Painted Cities

by Galaviz-Budziszewski, Alexai

  No one responded.

  We waited for a long while. They wouldn’t let go of each other. Finally Brenda’s mother sat up. She looked to Chuey, who was sitting on the edge of Capone’s bed. She turned to him and grabbed his hands. She held them close to her chest. She still had tears in her eyes. “How did you learn to do that?” she asked him. She was speaking softly, quietly. “A donde aprendiste eso?”

  “Sonora,” he said to her. “I learned it all in God’s Country.”

  Then she smiled and kissed his knuckles.

  We were on top of the world. For a while nothing could bring us down. It was a natural high. We woke up feeling powerful, breathing easy, clear. We went to sleep feeling the same. We were rejuvenated, ready to hit the streets. Alfonzo made plans for a bus trip across the country: “St. Louis,” he said. “Gateway to the West.” So we started collecting money; Marcus even sold some of his goldfish to the kids in his building. We were on our way somewhere, out of Pilsen. Then Chuey said the power needed a rest.

  A rest was understandable. We’d been going at it since Christmas, nonstop. Maybe Chuey was getting tired. Honestly, we were getting tired as well. Capone had come at just the right time to keep us going, but when we thought about it, we needed a break too. Our vacation was to last two weeks. Middle of June we were to pick up right where we left off. We’d have more money by then. St. Louis was just around the corner.

  The first day of June, Chuey started summer school. We didn’t even know he’d registered. He’d signed up before the end of May, before we brought Capone back. Chuey said that he hadn’t, that he’d only registered a few days ago, but this didn’t make any sense. We knew he was lying.

  But we came up with an alternate plan. During the week, while Chuey was in school, Marcus, Alfonzo, and I would scout bodies. We would list where things were, rank their importance. Then on the weekends Chuey would join us, give his gift. This was a silly idea—even then I knew it wouldn’t work. Marcus seemed like the only one interested. I can say now, honestly, that by then Alfonzo and I were just looking for something to do. With Chuey in school our days had become just as long and boring as they were before we found out about the power.

  We continued to meet under the trees on Twenty-First, only now it was just the three of us. Marcus had a little notebook where he’d jot down streets and intersections, types of bodies as we found them. After a few days even Marcus began to see the ridiculousness of what we were doing. One afternoon we found a pigeon in an alley, dead, shot, bleeding from its eye. It had fallen from the telephone wire above. An open attic window was just a few feet from the line, a straight shot with a pellet gun. Marcus crouched next to the pigeon. Then he reached out and touched it. He waited and waited. He asked Alfonzo to give the invocation. So Alfonzo did. Marcus breathed deep and clear. He hummed with his eyes closed. And then he touched the pigeon again. Still, there was nothing. We walked in silence, split up, then went our separate ways home. That was the last day we ever went out on rounds.

  A few weeks later, in early July, Alfonzo and I registered for the second half of summer school. It was a painless experience. Our social worker, Mr. Sanchez, wound up being our summer school counselor. He praised us for having “changes of heart” and then convinced us to get the hard classes out of the way first, algebra and U.S. history. Seven hours a day, a half-hour lunch, two fifteen-minute breaks. At least we were in the same classes. Marcus refused to enroll. The day we asked him, his response had been, “You know, I can’t ever see myself in a classroom again.” We knew he was serious.

  There were changes of heart in Brenda’s family as well. Capone had become a new person. He’d cleaned himself up. He’d stopped the drugs, stopped the gangbanging. The week after we brought him back to life, Brenda’s mother took him shopping, and not shopping at Zemsky’s Discount, or Goldblatt’s, but shopping like downtown, Stacey Adams, Marshall Field’s. She bought him an entirely new wardrobe, new shoes, ties that matched his socks. Brenda told us his mother would only buy him long-sleeve shirts and we knew this was true because eventually we saw Capone ourselves, walking to the Eighteenth Street L station, a brown bag lunch in his hand. He had landed a job working at a law firm downtown, shelving books. He had a tie clip, wing-tipped shoes, no earrings. At his wrists, peeking out from under his shirt cuffs, were the thick green scallops of his tattoos. At his collar, on his neck, the top edges of his name were visible. But he had a nice smile, and with him for some reason this seemed to go a long way. When he saw us he said what’s up and raised his lunch bag for show. He kept walking like he was in a hurry. He gave us a smile.

  That August, Capone was killed in a drive-by shooting. He had just stepped out of the Woolworth’s on Twenty-Second Street. He had bought some T-shirts to wear under his dress shirts. A gang-banger, a Disciple, was walking by at the same time and someone in a passing car, aiming for the Disciple, shot Capone once in the right temple. He was dead on the scene. There was no hope. Chuey was in school.

  Alfonzo and I heard the rumors. We were in school by then and we heard how someone had “paid” Capone back, and how he “got what was coming to him.” The whole neighborhood knew the shot was meant for someone else, but the way rumors work, people believed what they wanted. I never said anything. I knew what we had done, that we had served the common good.

  I don’t know exactly what killed Chuey’s power, or even if it’s dead at all. Chuey is long gone. He lives up on the northside now with Brenda and their kids. With some investigation I could get Chuey’s phone number—his family still lives in the neighborhood. But I’m not sure what I would ever say to him. It seems as if we’ve already done enough.

  Like so many people from Pilsen, Marcus simply disappeared. I talked to him off and on all through high school. He was working at UPS for a while. He met a white girl there and they moved in together. Then suddenly there was nothing. He was gone, disappeared, like childhood.

  Alfonzo joined the army. He lives in Arizona now and builds helicopters. I still talk to him, once a year or so. We always remember Brenda, how she made people say stupid things, how Capone was killed just when he was getting started. Beyond that I am not sure what else we say, though our conversations sometimes last for hours.

  I still live here, two blocks from where I grew up, four blocks from where we brought that first rat back so many years ago. I still think about raising the dead, every day. Sometimes, in my bathroom, I will find things, a dead spider, a dead ladybug, or, every so often, a cockroach. And just for fun I will close my eyes, open them, and touch the dead body. I’ll hope that my finger will give life, that I’ll feel again what I felt when I was fourteen, when, in this whole damn neighborhood, among all this concrete, all these apartment buildings, church steeples, and smoke stacks, we were somebody.

  SIDE STREETS

  In some quarters the death had become a macho thing. After all, the story involved Casper walking a full city block to the nearest tavern and ordering himself a beer so he could get change to call himself an ambulance. From all accounts, Casper had been shot at least three times that night.

  It wasn’t uncommon to see kids acting the whole thing out. One skinny brown kid running up to another and pointing a thumb and forefinger pistol at a mate’s chest, then voicing three loud “booms” before skittering back to his hiding place. Here, it seems, the children always embellished slightly. The “boom” they used, as everyone knew, was reserved for imitations of a .45, and Casper had been shot with a .38. But they did it anyway, it made for more dramatics, and on side streets dramatics count for more than reality.

  The child portraying the fallen hero, Casper, would usually stagger down the street, making small guttural noises as if gurgling blood. Sometimes the role player would say something like “I have—to—get—to Trebol’s, get me—some—change,” but nobody knew if Casper had really muttered these words. A few stumbles usually followed. Trips over his own feet, a couple of all-out collapses, complete with the customary pre-death li
mb twitches. But the player would always find it in himself to rise up and get to the front door of the local tavern, where he would say, “Give me an Old Style” (the brand varied depending on the player). This was as far as the act ever went, and at this point the performance was judged.

  Technique was most important—the player, through all his ad-libs and theatrics, had to convince the others that he was the actual person, had to convince unsuspecting adults that he really had been shot. It was never enough. There was always some other kid who claimed he could do it better. That he could’ve pulled off the act ten times better and could’ve fooled ten times as many people. So the play would go on, back and forth, until dinnertime, after which the act was tried out at night, when realism abounded.

  More than just Casper’s death marked that day twenty years ago. God knows the neighborhood crawled with death back then. Each day some new mutilation would present itself and give the church groups and the men working on their Ford pickups something to talk about. But with Casper’s death an aura emerged. Even years later, each person who recounted the story did so as if the event had happened only days ago. The real good storytellers in the neighborhood claimed the scene ran through their minds like a massive car crash: everything in slow motion.

  In the churches along Eighteenth Street, the mothers were reminded of Casper’s death while performing their stations of the cross. They’d see the Virgin Mother embossed on those plaster moldings and imagine Delores Calderon, Casper’s mother, in the Virgin’s place. Delores had become a martyr, a woman who had had to give up her son for something better, and they all wanted to be like her. They all wanted sons who could take Christ’s place on the plaster moldings the way they imagined Casper could.

  Mostly in pity but sometimes in jealousy, the mothers lit prayer candles for Delores’s and Casper’s souls—one extra when the mothers were really feeling mournful, and always two or three extra on the anniversary of Casper’s death. On those days, the immense light emanating from the overabundance of candles climbed the cold marble walls of the churches and shone through the stained-glass windows onto the annual memorial services held on the front steps. The light filtered out effortlessly, casting upon the crowd the soft oranges and blues of the glass mosaics.

  Mrs. Calderon’s disappearance wasn’t all that unexpected, at least when it first happened. For the females, a period of mourning is always anticipated. For the males, on the other hand, a stout heart is required; appearance at work the next day is mandatory. Casper, though, had no father. The older women in the neighborhood said that his father had died in a steel mill before Casper was born. Whatever the case, Mrs. Calderon mourned alone. Speculation as to her whereabouts didn’t start up until three weeks after Casper’s death. Usually, during mourning, one is at least seen—perhaps walking, aimlessly and sorrowfully—but seen nonetheless. With Mrs. Calderon, there had been nothing.

  Her apartment was broken into by the local clergy, her bank accounts traced, but all anyone could discern was that she had somehow vanished. Some said that she had gone back to Mexico to reclaim an illegitimate child. Some even believed that she had committed suicide, maybe jumped off the Twenty-Second Street bridge, where it was commonly said that “if the fall doesn’t kill you, the polluted river will.” Most likely, though, and a few of the older mothers knew this temptation from having lost children of their own, Mrs. Calderon had simply become a shell of a woman, and had returned to Mexico to live her final years without the constant reminder of her son’s death. Still, it was an odd thought. To think that that once-strong woman, that bowlegged brute who used to waddle down Eighteenth Street carrying bags full of tortillas and chiles, had turned into a sagging, broken-hearted crust.

  Of course, no one knew if any of this was true. Just as no one knew if Casper had actually ordered that beer in Trebol’s tavern—Trebol always swore to this as fact, but Trebol was also known as the neighborhood’s King of Bullshit. In truth, none of it mattered anyway. No one really cared if the stories had been passed down with accuracy or not, because the one thing everyone was sure of was that even though Casper had been a notorious drug addict, one whose drug of choice had been marijuana joints dipped in embalming fluid, it was during one of his highs that he came up with the ridiculous idea to get all the gangs in the neighborhood together. And even though he had been shot the moment he stepped into Latin Counts territory, shot by the first gang he’d tried to approach, in that instant he yelled “Truce,” he had made a completely heartfelt attempt at doing something in his life.

  BLOOD

  Make eye contact with everyone in the bar, everyone that walks in. Sit where you get a good view of the front door. Keep an eye on the bathroom; you never know what’s going to come out. Make sure you know where all the exits are. Be careful of a small guy who talks a lot of shit—he can usually back it up. These are the rules, little man, this is how it works.

  You put money on the counter only when you’re positive you can. No one will talk shit if you don’t, but if you do and you don’t look like you know what you’re doing, you’re a mark. Guys that come in here and don’t look the bartender in the eye when they order are assholes. You don’t need to talk to them. You can’t trust a guy who won’t look you in the eye. Remember Mustang? Used to live down the block. I don’t know if you remember him—you were pretty young then. He knew how to look you in the eye. You can trust a man like that. His old lady shot him. That’s the way it goes.

  See how I sit here, elbows on the bar sometimes, sometimes leaning back. That’s fine. Never put your head on the bar—you look like a fool. Rule number one: never look like a fool. If you know how to drink you can sit here all day long and never get drunk, just ride the same high, worst you get is a nasty headache—take aspirin for that shit. Dave Belmarez, Chorizo’s son, he used to come in here. Big guy, weighed two-fifty easy, six-foot-something, biggest Mexican I ever seen. Couldn’t drink for shit. Used to come in here and get fucked up, useless. Threw up on the bar once. Vincie, the bartender, had to put him out on the sidewalk. Needed six guys to help him—ain’t that right, Vincie? See, Vincie knows the score. Chorizo can’t even come in here no more. He’s embarrassed. I would be too. Slow, little man, that’s how you take it. You can go all night.

  It’ll happen to you once. Someone will step up. Someone won’t come up behind you and call you out—that shit only happens in the movies. But someone will challenge your ass, guaranteed—be staring at you from across the bar, looking at the back of your head so you can feel it. You just look them straight in the eye. Don’t even make a move, just make eye contact. Then you ask “What’s up?” Only you do it like you’re putting money on the bar, like you know your shit. If you say it right, everything’s cool. If they smile and turn away, you know you’re cool, but if you fuck it up, and you’ll know you did if they just stand there, hard as a rock, you’re going to have to go at it. It’s all right, Vincie knows you’re my brother—but if you back down, that shit’s with you forever. People remember that shit.

  You see that thing sitting down there, hunched over like he got a lump on his back? Well, he does. That’s Sammy. He’s a mope, a drunk, been one all his life. Got that lump from leaning over bars. He can tell you about when the neighborhood was all Polish. I bet you didn’t even know that. See, you learn shit. Bet you thought it was always Mexican. Hell no, the Polacks were here first. That’s what Sammy is—a Polack. Shit, I bet he’s the only one left, him and his mother. He lives with her over on Coulter Avenue. You see that stool he’s on? Tony from Mitchell’s Lumber built it for him. That’s Sammy’s stool. You don’t ever sit on it—you’re damn right that’s a seat belt. He fell off his stool so many times they put a seat belt on that motherfucker. Doesn’t work, though. He just falls over and the stool follows him. It’s worse than before.

  People fuck with Sammy, but you better not, ever. He won the lottery once, one of those scratch-and-win deals. Won six hundred dollars. Came in here with a woman. Trixie—that’s her
real name. Sounds phony too, don’t it? She lives by the hamburger joint on Eighteenth. When she came in here wrapped around Sammy, the whole bar stood up and clapped. She’s a whore but it don’t matter, not for Sammy. He bought everyone a round. Bought his lady some fluffy drink, schnapps—never drink schnapps, schnapps is for pussies. Trixie just sat there, looking sophisticated, next to Sammy and his seat-belt chair. She had her legs crossed, all scarred up, bruises, like she been in the alley awhile, but that’s all right, Sammy hadn’t been with a lady since World War II; he can tell you about that too, World War II. That’s why you respect him. He’s got history. He knows shit, like an old uncle.

  That back door over there leads to the alley. If you have to, your aunt Hildy’s house is two blocks down. If the heat’s really on, you can climb the porch right in back. That’s Chorizo’s house. You just tell him you’re my brother. Only if someone comes in here shooting shit up, that’s where everyone’s running. Think about that. Vincie don’t let nobody get behind the bar—remember that too. You see a guy come in with a wheelchair, be careful, watch that shit. The trench coats are obvious, people don’t do that anymore. They like wheelchairs now—I don’t know why. Farmer Dave was telling me about Martin’s hot dog stand over on Twenty-Third. Got held up by these two niggers, one was in a wheelchair. Those boys won’t be coming back, though. Martin’s gunning for them. He used to keep a .38 behind the counter; he’s got a shotgun now, short barrel, calls it his ghetto blaster. Farmer Dave got it for him.

  One time this boy came in here looking for Indio—you know, one of the Deluna brothers. They were hanging out in here for a while, but they stopped. People were driving by throwing bottles at the front door. It was only a matter of time before they started shooting up the joint. So Vincie tells them, “Why don’t you motherfuckers go back to your own corner?” Problem is Eddie Deluna drinks in here. He’s the older brother. Don’t ever tangle with him. If he ever bothers you, you tell me. He opens his mouth one more time and I’m going to kill his ass. I don’t give a shit—jail time is worth that motherfucker. He’s a hothead, that’s all he is. Has to be a hard-ass because he’s a pussy. You see Mario over there fucking with anybody? No, and you never will. He’s been in and out of jail more times than anyone can count. Fucking Eddie wishes he was like that.