Painted Cities (7 page)

“Jorge,” Sergio said. “Let Jesse see.” Jorge’s eyes were closed, his eyebrows raised in soft arches. He was ten at the time, a year younger than Sergio and me, but with his head to the side, his eyes closed the way they were, he seemed even younger, like the Christmas ornaments my mother had of baby angels sleeping.

“Jorge,” Sergio said again. And Jorge opened his eyes but made no move to get up. Instead, he continued to listen to the cardboard contraption, alternating his gaze between our faces as if what he saw was beyond us, beyond the walls of the tiny bedroom he and his brother shared.

“Jorge!” Sergio said again. And Jorge snapped out of whatever spell he was under. He leaped from the bed. “Damn, bro!” he said.
“They’re doing it doggie-style!” He sounded out of breath, excited. I took the tube and nodded, knowing from the
Penthouse
s Sergio and Jorge kept beneath their dresser exactly what “doggie-style” was.

On the other side of the small apartment, amid the cloud of humidity I had seen swirling when I passed, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. Though I lived just across the street, I had really seen Sergio and Jorge’s parents only twice in my life, once at our confirmation, at our grammar school, Providence of God, and once when a disgruntled former tenant set their apartment building on fire. Otherwise their parents hardly seemed to exist at all, disappearing into doorways, driving off in their green pickup, always slipping just out of view. Whenever I walked into Sergio and Jorge’s apartment and saw the swirling steam of their kitchen, I wondered if their parents were actually in there, or if they hid from their children the way they seemed to hide from everyone else.

Love affairs were a fact of life in my neighborhood. What Ms. Ramirez was doing was not that extraordinary. Stories abounded of mothers who had left their families to live with truck drivers from Texas or journeyman housepainters. And Mr. Gomez, downstairs in my building, had been seeing a barmaid at Trebol’s tavern for years. Everyone knew about it, knew Mrs. Gomez knew about it. She would send her youngest son, Peter, to fetch his father from the barmaid’s apartment atop the tavern. No one ever said anything.

But Ms. Ramirez was religious. Her husband had left her the year before and she had turned to the church, Rogelio in tow. When the Virgin Mary processions came singing up the street, carting the porcelain three-foot statue of
La Virgen
to the sin-afflicted apartments of the neighborhood, Ms. Ramirez was in the lead. She had
inherited from the most devout before her the task of deciding how long the Virgin was to sit in the various accursed households; sometimes it stayed for weeks on end. And behind her, carrying the candles and crucifixes of the procession, the fifteen or so other neighborhood women followed like apostles. They had all lost something—sons to drive-bys, unwed daughters to pregnancies and flight-of-fancy elopements—but Ms. Ramirez had lost a husband. And though the list of things-to-weather went on for miles in my neighborhood, deserting husbands sat at the top.

“All right,” Jorge instructed. “Now push it up till you hit the floor.” I raised my head as Jorge worked the other end of the tube deeper into the hole. Sprinkles of dry plaster cascaded down upon the side of my face, into my eye, as I held the tube to my ear. Abruptly the tube hit flush. Sergio and Jorge looked to me. I wasn’t sure what to listen for. What did doggie-style sound like? Then, without warning, unmistakable sounds began pouring down the tube. I heard the squeak of old bedsprings. I heard the scrape of bedposts against wood flooring. Most remarkable of all, I heard the voice of Rogelio’s mother, who just the day before had asked me how I was doing in school but who was now moaning out
“Rowdy,”
softly, quietly, as if sorry for something, grateful for something else.

I looked to Sergio.

“I told you, bro!” he said. “I told you she was up there!” I didn’t say a word. Instead, I listened more closely, able now to pick up even fainter sounds, the rocking of an off-kilter night table, the groans of Rowdy himself, whose voice here was smooth and easy, different from when he was out front drinking, cursing in ways we remembered and used on our own.

I couldn’t tell whether they were doing it doggie-style or any style. I only pictured in motion the
Penthouse
scenes Sergio had begun flashing before me like cue cards. I closed my eyes.

The heaves of Rogelio’s mother began closing in on each other. The groans of Rowdy got louder. I imagined Ms. Ramirez sweating, her mouth open, her tongue pushed against her upper teeth like the women in the magazines. I imagined her nude but for the red heels she often wore to work. And in my imagination her shoes glowed red, radiating as if with heat in the steam-filled room.

“
Ohh
,” Ms. Ramirez suddenly gasped. I opened my eyes.

“Let me see!” Sergio said. I didn’t respond. Sergio put his magazine on the dresser and sat next to me. He placed his ear close to mine at the end of the tube. On my right side, Jorge did the same, a triangle of eavesdroppers.

“All right,” Sergio said. “He’s about to climax.”

And then there was a quick trade of punches. Ms. Ramirez called out to God; Rowdy grunted; the rocking turned to a rumble, the scrapes to digs. Then there was a yell, and in that split second Rowdy’s voice was thick and heavy, the way it sounded out front when he called someone
a punk-ass motherfucker
and was about to prove it. Silence followed, then a soft thump. I held tight to the tube, listening for any aftermath. Sergio rose from the bed and bowed like a matador to the four corners of the tiny bedroom. Jorge whistled softly in applause.

“Man,” Sergio said as we walked to the corner of Eighteenth and Throop, our notebooks in hand, “they were all over today. Usually they’re just quiet.”

“Must’ve been horny,” I said. “She always yell for God like that?”

“All the time,” Sergio said. “She’s going to hell.” He blessed himself and laughed.

At the corner Jorge took a seat on Trebol’s stoop as Sergio and I looked up the block for Rogelio and Marcitos. Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday’s fried food, tacos,
gorditas, chicharon
, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day’s worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. Up the block, Rogelio and Marcitos came out of their buildings. Marcitos, carrying a single spiral notebook like the rest of us; Rogelio, carrying his books and Bible in a small brown briefcase. Marcitos crossed Throop and met Rogelio. They approached us.

Providence was marooned on the darkside, forgotten among abandoned factories, outmoded railroad lines, and dilapidated wood-frame houses. I’m sure those in the neighborhood who didn’t know Providence of God was back there—it was small, like any other three-flat—wondered every morning where all the kids were going, disappearing into the maze of decaying brick buildings, following the train tracks as if we were ghosts of a life that might once have existed there. We even felt like ghosts sometimes, in the winter, when the sound of our footsteps was muffled by snow, when even our breathing seemed swallowed by the thick air. In the spring, when it rained, we huddled beneath the train docks and examined the vast innards of the factories—the huge chutes that hung like descending missile silos, the conveyers that led off into distances we never had guts enough to explore. When the rain stopped, we crossed back over the railroad
lines and became real again, our walks like transformations.

“Hey, bro,” Sergio said as Rogelio passed us, assuming his usual position at the head of the pack. “Your mom leave for work early this morning?”

I cringed.

“She goes to work early now,” Rogelio said, not turning around to look, his briefcase bouncing off his skinny leg. “I told you last week.” Behind us Jorge and Marcitos, who were the same age, settled into their morning discussion about the previous day’s episode of
Spectreman
. Marcitos still had a black-and-white TV and it was Jorge’s duty to update him on anything he might have missed.

His blood is blue, bro. Everyone knows that
.

For real, damn, I thought I saw some orange coming through
.

Sergio stroked his chin.

“She must like working, huh?” he asked. Sergio elbowed me in the arm. Rogelio didn’t answer.

We neared Saint Procopius, our school’s competing parish. Morning sunlight exploded through the church, casting the reds and blues of the stained-glass windows onto the sidewalk below. As Rogelio passed the front doors, he blessed himself, forming a cross with his thumb and forefinger and tracing miniature crucifixes on his forehead, mouth, and chest. He kissed his thumb to heaven. In imitation, we all did the same.

“Hey,” Sergio said. “How about if your mother was seeing some other guy?”

“She wouldn’t see another guy,” Rogelio said. “She’s got the Lord.” He raised a finger to heaven.

“I know, I know,” Sergio said. “Everyone’s got the Lord, but say
you found out she was with some other guy. Maybe you came home and found her on the floor, maybe in bed—” Sergio was looking to the sky, imagining scenarios, sexual positions. He didn’t see Rogelio whirl around, his briefcase flaring out at his side.

“Don’t talk about my mother!” Rogelio said. He pointed a finger in Sergio’s face. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.” Rogelio was much shorter and skinnier than Sergio, but he held his finger right off the tip of Sergio’s nose. Sergio didn’t move. Rogelio turned and began walking again.

“Damn, cuz,” Sergio called out after Rogelio. “Don’t worry about me. I know what
I’m
talking about.” Rogelio simply continued walking.

Sergio laughed and brushed himself off. He blessed himself, held up a cross of forefingers, then marched forward.

We turned down Sangamon Street. Sets of railroad tracks, the dividing line between the darkside and the realside, ran down the center. More kids had begun filling in our side of the sidewalk, all of us waiting until we got to Eighteenth Place, the street our school was on, to cross over. Our school bully, Gustavo Rivera, a large kid with sweat glands that poured like waterfalls, walked on our side as well, torturing smaller kids with “the wedge,” what he called the Saturday-afternoon-wrestling move with which he crushed tiny first-grader heads between his chunky hands.

Across the tracks, only Pepe Ordoñez, Paco Martinez, and Jeremy Witek walked the darkside. We called them the Lost Boys. They had been walking the darkside for as long as anyone could remember, breaking factory windows, smoking, spray-painting unfamiliar gang signs on the crumbling railroad docks. Rumor had
it they were orphans, that they lived among the ruins of the darkside like animals, like the Villa Lobos, who for some reason, maybe respect, never seemed to mind the Lost Boys on their territory. The Lost Boys were eighth-graders. They had been held back two years or more and were actually old enough to be in high school.

“I heard Paco and Pepe were in the Audy Home for stealing cars,” Marcitos said from behind us. “That they got butt-raped in there and that’s why they went crazy.”

“Who told you that?” Sergio asked.

“Mona Colón, downstairs,” Marcitos said. Mona was a high-school girl who lived beneath him, one whom we collectively lusted after because at her age she didn’t seem that far out of reach. Paco was said to have gone out with Mona. Some even said that he had had sex with her. And at the time this seemed to have something to do with his ability to walk the darkside. We figured Jeremy and Pepe had had sex with Mona as well, or with the other high-school girls who stood on the corners smoking cigarettes, wearing tight black pants and thick black eyeliner and purple lipstick. The older we got, the more we wanted to be with them, have them hanging off our shoulders the way girlfriends in our neighborhood did. We imagined French-kissing them among the collapsed rafters of the burned-out factories we had always been so afraid of.

The three Lost Boys mounted an abandoned train dock and climbed through a half-fallen brick wall into one of the factories. Up and down Sangamon Street, the kids of Providence looked on in wonder, except for Rogelio, who walked with tunnel vision a half block ahead of us, and Gustavo Rivera, who reached for the head of another unsuspecting first-grader.

At Eighteenth Place, we crossed over the tracks, walked one more block in total silence, then went our separate ways, Marcitos and Jorge to their fifth-grade classroom, Sergio and I to the sixth, and Rogelio to the sacristy of Providence of God Church, where he took prayer sessions before the beginning of every school day.

There had been a time before the Revelation readings, before Ms. Ramirez led processions, before the briefcase, when Rogelio was one of us. Back then his father was still around, and on our way home from school we would see him on the corner sometimes, talking with his partners. Rogelio would run up to him like a good son and his father would pick him up and whirl him around like a good father. Then he’d give Rogelio money and we’d cross the street to Paul’s Drug Store, where we’d buy Slim Jims and Cokes, which we then consumed on the broken concrete steps of the Dvorak Park public pool, pretending we were rich, smoking thin cigars, downing dark champagne.