Painted Cities (6 page)

“Okay,” I told him.

And slowly, very slowly, the sheet of metal began to rise. I ran around the back, climbed the roof, and helped Buff pull it the rest of the way. We got the sheet to the top. We reached out and yanked the piece over the ledge. We sat on the gravel roof and breathed. A breeze was blowing now. Real traffic had started up on Twenty-Second Street. I looked at the rusted piece of metal and then looked to Buff. He was smiling, smiling the way he had that first time I met him. I smiled back. We were building a house now. It was only a matter of time.

The rest came easy. The wood Buff had found was really stacks of discarded truck pallets. We pulled them apart, pried off the healthy planks, scraped off the pieces of wilted lettuce and rotting tomato. We carried the planks three or four at a time back to the pierogi factory. After we tired of carrying, we hoisted them up to the roof and began construction.

After a few days the work became habit. In a week or so we had a solid frame. In another week the metal roof was in place, built of the tin sheet we had found in my basement and a piece of corrugated metal we’d discovered in a warehouse dumpster on Rockwell Avenue. Next we built the walls.

The room was small, maybe five by five. It was short, but tall enough for either of us to stand up in. Over the weeks of construction, the idea of having a separate living room and dining room had given way to what we were actually capable of: one single room. But really, that one room was enough. It was all ours.

The crowning achievement had been the mattress. Buff had
located it one morning while walking to the factory—to “work,” as we had started to call it. He didn’t even bother climbing the roof. Instead, from the alley, he called up to me.

“I found a bed,” he said. “Hurry before someone takes it.”

Quickly, I slid down the air ducts. I walked the fence and then jumped down to the alley. Together we ran the few blocks to where Buff had spotted the mattress.

It was small. The mattress was from a cot or a child’s bed. It was sitting folded over in a dirt patch off the cement of the alley. I pulled it open. It was stained in the middle, soiled like the mattresses in the attic of my house, old mattresses left over from whoever had lived there before, kids not potty-trained, old people unable to get up, drunks. Buff must’ve seen the look on my face.

“This side it’s not that bad,” he said. He twisted the mattress so I could see the back side.

He was right. The other side
was
cleaner.

We carried the mattress through the alleys of the neighborhood. Every half block or so we set it down to adjust our grip. Other kids from the neighborhood stopped their baseball games, their football games, to let us pass.

Finally, we were home. We dropped the mattress in the gangway of the pierogi factory. We rolled it up like a thick sausage. The mattress smelled dank, sweet almost, like weeds in the sun, like an alley in the summer.

Buff climbed the roof and let the rope down. I wrapped it around the mattress. “Okay!” I called up to Buff. The yellow line went taut.

The bed was actually easier to lift than the piece of tin or even the wood had been. The bed seemed to bounce right up the wall,
and when it got to the ledge, another strong jerk popped it right over onto the gravel roof. Immediately, we carried it into the house. We undid the knot and let it flop onto the floor. It was a perfect fit. The mattress lay snug against the rear wall, snug between the two side walls. Along the wall that held the doorway, there was enough space to walk in, enough space to put a table in if we wanted. Buff paced the small gap. He flapped his arms in and out as if doing the chicken dance.

“See, bro,” he said. “In case we have parties.”

I sat down on the bed. I sank down to the gravel. I forgot about the pee stains on the other side. The whole room took on the sweet smell of the dirty mattress. I leaned back and rested my head against the wall, our wall. Along the opposite side, sunlight piped in through cracks and nail holes in the planks. The wall looked like what I thought a nighttime sky in the country might look like, busy, crowded. I searched for constellations, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, ones I’d heard about in school. I closed my eyes.

“This is awesome, bro,” Buff said.

“Yes,” I said. “Awesome.”

The fantasy lasted three days. Each night I was the one who called “time” and said we had to go. Each night got longer. I’m afraid of what might have happened had Buff never thrown that rock, the one that brought everything down. We were so close already, another day and maybe we would’ve stayed forever. Maybe we would’ve disappeared, like I wanted to back then, when I was young. Of course, things never work out the way you want them to. And then all you
do, the rest of your life, is dream about what would’ve happened, or could’ve happened, had you done what you wanted to do in the first place.

In his defense, that rock was probably the biggest the gravel roof had to offer. In his defense, we should’ve hurled that rock months earlier, when the summer had first started, when I first met Buff. In his defense, no rock had ever glanced off a windshield, not like that, and really, what an odd set of circumstances, to have that little girl rounding third base in the park across the street at just the right time for the rock to go sailing into her temple, breaking her little head open, sending her chest-first into the concrete, her feet kicking up behind her, one lone white shoe cartwheeling over her body, landing somewhere up near her head, which had already begun to spout blood.

I remember this all as individual events. In my mind I can freeze each frame. Like when Buff and I turned to look at each other. Like when I saw Buff, not smiling but somehow shrugging, like he’d known this was going to happen, like he’d known something was going to happen to spoil everything.

They hadn’t even seen us yet, the family of the little girl, the gangbangers across the street. They hadn’t even called out like I remember them doing, “
Hey, up there! Look, there they are! There’s those little fuckers!
” None of this had even happened yet when Buff turned to me and said, “Sorry.” I wonder what he saw in my face. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t just
his
fault, that we were accomplices, friends.

In another moment the gangbangers were on the roof. I was punched in the stomach hard enough to make my back ache.

“
Who threw the rock?
” one of them asked me.

I looked to Buff. “Me,” he said. I am aware now that the noble thing would’ve been for me to say that I had done it, that
I
had thrown the rock. And I can see the nobility in Buff speaking up—even though he
had
done it, he didn’t have to
say
he had done it. At the time, though, the thought of taking the blame didn’t even cross my mind. I just watched one of the gangbangers approach Buff and without any warning, a windup, a step, a twist of the body, punch Buff square in the side of the face.

Buff didn’t make a sound. His knees buckled. He looked down. The side of his face was red. But he didn’t whimper or cry. When the kid who punched Buff turned, I saw that it was Junebug, the kid Buff had claimed was his cousin, the ugly kid.

They tore our house apart. They kicked in the flimsy walls. I hadn’t realized how weak the structure actually was. We’d sat in the house during rain, but we’d never have survived any kind of strong wind. It was only a matter of time.

I was dragged across the roof, handed down the air-conditioning ducts. Once on the ground I heard sirens, saw the flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks. Police officers were pulling up. They saw Buff and me being led down the street in opposite directions. They saw that we’d been roughed over, beaten. They didn’t stop any of the gangbangers to ask questions. We were on our own then, and for a split second I had a flashback to when Buff had first suggested that we could build a house, a flashback to when I’d first called up to Buff, “
Hey, how’d you get up there?
” And, as I was presented to my father and yanked by my collar into the house, I longed for that feeling again. The feeling that I was all alone, that I was entirely free.

I’ve had other moments, since then. When I graduated college, for about five seconds I felt free. Or when I rode my first motorcycle down the alley behind my house, for about ten seconds I felt free. Then I realized I had to turn. But up there on the roof, when I was alone with Buff, I knew it, that it was all us; our lives were what we made of them. Never again have I felt as free as I did then.

Years after the pierogi factory incident I heard that Buff had been shot dead. This was in high school, my sophomore year. I was hanging out with friends in Barrett Park, where we played ball and drank beer. Ramiro said it. He always had the neighborhood news: “Hey, did you guys hear Buffster from the Latin Counts got killed? A drive-by, bro, right there on Wood Street. Got blasted in the head. Dead on arrival.”

“You mean bald-headed Buff?” I asked. “Short guy, blue eyes?”

“Yeah,” Ramiro said. “You knew him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We grew up together.”

“No you didn’t, bullshitter,” Alex, another in our group, said.

“No, I did,” I told them. “One summer me and him, we built a house. Over there on top of the old pierogi factory. You should’ve seen it. We were going to live there.”

CHILDHOOD

I
grew up on Eighteenth Street and Throop, in the heart of Chicago. To the east, beyond the Dan Ryan Expressway, beyond the steeple of Providence of God Church, and beyond the no-man’s land that was the “darkside,” a stretch of neighborhood laced with forgotten Illinois-Continental railroad tracks and collapsing smokestacks, a place said to be inhabited by the most ruthless Mexican street gang in Chicago, the Villa Lobos, was the lake. To the north were the Puerto Ricans, who were rumored to surpass the Villa Lobos in ruthlessness, said to be willing to shoot you in front of a church or in front of family, sins the Mexican gangs swore against. And then beyond them, farther north, were the whites, in a dreamland accessible only by the Chicago L, and even at that a place you glimpsed momentarily—redbrick houses, wrought-iron fences, tree-lined streets—then left, swallowed by the subway if you were on the Douglas-Park B, or forced to watch it all fade from view if you rode the elevated Ravenswood A.

The blacks were to the south. They were unfathomables. Things we didn’t understand went on down there. Killings were indiscriminate. And to the west was the sunset, that’s all I ever knew about the west, when evening would come and the sun would hit that point at the horizon where it flared up the long neon glass corridor of Eighteenth Street as if each
panaderia
, taco joint, and tavern had caught fire. Then, minutes later, the miracle would disappear, and up and down Eighteenth Street the kids who had lined up for blocks were left to wonder if the sun’s sole purpose was to torture them with a paradise they would never reach.

We called this the Revelation. We’d named the event as kids, when Rogelio Ramirez, who grew up with the rest of us on Throop Street, began reading the Bible and reciting from the Book of Revelation as the sun set. He’d stand on the corner stoop of Trebol’s tavern, Bible open in his left hand, drawing exclamation points in the air with his right. “The Woman and the Dragon!” Rogelio would say. “The Fall of Babylon!” Occasionally, the men going into the tavern would stop and listen, as if contemplating the passages Rogelio read, but something in them always snapped, and they’d break into laughter and call Rogelio “The Pope” or “The Saint of Throop Street.” Rogelio never cared. He’d simply raise his voice even higher, bring his arm down even harder. Eventually, the men would retreat into the smoky darkness of Trebol’s, the thick black door sweeping shut behind them. The small diamond of mirrored glass at its center staring down at us as if a horde of curious drunks were peering out from behind it. When the sun dropped below the horizon, Rogelio would snap his Bible shut, turn on his heels, and march back down Throop Street, like a leader into flames.

When we were in the sixth grade, Rogelio’s mother began sleeping with Rowdy, an old Racine-Boy who lived above Sergio and Jorge Naveretté, two brothers in our group and expert spies who had devised an ingenious method by which to hear the sex going on above them.

“Check it out, bro,” Sergio said the morning after he revealed the secret to me. He turned and began walking up his apartment building’s stairs. That morning I had met him early for school, looking to hear Ms. Ramirez’s lovemaking for myself.

Sergio stepped into his living room, past his kitchen whose boiling pots of water always made that side of the house seem more like a rainforest than a place where people lived and ate. He led me around the corner into the small bedroom he shared with his brother. There on the bed, lying on his side, was Jorge, holding a long row of paper-towel rolls taped end-to-end to his ear. The other end was up on the ceiling, inserted through a hole for a missing light fixture.