Chapter 5 #3
The night hours dripped slowly into Saturday dawn.
They made conversation over coffee until about a quarter to six, when Irving stood from his round dining table and invited Laurie to accompany him to the newsies.
Laurie would never turn up a chance to see what papers a man read on the regular, so he put on his cap and left down the fire escape the way he’d meant to hours before.
After a prudent round-the-block, he rejoined Irving on the corner.
The man had put on a bowler and an elbow-patch jacket in the meantime.
Thankfully for the newsboys, the rain had stopped. Irving stood in their cloud of humid tobacco smoke and chatter and plucked a paper from a freckled boy who greeted him by name, and whose familiar stack teetered on a bicycle.
“You’re an Appeal man,” Laurie said, half-approving, half-alarmed, as he approached.
Irving grinned, stuck the paper beneath his arm, and yawned. “’Cept the mornin’ edition’s my evenin’.”
Laurie bought a copy himself. Number 495, fresh off the presses, rain-dampened: Call to Arms to the American Plutocracy: The Address to the National Manufacturer’s Assoc., May 16th. Heavy stuff.
“Brutal shift, you have.”
“Six on, six off, on workin’ days.” Irving shrugged. “Suits me, though. I can take all kinds of odd jobs.”
Laurie remembered his dark eyes across the bar and laughed. “I’ll bet you can.”
Irving smiled and bought a second paper from a different paperboy, today’s National Police Gazette, a less intriguing choice—except that it had a wrestler in very tiny shorts on the front page. Fancy. He might buy a copy for himself.
Irving jerked his head in fresh invitation, and they left the newsies.
A policeman came briskly toward them on the sidewalk, baton twirling.
They split automatically to let him through, rejoining farther apart than before.
Laurie might playact at being white-collar for Sam and his cohorts, but uniforms were centerfold fantasies of privileged queers.
Coppers weren’t remotely Laurie’s idea of masculinity made ideal.
Nor, he suspected, Irving’s; the man didn’t so much as take a second glance. He unfolded the wings of the paper, opening straight to advertisements. Typical.
“So, what’re you reportin’ on now, Lawrence Tulley?”
Laurie missed a step, stumbled over an upheaving brick. “Sorry?” he choked. Jesus, he hadn’t expected that. “When—?”
“I’m not gonna ever out you,” Irving said quickly. He twitched a newsprint wing. “Just now. Looked like it scared you. And you wouldn’t say your surname, hmm? Tulley’s Scots.”
Laurie sighed. He should’ve gone with a pseudonym years before. And he apparently needed to fix his face. Maybe there was something to Hiram’s insistence on using his real name. “Yeah. Got me.”
“I didn’t expect you to try a glassworks anytime soon, though. Like the local sixty-eight don’t buy an ad spread?” Irving turned a page, and there it was, sure enough, the A. F. G. W. U.—American Flint Glass Workers’ Union—had a corner spread.
“I don’t deal with… ads,” Laurie muttered. The day he took a stipend from an ad-man to censor himself would be the day he stopped writing. Although who knew what Sam would demand of him next.
“No shit.” Irving laughed. “You have a column. Might’ve even read it once or twice—”
Laurie rolled his eyes.
“—the one on meatpackin’ made me grateful for my furnace shop, no small thing.”
Laurie grunted. “Chicago,” he said, by way of explanation. As though it were the Wild West.
“Chicago,” Irving agreed. “So… you reportin’ on my employer?” He slit his eyes shrewdly sideways. “You’ll never get into the glassworks. I can’t get you in.”
“I know that,” Laurie said exasperatedly.
“And I felt badly for usin’ you only the once, since you paid an’ everything. Meanwhile, you were on the hunt for a story.”
Laurie hesitated. But why not admit it? He was already caught. “Yeah.”
Irving tsked. “And they call me trade?” He spread the newsprint conspicuously before his face and leaned against a dry patch of brick beneath an awning. Laurie settled in next to him, ankles crossed. He kept his paper folded, like a civil man of the street.
The head of the Manufacturers’ Association had capped his speech off with this incendiary lovely: It is the solemn duty of true American citizens of this generation to do whatever lies in their power to down this specter of Socialism.
Yeah, he thought. Sam had salivated over that.
“That work for you often?” Irving said. “Whorin’ yourself out?”
Laurie looked up. Not lately. “When the sex ain’t awful, sure, it does.”
Irving’s laughter sent two pigeons into indignant hops across the streetcar rails.
“Take it back”—he folded the paper and shook it in mock threat—“take it back, or maybe I’ll out you after all.”
“Balls you will, gaffer.” Laurie grinned. “Give me a light, yeah?”
“I already did that. This time for the paper, aye?”
“Oh, fuck off.”
More laughter; Irving obliged him with his striker. “As though I’d tell anyone I screwed up screwing Lawrence Tulley. Though, truth, I can’t see you fuckin’ in the fields. An’ muss that hair?”
“You happened to read that one, too?”
Irving stole the cig. “I got the censored version, apparently.” He inhaled deep, let the smoke curl back into his nostrils. “An’ then again in person.”
“Silent picture’s pro’ly more profane than last night,” Laurie agreed.
Irving nodded, solemn, straight-faced. It triggered them both into giggles, and they curled up over their knees, clutching the papers and sniggering like boys.
“If you read the cotton fields,” Laurie gasped, “then you’ll remember it was mostly children working.”
“Aye. I remember.” Irving snorted. “That what you reportin’ on here? Boys workin’ the glass house? I really can’t”—he coughed, the great, heaving coughs of a lifelong factory boy-turned-man—“get you in.”
“I’m not asking that,” Laurie said quietly. That cough had sobered him fast.
“Besides, what would they do if not work, the boys? They’d be on the streets.” He drew on the cig, still coughing lightly. “I’d’ve—I’d’ve been on the streets. And my mam and sister too.”