Chicago (16 page)

Mr Pawlowsky went on in this vein for a while, while the sailor caught a remarkable number of trout and perch along with two large whitefish, and I kept mental notes on the wonderful array of birds overhead and in the water—mostly loons, grebes, and cormorants, although here and there I saw little troops of scoter ducks—until we reached the area of the lake where Mr Pawlowsky thought they might begin prospecting for the Wildcat. Here I was put to work cleaning and icing the fish that the sailor caught while they consulted maps and charts and laid plans for winching and grappling; they also spent nearly an hour lowering plumb lines, measuring wind and current, and jotting copious notes. After a while Mr Pawlowsky opened the ice chest and brought forth sandwiches and beer, while the sailor again fished for a while; but this time he returned the three small whitefish he caught to the lake.

On the way back to Belmont Harbor I asked the sailor why he had not kept the little whitefish, and he said well, first, they were really too little to eat, and second, he wanted to be respectful to the life that had grown up around the airplane down there, as the airplane was serving as a sort of reef, and if he and Mr Pawlowsky could successfully salvage the Wildcat, then the fish down there would be losing their apartment building, so to speak, and he agreed with Mr Pawlowsky that a courteous gesture to those fish now would not be out of place, considering the magnitude of the changes that were imminent; and third, the lake had given us plenty of food today, and greed was never good. When we got back to the building he divvied up the fish, giving me two trout, dividing the two large humpbacks between himself and Mr Pawlowsky, and giving all the perch to Edward, who was delighted and had an oily sheen about his coat for the next week.

*   *   *

As June began there was a roaring hot spell and I played a lot of basketball at the park with Bucket and Monster—there's nothing quite so pleasant as playing intense basketball outdoors, with good players, when it's so hot you can sweat off a pound in an hour, if you play hard enough—and one afternoon I got into a weird fight with the leader of their gang, a guy named Luis. He was almost thirty years old, I would guess, and he was a gifted athlete, although not actually a great ballplayer—although he thought he was, which turned out to be the reason for the fight.

I had never seen him at the park before, and I have no idea why he was there that day, but he and I took an instant dislike to each other, and in the way of young men and ballplayers we immediately jockeyed to cover each other in the game. It was a Saturday, and we were playing games to fifteen, best of five, you have to win by two baskets. There were eight guys, so we played four on four, full-court. It was unbelievably hot, so hot that halfway through the afternoon, when a sudden brief Midwestern epic rainstorm drenched the court, the rain steamed and dried by the time we came back from getting water at the fountain behind the school.

Full-court games to fifteen baskets are tough enough, but with such evenly matched teams (I had Bucket on my team, with Monster and Luis on the other side) overtimes are almost inevitable, and all of the first four games spiraled up into the twenties or even late twenties by the time they were done. After four games we were tied, and everyone was tired and chippy; even Monster, who never spoke, said something curt after one rebounding melee, and I got cracked so hard by Luis on a baseline drive that I thought he broke my finger. That set me off—like many middling players I played best when I was annoyed—and after that I hammered him every chance I got, setting picks with grim pleasure, grappling for position with elbows high, and cracking him back once deliberately when I went for a steal and got all hands and no ball. He grew infuriated too, and by the end of the fifth game we were no longer playing ball as much as we were fighting without fists.

He was older and much more muscular, but I was quicker and, I think, angrier. Part of it for me was that I had felt established in the park, I felt that I
belonged
there, it was a part of Chicago where I was known and even respected, a little; and to me this was huge, for I was still relatively new in the city, far from home and school and friends and brothers. And the park was not the magazine office, where I was paid to work, or the apartment building, where I paid to live, but a place I had
earned,
so to speak, by being myself. And here was an interloper, hammering me on my turf!

I was a fool, of course, and it was his turf, really, not mine; and I think that made me angry too, for in my mind I had glossed over the nature of the Latin Kings, what they actually were and what they actually did. I was young, I was sentimental, I was a fool, and to me Bucket and Monster were essentially cool guys, ruffians who admired my game and chose me quickly when they chose teammates; but here was their king, and maybe part of what made me so angry was that looking at him I realized what a fool I had been to gloss over the reality of the Kings, who were collectively murderers, rapists, thieves, drug lords, pushers of evil and death to children, human vermin who didn't think twice about smashing families and neighborhoods. It was Bucket himself who had once told me that the Kings had started right, as defenders of poor Spanish-speaking kids against white gangs, but soon they had gone the way of all gangs.

And here, not two inches away, for a solid hour, was the perfect encapsulation of the real Kings, an arrogant blunt instrument pounding my stupidity right into my face; and I got angrier and angrier, at my own illusions, at his infuriating ego, at some lost thing that he was somehow responsible for, and then it boiled over.

The fifth game went into overtime too, of course, and Bucket won it with a quicksilver pair of stunning baskets that I do not think any defender on earth could have stopped. There was a second of exhausted silence and then Luis swung at me with all his might, but Monster, who had seen this coming, pulled me out of the way. I lost my temper and said foul and vulgar things and Luis came at me again but now Monster was joined by the rest of the players, ostensibly protecting their leader. Luis was shouting incoherently and I was still so angry that it did not occur to me that I was standing on gang turf with seven members of a gang that had murdered more people than anyone will ever know.

Bucket said quietly, “He think you disrespect him,” and I said angrily, “How the hell did I do that?” and Bucket said, “You play him even, man, and you skinny whitey and dork glasses.” This last was true—when I played basketball I wore a pair of ugly old thick-rimmed spectacles, to keep my good glasses safe from damage.

Monster said firmly, “Man to man, best two of three buckets, then magazine man be leaving, Kings ball first,” and Luis and I stepped in. I knew full well there would be no fouls. Luis drove right at me, head down like a football fullback, and I jumped out of the way, poked the ball away as he went past, and then picked it up and scored.

He who scores gets the ball again. Usually you “check” the ball with the opponent, a sort of polite gesture to be sure he's ready, but I knew if I gave Luis the ball it would come back at a hundred miles an hour, so I bounced it to Monster, who bounced it back, expressionless. Luis was fuming. I drove as hard as I could to his left for one huge step, and then spun back away as fast as I could, evading the forearm I knew he would throw at my head, and put up a little fallaway jump shot from about ten feet out. Not a shot I was very good at, but this one dropped through the net. Game.

Now Luis was apoplectic, and I had calmed down enough to realize there was real danger in the air; this could well end with me losing an ear, or worse. For a moment my mind grappled with the oddity of such rage in such a bucolic spot; you never saw a more typical beautiful summer Saturday city schoolyard playground, with the slightly bent rims, and the battered backboards tattooed by thousands of dusty balls, and the worn endlines and sidelines, and the scraggly tufts of grass along the fences, and the beginning-to-rust poles holding up the backboards, and the baking brick school walls, sprayed with graffiti of every sort of color, especially the black-and-yellow spoor of the Latin Kings. There was even, I had time to notice, a little spray-painted strike zone, where little kids played stickball.

Monster, to his eternal credit, made a judgment call then that I have thought about ever since; it must have been a remarkably brave act on his part, to essentially challenge the leader of his tribe in public, though he did it with a subtle brilliance that took me a while to appreciate.

“One shot and be done,” he said to Luis, and there arose a howl of appreciation and shrill debate, and then Bucket said to me, “He going to hit you hard, man, be ready, better give me them glasses.” I started to object and Bucket said “No, man, he get one shot, be ready. When you go down stay down.” I gave him my glasses and dimly I saw Luis lunge at me and then my nose exploded, is as close as I can get to explaining it. I went down and stayed down. A few minutes later Bucket helped me up. Everybody else was gone. Bucket said, “You nose is broken, man, better get that fix right away. He have to win, you see. Way it is. Maybe wait a week before you ball up here again, okay?”

Bucket walked with me through the schoolyard and down two blocks—later I realized he must have escorted me to the boundary of his territory—and then he left and I walked home holding my bloody shirt against my nose. At the apartment building Mr Pawlowsky led me into the alley and washed off the blood with a hose—I remember there was a lot of blood, and the water in the hose was so hot I gasped—and then set the two pieces of my nose back together with a quick wrench of his wrists, saying he had set many a man's nose in the Navy. It was possible and indeed probable that most men who had ever served in the United States Navy had broken their noses while in service, although probably most of those breaks were not incurred in
direct
service, you understand, but in extracurricular activity.

So it is that even all these years later I can look in the mirror and see Chicago; there's a hook or bend in my nose that looks exactly how Broadway bends between Roscoe and Aldine streets, near Belmont Harbor. I don't notice it much anymore, but little kids see it right away, and ask about it forthrightly, in their relentlessly curious way. I tell them a sailor in Shanghai did it, or a plummeting falcon in Ireland, depending on whim, but sometimes then I think of that blazing day.

Years later a detective friend of mine in Chicago told me that he heard Luis and Monster were dead but Bucket became some kind of social worker in the projects on the west side of the city, which could be true. I would like it to be true; he was a gentle soul underneath his rough veneer, I thought, and I bet he would be a superb social worker, all too knowledgeable about darkness and light.

 

17.

ONE DAY ABOUT A WEEK
later I was home sick when I saw a most amazing thing. This was on a Thursday. I had staggered down the street to the grocery store for orange juice, the only thing that would stay in my stomach, and when I dragged myself back into the building I remembered to check my mailbox; but as I shuffled down the hall I noticed the back alley filled with animals of all sorts, from dogs to squirrels to what appeared to be a black-crowned night heron perched on the fence by Mr McGinty's bathroom window.

Not for the first time in my life I doubted my eyes, and thought I was hallucinating, and decided that the shadow-line between this world and the dream world had been breached without my knowledge, and concluded that I was a lot sicker than I thought I was, and had better shuffle upstairs and go back to bed until Monday, but just then Mr McGinty came out of his apartment to get his mail. He saw me staring into the alley and laughed.

“You think you're hallucinating, don't you? So did I, the first time I saw it. But this is Thursday morning, and on Thursday morning Edward holds what you might call office hours in the alley. It used to be on the front steps but it got too crowded there and people stared. The alley's private and there's a lot more room. He sits at my chess table and they come up to him one by one for some sort of consultation. I think it's probably more spiritual than medical but I have never asked. Not my place. The first couple times I saw it I stared too. I mean, who wouldn't? But I think it makes everyone uncomfortable if you stand and stare and I wouldn't want to be disrespectful to Edward. You might take a good long look and then wander away, is what I would suggest. Not that I am telling you what to do. But we wouldn't want to be disrespectful to Edward.”

I got the message and stood at the back door for a moment and looked out at the line. You wouldn't believe the number and shape and size and variety of animals there were. I saw dogs of every sort, and all sorts of birds from sparrows to the heron (it was a night heron, I confirmed later in a bird identification guide), including what surely was a red-tailed hawk, standing patiently about halfway down the line. There were two raccoons, and an opossum, and rabbits, and three rodents of some sort, and what looked like an otter, although I had not known that there were otters in our neighborhood. In all I estimated that there were more than twenty animals on the line. As I watched a boxer dog turned away from Edward and walked quietly down the line and around the corner, and everyone on line moved up a space without jostling. At that point I thought I had been there long enough and the last thing I wanted was for someone on line to see me gaping, so I got my mail and went back upstairs to bed.

*   *   *

It turned out that Eugenia, the woman in 3C who had been an actress in the Broncho Billy films, had left a startling sum of money in her will to Miss Elminides, and a lesser but still very substantive sum to Mr Pawlowsky—the first for “kindness and generosity,” and the second for “generosity and kindness,” according to the letter from her lawyers. There was no explanation of how she had come by such sums—investments from her earnings? her husband's estate? some inheritance?—but the money was real, as Miss Elminides and Mr Pawlowsky discovered when they went to the bank and were handed bits of paper proving that the slip of a woman with the brightest orange hair you ever saw, the tiny old lady who loved to wear her costumes from the movies, the slight cheerful old lady who left the enormous stuffed horse in the basement, had indeed left a lot of money to her landlord and to the building manager.