In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [16]
I lowered the barrel convulsively. The target still stood; Red Ryder was unscratched. A ragged, uncontrolled tidal wave of pain, throbbing and singing, rocked my head. The ricocheting BB had missed my eye by perhaps a half inch, and a long, angry, bloody welt extended from my cheekbone almost to my ear. It was divine retribution! Red Ryder had struck again! Another bad guy had been gunned down!
Frantically I scrambled for my glasses. And then the most catastrophic blow of all—they were pulverized! Few things brought such swift and terrible retribution on a kid during the Depression as a pair of busted glasses. The left lens was out as clean as a whistle, and for a moment I thought: I’ll fake it! They’ll never know the lens is gone! But then, gingerly fingering my rapidly swelling black eye, I realized that here was a shiner on the way that would top even the one I got the time I fought Grover Dill.
As I put the cold horn-rims back on my nose, the front door creaked open just a crack and I could make out the blur of my mother’s Chinese-red chenille bathrobe.
“Be careful. Don’t shoot out your eye! Just be careful now.”
She hadn’t seen! Rapidly my mind evolved a spectacular fantasy involving a falling icicle and how it had hit the gun barrel which caused the stock to bounce up and cut my cheek and break my glasses and I tried to get out of the way but the icicle fell off the roof and hit the gun and it bounced up and hit me and.…I began to cry uproariously, faking it at first, but then the shock and fear took over and it was the real thing—heaving, sobbing, retching.
I was now in the bathroom, my mother bending over me, telling me:
“There now, see, it’s just a little bump. You’re lucky you didn’t cut your eye. Those icicles sometimes even kill people. You’re really lucky. Here, hold this rag on it, and don’t wake your brother.”
I HAD PULLED IT OFF!
I sipped the bitter dregs of coffee that remained in my cup, suddenly catapulted by a falling tray back into the cheerful, impersonal, brightly lit clatter of Horn & Hardart. I wondered whether Red Ryder was still dispensing retribution and frontier justice as of old. Considering the number of kids I see with broken glasses, I suspect he is.
III FLICK FAILS TO RECALL AN OLD SONG
… Flick topped off our glasses.
“How ’bout some more pretzels?”
He brought the beers back to where we were sitting. I took a deep swallow of cold beer. The old pipes were dry.
Flick went on:
“Do you remember Tom Mix and the TM Bar Ranch?”
“And the Old Wrangler? And that Lucky Horse-shoe Ring? As a matter of fact, you will notice that my index finger is still faintly green from that ring.”
Above us the monster color TV set loomed menacing and silent.
“When it’s Ralston time at breakfast.…
And the something something’s something.…
Something, something, Jane and Jimmy, too.…
Something, something.…”
Flick was trying to ad-lib the theme song of the TM Bar Ralston radio show which had formed a bulwark of our childhood morality. I raised my hand imperiously.
“Stop, Flick. I will sing the greatest theme song of them all.
“Who’s that little chatterbox …?
The one with curly golden locks.…”
He blenched. “My God!”
“Who do I see …?
It’s Little Orphan Annie.…”
IV THE COUNTERFEIT SECRET CIRCLE MEMBER GETS THE MESSAGE, or THE ASP STRIKES AGAIN
Every day when I was a kid I’d drop anything I was doing, no matter what it was—stealing wire, having a fistfight, siphoning gas—no matter what, and tear like a blue streak through the alleys, over fences, under porches, through secret short-cuts, to get home not a second too late for the magic time. My breath rattling in wheezy gasps, sweating profusely from my long cross-country run I’d sit glassy-eyed and expectant before our Crosley Notre Dame Cathedral model radio.
I was never disappointed. At exactly five-fifteen, just as dusk was gathering over the picturesque oil refineries and the faint glow of the muttering Open Hearths was beginning to show