Chicago Noir

by Neal Pollack

  Gerry began walking the perimeter of the dark shop, examining each television, radio, toaster oven, and computer. He didn't look ready to leave. Kimball leaned impatiently on his left hip. Of course, if he didn't hate confrontation so much he would have told Gerry months ago to find a new place to stash his crappy little TV. The secret to a solitary existence is to never make waves.

  Entanglements are just like they sound, ways in which you and other people are hopelessly entwined. Kimball reached up on a shelf and turned one of several in a row of police scanners to low volume.

  —Go ahead.

  —We're at the CITGO at [unintelligible]. We have an individual refusing to leave. It's going to be a black male [unintelligible].

  "Most of the stuff I get nowadays is old," Kimball explained. "Stuff with sentimental value, or obsoletes the Compaqs and the Sonys and the RCAs no longer make. Big console sets. Lots of record players. Tape machines. That kind of thing."

  Gerry turned to face him. "I need money."

  "What?"

  "Hundred-fifty dollars. I don't give him, he cracks me up."

  "Who?"

  "The man. The man in the green car."

  Kimball had no idea what Gerry was talking about, but he assumed the man in the green car was a drug dealer. What else could he be? On the other hand, what dealer would give a guy like Genuine a line of credit?

  "I'm sorry, Gerry. I don't have any money." He was still holding the television, waiting for Genuine to take it.

  "Maybe I take something from here," Gerry said. "Something worth hundred-fifty."

  "No. No. No." Kimball walked toward Gerry and tried to force him, again, to take back his own set. "These things belong to my customers." Gerry was still studying the merchandise. "Come on," Kimball said. "You have to get back to work. Back to the club."

  "This is why it's a good idea, Kimmy," Gerry said. "These things, they don't belong to you. I take them, you tell the owner it was stolen. Oops."

  "No. Come on. Leave." He put his hand lightly on Gerry's arm and tried to guide him toward the door.

  Genuine Gerry spun away from Kimball and when he regained his balance, his right hand was holding a pistol, pointed away, toward the wall.

  "What the hell, Gerry?"

  "You let me take something. I take something or I shoot it, your choice. You ever fix television full of bullets?"

  —Can I get a description? Suspect will try to blend in here.

  —White T-shirt. Long black jean shorts. Short afro.

  "Genuine, come on. Put the gun away."

  Gerry was leaning over a set of twin turntables Kimball had already repaired and tagged for pickup. "What are these?"

  "Turntables," Kimball said. "Record players. You know, for a DJ." He made a noise in the back of his throat like a scratching record.

  "I should take."

  "No. No, you can't, Gerry."

  Genuine took one step back, turned his head away, shut his eyes tight, and fired a bullet into the machine.

  "Gerry! Shit!"

  "I told you. You let me take or I destroy. Either way you lose."

  "No. No. No. Look, settle down." Kimball studied the situation nervously. Gerry seemed terrified of his own pistol and he held it away from his body the way you would a snake or a lit match. "Gerry, you have things you can sell." Kimball held up the set. "You have a television. Obviously, you have a gun."

  Genuine shook his head. "Television is crap. Gun is not mine." He waved at an old Waring blender on the counter. "What is this worth?"

  "Not a hundred and fifty bucks."

  With a sharp, stabbing motion, Gerry shot the blender twice at short range. The bullet pierced the glass pitcher and ricocheted off the concrete floor with a ping. Kimball ducked and covered his head, although if the bullet had been coming for him his evasive action would have been far too late. This had to stop.

  He took a step forward. Gerry, his back turned, was looking for his next mechanical victim. Kimball put an arm around his shoulder. Gerry twitched but didn't move away. Kimball reached slowly for the gun. Genuine began to weep. He surrendered the pistol and put his hands to his eyes. "Please,"

  Genuine sobbed. "Ple-ee-ease just give me money."

  "Gerry, no."

  Genuine turned to Kimball. His eyes appeared full of hatred. Because he had seen Gerry crying? Because Kimball had taken the gun? Between tears Genuine yelled, "You goddamn wop! You fecking dago!"

  Kimball blinked at him. Wop? Dago? These were slurs from another era. Right street, wrong decade. And Kimball was a mutt bred from many ethnicities, Scotch-Irish, German, even a family rumor that would have made him one-sixteenth Sioux Indian and, if proven true, eligible for a low-interest business loan. But he wasn't Italian at all. Genuine Gerry didn't know the first thing about him and for some reason that made Kimball angry.

  "Relax, Gerry."

  "Give me the money!" Gerry had squared himself with Kimball and was waving his taut arms beside his head. Now that he no longer had the unfamiliar pistol in his hand, he seemed less scared and more agitated. Quietly, Kimball recognized the irony in Gerry's demands, which had become more confident and assertive now that Kimball had the gun. He also recognized the upside-down logic of his own fear, which had likewise and just as oddly become more intense.

  "You're not gong to shoot me," Genuine said spitefully. "I know you. You're not going to shoot me." After one failed attempt, he lifted himself up on a gray, painted workbench and sat there, feet dangling. His tone was mocking. "Come on, Kimmy. Just a few bucks. A loan. It is nothing. Hundred bucks and I leave. No money, maybe I stay."

  Tears gone as suddenly as they came, he now smiled an unfriendly smile. A menacing smile. The unhinged smile of a dangerous buzz. Something about it made Kimball hot under his skin. This was an outrage. He had the gun now, after all, and Gerry was still threatening him. And threatening him with what exactly? This is why he preferred machines to people. Machines perform exactly as you expect them to. There's nothing ironic about a machine. When a machine acts erratically, you find the broken link in the chain and when you fix it, the machine does just as it's supposed to. If you wave a gun in a person's face you never know what's going to happen. If you wave a gun in a person's face and you're still more scared of him than he is of you, how do you fix that?

  Kimball pointed the gun at the ceiling, just to remind Gerry it was there. "You don't know me," Kimball said. "How do you know me?"

  "What? For years I know you. You keep my TV safe. In your shop. We are friends."

  Kimball still wondered how their relationship had become inverted. He had the gun in his hand, but he still didn't have control. Genuine continued to threaten him. Continued to blather on. Meanwhile, the Zero-Zero progressed into its final minutes and he was missing it.

  Genuine Gerry? Ungrateful Gerry, they should call him. Here he was, robbing the one fellow in the neighborhood who had been kindest to him. Kimball had never been afraid to answer his door, hadn't become cynical about helping his neighbors, and for that he gets an addict blasting away in his shop, keeping him away from the scanner, insulting him at all hours, the waning hours of the most important day in Kimball's otherwise uneventful life.

  "I fixed your TV," Kimball said.

  "What?"

  "Twice. It was broken. I fixed it." Kimball poked the gun at the new antenna and knob, which were clearly poached from another make and model.

  "I did not know," said Genuine, but the news seemed to please him. "This what I mean. You are nice guy. I know you. Now, you give me money. I leave you alone."

  —He's in custody. We have him in custody behind the Office Depot. He's got blue jeans and a green shirt. First name of Jimmy.

  —Ten-four.

  Cops and robbers, Kimball thought. On the street, the gun represents authority and power, but only when possessed by the willing. In a gangbanger's hands, or a cop's, a gun has influence because bangers and cops are expected to use it. A cop is supposed to exercise restra
int, of course, but a suspect will give himself up because he knows the policeman is empowered by the law to shoot him. Genuine Gerry surrendered his gun because he realized Kimball was not. If there are two people, neither of whom is willing to use the gun, then the gun is as impotent as cooked spaghetti. And so is the man holding it. A cop doesn't have power in a roomful of cops. A cop has power over suspects. Over civilians. For you to have power, someone else must be weaker than you. And a man alone is by definition powerless.

  "You don't know me," Kimball said, and then he did something unexpected, which was, of course, the only point of it.

  He fired the gun.

  Genuine Gerry yelped and fell forward onto the floor, his legs up in the air like a baby's. He was swearing. "You shot me! You shot me! You shot me!"

  Kimball watched the blood ooze from under Genuine's hands, which were pressed tight, one on top of the other, against his thigh. Kimball knew from the scanner that if the bullet hit the right spot in the leg it could be a bad bleeder, and he watched evidence of that fact form an amoeba-shaped red pool across the painted concrete under Genuine Gerry's body.

  "Call the police! Call the ambulance! You fecking dago!"

  Kimball walked to the shelf and turned up the radio.

  — [Unintelligible] domestic. The neighbor just got home and said she heard a door slam inside the apartment. Ex-husband has physically abused her before.

  —Ten-four.

  —Let me know what you have when you get there.

  "Call the ambulance! I'm dying!"

  Kimball looked at an old classroom clock on the wall. It was 11:45. "Fifteen minutes."

  "What?"

  "I can't call 911 for another fifteen minutes."

  "Call them now! I am dying!" The skin on Genuine Gerry's face had stretched itself tight across his skull. There was blood on his jeans and his hair. When he tried to close his bulging eyes, his eyelids didn't meet.

  "Fifteen minutes, Gerry."

  From the floor Genuine wailed in five-second bursts and cursed Kimball in Tajik or whatever. Kimball turned up the scanner's volume knob another quarter-inch and as he waited for the day to expire, he reminded himself to call Jen in the morning, as promised, after he had given his statement to the police. This had been a night of revelations.

  He might even ask Jen to dinner.

  ARCADIA

  BY TODD DILLS

  Chicago & Noble

  I work the desk at the old folks' house, though I also live there. People come in, drug dealers, little high school gangbangers trying to score an initiation sale at the place. They figure a captive audience is all they need. I tell Benjamin, the 300-pound security guard, to toss them out on their knees. He's always happy to oblige. There are junkies in this place who haven't had a drop of their particular sauce in years, yet they never leave. They need the gatekeeper. They need me.

  That's how I met Tristam, years ago; he turned out differently than many of the little entrepreneurs, though. After some college at the UIC—that's C Chicago-go, this shithole of a town—he flunked out, addicted to the city's second letter. He dropped by and was so skinny and haggard I didn't recognize him at first.

  "Goddammit, boy, you look like shit," I said. "Plastic getting to you?"

  We went on, as was our style in the days of old, about the plasticizing of the world around us. Plastic car rims, bumpers, plastic cigarette holders, plastic handles on doors to places like churches, plastic communion wafers (taking the symbolic one level higher) slated for reuse. Suck and spit, back into the offering plate. Then we struck a deal. Included in my diseased old man's daily dose was a single helping of the vanguard Ajexo painkiller. The combination of a Valium-like synthetic with just the slightest twinge of morphine-derivative punch, these pills were then mythic among the junkie set, regarded as a sort of withdrawal cure-all. I didn't take them, no way, since I was long off the hard shit and they'd have been the road back to death for me. Besides, pain I could live with.

  In the spirit of God's good grace, I handed them over to the boy. He needed help.

  But Tristam didn't keep his half of the deal: staying off the primary jolt. Time goes by and contracts lose their potency. Occasionally I'd start when on the bus on the way to a checkup, a prescription refill, and realize with the full weight of a catastrophe that the boy had gotten off at the park again to see the man who went by Valentino, recognizable by his perpetual attire: bright-red athletic jumpsuit, sneakers, and a fedora over his pristine afro. The pusher-pimp was known over the blocks for hard shit.

  One particularly momentous day, I felt like a martyr, like I wanted to be Joan of Arc or some righteous-ass Palestinian or Iraqi. Tristam and I rode the bus east on Chicago truly without an idea of what would happen. What we wanted was routine, of course, however chaotic our lives might be; we could strive. It was all I could do to resist the urge to burn the whole fucking place down, myself with it. For me, the days start nervous.

  I keyed my pilot to search the data bank for the right fit; I call it "pilot", but really it's custom, fabricated from the body of an old cell phone. It could get me into any city database long as I had the code. Old girl Jenna Simonsen of the Logan Square halfway house gave it to me in exchange for certain connections that only I can provide. At twenty-seven minutes past the hour, I ran a background check on myself, Mr. John Arcadia, to find I'd escaped from prison for the third time, but way back in 1987. More interestingly, I trashed the greenhouse of a neighbor in Waukegan, ended up in the hospital and with a charge of indecent exposure on top of other vandalism counts, a two-inch gash traveling the length of my buttocks. I got busted with marijuana two years later, and the cops put me in a boarding home with no hope of escape, which is to say without a goddamned chance, much less twelve jurors and a judge.

  "There's my money," Tristam said.

  The flunky pointed to the same park at the corner, by which we were presently passing; we stood each with one hand gripping overhead stabilizing poles like chimpanzees, myself keying the pilot in my other hand. The boy was getting bold. Valentino was there on the steps of the park's field house in plain view.

  "You mean you're pointing him out to me now?" I said. "What about our deal?"

  "Money," Tristam said.

  "That mean he got money, or he gone take your money?" I said, knowing too well the answer. "Boy, I don't know why you just don't settle on your fix with me. Settle on safety."

  "Who are you today?" he said, and before I could tell him about John Arcadia the greenhouse torcher, he gestured broadly back west, toward the church. "Meet you there," he said, and hopped from the bus, his skinny legs forever appearing like they ought to crumple under the weight of his body, however paltry. This time he stayed aloft, floating toward the pusher-pimp. And I may have been shaken, distracted, or angered by this, and maybe it prefigured things to come, but I didn't get heated just yet over it. I imagine he knew well what he was doing, the fuck, cause I didn't miss a step, headed downtown for my checkup, preoccupied, scanning the pilot for further details.

  In 1990, as it happened, I torched a service station, a blaze that singed the eyebrows of many a bystander when it got to the main gas tanks, and did time for it. In 1995 I got out and lit up the prison itself, which ain't here in the record, but I did do it. I'm liberal with history, you might say; the details are there to be eaten and spit back out however you like. They run television commercials about people like me, and usually there is some woman whose voice is overrun with that of a man, and she looks very silly sitting in her posh kitchen at a polished-titanium table talking about the booze and whores she's gonna buy on the vacation she's gonna take to Tijuana on her stolen credit card. I ain't in it for cash reasons, though. Money corrupts absolutely, to modify the old phrase. You might ask Tristam about that one. With me it's more in the blood, you know.

  I found a seat finally and just when I got relaxed an old bum strode by and knocked my legs. He was passing out badly reproduced leaflets on which were printed the
Lord's Prayer. The old son of a bitch stopped just by me and wailed on about the anointed cloths he was gonna give out to anyone with any bit of change whatsoever. He yelled through the bus, erupting brash and ugly in the center of this morning commute. Everyone ignored him but me. I could be him too, and was excited at the prospect for the moment, for I knew there would come a day when the pilot stumbled upon the fate of all gadgets of its kind, broke, and left me hanging with a story I couldn't play for keeps. I needed another option.

  I asked the bum his name. He looked a little like me. He stopped his sermon and turned my way, his eyes going wide.

  "My name is your name, Jehovah," he said, which I promptly keyed into the pilot. "Jehovah," the old bum repeated.

  The bus slammed to a hard stop, the vagrant swaying with the tide. Yeah, I could be this guy.

  "Last name, social security," I said.

  The bum's eyes shot wider still, and he broke into the prayer on his mangled photocopied leaflets, holding one up close to his farsighted eyes and shuttling out the rear door in the same motion, midsentence, at Larrabee. On his way out he dropped one of those "anointed cloths" he was talking about. It was bright-blue, a pretty picture against the ribbed black rubber of the floor. Before anyone else could get his or her hands on it, I jumped. It's a holy day, I figured. I remained standing in honor.

  They were gutting the old Montgomery Ward building at the time, turning the commercial space into luxury condos. I looked out the bus windows from my spot and saw straight through the twenty-and-some floors of the monstrosity. Can't break a structure that solid, been standing much too long now, and the developers figured it to go the route of the rest of the neighborhood south of Chicago this far east since the retailer shut down, absolutely fucking filthy rich. It wouldn't necessarily work out: On the north side of the street of course sat the outer edge of Cabrini-Green, the miniscule streets dead-ending before Chicago Avenue in cul-de-sacs, the single-story brick boxes reminding me of projects in cities much smaller. Say Charlotte, Atlanta. Long time since I'd seen those places.