Chicago

by Brian Doyle

  Before I left I picked up a pebble from the edge of the court, where the asphalt was crumbling into what looked like cake crumbs, and tucked it in my sneaker. I still have it, too, in a little bowl of talismans from courts where I had been lucky enough to be inside the deeper game—a court in Boston, in a park under elm trees; a court in Brooklyn, where we swept broken glass off the court with huge push brooms before we played; a court in Harlem, where the unspoken rule was all weapons were left with a silent burly man by the gate; and that court in Chicago, where Bucket slid though tangles of guys like he was a shadow and Monster set picks like sudden walls. I played on many other outdoor courts—meticulous new courts, and battered old courts, and courts with grass sprouting from cracks, and courts enclosed in wire mesh, and courts perched along beaches, even once a court composed entirely of close-cropped grass; but I only have prayer beads from a few courts in that bowl, and only the ones from Chicago are black, so when I see them from across the room, or pick them up and smell them like a truffle hunter, I am immediately transported back to that hot crumbling schoolyard court, where I am trailing Bucket on a fast break, knowing as well as I ever knew anything that he will drive right to the basket, and flip the ball back over his shoulder at the last possible second, even as he pretends to follow through on his layup, so that the defender will be taken completely out of the picture, and I will catch the ball and lay it in all in one smooth unconscious motion, and turn to hustle back on defense, and point to Bucket to say thanks, and he will grin that slight small smile, and we will not say a word, and that will be glorious and perfect and unforgettable, and somehow somewhere it will always be a hot evening in Chicago, almost dusk but not quite.

  * * *

  It was back in February when I had gotten into the habit of rising very early to catch the first bus downtown along the lake, the Sound Asleep Bus, driven by the dignified and gracious and eloquent Donald B. Morris, and by August he knew me well, and let me sit behind him in the first seat on the lake side, and I would ask him questions, and he would tell me stories. During the winter and through the spring he told stories mostly about his time in the war, and about religion and the Chicago Bears, his two favorite topics in life. When summer came, though, he began telling me stories about passengers he’d had on the bus, and how he came to be driving the bus, and how driving the bus was like being the mayor of a small town for a little while, with all the conundrums and pleasures of mayoring, such as “One time a baby was born on the bus, lady was quite overdue, and foolish me, I hit the curb pulling away by Melrose Street, and she have the baby right in her seat. Gentleman comes up to me as the bus is moving, which is against bus rules, and tells me lady having the baby, so we pull over and get some blankets I keep for emergencies and we take care of that. She name the baby Justus. Also a lady died on the bus one time, a very cold winter day, two feet of snow, she die somewhere between Belmont and Dearborn, everyone else get off the bus except her. I thought she was asleep but no. I have been asked to marry passengers, which I did not do, but I was honored at the request, which was heartfelt and genuine. We have never had an accident, no. We have had flat tires. We have never had fisticuffs, no. We have had altercations. Some drivers very worried about gunplay and theft and such but not me. I trust in the Lord to care for us. Plus it is very early and people not violent before sunrise. I have been driving for twelve years come winter which this year begins on a Wednesday. There was a time early on when I was first driving this route when I thought about assign seats, because some people very annoyed when someone sit in the seat they think their seat, but assign seats is too much trying to be in control of things, you cannot control all things, you must let things happen, within bounds. So one morning after my regulars are all on the bus I stand up and say we do not have assign seats on the Sound Asleep Bus, and we will not have them in the furthermore, so do not ask me about this again, but we will get along, and we will be civil, and we will not put bags and parcels on open seats to reserve them, but treat each passenger as you would wish to be treated, which is to say with civil behavior, and this is scripture also of course. I did not say that, because religion is a private matter, of course, but people know that, and abide by it, for the most part. This is Dearborn Street. Watch your step. God bless. Go Bears.”

  * * *

  Late that August I had the urge to climb and see the sights again, and I spent many hours sprinting up stairs in apartment buildings and towers, and surreptitiously climbing fire escapes on old hotels and tenements, and taking elevators to the tops of office buildings and trying to figure ways to get out on the roof. I climbed out onto the roof of the old convent around the corner, on what must have been its last days in that form in this world, and while you could indeed see for about a mile in every direction from up there, you could also see some serious holes and worn places, and twice I found tremendous nests, which I hoped were hawks or crows rather than members of the order Rodentia.

  I think now that what absorbed me, up on the heights in Chicago, was the sheer geometry of the city—the tumble and jumble of buildings splayed up against each other, at all different heights and volumes, so that sometimes the city looked like a vast array of children’s blocks of different manufacture and color and ingredient, arranged by many hands over many years. And each section of the city had a different geometric feel—the near north, where I lived, was mostly buildings of two and three storeys, with the occasional vaulting cluster of condominiums or hotels, all interspersed by the spire of a church or the dome of a temple; the south and west sides were houses and bungalows and cottages and brownstones and sagging wooden flats of two or three floors where large families had lived for a century, succeeding each other every twenty years, the porches and tiny yards and back stoops filled with one language after another, the clotheslines in the alley filled with washing of one culture after another—greens from Ireland, reds from Italy, blues from Poland, orange from the Dominican Republic.

  I also climbed trees, where I could find purchase and avoid law enforcement. I surfed tall old elms in Lincoln Park, and sweetgums and basswoods in Grant Park, and oaks in Skinner Park, on the west side—I remember tree-surfing in Skinner Park in particular because it was a day of incredible gusts of wind, and I was at the very top of a tremendous oak, and I was thrilled beyond measure because the tree was whipping back and forth with something like a sapling’s silly glee, and I was terrified because it was an old tree and the chance was not infinitesimal that it would snap altogether and I would end up in several pieces in Iowa and Nebraska and points farther west.

  It was easy to gain serious height in the Loop downtown, where height was a calling card and a marketing niche, but the vista there was mostly of other tall buildings, so mostly when I was atop roofs downtown I stared out at the sea of the lake, which went on forever east and north, and only dimly suggested a southern shore in Indiana. There was always shipping of some sort on the lake, day or night, and often there was weather out there wholly different than that of the city; more than once I saw a storm on the lake while the sky was clear and calm in Chicago, and once I saw a black wall of weather approaching so noticeably fast that I got down off the roof as fast as I could. That was the old Chicago Board of Trade Building on Jackson Boulevard, a lovely old limestone structure with a roof statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of farming, holding wheat in one hand and corn in the other. The Board of Trade Building was probably my favorite in the city to climb, not only because of its height (it was something like six hundred feet tall), and because it had hosted a famous hundredth birthday party for Abraham Lincoln in 1909, but because it had all sorts of corners and shelving, and very few security guards, and all sorts of odd beautiful sudden sculptures; I would wander out on one of the decks on the upper floors and encounter a statue of an American Indian holding a shock of corn, or notice suddenly, while approaching the building from the north, that there were enormous bulls carved right into the stone, twenty feet over my head.

  * * *
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  It was also late in August that for no reason I could tell I was suddenly weary of the city, weary of the dense huddle of buildings, of stone and brick, of jostling pedestrians, of bus exhaust and tangled traffic, of the ubiquitous strut and splat of pigeons, of broken glass and puddles gleaming with oil, of the stench of trash bins and the arrogance of skyscrapers, of broken men slumped on steam grates, of the screech of trains and the grainy dust drifting down from the elevated tracks; and I wanted to be away, to escape just for a day, to sprawl and breathe someplace green and vigorous and silent except for birds and crickets; weirdly I suddenly wanted to hear a grasshopper startle from a tangle of brush along a back road. An odd desire, for I have never been a rural man, let alone an adventurer in the wilderness, but that one day I found myself starving for something not glass and metal and concrete.

  By chance Sister Maureen, the leader of the nuns who were moving into the building over Labor Day weekend, was driving to Iowa, to visit her order’s motherhouse in Dubuque and explain what was happening with the nuns in Chicago, and she offered to give me a ride out into the country, leave me anywhere I wanted, and pick me up on the way back; it was about three hours to the land of the Meshkwahkihaki, the people of the red clay, she said, and she thought she would leave at dawn and drive back at night, if I didn’t mind spending the day on foot somewhere in the country along the way. I told her this was exactly what I wanted, for reasons that were murky, and so the next morning we left the city just before dawn, with a thermos of coffee and a pear each, gifts from the other sisters for the road.

  For an hour or so we didn’t speak much, and just enjoyed the hum of tires on the highway, and the world brightening slowly behind us, and the occasional deer or hawk, and once a coyote with the tail of something hanging from its mouth. Sister Maureen talked a little about Iowa, and the motherhouse, and the nuns there who were mostly great but two had illusions of grandeur, and how she was a student of the First Peoples in Iowa, and much enjoyed collecting and recording their stories, on the theory that, as she said, the best way to celebrate a people is to share their stories, because the best way to kill a people is to kill their stories, for example look at what the English tried to do to the Irish, although it didn’t take, because we are too damned stubborn, as my grandfather said, and all too familiar with duress. He was from County Mayo, you see.

  As we crossed the Rock River Sister Maureen said I think this is perhaps where you want to be, and she pulled over and let me out. We agreed to meet at this exact spot at sunset, and she drove off, leaving me her pear, and I spent the day wandering along the river, and climbing into the craggy rocky hills, and noticing deer tracks, and twice a thrash of wild turkeys, and what I thought might have been a fox or a bobcat, although it vanished as soon as it saw me, and left no prints on the rocks. I ate the pears slowly, savoring every bite. I lay in the grass watching hawks and swallows and swifts. I climbed a massive old maple and found a flying-squirrel nest. I found the biggest cottonwood tree I ever saw. I sat in the river and watched dragonflies and damselflies quarter the surface for insects. I found a pool under the bank that looked like it would be a great place for otters and catfish and I dove under and held on to rocks at the bottom of the pool as long as I could and twice fish nosed past curiously. I looked for turtles and frogs and toads and mussels and snails. I found the bones of a perch. I found the feathers and bones of a robin where a small hawk had torn it apart. I saw two different kinds of crayfish, brown and red, the red ones testy and argumentative. I did a lot of nothing. I napped in a honeysuckle thicket for a while and when I awoke I sat there slowly pulling the nectar-laden threads from the flowers and tasting a honey I had not eaten since I was a child on a gleaming summer morning long ago and far away. I heard a train somewhere in the distance. In more than ten hours in that forest by the Rock River I saw two members of my species, a man and a boy in a pickup truck in farmland to the west. Late in the afternoon the wind picked up and I sat on a hill and watched the cornfields sway and dust devils swirl in the soybean fields. Just before sunset, as I was walking back to the highway bridge, I saw a kestrel hover over a field like a tiny bronze helicopter, and suddenly drop like a bright stone into the dirt, and rise up again into the air with a snake.

  * * *

  September proved to be a tumultuous month. The nuns moved in, taking the whole west side of the third floor and 4E and 4F, next to the librettist. Azad, in 4A, began school, which reduced his little sister Eren to tears for weeks. The man who had invented propeller hats, in 2A, delivered an enormous check to Mr Pawlowsky to give to Miss Elminides; he did not want to hand it to her in person, being shy, and all he would say about where the money came from, according to Edward, was that it had something to do with where computing would eventually inevitably have to go. Miss Elminides received a letter from the authorities in Greece explaining that a Greek citizen named Giannis had been arrested in the Turkish city of Çanakkale, and that Greek authorities were pursuing repatriation with an eye toward indictment, but that Turkish authorities were at present recalcitrant and unhelpful, to say the least, and that the case would apparently have to be pursued at higher political levels, which promised to be a slow process, to say he least, and that they, the Greek authorities, would keep Miss Elminides posted, and that they wished her well, and would pray for her estimable grandfather, God rest his soul.

  It was a tumultuous month for me also. I was asked to play in a men’s league in Evanston which featured more than a few college football players using the league to stay in shape for spring practice, so it was all I could do to hold my own and not get hammered by guys twice my size; twice I was so tired after intense games up there that I fell asleep on the train home and woke up deep on the South Side, discombobulated and sore from head to toe. At work the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago tightened the screws grimly, so that the office grew tense, and even Mr Burns lost his temper one day and threw a roaring stomping fit that ended with a typewriter being flung out the window onto Madison Street, narrowly missing an unemployed plumber. The gyro shop where Leah worked was the target of an attempted shakedown by the city tax assessor, and had to be rescued by Mr McGinty, who somehow knew everyone who worked for the city, and called in a favor. The man in 2D who had once raised cheetahs burned his left hand so badly while cooking that he had to be hospitalized for four days, during which Edward and I tended his birds—his apartment was filled with parakeets of every conceivable color, so many that we never did arrive at a final count, no matter how many times we tried. One elevated train crashed into another at rush hour in the Loop, tossing people like bread crumbs from the platform. Denesh lost his absolute favorite cricket bat, the one with which he had played his final match; it had been mounted over his couch, and had perhaps been stolen somehow, although none of us could figure how it had been done. Four horses were murdered one night at Arlington as part of an elaborate insurance scam, which unraveled because one of the stable boys attending the horses was so angry at the killings that he led investigators to the money trail. The White Sox, having fallen out of first place on August 19, lost two of three to the Orioles as September began, and fell five games behind the Kansas City Royals. Four inches of rain fell one day, a windstorm howled through the city another day with gusts of fifty miles an hour (small boats on the lake were overturned, and a baby carriage was blown clear across Lake Shore Drive, although the child in it reportedly held on with both hands, and was unharmed), and lightning on still another day hit the Board of Trade Building and partially melted the corn in the goddess Ceres’ right hand.

  Also I received a letter from the young woman I had met on the train. She had accepted a job with a bank in Boston, and she was moving there from Wyoming immediately, in fact flying to Boston an hour after she posted this letter, a flight which precluded a long train trip during which she should happily have paused in Chicago for a while. But, she wrote, she would be delighted if I thought I could find a way to live in Boston also. What with a year’s ex
perience on a renowned magazine, and the gleam of my diploma from Notre Dame, I would be, she thought, an excellent candidate for jobs in Boston, and if indeed I did move to Boston, perhaps we could pursue our mutual interest in each other, and see what fate had in store.

  “Consider this an invitation,” she wrote, “and not pressure in any way or form, for I cannot make promises, nor can you, and perhaps I am being more forward than I should be. But it seems to me that there is certainly something between us, and I would very much like to see what that something can be. However I do not want to have a relationship with a thousand miles between us. As you know I did that twice already during my college years and it didn’t work either time. Probably it didn’t work because neither of the guys turned out to be such good guys, but I know myself well enough to know I don’t want to try that with you. I will understand one hundred percent if you feel that this isn’t the time for whatever reason for you to leave Chicago, and I know how much you love the city and your life there, but I have to be honest and say that I hope you will come to Boston. I hope that very much. Write me after you read this letter?”

  21.

  THE WHITE SOX WERE ON THE ROAD though much of early September, out west against the Oakland Athletics and the California Angels, and I was terrifically busy at work anyway, trying to finish a series of articles about differences among religious practices in parishes around the city, and there were many days when I was hardly in the apartment building at all, rising before dawn to catch the Sound Asleep Bus and coming home around midnight. I looked at my notes from that time recently and counted more than fifty parishes I had visited, from Saint Adalbert to Saint Wenceslaus; and at each parish I made an effort to talk not only to the pastor and assistants, if any, but to teachers, janitors, parents, children, neighbors, detractors, and the local police and firemen, who I had discovered usually knew far more about the actual intricacies of community life than any official or activist. I also had learned to visit taverns, to chat with bartenders and the old guys at the end of the bar at two in the afternoon, and restaurants, to chat with the older waitresses; those professions were in the listening business, and often I found gifted storytellers with tremendous memories for local lore. For professional reasons I also stopped into the offices of whatever small neighborhood newspaper I could find, but in general those were not productive visits, as the editors and reporters I spoke to either wanted to sell me an idea or make me buy information of unverifiable accuracy and doubtful provenance.