Painted Cities (4 page)

“Joker, what the fuck are you doing?” Jr. Chine said. And a tiny voice came from the hooded figure.

“Hey, bro, we need to find Angel.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Jr. Chine said, now loud and boisterous, his adrenaline sky-high. He bobbed and weaved as he moved around the figure. “Take off that hood so I can hear you.” Jr. Chine’s hands were wet. His right hand around the grip of the gun had become cold, though the rubber grip itself remained hot. He pulled the gun from his pocket and held it stiff-armed at his leg.

“It’s me, bro,” the voice said a little louder, the hooded head following Jr. Chine as he juked and stuck.

“Joker?” Jr. Chine asked.

“Yeah.”

Jr. Chine cocked his body, ready to spring into action, then reached out and peeked under the hood. It
was
Joker, though with
all the welts, the fluvial bruises around his eyes, the fresh slices to his cheeks, it was hard to tell. Jr. Chine’s trigger arm went limp, his elbow finally unlocked after what had felt like hours. Vision reeled itself back in. The burning in his arm remained, but he relaxed and put the small gun back in his pocket.

“Hey, bro,” Joker said. “Angel’s on his way to kill Susan.”

“Susan who?” Jr. Chine said.

“His lady, bro.”

UNDERGROUND

T
here are cities down there, Little Egypt said so. He said they’re smaller cities, not nearly as many people, but they have traffic and L’s, just like we do up here.

The subway used to connect. Little Egypt said that too. That the Douglas-Park B Line used to take a steep dive right after LaSalle Street and descend into the cities below, neighborhoods stacked on top of one another deep into the earth, like department-store floors. “But then,” he said, “they built downtown, John Hancock and all that. Now the subway just flies right over, Jackson Boulevard, Monroe. People up here don’t even care anymore.”

I saw Little Egypt’s suitcase once. He kept it stored beneath his bed, packed and ready to go if he ever got the call to leave. “My grandfather took this baby all around the world,” Little Egypt said; he hoisted the suitcase onto his bed. “Should handle a trip below, I’d think.” He patted the swollen hide, then curled out his bottom lip and nodded.

Inside were a lot of shorts. On the underside of the top flap a ziplock bag had been taped. A thick purple cross had been drawn on it, and beneath the cross,
FIRST AID
was written in large block letters. He untaped the bag and split the seal. Band-Aids, gauze, a spray-can of Bactine, a pamphlet on snake bites poured out over his blue comforter. A few sets of chopsticks from Jade of the East Chinese spilled out as well. I lifted a set. Along the paper wrapper
JADE OF THE EAST
was written in familiar Oriental script. A local address followed, then a picture of a Chinese temple, layered, like a playing-card house.

“That’s my grandmother’s favorite restaurant,” Little Egypt said. He took the set of chopsticks from me and tore off the temple end. He split the sticks. “They make great splints.” He placed one along his thin forearm. “And communication tools.” He tapped out Morse code: “SOS,” he whispered. “And great weapons too.” He did a pirouette, then waved the chopsticks in my face. “Hi-ya,” he snarled. “But they don’t really fight down there.” He straightened and put the chopsticks back in their paper sleeve. “Really, it’s a more peaceful society.”

Double-D batteries were taped like shotgun shells along the inside wall of the suitcase. From between his piles of T-shirts and shorts he pulled a red plastic flashlight. He offered it to me and I flicked it on, casting a sharp yellow beam against his white wall. “I’ve had that puppy for years,” Egypt said. “Never failed me. Not once.” He curled out his lower lip again and shook his head. “Never.” I flicked off the lamp and handed it back to him, grip first, the way one does a pistol or switchblade. “I mean, they have lights down there and everything,” Little Egypt said. He tucked his flashlight
back in between his clothes. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry.” He pulled a roll of clear packing tape from a bureau drawer and retaped the first-aid kit to its position on the underside of the top flap.

Sometime later, one morning before school, Little Egypt was at my door, suitcase at his side. He was dressed in his church clothes: a red knit sweater, tan slacks, brown loafers so polished they seemed wet. It was early spring, the sun was unusually high and bright.

“Just wanted to say bye,” Egypt said. He smiled, his row of tiny teeth nearly fluorescent. I offered to walk him, and I quickly dressed and washed my face. Over the running water of our kitchen sink, I heard Egypt on our front stoop, whistling.

We walked down May Street.

“I left a note for my grandmother,” Little Egypt said. “She should see it when she gets back from church. I’ll write her, of course. I just didn’t want to be too specific, tell her exactly where I’m going. Sometimes,” Little Egypt said, “a man just has to break free.” I nodded.

We passed the graffiti-covered field house of Dvorak Park, the pool, shards of broken glass catching sunlight along the concrete deck.

“That’s one thing I won’t miss,” Little Egypt said, looking to the pool. “The pollution. They got a system down there, you know. Cleans all the streets. They never even
heard
of graffiti.” He gave a nod as if there were a valuable lesson in this. Our field house’s shower-room walls held messages:
Ambrose Love. Flaca, You Know I Still Love You, Junebug
.

At Twenty-First Street we turned the corner and walked toward the abandoned junkyard. “Well,” Egypt sighed. He put his suitcase down. “I guess this is it.” He stuck out his hand. “I’ll be sure to write, and I hope to see you again sometime.” He clicked his tongue twice and winked. Then he lifted his suitcase, turned, and walked down the quiet street. As he walked, the heavy suitcase bounded off his short leg; he held out his opposite arm like a cantilever. I realized then how small he was.

He stopped halfway down the block in front of the junkyard office. He stepped off the curb to a familiar sewer grate, one I myself had looked into often as I combed our neighborhood for loose change. The smell of wet metal spilled over the junkyard’s corrugated walls—rust, oil. In the distance an L rumbled across Eighteenth Street, traffic whined on the Dan Ryan, a truck ground through its gears on Twenty-Second. I heard everything in echo, my ear to the city, one giant seashell.

“Hello!” Egypt called down into the grate. He was in a squat, his suitcase alongside him. He looked to me and smiled, then waved. The brown of his church shoes stood out red in the morning sun.

“Hello,” he called again. “Anyone down there?” At that moment I realized I was about to lose my only friend.

THE CITY THAT WORKS

P
uppet plays guitar. He strums his strings on Eighteenth Street and Wolcott, in the narrow gangway between Zefran Funeral Home and the El Milagro tortilla factory. There at night, the notes
bounce up the brick walls around him and create an echo that Puppet believes he’ll one day record and sell for millions of dollars.

He plays old tunes: Ritchie Valens ballads, Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk.” He thinks he’s romantic. When the L’s rumble by, he continues playing, convinced somehow that his music is affecting the travelers: making a pickpocket reconsider as he slips his trigger hand toward a sleeping passenger’s pocket.

Puppet can play the first few bars of Ritchie Valens’s “Donna” like an expert. The rest he fumbles through, and he returns to the chorus like it’s his lifeboat. The hair on the back of his neck stands on end. He wonders if those on the outside, those at either end of the dark gangway, where the orange of the streetlights glows in long, vertical slits, are feeling it too. Often, when he steps out of the gangway, he expects entranced crowds to be gathered there: beautiful women with tears in their eyes and a love for him undying. Of course, there never are—just the hum of the city at night, things on autopilot, neon signs, streetlights, the clicking of stoplights. Overhead another L rumbles by like a strip of film, only one or two of the yellow frames actually holding a silhouette.

Across the alley, in a bedroom on the top floor of a three-flat, a young girl sighs. She turns from her open window and faces the darkness. She hugs her pillow. “I love you, Ritchie Valens,” she says. “I love you.”

FREEDOM

I
knew Buff before he was a Latin Count, before he was shot dead. His real name was David. I heard his aunt call him that once, when we were on top of the old pierogi factory. “David!” she called out. And Buff looked at me. “Shit,” he said. He dropped the rock he had in his hand and went running across the gravel roof. He climbed over the air-conditioning unit and disappeared. I was up there alone then. I looked over the ledge onto Twenty-Second Street, the traffic. I looked at the kids playing swifties in the school playground across the street. I dropped my rock and climbed down as well. Throwing rocks wasn’t fun unless you did it with someone.

David, or Buff, thought different. I had first met him a few months before, when my father had sent me to the A&P to get some milk. I was approaching the pierogi factory, just across Oakley Avenue. It was hot out that day; the sun felt somehow closer.
WHACK!
I heard. Across the street, a CTA bus screeched to a stop. The driver turned
and stared back at me. Behind him, one of the large safety-glass windows had been shattered—a cool, spiderweb-like pattern spread over the entire pane. I looked to the sidewalk and continued walking. Finally, the bus moved on.

After it had crossed Western Avenue I turned and looked behind me. There, on the pierogi factory roof, standing at the ledge, was a boy my age, maybe a little younger, wearing a white T-shirt. His head was shaved. He had big ears and a smile that made him look something like Dopey from
Snow White
. He nodded at me as if he knew who I was.

“How’d you get up there?” I asked him.

“Around the back,” he said. His speech was quick, almost hyper. At the end of his sentence he sucked his tongue, like he was fighting back saliva. Then he disappeared beyond the ledge.

I continued on to the A&P. I kept looking back. I imagined couches up there, tables, a secret hideaway. I was jealous. The pierogi factory roof was one of the last frontiers of my neighborhood. It was only two cinder-block stories high, but its remoteness, its sheer walls, made hiding up there seem equal to never having been born.

The second time we met we became friends. I had figured out how to get up onto the roof myself. The key was the chain-link fence that enclosed the factory’s dumpster—at one corner the fence could be scaled, and then it was a matter of balance, a tightroper’s balance, skirting lines of barbed wire to the factory’s air ducts. After a leap to the thin sheet metal of the ducts, it was like climbing playground slides in reverse. Once, twice, three times, and suddenly you were there. It was amazing how easy it was. The pierogi factory roof had always seemed so impenetrable. I’d scaled garages. I’d scaled
abandoned warehouse fire escapes. I’d even scaled the Western Avenue L stop, using the steel straps that held the support beams together as footholds. But I’d only ever dreamed about gaining the roof of the pierogi factory. That first time up there I surveyed the terrain: blank, empty, a white-gravel roof with a huge, green-painted air-conditioning unit. I was disappointed. Still, no one else I knew had ever been up there. Except, of course, for Buff, whose name I didn’t even know yet.

It was a beautiful view, Twenty-Second Street, the street I lived on. I’d walked Twenty-Second so many times I knew every crack and buckle of its dilapidated sidewalks. But seeing it from two stories up, seeing each expanse of concrete imperfection, was awesome. The sidewalks seemed to make sense from up there; one could almost read the streets, the way they dipped and turned, how the sidewalk simply followed suit. I took a seat on the ledge of the roof and picked up a rock. I dropped it down to the sidewalk, waited for the sharp snap.

Across the street a large group of gangbangers, Disciples, were playing basketball. Their voices echoed loud and clear off the school building behind. “Ball! Ball!” they called out. “Foul, motherfucker! Goddamn!” It occurred to me that from up there I could be a spy if I wanted to. I could climb the roof late at night when the Disciples were having their meetings and overhear plans for drive-bys, cocaine sales, turf wars. It occurred to me that I could go to the Laflin Lovers or the Bishops, archrivals of the Disciples, and sell their secrets. I was hatching plans, schemes, when suddenly, behind me, the gravel churned.

He was there, standing. He was short, much shorter than he
looked from two stories down. He was younger-looking as well.

“Ha!” he said. “I knew it, bro! I knew you’d find the way up here.” He sucked spit. “You climbed the fence, didn’t you?”