Part II
Chapter 1
Joe likes to say that he’s the last bohunk in Pilsen.
This is Pilsen, port of entry, lucky Chicago neighborhood not gutted by the great fire of 1871. Shoeshine men at the Jumping Bean Café guzzle red-eye espressos, elbow to elbow at the counter with college gringas. Where the streets once ran like a river of black cinders from the factories. A neighborhood with no Starbuck’s, Pilsen is the steamy odor of tortillas fresh from the conveyor, supermercados fragrant with mangoes a little past their prime. At Saint Pius V, San Pio – the dried-blood-red brick church, long-ago Irish –the pastor on Sunday morning shouts “Viva Mexico! Viva la cultura de latinos y chicanos!” Where the new young mothers and fathers line up after Mass with forty-day-old infants and to the tumult of marimba and guitar, the pastor tucks the bottom of each infant in his palm and lovingly supports the delicate neck and hoists each infant in the air and sweeps up to the altar, offering the infant to God. His Lady of Guadalupe vestments shining, white like the Easter lilies, he turns in a ceremonial circle to show the infant to the parish and the applause is like water. You swim in the applause for the babies.
Across the street a mural blooms two stories high: Our Lady of Guadalupe watching over a Mexicana family treading the Rio Grande. Around the corner from the mural, SOKOL is cut into stone above an arched doorway. Joe’s Bohemian ancestors on his mother’s side fled Europe and settled in Pilsen; they named Pilsen, and joined together in sokols – gymnastic and social clubs – to nurture body and mind and spirit. One hundred and fifty years ago a nickel would be collected from every sokol member to tide you over if you were sick and could not work. You hear the stories of glass and steel workers, McCormick Reaper, meatpacking plants, breweries, railroad workers who were the first to strike in 1877, thirty of them slaughtered by police and the 22nd U.S. infantry, right here in Pilsen. Just as Rudy Lozano was slaughtered in 1983 for organizing labor. His murder remains unsolved. The branch library is named for Rudy Lozano, sop to those who grieve.
Immigrants on foot, by rail, by horse, by sea and bus and car and truck and jet plane, came and still come to labor. To live in Pilsen boarding houses, to live in boxcar homes. Pilsen is a midden pile of remains, the habits and grime of immigrant dream seekers, Bohemian and Polish and Lithuanian mothers who crossed the North Atlantic with sick children and Mexicans who swam the river. Some stayed – like Joe’s mother’s family, the Svizis. Some moved on, to houses with a bit of earth. A tree. A wider sky. To Lawndale or Joliet, or farther west, to Iowa or South Dakota. Always there is the fleeing, settling, migrating: desire, the heart’s perpetual fuel.
Sokols, Sunday Mass in Polish at St. Adelbart’s, froth of First Communion dresses in tuxedo rental shops, tamale carts, a religious arts store replete with every manner of Guadalupes for the devoted guadalupanas – plastic mini-shrines, T-shirts, pinkie rings – stocked alongside holy cards of Our Lady of Czestochowa, purported to be the oldest image of the Mother of God, painted by St. Luke and brought to Poland as dowry between two royal families: all Pilsen. And a stubble-faced drunk reels down the alley, crying, “Give me chilies, give me chilies.” Pope John Paul II came to visit these streets, to bless the people. Vicente Fox came to ask for votes. In a black rodeo hat, on horseback, he flashed the V for victory sign. “Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day,” Carl Sandburg wrote of Blue Island Intersection, not far from where Chanti Natividad Gonzales was murdered.
Chapter 2
Father Roberto unfolds the metal legs of a card table in front of the shop, and there is no candle bench, no canopy or marble footpace. It’s his custom to say Mass at the site of murders. There is only the sidewalk and the street, the orange foggy light, the night air chilly. You can see your breath. Somewhere detectives are going door to door, plying their questions. Sophie and Joe and Emma are back from the hospital. Magda and Arturo have returned from District Headquarters on Harrison. They don’t have the strength to stand; they huddle together on folding chairs, weeping. A blanket over their laps. I’m wearing Benny’s leather jacket; every few minutes Benny entwines his fingers with mine inside the big pocket. His fingers are bone cold. Joe and Emma support Sophie. She chokes on her tears. Father Roberto lays his black silk stole over his shoulders and recites the vesting prayer: “O Lord, who has said, ‘My yoke is sweet and my burden light,’ grant that I may so carry it as to merit thy grace.” A short, athletic man in his early forties, his face sun-creased handsomely – his former parish was in Tucson – Father Roberto wears a souvenir cap from a Sting concert. He works as a carpenter for Habitat one day a week, and when he gives communion, up-close, you see his labor-roughened fingertips. Benny and I take communion; for me, it’s the first time in years. When Joe cups his hands to receive communion, Father Roberto says, “The body of Christ, Joe.” Would he know the guilty by name?
Chapter 3
Later, around four in the morning, Emma retreats to the bathroom for a hot shower. Everyone has gone home. Odds and ends of liquor bottles seem to march upon the kitchen table. Joe leans against the sink, his arms folded. His tie loosened. The kitchen feels alien, no comfort. Sophie runs a finger around the rim of a highball glass half-filled with bourbon. Repeatedly she flicks the rim and it chimes.
Joe says, “Let me make you a bed on the couch. Sleep down here. Near us.” It is one small protection he can offer – to spare her the sight of her marriage bed.
“I’ll do it myself,” she whispers. “I’ll go up and get my pillow.” But she crumples on the stairs, still in her bloody sweater. She screams so piercingly that Joe feels as if it opens his chest. Her lips are chapped, her eyes swollen. She shivers and her words shiver from her mouth. “It’s – not – true, what he said, Daddy, it’s not fucking sweet, my burden’s not going to be light.”
In her robe, Emma steps out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand, eyes pink-rimmed. If only he had the muscle to pick up Sophie; he sits two steps down and says, “I hear you.” He holds her hand. Faint traces of mustard-ochre paint line each trim nail. Her wedding band is plain white gold.
Detectives come and go. One is older, with an ashen smoker’s complexion, and a high pot belly. His attitude says he’s seen it all. Joe recognizes the younger one – a blond, crew-cut military type. Franny Ryan. His father is a Cubs’ fan who moved to the Twin Cities for work, and every few months he buys memorabilia to assuage his father’s homesickness. Franny takes a more-than-professional interest in what’s happened. He clasps Joe’s shoulder right before leaving. “I’m real sorry, Joe.”
When they’ve clattered down the stairs, Sophie says, “Nothing will come of what they’re doing. I don’t care if you know him – nothing will come of it.”
The next day Joe goes down to the shop, to the back room. In the bare bulb’s hard shadows, with one hand, he feels along the dusty top shelf for his father’s handgun. An ammo box is there: yellow and red box, hollow-point bullets. He lifts the lid – the box is empty. And the gun has disappeared, the way guns do: stolen by Tony. Joe can’t prove it, but he knows it in his bones. Jesus – he’s almost family. Tony needed some work to keep a probation officer off his back. Joe hired him to clean up the stock room; later, to help him out, Joe signed a paper fudging the hours Tony worked by a few. He almost likes Tony. Once in a while Tony comes into the shop and stares, marvels, at the signed baseballs under Plexiglass. He never has money. Last summer, before Tony got in trouble, Joe took him to a White Sox night game. He imagines the Diamondback revolver floating around the neighborhood – but where? At Tony’s mother’s apartment before she returned to Mexico City? In the kitchen at Wendy’s, hidden in a trash bag in the manager’s cubicle? Under a boy’s mattress in a house where gang insignias have been carved into the dining room table?
Joe locks the deadbolt between the shop and the stairs. He turns on the television. His neck muscles twitch: a slight tic he’s never noticed before. Hands sweaty, he telephones Franny Ryan. His hand gripping the phone pulses with his heartbeat. He says, “When’ll we have more information?” We. We will conspire. He can’t bring himself to use the word weapon, the word gun.
Franny Ryan says, “In a couple days.”
“I want to protect her,” Joe says. “You understand. When you know more about – anything – come to me first. All right?” Sin of omission floats to Joe’s consciousness from catechism lessons he took when he was seven years old.
Franny says, “No problem, Joe. I have a daughter myself.”