Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  Was where you were what mattered?

  We Try to Find the Spring in Spring Rock Park in Western Springs, Illinois

  We try to find the spring in Spring Rock Park in Western Springs, Illinois, and we can’t. We can’t remember. We can’t remember where it isn’t anymore.

  We stomp out of Spring Rock Park and we cross the train tracks where we’re not supposed to cross and we pass the new train station made to look like the old train station and we get right up to the Western Springs Water Tower. The first floor of the Western Springs Water Tower houses the Western Springs Historical Society, we remember. We knock on the door and we try to open it and it’s locked—we all try one at a time, once—and we try the windows, all of them, all of them locked. We cup our faces to peek through the windows: inside it’s dark, the darkness looking thick and poured. Outside where we are it’s summer afternoon, linked ponds of light, earthy-cool islands of shade. We sit in the grass of the Western Springs Water Tower Green in the Western Springs Water Tower’s bending bridge of shadow. We sit in an arrangement that would like to be a circle. We’re thirsty.

  A clean police car rolls by. In it the officer watches us, not the road. The road is Grand Avenue. We remember Grand Avenues.

  While the officer watches us and not the road he runs a stop sign.

  We toss off our shoes and we pick our ears and we pretend to know where we really are. We hurt in places and in ways we can’t help each other find. These places and these ways, they groan from where they hide—they’re walls about to give, floors about to split, hearts about to starve. They’re how we mope along alone together. They’re why we want to find the spring in Spring Rock Park that we can’t remember where it isn’t anymore.

  The Western Springs Water Tower anyone can find for now. It’s tall and even more alone than us, with a splendid limestone body and a splendid redbrick head and a splendid short and slanting roof that once was struck like a match by a strip of lightning, we remember. Without moving, the Western Springs Water Tower laps at the fluids of the last two centuries with the kind of lips and tongue we can’t imagine, tasting no one we know can remember what.

  Its tank is empty, we remember.

  Two smart mothers push strollers stuffed with babies and baby-things right by us. They don’t look our way on purpose, none of them. This is a way and a place in which we hurt.

  Remember! one of us says, the oldest, and the way it’s said is fury from a deathbed.

  Remember? says the youngest. Remember what? Remember how?

  The shade outside our shade shifts its many edges.

  Remember with saying so, says the one who says so little.

  Saying so? we say.

  We think about it. We feel it out.

  A Say-So, we say, remembering.

  A firetruck chugs past, no lights or sirens on. In it the firefighters watch the road, not us.

  So we do it.

  We Say-So about the spring.

  We say, The tribesmen and tribeswomen who first found the spring found it speaking from a rock. What it said, it seemed to say to all: We are we are we are we are.

  Winter and summer, fall and spring, We are.

  You don’t say, says the oldest.

  We say, The tribesmen and tribeswomen drank from it. They hunted the animals that drank from it and they gathered from the plants and the trees that drank from it. They moved away from it and they moved back to it. The stories they told of it told of the ones who to them had made it. To them the stories seemed to say, We are you we are you we are you we are you.

  This we don’t remember, we say.

  We say, The settlers who first found the spring found it speaking from a rock. What it said, it seemed to say to them: I am here.

  Winter and summer, fall and spring, I am here.

  If you say so, says the oldest.

  We say, The settlers built a little house around the spring. They built little roads from the little house to bigger roads. They caught the spring’s water in buckets and jars and jugs. The stories they told of it told of what to them it might make of their settlement. To them the stories seemed to say, You are here.

  This we remember, we say.

  A police officer rides by on a bright bicycle. Watching us, he steers with a jerk onto the sidewalk, crunching to powder a nub of colored chalk left there by a child. He dismounts near a memorial bench.

  We say, The tribesmen and tribeswomen returned.

  Some tribesmen were impressed by the creations and arrangements set inside the little house, by the way the settlers took the spring’s water into buckets and jugs, and these tribesmen asked questions, while other tribesmen were outraged, afraid, or squeamish, and made dark jokes the interpreters did not interpret.

  Some settlers were impressed by what to them was the tribesmen’s curiosity or indifference, and they answered questions with their own questions, which nourished more questions, while other settlers were squeamish, afraid, or outraged, and made dark jokes the interpreters did not interpret.

  The tribesmen and tribeswomen departed.

  The settlers caught the spring’s water in jugs and drums and tanks.

  The settlers named their settlement Western Springs, we say.

  The tribesmen and tribeswomen returned with kindred tribesmen and tribeswomen from nearby lands and together discussed the likelihood of an upcoming great departure.

  Some tribesmen from this discussion departed to meet with other more important settlers in Chicago, and upon their return, met again with the settlers of Western Springs at the little house. Through interpreters the tribesmen described the Chicago promises that signaled, it was true, an upcoming great departure to other lands and springs.

  One settler asked if this meant they’d never return?

  One tribesman told a story of the tribe that walked into the sky.

  One settler told a story of the executed god-man whose body returned to life.

  One settler added, And walked into the sky.

  One tribesman said a spring is an always-returning.

  Visit, said one settler.

  The same police car pulls up. Two officers get out and join the officer who’s leaned his bicycle against the bench. They all adjust their loaded belts.

  We say, The tribesmen invited the settlers to a ceremony of singing, dancing, and storytelling, and although the interpreters did not interpret on account of their participation, the settlers, who did not participate, made do with meaning on their own.

  The tribesmen departed and never returned.

  The settlers pounded a plaque into a rock.

  The police officers approach.

  The settlers built more and bigger roads to more and bigger houses. They built a railroad. They built sewers and wells and drove them deep into the earth.

  Then the spring stopped speaking, we say.

  All its water was gone.

  Its little house fell down.

  The police officers stop outside our would-be circle. Their faces are practiced.

  We say, as loud as we can, And it never spoke again.

  Leave, say the police officers.

  This we don’t remember, I say.

  I don’t and you don’t, you say.

  He doesn’t. She doesn’t.

  So we say, They don’t.

  Western Avenue

  A young woman moves into her first apartment in the city on Western Avenue.

  “West of what?” says her mother, irritated.

  They’re eating hot dogs and sitting on tape-sticky boxes. The floor, walls, and ceiling smell like feet and smoke.

  The young woman says, “The lake.”

  They check a map on her phone. Neither has been to the lake.

  “But look at all these other streets,” says her mother. “They’re more western than Western. Just look at them.”

  They hug goodbye on the sidewalk. The young woman’s mother has gone from irritated to aggravated. “Forget it,” she says, tearing up, “forg
et everything,” and she walks around the block to where she’s parked her emptied car. The young woman lights a cigarette. She tries to see the people in the cars in the traffic.

  The young woman moves into her second apartment in the city on Western Avenue.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow,” says her boyfriend, who’s moved in with her. They’re naked on a frameless mattress. He touches her legs. She feels impatient: he isn’t saying he wants to break up, he isn’t breaking up, and he isn’t working like she is to make things bigger, deeper, or brighter. He’s on the other side of a fence she hadn’t known was there.

  The young woman moves into her third apartment in the city on Western Avenue.

  “Cowboy Avenue!” says her roommate from Missouri, riding an imaginary horse in the kitchen.

  “Yee-fucking-haw!” says her roommate from Indiana, driving imaginary cattle from the loveseat.

  “Giddyup giddyup giddyup, son!” says her roommate from Michigan, humping an imaginary cowboy against the entertainment center.

  The young woman, who’s from Illinois, laughs more than she has laughed since high school and drinks more than she has drunk since college and works more than she has ever worked at any time. When she isn’t laughing, drinking, or working, she feels a frozen wave inside herself. It’s standing still and shrinking.

  Or it’s not that it’s shrinking, it’s that the vast black beach it’s landed on is more immeasurable than she supposed.

  Either way the wave is hard to reach, even when she feels it.

  She feels it less.

  She tries to settle the matter but can’t. She looks for ways to talk about being unable to settle the matter, but with words she reaches only other reaching words, and her attempts leave her impatient, irritated, and immobile. She feels like a fence seen from faraway.

  She moves into her fourth apartment in the city on Western Avenue with her fiancé.

  “Tomorrow?” says her fiancé.

  She moves into her fifth, sixth, and seventh apartments in the city on Western Avenue alone.

  She lives above laundromats and banks and liquor stores and next to used car lots and carwashes and car repair shops, and when she thinks about what it will take to move again, she walks across her floors and under her ceilings and between her walls to her windows, from where she looks or listens to Western Avenue, feeling always that it’s only ever where she’s left it.

  Dead Dogs

  That winter, every other man or woman I met when I brought my then-fiancée’s dog to the dog-friendly bar would tell me about a dog they’d had, a dog who was dead. They’d be petting my then-fiancée’s dog. They’d stop.

  “Dead for how long, now?” they’d sometimes say to themselves.

  “Dead a long time,” they’d sometimes answer.

  The dog-friendly bar was an Irish pub with a Gaelic name so thicketed in consonants that I never heard anyone in it or the neighborhood call it anything other than “the Tab.” The neighborhood was Rogers Park, as far north and east as you could be and still be in the city, an hour and then some by train or by bus from everyone I was used to knowing. I lived with my then-fiancée and her dog in a squeaking fourth floor apartment on Chase and Sheridan. If I’d somehow stood on the roof I could’ve hurled a baseball into the lake, though all we saw from the windows was other people’s windows.

  That winter my then-fiancée flew to Europe for five weeks. During those five weeks I walked the four blocks to the Tab with her dog nearly every night. Until then I’d never been a regular anywhere. The Tab was shoebox-shaped and dim with a sour-water stink that stuck to what you wore until you washed it twice. Up front you’d find two sloping pool tables and three ragged dartboards and one ledge-like stage where loaded would-be stand-up comics tried twice weekly to make you believe that they didn’t believe in themselves on purpose. Its crowd, unlike the mostly white crowds I’d seen in the bars of Wicker Park and Logan Square, was white and black and brown all over, old and young, everywhere from shit-your-pants-miserable to shit-your-pants-satisfied. They sat at the same tables to watch the same games and shout the same objections, and when they met my then-fiancée’s dog they told me their dead dog stories, every one of which was different.

  Their names and the names of their dead dogs dissolved as soon as I heard them. Their stories, for reasons I’m still failing to find, stacked up in me like coarse little stones.

  “He used to lie on the last step,” said the regular with the dented head, the one who the more he drank the less drunk he looked. He pointed, imagining. “I still walk high over it. Every morning I do.”

  I bought him a drink. Everyone who told me about their dead dog, I bought them a drink. I didn’t think too much about why. I had a job, low rent, no debt. I had a fiancée in Europe. I had a dog. The dog had a name my then-fiancée’s ex-boyfriend had picked, and whenever I said it that winter I thought about her in Europe hanging out with this ex-boyfriend “as friends” (they were attending the same series of conferences with the same reunited network of former graduate school classmates) while I was here hanging out “as friends” with her dog, who she’d started calling “our dog,” whose name was Burnham. Burnham was an eager ninety pounds, all fluff and muscle, a collie-colored collie-German shepherd mix with a perky nose and flip-floppy ears. He was everything I then knew about dogs. I had never wanted, owned, or watched a dog. That winter I watched Burnham poke at whatever came before him with his nose and mouth and tongue, sniffing and licking, snuffling, and although I never said it out loud I loved the way he loved everyone who let him touch them. It was hard for me to love anyone that winter. That was maybe why I bought so many drinks for so many people I’d just met.

  “We forgot to ask somebody to watch her when we left,” said the long-bearded bartender. “My dad thought my mom had taken care of it, my mom thought my dad had. So she was in the apartment totally alone for a week. They didn’t realize the fuckup until we were on the way back, but when we opened the door the dog was just sitting there by the shoe-pile looking happy, like all we’d done was go around the corner for a pop. She hadn’t shat anywhere we could find it. She hadn’t even pissed. All she ate was a box of oat bran.”

  I bought him a drink.

  “You didn’t see me drinking more than one,” he said, drinking.

  “German shepherds, now they got noses,” said the young woman with the brightly dyed buzzcut. She came up from rubbing Burnham’s muzzle. “The one I grew up with, when she smelled weed, she howled like the whole city was on fire again and every drop in the lake wouldn’t put it out. Whenever I was coming home high, I snuck in through the window and made straight for the shower. My big sister, she used to smoke before she got got by Jesus, she knew, she’d play Momma and wait with the dog in the bathroom for me. Soon as the dog started barking, she started slapping me.”

  I bought her a drink.

  She said, “You smoke?”

  I said I used to.

  “Weed,” she said.

  I said I used to, and I tried to make it sound like I’d known what she’d meant.

  She nodded like she understood. I bought her another drink. She got up to use the bathroom and didn’t come back.

  “This one’s a real softie, I can tell,” said the moustached middle-aged man, well-dressed, “but holy hell, you should’ve got a load of the sorry mutt I used to have, was he a dope. It was embarrassing how submissive he was. He’d lie down for anything. Little dogs. Cats. Remote control cars. The thing was, though, he was huge and his hair was black, thick and black, and he had an even blacker face. So what do you think happened? What happened was everybody thought he was mean, bad, scary, that he’d bite your ass off. Black’s got these symbolical meanings in our society and boy did I see it. I’m no racist, that’s for sure.”

  I bought him a drink.

  He bought me a drink.

  “You a fag?” he said.

  I said I wasn’t.

  “Me neither.”

  “This g
uy I was dating, I watched his dog once,” said the young woman in the UIC hoodie. Although she was right out of college or right about to be, how she sat at the bar had her seeming older. She looked familiar, maybe, like someone I’d forgotten? She picked up her drink to put it on a coaster. “He had to go to Michigan for his uncle’s funeral. Him and his uncle were close, it was sad. I watched the dog for the weekend. Twice a day I walked him on the beach, Lane Beach Park, where everybody lets their dogs off leash, you know all about it I’m sure. So me and the dog come up to these three beefsteaky dudes walking four dogs, all off-leash. I look at the dudes, I give them the Is It Okay If My Dog Plays with Your Dogs? look, but I’m wearing sunglasses and they’re wearing sunglasses, and it seems like they see me, like it’s okay, so I let my dog go bounding up and before I know what’s happening their dogs fan out. They surround my dog. One of them pounces—he’s got my dog’s neck-fur in his mouth, he’s growling, and my dog’s laying down all submissive, and the other dogs, still circling, they start growling too. I’m freaking out. I’m worried these dogs are going to send my dog to the hospital or worse. So I’m like, ‘Can you get your dog off my dog like right fucking now, please?’ and the owner, who isn’t even looking at me, he says to his dog, ‘LET GO,’ and his dog lets go but doesn’t move, he starts barking these ugly barks. I’m about to say something else when the owner steps up and kicks his dog in the head. He just fucking boots him. It hardly does anything to the dog but it stuns me, like he kicked me too, and the next thing I know my dog is up and running, he’s running away. I sprint after him screaming for him to stop but he isn’t stopping, he’s running off the beach and towards the parking lot, and then he’s in the parking lot, he’s running between the rows of cars, he runs into the street—into Sheridan, you know how busy Sheridan is—and a cabbie slams the brakes and gets rear-ended by the cabbie behind him, and tires are screeching and I’m screeching and there’s horns and shouting and horrible crunching sounds, and as I’m watching all of this, I watch the whole thing, the dog somehow makes it to the other side of the street alive. Holy fuck. I’m out of breath and sobbing, my legs are dead, but I can see on the other side of the street there’s this tall old man with a cane. He calls out ​—the dog runs right up to him and stops. Like that was all I had to do. I cross the street, I’m blubbering, I don’t know how I don’t get hit, I leash the dog and thank the tall old man a million times and explain what happened, and he just smiles and says, ‘Darling, what I did didn’t require much.’ I give him a hug. I give hugs all the time but I mean the shit out of this one. Then one of the cabbies stomps over, he’s furious, he’s pointing at me. The tall old man raises his cane and tells the cabbie to go back to his car. And he does.”