Haid looked up at the television and saw the healthy spikes of the EKG machine.
Beyond that, the night winked at him.
* * *
Levelle Thigpen was overweight, sure. He weighed in at fifteen pounds twenty-six years ago and never stopped gaining. Only, everyone called him Chubby Love because of his taste in women. He’d spot a big-boned gal and nudge Mike Surfer or Glowworm Willie, tell them hey, I’s goin’ to get me some chubby lovin’ tonight. Like that.
Chubby also scavenged for things, when he wasn’t clowning for the crowd. After the McDonald’s on Randolph closed down at eight, Chubby Love had all of three dollars and twelve cents, all in change, jangling at the bottom of his 7-11 Big Gulp go-cup. He figured on a little scavenger hunting on his way back to the St. Benedictine Flats.
Entering the cobblestone walkway of Couch Street, flanked on either side by green and grey garbage cans, he started his scavenging at the first can in sight. He saw a black briefcase propped against one of the smaller bins. Bending towards it, a mean feat in itself, as Thigpen’s lower abdomen looked as if Chubby was hiding an inner tube under his shorts, he saw a three-piece urinating against the wail, both hands pasted to the wall. Chubby thought that the guy looked as if he was being frisked by The Invisible Man.
“Thought they had port-a-pots in the limosines that be taking you threads home.” He couldn’t pass up commenting on the one thing he rarely did in public.
“Get away from that,” the threads talking about his case.
“Just walkin’ by, is all. Take a chill pill, brother mine.”
“I’m not your brother.” But Chubby was no longer listening, because his attention was diverted towards the deserted wheelchair farther down the alley.
For a street person, a wheelchair was almost as good as a shopping cart when it came to carrying one’s life belongings.
Chubby heard the guy zipping up behind him; he was more concerned with that beautiful looking chair. He could set his go-cup between his legs when he sat in it, and keep his Woolworth’s bags on the seat when he was walking.
The Lake Street El roared by, always louder and more mournful in the winter months. The wheelchair was damn near spotless. A Chicago Cubs backpack was slung over the back of the handlebars. An index card, covered by clear plastic, the kind you buy in dime stores, read THIS CHAIR IS REGGIE GIVENS. Chubby knew that name from somewhere, maybe a friend of a friend. It was easy enough to pull the lamination off; whoever Reggie was, the chair was Chubby’s now.
He plopped himself into the chair, the adequate overhead light telling him that it wouldn’t be all that tight a squeeze. Hell, he could breathe, and the fact that his thighs were glued to the arms like Dentu-Grip to false teeth meant that he needn’t worry about buckling up.
Something was sticking to his right foot. Gum, maybe. He hoped that the guy in the suit hadn’t pissed him. He looked down, picking up his right foot best he could.
There was a single playing card on the footrest. A red queen, folded in the corner.
Chubby tossed it to the rats and wheeled back to the street.
* * *
Haid woke up to find himself feeling much better. He also found himself still on the pot.
Dr. Broonioge often had told him that dreams were symbolic. He had learned quite a bit from this last dream. With the rapture must first come the pain. And with Father’s hand guiding him, he would learn to heal without getting sick. Father had told him that the only way to do that would be to find more willing souls.
Tomorrow, he would search for the black-haired man that he saw wheeling away from the strip joint.
Chapter Five
“Anybody see Reg, yet?” Colin Nutman looked up from the registration information desk. “His rent’s coming up due, and I see from his box that he hasn’t picked up his mail in at least two days.”
“You know how he be,” Mike Surfer said with a gravelly voice. Even with two fingers pressed up against his shunt, some days his words came out in a way that made Nutman think of gargling marbles.
“Yea,” Glowworm Willie echoed from behind a pool table with shortened legs. “He stay out sometimes three, four days. Just when you think he be disappeared into the earif, he come poppin’ back in.”
Surfer rolled over to one of the lobby’s three color televisions. Two other Marclinn residents, a bearded writer named Etch, because of how he always scribbled notes on a pad of paper tied to his walker, and Wilma Jerrickson, a grey-haired, tiny woman that most everyone called Grandmother.
“If either of you see him...” Colin called in Surfer’s direction.
“I’ll tell him,” Surfer said, over his shoulder.
“Me, too.” Willie said, as he racked up the pool balls, hoping for a partner.
Etch and Grandmother were intent on watching an episode of Cheers and so offered no response at all.
* * *
Vic Tremble’s War Journal:
11/15/88—Time, see what’s become of me, the song went. Paul Simon was right. It is a hazy shade of winter. Ask my fucking body. Christ on a fucking dogwood it hurts. I used to laugh at the tin man when he pled with Dorothy for the oil can. That’s how my motherless shoulders feel now, like they are a solid strip of metal and just why the fuck do I try to move them anymore in the first place?
Nobility? At what? Who am I trying to impress?
Walking past the Midland Building on Adams I saw a policeman directing traffic in the shadows of the Board of Trade. Probably got caught with his hands in the graft cookie jar and got put on detail for a few months.
I envy cops. I’d love to be healthy enough to wear the uniform, the badge. Not as a glory hound. Never that. I guess it’s because the cops operate on the street level, and that is where I am at my best. Where I blend in the easiest. If I lived on the street, I would finally be able to live with myself.
I put Mineral Ice on my back. Doesn’t smell like Ben-Gay. Couple weeks ago, this Hispanic guy sniffs the air like somebody stuck a dog turd under his Duncan Rinaldo pencil-moustache. He said to me, buddy, joo smell bad, joo know joo stink dat way?
I wished I could’ve drooled over his work shirt, the cock-knocker.
More than cops, I envy the men in their wheelchairs on the street corners. Guys like John and Slappy, I’ll give them a quarter if I have it. Because they are honest about their handicaps, and even the most dimwitted of mooks in the lunch hour crowds would understand their pain.
I wonder if people like Laurie Dann, who killed a kid in a Winnetka preschool in May, or this guy the newspapers call The American Dream, he runs around with a heating pad for a cape and stops people from littering—do people like this do the bad or do the good because their lives are filled with chronic pain and they only have one kind of release?
My journals are my release. Fate is cruel.
* * *
“I don’t know why Mom Winona wouldn’t let me put on Crime Story last night,” Wally Grogan was saying as he walked with Eddy Diedzek past the Baptist church on Clark Street. “I mean, so Torello’s always shooting people! I know it’s not real, Jeez Louise! Except for the parts where Luca hits a lady.”
“Maybe she won’t let you watch ‘cause she thinks you’re a little peenie-boy,” Eddy returned, ready to fend off his friend’s blows.
“No, you dork.” The two ten-year-olds stopped to wave hello to the Rev. Marvin, the pastor of the church. Mom Winona said it was always a good idea to talk to men of the church, unless they were sidewalk preachers. Marvin Melone—his full name was hand-painted on the sign above the door—gave out the best candy at Halloween; the boys would say hello to him every day for that reason alone.
“Stay bundled up, boys!” The reverend admonished, as he walked up the front steps. “Even though you’ve only got another block, it only takes a second to get sick!”
“Yessir.” Both boys made a show of pulling their red scarves closer around their collars when they passed the church.
“Hey, let�
�s do that song we learned at school,” Eddy suggested.
“Which song?”
“You know, ‘Skokie’s Got Rhythm’.”
“You start.” Wally kicked a rusted can from the sidewalk to the street.
“Skokie’s got rhythm, rhythm all over, boom, check it out, boom boom, check it out,” Eddy did a kiddie version bump-and-grind. The song they sung in class was done round robin style, with Skokie being substituted with each classmate’s name. “Wally’s got rhythm.”
Just then, Eddy stepped onto a square of sidewalk that had the cement company’s name on it. Wally caught it.
“STINKFISH!” He bellowed, startling Eddy into looking down to see the box that read YURKES AND SONS, 1965. And the pile of frozen vomit beside it.
Wally, capering with his shadow, bumped into Eddy.
Chapter Six
“The hell, you say!” Frank Haid had given the matter some thought and decided to confront the man with honesty and sincerity. Robert Dolezal was going for none of it. ”What, you think I’ve got a deuce on me? Gonna roll me, are you?”
Haid had waited in the grey-white mist that was Chicago twilight for three separate nights that week. He couldn’t ask the strip joint owner about the suffering man; on the street, everybody looked out for the other guy. It wasn’t like this years ago. Father had told him that, once upon a time, when all the Old Style signs read ZIMNE PIWO and you could fall asleep on the El and actually wake up to tell the story, once upon a faraway time, you had as much on the guy next door as he had on you.
Haid didn’t have much to offer anybody, let alone the next guy. So he offered the black-bearded man in the chair honesty.
He had stayed a good distance behind the man, not wanting to draw attention. North Clark Street was no longer the Skid Row that it was during the seventies, but it was still deserted. Only diehards for the sexually perverse came down to the leather shops or to see the female impersonators at The Baton.
The man wheeled north to Ontario, then turned toward the lakefront. The guy had perseverance, that was for sure. And Haid was right about the guy being a vet; he had an olive-on-white sticker on the back of the chair’s headrest. MEKONG RIVER YACHT CLUB. Certainly he’d seen enough of all this world could show him. Had shown him.
“I have the power to heal you,” Haid said, having no intention of giving up. He had kept pace with the vet nine blocks, the cold digging into his bones like cancer. Finally making his move at the corner of Ohio and Wabash, in the neon wash of the Cass Hotel, Haid felt certain that the flophouse was where the guy lived.
“What, and take me to heaven?” The man smirked and the sound was that of a smoker’s hack. “I been to heaven and they stuck me back down here in Hell. So, go on. I ain’t got no money, but you’re welcome to take my food stamps if you have to, man.”
“What are you talking about?” Haid was baffled: Did he... ?
“Do you think that I’m here to rob you?”
“Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,” the vet said. “I killed a lot of innocent people when I was in-country, so...”
Both men stopped talking to watch the street corner’s only other sign of life: a Yellow cab sped to the south and careened around the Medina Temple.
“I’m not here to judge you,”Haid took a chance to move closer. Though the man’s size could be disproportionate because of the chair, he still seemed muscular enough to grab Haid and squeeze the shit out of him.
“That what they’re calling robbery these days? Sorry, I musta been sleeping when they put out the revised edition of Modern Slang and Euphemisms.”
“It’s what Father calls it.” The man’s denial so flustered Haid that he forgot about his book of psalms. He regained most of his composure by taking on his childhood persona. Bully. Intimidator.
Holy terror.
“Oh, I’ll save you, all right.” Haid said through clenched teeth.
He reached down swiftly, plunging his fist up against the vet’s chest. The man’s eyes bulged. Haid’s fist simmered and glowed, his thumb and fingers sinking through the layers of clothing first, and layers of skin second.
Haid clamped his other hand down over the crippled man’s mouth, to keep him from screaming. There was no telling about someone who had so little faith in God.
In a few seconds, both hands had disappeared into the sitting man’s body, and Haid was able to lift the entire body like a marionette and draw it to his own chest. The sizzling and the glowing started anew.
* * *
Several pieces of the body had fallen to the ground, but Haid was afraid to stay around and look for them. Father was prodding him to move on.
He didn’t notice the lake wind anymore, because his chest and arms were warm and tingling. The vet is reveling in his entrance to Heaven.
He walked over to State to catch a Chicago Avenue bus, hoping the route was 24 hour Owl Service. The healing process had taken much longer this time. Through the grates in the sidewalk, he could hear the coming of the State Street subway, running endlessly beneath an elevated hell.
Chapter Seven
“So here I am, I’m thinking,” Dean Conover glanced over at Aaron Mather, who was driving the unit tonight. “Like, why the hell is Division crawling up our asses over the bulletproof vests again? Three cops dusted this year, and because that last one, Doyle out of Wentworth, he only gets it once in the chest. Ba-bing! Time to talk about the vests again...”
He shook his head in disgust. Neither cop had to mention that Willett and Selfridge, partners out of Grand Crossing on the Far Southside, were shot in the head. Every Chicago cop had mixed emotions about the Kevlar vests. Aside from being uncomfortable in any season, constant wear caused the velcro straps to curl and not hold. Any subsequent vests had to be purchased by the individual cop.
The ultimate logic of the overall effectiveness of the vest was this: every gangbanger and street psycho, by the Chicago evolutionary scale, had long since learned to shoot for the head and/or armpit. And parents marveled when their sons and daughters figured out The Legend Of Zelda on the home Nintendo.
“And remember that detective out of Area 1, I forget his name, hit the S-curve on the Drive during a narcotics chase?” Mather had only been on the force for seven years, and knew as much about what went down in every alley as his partner. Every alley between Goose Island and Seneca Park.
“Right,” Conover hadn’t thought of that one. “A damn vest sure as hell isn’t going to keep you from dropping to the bottom of Lake Michigan!”
The blond cop, a ten-year veteran, turned south of Wabash. The call had come over the radio for their unit, 1844, to answer a possible assaultin-progress outside of the Cass Hotel. They could see the dull pink neon in the distance.
“Sure enough, the ‘C’ is burned out.” Mather gave a cursory nod to the right.
“Maybe it’s a subliminal thing to keep the straights out.”
“Yea, sure thing, Dean.”
“I’m selling the Orleans Street Bridge, too, did you know that?” While they talked, Conover’s ice-blue stare never left the street. Some of the people at the 18th District, blues and perps alike, swore that Conover never blinked, that his eyes simply narrowed to slits.
It turned out that it wasn’t the night desk at the Cass that had called 911, but a bartender at Murdy’s -- a bar of mixed clientele next door. A short alley ran between the two four-story brick buildings. A tall, blond man came out of the bar; the squadrol’s cherry flashed blue and red across his face.
“I’m the bartender, Mick Desmond.” When the cops didn’t respond, he swallowed. Both Conover and Mather had already noticed that there seemed to be no sign of an assault, and the bar was so quiet, there wasn’t any brawl going down in there, unless the bar catered to mimes.
“I know it’s awful quiet out here; guess I should of told the operator it was in the alley here.” He pointed over his right shoulder at an angle of darkness. Mather took a step in that direction; Conover took a moment
to size up Desmond. He made six feet easy, hair that looked bottle blond hung shoulder-length and curled around ears that resembled mutant cantaloupes. Dressed in black slicks and a T-shirt that depicted a “Lounge Lizard,” he didn’t look too … weird. Conover wondered why the hell he was gay. Had to be the funky ears.
“See, I was out the service door, dumping empty boxes of Perrier. I heard voices, glanced up front and saw them in the light of the hotel.”
“Them? You knew these...?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that, no.” The bartender folded his arms over his chest. “I meant that, well, there was one guy threatening this other guy in a wheelchair, and...”
“Wait,” Conover interrupted. Mather was approaching the lip of the alley. “Maybe the guy was pissed because the guy in the chair was a dead beat.”
“Oh, no, you got that wrong. Respectfully, the guy in the chair lived at the Cass. He wasn’t a bum, no.”
“Yea, yea. Go on.” Shit, he thought. No gunshots, this guy’s long gone. With one guy in a chair, we know it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel. He whipped out a black Mead notebook to take a few notes, for the sake of keeping the force looking competent. He motioned for Desmond to keep talking.
“I didn’t see that he had a knife, it was just like he was threatening the crippled guy. I think his name was Dole, Dolby, something...”
Conover had already effectively tuned the guy out. He concentrated on his pencilled notes:
15 Nov, 88 11:07PM. Resp. to report of poss. assault., 642 N. Wabash. Spoke w. Mick Desmond, bartender at same ad.
“The guy standing looked more like your partner. I mean he had darker hair, maybe a little white, kind of a husky voice.”
“That all you can give me, Des?”
“Hey, I had to get back inside, man! Murdy’s out on a shoot in Milwaukee, but that don’t mean one of his spies isn’t around!”
Ben Murdy was a local celebrity who had made dozens of commercials in the last ten years; some, for Lite beer and Church’s Fried Chicken, were national. He ran three bars in the city and knew quite a bit about the human flotsam that drifted by his establishments. Mather had read several articles on Murdy in the Trib and in an alternative weekly, The Reader. He was on location at the Milwaukee Penal Institute in Wauwatosa doing a pilot for the Fox network.
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