Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  We laugh.

  “Let’s go.”

  I get up, dragging ass a bit, but we head out the front door, generous and friendly “later bros” to the Bullet.

  We walk down the street. It’s a pretty nice night, the just-right bookend to the beautiful day. I think, man, we need to get something to eat. There’s just . . . too much going on here. Need to slow it down. Deaden the course of the alcohol uptaking from the veins.

  “Let’s go to the Oxford.”

  “The what?” he says, herding the poet north.

  I say it again.

  “What for?” he asks.

  “Grab a little something to eat.”

  “Hmmm. Okay, I guess. Let’s go.” He cuts back a little, pairs the poet off to me, lopes ahead some. He moves fast. Like you think he would. But not so fast that we can’t follow. Ditto. Me and the poet, we move okay. I look, and the poet, he’s drinking a can of beer, a tall boy. Where the fuck did that come from?

  I must’ve made a sound, since our boy laughs, sharp and loud, because, ha! I think, it’s a can of PBR. This, he seems to find funny. But he laughs to himself, and at us, not with us. He looks over his own beer at us, name on the can unheard of, walking backward, pace unchanging, eyes unblinking. He throws the empty can over his shoulder and turns back to the street. Me and the poet slosh along, almost catching up.

  “Did you see his face? It’s beautiful.”

  “Hey man. We’re going to get something to eat.”

  “Where?”

  “The Oxford.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “And then are we going over to his place?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, thinking, mind racing, how the fuck are we going to get out of this? “Whatever you want to do. But let’s go eat first.”

  “Where at?”

  “The Oxford.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  The Oxford. The Oxford is a bar/restaurant type place, well yeah, officially it’s a saloon. It has slot machines, brains and eggs, shitty beer; Budweiser is the imported stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (ha!), but yeah. It’s that kind of place. And the food is pretty good. The whole thing is open twenty-four hours, has been for years, I don’t even think they have keys anymore, but they shut the liquor down at some point in the evening, and people sort of drift over into the booths and tables away from the bar. Other people come in from other bars, other places, fresh off of whatever they’ve been doing elsewhere. Some of them look like whatever they’ve been doing is downright unsavory, but hey, that’s their business. We’re going there to eat, not to judge.

  We get to the Oxford before the crush, before the too-loud talking and too-earnest laughing that mark the inebriated begin to show. Me and the poet take a seat along the wall near the door. We’ve been here before. Our boy has disappeared for the moment—I hope it turns into an even longer run—and pick up a menu.

  The poet laureate is kinda laughing to himself, reading the menu and doubtless wondering at the conjecture of food and words and the jargony, old-timey names for some of the plates: “He Needs ’Em” (Brains & Eggs), “Overland Trout” (Roast Pork), “Slow Elk” (Roast Beef), and “Inside Job” (Liver), etc. I look over the menu halfheartedly, kind of because I know what I want, and kind of because the vibe is weird. I’m keeping my eyes open.

  Our boy drifts back to our table. He’s been over at the bar just as it’s closing. He shows us his prizes: two clear plastic bottles of, I don’t know, corn likker? Maybe it’s vodka. I shudder a little. He seems super excited. The poet looks at the bottles, holds them up to the light. His one eye blobs out, blows up real big through the plastic when I look over at him as brings the bottles slowly back down to the table. He reminds me of a goldfish my friend won at the St. Hilary’s carnival in the abandoned IHOP parking lot back in Chicago, the one where I won two cartons of smokes. I think I won four actually on their wheel of fortune, but because I was like twelve, they only gave me half my winnings. Fucking Catholics.

  “We’re gonna party.”

  Shit, man. I just want to eat, and say,

  “Hold on, man. We need to eat.”

  “Maybe you do, but we need to get drinking.” He looks over at the poet, who’s humming to himself.

  I’m about to make some probably unwise smartass comment when the waiter shows up.

  “Out.”

  “Whu?”

  “Out. Out! OUT!”

  “Dude. What is wrong with you?”

  The waiter, who looks like a cross between Leslie Jordan and Michael Jeter, and reminds me of a hostile Les Nessman, is starting to yell louder at us. Now, granted, he’s stiffed us before, made us wait like forty-five minutes before we up and left, treated us like shit before, and generally acted like the racist asshole that he is, but this was new.

  “Man. What is your problem?” I ask.

  “Just get out.”

  “Nah. What? Why?”

  “H-h-h-h, w-w-wh.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Just get out!”

  He calls over some ploppy security dude in a nylon gold windbreaker. I’m all,

  “Hey. Calm down. I just want to know why he won’t wait on us.”

  “I don’t know, but you need to go.” Little Yellowjacket rent-a-cop starts to get in my face.

  “Fuck. C’mon. Let’s go,” I say.

  Jordan/Jeter/Nessman is apoplectic.

  I hope he has a geyser or something. I really fucking hate this guy.

  Our boy looks at him. Doesn’t say a word. Just gets up. And leaves. All the way to the door, he never takes his eyes off the sputtering waiter, whose face is turning pink, red, redder. The silver temples on his glasses start to sink into the sides of his reddening head. His eyes dart around, the far-sighted lenses magnifying whatever the fuck is driving his tiny madness.

  I smile at him big. All the way back to where the gaps from my missing teeth show. The poet, he keeps chuckling. The waiter drops his pad, and by the time he gets it picked up, we’re gone, twists of smoke where our bodies were standing. The little bell rings as the door closes shut.

  Down the street we go. Weave, bob, drink. We trudge for miles. All the while he lopes along up front doing that just-out-of-reach thing you struggle to keep up with so that you’re not really thinking about what you’re doing.

  Until the poet stops to take a leak.

  We come to an abrupt halt by a discount tire place, the poet pissing in the sagebrush out back. The fluorescent light gives everyone’s face that real unpleasant cast, the one where everybody looks like they didn’t make the cut for the Less Than Zero club scene but the on-set lighting stayed with them anyway. We hear the zipper come up, and I gain my senses for a minute.

  “You know, I really need to get him home,” I say.

  “Nah.”

  “No. I do. It’s been a long day. He’s been up since like five this morning.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s a long day. He needs to get some sleep.”

  “That’s not a long day at all. Not for me it’s not.”

  “Well, he’s not you, so . . .”

  “So let’s get moving.”

  Damn it.

  The poet, he just laughs that laugh.

  Back in the street, walking. I’ve never seen a place like this before, wouldn’t even think this neighborhood would be considered part of the city. The street winds around, gets a little wilder, less populated. The light is a constant yellow, buzzing out of old arc lamps. The poet laughs and drinks. We’re shitfaced and humming shy of the streetlights, glancing down and wincing away, but I manage to send for an uber, thinking we’re close . . . r.

  We walk. So fucking typical, when you’re suddenly magically young and ripped—we throw drinks up in the air, hide from the cops, piss in the street, laugh too loud, and shush each other when porch lights come on. The air stays warm, gets damp. We can hear cars on a highway, whooshing low and intermittent, like
an alarm you can just barely hear, so you sleep on through it.

  Then:

  “Just around the corner. Go down that way,” and we’re at his place.

  He lives in an alley for fuck’s sake. It’s small trailer, jammed in a parking space behind a building, lined right up, nuts-to-butts with three or four abandoned trailers. Well, maybe not abandoned, but uninhabited and sad, if that helps. Harsh fluorescent light angles down from a utility pole over the scene, makes big shadows out of the places it doesn’t reach. Him and the poet head inside.

  I take a piss next to a wiry sumac and then look in his trailer. He’s standing next to a table where the poet is seated, drinking from the plastic bottle in one hand and out of a warm can in the other, blue slatted shadowed light defining both their shapes. My eyes trace their faces, and I look left then, away from the poet. My gaze comes to rest on those almost-white jeans, the ones the color of desert salt, the ones that fade away into dregs, torn edges that just hide what I knew would be there, a pair of wide, brown paws. When I look up at his face, it’s looking back at me, and the arms it belongs to are bracing themselves, one hand on the edge of the table, the other on the counter. I back out of the trailer slowly, my eyes never leaving his, and say,

  “Looks like the car’s here. See? Here it is, on my phone. C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go then.”

  He lunges at me from the trailer, his teeth snap over the shoulder of the poet, inches from my face, but we back out, me holding the poet’s hand.

  “You have a beautiful face,” that one says.

  “Good night, Old One,” I say.

  Good night.

  16.BLACK HAWK GOES TO THE ZOO

  The Potawatomi traded for this?

  “It does appear cruel, Grandfather.”

  It is, in fact. Are they at least going to eat these animals?

  “No. They’re for looking at.”

  So, they’ll spend their live locked in these cages? That seems particularly cruel, grandson.

  “It does.”

  We were making our way through Lincoln Park Zoo, that great, free showcase of Western opulence and magnanimity in the heart of Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood used to be interesting and diverse, but now it’s the home of million-dollar-plus mansions, more akin to John Hughes’s cinematic Winnetka than anything remotely urban, chock full of apple-cheeked cops, overpriced restaurants, and franchise shit shows that parade eight-hundred-dollar scarves and cups of coffee for slightly less.

  Where are these animals from?

  “All over the world.”

  Are they captured there? Born here?

  “It’s a mix. They have breeding programs for many of them.”

  It’s more cruel than I had thought, then.

  “Yup. It is.”

  I knew his Sauk name was Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, meant “be a black hawk,”

  thought,

  I probably shouldn’t take him to the raptor exhibit on the off chance—

  Grandson, we need to do something.

  Though he’s barely visible, and his voice is just above a whisper, I jump and say,

  “Like what?”

  His eyes gleam across countless planes.

  I’ll show you. Come with me.

  We walk for a bit and then we’re in the Lion House. We stroll past a few cages, stop at the first one with a visible occupant.

  His spectral hand reaches out, coalesces in this world, grabs the iron grate. His now-solid fingers deftly open the door to the cheetah cage. A young female registers his presence with a baring of her fangs, a feline smile and squinting of her eyes acknowledging his gesture as she walks out of the cage, steps down into the cement space between the ledge and the black metal slats, and effortlessly jumps over the handrail. She silently pads toward the glinting sunlight of the open door, the boisterous zoo patrons stunned into silence.

  That’s a beautiful being right there, grandson.

  I agree, watching her hips sway, exit the building.

  We make our way down the row, stop to marvel at the jaguar.

  He repeats the motions, and the ruler of the Mayan Underworld springs into the passageway, heads for the open double doors.

  This seems the right thing to do, grandson.

  “I agree, Grandfather.”

  Civets, servals, lynx, and ocelots freed, we continue through the zoo, releasing all of their relatives. Buffalo, wolves, giraffes, and elk low their way into the lakefront woods.

  Do they imprison winged ones in this place as well?

  “They do.”

  Show me.

  We head to the Bird House.

  He shakes his head.

  This is inexcusable.

  “It is.”

  He smiles over my shoulder, watches a polar bear with a chicken in its mouth rumble past the closing glass doors.

  He reaches up with both arms, closes his eyes.

  The glass walls and ceiling

  dissolve,

  the standing iron frames breathe lonely and out of place, disappear.

  Hundreds of bird eyes roll up to an indescribable horizon, pour through now-open space, take flight in a riot of flapping wings.

  He smiles.

  Look at this, grandson.

  17.INDIAN WARS

  We passed Chicago and observed that the fort had been evacuated by the Americans, and their soldiers had gone to Fort Wayne. They were attacked a short distance from the fort and defeated. They had a considerable quantity of powder in the fort at Chicago, which they had promised to the Indians, but the night before they marched away, they destroyed it by throwing it into a well. If they had fulfilled their word to the Indians, they doubtless would have gone to Fort Wayne without molestation.

  —MA-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-KIA-KIAK (BLACK HAWK)

  JD shot me in the chest with a pellet gun. And not one of those Daisy pumps either. This was the .45 looking one with the CO2 canisters.

  “You motherfucker! Goddamn, that hurts!”

  “Hahaha, Teddy! Fuck you.” He wheeled backward, me holding my heart with my left hand and taking a swing at that smirky face of his with my right.

  Son of a bitch. It really did hurt. I stuck my hand inside my big, loose royal-blue and black flannel, pulled it back out, blood smeared on my fingers. I went back in and fished out the lead pellet, tapped my finger on the still-pointy end, and flicked it over my shoulder. I’m pissed now, Bruce Lee style. Not because of the puckered scar it’ll leave (cool points, of course), but because now I had a hole in my favorite shirt. This shirt cost me twenty minutes of skilled dancing with the undercover security dick while I stole it from Zayre’s. Damnit. I worked for this one.

  We were playing, I don’t know, Army? Nope. It was Cowboys and Injuns. That’s right. That’s why I had this shitty pump rifle and the Jimmys1&3 and JD had those nice automatics. That made perfect sense.

  Yup. Those assholes were bored and Jimmy1 had all these BB and pellet guns just like his old man who filled his own shells had all these real guns. Jimmy1 said “let’s play Army” and that turned into “Cavalry” real quick after he handed out the guns and everyone realized what they had.

  I played along, but I knew in the back of my mind what was going to happen. I thought about what I was going to have to do and counted myself lucky I was wearing these big old glasses, cause if these guys were even remotely thinking like I was, someone was gonna lose an eye.

  Jimmy1 lived in this big red-brick three-story courtyard building on Damen Avenue right off Fargo where his dad was the janitor. I think in New York they call them supers or something, but here in fuckin’ RealTown Chicago you’re a goddamn janitor. Big Louie had this building and one other small one down the street that was on the way to the bar, so it all worked out real well for him. I always thought it was cool that Jimmy1 got to live with both his parents. His ma became my ma when she adopted me in that way that mas do. She was a waitress around the corner from where his pop drank. Shit, now that I think about it, all of
our mas were waitresses, except for JD’s. She was a traitor-ass Latin Queen, so who knows and who cares what the fuck she did.

  It was summer, but it was daytime, so we basically had the run of this giant building all to ourselves because everyone was at work, except for the drunks and the addicts, and those assholes never leave their apartments, so no worries. We grabbed our weapons and headed out the apartment down to the lobby and onto the grass in front. Decided it was every man for himself, and since I had been pumping this piece of shit since I got it fifteen minutes ago I turned and shot Jimmy1 in the neck. Just missed that eye.

  “Ow! Fuck you!” He popped off a shot that hit me in leg.

  It didn’t hurt, so I laughed and started running south across the face of the building, pumping the living shit out of this piece of crap, getting set for when I’d let him catch up with me. At least you could pack the rifle full of BBs then just pull the slide back when you were ready. I didn’t look to see if anyone was behind me, and I had no idea where anyone else went.

  I headed for the long gangway that ran under the building on the right-hand side as you faced it, the one that went almost all the way back to the alley. Off the path of its walk were the rear stairwells to the back doors of each of the apartments. On Friday afternoons we’d go up and down all the porches and steal people’s bottles to turn in for cash to go to the movies and buy booze. Every surface of the wooden stairs, railings, floors, and ceilings was painted that sexy-ass Chicago grey enamel.

  The gangway smelled funky all year long, but of course even more in the summer heat, and today the humidity was crackin’. It reeked. I was dying out here. Sure, I wore a flannel but anyway with no T-shirt because if we needed to do some shoplifting, well, yeah. It was big and loose and Open Pantry had these bottles of flavored wine that would get you fuuuucked up. Quick stick a pair of those in the waist of your baggies with that big shirt hanging down and buy a Slim Jim and ask the cute girl behind the counter for a book of matches and it costs you twenty-nine cents to get wasted.

  I made it almost to the end when JD popped out from the bottom of the stairs. Jimmy1 must’ve used his old man’s spare keys to let him cut through one of the endless hallways that internally connect this beast of a building.