In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  “You were lonesome?”

  “Oh, you know, you miss the people you left behind, and you’re in a new place and you don’t know people enough to talk to. I didn’t know many girls, that’s for sure.”

  He puffed at the dwindling cigarette butt and then put it out by squeezing it between his thumb and forefinger.

  A group of children ran by us and gave him a look. Several of them were black, and I was fascinated.

  “Were there colored people?”

  “Not many, at least not right here. But there were colored people. And Jews over there on Maxwell Street. ‘Jewtown,’ we used to call it. And other kinds of people, every kind you could think of, really.”

  “Did you like them?”

  He seemed on the verge of an easy answer, then stopped himself. “I did not. I…we didn’t like the colored. Young men don’t like anybody different. There is trouble all through life, and you want to blame somebody for it.”

  “Grandma says there’s good people and bad people in all the races.”

  He made a snorting sound. “She would. But she’s right about that. Just don’t tell her I said so. I don’t want to start something I’ll regret.”

  “Are women as smart as men?”

  “Well,” he said, and his eyebrows shot up in what I knew to be the sign of significant thought. “I suppose some of them are. Your grandmother—and don’t tell her I said this or I’ll say you just made it up—she’s smarter than most of the men I’ve ever known, and your Aunt Teresa Dorsey that’s the nun, well, she’s as smart as anybody you’re likely to meet.” He frowned and for a moment his thoughts occupied him.

  “You see, Danny, most men are utterly stupid. It has been a shock and a disappointment to me, but it’s true. Now, you happen to come from a long line of intelligent men, and the Irish are known for it in general, but you’d be surprised how many men are too dumb to come in out of the rain.”

  “Like Aunt Mary’s husband Joe?”

  This seemed to strike him funny, and he laughed aloud.

  “You’ve been listening to your uncles again.”

  “Yes.”

  He patted me on the head. “Your Uncle Michael thinks you hear everything, no matter where you are. But, yes, old Joe Collins, he’s a prime example of what I’m saying.”

  “But he’s Irish.”

  His face clouded. “There’s people born with three arms, there was a cow born with two heads over in India, two complete heads. Yes, Joe Collins is Irish. The world is a place of strange things, difficult for us to explain. I think it’s God showing off his sense of humor.”

  “Oh.”

  We wandered by the beautiful old Holy Family Church, which had survived the Chicago Fire, stopped in a saloon on the corner of Roosevelt and Racine, where many of the faces at the bar were black, some white. He had a shot and a beer and bought me a coke with a cherry in it.

  We wandered over to Maxwell Street, where many of the vendors were doing their business a day in advance of Sunday’s weekly free-for-all of street capitalism. He bought me hot dogs at a smelly stand where onions sat in an ominous brown pile at the end of the grill. A tiny, wrinkled man tried to sell him a green suit, another offered him a fedora, and a dark-haired vendor sold him a small religious statue that appeared to be a saint—“Holy thing,” the vendor said in troubled English. He was short and grim-looking, with nose hair and bad teeth, and he watched Grandpa warily. Then they engaged in twenty seconds of spirited haggling and Grandpa got the little statue for fifty cents.

  “Which saint is it, Grandpa?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll tell your grandmother it’s St. Patrick.”

  We wandered farther and farther away from the main street, ending up at a viaduct, where he sat down on a piece of concrete. “To catch my breath,” he said, but it seemed he’d stopped to cough.

  Our seemingly purposeless wandering had begun to worry me.

  I waited till he’d stopped coughing. “Are we lost?”

  “No, no, of course not. You can’t get lost in Chicago.”

  “Are we going to get a chicken?”

  “Oh, we are, indeed. We’re going to give her a bit of the Old Country.”

  With that, he got to his feet and announced that it was time to see “Barney.” We returned to Racine Street and a squat brick building that seemed to have sunk down below the rest of its block. At the bottom of a short staircase, we pushed our way into a long low room filled with people and cages, noises and smells, a hot, roiling, crowded place that was part market, part circus and probably never knew a quiet moment.

  People stood at a counter babbling with a fat man and a tall woman while others peered into the small metal cages that lined three walls of the shop, cages piled one on top of another and filled with chickens, rabbits, ducks, and a few birds of, to me, mysterious provenance. Some of the chickens had seemingly freed themselves, for there were at least half a dozen strutting around the sawdust-strewn floor and pecking for food, and no one seemed to mind. I looked up at my grandfather and saw that he was laughing soundlessly at my reaction.

  The fat man behind the counter boomed out, “Hey, Irish!” and the woman clapped her hands as though my grandfather’s appearance was Christmas come early. They hugged and shook hands and Grandpa pulled me to the counter by the elbow. He introduced them as Dora and Barney.

  “This is Daniel, my grandson,” he said.

  The woman clapped her hands together again and said that I was handsome. She had an explosion of gray hair like old steel wool but a very young-looking face, a pretty face, dominated by an amused pair of blue eyes. The man was red-faced and dark-eyed, with huge hands, and I noticed that, like my grandfather, he’d lost a fingernail or two to the vicissitudes of manual labor. He winked at me and said, “So you’re the crown prince, huh?” and I laughed at the oddness of the idea. I held out my hand and he engulfed it in his dark, calloused fingers.

  “Go ahead and look around, look at the critters,” his wife said, and my grandfather added, “Find us a chicken.”

  I turned and found myself facing a big one that eyed me with impertinence and blocked my path.

  “Except that one,” Grandpa said. “That’s a rooster.”

  “Thinks he owns the joint,” Barney said, and they laughed as I stepped gingerly around the glaring bird.

  I was in heaven. For what seemed ages, I wandered around the shop peering into the cages and making the acquaintance of the rabbits, chickens, ducks, and pigeons—at least there were a number of what appeared to be pigeons, though I was unsure what anyone would want with a pigeon.

  While I was making overtures of friendship to a large brown rabbit, a door opened out of the back wall and a younger version of Barney entered the room. He was puffing on a cigarette and wearing a bloody apron, and I assumed he was somehow connected with a local butcher shop and had come to visit Barney or see the interesting animals. When he noticed me at the rabbit’s cage he made a curt nod.

  “That’s a good one there.”

  I smiled and nodded, impressed at his taste in pets.

  Eventually my grandfather called out to me that it was “time to pick the prize roaster,” as he put it, and I selected a reddish-brown hen that seemed particularly friendly. Somehow I had lost all sight of our mission, and I no longer realized the impending fate of whatever bird I chose, or of all the birds in the shop, for that matter. Barney brought me back to earth with a jolt, taking the bird from its cage and calling out, “Hey, Lou!” in a voice that shook the walls and startled some of the animals.

  The blood-stained man reappeared from the back room, cleaver in hand, and then I understood that I’d passed a death sentence on this hen. Barney was handing the bird over when my grandfather said, “No, hold on there, Barney. Gonna have a little fun with the old woman.” He didn’t say what the fun was, but the nature of it
seemed clear to Barney and his smiley wife, for they both laughed, and the woman called Grandpa a scoundrel.

  The upshot was that Grandpa paid Barney some money—a dollar and a half, I think—and we left the store with the bird shut up in a cardboard carton. At my insistence that the bird would need “fresh air,” Barney had punctured the sides in a couple of places. Delighted with our new companion, I waved to Barney and Dora, promising to look after Grandpa and to come back and see them sometime.

  We walked to Ashland, and by the time our bus came, the chicken had gotten its head outside of the box, so that it seemed my Grandpa was carrying a box decorated with a chicken’s head. The chicken made frequent squawks so that my grandfather kept telling her, “Pipe down, you,” and seemed annoyed, but I thought that for a creature confined to a cardboard box she was surprisingly well-behaved.

  We boarded the bus, but the driver was a young man who did not know my grandfather, wasn’t impressed by the brotherhood implicit in his streetcar man’s card, and seemed to feel that a chicken on a public bus was an abomination. He curled his lip, exchanged a sour look with the chicken, and shook his head.

  “Can’t bring that on a bus, Mac.”

  “It’s the boy’s pet, pal. Can you go along with me here?”

  “Nah, they got rules, sanitation and like that.”

  He started to give Grandpa a lecture on public behavior, telling him people didn’t need to see a filthy chicken sitting on the bus. Grandpa listened patiently to his spiel, then pointed to the comatose drunk sprawled halfway into the aisle in one of the front seats.

  “My chicken’s not as good as this bum here?”

  The driver shot an unwilling glance at the snoring drunk, who had begun drooling down his shirtfront, then looked at the chicken. The bird seemed to sense that this was a pivotal moment and made neither movement nor sound, meeting the driver’s eye till the man shrugged.

  “Ah, go on. It’s all the same to me. You know, that’s not even the first chicken I’ve had on this bus today.” He sounded disgusted.

  My grandfather patted him on the shoulder and told him he was “a good egg.”

  The Ashland bus smelled of food, and I would have sworn someone was eating fried chicken, but the upshot was that somewhere around Chicago Avenue the chicken made a break for freedom. For several minutes she struggled at the confining flaps of the boxtop, and then she had it open. She burst up like a cresting whale and cleared the box before I could grab at her, then went scuttering and squawking up the aisle of the bus to the consternation of my grandfather and the amusement of the other passengers.

  The bus had come to a stop, and from the front I could hear the driver cursing, though whether his words were meant for the chicken or my grandfather was impossible to say. It had been a long day, with a great deal of walking and no small amount of liquor, and my grandfather was frankly not quite in the chicken’s class when it came to a footrace, so the bird made it to the front of the bus before Grandpa was anywhere near it.

  Then it made a small error, circling back and slipping past him, only to run into me. I was certain that the bird would peck my eyes out or work some other birdish horror upon me, but I grabbed it and clutched it to my chest in terror. My grandfather held his hands out and I thrust the bird into his arms. Then the light apparently changed, the bus lurched out into traffic, and Grandpa lost what little balance he’d begun with. With the bird tucked uncertainly under one arm, he fell back against a pole, grabbed for it, and missed, falling onto the lap of a man with a lunchbox.

  The chicken also landed on this man, her startled-looking face no more than an inch from his. He had apparently been dozing, and now awoke to find a strange man on his lap and a chicken staring into his eyes, and quite understandably he screamed—in Polish, Grandpa later told me—and this shook the already-terrified chicken, who pecked once at the man’s nose and bolted up off him in a burst of noise and feathers and avian terror.

  By now the aisle of the bus was filled with passengers trying to get a better look at this urban drama, so that the chicken had no way out except to go bounding up onto the laps of still other travelers, and from their surprised bodies to the metal seatbacks. I saw what she had in mind and tried to head her off, with my grandfather exhorting me not to let her get away, and even in my confusion and panic I heard amusement beginning to form in his voice, though I couldn’t have said why. People were yelling and laughing, and one man was cursing and yelling that the chicken had beaked a hole in his Daily News.

  I pushed and squeezed my way to the front, where the driver was yelling at us to get “the goddamn chicken” off his bus, but he could have saved his breath because at that moment the bus pulled in at Ashland and Clybourn, our stop. Grandpa had his hand around the chicken’s neck. He yelled at me to grab the bags, and then we were off the bus.

  A few minutes later we were on the Clybourn bus, the blessed Clybourn bus that would take us to within a few feet of our house. This new bus was almost as crowded as the Ashland bus had been, but with the difference that most of the earlier bus’s riders had been either sober or sane. Our new bus was one of those urban adventures that come together by fluke or the sardonic humor of the Deity, when the unbalanced feel one another’s pull like gravity and are drawn to a common place. I was to encounter such full-moon gatherings in many Chicago locations during my life—Bughouse Square, the Jackson El, the old Pixley & Ehlers cafeterias—but in this case, the odd and mentally infirm had collected on a simple bus, the Clybourn bus.

  At least a dozen drunks occupied the bus. In the very middle of the bus a man was playing the harmonica, occasionally interrupting his performance with an a cappella version of his tune and in the long back seat that stretched from one side to another, a crazed-looking man sang out greetings to the other riders. In the front, closest to the driver, an ancient woman eyed the newcomers and commented to herself about them. Our chicken proved to be beyond her depth, and she stared slack-jawed as we moved past her with the bird. We sat and I looked around uncertainly and saw here and there the dangling legs or arms of riders who had seen no reason to stay conscious during their ride.

  The chicken did not like the Clybourn bus. Whether exhausted by its exertions in the name of freedom or irritated by the music on the bus, it soon made its feelings known. The bird gave voice to a long, plaintive shriek.

  “He’s hitting that little boy,” I heard a woman call out.

  “Ah, you shut your trap, you old busybody, it’s a chicken, for God’s sake,” Grandpa yelled back at her. After only a few moments the other passengers seemed to acclimate themselves to the chicken’s presence and its unearthly noise, and returned to their various amusements. The din was awful, my ears were pulsing, and my grandfather put his face in his hand and shook his head. After a while he looked around, then at me.

  “You know we’re the only ones on this bus that aren’t crazy?”

  I nodded, and our neighbors, as if encouraged by this attention, burst into a hydra-headed rant of chatter and music that provoked in the terrified chicken an answering wail.

  The strange man in the back seat and the beady-eyed little woman in the front had somehow discovered each other and plunged into a verbal duel of insults and crazed accusations. Around them people sang, laughed, joined into the debate, or snored.

  My grandfather surveyed the little self-contained capsule of human madness and made a slow shake of his head.

  “When I was a streetcar man, I always imagined that there was a streetcar to hell. That people going to hell went there on a streetcar, a slow one that made you wait a long time and then was too crowded for you to sit, and had a driver that barked at you like a mad seal, and I always imagined that it would sound just like this.” He paused and listened for a moment. “Save yourself, Daniel, for we have boarded the express to Hades.” He laughed and looked out the window and muttered, “Serves me right.”

 
It was growing darker, and I had a sudden fearful thought.

  “Are we going to be too late for dinner?”

  He thought for a moment and then decided to face the ugly truth. He let out a long sigh. “For today’s dinner, yes, we’re too late.” He eyed me for a moment and then added, “But we’re very early for tomorrow’s.”

  He grinned and I laughed with him, and then he put his face in the palm of his hand again and his voice came out muffled: “Why am I laughing? I’m dead, you’re dead. I wouldn’t give you a nickel for our hides when she gets hold of us.”

  I smiled and looked around me, and when I glanced back his way, I saw that he was watching me. My grandfather had looked at me this way before, but now I could read other things in the look, and one of them was sadness. I had not yet understood the reasons for this sadness, at least I had not allowed myself to admit to them, but at that moment I knew I felt something of what he was feeling, and bus ride to hell or no, I didn’t want it ever to end. I began to cry, silently, looking away or hiding my face in the collar of my jacket, and when he saw, he put an arm around me and hugged me to him. That he did not ask what I was crying about told me that he knew, and that I did indeed have something to cry about.

  The chicken came to my aid. With one arm around me, Grandpa couldn’t keep the tired flaps of the box in place, and the wily bird saw one last chance at freedom. Once more it launched itself out of its confinement and then went cackling in terror up and down the aisle of the bus to hell as the driver snarled at it to shut up, and when the bus finally pulled in at the corner of Clybourn and Diversey, the chicken alighted with a young woman and we followed.