Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line. What with tough times down the Lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, Prohibition repeal just around the corner, Big Al in the federal pokey in Atlanta, Outfit affairs grown jumpy and unpredictable, anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breezing up here to Milwaukee, where it seldom gets

more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish.

“Come up lookin for a little peace and quiet, next thing you know…” “Startin to sound like Chicago around here.”

Imbisswagen,

Back when he was getting into the business, one of the first things Hicks noticed was how many pre-divorcées just in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties alone seemed disposed to linger over forbidden liquids, going into all the intimate details as if mistaking him for a lawyer that doesn’t charge much, with muscle thrown in for free, leading to romantic outcomes easy to imagine,

Mostly his news of current events comes from keeping an ear aimed at the radio and staying in everyday touch with the kid underworld—drifters, truants, and guttersnipes, newsboys

dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and perfume in the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street, immersed too deep in lives that Skeet could never quite see any plausible way to step into…A Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally.

“Wanted to get it really clean for you,” Skeet kept trying to explain, as Knuckles yanked open the oven door, revealing through the billows of smoke a reeking

and out-of-round ex–bowling ball. “Oh—no, what’d I do?” Which is where a normal Milwaukeean would’ve brought out some pocket revolver and settled things on the spot, confident that no local jury would call it anything but justifiable homicide. Instead Knuckles thought he saw an educational opening.

“First thing anybody learns in this town is never put a bowling ball in any oven over a hundred degrees, what kind of upb...

adenoidal

soda jerk he started off as.

“Thirty years ago this was no place for kids, the words ‘soda fountain’ would send mothers all over town into fits, worse than ‘opium den.’ ” Leapers and sleigh riders one end of the counter to the other lingering all day over house formulas with cocaine as the main ingredient, once a common sight ...

like a preview of Prohibition, “and now it’s all this wholesome family trade....

“Howzat?” “Spend your whole day around ice cream, you can begin to grow philosophical. You figure a state with two million dairy cows, a certain percent of that milk will be going into ice cream, nickel a cone, been that way forever. But it turns out there’s milk and then there’s milk. The kind you drink from a bottle is more expensive than the kind they use to make

cheese and ice cream out of. A two-price system is what they call it. Now we got syndicates of Bolshevik farmers looking to make it all one price, meaning the cost per scoop of ice cream goes up 70, 80 percent, next thing we’re looking at a dime cone, the banana split you thought you wanted goes up to 30, 40, 50 cents, no end in sight. Who’s got money like that to spend?” “Sounds serious, Hoagie.” “It’s civil war.” “Over ice-cream cones?” “Could be the one spark that sets it all off. Won’t take much. Milk is the universal American drink, ain’t it, bigger than beer, even in Milwaukee.

While not as common as a nose or needle habit, April’s married-man fixation does bring along its own set of health risks. Wronged spouses within easy reach of firearms can no longer be ruled out of the national domestic melodrama,

“Oh, but they all love their wives, it’s part of the deal. Something I may need to talk about someday with somebody, though maybe not with

forget that gum-snappin gal from the gashouse, ’n’ keep your poutin pluto-cratic prin-cess, Just gimme-that cute hootchy-koo, I’m ree-ferring to, that’s my— Little Missus, Middle- Clas-siness…

is handed to you on a plate, and continuing to believe against all evidence in true and faithful love, although to look at you nobody’d ever know it. Another romantic chump.”

Midnight in Milwaukee, Not exactly Paris,

Viaduct. Seems like the chief topic of supper conversation is going to be Adolf Hitler,

children present or not. This being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American

“Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’ ” “They called me Boy Inspiration of the Year once, look where it got me.”

“Jumpin up and down all nutty and screaming the minute anybody brings up the topic of Jews, sure, everybody’s welcome to their own sense of humor. Swell casserole here, by the way.”

Peony’s conversation has steadily been taking on an edge, her natural nerve coming out to shine, as if some maidenly spirit, searching and pious, has set out on a trip Peony has no plans herself to make, toward a destiny quietly lifted away from her when she wasn’t looking…

The logical field to get into after North Division High, it seemed to Hicks, was strikebreaking, being basically the same thing only better pay and always hiring.

“I would’ve flattened the little runt,” Hicks is advised helpfully. “How can a man live with verbal abuse like that?”

“Yes, to look at it you’d think, easygoing, midwestern, nothin much going on, but step around the corner, try another angle, and it’s a different story. What finds its way into which pockets, what and sometimes who gets deep-sixed in the Lake after midnight, what happens to Negroes down in the precinct houses. Hitler kiddies, Sicilian mob, secret hallways and exit tunnels, smoke too thick to see through, half a dozen different languages, any lowlife thinks they can turn a nickel always after you for somethin, there’s your wholesome

Cream City, kid, mental hygiene paradise but underneath running off of a heartbeat crazy as hell, that’s if it had a heart which it don’t…

Oriental Attitude and regain control of your life.” Of course Hicks picked it up, filled it out,

“Asported. When something disappears suddenly off to someplace else, in the business that’s called an asport. Coming in at you the other way, appearing out of nowhere, that’s an ‘apport.’ Happens in séances a lot, kind of side effect. Ass and app, as we say.”

“Well good luck, sonny. Hate to tell you but the only time ‘real’ comes into it is when they’re shooting at you. In practice, ‘real’ means dead—anything else, there’s always room for some conversation.”

“Say, I can handle this big creampuff.” Dominic goes rushing in at Hicks. It doesn’t last long. Presently, Dominic is lying inert though breathing next to a beaverboard partition wall, which now has a dent from where he’s just been slammed into it.

someplace, likely Chicago, hit-and-run victim not used to big-city traffic, Milwaukee being notorious for its inattentive pedestrians, ‘Jaywalkee,’ as it’s known to the wisemouths of the County of Cook…”

Fancy Vivid.

gemütlich

them across the Menomonee Valley via the Wells Street Viaduct, 90 feet up, iron, black, rickety in the wind, not for nervous passengers or even those with their wits about them who’d prefer to get across in one piece.

expected to get much above freezing, straw boxes few and far between, apt around any corner to find yourself up the wrong end of a roscoe from somebody you knew in sixth grade.

where it’s currently semifinals week for the Northwest Milwaukee Skee-Ball League, defending champs of the Ladies’ division, which

dog pounds had psycho wards, that’s where most of these jokers would be recruited out of.”

now zeroes in, humming “On, Wisconsin!”

wreckage, innocent lives lost, honest fortunes pissed away, all for millions of cubic feet of nothing but bitter-tasting bubbles.” Raising his glass, “Auf deine Gesundheit, so forth.”

came pouring into SMEGMA (Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area),

copasetic

Special Agent in Charge T. P. O’Grizbee, occupies a desk in a surprisingly tidy office

Plus, as any P.I. might add, that feeling that close by, just outside of sight, hearing, and the bounds of etiquette, at least one supply-room quickie is in progress.

“Maybe he saw something, maybe he doesn’t know what he saw. Knows enough not to talk but not exactly what he shouldn’t be talking about. Or who to. Which makes him dangerous, putting

forces he never knew existed to the trouble of setting things right again.”

Now, most of the time gastric distress and Hicks are strangers. Alka-Seltzer is not about to name him Customer of the Year. But there are exceptions, brought about by even the hint of an out-of-town ticket,