by Neal Pollack
They held her wake at Zefran's Funeral Home on Damen and 22nd Street. Masses of people came, including cousins I didn't know I had. Though I loved my aunt, especially the frijoles she used to leave me, at the wake I felt no need to cry. Mourners placed flowers on her chest, blessings delivered to her open casket. At one point a boy standing next to me, a boy that had been introduced to me as my cousin, began to cry. He turned and gave me a hug. I wasn't sure what to do. So I patted his back. "I know," I said to him. "She was a good woman." The kid raised his head and looked at me like I was at the wrong wake. Then he turned and walked away.
After the viewing we packed into cars and lined up for the funeral. The procession was too long for our family. My uncle and his daughters rode behind the hearse with my father in his black windowless work van. A few cars back, Maximillian and I rode alone in his Chevy Celebrity.
We were silent as we drove down Pershing Road. Maximillian had placed our orange FUNERAL sticker on the top passenger side of the windshield and for me it was like a sunscreen even though the day was overcast. The blinkers of the Celebrity matched our speed, the tick-over lagging as we braked, then racing when we sped to catch the car in front.
At Oak Park Avenue we slowed for a red light. Our blinkers were on. Our orange sticker displayed. We followed the car in front of us into the intersection. Suddenly a red pickup took off from the crosswalk. The pickup broke through the procession just in front of us, then continued south down Oak Park. It was a short pause, but long enough for me to consider what an asshole the pickup driver was for cutting off the procession. We were on our way to a funeral. I had that much in my head when Max threw the Celebrity into such a sharp left hand turn my temple knocked against the passenger side window.
We chased the truck for three blocks, the Celebrity's blinkers clacking so loud they seemed about to explode right through the dash. Finally the driver of the pickup pulled to the curb.
Through the rear window of the cab I could see the man jerking around. He looked out of his mind, yelling to himself. As we pulled up behind him, his shoulder heaved and he threw the truck into park. His taillights flashed to full red. He kicked open his door.
We'd stopped in front of a bank parking lot. It was the middle of the day but the lot was empty. Black screens covered the plate glass windows as if the bank was actually closed for good. Trees lined the street. I felt a million miles from home.
The truck driver slammed his door shut as Maximillian was stepping out of the Celebrity. The truck driver yelled something. He was a big man, white, potbellied. He wore a flannel shirt. His neck seemed like one big chin and his jeans looked too tight at the waist. Each one of his steps had a little bounce to it as if he had learned to walk on his toes.
The man continued yelling as Max moved forward. Maximillian didn't say a word. He simply continued to close, his feet looking small, his shoulders broad, his tight waist neat with his tucked-in dress shirt. His tie had blown up around his shoulder.
As my cousin got within arm's reach, the truck driver raised his hand and pointed to my cousin's face. His mouth was still going. He was looking down at my cousin, a heavy mean look, eyebrows pointed in, teeth showing as he screamed. It looked like he thought Max was going to second-guess, that he was going to stop and start yelling back. Max simply kept on moving, and just as the man was ending a word, drawing his mouth shut, my cousin lit into him with a flush right hand that sent the man staggering backwards. Even in the car, over the now practically dead heartbeat of the blinkers, I heard something snap. The man fell to a seated position and Maximillian bent over him and hit him three more times, solid, deep-looking punches, to the left side of the man's face. The man fell sideways and was out cold. His short arm flopped over his thick side and landed palm-up on the street.
Maximillian turned and started walking back to the car. His face was red now, swollen. He was crying. He looked like he wanted to yell, to scream, but couldn't get anything out. The Celebrity's blinkers had stopped. The car had died. I wished we were back in the procession. I wished someone had followed us, my father, or my uncle, or Stoney. I looked in my passenger side mirror. There was nothing.
ALL HAPPY FAMILIES
BY ANDREW ERVIN
Canal & Jackson
I am riding backwards on the Ann Rutledge, otherwise known as the Amtrak 304 originating out of Kansas City. I boarded in Normal, Illinois from where we departed precisely at 5:03 as scheduled. Pleasant enough ride I guess if you discount the possibility of any number of law enforcement professionals waiting for me at Union Station. They could also climb onboard at any of the five stops along the way. Shit. Local statutes require the engineer to blow the train horn more or less continuously and some college-age hottie a couple seats up is hollering into her cell phone. It frequently amazes me how few people possess even the slightest inclination toward common decency. I am writing you this letter in a composition book made by the Top Flight Co. of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It has a stitched binding, not glued, and a heavy stock cardboard cover with a black-and-white marble pattern. 100 Sheets Wide Rule. Of course this is a nonsmoking train, which I am forced to admit is beginning to cause me some small degree of consternation. Over two more hours until I get back to Chicago. Reds are in town tonight. Zambrano's first pitch at 7:05. He's currently 15-8, and his 2.64 earned run average makes him our most effective starter this year. Better even than Maddux or Prior or Wood. Without any unforeseen delays a twenty-minute cab ride from the station will have me kicked back with an Old Style by the start of the fourth. It is reasonable to expect the Cubs will already be losing by a significant margin. It is my belief that the long-term effect of noise pollution is something we are not yet able to comprehend. Approaching Pontiac now. The night we met you stabbed me with a sharpened No. 2 pencil. It happened halfway through the first meeting of our Russian lit seminar and I had to excuse myself to go to the men's room to inspect the damage. You were crying when I returned. We had never said more than one or two words to each other but I agreed to let you buy me a beer after class. Less than a month later you moved in. I never learned if the stabbing was accidental. Despite the huge production the press is going to make out of this thing it wasn't such a huge deal. You hear about these small heists, five grand here, seven grand there, but that's bullshit. I bagged eighteen thou and change once at a particular lending institution down in Champaign, but in the newspaper article the branch manager admitted just two. That kind of shit used to bother me; I know better now. His picture was in the paper looking all tough. Same dude that damn near pissed his pants. But it's in his best interest to lowball the figure so as to not send the public into a panic and to discourage future would-be perpetrators like me. Those university towns are the best. Big transient population, all the kids dress the same. Normal was the obvious choice. I showed up a few hours early just to walk around a bit, get some coffee and the lay of the land. At the campus bookstore I bought a red, adjustable baseball cap ($14.99) and a red windbreaker ($34.99), both of which were emblazoned with the university's pissed-off looking cardinal logo, along with this notebook (99¢) and a Sanford Uniball Grip pen ($1.29), which doesn't write very smoothly at all. My hope of course is that the FBI has bigger things on their minds right now than a hit in some bunghole town. This was my third job and I think it's my last. Shit. Let's just say I had no reason to expect things to get fucked up this bad. I wish she'd shut the hell up. Going into a weekend series with Prior and Wood on the hill we should be able to expect a sweep, but we lost two out of three to the Mets of all goddamn teams and are now just a half game ahead of San Francisco for the wild card. We are pretty much fucked. Christ a cigarette would be right on time. Dwight. No one on the platform thankfully. Not enough time to jump out. One long glorious puff, that's all I want. Ann Mays Rutledge worked in her father's tavern in New Salem, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln stayed for some time. According to several accounts he fell madly in love with Ann but she was already engaged to a local landowner, John MacNa
mar, formerly of upstate New York, who left New Salem on business never to return. Illinois State University is home to Waterson Tower, which at twenty-eight stories ranks as the tallest university dormitory in the world. Vestibule on the ground floor has a white emergency phone. I tell 911 that my room is packed with explosives and if I get another bad grade on a psychology test I'm going to set it off. Hang up, smoke a cigarette. Then it's fire trucks, ambulances, the yellow tape. The bank's a block away, back toward the station. Baker's the worst goddamn manager in the game. We had the best young staff in the league. Kerry Wood gets his elbow taken apart and put back together like it's fuckin Legos. Last season he threw an average of 109.9 pitches per game and went 141 on one occasion. Just this season he threw 131 on April 17. Most of the tellers are outside trying to figure out what all the noise is about. They're wearing billowy, cream-colored blouses and multiple cheap gold necklaces. Only a couple kids in the place, depositing what appears to be an excessively large bundle of bills. It used to be that you could tell just from the look of someone if he was packing. Now everybody's got guns. The fucking college kids got guns now. I walk up all smiles and lift the front of my new windbreaker to show her the handle of the .22 slid into my jeans. Her name plaque says DONNA. Something's genuinely fucked up about the state of the world when we got college kids who feel the need to carry firearms. Joliet, knock on wood. Killing me this year, I swear. You'd think Baker would get his head out of his ass. Tommy John surgery, that's what they call it. In 1974, Doctor Frank Jobe of Los Angeles, California treated Tommy John's torn ulnar collateral ligament by extracting an accessory tendon from the pitcher's right, non-throwing arm and then weaving it around his left elbow using holes drilled into the bones. Fifteen minutes to game time. Shit. Almost in Chicago. Union Station was designed by the venerable firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. Construction started in 1913 and lasted through the war. It's funny how things happen. On April 29, 1986, Roger Clemens set the all-time Major League record by striking out twenty batters in a single game. The same night, a chain reaction in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant led to an explosion that killed thirty people on the spot, caused the evacuation of 135,000 people within a twenty-mile radius of the plant, and sent a toxic cloud floating across a huge swath of Central Europe. On May 6, 1998, a paying attendance of 15,758 at Wrigley Field watched as Kerry Wood tied Roger Clemens's record. The same night, you returned home early from class to find one of my undergraduates naked under our bed, then left for Union Station never to return. Summit. No way I expected any trouble in Normal. I go in knowing it's going to be my last job so I want to make sure to score big. I've just had enough, you know? The stress is really something. I wish that bitch would shut the fuck up already. Jesus. Donna does the right thing. She grabs all the money out of her drawer and puts it into three of those heavy-duty zipper bank sacks. Looks like ten to fifteen even if the wads are filled with singles as I suspect. Couple twenties on the outside of each stack. It's smart. But who knows? Not like I can dump out my backpack on the next seat and count it out. Not till I get home. I drop the sacks inside my shirt. No one can see them with this big jacket on. But here's where I get stupid. Instead of walking calmly out and getting lost in the crowd outside, I pull my gun on the two college kids. That was a shitload of money they were depositing and I wanted some. Smaller of the two reaches into his armpit. He looks like he's getting ready to flap his arm to make fart sounds, but instead he draws out this gun way bigger than my little pea shooter. The sound is amazing. Something shatters behind me and this time I'm the one about to piss his pants. Shit. Never ran so fast. Heavy sacks of money bounce against my stomach. I push past the ladies smoking outside, toward the crowd. Throw the baseball cap under a parked car. Christ I hate the fucking Cardinals. Roger Clemens now pitches for the Astros, the team Wood struck out twenty of. Train's not for another hour, so I have to lay low and the best place to do that is among the mass of evacuated college kids. They're treating it like a holiday. You wouldn't believe the way these girls dress nowadays. I think I scored enough to keep me going till some other career path reveals itself. Maybe I'll try to enroll in grad school again. Union Station has a very unusual setup. The double stub-end tracks allow northbound and southbound trains to arrive at the same spot even if they're from different railroads. Something to think about. I boxed up your stuff and a month later your father and sister came by one night to throw it all in the back of a pickup truck. There remains the remote possibility there'll be a couple cops waiting for me on the platform. Unlikely but you never know. Those are the risks. Ann Rutledge finally agreed to marry Abe Lincoln, still a law student at the time, but she died at age twenty-two of typhoid fever. Some accounts say that her death caused the great emancipator-to-be to lapse into a permanent state of melancholia, one that affected the remainder of his illustrious life and career. This fucking curse. 131. I just don't get it. What the hell was Baker thinking? We could still face the Astros in a one-game playoff. Clemens versus Wood to determine which team makes the playoffs. Shit. We are totally fucked. Your flair for the dramatic was something I truly adored about you. Of course I never expected you to pull an Anna Karenina. Must have been right here somewhere. With trains coming and going both directions these tracks make Union Station, and I guess all of Chicago, a unique kind of crossroads. Doesn't happen anywhere else in the country. Another reason I admire this city. Sweet home. Shit.
MONKEY HEAD
BY M.K. MEYERS
Grand & Western
On the hottest summer night Perryman had experienced in Chicago or maybe anywhere, he sat on the front stoop and watched boys assemble on bikes at dusk in front of the convenience store. Assemble may have been too orderly a word. With the introduction of just one more boy, movement would ensue. When that occurred, the boys began their nightly circling of the block. Leisurely pedaling their tiny bikes designed for much smaller children, they could have been a circus act in the making, one in which jackals, without the guidance of a trainer, attempted the complicated task of filling time.
With each pass, the boys gained the collective confidence of a mob, which provoked them to widen their circle to adjacent blocks until they ran into another group of boys, also out exploring the limits of circumference fate had provided. When the groups met, they might skirmish, a little bantering and shoving, but surely, Perryman thought, they'd all get back on their bikes because it was too hot even to fight.
A hot cap of air that would not lift had descended upon Perryman's block. Everyone who couldn't get out of town was compelled to live under it. The entire neighborhood had moved outside. Standing or seated in metal folding chairs, in clusters or alone, the old, the very old, and women accompanied by their young arranged themselves and their provisions, coolers of drinks and food at their sides, as if preparing to lay siege to their own homes.
The men stationed themselves alone, one hip supporting them in a metaphor of what the men imagined themselves to be, what Perryman had once imagined himself to be, a pillar upon which their families stood upright and off the ground. Alone from each other and their families, at distances that looked prescribed, these men smoked cigarette after cigarette, like sentinels. In the intermittent dark spaces between streetlights, they resembled solitary fireflies. Around them the neighborhood might have been lifted whole from an earlier part of America's short life, when people without TV or radio to separate them were reported to have mingled more. With time not yet fractured into tiny bits, they were said to have been more amiable and languid, and generally, although they didn't live as long, were said to have had a better time.
Around 10:00 that night a tribe of boys from another neighborhood passed down the block on bikes and slowed. Dressed alike in white T-shirts and tan short pants, they'd dyed their sneakers to look cut from the hide of a leopard or giraffe. With a quick thrust, one of the boys stuck a rubber monkey head, broken and roughly abused, on top of the decorative hood ornament lifted from a Mercedes that Bobby Pando, the block's
drug dealer, had bolted to the nose of his Ford panel truck.
Everyone on the block knew Bobby Pando's love for his Ford panel truck extended beyond the Mercedes hood ornament. For its side Bobby commissioned a mural of a deer, or an animal with horns, standing atop a hump of green. Perryman had developed a nodding acquaintance with Bobby, one predicated on the understanding that Bobby Pando did not live on Perryman's block; Perryman lived on his. Often Bobby Pando strolled the block with his mate Stevie B. or the fellow called Mr. Panfish, and whenever he saw Perryman, he waved and called out, "Lou," which was not Perryman's name.
"Yo, Lou, what's new with you?"
"Nothing, Bobby, nothing's new."
"Lou, if nothing's new, that's something."
Once, gesturing him closer, Bobby cupped his hands to whisper directly into Perryman's ear.
"Lou," he said, "from now on, and I've talked this over with the guys," he thumbed air in the direction of Mr. Panfish and Stevie B., "you have nothing to fear on this block from anyone my age."
Perryman circled the day on his calendar, marking it: Limited Good News.
All that was left of the monkey head to let the world know it had been a monkey's head was one ear, a patch of raggedy black fur running across the crown of its head, and two near-enucleated button-shaped oogly eyes. There was its ear-to-ear toothy grin, but that could have belonged to any species, a small bear, say, or raccoon. It was remarkably little evidence to go on, but someone called out, just after the kids left, "Look at the monkey," and when no one disagreed, like the proving of many things, that first naming became what was thereafter called truth.
Coming back from whatever crime had recently engaged him, Bobby didn't see the monkey head immediately, but when he did, being drunk and happy and carrying an aluminum bat, he took a swing at it. He missed badly, smashing in one of his truck's headlamps and a chunk of its ornamental grill. All talk on the block ceased. Bobby had taken a big enough cut to fall down, and he did. The solitary men returned weight to both legs and approached the truck from all sides. Perryman moved with them.