He soaked himself in the cool shower of water. He felt a cold tingle between his legs as the water flooded his jean shorts. He ran his fingers through his hair. He saw the kids around him, some older, dancing and running, some babies, wading near his grandmother. Through the rain of the sprinkler he looked to his grandmother. She had rolled up her long flannel sleeves, and for the first time Daniel saw her forearms. She had tattoos, two or three of them on each arm. They were dull green, the same color as the rusting chain-link fence that surrounded the wading pool. Even from this distance he could see how the ink had bled into her dark skin, how time had created large splotches on her arms rather than anything even or clear. His grandmother was looking off to the left. He knew she would roll down her sleeves as soon as he returned. He wondered how much else he didn’t know about his family, how at ten years old he was completely unsure of who he was.
SACRIFICE
Our oldest just turned five. I’ve always been honest with him. And now I wonder if I should tell him I killed his father.
He is her child; I adopted him. I told Blanca I wanted to. I am not so sure she cared. My wife is a pretty woman, striking even. But she is also desperate. Desperate in the sense that she knows to take what she can get. Desperate in the sense that she knows not to ask for more. I’ve always given her the most I could. For this reason we don’t argue much.
I love her. Don’t get me wrong. Although after all these years, after two children, I am not entirely convinced she loves me. But this is not important. Because, you see, I am a desperate man, and my only wish is to come home to a family. Children who call me Daddy and a wife who will never cheat. In many ways our marriage seems born of convenience. Such is the case with desperate people.
Her boy, our boy, turned five in December. His name is Prince Marcus; I don’t like the name. He was named after his father, and so the boy is cursed. Each time I speak or hear our son’s name, I am reminded of the man I killed four months ago in the alley three blocks down from where we live. I walk by there often. I need to in order to get to the supermarket. And I look down the alley and expect to see his body there, slumped over, perfectly camouflaged like a bag of trash next to an overflowing garbage can.
I didn’t know him personally, not before I married Blanca. He was from Eighteenth Street, and in this neighborhood Eighteenth Street and Twenty-Second Street are night and day, two opposite sides of the universe. He really should’ve known better than to come around. I suppose the fact that he didn’t respect the obvious made me dislike him even more.
Marcus was the leader of the Laflin Lovers. His name on the street was Prince Marcus. The Laflin Lovers were not a big gang. They were one of hundreds in our neighborhood, thirty or so members, two or three street corners’ worth of turf. But the Laflin Lovers had a reputation. They were crazy. They jumped rivals in front of families. They pulled drive-bys in front of schools, churches. I’d heard of Prince Marcus long before I ever met Blanca. And then there was Orejas, Pac-Man, Lepke — all Laflin Lovers, all with ugly reputations, all under the leadership of Prince Marcus. Maybe this is what attracted my wife.
My wife and Prince Marcus had the fortune of ending up at the exact same school at the exact same time, and when I think about it, timing seems to be the culprit for everything. Benito Juarez High School was built on Blue Island Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, strategically placed to take in kids from both sides of the neighborhood, Twenty-Second and Eighteenth. While this was probably the brainstorm of a lifetime for some city planner, it was an unfortunate reality for any kid who couldn’t afford an alternative. For the first five years Benito Juarez was up and running, the school had the distinct honor of being the only high school in Chicago with a double-digit murder rate: Cullerton Boys, Two-Ones, Satan Disciples, Latin Brothers, Laflin Lovers, Latin Counts, Latin Bishops, Racine-Boys, Almighty Ambrose all claimed victims. Even in the envelope of my all-boys Catholic high school, I could see that Benito Juarez was the pits. And living in the community that Juarez served, I heard the stories. How Beany from the Two-Ones had stabbed Lil’ Cano, from the Party People, in the cafeteria. How Sleepy, who was just a junior Latin Count, was found shot in a stall in the men’s room. How Ms. Welzien, one of the PE teachers, had had her nose broken by an Ambrose named Juice. The gangs had taken over. They divided themselves into two categories: Folks and People. Drive-bys began with riders screaming their affiliations—“People!” or “What up, Folks!” Then the shooting started.
There were Chicago police units assigned to Juarez. Their primary job was to pick up the pieces. The wars went on.
It still offends me somewhat that my wife has a history with another man. I know this is petty. Plenty of marriages are actually second and third marriages. But I think my attitude would be different if my wife had been in a relationship with a different kind of guy. The first two years I was with her, I actually got to know Marcus quite welclass="underline" there was the time he kicked down our front door, the time he threw a brick through the front window of my car while I was driving, the time he nearly OD’d in front of our apartment, puke streaming down his chin onto his black T-shirt. That morning my wife took him in and put him under a cold shower. She knew exactly what to do. She massaged his chest. She gave him blankets, our blankets, and made him chicken noodle soup. He ate breakfast with us, and lunch and dinner, and then the next morning ate another breakfast. At one point he apologized for all he’d ever done. “I’m sorry, Jesse,” he told me over scrambled eggs. “I respect you, bro. You know how to keep a woman. You know how to have a family.” He cried. My wife put her arm around him. She told him everything was okay. “People in this house love you,” she said. I looked at little Prince Marcus, who was too young to love anything at that point, and I wondered who she meant. That afternoon Marcus left. Within a week he had broken into our apartment, through the back door while we were away at work. He didn’t take anything. It didn’t even appear that he’d gone through any drawers. But he left a note on the kitchen table. I still luv you, Blanca, the note said. I can’t help it. And while it wasn’t signed, it was obvious who it was from. My wife cried.
But it’s not like I grew up in Winnetka or Arlington Heights or Highland Park. It’s not like I took all this lying down. I grew up on Twenty-Second and Oakley. I knew protocol. When he broke in I chased him out of the apartment with a baseball bat. When he used to call late at night and not say anything, I would scream “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker!” into the phone. And then once, after slamming down the phone, I actually went out to hunt for him. I called my partner from when we were young, Ricardo. Ricardo was a Disciple. He’d dropped out of Benito Juarez when it was suspected he’d murdered a Latin Count named Buff. I told Ricardo, “Prince Marcus is fucking with my family.” Within ten minutes Ricardo was outside my door with a.38 automatic, fully loaded. Ricardo knew Prince Marcus. They had gone to Juarez together and had their own history. As I started for the front door, Blanca took a breath to speak. I turned to look and she was holding the phone to her ear, the same phone I had just hung up. With her other arm she was holding little Prince Marcus, using her hip as a ledge for him to sit on. She seemed amazingly young at that moment, small, and for a second I was lost, lost in my own home, married to a woman who had tattoos, a woman who could balance a child on her hip like he was glued there. I didn’t know who she had dialed. I wasn’t interested in asking. I turned and left the apartment.