We met under the trees on Twenty-First Place. From there we combed the streets. After the streets were cleared, we moved on to garbage cans, where we found parakeet mummies wrapped in newspaper, cloudy-eyed goldfish wrapped in toilet paper. The goldfish we collected in a Tupperware dish Alfonzo had stolen from his mother’s kitchen. Then we took the fish back to Marcus’s house and gave them life in the warmth of his basement bedroom. By late February Marcus had more fish than he had space for, and we started calling him Aquaman and telling him he was going to grow gills. Every time we found a new fish Marcus would say, “Hey, you guys need to take some.” But we always protested and said our parents wouldn’t let us.
We all started collecting things. Alfonzo had a puppy he’d named Cloudy. We’d found Cloudy frozen behind the junkyard on Peoria Street. His legs were stiff. His white coat was matted and ugly, bald in some spots. When Cloudy came back his coat was fresh and new, thin and wispy. We could feel Cloudy’s ribs as we held him up and had him lick our faces. He was a puppy again.
By March I had three birds: a finch named Ron Kittle, and two parakeets — Harold Baines and Mike Squires, my White Sox all-stars. I had found a birdcage in the dumpster behind my apartment building; I began calling the cage my dugout. I was anxious to add Carlton Fisk to it.
By late March, by spring, all four of us had maxed out on absences. Our parents were called in. We made excuses. I claimed that gangbangers were after me, that they had threatened to kill me unless I joined their gang. Mr. Stoner, the disciplinarian, asked me to name names, and I rattled off a few I had seen spray-painted on our neighborhood’s walls. Tom Cat, Jerry Mouse, Player, Jouster. My parents were sympathetic. So was Mr. Stoner. He let us all stay in school with promises that we would not miss another day. We even signed contracts. By April, though, we were missing days again, and by May, by graduation, we had stopped going completely.
Those days were fun. It seemed quite possible that we could make careers out of raising the dead. We could leave the neighborhood, travel the world, resurrect important figures in history. Already I found myself scanning the obituary pages of the Sun-Times, cutting out clippings of former presidents, kings and queens, rock stars, anyone famous, creating a list of important people we had to bring back to life. We wondered together if there was a statute of limitations on Chuey’s power. Could we bring back Martin Luther King Jr.? Could we bring back George Washington if we ever found where he was buried, or King Tut, who had been on display at the Field Museum downtown? These questions were on all our minds in late May, when Chuey told Brenda Gamino he could raise the dead.
I am not upset. The truth is Brenda could do that to a man. The second week of school I’d tried to ask her, “So how do you like high school?” Only my tongue got thick and it came out more like, “How do oh a hisco?” She just looked at me and smiled. “What?” she said. I wanted to kiss her right then and there. Her voice, even questioning me the way it was, was soft and warm. I think I wanted to marry her.
“No, no,” I said. “High school… I mean… if you like it… is what…”
“What?” she asked again. And I just turned and walked away, my Adam’s apple so far up my throat I felt like I was gargling.
Marcus had done it, and Alfonzo too. Brenda just made people say stupid things. But Chuey had been saved. He was too embarrassed. He’d never said a word to Brenda. I believed Chuey when he said that Brenda had been the one to start talking to him. Her question had been, “What are you going to do this summer?” And in the heat of the moment, in the desperate search to say something of meaning, something she would remember, Chuey replied, “Raise the dead.”
She didn’t mind us much, Brenda. I’m not sure she remembered that any of us had ever tried to talk to her. Those last few weeks of school we used to pick her up, the four of us. They weren’t really even dating, not yet. They would walk together, laugh out loud, hold hands. Marcus, Alfonzo, and I would follow, smoking cigarettes, anxious to get back to the business of Life, hoping someone like Capone didn’t show up to make us look stupid.
Brenda used to say things: “You know, they’re not going to let you guys back in.” “We know,” we would reply. “We have a plan.” But her comments began to have an effect. More and more while out on rounds, Chuey would start talking about going back to school, going to summer school even. Our plans were at risk.
So maybe he showed her at some point. Maybe they were walking after a rain and he found a dead worm on the school baseball field. Or maybe they found a dead bird, a pigeon hit by a bus, or a sparrow who’d ingested rat poison. Chuey said he never showed her, that he never even brought up the power, but he must’ve done something — otherwise she would’ve thought he was crazy, talking about “raising the dead” the way he did. But maybe she thought he was a little off anyway. When you’re a teenager you’re willing to take more things on faith. Reality hasn’t been defined by experience. Anyway, she asked Chuey, the night her brother OD’d, to bring him back to life. And then Chuey called us, and at 11:30 p.m., May 15, we met at Twenty-First Place and started walking to Brenda’s house. The trees were in full bloom by then. Even at night the smell was like inhaling through a sheet of fabric softener.
We didn’t know Brenda’s family. Chuey didn’t know them, and he’d walked Brenda home dozens of times. It’s no wonder, though, that she kept her family a secret. I wouldn’t have admitted to Capone either.
It’s beyond me how they came from the same family. One of them must’ve been adopted. Brenda looked like her mother. They had the same eyes. But then Capone had their mother’s skin — dark, sandy. So who knows, maybe they had different fathers. For so long Brenda had seemed otherworldly — even with her talking to Chuey, she was still beyond us, beyond Marcus, Alfonzo, and me. Yet here she was, sister to the most obnoxious gangbanger in Pilsen. Things suddenly seemed possible.
He’d OD’d in his bedroom. Brenda walked us there after meeting us on the sidewalk. They lived in the back basement of a narrow three-flat. Their apartment was cool and wet; the concrete floor was glossy with humidity. Carpets covered some spots and as we walked through I found myself taking long strides from carpet to carpet.
Capone was sitting on the floor, leaned up against his bed. His head was cocked sideways, his chin dug into his chest. White vomit streaked down the left side of his mouth onto his black T-shirt. He was filthy. He stank. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week.
“How long has he been this way?” Marcus asked.
“We just found him,” she said. “Maybe a half hour ago.”
“No, dirty like that,” Marcus said. “When’s the last time he took a bath?”
“Que dijo?” their mother asked.
Brenda ignored her.
“I don’t know,” Brenda said. “He leaves home for weeks, then just shows up for breakfast or something. We haven’t seen him for a month.”
Her mother looked to us like she was waiting for a response.
The last time the four of us had seen Capone was back in the winter, back when that white Cadillac had stopped in the middle of Paulina Street. I wondered if he’d been stoned since then. I wondered if his death was the end of a five-month-long high.
“You sure he’s dead?” Alfonzo asked.
“His heart’s not beating,” Brenda said. She raised her eyebrows like Alfonzo was an idiot.
Alfonzo nodded in return.
Chuey got down on a knee and reached for Capone’s wrist. He searched for a pulse, using two fingers, stopping at various points like he knew exactly what he was doing.