The Old Neighborhood (11 page)

I sat around half-way back through the pews with the fourth graders. Father McCale fixed his eyes in a dreamy gaze far above my head.
Why does he always look up there when he says dat? Can he see God up dere or somethin'?
A huge white marble wall of statues rose up behind Father McCale. It held the figures of Jesus and Mary and the prophets in descending order. Above the white statues, near the steep-pitched apex of the ceiling, two angels were painted in profile facing one another. Their skin was opaque, and their retracted, white-feathered wings were laced with gold. The wings sprouted from high on their backs, and their shape curved way up above their heads, then sleekly flowed down the length of their bodies. At their feet, the wings curled out and away. I wondered what it'd be like to fly, to levitate up out of the pews.

I floated upward. As I did, I noticed the intricate designs in the ceiling. A dashed line ran the length of the pinnacle of the ceiling's apex that looked like a miniature roadway. Suddenly, the room inverted, and the road was in a canyon at the base of two steep mountain ranges. I floated down into the canyon on my belly. Now, I faced the direction Father McCale stared at, and I saw why he looked there. The sunlight struck the stained glass—yellow, gold, red, two stories high and wide—and the flipped image looked like some strange, warped galactic landscape. Nebulous clouds collided.
It must be heaven.

A sharp slap struck the top of my head as I craned to see above and behind me. The shot sent me suddenly face forward again. I looked up—it was Sister Angelica. The bitter snarl on her saggy, wrinkled face let me know exactly where I was headed. She grabbed hold of my collar with her thin, boney hands and led me to the back of the church. Her hard-soled shoes clicked on the marble floor as my rubber soles squeaked across it. As we passed the eighth graders, Jan smirked sadistically at me with her chunky cheeks. My face burned red, and my stomach went hollow.

Sister Angelica led me through the open doors into the entrance corridor. She made me kneel on the cold, hard marble floor near a gray porcelain fount filled with bubbling holy water. The only light was a gray-blue glow that seeped through the edges of the oak doors of the main entrance.

“Twenty 'Our Fathers' for not paying attention to Mass!” she hissed in a cutting whisper. Father McCale's voice boomed on in the giant vault beside us.

   “Our Father, who aren't in heaven,” I began as she loomed behind me. Her golden crucifix tapped on her green, fuzzy sweater, and after I had said a few “Our Fathers,” Sister Angelica edged back to the doorway of the main room to watch Mass. I waited until she was just out of ear-shot and settled my weight down on my feet to take the pressure off my sore knees. Then, I looked up into the darkness above the fount.

“Our Father, who aren't in heaven, why the heck did you name her Sister Angelica anyway? She should be named Sister Sourpuss. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, with going to church and school, so I could play all day with my friends and not have to do multiplication tables. And why did you make Jan'n'Rose so big and strong and mean? And why did you let Dad punch Richard and knock him out? And why did you let Lil Pat kill somebody? Why'd the Assyrian guy have to die? Why couldn't he have lived? Does that mean Lil Pat has to go to hell? What about me, do I have to go to hell, too? And why did you let Lil Pat become a junky? And what's a junky, anyways? And why did you make Da sick, and why can't you make Da better?” Suddenly, a chill swept through me like the wash of a cold wave at Loyola Beach. My eyes got itchy, and a lump formed in my throat as the thought of what death was slowly set down on me. It became heavier and heavier until it clamped down on my throat from all angles like a massive iron vise. I realized Da would die and be gone forever, and I realized I was going to grow old and die one day, too. Or maybe, I wouldn't grow old at all. The sudden horror of that dark, inescapable contract sent tears rolling down my cheeks that splashed my light-blue shirt. By the time Sister Angelica led me back to my pew, my face was puffy and damp, and there was no question that I'd cried. As I passed, a fifth grader named Marty Espinosa giggled, so later at recess, I slugged him in the mouth and gave him a fat lip. Then, I called him a wuss when he started to cry.

•

I REMEMBER FISHING
on the stardock at Montrose Harbor where Da kept his small white sailboat. I cast a minnow lure into the big circle at the center of the dock. The lure jerked and twisted in the greenish water. The shadow of a seagull cut and slashed through the lure as I lazily reeled it in. Da and Grandma were on the boat cleaning and getting ready to take it out. There was a sudden shrieking cry from above and an explosion of feathers in the place my lure was.

“Ahh, no!” Da yelled from the helm of the boat.

I reeled as the seagull flapped, clutching the lure in its beak. It tried to fly and got a few feet out of the water before it wound and twisted in the line and plunged back into the lake. It cried there in the center of the circle of water, and I dropped the rod at my side. Da rushed beside me and snatched the line with his hand and pulled the bird onto the dock beside him. He unfolded his pocket knife and knelt over the squawking and writhing bird. He cut the line furiously as it wound and entangled him. He slit his own palm. Blood lifted up on his dark-brown skin. The bird wouldn't hold still and bit Da's wrist and chest and smacked him with its wings. He cut the line where it wound tight on the bird's neck. Feathers plumed up everywhere. The three prong hooks of the lure clung deep to the bird's beak, face, and neck. The seagull screamed like a child. Da delicately unhooked them as the bird's wings fluttered intensely with the pain. Then, it was free, and it flapped and awkardly flopped back in the stardock's center. It swam around in a slow circle, squawking angrily as Da stood beside me watching. Then, it tried with a great slow flap and rose low out of the water, cut between two sailboats, and soared up into the bright blue sky. Da put his hand on my shoulder.

“It wasn't your fault,” he said.

That's what I wanted someone to do for Da now. I wanted them to snap the strings that held him tight to that hospital bed and cut the cancer out of his lungs and his throat and his brain. But no one did, and he died on a hospital bed at Mount Sinai.

•

WE ALL KNEW LIL PAT
was a junky. His girlfriend, Angie, one-upped him by being a junky and a whore. He wasn't her pimp, exactly, but he did get high off her hustle. He had a lot a ways to score brown. He was notorious for robbing drug dealers, but the first one didn't go so well. He was driving in his red Ford Escort GT strung-out on a three-month supply of fifty-milligram Percocet, which he ate in two weeks. He hadn't shit in eleven days and had grown a low-slung shit-baby—a large lump of backed-up fecal matter that rose from his pelvis and dissipated at his belly button. He ate when he was high on anything; that deep thriving hunger never satiated. He'd just come home and raid the fridge, but he'd been so high he'd forgotten about laxatives. Lil Pat carried a little, black, snub-nosed .38 he'd grabbed off Fat Buck the night before. He rolled to the tip at Granville Ave. and Winthrop Ave., pulled over, and this teenage black kid in a black bomber jacket stepped up to his window, grinning.

“Whatchu need?” the kid asked.

Lil Pat trembled. He hadn't slept in two days, but he had enough presence of mind to wait until the kid got close. Then, he reached out, snatched the kid's coat collar, and yanked him in through the window. With the other hand, Lil Pat brought the revolver to the kid's temple and said, “Gimmy.”

The kid squealed and tried to twist away, but Lil Pat held tight. Suddenly, the kid tossed a roll of money in the window. It flopped in a cup holder.

“Not that—the China white you been running around here.”

The kid hesitated. Lil Pat grimaced and cocked the hammer. The kid threw in three little folded-up squares of duct tape, and they landed on the passenger seat. Just then, the front windshield splattered. A thousand tiny cracks splintered across its width. The glass was white at the center where the tip of the metal bat punctured it. Another dude in a bomber jacket yanked and twisted the bat to break it free. Thin little shards clattered atop the tan dashboard.

Lil Pat let go of the kid. He tried to aim the revolver and shot outward through the windshield. The bullet burst a quarter-sized hole through the spider-webbed glass. The bat tugged free as Lil Pat floored it down Winthrop. The wad of cash unfurled and flapped around the center console in the breeze as the Ford knifed through the canyon of red-brick high-rises. Feet pattered at his back. Then, three shots rang out, long and clear, into the daylight
.

He drove the Ford around with the windshield like that for three days until he totaled it, high, into the iron pier of a railroad underpass. He fled the scene and reported it stolen the next day.

He still had other less-messy ways to score—ways he'd manage when he was still buzzin' and feeling good. My Grandma was so heartbroken over losing Da, and she loved Lil Pat so much. She'd been kind of a surrogate mother to him in the early days when Ma was just a 14-year-old girl with an infant. I guess Gram was just lonely too. Terribly lonely and sad.

Lil Pat would go over there on cloud nine, take out the trash, and dazzle her with bullcrap about the new job he had. All the while, he stole anything he could get his hands on—cash, jewelry, checks. He had a knack for forging signatures and hustling currency exchanges and bank tellers. Since he had Dad's exact name, he could go to the bank with forged checks, and because Dad had an account, Lil Pat could cash 'em. But after a while, sadly and sickly, Gram started playing into it. They call it “enabling,” and old people are almost always the perpetrators. So damned lonely, having so much love to give, wanting to help their son or grandson or nephew, they plop cash in their hands so they can go buy heroin, or crack, or gamble. It's a sick world. I held a lot of animosity towards her about what she'd done, or helped Lil Pat do to himself, years later when I began to understand it all. But in the end, now, today, I can't. They were just two lost people way, way down on their luck. Even ten, fifteen years after Da was gone, she couldn't talk about him without bursting into tears. “Like a wildfire, Joey. I loved him like a wildfire.”

•

COPS AND ROBBERS,
right. It's a fun game. Both sides have their heroes, both their villains. But I never truly wanted to play the villain. I don't know that anyone does. I always knew Lil Pat was a robber but not a villain. But when the heroin took him, he was the villain—the true villain—in all ways. Though, then, I always allowed that he be detached from himself when he was strung-out. That it wasn't him who did those things. It was the drugs. There was solace in that, I guess, but it didn't stop the things he did.

•

THERE WAS A NICKEL-PLATED .45
semi-automatic that sat in a sealed plastic bag on a shelf down in the basement evidence room at Chicago Police headquarters for a decade. It was flagged for release. It never got picked up.

I was home sick from school. Or, in other words, Ma got tired of me whining that I was sick at the kitchen table that morning and let me stay home. This was something the old man woulda never put up with, but since he left for work before sunrise, it wasn't a problem.

It was around lunch time, and I'd just finished eating a bowl of Oodles of Noodles. Ma had cooked it up just the way I like it—with an egg dropped in. I headed down the long hallway from the kitchen on my way back upstairs to read my comic books when the front door slowly creaked open. It was always dark there by the door, and the windowless landing at the bottom of the stairs created a gray haze that hung there in the day with the lights out. Lil Pat stuck his head in as the door creaked opened. His eyes bugged out. His usually well-kempt goatee and mustache had grown into an uneven, stubbly beard. Scratches ran down along his cheeks, fingernail thick. He peered over my head as he slowly eased the screen door shut behind him. He glanced down at me with a false smirk and raised his index finger to his lips. His massive body trembled under his tattered, three-quarter-length leather coat, and the smell of burnt fingertips and ammonia swelled into the room with him. Suddenly, all the things my parents had said to me over the past few weeks flooded into my head:
Don't go anywhere with Pat. If you see Pat, run home.
Years later, I'd find out he'd threatened to kidnap me if my parents got between him and Grandma's money. I found this out when he started to make those same threats to my nieces and nephews, but by then, I was grown up and a different person.

He left the door cracked open and tip-toed up the stairs. I didn't know what to do. I walked back into the yellow-tiled walls of the kitchen where Ma stirred a pot of macaroni. I walked up behind her. The sharp smell of melted-butter mixed with cheddar cheese. I stared at her back as she dug the large wooden spoon into the pot. She must have felt my eyes on her because she stopped and turned around to face me.

“What is it, honey,” she asked, placing her hands on the small of her back. Her heavy curves slumped.

I couldn't talk. I just slowly raised my head and looked up at the ceiling where Lil Pat's steps creaked.

“What is it?” She repeated. She stepped toward me and undid the strings of her faded-red apron, then glanced up at the ceiling.

The sound of metal sliding across metal and then a sharp click cut through racket of the babysitting kids in the back yard. It was my father's .45mm semi-automatic—the same .45 Dad'd used to make a statement years before. There was this junky that lived in an apartment at the end of the block named Gabriel. He was a mean, skinny Cuban with bushy eyebrows, a mustache, and black eyes. Gabriel was a known burglar operating in the neighborhood—he had to pay for his fix somehow. He'd even been caught a couple times, but it didn't deter him.