Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  There, at Menard, John slumps in his chair, his head lolling to the side, his eyes closed. He could be asleep; he could be acting out his pretrial performance for the lawyers and psychiatrists at Cermak. He begins to snore, which is something people do when they are asleep and something people often do when they are pretending to be asleep.

  Minutes pass. Eventually the snoring stops and John struggles up out of sleep, moving ponderously. He can’t quite control the extremities of his body.

  “What happened?” he asks, eyes swimming vacantly in his head. “What happened? Is everyone all right?”

  John shakes his head and shoulders, throwing off sleep and confusion like a wet dog. “Was that Jack? I can’t . . . I thought I heard someone yell, ‘Sit down, Jack.’ I . . . are you all right?” He appears to be talking to someone on his right, and there is no one there. Sitting in chains at Menard, he is still at Cermak.

  John turns and stares into the middle distance for several seconds. When he opens his mouth, a woman’s high-pitched voice, less confident-sounding now, says: “I’m all right.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was talking to Jack.”

  “Yeah? What did he say?”

  The woman’s voice is coaxing now, a tone you might use to encourage a small child to let go, to take the first run of his life down a shiny new slide. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Cuz he don’t talk to me.”

  “Try him.”

  “I can’t. He don’t come out like . . .”

  The high-pitched voice begins to grate again: “I know your secret,” it seems to say, “I despise your weakness “—and the tone is taunting, bleeding with contempt, falsely reasonable. “All I can say is that Jack confirmed my feeling that you’re a faggot.”

  “Fuck you,” John says angrily. “You’re a liar.”

  “No, I’m not. He called you a faggot. He knows all about you: You’re nothing but a faggot, a dumb, stupid faggot.”

  “Jack wouldn’t, Jack doesn’t . . .” John’s face is red, swollen with a blood rush of anger, and he can’t find the words he needs to say. “Liar!” he shouts.

  And out of the same burning face, out of the same shouting mouth, the woman’s calm, reasonable, taunting voice says: “You know I don’t lie. And you know I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to Jack.”

  “Jack!” John howls. He is silent for a moment, then he speaks more calmly, imitating his own imitation of the woman’s voice. “Jack doesn’t want to come out.” The sentence is both a taunt and a challenge.

  “Sure he does, John,” the womanly voice says, all appeasement now. “He likes to come out when you go cruising, doesn’t he? Let’s get back in the car again. Let’s ask Jack to come along.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?” John asks, challenging again. “Aren’t you afraid that if Jack comes out he might kill you?”

  “I want to talk to him. Just get in the car.”

  Once again John stands, opens an imaginary door, takes a seat, starts driving. “Where are we going?” the woman’s voice asks.

  “The park.”

  “Bughouse Square?”

  “Yeah, the park.”

  “You going down Clark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see . . . I see the streetlights coming up the hood of the car. They’re like spotlights.”

  “Are you in the spotlight?”

  “Not my face . . . my hands.”

  “How do they look?”

  “Big. Strong. My hands on the wheel, they’re in the spotlight. They look . . . powerful.” John’s voice is dreamy; he sounds like a man reliving a pleasant memory.

  “There’s a guy,” the woman’s says. Her voice is sticky with honey and sex. “He looks right, doesn’t he? Nice tight ass, not too tall, slender build, blond hair. He big enough for you?”

  “He looks,” John says scornfully, “like a fruit.”

  “Ask Jack what he thinks of him.”

  “Fuck Jack,” John says, exasperated.

  “Kid looks about eighteen, nineteen. How old does he look to you?”

  “Maybe eighteen,” John says with a sigh, capitulating, playing the damn silly-ass game.

  “How tall is he?”

  “Five-seven, five-eight.”

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “White pants. Tight white pants,” John says without hesitation, “brown leather jacket, white T-shirt . . . white tennis shoes.”

  “What color eyes has he got?”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  “Let’s ask Jack what he thinks of him.”

  “Jack’s not coming out. Jack’s not coming out because I don’t want to pick the kid up.”

  “You asshole!” The woman’s voice is no longer breathless and sexy. “You dumb stupid asshole.” The voice grates, like a rat clawing on glass. “I don’t want you to pick him up. I want Jack to pick him up.” And now hard, like a slap at full force: “Jack says you’re a faggot.”

  John’s head jerks back, as from a blow, and the woman speaks out of the mouth in his stricken face. “Jack says you’re a faggot. I don’t want to see a faggot pick this kid up. I want to see how a real man does it.”

  Now John speaks in his own voice, softly, slowly: “Son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch . . . son-of-a-bitch . . . son-of-a-bitch, son-of-a-bitch.” The dead-level intensity of John’s voice is unsettling: it is like that strange green calm that settles over the Midwest just before a tornado howls over the land. “Son-of-a-bitch,” John says again, and his voice is deeper, more guttural, “son-of-a-bitch.”

  “John!” The woman’s voice again. “John, keep your hands on the wheel!”

  “Son-of-a-bitch.” Louder, deeper, hoarser.

  “Jack,” the woman says suddenly. “Is that you, Jack?”

  There is no reply, just a sepulchral mutter, a hollow, grinding rasp.

  “What are you feeling?” the woman asks, and her voice is almost tender. “What are you feeling right now?”

  Jack’s voice is that of a man wakened from deep sleep; it is a rumbling full of rust and broken glass. “I am going to kill you. . . .”

  “Hello, Jack,” the woman says, sounding both shaky and certain.

  John stares straight ahead with Jack’s tunnel-deep, unseeing eyes. There is a low vibration, a growling in the back of his throat, the sound of a large dog about to attack.

  “Jack,” the woman’s voice says quickly, “look at that guy, why don’t you. He doesn’t look like a fag, does he? He looks like a hustler.”

  Jack’s voice is very deep, very hoarse: “Yeah. Little son-of-a-bitch. I see what he’s up to.” Jack moves suddenly, swiftly, but his movements are curiously stiff, like a man miming a robot. He flings open the imaginary car door, swings his legs to the side, ducks under the imaginary door, and stands as at attention. He does not close the door. The man is in chains at Menard State Penitentiary, and he is demonstrating something that happened at Cermak Hospital before his trial. Perhaps he is not performing; perhaps, in his mind, he is standing on a dark Chicago street corner at 3:00 on a cold, windy morning. Perhaps he can see, in his mind’s eye, a blond young man in tight white pants, a young man who is staring at him, waiting, a half smile pulling at his lips.

  Jack’s eyes are opaque, flat, dead as onyx. He walks to his left—toward a boy standing on the corner near Bughouse Square this cold Chicago morning—and just for a moment, his knees seem to be locked. He moves one jerky step at a time: elbows at his side, arms out before him, the fingers hooked like talons. One step, two, three—this is the way the monster moves; everybody knows how the monster walks; everyone’s seen Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster—and suddenly, like a punctured balloon, the odd tension dissolves. His arms drop to his sides, and his eyes live inside his head.

  “You,” Jack says, “you kid, get your ass over here.” The voice is deeper than John’s speaking voice but not so hoarse nor so guttural as it
was a moment before. “I’m a cop, and I want your ass right here.” Jack waits a moment, then makes a flipping gesture, as if displaying a badge in a wallet. “I know what the hell you’re doing out here. I’m a cop and you’re hustling.”

  Jack’s face is stern—a good, tough cop’s face—and he doesn’t change position, but the boy’s voice whines out of his mouth. This tone is more realistic than that of the woman; it sounds very much like the cadences of a young man, a teenager. “Hey, man, I ain’t doin’ nothin’.”

  Now Jack’s deep voice, a cop at work: “You’re hustling.”

  “No, hey, I’m not. I’m just, you know, standing here. Waiting for a few buddies, you know.” The voice shakes a bit. The kid is young, a little naїve. He’s trying to tough it out and not doing too well.

  “When they coming, these buddies of yours?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy’s voice says, sounding trapped. “They should be here soon.”

  It is easy to picture the man in chains on a dark street on Chicago’s near North Side. He and the boy are standing on the sidewalk, well away from a bright circle cast by the nearest streetlight. They are dressed much alike: both wear leather jackets, white T-shirts, light-colored slacks. The older man is paunchy, and his pants are loose-fitting; the younger man is slender, very taut, and he wears his pants tight. In the dark, they might be the same man, separated by the cruelty of fifteen or twenty years.

  There is a sense of others in the gloom of the park behind them, a sense of men sitting in the cars parked along the curb. No traffic disturbs the night this late: only a few big cars—all of them with suburban parking stickers in the windows—drift occasionally down the dark and otherwise empty streets. Sometimes a shadow detaches itself from the gloom of the park and moves toward one of the cars. A window is rolled down. There is a hushed discussion.

  “Look, asshole,” the older man says, “I know you’re lying. You ain’t waiting for nobody. Fucking liar. I hate liars. Now I got to figure out, do I want to bust you and go through all that goddamn paperwork.”

  “Hey, man, please,” the boy says, “don’t bust me. Don’t take me in.”

  There is a sudden sound of laughter in the shadows. A young man walks under the light in the center of the park, stumbling slightly.

  The older man grabs the boy roughly by the upper arm and spins him toward the big black car. “Get over the hood of the car. Spread your arms and legs.” The man frisks the boy. He stops, cups the groin, then moves on briskly. It is dark out of the streetlights, and the car is black with no chrome but for the two spotlights just under the windshield on the passenger’s and driver’s sides; no chrome but for the two conspicuous CB antennae that give the car an official look. It’s a plainclothes cop’s car. An older man frisking a boy spread out over the hood of a car like that is nothing new to Bughouse Square. If there are watchers in the dark, no one says anything.

  “All right,” the man says, “get your ass in the car.”

  “Hey, no, please, man . . .”

  “Get in. Now!”

  “Okay, okay, but can’t we talk about this? Please don’t bust me. Man, I just couldn’t take—”

  And the man shoves the boy into the big black car. He puts his hand on the boy’s head, a protective gesture cops use when the TV cameras are on them.

  At Menard, John—or is it Jack?—walks around his chair, as around the front of a car. He does not open the imaginary door. He never closed it when he lurched out, stiff-kneed and growling. There is no provision made for the other voice, for the antagonistic woman.

  The man sits behind the wheel, driving. He makes four consecutive right-hand turns—one complete revolution of the single block that is Bughouse Square—until the boy’s voice, pathetic and pleading, finally says, “Okay, you got me. What do you want? Don’t take me in. Please.”

  The man is not so gruff now. He sounds thoughtful, almost friendly. “I’m supposed to take you in.” This is a cop who sometimes does not like what he has to do. “It’s my job to take you in.”

  Neither the man nor the boy says anything for another complete revolution of the park. “I’m supposed to bust you.” The tone suggests that there is a difference between justice and the law; the tone suggests that sometimes a cop is torn between his duty and his humanity. “I’m not like a lot of these cops,” the man says, as if speaking to himself. “I’m pretty liberal-minded.” The man looks over at his passenger and he almost smiles. “Why don’t we just take a ride and talk about it.”

  It is as if, on the second full revolution of the park, the car has worked up enough centrifugal force to break the gravity that held them, man and boy, to the park. The car swerves off to the north, toward Norwood Park and the house on Summerdale.

  “You do drugs?” the man asks.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I asked you if you do drugs,” the man says, sounding just slightly angry again.

  “I . . . not really,” the boy says uncertainly, but he must know that he can’t fool this experienced cop, and he adds, “I do ‘em a little. I mean, I’ve tried ‘em once in a while. I’m sure not heavy into ‘em.”

  “No?” the cop asks, friendly again, rewarding the little bit of honesty in the boy.

  “No,” the kid says, sounding very sincere. “Just a little, now and then.”

  “You live in Chicago?”

  “No.”

  “Got relatives here? Any friends?”

  “Not here.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Out of state.”

  “Your parents know where you are?”

  “My parents suck,” the kid says, suddenly angry.

  “They do, huh?”

  “Yeah, damn straight.”

  “You ever just try to talk to them?” the man asks. “You ever consider their side? You get a little older, you find out they aren’t so bad. Maybe just a little set in their ways. Hell, my own old man, he never understood me, and I was never close to him. Now he’s dead and I wish I woulda been closer. I wish I wouldna done some of the things I did. You ever think about how you’re going to feel when your parents are dead?” The man is a good cop, one who really cares about kids, one who would rather help them than bust them.

  “I never thought about them being dead,” the kid says, and then the full force of the thought hits him. “Shit,” he says.

  “They don’t even know where you are, do they?” the cop asks.

  “No,” the boy says, suddenly thoughtful. The black Oldsmobile cuts left, hits an entrance ramp, and rises up onto the Kennedy Expressway, heading north toward Norwood Park.

  “And here you are, down at the park, standing around. Don’t you know you can get hurt down there? You can get jack-rolled, beaten up. You could get killed down there. As God is my witness, I hate to see kids hustling their bodies down there.”

  “I wasn’t hustling.”

  The man turns to his right and pierces the kid with a flat black stare. He hates liars.

  “I was just, uh"—the kid stumbles, knowing that this cop will bust him for a lie and reward him for the truth—"just, well, I heard you can make some money that way. I can’t get a job, and I don’t have any place to live. I needed something to eat.”

  “Look, kid,” the good cop says, “I see a hundred of ‘em like you every week. What I do, if they’re straight with me, I’m straight with them. There’s bad people down at that park. Real bad people. I tell the good kids I got to pick up, I warn them about the jack rollers, and the queens, and all the sick ones. Just like you, first thing tomorrow, you ought to call your parents, at least let them know where you are. You ought to think about going back to them, maybe going back to school. See, you get so upset they don’t understand you, and you don’t make no effort to understand them. See what I mean? You make an effort to understand them, they’re gonna try harder to see what it’s like for you. One hand washes the other, see what I mean? It’s a two-way street.”

  The kid hesi
tates, and when he finally says, “Yeah, I see what you mean,” he sounds entirely sincere. The good cop glances toward his passenger and smiles: he feels warm and sees himself as a caring cop who does a lot of good things in his life. The big black car turns left, off the Kennedy Expressway, and follows the signs reading “O’Hare.” The car is moving north and west, toward Norwood Park. The man drives for some time, smiling.

  And then, suddenly, from out of nowhere, there is a new voice in the big car, a loud woman’s voice, rat claws on glass. “Look, he’s trying to open the door! The little shit is trying to get away!”

  The older man, the cop, responds to the action but does not reply to the disembodied voice. He reaches over, grabs the kid by the collar of his leather jacket, and yanks him savagely back into the car. “Get back in here!” he shouts, and then his voice drops into a deeper register. “I’m trying to be nice to you.” And deeper still, “You little fucker.” Under his breath, in a low, vibrating growl, the angry cop says, “Dumb stupid little fuck. I ought to kill you right now.” He is breathing heavily, as if in rage or passion.

  “Dumb and stupid little fuck,” the disembodied female voice whispers. There is, in the voice, a hint of sex, of shared secrets, of dark pleasures yet to be savored. “Little bastard,” the voice says, panting, and its message is, “I want to watch, I want to see it all. Turn me on, make me hot, show me, oh, please, show me.”

  But the older man is a good cop, a cop who can understand why a kid might be frightened, and he says to the boy, “Look, just don’t be scared, okay? There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re only going to take a little ride. Have a little talk.”

  “What are you going to do to him?” the woman begs. “Tell me.”

  The man turns to the boy sitting at his side: “I’ll decide what to do with you later,” he says.

  “You’re not going to bust me?”

  “Look, kid, I told you: I’m a good cop. I like kids. I ain’t here to do you no shit. No shit you don’t deserve, anyway. Let me ask you something. Are you homosexual?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not, huh?”