Windy City

by Scott Simon

  The political effect of Arty's scandale had surprised Sunny. But he figured that even those who were tempted by sympathy or fealty to vote for him would pull back as it was clear that he couldn't win. Sunny had reminded Harry Walker III and Salvatore del Raso that there was more reward in voting for Vera, whose record on such issues was beyond their reproach, than for Arty. Aldermen might fight for principles. But giving their vote away for nothing in return violated a law of nature. It overturned the gravity that kept their planet spinning, feet planted, and blood flowing to their extremities. As each alderman began to grasp that his or her vote could bring Vera closer to being mayor, their votes were their last chance to earn her conspicuous gratitude.

  Sunny folded the sheet of paper and kept it at his elbow. None of the red, blue, or blue-black squiggles, the arrows, slashes, or exclamations had surprised him. He saw Lew Karp hold a black marker over a yellow tablet that he had ruled with half-a-dozen columns. In the uncommon silence among fifty aldermen, he heard muffled chants, cheers, and slogans from the streets below. “The people, united, shall never be defeated….”

  Linas Slavinskas sat back, tucked his intense lavender tie back under the center button of his shark-gray suit, and called, “Sing it, Lewie!” The sharp end of the pen trembled, like a gnat circling, and Lew Karp's voice roiled in the back of his throat as he declared in the still chamber, “Agras! One!”

  Arty stood up from the very first seat in the front row to the very left of the chamber and bowed his head slightly in Sunny's direction.

  “If I may say Mr. President—”

  “Briefly—”

  “I am humbled by the spontaneous combustion of outpouring I have received.”

  He brought back his shoulders and lifted his head.

  “Agras,” he said with quiet defiance.

  “Washington, Two!” barked Lewie Karp. Evelyn raised a long hand with a single finger extended to the sky a lacy tan hankie in her fist. She ran half-a-dozen Higgledy-Piggledy storefront preschools on Madison and Harrison and usually had tissues trailing from her hands and wrists.

  “Vera Barrow.”

  There was a burst of handclaps from the gallery seats just behind the council. Sunny thought they were a few smacks short of demanding to be gaveled down.

  “Fisher, Three!”

  “Vera, Vera, Vera,” Dorothy sang out from her round, shy face.

  “The clerk will record that vote for Barrow,” Lew Karp said, with his head still bent low over his legal pad. “Jackson, Four!”

  Wanda wore a pink wool suit with thin bone stripes and an ivory hat with a brim like swallow's wings.

  “Barrow,” she called from underneath.

  “Barrow,” Lew said. “Five!” and Vera stood up smartly to call back her own name.

  “Brown, Six!”

  “Vera Grant Barrow,” Grace said, and there was a dash of friendly laughter and handclaps at the unfamiliarity of Vera's middle name.

  “Sparrow, Seven!”

  Miles let a moment pass before uncrossing a leg and standing up halfway to hail the clerk.

  “I was jest wondering when you'd call on a man,” he said, and anxious aldermen let out more laughs, as if they'd been punctured.

  “I call them as they come, alderman,” said Lewie.

  “Well I'm surrounded by the queens here,” said Miles to more laughter. “And I can't think of a better man to be mayor—man or woman—than Vera.”

  “The clerk records Alderman Sparrow's vote for Barrow,” said Lew Karp. “Reginald, Eight!”

  “Barrow,” the attorney called.

  “Lloyd, Nine!” and as Daryl stood up in his jungle-spotted tunic, Linas Slavinskas ducked below his desk. As aldermen and spectators noticed, laughter rolled around the chamber and up into the gallery. Daryl raised his hands for quiet. Then he found that he could clench and unclench his hands to show nothing was in them; which drew more laughs.

  “I had a little chat with Sarge this morning,” he said finally, gesturing toward Tina Butler in her dress blues. “She told me she didn't care if I had a sheriff's badge or a letter from the king of Norway, I'm not bringing a firearm onto this council floor ever again. Now that puts me in a persnickety position,” said Daryl, who then stopped and put his hands in his pockets, as if to feel for the right word. “I deplore the police abusing authority. And I am scared to death of Sarge.” There was another surge of applause as the sergeant-at-arms waved her white-topped cap.

  “I respect her,” Daryl added quietly. “And I respect this council.”

  Daryl was easily a sentence beyond the preface that Sunny usually abided during a roll call, but he chose not to insist that Daryl hurry to his vote.

  “No problem, Sarge,” he said.

  “None here, alderman,” said Sergeant Butler, and Sunny decided to insert himself only gently.

  “We await the alderman's vote.”

  “Lloyd,” said Daryl quietly, and sat back down. There was a flutter of muttering between Dorothy Fisher and Wanda Jackson, but Sunny stayed impassive in his seat; Daryl's vote for himself didn't upset Sunny's calculations.

  “Lloyd votes Lloyd,” Lew Karp repeated. “Mulroy Ten!”

  J. P. puffed out his buff pastry cheeks and rolled his knuckles over the surface of his desk.

  “Pass,” he said.

  Lew Karp looked up in a puzzle. Voting was one of the few real tasks of an alderman. Lew Karp thought that J. P. had just waved it off, like chopped chives on a baked potato. Sunny leaned away from the small serpent's head of the microphone in front of him.

  “The alderman will think it over,” he told Lew.

  Lewie lifted his mouth into a reluctant smile of resignation, and then rang out, “Sannndoval, Eleven!”

  Fred hunched under his orange-plaid horse blanket sport coat, and his great mattress-stuffing eyebrows narrowed in contemplation.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” he said. “Pass.”

  Droplets of surprise began to scale Sunny's back, like spider legs. J. P. had wanted the Minnie Minoso Seniors Assisted Living center put up at Ninety-third and Harbor, rather than in Miles Sparrow's 7th, as the mayor chose. Fred Sandoval was touchy because his brother-in-law, a hoisting engineer, was suspended for ten days when inspectors saw him having a beer at the Cork and Kerry when he was signed in at the Sixty-eighth Street pumping station. (“Who are they hiring as inspectors these days, Sunny,” Fred had exclaimed. “Puritans? Peeping Toms? People who never get thirsty?”)

  Neither man would have voted for Vera on a roll call. But Sunny suddenly wondered if the smallest gesture of inconsequential concern—an insincere note, an unredeemable phrase of encouragement—might not have made at least one of the aldermen less eager to sign on to whatever scheme Linas Slavinskas now rose from his seat to reveal.

  He was on his feet before Lew Karp could read off his name. His suit shimmered as blindingly silver as the skin of a hammerhead. He wore an opulently pink shirt and a lavender tie with as many thick folds of silk as opera curtains.

  “Slavinskas! Twelve!”

  “Mr. President, I have heard from a few colleagues who have urged me to offer myself for this high office,” Linas began.

  “Is the alderman casting a vote?” asked Sunny.

  “May I have a moment to put my vote in context?”

  “A sentence,” Sunny replied with a smile. “Our context is that we have fifty aldermen.”

  Linas smiled. He rocked on his heels and jammed his hands into his coat pockets. He lifted his chin until the cords in his neck seemed as taut as a cobra's. “While I welcome the esteem of my colleagues,” said Linas, “I have concluded that I can best serve the principles I hold dear in these important times by supporting the candidacy of a colleague who has served us ably and well and represents a new era in the history of this city—”

  “Sounds like a period, alderman,” Sunny interrupted.

  “Merely a pause for breath, Mr. President,” replied Linas, who then raised his
voice above the babble of laughs that followed. “A comma!” he pleaded.

  “When the chair said a sentence, I meant Hemingway, not Dickens,” Sunny declared, which won small snorts of laughter from Kiera Malek and Grace Brown, but not many more.

  “I will therefore simply and gladly cast my vote, Mr. President,” said Linas. “For the alderman of the Eleventh Ward, the home of great Chicago mayors—Alllfredo Saaandovalll!”

  There was a rush of gasps. Pads of paper plopped on the floor. Seat springs groaned, and shoes smacked the carpet. Fred Sandoval stood up from his desk. Gerry White and Astrid Lindstrom leaned over their desks to pat his plaid shoulders. Linas grasped his hand, then his elbow, and then raised both of their hands above their heads. Wandy Rodriguez in the row behind began to flap his own arms above.

  “Mr. President!” he called. “I ask for a recess!”

  Linas turned around from the gallery, lowered Fred's hand carefully, and turned his face up toward Sunny.

  “Do we need a recess, Mr. President?” he asked. Linas was rollicking over the observable chaos, like the bad kid who set off a firecracker in a high school girls’ room, just to see a lot of girls run out, adjusting their pantyhose.

  “Why do we need a recess?” he repeated.

  Sunny wavered. A recess would be a sign of confusion; even retreat. And now that he had gaveled the council to order, Sunny couldn't simply crawl down from the rostrum and reappear as Vera's full-time cheerleader. But he needed to give Vera the chance to reorganize and reload. He stood up from the high-backed chair and held his hand conspicuously over the microphone.

  “Because I have to go,” he announced, patting his belt for emphasis. He heard Collie Kerrigan crack a laugh at the end of the front row and saw Felix Kowalski in the middle tier put his elbow into Jesus Flores Suarez to repeat his remark. Linas Slavinskas threw his head back.

  “When you got to, you got to,” he conceded, and Sunny fumbled for the handle of the scuba diver's gavel to give a thwack! to the desk and declared, “Fifteen minutes,” and walked off the stage. He looked for Rula and Rita's faces in the gallery, just before he had to turn the corner into the mayor's bathroom.

  The tile was an eye-splitting yellow. The dual sinks were stainless steel that screeched in the bright light, the countertop was glassy, with small globs of purple suspended inside—“lost dinosaur sperm, looking for a mate,” the mayor used to say. It was said that the mayor himself had overseen the renovation, authorizing a design scheme that would make prolonged conversation painful. Two uniforms stood outside. Sunny was washing his hands when Wandy Rodriguez sent word through the uniforms at the door that he'd like to see him. His hazelnut face was long and gloomy.

  “Sunny, I'm sorry” he said. “I know I told you …”

  “I understand, Wandy Sometimes the wind changes.”

  Several bitter phrases flashed in Sunny's mind. But he would take no pleasure sticking pins into Wandy Rodriguez; he still hoped for his vote on the next ballot.

  Sunny also knew that if his own 48th had run a little farther west and a little farther south—if his ward had a few more Salvadorans and Mexicans, and a few less Gujaratis and Hanzus—he might have had to make the same choice as Wandy.

  Sunny stepped back into the hallway just as Linas strode by, shoulders gliding with the nimbleness of a panther springing from the bushes.

  “Refreshed, lordship?”

  Sunny reached around one of the blue uniforms to take hold of Linas's arm.

  “Positively effervescent,” he told him. “Fred Sandoval! He's a half-bright career bachelor who can't cut the tusks of hair in his nose without professional help. He runs a half-crooked insurance agency on Halsted that finances every factory and tavern fire in Bridgeport.”

  Linas had smiled through Sunny's entire denunciation.

  “That what you tell him when you need his vote?”

  “I think I promised him a stoplight,” said Sunny. “Not to make him pope.”

  Linas turned his face upward, looking like the choirboy who had caught Father Dan with Mary Catherine Flannery and who was now free to take ten from the collection plate.

  “Oh ye of little faith!” he grinned.

  “What you figure he'll get?” asked Sunny. “Seven, nine?”

  “A dozen and counting.”

  “And what happens when he believes that little speech of yours and runs next year—against you?”

  “That's Hay-zooses problem,” he said, rolling out the first name of the alderman of the 22nd Ward with a Mexican soap opera accent, to distinguish him from the Nazarene.

  “Besides—I count on the chihuahuas and the U.S. Attorney to head that off.”

  “This is dangerous, Linas,” Sunny said sternly. “Dangerous and stupid. You're setting off clan warfare. Fred's people against Jesus’ people against Vera's and Daryl's.”

  “Grown men and women, lordship,” said Linas.

  “Aldermen,” Sunny reminded him.

  Linas laughed with a broad, strapping smile that looked like it would be unscratched by a head-on collision. He squeezed Sunny's shoulder and patted his cheek.

  “I love you, lordship,” he said. “I swear I do,” and after Linas had turned the corner Sgt. Gallaher approached Sunny quietly from behind. He nodded for her to step ahead, but first she averted her eyes toward Alderman Slavinskas in the hallway.

  “If you don't mind me saying, sir—that's a little snide.”

  “Saying he loved me?” Sunny laughed. “It was the only thing he really meant.”

  As soon as Sunny gaveled the council back into order, J. P. Mulroy stood up and waved his five stubby salami fingers for recognition.

  “Mr. President, am I recorded on this vote?”

  Sunny looked over solemnly at the clerk.

  “The alderman is recorded as having passed,” and when Sunny heard both Linas Slavinskas and John Wu wheeze with laughter, he rushed ahead to amend, “That is, he is recorded as deferring his vote. I'm glad to confirm that the alderman is demonstrably alive before us.”

  “And I would like to cast my vote for Sandoval.”

  Sunny pulled back to have a word with Christa Landgraf, who raised her curvaceous glasses onto her brows.

  “You pass, you have to wait until everyone else has voted. Am I right?” he asked.

  “Except he's asked if he's recorded on the vote,” she whispered.

  “Meaning?”

  “That he's had expert advice,” she said, cocking her head toward Linas Slavinskas. “It lets him cast his vote right now. If you let him,” she added. “It's the chair's rule.”

  “He can appeal the rule of the chair,” Sunny pointed out.

  “Alderman Slavinskas won't push it,” said Christa, turning her small chin toward the wall. “Even he won't get twenty-six aldermen to say that they didn't hear J. P. Mulroy pass.” Sunny held his hand over the rostrum microphone.

  “I'm going to permit it,” he said after a moment. “I don't like it. But Fred is next, and it's better for everyone to let Fred vote for himself straight off. Any alderman deserves that, no tricks.” He nodded to Lew Karp.

  “Mulroy, Ten, Sandoval,” Lew repeated, and Fred himself raised a hand from his seat.

  “Mr. President? Am I recorded on—”

  “Does the alderman wish to change how he is recorded?” asked Sunny. He cringed to hear himself sound snappish and could see Alfredo lower his arm.

  “Please. Yes. Sandoval,” he called softly.

  “Sandoval, Eleven, Sandoval,” said Lew, who cocked a look above his glasses at Fred to add, “My apologies for previously incorrectly recording what everyone here heard.”

  There were hoots and claps. Sunny drew back his gavel, but they ceased in time for Lew Karp to resume the roll.

  “Lucchesi, Thirteen!”

  Brock had been clicking one of his ballpoints back and forth against his chin. He drew it back, leaving a tiny, red depression, and rolled the pen into his hand before calling out, �
�Agras.”

  “Kerrigan, Fourteen!”

  “Sandoval!”

  Lew Karp lifted his eyes into the second row of the chamber, on the left-hand side.

  “Wu, Fifteen!” he called, and John, who had been stalwartly for Linas, answered in a measured, muffled voice, “Alfredo Sandoval.”

  “Watson, Sixteen!”

  “Vera Barrow,” said Shirley, who leaned over to pat John's arm.

  Evelyn Lee struggled to stand on her slim legs as Lew Karp called her name. Her ankles often swelled on cold mornings, from thirty years of putting her short arms around heavy garments enrobed in plastic and stuffed with wire hangers and carrying them onto a truck. Kevin Corcoran of the 18th leaned over, but Evelyn put a hand heavily on her desk and waved him back with a nod. She wore a gray suit with oatmeal-colored speckles, and an orange kerchief tied at her neck. She took off her blue glasses to pick out Fred Sandoval on the other side of the chamber.

  “Ah, Fred,” she said. “I love you, Alfredo. But you're not a real candidate. We've had enough fun and games today. We've paid off favors and flattered a few friends. It's time to choose a real mayor—the best possible person for mayor.”

  “Vote. Vote,” shouted Sidney Wineman from the row behind. “This is a roll call, Mr. President, not Open Mic Night at a comedy club.”

  The laughter began in the knot around Sidney, Ivan Becker, Kiera Malek, Felix Kowalski, and Sanford Booker, and by the time it reached Evelyn Lee, she joined in. Sunny gave one soft tap of his gavel, but said nothing.

  “I thank the alderman. Was that Sidney?” she asked. “Sixteen years here, and I've learned to cherish the few truly funny remarks. Mr. Clerk,” Evelyn said finally, “please record my vote for Vera Barrow.”

  Sunny saw Vera swivel quickly around. Screeches and claps burst from some of the visitor's seats on the council floor. The gallery behind the glass buzzed. He saw Linas push back in his chair, but otherwise hold himself pointedly still. Aldermen in the last row, from Emil Wagner, to Cyril Murphy, and then to Jacobo Sefran, turned their heads to huddle behind their hands. Alfredo Sandoval leaned over; Linas heard him out, smiled, shook his head, and patted his arm with dramatic reassurance. Sunny looked down at his list and saw that the next dozen or so votes would bat back and forth between Vera, Arty, and at least six more for Alfredo Sandoval. Sunny decided to send the aldermen out of the chamber while Evelyn Lee's switch was the last broad stroke in their minds.