“Okay, but your mom . . . Doesn’t she care that you’re never home?”
“I am, rarely. I stop by to get clothes and the weekly envelope of cash she leaves for me,” he said. “But the short answer is no. Shopping and vodka are very important to her. Dougie, not so much. The only thing she ever taught me was when I was thirteen, tall enough to see over the dashboard of a car. She had this old five-speed Mercedes and she instructed me in the art of clutch, gas, and brake so I could drive her around when she was blitzed.”
“But what if something happened to you, like—”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was never a priority. It was always, ‘Stick Doug in front of the movie channel with a bag of something salty while the adults party,’ or, ‘Send Doug to the multiplex with enough money to see everything twice.’ And I did, and I’m lucky I did, because movies gave me more than my mom ever could.” We were quiet again, steam pipes hissing around us. “One other thing. It’s so effed up,” he said.
“What?”
“Her method of parenting was out of sight, out of mind, right? But like every kid, I’d get into trouble now and then . . . busted for shoplifting a candy bar or something.”
“Shame on you.”
“I know, surprise, I’m human,” he said. “And then you should’ve seen her. She became super-disciplinarian, raising holy hell, watching my every move. It was sick, like . . . she did so little, it made her feel like a mom. But then after a day or so, she’d get distracted by a martini or three and I’d become invisible again.”
“Mother of the year,” I said.
“Mother-something,” he said. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“How could you let Max go?”
It caught me off guard, slowing my step. “Being around me was too dangerous for him. I had no choice. You know that.”
“What I meant was, how were you strong enough to let go of someone who loves you?” he said. “I can’t imagine having the courage to give that up.”
“There was cowardice in it, too. I was scared what he’d think about me, the things I’d done. I hated letting him go.” I sighed. “But then, I hate a lot about myself.”
“You do what you have to do,” he said quietly.
“Doesn’t make it right.” We fell silent, trudging ahead, until I said, “What about your hockey player?”
“The lunkhead hadn’t even seen Citizen Kane. We were doomed from date one,” he said. “Your turn again. Spill it. What kind of friend is Tyler?”
“I’m not sure. I know he likes me . . . and it feels good. I trust him, at least a little.”
“Remember The Godfather. Trust only your consigliere,” Doug said. “For the record, that’s me.”
“What I meant was, Tyler and I operate in the same world. We understand it,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean we like it.”
“How do you know he doesn’t like it?”
“I just know.”
“Gut feeling?”
“We talk. We text. Okay?”
“Okeydokey,” he said. “Just watch your step.”
“Speaking of—is the ground getting muddy?”
“Definitely sticky . . . goopy,” he said.
I felt bricks scrape my helmet, the walls press against my shoulders. “Either I’m growing,” I said, “or it’s getting smaller in here.”
“I was worried about this,” Doug said. “Settling.”
“What do you mean?”
“All those books on the control center you never read? They explain how Chicago is built on mud and clay,” he said, touching the wall. “Bricks are missing. The earth is seeping in. This tunnel’s probably settling, sinking.”
“What if it settles on top of us?”
Doug was quiet a moment. “Just keep moving.”
The space narrowed more with each step, pushing down from the top, rising up from below. Doug was correct—the ceiling was sinking while wet dirt crumbled in from the sides, filling the floor. I stumbled, reached out to steady myself, and started a small avalanche of bricks and mortar. Overhead, a groaning noise sounded as a shower of grit rained down on our helmets. We froze, waiting for the whole thing to collapse on top of us. When it didn’t, I said, “My bad.”
“Do not do that again,” Doug said.
“Guaranteed,” I said, pushing on.
Soon it was difficult to walk upright—we were bent over like two question marks in the dark—and it was all I could do not to scream at the sense of being buried alive. The cold, wormy smell of soil enveloped us as the ceiling pressed down and the path beneath us pushed upward, and then it was so tight the only way to continue was by crawling through the muck.
Doug said what we were both thinking. “We could . . . we might get stuck. We should go back.”
“To what?” I answered, spitting mud. “This is it, my last chance.” When he didn’t reply, I said, “Doug? Are you having a panic attack?”
“I’m too scared to panic,” he said quietly.
I felt it then, a faint breeze blowing from just ahead. I squinted, seeing an actual light at the end of the tunnel—a horizontal half-moon shape, all that was left of the top of the tunnel exit. “Keep moving,” I said, pulling forward on my belly, ten more feet, then five, and then using both hands to dig away a larger opening through the half-moon. When it was just wide enough, I wiggled out, sliding face-first down a steep mound of dirt to a concrete floor below. I rolled onto my back, never so happy to be reclining in filth. Doug squeezed out using his elbows, slipping down next to me, saying, “Thank god I lost weight!” Rising woozily, he yanked the backpack from the crevice and looked around. “Where are we?”
“Sort of like where we started,” I said, nodding at a ladder bolted to the wall. Next to it, a painted hand pointed toward a high ledge. “There’s another tunnel up there.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“If the ladder holds,” I said.
“We have the grappling hook. If that doesn’t work, I’ll sprout wings and fly our asses away from this muddy death pit,” Doug said.
I pulled on the ladder but it didn’t budge. We ascended to the ledge and hesitated before the tunnel entrance. The darkness was impenetrable; it was impossible to tell if the ceiling and walls were intact.
“Are we really going in there? Again?” Doug said with a shudder.
“Once, when I was first learning to box, I dropped my guard and got punched in the face so hard I saw stars,” I said. “My trainer, Willy, said it was the dumbest thing he’d ever seen. Made me promise to remember one of his rules of the ring.”
“What’s that?” Doug said.
“‘Never do the same dumb thing twice.’” With a sigh, I said, “Forgive me, Willy,” and stepped inside the tunnel.
8
NOTHING CRUSHED OUR SKULLS AND WE DIDN’T have to crawl through sludge. Instead, traveling on, it was our noses that were assaulted.
“Mamma mia,” Doug said, sniffing the air, “do you smell that?”
“Are you kidding? How can I not?”
“It reminds me of the worst field trip I ever took,” he said. “A chicken farm on a hot day. Disgusting is too small a word for it.”
I slowed down, shining the flashlight in front of me. The tunnel ended abruptly. Moving the beam, I said, “Is that a door?”
Doug brushed cobwebs from it, showing a painted hand pointing upward and the words To Fillmore Avenue. “Fillmore?” Doug said. “I’ve studied the crap out of Chicago streets and I’ve never heard of that one.”
“Look, no latch,” I said.
Doug pushed on the door but it didn’t move.
I stepped up and thumped a shoulder against it, and it budged a little. “Help me,” I said, and we shoved together. It opened slightly, scraping at the ground.
“Pee-freakin’-yoo!” Doug said. “Something in there needs to change its socks!”
“Once more,” I said. We threw ourselves against it and the door popped open with a thunderous crash as we stumbled inside.
“Is that . . . it’s a snake!” Doug said, rolling around in the dark. “Help me, Sara Jane! It’s a huge—”
I shined a beam toward him. “Hose. It’s a hose, Doug,” I said, moving the flashlight, spotting a light switch. I flipped it and lit the space. By pushing through the door, we’d knocked over a shelf that had been placed against it, scattering tools and round plastic tubs. I stared at one marked Chromic Acid and another, Ammonia. “I think we’re in some type of storage area,” I said.
“Look,” he said, pointing around. “Three walls built from concrete blocks. But the one we came through . . . old brick.” He looked closely at the door. “It was sealed off. See how it was soldered at the edges? Someone did a lousy job.”
“Thank god,” I said. The stench was stronger, and I looked across at another door that was decades newer than the other one. “Come on,” I said. It opened easily, and we stepped onto a concrete platform that seemed to stretch forever in both directions. It was bisected by a slow-moving stream of beige goop, emanating a scent best described as slaughterhouse mixed with nursing home. Another platform, just as wide, ran along the other side of the stream. “Sewer. A big one and fairly modern, too,” I said, looking at the concrete walls and buzzing fluorescent lights. “This thing is fairly new . . . built way after Capone Doors. No painted hands.”
The muffled sound of traffic guh-dunk-guh-dunked from far above.
Doug tilted his head. “That’s why there’s no Fillmore Avenue,” he said. “Walking northeast from the bakery . . . I bet we’re under the Eisenhower Expressway. Fillmore probably got wiped out to make room for it.”
“That’s not all that got wiped out,” I said, staring around the cavernous space. “The tunnel used to continue somewhere up here, but it’s gone. Built over by the city.”
“Now what?”
I shrugged. “No idea.”
“I know you don’t want to go back, but I think we have to, and find another Capone Door. I hate the idea of squeezing into that tunnel, but it’s our best option,” he said, reaching for the door that had closed behind us. “Okay, scratch that. It’s locked.”
I looked at the punch code on the door, at the stencil reading Maintenance C-316, and at Doug biting his lip. “So, we head north,” I said, pushing the helmet back on my head, wiping at a line of sweat. “Hopefully, we’ll find something that leads back to Joe Little’s tunnels.”
Doug shifted the backpack and sighed. “Hopefully,” he said.
The platform was covered in a layer of slippery scum, with large pipes jutting from the wall, dripping into the terrible canal. We stepped over them carefully, our boots making suction noises as we walked. Now and then a big bubble of methane gas would pop lazily in the stream beside us, while cars and trucks rocketed overhead. It was as impossible to ignore the unbearable odor as it was the feeling of defeat, until I remembered something. “Last night,” I said, “I found a letter from Nunzio to Enzo hidden in the notebook.”
“Really? Where?”
“Under the back cover. It said all kinds of stuff but only one thing that mattered.”
“What?”
I grinned at him. “‘Ultimate power is freedom.’”
“Wow,” he said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You got me. But I like it,” I said, as my ears perked up, hearing a familiar tune—someone whistling “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Carefully, with a finger to my lips, I pulled Doug into a dark corner.
Footsteps echoed toward us as a wiry guy in an orange vest and hard hat appeared on the platform across the stream. A walkie-talkie crackled, asking if he was at the door yet. The guy told it to relax and asked what the code was again. The walkie-talkie told him—four-six-three—as he stopped at a door stenciled with Pump 12, punched the buttons on a lock, and swung it open. A light flicked on and I squinted through the gloom, seeing the walls inside, made of old brick. After some clanking and hissing, the guy reemerged, slammed the door, held his nose, and told whoever was on the other end of the walkie-talkie that there was something in the air down here that reminded him of the Cubs. When the footsteps faded, I said, “Come on.”
“Over there?” Doug said, pointing at the stream. “Through that?”
“How else are we going to get to the other side?” I said. “What, you’re scared to get dirty?”
“No. I’m scared of drowning in toilet paper and nightmare condoms.”
“It can’t be that deep,” I said, stepping over a low railing and sliding in, the sludge rising to the top of my boots as my feet touched bottom. It was syrupy and warm even through rubber. I moved cautiously, terrified of the slightest splash. Doug eased in behind with the backpack on his head. I grabbed the railing on the other side, pulled myself up, and helped him climb up, too, right outside the door.
“Let us never speak of this again.” He shuddered as I punched four-six-three into the lock. Inside, the fluorescent light spread a yellowish glow. The pump dominated the room like a huge steel octopus, fat in the middle, pipes twisting off in several directions, the thickest ascending into darkness. Doug touched the wall and said, “It’s the same brick as in the tunnels. But this place goes nowhere. Now what?”
Something else answered, high-pitched and insistent.
I turned to a tiny pair of gleaming yellow eyes.
“Antonio?” I said.
It wasn’t possible, of course. The two original sewer rats that Great-Grandpa Nunzio had trained to guard Club Molasses decades ago, Antonio and Cleopatra, were long dead. But throughout the past six months, their descendants had appeared at critical moments to do what they’d been bred to do—aid and protect a Rispoli. This one twitched its worm tail, impatient, not the least bit intimidated, and scurried up the high middle pipe. I aimed the flashlight after it, seeing footholds, and said, “Let’s go.”
“Whoa, time out,” Doug said. “I was willing to walk through a stream of human gravy, but follow a rodent to who-knows-where? Really?”
“At least it goes up.”
“At the very least.” He sighed.
We climbed quickly, leaving the ground far below. The helmet lights helped but the rat made the difference. It scrambled from foothold to foothold, guiding us upward, reassuring us with encouraging squeaks until it was quiet. I peered around, seeing nothing, and then spotted the little animal directly across from me, standing in the entrance to a tunnel. I knew rats were good jumpers; it had leaped across the three feet of air floating between the pipe and the tunnel entrance, and we’d have to do the same.
Running in a frenetic circle, the rat squeaked once in farewell and disappeared. “We have to jump over there,” I said to Doug. “Can you make it?”
“Of course. I’m in great shape,” he said nervously.
I took a deep breath and pushed off, landing solidly on both feet. Peering down into darkness and then at Doug hugging the pipe, I said, “Don’t think too much.”
He looked down, and then back at me. “I’m thinking too much.”
“Jump!” I yelled, the word bouncing from the walls, and he did, but with his arms extended instead of feet first. He hit the ledge at his chest, fingernails digging at the brick floor, and began sliding backward. I grabbed his wrists and pulled like it was a tug-of-war, grinding my heels, yanking with all I had as he came barreling up and over, knocking me flat. While he lay on the path fidgeting and talking to god, I rose and looked at the wall across the chasm. Just like in the sewer, it was solid concrete. My guess was that once, long ago, the tunnel we occupied continued on the opposite side. I turned and looked at a pointing hand on the wall behind me with the words LOOP—1/2 MILE. Doug stoo
d, foul-smelling and trembling. “Uh . . . is that your boots, or you?” I asked.
“At this point, what’s the difference?” He shuddered, drawing out a cigarette and the steel lighter. “Sorry to be a cliché, but I really need a smoke.”
“Doug,” I said, “remember? Explosive gases?”
He glanced at the lighter, sighed, put it away, and followed me into the tunnel. We covered the half-mile in silence until he said, “Hey. Look.” I turned my flashlight on a pointing hand with the words MONADNOCK BUILDING—6 FLIGHTS UP next to a passageway.
“We’re beneath Jackson Street, downtown,” I said. “In the Loop.”
“There’s another one,” he said, shining on the words SHERMAN HOUSE HOTEL—VIA COAL ELEVATOR. “Never heard of the place.”
“Must be gone. Knocked down and built over,” I said.
Our trek took us past more passageways leading to other phantom locations—Henrici’s Ristorante, The Venetian Building, St. Hubert’s Grill—until, slowly, the ever-present darkness was cut by weak illumination. It came from an entrance just ahead and we picked up our pace, hurrying toward it. Doug entered the large room first and I followed, gaping up at a cathedral-like ceiling, tall and airy, with light streaming through distant grates. There were no seeping pipes or flowing sewage, but instead, in the middle of the room, a circular bar. Empty bottles and overturned tumblers sat on it next to a rotary telephone and a ticker-tape machine, all of it caked in decades of dust.
“It’s an octagon,” Doug said, staring around the stop sign–shaped room, “like an intersection or crossroad.” Each of the eight walls bore a sign above a tunnel entrance leading to a specific location. “Krauss Music Store, Bruno’s Diner, House of Eng,” he read, nodding at three of the openings. “Never heard of those places, either.”
“Wrigley Field is still there, of course,” I said, picking up where he left off. “That tunnel leads to the Issel Building, that one goes to St. Alphonsus Church.” I turned and looked at the tunnel from which we’d emerged, its sign reading LOOP, which was now behind us. It was the seventh entrance, leaving one more. I walked across the room and stared at the words above the eighth tunnel. “Riviera Theatre,” I said, turning to Doug with a grin. “You know where the Riviera Theatre is, don’t you?”
Embers & Ash Page 6
