Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  And even I, who knew so little about love in those days, knew all there was to know about it then.

  TWO BOYS

  The two boys were in the backseat screaming for their mother, who was behind them in the parking lot, dying of a bullet wound to the thigh. The fact that Steve had shot her in a leg allowed me to hope that he wasn’t trying to kill her, but his lawyers would not make that argument during his trial. They would simply portray him as a victim, a person who should be pitied and prayed for, as if he, like the two boys, had also been strapped in a booster seat, speeding from a mall with a killer.

  He let them out just before pulling onto 79th Street. They ran back to their mother, not comprehending her nonresponsiveness because they were only five and six. They would not be called to testify.

  Katrina, Steve’s accomplice, would be. While he performed the jacking, she’d sat in an adjacent car, also stolen, watching with horror as a long prison sentence played out before her. Her lawyers would ask the jury for pity too. They’d explain how Steve, without telling Katrina his intentions, had driven with her to the mall, parked, told her to get in the driver’s seat, and then approached a blue Intrepid, pointed his gun at the driver, and ordered her to get out. The twenty-eight-year-old victim whirled and lunged for her sons. Steve fired through the window. When Katrina was asked why she didn’t flee, she would testify that she was too afraid, citing Steve’s history of physical and mental abuse. Just the night before, he’d beaten her and then locked her in their bedroom while he went to find them more dope. She saw no choice, she’d tell the jury, but to follow him, just as he’d commanded her to.

  They headed east, weaving recklessly through the two-lane traffic. I would read this part of the court transcript and remember Steve’s love of drag racing, how he’d challenge any drivers who were teenagers like us. The challenge taken, we’d hit speeds of sixty or more where the limit was only thirty, plowing through stop signs and red lights, seeking, it seems in hindsight, evidence that we were mortal. We didn’t find it then, but the proof is surely upon us now, as my hair has thinned and grayed, and Steve sits on death row.

  The crime occurred in March 2001. My twin brother saw the story on the evening news. When he called to tell me, I remember being grateful that I no longer lived in the kind of place that produces junkies who shoot mothers. Chicago’s South Side is a factory for such people, rolling them out like so many assembly-line toys, each seemingly no different from the other. That apparent lack of distinction would be why, during the trial, Steve’s court-appointed lawyers would offer the same tired excuses: a life of poverty, an abusive father, a neglectful mother, the tormenting want of love and attention. And that is also why the jury would turn a deaf ear on this defense, and on Katrina’s too.

  I did not know Katrina. By the time Steve committed this murder—his second—I did not know him; the last time I’d seen him was in 1984. My girlfriend Pam and I had just scored some coke and stopped at a liquor store when Steve swaggered from the shadows. A woman clung to his arm. I invited them back to my apartment to get high. Steve and I had lost touch for many years because he was in and out of jail, and while it was good to see him again, it was also uncomfortable. I had already begun to doubt my commitment to the thug life, whereas he seemed to be embracing it tighter, wedding himself to a brazen lawlessness that frightened me. Proof of this came late in the night, long after we’d all turned in. Pam and I were in our bed, while Steve and his friend were in the living room on the couch, both asleep, it seemed, as I passed them on my way to the bathroom. But when I returned a moment later, Steve was gone. And then I heard Pam scream. I ran into my room just as he scrambled off the bed, his boxers bunched at his heels. It was the kind of foolhardy act for which men have lost their lives, and yet at that moment I felt, for some reason, that my life was the one in danger. My voice trembling less from outrage than fear, I told him to leave. He went to the couch and woke his female companion, yelling at her as though the whole thing had been her fault. As she dressed, she cast me a quick glance; perhaps remembering the hopelessness in her eyes is why I cannot help but feel sympathy for Katrina, even though I did not know her, and even though her version of events may not be true.

  “I didn’t know he had a gun,” she would testify, insisting that she thought they were at the mall only to shoplift. I believe that. I believe, too, her claim to have deliberately caused an accident in order to attract police. A young man whose pregnant wife was in the passenger seat was driving the car she rear-ended. The man got out to inspect the damage, and then he went to confront Katrina. Steve pulled beside them and told her to drive away. She did. Steve did too. The man ran back to his car and gave chase. When he caught up to Katrina and began yelling profanities through his window, Steve shot at him twice. The man took off, heading west. Steve and Katrina, still in their separate cars, went east.

  Steve wanted to find a chop shop. Katrina had said she knew where one was on the West Side. They made several stops along the way—a liquor store, a gas station, Katrina’s mother’s house, her sister’s, closer and closer to a place that did not exist; Katrina had made up the whole thing, simply trying to buy more time. When it seemed to be running out, she caused another crash, this time hitting two parked cars, the impact with the second being so violent that her car flipped and threw her to the curb. Witnesses descended from all directions. One of them had called for an ambulance before telling her help was on the way. Steve, pretending to be just another concerned witness, pushed through the crowd and said he’d help her right now. He asked for and received directions to the nearest hospital, and then he picked up Katrina and put her in the Intrepid. As they drove away, he pressed the gun to her temple. It’s difficult for me to imagine that, by then, a part of her didn’t want him to pull the trigger. When the police captured them a short while later, I suspect it was one of the happiest moments of her life.

  Five years after their arrest, Steve was among the ranks of condemned inmates, while I was among the ranks of college faculty, toying with the idea of going to see him. I’d reviewed the visitation rules and regulations. I’d even priced tickets from Boston to Chicago. I had imagined us sitting across from each other, separated by three inches of Plexiglas, both of us holding phones. I knew we’d start the hour by recollecting the better times of our youth, how we’d made out with girls in his brother’s immobile Mustang, or the dance moves we’d rehearse before going to house parties. We’d mention the first times we got high, and then our forays into petty crimes, the botched ones making us shake our heads and smile. “Remember that time,” he would probably say, “when I teased you for wanting to take those groceries back to that old lady?” When we erupted in laughter, the other inmates and visitors would look our way, wondering what could be so funny, and Steve and I would know that, behind this lighthearted veneer, nothing actually was. He was going to be executed, and I was not, even though we were both assembly-line toys, manufactured with parts that weren’t intended to last. Mine had—he’d hate me for that. But I’d hate him too. Because for the entire visit, I’d be thinking about my two boys, aged four and six, and imagining them in a world, for no good reason, without a mother.

  PRINCIPLES OF MATH

  When my shift ended at midnight, I stopped at a liquor store and picked up a six-pack and a quart of gin. As soon as I entered my apartment I put the beer in the freezer because I liked it best when it had a certain chill. It was ready by the time I had finished eating a can of chili and half a dozen Ritz. I didn’t have a coffee table, so I sprinkled some of my coke on a plate and then sat in front of my window. I lived on the sixteenth floor with a nice view of the city, including the Sears Tower, and when I looked to the right I could see the Illinois Central Railroad that carried executives downtown to make the kind of money I figured I’d never see.

  I snorted a line every fifteen minutes or so until a quarter of the coke was gone. I needed to take it easy, though, because the coke had to last me at least three days. Af
ter a couple more lines, I told myself to stop.

  By 3:00 AM I was licking the empty package, fiendish for more.

  I paged Stan six times but he didn’t answer, so I started drinking gin and tonics, trying to bring myself down quickly, hoping to avoid the depression of a dwindling coke high. But somewhere between my seventh and tenth drinks I got very depressed. And as usual, when I got very depressed, I wanted to talk to someone, anyone, about anything—politics, college, anything at all. I finished another drink and got my coat. The rest of that night comes back to me in flashes, as if there were a giant strobe light in the sky.

  I’m jogging in a park … vomiting at the base of a tree … lying in a field of frost-covered grass … fleeing from the growl of an unseen dog … ducking when I hear sporadic gunfire … walking faster at the sound of footsteps … running when angry voices call … and now I’m only a few blocks from my apartment, standing before a cluster of buildings that I know belong to the Illinois Institute of Technology, the place where I’d once listened to math lectures with Tim.

  And every time I think back to that night I’m overwhelmed by the belief that some cruel principle of math was at work, that some terrible law or theorem had determined, the instant I decided to let Tim school me, that standing there, at that exact moment, in that hopeless condition, was where I’d be.

  OUTLAWS

  He appeared to have passed out, just another of the area’s drunks or addicts; perhaps that’s what the officer who first arrived on the scene believed. After approaching the idling car, which was blocking the intersection, he paused on the driver’s side and tapped on the window. Inside, Tim was slumped against the door, his heart swollen and still.

  “Cardiac arrest,” my mother announced quietly when she called with the news. “That’s what the doctors think, but we’ll see.” An autopsy was scheduled, which I assumed would point to drugs, even though by some accounts Tim had been clean of the hard stuff for years. But there’d been an epidemic of overdoses lately on Chicago’s South Side, caused by one of those pure batches of heroin that sweeps through ghettos every now and then and carries scores of users to the morgue, a form of junkie population control. “We’ll just have to wait and see,” she said once more.

  My sister Linda did not have to wait and see. “That woman poisoned him,” she said when I phoned her. She was referring to Tim’s wife. “That woman wanted his money.” I noted that Tim had not had any money, not for a long while. “Oh, he had some money,” she insisted. “And now she’s going to try to get it.”

  “We’ll have to stop her,” I said.

  “Yes we will have to stop her.” She recalled all the serious troubles Tim had had with his wife during their few years together, which told me two things: Linda’s intense hatred of Tim’s wife was proving therapeutic, a temporary distraction from her grief, and her admiration of our brother had not waned, not even after he’d left school and become a hustler. In her mind’s eye, she still saw him as a successful accountant, strutting down our street in his tailor-made suits and alligator shoes, or holding court on our front porch with teenaged boys who idolized him and sought to mimic his ways. I, of course, was one of those boys. And so was Jimmy. I called him next.

  “Did you hear?” I asked. Jimmy said that he had. He fell silent, then, which wasn’t unusual for him, because he wasn’t much of a talker; whenever we called each other our conversations would be punctuated with long periods of awkward silence. But this time the silence wasn’t awkward.

  Finally, he said, “That woman poisoned him.”

  “She didn’t poison him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Healthy forty-seven-year-olds don’t just drop dead out of the blue.”

  Tim had not been healthy. When I’d seen him a year earlier, at our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party, he’d looked like he was dying, and maybe like he was aware of it. His face was ashen and swollen, his body gaunt, and his eyes recessed, blank, and frightened. His hair was mostly gray and patchy. After we’d shaken hands, I’d given him some of my discarded clothes, as had become my custom over the years, and watched as he riffled through the bag. He removed a pair of winter boots I’d never actually liked or worn, bought impulsively, like much of my wardrobe, after some wild victory or defeat. Without expression he slipped off his shoes, a pair of brown loafers that I’d given him too, put on the boots, and then took a few trial steps, looking down admiringly as he moved in small circles through the weedy grass. Around us, dozens of relatives and friends milled about my parents’ backyard or sat at one of the card tables playing bid whist. Bottles and cups of liquor were plentiful; the summer air charged with pot and gangsta rap. Tim now stood before me, searching through the bag again, examining each item that I’d returned with from a larger world he’d elected not to see. Looking up, he asked, “Got a few bucks?”

  I had twenty-five dollars for him in my front pocket, but there was a ritual to be followed. “Nope,” I said.

  He grinned. “Now how does a big-time college professor not have no money.”

  “Shit, man, times is hard,” I replied, slipping easily into the dialect of my youth.

  “Come on, Jerry,” Tim persisted. “Just a few bucks.”

  I protested once more before relenting. He stuffed the bills into his pocket, told me he’d catch me later, and then, leaving his loafers behind, like the remnants of an abduction, headed toward the car in which he would die.

  I went to find Brenda. She was in the living room on the couch, our three-year-old son Dorian asleep in her arms, despite the dozen friends and relatives chatting nearby. Brenda looked at me quizzically and asked, “Where’s Adrian?” As if on cue, our five-year-old walked into the room with a few of his young cousins, drinking a beer. Brenda leapt to her feet as I lunged at him, snatching away the can before sweeping him into my arms. One of my nephews tried to put us at ease, explaining that Adrian had not had very much. He and the others turned and ran outside.

  Brenda’s usually quiet voice was loud enough to carry through the room when she announced it was time to go. Some of the males glanced our way, snickering.

  “Time to go?” I responded, facing not her but the growing gallery. “Time to go? Hell you talking about, woman? I decides when it’s time to go.”

  “Drop it,” she told me.

  We said our good-byes.

  The next two times I saw Tim were at funerals, the first one our father’s, the second one his. He looked better the second time. So much better, in fact, that I didn’t recognize him. Neither did Linda, who reached the coffin a step before me, staggered backward, and then turned and said, “That’s not him!” I moved around her and looked. She was right. The man lying there was definitely not our brother. There was a vague resemblance, as if they might have been distant relatives, but something I could not pinpoint was off. The calmness of his expression? The waxy smoothness of his skin? I didn’t know. But whoever this person was, he had freakishly large hands that I sensed were about to grab me. I staggered backward, too. I searched for and found an employee and told him of their shameful mistake. But he assured me that the mistake was mine. “That is Timothy Walker,” he said.

  My mother, Linda, and I, the first of our family to arrive, sat in the front pew. A moment later Jimmy sat behind us with his kids, and then my sister Mary arrived with her family, followed by my brother Tommy and his. Twenty minutes passed before our youngest sibling, André, entered the room moving very slowly down the aisle with an IV pole. A “johnny” hung beneath his unbuttoned blazer. He’d come directly from the hospital, where he’d lived for several weeks after being riddled with a rival gang’s bullets. This was the second time he’d been shot. I figured we’d bury him next, though sometimes I wasn’t so sure because Jimmy’s life was hard. He was a single father of three, working as an orderly while also taking classes at a community college in hopes of a more meaningful career. Sitti
ng next to me in the pew, he looked unhealthy and exhausted, just as Tim had when I saw him last.

  Tommy, by contrast, could have been a model for GQ. He was a vice president of a large bank, and he and his wife of twenty-seven years had raised their three children with unflinching discipline and far from the enticements of a ghetto. Their oldest child was studying at MIT, the second-born was at Northwestern, and the youngest was headed for the Oberlin Conservatory. It had been clear to me for some time that my life would have taken a very different course had I modeled myself after Tommy, and even though I knew he was keenly aware of this fact, he never told me so. But one day I would tell it to him. I respect the choices you made with your life, I would say, and I would say the same thing to Linda, a financial investor, and to Mary, a high school music teacher. But as I glanced at their grief-stricken faces, I knew that this was not the time or place.

  The eulogy for Tim was fitting in that it didn’t resemble the brother I’d come to know any more than the body before us did. Maybe since I’d last seen him he’d become a family man, religious and law-abiding, a model citizen in all ways. It certainly was possible, because that was what he was in his youth. I think back to those days sometimes and see him poring over his Bible, memorizing the scriptures that he’d recite when we’d gathered for dinner. I see him helping Linda and Mary with their homework or relieving our mother of washing the dishes. I see him playing catch with Tommy, teaching André how to walk, and showing Jimmy and me how to shoot pool. I see him typing letters for our father. We all loved Tim. He was thoughtful and kind, the embodiment of virtue, much as the minister was describing him now.

  The eulogy ended. One by one, mourners began to rise and offer testimony to Tim’s life, including our childhood friends Paul, Rob, and Louis. Next, the minister asked if any members of the immediate family would like to say a few words. Maybe because I had done so at our father’s funeral, my brothers and sisters looked at me. But I, like them, was grief-stricken; I couldn’t speak at that moment. I shook my head no. The minister cued the organist and she began to play. A line of people, starting with the pews in the rear, approached the casket to view Tim’s body. When it was my turn to go, I declined. I feared that if I did, the vision of his strange-looking corpse would haunt me. So far it hasn’t.