CROSS COUNTRY
235
'Truth
is
God-made. Spiritual Iwrdening of arteries is menace. Correct
thinking is urged. Dictators scored.
Do children grow up in heaven? If a man
has
three wives in the
course of 1W life which one does he live with in heaven? Tonight the
answers.
...
A man with a disfigured face, a patch covering one eye, walks the
streets. Slowly and softly he gropes his way along with his torn sneakers,
tap tapping with his cane, occasionally tinkling a little hell and calling
attention to the sign that sandwiches him: on such and such a date, it says,
the huilding where I was employed collapsed and my fourteen co-workers
were killed. But I, I had in my pocket a certain hlessed religious trinket,
and so, although I lost an eye and some ribs and can only move as slowly
as you see, carrying this cup that will hold the meagre alms you throw in
it,
yet I am
alive, alive, alive!
In
the first ward a youngster is accidentally killed in a street fight
and in the forest hill section a hoy shoots and kills his father in a playful
gesture with a
gun
that everybody forgot was loaded.
An unwed mother puts a little baby boy in a parked car on Halsey
Street and he freeezes to death. They were going to bury him in Potter's
Field but a kindly lady steps forward and sees that he is provided with
a decent burial.
A woman tells the Judge that her jealous husband would come home
at odd hours, with big green eyes in a green face, to look in closets and
under beds for the man he never found. He made her life one of utter
wretchedness hy unfounded jealousy of her cousin's husband, the iceman,
the chauffeur who came to hring her to work on one occasion, in fact of
anybody and everybody. He often threatened to kill his fancied rivals,
would become upset if she took too long to suit him when she went out to
shop, and at times brought home and cooked his own food because he
feared she would poison him.
This is the city where Dutch Schultz was shot. He met death as he had
lived. In an ambulance speeding to the hospital he turned and extended
a fat roll of bills to the interne. Here, you take this, he said, I won't need
it anymore. His last act a gesture like all the separate acts of his life....
Remember Two Gun Crowley? When he was a kid he wanted to use his
left hand and his teachers compelled him to use his right because every–
body else did. Mter he was dead learned psychiatrists discussed all the
different reasons why Two Gun Crowley might have become a gangster,
and they chose the forced shift from left to right handedness as the most
significant item in his background. But who is there to search out the
long forgotten, tiny, untraceable incidents in the pasts of those who do not
use the guns?
DAVID CHANLER
