Sergio continued turning pages. “This is Carlos,” he whispered to me, nodding toward the kid with the tube. “And Joseph and Tony.” He took a breath. “I think I’m going to start charging.” He whispered this even quieter. He smiled and gave me a nod like I should agree with him.
“Jesse,” I said, introducing myself to Joseph and Tony. I skipped over the kid with the tube. Tony, the kid I remembered, pounded his fist to his chest two times as I shook his hand. It was Amor, insider gangbanger stuff, done to represent a Nation. Rowdy pounded his chest when he said what’s up to people. He was an old Racine-Boy. But Tony did it obviously, because he was a Morgan-Boy, or if he wasn’t, an older brother was.
“Are they doing it doggie-style?” I asked Carlos.
Carlos opened his eyes, his head still sideways. “How should I know?” he said. And those in the room began laughing.
We took turns. Two minutes each. Jorge keeping track on his father’s Timex.
We went through the order and the tube finally came to me. Ms. Ramirez and Rowdy were talking. I was trying to pick up their whispers, searching for the words I thought people in love might say—love, babies, marriage—but in the crowded bedroom, concentration was difficult. I breathed, put my hand over my open ear, closed my eyes. Still, I heard only the heavy rush of silence, and an occasional echo too distorted to be understood.
“Se fue la Virgen!” somebody cried in Sergio’s gangway. “Dios mio!” A door slammed. The sound of footsteps could be heard between buildings. Sergio stepped to the side window, saving with a finger his place in the Penthouse he was working on. I handed the tube to Tony and went to the window as well. Jorge and Marcitos followed.
Mrs. Gonzalez, the woman who lived in the downstairs apartment, was running up the narrow gangway, yelling that the Virgin had flown away. She turned the corner onto the sidewalk and the three of us shuffled around the end of the bed to the front window. When we arrived, Mrs. Gonzalez’s blue shawl was fluttering out of range. We turned for the living room, where two more windows looked upon the street. Sergio flung his Penthouse onto the bed. Carlos, Joseph, and Tony stayed with the tube.
As we rushed through the bedroom door, Sergio suddenly stopped in his tracks. We stacked up behind each other, my chin jabbing into Sergio’s shoulder and Jorge’s chin into mine. Standing in the sun, at the living room windows, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. For the first time ever, I saw them up close. At our confirmation, and the time their building had been set on fire, their father had worn a baseball cap. Now he wore no hat at all, and I could see that he was not only bald down the center of his head but that his scalp glowed a bright scarlet like he had some kind of infection. His belly bulged within an old cowboy shirt and his arms seemed longer than they should’ve been: his wrists were visible beyond his shirt cuffs. Their mother stepped closer to us, taking tiny steps, and it occurred to me suddenly that the mother and father were complete opposites. While the father was lanky and bulbous around the waist, the mother was short and compact, muscular looking in the thick brown sweater she wore. She had a full head of gray hair pulled back in a tight braid, like something you might see on a young girl.
“Que estan haciendo?” she asked. When she opened her mouth, silver crowns on her bottom row of teeth caught light. She looked past us through the doorway and into the bedroom. Tony and Joseph still had their ears to the tube. Carlos had his eyes on the watch. Sergio’s magazine was strewn across the bed, its wrinkled and worn centerfold opened up and in clear view.
Her backhand rose like a reflex. It was so fast I felt its breeze as it whizzed past my nose and cracked Sergio square across the left side of his face. Sergio reeled back, bringing up his hands to shield himself. I stepped aside and his mother landed two more smacks, more dense-sounding, to the back of Sergio’s head.
She whirled around, her stiff braid unmoving. “Salganse de mí casa!” she screamed at the three on the bed. Carlos, Joseph, and Tony rose like soldiers, abandoning the tube still wedged in the ceiling, leaving the silver watch lying on the bed. As they passed through the bedroom door they brushed up against the doorjamb, eying the trigger hand of Sergio’s mother.
She turned to me and Marcitos and pointed her short, wrinkled finger in our faces. She told us she was going to have a long talk with our mothers, then stared at us with her flared-up eyes like miniature Revelations. “Sacanse de aquí,” she said to us, and we followed her finger as it turned toward the front door. “Largense a la escuela!” As I stepped into the hallway I saw, through the corner of my eye, Sergio’s father, his scarlet patch boiling, closing in on Sergio and Jorge.
A small crowd had assembled on the front stoop. Mrs. Gonzalez’s daughters, Vilma and Louísa, who already looked like their mother, old and bowlegged, though they were our age, were out there telling Carlos, Joseph, and Tony that during the night the Virgin had disappeared. That they had had it for the past week, trying to sober up their father, and that when they had awoken, the Virgin was gone, the window she had been placed by opened. Their mother, they said, had gone to get Ms. Ramirez up the block.
“She’s upstairs with that guy,” Tony said.
“Who?” said Vilma, stepping closer to Tony.
“Ms. Ramirez, that lady who leads the processions, she’s upstairs with that old Racine-Boy.”
“Ms. Ramirez is up there, Jesse?” Louísa asked me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me close, mashing her thick, immature chest against my arm.
“I don’t know,” I said. I worked my arm free.
“Is it Ms. Ramirez?” Louísa asked, and she stepped close to me again. “Is Sergio up there listening?”
“Not anymore,” I said. She latched onto my arm. Tony and the others laughed. I looked up the street for Rogelio and Mrs. Gonzalez.
Neighbors were out by this time: Pedro, who lived in the other downstairs apartment, just home from his third shift at Ryerson steel, his brown skin coated with a white powder that made you wonder exactly what he did. Bernardo Ruiz, in a metallic-blue housecoat, who lived the next building over and danced evocatively during all the block parties, who everyone knew was gay but who never found trouble for it because he was ours, a member of our block, our gang, was there as well. And some of the more astute procession ladies had arrived also, their pink and green hair curlers seeming to have picked up the potential for controversy like radar. The Gonzalez daughters began calling up the stairwell to Rowdy.
“Rowdy,” Vilma said. “Is Ms. Ramirez up there?”
“Tenemos un emergency,” Louísa added.
I looked for Rogelio again. I figured he would be able to calm everybody down, convince Mrs. Gonzalez that the Virgin hadn’t actually flown away, that someone had simply stolen her, and that, besides, the Virgin was only a statue anyway, and another could be bought at Opal’s Ocultos on Eighteenth Street. But I also knew Rogelio’s mother would be coming down the stairs any minute, that Rogelio would see her and realize we had been up there spying.
By now Sergio, Jorge, and their parents were downstairs, their father with his cap on. Sergio’s face was flush, his eyes glazed over. Jorge, on the other hand, seemed content, as if things, at least for him, could’ve gone worse.
“What’s going on?” Sergio asked softly.
I told him about the Virgin. I told him how Mrs. Gonzalez was trying to find Rogelio’s mother. He looked up the stairs and whispered, “El trutho comes outo.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled. For Rogelio, I nearly punched him.
Mrs. Gonzalez finally came waddling back up Throop Street. The procession regulars from Rogelio’s building followed. She came to us, her lips trembling. She held her fingers to her mouth. Just as she took a breath to speak, a step sounded, and we all turned to look up the apartment building’s stairs, to where Ms. Ramirez in her red pumps had appeared.
She came down slowly, each step accompanied by the sharp clap of a heel on the hollow wood stairs. She held onto the doorjamb as she stepped over the threshold. She stood on the bu
ilding’s concrete stoop and scanned the small crowd.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said to everyone. Her voice was crisp and sharp. She had no makeup on. Her skin was darker than usual, her lips pale. She was pretty. She turned to the procession ladies. “I’m sorry, all right,” she said, leaning forward. “But I’m not like you. I don’t want to be lonely.” On the first-floor landing Rowdy was standing, only his hairy legs and white boxers visible.
Ms. Ramirez stepped from the stoop and walked through the crowd. She looked to me. I could tell she was upset but I knew she wasn’t upset with me. I looked into her eyes and knew she had no idea I’d been up there listening to her make love to Rowdy.
“Where’s Rogelio?” I asked her.
“Rogelio?” she said. “He left. He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“He went to stay with his aunt, yesterday. He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“Sorry,” his mother answered. “I’ll tell him you asked.” She turned up Throop Street and began walking toward Eighteenth Street. The seam of her tan skirt was just off-center, making it seem like there was a limp in her step. The crowd turned to look up the stairs, but Rowdy was gone. Within the building a door slammed. The sound echoed through the halls and exited the open windows. The old ladies started in.
“Sin vergüenza! What are we going to do now? Where’s the Virgin?”
No one knew what to do about the Virgin. Mrs. Gonzalez was assured by Sergio and Jorge’s parents that it hadn’t flown away, although Tony, the Morgan-Boy, kept saying that it had. That maybe the sin of the Gonzalez household had been too much for the Virgin and that she had flown back to heaven.
“Sin overload,” Tony said. He sighed and shook his head. Mrs. Gonzalez began to cry.
That incident brought an end to the Virgin Mary processions. No new leader came forward. The apostles seemed uninterested in electing anyone.
I fully expected to see Rogelio again, as if he had only gone away on vacation. But a couple months later his mother moved out of the neighborhood as well, she and Rowdy loading up a rickety-looking U-Haul, a puff of black exhaust hanging over the corner of Eighteenth and Throop like a final farewell.
I don’t know if Rogelio found out we were listening. I sometimes think he did, and that that’s why he left. But then again maybe he didn’t. In some ways I feel like he vanished, was stolen, kidnapped, like the Virgin out of Mrs. Gonzalez’s window. I know he wasn’t. I know his mother probably met up with him in Aurora and that they settled there, or somewhere else, maybe even farther away, a different state. Maybe he still remembers how it was when we were young. When childhood was the only neighborhood we lived in.
SNAKE DANCE
CLIMBERS
They waved to each other like peeping toms. They had half smiles on their faces, unsure if they were happy to be seen—to be discovered meant the roof they were on, the perch they were on, was no longer sacred. The next day someone else was sure to be up there, potato-chip bags, coke cans, candy wrappers scattered carelessly like a slap in the face.
Some were hyper-secretive. When they were spotted atop a church steeple or warehouse roof, they scattered like mice. If there was nothing to hide behind, like at the top of one of the abandoned water towers, they raced back and forth like the Marx Brothers until it occurred to them that they could be out of sight on the opposite side. If you followed them around they kept themselves just out of view, like squirrels being chased up a tree, until eventually they stopped, and tried to blend in as much as possible with their surroundings.
Other climbers were proud, walking the edges of A-frame roofs, the ledges of dilapidated apartment complexes. They did tricks sometimes, like gymnasts on the balance beam, flipping and doing graceful cartwheels into dismounts where they arched their backs and threw up their hands in pride. They did this during rush hour, when even the side streets were packed with commuters searching for easier routes home. “Gapers’ block” it was called, when a car would stop, nearly causing an accident, to see a kid doing pommel-horse maneuvers atop the old pierogi factory on Oakley Avenue.
And some kids were sitters, thinkers. They sat and contemplated life, the state of the world, on the various roofs and ledges of the neighborhood. A subspecies of the sitter was the painter, who could be seen, sketchbook in hand, legs crossed, back stiff, painting skylines from various vantage points in the city. Sometimes there were schools of them, small herds who sat together and painted in much the same style, watercolor, surrealist, even Gothic—adding buttresses to the Sears Tower, complicated barrels and pinnacles that connected all the buildings downtown as if it were one large medieval complex. If you watched them long enough, you’d eventually see them turn to each other, give a smile, take a breath, shake their drawing hands for just a second, then jut their chins out and continue again, legs crossed, backs stiff as boards.
Then there were the subterraneans. Those who did their exploring, their investigating, underground, in the dark beneath the sidewalks. They wore flashlights attached to various parts of their bodies: foreheads, arms, legs. They looked like monsters, lit-up monsters, as they made their way through the caverns beneath the city: the old coal railways, the ancient pedways beneath the Loop. They knew the city’s complex system of tunnels like they knew the wrinkles in the palms of their hands. They were able to follow each tunnel, see where it was going, all this in advance, as if they were viewing it from above.
They initiated new members with a turn at the lead, telling them to simply calm down if they felt lost, because a true spelunker has this “sixth” sense. “Remember,” they said, “you always know where you are, always.” And they were always right.
From time to time a spelunker would pop up out of nowhere, through a basement door, coal hatchway, chimney flue, or in the subbasement of an L station or tavern. “Excuse me,” he would ask of anyone in sight. “Do you happen to know the time?” And the spelunker would wait, patiently, sweaty, his face covered in grime. Behind him, the flashing yellow lights of companions could be seen, small talk could be heard: “The best way is under Ogden Avenue, by far. Maybe Pershing as an alternate.”
“What about Archer?”
“Ends at Western.”
“Aaaah.”
The stunned civilian would check his watch and reply and the spelunker would always ask, “A.m. or p.m.?”
“Thanks,” the spelunker would say, when he had his answer.
“Eleven o’clock, boys,” he would say as he was turning. “A.m.!” And a small cheer would go up as the spelunker would shut whatever grate or door or wooden trap he’d come from, and disappear.
I remember these characters as if they still run through my life. I remember these characters like I saw them just yesterday, scurrying across the L tracks or down into a deep gangway. They were all so shy, so secretive, but when you saw them they’d salute, smile, just a little happy that they’d been seen.
DISTANCE
Chano says he’s never seen the wall open, but I know it’s a lie. It’s one of those things you never pay attention to, it happens so many times, like the sunrise, or a freight train running across your neighborhood. I pay attention when I see the wall open. You see things out there, the horizon, tiny stone islands like miniature castles. “Water-pumping stations,” the professor says. “Not castles. We don’t have castles where we live.”
The professor tells me the wall was first built to keep the Indians out, then the Russians. He throws up his hands. “It’s a relic,” he says. “A piece of machinery left over from an age of fear, fright. Things are different now.” Still, the wall stays closed, except to let the ships in. Those we sit and watch.
We walk along the piers with the professor. He is old and decrepit, so he has to hold on to my shoulder. The others walk ahead. Chano, Sylvia, Suzie. I can hear them talk, sometimes about girls, boys, sometimes about movies. Sometimes they make fun of me, call me an old man. They turn around and
giggle. Mostly, though, I pay attention to the professor.
“All the time we used to go up there,” he says, looking to where the pedways used to span over our heads. “We used to fish and swim down here on the docks, then walk up the ramps just to sit. We’d watch the sun travel across the sky. We’d see birds, peregrine falcons, hawks. Sometimes they’d swoop down and pluck a fish from the lake with those huge talons. Ah,” the professor says. “It’s great to see birds in the distance.”
I look to the abutments, the ramps leading to nothing, and try to imagine bridges, pedways, crisscrossing over my head, the view that must have been afforded. All that’s left now are the rebar innards of the reinforced concrete, which bristle from the ends of the abutments like things to hold on to when you’re falling over a cliff. Layers of multi-colored graffiti cover the walls, and from one abutment a lone metal handrail just out of scavengers’ reach dangles and reflects the sun.
I seem to have a memory of looking over the wall. I seem to have a memory of watching the sunrise, seeing the pastel pink-and-blue shades of the horizon. I have a memory of fins in water, dolphins or sharks. And I have a memory of birds gliding, sometimes diving steep, bombing dives, and pulling up large flopping fish, only to lose them as they tried to carry them away.
DAMASCUS
“In Damascus they wear long robes. In Damascus they have white, pointy beards and they all look like the guy from Hills Bros. drinking a big cup of coffee.
Painted Cities Page 6
