by test
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All she knows is that they are Indians who lost a baby. Lost a baby, she keeps saying. When a customer wanders in the front door, the younger woman murmurs an apology and moves off to see if she can help, straightening her Navajo turquoise necklace. The other woman, the owner, is still pretending to listen, but Sarah gets the point. She hands her a business card, gathers up the samples and leaves. It is three o'clock by the time she gets to the supermarket. Her feet are singing as she hurries up and down the aisles, picking out food for her mother at random. When the checkout boy, whom Sarah knows from the Alzheimer's support group in town, asks her how her mother is doing lately, it is all Sarah can do not to tell him the story. She piles the groceries beside her in the car, takes a detour to avoid the funeral homebecause what would happen if they saw her now, if they saw the look on her face, if she saw them and did not stop?and she drives home, eager to tell Mrs. Andrews.
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The Twin
by J. R. Jones
The crowded train rocked from side to side and I held on to the vertical seat rail, concentrating on the paper I'd folded in to the day's races at Arlington. I'd lost forty bucks on Tara's Song in the third and twenty-five on Dear Alba in the seventh. On top of that, I'd bet three hundred on the Black Hawks-Islanders game tonight, and if the Hawks lost I'd have to face my bookie with an empty pocket. A perilous situationplus, the pawn ticket on my Rolex ran out in two days and I needed the winnings to redeem it. My kid brother Eddie gave me the watch as a graduation present. "Yeah, it's being repaired; stem came out," I'd told him. Christ: if he ever found out, he'd give me a half-hour lecture with one silent shake of his head.
But he wouldn't find out, and tonight I'd bring home Hawks tickets; my boss had given me two tenth-row seats he couldn't use. Hard to have a bad day when you've been in the right place at the right time.
The doors opened at Fullerton and a blast of freezing air fought the Lincoln Park gentry as they piled out. Just as the door was closing an ace of spades pushed it open and boarded the train in a final, mad burst of wind. He wore a knee-length jacket and a knit cap, a twice-folded Tribune tucked under his arm.
"I'm Matt the Clown, here's what's goin' down," he announced. "If you're sad or blue, I got money in my shoe."
Across from me, two married professionals stiffened and ignored him. The wife crossed her gorgeous legs and stared at herself in the darkened glass of the train. Her husband was trim, dapper, his hair short, his jaw set tightly like the buckles of his London Fog overcoat. His fingers were smooth and blocky like a package of hot dogs as he tightened them around her shoulder.
First Commandment: Never Make Eye Contact. Love Your Fellow Man, but if he's a hustler or a crackpot, Never Make Eye Contact.
Matt the Clown set the smeared, worn-out rectangle of newspaper in his lap and laid down three whiskey bottle caps, one covering a brown cloth ball like a burnt peanut. He spirited the caps this way and that, braiding them slowly but smoothly, and without a break in the flow of his patter. "You can trust you eye or you can trust you luck, but you eye ain't worth a fuck." Round and round the bottle caps swam. "Watch de ball watch de ball whey is it? watch de ball."
At the other end of the car, Matt's partner made phony small talk with an
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office girl. Tall dude in a beard and flak jacket; I'd seen him before too. He never got involved, just kept his eyes open. They always worked the back of the car, away from the conductor; always worked the rush hour going north, when the office workers rode; never boarded until Fullerton or Belmont, when the cars emptied somewhat.
"Take a chance, mama, come on," Matt the Clown urged the young wife. The couple looked resolutely away. "I been ridin' this train four years, I know the money's here. I wanna tell you it's true, 'cause I got money in my shoe, watch de ball watch de ball whey is it?"
I stared out the window, swallowing. The first person to play him always won. I'd seen him do it twice. Shee-it, I picked the wrong train. Did you see what she done to me? The second player was the one who got sheared. I could double my last twenty bucks, no problem.
A cold sweat hit me: my watch sitting at the pawnbroker's. Learn to say when, for God's sake. The line between a good bet and a bad one had grown so thin I could barely find it without my reading glasses. Twenty bucks would never buy the watch out of hock anyway. I needed a really big win to clear all this shit away.
Wrigley Field swept into view. "See the boys in the ballpark hit them home runs, it sure look like fun." No one would touch the bet. The husband blinked and fixed his gaze on his wife's legs. You coward, I thought, you want that bet worse than I do. At least I could admit it.
The last time Eddie and I went out with Pop was an exhibition game at Wrigley: Cubs versus the Minnesota Twins. Two days later he walked into the boiler room at the Jesuit school where he was maintenance chief and the boiler blew up in his face. God has a reason for everything, the priests kept saying, and our neighbors, It was just a freak accident; both were trying to console us. When my mother drank her liver into submission I was at U of I, Ed a sophomore in high school. This time it was no accidentMama believed in the sure thing. At least now we could cut Mass. And I cut loose any of playing baseball, put all my energies into an accounting major. Sure, I know. But it doesn't look half as bad when you're thinking about three squares a day."
How 'bout you, friend?"
Matt had caught me off guard. "No thanks."
"I bet you twenty you can't find the ball, ali's you gotta do's bet on yourse'f and you take home twenty. You got a twenty you can show me?"
"I got all my money on the Black Hawks."
"Shit, they's worth bettin' on."
Laughter from the other passengers. The young husband was grinning. Sweat collected on my back. I pulled off my glove, reached into my pocket and brought out the crumpled twenty. "You're on," I said with a hint of a sneer.
Now the eyes of the riders were focused on us, papers lifted in the air un-
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read. They were safe now: I was the attraction. Matt smiled. His hand closed over the bill like a crab. "You gone and done it, pal, you already won it." The cash drove him into a frenzy of congeniality. "Find the ball you win a twenty, findin' it's element'ry. Watch de ball watch de ball whey is it? watch de ball." He was moving the bottle caps two at a time, with the fingers and heel of one hand, but I followed the ball easily. I was the decoy; I was betting on that, not the shell game. The Lawrence stop approached, and I readied myself to bolt. Second Commandment: Take the Money and Run.
The caps stopped moving. "Which is it?" Matt the Clown demanded. There was no rhyme now. I shifted nervously, fingering the good luck coin in my pants pocket. I pointed to the right-hand cap, and Matt turned it over. Nothing.
"Shit!" I pounded at the air with my fist.
"I'm sad to say you got to lose, the only way out's to never choose," said Matt the Clown as he stuffed the twenty deep into the pocket of his long leather jacket. Other times I'd seen him go up to the next car for another game, but he'd found his mark, and at Lawrence he and his partner headed out their respective doors. "G'bye folks!" he yelled. "I'll be comin' back for you, 'cause I got money in my shoe, y'all remember that, now!" For a moment I thought they'd burst into applause.
The last four stops were long ones. I glanced over at the man and woman. The husband tipped his finely barbered head with a faint smirk. "Tough luck," he said to me.
"Yeah, what the hell," I muttered. The doors of the train flew open at my stop and I escaped onto the platform, walked as fast as I could down the line of cars, bumping people in my haste. The train jumped twice and began to move, picking up speed as I fought to think of the hockey game.
A huge gob of spit leapt across my coat. I whirled around, stricken, and roared, "You cocksuckers!" Two kids hung out a conductor's window, laughing at me as the train retreated in the distance.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I li
ved five blocks from the Granville stop (three safe, two dangerous, each block its own entity). My apartment building seemed secure enough, with buzzers and intercoms and glass and steel. But this was a Disciples neighborhood. Last week a guytwenty-two, same age as megot greased up on the north platform. Three dudes hit him up for his wallet and he decided to show them the spirit of Chicago. They gave him the spirit of the city, all right, point-blank in the face.
I'd been on that platform much too late for my own good. The entrance was still closed off and covered with a thick layer of vomit sand. They must have had trouble with the stains. You'll get it someday, I told myself (knock on wood).
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The odds would play it out on mebut when? That's what drove me crazy, the waiting. "Always know the odds," my bookie Mike says. Well, I know themwe just about party togetherand one thing is, they always take their time.
Eddie wasn't at the apartment, and a few phone calls failed to turn him up. He'd blown his first semester at Champaign-Urbana and I was lodging him until he started at De Paul in March. He drifted around, killing time, slam dancing at punk clubs. Got the shirt torn clean off his back once, lost his coat, came home on the train naked from the waist up in ten-degree wind. I tagged along to the Metro one night and sat in the balcony. Below me a mob of young, sweaty boys thrashed, kicked, and slammed into each other as Hüsker Dü played at pile driver pace. Eddie climbed onstage, doing the clumsy, kicking, steel-booted step, then dove into the audience, where he vanished in the midst of their hands, bobbed back up onto his feet and started hauling toward the stage again. Punks crawled onstage, hurled themselves, flipped themselves, somersaulted into the pack of colliding bodies to land on their feet and catch some other idiot.
"How can you do that?" I asked him after the show.
"Leap of faith."
"What if they decide to clear a space for you someday?"
"Guess I break my neck."
"You might as well play Russian roulette."
"That wouldn't be as much fun with a band."
After dinner I took a shower and dressed for the game. Still no Eddie. The only other place I could think to look was the Grenada. We'd discovered a hidden fire escape to the roof of the abandoned movie palace this summer. It gave me the creeps, but Eddie still went there.
I would try the Grenada and, failing that, scalp the other ticket at the game. I'd get good money for it, too. But it wouldn't be the same.
The Grenada loomed above me like a Moorish whorehouse, a trashed temple to the gods of vaudeville and Hollywood. Over the marquee a stone facade rose in a soaring, fifty-foot arch that came to a point ten feet above the roof. Its center was a great arched window of stained glass, and flanking the glass on either side were stone columns, a corroding, neglected forest of sculpted foliage and gargoyle heads. A row of three tall windows began at roof level. I found Eddie's silhouette in one of the windows. It disappeared as I moved closer, so I crossed the street to the theater and slipped into the shadow of its north alley.
A minute or two passed. Shit! He must not have recognized me, and since he was trespassing I couldn't yell up from the street. I'd have to go up after him. He'd left the fire escape down, thank God. It wheezed and rattled as I climbed up the steps.
The roofscape was broad, shallow plains of tar separated into rectangles by knee-high walls of brick and mortar. An explosion of white paint announced
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"DISCIPLES" to all visitors, and other artists had elaborated a maze of spray paint, white and yellow and pink and blue, overlapping and intertwining like a sea of wild snakes.
I called Eddie's name.
"Tom?" He moved out from the shadows, translucent in the streaming moon-light, cradling a seven-ounce bottle of Christian Brothers brandy.
I told him about the Hawks tickets. "That's great," he said.
"You know, you must be nuts drinking up here."
"No, it's cool. View's magnificent." I took the bottle from him. "What?"
"Come on, are you crazy? You'll wind up like Mama did."
"Since when are you my nursemaid?"
"Too long ago."
"Ah, fuck off." He walked up to the windows overlooking Sheridan. They were full-length, and I didn't like being too close to them. "Come look. It really is great."
I walked over to his window and hugged the side. Below us a river of passing cars, a river of chrome and light, flowed in opposite directions. "You're lucky the Disciples haven't kicked your ass out this window. I bet you couldn't get enough punks gathered on Sheridan to catch you."
"What is this luck bullshit all the time? There's no such thing. I could do a backflip out this window right now, and if it wasn't meant to be I'd never hit the street. The earth would rotate backwards and the lake would catch me."
"Yeah, well, life doesn't rotate backwards."
"It doesn't rotate at all. I mean, shit, what's the point of pushing forward? What's forward? I called De Paul today and told them I was withdrawing."
"You what?" His mouth gave a twitch and he looked out the window. I could tell he'd been planning to bring it up more artfully than this. "You really called them and pulled out?"
"What's the point? It'll be the same as Champaign."
"How do you plan on feeding yourself? You can't stay with me forever."
"I'll get a place, get a job. Greenpeace gives you a hundred bucks a week. Maybe I'll be in a hardcore band with some guys. Greg Marelli's got a set of drums. We're gonna write a song called 'Baby Let's Sordid Out.' Get it? S-O-R-D-I-D?"
"Oh, brother."
"The point is, why do I need a safety net? It's a false god. Why follow it into a little white cubicle?"
"It pays the bills," I said icily.
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I'll give you some money."
"Keep it. You're gonna need it now."
He turned from the window and walked to the east edge of the main roof
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of the building. I followed him. A tower of sorts stood southeast of us, its roof ten-foot-square and walled in by brick. A brick wall extended out at a right angle to connect with our roof, and the blacktop caved in about a dozen feet to form two gulleys, one on each side of the wall. East of us the moonlight cast dancing bangles in the lake.
"Is that all you want, Tom? To pay the bills?"
I thought of the young couple on the train, the husband who had the money and the beautiful companion and didn't have to sweat out his last twenty bucks in a shell game. Contempt or envy? The line was so thin I needed my reading glasses. "I don't know what I want," I said to him. "But I know I don't have it."
"Besides, most of your bills are for Mike Curran."
I punched him in the chest; he laughed, and before I could get a word in edgewise he'd mounted the brick wall and walked quickly, evenly to the tip of the right angle.
"You're a fucking nut case. If you fall I'll never get you out of there. I'll have to call the fire department and we'll both be busted."
"I'm not gonna fall," he sneered. Looking straight ahead, he turned and crossed to the roof of the tower.