Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  The endorphins are great, though. I’m high as a kite. Way better than when you’re getting fucked up and you smack your head against the brick so you can get that little bit of your body’s own opiate production. The external catalyst is always better, comes with a bigger rush. And right now, my brain’s trying to OD me on its own shit.

  We cut the music back on and it’s Judas Priest and Sugarhill Gang and then Triumph, but we booted that shit. We knew even then they sucked, and years later I’d boo them at an Iron Maiden concert for talking shit about devil worship. Not because I gave a shit about devil worship or was even a Christian but because no one ever took up for Lucifer. And after all, as Saul Alinksy said, we really should pour one out every now and again for the first guy to rise up and successfully demand his own kingdom.

  I perch on the top slat of the bench. It’s one of those ones that sits on rough concrete legs with three wide planks up the back painted brown and one long plank for a seat. Fine urban design. I tap my foot on the seat part, ratty-ass black Converse hi-tops with wide royal-blue b-boy laces.

  Bubba walks over, laughs, shakes his head.

  “Damn, Midget. Ya lookin rough, brotha. I think you’re scaring these boys.”

  I say “hahaha” but don’t laugh, cause ribs.

  “You gonna let us have them?”

  “You mean for Farwell?” I say.

  “Yeah,” he smiles. Montell has one of those voices where he always sounds like he has a chest cold or something. It makes him sound emotional, but he ain’t.

  “Shiiit,” I say. “They ain’t mine. I ain’t trying to start no set. I just like chilling over here at the park.”

  “We’d still hang here sometimes,” he tells me.

  “I’ll always hang here,” I tell him. “This is Pott-a-fuckin-watt-o-mie Park, bro.”

  “You ain’t coming with us, Teddy?”

  “I tol’ you man. I’ll think about. Now drink with me, brotha,” I say, trying to deflect.

  “Alright, Midget,” he says. Hands me a beer. “You know what?” he says.

  “What, motherfucker? Why you looking at me like that?”

  Then he tells me, now he tells me. Tiger and the rest of those crowns from Howard Street are fixin to move on us. He heard it from one of the Columbia and Ashland Kings’ sister who works in the new place called Taco Bell. But I was worried a little. You know how the first time you get the breath knocked out of you and you think you’re going to die? Somewhere between that and the first time you’re in your twenties doing coke and you finally get a chest pain you’re sure is a heart attack? In between there is the itchiness of realizing your own mortality. It doesn’t bug you enough that it’s consuming, but it’s when you start making little deals with Creator so you don’t unexpectedly die doing something really stupid.

  I take too big a drag off a smoke and when I cough, the edge of one of my ribs reminds me how vulnerable I am right now. I look around me though, and I feel okay. I look at my boys and our girls and I know that we are far less a lost than a deserted generation. But we’re on this fuckin island together and yeah we’re gonna be okay. We celebrate that fact for a while.

  The wood on the bench just to my left frags out and splinters pop up in slow motion and I can see a curl of smoke behind where a bullet’s dug its way into the wood about two inches from my leg and the pop registers in my head. Motherfucker.

  Tiger’s here.

  I look up and over across the community gardens. Tiger, Taco Jr., and a couple of their white boys are moving our way quicklike. Tiger’s fucking with the slide on some automatic piece of shit he probably found in a dumpster hahaha jammed I think fuck you and Taco Jr. is looking over the top of a revolver. This prick is the most Indian looking dude I know, but there ain’t no brotherhood here. Goddamnit I hate this sonofabitch.

  “JD! You strapped?”

  “No,” he kinda mumbles.

  “What? You always got something.”

  “Cops took it this morning.” He shakes his head to flick that mass of greasy hair out of his eyes.

  Shit.

  Freckles pulls out a .25.

  “Gimme that.” I grab the piece.

  I turn and pop off a couple of shots at Taco Jr.

  The windshield in a 1980 baby-blue Regal collapses. The other hits something that makes it make that whhhiiirnnng sound like in the Westerns.

  The Coronas duck behind the line of parked cars.

  “RUN YOU MOTHERFUCKERS,” I yell at everyone.

  This .25 is a regular shorty clip, so I only got four shots left.

  The girls grab the boombox and two of the Jimmys grab up the beer. I appreciate their sense of priority, remind myself to thank them later.

  “Pinche cabrón!” I yell. “Chinga tu madre bitch!” My next shot takes out a headlight. I see Taco Jr.’s long black hair blow back from around the edge of the hood he’s crouched next to. Just missed. Tiger still ain’t got his piece of shit figured out, so it’s me against Taco Jr. and a dusty-ass revolver he probably got from Pancho Villa’s stash.

  I hop-walk backward kinda quicklike, two hands on the .25 extended out in front of me. The Kings’re still hiding behind the cars. I sneak a look over my shoulder, see Montell herding the crew toward the field house about 150 yards away. When I turn my eyes back in front, I see one of the white boys stand up next to a black Caprice. Pop! I take out its windshield. The sight on this thing sucks. Fuck, I think. Somebody’s gonna be busy with the glass jobs later. He ducks back down. I’m already halfway to the building and these Kings are fading fast. Right when I think we’re clear though, Tiger figures out his jam and poppoppop three shots whiz by. I don’t hear anybody yell, so all clear. I’m still moving quicklike and I yell out Royal Love! King Killer! Queen Thriller! and turn and make the corner toward the tennis courts. For some reason I think of how we catch bumblebees in the morning glories that cover the chain link that fences everything in, how we pinch the ends shut while the bees are busy, shake the shit out of them trapped in the petals then set the bees free into the trash can where they promptly take it out on one of those fucking yellow jackets. I look over my shoulder and see them standing around in the street, yelling and talking shit to each other. I know they won’t come all the way in here, so I relax. The .25 is too hot to stick down my pants so I shove it in my back pocket. I creep back to the edge of the fence and watch them walk away, arms waving around as crappy Spanish and worse English swear words drift my way and I laugh a little, light a smoke. I get to the tennis courts and lean back into the pale-blue morning glories, tilt my head up, close my eyes, and then I’m like one of those kites you can buy at Open Pantry for seventy-nine cents, the ones you put together made of paper and pine dowels, I’m a vulture with two big yellow eyes and purple-black wings that drifts up on this warm eyewatering wind and watches down on it all happening to us.

  It’s still only all I can do.

  2.SIMON CITY

  I have made diligent inquiries of the headmen of different tribes as to what estimate they place on the half-breeds among them. Their general reply has been, ‘They are certainly an improvement on the pale face, but not on the red man.’ . . . Yet, notwithstanding such an unfortunate mixture, we find some grand characters who have been able to rise high above the sins of parentage.

  —SIMON POKAGON, “THE FUTURE OF THE RED MAN”

  Those rocks, those slabs? We own them. Even as the water will swallow them whole.

  “What do you mean, grandfather?”

  I mean what I say. We own them and all of this beach as far as we can see. The Bodéwadmik, the Potawatomi, yes, but now I suppose, all the Mis-ko-au-ne-ne-og’, the red men. This is our land.

  We’re walking toward the breakwater at Jarvis Beach. I have a look up and down the sand, lean out over the concrete and granite, see the piers sticking out in the water, red beacons on their rusty tower ends lighting up the night and the flat surface of Lake Michigan. My eyes travel south, over field houses and hotdog a
nd tamale stands, pick up the big lights at Montrose and Belmont Points. Shit, even though the air around us is fuzzy, it’s so clear down that way I think I can make out the yachts in Monroe Harbor.

  My brain’s a little foggy here, too, but I don’t really remember what he’s talking about.

  “How’s that?” I tilt my head, look in his face.

  Do you know how to read? He doesn’t return the gaze.

  “I do.”

  They still don’t teach our history, do they? We talk about it sometimes. Well, mostly I do, but the old men listen on occasion. We thought maybe after all this time they’d run out of things to talk about, might talk about our things. So, you don’t know about the Sand Bar Claim?

  “I do not.”

  When the whites made their treaty with us to steal Chicago away, they asked for all the land available at the time. But they neglected to cover the lake bottom or any “made land” in their paper. Our grandfathers figured in their greed the whites would run out of land and they were right. All of these railroads and piers and parks are built on new land they had to create. None of that new land was covered under the original treaty, so we own it still.

  My head wraps around this and I smile, big.

  “So, all this is still yours, ours?”

  That’s right, grandson.

  “How do we get it back?”

  I made the claim for it. Went all the way to their Supreme Court.

  “No shit? Whoops. Sorry.” I put my hand over my face.

  No, it’s fine. We hear your generation’s foul mouths. It’s fine to use those words when necessary, but you seem to find them necessary all the time.

  “Times have changed.”

  Touché, as the whites say.

  We make our way down to the beach, walk awhile.

  I stop by a pair of buckthorns wrestling over a little patch of green at the edge of the sand, light a cigarette. Offer one.

  Machine-rolled? Thank you.

  I flick my lighter again, cup my hands for him, the smoke rolling up from the cigarette clenched in my teeth straight into my face. I squint against the acrid wisps, eyes watering.

  His eyes look up over the flame into mine, crinkle at the corners. He laughs, says,

  What’s wrong, grandson? Those are prayers to the Creator. Don’t be so soft. Sometimes you need to suffer a little to make your voice heard.

  “I’m fine.” I hold back a cough.

  He drags deeply, sends a huge grey plume skyward.

  These are good.

  He holds it out at arm’s length, admiring it. Not bad. You take this and so many things for granted. We worry about you.

  “We know you tried for us. Tried so hard. I’m not sure we’re doing all we can.”

  We can see all that’s happened. Their wars. Their armies are bigger every day.

  “Resistance is almost impossible. They destroy whole worlds at a time now.”

  That’s true, grandson. But there’ve been moments.

  “Like Wounded Knee?” I flick my ash.

  Yes. Like Wounded Knee. We saw that one.

  “Did you see the jet fighters and armored personnel carriers and automatic rifles?”

  We did.

  “Then you know.”

  We know the spirit was there, that Spirit was there.

  “It’s an army of empire. The most powerful the world has ever known.”

  The same empire met us when they were children. We fought them then. You can fight them now.

  His smoke is burned halfway to the butt already. He looks at it, flicks the long ash off with a translucent finger, sighs.

  “How, grandfather? They have no regard for life anymore. There’s no parlay with them.” I try not to sound spleeny, fail.

  It’s in their laws.

  “But it’s in their courts.” Damnit. That tone again.

  Facts and moral high ground. He squints out over the water.

  “We may have the facts, but they have no morality,” I say, with whatever authority teenagers might possess.

  We finish our smokes, looking down the shore. The lights look back, unblinking.

  He twists into the mist, leaving the same way he had come.

  3.UNSETTLING

  It is important for us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation which seeks only to destroy us.

  —PONTIAC

  Writers are thieves who steal stories and pawn them on paper. I think about that under the graywashed sodium arc light as I carve an Old English-style SCRNSG nice and deep into the brown enamel–painted wooden Pottawattomie Park bench with my butterfly knife. Would someone ever steal this story? Translate what happened at its inscription, what they thought had happened, what they hope had happened? What would they say, what would they write? Would those be very different things, the spoken how of their transit to Simon City Royal / North Side Gangster territory, their “discovery” of these words and symbols, and their written account of their transgression and trespass into a world not theirs, though created by their mothers and fathers and left to us, places they’d rather not know about, at least until we had vacated them, silver-shoveled gentrifiers skulking in our wake to repackage and resell this twice-stolen land in Chicago to the daughters and sons of eternal pioneers, ceaseless settlers in a country that will ever unsettle and elude their alien souls?

  That answer is going to have to wait, cause there’s some alien souls trying to creep up on us right now from the back of 3-D, the third baseball diamond in the park. I take a big swig off this paper bag–wrapped quart of Old Style and check their progress out of the side of my eye from the tracks on down to the backstop behind home plate, about a hundred and fifty yards across the field between us. I count three Latin Kings and one Howard Street Lord. I think about him and wonder why his set ever united with these Corona motherfuckers. And then I remember they lost one of their boys to John Wayne Gacy. Prolly scared, I guess. Between creeper cops and suburban murderers, their shrinking membership needed all the help they could get.

  We had shot out the big floodlights above the diamond at 3D a few days ago, and right now I’m glad I decided to chill at this end of the park and wait for Jimmy and JD and them to get back from a National’s run. That’s one of those runs you do at the grocery store where you fill the bottom of a shopping cart with beer, throw a bunch of tortillas and ham and cheese and chips and shit on top and roll that fucker right out the door to your buddies who are waiting to grab up everything and run like banshees across the parking lot and up the railroad tracks. The National’s at Rogers and Clark was our local store. It was an A&P’s and then eventually became an Aldi’s. I think that was right after my brother snorted a bunch of tic and sledgehammered his way through the cinder-block wall next to the tracks so he could get some gum or whatever the hell he needed that night. Don’t ask me why all the stores in Chicago get a possessive “s” when you say their name. They just do.

  I didn’t recognize any of the Kings at first, just knew that’s what they were because of the direction they came from. Howard Street east of Ashland was their turf, so to get to us they’d either have to biddly bop up Rogers Avenue or come up Birchwood and then down Wolcott, but we’d see their asses all those ways, and taking the alley between Winchester and the gardens was suicide, cause all those families that lived along there were outside at night and on our side. So these were Kings. Plus that HSL.

  As I set down my beer and reach over to turn down the NWA on the boombox a little and hope the fellas remembered to throw some batteries in the cart, I see Jimmy and JD out of the corner of my other eye making their way around the corner on the path from the field house over by Rogers. They’ve got two of the other Jimmys with them along with Freckles and—what?!—Bubba and Cesar from Farwell and Clark, and holy shit it looks like Lil Theo and a couple of Popes. There must’ve been a meeting or something. Yup. Probably, cause I can see Bubba holding his sawed-off shotgun down by his leg as he’s walking. Dude is such a show-off
. I love this guy.

  But shit. They only have one big brown paper shopping bag. JD’s holding it from the bottom while he pimps up the path. As they get closer, I hear bottles clanking. Cool. Beer at least.

  I look over at them, do the head nod over to my left a couple times, toward the Kings who are halfway across the yellowed grass on the dry and brittle field. My set looks over, and now chock full of confidence, so do I. I see some long black hair. That’s Taco Jr. along with Tiger and Chupe. I laugh to myself. Nice try, fuckers. They keep on coming. I don’t think they’ve seen everyone yet.

  JD and the crew are close enough that I can holler over to them.

  “Hey, man. How come you only got one bag? That ain’t enough beer for all of us.”

  Jade says, “We ain’t got no beer. The manager took our cart.”

  “So what’s in the bag?”

  “You’ll see,” he says, and they start to hustle up a little bit.

  The Kings are committed now, too close to turn and run. Taco Jr. reaches in his jock and pulls out a little chrome piece of shit, a .25 or a .32. I laugh as Bubba racks a shell in that Mossberg of his.

  The set gets to the bench and I say,

  “What the fuck’s in the bag, man?”

  JD holds it open for me, and I see a dozen Molotov cocktails ready to go.

  We smile at each other just as Taco and Tiger come within throwing range.

  4.THE BEACH

  At the World’s Fair on Chicago Day, after ringing the new Liberty Bell, and speaking in behalf of my people, I presented Mayor Harrison, according to the programme of the day, with a duplicate of the treaty by which my father, a Pottawattamie chief, in 1833, conveyed Chicago—embracing the fair-grounds and surrounding country—to the United States for about three cents per acre. In accepting the treaty, the venerable Mayor said: “grateful to the spirit of the past, I am happy to receive this gift from the hand of one who is able to bestow it. Chicago is proving that it recognizes the benefits conferred through this treaty. I receive this from an Indian all the more gratefully because in my own veins courses the blood of an Indian. Before the days of Pokagon, I had my origin in the blood that ran through Pocahontas. I stand to-day as a living witness that the Indian is worth something in this world.