Windy City Blues

These stories were written over a period of thirteen years, beginning with “The Takamoku
Joseki”
(1982) and ending with “Grace Notes” (1995), created especially for this collection. For that reason some details about V. I.’s life will appear inconsistent—sometimes she’s driving an Omega, sometimes her Trans Am. She bought the Trans Am in 1990, at the end of the novel
Burn Marks
. Her dog, Peppy, became part of her life in 1988, at the conclusion of
Bitter Medicine
. The story “The Maltese Cat” was originally written in 1990, during the Bush-Quayle administration.

I sometimes write short stories when I am trying to understand a question that doesn’t seem to merit a whole novel. That was true of “Settled Score,” where I was wrestling with the issue of personal responsibility. Unusual settings suggest other stories: I once swam for a corporate competition (where I was so slow the other swimmers were eating dinner by the time I covered two laps); the starting gun and all of us diving at once turned into “At the Old Swimming
Hole.” However, in “The Maltese Cat,” I simply wanted to pay my own particular homage to the great master of the hard-boiled detective.

Sara Paretsky

Chicago, June 1995

A Walk on the Wild Side: Touring Chicago with V. I. Warshawski

A lone heron spreads its wings and rises from the marsh. It circles briefly, then heads south, disappearing in the shrouding mist. A handful of purple-necked ducks continues to nibble at delicacies in the fetid water. Their families have come here for millennia, breaking the journey from Canada to the Amazon at what we newcomers think of as the south side of Chicago.

The patch of marsh where they rest is small, about half a square mile. It’s the sole remains of the wetlands which used to cover the twenty-five miles from Whiting, Indiana, north to McCormick Place, the monstrous convention center that squats next to Lake Michigan. Only fifty years ago much of this area, including the eight-lane highway that connects the south side with the Loop, was still under water. The marsh has been filled in with everything from cyanide to slag, with a lot of garbage to give it body.

The locals call the remaining bit of swamp Dead Stick Pond from the eponymous rotting wood which dots it. It appears on no city maps. It is so obscure that Chicago police officers stationed ten blocks away at the Port of Chicago haven’t heard of it. Nor have officials at the local Chicago Park District office. To find it you have to know a native.

I’m not native to this neighborhood, nor even to this city. I first saw Chicago at two on a June morning in 1966. I was coming from a small town in eastern Kansas to do summer service work here for the Presbytery of Chicago—volunteer work in a time of great hope, great excitement, a time when we thought change possible, when we believed that if we poured enough energy, enough goodwill into the terrible problems of our country we could change those problems for good.

The vastness of the city at night was overwhelming. Red flares glowed against a yellow sky, followed by mile on mile of unbending lights: street lamps, neon signs, traffic lights, flashing police blues—lights that didn’t illuminate but threw shadows, and made the city seem a monster, ready to devour the unwary.

The eye with which I see Chicago is always half cocked for alienation and despair, because for me the city is a dangerous place where both states are only just below the surface. When I fly in at night over the sprawl of lights, the feeling of tininess, of one lone unknown being, recurs. I have to scan the landscape
trying to pick out the landmarks of the south side that tell me I have a home here, friends, a lover, a life of warmth.

Chicagoans find their own particular warmth where all city dwellers do—in their home neighborhood. My city holds seventy-seven separate neighborhoods, each with its own special ethnic or racial makeup, each with its own shopping area, library, police station, and schools. Adults, even those who’ve migrated to the suburbs, identify themselves with the neighborhoods of their childhood: an Irish-American secretary of mine from South Shore used to spit when she talked about Irish staff from west side communities. She wouldn’t even pass along messages from them.

Northsiders don’t go south; southsiders seldom venture even as far as the Loop, unless their jobs take them there. Chicago has two baseball teams to accommodate these parochial needs. The Cubs play at Wrigley Field five miles north of the Loop; the White Sox are at Comiskey Park, the same distance south of it. (Chicago’s financial district is called the Loop because of the elevated train tracks that circle it.)

A southsider, I am often sharply criticized at south side events for being a Cubs fan. I have to explain that my allegiance dates from that summer of 1966, when I helped run an inner-city program for children. The Cubs, now sold out even in losing seasons, were then
in such desperate need of an audience that they gave free tickets to our kids on Thursdays. The Sox didn’t, so I became a Cubs fan. One thing all Chicagoans understand is loyalty, especially loyalty to someone who has bribed you. For years the definition of an honest Chicago politician has been one who stays bought—so my explanation passes muster.

It was hard to get the kids on the train to go north. Although they lived four blocks from the el most had never ridden it, most had never been downtown, even to look at the fabled Christmas windows at Marshall Field (once a Chicago landmark, now a colonial property of a Minneapolis conglomerate) and none of them had ever been north. When they found that they weren’t going to be killed going to and from Wrigley Field they started looking forward to the games.

Of all Chicago neighborhoods the most interesting to me are those on the far southeast side, where Dead Stick Pond fights for survival beneath the rusting sheds of the old steel mills. The whole history of the city is contained in four small neighborhoods there—South Chicago, South Deering, Pullman, and the East Side.

To see the true south side, drive south on 1–94, the Dan Ryan Expressway, away from the Gold Coast with its pricey restaurants and shops. The route passes first Jackson Street, where members of Chicago’s
Greek community operate restaurants, then Cermak Road which which leads to Chinatown, then nods at 59th Street, which borders the world-renowned University of Chicago—my neighborhood—on its way to the very end of the city.

At 95th Street, where the expressway splits, offering the driver the choice between Memphis and Indiana, go east on I–94 toward Indiana. At 103rd Street the air becomes acrid. Even with the windows up and the heater or cooler turned off your nose stings and your eyes tear. Although the steel mills are dead and a third of the south side is out of work, enough heavy industry still exists to produce quite a stench in this old manufacturing corridor.

Out the window to your left a hillock dotted with methane flares stretches the mile from 103rd to 110th streets. This is the City of Chicago landfill, where we Chicagoans send our garbage. It’s almost full, and the question of where to dump next is just one of the pressures on Dead Stick Pond. The flares keep the garbage from exploding as the bacteria devouring our refuse produce methane. (When landfill runs under a road, as it does here, exploding methane can destroy large sections of highway.)

You’ll also see grain elevators poking up behind the garbage mountain, and, startlingly, the smokestacks from oceangoing freighters. The landfill and factories hide a network of waterways from the road.

At 130th Street, twenty miles southeast of the Water
Tower where tourists and Chicagoans both like to shop, you finally leave the expressway and head east into the heart of the industrial zone. On a weekday yours may be the only car among the semis that compete with barges and trains to supply the factories and haul their finished products.