CHAPTER 32

FLIGHT

IT WASN’T TOO LONG before the phone rang. For some reason, I thought it was Ryan. I quickly stepped down the hall into my parent’s room. Forgetting the light, I rushed in the dark to the bedside table where the phone sat, picked up the receiver, and put it to my ear. Static, muffled screams, sirens. “Please, Darnel!” I heard Rose’s friend Tonya’s sobbing voice. My mom picked up.

“Hello,” she said into the phone. “Rosie…” A guy’s voice, then a scream rose up and blurred into static. Then, a quick murmur: “Rose got shot!”

“No, honey. Rose just left. She’s out for the night—” Click.

“No, God damnit, ROSIE JUST GOT SHOT!” Click. My heart started pulsing fast in my chest. It pumped outward and up like it’d burst from my chest at any second and undulate up to the ceiling and out the window into the March night sky. But the wires clung tight and kept it stuck there inside. I hung up the phone and walked downstairs slowly. The buzzing rose up in my ears again. Everything seemed to vibrate with electricity. These tiny electrons jumped out of the walls and up from the carpet, then fell off in the periphery like feathers. I walked down the hall into the gleaming, yellow-tiled walls of the kitchen. I’d never noticed how they looked like they were made of honey. My father ate at the head of the old oak table he’d made with his own hands and stared at the tall, sweating glass of ice water in front of him while Ma dug into the refrigerator. My father’s eyes shot at me as I entered. His protruding brow made his eyes look like two black voids.

“What are you covered in, Joseph?” Ma asked, leaning her head out of the fridge and looking at me. Three lines appeared and stretched across her forehead, then she disappeared again behind the refrigerator door.

“I think Rose got shot,” I said.

The phone rang sharp, blaring. The wires constricted and sent my heart pattering again. I’m gonna kill somebody—I’m gonna kill somebody—I’m gonna kill somebody… I held tight to the counter’s ledge expecting the wires to snap and my heart to explode through my ribcage. My father got up and picked up the receiver from the wall mount. Ma stepped back, closed the fridge and looked at me.

“What’s happening to you?” she asked.

“Rose.” My grip on the countertop was all that held me up.

“Rose’s gone honey. She left a half-hour ago.”

“What THE FUCK ARE YOU SAYING TO ME?” my father growled into the phone.

Ma put her hands on the back of her hips and arched her belly out. “Honey, what are you covered in?” She scrunched her pudgy-featured face.

My dad slammed the phone into the receiver.

“Mary, where’re your keys?” he asked.

“What the hell’s going on here!?” Ma said, turning to look at him.

“Rose just got shot. They’re taking her to St. Francis,” he said flat and clear.

We took Clark. As we passed Senn, a police car swerved up with its lights flashing, swung itself diagonal across all the northbound lanes, and slammed on its brakes. I could see a commotion a couple blocks up at the intersection at Granville. There were several squad cars, two ambulances, and what looked like a tow truck.

“Oh, God. Do you think this is where it happened?” Ma asked.

“She doesn’t hang out around here,” Dad spat disgustedly. “Does she?”

“Naw, it looks like a car crash,” I said as my dad turned down a side street to cut around the chaos and over to Ridge. We headed up north across the border of Howard into Evanston.

The emergency room was a bustling maze of halls and doors, rooms and curtains. It was strange timing, but when we entered the reception area, they must have been moving her into surgery. A door swung open, and there she was on a wheeled stretcher. Her chest was covered with a blue wool blanket, and her milky, light-brown skin showed naked underneath it. An IV was already started. The clear rubber tube dangled and curled beside her. She wept as she laid flat. Then, she strained her neck to sit up and turned her head to see us. “Mom!” she yelled in a weak voice. The door slowly swung closed again. Ma rushed over and burst through the door hard so it locked open. For some reason, the doctors let her and stopped the stretcher there. And for some reason, my father and I stayed back. I could hear Rose sobbing and saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over.

Ma grasped Rose’s hand with both of hers and leaned over her so their faces were close. Ma raised her chin. Both of their soft, rounded features somehow resembled each other, even though their blood was severed by continents. “Rosie, you have to fight now. You have to fight, Rosemary.”

Rose muttered and shook her head ’no,’ then Ma said, “I don’t want to hear that. You fight, Rosemary. You’re gonna pull through this.” A male nurse appeared at the foot of the stretcher in light-blue scrubs and said, “I’m sorry, miss… They’re ready for her.” He pushed Rose off into an operating room, and Mom came back. Her face was pearl white. Silver streaks jetted up her tightly pulled back hair. Wrinkles stretched and spread out from her crow’s feet like the roots of two oak trees. Just then, I realized that she was getting older right before my eyes, that I was part of what was doing it to her, and the guilt of that pushed barbed hooks into my Adam’s apple. Doctors kept coming up and talking to my parents, telling them it was a .22 that hit her. Then, no; the officers on the scene have confirmed it was a .25 by the bullet casings. I wanted to scream WHYTHEFUCK DOES IT MATTER WHAT SIZE ROUND IT WAS!? right in their dumbfounded faces, pull the chalk-white piece and jam it in their fucking mouths and tell them SAY IT AGAIN, SAY IT AGAIN, MOTHERFUCKER, AND I’LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD UP. Everyone seemed to be running but me. I felt like they were just ushering me—pushing and dragging me here and there. The lights in the ceiling grates kept dimming and flashing bright in the all-white emergency room, and I couldn’t figure out why.

•

I FOUND MYSELF SITTING in the waiting room. It was a wide rectangle with several long rows of chairs that spanned its width, all of them filled. There must have been 50 people in there of all ages, from old ladies to kids. But mainly, it was people in their early teens like me to guys and girls in their twenties. This one little girl sat on the floor, maybe five years old. Her hair was half-done in braids with little blue butterfly clips, like they’d gotten the call in the middle of it. The other half of her hair sprang out in a long-arcing afro that hung down to her shoulder. She sat with her legs bent underneath her and played with a naked, white Barbie doll by what looked to be her grandmother’s feet.

The only one I recognized was Rose’s friend Tonya. Her large torso filled her chair, and her short black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her back heaved as she wept. Her black and white high-top rose from the floor as she rocked. She was afraid to even look our way from shame. My mom, me, and my dad were the only whites in the room. We sat near the door that led out to the exit and the operating rooms. Our chairs were backed up to the wall. The large TV rigged into the ceiling hung down above our heads. The entire wall across from the TV was made of windows that ran almost floor to ceiling. The darkness outside made the reflection of the room colorful, and like it was double its size—like some war zone ER. 

For some reason I kept thinking, it’s not so bad, she’ll be alright. People don’t die if they make it to the hospital alive. I didn’t know then that she’d already died. Her heart stopped beating on the sidewalk right under the Howard L stop where the bums’ piss makes a stink like the cat cages in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Rose lay there with her light, chocolate-milk skin glowing under the streetlamps—her oversized Loony Toons gangster t-shirt of Tweety Bird as a thug with a hole at the side of her belly. The hole was just between the lung and the liver where the .25 caliber round entered and did some bouncing in her ribcage before it exited the way small-caliber rounds do if they exit at all. I didn’t know that they’d brought her back once, and that the heart had stopped again when they got her to the ER, and that it would stop one more time that night. I didn’t know any of this, so I kept thinking she’d be alright ’cause nobody dies if they make it to the ER alive.

At first, there was a lot of tears and sobbing and praying. I watched them all hugging each other, and I wondered why we weren’t hugging each other. The three of us sat side by side with me in the middle—we didn’t even touch at the elbows. I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd hugged either one of them. They must have still wondered about the blood I was covered in. I was so gone by then that I didn’t even remember it. My mind raced to where Ryan was, wondering if he’d rode out with Mickey in the Lincoln and shot up those D’s and if he would come to the hospital soon, so I’d have someone to talk to. Right then, the memory of Angel being shot, even though it was just an hour before, was completely blacked out of my mind. Years later, a doctor friend of mine would tell me it was PTSD, but now it was the only thing that kept me from melting to the floor and screaming until my lungs spewed blood.

Suddenly, I was on the dock, nine years old. The seagull flapped and screamed. White feathers sprayed everywhere. Da beside me with his hands bleeding as he cut the fishing line. The seagull swooped up into the sky, free, then it was gone. I remembered how I wanted someone to do that for Da with the cancer, but how he was free in death now. But then, if that vision came now, did that mean Rose was dying? That she was already gone, and any second the doctor would come to tell us? The wires twisted up my spine. The doctor didn’t come. 

After about an hour, the crying had almost completely stopped. The younger ones were all blood-caked. Their dark-brown skin’d turned ash-gray like they’d been standing close by watching the city burn all night.  Ma stepped out into the hall to the payphones. Suddenly, a tall, young girl jumped up beside Tonya. Her face was a smear of makeup and drying tears.

“Look,” she said. She jogged over to the TV and turned up the volume. Then, she darted back to her seat as a newscaster’s voice flooded into the room.

“We are at the scene of a deadly shooting in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood—a triple homicide. The shooting led to a high-speed chase that ended in the arrest of three men and one juvenile. All four are being charged at this hour with three counts of murder, and the shooting of several other youths. Nine total were hospitalized. The incident took place on the corner of Howard and Paulina directly under the Howard Red Line stop—an area known to the local hoodlums as ‘The Jungle.’”  I realized the bottom tip of my crucifix was sunken into my heart again. Even so, I got up and walked toward the center of the room and stood in front of the TV. On the screen, a female reporter stood with her back to a line of yellow police tape that trembled in the breeze.

“Police are not certain at this hour whether the shooting was gang-related or racially motivated. This was the scene where the police chase finally ended at the 6700 block of north Clark Street.”

The camera switched shots and panned to Mickey’s Lincoln. The front end was wrapped around a green stoplight pole. The two headlights seemed to point in toward one another like they’d gone cross-eyed. The smashed windshield had two skull-sized holes in it—one in front of the driver’s seat and another in front of the passenger’s seat. A tiny white fracture spread out from each hole and stretched across the entire windshield. The black plastic bag in the rear passenger’s side window flapped and sucked in with the breeze as if the Lincoln was gasping for breath. Ryan and Mickey’s absence from the Lincoln was even more ominous than if they’d shown their mug shots on screen.

“Motha-Fuckas! I’m gonna kill all those white honky motherfuckers!”

I turned, and one of the black guys stood across the room from me. His voice crackled over the newscast, and spittle splashed from his thick lips. He was tall and lanky, and his arms trembled as he squeezed his fists at his sides. Then, his eyes panned down to mine—they gleamed red behind the black irises.

“AND WHO THE FUCK IS YOU!!!” he said, pointing his long, thin finger directly at my chest. Even though he was still across the room, it felt like his finger jabbed straight into my sternum and jammed my crucifix in even deeper. Two other guys jumped up, grasped his arms, and pulled him back toward the full rows of seats. Tonya shouted, “Quit it, T. Dat’s Rose little brotha!” The two guys glanced back at me, squinted their eyes, then thought better of it and pulled harder. They yanked him into the only vacant seat in the wide room. T turned and glared at Tonya as she sat in her seat with a ball of mauve tissue paper clutched in her dark hand.

“WHY DE FUCK HE COVERED IN BLOOD DEN?” T screamed as a glob of drool dribbled like a teardrop from his bottom lip. “HE WADN’T EVEN THERE!” His voice thundered, and all the eyes in the room suddenly landed on me—the two guys’ holding him back, Tonya’s, even the old lady’s and the little girl’s. Then, I remembered Angel. I looked down at where his blood had slathered my t-shirt and jeans hours earlier; it was now brownish-purple on the white cotton over my belly. My jeans were stained black at the thighs. I raised my hands from my sides slowly and stood there underneath the still-blaring TV. Though for me, the room had gone silent. I looked down at the dry, coarse blood splintering off my fingers in tiny flakes and dropping to the scuffed, white-and-black-checkered, linoleum-tiled floor slow like feathers. I slowly opened my hands, palms up. The uneven, loping surfaces; the lines—heart, money, fate—all of ’em leading to the life lines like dry riverbeds. That brownish-red caked over both my hands like the surface of Mars. I still resisted the belief that the nightmare earlier was real.

Suddenly, my father’s massive hand slammed down on my shoulder and clutched my shirt into a ball. I turned to see his face. Pinkish splotches hazed around his pale skin at the cheeks like a spattering of clouds on the horizon at dawn. The stale gray light from the ceiling panels glared off his forehead. His lips curled into a frowning grimace and trembled under his thick white mustache. He’d put it all together—the blood on me from a shooting, and this nightmare the retaliation. What would have happened if he hadn’t stopped me from getting into that Lincoln earlier that night? He knew it was the same TJOs that had taken his firstborn son from him years ago. Hooks dragged through my intestines. He yanked me toward him. Something snapped and clinked to the hard linoleum floor. He shoved me forward and through the door that led out into the hall. My sneakers felt like they stepped atop mush, and I heard Tonya’s voice rise up again. “Quit it, T! Rose in dere! She might be dyin’ right now!”

“Well, you shot yo own sista, mothafucka! How de fuck dat feel?!” T’s voice twisted and followed me down the corridor like the blistering tail of a comet.

My legs felt loose, like two strands of cooked spaghetti. They just dangled and fell, one by one, in front of me. Why? Why the fuck would he say that to me? I cupped my heart where the wound was. Why would someone say something like that to me? Why. The nurses and doctors in teal scrubs rushed in all directions. We passed Ma at a payphone. Rich and his wife Nancy had arrived. They all spoke with urgency in their eyes.

“Stay with her,” my father spat at Rich as we rushed past. “And stay out of that goddamn waiting room.”

Rich nodded as his jaw dropped around his beard. He stared at me, at the blood.

Dad pushed me through the doors and out into the cool black air of the parking lot. My sneakers caught and scraped over the blacktop. The wind rushed up off the lake, cold, and sent a spray of goosebumps across my neck and face. When we got to the passenger’s side of the van, he spun me around and shoved me against it. My back slammed into the side panel, and I felt the sheet metal give, then pop flat against my back. I looked down at the ground and waited for it. I hoped it would put me out cold and drive me deep into some black-tar abyss that would erase all of it. It never came.

“Get in,” he said flatly.

We pulled up in front of the house. The block was calm and empty. The trees rocked slowly in the wind.

“Go in there and pack a bag,” he said, looking straight ahead as he gripped the steering wheel. His knuckles bulged out like large white marble stones. I swung the door open and started to step down. “And say goodbye to that house, that’s the last time you’ll step foot in it.” He brushed the back of his hand across his lips.

I went in and packed a bag in the dark. I didn’t know where I was headed. Dad switched to his pickup truck. A warm, throbbing tremble coursed through me, rising and surging like it would snap the wires at any moment, explode through my skin, and float up free.

I stepped out onto the porch and saw my block one last time as resident. Guess I am the baddest kid on the block after all—it only summoned a great wealth of sadness. I walked down the steps, turned, and looked back at the house. The old, gnarly siding, the wooden porch where I’d had my first real kiss. Suddenly, there was a hand on my shoulder. It was soft and strong. I turned and saw my father’s trembling blue eyes.

“Ahh, Joe…. Ah, Joe…,” he said softly, his lips nearly motionless under his mustache. I felt that connection again, like when he’d told me about Lil Pat in the basement that night.

•

WE TOOK ASHLAND TO FOSTER, cut over to Lake Shore Drive, and rode south. The small pickup rattled as gusts surged off the lake and got up underneath the small truck bed, lifting us up like we were riding the wind. The buildings slowly thickened, rose, and sloped upward. The lake was a black-gray glob swaying and peaking to the east. The moon was full and low on the dark horizon, emitting a brownish-orange glow that fluttered and flecked across the undulating surface of the water. Ahead was the Drake Hotel’s gleaming, neon-pink sign. The John Hancock seemed to rise up straight out of it like an Erector set of cold steel and black glass.

We took Lower Wacker to the Dan Ryan and drove past Comiskey in that canyon-like valley. There were five lanes both ways with the Red Line tracks in between them. He never even looked my way. We drove on past the high-rise projects of the Robert Taylor Homes—all of them lined up like dominoes, ready to fall. The red smudge next to my belly button began to tingle. A lotta shit ran through my mind. I thought of Rose, and I thought of Angel. Then, I thought of Ryan and our .25, and the first day I held it in my hand so many years ago when I was still a little boy riding with Rich down at Maxwell Street—the deceiving weight of it; how my hand felt big around the squared-off, white grip enclosed around the spring-loaded clip and those five small rounds; its nickel-finish barrel; how the weight of the barrel was too much for the grip and made it want to point downward; how holding that pistol made all the fear in my 9-year-old mind disappear and marvel at all the potential right there in my hand; how it made me grin like I knew a joke no one else knew. Guess the joke was on me.

He shot her. It was an accident, but Ryan shot my sister. The wires cut deeper into my mind. My skull slowly filled with blood.

I realized it was over. The TJOs would never survive losing Mickey, Wacker, Fat Buck, and Ryan to murder raps. No matter what guns the bullets were traced to, each of them would eat the three counts. Ryan might get out in four years when he turned 18, or they might charge him as an adult. Either way, it was over. I thought about the neighborhood without them—without the trouble that followed them at every step. The street numbers on the exit signs rose. A northbound Red Line train roared past, rattling up a spray of sparks, then it was gone and left just the sway of traffic and the burnt-orange, ever-present light that stained the concrete.

“Somebody told me something the other day,” I said, looking to the side out the window. “Said you started the TJOs.”

Just then, Da swept in through my open window with the street lights. He swirled around in the cab and slid over our shoulders and kept our arms and hands from moving. Da swallowed all the rage that was there in that truck.

I could almost hear Dad thinking as he shifted and gripped the wheel. Many years later, he’d put those thoughts to words. By then, I was a grown man with a family of my own, but now they just floated and swirled with Da in the cab of the pickup between us. I leaned against the door with my arm resting on the ledge. The wind poured in through the half rolled-down window and splintered my slicked-back hair. The streetlights approached slowly, then darted past in my periphery like so many sunsets.

‘I started Bryn Mawr after Devon broke up… It was different back then… Back then, it was about protecting the goddamn neighborhood so your grandmother wouldn’t get mugged walking home from the grocery store. There were drugs around back then, sure, but nothing serious; a garbage bag of rag weed, a couple sheets of acid, a few stolen cars—small time, you know? Kinda stuff kept food in your kid’s mouth when you were laid off. Back den, it was about street fights—maybe someone gets hit with a ball bat. There were guns back then, too, but you didn’t go shooting into a crowd of people! You wanted somebody gone, you go in and get ’em. Get it done right—close enough to be sure, bury ’em in the fucking alley… I hand it off to Ganci and Kellas, and they want to run it like a goddamned syndicate. Collecting from the businesses on Clark Street… Come on, that’s not what dis was about. I tell him ’no.’ Tell him he’s got to change the name... TJOs, the judge in that juvie court was right. That’s all they are: a bunch of jag offs… And what they did to those black kids at the school; it was wrong. Then, heroin comes in, lays the entire North Side on its back, from Uptown to Howard Street. And these little jags think they’re big dealers. They’re selling that crap to each other, can’t they see that? It’s gotten so there ain’t no neighborhood left to protect. It’s gone… Tearing my family apart. It’s over.’

He didn’t say none of it. Not a word of it. He just glanced over, reached out, and gripped my shoulder with his calloused, brittle hands.

“I love you, son.” It was the first time he’d said it that I could remember.

I looked him in the eyes, then I looked ahead and squinted. One healthy tear rolled down from my eye. He didn’t see it. “I love you, too, Dad.”

We took 90 towards the Skyway. It was empty. I looked across at the flat and slanted rooftops that floated past at eye level. I could see the Skyway Bridge—it loomed ahead like a steel-framed mountain. Then, my father’s voice broke the silence.

“We’re selling the house. You’re gonna stay up at Grand Beach ’til we get this all sorted out.” He paused. I said nothing. “We’ve been looking out in the suburbs, near your Aunt Cindy.” He looked straight ahead at the bridge he’d spent years building and rebuilding. They’d been planning it for months, with the trouble Rose and I’d been getting in, knowing there was no doubt we’d soon be locked up with Lil Pat or dead if they didn’t get us away from the city. It was their last chance to save us. Their only chance.

We creaked to a stop at the toll booth and strange Middle Eastern music leaked into the cab of the truck. I looked over, and there in the booth was the Assyrian—five years older than the last time I saw him dead on those green tiles in the pharmacy. There was no wound, no scar—no sign of any harm or hardship. He’d cleaned up, wasn’t gangbanging no more. There were family photos in the booth with him—children. He did have children. The Assyrian sang along to the joyful, flowing, rhythmic whine. He grinned and gave my father the change.

“Thank you, sir. You guys have a nice night,” he said with almost no accent.

Dad waved, and we pulled off. I glanced through the back window as we rolled away. The Assyrian watched us go. He looked me in the eyes with a pleasant smirk on his lips and waved goodbye. I waved back. All the wires that’d twisted so tightly around my heart and mind for so long, something sliced them, and they fell away. I sighed, turned forward, and whispered, “Goodbye.”

It wasn’t the Assyrian, of course; it was just another person who deserved to live.

My throat ached as we began the steep ascent. I thought of Hyacinth, and I knew I should let it be, let it go. I thought of Ryan and Angel and Rose and Lil Pat. I felt for my crucifix, but it was gone. Then, I looked out off the bridge at the steel mills and silos that towered beside us; their burnt-orange lights in the windows blazed like lit torches. A pack of seagulls disturbed by the windstorm soared in the light. I glanced back from where we’d come from. A murky, purple nebulous cloud hovered over the city, and the street lights pierced the haze in tiny gold dots like baby stars. I gazed out at the lake. The shoreline arced and spanned out northwest and northeast to the horizon. Then, it vanished into the vast black void of the night sky, and I wasn’t scared anymore. I thought about the neighborhood, and I wondered what life would be like in the suburbs.