THE YELLOW KID

WAR! is the one word the Yellow Kid can read. The rags have been hustling the WAR! for months, and now here is Specs passing it out in the day’s first special edition behind the Journal building. Specs has got an ink smudge on one of the lenses of his cheaters, ink all over his hands.

“By the time you little bastids unload this batch,” he says, “we’ll be ready with another extra.”

The Yellow Kid elbows in, slaps down a quarter’s worth of pennies and Specs slams a bundle of fifty against his chest, nearly knocking him over.

“Watch it, four-eyes!”

“Yer lucky I let you have em, you little Chiney piece a shit.”

Just because there is WAR! doesn’t mean their daily battle with the circulation gink is off.

“He aint Chiney yella,” explains Ikey for the hundredth time as he grabs his bundle, “he’s sick yella.”

“Yer both a friggin disease. Get outta here and sell those papers.”

They run around the building, shouting “WAR! Congress declares WAR!” and selling a few on their way.

“The Chief gotta be shittin himself,” says Ikey, pausing on the corner of William Street to adjust his load. They’ve seen him arriving late at night a couple times, Boy Willie himself pulling up in his hack with the white horse and his two sweet babies who look like the Riccadonna Sisters in the Hogan’s Alley comic he stole from the World, one on either side, fresh from some uptown theater or lobster palace. Big smooth-faced character in his glad rags. As far as they can figure he runs the dogwatch shift at his Journal dressed just like that, still in his silk top hat and swallow-tail coat. He always calls hello but never throws any mazuma their way.

“Willie been peddlin this yarn hard all year,” says Ikey. “Gonna be bigger than Corbett and Jeffries!”

They step out into Newspaper Row and the Yellow Kid takes the north side. They are at the center of the whole friggin works here. There is the tallest building, the World with its gold dome towering above, the glass boxes of the Electro Monogram out front swiveling to tell the folks that it is WAR! with the Tryon Building behind where the Staats Zeitung used to roll and the Sentinel and the mick Freeman’s Journal still do and then the Tribune Building with its clock tower showing that it’s nearly noon, the Yellow Kid better with the numbers and the hands of time than with letters, then the Times and the Sun behind it on Nassau, all of them flying their own flags along with the Stars and Stripes or even hoisting some kind of Cuban banner like Boy Willie’s paper, and then there’s the construction on the Park Row Building, already got the four giant Amazons with their giant stone melons up front and just across Ann Street the St. Paul Building is racing it story by story, both of them sposed to top the World by a good eighty feet when they’re done say the birds who bring the tours past and “WAR!” cries the Yellow Kid, waving a rag to display the scarehead, “Congress Declares WAR!” stepping over into the park in front of City Hall, geezers snatching papers and flipping him their pennies on the way in and out of the building. The Kid tries the can’t-find-change-for-a-nickel dodge on one old whitehair with a pair of muttonchops halfway out to his shoulders but the geezer is wise to it and waits with his palm out, the cheap bastid.

The Yellow Kid’s corner, by common understanding, is at Broadway and Warren where the omnibuses stop at the park and you can sell to the top-hat crowd heading for the Astor Hotel, with Graub’s restaurant, where the builders go if they haven’t brought their lunch, on one side of Warren and Donnegan’s, which is the reporters’ favorite gin mill, on the other. A hell of a location. But because today there is WAR! he can make a quick run through City Hall Plaza with the horse trolleys turning around and the noise and the dust and the drays pulling up with stone for the new buildings or the new bridge over to Brooklyn to the east and the Tammany hacks and city clerks coming and going and boys hawking the Journal and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Herald and the Trib and the Telegram and the Telegraph and the Daily News and the Mail and Express and the Star and even one poor clueless little street rat trying to pawn off day-old copies of the Weekly Post, just don’t stop moving and there’s no trespass, before he takes up position on his own spot.

“WAR!” he hollers. “Special edition, Congress Declares WAR! Only in the Journal!”

It isn’t only in the Journal, of course, at least he doesn’t think so, but the geezers don’t know that yet, do they?

Nobody muscles you off your spot, the place that is understood to be yours by the Unwritten Law. The one time somebody tried with him, big stupid spaghetti-bender wearing a different color shoe on each foot, thought just cause the Kid is sick-looking and little and skinny he’ll roll over easy, he sold maybe three papers before the Kid come back with a brick in each hand and half the newsies below Canal Street to teach him how it works. The wop tried to run but they caught him and knocked the stuffing out of him till he just rolled into a ball on the cobblestones and then they all pissed on him.

The Yellow Kid took the spot over from Dink Healy when Dink got too big and switched over to the Western Union, working as his striker for halvsies the first year, buying the corner a nickel a day. Dink has the glimmer that don’t focus right and was maybe a little scary toward the end when he got tall, so the Yellow Kid would sell most of his bundle.

“You look like death on a friggin soda cracker,” Dink would always say, tugging the Kid’s cap down over his eyes. “I couldn’t have a better striker if you was crippled.”

“Read about the WAR!” hollers the Yellow Kid. Some of the builders coming out of Graub’s buy on their way back to work, then he tries Don-negan’s but the joint is empty.

“Haven’t seen em all day,” calls Sweeny from behind the counter. “They’re all at work, poor miserable bastids, slapping together them extras.”

The Yellow Kid sells out to a mick priest heading for St. Paul’s and hotfoots it as fast as he can go back to the Journal building.

“You get the last dozen,” says Specs, jerking his nose at the pallet.

“When’s the next run?”

“Sposed to be out at three o’clock. All new headers.”

The Kid buys the dozen and heads up Centre Street. “WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Invasion Plans, this issue!”

He does a circuit around the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building, always good for a few sales to the turnkeys, got nothing to do but sit on their keisters, pick their noses, and read. He unloads two under the Bridge of Sighs on the Franklin Street side, then stops in front of the Bummer’s Hall and looks up from where Maminka brought him to wave up at the windows the first time Janek got pinched. The food was lousy in the Tombs, said Janek, but Alderman Burke from Tammany treated him to steak and spuds the day they sprung him.

There is a horse trolley running up Broadway that the Kid manages to catch up to, hauling himself aboard as it rolls and hollering his way up the aisle to the front.

“WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Fleet Sighted in East River!”

He sells all but one, hands it to the conductor before the old grouch can lay a collar on him. “Read all about it,” he says, then ducks under the man’s arm and leaps off the moving trolley in front of Blatnik’s.

The working stiffs have fed their faces and gone back to their stalls so now it is only newsies who have peddled their morning bundle at the counter—Nub Riley and Beans and Ikey and Chezz DiMucci and Yid Slivovitz. The Kid grabs a stool and shouts for his burger and pie and a chocolate fizzer which Yid likes to call an egg cream though they don’t put neither egg nor cream in the thing.

“About friggin time with this WAR!” says Nub, who is a fiend for red-hots and always has two, one with onions and one with pickle relish, laid on thick. “I mean shit or get off the friggin pot.”

“This is gonna be big,” says Ikey, pushing the scoop of vanilla under the surface of his root beer with the spoon. “You remember how we sold when they sprang the Señorita?”

“That was only the Journal.”

“So? This’ll be good for everybody.”

The Journal made a big deal out of this beautiful Cuban Señorita the Spanish bastids had violated and tortured and locked up in a dungeon in Havana, got the Women of America to write letters to their king or queen or whatever they got over there, then finally lost patience and sent their own guy, just a scribbler, down to spring her out of the joint with a ladder and some men’s clothes for disguise. Boy Willie hogged the headlines for a week.

“Well it’s a damn sight better than that Cross of Silver malarkey they were floggin. Jesus, Mary, an Joseph, how’s a guy spose to sell papers, they can’t make up better news than that?”

“You at least need a society dame floatin in the river. Or a riot where the Army gets to blast away—”

“Like that Pullman strike.”

“Okay for a week,” says Chezz DiMucci. “But them labor things burn out quick.”

“What about that Coxey’s Army circus?” says Beans.

“Or Dr. Holmes who croaked all the people in Chicago?” says Yid Slivovitz.

“Most of youse weren’t born yet,” says Slow Moe Hershel who is flipping burgers behind the counter, Moe who used to be a newsie himself when the Sun was the hottest rag in town, “but when they brung Geronimo in off the warpath, that was a story. Couldn’t print em fast enough.”

“And leave us not forget—” says Nub Riley, spreading his hands to signal he’s got the topper, “Remember the Friggin Maine.”

They all have to pull their faces out of their feedbags for that one. What a day that was, what a week.

“I had a guy bought my whole bundle, gimme a buck. Couldn’t of been more than fourteen, fifteen left.”

“Jeez, the way they played it out—Day One, the ship blows up. Day Two, who blew the ship up? Day Three, we think we know. Day Four, we sent down our experts, here’s the facts—and on and on and on—”

“The extra where they printed the names of the diseased—”

“You mean deceased.”

“You sure?”

“Diseased is your mama’s bunny hole. Deceased is them unfortunate sailors on the Maine.”

“But WAR!—”

“WAR!—”

“Fellas, I been in the newspaper business a long time,” says Yid, who is thirteen, “but nothing we been through in our lives has prepared us for this.”

Slow Moe lays a burger down and the Yellow Kid flips the lid and dumps ketchup on it. It comes with potatoes cooked in the same grease and half a kosher dill.

“Over in Europe, China, Italy, places like that,” Yid continues, “they got a massacre every day of the week. But here in America, what—” he looks to Moe. “When was our last big WAR!?”

“Week ago Saturday,” says Moe, not looking up from the grill. “The Eastmans took apart a social function the Five Pointers was hosting.”

“Friggin numbskull. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Even when I sold em,” says Moe, “I never looked past the headlines.”

“It must have been the Civil WAR!, that they put up all the statues about,” offers Ikey.

“Yeah,” says Chezz. “When we took over Mexico.”

“I bet Boy Willie goes down there to Cuba himself, bags a couple Dagoes for the front page.”

“Yeah, then what’s Jewseph Pulitzer gonna do? He’s too old to ride a horse.”

“Any stunt Hearst pulls, Poppa Joe’s gonna try to top him. If we’re sellin this good already and nobody’s fired a shot yet, just wait’ll the lead starts flying. We just gotta pray they can keep it going awhile.”

The pie is hot and full of apples and cinnamon and his stomach is full, tight even, like the chocolate fizzer is still bubbling inside him when they cross the street to Newsome’s Palace of Pleasures. Music blasts them as they enter, the Coinola Orchestrion that Gruesome Newsome who owns the arcade feeds to attract business pumping out a version of Down Went Mc Ginty, piano tambourine bells xylophone woodblock triangle snare bass and cymbal all-in-one mechanically slamming out the song punched on the paper scroll. Ikey and the Yellow Kid march straight down the center aisle, past the bagatelle games and the Big Six slots that never friggin pay off and the Electro Shock Machine and the Fortune Teller and the Automatic Billiards and the Lung Tester and the Skill-Shooter Pistol Range and the box-ball setups and the Scientific Punching Machine and all the Black Diamond Gum vendors to the last Mutoscope viewer on the left.

“This is the one,” says Ikey, pointing at the photo card above it that advertises the view. “I seen it the other day, twice.”

The Kid feeds it a Lincoln and gets on his toes to get his eyes to the slot. They put the ones that are spose to be for adults up on a board to make them taller, but not really so tall you can’t look if you want to. The light comes on and he starts to crank, nice and steady, so the Lady Undressing for Bath moves a little slower than normal.

“Careful you don’t run it out,” says Ikey. “She don’t ever make it into the tub.”

The Kid cranks it backward then, which Gruesome Newsome says you can’t do cause it hurts the machine but really cause he doesn’t want anybody getting more than a minute view for their penny, but what fun is it to see the lady put her clothes back on?

He cranks it forward again, real slow, till what must be nearly the last card flips into view and holds it there.

“Nice melons.”

“What I tell you?”

The woman is down to her unders, a white corset cinched tight in the middle and black stockings you can follow all the way up to her—

Whap! His cap flies off as Gruesome smacks the back of his head.

“What I tell you little shits?”

“Hey, I paid!”

“That don’t mean you can park yourself there with your tongue down the slot.”

The Kid bends to retrieve his cap. “Don’t cost you nothin extra.”

“You monopolize the machine, nobody else can see it.” There is ten or eleven of the guys in the joint at the moment, and plenty of machines to go around.

“Besides, you got the same crappy pitchers every week,” says Ikey. “Even Fine changes his once in a while.”

Fine runs the Garden of Delights two blocks down, but it’s smaller and dirtier and there’s a character they all call Creepy Drawers who seems to hang there all day long.

“You don’t like it,” says Newsome, “you can hit the bricks.”

They stroll around a few more minutes just to show him he can’t boss a paying customer, and then the Kid has to blow.

“I told my sister I’d come by,” he says.

The Yellow Kid, running, always running in the daytime cause there is money to make if you are quick on your feet and loud and fearless, cuts across Worth Street, the morning’s pennies rattling in the grouch bag tied around his waist and stuffed into his crotch, four more in his pocket in case the guinea kids catch him when he hurries past Mulberry and Mott and he needs something to surrender, running all the way to Chatham Square where he stops in front of Altgeld’s to look at the crates.

All the downtown Social Clubs buy from Altgeld when one of their brothers kicks the bucket, the crate from Altgeld and flowers from Kil-murray’s. There are three in the window now, two full-size and one cut short for kids. One of the full-size is the basic model, a wood rectangle with no metal fittings like the old-country hebes have to use, but the other is a real beauty, a polished box that juts out wider at the shoulders, with the shiny brass handles for your pals to hang on to and all kinds of fancy carving on the lid. If he’d had the dough he’d have popped for something like that for Maminka, instead of her riding the damn barge that might as well be a garbage scow up to Hart Island where One-Nugget Feeny says they just dump you in the common trench, shoulder to shoulder packed three deep with the other dead. Or worse, give you to the junior croakers to cut apart and learn their trade. But there was no dough and the Old Man fell apart, stupid Bohunk bastid, so there she was.

The child’s coffin looks more like a cake you want to eat than something to get planted in, all white and smooth on the outside with red plush trimmings and a little satin pillow. You see that crate roll by on the back of the wagon and you know it was somebody inside, not some pile of horseshit scraped off the street. A steam train curves overhead on the Third Avenue El, making the window glass vibrate and blurring his view of the coffin. He’s told most all of the guys that’s what he’s saving up for, figures it’s half the size it should be half the price of the ones they use for big people, but he has not quite got around to going in and asking old Altgeld what the ticket is.

The Kid turns up Bowery then, trotting, and at the corner of Pell runs into Janek shuffling out into the sun. Or Hunky Joe, which is what the other pugs in the Eastmans call him these days. He’s got the goo-goo eyes already, not even two o’clock, which means he’s just come from the Chinks.

“Frantisek,” he says, grinning stupidly, using the Yellow Kid’s Bohunk name.

“Janek.”

“It’s Hunky Joe—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” The Kid looks him over—nose crooked where it’s been bust a couple times, jacket too short on his long arms, bowler too small for his fat Bohunk head. “You been on the hip?”

Hunky Joe shrugs, grins wider. “I like to do a pipe or two in the mornin. Takes the edge off things. What you doin up here?”

“Going to see Vera. The Old Man been around?”

His brother spits on the bricks. “I aint been over there for weeks,” he says. “If she’s lucky the old bastid’ll finally drink hisself to deat’.”

“Yeah, well—”

“You doin all right?”

“Can’t complain.” The last time the Kid saw Hunky Joe his brother touched him for a buck. The Eastmans are spose to be such a hot outfit and there he is stumblin up Chrystie Street with his mitts out, practically begging.

“Money’s a little tight,” adds the Kid, looking away.

“Good news, though—”

“You mean the WAR! Yeah, as long as the papers don’t rise the price up on us.”

Hunky Joe gives him a once-over, the wheels in his head clunking the way they do when he’s trying to pretend he’s not doped up. “Listen, I got a proposition,” he says. “You still on your corner, right?”

“Yeah—”

“I and some of my associates have branched out into the policy racket. We are currently scouting for operatives—”

“Nigger pennies.”

Hunky Joe shrugs. “You got the location, a steady flow of clientele—”

“Brannigan just barely leaves me alone as it is—”

“Brannigan owes his uniform to the Hall. We, I and my associates, are the mighty right arm of Tammany. Brannigan, therefore, works for—”

“The thing is, Joe,” says the Yellow Kid, searching quick for a believable lie, “I just can’t handle the numbers. Anything past two plus two, I’m lost. I didn’t get up to the fit’ grade like you.”

“Just tink about it, all right?”

“I’ll do that. And stay away from the friggin Chinks. You look skinnier than I do.”

“Numbers, bullshit,” grins Hunky Joe. “You was always the smart one.”

The Yellow Kid runs away from his brother then, runs up Bowery till he hits Hester and cuts right to where the pavement ends and there are so many people you can’t run anymore. The sheenies are all out selling their second-hand everything, horsecarts and pushcarts and funny-smelling geezers wandering around wearing wooden trays full of buttons or ties or hot Jew food. Little girls empty ashcans or finger through yesterday’s bread to find a roll softer than a rock or watch from the stoops, latched ahold of the ones who can just walk or carrying the ones that can’t yet, the ragpicker yelling out but outyelled by the pots-and-pans hondler who knocks his metal together and both of them whispers compared to the big raw-throated ladies hollering down from their windows, lowering baskets and hauling up whatever they bought from the street vendors. Chickens hang by their feet, pickles float in barrels, and if Mott Street was garlic Hester is salt herring.

The Kid squeezes through till he finds the Hat Man. He needs a new cap. The one he’s got One-Nugget Feeny says looks like he took a dump on it, which is fine for the paying customers, the rattier you look the better you sell if you’re little, but it’s nothing you want topping your knob when it’s just you and the guys.

He tries on a few lids, checking his reflection in the butcher’s window behind as the Hat Man watches him warily, sure that he’s going to bolt with the merchandise. The Kid has his eye on a pair of shoes one stall over, light brown and shiny, with real laces that were made to go with them instead of string, a buck for the pair. His own old high-tops that Janek—that Hunky Joe passed down are split at the sole up front and his toes stick out if he doesn’t curl them under.

“Nu?” says the Hat Man, impatient, but the Kid knows the Customer is King and just keeps trying on lids. There’s a yellow-checked number that he pulls down over one eye.

“How much?”

The Hat Man holds up way too many fingers, so the Kid counters with a few fingers of his own. They keep it going for a while, the Kid knowing the bastid has a bottom price and when the old zid hawks something gray into the dirt at his feet and starts to shake his head and mutter in sheeny it’s clear they’ve reached it. The Yellow Kid has to go to his grouch bag, not so easy here on Hester where there’s a dozen eyes every way you turn, so he just digs into his pants, what Ikey calls cradling the cubes, and comes up with the mazuma.

“I’d say it’s been a pleasure doin business with you,” he says, “but it hasn’t.”

The Hat Man looks at the pennies in his palm like they might be slugs, exactly the kind of old tightwad who deserves a wooden crate with no brass, and the Kid takes a last look at those sweet brown shoes and shoves his way back out to Bowery.

There is a horse down on the corner of Broome. Little kids are circled staring like they never seen a dead nag before and a wop is trying to sell them shaved ice with lemon syrup from his bicycle box and a cop stands with his hands on his hips, thinking up what fine he’s gonna strongarm out of the dinge whose wagon it was pulling. The dinge is down on his knees wrestling the harness off in a big puddle of horse piss that’s still steaming hot though it smells like the nag’s been dead for weeks. Friggin cops always got their mitts out for a donation and get one or not he’ll just walk away and leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with it.

While the big mick has his back turned the Kid hops the back of a milk wagon headed uptown at a pretty good clip, the cans rattling empty over the cobblestones. Angelo Pino who shined shoes in front of Donnegan’s got rolled over a couple weeks back hopping a dray full of crushed stone leaving the Park Row Building, the wheel popping his head open the guys said, but he was lugging his box and only had one hand free and that’s when accidents is bound to happen. Angie’s little brother Pasquale has the spot now, but the newshounds that drink in Donnegan’s can’t tell the difference and call him Guido, which was the name of the kid who worked there before Angelo.

The Yellow Kid lucks out and the milk wagon keeps rolling across Canal, keeps rolling uptown, the driver never looking back, carrying him up to Houston where he hops off and runs five blocks up to see Vera.

The old place don’t look any worse. They moved a whole lot of times before he was old enough to know about it, is what Hunky Joe says, but this dump is the one the Kid remembers. Three stories, front and back entrance, toilet for the whole building out back, bring your own paper, jammed up next to three more shitboxes just like it. The Nemecs’ kid Dusan who’s never been right sits slobbering on the stoop and the Yellow Kid takes a minute to catch his breath before going in. His heart is racing. If the Old Man is there the odds are he’s not conscious, and even if he is the Kid knows he can outrun the bastid, even in these damn flap-sole high tops. It got worse after Maminka died but he was a guzzler from Day One, old Kazimir. The Kid used to rush the can for him on the one outside job the Old Man had, making bricks. Wrestle a big pail of beer over to him twice a day, never a tip like some of the other kids got. Get plastered and moan out those old Chesky songs, go on one of his cursing, spitting stomps, pacing all five steps from one side of the apartment to the other. Bohunks come in Catholics and Free-Thinkers and the two brands just friggin hate each other. The Old Man is an ateista, a Free-Thinker, always going on about the idiot Pope and the idiot Bohunks who kiss his holy ass, like any of that matters here on East 5th Street. Make you glad to be an American. He was a miner back where they come from says Hunky Joe, but left to get away from Germans and Catholics and the coal dust. After he drunk himself out of the brickyard he holed up and started rolling cigars like every other stupid greenie on the block, Vera and Maminka stripping the leaves and Janek out getting into scrapes with the neighborhood gangs and him, Frantisek back then, running up and down the friggin stairs with buckets and bottles to keep the old bastid lubricated.

It’s dark in the downstairs hallway and somebody is sleeping right by the stairs, got to step over to climb up. It smells like cabbage. At the door he hollers—you knock and they figure it’s the landlord’s collector come to jerk a few shekels out of you—and Vera answers. From the look on her face he can tell the Old Man is not at home.

“Frantisek!”

She looks like a ghost, Vera, pale and big-eyed and already a little bit stooped though she’s only a year older than Hunky Joe, a couple of her teeth gone missing since the Kid saw her last.

“I come to say hi.”

She pulls him in though he’s happy to stay in the hallway. The room smells like the inside of a cigar box, tobacco winning out over the kerosene, with piles of leaves and stacks of wrappers and the day’s work spread out thick on the table. Enough to make you gag. The window was always closed before to keep a breeze, should such a thing ever wander onto East 5th Street, from getting in and drying the leaves out. Then after Maminka jumped the Old Man nailed it shut forever.

“You are hungry?”

Vera never went to any school and speaks Bohunk English when nobody in the room, like the Kid, is willing to talk Chesky with her.

“Got a bellyful right now. He been around?”

Vera smiles, shrugs. He has tried to get her to give up on the Old Man, to walk outside in the sun and never come back, but it’s like she’s been sentenced to live in these little rooms forever, doing a jolt for some crime she can’t even imagine.

“He is very sick.”

Sick was how Maminka used to call it too, especially once he’d passed out and couldn’t hit or kick anymore.

“You o.k. here? You need anything?”

It is a stupid question. She needs everything.

“I am no problem,” says Vera. “Where do you sleep?”

This is always the big question with her, worrying about where he lays down at night ever since he told the Old Man to shove it and run off for good.

“Here and there,” says the Yellow Kid. “Depends on where I am when it gets dark.”

It was looking at the same damn walls every day that done it, finally, more than the Old Man going off with his hootch and his temper. “It’s worse than the friggin Tombs in here,” said Hunky Joe just before the last big fight, the one where he ended up on top of the Old Man with both of them bleeding and it was time for him to move on. The walls that Maminka tried to wash once and gave up on cause you had to haul the water up so many stairs, the walls with lighter-colored squares everywhere the Old Man took down pictures of saints the last poor bastids, some kind of Catholic Germans who snuck out a month behind in the rent, had left hanging. You put a nail in the window in this apartment, it might as well be in your coffin lid.

“Listen,” he says, “you gotta forget that old soak and take care of yourself.”

It’s a waste to try to get Vera to take money, so he says he’s got the afternoon extra to deal with and lets her hug him once. When he steps over the body propped against the bottom of the stairs he bends to see that it is the Old Man, in the tank again, wheezing a little as he breathes.

Any other day he might head over to the bathhouse on Rivington, give you a towel and chunk of soap for two cents and let the shower run a good five minutes before they shut it off on you. But there is WAR! and special editions waiting to be peddled.

The fellas got a crap game running behind the Journal when the Kid gets back, breathing hard from running the last six blocks. Ikey is holding the stones.

“Look who’s got a new lid!”

“Yellow hat for the Yellow Kid!”

“You’re so flush, you oughta get in on this,” Ikey calls, shaking the dice softly by his ear the way he does, as if they are whispering to him. “I’m rollin hot here.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Cheap bastid. You don’t never play.”

“He’s savin up for his goin-away party,” says Beans. “Gonna invite the whole city, get planted in a solid-ivory crate.”

“That’s all a racket,” says Specs, rolling out a dolly loaded with a pile of specials. “Them coffins got a false bottom. Everybody goes home and they yank out their goods, leave the stiff in the dirt with the worms. Everybody knows that.”

The newsies scoop their pennies off the ground and scramble to line up by seniority, boys who been selling the longest first, and the Kid takes a chance on another fifty. The schoolboys are out and ready to sell now, waiting at the back of the line.

“Bunch of friggin amateurs,” says Ikey, who left classes after the sixth grade, “cloggin up the sidewalks.”

Most of the stores and offices have dicks in the lobby to keep newsies and peddlers out, but the saloons are always open for business. The Kid stuffs his new cap inside his shirt, slaps the old one on his head, and makes a show of staggering under the weight of the bundle as he comes into Donnegan’s.

“Lookit this kid,” says Boylan from the Sun, who likes to sit by the door and listen for sirens to chase. “Little bastid’s on death’s door, he’s still hustlin papers. Lay em down here, kid.”

He offers his stool and the Kid parks his bundle, pulling a dozen off the top to work the room. It is elbow to elbow with reporters now, trading rumors about the WAR!, guzzling whiskey, ribbing each other. They are the best customers for print, some getting their own rag to crow over a byline, or buying three or four of the competition to see what the poop on the Row is.

“What’s Boy Willie got to say now he’s finally done it?” says Pope from the World, grabbing one from the Kid. “Probly wants to be made Admiral.”

“Over Roosevelt’s dead body.”

“If that could be arranged,” says Callan from the Journal, “the Chief would be only too happy.”

“I’m takin names for the Regiment,” Sweeny calls from behind the counter, waving a paper that dozens have signed. “Shall I put you on it, Kid?”

“Sure,” says the Kid. “Sign me up.”

That gets a laugh and somebody says he’s already got the Yellow Fever so why not and he sells more papers and there is lots of kidding about who is too old or too young or too much of a hopeless souse to go to WAR! Then Lester Schoendienst gets up on his hind legs and calls for order.

“I’ve got me colyum fer tomorra ready,” he says in the voice he puts on like a Ninth Ward mick, “and I’d aprayciate yer opinions.”

From what the Kid can tell this bird writes a column where he pretends to be these two bog-trotters, Gilhooley and O’Malley, the former who is spose to be a beat cop and the other a sanitation worker who specializes in horse pucky.

“My opinion is it stinks,” calls Pope, “and I haven’t heard a word of it yet. Finley Peter Dunne, on his worst day—”

“Can outwrite you on yer best, we’re all aware iv that, we are,” Schoen-dienst comes back as he steps up on a chair to be seen over the crowd. “Now kape yer pie-hole buttoned while the true gentlemen iv the press give a listen.”

“You break that chair, Lester,” calls Sweeny, “you bought it.”

“So Martin O’Malley is plyin his trade,” starts the scribbler, reading from his ink-smeared notebook, “with a shovelful of road apples in mid-air, whin Officer Gilhooley strolls by on his rounds.”

The reading is always good for the Kid. He keeps moving through the room as the newshounds listen, jamming papers under their elbows and into their hands, the men paying without looking at him.

“ ‘It’s quite a swagger yer walkin with today, Tom,’ says the man with the spade. ‘Have they lowered the price on whiskey?’

“ ‘Sure and hasn’t the Congress itself signed the Articles iv WAR!’ says the copper.

“ ‘Ohhh—have they finally done the dade? Tis a hysteric occasion—’

“ ‘It’s got me martial spirit inflamed,’ says Gilhooley. ‘If there was a Spaniard at hand I’d pop him in the beezer meself!’

“O’Malley throws a glimmer around the street. ‘And where is the swarthy little fandango-dancers whin you nade im? I don’t suppose an Eyetalian would do?’

“ ‘Diffrint race altogether, Martin. Yer Dons has been a haughty and crool outfit since the days of the conquistadoros, whereas your Eyetalian is more iv a Jovanny-come-lately to the Table iv Nations. Columbus himself was wurrkin for the Spaniards whin he bumped into the United States.’

“ ‘They’re a seafarin paypul, yer wops,’ agrees O’Malley. ‘Sure and haven’t ye ivver seen em on the Staten Island Ferry, with the rag and polish in their hands? All the grrreat ocean voyages—Magellan, Cook, Henry Hudson sailin up our own West Side—there was always a little Jewseppy aboard to kape a sparkle on their boots.’

“ ‘There’s a call out fer fightin men,’ says Gilhooley, twirling his stick. ‘I’ve half a mind to throw me name into the hat.’

“ ‘Half a mind indade,’ says O’Malley, filling the back of his wagon.

“ ‘Tis a grrreat day fer the Republic,’ continues the officer, a far-off look in his eye. ‘And the Cubings will be throwin a party as well.’

“ ‘The divvil with the Cubings,’ says O’Malley, tamping down his haul with the back of his spade. ‘This is our donneybrook now. They want a fight, they can attack Porto Rico or one iv them ither islands in the Carrybium. Forst come, forst served is what I say!’

“ ‘That’s the spirit—’

“ ‘And whin the Pearl iv the Aunt Tillies is free,’ he adds, ‘can the Emerald Isle be far behind?’ ”

There is cheering and banging on tables then and Schoendienst buys a round for anyone who can shove their way up to the bar. At the door the Yellow Kid runs into Maxie Schimmel, lugging in a stack of Heralds.

“Two more rounds in these jokers,” he shouts to Maxie over the sound of the scribblers stomping their feet in time and singing Glory, Glory Hallelujah, “and they’ll buy yesterday’s paper.”

He heads over to the Park Row turnaround then and attacks the commuters getting into their trolleys to go home.

“WAR!” he hollers. “Spanish Threat to Burn Washington!”

He is bumping shoulders with One-Nugget Feeny, who’s got an armful of the World.

“WAR!” cries Feeny. “World Exclusive, Cuba Declared Newest State!”

“WAR!” yells the Kid. “Houdini Disappears in Havana!”

“WAR!” shouts Feeny. “The World Remembers the Maine!”

“WAR!” screams the Yellow Kid. “The Journal Declares WAR! on Spain!”

The Kid is down to a handful by the time it is dark, hanging outside the New Citadel, the Delmonico’s downtown joint on South William Street. He has all but one paper stashed under a trash barrel across the way, and every time a couple sports wander out with their bellies full of oysters and alligator pears he goes into his crybaby routine.

“Wah-hah-hah-hah!” he goes, tears running down his cheeks, standing smack between them and the hack stand, bawling and snuffling and holding the lonely paper out with trembling hands.

“What’s the matter, sonny?” says one out of three.

“I wanna go to home!”

“Go home then.”

“I can’t! I gotta sell all my papers or my fadder’ll knock the tar outta me! Whah-hah-hah-hah! Dis is my last one ony won’t nobody buy it. I wanna go home!”

“Here, then. What’s this, the Hearst paper? There ought to be a Com-mission to look into this—forcing young children out on the streets to peddle this trash! Here, go home now.”

And before he’s halfway down the block they’re gone in their hack and he runs to grab the next one.

There is a woman, a young one, all dressed in satin and foxtails with a big hat with feathers and a bucket of perfume on her who bends down to take his face in her hands.

“Isn’t he adorable?” she says. He has the ratty old cap on still, and he’s been blubbering so much there’s snot hanging out his nose and his toes are sticking out the front of Hunky Joe’s old clodhoppers and he’s yellow as the flophouse sheets, but what the hell, she thinks he’s adorable that’s her business. “What’s the matter, little boy?”

There’s nothing much the matter, he’s never made so much mazuma in one day, ever, but her hands feel nice on his cheeks and the perfume is o.k. too, so he just keeps sniffling.

“I gotta sell—my last paper—before I can go home,” he manages to whine out between sniffs, lips trembling. “An if I don’t—”

“Hush now. Rupert?” And with this the skinny geezer scowling down at him sighs and digs into his jacket. “Rupert, buy this poor child’s newspaper. How much is it, darling?”

“Only a nickel,” says the Kid in a very small voice. “Onnaconna it’s my last one.”

Rupert slaps the coin into his palm and snatches the paper away.

“And where do you live?” asks the pretty woman, straightening up.

“Baxter Street,” he answers without pause, “with my fadder and six baby sisters.”

By the time he is making the long walk back up Broadway, legs weary, he has only four papers unsold. The Journal doesn’t give you nothing back for returns, none of them do, so he is out the four cents.

He is passing Fulton Street, yawning already, when Sluggo Pilchek calls from under a streetlight.

“Yo Kid,” he calls, “lookit what I got here.”

At first when Sluggo peels the paper back he thinks it is dead, but then he can see its face is red and that it’s only too weak to cry, little eyes blurry and almost clear blue, naked inside the front page of the morning Telegraph.

“Some lousy break, huh?” says Sluggo, who works for the Sun. “Ditched on the street wrapped in a stinker rag like that.”

“What you gonna do with it?”

“What am I spose to do with it? The old lady’s already got a squaller at home.”

“We can’t leave it here.”

“Its mother did.”

The Yellow Kid rewraps the baby, lifts it awkwardly. “Grab my papers.”

“You aint gonna sell these now—”

“Grab em.”

“What are we doing?”

“Look for a cop.”

Sluggo picks the Kid’s papers up, shakes his head. “This hour? They’re all up on Bowery, suckin at the tit.”

“So we’ll bring it to the nuns.”

They walk, the Yellow Kid wondering if it’s still alive but not daring to check.

“How’d you do today?” asks Sluggo.

“Knocked em dead. They can’t get enough of this Spain business.”

“It’ll only get better.”

“That’s what they say.”

Sluggo cocks a doubtful eye at the Kid’s new bundle. “So how you figure the nuns feed these things?”

“They keep milk.”

“Just sittin around?”

“Maybe.”

“Cause they got no tits, nuns.”

“Really?”

“Brides of Christ,” says Sluggo. “They’re not spose to have em.”

“They must keep milk then.”

“It goes bad awful easy.”

The Kid shrugs. “They do what they can,” he says, “then send em to Randall’s Island.”

“What’s that?”

Maminka had gone out there for a while, after she was big with the last one who was going to be Anezka if it was a girl or Miklos if it was a boy, the last one that came out blue, not yellow, and didn’t breathe. She went out there for the money a couple weeks, before she got so low she just sat and stared out the window that wasn’t nailed shut yet, frozen for hours like the Lady Undressing for Bath. You took a ferry to Randall’s and nursed the orphan babies and the nuns at the Infants’ Hospital paid you.

“They bring women out there to feed the squallers,” says the Kid. “It’s like a dairy.”

“Well whoever ditched this kid should of ditched it out there. Stead of the friggin sidewalk.”

“Women get moody,” says the Kid, “you never know what they’ll do.”

“You can say that again,” says Sluggo.

Most of the shops are closed up. A lone horse trolley rolls by in the opposite direction, nearly empty.

“Where you sleepin?”

“They got a room by the presses at the Sun,” says Sluggo. “We can stretch out on the benches. Don’t cost a penny.”

“Yeah, but you sleep at the Sun, you gotta sell the Sun.”

Sluggo shrugs, his feelings hurt. “It’s a good paper. Everybody says so.”

There are no cops on lower Broadway, so they cut across City Hall Park, nearly empty now, the fountain shut off, and angle up to the Five Points Mission on Pearl. They used to have a stroller outside, one of those nice wicker jobs with the wheels pulled off so nobody would nick it, but people would just ditch their babies in it and blow, no matter what the weather, so now you got to rattle the knocker.

“Lord save us, not another one,” says the Sister of Charity who answers. “And at this hour.”

“We could put it back if you want,” says Sluggo.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.” She takes the little thing from the Kid, holds it up to the light. “Only a few hours in this world, the poor thing. Not much hope for him.”

“You gonna put it on one of those trains?” The Kid has heard about Sister Irene and her trains, sending orphans out to lonely people in the far West, out past Jersey.

“He’ll be lucky to see the sun rise,” she says, hugging it close and turning to go. “We’ll have to get the sacraments taken care of, save his little soul.”

“What I tell you?” says Sluggo when she has closed the door on them without a tip or even a thank-you. “No tits.”

Sluggo gives the Kid his papers back and heads off for the Sun building. The Newsboys’ Lodging House is close on Duane, where everything is a nickel-and-a-penny—six cents for a bunk, six cents for coffee and roll in the morning, six cents for pork and beans at night. You can wash up, bank your money, even get a stake to buy the next day’s papers if they know you well enough. But it is a warm night and doesn’t feel like rain. There is a headstone, a big tall hunk of polished pink rock that shields you from sight of the street in the old St. Paul cemetery yard. Big letters on the front of the stone, somebody important planted under it.

The Yellow Kid spreads his newspapers carefully on the ground, lies down on them and looks up at the stars. The Sunday edition is best for this, at least a hundred pages, three color supplements, a regular mattress of a newspaper, but two afternoon extras will do. If the baby lives, he thinks, probly it will get sent out somewhere with nothing but dirt and trees on the ground, where the horses got no trolleys hitched to them, where you look up in the sky and there’s nothing but clouds. Poor bastid. The Kid can hear the thrum of the presses rolling in the giant buildings a block away, can feel the rumble of them through the ground here at the center of America. They will run all night and tomorrow there will be fresh news to sell. The baby is safe with the nuns and the Spanish fleet is creeping who knows where and the Yellow Kid has a full belly and a new hat and the moon is rising nearly full, smack behind the chapel spire. There is WAR!, and fat times lie just around the corner.