Hope Rides Again

by Andrew Shaffer

  As we made our way through the buffet line, Barack lowered the bill of his Cubs cap—or, more accurately, Steve’s Cubs cap, which was on loan to the president. Steve was a diehard Cubs fan. Chicago’s North Side team had long been lovable losers (which explained a lot about Steve). But then the Cubs won the 2016 World Series, ending the longest championship drought in professional sports history. It was a victory overshadowed by the election just days later. Suddenly, the Dems had taken over the mantle of “lovable losers.”

  Barack looked distinctly uncomfortable. Almost constipated. As a White Sox fan, it was the ultimate sacrilege to don the other team’s logo. I told him it wasn’t that bad. Delaware didn’t even have a Major League sports team. We had to borrow Philadelphia’s.

  “I’d rather be wearing a Phillies cap,” Barack grumbled. The Cubs hat paired well with the North Face windbreaker Steve had also loaned him. Barack looked like the saddest guy in witness protection.

  “Not exactly what I expected,” I said as we sat down.

  “You don’t like the food?” Barack asked.

  My plate was stacked high with every breakfast item on the menu. “You’re not really a fan of greasy spoons.”

  “Except when he’s on the campaign trail,” Steve said.

  We both looked at Steve, who stuffed his mouth full of ham. He’d been on that caveman diet for so long that his eyebrows were beginning to grow together.

  “I ate a little differently when I was younger,” Barack admitted. He had a bowl of green beans and an herbal tea. That was it. It wasn’t some cover, like he was trying to pretend he wasn’t Barack Obama and not order the “Obama” off the menu—this was the real Obama, the one with gray hair, smile lines, and an AARP card.

  I ate better when I was at home, but I wasn’t at home. By midnight, I would be, if we could make some headway on this case.

  It was a long time between now and midnight.

  “So, the question is, what now?” Steve asked, chewing with his mouth open.

  “Were you raised in a barn, boy?” I asked.

  He kept chewing. “Just because I’m from Iowa doesn’t mean I grew up on a farm. For your information, I was born in a hospital. Same hospital as Ashton Kutcher, in fact.”

  “That’s impressive,” Barack said, bringing the full weight of his sarcasm to the table.

  Steve filled his mouth with another thick slice of ham.

  “So, what now?” I said, repeating Steve’s initial query. “I don’t know exactly, but I’m not heading home with my tail between my legs.” I paused. “And no, I don’t have a lizard tail, to knock one of your other conspiracy theories off the shelf.”

  “I’ve seen you swim, sir,” Steve said. “I’d know if you had a tail.”

  “Why are you still talking?” I asked.

  I shouldn’t have snapped at him. I was frustrated. Everywhere we turned, we were running into brick walls. I’d never been able to get a feel for the city. I liked New York style pizza with thin crust; I liked my politics free of corruption. I didn’t want to throw in the towel, but we weren’t just up against criminals—we had a whole damned city to contend with. A city that didn’t put ketchup on hot dogs.

  A couple of hours into my day trip and already my outlook was blacker than Steve’s coffee. In Chicago, there was a shooting every three hours. A murder a day. This weekend was shaking out to be its most violent in many months. That was why Rahm had blown me off. He didn’t need me causing him headaches. Not this weekend. The city could erupt into flames at any moment. The police were mobilized to put out the fires before they spread, but they couldn’t stop them from starting in the first place. The people were the matches. The city herself the kindling.

  Steve’s phone buzzed. As he took it out, the butt of his pistol peeked through his jacket. He listened without speaking. After he hung up, he said, “The lead on Shaun’s aunt didn’t exactly pan out. The phone listed for her is disconnected. The agent we sent over to her apartment said she wasn’t home. She still hasn’t shown up at the hospital.”

  Barack set down his cup of tea. “Do we know where she works?”

  Steve shot him a disbelieving look. “Her nephew was almost murdered. You think she’s at work?”

  “This may come as a surprise to you, Steve, but not everyone has a job with paid vacation or sick leave. She may not have a choice: either go to work, or lose her job.”

  “Find another one if your boss is that much of a dick. I did.”

  We didn’t need to ask Steve what boss he was referring to.

  “Be that as it may,” Barack said, “not everybody in this world has that sort of freedom. Is the jobless rate at an all-time low? Close to it. Are the jobs many Americans have worth a damn? We all know that answer.”

  I balled up my napkin. I wasn’t finished with my plate, but I’d heard enough.

  “We need to find out where this aunt works,” I said, cutting off Barack’s stump speech. There would be plenty of time to discuss America’s broken paid-time-off system later. There wasn’t a false note in the tune he was singing, but there was a time for talking and a time for action.

  Be the change you wish to see in the world, Barack was often misquoted as having said.

  When I picked up my tray, I quoted his wife instead: “Let’s move.”

  16

  Steve worked his contacts to pull together a dossier’s worth of information on Shaun’s aunt, working off what we’d found on the application. A cross-check with the IRS revealed her last known place of employment: a grocery store named Han’s, on the western edge of Englewood.

  In stark contrast to the blighted area around the freight yard, this section of the neighborhood was alive with activity. A group of jacketless young men here, a woman pushing a child in a stroller there. This wasn’t the war zone the media and politicians made it out to be; it was a neighborhood. A neighborhood with problems, but also with people who lived and worked and socialized like in any other neighborhood in America.

  I could feel eyes on us as we stepped out of the car, people watching from behind curtains and blinds. Barack, with his cap and windbreaker, was the only one of us that didn’t look like a G-man.

  Han’s wasn’t so much a grocery store as it was a convenience store. It was squeezed into three hundred square feet, smaller than my sunporch at the beach house. What food they did have on the shelves was mostly junk food. I’d read about “food deserts,” poor neighborhoods without grocery stores. I hadn’t realized some of the grocery stores were food deserts themselves. There was always the Whole Foods half a mile away. If you could afford to shop there.

  A middle-aged black woman was working the register. Chelyne? I squinted. The nametag read “Chelly.” Had to be her. She didn’t appear to be the junkie that Pastor Brown made her out to be. Maybe I was holding onto my own outdated ideas of what drug users looked like. I’d been wrong about that sort of thing before.

  I opened a refrigerated case and reached for a Dasani.

  Barack poked his head over my shoulder. “Is that all they have?”

  “It’s water,” I said. I peered at the label to see if I could tell where it had been bottled. Most of the time, you were getting some other state’s tap water. This one said Oak Park, Illinois. “It’s local.”

  “No Smartwater?” He looked up at Chelly. She was counting out change for a kid.

  “That the one with electrolytes?” she asked without looking. She didn’t smell like she’d been drinking or toking the reefer. She smelled like cookies ‘n’ cream hand lotion.

  “That’s the one,” Barack said. “The distillation process replicates the hydrologic cycle to create water that’s pure as rain.”

  “We don’t have it.”

  Barack rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. I didn’t actually see him do it—the glasses were reflective for a reason—but I knew him well enough to know which way his eyes rolled.

  Steve tossed a sugar-free energy drink onto the checkout roller alongs
ide our waters. I waited to see if he was going to pony up. He made no move for his wallet.

  I started to hand Chelly my credit card but she stopped me. “Cash only.”

  While I fished in my wallet, Barack spoke up. “Your nephew Shaun Denton?”

  She didn’t look up. “I already told y’all, I ain’t seen him or heard from him in three weeks.” She had a weary look on her face. We weren’t the first strangers to visit her at work or knock on her door with bad news.

  “We’re not with the police,” I said. “We’re more like friends of a friend. We have some difficult news to share. If you have a few minutes—”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have a few minutes. Even if I did, I already heard what happened to him. He got his ass shot. I told him if he kept hanging around with that crew, something bad was going to happen. And it did.”

  There was no pity in her voice.

  I wished I’d started our conversation differently, with a little small talk. But she’d known why we were there from the jingle of the bell on the door. Why else would a couple of white guys in suits be in here wasting her time?

  “He has a part-time job,” I said. “At the freight yard. Is he into trains?”

  “You think I’m into cigarettes and Lotto tickets cuz I work here?”

  “We’re just trying to get a feel for the kid,” I pleaded.

  She counted my change back. “The only train he ever set foot on was the L. He sits in a booth at the yard and checks shipping containers in and out. It keeps him out of trouble a couple days a week. Or it did.”

  “He’s part of a mentoring program for urban youth,” I said. “He had so much going for him. I don’t understand how this could happen.”

  “He meets with this rapper once a month at that center in Hyde Park. How’s a rapper going to help him get through high school? What he needs is a tutor. Especially now, if he’s out of school laid up at St. Bernard’s for longer than a couple of days.”

  What he needed now was prayer.

  Barack took a sip from his bottle, then looked at the label with satisfaction. As if he could taste how local it was. Chelly looked him over suspiciously. I worried that she’d recognized him, but we were saved by the door jingle. A pair of teenage girls came in, and she turned her attention to them. We were yesterday’s news.

  I tapped Barack on the arm. “Let’s go,” I hissed.

  Barack started to follow me, then paused.

  “You mentioned a gang,” he said.

  Chelly whipped her head around. “A gang?”

  He nodded. “You said Shaun was hanging around with a gang. Do you know its name? We’re trying to build a list of his known associates. We’re trying to find out who did this to him.”

  “I never said gang,” she clarified. “I said crew. And the crew that he rolls with call themselves the Red Door.”

  17

  On one of our visits to Chicago in 2008, Barack had given me a short history lesson on why the city was still so racially segregated, despite it being such a liberal haven. African Americans had moved here from the South in the early twentieth century, during what came to be known as the Great Migration. They settled on the South Side, where jobs and housing were plentiful. Unfortunately, white Chicagoans were as resistant to integration as the Southerners they’d left behind. They threatened African Americans who tried to buy into their North Side neighborhoods. Refused to sell to them. Threw rocks through their windows when any did manage to break the color line. The usual bag of dirty tricks. Though progress toward equality had been made in the past century, structural racism meant that the city was still largely divided in two.

  I was getting a firsthand education on the legacy we’d handed down to our brothers and sisters on the South Side. It was much more visceral than sitting down with Caruso would have been. I’d seen poverty and its effects in Wilmington, but nothing on this scale. We were heading back to the car from Han’s. Half the homes and businesses we passed were boarded up. There were disturbing yellow signs stapled on rotting telephone poles warning residents to STOP FEEDING THE RATS. WE NEED YOUR HELP TO ELIMINATE THE RODENT PROBLEM IN THIS AREA. Yet life went on, all around us.

  “What was that stuff about the trains?” Barack asked me.

  “Nothing important.”

  “Is that why you’re so interested in finding this kid’s shooter? Did you think he was a fellow railhead?”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like that at all.”

  It seemed like he wanted more from me, but we were cut off by the deep bass of a passing Cadillac DeVille. It was a freshly waxed beauty, and it rolled up to the curb beside us. Caruso was behind the wheel. He turned down the music.

  “Y’all need a lift?” he shouted through the open passenger window.

  Barack told him we were parked right around the corner, but thanks. It seemed improbable that in a city of this size he would just happen to drive past us. This was in his neighborhood, though—and word must have gotten to him that we were around.

  Barack introduced us. I leaned on the door and shook his hand. He had a strong grip.

  “Heard some good things about you,” I said.

  “And some bad things, right?” he joked. “Sorry I had to run this morning. Had to put out a fire.”

  “Did you hear about Shaun?” Barack asked.

  “Shaun? From the program? Tell me he didn’t do some ignorant shit again.”

  “He’s at St. Bernard’s. He was shot. He’s out of surgery—”

  Caruso slapped his steering wheel and muttered a string of obscenities.

  “You might be able to help us find the shooter,” Barack said, filling him in on what we knew so far, which admittedly wasn’t much. Barack didn’t say a word about the Red Door.

  Caruso was shaken by the news. He’d already passed sadness and was onto anger. “I’m sorry. I’m going to see him now. I’ll see you tonight—we can talk more then.”

  We watched him spin the wheel and tear off down the street. Steve cleared his throat. The Secret Service didn’t like it when their protectees lingered on sidewalks. A couple of kids ran past us, causing Steve to visibly tense up.

  Barack turned to me. “Not how you planned on spending your Saturday, is it?”

  “Remember what you said?” I asked him. “If there’s a child on the South Side who can’t read, it matters to you. Even if it’s not your child. How did we let things get so bad?”

  “Believe it or not, things have been getting better. If you think Chicago is violent today, you should have seen it a hundred years ago. Take one of those gangland tours sometime, see for yourself.”

  Steve cleared his throat again, louder this time.

  We both turned to him.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but it’s 2:30, Mr. President.”

  Barack groaned.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “The Bulls playing?”

  “I’m supposed to give a speech at the forum at three. I haven’t even started writing it yet.”

  We loaded ourselves into the Firebird. Steve mapped the Tribune Tower’s address on my phone. It showed us arriving there at 3:05, based on current traffic conditions. I liked a good challenge.

  Steve reached for the radio, and I slapped his hand away.

  “I just wanted to turn it up,” he said, rubbing his wrist.

  “Leave it alone,” I spat. “You don’t touch another man’s radio.” One of the many life lessons Pa Biden had drilled into us when I was a kid. If only the youth these days had someone to guide them in life, like I’d had.

  It was an outdated way of looking at the world, and I knew it. Even if you had somebody in your life, there was no guarantee they would lead you down the straight and narrow.

  Take Pastor Brown, for instance. Barack trusted him. I’d learned that they’d worked together back in Barack’s community organizing days. Barack valued loyalty above all else. I had no reason to doubt that the pastor’s motives wer
e pure. The Red Door didn’t sound any different from thousands of other churches that did good work in neighborhoods across the country. Plus I had no room to talk; the Catholic Church had its own troubles. When you point a finger at somebody, three point back at you. (The thumb kind of sticks to the side, pointing at nothing or no one in particular, but I’ll let that slide.)

  Shaun’s aunt was convinced the pastor and his church were trouble. She didn’t go into detail, though—her manager had come back from lunch and that was the end of our conversation. On our way out, I saw her bury her head in her hands.

  Barack refused to believe his friend was involved in any way with the shooting. He did acknowledge that Pastor Brown’s particular mission made some folks nervous. The pastor’s forte was “rehabbing” wayward youth. Jenkins Brown had been through the legal system himself, having robbed a liquor store when he was younger. Now he helped kids who were on the same path get off the street. And he was successful at it—his kids stayed out of trouble, for the most part. But what if his church operated like a prison? Not in a literal sense, but in the sense that prisons had become places for criminals to pool their resources and knowledge. What if the kids Pastor Brown was helping were teaching each other how to pick locks and boost cars? They weren’t staying out of trouble, in other words. They were just becoming better at not getting caught.

  Of course, I couldn’t bounce my theory off Barack. I couldn’t accuse the pastor without evidence. I didn’t even know what I would be accusing him of. Was it really possible for him to have pulled the trigger at the freight yard? He’d left the economic forum after the prayer breakfast. He’d been in a hurry, too. And not very happy about it.