The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Galina remarries fast, some say a little too fast, even for her. Her new husband is Polish, which makes a little stir, but Galina doesn’t care. The hell with them, she thinks. They don’t have no husband and two boys to feed. The new husband isn’t bad. He likes the boys’ mother well enough. He works in the mills like Mykhaylo did, provides for them, but isn’t around very often, doesn’t talk to them very much when he is. Even less when Petro lets the man know how much he hates him. Father Tarnawsky is the closest thing the boys have to a real father now, and for Petro, that means not very close at all; for Stefan, it’s closer. But it’s Tarnawsky who puts them on the paths they follow. He sees the kindness in Stefan and tells him so. Sees how sharp Petro’s ambition is and tells him to be careful. Oh, I will, Petro says, and Tarnawsky, who has dedicated his life to helping children, assumes the best. He shouldn’t.

  On Easter 1917 all the bells in all the churches in Cleveland, a city of churches, churches and factories, are ringing everywhere, all the notes in the scale at once. They’ve been ringing since seven in the morning, and they’ll still be ringing into the afternoon. The churches are packed, like they are every Sunday, but today’s the big one: The three-hour mass has just let out at St. Peter and Paul, and you could say this story’s born here, on this sacred ground, because everyone’s there. There are the factory workers and their families, the mothers and children in smart outfits they bought just for today, the fathers in the same suits they’ve been wearing to Easter for years. They’ve got baskets of food they put in rows for the priest to bless, sausage and eggs, ham and bread and cheese, cloves of garlic, the makings of the giant meal that’s coming. There are the factory managers in finer clothes, too, the guys who made it that far up and live along Lincoln Park now, but come out on the lawn to hear the bands in the gazebo in the evening, just like everyone else. The shopkeepers and the grocers, the local politicians, they’re all there, too. In the middle of it all is Father Tarnawsky, spectacled and balding, but with so much life still in him. He’s building schools, starting businesses. Doesn’t worry much about the conflicts of interest among business and church and politics; he just wants to get things done. He’ll meet with the president in a few years, still speak his native tongue as well as ever. Next to him are two of his altar boys, the Garko brothers, Petro and Stefan. Stefan’s fourteen and small, a little fidgety, hiding in the robes. The look on his face is too open, too earnest, for this place. What a good boy, his teachers in school say. What a good mark, say the kids in the gangs who intercept him on the way home. Petro’s almost his opposite, just this side of eighteen, and if you look at him the right way, you can see how he doesn’t belong in those altar boy clothes anymore, because the beyond he’s contemplating doesn’t have much to do with heaven. Watch out for that kid, the teachers say. The kids in the gangs say the same thing. Both with admiration and fear, because the thing that makes him so strong—untouchable, some people say—makes him dangerous, too. One of these days, Petro’s going off like a firework. And everyone who wants to be near him is trying to figure out if they can go for the ride without getting scorched, or losing their fingers, or worse.

  But the trouble takes some time to start, because for a while, Petro can’t see any way out of the South Side, out of Tremont. The streets are a labyrinth, tangling into alleys too narrow for two carts to pass each other. For the people who don’t think of leaving, it can seem as though all the world is on Professor Avenue, with its bakeries and candy stores, used furniture and appliance places. A photo studio. A bowling alley. A bank building like a tiny temple. Two funeral parlors. Kids following the pie man down the street; when he opens the back door to make a delivery, they all get in close just to smell it. The streetcar, the dinky, running down the middle to Starkweather Avenue, the women going to the West Side Market in Ohio City asking for a free transfer. The street peddlers shouting out their wares. Boys making small change any way they can. They pick up cigarette butts that still have some tobacco left, fill a cigar box with them, and sell them to some addict for a penny. They sell empty booze cans, shell peas at the market stalls if they can get over there, beg for chicken feet from the poultry house, fill a sack with them, and run them home so their mothers can make soup. They collect scrap metal, iron and steel, copper and aluminum if they get lucky. They wander around on the tracks of the Erie Railroad with burlap sacks, looking for any coal that might have fallen off, because the house doesn’t stay warm by itself. When the railroad cops aren’t looking, a couple of them climb into the cars and throw the coal down, and for the children on the ground, it’s like black hail, until they get chased away. They gather rags to sell to the paper and rag man who comes through the neighborhood on a horse and wagon, shouting paprex, paprex. A band of little criminals tails the man down the tiny streets; the kids raid his cart when someone lures him into a house with the promise of a big stash. Or they ambush him on the Central Viaduct Bridge when he’s going back to the East Side, beat him down and sell what he’s got at the junkyard before he wakes up again. At home, Galina makes curtains out of wallpaper and beads, hangs a cardboard triangle in the window when they need more ice from the iceman, who carries a fifty-pound block on a leather pad draped on his shoulder while the kids in the street suck on the shards that drop off the back of the truck. The stepfather takes a shot of booze before work, a shot of booze when he gets home. Galina doesn’t say anything; Mykhaylo did the same thing. On Sunday evenings there’s a party, and they bring out the good stuff, have a shot of it chased with a mouthful of black pumpernickel bread they tear off the loaf with their hands. They’re there long after dark, the boys slaughtering songs new and old on ocarina and ukelele, beating on the bottom of a booze can for a drum. There are fights between people who want to hear obereks, the Polish dances, and people who want to hear the Ukrainian songs. The boys can’t play either very well. Then all the guests stagger home, or almost home. The stepfather doesn’t always make it to the bed. They go to a wake of a friend’s cousin, see the wreath on the front door of the house of the deceased, the open coffin in the living room. Men sitting around playing cards and drinking, again, telling each other all the good things the dead man did. Everyone looks at the coffin, at each other. None of us is ever getting out of the South Side alive, they think. It’s an island in the middle of Cleveland, surrounded by fire. The trains howl in and out along the tracks, day and night. When the wind blows in from the north or the east, the smoke from the mills and the freight yard, the tar and asphalt plants, the stink from the slaughterhouse, covers everything in the neighborhood. The church steeples are black with it, and the South Siders who go downtown that day can’t get the smell off their clothes. No one will ever swim in the river again. But so many people who lived there will be proud they did, until the day they die.

  When Petro and Stefan are older boys, Galina takes them to the edge of the neighborhood with her and tells them a thing or two. Look behind us, she says. Takes all of the South Side, everything they’ve ever known, in one gesture, with one hand. Now look ahead. Look how big this city is, she says. Opens her arms wide. Now think about the world. And Petro starts sitting on the edge of the ravine to the Flats, too, trying to take it all in. Below him, the slope is tangled with weeds. He can see the bobbing heads of a few boys harvesting the marijuana; in a few months, the police will come and burn it all, but it’ll just grow back again. In the valley, a freight train heads out of town with a hobo on the roof. He’s tying himself down so he can sleep. Across the river, Petro can see the great lit arc of the city, from the opposite bank of the Cuyahoga to the shore of the lake. He’s going to get out of Tremont; he can feel it. He’s going to rise above it, so far that they won’t be able to see him. Just the trail he left in the air.

  It’s when Prohibition starts that Petro gets his shot. It’s 1919. They read in the paper that alcohol’s illegal, hear about it on the street. At first, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal. It’s just another rule that people in the S
outh Side can ignore, and they’re almost cheerful about it. They’re ahead of the rest of the city; they start making booze themselves about as soon as they can’t buy it from the store. Soon every fourth house is making beer or liquor and selling it to the other three. On Saturday night, they go out to the dance halls, where the bands play loud and the singers use megaphones to be heard above the music. They can’t drink there because the police make sure they don’t, ruining a good time. But when everyone gets home, after the band sends them off and the dance halls close, everyone drinks as much as ever. It’s just that the stuff they’re drinking is a lot worse. Some of it’s bad enough to cause seizures. Some of it’ll put you away for good.

  And everyone gets a little too used to seeing guns when the bootleggers come around, people from the East Side. They have good wine that the Italians are making—Dago Red, they’re calling it. Whiskey from Canada, the real thing; they bring it right across Lake Erie into Cleveland at night. They fight with each other over who gets to control Tremont, and now and again that ends in gunfire. A couple people end up under the ground. But they’re nice as anything to their potential customers. A gangster named Cesare, who can’t be much older than Petro is, does a deal with a man who lives just down the street named Bogdan; Bogdan’s daughter’s getting married, and he wants to have something for his guests as a treat, to express his happiness and gratitude. The neighbors gather around when the transaction happens; they want to see how good the stuff is. Almost everyone’s eyes are on the alcohol. Petro’s are on the money. He sees just how much more Bogdan’s willing to pay for the quality—a quarter a pint—than for the rotgut his neighbors are making, which doesn’t taste like anything good. And Petro sees where the money’s going. It starts with the clothes Cesare’s got on, the tailored suit, the tilted hat. He saunters up the road in that, and all Petro’s neighbors, all at once, look like they just got off the boat, like they can’t speak a word of English. For some of them, that’s the truth: they’ve been here for two decades and English is as far away from them as ever. Petro’s own mother struggles with the language, has trouble getting her tongue around some of the phrases that have crept into American Ukrainian—receipt, umbrella, strike breaker, smart man. Stefan’s not much better; his English is okay, but he speaks it with such a thick accent that people outside of the South Side have to use their imagination to comprehend him.

  “So this is the best you have right now, yes?” Bogdan says, in English.

  “Speak English, pal,” Cesare says. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  And what is the point of speaking English if you can’t use it outside the neighborhood? Petro thinks. What is the point of speaking it if they still think you’re just a dumb Slav? He thinks about his little family, his friends, his neighbors, and is embarrassed; and that makes him loath himself, that he can’t stand to be around his family outside his house. That his own accent is still so sharp. That he can’t talk anything like the people he sees downtown, who speak English with the careful, lilting ease he associates with actors, singers, voices on the radio. That’s the key to all this, he thinks to himself. Knowing what to say and how to say it. That and money. The rest is just appearances. Disguises.

  Which is how, in 1921, Petro and Stefan have the first conversation that starts to drive them apart. It’s after dinner, and Galina and her husband have gone to bed. Petro and Stefan are in the living room; the parlor, as Galina likes to call it, half joking. Petro’s twenty-two. Stefan’s eighteen. They’ve broken out a couple beers, some semi-flat stuff they bought from their neighbor neither of them likes, but it’s what they have.

  “This house is really too small for the four of us,” Petro says.

  Stefan shrugs. “It works well enough.”

  “Does it?” Petro says.

  “Sure it does.”

  Petro takes a gulp of his beer. “I’m leaving, Stefan,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “It’s not so much where,” Petro says, “it’s what. I’ve been watching those bootleggers, how much money they make, and I’m going to get a piece of that. A big piece. Enough to get us all a bigger place.”

  “Like the places on the park?” Stefan says. His voice is weak.

  “Are you kidding?” Petro says. “Those aren’t big enough.”

  “They’re the biggest places on the South Side.”

  Petro just looks at him for a couple seconds. Then he says, “Screw the South Side.”

  They’re both angry young men, and maybe if they weren’t, they’d know how to say what they need to say without tearing everything down. But they are, and they don’t.

  “I’m glad Ma isn’t here to hear you say that,” Stefan says.

  “You don’t get to talk to me like that,” Petro says.

  “Someone has to,” Stefan says. “If Pa were here, he would.”

  It’s been almost a decade since their father died, and he worked so much in the Flats that Petro and Stefan didn’t see him very much at all. But they miss him every day, so much, and they’ve lived with the grief for so long to know that they’ll never get past it. They see a father playing with his son, throwing him in the air, spinning him around, playing chase, and remember when Mykhaylo used to do that with them. They remember him on the couch, and both of them on top of him; he used to pretend to be a bear, and they would capture him and try to tie him down, but he would always get away from them, roaring and laughing. They remember him kissing their mother on the forehead in the kitchen every morning, then patting her on the back just before he left the house. The only thing they have trouble remembering is his funeral, and the gigantic party it became, because so many people liked their father and were shocked to see him go. There was a coffin, but it was closed. So for them it’s almost like he’s still alive, alive and out there, watching them somehow, always asking how they are. Trying to keep them in line, raise them right, even though they can’t see each other anymore. It makes what Petro says next more hurtful.

  “Pa was a sucker.”

  “Take it back now,” Stefan says.

  “The hell I will. He let them work him to death.”

  “He was killed in an accident, Petro.”

  “That wouldn’t have happened if he’d had any ambition at all,” Petro says. “If he’d wanted more than to work in a factory and go dancing on the weekends, he never would have been anywhere near that train. He’d be working somewhere else, and he’d still be here with us, and none of us would have to be here, in this fucking place.” He waves his hands in disgust at the house, the street, the entire neighborhood.

  “How can you be so ashamed of us?” Stefan says.

  “How can you not be? Look at this place. Look at yourself.”

  In the backs of both of their minds, a small voice is screaming at them, telling them to stop talking, wondering how the hell the conversation went so sour. But they don’t know how to stop. They’re both buzzing, shaking, and it’s Stefan who lunges first, throws the first punch, hits Petro square across the jaw. Petro doesn’t hesitate; he kicks Stefan in the stomach, sends him flying back across the room, and then jumps up and closes in. Stefan manages one more good, solid hit, a punch that gives Petro a gushing nosebleed, before Petro, who’s still bigger and stronger, has him pinned to the floor. He punches his brother four times in the stomach and then stands up and kicks him. Stefan’s yelp sends Galina rushing from her room in her nightgown. Stop! Stop, both of you, she yells. If your father could see you like this. They skulk off to bed, don’t say a word to each other the next day. The day after that, they seem fine. But they’re not.

  So, in 1921, for Petro’s family, it’s as if Petro vanishes. For a little while, he’s one of those same-old-stories, the one about the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and is never seen again. His mother and Stefan as
k around, but nobody knows where he’s gone. Stefan goes to the police, but that doesn’t go anywhere; the police have other things to do. Petro Garko is a missing person case that, in a way, never gets solved. Because when the man turns up again, his family doesn’t recognize him.

  Chapter 8

  It’s March 21, 1921. Petro’s walking home when he happens to cross paths with Cesare. Like I said, Cesare and Petro are about the same age: Cesare still has a bit of the boy about his face, which is even more obvious because he doesn’t work in a mill, doesn’t work on the Flats at all. Doesn’t have all that oil and smoke driven into his skin like everyone around the South Side does. Petro’s seen Cesare a dozen times since he sold the whiskey to Bogdan, moving from door to door down the alley where the Garkos live, passing out bottles, taking orders for more. Petro’s been wanting to approach the guy for a few months now, but it’s never the right time. Cesare looks like the kind of guy who doesn’t like his business interrupted except if it’s for more business, and Petro respects that, knows he doesn’t have anything to offer Cesare, at least not yet. Right now, it’s all favors, what Cesare’s willing to do for someone he doesn’t know. What Petro might be willing to do in exchange for what he wants.