house."  Toilet done, he'd pull on his shirt, scoop me up in his wiry arms and carry me into the living room where mom would have a tall glass of iced tea waiting for him, a glass of cold milk for me.  We'd sit together as night came on and the locusts started singing, my dad and I, waiting for dinner and listening to a ball game.  So when I'd see him there in Bertelli's storeroom, his face unshaven, he looked like an entirely different person to me, dirty and poor.  Like the guys you saw hopping freights.

        Sometimes he’d puke down the front of this shirt, but it was just whis­key puke -- not the height of fashion, to be sure, but not nearly as disgusting as what comes out of the south end of a northbound chicken.  With Bertelli watch­ing, I'd quietly ease myself down close to Dad, so close I could smell his labored breathing.  Outside of the faint puke odor, he reminded me of how Mom smelled after a long Friday night with her patent medicines.  Very gently I'd tease all the folding money out of his pockets, then work on getting all the change I could get to.  I tried like hell to get every cent, and if Bertelli was patient with me, I usually did.  I didn't want to leave even carfare.  Then I'd tickle his nose or ear until he harrumphed or belched and rolled over, giving me access to his back pockets.  They were usually empty save for his pay stub.  I'd lift that, too, plus pick up his lunch pail if I could find it, the one with our name painted on it in Mom's pretty, back-slanting hand.  Back in the main part of the bar I'd make a quick accounting while Bertelli looked on, assessing the damage by comparing my proceeds to the pay stub.

        "Satisfied with your take, boy?" Bertelli would ask.

        "It's getting kind of steep to throw a drunk these days, sir."

        "Depends on how hard you throw it, boy.  This one wasn't half as ex­pensive as it could have been."

        "Mr. Bertelli, could you make Dad stop doing this?"

        "No, son.  Nobody can."

        I thought about that for a while.  "Well, sir, could you at least see that Dad shaves and cleans up before he comes home?  Ma just has a fit with him when he drags in this way."

        "I ain't the barber, boy.  Here's your shells, money for the eggs less the feed.  Now run along.  Tell your mother that if I don't hear otherwise I'll have another sack of cracked corn brought around on Wednesday."

        On the way home those bright Saturday mornings, provided Dad had got­ten at least a couple of days' work that week, the price of a drunk got inflated by the cost of an ice cream bar and a pack of gum or two.  "Close" not only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, as the saying goes, but also in account­ing -- a notion I got by reading about the Pendergast brothers down at city hall.  Mom would have gone ballistic at my pilferage.  On the other hand, she al­ways said the laborer was worthy of his hire.  I took her at her word.  When Dad took me for ice cream, we always went to Lambert's, but it wouldn't do to go there on the sly.  If I asked Lambert not to tell Mom, knowing grown-ups, that's exactly what he would do.  Instead, I took the long way home, down through the bottoms behind Monkey Ward's, getting my ice cream at another corner grocery called Carroccia's.  It was the same there as at Lambert's: a per­petual horseshoe game out back, out-of-work guys hanging out with their kids waiting for the phone call that rarely came. 

        Carroccia's, though, drew a rougher crowd than up in my neighborhood, mostly Italians, Hunkies and Polacks.  The hobo camps started behind Carroccia's, strung out along the railyards.  There were a couple of natural springs down there you could drink from without getting the trots, and a few truck farms run by Italians.  The cops didn't bother the hobos down there.  In those days everyone was just a pink slip away from riding the rails themselves.  Some of the hobos would work day labor on the farms in return for a meal of turnips, greens, and sometimes potatoes, which the farmer boiled on an open fire at sun­down and ladled out himself.  If they were lucky someone might have snared a squirrel to throw in the pot, although I bet a lot of those "squirrel" carcasses were really fat rats that fed on the grain dropped along the railroad tracks.  But you couldn't pitch horseshoes or get phone calls at Carroccia's if you were a hobo.  Without a permanent address in the neighborhood, the other guys ran you off.

        Mom was big on manners, which she drilled into my head.  When that didn't take, Dad beat them into my butt with his belt.  When I started buying my ice cream from Carroccia, I asked him to slip it to me under the counter in a brown paper sack so I could take it around the side of the building toward the camps, away from everyone, telling him "it was rude to eat in front of people."  Carroccia started calling me "the little gentleman" after I explained all this but would only bag my purchases if I promised to bring the sack right back as soon as I finished the ice cream.  Things really were tight in the bottoms.  He also wouldn't buy my leftover eggs, saying we charged too much.

        The truth of it was, I didn't want any of my running buddies who hap­pened to be slumming around the bottoms to ask where I got money for ice cream.  There was, after all, a depression on.  That sack dis­couraged curiosity.  Not only that, but back then everyone thought all the Italians were in the Mafia, especially all the dago kids, despite their parents' best ef­forts to whip the notion out of them.  Most of the kids who hung out behind Carroccia's wouldn't taste ice cream again until after Pearl Harbor.  They acted tough, were loud and pushy, and had a habit of getting ownership relations confused, especially when it came to ice cream or ball cards, although they left my hard-boiled eggs alone.  I grew up thinking Catholics didn't eat hard-boiled eggs, like meat on Fridays or something.  My sack and I gave Carroccia's horseshoes game a wide berth.

- - -

        It must have been during one those little economic upturns they had during the Depression, brief moments of false hope in the ever-deepening despair, that I made the biggest haul of all.  Dad had not only worked all week, but the prior Saturday and Sunday as well, so he'd put in tons of overtime.  After doing my filial duty, I had well over a hundred bucks in my pocket.  I had never seen so much money in one place -- I just kept pulling and pulling the bills out of his grimy coveralls.  That Saturday I got not one, not two, but three ice creams at Carroccia's.  I'd have gotten more than that if I thought I could eat them without getting a stomachache, a problem I had frequently.  I rode down to the first railroad crossing, cut left onto the path along the new railroad grade for about twenty-five yards until I was out of sight of the road, then leaned my bike up against a tree.  I had just taken an ice cream out of the sack when I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  I never heard them approach, but when I turned around, standing right behind me like a couple of wraiths con­jured up straight out of hell were two hoboys.

        I knew immediately these guys weren't from behind Carroccia's.  They had grimy faces.  Any Italian mother whose sons went out in public with faces like that would have killed them and started over.  Neither one was old enough to shave, but both had that ashen, grit-impregnated skin you see on tramps nowadays.  Hobos back in the 30s weren't really like the bums you see today.  Most of them were decent, single guys or even family men who couldn't find a job to save their souls.  They tried their best to maintain their dignity and clean­liness while riding the rods.  Not to do so would have been disgraceful, another mark of their failure, plus appearance helped a lot in snagging the rare job.  Shaving of course was their biggest expense, the one where they often fell short.  Hoboys, on the other hand, were thrilled to be free of maternally-mandated face-washings, with the obligatory, humiliating post-scrub inspection behind the ears.  I know I would have been.  But the cost of these boys' freedom was that dirty, castaway look that scared me so. 

        I had never been so close to a hoboy before, let alone two of them.  They were both bigger than me, though thin, one maybe a year older than I was, the other maybe two.  Before I had time to close my gaping jaw the bigger one snatched Carroccia's precious sack right out of my hands.

        "What you got in here, kid?"

        I know I was stuttering.  I had to be, quaking in fear.  "I-i-ice cream, and g-g-gum."

        "Don't you want to share some with your friends?"

        "S-s-sure."  It looked like I already had.

        "Two ice creams!" the big one said, looking at me enviously.

        "Three," corrected his partner, nodding at the one in my hand.

        The bigger boy fished out the two hard bars, handed one to his friend.  "Go on, eat!" he gestured at me.  They both kept eyeing me, as if afraid I would run.  I was afraid I wouldn't.

        Somehow I got the wrapper off and started eating, hating it, hating every bite of it, hating my fear, hating my weakness, hating my smallness, hating my own cowardice.  I thought afterward I'd never eat an ice cream again, but miraculously my taste for them returned in a couple of weeks.  The hoboys gobbled theirs down a lot faster than I would have, so I followed their example, figuring what the heck, I'll catch the damned headache and be done with it.

        Ice cream gone, the bigger boy rummaged in my sack with his hand.  "Quite a bit of gum in here," he said, looking at me with a curious gaze.  "You must be a rich boy.  What else you got you might want to share with your friends?"

        I hadn't even thought of Dad's money until then.  Where before I was afraid, now I was speechless with terror.  Taking a step backward, I got ready to run, but hesitated a second, thinking of my shiny new red-and-white Western Flyer.  Mom would kill me if I lost it, not that I could have out­run them on it anyway.  In that instant they pounced.

        I'd traded a punch or two with boys before, and I got in an ugly scrape once later in high school, but never did I struggle with the fury that seized me then.  I hit both of them simultaneously in the face as they tackled me, how I don't know.  I landed on my back on the railroad embankment, which knocked the wind out of me.  The force of their double tackle flung my arms out, but I turned my hands over quick and grabbed a rock in each hand, tearing off a fingernail in the process.  I banged and gouged them on the heads with my rocks, drawing blood and screams of pain.  This just made them overpower me faster.  I never had a chance, although I laid on some licks they'd remember me by.

        The bigger boy ended up sitting on my chest pinning my arms, banging and grinding them into the rocks, while the other rifled my pockets.  He got Dad's wad in one shot.  I always carefully arranged the bills when I counted them, all the presidents facing the same way, biggest bills on the bottom, and then tied them up with a ribbon to give Mom.  I could hear the change tinkling into the fist-sized chat of the embankment when the wad of bills popped out of my pocket -- it felt like he was yanking out my heart -- but these guys paid no attention to the coin.  They were mesmerized by all that green.  The money im­pressed them so much that they forgot the head-banging I'd just given them with those stones.

        "Holy Mary Mother of Christ!" the smaller boy said.  "What did you do, rob a bank?"

        "Give it back!" I tried to yell, but with the wind knocked out of me, gasping for breath, all I could muster was a whisper.

        The big boy released my arms, jumped up, and grabbed the wad of bills, ripping off the ribbon.  The roll flopped open in his hand.  "My God," he said, "there's a fortune here."  He started counting the money.  I struggled to my feet, rocks in my hands.  Both of the boys stepped back and looked around, then the bigger boy snatched up a three-inch-thick branch, a green one about the length of a baseball bat that someone had cut for firewood.  "Goddamn you, you hit me with a rock again, I'll beat your brains out right here, so help me God I will."

        That was beginning to sound like the optimal outcome.  I would have lit into them again, but the wind was still out of me.  The edges of my field of vi­sion were growing dark, and I was woozy, struggling to breathe.  My arms felt too heavy to lift anyway.  I let the rocks drop.

        "Now that's better," the big boy said, and handed the stick to the smaller.  "Watch him, Miller."  Miller took the stick and hefted it over his shoulder like Jimmie Foxx at the plate, tensed to whack me one.  The bigger boy started counting the bills.  After trying three times to get past a hundred, I realized that was all the higher he could count.  He gave it up.  "Lord, there is ... Miller, there's a fortune here."  Then to me, with wonder: "Where'd you get all this cash, kid?"

        I was taking deep breaths now, my vision clearing.  I was thinking about going for those rocks again, wondering if I could grab them before Miller nailed me with that club.  I doubted it.  The gasping voice that came out of my mouth convinced me I was beat.

        "My dad ... that's his wages ... " I paused, my mind racing.  "Two month's wages ... he had to go on the road ...  but ... he collapsed ... the con­sumption ..." They both shuddered -- I bet they'd seen their share of TB in the camps, which wouldn't have been pretty.  "I ... I ... my mother ... she sent me to the sanitarium, to get this money.  She's ... she's sick herself, and if I don't get this money back to her ... she'll ... we'll ... we won't have nothing to eat, and ... we'll lose the house and ... Dad won't have nowhere to come home to, if he lives."  At least the part about the house payment wasn't a lie, given how Mom saw things, although I found out years later that she always had the mortgage paid ahead three or four months.  Our approach with Dad actually worked better than I knew.

        "You don't look like you miss too many meals," the bigger boy said, eyeing me.

        "Mom ... she sometimes ... goes without dinner ... so I can eat.  They do ... everything for me."

        The two boys glanced at each other, then turned back to me. They seemed to be considering something.  The larger boy said, "Bullshit.  You stole this money."

        "Didn't either!" I yelled.

        "Did too.  If this money's so important to your family, what the hell you doing hanging around a hobo camp, nigger rich, stuffing your pie hole with ice cream and candy?"

        Miller snorted.  "Ain't no nigger in America that rich."

        "No, no, it's not like that.  It's just ...  it's just ..."

        "You ain't got no damned father, neither," the older one said.

        That stung.  I gasped, wanting to yell something back, wanting to scream, but I was speechless.  I briefly considered going for the rocks again.  Miller must have sensed what I was thinking, for he hefted that stick higher over his shoulder.

        "Hey, it's okay, kid," the older boy said.  He smiled.  "Look.  I know you can't go back to wherever you got this money.  And you can't wander around out here alone.  Some of these men..."  He nodded down the track toward the camps.  "They get too ... friendly."

        I wanted to scream at him, call him liar, but something held me back.  What did this boy care about me?

        "Hey, listen.  Tell you what.  You come with us.  It ain't such a bad life.  We take care of each other.  On this kind of dough we can live for … well, a while anyway.  Live like kings.  What do you say?"

        I didn't reply.  I felt empty inside, considering his offer.  Surely nothing could happen to me out on the road, homeless and alone, that could be worse than what Mom was going to do when I showed up without that money.  I'd have to leave my bike, though.  You couldn't drag a bicycle around while hop­ping freights.  How would my folks would feel when the police found it?  They'd probably figure a hobo had killed me and threw me in the river.  I im­agined my mom crying, with Dad beside her, comforting her, his arms around her shoulders.  It was a sad thought, but pleasant.  She'd be sorry then about making me spend my short, unhappy life wading through chicken shit.

        "Serve her right," I said.

        "What?"

        "I said, serve them right.  My parents, I mean."

        The boys glanced at each other again.  Miller shrugged.

        "You won't have to go to school no more," the big boy offered.  That didn't help.  I actually liked school, something else I didn't share with the guys from my neighborhood.  They didn't keep chickens at school, for one thing.

        "Look," the larger boy said, "we'll give you back a third of this, and you come with us.  It'll be OK.  We'll be pals -- you know, 'all for one, and one for all,' just like the Musketeers.  All right?"

        When I didn't respond, he squatted and began dividing the money, look­ing up at me every now and then.  "One, two, three," he counted, "one, two, three."  He was putting the bills into three piles without paying attention to their denominations, which I knew wasn't right.  There wasn't any pattern to it, though.  I could see he wasn't trying to cheat me.  He was just dumb.  When he finished, he looked up at me hopefully.

        I began to cry.  As they watched, I cried harder.  "I can't," I finally managed to sob.

        "Can't what?" Miller asked.

        "I can't go with you."  At that moment, of all things, I think I really wanted to.  "I just can't.  They need me.  Mom and Dad, they ... they just need me."

        "Oh, come off it, for Christ's sakes," the bigger boy said. 

        I just sobbed harder.

        Finally he snatched up all the money.  It occurred to me I might have lost my chance to salvage at least some of the money, which made me feel even stupider.  Maybe I should have gone along with them, then run away later that night, saving at least a third of the cash.  But I would have lost my bike if I did that. 

        The two boys looked at each other for a long time.  I began to think about going for the rocks again.  Miller nodded at his partner.

        "You big baby," the bigger boy said, turning to me.  He pulled a five out of the pile and handed it to Miller.  Then he peeled off another bill, a one, and stuck it in his pocket. 

        "No," Miller said, reaching over to pick a five out of the pile.  "Take this one."

        The big boy stuck the five in his pocket, wrapped the one back around the roll, then looked at the wad for a moment.  He threw it in my face.  "There, you goddamned baby.  Go take care of your ugly old mother and your wheezy old father."

        There was only the gentlest of breezes blowing.  The bills fluttered to my feet.  It became very quiet, there by the woods next to the tracks.  For some reason I didn't go for the money.  I just looked at the two boys, who turned and took off jogging down the path beside the tracks.  They still had my bubble gum, in Carroccia's sack.

        "Baby, baby, baby!" Miller called over his shoulder.

        "Sissy!" added the older boy.  He made an obscene gesture, which shocked me.  But I could also see he was grinning.

        After they disappeared, I leaned down and slowly started picking up the bills.  There were a still a bunch of them.  I was about halfway through when I realized that maybe the next people to come along might not be so nice, espe­cially with all that moola spread around.  I started gathering the bills then as quick as I could, stuffing them in my pockets, then jumped on the bike and spun feet back to my neighborhood.  I forgot all about the coin in the rocks, although I did go back and gather it up later.

        Mom was standing on the front steps waiting for me when I got home.  She stuck her hand out, but a frown lit on her face when I started pulling out the crumpled bills, among which was Dad's wrinkled pay stub.  Once she had all the money she marched into the house, sat down at the dining room table, and immediately started balancing the pile against the stub.

        "Are you sure this is all of it?" she asked.

        "Ugh, well..."

        "Where's the change?  Surely he had some change."

        "Well, mom, I was coming right home, just like you always tell me, along the tracks down behind Carroccia's, and three men jumped me, no, four, there were four men, hobos, great big hobos, and they wrestled me down and hit me and held me down and beat me up and grabbed the roll of money out of my pocket, but they were so ... so ... amazed by how much there was, that they forgot about me and let me up, so while they were counting it I grabbed this big branch, big as a baseball bat, and ... and ... I started whacking them, really whacking them, I think I even killed one of them maybe I was hitting them so hard, so they all ran off and this was what they left behind, but they may have got some of the money, I don't know, this was all that was left but I got most of it --"

        "Carroccia's!  That's not on the way home.  What were you doing down around Carroccia's?"

        She had me there.  Busted!  My powers of invention suddenly failed.  When in doubt -- or cornered -- it sometimes works to fall back on the truth.

        "Uh ... I don't know."  Well, perhaps not exactly the truth, but some­thing a little closer than the Battle of Gettysburg.

        "Now you listen to me, young man --"

        At that moment, praise God from whom all blessings flow, I held up my arms, the back sides of which were scraped and bruised from where the hoboys had banged them against the rocks of the railroad grade.  I was trying to strike a maternal chord somewhere deep within my mother, and miracle of miracles, I hit it.  The look of horror on her face startled even me, making me glance at my arms.  I was bloodied and banged up a lot worse than I'd imagined.  My arms started hurting immediately.

        "Oh my heavens, honey!" my mom exclaimed and went running for the bathroom.  I just stood there, arms raised, feeling like the Eastern dude watch­ing the stagecoach robbers gallop away with his watch and valuables, not pleased exactly, but certainly grateful to be alive.  It began to look like I might get a chance to try some of those patent medicines Mom liked so well.  Unfor­tunately, she came scurrying back with only cotton balls and the iodine.  By the time she got done torturing me, she'd forgotten all about the missing money.

        - - -

        After that, Dad's money went straight home -- minus the small gratuity for ice cream, of course -- with me taking my pleasures later behind Carroccia's.  Somehow it seemed more like stealing to keep back a little of the money while I gave the rest to Mom, but I reminded myself that the laborer truly is worthy of his hire.  I offered to pay Carroccia for the missing sack, but he said he'd spot me one, just this once, seeing as how I was such a steady customer. 

        Not many years after, when I hit junior high school, I wanted to go out for the football team, that being the first sport they offered.  The football team didn't keep chickens, either.  Mom was against it, saying it was dangerous, plus she needed me for chores.  But for once Dad put his foot down.  It was one of the few arguments I ever saw between my parents, but at the end of it they let me try out for football.  I was a hefty boy, tall for my age, and made the team on my first try.

        The good thing about JV was that they played on Friday nights.  Dad loved sports of any kind, and just as I figured he would, he came to every game.  Afterward, I made sure he was included when the team and some of the parents went to the drugstore for sodas, proud that he was one of the few dads who could afford to treat all the boys.  I dragged these treats out as long as I could, then kept him talking while we rode home on the trolley.  Dad tried a few times to slip out afterward, but on the rare occasions he could get past Mom he found that for the kind of drinking he and his buddies did, he needed to start at the same time as the rest of the mob.  Joining the boys at Bertelli's in the middle of the party was a lot less fun.

        I went out for every sport the school offered, as a junior choosing 3-2 baseball over the school team because the 3-2 leagues played on Friday nights in city parks, while varsity played Saturdays.  Dad couldn't make all my games anymore because by then the war was on, but when he wasn't pulling a double shift he was always there in the bleachers, cheering like a madman.  I had to go to summer school since Mom wouldn't sign for me enlist without my high school diploma.  When I boarded the train for Camp Pendleton I told Dad to take care of Mom for me, and for the first time ever I saw tears well up in his eyes.  I don't know how Dad fared after that.  Mom wrote all the letters, and of course his drinking wasn't the sort of thing she would discuss.  I discovered in Australia, Port Moresby and points north what Dad saw in his times down at Bertelli's.  I also learned on Iwo and later taking Okinawa why Grandpa Schmidt let them cut his finger off.  But in another sort of miracle, during my whole tour of duty I suffered nothing worse than that hiding I got at the hands of those two hoboys on the railroad grade behind Carroccia's.

        After the war I married, settled down, and moved to Raytown.  During those years, since Dad was always crazy to go fishing, I insisted we run trotlines at the Lake of the Ozarks nearly every weekend.  Of course, we had to leave Friday as soon as Dad and I got off work so we could get in our two full nights of fishing.  The tough luck our clan has birthing babies held, though.  My wife had two miscarriages before my son was born in '55, the year Dad retired.  Mom was already sick with her cirrhosis by then, and everyone could see it was a losing battle.  Dad stuck right by her, feeding her every patent medicine in the book, none of which helped much.

        About a month after Mom passed away, I got a call one Saturday morn­ing from Elmer, the folk's next-door neighbor, saying that he and his wife hadn't seen Dad in three days.  I was a little worried but dutifully hopped into my blue-and-white Ford coupe and headed for Bertelli's.  The old roach himself had long since got a job tending bar for St. Peter, but the joint was still owned and operated by his boys, Frankie and Sam.  Frank was sweeping off the sidewalk in front of the place when I pulled up.

        "Hey Frankie, you old snake!  Seen my old man?"

        Frankie flipped his thumb over his shoulder, motioning me inside, then followed me in.  I headed for the storeroom door, and sure enough, there was Dad, sprawled on the floor, his face looking like a cocklebur with its three days’ growth of beard.  Snot had trickled from his nose and dried in the stubble above his lip.

        "Shit, Frankie, I didn't know liquor control let you do this anymore."

        "They don't.  But they ain't around that often.  I figured, what the hell, just for old time's sake, you know?  But I was fixing to get hold of you here pretty soon.  Three days of this, I'm pushing my luck."

        "I'll bet."  I looked at the old man, wondered briefly how long it would take for him to drink up a pension check.  I thought about leaving him there, just letting him do it.  But then something came over me.

        I grabbed the old man by the front of his shirt, lifted him off the floor, and dragged him out of the storeroom and behind the bar to the big double sink where they dipped the glasses.  I grabbed Dad's hair and shoved his head under the water, dunking him in and out a few times to get him good and wet.  Turns out I'd picked the soapy-water side of the sink. Dad came up with bubbles all over his face.  I rubbed my hand roughly over his mustache to wipe that damned snot off his face.  The soap lathered up under my knuckles.

        Frankie laughed.  "What're you going to do, shave him?" 

        I glared at Frankie.  "Hell, no.  Do I look like a barber?"

        Frankie's laughter pissed me off even worse, so I wrestled Dad to the other sink -- he was gagging, fighting me pretty good by this time -- and dipped him three or four times in the rinse water, then held him up, choking and sput­tering.

        "Get me a chair, Frankie."

        Frankie ran ahead of me and grabbed an upturned chair off one of the tables, slamming it down in the middle of the floor.  I hauled the old man around from behind the bar and dropped him in it, then took a step back to let him catch his breath.  Once he did, I stepped forward, grabbed him by the shirt again, and stuck my face down in his.

        "Now listen to me, you useless old son of a bitch.  I've had just about enough of your shenanigans.  I'm all you got left now, me and your grandson, and I'll be goddamned if he's going to grow up watching this crap like I had to.  If you ever pull this stunt again, and I mean ever, that'll be the last time you see either one of us, do you hear me?"

        "Yeah, son."

        "Do I make myself absolutely clear?"

        "Yeah, son."

        "I can't hear you!"

        "SIR, YESSIR!" Dad yelled back.  That let me know he was tracking, even though I could tell by his stink he was still pickled.  I hoped he wouldn't forget our conversation.  But I didn't know.

        "All right.  You got any money left?"

        Dad fished in his pocket and held up a couple of wadded bills.

        "Good.  That's your carfare.  You got your ass down here, you can damned well get it home.  But I'm telling you --"

        Dad held up his hand.  I guess he'd heard enough.

        "All right," I said, and headed for the door.  I was crossing the threshold when Dad called to me.

        "Son?"

        I turned.  "What is it?"

        "It was you that came down and took the money off me all those times back before the war, wasn't it?"

        "Yeah, Pop."

        "Your mom told me all about it, just before she died.  Said you always used to stop at Carroccia's for ice cream and candy on the way home.  That true?" 

        I cringed.  Damn her.  "Yeah, Pop.  That's true."

        "Well, good, son.  You deserved it."

        I smiled.  "Thanks, Pop."  Dad smiled back.  I was out of there.

        That was the end of it.  For the next thirteen years, until he passed away, I stopped by the old homestead every Sunday evening to visit my dad.  After they shut down the trolley line I had to deliver his weekly cigarette ration -- a carton or two of Camels, non-filters -- which I bought at a wholesale outlet un­der the stone bridge below Blue Ridge Cut-Off.  He never did learn to drive.  We always had a couple of beers together, but I never again saw Dad drunk.  I doubt he ever was.  My son, of course, being his only grandson, was the apple of his eye.  My boy never had anything but the deepest love and respect for his grandfather.  Come to think of it, neither did I.

        I wonder sometimes what became of those two hoboys, Miller and the bigger one, if they ever got off the road, ended up in the service, survived the war.  I hope they did.  I hope they reconciled with their fathers, if they even had fathers, and settled down and had families of their own to be proud of.  It's pretty to think they did.  They deserved them.  They weren't such bad guys, after all.  They were just hoboys.

        Still, I am glad I didn't go with them.  It’s better to choose home.