Painted Cities (11 page)

GOD’S COUNTRY

A
sk him where he learned to do that stuff and he’d say, “Sonora, God’s Country.” Chuey had never been to Sonora. He spent every day of his life right there in Pilsen, just like the rest of us, playing ball, jumping the freights. We thought maybe he’d resurrected some witch doctor’s memories of being in Sonora. I mean, he resurrected everything else: dead cats, dogs, finally a human being. So when people asked us how he learned to do the things he did, we said, “He learned it all in Sonora, God’s Country.” There seemed to be no other explanation.

He was fifteen when he found out he had the gift of life. It was one of those mornings we skipped school. It was early, right around the end of first period.

“Poor fucks,” Alfonzo said, looking to the high school, the kids transferring classes. “I’d be in algebra right now.”

“English,” I said.

“I’d be in gym,” Marcus said.

“
Booo
,” me and Alfonzo answered.

“No, man,” Marcus said. “Gym this early is a drag. All sweaty afterward. All sweaty for Brenda Gamino second period.”

“Damn,” Alfonzo said. “You have Brenda Gamino in a class?”

“Second period,” Marcus said. “History.” He pulled out the joint he had in the inside pocket of his leather. We were standing in front of the Pilsen YMCA, just across the street from Juarez High School.

“We’re going to get busted,” Alfonzo said. He said this as a matter of fact. That year, our freshman year, we’d been caught skipping three times by December. The limit was five unexcused absences per year. Our parents had been called. We’d been reasoned with by Mr. Sanchez, the school social worker: “So if you get expelled, what kind of job are you going to get?” We didn’t know. We didn’t care. The only thing that seemed to matter was that the thought of school made us literally, physically ill.

Marcus pulled out his tiny Bic lighter. He lit the joint and took a deep, early-morning drag. He passed the joint to Chuey, who hadn’t said a word all morning. Marcus exhaled.

“Want to walk to Speedy’s?” he asked.

Collectively, we began to move.

It was cold out that day. Alfonzo and I had on our hooded sweatshirts. Marcus had on his black leather. Chuey had on that brown, crusty leather jacket he always wore, the same one he had worn all summer. An
heirloom
he had called it that first day he showed up with it on. “It was my great-grandfather’s.”

“Looks like it,” Alfonzo had said.

“The fuck’s an heirloom?” Marcus asked.

“Something special,” Chuey said.

For weeks after that everything was an heirloom, a quarter someone had for a video game, a last piece of gum, a last cigarette in a pack. Some people called them “luckies.” We called them heirlooms. “I only got one left, that’s my heirloom,” we’d say. Chuey just continued to wear the jacket.

We walked down Twenty-First Place. The street was empty. All the factory workers had left for work, all the cleaning ladies, the secretaries, had taken their L’s downtown. Twenty-First Place was the only street in our neighborhood that had any trees, tall, full trees that lined the sidewalk for exactly two blocks. On summer days Twenty-First Place smelled good, fresh; birds sang and fluttered in the branches. Out of habit, on winter days we stuck to Twenty-First Place as well, even though by that time the birds were gone, and Twenty-First Place was just like any other street, cold and gray.

We kept our hands stuffed deep in our pockets, reaching out only to toke and pass the reefer. As we neared the corner of Paulina Street a beat-up white Cadillac pulled around the corner. The car jerked to a stop, seesawing in the middle of the intersection. Heavy bass rattled the trunk lid. The four of us stood still, ready to bolt down a gangway, jump fences. At the rear window a hand came up and rubbed out a hole in the steamed-over glass. Someone peered through, directly at us. Then the hand came up again, this time wiping with a blue piece of sleeve. The person looked through. We saw the face, dark, thick eyebrows, wide, flat nose. The person smiled, then held up the Almighty Ambrose hand sign. Then the car took off, tires screeching, tailpipe sparking as it knocked against the uneven street.

“Capone,” Marcus said.

“I know,” Alfonzo said. We all knew. Capone was someone we could recognize from a block away. Pilsen seemed like it would be a better place if he’d never been born.

Capone was an addict. He did everything: coke, heroin, happy stick. His favorite pastime was cornering kids in gangways. “What you be about?” he’d demand, a crazy, mindless look in his eyes. “
Am-brose Love,
” the kids would stammer out. They all knew the routine. Capone liked to bum cigarettes. When taking one he’d say, “Let me get a few more for later.” If you protested he’d say, “Want to fight about it?”

One time he asked Chuey for a cigarette and Chuey said no. Capone punched him so hard in the chest that Chuey lost his breath. There should’ve been payback. Chuey’s family were all Two-Ones. Chuey could’ve said something and all four of his brothers, a few uncles even, would’ve been out hunting for Capone—and they would’ve found him. But Chuey never said anything. “It doesn’t matter,” Chuey said. “It’s not like that fucker will ever learn.” Chuey was right. Once or twice a year Capone was beaten, bloodshot eyes, cut-up face, casts over broken limbs; even looking like that he’d be out gangbanging. Still, it would have been sweet to know Capone’s ass had been kicked yet again, and that Chuey’s brothers had done it.

“Just remember that car,” I said.

The Cadillac peeled off onto Twenty-Second Street.

“If they come back around we’ll meet up behind the Farmfoods.”

We continued walking.

We passed the old funeral parlor, the large, arched doorway that was once the entrance to a barn at the back of the building. We passed beneath the stone horse’s head, the words
FUNERAL PARLOUR
embedded in color tiles in the arch. Now the building was just another place to live, like so many other storefronts in our neighborhood, boarded-up plateglass windows, marquees covered with plywood, everything washed in a deep maroon as if to match the dirty brick of the neighborhood.

We turned north and headed toward Speedy’s corner store. Our joint was running short. Chuey passed what was left to Marcus. “We should get some more weed,” Marcus said. He pinched the lit joint and brought it to his puckered lips.

Chuey took a breath.

“I can bring things back to life,” he said.

I turned.

“What did you say?”

“I can bring things back to life,” he said again. “I did it this morning, a dead bird.”

Chuey was staring down at the sidewalk. His hair hung low over his brow. His arms were locked at the elbows, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

Alfonzo and Marcus turned.

Marcus was trying to position the roach in his fingers.

“You can bring things back to life?” Alfonzo said.

“Yeah,” Chuey said. He lifted his head. He gave a jerk to get the hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know how. It was an accident. I was walking by Wolcott and I saw this thing in the alley. It was green, a parrot, with a red beak.”

“We don’t have parrots,” Marcus said. “Too cold.”

“I know,” Chuey said. “That’s why it was weird. Then I went over there and just touched it. And the thing woke up and flew away.”

I wondered if Chuey had been smoking earlier. He did that sometimes, got high alone. I looked at his eyes. They weren’t glossy like they usually were when he smoked too much. They weren’t lit-up either, as if he might be telling a joke. But then Chuey wasn’t one to tell jokes. Generally what he said was serious—even if it was funny, like a story, it was always true.

“Maybe the bird just got knocked out,” I said. “They fly into windows and shit.”

Chuey shrugged.

“Why would you touch a dead bird, anyway?” Alfonzo asked.

“For real,” Marcus said. “That’s fucking gross.”

“Show us where you found it,” I said. And Chuey took the lead. He headed down Cullerton Avenue. We were high. At that point we really started to be high. For some reason I remember snow falling, but I don’t remember any snow being on the ground. In any case, things suddenly seemed to be happening, more things than I could register, and all I recall about the rest of that day is the burnt-orange leather of Chuey’s jacket, and Chuey talking fast and pointing things out in the middle of an alley.

Chuey was a hippie; at least that’s what everybody in school called him. I’m not sure they even knew what a hippie was. Chuey was more a rocker. He’d introduced us to Rush, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Chuey gave us our first taste of reefer, back in the seventh grade—he’d stolen it from his cousin Rom. Even then everyone called Chuey a hippy,
we
called Chuey a hippy, but back then it was because of those crazy shoes he wore. He didn’t start wearing that
funky leather jacket until high school.

White-boy shoes, that’s what they were. Black, brushed suede. None of us would’ve dared to wear such things. They were Herman Munster boots, and if it wasn’t for Chuey’s long brown hair we might have called him Herman Munster instead of Hippie. Herman Munster or White Boy, one of the two. Chuey never tied his boots. They looked like they would get left behind if he ever had to run anywhere. Of course, Chuey never ran anywhere. Which was one of the reasons we hung around with him. We never ran anywhere, either, spending our lunches instead on the Thomas Cooper Elementary School steps, trying to look cool for the girls, trying to believe we were anywhere but school, trying to ignore the fact that a school bell dictated our lives so completely.

By high school, though, Chuey had adopted at least part of the Pilsen uniform: black Converse All Stars. He still wore straight-leg jeans. The rest of us wore Bogarts—baggy pants with sixteen pleats cascading from the waist, tight cuffs at the ankles. It was strange that Chuey didn’t adopt more of the neighborhood style. He had grown up in Pilsen, just like the rest of us. In fact, Chuey’s roots were deeper in the neighborhood than any of ours were. Our parents had come straight from Mexico. Marcus, Alfonzo, and I were first-generations. Our parents worked in factories, didn’t speak English. Chuey’s parents were gangbangers, old gangbangers, sons and daughters of immigrants. Chuey seemed a step ahead. Like if we ever had kids they’d come out like Chuey, a little more worldly than we ever were. We were jealous of Chuey for who his family was, people who had tattoos, people who had served time in jail, men with names like Hustler, Shyster, Red, women named Chachie
or Birdie. These were the people a child growing up in Pilsen heard stories about, people who gave someone from our neighborhood life, history. Chuey never seemed to care. He didn’t walk with pimp. He didn’t magic-marker gang initials on the white soles of his Converses. He didn’t tattoo things on the backs of his hands. Rather, Chuey just seemed to be drifting.

Two days after that day in the alley we were sitting in the school atrium. We were smoking Alfonzo’s Kools. We were not high.

“I did it again,” Chuey whispered.

We were on lunch.

“Hey, bro,” Alfonzo said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in biology or something?”

“Yeah, I know,” Chuey said. He was still whispering. “But listen, I did it again.”

“What?” Alfonzo asked.

“Raised the dead, bro,” Chuey said. He was excited, smiling. “Another bird, man, a little sparrow, right outside my window. It must’ve froze to death.”

I looked to the group of girls sitting behind us. They had heard Chuey. They were laughing, making faces. I smiled at them.

“I asked my great-grandfather,” Chuey said. “He said I had the gift of his people, the Seri, back in Sonora, God’s Country.” By now the girls behind us were paying even more attention. I pinched my fingers and touched them to my lips. The girls started laughing again.

“You’re not an Indian, bro,” Marcus said.

“No, but I have the gift,” Chuey said. “It’s in my blood.”

None of us said anything.

Chuey’s great-grandfather
was
an Indian. Back in grammar school we once sent Chuey home with phrases to translate. The next day he came back with these crazy sounds that were supposed to be words:
“Motherfucker
is…” “
Give me a beer
is…” “
Hey baby what’s your name
is…” The language had hard
t’
s and heaves yet still managed to sound somehow Spanish. Chuey’s great-grandfather still lived in Mexico. He sent Chuey things: that ugly leather jacket, a rusting metal pendant, a small sack of tin coins. It was junk, the stuff you’d find in a secondhand store on Eighteenth Street. Chuey called them heirlooms.