Murder began when I was ten years old.
It was a long summer’s day, in the late seventies, and the sun kicked hard enough to melt your wings. We lived in West Town, a Puerto Rican neighborhood near Humboldt Park, in Chicago. Fifteen minutes and a million miles from downtown.
My father ran bolitas, the numbers, and muscled for a local loan shark.
“I never take nothin’ from nobody,” he said. “Except what they owe.”
My father was tall for an Island-born Rican, nearly six feet, and brown. He was thick from rocking push-ups and pull-ups in the park. His street name was Caballo. Rumor had it he earned it by kicking a deadbeat in the style of a crazy horse.
One time I saw him attack two men in front of a movie theater. He kicked them with his eyes wide and his nostrils flared, and he smiled the entire time. I held his beer. Afterward, we strutted into the theater as if nothing happened.
The houselights dimmed, the curtain rose. My father lit a cigarette and blew a stream into the red light that flickered above our heads. Smoke floated like the wake of some scarlet ghost.
My father looked down at me and smiled. “My partner told me this is gonna be a good flick. It got a lotta action in it.”
“Yeah, Pop?”
“Uh-huh.” He winked. “He tole me there’s a little romance too.”
My father smiled down at me, but he must have seen some residue of that sudden violence on the sidewalk. He passed his hand through my hair. “So now you know,” he said. “Don’t ever be a punk.”
One day my mother was at church. My father lingered in the apartment, mopped sweat off the back of his neck with a white handkerchief, and sipped straight rum. He owned congas, two hand drums carved from wood. They were elderly, scarred by chips, scratches, and varicose cracks. Mostly, they slept in the corner. The leather skins stretched across their tops were filthy from a generation of sweat, dirt, oil, even flecks of blood that my father kneaded into them. Some days, if he drank enough, we’d pretend we were in a salsa band. I sang and he beat the drums.
But not that night. Instead, the time came, my father dressed, he headed for the door. I asked where he was going.
“To the moon,” he said. “No kids allowed.”
“Can you buy me an ice cream, Pop? When you come back?”
The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He squinted. “Te estás poniendo grande.” He reached in his pocket and flipped me a quarter. “Go down when you hear the truck, OK? But come right back up. And don’t let Mami know you was out there.”
I nodded. He patted my head and left. I ran to the window and watched my father slide from view, grooving on his private rhythm. I pocketed the quarter and ran down after him.
In the west the sun appeared as a giant bleeding ulcer on the horizon. I shadowed my father. Large metal cars roamed Chicago like modern buffalo, and one custom horn blasted “La Cucaracha.” The shells of burnt houses reeked of smoke and stale water and stared sullenly through boarded windows. Children frolicked in the geyser of a corner hydrant. On sidewalks and stoops the adults moved slowly, like chickens on a spit.
My father entered a bar with a sputtering neon sign: LA SIRENA. He exited, rubbed a tall can of beer across his forehead, then cut down a side street to drink and smoke pot.
Finally, he met his appointment: a tall black man in a wide-brimmed hat. Shadows concealed most of the stranger’s face, but not his teeth, which were made of gold.
The gold-toothed man slapped my father on the shoulder and grinned. “My brother!” he said. “I thought you got lost.”
My father shook his head. The gold-toothed man invited my father into a nearby gangway, and they went.
I crouched in a gutter across the street, between two parked cars. I spotted my face in a curved chrome bumper, and a convex gargoyle version of me stared back. I stuck out my tongue at my distorted self and almost laughed. Somewhere nearby the melody of an ice-cream truck faded and the quarter tingled in my pocket. I held my place and watched the men negotiate as silhouettes framed by the mystery of their business and the final embers of a fiery dusk.
Then came the horror.
Another man slithered from the silent shadows. He, too, wore a concealing hat. In his hands was a sawed-off shotgun. The hit man pointed the barrels at the base of my father’s spine, and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
I saw the flash, heard the echo, and the startled birds roared helter-skelter from the trees above. In one sick motion my father dropped to one knee and snapped his face toward the sky. Smoke rose and a sudden hot gush of piss ran down my leg. A scream got tangled in my throat.
The man with the smoking sawed-off spotted me across the street—I was trembling between the cars. Our eyes locked.
Am I next? I thought. Is this our secret?
The shooter froze inside my gaze. But his gold-toothed accomplice did not look in my direction. He snatched the shotgun from his partner, pointed the barrels at my father’s head, and pulled the trigger.
BLAST!
I saw a spray of flesh and was knocked unconscious by a tidal wave of grief.
The earth swallowed my father’s coffin. My mother suffered his demons, but she prayed and wore black in the unflinching sun. I prayed, too, and hoped he was going to God, though I feared that he was going to the other place. I’d seen my father’s partner stash reefer, money, rum, and a gun in the casket before they closed it.
The títere patted my father’s stiff shoulder before the lid went down. “Everything you gonna need for the next life, Negro.” He looked at me. “Ven acá, nene.”
I went to him.
His Puerto Rican accent was thick with alcohol. He rolled his R’s. “You father was a good man. ¿M’entiende? Un hombre verdadero.”
I nodded.
“Acuérdate de él.”
As if I could ever forget. I tried to pull away, but the man held me in place.
“You gotta be a tough guy now, little man. Unnerstand?”
My lip trembled, but I nodded, and I swallowed all that pain. It was a jagged rock inside my throat, but I swallowed it. My father was dead and so was my innocence. I was ten years old.