by Gil Reavill
We wound up at Judy and Jack Creager’s spacious home, set amid the woods in a development near Silver Springs State Park. Jack Creager was just headed out to pick up Dave’s brother Paul, now fully recovered from his accident after years of painful rehab. I caught some of the capable, hardworking nature of the son in the figure of the father. I sat at the kitchen table with Dave’s mother, Judy, talking about the family and about Paul’s near-death experience.
“The thing I like about Aftermath,” Judy said, “is that it’s helping people out in their time of need.” It was a theme sounded by virtually everyone who worked at Aftermath, from Chris and Tim to the secretaries and the techs. They all cited altruism as the aspect of the job that was most satisfying to them. There was a Midwestern earnestness to the claim that made it difficult to second-guess.
Judy worked out of her home, distributing a vitamin product called Ageless. She had experienced four successive bouts of cancer, she said, and she had become very proactive about her health. She offered me some free samples of Ageless, a blueberry-colored liquid supplement that needed to be refrigerated, and that you were supposed to take twice a day. Judy looked healthy to me, cheerful in the face of what was, for her, lately, a hard life.
The assaults of accident and the depredations of disease, the seemingly endless catalog of pain and tragedy and mortality that I encountered at Aftermath, had begun to affect my outlook. I saw death everywhere. It was like buying a new car and then suddenly seeing that make and model constantly, whereas before you hadn’t ever noticed it. Like a lot of people, I managed to block out as much misery as I could.
I thought about that as I drove away from meeting Dave Creager’s family, a large plastic baggie full of vitamin supplements next to me on the seat of the rental.
Ageless.
In Greek mythology the gods granted a prophetess named Sybil a single wish. She asked for eternal life. It didn’t turn out well. She forgot to ask for eternal youth. As she lived on and on over years and decades and centuries, her body shriveled with age until she was the size of a grasshopper. The high priests put Sibyl in a bottle and kept her at the oracle at Delphi.
Once in a while someone would open the bottle and ask, “What do you want, Sybil?” And Sybil would say, “I want to die.”
Agelessness is the true deep-down wish of every human being, and the one thing denied us. I didn’t know about the health-giving properties of the juice Dave’s mom was distributing, but they got the name right, at least. I popped a couple open and sucked them down.
A month after the cleanup of the shotgun suicide in Irene, I returned to talk to the family. I hesitated before calling them, since the death of the boy in the yearbook was still no doubt fresh in their minds and hearts, but when I spoke with the victim’s older brother—Pat Sullivan, the one who had difficulty walking when I first saw him—he said he wanted to talk about the tragedy. He told me he’d prefer I not come by the house, so as not to upset his grieving parents. We spoke at a restaurant in a strip mall outside Rockford, and over coffee, Pat Sullivan told me about his brother.
Sean Sullivan lived most of his life in the cramped asphalt-shingled house catercorner from John F. Kennedy High School, which opened when Sean was eleven. He did well in grade school and junior high in nearby Rockford, and was marked as an intelligent, sensitive kid.
His father, a long-distance trucker, was absent for long stretches, and his mother worked swing shift as a nurse’s aide in Rockford. The Sullivan boys, Pat, Wesley, and Sean, were alone at home for the majority of evenings in the week, but their aunt and uncle, their mother’s brother and his wife, lived five hundred yards away, in a farmhouse back off the main road.
“Sean started acting funny the last year of junior high, when he was in ninth grade,” Pat told me.
“Funny how?”
“It was hard to put your finger on,” Pat said. “I thought he was smoking too much pot. I smoked myself, so I wasn’t one to talk. But the older he got, the stranger he got.”
When he hit high school, troops of kids would be in the house every day after school. Pat had already graduated and wasn’t around much. “But I know they had a lot of bong parties, stuff like that.”
Heavy pot use has been associated with depression in teenagers, and Sean began to withdraw socially as a junior. His grades fell off. Then, on the afternoon of his seventeenth birthday, he tried to rob a branch bank in Rockford with an orange-colored water pistol.
“That was a real wake-up call. He just shoved a note at the teller, like ‘I’m here to rob you, give me the money.’ But he was just a scrawny kid with a toy gun. The cops overreacted. They tackled him, put him on the ground, and handcuffed him and all that.”
Sean spent six months in psychiatric lock-down at Singer Health Center.
“I think it made him worse,” Pat said. “He went around to all his old high school friends, and told them that they were the ones who made him crazy.”
Sean missed school a lot in his senior year, and it got him in trouble with his social workers, since he was on supervised release from the hospital. He stayed home and watched television—or watched the high school across the street from an upstairs bedroom window.
“I saw him like that a lot,” Pat said. “He’d be curled up on Wesley’s bed, because Wes had a better view of the school. I’d ask him, ‘Sean, what are you staring at?’ He’d say, ‘Nothing.’”
The social work team at family services talked about returning Sean to the hospital. He spent a lot of time paging through the yearbook from his junior year, defacing some of the pictures with a ballpoint pen.
What do you want, Sean? I want to die.
Sean had his choice of firearms in the house. Every fall, all the members of the Sullivan family, men and women both, hunted deer in the corn-rich Illinois farmland around Irene.
“Sean usually used a shotgun with a solid slug,” Pat said, “A lot of times some of the places we hunted were near houses, and we didn’t want a rifle to take somebody out.”
The day Sean shot himself he came home from school, a rare day when he attended all his classes. He was alone in the house. He opened the yearbook on his own bed, not Wesley’s, but he could still see a small slice of the high school from where he sat. He positioned himself awkwardly, twisting around so the blast was directed into the room and not toward the wall behind him. Loading the 12-gauge with a single shell of heavyweight buckshot, he pressed the trigger with the thumb of his right hand.
Pat Sullivan didn’t speak about the details of his brother’s death. Talking about it made him feel lost, he said. He asked me what he could have done that was different.
“We tried to get him help,” he said. As we said good-bye, he attempted some rueful gallows humor.
“You know, we all would have preferred it if Sean had used the real gun to hold up the bank, and used the toy gun if he wanted to hurt himself. That would have been a lot better, don’t you think?”
CHAPTER NINE
The Long Pig
The Chicago Rippers in the news
In most cities, there’s a constant battle between good and evil. In Chicago, everybody gets along.
—Lenny Bruce
You get more with a smile and a gun than you get with just a smile.
—Al Capone
The mantle of criminality has never rested easily on Chicago’s big shoulders, but the city has never quite been able to shake it off either. “The only completely corrupt city in America,” one disgusted nineteenth-century reformer labeled the town. A hundred years later, when the son of a prominent political family wedded the daughter of a reputed mob figure, the Chicago Tribune did not deign to cover the marriage in its society pages. The story belonged exclusively to the paper’s crime reporter.
Going to Chicago for crime is like going to Vichy for the waters, and it’s been that way since the very beginning. The city erected itself on shifting foundations, both of the moral and physical variety. Building on the wet, sand
y soil of a marsh on the southern rim of Lake Michigan, the city founders encountered immediate difficulties with multistory structures. They couldn’t build big. The foundations sank into the quagmire. An apt metaphor, some said, for the moral quicksand that was the city. Feet of clay, indeed. Chicago existed on extremely rickety stilts.
For a time, engineers attempted a bizarre, makeshift solution. They created an understory and jacked the buildings downtown ten feet off the ground. From their sidewalks, respectable denizens of Chicago could gaze downward into that shadowy understory—a muddy nineteenth-century twilight zone of beams and trusses, exposed to the elements and representing an open hunting ground for legions of cutpurses, thieves, and thugs. The city fostered a criminal underworld that was among the most vibrant, enduring, and powerful in history.
Architects eventually solved the sinking-foundation problem, to the degree that Chicago became the skyscraper capital of the world. Shifting moral foundations were harder to address. The criminal element that graduated from downtown’s strange architectural understory went on to rule the city and, eventually, the whole country, dictating legislation, electing presidents, and gorging themselves on graft.
During the Roaring Twenties and the gift to the underworld that was Prohibition, there were 976 gang murders in Chicago,* a death count not really matched until the crack epidemic hit Los Angeles sixty years later. Chicago in the twenties had its own “death corner”—at Oak and Milton, where thirty-eight victims were gunned down in a single year—and even its own “dead man’s tree”—a poplar on Loomis Street upon which Black Hand assassins would pin the names of their victims.
From the feuding fiefdoms of Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and Dion O’Banion grew Chicago’s reputation as a gangster’s paradise. Out of the Prohibition-era mob grew the “Outfit,” a vast organized-crime enterprise that spread its influence to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and beyond. The Outfit helped put Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy into the White House, and infiltrated countless sectors of American business, industry and, society. “Crime does not pay,” stated Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, “as well as politics.” Chicago has shown that when you can combine both, you’ve got it made.
Growing up, I felt Chicago hovering at the southern border of my world, gazing evilly at me like the eye of Sauron. Both my parents were raised there, and for a while in my preteen years I spent my summers at my grandmother’s house just off Kedzie Avenue, while my mother took her education degree at the University of Chicago. Later, in the early 1980s, I returned to the city with a girlfriend who attended medical school there.
My first Aftermath jobs had all been in the western suburbs, or farther afield, in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. But a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Chris Wilson called and asked if I wanted to join a crew of techs on a body removal in Chicago.
“Sure,” I said. “But I thought Aftermath didn’t do that much business in Cook County.”
In most Aftermath jobs, the actual corpus has long since disappeared, bagged up and hauled off by personnel from the medical examiner’s office. Many times days or even weeks might go by before the Aftermath crew arrives to deal with the human leftovers.
But in a small percentage of cases, the local authorities contract Aftermath to remove the body. Several jurisdictions, primarily smaller ones in the western suburban counties of Kane, Kendall, and Will, occasionally use the company’s removal services. Cook County, which embraces the city of Chicago proper, normally does not.
“The job’s east of Archer Avenue, a Polish neighborhood, Pope John Paul Drive,” Chris said. “Joe and Kyle are going to handle it.”
Joe Halverson had completed his training under Ryan and Dave. He and his stepbrother, Kyle Brown, now made up the third and least senior crew operating out of the corporate headquarters of Aftermath. Usually they inherited the jobs no other techs wanted—the jail cell cleanups and squad-car details that Aftermath does gratis, as goodwill gestures to the sheriff’s offices and police departments it depends on for referrals.
Joe was stocky and heavy-browed, with short-cropped brown hair, while Kyle was slight, more wiry. But they both displayed a sunny bonhomie in the face of the gloomy and macabre situations they encountered on the job. I rode in their GM, an older truck they were assigned as the low men on the Aftermath totem pole. Joe installed a green canvas camp chair between the front seats and I squeezed in.
I asked them if they’d ever done a body removal. “No, and I’m not wild about it,” Joe said. “I don’t like to see dead people. I’m fine with cleaning up their fluids and their shit and their odor, but even at funerals, I don’t like to see dead bodies.”
“But we’ll take it,” Kyle said. “We haven’t been working that much lately.”
At Aftermath, techs are treated not as salaried employees but as subcontractors. If a tech doesn’t work, he doesn’t get paid. Jobs go first to the top crew, Greg and Greg; next to the second crew, Ryan and Dave; and last to Joe and Kyle. Aftermath charges its clients (or their insurance carriers) $250 an hour for the services of their trained biohazardous waste removal teams. The techs receive varying portions of that, from $80 an hour for Banach down to $45 each for Joe and Kyle. There are extra charges for materials, demolition, chemicals, and biobox disposal. There have been instances in which a Wet Vac used on a job had to be discarded because it had been contaminated with biomatter. That and similar charges go on the client’s invoice.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Over by Comiskey,” Joe said.
I corrected him. “You mean ‘U.S. Cellular Field.’” The trend to corporate branding had hit the venerable Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox.
“I hate that stupid name,” Joe said. The White Sox were deep into their World Series run, and the tech crews split evenly along north (the Cubs) and south (the Sox) lines.
I examined the MapQuest printout that Nancy Doggett, the Aftermath office manager, had prepared for Kyle and Joe. Computer-generated mapping has been a godsend for far-flung service companies such as Aftermath, but the crews widely deride the maps and directions as difficult to follow and oftentimes downright wrong. On a MapQuest printout “2.8 miles” sometimes turned out to be more like 2.8 blocks.
“Jesus,” I said, looking at the map. “We’re going to the Back of the Yards.”
“What?” Kyle asked. “Where’s that?”
“Packingtown. It used to be the worst slum in the country.”
The “yards” that the neighborhood was in back of were the Union Stock Yards, which for over a century had made Chicago into the world capital of death. More higher life-forms have perished in Chicago than in any other place on earth.
Imagine the globe rendered in some sort of death-sensitive imaging system (infradead photography?), whereby areas of increased mortality are highlighted or, perhaps more fittingly, darkened. Darkness rolls over the whole globe, of course, but Dachau, Buchenwald, Birkenau show as pinpricks of black, along with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Bhopal, the World Trade Center. But Chicago—Chicago of the area where Joe, Kyle, and I were headed, the district bounded by Pershing Avenue, Halsted Street, Forty-seventh Street, and Ashland Avenue—Chicago would be a massive black hole, a sucking vortex that swept billions of creatures into oblivion and onto dinner plates.
Animal rights activists refer to the place as the “Inferno.” From the time the Union Stock Yards and Transit Company opened on Christmas Day 1865, through the development by Gustavus Swift of the first practical refrigerated railcar in 1882, until decentralization and interstate trucking doomed the enterprise in the years after World War II, Chicago killed the country’s cattle, hogs, and sheep with a brisk and brutal midwestern efficiency.
Wags called it the “disassembly line.” Decades before Detroit was a glimmer in Henry Ford’s eye, first Cincinnati (aka “Porkopolis”) and then Chicago perfected the assembly-line slaughter of animals. The cattle cars arrived by rail from all over the country, but mostly from the
rangelands of the western states, and were shunted along the 130 miles of railroad tracks within the Yards. Animals for slaughter were first stunned with a poleax, and later, as techniques were refined, with pneumatic guns equipped with captive bolts. The actual killing occurred as their throats were cut and they bled out, “desanguinated,” to use the terminology of forensics. Using power hoists and other innovations, workers hung the carcass overhead on a moving chain, passing it between cleaver-wielding cutters, each responsible for a different slice of meat.
“No iron cog-wheels could work with more regular motion,” said visitor Frederick Law Olmsted of the butchers on the killing line.
The whole offal-and-manure mess of the yards drained into the South Fork of the Chicago River, which locals called “Bubbly Creek,” since rotting animal carcasses rendered the water effervescent. The neighborhood had a lot of names. Ducktown, because it flooded so often. Canaryville, because of the sparrows that fed off the feedlots, and also for the gangs of young toughs (“wild canaries”) that infested the place.
By the end of the nineteenth century, when the Yards cranked up to spectacle-level production, tourists flocked to the site. One of the recognized side attractions during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition was a day trip to the Union Stock Yards. The actress Sarah Bernhardt termed her visit “a horrible and magnificent spectacle,” and Rudyard Kipling stated simply, “You will never forget the sight.”
In 1906 Upton Sinclair portrayed the pathos of the place in The Jungle:
Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure, but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and memory. One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal with symbols and similes, and to hear the hogsqueal of the universe.