The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  •

  IT WAS LIL PAT’S BIRTHDAY around then, and Ma and Dad felt bad for him—he’d been in the infirmary for some kind of fight—so we drove out to Statesville Correctional to visit him. Jan’n’Rose came along even though they’d never gotten along with him, and at the last second, Rich shuffled out of the house and jumped in the van. There was nothing much to do—it was a rainy Saturday. Statesville is in Joliet and only about an hour outside the city. I was glad to go, glad to see Lil Pat again. I missed him a lot, and we didn’t go to visit much; Ma didn’t like the idea of us getting tangled up in that world. She wanted better for us. We drove through endless lines of tall cornfields, then passed a sign on the road that read “Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.”

  “Yeah, if Pat ever escaped, he’d probably need a ride into town, huh?” Rich guffawed.

  “Quit talking like that, damnit,” Dad said, trying to hide his smile as the rest of us the giggled softly.

  The van came over a hill, and there it was in the center of a cornfield. The huge concrete prison walls spread widely across the field with the grayish-purple sky hovering heavily above. I remembered it being taller and scarier the first time—I thought it was like Conan the Barbarian’s house—but now, it just looked sad and depressing.

  “So he’s in segregation, huh,” Dad said.

  “Yeah, I guess he’s been misbehaving,” Ma replied.

  “Ah, what’d you expect,” Rich said. “He had detention every day at Gordon.”

  “Richard, if you don’t shut’chur mouth,” Ma said, twisting and glaring at him.

  It was a long wait. Two lines—one for men, one for women. Step out of your shoes. We were all searched. Ma, Dad, and Jan’n’Rose went in first while Rich and I waited for about a half an hour. Suddenly, Dad burst out of the doors to the visiting room. His face was red and puffy, and he tore across the room to the exit doors where a guard stood behind a glass and mesh window.

  “Let me outta here!” he yelled.

  The guard buzzed him through.

  Ma, Jan, and Rose followed soon after. Ma grinned stoically at us while Jan’n’Rose hung their heads solemnly.

  “Go on in. He’s only got fifteen minutes left,” Ma said.

  “You think he should go in?” Rich asked Ma, nodding at me.

  “He’ll be fine,” she replied. “Daddy just got worked up.”

  “I’m goin’ in,” I sighed. “I didn’t come out here for nothing.”

  “Go on, it’s OK,” Ma said, patting me on the shoulder. “He’s got a busted-up eye, but he’s fine.”

  I followed Rich through the doors, and we walked down a short hall. Along one side, there was a series of booths—some with people talking and others that were empty. We walked until we saw Lil Pat sitting across the thick glass. His left eye was swollen terribly and sealed shut, and there was a long, twisty string of black stitches running along his brow. He looked anxious and grabbed the yellow phone and motioned for us to pick ours up. Rich picked his up, and Lil Pat spoke fast. I put mine to my ear.

  “He’s fine,” Rich urged.

  “Are you sure? He was crying and everything. Jesus,” Lil Pat said. His eye bugged out. “Are you sure, Rich?”

  “He’s fine,” Rich sighed.

  “Ah, aye, Joey,” Lil Pat said, looking at me bright-eyed. “How are ya, buddy?”

  “Good,” I said. “What happened to your eye?”

  “Ah, nothing. I’m fine.” Lil Pat shrugged. “How are you, kid? You’ve grown! How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen,” I replied.

  “Jesus Christ, kid,” Lil Pat said as he twisted his head sideways. “I remember when… Ah, ya look great, kid. I miss ya so much.”

  “I miss you, too.” A knot strung-up in my throat.

  “So what the hell happened?” Rich laughed.

  “Ah, nothin’,” Lil Pat said as he eased back on his stool. All his street swagger returned. “Some nigger hit me wit’ a hunk of brick rolled up in a sock.”

  “Ohhho fuck!” Rich gasped. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Yeah,” Lil Pat said. “We was working down in the laundry, and he snuck up on me. Little fuckin’ bastard. I’d stole on his boy a couple weeks ago.”

  “Did you get knocked out?” Rich asked.

  “Yeah,” Pat smirked. “I woke up like woohoo!” He rolled his eye around in its socket. “But he got his already.” He mimicked a stabbing. “The white brothers are doing just fine in here. Don’t worry about dat.”

  “Damn.”

  In my imagination, the entire series of violent repercussions suddenly unfolded like a row of dominoes falling and clattering on a table. No winners, no losers, just destruction.

  “It was good, though. Got me out of the pressure cooker. It’s quiet over here.”

  “Sounds real nice, Pat,” Rich said, sarcastically arching his eyebrows.

  “You asshole,” Lil Pat said giggling. “I heard ya got a real nice girl.” He smiled at Rich.

  “Yeah,” Rich said bashfully.

  “Got tired a dem skanks, huh?” Lil Pat asked.

  “Yeah,” Rich answered and looked away. “She’s great.”

  “You guys gonna get married?” Lil Pat asked.

  Rich hid his eyes from his big brother.

  “Ah, look at-chu. You’re gonna ask her to marry ya, arn’tcha?”

  “Come on, Pat,” Rich whined.

  “What about you, kid? How are things?” Pat looked at me. “You playing sports?”

  “Yeah. High Ridge Chargers.”

  “That’s good. How’s that knucklehead best friend a yours?”

  “Ryan?”

  “No! Who else would I be talkin’ about?”

  “He’s good.”

  “Remember what I wrote you about?” Rich butted in.

  “I know, I know…” Lil Pat dismissed Rich’s interruption with a wave.

  “He’s good. We’re good, we’ve been runnin’ around fighting and shit.”

  “Some niggers jumped you guys, huh?”

  I glared at Rich. “Yeah,” I said, and cleared my throat.

  Lil Pat’s eyes hardened. “Niggers are the scum of the earth, kid. They’ll pretend to be your friend, and then they’ll sneak up behind you and stab you in the throat. I seen it in here. I seen it a hundred times,” he said, keeping his hard eye on me. “That neighborhood’s ours, kid. Don’t let those porch monkeys push you around. You got Ryan’s back no matter what. No matter if there’s six of them. You get beat down together. You go out fighting with pride. Got that?”

  I nodded and scratched my thigh nervously.

  “It’s about loyalty, kid. On the street, it’s all that matters. Ryan and you against all them motherfuckers. And don’t be scared-a-them neither. You hit ’em good, they’re goin’ down just like any other dude. Shit, I made a habit a droppin’ big niggers in the day-room when I got in here.”

  His anger flooded through his whole being. His shoulders swelled and trembled in his green smock, and I was scared, to tell ya the truth. He must have seen it. He shook his head in frustration and rolled his shoulders.

  “Naw, kid, that’s not what I mean. What I mean to say is… Ryan’s your friend—your real friend. You gotta hold on to that and protect it, kid. Protect each other. Just be good to each other, like brothers.” He leaned his elbows on the small shelf in front of him, and the warmth returned to his voice. “OK?”

  There was a beep on the line, and a recorded voice said, “This visit terminates in the thirty seconds.” Lil Pat put his hand to the glass, and Rich matched him with his own.

  “See ya around, Pat,” Rich said sadly.

  “See ya, Rich,” Lil Pat replied.

  Lil Pat moved and put his big palm on the glass before me. I placed mine in the shadow of his.

  “Ah, Joey, I love ya,” Lil Pat said. “I’ll be home soon.”


  “I love ya, Pat,” I said, but there was a high-pitched dial tone coming through the earpiece. And that was it.

  The whole ride home I kept quiet in the back of the van with my knees hugged up against my chest and thought of what Lil Pat’d said. The storm rumbled on—not a violent storm, but steady. The water mopped down slowly on the windshield. It was fucked up to think about it—to end up in a place like that. Hell, I didn’t ever want to end up in there. Made me sick to think of getting hit with a brick for next to nothing. I felt far away from Lil Pat—way far away. A semi-truck blared past us and sent a heavy splash of dark water against my window in its wake. The water trickling down the glass lit a dark-gold like the light inside the back room of the pharmacy where the Assyrian lay dying. I thought of his loved ones having to come to claim the body, and how long it must have took to smear away all that blood and sinew and brain—how that image must have stayed with the loved one forever. I thought of the Assyrian’s family driving out to the cemetery to put flowers on his grave. What if he had a little brother or sister, or even kids of his own? I thought of them growing up without a father.

  Maybe Lil Pat deserved to be in there.

  CHAPTER 15

  LINCOLN

  WE KNEW DAD had a tough job. Shit could get extremely dangerous at any moment. He was down in a deep tunnel one day—a three-hundred-foot circular shaft bored vertically through the bedrock. It rains all day when you’re that deep; endless water cascading down the stone, and the sky is just a small blue circle above. They were raising forms for the foundation of a small structure, and one of his laborers, Jose, realized he’d forgotten his lunch pail behind the eight-foot plywood wall that they’d just stood and fastened. They both climbed up, and Jose pointed it out in-between the wooden structure and the rough, wet stone. A series of coil rods rigged into the rock-face sat horizontally, plugged into the wall on two-foot centers. It was all kicked to hell with 2X4s, too.

  Dad decided to climb down for it. It’d only take a minute, and as foreman, he’d rather it’d been him that got hurt doing something stupid than his best laborer. He climbed the form and shimmied himself in, head first, on an angle so his hands would reach the lunch pail first. It was narrow enough to breathe, but not enough to move quickly. He’d just reached down and grabbed the handle of the red and white plastic pail. He was six-feet deep at the head. His tan boots were still way up by the opening. The ever-present water slid down the stone and slipped under his rain gear, coolly slicking his back. Suddenly, there was a short burst from a foghorn, and he remembered they were setting off blasting caps on site #2, which was a hundred yards north, down a tunnel. He knew there’d be twelve dynamite bursts, and he knew he was fucked.

  The thunderous booms from the erupting dynamite layered up on themselves. The echoing reverberation swelled into the shaft and ballooned up to the blue sky. At first, his heart patter accelerated. He struggled to breathe. He twisted and fought what he knew was inevitable. At the seventh blast, he’d given up on trying to twist upright. He braced. The shale, clay, and stone broke above him along the circular shelf face. He knew it was coming, and just when he was sure his pulmonary valve would explode, he gripped a coil rod and breathed deeply. His heart slowed to a hard thump. His vision brightened. All around him grew vibrant and magnified: the oily, brownish-gray thread of the rod next to his pulsing, hairy hand; the grainy, tannish-brown of the many-layered wood slivers of the sheet of plywood. The stone and clay descended and plummeted until it clapped on his legs and side. He was perfectly calm. Then, nothing—a soundless, pitch-black void.

  Before the cave-in was even finished, the seven-man crew all stood atop the form. They dug ferociously, clawing the dirt and stone and mud with their fingers and hammers. They gripped the coil rods and bent them by hand. One of them leapt down, snagged a stake-mall, and slung it up to another, who caught it and swung down viciously in one motion. He banged the coil rods and opened a path to him. Dad was a feared boss, but his savage intensity toward the work made him revered. The way those men urgently dug him out and had him hoisted on the deck within a minute—I guess you could call that respect, or loyalty, or even something more.

  When he told me the story, he said he had a nice little pocket of air to breath—that is wasn’t that bad. But then, I asked Jose a decade or so later while we took lunch break under a bridge way out in Willow Springs. He shut his tattered lunch pail and got real quiet. He cleared his throat of something. His brow creased, and his deep, wrinkled eyes dampened. He shook his head and said, “When we get your Poppa out, he is unconscious. It was very bad.”

  Within minutes, Dad came to. They’d lowered the big metal box down with the long iron cable of the boom crane and readied to lift him out to an inbound ambulance, but he refused to go. When his men urged him, he shouted, “I’M NOT GOING ANY-FUCKING-WHERE! WE GOT CONCRETE AT 1:30 GODDAMNIT!” They all sighed—relieved he was his old miserable self again. He grinned and started to crackup, which broke ’em all into joyful hysterics. Finally, he got his shit together and slung his tool belt on. Then, he climbed back in the very same crevasse he’d been buried in, bent the coil rods back straight and true, and replaced the ones he couldn’t. Then, he re-kicked the wall, and they poured at 1:30 sharp. And they made it home in time to eat dinner with their families—their sons, and daughters, and wives who didn’t know a thing about it and couldn’t ever have understood.

  But when each of my father’s sons grew into manhood, we did understand, and we loved him with that very same visceral savagery.

  •

  CLARK IS A SNAKE of a street. There’s no sense of order to it. It leaps out of a grassy field next to the railroad tracks at Cermak, then slips through downtown, past the Federal Building, and shoots by that crazy Picasso sculpture and City Hall and the location of the St. Valentine’s massacre, past Wrigley Field and the heart of Chicago music: the Metro. Then, it roams north-northwest at its own slithering trajectory creating calamitous intersections and mocking the grid of the city. They named it after the Lewis and Clark expedition because it’s an ancient Black Hawk tribal path where many a bloody battle took place; their ghosts haunt it with a mad fury. Our McDonald’s is on Clark, just past Bryn Mawr. A block north, Clark overtakes Ashland and drops it a few blocks up, leaving it as nothing more than a side street. Just after that, and exactly seven miles from the center of the city, Clark glides past a statue of Abraham Lincoln, sitting in the park with his back to Thorndale. Then, Clark rides north, strong, and dies at Howard Street right at Chicago’s north pole. The parking lot of the McDonald’s feeds out onto Ashland to the west and Clark to the east, connecting two of the great arterial streets of the city.

  Angel had a beef with this shorty Moe named DeAndre ’cause he called Angel a bitch during summer session at Pierce. So when school let out, it was “On like Donkey Kong.” We waited on the side of the McDonald’s, silently, passing a Marlboro Light back and forth. Ryan pinched his bright blue and purple collared Guess shirt at the chest and fanned himself, jostling his thin gold rope chain—the only two remnants of his cut of the weed money. Angel leaned against the McDonald’s wall and gazed steadily across the lot at the huge, windowless, red-bricked edifice. It had an old, paint-on 7 Up ad that looked like somebody had started to it sand-blast off and given up halfway through. A hot pool of emotion churned inside me. The fear that Angel’d get whooped, then the rest of these bastards’d jump in, and that we’d be on our backs bleeding again. BB’s laughter trickled through my memory. The panic swelled until bright flashes pulsed in my cranium. Run, Motherfucker! RUN THE FUCK AWAY FROM HERE! But there was this cool, magnetic force holding me right there. Then it clicked: I was trapped. No way out. Accept it, motherfucker. They’re coming out here, and it’s going down. You better be in and all the fucking way. A growl popped and grumbled up in my throat. I squared with Angel. “You ready!?” I snarled. He yawned in response and kept his long gaze across the way.

&nbs
p; The side door of the McDonald’s opened, and they filed out. DeAndre in front with the rest trailing in a loose line like a platoon headed into the jungle. There were seven dudes, all our age and younger, and three girls. DeAndre dropped his McDonald’s cup on the blacktop as he led them away from us and across the lot. When BB got beside it, he hopped up and stomped it, so the plastic lid and straw popped off. The soda-browned ice gushed out and instantly morphed and melted on the sun-baked pavement.

  The afternoon traffic flicked past on Ashland and Clark. The wind gusts doubled up on each other. DeAndre stopped across the lot where there were a few empty parking spaces. He handed his backpack to a fat girl in a baby-blue t-shirt, then he looked down and chuckled. He was a few shades darker than the rest, and there was a line etched into his hair that started at his widow’s peak and traced across and over his scalp like the trajectory of a meteor that impacted somewhere behind his ear.

  Angel gazed steadily at DeAndre. It was like he stared straight into him and if he peered long enough, whatever was there would disintegrate. DeAndre looked up at Angel and smirked. Angel grinned back slyly like he knew a secret nobody else knew.

  “Come on, motherfucker!” I said, shoving Angel. He sighed. Then, he pushed his back off the wall and started toward DeAndre. The group whooped and hollered as we fanned out at his sides. Angel walked cool—like he was stepping into a party where everybody knew his name. As he got close, the group parted and opened a path. Angel smoothly glided toward DeAndre, loose and limber. DeAndre stood with his hands open and spread out at his sides. He raised his chin high. His eyes bugged out. Angel stepped into range, never breaking his stroll, then he just swung right from the hip—deliberate, straight, and true. Angel’s fist splashed into DeAndre’s upturned jaw and snapped his whole head sideways. A shocked wail rose up around them. DeAndre’s knees instantly buckled. He lunged forward and grasped Angel’s t-shirt. Angel stepped back. Then, he slammed both hands down on DeAndre’s grip and broke it. DeAndre stumbled forward and launched wide haymakers. Angel backed up straight and deflected the punches easily with his shoulders and forearms. DeAndre bulled forward. Angel reeled backward across the lot snapping quick punches that bounced off DeAndre’s head until he got to a parked yellow Nova. The back of Angel’s legs butted against it, and he toppled onto the car’s hood. DeAndre leapt on top of Angel and straddled him. He sat up and throttled vicious punches that penetrated Angel’s guard. Angel’s head bounced off the sheet metal.