Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  The stars foretell everything, he said. My birth. My son’s. The boy-child who will bring back the grandeur of my people from those who have broken the arrows, from those who have pushed the ancient stones off their pedestals.

  Then he told how he had prayed in the Temple of the Magician years ago as a child when his father had made him promise to bring back the ancient ways. Boy Baby had cried in the temple dark that only the bats made holy. Boy Baby who was man and child among the great and dusty guns lay down on the newspaper bed and wept for a thousand years. When I touched him, he looked at me with the sadness of stone.

  You must not tell anyone what I am going to do, he said. And what I remember next is how the moon, the pale moon with its one yellow eye, the moon of Tikal, and Tulum, and Chichén, stared through the pink plastic curtains. Then something inside bit me, and I gave out a cry as if the other, the one I wouldn’t be anymore, leapt out.

  So I was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir—Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. I, Ixchel, his queen.

  * * *

  The truth is, it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t any deal at all. I put my bloody panties inside my T-shirt and ran home hugging myself. I thought about a lot of things on the way home. I thought about all the world and how suddenly I became a part of history and wondered if everyone on the street, the sewing machine lady and the panadería saleswomen and the woman with two kids sitting on the bus bench, didn’t all know. Did I look any different? Could they tell? We were all the same somehow, laughing behind our hands, waiting the way all women wait, and when we find out, we wonder why the world and a million years made such a big deal over nothing.

  I know I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I wasn’t ashamed. I wanted to stand on top of the highest building, the top-top floor, and yell, I know!

  Then I understood why Abuelita didn’t let me sleep over at Lourdes’s house full of too many brothers, and why the Roman girl in the movies always runs away from the soldier, and what happens when the scenes in love stories begin to fade, and why brides blush, and how it is that sex isn’t simply a box you check M or F on in the test we get at school.

  I was wise. The corner girls were still jumping into their stupid little hopscotch squares. I laughed inside and climbed the wooden stairs two by two to the second floor rear where me and Abuelita and Uncle Lalo live. I was still laughing when I opened the door and Abuelita asked, Where’s the pushcart?

  And then I didn’t know what to do.

  * * *

  It’s a good thing we live in a bad neighborhood. There are always plenty of bums to blame for your sins. If it didn’t happen the way I told it, it really could’ve. We looked and looked all over for the kids who stole my pushcart. The story wasn’t the best, but since I had to make it up right then and there with Abuelita staring a hole through my heart, it wasn’t too bad.

  For two weeks I had to stay home. Abuelita was afraid the street kids who had stolen the cart would be after me again. Then I thought I might go over to the Esparza garage and take the pushcart out and leave it in some alley for the police to find, but I was never allowed to leave the house alone. Bit by bit the truth started to seep out like a dangerous gasoline.

  First the nosy woman who lives upstairs from the laundromat told my Abuelita she thought something was fishy, the pushcart wheeled into Esparza & Sons every Saturday after dark, how a man, the same dark Indian one, the one who never talks to anybody, walked with me when the sun went down and pushed the cart into the garage, that one there, and yes we went inside, there where the fat lady named Concha, whose hair is dyed a hard black, pointed a fat finger.

  I prayed that we would not meet Boy Baby, and since the gods listen and are mostly good, Esparza said yes, a man like that had lived there but was gone, had packed a few things and left the pushcart in a corner to pay for his last week’s rent.

  We had to pay twenty dollars before he would give us our pushcart back. Then Abuelita made me tell the real story of how the cart had disappeared, all of which I told this time, except for that one night, which I would have to tell anyway, weeks later, when I prayed for the moon of my cycle to come back, but it would not.

  * * *

  When Abuelita found out I was going to dar a luz, she cried until her eyes were little, and blamed Uncle Lalo, and Uncle Lalo blamed this country, and Abuelita blamed the infamy of men. That is when she burned the cucumber pushcart and called me a sinvergüenza because I am without shame.

  Then I cried too—Boy Baby was lost from me—until my head was hot with headaches and I fell asleep. When I woke up, the cucumber pushcart was dust and Abuelita was sprinkling holy water on my head.

  Abuelita woke up early every day and went to the Esparza garage to see if news about that demonio had been found, had Chaq Uxmal Paloquín sent any letters, any, and when the other mechanics heard that name they laughed, and asked if we had made it up, that we could have some letters that had come for Boy Baby, no forwarding address, since he had gone in such a hurry.

  There were three. The first, addressed Occupant, demanded immediate payment for a four-month-old electric bill. The second was one I recognized right away—a brown envelope fat with cake-mix coupons and fabric-softener samples—because we’d gotten one just like it. The third was addressed in a spidery Spanish to a Señor C. Cruz, on paper so thin you could read it unopened by the light of the sky. The return address a convent in Tampico.

  This was to whom my Abuelita wrote in hopes of finding the man who could correct my ruined life, to ask if the good nuns might know the whereabouts of a certain Boy Baby—and if they were hiding him it would be of no use because God’s eyes see through all souls.

  We heard nothing for a long time. Abuelita took me out of school when my uniform got tight around the belly and said it was a shame I wouldn’t be able to graduate with the other eighth graders.

  Except for Lourdes and Rachel, my grandma and Uncle Lalo, nobody knew about my past. I would sleep in the big bed I share with Abuelita same as always. I could hear Abuelita and Uncle Lalo talking in low voices in the kitchen as if they were praying the rosary, how they were going to send me to Mexico, to San Dionisio de Tlaltepango, where I have cousins and where I was conceived and would’ve been born had my grandma not thought it wise to send my mother here to the United States so that neighbors in San Dionisio de Tlaltepango wouldn’t ask why her belly was suddenly big.

  I was happy. I liked staying home. Abuelita was teaching me to crochet the way she had learned in Mexico. And just when I had mastered the tricky rosette stitch, the letter came from the convent which gave the truth about Boy Baby—however much we didn’t want to hear.

  * * *

  He was born on a street with no name in a town called Miseria. His father, Eusebio, is a knife sharpener. His mother, Refugia, stacks apricots into pyramids and sells them on a cloth in the market. There are brothers. Sisters too of which I know little. The youngest, a Carmelite, writes me all this and prays for my soul, which is why I know it’s all true.

  Boy Baby is thirty-seven years old. His name is Chato which means fat-face. There is no Mayan blood.

  * * *

  I don’t think they understand how it is to be a girl. I don’t think they know how it is to have to wait your whole life. I count the months for the baby to be born, and it’s like a ring of water inside me reaching out and out until one day it will tear from me with its own teeth.

  Already I can feel the animal inside me stirring in his own uneven sleep. The witch woman says it’s the dreams of weasels that make my child sleep the way he sleeps. She makes me eat white bread blessed by the priest, but I know it’s the ghost of him inside me that circles and circles, and will not let me rest.

  * * *

  Abuelita said they sent me here just in time, because a little later Boy Baby came back to our house looking for me, and she had to chase him away with the broom. The next thing we hear, he’s in the newspaper clippings his sister sends. A picture of him looking very
much like stone, police hooked on either arm . . . on the road to Las Grutas de Xtacumbilxuna, the Caves of the Hidden Girl . . . eleven female bodies . . . the last seven years . . .

  Then I couldn’t read but only stare at the little black-and-white dots that make up the face I am in love with.

  * * *

  All my girl cousins here either don’t talk to me, or those who do ask questions they’re too young to know not to ask. What they want to know really is how it is to have a man, because they’re too ashamed to ask their married sisters.

  They don’t know what it is to lay so still until his sleep breathing is heavy, for the eyes in the dim dark to look and look without worry at the man-bones and the neck, the man-wrist and man-jaw thick and strong, all the salty dips and hollows, the stiff hair of the brow and sour swirl of sideburns, to lick the fat earlobes that taste of smoke, and stare at how perfect is a man.

  I tell them, “It’s a bad joke. When you find out you’ll be sorry.”

  * * *

  I’m going to have five children. Five. Two girls. Two boys. And one baby.

  The girls will be called Lisette and Maritza. The boys I’ll name Pablo and Sandro.

  And my baby. My baby will be named Alegre, because life will always be hard.

  * * *

  Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it’s not that way at all. It’s like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they’re not colors anymore and all that’s left is a white hum.

  There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn’t talk, just walked around all day with this harmonica in his mouth. Didn’t play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out.

  This is how it is with me. Love I mean.

  The thirtieth amendment

  by HUGH HOLTON

  Bridgeport

  (Originally published in 1995)

  The Future

  Congress repealed the Bill of Rights with the Thirtieth Amendment. Instead of playing games with idealistic crap about search and seizure, rights against self-incrimination and protection from double jeopardy, the Gingrich White House took aim at the criminal element which was turning America into a wasteland. The Tri-X Law, as it was called, made the death penalty not only legal but mandatory for the maggots, drug dealers, child molesters, and social undesirables who murdered, kidnapped, and played treasonous games with scum like the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

  Mr. Law and Order himself, President Newt Gingrich, supported a broader interpretation of the Tri-X Law at the state level. So in California bikers who engaged in violent acts on public highways were added to the list. In New York and Chicago punks engaged in illegal acts on rapid transit lines were added to the list. In Texas, which I always thought was a pretty progressive state, corrupt politicians were added to the list. The other sixty-three states, with the exception of Old Mexico, soon followed suit.

  This caused a remarkable increase in executions, which became the growth industry in the USA for the twenty-first century. My name is Jules Freitag and I managed to get in on the ground floor, so to speak. I majored in Public Executions and Human Terminations at Harvard. The course took six years to complete at a cost of $600,000. The first three years were spent on Law and Sociology, as these subjects relate to the Tri-X Law. The last three years were devoted exclusively to an intricate study of Physiology, not from a medical standpoint, but rather from the termination end. Efficiency was our aim and by efficiency I don’t mean just speed, as at times it is decreed that pain must be as much an integral part of the sentence as the death itself.

  I am a master of my art.

  Randolph Nimrod, the Deputy Commissioner of the National Bureau of Executions and Public Terminations in Miami, called me into his office. He was an intense man of sixty who had given his all to our profession and was considered a living legend. A man with no family or friends, he had risen within the Bureau to the rank of deputy because of his supreme devotion to the field and his administrative skill. For some reason, though, he didn’t like me, which made what he had to say that much harder to understand.

  “I’ve selected you for a special assignment, Freitag.”

  I am usually not a very demonstrative fellow. My vocation demands this. But Nimrod did get my eyes to widen a bit. “Me?”

  “Yes, you!” He frowned, grimacing as if he had just been administered a Xyclon cube, which tastes like a sugar cookie and kills in eight seconds.

  I stood at attention and waited, as there was nothing else I could do.

  “There’s an inmate in Chicago named Darka Paris. A vicious convicted murderess. Cut off her lover’s head with a butcher knife. I want you to size her.”

  I stared at him. As a Bureau Deputy Commissioner, he had a staff of over a thousand professional executioners to choose from. There were any number of them beholden to him for their positions who would be eager to do as he asked. My pride told me I was selected because I was the best. But I knew Nimrod would never admit it.

  The Jetstar got me from Miami to Chicago in twenty minutes. The state prison was in the inner city. The walls stretched from 35th Street on the north near the old ball park, down what had once been an expressway for ground vehicles called the Dan Ryan, to 53rd Street on the south, and west over to State Street. The surrounding area had become an urban desert.

  I was admitted through the seven normal security gates leading into the prison. The buildings had originally been high-rise, low-income housing which social neglect had transformed into human zoos. So, during the final year of the Quayle presidency, remaining residents were ordered out and the maximum-security penitentiary was established in the sixteen-story monstrosities near the center of what had once been the second largest city in the United States.

  The Tri-X inmates were held at the center of the complex in the 4444 Building. As I stood in the shadow of the imposing edifice, surrounded by machine guns, electrified barbed wire, and guards recruited primarily for their ability to inflict violence on their fellow man rather than for their intellect, I recalled a phrase from a high school literature class: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Very appropriate, I thought, as I was admitted inside. But then I was a professional who had no time for poetry.

  Inside the Tri-X section it was bright, clean, and terrifying, especially if one were an inmate forced to spend the last moments of one’s life on Earth here. The thick-foreheaded guard escorted me to a private room where I could check my equipment and put on my work clothing. There was a surliness in his manner initially which was quickly erased when I exited wearing the black hood which displayed only my eyes and mouth.

  It was the same everywhere I went. The hood generated a fear so intense it tended to manifest itself as a separate physical entity. This made my work much easier.

  “The girl is in Block L,” he said, staunchly refusing to look at me. “She’s a real looker. Keeps saying she’s innocent, but they all say that.” He laughed, glancing sideways at me to see if I had enjoyed his little joke. All he could see was the outside of the hood, which revealed no more emotion than my face beneath it.

  We came to her cell and he started to open the door.

  “Stop!” I ordered so abruptly he jumped. “You must properly prepare the inmate before I enter.”

  He caught on quick enough and took the garments I gave him before slipping inside the cell. I waited in the corridor studying the cracked plaster on the walls of the high-rise gallery until he came out.

  “She’s ready,” he said, still refusing to look at me.

  I entered to find the inmate securely chained to a chair. Her head was covered with a hood, very much like my own, and her body was shrouded in a black full-length robe. The only flesh exposed was that of her hands, arms, and neck, which I would need to work with directly.

  I prided mysel
f on the efficiency of my sizings, which involved the taking of vital statistics about the inmate to aid in the selection of the method I would choose for her death. I could generally do an accurate, very thorough sizing in less than two hours. With her it would take longer because she violated the regulations by talking continuously.

  “I know you’re here to kill me and that you’re trained to ignore what I say but, for the love of God, you must listen!”

  It was strictly forbidden by the Executioner’s Code of Conduct for me to speak to her. We wore the hoods to maintain mutual anonymity and to prevent any buildup of sympathies between inmate and executioner. Talking could engender some degree of sympathy, but in Executioner Psychology 412, it was plainly established that condemned inmates were liars. It was simple self-preservation to try to maintain one’s existence as long as possible by whatever means necessary. So they lied.

  “I am innocent!”

  Of course you are, my thoughts mocked her. How many times had I heard that before. I could have her gagged, but then she had a nice voice. One that could even be called sexy. I scolded myself for my lack of professionalism and concentrated on my work.

  “I would never kill Arthur! I loved him! Someone followed us and executed him! It happened so quickly only one of you people could have done it!”

  The last statement got through to me. She was making me angry by impugning the integrity of one of the last truly noble professions on Earth. My job was to kill her and her crime limited the means by which I could do it. But then there were always certain tricks of the trade that could be used to make my method of dispatch pure agony for a very long time.

  “It had to be an executioner!” Her anger bubbled on the edge of hysteria. “Who else has the knowledge and ability to kill like that?”

  Like what? But I forced the question out of my mind. I didn’t care.

  “What kind of people kill without warning? Would kill Arthur without giving him a chance to defend himself?”