The South Side Tour Guide

by Shelter Somerset

  He wasn’t disappointed. A healthy number of pedestrians pressed up and down the street, heading home from bars, friends’ homes, or late-night eateries that opened on Mondays. The evening was mild, and people seemed to want to enjoy the weather before a cold, gray Chicago winter locked them indoors.

  The typical North Siders passed by. One man had his shirt half-tucked in his stained pants, walked with a strange limp, and mumbled to an invisible companion. Another dressed in so many fashionable layers, Andy wanted to rip his own clothes off in protest. A reeking mist of L’Uomo Amore wafted in his wake, mixed with the smell of the limping man’s urine-stained clothes.

  Unexpectedly tired, he sat on a corner bench at Roscoe and Broadway, his forearms resting on his thighs, and watched the strollers. A lifetime seemed to have gone by from moment to moment, when last Friday he had been sitting, cozy, on the sofa between Harden, Olivia, and Mason, watching a movie, to the present, sitting alone on a Chicago public bench at one o’clock on a Monday morning.

  I’m where I belong. Grabbing life by the balls and yanking hard.

  He rose again and wandered farther down Broadway. A college-age girl cut him off from a side street and strolled in front of him. She was chatting on her cell phone and complaining to whoever listened on the other end that her father had yet to pay off her credit card bill.

  A large group of fun-seekers brushed passed him, laughing about nothing he could decode. A couple sauntered down the street from the other direction. The woman clung to her male companion’s forearm to keep from stumbling. More and more people scuffled by, streaming from the north and the south. Some were talking about their dreams of moving to Europe, others retelling what a famous movie star had said in a recent interview, a few more mentioning the best places for sushi. One solidified blur of Lakeview humanity.

  “Self-awareness is my worst enemy.”

  The cell phone talker turned and leered at Andy when he muttered those words aloud. He wanted to laugh in her face.

  “What’s going on with me?” he said directly to her, frightening her down a street that clearly she had no intention of taking. “I blew what could’ve been a lucrative night,” he said after she’d long disappeared out of sight. A bunch of out-of-town drunks with money to burn.

  The urine-smelling man passed him again. He was wandering the streets, aimless. Wasn’t Andy?

  Andy took the same street the phone-talker had, and he came to where the tall condominiums lined up facing Lake Michigan.

  One after the other, as far as he could see, the high-rises jabbed the nighttime sky, heaving with the city’s illuminated breath. A tight, sturdy row, shoulder to shoulder. Some old, others recent construction. The buildings did not visibly bend. They were designed for give—one inch, maybe less, to sway with the constant winds off Lake Michigan.

  He envisaged what it might be like to live in one of those sturdy towers with plush carpeting lining the lobby and a doorman who addressed everyone by name. Did the residents ever tire of looking out over the lake from the top floors? What might it be like to lounge alongside rooftop pools in summertime while listening to old ladies reminisce about their winter sojourns to Florida?

  He laughed aloud, leaving off with a headshake and snicker. A man and a woman waving for a cab glanced at him. They probably cared little if he were a nutcase wandering the streets loose, like that man with the stains on his disheveled trousers, or thousands of others on a balmy September night in Chicago. He turned toward the pedestrian underpass for his van, realizing he minded even less.

  When he cleared the tunnel for the Clock Tower parking lot, he noticed the mark of a deceptive society. He circled in closer, inspecting his van, his left ear near his shoulder.

  Someone had slashed each of his four tires.

  Chapter 30

  THE first action Harden wanted to take when he heard news of his dad’s death was to inform Andy. But there was little point. Andy had only left five days before. Instead, he sought condolence from the world he knew, the world he’d grown up in and had dreamed to become more a part of by living on his grandparents’ farm.

  His father had been raised on that farm. Now that he was gone, his little boy’s presence seemed even more fixed. The rooms, the hallways carried the sounds of his tiny voice and footsteps, like Mason, demanding attention or something to eat. The towering burr oak, the tree in which he’d once told Harden he’d climbed far too high and had crashed to the ground, breaking his leg in two places, stood as a monument to his pastoral boyhood.

  Harden imagined the burr oak incident was one reason why Dad had always disliked the farm and, once coming of age, had wasted no time leaving for town.

  The kids were handling his death well. They had loved their morbidly overweight grandpop—a man far removed from the tree-climbing youth—and wished he could have moved easier in his retirement years. Yet they’d enjoyed his doting presence whenever they had visited the house in Duncan. Olivia had drawn his portrait, more muscular-looking than obese. Almost like an unintentional rendition of a sarcophagus.

  Harden was happy to see his youngest brother, Jordan, who’d traveled from Kansas City with his wife and kids for the funeral. His last visit had been nearly a year ago last summer. He had more kids than Harden and Lance combined, with a fifth due in April. The youngest always embodied more domestic traits, Harden mused.

  Lucinda comforted him at Mom and Dad’s house after the funeral. She never once took her eyes off him her entire two-hour stay and provided him solicitous attention when he sat beside her. Before she excused herself to leave, he asked her out to dinner. Starry-eyed, she practically left on her toes.

  And it was good they went on a date that next Saturday. If Lucinda Jamison harbored any illusions of Harden beyond what he represented, they ended that night.

  Harden did not sulk. He was who he was: a laidback country boy who talked the same talk at work as he did at home, with a quieter voice, perhaps. Lucinda, sitting across from him at dinner and later next to him on her living room sofa with her jasmine scent choking him, never appeared more ill at ease.

  She mentioned needing to rise early, and Harden, happy, understood the hint. He left for Burr Oak Farm, never more eager to send Alicia Anders from down the road on her way home and play Monopoly Junior with Olivia and Mason until their eyes glazed over with tiredness.

  Funny, when talking with Andy, Harden never experienced inadequacy or awkwardness like he had with Lucinda during their date. Sure, Andy and rural life sometimes butted heads, but he acted more like a chameleon than perhaps Andy ever wanted to admit. His spontaneity, his keen understanding of his environment, was what Harden had always admired most in Andy. Perhaps that insight was what had made Andy bitter toward life.

  He was at first surprised when Andy texted him with condolences a week after Dad’s death. At breakfast, Harden mentioned the message, and Mason admitted he’d texted Andy with news of Grandpop.

  From that moment, Andy began to send Harden short greetings about two or three times a week. How’s the kids? and How’s work? and Did Olivia study her cursive?

  Waiting sometimes several hours before replying, Harden would write Kids r great or All’s good.

  Harden grew excited, then frustrated, whenever he’d see Andy’s name appear. He’d inserted his name along with his phone number (the one with the 312 area code that a few months ago he hadn’t recognized) into his phone’s address list the day Andy had asked to visit the farm. He’d dared deleting it after Andy had left for Chicago but never got around to it. They texted, but never spoke on the phone. Too much of a commitment, Harden suspected. It was easier to maintain a safe distance without hearing each other’s voices. Andy’s texts came less frequently with the onset of October.

  He pictured him now and then, driving his sleek black van through dirty, crime-ridden city streets. But the same worries had ground into his mind after he’d kicked Lillian out of the house. He’d run out of emotions for her. He supposed he might w
ith Andy too.

  Was it possible for him to have fallen in love with another man? The more Harden reflected, the more he realized Andy’s presence at Burr Oak Farm had evoked positive changes for him. Was it wrong to have expressed that appreciation, that harmony, through physical communication? And Andy was gay. That made the big difference. Didn’t it?

  Harden had tried to stop analyzing what had happened between them. Don’t think too hard on things, Andy had warned.

  The kids mentioned his name as if he continued to live among them.

  “Uncle Andy used to….” Olivia would say without fail nearly every day. Even when she’d watch Thumb and Thumbelina alone, she would laugh and talk to the cartoon characters on screen in that odd way of hers, bringing up Andy’s name.

  “Now, Uncle Andy would laugh at that, yes he would.”

  Months after their mother’s leaving, the kids had spoken of her in a similar fashion. Her name falling from their lips had dwindled to a rarity. Harden reasoned the same would occur with Andy.

  Kamila remained closemouthed. They barely spoke to one another. The employer-employee relationship sputtered forward. If Kamila had ever expected a relationship with him beyond business, she now accepted that it could never happen.

  But she lingered, cleaning and cooking and, most importantly, watching her first loves, Mason and Olivia. Hearing them mention Andy’s name caused her to falter, and her shoulders would rise and her brow furrow. And then a strange look of empathy would seem to gleam over her dark countenance.

  The kids’ school activities stirred the household into a blur of bodies and raucous voices. Mason began flag football with the Dover County Athletic Youth Club, since the middle schools no longer afforded interschool sports. He was gone longer hours and often required Harden to drop him off or pick him up when Harden couldn’t remain and watch the scrimmages.

  Olivia’s second grade-class seemed to have one project after another. The latest—searching for different types of tree nuts. One weekend Harden took her to the creek with a plastic bag, collecting what they could find.

  “We aren’t taking the squirrels’ food away from them, are we, Daddy?”

  “No, sweetheart,” Harden said. “They have plenty to fill themselves before winter.”

  “Don’t they get tired of eating the same old stuff?”

  “They aren’t spoiled like humans can be,” Harden said, catching himself smiling when he recalled Andy once uttering the same words years ago.

  In addition, the kids demanded to partake in the pumpkin tosses and tractor pulls local farmers threw to earn extra cash. Parents of friends drove the kids to distant farms. Closer to home, Burt and Alicia Anders opened their pumpkin patch to the public for three dollars per pumpkin. After church Sunday, Harden hiked with Olivia down the road to search for the perfect potential jack-o’-lantern.

  They returned an hour later smelling of vinegary apple cider, which the Anders provided free to paying guests, and peppery fertilizer. They spent the next two hours carving an unintentional likeness of Arty Ficklemeyer. Noticing the uncanny resemblance, Harden cut a small hole near the mouth and inserted a sheet of rolled white notepaper for an added touch. Olivia, and Kamila too, clapped and giggled.

  The remainder of the evening, Harden, scratching from rummaging through the spiny pumpkin patch, worked on the computer. The kids watched Disney cartoons behind him, and Kamila was busy preparing dinner. He was grateful when Mason pulled his attention away from his latest ethanol research.

  “Dad, can I have a dog for Christmas?”

  “Dogs are too much trouble,” Harden stated vacuously, irritated with the commercial selling Christmas toys one week before Halloween.

  “I want a rabbit,” Olivia declared, rolling back and forth on the floor.

  “Dad, tell Olivia to stop messing up my notebooks. She keeps rolling on them.”

  “If you have homework, Mason, go to your room. That’s why you have a desk.”

  Sighing, Mason collected his schoolwork and trudged upstairs. Olivia giggled and began mumbling to herself, a habit Harden had noticed frequently. He watched her. She tilted her head, made an “oh, stop that” gesture with her hand, and moved her lips, devoid of audible words.

  Innocent enough, Harden figured. Who else was she to converse with on a farm, miles from her closest friends?

  With the kids tucked in bed and the dinner dishes stacked, Harden carried a cold beer to the front porch, standing alongside the Arty-o’-lantern. Dick Carelli had finished the harvest a week before, and the field lay flat and barren. Green clover popped through the remaining scattered duff, and birds fed off the leftover kernels. The cornstalks were gone, but life forged ahead. Soon, spring would arrive anew, as it always had. Good things always returned. Or some good things.

  The wan fields also meant a drive to garner substitute income sources for next year’s yields. Harden hadn’t gone back on his word to Charlie Marshall. He spent most of his working hours digging for justification to subsidize the alternative fuel.

  He was in the middle of working on one such proposal the next morning when Arty popped his head in his office. The ever-present stench, both on Arty and the office, was thick in Harden’s face.

  “How you doing, Arty?”

  “Good. Lunch later?”

  “Sure, Arty. Come get me.”

  Harden worked through the morning and broke for coffee around ten o’clock. He had skipped coffee at the house since Olivia needed a drive to school extra early to prepare for a pageant. She was going to play a candy cane in the school’s annual holiday spectacle to open the week before Thanksgiving. Wouldn’t Andy love to see that!

  “Hi, Harden.” Lucinda turned from putting away a snack in the refrigerator. “Good weekend?”

  “Hi, Lucinda. Busy one, that’s for sure. Took the kids to a pumpkin patch.”

  She stood tall. “Where did you go?”

  Harden hastened to make a single-serve coffee. “Down the road.”

  “Crowded?”

  “Not too.”

  “Well, great seeing you again, Harden.”

  “You too, Lucinda.”

  Lucinda continued to smile and be polite at the office. Nothing excruciatingly uncomfortable stuck between them, merely because Harden refused to let it. The very first day back to work after their disastrous date, he’d looked her straight in the eyes, smiled, and had said with a hearty voice, “Hey, Lucinda, how’s it going?” Of course, he didn’t dare ask her how her weekend had gone. They both had an answer for that.

  What else do you say to a coworker when a date flops? A small discomfort compared to Harden’s other concerns.

  Relieved she’d gone, Harden waited for the coffee to brew, headed for his office, shut the door, and focused on work. Ethanol reports. Heaps. Investors from Brazil and Japan wanted information. Fast. A succinct e-mail from Charlie Sunday night italicized the urgency.

  He pushed himself so hard on the project, he never lifted his eyes from his desk until Arty stopped by, reminding him of lunch.

  Fifteen minutes later, relaxing on the smooth faux leather booth seats at Ferdia’s Diner, Harden breathed for the first time in…. Weeks? His neck and eyes ached from staring at reports, and he looked forward to comfy food and idle chitchat with a sociable colleague.

  “Your head is on our front porch,” Harden said to Arty. “Olivia and I carved a pumpkin last night, and it came out looking like your twin.”

  “I should sue for use of my image.”

  Harden laughed. “He’s handsomer than you. Don’t blame me if it becomes a Halloween sensation.”

  They studied their menus a moment in silence. Then Arty asked, forcing Harden to jerk his head up, “Whatever happened to that brother-in-law of yours?”

  “Why on earth would you ask that?”

  Arty continued to scan his menu. “Thought he might move here, he was with you long enough.”

  “He’s a former brother-in-law,” Harden corrected, more fo
r his sake than Arty’s, “and he lives in Chicago. You know that.”

  Harden’s breath fogged over a section of the plastic-coated menu. Arty’s question brought back the old longings he’d wanted to suppress, and there was little he could do but sigh and slide farther into the slick seat.

  Arty kept his nose between the folds of the laminated menu. “I’d go nuts if my brother-in-law lived with us for that long,” he said. “Probably would have moved out myself. Maybe move in with my sister-in-law.”

  Harden chuckled, appreciating Arty’s sarcastic wit. “Andy is family, Arty. The kids loved seeing him.”

  “So you’d let him stay longer? Move in permanently, with you and the kids, if he asked to?”

  Harden had pictured Andy living at Burr Oak Farm many times. His gut roiled as he thought about it now, a roller-coaster ride of angst. Struggling to look indifferent, he said, “Sure. Like I just said, he’s family. Wouldn’t you cave to your higher ethics and let your brother-in-law move in with you, even a former one?”

  Arty sipped ice water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “If Loretta were no longer in the picture?” He shook his head. “Gary and I get along well enough, but…. Nope, I can’t imagine.”

  “Why not, Arty?” Harden glanced at him above his menu. “Is your brother-in-law that bad?”

  “He’s a big overgrown lazy slob,” Arty blurted. “Nothing like….”

  Harden relished the unusual pallor that stained Arty’s features. “Nothing like what, Arty?”

  Squaring his shoulders, Arty lifted his menu higher to conceal his face. “Nothing like Andy.”

  Harden’s head flew back against the seat, and he let loose a howl. A few patrons glanced at him. Felt good to laugh earnestly again. But what was so hysterical that even Arty ogled him and then turned away, redder than a maple leaf in autumn?

  Coughing a few lingering chuckles, Harden said, “Arty, if you ever travel to Chicago, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to play tour guide for you.”