We Come to Our Senses (9 page)

An upscale southern woman is patting her bald, tiny-headed baby, which hangs in a decorative sling over her shoulder. My boss, Mr. Dempster, a wad born of plantocratic stock, is explaining to the lady that an antique Heriz rug is in fact a treasure, despite the toughness of the wool and relative lack of dense Knots Per Square Inch (kpsi). I stand next to a stack of rugs, idle and silent, prepared to showcase another nine-by-twelve as cued by Dempster's nod. The diorama woman swats and seems to be saying,
Well, the rug is lovely Mister Dempster, but all said and done I'm concerned about the central medallion.
The piece has to
. . . She sways, sashays almost as she talks and swats, which is why the dioramic baby is vomiting/has vomited on the parquet floor. Accordingly, this is why the onus came upon me, as clerk, to wipe the milky vomit up.

When complete, my defiant pose will indicate that I've said:
I'll get you some paper towels
. Mr. Dempster's counter-pose will indicate that he has corrected me:
No. You'll
GET
some paper towels
.

The problem, in terms of portraying the resulting tension to Darla, to the world, is how to edit-in all this action, which continues/continued as:
Oh
, the woman replied, aghast at the thought of wiping the vomit up herself; the baby's bitsy head jostled, at the time driving me to conclude that if I were ever to sculpt a baby with a head so minuscule, it would be—and thus is now—deemed a disproportionate flaw (unlike portraying vomit, which may be imprecise); I walked to the back of the store and unraveled many paper towels from the spool, something I'd long gotten used to when cleaning Darla's vomit at home; old popcorn was on the break table in a red plastic basket lifted from Chicken City; a stare-down ensued upon my return: the woman at Dempster, he at me; I stared at the baby and the vomit, and held the towels out for whomever would take them; nobody took them; the baby slung about, looking elsewhere; we were all at a crossroads, and my chest grew heavy as I again thought of Darla.

In the Alley That Runs Behind
My Rotted Clapboard Apartment
House There Are Sick Cats

IN THE ALLEY
that runs behind my rotted clapboard apartment house there are sick cats, everywhere.

No. That's drama. Mostly, they're healthy. A clowder of lithe kittens not yet smashed by the low-riding thugs, or mauled by neighborhood dogs, dogs that crap by my back door.

But there is this one old queen. Her fur is the color of the street-plowed snow. Gunky ruts streak from her eyes, and the end of her tail is hairless, like a rat's. She's the only mature cat I've seen around here. Is Chicago's queen regnant of Hermosa and Humboldt Parks.

I looked for her the other day, after Spec's makeshift IED blew house paint and hot sauce over the driver's side of a parked BMW. Within thirty seconds of the blast, half the neighborhood leaned out of their open windows. Aroused by confusion, their breath tufted in the winter air. It took three minutes for City of Chicago's first responders to arrive, though a full two hours before the bomb squad had cordoned
off the street. (This neighborhood is far more Hermosa than Humboldt, so the saving arrives in degrees.) In the interlude, many of us went outside to gawk, the young snapping selfies while wrapped in dramatic parkas, the old clobbering the cops with accusations of neglect. Having recognized the construction of the IED itself, I just looked for the old cat. As the pinky mix bled into the cavity of shattered side windows, I wondered if she was ready for what's coming.

Fourteen degrees, late November, I find her tugging turkey bones from a fallen trash can. The foil that wraps the carcass scrapes the alley ice. In the four years since my out-processing from Bragg, having abandoned a return to Tennessee for the unknown of Chicago, I've never gotten near her. The cat pivots in precise opposition to my approach, her eyes fixed on me, her tugs convulsive. This is straight-up terminal endurance. It reminds me of an anti-world: urban ops, Baquba. Where high-rises meet skin- and scab-colored streets, and scars of charred sand and metal, and bricks like hailstones and sinews of rebar from pulverized terraces, and black spray-paint warnings on bullet-pocked walls. The plotted oases of palm trees and rushes amid the browns and blacks and bloated.

The fact is, that cat should die. I know this now. God knows it. You look into her eyes and realize that even
she
knows.

Enough spirituality. Woe-ish anthropomorphism. In the alley behind me, kids chuck bricks through the back windshields of parked cars. Did it again the other day, just below my kitchen window. Afterwards, I ate a ham sandwich and watched some hipster white girl cry into her phone while pacing the rear of her Subaru. From the rooftop of his cattycorner
brownstone, Spec filmed her with a handheld, his face shrouded in black balaclava. At some point he noticed me in my window, lowered his camera and stared. I offered a slight wave, then held my right hand to my heart, Islam-style. He considered this, the snow dusting his black mask, then turned and disappeared.

Through the alleyside chain link, the kids poke sticks at old dogs, stabbing them in the gums when they bark. I yell at them to stop and they call me faggot and
maricón
,
puta
and bitch. It doesn't bother me. The faggot stuff. The dog stuff does. I watch them hurl empty bottles against eroding brick walls, and sidestep the security cameras of the rehab-condos that flower around us. They dump over trash cans and wait for the race-modified Japanese cars to blaze through the alley. They taunt each other and yell like kids are supposed to, and dare each other to break windshields, and burn dope and get worried about kid stuff and Chicago public school, and walk and brag about their older brothers' beat-mean dogs. Presa Canarios. American Pits.

We are under invasion. The horde of others buy and rehab the clapboard houses and small brick buildings, the refuse dragged through the alley in dump trucks, a hemorrhage of exhaust. In the early evenings, after work, these others cruise our neighborhood, gathering intel; they scout and evaluate and buy and sell the structures—the kids' families still inside. Sometimes they skip the rehab altogether and just raze. Hired guns block off parts of the sidewalk with yellow tape, and then pickax the Slavic inscriptions off of the worn stone archways. Mercenary pickers strip the copper wire and piping, careful to crimp the gas lines, to always crimp the lines.

Or not. Mostly, these invaders merely patrol in pairs, in German SUVs, talking to each other but doing nothing immediate. They scout for the big red
X
that the city of Chicago bolts onto dilapidated buildings—indicating that public resources, e.g., fire trucks, should not waste their time.

(Third strategy: The invaders scout, buy, evict . . . and then just sit on the empty houses. The kids and families are thereby redeployed: two blocks south, six blocks west. The windows and nooks and alleyside crannies of the empty homes are boarded over; the buildings sit in waiting for the black and Puerto Rican and Polish holdouts to turn over the rest of the grid.)

Sometimes, men and boys hire on to help destroy their own spaces. This, too, I saw in Baquba.

The pickers must crimp the gas lines so the buildings don't explode. So the gas pockets don't mark time for a spark.

In my tiny kitchen, on the bistro table beneath the window, is the application. It sits there, day after day. My VA home loan can or will buy a fixer-upper. I can or will play a part in an undeniable future. I can buy this place, or the one next door, and rent to artists or grad students or . . . anyone who will wear this neighborhood like a medal, like a badge that indicates their life at the edge. This was the same dynamic in Nashville before the war. Hell, I think it was the same thing in Iraq.

SPEC
is twenty-two or twenty-three, Latino, still at the point where he dons his dress greens for church and on Veterans Day. His Specialist 4 rank insignia and campaign medals are
Brasso'ed and perfect. At least, I
think
this kid is Spec. He doesn't go by that nickname, anyway, certainly not to me. On warm summer Sundays, he'll loiter on the porch with his parents. The old folks on adjacent patios or porches call hello to him in Spanish; the drive-by crews nod out of respect. If and when I have tried to engage, hurling a question or comment from my stoop to theirs, Spec falls silent, or just walks inside. His mom will jump in to rescue the awkwardness, her accent and Spanglish a bridge of neighborly communion.

Sitting at my window, I like to spy on him through my old combat optic. Tickle him with crosshairs as he engages the empty houses, setting up his snares and traps. Other times I sit on my front stoop and just watch him tend his stupid dog. Dare him to confront me.

Spec can't let go of war. What's worse, he remains idealistic. Instead of contemplating his own VA loan, trying to buy in or buy up, he risks all by planting snares inside any building with a lockbox. Coyote spring traps are set to snap metatarsal through Italian leather loafer. In the gutted brownstone hulls he mounts plastic buckets full of shit and orange soda above cocked doorways. He tags the building exteriors with hobo code, lest the kids or locals fall victim to his devices. A rectangle with a dot in the center, or a symbol that looks like a
T
tipped on its side. I can't translate the signs but I know what they mean.

I also know what comes next: the Surge. Spec knows this, too, that law enforcement will soon mobilize against him. Yet he still posts raw phone video of a Hakkotsu shock grenade explosion from down the street. (He introduces the online segment on a makeshift set—his bedroom?—while clad in a Bulls'
ball cap, shades, and black bandanna. On the wall behind him is a modified City of Chicago flag, in which the flag's three central stars have been replaced by dollar signs. Spec issues conditions to the authorities, the banks, and the gentrifying rich, then calls out neighbors who stride the fence.) He rigged the Hakkotsu inside an empty Big Gulp cup. Detonated it just as a female realtor unlocked a gut rehab for a young Indian couple. The latter sprinted off. The former squatted to the sidewalk in a piss-wet skirt, her fingers toggling her ears to clear the ring.

THE
dark grooves beneath the old cat's eyes are pure sick. Distemper rivulets, blood and influenza. I wish she would die. In the alley, when the kids walk their Pits and Presas, and that one fat Rottweiler, she flees. Pulls her nicked ears back and hauls ass, like a refugee, or jihadi. She looks proud, somehow, sometimes. The young cats invariably end up crushed and ice-matted, their blood-rimmed nostrils and gaping mouths.

Outside my hazy kitchen window, rising from the horizon of flat rooftops are a pair of antiquated, rust-iron cupolas. Remnants of a neighborhood not under siege, they're the only structures I've learned to appreciate here. In the afternoon sunlight, they remind me of Rome.

EARLY
in my time here, one evening at sunset, I heard a car pull into the alley below my window. It stopped and idled brusquely, as if it had a hole in the exhaust. A few seconds later came the report of five or six low-caliber gunshots. Tiny
pops, cutting the atmosphere. This sounded like cheap fireworks, or like those plastic mini-champagne bottle streamers so rampant in everyone's Chinatown. I ran to the window to assess, my father's old M1911 pistol in hand.

Christ, Tennessee, I thought. You do NOT engage combat outside of an official combat zone.

The car gunned it back to its own eroding neighborhood. This was no militia. It was just a rival gang. Cats and kids scattered.

I
can never relate the fury: torn awake at 3:21 a.m. by the back-and-forth of a rapid-fire, low-caliber semi, and the slow cannon blasts of a large-bore revolver. Exactly as the continuity of the firefight drove me to the floor, consumed by memory, the gunfire ceased. Things fell into pitch, homelike silence—until this rock-star-confident male bellowed, “
I hit you yet, nigga?
”

THE
kids will kill the old cat if they can. I just want to cure her. Replace her. In Baquba and Taji, they were everywhere: legions of runny-eyed runts, available to absorb rage. Yet nobody messed with them. Rather, they just lived, and bred, and mewed, and no local kid or old man yanked them up by their tails. Booted them to feel in control. Amid the palm rows and beige buildings, the onslaught and block-to-block, it was as if those cats were neutrals. Better than neutrals, though, because all sides sort of revered them. Tacitly. Tiger-striped kitties pouncing as if on cutesy YouTube—against a backdrop
of torched cars and rubbled mud-brick. The fetid stink of the Diyala and orange groves and burnt plastic, people.

YOU
don't need much money to see Rome. You only need take advantage of your earned combat benefit. If things get too intense at home, you claim space-available on a DoD flight to Baltimore, then on to Aviano, and Rome. You stay in this Philippino-owned rooming house, surprisingly close to Piazza Cavour. Share a
residenza
with strangers and cook for yourselves. You don't have to go on tours or buy expensive clothes. Just saunter around, lost in the antiquity, amid the sun-soaked spectrum of pastel-colored walls and lame political graffiti, plant-lined terraces and umbrella pines. Hike up one of the hills and sit through dusk. Buy food for the cats from a cart at the Forum.

MY
mortgage broker called last week. It is time to pull the trigger, or reassess; by spring, this block will outprice me. I listened, and listened again, my eyes fixed on the neighborhood of questions that populate the VA app.

Late that night I put on my black fatigues, then snuck into Spec's target homes and removed all of his devices. I left the snares and spring traps in a box on his doorstep. I trust he will realize this more as tribute than threat.

LATE
spring through early fall, when you come home at the right time, at the first cast of sunset, you see it. Generations
gather around the stoops and doorways, and laugh and yell and wave. The old ones tell embarrassing stories about the young while sweeping smooth their Astroturf patios. The young ones take turns practicing rhymes, cheering or jeering each other's performance. Spec looks on, smiling. When I was very young I lived in a small decent house in Nashville proper, in a would-be historic district hemmed in by squalid urban housing, and I was afraid to go outside, and was told not to do so when alone, and inside that house I one day saw an old video for a Rolling Stones song, “Waiting on a Friend,” and Mick and Keith and a couple of Jamaican guys gathered on the steps in front of a gritty metropolitan graystone, and all kinds of people walked by, and Sonny Rollins played saxophone on the soundtrack while they hung out. This street reminds me of that, only that is a joke. This is a double-parked Ford Explorer with a Puerto Rican flag hung from the rearview mirror by golden tassel, and with lowered windows from which erupt a sonic mash of hip-hop and Latino rhythm that wiggles the hips of young and old and me. It is the sigh and squeal of air brakes on the bus at the corner. It is a squirrel standing upright beneath one of the city-planted trees, her teats bursting with milk; it is the fair-haired Polish barber-woman who shuffles by after work every evening, rolling her eyes at the dark-skinned newcomers (who have been here for at least a generation). The smell of the take-home pierogis she clutches, the punk lottery tickets at everybody's feet. The cautious, peering eyes of an orange kitten beneath a parked car, and the crepuscular sunset, purple, pink and navy, drenching a ceiling of clouds like quilt batting, my god.