“Dat’s why we have to hurry and get dis cleaned up,” said Stash. “Once we get de cutting done, you guys have to dump de bags and de girls will have to scrub down every inch of dis room. If de real cops get involved, dey might use dose luminol lights for bloodstains, but we’ll tell ’em you came home drunk and you knocked Lorna around a few nights ago.”
“I’ve never laid a hand on Lorna!” protested Eli angrily. “I’m not a wife-beater!” Not like you, he thought silently.
“Dey don’t know dat,” said Stash evenly.
“Did you ever cut up a body before, Grandad?” asked Eddie.
“I doubt it,” snarled Eli. “Eddie, I thought you’d figured out by now that all those Outfit stories were bullshit. Your grandfather spent forty years working like a dog in the same place I just got laid off from today. If he was mobbed up, we wouldn’t be living in a three-bedroom bungalow in Cicero with a half-million-dollar mortgage, he wouldn’t be sleeping on a roll-out sofa bed in the garage, and you wouldn’t be sharing a room with your brother.”
“Sorry to hear de plant’s closing down, saw dat comin’ a long time ago, but we got other problems to deal wit now,” said Stanislas. “Eli, you get his head and Eddie, you get his feet. Take him into de bathroom, strip him, and I’ll walk you through it while I watch from the doorway. Eddie, give me de gun.”
“Why?” asked Eddie.
“Because if anybody walks in dat front door while we’re doin’ dis besides your mother, I’m gonna kill him, and dat’s no bullshit.”
Eli’s wife Lorna, a faded blond woman with a work-worn face, arrived home half an hour later with five-year-old Tommy. She saw what her husband and son were doing in the bathroom, and went into hysterics. Eli managed to get her calmed down after another half hour. Then he sent the little boy into Millie’s room, telling a white-faced Millie to play a computer game with him and keep him in there, while Lorna got busy with the Ajax, a scrub brush, and a mop. Then Eli and his son went on with their gruesome task while old Stanislas offered helpful supervisory suggestions that made Eli wonder if his long-held, skeptical estimation of his father’s alleged criminal past might need re-thinking. By nine o’clock that night, the bathtub was piled with doubled black garbage bags, firmly closed with plastic ties, and Lorna had managed to whip up a big pot of macaroni and cheese, which she served as supper along with a plate of buttered slices of cheap white bread. This was how the family always ate anyway, since the Food Stamps program had gone bankrupt years before. Every dime she and her husband earned had to go for the house mortgage and her father-in-law’s twice-weekly kidney dialysis treatments; food was a necessity of life that had to be provided as cheaply as possible.
There were no recriminations at the dinner table. This was America, these were poor white people who knew the score, and the only concern now was to save Eddie’s life. “I know what I gotta do,” said Eddie soberly. “Mom, Dad, give me some money, as much as you got on you, and I’ll leave town. After we get rid of the bags, Dad, take me up the Tollway as far as Interstate 90, and drop me off at some truck stop. I’ll hitch from there. I can make it to Wyoming in three or four days if I’m lucky, and then I’ll sneak across the border into the Northwest Republic.”
“But when will you come back?” asked his sister Milada, a thin girl with long blond hair who was on the verge of tears.
“I can’t ever come back, Millie,” said the boy. “I’m sorry it played out like this, I’m sorry I jammed the family up like this, but what’s done is done.”
“There has to be some other way!” moaned Lorna.
“There isn’t,” said Eli harshly. “He’ll be tried as an adult in one of those goddamned new Hate Courts, and he’ll get life in prison, although in his case that won’t be long since we all know what happens to teenaged white boys in Joliet.”
“What would happen?” asked Millie.
“I won’t last a week,” explained Eddie brutally. “The first time the niggers try to fuck me in the shower I’ll fight back, and they’ll stab me to death with their shivs.”
No one questioned what Eddie said. Life for white people in blue-collar Chicago was grim, and even Millie was old enough to know what he was talking about. Little Tommy simply stared. He knew something bad was happening, but he didn’t cry. Already he understood by some mental and emotional osmosis from the others that in this world, his family was surrounded by enemies, and he must not show weakness. “We all have to go,” said Eli. “They’ll be coming after all of us now, because of that Parental Responsibility Act, and they’ll give Millie and Tommy to It Takes a Village to be sold. Hell, might as well make a break for it, just on general principles. I ain’t got no job any more, and at my age I ain’t getting another job. I been thinking about it for a while.”
“Maybe it will be all right,” ventured Lorna. “The angels watched over Millie and Eddie this afternoon, maybe they’ll keep on watching over us.” White people in America dealt with the unbearable strain and tension of life surrounded by a slowly rising sea of mud in many ways. In Lorna’s case, it was through her Catholic faith, and a resolute belief in the existence of angels on earth who would somehow make everything work out in the end. She had a shelf full of books and a rack of video discs, all on the subject of angels. No one else in the family believed in them, and no one was so cruel as to argue with her on the subject. “But we can’t all go,” Lorna went on “What about Stash? He’s supposed to go for dialysis tomorrow. And besides, it’s against the law to move to any of the Northwestern states now. We’ll be arrested at the state line.”
“That’s why it has to be just me, Mom,” said Eddie. “I broke the law when I shot that ape, but you guys haven’t yet, unless you shelter me. That’s why I gotta leave on my own, so I don’t get you guys into more trouble.”
“I don’t give a damn about the law of this goddamned country no more,” said Eli. “Two tours in Iraq, and what did this country ever give me in return? I got a piece of shrapnel in my leg that still hurts like hell, but the goddamned VA doctors won’t take it out because it costs too much. There’s no more Medicare or any kind of help for my father. Neither of you kids are learning a damned thing in school, and if your mother and I didn’t stand over you and make you learn on the computer every night, neither of you would even know how to read and write. Now I got no job, because those Jews on the board of directors sent it to some shithole in Guatemala where they’ll train some Indian to push the buttons on the robot that actually does what I used to do. Nothing but niggers and Mexicans everywhere like a plague of goddamned locusts! Now they do this to my family? That nigger was probably getting paid more by the city for swaggering around the neighborhood with his gun and molesting any white woman he met than I was getting paid at the CT&D. He comes into my home and expects to rape my daughter just for shits and giggles, my son defends her, and now he’s gonna get thrown away like a piece of garbage? To hell with the law and to hell with America! I say we all go Northwest!”
“But what about Stash’s dialysis?” asked Lorna.
“De answer is simple,” said Stanislas. “You guys go Northwest. You go tonight. You can’t take me, and you know it. I’m stuck in dis chair, I can’t even take a shit by myself, and I gotta get hooked up to dat goddamned machine in de hospital every three or four days. You’re gonna have to run de border, where de TV says dey got army and Marines and special police units setting up barbed wire and minefields because so many white people want out of this latrine. You can’t be lugging me along while you’re cutting through barbed wire and dodging machine gun nests, and you can’t push me across a minefield in dis chair.”
“And what about our friend in the bathtub?” asked Eli.
“Before you go, stuff de garbage bags in de crawl space under de house,” said Stash. “When de Neighborhood Watch shows up looking for deir head nigger in charge, I’ll just clam up and tell ’em I don’t know nuthin’. When Tubbsy starts getting ripe and people notice de smell, sure, dey’ll fin
d him, but I still don’t know nuthin’. I mean, like I killed him and stuffed him under de house? In dis chair? Yeah, dey’ll figure out what happened, but you’ll be long gone.”
“Then they’ll just kill you,” said Eli. “They’ll beat you to death or drag you out into the street and run over you with their patrol SUVs like they did poor old Frank Metesky back in October when he hung blue, white and green streamers on his porch.”
“I’ll talk ’em out of it,” said Stanislas. “I can act like a real dumb and pitiful old bohunk when I want to.”
“And suppose you managed to do that, what will happen to you then, Stash?” asked Lorna. “Who will take care of you?”
“I still got some friends down at de precinct,” said the old man. In Chicagoese, he was referring to the Democratic Party precinct house, not the police precinct. “Dere’s still a few old bohunks down there who can get me a check of some kind, and if not, I’ll go into a nursing home.”
“You’re not going into a nursing home,” said Eli. “Especially not the ones for indigent old white people in this city, where you’ll be starved and beaten by the Filipino and Nigerian orderlies, and then one night one of them will cut your throat for your IV. I’m not leaving you in a place like that while we run away, Stash.” He sighed. “Eddie’s right. He has to try and make it on his own. We’ll dump the bags in the lake, and then I’ll drop him off up where I-90 begins. When the Neighborhood Watch comes looking, Eddie just ran away, and none of us knows anything. If they honestly don’t know what Tubbs was up to for his entertainment this afternoon, maybe we can get them to believe us. Eddie, go get dressed for the road. I got about forty dollars on me, I think.”
“I’ve got twenty or thirty,” said Lorna, sniffling.
“I have about a hundred dollars in my piggy bank,” said Millie, her eyes tearing.
“Aw, Millie, for Christ’s sake, you been saving that since you were eight,” said Eddie with a sad laugh. “I don’t need your money.”
“You saved me from that nigger,” said Millie, weeping openly now. “I know what he was going to do to me. I ain’t a stupid kid any more. Now you have to go away forever because of me. I can at least give you my pig.”
“Take me out to de garage and let’s give ’em some time,” said old Stash to his son. Eli and Eddie had built a ramp, and Stanislas could get back to his roll-up-bed sofa in the garage well enough on his own, but Eli wheeled him out anyway. When they got out to Stash’s hootch he’d made for himself, he said, “Eli, dis is bullshit. You can’t break up de family like dis. All of yez gotta make a run for it, get to de Northwest. Leave me. Don’t worry, I’ll be okay. Pack your shit, and take it on de arches. Tonight.”
“Leaving you behind would break up the family,” said Eli, “You’re right. You can’t run a border full of armed guards and land mines in a wheelchair, and that doesn’t even take into account your bum kidneys and your dialysis. Eddie’s young, he’s smart, and I’ve taught him how to work with his hands, carpentry, electrical, plumbing, not to mention how to keep that piece of crap van running. Hell, he’s handier around the house than I am. He can take care of himself and make a living in Seattle or someplace like that. You can’t. We can’t take you, and I’m not leaving you, so this is the only way. Maybe if all of us white people had stood up to the government like those Jerry Rebs in the Northwest did, things would be different, but we played it safe and stayed on our bellies, and things ain’t different. So that’s the sitch, and we’ll deal with it.”
“Even if you can somehow talk your way out of it when dose niggers come nosing around, you got no job any more, and from what you said at dinner de goddamned FBI may be coming after you for hatecrime as well,” said Stash.
“This is our home. Grandpa and grandma came to this country as DPs and spent twelve years working their fingers to the bone, grandpa swinging a pick and shovel and grandma waiting tables and sewing in a Jew sweatshop to buy this house. You grew up here and so did I, and now so have Eddie and Millie. Eddie has to leave now, but you don’t, and the rest of us don’t,” said Eli, desperately trying to convince himself.
“Bird turd!” snarled Stash. “Why do you think my parents came here after World War Two? Dey was one step ahead of de fucking Communists back in Czechoslovakia, is why. Dey was done dere, and now we’re done here, Eli. Dese things happen every few generations. All of yez need to accept what’s happened and clear out. Leave me. I’ll be okay.”
“You’re my father. I’m not running away and leaving you behind to face the music,” said Eli stubbornly.
“You know damned well I was a lousy father, just like I was a lousy wiseguy,” said Stanislas.
“Well, if you’d been a better wiseguy, maybe we’d be living in a nice suburb now and we wouldn’t be in this shit,” said Eli bitterly. “Okay, let’s say for a moment that I believe you. If you really were with Giancana back in the day, why didn’t you stick with it?”
“Your mother,” said Stanislas with a sigh. “Just after you was born, I got caught up in one of dose big Crime Commission sweeps dey used to pull every few years, all de politicians and cops downtown standing in front of de TV cameras and telling everybody how dey was gonna shut down de Outfit and clean up Chicago. Yeah, like dat’s ever gonna happen. Half of ’em were on Accardo or Momo Giancana’s pad even while dey were talkin’ dat crap. I was a little fish, and my charges were all petty bullshit beefs, running a couple of handbooks, receiving, nothin’ I couldn’t beat, and eventually I did.
“But for de only time in her life, your mother put her foot down. She said you wasn’t gonna grow up never seeing your old man except on visiting day. She didn’t care what I did when I was home, so long as I was home every night, otherwise she was gone and so were you. I knew she meant it, so I went to my precinct captain and I got a union card and a job at CT&D. So instead of seeing me only on visiting day, you got to see me home every night, usually drunk and whaling on your mother or you or your brothers, taking it out on you because I was working a drill press instead of running numbers and hustling and driving a new Caddy every year.” Stash looked up at him. “Eli, I was a rotten son of a bitch. I’m damned if I know why you let me live here after de way I acted all dose years. You don’t owe me nuthin’, rather de reverse. You take your family, and you get in dat van and you head Northwest, before Rico Tubbs’ homeys come knocking on de door, which could happen any minute now if you don’t move your ass.”
“I told you, you’re my father,” said Eli. “It’s not about what kind of man you were, it’s about what kind of man I am. I’m not leaving you behind.”
He walked heavily back into the house. Lorna and Millie were sitting on the sofa crying and hugging Eddie. In all the stress and turmoil of the day, Eli had forgotten that Stash still had the .45. He was just nerving himself up to tell Eddie and the women that it was time, that Eddie needed to say his goodbyes and they needed to get the van loaded with the macabre black bags and get moving, when they all heard the gunshot. Lorna screamed. “Stay here!” Eli ordered them, and he ran into the garage.
“Stan the Man” Horakova had performed one last hit, or possibly his first, on himself. Eli would never know. His father’s bloodied head was thrown back in the wheelchair, and the wall and ceiling of the garage was covered in dripping blood and gray matter. The gun lay on the concrete floor beneath the chair. There was still a lot of stuff left in the room from the days when it had been an actual garage, one of them being a can of vermilion spray paint. Old Stash had taken the can and spray-painted one word on the back of the garage door: “GO.”
* * *
The Horakova family pulled out of the driveway of the house on Kildare Avenue in the first thin light of dawn. They were driving a battered white van that was the last remaining relic from Eli’s attempt, some years before, to start his own part-time electrical contracting business using the umpteenth re-finance on the house mortgage. Then Stash’s kidneys had gone south and most of the capital went into keeping
the old man alive.
The business had spluttered along for two years and then been shut down by the federal government for failure to meet OSHA standards, although that was just an excuse. It had long been the policy of the U.S. government to destroy any white entrepreneurial endeavor wherever it raised its head, either through regulation or taxation. The American ruling élite disliked and distrusted self-employed white people. They wanted everybody in the country working for a paycheck that could be cut off, if it ever became necessary to get a handle on someone. The two parties differed only on tactical details, not in their commitment to full economic control of the white population. Republicans wanted that paycheck to come from a large multinational corporation, whereas Democrats preferred that it come from the government. Democracy in America had long since been reduced to a matter of who controlled the patronage. It was Chicago writ large.
Eli carefully packed the van with the things he thought they would need, mostly clothes and the tools he and Eddie would need to earn a living in the new land. The first stop was an automated teller machine at the far end of Kildare Avenue, where Eli drew out $220 of the $227.15 in his and Lorna’s joint account in $20 bills, the family’s entire worldly wealth. With what they had on them, as well as the contents of Millie’s pig, they had almost four hundred dollars, which would not be enough even for gas. But Eli had a large jerry can of gasoline he kept for emergencies, and this qualified. He also packed a siphon hose. “If we run dry we’ll just steal some gas,” he told them. “Preferably from some Jew’s Cadillac.”
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