The Holy Terror (4 page)

Years later, Francis Madsen Haid would be sitting in front of a television at Massie’s Bar on Augusta Boulevard, flanked by losers like Dennis Cassady and others embittered over their trapped lives. He would be drinking a draft beer and watching the hostages gaining their release from captivity in Iran, when a news bulletin of local interest flashed across the bottom of the screen. Many of the patrons had to read aloud, word for word, as they did with severe weather watches.

The news item would say that a forty year old Bucktown man had confessed to starting a fire at the St. Vitus catholic school on Crystal and California Streets in 1958. The man’s name was Jeffrey DiMusi and he had been reprimanded earlier that winter by one of the nuns for smoking in a stairwell. To avoid being caught a second time, he had hurriedly tossed his lit cigarette into that same stairwell.

DiMusi would commit suicide at Cook County Hospital the next night, but for long hours before that, Haid would recall the fire and the falling.

He remembered God coming through the flames and embracing him, soothing him and telling him to come home. He could barely remember more than that.

He could recall the man’s caress.

But not the terror he had felt.

The holy terror.

Winter 1988

This tired city was somebody’s dream

Billboard horizons as black as they seem

Four level highways across the land

We’re building a home for the family of man

And it’s so hard whatever we are coming to

Yes it’s so hard with so little time

And so much to do

Time running out for the family of man

-”Family of Man” THREE DOG NIGHT

“Man, ain’t you ascared some big ol’ maggot goan crawl down that hole in your throat, you come in here looking like that?” Reginald Givens gave Mike Surfer the badeye—a variation of the one he saved up for his parole officer—as he watched his friend wipe the piece of plastic free of spittle.

“First, I done been in here twenty damn minutes,” Surfer’s voice was smoother than that of the younger man across from him. “Here” was the Hard Times Lounge on Randolph and Canal, and he’d hoped his voice had carried enough so that Chet the bartender would see fit to bring him a lousy draft. “Second, it only takes a second. See it’s already back, and here comes Chet. Order up, Reggie, I picksed up my disability check today.”

“Man’s got it hard, with they only selling Old Style on tap.” Givens still had the mouth that got him into Joliet when he was barely old enough to set on a bar stool, let alone drink.

“Hush,” Surfer patted his hand on the table. “Seem’ as it’s free...” He raised two fingers, giving a Sideways nod at his short friend.

“I know, I know. Don’t you think you might want to go to the baffroom when you clean that thing in your throat?” Givens wasn’t letting up on that one thing. Both men were black and both were in wheelchairs, as well. Three years after his last stint at the Correctional Center, Reginald Givens had gotten himself faced and fallen onto the elevated tracks on Kinzie. The passing Ravenswood All-Stops had successfully amputated his right leg at the knee.

Michael Surles, who called himself Mike Surfer because of the ease with which he maneuvered the streets of the Loop and West Side, was a hydrocephalic. He had been a syphilis baby, as there are crack babies today, and he had worn a plastic shunt around his neck for all of the forty-seven years of his life. The shunt was the thing Givens had been talking about. Commonly known as water on the brain, the disease is an excessive accumulation of CSF—cerebro-spinal fluid—in the brain. Surfer’s shunt, a circular device which resembled nothing so more than a cheap medallion from a sixties science-fiction show, fit on a tan velcro strap into a tracheotomy hole just below his Adam’s apple. His disease was not of severity, but his neck muscles were weak, and a bulging forehead gave his eyes a downward cast.

The latter characteristic suited him just fine, as he looked at himself in the mirror thinking his eyes made him into a black, hipper, version of Steve Carella, from the 87th Precinct novels. Surfer was a resident at the Rainey Marclinn Home down Randolph, as was Givens, and Wilma Jerrickson, another tenant, often let him read cop novels by Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard.

“Just you drink,” Surfer told him with a beer foam moustache over his own grey one. “And be glad you only got that.” He nudged Givens’ stump under the table with his foot.

“Enough to groin you on the street you want to clown, man.”

“I’m sayin’ is, lighten up, is all.” The two men drank their beer in silence for a time. Hard -Times Lounge was a misnomer of sorts, because, although it catered to a few loose psychos from the Halsted Street skids two blocks to the west beyond the Kennedy overpass, the majority of the clientele worked in River Plaza, where the offices of Social Security and Disability were located. Which was how the men in the chairs and canes ended up here. Chet the bartender took care of them even when they hadn’t come from picking up a check, and he’d cash it for them on the days that they did.

“Goan be chillin’ this winter.” Givens offered up in apology. “Leg’s already throbbing, it’s only November.”

Someone in the shadows went up to the Seeberg juke and punched in “Luckenbach, Texas.”

“Waylon and his ol’ Willie,” Givens said.

* * *

The two men had parted after they had crossed the river at Wacker. As much as Reginald complained about the cold, he was still a hustler at heart. It was only two in the afternoon. Two hours of daylight left, Surles figured his friend for having a decent game of monte going on soon enough. The shills would supplement his disability check but good.

“Got to have the faif, man.” Givens had waved.

“Yea, faith. Keep on keepin’,” Surfer had returned, with so little conviction towards his friend’s equating religion and criminality that he did not bother to cover his shunt with his forefinger. He doubted that Reg would have been listening, even if his response had been audible.

Back in the Hard Times, he was no stranger to most of the steadies there. No one would give it a second glance when he touched either forefinger to the plastic device whenever speaking. As with most of the Marclinn’s residents, many of his moves were unconscious.

Many of the late-afternoon crowd and storefront employees knew him as well, and sometimes, when his personal pain was darkest, Surfer thought that maybe they smiled only out of relief because he was not looking for a handout.

Now that he was past the incline of North Wacker Drive, he reached into his white sidepack—10th Annual Ortho-Olympics stenciled in blue across the pack, his name and address back when he lived on Keystone across the flap in red—and pulled out a cassette-Walkman. Flipped in a tape of sixties beach music.

“Ride, ride, ride, the wild surf...” he sang, passing the United Cerebral Palsy building at 318 West. Waved hello to Miss DeWalt as she rushed back from lunch. In front of the Randolph Towers a block east, old Chubby Lovell pandered for the tourists who went into the lobby’s McDonald’s.

Surfer had told Chubby Love he should pick a location opposite a lesser landmark than Capone’s Bismarck Hotel. He’d make more jingle on the State Street Mall.

He had plenty of room once he hit the 100 block. The silver arc of the State of Illinois Building to his left, City Hall kat-corner, Surfer just wished that the pedway under the two blocks was accessible to those in wheelchairs. Sometimes he really didn’t understand what each new mayoral administration was bragging about. And he didn’t think things would be any better if Richard Daley Jr. was elected in April.

So he made do with the wide open expanse, letting the songs of Jan & Dean or The Hondells - keep him from shivering too much. He saw Blackstone Shatner out hustling up pennies by the Greyhound Terminal. The guy drank his wine from an old detergent measuring cup and he wasn’t even clownin’ when he did it. Surfer wondered how Givens was making out. The three wrought-iron sculptures atop theMarclinn’s doors were less than a block away. At least, he would be out of the cold.

Today was the day that he would save the three card monte dealer and take him to gloryland. The man that tomorrow’s papers would call The Painkiller was certain of this and he felt good.

At twenty after three that Thursday evening, Francis Madsen Haid walked past an orange Volkswagen Beetle that had been abandoned in the alley off Tooker Street. It effectively blocked the entrance to his first floor apartment, but since Uncle Vince’s death in September, he hadn’t had any need for maneuvering room for his beloved Father’s wheelchair. In addition, the ancient car succeeded in blocking any strays who might come across the smell and become inquisitive...

He figured that he had a good hour of daylight to catch up with the monte dealer. Of all those in the chairs that needed saving, Haid had found himself thinking with increasing frequency that the dealer wanted it most of all. Father seemed to agree. And in the two months Haid had been walking the streets, searching, recalling faces and hangouts, he knew that the dealer would be flipping the cards on Couch Street, a glorified alley behind the United Cerebral Palsy building. That was his destination.

His sparse blond hair whipping across his forehead in a November wind that came in off the lake, he made several strides toward’s the alley’s entrance on Dearborn Street before turning back and rechecking that the door had been locked securely. It had been double-locked, but he still had to look.

When he had walked down Dearborn past Chicago to Superior, he still fought an urge to go back and check the lot. But the patch of lighter grey in the overcast sky was dropping further behind the CHA projects. Today was the day he would finally make Father proud.

* * *

Today would be best for the crippled man, of this he was certain. The weather was playing havoc with his own limbs, he knew that the other’s pain must be a hundred times worse. Trapped in the chrome cell of the chair. Yes, the man would welcome his presence and thank him.

On his way to Couch Street, it was only across the river and he’d be there in a moment, Haid stopped in front of a strip joint in the 400 block of North Clark. One of those places where you paid to stick your dingus through a slot and a woman in a booth would suck it. He stopped because the weathered brown door opened and a white man in a wheelchair—he had a bushy brown beard and Haid suspected him to be a veteran of Vietnam—rolled down the step. His features were washed in the lilac neon surrounding the windows. The neon said Bare Bodies and Sex Stage. A man of about the same age followed the other down towards the Merchandise Mart, but Haid knew that they were not together by the way the walking man, with shoulder-length blond hair falling over a black suede jacket, regarded the other. His gaze was constantly going back to the man in the chair, who was making somewhat better time down the block.

The two went in opposite directions when they reached Hubbard. Haid had never met either man before, and seeing the man in the wheelchair coming out of a place like that brought up a slew of questions. The man was following Haid’s own path. He continued watching the guy roll along, wondering what kind of woman was sick enough to stuff a limp piece of flesh in her mouth.

* * *

All the wannabe players were gone to their Metra trains or happy hours—it used to be inthis city, happy hour meant cheap liquor; now the original premise was illegal, and all the bars could do was offer free pizza and shit like that in those hours before the Loop shut down. But for the Polish cleaning women, and they didn’t drink.

So there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot Reginald Givens could do but scrounge for a bottle or some recyclable aluminum cans. His deck of cards, the imprint of the Caeser’s Palace casino on one side, lay in his lap, yet to be boxed, which included the red queen with the subtle fold that gave a monte dealer his edge.

Francis Haid watched the man in the chair rummage through a cyclone garbage can, a Vrdolyak sticker slapped on at knee-level. He was at the corner of Wacker and Couch, the black hustler about a quarter of a block in. The dealer’s arm moved within the depths of the trash as might the hand of a near-sighted man who has dropped his glasses onto the living room carpet. He found nothing worth saving, and looked down at the garbage in disgust.

The November sky had been pregnant with rain for two days and the first drops started to fall. Both men cursed their respective gods. Haid speculated briefly that some might consider rain to be a kind of divine intervention.

The few stragglers along Wacker raised their umbrellas or made their Tribunes and Enquirers into tents and went dashing off. Something else for them to complain about. Bastards didn’t know anything about pain, Haid thought. Then, time to make my move.

Standing there a few steps into the glorified alley—given a street name designation so that the delivery people could find the back entrance—Haid breathed once, twice, and let his heartbeat slow. He figured that this was how you felt right before losing your virginity. He started walking towards the hustler.

Into the shadows now. He heard sounds familiar to most Chicago neighborhoods at night: the muffled crumpling of newspapers, the clinking of bottles. He also heard the scrape of the wheelchair’s frame against the metal compactor.