Painted Cities (8 page)

We only ever knew his father from these scenes and the few things Rogelio had told us—how his father was rich, owned oil wells in Texas, had stock in Shell Oil. We all lied about our families. Sergio said his father was a millionaire cattle breeder in Mexico. I said my family had houses in California, that we could see the Hollywood sign from our backyards, some with better views of the sign than others. After hearing Rogelio’s lie, Sergio began telling kids at school that his father had stock in Shell Oil too. In the court-yard, when the girls asked me or Rogelio if what Sergio said was true, we always said it was, that all three of our fathers had stock in Shell Oil, that our families were part owners and that we all split profits. When asked why we weren’t living in the mansions we
claimed to have, we pounded our chests the way the gangbangers did and claimed it was the neighborhood. That we had family here, even the people we didn’t like. And those listening always nodded in understanding.

Those days were full of talk. Talk about our favorite team, the Chicago White Sox, and the hated Chicago Cubs. Talk about where we wanted to visit when we got older: Alaska, Yellowstone Park, places we had researched in our school’s only set of encyclopedias, which were guarded by our school’s secretary, Ms. Margaret, in the main office. We talked about running away. Rogelio had mentioned his aunt who lived in Aurora. Aurora sounded like a nice place and I told Rogelio if he wanted to go I would go with him. Sergio laughed at us for thinking we would ever run away, and when we thought about it more, we knew he was right, and became embarrassed for thinking so childishly.

But Rogelio changed after his father left. In the beginning it was just the Revelation readings, which were fun because for a while we thought Rogelio was joking, the way he wrinkled his brow, the way he moved his arm stiff and strong. But then he started going to church even on Saturdays, our baseball days, our football days. He had become an altar boy and had to stay after school for practice. In the mornings he stopped going straight to class and instead showed up somewhere around third period, having missed most of the morning praying back in the sacristy. And finally, when we did talk to him, Rogelio talked about things we didn’t care about, religious things:
You know that Brother Adam went to Providence when it was all Polish?
Little by little Rogelio became someone else, someone we didn’t know except for what we remembered.

We continued listening to Rogelio’s mother. I showed up at my usual time two days later and found Marcitos there. Sergio had obviously passed word. We divided up the half hour between the four of us, Jorge keeping time on his father’s silver watch. At one point, Ms. Ramirez said, “I love you.” Marcitos was listening.

“She just said, ‘I-love-you,’” Marcitos said, inflecting the couple’s rhythm.

“Let-me-hear,” Sergio said. And they talked like that the rest of the morning. Even to Rogelio, who had become remarkably more distant in the past few days, walking even farther ahead of us, sometimes leaving us altogether.

“Your-mo-ther-still-lea-ving-ear-ly?” Sergio asked as we walked to school.

Rogelio said nothing.

“Hey,” I called out to Rogelio. “Remember they used to call you the Pope? Remember we were going to run away?”

Rogelio didn’t answer. When he passed the doors of Saint Procopius, he blessed himself. In routine, though we were a full city block behind him, we all did the same.

A week later I showed up at Sergio and Jorge’s building and found the front door open. Upstairs, their apartment door was open as well. I stepped in and tiptoed through the creaky living room, past the dripping kitchen. I opened the door to Sergio and Jorge’s room and saw the usuals, Jorge with the watch, Marcitos sitting on the bed, and Sergio with his stack of magazines. But there were three new kids there as well, one with the tube, now bent and velvety, to
his ear, and the others on either side of him, watching Sergio flash his
Penthouse
scenes. I recognized one of the new kids from Morgan Street, a side street we often used on our way home from school. I hadn’t seen him since months before, but his face, especially his eyebrows, which were upturned in a perpetual scowl, had stuck with me as a mark of a person to avoid.

Sergio continued turning pages. “This is Carlos,” he whispered to me, nodding toward the kid with the tube. “And Joseph and Tony.” He took a breath. “
I think I’m going to start charging
.” He whispered this even quieter. He smiled and gave me a nod like I should agree with him.

“Jesse,” I said, introducing myself to Joseph and Tony. I skipped over the kid with the tube. Tony, the kid I remembered, pounded his fist to his chest two times as I shook his hand. It was
Amor
, insider gangbanger stuff, done to represent a Nation. Rowdy pounded his chest when he said what’s up to people. He was an old Racine-Boy. But Tony did it obviously, because he was a Morgan-Boy, or if he wasn’t, an older brother was.

“Are they doing it doggie-style?” I asked Carlos.

Carlos opened his eyes, his head still sideways. “How should I know?” he said. And those in the room began laughing.

We took turns. Two minutes each. Jorge keeping track on his father’s Timex.

We went through the order and the tube finally came to me. Ms. Ramirez and Rowdy were talking. I was trying to pick up their whispers, searching for the words I thought people in love might say—
love, babies, marriage
—but in the crowded bedroom, concentration was difficult. I breathed, put my hand over my open ear,
closed my eyes. Still, I heard only the heavy rush of silence, and an occasional echo too distorted to be understood.

“
Se fue la Virgen!
” somebody cried in Sergio’s gangway. “
Dios mio!
” A door slammed. The sound of footsteps could be heard between buildings. Sergio stepped to the side window, saving with a finger his place in the
Penthouse
he was working on. I handed the tube to Tony and went to the window as well. Jorge and Marcitos followed.

Mrs. Gonzalez, the woman who lived in the downstairs apartment, was running up the narrow gangway, yelling that the Virgin had flown away. She turned the corner onto the sidewalk and the three of us shuffled around the end of the bed to the front window. When we arrived, Mrs. Gonzalez’s blue shawl was fluttering out of range. We turned for the living room, where two more windows looked upon the street. Sergio flung his
Penthouse
onto the bed. Carlos, Joseph, and Tony stayed with the tube.

As we rushed through the bedroom door, Sergio suddenly stopped in his tracks. We stacked up behind each other, my chin jabbing into Sergio’s shoulder and Jorge’s chin into mine. Standing in the sun, at the living room windows, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. For the first time ever, I saw them up close. At our confirmation, and the time their building had been set on fire, their father had worn a baseball cap. Now he wore no hat at all, and I could see that he was not only bald down the center of his head but that his scalp glowed a bright scarlet like he had some kind of infection. His belly bulged within an old cowboy shirt and his arms seemed longer than they should’ve been: his wrists were visible beyond his shirt cuffs. Their mother stepped closer to us, taking tiny steps, and it occurred
to me suddenly that the mother and father were complete opposites. While the father was lanky and bulbous around the waist, the mother was short and compact, muscular looking in the thick brown sweater she wore. She had a full head of gray hair pulled back in a tight braid, like something you might see on a young girl.

“
Que estan haciendo?
” she asked. When she opened her mouth, silver crowns on her bottom row of teeth caught light. She looked past us through the doorway and into the bedroom. Tony and Joseph still had their ears to the tube. Carlos had his eyes on the watch. Sergio’s magazine was strewn across the bed, its wrinkled and worn centerfold opened up and in clear view.

Her backhand rose like a reflex. It was so fast I felt its breeze as it whizzed past my nose and cracked Sergio square across the left side of his face. Sergio reeled back, bringing up his hands to shield himself. I stepped aside and his mother landed two more smacks, more dense-sounding, to the back of Sergio’s head.

She whirled around, her stiff braid unmoving. “
Salganse de mí casa!
” she screamed at the three on the bed. Carlos, Joseph, and Tony rose like soldiers, abandoning the tube still wedged in the ceiling, leaving the silver watch lying on the bed. As they passed through the bedroom door they brushed up against the doorjamb, eying the trigger hand of Sergio’s mother.

She turned to me and Marcitos and pointed her short, wrinkled finger in our faces. She told us she was going to have a long talk with our mothers, then stared at us with her flared-up eyes like miniature Revelations. “
Sacanse de aquí
,” she said to us, and we followed her finger as it turned toward the front door. “
Largense a la escuela!
” As I stepped into the hallway I saw, through the corner of my eye,
Sergio’s father, his scarlet patch boiling, closing in on Sergio and Jorge.

A small crowd had assembled on the front stoop. Mrs. Gonzalez’s daughters, Vilma and Louísa, who already looked like their mother, old and bowlegged, though they were our age, were out there telling Carlos, Joseph, and Tony that during the night the Virgin had disappeared. That they had had it for the past week, trying to sober up their father, and that when they had awoken, the Virgin was gone, the window she had been placed by opened. Their mother, they said, had gone to get Ms. Ramirez up the block.

“She’s upstairs with that guy,” Tony said.

“Who?” said Vilma, stepping closer to Tony.

“Ms. Ramirez, that lady who leads the processions, she’s upstairs with that old Racine-Boy.”

“Ms. Ramirez is up there, Jesse?” Louísa asked me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me close, mashing her thick, immature chest against my arm.

“I don’t know,” I said. I worked my arm free.

“Is it Ms. Ramirez?” Louísa asked, and she stepped close to me again. “Is Sergio up there listening?”

“Not anymore,” I said. She latched onto my arm. Tony and the others laughed. I looked up the street for Rogelio and Mrs. Gonzalez.

Neighbors were out by this time: Pedro, who lived in the other downstairs apartment, just home from his third shift at Ryerson steel, his brown skin coated with a white powder that made you wonder exactly what he did. Bernardo Ruiz, in a metallic-blue housecoat, who lived the next building over and danced evocatively during all the block parties, who everyone knew was gay
but who never found trouble for it because he was ours, a member of our block, our gang, was there as well. And some of the more astute procession ladies had arrived also, their pink and green hair curlers seeming to have picked up the potential for controversy like radar. The Gonzalez daughters began calling up the stairwell to Rowdy.

“Rowdy,” Vilma said. “Is Ms. Ramirez up there?”

“
Tenemos un
emergency,” Louísa added.

I looked for Rogelio again. I figured he would be able to calm everybody down, convince Mrs. Gonzalez that the Virgin hadn’t actually flown away, that someone had simply stolen her, and that, besides, the Virgin was only a statue anyway, and another could be bought at Opal’s Ocultos on Eighteenth Street. But I also knew Rogelio’s mother would be coming down the stairs any minute, that Rogelio would see her and realize we had been up there spying.

By now Sergio, Jorge, and their parents were downstairs, their father with his cap on. Sergio’s face was flush, his eyes glazed over. Jorge, on the other hand, seemed content, as if things, at least for him, could’ve gone worse.

“What’s going on?” Sergio asked softly.

I told him about the Virgin. I told him how Mrs. Gonzalez was trying to find Rogelio’s mother. He looked up the stairs and whispered, “El trutho comes outo.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled. For Rogelio, I nearly punched him.

Mrs. Gonzalez finally came waddling back up Throop Street. The procession regulars from Rogelio’s building followed. She came to us, her lips trembling. She held her fingers to her mouth. Just as she took a breath to speak, a step sounded, and we all turned to look
up the apartment building’s stairs, to where Ms. Ramirez in her red pumps had appeared.