Painted Cities (20 page)

“I thought I heard a gunshot.”

“Must’ve been the traffic,” I said.

I lay down. I was shaking. She was staring down at me. I could feel it.

“Jesse, what did you do?” she asked me.

“Nothing,” I told her. “It’s cold out there. I don’t even know where he went. That guy’s a fucking chameleon.”

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I could even hear it in my breathing.

“Jesse, you know, he’s just going through hard times,” she said. “Just let him be. He’ll get over it. I know him. I know how he is.”

I turned my face into my pillow and closed my eyes. My wife
finally lay down. I took a deep breath, then another.

I’ve never told anyone about what I did. And whatever neighborhood talk there was seems to have been confined to Marcus’s part of Pilsen. This is how it is when people have enemies. The gun still sits underneath my underwear, in my dresser drawer. For a few days my underwear smelled like gunpowder.

That was four months ago. Since then my wife has brought up Marcus only once, and even then it was to comment on something little Marcus did, how he “looked” like his father when he got frustrated. At night, though, each time there is a knock or a scrape near any window, my wife stirs. I can feel her wake up. I can feel her stop breathing for just a moment, as if even her breath gets in the way of what she thinks she hears.

I know she will start to suspect something, eventually. I know she will begin to suspect. And when she asks, I will not tell her I killed the man she loves. But my son I feel I must tell, at some point. Just so that he knows his father loves him. Just so that he knows his father would do anything for his family.

SUPERNATURAL

O
nly a miracle could draw people to that canal. It has been forgotten about, shut off from the main river years ago, left as a depository of dumped appliances, cars, street-gang hits.

It’s the perfect ghetto miracle. The toxic haze glowing bright green as if its light were filtered through emeralds. Maybe the years of dumped chemical solvents from the factory alongside it have finally yielded the kind of catastrophe scientific experts have anticipated for years. But this catastrophe is beautiful. A fluorescent haze that comes into sight each night, deepening as the heat of the day settles around the neighborhood.

They’ve been coming here for a week, the crowds, getting larger each successive night. The canal banks can barely hold the masses of people now. The spectators have begun spilling over into the factory’s gravel parking lot, onto the bridge that spans the canal, onto Thirty-First Street, filling it in for blocks, as if in exodus.

Word has obviously gotten around. Probably passed along the front stoops of the neighborhood like hot merchandise. Down Twenty-Sixth Street, past the Cook County lockup, past the taco stands, the corner taverns, the story indulged a little more with every pass and reception:
The glow’s deep, man, I mean deep. People are being cured and shit. Lil’ Ralphy can walk again
.

The words would have sailed over the junkyards, the sleeping drunks, the trade school, the abandoned drive-in. They would’ve come to rest at Cicero Avenue, where the ghetto stops and a vast field of open prairie spans from there to the next neighborhood. The words would’ve mixed in with other marooned statements, the old news that had come to rest there, no one left to listen:
Crazy Frankie shot Player. Got me some wicked shit. The bitch is dead
.

Memo, everyone agrees, should’ve been the first to appear, charging money for canal-side seats, a dollar a pop, like he charges for his snow-cone
raspas
, his cucumber
pepinos
, every time there’s a police investigation. With his nose for disaster, kids spend their summer days following him around the neighborhood, cheering when he starts his sprints, which sometimes last for blocks, ending at the next brutal event. His swift parades flash between buildings. His handcart bells jingle. His red baseball cap beckons the kids to follow. Eventually they stop at some place where there’s blood in the street and Memo starts to call out, “
Raspas! Pepinos!
” not even winded. The kids, panting, lean up against each other and savor the carnage. Sometimes, if they have money, they pitch in and actually buy something.

But Memo, even with his nose attuned as it is to moneymaking opportunities, couldn’t detect the event, didn’t. And the brujas didn’t
either, the back-alley witches of K-Town, where all the witches are said to live, drawing power from the uniformity of the street names—Karlov, Kedvale, Keeler. And maybe, at the heart of it, this is the appeal of the green glow. How those normally attuned to the supernatural, those who seem to have a “sixth sense,” seem dumb-struck, as if it were beyond their comprehension.

The event has taken on an air of revival. Estranged family members are reunited, quarreling relatives embrace, old partners, gangbangers, are brought back together as if their differences, their knife fights, their nights spent hunting for each other with baseball bats, had never occurred. “Just like old times,” they say to each other. And this phrase permeates the crowd. Husbands are reunited with the mothers of their children. Boyfriends hug ex-common-law wives. The night becomes one big flashback. Everyone sliding one step back to a time when they were happy, or at least thought so.

Around nine o’clock, when the buzz of the insects turns to a strong throb, and the sun, somewhere behind all the haze, the buildings and church steeples, starts to set, the crowd quiets, and a flicker of green starts to snap at the center of the canal, just above the water. The flicker jerks and twists, then explodes into an opaque globe of light, strong, like a spirit, like you expect it to talk—but it doesn’t. It just hovers there, casting a white light that passes into green as it reaches the crowd. The pulse of the insects fades, conversations, thoughts, movements stop, and a dullness takes over.

A freeze-frame, a wide-angled freeze-frame showing the long expanse of Thirty-First Street, its corridor of streetlights stretching into the horizon, would show the crowds en route. It would show them all staring up, pointing as if at fireworks, a glaze across their
eyes as if they were under mass hypnosis. Some would be caught with their mouths open, black gapes, white teeth catching the light, streetlight maybe, but maybe the light of the glow as well.

Young women would be caught looking innocent. Those with tattooed tears, those holding babies, would be caught looking like their children, sharing their defenselessness, their vulnerability. And the young men too would be caught smiling the way gangsters do when some truth is revealed—innocently, giving one the slightest hope that they could be reasoned with, “saved,” as some of their mothers might say. Of course, they never can be. Gangster faces change like masks. They’re defense mechanisms. But in the freeze-frame the gangsters would be caught red-handed, smiling like bashful teenagers, as if they’ve suddenly found the right answer to a math problem on the blackboard before a class of schoolmates raised from the dead.

In the freeze-frame, Thirty-First Street would be crowded, ready to burst its sides and collapse the walls of the abandoned buildings that line its sidewalks. The exodus might be confused with any other pilgrimage, quests to view saints, kiss the feet of monks, to discover the meaning of life in deserts in Saudi Arabia, atop mountains in South America.

At the bottom of the freeze-frame, those closest to the glow have begun to take seats, resigned to the thought that they won’t get any closer, overwhelmed by whatever the green glow holds.

And this goes on all night, through the heat. The drunks stay awake. The clergy from the local churches lead prayer sessions. Memo, the
vendedor
, stands there, his band of children crowded around him. The witches’ assistants scan the crowd for more faces, those of the
dead, the forgotten, more of whom seem to appear each night.

As morning comes, the very first tinges of light sliding up the horizon, the green glow begins to fade, and so does the mystery of whatever brought the people here. Shadows give way to starkness, reality, and slowly the people begin to move, some slower than others, embarrassed by their own gullibility. As they make their way back up Thirty-First Street to their sweatbox apartments, they crowd in closer, like cattle, seeking safety in numbers. They avoid eye contact, slouch as if hung over. They carry their sleeping children, the mothers following the fathers, everything in reverse. There is an aura of defeat to the crowd. Truth becomes apparent. There is only heat to look forward to, days spent at work, in factories, as secretaries, days spent in bed, days spent watching Memo charge up and down side streets, days spent believing in God, witches, prayer, the coming of another night.

ICE CASTLES

O
n the south side of Chicago, at Harlem Avenue and Archer, Joe and Frank’s Meat Market pumps out smoked kielbasas like clockwork. Every Wednesday and Friday the smell of burning hickory fills the intersection. If the air is stagnant, smoke billows from Joe and Frank’s chimney and fills the street corner like fog. But when the wind is up, the smoke carries. I live in Berwyn, a full three miles north of Joe and Frank’s, and still, on a good day, with a gust of wind from the Bedford Park Intermodal, a blast of air from the Sanitary and Ship Canal, I can pick up the scent of Joe and Frank’s. It reminds me of my childhood and of Pilsen.

Pilsen was marooned by relics, locked in by ancient industry. To the north was the old C, B & Q Railroad yard, rusted arrays of tracks twenty or thirty sets wide. To the east was the Chicago River and its permanently raised bridges. And to the south was Twenty-Second Street and its mile-long stretch of power plants, vacant warehouses, and junkyards. Pilsen was tall, dense, massive. The only reprieve
was the uniformity: the open-air gangways that matched up perfectly from block to block, the side streets that ran uninterrupted through Pilsen. At any point in the neighborhood, down these corridors, our borders were in full view: the abandoned bridges at the river, the terrifyingly dark viaducts at Seventeenth Street, and above it all the fuming smokestacks of Twenty-Second Street.

Our houses were our reflections, cramped, utilitarian. We lived atop one another in wood-frame, two- and three-flat apartment buildings, clapboard siding like stereo-sundials as the sun rose and set. All of our houses were off-kilter somehow, a limping back porch, front steps crumbling and broken like ancient ruins. In some cases the flaws were inside, like in our apartment, where I could roll a penny in the kitchen and have it continue through the living room, pick up speed in the bedroom, and, if the back door was open, hop the threshold right out onto the porch. Pilsen had its share of stone-faced buildings, storefronts, brick churches, corner tenements, but these were torn up as well, mortar dark and broken like rotting teeth, soot rising in columns from wall-mounted chimneys. Pilsen was dark, forever. We lived in shadows with railroad tracks beneath our feet, tracks that ended at walled-off docks or rusted-over bumpers or sometimes at nothing at all, two lines side by side cut off in the middle of a street, traffic beating the ends into the asphalt, burying them slowly, inch by inch, like the whole city was sinking, Pilsen first.

Back then my father was a cab driver. He was in school studying to be a social worker. I didn’t see him much. My mother was a secretary. She worked at an insurance agency, a social-service agency, the phone company: she changed jobs so often I stopped wondering where she worked. She would sigh as we ate dinner alone in our
tiny kitchen. Sometimes I would sigh back. “Bad day?” my mother would ask.

“Yes,” I would answer.

“Me too,” she would say.

There was nothing excessive about my family’s existence. We didn’t go out for breakfast. We didn’t order Chinese food. We ate beans and tortillas, fried potatoes, the occasional egg with my mother’s green salsa. My mother made one thing each Sunday without fail, a pot of
frijoles
, and in the winter the kitchen window would fog over with steam and the house would smell of garlic and onions. In the summer when all the windows of the neighborhood were open and all of Pilsen was making its
frijoles
for the week, the whole neighborhood smelled of garlic and onions.

Memories of my father during this time are sparse. I used to see him asleep on the couch as I got ready for school. Sometimes I would wake to use the bathroom and he would be at the kitchen table eating leftovers. The streetlight outside would illuminate our white curtain; our white table would reflect the dim light of the kitchen. My father would watch me walk across the kitchen and into the bathroom. Then, when I was done, he’d watch me walk back across the kitchen, everything in total silence, like he was afraid to speak. As it stands, most of our encounters during this period seem more like dreams than actual memories. And really what seems most stark about those memories is the checkered-flag floor in our old kitchen, the tall, rotted step to get up into the bathroom, the painted-over hook on the door, the orange streetlight shining through my mother’s sheer curtain. The image of my father sitting there is so vague I’ve nearly forgotten it: my father is a forgotten dream, how much
more detached can I be? But we had the fires, him and me. If not for the fires I might have forgotten who my father was altogether.