Daniel, his grandmother, and his mother left after only an hour. When they got back to the car his grandmother and mother went back and forth like schoolgirls. Daniel couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but he knew they were talking about his great-uncle and cousins, and not in a positive way. His grandmother and mother laughed and waved their hands. Then they said things and laughed and waved their hands again. It was the only time all week that they seemed at all alike. It was the only time all week that they seemed the least bit happy with each other.
Between Daniel and his grandmother, though, things were different. There had been cold nights, damp nights, like the night of his grandmother’s arrival. Daniel had experienced his rumas often, and while his mother had taken to leaving him to his own remedies, his grandmother went out of her way to make him more comfortable. She drew baths for him, something his mother hadn’t done for him in years. His grandmother had also cut tube socks for him, taking the toes off of an old pair so that he could use them as warmers once he put his Ben-gay on. When he went to bed now, with his rumas, tube socks around his elbows and knees, he was in a world of warmth, heaven.
Daniel had also improved his Spanish. In the last week he had learned the right way to roll his r’s. His grandmother spoke to him in Spanish, so he had to understand, and more than that, he had to respond. If he was unsure of a word, he used those he knew and got as close as possible. Then his grandmother would say, “Ahh, caca-huete,” or whatever she guessed the word was. Somehow, Daniel knew instantly if the word his grandmother quoted was the word he meant. If it was, Daniel would nod, say it over to himself, and commit it to memory.
Between his mother and grandmother, things were more tense. Aside from that brief moment after visiting his great-uncle, the two of them argued constantly. Sometimes his grandmother tired of arguing and dealt quietly with whatever his mother said. Sometimes it was the other way around, and his mother put up with whatever his grandmother said. But most often neither could stand the other, and they would walk around the kitchen cooking or cleaning and at the same time arguing, his grandmother’s voice screeching, his mother’s voice sounding amazingly similar. When they got to fighting like that, even sitting in his room with the door closed didn’t help, and Daniel would leave the apartment to walk the neighborhood, where it was quieter, where at least he was able to think.
Daniel wondered if he’d eventually get to be the same way. If he’d get to the point where being in the same room with his mother was almost physically painful. Already he felt himself wanting to say things—“Mom, can’t you just shut up for a minute? What the hell is your problem?” It wasn’t so much that he suddenly loved his grandmother and would take her side over anyone else’s, it was just that he wanted things to go more smoothly, more smoothly than it seemed they ever could.
At the sprinkler pool Daniel could’ve made things easier by wearing clean socks. His mother would’ve said something if she’d seen the ones Daniel had on. Especially considering that there were probably clean ones in his dresser drawer. As it was, he knew that as soon as he and his grandmother returned home from the park, she would take the socks she had pulled off his feet and scrub them the way she did all the white clothes, in the kitchen sink, on the washboard she’d insisted on buying the first day she was in Chicago. She would use gallons of bleach, Daniel knew. She had used so much already that the apartment had begun to smell sour. A smell Daniel was convinced had fumigated all the cockroaches in their apartment building.
As he got up and walked through the wading pool to the sprinkler, Daniel thought about what it must be like in Mexico: if his grandmother had separated herself from her whole family the way his mother had separated herself from everyone here. He wondered about his uncles, his aunts. Fourteen of them. He wondered at the cousins he had running around. He wanted to meet them, visit them, stay with them. He wondered if his grandmother even talked to them, or if all her children, like his mother, had cut her off.
He soaked himself in the cool shower of water. He felt a cold tingle between his legs as the water flooded his jean shorts. He ran his fingers through his hair. He saw the kids around him, some older, dancing and running, some babies, wading near his grandmother. Through the rain of the sprinkler he looked to his grandmother. She had rolled up her long flannel sleeves, and for the first time Daniel saw her forearms. She had tattoos, two or three of them on each arm. They were dull green, the same color as the rusting chain-link fence that surrounded the wading pool. Even from this distance he could see how the ink had bled into her dark skin, how time had created large splotches on her arms rather than anything even or clear. His grandmother was looking off to the left. He knew she would roll down her sleeves as soon as he returned. He wondered how much else he didn’t know about his family, how at ten years old he was completely unsure of who he was.
SACRIFICE
Our oldest just turned five. I’ve always been honest with him. And now I wonder if I should tell him I killed his father.
He is her child; I adopted him. I told Blanca I wanted to. I am not so sure she cared. My wife is a pretty woman, striking even. But she is also desperate. Desperate in the sense that she knows to take what she can get. Desperate in the sense that she knows not to ask for more. I’ve always given her the most I could. For this reason we don’t argue much.
I love her. Don’t get me wrong. Although after all these years, after two children, I am not entirely convinced she loves me. But this is not important. Because, you see, I am a desperate man, and my only wish is to come home to a family. Children who call me Daddy and a wife who will never cheat. In many ways our marriage seems born of convenience. Such is the case with desperate people.
Her boy, our boy, turned five in December. His name is Prince Marcus; I don’t like the name. He was named after his father, and so the boy is cursed. Each time I speak or hear our son’s name, I am reminded of the man I killed four months ago in the alley three blocks down from where we live. I walk by there often. I need to in order to get to the supermarket. And I look down the alley and expect to see his body there, slumped over, perfectly camouflaged like a bag of trash next to an overflowing garbage can.
I didn’t know him personally, not before I married Blanca. He was from Eighteenth Street, and in this neighborhood Eighteenth Street and Twenty-Second Street are night and day, two opposite sides of the universe. He really should’ve known better than to come around. I suppose the fact that he didn’t respect the obvious made me dislike him even more.
Marcus was the leader of the Laflin Lovers. His name on the street was Prince Marcus. The Laflin Lovers were not a big gang. They were one of hundreds in our neighborhood, thirty or so members, two or three street corners’ worth of turf. But the Laflin Lovers had a reputation. They were crazy. They jumped rivals in front of families. They pulled drive-bys in front of schools, churches. I’d heard of Prince Marcus long before I ever met Blanca. And then there was Orejas, Pac-Man, Lepke—all Laflin Lovers, all with ugly reputations, all under the leadership of Prince Marcus. Maybe this is what attracted my wife.
My wife and Prince Marcus had the fortune of ending up at the exact same school at the exact same time, and when I think about it, timing seems to be the culprit for everything. Benito Juarez High School was built on Blue Island Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, strategically placed to take in kids from both sides of the neighborhood, Twenty-Second and Eighteenth. While this was probably the brainstorm of a lifetime for some city planner, it was an unfortunate reality for any kid who couldn’t afford an alternative. For the first five years Benito Juarez was up and running, the school had the distinct honor of being the only high school in Chicago with a double-digit murder rate: Cullerton Boys, Two-Ones, Satan Disciples, Latin Brothers, Laflin Lovers, Latin Counts, Latin Bishops, Racine-Boys, Almighty Ambrose all claimed victims. Even in the envelope of my all-boys Catholic high school, I could see that Benito Juarez was the pits. And living in the community that Juarez served, I hear
d the stories. How Beany from the Two-Ones had stabbed Lil’ Cano, from the Party People, in the cafeteria. How Sleepy, who was just a junior Latin Count, was found shot in a stall in the men’s room. How Ms. Welzien, one of the PE teachers, had had her nose broken by an Ambrose named Juice. The gangs had taken over. They divided themselves into two categories: Folks and People. Drive-bys began with riders screaming their affiliations—“People!” or “What up, Folks!” Then the shooting started.
There were Chicago police units assigned to Juarez. Their primary job was to pick up the pieces. The wars went on.
It still offends me somewhat that my wife has a history with another man. I know this is petty. Plenty of marriages are actually second and third marriages. But I think my attitude would be different if my wife had been in a relationship with a different kind of guy. The first two years I was with her, I actually got to know Marcus quite well: there was the time he kicked down our front door, the time he threw a brick through the front window of my car while I was driving, the time he nearly OD’d in front of our apartment, puke streaming down his chin onto his black T-shirt. That morning my wife took him in and put him under a cold shower. She knew exactly what to do. She massaged his chest. She gave him blankets, our blankets, and made him chicken noodle soup. He ate breakfast with us, and lunch and dinner, and then the next morning ate another breakfast. At one point he apologized for all he’d ever done. “I’m sorry, Jesse,” he told me over scrambled eggs. “I respect you, bro. You know how to keep a woman. You know how to have a family.” He cried. My wife put her arm around him. She told him everything was okay. “People in this house love you,” she said. I looked at little Prince Marcus, who was too young to love anything at that point, and I wondered who she meant. That afternoon Marcus left. Within a week he had broken into our apartment, through the back door while we were away at work. He didn’t take anything. It didn’t even appear that he’d gone through any drawers. But he left a note on the kitchen table. I still luv you, Blanca, the note said. I can’t help it. And while it wasn’t signed, it was obvious who it was from. My wife cried.
But it’s not like I grew up in Winnetka or Arlington Heights or Highland Park. It’s not like I took all this lying down. I grew up on Twenty-Second and Oakley. I knew protocol. When he broke in I chased him out of the apartment with a baseball bat. When he used to call late at night and not say anything, I would scream “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker!” into the phone. And then once, after slamming down the phone, I actually went out to hunt for him. I called my partner from when we were young, Ricardo. Ricardo was a Disciple. He’d dropped out of Benito Juarez when it was suspected he’d murdered a Latin Count named Buff. I told Ricardo, “Prince Marcus is fucking with my family.” Within ten minutes Ricardo was outside my door with a .38 automatic, fully loaded. Ricardo knew Prince Marcus. They had gone to Juarez together and had their own history. As I started for the front door, Blanca took a breath to speak. I turned to look and she was holding the phone to her ear, the same phone I had just hung up. With her other arm she was holding little Prince Marcus, using her hip as a ledge for him to sit on. She seemed amazingly young at that moment, small, and for a second I was lost, lost in my own home, married to a woman who had tattoos, a woman who could balance a child on her hip like he was glued there. I didn’t know who she had dialed. I wasn’t interested in asking. I turned and left the apartment.
“It’s chambered,” Ricardo said as he handed me the gun. “Careful.” The gun was small, nickel-plated. It fit perfectly into my hand. It was the same piece we had used over New Year’s to shoot off rounds in Ricardo’s gangway. I remembered how quiet it had been. How I’d expected some loud blast but had gotten only a shallow pop that between buildings echoed with a sharp hum.
We cruised Eighteenth Street. We started at Damen Avenue and worked our way east. We slowed down at the taverns, watched who was going in, who was coming out. I held the gun hidden at my thigh, ready to raise it the second I recognized him. At Cirito’s pool hall on Blue Island Avenue we pulled to the curb and peered in through the torn black tint that covered the plate-glass windows. On the sidewalk a young girl, a teenager, walked out of a grocery store. She looked into the car as she passed. She saw Ricardo and me and for a quick moment she searched our faces, trying to figure out what we were doing. Something registered. Suddenly the girl turned her head and began walking faster. I looked to Ricardo. He was still studying the pool hall; he hadn’t noticed her. I waited for the girl to turn and look again but she never did.
Marcus wasn’t there, just a bunch of kids, gangbangers in training, shaved heads, Dago-T’s. We pulled away and reached Halsted Street. Then we turned back west. Sweat coated the grip of the gun. I felt as if I was fisting a dirty quarter. I switched hands, flexed my fingers, then wiped my palm on the knee of my jeans. By the time we got to Damen Avenue the gun was under my seat, tucked away in case we got pulled over.
“Want me to turn around?” Ricardo asked.
“No,” I said. “He’s gone, man. We’re not going to find him.”
“He’s probably fucked up somewhere,” Ricardo said. “Angel dust, those Laflin Lovers do angel dust. We should go search some alleys.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Ricardo drove me home.
“It’s under the seat,” I told him as I climbed out of the car.
“Bro,” Ricardo said. “If he comes back just call me. I’ll pop him if you don’t want to.” Then he reached over and pulled the passenger door shut. It was late by then. Or maybe it just seemed late. The streetlights were on. My shadow was pitch-black against the orange-tinted sidewalk. I stuck my key into the door and quietly stepped inside.
But none of this explains who I am. And truth is I am no one. I work at a law firm. I’m a clerk. I make thirty-two thousand dollars a year. I have health insurance and a brand-new Honda. I get on the L at 7:15 a.m. and start work by 8. In the morning I file cases in Circuit Court. Then I eat lunch. Then I file cases in District Court. At some point I am going to finish school. I’ve been given a promise by my law firm that they will pay my tuition. I am a normal man. I don’t wear gold. I don’t get high. Things will change. I know they will. I’ve told my wife this, at night in bed, my arm around her waist. “We’ll get a house soon,” I’ve said. “You’ll see. Prince will be in a decent school, not that fucking Pickard, where all the gangbanger kids go.” My wife never seems to hear. She always has her head turned. I listen for her breathing. I wonder if she is already asleep.
I met my wife in a club called Vincie’s on Fifty-Ninth and California. Other than beer advertisements, the only real light in that place was a huge neon sign behind the bar, VINCIE’S, in hot-pink illuminated script. I would never have considered Blanca my type, but darkness changes a lot of things and alcohol changes even more. She was pretty, of course, stunning in a familiar kind of way, like you knew who she was, what street she was from, just by looking at her. I’d seen girls like this all my life. Girls that put up a front, a facade you had to scratch through to get to something real. She was sitting at the bar with two other women, and their ugliness seemed to make her stand out. I’d seen them before, all three of them. They were older, more experienced women, like they might really be there just for the drinks. That night I was with Gilbert and Diego, two friends I’d grown up with. I don’t know who had had more to drink, my future wife or myself. I don’t remember being that drunk, although she says that I was “wasted.” She was drunk enough. When Gilbert asked her friend to dance, the girl said she’d go only if Blanca went also. My wife claims to remember that night clearly. How I stumbled
when I led her out onto the dance floor. How I couldn’t keep the beat and kept holding my hands in the air like a flamenco dancer looking for style points. She still makes fun of me, when she’s in a good mood, after the kids are asleep. She giggles and whispers “Olé” in my ear. I remember things differently. I remember my wife telling me, “I’m only here to have fun. Don’t think
this is love.” And saying things like this so often it became silly, and we started laughing and telling each other we were “over before we started” and “you can keep the house” and “those kids are mine as much as they are yours.” All this while we moved on the dance floor. My wife is a beautiful drunk. Things make more sense to her then. Like at that party for her sister Junie’s eighteenth birthday. My wife sat next to me and had me taste her aunt Hilda’s mole. She kissed me and held her face next to mine for a long time. Then she asked me why I married her.
I told her I’d done it because she was “nothing special” and she seemed to understand what I meant even when I didn’t.
Or that time there was a party for her brother Robert when he finished army boot camp. That night she sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and I had to carry her to the car while Robert carried Prince. “Later,” Robert said to me. “As long as you’re good to my sister.”
“I am,” I said.
He shook my hand and walked away. That was a year after we got married.
It’s when my wife is sober that things are slightly more difficult. Maybe reality hits then. Her job with the state—she hates answering phones. The homemade tattoo she has on her right hand, M4E—Marcus For Ever. I’ve told her we could get rid of it, and we’ve even gone so far as to ask the gynecologist—because that’s where we were when we thought of it. But with everything else going on, my wife’s tattoo doesn’t seem quite so important. Unless of course it’s late at night, and I am reading, and I see her asleep there on the couch, her hand draped across her belly. Marcus For Ever. My wife isn’t one to think of the future. I have come to accept that. She was born with nothing and it’s a struggle for her to think things could be any different. I don’t hold that against her.
Painted Cities Page 13
