by Brian Hodge
The place where Wilhelmina was buried was, as I said, close to the river. The air was fresh and moist as I stared up at her grave marker. Rising straight and tall, the greying granite was barely readable. Wilhelmina had lived between 1902 and 1908; this knowledge was just below eye-level, and her family name was all but obscured. Above the base of the grave was a vision of a child, frozen against the sky. A bow in chipped frocks of hair, arms once plump now atrophied by erosion, and, in her hands, a sudden invasion of color. Someone came here to this grave and put plastic flowers or candy or Easter eggs in the ledge made by the statue's arms.
Harry told me that the flowers were exchanged with some regularity, and he had first noticed different remembrances left in Wilhelmina's arms only after passing by her on numerous visits. The flowers were a pale blue that one single time I had been invited to the place where she lay buried.
At the opposite end of the cemetery, near First Avenue, is the memorial for the Haymarket Riot. Policemen lost their lives one day over a century ago when protesters bombed a rally of some sort near the north banks of the Chicago River. Some historian I am, I should know exactly what it was. Ask me about crime or O'Leary's infamous cow and the barn on DeKoven Street, and that's fine. Political rallies are a different story.
Piles against the old memorial were empty cardboard cases of beer frequently purchased by underage drinkers. Nearby crypts were scrawled with graffiti, and at road's end, one could see the looming silhouette of an apartment complex. In between the riot memorial and Wilhelmina lay hundreds of corpses below forgotten headstones. I suspected that the person who left the flowers by the grave of the six-year old came to see only her.
I had given much thought to writing an actual, more detailed story to this slice of my recent past (it would be demeaning to refer to it as "anecdotal"). The Des Plaines platform to the Congress line of the elevated was not far from the cemetery, and so it certainly made sense that I could get there on my own, that I could be a solitary figure in my observations.
I reflected also on the fact that I would use Wilhelmina, as I have used so many other forgotten unknowns, to preface the collection of stories in your hands. An actual introduction would be ultimately futile, because in my "real" world in which Kathe Koja feted me with flawless prose I could only dream of writing myself, I am always trying to justify (usually to the wrong people) the hopelessness in my work. Why is it I choose to write about the obscure, the deformed, and the forgotten?
Everyone else may care to put certain memories out of their mind; in some cases, as with those who mock my characters' shortcomings, taken in the context of everyday life, they may simply not have the faculties to retain any information past put-downs and gossip.
Many of the people who wished I would start writing upbeat sorties were suddenly disturbed by the South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons by driving her car into a remote lake, deciding against suicide at the last moment and leaving them strapped into their safety belts. They couldn't stop thinking about that as they imagined the looks on the boys' faces.
I wonder if any of the people who shared that image with me understand my world any better. Why I hate to sleep, what I envision when my eyes slam shut.
I thought of my fictional Wilhelmina story again. Would I finally encounter the gravesite's benefactor, and would she have skin like pale granite and limbs abused not by time, but by acts of others, maybe herself? Cigarette and/or rope burns, hesitation marks? My grandfather had several brothers who died before they were three in Wilhelmina's time. His parents would not try to save a weak child because that was simply the way it was.
Would the person who left plastic flowers at the grave understand this all too well because a baby had been given up for adoption, or left to wither in a womb, or would she multiply upon being confronted by me, there suddenly being hundreds of doppelgangers rising from the graves, the dead mocking me for making a mockery of them...
Which is how a bad story would turn out.
Let's leave it at this. If I ever find out who it is that leaves the flowers at little Wilhelmina's grave, it will be a secret I keep unto my grave.
Chicago, Oak Park
February-March, 1995
Defining the Commonplace Slivers
We all lead commonplace lives, he had said in a time that seemed so long ago that he might have actually only written it down. He was a writer, but he had bills, and rent, and health insurance. Things he once had to think about the same way he thought about his writing. Feeling on top of things until the sensation was so good that it only made some perverse sense that things come crashing down.
Commonplace vignettes written down in commonplace books with whatever ink pen might be handy right then and there. He has been talking to a waitress in a diner on Montrose, a dark-haired woman whose eyes spoke of their own secrets, who simply wanted to know what the hell a Belmont-Cragin cop was doing writing stories in a notebook. Maybe I'm writing out possible health violations, he smiled. Maybe you're writing about me, she said back. If he thought hard enough, he could recall how her nostrils flared, how her chin tilted up. Then every image in his mind toppled into the next like apologies on the tip of an epileptic's tongue.
My name is Dave Slenium, he whispered/narrated in his mind because he knew he would never live to write his last tale. It would be a short one. He was not expected to last the night. Or so he thought he had heard. Maybe he had whispered it himself, in a kind of prayer. And I was a writer who believed in what I was doing. It was important to me that I told people what my life was like, who I encountered, why they did what they did. It is too difficult to narrate and sad, as well.
He wrote stories with few slivers of hope because that is all he saw every day. Eyes set into faces barely two decades old that were either pissed off, pissed on, or simply drawn out and tired. He was a writer, but he was a cop first. He had been a cop longer, for ten of his thirty-three years. He had only been writing, and for contributor copies at that, for less than two. But he was getting better at his writing, defining the slivers in ways unique to his point of view. Had been getting better with his writing, rather. Before he'd been gunned down.
He reflected on his first sales — really, for the most part, acceptances — in the minutes he lay on the floor of the Eddy Street garage waiting for another squad to respond to shots fired. Neither he nor his partner, Tim Hauser, had an opportunity to call in an officer-down. They had responded to the 10-1, a domestic disturbance, twenty minutes before their shift ended. Domestic disturbances were worse than picking up a D &D, because even a stewbum swinging a gun couldn't be expected to shoot straight. Family holidays were the worse, and this time it was a Mother's Day fight.
Hauser called it in as a 10-1-Edward after they found the perpetrator gone by the time their squad rolled down the street of three flats. The perpetrator was a disassociated schizophrenic, one Howard Shehostak, who had been on holiday release from County to visit his grandmother, Josephine. She had called the Belmont-Cragin district house after he began threatening her with a cake knife. Hauser and Slenium were on their way back to the squad when they heard the scraping coming from the vacant garage on the corner of Eddy and Wolcott.
Slenium went down first with a knife gouge in the armpit. His partner was stabbed in his left eye. Both were then shot a total of five times with Tim Hauser's police-issued revolver.
And now Slenium thought about what he'd written, the stories over coffee that relieved his stress better than any six-pack of beer or endless shot glass of bourbon. Write about what you know, a New York editor had told him once. His early stories were clichés every editor dreads, he learned that quickly enough. The girl in the tavern who isn't what she seems, that kind of thing.
But he'd added a twist born of his career as a cop that made a Cat From Hell story become the Pit Bull From Hell story. Still a horrid tale, with the owners getting their just reward after the cops can't shut down their operation, but with fresh characters in an all-too-real s
etting. His only professional sale was to a crime anthology. "Incident in The Van Buren Corridor" was about a druggie on PCP and a rookie cop.
Slenium wondered if there would be any posthumous pro sales. The right side of his face had gone numb and he figured he had about two pints of his blood mixed with the oil on the garage floor. When he held his breath, he could hear nothing coming from his partner's gaping mouth. He knew he'd been hit in the chest several times.
He measured out his remaining life in eight minute rumblings, a product of the subway line running beneath Milwaukee. He wished he could smell the heady mix of piss and rain water the train's passing brought. All he smelled was death.
And all he saw, all at once, was stories he would never write. Ideas he had yet to have. The first one was simple: an elderly woman staring out the window after hearing shots in her garage, afraid to move toward the phone to call the police. Scene shift to a cement floor stained with copper tears.
The thoughts became clearer as he lost more of his life. It made sense to him. Writing about what you know is the hardest sacrifice. Giving up all your worst fears and secret concerns. He couldn't recall the last thing he had written in his commonplace notebook. When he coughed, it tasted like he was licking a battery.
And the images went through a red gauze and touched him with comforting, soothing caresses. The lady in red is dancing with comforting, soothing caresses. The lady in red is dancing with me, song lyrics that became the dirge of an infantryman spastic in machine gun fire in the Gulf War. The devil with a blue dress on was Lake Michigan and the scene of a drowning.
He would have written stories about real life, paring down his soul, allowing his veins to bleed onto the lines of his notebook. Tapping out his pulse with a coffee spoon. He would write about the retarded girl who got pregnant and gave her babies to a neighbor, who in turn sold them to a certain man who ran a certain strip joint in a western suburb. He encouraged the retarded girl to get pregnant again, eventually doing the job himself. He'd write about the waitress, and maybe call her Lisa, or Lilah. Words clicked against each other. A Leland Street hooker called herself Shelby, shortened from her given name Michelle Beatrice. Another writer he admired became Willy Sid, a small-time hustler. And in a burst of wonder, he thought of his boyhood dreams of Betty Page, good girl model of the 50s. Of how her fame might be construed to her resemblance to the infamous Black Dahlia, murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. And what a story it would be if a young punk hip to both legends deciding that, if he found the right Gold Coast hooker, well, his Rogers Park girlfriend might become the next supermodel of the nineties. Maybe pattern her after the waitress at the diner, give her a mysterious name like Lisa Sestina.
The words became ideas that were more fantastical than he had ever thought he could create. A girl in the subway carried around a box, its contents were the shadows of fingers from beneath spinning plates. A man with no fingerprints waited in the begging room for a bastardized phone to shudder. A man was thrown off a bridge and it sounded like skeleton keys being dropped down a vacant stairwell.
The Fremont Hotel is saved the indignity of being demolished because a local historian torches the place the night before the wrecking crew moves in. The rags that were ignited were being worn at the time by a toothless bum named Blackstone Shatner, who drank his Wild Irish Rose from a detergent measuring cup. So many wonderful tales. He knew how to give of himself. How to define the slivers with his own last breaths.
But he would not allow himself to smile at the rush of a dream realized, at least in some small way. When the next squad car showed, his blood had pooled against the far wall of the garage. It had started to dry up.
Chicago:
13-14 May 1991
This story was written for the memory of Ray Rexer, 1983-1991.
Skull Carpenters
Rizzi and Leland had just walked into the station house as Agar was putting the final sutures in his confession back in Interrogation Room Number Two. It was by far the shabbiest of the three examination rooms, and it was long rumored that the two-way mirror was faded and prisoners within attempting to show their alibi could look at the senior detectives on the other side. The watch commander of the night shift, Pasdar, made a clever analogy to the novelty glasses depicting women in bikinis whereas the clothing disappears once a cold beverage is poured into said glass. On the oldest of glasses lying around the squad room, the skimpy attire of the "models" — one spread-eagled on a bean bag chair — was nearly transparent when the glass was empty, giving the women's skin a jaundiced look from tits to crotch. Pasdar, on occasion, was struck by insight.
Augusta Boulevard was quiet that night, the first of June, but neither of the two detectives suspected that the peace would last. It was seventy-three degrees outside, two degrees warmer than the previous night. Senseless murders would rise with the heat index.
What the detectives didn't realize, at that movement, was that the videotape of Andy Agar's confession to attempted theft would make even less sense than the most idiotic hate crime that they might encounter down the volatile Damen and Milwaukee corridor.
It was Wimberger who mentioned the tape as Leland and Rizzi poured themselves mugs of lukewarm water from a corner faucet that assumedly brought in the dregs of Lake Michigan from somewhere off Indiana's shoreline. It was his partner, Riggins, who had played good cop/bad cop against Agar with Ileana Cantu. Karl Wimberger had hair all over his body, and had actually done part-time work on several movies in the area like "Mad Dog and Glory" and "Blink." He personally liked Madeleine Stowe over Uma Thurman, but don't let his wife even hear about it. He'd continually tried to get Rizzi with his marine buzz-cut or Leland who looked like Jim Garner's stunt double to try their hands at the extra work; neither was interested, though Leland kept secret a yearning to appear in a Steve McQueen-style movie. As the star.
But, again, don't even let his wife hear about it. "What's the deal?" Rizzi was always suspicious of Wimberger's enthusiasm.
"Guy was stealing organs," Cantu said, walking from the locker room in street clothes. Lavender sun dress that always knocked the other guys over the way it slipped up the crack in her ass, and she knew it.
"Your partner's all excited over pianos?"
"Les, I'm talking the organ banks at St. Mary of Naz. The guy claims he had a debt to pay, the creditor would rectify it if our man Agar would steal a kidney."
"You are shitting me, Ile, right?" Rizzi was thinking that the guy owed bones to the riverboat casinos or something.
If it were only that simple.
That tape was playing back when Rizzi and Leland took seats in the now-vacant interrogation room. Beyond the black-and-white screen, the street light at the intersection of Augusta and Wood played against the grey brick wall and the rusted grillwork in the window.
The screen showed the perpetrator to be gangly and balding, the kind of guy one would expect to open fire on a crowded subway train. Wimberger was in the frame, as well; in grainy black-and-white, Leland thought his fellow cop was one expected to open fire on said "El" train.
The television was a Panasonic, and the bottom of the screen, in white numerals, read 8/17/95, and below that, 7:44 p.m. Sterling Riggins ran the video, and commented that the perp's name reminded him of "that nutty guy on TV." Leland thought he was taking a shot at John Agar, the actor who starred in everything from "Sands of Iwo Jima" to "The Brain from Planet Arous." The man was one of his personal heroes, another thing he wouldn't admit to his wife.
Riggins corrected Leland's misunderstanding, telling him that he was referring to that Army guy Larry Storch played on "F Troop." Leland forgave him, begrudgingly.
They sat back in the plastic scoop chairs painted a hideous apple-green. Rizzi's shoulder blade cracked, a sure sign of relaxation to a street copper.
"The guy doesn't look crazy, Sterling," Rizzi said over the steam of the Styrofoam coffee cup. "What you talking about, just because he's Bucktown whitebread." Referring to the neighborhood to
the near west, home to the third largest artist colony in the country, if you want to believe the trade magazines. Not that Rizzi read them. Bucktown is as Bucktown does, is all.
"Ain't that, t'all, y'smartass," Riggins smiled his bridgework. "Jus' listen to him as he gets into the rhythm of it all."
So they did. And it went like this, never mind Agar's gesticulations and hippy hippy shakes, caused by the arrest sweats.
Agar at home: the dump to end all dumps, basement flop in a two-flat off Noble Street. Living with his girlfriend Ginger Leigh Graddy while struggling through entry level jobs. He was not Bucktown in the least. Near North five o'clock wonder with a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Illinois at Circle Campus, that was Agar. Never had a student loan to hide from, but he did get himself a loan circa 1990 through Sentry Bank right up there on Division by the subway entrance.
"That place is gone," Leland interrupted the tape's jerky narrative. "Payless Shoe Source and a Taco Bell, right, Les?"
"Original building burned, I think." Rizzi watched Riggins shoot the both of them the hairy eyeball, pausing the tape. "Don't worry, Sterling. My partner's maybe still thinking you dissin' his movie idol."
To which Leland snorted and reached to start the tape backup himself. And they all settled back to listen.
Agar still talking his life story, sans violins in the background. Or hard rock, or double take close-ups. This wasn't being filmed like one of those television shows that come on after the kiddies go to bed. Just straight on, Agar looking at the camera, getting into it. The story about the people who contacted him, the ones who wanted him to break into the organ bank.
The skull carpenters.
He gets behind on his payments to the bank, Agar says smiling, the way all street rummies do. Flashing the fillings like he was going to talk himself out of a traffic violation, a "misunderstanding," officer. A prick he was, each cop knew. Rizzi suspected that Agar likely took it out on sweet Ginger Leigh Graddy, each and every time a bill collector called. Guy didn't look like an addict; more like he gambled his paychecks on the automatic bowling machines at The Wish Bar or Selina's Corner.
