Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  She says, “What’ll you have? You changing your order, or are you still good with eggs and the ‘toast bread’ (she gives him the air quotes)?”

  “No. No. This man deserve introduction. Please, miss. Miss. Hear poor Vassily humble words.”

  Humble words. This motherfucker, Vassily. I’m embarrassed.

  Vassily, though, he’s tryna. For me. What a guy.

  Except she’s not buying it. Yup. Of course, now I’m even deeper in love.

  “Vassily. Let’s go.”

  “What, man? Are talking such bullshit, now.”

  “Dude. It’s okay. Let’s go,” I say.

  “But Vassily working Ukrainian love magic. Teddy will be having the sex any minute now, while poor Vassily sadly but happily eating toast bread and waiting to warm up car, while greasy-face friend making humpty hump in back room.”

  She gives him the death stare, but he keeps smiling like no one is there but me and him.

  “Nah. I’m good,” I say.

  “What the fuck talking about, man?” he says.

  “It’s cool.”

  “No. Is not cool. Fuck you, man. This brooding bullshit too much sometime.”

  She’s clearly uncomfortable. I want to tell her it’s okay, and please don’t freak out, and when do you get off work, and have you ever been to Italy or the Badlands or even fucking Muncie, anywhere but here because I want to take you there and never come back, but I don’t do any of that since I’m incapacitated.

  Vassily goes on. “Well fuck this then,” he says. “Let’s go to car.”

  I put a ten on the table, cause, shit, I don’t know what else to do.

  “Let’s go, idiot,” he says.

  She looks into my face, judges my past, calculates my future, maybe sees something I missed. She walks away. I watch her do it.

  “Hey, idiot. Want get high?”

  Jesusfuckinchrist. I can’t believe this.

  “No,” I say. Shit. “Sit. Shut up.”

  “Oh no. Not telling Vassily shut up sit down. You be fucking quiet right now, mister. Put money back in pocket. Vassily stepping outside to hit this joint, then coming back to decide rest of beautiful day plan. This stand up sit down shut up giving Vassily headache. Is like Catholic Church or something.”

  He heads through the door and I turn away, look for her immediately. She leans on the gold-flecked white Formica counter, reads over her order tickets. Of course that piece of hair falls from behind her ear and over her eye when she does it, that piece you’ll always remember when you describe how you fell in love with your grandkids’ unci the day they met, the story they’ll never get tired of hearing as long as you make that moony face and laugh like you do when you tell it.

  “What on paper, Mr. Not Writing?” Vassily returns, smells like a skunk pissed on his red, white, and blue shoes. Just so you know, Vassily has worn bowling shoes since moving to America. “Is nothing this comfortable ever made Russia,” he tells me. “Or beautiful,” he likes to add.

  “Nothing. Just a note.”

  “Shut it. Stop this bullshitting of Vassily. Give to me.”

  He reads it. Out loud. The prick.

  In that accent of his. Hahaha. He reads:

  We make our way to the front, now bearing these gifts at the head of the room. When we share, we do our best to give everything we have, but in those moments when all of it is rejected, when the world says this is not enough, our eyes widen, not from pain, but from searching for that littlest bit of light that’s just been lost. Sometimes, in that deepening of the eyes, the sharing of the soul, the love comes back to us, and then, too, our eyes widen, but the better to receive that gift, that return of heart, that reason, that hum, that scratch on the paper in the night in the dark, in the weakest of light, the why we do what we do.

  He looks at me. Eyes a little wider. And says,

  “You motherfucker. Now making Vassily want punch Feodor face. And self in balls. You are jagoff.”

  I laugh.

  We eat.

  Vassily eats the grape-jelly omelet I talked him into. “What the fuck! This delicious!” he says, high as a fucking kite, choking on “toast bread” and asking for more tea.

  I pick at my fried bologna. The thing about it is you have to eat it quick, right when you get it, or it turns weird, things congeal, desire . . . slips. I smoke cigarettes instead, drink coffee. Pretend I’m looking out the window when all I can do is slip glances of her sideways in the smudgy glass, her face lightly overlaying the underlying snowbanks, crusted in black on their uneven tops, tiny copies of the Alps, salted rivers and ash defining their peaks. Vassily talks under his breath, compliments the food, misses his mom, speaks Ukrainian words whose meaning I’ll never know—translations will always be insufficient when we work to describe love. If I had a mom to miss, I would, right along with Vassily, but instead I wish it was July, cause for some of us the only warm hug you get is from a slow summer rain.

  We finish eating. Well, Vassily finishes eating, and I drink coffee, steal away looks at my future wife, kill a pack of Newports. It sleets a little, and then the sun comes out and tilts quicker than I thought it would, the darkened light of a late North Side winter pushing against the buzzing fluorescents here in the restaurant. I throw the ten back on the table. The best light in the world waits outside. It’s where we head.

  “Sit in front seat with poor Vassily.”

  “No.”

  “Goddamit, Feo. Am not your fucking driver today, man.”

  Shit.

  “Alright, man. Calm down,” I say.

  I hop up front with Vassily. It’s a fuckin’ pigsty. There’s chip bags and shit, pop cans and candy wrappers, and everything is covered in ash, like maybe Vassily is the Uki word for volcano.

  “What the hell happens up here, Vassily?” I ask. “Jesus Christ, man. This place is a fucking dump. You need to clean this shit up.”

  “Think of this as proof Vassily success. This trash Vassily pay to have picked up by other less fortunate lumpenproletariat, contribute to American dream for other miserable fuck somewhere, have car detailed Bensonville, Franklin Park. Hell, maybe Berwyn.”

  I turn to my left, look at his not-smiling face, reply with my own slitted stare.

  “Hahahaha! Vassily joke! Fuck Berwyn. Just kid!”

  I laugh too. “Ya motherfucker. Just drive.”

  Vassily heads east toward the lake, takes Foster all the way down. It’s dumpy, dumpier, dumpiest. By the time we get over by Edgewater Hospital, the boarded-up site of my birth, it’s just fucked.

  “You’re bumming me out, man,” I say. “Hang a left up here and take Clark Street up toward Rogers. We can go to Leone or Jarvis Beach or something.”

  “Teddy needs to stop drinking so much daytime,” he says, leaning into the turn. “Am not going to fucking beach in winter. Vassily might be from Soviet Union, and once try to fuck polar bear, but is not swimming Lake fucking Michigan wintertime. This crazy talk.”

  I crack the window and light a smoke from a fresh pack.

  “No. We’re good. No swimming, man. Just looking,” I say.

  “Who is bumming out who now,” Vassily says, “with a visit to cold lonely beach for ‘looking’ (air quotes)? Looking what? Sadness? Is already much sad here in front seat right now. Does Teddy need ride back to diner; back to booth so can moony face over new waitress? How come did not talk more? Get phone number? Use writer-man charm? Vassily much worried now. Does not like friend maudlin bullshit.”

  “Fuck, man. Just drive. Let’s cruise.”

  “Smoke a joint?”

  “No thanks. Pass,” I say.

  “Suit self,” says Vassily, and he pulls one out from the elastic band on the driver side visor, the one that’s supposed to hold your parking receipt, or a valet ticket, or some kind of memento from a life someone else will get to live. It looks like he rolled this joint in the cheap newsprint from the free weekly. I watch him dig for a light for a minute (“Having matches some
where,” he says, patting his side pockets and digging deep into his black polyester blazer), and when none appear, I pull out a lime green Cricket and hold it lit to his face. He jumps a little, and then he pulls the flame to the joint. Acrid paper smoke fills the car and then heads toward the window I have vented over on my side, giving me a chance to huff up all that nasty smell on its way out the crack just above my head. Vassily coughs like he’s got the consumption, takes another quick hit, holds it in, and then rolls his eyes over my way while he keeps his head straight in the seat, never moving it a hair. He’s glazed and blazed out, has that grin going on.

  “Pay attention to the road, man. Stop looking at me,” I say. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “Worry too much, Feo. Have got this. Vassily is professional driver, man. Relax.”

  I do. We move north pretty fast; there aren’t too many cars at all. No one really wants to be stuck in this neighborhood as the sun heads down, and I think I saw the bus driver change his sign to read “Out of Service” just because. But Clark is a big, wide street, and up here, when it’s deserted this way, the sun setting out in the suburbs somewhere, the light hitting the top floors of the yellow-bricked buildings and slashing off the glass windows while the purpled darkness pools in the wide canyon floor below, it’s just beautiful.

  We pass Devon, and Pratt, Morse, and Touhy. I point over to the left. “Vassily. Check it out.” I show him some graffiti on a wall that I did. It was supposed to say:

  with Kings written upside down (as a mark of disrespect), but I was so drunk and so used to writing it upside down that I accidentally did the Kings a solid when I hung off the roof and tagged the building across from Zayre’s in fine fashion where it stood for so long they eventually took over the neighborhood and it fit right in:

  with the cross and the bunny painted over at some point. Shit.

  Vassily laughs at me. Eats the roach left from the joint he’s been smoking on again off again. I lean my arm out and lob the quart bottle of Old Style backwash I’ve been nursing over the top of the car at the offending building and then we’re quick at Jarvis so I yell, “Take a right!” and we gun it toward the lake.

  I can smell the water before I can see it, the dying sky out over the lake like unpolished steel, still sooty and flat, but with sharp edges that pick up the last bits of light in the day. Vassily is so high I’m not sure if he’s awake, so I poke him with my finger, the one with the cross tattooed on it, and say,

  “Hey—got any of that coke left from last night?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Feo and Vassily do nice fat line.”

  And we do.

  Four or five more times. Vassily grabs an old plastic cup out of the holder in the door and finds the fixin’s for Greyhounds down in this magic console between us in the front seat. I finish off a couple warmish Mickey’s Big Mouths I find in that console. We listen to the water, watch the light leave the day for night. After a while I tell Vassily let’s go, let’s head south, pick up Lake Shore Drive and go down to Michigan Avenue and look at the lights or something.

  We head out in the now-shadowed night, kinda fucked up, kinda listening to the radio, kinda singing too loud to whatever classic rock they’re playing on the Loop, the limo and its fine sound system wasted on this shit. We make the turn at Hollywood and hit the Drive. We cruise and both try to see the last light off the endless glassy lake, see what’s out there that’s better than whatever’s here. I think we drift a bit. Then me and Vassily, we hit the embankment and roll that limo, the big Linc turning in the cold iced air, windows shattering and safety glass tinkling down, and we come to rest on our side looking out at the lake, our breath steaming out into the night’s winter dark, one wide beam pouring down from the moon onto the water, the glow it throws back laying bare our petty sins for all to see, transgressions long and shady, but the evening rush screams past, caring even less than we do. We just laugh, alive in the moment, so sure that sun’s coming up tomorrow.

  6.TECUMSEH AT THE TOWER

  As to boundaries, the Great Spirit above knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge any.

  —TECUMSEH

  What is this?

  “It’s a memorial to the Battle of Ft. Dearborn. They used to call it the Ft. Dearborn Massacre, but it, uh, got changed.”

  Hmmm.

  “Mmmhmmm.”

  Tell me more about it.

  “Sure thing. Let’s walk, Grandfather.”

  We head north up Michigan Avenue toward Water Tower Place, the wind warm and surprisingly from the east, bringing the smells of the lake our way. Bad day for alewives.

  I show him a picture on my phone of the original monument.

  Hmmm. He doesn’t look Potawatomi to me.

  I like that he doesn’t mention the phone thing. Cool.

  I say,

  “The artist used Short Bear, a Sicangu, who was being held up at Ft. Sheridan after the murders at Čaŋkpé Opí Wakpa, at Wounded Knee, as a model for Black Partridge in the sculpture.”

  His eyes go liquid for a bit.

  The pain in both faces . . .

  The whole place sure looks different than when I was a kid, and I can’t imagine what it looks like to him now. Shit, the river doesn’t even flow in the same direction. We head over the bridge and halfway across, then he stops me, looks at the sign.

  They named this bridge for Point de Sable? They spelled his name wrong.

  “They did.” I had forgotten he could read English.

  He was a good man, fair at least. He married a Potawatomi woman, didn’t he? An ancestor of the Pokagon we heard about for a while.

  “That’s true, Grandfather,” I say.

  I’m surprised the Americans would allow a monument to a black man.

  “Times have changed. A little, anyway.”

  Hmmm. He raises an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. Not much,” I agree.

  But there are many Indian people here now, in this city.

  “You’re right. They had a program starting seventy-five years or so ago, called ‘Relocation.’ They tricked a lot of Native folks into moving to the city. Places like Chicago and Denver, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They said it was for jobs and opportunities. I think it was because they were afraid of communism. America survives best when they have something to be afraid of. And the vaguer, the better.”

  They are a fearful people, Grandson.

  “And cruel, Grandfather. That’s something we never forget. Still see.”

  There are Indians, but where are the Potawatomi? This was their territory.

  “Well there’s a park named for them, Grandfather.”

  And that’s all?

  I tell him to the best of my memory:

  According to Chief Simon Pokagon’s 1899 article, “The Fort Dearborn battle has been denounced by the dominant race as a brutal massacre, regardless of its many individual acts of mercy and kindness. In this wholesale slaughter, not one white man stretched out a hand to save a single soul.” I’ve paraphrased it a little.

  He replies,

  Pokagon was an observant man. And wise to have learned English. It was the only language they would respect you in, then.

  The brass buttons on his Redcoat officer’s jacket flash bright in the early summer sun, narrow my pupils.

  “You’re right. I’ve made it a point to be well-versed in it myself.”

  That’s good, Grandson. Creator has shown you a worthwhile path.

  “I think so. I do my best.”

  It’s all any of us can do, what we are supposed to do.

  He spots a street sign, continues, eyebrows raised:

  I see they named a street after that traitor to our English allies. I should have done more to help our confederates hang him when he changed his allegiance to the Americans. Kinzie expended quite a bit of effort trying to arm our brothers to fight for them, afterward. If I recall, a granddaughter of his tried to rewrite the history of this place, make their family out to be her
oes. It would appear it worked for a bit, at least.

  “It’s unfortunate,” I say. “But it’s everywhere in this country the invaders now control. They have a singular way of recasting history to make themselves righteous victors in what they portray as their creator’s war on all of us.” I surprise myself with all this formal English coming out of my mouth.

  Grandson, we saw that writ large on their faces in every meeting, every council, every treaty attempt they ever proposed. Versions of it appeared on the faces of their British relatives, no matter how hard they tried to deny it. These whites are eternally famished for land and divine approval of their thievery. Anishinaabe deemed it Wendigo, and Sioux called it Wasicu, but in the end it was all the same—a neversated thirst for more, and nothing else, no matter what the more might be. So very sad, but so very destructive for our people.

  I think this is some heavy shit to be laying on a kid, but I say,

  “We’re doing what we can to fight it, though the burden is heavy.” What the fuck is that? I’m talking like it’s the 1820s or something.

  What do you think your ancestors carried, to ensure you’d be here today?

  He’s right, of course. We drive around in cars to ceremony, fill buckets of water with ease at the side of houses for our sweats, turn up the heat or the air conditioner, buy ground buffalo at the grocery store. Cry around online about mascots and ignore regular assaults on our sovereignty, we who fight over blood quantum and dogshit percaps and ignore traditional kinship and ways of knowing on the regular. We’re shit descendants and worse ancestors most of the time. I have no reply.

  Which works out, cause he’s super tradish, doesn’t remark on my silence, let’s me have it. We walk along. I watch him watch people. After a while he says,

  Do people really have so much that they throw out food, yet feel so little they ignore their starving relatives?

  “Every day, Grandfather. Every day.”

  It was hard in our time, to be sure, but I prefer those days to these ones of excess and foolishness.