“It’s chambered,” Ricardo said as he handed me the gun. “Careful.” The gun was small, nickel-plated. It fit perfectly into my hand. It was the same piece we had used over New Year’s to shoot off rounds in Ricardo’s gangway. I remembered how quiet it had been. How I’d expected some loud blast but had gotten only a shallow pop that between buildings echoed with a sharp hum.
We cruised Eighteenth Street. We started at Damen Avenue and worked our way east. We slowed down at the taverns, watched who was going in, who was coming out. I held the gun hidden at my thigh, ready to raise it the second I recognized him. At Cirito’s pool hall on Blue Island Avenue we pulled to the curb and peered in through the torn black tint that covered the plate-glass windows. On the sidewalk a young girl, a teenager, walked out of a grocery store. She looked into the car as she passed. She saw Ricardo and me and for a quick moment she searched our faces, trying to figure out what we were doing. Something registered. Suddenly the girl turned her head and began walking faster. I looked to Ricardo. He was still studying the pool hall; he hadn’t noticed her. I waited for the girl to turn and look again but she never did.
Marcus wasn’t there, just a bunch of kids, gangbangers in training, shaved heads, Dago-T’s. We pulled away and reached Halsted Street. Then we turned back west. Sweat coated the grip of the gun. I felt as if I was fisting a dirty quarter. I switched hands, flexed my fingers, then wiped my palm on the knee of my jeans. By the time we got to Damen Avenue the gun was under my seat, tucked away in case we got pulled over.
“Want me to turn around?” Ricardo asked.
“No,” I said. “He’s gone, man. We’re not going to find him.”
“He’s probably fucked up somewhere,” Ricardo said. “Angel dust, those Laflin Lovers do angel dust. We should go search some alleys.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Ricardo drove me home.
“It’s under the seat,” I told him as I climbed out of the car.
“Bro,” Ricardo said. “If he comes back just call me. I’ll pop him if you don’t want to.” Then he reached over and pulled the passenger door shut. It was late by then. Or maybe it just seemed late. The streetlights were on. My shadow was pitch-black against the orange-tinted sidewalk. I stuck my key into the door and quietly stepped inside.
But none of this explains who I am. And truth is I am no one. I work at a law firm. I’m a clerk. I make thirty-two thousand dollars a year. I have health insurance and a brand-new Honda. I get on the L at 7:15 a.m. and start work by 8. In the morning I file cases in Circuit Court. Then I eat lunch. Then I file cases in District Court. At some point I am going to finish school. I’ve been given a promise by my law firm that they will pay my tuition. I am a normal man. I don’t wear gold. I don’t get high. Things will change. I know they will. I’ve told my wife this, at night in bed, my arm around her waist. “We’ll get a house soon,” I’ve said. “You’ll see. Prince will be in a decent school, not that fucking Pickard, where all the gangbanger kids go.” My wife never seems to hear. She always has her head turned. I listen for her breathing. I wonder if she is already asleep.
I met my wife in a club called Vincie’s on Fifty-Ninth and California. Other than beer advertisements, the only real light in that place was a huge neon sign behind the bar, VINCIE’S, in hot-pink illuminated script. I would never have considered Blanca my type, but darkness changes a lot of things and alcohol changes even more. She was pretty, of course, stunning in a familiar kind of way, like you knew who she was, what street she was from, just by looking at her. I’d seen girls like this all my life. Girls that put up a front, a facade you had to scratch through to get to something real. She was sitting at the bar with two other women, and their ugliness seemed to make her stand out. I’d seen them before, all three of them. They were older, more experienced women, like they might really be there just for the drinks. That night I was with Gilbert and Diego, two friends I’d grown up with. I don’t know who had had more to drink, my future wife or myself. I don’t remember being that drunk, although she says that I was “wasted.” She was drunk enough. When Gilbert asked her friend to dance, the girl said she’d go only if Blanca went also. My wife claims to remember that night clearly. How I stumbled
when I led her out onto the dance floor. How I couldn’t keep the beat and kept holding my hands in the air like a flamenco dancer looking for style points. She still makes fun of me, when she’s in a good mood, after the kids are asleep. She giggles and whispers “Olé” in my ear. I remember things differently. I remember my wife telling me, “I’m only here to have fun. Don’t think this is love.” And saying things like this so often it became silly, and we started laughing and telling each other we were “over before we started” and “you can keep the house” and “those kids are mine as much as they are yours.” All this while we moved on the dance floor. My wife is a beautiful drunk. Things make more sense to her then. Like at that party for her sister Junie’s eighteenth birthday. My wife sat next to me and had me taste her aunt Hilda’s mole. She kissed me and held her face next to mine for a long time. Then she asked me why I married her.
I told her I’d done it because she was “nothing special” and she seemed to understand what I meant even when I didn’t.
Or that time there was a party for her brother Robert when he finished army boot camp. That night she sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and I had to carry her to the car while Robert carried Prince. “Later,” Robert said to me. “As long as you’re good to my sister.”
“I am,” I said.
He shook my hand and walked away. That was a year after we got married.
It’s when my wife is sober that things are slightly more difficult. Maybe reality hits then. Her job with the state — she hates answering phones. The homemade tattoo she has on her right hand, M4E — Marcus For Ever. I’ve told her we could get rid of it, and we’ve even gone so far as to ask the gynecologist — because that’s where we were when we thought of it. But with everything else going on, my wife’s tattoo doesn’t seem quite so important. Unless of course it’s late at night, and I am reading, and I see her asleep there on the couch, her hand draped across her belly. Marcus For Ever. My wife isn’t one to think of the future. I have come to accept that. She was born with nothing and it’s a struggle for her to think things could be any different. I don’t hold that against her.
Prince Marcus, though, he’s a wonderful boy. He’s five years old now and he acts like it. He likes to say “shit” and knows it’s wrong so he follows every “shit” with an immediate “sorry,” as if that makes everything better. After baths he likes to sing and dance naked in front of the mirror, and if he notices us laughing he’ll do something even more silly, like act like a monkey or put underwear on his head. With my son I find myself saying over and over, “What is that kid doing?” He looks like his father. He has crazy, thick black hair, the kind that stays up no matter what you put in it. He has sleepy eyes, downturned at the sides as if he’s always sad. My wife has since given birth to our daughter, Marisa, and Marisa is the complete opposite of Prince. She’s quiet, for one, and calm. She looks like me. She doesn’t cry or ask for attention. She just lies in her crib and watches Prince play monkey bars on the furniture. Some nights I bring home McDonald’s and Prince goes crazy — he loves Happy Meals. Some nights I bring home Los Comales tacos and my wife goes crazy — she loves their al pastor. Some nights I bring home toys for Marisa, stuffed animals, baby puzzles with big pieces that are supposed to teach kids coordination, logic skills.