Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

They headed over to the bar, made fun of the way the white girls danced, glared at the white boys, drank Modelos or Millers, whatever, got Chuckie to do a couple shots of Cuervo. Everyone was feeling good. They even did a couple lines of Chuckie’s shitty blow. Frankie watched Chuckie. A lot. Set his mouth, chewed the inside of his bottom lip. Chuckie didn’t notice, but Jimmy did. He chugged his beer and shuddered.

  Hey. Let’s get the fuck out of here, Frankie said.

  For sure, peoples. Let’s go, Chuckie said.

  They got to Chuckie’s door-slapping trailer, pushed some fly strips out of the way, and walked inside.

  Frankie smashed in the back of Chuckie’s head with a golf club he found who the fuck knows where, a five-iron, right there in the kitchen. Chuckie crashed face first on the yellow and white linoleum floor, his blood landing in a fine spray pattern around his head milliseconds later. But he was awake, his eyes rolling around, looking at his shitty appliances from an angle he’d probably never seen, never considered before. Jimmy pulled up a chair at the kitchen table, opened a beer, a Modelo or a Miller, lit a smoke.

  Frankie laughed that jackass laugh of his and rolled Chuckie over. The little dealer tried to talk, but Frankie put his hand over his mouth and shushed him. He took out a grubby pocketknife, plunged it into the middle of that five-pointed crown, then dragged across and started to cut a circle around it. Blood sparkly and bright jetted up. Frankie took his hand off Chuckie’s mouth so he could use his fingers to spread the skin on his arm, make a cleaner cut. Chuckie made a weird noise, but he didn’t scream, didn’t cuss, nothing, eyes just looking somewhere over Frankie’s shoulder.

  Frankie sawed away, pulled the crown off, and stuck it on the refrigerator like a blue-starred homework assignment. Chuckie gagged. Jimmy laughed and ground his smoke into the kitchen floor. Frankie noticed he had cut his hand in the crotch of his thumb while working on Chuckie. He took two steps over to the sink to wash the cut out, already gross and looking infected. He swiveled to admire his work on the fridge one more time and then walked over, punched the dealer in the face, knocked him out, and dried his hands on Chuckie’s dago tee. Chuckie was passed the fuck out, with the faintest smile on his face. Frankie went through his pockets, grabbed his roll of cash, a couple of pill bottles besides the ’luudes on the counter (Praziquantel? Lomitil? What the hell are those?), and his keys—just to be a dick, Jimmy guessed. They turned out the lights and left.

  And now here they were in the middle of who knows where, light glinting off the hood of that ’74 Monte Carlo, Jimmy jerking it side to side, the heat blasting to keep the motor cool. Driving in silence since they were afraid to put on the radio because you know you need to listen for any potential automotive death throes.

  Little black tentacles whipped around inside Frankie’s irises as he stared over at Jimmy, the red red sunlight outlining the tiny sucker pads, sweat rolling down his forehead.

  Frankie said, Pull over, man. I’m hungry.

  So hungry.

  “You’re such a fucking liar, man.”

  “We’re all fucking liars, Jimmy.”

  11.THE PROPHET AT THE WOODEN NICKEL

  No red man must ever drink liquor, or he will go and have the hot lead poured in his mouth!

  —TENSKWATAWA, THE OPEN DOOR

  Me and the Prophet survey the bar on down from the entryway. Two of my Indian-way uncles are arguing about movie stars. My pop is passed out at the end of the bar, skinny ass gripped tight to the stool, assuredly going nowhere, head down in a puddle of ash, warm beer, and glass sweat, snoring away the breath of the righteously drunk, moving into another world. The jukebox plays Patsy Cline almost not loud enough to hear, but I know that’s “Crazy” tinkling through all the conversations. The Christmas lights are still up, always up, just how I like them. Beer signs sizzle and crack in the dark room and people talk words in their glow.

  The Open Door turns to me and asks, Is it always this way?

  I look him up and down, his shape shimmering in the smoke haze, his face in and out like a black and white Zenith that’s lost its tinfoil rabbit ears.

  “It’s always been this way, at least for me,” I say.

  Hmmm, he says.

  “Frank,” I say to the bartender, walking over toward the taps. “Can I get some caramel corn? Put it on the old man’s tab?”

  “Sure thing, Speedy,” he says, reaches back to the rack of chips and shit, hands me the mostly clear bag with the navy-on-white Jay’s logo at the top.

  Frank is either twenty or a hundred and fifty years old, I can never tell. He’s from White Earth. I think he’s related to my godparents, but either way, he treats me like a nephew / little brother, so he’s the goods in my book.

  The Prophet leans in, asks me what I just got.

  “Caramel corn.”

  What is that? He asks.

  “I think you would’ve called it maize or something.” Visions of that chick in the commercials flash in my head. “But it’s like tossed in cooked sugar,” I say.

  Does that make alcohol? He asks.

  “No. Just cooked, syrupy, like with maple, yeah?” I say.

  Hmmm, he says.

  I know he couldn’t taste it even if he wanted to, so I say, “It’s so sweet it hurts your teeth just to eat it. You probably wouldn’t like it. It’s kinda for kids.”

  Probably good, though, yeah?

  “Yup. It is, but too much will make you sick,” I say.

  As in a serious illness? Why would you eat that?

  “No. Just sick to your stomach,” I say.

  Then you better not eat too much, he says.

  “I won’t, Tenskwatawa. I won’t.”

  Is that your father there? He asks.

  “That’s him,” I say.

  He’s liquor sick, isn’t he? the Prophet asks.

  “I think so,” I say. “I think if you mean not beating us up too much, keeping the lights on and cooking one meal a week he’s liquor sick, but maybe not terminally, sure. He’s sick alright.”

  A father should never beat his children, the Prophet says.

  “Times have changed, Grandfather,” I say. “Maybe sometimes we do things that make us deserve it.”

  Never, he says. Never do children deserve to be beaten.

  “I’ll remember that,” I say.

  You would do well to, he says.

  I’ve never forgotten.

  “But Wayne Newton isn’t a fucking Indian,” says Leksi Tommy, his fattened Oglala face earnestly pleading his case, with an edge.

  “The fuck he isn’t,” Leksi Joe replies, matching that edge, his mean Sicangu eyebrows flaring like his big nostrils. “I know he sings that German song, but he’s an Indian, goddamit.”

  “Bullshit. And if he is,” snorts Tommy, “he’s a fuckin’ Cherokee.”

  “Ha. You’re the dumbass who told me Anthony Quinn was an Indian. Cause he played Flapping Eagle and visited Alcatraz? Sheeeit. He played a better Eskimo than any of that fake Indian shit and he was in a movie called Never Love a Drunken Indian. I’m a drunken Indian. Fuck that guy. You’re an idiot. Wayne Newton is some Virginia tribe anyway. And you know Teddy Sr.’s ex-old lady was a Cherokee. You need to knock that shit off before he wakes up and hears you. Plus, his kid is right there. What if that was his mom you were talking about? She could’ve been.”

  “His real mom is a Cherokee,” Joe says.

  “No she isn’t. She might be part hásapa, but she ain’t Indian.”

  “Fuckin’ ayyy, Tommy, you’re a real asshole.”

  Tenskwatawa says, are these two your uncles?

  “Yup,” I say.

  This is what liquor does to people, he says. They sound like idiots, like white men.

  “It’s a white man thing, so that makes sense, I guess,” I offer.

  Mmmhmmm, he says. They are impugning your mother’s honor. I don’t know your language, but this hásapa word doesn’t sound like a compliment.

  “It’s not, really, at l
east not the way they’re using it,” I say. “But they’re drunk.”

  You know if my brother was here, things would not go well for these two.

  “I know,” I say. “If I see him later, maybe I’ll ask him for some advice.”

  I think we both know what that would be, he says.

  “It’s alright,” I say. “They don’t mean anything by it.”

  But they do, he says. Or else they wouldn’t say it.

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  Okay. Is that an Indian word? It sounds like something Choctaws might use.

  “It sounds like it, but it’s not. I think it comes from the Americans. But it means everything is alright, in any case,” I say.

  Okay, he says, watching the word come out of his mouth, drift across the bar.

  “Okay,” I say, thinking he’s right. It doesn’t sound English at all.

  “Maybe I am. But what about Ricardo Montalban? He’s definitely an Indian,” Tommy says.

  “Holy shit. This guy,” Joe says.

  “Eeeez. You know I’m right,” says Tommy.

  “Because he played a Blackfeet named Iron Shirt? Fuck him and fuck them, too,” says Joe.

  “This one. Eeeez,” says Tommy again. “What about Elvis?”

  “Everyone knows Elvis is an Indian.”

  “Alright, den.”

  “Flaming Star, Stay Away Joe? Sheeeit. Elvis is a fuckin’ Indian,” says Joe.

  “Okay, man. Calm down.”

  They drink in silence for a while. Marty Robbins tells us about his adventures in Texas. Tenskwatawa flickers in and out. I eat caramel corn and peek at my dad, who snores away.

  “Hey Joe,” Tommy says, peeling the label off his Schlitz.

  “What, asshole?” Joe replies, looking over the top of his heavy black frames, trying to fill his glass from his pitcher and what’s left of someone else’s, working hard to keep a cigarette butt from bouncing over the lip and into his drink.

  Tommy says, “This Oglala and this Rosebudder were driving out of Pine Ridge and they stopped at the White River to take a piss.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. So they get out of the truck and head over to the bridge and they’re standing there pissing and the Rosebudder goes, ‘Eeee this water is cold, init?’”

  Joe laughs. “That’s right, fucker!”

  Tommy continues,

  “And the Oglala goes, ‘Shit, it’s deep, too.’”

  “Hahahahahaha!”

  “Hahahahahaha!”

  “Good one, Tommy, you motherfucker!”

  “Hahaha, Joe. Gotcha!”

  “Ayyy. Buy me a drink, Mr. Big Dick!”

  “Okay, misun. I got you.”

  Tenskwatawa shakes his head at me, eyes not leaving my face.

  “At least they’re having fun. You can see they care about each other,” I say.

  Do they? Do they really?

  I don’t really have an answer for that, but I say, “Sure they do.”

  Okay, he says, the word sharp and blue, twisting for just a second in the dark air.

  Okay.

  12.POP-OFF

  Vassily is trying to quit smoking. I look over and that savage heathen has an upside-down cross of nicotine patches across his shaved and sweaty chest and stomach. He sees me counting them and laughs.

  I’m trying to listen to a Hank Williams Sr. album and wondering why this Ukrainian linguist-turned-limo driver who keeps talking over it is my friend.

  “This music, to Vassily, this accompaniment to bearded cousins making the sex act, this is not good,” he says. “Picturing dirty overalls, and Red and Black Abners from Bugs Bunny pulling each other rotted teeth.” Vassily likes to make air quotes when he emphasizes words.

  Jesus, he was harsh. I felt lonely as Kaw-Liga when I woke up this afternoon, so yeah, I put this record on repeat and called Vassily. Thought that would be fine, but none of it was working. Hank turned overly plaintive, and Vassily turned prick.

  It’s hotter than hell outside. We’re roasting in the “living” room of my shithole cold-water squat above an abandoned bowling alley on Belmont Avenue in Chicago and drinking shots of vodka from a full bottle I found in the back of the freezer. We’d been at it for a bit, but it was still too humid to get drunk, the liquor sweating out before our livers could wring the fun from it. Looking at the light, though, it was getting close to dark, the last bits of sun streaking out of the West Side to edge the windows and rooflines across the street in liquid gold foil and ambered glass, the shadows just purple and not yet black.

  “You know that’s Popov you’re drinking there, asshole?” I say.

  “What!? You fucker. Would give me the cheapest Polack vodka? Not even Sobieski? Why hate Vassily?”

  I say, “Kidding. It’s Smirnoff. Some Russian you are, ya—”

  “Fuck you. Am Ukrainian, greasy red man. Do not make me tell story of Free Territory of Ukraine, 1919—”

  “So I can one up you with fifty thousand years of anarcho-communism in this hemisphere? Don’t do it, Vassily.”

  “Jesus, Fyodor. You are biggest asshole sometime.”

  “You got that right.” I give him the twin finger guns. I want to launch into a lecture about the long Polish-Ukrainian Golden Age, but he’s a recalcitrant prick and an unreconstructed 1950s-style communist, so fuck it.

  We drink in silence for what seems like hours, Vassily thankfully not given over to the Western need to pointlessly fill the air with self-made sounds and nervous words. I smoke the occasional cigarette, watch the black of night tendril up the red bricks outside, the sky around the early-risen moon narrowing its lids around the yellowy eye of its nearly full face. When the antique blue and white neon of the Courtesy liquor store comes on I stub out my smoke and say,

  “Vassily. Let’s go out.”

  “Thank god, this fucker making me cry with smoking in here. Vassily miss smoking so much,” he assures me, puppy-dog eyes and all, pulling on a grimy orange T-shirt.

  “Man,” I say. “You gotta be tripping with all those patches on you.”

  He yanks the shirt down over his rounded gut. “Just never mind. Anyway, Feo, these patches two days old.”

  “I thought you smelled a little ripe. Don’t those come off in the shower?”

  “Shower (air quotes), Mister Cold-Water Shithole? When last time you clean self?”

  “Indians don’t stink like you monkey-people do. We don’t have that nasty peeled onion B.O.”

  “But are greasy enough slide through that rathole by hot plate in kitchen, so—”

  “So fuck you, Vassily. Rat holes are like farms where you come from.”

  “Ha! At least having meat to eat, noodle king. All that ramen must make tapeworms feel right at home in Feo’s underused bowels.”

  “Damn, Vassily. That’s cold. Not as cold as your never-used other side of the bed in that flophouse you call ‘home’ (I return the air quotes), but yeah, sure.”

  “Do not fuck with me, Feo. Am full of terrible Polack vodka. Having belly full of potato-based fire and bad mood. Call truce.”

  “Truce, my friend,” I say.

  Friend (no air quotes). Men’s friendships are fucked up. I mean, I’m glad for this younger generation, our kids, I suppose. They’re doing it right, and for that I am grateful. They hug each other, genuinely ask each other how they’re doing—hell, they even tell one another they care about each other. It’s made it less awkward for our generation to be human while obligating us to be so, even if it’s hard sometimes. We grew up being unemotional and unloving, not showing our feelings, or being kind. Fuck, we couldn’t even put sugar in our coffee. Now I cry at songs on the radio, when I read great lines in books, when the light in the sky is just right. It’s fifty years of not saying or feeling jack shit poured into my adulthood, my fatherhood. It’s a river of grief that appears at inopportune times, but it’s also a joyful sadness I can share at least, tell to the folks who catalyze these grateful
emotions into the world where they belong. And I don’t have to feel shame about them. Yeah. That’s okay to me. Real okay. But at this moment early in my twenties, me and Vassily are traditional men friends. That means we talk shit to each other constantly, never mention our love for one another, and beat the shit out of each other instead of hugging, unless we’re super drunk. That last moment lives in the veil between those two worlds. I’m determined to head out and break on through.

  “Let’s fucking go, man!”

  “Alright, alright, Feo. Are such prick sometimes.”

  “You know I like the near dark. Come on.”

  “Am coming. Having to piss now. Hold on.”

  “Fine.” I light a smoke, lean back, tilt my face up, and lightly bang the back of my head against the plaster in the hall next to the front door. I can hear Vassily’s urine assault the bowl through the thin wall of the bathroom. I really should move.

  We head down the two stories of staircase to the street in the almost-black gloaming, what’s left of the thin and spidery light leaking over the transom at the bottom of the stairwell. We jerk the door open, and a bum slo-mos over the threshold. “Never trust a junkie,” he croaks, and we step around him onto the sidewalk, taking in the fresh air.

  “Where going, Feo?” Vassily asks.

  “To the Courtesy, my Uki friend,” I reply.

  “Jesus Christ,” he shakes his head.

  The Courtesy is a typical old-school neighborhood Chicago bar/ liquor store. Old wooden bar on the right, coolers of to-go stuff on the left. It has a cadre of shitty wizened retirees possessed of Neanderthal politics and worry-worn coin purses, both evidence of solidly crappy educations and low-paying jobs, both serving their old-age needs, at least. Blowsy “broads” of similar age round out the color, and low-level weed and coke dealers fill in any cracks left open by the occasionally visiting offspring of the aforementioned elders. Things get ugly but never too violent while we watch Kojak reruns on Channel 9 with the sound turned off because we know every episode. It always closes on time (2:00 a.m.), its vaguely bewildered and simultaneously bored Korean owners rudely counting their money in front of their addled customers while future winos and their contemporary heroes try to buy road pops at less-than-inflated after-hours prices, which kick in at last call. Sometimes you can get a Tombstone pizza, but the oven behind the bar is usually broken, so it’s Jay’s O-ke-Doke cheese popcorn or Hot Stuff chips for dinner. I love and hate the place all at the same time, depending on my mood and capacity for self-reflection.