The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  “We got a gat, man. What’s the problem?” Ryan asked, disgusted. His knees bobbed up happily as he sat, like he’d been waiting for this shit his whole life.

  •

  LATER THAT WEEK, I was at the dinner table eating. Ma had her little black and white TV on the counter. The volume blared over the clicks and claps of forks and knives and the steady chomping of mashed potatoes, roast beef, and peas. I’d tuned everything out when suddenly the sound of the TV locked in on me from across the room.

  “Violence strikes again at Senn High School on Chicago’s far northside. Authorities say that at 1:20 this afternoon, Thomas Leaman was shot to death in the school’s gymnasium.”

  They showed a picture of Chief’s face, and an electric shock gushed through me. For some reason, I thought they’d caught Chief for the shooting a few days back. Then, it all sunk in: Chief’s name was Thomas Leaman, and he was dead. It was then that I realized I was standing at the kitchen table with my palms flat on the smooth oak. My parents and sisters all stared at me. I cleared my throat and sat back down and jammed my fork into my mashed potatoes. I kept my eyes on my plate.

  “Don’t worry, it wasn’t Angel or Ryan. It was just some gang shooting,” Ma said.

  “Ahh, yeah, it just scared me is all,” I replied quickly.

  I stuffed those potatoes in my mouth and jammed huge hunks of the roast beef down my throat as fast as humanly possible. My father’s eyes beat down on me. I got up and put my plate in the sink. Then, I walked down the hall to the phone in the front room when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and Angel was there in some blue jeans and a black hoodie. He was pale. The porch light above him struck a dark, oval-shaped shadow on his forehead like a black halo. I opened the screen door and walked out onto the front porch. A chilly breeze sent goosebumps up my arms.

  “What’s goin’ on, man?” I whispered.

  “They got ’em,” Angel answered. His eyes and face had a strange stillness. “Shot him in the chest, then in the head when he went down.”

  “Let’s walk, man. Come on.” I led him down the porch steps. He swayed down them. “Man, you been drinkin’?”

  “Naw, man, I’m just high.” He straightened up. A truck down at Ashland blew its horn long and loud.

  “The GDs got’ em?” I stepped down the sidewalk towards Ashland.

  “Yeah, dude. Ran into the gym blastin’,” Angel said. “I heard the shots from the other side of the buildin’. At first, they said it was D-Ray.”

  Suddenly, it struck me; they fucking annihilated each other. Then, I shivered that away and tried to assure myself.

  “D-Ray’s dead.”

  “I know, but that’s what they said. He looked exactly like D-Ray.” Angel looked hollowed out.

  “Fuck, maybe it wasn’t him after all?” I sighed.

  “No, it was. Everybody knows D-Ray’s dead. Hell, we were fighting all day, an’ they kept screaming, ’This for D-Ray!’”

  “No shit? What the fuck was it, D-Ray’s brother?”

  “I don’t fucking know, man.” He shivered.

  “So you guys were fightin’ all day?”

  “Man, they were chasin’ us, then we was chasin’ them. I think Ryan pulled the .25.” He sighed.

  “What?! He’s been brining dat shit up there?”

  “He needs it,” Angel said. “They’re gunnin’ for us.”

  “So you was fightin’ all day?”

  “Naw, man.” He looked away. “I took off.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Fuck that place.” He took a small plastic bag out of his pocket. “Fuck all this shit.” He took his school I.D. and shoveled out a bump of the powder.

  “You like dat cane, huh?”

  “What? Ah, yeah,” he muttered.

  An old man stepped onto his front porch across the street and eyed us suspiciously.

  “Man, I’m about ready to try dat shit,” I said, watching him snort the bump.

  “Naw, man, don’t.” He put the bag away quickly.

  “Whatever, man,” I said, shrugging. “Think we should stay off the sills tonight?”

  “Naw, man, I got some people comin’ through right now.” He walked to his sill.

  “Where’s the piece?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Ryan’s got it.”

  “Where the fuck’s Ryan?” I growled.

  He shrugged as we both took our seats in our sills. His head bobbed and nodded like he’d drank ten beers. Traffic was slow on Ashland. A woman walked past in a brown Jewel uniform hugging a paper sack against her side. The peace on the street was in bold contrast to my insides. Chief…I never liked the motherfucker, and I wasn’t pretending to then, but God damn the bastards had killed his ass in broad daylight in the center of a packed gymnasium. What the fuck was stopping them D’s from strolling over here and mopping us up? I felt like they would come at any second. I listened for it. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run and hide somewhere where none of this shit could ever find me. I wanted to go back to the beginning, but I couldn’t even tell where it was. Was it me going heads up with Leroy? Was it Lil Pat killing that fucking Assyrian? His first hit of H? His first scrap? They said the old man was bad, too—as bad as they come. It was like I was locked into some rollercoaster, some spiraling acceleration propelling me towards something. Something horrifying and inescapable.

  After a while, Wacker’s brown I-ROCZ with gold racing stripes pulled up. Angel swayed towards the street. There were two ladies inside. Both of them had tall New Wave hairdos and giant hoop earrings.

  “Hey, cutie,” Charlene yelled in her screechy voice from the driver’s side.

  “They didn’t get you today, did they?” the other girl shouted to me as she leaned across the cab with her face near Charlene’s.

  “You got it?” Charlene asked Angel. He stepped up to her and leaned into the window. They whispered.

  She opened the door and pulled her seat forward a little, then Angel squeezed into the back seat.

  “I’ll be right back, bro,” Angel said with that same emptiness in his face. I knew he wouldn’t be back at all. I raised my hands out, palms up, in a plea for some form of sanity, but there wasn’t none. I walked through the foggy tunnel towards Ryan’s house. There was a stony quiet at the Dead-End-Docks. As I got close to Ryan’s house, T-Money appeared in front of his apartment building with his hands buried in the pockets of his black hoodie. His face was still, and his gray eyes were stone-cold. Then, he stepped back into his gangway, and for some reason, I knew he’d be dead soon, too. There was no jail cell waiting for him, no revelation and escape from the life. Nothing but a pool of blood on some sidewalk. I didn’t feel any sadness. Nothing in his being pleaded for pity. There was fortitude in him, a resolve; a simple resolve to die a real motherfucker, and that was all he was living for. A true soldier to a soulless war.

  Ryan wasn’t home. His Ma opened the door in a dirty pink robe that didn’t quite close around her wide stomach and chest. Her eyes were still and bloodshot behind her large brown-framed glasses. “He’s not here,” she sneered, drunk. Her spiced rum breath was hot and sour in my face. Even the dogs were solemn, mourning. Bear laid on his belly atop the couch with his wide head resting on his paws. The white glare from the TV flashed in his face as he looked at me with his eyelids sagging.

  I went home.

  •

  WHEN I WALKED IN, Ma called me into the living room. “Well, you better try!” she said angrily into the receiver as I walked up to her. She handed me the phone. “Your brother wants to talk with you,” she said, looking me sternly in the eyes before walking out of the room.

  “What’s up, Pat? Are you ok?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, kid. I’m, I just had to talk to you. I…” He sighed. “You need to know… He needs to know…” he muttered to himself. “I shot heroin because I done things, bad things— things t
hat haunt me every day. I have nightmares. I have anxiety attacks. My heart starts racing for no reason. I shake and tremble when I’m in a crowded room,” he whispered. I heard the occupants of the day room chattering in the background. “I’m afraid someone is gonna kill me all the time. I think of killing people, people who did very bad things to me.” His voice strained with emotion. “Drugs, they… they took all that away. Heroin, it was like nothing bad ever happened to me in my whole life. I finally felt peaceful. No pain, no hate, no fear, no anxiety. Jesus, I can’t even talk about it without itching for it all over, Joe. You can’t… You can’t end up like—” The phone muffled and clanged against something, then it clattered to the hook, and the line went dead.

  “Pat… Pat, you there?”

  CHAPTER 29

  PIGEONS

  THE LAST TIME I made love with her was in the garage on a Saturday in the middle of March. You know the saying, ‘In like a lion, out like a lamb’? Well, in Chicago, the lion keeps roaring all the way into April. This night, it roared in the form of freezing rain that clattered atop the wide concrete slab of the backyard. I’d brought this old brown hide blanket out there that was made out of a steer or a buffalo or some kinda beast. I got a bottle of high-end wine—$15. High-end for me back then, anyway. We had the little radiator-style electric space heater cooking, but it was still cold. The lights were out, so I had two tall white candles burning; the wax beaded down them and onto the little table in front of the couch. The scent of her vanilla lotion swirled and twisted around the pungent red wine on her lips and her breath. It exuded from her in a thick steam in my face. The candlelight flickered burnt-orange on her calm cheeks, and her eyes were like two bright amber embers. Her lips were wet and heavy with emotion, and there was the sopping elasticity of me inside her. She panted in my ear, moaning in an impassioned agony. Then, the explosion like an incandescent, white flare struck inside her and me. Then, trembling, trembling. Her tears slid down her face onto mine and sizzled like beads of lava.

  “I love you, Hyacinth.”

  “I love you, too, Joe.”

  I rolled onto the lumpy couch beside her as steam sifted and streamed up off our sweaty foreheads. Our breath trailed and feathered up like smoke into the bare rafters of the garage. We laid there ’til our breathing slowed.

  “Joe.”

  “What?” I pulled the coarse, furry blanket up higher onto us.

  “You think you’re ever gonna stop all of that trouble, you’re always in?” The four small windows that faced into the backyard were all fogged up and glowed white. The freezing rain roared on, pattering the glass and thrumming atop the roof.

  “Yeah… Yeah… One day. One day it’ll all stop.”

  “You think it might happen soon?”

  “I hope so.” I kissed her temple.

  “Me too… Me too.”

  •

  IT WAS AROUND THEN that we found out about Monteff. I’ve lost people in my life, but that was one of the ones I just never got over. He was just a good person, a bright soul. Even now, sometimes I think of him in there. Some people just aren’t meant to be in places like that—locked away inside where the weak are preyed on and tormented and even tortured. When I think of him in there, I want to reach out to him somehow and tell him, ‘Kid, if you’re gonna survive this, you have to cut out those things, those very tender things: your compassion for others, for the weaker ones. You need to cut all of that out of your heart, and hope that it catches up with you somewhere down the line.’

  But maybe some people just can’t do that.

  •

  I CAUGHT UP WITH RYAN the next night over at the sills. He was decked out in a brand new Celtics jersey over a gray sweatsuit. A diamond flickered in his earlobe, and a thick white gold herringbone chain glimmered in the lamp light. Business was good as usual. There wasn’t much to say about Chief; he was dead. The war was raging on at Senn, and I knew Mickey would make Ryan the new chief any day now. There was so much I wanted to say to Ryan, but I knew he wouldn’t listen anyway. But it made me feel better to see him again. Ryan was my oldest and dearest friend. We’d been through so much, but the silence that had slowly built and surrounded him had spread outward, and there was just no way to cut through it. No way to breach it.

  I wanted to tell him, ‘This shit’s gonna be the end of us. I feel like I’m losing my soul. I feel like I’ve lost so much already. I’ll never be a TJO, and I don’t want to be one. You scare me, man. I don’t know when or how, but you’re gonna kill somebody. If I stick around long enough, I’m gonna kill someone, too. I’m probably going to hell or something like it, and so are you. We’ve got to pay for all that we’ve done.’ But nothing came out. The whole world was resting on his shoulders and mine as we slowly fed the neighborhood the same poison that’d gotten my own brother exiled in earth’s living purgatory and his father the same.

  As the night wore on, Angel stumbled up to the sills wearing an opened red and yellow flannel shirt. His upper lip curtained his top row of teeth, and the bottom lip hung low in a loose ‘O.’ His eyes were distant. His shoulders slumped—every joint in his being languorous. There was some kind of wet spot on his undershirt that I kept seeing in slashes of as his flannel swayed with his shoulders.

  “This motherfucker,” Ryan said.

  “What the fuck… You been drinkin’?” I asked with a smile.

  “Yeah,” Angel said, sniffling back a clear drip that hung from his nose.

  “What’d you get? Some cane?” I asked, looking at him sideways.

  Angel giggled. His eyes were glossy, vacant.

  “That ain’t cane, man. Look at him!” Ryan growled at Angel. “He’s fallin’ asleep.” Ryan’s neck and head blossomed red.

  “You fucking with that shit?” I asked Angel, still looking at him sideways.

  “Naw,” Angel said, smiling. “I just got it mixed up with that last 8-ball.”

  There was a silence as I looked at Ryan, shocked. Ryan’s chin sucked into his neck. A vile grin slashed across his mouth.

  “It’s cool, man. I don’t even like it,” Angel said.

  “You fucking idiot,” I said slowly.

  Ryan’s torso swelled below his Celtics jersey. He bobbed on the toes slightly, then his flabby fist slapped into Angel’s jaw. His jaw compressed into his throat. Angel slowly fell away with his eyes closed, a slight smirk on his lips, hands limply at his sides like he was playing—like he was falling backwards expecting someone to catch him. No one was there except the cold sidewalk. I lunged and reached out to try and snag his shirt, but it was too late. He fell flat out, and his skull splashed and bounced on the concrete. His eyes retracted up into his skull and flipped like two movie reels hitting their ends. A hum came from his mouth. Blood pooled under his head.

  “You’re through now, motherfucker!” Ryan shouted.

  “Ah, shit,” I said, crouching down and cradling Angel’s wet head.

  “You son of a bitch,” Ryan snarled, pacing back and forth. “One thing. You couldn’t do one thing for me.”

  Angel’s eyes were half open, still flickering.

  “You gonna be alright, man,” I whispered to him.

  It shocked me that Ryan had that much pop in him. None of us’d ever put anyone clean out. I’d never known who’d win between all of us heads up, and to see Angel dealt with so easily had me embarrassed for him. It had me wondering if I was all wrong about my speculation and if Ryan really was the baddest with his hands after all.

  I saw a light come on in a house across the street. “Ryan, man. Take off, you’re blowing up the spot.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Ryan shouted.

  “Go on. Get the stash, and get the fuck outta here,” I whispered. Ryan hesitated, grimacing. “NOW, MAN!”

  Ryan jogged across the street, then squatted down, grabbed the stash, stuffed it in his sweatpants pocket, and started walking down the arteri
al alley towards the Bryn Mawr house. A squad car pulled into the alley in front of him, and he froze in the bright beam as the car came to a halt.

  “Be cool, man,” I whispered to myself. I watched Ryan and the dark figures in the squad car staring at each other. I knew the squad could see me and Angel on the sidewalk—him bleeding and me holding his head up. I tried to play it off. I smiled and grabbed him by the arm. I tried to pull him to his feet, but he was still out. His head slumped limply.

  The cop flicked a switch in the squad, and its blue and red strobe lights twirled alight. Without hesitation, Ryan broke down my alley out of sight. The squad roared after him, strobe lights spinning. The siren careened as the wheels squealed around the corner.

  “Fuck!” I yelled. “Wake up, man! We gotta fuckin’ hide now, you asshole!” I pulled Angel up by both his arms. “Wake up!”

  Angel got to his feet, kneading the back of his head with his palm. I pulled him along towards my house by his elbow, and by the time we got half way, he had it together enough to jog. We cut through the gangway to the garage. Other sirens popped on around the neighborhood as the whole shift slowly committed to catching Ryan. I only hoped he could ditch the stash before they got him.

  I sat on a milk crate near the garage door listening until the sirens stopped, and I knew they’d snagged him. Angel was a mess. His jaw puffed and reddened where Ryan’d cracked him. He had this far off look on his face as he slouched on the couch. Finally, his eyes just slid shut, and he drifted to sleep. I watched him as the low light crept in the small windows of the garage. His mouth hung open, and his skin was like brown porcelain—calm, at peace, and pure, like a child dreaming.

  After about an hour, I woke Angel up and walked him home. We didn’t say much; he was too out of it anyway. I headed over to the house on Bryn Mawr. Wacker sat on the front porch smoking a cigarette. His thick arms flared as he saw me. His face was worn and wrinkled. The scar was more prominent now—like he’d been branded.

  “What the fuck happened?” Wacker said, standing up.