The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  •

  HYACINTH, TEETEE, AND A FEW of the Good Girls were headed to the beach, and she invited me to come with. It was the last of the nice weather and probably the last swim of the season.

  We walked it, only about a mile down Bryn Mawr to Osterman Beach. When we got to the little arched patch of sand, we settled on a flower-patterned towel she’d brought. A bunch of little kids were out with their mothers, scampering around in the sand. Long rows of high-rise apartments rose out of the shoreline to the north with their vacant balconies stacked up like ice cube trays facing out toward the water. I wondered if you could see to Indiana from up there.

  We laid on our bellies facing the water and held hands while the others ran in and splashed around in the shallows. The deep-brown skin of her forearm stood out against mine, which was tanned by the summer but unmistakably white. Her skin seemed dark like a Mexican’s, and it got me thinking about the migration of Man—the ice bridge connecting Asia and America, and how Eskimos were kind of in-between Orientals and Mexicans, and why the hell they say Columbus discovered America? And about all the distance and shades of color that separated Hyacinth’s and my skin, and how it wasn’t really much anyway.

  The waves rolled in slowly then fizzled near the shore. They bubbled over the damp sand then slurped back. The spotty clouds moved steadily, and the sun beamed through the openings and warmed our skin. We both had a dusting of sweat in the fine hair of our forearms, though she had almost no hair on hers. A golden sheen blazed on her skin from the suntan oil. We clung to each other’s hands with a steady, calm pressure, then we alternated from folded palms to spliced fingers.

  National Geographic had done a thing on the images coming back from Hubble—all these far-off clouds called nebulae. I’d read about how when a star dies sometimes, it just shrinks to nothing. Other times, it explodes in what’s called a supernova, then it makes these things called nebulae.

  “They’re pretty,” she said, sliding her fingertip across the glossy page. Her pink nails matched the purple and red clouds.

  “Yeah, they’re cool, aren’t they?” I replied, glancing at her pouty lips in my periphery.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said as she flipped the page to the next full spread of a nebula. “Then what happens?”

  “Well, you see that?” I said, pointing at a little incandescent white dot. It’d formed in the midst of a mountainous, billowing purple cloud that spanned the entire page. “That’s a new star forming. It’s like a baby star.”

  “Aw, that’s so cute… A baby star.” We both giggled and turned and kissed. Her lips were wet and hot and slippery. We kissed for a while—no way to measure the time. Everything ceased to exist. Just the smell and touch, my heart flickering, and the pulsing all over. When we stopped, she folded her hands in front of her and placed her chin atop them, then looked out to the water. The breeze played in the curled strands of her hair. Her lips were damp and swollen from kissing.

  “I feel bad for him ’cause everybody picks on him ’cause he’s different,” she said as she watched TeeTee splash around in the water. His limp-wristed gestures and high-pitched squeal inspired a scowl from an obese mother in a dark one-piece bathing suit.

  “But he’s not so different. He’s a very good and caring friend.” She turned her head so her cheek rested on her hands, and her hair feathered in the breeze. Her dark eyes met mine. “Whenever I have trouble, he’s there to talk with me and just listen, ya know?”

  I thought of all the times I’d burst into laughter with the guys at TeeTee’s expense, and how we used to throw rocks at him when we were little and make him run home crying. Maybe some people were just born like that—look at Boystown. Think all of those guys just prefer having sex with guys instead of girls? Like it’s some kinda fad that’s gonna pass like frickin’ bell bottoms or some shit?

  “He’s always been nice,” I said. “I remember when Rose would get her migraines, he’d always come by a few hours later to check on her. He didn’t have to do that.”

  She smiled at me, then looked back out at the water. The lake was suddenly enormous in my mind, and I thought about the astronauts looking down at us from space as we slowly spun past. And then I thought about how fast we were moving—hundreds of miles per hour. We spun around like a top. I was suddenly dizzy. I blinked and watched the seagulls cut across the blue sky like tiny dots and thought of the day I caught that seagull with my lure in the center of the stardock at Montrose Harbor. How the bird flapped, twisted, and coiled itself in the line, and how Da had cut it free. How the bird flew away, and how Da was free now, too—free from the cancer and all the tortures of life, smiling down on us all from above.

  There was a commotion, and a little blond-haired Polish kid with a big cube of a head ran up and slapped a Mexican boy in the face. Then, he grabbed a little plastic shovel out of his hand.

  “Ow!” I laughed as the blond kid’s ma ran over. She swore at him in Polish, then grabbed the shovel out of his hand and dropped it at the sobbing Mexican boy’s feet. She drug her son away by his wrist, slapping his bottom.

  “A little badass,” Hyacinth said, raising her chin.

  “Yep.”

  The Mexican boy squealed and writhed in his mother’s lap.

  “Ow, poor little baby…,” Hyacinth said as we giggled. “Why do boys have to hit?”

  “Well if you got hit like that, you’d want to hit back, too,” I answered.

  “I think I would just cry.”

  “Well, we can’t cry.”

  “Yes you can. Guys can cry.”

  “Naw, if we cry, then we’re gonna cry more and get hurt more, too.”

  “That’s not how it should be.”

  “Maybe, but it’s everywhere I look.”

  “There’s more to life than fighting,” she said, brushing her hand through my hair at the base of my skull. A flicker of pin prickles ran down my neck and back. “There’s more to life than that, and there’s more in you than that.”

  “Think so?”

  She leaned in and kissed me on my cheek, then she lightly bit my earlobe. I turned onto my back and brought her into my arms. Above, the sky had cleared some, and the blue was deep and vibrant. The clouds stayed back for a while, and something began to loosen from around my chest and stomach like knots unwinding—the wires I’d only just noticed constricting there. And I held her close like she was all I had in the whole world. Then, I said it, like it wasn’t me, like someone a little ways away was whispering it. I felt it in my lungs like a rumble.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, like it was the continuation of one sentence.

  We watched the clouds. They separated and combined and dissipated as they slowly drifted past.

  •

  MONTEFF STARTED SEEING one of the Good Girls named Annie Rogers, who was a little blonde from a few blocks over. She and Hyacinth were downtown shopping on State Street. They called, and we set up a double date to walk around down there and then go to the movies. Monteff and I jumped on the Red Line at Bryn Mawr.

  “You been contemplating any more of that philosophy?” I asked. The train knifed through the dark high-rises of Edgewater into Uptown.

  “Always am,” Monteff said as he reclined in his seat. “How about you? I heard you been getting into astrophysics and all.”

  “Yeah…” I flung my feet up on the empty bench in front of me. “You know that gospel supposed to be written by Jesus? Said lift up a stone, and you’ll find me there and all that? Like God was in everything, in the air in you in me.”

  “Yeah I heard about it.”

  A bum down at the other side of the train car muttered to himself angrily.

  “There’s this religion, or philosophy, called Pantheism. It’s the same as that gospel, basically. And when I learn about those things—the Sun and the Universe—I feel like I’m learning about God. Except
I don’t call it God anymore, ya know?”

  “Damn, that’s deep. You should keep searching into that, Joe, ’cause it really means something to you. You can understand it in a way most a’ those dweebs can’t—just memorizing it and stuff like that outta a book to ace a test. You reasoned what you know. You know what I mean, Joe?”

  I nodded.

  “Keep at that, brotha.” He looked me in the eyes.

  “I will, man. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s not just the religion stuff either, man. I feel like the more I know about the Universe, the more I know about who we are an’ shit.”

  “Know the Universe, and you shall come to know thy self.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One a those Greek mothafuckas said it, but backwards.”

  “It’s good.”

  The girls waited for us at the top of the stairs of the Lake St. Red Line stop. We switched to the Brown Line at Belmont and snuck up on them and scared ’em. It was a nice, chill time. I was almost starting to believe shit would really cool off for once.

  CHAPTER 21

  MA

  THE THINGS YOU DO eventually catch up with you.

  I came downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast one Saturday. The dry, yellow leaves of the tree in the backyard helicoptered slowly to the ground. Brown, yellow, and red trees rose up over the garages and peeked out between the houses across the alley like the whole neighborhood had lost its complexion.

  Ma made me some French toast that was crisp on the surface and soggy and cool on the inside, but I was so hungry it didn’t matter. I slathered them with cool syrup and sliced ’em up. Ma had the whole kitchen table covered by the two-fold Sunday Trib, and there were stacks of the colorful coupon brochures everywhere. The Sun Times sat down by where my Dad’d had breakfast earlier. The ends of the one-fold paper were crumpled and soaked with the water that hung in beads on everything he did in the kitchen—plates and cups and pans pulled out of the cabinets and rewashed thoroughly.

  As I finished my French toast, our dog, Kelly, growled, then she scampered to the back gangway gate. She barked viciously and clanked off the wooden gate. Some invisible bum or kid or neighbor passed through the alley.

  “A boy died from the neighborhood,” Ma said as she looked down at the paper.

  “What?”

  “He was your age.” She raised her eyes to mine. “It says here he went to Senn.”

  “Huh, really?” I dropped my eyes back to my plate.

  “He got into a fight and got beat so bad he slipped into a coma,” she said. “His name was José Alverez.”

  My heart sank. It had to be that PG3 from a few weeks back. A tremor shot through my shoulders.

  “I wonder if Angel or Ryan knew him,” she said, looking up at me.

  “Naw,” I said quickly. “I don’t think so.”

  “He only lived a few blocks from us.” She looked back at the paper. “Right on the other side of Ridge.”

  Silence filled the room, and I quickly finished my orange juice. My hands trembled.

  “They say it might be gangs who did it,” she said.

  “No kidding?” I didn’t look up.

  “It’s so sad, isn’t it, honey? A young boy like that.” She slid the paper and spun it so it was right in front of me. “He had his whole life ahead of him.”

  I looked at the picture. It was a school portrait with the fuzzy background. He had a square forehead and short, slicked-back, black hair. He didn’t look like no gangbanger, except for that smile. That sly grin, like he was getting something over on someone. Like he was inside the center of some nasty joke looking out at the world.

  Then, I realized I knew the guy.

  “José! Shit! He went to Greg’s for a little bit! Yeah, damn! Until they kicked him out for stealing some books from the library.” I planted my palms on my forehead. “What the hell he wanted with those books I could never figure out,” I laughed.

  “Joseph,” Ma scolded.

  “What? Naw, he was an OK kid. I liked him. I can’t believe it.”

  It all washed over me. They killed José.

  I barely knew him. He had a little sister that stayed at Greg’s after he got kicked out, and I remember seeing her in the hall crying that day. A skinny little second grader with a pink scrunchy tied in her dark, straight hair. Not only in a new school, but now in a new school where everybody knew her brother was a thief. Wonder how she feels now. Something sharp seemed to pierce my stomach, and it let out a slow grumble. I gazed at my empty plate. The brown syrup sitting atop the glossy, white ceramic plate reflected the room, all murky and dark like a dream.

  “Did you hear anything about that fight?” I felt her eyes on me as I stared back at José’s face. Who woulda known José grew up to be a PG3? It must have been all over me. My whole body felt heavy. It felt like it was sinking, like slime, like mucky rain water finding the gutter. “Joseph!” She yelled. “If you know anything about what happened to that boy, you need to go to the police!”

  “Ma, I don’t know anything, alright?” I shot to my feet and stomped out of the room, leaving my syrup-streaked plate beside the picture of José and Ma all alone in the kitchen.

  •

  I WALKED OVER to Angel’s house.

  I knocked on his front door, and he parted the light-yellow drapes of his bedroom window and looked out. Still in bed, his hair was all clumpy and matted.

  “Man, what time is it, bro?” he groaned through the open slit of the window.

  “Man, we gotta talk, now,” I said with all the urgency rattling out of my throat.

  “What?” he said as he sat up and met my eyes. “Alright, I’ll be out in a second.”

  Angel came out of his front door a few minutes later and drug his plastic palm comb through his shock of hair, then knotted it with a small black rubber band.

  “That PG3 died, man,” I said as we walked down his front steps.

  “What?”

  “It’s in the paper.”

  He froze like a raccoon caught in the headlights of a surging car. “Oh shit,” Angel said as he walked over and leaned against a thin birch tree. He gagged a few times, then spit. He bowed his head, trying to wrap his mind around all of it.

  We walked down to the corner and got the paper out of the little metal stand. Angel read the small article in silence as I lit a cigarette and handed it to him.

  “Oh, man, dat’s the one,” Angel said, pointing to the picture. “The one who started the whole thing…”

  “Was it the one Tank hit?” I asked.

  “Oh my God, yeah…,” Angel looked up at me. “He fucking killed him. Holy shit.”

  •

  WE WALKED OVER to Ryan’s. He was out on his front steps working on his tags in a ragged spiral notebook.

  “What? What’s up?” he said as we walked up the creaky porch steps in silence.

  Angel handed him the paper, folded open to the article. Ryan snatched it and grimaced down at it.

  “Yeah, man, so what?” Ryan said, shoving it back into Angel’s hand.

  “It’s that PG3 from the other day, man,” Angel urged.

  “I know, man,” Ryan said. His jaws snapped sharply.

  “Tank fucking killed him,” Angel whined.

  “Shhhhhhh.” Ryan lifted his pudgy palm toward Angel.

  We walked toward the concrete wall at the end of the dead-end street and stepped over a furry, black streak on the concrete—a dead cat. It was flattened to a thin film. The bugs were already out, and its tiny bones were like twigs sticking up through the fur. The profile of the cat’s crushed skull showed its fangs spreading open in one last frozen hiss. Ryan led us down toward the dead-end wall. The concrete had crumbled, and rusted rebar showed through where vertical chunks had fallen. He glanced around, then stopped.

  “First off… We all fucking killed him. I kicke
d every one of those flakes in the head at least twice, man,” Ryan sneered. “We were all stomping him.”

  “That kid was out when Tank hit him,” Angel said. “You saw how he fell.”

  “Man, whatever,” Ryan snapped sharply. “The cops already been around here looking for Tank. He’s hidin’ up in Rogers Park, I think.”

  “The kid is dead, man,” Angel remarked, emotion trickling into his voice.

  “Man, so what?” Ryan shouted. “That flake never shoulda kicked shit off with the Peoples, man. They shoulda known betta than fuckin’ with us. We run dat fuckin’ park.”

  “Man, shit is gonna get crazy now, man,” Angel sighed, then gathered himself. His neck strained pink.

  “Man, this is how it’s always been, man. Mickey’s killed like three PG3s by hisself,” Ryan replied, flashing his emerald eyes at me. “Remember when they went to war with them Assyrians?”

  “I remember,” I said flatly. The Assyrian floating in that red pool suddenly flashed in my mind.

  “Man, either you’re down for your crown, or you ain’t,” Ryan said, shooting his eyes at Angel.

  There was a pause. Angel looked across to the point where Ashland and Clark come together. The weekend traffic buzzed past.

  “Man, you know I’m down, man…,” Angel said, looking away. “It’s just… Goddamn, man! I didn’t think it was gonna be like this.” His voice cracked as he put both his hands on his head, contemplating it—the guaranteed repercussions, the hundred or more newly sworn enemies. Fear swirled between the three of us, menacing and cold.

  “Well, you better get used to it,” Ryan said, looking away.

  Angel crouched down, still gripping his head like it was about to explode. “It’s too late now, anyways,” he whispered to himself. Then, he stood back up.

  “But, man, we got to get ready,” I said. “Them PG3s are gonna go nuts now.”

  “Shit, they already did,” Ryan said. “They shot up the block last night.”