Painted Cities (16 page)

“The fish,” she said. “Didn’t you ever see the fish floating on top?”

“No.”

“We should come out in the day sometime. You’ll see the dead fish, how they float on the top.”

“Do you think the group KISS are really devil worshippers?”

“No, I don’t think they worship the devil. But I think maybe they know some kind of magic.”

“Do you think they ever take off their makeup?”

“No. They do everything with their makeup on. They even sleep with it on. They never take it off.”

My aunt and I had conversations like this as we walked down the broken streets of our neighborhood. We always moved along the same route, starting out toward downtown, the big buildings of the Loop, then turning up and over the railway viaduct, then moving down by the shrimp store, then over the river. We were always on the edge, skirting the lines, the boundaries. I often felt that one step too far to the left would cause the earth to crumble beneath my feet, and off I would tumble into darkness, nothingness, my aunt looking down at me, her hair blowing in the wind, a look on her face like she’d seen things like this happen before.

STREETLIGHT

W
e stole the ladder from Fat Javy’s house. It was in his gangway. He should’ve had it locked up.

Sergio was more drunk than me. We laughed as we walked down Javy’s gangway. I remember Javy opening his window and saying something. I remember Sergio saying something back. I wish I could remember what it was now. It was funny as hell.

We walked down Twenty-First Place. Sergio was in the front. I was in the back. The streets were empty. It was late. We had school the next morning.

I remember now. I remember Little Joseph opened his screen door. It was warm that night, like close to the end of the school year. Little Joseph, who was eight or nine at the time, opened his screen door and asked us: “What are you guys doing?”

“Shhhh,” Sergio told him. “We’re breaking into Yesenia’s house.” We started laughing again. Little Joseph looked at me and smiled, then he closed his screen door. When Little Joseph was fourteen he was stabbed to death by his girlfriend, a girl who everyone said “loved him too much.” It’s funny how you remember things, a word or two, a scene you carry with you for the rest of your life.
What are you guys doing?
I remember Little Joseph.

We got to Yesenia’s building. Sergio said he knew where her bedroom was. “Right here,” he said. “It’s this one. I’m positive.”

We placed the ladder up against the wall. She lived on the second floor. The top of the ladder rested just below the window ledge.

“Hold on to it tight,” I said to Sergio.

“All right,” he said.

I began to climb.

It was a long climb, longer than I’d expected. Halfway up I stopped to rest my arms. I looked up the block. Streetlamp poles sliced long, thin shadows across the orange-tinted sidewalk. An L train rumbled over Hoyne Avenue then disappeared behind the Lutheran church. I looked down to Sergio. His face was bright orange with streetlight.

“Hey, bro,” he whispered loudly to me. “Tell her you love her.” He started to laugh.

“Fuck you,” I said down to him.

And then I turned and continued to climb.

BLUE MAGIC

S
he made me dance. It was her. I never wanted to.

She was drunk. I knew she was when she started to smoke the Kools she bummed off my aunt Stephanie, or my father’s Winstons when Stephanie had run out. She’d hold the cigarette between two fingers and with her remaining fingers hold on to my small hand. In those days I was just barely tall enough to stare at her breasts, but I didn’t. I looked down at our feet, my dirty white socks, her bare, dark toes. She was a natural barefooter. It was in her blood.

“No, no,” she corrected. “Like this,
Mm, mm—mm, mm.”
She moved to the Chi-Lites, the Delfonics. She swung her hips, stepped in a way that appeared entirely light. I followed her movements. “Listen to the song,” she corrected. “There… there you go… right… that’s it.” At this point I closed my eyes.

I don’t remember much after that, at our parties. The feeling
I remember after closing my eyes is something similar to what I felt as a drunk teenager, cruising with my partners, time and distance nonexistent.

For me, our parties always ended up this way. I remember small things, people laughing, cursing. I remember my aunt Chefa cackling, that laugh she used to have. I remember my cousin Bobby fistfighting with my aunt Bernice’s boyfriend, Fabian. I remember bottles of wine, clinks of glasses. I remember the Stylistics, Blue Magic. I remember death being something that happened to people I didn’t even know, ancient, gray people from Mexico or Poland, places I’d never seen, places I could only imagine. And I remember a song called “I Do Love You.” And if I could, I would take my mother in my arms again, and I would dance with her to that song, which went, “
I do love you, Ooo-oo-o, yes I do, girl
.”

GROWING PAINS

T
hey sat at the edge of the sprinkler pool, the two of them, a boy who spoke no Spanish and his grandmother just in from Mexico. He reached for his shoes, Daniel. He reached down to take off his shoes and immediately his grandmother moved to help. She untied the left, then the right, then paired them up and placed them between her and her grandson. She patted them as if they were alive.

She wasn’t much taller than him. As they sat there together it seemed in fact that Daniel was taller than his grandmother. But she was wide. Not fat or even heavyset, just wide, like a tank or a bulldozer is wide. Daniel looked at her arm. She wore a dark flannel long-sleeve shirt. She’d worn long-sleeves for the past week, ever since she’d arrived in the States. It was mid-August in Chicago, hot, humid. Still, Daniel thought, she was from Mexico. Chicago summers were just too cold for her.

He looked up and noticed his grandmother was staring at his
feet. He was wearing dirty socks. Daniel had known that they would end up at the sprinkler pool today. He had known his grandmother would ask him if he wanted to go in: she’d done the same thing every day since she’d arrived. But he’d put on dirty socks anyway. There were cleaner ones in the dirty pile, Daniel knew. But he’d simply grabbed the first pair he found, a pair lying on the floor next to the dirty basket. Now he hesitated before reaching to pull them off.

His grandmother sighed. She looked up across the park, focusing her beady eyes on something far away. She looked back to him. “
Pues
,” she said. “
Andale
.” She clapped her hands. “
Andale, andale
.” She reached down, grabbed the toe of his left sock and yanked it off. Then she went for the right. She held the socks up in front of her. For a moment Daniel thought she might bring them to her nose for a smell. But she only sighed again, then flapped them out. She folded the socks neatly, dirtiest sides in, then tucked them into his shoes. She looked back to him. “
Pues, que tienes?
” she asked. Her voice was squeaky, witchy, like there was a cackle in there somewhere, waiting to come out.

“
Nada
,” Daniel answered. But the word came out wrong, the
d
sharp and heavy, the way the word sounded in English. He got to his feet and walked slowly toward the sprinkler. Na-
tha
he told himself. Na-
tha
.

The trip to pick up his grandmother had been only slightly eventful. It could’ve been worse. He and his mother had made the long trip to the airport in their silver 1978 Ford Granada, the one with the thermostat problem. Daniel didn’t understand what the thermostat was
and he doubted that his mother did, yet every time the car started smoking and wheezing and eventually stalled, his mother mumbled “Fucking thermostat” as if she knew exactly why it had stopped the car from moving.

His grandmother’s flight was to arrive at 1:25 a.m. That night the air was cool and damp, the type of heavy night that forecasted the end of summer, the coming school year. It was the type of weather that gave Daniel his aches, or
rumas
, as his mother called them: the “Mexican pains.”

“Good thing it’s cool out tonight,” his mother said as they pulled onto the expressway. “Fucking thermostat might actually work.” Daniel moaned. Above them long rows of streetlamps stretched off into the distance. Shadows from each light pole flickered through the car’s interior, strobing what little light there was. Down below, to either side of the expressway, the lamps at street level held wide orange halos of humidity.

They approached Eighteenth Street, Providence of God Church. Just around the corner lived his great-uncle Max, whom he hadn’t seen in two years, who’d raised his mother when she first moved to Chicago. When Daniel was younger, his cousins, Max’s daughters, had babysat him. They were more like aunts back then, more like sisters to his mother, the way she had lived with them. They used to take him on long walks around the neighborhood and he remembered how the expressway sounded from underneath, the high whine of tires, the low drone of truck engines, the shudder of engine brakes. Where he and his mother lived now, Twenty-Second Street, was in the same neighborhood, just farther away from the expressway. Still, on clear nights the sound of travel could be heard
through Daniel’s window and it helped him get to sleep.

They passed the Sears Tower, the city skyline. He looked out to the Morton Salt factory, its blue corrugated roof lit up bright,
M-O-R-T-O-N
spelled out in large white block letters. A wave of pain shot through his knees. He flinched.

“What, you got your
rumas
again?” his mother asked. At the steering wheel, between two fingers, his mother held a Newport 100. The embers glowed a bright red, pulsing with the air rushing in through her open window.

“Maybe it’s time to take you back to the doctor,” she said.

“I don’t need to go the doctor,” Daniel replied. “It’ll go away.” He reached down and began massaging his knees.

“It’s up to you,” his mother said. “I’d go, though.” She brought the cigarette to her mouth.

When Daniel was a young boy his mother had taken him to four separate doctors, pediatricians. Finally she had taken him to a fifth, a geriatrician, looking for some answers about the arthritic-like pains Daniel was experiencing in his joints. “Just growing pains,” they all said. “He’ll outgrow them.” They all said this with a smile. They all patted him on the head and called him “Sport.”

Daniel had yet to outgrow his growing pains. He was now ten years old. Whenever the weather changed, whenever the air was thick and wet, Daniel felt his joints swell and stiffen. When he was younger the ache had been so bad he’d had to soak in steaming hot baths for hours at a time. He often wasn’t able to sleep and instead would sit and cry until his mother came into his room with the Ben-gay. Now, at his older age, Daniel had come to accept the pains like one does an annoying relative: just put up with them, they’ll
eventually go away. In his sock drawer he kept his own tubes of Ben-gay, two of them, just in case one ran out.

Cool air from his mother’s open window swirled around Daniel and his pains. The car had no radio and instead his mother sang Smokey Robinson tunes one after another—“Baby That’s Backatcha,” “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.” She hummed the words, stopping only for a Newport inhale, or when she suddenly seemed deep in thought.

“Mom, can’t you close your window?” Daniel asked. His mother was quiet for the moment, driving, looking straight ahead. Daniel could see the distance his mother’s gaze often assumed, like on days off when she parked herself in front of the TV and watched
The Price Is Right
, or Friday nights, when she watched
Dallas
. Daniel hated that look of his mother’s. He thought she looked dumb at those times, helpless.

“Mom,” he said again.

“What, baby?” his mother asked. She reached across her body and tapped her cigarette on the top edge of her window.

“Your window,” Daniel said. “Can’t you close it?”

“Oh. Sorry,” she said. She took one last inhale, then made a motion to throw the cigarette out. Just before releasing it she stopped and brought it back for a quick, final tug. Then she tossed the butt out the window. In the light of the expressway, Daniel caught sight of the faded green tattoo on the web of his mother’s right hand. It was small, a six-pointed star with a
T
in the center. The tattoo had been there since before Daniel was born; he’d grown up with it, but it never failed to catch his eye. When he’d asked about it in the past, the only answer he’d gotten was that it was a club his mother used
to belong to. “We did stupid things,” his mother said. Daniel knew the truth, that his mother had actually been in a street gang. The Tokers didn’t even exist anymore as far as Daniel knew. But some of their graffiti, old and faded, was still scrawled on the factories and warehouses back in their neighborhood.